Reviews by Mike Russo

German is one of those languages which, if it didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent: it offers up an essential myriad of agglomerated noun-piles that somehow always communicate images or ideas more neatly than a circumlocutorious English phrase can manage. Thus Zugzwgang, combining words for “move” and “compulsion” to mean a circumstance where you need to do something, but anything you do is wrong (this is almost exclusively used in a chess context, though I find its ambit can be usefully expanded: take figuring out what the Democrats should do about Biden’s age, for example).

What does Zugzwang the game have to do with Zugzwang the concept? Er. Let me get back to you. Maybe it’s that your protagonist – dubbed “the pawn”, one of several elements that gives off a sort of Dark Souls-y vibe – spends most of their time shuttling from the scene of one battle to another, generally unable to make progress? You start at a hub caught between a quartet of vicious foes: an obdurate rock, a twisted ent, a spiteful dragon-rider, with only a limited palette of initial actions available. Visiting each monster quickly sees you learning from their attacks, however – the rock teaches you how to use a fortification move to endure damage, and dodging a burst of dragon-fire unlocks a flame attack. Obviously each baddie is immune to a taste of their own medicine, but mixing and matching your targets Mega Man style allows you to progress.

There’s no danger here – it’s impossible to perish, so far ass I can tell – and there’s no timing element to the combat puzzles, so the gameplay does reduce to just visiting each battlefield in turn and spamming different attacks to gain new abilities and eventually conquer the local baddy, which propels all your abilities up to a new tier of puissance. But the prose manages to bring the requisite drama:

"Shards of smoking trees jut up about the Ebony King like the leaning columns of a time-lost temple. Between these verdant ruins, the black liege sends forth a shock of flowers, sprouting, bursting, encroaching."

Just about every moment of each fight could be the world’s coolest black metal album cover, and while that’d be a little one-note in an extended game, the gag doesn’t wear out its welcome over a fleet ten-minute running time. There are also some novel twists on the standard dark fantasy archetypes – the pawn’s ability to learn Blumenkraft is enjoyably over the top. The world and the writing are compelling enough that I kind of wish there was a bit more to it than just endless battling, but it’s still a lot of fun for what it is.

Spoilers now for the endgame:

(Spoiler - click to show)If you check out the ParserComp 2024 entries page, it doesn’t take much perspicacity to notice that the cover art, itch.io blurb, and author names for two games rhyme in peculiar ways: 19 Once and Zugzwang both have a cruciform grid as the central element of their cover images, the author names are anagrams of each other, and the credits blurb listing how the cover art was made are word for word the same. And despite the variation in their genres – post-high-school nostalgia-fest and dark-fantasy action thriller – the gameplay in both involves navigating to a single-room location and gaining keywords you can use to unlock still others if used at a different point of the compass. It’s not shocking to learn, then, that they were both written by the same duo of authors, and that their plots are more connected than they appear: Zugzwang depicts the climactic sequence of the movie that the friends in 19 Once are all going to see. There’s also a series of nested Easter eggs that unlock a secret coda for the pair of games: the end text of 19 Once has a certain phrase bolded, which if you type it into Zugzwang will unlock a new commentary mode, where you can see the 19 Once crew banter as they follow the pawn’s progress. This in turn leads to one more keyphrase that leads to a secret ending for 19 Once (at which point the trail ends, as far as I can tell).

This is a fun way to braid the two games together; it’s perhaps a bit on the simple side, though it probably needs to be given that many people are likely to play one or the other game outside of ParserComp and might not otherwise easily notice the similarities. And bringing the irreverent voices of the 19 Once folks into Zugzwang’s grim world of perilous adventure makes for an entertaining juxtaposition. With that said, while I laughed at many of the extra jokes, I didn’t feel like I learned too much more about the characters than I’d picked up from playing the initial segment of 19 Once; similarly, while I appreciated the secret ending, it doesn’t feel like it culminates the stories of both games so much as it provides a punchy alternative narrative that loses some power inasmuch as it focuses on Esther, who as I mentioned in my 19 Once review I found the dullest of the buddies. But not everything needs to be a narrative puzzle that clicks into place; I think both games work well on their own terms – it’s just better to think of their intersections as a series of DVD extras rather than the narrative climax.

It’s a truism that there’s a lot about being young that only makes sense in retrospect. One can interrogate whether that’s actually, y’know, correct, or if it’s just a way for middle-aged people to feel superior to their past selves, but the lovely thing about truisms is that it doesn’t really matter if their true. Anyway, one can certainly cherry-pick examples – the reasons why you messed things up with your first romantic partner are probably going to be painfully obvious at just a couple of years’ remove – and I think high school graduation also falls into that category: at the time you think it’s a uniquely important change as you embark on your adult life, but the truth is there are very likely to be much bigger pivots waiting in your twenties and even thirties, and most likely you’ll still be cluelessly failing to figure yourself out all through your college years (reader, do I project? I think I do). No, with the benefit of perspective, we can see what’s special about high school graduation is that everybody you know is clumsily trying to change who they are all at the same time, and the tensions of trying to hold old social arrangements together across that maelstrom of becoming can be as poignant as they are doomed.

19 Once sees its protagonist caught by this dilemma, a first-year university student unable or unwilling to turn the page on her old life (is that why she’s called Paige? Almost definitely not, but it might be fun to agree that I’m being insightful rather than just making a dumb pun). Her four closest friends have all gone their separate ways – high-achieving Sofia’s off at a different uni imbibing critical theory, Esther’s repeating a year to try to get into a better school, Nora’s entered the workforce, and Wesley’s moved into the attic and is devoting himself to dank memes. But back in the day they were all fans of a YA book franchise whose final film installment has just come out, so maybe it’d be possible to bring everybody together for one more, or one last, hurrah?

The translation of this social puzzle into parser form involves considerable abstraction, but I found it overall successful. Navigation commands let you initiate a text chat with each friend – going north gets you to Nora, south to Sofia, and so on. This is a limited-parser game, so just about all there is to do once you’re in one of these “rooms” is to engage in conversation, which proceeds via a keyword system that flags when you unlock a new topic. Unsurprisingly, nobody’s initially excited to buy a ticket to the film – Wesley prefers video games now, Nora’s stressed at work, Esther’s skint, and Sofia finds the whole thing a bit bourgeois (Sofia was my favorite). You need to change their minds, but rather than persuading them one at a time, instead you need to hop from conversation to conversation to progress, because the topics unlocked from speaking to one friend will only allow you to make inroads with another friend – talking to Nora reveals that she’s pressed for time because of her job, and then asking Sofia what she’s doing with her time reveals that she’s been journaling, which opens up the memories keyword.

It’s a mechanical approach, I suppose, but it works to mimic the structure of online conversation – rather than unfolding as a linear discussion, instead you’re hopping between windows, always with your head half-stuck in the previous topic as you broach a new one with someone else (this also functions as another metaphor for Paige’s ambiguously-post-graduation mindset, perhaps). It also winds up dulling the danger of lawnmowering, since you can never brainlessly plug through the topic list with a single character; you need to rotate through, building out new keywords as you go. With that said, this admittedly-simple gameplay model puts pressure on the writing to deliver, which happily it does. It’s all jokey, of course, swerving pleasantly from highbrow to low humor:

"Sofia, she went to uni too, we haven’t spoke much since school. She was always very intense, always had a paperback sociology book in her back pocket. Pelicans. Wesley called her pelibutt."

There’s also the odd moment of pathos:

"WESLEY: I’m a neet, what do you think?
PAIGE: You’re not neat.
WESLEY: not in education or training. you know, not like you or Nora or Sofe"

I’ll admit that Esther didn’t make much of an impression on me, but the other three characters are drawn with verve, boasting distinct voices and grappling with prosaic but engaging dilemmas. 19 Once is a slight game (it’s over in perhaps fifteen minutes), and the stakes are low because of course we know that whether or not this quintet manages a fun night at the cinema, none of them will be hanging out when they’re 20. But part of the perspective that comes with age is realizing that moments still matter even if they don’t actually change anything, and 19 Once is a winning, wistful collection of such moments.

Spoilers now for the endgame:

(Spoiler - click to show)If you check out the ParserComp 2024 entries page, it doesn’t take much perspicacity to notice that the cover art, itch.io blurb, and author names for two games rhyme in peculiar ways: 19 Once and Zugzwang both have a cruciform grid as the central element of their cover images, the author names are anagrams of each other, and the credits blurb listing how the cover art was made are word for word the same. And despite the variation in their genres – post-high-school nostalgia-fest and dark-fantasy action thriller – the gameplay in both involves navigating to a single-room location and gaining keywords you can use to unlock still others if used at a different point of the compass. It’s not shocking to learn, then, that they were both written by the same duo of authors, and that their plots are more connected than they appear: Zugzwang depicts the climactic sequence of the movie that the friends in 19 Once are all going to see. There’s also a series of nested Easter eggs that unlock a secret coda for the pair of games: the end text of 19 Once has a certain phrase bolded, which if you type it into Zugzwang will unlock a new commentary mode, where you can see the 19 Once crew banter as they follow the pawn’s progress. This in turn leads to one more keyphrase that leads to a secret ending for 19 Once (at which point the trail ends, as far as I can tell).

(Spoiler - click to show)This is a fun way to braid the two games together; it’s perhaps a bit on the simple side, though it probably needs to be given that many people are likely to play one or the other game outside of ParserComp and might not otherwise easily notice the similarities. And bringing the irreverent voices of the 19 Once folks into Zugzwang’s grim world of perilous adventure makes for an entertaining juxtaposition. With that said, while I laughed at many of the extra jokes, I didn’t feel like I learned too much more about the characters than I’d picked up from playing the initial segment of 19 Once; similarly, while I appreciated the secret ending, it doesn’t feel like it culminates the stories of both games so much as it provides a punchy alternative narrative that loses some power inasmuch as it focuses on Esther, who as I mentioned in my 19 Once review I found the dullest of the buddies. But not everything needs to be a narrative puzzle that clicks into place; I think both games work well on their own terms – it’s just better to think of their intersections as a series of DVD extras rather than the narrative climax.

When I was a kid I went through a phase where Howard Pyle was one of my favorite authors. A turn-of-the-century writer and illustrator, he wrote charmingly old-fashioned books about Robin Hood and King Arthur that delighted eleven year old me with their ornate prose and classic narratives. My tastes have since moved on, but The Moon-house Technician confirms that I still get the appeal; it’s based on one of his stories that I never read, about a boy who spends a year on the moon getting into various fairy-tale adventures, and while I’m not sure if any of the writing comes directly from Pyle or if it’s just inspired by him, either way I enjoyed it quite a lot. Here’s a bit where the game’s main character – who’s similarly taken to the moon-house after the plot of the original story has wrapped up – helps earn his keep by polishing stars and setting them back in the sky:

"You sit on the wooden bench and pick up the first star, rubbing it with the lamb’s-wool. As you rub the star it grows brighter and brighter until it throbs with light as if alive. You repeat this process with the remaining stars before casting them into the sky."

Everything about the game has this sort of Victorian Stardew Valley vibe; your companions, for example, are an initially taciturn but eventually simpatico moon-angel, the man in the moon himself, who’s got a beardy raconteur vibe, and a beautiful lady who teaches you alongside some other children every Saturday. And the major progression tracker involves obtaining illustrated playing cards from this trio; the ASCII art is more 1980s than 1880s but it’s a wholesome pastime nonetheless, and each gives you a short excerpt from the original Pyle story too.

There is a downside, though, which is that Moon-house Technician is Stardew Valleyish in more ways than one. There are no puzzles to speak of here; the gameplay is just a menu-based time-allocation simulator, as you step through a full year on the moon one day at a time with your only goal to collect all of the aforementioned cards. Admittedly, each month is only a week, but what is there to do over those 96 days? Well, you earn $5 a day polishing the stars, which always gives you the same text quoted above, along with a little tune that takes five seconds or so to play to completion (the delay ceases being charming and starts being painful at about day four). You can talk to the moon-angel to try to win him over, though it only takes five months before he thaws and gives you a free card, and isn’t ever a voluble conversationalist. You can visit the main in the moon, giving you a couple sentences of rotating flavor text and the opportunity to buy a card, though I’d bought him out by month nine. You can look out a window at the stars, though that again just leads to a single bit of unchanging text and also regularly would crash the game for me. And every Saturday you can have a lesson with the beautiful lady; those only start repeating at month ten.

The gameplay is very grindy, in other words, with most of the interesting bits feeling like they’re references to the fun things that happened to the protagonist of the original story rather than anything that you get to experience yourself. Mostly you’re just doing the same thing over and over again, with a couple of sentences of new flavor text and maybe some fine but unspectacular ASCII art the only rewards on offer. The game does end with a nice coda allowing you to reflect on your time on the moon, but getting to that point is the definition of drudgery: Moon-house Technician is ten minutes of lovely writing stretched across forty-five minutes of dreary incrementalist gameplay, with not much in the way of narrative motivation and a frankly ugly presentation (it’s a Pythonesque text window that lacks word-wrapping). I’d rather just read Pyle’s lush prose and look at his Pre-Raphaelite illustrations; I appreciate the game for reminding me of how much I enjoy him, but any shine it’s got is from his reflected light.

I have to give Postage Code massive points for what seems like a simple thing: it starts when you double-click it. It’s a Python game, you see, and while I’m used to those requiring some command-line incantations to get running – witness Free Bird, from this Comp – so this level of ease of use is definitely an improvement. Its pixel-art graphics also help it make a positive first impression, as does the cozy premise that tasks you with making mail-delivery rounds to get the quirky inhabitants of a small village their packages. Admittedly, my virus-checker did throw up a false positive on the executable, and it loses some points for the title – wouldn’t the postage code be setting out how much you charge for shipping, rather than governing your responsibilities as a mail carrier? – but still, I went into this one with high hopes.

The fact that I just did a paragraph transition probably flags that those high hopes, alas, were quickly dashed. I can see a core gameplay loop here that could work – you deliver packages, earn money, and use that money to buy stuff you need to deliver more packages, with a couple of different entertaining Easter Eggs and more nice pixel art carrying you through to the end. But unfortunately Postage Code’s spotty implementation of basic parser mechanics combined with cruel design choices make it a pain to play; I persevered through to the end, but this really isn’t the kind of game that should require grim, Dark-Souls-style stamina to play.

Let’s start with the parser, since this is ParserComp, after all. Postage Code doesn’t contain any instructions, or respond to ABOUT or any similar commands, but it does have a quick rundown of accepted commands on its itch.io page. Unfortunately, some of the listed commands don’t seem to work – I was never able to successfully TALK to any of the character I met – and at least one critical command isn’t listed at all. That command is GO, and it’s what you need to type to get out of the very first screen; I spent a solid five minutes trying to look at stuff or use the directional commands to progress before I lucked out on the solution. The parser also lacks most helpful abbreviations as far as I can tell; I suppose that’s not the biggest deal in the world, but having to type out ordinal directions is quite the pain (thankfully, TAKE ALL is implemented). Oh, and DROPPING a package causes it to disappear from the world, meaning you’ll fail the game (there’s no save or undo, of course).

As to the design, as mentioned the basics of the puzzles are fine. There are a couple of completely straightforward deliveries, one that requires making a fairly intuitive purchase to complete, and finishing the first three unlocks a final tier that are more challenging. These last challenges aren’t particularly fun, though, inasmuch as two of them are impossible-to-predict gotchas that are trivial to solve once you know they’re coming, but first time out will cause you to instantly fail and have to restart (again: no saves). The last one, meanwhile, is a maze you can only solve with knowledge of an old-school video game reference (Spoiler - click to show)(the infamous Konami code); it’s clued in the game, at least, but by the time you’re stuck in the maze you’re not able to go back and reference the clue, so that’s another restart. And while we’re talking about restarts, I had to do one more because trying to microwave some shrimp crashed the game – though I have to confess that I’m a vegetarian so I don’t know whether that last was something no one in their right mind would ever attempt.

Put it all together and you get a frustrating game that’s all the more annoying for its missed potential; I did like the variety of people and places I got to visit in this little village, and a gentle mail carrier simulation seems a perfect premise for a piece of chilled-out IF – heck, I swear I can see what this game would look like if it was implemented in Adventuron. But punishing gameplay, an underbaked parser, and an inability to interact with the world by talking to folks or examining its finer points takes the Postage Code out of the idyllic realm of Postman Pat and into the era of 90s postal workers on the edge.

The rise of choice-based games to co-equal status alongside their parser cousins has had a lot of positive effects, in my view, among which is an understanding of the fact that under the hood parser games also operate on choice-based logic: the unlimited freedom of text input hides the fact that a game will only accept a limited, pre-programmed set of actions, which can then be likewise applied to a limited, pre-programmed set of objects. This isn’t to say that there aren’t real differences, as anyone who’s ever cursed at a guess-the-verb challenge in a parser game will attest, but it’s an interesting viewpoint that interrogates the conventional wisdom.

None of that applies when you’ve got a game based on riddles, though – sure, there are only a finite number of words in the English language, but if an author doesn’t implement all of them, that doesn’t undermine the illusion of mimesis: that just means there’s one right answer and a whole whole lot of wrong answers, and suddenly the parser really can offer a whole world of possibility. Of course, building your game around riddles is a risky move exactly because of this. While a wonky puzzle in the medium-dry-goods tradition might see a player shoving all sorts of odd objects at NPCs to see if they’ll accept a swap, or one focused on complex Myst-style machinery might lead to pushing and pulling of levers at random, there’s no way to attack a riddle via trial and error or make slow progress by solving other puzzles and clearing out your inventory first. A bad riddle will leave the player frustrated and running to the hints, grunting out “I never would have guessed that” as I seethe.

Yurf is a one-word parser fantasia that dares to run that risk, and I think mostly succeeds despite it boasting its share of bumpy patches. You’re a nameless faceless etc. adventurer journeying around an Alice-in-Wonderland-inspired kingdom in search of four card-suit-themed jewels, in order to – well, despite having played through the game twice (since completing it a first time unlocks a “boss mode” that remixes some of the puzzles), I confess I couldn’t quite tell you, though it seems to have something to do with unlocking a vault and reuniting the king of the day with his estranged spouse, the queen of the night? To say that the plot isn’t the point isn’t to undersell the enjoyable whimsy with which the world is sketched, though: although the broad outlines are familiar, down to specific quotations of Lewis Carroll, the various characters and environments are drawn with verve, from the mathemagical neighborhood where number is all, to the slyly grumpy tree, to the pirates plying the space-lanes between the earth and the moon. The sad-sack king is a particular highlight: you first meet him crying his eyes out while being force-fed pies, because, as he says, “having banished the Queen, I’m getting just desserts.” The parser puts a cherry on top of the gag, too, in how it expands your command CONVERSE to CONVERSE WITH THE WET WEEPING MOUND THAT IS APPARENTLY THE KING.

Speaking of that parser, as mentioned it only takes one word – all actions, no objects. That means that there’s only ever one thing you can examine, or one character you can converse with, at any location. Aside from compass navigation, those commands are in fact most of what’s available to you, save for a few special commands reflecting expanded abilities from obtaining some inventory objects. It works cleanly enough, but it’s not really enough to hang a puzzle around, which is where the riddles come in. Except for a few straightforward places where using the aforementioned items allows you to progress, most of the obstacles you encounter require you to answer some kind of riddle – helping an artist-cum-engineer decide what kind of bridge to build, say, or editing a bit of doggerel to become a compelling love poem. Some of these are quite good – I especially liked the first of the math-based puzzles, which puts a numeric twist on the hoary old “one guard lies, one tells the truth” gag – though others, predictably, were too out-of-the-box for me to figure out without a hint (I still don’t really understand how the solution to the Air to the Throne’s riddle is meant to work). But the good ones predominate over the wonky ones, enough so that I continued on to play through that second quest – it disables hints, though if anything I found the riddles a bit better clued the second time round, with the exception of that %$#@ Air guy.

Beyond the occasional wonky riddle, I did find a few bugs – most notably, I was able to sequence break since the game allows you to burn stuff before you find the tinder box that notionally unlocks the ability. I was still able to complete my playthrough, though, and I actually found that contributed to the enjoyably topsy-turvy vibe of the game. That lovely atmosphere, combined with Yurf’s ability to pull off those moments of inspiration where you come up with the answer to a riddle out of thin air and marvel that it works, makes for a pleasant sojourn in Wonderland indeed.

I’ve never dug that deeply into Text Adventure Literacy Project games, mostly just because I’m already fairly overcommitted when it comes to IF, so it’s interesting to see a game initially intended for that event crop up in ParserComp instead, if only to provide a look at how one veteran author might introduce IF to new players. Beyond its well-implemented tutorial, The Samurai and the Kappa provides a few simple but mostly appealing characters, manageable medium-dry-goods challenges, a world that’s enjoyable to explore, some slightly ill-fitting logic puzzles, an old-school maze that’s not too hard to flail through with trial and error, and a happy ending – seems like a pretty good way of getting your feet wet to me.

You play a Tokugawa-era samurai era who’s fed up with life as a courtier and has take to wandering the countryside looking for work. After spending the night in a small village inn – the business of paying for a room, taking a bath, having dinner, and retiring for the night constitutes the tutorial section – the plot kicks in when you’re approached by a peasant who asks for your help rescuing a kidnapped child from an evil turtle-spirit. There’s a nice mix of historicity and fantasy to this premise; the Kappa’s folklore feels authentic, and SAK does do a good job of weaving in period-appropriate detail so that the world never feels generic and rewards poking at the scenery. Admittedly, it wears its research a bit heavily – implementing three separate pieces of your clothing feels a bit much, and while I enjoyed the density of scenery, some of the descriptions feel like they could have come from a textbook:

The shimenawa is a special rope that’s woven from hemp and tapers towards each end. It’s suspended below the rafters of the haiden to denote its sanctity or purity.

Still, I enjoyed the care taken with the game’s setting and atmosphere, so this is a mild complaint.

The process of rescuing the child is enjoyable too. You need to learn the kappa’s weaknesses from several characters across the game’s small map, and while dialogue is mostly kept short and to the point, they respond to a wide variety of potential topics. For the most part progress depends on solving two puzzles – there’s a Nurikabe, which is a sort of Slitherlink or Picross-style exercise in coloring a grid, and one traditional logic grid. The game’s itch.io page provides feelies to make solving them more convenient. I found them satisfying to work through, though writing down all the different clues and then alt-tabbing into a logic grid tool to laboriously work through them did take me out of the story. The final set of challenges are resolutely in-game, though, and focus on taking advantage of what you’ve learned about the kappa’s likes and dislikes, and even when these are a bit esoteric, I never had any trouble getting the parser to understand what I was saying.

…and I really wish that I could end this review here, saying that SAK is a fleet, puzzle-focused adventure with nice period details and a pleasant story. Alas, I can’t end the review without addressing the inclusion of one disastrously ill-advised bit of content. The game earns its “adult content” content warning by virtue of your interactions with Mokuko, the maid who works at the inn in the tutorial section. When you first enter, the innkeeper suggestively indicates that you can avail yourself of some extra “service” for one additional silver coin. The implication is made clear when, after your meal, Mokuko asks “if you require any extra ‘service’.” As far as I can see there’s no option to simply decline the invitation – the tutorial text butts in here to say “when someone mentions something interesting, you should ask them about it. In this case, ASK MOKUKO ABOUT SERVICE.” And when you do, well:

Mokuko parts the folds in her kimono in a suggestive manner to reveal the cleavage of her petite breasts. The poor girl looks like she’s barely out of puberty.

You see, this is Mokuko’s description:

Mokuko is very pretty, but she looks too young to be a maid. You wonder how old she is.

And when you ask her about her age:

“I’m 16 sir, but I’m very experienced.”

It’s a small mercy that you don’t have the option of going to bed with her, as you automatically decline politely and go to bed. Any relief I felt at that point was undone by the fact that the game then told me that I had a hard time getting to sleep because of the noise from the guest next door having sex with his maid (per the author this is meant to be a brand-new character, but as this other maid is never seen or mentioned in the game I had no idea she existed and assumed Makuko was serving the other guest as well).

So this is a game that forces you to think about the sexual exploitation of a 16 year old girl. And it gets even worse – I think there’s a reasonable implication from the excerpts mentioned above that Mokuko is lying about her age, and she tells you this if you ask her about herself:

"I’ve been working here for two years. I’ll make sure you have a pleasant experience in our humble little inn.”

So actually this is a game that forces you to think, at minimum, about the sexual exploitation of a 14 year old girl.

I am really at a loss to understand why this is here. Is it the case that maids at roadside inns like this engaged in sex work, that they were pimped out by their innkeepers, and that they were sometimes teenagers? I’m no expert on the period here, but I’m certainly willing to believe it. Authenticity is certainly no reason on its own to have included something like this, though – the setting here departs from reality in innumerable ways, and reflects the author’s editorial judgment about what to include and what to elide. And it’s not as though this is a plot element that has any narrative significance or connection to the rest of the story in any way; it’s just a throwaway incident that’s the definition of gratuitous.

I’m no prude and I’m not opposed to “adult” or sexual content in IF by any means. But there are certain topics that, if you include them in your game, now your game is about them whether you want them to be or not. I can certainly imagine playing a game that engages with this topic in a nuanced way and creates space for Makuko’s subjectivity, but this is the Samurai and the Kappa – no room for her here. At best, the child sexual abuse is meant to be an interesting historical detail and a way of underlining the manly self-restraint of the protagonist, while at worst it’s meant to function as an enjoyable moment of titillation. Either way, it was a profound mistake to include it, and it comprehensively soured me on the rest of the game.

It’s unfair to Project Postmortem to compare it to The Mysterious Cave, a pretty-but-buggy Adventuron game that consists of one basic puzzle and takes five minutes to play. I didn’t run into any bugs in this tale of academic skullduggery, and while the plot is neither especially novel nor robust – you’re tasked with tracking down a report showing that the research underlying a thesis with big economic potential was falsified, and then need to escape the vengeful postdoc when he comes gunning for you – it at least exists to provide a motivation for the action. The custom parser works well enough, modulo some slight infelicities of implementation, like few objects having descriptions and OPEN FOLDER getting the response “you can’t open the folder” while X FOLDER gets you “You open the folder and skim the contents…” And there are some pleasant features to counterbalance those small bits of awkwardness, like a fun menu-based system for interacting with computers that winds up pivotal to the game’s puzzle.

There’s the similarity and the awkwardness, you see: this is another one-puzzle game (maybe one and a half if you count “unlock the filing cabinet with the plainly-visible key”). The puzzle itself is okay, I suppose – you need to create a distraction to slip through the fingers of the blood-crazed academic, taking advantage of some cutting-edge capabilities of the computer network (Project Postmortem appears to be a nineties period piece, so don’t get too excited). It’s not especially challenging, since there aren’t any red herrings or potential alternate paths to throw you off, and it’s a bit silly that even if you don’t quite get the timing right, you can try again with no penalty, but it’s hard to fault a game for being merciful. Still, between the short playtime, the straightforward gameplay, the underdeveloped plot, and the unremarkable prose there’s as little here to praise as there is to condemn; as one episode in a larger thriller, I might consider it an effective setpiece, but it’s not really up to the rigors of standing on its own.

Free Bird’s blurb conveys at best a profound ambivalence about its value: of this short game functioning as a proof-of-concept for a Python IF system, the author says “I never liked it very much,” admits that “the program is inferior to Inform and other parser game creation tools in almost every way”, and closes by saying “I wouldn’t recommend this game or my attempt at a Python interactive fiction ‘library’ to anyone.” Oh, and unlike any of the myriad Python-based IF games I’ve wrestled with, the installation instructions flat-out tell you “it’s not user-friendly.”

Well, that last part is indubitably right – despite my aforementioned track record of snake wrangling, it still took me a solid fifteen minutes to figure out how to get it running (protip: you don’t need to download anything manually to install the required PyGame library, just type in the command prominently featured on the website and Python will take care of the rest). And it’s not surprising to me that one person dabbling at a project can’t rival the multiple decades of effort that have given rise to the Inform ecosystem – I’m not at all qualified to assess how well it works as an authoring environment, but while the system here boasts a reasonably solid parser it also has some foibles even once it’s up and running. The text was blurry on my machine with no obvious way to sharpen it, the scroll function didn’t work for me on either keyboard or trackpad, and the innocuous command SING TO KEY seemed to crash the game, for example. It’s better than many custom systems I’ve played, but there was never a moment where I wasn’t thinking “I wish I were playing this in Inform or TADS.”

On the flip side, though, I wasn’t thinking that just because those languages are more robust, but because I was having a good time with Free Bird and would have preferred it if the author had had more time to flesh out the content rather than work on building a new platform. Often in this kind of situation the demo game is an afterthought, a bland bit of dungeoneering crafted as a showcase for the world’s blandest medium-dry-goods puzzles. Not so with Free Bird, which starts as its protagonist – an immortal avian spirit – is freed from a millennium-long imprisonment by the slow passage of time finally eroding away the runes by which it was bound by a long-dead sorcerer. It’s an evocative setup, rendered in evocative language – I couldn’t copy and paste the text so you’ll largely have to take my word that the prose is really good, but I did jot down the phrase “they chained you in a miserable cell of bitter iron” as a representative example.

Beyond the setup, the puzzle-solving also has a distinctive flair: as implied in my crash-bug report above, since you’re a bird-god, your primary way of interacting with the world is through your songs. Weak as you are, SINGing at a particular object might only give it the weakest of shakes, but these small tweaks and nudges, properly deployed, allow you to navigate a compellingly realized set of ruins. The puzzles here are all ones a seasoned adventurer will have seen before, and the general environment is of course likewise familiar, but there are lovely details that put an endearingly novel spin on even so hoary a chestnut as obtaining a light source. While the game does lose some steam at the very end – after a paid of well-done puzzles where you learn some backstory about your captor and reclaim a greater measure of your magical power, the final sequence just sees you unlock a door with a key to reach an abrupt victory screen – it definitely still left me wanting more. As a proof of concept for Python as a major-league IF platform, Free Bird is, as advertised, a failure, but as an indicator of its author’s skill at making games, it’s a secret success.

It is nothing short of miraculous that Andrew Schultz has now made eight large, robust games centering on a very specific bit of wordplay that, to my knowledge, no one else has ever picked up on: transforming one two-word phrase to another, rhyming one by substituting a different initial phoneme (as in the b-to-g swap in the title). What’s more miraculous is that, though as always I struggled with it and there are some noticeable bugs, it might actually be my favorite of the bunch?

The gameplay here is much the same as previous installments: after a framing plot establishes stakes, you’re turned loose on a medium-sized world stuffed to the gills with the aforementioned rhyming pairs. The name of each location usually provides the starting blocks: typing in a successful rhyme for that might bring a new object into the scene, give you an inventory item, open up a path to a neighboring area, or just give you brownie points that allow you to skip a puzzle when you get stuck. Items and characters also usually can be poked at through the wordplay mechanic, allowing you to progress still further. There aren’t any traditional parser actions implemented besides movement, keeping the game focused on what it does best, and as per usual there are a large variety of hints, help functions, and other supports that let you know when you’re on the right track with a rhyme, list out common English sounds if you’re stuck for something else to try, and let you know when you’ve exhausted all the essential tasks in a particular area. This is a gameplay structure that can be quite challenging – after an hour, I find I’m muttering nonsense to myself as my brain leaks out my ears – but the games always go out of their way to be friendly to the player, the hitting on an unlikely rhyme that the game recognizes, and uses to spin a good joke, is delightful.

BBGG is a standout in the serious because of its the theme: this time out, you’re a gnome tasked with assembling the fixings for a feast, and you’ve got a checklist of foods and utensils guiding your progress. Beyond being pleasing in its own right, the theme also helps keep the various events that happen from feeling too unmoored from each other – in previous games in the series, it sometimes felt to me like the consequences of successful actions were essentially arbitrary, determined more by a syntactic validity than any other logic, but this time out there’s reason to go with most of the rhymes. The theme also helps guide your guessing in more productive directions: if you know you need to find some salad, it’s easier to jump to CHOOSE CHARD from LOSE LARD (not a real example, obviously that would be a terrible puzzle).

Unfortunately, in its current form BBGG is more than a little buggy. These games often see multiple updates and releases, so I’m confident they’ll be ironed out eventually, but for now, I found a couple of places where obvious placeholder or bug-testing text got spat out in response to what I thought was reasonable input, and the hint system seemed to get a bit confused in places. Most problematically, I also hit what I think is a progress-blocking bug that blocked a valid answer from being successfully processed, meaning that I couldn’t enter the endgame (Spoiler - click to show)(I couldn’t get the game to accept SPOON SPIED, even after I’d primed the GOON GUIDE with PRUNE PRIDE, which per the walkthrough should have been all that was required). Still, by that point I’d had a solid couple of hours of fun, and these aren’t the kinds of games where seeing the plot conclude is a major draw – much like a meal, the enjoyment is in the process of consuming it, rather than in getting to the end.

“Your goal is to navigate through the forest, solve puzzles, interact with characters, and ultimately discover the truth about your identity,” claims the blurb for The Mysterious Cave, and none of that is technically untrue. You do navigate through a forest – though the map is only four locations connected by a linear road, so this is less compelling than you’d think (there is some nice art, though, par for course for an Adventuron game). As to the next bits, they plurals are a bit misleading, since it’s more the case that you solve one puzzle and interact with one character: the only objects that are implemented are a tree and the mushroom growing on it, and the only character is a nameless guardian barring your way into the eponymous cave who monologues that he’s hungry when you examine him, and the only way of interacting with him is to solve the one puzzle, which is giving him the as-it-turns-out-poisoned mushroom to knock him out (I suppose “don’t eat the obviously sketchy mushroom” might qualify as an additional half-puzzle). And once you go past him and enter the eponymous cave, the game does say you now remember who you are – but it ends before it deigns to let the player in on the secret.

So much for truth in advertising, but bar the admittedly-lovely pixel illustrations, it’s very hard to find anything here to catch a player’s interest; the gameplay, as discussed above, is about as minimal as a work of IF can attain, there’s almost no flavor text to speak of, and despite how stripped down it is there are still some noticeable bugs (the game starts with an Adventuron setup error message, there are typos in the first location’s description, and the guardian keeps saying he’s hungry even after he’s unconscious – maybe he’s talking in his sleep?) As an exercise to learn a new authoring system, I can see the value here, and the presentation really is nicely done, so I’d be happy to play a full game from the author, but the solution to the enigma of the cave is that it’s just a glorified tech demo.

The legends surrounding King Arthur loomed large to the medieval mind: as the so-called “matter of Britain”, they made up one of the three primary literary canons of the Christian world, using an idealized world of chivalry to reflect on humanity’s weaknesses and the pursuit of the divine. Today, of course, the social milieu of the original stories is quite foreign to us, but there’s still a fascination in the tragic fall of Camelot, a mythic frisson from coming close to a strand of culture that’s so old, and meant so much. So I was excited to learn that the eponymous blade in Return of the Sword is Excalibur; your nameless protagonist is tasked with recovering it and returning it to the Lady of the Lake, tying off a loose end in (some versions of) the myths and participating in the cycle of death and renewal to which they allude.

I was less excited that I didn’t learn this from the blurb or intro text of the game, though, but rather by reading an unprepossessing letter that was in my starting inventory; you need to check out the optional lore documents to reveal that the artifact you’d been commissioned to find for the batty coot who hired you is fricking Excalibur! Said coot, the memorably-named Jedediah Strangeblossom, gives you the job because you did a solid for his friend, who’s got the still more implausible name Ezekial Throgmeister: this, I think, is a reference to the author’s 2022 IF Comp entry, The Alchemist, and in fact Return of the Sword shares more than a few similarities to that and other games he’s made. It’s written in the author’s custom system, for one thing – it’s retro-looking but fairly solid, with a robust parser, some nice though unnecessary bells and whistles like custom macros, and one longstanding foible which is that you need to take items out of containers before you can examine or otherwise interact with them. For another, it boasts a magic system that seems a close cousin of the one from 2023’s Have Orb, Will Travel, aping not just the memorize-from-spellbook-then-cast system but even the names of particular spells. The structure also echoes the hub-and-spokes designs of those other games – here there’s an underground chamber with a dial that allows you to pick one of five different standard adventure-game settings to teleport to (a castle, a cave, a church…) once you unlock each with a different plot-token coin. And the puzzles, which are a mix of codes, object manipulation, and spell-casting, are all old-school in design but vary from bluntly telegraphed to fiendishly recondite, just as in those previous entries in the loose series.

While I generally had a good time with the Alchemist, and thought there were some high points in Have Orb, Will Travel, Return of the Sword worked less well for me. Some of this, I think, could just be familiarity breeding contempt – there’s a charm in the author’s sensibility, but it’s not my favorite aesthetic, and even for those who enjoy this stuff more, surely just referencing Adventure’s Witt’s End without an accompanying joke or subversion feels pretty stale. Some of it could be the puzzle design, which wrong-footed me enough times – as with the pin that’s clearly meant to attach two wheels, but which won’t work unless you use trial and error to rotate the wheel into the single configuration where it’ll fit, with no clues provided or even an indication of what exactly is going wrong – that I probably wound up overusing the hint system even for solvable conundrums. And some of it is surely due to the game’s general unpolished and loosely-designed vibe: there are unmarked exits, parser oddities I don’t remember in the author’s previous games (UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY indicates it doesn’t fit, but simply UNLOCK DOOR opens it up in a jiffy), two of the four spells in your spellbook appear to be useless, and there’s a room that includes an “escritore” as part of its furnishings but of course no such thing is implemented, it’s just a typo for “escritoire.”

The biggest issue I had with it, though, is the way it squanders what could have been a compelling, elegiac premise. The cavalierness indicated by putting the backstory in a missable infodump continues to the game’s kitchen-sink fantasy milieu: besides the aforementioned Colossal Cave easter egg, you find a complex electronic scale system in a clergyman’s vestry, solve a riddle straight out of Tolkein, and have as your key nemesis not Mordred or Morgana, but instead a Hammer Films vampire. Far from being an Arthurian game, that’s just one of a dozen flavors sprinkled over the staid gameplay, with little concern for cohesion apparent anywhere. The overall effect is of an overcaffeinated teenager running a marathon DnD game for their friends – they’ve long since outpaced their prep, so now they’re just throwing any nerdy stuff they can think of into the pot. In fairness, that’s not too far off of how the Arthur stories got their start, with a variety of authors taking the basic story framework and adding various bits of previously-independent legends to create enough unmotivated crossovers, dubious retcons, and long-delayed sequels to rival the MCU. But even at their bouillabaissiest, effective writers in that tradition stuck to the key themes: this is just a mishmash, and the puzzles aren’t enough to save such a muddled narrative.

Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably . But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed. But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed.

I am, generally speaking, an optimist. Some of that’s just the fruit of being born with a lot of privilege and a brain that knows what to do with serotonin, I suppose, but it’s also by choice: many years ago I came across a bit of Karl Popper arguing that nobody knows what the future will bring, or what will move it one direction rather than another, so we have an obligation to hope for a better world and act as though the little things each of us can do might bring that hope a bit closer to reality. That was persuasive to me and so I try to live into it, but I’ll confess that some days it’s harder than others, like for example the end of Supreme Court terms and when I play a Perplexity game.

I’ve been reviewing games using this engine since 2021 – this is the fourth, by my count – and while the pitch for a parser system that allows the player to use natural language input remains compelling, the reality is still so stubbornly far from the promise that reader, I begin to despair. Like you’re told your goal here is to order lunch at a diner for you and your vegetarian son, but when you say to the maître d’ “I would like to get some lunch,” the game butts in to say “I don’t know the words: lunch.” That’s small beans compared to this exchange with the waiter, though (the question marks are the prompts for player input):

?:my son is vegetarian

my son is not veggie

?:my son is veggie

I don’t know the words: veggie

?:my son does not eat meat

I don’t know the words: eat

Trying to couch your input as regular English sentences simply does not work – even as simple a phrase as ORDER TOMATO SOUP makes the parser throw up its hands in despair. What does work is single-word input: typing TABLE, MENU, SOUP to indicate what you want, which of course any existing parser engine under the sun can manage. It’s hard to hold this against the system, truly – natural language processing is quite difficult, from what I understand! But still, pushing the player to try to use complete sentences sets expectations the game can’t come close to living up to, while the blurb’s promise that it’s a good way for English learners to practice their language skills feels frankly irresponsible. Judged as a game, meanwhile, there’s basically nothing here – the only thing resembling interest is that you have a terrible waiter who needs too be reminded to hand you a menu and then prompted to tell you the specials – with no details to speak of and the world’s most basic prose.

In my previous reviews of Perplexity games, I’ve generally wrapped up saying some variation of “hopefully the system’s authors will keep fine-tuning things so it works the way it’s advertised to do,” but after three years, it’s hard for me to see any improvement on this front (at least the lag that I remember afflicting the earlier games appears to be a thing of the past). Perhaps it might be time to bring this experiment to an end? That’s maybe an unfair sentiment – and one certainly biased by the fact that the game doesn’t appear to end, so I spent a final ten minutes frustratedly typing BYE and LEAVE and I’M GOING and EXIT to the maître d’ who kept asking how he could help me today over and over like a robot – and I’d love to be proved wrong! But I’m not optimistic.

Oh, and the cover image is an AI-generated picture with myriad issues – beyond the standard-issue nightmare fingers, there are light fixtures hanging off of others, a double-handled coffee mug, an olive oil bottle standing in for wine, and a robot with only one eyebrow – and no attribution. Can we please stop doing this?

Quick, close your eyes. Now imagine the most prototypical adventure game puzzle you can think of – not any specific iconic one from the classics of yesteryear, nor the dreary ones you’ve done a million times like the get-the-key-out-of-the-keyhole bit, just the Platonic ideal of a classic text adventure puzzle. Once you’ve got it, you can open those eyes (how have you been reading this?)

This exercise doesn’t admit of wrong answers, of course, but I’d submit that there’s a single most-right one: there’s a monkey, and you need to give him a banana so he’ll give you his wrench. I don’t think I’ve encountered this specific scenario presented quite so baldly before, but when I ran across it in Mystery Isles, I recognized its totemic power. And in fact the whole game is like this, in its stripped-down, old-school-yet-friendly glory: you could call it Text Adventure: the Text Adventure and wouldn’t be far off. You’re marooned on a desert island, you see, and to escape you’ll need to construct a makeshift torch, unearth pirate treasure, climb a tree, and offer up multiple food items as bribes (it’s not just the monkey); it’s all presented in breezy, unadorned prose and will either take you forever – because there are a couple of puzzles that are real head-scratchers – or ten minutes, and fortunately there’s a hint function included so you can choose your own adventure on that front.

Much as I enjoy ParserComp as a space for experimentation, it’s also clearly a place to play the hits. Even given its limited ambitions, though, Mystery Isles could have stood for several additional rounds of polish, because the implementation is fairly rough. Beyond the aforementioned underclued puzzles – there’s a bit where hitting a big rock with a little rock turns the little one into a makeshift axe, which is not how flint-knapping works, and the business of how exactly you’re meant to get the banana out of its tree doesn’t give much for the player to go on, not even confirming the existence of actual bananas in said tree – there are plenty of niggles and small bugs. Items don’t always disappear from the inventory once used, once you solve a puzzle to obtain an object you might need to resolve it to pick them up again should you drop them, there’s a spurious north exit mentioned in the jungle description, and the hint function is welcome but gets a bit confused towards the end (Spoiler - click to show)(it kept wanting me to relight the torch after I’d already obtained the map, which I believe at that point was both useless and impossible).

This is a short game, so even game-breaking bugs are quick to recover from, at least, but the lack of any credited testers really shows: there is no parser game so simple that it can be credibly released without independent beta testing, in my experience. There’s a lighthearted simplicity to Mystery Isles, and a certain ramshackleness can be part of the charm of such things – only as I’m writing this am I wondering about the plural in the title, since there’s just the one as far as I could see – but classic premises and design don’t need to be matched by creaky implementation.

One of the things that I really look forward to in ParserComp is seeing games that try to come up with different gameplay mechanics for the hoary old parser interface, because even almost 50 years on from Adventure, there’s still plenty of fertile ground to be plowed. PARANOIA’s twist is so clever yet so well-suited to its format that it feels like someone must have tried it before, but as far as I know this is a real innovation: taking the meticulous investigation of a fractally-detailed environment and making it into the core gameplay, rather than just a means to the end of solving medium-dry-good puzzles, by challenging the player to notice small (and not-so-small) discrepancies – it’s an interactive version of those puzzles where you’re supposed to find three differences in a pair of seemingly-identical images, livened up with impeccably-timed comedy bits. If there’s not much plot to speak of and the instructions could use some sharpening, those are minor blips indeed compared to what it gets right.

Might as well start with the plot, so we can get that out of the way: it’s your basic Portal setup, as you’re participating in an experimental scenario whose contours are at first unclear. After you’re given a chance to poke and prod at your sparse surroundings – a vase of flowers, some wall art, a couple pieces of simple furniture – you’re instructed to push a particular button, and then the fun begins. The lights go out, the scientist’s flunkies scatter around changing some key detail about the room – or perhaps they don’t. And you need to use your five senses and your memory (there’s no undo or transcript feature available, and the scrollback window clears for each round) to suss out what, if anything, is now different.

Sometimes it’s very easy, obvious just from seeing the updated room description print out, but sometimes it takes close, careful investigation to identify the change, and the game does a great job of milking the disjunction between those two modes for comedy: a couple of times, I got a couple of rounds in a row where nothing changed, which of course occasions the most thorough poking and prodding, and self-doubt before you hit the all-clear button, only to be greeted with a ridiculously over-the-top shift that had me burst out laughing. I won’t spoil any of them, but there are some great gags here that go beyond just changing the physical layout of the room and mess with the player’s expectations in really entertaining ways. Being funny is rewarding on its own, of course, but these eruptions of hilarity also help with the pacing, since they usually provide an easy win – you need to get 14 guesses in a row right to achieve victory – or at least switch up the steps required to solve the round, and help motivate the player to press on to see what might happen next.

My only real quibble here is that it took me a little while to get into a groove with the game, which I think could be streamlined. In particular, I found the opening instructions ambiguous about whether I was meant to be comparing each round with the original state of the room, or to how the room looked in the round that came before. It’s the former, which for good or ill keeps the madness from escalating too far, but I wasn’t sure at first, and combined with the counterintuitive way the buttons are labeled – the green button means there is a change and the red one means there isn’t, which makes sense from a yes/no perspective, but my brain interpreted green as “everything’s fine” and red as “watch out, something’s changed.” After a couple of restarts it all became second nature, but slightly clearer framing might have helped me get to the good stuff quicker. Oh, and the winning menu asks if you want to UNDO, like always, but of course UNDO is disabled. But those are my only bits of feedback – this is a unique, engaging piece of IF unlike anything you’ve played before, and well worth the fifteen minutes or half hour it takes to win. So long as ParserComp keeps turning up these kinds of gems, long may it continue.

I’ve talked before about the culture shock that ParserComp can sometimes engender, sitting awkwardly as it does between the IF community’s norms of polished games made with an expectation of substantive feedback, and a more laissez-faire itch.io jam vibe where hacking something together in a couple of days is a praiseworthy act of solidarity and an opportunity to develop some new technical and design skills. There’s nothing intrinsically better or worse about either of these approaches, of course, but it can make the job of a reviewer somewhat awkward, especially since I’m very much of the write-a-couple-hundred-words-minimum school. Alphabet City’s blurb makes no bones about the fact that it represents its author’s very first steps with Inform, with some of its features included more to provide programming practice than for design reasons. In its favor, it boasts a gritty, underexplored setting (the early-80s NYC demimonde) and an endearing ambition, but it’s also got a long, long way to go before it could even be considered an alpha.

I assume the author is aware that there are a myriad of issues that would need to be addressed before the game could be considered ready for release – if indeed that’s the goal, and this isn’t meant to just be a learning exercise (nothing wrong with that!) So I won’t belabor the negatives; some are flagged in the attached transcript, but in brief, the combat and scoring systems both feel superfluous and arbitrary; scenery objects are often under-implemented, completely missing, and/or incorrectly marked as takeable (my inventory by the end included “the air in the Mudd Club”, “a motorcycle throttle”, “a pile of puke”, “a folding fixed in place three legged stool”, and “a Squeegee kid” as well as “a panhandler”); many conversations and other interactions are triggered bottom-lined when you simply examine a person or item; the game’s senses of place (a George Washington Bridge overpass is immediate adjacent to your Alphabet City apartment, which is in the Lower East Side; going south from the Fort Lee area somehow gets you to the Triboro Bridge) and time (despite being set in 1982, there’s a “thanks, Giuliani!” joke) are often loosey-goosey; there are omnipresent disambiguation issues; and the final (and only) puzzle is of the read-the-author’s-mind variety (Spoiler - click to show)(you have to LOVE JAYNE; more concrete attempts to HUG or KISS her, much less talking to her first to establish consent, go unacknowledged). And the fact that this is notionally a story about addiction, dependence, and relationship trauma makes the jank even more farcical, because Alphabet City in its current form is nowhere near up to the task of engaging with such weighty themes.

But! Judged as a couple days of work by someone brand new to Inform, what’s here is by no means bad. Lots of these issues are things that bedevil experienced authors, or would be smoothed out with a modicum of testing, and there’s even a certain charm to a few places where the game’s reach exceeds its grasp (there’s a subway ride that progresses by moving from one location to the next, rather than by waiting for time to pass, which is clearly just the fruit of not knowing how the rules for that work but made me smile regardless). And I’m all for more games with grounded milieus; okay, sometimes the grunginess here is a little much, but give me an incompletely-renamed Max’s Kansas City over a generic spaceship any day. The writing, even in its rough form, is also sometimes cleverer than it appears, like X ME telling the player that you’re “young, dumb, and full of romantic aspirations.” So as I’ve said before about similar games: as a competition entry, this is a disaster, as a thrown-together jam entry, it’s potentially promising, and while I can’t recommend playing it in its current form, I’m definitely curious to see where the author might be going next.

In his writings on so-called “entheogens” – hallucinogenic drugs used for religious purposes – scholar Huston Smith proposed a three-part model for analyzing the experience of those using them: set, setting, and drug. “Set” is more or less shorthand for mindset, the expectations and beliefs a particular person brings with them, which obviously enough shape how things play out, while the specific characteristics of the precise hallucinogen on offer similarly has a clear impact on what the experience will be. “Setting” here signifies the ephemeral details of the particular context in which the drug is taken: is it night or morning? What nearby objects might attract the user’s attention? Who is the friend or friends there to keep an eye on things? For whatever reason, this last element always struck me as the most elusive – while the first and last factor are reducible to psychology and chemistry, the middle one partakes of alchemy: the same exact person could try the same exact drug, but have a radically different experience from one time to the next based on something as small as the color of the drapes.

I’m not necessarily saying that playing IF is like taking psychedelics, but the model comes to mind because I suspect my response to The Fountain would have been entirely different had its cover art been different. The blurb, which is surely a central part of the setting, nicely conveys what the game offers: a low-key fantastical environment through which the player can wander while soaking up the peaceful atmosphere. But the art conveys how that’s going to be done, presenting an aesthetic that’s Thomas Kinkade by way of Midjourney – for the former, see the garish, over-saturated colors, for the latter, see the dinghy that’s tied up to the underwater part of a piling or the chaotic pattern of ripples on the lake. Without that visual prompt, I suspect I would have enjoyed this well-meaning game a lot more; with it, though, I found myself getting undeservingly irritated by its sometimes-schmaltzy prose and thin implementation.

The writing issue is the biggest one because the game is more or less a walking simulator: over the ten minute or so run-time, by far the thing you spend the most time doing is looking at scenery. There are a few actions required of the player – you need to cross a lake on a boat, there’s some limited interactivity allowing you to bottle some water from the eponymous fountain, and at one point progression is blocked until you realize one location has an unmentioned exit, though I wasn’t sure whether this was a puzzle or an oversight. And beyond looking around, you can better appreciate the atmosphere via LISTEN, BREATHE, and MEDITATE. But there’s not much to the gameplay, and as far as I can tell the responses to these latter verbs are identical no matter where you go.

So looking at stuff is where the game is at, which is fine by me: I’ve played plenty of similarly-structured games, and it’s an approach well suited to the parser format. But this is a structure that lives or dies by the quality of the writing; absent deep lore or a characterized protagonist with a backstory to peel back, the only reward the game has to offer is descriptive prose, and sadly I found it just wasn’t up to snuff. Here’s X ME, for example:

"You see yourself as a tranquil traveler, immersed in the serene beauty around you. Your presence here feels harmonious, a perfect blend with nature’s calm and gentle rhythm."

Here’s X SKY:

"The sky stretches wide, a vast canvas of soft azure blue. Wisps of white clouds drift lazily, their edges kissed by the golden sun. Birds soar gracefully, their calls echoing in the serene expanse. The air is fresh and crisp, carrying the faint scent of pine and wildflowers. Sunlight bathes the world in a warm glow, casting a gentle radiance that touches everything below. As you gaze upward, the endless sky fills you with a sense of peace and boundless possibility, inviting you to lose yourself in its tranquil beauty."

And one final excerpt, from when you make landfall on the island:

"You arrive at the island shore, it welcomes you with a blend of soft, golden sand and cool, green grass. Tall, shady trees line the edge, their leaves whispering in the gentle breeze. The water, clear and inviting, laps softly against the shore, creating a soothing rhythm. Sunlight filters through the branches, casting dappled patterns on the ground. Colorful wildflowers dot the landscape, their delicate fragrance mingling with the fresh scent of the lake. The shore invites quiet reflection, its beauty a tranquil retreat. Here, surrounded by nature’s serenity, you feel a deep sense of peace and connection to the world around you."

I can see what each of these excerpts is trying to do, but unfortunately I don’t think any of them work. Adjectivitis is the first problem, with the overuse of descriptive words undercutting the power of the prose and reducing the power of any individual image. It doesn’t help that the palette here is an extraordinarily limited one, too – “serene”, “tranquil”, “peace”, “harmony” are words that recur again and again, flattened by repetition, and even particular details, like sun dappling across a surface, are overused. The descriptions also commit the cardinal sin of commandeering the player to tell you exactly what you feel and think, which is risky enough with a characterized protagonist; with a main character who’s an empty vessel, this feels like a lack of respect for the player combined with a lack of confidence that the prose is accomplishing what it should. Taken together, these flaws make the writing aggressively kitschy, which doesn’t convey the restful vibe the game’s going for – and its wordy blandness kept me wondering whether the prose was also a product of an LLM tool.

Some implementation stumbles also took me out of the world. Beyond the unmarked exit, I ran into some trouble with the bottle (once I dropped it, trying to pick it back up triggered two messages saying I didn’t want to get it again), and in the second half of the game, I noticed a fair number of mentioned scenery items that weren’t actually implemented. It’s nothing too awful, but in a small game that’s aiming to create a meditative mood, the impact of snarls like these is magnified.

I’m aware I’m probably being too hard on an inoffensive game, and it’s important to acknowledge that this puzzleless, plotless structure is a high-wire act that makes small flaws more visible. And god knows we could all use more peace and a place of refuge these days. So if the cover art hadn’t pushed me to be on alert for the prose getting purple or robot-y, possibly I would have judged The Fountain to be anodyne enough – and I suppose there’s someone out there who might have had the opposite reaction (Thomas Kinkade sold a lot of paintings). Using the IF medium to present short, meditative experiences seems like a promising approach to me, so I’d definitely be up for more efforts in this vein in the future – I just hope I like the drapes better next time.