Reviews by Mike Russo

Now that the post-Twine revolution is well and truly settled, it feels natural to survey the different choice-based subgenres – branching CYOA-style narratives, RPG-lite quality-based narratives, puzzle-y parserlike hybrids – and think yes, of course this is how it had to be. But if you went back to 2000 to tell a reasonably-cosmopolitan member of the parser-focused amateur IF community that in 25 years choice-based games would be a big part of the scene, I’d bet that they’d think you primarily meant hypertext fiction. While many folks back then thought CYOA and gamebook approaches were overly simplistic, literary hypertext had serious ambitions and academic cred that matched the arty aspirations of the IF scene, so it might not have seemed like that big a gap to bridge. Of course that’s not the path events wound up taking, and I’m not sure of any contemporary authors mainline-IF working in that tradition other than Kaemi Velatet. But I still sometimes wonder what our Comps and Festivals would look like if the hypertext model was a major influence on our games: we might see narrative choices decentered in favor of allusive linkages, characters deemphasized in favor of linguistic play, and thematic coherence seen as a greater virtue than a satisfying plot. We might have better tools, in short, to create, present, and engage with games like SALTWATER.

Recapping the premise and the way it’s elaborated here might start to get at what I mean. The game plays out over three acts that are more like cycles, with each one moving an ensemble of half a dozen or so main characters (and maybe a dozen more supporting ones) through a sequence of set-pieces and flashbacks that see as much variation and elaboration as straight repetition, before ending in a climactic scene that brings everyone together in a collapsing church just as the world might be ending. The emotions are pitched fever-high, and the roles each character plays progresses over time: there are always people being lost, and people looking for them, but the identity of who plays any particular role is always in flux. There are different subgenres at work, largely divvied up between the different viewpoints the game provides: one character is drawn back to a past they’d tried to flee by the death of their parents, and is haunted by one of the people they left behind; another is running a sort of Lord of the Flies apocalypse-cult, squatting in the ruins of an old slaughterhouse to listen to the prophetic whispers of long-dead pigs. Much of this is compelling, but none of it is especially naturalistic, and besides a shared juxtaposition of externally-mediated catastrophe against salvation through connection, the strands aren’t woven together especially tightly.

Indeed, I have to confess that it took me a while to get into SALTWATER. The entire first act – an hour or so of playtime – consists of jumping from one perspective to the next, running through five or six entirely different sets of characters and situations with little time for the often-disorienting plot elements to breathe, much less engender investment in the characters or their world. And the relatively traditionalist choice-based approach to interactivity highlighted my lack of understanding and investment. There are quite a lot of novels I’ve loved while still experiencing pervasive moment-to-moment confusion about what exactly is happening or which character is talking (Ulysses is the obvious touchstone here, so let’s give the shout-out to Gaddis’s The Recognitions just for variety’s sake) – but that confusion lands different when you’re expected to put yourself in someone (whose?) shoes and make choices for them. There’s an early sequence, for example, where I had to decide whether a bartender (who I knew basically nothing about) was going to lie to Molly, a customer he’d just met (who both I and he knew nothing about), about an old woman who’d just collapsed upon entering the bar (who both he and she knew nothing about, though I at least had a small inkling about her deal since she’d featured in one of the earlier vignettes) – trying to figure out what the bartender might do, and why, and why I’d be expected to have any clue about any of that, took me right out of the game.

SALTWATER is also sometimes a bit slapdash about its worldbuilding and characterization. Rye, the aforementioned prodigal child, is introduced receiving a phone call from their sister, who asks them to come to their parents’ funeral to help support her. But then the next time we see them, the funeral’s over, and the last we hear of the sister is when an old friend asks Rye how she’s holding up, and Rye waves the question away with a dismissive “she’ll be fine.” Meanwhile, the societal decay implied by a bunch of children taking up long-term residence in the meatpacking plant is nowhere on display in the other sequences, and I got hung up on the revelation that the aforementioned bar is miles and miles from where people live (it sure doesn’t seem like it’s in a business district either, so who decided to set it up there?) And there’s an overreliance on talismanic images and activities – many of these are individually powerful, but between rising floodwaters, a collapsing church, a flickering lighter, bodies being put into and dug up from graves, people being lost in the snow and warmed back to the land of the living, plus the oracular pigs and maybe-ghost, there’s too much being crammed into the frame to fully cohere.

Yet I did find that I enjoyed the game substantially more when I got to the second act, and SALTWATER shifted from introducing a disorienting panoply of people to fleshing out their motivations, personalities, and the context for their decisions. And on a paragraph by paragraph level, the writing is often quite evocative and engaging (the way Ink is customized here meant that copy and paste wasn’t working for me, so you’ll have to trust me on this). By the time the third act came around and it became clear that events were moving into their final configurations, I found myself moved by the plights of some of the characters, hoping for them to find some peace.

All of which is to say there’s a better version of SALTWATER that ruthlessly simplifies it, cutting unneeded viewpoint characters (the bartender and Molly wound up being completely irrelevant so far as I could tell), building more extensive linkages between those that remain, and rigorously providing context so that the player feels empowered to make choices on their behalf. But I think I’d like that less than the other better version of SALTWATER that leans into its messiness, doesn’t impose expectations of agency on the player, jumbles up the characters without worrying so much about where one ends and another starts, shifts the prose to be even more poetic, and presents its various narrative strands not as rigorously-alternating plaits in a braid but as nodes in an ever-expanding, densely-interconnected web: a beautiful sally in a hypertext revolution that never was.

What makes a Verdeterre-like a Verdeterre-like? A design-focused analysis of the subgenre would zero in on key elements of Captain Verdeterre’s Treasure, the game that launched the mini-trend: high-score-chasing gameplay, a time limit, a complex optimization metapuzzle providing a framework around the individual challenges, and an expectation of multiple replays to come to terms with all of the above. Captain Piedaterre’s Blunders, however, has a much simpler answer: just put Captain Verdeterre, the world’s snarkiest rat pirate, in the game.

Mr. Green-dirt only has a glorified cameo at the end, however – instead looting duties fall this time to his cousin, the eponymous Captain Piedaterre. That punny name is one of the one and a half very solid jokes in this short choice-based take on the formula. The half is the Piedaterre takes the adage that one person rat’s trash is another’s treasure a bit too literally; as you run around a treasure-laden pirate ship (not your own), you reject the shiny stuff in favor of everyday dross. There’s a bit of backstory here that explains the source of this curious approach to valuation, and provides a sample of the game’s breezy prose:

"This splintered chair leg lights the corners of my mind. It reminds me of the day when, as a wee rat, I fell off a broken chair and landed on my head. Coincidentally, that was the day I discovered I had exceptional taste in all aesthetic matters."

Despite its choice-based interface, the game is unexpectedly written in Inform, with a convenient set of options enabling you to make choices by clicking hyperlinks a la Twine, typing a number, or both. The system itself works well, but I ran into some broader UI issues when playing via the browser, as “More” prompts kept popping up and requiring me to scroll down to the bottom of the window in order for new keypresses to register; sometimes a simple space bar or page-down would do the trick, but other times I was reduced to using the mouse to manually drag down the scroll bar, which was finicky process – fortunately the clickable links helped avoid this issue when it got too annoying.

For all that there was clearly a lot of time spent on the interface, I did find the substance of the game rather bare. It doesn’t wear out its welcome, to its credit, but as mentioned, it forgoes the dynamism and optimization of the core Verdeterre-like gameplay loop in favor of presenting a static environment with few puzzles; you mostly just walk through the small map grabbing whatever bits of dross you see (and if you don’t see any upon entering a room, you just poke and prod at the scenery until you find it). For a short comedy game, it’s fine, but since it so clearly invokes the original, it can’t help but suffer from the comparison – really, that title is a magnificent gag that deserves at least a little follow-up (I would love to see how Captain Piedaterre’s city apartment is decorated).

I was mystified by the first ending I reached in Larvae: for one thing, there’s no clear indication that you’ve reached the final passage, which left me half-expecting that there was timed text still to come or I’d run into a bug. For another, it felt like some horror elements teased in the opening sections (and the genre tag on IFDB) had receded without fanfare, with the story seemingly content to pivot exclusively to low-key teenage melodrama. Wondering if I’d missed something, I backed up and started making different choices – where before I’d picked options having the protagonist I’d chosen, Isla, express contentment with her boyfriend Cam as they spent a month together at an academic summer camp focusing on biology research, I tried to pull back and see if this would provoke a blow-up. But no, this just made the conclusion an understated break-up scene, rather than an I’ll-visit-you-during-all-the-vacations lovefest.

Then I went back to the very first choice I’d made after deciding which of the pair to play as, which bizarrely had me as Isla deciding whether Cam wanted a drink from my water bottle, and this time opted for him to say he’ d already had his own water. This seemingly-innocuous choice was the last one I made, as it put me on an underexplained railroad track to an entirely different kind of ending.

While this kind of non-telegraphed swerve between genres can work – heck, Hanna, We’re Going to School does something not entirely dissimilar – it’s a tricky thing to manage in practice. Ideally, each branch of the story would make sense of what comes before and act as a satisfying resolution of at least the major themes the beginning has put into play. Or if there are less-canonical options that provide a quick off-ramp from the story, that can work if the author signposts where the story is supposed to go, so the player gets a thrill out of bucking their fate for a minute before getting back on the ride. But here, it really does seem like there’s meant to be a “right” option – the horror one – which is less worked-out than the longer set of branches that don’t pay off a key element of the setup, and the contrast between the trivial decision and its fatal consequences lends the game an unintended note of bathos.

True, if you play as Cam you get a bit more perspective on why that choice of potables matters, but why would you? As mentioned, the setup here is that he and Isla are a couple of high school seniors who get an opportunity to attend a prestigious research program bringing together talented students with biologists doing cutting-edge work in a variety of fields. Except it’s Isla who’s the talented student – Cam just gets to come along as her plus one so they can spend some time together before university, and maybe so he can do some livestreaming of anything interesting they see – and if there are any players of IF who are going to pick the bro-y YouTuber over the studious, responsible one, I’ve yet to meet them.

Larvae’s multigenre ambitions are also let down by some weak writing. Neither of the main characters enjoys much in the way of characterization, and the worldbuilding is thin (it’s notionally set in the 2050s, but the world pretty much works the way it does now, except that the only cultural touchstone people tend to reference is 1979’s Alien). The rules of narrative economy are flagrantly violated – there are two different scientific legends who are introduced as potential mentor figures, but who both immediately disappear after the passages when they’re first mentioned. And the prose has the feel of something translated from another language, which sometimes can work to add an unexpected note to a game’s writing, but here is just awkward:

“Come on, you have enjoyed the activities we’ve been doing these weeks, right?” I observe a strawberry, and toss it away as it’s rotten.

“Yeah, yeah I know,” he says, taking my hand as he rises.

“Besides, it does you some good to be away from your truelove the blue-light devices.” I say, taking a look at the beautiful lavender sky. Stars are already sparkling it.

He smiles. “You’re literally my next-door neighbor girl.”

Admittedly, some of the creepier horror elements are effective, especially a viscerally upsetting bit of gore in the worst endings. And even sadder is that I think there’s the germ of an idea here that could have worked really well: when you’re experiencing the last few weeks with your girlfriend before she goes away to school and might forget you forever, it does kinda feel like there’s a monster growing in your guts could explode your heart any minute. But making that work would have required ensuring that all the pieces of the premise come into play in most paths, and sharpening the writing so that we really feel the emotional bond between the core pair, and understand them as distinct, engaging people. Unfortunately in its current version, Larvae is only able to gesture towards the stronger game it could have been.

Sometimes I play a game and it’s like sinking into a warm, familiar bath – I’ve got a history with the genre it’s playing in, the cultural signifiers are familiar, the character dynamics are ones I’ve directly experienced. With Hanna, We’re Going to School, I’m facing the opposite situation, though: while presented as a fairly standard piece of choice-based IF, per the author’s note at the end it’s directly responding to a visual-novel subgenre I’ve at best dimly heard of (and in fact specific games within that tradition). It’s set in a Singaporean high school, though it’s an international school that cleaves more closely to the John Hughes model than you might imagine – though that’s little help to me, since I went to a boarding high school and those traditionalist tropes are just as foreign to me. Meanwhile, the situations the protagonist, Jing, faces turn on gender-based bullying and stereotyping, not to mention navigating her relationship with her best friend’s ghost (I am a straight white dude and am friends with zero ghosts).

Alienation is maybe not the worst standpoint from which to approach Hanna, We’re Going to School, though. Beyond creating a perverse sense of identification with the uncomfortable-in-her-skin Jing, it’s also clear that the game is more interested in providing a critical take than serving up warmed-over tropes as comfort food. The most hilarious example of this is too good to spoil, but I’ll just say that while you’re given plenty of options as you help Jing navigate her teenage wasteland, there are only two choices that determine which ending you get: the tack you take when you finally confront your bully, which is appropriately dramatized as a high-stakes encounter, and another completely unheralded moment that you or I might experience every morning (Spoiler - click to show)(well, more so those of you who live in places where it rains, I suppose). It’s hard not to read this as cheeky commentary on the most fundamental premise of choice-and-consequence gameplay, lifting up the absurd triviality of the decisions on which whole lives can turn.

Not that this is a cynical game. Jing is a hesitant protagonist, riven by self-doubt and perennially unsure of what she wants, much less how to get it, but she’s utterly sincere in her emotional responses, feeling compassion for a victim of cool-kid teasing, passion for the idea that there can be some justice somewhere, and deeply connected to her best friend. Hanna’s a unique character in her own right – a trans girl who killed herself because of the rejection of her family and most of her peers, including Clara, the school’s queen bee, she failed to move on to the afterlife and is now tied to Jing. They make for an appealing double-act, Hanna mothering Jing and trying to look out for her, Jing honoring her memory and struggling to accept the world that threw her away. Seeing Jing navigate the high-school hellscape while Hanna tries her best to act as a guardian angel – though she’s just as young and occasionally clueless – is endearing.

It’s also often quite funny, since for all the dark themes the writing here crackles with wit. When you first meet your classmate Harold, his name is highlighted, indicating you can click it to expand some new text explaining something about who he is: when you do, you learn he’s “a guy who really likes to draw tanks during math class.” When you go down your building’s elevator, there’s an impressively large store of random gags that can fire as Hanna struggles to time her levitation appropriately. And I loved this little excerpt, which describes the entry to the school and makes clear that this is a turn-of-the-millennium period piece:

"…preschoolers crying, elementary students playing their Gameboys, middle schoolers tittle-tattling about their crushes, and angsty high schoolers listening to Linkin Park through their cracked earphones all in one bus."

So yes, there’s angst here, but it’s presented with heart and perspective – and it helps that Jing isn’t just struggling with the typical no-one-understands-me blues. A lesbian, she’s acutely aware of the ways that social pressures are pushing her to conform, especially the ostensibly well-meaning overtures Clara makes to improve her dating life. And she’s also got a sneaking suspicion that she won’t fit into the grown-up world school is theoretically helping to prepare her for, anyway – this is especially foregrounded through sequences showing the strong holding up the weak to ridicule, or asserting stereotypes about submissive Asian women. The character work makes these themes land, too – heck, even Clara, who’s a bit of a monster, appears to sincerely understand and appreciate poetry, and is given surprising depth in some of the endings.

Hanna’s portrayal, interestingly, is a bit flatter; for all the horror of her death, there are very few moments where we see her reflect on her struggles, or the existential precariousness of her current position. While she’s an active character who’s constantly talking to Jing, we get the clearest view of her subjectivity in flashbacks filtered through Jing and Clara’s imaginings of her experience. To an extent this makes her slightly flat, but then, she is a ghost; a reminder, perhaps, that there’s a sort of privilege in even the terrible parts of life being reserved to the living.

This review is, I know, a bit of a cop-out; “look at all the interesting things going on here,” I say, without landing on a particular core for my critical reading. This may just be a consequence of the fact that I’m a bit of a stranger in a strange land here, ignorant of the dialogue into which I’ve blundered, or that this is a rich text that resists oversimplistic reductions. But it’s also, I think, emblematic of the confusion of your teenaged years and school experience: a lot happens, the choices you make may matter but the way it all adds up is elusive, until you grow out of it and impose a narrative on it in retrospect. Unless you don’t grow out of it.

Starting up My Girl I was initially overwhelmed by a swarm of dubious associations. No one of my generation can read that title without thinking first of the lively Motown standard and second of a dying Macaulay Culkin, and then when I started the game and saw that the protagonist’s husband was named Santiago and spent most of his time out at sea, Hemingway shouldered his way in there too. But it didn’t take long to realize that none of these were authentic influences: this is Bluebeard, and a Bluebeard played shockingly straight, with no dramatic twists to the premise or gimmicky gameplay to distract (indeed, this is dynamic fiction – the only interactivity is clicking forward to the next passage).

This means that the game’s prose has nothing to hide behind – which is good news, since you wouldn’t want it to even make the attempt. Some early excerpts will stand for many more that I saved in my notes file, with their precise mastery of detail and portentous allusion:

“You know that I love you, don’t you, Carmilla?” he asks. His eyes are doleful, focused intently on your own: pinning you beneath the weight of his gaze like a butterfly skewered for a collector’s pleasure. “Thank you for listening to me. You know that I only want what’s best for you,” Santiago says. He brushes aside a curl of your dark hair, smudging his thumb against your forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday. You close your eyes. You don’t want to see his mouth slanting closer.

"Later, Santiago is fiddling around with a length of rope, restlessly tying and untying knots in turn. The fires crackle in the distance, the thick stone walls slow to warm. Santiago loves the sea, is bound to die by its hand someday - to be swallowed by the arctic depths, bones plunging to the bottom of the sea: whale-fall, to return from whence he came. Sea foam and salt, smooth bone and corrugated shell. When you view your husband at just the right angle, in the fast falling light, he is nothing but the blue afterimage that burns after bearing witness to the sea."

Visible too in these passages are some of the grace-notes the game does introduce to the folktale. First, rather than doom standing over Bluebeard’s wife, here it’s the sailor himself who seems destined an early grave; second, despite her material dependence upon him, his need for her love and approval goes some way to balancing or even reversing the traditional power dynamics. For all that Santiago carelessly constrains Carmilla to the same straitened horizons as her literary precedents, fulfilling his role as an instrument of the patriarchy, this is a softened Bluebeard: there’s no confrontation scene after she disobeys his instruction, as he meekly accepts her lies and slinks off-stage to be murdered. Indeed, the discovery of the Bloody Chamber is underplayed, so much so that I could almost believe Carmilla decides to kill him as much out of jealousy for his love of the sea as out of desperation to save her own life – indeed, the happy ending crows that “the sea will haunt [her] no more,” as though the ocean was the target of her vengeance, with Santiago simply the unfortunate vessel.

Of course it’s not as simple as all that; the patriarchy is ultimately what sets women against each other in competition, and the sea’s not immune to that, and Santiago’s very blindness to his wife’s needs and emotions justifies his demise. Beyond being a lush and lovely retelling of one of the great stories, I also enjoyed My Girl for the way it denies the ideas that a threatened wife needs to be only a victim, or that a monstrous husband can’t suffer.

It’s appropriate that VESPERTINE comes from the Goncharov jam, since more so than the classic techniques of interactive fiction the primary structural approach is the montage. We’re given hints of context, allusions to background, a looming presentiment of violence that will become the plot, but mainly what we see is two men coming together: the eponymous Russian mobster and his chameleon lover, Andrey. It’s clear that theirs is a long-standing affair, but the game isn’t overly fussed with sectioning time and space to keep their illicit encounters distinct: they might be tangled together in bed and a footnote will see them encountering each other in the street, but who’s to say whether that’s a memory from five years or five minutes ago, or even a glimpse of things to come? Indeed, as the evocative prose ranges over the territory of their bodies and the territory of their relationship, the boundaries between the two sometimes dissolve: at the level of language, in the way any given “he” might refer to either or both of them, at the level of metaphor, in the way Goncharov writes secret missives in the black book Andrey keeps as a journal.

The writing is dreamlike yet holds nothing back in exalting these characters in each others’ eyes. This early bit about Andrey’s penchant for hair-dye as an element of disguise is emblematic of the way a facility with the tools of violence and crime become sexy:

"But I’d want you all the same as a blonde - like the wheat fields we painted portraits of each other in, summer sun baking over our shoulders. Alla prima: all at once. You and I know something about that. I’d have eyes only for you as a brunet: church mouse brown, a shy, faltering touch over communion. Such a devoted man. And as a redhead - you captivate the room, eyes drawn to the flame, to the way you liven up a room."

Color recurs – there’s that link to film again:

"I love you the way the dead sea loves: caustic, catastrophic, and still- halophilic archaea persist in those blue, blue waters. The way a lighthouse throws its light over the ocean waves: a beacon of warning, to stay away- refuge is not in sight. Those craggy corals and rough rocks will tear into your hull, until there’s nothing left of you."

It’s heady stuff, straining at the very edges of the sublime but never tipping over into the ridiculous. The disorienting way the prose is delivered also makes the player vulnerable to sudden, unexpected imagery: the main thrust of the progression spools out linearly, through end-of-passage links that move onward, but each page boasts several superscripted end-notes as well as a single highlighted word or phrase that will reveal new vignettes, some short flashbacks, others discursions into the first person, and yet others perhaps indicating hoped-for futures that may or may not come. It’s an effective delivery mechanism, though I found it perhaps a bit baroque, with the many different ways and places to click drawing more attention to themselves than I needed them to (I wonder how this piece would work as literary hypertext?)

Beyond the slightly over-engineered interface, the only other thing that left me less than enraptured was a fleeting reluctance to believe that these hyperaesthetes truly lived the lives the story was telling me they did: none of the violence they inflict here is brutal, it’s just as heartbreakingly beautiful and painful as their lovemaking. Perhaps having more familiarity with the Goncharov meme would help with that, though – or perhaps it’s just another nod to the game’s filmic origin, as the camera’s got a long history of making killing look like art.

(I wrote two reviews for this one, here are both)

Naughty in the Library, like its companion piece Hot in the Office, is largely an exercise in satisfying expectations: once again we’ve got a pornographic Twine game presenting a specific-yet-generic sexy scenario. The latter game, per my review, managed to delight with a completely loopy take on the premise, including a partner hell-bent on sending you sexy pictures no matter how discouraging the dialogue options you pick and an inexplicable eroticization of office chairs (alert J.D. Vance). Naughty in the Library plays out almost beat-for-beat the same – a woman you barely know starts texting you emoji-filled updates about her daily activities, then her exhibitionist tendencies start coming out once she finds herself alone – so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some kind of formula the author uses to Mad-Libs out the different sequences. But there’s nothing as deranged here as in Hot in the Office, save for the fact that the scene kicks off with your interlocutor firing off flirty texts while sprinting across campus to avoid being late for class (my ears pricked up upon learning the subject is ancient history, but alas no details were forthcoming no matter how much I pried) – other than that, things proceed exactly as you’d think they would, down to wet-blanket dialogue options succeeding in killing the mood this time out.

On the plus side, the art style is still the same, so if you like MS Paint and dislike eyes, boy howdy do I have a game for you.

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A library is an alchemical machine: fittingly, it was Sumerian priests who first took the quicksilver knowledge coursing through their minds and transformed it into dull clay, a Philosopher’s Stone in reverse. Perhaps that’s an overly romantic view of what at first were merely storehouses of commercial transactions, allowing proto-bureaucracies to ensure that taxes were paid and contracts satisfied – but information is information, and transformation transformation: despite all Gilgamesh’s literary striving for immortality, Ea-nāṣir has precisely the same share of it. And we can run the metaphor in reverse if we like – after his death, Ashurbanipal’s capital of Nineveh was razed as his empire crumbled, but the fires baked the tablets in his great library, preserving them for millennia to kindle the scholarship of those who came after. That’s a miraculous exception, though, we all know the library at Alexandria only burned to ash; it was well past its prime, so who can say what was lost.

A library is a mirage of justice. Late in his life, Andrew Carnegie endowed thousands of libraries to enable young people, starting out in life as impoverished as he had bit, to educate and better themselves; if any of these eager students were able to similarly catapult themselves to the apex of plutocracy, I’m unaware of it, just as I’m unaware of any sums he donated to trust-busters. A hundred years later, public libraries in Los Angeles are a refuge of last resort for the homeless, with librarians struggling to provide them the services they need while still making the space safe and accessible for other patrons who need a place to study, or get online to submit a job application or benefits paperwork (California’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps crowd succeeded in slashing our property taxes in 1978 – library staffing levels dropped by a third overnight and have never recovered).

A library is a pivot point. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was 7, I would have said paleontologist, and at 17 I would have said cosmologist. Bush v. Gore and the War on Terror made me wonder whether there were more pressing problems in the here and now, but my first taste of real activism was trying to save my university’s library: my senior year, we caught wind of a plan to turn the central library building into offices for fund-raising and administration (if there’s an apter found-metaphor for the ways American higher education has gone astray in the past quarter-century, I haven’t seen it), leaving each department to cram a few books into whatever rooms they could spare and archive the rest off-site. The building was an unlovely steel tower, and named after a former professor infamous at the time for dry-labbing the results that won him the Nobel Prize and infamous later for his support of eugenics; still, a library’s a library. I organized a petition that a tenth of the student body signed, conducted a notably hostile interview with the dean who’d masterminded the plan, and wrote fiery editorials in the school paper. I graduated that summer, eventually to wend my way to law school; the books lasted on campus only a few months longer.

A library is an act of hubris. Borges connects the universal library with the upward-yearning tower of Babel, Eco’s labyrinth of books conceals a truth that might make us laugh at the divine. Why do the thoughts of particularly metafictional authors incline towards the library when they want to overthrow the heavens? Because it’s possible to imagine a library unfettered by constraints of time and space, freed to pursue its telos of bringing together all knowledge that exists, all knowledge that could exist – more than anything else human-made, libraries gesture towards omniscience, that divine perquisite. Or are we to think it a coincidence that Diderot, first among the Encyclopédistes, ruminated about strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest?

A library is a place of honor. Forget the vexed, restrictive arguments about the cultural canon, which are all about exclusion; what’s important here is the way the collection of a public library signals inclusion, asserting that at least some people will find at least some value in everything on its shelves. No wonder then that right-wingers have turned our libraries into warzones: the defining characteristic of the reactionary mind is the psychic harm it suffers at the idea that people different from them are equal in dignity, and so what greater insult is there than seeing literature of, for, and by those you hate given a place? You can enforce hierarchy on bodies, exalt some spaces at the expense of others, and you can try to do the same with books – there’s that pesky canon again. But books are stubborn things, and short of burning them (oh, do the reactionaries dream of burning them) there’s no way of shutting them up.

A library is also a place where you can bone; if that thought occurred to you before any of the ones above, and ideally you like MS Paint and dislike eyes, boy howdy do I have a game for you.

Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is one of the all-time greats of vampire cinema. His background and agenda don’t really stand out, inasmuch as Murnau just filed off the absolute minimum quantity of serial numbers to avoid infringing on Dracula’s copyright. He’s also not much of a conversationalist, inasmuch as all his dialogue has to show up in intertitles and is translated from German. But oh, that look! Pointy-eared, bald-headed, snaggle-toothed, giant clawed hands at the end of too-long, too-straight arms, and those eyes – deep set, black-rimmed, perpetually bugged out. He’s operatically hideous, you can’t look away. Teatime with a Vampire’s Mr. Orlok, by way of contrast, is a charming flirt, always one bon mot ahead of the guests on his midnight talk show; he smells great, has a great head of hair, and golden, limpid eyes; Alex, our protagonist, spends the whole game lusting after him because he’s the sexiest thing on two legs. Me? I miss the Count.

This is an entry in the romance-focused Smoochie Jam (and, apparently, the awfully-specific Queer Vampire Jam?) but it takes a minute to warm up to its theme. The extended opening sequence focuses on Alex watching TV while in the throes of depression; with eir roommate out and up way too late, ey’s flipping channels and wallowing. Mr. Orlok’s a vital presence, so to speak, who arrests Alex’s progress clicking by, and given that the name of his show matches the name of the game – this is all happening in a universe where vampires are a mostly-accepted part of society, though they’re still exotic enough to make Alex’s clear thing for them slightly uncomfortable, like a white guy who only dates Asian women – it’s clear which way the plot lies. But you’re given a surprising amount of leeway to refuse the call in one way or another; deciding to keep on channel surfing, or just go to bed early, results in distinct early endings that elucidate a little more of Alex’s angst. Though the prose has a fair number of typos, there’s some quite solid writing in these short stubs that few players will likely see:

"Alex pushes the remote to the side and lets eir head fall back on the couch, eyes staring at the colours flickering on the ceiling. Because of the colourful set of the show and the contrasted individuals on TV, shades of yellows and reds, and sometimes greens, dance with the shadowy blues. Pushing and pulling, twirling, merging and separating. Ey lets out a deep sigh."

If you keep watching Teatime With a Vampire, though, the story takes a more compelling turn, which brings Alex into a close pas de deux with the eponymous Mr. Orlok. Against the backdrop of cheesy daytime talk-show staples given an additional bite – think a truth or dare game enlivened with some truly awful offal, or a photo montage featuring some preternatural snaps – your choices determine whether you go along with the sexy but threatening ride Orlok is offering, or instead reject it. There’s quite a lot of reactivity here, with the game saying there are 13 endings, of which only three or four appear to be of the bailing-before-things-get-good variety; while mostly played nice with Orlok, that definitely felt like one choice among many, rather than the “do you want more plot Y/N” of the early going.

It’s a clever setup telling a novel story, with writing and mechanics that serve the narrative. The exposition is also woven in with a deft hand, with interview questions giving Alex a chance to rattle off previous romantic partners or gesture towards what appears to be a trans narrative. All told the game offers an impressive package, but I have to confess that I enjoyed it less than it probably deserves because I felt a bit too much of Alex’s ennui rubbing off on me. Partially this is down the pacing, which feels like it slows the game way down in the back half – there’s an innuendo-filled cooking segment that feels like it just keeps going on and on, without much sense of escalation or anything that it’s building towards, which I found especially sapped my energy – but partially it’s that I found the characters dull as dishwater. This is maybe a slightly unfair accusation to level against Alex; no one is especially dynamic when they’ve been sitting on a couch for weeks, and Alex does have some people ey cares about. But eir conversational mode is basically either “get super flustered” or “pretend to be cool”, and the particulars of eir anomie are left pretty vague, save for it being something that some hot hot vampire loving might solve; it’s a setup that works to create a self-insertion-friendly romance protagonist, but I didn’t find it especially exciting.

Orlok is the bigger disappointment, I think. As a nigh-immortal creature of darkness, I wanted him to be dangerously compelling, but instead he came off like – well, like someone who belongs on daytime TV. His jokes aren’t especially sophisticated, his flirting is all a bit camp, and his looks, as described, are pretty but generic. Sure, he’s putting on a performance for the camera, but that’s just about the only way we see him: my favorite moment is where he responds to a question about the most interesting place he’s visited by telling a story about walking to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and image of a deathless but hungry immortal slowly dragging himself to such an alien sight, fathoms-deep below the waves, is immediately compelling, and makes me want to know more about the kind of person who’d do that – but then the moment passes and he’s fake-laughing again.

I wanted to find Orlok as magnetic as Alex, and the game, both do; I wanted someone I couldn’t stop thinking about. If the game had taken a risk and put in the “real” Count Orlock, buck teeth and all, that might have stood in the way of the romantic fantasy, but I think something like that would have been a bold but ultimately more successful choice – the game is really built around Orlok, who’s the vehicle and impetus for Alex’s self-discovery and transformation, and no ordinary vampire will do.

I don’t think we’ve seen a SeedComp game yet in the thon, so this is a nice surprise now that we’re getting close to wrapping up. Actually the genesis here is slightly more interesting than that; the plot and characters are drawn from the author’s earlier game Structural Integrity – where a city-planning bureaucrat faced a difficult moment in his relationship with his partner – while the seed provides the structure, summed up as “one click, one viewpoint”. That means there’s no branching this time out: the story, which focuses on the aforementioned couple having a strained conversation with the bureaucrat’s boss and his partner, plays out the same way every time, but after each bit of narration you’re given the option to jump to a new perspective to see the next chunk from another character’s perspective (in fact, until you complete a playthrough you can’t stick with the same viewpoint two times running).

I admit I experienced a bit of disorientation at first; less due to the perspective shifting as such than because it’s been a year and a half since I played the prior game, and having four characters with fantasy-ish names that lack close real-world equivalents who can be referred to either by their first or last name depending on what viewpoint you’re tracking. Fortunately there’s an always-available dramatis personae link in the corner, which was a helpful reference, but it still took me a minute to get into the swing of the story. Fortunately, what’s going on here is relatively simple: Ubay, the boss, is a snob intent on cutting his working-class staffer, Yaan, down to size with a withering remark or two, while their respective partners provide support and/or a bit of additional snark. And that’s really the size of it – there is a threat of escalation, but it’s preempted by the arrival of a fifth character, which ends the scene and the game.

It’s an engaging enough sequence that I replayed until I’d gotten the full story, but it’s also relatively slight, the kind of thing snippy exchange that would take up maybe a minute and a half in an episode of Parks and Rec. I don’t mind the stakes being low – heck, Parks and Rec is one of my favorite shows – but the quadrupling of perspectives means that this is more akin to a full six-minute sitcom act, and after the second or third repetition, the core action felt less compelling. Ubay’s classism doesn’t feel especially motivated, and despite his partner Erandan getting a bit of backstory establishing that he resents Yaan after being passed over for a promotion and is kind of horny for his partner Kel, he definitely feels like a bit of a third (or I suppose fourth) wheel.

With that said, the core dynamic between Yaan and Kel is well drawn, and having been to a lot of work events with my wife, seeing them support each other through an awkward moment resonated with me. And if I hadn’t replayed it fully, I might not have experienced the flaws mentioned above. Actually, I wonder whether the “stick with one character” mode, while a welcome convenience, might not have been the best idea to implement – because you can jump into any character at any time, each passage necessarily restates some of the core dynamics for that character, meaning that staying in just one head for a full playthrough, as I did for all of mine past the first, makes the game feel a bit more plodding and simple than if it’s played as intended. Besides that, given that it’s a sequel there might be more games in this sequence to come, which might provide better context for the eponymous conversation; regardless, for now it’s still a nice bit of writing that may be better to just experience once or twice than plumb exhaustively.

(No rating entered since I only played the free Chapter One)

Look, I get it: if you asked me what fictional world I’d want to live in, the Shire would definitely come to mind. Sure, it’s parochial and insular and state capacity is sufficiently low that per the book one point five sufficiently-motivated randos came close to knocking the whole thing over, but the flood of tourism New Zealand saw after the release of the films testifies to the impression those rolling hills, those lush gardens, those curly-headed children made on the broader public. As idylls go, the hobbit life seems hard to beat, and I say that as someone who’s never smoked pot, er, Longbottom Leaf – so a cozy game offering the opportunity to live life as a humble homebody who doesn’t go following wizards off on adventures has immediate appeal.

On the evidence of the one chapter provided as a free demo, Halfling Dale seems well-positioned to satisfy the fantasy. The model here is very clearly Choice of Games, down to the main audience being phone-users (in fact there’s no PC option so far as I can tell) – the blurb highlights character customization options, romanceable characters, and the number of words, so really, based on what I know about the CoG house style, this is a close match. There doesn’t appear to be a stats page where you can track the effect your decisions are having on your character, but there are an opening set of choices where you can establish some of your hobbit halfling’s traits so I suspect there’s a similar system running under the hood – though of course rather than being strong, tough, or social, here you can opt to be imaginative, mischievous, or have a good sense of humor, and you’re your job options include apiarist or cheesemonger, which make for a nice fit for this pastoral subgenre.

Of course, the game isn’t set in the Shire, but in its non-union Mexican equivalent, and here’s where some problems start to crop up. The Scylla and Charybdis of the pastiche are either hewing so closely to the source material that you wind up in an uncanny valley, or making so many intentional departures that things start feeling incongruous. Halfling Dale definitely errs on the side of the former rather than the latter (though the fact that the halflings all love to play Go did tweak my what-the-heck-is-a-Chinese-game-doing-in-Hobbiton sensibilities). The game starts with a birthday party that involves a long speech, okay. You’ve got a family member who’s got a disreputable-by-halfling-standards association with dwarves, sure. And then there’s a wilderness-dwelling protector who frowns a lot, and you learn some backstory which has to do with well-meaning free folks needing to find a long-lost artifact to keep an ancient evil at bay, and the list of default options for your character’s name includes “Fredegar” and “Lotho”, and come on now, you don’t need to have the literal plot of Lord of the Rings playing out in the background to make this setup work.

In fairness, so far when it sticks to its knitting the game seems to work well. Your mom vents her frustration at your brother’s iffy friend by calling him a “confustable dwarf”, and the intimation that the fair that appears to make up Chapter Two involves a Naughtiest Parsnip contest is certainly intriguing (this thing’s rated G, right?) And the intro does efficiently set the table, establishing the world, your character, your family situation, and the ominous backstory, while still having time to offer each of the romance options a bit of spotlight time. If you’re not overly fussed about the degree to which pastiches cleave to their source material, and the CoG model is one that appeals, I suspect you’ll be in good hands with Halfling Dale; to be honest, though it’s not my usual cup of tea, I definitely experienced some of the draw myself.

It may be that there are other games that I’ve started up, squinted painfully at the text, and then thanked heavens – and then the author – that there’s a font size option in the settings. But I’m not immediately thinking of any off-hand, meaning it’s still a sufficiently rare occurrence that constellate’s opening made me acutely self-conscious of my age, and the current and sure-to-increase physical decline that goes along with that. It’s not a pleasant headspace to inhabit, but it’s an apt one for this story of spent interstellar gladiators coming together to manage their decay.

The backstory here is doled out in hints and partial memories doled out through multiple replays: you play a former soldier, scarred by what you’ve seen and done, retired now to become a farmer. Your former commander, Eris – who seems to be something more than human, almost like a Warhammer 40k Space Marine – took a more direct route out of the war, falling from the heavens and barely surviving the ordeal; you’ve been trying to nurse her back to health as best you’re able, though the things she’s done dwarf your own crimes by their enormity and you fear her age and scars mean she won’t ever be able to come back. Oh, and the devotion you used to feel for her may now be turning into a kind of love.

As is typical for the author, the prose’s lushness and emotional immediacy mean that the general fuzziness over exactly what’s going on doesn’t matter that much, as the feelings still come through. Here’s the opening, for example:

"A blanket of snow covers the earth, obscures its surface, veil waiting for debridement. Microcosm, these tiny moons carefully hung in orbit, made in desperately hopeful vignettes of a pastoral, ancient Earth. Manufactured nostalgia for things long since extinct; to work the land with your hands under pale blue skies, to find purpose as dirt gathers beneath your fingernails, to gaze up at the unfamiliar vestiges of the constellations, their myths blurred by time, lost in translation, warped by distance from home."

Or here’s a description of Eris:

"Her, the tired woman ill-accustomed to dealing with Earth-like artificial gravity and the changing seasons, long-limbed and thin enough to count each individual ridge of her spine, tattooed in elaborate patterns that emerge from the sleeve of the too-short sweatshirt and make themself known in other places, the thin strip of warm tan skin between hem and waistband, the pantleg haphazardly scrunched to rest below her knee. Beneath the softened exterior lies the spitting image of every heretic you were taught to fear and despise."

The themes here are right in the open, but not in any bald, dead way – this is a game that knows what it’s about, and isn’t afraid to tell you because it has confidence that its prose can carry you right along. And it did; much like the author’s earlier Protocol and the Revenant’s Lament, this is a story of a dangerous, broken person and the woman who loves them, but the specifics are drawn so distinctly that there’s no danger of repetition.

While the writing is the most immediately engaging element of constellate, I actually find its structure the most interesting piece. This is a relatively short game, but it has a fair number of choices, which significantly branch the passages you see and the text that you read – indeed, the IFDB page mentions that there are nine endings. But after three replays where I tried to take reasonably different tacks through the materials, I didn’t experience much difference in plot – things pretty much land in the same place, and the emotional dynamics between the two characters remain a constant, but the particular ways those dynamics get activated, the give-and-take balance between attraction and despair, can shift substantially, and I also saw noticeably different bits of backstory depending on the choices I made. In some respects this is an inefficient way to design a game; I suspect a single playthrough sees a much smaller percentage of the text than is typical for a game like this, and the relatively small number of choices that draw attention to how consequential they may be risks players feeling like the game is less reactive than it is. Plus I didn’t find myself compelled to go back and exhaust the different endings the way that I sometimes do when there are clear stakes established around decision points.

For all that this is an idiosyncratic choice to have made, though, I’m not sure it’s a bad one. My playthroughs feel more authentically “mine” as a result than I typically experience with choice-based IF, and the conflicted, self-denying nature of the protagonist’s feelings for Eris make it reasonable that there’s no canonical playthrough that directly lays out the relevant history and emotional toplines. For two people who don’t really belong, living on a fake planet that likewise doesn’t belong, feeling their bodies give out as fast as my eyesight, this sense of contingency is a perfect fit.

And so we come to the end of the RGB trilogy [later edit: per feedback from the author, no we don’t! There are still two to come. I’ll leave the rest of the review as originally written, but the last two paragraphs especially should be taken as much more contingent given that we haven’t yet seen the cycle’s last word]. True to form, there’s significant continuity of theme, moderate continuity of characters, and a whole new gameplay idiom in this final, red-themed installment. Speaking of red, he’s once again one of the primary characters here, as “quick-tempered and immature” as he was in the last outing, though substantially less dead. The introductory screen tells us that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”; perhaps he narrowly escaped death at his mother-in-law’s hands despite being trussed up like a prize turkey, or perhaps a better understanding is that we’re just meant to perceive continuity between the characters without fussing the details unduly. Adding to the sense of dislocation, despite the opening act of the trilogy leading off with Shakespearean language and the second having a bit of an Edgar Allan Poe vibe (albeit with some anachronistic touches of technology), we’re firmly in the modern day now, with the story opening on a chat window on a Grindr-like app warning you – teal – that the guy you just slept with – red – is a murderer.

Delightfully, your attempt to escape before he finishes his post-hook-up shower is rendered in parserlike form. There’s furniture to rifle, various locked doors and compartments, an inventory puzzle, and even a secret password. Teal, we are told, is “dense and nosy”, which as a descriptor of the prototypical parser protagonist made me laugh; yes, we’re usually feeling a bit thick as we bash our heads against the puzzles, and we certainly poke everywhere we don’t belong. The gameplay is standard enough, and the puzzles aren’t exactly brain-melters – there’s only so much you can do with 500 words, and the medium-dry-goods parserlike approach isn’t an especially plot-rich way to deploy them, so things are kept reasonably terse – but I still deeply enjoyed how surprising I found this move.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell the plot doesn’t ultimately branch based on whether you succeed at the parser section; red’s view of you in the climactic confrontation does seem to shift based on your actions, but that’s just a sprinkle of flavor on top of a cake that’s going to come out the same way every time. Again, that’s a reasonable design decision given the brutal word-count limits, and I don’t think the game would have worked as well as a capstone for the others if the ending was up in the air.

Now that the series is finished, I think I have a sense of the overall drift: once again, the target of violence in the previous act is the one directing murderous menace at the new protagonist, and once again marriage is the site of this violence (red is getting married in the morning). One doesn’t want to get too reductive and schematic about this, since there are unique elements to each game. This is the only act where we don’t see one member of a married couple threatened with death, for example, and a possible interpretation is that that’s because red is able to displace his lusts and his serial-killer tendencies out of wedlock – which would lend an anti-hedonistic tenor to proceedings that isn’t as directly present in the other acts. But still, we’re left with cycles of violence and marriage as an institution that at best is incapable of stability in the face of the storms of emotions it generates, and at worst is actually conjuring up the abuse.

Those aren’t especially novel themes, of course, but most themes aren’t – it’s the way an author uses plot, characters, and game mechanics to play them that can make something memorable, and I think the RGB cycle definitely does well on this score; the bones are solid and evocative, and the variations are well considered. I might have liked to see a bit more of a bow on the package at the end, perhaps a slightly more explicit looping back to the beginning, but that’s just a personal aesthetic preference; sadly, the omnipresent nature of intimate partner violence means that this is an idea that could just be endlessly riffed on until the heat death of the universe. And there are few games that I can think of that accomplish so much with so little, providing entertaining gameplay as well as some food for thought.

We’re doing this again, I say to myself – you can read that in an excited tone of voice, representing my combined eagerness and dread to revisit the horrifying yet oddly beautiful world of A1RL0CK, or with a world-weary sigh as I contemplate having to type out a bunch of number-for-letter substitutions once again (how ‘bout we just call it TROOP from here on out?) My emotions on this second encounter with the alien terrors and man-made atrocities found under the waters of Titan aren’t far afield from those of our protagonist this time out:

"Colonel J.T. Thomas. Father of twins that he hasn’t seen yet, husband of a semiotics teacher, head of a recovery team who doesn’t have a clear idea of what the fuck he’s doing three thousand meters deep in the black ass of the universe… Fuck Biofarm and fuck the fucking rescue team."

Yes, after the mess you contributed to creating in the first game, in the grand tradition of sequels everywhere now you’re sent to clean things up. The efficiency with which the above response to X ME conveys backstory and engenders sympathy – I definitely did not want to screw up and get this guy killed – is of a piece with the environmental descriptions, which grounded me in the awe and awfulness of going so deep below the seas:

"As you descend, the darkness becomes less penetrating. Black becomes blue, the same shade as any night at the north pole, under a sky with few stars…The water seems thinner here and the pressure less impressive. All directions are good, if you want to go to a worse place than this.”

There’s great imagery and evocative prose throughout the piece, which combines the laconic lilt of hard sci-fi with grand guignol sights and body-horror flashes that wouldn’t be out of place in a dark, edgy anime. It’s a combination that ratchets up the intensity beyond what I experienced in the first game; here, it’s clear that you’re to some degree complicit in the crimes committed in this place, even if you’re not aware of their full scope, and with the station now almost fully swamped, and fallen hundreds of fathoms deeper, I always felt exquisitely vulnerable in my explorations. And while J.T. is in some respects a more conventional main character that Chloe was in A1RL0CK, TROOP similarly manages to throw his sense of self into turmoil with a few well-judged and well-delivered twists.

Once again, though, I struggled with the puzzles. There are a few early ones that are simple but satisfying to solve, relying on your suit’s different scanning instruments to suss out the way forward. I was disappointed that this mechanic fell by the wayside as the game opened up into its middle act, though – as I explored a relatively large map with confusingly-described exits (sometimes passages towards a staircases are given as both a vertical and compass direction, sometimes only one) and no real sense of where I should be headed, I felt as though I was in a maze, and many of the challenges hinged on vaguely-described gadgets that I had a hard time picturing, much less knowing what they could do. There’s a valves-and-tubes puzzle that I think just requires a lot of trial and error, unless I missed some more direct clues, and one that involves combining a few devices that are described just by their shape rather than their function, which meant I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. Fortunately, David Wellbourn has pulled together a walkthrough of this game too, since I confess I was following it quite closely for the second half of the game.

I’m glad I did, though, since the final confrontation is appropriately nasty (even if I’m still not completely sure how I won it), and the hint of redemption in the epilogue is a lovely grace note. The story and environment here are really compelling, selling the fantasy of being unimaginably deep underwater and coming face to face with the worst fruits of man’s inhumanity. So it’s definitely worth a dip, I just wish the water was a little more welcoming – and for my nerves’ sake, I’m not sure I could handle a third visit to 0CEANUS PR1ME!

I don’t know if I’m especially atypical in this, but every once in a while I notice how there are certain allegedly-universal elements of the human experience that I’ve actually never personally experienced. I went to a boarding high school, for example, so the prototypical John Hughes version of one’s teenaged years is unrecognizably exotic to me. Or there’s the fact, which is not unrelated to the prior point and is related, finally, to the game I’m reviewing, that I’ve never been broken up with. That’s mostly just a factor of having had fewer, longer relationships rather than because I’m some amazing catch or anything, and of course I’ve read and watched plenty of breakups from both perspectives, but the result is still that my primary personal reaction to breakup conversations is just wanting them to be over and done with, rather than replaying them over and over in my mind to try to find just the right thing I could have said to get a different result.

Boy howdy is Tiel, the protagonist of Cycle, not in that boat. This is the choice-based original upon which How Dare You is based, and among the myriad differences between the two is that in this iteration, you are nearly compelled to replay the breakup sequence, trying myriad different strategies and exploring the tides of cause and effect; Tiel is frankly like a dog with a bone, unable to let go and accept Heron’s word that their relationship has run its course.

Another difference is that where the parser-based version of this story presents it almost as avant-garde theater, a nearly wordless tableau where the scenery reveals the merest hints of the context of the fight and gesture and action carry the plot, Cycle is not nearly so minimalist. The opening narration here is three or four paragraphs that provide more information on Tiel’s living situation, what he enjoys about his relationship with Heron, and creates a spirit of optimism that’s suddenly ground to a halt by his soon-to-be-ex’s “we need to talk”, whereas in How Dare You there’s only a bare sentence or two before hitting that moment. And in addition to the backstory and detail, there’s a lot more dialogue – I got a much clearer sense of both Tiel and Heron this time, and why their relationship is probably doomed.

Cycle also does some interesting things with its gameplay and potential branching that I don’t think are mirrored in its remake, but they’re sufficiently spoilery that I’ll hide them for the rest of this paragraph: (Spoiler - click to show)so the “cycle” of the title, and the esprit d’escalier that I understand often accompanies being broken up with, are made quite literal here through the device of the watch Tiel can use to rewind time and try again. I was really taken by surprise by this pot twist, delightedly so – I’d gotten a sense of why Tiel was a bad partner, but seeing him manipulate Heron via undetectable means, and reading the implication that he’s been doing this from the very beginning of their relationship, makes this story something far more memorable than a quotidian breakup. I also really liked that the game doesn’t just make every option available to you from the get-go; each loop adds only one or two new options, based on what didn’t work or almost worked the previous time. This means that there’s a sense of progression even as events are repeating: structurally, we’ve got a spiral, not a circle. And the possibility of reaching one of the endings is withheld long enough for the player to have no illusions about the stakes for their choice.

All told I have to say I enjoyed Cycle significantly more than How Dare You, though I respect its radically different approach. I’m also now very curious how I would have felt about it had I come to it assuming its characters are the same as the ones in this game; the subtle push towards making Tiel physically violent in the latter game makes a lot more sense to me now. Regardless, Cycle certainly stands on its own as well as being part of an interesting pairing – though it’s definitely cemented me in my belief that the best breakup is the one everyone walks away from as quickly as possible.

Having just written a long review taking a game to task for its toothless satire, I come now to Renegade Brainwave, which finally has the gumption to set its lance at a real sacred cow: terrible B-movies of the 1950s, especially those made by Ed Wood. This is working in “loving parody” mode, though – from the overwrought narration to the main character’s penchant for cross-dressing, the game’s animated by a clear affection for its source material, warts and all, and wants nothing more than to share its enthusiasm with the player. The introductory narration, for example, comes from an undead circus-ringmaster whose words practically beg you to imagine the hammed-up delivery:

“Beware! Take care! For you are about take part in an interactive story that will reveal the terrifying truth behind the ill-fated Soviet space program! Revelations of incredible horrors that will terrify you with their brutal reality!”

“For this is the story of a mysterious force — a force that has crossed the billion-mile vastness of infinite space! Boneless, fleshless, almost invisible and yet imbued with incredible power — I speak to you of cosmic radiation!”

(Almost invisible?)

This histrionic voice is maintained in the game proper, where you step into the white vinyl go-go boots of a beat cop who’s been charged with investigating a mysterious meteor that’s cratered into the burial ground for local carnies, alongside your partner, an off-brand Ronald McDonald (I am not trying to be funny, this is just a straightforward description of the setup). The swamp-choked graveyard is home to all sorts of hazards and haunts, all described with a purplishness of prose that would put the ripest eggplant to shame, but there’s room for snappy jokes, too:

"Pallid-faced with a shock of orange hair and a red nose, Donald is one of the more bizarre-looking officers in your precinct, topped only by Officer McGillicuddy who is a chimpanzee, and Officer McKenzie, a spoon."

The map is laid out in a compact three-by-three grid, and it doesn’t take much poking around to learn what’s actually going on: that meteor was actually a crashing Russian spaceship, and the cosmonaut, a Soviet cur – I mean she is literally a dog – has been given psychic powers by space radiation and now is working on a machine to create an army of the dead (again, this is just the plot, I’m not adding any additional wackiness or anything). Foiling her plans requires testing your wits against the living and unliving denizens of the swamp, from a giant alligator to a fetid bubble of swamp gas, and marshaling the talents of your often-uncooperating partner to boot.

The game’s wordy narrative voice does mean that I struggled at first to get into the rhythm of the puzzles; nine locations isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things, but some of them boast entrances to buildings, and all have long, dense descriptions that take some repeated reading to fully parse. Fortunately, they don’t actually have all that many implemented nouns, and the game’s pretty good about highlighting the one or two actually-interactive objects per area. While some of the challenges can feel a bit obscure, the fact that at any given time there’s only one or two puzzles you can make progress on paradoxically helped me focus my efforts, since it meant I could put all my brain-power to the question of what good the angora sweater I just recovered could possibly do me (beyond going nicely with my Mary Quant dress, of course). There were a few challenges that stymied me for a bit – including one that appears to have been added in an update to the game, and therefore isn’t addressed by the hint system or provided walkthrough – but close observation and a bit of trial and error were generally enough to come up with a reasonable solution.

Some of those solutions might be more challenging for beginning and intermediate parser players, though, as they center on ordering around your partner, Donald – I get the sense that the NPC, ACTION syntax isn’t especially commonly used, these days. Once I got the idea to try to leverage his skills, though, I found these puzzles were generally intuitive, though I think as a sidekick Donald unfortunately does leave something to be desired. For one thing, every turn you direct a bit of banter at him, and even though there’s a long list of random lines here, over the course of the game the well definitely ran dry, and the duplicative dialogue contributed to the feeling that location descriptions were exhaustingly long. For another, Donald often works at cross purposes to you, stealing your things, playing practical jokes on you, and generally being a nudge. It’s easy to recover from most of his hijinks, and I suppose the incompetent sidekick is a B-movie staple, but I still found it pretty irritating to be locked into a coffin over and over.

This is a somewhat churlish objection to a single element of an incredibly good-natured package. Renegade Brainwave wants you to have a good time, and if counterproductive slapstick is part of that package alongside over-the-top writing and cartoon-logic puzzles, well, I won’t presume to mess with the recipe. If you don’t enjoy the vibe of the source material, or don’t get on with fairly challenging puzzles, Renegade Brainwave probably won’t change you’re mind, but if you’re an MST3K fan who wants to go back to where it all started, this game’s got your frequency.

Satire is a tricky beast. Oh, I get the allure – it’s a writer’s dream to cut the Emperor down to size with razor-sharp, Swiftian wit and reveal his naked form to all and sundry. But there are many ways the implementation can go awry. Pitch it too dry, and people might not notice you’re taking the piss (well, I say “people” but I’m mostly thinking of sixteen-year-old-me watching Starship Troopers). Go too over the top, and you’ve got a toothless parody – nobody ever had second thoughts about the carceral state after watching Naked Gun. But worse yet, if you don’t quite grasp why the system is actually bad, you can wind up making superficial jokes while reifying the too-comfortable worldview you thought you were tearing down; what starts as satire ends as propaganda.

Cubes and Ladders is a parser-based lampoon set in the target-rich environment of corporate America; as a fledging employee at photocopier-turned-financial-services-firm Minimax, you’re told that the report you’ve written for your boss is too short, simple, and buzzword-free to cut the mustard, and you’ve got to zhuzh it up before the noon board meeting where layoffs are the agenda item of the day (for some reason, the photocopier-turned-financial-services firm is struggling). For what appears to be the author’s debut game, there’s a lot of ambition on display – there are several characters with relatively deep conversation trees, a turning-point midway through that adds a whole additional layer to the story, a fun running gag about your character’s ability to detect the hyper-specific scents that mark out everybody else at the office, and a Vorple-based presentation that shows off a robust suite of AI-generated art (more on this last bit later).

The puzzle design is quite solid, with the game often hitting that sweet spot where it feels harder than it is. There’s a maze that mostly serves to just waste a bit of time and lightly poke fun at cube farms, a confrontation with an elderly security guard that unexpectedly solves itself, a multi-step puzzle to retrieve a branded baseball cap that’s just out of reach, and a mess-around-with-the-complicated-machine puzzle that again winds up being fairly intuitive in practice. Admittedly, they’re not all winners – there’s a guess-the-combination puzzle that I solved only by noticing that there was only one number written down anywhere rather than through any real sense of logic, and which requires some finicky syntax to input besides – and the fact that there’s a time limit made exploring more stressful than I’d have liked, but the batting average is solid, with reasonable clueing and satisfying aha moments.

Circling back to the implementation, though, there are some more flies in the ointment here. I wound up taking an expansion port right off a large machine that I’m pretty sure was meant to stay there, a fair number of non-scenery items aren’t given descriptions, and I experienced noticeable lag when inputting some commands (the game can’t be run locally, so could be I was just having a slow internet day, though). Provoking more hair-pulling is the fact that save, load, and undo appear to be disabled; beyond the time limit, it’s also possible to die in this game, via a pratfall that would have been funny if I could have just typed UNDO and not done the stupid thing, but which instead required a full replay and occasioned plenty of grumbling.

The AI art that’s a centerpiece of the presentation is also not up to much. It’s exhausting to have to recapitulate the broader conversation about LLMs and AI-generated art every time it comes up in a review, so I’ll just say that while I’m very much on the skeptical side of these debates, even folks far more comfortable with generative AI than me would have to admit that the pictures are a bit of a mess, showcasing impossible spaces and uncanny figures in a way that took me out of the game; the author mentions that the pictures were generated based on their own sketches, and I’m pretty sure I would have preferred just seeing those.

And not to bang on about the AI thing, but that brings me back to where I started, which is the question of what exactly Cubes and Ladders is saying. Look, I get that this is just a silly parser puzzle game and not worth getting too worked up about, but I’d be lying if I said the ending didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth. After spending the first half of the game trying to avoid being laid off while enduring lectures by all the other characters about how everyone was looking at me to innovate (there’s no dialogue option to say “I’m pretty sure I’m getting paid minimum wage, how about you do the ‘innovating?’”, sadly), I wasn’t too surprised when the back half moved from trying to save my job to trying to save the company. And this is presented as an act of regeneration, turning back to using engineering to actually create things again after the company founder’s failson decided to move into investment banking. Except the punchline is that the game-winning invention is a socially-useless arbitrage machine (Spoiler - click to show)(it predicts stock fluctuations based on yesterday’s newspaper) – never mind that all you’ve done is figured out a way to move money around in such a way as to make rich people ever richer, at the expense of people who aren’t lucky enough to be able to pay for your prophecy engine, the ending straightforwardly fetes you for your accomplishment, rewarding you with a corner office overlooking a golf course and your former boss as your new assistant.

It’s an ending that could work to make fun of the empty cult of “innovation” that animates corporate America, but if this is satire, I admit I didn’t get it. Cubes and Ladders gets some hits in along the way against over-the-hill salesmen who get too excited for company merch and bosses who talk only in corporate platitudes, but these are glancing blows at best against capitalist ideology. I’m not saying I can only enjoy text adventures with an orthodox Marxist pedigree by any means, but if a game seems like it’s trying to say something, it’s hard to ignore when that “something” appears to be unquestioningly reinforcing an empty worldview – all the more so when it’s festooned with ugly and questionably-ethical corporate art.

I’ll close by emphasizing again that there’s a lot of promise here; the puzzles are good, the writing quality is solid, and modulo the ill-advised decision to eliminate saving and undoing the implementation mostly impresses. And once again, not every piece of IF needs to have a political axe to grind (god, that sounds like it would be tedious). But if you choose to write satire, you either go for the jugular or you risk looking like a lapdog.

I have now played a number of Neo-Twiny Jam entries (yes, saying “a number” rather than going back to check is lazy, but look, I’ve capped out on my sponsorships and you get what you pay for) and I feel like I’m starting to get a sense for how you can make a memorable game under brutal space constraints. Minimizing branching is definitely a key strategy to wring the most out of the word-budget, as is focusing on dialogue, or at least prose with a voice, so that fewer words can have more impact. Managing the scope of the story also makes a lot of sense (though now I’m curious whether you can stitch together one or two word mini-phrases, Collision style, to weave together an epic). But less obviously, I wonder whether a respectful relationship with storytelling archetypes – okay, we can just call them tropes – should also be on the list. Not to say that there’s no place for surprises, but being able to sketch a narrative in just a few lines, and then devote the rest to the ways this story is different or unique, probably puts an author in a better position than having to burn most of their fuel just getting the reader to understand what’s going on.

So yeah, given that intro, despite some arresting themes and well-turned phrases, Read This When You Turn 15 didn’t fully work for me because I think its narrative ambitions outstrip the space it’s been allotted. Pitched as a letter written from a brother to his adopted sister, for her to open when she’s old enough to understand it, its 500 words of dynamic fiction paint a picture of an abusive family so idiosyncratically awful I was too busy asking questions to feel very much.

As I understand it, the core trauma here is that the sibling’s mother adopted the sister to be a remote-viewing fashion plate: while galivanting around the world on trips to fashion capital after fashion capital, she has various nannies and caregivers dress up the infant in precious baby-outfits and parade her in front of the webcam (the brother might be complicit in this). But then she apparently tires of this amusement by the time the kid’s Pre-K aged and abandons her to neglect, perhaps assuaging the occasional tiny shred of guilt by sending some of the largesse from her latest shopping trips home. Speaking of guilt, the brother has a lot of his own since the occasion for him to write the letter is his departure to America to get a remunerative job; he took care of her when she was little, but knows he won’t be there during the very hard years to come:

"You are going to be a stranger to me by the time you read this. The isolation and traumas you’ll face, I cannot imagine. I can only hope that this letter is not the way you found out you were adopted."

(Jesus Christ, buddy, if you write a sentence like that maybe take a step back and ask yourself “wait, how would I write this letter differently if it was going to be the way she found out she was adopted?")

On the bright side, the brother’s goal in writing the letter isn’t to try to wring possibly-unearned forgiveness from his sister; less cheerily, that’s because he’s monotonously focused on making sure his sister blames their mother for her misdeeds:

"But your mother, she’ll say she loves you and remind you that she put money into your education.

"I have only one request: please have the courage to hate her."

It’s searing stuff, and I have no doubt that there are abusive families where this particular configuration of pathologies and hatreds could play out. But it’s not a familiar configuration, to me at least – I wanted to know more about what precisely the mom was thinking (adoption is not a quick or easy process in most countries, so it’s a hell of a lot to commit to for some photo ops, especially if you already have a kid), what the brother’s relationship with her was like (was he treated the same, or different?), whether there was another parent in the picture and what they thought of all this, whether the brother was specifically focused on money (he name-checks “getting a job in Silicon Valley”) or just looking for the easiest possible escape….

In a longer work, there’d be room to modulate tones, contrast the Grand Guignol awfulness of the world’s worst mother with a grounded, psychologically-driven portrait of what could have motivated her, and what the consequences could be for her kids, and give a sense of the personalities behind the abuse. And what’s here is a good teaser for that longer piece – it’s shocking, well-written, and again, I want to know more. But I felt like it was trying to do too much in its limited space; to work at 500 words, it might have been wise to make at least some aspect of the family’s unhappiness more familiar, to take some pressure off the player’s imagination and enable the truly aberrant pieces to stand out.

(I haven't given this a star rating since since currently only the demo is available)

There are a lot of ways the contemporary video game scene is different from what it was when I was growing up, many of which are good and many of which are bad, since the transition from playground-for-insular-but-sincere-weirdos to gigabuck-suffused-juggernaut-targeting-every-imaginable-demographic doesn’t lend itself to a simple good vs. evil dichotomy (though I will note in passing that the clear balance point of awesome between these questionable extremes was 1998, a year that was clearly Peak Videogames; yes, I was 17 that year but leave that aside, I am 100% right). Despite the profound ambivalence I typically feel when comparing then with now, though, one thing that still evokes uncomplicated nostalgia for me is the demo. Demos were the 1990s version of Early Access – developers trying to build buzz for their games by releasing a limited slice ahead of the full release – except you didn’t need to pay for the privilege and the games would eventually come out. Some were good, and admittedly some were quite bad – a particularly dire Hellboy demo that involved spinning around endlessly in a deep-brown graveyard looking for a way out was a lowlight – but regardless playing a demo was an exercise in abiding in hope: this was just a little bit of game, it’s still being worked on, and besides, it’s free, how great is that?

There are a lot of reasons the demo has gone by the wayside in the larger video game culture, and understandably they’ve never been big in IF, province of short, free games that typically don’t use teasers to sell themselves. Romance the Backroom isn’t a typical piece of IF, though – though using Twine, it’s styled as a visual novel, with copious character and background art, music, and (eventually – it’s not in this release) voice acting. It’s also got a long playtime, judging from the fact that the piece that’s currently available is billed as only the first act. So a demo to give players a low-commitment way of trying things out actually makes sense.

The balancing act a demo must undertake is to provide a satisfying, self-contained experience that lets the player experience what’s good about a game, while making clear that there’s a lot more to come in the full game. On this front I think the present demo is a success. The setup here is that the main character, Carla, falls through the cracks in the world into the “backrooms” that undergird the multiverse, literally tripping on her way out of the day-care where she works and finding herself far from home. It’s an abrupt, unexplained shift, but the details ground it:

"…instead of my hands hitting the cold hard gravel of the parking lot, they hit a wet, carpeted surface, splashing on top of it with a loud smoosh."

That is just viscerally unpleasant! The backrooms themselves are an interestingly empty setting; at first they’re just a maze of yellow-wallpapered hallways (the protagonist made a Charlotte Perkins Gilman reference just after I did), but you soon run across a bizarre fellow named Kilcal – he’s got a clock for an eye and is clear that he’s not a human – and his compadres, four other warm-hearted grotesques (my favorite is a guy with eyeballs in his hair named Glarence, I mean come on) who promise to keep an eye on you and help you get home. But it doesn’t take long for you to be separated from them and kidnapped by a creepy group of “mimics”, who take you back to their king, who menaces you for a bit before Kilcal and company show up to rescue you, starting your world-hopping adventure in earnest just in time for the “coming soon…” banner to pop up.

It’s a lot of backstory, worldbuilding, and characters to establish, but the game lays out its premise effectively; there isn’t enough time to feel like I really got a handle on the main supporting cast, who I assume will carry the “romance” part of the title (this part of the gameplay isn’t really evident yet in the demo), and Carla is a bit of a generic protagonist, but things are archetypal enough that I never felt overwhelmed, and the writing is specific enough that I never felt like I was just experiencing a naked trope-fest; this is especially the case with the villains, who are legit creepy. The prose is straightforward, but each of the characters does have an individual voice, which is no mean feat. And the setup seems sturdy enough that I can imagine a lot of adventures, and interpersonal drama, to come.

On the more questionable side, the visuals lean a little far to the grotesque for my taste, and I ran into an odd bug where the top 20% of the images started getting cut off after a bit. But I tend to find it pretty easy to ignore pictures in my IF. Similarly, the frequency and impact of choices seems relatively light so far, with the few on offer primarily giving you the opportunity to resist or give in to the obviously-bad king’s blandishments. But I was certainly feeling engaged regardless, and I assume that as the game progresses, the gameplay will open up a bit too. For that matter, future development might shift the art style into something I enjoy more – again, that’s the beauty of the magical thinking prompted by a demo! But in this case I feel confident expecting that the solid parts of what I’ve played so far would translate over into the full game, and even if the weaker pieces remain as they are, they’re still not sufficient to drag down what’s shaping up to be the weirdest Saturday morning cartoon that never was.

The first thing I wrote in my notes for this game was that the presentation is really nice; it looks like a book or (better) screenplay, with a clean white background, text in a lovely, readable font, and a horizontal line across the bottom with the title beneath. So I goggled when I scrolled down a bit on the itch page and saw this was an entry in the Bare Bones Jam, which prevents authors from doing any UI customization at all. I assume this must be some obscure Twine format – it’s definitely not the familiar, endearingly ugly Harlowe or Sugarcube – but good lord, why isn’t everybody using this?

Speaking of Jesus (…yes, I’m going to hell for that segue), this piece of dynamic fiction – a single short scene excerpted from a longer work-in-progress, entitled Anchorite which per the author’s note at the end is sadly a place and not a job description – centers on a Catholic priest whose ex-lover has just slid into his confessional. Most pages consist of a short paragraph of physical business describing what’s happening, before shifting into screenplay mode to display the dialogue, in which the pair run through their recriminations and hopes. Andrey, the ex, is the wittier, invoking bits of Catholic ritual to fondly needle the priest, Joel, who seems earnestly and perpetually flummoxed. It’s a fun dynamic – you can see how they would have worked when they were an item – and they’ve each got distinct voices that come through clearly in the writing; I keep saying “screenplay” because you could see this working if shot as a film.

Those initial paragraphs go well beyond the relatively terse stage directions you typically see in a script, though. There’s some good stuff here too, but I found that I experienced a bit of a disconnect between what the characters were saying and what they were doing. Take, for example, the moment where Joel “places his cross between his teeth, biting into the soft gold.” This is an incredible image, obviously a weighty, symbolic act that communicates torment and desire in equal measure. But it comes not at the climax of the scene, but in the middle, and didn’t seem to me to be clearly precipitated by anything that had just been said, nor is it acknowledged by either character in the dialogue. A talented director and well-trained actors could sell the moment nonetheless, but on the page it felt like the different pieces of writing added up to less than the sum of their parts.

Ironically after just saying that I might have liked NYX better if it hadn’t had any choices, I also found myself wishing there was a choice or two embedded in this. I don’t think anything as vulgar as branching would fit the story, but I did feel like I wanted a little more interiority for the characters: why was Andrey coming back now, what would rekindling the relationship mean to Joel? Choices would have slowed down the momentum of the story so that I had to think about these questions more deeply, and displaying different options could have helped convey internal conflict.

Of course, it may be the case that in the full game, there’s context and backstory to this scene that addresses these dynamics – and for all that there are aspects of the game that didn’t fully land for me, it still worked as an effective teaser for that larger project. Operatic relationship-drama in a Catholic milieu is a delicious premise (to me, at least – why yes I was raised Catholic), and I definitely found myself curious about how Joel and Andrey had first gotten together, and where the story was going from here, since it very much ends on an emotional cliff-hanger. And similarly, even though it didn’t fully land, that cross-biting image will stick with me.

I count at least two layers of metatextual irony in Nyx’s second sentence:

"Scientists, soldiers, pilots, people of few words — why didn’t we send painters, writers, musicians, why didn’t we send anyone capable of humanity?"

The first layer, of course, is that this is a work of IF, an art form pioneered by programmers, mathematicians, physicists, and many other scientists who proved themselves more than capable of humanity (and, as to at least some of them, less-than-capable at shutting up). The second layer is that this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, so a person of few words is actually the ideal narrator.

Given the brevity of the format, it makes sense that the game unabashedly tips its hand to what it’s riffing off; the opening is a clear response to the “they should have sent a poet” bit from Contact, and the situation – the narrator is the last one left after a space monster has killed all the other crew on their ship – is structurally the same as Alien, though there are some important differences in the details. It’s a neat juxtaposition, since the former is all about the wonder of exploration while the latter turns space into a site of terror. The prose, as always with this author’s work, edges on the sublime, and is more than capable of holding these opposites simultaneously:

"Why me? Why me, when the only prayer I know is the astronaut’s — dear God, please don’t let me fuck this up — why me when there’s something spiritual about how oxygen reacts upon ignition, stomach lurching backwards, pressed against spine, dreadful exhilaration robbing air from lungs and rattling teeth as higher into the heavens you spiral — why me?"

The story is also well-chosen for the length limit, since relaying how the other crew-members died in a sentence or two apiece is effectively chilling, and conveys all that’s really needed; there are fuzzy indications that the alien does more than just eviscerate people and perhaps exerts some degree of psychic influence, but of course the narrator wouldn’t have a clear sense of how that works, as this is apparently humanity’s first contact with any sort of extraterrestrial life. And this simple setup is more than enough to provide context to the game’s one, climactic choice – whether to send the ship into deep space and hope it stays lost, set coordinates back to earth so that others will encounter the alien, or open the bulkhead door and embrace what’s coming.

Narratively speaking all of these are reasonable endings to the first 2/3 of the game, but my one critique of Nyx is that I didn’t feel like there was as much thematic connection between the opening – which, per the bits I’ve quoted, is heavily devoted to the inadequacies the narrator feels about trying to use words to capture their experiences in space – and two of the endings; each of these individual pieces are quite well written, don’t get me wrong, but for a game this short I wanted the experience to feel tighter. It took until the last ending that I tried to see the build-up actually pay off – which it did, quite well. But as a result I think this is a work of IF that suffers somewhat from its interactivity; I was sufficiently engaged by the presentation, in stark black and reds with clicking required to get the next bit of tense, evocative text, that I didn’t feel like I really needed any narrative agency. And as a work of dynamic fiction that ensured the player sees the parts of the story in the order that would have the most impact, I think Nyx could be even more successful – though I think it certainly works well enough as it is.

Geez, ^ spoiler alert.

We have here the second part in the RGB trilogy – and while it’s recognizably of a piece with He Knows That You Know and Now There’s No Stopping Him, it also throws some curves into the emerging formula. For one thing, the cast list gives us three characters this time: green makes a repeat performance, and we’re introduced to red, “a handsome and charming, if quick-tempered and immature, man” but also purple (purple?), “a kind and gentle, if naive and sheltered, woman.” But rather than a three-way conversation, this green-themed instalment is rather a solitary affair: you play as red, waking up in a dark, solitary room suspended in the air so that… well, see above.

The mechanics of choice are different this time too – you’re given an array of possible actions across the bottom of the screen. Given your predicament there isn’t a lot you’re able to accomplish besides try to look around as best you can, cry out for assistance, or start swinging… eventually you’ll overhear a discussion between the other characters that sheds some light on what’s going on and how you got here, and your attempts to escape bring the short story (this is another Neo Twiny entry, so it’s also 500 words) to another violent close – that’s directly in keeping with part one, at least.

While I found this part a bit slighter than the blue one – as I noted in that review, dialogue lets you do more with less; the need to describe action chews up a chunk of the word count – there’s still plenty of thematic weight to proceedings. Though speaking of spoilers, I should probably spoiler-block the rest…

(Spoiler - click to show)So turns out we, the callow and potentially overbearing husband of the ingenue purple, have been strung up and left to die by green, our mother-in-law. While the milieu has apparently changed somewhat between entries in the series – blue had a historical feel, while the language here is more modern and reference is made to a laptop – the opening page stresses that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”, and I’m inclined to take it at its word. If this green is the same as the one who killed her husband to escape him, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she’s over-protective of her daughter given her own experience of marriage (though given that said daughter is purple, not teal, we perhaps are being prompted to assume that the family history here isn’t as simple as all that?) and level of comfort with murder. Making the parallels starker yet, as she kills red, green murmurs “she will heal… she always does,” suggesting that much as blue did away with more than half-a-dozen brides, she’s killed several of purple’s grooms by this point.

There’s probably more going on here than just “mothers-in-law, amirite?”, though. The other thing of note that green says is “I know your plans for my daughter… I won’t stand for them.” Given the framing of the series so far, the mind naturally goes to sex and/or death, but it’s interesting that in addition to secreting you away, green has also stashed all your possessions in this abattoir: “your books, your gramophone, your laptop – everything’s here.” Knowledge, art, and creativity are also being shut away and taken from purple, which perhaps is part of what keeping her innocent entails – and part of what prevents her from understanding the lies that green spins.

As I said in my review of the first game, though, these are all tentative thoughts; I’d be surprised if the major themes I’ve noticed so far don’t get carried over into the final act, but I also can’t say I have a clear sense of how the series will culminate. But suffice to say that I’m continuing to be intrigued, and am looking forward to seeing how, or whether, everything connects.

After a long stretch of the randomizer doing a shockingly good job of ensuring I play games in the proper order (beyond correctly sequencing the RGB trilogy, I’ve noticed that it also put A1RL0CK before its sequel, and ensured an adequate distance between the two porn games), it’s now thrown a curve-ball by having me play an Inform remake before its Twine original. I’ll be interested to assess comparisons once I hit Cycles in about eight more games, but I can’t imagine I’m missing out by playing How Dare You first, because this is a game that is unashamed about rejecting context, focusing on the dramatic action of a lover desperately trying to avoid a breakup without overly concerning itself with backstory or plot. Sure, you get the bare bones of the setup, but the opening text starts with “we have to talk” and only provides four or five short paragraphs of elaboration before opening up the interactivity.

Such a character-focused premise isn’t the most natural fit for a parser game, but the design cannily takes advantage of what players are likely to do. The scenery is densely-implemented, for example, and the descriptions provide a bit of nuance as to what’s going on. You’re having the breakup fight just outside your partner’s room, and here’s what X HOUSE gets you, for example:

"It’s smaller than the one you share with your parents; only Heron and eir mother live here. She’s out somewhere right now."

(Heron is your soon-to-be ex, and uses ey/em pronouns; I think this line is the clearest suggestion that both of you may be teenagers or young adults).

A lot of your and Heron’s body parts are also implemented, which gives some additional color to the scene and also helps clue potential actions. You see, while the concept might make you think that this is a dialogue-focused game, there are no conversation menus in sight; TALK TO HERON (ask/tell aren’t implemented) just gives you one brief exchange, while subsequent attempts just have you begging “please, Heron…” before drifting into silence. Since you can’t try to convince Heron to change eir mind with words, you’re just left with approaches, which of course is right in the parser wheelhouse. Many of the standard Inform verbs will lead to a customized response (my favorite was sitting on the floor, which sees Heron heave a sigh at your I’m-not-leaving-here-until-you-un-break-up-with-me dramatics), but there are a whole lot of additional possible actions available too, from taking eir hand to weeping. While you’re not limited to just one verb – though there are some that shunt the story to a conclusion – playing How Dare You reminded me a little bit of playing Aisle, since it has a similar dynamic of trying to suss out a large possibility space by testing prompted but not explicitly spelled-out verbs.

So playing this scene while dramatically de-emphasizing the talking is an interesting choice, and I’m curious whether things will be different in the game’s Twine incarnation. I liked the way it lent a heightened, almost theatrical air to proceedings, with one lover searching for the grand gesture that will win back the other. It makes for a novel portrayal of a familiar kind of scene, but at the same time it did mean that I wasn’t especially invested in the outcome since I didn’t get much sense of who either the protagonist or Heron were, or why (or whether) their relationship was worth fighting for. As a result the game didn’t land with much emotional impact for me, though I should add the caveat that beyond attempting one last kiss, I studiously avoided any actions that involved physical violence. I confirmed from reading the spoilery commands list you can read after completing the game that a number of these are implemented, and depending on how those play out I could see them having a significant impact on my sense of what the game is doing. But while domestic violence is an entirely valid thing for a game to take on, it’s not something I feel comfortable opting into if I have any other choice; perhaps that means that my view of How Dare You as an interesting and successful writing exercise is incomplete, but if so I suspect the probably-more-guided experience of playing Cycles may let me in on what I’ve missed.

I can’t decide whether Kiss of Beth works better the first time or on the replay. Oh, even from the get-go of this dialogue-based two-hander, you’ve got more than enough indication that what your interlocutor, Cordero, thinks is happening (nosy roommate grilling the new boyfriend before a date) isn’t what’s actually happening. But you’re not sure exactly what direction the game is going to go, so even as you’re feeling him out by asking leading questions about his family or job, you get the sense that this is building to an important choice, but the stakes for whether to send him on in to see the eponymous Beth after she finishes showering, or fake a family emergency, are deliciously unclear. On a replay, though, despite knowing exactly how the horror is going to play out, I found I was scrutinizing Cordero’s responses to try to get a level of certainty about that final decision that just isn’t possible to achieve – as well as paying even closer attention to what the protagonist’s questions were revealing about them.

The presentation here is effectively off-putting. The text splays over an aubergine background, with a slightly-pixelated photo of Cordero off to the side. Then as you get over the preliminary greetings and the not-so-subtle interrogation begins – you want to make sure you have a clearer sense of who he is before you make a final call – the photo snaps to black and white, before slowly filling in with color as you learn more. The dialogue is well-done too, naturalistically shifting from topic to topic with a sheen of awkwardness that’s entirely fitting for the circumstance. Most of the questions you can ask have at least a hint of passive-aggressiveness about them, but that also makes sense – for reasons that eventually become clear, the main character is looking for reasons to dislike Cordero, which makes for some entertaining friction between the seemingly-cordial dialogue and your inner monologue.

You don’t get a full biographical readout on him through your questioning, of course, but the game does do a good job of sketching out a sense of who he is, both in terms of class, background, and personality, with solid attention to detail (when he mentioned that he wanted to get an MSW, I was able to correctly guess that Columbia was his dream school since I know that they have one of the best social work programs). There are ways to get him open up a little more, or to push him to be more defensive, which makes the conversation still engaging the second time through (again, this is a game you’ll definitely want to replay), but you’ll never be completely satisfied that you’re getting the real Cordero, and not just a scrubbed-up version he’s trotting out to make a good impression.

The eventual reveal isn’t one that’s unguessable by any means, but the details are memorably horrific, and left me feeling queasy regardless of the choices I made – the final screen puckishly tells you “this game has two endings. You got a bad one” in text that doesn’t vary regardless of your decisions. And it effectively throws the spotlight from Cordero back to you; as I mentioned, the second time through the game, I found it interesting to consider whether the questions I was asking, and the asides I was making to myself, meant that I was a better fit for Beth than him.

The randomizer continues tracing its whimsical path through my to-play list, putting the two remaining Kenneth Pedersen games back to back. They make for quite a contrast, though, because while Museum Heist has some things in common with The Way Home – the ADRIFT format, terse but effective prose, bug-free implementation – this is no old-school treasure hunt; while you are an art thief looking to lift as much loot as possible from the eponymous institution, the game operates in the thoroughly modern optimization-game framework. Just as in Ryan Veeder’s Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder, which is largely credited with kicking off the sub-genre, you need to search a small map stuffed with riches, solving individual puzzles to obtain each, while using trial-and-error over repeated runs to figure out the metapuzzle of how to get the richest possible haul before time runs out.

The theming is obviously a great fit with the gameplay – the time before the police arrive provides an obvious ticking clock, it makes total sense that a museum would be stuffed with more art and antiquities than one thief could reasonably make off with, and that some would be easy to simply smash and grab while others would be protected with more robust security measures or present logistical challenges to obtain. And while this isn’t the kind of game where you can linger over descriptions, the various galleries and objets d’art are effectively chosen to communicate the idea that you’re grabbing exciting, valuable stuff (look, I’m going to like any game where I get to lift Etruscan artifacts and something made of porphyry).

The game’s relatively compact scope also makes it more approachable than a sprawling example of the subgenre like Sugarlawn. The greater part of the museum is just a three by three grid, and unlike the slowly-flooding ship of CVP, you just have to worry about one timer. You’re also only required to solve maybe two and a half puzzles in order to liberate individual artworks; one of these, which requires some lateral thinking on how to get a massive Rosetta-Stone style inscription, takes some enjoyable outside the box thinking.

The flip side of this, though, is that I quickly found myself grappling with the optimization puzzle rather than trying to figure out its component parts, and the metapuzzle here is largely focused on inventory juggling. If you had infinite carrying capacity, the 40 turns you’re given would provide a comfortable margin for hoovering up everything on offer; the issue is that you can only carry so many items in your hands before you start automatically dropping things. You do have a backpack – and a tube for carrying rolled-up paintings – which makes life easier, but the order things go in matters, with higher-up objects needing to come out to get to the stuff you first stored away, and there are a few puzzles that require swapping things into and out of your carryall.

In the abstract it’s a reasonable enough set of constraints to layer onto the more traditional optimization-game challenges, but I suspect like most people, I don’t really enjoy faffing about with carrying limits, so I found I didn’t have much appetite to really push for the high score, all the more so because I was a bit demoralized when I thought I’d found an optimal solution, only to discover waiting out the time limit rather than manually triggering your escape means you drop everything you’re carrying, so I’d actually need to eke out two more turns somewhere. For all that, Museum Heist is still a solid introduction to this fun, contemporary IF subgenre, providing a manageable sample of why it can be so enjoyable; beyond that, seeing it paired with a more throwback game definitely demonstrates the author’s versatility.

I didn’t find the context for The Way Home quite as dubious as that for Quest for the Serpent’s Eye, but I have to admit I also went into this one with my shoulders preemptively squared up: what we’ve got here is an ADRIFT adapting just the second half of a game the author had previously written for the C64. Perhaps I’m an inveterate stereotyper, but regardless I was expecting unwinnable states, low-context puzzles, minimal implementation, and objects requiring pixel-perfect searching to find.

There’s definitely some of that stuff here. The backstory is conveyed with minimal texture – you’re a Conan-style barbarian who’s just recovered a massive gemstone on behalf of some queen, for some reasons, that aren’t especially fleshed out. Leaving the forest where you found it, and facing the return trek across a trackless desert, you decide to stop off in a glacial valley to up your stocks of water (…can I venture a guess that the author isn’t a geologist?) And the first puzzle very much suffers from some fiddliness of implementation: you get captured by ice trolls in the prologue (I am not at all clear why they left me alive, but one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth I suppose) and need to do the classic cut-the-ropes-with-a-sharp-stone bit, but I found it very hard to tell whether the stone was too far away from me to get, or just hadn’t come up with the right phrasing, and even once I figured out the necessary intermediate step, there were still some misleading responses that delayed the solution yet further (Spoiler - click to show)(in particular, the game strongly prompts you to WEAR BLANKET, but if you try to THROW BLANKET AT STONE while you’re wearing it, you get an unhelpful generic error message, rather than being told that you need to manually remove it from your shoulders first).

Thankfully, things started to look up from there. The map of the valley is small and tersely-described, but it’s got an interesting mix of places to visit, and the subsequent puzzles are generally well-clued and offer some nice shortcuts – there’s one location that holds a bunch of different building materials, and I was a little worried about all the hoops I’d need to jump through to assemble the object I knew I needed, but fortunately MAKE worked a treat. There’s even a cool bit of global interactivity that winds up changing the descriptions and behavior of most of the map, which is implemented way more robustly than it needed to be since it only really impacts one puzzle. There is a slightly-unfair puzzle that forced me to restart – at one point you get an object that unlocks two new areas, and if you go first to the area that’s closest and which you have an in-game reason to be interested in, rather than going to the other side of the map to explore just for the sake of it, you’ll lock yourself into a dead-person-walking scenario – but this isn’t the kind of game where replays take very long once you know what you’re doing, and honestly I was expecting to hit something like that sooner.

And then after solving that area, you’re whisked away to a separate vignette in an entirely new area! This once again suffered from a lack of connective tissue – the problem you need to solve there does directly grow out of what you do in the first part, but it still feels like it comes out of nowhere. But this area has a lot of other characters, who have a reasonably broad set of conversation topics, and the puzzles shift from the predominantly medium-dry-goods affairs of the ice valley to ones having to do with helping, interrogating, investigating, or otherwise interacting with people, which I found more engaging. In fact I’d say I really enjoyed this second half; there’s still not much in the way of scenery or anything to do except solve the next puzzle in the chain, but the difficulty is pitched just right and it’s a perfectly serviceable bit of fantasy adventuring.

Sadly, the low-context thing returns in force: once you get to the end of the puzzle chain you’re basically handed an “I win” button to resolve the overall problem (Spoiler - click to show)(in the game’s defense, “here’s an apple, eat it and you’ll automatically beat the dragon” is not a plot twist I’ve seen before), and characteristically the game’s ending text is beyond anticlimactic, consisting of a single sentence saying you brought back the gem and the queen rewarded you. All of which is to say that The Way Home never transcends its origins, but it winds up a reasonably welcoming example of its form just the same.

Friends, I am acutely aware that I just wrote a 900 word review about a 500 word game (He Knows That You Know and Now There's No Stopping Him); with another Neo-Twiny Jam entry up next (and one that actually uses only half of the already-scant budget) I’ve got a chance to do better.

Collision is a practical joke of a game that proceeds largely in deadpan two-word couplets: you get a spray of three or four super-short phrases each “turn” (“stuck neck”, “roaring engine”, “no voice”), and an expanding number of similarly-terse choices to move things ahead (“look around”, “move hands”, “scream”). This hyper-compressed writing style obfuscates the setup slightly, but only slightly – even if you haven’t paid attention to the cover art, an early bit of narration’s declaration that you have “no pants” and “yellow and black dots on arms” mostly gives the game away.

So it’s clear something terrible is going to happen – though your choices allow you to waste time confirming the obvious – and it’s also clear that you’ll ultimately be powerless to avert it. The comedy of the game arises from the absurdity of making the effort nonetheless, and the bathos of panicking at the realization that there are others stuck in the same predicament as you. It’s a solid gag, and the blinking “failure” you see at the end of each run is a canny lure to get you to try again, at which point the futility of your efforts gets even funnier. Collision is nothing but a one-note gag – it won’t make you look at the world differently, or expand your understanding of what IF can accomplish – but it’s a gag that works, and one I haven’t seen before.

(Under 300 words, that’s gotta be a record for me!)

The randomizer must know that I’ve been saying nice things about it, because I just realized that it’s managed another cool trick: it put the three entries in Charm Cochran’s “RGB Trilogy” relatively close together in my to-play list, and in the proper order to boot! I contemplated waiting to review them all at once, since from context, they seem to be designed to be played that way – they were all entered together in the Neo-Twiny Jam (meaning they’re also short, given the 500 word limit for that event), and there are links to the other Acts within each game. But I ultimately decided it might be more interesting to review them piecemeal, to better track how the themes and structure emerge with each installment (so no, this has nothing to do with padding my review count on IFDB and for the sponsorships, perish the thought).

The last review will probably be a bit weightier than the first two, I suspect, since I’ll hold off on digging into what I think the trilogy is doing until I see everything it has to offer, but fortunately, even just in this first Act there’s a fair bit to talk about. From the color-coding of the game’s itch.io page, it’s clear that this is the “blue” entry, with later entries taking the “green” and “red” slots; further reinforcing the color motif, the dramatis personae page that opens the game identifies the two characters not by name, but by description – the game is constructed as a dialogue (which is an efficient way to use the scant words the jam rules allow) between “a rich and imposing, if ugly and impulsive, man” (whose words are all in blue) and “a quick-thinking and witty, if selfish and manipulative, woman” (whose words are all in green). The psychological priming here isn’t especially subtle, and the first line of the game proper – a stage direction noting that the blue man is “brandishing a bloody key” – pretty well confirms what story we’re in: this is Bluebeard, that most Freudian of folktales.

Except, well, that’s not exactly right. The language is off, for one thing: the game is written in a Shakespearean English that feels a bit archaic for a story that was famously collected by Perrault. This is a dangerous choice, since there’s a risk of ending up sounding like a bad 80s RPG, all thee-ing and thou-ing, but I found the style here worked – the grammar and syntax are credibly done, while the vocabulary is kept relatively modern for ease of reading. It winds up giving a hint of old-fashionedness without slowing down the dialogue too much.

That’s important because – understandably given the space constraints – the game is concerned just with the climax of the tale: blue has caught green (his wife) in the act of defying him, and bad news, the player is responsible for what green says as she attempts to escape punishment. The back and forth her is really punchy; each line of dialogue is fairly short, and the back-and-forth volley between the partners in this two-hander feels rapid, and intense, as a result. Your possible responses tend to include calling blue out for his crimes, pleading for forgiveness, and playing for time, but not in a mechanical way – sometimes you only have two options, and the confrontation does escalate fluidly, so I think it would be hard to stick to just one approach without intentionally disengaging from the story; I did find my approach varied satisfyingly in replays, but the game did a good job of shaping an arc from my choices regardless of what I did, sometimes starting out defiant and then growing chastened, other times desperate for mercy and then trying just to delay the inevitable once it became clear that wasn’t working.

There’s one other interesting aspect of the game’s storytelling that’s worth discussing under spoiler tags: (Spoiler - click to show)the main way the game departs from the story it’s riffing on is the ending – because blue does not kill green the way he’s killed all his previous wives, instead she ganks him with the dagger she’s had concealed behind her back this whole time. For all that the presence of the weapon is flagged from the very beginning, it’s still an effective twist, not least because the player’s given no direct hint that all of green’s conversational gambits are just setup for a stabbing. Indeed, one of the options you’re given late in the game is simply to “acquiesce” to your own imminent murder, but even that is a feint and leads to blue’s bloody end just the same. I really enjoyed this move; it’s an effective way of demonstrating exactly how manipulative green can be, and exploits the tensions within IF’s triangle of identities (player, narrator, protagonist) to good ends.

There’s more to say about the game, or at least more to speculate on – I’m curious what direction the Hamlet quote that closes things off is meant to be pointing to, and when we’ll be introduced to the “red” character who must surely come onstage at some point to complete the design. But I’ll hold all that in reserve until I get further into the trilogy; for now, I’ll just note that I’m wrapping up Act One very interested in seeing more.

The randomizer always enjoys its little jokes, its latest being to sequence a somber choice-based retelling of a Greek myth right after a parser romp riffing on one. For all that the games are quite different, the particular stories at issue aren’t too dissimilar: while Lysidice and the Minotaur centered on a young woman dedicated as a sacrifice to a monster, only to be rescued by a demigod, Andromeda Chained centers on the eponymous princess who’s dedicated as a sacrifice to a monster, only to be rescued by a demigod. Both even subvert the stories in analogous ways, with the former swapping the roles of monster and rescuer, whereas the latter makes the rescuer a dunderheaded representative of the patriarchy. They have their differences, though – Lysidice is a romp that ends on an optimistic note, whereas Andromeda Chained is a somber reflection on fate that may end differently in multiple replays, but never ends happily.

It’s also a focused game: it starts on the rocks by the sea where your father is about to chain you – for those unfamiliar with the backstory, your mother boasted of your beauty in a way that offended Poseidon, so he sent a sea monster to ravage your home and the Oracle has said that it’ll only go away if you’re offered up as a snack – and proceeds through a few beats of isolation and fear before Perseus shows up to destroy the serpent, and off-handedly mention that he’s decided to marry you once he completes the rescue. This is still plenty of time to engage with the situation, though, and the available choices do a good job of articulating various stances towards what’s happening without changing the fundamental direction of the myth, which would undermine the theme of inevitability that permeates the work. Here are the options you’re given after you’ve been chained, but before you have any hope of rescue:

"-Look for a means of escape.
-Await your fate.
-Wonder why you have to be naked.
-Think about how glad you are to be helping your kingdom.
-Think about your father."

This division – some options indicating resistance, others indicating acquiescence, and one emphasizing the more ridiculous or credulity-straining aspects of the myth – runs through most of the game’s choice points, and helps unify the emphasis on fate with the emphasis on patriarchy: after all, it’s a god whose curse has doomed you, your father who personally chains you up, and Perseus who decides that he can do whatever he wants with you since you would have died without him. As a result, your attitude towards inevitability maps to your attitude towards these domineering men.

The language throughout is effective; there’s a note of archness or wryness running through even the non-snarky options, and it’s couched in archaic-sounding syntax that doesn’t draw attention to itself. It doesn’t strike me as a distinctively Ancient Greek voice, but it’s solid enough for what it needs to do, and most of the key moments land, like this reflection on how blameworthy you find your father:

"Is your father a good king? Does he truly love you, to do something like this? These questions glide in and out of your mind like gulls on the water, but you’re not sure their answers are relevant. You decide that at the very least he is competent. After all, a single life for the safety of his entire kingdom? It makes a certain kind of sense, and you’re sure he did a lot of beard-stroking to figure that out himself. Yes, it’s your life, and no, you don’t particularly want to die. Still, it’s only a single life."

The only real criticism I’d levy at Andromeda Chained is that it never surprised me: from its framing, it looks like a feminist take on the Andromeda myth, and if you’re familiar with the rudiments of feminist deconstruction and the major beats of the legend, there’s a lot that you’ll see coming. Part of me wishes the game had leaned harder into idiosyncrasy in some way – by making the characters more naturalistic and less archetypal, say, or risking a stranger prose style, or confusing the themes a little so they feel less stark. But that’s just a judgment based on aesthetic preferences; making any of those changes would shift the flavor of the game without impacting its already-high quality, and there’s certainly always room for more engaging, clear-eyed pieces like this.

There are, I am sure, many IF reviewers who can cooly and dispassionately evaluate the merits of lighthearted parser romps set in Ancient Greece – but I, sadly, am not one of them. Lysidice and the Minotaur has a lot of points of difference from my first game (it’s riffing on the mythological rather than historical eras, for one thing, and it’s not written in a trying-too-hard Wodehouse-aping style), but still, this kind of thing is very much my jam – and actually, now that I think about it, my objectivity could probably be called into question for another reason, which is that I actually helped a tiny bit with this game because when a couple months ago Manon mentioned wanting to know what kinds of foods they ate in Ancient Greece, I passed along the food-y (and pottery-y – there are a lot of funny-sounding jugs) bits I’d written up as potential inspiration. All of which is to say that this is the kind of thing that I like, so it’s maybe not much surprise that I like it.

Still, I think there are defensible reasons for that! This Adventuron entry into the most recent Text Adventure Literacy Jam does a nice job running players through the basics of parser gameplay. There’s a maze (duh), albeit a rather simple one, but also a lot of object manipulation puzzles, a couple fetch-quests running between different characters, a riddle… The solid gameplay is paired with nice quality-of-life features, too; beyond the de rigueur tutorial, exits and usable objects are highlighted in each room’s header, and while the critical path to finish the game is easy enough to figure out, there are a number of satisfying optional puzzles that make the ending more satisfying and give more experienced players something to do.

The plot is similarly solid. You play as the eponymous maiden, who was brought to the Labyrinth as one of the Athenian sacrifices paid as tribute to Minos, but who’s befriended the minotaur who now serves as your protector. After the latest would-be hero grievously wounds your bovine pal, you decide it’s time for the two of you to bust out and make your own way in the world. It’s an appealing premise, and the puzzles do a good job of involving the minotaur so that it feels like he’s pulling his own weight, and the two of you are working together (you providing more of the brains, he more of the brawn, of course), which strengthens the central relationship of the game. I also enjoyed how deeply the game engaged with the myths; this is still a game aiming more for fun than verisimilitude, but it does draw in some more esoteric bits of the stories, and puts its own spin on traditional elements like the Daedalus/Icarus relationship. It’s well done, and I think would appeal even to players without a predisposition to this particular body of legends.

So the bones here are good ones, but unfortunately the flesh is not without its blemishes. The game doesn’t have quite as much polish as I generally like to see, and I think the standard for a game intended for IF newbies is generally set higher than that. While I didn’t run into any game-breaking bugs, there were definitely some instances of confusing behavior, like GIVE WAX TO MINOTAUR leading to me giving wax to Daedalus, and this disorienting output when I tried to TAKE SACK

"I don’t need to carry that old thing around.

"You can’t take it.

"You pick up the a sack of grains."

(I didn’t actually pick up the sack, at the end of all that).

The prose is also a little rough in patches, especially around more idiomatic English. Here’s a bit on your history with the minotaur, which includes a few of the relatively-common infelicities I noticed:

"The Minotaur would often come back from his strolls in the treacherous maze with drinks and food, usually in too large quantity. You never missed for a thing."

It’s nothing that sinks the game – actually the writing is breezy and engaging, for the most part – but again, for a game that’s intended to provide an on-ramp to people unfamiliar with IF, it’d be nice if things were a bit smoother.

As always, though, these are cavils. Lysidice and the Minotaur is a straightforward but effective introduction to traditional parser IF, with an appealing cast and good pacing (I haven’t mentioned that different sections of the maze are unlocked successively as you solve puzzles – it’s a good mechanic to keep the possibilities manageable, and ensure exploration is never overwhelming). It could use a little more time in the oven, but even in its current state, and even for experienced players or those who don’t find its premise immediately entertaining, it’s very much worth a play.

Codex Crusade has the kind of premise where if you explain it to someone else, they’d check the back of your skull to see if you’d suffered a head injury – and I mean that in the best possible way. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you’re a library intern at the University of Turin (Georgia, not Italy), where the geographical confusion adverted to in that parenthetical has led to a collector of arcane lore to leave a treasure trove of books to your otherwise-agronomy-focused archive, which in turn prompts a mysterious woman to charge you with entering the stacks to find a mysterious tome that contains all other books within it, offering you access to all the world’s knowledge if you succeed, delivered in the shape of a cat that answers to “the Akashic record” (you can pet the cat) (okay, having typed all that out, after checking for head trauma they might also just ask if you’d been playing a bunch of Mage: the Ascension).

This off-kilter mix of scholarly references and giddy humor continues once you get through the intro and enter the game proper, which presents you with the first of what will presumably be many challenges in your quest (the game only offers this teaser, but says there’ll be sequels to come). Your task is to navigate through a sort of cross-dimensional cafeteria to reach an elevator to the deeper levels; standing in your way is the elevator security system, which requires a keycard to bypass, and the elevator security guard, who isn’t going to let you by even with said keycard (his first name is Jorge, and I’d eat my hat if his second name isn’t Luis). There isn’t a lot of incidental scenery to take in before puzzle-solving imperatives take over, but what’s there is is fun, like this dialogue from some pretentious scholars:

“Maybe if you read Heidegger, you’d understand why your pedestrian takes on morality aren’t useful!”

“Yikes! Have you considered that if your source is a Nazi, you’re on the wrong team?”

“Well, I think you’ve both missed a big point. Have either of you read House of Leaves…?”

And in trying to wake up a dozing diner, you can shake him and say “hey”, “wake up”, “fire!”, or “hey look there’s Pedro Pascal.” Sure, to a degree these are empty references, but a) they’re funny, and b) given the setting and premise, empty references seem entirely on point. It’s true that I did find the very end of this installment of the game teetered a bit too close to the edge of absurdity, but for the most part Codex Crusade walks a fine line between silliness and profundity.

The puzzles are also engagingly off-beat, though one ill-advised interface decision made the game’s central challenge much more frustrating than I think was intended. You see, through a set of circumstances that don’t fully make sense, you need to follow a half-completed recipe (that you find in the Canterbury Tales!) for posset, a medieval medicinal drink, using only the ingredients you can scrounge up from the criteria. That means raiding the drink area for a choice of two beverages, and the snack bar for a bit of food, which you can then combine as best you see fit. When mixing the beverages, the interface is a conventional choice-based one – you say you want to start preparing the drink, then a pop-up asks you which liquid you want to add first from a multiple-choice list, followed by another prompt that allows you to add a second. But then it prompts to ask you if you want to add a third ingredient, at which point you need to write something into a text bar (and then click the forward link, just hitting enter doesn’t work).

The recipe is especially cryptic, so I ran through a whole bunch of different choices for things I could put in, since the game doesn’t give any indication whether what you type in is being recognized. I tried putting in the seitan-jerky snack I’d picked up just for the heck of it, before shifting to cinnamon, ginger, and lemon, which are the most common additional ingredients in posset from the recipes I found online (there’s also a set of clues you can find by rifling through one of another student’s books, which point in the same direction). Finally after fifteen minutes I checked out the source code to discover what I was missing: turns out you’re just supposed to write in the name of the snack you want to try. I was intensely frustrated by this design choice, since it would have been far simpler and intuitive – not to mention in line with how the beverage-choosing interface works – to just select an inventory item from a list, rather than go with a free-input parser box. The particular solution also doesn’t make much sense on its own terms, either (Spoiler - click to show)(if the key additional ingredient is breadcrumbs, why should you put in oatmeal, rather than wheat-based seitan?)

Brute-forcing my way through this puzzle dimmed my excitement momentarily, and while I’m grousing a bit I’ll say that I thought the two “battles” that wrapped up this section of the story were a bit repetitive. But given the scale of the creativity on offer in Codex Crusade, I’d still gladly sign up to play the next instalment – it tickles a lot of my areas of especial interest, and when it’s on, it’s very on. Just no more parser interfaces where they’re not needed next time, please!

This game (no, I am not retyping the full title out again) is proof that there’s really nothing wrong with the hoariest old storytelling tropes. It trots out one of the oldest premises in parser IF – you wake up alone in a space station, with amnesia – adds the smallest imaginable twist – actually the station is underwater, not outer space – and brings it to life with tense, evocative writing. There are a couple of overly-obscure puzzles that I doubt I would have solved but for David Welbourn’s helpful walkthrough, but this remains a gripping bit of horror-tinged sci-fi.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot; while it hits pretty much all the story beats you’re expecting from the get-go, seeing them play out is a big part of the draw, and the revelations are well spaced out over the course of the game’s hourish running time, creating solid pacing (assuming you can get through the puzzles – we’ll come back to that). But suffice to say that it’s clear from the get-go that there’s something wrong with the facility, and wrong with you, too – for one thing, what’s a small child doing in such an isolated place? The intro does a very good job establishing the stakes and pointing towards where the narrative is headed:

“WE ARE APPROXIMATELY TWO KILOMETERS BELOW THE SURFACE. IF THAT DOOR OPENS—WHICH IS CURRENTLY PREVENTED BY OUR SECURITY FAILSAFES—MILLIONS OF TONS OF SEAWATER WOULD RUSH INTO THE FACILITY AND DESTROY EVERYTHING. YOU YOURSELF WOULD BE CRUSHED BY THE PRESSURE IN MOMENTS.

"You squint to compensate for the darkness and the headache returns. Instinctively, you run a hand over yourself to make sure that no pieces of glass remain on the overalls since the cocoon broke. You are clean."

The prose is a real highlight throughout; it’s typically sharp and declarative, but occasionally reaches for a striking image or presents a more confusing, impressionistic jumble when the protagonist gets knocked off-kilter. And there’s one development in the plot that yes, is telegraphed and a bit cliché, but still landed quite heavily on me (Spoiler - click to show)(the death of Nelly). If you’re looking for a boundary-pushing think-piece, well, that’s not what’s on offer here, but as a piece of genre writing it’s quite successful.

As a work of IF, though… well, this is the kind of piece where being able to wander around at your own pace and soak up the ambiance and environmental storytelling is a natural fit for the plot. And some of the puzzles work well to get you to engage with the setting and gate out the various bits of backstory you can piece together. But too many of them are firmly in read-the-author’s-mind territory. (Spoiler - click to show)I’m not sure how you’re supposed to intuit that the tin you find in the kitchen is poison, for example, much less what cooking cream is and that it’s explosive. And I still can’t at all picture what’s wrong with the dumbwaiter such that setting off an explosion in it sets everything to rights. The magnetic disc, meanwhile, at least feels like something you could solve via trail and error, but similarly feels more like an abstract video-game puzzle than anything organic to the environment. The good news is that most of these rough patches come in the middle of the game; the opening segment and the climax are relatively smooth sailing, so the clueing misfires don’t detract as much as they otherwise would.

All told the positive parts of the game are definitely enough to make this one I’d recommend; there’s something uniquely likeable about a familiar story that’s well-told, especially one that’s spooky and has a good eye for a compelling image. Playing it entirely straight, without hints or a walkthrough, is likely to be an exercise in frustration, though – there are no heroes in this story, so there’s no upside in gritting your teeth and trying to tough it out.

Porn is much like any other fantasy genre in that for it to work, you need to buy into some absurdity in the premise. Sure, in fantasy it’s stuff like trees that can come to life and people who can summon the mightiest powers of the elements exclusively going around in their PJs, while in porn it’s that five minutes of conversation is enough to get perfect strangers to get down to boning – to say nothing of the various physical implausibilities that come into play once said boning commences – but in either case it’s all about the willing suspension of disbelief. Despite making the attempt to engage with it in good faith, however, I have to admit that Hot Office struck me as completely ridiculous even by the fantastical standards of AIF.

Things start off reasonably grounded, I admit: you’re having a chat by text with your coworker Sophie, who’s on her way to the office. It’s all presented clearly enough, with a phone-mimicking interface offering you a choice of two or three terse replies to each message by which she narrates her commute in – it’s like Lifeline with boobs. The basic scenario is also a bit silly – the A/C is off in the building and everyone else is working from home, so with a bit of encouragement from you she wastes little time in stripping down to her underwear, and then beyond – but sticks to the standard tropes of the genre.

But there’s a bunch of stuff that’s decidedly not standard, or just plain odd. For example, each step of the striptease is illustrated with a picture, which is all well and good, except that these appear to have been slapped together in MS Paint – they might have passed for hot and steamy in 1991, but kind of a lot’s happened on this front since then. The conversation with Sophie is also increasingly bizarre the more you pay attention to it: she makes a note of saying that she’s wearing a winter coat as she comes into the office, but if it’s winter why is the office so hot in the absence of A/C? If she’s your coworker, why is she showing you around the place and pointing out the plant in the corner, as if you’ve never been there before? Why are we interrupting the clothes-removing process to snap a photo of Sophia’s office chair, which has a couple of discolored impressions from the weight of her sweaty butt – is that some kind of fetish? Speaking of fetishes, WHY DOESN’T SHE HAVE ANY EYES???

This was all quite confounding. Possibly as a result of being distracted pondering these imponderables, I can’t say I found Hot Office especially hot, but its very idiosyncrasies mean that I eventually began viewing it with some affection. Possibly I only feel this way because it cuts off just as Sophie really gets her kit off – it’s apparently a free excerpt from a longer, paid game, so makes sense to leave the punters wanting more – but there’s something guileless about the very specific sexual scenario being constructed. There’s of course more than a bit of male gaze creepiness in the premise, but even that is blunted by the fact that Sophie is so ridiculously eager to strip for you, to the extent that even if you try to chit-chat about the weather and stick to the most non-committal comments possible, she’ll still aggressively insist on peeling off her shirt and sending you a picture to prove it. My head-canon explains this and all the inconsistencies in what she says about the office by assuming that actually the two of you are a long-partnered-up couple trying some roleplaying to spice up your conjugal life – so go figure that she’s babbling and giddily enthusiastic. Viewed in this light, you might even say there’s something vaguely wholesome about Hot Office.

Of course I’m sure this interpretation is completely untenable if you actually play the full game, and as the encounter gets more explicit things would get unavoidably creepy. But hey, if porn requires buying into a fantasy, I can choose which impossible thing I’d prefer to believe in.

(I still don’t have a theory for the no-eyes thing, though. Seriously, is that a thing? Please nobody tell me).

Okay, yes, I’ll confess it, when I read the title I did a double take and my brain couldn’t help making a terrible joke: “you just slice them really thin and layer them, same as the eggplant.” I can’t have been the only one who thought that, right?

I am going to hell.

Despite the evidence of that first paragraph, I actually do like animals quite a lot (including cats!) and so the wholesome comedy on display here quickly put that awkwardness in the past. How to Make Eggplant Lasagna was an entry in the heretofore-unknown-to-me Recipe Jam, games entered into which were supposed to incorporate a complete, cookable recipe (my brain also can’t help wondering whether anyone submitted an entry with a literal recipe for jam: it’d be the Recipe Game Jam jam recipe game). The approach to the theme here is straightforward: you’re trying to cook the eponymous recipe, but you also have two cats who like to involve themselves in the process, and making lasagna is of course relatively time-consuming, with a bunch of different time-dependent steps where a distraction can make things go awry…

I am a sucker for the one-thing-going-wrong-after-another silliness of farce, and cooking provides a perfect framework for escalating accidents, mistakes, and bad judgment calls to threaten to bring everything crashing down into disaster, while having adorable and (mostly) innocent kitties be the vectors of destruction keeps things from getting ill-spirited. And the comedy here is very well done – a solid three quarters of my notes for this game just consist of pasted-in excerpts with me saying “lol” right after them. An example at random:

"Unfortunately it’s Boris. He’s the bigger (and dumber) of your two cats, but despite having the body of a black fuzzy cinder block he also has the soul of a small Victorian orphan."

Another:

"You scoop up Natasha and place her on the ground. She hops right back up on the stove. Having been left with no alternative, you grab your trusty squirt bottle and squirt her right in the face. She blinks at you indignantly and doesn’t move."

Structurally, you face a gauntlet of one dilemma after another: do you try to keep your workspace clear of cats, or leave them be so long as they’re far enough away that you can get your chopping done? When they start to tear things apart in the other room, do you pause your cooking or just let them cause damage until they get bored? There’s rarely a clear right answer, as the best-case scenario typically only allows you to keep chaos at bay for a few more minutes, but at a cost of losing some of the ingredients, or cutting short a key step in the cooking, or just tiring yourself out. I’m not actually sure what’s going on under the hood, here – there aren’t interface elements telling you how much time you have left to cook, or anything else to provide you with an objective view of how you’re doing. And when I replayed, it sometimes felt like slightly different challenges were being thrown at me even when I made similar choices leading up to them. I sometimes felt that there might be a degree of randomness determining which events happened, and sometimes that there were a few key statistics being tracked, but whether it’s one or the other, or both, I think this black-box approach was a good one: nothing kills farce deader than it feeling mechanical, so the obfuscation was worth it in my book (though I did notice one slight inconsistency: in my most successful playthrough, I was told I’d made a lasagna whose “cheese on top is beautifully crispy”, which sounds nice except the last decision I’d made before popping it in the oven was to cut my losses and not chase Natasha around in a futile attempt to get back the cheese package so I could sprinkle the final layer on top).

So yeah, if you like cooking, cats, or shenanigans, I think you’ll have fun with this one – it honestly made me glad I’m usually only cooking with a toddler these days, since at least he mostly understands English and only takes perverse delight in throwing everything everywhere like 15% of the time, meaning he compares favorably to a cat on both of those criteria. It’s funny, the cats are cut; heck, the recipe even sounds good, though I’m not fool enough to try anything this complex until my son’s much older.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the borderline-compulsive way that I can only either review zero or all games in an IF competition to learn that I can get oddly obsessive in how I approach other games too. Take immersive sims: the best ones, like Thief or Dishonored, offer a broad panoply of tools for engaging with multiple deeply-implemented systems, and are at their best when you improvise, roll with the punches, and enjoy the complex way all these interactions lead to emergent gameplay. Me? I prefer to hoard every consumable I come across instead of using a single one, and ignore just about every weapon or supernatural ability in favor of just hitting each baddy in the back of the head with a sock full of quarters. Since of these games aren’t designed assuming that you’re only using 5% of your options, this can often be quite hard, so I often wind up abusing the quickload key, running through particularly tricky setups again and again: maybe if I throw a crate over there to create a distraction, I can nab guard number one when he comes to investigate and create a hole in the patrol pattern to get the others? No, OK, so what about climbing the wall over here and getting the drop on guard number two when he briefly pokes his head into the alley? No, so maybe next time…

Playing Dark Communion is kind of like that – it’s a supercompressed horror scenario that sees you and another girl investigating an abandoned church, at which point things quickly go wrong and you’ve got to face a gauntlet of lightning-fast decision points to try to make it out. It’s clearly designed for multiple replays, inasmuch as it tracks your successes as well as your failures (plus some bonus achievements) so you can see how much of the possibility-space you’ve plumbed, and for me it evoked that same rhythm of repeating a familiar gameplay loop but intentionally introducing small deviations – maybe wait an extra beat before investigating the choir loft this time? – to see if I could get an optimal result.

Where the metaphor breaks down is that the choices you have aren’t purely about guiding your character through the scenario. In fact the very first one you’re offered asks you define your relationship with Lianna, the other girl: is she your sister, someone you’ve got a crush on, or just some acquaintance you wound up going on an adventure with? At first I was bit nonplussed by this choice, because of course the emotional connection you’ve got with Jane rando will be much weaker than the one you’ve got with a sibling, which feels like it should have a significant impact on the story. And it does! These different choices of relationship significantly alter Lianna’s motivations, and the options available to you at particularly high-stress moments. It’s a neat bit of design because the fundamentals of the narrative remain the same, which maintains the loop-y, accretive nature of the gameplay, but they get remixed and stay fresh by virtue of their new configuration.

As for what those elements are – well, they are fairly generic horror beats, though they’re worked through efficiently and effectively. The church is properly spooky, with the descriptions sprinkling in a light theme of alienation:

"A space that was made to hold throngs of people, voices joined in song, speaking and kneeling in unison, eating ceremonial bread and drinking ceremonial wine. Communion. Now it’s dead and silent, and you, who never even believed in God—you’re the last person who belongs."

The terrible thing, once it gets on-screen, doesn’t get much by way of explanation, which is usually something I dislike in horror – you can definitely take the lore-dumping too far, but one gribbly monster is much the same as another, so give me the tortured backstory and scraps of worldbuilding dripping with implications – but it works fine here since it means the replays aren’t burdened by the need to run around collecting information that the player already knows. The scope of the variation in the potential scenarios means that the thematic connection between the horror and the interpersonal stuff going on with you and Lianna is sometimes tighter and sometimes looser – because of this, I felt like the playthrough where Lianna was a potential romantic partner felt more canonical than the others – but the tropes being invoked are all sturdy ones for the supernatural horror genre, so there’s never too much of a mismatch.

It all adds up to a compelling experience that maybe doesn’t have that much power in any given playthrough, but winds up more than the sum of its parts as you experiment with all the different things you can build with this Girls in Spooky Church Lego set. Even if you’re not moved to exhaust every single possibility – I confess I didn’t get two of the bonus achievements – and the set of tools you’ve got to confront the monster isn’t that broad in any iteration, there’s still more than enough here to make for a satisfying half-hour of playing and replaying. It’s just a shame there are no smoke bombs to collect and never use…

I believe a lot of things that might not have as much hard evidence as some people might prefer. I believe the White Album is the best one the Beatles ever recorded. I believe a good dark beer is far superior to any IPA. I believe it’s worth getting involved in politics. But no matter what receipts you show me, I don’t think I will ever be able to truly believe that Labyrinthine Library of Xleksixnrewix (I will not type that correctly ever again) was written in four hours. I’m by no means accusing the authors of fraud, let me be clear, and I can see that it leverages a bunch of pre-written extensions so I can even see how the trick must have been done. And yet, when I contemplate what’s here – a remappable maze a la the best bit of Enchanter, an intuitive automap, thirty different library sections each with their own in-jokes, and a tightly-designed Dungeon-Keeper style metapuzzle bringing all of these pieces together – I am just in awe that this was entered into an EctoComp’s Petit Mort category (there’s a cool feelie too, though I believe those don’t count against the time limit at least).

The conceit here is that you’re a kobold-librarian midway up the totem-pole at the eponymous archive, which in addition to orderly daytime visits from scholars, is also subject to nightly raids by uncouth adventurers hell-bent on pillaging the place for lost artifacts and recondite secrets. Tonight, it’s your section’s turn in the barrel, so it’s up to you to construct a deathtrap that will rebuff the intruders and leave you well-positioned for advancement to Second Assistant Librarian. The most important thing to say about this premise is that it is delightful beyond all belief; the protagonist’s doughty self-importance, and their fancy little hat, are immediately winning, for one thing. The library is also an amazing character all its own; it’s laid out in a thematic grid, with alphabetically-incrementing nouns running along the east-west axis and a series of adjectives similarly running north-south. That means you start out in archaic languages, while going south sees you visit bio-languages, which in turn is west of bio-music and then bio-numerology. Libraries with unique layouts are among my interests (…why yes, I do love Name of the Rose, thanks for asking), and this is a great one, not least because the gags are good – archaic numerology was my favorite:

"Numerology ranks among the oldest fields of magical science—these tomes date back millennia! They contain more than a dash of unnecessary mysticism, although experiments done centuries later proved that avoiding beans really was necessary for good numerological work."

(I’ll just say it, Pythagoras was wrong, fava beans are delicious. Wait, unless that’s because the souls give them extra tastiness?)

All that is just flavor for the puzzle, of course – you don’t need to read a single book or pay attention to any of the room descriptions to solve the game – but they still make the process anything but dry. That’s helpful because the opening is a little intimidating; the instructions do step you through what you’re meant to be doing, but there are a lot of moving pieces so I was glad to have some solid jokes to enjoy while I was trial-and-erroring my way through the setup. The key mechanic here is that unlike in a tower defense game (or Lock and Key, this game’s clearest antecedent), you can’t set traps before the adventurers arrive: you’ve got a magic gong that opens up the secure chest where they’re kept, but that also is the signal for the baddies to start marching in. Instead, the setup phase is about preparing the layout, since you’ve go the magic ability to open and close passages between the various rooms (though only twenty rooms can be part of the maze at a time, which helps keep things manageable – an especially thoughtful limitation, actually, as I only just now remembered that the map is 3-D, since each section has a possible “above” and “below” location, too!)

This means that dealing with the adventurers isn’t just a waiting game, where you stab the Z key over and over and wait five minutes to find out whether you’ve already won – once they’re in the maze, you need to run to the area where the traps are kept, and then scramble deploy them even as those vicious miscreants are marauding through the passageways, ready to shoot you down if they catch the merest sight of you. This lends a pleasant dynamism to proceedings; even though the puzzle is pretty simple once you understand all the rules for how the traps work, and how the adventurers behave, implementing the solution still requires active thought to come up with and carry out your plan without getting skewered, and the details will vary based on how exactly you’ve constructed your maze. I wouldn’t say this gives the game replay value, exactly – there are only three traps at your disposal, and I’m pretty sure they need to be deployed in a specific way and in a specific order to attain victory – but it does mean that my playthrough felt like it was uniquely mine; I brought the adventuring party down in demonic oikology (which is to say, the interior decoration that most appeals to the mephitic taste), which seemed the appropriate place to do it.

All told, this is a heck of a clever game, marrying a lovely theme with engaging writing and a puzzle that made me feel smart. Most authors could spend 40 hours and still barely succeed at one of these pillars; to accomplish all in a tenth of that time is something miraculous – just as miraculous as me being able to spell the game’s name from memory: folks, believe me when I say you should drop everything and go play Labyrinthine Library of Xacklexendrewxixix!

Okay, I was close. Kinda.

The Faust legend is an old one – Marlowe’s take goes back to the early 17th Century, and of course there are many medieval and classical antecedents similarly featuring deals with the devil. But it’s one that’s got many modern incarnations, too: Thomas Mann reworked the story to juxtapose Mephistopheles with the Nazi regime, The Master and Margarita does the same with the Soviets, but there are lots of other more or less elastic adaptations. The mere fact of reinterpretation perhaps doesn’t mean that much in our current reboot-heavy culture, but Dr. Faust has a couple hundred years even on Spider Man, so it’s worth considering what’s responsible for the myth’s longevity. Beyond the obvious vicarious pleasure of seeing all the joys that a life of sin can offer (portrayed inside of a moralizing frame offering plausible deniability, of course), the fun of a capering, too-clever-by-half devil, and the compelling image of a scholar who’ll stop at nothing for knowledge – surely there are more than a few literary critics who flatter their egos by seeing something of Faust in themselves – it also satisfies a primitive desire for punishment: Faust makes a rash deal, promises something he shouldn’t, and has to face the consequences. Even if he is sometimes saved in the end, he earns his redemption, and the story as a whole reifies the idea that a moral order exists, which is comforting even if the details of said order may or may not be defensible.

The protagonist of The Revenant’s Lament, John Cassidy King (who winds up going by a variety of names and pronouns over the course of the game, so I’m going to stick with King and they/them pronouns for ease of discussion) certainly seems to believe in the reality of punishment, and even crave it to a certain extent. This is an EctoComp entry so tortured protagonists are de rigueur, but the details here are compellingly specific: King is an Old West cowboy, born as a girl but living now as a man, who escaped a domineering, vicious father though not without committing some crimes in return. They ride their father’s stolen horse but expect it to turn on them at any moment, and it’s not surprising that that guilty conscience seems to hover over the conversation they have when a white-clad stranger shows up at their campfire, offering any wish King pleases just for a song and the warmth of the flames – the narration is close-third on King throughout, but it still judgmentally notes that King is being selfish when asking what the visitor can offer as a gift. And when it appears that the stranger can make good on his extravagant promise, what does King wish for but to live forever, to forestall the day of reckoning as long as they can. And when that decision has consequences – because of course it does – King fights mightily against their fate, but still seems half to believe they deserve what’s coming to them.

Tragedies can’t hold the player in suspense as to their outcomes, so they need a solid dose of pathos to really deliver, and this Revenant’s Lament has in spades. The prose here is very good, propulsive and showing equal facility with drawing characters and displaying well-turned images. Here’s an early bit of scene-setting:

"The trading post is just across the street from the post office, the hitches outside occupied by tall, painted horses who graze on sparse grass, shuffle and snort and wait for their riders to return. The type of creature to make John nervous, beasts so assured of their own existence that fear becomes an afterthought."

And here’s the devil himself:

"The lonesome stranger doesn’t look old. For the briefest of seconds, he looks like John’s father, smiles in the same crooked way, his thin lips curling back into a snarl or sneer, nothing real in the expression. A coyote grin; knowing something John doesn’t. And then he’s a stranger again, one with short, slicked back salt and pepper hair and the shadow of a beard across his jaw, one with eyes black as a clouded night, empty, dull, filled with flame."

Every once in a while it does tack on one clause too many after a comma, or get a small detail wrong (the dead man’s hand was a pair of aces and a pair of eights, not a full house), but that’s only the kind of thing that you’d notice if you were taking notes for a review (er.). The themes here are relatively straightforward ones – identity, sin, all that stuff – but they’re played with a lovely richness of tone, elevating what could have been merely pulp material in lesser hands.

The interactivity is also nicely handled. King is something of a passive character, often deferring their choices to what others wish, and this is nicely mirrored in choices that wind up channeled into a single outcome (either through narrating abortive attempts that turn out futile, or graying out seemingly-valid options to make clear that there’s only one path forward). There is one significant moment of choice at the end, leading to substantially different denouements; by that point events have progressed so far that the outcome is always tragic, but it is an engaging moment of agency by way of contrast with the rest of the game. And this approach does mean that the moments when King does take the reins and articulate what they want for themselves stand out, and land with some force.

The one thing holding the Revenant’s Lament back is its pacing. The plot here is compelling, with a lot of incident – I was very invested in following King’s story to its end – and the characters and prose also help sustain interest. But nonetheless there are a few sequences that felt quite slow to me, notably an extended series of vignettes towards the middle of the story that went on a bit too long, and ill-judged timed text at both the opening and closing of the game which undercut the moments that should have been the most powerful – I know the intention was to slow down and emphasize the significance of what’s happening, but the reality is that I alt-tabbed to check my email until I could actually read the story again.

If I wound up spending a bit longer with King as a result, though, that’s hardly something to lament. The game offers a compelling character study, with a meditation on guilt and violence that’s entirely in line with what the Western genre does best while interjecting unique themes and story beats I’d never exactly seen before – it’s a worthy addition to the deal-with-the-devil canon, even if the reader does wish King had been able to be better at forgiving themself.

I mentioned in my review of Remembrance that a straightforward structure for Single Choice Jam games is to reserve the choice for the final bit of the game, using the opening and middle to establish stakes and build up to the drama of the one place where there’s player agency, and then ramify the endings according to the path the player opts to take. There’s nothing wrong with that approach at all, but it’s also interesting to see another entry in the jam subvert that structure and call into question whatever this “agency” thing it is we think we’re talking about. Chinese Family Dinner Moment also stands out from its peers in the jam by being a parser game; the very concept of “choices” fits awkwardly into the standard parser game format, inasmuch as typically they offer quite a large range of potential inputs (you can type anything you want, and might get a customized response) but also often constrain the player to a stultifyingly-linear plot. So what, exactly, counts as a choice and what doesn’t?

Let’s put in a pin in that; don’t worry, we’ll be circling back soon enough.

Shifting from structure to themes, CFDM makes no bones about the fact that it’s about alienation. The protagonist is a young Chinese person who’s recently come back from studying abroad in the U.S., which their parents have used as an occasion to throw a bigger Lunar New Year party than usual. And on every level they feel disconnected: from the casually racist attitudes of their family and family friends, from their narrowly-materialist view of what matters, from their choice of food to serve (they’ve gone vegan), even from the plausibly-deniable sexual assault they endure and from their own physical reality:

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"You don’t like your body."

Make no mistake, this is a downbeat game; there’s some humor, but it’s almost all dark and derives from how unselfconsciously awful the other characters are. Here’s some dating advice from an aunt:

“You better not get a white woman since white women can’t cook. And you definitely don’t want to get a black woman because they’re criminals … or an Indian because their cooking smells.

“Between you and me,” she continues, whispering in your ear, “Chinese women are a bit better, but have you read the news? That lady tricked her husband into giving up his cash. That’s why you shouldn’t trust us devious Chinese women. Get a Japanese woman. They are polite and deferential to their husbands — unlike me!”

The picture being painted here is very specific to a particular socioeconomic cultural stratum, of course, but I have a friend who was subject to almost this same tirade, word for word, except he got it from a Persian woman warning him off of other Iranian-Americans. So while the details are all well-chosen to root the game in its milieu, I think it also succeeds in creating resonance with anyone who’s ever chafed at the chauvinistic, greedy, blinkered principles of friends and family after starting to be exposed to a broader understanding of the world, and questioning what received wisdom tells them is their place in it (Chinese people, of course, don’t have a monopoly on either side of this equation).

I use “picture” advisedly here, since the player’s role in CFDM is largely a passive one, but one that requires the player’s active complicity. There are conversations that play out, uncomfortable situations that occur, and an unsuccessful attempt to take refuge by retreating to social media (if you thought your relatives were shallow and transactional…), but while you might expect these to be implemented as events that occur according to a timer system that ticks onward regardless of what you do, in fact by default scenes are mostly static. Instead, time generally advances only when you type LISTEN; this is a canny design decision, because of course your silence means that your interlocutors feel free to fill the air with their discriminatory nonsense or otherwise play out their anti-human pathologies. But since you’re allowing them, if not inviting them, to do so, can you say that you’re so much better? There’s even a late-game sequence that makes this explicit, as LISTEN leads to you actually speaking up, though not for yourself, as it leads you to repeat your relatives’ prejudices about poor people and black folks and trans people right back to them, validating and reifying their biases.

This is of course deeply unpleasant, but as I said above, I played through the game expecting that it was building to a point where I’d finally have a choice to rebel. As it came close to the end, I thought I’d spotted the moment: there’s a family picture to wrap up the evening, and as everyone prompted me to say cheese, I saw the opportunity for a gesture of quiet dissent, at least FROWNing to create some visible distance. But no, I was surprised to see, that wasn’t an option: again, all there was to do was LISTEN, and go along with the crowd.

Is CFDM a zero-choice game instead of a single-choice one, then? Well, no; after finishing I checked out the source code and saw that there’s one other option that’s always available: the out-of-world command QUIT is altered to have diegetic effect here, and you can invoke it at any time. It doesn’t exactly let you achieve catharsis, though – instead of a self-righteous denunciation of your family’s reactionary values that validates your identity and maybe starts to change their minds, you get a response indicating that running out of the restaurant caused a small scandal that impacts both you and the rest of your family. No matter what, you’re in this together.

What are we to make of the moral universe thus established? Per the implementation of LISTEN, allowing yourself to be a victim makes you culpable in the small-minded bigotries of your family; per the implementation of QUIT, refusing to be culpable makes you a victim and tars your family with guilt by association. Some might say this is no choice at all, since both ends are so bad, but are choices just about outcomes? And does the possibility of even an unguessable choice that doesn’t wind up changing anything somehow still bestow freedom? For all that Chinese Family Dinner Moment is studiously anchored to its context, it’s nonetheless one of the most Existentialist pieces of IF I’ve encountered – we can hope that material circumstances will change and liberate the protagonist from their subaltern status, but even that won’t blunt the horns of the dilemma that’s depicted here.

One of the things I like best about IF is its austerity. Mainstream video games have had decades to develop the sensory delights they offer, from photorealistic graphics to pleasingly responsive interfaces to viscerally satisfying sound affects, but I often find the humblest piece of interactive fiction more impressive because it’s living and dying just by its text. Sure, there can be various bells and whistles on both the parser and choice-based side of things – integrated music, some attractive pixel art, that sort of thing – but to be honest I find that stuff rarely makes much difference to me when I’m reflecting on my response to a game: it’s all about the words, and how they’re used. So it’s hopefully a marker of DOL-OS’s aesthetic achievement that the main thing I keep coming back to is how pretty it is.

The game presents itself as a sort of found-object piece: the conceit is that it’s far in the future and you discover an old but still functional computer, so you decide to undertake some digital archaeology. It seems as though it dates from some time at least a few years on from our present, so strictly speaking it doesn’t make sense that the presentation relies on 80s-era markers – a yellow-green palette, graphics broken up by scan lines, chunky, pixelated icons – but this is what my brain, at least, thinks a computing artifact should look like, so I think it’s an inspired choice. And it commits hard to the conceit; every font, image, and glitched-out display is note-perfect. Similarly, I don’t know what kind of work was needed to torture Twine to create an interface that functions exactly like I remember the old Apple II ones working, but it’s similarly an impressive achievement – navigating the file system is immediately intuitive, and there are myriad extras all the way up to interactive implementations of hangman and sudoku. Truly, it’s a triumph – if, instead of a self-contained piece of IF, it was embedded in a AAA game like one of the later Fallouts, it would inspire excited PC Gamer blog pieces about this awesome Easter Egg everyone should check out.

(Now that I’ve typed that out, both in presentation and plot I realize that DOL-OS would perfectly fit as one of those terminals you occasionally run across in Fallout – I’m curious if there was any direct inspiration there?)

As for that plot, there’s a fair bit of it. DOL-OS proceeds in three distinct layers, with the game’s two puzzles gating progression between each act. The first act is a collage, with a variety of different documents painting a picture of a repressive, authoritarian society. The files on offer include news stories about public executions, official histories, annotated literary texts, official documents… it’s a real mélange, and while there are a few connections between the various small stories on offer, those function more as bonus insights; the point is just to experience the many different ways a society like this commits violence against its citizens. The writing here is often stilted, reflecting the way that fascist states manage to use language bluntly while still avoiding saying what they mean:

"We encourage still that anyone having had contact with The Gendarme to deliver to the nearest police station any information that might to help recover these documents or in relation to the young woman and her connections."

(I should note that the game was translated from French – it won last year’s French Comp – so some of these stylistic tics might be a result of that process. It still works well, though).

There’s room for a bit of humor, though – the story implied in the terse notation that one criminal was punished for “[stealing] a goose thrice (same goose)” is marvelous.

The second section is more focused; now the documents are following a young researcher who’s been brought on board a mysterious project, that involves both digitizing historical documents and developing an AI. This part of the game proceeds fairly linearly, as you read his diary and his involvement in the project gets deeper and deeper. The final section sees you engage with the research project directly and shifts from the document-review gameplay of the first two-thirds of the game to a more traditional choice-based interface, which effectively raises the stakes and indicates that the focus has moved from understanding what’s on this old computer to deciding what to do with it.

It’s a nicely-paced progression, and as a result I’ll reserve in-depth discussion of where the game winds up going for a spoiler section; suffice to say that that I think the plot works well, though perhaps takes a slightly more tropey and bloodless approach to an issue that could have been rendered with a bit more social realism. And while I’m being slightly critical, I’ll also say that the puzzles are rather desultory; there’s a guess-the-password bit that’s got some very blunt clueing, and a jigsaw-puzzle captcha where the main challenge was avoiding getting a headache from squinting at a bunch of yellowish smudges. They’re by no means bad, but at the same time I can’t help but think I’d have enjoyed the game more if they’d either been made more demanding, or dropped entirely so that progress just depended on reaching certain milestones in the document-review process. These are especially niggly niggles even by my standards, though – DOL-OS stands as a really impressive game that deservedly won the laurel in its Francophone version, and us English speakers are lucky to get another bite at the apple.

(Spoiler - click to show)Right, so the revelations: it turns out that the authoritarian era is well in the past by the time the researcher starts up his work, and in fact at first his job is just to digitize the records you find in the first chunk so they can be used as AI training data. The judicial system is overburdened in his time, you see, so the project is all about creating to a tool to speed up the slow business of deciding guilt and punishment; the previous project lead gets chewed up by the stress and ethical compromises, so the researcher gets thrust into the limelight, at which point it becomes clear that the bosses don’t care that the AI is bloodthirsty in the extreme. The story breaks off somewhat at this point, but when the third act kicks off and you’re able to engage the AI in direct conversation, it becomes clear that it was in fact deployed and wound up passing judgment on a whole lot of folks. This final tete a tete makes clear a lot of the stuff that’s established by implication in the first two sequences before building to a climactic choice of either consigning the AI to its doom on the failing terminal hardware, or copying it over in a fresh install.

This all works well enough, and I have to give the game kudos for creating a “save the AI y/n” moral dilemma where I was all in on letting the thing die, but I did feel like it could have played things with a bit more nuance. These kind of systems are being implemented in real life – most notably, a lot of jurisdictions have experimented with algorithms to make recommendations for who should be offered bail after being charged with crimes. You can see how this might be a good idea in theory, but in practice mostly they just wind up laundering racist decision-making via a Big Data disguise; there are well-known cases where first-time Black offenders aren’t recommended bail, while white career criminals get every benefit of the doubt, because that’s what the algorithms learned to do from the training data. Beyond these instances of straight bias, there’s also a ideological element of horror here; in the Anglo-American criminal system, at least, decisions of guilt are consigned to a jury of ordinary people, and taking a social judgment and turning it into a data-driven one is a radical shift, and I wish more hay was made of it. But DOL-OS mostly refrains from plumbing direct real-life analogues or self-consciously putting big ideas into play; the second section sticks to the well-worn Frankenstein-y scientists-create-monster-that-escapes-their-control plot beats, and the third section doesn’t create much nuance or ambiguity. All told that means I found DOL-OS an effective bit of sci-fi horror – and again, a gorgeous example of the form – but I was disappointed it didn’t try to do a bit more in the way of social comment.

Here’s our next entry in the review-a-thon as a jam of jams: Remembrance was originally entered in the Single Choice Jam, which, as it says on the tin, required authors to construct games with only one moment where the player has multiple options. There are several potential structures that satisfy this constraint, and Remembrance opts for what’s probably the most straightforward: the game consists of an initial linear section that previews and builds up the significance of the choice, then shunts the player into one of four short, somewhat-different endings based on what they pick.

The flesh that goes on those bones is anything but straightforward, though. The protagonist is a young woman – maybe in your early twenties – who lives on the world’s first asteroid-mining station, and whose mother has recently died; you’re going back to Earth to inter her ashes, and have to decide which of a quartet of objects to bring along to leave by her urn as a memorial. As the game tells the story of your relationship with her through each of the potential offerings, you get a sense of the challenges you both faced relating to each other: the gifts that pushed you to be someone you’re not, the art pieces that she didn’t know what to make of. It’s narrated in a compellingly wry voice that lets the grief show by its absence, and which combines worldbuilding and character work with impressive economy:

"It’s been about a year since she died; the trip can only be made within a narrow window every 370 days or so, and your mother’s heart attack happened right after the last shuttle left. Punctuality was never her strong suit."

The game also succeeds at making its situations relatable by leaning into specificity: I’m not a tomboy who isn’t into jewelry, but I’ve definitely had interests that diverged from my parents’ expectations; I’m not a Jew who can’t cook the family recipes because there’s no honey on the space station, but there are certainly a lot of traditions my family hasn’t been able to keep up due to time and distance. And there was one moment where the specificity was, in fact, my specificity: the worn wooden box the mother stored her recipe cards in seems on its face identical to the wooden box my mom stores her recipe cards in.

The endings are finely-tooled as well. The temptation with this structure would be to have the choice be a Bioware-style BIG CHOICE, with each of the objects directly corresponding to some specific aspect of your relationship with your mom that would then take primacy in the final sequence – leaning into rebellion, or acceptance, or spirituality, or what-not. Remembrance resists this temptation, to its credit; there’s clearly a particular cluster of associations and emotions bound up in each object, but they’re not simple to unpack, and while the ending text does change in ways that feel satisfyingly responsive to the choice you make, there’s no radical branching or splintering of outcomes. Everything goes just as you expect it to, it’s just that the details are different.

With that said, I do think I would have liked the game better if there was a broader set of objects to choose from – I don’t mean that four is necessarily too few, but it was notable to me that all of the objects are ones that are as much, if not more, about you as they are about your mother. Two of them are gifts she gave you, one is something you made, and the last is something of hers that it seems like she wanted you to have after she died. As a result, no matter what choice you make, the remembrance-offering winds up presenting your mother through the memory-prism of her daughter; for many parents, that might well be what they’d want, but I think it would have been interesting to have at least one choice that was more clearly focused on how she understood herself, and how she’d want posterity to remember her. I can see the argument that that might have weakened the game’s focus on the mother/daughter relationship, but who we are when we’re alone determines who we are when we’re with someone else, after all. Perhaps the stronger reason against such an option is that Remembrance doesn’t really strike me as being about mourning as such; the stories it tells are more about how we understand ourselves in the light of the people who helped us become who we are, intentionally or not. And yes, that understanding is a choice, but it’s not a clean one.

Everyone knows a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but for all that, there is something in a name – and is there an author’s name more likely to strike terror in a player’s heart than “lazygamedesigner82”? Whether they’re intentionally hearkening back to the text adventures of 1982, or they were just born back then, it’s definitely a warning that the game they’ve produced is going to lack modern conveniences. Similarly, especially for a parser game, a good author has to be the very opposite of lazy, making sure that there’s sufficient depth of implementation, and enough proactive clueing, to make a game anything other than an exercise in frustration. Combined with the fact that Quest for the Serpent’s Eye is a Quest 5 game written as late as 2020, that the blurb winks at all the old-school tropes that to my taste were stale before Infocom shut down, and that the instructions tell you you might need both LOOK IN and LOOK UNDER, I went into this one bracing myself against the pain that was inevitably going to make this experience a torture.

Reader, I was as wrong as I’ve ever been. Low-plot-1980s-throwback-puzzle-fest is by no means my IF subgenre of choice – to put it mildly – so I am as shocked as anyone to relate that I had a really fun time with this.

In one sense, it’s exactly what it looks like. You’re off on a lightly-motivated treasure hunt for the eponymous gem – your old professor went missing trying to find it, so of course you decide to track down both her and it – in a jungle / cave / temple setting that couldn’t be more cliched if it featured in an Indiana Jones movie. The puzzles are a mix of straightforward medium-dry-goods stuff – cutting vines with a machete, that sort of thing – and escape-the-deathtrap gameplay. There’s even a maze. And as advertised, there are monochrome graphics with almost no straight lines, lending everything a wibbly-wobbly vibe.

But contrary to that “lazy” sobriquet, tremendous care has been taken with every aspect of the thing. The puzzles are actually carefully considered, with a relatively small map and relatively small number of objects helping attune the player to the clues that are there to help you progress. Death can come frequently, but it instantly warps you back to where you were so you can try again. The game makes the obvious jokes and references – the shopkeeper is named Stanley – but also goes a step beyond to make the non-obvious ones, too – the ship you arrive on is called the S.S. Fawcett. There’s an infectious enthusiasm to the prose that feels distinctive while staying perfectly in-genre, plus some one-liners that made me laugh out loud (the list of example commands in the HELP text includes “SHOW DRIVERS LICENSE TO HORSE”). The traditional ASK ABOUT conversational system is implemented with an impressive depth of topics. The graphics started to grow on me after a while, and somehow, there’s even a cool twist in the ultra-generic plot that’s well-telegraphed but still took me by surprise.

Quest for the Serpent’s Eye of course isn’t a perfect game – there are a couple of later puzzles that I think are a bit underclued, especially a speak-friend-and-enter riff that feels like it’s taking unfair advantage of a player’s likely assumptions, and it suffers from some of the weaknesses of the Quest 5 platform (notably, you can’t save if you play online, and I wound up losing my progress after alt-tabbing for a bit. Definitely download this one and play it in the interpreter!) But the strong design, robust implementation, assiduous polish, and genial good humor – not to mention the fact that the author puts themself very clearly on the player’s side, rather than an adversarial position – makes this one of the very few games that communicates to a modern player why this style of adventure built a following back in the day, and still has something to offer to a contemporary audience. Typically when I review games in this genre, I wrap up by saying some variation of “if you like this kind of thing, you’ll probably like this.” But for a change I can just say hey, I think you’ll probably like this.

Thread Unlocked is another Neo-Twiny Jam entry like Idle Hands, but instead of using its scant 500 words to communicate an entire, but linear, self-contained experience, it allows the player to construct one of a myriad of one- or two-line forum posts, which gain power from your ability to imagine all that’s come before and all that will come after. The game’s opening wrings as much dread as any horror movie out of just four words: “Thread unlocked. Slowmode off.” We don’t know where we are, or what exactly was being discussed before the modhammer came down (though c’mon, it was probably AI) – all that matters is that we now have a renewed outlet for our feelings, which the mandatory cooling-off period has done nothing to quench.

You build your responses one word at a time, from a choice of two or three, until you’ve picked four, at which point the game extrapolates out a full, short post. This filling out of the prompts provides the game’s energetic kick, because the pieces that are in your control are pretty much just throat-clearing – “well now there’s another,” “you are not being”, “can I just say”. Seeing these banal introductions turned into discourse-interventions that are sure to wind up escalating things is gleefully groan-worthy; after running through the mechanic a couple of times, I started to feel the same exuberant anticipatory outrage I experience when seeing that there’ve been new posts to a contentious thread.

The responses are all there is to the game, while they vary, it’s not over a wide range. Still, they’re not all just flame-bait. Some are passive-aggressive:

"You are not being very thoughtful with your words. Can you delete what you just said, or I’ll have to flag you."

Some are vain attempts to tamp down the disagreement:

"Well now there’s another thread on sensitive topics. Leave it alone, I tell you."

And there’s at least one that’s actually nice:

"Can I just say that really means a lot to me! Thank you. I can’t express my gratefulness!"

(I stopped after getting this one, figuring I’d quit while I was ahead).

Again, you never see what prompted these posts, or what comes after them, which helps the purity of the gag stand out in sharp relief: it’s notable that there’s no option not to post, you always have to say something and that something will almost always be calculated to keep the bad feelings going until the thread is inevitably re-locked. Part of me wishes that the writing was a bit less generic, that there were more specific jokes or different voices woven into the responses, because I did find that they got a little same-y after a while. But I think that would have wound up undercutting the structuralist point the game is making: Internet arguments are all alike, and however much we might like to think of ourselves as above the fray, even the most anodyne point is likely to feed the flames. The way to win Thread Unlocked is not to play, but where’s the fun in that?

I recently contributed to a game with a dozen or so different authors (Mathbrush’s Untitled Relationship Project 1); the various excerpts are all mixed together without attribution, so part of the fun of playing is trying to figure out who wrote which bits. And while I felt reasonably confident in a number of guesses, the ones I was surest of were those by Sophia de Augustine. While their oeuvre has a bunch of recurring motifs – religious imagery, flawed dads, queer love – even when those elements are dialed down, there’s still something instantly recognizable about their prose, and that something is adjectives. Adjectivitis is a curse, of course – I’ve spent a lot of time groaning at fledgling writers’ attempts to pad their prose by making sure every noun has at least one modifier attacked to it – and often it’s good advice to use them sparingly. Sophia’s writing rejects these counsels of caution, however, and winds up distinctively effective by picking exactly the right words, over and over.

That gift is at the heart of what makes Idle Hands successful. A bit of dynamic fiction entered into last year’s Neo-Twiny Jam – which limited games to 500 words or fewer – it recounts the before, during, and after of a bout of love-making with a demonic partner (the timeline shifts around a bit, and also this is the kind of sex where you have more than one go). The focus is on communicating an overwhelming sensory experience, not plot or narrative; you get a bit of a sense of his personality, but this is an element of flavor rather than anything resembling a character study. As dynamic fiction, there’s also nothing by way of player agency or choice – there are a few highlighted phrases that reveal a bit of additional text when moused-over, which serve to engage the player and provide an opportunity for them to feel complicit in opting into the sex, but otherwise you’re just clicking the forward arrow to reach the next passage.

Given the necessary privity of the piece, these are the right choices – constructing context for what brought these people together and what their coupling means, or allowing for different paths through the text, might seem fine enough goals in isolation, but efforts in those directions would come at the immediate expense of the game’s throbbing, fiery heart. So this is a piece set up to live or die by its prose, and fortunately it delivers, a marvel of evocative economy:

"He is all forked silver-tongue and razor-sharp teeth, biting off the rounded, purring edge to his voice with a cessation droning like fruit-drunk wasps at summerly height."

I could write a couple of paragraphs just on why I like this one sentence so much, but I think the strengths are obvious: its descriptions are playfully haunted by the traditional attributes of the devil, makes sure even seemingly-innocuous details like the timbre of a voice have a seductive tinge, and confines itself to just one idiosyncratic bit of vocabulary to make the reader slow down and feel the emphasis proper to the final simile. It’s a dense style, and in a long game might wind up feeling like too much, but the game also does a good job alternating its purplest transports with sacrilegious gags or winking references to boning; it also doesn’t rely on any one trick for too long, opening with a bunch of alliteration before wisely putting that back in the quiver for the rest of the game.

Admittedly there are a few moments where I felt like the writing was so heavily freighted that it threatened to topple over, but only a few, and it always reined things back in: this is a controlled, writerly piece that creates a singular aesthetic experience through well-chosen words (and also through well-chosen colors and visual theming, though as always I feel less qualified to comment on those elements). I can see how some potential players might find schtupping Satan to be an off-putting premise, but those interested in giving it a try will find lots here to enjoy.

[I should acknowledge that Sophia provided a cool banner for my Review-a-Thon thread on the IntFic forum. But a) I’d played the game and formed my opinion of it before I learned that, and b) I think everyone knows that if you want me to write a positive review of your game, bribery is a far less efficient approach than just slathering crypto-Catholic themes all over it, so Sophia’s bases were covered either way]

Two games after playing an entry planned for 2023’s ShuffleComp revival, the randomizer gave me an entry in 2014’s OG ShuffleComp – I am really enjoying how wide-ranging the thon feels! Once again, this is inspired by a song I’ve never heard before and didn’t get around to listening to, but hey, this isn’t actually a ShuffleComp, so I’m telling myself this is a reasonable approach to reviewing (I’m also telling myself that it’s totally understandable that I spent ten minutes flailing around trying to get the game to work – turns out that the first file listed on the IFDB page is an HTML TADS one that doesn’t work in modern interpreters or web browsers, but fortunately the second one listed plays just fine in QTADS).

There are probably two basic ways to make a game inspired by music. The first, taken by Not Just Once, is to assemble a linear narrative out of the lyrics and bits of plot implied by the songs, filtering a mélange of story-content through the Aristotelian unities. Look Around the Corner takes the more dangerous course, and tries to capture something of the experience of listening to a song while sticking to a largely-traditional IF approach. In particular, it deploys repetition and novelty to mirror the verse-chorus-verse structure familiar from music. This is a time loop game, in each of which the player must perform the same sequence of events: getting up out of bed, leaving their room, catching sight of a ray of light coming around the hallway’s corner, and then experiencing one of five wildly-disparate visions – the only bit of text that changes from iteration to iteration – before the whole thing resets.

The focus is clearly on the set-piece visions, and they range over an intriguingly broad territory, alternately invoking the primum mobile, Sumerian myth, the fractal structures of nature. Here’s that last one:

"The light of the dawn filters through an enormous tree, whose trunk divides into branches, whose branches divide into twigs, whose twigs carry leaves. Each leaf has veins that branch into smaller and smaller veins, bringing water and minerals to every chlorophyllic cell."

The writing is fine enough to communicate the ideas, but I did wish the author had leaned even more into poetry; five different sequences of two sentences isn’t a lot of time to make an impression, and getting a little less linear, a little more allusive, would have made these pieces more memorable and helped the player intuit connections between what felt to me a bit of a random grab-bag of themes. I also found the ending a bit of an anticlimax – there’s a fun little puzzle, clued with increasing obviousness as visions start to repeat, but your reward for untangling it is little more than “and then she woke up.” Again, perhaps listening to the song would mean that all these choices would make sense, as I’d see how the music provides a unifying ground to the whole experience, but I can’t but feel that there was a missed opportunity here to make a song-like game that doesn’t rely on anything else for its impact.

There’s a running joke about the classic sci-fi tabletop RPG Traveller, which is that it’s the only game where you can die before getting out of chargen. It uses a “lifepath” system, you see, where a series of tables let you roll year by year for events in your military career before you decide to muster out, at which point the game proper begins. But buried in those tables are some options that will just kill you, and send you back to the drawing board before your poor character even gets a chance to start a campaign. The other running joke is that chargen is the best part of the game, and A Mouse Speaks With Death shows that actually there might be something to that: it uses a card-based storylet system rather than dice as you recall each of the events of your life, and per the title no matter how well you do there’s no way to get out alive. But just like Traveller, it’s compelling stuff that positively demands you try it at least a couple of times, just to see how differently things can turn out.

The other similarity with Traveller is that the game is based on the author’s own tabletop setting, a Watership-Down-style place where heroic mice scrounge, travel, and protect what’s theirs in the shadow of the overwhelming and arcane world of humankind. I was worried at first that this connection might wind up overburdening the game – there’s a very robust glossary running down in-world terminology, much of which felt unnecessary: did we really need to know that “thief” means someone “who steals from their own nestmates, a term of opprobrium” or that “trouble” is “something dangerous”? I presume that in the RPG some of these terms have mechanics attached to them, but in the context of this game, they’re superfluous.

Fortunately the game quickly proved that it’s a fleeter thing than that first impression might have suggested. Part of that is the lovely art: you’re greeted with a well-realized mouse skeleton wearing a robe and perched on a spool of thread, a near-perfect blend of dread and cute (this is the eponymous Death, to whom you’re reciting your memories before he moves you on to your final destination). Part of it is the no-nonsense interface: at each life-stage, you’re given a hand of three cards and can pick one to play, at which point you’re whisked into a storylet that offers more traditional choice-based gameplay (past the first choice, you can also use one of a limited stock of redraws to swap out your options). But mostly it’s just down to the writing, which efficiently delivers all the pleasures of this genre: the mice are doughty and resourceful, the mysterious human artifacts they encounter induce awe as well as a thrill of recognition, and there’s a lovely concreteness to it all. Here’s a bit from one of the opening vignettes:

"Our nest was tissue paper chewed into strips. When I first opened my eyes, the world was white and red in the gloom, the colour of the paper. We — me and my brothers and sisters — were all heaped up together. Those were wonderful days. We had full bellies; each other."

While you’re to a certain degree at the mercy of the cards, and no matter how well you play you can only make it through at most eight rounds, the game still feels generous and provides plenty of player agency. It helps that the framing lets you know that you’re going to die no matter what so you might as well enjoy yourself, but the storylets are also designed to let you coauthor many of the outcomes; if you feel like inflicting setbacks on your mouse, you’re free to, but for the most part you can also just decide to live a relatively charmed life before the inevitable happens.

While there isn’t any visible stat tracking or explicit connections between the cards, it’s clear that some storylets unlock others, like the way I saw cards enabling me to start a family after playing one that introduced me to my partner (I was a little disappointed, though, that the Red Beast storylet, which saw me boldly stride out to defend the nest, didn’t acknowledge that a previously one had seen me named the nest’s official Champion – this was actually just my job). The end of the game also shows you a little animated word-cloud based on how you played your mouse and what you accomplished; in my most eventful playthrough, I wound up with something like 17 tags, which maybe made the animation drag, but it makes for a nice incentive to try again and explore the possibility-space. The space around Death also fills up with cute bits of art representing possessions you accumulate or key events in your life, which similarly winds up rewarding experimentation.

Also contributing to A Mouse Speaks to Deaths’ grabbiness is the suggestion of a metaplot. Certain cards are marked with a special triangle symbol, and by playing as many of those as you can, you can learn scraps of lore about a fabled city whose inhabitants managed to obtain immortality. I’m not sure if the likelihood of getting these triangle cards increases in subsequent playthroughs, but in my fourth go-round I was able to find out the truth of these legends after some nerve-wracking derring-do; it’s maybe less climactic than I was expecting, and I still had three rounds left so this heroic mouse still wound up going out on a relatively simple note, but that fits the game’s unpretentious, wistful vibe better than allowing an epic fantasy theme to suddenly dominate.

I should mention some elements that are flaws, not just design choices: I noticed a few bugs in the Wind storylet, where several passages threw up angry red “bad conditional expression” errors, and the chronology of the different storylets sometimes got muddled (a few seem to take multiple years, whereas others are clearly over in a matter of hours or days and seem like they should certainly overlap with a few of the longer-term ones). One time I also died at my fourth or fifth card play without being sure what exactly had happened – I suppose that’s delivering the classic Traveller experience, but I definitely wanted a bit more closure. And I’m not sure the pool of different events is broad enough to keep each playthrough fresh after the third of fourth. Still, that’s more than enough to make for a meaty, satisfying experience; the well-judged game design structure and winsome prose were enough to induce me to see 23 of the 46 available stories, over the course of an hour or so, and I enjoyed every single one at least a little. The one downside is that I’m left with no desire at all to check out the tie-in RPG: I’m satisfied just rolling up and killing characters, thanks.

Continuing the review-a-thon run through the highlights of other events, we come to Not Just Once, which was intended as an entry in last year’s ShuffleComp revival, but missed the deadline. The conceit of ShuffleComp is that participants submit a couple of songs, the organizers shuffle them around, and then they hand a new selection back to the authors, who make a game based on some or all of the songs on their customized mini-mix-tape. Sadly for my ability to evaluate Not Just Once according to the rules of the Comp, I didn’t listen to the playlist listed by the author, which contained three songs from bands I’d never heard of, a Radiohead track that’s unfamiliar to me, and a Genesis song whose title meant nothing to me at the time though now that I go back and look at it again, I realize was on the adult contemporary station all the time when I was a kid.

Fortunately, Not Just Once stands on its own well enough. A Twine game gussied up with a stylish blue header and footer, it also boasts a customized interface where selecting a choice reveals a few new paragraphs and then scrolls down to the next set of options, making it play something like an Ink game with a better color palette. It also impresses with how quickly it establishes its downmarket UK setting:

"This is your local high street, although it barely deserves the title. Fully half the shop fronts are boarded up or to let. There’s a corner shop with overpriced groceries - that you’ve just come out of - an off-license, a phone repair kiosk, and a couple of charity shops (they closed mid-afternoon, though).

"Overhead, Christmas lighting flashes desultorily - alternating stylised LED gifts and trees, strung across the street. The local council’s festive offering, still in place."

There are a few small infelicities here (the “that you’ve just come out of” interjection is a little clumsy, and “desultorily” is always a mistake) but they’re drowned out by the evocatively sardonic turns of phrase and nicely-chosen details. The prose remains strong as the plot kicks in: a pay phone is ringing in its booth as you walk by, and after you feel drawn to pick it up, you unexpectedly find yourself thrust into a disorienting and intense conversation with a women who’s alluring as she is threatening, and who says she knows you though you’d swear you’ve never met her before in your life.

While the direction the story goes isn’t too hard to guess, the writing is effective at communicating your warring curiosity and wariness, and early choices that seemed merely incidental see call-backs that make the game feel responsive. Despite drawing on five different songs, it struck me as fairly one-note – modulo a bit of a twist in the ending and those couple minutes of setup before it shows its hand, Not Just Once is content to stick with a slow ratcheting up of its I-want-to-make-out-with-you-but-also-you-might-kill-me tension. But hey, that’s a fun note, and it’s well played here.

There are a few missed opportunities: many of the choices do feel like they reduce to “do you want the plot to keep happening Y/N”, which isn’t very interesting, and I was surprised the ending didn’t twist in the way I was expecting (Spoiler - click to show)(wouldn’t it have been more fun, and neater, if it had been the girl who answered the phone call at the end, except this time she’s the one with no memory of you?). And I think the pacing is perhaps five to ten percent slower than would be ideal; this is still a nervy little thriller, don’t get me wrong, but a little bit of tightening would pay significant dividends. But that’s often the way with mix-tapes: they can be a bit shaggy, but an enthusiastic mix of disparate elements will take you far.

We’ve now reached the first of a couple Goncharov games in the thon. I’m dimly aware of the provenance here; there was a social-media meme a couple years ago where folks conjured up the existence of a “lost” Scorsese film focusing on the namesake Russian gangster, and then a game jam dedicated to games fleshing out the mythos. I’m not sure how much of the core concepts were set by the organizers, or the meme – I’m assuming at least some of the details of setting and a few of the characters – but suspect that the jam will take the “interpretation of the Odyssey by someone who’s never read the Odyssey” thing I mentioned a couple reviews up to heretofore-unplumbed, kaleidoscopic extremes.

Someone Else’s Story is a short Twine game, and zooms in on one moment that surely must come early in the film: you play Sofia, a woman with some connection to the Italian mob who’s given the task of weaseling into the good graces of Goncharov’s wife Katya at a cocktail party to see what she knows about what the Russians are up to. I found the backstory here somewhat confusing – there are a lot of different characters name-checked, and the details of who you are and what kind of move is being made are left vague – but this isn’t a mystery or thriller where you need to carefully sift through information and make high-stakes deductions. No, all of that setup is basically just there to create background vibes for a flirtation-with-intent pas des deux with Goncharova.

Sexually-charged conversations with an undercurrent of danger are a staple of mob movies, of course, even if the details here would strain credulity if one took the meme seriously (forget the lesbian subtext, has Scorsese ever shot a scene that’s just two women talking?) The game does a good job of playing this trope; the descriptions convey Katya’s sexiness, and the player’s given a couple of satisfying opportunities to take a risk and make their interest known. Meanwhile, while the men’s criminal business is never openly spelled out, the writing conveys the possibility of violence and its potential to swallow you up, too, if you’re not careful:

"'Most people don’t want to get on the wrong side of my husband,' she says. 'But you—you don’t care. I like that.'

"You wonder if perhaps it would have been wise to care."

While there are clearly mechanics that track how much you’re leaning into seduction vs. fishing for information vs. playing it safe and building a rapport to exploit later on, the choices never feel mechanical; the fiction effectively pushes you to try to balance your disparate goals, and it makes sense that there’s rarely a conversational gambit without tradeoffs or opportunity costs. My one complaint about the implementation of the battle of wits is that on my first go-round, it was over surprisingly quickly – the main conversation is just a sequence of four or five choices, so while I thought I was starting out with a cautiously considered opening to feel Katya out, in fact I was just frittering away my scarce opportunities to push forward. But on the flip side, the game’s brevity means it was easy to replay, armed with the knowledge of the ticking clock, and even that ambivalent, premature ending works well on its own terms.

Of course, partially that’s because this is, as mentioned, an early establishing scene: it sets up the relationship between two characters and clarifies the stakes for when they next come together. Whether Katya will be eager to pursue an assignation with an enticing stranger, or will find herself trying to shield a nosy interloper from the consequences of her own curiosity, the consequences will all play out off-screen. So too are we not privy to how Sofia will navigate the conference with the boss who assigned her her task, though notably in none of the game’s endings does she get any definitive information from Katya. This range of potential outcomes combined with the lack of narrative resolution mean that the game is essentially ambiguous – but that’s not a flaw so much as further confirmation that, as Katya says, this is fundamentally someone else’s story: Scorsese’s camera will lock onto the husbands and capos, while the struggles, loves, and hazards of the women are confined to the margin.

While at 43 I often find myself feeling like a bit of a graybeard, my contemporary experience with vintage-era IF is actually fairly limited – I played a few Infocom games that I was a bit too young for, and outside of a few low-rent BASIC adventures that was pretty much it until Photopia got me into the amateur scene. I’ve managed to go back and patch up several of my biggest lacunae, but I’ve never felt especially tempted to check out the Scott Adams two-word parser games; I understand their historical relevance in cramming an adventure game experience onto the earliest microcomputers, but by reputation and upon first inspection they seem to have bare prose, a primitive parser, and obtuse puzzles, which aren’t exactly a cocktail that gets me excited.

Thus, I groaned when I saw that Sunburst Contamination was a Scott Adams homage from 1988, then given an update into Inform in 2007. And indeed at first blush it mostly lived down to my preconceptions: there’s the simple moon-logic plot overcomplicated with dream logic, for one thing, in which you’ve taken your employer’s spaceship on an unauthorized joyride to visit your girlfriend and now need to get back to base, except there are hungry toads who’ve gotten loose, and you need to run around the ship finding inexplicably-hidden ration packets to prevent the toads from eating them while in transit. There are the frequent typos, the unimplemented scenery (one of the first locations is named “Fountain,” with a description that spotlights the eponymous water feature – guess what response X FOUNTAIN gives?), the inevitable inventory limit, a nonsensical title, and then there’s the stuff that’s really baroquely terrible, like the “insignificant button” that can only be interacted with by calling it INSIGNIFICANT, rather than BUTTON, or the switched-off flashlight I spent a solid ten minutes guess-the-verb-ing in an ultimately futile attempt to activate.

I managed to struggle through the first half hour or so, by sheer force of will solving the initial couple of puzzles that gated access to the ship and collecting one or two of the seven ration packs, but pretty quickly hit a wall. There’s no included walkthrough, so I scoured the IFDB page and saw that the BASIC source code was available. I was bent on finishing the game – let it never be said that you don’t get value for money in a Mike Russo review-a-thon – but I figured I’d glance at the other reviews while I girded my loins to start back-tracing GOTO statements to discover what I was missing. And lo and behold, what did I see but a SPAG review from 2008 crowing about what a funny parody of Scott Adams style games the authors had pulled off.

Reader, the light dawned, and my good mood was further strengthened by the realization that CASA had a full walkthrough available and I didn’t need to go source diving after all.

Having played the game to completion, I can say I now kinda get the joke and see how it could be enjoyable? The flashlight bit is legit pretty funny, I have to say, and it is notable that the game is mostly merciful (I hit an issue where fumbling around with the cargo-crane controls got me in an unwinnable position, but I think that was due to a bug rather than intentional design); likewise careful trial and error, paying close attention to the verbs the ABOUT text tells you are implemented, will get you through most of the puzzles, even though the game’s humor extends to messing with the verb list. I think this is an attempt to make a game that sends up the extreme difficulty of those Scott Adams games, while still providing enough modern conveniences to be player-friendly.

Except, well, this is a game from 1988, so player-friendly by those standards still winds up feeling pretty forbidding today; meanwhile, the tropes being parodied have sufficiently receded that I suspect it’d be hard for most modern players to tell the difference between a sincere and a satirical implementation. The overall effect is like one of those jokes in Chaucer you need the footnotes to understand; now that I get what Sunburst Contamination is up to I appreciate what it’s doing, but I’m too far away from the target audience for the gag to truly land.

One cool thing about the review-a-thon is that it seems like a lot of the games were entries in jams or events that passed me by, so it functions as an anthology of sorts, providing a little taste of a wide range of flavors. Your World is from 2023’s Bare Bones Jam, whose operating constraint was that entries had to stick to their system of choice’s default visual styling. This is obviously far more interesting for choice games than parser ones, so fortunately that’s what we’ve got here, a Twine game in that glorious black-background-white-text-blue-links palette we all know and love.

I’m not sure whether many other entries in the jam justified their minimalist presentation diegetically, but Your World does, and with a doozy of a concept: the game presents itself as written by a sentient word, who swapped places with the author for a month, in order to communicate its experiences and reflections after leaving its text-based world for our own. With the clock ticking on its sojourn, and after an abortive attempt to learn Inform, it makes sense that the word wouldn’t be wasting time with fripperies.

There’s a certain irony to that choice, however. You see, one of the central things the word wants to share is exactly how much better rich sensory experiences are than mere text. The early section of the game, where the word explores the author’s apartment, is dominated by an overwhelming intensity of sensation:

"The noise from the AC was blaring, the brown light coming from the bulbs in the room hurt me, and the smell of the carpet – god, it must smell normal to you, but I could smell the mustiness. I tried to breathe for the first time and the dust in the air choked me."

The word is eager for all of this: there’s an entertaining bit where it opens the author’s dresser and lists each and every garment there, focusing on the color and texture of every one (there’s also a fun running joke where it keeps expecting green things to smell like grass – capped off by a heck of a punchline when the word eventually does make it outside). But despite the clear pleasure it takes in all this, the word is no mere sybarite; no, it has philosophical and ideological reasons for rejecting its textual origins, riffing on Wittgenstein to critique the naïve idea that words have distinct meanings, and continually arguing that mere text is too imprecise and too abstract to full communicate the quiddity of experience. Images, especially moving images and moving images with sound, are the word’s beau ideal:

"I want to be free from words. I want to be the gestalt that captures all the sights and sounds of everything around me. I want to live up to my ideals, not just be a word association game."

I mentioned that the choice to present this ode to splendor in the ugliest imaginable format is an ironic choice, but to an extent the whole game undercuts itself. Look at its structure: it opens with an incredibly zoomed-in look at a single room, with hyper-realized, fractal detail, then skips over a whole romantic relationship in only a few sentences. And almost every single sequence features description that foregrounds smell, taste, and a subjectivity around color and sound that would be near-impossible to communicate in film, at least without near-constant, plodding narration. The bit where the word stumbles across the IF Top Fifty and is horrified is just the cherry on top – what better way to prompt an IF audience to view the word as an unreliable narrator?

It’d be easy to dismiss Your World as a self-satisfied joke about the superiority of text-only IF, in other words – all the more so because there really are some great bits here that only work in text, like the word feeling “like serifs [are] coming out of me” when it starts sweating from a fever, or accuses the color gray of being “like a half-assed word… something like ‘implicative’.” The final reveal of what the word actually is also earned a guffaw. But I think there’s more going on here. For one thing, the word is self-aware enough to anticipate the most obvious objections to its position:

"I know what you’re thinking: I’m just some word that’s in love with anything that isn’t text; anything that is reminds me of my own weaknesses."

And is capable of acknowledging the ways that words alone can be effective:

"I think there’s something to be gained by trying to communicate – even within this broken and flawed system.

"At the very least, it’s easy to write something in text."

This combination of sincerity and irony is very contemporary, of course, but I think it’s also apposite to what the game seems to me to be getting at: all the different media at our fingertips have their limitations and their glories, and though the specifics of our experience may make one more appealing than another – indeed, just as the word rejects the markers of the textstream where it came from, by negative inference perhaps many of us are so drawn to text precisely because we live in a culture so saturated with audiovisual noise! – the possibility of connection, however achieved, is the important thing. And a rejection of artifice can ultimately wind up being just as artificial as what it purports to oppose, if it departs from that goal.

There’s a story I remember hearing about O Brother Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ The-Odyssey-by-way-of-Appalachia musical, which is that as they translated each of the famous elements from the source material into the 1930s context – the cyclops, the suitors, some dude named Menelaus – they intentionally did not refer back to Homer or reread the poem, the better to lock in on the pieces of the story that are archetypal and have fully entered the cultural zeitgeist.

(No, I haven’t gone back to verify whether or not this is true; that would go against the point of the anecdote, wouldn’t it?)

Anyway, if the Coen Brothers can make a movie about the Odyssey without reading the Odyssey, hopefully I can get away with reviewing a game about City of Secrets without playing City of Secrets. Tribute, you see, was an entry in 2020’s Emily Short Anniversary Contest (said anniversary being Galatea hitting the 20 year mark), and it directly riffs on CoS by borrowing its map and many of its scenery descriptions and then plopping a scavenger hunt on top of the geography. My dim sense of the original game is that it’s got a lot of conversation with a bunch of different characters, with an espionage kind of vibe, but little of that carries over into Tribute: there’s one character who contacts you via a telepathy-enabling pendant to say deeply un-Shortian things like “we really need your help. Evil is once again threatening our city. This time the enemy is in the form of dark magic.” I also suspect that the gameplay for CoS is more involved than just finding ten haphazardly-hidden gems in a nearly-empty map.

So yeah, playing Tribute doesn’t seem like it much resembles playing CoS, despite the fact that it seems like a large majority of the words here come from the original game. But writing prose as good as Emily Short’s is a high bar, to say nothing of designing challenges as tightly as she does, so I think there’s limited value in comparing the games directly. Really what the author is doing here is akin to doodling on a bunch of Caravaggios to create a hidden object game; the cartoons aren’t going to display quite the same mastery of chiaroscuro, but hey, you get to enjoy some great art while playing find-the-widget, what’s not to like?

Viewed in those terms, Tribute is… okay. I like Short’s descriptions as much as the next IF veteran, and there are some solid ones here that do entice me to play the full game so I can see what they look like in their intended context:

"The bottom of the hill, outside the train station, with its trolley tracks and the dulled statue of an ancient queen, hemmed on the east by the hotel and on the west by the health office."

But I couldn’t help notice that the map, denuded of characters and stripped of plot-relevant objects, is a bit sparse. Short often does the thing where you carefully mention as few nouns as possible in your area descriptions in order to convey the idea of a place without having to spend days implementing scenery; it’s is a canny technique to effectively create a backdrop, but it works less well when you take away the foreground. It also seems like the author hasn’t translated over everything that was in the original game, since I ran into far more unimplemented objects than I’d expect to see in a game from the same person who wrote Metamorphoses.

This art-appreciation side of Tribute is also undercut by the Where’s-Waldo side’s choice not to engage much with the original setting. In a map of 30ish locations, only ten feature a hidden gem, and only a handful more are involved with any of the puzzles. The pendant the player character starts with gives a warning when you’re in one of the rooms with a gem, as well as when you’ve found one of the plot-critical objects. This does avoid the tedium of aimlessly fiddling about with every unpromising bit of impedimenta, but unavoidably does make it easy to play on autopilot when you don’t get a bolded alert telling you to pay attention. It also means that I was stymied for a while when I hit the one or two puzzles that didn’t announce themselves (these largely had to do with unlocking exits that are mentioned in the text but don’t show up on the convenient automap – it makes sense that only currently-valid connections are shown, but I didn’t realize that was the rule so once again a helpful feature wound up being an obstacle).

The puzzles themselves are generally fine; they’re nothing to write home about, but I found it pleasing to poke and prod around until I found each gem. Many of them do involve that very Shortesque dynamic of fractally unveiling more and more details of an object by looking at successive pieces in turn, and a bit of messing around with the standard verb set is enough to solve nearly all (though I thought (Spoiler - click to show)SHAKE TREE was a bit underclued). Unfortunately I did run into a couple of bugs that rendered the game harder than it should be: there’s one object that should reveal a gem once you take it, but I was able to tote it around and pick it up and down a couple of times before the appropriate trigger fired, and I had to replay because the game didn’t register the first gem I found (they’re supposed to vanish once you touch them, but this one stuck around in my inventory after I grabbed it).

This is a lot of caviling, though, since I think Tribute did succeed in its most important goal: it made me want to play City of Secrets. Viewed through this imperfect reflection, CoS seems elusive yet enticing, filled with sweetshop robots, a surprisingly-large academic district, and a nightclub where I’m sure there’s at least one or two people I’d enjoy chatting up. If Tribute doesn’t stand on its own two feet as well as something like O Brother Where Art Thou, perhaps that’s partially because it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own identity – but then, this is a tribute, not a reinterpretation.