Reviews by Mike Russo

(This is a review of the Spring Thing version of the game; I understand it's since been updated to address some of the implementation issues raised below)

Having just written a review of a Back Garden game that could have just as easily been entered into the Main Festival, I turn now to one that clearly belongs where it was entered. In some respects that’s simply an acknowledgment of what’s on offer here, which is a self-contained tutorial or demo section of a larger game targeted for release next year – and in many ways it’s an effective teaser, with the Taoism-inflected magic academy setting hitting a nice balance point between familiarity and novelty, and a backstory involving a dead parent and their mysterious former paramour that I’m curious to further unravel. In other respects, though, in its current incarnation Luna Gardens is recognizably a clumsy first draft in need of further refinement.

The game’s central mechanic is emblematic of this duality. Appropriately for the setting, you’re required to perform an act of divination to successfully complete the opening section, and the basic outline for how this is done is solid: first you identify particular mystically-significant symbols by exploring the eponymous grounds and finding especially resonant objects, at which point you can try to guess which are most relevant to your present circumstances and construct an oracular reading from combining the correct set of three. That’s a nice way of embedding a magic system in behavior that’s well-suited to a parser game – wandering around and examining everything you can see – and leveraging a game-y but reasonable enough structure to lend narrative weight to what’s mechanically speaking a basic combination-lock puzzle.

The difficulty is that every step of this process has significantly more friction than it should. Start with exploration: getting around the garden is a little tricky, I found, since neither of the two navigation options on offer is completely intuitive. Traditional compass navigation works well enough, but exits aren’t always clearly marked, and the frequent use of ordinal directions made it hard to build a mental map. There’s an alternative keyword-based system that allows you to simply jump to neighboring locations, but I also found it occasionally leading to strange results. For example, each location tends to list adjacent landmarks in a final paragraph at the end of the description, but upon being told “farther away, you see a dark gate rising in the air and a rusted light pole” I was surprised that EXPLORE GATE just resulted in the game saying “You can’t see The gate.” I’m pretty sure that capitalization means you knew what I was talking about! Admittedly, this is partly to do with the barriers cutting off the demo area from the larger game’s map, but it can still make for a frustrating experience.

Finding the symbols also had its speed-bumps. I like taking my time checking out scenery, and Luna Gardens does a good job of making the process rewarding by sprinkling hints of backstory and worldbuilding into object descriptions. But there are some rough patches in the implementation that sometimes led to me tearing out my hair:

> x trees

…You notice a carving someone made on one of the trees.

> x carving

You can’t see any such thing.

> x tree

You can’t see any such thing.

I was eventually able to guess that the right answer was X INITIALS, which isn’t totally unreasonable but still, the protagonist obviously knows what they’re looking at so why make life hard for the player? At least this is just an incidental detail; I needed a hint to complete the game because X OCEAN at a cliffside overlook was insufficient to reveal the relevant symbol, with X WAVES being required to progress (X WATER just got my “you can’t see any such thing).

As for the actual divination process itself, the syntax is a little under-clued – I thought at first I had to type DIVINE [SYMBOL 1] [SYMBOL 2] [SYMBOL 3], but actually you just enter DIVINE and then get a follow-up prompt where you pick the symbols you’d like to try. Further complicating matters, you don’t actually slot in the short-form name of a symbol – there’s a FIND command that tells you that, say, the connection symbol translates into “a link between two poles”, and that longer formulation is the one you need to write in, magnifying the scope for typos and confusion. Meanwhile, the actual answer of which symbols are the “right” ones that trigger the end of the game is underclued – there’s a FORECAST hint command that gives you a strong prod in the right direction, but there aren’t really any diegetic prompts to help you avoid simple trial-and-error, so far as I could tell.

The good news is that the author’s indicated that the final game will be redone and written in Gruescript, rather than Inform, which strikes me as a smart idea – using that choice-based interface will remove some of the ambiguities and confusions around navigation and identifying relevant nouns, while giving more space for the prose’s wry mix of mysticism and observational humor.

(I haven’t mentioned the writing yet, but while it’s occasionally a bit convoluted due to complex syntax and the use of the passive voice, I generally liked it! Here’s a matter-of-fact bit of landscape description:

"A grove of trees forms a circle in the middle of this garden and shield from the outside world the bench you like to nap on in-between classes."

Or a later bit:

"In fact, the only things resting around here are students reaching the end of their wits as they journey through textbooks, dry lectures, and someone’s bright idea of putting everything on campus far away from each other.")

A clickable interface would also make the divination system more manageable, and generally reduce friction across the board. Hopefully the feedback from this and other reviews will help inform the future, final release of Luna Gardens, since there’s definitely enough promising elements here to make me look forward to it.

(This is a review of the Twine version of The Kuolema, as entered in Spring Thing 2024, followed by a review of the Spring Thing 2023 Google Forms version)

A year and three weeks ago, I said:

"even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking '[the Kuolema] would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine'."

It works just as well, and is smoother, in Twine!






…okay, the work the author has put into updating the game deserves a little more than that, but unlike my takeaway from One King to Loot Them All, where choosing between the Inform or Twine versions came down to a matter of taste, this is a clear upgrade all around. The Google Forms original pulled out some clever tricks to deal with the fact that that system was never designed for games – including not having any state tracking – but the Twine version is unencumbered by those awkward contrivances: the full game is all in one file, rather than being split between three password-gated ones, inventory and notes are easily available in a sidebar, along with a save-and-load feature, and the presentation has gotten an across-the-board upgrade including some attractive typography and graphic design. Puzzles do still require you to type the name of the object you’re using, the password you’re trying, or what you’re looking for into a text box, but I enjoyed this hold-over: the sidebar allows you to easily refer back to items and info you’ve collected to date, and the type-in requirement means you have to think a bit about what you’re trying to do, rather than just lawnmower through links.

There’ve also been some improvements to the meat of the story. The general shape of the narrative remains the same, but while I didn’t go back to compare things line by line, I remembered seeing some typos and clumsy phrases in the original prose that I didn’t pick up on this time out (I just saw one misspelling: “metalic” for “metallic”). There’ve been a couple of alternate solutions added to puzzles that perhaps felt a bit out-of-context in the initial iteration, and the endgame has seen some expansion – my sense was that the climactic conversation has been substantially fleshed out, and takes advantage of the game’s newfound ability to remember actions you took earlier in the story, while the set of factions you can potentially ally with has been expanded, with accompanying options seeded earlier in the game to set up those possibilities. It’s still recognizably the same pulp sci-fi thriller, but it’s got a bit more heft to it and the central character of Dr. Vrieman has some more psychological plausibility.

The game does include “AI” generated art, alongside hand-made graphics for the puzzle-relevant visuals and documents. As I’ve mentioned before, I am generally down on such things, but kudos to to the author for handling this well: using such tools wasn’t such a hot-button in 2022, when the game began its gestation, and their use is fully disclosed, with a post-victory survey even enabling players to weigh in on how they felt about their presence in the game. I still don’t like seeing them – and I personally don’t think they add much to the game, it would work just as well with the gameplay-relevant graphics being the only ones – but this helped take the sting out.

I suppose the Google Forms version does still retain some novelty value, and future players might enjoy checking it out just to see how far one can torture the system, but the Twine version is very much the definitive edition of what, per my 2023 review, was already a heck of a good time. Nice job, year-ago-Mike, you were spot on!

------Review of Spring Thing 2023 Google Forms version------

Ah, dilemmas! The overwhelming temptation I’m facing here is to open this review by talking about the novelty of the format, since The Kuolema is a choice-based game implemented in Google Forms – but I’m going to resist that temptation, if only because I’m a lapsed Catholic who’s belatedly realized Lent is almost over and I haven’t done anything to mark the occasion. So what would my first paragraph be if it were just another Twine game? Let’s see…

What is it that makes a ghost ship so compelling? The idea of a derelict vessel, devoid of life and presenting an enigma equally intriguing and fatal to investigate, is a freak occurrence here in real life – there’s what, the Mary Celeste? – but beyond literary antecedents like Dracula’s Demeter, it’s become a common motif in gaming, from historical takes like Obra Dinn to yer sci-fi Dead Space-alikes, and has launched a million direct-to-SyFy Bermuda Triangle movies. From a production point of view, this is understandable enough – you get spooky atmosphere, isolated protagonists, and a built-in reason you don’t need too many speaking parts. For an audience, though, the appeal is a bit less obvious. After noodling on it a bit, I think part of the answer is that a ship is both a place and a machine – the empty spaces on an abandoned vessel aren’t just rendered forlorn by the lack of people, they become purposeless and useless, adding poignancy, sure, but also danger (what if part of the machine malfunctions?)

The eponymous ship in The Kuolema fits this model twice over – because it’s not built just for travel, but also to perform novel experiments in clean energy. It was on the verge of some great breakthrough when it suddenly went dark, before popping up again, adrift and on the edge of Chinese territorial waters. As the representative of some unnamed agency, it’s up to you to keep it in international waters, figure out what disaster led to its abandonment, and discover the secrets its crew were keeping from each other.

A story like this could lean a couple different ways, and despite a few technothriller touches, we’re firmly in pulp territory – there’s a mysterious antagonist in a gas mask, the scientific genius has delusions of grandeur, an inevitably spy is working for the Russians, and you’ll probably work out what the deal is with your mysterious contact within five minutes of meeting him. All of which is to say the story beats feel very familiar, but when I stop to think about it I can’t remember anything that deploys exactly the same tropes The Kuolema does, which speaks to how effectively it inhabits its genre.

The prose is of a piece with this unpretentious approach. Here are some excerpts of descriptions from a few early locations:

"The top deck (Deck 4) is open to the elements and the rain-slick deck reflects the glinting lights as they shine and flicker through the downpour. The wind is howling and the white crests of the sea are visible out in the darkness.

…

"The stairs are awash with water and the ship continues to sway and lurch. You concentrate on keeping your footing as you cautiously step down into the darkness. There are a few dim lights still on below deck, just enough for you to make out your surroundings.

…

"It’s pitch black, with the only light coming from the corridor behind you. You move towards one of the windows to see the foaming waves outside. Suddenly the room is lit by a flash of lightning - giving you a brief imprint of the space you’re in. There are several tables and faux-leather seats spread around the room, along with a canteen serving area and a separate bar. Glasses and bottles litter the area – some rolling across the floor casting long, dark shadows – making it seem like creatures scuttling away from the flashes of light."

This effectively conveys a vibe, and that vibe, clearly, is “dark”. Sure, it’d be stronger with some more synonyms (and fewer comma splices), but given the kind of game this is it’d be easy to tip into ridiculousness by banging on about the tenebrous murk of the gloaming, so there’s nothing wrong with taking the safer path. Also, the writing isn’t stuck doing the heavy lifting all on its lonesome, since the game’s well illustrated with various 3d renders, documents, and diagrams that all fit the menacing mood. And once the game moves into its final acts, the one-note chiaroscuro gets replaced with some surprisingly-punchy action sequences.

The gameplay also doesn’t make waves. The Kuolema is one of those parser-aping choice game, with map-based navigation and puzzles that primarily involve getting through locked doors, figuring out computer passwords or safe combinations, and collecting three parts of an important device. It’s all stuff you’ve seen before – heck, you even need to solve a crossword to get one key clue! – but it’s workmanlike, with the various bits of gating making exploration feel rewarding, and the barriers putting up enough of a fight to seem satisfying without being too tough (with the possible exception of that crossword, which does rely on knowing some nautical slang).

And now, finally, we have to get to the Google Form-ness of it all, because the process of moving around and solving these puzzles is heavily influenced by the game’s format. Google Forms, for those of y’all not familiar, is Alphabet’s answer to Survey Monkey*, allowing for radio-button style selection of choices as well as text input. Interface-wise, then, it seems like it would offer the best of both the choice-based and parser worlds – but the wrinkle is that it doesn’t track world state. That means that the game doesn’t know what you have in your inventory, or what you’ve already talked to an NPC about.

The author’s done a clever job of getting around this limitation, it must be said. For one thing, the game’s broken into three different files, making it easy to jump in and out (a necessity, since the lack of persistence means there’s no save function) and also allowing for the progression of the plot to alter the environment after each major chokepoint is reached. Inventory puzzles are also handled by typing in the name of the object rather than the honor-system approach taken by old gamebooks (“if you have the crowbar, turn to page 58, but please don’t cheat”), and each usually has some nickname or codeword associated with it, so random guessing won’t get you anywhere. There’s still some wonkiness (I saw options about the computer password needed in the security room before I first visited said room and learned there was a computer) but between careful design and careful writing, the game works much better on this score than I expected it to. There are even a few places where the player’s choices can lead to different outcomes, though these all appear to be in the final section, of necessity.

Still, for all that it’s hard for me to imagine a better implementation of IF in Google Forms, I’m not sure The Kuolema justifies its choice of systems. This is a well-done but straightforward piece of IF that doesn’t seem to take advantage of any unique affordances of Google Forms (it could have been fun to see what choices other players made at different parts of the story, for example); as a result, even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking “this would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine”. I’m guessing the advantage is that Google Forms doesn’t require any programming chops, but of course that’s immaterial to the player – and considering how complex this thing must have been to orchestrate, learning a standard IF language might have been less work!

Turn that around, though: towards the beginning of this review I talked about how one thing that I like about ghost ship stories is that they present idle machines, inviting the question of how they broke down. If The Kuolema, in a postmodern twist, is itself a mechanism whose workings are clunkier and more exposed than they could be, perhaps that’s just function following form? At any rate, this is a wreck that’s worth investigating, and I hope to see more IF from this author (though I wouldn’t be sad if their next game used a more conventional system).

* I was going to include a crack here about how big tech companies can be threatened by anything, but then I looked up some financial data and learned that Survey Monkey has a $1.5 billion market cap, which I guess is what it is but sure feels like it’ll sit next to pets.com in some future textbook about the ridiculousness of the various turn-of-the-millennium tech bubbles.

(Note: this is a review of the Spring Thing 2024 version of The Time Machine, followed by my original review of its ParserComp 2021 incarnation).

(I beta tested this game).

Unlike the other New Game Plus entries, this updated version of The Time Machine sticks to the same system as its original ParserComp 2021 release, and retains the same plot – you’re a friend of H.G. Wells who’s attempting to prove him sane by showing that he really did travel through time and isn’t suffering from a delusion. But where that was mostly a standard Inform affair, version 2.0 has gotten quite the coat of paint: the status bar tells you where (and when) you are while providing a small map of exits; subwindows offer character portraits, an inventory list, and a character interaction area telling you which NPCs are present and suggesting some topics of conversation (there are also graphics for each location; while I’m not sure of their provenance, they’ve unfortunately got a bit of an AI vibe to them, and regardless it would be nice to note where they came from in the ABOUT text). It’s about as slick a presentation as a parser game can offer, down to the scroll-bars that make it easy to navigate long menus or go back to earlier sections of your playthrough.

Looking back at my review of the original game 1, I spent a lot of time harping on niggles of implementation – missing synonyms, unwinnable states, endemic typos, objects that you couldn’t pick up again after you’d dropped them – but I found the updated version smoothed out all of these issues and more besides. It also addresses my other major complaint, which was a faint whiff of anticlimax: the author’s added a final act involving an escape from the Morlock’s tunnels, which creates some excitement before the end and ensures all the iconic elements of Wells’ novel are brought on-screen.

This is still a comparatively small game, though – there are only three or so puzzles, and neither the characters, the plot, nor the themes are especially deep. Ordinarily I’d say there’s nothing wrong with that – better to get in and out while you have something to say – and The Time Machine, in its current form, feels neither over-short nor padded. Still, I do find the 2.0 release’s robust package of interface features and implementation improvements risks coming across as overengineered compared to what, in context, may seem a relatively slight story; three years is a long time to add polish, after all. But that’s not really a critique, and if anything, the issue may just be that my standards for parser game presentation are too low. There are always lots of forum conversations about how to make these kinds of games more appealing to new players, and while that task certainly has gameplay and narrative elements too, in addition to its own solid merits it’s worth checking out the Time Machine if only to see just how modern an Inform game can feel.

-------Review of 2021 version--------

The Time Machine by Bill Maya is an Inform follow-up to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, a confusing state of affairs that highlights the challenges of writing an unplanned sequel. If the initial work was conceived of as part of a series, that’s an easy enough situation – presumably there are enough hanging plot threads and unresolved conflicts lying about to let you to whip up a plausible plot. But where a story’s been resolved, the protagonist’s journey completed, where is there to go? Sure, a Hamlet sequel would have to be a spin-off, given that everyone north of Horatio in the dramatis personae snuffs it before the final curtain, but even murder-light fare runs into this problem: count ourselves lucky we’ve been spared such enormities as 2 Secret 2 Garden, or Catch 23 (actually, there is a sequel to Catch 22. It’s not great!)

The author’s solution to the dilemma is elegantly done in the present case: there’s a switch of protagonists, from the time machine’s inventor to his friend and lawyer (like, the friend is a lawyer), and the task at hand is to prove Wells’s rantings about Eloi, Morlocks, &c. shouldn’t get him hauled off to a late-Victorian sanitarium by retracing his travels through time. It’s a good setup, allowing the player to re-experience the highlights of the novel without forcing you to go through the remembered steps of a familiar story.

Sadly, the game still requires the player to adhere to a script, though this isn’t always communicated well. My first full playthrough ended in an unwinnable state because immediately upon activating the time machine and finding myself in the Edenic surroundings Wells had related before being hauled off in an ambulance, my first instinct was to return to safety and tell the censorious alienist he’d gotten it all wrong. But when I got back to 1890 and related my wild story, the doctor only listened, “with an accepting look on his face.” That was admirably open-minded of him after he’d stuffed Wells into a strait-jacket for telling much the same story, but that was as far as things went – and since the fuse on the machine burned out after that trip, there was no opportunity to return and bring back more definitive proof. In fairness, the game does signpost that he’s looking for a particular piece of physical evidence – a flower to match the unique petal Wells had shown him right before the game opened – but it would have been polite to fire off a losing ending to bring the story to a close, rather than leaving it to peter out.

Being on rails wouldn’t be so bad if the story the game was out to tell was a gripping one, but despite solid prose, the plot is sadly rather pedestrian. First, most of the game’s playtime is spent in the present day, trying to get into Wells’ workshop and get the machine up and running by solving a few desultory puzzles. Once in the far future, you can explore a single two-location building and have a brief interaction with some Eloi, but it’s all functional at best, and only recapitulates more exciting incidents from the book. If you want to explore off the beaten path and solve a mildly-annoying guess the verb puzzle (to get through a rusty grate, (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE GRATE will work but PULL GRATE and BREAK GRATE won’t), you can have a run-in with Morlocks, but it’s likewise abbreviated and completely optional.

The puzzles are fine, though with the exception of the first (figuring out where Wells’s workshop key has gotten to, which requires a bit of deduction) they’re very straightforward – putting a machine part in a machine, showing an interesting object to an interested NPC, that sort of thing. I had more trouble with them than was probably warranted, though, because there are some infelicities in the implementation. Prior to the nobody-cares-about-your-time-travel-story restart, I’d actually already had to restart because I’d put a watch down on a desk – after being prompted to do so by an NPC – but then was told “it’s hardly portable” when I attempted to retrieve it. And when I grew frustrated at my inability to find the workshop key and considered resorting to violence, BREAK WINDOW WITH POKER just elicited an empty command prompt, with no acknowledgment or rejection of the command. And there are a good number of typos throughout (including a missing period in the opening sequence).

I still had a good time with the game, because the writing is solid, the premise enjoyable, and the setting a pleasant place to spend time (well, modulo the tunnels where blind inbred cannibals live, I suppose). But it felt quite dry, and I was left wanting a little more there there – a little more interactivity, a little more story, a little more puzzling, just something more to create emotional engagement and make The Time Machine feel like a real sequel and not just a retread.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp COMBINED WITH a review of the Twine version entered into Spring Thing 2024 -- scroll pas the original review for that).

Without context, One King to Loot Them All would be a weird game. Not so much in its premise – it’s a limited-parser sword and sorcery pastiche set in a funhouse-dungeon that wouldn’t be out of place in an early-80s D&D module, with dracoliches, logic puzzles, and pit traps set cheek-by-jowl without excessive regard for rhyme or reason – but weird in its gameplay, especially the way it provides information and responds to player commands. For one thing, location descriptions are typically quite long and detailed and print out the player’s inventory at the bottom, while examining most objects just unedifyingly reprints the details already included in the location description. For another, it’s extremely solicitous of the player – maybe even sometimes veering to the pushy – in how it prompts you towards the next action. More so than most parser IF, the experience is of being on a ride (uncharitably, one might say a railroad) where doing the one right action gets you a mini-cutscene and moves you on to the next sequence, and anything else is quite unrewarding.

There’s nothing wrong with linear IF in my view, but this is an approach at odds with the traditional strengths of the parser game, where tootling around a map and examining every detail that catches your fancy is typically a big part of the draw. So coming to the game without any context, the player might be scratching their head about why the author took this particular tack. Fortunately, the ABOUT text reveals the secret origin of One King to Loot Them All, which explains quite a lot: the game was originally intended for this year’s Single Choice Jam, where games had to have only one moment where the player could do more than one thing, but missed the deadline.

Viewed in that light, many of its odder features make sense: the descriptions works the way they do, for example, because originally, looking or examining random scenery or even checking inventory would have been disallowed, so all that information needed to be conveyed automatically when entering a new area. Similarly, the limited-parser approach would cut down on the frustration of most commands not doing anything, and since the player could similarly easily get fed up without being able to uncover clues by investigating a scene, these likewise need to be extremely obvious.

One King to Loot Them All, in the form we’ve gotten it, has lifted the most extreme constraints of the jam – commands other than the intended ones are allowed and sometimes marginally useful – but the gimmick is still imprinted deep in the game’s DNA. It has some fun with the concept, too, with a consistent meta joke being the way the protagonist (an off-brand Conan the Barbarian) never met a complex problem he couldn’t solve with immediate violence – when all you’ve got is a hammer… (I kid, but really, the solution to the hoary old “one guard always lies, the other always tells the truth” problem made me snicker).

On the down side, I found the game sort of… lulled me? I’ve played easy games before, of course, but even in an easy parser game there’s typically at least some decision-making incumbent on the player, and again, there’s always the temptation of noodling around (I am an inveterate noodler). Knowing that actually, I should just do the thing I was supposed to do and then move on to the next thing meant that I was acting in as direct a fashion as the protagonist, but also made me feel like my job was just to figure out what the author wanted me to do and then do it – this got me into a flow state of a sort, but it was a sort of inattentive flow state, if that makes sense (it doesn’t).

Of course, you typically don’t just say something “lulled me”, you say it “lulled me into a false sense of security.” And that’s my excuse for why when One King to Loot Them All got to the point where I could make my one choice, I was incredibly slow on the uptake. I’m spoiler-blocking this bit, since it’s the cleverest part of the game:

(Spoiler - click to show)so knowing that there was only one point in the game where more than one action would be productive, I naively assumed it would either come at the beginning or at the end. When the opening half hour was completely linear, I relaxed and, as mentioned in the paragraph above, just played on autopilot, figuring I could turn my brain off until I got to the final scene of the straightforward kill-Foozle story. Even when I went through an odd timey-wimey bit, I still contented myself with doing the most obvious thing at every juncture – and was surprised when it turned out that wasn’t working.

It took me astonishingly long to realize the game’s twist – the choice isn’t so much a choice as a puzzle, and it’s embedded in the middle of the game, not the end. It’s an impressive bit of misdirection that left me clapping my hands, but it also left me a bit frustrated. There’s a fair bit of drudgery involved in experimenting, since I wound up replaying the whole game to that point to confirm that what I’d tried didn’t work, and the logic of the puzzle still doesn’t fully make sense to me: you meet a mysterious sage who blesses your axe, then tells you you need to rewind time to change something that happened before the game starts. So after a bunch of UNDOs you can actually slingshot your way beyond the opening scene and try to change history – but crucially, the axe remains blessed even though you’ve turned back the clock to hours before you met the sage. It’s fair enough, I suppose, since who knows how a diegetic UNDO should work, but in my fugue state, I wasn’t quick enough to figure out the trick, and I didn’t notice any clues (like a telltale new sparkle about the axe, say) that would have helped me out, and I had to use the walkthrough.

To briefly summarize all that blurry text: there’s a really cool twist, but I was too dull to appreciate it, which is mostly my fault though I think some elements of the design could have mitigated the risk of the player being a big old dum-dum like me. I also think the game could have cut itself freer of its single-choice origins while retaining its impact. In particular, making the descriptions more conventional would have made the gameplay a bit more engaging by rewarding player investigation, and kept certain sequences, like the multi-part puzzle to get across the river, from feeling overly constrained.

While I’m picking nits, I also felt like the writing could have been a little zestier. It’s technically solid and hits the genre tropes in a satisfying fashion, but I like my sword-and-sorcery prose to be more over the top, with extravagant superlatives and overly-baroque locutions, as in Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest; One King to Loot Them All is more workmanlike. Similarly, sometimes the barbarian-y synonyms chosen for the limited-parser actions were strained; OPEN being remapped to LOOT made good sense when I was pillaging a chest, but less so when I had to LOOT a wineskin already in my possession to drink it. But these really are nits, and my complaint above might just reflect that I was a bit tired when I played the game and not sufficiently with it to appreciate its uniqueness and smarts.

------Twine version review starts here ----

This is a remake in Twine of an Inform game entered into last year’s Comp; it was originally intended for the One Choice Jam, whose requirements called for games that only had one moment where the player had any options. One King, in its original incarnation, had a clever interpretation of the theme, and its essential linearity was disguised by its nature as a parser game – having a whole bunch of potential options, only one of which is productive at any particular point in time, can be de rigueur for such things, after all. The plot, characters, puzzles, and text all seemed unchanged to me, so on all those points I’ll just refer back to my review of the original game; the short version is that this is an entertaining Conan pastiche with straightforward but satisfying challenges and solid prose. So how has it been changed by its new choice-based interface?

Some things that I found frustrating in the game’s first iteration have definitely been streamlined; the sometimes-cryptic limited-parser verbs are no longer a barrier, for one thing, since you just need to click on stuff to interact with it. The use of an inventory sidebar also helps make one of the harder puzzles fairer by making obvious an option that previously required a bit of a leap of intuition. While navigation links aren’t highlighted, leading to some potential confusion – the opening scene has two separate “broad dark stain” links, one of which provides additional detail text, the other of which advances the plot – the game’s linear nature (and the always-available undo button) means this is no big deal.

There are some places where the interface does get a little awkward – trying to open a chest can require clicking two or three times, which is a few too many in the abstract and also creates challenges if the player’s also trying to use an inventory item to break it open and isn’t sure when they’re supposed to do that. And while it’s nice that there’s a new achievements feature, it’d be nice if the game told you when you’d unlocked one, or told you the names of ones you haven’t found yet, since as is I just looked at them at the end of the game, went “huh”, and closed it down.

All of which is to say that this is a clean and faithful translation of the parser game: that trick with the one meaningful choice is still really smart, the puzzles and story seem to work just as well as they did in the original, and that one puzzle at the end about heading off a “circling” enemy still makes my head hurt. If you’ve played the game already, there’s probably not much need to revisit it unless you’re interested in doing comparative analysis on the different interface schemes (which is totally legit, I actually enjoyed doing that!) But if you’ve hesitated to take the plunge, this is version hits all the same high points and is more accessible to the parser-averse to boot.

Theme and variation is a solid approach for an anthology, and Deep Dark Wood – a collation of seven small Twine games written by Slovakian students ranging from six to thirteen years old – picks a classic for its hook: as the title says, each of the heptad sees the player lost in a spooky forest and facing a variety of dangers. There are structural similarities too, as they all implement Time Cave or gauntlet structures with plenty of deaths and bad endings lurking to claim the unwary; generally there’s not much by way of cluing to differentiate the safe from the dangerous paths, but fortunately the always-available undo button and the games’ short lengths make exploration painless (in fact some of the bad endings are as much if not more fun than the successful ones).

The fact that there are so many similarities here, though, helps throw into sharper relief the differences in approach taken by the various authors – which largely turn on writing style and implementation of the choice framework. So I’ll provide some quick thoughts on each of the seven in turn, focusing on those elements:

Back to the City, by David (8)

The most immediately engaging thing about Back to the City is its enthusiasm: almost every choice ends with an exclamation point. This upbeat vibe extends to the narrative as well, as this is the rare Deep Dark Wood that doesn’t threaten the player with peril. Per the title, all roads eventually lead back home, but the player’s able to explore as they desire, perhaps having fun at a Christmas Eve party or helping a lost horse get back to the farm. None of these incidents are sketched in too much detail, but they effectively move the story along and are introduced and resolved in a satisfying fashion, lending the longest playthrough a bit of a picaresque vibe (the shortest playthrough traverses only three links and isn’t nearly as satisfying). It’s a gentle, slight game, and I can’t help but suspect that it was put first in the collection to ease the player into the more dangerous woods to come… (OK, it’s also first alphabetically).

Dark Dream, by Baily’s Sisters (11)

Dark Dream shares the exclamation-point-at-the-end-of-the-choices trick with Back to the City, but is a much more challenging story to navigate. Per the dream theme, the forest-and-cabin setting this time boasts surreal touches – you can find your headlong flight through the wood interrupted by running straight into a fox’s mouth, and there’s one branch that leans into the way absurd details can pile up in dreams:

"Finally, you find a doctor that is also a dog. He gives you pills and you take them.

"You feel great but you are lost. The dog asks you if you have money. You have some."

Structurally, Dark Dream is more of a Time Cave, with different decisions in the opening leading to distinct, nonoverlapping episodes that all quickly lead to an ending. Again the game leans into its themes, because in each ending you’ll eventually wake up – but per the conventions of the horror genre, there’s always a twist where whatever happened to you in the dream will recur when you’re awake. Sometimes this can be as subtle as a bad taste in your mouth if you finished the dream gorging yourself on bear meat, but it can also go in hilariously metaphysical directions too, as in the various endings where you wake up only to find yourself dead. Another nice bit of craft is that the final passage is always introduced with an ellipsis, creating drama about what exactly is going to happen when you find yourself in your bed, which adds to the punch-line nature of the endings and makes the bad ones just as much fun as the good ones.

Halloween, by Hailey and Milka (11)

Halloween also leans into the surreal, though doesn’t adopt anything as straightforward as the “it was all a dream” explanation from the previous game. Instead, you might enter a creepy cabin, get bitten by an evil doll, and then find yourself whisked to the bottom of a lake. As a result, it plays like a roller-coaster ride – you don’t know where you’re going to go, but you can trust that it will be entertaining. My favorite vignette is the one where you wake up from a dream (okay, some of the bizarre branches do use this cliché, but not all of them) only to find that your fingers have vanished, and your only choices are to pray to Jesus or try to go back to sleep. There’s also one where you find a duck and then get abducted by aliens – it’s zany, in other words, though there’s another branch that mixes in a note of social realism by telling you that your parents have recently gotten divorced, which is “a usual thing in Halloween stories”.

Once again the approach to endings is a highlight – the authors are aware that much of the draw of a game like this is collecting the different endings, so they judge each as good or bad, let you know whether you’ve been awarded any trophies (these are numbered, but no explanation of the numbering is provided, which paradoxically made me more excited to try to collect them all), and then let you click one final link for good measure – though that just confirms that the story is over and you can stop clicking.

IXI in the Forest, by Leontine (6)

IXI in the Forest distinguishes itself less by its plot – once again there’s a child lost in the woods, who can try to befriend and/or flee from a variety of animals, with a gauntlet structure funneling the player to the best ending, where IXI, a bird, and a rabbit enjoy a picnic together – than its approach to choices. Rather than playing as IXI, you function as a co-narrator, deciding what outcome for each particular small vignette to pursue: for example, when IXI meets a doe who turns out to be dangerous, your choices are either “let IXI escape” or “let IXI not escape.” This adds a bit of distance to the player’s engagement with IXI – who isn’t characterized in any notable way – but also pushes the player to think about the choices differently, looking not for the most advantageous strategy but for which option might lead to the most interesting narrative.

Little Frogie, by Natalie (12)

Little Frogie is the game in the anthology that departs the most from the walk-through-the-spooky-forest vibe – there’s one branch where the eponymous frog gets restless and decides to leave their cabin, with a trip to the woods being one of the options, but other than that they’re just going about their froggy business: making a meal, drawing a picture, taking a bath. Despite this, Little Frogie has a strict gauntlet structure, with only one correct path allowing you to make it through each episode in turn and get to the best ending. As with other the other games, though, it takes the sting out of the bad endings with a bit of humor: starving to death will elicit a wry “a sad moment”, while more successful ones might be judged “most adventurous moments”. It also provides some judicious hints to help the player navigate some of the trickier choices, like reminding you that it’s a hot day outside when you’re picking the temperature for your bath. The final set of choices – those ones allowing you to leave the cabin – feel like a bit of a shift from the rest of the game; beyond leaving the cozy setting of the frog’s hidey-hole, they also amp up the danger, which makes for some heightened drama in a story that could have otherwise petered out in a low-key fashion.

Survive or Die, by Unicorn Sisters (13)

Survive or Die takes us back to the core of the Deep Dark Wood theme by modeling itself on a horror movie: you’re lost in the forest in the middle of a storm, in need of shelter, when you stumble across an old house… There’s of course a monster, and danger lurking everywhere, but what’s clever about Survive or Die is that succeeding requires you to embrace genre tropes. You can pick whether you’re by yourself or with friends, for example, and of course the movie is more fun with other people around. Similarly, when there’s a loud noise you’re prodded to ask whether they heard the scary sound too. It all leads up to an entertaining twist ending, a perfect capstone for this self-aware genre exercise.

The Dark One, by Mushroom (13)

The anthology closes as it began, with a relatively friendlier entry. There’s still quite a lot of danger, don’t get me wrong – structurally, this is a combination gauntlet and Time Cave so there are quite a lot of ways to reach a bad end, including monsters and poison. But in addition to the welcome return of choices mostly punctuated with exclamation points, the narrative voice is also companionable, providing positive reassurance like “I like your way of thinking” when you make a wise decision and commiserating with you when things don’t quite go your way. After the often-solitary escapades of the prior six games, it’s nice to have a friend along on the adventure, and the game recognizes that this is one of its key draws: one of the ways to fail is to refuse to trust the narrator. And being told “I’m so happy for you, my dear friend!” brings an extra warmth to the best ending.

(This is a review of the incomplete version of the game entered into 2024's Spring Thing Festival)

I’ve got a conundrum: what’s the opposite of a chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation? I’m a big fan of Abigail Corfman’s mechanically-engaging Twine games, and while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m sufficiently into Bioware-style RPGs with relationship drama to make the prospect of melding these two things into a fangame where you need to help a BG3 companion explore and escape a traumatic dream-prison via judicious stat-juggling and trust-enhancing conversation immediately appealing. But instead of a delicious Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I feel like I’ve just bitten into – I dunno, a Swedish Fish Oreo? Onion-ring mints? I’m just goggling weird candies now, somebody help me out.

I should say up front that this is an incomplete chunk of what will eventually be a larger game – it consists just of a prologue that sets up the main action, and then a first act that ends just as there’s a glimmer of hope of rescue. Per some notes from the author, it sounds like there’ll also be some beefed-up options for specific kinds of characters to flesh out the interactions. And I think I am at a disadvantage from not having much pre-existing familiarity with Astarion, the game’s central character – I’m dimly aware from the BG3 discourse that he’s a popular character, and Dream of Silence provides an efficient summary both of the larger game’s plot, and Astarion’s basic deal as an elven vampire, that I understood the plot, but I didn’t have any feelings about him one way or the other going into things. So it’s possible my current reactions won’t make as much sense once the full game is out, or for a player who’s already Team Astarion.

With that said, I think there are some interrelated design and narrative decisions here that wind up yucking what should be a yum. On the story side, after an intense, confusing opening that again probably works much better if you’ve played BG3 and know who the various name-checked characters are, things slow way down. See, your party is under attack from a dream-eating monster, which has lead to Astarion being trapped in what appears to be a nightmare based on memories of when he was enslaved by the vampire who turned him. Said nightmare is one of isolated captivity: he’s stuck in a small, near-featureless crypt, slowly starving to death while his mind frays. You’re able to project yourself into the dream to try to rescue him, but only appear as a sort of wraith, with limited ability to interact with Astarion or the environment. While there are a few events that liven things up to a certain degree, for the most part all that happens for the game’s half-hour-ish playtime is fiddling around, unable to accomplish much or have much by way of conversation, while hopefully finding some way to put off his seemingly-inevitable demise.

This is all accomplished via a parser-like interface where you can zoom in on different sub-areas of the crypt and engage with the objects and characters there to the extent of your abilities, which are quite restricted. While you can pick a Dungeons and Dragons class at the outset, as far as I can tell this only provides a very few rare one-off options. For the most part, your capabilities are restricted according to an energy gauge (you get ten points at a time; resting replenishes them, but also reduces Astarion’s HP and sometimes his mental health) and how much you’ve levelled the three core skills of sight, touch, and speech. Speech 1 only lets you produce a vague susurrus of whispers, while higher levels allow you to say single words or even a few at a time; similarly, higher levels of sight give you more insight into your surroundings (and Astarion) while touch helps you interact with your surroundings.

That’s a reasonable enough framework, but the I found the implementation really drags. Partially this is because you need to level up the skills a fair bit to be able to do much, and at the default “balanced” difficulty level, it can take multiple rests to get some skills even up to level two or three (you choose how to prioritize the skills so that there’s one that’s relatively cheap to level, one that’s fairly punishing, and one in the middle). The game does provide you with specific targets to aim for by graying-out options you can’t yet access, but telling you what skill level you’ll need to unlock it. The nature of the tiny playing area, though, is that each level-up only opens up one or two new things, and as far as I can tell it’s not really possible to specialize just in one or two – you’ll eventually need all three to a certain extent. So that leads to a lot of thumb-twiddling gameplay just to move the ball forward a small amount, mechanically speaking.

What’s worse, the narrative impact of your abilities is often quite disappointing. For example, I was excited to get Touch 2, since that would let me pass through walls. But exiting the crypt just revealed that I was tied to Astarion and couldn’t go far, and unlatching the door to make it easier for him to escape required Touch 3. The only other thing I could do was enter a particular, prominent sarcophagus – but popping in just revealed that there were two items there that required Touch 5 to retrieve. This wasn’t a one-off anticlimax, either – once I got Touch 3 and opened up those latches, a skeleton immediately came and re-locked them, with no positive impact. It’s possible that if I’d had my speech skill leveled up further I would have been able to tell Astarion to try something with the door (though I didn’t see even a grayed-out option for that when I checked), but again, levelling up multiple skills is a time-consuming slog.

The nadir probably hit when I tried to use my special paladin power. There was a monster who showed up to menace Astarion, and I was excited to see that I could try to SMITE it – except I needed at least Touch 3 to unlock that option, and in my first playthrough I’d made that my lowest-priority skill and therefore was nowhere near being able to use it. On a subsequent playthrough, I made the appropriate investment so that I could try out the shiny, exciting choice – only to find that smiting the monster didn’t hurt it in the slightest, but drew its attention to me so I lost all my energy for the day and faced ongoing penalties even after resting, which is a far worse result than what you can get by just mumbling “hide” with no class powers and Speech 2.

It could be that these mechanical choices are the game trying to push you to worry less about the environment and more about the NPC, but sadly I didn’t find Astarion himself that engaging, even when I did a playthrough investing heavily in speech. He’s not a very garrulous conversationalist, which is fair enough given that he’s talking to a disembodied ghost, but still, the perfunctory way most exchanges play out is both a bit dull and mechanically punishing since you need to pay energy to keep each back-and-forth going. He also comes off as lightly characterized, despite a few hints of an enjoyably-spiky personality in some of his lines; likewise, nods to his backstory occasionally come to light but since that’s all spelled out in the pre-game infodump there’s not much intriguing about them. And outside of dialogue, he also isn’t especially proactive in taking any actions on his own to try to get himself free. Again, this is narratively reasonable: by the time the game opens he thinks he’s been held captive for fiveish months, so presumably he’s already explored around and tried everything he can think of, but the result is that without the benefit of how he’s established in BG3, I found him a passive, somewhat-generic character who couldn’t bear the weight the game’s structure puts on him.

All of which is to say that on both the mechanical and plot levels, the game creates a lot of tedium and frustration which is thematically relevant but doesn’t provide much for the player to glom onto – and the slow pacing and unrewarding narrative progression are exacerbated by the difficulty level, which at the default “balanced” level required me to start over several times to make progress. The easy “story” mode was slightly faster on the mechanical level, at least (I shudder to contemplate the unlockable hard difficulty), but that didn’t provide much of a patch on the game’s other issues; heck, I got to the end successfully in that playthrough, but it still wasn’t clear what I did to trigger the deus ex machina event that caps off the demo, adding lack of agency to my complaints.

I realize this is a lengthy review that’s more negative and less balanced than I usually try to be, so it’s worth repeating that this is probably due to my frustrated expectations – I went in expecting to really like A Dream of Silence, so I’m still working through the whiplash of bouncing off of it instead. I’m interested enough to still check out the full game, I suppose, but I’ll be sticking to the easiest difficulty and hoping for substantial changes behind the scenes.

I am not usually one to police genre boundaries – these are useful shorthands for discussion, analysis, and (mostly) marketing, nothing more – but I have to admit my ears pricked up when I saw a slight inconsistency in the tags the author provided for Provizora Parko (which as far as I can tell is Esperanto for “provisional park”, reinforcing my conviction that Esperanto is just a monoglot American putting on a fake accent and pretending to speak Russian). The primary genre is tagged as surreal, you see, while there’s also a content warning cautioning about implied violence “in a magical realist context.” And while the border between these two things is admittedly vague, there are real differences, beyond just that I tend to like magical realism and am more frequently left cold by surrealism. The former is more likely to accord with the traditional plot dynamics of a literary novel, with occasional fantasy elements introducing moments of illogic into a familiar structure, whereas in my experience the latter eschews linear narrative and tends to put conventional elements and outré ones at the same level. My complaint about surrealism is that it can often feel lightweight: a bunch of stuff happens, but there’s no throughline of dramatic progression ensuring that actions beget consequences in a comprehensible way. For a poem, that’s completely fine, but for a story – and most IF is structured as a story, of course – it’s a riskier proposition.

Provizora Parko definitely falls much more on the surrealism side of the line. But! Like a good poem, it’s also admirably disciplined about the language, imagery, and themes it deploys, which mitigates that feeling of weightless contingency: this is definitely not a world where anything could happen. As you (it’s unclear who “you” are) explore the titular mostly-abandoned zoo, there are certain elements that recur: crowd scenes, birds, travel, disaster. While you’ve got freedom of movement (this is a Twine game that allows you to navigate, though there’s no compass directions or inventory or any other parser-like touches) the map imposes or at least suggests a particular progression through the space that leads to something resembling an arc, with individual, memorable set-pieces gaining significance by the way they’re juxtaposed.

I want to zoom in on the language, since to my mind that’s the primary draw here. It’s evocative and clear while still remaining elusive, like this bit of landscape description:

"Rainbow shower trees with sherbet-colored blossoms border the plaza and cast crisp shadows in the midmorning sun."

This approach extends even to the unfamiliar or fantastical elements – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which, in fact. Take this bit:

"Sunlight dances on the path, which is carpeted with layers upon layers of exploded figs. In the heat and humidity, the sugar sculptures are beginning to sweat, the beads of moisture hardening into tiny pimples."

I don’t really know if that’s how a sculpture of sugar really starts to melt, and that tentative sense of alienation, that tension between the alien and mundane, helped keep me engaged. It also helps that there’s a real sense of variety to the half-dozen different areas: one uses timed text to create a delightful emulation of luggage coming down an airport’s baggage claim carousel, while another takes the shape of an extended, absurd dialogue with a man and his perhaps-imaginary bird.

For all that I enjoyed much of the experience of playing Provizora Parko, I ultimately did find that its surreal aspects were too distinctive for my tastes. In particular, while I can identify some of the game’s key concerns, and squint at the endings to see how the theme of substitution or transformation that runs through them finds echoes in earlier parts of the game, it didn’t feel to me that this was an organic climax that brought everything that came before into coherence. This might just be a reflection of wanting the game to be more prosaic than poetic, but even very abstruse poems usually strive to leave the reader with a pop of insight at the end that refigures what’s gone before. Someone else more on the game’s wavelength might feel differently, though, and just based on the quality of the writing I’m certainly satisfied by my visit to this park.

There are of course innumerable ways you can divide people in two – by which I mean, do the whole “there are two kinds of people in the world” thing, not literally bisecting them – but the opening passage of ChoiceScript demo Ink and Intrigue provides, I suspect, a handy litmus test for an IF-relevant difference of viewpoints:

"Chapter One: The Call of the Kitherin

"The approach to Ra’zai is best made in the last hour of darkness. So say the books you’ve read, the innkeepers you’ve chatted with on your month-long journey across Rzskador, and the ferrymaster who took your coin at midnight and welcomed you aboard."

Some people will perk up at this reasonably-well-written excerpt, curious to learn more about what’s surely a mystical world of legend and excitement. Others, seeing the profusion of unexplained proper nouns and especially sensitive to that “Ra’zai”, will feel their stomachs sink at the realization that they’ve unwittingly wandered into the domain of Apostrophe Fantasy.

Reader, I confess that I am of the second party; it’s a totally valid preference, but so too is liking this stuff, and I fear that I had a hard time separating my ennui at the game’s genre from my response to the game itself. In trying to evaluate it objectively, I think it’s a reasonable enough teaser – there’s a potentially compelling premise, the writing is generally solid, the plot, characters, and mechanics all seem like they’d support the kind of game the author is going for. The stuff that I disliked, beyond the generic fantasy setting, is also somewhat down to personal taste: the pacing is perhaps slow, the character generation section sometimes dwells on what seem like trivialities to me, and the love interests a bit schematic, but my sense is much of that’s standard for the Choice of Games style, which places a premium on role-playing and tries to create space for players to project their own perceptions and preferences onto romanceable characters. So it’s tempting to just do the mealy-mouthed “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’d like” dance and call it good.

That’s not the kind of lazy reviewing y’all are paying for, though, so we’re not going to do that! No, instead I’m going to dig into a couple aspects of the games that I think count as strengths, and then some weaknesses, without hiding behind a subjectivity dodge.

On the positive side of the ledger, the opening bit where you define your character’s background and abilities deftly weaves together mechanical choices with bits of worldbuilding: you’re a spy for your royal uncle, but “spy” is one of those job descriptions that can be interpreted rather creatively, while lending itself to interesting missions, and picking things like how I chose to infiltrate a decadent cabaret that presumably hosted clandestine meetings and furtive assignations was way more engaging than just deciding whether I wanted +2 to dexterity or charisma. You also get some cool bonus elements to define, like your relationship with your pet hawk, that sit nicely between the choices that are obviously purely cosmetic (seriously, why are these kinds of games so insistent on making me choose an eye color?) and the clearly mechanical ones (to Ink and Intrigue’s credit, these are more frequently personality-based than attribute-based).

On the flip side, I think the game gets in its own way when it comes to establishing stakes, which meant my engagement generally fell off after the stronger-than-expected chargen system. See, this isn’t just a fantasy James Bond scenario – your mission is largely a diplomatic one, as you visit a secretive order of warrior-mages in an attempt to recruit them to your monarch’s side in an upcoming war. Except as soon as you enter their enclave, the magic alarm-bells they put in the gate announce that you’re a Chosen One and you get dragooned into being initiated into their order. The game is clearly much more interested in these guys than in your original mission, which is established in a couple of bottom-lined backstory paragraphs that once again feature apostrophes; further, the chargen section heavily prompts you to think that the king is kind of a bad dude and you might want to think about other options. And beyond that, it drops heavy hints that these Jedi-ish folks are too cool to get enmeshed in petty mortal struggles anyway, since they’re all about preserving the balance between different realities. So that initial motivation is quickly sapped of urgency; I think the idea is that the desire to go through the monks’ (apparently very long) list of initiations and tests to unlock your new powers will replace it, but without any clear sense of why you want these powers and what you’ll do with them, I found my interest flagged.

The other place where I think the author puts a definite foot wrong is with those romance options. Again, I think it’s fine for them to be stereotypical in order to increase the odds that a player will find at least one appealing. But these bunch often seemed more bland than archetypal to me. Partially this is because most of them don’t really do much; they’re all either fellow initiates or mentors who play some vague role in the tests, so outside of infodumps and light socialization there’s not much for them to do, at least in this opening section of the game. The writing also can be excessively didactic in laying out their personalities:

"You lower your voice. “Is your sole motivation the mission you’ve been denied, or is there something more?”

"A wry smile tugs at his mouth. 'I think my motivation is an alchemist’s mixture of rage, vengeance, and optimism. I’ve been planning my revenge for most of my adult life, but I push myself for bigger reasons than that.'"

(I should note that there are optional graphic sex scenes that are part of the game, if this kind of talk turns you on; I opted into one, largely to have something to do. It seemed fine, though the diffuse nature of my engagement with the characters likewise made the hook-up likewise feel perfunctory).

This is a demo, and given the average length of Choice of Games works I’m guessing there’s a lot more to go, which makes it somewhat unfair to judge the narrative and characters just on this limited slice, I suppose, just as it’s unfair to keep moaning on about how jaded I am about generic fantasy stories. But I do think tightening up these elements would increase the pitch’s appeal, even if it’s not going to hook everyone, and give those of us outside the target audience a little more to enjoy along the way.

Or just add more apostrophes to stuff, everyone likes that!

There’s not much to say about Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights – as its charmingly awkward, late-period-Planet-of-the-Apes-sequel-ish title suggests, this is an author’s first parser game set in a generic deserted dungeon that doesn’t do more or less than you’d imagine it would. After playing the first couple of rooms I thought to myself that the prose was cleaner than I’d expected, and then immediately ran into a series of capitalization errors and an its/it’s typo soon thereafter. There’s a little bit of spooky atmosphere conjured by a statue of the eponymous knights that conspicuously doesn’t reveal what, if anything, is under their armor, which is undercut by all the rest of the tomb’s décor consisting of variations of that one statue (well, except for the parts that are skulls or coffins, both generic). There’s a gimmickless maze, but it’s basically fine; of course there’s no plot to speak of but that’s as much a relief as a negative. When playing online there’s a noticeable lag (there’s no local download option), the parser’s a bit finicky, and I couldn’t get the transcript to work, but this is a Quest game so it’s hard to hold all of that against the author.

It’s understandable why you’d take this kind of approach for your initial foray into writing a text adventure: the simple, sturdy setting and gameplay make it maximally likely that you’ll be able to complete the hardest step of the game design process, which is to say, finishing something. But it also puts a ceiling on what you can achieve – even if all the little niggles I mentioned above had been resolved, so that rather than dichotomies each sentence was unalloyed praise, it’d still be faint praise indeed. It’s in theory possible to implement this generic scenario with such quality that it’s nonetheless memorable, I suppose – as I write this, I’m recalling a game from maybe a couple years back that had a similar start-at-the-bottom-of-the-dungeon setup and was also a first-time effort, but had some interesting ornamentation and dressed up the puzzles fairly well? Ah yes, The Hidden King’s Tomb: but the fact that I had to struggle to come up with the name (this took a solid ten minutes of scrolling through my old reviews to find), and that it turns out I rated it only a 2 out of 5, perhaps makes this less of an exception than I thought when I began this anecdote.

Sadly, I doubt Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights will have much more staying power – besides the funny-ish title, my main takeaway is that I continue to really struggle with even simple puzzles in games with two-word parsers where USE is the main action you’re meant to use. Still, this is a first game, and it is entered into the Back Garden, so it’s probably unfair to set expectations too high. I’ll wrap up by paraphrasing what I said in that Hidden King’s Tomb review: this isn’t the kind of first game that’d be of much interest to anyone but the author, but it is the kind of first game that the author might have had to write in order to write a much better, much more interesting second game – and I look forward to playing that second game.

I throw around the term “old school” a fair bit when discussing IF, but it’s worth remembering that the scene has never been a monolith. For all that the term conjures up the bad old days of hunger daemons and time-limited light sources, it’s also now been a full quarter-decade since the launch the IF Art Show, a series of BREASTS events that aimed to explore the boundaries of parser IF by asking authors to eschew complex puzzles or melodramatic narratives and instead, by analogy with a museum’s offerings, present still lives, landscapes, or portraits – which is to say deeply-implemented single objects, locations, or characters. For all that there are some celebrated works that came out of this tradition, most notably Galatea, a portrait entry that unsurprisingly won best in show in 2000, it represents something BOSOMS of a road not traveled; the events themselves petered out in the mid-aughts, and while modern IF certainly prioritizes deep implementation, it’s almost always in service of plot or gameplay rather than the more reserved, intellection engagement that the very name “Art Show” evokes.

It’s notable, then, that the Portrait explicitly situates itself within that moribund tradition, down to including the actual guidelines from the original 1999 event in an “extras” folder accompanying the download. It’s certainly DECOLLETAGE the case that there’s a story visible in the margins – the game is a small, self-contained excerpt of a forthcoming game titled “Isekai” which, per the eponymous genre, will presumably involve a person from the real world being sucked into and engaging in adventures in a fantasy world – but this nondiegetic framing, and the parsimonious amount of plot available in the excerpt, push the player to engage with the game in a less-directed, contemplative manner. The four BOOBS rooms that constitute the game have a fair amount of scenery to explore, but not much in the way of items to pick up or obstacles to overcome. Instead you’re encouraged to just wander around and examine as many details as you can – especially the details of the painting that gives the game its title.

This is a style of gameplay that I enjoy, since I think it leverages the exploratory strengths of the parser game while making a virtue of its often-pokey pacing and issues creating UNDERBREAST plausible, interactive characters. I’m more than happy to just stroll around an environment or cast my virtual gaze on each element of a scene in turn, even without much extrinsic motivation. But the thing about eschewing those more atavistic drivers of engagement is that it puts a lot of pressure on what exactly you’re asking the player to spend so much time on. And here, while I admire the PELVIC MOUND Portrait’s formal approach, I have to admit that I found the content somewhat lacking.

The portrait itself makes a reasonable first impression: it’s a picture of three women native to the fantasy world that the protagonist has found himself in, namely a demonic-looking one, an angelic-looking one, and one who seems to be an elf. And there’s an element of personal relevance, because once you find a mirror the protagonist realizes that although he’s a he in the real world, in this fantasy milieu he’s somehow taken on the shape of the elven woman who’s center stage in the portrait. So trying to learn more about her and BIG AND GORGEOUS D CUP BREASTS her world by closely studying the portrait is an understandable step. But I found there wasn’t much payoff to this setup: it doesn’t take much observational acuity to realize that the trio are a throuple, which isn’t very interesting since the player never makes their acquaintance, and the hints of personality given off by the visual detail are as bland as the fantasy world seems to be, from this short preview: would you believe the demon girl is a brunette and seems passionate, while the blonde angel is full of strong will to protect the other two?

Similarly, the implementation feels deeper than the substance supports. There are apparently 46 sub-items that can be examined within the painting, and the game provides a score system to help you track your progress, but the level of detail feels excessive. Even after looking at the ODDLY SEXY BAT-WING picture’s background elements, each of the three figures, their clothing and jewelry, and their faces and significant parts of their bodies, I only found 39 of them – but even then, there were many details that gave near-identical descriptions to others when examined, making this feel more like an exercise in box-checking than in discovery. The often-haphazard nature of the game’s prose is likely an understandable consequence of the author’s first language not being English, but it still often winds up coming across as vague and awkward, as in this description of a “stand”:

"the large and prominent stand, clearly a permanent fixture, is elaborately adorned, in a very festive but at the same time solemn manner, giving out that the context depicted in this portrait is of a very significant and joyous ceremony, like a rite of passage."

Or this early glimpse of the portrait itself:

"On the centre of the southern wall, flanked by an arched passage on its left and a larger archway on its right, hangs, an huge life-size painting, so detailed and realistic that you can’t exclude that is actually a photograph, no wonder that has catched your attention."

Some grammar-checking and beta reading could help tighten up the prose, but as it stands the writing isn’t enough to reward the obsessive poking about that would be required to get full points.

In fairness, the game provides an early off-ramp, with an authorial stand-in entering the scene and telling you you can stop at any time after you find SINGLE AND SPECTACULARLY ILL-CONCEIVED REFERENCE TO GENITALS about 15 details – and I think that probably is about the number of actions, and depth of implementation, that would feel right. So the fact that I kept going past that is mostly on me, and to a certain degree on the scoring system that I suspect won’t be the same in the full game. And in the context of the bigger story that’s teased here, this intro might work well enough to give the player a chance to slow down and get their feet under them before being swept away by a grand adventure, like an opening CGI cutscene lending gravitas to an action RPG. But presented on its own, framed as an objet d’art, I’m not sure it’s up to the amount of scrutiny it invites.

I’m a reasonably confident critic of several things: writing, first of all, but also characterization, plot, and puzzle design (whether I’m a good critic of these things is a separate question). But when it comes to things like graphics, movement-based gameplay, and music, I’m anything but, often struggling to feel like I have anything interesting to say – heck, I play most IF, this game included, with the sound off, so I’m especially at sea as to that last bit. As a result, I’ll take a page from this near-wordless micro-length game and try to keep this short, to avoid embarrassing myself with too much aimless flailing.

Bydlo is a second-order bit of ekphrasis – that’s a work of art that describes or deeply comments on a single other work of art, Ode on a Grecian Urn being the canonical example. Here we’re told the game is based on one of the movements from the classical music suite Pictures at an Exhibition – the gimmick of said suite being that each movement was based on a single painting from a posthumous exhibition by a now-obscure Russian artist. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of either the music or the painting (and actually it turns out many of the paintings are now lost, including this particular one so far as I can tell from Wikipedia), so that doesn’t provide much in the way of context for me to grab onto; fortunately, the itch.io 1 page does directly say what the game is about, albeit with a spoiler warning, so I’ll likewise spoiler-ify it here: (Spoiler - click to show)the triumph of art over drudgery.

Does the game incarnate that theme? Maaaybe. This is a Bitsy game with a simple set of mechanics: your little guy starts out in a fenced-in field, with an ox-cart at the other side of the screen. Shiny lights at the exit of the field and then a path leading off-screen indicate destinations towards which you should walk; when you reach the latter, the screen resets, with the field being encumbered with incrementally more obstacles and the cart moving one square over. Over the course of subsequent iterations, the field becomes a maze, clogged with pixel-art squiggles that might be bales of hay, fallen crops, and the bones of other oxen (I think? I have a hard time decoding them); finally, the cart exits stage left. You’re allowed to follow its tracks; a new set of screens open up, empty space filled only by the one track, which is then joined by two others running parallel to it. Musical notes begin to fill the tracks, which have becomes a musical score; you reach a last screen where an orchestra plays, with the word “FIN.” printed across the top.

I can try to venture a few interpretations of all of this – if I’m right about what the graphics represent (and I’m supremely unconfident that I am), perhaps the protagonist is a farmer who’s neglecting their work because of their fixation on music? If one part of the theme is meant to be drudgery, I’m guessing that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy running through the mazes (they weren’t super fun but the worst of them only took five seconds to solve)? I did feel a sense of relief and possibility at finally seeing a new screen after doing the same thing twelve times in a row, though I can’t help but feel that moving to the left four times isn’t substantially less drudgery-y than doing a maze a dozen times. Does the fact that I can run straight through the orchestra members and the “FIN.” at the end indicate that they’re a hallucination? If so, what does it mean that the notes seem to be solid? Was coding this game (Spoiler - click to show)a triumph of art over drudgery, or was it (Spoiler - click to show)drudgery in service of art, and if that’s the case, is composing a symphony or painting a picture any different?

These are not questions posed for rhetorical effect: I really don’t have a strong take on Bydlo. It seems like a unified aesthetic object that’s aimed at questions I find important and interesting, so I will say I’m happy it exists – in fact I think it’s kind of neat to engage with something that’s coming at these themes from an entirely different frame of reference than those I’m more used to. And I think it’s meant to be open-ended and unbothered by whether or not I “got” anything out of it – like a placid ox tilling its furrow, I suppose, though I still can’t help but feel it deserves a better critic than me.

My wife recently decided she wanted to get into gardening, and as a result we’ve started to slowly make some improvements to our back yard, which heretofore was evenly divided between tufts of fake grass (don’t judge, we live in Southern California where we’re just getting out of a yearslong drought with more to come) and a dirt patch overgrown by snarls of weeds and a tree that keeps sending off a fusillade of saplings as though it’s overheard us speculating about chopping it down (again, don’t judge, it’s really tall and close to the house so we’re paranoid it could fall down in a wind storm). We’ve now mostly pruned that whole mess back, and gotten a couple pots of flowers and vegetables to prop up by the fence, and while it’s not much to look out we’re proud of the progress. It’s a bit sobering when we consult the source of her horticultural impulse, though, which was born of watching a British reality show: in that, people are always acting all ashamed about the state of their rear allotments, which boast lush flowers, well-tended herb beds, and a well-judged mix of different plants; it’s on a whole different level from our meager efforts.

All of which is to say that opinions differ about what standard “Back Garden” implies, and I’ll confess to being a bit mystified about why Nonverbal Communication isn’t in the main festival; it’s a bit short, sure, but it’s got a neat premise that combines real-world resonance with a clever riff on standard fantasy tropes, some clever puzzles with multiple solutions, and in my view the best joke of Spring Thing to date (I won’t spoil it, but it’s the death banner when you try something obviously and spectacularly stupid – nothing quick UNDO doesn’t fix).

The setup here is that you’re a wizard whose power comes from their mastery of words, but in your haste to prepare for an attack from a dragon, a mishap occurs that throws your magics all out of whack. I’ll quote the game’s description of the result, since it’s emblematic of the elegant yet approachable prose:

But verbs are independent, fickle things, and although you feel the presence of some of your most beloved verbs within the tower, you doubt you’ll be able to compel them directly.

What this means is that you don’t have access to verbs: a set of the most common Inform actions, from the humble EXAMINE to the workhorse OPEN to the disfavored ATTACK to the how-am-I-supposed-to-live-without-this GO have flown out of your head and become incarnated in various automatons scattered throughout your tower (WAIT, THINK – a hint command – and various out-of-world activities like SAVE and TRANSCRIPT are still available). Interaction therefore hinges on your nouns – by typing in the name of a thing, you can focus the automatons’ attention on it and prompt them to target each of their actions at that one object.

That’s simple enough in theory, but in practice this makes for some tricky puzzle-solving, as well as some slapstick comedy. There’s always at least two or three automatons firing off at one time, and with no ability to tell the automatons that OPEN is needed here, so having CLOSE execute immediately thereafter is counterproductive, you need to get creative – while none of the puzzles are too too hard, I definitely did some floundering, and picturing all the different gizmos faffing about and working at cross-purposes definitely elicited a giggle. The flip side is that cracking each conundrum left me with a strong sense of satisfaction.

The narrative was also satisfying; there are multiple endings, tied to which of several significantly-different tacks you take to solving the game’s puzzles, and the one I found tied a neat bow on the themes implicit in centering a protagonist who struggles with the sometimes-destructive results of their careless words. This turn towards the serious isn’t enough to bring down Nonverbal Communication’s lighthearted vibe, but it definitely lends the game more heft than the average hey-look-I-came-up-with-a-cool-mechanic-for-my-half-hour-puzzle-game puzzle game.

All told this is a polished game that checks all the boxes it should – my only points of critique are that the convenience of bolding significant nouns when they show up in room descriptions meant it took longer than it should to realize that other nouns might also be available, and in common with other limited-parser games that get rid of access to the EXAMINE command, room descriptions could sometimes get a little long. It occurs to me that one reason the author could have nonetheless picked the Back Garden is that they’re considering this a proof-of-concept for a longer game, because yeah, it is a little on the short side – if that’s the case, I’d definitely be interested in seeing more of both this world and this approach to puzzles, since I think there’s plenty more room to explore here!

You’ll probably go into this death-of-the-Weimar-Republic simulator expecting a titanic struggle against Hitler, pouring all your wits and intelligence into a duel against one of history’s greatest monsters. But it’s emblematic of the intelligence with which Social Democracy is made that Hitler’s only present in the game as a mostly-ineluctable fail state; no, if there’s anyone the game teaches you to hate, it’s Hjalmer fucking Schacht, the central banker who uses the credibility gained from his admittedly-impressive achievement of ending hyperinflation to take a meat-axe to any plans to fight the Great Depression with Keynesian stimulus. Doesn’t matter that your party, the Social Democrats, has the chancellorship and plays the leading role in the grand coalition governing Germany at the dawn of the thirties: this hidebound, reactionary asshole is here to prevent you from doing the obviously-right thing, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

(On reflection, maybe Schacht isn’t the most emblematic villain here, since if you’re up on history, or have your internal security forces dig into just the right scandals, you know he actually wanted the Nazis to win. But for purposes of the above paragraph let’s pretend he was just an asshole).

I wish I could report that things are better on the Left. Alas, the Communists are intransigent as all get out too – despite agreeing that the working class and unemployed need to come first, they’re not willing to look past your failure to kowtow to Moscow (and plus, any loss of support the Social Democrats experience will likely translate into direct gains for them). With plenty of wooing, they’ll at least go along with a truce between your respective paramilitary arms, but since they’re not willing to participate in bourgeois parliamentary government, you can’t work with them to form a coalition even if you do manage to eke out a Reichstag majority between the two parties (or at least, if you can, it’s well beyond my skills, even when notching the difficulty down to easy).

So yeah, as you ping-pong between inflation-spooked centrists and blinkered tankies, with election after election failing to produce a stable government, Hitler doesn’t need to do much: the Nazis just lurk in the middle distance, making greater and greater gains as this frantic, useless politicking discredits the idea of democracy in the eyes of a growing share of the populace. All historical games build an argument into how they frame their simulations, of course, and I think Chen has struck on one that’s insightful in historical terms, while also providing for engaging gameplay: Hitler’s rise was only possible because of the choices made by a whole host of people who nominally opposed fascism, and even 20/20 hindsight doesn’t make this an easily-solvable problem due to the strictures of politics. Even those with lots of power were tossed about by the whims of chance and the force of outside interruptions, limiting their ability to play out their intended strategies – which is why it’s apt that Social Democracy’s simulation is built as a card game.

The touch-point here is probably Fallen London, whose storylet-based design inspired the construction of the DendryNexus platform that powers Social Democracy. Rather than assuming the mantle of a specific character, the player is the animating spirit of the party as a whole (don’t call it a Zeitgeist….) A turn takes a month, in which you can choose to play one of three cards from your hand, each of which represents an opportunity or threat to respond to via a simple choice-based interface. You might be given the chance to invest your precious party resources in outreach to one of a choice of key constituencies, or weigh whether to make overtures to another party to improve relations, or have to decide whether to issue arms and military training to your citizen’s auxiliary; if you’re part of the governing coalition, you can also draw from a deck that contains cards allowing you to set policy on labor issues or address women’s rights. Most of the time, the presence of grayed-out options allows you to see the way that your choices are constrained, due to limited resources or inadequate party relationships or lack of support within your own party’s internal factions (briefly: tankies, squishes, teamsters, and lanyards) – a nice mirror of the way that those working in practical politics can see the path to a better outcome even if they can’t manage to take it. There’s some limited scope for proactive action – in particular, you pick a trio of core advisors who each have one or more special powers you can deploy at any time, though there’s a six-month cooldown that’s shared by all three – but the limited hand size and the pace of play means you’re always somewhat at the mercy of events.

This is never more obvious than at election time. As the game opens, you’re informed that the polls will open in only a few months’ time, lending the beginning turns a campaign rhythm that’s familiar enough to American players (the game also provides a nice hit of dopamine by setting starting conditions that mean you’re almost certain to have the plurality once the votes are counted). At that point, the next scheduled elections are four years away – again, so far so familiar – but once the ravages of the Depression begin to fray the bonds that allow coalitions to function, elections can come whenever a restive partner decides to call for a no-confidence vote. If you’re in the government, you’ve got some room to maneuver to fend these off, from offering policy concessions to straight-up bribes, but as the lines harden and resources become scarce, it’s easy to wind up in a Blitzkrieg of repeated elections, none of which deliver a decisive result and each of which drains you still further, as the Nazis make greater and greater inroads.

The systems make for nervy, engaging play, and with only a few concessions to the board-game logic running things (that limited hand of possible actions, the artificial constraint on advisor actions) it often feels more like a simplified version of history than a mechanical simulation. It’s possible, if not mandatory for any degree of success, to pursue an intentional strategy. Appropriately, the game’s difficulty isn’t tuned to make a total victory for democracy simple to achieve, even on the easiest setting. My first time out, I tried a no-enemies-to-the-left strategy that saw me punted out of the government early on but maintaining my base among the proletariat through staunch advocacy for welfare and stimulus; I was also able to work out a modus vivendi with the Communists (and came within one resource-spend of installing one of them into the presidency!) The endemic lack of a governing coalition meant that the Nazis were quickly ascendant, however, and while I was able to pivot to arming and training my auxiliaries while creating a united defense front with the Reds, that just meant we were able to give as good as we got in the devastating civil war that followed. The opposite path of sticking around in the government and avoiding snap elections by going along with austerity was even less successful – the workers flocked to the Communists as welfare cuts stifled the already-struggling economy, and after four years the Nazis once again sewed things up handily, except this time I didn’t even have enough of a base to launch any sort of armed struggle.

I found my best success with what I called my Belgian strategy, developing and pushing a massive public works program to maintain my support, while playing a waiting game on the governmental side of things: after each election I’d join the coalition and work on mending fences, but then I’d quit and trigger new elections whenever a proposal for cuts came down the pike. This somewhat-farcical cycle created just enough stability for me to kick the can down the road long enough for the economy to slowly improve, and temper the fires of crisis (I later attempted to replicate this half-success on the hard difficulty – lack of resources and lack of focus meant I failed once again).

If you are at all interested in history, this is riveting, riveting stuff – a story engine on the level of the Paradox grand strategy games, without the often-wacky left turns they often take. Indeed, while I’m usually a stickler for authenticity in games set in the past, I’ve got vanishingly-few complaints about Social Democracy, most of them simply just places where the game starts to push up against the limits of its implementation: each turn representing a whole month means that several times I’d resolve an election, work to influence the selection of chancellor, and click to start the next turn – only to immediately be told that Hindenberg had already cashiered the new guy and picked someone even worse. It’s frustrating, but might not be all that ahistorical – however, the event where I was told “Hindenburg’s camarilla has turned against Papen, and Hindenburg has dismissed the Chancellor, replacing him with the more reactionary Franz von Papen” seems like it’s probably a bug rather than modeling the long-suffering president entering a fugue state. In a game of this complexity, this is small stuff indeed.

No, my only substantive critique is that I think there are a few places where readability could be improved on the mechanical end, and more context could be provided on the historical side of things. As to the former, I didn’t notice any reminders of when the presidential election was going to happen, which meant I was woefully unprepared the first time it came up, and greater feedback for repeated actions would be helpful in a few areas to better indicate progress (I of course wanted to clean up the police force in Prussia before recruiting more members, but wasn’t sure whether I was having meaningful results in my efforts due to always getting identical feedback). It would be nice to know what the difficulty levels actually do. And perhaps this marks me as a Marxist, but I wanted a bit more visibility into material conditions – that unemployment ticker is arresting, but given that you have real-time polling data whenever you want it, it’s striking that there’s no other way of gauging the health of the German body politic.

As to the latter, much as it pains me to admit that the assholes of the left and center have reasons for their actions, I think the game may assume more player knowledge of the relevant history than is justified. Schacht was being all Schacht-y because of hyper-inflation, and he and his cadre sincerely feared that deficit spending would bring it all back, but the game doesn’t really spell this out. Similarly, there are only a few glancing mentions of the Spartacist Uprising and Rosa Luxemburg scattered through events that happen reasonably far into the game; knowing that within the past decade the Communists launched an armed revolt against the state, and the Social Democrat leaders condoned the extrajudicial murder of the party’s leaders, rationalizes their reluctance to form a coalition of the willing. There are similarly glancing references to the Stabbed in the Back myth that might be hard for some players to decipher, and I can’t help but wish some of the culture of the Weimar Republic could make an occasional appearance (maybe some Otto Dix paintings for particularly grisly event-cards?) I certainly appreciate that there’s a fine line to walk between providing enough information to the player to allow them to make solid decisions, and keeping the amount of text and background reading light enough to stay accessible, and I should emphasize that the game generally does quite a good job of this – there are just a few places where I think it could usefully go into a little more detail.

It’s impossible to review Social Democracy without being aware that it is a miraculously buzzy game – an example of the vanishingly-rare piece of IF that manages to get noticed outside our little community, and get attention from the mainstream gaming press. Sometimes lightning strikes for incomprehensible reasons, but this time the virality is entirely understandable and deserved. This is a masterwork of design by one of the scene’s most exciting authors, which makes the past come alive and feel immediately relevant – having been engaged in politics during the 2008 financial crisis, the failure to adequately respond to it, and the ensuing emboldening of fringe right-wingers, I grimaced at the familiarity of many of the scenarios I encountered. I’ll be returning to this one quite a lot after the festival is over, I think, if only so I can finally get one over on $%@# Hjalmer.

(This is one of those games that can’t meaningfully be reviewed without spoiling a particular narrative and gameplay twist, so it might be best to go in blind – though if you’ve read the content warnings you probably have some sense of where things are headed…)

I am really eager to read the postmortem on this one. Studio takes the my-dumb-apartment setting of many authors’ first parser game and uses it as the canvas for a violent, nervy thriller, and I’m very curious whether this was meant from the beginning as an intentional subversion of the subgenre, or if the deeply-implemented setting came first and the plot was added as a way to leverage it. Either way, its confident storytelling and sandbox approach make Studio a standout; it’s a bravura performance in an under-explored gameplay paradigm.

The key insight here is that a stealth-focused immersive sim – think Thief, or playing a sneaky build in Deus Ex – can work really well in parser form. There’s logic here; parser games are generally good at modelling detailed environments that reward exploration, and their turn-based nature can heighten the drama of an alert enemy slowly drawing near to your hiding place. There’s also precedent, as last Spring Thing’s I Am Prey was a solid proof of concept that stealth can work in IF (I promise I will get around to reviewing that soon…)

A narrative certainly exists, and it’s deftly rolled out via the introductory tutorial section: as you finish unpacking in your new apartment, which takes you to its various corners and establishes the key features and actions that will be important in the game’s second half, the hints that things aren’t quite as innocent as they seem escalate. A mention of a mysterious contact, a casually-stored taser, a safe whose combination is keyed to the made-up birthday of an assumed identity – the details aren’t fully spelled out, even when you’re prompted with a REMEMBER command that fills in some specific backstory, but they don’t need to be. You’re on the lam, running from dangerous people, and you’re something of a dangerous person yourself, which is all the setup that’s required to make the home invasion that kicks off after the prologue concludes feel motivated and intense.

What makes Studio so fun is the wide field of possibility open before you when you wake panicked in the middle of the night and hear suspicious scratching at your door. There’s obvious stuff to do to prepare (hide under the bed, grab the paring knife from the knife block). There are obvious points of vulnerability (do you really want to let the intruder grab your wallet, or break into your laptop?) There are obvious courses of action that are probably a bad idea (is it smart to get the cops to alerted to whatever your deal is?) There are obvious repercussions to your choices (just booking it and running away poses some risks; so does trying to subdue or kill him). And with only few exceptions, this all works seamlessly, turning this tiny apartment something of a playground.

I found seven different endings, most with variations depending on exactly how I reached them, and found it fun to collect them not because they implied drastically different narrative outcomes – in fact many of them are pretty similar, and the denouement is generally left to the imagination in each case, with just a few ambiguous sentences providing a hint of where things might go before asking the player if they’d like to try again. No, it’s just that seeing the simulation respond and react is delightful. If anything, despite the horror-movie premise I found Studio something of a power fantasy; the protagonist knows how to handle herself and UNDO and SAVE will correct for any misstep, so it was enjoyable rather than stressful to set myself challenges like ghosting my way around the apartment until the intruder got bored and left empty-handed.

The implementation supporting all of this is truly a gold standard for my-dumb-apartment games. Usually such things founder at the kitchen or the bathroom, as implementing all the fixtures is an annoying pain, but here they’re all present and accounted for and work exactly as you’d think. Beyond that, there’s a dishwasher, a laptop, a phone (with charger), a radio, and everything is fully interactive without being excessively fiddly. This attention to detail continues when the stealth section kicks off; in particular, it feels like the intruder has a coherent plan in mind and improvises based on what he finds or doesn’t find, rather than behaving like a robot.

There are a few places where small bugs or moments of friction creep in – the unlocking action retains an implicit take, which leads to odd response messages when you refuse to take a key off its keyring, and sometimes I experienced momentary confusion about how to properly interact with the phone’s various submenus. But these are niggles on what’s otherwise a very polished experience. If I have an actual complaint, it’s that the game is maybe a hair too straightforward – one decisive action is usually enough to trigger an ending, and I get the sense that there are a bunch of esoteric interactions that I didn’t get a chance to uncover because it was so easy to just hide behind some boxes and either stab or smash a vase over the head of the baddie. Pacing and escalation in stealth games can be tricky in general, though – they lend themselves to binary success and failure states – so it’s hard to hold that against Studio. Still, I can’t help but be curious to see what an expanded version of this concept might look like, with a bigger environment and additional affordances like, say, being able to throw stuff around to distract the intruder’s attention.

All of which is to say that despite being rooted in one of the hoariest of IF tropes, Studio breaks new ground for future exploration while being perfectly enjoyable in itself. The purity of the concept and the depth of the programming that support it are equally praiseworthy, so like I said, I’m anxious to read the postmortem to get a better sense of where exactly the ideas came from, and maybe a clue to where they could be further elaborated, too.

(I beta-tested this game)

In my first review of this year’s Thing, I lifted up Potato Peace as an example of a game that has the trappings of a game about politics but isn’t actually a game about politics. Part of the reason that concept struck me the way it did is that I’d only recently tested Pass a Bill, which despite its Schoolhouse Rock-baiting name likewise resolutely avoids having anything to say about the actual exercise of legislative powers in this or any country. For all that the protagonist – a newly-elected representative who’s either well- or terribly-positioned for success by virtue of being the only independent in a two-party legislature – has their heart set on getting a bill enacted into law, much like the game they’re profoundly indifferent to the actual substance of said bill, and the process of doing so requires not a single iota of politicking or parliamentary maneuvering.

And despite the fact that it took me a little while to readjust my expectations, that’s OK! Pass a Bill is slapstick, not satire. Yes, it makes no sense at all that the majority whip won’t talk to you about moving your bill until you check in with the minority leader and let her lard up your draft with poison pills, but it does make for a silly bit of shuttle diplomacy. No, I don’t know why said whip is a violent weirdo bent on getting your personal oath of loyalty (Spoiler - click to show)(nor how he’s managed to get elected to two separate seats for two different parties). And the game’s eventual climax is impossible to take seriously but good-natured nonetheless.

In terms of presentation, Pass a Bill is an appealing mix of primitive and sophisticated. The black background, white text, and blue links put us firmly in Default Twine territory, but there’s an inventory and hints sidebar that provides helpful information throughout, and the MS-Paint-style illustrations similarly have more than their share of rough charm. And for all that there’s a clear spine through the game, there are a fair number of branch points, easily-rewindable deaths, and Easter Eggs to reward poking around a bit.

Pass a Bill is still a sillier game than I tend to enjoy – nothing wrong with comedy, but I tend to prefer stuff that either has more bite, or goes even farther to dress up dumb jokes with a veneer of sophistication. But it’s got some appeal nonetheless: I ultimately wound up thinking of it as a kind of extreme version of a yes-and improv session where an initial, politics-heavy setup gets quickly and entertainingly pushed into absurdity, leaving only a rough framework and handful of NPC descriptions in its wake. If it’s more Mr. Bean Goes to Washington than Mr. Smith, there’s nothing wrong with that.

OK, anecdote time: when I was in high school, my summer job for a couple years was as a busboy at a country club. This was less exciting than it sounds – and believe me, I’m under no illusions as to how exciting it sounds – but one fun thing was that there was a team-building day where we saw Rent on Broadway (the club was on Long Island). This necessitated a bus trip, and whether or not said bus was formally licensed as a party bus – I rather suspect not – my coworkers decided it would be prudent to avoid inflated NYC liquor prices by getting blasted on the way in, and further decided it would be amusing to peer-pressure the 17-year-old into having a couple of beers (reader, I’d like to say I put up a fight, but I was nerdy and was moved that they cared enough to make the attempt). I only had two drinks, but I was an inexperienced drinker and weighed like 120 pounds, so that was enough to throw me off-kilter for the remainder of the trip as well as – and here we’re finally getting to the point of the anecdote – the entire first act of Rent.

There’s a whole lot of incident that plays out over that initial hour or so, and I’m sure a more sober critic of theater would have found a lot to unpack, but I have to confess that all the relationship melodrama and demimondaine cris de coeurs were lost on me, because in the flush of my first drunkenness, I’d decided that actually the most important thing on that stage was this one particular chair. All the frenetic dancing and singing happening all around it, I was sure, was just meant to provide a counterpoint to the stolid immanent quiddity of this humble chair; people sat in it, gripped it from behind, leaped over it in impressive jetes, but rather than see the chair as providing a backdrop to their actions, the musical’s author clearly wanted the audience to see the cast as a backdrop to the furniture.

I dried out over intermission so thankfully my impressions of Act Two are much more normal, but that experience of fixating on something that in retrospect was clearly of at-best tertiary importance persists; obviously I was totally off base, but maybe I was chasing some elusive insight that could unlock the greater meaning of the piece?

All of which is an excessively long intro to explain why throughout To Beseech Old Sin’s Sturm-und-Drang space opera, I was only half paying attention to the narrative and wondering how sexual harassment laws worked in the far future.

See, the story has the trappings of a Halo or a Warhammer 40k – there’s this squad of giant armored supersoldiers, who are ordered to make a desperate assault on an enemy capital ship – but the shooty-shooty business is largely underplayed, while the setting, as well as the personal and ideological stakes of the game’s main conflicts, are underexplained. I’m typically allergic to extended infodumps laying out a game’s premise in unnecessary detail, don’t get me wrong, but here I missed them, because it’s both the case that the elided details were necessary to build investment in a generic, and ultimately low-key, shootout, as well as seeming intriguing in their own right (the supersoldiers are referred to as golems, and seem to have alchemical script tattooed onto their bodies, which is part of what empowers them as sets them apart from ordinary humans? Yeah, I’d like to hear more about that).

That vagueness extended to the trio of main characters, consisting of the protagonist plus two squadmates – none of them felt like they had especially distinct personalities or voices, and making their names Greek letters fuels the genericism. And the game’s choices don’t feel especially impactful; mostly links either provide more detail or just move the story forward, and this is a low-risk mission that seems impossible to mess up too badly, so while it’s pleasant enough to click through the attractively-presented text, there isn’t grabby gameplay or any moments of high drama to liven things up.

So in the absence of more traditional engagement points to latch onto, the thing that mostly stood out to me was the contextually-inappropriate cuddling. You and your squadmates aren’t just a trio, you’re also a throuple, and seem to spend most of your downtime half-naked and spooning. And that’s fine! Office relationships can be challenging to navigate, but everybody seems into it and I’m sure space combat is super stressful so this seems like a nice, healthy way to blow off steam. Except the three of you keep up said canoodling even when the admiral commanding the squadron comes down to give you your mission briefing, which isn’t just an accident but a deliberate provocation as it’s made clear you knew she was coming but decided not to put pants on nonetheless. Sure, the admiral is presented as a romantic interest – she blushes yet seems intrigued, and your dialogue options with her range from double entendres to point five entendres – but c’mon, this is her workplace, and almost the exact same scenario plays out a second time towards the end of the game. If you really think you’re vibing ask her out for a drink once she’s off-duty, but right now this is textbook hostile work environment sexual harassment.

To stop kidding for a minute, I do get the sense that there is meant to be more depth here; the author’s note indicates that these are recurring characters, and there’s an “other stories in the anthology” link on the festival page. So I’m guessing that some other game provides more in the way of backstory for the characters, establishes deeper themes for the milieu, and otherwise offers more in the way of on-ramps for uninitiated players. Indeed, the author’s note positions To Beseech Old Sins as a lighter interlude from an overarching story that trends grim; in that context, and with more investment in the characters, I’d probably have more to focus on than the state of employment law in this imagined world. So okay, it’s still mostly my fault that I fixated on a mostly-irrelevant detail this time out, but unlike with Rent, I do think the author could have given me a little more help.

I’ve made the point before (even in another review for this festival, I think?) that dreams are typically more meaningful to experience than relate. Like, just a few weeks I had one where I was in airport, trying to get rebooked after my flight was cancelled, and then after I’d managed to wrangle a replacement ticket, upon takeoff my seat was somehow flung forward and got lodged in the cockpit window, which didn’t hurt me(?), except I uncharacteristically hadn’t fastened my seatbelt so the only thing keeping me in my now-open-air perch as we climbed and climbed was a death-grip on my armrests, which obviously wasn’t going to be sustainable, so I reached down to try to buckle myself in but wasn’t quick enough so I found myself falling, for long enough to think well this is it, all my hopes and dreams and loves are ending in just a few seconds, I’m not ready and I never got to say goodbye – and then I woke up. It shook me pretty hard, and I’m still processing some of the aftershocks, but it doesn’t at all hold together as a story; it’s just a boring dream of falling with some implausible details, and if I add in that this happened almost to the day of the fourth anniversary of my sister’s death, well, the armchair psychologizing writes itself.

You Can Only Turn Left, as you might have guessed from this intro, has to do with dreams, though it carves out some space for itself by concerning itself with overall sleep practices and sets of dream patterns, rather than just expanding one particular dream into game length. This approach means that there are some grounded sequences threaded through the narrative, which let you catch a glimpse of the protagonist’s changing life circumstances and discern something of an arc. Their very mundanity is even sort of appealing: in amidst trippy visions, engaging with the way a new job forces you to wake up super early feels like a breath of fresh air (it does make me question why the main character seems so bent on never getting a good night’s sleep, or thinks that given all this dropping acid is still a good life choice).

Breaking up the dreams like this also means there’s less need to shoehorn narrative weight where it doesn’t truly belong, instead presenting them as a series of arresting images. And the writing on a few of these does feel like it conveys something of the immanence of the original experience:

"The air was electric and the veins of your eyes became ghosts of hot pink lightning. The static shock grounded your body into the abyss and you clenched your jaw."

The title image also is one that will stick with me – it’s drawn from a science-class experiment where deformed tadpoles birth frogs with spinal issues that prevent them from swimming in more than one direction, which lends some power to what’s otherwise a clangingly obvious metaphor. The game’s presentation also deepen its impact; there’s blurry, shifting text, eyestrain-inducing background images, quick pans and flashes, that aim to alienate the player from what they’re reading.

For all that, though, I didn’t find You Can Only Turn Left escaped the oneiric trap. Like, I played the game the day before yesterday, and while the vibe was memorable, before I reviewed my notes I don’t think I could have told you a single thing that actually happens in the game; shorn of the context and structure that gives incidents their heft, you’re just left with a lot of stuff. There is some gameplay here – there are a host of choices that mostly boil down to “try to stay awake”/”try to go to sleep”, albeit without much clarity about the implications those decisions wound up having – and something of an arc, with the protagonist exiting the story seemingly better actualized and having reclaimed their ability to break out of patterns, though I couldn’t even make a retroactive guess at what led to that shift. As a result the game is I think a success as an aesthetic experience, but not so compelling as a narrative one; perhaps that’s the most that can be done with such stuff as dreams are made on.

I’m not quite sure how folks decided Bitsy should become an IF platform – from its Gameboy aesthetic, I’d imagine it’s mostly used for throwback action games? – but I’m glad that they did. Sure, its affordances seem to encourage the use of graphics and keyboard-based (but non-parser) interfaces, which I suppose aren’t the best fit for IF, but the plucky, lo-fi vibe is dead on, and every piece of Bitsy IF I’ve played has stood out from the crowd. The Truth About PRIDE! is no exception, with gameplay based on navigating a black-and-white sprite through a series of top-down labyrinths. That could describe any number of puzzle games, but here, text is clearly the central element, so yeah, it’s unique but fits comfortably into the IF tradition.

The experience on offer here is simple, as befits the presentation: you’re given a choice of six mini-mazes, each corresponding to a character in “PRIDE!” When you bump into certain icons within each of these smaller areas, you get a few sentences that aim the concept of pride, which is interpreted as a flexible acronym – the author’s chosen a few resonant words that start with each letter, like posture and professionalism, and relates them to the central concept of having confidence in and valuing yourself. You have the option of bringing the experience to a close after finishing each maze, or restarting again, and if you complete all six, you’ll pick up clues to a puzzle that unlocks a final area and a couple more small challenges.

I’ve already used the words “small” and “simple” a fair number of times in this small, simple review, but I don’t think those are critiques; the author’s kept their ambitions aligned with their design, and I spend a satisfying fifteen minutes working through it. I will say that the game’s exhortations to positivity struck me as pleasant, but not especially impactful – they’re pitched at a high level of generality so I assume just about everybody can nod along, but that means they lack the specificity that can make a moral or philosophical point linger. At the same time, I suspect part of the reason these affirmations didn’t register that strongly for me is that I’m a straight white middle-aged guy: pretty much all of Western civilization is designed to tell me that I’m important and my life and thoughts are valuable 24/7. There’s a reason why capital-p Pride was started by non-straight people, after all, and while it’s nice that the author made a game that speaks equally to more or less everyone, I think grounding it in a more particular set of experiences or perspectives could have given it more resonance.

I was into a lot of the standard nerdy stuff when I was a kid in the late 80s – DnD, Star Wars, Asimov, Tolkein, you name it. But the one that stood above all others, the one that really made my heart sing, was Star Trek. Even now there’s something about those ships, those uniforms, that idealistic mission of exploration, that deactivates my critical faculties and makes me just hum along with the theme: dum-dum-dum, dum-dumedy-dum… So when I realized that despite being a sci-fi roguelike about getting your ship from one side of a sector to another with limited crew, weapons, and fuel, Voyage of the Marigold owes a much bigger debt to Star Trek than it does to FTL, I squirmed with glee.

Even as a 43 year old, commanding a starship on a mission of mercy is an irresistible draw – and what makes it even better is the way you get to command it. I’ve played plenty of Star Trek games in my time, and enjoyed them, but hunching over a laptop and clicking the comm badge to open hailing frequencies or flailing the mouse around to try to shake an enemy warbird don’t have much gravitas. No, the actual fantasy is to command the way Kirk or Picard did, snapping off a cool “on screen, Lieutenant” or ordering “evasive maneuvers, bearing oh-three-six mark five.” Turning a marvel of sci-fi engineering and its highly-trained crew into an extension of your intellect just through language – that’s the dream, and it’s one Voyage of the Marigold completely nails.

To help you succeed in your mission of ferrying much-needed medical supplies through a nebula in the neutral zone, you’ve got a nicely graphical star-map and a status screen to show you your resources (we’re a long way from default Ink styling), the game itself is played exclusively via your captain’s log, which chronicles your exploits in note-perfect first-person narration, and drops into dialogue mode whenever it’s time to issue an order and make a decision. Your bridge crew aren’t deeply characterized – they aren’t given names, just addressed by their position – but they play their roles well, and I found the vagueness presented a blank slate onto which to project my positive associations of Sulu, Spock, Data, and the rest. The rhythm of warping into a new sector, scanning to see what’s around, planning how to avoid its dangers or take advantage of its opportunities, and then moving on to the next one, provides a pleasing gameplay loop but also nicely apes the show.

It isn’t just the trappings that reminded me of Star Trek, I should add; the game has an earnest, idealistic streak to it and plays with similar kinds of moral dilemmas. Your progress is dogged by not-Klingons and in some cases fighting is inevitable, and supplies are always tight, but throughout, you’re rewarded for seeing the humanity in even the most frightening aliens, not letting your need for resources push you to desperate measures, taking time for exploration and discovery even in the midst of an urgent mission, and respecting the Prime Directive.

That isn’t to say that it’s easy to win just playing as a goody-two-shoes, though – as befits a roguelike, the difficulty is such that I had to play three or four times before victory. That’s par for the course for the genre, and since each run is only fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s well worth giving it a few tries. But while overall I think the challenge is fair enough, there are a series of interlocking design decisions that occasionally can edge on frustration, and create some tension with the otherwise-consistent mood. Success hinges on navigating from one corner of a five-by-five grid to the other, with limited time and limited fuel, and the randomly-generated maps tend to be constricted, rather than open, with a few specific bottleneck sectors offering the only ways to make forward progress. I found it was very easy to make a wrong turn but only realize I was in a dead-end four or five warp jumps later, requiring me to burn significant resources retracing my steps. What’s worse, revisiting sectors you’ve been to before imposes a steadily-increasing morale penalty; I lost my first playthrough when the crew mutinied over being denied shore leave with only two days remaining before the plague killed millions of colonists. This morale hit feels unnecessary, since the thin margins on fuel and time are already punishment enough for backtracking, and it also jars with the professionalism of the Starfleet crews the game’s clearly trying to evoke.

My other complaint is that the deck of possible events is relatively thin; it’ll probably only take one and a half playthroughs to see just about everything except the endgame. This is fine for some of the more open-ended encounters, but some of them are closer to puzzles, offering clear correct decisions rather than context-dependent tradeoffs. As a result my engagement with the narrative layer started to erode in repeat playthroughs, impatiently clicking past descriptions of ancient civilizations and god-like energy beings since I already knew their deal.

Obviously, though, it’s not a harsh a criticism of a game to wish there was more of it. I heartily enjoyed my time with Voyage of the Marigold and was sad when my time with it came to an end – though learning I was the only Federation citizen for decades to come who received the Glexx Crown of Honor (second glass) for my humanitarian efforts helped take the sting off it. This is a gripping but feel-good game that’s precision-engineered to appeal to me, but even for folks who don’t dream about wormholes and bumpy-headed aliens and low-velocity space battles, there’s a lot here to enjoy.

I can’t think of a piece of IF that’s made me feel dumber than Doctor Jeangille’s Letters. That’s not because it’s got fiendish brainteasers or elevated-but-gnomic prose, I should say – on those scores, this epistolary mystery is accessible to a fault. No, it’s because the game’s eponymous letters are written in a script-handwriting font that after ten minutes started bothering my aging eyes, and only after I’d given myself a headache by persevering to the end did I realize 1) there’s a settings menu in the corner that allows you to shift to something more readable; and 2) I’d actually noticed this menu when I started playing, jotted down a note about the cunning way it rotates in and out of view when summoned, then promptly forgot about it. So yeah, if the game gave me eyestrain, I have only myself to blame – although, now that I think about it, if it hadn’t been so compelling it would have been easier for me to stop, close my eyes for a bit, and consider changing the font, so maybe we should just say the fault is 50/50?

The idea of telling a story entirely through letters goes back almost to the beginning of the history of the novel – partially because in a time of widespread letter-writing, the format added a touch of immediacy and verisimilitude, much as today’s works of fiction (static or interactive) may incorporate emails or social media posts as gestures towards realism, but also because making each chapter its own letter provides a clean structure that wraps up each segment of the tale while inviting the reader to flip another page and see what happens next. So it is with Doctor Jeangille’s Letters, each of which ends on some note that points towards the next exciting development to come. At first, this is simply a matter of wanting to see how the eponymous heroine gets on after she returns to her small French hometown; she’s coming back with a medical degree and a mandate to minister to the health of her former neighbors, but she’s also fleeing a scandal in the capital, one that seems to be wrapped up with the lovely Olympia, to whom her overheated missives are directed. She attempts to push pass the farmers’ wariness of a female doctor; she weathers her parents’ misguided attempts at matchmaking; she meets a charming noblewoman who’s taken up temporary residence in the town, and tries to keep Olympia from feeling jealous. Soon matters escalate beyond this domestic melodrama, however; first livestock goes missing, then one of the village’s children…

The irony powering the game’s engine is that it’s able to go big even as it’s staying small. The prose is all overheated Romantic gushing. Here’s the good doctor on her parting from Olympia:

"The breeze danced with your chestnut curls, untangling and entangling your so lovely locks. Your flushed cheeks, on which I had laid my kisses only moments earlier, were now beaded with tears. Your hand, which had refused to let me go, trembled."

Her inamorata’s eyes are “emeralds”; when she considers her grievances, “rage consumed my body inside out, for at that moment, I was only flame.” It’s gloriously over the top, and if it’s occasionally a little silly and marred by the occasional maladroit word choice, it nonetheless is deeply enjoyable, and clearly establishes the doctor’s passionate but often-ingenuous personality.

The writing nonetheless is capable of subtlety, too. Olympia’s replies to the doctor, for example, are never visible, but reading between the lines it’s possible to get glimpses of what she’s like – and my sense was that she’s decidedly more pragmatic, and observant, than her lover realizes. The choice mechanics are also understated. For most of the game, interaction involves clicking on a key sentence or two in each letter to cycle it between various options, before choosing which one to include in the letter’s final draft. These options don’t generally lead to significantly different decisions, but rather give the player a chance to add slight shading to the doctor’s impressions of someone they’ve newly met, or express either certainty or qualms about a particular course of action. This does mean that every once in a while, I was surprised by the way an obliquely-phrased choice wound up being interpreted, but on the whole that’s in keeping with the doctor’s impulsive nature.

So long as I’m listing flaws, I should say that the game’s mystery plot is not exactly a head-scratcher, and the doctor’s inability to put two and two together occasionally risks drifting across the line separating a laudable desire to think well of people from simple thick-headedness. And the ending I got was exciting and wrapped up the story well, but I was also surprised that my choices didn’t put the doctor in substantially more peril than she wound up experiencing (on the other hand, in an epistolary piece it’s a little hard to sustain suspense about the fate of the protagonist – “Dear Olympia, then I was horribly murdered” is a letter that’s not going to make it into the post – so there’s an argument for just embracing the plot-protection that comes with the format). But this is an endearing, engaging game, with likeable characters and an enjoyable interaction mechanic, so much so that I can’t even hold the eyestrain headache it gave me against it.

I don’t think it’s a kick against Thanks… to say that its opening is disorienting and dreamlike, since the author’s note reveals that it was in fact directly inspired by a dream. My first ten minutes with the game involved me muttering “oh, now I get it!” three or four times running, as I grokked each potentially-confusing bit of the setup in turn. At first I thought the protagonist was a teenager, but maybe in like a fantasy world with monsters – but eventually I figured out the game’s actually got a postapocalyptic setting and the main character’s just hiding out at a school. Then I wasn’t sure what was going on with the main character’s oddly-aggressive behavior when confronting a trio of passing scavengers, only to realize that she’s got a traumatic backstory and a unique condition (well, unique modulo (Spoiler - click to show)Memento) that actually made those responses appropriate and thematically rich. And then a couple minutes after that the game wrapped up.

There were definitely some high points to the game’s short run-time – while the writing is generally pretty straightforward and the setting and characters remain archetypal, there were details that stuck with me, like the repeated emphasis on the color of the red volleyball courts outside the school. And the choices offered effectively convey that there’s something not quite right with the protagonist, like this set of options for which of the aforementioned three scavengers to engage in dialogue:

-I looked at her for a second too long before answering.

-Something compelled me to address the whimpering man at the back.

-I didn’t want to admit that I was alone, so I turned to face the short man again.

It reminds me of a Scientology personality test I saw one time, where all the questions were like “What do you do on a Friday night? 1) I stay home by myself because I’m alienated and don’t have friends or 2) I go out and party, trying to pretend my life isn’t meaningless by pursuing hollow pleasures.”

(This is I think the first time in my life I’ve said “hey, this is just like something Scientologists do!” and meant it as a compliment).

And the setup is does arrange some conventional tropes into a promising configuration (spoiler time): (Spoiler - click to show)the zombie apocalypse generally raises the stakes and puts issues of trust front and center, and also interfaces well with the protagonist’s inability to make new memories: is it actually a blessing to be able to forget the massive trauma of the past, as the main character’s abusive ex suggests, or is there a price to be paid for disconnection from one’s past? That memory issue in turn sets up the interpersonal drama to center on whether and how the other characters, like those scavengers, might try to manipulate and take advantage of her.

Unfortunately the game’s short running time isn’t nearly enough to actually do more with this framework than establish it; there’s a final, climactic scene that adds some action, but it felt very abrupt to me, forcing catharsis and resolution on a dilemma that hadn’t had time to sink in and have any impact. Short games can be great, don’t get me wrong, but there needs to be congruence between a game’s ambition and its length; Thanks, but I don’t remember asking, I fear, has a premise that demands more elaboration than it gets. There’s certainly a risk of dulling the force of an idea by padding it out too much – and I suppose that’s especially the case here, given that nothing makes a dream more prosaic than trying to explain it at length – but I think the author needed to either expand their scope, or trim the number of themes they were working with, in order to right-size the work.

I was raised Catholic, and unsurprisingly given the wide range of material included in the Bible, I remember often being confused by what on God’s green earth some bits of scripture were trying to say. Revelation was of course both especially exciting – it’s the Avengers: Endgame of the New Testament, all sorts of cross-overs with other characters heading towards a big showdown – as well as especially bewildering, and there was one passage in particular that always stymied 10-year-old-me, an angry missive from an angel to a congregation that had fallen short in some way: “You are neither hot nor cold… because you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.” I was smart enough to recognize that this was a metaphor, but figuring out what hot and cold meant into this context was beyond me, and wasn’t spitting a kind of rude, earthy metaphor?

I still can’t claim to fully understand this verse, but if I could send A Simple Happening back to my ten year old self, it’d give me a substantial leg up. This parser game set in feudal Japan runs through every cliché you can imagine – you’re a samurai about to commit seppuku, but you have to write a death poem first, there are carp in the nearby river, you get a katana and a tanto and a shuriken, you get the drill, it’s all fine and correct enough so far as I can tell but just very vanilla. It also features an annoyingly slapstick vibe that throws away any gravitas the setup earns: you’ve been ordered to commit suicide because you threw a helmet at your lord and insulted him, for no real reason that’s ever disclosed; the ambient events that fire every turn include a member of the crowd of spectators mumbling that he’s late for another seppuku; you smash through a wooden door with your bare hands.

But! It’s also quite well implemented and paced, running through a linear series of set-pieces with aplomb, and utilizing a random-haiku-generator for that death poem bit that actually throws up a substantial percentage of hits. Even as I made my way through one deadly situation after another, I don’t think I ran into a single guess-the-verb issue, and the puzzles, while all straightforward, boast a pleasant variety. The mostly-pedestrian prose even has a few moments of real strength, like the response to taking inventory at the beginning of the game:

"On the day you’re to die, you’re holding nothing, just like the day you were born."

Admittedly this is undermined by the addition of “How poetic” at the end. No! Stop! You were doing fine! I’d be tempted to say that one line sums up the whole experience of playing A Simple Happening, except there’s one at the very end that’s even more perfect, the protagonist’s final moment of reflection:

"…you think, 'Isn’t this story just [literary reference redacted] set in feudal Japan?'"

That this is correct, and that redoing the cited work in this setting is a fine-but-not-spectacular idea, is completely besides the point – take just about any acknowledged classic and you could knock it down a peg with this exact formulation. Who cares!

So yeah, this is a lukewarm game – which isn’t just a matter of strengths and weaknesses cancelling out, but I think also the author feeling diffident (or at least projecting diffidence) about their own game. So per the angel, I’m cranky and spitting it out, but I’m also frustrated because it didn’t have to be this way: buddy, you’ve got good Inform skills and you can write when you get out of your own way! This game would be really solid if you didn’t undermine yourself at every turn! Be hot, be cold, be whatever you want, but just commit!

And er while you’re at it, watch out for seven trumps and seven seals and if you see a weird leopard thing with extra heads and feet like a bear, book it.

(This is a game with a narrative that unfolds in layers, and as a result it’s hard to talk about without engaging with some elements that seem to be meant as surprises; unmarked spoilers ahoy!)

Alltarach is an impressive Twine game that does a whole lot of things very well. The setting is perhaps the most unique element: its take on Dark Ages Ireland engages with the displacement of druidic paganism by Christianity, while taking each side of the struggle seriously and leaving more than enough room for fantasy. There’s also a large cast of appealing characters, each with their own role to play in a complex society but also boasting enough personality to feel like real people. There’s moody art, evocative writing incorporating lots of Irish, strong pacing, and a really well-done climax that introduces a satisfying twist to everything that’s come before and allows your choices to have a significant impact on the story’s resolution (or at least, it really feels like it does – the game autosaves, so no going back to check – but isn’t that all that matters?) As a result, I really really liked it!

I didn’t love it, though, so this is review is going to be one of those unsatisfying ones where I pick at a game I thought was very good and try to determine why I didn’t think it was great. Given that the word-count is going to be disproportionately devoted to nit-picking, let me emphasize that the above paragraph is not just me doing a bit; this is legit a really strong, enjoyable game, and I hope it gets the audience it deserves. And I suspect some of my reaction is down to matters of idiosyncratic preference – I was really digging the grounded historicism of the first section of the game, for example, and found myself slightly disappointed when the fantasy elements came to the fore; other players might find their reactions to that flipped.

Sticking with that shift, though, I don’t think my negative reaction is wholly down to a matter of taste. For one thing, it happens fairly abruptly and without much foreshadowing in the game’s first act, in which the game’s protagonist, an orphaned teenager living on a tiny fishing-dependent island, realizes that her brother has abandoned her and makes grounded preparations to voyage to the mainland and track him down. There are other youths with whom she shares a history (and maybe a flirtation or two), scant possessions to gather, a prized sheep to make arrangements for, and a colloquy with a priest that establishes some of the axes of conflict in this alien world. It’s an effective prologue, so I was taken aback when some mid-journey dialogue established that the brother was under an apparently-effective magical geas preventing him from setting foot on Ireland proper – and then even more taken aback when almost the first person I met upon arrival was the god of the dead himself. True, he’s come down in the world quite a lot what with the rise of Christianity, but still, this felt like a major escalation without much buildup.

Beyond this matter of craft, the density of supernatural people and occurrences – seriously, you wind up meeting at least one major figure from Irish folklore a day – seems sufficiently high that it calls into question the success Saint Patrick appears to have had; there’s no indication that the protagonist is at all special in terms of attracting more supernatural attention than normal (if anything, as a Christian herself, she might be getting less?) but surely the living presence of the old gods would inhibit the adoption of a new one? What’s even more challenging to the story’s integrity is that the player doesn’t get a sense of how this impacts the protagonist’s beliefs: her faith is established as perhaps a bit flexible in that opening act, as much born out of adherence to her dead parents’ wishes as sincere personal engagement with Christianity. But at least in my playthrough, none of the things she experiences causes her to question her allegiance.

Some of this may be due to the authors’ reluctance to characterize the main character and therefore make it harder for players to project themselves into her, I suppose. But I’m not a big fan of that approach to player characters in general, and it seems especially ill-suited for this story, which is no generic quest narrative. And it’s not just the question of religion: the protagonist often felt like a cipher to me. It wasn’t until a throwaway comment in the ending sequence that I realized that she was meant to be deathly afraid of the sea since her parents were killed while sailing during a storm; that hadn’t come through at all during the extended voyage sequence. I also hit a moment in my playthrough where during a conversation with a nun, she was struck by the twin revelations that a) lesbianism existed and b) she was probably one – but as far as I can tell this is never mentioned again.

That’s not the only thing that falls by the wayside as the game progresses. Much of the well-drawn supporting cast largely exits the narrative halfway through, and while there are newcomers who are no less interesting, I have to confess this reduced my engagement. There’s also an inventory system that feels like it has real weight early on – this is a society where most people have very few possessions – but that likewise didn’t seem to have any impact after reaching the convent.

The final thing that kept me at arm’s length was the occasional inscrutability of the game’s prose. I’m fine with confusing writing when it sets a mood or serves a purpose – I will never shut up about how much I love Queenlash – but I sometimes found myself baffled by unclear pronoun referents or glancing references that I think I was supposed to get. Here’s a bit where the protagonist is reflecting on her brother’s flight:

"The suggestion of the mainland comes to you again. Men in golden chariots, wheeling around bellowing dreadful cries of vengeance, the great brown bull loose amongst them. But also culture, indigenous and Roman, hiding in their fortresses and churchyards. He wouldn’t fit in there, but nor would he much care. Stubborn, like yourself."

The game doesn’t provide any clues I found to decode that second sentence, and I really can’t parse the third at all. Or later:

"When the sailors are red-faced and tired enough and the hooker swaying with the weight of her cargo, the captain, a big, weatherbeaten man who looks half-squid, barks an “all aboard” and stares down at the druidess."

I guess the hooker is the boat, but it seems like there’s a tense change happening somewhere in the middle? This isn’t a matter of the occasional typo, I don’t think; just an element of the writing style that I think adds enough friction to exacerbate some of the other things that occasionally took me out of the story.

That’s a lot of critique, so let me toggle back now and wrap up with some praise, because I really did want to be beguiled by this story, and sometimes was, especially in that first section which I think is the strongest. Here’s one of the first descriptions, of your tiny little hovel:

"You stumble into the kitchen area. Like the rest of the little cottage, the walls are bare stone, unpainted and unornamented, and in the centre is the hearth where last night’s sad embers, smoored with ash, struggle on. You look away reflexively, flushed with the shame of knowing that it’s not the same fire that Mam had tended every night since she moved to the island; you had let it die, not long after it happened, and for a long time you lay barely sleeping with him in a hollowed home, damp and dark, wind groaning through every crack. Now you keep it diligently, even though it still feels like someone else’s responsibility."

That’s a great, grounded way of showing the impact of grief with some efficient world-building on the side.

And I really did like many of the characters – I’m not surprised everyone seems to have a crush on Ailbhe – and some of the creative worldbuilding touches – it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Brigid wasn’t just the goddess, but somehow was also the saint of the same name, which is really cleverly done. Again, a lot of the ingredients here are excellent; there’s something about the recipe that didn’t fully click for me, but I do appreciate the care that went into making it.

So this is a slightly strained parallel, maybe, but you know Evil Dead 2? The title makes it sound like a sequel, but actually it’s more of a remake, taking the same basic ingredients from the first movie (cabin in the woods, Necronomicon, first-person POV zombies, Bruce Campbell) and redeploying them with significantly higher production values. It’s the same story with The Case of the Solitary Resident, which is recognizably of a piece with Last Vestiges, the author’s IF Comp entry from last year, sharing a locked-door-murder premise and a focus on forensic deduction while moving to Twine, incorporating visuals, and better communicating its expectations to the player. While even in its more accessible form this gameplay paradigm is still a bit dry, the end result is a satisfying intellectual puzzle.

I sometimes struggled with Last Vestiges because it looked like a more conventional mystery than it wound up being – in particular, there were a series of standard adventure-game logic puzzles that gated progression, which made it seem like solving those would likewise solve the mystery. However, that just provided the raw clues; actually understanding what happened also required bringing medical knowledge to bear, and while a police-inspector NPC was on hand to provide some of that information, their expertise wasn’t clearly telegraphed, and accessing that information was made challenging by the open-ended parser interface. Solitary Resident improves in both areas, eliminating the out-of-context game-y elements to focus on its core competencies, while using the affordances of its choice-based interface to make clear what kind of data you need to gather and how you can get it analyzed.

The real strength here is the high level of detail; you can search for blood, hair, and fingerprints in each room of the victim’s apartment, as it becomes clear that poison may have had something to do with her demise, you’ve got lots of tools to come to grips with what’s happened, including sending samples off to the crime lab and two different keyword-driven reference manuals. Beyond that, you can also get formal statements from half a dozen or so suspects, and then question them to push on key elements of their stories (this is the one place where the otherwise-smooth interface falters – I was stymied for a bit after launching my first interview since I didn’t realize that I could go back for Q+A after reading the initial statement). Chasing down every single lead requires paying close attention to everything you’ve learned, and a few use text-box input to make sure you can’t just lawnmower your way to victory – I felt very satisfied when the game told me I’d found all 16 clues after finishing the game and aced the multiple-choice test where you lay out your theory of the case, since I’d had to use my noodle to get there.

My only real critique is that the forensic side of things feels like it far overwhelms the personal elements of investigation. The suspect interviews are much more straightforward than the evidence-gathering gameplay, and none of the characters – the victim very much included – never threaten to feel like real people. That perhaps fits the author’s design goals (the game is tagged as “educational”, and a few references within it suggest that it’s at least partially intended as a more-engaging experiential-learning alternative to textbooks), but does feel like something of a missed opportunity – a few more colorful characters to liven things up wouldn’t undermine the pedagogical possibilities, I don’t think. This head-down approach to detective-work also winds up making the solution to the locked-door mystery easier to guess: (Spoiler - click to show)when the thinly-sketched suspects are a son who needs money but clearly could have just asked for it rather than tried to hurry his inheritance, an old business associate who had a moderately-intense falling-out with the victim a decade ago, a neighbor who has no conceivable motive whatsoever, another neighbor who had a strained relationship with the victim since she was annoyed by his smoking habit, and a near-comatose ex-husband, it doesn’t take too many little gray cells to realize this was an accident and not murder.

If there’s a third game in the sequence, I think I’d enjoy it more if it paid more attention to the personalities involved and created as much suspense around the question of who did the killing, as around how it was accomplished. A full-comedy installment a la the third Evil Dead movie, Army of Darkness, is probably not needed here, though – the authors have cracked their formula and there’s plenty of room to keep playing with it.

In my experience, an amusement park appearing halfway into a game that hasn’t previously established said amusement park as part of its premise is typically a sign that the author has given up on their own theme (OK, my experience here starts and ends with Sorcerer). So I have to confess I winced when I stumbled out of Zomburbia’s haunted bayou and came upon a zombie midway – but then I smiled when I got to the description of the bumper cars, where zombies wearing trash cans ran around bumping into each other while burbling motor noises with their decaying lips. Sure, this is a bit old-school for my tastes and maybe not great game design in some abstract sense, but it’s so good-natured and entertaining, it’s impossible to stay mad.

To subject Zomburbia to a degree of pretentious literary theory that it is probably too innocent to deserve, the midway could be synecdoche for the whole: this is a decidedly 80’s style adventure, complete with inventory limits, hair-trigger unwinnability, and a find-the-deed-to-the-haunted-mansion-you-just-inherited plot (someday one of these games will inform the heir that if getting the deed is going to be too much trouble they can just go to the county registrar to get a replacement; sadly SUE ESTATE LAWYER FOR MALPRACTICE goes unimplemented).

I am typically somewhat allergic to such things, and I have to admit that I gritted my teeth the first couple of times I borked a playthrough by not knowing the exact right actions to take in a five-move timed section, or found myself juggling items between my pockets, my backpack, and the ground in an area I wasn’t going to be able to revisit. But Zomburbia’s bark is worse than its bite – notably, there’s an option to allow the SCORE command to tell you whether you’ve made the game unwinnable, and typically an UNDO or two will be enough to get you back on the right path. There are roving zombies, but they’ll typically ignore you for at least a couple of turns, and again a single UNDO will rescue you from their clutches. Similarly, while the game suggests that there’s an overall time limit setting a clock on your adventures, this is either a head-fake or just set at an absurdly generous level so that it adds flavor without frustration. And eventually its goofy enthusiasm won me over.

Make no mistake, there are some rough edges here – there’s a lot of unimplemented scenery, some guess-the-verb issues (PSA: you can’t POINT or AIM the laser pointer at anything, instead you have to SHINE it), at least one read-the-author’s-mind puzzle (or at least if there’s a clue about how to get past the muscle zombie, I missed it), and I found a couple bugs, though the author was responsive about fixing the one I flagged (including a game-breaking one where (Spoiler - click to show)the steamboat didn’t start sinking even after I blew up the boiler – fortunately I had a convenient save and I believe that's also now seen an update).

But look, this is a game where a skeleton band plays “I Left My Heart (in the Other Room)”, which boasts an actually good dumbwaiter puzzle, a giant alligator out of Peter Pan and ooky spooky ghosts out of the Haunted Mansion, and the world’s politest hedge-maze (it has a sign out front telling you you don’t need to bother mapping it!) If you have any affection at all for throwback puzzlers, Zomburbia is a great excuse to put on a headband and a Member’s Only jacket, slide a Van Halen cassette into your boombox, and enjoy a nostalgia trip that’s actually better than we had it back in the day.

I hope nobody reading my reviews is under the misapprehension that I ever strive for, much less achieve, objectivity, but I figure it’s probably worth acknowledging when I’m coming to a game with an especially large bias: I am a complete sucker for 18th Century stuff, and this game’s Blurb With Frequently Capitalized Words, use of “&c.” for etc., and broadsheet-style fonts are speaking one of my love languages. Now, this can sometimes be a double-edged sword, because it means I started playing with high expectations and a nagging dread that they might be dashed. Happily, that is not at all the case, so much so that I’m quite sure Rescue at Quickenheath will delight even those benighted souls who don’t have strong feelings about perukes, coffee-shops, and Tristram Shandy.

Admittedly, part of what makes the game work is that it doesn’t wear its setting too heavily; this is a fantasy-tinged take on Georgian London where the fae have an embassy, for one thing, and the author’s note disclaims any pretense of historical realism. Still, there are enough authentic touches to lend some nice flavor, from the sensationalized news coverage that relates the backstory (you’re a highwayman whose partner in crime has been nabbed and is slated for execution in a few hours – thus the need for the eponymous rescue) to the acknowledgment that the execution really should be happening at Tyburn Cross rather than the titular Quickenheath. The language also strikes a solid middle-ground; the prose eschews complex18th-Century sentence structure in the interests of readability and pacing, but the entertainingly flippant narration still seems a fit for the story, like this description of a prison:

"In all your years of highway robbery, you’ve never been captured or arrested, so this delightful little escapade marks your first view of the inside of a prison. You can’t say you think much of it. It’s a little bit damp, and not even with the poetic, angst-ridden kind of damp, merely the boring kind."

(OK, that dig at poets is maybe aimed more at the Romantic era, but it still works).

The characters are likewise relatable without feeling like they’re jarring with the setting, albeit it helps that the only ones who are fleshed out are the main duo of outside-of-society criminals and a number of faeries. These latter don’t have the alien, cruel bent that characterizes the oldest fairy stories, but they are an appealing bunch nonetheless – my favorite was a bewhiskered fairy who responded to my overly-audacious plots with a litany of “don’t say that!”s and “dreadful, dreadful.”

The gameplay also takes a middle course. While Rescue at Quickenheath isn’t a full parser-like choice game, for the first two-thirds of the story can you can freely navigate between different locations, and there are puzzles to be solved – a couple inventory puzzles, a riddle or two, a hidden password… The game does a good job of implying that there are high stakes for getting these right, though after having failed a couple, I think this is something of a bluff, and even if you fail fate will contrive to keep you on course – which is appropriate to the game’s easygoing vibe.

Do I have some quibbles? Of course I do! There were a few times where I wished the game did take its own conceits a little more seriously –in particular, there’s one moment towards the end that seems to undermine a key plot element having to do with your unfortunate partner (Spoiler - click to show)( (after having made such a big deal of True Names, surely it’s not great that you blab out their new True Name in the middle of a hostile crowd?). And since much of the real drama of the game turns on the two main characters working up the gumption to reveal their feelings for each other, I felt the lack of any real barriers that would have prevented them from doing so earlier.

There are minor, minor complaints, though, ones that I noted in passing out of a sense of intellectual rigor, but which did nothing to reduce my enjoyment of the game. Rescue at Quickenheath is a pure romp, accessible while remaining true to its inspirations. And hey, it might even work as a gateway drug for people who are 18th-Century curious…

Lately I’ve been thinking about my approach to a reviewing for an article I’m working on for The Rosebush, and in particular my hesitation about reviewing games submitted to the increasing number of excitingly-themed jams. These are often shorter games by newer authors, and I think are frequently trying to do things other than just competently execute standard IF tropes, all of which should be up my alley (for evidence see my just-written review of Dragon of Steelthorne, where I spend 1,200 words moping about an entirely competent bit of IF!) But I know that jam games are also typically written in a short period of a time, might be pretty narrowly focused, and are sometimes more about communicating one key idea or trying to provoke one specific response rather than building out robust implementation. Which is all fine, but really at odds with my reviewing style, which tends towards the overly-detailed, the nitpicky, and (above all else) the verbose – it seems unfair and unedifying to subject that kind of scrutiny at games that are not really asking, or designed, for it.

All of which is to say that I’m going to try hard here to play against type and write a short review that doesn’t excessively harp on my complaints. So: Do Good Deeds… is a relatively compact Twine game that tells a sweet, fable-like story of an unlovely elf who makes friends with a bunch of animals who are initially wary of him. He helps a hare escape a hunter’s snare, comforts a rat who’s afraid of his own shadow, rescues a drowning porcupine, and more, all illustrated with appealing cartoon-style pictures. There are some light puzzles, like picking the right object to use to resolve these various situations, but there are no penalties for guessing wrong, and all the choices reduce to either being helpful or ignoring the animals’ distress, so the overall vibe here is very gentle.

It’s the kind of game that might be good to introduce a younger kid to IF, in other words – for them, the moralistic, didactic streak might even be a strength? – and even though that’s obviously not me, that’s still something I can appreciate. But there are two disastrous issues. First, the prose is riddled with typos, infelicities, and confusing verbiage; per the last paragraph, I’m not going to pick on any specific examples, but trust me that every single passage led to me furrowing my brow at the language at least once. I’m not sure whether the author’s primarily language is something other than English, which might explain some of these issues – and I recognize that’s a hard problem – but there are also a bunch that a basic spell and grammar check would have caught, which would have drastically improved the game’s readability.

Second, Do Good Deeds… uses more timed text than any game I can think of off the top of my head. Again, it’s in just about every single passage, and it is very slow, with no facility for altering the speed. The game also has a small readable window, with no visible scroll bars, all of which combined to make progressing through the game frequently tortuous, as I clicked on links, waited for the timed text, realized it had moved past the window, tried to drag-scroll down the page and overshoot, then tap the arrow key to try to scroll back, only to see that the timed text was still crawling snail-like to the end… it’s excruciating, and as a result it probably took me an hour to play this 15-ish minute game, since I ultimately starting alt-tabbing away to kill time doing other things in between every click.

As with Octopus’s Garden, I can’t help but feel that having just one or two testers would have made a world of difference here; their feedback could have hopefully helped the author recognize where some changes were needed, which would have made for a far better game. So I’ll close this uncharacteristically-terse review with three uncharacteristically-terse pieces of advice for what seems to be a new author who shows some promise: 1) always get testers (the IntFic forum is great for that!); 2) always spell-check; 3) never used time text without a really good reason, and recognize that “it’ll make the player slow down and really concentrate on the writing!” is not a good reason because you’ll actually achieve the opposite.

I had some trepidation going into Dragon of Steelthorne, born of my previous experience with a fantasy-themed ChoiceScript game – in 2023 IFComp entry One Knight Stand (colon part one colon the beginning of the end), the character-creation process takes the better part of an hour, and requires you to set such minutiae as the color of your favorite mug – so I was pleasantly surprised to see that here it was just a matter of picking a gender, picking a name (entertainingly, “Maurice” was one of the default options; I couldn’t resist), and choosing your class among fighter, cleric, and… engineer?

What distinguishes this mostly-generic fantasy realm, you see, is that it’s a little bit steampunk – the protagonist is a military commander in an empire that’s mastered construction of armored landships, and is using them as the backbone of a campaign of expansion. With a city-management minigame that kicks off once you establish a new base, a combat system where you leverage your previously-generated resources and manpower to win battles, and the usual Choice of Games coterie of friends and advisors with whom to curry favor, Dragon of Steelthorne would risk feeling overstuffed but for its pacing, which whisks you to the next bit of the plot whenever things start to drag. It’s all well enough executed, but bland prose and an even blander story, which doesn’t execute well-worn tropes so much as it just gestures at them, mean that the game didn’t leave much of an impression on me.

The deadly flaw of Dragon of Steelthorne is that it rarely gets specific. Here, for example, is the description of your character’s travel to the abandoned city they’re tasked with recolonizing for the empire:

"Time seems to fly as you pass a seemingly endless stretch of flora and fauna, with day rapidly turning to night, night to day, and day to night again."

A bit later on, you get a choice of spending time building your relationship with one of your advisors. I picked Chang, a mercenary from the awkwardly-Asian-themed empire next door – they’re obsessed with honor, have a Great Wall, and their emperor has as one of his titles “Mandate of Heaven”, it’d risk coming across slightly offensive but for the fact that the “western” empire is a similar deracinated hodge-podge of signifiers. Anyway unlike some of the other characters, who include other officers you’ve been serving with for a long time as well as your sister, Chang is a stranger, and from an alien culture, so surely this would be an opportunity for an interesting exchange of views and getting to know each other better? Nah:

"Chang initially seems surprised when you strike up a conversation with him. Nevertheless, he spends the afternoon talking about his adventures, while pointing out interesting bits of scenery every now and then. As evening finally approaches, he thanks you earnestly for your company before heading down."

In fairness, Chang does at least have a tragic backstory, which he parcels out over further meetings; most of the rest of the crew lack that, coming across as mildly-flavored bowls of oatmeal, ranging from a plucky servant to a reckless commander. The only one of your group who struck me as an actual character is your sister, who’s lazy, violent, and treacherous (this is of course the personality type that feudal aristocracies actually produce, of course, so kudos for accuracy there).

I also found myself not very engaged by the two minigames. In both city management and combat, you’re given incomplete information about your capabilities – you know the cost of new buildings and which stats they’ll increase, but not by how much, and you’re likewise given numbers of the different troop types, but their relative strength is only rendered in qualitative terms, and it’s not clear whether there’s any rock/paper/scissors effects impacting their effectiveness. This means that they’re not very satisfying as abstract games – I felt like I was making decisions based on insufficient mechanical information. That could have been an intentional choice, forcing the player to read carefully and base their decisions on narrative factors rather than openly-disclosed statistics, but if that’s meant to be the case I found the game’s loose allegiance to realism undermined the effect. Like, in the tutorial combat, I was faced with a horde of cavalry, so I sensibly decided to counter with my pikemen; to my horror, I read that rather than setting themselves against the charge, instead they decided to try to chase down the horsemen, and then to my greater horror I read that this actually wound up working okay.

Fortunately, then, these strategy elements wind up being so-much opt-in busywork – all of the fights are easily avoidable, and in fact in all but one case it was obvious that peace was the far better option, so the only reason to engage with the combat is if you’re role-playing as a short-sighted hothead. And since as far as I can tell the only narrative impact of the city-builder stuff is how many troops you get, the stakes are low there too (admittedly, I was playing on the Easy difficulty; things might get trickier at the harder level, but new players are strongly pushed to avoid that one).

Also on the plus side, while I found the gameplay and the characters somewhat soporific, the core narrative, while likewise feeling quite generic, has some moments of excitement and twists and turns that, while tropey, land reasonably well. To its credit, it avoids the post-Game of Thrones thing of having war crimes be edgy and cool; at one point, a character violates the laws of war and it’s clearly a mistake, generating disquiet and a loss of trust from previously-allied characters. That sets up the finale, where I found the momentum faltered at last; the narrative suggested that I’d have a bunch of options, including allying with various factions or attempting different stratagems, but in the event I could only kowtow to the bad guy or flee ignominiously. I suspect this might have been because my approach to relationship-building was to spread out my attention and shore up weakness – I tried to spend more time with people I was afraid would backstab me – so I never triggered “high relationship” with anyone, which I think cut me off from those previewed options. As a result, I missed out on the possibility of a stirring conclusion that tied things together; my playthrough of Dragon of Steelthorne mostly just petered out, which I guess is of a piece with the rest of it.

For all that, I should say that for someone who likes generic fantasy more than I do, or who’s better versed in the CoG house style, this review might be better seen as praising with faint damnation than damning with faint praise; the lack of specificity and straightforward gameplay do make the game go down easy, and it isn’t afraid to get to the point, with most decisions feeling like they have clear, quick impact (again, it’s much better on this front than One Knight Stand!) But even by those standards I think Dragon of Steelthorne would have improved by a more distinctive prose style, more memorable characters, more robust gameplay, and a little more creativity and willingness to get weird or difficult.

Octopus’s Garden has a lovely premise – octopi in real life have been known to crawl out of their aquariums and get up to shenanigans, so getting to play as one who’s bored of the view from their tank makes for a delightful spin on the parser-game-set-in-an-apartment theme. There’s also a lot of creativity in the implementation, down to the ability for you to wear a baseball cap and play with squeeze-toys just because that would be fun, and a short set of puzzles that lean into an octopus’s strengths and weaknesses, with one that made me feel quite clever when I sussed it out (Spoiler - click to show)(getting the undergarments from the clothesline). There are some elements that are a bit of a stretch – the octopus has a much greater understanding of human behavior and the environment than you’d think, and there’s a subplot about the apartment owners’ sex lives that turns out to be plot-important but is maybe slightly ill-judged. I wish I could say this adds up to a short but engaging romp – but sadly Octopus’s Garden is also weighed down by a bunch of gameplay niggles, design oversights, and typos.

Some of these are actions that seem cued but go unimplemented; they’re not game-critical, sure, but they shook me out of the fantasy of playing as an octopus. The description of the filtration unit in your tank says you disassembled the previous one, for example, but DISSASSEMBLE isn’t recognized as a command, nor do PULL, OPEN, TURN, or TAKE FILTER get you anything but the disappointing default Inform responses when you try to fiddle with scenery. Similarly, if you check out the plastic pirate and treasure chest on the aquarium’s floor, it says it opens automatically, and OPEN CHEST tells you it’ll happen soon if you just wait – but it never does (can’t TAKE or THROW it either, though once again the narration says you liked to do that to previous tank decorations). And you can’t PLAY with your toys.

Similarly, there are some inconsistencies in object names – “tub” is unsurprisingly an acceptable substitute for “bathtub”, but if you try to turn on the water you have to distinguish its faucet from that of the sink, and in that case the shorthand is rejected and the player’s forced to type out “bathtub’s faucet.” A window is described as locked, but you can only X LATCH, not X LOCK. There’s an area where the location description doesn’t tell you which direction the exit lies. And while there aren’t many flat-out misspellings, there are a fair number of missing words or other grammar issues.

Admittedly, these issues are comparatively niggling, but I found my frustrations multiplying as I got into the endgame. While the main part of the game simply involves exploring the space, you eventually find an object that, if your owner finds it, will convince her to move, and therefore get you a fresh view (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers, but I’ll say that while I think the chain of deduction that you go down to figure this out is clever, it’s nothing an octopus could ever understand; it’s not the biggest deal in a lighthearted game, but it is the kind of tension the phrase “ludonarrative dissonance” was coined to describe). Trouble is, after I’d found the item, stashed it somewhere she would be likely to find it, cleaned up after myself, and secreted myself back in my tank, the game stubbornly refused to end, or give any indication of what I was missing.

Thankfully there are hints included, so I was able to get back on track – turns out the goal state involves the owner coming into the room to find the item, which requires you to lure her into the room with a loud noise. But as far as I could tell there’s no in-game indication that this is required, much less any suggestion that the owner’s in the apartment rather than having gone out to go to work or run some errands. That wasn’t even the end of my troubles: you aren’t given enough time to sneak back into your aquarium after triggering the noise, and while the obvious solution is to leap off a dresser rather than clamber down it step by step, JUMP is just mapped to GO DOWN and JUMP OFF and its variants go unimplemented. After consulting the hints again, it turned out that I had exactly the correct idea, but for some reason the only way to make a precipitous descent was to close the dresser drawers under me and then try to go down, instead of directly trying to jump.

Here’s the thing though: just as an octopus’s distributed consciousness allows its limbs to act semi-independently while still being part of a single organism (seriously, they have nervous tissue throughout their bodies, octopi are really cool), I have a suspicion that this litany of complaints, from holes in implementation to occasionally-clumsy writing to the read-the-author’s-mind finale, actually boils down to just one oversight: nobody appears to have tested Octopus’s Garden besides the author.

I might be wrong, of course, but there’s robust ABOUT text with thanks to the creators of Inform 7, so if there were testers and they just went uncredited, that would be an odd oversight. If that’s the case, then I have to admit that this is an astonishingly impressive achievement; when I see a parser game without testers I expect game-breaking bugs, broken English, and a sophomoric plot. Octopus’s Garden’s flaws are minor in comparison, basically adding up to a low-level annoyance that some of the standard impedimenta of parser gaming got in the way of my cephalopœdal frolics and made them less enjoyable than I wanted them to be. Even in the form we’ve gotten it it’s a fun, unique game – but I’ve gone on so much about its negatives because I’m disappointed not to have played the superior version we would have gotten if it had followed the number one rule of writing parser IF.

(Much of the interest of this game comes from the way its mechanics are introduced, tweaked, and woven into the narrative; spoiler-blocking all of them would add too many redactions to this review, so I’m leaving them unmarked and will just caution that you might want to give the game a play-through before reading this review).

I’ve grown increasingly wary of “worldbuilding” as I age – in sci-fi, it often feels like techno-fetishism substituting for political analysis, and in fantasy it often feels like it’s just sanding the interesting bits off of history – but every once in a while, I nonetheless stumble across a sentence whose understated implications send my brain whirling off into speculation about what kind of society could create it. “There is unfortunately no room for art of any kind in the Database of Subsumed Cultures”, the introductory text to PROSPER.0 tells us; we don’t know how those cultures got subsumed, why your employer, CORPOTECH, is compiling such a database, and whether “there is no room” is a technical constraint or a value judgment.

Any set of answers you imagine to those questions makes this a dark setup: the nameless protagonist has to scour an intergalactic factbook in the wake of a computer error that’s corrupted some of the data, tasked with deleting the occasional eruption of poetry into the realm of pure statistics. If you’re inclined to rebel and say “I would prefer not to”, of course there’s a supervisor monitoring your terminal and ready to fire you if you step out of line; between the surveillance, the bland corporate-speak of your directives, and a UI that’s functional in both senses of the term, the task of evaluating information about species as exotic as the Drumnisllonans, “humanoid beings with shelled-octopus parasites for heads” and who live more than half a million years, becomes the purest bureaucratic tedium.

After a few go-rounds demonstrate the blithe disregard the system takes of permanently erasing these species’ contributions to the lyrical arts from the database, though, a mysterious interlocutor contacts the player’s terminal and opens up the possibility of resistance – and likewise opens up PROSPER.0’s central gameplay mechanic. You’re now able to “harvest” the words in the poems by clicking them as the database’s automated deletion routine runs, at which point you can use the rescued words to write something that will be preserved: either recapitulate the original, now-lost poem as best you can, or reconfigure the language to create something new (or anything in between).

The interface for all of this is generally well done. The writing UI, in particular, thoughtfully adds buttons for common punctuation and line breaks, which allows for finer control of meter and a more elegant visual presentation of your creations. The harvesting interface is a little messier, though – while there are some configuration options that allow you to tone down the difficulty, I found the default deletion speed was relatively fast, and attempting to click on particular words was very challenging on my trackpad. As a result I generally just clicked on from the beginning of each poem as quickly as I could, which sometimes felt awkward as my browser sometimes interpreted double-clicks as an attempt to highlight things, but did seem to maximize my crop of vocabulary.

The game doesn’t judge your creations – that would be quite the trick – but it does provide some prompts and context that I found made the mechanic more engaging than just fiddling with magnetic poetry. I generally found myself trying to capture the poems word for word, seeing my task as basically a historical one, but later in the game you face harsh limits on the number of words you can collect, or write, for a particular poem, which pushed me to take different approaches.

I haven’t talked much about the poems themselves yet. I liked them, but found them elusive, I think intentionally so given how they were produced (the author took public-domain poems and chain-translated them through several languages before coming back to English; they’re also stripped of much punctuation and any line breaks). This provides the player with enough of a blank slate to make alterations while preserving some of the imagery and force of the originals, but I found it also smeared out subtleties and made them sound oddly similar, which was at odds with the conceit that these were the products of distinct cultures. The game makes sure you get the facts about the species of each poem’s author, but these never felt all that connected to the texts. Like, can you tell this poem was written by an authoritarian tree?

In front of me now I see him rise… A face that has been snowing for seventy years With winter, where the kind blue eyes While hospital fires are lit: A little gray man who had a big heart, And great with learned knowledge of necessity; Heart, the harsh world has served its purpose, That never stopped bleeding.

Or that this metaphysical excerpt came from a notably materialist culture?

Some will accuse you of taking it away from them. Verses that may inspire them that day When the ears become blind, they become blind. The lightning left me and I was able to find it. There’s nothing to sing but kings. Helmets, knives, half-forgotten things Like your memories.

The game lampshades this, to its credit – in one late-game dialogue with your mysterious benefactor, it asks “Do you think that these poems, created by the races themselves, truly encapsulate the entirety of the spirit of their own people? We’re all simply doing our best to reflect back the most miniscule portion of existence in a way that rings true, aren’t we?” Which is entirely fair, and again seems to be giving the player permission to muck about, but does underplay the importance of culture in a game that otherwise makes quite a big deal of it.

The final set of challenges are in fact notably freeform: the user who’s been contacting you (it’s a rogue AI, because of course it is) tells you you’re part of its plan to bring down the evil corporation, and asks you if you want to join the plot. If so, the last “poem” is actually a bit of computer security code that you can delete and reconfigure into free verse. It’s an arresting idea – a digital equivalent of flowers growing in the ruin of a tank – but in practice I found it less engaging, because the words that make up the program are pretty dry. More resonant for me was the branch where you say no thank you to the revolution; in that case, you go on a tour through all the previous poems you’ve made, harvesting pieces from them in turn in order to create one culminating valedictory work.

I’ve been doing more describing of the game here than I usually do in my reviews; partially that’s because it uses a novel mechanic that’s worth explicating in detail, but partially it’s a sign that I have mixed feelings about its effectiveness. I found PROSPER.0 interesting and worthwhile, but ultimately I think it awkwardly straddles the line between story and toy (which the inclusion of a separate “arcade mode” allowing you to just mess around with the poetry without worrying about the plot perhaps acknowledges); the relationship between the poetry challenges and PROSPER.0’s rebellion isn’t sketched in enough to feel compelling, and the poems, and the picture we get of their authors, are too chilly for their loss to truly register as a tragedy. But if the game is slighter than it could be from an emotional point of view, it’s nonetheless of considerable intellectual interest and an impressive achievement in game-ifying poetry – in fact I’m eager to jump over to the thread where folks are posting their poems so I can share my own inventions – and I’d be excited to see this mechanic used in other games that take an earthier approach to things.

(I beta tested this game)

So far in this festival we’ve seen games that seem to be about politics but aren’t (Potato Peace, Pass a Bill) and games that seem to be about politics and are (Social Democracy, Dragon of Steelthorne sorta); Loose Ends completes the set, being a game that doesn’t seem to be about politics but actually 100% is (I suppose there are also a bunch of games that neither seem to be nor are about politics, but that’s a singularly unedifying line of inquiry). It’s about vampires, you see, but not just any vampires: these are the Kindred of the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: the Masquerade, which can be played in a variety of styles ranging from angsty personal horror (…or so I’ve heard) to superheroes with fangs (definitely played in a few campaigns like this), but always foregrounds the complex web of relationships, feuds, and factions that dominates the endless unlives of the titular immortals.

The game does a good job of letting you slowly wade into the deep end of the pool, though. You’re a newcomer to town who gets hired for a classic Vampire task, a Masquerade cleanup: some chump of a vampire’s revealed their supernatural powers to mortals, leaving witnesses and evidence, and it’s up to you to preserve the secrecy of undead society by seeing to the requisite disappearances and threats. The early stages of the game therefore unfurl as an investigation, as you follow the schmendrick’s tracks and try to figure out exactly how big of a mess has been made. But it doesn’t take long to realize that, again in classic V:tM style, the job isn’t on the level and by nosing around, you’ve inadvertently put yourself into grave (groan) danger. As the game progresses, gameplay shifts from finding evidence or persuading witnesses to strategizing about trading favors: there are a wealth of characters representing a wide number of factions, most of whom hate each others’ guts, and sharing resources, information, or promises with some of them will help unlock secrets, or lend you mundane or supernatural aid. It all comes to a crescendo in a final conflict that turns less on whether you’ve sussed out the mystery than if you’ve made any allies who’ll care enough to keep you from getting squashed by a bug.

The interface does a good job of helping you master the array of options and information at your disposal; each night, you’re given a choice of locations to visit, and also the chance to review your resources and what you’ve learned. Gameplay largely proceeds via standard choice-based gameplay, but with clearly-marked places where your choice of focus attributes and vampire powers unlock new options. When it comes time to offer a favor, you always have a chance to back down and change your mind; likewise, while the game does have an overall time limit, it’s fairly forgiving and runs partially according to the rules of drama rather than a strict clock. As a result the game feels quite fair, even as the social-engineering puzzle it presents can be quite challenging to navigate.

The characters are a highlight, brought to life by evocative prose and well-chosen dialogue. They tend a bit to the stereotypical, if you’ve played the tabletop game, since most stand in as single representatives for their faction, but they’re all well done, and there are some who stand out as individuals, like the freethinking university professor or the alchemy-dabbling painter and her making-a-series-of-bad-decisions lover. And I’d imagine they make the cavalcade of political groups a little easier to navigate for newcomers to the World of Darkness, by personalizing the factions – in fact overall I think the game does a good job of explaining itself and not presupposing prior knowledge of the setting (if anything, I might have wrong-footed myself through my familiarity with older versions of Vampire: in my first playthrough, I caught wind of the hideout of a Sabbat cabal. Seeing as they’re a sect of vampires whose cruelty and fanaticism are so extreme that I’m struggling to come up with a plausible real-world analogy, I steered well clear. But when I visited them in a subsequent save-file there was just a tense conversation waiting for me, reflecting I think that the Sabbat have been toned down in recent editions).

I can still see Loose Ends not being for everyone: the web of information and relationships is tricky to navigate successfully, and if you’re interested in the personal-horror aspect of vampirism, your thirsts will largely go unslaked – there’s no existential angst here, and heck, feeding on the blood of the living is mostly something that gets taken care of in a perfunctory paragraph between chapters. But if the idea of trying to use your wits to survive jaded immortals’ games of feint and counter-feint, look no further.

I wrapped up my review of Spring Thing 2021’s The Bones of Rosalinda with a tossed-off wish for an eventual sequel, off the strength of its winning characters and engaging gameplay. Three years later, that wish has been granted, and it’s worth pausing for a minute to note how tricky sequels can be, balancing the audience’s desire for things to stay the same while also feeling different – characters should evolve but too much, the scope should broaden but not unrecognizably so, the gameplay should stay familiar but boast new twists and turns, and the plot should raise the stakes without undermining the original. With so many balls to juggle, it’s almost inevitable that one or two will fall, right? Yet Trials is a banger of a follow-up, delivering everything a sequel ought to and making it look easy.

The core of its success is once again the characters: double act of Rosalinda, a free-willed skeleton, and Piecrust, a wizard shapechanged into a mouse, is as compelling as ever, two plucky underdogs who use all their wits and heart to look out for each other. The supporting cast is even bigger this time out, though, and every one is a winner, including some returning favorites from Trials, like Teckla the conscientious ogre and Albert, a former servant of an evil wizard trying to make good. The newcomers make a strong impression too, though, with even some initially-antagonistic characters eventually joining team Rosalinda to help save the day.

Similarly, the story is much the same in its broad contours – there’s a naughty magic-user up to no good – but this threat feels distinct from the small-time necromancer of the first game. The villain has many more henchmen, and illusion-based powers that can strike terror into the hearts of all the living characters. The setting is also more engaging than the sometimes-samey dungeon of Bones; after an action-packed prelude that quickly shuttles between environments, the meat of Trials plays out in a haunted forest that’s grown up around a ruined magical city. It’s a standard fantasy locale in some respects, I suppose, but it’s enlivened by compelling images like an atmospheric underwater sequence where you need to swim among the city’s fallen buildings to recover an artifact.

Also in the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it camp is the parser-like choice-based gameplay. Once again, there’s a linear tutorial that carefully walks the player through the key elements of puzzle-solving, which involve switching between Rosalinda and her detachable, independently-controllable skeleton-limbs and Piecrust with his ever-growing magical powers. It’s a fast-paced affair, jumping around to a few different locations and introducing a new faction of overzealous religious warriors, which winds up pushing Piecrust more to the fore, as Rosalinda’s capabilities tend to require more set-up to be useful; regardless, it’s an effective refresher that benefits from a clear UI that makes it easy for the player to navigate a suite of options that could otherwise feel overwhelming. It helps that the puzzles are well clued, and progress in the main forest area carefully constrained, so that the player usually has a clear sense of where they need to go to advance the plot, and has a manageable two or three obstacles to work on at any time.

The writing throughout is unpretentious but effective; there are occasional passages where the tendency of each noun to have exactly one adjective starts to feel awkward, and a few typos (largely places where the past-tense narration slips into present tense), but the dialogue is strong, with each character having a distinctive and appealing voice. And while this is no indie platformer screaming I AM AN ALLEGORY, there are some pleasing thematic resonances between Rosalinda’s e pluribus unum puzzle-solving body and the way the larger group of characters bring their own unique skills and personalities to bear to support each other; it’s also no coincidence, I think, that the few truly irredeemable villains are the ones bent on controlling other people for their own ends.

So yeah, another Rosalinda game, another triumph. This is about as good as this strand of IF gets; if you added graphics and told someone this was a lost LucasArts demo, they’d believe you. I’m not as unconflicted about calling for a sequel this time out, largely because of a plot development that’s satisfying here but might make future installments tricky (Spoiler - click to show)(Piecrust’s transformation back into a human, I mean – wizards are fun and all, but they’re not mice, now, are they?), but I’m more than willing to be convinced.

It took me many years to figure out exactly how I felt about horror as a genre. I really enjoy some parts of it – ancient curses, hidden secrets, vampires and werewolves and ghosts all spooky in themselves but also metaphorically representing aspects of the human condition! – whereas there are other parts I find pretty unpleasant – gore, traumatic violence, bad things happening to nice people. After running through a bunch of different theories (maybe I just like certain subgenres? Maybe I’m getting squeamish in my old age?) I think I’ve landed on the explanation: I like the trappings of horror, but not the substance. My ideal horror movie is something like the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula: sure, there’s blood and madness and everyone on a ship gets torn apart, but that’s mostly superficial, the movie’s basically a – well, I was going to say “romcom”, except that would imply that its tortured romance and slapstick comedy were harmoniously integrated, which is not at all the case. But the point being that rather than dealing with the core themes of horror – man’s inhumanity to man, the terrifying threat of dangers that can strike without warning, etc. – it’s concerns mostly lie elsewhere, with the horror tropes sprinkled on top for flavor. And that’s okay by me!

I suspect something similar is going on with Potato Peace, a politics-themed visual novel with no actual politics in it. This isn’t because it’s set in a fantasy world – admittedly, the setup where people and slightly-svelter Mr. and Mrs. Potato-Heads coexist in an advanced society is pretty out there, but of course there are lots of opportunities to dig into real-world dynamics with that kind of frame. Nor is it because the game’s pitched as a comedy; plenty of political satire out there, after all, not all of it dark. It’s because as hard as I tried to figure out what was at stake in the narrative, I felt stymied: while the investigator protagonist has an opportunity to bring down a possibly-corrupt mayor and make a rousing speech straight out of the West Wing, the context for the action and the motivations of the various characters go largely unexplained.

The main way this plays out is in the relationship between the two populations (man and potato-man). There’s a thread of the investigation that brings you into contact with an activist type who implies that potatoes don’t have the same rights as humans, but this isn’t really specified, and the most powerful character in the game – that mayor – is himself a potato. It could be that there’s stratification within the potato-American community; well-dressed jacket potatoes taking advantage of the grievances of ordinary spuds, say. But without more detail the worldbuilding – and thus my engagement – felt thin.

Exciting gameplay or clever wordplay can help make up for a lackluster theme, of course, but here I found those aspects were similarly of middling effectiveness. The game is mostly linear until the final sequence (helpfully, it flags this to players, which makes replays easier); there are a few choices along the way, but they generally reduce to “advance the plot” / “advance the plot zanily”. The finale, meanwhile, has razor-thin margins between crushing defeat and overwhelming success; in my first playthrough, I went on with my climactic oration a bit too long, and the crowd turned on me for piling the rhetoric on too thick, but when I replayed and made the opposite choice, everything turned up roses. Meanwhile, on the writing front, the jokes often felt strained – there are some okay ones about things piling up “like a mountain of fries”, but I was hoping for something more like “in the land of the potatoes, the one-eyed man is king”, y’know? And these two strands occasionally combine when the prose makes the available choices unclear, as in this bit:

"Will you stand idly by and watch as chaos reigns, or will you rise up and fight for the peace and harmony that once united humans and potatoes alike?

-Attempt to intervene and debate the mayor.

-Rally the town against the mayor’s tyranny."

Er, both of those seem like rising up and fighting for peace?

Possibly I’m giving Potato Peace too hard of a time; I work in a politics-adjacent field so I’m probably more disappointed by the lack of substance than the average player (I’m also probably way more disappointed by the lack of a Dan Quayle joke than the average player). In its favor, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the author does describe it as a testbed for a visual novel engine. Judged as a jokey technical proof-of-concept it probably does better; whatever hacks were used to make Ink look like RenPy were pretty well done, to my eye.* Still, regardless of the attention paid to coding, I wish a bit more effort had gone into sharpening the language and clarifying the conflicts the story presents – I didn’t need to see details of impeachment procedure or a run-down of the state of civil rights law in Potatotown USA, but knowing what wide impacts my actions had would have felt the story feel more political, even if it is just a paprika-sprinkle on top of a mound of starch.

*Actually, speaking of visuals, while there’s no mention of their source they sure seemed “AI”-generated to me – there were characters with inconsistent numbers of fingers on each hand, background writing was oddly-aligned and out of focus, there’s a non-Euclidean pie lattice… I know there are a variety of opinions about AI art, but speaking personally, it bums me out and I especially really hate having to second-guess what I’m seeing to try to figure out whether or not a person drew it. Again, I know there are different opinions on this, but I think it would benefit everybody if there were a really strong norm of disclosing the use of such tools so players can know what they’re seeing.