Reviews by Mike Russo

This is unavoidably going to sound like damning with faint praise, but Unseelie is really good for an untested parser game made in a week. Like, there is a reason this is not how anyone writes parser games these days, outside of speed IF and other such contexts where having even a minimally-playable game at the end counts as an achievement – beyond the fact that it’s unfinished, with a plot that ends just when things are starting to get interesting and a solid quarter of game’s puzzle paraphernalia going unused, there are bumps in the road a-plenty, from underclueing to a frustratingly-invisible disambiguation issue that almost prevented me from getting through the final set of challenges. But! While presenting a reasonably old-school puzzle-dungeon, the design is generally welcoming and engaging, with fairly robust implementation, a couple of distinctive setting elements living up proceedings, and unpretentious, confident prose that knows how to lift up an evocative detail. Even if it’s hard to exactly recommend in its current state, Unseelie can already be a lot of fun if you go into it with the proper mindset, and if it’s ever finished, it could well be something great.

As mentioned, this is a slightly old-fashioned kind of game where you wander around an underground world featuring magic – largely mushrooms with various unearthly powers, plus I suppose the woman whose portal-spell transports you into the aforementioned catacombs to begin with, though that’s more of a plot device than an element in the game as such – and anachronistic technology (plumbing, key cards, pressure plates). You’re not given much direction beyond a general desire to explore and hopefully escape back to your own reality, but there are enough obvious barriers and things to poke at that I found myself getting into the swing of things soon enough.

The writing definitely helps. It focuses attention on gameplay-relevant elements while not neglecting to set the mood, like this location description:

"The corridor ends here to the west in a metal gate beyond which you can see the outdoors—though a part of the outdoors apparently teeming with giant mushrooms and wickedly thorned plants. The sky outside is an odd shade of lavender that skies should definitely not be. A single thorny bramble extends through the gate into the corridor, winding along the stone floor."

It hits a deceptively hard-to-nail sweet spot, I think – these kinds of games work best when they don’t feel like bare mechanical challenges, but also can get frustrating if overly-elaborate language obfuscates the interactive bits you use to solve the puzzles.

Speaking of, the puzzle structure is rewarding, with new areas opening up as you explore and overcome obstacles, and a couple of moments when previously confusing or useless things come into focus, most notably when you reach the sole real NPC, who’s implemented fairly deeply and can tell you what all the fungi you’ve been finding can do. There’s also a fairly broad variety of things to do for what’s a relatively small game, from straightforward fetch quests and use-x-on-y puzzles to some that involve slightly more complex object manipulation and others that focus on the aforementioned NPC (a prisoner who promises to help you if you free him) or shifting the behavior of an animalistic native of this strange place. There’s nothing that made me slap my head in novelty and surprise, but equally, none felt illogical or like busywork, albeit there were a few where the clueing was noticeably thin – just the sort of thing that testing is good at smoothing out.

And yes, now that we’re talking of testing we have to come to the critiques, few of which I suspect will come as a surprise to the author given the caveats in the ABOUT text. While the implementation here is fairly robust, in terms of attention to detail, there are also a good number of rough patches – I’ll go into detail on the bug I mentioned above, since while it comes late in the game, spoiling the puzzle solution it pertains to will be a positive good to most players. See, at one point the complex quest chain to free the prisoner requires you to get a hypodermic needle that he’s got in the cell with him, due to some Geneva-Convention-violating stuff his captors got up to. But every attempt I made to take the needle or get him to hand it over ended in failure, with him annoying declaring that the needle couldn’t possibly be useful when I had a very clear understanding of what I needed it for. Turns out, I was on the right track, but the game was confused because there was also a needle-like thorn in the room, and the parser was automatically assuming I meant the latter rather than the former – referring to the HYPODERMIC rather than the NEEDLE cleared things up right away. Again, it’s a small quality of life fix that testing would immediately reveal the need for – but the lack of it wasted half an hour and burned quite a bit of goodwill.

(Oh, while I’m dispensing spoilers, I might as well mention that from glancing at some other reviews at transcripts, many players seem to be missing that (Spoiler - click to show)you need to examine the gap in the control room).

What’s here isn’t at all unplayable, let me be clear, but it’s also clear what we’ve got is a really fun Zork-like reduced to only moderate fun-ness and lacking half or so of the plot by the vagaries of its creation. Given all that, Unseelie’s entry into the Back Garden rather than the main festival makes sense – and if that decision was the author’s desire to test the waters before committing to doing the work to finish the game, hopefully this review counts as clear evidence of the need for, and upside of, that work.

As is now Spring Thing tradition, Senica Thing has contributed an anthology of IF by students (and a few friends), this time all written in Twine and riffing on the eponymous theme. Those three words set up an impressively broad range of experiences, so I’ll write capsule reviews of each in turn:

A Swarm of Spiders, by DiBa

The opening game in my Senica Thing playthrough jumps admirably into the action: you’re awakened in the middle of the night by a strange skittering, and find yourself compelled to investigate. Structurally, it’s a sequence of binary continue the story/back out yes-or-no questions, which I often find a bit underwhelming – why are you asking me if I want to leave the ride early when I’ve already paid for my ticket? But in this case I think it works really well, as it helps align the player’s behavior with the protagonist’s: obviously the counsel of reason would be to just go back to bed and ignore the spiders, but there’s something irrationally pushing you to go outside and follow them… The writing also includes some nicely creepy details, while playing up the combination of fascination and repulsion that gives the story its energy:

"You are pretty scared, but even more curious. You slowly walk up to the window and see plenty of spiders crawling out. They are all moving in one direction, leading to a tree."

It all leads up to a fun twist that nicely illustrates the theme, making A Swarm of Spiders a perfect introduction to the anthology.

Dystopia, by Creator

This time out the theme is take in a more metaphorical direction: the swarm isn’t literal hive-minded insects, but money-chasing video game developers who’ve given up their artistic ambitions to follow the crowd. You play a young indie dev who’s tempted to join a big studio despite some understandable misgivings, and as it turns out there’s more going on than just overly-mercenary suits trying to monetize the latest trends.

While other games in the anthology play up the ambivalent nature of swarm living, Dystopia interprets the premise as straightforward horror. Unsettling text effects, eye-straining color choices, and menacing prose underscore the soul-threatening power that you’re up against:

“You have our gratitude for applying, we shall see you tomorrow at the following address: ▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊ st. Nr ▊▊▊▊▊▊. Sleep tight our little gem.”

Compared to the strong use of aesthetics, the interactive elements feel a bit underdeveloped – there’s almost always one right answer and one wrong one, and if you pick the latter you get automatically put back on track after reading about the bad end. And since the video game company is portrayed as unremittingly malicious, I sometimes had a hard time justifying why I was sticking my head in the lion’s mouth. But the game opens up as it reaches its action-filled climax, and doesn’t just rely on style, adding some philosophical notes to the ending: “WHAT, YOU THINK IDEAS SPREAD BECAUSE THEY’RE GOOD? NO ,THEY SPREAD BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE THEM”, the prime evil says, and in this our current dystopia, it’s hard to say he’s wrong.

It’s Here, by Chaos

I feel like one of the principles of good writing that I lean on a lot in my reviews is that specificity trumps generality – a well-chosen, evocative detail can make even the most familiar story come alive, while plodding prose can suck the energy out of every novelty. It’s Here tests the limits of that commonplace, though, because while its language is entirely abstract throughout – so abstract that I think different readers could come away with very different interpretations of what, exactly, has occurred – I nonetheless found it compelling. The action, much as it is for the rest of the games in the anthology, turns on whether to meld oneself into a larger collective, and if so, on what terms. But rather than fleshing it out with the typical accoutrements of narrative (protagonists, antagonists, themes), the game focuses on the dynamics of that action, dramatizing motion and play over substance.

"Instead of chaos, there is a flow of deliberate patterns, folding and unfolding like a single, capable organism that he can breathe. There is no roar or violent rush of wings, only a muted tremor in the air, a living current that bends the light and draws every eye upward. As you watch, a subtle rhythm begins to echo behind your thoughts, steady, layered, impossibly complex, yet harmonious."

In keeping with this ultra-refined approach, the simple choices combine in complex interactions; while most of the early choices reflect the familiar join/withdraw dichotomy we’ve seen in other entries in Join the Swarm, this is more of a dance or an exploration than a final commitment, as you can move in or out as the spirit moves you, and eventually the choices turn not on whether you’ll merge with the collective, but whether you feel ambivalent about your decision, and how to respond to unexpected disturbances.

I’m not sure this approach would work in a longer piece – the human mind, or at least mine, will eventually crave some more human-apprehensible elements in its stories. But it very much worked for me in It’s Here – this is an engaging, self-assured piece.

John the Swan, by Vitalii Blinov

There are a few examples of IF in poetic form, and I’m always impressed when authors make the attempt given that it requires imposing two entirely separate sets of constraints on how you use language: the responsiveness and nonlinearity of IF, and the precision and control of poetry. John the Swan is a good illustration of both the challenges and the opportunities of this kind of thing, I think – the author cannily keeps things short so that the poetry doesn’t drag (there are two choices with two options each), and there are additional text effects further livening up the presentation. And the text employs joking half-rhymes to good effect, undermining the player’s expectations:

Was he a swan?

Was he the John?

Memories gone.

He stays alone.

As that except indicates, the substance of the game is whimsical and doesn’t overly explain itself. While poetry doesn’t of course need to be narrative to be effective, I found myself wanting at least some greater sense of progression, some clearer indication of what conflict the choices were resolving. While the game gestures at some consistent themes – identity, threat – I had often had a hard time decoding the intended impact, or relating this piece to the Join the Swarm theme. Still, it’s a worthy experiment, with some engagingly ambiguous endings.

Jouin Le Swarm, by Neural

This game combines elements of others we’ve seen in the anthology, with an ambiguously-portrayed hive-mind, a variety of endings that feel responsive to your choices, and even an opening that’s eerily reminiscent of that of Swarm of Spiders; there, you were wakened by the swarm’s activity at 2:16 am, whereas here you’re roused by the swarm’s activity at 2:17 am.

While the focus is on how you respond to the part-enticing, part-threatening invitation you receive from the swarm, I appreciated that there were several paths to get to the different endings – in particular, you can choose to bring a friend along with you as you investigate, which can set up a solid late-game twist, though that choice doesn’t actually change the endings.

I also liked the spare way the game communicates the appeal of subsuming your individuality into the swarm, which doesn’t resort to force to bring you along; while I think it’s clear in presenting the paths where you retain your independence as positive ones, it includes some discordant notes that indicate that there’s no way to encounter such a profoundly different way of existence and remain unchanged:

"After a few days, it disappears completely.

"You remain alone.

"But sometimes, in the silence, you almost miss it."

Join the Swarm, by SAT

This most generically-titled entry in the anthology cleverly inverts the theme – and brings in a hoary yet unexpected set of tropes – in a way that I genuinely didn’t see coming (and won’t spoil, given how short it is). It also boasts an impressively open structure in its short runtime: as you’re thrown into a dangerous situation and have to choose how to respond, you navigate challenges both external and internal, with some of your choices looping back around to prior events and others opening up a whole new perspective on how exactly the swarm functions here. While I think all roads lead to the same endgame, you can have substantially different experiences – and substantially different information – as you make the critical decisions.

I’ll repeat that the twist in question is a relatively tropey one, and not an unproblematic trope at that, but I don’t think Join the Swarm is presenting itself as an especially grounded depiction of reality; it certainly counts as a novel way of executing on the theme, and the thriller-style writing keeps things moving towards that revelatory climax.

Swarm of Thieves, by SKIT

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards,” goes the meme, and Swarm of Thieves got the message. This is a Robin Hood allegory where the thief is named TRUTH and the kingdom is called KLEPTOCRACY; any relation to persons living or dead sure seems more than coincidental when reading speeches like this:

"TRUTH replies: 'You must give us the right to decent work for decent pay. Together we can create a more equal society. In KLEPTOCRACY’s budget, prison spending is double that of education and healthcare. You must give us hope of escaping our poverty!'"

The plot is thin but exciting – the king’s guards are close to catching TRUTH, and you get to decide whether they succeed, and if so how the subsequent confrontation goes. Everything’s quite Manichean, which is forgivable for an allegory, but I felt that there was a mismatch between the narrative stakes and the gameplay ones – a notorious thief being nabbed and facing the justice of a corrupt king is a nail-biting situation, but the player’s ability to dictate outcomes via high-level narrative-guiding choices sucks away some of the drama. Heck, even if you pick the option that tells the king to condemn TRUTH, the subjects launch a revolution due to his crimes and usher in a happy ending. It’s a comforting resolution, but one risks turning the game into mere escapism.

The Underground Dungeon, by A.S.M.

One of the highlights of previous Senica Thing entries was coming across stories, usually by young authors, that delighted in messing with player expectations, introducing out-of-nowhere plot shifts that keep things fresh and display a wild imagination. It’s absolutely a technique that works best in short doses, but when it works it’s a lot of fun, and I confess I was a bit disappointed that the previous anthology entries were generally more focused, not to say staid, affairs.

So I was very ready for The Underground Dungeon, a madcap romp of bad behavior through a fantasy kingdom. The first line is “far away from your home is a castle,” which made me think we were maybe going on a quest to rescue the king from the eponymous oubliette, but no, actually the king is our boss, we’re the chef, we just have an absurdly long commute. Before work one day you discover a locked door to the undercroft, and since you don’t have the keys, you come up with a couple of plans and are presented with these two choices:

-Steal the keys

-Poison the king

What?! Why would we poison the king?! Well as it turns out he’s not very nice – depending on how exactly you choose to poison him, he might fall into a frenzy, leading to this vignette:

"The maid enters the room. The king bites her, but she doesn’t find it weird since the king throws a lot of tantrums."

I don’t want to spoil any more of the game, but suffice to say there’s a lot of this sort of thing, and it always made me smile. Navigating to the best ending isn’t too hard, but there’s just as much fun to be had exploring the various dead ends and blind alleys the authors have cooked up. I’m not sure what any of this has to do with joining a swarm, or what the cook thinks they’re going to find down in the dungeon, but when I’m having such a good time, it’s hard to care about any of those details.

WHAT A MESS, by T.H.K.

WHAT A MESS takes a similar approach to Underground Dungeon, which as I’ve just said, really works for me – this is a story that zigs and zags, though with more of a time cave structure that allows for significantly different plots to play out depending on your seemingly-innocuous choices. Here there are two protagonists, the plucky duo of James and Emma, though depending on your choices they might not both make it to the end. Many of their adventures also involve a kingdom of alternately threatening and welcoming bunny rabbits, which, yeah, that seems about right for bunnies, they’re cute but there’s certainly something untrustworthy about them.

The game’s jokes largely rely on misdirection, and I thought they generally landed:

"When they got up, there was a rainbow cake with a unicorn on the top. Emma and James were surprised. They cut the cake into many pieces and each of them ate one piece of the cake and then they died."

Though seemingly-ominous choices sometimes lead to better outcomes:

"The bats were flying arund them for a long time. At first they were scared, but then they figured out that it was actually very romantic. James and Emma fell in love and got married."

(I love that it’s unclear whether the “they” who were scared and then felt romantic are James and Emma, or actually the bats).

Too much of this sort of thing can of course wear one out, but WHAT A MESS isn’t something to take too seriously; it’s short and light-hearted, and perfectly enjoyable on those terms.

The Yellow Swarm, by HOT

I’ve gotten used to Senica Thing games being way more about content than styling – sure, Swarm of Thieves had a background image and Dystopia a couple of illustrations and text effects, but for the most part they stick to basic Twine aesthetics, which is fine in my book. Still, I gotta admit that the slick visuals of Yellow Swarm made for an arresting, and very pleasant, surprise. There are bright yellow/orange colors making a bold contrast with the black background, scan-lines and terminal fonts that recall Aliens, and an intense, military sci-fi vibe that demands attention.

Fortunately, this isn’t at all a case of style over substance. The prose is dead on, alternating between po-faced special-ops speak:

"The facility went dark six days ago. Meridian Biotech, sublevel research station, built into a hillside in rural Romania. Forty-two personnel. They were developing something called Apis-7: a neural synchronization compound derived from insect pheromone chains."

…and effectively creepy body-horror when you get into the facility and see what’s become of the people:

"It used to be a person. It walks in a straight line toward the far wall, stops, turns, walks back. Three more behind it do the same. Their skin has gone yellow-grey and the surface of it shifts slightly, like something pressing from inside. Their eyes are white, opaque."

The story is straight-ahead, but it’s well-paced and hits all the beats it aims for. The choices similarly avoid over-complication – your mission is clear, so you’re typically just offered binary options about how best to infiltrate and destroy the incipient hive. It’s more of a roller-coaster ride than a tactical challenge, with the player needing to really try to get a suboptimal ending, but it’s hard to complain when the ride is this thrilling and good-looking.

I’ve made some significant choices in my IF career: doomed planets and saved them, redeemed villains and romanced companions, started wars, delved into forbidden knowledge, risked everything to save just one innocent. And yet little did I know, upon starting Exchange, that opting for “Vrnnt” over “Tink” would be so weighty!

See, this short excerpt from an in-progress sci-fi game – this is the first act of an eventual three, per the blurb – places you in the shoes of one Aloysious Menfer (I love that name), a business magnate who’s on the verge of two life-changing events at once. Though the game plays coy with the details, the first is that he’s apparently taken some step in his professional life that will galvanize his former colleagues against him once it comes out, while the second is that he’s about to have a medical procedure done that will apparently swap his body for one that’s slightly more immortal. The excerpt on offer is mostly devoted to nicely-allusive worldbuilding while developing anticipation: you sit in the doctor’s waiting room, answering the secretary’s questions and watching TV news as both revelations grow closer and closer.

The prose is solid and proceedings are well paced, with the choices not providing much branching but offering an opportunity to dig into the protagonist’s past and behavior as his nerves are drawn tighter and tighter – with the final reveal, that his enemies may have bribed the doctor just before he’s about to head in for the procedure, providing a nicely dramatic teaser for the remainder of the game (although I found it kind of amusing that even after this bombshell, I couldn’t find an option to prevent Menfer from going through with things, apparently based solely on the fact that it would be socially awkward to duck out after the practice’s secretary has called his name. Like, my guy, you are potentially going under the knife of a paid assassin here, just say you gotta pee again and run).

Except! That’s just what happens if you go for the onomatopoeia that sounds sorta like a cell phone on vibrate – if, instead, you opt for the one that sounds sorta like a fluorescent light flickering on, the protagonist isn’t the client but the doctor! This branch runs through a similar slice of time, as you get reflect on your family and career travails before getting a mysterious call from someone who wants to give you some money if an unfortunate accident just happens to befall your next patient…

Admittedly, the game’s blurb does encourage playing more than once, but still, if the intended experience is to go through both halves of the story, I think a bit more – or really any – signposting would be helpful, all the more so because the two protagonists seem drawn from two different styles of story. The doctor feels like an everywoman about to be swept up into a thriller, while the businessman feels like a spy-novel protagonist playing out a grand design and keeping one step ahead of his foes. Giving the player an opportunity to knowingly opt into one or the other of those narratives might be a nice upgrade for the final version. I also think the doctor’s branch could use a bit of punching up, as it felt comparatively less dramatic. Partially this is because I played it second and knew where the plot beats were headed, I think, but also, the stakes for her felt lower – she doesn’t seem to have urgent money troubles and her family drama is ho-hum rather than anything that would motivate a drastic break from her routine, so I had a hard time believing that she’d respond at all positively to the invitation to murder.

But regardless, what’s here of Exchange does pique my interest in the remainder, even if it mostly goes on as it’s begun – Philip K Dick-style confused-identity sci-fi is always a good time, and the game seems well set up to deliver it, with, I’m sure, even more dramatic choices to come.

Three games into the Social Democracy franchise, I think we’re now past the point where reviews need to assess the quality of the latest installment – unsurprisingly, it really really is, if you like strategy, history, or things that are good, you should play it – and into the realm where it’s most interesting to talk about how it differs from the others, and what that winds up saying about the particular era it focuses on, and our own.

But first a paragraph of throat-clearing, for those who somehow have managed to miss what’s probably the biggest thing to come out of IF in at least the last half-decade: the Social Democracy games are storylet-based simulations of interwar European politics, where you play not a nation but a particular left-of-center party as you attempt to deliver economic growth and freedom by any means necessary. What distinguishes the games from the traditional Grand Strategy approach is the focus on party politics: you’re almost always attempting to manage a coalition, keeping fractious interest groups on-side and doing just enough to pander to public prejudice to eke out enough power to implement the reforms that will, hopefully, create lasting material change. Gameplay-wise, the storylets are delivered via cards – you can draw from different decks representing internal party affairs, or, if you’re in the government, the particular ministries you control, with each card representing an opportunity to shift policy, or an event or dilemma to which you must react. Since you can typically only have a hand of three cards at a time, this winds up being an elegant system to manage the games’ staggering-when-you-thing-about-it complexity, and put you more in the shoes of a contemporaneous leader, subject to the whims of fate and forced to grapple with transient opportunities, than a deathless spirit-of-the-nation able to advance your strategy regardless of what might be happening.

The other commonality is that there’s always a wolf at the door. In the first game, you played as the German SPD, desperately trying to maintain a truce with Russian-aligned leftists as Nazis and their paramilitaries attempt to overthrown the Weimar republic. In the second, you can play a variety of Russian parties during the interregnum between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, though by default you’re the Mensheviks, waiting to be outmaneuvered by the more hardline Bolsheviks. In this third game, you guide the French Popular Front, a coalition of left-leaning parties that takes power in the late 1930s, so we’re back to the Nazis again – but this time it’s not street violence and idiot conservatives handing them the chancellorship you need to worry about, but tanks. So many tanks.

One thing to admit up front is that while I went into the other two games with a dim sense of the time periods and their politics, this is not an era of French history with which I’d previously had any familiarity. So while I was excited to learn, I was also worried that my ignorance would leave me just hitting my two default buttons (1) vulgar Keynesianism, 2) no enemies to the left unless they’re authoritarians) without any understanding of where I was getting myself into trouble. Fortunately, I needn’t have worried, since I think Popular Front is the easiest of the trio to get up to speed with. See, the game starts just as a wave of popular unrest carries your coalition into power, and unlike previous games, where regular elections producing splintered results made forming a government an agonizing, repeated part of gameplay, here you come in with a strong majority and no elections scheduled until after the Nazis invade (I at least knew that much off the top of my head). You’re also handed a program of agreed-upon policies for the Front to pursue, which acts as a relatively simple framework pushing you towards short-term goals you should be pursuing.

You’re also much less dependent on the luck of the draw this time out. You have enough juice to snap up half a dozen important ministries from the get-go – the rest go to your coalition partners – and cabinet members show up as always-available cards in addition to the trio in your hand, meaning that if you’ve got the finance ministry, you can use an action to tweak tax rates or mess with tariffs (or devalue the currency) any time you want. You also get more than one action per turn if your coalition is strong enough, though they start to decrease if your partners get fractious or the Senate gets restive at the pace of progress (though I was a little surprised their disapproval had as much impact as it seemed to, since almost my first course of action every time I’ve played is to remove their veto and kneecap their prerogatives – I’m no idiot, I know what to do to Senates).

As a result, Popular Front can play more like a traditional strategy game, where you can play out a proactive strategy and take action on your own terms, and marshal almost the whole powers of the state rather than a single formation within it. It makes for an empowering change of pace, but there are of course reminders that you’re still subject to the whims of history, most notably the events that play out at the end of many turns: in the early stages many are entirely domestic, highlighting the agency of players outside your control, like union leaders or other parties, but as time goes on they increasingly have to do with foreign relations. The Spanish Civil War kicks off early, and you have some ability to influence it via arms sales; similarly, German rearmament and adventurism create a constant, escalating drumbeat to which diplomacy can only offer so much of a response.

Thus, the central dilemma of the game reveals itself to be the question of when to pivot from domestic considerations to a military buildup. In my first game, I didn’t have the War Ministry included in my portfolio by default, and I figured that was OK – I spent three years leading France out of the Depression via judicious public-works programs and pro-labor reforms, giving women the vote, encouraging immigration, and accomplishing various other liberal priorities along the way, all while keeping the budget more or less balanced, inflation under control, and the government unified. As German saber-rattling about the Sudetenland increased, I figured it was time to reshuffle the cabinet and run a crash-investment program to get the military up to snuff. But I was horrified to see what my complacent coalition partner had been up to when I took over the War Ministry, as a few dozen armored divisions and an anemic air force didn’t seem likely to give the Wehrmacht much of a pause. Nine months of maxed-out deficit spending, alas, wasn’t nearly enough to get things back on track, and I had cause to regret erring so far on the butter side of the guns-or-butter debate (while still appreciating how awesome it was to have all that butter) as the tanks rolled into Paris.

My second time out, I made the opposite mistake, rushing defense production too early which meant the economic recovery never really took and some of my allies got a bit cranky (especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant the pro-Soviet tankies didn’t like my antifascist propaganda any more). Still, I was able to keep the plates spinning long enough to get an impressive army pulled together, and with some judicious save-scumming to explore the set of strategies control of the military allows you to adopt, this time it was French troops entering Berlin in 1940.

All of which is to say that while Popular Front may be a bit easier and more conventional than other games in the series, it very much works gangbusters as a story-creation engine, and it once again helped me see history in a more direct, participatory way. And not just history – this is a small thing, but as I played the card that allowed me to organize a mass rally and picked as the theme, as always, “against fascism, at home and abroad!”, I found myself comparing this attempt to educate the party’s voters about their interests, and form a public around these ideas, to our current, cramped debates about how best to sacrifice vulnerable minorities to public opinion for maximum electoral benefit. Perhaps more so than any other game in the series, Popular Front reminds us that politics is not just the pursuit of economic growth and a 50%+1 electoral margin: there are larger things at stake, then as well as now.

In the spring of two thousand and twenty six, I, Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, poured all the gold of my rich nature into this heroic task: to review a game in which I am the prime mover, but do not appear in my full splendor – rendered, by the pen of a grasping and jealous author, farcical, capering, an organ-grinder’s monkey gifted, admittedly, with my mesmeric gaze, but subordinated to the caprices of chance rather than elevated above it by virtue of supreme intellect. As one who originated the rôle of the sensation-novel villain, I recoil to see it performed today in so tawdry an imitation.

I note these personal reasons to deplore the present work, only to dismiss them. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments is for a man to judge with perfect impartiality even when his reputation is called to question. Immense privilege! I possess it – do you?

But to commence upon the matter. To create an interactive fiction drawn from the world of the sensation novel and its gothic-novel antecedent is only natural; and it is just as natural to align the player with the interests of the devilish antagonist, rather than the insipid protagonist. Lurking in a decaying manse, bent to the realization of a grand design, the villain starts at the intrusion of those who would foil my – that is, his – conspiracy:

"After years of meticulous manipulation, your plans are nearing completion. You are so close to your goal you can taste it. As you stare out the window of your only somewhat stolen manor you see a blot on the horizon that troubles you."

The author – surely a person of the lower classes – is not content to present a single elegantly-laid narrative, but has recourse to games of chance instead. The pair of heroes who burst onto the scene are chosen at random – perhaps a ghost, or a turncoat partner, or simply a nosy neighbor who has no business in interfering with matters as far beyond them as is Fosco from a gnat!

The throw of dice likewise governs the resolution of the repeated confrontations between these contending forces. The villain must choose where to set an ambuscade for his quarry, knowing that their strength waxes in some environs and wanes in others. And as a master of matters both chemical and metaphysical, I look with approval upon the influence of weather on the success of the villain’s endeavors: the black, baleful eye of the new moon will set some heroes’ sinews a-tremble, while endowing others with false courage, and it is much the same case with clouds, the lashing wind, &c. Still, is matching opportunity to action so mechanical a process as the game proposes? It is not. And does success turn on the mere fortuity of happenstance, rather than the perfection of premeditation? It does not – infuriating, insufferable insolence!

My own mental insight informs me that three inevitable questions will be asked here by persons of inquiring minds. They shall be stated—they shall be answered.

First question. How may a mere glance defat the heroes? The answer is, the villain is like myself a disciple of Mesmer, capable of reducing the most stalwart of meddlers to a senseless swoon with the precise application of their gaze (subject, I repeat, to the vagaries of the dice which so enamor the author). Should they faint ten times or more, their strength shall fail and, chastened, they shall slink back to the London drawing-rooms of their friends, in search of sympathy for their unmanly failures. One gloats at the prospect, though one also quails at the repetitiveness of besting such unworthy opponents so many times.

Second question. May the villain also complete his plot? Answer: perhaps, though even I – I! – have not managed it. The vulgarity of the present author extends to assessing the success of a design not according to its sublimity, its refusal to obey the limits inscribed at the borders of human imagination and human morality, but instead by a counter of Plot Points. These are increased by using an appropriate item against the heroes at an appropriate time, rather than relying on the gaze, but beyond the damnable abstraction, Fosco must raise an objection: why can poisoned lemonade be proffered profitably in a cloudy colonnade, but not a sunny lake? And having once sucked its sour venom, would any hero truly be dull-witted enough to sup again, and again, when given the chance? To exhaust the possibilities compassed by the author’s limited mind would exhaust me as well.

Third question. Is this as much fun as it sounds? I answer, to be Fosco is to feel, with Icarus, the tips of your wings brush against the firmament of heaven – but, besting the Greek, to rise once more, rather than to fall! The game gives the taste of such bliss, but only the meanest taste.

I enter into no sordid particulars, in discussing this part of the subject. My mind recoils from them. With a Roman austerity, I pass on in silence.

Well, perhaps you are owed one sordid particular:

"Ice hangs off the balcony, like the teeth of some impossible beast. The cold wind blows, and you are exposed, no longer protected by walls and warm tapestries. Snowflakes dust your shoulders, as bright as diamonds and three times as cold.

"You break icicles off the ledge and drop them off the roof, waiting to hear them shatter below. The only thing better would be if they actually hit someone.

"‘How fraile ice is. Just one tap and it shatters. How similar to human bones. You just need to know where to hit it.’ You snap an icicle and the heroes jump."

A captivating scene, truly. But the misspoken word, the recourse to mere brutishness, the sullying of one’s hands – these are the actions of a lackey, nothing else.

A word more, and the attention of the reader (concentrated breathlessly on myself) shall be released. Shall the Perilous Plot be indicted in the public dock? Can the verve of its conception survive against the accusation that it does not do justice to its theme? Can we set aside the ways it has insulted me, as the origin and archetype of its protagonist?

No. It cannot be permitted – the enormity cannot be forgiven. Youths! I invoke your sympathy. Maidens! I claim your tears.

I announced, on beginning it, that this narrative would be a remarkable document. It has entirely answered my expectations. At immense personal sacrifice, I followed the dictates of my own ingenuity, my own humanity, my own caution. Receive these fervid lines—they are worthy of the occasion, and worthy of

–FOSCO

(With apologies to Wilkie Collins)

One of the coolest things about IF Comp is that every year, you come across brand new authors who bring something fresh and idiosyncratic to this hoary old genre of ours. So one of the highlight of last year’s Comp was getting to play not one, not two, but three games by a debut author that boasted a high level of craft and shared a common vibe – cozy, nonviolent D&D-inflected fantasy focusing on romance and mystery – but managed to each put their own spin on things. Of Lamp Post Production’s trio of games in their annus mirabilis, though, Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade seemed like it would most benefit from elaboration. That’s not because it was a weak entry by any means; far from it, playing a private detective in a magical version of early-modern Venice trying to track down an anonymous threat to a world-premiere opera was all sorts of fun. But its use of RPG elements felt like it was crying out for elaboration, and its shorter running time meant the romance elements didn’t have as much room to breathe. So while I very much enjoyed the author’s other two games, I was happy to see that it was Fantasy Opera getting the sequel treatment this Spring Thing.

And this second installment proves that 2025 was no fluke. Theater of Memory boasts the same strengths as the author’s earlier work: while you’re in a different city, investigating a different music-related mystery, once again there’s a wide cast of appealing characters, design that feels responsive to your chargen choices without evoking FOMO, and lush art illustrating proceedings. But there are some differences too – notably, you can’t actually romance any of those appealing characters, which is a good choice given that the timeframe of the investigation is once more fairly curtailed, and there’s a new dream-analysis system that enlivens the game’s central metapuzzle.

See, this time out you’ve been called in to discover why all the musicians in the company of a newly-built theater are plagued by uncanny recurring dreams. While the first stage of the investigation proceeds in a straightforward-enough fashion – you interview your client, then a bunch of the people who’ve been affected, with your choice of whether to specialize in observation or charm, or build expertise in matters mystical, magical, or (m?)architectural providing slightly different clues – there’s an intermezzo section where you’re tasked with identifying key commonalities in the various dreams before proceeding to the climax.

There are some slight rough edges in this bit – in particular, I found distinguishing between “love” and “romantic relationship” when sussing out shared themes to be a bit overly-narrow – but there aren’t penalties for guesses so far as I could tell. And solving the puzzle isn’t that hard, but made me feel very satisfied: the groundwork for the eventual revelation is well established, and even once you get the overall gist, working through the exact mechanics of how to end the haunting is a very fun process, and again, one that isn’t overly reliant on what skills you picked or how poorly you’ve been rolling (I think some unluckiness with dice meant I didn’t fully understand how the (Spoiler - click to show)paintings worked until relatively late in the process, despite magic being my best skill, but the game still made me feel like a clever detective who’d figured everything out, with the only indication to the contrary being a deduction from the number of points I was assigned at the end).

Throughout, there’s a pleasing attention to detail that enlivens the world and the people in it – it’s a straightforward mash-up of early-modern Italy with 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, I suppose, but there’s real research undergirding the first part of that equation (just read the detailed source notes in the afterword) and while species is a big part of how the characters are defined, they play against stereotypes as often as with. The prose, meanwhile, remains direct and keeps the pacing up, while offering more than enough specificity to draw you in:

"You walk over to the bass singer. The pacing minotaur towers intimidatingly over your average human stature. Long, curling horns extend from his bovine head, and the floor of the wooden stage seems to tremble whenever he hits his lowest notes."

It’s true that few of the ensemble come through as strong characters in their own right – I felt like I only got a good read on the maestro who hired me, as well as the trio of suspects, who get more detailed backstories and conversations – but again, that feels like a good decision given the game’s length and structure. And keeping the focus on the NPCs relevant to the mystery is similarly appropriate to the genre.

All told, this second installment in the Fantasy Opera series makes a good case for this as a sturdy framework for a procedural, and for the author as no one-hit – or three-hit – wonder. Keeping the brand identifiable while bringing fresh mechanics and storytelling approaches to each game is an impressive feat, and whether Lamp Post Productions goes with another sequel, or something brand new in the house style, sign me up for whatever’s next.

I suppose this exposes me as a person of limited imagination, but before I played Maybe you’ll respect this dead person instead, I’d never really contemplated the broad advantages – to one’s social life, career, and general psychological well-being – of being able to summon a giant hermit crab to wreak havoc at your merest whim. Christmas party running long? GIANT HERMIT CRAB. Frustratingly vague performance review? GIANT HERMIT CRAB. Seasonal affective disorder? GIANT HERMIT CRAB. Truly, self-actualization via enormous crustacean is an idea whose time has come – get this crab a podcast and an Instagram account.

Admittedly, the protagonist of Maybe you’ll respect… has more legitimate reasons for letting a hermit crab do the talking than the generalized anomie of modern life. As a mute spirit-summoner in a fantasy milieu, he must rely on a quartet of ethereal allies not only to defeat the powerful monsters trying to destroy the world but also for basic communication, not to mention to push back against the institutionalized sexism of the all-female Hunter’s Guild he wants to join. And players with more restraint than me might lean more heavily on the other three inhabitants of the censer he uses to call forth the spirits: a diminutive sword-saint, a giant ogre warrior, and a duelist as deadly as she is conceited (this last one does double duty as the game’s narrator – she’s almost as fun as the crab).

(Almost).

The plot here is very basic – our hero is snubbed by the powers that be and takes on a dangerous mission to prove himself, accompanied by a plucky ally who provides the exposition that’s tricky for a mute character to deliver. As well, the game’s got the kind of hazy fantasy worldbuilding where the guild of monster-hunters has property and casualty insurance for their headquarters (it’s not clear this is meant to be a joke), and the prose is evocative but occasionally tends to adjectivitis:

"The perpetual lava falls on the cliff face backlight the marble white city in the evening light of the setting sun and the planet’s orbiting rings."

It feels churlish to complain about these slight rough edges when the main business of the game is so entertaining, though. The gameplay revolves entirely around choosing which of your four summons to lean on from moment to moment, through two major setpieces: first, trying to persuade the guild to let you join, and second, the aforementioned adventure to bring back trophies from some defeated monsters. You can’t always summon anybody, and the author does a good job of imposing restrictions to help the player internalize the fancy anime-style names (at least as long as you’re playing; I’ve completely forgotten them one day on) and get familiar with their capabilities. The choice of two radically different scenes also highlights the importance of versatility – contra my intro, the crab isn’t always the optimal choice. And speaking of optimal choices, while I think you can get to a good ending no matter what, the game does keep track of stuff like how many times you and your partner get hurt in the fight, awarding fun achievements at the end, which feels like the right level of consequences (I didn’t get many of these, because again, any time I could introduce my opponents to the power of my Crab Style Kung Fu, I did).

Maybe you’ll respect… makes good use of this simple but novel gameplay structure, then, and the straightforward story does resonate with positive values of representation and belonging. And, as the “to be continued” at the end indicates, this might only be the introduction to a larger saga, in which case keeping things comparatively simple before proceedings get more complex is entirely understandable. And as long as “that’s an interesting point, why don’t you repeat it to my GIANT HERMIT CRAB” remains an always-available option, bring on the sequel.

There was a year when I was in middle school that the Redwall series were my favorite books. As with so many artifacts of one’s youth, I’ve no idea how they hold up today, but I remember them as King Arthur meets Brambly Hedge: action-packed medievalish adventure, with sieges and abbeys and ancient swords, and a cast of animal characters that followed what in retrospect is slightly uncomfortable species-based determinism. Like, the vicious, untrustworthy baddies were stoats and weasels, badgers were all strong and kinda prickly, and the main characters were mice – humble, clever, kind, and always underestimated by those around them. They were a lot of fun, but I have to say, there’s something profoundly un-mouse-like about an epic, isn’t there? Like, the metaphors all work well enough, but those were stories that had mice in them, not mouse-shaped stories.

A Quiet Scurry illustrates the difference: this choice-based look at the nightly gauntlet a British mouse must run to survive until its next morning is wholly concerned with rodent business, and beyond that its small, focused size make the choice of subjects entirely apropos. Short, near-poetic bursts of text introduce each of your basic needs in turn: first, satiating your hunger, next, finding something to drink, and lastly, scouting out a safe place to rest. So far so cozy, but mice are vulnerable, and danger is always near, whether from hungry predators or the uncaring human world. While you’re not overwhelmed with choices, the game does a good job of presenting three or four plausible-sounding alternatives at each juncture; while careful thought got me to a good ending on my first playthrough, I replayed Quiet Scurry a few times (it only takes about five minutes) and confirmed that even small lapses of judgment can have deadly consequences.

The prose does a good job of situating you in a mouse’s-eye view of the world, neither needlessly obfuscating what’s happening nor giving the player-mouse more understanding than seems reasonable. It’s all conveyed through quick, concrete details:

"Now safe within the roots of the hedgerow your thirst tugs at your mouth, the dryness of the oats worsening the need."

The one place where the writing gets less precise is the various bad ends; here, the merciful veils of indirection and metaphor conceal the violence that the player intuits must have happened, but isn’t forced to confront. I suppose this means Quiet Scurry shies away from the full nature-documentary experience, but I was glad of it – along with the game, I’d prefer to dwell on the plucky, indomitable spirit of the mouse that succeeds than the violence that befalls those who fail.

I don’t have much more to say about the game than this – it has modest ambitions, it realizes them well, and its form follows its function. Part of me wonders what a more robust take on the subject matter would look like, perhaps digging into the social world of mice, or expanding the timeline to examine their different stages of life. But that risks getting us back to the oxymoronic mouse epic: part of what’s appealing about mice is that they seem small and contented, so let us be contented that Quiet Scurry is small.

Local government is weird. In my career I’ve done advocacy at the federal level as well as the state level in California, working on bills that would raise and spend billions of dollars or make substantial changes to major sectors of the economy. But I’ve also done work in cities, counties, and other local governments, and while a lot of the dynamics are exactly the same, just with smaller numbers, I’ve also come across irruptions of pure chaos that are impossible to explain without just saying “man, this is weird.”

Like, one time I was supporting a community group that was pushing for expanded weekend burial hours in a rural public cemetery district – they were Hmong, and had a tradition of doing Sunday funerals – which seemed pretty straightforward. They’d gone to the district superintendent, who was an old guy who didn’t much like changing the way things were done, and he’d said he wouldn’t do it, so they went to a sympathetic board member who said he’d be willing to push for it if he could get a sense of what it would cost. The superintendent wasn’t going to be helpful, so I worked with a colleague to analyze the district’s budget, made some estimates, and concluded it would cost maybe a couple thousand bucks wouldn’t really impact the bottom line. We were feeling good about things when my colleague went out to one of the district’s board meetings to share the analysis – except instead of greeting her presentation with a “huh, cool, glad this won’t be a big deal after all,” the superintendent freaked out at the idea that someone else was looking at the (publicly available) books. Even more unlikely, it turned out that one of the attendees at the meeting was a woman who’d decided to spend her retirement going to every single cemetery district meeting, and she tracked down my colleague’s phone number so she could leave a rambling three-minute voicemail in which she expressed how upset she was about… something, it was very hard to tell. Everyone got angry at everyone else, the county supervisor had to pull some strings to get people removed from the board, and the superintendent eventually decided this was all too stressful for him and retired. It was an enormous mess that took hours and hours to deal with, a gigantic fight over the smallest imaginable iota of policy. Like I said: weird!

But not as weird as what’s going on in the Missing City Council (ha, managed to get around to it before we hit the 500 word mark!) The premise of this debut parser game is that you’re a Finn at City Hall for a hearing about a zoning dispute, but when you arrive, the building is almost deserted: nobody’s in any of the offices or meeting rooms, except for a pair of British guards inexplicably hanging out in the basement. So your task is to explore the building, get through some locked doors, and solve a multi-step puzzle to find out what’s happened to the misplaced aldermen so they can rule in your favor.

At least, that’s what I think is going on, based on the title and blurb; the game itself doesn’t provide any direct context or motivation, so this is really one of those fumble-around-with-everything-that-looks-like-a-puzzle-until-you-win affairs. And fumble I did, because Missing City Council makes a bunch of idiosyncratic interface decisions, like eschewing compass directions in favor of having you ENTER or go IN various doors and passages. The contents of rooms are also often listed in a jumble at the end of the sparse location descriptions, which lends a bizarre air to proceedings:

"You can see a staircase up, a door to the lift, a left guard, a right guard, a door to the toilet, a door to the shelter and a door to the garage here."

There are also a lot of the usual infelicities of a minimally-implemented game that didn’t receive any outside testing – many objects (including the player) have default descriptions, there are locked doors that open only by PUSHING and items mentioned in descriptions that aren’t implemented, and so on. The puzzles also seem like they must only make sense to the author – while I dimly intuited that I needed to make some tea to distract the British guards (points for knowing national stereotypes), the steps required are so Byzantine that I can’t see how a player would make progress without going to the walkthrough. Like, the first step major step is to intuit that an avant-guard art piece described as being made of boiled sweets would dislodge some of its hard candies if you hit it, then hitting it enough times to get a lemon drop to pop off so that you can put it in the tea to make lemon Earl Grey.

Usually try to say at least something nice about authors’ first games, no matter how much I’ve complained about their rookie mistakes, and that’s actually easy to do here: this is a charmingly zany premise, some of the scene-setting, like the art collection crammed into the upstairs sauna, is memorably silly, and the ultimate explanation as to what’s going on made me laugh. So this is an author with a unique comedic angle, and we could always use more farce in parser IF – hopefully their next game will get some more testing, and sand down the weirdness so that it’s quirky rather than completely impenetrable.

(Oh, and there’s a happy ending to the cemetery district story: a new superintendent took over, and confirmed that yeah, they could extend the hours for just a couple thousand bucks, no big deal. I’m not sure whether that lady kept going to the board meetings, but I like to think she does, and finds something new to get incredibly upset about every month).

One of the blessings of middle age is that I’ve arrived at a stage of life where I’m neither especially good at video games, nor especially bothered by not being especially good at video games. I can bumble my way through an immersive sim with plenty of save-scumming, have an adequate enough understanding of roguelike strategy that I can usually eke out a lowest-difficulty win eventually, and have the wisdom to give anything that advertises itself as a Soulslike a wide berth (no, wider). But IF is a relatively sedate pasture, where fading reflexes and blurred vision don’t exact much of a toll, and by this point I’ve played more than enough of it to have a solid feeling for the common tricks and tropes, so it’s usually not too much of a challenge to get to a good ending (especially since some of the wisdom time brings is a lack of compunction about consulting the walkthrough).

Nonetheless, I’m forced to confess to y’all that I absolutely suck at Cryptid Hunter.

It doesn’t seem like it should be that fiendish of an experience – in fact, its first impression is almost cozy, drawing you into a heartwarming story where an aspirational hunter after obscure creatures is gifted the tools they need to make their avocation their vocation (well, actually that’s the second impression; my first impression was chagrin that the very first word of the blurb is a typo’d “your” in place of a “you’re”, which thankfully isn’t reflective of the mostly-solid editing in the game proper, but is still worth correcting). Your mysterious benefactor also gives you a list of three specific cryptids they’d like you to nab, each characterized by a trio of vague traits like “near water” or “elongated.” After a quick trip to the library to read up on the spooooky background of the town’s six creepy locations, and a glance over the thoughtfully provided notebook where you can scribble observations and guidebook that memorializes your quarries, it’s off to the field.

Investigations follow a consistent pattern: after a few introductory passages where you explore the chosen location, you come across evidence of a cryptid or the thing itself, at which point you have a few choices, which always includes taking general observations, snapping a photo, capturing it, or leaving it alone, at least for now (sometimes there are additional bespoke interactions, too). Usually a casual perusal will establish one of the creature’s traits with clarity, but often there’s a fair bit of ambiguity, so you need to think carefully about what the game is presenting to you. You’ll also need to pay close attention to the photos, which are rendered in-game, not just described in the text, and are impressively surreal and creepy.

Indeed, the cryptids are a real highlight; we’re not just talking about Bigfoot here, these are unique beasties I don’t recall coming across before. And while the prose is a bit too informal to be really scary, it nonetheless lifts up well-chosen details to set the mood:

"Actually determining the lake from its banks is harder than you thought. The lake is filmed over with dense, slimy algae matching the muddied moss that you’ve been schlepping through. Pieces of trash float around the sides of the dock."

So all the elements are in place for a satisfying deduction game, the more so because the creatures you’re searching for are randomized each time you play. After you capture your third cryptid, an endgame sequence triggers that sees you bring your prey to your employer, unlocking a climactic encounter if you’ve gotten them all correct. Sadly, as I mentioned, it turns out I was quite bad at this! I felt confident enough in deciding whether a particular beast let out a scream or had a smell, but some of the traits are far more obscure – does a monster that goes on all fours but sometimes rears up have “two ways of moving”? If water is rippling in all directions around a sea creature, is that an indication that it’s got “elemental manipulation” or is it just thrashing around?

I’m sure smarter, more observant people than me would play carefully, take careful notes, rule certain monsters in and out, and only begin capturing once they were sure they had the solution. I, on the other hand, preferred to squint uncomprehendingly at the guidebook, shrug and make a gut decision, and trust random chance to deliver me to the true ending.

This, as it turned out, was an amazingly effective strategy at getting me two out of three of the right monsters, which I managed to do six times running before the gods of the random number generator finally took pity on me. And while the climax was worth it – it has a fun twist and some choice-based gameplay that feels like it allows for some satisfying variation in endings – playing Cryptid Hunter that many times unfortunately did take some of the bloom off of it. The location descriptions, the monsters, and the places where you find them are exactly the same in each playthrough – it’s only the list of targets that changes – meaning that almost all of the text is exactly the same every time; if you didn’t quite grok a creature’s traits last time, well, good luck, you’ll be reading through the same fuzzy description next time. The game also presents itself in a lot of shorter passages, meaning that even if you know exactly where to find a monster you want to capture, you need to do a lot of brainless clicking to get to that point.

As a result, I’m not sure Cryptid Hunter is as replayable as its blurb claims, but it’s very much a good time over the first playthrough or two. So if I didn’t have quite as fun of a time with it as I would have liked, well, I guess that’s just down to my failure to Git Gud.

The pantheon of great murder-mystery settings surely has a niche of honor set aside for the medieval monastery. Partially this is just aesthetics, and a lingering anti-Papism that’s long haunted anglophone culture: cloaked figures skulking in the shadows of great stone buildings, great artworks of gold and stained glass bearing witness to bloody deeds, men who say they’re pledged to God but who nonetheless commit the darkest of sins… Partially too it’s the fortuitous result of some exemplary takes on the premise, none looming larger than Eco’s Name of the Rose, which is of course name-checked by Our Lady of Thorns’ ABOUT text.

But partially, I think, it’s because the monastery and the murder plot share a dual nature. A monastery is a clockwork thing, with everyone dwelling in it assigned a particular role and duties, and the passage of time creating an orderly, coordinated motion from work to devotions and back. So too is murder a thing of intricate design, at least in murder mysteries: the killer’s design is obscured and complex, but subject to logic, it can be rationalized, dissected – so a murder is a devilish machine playing out within, and against, the holy machine on the monastery. And yes, monasteries are of course not purely mechanical, the point of all this activity is that it enables exactly that holiness, and for a modern audience, being confronted with this alien excess of devotion raises spiritual questions: does man have a higher nature? What does the soul consist in? And again, the murder mystery comes at these questions widdershins, as it provides an opportunity to see what will make a person stoop to the most infernal depths of crime.

OLT is a wonderfully realized illustration of the monkish-murder genre, leaning very strongly into the former element of its nature (in fact, to the extent that it’s a game simulating a monastery murder, here we have a machine inside a machine inside a machine…) A whole priory – a smaller-scale monastic community, as these things go, but still quite large by the standards of contemporary parser IF – is available for exploration, from the central cloister to the gardens, the dormitories, and the inevitable crypt, nearly a dozen Brothers carry out their duties and regularly come together to pray at the canonical hours.

The research that’s gone into the game is more than adequate to lend a pleasing aura of historicity – the priory layout is familiar if you’ve visited one in real life (or played Pentiment), the narrowness of monastic life is neatly portrayed through the regular offices and each monk’s particular role in the priory, and the only anachronism I noticed is that when I looked up the real-life Our Lady of the Thorns, it turns out she’s a Marian apparition that occurred a few decades after the game’s fourteenth-century timeframe. The prose is very nicely judged, too, avoiding throwing in excessive ornamental detail that might get in the way of the puzzles while still providing the appropriate sensual thrill:

"Centuries of incense have worked themselves into the very stone here. The smell is deep and resinous, threaded with beeswax. It is a smell that seems to belong to God rather than to men."

But as much fun as I had simply wandering through the halls, there’s serious business afoot: the player character is a novice apprenticed to the garden-keeper, and when your mentor dies in mysterious circumstances, you need to plumb every depth of the priority and unearth the monks’ hidden secrets to determine the who, how, and why of the murder. The game proceeds on a timer, but the passage of time is as much an opportunity as it is a threat: because while of course the game ends if you haven’t found the culprit by the end of the day, every few hours the other monks gather for their religious duties, from which you’re excused due to your youth and the horrific events, allowing you to poke into places where you’re not allowed.

Time isn’t the only system at play in Our Lady of Thorns; there’s an inventory limit and concealment mechanics to prevent you from waltzing around the priory with a giant pile of illicit material, and the monks do move around a bit, ready to prevent you from engaging in any unauthorized mischief if they see you (save for the few you might be able to convince to turn a blind eye…) Many of the puzzles also have multiple solutions. All of this means that there’s a high level of player engagement and advocacy, as you refer to the nicely-drawn map to plot out a path where you won’t be seen, track the clock to ensure your movements are well-timed, and furiously improvise when you’ve made a miscalculation. As far as I can tell, there are consequences to messing up, but they’re generally relatively mild – the game seems to track how many times you’ve drawn undue attention to yourself, and while eventually that can lead to a premature game-over, you’re afforded a generous amount of leeway (unless, of course, the monk whose attention you’ve drawn happens to be the murderer…)

The puzzles themselves are generally conventional ones, but that’s a good decision, I think, given that often getting to the puzzles undetected, with enough time to solve them, and with the right items in your inventory is already half the challenge. There are some predictable ways to befriend or hoodwink some of the monks, the architect of the priory had a convenient love for riddles and secret passages, and a few books offer important clues if you consult them about the right topics. They work well enough and are well integrated into the plot and setting, albeit there are a few that require an old-school specificity of interaction that’s at odds with the game’s generally friendly presentation – this is a game where you need to be very thorough, despite the time limit, or be comfortable consulting the hints. To cite an early example, it’s easy to miss an important object when examining the dead body:

x aelred’s habit

You see nothing unusual about his habit, and don’t see the things he was picking at.

search aelred

In an inner pocket of his robe, you find an iron key. You take it.

There are at least two other places where the player has to use very particular syntax, beyond simply examining the objects the game mentions, in order to progress, and while it’s not too hard to deduce the need to do so if you stop and think carefully, in a game this big, it’s easy to assume that if you’re not making progress on a puzzle, it’s because the solution is in one of the locked-away areas you haven’t been to yet, rather than because you missed something in a place you thought you’d already explored thoroughly.

The game’s other blemish is the characters, few of whom have much of a personality. The lovely exception is the librarian, Wilfred, who used to be the prior but who has retired to a life filled with books (and a cute orange cat) in his dotage. He’s a friendly presence – and also a puzzle element, because of course you need to get into those books – and responds to a variety of conversational topics. Most of his brethren aren’t so lucky, though; many of them have taken vows of silence or are otherwise uninterested in communicating, and few of them play a direct role in the gameplay. That’s all realistic enough, but it does mean that the revelation of the murderer was a fairly muted affair, based on gathering physical evidence and reading between the lines in a few documents; sussing out the culprit didn’t take much brain power, but struggling to recall whether I’d exchanged more than a single greeting with him certainly did.

More active characters probably wouldn’t have fit the setting, and the intended gameplay, quite so well, though – as I said, I enjoyed poking around the priory quite a lot, and having to trail half a dozen monks this way and that while interrogating them about all the other suspects, Infocom-mystery style, would be a far more stressful, and far less meditative, experience than what Our Lady of Thorns offers. That solitary vibe is very much in keeping with the subject matter, and makes the final dilemma – because once you’ve solved the mystery, you can choose whether to prioritize justice or mercy – one that plays out at a higher level, responsive more to universal principles than the concrete particularity of one person’s squalid motives and worse actions. So while it takes a while to get there, the game does ultimately touch on spiritual as well as mechanical concerns, a fitting capstone to a game that’s one of the standouts in this year’s Festival.

I’ve mentioned before that my wife is a fan of the notionally-set-in-the-Regency-but-people-talk-about-closure romance Bridgerton, so we’ve been working our way through the recently-released season, but finding it a bit of a slog. Partially this is because the writing seems to have suffered from those Netflix notes about making sure every character is spelling out the plot for the people not paying attention in the back. Partially it’s because the male lead spent the previous three seasons mired in dull subplots that didn’t go anywhere and which – since their consequences all need to be cancelled out so he can be a blank slate when meeting the female lead – made him seem rather callow. But mostly it’s because the show barreled through the process of the two leads falling in love as though it were running late for a train: there’s barely half an episode of them getting to know each other before the plot starts throwing obstacles in the way of what by now the viewers assuredly feel must be their destined union. And look, I know whose pictures are on the posters, and the tropes of forbidden love are always entertaining to work through, but it’s hard to muster up much enthusiasm because I’m not especially invested – the show is telling me these people are deeply in love, but it hasn’t shown me how they got there.

Before the Snow Melts is a visual novel that takes a broadly similar approach: from the jump, we’re told that the protagonist is deeply and secretly in love with their best friend Clover, and has seven days to tell her – or not – before she leaves the town where they grew up together. It’s a familiar but promising setup, and I liked the straightforward but nonetheless compelling metaphors the author employs to communicate the protagonist’s hidden yearning:

"I don’t know when that started. It feels like it’s always been there. Like snow, quietly piling up. Layer by layer, until everything was covered. Still. Preserved. Untouched."

The seasonal imagery in the prose is a highlight throughout, in fact – here’s another bit I liked:

"A light breeze moved through the trees, carrying that damp, thawed scent of early spring. Somewhere deeper in the forest, water dripped steadily, like the season was slowly unfreezing itself."

The visual presentation isn’t quite so understated. The anime-style characters are expressive, but maybe too much so – Clover is appealingly spunky but she’s only drawn with a few rather extreme variations, so that she goes from smilingly chatting over coffee, to being depicted as crying in the time it takes her to meditatively run her finger around the rim of the cup and say “hey.”

Perhaps that level of emotional whiplash is appropriate to these characters, though, since while the game doesn’t divulge specific ages or even their overall life circumstances, they’re heavily teenaged-coded, with Clover’s mysterious departure seeming to me like an impending departure for college and the light bickering that characterizes her dialogue likewise coming up sophomoric. So while the protagonist’s refusal to tell their crush about their feelings until literally the last second is definitely a bit frustrating, I remember what I was like as a teenager and can’t say that it’s unrealistic. Whether it’s compelling is a different matter, though; I didn’t agonize over most of the game’s choices because it was clear that the only important one would come on day seven, which means that by midweek some of the pseudo-dates had a harder time holding my interest. Here, the game’s refusal to offer specifics is to its detriment; the line by line dialogue is solid enough, but being told that the characters go to see “a drama” is less compelling than if it had been, I dunno, Oppenheimer, and a lot of the conversation topics are quite abstract and philosophical, so they could have benefitted from additional grounded.

Fortunately, the game does get a mid-stream dose of energy when a third character is introduced into their tiny menage; Iris, a mutual childhood friend, is a bundle of chaos who drinks too much and speaks too bluntly, and in her frustration that these two people haven’t just started kissing already is an effective proxy for the player. Her attempts to move things along are necessarily unsuccessful (and for anyone tempted to roll their eyes at the way that the two main characters just completely ignore the way Iris all but tells them “you guys are super into each other!”, I can testify almost this exact same thing happened to me when I was this age, again, this is gritty realism), but her presence is a highlight and helps ease the process of getting to the ending, which is the other highlight.

The climactic conversation is, I suppose, just as high-level as the rest of them, and edges closer to melodrama, but that’s fitting for the stakes. And it finally pays off some of the seeds sown in earlier sequences: very often the protagonist talks about things feeling or being “easy” in those previous conversations, which provides a counterpoint when Clover, justifying her decision to leave, says “I’m afraid of choosing something smaller than I wanted, not because I had to, but because it was easier”. You really do have choices here, and while all the endings work well enough, I found myself most drawn to the one where you can let Clover know about your feelings without initiating a relationship – there’s a grounded poignancy to acknowledging, at a time of transition, that something could have happened but now it’s too late.

It would have landed harder, though, if I’d come to this scene with a clearer sense of what, exactly, the protagonist saw in Clover, and what Clover saw in them. They both seem like nice people, and as a player, I felt the vague benevolence of wanting them both to be happy. Before the Snow Melts didn’t sell me on the idea that they could only be happy together; it’s vague, perhaps intentionally, about whether this is star-crossed destiny or just youthful hormones bubbling over. I suppose this, too, is realistic, since God knows it’s hard to have that perspective when you’re in it, but fairly or not, the standards for fiction are different.

Sometimes you can tell a lot from a font, and the one visual novel Crier uses for its protagonist’s dialogue is a clear statement of purpose: an all-caps, heavily bolded gothic excrudescence, its chunky letters more concerned with straining to escape the narrow strip of screen real estate into which they’re claustrophobically crammed than anything as pedestrian as legibility. What typeface could more aptly give voice to a mad prophet so monomaniacally bent on predicting grotesquely baroque curses upon the reigning sovran that being thrown into the endless oubliette under the palace barely slows down their doom-saying?

This is a game that revels in the aesthetics of its transgressions, turning every available dial up to 11: the character and background art is a well-executed attempt to do Geiger with fewer genitals and way more goo, while the more restrained prose, meanwhile, delivers precisely-limned descriptions of horrors, its clinical tone dwelling on the diverse ways to experience organic rot:

"Feeling your way along the wall, you encounter a textured patch on the stone: it smells fungal, ozonic, wetly metallic."

The dungeon has more to offer than just decomposing bodily fluids, though – the ecosystem down here is grasping its way towards a higher purpose, like an artificial but biologically-mediated neural net. In the chatty words of the sidekick who eventually accretes on to you, who’s an oddly adorable sort of giant dendrite:

"lots of things survive down here… biotech stuff, variously sapient/sentient, outfolding like ancient dungeon tunnels into villi, 2 extract info from the miasma"

The aforementioned Phenol Red is a mensch, but there’s royalty down here too, queens and duchesses of decay, whose domains you’re forced to navigate in your quest to escape back to the surface so you can tell those jerks that no seriously, y’all are turbo-doomed. Most of the game’s choices revolve around set-piece encounters with these figures, as you must give them something of what they want in order to progress, but giving too much can cost you more than you can bear.

But, interestingly, it probably won’t. For all that Crier’s presentation is relentlessly grim, its actual mechanics are pretty low-key. From a bit of experimentation, most choices only change a bit of the following line of dialogue, so are far lower-stakes than they appear, and while there are ways of getting to a premature bad ending, it takes intentionality to swerve into them: pretty much every character will give you direct instructions about how to handle the next one in line, and the game usually provides plenty of warning if you’re on the wrong track. As a result, I experienced a not-unpleasant clash of vibes as I played: the text was telling me I was a degraded churl wallowing in filth for all eternity, while the gameplay structure was telling me I was on a jolly dungeon crawl adventure that just happened to boast some naughtily outré décor.

I wouldn’t say that’s wholly a bad thing. Crier really does have some compelling writing, dense with allusion and gesturing towards ideas that are more fun to contemplate than have spelled out. There’s an engaging section where you’re trying to use your prophetic talents to decode the messages coming down a sort of fungal sigint network, and the choices are enticing – my favorite was interpreting one splotch of lichen as “a dragon encircling a sun while eating its own tail and buttocks[, d]rawn in fluorescent blue kohl.” There’s a later bit of worldbuilding that reflects on the methods of the above-ground tyrant: “The sovran’s men take to the sea for new markets. They bring lenses, automata, small marvels. Whalebone dice. Thaumaturgy husks. Severed thumbs. Those who will not trade will be cut down.” I dug all this stuff, and I doubt fighting the game tooth and claw to progress would have made me enjoy this imagery more.

As a result, though, I’m not sure Crier goes as far towards celebrating the fecund and horrifying vitality of the abjected as it seems; player-empowerment sits awkwardly alongside these themes. IF boasts plenty of examples of games with similar subject matter that either through gameplay mechanics (like say, howling dogs) or downbeat narrative progression (hat tip here to Accelerate) feel like more unified aesthetic objects. It’s probably not wholly positive that I quite enjoyed my time with Crier; for all that it’s a very well-put together piece of misery tourism, I can’t help wishing it imposed more of a toll.

can’t fully decode the wordplay that gives rise to meminerimus’s title, but I think “minimum” or “minimus” has to be somewhere in the blender, because this parser game seems an exercise in creating the smallest possible unit of story: the critical-path transcript barely cracks 500 words. So as a result it’s hard to discuss the game without getting into the ending, and since there is a plot here to be spoiled, fair warning that the rest of this review does so.

To pad out the text a bit so readers deciding to nope out after that warning aren’t immediately confronted by unwanted story details in the following line, before they have a change to hit the back button, let me do some throat-clearing and note that the brevity of the text doesn’t indicate that the game is a low-effort production by any means; there are a bunch of testers listed, and there’s a nicely-styled online version of the game that features intuitive hyperlinks for potential actions.

So the restraint here certainly feels intentional, which makes for an interesting contrast with the density of the premise. See, what’s going on here is that the player-character is a digital simulacrum, reconstituted and placed into a virtual shrine featuring the effects of a real-world person who, we learn through examining each of the four items in turn – and examining is all you can do, this is a limited-parser game – has died of suicide. The person who commissioned the replica is the dead person’s parent, who, through misguided attempts to change them “for their own good”, wound up hounding them into their desperate act of self-harm. That parent acts as the game’s narrator, providing commentary as you look at a gift the dead child received from a boyfriend, an award they won at school, and so on, providing a small anecdote for each before eventually triggering the endgame text which spells out the above summary.

This is a fine story, albeit a sadly familiar one, so what I found notable were the ways the game deviated from my expectations. The main divergence is that while the parent is clearly a terrible person who did terrible things, the game’s presentation is nonetheless at least a bit ambivalent. At a micro level, this is done by having one of the four items represent what appears to a wholly positive memory, a board game the two of them enjoyed playing together, which serves to indicate that the relationship wasn’t completely one-dimensionally negative. But zooming out, the reason the parent’s gone to the trouble of creating this “virtual resurrection” is that they’re baffled by what they did wrong – they’re aware that the things they did exacted a toll upon their child, and from the questions they ask in the finale (“Why did you have to do that to yourself? Why did you have to go so soon? Where I did I go wrong? Am I to blame for this?”) it’s clear at least part of them understands their guilt. But for all that the game makes the parent’s passive-aggression, low expectations, and abusive behavior pellucidly clear, this incomprehension seems to be sincere.

This is an intriguing dynamic! An AI looking at the detritus of the person it’s aping, looked at by the person who knows that they caused their death but due to some flaw in their humanity unable to grasp exactly how or why – it’s an existential hall of mirrors that caused me some vertigo when I thought it through. But it’s also one would probably be more impactful if the game had spent more time elaborating upon it. The AI, for one thing, has no subjectivity beyond providing a vector for the player to make the arbitrary choice of which object to examine, and with the dead child provided no real character traits beyond a few generalities adverted to by the obviously-biased narrator, their suicide lacks some impact.

Sure, there would be challenges to expanding this piece of micro-fiction too much: more robust gameplay systems would probably be required, which can be tricky in a character-first game like this, and it might be hard to sustain the narrator’s lack of understanding across a more worked-out plot without things feeling absurd. Still, I think it would have been worth the attempt; meminerimus raises some interesting questions, but doesn’t do much to elaborate upon them. That’s not a bad position for what appears to be a debut work of IF to leave the player, though, as that means I’m game to see what the author does next.

Back in the mid-90s when Doom was all the rage, I was in high school and had dreams of video-game-writing glory, so one afternoon I cracked open the game’s level editor to see what I could make of it. Confronted by the blank grid, I was momentarily at a loss for what to create, and defaulted to trying to map out the dorm I was sitting in. This was fun while it lasted, but unfortunately the building’s defining features were its two high stairwells, which were impossible to so much as gesture at in Doom’s 2.5-dimensional-on-a-good-day engine, so thus my dreams were dashed. But I always think of that when I come across a my-dumb-apartment game or something similar, because for all that it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at the lack of inspiration, and be frustrated by the way real-world places feel like they’re full of redundant rooms, illogical connections, and gratuitous empty space when experienced in a virtual context, it’s also worth trying to get back in touch with the impulse that gave birth to them: the wonder at being able to conjure up something from nothing, the impulse to domesticate a strange new digital world by recreating someplace familiar, the thrill of recognition when hard work finally makes it real.

Latinorum makes it easy to dwell on the positive side of that dichotomy. Per the author’s note, this is a rewritten version of a game he wrote when he was likewise in high school, updated and rewritten but still very much of a piece with that early era of IF (like, it requires a C64 emulator to play, for one thing). The real-world origins would be obvious even without this paratext, though – the school you explore has a bunch of near-identical classrooms, features like blackboards and closets that are scrupulously implemented but rarely have anything plot-related to offer, and a confusing map with exits that don’t always make sense, all of which means it feels too idiosyncratic to be made up.

But while I don’t have any nostalgia for this vintage of IF, much less this particular Italian secondary school, the game still manages to be worth the fifteen minutes or so it takes to play through it. For one thing, you’re given a clear goal that rationalizes why you’re exploring this particular deserted place – you’re trying to steal an exam paper the night before the test so you can get a good grade, which is cheating, sure, but a fun enough jumping-off point for a short adventure. For another, the game keeps things short and easy enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. There’s some light object-manipulation puzzles and some locked doors, but the two-word parser makes solving most of these straightforward, and the game is free of hunger timers and unwinnable states; the only old-school touch I noticed was one puzzle near the end where I had to manually OPEN a BOOK despite EXAMINING it seeming to indicate that I had already flipped through it, which is a little annoying but nothing a trip to the thoughtfully-provided walkthrough couldn’t solve.

Beyond that, the game leans into its scholastic setting with some fun, gentle gags: I like that it opens with a cheery “alea iacta est”, and this bit of description when you check out a paper airplane made from folding up a page from one of Kant’s books made me laugh very hard:

"The legendary Critique of Pure Reason. The aircraft, made from a sheet of notebook paper, took off from an unidentified bench, but due to a malfunction in the control systems, landed at the feet of the Philosophy professor who was explaining (so to speak) Kant."

That “(so to speak)” is 10/10, no notes.

Is Latinorum one for the ages? No, it’s a slight thing, but there are worse jaunts to take down memory lane, and it makes me positively disposed towards the games the high school students of today are even now making, recording their experiences for future generations yet to come.

There are a lot of crimes to be laid at the door of postmodernism, from academic texts that use up three quarters of their word count twisting themselves into knots at the violence inherent in any act of analysis to the brainwave that led to an unremarkable margarine being marketed as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, but credit it with this: the idea that every particular narrative voice, in nonfiction as well as in fiction, is an artificial construct, rather than a direct and unmediated expression of the writer’s identity, is these days pretty universally understood. So it’s no great revelation to confess that the Mike Russo who’s offered his opinions on some 700-odd works of IF to date diverges in many respects from the actually-existing fellow currently putting fingers to keys. In most respects, these differences are banal: I doubt any of y’all would be surprised to learn that reviewing-me is much more discursive, nor that intensive joke-workshopping means he comes across as far more clever than the genuine article. But beyond these matters of degree, there are also areas that don’t come up, either because they’re not typically that relevant to talking about IF – like my work in the nonprofit industrial complex – or because they’re not part of what I tend to prioritize when assessing a game.

Puzzle design is a good example of this latter category. When I talk about puzzles in my reviews, I usually focus on how well-integrated they are into a game’s story and how they advance its themes, how they affect the pacing, whether the clueing is fair and if solving them feels like it moves the player ahead, since I think those are the most broadly-applicable ways to evaluate them. But this high-minded focus on design goals and literary function typically pre-empts me from talking about how much of a nerd I am for puzzles, especially of the wordplay variety. Every day I do the Wordle, both Squardles, Bracket City, and several crosswords – so many that I’ve had to intentionally drop some from my quotidian rounds because it was notably eating into my free time. I love a rebus and a not-too-hard anagram, and I especially love a game that’s a collection of brainteasers: your Fool’s Errands, your Professors Layton, your Sage Sanctums Scramble.

As a result, while part of me has to acknowledge that there’s a way in which Enigmart is a bit perfunctory – it’s a collection of the puzzles the author wrote for the monthlong Enigmarch event, gathered together with a couple pages of absurdist story providing connective tissue – a much bigger part of me just squeals in delight at getting to dig into a variety-box of 26 different bite-sized puzzles. There’s a consistent food theme that provides a bit of humor and some gentle prompting in some of the puzzles, but no particular idea is repeated: there are some familiar ones like anagrams and logic puzzles, but also more esoteric challenges involving mixing-and-matching pairs of letters to create words, a Venn-diagram-based puzzle unlike anything I’ve seen before that’s nonetheless immediately intuitive, and even a tricky reverse-Wordle.

The difficulty is generally pitched just right; most range from easy to moderate, with only a few that take more than a couple minutes of thought or require you to stare at the thing until your brain suddenly clicks and gets the solution (though I will say that familiarity with the pop culture of the 80s and 90s is definitely helpful for a few of them). And for the trickier ones, there’s a hint function to help you get over the hump, though it’s only unlocked pretty far into the game – still, I think that’s a reasonable choice since it ensures it’s just there to help you finish up those last couple puzzles you’re not quite getting, rather than pushing people who just don’t get along with these kinds of brainteasers to power through nonetheless.

The implementation is also top-notch – there are all kinds of pictures, drop-down menus, and checklists incorporated which helps keep the puzzles fresh, and I didn’t come across any bugs or interface infelicities. As for that framing story, it’s enjoyably daft but winds up having more layers than it needed to; the conceit is that you’re shopping at a new supermarket where you can get discounts on particular products by solving puzzles in the store’s proprietary app, which is of course silly, but the game surprised me by taking this premise seriously, engaging with questions of privacy and capitalist exploitation while introducing a couple of honest-to-god characters into what’s otherwise a straightforward puzzlefest. As far as I can tell there’s no metapuzzle or branching choices here, which is perhaps a missed opportunity – did I mention how much I adore Fool’s Errand – but it’s still a nice bonus that doesn’t draw too much attention from the puzzle-y main event.

If you’re only interested in IF for its potential to tell a rich story, or if you only like inventory puzzles deeply rooted in a coherent narrative, Enigmart is unlikely to change your preferences. But if you likewise have a suite of puzzle websites you visit every morning as soon as you wake up, I think you’ll also have a great time putting it through its paces. But I do have to levy one complaint: March has 31 days but there are only 26 puzzles in the game, so come on, there has to be a post-festival release with the left-over five, right? I’ll be waiting!

There are few constants in this storm-tossed age, but it is nonetheless an iron law of IF that you will never have a bad time in an Agnieszka Trzaska game. The roguelike 4x4 series, the skeleton-and-mouse buddy act of the Rosalinda games, one-offs like the sci-fi shenanigans of Chuk and the Arena – for all the differences in setting and gameplay, you can expect a charming story with plucky characters and laugh-out-loud humor, undergirded by solid, satisfying mechanics. Universal Robot is no exception, and if the puzzles are a little less complex than usual, the almost sandbox-style climax and righteous social comment provide more than enough of a counterbalance.

The “Hex” of the title is the player-character – you’re a put-upon alien wage-slaving it up on a space-station owned by a megacorporation that’s figured out how to use tax loopholes to make pointless widget-production profitable regardless of the fact that they don’t get sold, and in fact get dumped out into space. Not content with this money-for-nothing scheme, they’re putting on pressure to cut costs further, which is where your manager gets the idea of replacing you with a robot. Adding insult to injury, you’re tasked with assembling and training the thing, and adding injury to the insult to the injury, you’re not so much going be laid off as jettisoned out the airlock alongside the station’s other refuse. Fortunately, you’ve got a tool-belt, a buddy who works in the station’s kitchens, and no compunctions whatsoever about using every shrink-ray, inversion module, and rubber snake you can lay your hands on to claw out a better ending to this story.

As the list of inventory items there suggests, we’re very clearly in comedy-point-and-click-game territory. The game revolves around a series of inventory puzzles, which are supported by a clean interface – there’s an always-accessible subscreen where you can examine, combine, or use the stuff you’re carrying on the items in the room you’re in, combined with a simple navigation system and simple dialogue trees. But for the graphics, it’s a pitch-perfect implementation of a late-period LucasArts game, and as with the best of those classics, puzzle solutions are logical without feeling too straightforward, prompting plenty of “wait I think this should work” moments.

In further keeping with that tradition, there are also jokes a-plenty. That manager scheming to replace you? He’s called Mr. Green, but as the game is quick to emphasize, “new”, not “old” Mr. Green, because he’s actually a giant red monster who ate your former, human boss, but absorbed some of his memories and expertise and therefore inherited the manager’s position because the company decided it would be a pain to train someone else up from scratch. And I guess it’s a dumb joke, but I laughed at the earnest prediction that adoption of robots “could lead to unemployment rates reaching 160% by the end of the decade, with some workers being forced to be unemployed at two or more companies at once.” The tragedy!

Per these examples, there’s definitely an anti-corporate, anti-LLM thread that runs through the game, but it’s largely used for jokes and to evoke sympathy for the working-class characters, so stays relatively restrained; as someone who can get annoyed if it feels like a game is getting too didactic even when I agree with the points it’s making, so I appreciated the light touch. And it does serve to add a note of dignity to proceedings that can often get quite slapstick.

The endings, in fact, are where things can become somewhat serious. The puzzles along the critical path are generally quite straightforward: see, the robot is missing a couple pieces, so you need to collect those before you can finish assembling it, and the obstacles to doing so are clearly flagged and don’t require too much brainpower to surmount. But if you just run through that path of least resistance, you’ll find yourself having created a perfectly-functioning robot trained to do everything you can do, which given the ruthlessness of your corporate overlords, is not a great idea.

But there are many, many ways you can undermine or subvert the robot, leading to radically different results; there are a dozen endings to find, and even after coming up with a variety of plans, I still missed almost half of them. Despite the small map and limited number of objects, there are lots of opportunities to mess about, and I was delighted to realize that I could implement just about every silly thought I had, from sabotaging the robot’s physical capacities to messing with its programming (I’ll drop into spoilers to relate my favorite ending: (Spoiler - click to show)it’s the one where you get yourself hopped up on a giant chocolate-chip cookie, cocoa being an intoxicant to your variety of alien, just before donning the training helmet, which leads to a drunkenly incompetent robot slurring its way through the initial interview with management). I was a little disappointed that it appears it’s possible to lock yourself out of some endings based on a decision that isn’t flagged as irrevocable (I’m talking about (Spoiler - click to show)downloading the finance podcasts to your terminal), but it feels churlish to complain based on how much fun I had with the ones I did find.

I’m not sure Universal Robot will wind up at the absolute top tier of Trzaska’s gameography – for all that I enjoyed the characters, there isn’t a relationship quite as winning as the one between Rosalinda and Piecrust, and the mechanics aren’t as intrinsically compelling as those in the more systems-driven games. But this is praising with faint damnation indeed; this is a fun, fleet game with something to say, solid gags, and an enjoyably farcical climax. What more could one want, or expect?

Literary hypertext is like a fractal miniature of the IF scene: compared to the larger world of video games, IF is a tiny, un-commercial niche more focused on quality writing than fancy gameplay or bells and whistles, whereas in comparison to mainline IF, literary hypertext is a tiny, un-commercial niche etc. etc. While I haven’t dug into the classics of the subgenre, I’ve appreciated reading about them in places like Jimmy Maher’s blog, and where I’ve come across their few latter-day inheritors, most notably kaemi’s oeuvre, I’ve often found myself bowled over – their distinctive features are self-consciously literary prose and a dreamlike, nonlinear use of links to connect a story’s component parts, so done right, these pieces can feel like the best video games James Joyce never wrote.

So I was excited to see Cyclic Fruition Number One pop up in the festival, as from the first click it’s clear that it’s working in the literary hypertext tradition. Structurally, there are static passages telling a story with no particular character identified as a singular protagonist, with inline hyperlinks on words that obliquely point towards an action or change of location. Interestingly, these links are echoed in the page footer, where they connect to the same destination passages but boast new, abstract titles – the one link in the first passage is a character saying “I’d like to wander around first”, which is picked up at the bottom of the page as “Proposal”, for example.

As for the content, it’s also giving Modernism, as the kids say. We follow a trio of agents of some ineffable bureaucracy as they visit a midcentury-vibed railroad station, before exploring the neighborhood in pursuit of a rogue word that’s invaded our pre-existing linguistic consensus:

"He cocks his head up to listen. A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals. Each one declared under management of Reciprocus."

Per the above excerpt, the prose is controlled, complex, drily amused. I enjoyed this description of Chalgrove, the last of our abecedarian three, so forgive the long quote:

"His mind exists, even downright persists, by virtue of regular routine. It is laid out in a grid pattern, and castellated in certain critical ratios. A measure of seven splits into a two and a five. Where precision is required (and Chalgrove does enjoy precision) twenty-four is employed as the divisor.

"This cerebral containment resembles, perhaps, the rear garden of a modern family dwelling. Never quite embracing nature; the planters positioned according to policy, and the greenery only from certain Approved Suppliers.

"There is likely to be a mild disagreement very soon. Appleby always wants to go his own way, whereas Broadstairs will demand a clear objective. Chalgrove is the man to schedule this dispute for later."

As for where they’re going, well, it’s mostly in a circle. The game is fairly short, and as the title indicates, while a few of the passages do have multiple exits, they all eventually lead back to the railroad station, at which point you can keep playing to explore alternate trajectories. It’s workable enough, though I confess I found it a bit unsatisfying, possibly because I found the “true path” – which explicitly calls out the loop and links to an external blog post that explains a little more about the structure undergirding the thing – on my first go-round; unsurprisingly, later iterations felt like exercises in diminishing returns, simply piling up more incident without adding much to the picture, albeit the prose remains a draw throughout.

The about text on the festival page indicates this is a “demo piece”, though I’m not sure whether that means there may be more of this story to come, or just that it’s a shakedown for the system it’s written in, the new-to-me Spiki (my hot take: looks a lot like Twine’s Chapbook story format, seems fine). If this is a preview, then sure, I’d definitely play the next bit. As a work unto itself, though, it feels quite slight. But either way, I’m left wanting more – bring on the literary hypertext renaissance, we have nothing to lose but our attachment to causality.

“The House is one of those games that lives or dies by vibes. While the setup calls to mind Maniac Mansion – you need to assemble a four-person team of stereotypes to explore and escape a spooky house – we’re actually in manic territory here. Those stereotypes aren’t ‘jock’, ‘nerd’, or ‘cheerleader,’ but ‘Lassie with a catnip habit’, ‘extra-dimensional time wizard’, or ‘Actually Dracula’, for one thing. And this straightforwardly-presented Twine game doesn’t involve any puzzle-solving – you just start out talking to each of the four characters in your party to get the first half of their backstories, then lawnmower through the rooms, each of which will prompt one character to infodump the other half of their pop-culture-reference-hammed background and then find a key. Once you bring all four keys to the attic, you win.

“The eight characters on offer are distinctive, but there aren’t many interactions between them – there’s like one short passage that varies based on who you’ve chosen as your main character, which also provides some customized narration, but each character is associated with a different room, and just spews out their spiel the same way every time, regardless of who’s listening. As a result the game supports two full playthroughs to see everyone’s plots, since almost all of the game’s text will be different if you choose the first four characters and then the last four, but after that diminishing returns set in pretty quickly.

“So with limited gameplay and a ten-minute or so runtime, as I said The House’s success really comes down to vibes, and the good news here is that while there’s a range in how well the game’s lolrandom humor landed for me, there are definitely some strong points. Some of the characters are a bit humdrum – that time wizard was kind of a dud – but I loved the Terminator pastiche, who per the movie is a robot who’s been sent back in time to assassinate the future leader of the human resistance, but has somehow adopted the identity, mannerisms, and accents of a Brooklyn cabbie from the 60s, and whose story winds up going even farther afield from those already-zany beginnings to involve babies, lava, and moral dilemmas. Similarly, I laughed at the fact that the alien-pretending-to-be-a-human’s cover story is instantly unbelievable, not because of the way it keeps accidentally mentioned being birthed in an extrasolar hatchery, but because it says it was raised in a middle-income household, when per the game ‘there hasn’t been a middle income since 1971’ (I’d date it later, to the oil shock, but that’s a nitpick).

“Sure, many of the pop-culture references seem unnecessary, and as I said, the characters are hit and miss. But the ratio is solid enough, and the time commitment low enough, that The House more than justifies its existence.”

So.

That’s the review I’d prefer to have written about The House. But we need to talk about Jessica.

In that roster of eight characters, only two are female, and actually one of them is a male-coded extradimensional demon bound into a doll, so that just leaves Jessica. Here’s her blurb on the character-select screen:

"Jessica is an aspiring writer who could never really get off the ground after college. She is a little plain and no one would call her unattractive, but her only serious relationship recently ended in a bad way. Now she is thirty-something, living with her parents again, and left asking herself: 'Is it too late for love?'"

Her internal narration is presented in a flowery script, she’s a big fan of romance novels, her dialogue is broken up by stammers and stutters to convey her low self-esteem, and her “relationship” ended because she wanted a baby and her commitment-phobe partner-only-by-a-technicality immediately dumped her when he found out. What’s worse, while the jokes for most of the other characters are designed to make you laugh at what they say, many of Jessica’s invite you to laugh at what a pathetic girl she is, like this bit of dialogue: “I-I love this house, don’t you? I can… imagine me cleaning it for you.”

“Lady with romance-addled brain” isn’t necessarily a terrible idea for a comedy character, let me say, and there are some gags that gesture towards how this could have actually worked: I giggled at the absurdity of a description that said “Mirrors line the walls, like in a romance drama set in a hardware store.” But again, she’s the only female character, the majority of the jokes are unfunny and at her expense, and nothing kills the good-natured buzz of a silly comedy game like lazy stereotypes. I wish I didn’t have to write this addendum, because most of the game is an inoffensive fun time with occasional moments of inspired wackiness – but here we are.

I was halfway into Strings when I realized that there was a certain repetitiveness to its puzzle structure. In this substantially cozier spin-off from last Ectocomp’s bug-horror Warden, you play an insectoid musician bent on forming a band by convincing four legendary musicians to play with you. Each is conveniently located in one of the four cardinal compass directions, which admittedly is a common coincidence in parser games, but more to the point, convincing them plays out in a predictable sequence: after getting the lay of the land, there’s a traversal puzzle before you can press your case with one of the musicians, then after a bit of dialogue you solve another puzzle that leads to playing a tune for them that’s so great that it makes them want to jam with you.

This observation wasn’t meant as a gotcha by any means – I actually like it when a game creates a structure that helps the player understand what’s expected of them, and just as I noted the common threads between the first two vignettes, I hit a third that hewed to broadly the same pattern, but changed things up by making the traversal puzzle a much more involved process, with higher stakes than just getting to the relevant bug (I’m talking about the (Spoiler - click to show)underground tunnel echolocation bit, to be clear), showing that the game leaves more than enough room for variation to keep things fresh. But beyond that, as I got through the last of the four sequences and headed into the endgame, I realized that despite my oh-so-clever pattern-spotting I’d heretofore failed to understand the true reason for this structure: it’s right there in the title, this is a folk tale rendered in song, so what’s more natural than verse chorus verse chorus etc.?

Indeed, everything in Strings revolves around its musical theme – well, everything besides its adorable entomological trappings. The game’s paratext establishes it as a legend and thus it takes more liberties than did Warden’s comparatively-grounded setting, so while the protagonist, a cricket-like mandolin player, is familiar from the former game, this time out there’s a wider menagerie of allies and threats, from an irritating sparrow to a winning worm to sapient insects of all descriptions (as well as a parasitic mite that evokes some of the creepier bits of Warden…) The lush prose conjures a magical world that’s familiar in its broad contours, but transformed by its zoomed-in perspective:

"South of the stage the soil becomes spongy, the grasses and herbs become reeds and tangled jewelweed. A vast pond stretches to the south, surface still and glinting in the sun, bordered just offshore by towering reeds. It would be peaceful if it weren’t so loud with frogsong; the frogs themselves are hiding at the base of the reeds or in the water, invisible."

It’s a lovely place to spend time, but your musical quest is an urgent one, as you’re bent on performing a triumphant concert for the love of your life, which just happens to be the moon. And performance isn’t just your goal, it’s also your major puzzle-solving tool: there are plenty of obstacles in your way, from hostile wildlife to inaccessible pathways, and almost all of them save a few optional tasks are resolved via your bugdolin. It’s an impressively versatile instrument, capable of being tuned into high or low pitches, and you’re able to find new strings that can totally transform the sound it generates; then, once you’re ready to play, beyond playing a song you can pluck a single note or strum a chord, or even pitch a performance to an audience of one in order to sway them in a particular direction.

My one small knock against Strings is that there isn’t always a lot of in-game prompting for all of these verbs; you really need to type HELP and COMMANDS at the beginning to make sure you know what you can do. But once you’ve internalized the vocabulary, the puzzles are well constructed to make use of your capabilities – I was never at a loss for what to do, and even my further-out ideas were often rewarded by unlocking an optional achievement (in fact the game boasts quite a lot of pleasing bells and whistles along these lines, including a nicely-drawn map that situates all your peregrinations in space). Combined with the clear, clean structure, it all makes for a nicely-paced sense of progression, as solving puzzles feels satisfying without ever being too hard, and each step tangibly moves you closer to your goal.

And that goal, when it arrives, is a magical-realist set-piece that effectively crowns everything that’s come before, boasting an emotionally-resonant choice as well as more lovely bug-puns (“probos-kiss” is some all-time great wordplay). For all that Strings is a companion piece to Warden, it’s got a vibe all its own, with writing and puzzle design that precisely advance its design goals (and while there are bugs all over this thing, none of them are of the software-error variety). It all makes for a winning package; if it were a folk song, it’d be the kind you catch yourself humming for days after you first hear it.

My son was home from preschool for six straight days last week – a combination of the weekend, Easter holidays, and a bout of strep throat we both got – and as a result we wound up watching a bunch of kids’ movies (and doing Lego. So much Lego). On back to back nights we did Ratatouille and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and I was intrigued to discover that despite their wildly different plots, i.e. up and coming rat proving himself in the realm of haute cuisine vs. lovable mad scientist trying to save the world from a plague of giant raining food he accidentally unleashed, their emotional spines were completely identical: in both, a comedian plays a young man (well, rat) with a special gift (good taste/off-the-wall inventing) that places him at odds with the expectations of his society, and especially with his father, an emotionally-distant patriarch played by a respected actor of yesteryear slumming for a paycheck, until at a climactic moment the son proves his independence and worth, and his incommunicative father is finally able to express his love.

It’s maybe not surprising that people who write and make movies specifically have some unresolved feelings about feeling less supported by their primary male role model, but this is not peculiar to the field of children’s animation – as a society, we have daddy issues, look around (the first draft of this intro included more geopolitics and was a much bigger downer). So 23 Minutes, an extended Twine narrative-poem about the anxieties of being a new father that unfurls across a sleep-deprived walk to work, has a claim to a broader zeitgeist, even as its signifiers (Tesco, newly-creaking knees, Nigel Farage) anchor it to a particular older-British-Zoomer milieu.

It’s less these particulars and more the presentation that stand out at first impression, though. The commute is rendered as a long series of moments, with each click revealing a handful of new words and updating the blurred background photo to a view a few feet further down the London streets. While I often find excessive clicking an annoying way to navigate a game, 23 Minutes’ approach worked for me, since lingering on each cluster of words in turn feels like an appropriate way to read poetry, and the progression of the photos communicates a sense of motion (as well as a sense of danger: there’s one bit where a van hops onto the sidewalk and comes towards that camera that left me worried for both the protagonist and the author!)

Keeping the player feeling like they’re always moving also fits well with the protagonist’s lapidary thoughts – since for all that fatherhood is the central theme, his narrative stream jumps around quite a lot. Early grumbles at sleep deprivation and regret at snapping at his wife over a trivial household chore give way to frustration at the seeming meaninglessness of his work (he’s a teacher), then deepen into more anxious ruminations about whether he’s emotionally connecting with his new baby and finally digging into a major conflict with his own dad, with diversions into his musical preferences and how he met his wife along the way.

Having been a new father myself, I can testify to the way your sleep-deprived brain can flit from topic to topic at the slightest provocation, and the connections between these leaps are usually clear. And the writing is dense with memorable details, like this early bit where the somnambulant protagonist:

Wipe[s] the debris from my eye / crunchy / like the tips / of oven-baked broccoli

(The crunchy broccoli even gets a callback when he reflects on those cracking noises his knees have started to make)

The author also uses the trajectory of words on the screen to mirror the protagonist’s distraction-prone consciousness; the word yesterday on the right-hand side of the screen calls to mind apposite Beatles lyrics on the right.

With that said, 23 Minutes isn’t just trying to dig into the subjective experience of being an exhausted parent trying to keep their head together while they go through their day; it becomes clear that there’s a progression to the topics the protagonist’s brain keeps bringing up, with all of it ultimately being rooted in that pivotal conflict with his father. While he’s prey to a whole host of worries – that he’s too irresponsible yet to be a good dad, that he’s not able to answer his students’ questions about the really important things in life, that he’s too emotionally detached to bond with the baby, and that he’s being childish and churlish with his wife under the pressure of their new status quo – there’s a particular abscess at the root of all this: the dad, you see, has turned to Reform’s anti-immigrant politics as an emotional salve in the wake of a late-in-life layoff, and when he lashed out at the protagonist’s immigrant wife, the protagonist bumbled along trying to keep the peace rather than sticking up for her. The game makes of this incident a big reveal, building up to it and adverting to its significance even as it works through the protagonist’s subsidiary issues, making clear the connection between this primal emasculation and all his other concerns.

It’s a choice that admittedly lends some drama to proceedings, but one that I have to admit left me somewhat cold. One doesn’t need such a Freudian origin-story to explain why you’re not your best self with your spouse in the heat of the feed-the-baby-every-two-hours crucible, and I think pretty much everyone second-guesses themself about what kind of parent they’ll be. I found myself far more invested in the protagonist’s relationship with his wife and child, and was disappointed that the latter part of the game refracted them through the lens of his more stereotypical daddy issues. In fairness, 23 Minutes does soften this blow by toggling to a more upbeat mode for the ending, with hope represented by self-acceptance and a dedication to change for the better, rather than suggesting that everything would be fixed if the protagonist got in a screaming match with his dad. And there are a few other scenes with the dad, set before he gets sucked down into the black hole of right-wing politics, that prevent him from being a complete caricature.

Still, it’s a bit tidier than I wanted it to be. It’s notable that as the bad-dad plot comes to the fore, the writing feels prosier, more like narration. But the game works best, I think, at it’s most specific, when it’s using the tools of poetry to embed the player in the mind of a lost soul hyperfixating on tiny details in a blurry landscape while he tries to figure out this radical change in his life – I wouldn’t have minded 23 full minutes of that.

My wife is a fan of all things British, and I’m usually happy to go along for the ride, so when she started getting into TV adaptations of UK-set cozy mysteries, I gladly watched them alongside her. I could definitely see the attraction – one of her favorites was set in the Cotswolds and added to its bucolic setting wacky hijinks and endearing side-characters, while ensuring that the murders were handled with discretion and indeed, a hint of whimsy, which kept the quantity of ugly brutality required to set the mechanism of mystery into motion to a minimum (see, you start writing about these things and the twee wordplay is infectious). So it was all a good time, save for one rather large fly in the ointment: none of the aforementioned mysteries made a lick of sense.

See, when I watch a murder mystery, I like to play along and guess at whodunnit (not to mention why and how), and while my hit rate is generally pretty solid, I wound up completely stymied when watching these. Reliably, the investigation in the first three quarters of the show would serve only to chase down red herrings and false leads, the blundering policemen would get in the way just when the detectives were about to figure something out, and pretty much all the cases were “solved” when one of the lead characters inadvertently put themselves into the power of a heretofore-innocuous supporting player who would suddenly reveal an unguessed and unguessable motive that had only benefited from the lightest of foreshadowing in the course of trying to cover their tracks through one final (inevitably foiled) act of violence.

For all my complaining, there’s a method to the madness – a cozy mystery wouldn’t be very cozy if the reader/viewer were tensed up on high alert the whole time, scanning for the scantest clue and obsessively weighing and reweighing competing theories. That’s good for a high-tension Christie novel, but here, it’s all about the vibes, and once I realized that they’d intentionally removed the solve-it-at-home aspect, I was able to relax and enjoy the ride.

Anyway, that’s my theory of cozy mysteries, and while I hesitate to tar the entire genre with this critique, since I’ve by no means assessed a representative sample, I will say that The Coffee Cake Caper didn’t disabuse me of my stereotypes. Setting-wise, we’re clearly in cozy territory: the protagonist, a neophyte sleuth, is called to a British carnival where a longstanding baking competition has been thrown into chaos by the disappearance of one contestant’s dough during an overnight proof (shades of Bingate). While the stakes eventually do rise slightly (groan), there isn’t even the slightest flavor of danger to proceedings, and the characters are an enjoyable cast who, if anything, could have been a bit more eccentric: you get two bakers (one uptight, one flashy), a somewhat diffident judge, a stolid night-watchman… It’s a fun world to inhabit, and is fleshed out to a reasonable degree, with the carnival’s environs enlivened with just the right amount of detail. There’s a fair bit of exposition and characters giving their alibis, but it’s all written with a light touch and moves along at a good clip.

But this isn’t just an explore-and-chat-em-up, this is a mystery, and that’s where Coffee Cake Caper’s troubles begin. First, the interface is not well suited to the gameplay on offer. The main interactivity is a series of mad-libs deductions where you must poke holes in the stories of each of the suspects, before transitioning to the finale where you solve the case once and for all (there are a handful of places where the game feints at providing some branching options, but these are invariably but-thou-must Hobson’s choices). The mechanics are simple enough – you fill out the contents of an accusation, then list the three or four pieces of evidence that that support your contention – but the implementation left me flailing. For one thing, despite the fact that the text frequently mentions that you’re taking notes about the clues you discover, there are no handy player aids keeping track of what you discovered; hopefully you were doing that on your own, or enjoy scrolling back through thousands of words of infodumps, in order to review the case file. For another, sometimes the grammar required is strained – at one point I wanted to accuse someone of lying about when they went home, but I had to render it as lying about “when you took the car” – and the fiddliness of getting everything exactly right can lead to farce, as when it took me five tries to figure out how to call out a carnie for eating some of the missing dough, when I’d caught him red-handed with some of it in his waste basket and on his collar (my problem – shared by the walkthrough – is that I called his clothes a uniform rather than a costume). And making everything much more annoying, the order of clues within each drop-down menu is randomized, I suppose to punish lawnmowering, which means hunting for the five or six specific items you’re looking for is always a pain.

Beyond these mechanics, the mystery itself relies on soaring leaps of logic and frequently calls back to small details mentioned at most in passing long before the player knows they should be relevant. Admittedly there are a few places where this is done elegantly – there’s an early bit in the parking lot where the descriptions of two cars sets up a later chain of logical reasoning that I felt clever for figuring out. But for the most part it’s intensely frustrating and had me running to the walkthrough, with the most egregious example being an endgame deduction that requires the player to work out that a character’s brand-new outfit indicates they’d had to change out of a soiled one – except as far as I can tell from the transcript of my session, the only indication they were wearing new clothes is that when they were first introduced, at the very beginning of the game, their outfit is described as “sharp.”

For a passively-consumed cozy mystery, this wouldn’t raise an eyebrow – you’re here for Diffany and Cornie’s ridiculous rivalry and more-ridiculous names, not to play Sherlock Holmes. But enlisting the player in a mystery constructed this opaquely is no fun, even if you were going into it expecting to exercise your little gray cells to their utmost. With a system that didn’t demand quite so much specificity of the player, and that highlighted important clues so you could spend more time testing theories and less hunting through walls of text, it would all go down a lot easier. So, for that matter, would quashing the bugs that twice required me to start over when clicking a link grayed it out but didn’t display any new text – fortunately that only happened in Chrome, and I was able to reach the end in Firefox. The mystery could also use fewer red herrings, and more logically-clued deductions, to truly sing (some testers could really help with ironing such things out; none are currently listed in the credits, but the difficulty of an investigation is very hard for an author to gauge, meaning their feedback is especially important in this kind of game). There’s a lot that’s appealing about the Coffee Cake Caper, from the solid prose to the appealing characters, but as is so often the case in a competition, it would benefit from a bit more time in the oven and some outside perspective – here’s hoping for a post-festival release that smooths out the rough patches and makes for a more enjoyable ride!