Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

I’ve been at the IF-reviewing game for a while now: over twenty years stem to stern, and even if you discount the interregnums it still comes to about a decade. There’s been a lot of opportunity over all that time to interrogate my methods and their foibles, so I feel like I’m generally pretty self-aware about how I approach reviews. But there remain a couple of black holes that still lurk within this otherwise-well-surveyed galaxy, jealously guarding the secrets yet concealed within their Schwarzschild radii (forgive the tortured metaphor, my son’s been into space stuff lately so it’s all been top of mind). The one apposite to this, my final review of the Thon, is the mysterious ability some games have to make me stick to my first ending rather than replay them.

It’ll shock no one who’s followed my reviews that I have a bit of a completionist streak – OK, I’ve exhausted literally bit of content for every Assassin’s Creed game that came out before my son was born, down to finding all those stupid feathers that were floating over Venice in AC2 and clearing every map icon, however mundane, in Origins and Odyssey, so perhaps “a bit” is a misnomer. So it’s probably unsurprising that if a piece of IF advertises itself as having multiple endings, or significant branch points, my natural inclination is to check those out, and that inclination is even stronger when I’ve decided to review something; obviously an analysis informed by an understanding of a game’s structure and the full range of its narrative possibilities is going to be more incisive! Of course, I’m not slavish about this, if a game is super long or there are options that I’m just deeply uninterested in (see, e.g., “evil” paths), I’m more likely to be one and done. But when playing a short game that clearly signposts that it changes quite a lot based on player choice, and that maintains a minimum level of quality such that a replay feels like it would be reasonably rewarding, I’m typically happy to do so. Except every once in a while I just don’t feel like it, for reasons that I think aren’t *just* laziness but remain frustratingly hard to pin down.

Whew, we’ve finally circled around to Blood and Sunlight. This is a short Ink game that’s part of a series (I haven’t played any of the others) focusing on Zach, the vampire PC, and Lyle, his lover. This installment sees them firmly coupled up, but seemingly still in the early stages of the relationship, facing a milestone: there’s a party at Lyle’s place where Zach is meeting their family, it gets late, and Lyle asks Zach to stay the night, which he’s never done before. The dilemma isn’t about sex, to be clear – Lyle conks out a little too early for that to be on the table – but about Zach’s vampiric nature: Lyle doesn’t (yet?) have blackout curtains or any of the other niceties the discerning Nosferatu arranges for their lair. Fortunately, Zach isn’t the kind of vampire who’ll burst into ash if they catch a stray ray, but sunlight is enough to cause discomfort and nausea, so there are reasons beyond potentially-fraught interpersonal dynamics to hesitate to sleep over.

All of this is well explained within the game, even for a newcomer to the series – I felt like I had a solid handle on the characters’ respective personalities (Zach is a bundle of anxiety, Lyle is gentle and solicitous; Lyle’s family members are very much secondary but still manage to be appealing) and a clear view of the situation. Details of their backstory don’t really come on-screen, but given that those are probably the purview of the other two games, that’s fair enough. I will admit that I wanted a bit more worldbuilding on how exactly vampirism is meant to work, especially given that the treatment of sunlight is idiosyncratic – in particular, I wasn’t sure whether feeding generally entailed some form of predation or if ethical vamping was a thing, since that would have helped me get a better handle on how much of Zach’s angst is due to his personality rather than his situation – but all things being equal I feel like a lighter touch is better than a heavier one on this score.

Speaking of things that are light or heavy, there are a lot of choice points in what’s a reasonably slight vignette: beyond narratively important ones like deciding whether or not to accede to Lyle’s entreaties, you’re given quite a lot of scope to define Zach’s attitude and mood. These tend to range from more self-loathing ones, where you draw back from others’ attempts to reach out to you, to happier choices where you disbelievingly accept the love and care that you’re offered (as I said, Zach is angsty, you understandably don’t get completely low-key options).

It’s all well-presented, in prose that’s unshowy but evidences a good eye for detail and foregrounds emotion:

"You both get up, and Lyle laughs when they notice your pajamas, informing you they were a gag gift from Daph. You let them hit the bathroom first, and you pull on yesterday’s clothes, glancing yourself over in Lyle’s mirror afterward; that whole no-reflection thing is as much a lie as the burn-up-in-the-sun shit. Your eyes are a little hollow, the corners of your mouth drooping. You put on a smile, grinning so hard it becomes macabre, and when your face goes slack again you look a little less dour. Then, too antsy to just sit and wait, you crack the door."

It all adds up to a satisfying, nicely made game, albeit in my first playthrough it felt a bit slight – I generally stuck to the choices that saw Zach accepting Lyle’s overtures and making a reciprocal effort to connect with them, and while that course did have some bumps along the way, notably some barfing and a need to push down feelings of inadequacy, it felt decidedly low-drama both in terms of conflict and outcomes; by no means was Zach and Lyle’s relationship transformed by these events, it just took a solid but small step forward.

I suspect that players who leaned into other versions of Zach would find their experience quite different, however: a vampire who slinks home alone or awkwardly runs out first thing in the morning would likely see this night as more of a turning point, potentially threatening this promising relationship or just offering a poignant reminder of the ineluctable curse of undeath. If I felt like my playthrough was low-drama because the main takeaway was that Zach just needs to relax a little, well, those other playthroughs are presumably right there.

And yet that’s all speculation, since I left things there. Objectively, there’s no real reason I can give for not exploring my options: I sincerely think the game would change a bunch, and my opinions would be more well-rounded, if I gave it another whirl, and I enjoyed my first go-round so I’m pretty sure I’d like a second, too, even if I’d be spending more of it wincing at Zach’s refusal to get out of his own head. But, well, see above – after hovering my cursor over the “restart” button a couple of times, I didn’t wind up clicking. I guess even if you’re usually a pretty responsible person, there are times when just going with the flow still somehow feels like the right thing even when you know objectively it’s not. And if I can’t figure out why that is for myself, it’s easy to sympathize with Zach for being in the same boat.

I have an odd relationship to floods, which is to say, I don’t actually have one. I’ve experienced earthquakes and hurricanes, seen a tornado, had to evacuate my home because of a wildfire, missed my wedding rehearsal due to mudslides, and hunkered down through more blizzards than I can remember before I decamped to Southern California (they’re way better than the fires). There are more exotic natural disasters beyond these, of course, but I’ve seen movies depicting avalanches and tsunamis and volcanos so there I at least have some second-hand associations of terror. But floods? I’ve never actually been in one, and they don’t present an especially cinematic prospect, unless a dam breaks or something. As a result, while I intellectually know they’re awful – witness all the recent deaths in Texas – I don’t have much of a visceral response to them. If anything I think the images of flooded towns can seem oddly peaceful, the ordinary landscape of roads and buildings transfigured.

So I vibed with The Deluge’s take on the theme: the nameless protagonist is forced by a flood to leave their home, but leaving everything and everyone behind doesn’t seem entirely unwelcome. This is a meditative game, the danger universally acknowledged but never actually approaching, allowing plenty of space to contemplate mistakes and paths not taken and consider what might come next. This choice-based game isn’t exactly parser-like – there are no compass directions, no inventory you can check, and no puzzles besides some order-of-operations stuff and one unique challenge I’ll circle back to later in this review – but you do have freedom to explore, ranging from your apartment to your old haunts to the outskirts to which you’ll eventually have to escape. There aren’t many direct conversations or anything you’d think of as an action sequence, but there is a lot of environmental storytelling, effectively narrated in a voice that focuses more on conveying sharp, concrete detail than providing a complete backstory for your character:

"The bed is unmade. You imagine yourself half-asleep, safe, warm, and as perfectly content as a stretching cat. You imagine the body beside you, reaching out instinctively for you without fully waking up."

This extends to the effects of the flood, too:

"You’re only halfway down the least-used of three stairwells when you realize the extent of the damage. Puddles slosh at your feet; a vaguely riparian odor drifts up from the basement below you."

There were times when this studied fuzziness of plot did present a slight obstacle; it seems like the protagonist has complex history with a lot of former lovers, friends, and family members, and since none of them are given names I sometimes had a hard time keeping them straight. But obfuscating the details helps reinforce the central vibe, of a mountain of regrets and guilty relief at being forced to leave them behind. It also means that when something does snap into focus, it gains additional power: there’s a charged conversation with an ex that really stands out, for example.

The gameplay, meanwhile, also meshes nicely with the theme. You can’t get everywhere from everywhere, and there are interactions that are only available on repeat visits or after you’ve gone someplace else first, which means that you spend a lot of time circling around the same ground, slowly building up to making your escape. There’s a list of things you need to accumulate before you’re able to finally go, some physical, some more nebulous, though I didn’t find a way to check these other than trying to leave, which made the transition to the endgame feel bit more abrupt than I would have liked (on the plus side, it was exactly as enigmatic as I liked). There’s also that odd gameplay mechanic I mentioned above – let’s spoiler this: (Spoiler - click to show)when I tried to find the key to my uncle’s boat, at first I thought I was stuck due to a bug that only let me toggle between two passages, rather than allowing me to retreat back to town when it didn’t turn up. I actually alt-tabbed for a minute to jot down some notes in frustration – but then when I alt-tabbed back, suddenly I’d found the key! I think this is a real-time mechanic that reveals the key after you’ve let the page stay up for a certain amount of time, which is formally interesting, but felt like an odd choice to me – the game doesn’t otherwise use timed text, I don’t think, and without that telegraphing I almost got annoyed and restarted the game! It’s something that I think is neat in isolation, but I’m not sure is a great fit for this game in particular.

That’s really the only discordant note I found in The Deluge, though – it’s otherwise a very coherent work, embedding some universally-relatable emotions in a distinct, and distinctly-presented package. It didn’t make me afraid of floods, but it did help me inhabit their aftermath with more clarity than I had before, making a case for rising waters as a pregnant metaphor worth dwelling on, regardless of their real-world dangers.

When learning something new, the most important factor – I’d argue bigger than native ability or quality of instruction or anything else – is often enthusiasm. No matter how quickly things click, you’ll invariably run into road-blocks, and no matter how fun developing one aspect of a skill might be, there’s always going to be something else that’s a slog. Sure, all those other things, skill and good teachers and so on, can reduce the friction so it’s easier to power through, but you still need that motive force to keep you moving even as things get tough. And beyond overcoming obstacles, enthusiasm can have active virtues too: even the most jaded critic can be charmed by a roughly-hewn work if the palpable excitement of creation comes through.

The thing is, though, enthusiasm can only take you so far. A short game with all the flaws of inexperience can still leave a positive impression if it’s fleet enough to end before those flaws weigh down its exuberance. But if things drag on too long, the nitpicks start to pile up, the bubbly energy starts to feel exhausting, and the jaded critic (hi, it’s me!) loses track of what perked them up about this thing in the first place.

Quotient: the Game could have been engineered in a lab to illustrate the principle. The ingenuousness of its spy-thriller-meets Zork premise wins it a smile, which is only deepened by the cornball appeal of its love of junk food and Ohio pride (seriously, your jet-setting spy can go to Oxford, DC, “Africa”, outer space – or Cleveland and Cincinnati). And there are some solid puzzles that help keep the momentum going. But over the course of this two to three hour game, the constant in-jokey references to Dr. Who and Star Wars start to grate, the lack of adequate player direction or clueing lead to floundering, and the weight of minor bugs and small implementation threatens to overwhelm the fun stuff. Most of Quotient’s issues are ones first-time authors have to deal with (especially those who don’t benefit from a lot of pre-release testing); it’s just a shame that so much time and energy appears to have gone into this debut when it’s likely that the lessons learned from completing a game would help the author write something a lot tighter the second time out.

On to specifics: Quotient self-consciously invokes Zork with its setup: you’re outside a house, with a leaflet promising adventure to come, and a scoring system that rewards the accumulation of treasure as much as progression of plot. But this is no fantasy pastiche: instead we’re in the realm of a technothriller, as you play a new recruit to the eponymous spy agency, tasked with … well, it’s not really clear from the outset. One of the first challenges I faced with Quotient is that the game seems to assume you already know about the important characters, the world, and the basic outline of the plot – there’s some exposition, but almost always it left me with more questions than answers. Not getting bogged down in details until the player’s invested in the game can be a powerful technique, but here the other shoe doesn’t really drop. Like, once I solved enough puzzles to be admitted to the spy agency as a probationary agent, I finally got a mission briefing, which read as follows:

"Welcome to the team. Your mission involves two things. One is simply treasure hunting. This will earn points toward your rank. While we were setting up this training mission, a real mission came in. This is the second and most important part of your mission. The Lion has escaped and interfered with Cassie’s time experiment. We need your help on this mission. It’s critical we help Cassie complete her experiment. All of our agents are already working it. There is no time to explain more, you’ll have to figure out the rest as you go."

I eventually groped my way towards a fuller understanding of the premise: the aforementioned Cassie is a scientist working on a future-prediction machine that uses quantum computing, but a villain stole the magic crystal that powers the device, so you have to track him down and take it back. The game doesn’t end at that point, though – to my surprise – as you then need to help Cassie complete her experiment. Each of these steps is either underexplained (exactly what the experiment is, or what it requires, isn’t really spelled out) or overexplained (I got a few updates from Florian about how to find Robert well before I had the slightest idea of who either of those people were).

As a result, it’s most natural to treat Quotient as a treasure hunt – just wander around, solve puzzles because they’re there, grab whatever’s nailed down. And on that score it works OK! Here’s where the enthusiasm really tells; the game is palpably excited to show you around such tourist attractions as the National Mall, Oxford University, and downtown Cincinnati. In the farther-flung locations, the narration is very much lifting up the Wikipedia highlights and flubs a few minor details (I’ve lived in DC, and the geography there is slightly off in a way that kept wrong-footing me). But the local Ohio stuff elevates what sure seems like it must be the author’s favorite diner, and the allegedly-famous Cleveland sign. The gonzo would-a-teenager-thing-this-is-cool sensibility is also in best display in this section, like when you get this readout on the current British PM:

"Prime Minister Jason Stevenson is an experienced leader with a deep understanding of European state affairs as well as genetics. He is a skilled martial artist and has been known to relax in front of a videogame at times."

The puzzles are also pleasantly moreish, for the most part. There are two mazes and some unmarked exits, and some of them rely on completely arbitrary clues, like a deck of cards that for some reason spells out the steps required to complete a high-tech feat of engineering, but on their own terms, that’s fine. There are some password challenges, a couple straightforward inventory puzzles, dark areas that require a flashlight – it’s all basic but goes down easy.

Well, it goes down easy until it doesn’t. At what I think is about the 2/3 mark of the game, my progress slowed substantially – I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to be doing, and I’d run out of puzzles that I could easily figure out how to solve. There are some in-game hints, but they tend towards the cryptic, and don’t account for stuff you’ve already done, but I was able to use them to grind through a few more puzzles, albeit these ones felt more arbitrary than the earlier ones (Spoiler - click to show) (I’m pretty sure praying in the National Cathedral made a laser pop out of the floor; if that’s explained anywhere, I missed it), and threw the unhelpful nature of the thinly-implemented NPCs into sharp relief (after I’d recovered the crystal she was looking for, why didn’t Cassie unlock the door to her lab instead of making me fly halfway across the world to try to dig up a keycard?). And then I hit a wall when I realized I’d soft-locked myself by fiddling with a much-earlier puzzle (protip: don’t put anything into the lighting tube you want to get back).

So yeah. At the one hour mark, I’d have said that I was enjoying the silly, giddy ride that Quotient has to offer, but at the three hour mark, I was mostly just frustrated. None of my complaints are mortal ones, I don’t think, and again, they’re incredibly common among first-time authors – assuming the player will know what they’re doing because it’s obvious to the author, missing that some puzzles don’t have nearly enough clueing or motivation to allow the player to solve them, going for a larger cast of shallow characters rather than just a few more deeply-implemented ones, and not quite enough time polishing and fixing bugs that arise when the player doesn’t do quite what’s expected. Unfortunately Quotient goes on long enough that its early promise does have time to curdle into annoyance. The good news is that usually second-time authors quickly learn how to avoid these mistakes – it’s just that for both author and player, there can be an advantage to getting to that second game sooner rather than later.

I am not a J-horror fan, or even a horror fan in general, but there is one clip from a mid-aughts entry in the genre (I think it was called Pulse, but I am 100% not looking it up to check) that lives rent-free in my head: a guy goes into a sub-basement, hears something weird, and at the end of this dark hallway, sees a strange figure standing there in the shadows. Slowly, slowly, it starts to walk towards him, with this hideously unnatural gait, almost falling once before it gets its limbs back under control. He’s rooted to the spot, just watching as it gets closer, and closer, and closer, mesmerizing in the inevitability of its languid approach.

I don’t know how the sequence ends – I honestly hope it’s just a jump-scare, because that would be the least-scary of the alternatives? – but I find it terrifying; being forced to inhabit the same world with something uncanny for so long, with no choice but to linger on the details of how wrong it is, makes my blood run cold. It’s horrible! But in a really compelling way.

A House of Endless Windows pulls off a similar trick: while this kinetic novel plays coy at first, dancing around details of backstory and context, it’s clear from the get-go that there’s something deeply wrong in this family – the alienated child (that’s our narrator), the pushy mother, the absent father – even before a new arrival shatters the prevailing chilly détente. But then the player understands more about what’s happened to create this situation, and engages with the mysteries surrounding the newly-arrived housekeeper, and the effect is slow-motion torture: the situation feels untenable, even as nothing overtly threatening is happening, the danger and trauma masked behind stilted dialogue and a refusal to acknowledge the reality that everybody knows lies beneath the surface.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a plot, stuff does happen, but the vibes are really what make A House of Endless Windows so arresting. You get a sense of the contortions the main character has made of his life in order to hedge defenses around himself almost immediately:

The sooner I complete the chores, the sooner I can start on homework. The sooner I start on homework, the more time I have to study.

Or:

I yell as loud as I can. It’s a pitiful, quiet yell.

The writing is finely calibrated, getting us in the head of Pierce, our damaged, precocious protagonist, while writing dialogue that isn’t quite naturalistic but still manages to feel plausible. Here’s an exchange between him and his friend Avery:

Pierce: Do you believe me?
Avery: Well, I can’t imagine you’re lying about it.
Pierce: That’s not the same as you believing me.
Avery: No. It isn’t.

It’s clear this awkwardness is intentional – there are a few flashbacks that take Pierce back to a time before things in his family were quite so broken, and his mother’s dialogue is notably warmer than it is in the present. There are also a few well-earned moments where the possibility of emotional engagement at least flickers into possibility, even if it’s never quite achieved. But they gain their power from the contrast they draw with the rest of the game, where Pierce is typically passive or frozen, observing that things aren’t right but unable to take action to correct them. Indeed, his lack of conviction is a major character point: he takes refuge in the rigidity of mathematical proofs, but finds he can’t even conjure enough faith to assume the axioms to be true – indeed, while contemplating the possibility of a higher power, he says he “prefer[s] this to the other options. And yet, it’s unsatisfying. I don’t like it. The proof, when I write it out, looks weak and flimsy.”

This is very internal horror, in other words, which is a good fit for the deliberate pace at which the plot doles out its revelations. For all that I think there was probably room for the climax to go a bit bigger and provide a sharper contrast with the slow-burn of the rest of the story, I found those middle bits, where Pierce knows more than you but not enough to be able to make sense of what’s happening, very effective. I’m no more eager to revisit A House of Endless Windows than I am that clip of a ghost walking down the hallway, but I think it’s going to stick with me just as long.

It’s not often that I’m stymied by a piece of IF – especially not one as slight and apparently straightforward as Return to Home. This short parser game starts with your car blocked by an unexpected detour on your way back from work; rather than drive around to find another route, you decide to cut through the countryside and walk home. This isn’t a perilous adventure where you need to cross raging rivers or make your way through a forbidding forest – there’s a hill, sure, but the weather is fine and the danger is non-existent. Nor is it a set of brain-teaser, with no puzzles to speak of beyond a couple of Easter eggs to be found if you stray slightly off the short path home (the whole game is about a dozen rooms). Structurally, it resembles a so-called “walking simulator”, but where games in that genre balance their mechanical simplicity with detailed backstory and lush environments, Return to Home is matter-of-fact; most descriptions have a sentence or two of simple prose, without much in the way of scenery, and there’s no lore or hidden trauma to pick up on (or if there is, wow did I miss it!)

So it’s hard for me to evaluate the game’s success according to its design goals, since I have a hard time articulating what I think those are – it seems content to just be a low-key experience, not in a hurry to impress anything in particular on the player. There are some small grammar and spelling issues in the prose, but English isn’t the author’s first language, and since the writing isn’t reaching for the stars I didn’t find these minor slips had much impact on my enjoyment. The one thing I can say about Return to Home is that I think it’s a game that enjoys that it’s IF. Most of the Easter eggs point to classic-era games (I picked up references to Curses and Once and Future/Avalon, though there were a couple I know I missed), and beyond that, by stripping the parser game down to its bare essentials, it made me slow down and be more mindful of what I was experiencing: moving through a map, reading a few sentences of narration, enjoying the way that a minimum of effort would frequently turn up a new bauble, without needing to worry about what I was supposed to do with it. Playing Return to Home was a gentle way to spend five minutes connecting with as unpretentious a piece of IF as you can imagine, and I guess that might just be the entire point of the thing.

It’s a truism that RPG sessions are often way more fun to experience than they sound when you describe them to people who weren’t at the table. And it’s a truism because it’s true – even I, gentle reader, have seen an interlocutor’s eyes glaze over while telling them some totally awesome story about the Satyr I played in this Changeling game back in undergrad. Descriptions that sound great when improvised come off flat when it’s part of a presumably-rehearsed narration. Out-of-character friendships liven up the banter that can feel lame shorn of that context. The drama of uncertainty, of not knowing which way the dice are going to fall or what lurks behind that nondescript door, is way more intense to experience first-hand than hear about second-hand.

(Seriously, though, Harry Dedalus was the coolest fae in the San Jose Court, the stories are great).

The Sword of Voldiir is a choice-based game that touts its origin in a tabletop DnD campaign, and it’s a case in point. It’s definitely got some shaggy charm, with a cast of NPCs who seem to enjoy hanging out and razzing each other, and solid pacing that keeps the narrative ticking along. But the fantasy world and quest plot are mostly generic, the RPG-inflected mechanics aren’t that engaging, and the whole thing, especially the prose, is in need of some polish – I only played the free demo rather than shell out for the full version, so perhaps there’s a significant uptick past the parts that I was able to play, of course. But while I definitely would believe all the original participants of the tabletop game had a great time, on this evidence you kind of had to be there.

I’ll take my first and third critiques together, since they wind up reinforcing each other. While there are some flashes of originality in the character creation section – the races on offer are human, half-elf, and siren – the setup is one you’ve definitely seen before, with your character hired on to accompany three NPCs on a mission to recover the titular artifacts: the reasons, and its powers, are underexplained, as are the personalities of your crew (there’s a sidebar with some biographical info: the first one’s “quick-witted, smart, and conniving,” while the second is “intelligent, rather quiet, and alert”. The poor fighter, meanwhile, just gets some middling backstory, with no actual characterization listed. The story does go through some twists and turns, but there’s little narrative groundwork laid, so it can came off feeling like just one thing happening after another, and each incident is a trope you’ve definitely seen before (the one exception is the bit where you’re able to track down a bandit because she gave her real name, and declared the magic items she was carrying to customs, upon entering a city).

The classics are classics for a reason, of course, but making them sing is down to execution, and here’s where the omnipresent typos, eyestrain-inducing dark-red-on-black color scheme for links, and leaden prose prevent Sword of Voldiir from going down as indulgent IF junk-food. There’s just a little too much friction, a few too many details that jar – like the party members setting up a fire in the middle of an enclosed cave without worrying about smoke inhalation – and a few too many scenes that seem to be included out of a sense of obligation rather than because there’s anything compelling about them. Here’s a sequence where you check in on a companion after arriving at an inn:

“What have you been up to?”

“People watching.” She nods to the people sitting all across the dining room. “Interest folk who come here. I always enjoy watching them.”

“That’s fair enough. Have you seen anything interesting?”

“Plently.” She lets the conversation die there.

(There’s a pick-which-NPC-to-spend-time-with mechanic that appears that it eventually leads to a romance – I played the field to try to get to know all of them a bit, so in fairness it’s possible that if I’d stuck with one they’d start opening up a bit more).

As for the second item on the bill of particulars – I like RPG-style mechanics in IF, but Sword of Voldiir’s implementation doesn’t leave much room for the player. You do get randomly-rolled stats for your character, which I dig, and they do influence how some of your decisions play out, as well as coming to the fore in a couple of combat sequences. But their impact is obfuscated, as dice are only rolled behind the scenes, and your role in fighting is just to pick whether to use magic or weapons at the outset, with no information given about the options, and then click through turn by turn to see whether you die. There are various ways to make these kinds of mechanics legible to the player, from the simple expedient of showing the results of die-rolls, to graying-out options that aren’t available to you due to your build, or signposting where you’re getting more information because of a skill or background – and the RPG elements of the game would be stronger if some of these strategies were pursued. Heck, even the non-RPG bits suffer from a lack of player agency, with many choices literally coming down to picking which of three doors or passageways to go down, sans any context to make this anything but a stab in the dark.

Like I’ve said, all of this is stuff that would be eminently forgivable if it came up around the gaming table on a Thursday night – all the players would know what was going on at the system level, the low-key world building and action-oriented plot could make for a fun beer-and-pretzels experience, and the fact that the characters all talk about being “stoked” and curse a lot would just be an indication that the group is unwinding after a long day at work. Even the choose-a-door-any-door bits would indicate someone is about to have fun doing some graph-paper mapping! But it’s hard to make a tabletop campaign work as IF without deeper-seated changes than what Sword of Voldiir has to offer; adaptation, rather than direct translation, is what can breathe life into old grognard stories, and there’s not quite enough of that on offer here.

For all that we are changeable creatures, most of the poignancy of our temporary lives comes from their implacable, irrevocable permanence. As the poet says:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

One of the pleasures of games is the escape-hatch they offer from the tyranny of causality: feel free to move that Moving Finger back a ways, thanks to omnipresent save/load functionality, no tears – much less piety or wit! – required. The ability to explore what might have been is incredibly potent, but the tradeoff is that it’s also inhuman; there’s nothing in anyone’s lived experience remotely like thinking “nah, I didn’t like how that played out” and pushing rewind. So it’s perhaps no surprise that some designers perversely constrain the play of contingency in their games, in search of immediacy or meaning. Permadeath is one key strategy these folks pursue, forcing a player to slow down and consider the consequences of their actions – but this approach isn’t as powerful in narrative-focused games, as most stories don’t hinge on the extended moment-by-moment drama of “is the main character going to die now? How about now? How about now?” No, for narrative games the mechanic of choice is the Game You Can Only Play Once: by forcing you to live with your choices, removing easy options like reload and undo, and sometimes even preventing the player from restarting from a blank slate, you create a game that’s like, well, life: no do-overs.

Thousand Lives takes things one step further: this biographical game about a woman navigating the ebbs and flows of life in postwar Poland plays out in real time, forcing you to wait a day to see the consequences of your actions. Structurally, it hearkens back play-by-post games of the 80s and 90s (heck, the game’s main visual motif is a series of historical postage stamps); after you sign up to play, you get an email each day, laying out a bit of story and then prompting you for a choice that determines which bit of narrative you’ll get on the morrow. If you get buyer’s remorse half a second after clicking submit – which happened to me more than once in the week it took me to play – well, that’s just how it is, presumably you can relate!

There are dangers to this approach – most notably, each of the vignettes is relatively short, perhaps a thousand words or so, and a day in 2025 can feel very, very long. Fortunately, Thousand Lives does a good job of recapping the previous day’s action at the top of each email, re-grounding the player in the story before pushing it ahead.

And it’s a story I was very interested in. I’m by no means deeply versed in this era, but as a child in the 80s, I knew about the Polish pope, heard dockworkers chanting “Lech Walesa!” on the TV – I learned the word “solidarity” from the name of the union. I’m a sucker for a historical game, and the history Thousand Lives has to relate, of Poland’s suffering under and then emergence from the Iron Curtain, is dramatic – plus, it’s got a unique viewpoint character. The protagonist is a woman based on the author’s grandmother, and while her biography will vary depending on your decisions, she’s got a compelling personality: smart, caring, and willing to make tough choices to protect her dreams and her family (though of course she might not be able to do both).

Those choices are a high point of the game, as well they should be. They all feel impactful, and I agonized over most of them. Reflecting societal constraints under Communism (and capitalism, once it arrives!), only a few are about expressing a preference for what the protagonist wants their life to look like – most are about trade-offs, asking you what you’re willing to give up for one thing you want. I think you can play the game to create a version of the protagonist who’s completely uncompromising, but while I can see the temptations of that path, I wasn’t confident enough to take it, instead tacking back and forth with circumstances, sometimes pushing for my ambitions, sometimes settling for less when the cost to me or my loved ones felt like it would be too dear.

So this is a successful game, I think, but I admit my admiration is a bit chillier than I’d prefer. Partially this is because of how zoomed-out it is – Thousand Lives covers 75 years in the course of six chapters, none of which are especially long. Trying to cover a decade in a thousand words inevitably means that there’s not much texture; situations are described, but not events, trends, but not moments. While the writing successfully conveys some of the personality of the various people in the protagonist’s family, they never truly came alive for me. As a result, while the dilemmas the game regularly threw up were intellectually engaging – I didn’t want any of my loved ones to be imprisoned by the army! – they lacked the emotional heft that comes with specificity.

Paradoxically, the time lag and no-backsies mechanics might have also drained some of my choices of their impact. Given that it took some time and effort to get myself back in the cultural space of Communist Poland each time I got one of the game’s emails, I can’t help wondering whether longer, more intense engagement would have made it more memorable. But more significantly, in a game like this, there are no right answers, no wizard at the bottom of the dungeon who throws up a “you won!” sign upon his death. Navigating this kind of story isn’t a puzzle, it’s a journey, and I think I would have better appreciated my decisions if I’d had the opportunity to see the alternatives, and commit to my story. Life is one damned thing after another, as they say; if art lets us see all the different places that Moving Finger could move, before finally coming to rest in the place it does, well, there’s a poignancy in that, too.

There’s a distinct and robust subgenre of IF that’s devoted to the subjective portrayal of mental illness, braiding description and mechanics together to try to communicate the lived reality of conditions like OCD, social anxiety, autism, depression, and many more (like I said – it’s a robust subgenre, and one I think is a great example of what IF can do well). But Method in My Madness, despite appearances, isn’t actually part of this subgenre – while it effectively uses chaotic typography and text effects to make its scant word-count disorient and oppress the player (this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry), the mode here feels more focused on artifice than confession, more a lurid thriller with a twist than an attempt at verisimilitude.

Oh, what a twist, though! The game’s bag of tricks aren’t that novel, I suppose, or too hard to tease apart if you analyze them piece by piece, but they add up to an overwhelming assault on the senses. Words are splayed across the screen at odd angles, splashing in or fading out, their upsetting content secondary to the still-more-upsetting presentation. At first, appropriately, things don’t quite cohere – the name Cauchy (or is it a word? “Cauchemar” is French for nightmare…) is repeated like a mantra, “Fix me” is the only clickable link (though of course clicking it won’t) – but something resembling a plot does emerge: the protagonist is obsessed with a neighbor, contriving excuses to bump into him early in the morning when taking out the trash for pickup.

The narrator, with the player’s complicity, eventually engineers a meet-cute that leads to something further, a potentially sweet moment made terrifying by the disjunction between the reasonable-seeming dialogue, representing the protagonist desperately trying to hold things together, and the explosion of intrusive thoughts and mania leaking out at the margin. And then things take another turn…

Stripped of its House-of-Leaves aesthetics, Method in My Madness admittedly wouldn’t land quite as hard, but the prose works hand in hand with the formatting. I copied and pasted a bunch of sentence-fragments into my notes to jot down memorable phrases, and if the game’s styling hijinks meant that sometimes what got CTRL-V’d was a bit jumbled up, well, that’s all the more on point:

"Cauchyburn us all, our bodies fed to the spirits in the same way we were born: by the fairies
nothings mumbled in a restless, cold ear"

And while there are only a few choices, the use of interactivity is well-judged, making the player feel like they’ve got a say in where things go and pushing you to engage with the riot of text and appreciate the details, rather than just letting it wash over you. Again, I don’t think this game has much to say about real mental illness, rather than the Hollywood kind, since spectacle and plot are the first priorities here. Admittedly, sometimes that can trivialize important issues – Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitivity! But Method to my Madness doesn’t pretend to be something different than it is, and on its own terms, I think it delivers (and if you’re in the mood for something more substantive, there is that whole robust subgenre filled with great games to explore).

Pornography is not a genre known for its narrative inventiveness. This, frankly, is probably for the best (whoever decided to replace hoary old pizzaboy scenarios with the incest-baiting stepfamily thing: thanks I hate it), but it does mean that Office Temptation, which is another in the long line of Lewd Mod demos, excerpts, and previews, wrong-footed me for a minute since the setup is almost exactly the same as that of Hot in the Office, which I played for last year’s THON. Once again, you’re chatting with a sexy coworker (who you may not have previously met or recognize as a coworker, depending on which dialogue options you pick?) via a phone-based interface as she engages in some light flirtation and texts you the occasional risque selfie. The game’s clever enough to nod at the similarity – the previous game hinged on a faulty air-conditioning unit that led to stripteases to beat the heat, whereas this time the AC is on full blast so perky nipples are the order of the day – but this is still very much retreading some of same ground.

As a result, even on its own terms Office Temptation suffers in comparison to Lewd Mod: Noir, its companion entry in the THON. That had some pretensions towards a larger plot, more stylish visuals, and rudimentary gameplay; there’s nothing of the sort in this one, and without the shine of novelty I wound up fixating one the specifics, which I think was detrimental to the experience. Like, at one point there’s a long section where Maddie (your interlocutor) tells you about a time she wore some fishnet stockings in to work, but got written up for violating the dress code, which seems like it should be a prompt for some suggesting pictures or at least loving descriptions of how hot her legs looked in the fishnets – but no, it’s just an extended digression about an unpleasant interaction with HR, which feels like an idiosyncratic fetish (speaking of: there are still no eyes in the pictures).

Then there’s the fact that the central branch-point of the game hinges on the uncomfortable topic of Maddie’s body issues. See, she loves donuts, and there’s a big box of them in the break room, and she’s worried that if she eats one she won’t have the self-control to stop there, at which point she might not fit into the new lingerie she just bought and is eager to show you. This is awkward enough to begin with, but then it also turns out that Maddie has a boyfriend who calls her a fat pig and has made her internalize his body-shaming. So she asks you to berate her to prevent her from gorging on the donuts. You’ve got the choice of doing as she asks, or encouraging her to go to town on the sugary treats, which again I guess is somebody’s fetish, but the whole thing was pretty off-putting to me, lending credence to my these-people-are-trying-to-roleplay-a-sexy-scenario-but-intensely-bad-ad-it theory of these games (also, maybe once you bring mention the boyfriend throw in a “but it’s cool, we’re poly” or something?)

Where Office Temptation succeeds, though, is in dialing the loopiness of the dialogue, and especially the player’s options, up to 11. When Maddie says she’s wearing a thin vest and suggestively asks whether we know what happens to her when it gets cold (these people have the subtlety of a brick to the face), you can answer YOU DIE?; similarly, after the lingerie photo-shoot is aborted following an unfortunate incident with hot cocoa, you can swoop in with a desperate ARE YOUR TITS OK? Maddie isn’t much better; another long (oh god it feels so long) bit has her look for a hot drink because the AC is making her so chilly, leading her to seductively croon that she’s gong to “get a nice hot coffee to warm up my cold nipples.” So yeah: if you like coffee, boobs, donuts, body-shaming, and lingerie, and hate eyes and naturalistic dialogue, boy howdy does HHRichards have your number – others might want to steer clear.

There’s something recursive about the Single Choice Jam: because the jam’s constraint requires the player to have only a single moment when they can make a choice, the author’s choice of where that choice should go likewise takes on disproportionate weight. The obvious way to play things is to put it right at the end, so that the player is confronted with a dramatic climax after a comparatively longer build-up, but while this orthodox answer is hard to argue with, it’s also a little bit conventional. So I admit to feeling a bit underwhelmed when I realized that’s probably where Lazarrien: A Love Story was heading – the more so because the central dilemma the game was clearly setting up (try to end the curse on the Dark-Souls-esque fantasy land, or turn away from my quest in favor of the sexy demon with whom the main character has an immediate if underdeveloped rapport) also seemed like one I’d seen before. Happily, though, that meant that I was not at all expecting the way things actually played out, with a late-story twist that reconfigures everything that’s come before while sneakily getting an extra choice into the game while still obeying all the rules.

Admittedly, Lazarrien doesn’t put its best foot forward: stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but an amnesiac knight wakes up in an abandoned crypt, only to find the world is a blasted hellscape and the few survivors tell him he needs to climb to the castle on top of the mountain to set things to rights? Meanwhile, the adjective-heavy prose in the opening section sets a mood, but with visible effort:

"He traced the contours of the dusty shrine, taking in details that seemed familiar in a way he couldn’t place. A painting of a storm-battered mountain. A vase of withered flowers. A blackened ring set with a raw, gnarled garnet. Across the room, a strange statue stood on a plinth. Carved with uncanny precision from dark stone, a fearsome horned man reaching, his claws outstretched.

"…

"As he approached, the music grew louder, richer. He peered around the doorway. In the middle of the cobbled road stood a short woman dressed in an impossibly vibrant array of quilted patchwork, frayed paisley that defied the bleakness of its sky."

Happily, things quickly settle down. The game is structured around a series of encounters with four characters – as well as the aforementioned sexy demon, who’s pursuing you as you climb – and all of them have distinctive voices that nicely break up the more portentous narrative voice. And as the landscape gets more outre, the writing doesn’t feel like it needs to do quite so much work to get its point across – this bit is much more understated, and the more effective for it.

"The city gave way to a field of bramble, scorched rose vines that wove a thicket higher than three men. Thorns scraped against his armor and flesh alike as he rushed past. Crisp gray blossoms crumbled to ash in his wake."

Meanwhile, as the confrontations along the way get away from exposition and more into action, I likewise found the story more compelling. Lazarrien has big-time daddy issues that are familiar in broad strokes, but having a candle-wax effigy of his father shout his disapproval at his fleeing son is an effective way to make them more engaging, and while the inevitable sex scene with the demon may feel like it cuts to the chase oddly quickly, there’s an in-story reason for that.

So as I said, my opinion was trending positive when I hit the decision-point and the twist that immediately follows it. I won’t spoil that, but I’ll just say that if you think you’ve played a version of this game before, think again – it’s definitely worth following this journey to its destination at least once. More spoilery thoughts – largely gushing – are in the blurry-text below.

(Spoiler - click to show)So having the big choice of whether to be a loser and kill Agramith, or spare him and try to escape the curse some other way, wind up completely irrelevant to the actual nature of the trial is inspired – it made me literally cackle aloud, and I adored the fast-talking demoness who rolls her eyes at how dense you’ve been on this, your umpteenth time failing the challenge. Admittedly, I’m not sure this late turn into comedy fits completely smoothly with what comes before (in retrospect, it makes Agramith’s slide into the abyss feel even more slapstick – and also, Lazarrien, buddy, if you get told you need to bring the demon, your sword, and a ring to the castle, and you’ve screwed up a million times before, and there’s a giant pile of swords but not a single ring to be found, maybe put the ring first on the list of stuff you’re trying to remember, not last???) There’s still some pathos in Lazarrien’s plight, however, especially since the twist of course made me curious to replay and see how things differ when you encounter the characters in a different order – or see if there’s an invisible link that allows you to actually take the ring when you find it. Going through the same steps time after time, always hoping to find a better ending but always returning to the same place, put me in the shoes of the protagonist in a way a lot of eternal-recurrence stories struggle to achieve. The timed text does make replays a little slower than I’d like, but there is a satisfying level of variation, making the choice of whether to start over as, if not more, significant than whether you kill Agramith or allow him to fall to his doom, which is a clever subversion of the Jam’s constraints.