Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

Exciting news, folks – it’s time for our third and final (at least for now) installment of:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

Yes! Just a month or two ago, so I actually remember doing so fairly well! God is in his Heaven and all is right in the world, nice work chaps, we’re all done here.

…

Oh right, the review. Knew I was forgetting something!

The Most Valuable Card in the World is a big comedy parser-puzzle adventure that’s at once highly traditional – like, read that description again and tell me if it reminds you of one or two other games you’ve played – and novel, incorporating some unique mechanics and centering on series of swaps that sees you upgrade, step by step, from what’s basically the worst Pokemon card imaginable to the eponymous treasure. It’s cavalier about killing off the player, especially in the opening, which can occasionally threatens to feel annoying – except those death messages are written with such good humor, the ways to avoid them are eminently logical, and a quick UNDO will get you back on the right track in a jiffy. There are some tricky puzzles – you’re going to need to push items from one location to another, and a simple X OBJECT won’t always tell you everything you need to know – but the clueing is very well tuned (and the hints are clear and always available), making them satisfying to solve.

For all the above seeming-contradictions, I was able to get a handle on Most Valuable Card in the World rather quickly. The chain of trades provides a clear, compelling structure to proceedings, and actually helps orient you towards what puzzles in the medium-sized map you should be solving next by providing a rough dollar value for each card you find – typically you need to be moving up step by step rather than leapfrogging. The authorial voice is also consistent and confident, managing to cram something funny into basically every sentence without seeming like it’s giving off flopsweat. Like, here’s a quotidian description of pushing a shopping cart around:

"Screeeee! Screeee! One of the wheels on this cart is so non-functional that it might as well be a cube of rock. You power through at the expense of the already damaged floor."

That made me smile, and it’s just the baseline of enjoyment that the big-swing jokes and set pieces push still further. Some of the more traditional puzzles are lampshaded, the supporting cast are an endearing set of weirdos, and the descriptions of what happens once you actually start throwing down in the ersatz Pokemon game are lots of fun. Most Valuable Card in the World isn’t my favorite story about a wildly-improbable sequence of escalating barter – the laurel goes to Gamma World RPG session I played in where I was able to parley an irradiated can of baked beans into part-ownership of the bombed-out remains of Powell’s bookstore – but it’s a heck of a close second, a real gem from this partnership between an enthusiastic neophyte author and one of the most seasoned implementers in the business.

The conspiracy theories around the secret treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau are incredibly well-trodden ground in pop culture in general due to the eye-popping (and occasionally head-scratching) success of the Da Vinci Code, but this potboiling tale of Templar riches and esoteric secrets also got a definitive workout in gaming, via the third Gabriel Knight game, though it’s largely remembered these days for the dumb cat-hair mustache puzzle rather than its take on the whole lost-bloodline-of-Jesus (plus there are vampires) thing. Heck, the topic is even relatively top of mind for me at the moment since Jimmy Maher recently wrapped up his five-part look at the conspiracy theories and the tawdry men behind the hoax.

So a threshold question for a new game offering yet another run at good ol’ Fr. Sauniere, his mysteriously-acquired riches, and the various cults and heresies of the region, is whether there’s sufficient juice to be worth the squeeze after all this time. I think The Priest and the Rennes Alignment manages to clear this bar, albeit it’s a close-run thing. Wisely I think, the game doesn’t harp on the traditional trappings of the conspiracy: we get the church and the villa that the eponymous priest built, with their creepiest elements intact, and the geographic alignments that are a significant strand of the more bonkers side of the hoax are an important part of gameplay, but besides some brief gestures towards the end, we don’t get into any of the Church history stuff, there are no secrets encoded in paintings, and the only coded message is entirely optional, and it uses the world’s simplest Caesar cipher.

In place of all that hoary rigmarole, we get a bit a bit more of an Indiana Jones plot – the protagonist is an older treasure hunter whose academic colleague goes missing, while another, more mercenary tomb robber flits menacingly around the background. Meanwhile, most of the puzzles are largely agnostic about their broader context, medium-dry-goods stuff involving locked doors, magnetism, digging in the dirt, and so on. The exception is the sequence of puzzles alluded to by the title – unlocking the endgame requires using surveying tools to take sightings from a series of important landmarks around the village in order to identify a major geomantic axis.

It’s a cool idea – speaking of Indiana Jones, I’ve loved these kinds of puzzles since I encountered them in Fate of Atlantis – but I found it a bit anticlimactic because, while all the individual steps were fun to work through, at the end I think all it does is point the way to a locked door I’d identified near the beginning of the game by examining a suspicious bit of scenery. It’s a symptom of the way the game sometimes suffers from brushing past the more esoteric edges of the Rennes conspiracy and as a result stretches a relatively small quantity of esoteric hoo-ha across too broad a swathe of gameplay. There are tons of documents to recover from nooks and crannies across the village, and I enjoyed uncovering them, but after the first one or two they pretty much just all restate the same hints about geographic alignments, crystals, and light – it gets repetitive, and none of it actually provides any hints or knowledge you need to progress through the endgame (at least said endgame does ramp things up into an appropriately-silly Grand Guignol finale).

The implementation is similarly a mixed bag. The game is coded in the ThinBASIC Adventure Builder, which has a solid-enough parser but suffers from the inability to recall previous commands with the up key. Character interaction is also mostly solid but occasionally finicky, with attempts to TELL them about important subjects often not working – sometimes I realized that’s because SHOWing a relevant object was the intended path, but sometimes reasonable-seeming interactions didn’t seem to be implemented.

The prose is well-judged, keeping things moving at a thriller’s cadence while throwing in some lurid details at appropriate moments:

"You examine the famous carved devil. The figure is grotesque yet strangely compelling - a hunched, demonic Asmodeus. His expression is one of grim resignation, as though he has been forced to serve a higher purpose against his will."

The puzzle design sometimes did bring me up short, though. While most of them are reasonably clued and fun to work through, there are a couple that are a bit obtuse: there’s one that can only be solved by examining a particular object twice, without any specific prompting that I noticed, and I was stuck for a long time on the penultimate puzzle because I kept trying to remove an obstacle to progress when all I was supposed to do was to keep trying to move past it, which leads to it being automatically removed. The biggest issue I ran into, though, was that after solving all the puzzles I could find the game prevented me from entering the endgame area, based on a general vibe that there was more to be done. I went back over the full map and found one or two optional locations I hadn’t previously explored, but they contained no additional items or relevant information, at which point I was allowed it, but it was still an annoying roadblock.

I don’t want to overly harp on these complaints – the game is pretty well put together, and I generally enjoyed my time working through it, even if there are some places where some more polishing or rethinking of the approach could have made things smoother and more engaging. As a matter of personal preference, I do like my supernatural archaeology mysteries to be deep and abstruse, so the streamlined approach the game takes isn’t as much to my taste, but it’s a perfectly reasonable one that will probably resonate better with other players, and given how much of a punch-line Rennes-le-Chateau is these days, in objective terms it probably was the right call. Still, I find myself with a hankering to replay Gabriel Knight 3 – the deep-down-the-rabbit-hole puzzles charting landmarks and doodling lines over oil paintings really do hit the spot for me…

Criticism, I firmly believe, is most valuable when it’s sympathetic to the specific goals of a work. “This apple is no sort of orange” is about as helpful as complaining that you can’t talk to the monsters in Doom, or that there aren’t enough puzzles in a kinetic novel. Articulating what a game is trying to accomplish, then analyzing what pieces of the design and implementation either support or undermine those aims, is what I try to take as my guiding ethos for reviewing – if I allow myself some leeway to nerd out about themes or influences or personal resonance, I like to think that’s OK so long as that foundational work of criticism is there.

By those lights, I can only judge Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory a resounding success. The game’s itch page explains that the goal was to make the smallest piece of IF ever, with size measured not by word count or file size but the physical dimensions of the screen displaying the game. And by implementing a miniature text adventure in Thumby, a platform that emulates what’s basically an even smaller-than-real-life version of the Nintendo Gameboy with a screen about the size of a stamp, I think the author must have done it. Mission accomplished!

…and if I were consistent in my critical methods, that’s where the case would rest, I suspect, but I can’t help assessing the game’s quality qua text adventure, and also what kind of experience the unique interface provides. So let’s proceed with those inquiries, with the disclaimer that these are just bonus sections because the game clearly did what it set out to do.

On the former question, I’d say it’s completely fine. I’ll give it points for the overall structure, which is basically an extended shaggy-dog story: you’ve messed up your shift schedule and gotten stuck in the eponymous factory right when it’s scheduled for demolition, so you need to scramble around trying to get out. There are five different potential avenues of escape you need to attempt before the final course of action unlocks, which leads to a groan-worthy and entirely predictable punch-line (I mean this in the most complimentary way possible). None of the five are especially challenging to figure out – the parser is pretty stripped-down, so most of them involve just typing USE [OBVIOUS OBJECT] in the relevant room, with the few exceptions just requiring straightforward, logical item usage. The writing is serviceable, light-hearted without ever being funny as such, and the only real quibble I had with the scenario is that at one point you try to wriggle out a vent, and the game notes that your head and shoulders fit just fine, but your rib cage can’t make it through, and I can’t help pointing out that that’s not how bodies work.

As to the second question:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!! FHHFGGGGFHNNNNNGGGGGGGHHHH!!! YUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGGKLKLKLKLKLK!!!

[pant,pant]

I am having a hard time coming up with comparisons for what the experience of actually playing HILFCF is like that do not involve trivializing actual real-world atrocities. So I won’t make the attempt, and simply describe how the game works.

Let’s start with that tiny display. It fits about 12 characters at a time, so anything longer than that slowly scrolls across, with each sentence repeating until you push a button and it moves on to the next one. I guess that’s pretty much the only way to manage things, but when I tell you that the description of an object is often around 100 characters, and the results of one of the five futile escape attempts can be more like 250, you can start to see the problem. Imagine every complaint you’ve ever heard about timed text in IF, then raise it to the power of please god make it stop.

So much for output – there’s also the input side of things. Thumby takes inspiration from the Gameboy here too, so by default you have a directional pad and two buttons. The default, recommended interface option is to use the directions (mapped to the arrows) to scroll through the letters of the alphabet one by one, with the buttons allowing you to select a letter or delete one. This mode also boasts an autocomplete feature, but it still took me like fifteen seconds to enter TAKE BAR. That was the last command I attempted with the default control scheme; fortunately, there’s also a QWERTY option where you can just use your keyboard as normal, except, whimsically, the m key doesn’t work. Oh, and while the two-word parser is generally pretty straightforward, many map connections aren’t two-way, requiring you to type BACK rather than the relevant direction to retrace your steps, which makes the game’s geometry far more confusing than it needs to be.

Put all this together, and the fifteen minutes I spent playing the game are among the most physically unpleasant of my IF career, leaving me squirming, impatient, and frustrated. Admittedly some of these issues were unavoidable given the aim of cramming a full text game into such a small container, but more could have been done to match the content to the game’s affordances, like writing highly-condensed descriptions that wouldn’t require so much waiting (I’m reminded of After-Words in the 2021 Comp, which made every single bit of text in the game exactly two words). And the weird map connections, and the inability to type m, just feel like bizarrely gratuitous obstacles to engagement.

I don’t want to be too negative here – I do find the ridiculousness of the game’s goal delightful, and the actual words and design are more than good enough given the remit (I am very partial to a shaggy-dog story). It’s just that HILFCF is way, way easier to enjoy by someone telling you all about it than by girding your loins and playing it. And whatever a game’s stated objectives, that sure seems like a shame.

In every event where I use a randomizer, I feel like there are at least one or two coincidences that prove that God does in fact play dice with the universe, and this time out the cosmic joke is that out of the combined list of 40 ParserComp and Review-a-Thon games, I wound up playing Garry Francis’s pair of ParserComp entries one after the other. What are the odds of that? Well, like 3 or 4 percent, I think, depending on the math I’m too lazy to attempt for the edge case where one of them is first or last on the list so it’s only got a single neighbor, rather than one on each side – which explains why when you’re randomizing 30-70 games stuff like this is bound to happen, I suppose.

But if Dead Man’s Chest and Woodcutter’s Quest were going to wind up back to back, I’m happy this is the order they landed in, rather than putting Woodcutter’s Quest second. Per my review, I enjoyed playing the earlier game, but it’s by design a simpler game, and adapted from another author’s initial plot and puzzle framework. So I was glad to get to chase it with a shot of the uncut stuff. Oh, the premise is still a classic one – it’s a treasure hunt through the abandoned manor of an old pirate captain (in fact the same captain from one of the author’s earlier games, in a nice bit of mythos-building) with all the secret passages, shipwrecks, and sandy coves that implied. But everything here is just a bit more robust and fleshed out – it’s specified that the mansion is empty because the captain’s last descendent died intestate, which for some obscure reason is a word I always love to hear deployed. For one example, careful attention has been paid to the geography and interconnections of what’s a reasonably large map, with a few optional puzzles providing a sense of how the pieces all fit together. For another, even small incidental descriptions are written to highlight what your character, a treasure-hunter on the make, would notice and do. Like, here’s the response to X PANELLING in an early room:

"The panels are chipped and faded with age. You tap on them to check for any hollows where treasure could be hidden, but everything sounds solid."

For a game like this, though, all that stuff is secondary to the puzzles, and they’re a solid lot. There’s nothing that stands out especially, as the kind of thing you get up to is exactly the kind of thing you get up to in a pirate-themed text adventure: you push and prod the furniture to reveal the aforementioned secret passages, there’s business with ropes and locked roll-top desks, and even a (appropriately easy) riddle at the end. For all that they’re workmanlike, they reward careful observation, which made them often satisfying to solve.

That “often” covers up the one thing I’d critique about the game, which is the few occasions when I think Dead Man’s Chest prioritizes challenge over narrative coherence. The primary offender is the puzzle that opens up the secret passage I’ve mentioned a couple of times – I knew it was there, having noticed tell-tale grooves on the floor, but thought it opened from the other side as attempting to PUSH or PULL the relevant piece of furniture was an exercise in futility. After consulting a hint, though, I discovered that actually I was on the right track, but I’d needed to use the verb SLIDE instead of the more familiar alternatives I chose. This is arguably overly precious as a matter of general implementation, but also faintly ridiculous as applied to the actual situation – having seen the grooves the protagonist knew exactly which direction the wall was supposed to swing open, so what, they were just pushing perpendicular to that without deigning to mention that’s what they were doing? I ran into a similar issue with one of those optional puzzles mentioned above, where neither opening a curtain, re-checking the room description once it was open, or even explicitly typing LOOK BEHIND CURTAIN revealed that there was in a fact a new piece of scenery available (I was supposed to examine the wall instead). There’s a thin line between “puzzles that reward careful observation” and “mimesis-breaking pixelbitching,” I suppose, but these are a couple of places where Dead Man’s Chest runs afoul of it.

Still, I mention these issues largely just to flag them for potential tweaks in future releases, and to acknowledge them as exceptions to the rule. This is one of the best-designed and best-implemented iterations of one of the comfort-food IT setups, and even when I struggled with problems both of my own making and not, the helpful contextual hints quickly got me back on track. If you’re at all interested in old-school puzzlefests, this one’s a treat.

It sounds like the very definition of damning with faint praise to say that my favorite thing about The Woodcutter’s Quest is the wood. But actually I quite enjoyed my time with the game! It’s just that it’s intentionally rather straightforward, an implementation of a pedagogical example used in a how-to-design-adventure-games book – a book entitled, in fact, How to Design Adventure Games (by Shaun McClure) just to be clear how straightforward we’re being here. It’s charmingly simple to my taste, boasting Classic Text Adventure Premise #17: a wizard has kidnapped the rest of your village, so it’s up to you to journey through the forest to his castle and save them. There are several puzzles that involve giving food to animals, the descriptions are terse but communicative, and provide solid clues about to overcome obstacles, and the implementation is of the high standard I’ve come to expect from the author. And per the ABOUT text, there are even some bonus puzzles and extra bells and whistles belted onto McClure’s chassis.

All that makes for a solid game but one with few surprises, so like I said, the wood-forward nature of the adventure really stood out. I mean, sure, it’s right there on the tin, but I figured the whole “you’re a woodcutter” thing was just an excuse for having you be out in the forest when the wizard comes calling, and maybe start you off with an axe already in your inventory. But actually said axe can be used to chop a surprisingly large number of objects into kindling – sometimes usefully, sometimes just for stress-relief – there are plentiful opportunities to search around in wooden objects or furniture, a key early puzzle revolves around making a fire from wood… heck, the background of the game’s itch.io page is even a tessellated mosaic of sawn-through logs! It’s commitment to the bit, and also makes the game feel more simulationist without making any of its puzzles too complex, since one bit of wood can generally be substituted for another. So yeah, I was a fan of the wood.

As for things I wasn’t as much a fan of, well, that’s a shorter list. I was sad not to have found an alternate way past the goblin, though there might well be one and I was jut too thick to notice. Beyond that, I had to look up the full answer to the puzzle I mentioned above involving fire, because it relies on some pyrodynamic assumptions that I think aren’t right (Spoiler - click to show) (surely in most cases throwing a jugfull of water on a moderately-sized fire will just produce some steam and maybe put out the fire, rather than producing smoke? For smoke you need wet wood, but burning the rotten wood didn’t get me smoke, and despite wrestling with the parser for quite a while I couldn’t convince it that I wanted to put any of my large pile of wood into the easily-accessible river to get it damp).

The fact that I just spent so much time quibbling about one small aspect of a puzzle is an indication of just how tight the game is overall – it’s a textbook example of the small-fantasy-text-adventure genre, and if along with praise for the effectiveness of the execution, that also suggests a cap on how exciting it can be, well, so it goes. I was more than happy to enjoy Woodcutter’s Quest for what it is – but also because if I squint at it, I can see the outline of a much weirder game that really goes whole hog on the woodworking angle. Maybe some newcomer turned onto IF by this game, or the book it’s riffing on, will take up the gauntlet? Stranger things have happened.

Towards the western end of the Forum Romanum, the ancient heart of the Eternal City, tucked below the still-majestic ruins of temples, arches, and courthouses, lies the Lacus Curtius. It’s incredibly unassuming today – a random assortment of paving stones scattered around some divot-filled turf – but it wouldn’t have been much more imposing at the height of the Republic either; for the Lacus Curtius wasn’t a great edifice, but rather a sort of basin or wet pit, one of the last remaining bits of fen when the swamplands below the Capitoline Hill was drained. What makes it special? Even the Romans themselves weren’t quite sure. One story is that the spot was made sacred after it had been hit by lightning. Another, more involved, says that a great sinkhole once appeared at the site, threatening to swallow some of the most important buildings in the city, when an oracle said that the rift could be closed only if Rome’s greatest strength were sacrificed to it; a brave young soldier decided this must mean the bravery of a soldier (perhaps unsurprisingly) and jumped into the abyss, saving the day.

The last story is that some guy named Curtius got his horse stuck in the mud there one time.
There’s nothing especially special about the Lacus Curtius, all of this is to say, except for the fact that some people who lived a very long time ago thought it was special too. So in some ways, A Quest in Time, which is a game made almost entirely out of Lacus Curtiuses (I know that’s bad Latin, Daniel, sorry!), should be right up my alley (you will be unsurprised to learn that when I visited Rome on my honeymoon, I befuddled my wife by making a beeline for the aforementioned sump). This time-traveling adventure takes you to Rome in the last decades of the Republic, but also Athens as it catches its breath between flare-ups of the Peloponnesian War, London during the Plague Year, and more eras besides. But you’ll find no lovingly-described Acropolis or a version of the pre-Great Fire St. Paul’s conjured up with historical fidelity; there are temples and churches and marketplaces and all that, but the spaces are general rather than specific, workaday spaces that provide a bit of color to the puzzles, most of which involve decoding ciphers left behind for you by a rogue time-agent in order to figure out the spatio-temporal coordinates for your next destination.

Rather than offering a view of regular life in the past, a sort of quotidian temporal tourism, though, the effect is often just vague. Here’s a lawyer’s office in Restoration England, for example:

"The room is arranged with a careful sense of order, its atmosphere one of a quiet formality. Everything appears to be kept in its proper place, just as if governed by rules not immediately visible. There’s a stillness here that suggests deliberation rather than neglect, and you get the impression that matters of consequence are conducted within these walls."

A certain degree of vibes-focused description can be a virtue in parser games, inasmuch as it conveys mood without creating a whole bunch of distracting scenery that takes a long time to implement and risks sending the player down blind alleys. And there are other locations that have a bit more concrete detail to them. But it’s not just the location descriptions, a similar sort of fogginess infects NPCs and their dialogue, and actually interactable objects and scenery. Too many parts of the game, especially in the latter half, fall prey to fuzziness, which dramatically undercuts the fun of hopping through history.

But back to the puzzles, which are the main focus of the game – though there is a reasonably robustly-written opening, it pretty much just boils down to “you’re a rookie time agent, someone’s gone missing and could be playing out their own agenda, so it’s up to you to track him down.” They’re a pretty classic lot, with a fair number of swap-item-X-to-NPC-Y-to-get-item-Z chains there mostly for pacing, and the aforementioned encoded-coordinates puzzles being the set-pieces. I found those to be a mixed bag; several work well enough, providing just enough resistance before you can figure out how to turn a bit of ASCII art or a scrawled message that appears to be about something entirely different into a six-digit number. But I had to go to the walkthrough to solve the first of them, and even seeing the steps required to solve it I still don’t understand what was going on. The sometimes-finicky parser also made a couple puzzles harder than they were probably intended to be – there are a lot of clues written in dead languages, which is fun, but the availability of the TRANSLATE verb really should have been better signposted, and getting the time machine to work took me way too long, largely because the keypad can’t be TYPEd on, nor can its buttons be PUSHED – only PRESSED.

While the environmental storytelling gets weaker as the game progresses, however, the puzzles get easier, and the throwaway plot from the intro starts to come back into play, leading to a late-game twist that recalls a major work in the IF canon for its climax. It’s a bold move, though not one I’m wholly convinced by (Spoiler - click to show)y (inviting comparisons with Trinity is probably a fool’s errand in general, and the specific method of sabotage contemplated here – stopping the Trinity test by blowing up a particular piece of equipment with a hand grenade – doesn’t seem like it would actually accomplish much, though in fairness there are indications that there’s some other timey-wimey stuff in play and it’s that, rather than the secrets of nuclear fission, that you’re trying to keep bottled up). There’s fun to be had with A Quest in Time, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help wishing it had committed to being the clearest, most compelling version of itself, rather than the decidedly thinner and more spread-out iteration we got.

For decades, one of the standard critiques of adventure game puzzles is that they can operate on cartoon logic. It’s a brave move by Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl, then, to steer into the skid: one the one hand, having a game that’s literally in a Looney-Toons style cartoon means that slapstick doesn’t create tonal clashes with the rest of the game, but on the other hand, there’s a very real risk of frustration if players aren’t thinking outside the box in exactly the right way. Fortunately, the game nails its premise, offering up clever twists on classic scenarios that prompt you towards solutions while maintaining a healthy level of difficulty, and make plenty of room for funny gags along the way.

The precise setup here is one of the oldest in video-game-dom – someone nefarious has kidnapped your girlfriend for underspecified reasons – but what you’re really doing is wandering around looking for anything shaped like a puzzle, in the confidence that that will eventually get you where you’re going. The early stages are more directed, as you’re confined to a small area of the map until you figure out how to reach the city where your paramour disappeared, but once things open up there are pretty long puzzle chains to be traversed before you pick up the thread of the plot again. And that works fine, since in a cartoon short the mayhem in the middle is the point.

Again, it helps that the scenarios are nicely chosen to prompt the player to act – if you see a safe dangling in the middle of the street, hanging by only a fraying rope, or a parasol next to a near-bottomless pit, you don’t need to have mainlined cartoons to guess what you should be doing. While there are maybe one or two that could fit in just about any parser game (I don’t remember Bugs Bunny doing anything so straightforward as prying up a grate with a crowbar), they’re very much the exceptions from the inspired set of challenges on offer. You can die – though nothing a couple UNDOs won’t solve – and I think there’s at least one way to get yourself into an unwinnable situation, albeit it’s near the start and you need to do something that’s fairly obviously unwise. But I didn’t mind this flirtation with cruelty, because it’s part of how the game balances approachability with challenge: there are some tricky puzzles (I actually needed a hint to figure out exactly how to deal with that cliff, though it was reasonably clued in retrospect) so the game wants to make sure you’re thinking about what you’re doing.

As I also mentioned, Slappy Squirrel actually is funny, too. I really enjoyed the name of one of your neighbors, which is an off-brand riff on Pepe LePew, and the game never misses a chance to indulge in a cartoon trope, like emphasizing how background scenery keeps getting reused or how the world disappears as you get near the horizon past which the artists haven’t drawn anything. It’s also well implemented, with the only tiny bug I ran into setting up the biggest laugh of the game. Here was how the ending text was displayed:

"Congratulations, you have saved the girl and joined the ranks of the greatest romantic couples in toon history.
(first dropping the vacuum cleaner hose)"

That kind of intrusion of chaos into narrative is characteristic of both cartoons and IF – and Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl what good things can happen when that convergence isn’t run from, but embraced.

The Simpsons is responsible for so much at this point that it feels hubristic to pick out one thing and call it the Simpsons Effect, but since from the state of the world it sure feels like the Furies have been sending out-of-office autoreplies for a while now, let’s risk some lightning bolts: due to having watched a bunch of the Simpsons when I was relatively tender-aged, there is a whole host of pop culture that I first encountered, and remain primarily if not exclusively familiar with, via Simpsons parodies. I’ve never seen the Shining or Cape Fear or Rear Window, but beyond the broad outlines of the plots I know many of the key setpieces and even how they were shot, based on seeing them played out by a cast of oddly-yellow cartoon characters. On the one hand, the Simpsons Effect really is an efficient way of expanding one’s cultural horizons – I can keep up in a conversation about the psychosexual themes of the Shining so long as I remember Groundskeeper Willie wasn’t actually involved – but on the other, that expansion is based on unstable foundations, an impression of someone else’s impression of a thing.

So anyway This Island is Trying to Kill You unabashedly presents itself as a homage to, specifically, shareware text adventures of the mid-1980s. I was 4 or 5 for most of the mid 80s, so what with not having a computer and not being literate, this isn’t an area where I have any firsthand knowledge, and I don’t even have any years-later experience, either – I’ve gone back to play some Infocom games, but even a quick glance at Island’s garish colors, integrated ASCII mazes, and cheerful use of the nether depths of the character set make clear that we’re a far way afield from A Mind Forever Voyaging. But I have played stuff like And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One (and its companion, Infinite Adventure) that similarly leverage period-appropriate visuals and interface elements to tweak a nostalgia I don’t actually have, but in service to different creative agendas and more modern design sensibilities.

And at least in this case, that’s great! I can’t say with any authority how well Island apes its inspirations, but the vibe definitely matches what I’ve seen in analogous projects – brief but enthusiastic prose, unselfconsciously old-school puzzles, a sprawling, low-density map, a light treasure-hunt premise, and that all-important interface. There’s a blue header with your score and exits listed (of course there’s a score), a dappled-purple footer that occasionally pops up a light hint, your commands get typed in in cyan with error messages colored red, and there are lots of puzzles that bring in wingdings-style symbols to liven things up, not content to stick to the alphanumerics. It makes for a coherent aesthetic that wouldn’t be out of place on someone’s bedroom C64 in the background of a schmaltzy 80’s movie, but it’s also very functional: you have all the information a modern player has come to expect, the parser is fast and boasts some nice features like an optional autocomplete for longer words, and there’s an in-game automap to help make sense of the sometimes-wacky geography (oh, and there are deaths but they’re all reversible with a simple UNDO).

The other more contemporary touch is a dash of roguelike DNA – the ABOUT text indicates that there’s some randomization at play, jumbling up some of the layout and puzzle solutions between runs. I only went through it the once, but can see where things like safe combinations and the location of some items (like the mysterious ship’s wheels) could be changed, though I don’t think this would add much replayability since the basic contours of the solutions seem like they’d be the same – I am curious whether there are a few larger-scale alterations, though, as I ran into at least one obstacle that I never figured out how to circumvent (Spoiler - click to show)(the shark-infested lagoon).

We’re almost 700 words in and I haven’t said what the game is about yet, but the premise is somewhat besides the point: you’re shipwrecked on a desert island and need to collect a bunch of treasures because a talking porpoise (?) tells you you need to buy a ticket off the island (?) from a magic underground vending machine (?) that extends you credit based on the off-screen bank account you’ve accumulated by finding the aforementioned treasures and handing them off to a handy crab who appraises them and whisks them away for safekeeping (???) Basically: solve 17 puzzles, win the game. Some of these are beyond straightforward – unlock the box with a monkey on it using the key with a monkey on it – but there are also a couple simple math puzzles, some combinations to collect, and straightforward object manipulation challenges.

There’s nothing that’s especially tough, but the fact that the clues and items are spread over such a large map makes it satisfying to recognize that now you can go back and solve something you ran into much earlier. The extensive real-estate – which also includes a couple of evocative sub-areas – makes exploration fun, too, as you uncover the island’s secrets and get a sense of how it all fits together. Meanwhile, the prose is zippy and the jokes solid, with the unexpected result of trying to feed a seagull so it’d stop bothering me getting an out-loud laugh. And as mentioned above, despite appearances the interface is smooth enough to remove most friction. I did run into a couple of small bugs (the help text for interacting with characters seems to be missing, and trying to save the game threw an error, though I’ve been having issues with Itch.io in Chrome, so that could be the culprit), but those didn’t affect my enjoyment in the slightest.

I suspect that people who remember the 80s and played innumerable games like this in their formative years will get more out of This Island is Trying to Kill You. But even for those of us for whom it won’t be a madeleine evoking younger days, there’s a lot to enjoy here – actually, this might be a case where the Simpsons Effect second-hand version is way better than the original inspiration.

Apologies for the mass of blurry-text immediately below, but despite its apparently straightforward treasure-hunt-in-a-1930s-bank premise, Grand Island Bank Robbery (even the title couldn’t be more ingenuous!) is one of those games that can’t be discussed without spoilers. It’s very much a good time, though, so I recommend you give it a whirl and then join me for the real review once you’re sure you’ve hit the ending.

I have been married for going on eleven years now, and in that time my wife and I have developed our own little habits for certain things. For example, here’s how we celebrate our anniversaries: each year, without fail, we’ll decide what day we want to go out and do something, then I’ll do some research to come up with two or three options that I think would be fun or romantic, present them to my wife, who’ll deliberate for a couple of minutes before making a pick – and then each year, a day or two later, she’ll tell me that she did a little bit of her own digging and came up with an idea that is obviously and objectively way, way better than what I came up with, so we do that instead. Unsurprisingly, that means that over the years, even as we’ve stuck to the exact same formalities, the amount of effort I put into coming up with those initial choices has ratcheted down, because even though part of me has to believe that it’s meaningful effort, the greater part of me knows that it’s really just putting on a show before the inevitable happens.

I’ve got something of the same learned helplessness when it comes to Larry Horsfield’s old-school ADRIFT parser puzzlers (yes, that’s the kind of segue you can only get from a Mike Russo review, at least for another two or three generations of LLMs). Every time I read the preview, get excited at the idea of testing my wits against a long, fiendishly-tricky fantasy adventure, read through the extensive instructions and pre-game material while psyching myself up for the challenge, explore the opening area and pat myself on the back for successfully deploying a LOOK BEHIND or LOOK UNDER or two – then get stuck, realize there are no hints, allow my low-level social anxiety to prevent me from taking the author up on the invitation to email them for the walkthrough, and quit in shame. Once or twice, with especially short and easy games, I’ve managed to break the pattern and make substantial progress or even win the thing, but friends, I think this was my worst showing yet, akin to asking my wife if she wants to just spend our anniversary at the second-closest McDonalds (it’s marginally nicer than the closest one!)

I’m disappointed, since until I hit a brick wall I was having a good time. The inciting incident is ridiculous – the village elder sends your village into high alert because someone has stolen the pipe of the evil warlock Rummikum Rummkub, and dragoons you into a quest to recover it – but the other villagers also think it’s a bit much, and there’s a similar amount of just-getting-on-with-it charm to the game’s extremely white-bread fantasy world. Sure, it’s a mismash, with the village boasting a longhouse, a roundhouse, a yort (sic?), and a church complete with stained glass and a nave, but the matter-of-fact prose and just-detailed-enough implementation successfully evoke a classic adventuring vibe. And it was satisfying to run around gathering supplies for the adventure, finding food and water, retrieving your dagger, and so on – that kind of low-key grounding makes the grand fantasy bits stand out all the more.

I never actually got to any of those grand fantasy bits, though, since when I tried to leave the village in pursuit of the thief, an out of character voice told me I needed something from the church. That’s a better approach than letting the player get into a walking dead state, I suppose, but the problem was there was no in-game reason why I would expect there to be anything hidden in the church, nor any clue as to what I was supposed to do there – I messed around with the pews, fumbled around with some carved decorations, tried to steal the god’s statue from the altar (at some point my score went from 10/650 to 5/650, and in retrospect this might have been where I made my blunder), and admitted defeat some 15 minutes later.

Before fully giving up on the game, I made a half-hearted attempt at the other puzzle I was aware of, prompted by reading a book indicating that I’d need some ashes in case I ran into a giant spider later (it’s somehow supposed to confuse them). I’d found a dirty fireplace but couldn’t get a container to scrape the ash into. The miller at the edge of town has a giant pile of empty sacks, which seemed promising, but he wouldn’t let me borrow one or even try to buy one, and realizing that I couldn’t swap gold for an empty burlap sack made me realize that progress in this game was going to depend more on lawnmowering through the command list than thinking up reasonable solutions to obstacles, and I just couldn’t muster up the requisite enthusiasm, since I was sure that even if I did eventually figure these two puzzles out, I’d inevitably come a cropper on some future challenge. Farewell, Alyas of Star – sorry, ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, we barely knew ye, you put in a lot of effort and I barely made any, but that’s just the pattern we’ve settled into after all these years.

UPDATE: Upon getting a in-retrospect-kinda-obvious-though-still-unmotivated hint from the author in the thread below, I was able to get through my ecclesiastical blockage, and after some comedic back and forth where I was prevented from venturing forth on my grand adventure until I’d secured that most critical piece of a hero’s equipage, a tea towel, finally made it to the game proper. I actually started making some solid progress, working through some solidly-clued puzzles to get rid of a pack of wild dogs, explore a deserted village, and uncover some secrets hidden in an enchanted forest. Then I ran out of steam trying to get down from a hundreds-of-feet-high escarpment – I’m worried I might have released a genie too early – but still, with a respectable 150/650 points, and having enjoyed some solid adventure-gaming, I’m much more satisfied both with myself and with the game than I was yesterday.