Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo
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Middle march, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game. Also, this review contains spoilers).
I am very much a city kind of person – so much so that when I went to stay with my uncle in semi-rural New Hampshire for a couple of weeks immediately after moving out of Manhattan, the combination of deep silence and unfamiliar wildlife sounds that characterized the local soundscape gave me insomnia for the first time in my life. And actually I just recalled that when I was still living in the city, even just taking the subway to Brooklyn could make me agoraphobic. Despite all that (or maybe because of it), though, I totally get the fantasy Tricks of light in the forest offers: going into the woods, exploring slightly off the beaten trail, looking closely at every rock and flower and tree and bug, syncing into tune with the world… it’s alluring because it’s such a change of pace, sure, but also because it feels like returning to nature is an antidote to the poisonous distractions and superficial conflicts of civilized life.
My experience is actually not that far off from that of Lara, this Gruescript game’s 12-year-old protagonist; while she embarks on her unsupervised trip into the woods with the insouciance of a born ranger, actually she’d also lived in a city until just the previous year. And for her, getting in touch with nature is even more important than it is for us, as hints in the game’s narration indicate that it takes place after climate-change disasters have wrecked much of the earth, displacing people and animals alike. Not that she’s very concerned with any of that; monitor lizards have always roamed Europe in her lifetime, so she’s just focused on having a fun time exploring, taking some pictures of interesting plants or bugs, and finding something to collect for a classroom exercise.
While eventually a few brushes with danger intrude on this innocent agenda, this is a decidedly low-key game by IF standards, and it sings when it leans into its smallness. There are only a few objects needed to surmount the game’s small set of puzzles, but each of its locations typically boasts at least a few pieces of scenery: a half-dead tree, a heap of trash, a swarm of bees, a cleft in the earth. In addition to examining them, you’re typically also able to take a photo, or touch or smell, or, for portable items, harvest a piece for your sample box. The game tracks all of this, but it isn’t vulgar enough to change the plot based on your actions, much less include anything like an achievement to “reward” you for mechanically clicking on everything. Instead, exploration is worth pursuing for its own sake, or rather for the sake of tiny jewel-like bits of prose:
"There are two kinds of moss on the rock here: both are like carpets made up of green strings, but one has longer, thinner and lighter strings, while the others are shorter, thicker, and a less cheerful tone."
"I kneel under the highest part of the fallen tree. The underside is different from the top. Cold, a bit damp, softened. Eaten by bugs? Small circles of white and yellow fungus thrive in the shade. Some day, not too far, they will weaken the wood so much that the trunk will finally break."
There’s a neat connection drawn between this external poking about and more internally-focused reflection. Often, engaging with an object will prompt an association whose thread Lara will follow over a few subsequent turns, sometimes sparking a memory of her previous life or prompting her to think about her family members or the bigger world. Similarly, most of the big-picture setting details are established glancingly, through these fine-grained observations: noticing some dead trees will reveal that they were probably killed by climate-induced flooding, or seeing the traces of poachers will make Lara recall a conversation where her dad alluded to the political upheaval that predated the current, more stable time. Notably, while it’s clear that the world has changed in generally bad ways, Tricks of light in the forest posits a future where nature has begun to heal, generally assisted by humans. Both of Lara’s parents work in recovery efforts, and while the woods are wilder and different than they are today, they’re still vibrant and a place of wonder.
This quietly hopeful vibe extends to the moments of genuine threat, where Lara encounters untamed wildlife. These sequences are definitely tense, but I don’t think it’s possible for the player to die, and the way you deal with the animals just involves shooing them off, rather than inflicting lasting harm. And while these are puzzles that involve multiple steps to solve, I didn’t find that they detracted from the meditative mood of the piece; you typically only have one or two usable inventory items at a time, and Lara is a resourceful enough character to take initiative and set up the next action in the chain without requiring too much handholding, so the steps are typically clear. The Gruescript implementation does mean that there’s often a fair bit of clicking to manage – getting an inventory item queued up to use sometimes felt to me like it took one step too many – but it’s not awful, and again, this isn’t the kind of game where you feel lots of urgency.
No, things stay contemplative throughout, never more so than at the end. After finding your way back home, you’re given the chance to look over the mementos you acquired during your trip, and pick which one you want to bring to school. It’s a small, satisfying note to finish on – or it would be if it were the finish, but it’s not. Instead, these enigmatic paragraphs are the last writing in the game:
"I’ve been thinking about all I’ve seen: the living things that thrive in the light and the dark, but also the traces of disaster, the secrets of Terror Country, the invading species, the heat.
"I have the feeling that I’m missing something. That there is something to be understood in the middle of all this, which I can’t understand, I can’t even guess."
This isn’t, I’m fairly sure, anything so crass as an indication that there’s a secret ending I failed to unlock; rather, it’s an invitation to the player to reflect on what the game’s presented and see if there’s something visible to them that Lara – who, remember, is twelve – missed. Here, the game’s repeated theme of depth, and its miniaturist mode, loom large: Lara is continually pushing herself to go deeper into the wild (indeed, the navigation system is nearly linear; most locations offer only “home” and “forest” as travel options), while hyperfocusing on each leaf, twig, and bug. And on the internal side of things, she gives us big-picture statements about the world and very specific recollections of particular incidents in her life.
So what’s in the middle of these two spectrums, at the interface of the personal and the global? There are many concepts one could throw out, and find support for in the game: history, say, society, or politics, and the way they create larger-scale shifts to systems. Appropriately, Lara seems innocent of all this, but the player is given more than enough hints to see what’s elided: that reference to the wilderness being “Terror Country” aligns with Lara’s father mentioning “the time when [bad people] were in power. When they threw your grandad and grandma in jail. The Terror,” for example, and forms a still more menacing constellation when you throw in the tucked-away cabin, with its chair with leather straps and generous supply of bleach. Lara’s relatively-safe, relatively-hopeful existence, that is to say, is one that’s contingent; it took coordinated action to achieve it, and it was opposed by the coordinated action of others who had a different vision. The sum of our decisions, as mediated through our civilization, is the single overriding fact: alone, deep in nature, it may be hard to see the city, but it’s not so easy to escape.
(Okay, having written those last two paragraphs, boy will there be egg on my face if actually it’s just that there’s a secret ending I failed to unlock).
This man knows nothing, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game).
In the English class I took as a high-school sophomore, in lieu of formal essays the teacher would have us write little weekly papers in response to a quote he’d pull from whatever book we were reading. Usually the quote would clearly invite a specific kind of analysis, like it’d spotlight a key theme or a bit of character development or what have you, but every once in a while he’d mess with us, like when we were reading Updike’s The Centaur: out of that novel’s heady mix of mythological allegory, lyrical landscape-painting, and squalid small-town depression, he extracted for our waiting pens the bare clause “…a sluggish digestive rumbling.”
This was, so far as I remember, a totally insignificant quartet of words, brought on by one character drinking coffee on an empty stomach or something like that – a mere incidental detail signifying nothing. The upside was that I felt free to write whatever I felt like, and for whatever reason, I decided what I felt like writing was a three-page narration of Socrates’s last hours. I had him run through a monologue about his devotion to philosophy and the ideal, drink the hemlock in perfect equanimity, and say goodbye to his disciples with no great show of emotion. Yet even as his spirit faced its end with calm, I had his body rebel, guts heaving and roiling against the hemlock, lungs desperate to keep gasping down air. The ending line (I was very proud of the ending line) was “what is Truth? Truth is a sluggish digestive rumbling.”
All of which is to say that even to a teenager whose knowledge of Socrates came mostly from The Cartoon History of the Universe, the idea of using him to dramatize the physical nature of man is irresistible: to levy a critique of pure reason (wait, that’s Kant) by bringing the body into the equation, to juxtapose the phenomenology of spirit (oops, that’s Hegel) with the reality of flesh. This is something Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates does, and does well – we meet an embodied, earthy Socrates, with a big nose and a bigger belly, and with a taste for wine and food and sex – but it’s also, let’s face it, a sophomoric trick that isn’t actually that interesting: ideas come from people, and people exist in the world, film at 11.
No, what’s interesting in this game isn’t so much what’s done with Socrates qua Socrates, as what’s done with his wife Xanthippe, and therefore with him in relation to her. Xanthippe has come down through history only as a silent archetype, demonized by centuries of male writers as a shrew so vituperative that Socrates turned to harassing passers-by in the agora just to escape her clutches. It would be tempting to flip the tables on this legacy of misogyny by positing a Xanthippe who’s a perfect mate for her husband, someone who’s supportive of his endeavors, an intellectual match for him, and able to create a harmonious home for him as a refuge from the small-minded politics that ultimately killed him. Fortunately, Victor resists this temptation: his Xanthippe is certainly Socrates’s equal, but she’s recognizably someone who gossips would turn into a legendary termagant. She holds a grudge, she knows what buttons to push, she calls him on his BS. It would have been easy to write this game to be about reacting to the great philosopher; instead, he has to react to her.
There’s a lot of skill needed to make this work, though; it’s easier to describe the dynamic between two long-married people than it is to show it, especially when they’re interacting in circumstances as extreme as these (the premise, memorably laid out by the blurb, is that as Xanthippe you’ve bribed your way into his prison cell on the eve of his execution, bent on one last roll in the hay). The game rises to the challenge by slaughtering sacred cows left and right. Almost the first thing out of Xanthippe’s mouth is ”come here, humpty grumpy Socratumpy,” which is a hilarious line but also a statement of intent: these characters aren’t going to be mere figures mouthing stentorian dialogue, but human beings who demand to be understood as such. This does mean that there’s more than a bit of anachronism in the dialogue (there’s a reference to a cuckold’s horns, for example, though I’m pretty sure that figure didn’t exist in antiquity) but the game is more than worth the candle: freed of the need to hew to some imagined Merchant-Ivory portrait, the game has full rein to be funny and sincere.
Indeed, while the circumstances of the characters are quite dire, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates made me laugh as much as any game in the Comp. There are of course philosophy jokes sufficiently accessible that I got them (despite the passage of 25 years, I’m still mostly relying on that Cartoon History for my knowledge of Socrates), little Classical in-jokes (“That’s not what Alcibiades told me”/”You shouldn’t believe everything Alcibiades says”), and parodies of Homer, but the humor really proves its worth in the fights between the two spouses – for of course, whatever you choose, the evening quickly goes off the rails and a lifetime of resentment, regret, and suspicions get dredged up for one final look.
Arguing with your spouse is usually not considered fun IF gameplay, but here, it’s both integral to the story and entertaining in its own right. The marital dynamics here are very keenly observed – I swear that I’ve had some of these exact fights with my wife, especially the one about what counts as an apology, and Socrates’s inability to let an opportunity for a little joke slide or refrain from raising tiny, completely insignificant objections had more than a bit of a personal resonance – but among the heart-truths they sling at each other are enough gags and funny moments to make the conflict go down easily. The game’s also careful to manage the power disparities: neither one is wholly right or wholly wrong, the emotions aren’t allowed to go too far out of bounds, and since the game is necessarily framed by the question of when to sacrifice truth for social expedience (with Socrates’s example implicitly suggesting the answer is “very rarely”), it would feel perverse to try to avoid conflict when there are things left unsaid. As a result, despite being the kind of player who’s almost invariably polite when given the option, here I was gleefully picking the choices that maximized the amount of time Socrates was raked over the coals for slipping and calling Xanthippe a cow.
So yeah, this is quite a fun and funny game – I think this is the only time in IF Comp history when a player character has (Spoiler - click to show)shagged Plato. But as with many of Victor’s games, the comedy is in service of a non-frivolous examination of what we owe each other, what partnership can look like, and how we can imagine saying goodbye to the most important people in our lives. The closing scene is lovely and wraps many of these threads together, positing a domestic origin for the famous Allegory of the Cave that’s sweet and sexy and segues beautifully into the final bout of lovemaking (I know a mid-Comp update added the option to wrap up with cuddling, but that choice feels decidedly non-canonical to me).
For all that it’s set almost 2,500 years ago, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates feels vital and contemporary; just as the questions Socrates grappled with are still ones that haunt us today, there’s nothing in this story that feels like it’s since been solved. Shorn of their dramatic circumstances, these dialogues are ones many of us have, or will have, with our partners – and just as in the game, those conversations proceed a lot of yelling and ill-advised joking that we hope history will fail to record.
Heartfelt clowning, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I alpha tested this game).
One of the things I worry about, as a critic, is turning into one of those people who says everything under the sun is a liminal space. It’s a cool-sounding phrase, sure, but it’s one of those concepts that can easily become a crutch, allowing one to say something that seems impressive but doesn’t communicate much beyond “this is a place that’s between other places”, which for sufficiently loose values of “place”, “between”, and “other” can be made to fit whatever you like.
Having written the above paragraph I am now seized with concern that actually I’m already one of those people and just haven’t noticed. …but OK, I just searched my IFDB-posted reviews and only 3 out of 387 use the phrase, referring to trains, bus stops, and public transit, which seems fairly restrained. So I think that means I can burn some of that banked capital and say you know, when you think about it, traveling circuses sure are liminal spaces. At a basic level, they move from place to place, but there’s also a temporal component, because when they’re pitched up somewhere and you visit, you’re sandwiched between its past nonexistence before they came into town and its future nonexistence once they leave. It’s unsurprising, then, that the circus is often positioned as a site of transformation: shuffling through my mental inventory of circus stories at random, you’ve got Big, where Tom Hanks literally enters one a boy and leaves a man; sticking to IF, Ballyhoo sees the player character lunge at the chance to stop being an anonymous punter and take on a new life of adventure.
For the people who work at a circus, though, it certainly can’t function as a one-off engine for change. In reality I’m sure for many it’s just a job like any other, but from a literary point of view, the approach taken by Honk! seems exactly right: the winning cast of this top-notch comedy puzzler are predominantly queer in one way or other, but comfortably so, at peace with an existence that the narrow might say is perennially in-between more conventional alternatives. The main character, a clown named Lola, takes hormone pills; her lover Freda is the circus strongwoman, gigantic and mighty and tender. The magician Adagio changes gender as part of her act, and the goose-trainer, Ken Lawn, clocks as neurodivergent (beyond his questionable decision to spend lots of time with an animal as ill-tempered as a goose as part of his profession, I mean). Against this, the Ringmaster seems a plain-vanilla kind of guy, but hey, he’s nice so we can let him skate by.
Actually pretty much everybody is nice, even initially-prickly Ken – except for the Phantom who’s haunting the circus and sabotaging everyone’s acts. The main business of the game involves assisting the three other main characters in their performances, seeing how the Phantom tries to wreck them, and foiling his plans to keep the shows moving (they’re endlessly repeatable until you succeed, this being a merciful game). This is a lovely structure, since it gives you multiple avenues to work on at once without any interdependences, so if you’re momentarily stymied you’ve almost always got another avenue to switch to. It also makes the player feel more proactive than in many parser games, since in practice you wind up scoping out the carnival grounds, then trying the acts to see what the Phantom’s going to do, then going back to the free-roaming section to hatch your plan and prepare.
Honk! is also among the funniest games in the Comp. The author’s a dab hand with farce – pretty much every scene involving the assholish goose left me giggling, for example:
“Completely asleep!” marvels Lawn. “I don’t believe it! How did yaargh fnaaargh,” he continues as the goose wakes up and bites his nose.
But there are also really good laconic, tossed-off jokes:
“It was your day off, you got back late, maybe you didn’t hear from anyone yet,” says the Ringmaster. “The circus is haunted now."
And the best gags to my mind are the ones that play their hand slow, telegraphing the punch line to the player and then drawing out the windup longer and longer and longer until an initially-good joke becomes sublime; it’s an impressive bit of comedic legerdemain that’s totally appropriate to the setting.
The puzzles themselves are a strong bunch, too. Most aren’t too hard, requiring just enough forethought to feel clever; there’s maybe one puzzle that’s a little too hard because it tips into overly-cartoonish territory (Spoiler - click to show)(the bit where a helium balloon makes the rabbit float upwards) but even that is mostly delightful and funny. In fact for all that it’s all mostly standard medium-dry-goods manipulation, the puzzles have a very strong thematic focus – the tools of your trade involve pie-throwing, making balloon animals, and playing around with magic tricks – that make Honk! truly feel like a circus game, not just a game taking place at a circus.
That strong theme comes into play in the ending, too; after a deliriously-escalating climactic sequence, the game’s final text ties a surprisingly-affecting bow around everything the game’s played with – queerness, found family, laughter, killjoys using the law to stop people doing stuff they don’t like. While it never lets its message get in the way of the fun, Honk! is the rare silly parser puzzler that actually has something to say, positing that people who live in liminal spaces deserve a place to call home, too.
Post-post-modern and emotionally raw, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game. Also, this review contains spoilers since it deserves to be discussed in its full context).
I regret not having a stronger grounding in literary theory pretty much any day ending in y, but that lack feels especially excruciating as I turn to LAKE Adventure, because it’s operating within a movement that I’d love to be able to name definitively. Instead, I’m going to have to wildcat this thing and call the game part of the New Sincerity. Like, we all know that modernism happened, right, and dramatized the way that conventional narrative forms and naïve realism were no longer tenable in an increasingly polycentric and polyvalent world, right? And then came post-modernism, which responded to the anxiety that forms might be empty by turning a microscope onto said forms, exalting self-conscious exploration of structure above superficial considerations of plot and character.
But after post-modernism exhausted itself (er, to the extent it has – again, I am mostly groping blindly here) something had to come next, and for many, that something had to respond to the ongoing felt need for old-fashioned emotional engagement and catharsis. But how to manage that in a world where a genre-savvy audience goes into a work knowing all the tricks? Paradoxically, the author needs to meet them where they’re at, and move outwards into ironic distance to create the preconditions necessary to eventually move inwards to identification. Thus the New Sincerity; think of House of Leaves, which for all its metafictional flourishes has as its engine the failing marriage between the two leads. Or of the Sandman comics, which move into an epic register to chronicle the exploits of the Prince of Stories, but ultimately are largely concerned with how he’s a shitty boyfriend. Or – to tip my hand – think of And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, B.J. Best’s Comp-winning game from 2021; a coming-of-age story about the pre-teenaged angst of moving away from your best friend, it could have been saccharine-sweet but for the way its narrative was ramified through text adventures within text adventures (with bonus parallel text adventures as an Easter Egg).
LAKE Adventure is doing something similar, I think, but there’s no risk that anyone will find this game cloying. It’s also part of what I’ve called a confessional turn in recent parser IF (think of this year’s Repeat the Ending and Hand Me Down; also, I really need to stop trying to name things, I’m bad at it), positioning the game the player experiences as a diegetically-created work whose origins are themselves elements of the game’s story. The premise is that the game’s central character, Eddie Hughes, has dug up an old text adventure he wrote when he was 13 (and later revised when he was an older teenager) and, facing the doldrums of the first months of 2020’s lockdowns, is watching on Zoom and commenting along as a friend plays it for the first time.
This is an excruciatingly painful framing device. Like, I am one of the few (maybe only?) people in the world who’s experienced something like this: I presented Sting, my memoir game, to a meeting of the Seattle IF Meetup in 2021, and while they were completely lovely about it, sharing scenes from my actual life as rendered into parser form – in real time – was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever done. And that was just a game that emulated how I was when I was a young teenager, rather than one actually reflecting my 13-year-old sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, Eddie is diffident in the extreme, repeatedly asking the player whether they want to stop playing, apologizing for the overly-faithful implementation of his childhood home, and audibly squirming when his younger self-insults the player for turning on the TV by calling them a “vidiot.” No wonder that self-deprecating phrase “I guess” is by far Eddie’s most common verbal tic as he attempts to narrate his lost youth.
For all that LAKE Adventure boasts a note-perfect recreation of a late-80s childhood – there’s a birthday party invitation recognizably created via Print Shop, and the in-game narration focuses with hyperspecificity on the material and brand of young Eddie’s swimsuit – it’s not nostalgic, and in fact is anti-nostalgic. While the few glimpses we get of adult Eddie’s life indicate that it’s unremarkable but stable, his youth was anything but. The plot of the game-within-a-game is notionally just about visiting a birthday party for his best friend’s sister, but it’s haunted by numerous specters, from his parents’ shattered marriage to his own sister’s illness to a history of bullying to the sad fate of his friend. Snatches of this dark reality come in extradiegetic Shards of Memory, which take the player out of the idyllic lake-house setting to experience snatches of Eddie’s contemporary reality, or in adult Eddie’s understated acknowledgement of the ways that the game functioned as an escape from an untenable situation, or from the incursion of graphic violence into a heretofore-innocent story. The game mines pathos out of the implications of the smallest detail or slip of the tongue:
"Your mother’s clothes are on the floor in piles. Some are dresses. Some are jeans. It’s a good thing you know how to do your own laundry!
"Anyway, the bathroom is to the east and my paren—my mom’s—room is west."
And I’m not going to quote it, but there’s nothing in this year’s Comp that hit me as hard as the description of the doll.
The player has work to do along the way; there are puzzles that keep you busy, but mostly what I found myself doing was reflecting on memory. The game is a palimpsest, with some of the darker elements presumably added in by the late-teenage Eddie who knows how some things end up, changes that retroactively reconfigure what’s come before in a way that makes the original forever inaccessible. Of course, that isn’t even a metaphor – to invoke one of my many strange points of bleed-through with this game, my memories of my sister’s last months are already confounded by all the times I’ve remembered them. Later, in the climax, the player’s explicitly confronted with a series of young Eddie’s most traumatic experiences, and has the option to either embrace or reject these memories – but for those seeking comfort in coming full circle will be disappointed to learn that these choices make no difference to the outcome. Then the tragedy of young Eddie’s disillusionment is driven home by a sequence that runs through all his hopes for the future, from romantic conquests to worldly success.
After all this, LAKE Adventure ends with a coda that could be seen as a final, superfluous twist of the knife. The Zoom session is cut short as Eddie’s daughter comes into the room and kicks him off the computer for an early-COVID remote study session for her ancient history class. She’s uninterested in her father’s half-hearted attempts to tell her what he’s been doing, and the game draws the curtain to leave his final, plaintive question unanswered: “I’d like to know if ancient history matters.”
It’s hard to get to this point and not feel beaten down. Again, this is the genius of the New Sincerity: narrate Eddie’s life from front to back, and we’d roll our eyes at the naked emotional manipulation, but let his pain peek out through the multiple overlapping layers of narrative, and it’s heartrending. This final suggestion that all of this was for nothing is almost too much to take. Yet it’s worth being pedantic about what Eddie’s asking: not whether the past matters, but whether history does. We routinely conflate the two, but in fact these are radically different, for the past is what happens, and history is what we write about it, how we try to wrest brute facts into narrative. While we don’t have details, it’s nonetheless pellucidly clear that Eddie’s experiences have shaped his life for good or ill – hell, just about the only thing we know about his daughter is that she’s named after his sister.
The judgment on history, though, is more equivocal; Eddie spends the whole game running away from or apologizing for the story he’s made of his traumatic past. And yet, even in this reticent, half-unspoken way, he does share his embarrassing juvenilia, and if it is possible for history to matter, surely the necessary first step is for someone to read it.
I am definitely shook, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game).
I always find it hard to review games I’ve tested, because even when I replay the final, finished version, my first impression is inescapably of a no-longer-extant game still in the process of reaching its ultimate form; I sometimes attempt some mental gymnastics to try to figure out how my sense of a game might differ from that of someone coming to it fresh, but that’s especially challenging here, because Prince Quisborne is a massive game that I haven’t had the opportunity to revisit in any depth, and I first started testing it in February. So my memories are more distant than I’d like, I haven’t refreshed them recently, and I suspect the addition of some new features, like the NUDGE command that points you to areas where you’re able to make progress, or the DESTINATIONS-based fast travel system to minimize the challenge of navigating the large, diagonal-direction-happy map, radically smooth out the gameplay. Nevertheless I feel obliged to write something by way of comment on the most Brobdingnagian game of this, or, perhaps, any Comp, but you might want to take it with even more salt than usual.
Right, with that distressingly on-point intro out of the way, let’s talk about tarof, which is the Persian practice of hospitality. So far as I’ve experienced it (I have an Iranian-American wife and in-laws), the thing that’s distinctive about tarof is its extravagant generosity. The quintessential example is that you’ll be invited over for lunch, and on your way in you’ll maybe mutter some compliment about the nice rug they have in their living room, at which point your host will beam at you and say “oh, it’s a terrible old thing, I hate it, but I’m so glad you like it, let me give it to you!” At which point you might protest a) you weren’t dropping a hint or anything like that; and b) actually you’re no expert on rugs but now that you look at it it sure seems very nice and actually probably quite expensive. But they’ll say it’s kind of you but no need to be polite, actually you’d be doing me a favor if you take it. And as you try to think of what to say, your host will gently shove you out of the way, get down on their hands and knees, and start rolling the thing up for you. The thing is, this is obviously incredibly nice. But it’s also super overbearing – it’s too much, and even leaving that aside, how the hell are you supposed to get that giant rug home?
And so we come again to Prince Quisborne, which combines the vast scope of a mainframe game with the intricate depth of implementation of a short one-room one, and presents its epic story in a prose style that’s prolix to a fault. In some ways this is the dream that animated the early amateur IF scene: a whole world rendered in jewel-like detail, where you could equally well traipse from one side of a kingdom to the other, and pause anywhere along the way to take in a pagelong random event tied to your exact progression through the plot, or stop off at a blacksmith’s shop to futz around with a fully functional forge, or visit a mini area with fiendishly complex logic and word puzzles that could be a whole game in its own right.
I’m not sure I’ve come across anything else that incarnates this vision nearly as well – Cragne Manor is the only plausible contender, and as a game with 84 authors and all the incoherence that implies, it’s not really a close comparison – and the thing is, having experienced it, it’s not obvious that this was such a good idea. Prince Quisborne is a lot; the prologue is manageable, though already shows off the author’s facility with jokey high-fantasy-ish language and love of multiple puzzle solutions, but once past that lagniappe, the full game unfolds and I can only imagine that most players will issue a gulp, much like I did, once they realize exactly what they’re in for: sure, an incredible voyage of discovery where your eponymous protégé will learn to be a grown-up under your tutelage as you unlock ancient secrets, but also puzzles that rely on having searched an unobtrusive bit of scenery halfway around the world, or remembering an incidental detail from a lore dump ten hours ago; or finding the thingabob you suddenly realize you need means remembering whether you first saw it in Chelkwibble or Chedderwicket; and when you hit the big plot-progressing cutscenes to hand, I sure hope you have a drink and snack handy.
As with tarof, it’s easy to look at all of this and just think “it’s too much”, especially in the press of the Comp. But unlike with tarof, which is embedded in complex systems of power, class, and reciprocity that need to be navigated to maintain politeness, there’s really no downside or ulterior motive here: Prince Quisborne is precisely as generous as it appears to be. If a player tries to rush through it in one go, I suspect they’ll resent it, but if instead it’s played over weeks or months, I suspect it’d deservedly be one of the greatest IF experiences you’ve ever had. It’s extraordinarily rich, and the more I played it, the more I appreciated touches like Prince Quisborne’s facility for having a limerick for every situation, or the way his character subtly changes over the course of the journey as experience leads him from callow youth to surprisingly-touching heroism. In fact, I’m not ashamed to admit that the ending sequence made me tear up – while PQ starts out as a comedy character, he achieves real depth by the finish, and the way the game acknowledges his growth is at once a total blindsiding and completely, necessarily obvious. It’s one of the most impressive climaxes to a piece of IF I’ve ever experienced, so if you’re wondering whether pressing through to the end is worth it, I can say that it emphatically is.
PQ also goes out of its way to be friendly to the player, without watering itself down in the slightest: there are all those convenient commands I mentioned at the beginning, as well as an always-on inventory window, exhaustive hints, and a lovely, inviting presentation (for the love of god, play this in QTADS to get the full experience). One doesn’t need to meet PQ halfway, only a quarter of the way at most.
This is still a commitment, let me reiterate! I’d guess this is at least a 20 hour game. But each of those hours will show you something worthwhile, and the accumulation of them accomplishes things very few other games have done. Now that the Comp is over, it’s the perfect time to approach PQ as it deserves to be approached: dedicate some time. Let go of the idea that you need to race through it (or that you should have any shame about consulting hints or the walkthrough!) And get ready to experience something extraordinary.
Mind = blown, but maybe not blown enough, December 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I think anybody who has a job or area of expertise that’s routinely depicted in popular media has a pet-peeve list of things that are continually and hilariously flubbed in said media. As someone with a law degree, I’d put the talismanically-powerful contract waiver near the top of my list: you know, someone’s about to do something ridiculously dangerous and/or ill-advised, but since they agreed to a generic waiver, all is good. So it goes for Ziyan, the protagonist of this stylish choice-based game, who signs his name to a vague waiver saying “We are not responsible for any liabilities and damages that may occur during the games” before entering a reality-TV videogame competition that immediately goes way off the rails. As the battle royale gets way too real and axes, grenades, and body-parts start flying, the question isn’t who’s going to be left standing to claim the million-dollar prize – it’s how fast the survivors and the family members of those who don’t make it out will sue everyone involved back to the stone age, waiver or no waiver.
Okay, okay, that’s clearly not the point – and to a certain extent, the ultraviolence isn’t really the point either, as GameCeption’s thankfully more focused on the relationship between its two leads and the game-theoretical implications of its twist than it is on rendering a Battlegrounds-style game in IF form. Ziyan’s best friend, and partner in the competition, is Airen, an affable, supportive guy who provides a nice counterweight to Ziyan’s occasionally moody nature. There isn’t much time for the two of them to hang out before they decide to sign up for the TV show in hopes of making enough money to pay the rent, but the introductory scenes are enough to establish an easy rapport between them that raises the stakes once things go pear-shaped.
The signs that that something’s off about the production company come early, as the initial interview delves into some oddly invasive questions about how much the duo trust each other – this is effectively lampshaded, though, in a bit that showcases the early, laidback vibe:
“Dude, same,” Airen agrees, scratching his head. “Like are they gonna make us do a trust fall off the side of a building?” Ziyan punches him. “If that really happens, I’m blaming you.”
This introductory sequence does feel fairly long, and doesn’t have too many decision-points, but once the competition starts, things pick up. As you play the game, you’re presented with a series of mostly binary choices; I’m not sure how on-rails this sequence is, but it feels authentically tense. The writing does go a bit over the top, and having the gameplay narrow to determining whether you die or get to continue the story, but this section moves quickly enough that it doesn’t wear out its welcome. And then comes in the twist, which I found fairly predictable but which I’ll spoiler-block nonetheless.
(Spoiler - click to show)It turns out that you’re not piloting a polygonal avatar around, but rather (through some unexplained technology) your buddy Airen; likewise, the other players you’re fighting are real people who are being killed and/or maimed by the ultraviolence everyone is deploying in pursuit of the prize. This ironically brings the video-game battle royale genre back to its cinematic roots, but shorn of its original thematic heft; GameCeption doesn’t seem interested in interrogating the economic, political, or cultural systems that created such a horrifying competition, but instead uses its premise to put pressure on the traditional understanding of player identity in IF: if you’re making decisions for Ziyan, and Ziyan is making decisions for Airen, who’s actually the player?
It’s a superficially clever turn, but this twist didn’t do much for me. Again, it’s pretty heavily telegraphed, and questions of players’ complicity or agency in a narrative are old hat for IF by now; I don’t feel like adding the second-order complexity of one character piloting another did much to unsettle the well-understood IF triangle of identities (narrator, protagonist, player). Even a somewhat-stale theme can still support a good game, of course, but I felt that GameCeption put too many eggs in the metafictional basket: the rapport between Airen and Ziyan largely drops out as the action picks up, and the simple gameplay isn’t enough to hold the player’s interest. And then the ending doubles down by having Ziyan reup with the competition, and using his interest in game-design to implement an even bigger twist for the next season that makes even less sense, and has even less emotional impact.
Bringing things back as we return for spoiler-town, I’d summarize by saying that the game becomes over-reliant on a meta idea that isn’t quite as clever as it seems to think, and becomes a slender reed upon which to rest the second half of the game. There’s some excitement to be had, but I think GameCeption would have been stronger if it had either gone smaller, by staying grounded in the best-friend relationship between the two characters, or even bigger by leaning into the implications of its twist and dialing up the questions it raises about agency and control to 11. As is, I found the game a little too lukewarm to make much of an impact, like boilerplate contract language your eye just skips right past.
A lost sequel, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
One thing I’ve noticed when thinking back to my tween years, three decades on, is that things are either seared into my memory or complete blanks. I can still hear what it sounded like, for example, when we got back from a summer vacation to find that a brood of cicadas had hatched while we were gone and had decided to fill the night with a beautiful and threatening cacophony of chirping. And I can instantly recall the squirming, excited embarrassment I felt when the girl I had a crush on me called me one evening because I’d messed with her little brother the day before, telling him I’d found a long out-of-print Dragonlance gamebook that she coveted. On the other hand, I know I must have played months of basketball in eighth grade – I went to a tiny school, everybody was on every team – but I can’t summon up one reminiscence of anything that happened at a single game or practice.
So too it is with Douglas Adams: I was obsessed with him the summer I was 11, blazing through the then-four-part Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy just as school ended and then chasing down the Dirk Gently books before embarking on a campaign of rereading those six books over and over until I got thoroughly sick of them, which took a while. The first book I remember pretty well, because it’s got most of the iconic moments; the third was my favorite so I reread it like once a week, and as a result I can still run down most of its cricket-based MacGuffin quest. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, though, didn’t make much of an impression all these years on – the ending sticks, not so much the rest. And the second book, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe mentioned so prominently in this game’s subtitle? Um. I remember the gag about it being stuck in a manufactured time bubble so patrons can swig their martinis as they watch the heat death of all things, but I’m pretty sure that’s actually introduced in the first book. Like I said above: complete blank.
My other relevant Douglas Adams lacuna I can’t blame on advancing age: I’ve also never played Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with any degree of assiduity (I think I poked at the BBC illustrated remake long enough to give up halfway into the babel fish puzzle). I suppose I should get around it one of these days, but its reputation as an unforgiving puzzle-gauntlet doesn’t do much to recommend it to my sensibilities. Sure, I remember liking Adams’ writing, but if I wanted to revisit it I’d much prefer to go back to the books than struggle through a style of IF that doesn’t do much for me.
All of this is to say that I am entirely the wrong audience for an impressively-robust fan-made sequel that appears to pick up immediately after the first game left off, and doesn’t provide anything by way of context or motivation. I wouldn’t say Milliways is explicitly nostalgia-bait; from my very vague understanding, it primarily visits situations and characters not covered in the first game (though I think some pieces may be part of the book plots that I’ve forgotten?), and while the troupe of familiar characters are present, they’re off getting hammered so are almost completely noninteractive. But it’s clearly the product of deep affection for the original – so much so that it’s written in the modern incarnation of the language the Infocom Imps used to make their games – and shorn of the pleasant sheen of remembrance, the game often just left me baffled.
The earliest example is maybe the most telling: the game doesn’t tell you who you are. I feel it’s safe to assume that you’re once again inhabiting British everyman Arthur Dent – the clearest clue is that you can find your dressing gown, which the game tells you you must have dropped in the previous game. But I don’t think ABOUT spells it out, there isn’t actually any intro text, and X ME just tells you “you see nothing special about you” (ouch). It also doesn’t tell you what you’re doing. You start out having just exited your spaceship and reached the surface of a planet called Magrathea (the name’s dimly familiar, no recall of the details); presumably you’re meant to explore, but there’s no narrative telling you that you’re there to look for anything in particular, and the cryptic stuff you find doesn’t retroactively explain why you might have come here in the first place, or what you think you’re doing. By the time I stopped my playthrough, about three hours in, I’d finally encountered the first indications of something like a plot, but it took a lot of unmotivated bumbling to get to that point.
Of course, not every game needs to be Photopia and unmotivated bumbling can make for solidly entertaining gameplay, so long as solid writing and enjoyable puzzles are pulling the player along. Milliways gets mixed marks from me on this front. There are solidly Adams-aping gags sprinkled through the text, like this bit where you look up the eponymous eatery in the Hitchhiker’s Guide:
"It goes on to explain, in extremely vague then suddenly extremely detailed (and obviously copyrighted) paragraphs how Milliways, better known as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is the best restaurant you can ever visit."
There are also some good jokes embedded in the parser, like this exchange prompted by examining a painting:
"You look at the painting, which could have been done by yours truly (and I’m not even AI yet). It is of an old mouse wearing a monocle. At the bottom of the painting is a plaque, which reads:
"Reginald Markenplatt
Founder of Magrathea Corps.
86 standard yrs.
“Oh, you like it?” says Percy.
"> no
“Well that’s not very nice.”
While for much of my time with the game, I was basically keying in the walkthrough (more on that later, of course), I had a reasonable time doing so based on the charm of the prose and the efficiently-drawn situations. It’s certainly not laugh-a-minute funny the way that I recall Adams being (…probably best not to revisit and find out whether that impression holds up), but this all makes for an entertaining way to pass several hours.
I found the gameplay often made things much less entertaining, unfortunately. There are some quite good puzzles here, like camouflaging a drink to knock out someone whose keycard you need to steal and figuring out how to deal with a shape-changing alien, but many of them rely on frustrating mechanics – there’s a strict inventory limit, many instant-death timers that end the game if you don’t solve things fast enough, the mechanics for travelling between different areas appears to be largely random, and at least one place that will lock you out of victory if you don’t somehow know which objects will be plot-critical and which are red herrings. Compounding the challenge, I came across some notable bugs in the game; twice, an event was supposed to trigger after waiting for a reasonable number of turns, but both times 150-200 turns of waiting didn’t do the trick (the walkthrough offered a workaround for one, and I had a save that allowed me to replay and eventually get past the other, at least). And there’s a recurring puzzle that appears to quite literally involve guessing a verb at random (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking of the different ways you can escape the Dark; trying to use the “missing” sense is nicely clued, but having learned that my sense of touch is going to be important, I’m was at a loss for how I was meant to go from TOUCH LUMP, learning only that it’s “warmish”, to PUSH LUMP other than just running through all the possible interactions). From inadequate clueing to disambiguation issues, it really feels like the game just needed a little more time in the oven.
With that said, as I hit what seems to be the halfway mark I was starting to get into more of a groove, though this could have been as much my increased readiness to consult the hints as anything else. And I did appreciate the moment when an NPC finally started explaining a bit of what was going on and why it was important. Sadly, almost immediately after that sequence a combination of those frustrating mechanics I mentioned above seem to have killed me – I needed to pick up an object, but I didn’t have the spare carrying capacity to do so, and as I futzed around with inventory a timer ended the game – and, facing the quickly-impending Comp deadline and realizing that a post-Comp, less buggy version, is likely to come out soon, I decided to bring my playthrough to an end.
I’ll repeat that Milliways doesn’t seem to me to be purely banking on nostalgia; there are novel ideas here, and the classic ethos seems to be a matter of intention rather than ignorance. And I can’t help but feel affection for something that’s so clearly the product of unbridled enthusiasm. But without much enthusiasm of my own for its antecedents, the game lives and dies by what it’s able to bring to the table on its own – which is currently a bit wonky and sometimes willfully obtuse. With that said, the experience was anything but forgettable; hopefully I’ll eventually get to finish Milliways, but in the meantime I definitely have a few fun new memories to rattle around in my increasingly-empty head.
An eminently logical room-escape, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The thing about escape-room inspired games is that you can’t think about them too hard, or they suffer narrative collapse. Like, okay, you’re stuck in a cell of some kind, sure – sometimes there’s a more-or-less-contrived reason the baddie would do that instead of just kill you, sometimes there isn’t, but that’s a sufficiently common genre situation that it’s not too hard to swallow. But instead of one normal lock that keeps you in (and that presumably would have had to be opened to put you there in the first place), there’s a system of like half a dozen different interlocking mechanisms that all need to align? And there just happen to be clues scattered around that make the puzzles solvable, but not too trivially so? There’s no way to rationalize this kind of setup, so instead of being a killjoy clearly you’re supposed to just turn off that part of your brain and enjoy the puzzles.
Major, major points to LUNIUM, then, that I think it basically works? It’s got all the trappings of the genre: you wake up with amnesia, chained to the wall in a room chock-a-block with paintings with mystical symbolism, scraps of paper with numbers and letters scrawled on them, turgidly-written pages of your diary that you can recover piecemeal, and a ticking-clock conceit that requires you to escape before the dawn so that you can stop the killer who trapped you from claiming their next victim. It even adds a layer of complexity by requiring you to deduce the identity of the baddie from a list of suspects to get the best ending, in addition to unlocking the final door so you can escape (I mentioned liking this structure in my Mayor McFreeze and Death on the Stormrider reviews, and I think it works well here too). And yet, when I got to the end and figured out what was going on – it actually all kind of made sense and held together! True, I haven’t gone back and rigorously tested the diegetic plausibility of every single bit of the design, but that’s an unfair standard to inflict on a piece of IF; at least as to the broad strokes, each of these bits of contrived escape-room logic hold up, and in fact things couldn’t have gone any other way!
The elegance here goes beyond the narrative, though. This is one attractive Twine game, with moody illustrations conveying a vibe as well as critical clues if you zoom in to enjoy the artwork, and the interface makes it simple to fiddle with the various safes, locks, and other paraphernalia on display. There are also well-integrated hints (plus straight-up solutions, if you need them), though many players might not need them given the well-judged clueing. There’s a nice range of puzzles here, and if they’re not especially thematic, they’re solidly designed and offer some good variety, so no particular approach overstays its welcome: there are of course a number of code-deciphering puzzles, but some are exercises in pure logic, others rely on deductive reasoning that lend a mystery-solving vibe to proceedings, and a few require a bit of lateral thinking, which lead to some satisfying aha moments while still being eminently fair. I’m not the best escape-room puzzler-solver in the world, but I only needed to go to the hints twice: once when the small screen of my phone meant I couldn’t make out an important clue (though I should say that unlike many graphically-rich Twine games, LUNIUM generally works a treat on mobile), and a second time when I’d mixed up two character’s names and therefore didn’t realize I’d already gotten the solution to the puzzle, I was just implementing the solution wrong.
As for the plot, I don’t want to say too much lest I spoil the fun reveal I alluded to above. As is typical for escape rooms, there isn’t much in ongoing narrative, but there is some backstory to discover, and this is parceled out judiciously in between bouts of puzzle-solving. As a Victorian detective, you’re on the trail of a serial killer, and while the outline is quite generic, there’s enough detail given about your previous investigations of the key suspects to give them at least a whiff of personality. There are also some specific themes that keep recurring, like an omnipresent moon motif to go along with the game’s title. As a result it’s enjoyable to read the various document-facsimiles provided, even when you’re largely skimming them looking for clues to the puzzles. This is helpful because it’s this non-puzzle-relevant information that provides the prompts needed to guess the identity of the killer, and while I got to the end with only a tentative guess at whodunnit, the ending prompts pushing me to make my accusation provided another subtle hint or two that let me feel very clever for ultimately fingering the right suspect.
LUNIUM isn’t perfect – I noticed one small bug, where I got some text mentioning the contents of my pockets after I freed myself from the wall despite not having had a chance to look in them yet. But that’s an incredibly minor issue, and I honestly am having trouble dredging up any additional constructive criticism (the writing could be a little more authentically Victorian, I guess? Really though it’s just fine for the purpose it serves). This is an assured game, playable and narratively satisfying in a way I didn’t think I was even allowed to hope an escape room game could be. So I guess that’s my other criticism: it may have spoiled me for other games in the subgenre by making it harder for me to look past it when they don’t make any sense!
Stupid universe, I hate it so much, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Before we talk about For Eternity, Again and Again, we need to talk about lore.
Wait, come back! Look, I often give lore a hard time – by which I mean the generous slatherings of worldbuilding minutiae that get troweled all over many a fantasy or sci-fi setting. You know the stuff: codex entries going into absurd detail about the botany of a made-up tree that’s just there to pad out the skybox, mythologies that are long on incident but thematically inert, absurdly over-worked discussions of political or economic background with no conceivable relevance to the plot… There are better and worse versions of it, but it’s largely waffle, interesting maybe to think up but deeply enervating for most players to have to wade through (I admit I don’t always fall within the most, since I have a soft-spot for the fantasy economics stuff).
Lore makes for a convenient punching bag, because it’s often the sign of an author who’s more interested in sharing their setting notes than telling a story. But I do fear that the pendulum can sometimes swing too far in the other direction, with authors holding back on important information about how their world works for fear of boring the player. The thing is, worldbuilding for its own sake is dull, but in genre fiction it’s absolutely the case that the player needs to have some sense of the rules governing the pieces of the setting that depart from the familiar real-world milieu. Like, the answer to any question of the form “why did X happen in this story?” is “because the author wanted it to happen.” But emotional engagement requires that dynamic to be disguised as much as possible, so that actions feel like they have understandable consequences and the plot doesn’t come off as bare authorial fiat. The context needed for this alchemy to happen isn’t lore, though it might look like it – it’s stakes.
For Eternity, sadly, is one of those games that throws the baby out with the bathwater. This short Twine game riffs on the Moorcockian Eternal Champion premise, with a protagonist who’s endlessly reincarnated in new situations to carry out quests, and who’s joined by their likewise eternally-recurring lover. But in this latest rebirth, there are worrying signs that this rather cozy cycle is coming to an end. Structurally, the game consists of one conversation with the lover establishing the set up, then a quick transition to a second dialogue as things, predictably, go pear-shaped. This could be a tight, efficient way to get to some drama as these star-crossed lovers are cruelly torn asunder. But it lacks much impact because it’s never clear why anything is happening. Per the opening, “the Universe” has something to do with this whole cycle, with mention of dark tendrils holding different timelines together. That’s an interesting – though not I think especially appealing – image, but it’s pretty hand-wavey. That’d be fine if the focus were on what happened within each cycle, but it’s not; as mentioned, the questy bit is entirely bottom-lined:
It is almost the same as every other hero you have lived as before. You fought monsters, almost died several times, and met companions. All the while your lover floats around you, whispering jokes and loving words in your ear. Well, they were supposed to be.
That stuff actually sounds interesting, but those couple sentences are all the player gets. Instead, you’re shunted into one of I think two distinct endgames; in one, the universe is decaying into an entropic end-state, taking you with it, while in the other, it somehow decides it doesn’t like you and brings an end to your reincarnation dealie. The first thing that makes this feel arbitrary is that your choice of dialogue as you groundlessly speculate on what’s going appears to determine which path you wind up on. But since neither scenario is motivated by facts or observations, just tossed-off brainstorming, it feels decidedly coincidental that your stab-in-the-dark just happens to be right. Beyond that, there’s no previously-established reason why the universe would be decaying, or how, mechanically, it can have opinions and act on them. These ideas aren’t terrible in of themselves, but they’re given no context or buildup: when you get to Act III, you can’t have the narrator run onto the stage, blurt out “oh sorry, there was a gun on the mantel this whole time, forgot to mention it”, then speed off just as a character aims and fires. Rather than situations leading to consequences, this is consequences dictating situations. If the universe decides it dislikes me, what’s stopping me from deciding I don’t like it and I’m not going to play it’s stupid game anymore? Who can say.
The overall weak prose means that these narrative problems loom all the larger. There are myriad typos, starting at the beginning of the game’s second passage, and there are often-bizarre images, like this description of your lover:
Soft skin, plush lips, tender touches, and a voice like a music box.
Or this bit of establishing dialogue, which achieves a sort of low-energy camp poetry:
A huff echoes through your mind. “It took a while to look for you. It will take a short time for me to materialize. The Universe is just playing tricks.”
“That you don’t appreicate.” You say, knowing how much they hate the Universe.
Stupid universe, I hate it so much!
On the plus side, sometimes this kind of thing teetered into hilarity, perhaps intentionally, like the bit where the hero, a mighty immortal warrior, gets punked by a lowly goblin because they’re hanging out flapping their gums while backlit by a cave entrance. But this comedy makes the low-stakes melodrama even more bathetic. I repeat, the concept for For Eternity’s narrative could work, but I needed more of a reason to care about these people and their world to make the story hit home.
I just got why "The Undiscovered Country" is a punny title, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
You can’t drop your dick on the first turn 0/10.
(Later).
I played for five more minutes and turns out you can drop your dick, so okay, we’ll do a real review.
Despite having never previously played a Stiffy Makane game other than the short, semi-high-brow Nemesis Macana, I still knew enough to make that joke because somehow, Stiffy has become a part of IF’s communal lore. From humble beginnings in a poorly-made late 90’s work of AIF, he was thrust to stardom via interactive MST3K mockery, much of which from my understanding centered on the fact that Stiffy’s stiffy was implemented as an ordinary inventory item. Thence his career got odd as different authors took the helm, running from sci-fi parody to filthy-minded philosophical rumination, with a few meta meditations on choice-based mechanics and the uglier side of player empowerment along the way (hopefully this potted summary is more or less correct; checking out the Stiffy oeuvre is on my list, but as I said I haven’t really gotten around to it).
Stiffy has a history, in other words, and for a maybe-new author (one never knows with pseudonyms) to make a Stiffy game out of the gate strikes me as audacious – almost as audacious as naming it after Citizen Kane, for all that that is a simply irresistible pun. And in fact this is an ambitious game. After a brief introduction in which you have a nightmare of being stuck in an eternally-resetting loop of the original Stiffy game, you wake up and learn the premise: you’ve just been defrosted from cryogenic suspension into a future where men are extinct (we lost a literalized battle of the sexes) and a new generation of hopefully enlightened scientists are hoping to study you, learn more about heterosexuality, and find out whether peaceful coexistence as a once-again gender-integrated society might be possible. That means you’ll need to wander around having a lot of random sex, which is accomplished through a deckbuilding minigame, all while solving the problems of the good citizens of Urville, from improving production in the local milk farm to teaching a college course on sexuality to helping the priestess recover a stolen relic.
This is of course only a slightly-better worked out version of guess-you-need-to-schtup-everybody AIF worldbuilding (“what if Y: The Last Man, but with a lot more boobs?”), with RPG-light gameplay to match. But the degree of care that’s been taken in implementing the game is impressively far from the notorious shoddiness of the first Stiffy. The minigame hits a just-right level of complexity, being relatively straightforward to understand but taking a few tries to get the nuances, while also striking a good balance between grind and progression. There’s a time-of-day system that gives the city an air of vibrancy without imposing too many annoying delays on the player. And the overall polish is very solid, with lots of synonyms, implemented scenery, and small little Easter eggs, like this one from the time-looping opening:
“Hello, Stiffy. I’ve been expecting you.”
She is naked.
You can imagine where it goes from here.
> imagine
The thing is, you don’t have to. You’ve been through this a million times.
The writing is also well judged; this is AIF, yes, but in normal gameplay it’s content to stay in gentle nudge-nudge wink-wink territory. It’s puerile, but I laughed when I visited Fountain Square and saw a note in the location description about the titular fountain, and laughed again upon examining it:
“Titular” is right. The centerpiece of the fountain is a statue of a beautiful naked nymph, water spurting from at least every orifice.
The first part is obvious, sure, but that “at least” is a good gag.
In the sex scenes the game does get quite explicit, but the randomly-generated text here is far more calculated to raise a laugh than the libido:
"As you slide your hammering hampton in and out of Aubrey with a smooth, steady rhythm, the sound of your loving echoes through the air like a whole volume of books being slammed shut in sequence."
"You burst like a violently vomiting giraffe. The two of you get dressed again."
"The feeling of your protruding pencil stuck deep in her gutted hedgehog is a sensation you won’t forget soon."
(The game’s ABOUT text mentions that ChatGPT was used in some portions of the writing, and I can’t help but wonder if some of these deranged combinations are the fruit of an LLM not knowing how inserting tab A into slot B actually works).
And beyond the tamer-than-it-looks writing, Citizen Makane is actually kind of… wholesome? All the other characters are quite earnest (and generally down to get down with Stiffy – there’s no iffy consent stuff here, thankfully), and you’re written as a laid-back, polite sort of horn-dog. All the game’s quests involve being helpful, and while the recovering-stolen-property one does foil the plans of the thief, she doesn’t wind up holding a grudge and everybody’s cool with everybody else by the end. The best ending even winds up arguing that non-stop sex only gets one so far, and it’s nice to just cuddle or see a movie sometimes too to build a strong relationship. Truly, this is the Stiffy Makane game you can take home to meet your mom.
Qua game, the only other thing I’d note about Citizen Makane is the caveat that the sex minigame does have one obviously-best strategy that’s a little too easy to hit upon and implement, and makes things fell quite mechanical by the end-point: all you need to do is find one rare dominant card and one rare submissive card (cards represent sex acts, and in an effort to keep you from just spamming the same one over and over again, you get a penalty for playing two of the same type in a row), upgrade them each, and then alternate them over and over until you win. Sure, the increasingly-mechanical nature of nonstop coitus is part of the game’s theme, but I think that could have been accomplished narratively while making the gameplay a little more engaging (for example by dealing out a subset of your equipped cards each round rather than having all of them always available).
Those themes are worth digging into, though. Sure, this is a silly sex comedy, but at this point the Stiffy Makane brand, oddly, is at least as much about making philosophical or sociological statements as it is about parodying AIF, so I think it’s worth taking at least a little seriously. We’re not meant to think too hard about the war that killed all the men, which is fair enough, but Citizen Makane does seem to want us to think about the all-female society it depicts. In many ways it’s a utopia – while one character does indicate that Urville’s self-presentation as a post-scarcity, egalitarian, and peaceful society is slightly untrue, the worst we see is that money does still exist in other parts of the world, and some people seem to think that having slightly kinkier sex than others is somehow subversive.
There is one element of the society that is problematized, though. Midway through a history lecture you can wander into and listen to, you get this bit of background:
“Over time, the new all-female society developed a myriad of alternative forms of intimacy. Emotional connections, intellectual stimulation, and artistic collaboration became increasingly significant aspects of women’s relationships with one another. This expansion of intimacy beyond the purely physical realm contributed to significant decline in female sexual activity over time.”
Yes, part of the reason they thawed you out is because Urville, without men, has reached a crisis point of too much cuddling and not enough boning.
Again, this is a standard heal-the-world-through-the-power-of-dick AIF trope, but the game really does dwell on this aspect of the world more than it needs to in order to establish that yeah, random people will want to screw you. And it’s of a piece with a decidedly reticent treatment of people with non-heterosexual orientations; lesbianism is only indirectly acknowledged in the various lectures and documents you find (and when it is, as in this excerpt, it’s implicitly positioned as lacking as compared to straight relationships), and while there are a couple of sapphic orgies you come across (er, not literally, thankfully), there’s only a single, very missable line towards the end to indicate that two characters are in a relationship with each other. For all intents and purposes, it feels like the only real sexuality is straight sexuality, so you’re the only game in town (there’s also no indication that there are any people not on the gender binary, which seems decidedly odd given the setup).
This is an oversight, but I think it’s intentional; to the extent the game has something to say, it’s saying it about male sexuality. The name of the holographic AI who piggybacks on your brain to vicariously experience sex (…I don’t think I’ve mentioned her yet, there’s a lot going on in this game) is called Shamhat, for example, which is the name of the temple prostitute who civilizes the wild man Enkidu through lovemaking in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Shamhat is also a critical part of that climactic scene where Stiffy renounces impersonal fucking in favor of engaging with the humanity of one’s sexual partners. And throughout the game, the player’s interactions with the town’s inhabitants do help bring out restraint in Stiffy; he learns to act professionally even when there are opportunities to push things in a sexy direction in the classes he teaches, for example, and there’s a semen-milking minigame that’s all about teetering at the edge of orgasm without losing control. Without spoiling things too much, the game’s ending also circles back to the beginning, and finishes with an explicit renunciation of the logic of early AIF. To the extent there’s a message, it’s that sex is an important and positive part of many relationships, but it’s just one part of fostering a human connection with one’s partner.
That’s a nice lesson that hardly anyone could object to (if they do – run) but at the same time, it sure doesn’t seem like the artistically-collaborating cuddle-happy lesbians of Urville need to learn it; this is all about Stiffy within the fiction, and out-of-game it sure feels directed at a presumably-male player audience. And I dunno, in space-year 2023, where there continue to be lots of issues around sex and intimacy in heterosexual relationships, but where there’s hopefully pretty broad understanding that similar issues arise in other kinds of relationships too – and, not to be a bummer, where setting up straight relationships as the norm can marginalize people with other orientations and gender identities – that approach does strike me as a little parochial. I’ll repeat, this is an ambitious, well-designed and implemented game that’s about as heartwarming as an AIF parody can get, but I can’t help but wish it pushed the envelope a little further and thought through what, if anything, Stiffy Makane has to say to people who aren’t straight men (I mean, his dick comes off! Someone’s gotta be able to do something with that!)
In-jokes and Easter eggs, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Interactive fiction, we’re told, can be conceptualized as a crossword at war with a narrative (this obviously isn’t true for much, if not most, contemporary IF, but please just go with it). All Hands Abandon Ship is what happens when they’re enmeshed in a three-front war with an all-encompassing pile of Easter eggs and pop-culture references, and actually neither of them are putting up much of a fight.
This sounds like I’m saying the game is bad. It isn’t bad! Mind, it’s not great, either: the escape-the-doomed-spaceship premise isn’t just old enough to drink, it’s got a Facebook account it uses to post photos of the grandkids and share awkward grumbling about foreigners; the implementation is pretty thin, with lots of generic descriptions and unimplemented synonyms; and there are no characters or much in the way of environmental storytelling to liven things up. But there are attractive feelies with a cool map of the ship, there’s a pretty solid amount of geography to explore, and I didn’t notice any bugs. So it’s got solid enough bones for a low-narrative sci-fi puzzlefest.
The trouble is, there aren’t really any puzzles. Okay, I guess there’s an overall time limit that counts, but since that just makes escape impossible (after 100 turns, you drift beyond a black hole’s event horizon so life pods can’t get out) and you can continue running around the ship exploring, all that means in practice is that you’ll run out of your time on your first go-through, figure out how to win, then type RESTART to do so. Outside of the countdown, though, all you need to do is (Spoiler - click to show)wriggle down a dumbwaiter, which doesn’t require any commands more exotic than ENTER DUMBWAITER and D, then get an electrical system working again by the simple expedient of (Spoiler - click to show)OPENING a panel and then TURNING ON a circuit breaker. I spoiler-blocked the details to be polite, but trust me, this is stuff that anyone with even minimal experience with parser games would do in their sleep. In fairness, there is one alternate path to victory that involves a tiny bit of problem solving, but this is marred by some guess the verb issues (Spoiler - click to show)(you need to put a yoga mat on some live wires to provide insulation, but various iterations of PUT MAT ON CABLES fail; only DROP MAT works) so I think best not to count it.
This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to do, though, since the game actually has a reasonable amount of things to mess around with and places to explore. Some of these include some reasonable jokes – when you’re told, of an unremarkable head, that “[y]ou wouldn’t be at all surprised to see its design aesthetic featured on the front cover of Brutalist Architecture Monthly” it’s inevitable but still entertaining that you’ll eventually come across an issue of just such a magazine. And there are lots of little optional interactions, like microwaving various inappropriate foodstuffs or getting a physical from the holographic doctor.
But mainly what you do is notice references. Past a certain point, my notes just became a litany of all the in-jokes I’d seen – there’s a strong 80s/90s pop-culture angle here, since I came across a Soundgarden CD, a Presidents of the United States lyric, a Scarface reference, and of course a couple from Aliens. But lest you think there’s a consistent retro pre-millennium revival across the futuristic society, there are also prominent mentions of the Doors and the Great Gatsby.
Look, I know I sound like a scold. And I can’t lie, it is a fun idea to have a holodoc that goes by T.J. Eckleburg. But, like, what am I, as a player, to do with that idea? The doctor doesn’t have any dialogue, I don’t think, beyond “open up and say ahh” (I thought he was an optician, not an ENT); he doesn’t have a fascination with the book, or provide a thematically similar role by witnessing and judging the player’s activities. Like all the other references, it’s an empty signifier, there to provide a frisson of recognition and that’s it. This sort of thing can be entertaining in moderation, as a break from more engaging business, but again, the game doesn’t have a story to speak of and lacks much in the way of challenge. To risk a culinary metaphor, the author phoned in the entrees and spent all their time on the side dishes instead – but actually, the side dishes are junk food, conveying an instant pop of flavor but containing no nutrition – so go figure, I didn’t leave especially satisfied.
Choose your own psychotic break, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
In my Dysfluent review, I mentioned that there’s a robust subgenre of IF that centers on the experience of living with a particular disability, and at first blush Escape your Psychosis – which is quite literally about trying to escape a repeated series of psychotic episodes – seems to fit squarely among their number. It’s late in the Comp, so forgive me for quoting from myself about the common threads that tend to show up in these games:
they’re most often short, choice-based, and allow the player to engage with the disability via a central game or interface mechanic. I’d also say that much of the time, their focus on the subjective experience of a particular challenge understandably gets prioritized over traditional IF elements like narrative, character development, or gameplay.
All of these get a solid check save the one about having a unique game or interface mechanic that’s thematically tied to the disability at issue – though it does stand out from the rest of the games in the Comp by being presented as a pdf file with internal hyperlinks, I couldn’t find any linkages between this approach and the experience of psychosis. For all these points of similarity, though, there’s something about Escape your Psychosis that felt slightly off to me compared to other games in the subgenre, and once I finished and read the post-script, I realized what it was: whereas all those other games were written by folks who actually live with the conditions they describe, this one was written from the outside. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that there’s some distinct distancing from the protagonist, and a slightly dodgy quality to some of the depictions; the game’s got an educational purpose, and I think it mostly fulfills that remit, but I’m unsure about how well it communicates the subjectivity of psychosis.
One aspect of this is the game’s cartoony presentation. Each page features attractive doodly art that helps make what could be a heavy topic go down more easily. But when it’s juxtaposed against events that are legitimately concerning, I experienced dissonance that sometimes undercut the impact of what the narrative was depicting. And it was uncomfortable to see the somewhat-dehumanized depiction of two homeless characters – they’re treated straightforwardly by the prose, but are drawn with stink-lines emanating from them and other exaggerated characteristics. On its own terms, I actually like the art; it’s cute and well done. But it seems calculated to make the game more approachable rather than to convey how a person experiencing a psychotic episode views the world.
Similarly, the plot takes some rather wacky turns. Structurally, the game is built as a series of interlocking circles, with different choices at the onset of an episode taking you down various semi-overlapping paths as you alarm your friends and neighbors, then possibly attract official attention and get into treatment, before inevitably having another episode recur. The various incidents seem to map with what little I know of psychosis – a few are built around megalomania, many around paranoia – but the focus is very much on what the protagonist is doing, with their emotional state described primarily to explain the behavior, and the consequences of the protagonist’s disturbance are sometimes played for laughs, like when you strip naked and splash around in a fountain in the park.
None of this is ill-intentioned, I don’t think, and the information the game conveys about how to support people undergoing psychotic episodes seems valuable to me (there are one or two things that struck me as odd, especially the way the game suggests that treatment, medication, and regular habits are helpful but can’t prevent backsliding, whereas if you just have three episodes you’ll eventually learn enough about how they go to get to a happy ending where the condition becomes manageable. But I think that’s primarily just a limitation of this very unsophisticated game format). So I guess it’s unfair to criticize Escape your Psychosis for not doing very much to show me what it’s like to live with an awful, highly-stigmatized mental illness. But I was hoping it would do just that, especially since people with the condition are so heavily marginalized; there’d be real value in helping more people better understand, only slightly, what the experience is like. And the success of many other works of IF in a similar vein indicate that such a thing would be possible; maybe someday somewhat will write that game, since I don’t think Escape your Psychosis is the last word on the subject.
Weapon of choice, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Without context, One King to Loot Them All would be a weird game. Not so much in its premise – it’s a limited-parser sword and sorcery pastiche set in a funhouse-dungeon that wouldn’t be out of place in an early-80s D&D module, with dracoliches, logic puzzles, and pit traps set cheek-by-jowl without excessive regard for rhyme or reason – but weird in its gameplay, especially the way it provides information and responds to player commands. For one thing, location descriptions are typically quite long and detailed and print out the player’s inventory at the bottom, while examining most objects just unedifyingly reprints the details already included in the location description. For another, it’s extremely solicitous of the player – maybe even sometimes veering to the pushy – in how it prompts you towards the next action. More so than most parser IF, the experience is of being on a ride (uncharitably, one might say a railroad) where doing the one right action gets you a mini-cutscene and moves you on to the next sequence, and anything else is quite unrewarding.
There’s nothing wrong with linear IF in my view, but this is an approach at odds with the traditional strengths of the parser game, where tootling around a map and examining every detail that catches your fancy is typically a big part of the draw. So coming to the game without any context, the player might be scratching their head about why the author took this particular tack. Fortunately, the ABOUT text reveals the secret origin of One King to Loot Them All, which explains quite a lot: the game was originally intended for this year’s Single Choice Jam, where games had to have only one moment where the player could do more than one thing, but missed the deadline.
Viewed in that light, many of its odder features make sense: the descriptions works the way they do, for example, because originally, looking or examining random scenery or even checking inventory would have been disallowed, so all that information needed to be conveyed automatically when entering a new area. Similarly, the limited-parser approach would cut down on the frustration of most commands not doing anything, and since the player could similarly easily get fed up without being able to uncover clues by investigating a scene, these likewise need to be extremely obvious.
One King to Loot Them All, in the form we’ve gotten it, has lifted the most extreme constraints of the jam – commands other than the intended ones are allowed and sometimes marginally useful – but the gimmick is still imprinted deep in the game’s DNA. It has some fun with the concept, too, with a consistent meta joke being the way the protagonist (an off-brand Conan the Barbarian) never met a complex problem he couldn’t solve with immediate violence – when all you’ve got is a hammer… (I kid, but really, the solution to the hoary old “one guard always lies, the other always tells the truth” problem made me snicker).
On the down side, I found the game sort of… lulled me? I’ve played easy games before, of course, but even in an easy parser game there’s typically at least some decision-making incumbent on the player, and again, there’s always the temptation of noodling around (I am an inveterate noodler). Knowing that actually, I should just do the thing I was supposed to do and then move on to the next thing meant that I was acting in as direct a fashion as the protagonist, but also made me feel like my job was just to figure out what the author wanted me to do and then do it – this got me into a flow state of a sort, but it was a sort of inattentive flow state, if that makes sense (it doesn’t).
Of course, you typically don’t just say something “lulled me”, you say it “lulled me into a false sense of security.” And that’s my excuse for why when One King to Loot Them All got to the point where I could make my one choice, I was incredibly slow on the uptake. I’m spoiler-blocking this bit, since it’s the cleverest part of the game:
(Spoiler - click to show)so knowing that there was only one point in the game where more than one action would be productive, I naively assumed it would either come at the beginning or at the end. When the opening half hour was completely linear, I relaxed and, as mentioned in the paragraph above, just played on autopilot, figuring I could turn my brain off until I got to the final scene of the straightforward kill-Foozle story. Even when I went through an odd timey-wimey bit, I still contented myself with doing the most obvious thing at every juncture – and was surprised when it turned out that wasn’t working.
It took me astonishingly long to realize the game’s twist – the choice isn’t so much a choice as a puzzle, and it’s embedded in the middle of the game, not the end. It’s an impressive bit of misdirection that left me clapping my hands, but it also left me a bit frustrated. There’s a fair bit of drudgery involved in experimenting, since I wound up replaying the whole game to that point to confirm that what I’d tried didn’t work, and the logic of the puzzle still doesn’t fully make sense to me: you meet a mysterious sage who blesses your axe, then tells you you need to rewind time to change something that happened before the game starts. So after a bunch of UNDOs you can actually slingshot your way beyond the opening scene and try to change history – but crucially, the axe remains blessed even though you’ve turned back the clock to hours before you met the sage. It’s fair enough, I suppose, since who knows how a diegetic UNDO should work, but in my fugue state, I wasn’t quick enough to figure out the trick, and I didn’t notice any clues (like a telltale new sparkle about the axe, say) that would have helped me out, and I had to use the walkthrough.
To briefly summarize all that blurry text: there’s a really cool twist, but I was too dull to appreciate it, which is mostly my fault though I think some elements of the design could have mitigated the risk of the player being a big old dum-dum like me. I also think the game could have cut itself freer of its single-choice origins while retaining its impact. In particular, making the descriptions more conventional would have made the gameplay a bit more engaging by rewarding player investigation, and kept certain sequences, like the multi-part puzzle to get across the river, from feeling overly constrained.
While I’m picking nits, I also felt like the writing could have been a little zestier. It’s technically solid and hits the genre tropes in a satisfying fashion, but I like my sword-and-sorcery prose to be more over the top, with extravagant superlatives and overly-baroque locutions, as in Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest; One King to Loot Them All is more workmanlike. Similarly, sometimes the barbarian-y synonyms chosen for the limited-parser actions were strained; OPEN being remapped to LOOT made good sense when I was pillaging a chest, but less so when I had to LOOT a wineskin already in my possession to drink it. But these really are nits, and my complaint above might just reflect that I was a bit tired when I played the game and not sufficiently with it to appreciate its uniqueness and smarts.
Abstract angst-em-up, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My first year of college, I had a roommate who was super into Dar Williams. He was so into her, in fact, that he would fall asleep every night listening to his playlist of her songs on repeat. This being 1998, though, we were well before the era of Spotify and infinite music availability; that playlist was about fifteen songs he’d managed to snag on Napster. Oh, and our room was pretty small – our beds were about four feet from each other – so when I said he would listen to that playlist every night, I meant we would listen to that playlist every night. And while when I first heard Williams’ stuff, I found her a pleasant enough singer-songwriter who’s recognizably of a piece with a bunch of similar mid-90s folks that I really enjoy, being subjected to the same hourlong loop of music, running over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, did uh not leave that positive first impression intact, through no fault of her own. You might justifiably ask “wait, why didn’t you just ask your roommate to play something else or turn down the volume or wear headphones or something?”, but I was a 17 year old boy, dealing with another 17 year old boy – I did not have nearly the emotional intelligence needed to initiate and negotiate that dialogue, so now something I once kind of liked leaves me twitching with shellshock.
…for once, I am starting a review off with a rambling, overly-specific personal anecdote, and it is precisely on point. The Gift of What You Notice More takes its title from a Dar Williams song, and takes as its subject a failed relationship whose fractures stem in large part from its protagonist’s reluctance to speak up and have direct conversations about their needs and feelings. Rather than an interactive drama, though, this parser-like Twine game explores its emotional terrain through allegory and flashback. After an opening that sees the protagonist ready to leave their apartment, and husband, for good, you visit a strange café where you encounter a trio of poets and an ambiguous angel who arm you with the tools you need to delve into your memories, which you do by entering three photos of pivotal moments in your conjugal lives: the night when your husband proposed, the day you moved away from your hometown to support his career, and your last birthday, when the façade of happiness you showed to him and your friends became too much to bear. By solving inventory-based puzzles in each vignette, you achieve some tentative revelation about one of three key questions that are gnawing at you (where did it all start to go wrong, what do I really need, etc.), and then you can choose which one is most compelling to you when you revisit the poets and unlock the next phase of the game.
I actually really like this structure; it combines things that parser-like IF is really good at (environmental storytelling, light puzzle-solving) with a strong thematic framework that links the gameplay to the overall narrative, while giving the player space to provide specific input about how they’re interpreting the story as they uncover it. And divorce has supported a million novels and movies, hard to go wrong there. The puzzles are solid too, all quite intuitive so they never slow you down, with an inventory system providing the tiniest bit of friction so lawnmowering isn’t that appealing.
And yet, as if it were a Dar Williams song, I found I didn’t quite get on with the game (I repeat, my current antipathy for her music is entirely irrational and undeserved!), I think for two primary reasons. The first is that the allegory is often way too literal for my tastes. This is maybe a Scylla and Charybdis thing, since I also tend to dislike games where the allegory gets too personal and abstruse to be resonant to anyone else, but I still think there’s a generous margin between that sort of thing and the puzzles we get here, where you need to confront the elephant in the room and recover what’s been swept under the rug. As one-off groaners these’d be bad enough, but they’re often the prompts for multi-step puzzles that make you really dwell on how clangingly obvious the imagery is, like the bit where you see that you’re wearing armor in the birthday-party scene, but when you try to take the armor off so you can be vulnerable, a jester comes jumping out from behind the couch to replace your protection. I admit, I’m not sure I can immediately come up with an instantly-readable metaphor for using humor as a defense mechanism that’s any less ridiculous, but perhaps that’s an indication that this whole approach is flawed.
I think I get why the allegory is as on-the-nose as it is, though, which goes to the other reason I didn’t click with the game. There’s very little here that says anything specific about the relationship, or about the character of the husband, or for that matter about the character of the protagonist. We get a very few hints – there’s a short text-message exchange where your husband’s trying to cheer you up ahead of the birthday party, and we see he’s fond of emojis – but when you go to the flashbacks, everything is static; all the characters, your past self included, are frozen, and you can’t engage or interact with any of them. While there would have been ways to keep this element of the design while still getting more concrete details into the picture – the narration could have incorporated more specific bits of dialogue, for example, or spent more time reflecting on what drew the narrator to her husband in the first place – for the most part the authors seemed content to leave both characters largely as ciphers.
As a result, picking apart the reasons why the relationship failed felt too abstract to truly land for me. Like, many of the potential problems listed – saying yes to a commitment when you weren’t 100% sure, moving someplace far away from your home for a partner’s career opportunity – could either be deal-breakers or complete non-issues depending on the specific people and specific circumstances involved. And the others are largely just truisms – yes, addressing challenges as they come up rather than burying them and building up resentment is important! – that, shorn of any particulars, lack the heft to elicit more than a shrug.
The frustrating thing is, in the ending sequence the game is more concrete and specific, and it’s by far the most affecting part of the piece. Calling a friend to come pick you up, washing the dishes one last time before you leave the apartment forever, deciding what to pack in the one suitcase you’re taking with you: the writing here conveys real emotion, and I think would resonate with anyone who’s ever been in a similar situation. After all, as great songwriters know, all the platitudes about love and overwrought metaphors in the world can’t stand up to a single well-chosen detail (again, Dar Williams could certainly be counted among these great songwriters for all I know!)
Wordy and muddled, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The major part of Meritocracy depicts a philosophy class where you’re the only student, framing this as an opportunity for free-ranging discussion that sparks creativity and learning – but let me tell you, I’ve lived something close to this experience and the reality is very different. One trimester when I was in college, I took a Philosophy of Mind class on a lark, only to discover that at my small, science-focused school, not many other folks shared that lark – there was only one other student enrolled in the course, and he was pretty flaky in his attendance. Making matters worse, the professor had the most droning voice I’ve ever heard, the class was held immediately after lunch, and the rest of my course load that trimester included some very hard classes so I was regularly pulling two or three all-nighters a week to keep up with the problem sets. As a result, I’ve retained only three things from the class: 1) I can use the word “qualia” correctly a solid 30% of the time; 2) I’ve got an anecdote I can dine out on about the time I walked into the classroom only to see a dozen Secret Service agents staring unblinkingly at me (then-President Clinton was giving a speech and they’d commandeered the room as a command post); and 3) I determined that philosophy is 95% defining reasonably-intuitive terms in excruciating detail, 4% saying completely obvious things with those terms, and 1% thought-provoking new ideas.
When I was 20, I meant this as a burn – take that, Western canon! – but with a bit more perspective, I think there’s actually a lot to respect about this approach. For one thing, having gone to law school helped me recognize that it’s often incredibly hard to come up with air-tight definitions for things that seem to be simple common sense, so while the labor of pinning language down to the mat might not be especially glamorous, it’s useful work, allowing seemingly-obvious propositions to be tested and setting the needed conditions for clear, productive disagreement and discussion. This is where Meritocracy founders: while it takes on a debate that’s recently generated a reasonable amount of energy, I found the writing throughout to be muddled and confusing, such that I’m not sure I ever got a clear sense of what the various ideas, arguments, and counterarguments here on offer actually add up to.
Structurally, the game is relatively simple – using a choice-based interface, you navigate your first day going back to school, visiting first a mechanical engineering lecture (turns out you were in the wrong classroom), then go to the aforementioned solo philosophy class where you discuss the ad hominem fallacy, before you wander into an open-air debate between students about the titular philosophy; the game then wraps up with a final visit back to the philosophy prof, where you can reflect back your take on what you heard and then hear some counterarguments. You have a few incidental choices in each vignette, but save for the one at the end where you give meritocracy a yea or nay, I didn’t get the sense that there was significant branching – which is OK, this is a game that’s trying to walk the player through an argument.
Again, though, the problem is that this argument doesn’t quite land. The general prose style is a major culprit in the lack of clarity I experienced; it’s quite wordy, and often repeats the same idea multiple times after only slight reformulation. This is rather stultifying to read, as in a mid-game sequence where you walk through the campus that feels like it loops back on itself over and over without saying anything of note. Forgive me for quoting at length:
"You are observing everything, the buildings, the gardens, the fountains. Observing them with curiosity and admiration. Observing them with reverence and gratitude. Observing them with wonder and awe. You are walking around the campus, thinking about everything. Thinking about what you are doing here. Thinking about why you are here. Thinking about how you came here. Thinking about what you will do here.
"You are here, because you want to be here. Because you chose to be here. Because you have a purpose. A purpose that is noble and lofty, that is worthy of your efforts and sacrifices, that is dear to your heart and soul. A purpose that is to study. To study not only for yourself, but for others. To study not only for today, but for tomorrow. To study not only for knowledge, but for wisdom. To study not only for pleasure, but for duty.
"But you are also here, because you have to be here. Because you were compelled to be here. Because you have a destiny. A destiny that is mysterious and inevitable, that is beyond your control and understanding, that is shaped by forces greater than yourself. A destiny that is to learn. To learn not only from books and teachers, but from life and experience. To learn not only from success and happiness, but from failure and sorrow. To learn not only from joy and love, but from pain and loss.
"You are here, on this campus, where you will study and learn, where you will grow and change, where you will meet and part, where you will love and suffer. You are here, on this campus, where you will face challenges and opportunities, where you will make choices and consequences, where you will find friends and enemies, where you will discover yourself and others."
When it comes to the philosophical aspects of the story, the stylistic issues become even more challenging. Here’s an excerpt from the exchange about meritocracy that kicks off the second half of the game:
"[First character:] You are wrong about the effects of meritocracy, my friend. The effects are not positive and beneficial, but negative and harmful. The effects are not empowering and liberating, but oppressive and alienating. The effects are not inclusive and democratic, but exclusive and elitist.
"[Second character]: You are wrong about the alternatives to meritocracy, my friend. The alternatives are not better and fairer, but worse and unjust. The alternatives are not more humane and compassionate, but more cruel and indifferent. The alternatives are not more progressive and innovative, but more regressive and stagnant."
This isn’t a debate, it’s a staged reading of the thesaurus.
What’s worse, when the writing isn’t being repetitive, it’s often being confusing. Like, the major choice about how you feel about meritocracy prompts you for your feelings on “this idea”, but there’s no immediate antecedent in the rest of the sentence or paragraph to clue you in on the fact that “this idea” here means the arguments against meritocracy that you just heard, rather than meritocracy itself, which was how I initially interpreted the clause.
The muddle extends beyond the writing into the ideas themselves, too. For one thing, the extended treatment of the ad hominem fallacy – itself somewhat confused, in that it invokes the execution of Marie Antoinette as an example of the fallacy – doesn’t have anything to do with the conversation about meritocracy as far as I could tell; the debaters are barely characterized, so they don’t go after each other on that basis. And then in the final sequence, at least in the branch I chose the professor went off on a bizarre tangent about the trolley problem, arguing that it can be “seen as a metaphor for the competition for limited resources in society” to justify its relevance. But this is pretty unconvincing – the trolley problem is obviously about ethics, not distributional justice (also, can IF please just stop it with the trolley problem? Thanks).
Perhaps as a result of the fact that comparatively little of the game is spent on the idea that’s centered in the title, I likewise found the treatment of meritocracy underbaked. There are lots of arguments and ideas thrown around, but there isn’t any kind of analytic framework provided to make sense of what positions different characters might advance, or which you might want to agree or disagree with. Like, in the farrago of verbiage, nowhere is it acknowledged that arguing that meritocracy has been tried and found wanting – because it devalues the innate dignity of human beings, for example – should take you to a completely different place than arguing that it has been found difficult and not tried – by pointing out that rich people get unfair advantages that have nothing to do with merit; all these critiques are simply lumped together. Similarly, I found the game persistently conflated meritocracy as an ideology and meritocracy as a system of concrete policies and practices. There’s just a lot of words being thrown around, and then the game ends.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the game needed to situate the conversation about meritocracy in the broader context of political philosophy, or give a potted summary of Rawls or anything like that, in order to be successful (though honestly, some of this kind of thing might not have been a bad idea…) But I do think it needed a lot more discipline, in both its conception and its writing, to convey any idea beyond “meritocracy: people sure have feelings about it, seems complicated!” I suppose that requiring the player to sharpen up their linguistic tools so they can make more refined assessments could well turn out deadly dull, but that, alas, is often the price of philosophy.
A buggy, over-ambitious homebrew, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I had my issues with Hawkstone, but full points for honesty. The game’s introductory text straight-up tells you that “you will travel to far off imaginary lands with your avatar and attempt to command yourself with basic English sentences; All the while while upping your stats by fighting gratuitous monsters and looting pretend valuables so you can stuggle to the end and earn the magical McGuffin for defeating the game.” The unpretentious humility of that disclaimer made me root for the game even as the typos and expectation-management sent out warning signs – not that it takes an especially sensitive antenna to pick up on such signals when that opening blurb also says “I’m sorry the game isn’t as good or polished as I wanted, but I was down to the wire and needed another week to implement everything I intened. I worked really hard and hope it’s good enough for you.”
Points too for content. I feel like often games written in homebrewed systems are often on the shorter side, since so much of the author’s time has to go into developing the engine, but this adventure-RPG hybrid has complex mechanics (there’s a full character-development system that gradually increases a bevy of stats as you adventure, as well as separate adventure-game and RPG-game inventories) and, from a quick glance at the long walkthrough file, a giant map bursting with puzzles.
There’s obviously been a “but” hanging over those first two paragraphs, so I’m just going to rip off the band-aid: but the game is still a bit of a mess, with technical issues up the wazoo and a mystifying lack of clarity about what’s going on. Without any real plot to speak of to pull me through the rough patches – you’re just an adventurer who washes up on a strange shore and starts solving puzzles and picking stuff up for the heck of it – I bounced off this one fairly quickly.
By far the biggest usability challenge I ran into was the game’s issues displaying text. The interface keeps the location description constantly available at the top of the window while commands and responses fill in below. This isn’t my favorite approach, since it can involve a lot of looking up and down the screen, but it’s made far worse here by the game’s tendency to resize its window, making them narrow or wider in response to what I typed, and sometimes triggering scroll bars that I had to click through in order to get back to the action prompt (there are some suggestions in the readme that helped make this issue somewhat less pronounced, but it was never fully resolved). Making matters worse, sometimes new output would overwrite previously displayed text, leading to stuff like this:
—What now?–>look gate
—What now?–> ocked gate closely.ck up the plant pot above gate.
You rattle the gate hoping it’s only slightly locked. Turns out it’s very locked.
Even when the display is working properly, I still found it hard to understand what was happening around my character and what, if anything, I’d done to trigger these particular results. The RPG statistics are the worst example of this; while I like the idea that you increase your attributes by doing things (shades of Quest for Glory!) it didn’t seem like there was any link between the actions I was taking and which stats were going up, and the specifics of what different attributes did didn’t appear to be explained anywhere. Sure, strength is probably self-explanatory, but making sense of stuff like this is much harder:
—What now?–>look fishing line Search[TM] without perception and a shovel.
You examine the fishing line closely.
It goes down into the ravine. You can use it to check if the tinker has caught any supper yet.
Moved smelly kipper to location.
You check what’s on the line.
experience+
You have discovered ONLINE SHOPPING
The parser is often fairly obtuse; despite a solid five minutes of struggle, I couldn’t figure out how to light a candle with some matches, which is what eventually tipped me over into putting down the game. Occasionally I have enough patience to just key in a walkthrough to see what a game has to offer, but as mentioned, this is a really big game, and I think I’d just get more frustrated if I tried to power through it. That’s a shame given the amount of work the author clearly put into Hawkstone, but hopefully my response exemplifies some good advice for folks entering the Comp: if you think you need another week to make the game you want to submit, you probably should wait for next year (or another festival) because you likely need way more than that week. If you’re homebrewing or creating an intentionally retro experience, think hard about why you’re doing that and what the upside will be for the player’s experience. And if you need to choose between expanding your game and polishing what you’ve got – which eventually you will have to do – polish is almost always the right answer. Entering any game into the Comp is an achievement, and I hope to see more games from the author after taking onboard some lessons learned!
(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
So this game leaves me in something of a quandary (and I don’t just mean that I tried and failed to do this as a theme review rewriting the Who’s Pinball Wizard): I have long been of the opinion that IF can, and should, take on politically and personally important themes, and I also really enjoy comedy puzzlefests too. You could say that’s inconsistent, and sure, I maybe lean a little more on the games with Something To Say when constructing my list of all-time favorite pieces of IF, but the variation between these kinds of ways a text game can be is actually one of the things I love about the scene: in this very Comp, I played To Sea in a Sieve back to back with Gestures Towards Divinity, which ironically was a perfect pairing.
Usually these contrasts are a matter of different games taking dramatically different approaches, though. Thus the flummoxing: Paintball Wizard is a parserlike choice-based puzzle game where your frat-bro protagonist uses a robust magic system to win the eponymous faux-battle. It’s also a narrative intensely focused on the experience of marginalization and abuse, steering into bleak real-world events so directly that they barely count as allegories. It’s a bold mélange whose audacity I admire, but while there are very strong elements in each of the game’s two halves, for me at least I felt too much whiplash to ever get past the incongruity and feel like the game worked as a unified whole.
I guess I’ll start with the nuts and bolts of the system that supports the paintball game. This is a parser-like choice game with metroidvania elements; you navigate around the outdoor arena searching out your opponents in order to zap them into submission, via an interface that allows you to move around, examine particular objects, take a context-specific action, talk to any NPCs present, access your inventory (though this is typically for informational purposes only, there aren’t any USE X ON Y puzzles), or cast a spell. The magic system is syllable-based; working out exactly how it behaves is a fun meta-puzzle that you can start to solve before you’re “meant” to, which is a nice touch, so I won’t spoil it except to say that it reminded me of one of my favorite tabletop RPG systems (for the curious: (Spoiler - click to show)Ars Magica). It’s quite complex – and there are some puzzles that I thought were slightly underclued or wonkily implemented, like the paella-pan necromancy or outdrawing your pledge-master, but you’re eased into things because you start out knowing only one spell, and unlock more as you go.
Thus, while the name led me to expect that the gameplay might be open and dynamic, in actuality it’s fairly linear; the other players don’t move around, just staying in their respective hideout areas waiting for you to get the tools you need to find them and zap them. Those other players – your frat brothers – are also the way that you gain access to new magic, because after you beat them, you can enter their minds to get a flashback that reveals some backstory while teaching you a new spell or two.
This is what brings us to the other side of the equation: in this world, wizards are known to the world at large but are subject to widespread bullying, hatred, and distrust. As a result, these flashbacks are uniformly bleak, sometimes operatically so:
"St Mungo’s is a detention center reserved for children who cannot be adopted, who cannot be fostered, and who will not be accepted at the work farms for normal children. The mission of this grim institution is to hunt down and reform unwanted children who are known or suspected wizards. The other orphans have left for the day, most of them leased laborers at a local glue factory or working in even more horrible places. Some of them actually like the glue factory because they glean extra calories licking spilled horse gelatin off the floor."
You read that and think, “OK, couldn’t get any grimmer”, but turns out the orphanage was an old radium watch-dial factory, and they haven’t bothered to clean up the residue. Other vignettes deal with the immigration system separating children from their parents, redlining and ghetto-formation, and even a lynching. Gameplay-wise, these sequences all use a restricted set of the same mechanics that animate the paintball bits, but instead of creeping around in dark alleys trying to get the drop on your buddy, you’re trying to escape extrajudicial detention or recover a beloved pet before your home is seized. They work well enough on their own terms, with some unique gameplay twists that are actually more interesting than the paintball game. And there’s a narrative link to the frame story, as learning more about his brothers makes the protagonist reciprocate by opening up to them about his own history of trauma, helping reinforce the game’s overall theme of found family.
It all makes sense in the abstract, and I can see the coherent vision that the author is going for. Still, making all these different emotional registers work, and invoking these very real horrors without trivializing them, is a tall order, and I’m not sure the writing is always up to the challenge. There are some odd details or minor errors throughout; nothing too major, but enough to elicit a “huh?”, like the note that you might know more about ants if you’d taken an introduction to ornithology class (should that have been entomology?), or a character bringing their younger sibling into the room for their high-stakes college interview. The game’s focus on bringing dignity to subaltern characters also stands in tension with some mildly culturally-insensitive banter the wizards engage in when they go out for dim sum – so much for solidarity!
The worldbuilding is a little strange too, especially the repeated reference to terms like quidditch or Muggles; it wasn’t clear to me whether this was the result of the wizard community ironically reappropriating these words, or if the setting is supposed to be a more literal alternate take on Harry Potter. And sometimes the needs of gameplay seemed to trump narrative logic, as in the flashback sequence where the mother of one of your frat brothers starts trying to teach him magic in the middle of a crowded immigrant processing center, while trying to pretend they’re not wizards. Paintball Wizard is only rarely clumsy, but I never found it showed the deftness of touch you’d probably need in a game where one minute you’re contemplating the fact that wizards with cancer are denied life-saving medical care because of their identities, and the next you’re trying to figure out what the XYZZY spell does.
So the game’s high-wire act was wobbly throughout, but the moment where I feel like it definitively stopped being able to keep its components from flying apart came close to the end – it’s a sufficiently big twist that it’s worth spoiler-blurring:
(Spoiler - click to show)Turns out the protagonist has a deep dark secret he’s keeping from his brothers, which is that he’s not really a wizard; he manages it all with stage magic and sleight of hand. This is nonsensical on its face – for example, one of the things that led to him being on the outs with his family was a vanishing trick he pulled in the middle of his sister’s interview with a Princeton admissions officer. He says this was “accomplished with a half silvered mirror and a trap door in the floor behind the admin officer’s desk”, but what, he snuck into the office to saw out the trap door the night before the interview? And of course he spends the whole game actually doing magic; the game tries to get around this by having the protagonist protest that “I’ve stolen all my real spell casting knowledge from inside your minds using SPLACK. I’m still a fraud.” But SPLACK is a spell! More tellingly, this makes a mess of the game’s themes; while the wizard community mostly seems to operate as a racial metaphor, it could have also worked if wizarding were a behavior, making it more of a queer metaphor. But saying that you can opt into being a wizard, but doing so is a shameful thing you keep secret means that the protagonist is basically positioned as Rachel Dolezal. And again, the player has to think this stuff through while trying to out-paintball your bros and complete various side-tasks like learning the chapter pledge song and trying to work an off-brand TARDIS.
If Paintball Wizard doesn’t work in its current form, though, it still deserves flowers for making the attempt. It’s cleanly programmed, and has strong puzzle design and a myriad of engaging gameplay systems; it’s also unafraid to take on some really important issues and boasts moments of appealing humanism and openness. Sure, in retrospect it’s got an ill-conceived premise that probably would never have fully worked regardless of whether the specific complaints I levy above had been addressed, but it’s a memorable fiasco that’s a standout game in the Comp, which as far as I’m concerned is its own kind of success.
Well-textured sea adventure, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There’ve been a goodly number of short Texture games this Comp and last, and call me jaded but by now I’ve got a pretty solid sense of what to expect when I see one coming up next: a personal narrative with a reasonable albeit clunky metaphor, confusing use of the drag-and-drop interface, interestingly flawed writing, and minimal branching. Leave it for the last such game in my queue to leave me spluttering and unsure of what I’ve just seen: All Hands is, I swear to y’all, a limited-parser game in Texture form. I didn’t know you could do such a thing, but now that I have, I think the system might be almost perfect for it?
In retrospect, this maybe should have been obvious to me. The drag-verbs-onto-nouns interface is quite similar to how classic graphic adventures were set up, but since most games tend to change the verbs on offer with each passage, the resemblance is typically obscured. Here, the player gets a consistent trio that map cleanly to traditional IF actions – reflect/examine, take, and approach/go – and the author’s also set things up so that after an introductory section, you’re able to wander around different areas of a ship and even revisit places you’ve been before. And while I wasn’t even aware Texture could do much in the way of state-tracking, there are obstacles that are clearly puzzles, and which respond in different ways if you’ve acquired the right tool or piece of information. I wouldn’t say any of them are challenging – this is very much an exploration-focused game – but this is a sturdy formula to drive player engagement, and it’s well-realized here.
Uncharacteristically, I’m three paragraphs in and I haven’t said anything about the game’s plot or themes; it’s time to remedy that, but take the omission as an indication of just how much the structure bowled me over. So you’re a young person living in a fantasy version of the real world who’s always been fascinated by the sea, and as part of your backstory, your sister killed by sea monsters, so this fascination has a dark, obsessive element to it too. One night while wandering the coast, you come across an unearthly vessel that plays host to a strange, ocean-going carnival. The ringmistress invites you aboard and gives you a chance to explore before the show begins, and as you poke around belowdecks, you can uncover the ship’s secrets, some of which are uncannily personal…
The premise is over the top, in other words, and the writing sometimes doesn’t sell it as effectively as it could – as you climb the ladder onto the ship, for example, you’re told that there’s a bunch of dust on each rung, indicating that it’s been a long time since there’ve been any visitors coming aboard. It’s presumably meant to be a spooky touch, but it’s rendered ridiculous by the fact that you’re scaling the ladder in the middle of a storm, a detail that this very passage takes pains to remind you of. But there are some authentically eerie notes too, like the observation that the ship’s larder seems to stock only root vegetables, which is bizarre and oddly specific. Overall, despite its moments of weakness, I liked the prose; unfortunately, you’ll need to trust me on that because I played the game on mobile which meant that whenever I tried to copy and paste any excerpts into my notes, it crashed (Texture gonna Texture).
The game’s climax is a nice capstone too, snapping into focus some thematic elements whose presence earlier in the narrative seemed slightly off. It seems like there were several different endings the player can choose between, based on how deeply they plumbed the ship’s mysteries, which was a pleasant way to make the parserlike gameplay relevant to the story, though once again one of Texture’s foibles reduced my enjoyment; I wanted to go back and try out some of the other options, but without an undo or save/load option, that would have meant replaying the whole game from the beginning.
I guess I can’t help banging on about Texture even when reviewing a game I enjoyed; it’s a frustrating piece of technology. But for a change, I can actually see how it supports what a game is trying to accomplish, and the tweaks I’d want to see to make the system work better are just tweaks, not fundamental reimaginings. That’s an exciting place to leave my journey with Texture for the year, so nice work, All Hands; your weirdo creepy circus and this weirdo creepy engine are a surprisingly good fit.
Memory boxes, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve found myself increasingly interested in non-fictional IF over the past few years, and not just because of a love for lexical paradoxes; the gotcha of pointing out that “interactive fiction” is underbroad as well as overbroad has long since grown stale, after all. No, what’s unique about these games is that they’re the logical end point of quite visible, longstanding trends – I’m thinking here of the decades-long shift towards more personal IF, which was of course turbo-charged by the rise of choice-based games but does have roots that predate it, as well as the significant increase in the prominence and respectability of the memoir in the broader culture – but by this sensible extrapolation, they wind up putting revelatory pressure on the “interactive” part of IF.
If a game is telling a true story, after all inviting a player to interact with it, allowing interactivity to directly change the narrative would be self-undermining (…though it occurs to me that could be a viable strategy; we’re still waiting for the IF equivalent of Adaption). But there are other approaches available; You Couldn’t Have Done That, an almost-memoir with an autistic protagonist from a couple years ago, offers multiple choices at key decision points but redirects the narrative onto the critical path if the player strays from what’s possible for the player, providing a concrete but frustrating look at unrealized alternatives. And my own game Sting from a couple of years ago lets the player act in the gaps in my memories, where I don’t fully recall the order that things happened or the exact details of conversations I had. One could argue these are bits of sleight of hand, and I suppose that’s true. But at the same time, it’s also the case that regular fictional IF very rarely allows for anything like true player agency. The illusions provided by nonfictional IF may put these tactics on more obvious display, but to my mind that’s a virtue, not a vice – part of what I enjoy about games in this subgenre is that they require authors to think more creatively about interaction, and help me better understand what’s going on when I engage with an author’s mind via a piece of IF.
I’m writing this overlong, probably over-theorized, introduction because I think it would be easy to write a review of My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition that focuses just on the content, because it is searing and intense: the game chronicles the author’s year in several treatment facilities as they worked to survive a severe mental health crisis that, among other impacts, dramatically reduced their cognitive function. That crisis by itself would be more than enough to carry the game’s weight, but the author also experienced – and writes about – parental abuse, transphobia and misgendering, suicidal thoughts, and the bureaucratic nightmares of America’s heath care, insurance, and housing systems. But the narrative isn’t misery tourism by any stretch of the imagination, as the author throughout highlights the things that helped them hold on and survive, the art they continued to create despite the incredible limitations they faced, and the authentic moments of connection and joy they found along the way.
The writing tells this story in direct and affecting prose that’s confident in its power; it knows that a specific, well-chosen detail evokes far more emotion than purplishly exaggerated language. I have a lot of these in my notes, but here are a few examples from the early parts of the game:
"[The pseudo-dementia] even affected how I could eat food: because of the high executive dysfunction that was now in my brain, I could only eat food that was simple in texture, simple to prepare, and easy to eat. I ate a lot of cups of Kraft Mac and cheese at that time.
"When I was in the ER, they couldn’t give me access to a pen due to my suicidal ideations—they were scared I would hurt myself. But I was desperate for a writing utensil, and they were able to give me a little crayon pack: one that you would give to children, with the colors yellow, red, blue, and green. I was very grateful to receive it."
There are also some wry bits that made me laugh – a quartet of paintings depicting the author, their twin, and their parents is titled “Leo Tolstoy Was Right About Families.”
So yes, the narrative here deals with very weighty subject matter, and is very well-told. But I was just as impressed by the structure the game uses for the story. The “exhibition” referred to in the title is entirely literal, as you’re positioned as a visitor to a museum that houses a collection of concrete artifacts from the author’s odyssey. A lovely dual-window view displays text in the right window, and images in the left – the interface elegantly recreates the quintessential museum-going experience of moving your eyes back and forth between an object and its informational label. The game goes even further by embodying the player; rather than flicking through a catalogue of items, you’re given a map of each wing of the show, and use directional navigation controls to decide where you want to go. This means the player can decide to go back to look at a previously-visited object if a later one recontextualizes it, or choose when they feel ready to move on to the next collection. And critically, there’s a small bit of friction at every step – walking around is quick but not instantaneous, and the sound of footsteps imposes a short but noticeable delay when moving from wing to wing.
The effect of all these choices is to create distance, but it’s not the kind of distance that keeps the player at arm’s length; rather, it’s a reflective distance that invites the player to engage with what they’re seeing and reading, and then think about it. There are certainly moments when the exhibition is overwhelming, like long screeds of journal entries written in the throes of crisis, or when a piece of art that depicts a source of chaos in the author’s life fills the screen. But these are balanced by moments of peace and isolation, which I found made the moments of intensity even more impactful since they had time to land. It also helps draw attention to some of the subtler aspects of the game’s design, like the clearly-intentional way that a positive COVID test kit is tucked away in its own isolated niche.
The way the presentation focuses on a selected set of the impedimenta of the author’s journey is also a smart way of acknowledging that the full experience can never be communicated to someone who hasn’t gone through something like this: this approach provides concrete, tangible examples and then leaves space for the player’s mind to fill in the gaps. Sure, some examples had more personal resonance for me than others – the author’s practice of writing themself a letter on an important anniversary date is one I’ve used myself, for example, whereas I’m pretty sure I would dislike all the anime series that get mentioned – but that’s not the point, because the game’s methods of fostering engagement don’t rest on anything so flimsy as relatability.
I find it can often be challenging to write good criticism of works like this that engage – often uncomfortably – with intense, personal trauma. Beyond the obvious tendency to softpedal critiques (“your suffering was insufficiently entertaining” is not a sentence anyone ever wants to write), I think it’s also often the case that reviewers overemphasize the bravery of the author for sharing their story, without acknowledging that bravery all by itself doesn’t make for a good work of art. So while I do think the author is brave and have intense empathy for what they’ve gone through, I also wanted to spell out very clearly that I was very impressed too by the craft that went into this game, both as to writing and as to design; I’ve written down a 9 for it in my rating spreadsheet, which is as high as anything else I’ve rated this year, and I might adjust it upwards when I do my final scoring. This one’s not to be missed.
Post-mortem exam, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Would it be braggy to say that I don’t think I’ve ever had the showing-up-for-a-test-and-you-haven’t-studied dream? When I was in school, I had the Lisa-Simpsonish trait common to many people-pleasing nerds of kind of enjoying tests for the opportunities they offered for external validation, and I guess as a result tests, even when they were hard, never generated the same intense apprehension that makes them the stuff of literal nightmares for many (to this day I do still have anxiety dreams about the time in college that I failed to drop a PE class that I couldn’t attend since it clashed with my course schedule – make of that what you will). So it was something of a revelation to me when I entered the endgame of Last Vestiges and suddenly realized I was wildly unprepared for what this locked-room mystery required of me if I wanted to solve it.
After Mayor McFreeze and Death on the Stormrider, this is the third mystery in the comp that decouples the puzzles required to trigger the end of the game and the steps needed to actually solve the mystery – I continue to like this structure, though its recurrence is making me wonder if this is a well-settled design approach that I’m only belatedly catching on to? – but here, instead of Mayor McFreeze’s medium-dry-goods puzzles and Death on the Stormrider’s NPC-manipulation challenges, progress involves solving a series of escape-room style puzzles. It took me a minute to get into the swing of this, since it felt somewhat at odds with fairly-grounded vibe established by the game’s narration, and I felt another moment of dissonance once I reached the end of the chain, since it turned out that the reward for solving all the puzzles was finding the victim’s hidden will – protip from someone who knows a bit of inheritance law, you generally want to make it super easy for the authorities to find your will, not conceal it behind a set of arbitrary barriers. But judged on their own terms the puzzles are solid enough, offering a bit of variety without too much challenge (though one picross puzzle was a bit annoying solve since it displayed oddly on my interpreter – fortunately it was pretty easy to intuit the answer).
The implementation has some nice touches, with the various characters having a robust set of conversational topics, and an integrated tutorial helps get new players up to speed. And while I wouldn’t formally count it as a limited-parser game, it’s aggressive about pruning out unused commands to avoid potentially confusing or unexpected interactions. There are some odd choices (the game’s single location doesn’t appear to have a description, just a list of its contents) and an awkward moment here or there (when I wanted to check whether there was anything behind the clothes in the wardrobe, MOVE CLOTHES and TAKE CLOTHES didn’t work, with the less-intuitive X RACK being the right answer), but I found the game generally quite solid.
So everything was going well, until I found the will and the game told me I could trigger the endgame at any time, and I realized I only had a very vague idea of what had happened and no obvious outstanding leads still to investigate. There were a few small clues I’d picked up along the way by asking my superior officer about various bits of forensic analysis that had already been done, and noting a few suggestive details about the objects I’d turned up, but certainly nothing conclusive. And then when I figured I’d just see if I could bluff my way through the game’s concluding quiz – which works similarly to Antony and Cleopatra, where you need to select your theory via a multiple-choice menu – I was reasonably confident about my guess of suspects, maybe fifty-fifty on my guess about the general cause of death… and then was confronted with this set of choices for the final question on what specifically killed the victim:
1 - drug overdose
2 - self-inflicted cut injury
3 - adverse side effect of propranolol
4 - adverse side effect of antidepressants
5 - drug interaction
6 - gunshot wound
7 - stroke
8 - heart attack
9 - ruptured esophageal varices
10 - stomach ulcers
11 - intractable vomiting
12 - diverticular bleeding
13 – tuberculosis
Thus the anxiety – as far as I can tell, there’s nothing you can do in the game to get a primer on what diverticular bleeding is, or an NPC you can consult to fill you in on the specific side effects or interactions of drugs. So for me the game ended in a decidedly un-Sherlockian fit of panicked trial-and-error guessing; after four or five tries I eventually got there by process of elimination, but rarely have I felt a less sleuthy sleuth.
The game’s postscript explains what I was missing: apparently the author wrote it as a proof of concept for potentially using IF as a teaching tool for people studying forensics or medical examination. Used as part of a course of study where players would have outside resources to consult and a sense of what questions to ask, this final challenge could actually work really well. This focus on pedagogy also makes sense of some aspects of the game that feel underbaked (I haven’t mentioned the plot or characters that much in this review since there isn’t much to talk about on either head), as well as the rationale for the easy escape-room style puzzles, which I suspect are meant to be there as a pleasant bit of sugar to make the lesson more fun.
But with all that said – yes, this is exactly showing up at the test without having studied, and without even knowing you should have studied and there was going to be this kind of a test at all. So as a Comp entry offered up without more warning or context for the player, I can’t judge Last Vestiges as that successful; nonetheless, I’m intrigued by this approach, and could easily see myself enjoying a future game along the same lines that offers lay people an opportunity to access the information they’d need to be successful, and maybe learn something along the way (I told you I’m a nerd, turns out I want IF Comp to be more like school).
In-artful throwback, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I keep turning the title over in my head. “Artful Deceit” works on a literal level, sure, for a mystery centering on the death of an art magnate that at first appears to be an accident but ultimately proves to be murder most foul. But zoom out a step and it’s still got some apt resonance, since the game’s a retro artifact, packaged as a Commodore 64 disk image that requires an emulator to access. The two-tone blue startup screen, the noticeable delay when typing commands, the feelies that offload long text-dumps to pdfs to reduce the game’s memory footprint – all of these are integral parts of the experience that wouldn’t be replicable if the game were just another .blorb file. But where once these elements were the inevitable consequences of then-cutting-edge hardware, now they’re limitations affirmatively chosen to evoke a specific response: an artful deceit, you might say.
I don’t mean that to be a slam on retro gaming as a category, or this game in particular; heck, you could safely argue that “artful deceit” is redundant inasmuch as all art involves an artist creating an illusion that may make gestures towards realism but is nothing of the sort. But if the medium is the message, I always wonder why an author chooses to introduce the level of friction that comes with a game that’s an intentional throwback to a 40-year-old experience of playing a game: is it just nostalgia, or is it something more that explains why the player’s expected to wait over a minute for the game to load, or put up with typing LOOK INTERIOR GARAGE DOOR instead of X INTERIOR?
Artful Deceit isn’t an exercise in throwback annoyance for its own sake, I should admit. There are some notable player-friendly touches, like a means/motive/opportunity system that signposts to the player when they’ve gathered enough evidence to solve (and prove) an aspect of the case, and unlike many self-consciously old-school puzzlers, there are robust hints and a complete walkthrough. Meanwhile, if the lack of implemented scenery grates on someone used to more modern IF, and the NPCs aren’t especially interactive, that’s both authentic to the 80s experience and also helps keep the player focused on the core gameplay needed to solve the puzzles and reach the ending.
At the same time, elements of the design did start to grate, over and above the lack of the conveniences offered by a modern parser. Progress requires knowing that at some point you’ll need to leave the scene of the crime to drive to the victim’s workplace, despite the absence of any specific clueing that this is possible, for example; and a bug meant that I wasn’t able to complete the game despite having all the necessary evidence in hand (Spoiler - click to show)(I happened to search the corner of the sculpture that had the magenta button first, and when I pushed it, the hidden compartment popped open even though I hadn’t realized there were other buttons – much less that the correct combination was hidden in several paintings in an overly-literal interpretation of art having a message – which meant the game didn’t recognize that I’d fully solved this puzzle chain). Modern games have issues like this, too, but what feels like a forgivable oversight there can sometimes come off as deliberate obtuseness in a retro context, through no fault of the author.
The details of the plot also sometimes made me happy to have left the 80s far back in the past. The resolution of the mystery hinges on some fairly retrograde thriller tropes that struck me as insufficiently motivated, and left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth – it’s the kind of plot that could be palatable if viewed through a revisionist lens, but in my opinion isn’t much fun anymore when played straight.
All these pros and cons might just add up to the same thing, which is that Artful Deceit is successful at its aesthetic endeavor of recreating a long-gone moment in time. When writing these reviews, I generally try to be sympathetic to authorial aims and judge a game according to how well it meets its brief, so I suppose I should end things there. But – cards on the table – I was one in 1982, and didn’t really get into IF until I was almost 20, so in this instance the nostalgia of imagined time travel is lost on me, and I’m left going back to the question with which I opened the review: what’s the point of all this effort, really? If Artful Deceit is content to be a view back to the early 80s, but as far as I could tell it doesn’t use the perspective granted by age to say anything distinctive about the era, either in terms of the culture depicted, the experience created by then-current gameplay aesthetics, or the ludonarrative implications of contemporary hardware. Let me repeat: that’s not necessarily a failing, but in this case I was left wanting something more.
Cowboy lawnmower, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Is there a name for the genre of games that are structured around collecting all the endings? Insomnia, in this year’s Spring Thing, comes to mind (still need to review that one) but I feel like I’ve played a bunch of others; they tend to be choice-based, with strong Time-Cave-style branching leading to a variety of equally-ridiculous endings, each playthrough is typically pretty short, they have absurdist premises and/or senses of humor, and the only gameplay challenge is typically how much lawnmowering the player wants to do before calling it a day? If not, there really should be, if only because the most interesting thing about All the Troubles Come My Way is the way that it is but also isn’t an Insomnia-like (look, we’ll workshop the name later, let me just get through this review).
On the “way it is” side, we can firmly tick the absurdist premise and/or sense of humor box: you play Johnny Montana, a cowboy from Texas who’s somehow (if you think this “somehow” is ever explained, or at all important, you are in the wrong genre) been transported to modern-day New York City, but instead of the game being about that strange, fish-out-of-water experience, it picks up an indeterminate amount of time later where your biggest challenge is finding your misplaced hat after a bender. The writing also wrests some humor from the clash between your old-fashioned personality and your new, incongruous surroundings:
“No, ma’am, that just wouldn’t be just,” you say. You try to finish the sentence dramatically by looking wistfully in the distance, but being in a bathroom, the distance is limited. You end up just squinting somewhat suspiciously at a toothbrush resting on the sink.
Playthroughs are also pretty short; I counted three major ways to win the game (by getting a, not necessarily your, hat), and not counting the prologue section, which is skippable on replays, the shortest probably takes about two minutes and the longest maybe ten. And as the blurb says, the game is clearly meant to be replayable, with engagement coming from how deeply you explore the possibility space.
Turning to the “way it isn’t” side of the ledger, though, the possibility space isn’t strictly branching; instead, it’s hub-and-spoke-y, with three major locations you can eventually move between, each of which offers at least a few sub-areas you can investigate or different ways you can engage. Relatedly, there’s also a mechanical system that impacts your ability to move between different branches: you have a quartet of RPG-style stats, with evocative yet vague names like Southern Charm and Rodeo, that sometimes increase when you make decisions and which gate certain actions. It’s an interesting idea but I found it an awkward fit: for one thing the player generally doesn’t have enough information to consciously decide how to build their character (at one point, questioning whether dirt is still brown in the future gets you a point of Cowboy Justice) or weigh whether a less-optimal-sounding choice that checks a strong stat is better than a more-appealing one that relies on a dump stat. Making things harder, unless you take notes you can’t even see how your build has evolved in a particular playthrough – I think this might be a limitation of the default implementation of Ink, since I couldn’t help thinking that a Twine sidebar or ChoiceScript stats page would have come in handy.
The system also seems overengineered for such a short game, like it needed more space to feel worthwhile. This is especially the case due to the game’s last major departure from the Insomnia-like template: all the endings are emphatically not created equal, since in only one of them do you find your own hat. And inverting my narrative intuition, that ending is the easiest, quickest one to get – in fact, I got it first time out, just as I was starting to feel like I understood the game’s vibe and systems. I replayed a few times and saw that it’s got a fair bit more to offer, and there are some fun vignettes in this portion of the game – I liked the verbal duel with the Indiana Jones impersonator and chatting with the costume shop clerk about 12 Angry Men – but since those other endings seemed manifestly worse (you mostly wind up with various hats that don’t belong to you and might only be cowboy-hat-adjacent rather than the genuine article), all this felt too much pointless padding; after all, I’d already gotten the “real” ending.
I should note that I’m no exponent of slavish adherence to a formula, and in theory, the attempt to expand out the Insomnia-like approach to include more robust gameplay systems is one I could see working. And the writing does a good job of being funny without becoming too annoyingly zany. But some of the specific choices made by All the Troubles Come My Way undercut the benefits of the new tack it’s taken; either make the RPG system lighter and more of a joke, or more important and legible to the player, and put the good ending at the far side of the content rather than right at the start, and I think you’d be on to something.
Zorklang unbound, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Joey Acrimonious has written some of the best recent IF that includes graphically-depicted sex – the blurb here refers to its genre as “erotica” rather than “AIF”, and I think that’s an appropriate distinction as to the author’s previous work too. Turbo Chest Hair Massacre is a farce that culminates in the world’s most debauched description of a robot changing her cooling fan, while Digit is a sweet romance that takes its time getting to the moment when its well-drawn characters take their flirtation to the next level. Both mostly progressed as standard parser games with maybe a few lewd touches before climaxing with set-piece sex scenes; Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest breaks the mold, though, because this one starts out with a bang. Specifically, the eponymous heroine is enjoying a bout of vigorous, lovingly-described lovemaking with her barbarian lover – the sex is so good that when he casually mentions that his birthday is coming up, she rejects his suggestion for a casual hang in favor of knocking over a small country and giving it to him as a gift. This sweet gesture is somewhat complicated when her main contact turns up dead and a mysterious assassin starts chasing her down. Hijinks – and lots of interstitial sexy bits – ensue.
The game wrings a lot of comedy out of playing its absurd premise so straight it ends up way over the top, which is to say, it’s very very camp. The prose is written in an exaggerated sword-and-sorcery style that left me chortling. Even the tiny bit of narration when you open your journal (which handily tracks your progress and your to-do list) is an opportunity for a gag:
Zorklang checked her scriven notes, for all great despoilers keep a journal of their deeds and intentions.
Oh, did I not mention that the bat lady is named “Zorklang the Despoiler”? And that she has a catchphrase she intones whenever she meets anyone, warning them that she is “bound by the laws of neither gods nor men”? She also has wings and a cool cape, making her a sexy distaff Batman, plus she has mind control powers she can invoke via the eponymous DESPOIL command? She has more authentically chiropteran powers too, like echolocatory hearing and an impressive sense of smell (OK, it’s less impressive than the whole DESPOILing thing, but still pretty good).
This suite of abilities is used to largely good effect in the game’s puzzles. There are a few that involve inventory items, fiddling with mechanical contraptions, or solving a navigation challenge, but for the most part the player winds up searching out hidden ways, recruiting weak-minded confederates, and leaning into her unique abilities. There are some implementation hiccups that meant some puzzles weren’t as smooth as they could have been – one stymied for a while because I hadn’t noticed that GIVE OBJECT defaulted to making an offering to my pet cat, rather than the NPC who needed an object, making me thing I’d tried the solution and it hadn’t worked. And there’s a late-game sequence that’s only kicked off once you notice that one detail in a single previously-visited locale in the largeish map has changed; the player’s given a light hint pointing them in the right direction, in fairness, but the detail in question is just tacked onto the end of the location’s description without being broken out into a new line or anything, so I found it very easy to overlook.
As long as I’m segueing into complaints – don’t worry, I’ll get back to praise soon enough – I also wasn’t entirely sold on the lewd bits that came (yes, yes, I know) in the middle parts of the game. The opening sex scene is necessary to motivate the game’s plot, and is silly and sweet in equal measure, while the closing one (of course there’s a closing one) is likewise a nice capstone reinforcing what a great time the sexy main couple have with each other; they’re the kind of sex scenes you could take home to meet your parents. But the sex in the rest of the game doesn’t feel nearly as organic; often you’ll just be running around doing your regular parser-game stuff and then run across people making out, or the game will pause and drop not-at-all-subtle hints that you should relax, nudge nudge wink wink. It largely avoids the creepiness of the typical exploitation-film approach – you do use your mind control powers to kick off a small orgy at one point, but it’s pretty clear the characters were just looking for an excuse – but these sequences do feel somewhat shoe-horned in, and without of the emotional connection that animates the lovemaking between Zorklang and her boy toy, the florid language risks just seeming silly:
Gasps and sighs of fleshly pleasure answered the salacious squelch and gurgle of her hotly slathered loins. Arching her back and rocking her hips in an ancient, primal rhythm, she painted the bedsheets with sweat and slick passion.
And speaking of potentially unnecessary elements, there’s a treasure-collection mechanic that gives you a score post-endgame based on how much loot you’ve been able to plunder along the way. It’s right there in the title, I suppose, and the system is entirely optional, but its inclusion still struck me as bizarre – anyone who can try to steal a whole country as a token of affection probably doesn’t need to steal minor valuables along the way.
There, now my critical duties are fulfilled and I can close by giving some more examples of how Bat Lady Plunder Quest’s genre self-awareness made me laugh. There’s an absolutely savage skewering here of the kind of DnD player who won’t shut up about their tortured and completely plot-irrelevant backstory, as well as a blurb laying out the in-game lore for the setting’s dog-furry race that gets increasingly shamefaced as it goes:
The two were of dog-person lineage, a race of beast-people: half-human, and half-dog. Well, more like 90% human and 10% dog. Well, more like humans, but just with cute dog ears and silly dog tails.
The ways other characters respond to your introductory catchphrase also never fail to charm:
“I am Severskidim the Crime Lord,” replied the rather bemused man lounging on a plush chaise longue. “My brothels, gambling-dens, tobacconists, and other illicit enterprises payeth no tax, and I do pass the savings on to me.
A few dodgy puzzles and some unnecessary sex didn’t do much to reduce my enjoyment of the game, in other words. I do wish there’d been a full walkthrough uploaded, rather than the helpful but incomplete hints we’ve got now, since there is more friction than I’d like, but Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest is funny and charming, and lives up to its predecessors as a strangely wholesome and wholly entertaining romp.
Ill communication, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
2023's had a lot of boatiness, but it was also murderier than usual, with a solid number of mysteries represented in the entries. Death on the Stormrider crosses the streams, being a murder-mystery on a boat – on a steampunk airship, no less, which makes the protagonist’s isolation and vulnerability even more intense. As a foreigner trying to work their way home on a ship where only one crewmember spoke their language, things were already parlous enough, but when that one crewmember is found murdered – with your brother fingered as the only suspect and thrown in the brig – you’ve got to do everything you can to find the true culprit. Of course, you can’t interview suspects or read any incriminating documents, and you start out locked out in your cabin, though it seems like that wasn’t intentional. At least the rest of the crew is busy getting ready for landing, and will mostly ignore you.
The setup here is compelling in narrative terms, but is also cannily contrived to avoid the typical weaknesses of parser-IF mysteries. The language barrier means there’s no fussing about with a clearly-inadequate conversation system, and also explains why everyone else mostly leaves you to your own devices as you wander around and taking everything that isn’t nailed down: they’re busy, and it’s too much trouble to tell you to stop unless you seem to be messing with something important. In fact, though their vibes are wildly different, I was reminded of Mayor McFreeze’s analogous approach – in both games, you’re mostly solving navigation puzzles to thoroughly explore the map, with the investigation part of the gameplay largely reducing to simply examining the stuff you find along the way.
A difference is that in place of the medium-dry-goods puzzles of Mayor McFreeze, in Death on the Stormrider almost all the puzzles involves engaging with the various NPCs – who are in fact quite active, wandering about the ship bent on their own tasks. And just because you can’t talk to them doesn’t mean you can’t interact with them, or they with you. As expected, if you poke your head into some especially important areas, they’ll quickly eject you, and there are also many locked doors that can only be opened by a crewmember who has reason to pass through them. As a result, the primary gameplay involves observing the NPCs’ movement patterns, scoping out hiding places, and creating distractions to get them to go where you want them to. It’s nonstandard, but the optional tutorial that takes the player through the first major puzzle does an admirable job of demonstrating the game’s systems; likewise, the included map makes navigation significantly easier.
The prose isn’t called upon to do anything fancy – it has enough to do to situate the player, alert them to exits, highlight the activity of crewmembers in the immediate or nearby locations, while noting any interactable objects. Still, I found it nonetheless communicated a strong sense of place in just a few words, like this early segment that has you forced to the perimeter of the ship:
"The maintenance passage (forward) ends, sharply, terrifyingly, with a narrow metal platform—and then nothing but the great expanse of the air behind you, the ground so far below that you can barely make it out. A hatch to port leads back to the safety of your cabin."
Less positively, I did feel like the writing sometimes wasn’t up to the task of communicating the key clues needed to solve the puzzles. For example, I was able to figure out that I needed to get through a currently-inaccessible exit, but the description of the situation seemed to point somewhere entirely different from the actual solution (Spoiler - click to show)(trying to move the shelf in the miscellany does say you’re unlikely to succeed with your bare hands, but the rest of the response seems to indicate there’s too much stuff, rather than just one object that’s too heavy to shift unaided). And in one of the final puzzles, the game seemed to go out of its way to provide an anti-clue: (Spoiler - click to show) once you get the wrench, most location descriptions print out an additional line drawing attention to the presence of pipes you can sabotage, but that line is notably omitted in the captain’s cabin so I assumed there weren’t any present. Still, the final puzzle is intuitive and satisfying, requiring the player to synthesize several different strands of information to determine the actual reasons for the death of the murdered crewman.
That synthesis also points to my other criticism, though, which is that when it comes to the mystery side of things, the game leaves an awful lot up to the player. For one thing, while the stakes – your brother’s life and freedom – are effectively conveyed in the opening, they’re left in the background for most of the game’s running time. The player character doesn’t have much subjectivity, and while I kept expecting that there’d be a sequence where I’d come across my brother, or at least the locked door to the brig where he’s held, nothing like that ever happens (oddly, while the brig is noted on the map, its presence isn’t ever mentioned in game, making it seem like it’s sealed off in a parallel dimension or something). And then the ending doesn’t give the player very much: I found what I think is the optimal resolution, and have a pretty solidly worked-out theory of the various intersecting crimes and deceptions that played out aboard the Stormrider, which is reasonably satisfying from a gameplay perspective, but the final text felt strangely perfunctory, declining to dwell on the protagonist’s joyful reunion with their brother or even to explicate the mystery’s solution. The ending of a whodunnit doesn’t need to provide emotional catharsis or spell out the answer to the puzzlebox, I suppose, but it’d be nice if it did something.
All of which is to say that Death on the Stormrider leans more on the crossword than narrative side of the parser-IF dilemma. But it’s generally a good crossword that cleverly matches its novel gameplay to its premise; if a post-Comp release cleans up some of the clueing issues, and a player goes into it wanting to uncover all the game’s secrets for their own sake rather than to earn a story-based payoff, I think there’s a whole lot of fun to be had here.
Start shouting, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve read a fair bit of Russian literature, and I tend to like political fiction. The Whisperers, then, is up my alley: it’s an interactive play that is set, and notionally performed, in the USSR in 1938, chronicling the lives of five inhabitants of a communal apartment in Moscow as they make an escalating series of poor decisions that eventually end in catastrophe (but I repeat myself: I already said it’s about the USSR in 1938, when the Great Purge reached its climax).
Before delving into the plot of the play, it’s worth sticking with the framing for a beat. The conceit is that the player is attending a performance of a novel entertainment – at scene breaks, one of the characters in the play will break the fourth wall and ask for the audience to indicate their choice of several narrative options via cheering; whichever one seems to have the greatest enthusiasm behind it will be chosen.
As a way to diegetically explain the mechanics of choice-based fiction, this is smartly done, and I actually wished the game had done more to explore it. At the beginning, you’re given the choice of how literally to take these mechanics; the author recommends a mode where the player’s decisions are given priority, making the game play like any other work of choice-based IF, but there’s also a mode where you just play one audience-member among many, with your voice not necessarily being determinative. I took a risk and picked the latter option, but I was disappointed that there wasn’t more explication of how the audience was responding to the play, and whether my hooting and cheering was making a difference. This is especially the case because some decisions involve resistance to Stalinist orthodoxy; the actor framing the choices swears that they’ve been given special dispensation not to report anyone who evidences signs of deviation, but that struck me as a hollow promise. The audience is already lightly characterized – the player’s given a choice of whether to sit among the proletariat, the party bosses, or those in need of reeducation – so making more explicit the implied social context in which the play is being performed could have enriched proceedings further, I think.
Another interesting aspect of the presentation is the use of stage directions. These are generally a bit more heavy-handed than I’d expect to see in a real theatrical script, but given that a player doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the actors’ interpretations, I think that’s a good choice. But among their idiosyncrasies is the approach to indicating the volume at which dialogue is delivered; the game notes that unless otherwise indicated, all lines are spoken at a whisper. On the one hand, this is both narratively and thematically apt: with five characters crammed into three thin-walled rooms, keeping one’s voice down is both polite and, given the police-state context, prudent. And keeping even extremes of emotion and distress sotto vocce suggests the ways that life in authoritarian states is lived; concealment is the default, rather than an exception. But I found the actual implementation challenging, because of course as I read the game’s text I’d often forget that injunction and assume that un-annotated dialogue was spoken full-volume; again, if the scenes were actually being performed, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the experience of reading the text on the page was different.
The play itself is quite well-written. There’s a certain quality of slightly-awkward effusion that I expect when reading something by a Russian author, and the dialogue captures something of that tone. Here’s a line from one of the two leads, Agnessa, a Trotskeyite idealist, on her feelings about one of her new neighbors:
"No, no it’s nice to see you. I do like you Dariya Yuriivna. I’m not embarrassed that you know it."
Or here’s a bit from the other lead, Nikolai, waxing rhapsodic about his romantic connection with Agnessa:
"Now. I have things now, I love my work, I love my books, I love … things, life! But sometimes, no, all the time; sometime, sometime, a long time ago, when I was a child, something changed. Dreams became safer than life. Yes, there were reasons to wake up. But there were reasons to stay asleep too. As well. I was scared, I guess. And I became bad. But now I wake up, straight up, childishly up, because I know that I might get to be with her."
Sometimes the characters come across as callow, or talk past each other, but that all generally rings true. I do think Whisperers does sometimes presuppose more familiarity with the politics of pre-WWII Russia than the abbreviated pre-game glossary can provide – there’s an extended riff that depends on knowing the context of what “socialism in one country” means, for example – but I think it still works well enough even if you don’t get the nuances. And the themes it engages with are strong: the central couple’s relationship dynamics drive the plot’s main clash, the tension between the political idealism to change an unjust world and the desire to nonetheless live a private, mostly-happy life within it. That conflict is echoed in a lower key by the marriage of the two older characters, as Dariya’s continued attachment to Orthodoxy is part of longstanding worry on the part of her husband Georgy. And then the fifth character, Agnessa’s brother, Sergei, serves primarily to up the stakes, since he’s an NKVD officer.
(Er, I just realized I’m doing the thing I dinged the game for at the beginning of the last paragraph: the NKVD was one incarnation of the Soviet secret police, part of the alphabet-soup sandwich between the Cheka and the KBG).
(Yes, that’s a terrible mixed metaphor).
It’s all solid and resonant – especially now, given the war of aggression the USSR’s succession state is currently waging – but I have to confess that I didn’t find The Whisperers quite as compelling as I expected. All the themes make sense, they’re played in a smart, historically-grounded way, the writing is strong, and the use of interactivity is well-considered. But I suspect the character work isn’t quite up to the same standard. The core due of Agnessa and Nikolai especially sometimes veer into caricature – she’s a true believer who at one point directly says that she doesn’t see a difference between fiction and real life, and he’s so feckless he seems to make decisions purely on impulse. I liked them, but they felt more like types than people. Sergei, meanwhile, is likewise mostly just a plot device, and while Georgy and Dariya have a world-weary charm, they get by far the least spotlight time (I also came across what I think is a bug that undercut the impact of their strand of the story; in my playthrough, I didn’t have Georgy burn Dariya’s idols, but the NKVD still couldn’t turn up anything untoward when they searched the apartment. From looking over the full text of the game via the included script mode, though, it seems like the bad consequences you’d expect to happen should, in fact, happen).
The related issue is that I suspect I didn’t invest myself too heavily in Agnessa and Nikolai’s relationship because it was clear from the jump that they were doomed. The fact that a story telegraphs that it’s a tragedy doesn’t mean it can’t work, of course. But I did feel like the latter stages of the plot hinged too much on, well, plot-y stuff like whether they would get away with their acts of defiance and if they’d have any broader impact – but of course they don’t, and of course they don’t. This is very old history at this point, and besides, I’ve read all three volumes of Gulag Archipelago, there aren’t really any portrayals of Stalinist brutality that can surprise me at this point. Focusing in on the emotions, conveying what it might be like to live in this horrible situation, could have worked, but here’s where I think the archetypal nature of the characters wound up being a flaw. Admittedly, there’s a plot branch that didn’t show up in my playthrough that I suspect might recast the emphasis of the final scenes (Spoiler - click to show) (my audience opted not to have Agenssa tell Nikolai that she was pregnant, which would presumably up the soap-opera quotient) so maybe one point of feedback would be to prioritize that choice in the mode where the player doesn’t get to make all the decisions.
The thing is, when I consider all the issues I’ve raised, it occurs to me that they all boil down to the same actually-kind-of-vapid critique: this is a play that I’m reading rather than seeing performed. With actors bringing life to the characters, and the immersive engagement that theater provides, I think these downsides would melt away, and the work’s very real strengths would be even more apparent. Of course, this is also a piece of IF that’s been entered into an IF competition; it’s entirely appropriate to judge it on the form in which I encountered it. But heck, I enjoy reading Shakespeare, even knowing that that’s far from the ideal way to experience his plays – if anyone ever puts on a production of The Whisperers, I’d be eager to see it, but in the meantime I’m glad it was entered into the Comp.
Charge sheet, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
ARREST/CHARGE INFORMATION
SEPTEMBER 20, 2006
NAME: 20 EXCHANGE PLACE AKA “SOL FC” AKA “HAYES”
PLACE OF ARREST: 20 EXCHANGE PLACE
ARRESTING AGENCY: NYCPD PCT001
ARREST CHARGES:
CRIMINAL IMPERSONATION (PL 190.26): suspect entered the scene of a hostage situation outside a Financial District bank at 20 Exchange Place. He put himself out as an NYPD officer and engaged in various law enforcement activities, but his level of professionalism and effectiveness was so indescribably low that suspect obviously was nothing of the sort.
AGGRAVATED ASSAULT UPON A POLICE OFFICER (PL 120.11): suspect claims that upon arriving at the scene and asking his notional colleague, Officer CORTEZ, for a briefing, CORTEZ responded with unreasoning hostility and initiated a physical altercation (Office CORTEZ has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into his actions).
ASSAULT IN THE FIRST DEGREE (PL 120.05): suspect, noting that a crowd had gathered around the crime scene, attempted to clear the surroundings. Subsequently, a reporter for the New York Post identified him as a police officer and approached suspect to ask for an update; suspect, apparently incapable of delivering a simple “no comment”, responded with hostility and escalated the situation and eventually initiated a brawl with the journalist (NOTE: eyewitness indicated the Post reporter carried a live mic and was accompanied by a video camera crew; potential credibility issues if we put them on the stand?)
CRIMINAL USE OF A FIREARM (PL 265.09): after the aforementioned physical altercation appeared not to be going his way, suspect fired three “warning shots” in an attempt to stop the brawl, and then aimed his loaded firearm at one of the journalists. Suspect argues that this was a conservative choice, as his only other option was to “go off book”, though he did not elaborate on what that would have entailed.
AGGRAVATED ASSAULT UPON A POLICE OFFICER (PL 120.11) (yes, again): subsequent to the above altercation, Deputy Inspector PASH arrived and attempted to deescalate. Suspect once again initiated a fistfight (NOTE: several eyewitnesses swear that the fight lead to HAYES being shot dead, which is clearly impossible. Did the bank robbers release a hallucinogen or something?)
OBSCENITY (PL 235.05): despite claiming to be a police officer, suspect appears to have an aversion to even as mild an oath as “pissed off”, somehow managing to pronounce it as “p***** off”.
SMOKING (NYCAC 17.503): before initiating planning on how to breach the bank and rescue the 17 hostages, suspect paused to smoke a cigarette within 50 feet of the bank’s entrance. Suspect claims that he had no choice, as he is sufficiently addicted to nicotine that without said cigarette, he would have been so nervous that he would have been forced to blurt out confidential information when engaged in negotiations with the robbers.
EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION – HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT (NYCR A.2.7): suspect seems to harbor a bizarre grudge against Irish-Americans, including claiming not to understand the accent of a decorated member of the NYPD bomb squad (NOTE: see charge under PL 190.26. Who the hell does this guy think makes up the force, anyway?)
AIDING AND ABETTING ROBBERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE (PL 160.15): while suspect purported to be trying to rescue the hostages and apprehend the robbers, his advice and actions were so error-prone as to indicate that he was likely in collusion with the criminals. At every stage, even the most anodyne of his suggestions would lead to disorder within the ranks (see charges under PL 120.05, PL 12.11 x2), assistance to the criminals (see charge under NYCAC 17.503), or catastrophic failure and loss of life (three separate suggestions about how to infiltrate the building, plausible on their face, led to unexpected explosions and death of hostages). One initially-promising sortie via a side door was even brought to a halt when suspect appeared to have some form of seizure, requiring resetting planning from the beginning.
CRIMES AGAINST MIMESIS (IFTR 1-25): please just make them stop.
An occasionally-wonky thin-mint-stery (am I doing this right?), December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I feel like there are a larger-than-usual number of sequels in this year’s Comp, and this is probably the most unexpected of them. Last year’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear? was an fun but slight whodunnit that mashed up hard-boiled narration with hard-candy characters; it wrung some solid laughs out of its off-the-wall premise, but gave every sign of being a one-off joke. So when I saw that Bubble Gumshoe had another case, part of me wondered whether the gag would have gone stale. Fortunately the answer is no; Mayor McFreeze still entertains by leaning into its Candyland-gone-bad setting, and changes up the gameplay formula by swapping more traditional IF puzzles for Gum E. Bear’s focus on interviewing suspects.
The plot this time out is a mystery cliché, but a different one from the straightforward who-killed-the-dead-guy hook of the previous installment: the mayor’s femme-fatale wife walks through the door of your office and asks you to check in on him, as she learned he was lured to a meeting with a notorious crime-boss at an abandoned factory on the wrong side of town. But when you go to investigate, you get locked in, and turns out the factory is due for demolition in the morning – you’ve got to escape, and hopefully solve the crime along the way.
My memory of the previous game is that the comedy came largely from one-liners and delicious puns, and those are still in evidence this time out, but I got the most enjoyment from the places where the author really leaned into the absurdity of the game’s world, piling joke upon joke without once cracking a smile:
"The docks once saw fleets of ships coming in full of raw sugar, and leaving full of premium saltwater taffy. But the pollution from Sugar City’s industrial district has given the cola here an extra kick: the extra maintenance costs involved in shoring up the ships’ dissolving hulls put the factory into the red, and when the Good Ship Lollipop foundered right in the middle of the channel - blocking access to all other vessels - that was the final marshmallow in the s’more."
This kind of scene-setting calms down a bit once you reach the main part of the gameplay, but there are still plenty of good lines slipped in even once things get serious, and the endling features a delightful escalation of noir cliches and dessert-based investigative techniques, again all played entirely straight.
I also thought the gameplay structure here was cleverly done. There are basically two tracks the player needs to work through: to escape the factory, you need to solve a series of fairly conventional medium-dry-goods puzzles that are primarily about traversal. But along the way, you’ll also have the opportunity to find and investigate some clues about the titular crime; these aren’t puzzles per se, but the game tracks which ones you’ve found, and then changes the ending based on the information you’ve gathered. This is an elegant way of representing a mystery in IF form – conversing with NPCs is obviously challenging to do in a satisfying way, and requiring the player to demonstrate they’ve figured out the solution can often be tricky, since it’s easy to make things either too easy (most genre-aware players will guess the identity of the bad guy pretty quickly) or too hard (since spelling out the exact way all the clues fit together represents an interface challenge, and may require information the protagonist has but the player doesn’t). And allowing the player to get to the end without solving the mystery helps provide a hint about what they missed, so they can go back and try to do better.
The implementation sadly lets the comedic tone and elegant structure down, though. There aren’t a lot of alternate syntaxes provided, and Inform’s default responses largely haven’t been changed, so I spent a lot of time fighting with the parser and hearing Graham Nelson’s drily amused voice chastising me, which took me out of the world (tip to authors: it only takes fifteen minutes or so to customize the most commonly-used responses, and this goes a very long way to making your game feel polished and unique). There’s a point where I needed to untie a piece of cord from a door, and TAKE CORD, UNTIE CORD, and DETACH CORD were all unsuccessful, with only TAKE DOOR working – which was odd, since I needed the cord, not the door! There are also several things that look like containers that you can’t put anything in, a fair number of disambiguation issues, and long location descriptions that are presented as single unbroken blocks of text.
Beyond the technical aspects of implementation, I also found a fair number of the puzzles required a higher amount of authorial-ESP than I’d like, and solutions sometimes relied on what felt to me like dodgy logic. Like speaking of that guess-the-verb issue I mentioned above, one puzzle requires you to rip a metal door off its hinges using detonator cord, which from my understanding is made of plastic and quite thin, so I wouldn’t have thought it would be up to the challenge. Conversely, I had to go to the hints because I wasn’t sure how to get through this door:
"A cheap, stained wooden door, badly warped by damp. There’s a small keyhole just beneath the brass handle."
Turns out it’s sufficiently fragile that throwing a heavy object into it will break it, but I don’t think that description adequately signposted that brute force would be a solution here (the fact that the keyhole is a separately-implemented object also seems designed to mislead the player).
The investigative track I think is a bit more intuitive than the puzzle track, though again there were places where a bit more hand-holding would have been appreciated, especially where world-building details that might be lost on the player are at issue ([spoiler]I’m thinking here mostly of the need to TASTE various objects, most importantly the dead body, which feels like an egregious violation of crime scene protocol as well as slightly cannibalistic).
As is my wont, I’m harping on details, but it really just is the details that are the issue here; the writing, story, and general design are quite strong, unlike the funny but sometimes-dodgy Gum E. Bear (I solved that one by accusing suspects at random, which I think was a common experience for players). Despite its sometimes-thin implementation and inadequate clueing, Mayor McFreeze represents a real progression; dare I wonder whether we’ll see a completed trilogy next year?
It's all over (and over), December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The thing about Groundhog Day is that it’s a horror premise dressed up as a rom-com. Like of course there’s the sheer existential terror of the way the time loop cuts you off from the rest of the world, shipwrecked on an isolated outcrop of temporality. But beyond that, God or fate or kismet or whatever taking a direct hand and saying you are meant to be with this one specific person, and will keep you stuck in a timey-wimey rut until you perform just the right steps to unlock the prison? That’s the part that kicks things over into nightmare territory. Even if there’s a spark and connection, life is long and relationships are hard; once time’s arrow is flying forward again, who’s to say what’ll happen next Groundhog Day, or the one after that? If you get in a fight, or decide you want a divorce, will the world stop again until you take it back? Every minute of every day would be torture as your subjectivity is annihilated.
As per usual I am perhaps overthinking things. But Last Valentine’s Day remix of the classic formula comes up with what I think is a better alignment of themes and narrative: if the story is trapping the protagonist in a loop, shouldn’t the resolution also hinge on an internal emancipation? Certainly the main character doesn’t start out the story in any obvious need of a personality adjustment: walking through an unseasonably-warm February afternoon with a spring in their step, they seem to have it all figured out, with their biggest dilemma deciding whether to get orchids or roses for their partner. Given the framing of the game, it’s not much of a surprise when they get home only to be blindsided by a Dear John letter, nor that you quickly get sent back to the beginning of a day that’s suddenly a little colder, reflecting on a relationship that suddenly seems to have some cracks in its façade.
The challenge of a time-loop game is that it can get boring for the player to run down the same track time and again, and in its second iteration, I was worried Last Valentine’s Day was going to fall into that trap; the situations, and even the specific sentences you read, are quite similar to the initial sequence. The modifications are well-chosen to clearly but subtly shift the mood, but I still felt my eyes starting to skim over seemingly-familiar bits of prose. Fortunately, subsequent trips through the loop see even clearer variations, focusing on new characters or situations, or zooming in to focus more on things that were bottom-lined the previous time out. As a result, while the palette of narrative elements stays limited throughout, I found the game remained fresh through its running time.
These narrative elements are decidedly low-key, but effectively play with the central theme of a curdling relationship. You have encounters that foreground the potentially transactional nature of love, highlight the possibility of heartbreak due to betrayal or tragedy, or just provide a light thematic throughline based on the legend of Orpheus (I was disappointed that telling a character that yes, I was familiar with the story, wound up terminating that branch of the conversation rather than leading to a dialogue about what it means). There are plenty of choices available throughout, and while I never got the sense that any particular decision I made was going to have much of an impact – the protagonist’s escape from the loop isn’t a puzzle the player needs to solve by doing everything exactly right, thankfully – these frequent interjections of interactivity succeeded in keeping me engaged as I decided how sympathetic to be to each of the views of love being offered up.
For all that there’s a lot of external incident, though, the game is quite solipsistic, with the reality of the protagonist’s partner never coming through in any concrete way. Instead the focus is all on the protagonist’s feelings and reflections about love. I think this is a reasonable choice for a game that’s so internal, but it does contribute to an impression that the work is intended to speak for and to younger people entering into some of their first relationships (also adding to this impression: the fact that the florist, who I think is described as being in her very early thirties, is referred to as middle-aged, and who, after suffering a romantic setback of her own, bemoans the difficulty of starting all over and worries that she’s far too old to find love again. For the record, I am 42 and only like halfway crumbled into dust). The writing, while generally strong, also occasionally hits a clunky or callow note, like this bit of one of the breakup notes:
"Life with you has been an adventure. There is no other word to describe it. The clouds parted and I started anew. There was so much excitement. And so much angst. I ceased to live in a pit, I ceased to walk on a plateau. I was on a roller coaster, and you were there right beside me, laughing and screaming and crying, all at once."
While I would have enjoyed the game more if its take on love had been a little more grounded and, dare I say, mature, I’ll admit that this is a game with a naïve protagonist who is a little too much in their own head. As I read the game, it gradually makes clear that what’s trapped you in the loop isn’t so much any external force, it’s your own desire to cling to the past and escape heartbreak, and your tendency to catastrophize what’s after all an ordinary and expected part of life, however painful. The prose in the ending is slightly overdone for my tastes, but it hits a properly resonant thematic note: it’s not that you finally move on by jumping through the proper set of hoops, but rather that you move on by moving on. And having gotten the knack, one hopes, there’s no sword of Damocles hanging overhead waiting to strike if you ever again stray from the straight and narrow.
A riddle wrapped in an enigma, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I really like riddles. What’s more fun than wordplay, engaging with some cryptic poetry and turning it over and over until it lines up at precisely the right angle and you see the obvious solution that’s been staring you in the face the whole time? I’ve got good memories of a car trip I took with some friends twenty years ago where we killed four or five hours just swapping riddles – somehow I almost stumped everybody with the hoariest of old chestnuts, you know, the whole “a rich man needs it, the poor have more of it than they know what to do with” one, except after fifteen minutes one of my friends looked out the window at a storm-cloud and said “that looks like the Nothing” (you know, from Neverending Story – I told you this was a long time ago) and that shook the answer loose.
That’s the rub, though. Riddles are a good way to pass the time with friends, so you’ve got someone to bounce ideas off of and nothing better to be doing – plus it’s also no big deal if you can’t guess one right, since that just gives someone bragging rights and you can move on to the next one (assuming you’re not going to be a sore loser, skulk after them in an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim their prize, then ultimately bite off the finger of their second cousin once removed). In a piece of IF, they’re a high-stakes design element because these forgiving bits of scaffolding disappear: sure, they can go gangbusters, but a distressingly large percentage of the time, if the player doesn’t immediately figure it out, they’re going to grimly stare at it, fail to get any good ideas, try a couple more options, then dispiritedly have recourse to the walkthrough and feel bad about the whole process.
So yeah, if you’re going to have your game hinge on riddles, it’s good to be mindful of the dangers. And also, for the love of God, don’t make the text entry boxes case-sensitive.
Right, now that that’s off my chest we can talk about Paper Magician. This is a short choice-based game where you play a test subject bent on escaping from the lab where they’re confined so they can finally see the things they’ve only read about in books, like the sky. It’s a premise that could be played many different ways, and the game opts for a fairy-tale take. It opens with an extended sequence where you meet a disembodied spirit in a dream who promises to help you escape if you can make them a body – for you have the power to conjure the things you draw or write about into reality. This is a neat idea, and when the writing stays grounded in the protagonist’s perspective, it can be compelling, like this bit where you fantasize about what escape could mean:
"The sensation of placing my hand against a river’s current, running across a field, petting a griffin’s fur. I’ve only truly experienced breathing, the touch of a cold wall, the brush of paper, and the thin solid form of a pencil in my hand."
I like that it’s unclear whether griffins are real in this world, or if, since you only know about what you’ve read in your few books, you just don’t know that they’re mythological. On the other hand, the prose can also feel muddled and vague. Like, it took me a longer time to come to grips with the actually-fairly-simple map of the compound because of stuff like this:
"I see two doors, each one on opposite walls, marked West and South."
Wait, west and south are opposite?
This became a bigger issue as I started to dig into the meat of the game, which involves investigating a few rooms in the lab for clues about the experiments being conducted on you. Like, I’m pretty familiar with video game tropes, but I struggled to make sense of stuff like this:
"As the source of all magic in this world, the Dragon of Origins is omnipresent in different forms. However, it has a core form, within the depths of this world. If we can draw out the core and then implant it into Subject 0013, then it can become our personal reserve of magic."
If it was just a matter of digging into optional ~lore~, I’d have shrugged and moved on, but actually the player needs to understand this stuff to reach the endgame. The final area of the lab is sealed with four locks, each of which poses a particular question about what the scientists are up to and requires an answer to be typed into the waiting text box. So yeah, they’re riddles. While two of the questions were straightforward to figure out, the other two felt substantially more open-ended, and susceptible to several different legitimate answers. For example, one asks what the subject is going to become, which seems to refer to this extract from one of the documents I found (spoiler-blocked since this reveals one of the twists):
(Spoiler - click to show)"Raise and control the subject as our new god. Harness its power as it becomes our own new reserve of magic. A living reservoir."
Another document also uses the phrase (Spoiler - click to show)"figurehead god” to refer to this idea. So I tried that, as well as (Spoiler - click to show)”new god”, “living reservoir”, “reserve of magic” and permutations of all of these. Turns out the answer was just (Spoiler - click to show)"god", but either the hint needed to be much clearer, or alternate solutions should have been accepted. And here’s where the case-sensitivity comes in, because actually that doesn’t work either; it needs to be capitalized. This is the point where I went scurrying for the walkthrough with a frown on my face. It didn’t need to be this way – I’d actually gotten all of the riddles mostly right – but this overly-strict design turned what could have been an engaging, albeit diegetically unjustified, opportunity for the player to demonstrate their understanding of the backstory before entering the endgame into a frustrating exercise in reading the author’s mind.
Said endgame does pick up a bit; the scenario as a whole is fairly underdeveloped (I would have liked to see more uses for the protagonist’s cool magic abilities, and better integration of the backstory elements into the narrative once they figure out what’s going on), and the story just goes exactly where you think it’s going to go given the setup, but it still finishes on a nice note of catharsis. Still, my opinion on riddles remains unchanged: a lovely game to play among friends, but outside of that, they’re a dangerous business.
Untamed, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
An awesome thing about well-crafted video games is that they can conjure up seamless new worlds for the player to explore. An awesome thing about poorly-crafted video games is that by inadvertently breaking the illusion of mimesis, they can conjure up hallucinatory terrain that dislocates and disorients the player in a way that wind up perversely enjoyable. So it goes with Into the Lion’s Mouth, which combines a strange loop born (I assume!) of a weird bug with some odd writing choices to convey a discordant, postmodern experience where the player’s more Theseus adrift in a maze than Heracles bearding a lion.
The opening is deceptively simple: this choice-based game starts in medias res, as the protagonist suffers a vehicle break-down in the middle of the Serengeti and is immediately menaced by lions. The player is primed for a tale of survival as you need to make the right choices to escape hostile animals and unforgiving wilderness to make it back alive, but the reality is more discombobulating. For one thing, if you try to deal with the lion, your only options are to yell at it and draw attention to yourself (bad idea, duh) or to… try to hypnotize it, which the game illustrates with an inline YouTube video of a young girl “hypnotizing” various small animals like a frog and an iguana. Shockingly, this also doesn’t work, sending you back to the opening menu where you can select the remaining, incongruous option: “Lucky I prepped with the lion taming simulator.”
Clicking on that takes you to what seems to be an unrelated vignette, where you (is this the same you? In this story you apparently work as a park ranger, whereas the main-timeline you seems to be unfamiliar with the Serengeti) encounter an abandoned lion cub and nurse it back to health. There’s another odd fourth-wall breaking bit here, where you get sent to an unrelated website that lays out a DIY recipe for approximating lion’s milk that you then need to pick out of a set of choices in order to successfully feed the cub. But other than that things progress as you’d imagine: you bond with him, you help him learn to hunt, you reach the moment when you realize he belongs in the wild, and you tearfully leave him there and drive away…
At which point you’re sent back to the game’s opening yet again, I guess to hope that hypnosis will work better this time out (it doesn’t).
I have questions. For one thing, in what sense was this vignette a “simulator”? It’s framed as something that actually happened. But are we to assume it was just a Twine game that the protagonist of this other, less-successful Twine game played prior to going on safari (the lion-cub bit is far and away the best part of the game, seeming to indicate that some bit of research went into it, plus as mentioned it has a narrative arc rather than allowing time to become a flat endless circle)? If that’s the case, and you’re the kind of person who is so psychotically prone to overpreparation that before a trip to a wildlife preserve you research exactly what you should do if you happen to come across a lost lion cub and need to raise it into adulthood, shouldn’t you also know how to jump-start or a car? Or at least know not to engage with potentially dangerous animals instead of shouting “yoo-hoo, over here!” or trying, I repeat, to hypnotize them?
I had plenty of time to contemplate the answers to these queries as I confirmed that yes, everything remains the same in this second iteration, including the possibility of jumping back into the simulator again and rebooting things yet a third time. Into the Lion’s Mouth is a misnomer of a title: play this one, and you’re crawling into an endless matryoshka doll with infinite narratives nested inside each other, never resolving; I’m half tempted to play it until I’ve set free so many rehabilitated lions that they’re no longer endangered. Surely this can’t have been what the author intended, but from a quick nose at the Twine code, I can’t see a more definitive ending. And honestly I’m glad for that, since absent this bug or whatever it is the game would be a forgettable snack that doesn’t do much with a unique premise. Instead, I get this picture of the future: a man, hypnotizing a lion – forever.
A dark revenant, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I think most people who’ve lost someone close to them have played some version of the bargaining game: imagining what you’d be willing to give up to get one more day, one more conversation, one more hug, with your loved one. It’s a ghoulish pastime, beyond being quite futile – perhaps for the best, there’s no interlocutor out there ready to take up the opposite side of the bet – but it’s nonetheless a positive fantasy; knowing that it’s impossible to obtain something so devoutly to be wished, or at least not for free, our lex-talionis-addled brains heap up sacrifices to make the vision plausible.
Careful what you wish for: in the grim world of My Brother; the Parasite (dig that semicolon), they’ve discovered a microorganism that delivers the unthinkable: once it colonizes a person’s brain, it will spring into action after they die, sending electricity into the brain and reanimating a corpse for four or five days. The person’s still dead, but their corpse lingers on, a talking thing that’s kept around out a vain hope that it can offer closure.
That hope is especially vain for Inez, the protagonist of the game. Her brother has died – choked on his own vomit after one bender too many – but as he luckily was afflicted by the parasite, she’s offered the chance for a series of one-on-one interviews to unpack the many, many layers of trauma he’s inflicted on her over the years. There are some details given, and others withheld, but it’s dark, dark stuff (Spoiler - click to show)(while it doesn’t spell things out, I read the game to imply that he sexually assaulted her at least once), and Inez can’t help but pick her scabs, verbally jousting with the body that used to be her brother in search of something she knows he can’t give.
The writing here is queasy and authentically muddled, and often describes abuse that was inflicted so frequently that it seems to have become almost commonplace:
"You knocked the wind out of me. I collapsed onto the floor, gasping, in tears, trying my hardest to force air back into my lungs. You brought me half a mango as an apology and begged me not to tell Mom."
"My mind, though… There are a hundred, million reminders that set it aflame. There are sounds that make me jump. Phrases that make me sick. Parts I can no longer touch."
The visual presentation matches this dour tone. The graphics – a mixture of portraits and heavily-modified photographs, with some limited, disorienting animation – occupy a range from moody to actively unsettling. There are occasional choices that prioritize vibe over readability, like the use of dark-gray text over a black background, and a few instances of timed text, but I think these are legitimate decisions that work to make the player uncomfortable, giving them the smallest taste of what it’s like to live as Inez does.
The game’s perspective in fact is locked very close into her subjectivity; this is a hothouse-flower of a game, focused overwhelmingly and obsessively on the trauma her brother has inflicted on her. If anything, I found that when the game tries to broaden out from this theme, it hits its few false notes: there’s a repeated suggestion that part of the ill will between the siblings came from competing for their mother’s love, and Inez several times repeats that she loves him and will mourn him. But these claims ring hollow in light of the intensity of the brother’s transgressive hatefulness and Inez’s complementary rage; I just didn’t buy these conventional, psychologized elements, and frankly the game doesn’t need them.
I’m hopefully communicating that this is a deeply unpleasant, but also deeply compelling, work to experience. Inez’s experiences are intense, but suggested with enough subtlety that the player can’t push them safely into the realm of melodrama or schlock horror. For all that it’s a very internal work, the author sets up the plot with care; it progresses from one distinct scene to the next with a clear logic of escalation connecting them. Despite the lack of anything resembling a branching choice, there’s some skillfully-deployed interactivity that means clicking through the various bits of text remains engaging throughout. And the conceit of the parasite is brilliant, because instead of a duel between two people, it’s simply a matter of a single person and a thing, meaning Inez is always in the spotlight and on the hook for the decisions she makes, while her brother is a dead but still-animate sparring partner whose incapacity for moral action is no longer blameworthy.
My Brother; the Parasite didn’t resonate very strongly with my personal experiences; my sibling relationship was complicated as all are, but nothing at all like this. And the emotions it evokes most frequently are ones that are generally alien to my personality. If there were too many games like it in the Comp, I think I’d have a hard time playing my way through it – I certainly needed a break after finishing this one. But it’s a haunting and well-crafted work, and for those who enjoy engaging with darker situations and feelings, it’ll be something very special. For my part, I’m glad to have played it, and glad too to be putting it aside.
A haunting non-allegory, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
While I’ve generally read far fewer books by non-Anglophone writers than I would like, to the extent that there’s an exception it’s Russian novelists: while I don’t speak the language and I’ve thus relied on translations, I’ve made my way through a pretty high percentage of the 19th-Century canon as well as a smattering of more recent authors. Probably this is partially down to subject matter: I like political and philosophical novels, so given the preoccupations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, et. al. this is a rewarding furrow to plow. But more than that, even in translation there’s something about the quality of the language that’s unique and engaging to me, some blunt poetry and non-Western meter to the writing that forms something of a common thread even for authors with very different styles.
I got something of the same vibe from Kaboom, which is similarly translated from Russian, and which has a premise that’s seemingly as off-kilter as its prose: in this parser-like Twine game, you play a stuffed hare who has to try to help its person (a five-year-old girl) after a bad dream that seems to turn the whole world topsy-turvy. Like, here’s the description of the anthropomorphized sun that floats above the strange dreamscape that opens the game:
The sun gazes directly at you, jokingly wagging his scalding rays. He has a clean-shaven, balding elderly face with somewhat lumpy cheeks and small eyes slightly turned towards the nasal bridge. In spite of his countenance being noble and a little weary, it also gives away an immense inner tension - looks like it takes him quite an effort not to blow up altogether, taking this whole world into oblivion with him.
That’s not a paragraph most native speakers of English would write, I don’t think – that use of “altogether” is a little archaic, the image of wagging rays of sunlight probably wouldn’t occur to me but might make more sense in the original Russian, and the repetition of “somewhat” and “slightly” and “a little” I think reflects diminutives that English lacks. But for all that the writing is grammatically correct, and I found this an arresting image, rendered in a distinctive, engaging way.
I definitely experienced some disorientation from a combination of the odd premise and the unintuitive prose, though. This sometimes made solving the game’s puzzles more challenging: I often had a hard time visualizing the space I was moving through, and while there are usually good hints or cues pushing the player towards what they should be doing, I was often unclear on what broader goal I was serving by pushing a pillow around or getting glue on my paws, even though I could tell that the game wanted me to do these things.
The interface also could be cleaner: there’s an inventory menu in the upper right corner that is mostly limited to your cute little hare-y arms and jumpy hare-y legs, with options for grabbing or kicking showing up when you click to open the menu. But most of the time the choices presented in the main window include things like pushing or picking up objects, so the logic of when and why I’d need to go to the inventory remained opaque throughout my playthrough. There’s also some unneeded friction that comes of the game’s decision to return back to a location’s top menu after you take most actions. There were sequences that require multiple connected steps, like pushing a toy crane truck, turning its crank, connecting its hook to something, then turning the crank again to lift the object into the air, and it was a little annoying to have to manually click “look around” then on the crane truck each time I wanted to perform the next step; the annoyance was increased by the realization that the game appears to have a time limit, though I got to the end before time ran out.
The consequence of all this, though, is that it took me way longer than it should to figure out what Kaboom is actually doing. Full spoilers after one last evocative but confusingly vague passage:
"Full of thoughts, you slowly turn towards the house and suddenly hold still, thunderstruck: only a small part of the wall at the corner you came from is visible, the rest of the building is covered by a huge messy heap of unidentifiable something! What’s happening? What crazy giant gambolled here? And how can you, an ordinary toy hare, withstand this giant?"
(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, what’s going on is that you’re in Ukraine, and your house has just been hit by a bomb; it’s pretty clearly implied that your owner’s parents were both killed, and you have to draw attention to her predicament so that she can be rescued before she bleeds to death. It’s possible to fail at this task, though mercifully the game doesn’t go into details, but even success comes at a cost: your poor hare winds up doused in ash, covered in glue, and finally half burned away by the end of the game, and since your owner is unconscious when she’s pulled from the ruin of your house, it’s pretty clear that you’re going to be abandoned and lost forever.
This twist hit me like a ton of bricks. Some of that is of course just seeing the horrors I’ve been reading about in the newspapers for a year and a half unexpectedly brought home; some of that is the sentimental fact that I tuck my two-year-old son into bed every night with his favorite toy cat beside him; and some it’s the simple and heartfelt closing message from the game’s anonymous Russian author. This is a game with some infelicities, as I pointed out above, but it got more of an emotional response from me than anything else in the Comp so far, and I think partially it’s those very points of friction that make it so effective. I wish to God we didn’t need to have games like this – much less that there’d be another recently-ignited conflict to which Kaboom could equally apply – but I found this game a very effective use of interactive fiction to create some much-needed empathy and connection; it’s trite to say that art is what will eventually end war, but however small it is, in my heart of heart I believe games like Kaboom are making some difference.
Sub orb-ital, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’m not generally one for “old-school” IF. The text adventures of the 80s don’t tickle my nostalgia receptors – I played a few at the time, and many more since then, but I got into IF via the late 90s/early aughts indie scene so when I think of The Games of My Youth, it’s Photopia and Slouching Towards Bedlam that come to mind. Many of them also tend to take the two-word parser approach, which fundamentally doesn’t jibe with how my brain approaches IF interfaces. And while I enjoy a good puzzle as much as the next person, I tend to place a high value on literary prose, thematic depth, and engaging characters; it’s not so much that most old-school IF is bad at those things as that it politely declines to even attempt such things in favor challenging gameplay in the medium-dry-goods model. I can enjoy this style of gameplay but I’m very aware that when I bounce off an old-school piece, the fault’s more likely to be on my side than the game’s.
At the same time, though, I sometimes wonder whether this attitude has become something of a crutch for my critical faculties. Like, it’s easy to say “I guess this thing I didn’t like is just a matter of taste”, and it makes one feel like a broad-minded, ecumenical sort of person who can look beyond their own prejudices. It’s much harder to try to be more rigorous and nail down questions like a) what exactly do we mean by “old school”, anyway, given that there were plenty of early 80s games that aimed to integrate gameplay, plot, and theme and had literary pretensions; b) what particular design elements are necessary or at least helpful to creating an “old school” vibe; and c) are those elements implemented well or poorly in a particular work?
That sounds like a lot of work that I’m not going to attempt now – maybe post-Comp fodder for the Rosebush – but having had these thoughts, I’ve decided to try to provide a slightly more critical look at Have Orb, Will Travel than I was first inclined to do. Because despite having enjoyed the author’s previous two games, this is another old-school puzzlethon that I didn’t quite get on with, but upon reflection I think that’s due to some particular design choices that deserve to be engaged with rather than just chalked up to de gustibus non est disputandum.
Start with the curious decision to play coy with the plot. It’s a hallmark of this style of game that the story isn’t a primary draw, but even by those standards what we’ve got here is curiously thin. The game’s blurb, its opening text, and the letter you start out with in your inventory all gesture towards your character having been given some sort of charge by a Council of Elders, which can be inferred to be to obtain the titular orb, but despite several hundred words being dedicated to this setup, it never comes out and says what the orb is, what it does, how it got lost, why you’re looking for it where you are, and why finding it will matter. Sure, it’s a MacGuffin, but this is uninspiring and even a little confusing, so much so that when I found a magical “sphere” I thought I’d just about hit the end of the game, even though I was only halfway through.
Speaking of magic, HOWT features a Vancian spellcasting system where you can learn spells from a spellbook and then cast them. I’ve liked this kind of system in games like Enchanter, but it’s again oddly vestigial here. There are only three spells in the book and you never accumulate more through play, there are only two places in the course of several dozen obstacles where spellcasting comes into play (meaning that yes, one of the spells appears to be useless), and the system is needlessly baroque, requiring the player to intuit that they need to manually LEARN each spell, which can only be done when you flip through the book page by page until you get to the appropriate one.
The puzzles are generally solid, though after a couple gimmes (there’s an early maze with a fun but straightforward gimmick that’s satisfying to solve) they quickly ramp up in difficulty. This is genre-appropriate – and kudos to the author for providing a full hint system as well as a walkthrough – but some design decisions around traversal made experimenting with them much more tortuous than it needed to be. The map is riddled with one-way passages whose existence isn’t disclosed in advance, and it’s easy to blunder into one before you’ve completed exploring a new area. It’s always possible to retrace your steps, but for much of the game, doing so typically requires either solving the maze again – which quickly grows tedious – or enduring a medium-length section with timed text, which similarly wears out its welcome almost instantly. Further, many puzzles involve interacting with some kind of mechanism that has an impact somewhere else in the map, often without a direct cue about what sort of changes you should be looking for. As a result, the puzzle design presupposes that the player will be making frequent laps around the map, while the navigation design contrives to make that approach pretty annoying.
I hasten to point out (er, 900 words into the review) that there are definitely strong elements here. The author’s homebrewed parser continues to be a highlight, feeling almost as seamless as the tried-and-true Inform or TADS ones (the only foible is that taking items from containers requires a little extra typing, but this is well signposted in the documentation, and a shortcut is provided). There are also a lot of little riddles and clues that help lead you through many of the puzzles, which is a style that I like and which is generally well-executed. And while the setting could be a bit more exciting – when you wend your way through a magically-confusing wood and discover a secret cottage hidden away at its center, it’s deflating to be told that it’s “totally uninteresting” in its features and décor – the prose is efficient at communicating what you need to solve the puzzles, and even manages to be fairly evocative. I think I found one bug (the game crashed when I tried to walk W into the lake rather than type SWIM) but otherwise it was completely smooth.
It’s these very positive pieces that make me want to beg off from any sharper critical judgment: this is a well-made game with a cheerful vibe, and its design choices feel intentional rather than being oversights, so if those design decisions frustrated me, again, maybe I should just blame myself. But thinking about them some more, I’m increasingly of the mind that actually some of those decisions were bad ones, and that HOWT could have been just as old-school but decidedly more engaging if it had paid a little more attention to its plot, or made the magic system a more integral part of its challenges, or reduced the friction of navigating its map. A game like this was never going to be my favorite in the Comp – again, this isn’t my subgenre of choice – but there’s no reason I couldn’t have liked it a lot more than I did.
A feisty heist, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There are a lot of things I enjoyed about Finders Commission, a parser-like choice game where you carry out a museum heist — like, for example, everything in that clause I just wrote – but my favorite was the breezy way it lays out its premise:
"Bastet is a beautiful cat.
She believes she is an ancient deity who should be worshipped by all.
Her Aegis, or breastplate armor, has been missing for centuries.
She read online that it was sold at auction to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities."
Each line of is wackier than then next, but it’s delivered with such supreme nonchalance that you almost don’t notice how off the wall it is – to say nothing of the way the brilliantly impossible-to-argue-with first line just slips by. The game largely delivers on this promise, offering an entertaining set of puzzles and a straightforwardly pleasant story; it’s a bit rough in places, and I think it had room to lean more into the silliness of its setup, but I found it an engaging way to while away half an hour.
The planning is an integral part of any heist, and here Finder’s Commission offers just enough to whet the appetite. You get to choose your protagonist from a menu of gender-ambiguous options, each of whom boasts a special talent or two (I opted for Nat, “strong and compassionate”), and then negotiate your fee with Bastet (to no real end, as far as I could tell, but it’s still a fun touch) before heading to the museum to reclaim the unjustly-stolen antiquity. This phase did seem to have a peculiarly large number of empty, useless locations, and that feeling persisted once I got to the main gameplay space; fortunately, it doesn’t take long to find a map to make the compass navigation more intuitive, but there’s still way more real estate in the museum than seems necessary to support the handful of puzzles on offer. I’m guessing that this is partially in service to the character-selection portion of the game – there was at least one interaction I found that I’m pretty sure was available because of Nat’s strength, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the useless places I encountered play host to bespoke options for other protagonists – but there might have been a more elegant way to accomplish this.
The writing also feels a bit perfunctory once the heist proper kicks off. There are a few vignettes that have some charm – I liked the sequence where you can do some light flirting with a cute docent – but for the most part the descriptions are quite functional. This isn’t the kind of game that should provide reams of historical context for each inessential artifact displayed in the museum, nor should there be long dialogue trees with NPCs when you’re trying to keep a low profile, but I couldn’t help think of the way the Lady Thalia games get a lot of mileage out of a few well-chosen period details and a couple lines of witty banter.
The actual process of making off with the aegis doesn’t have too many steps, but some do require some timing and forethought, which pushed me to scout out the scene, and try to come up with a plan before making my move, all of which felt in-genre. Each puzzle is relatively simple on its own, but the game does have time limits in a few sequences, and the inventory system requires manually selecting an item when you want to use it in a location, which discourages lawnmowering, so accomplishing the goal felt satisfying even though it was ultimately fairly straightforward.
I wound up with 87 points out of 100, though I characteristically want to try to argue my way to a better score – for example, I got dinged for leaving a security camera pointing at the aegis, but while I had figured out how to move it, the game didn’t do a good job of explaining which direction it needed to be pointed so it couldn’t see the case I was breaking into. I also got dinged for not charging my phone, when the last time I checked it it had 162% battery power, and for not tipping a barista when I’d never actually ordered a coffee. So I think we can all agree I deserved to get 100%.
Beyond these small oddities, I think I ran into a couple of other bugs – in particular, an important box-shaped gizmo seemed to go missing most of the way through the game, though I was able to undo back until it popped up again. These weren’t a very big deal, but hopefully they can be cleaned up for a post-Comp release.
Still, even when I was thinking of ways the game could be improved, I was still smiling as I played Finder’s Commission. I believe it’s the author’s first piece of IF, and it appears they’ve taken the oft-given advice that new authors start out with a short, manageable first game; if that’s the case, perhaps there’ll be a future, more robust Finders Commission game to come (this one is labelled as Episode One), which I’d certainly look forward to!
Introduction to camp, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The girl whose two moms were a mermaid and a pirate did most of the job, but it was the Prana Yurt that broke me.
I know it sounds like I’m saying that to make fun of Lake Starlight’s world’s-wokest-wiccans premise, but I think – or at least hope – I have some substantive critiques beyond just being a hopeless geriatric reactionary. This choice-based game is the first part of what promises to be a much longer YA-style story, following the tween protagonist as she leaves her home in a polluted, dystopian city and attends a sleepaway camp where she’ll make friends, learn about her magical heritage and, from the cues in the game’s ending, eventually take on the greedy companies that have ruined the land. The game is resolutely BIPOC-centered; the protagonist is a Latina (though oddly, the game has you choose a name before letting you know that), and a major part of her journey is connecting with her family roots and encountering other characters who are likewise empowered by their respective traditions. And it’s also staking out a clearly environmental-justice-oriented stance in laying out who’s made the world as bad as it is, and who needs to be stopped to begin to heal it.
This is all fine, I think – it’s as subtle as a brick to the face, but it seems to be pitched to younger players so that’s forgivable. Similarly, the worldbuilding is fairly thin, since there are lots of details making clear this is basically our world (the man character speaks Spanish, another one is named “Marie Bayou” and is from “Orlenze”) while the major departures, like the swarms of blood flies and the mind-control cults, are never explained, but I’m not sure heavy helpings of lore would have improved the experience. The writing had a number of typos, but generally struck me as in-genre for a YA work; it’s fairly simple and frequently made me feel like I was crumbling into dust:
Together, all of you yell out, “Yessss!” Then Stella shouts for everybody to jump up and she teaches you a super-fun cheer routine that involves lots of booty shaking and kicking and jumping and spinning around while shouting: “Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up! Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up!”
There are some 13 year olds who would find this cringe, but others for whom it would work, I suspect.
So all of that is to just say this is very much not for me, but that’s completely OK! Not everything has to be, and in fact I think the IF scene is stronger when there are more games not pitched at nerdy middle-aged white guys as the key audience.
I do think there are some issues here that go beyond mere preference, though. For one thing, the player isn’t given very much to do – there are sections of the game where ten minutes will pass in between choices – which I generally don’t mind too much, but I confess I did get annoyed when Lake Starlight felt like it was actively undermining my choices. Like, there’s a segment where you get to choose which of your cabin-mates to pair up with for task, except when I clicked on the one I opted for, I got told she’d already teamed up with someone else and I got automatically assigned to another girl. Previous to that, there’s a bit where you need to choose your strategy for introducing yourself to the other campers, and I decided to focus on my self-assurance – only for that to completely fail as I turned into a bundle of nerves. Making matters worse, I made that decision because I’d previously chosen for the protagonist to be born under the Fire Moon, which was supposed to make me brash and strong-spirited, so it felt like the author was doubly-negating my input. If a game has a specific story it really wants to tell without the player getting in the way, great, but in that case I think it’s much better not to present false choices.
The deeper critiques I had about the game go back to where I started this review. First, there’s the girl with the pirate mom (the mermaid one is blameless in all this so I’m leaving her aside). She tells the rest of the cabin about her mom’s occupation with a clear sense of pride, and they all nod along like this is a cool, normal job for someone to have. Sure, she does say something about “colonizers” being the target of her mom’s piracy, but given the absence of any active colonial activity being foregrounded in the story and the setting’s resemblance to the real world, this feels like it’s justifying violence against people based on their group identity. It’d be one thing if this was an isolated incident, but the game several times gives a pass to “good”-coded characters recklessly threatening violence against the protagonist. The camp head has a trio of pony-sized attack dogs charge the main character in what’s played as a small welcome-to-camp practical joke but looks way more like hazing to me, and later in that same scene, one of your cabin-mates draws a bow and points a nocked arrow directly at you, seemingly to show what a cool rule-breaking badass she is, but which is entirely equivalent to the decidedly un-cool activity of pointing a loaded gun at somebody.
Maybe I’m being overly-precious about this – and in an empowerment fantasy like this, I totally get that part of the draw is the cathartic idea of unleashing redemptive violence against bad people who share traits with the real-world politicians and oligarchs who’ve inflicted harm against communities of color and the environment. But Lake Starlight seems to me to have a too-cavalier attitude towards violence, and having played it not two weeks after the self-appointed representatives of an oppressed people unleashed horrifying violence against civilians and sparked a confrontation with a vicious government that’s killed thousands more innocents, its juvenile take on these issues grated.
Then there’s the Prana Yurt, which struck me as taking two vaguely non-Western words bespeaking alternative wisdom or lifestyles and mashing them up without any rhyme or reason. There are parts of the game that seem well-observed to me, like the protagonist’s home life and relationship with her family. But there are other parts, like the Prana Yurt, that feel like the result of antiracist mad-libs – I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the pirate-mermaid daughter is named “Lilo Keanu”, which I’m pretty sure is the Hawaiian Kemal Pamuk*. The BIPOC Avengers is a cool concept, but given the hard work that goes into building nonracial solidarity, it again feels like it can trivialize important real-world history to treat things so superficially.
I’m aware as I say all this that I could just be a big old hypocrite (emphasis on the old) – back in the day, I enjoyed the heck out of the tabletop roleplaying game Mage: the Ascension, where various stereotypes, including kung-fu monks, violent neo-pagans, and indigenous spirit-summoners team up to fight an authoritarian technocracy, and it’s definitely guilty of all the sins I’m laying at Lake Starlight’s door. Still, Mage came out in 1993; 30 years on, I think it’s reasonable to expect more.
* I don’t think I’ve recently explained the Kemal Pamuk thing anywhere. See, in the first couple of episodes of Downton Abbey, there’s a sexy Turkish guy who shows up as a guest star, and Julian Fellowes, when deciding what to call him, very clearly just stole the first name of the first political leader who popped into his head (Kemal Ataturk) and the last name of the first writer who popped into his head (Orhan Pamuk). This is extremely racist, but IMO also quite hilarious when you play the parlor game of applying the same logic to Western countries – Abraham Twain, Winston Shakespeare, Louis Hugo, etc. etc. etc.
Stuck at a low boil, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I have played a lot of IF over the years, and as a result – not to brag or anything – I’m kind of a big deal. I’ve rescued crashing spaceships, defeated maniacal supervillains, slain more evil wizards than you can count, and saved humanity, earth, the multiverse more times than I can count; I’ve bearded Lovecraftian horrors in their dens, and performed great acts of perspicacity in ferreting out whodunnit (albeit typically with a lot of restarts). So to play a game where the inciting incident is that you’re missing a couple of ingredients for the dinner party you’re going to throw for your friends, and you rise to the occasion by popping out and grabbing them with little more fuss than it takes to make a Trader Joe’s run… is actually a nice change of pace.
Creative Cooking is a cozy, exploration-focused game that, pace the title, doesn’t require you to do any cooking at all. Instead, it’s got two phases: first, you wander your house and learn a little more about the protagonist and their world – this is a fantasy world and you’re a sort of elf, and there are a lot of proper nouns being thrown around – then you get to the pantry, realize that you’re out of some stuff, and the second, puzzlier portion kicks off. You automatically jot down the three ingredients you’ll need, as well as some notes on how to obtain them, and head out to the elf village proper to find them. Between the three, there’s maybe a puzzle and a half; one is just lying on the ground, you get another just by talking to two NPCs (who have maybe two or three possible topics of conversation apiece), and then the last requires you to take one additional action after you pick it up, which is explicitly cued but I still managed to mess up due to my blind spots when dealing with two-word parsers (Spoiler - click to show) (I tried putting the vine in the pond, and throwing it in the pond, and dropping it, but had to get a hint to land on just THROW VINE). Then you go home, cook the meal, and have a nice time with your friends – actually, an especially nice time with one in particular.
I’m all for this kind of thing; not every game needs to have world-shaking stakes or brow-furrowing challenges, especially this deep in the Comp randomizer list. A simple premise with easy puzzles that just provides an excuse to hang out and explore a setting is a great concept for a game, especially one that, per the blurb, is meant to ease players into a forthcoming longer piece set in the same world. Unfortunately, I don’t think the implementation of the concept worked especially well for me. In large measure this is due to the shallowness of said implementation. Creative Cooking is written in a successor to the very early AGT language, and since I’m not familiar with that, I can’t say how much of this is due to the choice of language, but regardless, the game feels significantly more primitive even than other intentionally old-school games entered into this Comp. Very very few nouns are implemented – room descriptions will routinely mention objects that seem worth investigating, like a table with a drawer, or tools on a workbench, but rarely is any of this stuff even minimally implemented. Seemingly-obvious actions, like COOK, are also disallowed, and see the spoiler above for the parser issues I ran into trying to solve the one real puzzle.
The other factor distancing me from the game was the prose style. English isn’t the author’s first language, and several native-speaking testers/proofreaders are listed in the credits, so I don’t want to harp on this element too much, but there are still quite a lot of typos and confusing syntax, compounded by dense worldbuilding that lacks an immediate hook, a chatty approach that bombards the player with gossip without much context, and a reluctance to present text as anything but a single overlong paragraph (this might be a limitation of the engine). Like, when you examine yourself, the game notes that you’re an elf with a “kirune” body, so when I found a book in my library about kirune physiology I was hoping to learn more about what that meant. But here’s what you get when reading the book:
"This book on kirune physiology is the gift from Senpai Miryarai; when I unwrapped it, I was perplexed of the choice, Miryarai is a very accomplished healer, and for me is a really trusted friend and senpai. And she knows it. Noticing my perplexity, she says, with all her proverbial phlegm and calmness, a strange phrase: “a page a day keeps the healer away”. I never heard something like. Seeing my increasing perplexity, she coquettishly looks toward Etuye Alasne, hugging her with her right white wing. “it’s a saying from another world, far in the past and space”. Her matter-of-fact, objective explanation makes sense, Etuye is an exceptionally well-versed Soulmancer, and her soulmancy led to the first Soulmating till the end of Time in more than 10,000 years, the one between Miryarai, Etuye Alasne and Atuzejiki, but I still felt something off in her manifestation of love towards Etuye. Sometime later, I asked Miyai about this, and she explained, but it’s another and long story, to be narrated elsewhere, later…"
It’s interesting to see a game implemented in an older IF language that does something other than bog-standard collect-the-treasures gameplay, and I admit that I’m probably more down on fantasy worldbuilding bollocks than I should be, so I don’t want to judge Creative Cooking too harshly – and again, I really did like the setup. But with gameplay that’s so simplified, and the fruits of exploration so baroque and unrewarding, I didn’t find much here that clicked with me.
Floyd I'm ready to be heartbroken, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There’s a longstanding tradition in parser IF that authors should eschew the generic USE verb. The conventional wisdom, which I ascribe to, is that there are two major reasons for this: on the player’s side, it removes much of the fun of playing a parser game if you can just mindlessly spam USE X or USE X ON Y without actually thinking through a potential solution, and on the author’s side, you wind up with one mega-verb that can function radically differently in different contexts, which can make debugging really tricky, and can paradoxically make implementation even more work, as the player might expect USE to work as well as whatever more bespoke actions might be needed to resolve a challenge. After playing CODENAME OBSCURA, a spy-themed Adventuron game that’s an intentional 80s throwback, I can adduce a third rationale for avoiding USE: I, specifically, am very bad at figuring out when to try it, such that I had to go to the walkthrough three separate times to figure out what I was missing, and each time it was because I’d attempted everything but USE.
Admittedly, I expect the Adventuron parser to be a bit picky in the best of circumstances, and in each case, it was immediately obvious what to do once I got unstuck, so I shouldn’t pretend my repeated oversights about USE were that much of a barrier to enjoying the game. It makes a winning first impression, efficiently setting up a silly James Bond plot (you’re a secret agent working for an organization called TURTLE, visiting a town in Northern Italy to foil the plans of a German Count who’s stolen a diamond from England and is in league with the Sicilian mafia) and charming with lovely, colorful pixel art. The picturesque opening quickly segues into an action set-piece and then a simple escape puzzle, before setting the player loose to tackle the meat of the game.
There’s a lot to do, from visiting a witch to infiltrating a costume party to breaking into the compound where the Count is building a doomsday weapon. The map is reasonably open, but there’s typically only one or two puzzles where you can make progress at any point in time, which could be frustrating if the game world was much bigger, but CODENAME OBSCURA just about gets away with it. Speaking of the puzzles, they’re typical medium-dry-goods affairs; there’s perhaps a bit too much repetition, with three different blocked-off areas requiring you to WEAR something and/or SHOW something to gain entry, and one sequence where you solve a puzzle to find a password which allows you to find a combination which allows you to find a code, but they’re generally straightforward enough – save for a computer puzzle that combines unclear instructions with a bit of timed text to make for a fairly irritating barrier.
Speaking of annoyance, that USE issue is a real one, however, and bespeaks a game that has a very particular idea of how it wants you to interact with it. There are relatively few actions implemented – despite sound being important at several points, the player can’t ever LISTEN – American spellings for common commands aren’t accepted (PET vs. PAT, PUSH vs. PRESS), there are lots of items that you can’t examine until you pick them up, and it wasn’t just the USE case where I had to play guess-the-verb (the worst offender was a bit where you have to manipulate a part of a statue, and only one very precise syntax will work). CODENAME OBSCURA also does the default-Adventuron thing of bluffing when you try to interact with or examine an object that’s not actually implemented – it just says “you notice nothing special” rather than admit it doesn’t know what you’re talking about – and then makes the problem worse by retaining that same “you notice nothing special” default description for several game-critical items. I suppose that thinness of implementation is part of the game’s intentionally retro vibe, but a bit more testing could have helped the author strike a better balance between that lo-fi feel and player convenience. Likewise, I twice ran into a bug that led to the game hanging and not accepting input; fortunately, I was able to simply reload the webpage and seamlessly pick up from where things went off-track, but it was nevertheless kind of a pain (that’s why I’m attaching three transcripts).
For all these complaints, I did enjoy my time with CODENAME OBSCURA; it’s a far friendlier old-school puzzler than The Witch, and it’s got more meat on its bones than Magor Investigates…, so it did scratch an itch – and I say that as someone who doesn’t have any nostalgic attachment to the old two-word parser games that it mimics. I’d say it needed a bit more time in the oven, but from the blurb it sounds like the author’s been working on the game off and on since 1987, which is quite the gestation period; still, a little more testing and refinement to sand off some of the unintentionally rough edges – and provide alternatives for the USE-allergic among us – would be quite worthwhile.
There's no Spoonerism for "Spoonerism", December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I've played a lot of Andrew Schultz games, and while there are definite themes and sub-series, he’s a wide-ranging author and about the only thing that applies across the board to his work is that he’s always doing something other than regular parser stuff, be it anthropomorphized chess puzzles, an inverted tic-tac-toe game where losing is winning (and vice versa), or the extended wordplay riffs of Bright Brave Knight Knave, which I already played in this Comp. To my knowledge, though, outside of a few short jam entries, he’s typically stuck to parser engines for his more robust games, so I was curious to see what he’d gotten up to with Twine.
Trail Stash is actually not that far off from Schultz's other entry in the '23 Comp, Bright Brave Knight Knave, in that it hinges on Spoonerisms, a kind of wordplay the initial sounds of two words swap – like, you’ll win twaddle if you make a twin waddle (I don’t even know what the term is, if there is one, for the more complex stuff in BBKK and its ilk). The game’s replete with them – every location is a Spoonerism, and so are all the items you pick up along the way, because yes, this is a parser-like choice game with a persistent inventory and a navigation system that enables you to revisit places you’ve already been. And in fact you’ll have to, because each location contains one, and only one, item, and requires you to use one, and only one, other item to solve it (and thereby obtain one of a dozen pieces of a treasure map).
There is a story here, but it’s pretty vestigial even compared to the sometimes-sketchier frames for Schultz’s other wordplay games; it basically reduces to “you’re a guy who likes treasure, go find the map.” Likewise, if there’s any theme that unites the various situations and problems you face, it felt pretty light to me. Nothing wrong with that since it lets the player concentrate on the gameplay, and that suited me just fine. I often find the wordplay games a bit tricky, but shifting to a choice-based engine makes proceedings much simpler, since you just need to click the item you want to use; no need to sound things out and decide whether you want to write a word with an f vs. a ph, for example. Of course, that risks making things too simple and turning the game into a lawnmowering exercise, but I thought the game mostly managed to hit the sweet spot in between; with 16 total locations, comprising a training-wheel set of four and the meat of the game in four additional sets of three, the set of possibilities is manageable while still making trial-and-error unrewarding unless you’re really feeling stuck.
I also thought the hit rate for the jokes was pretty good. Plaid base is a good gag, as is funk pail. And I had to stop and think for a second when I found the one-word item to figure out how that one could work. And Trail Stash trusts the player enough not to belabor its point – it usually avoids spelling out the Spoonerism so that you can get the pleasure of feeling the click in your brain. I liked this description that came after figuring out how to solve the “weedy nerds” area:
"The weedy nerds are quickly very interested in the wee freights, be they ships or trains. The process of moving and organizing said freights gets longer. They analyze the structure of the freights and build bigger ones. All this is a good workout—something the weedy nerds once avoided."
Sure, not all of the puzzles are so clean, and I was definitely reduced to mechanically clicking through my options a few times, or left scratching my head after somehow landing on the right answer. But for the most part, I felt like I got the logic of which object I should use when. I’m sure this is partially because of the shorter running time of Trail Stash, so despite its name, it’s able to stick to the cream of possible Spoonerisms rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel. Likewise, this fresh twist on the Schultz wordplay formula would probably feel restrictive if it went on too long. But as an experiment in taking a tried and tested parser approach into new, choice-based territory, I’d rate the game a solid success.
Perhaps too low-key, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I have by now played a reasonable number of Larry Horsfield games – three just in this year’s ParserComp – so when I see his name on IFComp entry, I approach it with a certain amount of respect leavened by an also-certain amount of fear. He writes big, old-school games that fall into the traditional genres, but has an eye for appealing worldbuilding and an engaging, almost homey level of detail. But the puzzles he writes are almost always way harder than I’m able to solve, most often due to my own lack of brain-power, but occasionally also due to the idiosyncrasies of the ADRIFT system and parser; he’s also parsimonious with hints and typically doesn’t post a walkthrough. My quintessential experience with one of his games is to bumble my way to about a quarter of the points before giving up in despair, feeling like I’d missed out on something that could be really good if I was just more in tune with the intended gameplay.
This feeling, as it turns out, is right on, because Magor Investigates… is a sidequel to one of those aforementioned ParserComp entries, Xanix-Xixon Recurrence (yes, I looked that up), and the introductory text allows you to get a summary of what happened in that game to its two heroes (Duke Alaric Blackmoon, who’s the protagonist of many of the previous games in this series, and his buddy the king, whose name I’ve forgotten, and look, I’ve already looked one thing up in this paragraph so I don’t know what you expect). I left them flailing about in an abandoned city after a sandstorm, but apparently they had some cool adventures after that as they fought the titular lizardmen (they’re the Xanix, I think?) including a giant scary hybrid. It definitely sounds pretty neat, and there’s even a closing plot twist: Duke Blackmoon is able to use a special ability of the king’s magic axe, except only someone with royal blood should be able to activate that magic!
That’s where you – Magor, the court wizard – come in. Once the duo are back and rested from their journey, they charge you with doing some genealogical research to investigate Blackmoon’s connection to the royal family. I loved this premise – you will never go wrong pitching me a game about reading old documents – and the author’s worldbuilding strengths are very much on display. While the absent-minded wizard is a hoary old archetype, Magor is a great incarnation of the concept, and has his own idiosyncrasies: I laughed at his industrial-sized home distillery he’s got tucked right off his sitting room, because the guy loves his whiskey. So I embarked on this adventure hoping I’d get a little farther than usual.
And, er, I did; I managed to win, in fact. Magor Investigates…, it turns out, is an appetizer of a game; you have a ten-element task list laying out what you need to do to win, but some of them are optional (I forgot to water the plant, oops!), many of them are well-nigh automatic, like meeting with the king, and the few puzzles, which largely revolve around curing the royal archivist’s tummy-ache, are quite straightforward, though not without their pleasures (fussing about with the kettle and herbs to make an herbal infusion was just the right amount of busywork).
I was a bit disappointed the game was this slight. Partially this is just because it’s fairly easy, but also because of the way the difficulty is managed: there aren’t any conversational commands in the game, for example, with dialogue just happening automatically in cutscenes. Some puzzles also take care of themselves, in ways that actually sometimes wrong-footed me: I couldn’t figure out how to give the infusion to the archivist, because you’re not supposed to do that yourself – it’s all taken care of once you walk into the bedroom carrying the mug, but since I poured the kettle into the mug once I was already in the room, this “convenience” wound up being frustrating. And I was likewise momentarily stymied when I failed to notice that putting one herb in the kettle automatically put the other one in, too.
This is the second of Horsfield’s games that I’ve finished; I made my way through another of his ParserComp entries, Bug Hunt on Menelaus, this summer. It likewise was fairly short and consisted mostly of simple puzzles, though it was subject to a very tight time-limit that required frequent reloads; there’s nothing like that this time out, and if anything the challenges were even simpler. In both cases, I enjoyed myself, but definitely wanted something a little meatier than what I got. I know, I know, I am being a jerk, like Goldilocks saying “this one’s too long and hard,” “this one’s too short and easy,” when I am just freeloading on the hard work of others. Still, I do hope that sometime, I’ll get to play a Larry Horsfield game that’s just right – and for all my bellyaching, Magor Investigates… is certainly a fun way to pass the time until then.
Cult decor, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There are several ways to interpret Assembly – a short parser game about using your IKEA-honed furniture-construction skills to foil an incursion of Lovecraftian gribblies – but the most natural, I think, is to read it as a riposte to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. That seminal essay, of course, argued that the rise of technologies that allowed for the unlimited copying and display of objets d’art – photography, printing, the moving image, to say nothing of developments Benjamin couldn’t have dreamed of in 1935 – would sap them of their aura, the unique quiddity that gives it its authority by placing it in space and in time. Benjamin traces the concept of aura back to an imagined origin where the primary purpose of art was to create images of deities for religious purposes; thus, mechanical reproduction reduces or even eliminates the so-called cult value of the work of art.
Against this, Kirwin posits a thought-experiment by which a singular monument like Stonehenge can be crammed into an infinitely-replicable flat-pack:
Then, finally, a new age: an age of infinite repetition, of unbounded mechanical reproduction, of forms iterated out beyond imagination. These gods, and the few who remember them, have found their chance — for a ritual copied blindly from an instruction booklet, or a sacred ratio embodied in fibreboard instead of stone, still holds the same power.
This is a bold claim, and demands us to expand our understanding of what can constitute “cult value”. For Benjamin, it is axiomatic that while ordinary worshippers may not have access to the work of art and be fundamentally ignorant about it – think of the divine statues sequestered in the rear of Greek temples, or, less representationally, the placement of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies – the priest does engage directly, physically, and intentionally with the image, and through their role as intercessor connects the veneration of the non-present worshipper with the aura of the artwork. Kirwin elegantly reverses this exclusive formulation – the worshipper remains ignorant of the higher mysteries, but is granted access to a mass-produced replica of the objet that nonetheless retains its cultic nous. What complicates this picture is the role played by the protagonist –
OK OK I’m dropping the bit. I’m reduced to comedy-art-history because for a change I don’t have a ton to say about Assembly; it’s got a killer premise that it executes with elegance, and my only complaint is that it left me wanting more; despite the blurb promising an hour and a half, it only took me half an hour to get through (my experience with estimated construction times for furniture is very much the opposite).
Really, it’s all very well done. The loopiness of taking something so workaday and familiar as IKEA and mashing it up with cosmic horror is inspired, but actually makes an odd amount of sense. And the jokes are spot-on – sure, making up punny IKEA-style names for different pieces of furniture is a common pastime (…we all do this, right?) but I got a good chuckle out of several of these, especially the way that the name of the table you start out building presages what’s to come.
Turning to the gameplay, the various puzzles are all logical, and build on each other in a way that makes the player feel clever; maybe they’re a little too easy, but better that than too hard. The implementation is top-notch, too – with all these flat-packs, instruction manuals, screws, pins, pegs, nuts, screwdrivers, hex keys, &c &c I thought this would be disambiguation hell, but instead everything feels very smooth, with the parser keeping up with even shorthand commands for each step of assembly or deconstruction. If anything, I thought the game could have stood to add more friction here, and make the process of building things more of a challenge (Spoiler - click to show)(I kept waiting for there to be a gag where one of the pieces of furniture had incorrect instructions or holes too small for its screws or something – c’mon, I love IKEA too, but we all know that it happens – and then that triggering a blood sacrifice or something when you inadvertently cut yourself, but that shoe never dropped).
So yeah, I guess I’m hoping for a sequel that just gives us more of all the good stuff here on offer; maybe Walter Benjamin wouldn’t have been so down on mass-production if he knew it’d get us awesome things like Assembly.
Navel-gazing voyages, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
So here’s a deeply thought-out model for adventure stories that I’ve just thought up this second: imagine a line that says “external conflict” on one end and “internal conflict” on the other, then plot out various stories along the continuum. There’s a range of what works, certainly, but probably most of the really successful stuff lies somewhere around the middle: your Lords of the Ringses, say, where the business of orc-slaying is balanced by Frodo and Gollum undergoing their mirrored crises of self-doubt; or your original-flavor Star Wars, a bit further towards the external side what with all the laser-swords and pew-pew-pew stuff but still slowing down to deal with Luke’s journey towards white-guy Zen enlightenment and Han emerging from his solipsism. If you get really fancy, of course, you set things up so that the external conflicts rhyme with the internal stuff, but that’s not strictly necessary for a satisfying adventure, just gravy that moves you upwards on the orthogonal literary/unpretentious axis.
But shifting too far on the conflict continuum does risk pushing the formula to the point of breakdown: not enough internal conflict and you’ve got bubble-gum pulp that evanesces as soon as it’s consumed; not enough external conflict and you’ve taken the “adventure” part out of the adventure – which is my second-biggest critique of The Ship. This big choice-based game is pitched as a journey into mystery, with two captains charting their respective courses into uncertainty and danger, with only a cryptic poem to guide them, in search of a transcendent experience beyond mere treasure. And that’s a great pitch! But the game doesn’t really sell the high-stakes nature of the voyage; most of the challenges you experience aren’t about testing your wits against a hostile nature or devious foes, but rather getting a recalcitrant ship and querulous crew to keep moving in pursuit of the goal.
These are technically external obstacles, I know – maybe my model is not as ironclad as I thought – but they feel decidedly low-key. The game’s first puzzle involves winning a game of liar’s dice against a crewmember to win back the astrolabe he borrowed from the ship’s navigator, which is fun enough in itself but of course feels like busywork since you’re the captain and could just order him to give it back; others require you to fix damage to your ship (largely inflicted offscreen), investigate a spate of thefts, and fetch some soup for a prisoner. There is a minigame that sees you navigating through a series of treacherous passages, but it plays as a highly mechanical programming puzzle where you input your moves ahead of time and see if they bring you through; it’s reasonably engaging, but fairly bloodless. It’s all stuff that could work well if the game was attempting to provide a low-key simulation of shipboard life in the early 18th Century, but both from the blurb and the structure of the game, it’s clear that it’s aiming at, but failing to reach, a more dynamic, epic feel.
The game’s biggest issue, though, is its inappropriate prose style. Skillful writing could have perhaps bridged the gap between The Ship’s ambitious premise and its quotidian reality, and period-appropriate prose could have livened up the historical tourism aspect of the game. But instead, what’s on offer is informal and contemporary. Here’s a bit of the main character’s journal:
"All my life, I never truly belonged. Never had a family, a job, or something else that would make me a normal person. Hell, fuck normal persons, could not even be a half-decent pirate to earn my living! The sea was too much of a hassle for me."
Modulo the pirate-orphan stuff, this sounds more like a middle-class emo teenager from 1997 than a dashing ship’s captain from 1719. As that awkwardly-inserted f-bomb indicates, there’s also a fair bit of profanity, but it doesn’t sound anything like what I’d imagine someone of the captain’s background would actually say; I couldn’t help but compare the game’s use of language to that of To Sea in a Sieve, and the Ship sadly comes up wanting. And while I’m probably more of a stickler for period detail than most, for a contemporary style to work in this story, it would have to be more engaging, and again, epic – while it does reach for big-picture imagery in a few sequences, the writing is largely content to stick in this low-key dear-diary sort of mode.
So these are the reasons why the game didn’t fully work for me, but I have to admit there’s a lot to like here. The cast of supporting characters are quite one-note, but they’re generally pretty appealing, and the various minigames are skillfully programmed and change up the gameplay, even if they do get a bit repetitive and the navigation one dearly needs a function allowing you to edit your movement queue rather than just delete everything back to where you made a mistake (the biggest of these puzzles is almost fifty moves long! I confess I consulted the walkthrough for a couple of these). It also ends strong, with a climax that unites the two strands of the plot and posits a resolution that would externalize the internal conflicts that came before in a way that could have worked, if the earlier segments had been stronger. And speaking of the second strand of the plot, I haven’t said much about it because it actually functions as a pretty cool reveal. But there isn’t enough ballast to keep The Ship fully afloat.
PC LOAD LETTER, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
For its first ten minutes, I was pretty convinced that Fix Your Mother’s Printer just wasn’t going to work for me. The title and blurb instantly convey a compelling comedic premise – troubleshooting printers is annoying enough, much less with someone who’s probably a little out of step with modern technology, much much less via Zoom – but the initial exchanges with my mom seemed to indicate that it was also going to wring some jokes out of not-so-friendly banter and maybe even some passive-aggression; she reproached me for never calling, while most of my dialogue options contained some barb or other to throw in return.
That’s fine so far as it goes, but look, unless I’m prompted to play a specific character, I usually play IF as if I were myself – I mean, I am myself, but you know what I mean. And my mom is pretty great! She likes wine, NPR, and the New York Times games app, and though she lives on the opposite coast she comes out to visit for a couple of weeks every few months to offer free babysitting and cook delicious dinners. So I was already pretty disinclined to be mean to my game-mom, all the more so since she’s drawn to look not too different from my real one.
I was resigning myself to not enjoying this one as much as I hoped I would as I embarked on the tech-support odyssey, trying to at least pick the least-prickly options – when I realized the game was actually following my lead and the dialogue on both sides appeared to soften. I actually wrote in my notes file “seems like she’s getting less acerbic”, and then alt-tabbed back to see that the next line of dialogue involved the mom saying she was glad I was being nice, since “sometimes you can be a little bit acerbic.” Turns out I was on the same wavelength as this game after all! And from there I settled in to have a positive, lovely time.
That is, a positive, lovely time with my mom; the printer was an obstreperous beast throughout. You have to work through checking the power, the print que, the drivers, the toner, the firmware… I’m no longer an expert at this kind of thing, I should admit – I’ve long since experienced the transition that prompts soul-searching for so many middle-aged geeks, going from “I know how to write my own autoexec.bat and himem.sys files” to “can someone please tell me how to turn off the Apple TV?” (that isn’t a randomly chosen example; if any of y’all know, please do drop me a line) – but I thought the troubleshooting bits worked well, hitting the right balance between frustration and at least narrowing down the possible problems. And with me and my mom firmly on the same side, the increasingly-ridiculous lengths we had to go to to try to fix things provided grist for our double act; it was more good-natured than laugh-out-loud funny, but it was still really enjoyably written, and I did giggle when some joint of hers let out a loud crack when she bent down to move the printer, and she told me “you have no idea what’s coming to you, physically.”
The rat-a-tat comedic timing meant that I often was clicking through so fast that I missed changes in the game’s graphics, but that’s my own fault. The interface is nicely set up to mimic a video call while keeping ample screen real estate for the all-important text, and the charming, hand-drawn image of your mom updates as her expression changes, she ducks out of frame to mess with the printer, or Very Good Boy Pawford pops in for a cameo (even though it’s accomplished vicariously, petting Pawford was the best bit of doggie tummy-rubbing I’ve seen in a piece of IF in quite some time). They’re never overbearing, and as my experience indicates, you can pretty much ignore the visual elements if you want, but they do add a really pleasant vibe to the proceedings.
So all was well that ended well; we did manage to fix the printer, and despite what seemed at the beginning of the call like a threat to discuss your dating life once the tech support was done, actually that part was really sweet too – as was another sequence involving talking to her about her in-progress divorce or separation from your dad. I was not expecting Fix Your Mother’s Printer to be gently emotional, but turns out that was my major takeaway vibe. What’s even more impressive is that there seems to be significant branching – from reading other folks’ experiences with the game, it’s possible to fail to fix the printer, to have a way more conflict-oriented conversation with your mom, and generally have a completely different experience. Still, I’m quite satisfied with the ending I got; how can you expect a printer to play nice if you aren’t going to?
Communications breakdown, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Dysfluent is part of a subgenre of IF that foregrounds the experience of living with a disability. I’ve played a number of such games, focusing on autism, OCD, social anxiety, and I’m sure there are many others I’ve forgotten, and beyond the subject matter they tend to have common threads: they’re most often short, choice-based, and allow the player to engage with the disability via a central game or interface mechanic. I’d also say that much of the time, their focus on the subjective experience of a particular challenge understandably gets prioritized over traditional IF elements like narrative, character development, or gameplay; they tend to be immersive and dramatize short, intensive events that don’t leave much room for such things. There’s nothing wrong with making those choices, in my view – I’ve found many of these games effective and memorable – but I think I’d internalized the necessity of this tradeoff to such a degree that it felt deeply surprising to me when Dysfluent demonstrated that it’s eminently possible to depict a disability in an informed, sensitive way, while still including a plot arc, impactful choices, and a well-characterized protagonist, without any significant compromises required.
As the title suggests, Dysfluent’s main character lives with a stutter, which makes the quotidian tasks that make up game’s plot – picking up a gift for a friend, attending a celebratory lunch, and interviewing for a new job – a bit of a minefield, and one with a lot of minute-to-minute uncertainty. While sometimes your speech impediment manifests in very intense ways, other times it’s relatively minor, and you’ve developed a host of workarounds and other strategies to help manage it. This means that the player’s actually given a fair degree of agency, since the interface allows you to see the likely difficulty level of the various dialogue options you’re given; you can decide that in a particular situation it’s more important to be understood quickly than to take the time needed to get out exactly what you intended to say, or just wave at someone rather than say hi to avoid the dilemma entirely.
I never felt like there was a single right approach, as the different contexts the game offered for these interactions shifted my sense of the tradeoffs. Dysfluent also does a good job of making these decisions important both internally and externally. The protagonist appear to have had their stutter since childhood – and per some flashbacks, are carrying around some trauma from some callous and clueless behavior from parents, friends, and teachers – and feels a lot of pressure to avoid discussion of, or calling attention to, it. As a result, the choices aren’t simply cold-blooded exercises in optimization; they also impact how authentic the protagonist is able to be, both with themself and with their friends.
It’s nice that the game doesn’t make this too one-dimensional on the other side, either; I didn’t feel judged when I decided to give a fake but easier-to-say name when picking up coffee because I just wanted to push the easy button. Dysfluent also isn’t a total misery-fest – I certainly respect games that lean into that approach, but it’s also nice to see protagonists in these sorts of games get a win. Despite a little bit of difficulty communicating, I was able to get exactly the right present for my friend’s birthday, which helped get the game off on the right foot and reassured me that my choices could have an impact. And while some of the other interactions didn’t go so well, I was OK with that; when bad things happened, it generally seemed like a logical consequence rather than the game trying too hard to make a point.
The elephant in the room is the omnipresent use of timed text. This is unavoidable given Dysfluent’s subject matter; it’s the obvious mechanic to represent the stutter, and it definitely helps the player experience the frustration of not being able to get out what they want to say. Still, there’s no two ways around the fact that this design choice does mean intentionally frustrating the player, and I do think the annoyance factor could have been tuned slightly down without harming the marriage of gameplay with theme – in particular, timed text is sometimes used when it doesn’t seem necessary, like delaying your internal thought processes or dialogue from other characters.
On the positive side, the game does allow you to turn off the delay after finishing it, if you want to go back and try to make different choices or gather some of the achievements you missed your first time through – again, it appears that there’s a lot of branching, and that achievement section is quite robust. So those “new game plus” options are a nice convenience, but also an indication that the author’s thought about who Dysfluent works as a game, not just as an experience, and it’s all the better for it.
Divine investigation, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Adapting a piece of static fiction into IF is a vexed challenge that could bedevil even the wily Odysseus. On one side, there’s the risk of hewing so closely to the original story that a player who’s familiar with it gets bored, knowing all the plot twists in advance – call that Scylla. On the other side lurks the danger of changing things so much that the coherence of the story falls apart, and it deviates so much from its inspiration that it no longer functions as an adaptation – call that Charybdis. Of course, this dilemma doesn’t cut so deeply if a player hasn’t read the original, though this creates its own problems: “come play my adaptation of the Odyssey, except if you like the Odyssey, this isn’t for you” is a rough marketing line. Detective Osiris proposes another way out of the bind, though, by adapting a myth – myths, after all, having a certain margin of error, being endlessly retold and reinterpreted in ways that occasionally differ from each other in quite radical ways. It nonetheless sails a wobbly course – at first I thought it tacked too close to Scylla, then at the end I was worried Charybdis was going to get it – but ultimately it does make it through.
This Ink retelling of the story of Osiris starts out with many of the traditional plot points: you wake up in Duat, the Egyptian underworld, having been hewn apart and then painstakingly reassembled and resurrected as a god through the good offices of your wife Isis. Rather than immediately taking up your new divine duties, however, the other gods of the pantheon encourage you to investigate your murder so you can bring justice to the unknown perpetrator. This plays out largely through interviewing suspects, both divine and mortal, as you wander through a small but pleasing recreation of Ancient Egypt and its imagined afterlife, with a few puzzles tacked on towards the end of the case.
These conversations aren’t anything special in gameplay terms; there are typically only a few dialogue options in each, and you don’t need to work too hard to figure out who’s lying or choose an approach, as simple lawnmowering will work just fine. I did enjoy getting to know the various characters, though, especially the gods, who are given a recognizably modern slant: Geb is imagined as a TV addict who views the lives of mortals as “content”, while Anubis and Ammit are pets of Ma’at and Thoth (they’re both pettable: Anubis is a good doggy and clearly enjoys it, while Ammit doesn’t acknowledge the gesture in the slightest, which Ma’at says is a sign that she likes you). Sometimes this perhaps goes a bit too far – Ma’at’s dialogue skews a bit too informal for my taste, and Ra saying “wow. I love that” does undercut the majesty of the sun god – the game’s casual attitude towards anachronism occasionally leads to an inadvertent howler, like the mention of Alexandria at a time thousands of years before its founding, but on balance I found this more interesting than a more traditional, wooden approach would have been.
The puzzles, on the other hand, feel somewhat vestigial. There are only two, and the multiple-choice format combined with the lack of any penalty for failure means they’re trivial to brute-force. Even if you try to solve them honestly, one is far too easy, and the second (a math puzzle) is maybe a bit too tough. I appreciated the attempt to change up the gameplay, but I think the author would have been better off either leaning in by having more, more robust puzzles, or simply dropping them and focusing on the character interactions exclusively.
As for the prose with which all of this is rendered, I found it rather inconsistent. It starts out quite nicely, with this description of your experience of revival:
"When I wake up, I can taste the river in my throat. I’m laying in a glade, which seems unkissed by the sun and yet somehow still lit. The trees have cobalt leaves and the thicket is so dense that it obscures any kind of sky."
That’s quite nice! There’s also a sex scene which, impressively, isn’t terrible or cringe-inducing (though it does seem to indicate a major departure from the original myth, given that Isis famously couldn’t find one specific bit when she was stitching Osiris back together…) But there are some bits where the attempt to bring in a slight noir tone leads to comedy:
"I can scarcely believe it. Dead? And chopped into pieces? It didn’t exactly sound like an accident."
The text also boasts a fair number of typos and spelling errors, most of which are forgivable (it’s for its, that sort of thing), but there were still enough of them to occasionally take me out of the story.
So it’s all solid enough and engaging on its own terms, but I still found myself slightly checked out for the first three-quarters or so of the game. The trouble is that per the myth, I knew perfectly well who the perpetrator was, and the game doesn’t work very hard to hide the ball. So while running around and ticking the boxes on my investigative checklist was all well and good, none of the conversations really told me anything I didn’t already know, and again, Detective Osiris doesn’t make you jump through any hoops to obtain these somewhat-underwhelming clues. On the one hand, it was nice that the game didn’t require me to play dumb; on the other hand, that means this murder-mystery isn’t very mysterious.
But then the game did something unexpected, throwing in a twist I didn’t see coming at all. I’m not convinced it fully holds together – and it’s certainly not very well seeded in the previous section of the game, further undermining any claim Osiris has to being a detective – but it is reasonably clever and reinterprets the myth in a new way. It’s not going to replace the original, of course, and I do think the game maybe skews too faithful in the early going before getting too radical in the end, where a more consistent approach would have worked better. Even so, Detective Osiris still averages out to a novel-but-not-too-novel take that makes it through adaptation’s peril-filled strait only a bit worse for wear.
Lights, camera..., December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My wife and I visited Venice a few years ago, on a trip that had a lot of conventional highlights – the Arsenale! The Bridge of Sighs! That quadriga they stole from Constantinople! – and one that was quite unconventional. We went in late October, as the tourist season was starting to ebb, and though the city was still flooded with people during the day, many of them were cruise people who went back to their ships in the evenings, so once the sun was down it was surprisingly thinly populated. In fact one night as we walked back after dinner, the campo in front of our hotel was completely deserted, and as we marveled at the romantic ambiance, we suddenly spied a flickering light off at the other side of the square, in a heretofore-unnoticed breezeway leading around the side of a decaying building. We crept closer and saw that, oddly, small candles had been placed at intervals at the sides of the passage, leading us down and down the arcade into a night that suddenly felt quite black and cold, though still just as absent of human life. As we considered whether to keep going, I felt near-certain that either a ghost was going to appear, or we were going to be murdered, but either way it was going to be stylish.
From its movie-aping cover image to its multilingual-pun title (“yellow” is “giallo” in Italian, of course), Barcarolle in Yellow is similarly enticing, promising lurid thrills in a memorable setting. As an actress specializing in Italian B-movies, you’re summoned to Venice with the promise of work, but soon find yourself teetering at the edge of madness as plot points from the film – like a mask-clad stalker and a depraved cult – become all too real. Have you just been popping too many pills, or are the brutish director and sinister psychoanalyst in on the plot? And are you just the victim, or something else entirely?
This is a lovely lovely premise, but sadly for me the game didn’t quite live up to it, for two main reasons. First, the setting is surprisingly underutilized, and in fact Barcarolle in Yellow overall doesn’t provide much in the way of striking imagery. There’s something charming about entire districts of Venice being rendered as single locations, but the effect is to make an already-small city even more cramped. The general absence of implemented scenery – or even mentioned scenery – also drains the setting of some charm. Like, here’s the description for Piazza San Marco, omitting only the listing of exits:
"The best-known square of Venice, perhaps of Italy, featuring the church of San Marco, the iconic Campanile and the Doge’s Palace, as well as a grand view of the lagoon to the south and the island-monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore on the other side of the water."
This is a singularly underwhelming rendering of one of the most beautiful places on earth, and what’s worse, trying to examine any of the landmarks gets a terse reminder that you’re here “to work, not to see the sights.” Where a screenwriter might be able to get away with simply writing “EXT – LIDO – NIGHT” on faith that the director will add the details and ambiance, this works less well in IF form; again, I could fill in the blanks a bit from my own experience, but I still found myself wishing that the prose provided a more evocative jumping-off point for my imagination – all the more so since this is nominally a giallo, which thrive on atmosphere. Sure, things do get more evocative and intense in the interstitial cut-scene sequences, and there is the occasional exception, like a psychiatrist’s office that’s described with well-chosen details, but this can’t really substitute for the relative thinness of the interactive sections.
And speaking of interaction, that’s the other place where I thought the game fell a bit short. You’ve definitely got some interesting things to do, from escaping a violent mob to trying to catch the killer on film, but I never felt like an equal partner in proceedings; instead, like an actor working for a domineering director, I felt henpecked, pushed to do whatever specific thing the game had in mind with no tolerance, much less reward, for trying to explore off the beaten path. As mentioned above, the authorial voice even hurries the player past examining things it doesn’t want you to look at, but beyond that, the puzzle design is actively discouraging of experimentation – your introduction to Venice is a chase sequence with not even a single turn to spare, the movie-filming sequences adhere to a rigid set of requirements (you’re not even allowed to scream when someone gets gunned down in the Western you’re filming in the prologue), and in general I just felt like I was somewhat surplus to requirements. This reached a nadir in the ending, where the final text seemed to assume I’d accomplished something I’d spent many turns unsuccessfully wrestling with the parser to attempt (Spoiler - click to show)(shooting either my double or myself – the game kept insisting the gun was unloaded, even though I’d opened it and seen the bullet in the chamber). There are some decision points that seem to determine which of several endings you receive, but these are similarly curated, coming as yes/no decisions that break into the normal flow of parser gameplay, so I found they didn’t add much in the way of engagement.
Admittedly, the game’s thin implementation and occasional bugginess also meant that in the back half of the game I hewed closer to the critical path. When I took an action necessary to solve the first puzzle, for example, the opening sequence where the director of the Western yelled cut and a boy ran up with a telegram inviting me to Venice suddenly replayed, despite already being in the Venice train station. And an action sequence involving falling off the Ponte Rialto was somewhat undermined by the ability to enter a souvenir shop mid-descent, and pick up a passing motorboat along the way.
For all that, once I just gave up and went with the game’s direction, I did have a reasonably fun time. While this isn’t a story for the ages, it hits some fun beats, and gets many points for novelty (is there a second parser giallo?) And it’s occasionally quite skillful in how it mixes artifice with reality, with the protagonist’s real life sometimes seeming to be a movie, and vice versa. Still, I wish I hadn’t had to work so hard to meet the game halfway; this one needed a little more time in pre-production and a director who’s a little less of a control freak, though I could still see it gaining a cult following.
Old-school to a fault, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Points to The Witch for delivering when it comes to terror – guessing that in an old-school game like this the SCORE command might be useful, I was chilled to read the phrase “the game is winnable from this point” after it duly recited that I’d garnered 0 of 150 points. That positive statement, reassuring on its face, gives rise to what we fancy JDs call a negative inference: it wouldn’t be there unless at some point the game becomes unwinnable.
I don’t necessarily have a philosophical objection to games that are cruel in the Zarfian sense, I don’t think; in some cases, requiring restarts to optimize a puzzle solution or having certain especially significant or bone-headed choices lock a player out of victory might be defensible. No, my issue is a practical one, which is that cruel games, especially those of the old-school persuasion, are often tedious – there’s often a lot of retracing of one’s steps, resolving of puzzles one has tried before, and just generally faffing about in an uninteresting way. Sadly, The Witch already has a tedium problem, with a mostly-generic setting, a yawn-worthy premise, and fiddly features like an inventory limit. Add to this a generally high level of difficulty that seems to require authorial ESP to progress, and hair-trigger failure states that punish the player for the slightest deviation from the walkthrough, and I have to confess I couldn’t motivate myself to finish, even though I only put slightly more than an hour into it.
Let me start out by saying there were some elements I like. The player character is an elf with a mead hangover who missed the titular witch’s abduction of his village-mates because he was off on the aforementioned bender. I like this premise both because it’s implied that these aren’t like Noldor-type elves but rather Keebler ones, and also because I find the mead hangover thing very relatable; I’ve only had mead twice in my life, and each time I woke up the next morning praying for death. So me and this elf were sympatico. And while the prose is generally quite terse as per the usual style for this sort of throwback puzzlefest, there were some neat set-pieces, like an encounter with a giant owl, and some places where the writing went to some extra effort:
“This cottage belongs to Widow Elf, the matriarch of the village. The air is thick and still, smelling vaguely of lavender. Sunlit dust motes dance in the faint light. The cottage is warm, the air oppressive.”
That’s one more clause about the air than is needed, and Gloria Steinem could have a field day on how this lady’s identity is literally subsumed by that of her dead husband, but the passage is still way more lyrical than I expected.
Now that we’ve reached the inevitable pivot, though, I have to rattle off the stuff that wasn’t so nice. For one thing, the implementation is quite thin, with a lot of objects mentioned in location descriptions either not available to interact with, or brushed off with a “you don’t need to refer to the X”. Said locations are also pretty repetitive, with a lot of empty paths and elf cottages with only one or two salient features; combined, these two issues mean that exploration of the reasonably-sized map is a drag. Speaking of, there are at least two mazes; I made my way through one with a bit of trial and error, which wasn’t too bad, but come on, gimmick-less mazes in 2023 – in a game with a time limit – are a hard pill to swallow.
And oh, speaking of hard, the puzzles. Some of them aren’t bad in concept, but seem quite fiddly in implementation (Spoiler - click to show)(I’d come up with the idea of using the birdseed to get the key from the owl, but he attacked me every time I brought the seed out of the contained I’d hidden it in; from the walkthrough, it seems like you have to make use of Inform’s implicit take function to solve this puzzle, which is a really high bar); others just don’t seem to make any sense (Spoiler - click to show)(is there a clue anywhere that indicates that you should show the teddy bear to the catatonic elf?). And then, as mentioned above, there are the fail states; there are a couple of traditional puzzles that I would have enjoyed muddling through, one involving finding the correct combination for a series of levers, the other involving using a cart to explore a mine, but for the fact that they actively discourage experimentation. If you try a single incorrect combination for the levers, the machinery permanently stops working (this is especially egregious because the most logical way to read the one clue you get points to the inverse of the correct combination, not the one the game actually accepts), and the mine cart zooms off without you if you neglect a single step in what becomes a rather involved trial-by-error process, plus you need to do the whole sequence before your lamp burns down, which is on a ridiculously short timer.
I know there are folks who like this sort of thing, either out of nostalgia or sheer bloody-mindedness (hey, Francis Bacon, over here! Have I got a game for you!) But I got into IF through Photopia, not Zork or Adventure, and such as they are, my kinks top out at quite liking brunettes. God bless you people who will like The Witch, but I am not one of you (hell, you folks probably like mead, too).
Systems of oppression, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Thing of Wretchedness bills itself as sandbox horror, which is a phrase I read in the blurb then promptly forgot about; now, though, as I turn over which parts of the game worked and which didn’t work for me, I’m realizing that label is key to the whole experience. The horror elements are clear enough: you play an older woman, living in an isolated, snow-bound cottage, who’s desperately writing away for help dealing with a big, awful thing too terrible to describe that’s taken up residence with her – while they coexist uneasily at first, the threat of future violence is omnipresent. The sandbox elements are well-defined, too – there are several different paths you can pursue, each flagged with greater or lesser obviousness, from attempting to deal with the thing yourself to looking for external aid to trying to plumb the mystery of its existence. And the major gameplay challenge isn’t so much the simple puzzles as it is solving said puzzles while managing the thing’s semi-random behavior; ToW feels more open-ended than the typical parser game as a result since no static walkthrough will guide you to the end.
While each of these elements is well-done, I’m not sure they fit together all that well, though. In particular, while I enjoyed the game’s presentation of Lovecraftian tropes, I didn’t find it the least bit creepy. Partially this is down to the decision not to describe the thing’s appearance or behavior in any detail, but I think that’s partially motivated by a desire not to have the thing’s repetitive, system-driven actions clash with a more literary prose style. And of course the tension in horror depends almost entirely on pacing, which is hard for an author to manage when so much of what happens and what order it happens in is out of their control. Sure, there are other horror video games that use semi-emergent behavior to get scares, like your Amnesias and what all, but I’m not sure these techniques translate well to the text-based context, without audio and visuals. Lastly, I didn’t get much sense of the protagonist’s subjectivity; I think this was intentionally done to try to conceal a twist that she presumably knows about but the player doesn’t, but the downside is that because she rarely felt all that concerned about the thing, neither did I (it also doesn’t help that I guessed the twist about thirty seconds into the game).
Meanwhile, the sandbox-y gameplay is pretty engaging – while I was several steps ahead of the plot, it was a fun reveal when I started to understand the rules for how the thing worked and figured out how that would help me achieve some of my goals. But in practice, the player’s tools for manipulating these systems are limited, so I wound up spending a bunch of time banging the Z key to wait for the thing to do exactly what I wanted; that’s no big deal in of itself, but again, slight boredom is antithetical to any mood of real horror.
The game’s endings are fortunately among its best elements, so while the middle section did sometimes drag a bit, it finished strong. The actions you need to take in several of them are bleak and intense, making up for the slacker pieces that came before. I also enjoyed the crossover with the author’s previous (and excellent) Ascension of Limbs – it’s not anything that a new player will miss, just a slight bit of added context to a small frame-story, but it puts a cute button on the game while hinting at the events that happen after the formal action of the game is done. So while A Thing of Wretchedness definitely feels like a minor game, it very much has its pleasures, even as it demonstrates that marrying a horror story with sandbox gameplay is a hard nut to crack in IF.
Snipe hunting, December 4, 2023Out of Scope tells a story of twin siblings brought into deadly conflict. Reared by a prominent military family, their parents try to push them apart for fear of an obsessive love between them that might border on the romantic; the son is trained to be a soldier, despite his disinclination to violence, while the far-more-vicious daughter is shunted into peaceable work. Their domestic psychodrama is soon caught up in great-power politicking, in a world that may differ from ours in the details – all of the country names are imagined – but is otherwise quite similar – there’s colonialism, a military propaganda machine, and Shakespeare has somehow persisted – and the story is all too likely to end in tragedy.
The only literary precedent this mélange brings to mind is Ada, or Ardor, with its too-close sibling bond, aristocratic milieu, and alternate-history setting of Anti-Terra, and if you are aping Nabokov, you are flying close to the sun. It’s a high-wire act, in other words, but sadly, one that I don’t think succeeds, as the ambition of the premise is let down by a terrible UI, inconsistent writing, weak pacing, and at least one game-stopping bug. For a game that set its sights lower, maybe none of these issues would be fatal, but given that the themes Out of Scope puts on the table are extraordinarily freighted – again, the player is asked to invest in a quasi-incestuous relationship between young twins – these are deadly flaws.
(As a point of disclosure, I should probably acknowledge that since I’m a twin – or rather, was a twin, since my sister passed away a few years ago – the whole twincest angle would at best be facing a steep uphill climb with me. For all that, I did like Ada, or Ardor, but I’m struggling to think of a second story about sibling incest that doesn’t want to make me throw up. Still, I think the problems I experienced with Out of Scope aren’t purely down to personal idiosyncrasy).
I’ll start with the UI, because it’s impossible to ignore. Out of Scope is a Unity game (available in downloadable form as well as a browser option), and it offers a bespoke text-based interface; in each sequence, you’ll see a gray background onto which are scattered several small text boxes. Those with gray outlines just provide a bit of flavor text; those with black borders can be clicked on, which will often lead to further text, or possibly a yes-or-no choice that pops up as a thought balloon below the window. Choosing no might then lead to a different question popping up, allowing you to cycle through different options, though it’s never clear how many you might have, and in some cases considering all of your choices means you forfeit the chance to do anything at all. Oh, and these different boxes are often not visible from the start, requiring you to repeatedly drag around to search them out – sometimes moving to a new scene will lead you to an entirely blank screen, in fact, with the actual interactive bits of the passage scattered to the four winds. At least there are arrows that occasionally show up at the edges of the screen to point you towards boxes you can’t currently see, though I found they sometimes didn’t work. Plus the various buttons aren’t especially responsive, at least on my track pad, requiring double-clicking that sometimes speeds through text before you’re ready.
Oh oh oh, and it’s all animated so there are delays before text loads and the option-bubbles pop up.
Let me be very clear: playing this game was torture. Maybe it’s more manageable on a mouse, but the interface still adds a huge amount of friction to every interaction. In a tight, linear game where this was thematically appropriate, perhaps that would be forgivable, but Out of Scope goes for at least two hours, has long stretches where it wants you to explore a large map, and doesn’t try to create any resonance between the extra-diegetic abuse inflicted by the UI and the diegetic events of the game. There are moments when it is aesthetically pleasing, like a dinner party where each guest’s bit of dialogue shows up on overlapping text boxes that denote their places at the table – but even then, there would have been a million other ways to get a similar effect without inflicting such needless annoyance.
Contrarily, the writing does provide some high points, but doesn’t manage to sustain them throughout the wide-ranging plot. Some of the interactions between the twins have a sort of poetry to them:
"When two people are silent together, it’s like a song."
(This reminds me of one more interface complaint – highlighting text isn’t allowed, so I had to manually copy down any passage I wanted to quote).
The house that forms the main backdrop for the game is also often evocatively drawn, alternately imposing and pathetic depending on where you are in the timeline (the game’s chronology jumps around a fair bit). Here’s a bit noting an aftereffect of the fire that ruined the estate:
"The fire was intense here, warping and twisting metal cans of fruit and soup into little bombs."
On the other hand, there’s stuff like this:
"A south-easterly tor watches and chills and wets you from its prominence, irrespective of yours."
Huh? There are lots of head-scratchers like this, like saying of some fallen leaves “crisp winds divide them. Crisp thoughts too.” The game is full of malapropisms, from a moon likened to a “scrambled egg, white-yolked and runny in the pan” (….have you cooked an egg?) to a reference to “the twisted logic of a rubber sock.” And there are frequent dangling participles, confused pronouns, and verb-noun agreement issues. I feel like a bit of a jerk harping on this stuff, but again, Out of Scope is attempting some seriously challenging things – the stakes are very high for many of its set pieces, especially the highly-charged encounters between the twins, and when the prose gets weak or unclear, everything lurches towards comedy.
As to that relationship, though, the game’s structure does it no favors. The whole logic of the plot depends on there being a preternatural connection between the two siblings, but the game starts with a flash-forward where they’re already trying to kill each other – though the drama of this setup is blunted by requiring the player to explore a large area mostly devoid of points of interest before they can interact – and then flashes back to a sequence where they only have one short interaction before they get separated. By the time the game lets them meet again, as late teenagers, a lot of time has passed both in the plot and for the player – there’s an extended military-training sequence for the brother, then an even longer one where the sister wanders around the house before the aforementioned party – and by that point things are already weird and strained between them. It’s just not enough to establish the bond in any resonant way, all the more so because what the author is trying to set up isn’t just ordinary love between siblings, but something weirder and more intense that might not be incest but isn’t exactly not incest.
Then there’s the bug I mentioned. After I finished chapter 7 (of 10), I had to step away from my computer for an hour or so. When I came back to the game, the text boxes had all vanished and I was facing a blank yellow screen; scrolling around, or restarting the game and resuming my save, did nothing. I was about at the two hour mark, and the prospect of braving the interface to redo everything I’d done defeated me. Fortunately, the author provides a walkthrough that includes a basic plot summary, so I was able to learn how the game ends. Unfortunately, here’s where I learned that there was a whole additional layer of political intrigue that had been completely lost on me. Admittedly, some of this is stuff that appears to only come into play in the final few chapters, but the political maneuvering that I’d seen felt to me like it was meant to provide a backdrop for the family drama, rather than being robust enough to support major chunks of the narrative on its own. But there’s apparently a major twist that makes the twins’ relationship decidedly secondary to a wide-ranging espionage plot aimed at reconfiguring domestic politics in the family’s home country, which are only lightly sketched in the portions I saw; I suspect this swerve would be pretty unsatisfying to those who experience it. Also, this plot point hinges on understanding that this family, where the patriarch is part of a naval dynasty and keeps trophies of a country he helped conquer in his study and the mother runs a propaganda outlet selling a Thatcherite brew of social conservatism and militarism, are moderates, which is uh not how I experienced them.
Again, I can’t fault Out of Scope’s lofty goals – despite my hesitance about some of its themes, I really wanted it to succeed. But in every way, its reach exceeds its grasp. Reading the plot summary and thematic discussion contained in the walkthrough file, I can see how the game is meant to work in the author’s eyes, but it’s not there yet. With that said, God knows I’d be excited to see more smart, political IF that deals with complex sibling relationships, so I’m really hoping for a robustly-improved post-Comp release for this one.
Consulting vice-president, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
A game with a title like this isn’t exactly crying out for another reference to throw into the mix, but nonetheless, I have to do it: the figure out what the game is doing, we shouldn’t look to Shakespeare or The Godfather, but to Sherlock Holmes. That’s because this multiplayer whodunnit, where the titular couple team up to solve the murder of Raytheon CEO Marlon Brando in an alternate-reality Washington DC, is largely reimplementing the classic board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. This is no bad thing, let me hasten to add! I’ve been obsessed with the game ever since we had a copy of the video-enhanced original from back in the 80s (a part of the VHS-board game boom that is wholly regrettable save for the fact that it brought us Dragonstrike), since it’s such a unique concept in the boardgame arena: unlike other games in the subgenre like Clue, which abstract mystery-solving into abstract logic puzzles or deduction games, the cases in Consulting Detective are actual cases.
A few pages of read-aloud text introduce a crime, and then the players, working together, decide which leads to follow up on, picking suspects to interview, crime scenes to investigate, or contacts to visit. At each, another few paragraphs of text may reveal further clues, or indicate a dead end or red herring. And then, after time’s elapsed, the players are confronted with a quiz laying out the key questions for the mystery, and once they agree on their answers, there’s a final bit of story that tells them the actual solution and allows them to see how they did.
From that description it’s pretty clear that this is a species of analog IF, so it makes all the sense in the world to adapt the model to a digital incarnation. And implementing it as a multiplayer title is similarly a no-brainer: while other recent works of multiplayer IF have set up the players as directly or implicitly antagonistic, or given them asymmetric information to encourage cooperation, the player interaction here is purely about talking through the clues, developing theories of the case, and working together to solve the mystery. As a single player game, the relative mechanical simplicity would risk things getting dull; as a multiplayer game, it sings.
Antony & Cleopatra implements the model faithfully. The main investigative tool you’re given is a calendar that allows you to schedule suspect interviews or visits to key locations, with two slots available for each of the seven days you’ve got to solve the crime (the set of possible leads expands as you go, of course, and there are tools in the sidebar to remind you of who or what each is). Once a scene begins, you may just be given the relevant information or be told there’s nothing much to learn, but more frequently, there’ll be a list of questions or investigative avenues to pursue; these can typically be lawnmowered, but it does break up the wall-of-text issue that the board game sometimes runs into. There doesn’t appear to be state tracking – at one point, we noticed that a character had just told us something that contracted what someone else had said, but there was no option to call them on it – which is a little odd, but does mean that the players, rather than just the characters, need to be alert about the clues they’re gathering.
The game also departs from its inspiration by offering a few minor multiplayer-specific mechanics. The two players need to agree on which leads to follow, and that they’re finished with an investigative visit, before the game will move on; similarly, you of course need to reach unanimity on the end-of-game questionnaire laying out your ultimate theory of the case. The most game-like mechanic is the dialogue options specific to each character; while it doesn’t matter who clicks on most topics, a few are marked with an A or a C to indicate that it’s available only to Antony or Cleopatra respectively. It appears that these always are offered in analogous pairs, and the choice of which character should take lead seems to roughly correspond to a good cop/bad cop split, with Antony generally taking a more direct approach than Cleo. It also appears this is largely a cosmetic difference rather than one leading to dramatically different clues being revealed, but even if it’s largely superficial, it’s still a pleasant reminder that there are two distinct characters here, not a single blob being jointly piloted by the two players (although since they are always accompanied by an FBI agent sidekick as well as a half-dozen royal bodyguards, actually there is more than a little blobbiness). Impressively, as far as I could tell there’s actually quite a lot of variation between the text the two players see; while key clues seem to show up in both, Cleo tends to be more perceptive about interpersonal dynamics, while Antony (who’s the Vice President of the US, by the way – don’t think I mentioned that!) has a deeper understanding of everyone’s social and political positioning. As a result, comparing notes on impressions and theories is richer than it would otherwise be.
So much for the systems – what about the setting and story? As to the former, it’s a fun mash-up of 50s Hollywood with Ancient Rome, and serves as an enjoyable romp through the sights and sounds of DC, but I couldn’t help but wish it went a little deeper. If there’s some underlying logic connecting these various inspirations, it’s not foregrounded, and while this odd juxtaposition could make for some wackiness, the game generally plays things straight; there are a few good jokes here and there, but when Cleo doesn’t even make a comment about visiting Alexandria, VA, it feels like a missed opportunity. Similarly, it sure seems like a game that puts President-for-Life Julius Caeser in charge of the US and then has a plot hinging on the murder of a defense contractor should have something to say about the military-industrial complex. It also doesn’t really go into the alternate-history aspects; if Napoleon is the French Ambassador to the US in 2021, I’m guessing that the early parts of the Long 19th Century must have been very different in this world, but we don’t get even a whiff of that. I got the sense that the pop-culture stuff was mainly just used to make the names of the characters more memorable – it’s way easier to recall that Audrey Hepburn is the new Raytheon CEO than if it were some rando, to be fair – but the game’s refusal to play out the implications of its choices sometimes frustrated me. The depiction of DC, meanwhile, is generally quite good, though there are a couple details that suggest it wasn’t written by a native (despite being the home of a university, Georgetown sadly doesn’t really have the boho vibe it’s given in the game, and rich neighborhoods not having sidewalks is far more of a California phenomenon than an East Coast one).
As for the mystery itself (he says, a thousand words in), it’s pretty good, neither too simple nor too complex. Industrial espionage, national security, and sordid personal affairs are all in the mix, and while the time limit is relatively forgiving and it’s not too challenging to suss out the basics of what’s going on, the story’s sufficiently twisty to make for fun conversations between the partners. The case is faithful to most of the ones I’ve played from Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective by having at least one element of the solution feel like it requires a big leap of intuition to get right, but that’s probably the right balance to strike; getting ¾ of the details right is in some ways more satisfying than either being completely ahead of the game, or floundering.
I’ve been a little down on the game here, as is my wont, but that’s largely because I think this approach has a lot of potential that’s only been partially realized in this particular case. If there is a Case V, I hope it marries the setting more deeply into the mystery, and perhaps takes a bit more advantage of the digital medium to offer some more involved mechanics – I actually missed the vintage newspapers, London map, and telephone directory that in the board game offer some additional avenues of finding leads beyond just picking who to interview next. All that’s forgivable in a first instalment, though; Antony and Cleopatra’s unique and enjoyable, and well deserves a follow-up.
Might make light ... lake? (I am bad at this), December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Graham Nelson’s adage about a work of IF being a crossword puzzle at war with a narrative has been rattling around for decades at this point, so it’s perhaps surprising that so few authors have steered into the crossword side of things. By this I don’t mean puzzles at the expense of narrative – there are still plenty of puzzlefests out there, of course – or even literal crosswords – shout-out to 2000’s Letters From Home! – but adopting the crossword puzzle model. Like, most authors (myself included) tend to conceptualize their games as distinct, requiring bespoke narratives and mechanics , or if they’re part of a series, adopting a traditional narrative throughline connecting installments. And yet, for all that, I have cheerfully played the New York Time crossword every day for – [checks statistics on phone] – actually, let’s not get into details, but suffice to say, a whole long time, and the fact that the framework is almost entirely static isn’t at all a barrier to my enjoyment, because the variety in clues and theming is enough to make each one feel unique.
Andrew Schultz is one of the few authors who’s exploring this territory, notably with his series of rhyming wordplay games, of which the present instalment is the sixth. As with a crossword, the basics are the same each time – the player navigates a somewhat-absurdist space, and when prompted with the two-word name of a location or significant object, needs to come up with a rhyming phrase that substitutes a different letter or sound at the beginning, as in the game’s title (we’re miles away from the traditional medium-dry-goods model). The games don’t tend to have very involved narratives, as often-idiosyncratic circumstances required to support the baroque wordplay aren’t really consistent with the Aristotelian unities, but they do have cross-cutting themes that animate some of the more memorable set-pieces and serve to distinguish them from each other. They also all boast incredibly robust quality of life features, from a hint function that tells you whether a guess is partially right and how far off you might be, to a THINK command that memorializes guesses that match the wordplay constraints but require some change in the world model to be effective, to a handy list of the most common English phonemes if you’re reduced to lawnmowering (reader, while I enjoy them, I am not very good at these games and am always reduced to lawnmowering).
It’s a unique puzzle system, and it’s still engaging even this far into the series; you’d think the list of rhyming phrases would eventually run dry, but Schultz is able to keep filling his quiver with clever prompts that make for memorable visuals and fun gameplay. Sure, there’s an occasional clunker (Spoiler - click to show)– HID HUM felt like a reach – but look, you don’t have to do many crosswords before you realize that sometimes some junk in the fill is the price to be paid for a construction that’s elegant overall. The theming on this one is also interesting; it’s more social than the others, with the protagonist suffering a crisis of faith that requires them to find and help other people to reclaim their prior (metaphorical) status as a knight. This idea is present in the introductory text, but also through the gameplay, as several puzzles involve finding different companion characters who can help solve certain puzzles when the right pair are present. I also felt like Bright Brave Knight Knave had a bit more focus on the world model – you’re still not INSERTING X INTO Y, or anything, but there are more puzzles about finding objects which in turn unlock new possibilities elsewhere this time out (BBKK isn’t quite a Metroidvania, but it is a sequel and there’s a boat, so yes, it’s a 2023 Comp entry all right).
I liked these new features, but they did lead to some hiccups, too. In particular, having to decide which pair of followers to bring along when solving specific problems felt like one more axis of complexity than my brain could handle, and exacerbating the challenge, I couldn’t quite get the syntax for swapping them to work (characteristically, there’s a difficulty setting that should automate this process if you don’t want to bother with it, but I likewise had trouble activating it). At about the two hour mark, I hit a point where this meant I got stuck, but I definitely felt satisfied with the portion I was able to play; I’m sure there’s a cool set-piece ending, but I’ll probably wait for the post-Comp release to check it out. In the meantime, it’s almost midnight, so tomorrow’s crossword will be up soon…
A brazen head, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. Some spoilers in this one, though the concept of spoilers is a little odd as applied to this game!)
If you are the kind of nerd who likes Greek words, poetry, and/or Greek words about poetry, you’ve probably come across the rhetorical device “ekphrasis”, which is piece of writing about a work of (usually visual, I think?) art. It’s a hoary enough trope in poetry and prose, the most famous example probably being Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, though there are more modern practitioners too – A.S. Byatt’s novel Still Life talks about Van Gogh’s art in smart, richly-descriptive prose that made me appreciate his work far more than I had before I read the book. I can’t offhand say that I’d applied the label to a piece of IF before coming across the rich, enigmatic Gestures Towards Divinity.
The blurb says that the game isn’t about Francis Bacon but his work – violent and frankly unpleasant – and biography – likewise violent and frankly unpleasant – are certainly the main elements of the piece. As an anonymous museum-goer, you have the opportunity to explore a small exhibition of his paintings, looking at three triptychs exemplifying different eras of his career. You can also enter each of them and carry out deep conversations with their central subjects: an imagined, misshapen Fury; Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer; and Dyer’s corpse, after he’s committed suicide. Or you can go to the café, which is much more pleasant (there’s no gift shop).
There is a fair amount of gameplay here – seventeen achievements are available to mark various accomplishments, surprisingly including some medium-dry-goods stuff that makes for a nice change of pace. There’s also basic information about Bacon and his art available in the museum’s placards, while the written descriptions of the paintings are quite good, conveying more than a flat narration of the objects in view by communicating something of the effects of the piece, without imposing too much of a prejudged interpretation that would crowd out the player’s imaginative faculties. But these are just enough to prime you with questions and a basic orientation towards the Bacon’s themes; the heart of the game is the three set-piece dialogues where you learn about Bacon’s upbringing and evolution as an artist, as well as Dyer’s life and relationship with Bacon.
These conversations are richly-textured, engaging directly with challenging material without sanitizing or dumbing it down in the slightest. Bacon had a domineering, abusive father, and as a gay man, his earliest sexual experiences were inextricably linked with violence and shame. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps just because he was the way he was, he grew into a man with deep obsessions around religion, death, and suffering, which were reflected in his art – and with a deep masochistic kink that saw him push others, Dyer included, into becoming sadists, regardless of whether they were comfortable with the role.
Each of your interlocutors provides a distinct perspective on these dynamics, and there’s plenty of straight biography and art criticism, but the game isn’t afraid to take on larger questions. There’s an additional swirl of other themes around luck, karma, divinity, and the afterlife – in addition to these being common conversation options that appear for all of the key characters, (Spoiler - click to show) there are indications that the player is dead, though whether they’re meant to be the ghost of any particular person or character in the story is left open-ended so far as I can tell. And Dyer pinches Jesus’s last words.
These elements didn’t really cohere all that strongly for me, though. The bits of dialogue are interesting enough on their own, but unlike the themes related to relationship dynamics, I felt like they had only a loose connection to the main narrative, and as a result didn’t seem as connected to the main thrust of the game, even if I can see how they’re clearly important elements of Bacon’s art (I mentioned these are all triptychs, right, which is the standard format for altarpieces?). It’s intellectually rich, but it just feels a bit abstract compared to stuff like this:
He grimaces. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, after all. I don’t know. My stomach hurts.” He falls silent for a moment, then says “why do we fall in love with bad men? Why do we stay in love with them? Why do we deny and make excuses and protect them? Who protects us?”
While I very much admire (I can’t really say “enjoy”, given the subject matter) the content and prose style of these conversations, the mechanics can occasionally be slightly awkward. GTD is a parser game, and uses the ASK ABOUT/TELL ABOUT system with an ever-updating topics list to help keep the dialogue on track. It’s quite well paced too, with new topics being added to the list as they come up in conversation, and whole tranches of new ones being unlocked when you start to exhaust an earlier set. The game also rewards exploration; I found quite a lot of subjects that weren’t listed in the topic catalogue but which led to robust, interesting responses. Unfortunately, the topic names are often quite complex – you can ask the Fury about “its relationship with Bacon” – or seem to overlap – Dyer has different responses when asked about “his life” and “life in general” – and the parser sometimes struggles to keep up unless you type things in exactly as they’re written in the topic list, which detracts from the otherwise-organic give and take of the dialogues.
In these conversations and in the museum sequences, GTD is a game of nearly pure exploration. The player doesn’t have any external goals to accomplish – the names of the achievements are hidden until you get them, and there’s nothing stopping you from walking out the museum’s door without looking at any of the art – and the “puzzles”, such as they are, aren’t especially meaningful in and of themselves. Instead, most of my engagement with the game came from trying to decide what I thought about Bacon, and the vexed question of whether his artistic accomplishments in some sense justify his actions (often quite horrifying, I haven’t come close to mentioning the worst parts).
It’d be understandable for a game so fully engaged with an artist’s work to ultimately take his side, but just as GTD doesn’t impose its interpretation of Bacon’s art on the player, so too it maintains a studied reticence. If anything, in the places where it offers a glimpse of its hand, its sympathies seem to come down against Bacon. There’s an oblique resonance to Dyer’s choice of reading material in the second triptych, for example – it’s a newspaper story about the kidnapping and murder of an ordinary woman who the criminals have mistaken for Rupert Murdoch’s wife. She’s an ordinary person who’s come to great harm by getting mixed up with a rich, famous person, in other words. So if she’s the analogue for Dyer, that means Bacon plays the Murdoch role…
The barista working the museum’s café offers another hint; she’s trans and has a girlfriend, but except for one note about some uncomfortable relationship dynamics before she transitioned, she’s notably trauma free, thinks Bacon’s art is unpleasant and his personal history is worse, and mostly seems to care about cleaning up litter and playing D&D – a regular, functional person with what sounds like a functional relationship, serving as a notable counterpoint to Bacon and Dyer’s tragic queerness. True, the barista is also there to balance out the museum guard, an amateur painter who’s enthusiastic about Bacon’s paintings – but even she is clear-eyed about his human failings, and uses Bacon as fuel for her own work.
And then there’s the climax that greets the ordinarily-diligent player. If you work through the conversation with the guard, she lets you into her locked office, which contains one final Bacon painting, this one a self-portrait (it also contains a computer with some draft placard text which enables the player to learn exactly which self-portrait this is – thanks to playing Hand Me Down earlier in the Comp, I thought to try MOVE MOUSE to wake up the screen). You can’t enter this one, nor engage it in dialogue, since this representation of Bacon ignores whatever you say, simply spewing out bon mot after bon mot, witty observation after witty observation, a never-ending and exhausting charm offensive from someone convinced (not undeservedly) of his own cleverness.
If you check your topics list, though, you will see that you do have one additional option: you can tell him that you know who he is – and once you do, the urbane litany ends, and Bacon begins to howl, keen, and gibber, giving voice to sheer terror and self-loathing. It’s hard not to interpret this as a judgment; having plumbed his dark secrets by studying his art and talking to the man he victimized and ruined, you have the power to cast aside his self-protecting delusions and expose him. This is a rhetorically neat solution, too; if you go back to the Greek, ekphrasis means to speak out, or more poetically, to call something by its name. So by understanding Bacon, by naming him, you cast him down in act of karmic, retributive justice.
There are only two troubles with this reading. The first is that the player’s action of revealing Bacon to himself is entirely unnecessary. Even if you never decide to use that conversational topic and let him continue his babblelogue uninterrupted, he’ll also eventually begin his unending scream. You aren’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know, in other words. The second is, well, did we forget that he’s a masochist?
No, the blurb didn’t lie; this game isn’t about Francis Bacon and whether he gets his just or unjust deserts – even in this imagined space, that’s far beyond our power to accomplish. And it’s only incidentally about his art as such, or about the people he loved and hurt along the way, or about whether he’s a monster or an inspiration or just (“just”) a flawed, talented man. No, GTD is a simple game, or at least only as complex as the player wants to make it: all it does is ask how all this makes us feel or think, and, like the best museum pieces, makes us consider whether we’ll take anything away with us when the time inevitably comes to leave the exhibition.
A reckless disregard for gravity, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve never had a dream of falling, or at least not that I can remember, and I’m kind of bummed that I’ve missed out. The feeling of flying through the air seems like it must be exhilarating to me, and without the real-life risk of splatting against the ground, wouldn’t that be an amazing sensation to experience? We All Fall Together takes a different view, however, imagining a Limbo of ever-plummeting bodies caught between a terrifying cyclone that claims those who dive too low and shadowy predators who snatch those who try to slow their fall and drift too far up. It’s a situation that can be read to have a number of different real-life analogues, but it’s not so one-note as to be too simple of an allegory, so it’s interesting enough to support the game’s ten-minute runtime – and while my streak of being annoyed by the Texture engine continues with this game, at least it has a better showing than most.
As in medias res openings go, “you’re falling endlessly” is a great one, so the game makes a solid first impression, and throws in enough incident to keep the story moving – after starting to get oriented towards the situation, you get a chance to engage with several other inhabitants of this strange netherworld, most notably a black-clad figure you call “the Rock Star.” They’re a great source of exposition, and the dialogue efficiently sets up the metaphysical stakes, establishing that there’s a risky but rewarding path that may allow you to escape your fate and return to your loved ones.
Granted, it’s not an especially sharp dilemma, but it’s reasonably engaging and the opportunity to give the Rock Star a pep talk is nice; similarly, while the writing occasionally overreaches and has some errors, for the most part it hits a solid balance between action, dialogue, and jokes. What works less well is the attempt to impose a backstory on you and your interlocutor. You each talk about partners who are devoid of names, genders, personalities, or histories, landing at precisely the least-effective position between specific enough to be affecting, and general enough to be archetypal. The ending still feels rewarding, though, and again, this is a very short game so the offending bits only amounted to a minute or so of reading.
As for the Texture-ness of it all, I thought the author did a good job of picking verbs that were clearly distinguished from each other, and signposting what actions would do. Oh, and I played this one on my phone, and good news, the tiny-text-on-buttons bug I’ve experienced in other Texture games went away! …bad news, I experienced a new bug where switching to my Notes app to paste in excepts or jot down thoughts caused the buttons to stop work. Texture, you take delight in vexing me and have no compassion for my poor nerves – but despite that, I’d still say this is among my favorite games using this engine.
Short, talky golden-age sci-fi, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I grew up reading Golden Age sci-fi, and for all that even at the time I recognized its corniness, I still have a big soft spot for that kind of thing. As a result, while I can’t tell whether or not the opening of The Enigma of Solaris is intentionally camp, I loved it all the same:
”Agent Grey,” the colonel announced, his voice carrying the weight of gravitas that only a military man of his rank could muster, “we have a situation on Solaris.”
Grey leaned in, her senses alert to every word. “The Solaris, sir?”
(The use of “muster” so close to “colonel” is an argument for intentional silliness, it occurs to me).
If you guessed that this is immediately followed by some exposition where the characters explain to each other things they already know perfectly well, points to you. It’s a formula, but it’s one that’s not presently overused in IF, and like I said I’ve got some affection for it, so after the briefing established the situation (research station mysteriously losing power, go investigate and save the day), I was ready for adventure.
Things get a bit more serious when you arrive at the station, and the early sequence of poking around to gather clues is pretty engaging. But this turns out to be quite a short game, and what initially seemed like it was going to be a high-tech investigation quickly turned into an extended NPC interaction sequence with few if any choices for the player to make. Said NPC is another sci-fi caricature – he’s a scientist who’s lost perspective on the risks of his research – but trying to reason with someone like that isn’t particularly fun, and the eventual reveal of what’s going on on the station struck me as a bit underwhelming.
While the prose never loses its over-the-top charm, I couldn’t help but wish that the plot matched that tone rather than staying relatively grounded, and I wished too that there was a little more for the player to do. This partially could be due to the extreme concision of the game – it’s really maybe 10 minutes at most – so I could understand it if the author didn’t feel like it was worth fleshing out too much. A game that took this same basic approach but which had more robust gameplay and leaned further into the far-out elements of its inspirations could be a lot of fun, but as it stands, there’s just not that much to the Enigma of Solaris.
De-plunder , December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I don’t know where a two-year-old picks up these things, but my son has learned that pirates say “yarr!” The other night we were reading a book about animals dressing up for Halloween, and when he saw the chicken with a peg-leg, he swung his arm in a little Pirates-of-the-Caribbean move and said “yarr!” I can’t think of any other book or show he’s seen that involves pirates, so like I said, I’m somewhat at a loss – is there some kid at day care who pontificates about this stuff during outdoor play period, confidently explaining in a toddler’s burble how you pretend to be a pirate? – but I guess the cultural knowledge that this is how pirates talk is just that strong.
The kicker, of course, is that so far as I understand pirates didn’t talk like that; your stereotypical Golden Age of Piracy buccaneers probably spoke like the 18th Century Englishmen they were, albeit with more lexical flights of fancy than would be typical given their outré experiences and dearth of formal education. They likely sounded, in other words, like Captain Booby, the deuteragonist and comic centerpiece of To Sea in a Sieve:
“That’s it, boy — bail, an’ lively ho!” says the Captain. “’Twill all ha’ been worthwhile when we’m rescued, ye’ll see!”
“Not me snuffbox too,” wails the Captain. “Well, here’s lubberly manners! That snuffbox was o’ great sentimental value to me, I’ll have ’ee know. The man I killed fer it were a dear an’ loyal friend!”
“Arr, not me pineapple!” says the Captain, woefully. “I had me a fancy to make a lovely canapé — pineapple and hunks o’ cheese, served up on the spines of a porpentine. Ye’ve set haute cuisine back centuries, damn ye!”
(Okay, maybe that last one undermines my point, but technically it’s an arr, not a yarr).
There have been some very funny games so far in the Comp, and I know there are more ahead, but I have rarely laughed so hard at anything as I did at Captain Booby. This is fortunate because for the game to work, he has to work, since he’s the only thing standing in the way of this being the shortest parser puzzler ever: you play the cabin-boy he’s dragooned into helping him flee with his ill-gotten plunder when the authorities put an end to his piratical career. But since an errant cannonball has holed the lifeboat, you need to dump the loot before you sink. If the good Captain were capable of balancing risk and reward, he’d obviously stand aside and let you do it – but if he were capable of that, presumably he wouldn’t have gone into piracy, and so he opposes you at every turn, so that you need to outwit, outmaneuver, and outsnuff him in order to commit his treasures to the briny deep.
As a result, in less skillful hands Booby could have become a deeply annoying character, continually frustrating the player and providing handy, punchable characterization for the frustration of failing to solve puzzles in a parser game. But this hardly ever happens, as Booby is as pathetic as he is bombastic: I mean, if you can read the line “’Od’s blood, fire and thunder, my sinuses!” without a) feeling a little bad for the fellow, and b) giggling so hard you almost go into a fit, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Even when I was stymied on a particular challenge, sharing a lifeboat with Booby was never anything less than delightful.
Not that I was stymied that often or that long, since this is a well-designed set of puzzles. A few of the Captain’s treasures can simply be heaved over the side, but most require some work to obtain and drown, and all the while water is seeping into the boat, lending an air of farce to proceedings as you pause in your efforts to desperately bail. To make progress you’ll need to relieve the Captain of some of his effects, match wits with a carnivorous plant, and prevent an overzealous beaver from sending you to Davy Jones’s Locker. Even as the boat’s load lessens, the comedic frenzy heightens, with new complications lending increased energy to the situation and preventing it from getting dull over the game’s one-hour running time.
While many of the puzzles do require relatively specific syntax, I found for the most part that To Sea in a Sieve did an excellent job cueing the appropriate action, which made me feel very clever indeed but is actually just good game design. There were a few challenges towards the end of the game where it felt like this broke down somewhat and some additional clues might not have gone amiss (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking of looking at the tea caddy through the quizzing-glass, and the precise language required to use the brocade), but it’s got a well-implemented hint system so I can’t complain too much (and I have to admit that I was having so much fun that I stayed up way past my bedtime playing this one, so my brain probably wasn’t working so well by the end).
The only thing better than finishing To Sea in a Sieve was seeing in the ending text that it’s part of a planned trilogy – the middle part, To Hell in a Hamper, was released 20 years ago so this technically checks both the “boaty” and “sequel/prequel” boxes for Comp ’23 bingo – so there’ll be another iteration of the concept to look forward to. And even if it takes another 20 years to get the final instalment, based on the success of To Sea in a Sieve it’ll be worth the wait.
Single White Barista, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Please Sign Here is a deceptively complex game. Superficially, it’s a slice of life mystery; as the framing story establishes, the main character, Jackie, has just been in a car crash that’s claimed the life of her best friend Casey. But the police have other things in mind as they interrogate her, since she’s also potentially linked to the murder of a number of delivery drivers whose last stop before their deaths was the coffeeshop where Jackie works. The meat of the story involves flashing back to the events of the last week, when torrential rains and a vacationing boss left her isolated during a series of night shifts, and she repeatedly encountered three customers who each seemed like they could be hiding something…
This moody mystery is more than it appears, however, and that’s not just down to the attractive art. I don’t think it’s fully successful at the tricky moves it pulls – heck, I’m not 100% sure it’s aware of exactly how tricky they are – but I’ve been turning it over and over in my brain ever since I finished it, which I’d certainly count as an accomplishment. Talking about why involves digging into the plot, though, and since this is a mystery it’s poor form to just spoil said plot without warning. So you might want to give the game a play-through before joining me in the spoiler-text below – and if you have and aren’t sure what tricky things I’m talking about, let me just say that you might want to replay and remember your Miranda rights.
(Spoiler - click to show)
Hi there! I’ve got to do a little bit more plot summarizing before we can get to the good stuff. So as mentioned after the in-medias-res police-interrogation opening, you flash back to your shifts at the coffeehouse, with the game progressing day-by-day through the week leading up to the opening car crash. Jackie’s the daughter of a cop, but she’s quite jumpy, starting out suspicious of the three recurring customers: Quan, an elderly recent-immigrant from Vietnam; Aaron, a young Black man who’s juggling a job and his studies; and Marta, a Latina mother with a demanding and thankless job. In fairness, this might be because something odd seems to be happening in the shop; even thought Jackie’s supposed to be alone, the back door keeps getting mysteriously unlocked and opened…
Despite the sense of dread the game’s trying to establish, I actually found the meat of the game surprisingly cozy. In part this is down to the art, which has a warm webcomic-y vibe; there are a few illustrations that are creepy, like the one depicting the fateful pre-crash car ride, but the coffeeshop sections seem to depict a warm, dry haven on a stormy day, with the visiting customers looking friendly and appealing. Intentionally or not, the writing also signally fails to establish any of the three “suspects” as remotely threatening; as far as I can tell, the major details that are supposed to make them potentially dangerous are the fact that Quan drives a black car that might be the same as one Jackie’s seen loitering around, Aaron brings in a big package one day, and Marta’s job occasionally requires her to pick up documents from city hall. You can practically hear the duh-duh-DUH when these details are revealed, since the game frames them as significant, but they’re such obvious red herrings that Jackie’s reactions just mark her out as a paranoid fussbudget – she’s also a real stickler for the rules, not even letting a wet and bedraggled Marta wait for her bus inside the near-empty coffeeshop unless she buys something.
The writing is also, bluntly, not that great, which undercuts the game’s attempts to set a mood. Like, here’s Jackie’s reflections on why she’s friends with Casey, who’s kind of the worst:
>[I]f her dad wants to keep his high chances for donations to become Police Chief next year, Jackie has to keep up playing friendly with one of the richest families in town. The Wintons might only be a truck service company, but they’re the reasons semi-trucks even exist in the first place."
That took me a while to parse, and it’s par for course with much of the game’s prose. The choice-based elements of the narrative also aren’t especially engaging, as there aren’t many decision points and not enough effort is put into making them seem meaningful; there’s one moment where you hear something in the back and go to investigation, and you’re given the choice of grabbing either a broom or a “group handle” (?) as a weapon, but after selecting one the next passage begins “It doesn’t matter.” For the love of god, game, I know this is mostly on rails, but you don’t need to draw attention to it!
Things get much more interesting when the timeline catches up to the framing story, though. After recounting your memories, the cops ask you to pick which of the three “suspects” you think they should prioritize in their investigation. I clammed up and refused to finger any of them, both on general principles – public service announcement, if cops are ever asking you anything, shut up until you’ve got a lawyer present – and because I was quite sure none of them murdered the delivery drivers or was responsible for the car crash. And in that ending, which the epilogue text deemed the “main” ending, the third-person narration shifted from referring to the main character as Jackie to Casey, instead – she’s Jackie’s notional best friend, remember – and mentioned her recent hair-dye job.
The clear implication is that Casey has gone all Single White Female (or Talented Mr. Ripley, if you prefer) and killed Jackie in service of trying to switch identities with her. There are some seeds of foreshadowing throughout the earlier section that point in this direction; Casey seems envious of Jackie’s life in their earlier interactions, and right before the car crash, the flashback sequence ends with Casey asking whether Jackie thinks people deserve second chances – a macabre question when you realize that Jackie is herself the second chance in question. So it could be an inspired twist.
There are two flies in the ointment, though, one more interesting than the other. To get the boring one out of the way: of course this makes no ^%$^ sense. There’s no indication that Casey’s done anything more than the dye-job to make herself look like Jackie, nor that she had much time or expertise post-accident to make Jackie look like her. The twist has nothing to do with the much-belabored deaths of the delivery-men, and in fact Casey killing all of them – as the ending implies – would do nothing but invite further scrutiny of the switcheroo. And did we forget that Jackie’s dad is a cop, and presumably knows what his daughter looks like? So take as read that this is all completely ridiculous.
The more interesting inconsistency in the twist, though, is the fact that you only see it by refusing to try to set the cops on some innocent person to throw them off the scent (this is where the racism/police corruption themes mentioned in the blurb come into play, by the by – the implication is that they’re happy to go after one of the POC “suspects” and ignore the possibility that the white girl is a baddie). You can conceptualize this as a reward for the player – by successfully realizing that none of them is the killer, the player gets a hint of what’s really going on – or as an in-character decision by Jackie, who’s gotten to know these people. But for Casey to make this choice is counterproductive; again, she’s inviting more scrutiny for no reason!
This isn’t a just a plot hole like the ones I mention above, though; it calls into question who exactly is making choices and how those choices are being resolved. Instead of the conventional IF triangle of identities – player, protagonist, and narrator – here we have the traditional player and narrator joined by a competing dyad of protagonists, whose methods and motivations are diametrically opposed, and who, unless you happen to pick just the right options, seamlessly substitute for each other with the player and narrator none the wiser. And now that we think about it some more, the flashback depicts events in Jackie’s life, but it’s being recounted by Casey to the cops as though it’s about her, so this doubling is even more complex than we thought (oh, and this also means the narrator is completely unreliable too and we presumably can’t trust anything we’ve read)! Please Sign Here thus becomes narrative collapse: the game – nothing that comes after the twist makes sense, and it throws into question everything that comes before the twist, too.
I wish I could say the game does something compelling with this move, but per my long-ago, pre-spoiler-text note, I’m unconvinced that it knows how radical it’s being – possibly this is me just being judgmental and overgeneralizing from the weak prose to assuming that the game has weak writing overall, I suppose, but it’s inarguable that the game doesn’t explore the implications of its scenario, seeming satisfied with using it as a noirish capstone to a conventional whodunnit, not one of postmodern dislocation. Still, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even what may seem an often-clumsy mystery can dislocate its player into acute postmodern vertigo.
No fluke, December 1, 2023I used to work with some environmental advocates, from whom I learned a mouthful of a Greco-Roman phrase: charismatic marine megafauna, or, in normal-personal language, cool big ocean creatures. All the organisms that live in the sea, as well as general environmental features like pollution, oxygenation, and (gulp) temperature, are critical to keeping oceanic ecosystems stable. But “save the krill!” is a rallying cry for precisely nobody, so in order to persuade people to adopt the kind of laws and regulations that are needed to mitigate the impact we’re having on the marine environment, you’d better trot out a dolphin or sea turtle or something big and sympathetic like that. And of course marine fauna don’t come any more charismatic, or any more mega, than the whale: warm-blooded and communicative like us, but massive and as comfortable at the depths as on the surface, it’s no wonder they’re an object of fascination, back to the story of Jonah and the whale. So it’s perhaps just understandable that the cetologist protagonist of The Whale’s Keeper appears to have purposely arranged to get himself swallowed by one.
This choice-based game’s obviously set out a magic-realist scenario, but it does credit to both sides of that equation. As to the latter, the pressure increases as the whale dives down give rise to a memorable set piece, for example, and there’s some lovely prose describing what it’s like to be inside it as it sings:
"You are at ground zero and for a moment you wonder if this vibratory wonder might thrum you into oblivion. It overwhelms you with its grandness. It is the most perfect, all-encompassing thing you’ve ever experienced, every molecule of you sings in response."
The mechanics also reflect the precarity of your situation; you’re given a 10-click “sanity” clock, which decreases as especially frightening things happen; presumably once it hits zero, you get a bad ending, though I never had that happen since the system is fairly forgiving. This is especially the case because there are opportunities for your sanity to go up, primarily as you encounter the elements that fall more on the “magic” side of things. In particular, the game quickly establishes that you’ve got company in this particular gullet; figuring out how to engage with the hermit you quickly nickname “Jonah”, interacting with him and learning how he’s managed to eke out his existence, is a highlight of the first part of the game, even if some of these details strain credulity past the snapping point.
While the game starts out with you (er) in the middle of things, it does eventually sketch out a few elements of your character’s backstory and try to explain why you’d do something as crazy as this, I wasn’t as sold on this piece of the game, both for the specifics (there’s a particular detail about the death of your child that probably could have merited a content warning) and just the general concept of the attempt (look, I don’t care how terrible things have been going for you, there’s no way to logically justify jumping down a whale’s throat). The game really only works when it keeps its focus on the present, and the player of necessity has to run with the off-kilter reality being presented.
The elephant in the room is the format. For all that the game I’ve just described would work just fine in a conventional engine like Twine, The Whale’s Keeper runs on its author’s bespoke chat-based IF platform; you have an option of playing it via Telegram or just, as I did, via the web. So while each passage ends with a series of choices, instead of clicking on the appropriate one, you need to type in the indicated work or two to select your preferred option. While I can see some games taking advantage of the chat-based interface, this one doesn’t gain anything by it – and since I played on my phone, tapping out the required words felt like it added unnecessary friction to the experience. And despite a fair bit of fiddling, I couldn’t adjust the text speed to a comfortable pace; many of the passages are long, but each is delivered in short speech-bubble chunks, so I wound up either tapping my foot waiting for the next one to load, or having the view window prematurely yanked down as one arrived while I was still finishing the previous one.
These quibbles didn’t do much to take me out of the game, though, and the game’s strengths are unique enough that it’s worth putting up with these idiosyncrasies. It communicates a real sense of wonder by immersing the player in a compellingly-imagined environment, and while it dances on an absurd tightrope between reality and fantasy, it’s over quickly enough that it never topples to one side or the other. One of its most impactful sequences, in fact, marries the two: Jonah guides you down to the acid pools that he scavenges for sustenance, and in amidst the potential food you fish up clumps of garbage and plastic bottles, too. For all the power that this leviathan has over you, it’s subject to the same human-made pollution that’s destroying the rest of the oceans; save the whales, save yourself.
For the real CoG heads, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
One Knight Stand reminds me of a peacock. This hefty ChoiceScript game is impressive but also absurd, hyperspecialized after taking evolutionary logic way past its logical endpoint. I know, for example, that the Choice of Games audience tends to really like player-customization options, but when it took me four separate choices to establish the length, texture, and color of my character’s hair, I thought something had gone awry; when, five minutes later, I picked out the color of my favorite mug and laid out my habits when shopping for a cell phone, I half suspected this thing was actually a parody or maybe a marketing survey in disguise. Similarly, CoG games tend to use length as a selling point, but having slogged through what I’m pretty sure was a short novel’s worth of prose to get through just four simple scenes and introduce only two significant characters, I can only imagine the fortitude needed to persist through the Middle of the End and the End of the End. There are some promising modern fantasy flourishes here, and I can’t fault the author’s work ethic, but sadly this is one of those games that I suspect will elate its intended audience while leaving those outside that group bewildered.
In its outlines, the story here is pretty solid. The main character lives in an alternate future where COVID gave way to a series of other plagues and pandemics, though as the game opens they’re more focused on practice with their surprisingly-intense polo club. But the city’s been threatened by a series of gruesome murders, and after seeing some strange things around your apartment, you get swept up in a supernatural world that involves demons, reformed incubi, the reincarnations of the Arthurian Knights, and a best friend who’s harboring some kind of secret…
It’s all fun enough – I could see the setting being a lost World of Darkness RPG from the late 90s – and the bits involving the polo team have some zip to them (I wouldn’t be surprised if the author has a bunch of real-life experience with horses), but the game’s glacial pacing does it no favors. I had to get through half a dozen see-something-weird-out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye-but-there’s-nothing-there-when-you-check “scares” before the first sequence was over, so that the creepiness had long since worn off, and the game’s written in an incredibly granular style that completely undermines any sense of pacing; I was similarly bored of most the action scenes by the time I was two-thirds done with them because they just took too long. And the transitional sequences are just as bad, as you’re forced to play through the dull bits between the set pieces at a similarly high level of detail; it’s like reading the first draft of someone’s first novel, before they’ve figured out how to move characters around in time and space.
The other element undermining what could be a fun pop-fantasy romp is the tonal whiplash. While the world is generally fairly grounded, and the game’s blurb says its genre is “dark urban fantasy”, a large portion of the game’s choices have some ZaNy options. Like, here are the player’s choices in one of the action scenes:
-Here goes nothing.
-Easier said than done.
-I don’t get paid enough for this.
-Da da da da da… Batmaaaaaaan!
The monster you’re trying to run away from here is actually kind of creepy, but this kind of thing drastically undercuts any sense of realism or fear the game is trying to convey. And I’ve picked a mild example; there are lots of pop culture quotes and bewilderingly over-the-top choices that seem to show up more and more as time goes on (though even the first sequence suffers from a news broadcast where April O’Neil and Peter Parker are highlighted as featured reporters).
One Knight Stand also gets way too dark sometimes given its omnipresent refusal to take itself seriously. You (of course) have a tragic backstory, and without thinking too much about it I went for the one where my family died in a car-crash (the others are comparably bleak). I was not prepared for how this was narrated (putting the details behind a spoiler-block; CW for violence and just general terrible things):
(Spoiler - click to show)Your father had turned the car at the last moment so that the driver’s seat took the full brunt of the crash. He’d been killed instantly. At the trial that followed, lawyers had argued that the people in the backseats — your brother, your sister, your mother — could have survived if the car’s side airbags had deployed as they were supposed to.
In the end, both your siblings had died before rescuers could prise them out of the wreckage of the car. You know your little sister, at least, had been alive directly after the crash. She had cried, gurgled, and half-screamed for several minutes afterwards. Your mother in the seat directly behind you had lingered the longest. She never regained consciousness in those last few days and finally passed on after a bloody miscarriage.
What the fuck, game.
I’ve said before that to my mind, the one thing that most amateur IF needs to feel professional is an editor, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glaring proof of that. If someone had helped the author smooth out the drastic tonal shifts, cut down 2/3 of the word count to focus on the engaging parts, and highlight places where going deeper really would be helpful (the main romance interest is so bland that even after three and a half hours of gameplay, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about his personality), this could be really promising. As it is, while I suspect the hardcore CoG-heads will lap this up, I didn’t get much enjoyment out of One Knight Stand. Which is a shame: peacock feathers may only turn on peahens, but at least they’re still pretty to the rest of us.
DICK MCBUTTS GETS REVIEWED IN THE NUTS, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There are some stories that, when you encounter them, worm their way into your brain and take up permanent occupancy. Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is on that list for me; the piece concerns an eccentric Frenchman who so fashions his life so that he can write, from scratch and without reference to the original, simply from his own mind and direct experiences, a brand-new version of Don Quixote that is exactly the same, textually speaking, as what Cervantes wrote. But even though every character precisely matches, the story’s narrator tells us that the two books are not the same: there are some passages where Menard writes so movingly, and with such fiery, personal inspiration that the corresponding bits of Cervantes pale in comparison.
We have something slightly different here: instead of two identical works with the same title but different authors, DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS has one title and one author but two entirely separate texts. I was spoiled on this feature by some of the forum discussion surrounding what’s clearly an entry that wants to be noticed, learning that there’s a random die roll at the beginning that determines which of the two versions a given player will get. I also knew going in that one is linear, full of typos and egregiously offensive, while the other has some actual gameplay and is legit funny.
On the one hand, this is clearly just a play for the Golden Banana of Discord. On the other, that’s a good meta joke, and the combination of title, authorial pseudonym (my money was that this was Graham Nelson’s triumphant return to IF; it was only slightly disappointing to learn it was actually the very funny Damon L. Wakes), and blurb was sufficiently funny that I decided I’d play along: I resolved to take whichever version the RNG offered up, and not game things to replay the other one, in order to obtain the intended experience.
Reader, you probably know me well enough by now to know that I was secretly hoping to be stuck with the terrible one, and my hopes were not disappointed. The five-minute vignette I played was entirely linear, moving sentence-by-sentence through a zero-context extravaganza of genital trauma and bodily excreta with cameos by Adolf Hitler (as promised), various 80s movie villains, and a troupe of cancan dancers. There’s only one dramatic element – it’s the one in the title – that plays out in a variety of scenarios, the content set off by a nauseously-oscillating green-and-pink background, rakishly-angled text, and typos that couldn’t be more aggressively awful if they tried.
But there’s the rub, of course they tried; the whole thing is entirely calculated to be bad, rather than naively bad. And I found that knowledge colored my entire experience, and meant that I actually kind of enjoyed something that’s objectively terrible. We’re back in Borges territory here, but legitimately so: like, when I read that Darth Vader shrunk himself down into two mini clones, and one of them kicked DICK MCBUTTS’ right ballsack and the other kicked his right ballsack, I didn’t roll my eyes at the slapdash mistake, but chortled at the skillful trolling. Similarly, the rising-and-falling action – no, not of the kicking, but of the game’s pacing, which hits several fake-out climaxes in its short running time – seemed balletic to me, cruelly playing on the naïve player’s hope that this thing is finally ending. There’ve been troll games in the Comp before, so it’s really not hard to imagine the Cervantes DICK MCBUTTS, which would make me angry about how it wasted my time and how cavalierly it deployed Hitler for cheap laughs; but this is the Menard DICK MCBUTTS, and it is sublime.
I’m still rating it a 1, of course. Anything more would be disrespectful to Mr. Janus.
Matchless, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
As discussed in my Eat the Eldritch review, boats are clearly the central theme of this year’s Comp. Little Match Girl 4 does OK on this score – there are some shipwrecked pirates, plus an extended sequence on a spaceship – but my experience with the game was largely defined by its membership in two other incipient trends of the Comp, being a sequel (I’ve already reviewed Shanidar, Safe Return, and looking ahead on my list there are a bunch more) and a Metroidvania (joining Vambrance of Destiny and Put Your Hand Into the Puppet’s Head).
Let’s take the sequel part first. I haven’t played any of the three prior Little Match Girl Games, and while I’m dimly familiar with the original Hans Christian Andersen story, any connection to that moralizing fable has long since fallen by the wayside; per a handy recap function, the eponymous protagonist has developed the power to travel through time and space by looking into fires, been adopted by a post-reform Ebenezer Scrooge, and currently works as a freelance sniper-cum-troubleshooter for Queen Victoria (England’s gain is Denmark’s loss; I guess she wasn’t very patriotic?).
The game seemingly isn’t especially fussed about any of this backstory, though, and in fact opens in medias res, with the introductory text not explaining anything about your immediate mission or situation. This kind of beginning can work well, but here I feel like it was misdeployed. It’s not used to skip boring exposition and get the player into the action from the get go, since the opening sequence just involves quiet exploration of a deserted beach. Nor does it do much to heighten player interest in what’s going on, since the actual plot is straightforward – you need to find half a dozen magic pearls as a combined peace offering/christening present to a baby fairy; i.e., it’s a fetch quest – and it’s effectively dropped in your lap ten minutes in without any deeper engagement or piecing together of clues required; you wander into Faerie and come across the infant prince and his caretakers, and everybody acts as though you already know the deal. As a result, the decision to forego a conventional introduction struck me as an odd one: I don’t think the game gains anything by it, but it loses the opportunity to establish stakes and engage the player in the world and the characters.
The Metroidvania aspects of the game also start slow. This is a genre convention, of course – the accretion of powers allowing you to overcome previously-encountered obstacles is a major part of the appeal – but I also found that the absence of minimap like that provided in Vambrance of Destiny, combined with the additional navigation challenge posed by the fire-portals leading to other settings meant it took me a while to wrap my head around the available space for exploration. It doesn’t help that the first few areas are rather straightforward – a ghost town, the age of the dinosaurs, a coast – with the few other people not especially engaging to interact with (LMG4 uses a TALK TO system without any dialogue options, which is probably my least-favorite way to implement character interaction in a parser game).
Fortunately, I found the game picked up by about the halfway point. Gaining a few additional abilities and a clearer sense of the map made the puzzle-solving feel more rewarding, and the environments became more interesting – the dinosaur era actually involves a modern, oddly-bougie civilization; the English coast is home to the actual Pirates of Penzance; and there’s a vampire-haunted Alpine chateau that’s the best of the bunch. The number of sly jokes and clever Easter Eggs also ramps up quickly from the comparatively-straight beginning: it took me a minute to realize that your first two upgrades mirror the ones Samus gets at the beginning of each Metroid game (Spoiler - click to show)(the fire-bullet is like a missile, and the mouse-transformation is like the morph ball); there’s an extended conference among the vampires that gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes – and it goes a long time; and there’s a disguise bit that I’m pretty sure is directly tweaking the Gabriel Knight 3 puzzle that’s long been decried as having killed graphic adventures all by itself.
Even in this running-downhill part of my experience with the game, though, I still found there were underexplained elements that I think must have been part of earlier games in the series – you seem to have some history with a couple of the specific vampires, you’ve encountered that prehistoric civilization before, and I’d guess that the climax is calling back to the very first game. So while I did eventually very much enjoy my time with LMG4, I can’t help but think that I would have liked it even more if I’d played the earlier games in the series, or even better, if it had done a bit more work to get new players up to speed. I can see how entering a late-series game in the Comp can help draw attention to earlier works, which is all to the good, but it’d be nice for us newbies to be met halfway.
It's beginning to look a lot like fish men, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Well, it’s finally happened. Even a casual perusal of this year’s Comp roster reveals that games with boats are way, way overrepresented, and I for one couldn’t be happier – big boats, little boats, sail boats, paddle-wheelers, motorboats, house boats, inflatable boats; yawls, yachts, ketches, clippers, men o’ war, brigantines, sloops, catamarans, schooners, container ships, dinghies, triremes, hovercraft, barges, scows; even airships, zeppelins, sauce boats – I love ‘em all, and I’m excited to finally be able to embark (eh? Eh?) on the nautical portion of my Comp explorations.
Eat the Eldritch is a great way to inaugurate the trend, too, because it’s both very boat-y (the whole thing takes place on board a giant fishing boat) and very good, leavening an effective Lovecraftian vibe with good-natured gross-out humor and some satisfying parser puzzling – call it The Terrible Old Man and the Sea. You play the captain, who’s had a bad run of luck that means he hasn’t managed to catch any fish to feed into the floating fish-stick-making plant belowdecks; you’ll get right on that, as soon as you get the suspicious “Rudolf Carter” fellow you just hired on as cook to fix you some lunch… As that potted summary as well as the title suggest, Eat the Eldritch presents a horror of consumption, where everything exists to eat and be eaten, with the latter stages of the game containing revolting, stomach-churning images by the score.
This would be a little much for my poor vegetarian self, but fortunately, the game’s also wickedly funny, and the occasional chortle really helps the offal go down. Here’s a bit of the description of the aforementioned cook, focusing on his fingers:
They are thick and swollen and their skin looks like brittle scabs. The comparison may be disgusting, but they actually look like fried fish sticks and when he uses them, you’re afraid they’ll crumble.
It’s a ridiculous image, but very gross, and works very well. The game does swerve into more straightforward horror territory from time to time – the description of the inevitable Cthulhoid monstrosity is a uniquely messed-up phantasmagoria, and there’s a lovely disorienting bit where you see some ceiling-lamps swaying with the waves, and you imagine yourself upside-down and underwater, looking down at colossal sea-grasses. But there are also some extended jaunts of wackiness, maintaining the overall balance and keeping proceedings from getting too grim.
Eat the Eldritch is also impressively balanced when it comes to gameplay. It uses shipboard directions for verisimilitude, for example, but smartly keeps the size of each individual deck small, and provides handy ASCII-art maps for each, so these aren’t as disorienting as they can sometimes be. There are also regular prods towards your immediate goal to keep you on track, and a handy THINK verb in case you need a reminder (though attempting to THINK in a particular extra-dimensional space threw off a run-time error). And the downloadable version of the game comes with a nicely put-together Infocom-style manual that should make this easy for folks newer to parser games to get into. Oh, and while there is definitely peril of both the physical and existential varieties, Eat the Eldritch will politely rewind if you reach a bad end, taking the sting out of failure (you’ll also often get an optional achievement for your trouble – I though I was pretty thorough, but I only got about a dozen of the 27 on offer!)
The puzzles are similarly player friendly; there’s nothing too head-scratching here, but they’re satisfying to solve, especially the climactic set piece, which had me giggling and gaggling in equal measure. But beyond its visceral appeal, it’s a clever bit of design – it’s got multiple steps and requires some clever leaps of logic, but it’s all quite well clued and I was able to put all the pieces together without any hints. There is one potentially misleading reference that could lead folks less-familiar with maritime matters astray – protip, if you’re ever in a major storm, you emphatically do not want to go perpendicular to the waves, you want to steer your bow directly into them – but other than that, they’re uniformly well-clued.
It’s a real pleasure to come upon something as horribly lovely as Eat the Eldritch; as I said, I may be slightly partial to maritime tales, but this one floats on its own ballast, and sets a high-water mark for the other games in the Comp.
Idle hands, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I swear, the Comp randomizer has a sense of humor: immediately after having me play a possibly-unfinished game about not being able to see, it serves up a Texture game that features the engine’s signature miniscule-text-on-action-buttons bug and which explicitly presents itself as a teaser. In the Details has a solid premise, updating Robert Johnson’s legendary deal for the social-media age, but the implementation’s a little wonky and it ends just as things are getting interesting. I’d certainly play more of this story, but what’s been entered into the Comp isn’t especially satisfying on its own.
The opening sequence sees your rock-star-on-the-rise rolling into your upcoming gig in style, then blowing off your manager; it helps establish the main character as a conceited, thoughtless brat, but then, I already said they’re a rock star so I’m repeating myself. The elements of a strong beginning are here, but the scene could use another layer of polish: the manager says you’re too drunk to perform, but that level of inebriation hadn’t been conveyed through the earlier text, for example, and the prose throughout conveys some bold, if not garish, imagery, but has more than a few awkward moments. Here’s the description of entering the venue:
"A gold-speckled red carpet yawns at your feet, all the way down the procession and into a set of double doors whose windows glow with a heavenly facade."
Or a sequence where you wow some backstage listeners with your virtuosity:
"To their gaped jaw and compulsory applause, you close your eyes and take a deep bow. You live for this, and maybe [your idiot manager] will appreciate what you do just like the others."
I found the Texture drag-verbs-to-nouns interface worked okay, but not great, throughout this sequence. In particular, sometimes the distinctions between the available actions felt too fine to easily parse: in one of the first passages, you get to choose between “inspecting” and “considering” various nouns, with no clear indication of which might move the narrative ahead. Later on the options do become more straightforward choices, which were simpler to navigate – but here the stakes are quite high, with one wrong move leading to a premature, and quite violent bad end.
(Complete plot spoilers follow; it’s nothing you can’t guess by reading the blurb and looking at the cover art, but still figure it’s good manners not to completely ruin the twist).
(Spoiler - click to show)Because yeah, 3/4 of the way through, the devil shows up; you sold your skill for guitar skills, and now the bill has come due. The writing gets much more engaging at this point, as the author clearly starts having more fun – we’re told that in a bit to intimidate you, the devil “rolls his neck slowly. Purposefully. Vaingloriously.” And you do have that high-stakes choice. But if you guess wrong, he simply murders you (albeit in lovingly metal prose); if you guess right, you get shunted into a series of noninteractive passages that work as an ending cutscene setting up the final “To Be Continued.”
Based on this finale, the game rallies sufficiently to make me interested to see what comes next; there’s promise here, but also some rough bits, so hopefully the author refines the existing prelude even as they work on the next chapters.
A bit out of focus, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My freshman year of high school, somebody stole my glasses. I wasn’t as nearsighted then as I am now (and I wasn’t farsighted at all – ah, to be young again!), so I was able to struggle through the day, but it was still a disorienting experience; I remember squinting at blackboards, at faces, at the TV, hesitant and having to constantly guess at what I was seeing, who I was talking to. It was an object lesson in how fragile one’s sense of stability in the world can be – and also an object lesson about the cluelessness of teenaged boys, because turns out the culprit was a dormmate who’d drawn my name for Secret Santa and decided it’d be funny to give me back a bunch of my own stuff.
So I think the inciting incident in Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses has legs; waking up after a nap at your school’s Literature Club room to find them missing, of course you’d drop everything, and even grill your close friends, to get them back. Unusually for a ChoiceScript game, there aren’t any stats governing your travails (or at least if there are, they’re hidden), though you do get to customize your gender and romantic preferences (relevant because you can get flirty with at least one of the two prime suspects) – success is all down to the perspicacity of your investigation.
Or is it, though? After two playthroughs, my sense is that the game isn’t really structured as a mystery. Sure, you can go interrogate your two friends – one the anarchic class clown, the other a mysterious and cool new kid who’s a multiclassed jock/nerd – and take a variety of conversational tacks, but these choices mostly seem to have an impact on you relationships rather than your ability to solve the mystery. And as is perhaps evident in the lopsided detail with which I characterized the pair of friends, while questioning one of them is an involved process with the potential for myriad different outcomes, the other friend is dispensed with in a conclusory two or three choices. I explored pretty thoroughly in my first playthrough, but I didn’t find my glasses, and though I did in my second, success didn’t feel especially satisfying (Spoiler - click to show)(I decided to take a nap and the glasses had come back while I slept)). I consulted the walkthrough, and it seems like the results of your investigation might depend primarily not on what you say when you encounter your friends, but your skill at finding them: the initial sequence of the game involves you trying to track them down via a variety of means, which feels a bit like an exercise in forcing the player to find the plot.
The writing is charming enough to somewhat carry this disappointing gameplay, though – it’s got a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and though the prose has more than its share of grammar errors and typos, it’s still occasionally charming. I got a laugh out of this description of one of your friends:
"She’s the typical class clown, always with her antics, never taking anything seriously. One time she ordered milk tea for the whole class, even when your school specifically bans outside food."
What a mischievous imp! I do wish the writing had done more to foreground how challenging it is to exist in the world without being able to see well, though; while it gets mentioned from time to time, I’d often forget my predicament since many descriptions don’t seem to be impacted by the main character’s presumably-intense myopia.
Actually, there’s an indication that H!ICFMG may be unfinished; the Comp blurb starts off with “(To be updated)”, and the author’s already uploaded two new versions as of this writing. If that’s the case, a more robust final release may help the game more fully live into its fun premise, but for now it’s more of a teaser.
Lost in prehistory, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Shanidar, Safe Return, has a compelling setting that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a work of IF before – Clan of the Cave Bear style prehistory. Jumping back 40,000 years ago, this choice-based game tasks you with guiding a small band of Neanderthals who’ve suffered an attack from some aggressive Cro-Magnons first to immediate safety, and then to a far-off sanctuary where they can hopefully flourish. It’s enriched with compelling details that appear to be the fruit of quite a lot of research – I really felt the texture of these people’s way of life. While the author made a few choices that I found worked somewhat at cross purposes and lessened the impact of the work overall, I was still glad to experience this story.
The game admittedly doesn’t make the best first impression – instead of a play online link or a game file available for download, instead you need to open up a pdf that contains a link to the actual website where Shanidar, Safe Return is hosted. For something that appears to be a conventional Twine game in format, this feels needlessly convoluted. The landing page includes a quick summary of the setup, but then lists links without providing any context – I wasn’t sure at first whether these were ways of jumping to different sections of the story, but as it turned out the game gives you an option of which of three story vignettes to start out with.
There’s a cast of characters page there too, but I found it hard to digest. The names aren’t drawn from any language I’m familiar with, a lot of characters have names that begin with the same letter, and you can’t refer back to the cast list once the game starts, which really wished I could do once I’d clicked through: immediately, there are a lot of different people to keep track of, and their basic information and relationships with each other aren’t always communicated. I was deep into the game’s second act before I realized that Uda, one of the major recurring characters, was actually the father of the main character’s son, but I think I was supposed to know that from the beginning.
Admittedly, some of this confusion may be due to the fact that the game is a sequel to an earlier instalment – those who’ve played that one might find this introduction smoother. Still, since I don’t believe the prequel was an IF Comp game, I think the author could have probably been more mindful of the likelihood that there’d be a lot of new players who were coming to the series fresh.
It didn’t take me too long to get into the groove of things, though, since the initial setup of fleeing from danger was clear and compelling. The game’s written in a very simple prose style that feels like a good fit for the subject matter, too; the characters are never dehumanized by forcing them to adopt stereotypical “cave man” speech, but it does make sense to keep the language from getting too flowery. Here’s an early passage:
"Oihana carries Eneko in a soft leather sling on his back. Eneko is never a burden. Eneko falls asleep in the safety of Oihana’s sling. He drops the doll, Pala, along the way. The forest canopy protects the band of refugees from the rain. They leave a trail of wet prints in the mud, most of which are washed away by morning. Dawn approaches. The rain stops."
There’s a kind of mythic, elemental resonance to this kind of writing, and when it combined with those well-observed details about how the characters found and prepared food, or gathered supplies for travel, or engaged in group decision-making, Shanidar, Safe Return works very well in a unique, anthropological vein.
Unfortunately, pretty soon after the initial act came to a close, I once again started feeling disoriented. The game started introducing more and more characters, and I realized that its idiosyncratic approach to choices – each passage ends with two or three links summarizing something different people are doing, and clicking on one will skip you over to that part of the plot, without any interstitial narration to make the transition less jarring – was actually skipping me over important information or plot developments; for example, in the first act, I found it most compelling to follow the thread involving an orphaned toddler and watchdog finding their way back to the larger group, but as a result I didn’t wind up clicking on any of Uda’s links, and as mentioned above, didn’t understand who he was or why he was playing such an important role in Act 2.
This sense of the game skipping around was exacerbated in the final act, where, their preparations complete, the group embarks on an epic journey of thousands of kilometers. I was deeply curious about how they were going to cross mountains, pass over the Bosporous, and explore unfamiliar lands – but since Act 3 also introduced a whole new set of characters, who appeared to be ancestors of Aboriginal Australians, I was curious about them, and by the time I’d gotten a handle on who they were and switched back to the original group, they were already just about at their destination! This isn’t a modernist story, where fractured timelines and incomplete information are thematically important – again, I feel like the game is most effective when it’s working in National Geographic mode – so I feel like a more linear approach to the material would have worked better.
The other authorial choice that didn’t resonate especially strongly for me is the use of some narrative elements that felt YA-inspired; there are some tropey romances, and the Neanderthal-Cro Magnon conflict is characterized in a fairly Manichean, diversity vs. intolerance sort of way. I’ve got no objections to any of that, but I felt like they didn’t mesh well with the dry prose style, and injected some notes of anachronism into what was otherwise an engaging window into a long-forgotten past.
For all that not all the strands here come together seamlessly, though, many of them do. I liked getting to follow Eneko’s coming of age, and learning about how the people’s foraging practices changed as they came to the Middle East from their original home in Europe. I’d gladly play a third game in this series – but would hope that it would be a bit more accessible to newcomers, and not lose sight of the primary threads of its story.
Pauldron of peril, gorget of glory, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
It’s probably the dream of most IF authors to be a prolific writer of high-quality games, but contemplating the oeuvre of Arthur DiBianca, who’s perhaps comes as close to that ideal as anybody currently working, I wonder whether there’s a downside to such consistency. Does there ever come a point where the audience starts to take you for granted, and greet each new work with a simple “ho hum, here’s yet another really fun Arthur DiBianca game”? I hope that’s not the case, but I have to say, I was not the slightest bit surprised to find that Vambrance of Destiny is pretty great.
Like pretty much all of his work, this is a limited parser game, one that specifically feels like an iteration on last year’s IFComp entry, Trouble in Sector 471. Like in that game, here we’ve got a nicely-realized minimap, a metroidvania explore-to-upgrade-to-explore-more structure, and a main objective that’s largely advanced by using your abilities to beat baddies. Here, though, the robot-topia of Section 471 is swapped for the aesthetics of dungeon-crawling fantasy; plotwise, you’ve got to delve into an ancient ruin to beat up a rogue wizard and reclaim his stolen staff of power, and ability-wise, you’ve got the eponymous arm-armor, which evinces various spell-like abilities as you fill its various receptacles with magical gems. There’s also a cool tech upgrade this time out, which is that the game is played with single keypresses – no need to type out full commands or even hit enter – which is a nice convenience (the tilde key allows access to SAVE, LOAD, and other systems commands, though).
The story and writing are relatively minimal – the Foozle shows up a couple times to taunt you, but otherwise this is a simple get-to-the-end-to-beat-the-boss affair, while the absence of an EXAMINE action helps keep the location descriptions tight and focused. They work well for what they are, don’t get me wrong, but like most of DiBianca’s games, VoD lives and dies by its puzzles. And unsurprisingly, they’re really quite well done.
The process of getting new capabilities via gem upgrades is always fun, of course, and you get to master a fun set of spells over the course of the game, from elemental attacks to teleports to summoning spells. Having spent a bunch of time recently assessing the design of limited-parser games, I’m increasingly of the mind that the key challenge is to avoid the lawnmowering problem – that is, making it too tempting for the player to make progress simply by running through all the different options at their disposal whenever they hit an obstacle, rather than engaging with the puzzle and trying to solve it. Vambrance avoids this pitfall handily; the challenges progress nicely as you go, with straightforward one-spell-required obstacles soon giving way to more complex ones that require an extended sequence of different spells, or have timing elements that require you to wait or otherwise pay attention before spamming different actions. This variety of strategies keeps things fresh, and means that spamming all the spells in turn eventually becomes tedious and unproductive.
Of course, there’s also a risk of making challenges too complex – which is just that a game becomes too hard. VoD generally stays on the right side of this line, too. I struggled a bit with some of the multi-step solutions in Sector 471, but generally had an easier time here, I think because the game does a great job providing feedback for when you’re on the right track or have come up with a partial solution. As with most of DiBianca’s games, the most esoteric puzzles are mostly saved for optional side-objectives (here, there are a dozen bonus treasures to collect along the way to the big boss, in keeping with the dungeon crawl theme). That said, while I did complete all the puzzles, both the critical path and the optional ones, I did wind up going to the hints more than a few times towards the end – ultimately, you wind up accumulating over a dozen different ability-gems, some of which are fairly involved to use (like the one that enables you to temporarily teleport in one of a half-dozen different objects), which feels like it starts to strain at the borders of how limited a limited-parser game can be.
Still, even the puzzles I got hints on were well-clued in retrospect, and fun to solve. The climactic fight with the rogue wizard is also a really good time. It maybe doesn’t play completely fair, I have to admit -- (Spoiler - click to show)you need to beat him in a spell duel, and after a warm-up round where he throws things with obvious counters at you, and then starts mixing in ones that require extrapolation from puzzles you’ve previously solved, to a final set that actively mislead you, telegraphing one vulnerability only to reveal a different, hidden one after you fail to stop it. This means that victory will almost certainly require an initial loss or two so you can memorize how to respond to these tricky ones, albeit trying again just takes half a dozen turns -- but since the whole sequence winds up being an enjoyable set piece, this notional violation of good game design principles winding up eminently forgivable.
All of which is to say: ho hum, here’s another really fun Arthur DiBianca game. Yawn. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next year!
Art vs commerce in a rigged fight, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The randomizer, ever playful, gave me two short Texture games in a row. Like Lonehouse, this one’s also a deeply interior portrait of a person in the throes of powerful feelings, and also boasts a fair bit of awkward writing. It does have a clarity of purpose, though, and some arresting images, as it tells a story of one old man’s obsession with completing his sculptural masterpiece, while it manages to use the sometimes-awkward drag-verbs-onto-nouns Texture interface fairly intuitively; for all that it does have real merits, though, it seems to endorse a rather narrow understanding of the role of art, which limited the effectiveness of its climax.
While The Sculptor doesn’t offer a lot of biographical details about the main character, it does give you enough to understand his situation. His aspirations towards artistry have been frustrated for decades, first by an unsupportive father and then his lack of money. After a lifetime of menial labor, though, he’s finally been able to save up enough money to purchase a block of marble, so that he can have one last chance to create a magnum opus. Complicating matters, he’s also deep in medical debt due to a hernia surgery – the collections agency representative, though, seems intrigued by your work, and might accept your masterpiece to discharge the debt, and their display of such a remarkable piece might even help make your name famous…
This is a straightforward plot, but it’s enough to support the game’s short runtime. And there are a few places where the game offers some optional social engagement with your old boss, or lets you contemplate what you’re trying to achieve, which enriches the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Mechanically, you’re usually given one or two more passive or reflective verbs, and one that’s more active, so it was typically clear which options would deepen the current scene and which would move on to the next bit of the story. On the flip side, the prose is often wonky, but does mix in some moments of real power. Here’s a bit where you consider the sacrifices you made for art that shows off both these aspects of the writing:
"The days you scavenged your intact pockets, counting what to spend so you could put the rest away. The nights you slept in hunger’s bed, the winters of wet socks and tattered shoes you wore with pride, and the dear family you loved — children and wife you chose not to have lest they too would choose to put the rest away."
There are also a few images that just land, with no caveats needed, like this description of the marble block you’ve paid for with your life’s wages:
"That is your whole life, you explain. Where every little coin you saved went. You struggle to admit that every chip you break from it is a year thrown away."
I did find the game tottered a bit at the finish line, though. After you complete the masterpiece, the collections agency people return, and you’re confronted with a climactic choice, which are literally labeled as either “Sullied and Impure” – you let them have the sculpture, clearing your debt and bringing you worldly fame – or “Refined and Preserved”, where you take a hammer and smash the sculpture to bits before their disbelieving eyes. This is not an especially nuanced look at how artists are cross-pressured between commerce and integrity!
This could work, I suppose, as an allegory of various artistic dilemmas, but the rest of the game has too many specific details – like the whole hernia surgery/medical debt plotline that sets up the choice – for it to easily function as a pure philosophical statement. At the same time, it isn’t sufficiently grounded to really engage with the questions of artistic production under capitalism; like, if he has the medical debt because he was uninsured pre-Obamacare, that lands differently than if he lives in a state that’s stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid for obscure reasons of political fealty. Similarly, the game seems to posit collections agencies as well-funded, classy operations akin to Fortune 500 corporations or law firms, able to shell out big bucks for art and promote it in such a way as to ensure your reputation.
This matters because throughout human history, artistic production has been embedded in webs of economic exchange and patronage – especially capital-intensive forms like marble sculpture – so the simple art-for-art’s-sake philosophy the game endorses seems about as substantive as someone yelling “no sellouts” at a Jawbreaker show. Like, creating a great work of art is rewarding in and of itself, sure, but quarrying rock is not an especially fun job, and the people who cut it into regular blocks often die of silicosis. The myth of the lone, tortured artist creating at the margins of society is largely an invention of the Romantic era, but it’s telling that the people actually doing the creating back then were primarily white male aristocrats or members of the haute-bourgeoisie. The Sculptor seems to interrogate that myth by seeing how it applies to someone with dramatically less economic privilege – but it can’t quite bring itself to reject this inherited narrative.
An over-generic take on loss, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My wife has a sweatshirt that used to belong to my sister. We live in California, and she lived in Maryland, so one September when we were visiting and it got cold, she noticed that my wife was shivering in her SoCal-appropriate outfit, and lent her a hoody. I forgot to give it back before we left, and a month later we found out Liz’s cancer had come back, so returning a sweatshirt wasn’t ever a priority in the time we had left. And now that sweatshirt isn’t just a sweatshirt.
There can be an unbearable poignancy to the artifacts our loved ones leave behind when they die; the books they read and wrote in, the glasses that let them see, the tchotchkes they’d look at and smile. Trivial, everyday objects that were barely worth a second of thought are transmuted to relics, bearing the last impress of someone’s now-finished time in the world.
Lonehouse engages with that poignancy, in ways that were occasionally quite arresting for me to encounter – the protagonist is visiting the apartment of her recently-deceased sister, named Liv, to help clean it out and take away some keepsakes. As you explore using Texture’s drag-verbs-to-nouns interface, you get snatches of the history between them – it’s not fully explained, but it seems like the sisters hadn’t been in touch, and perhaps there’d been a falling out – and identify the things that seem to have the most Liv-ness to them: a jacket, a favored plushie, a photo.
Despite the strong personal resonance of the premise, though, I didn’t wind up feeling like Lonehouse was truly compelling. Partially this is because the writing is often awkward. The style is generally unadorned and matter-of-fact, which I think is appropriate to communicating grief, but some of the author’s word choices undermine the simple power of this approach. Partially though it’s because the writing never gets especially specific. The general experience of death is one we’ve all had or will have, of course, but it’s unique details that turn this from a vague sense of loss to heart-rending tragedy, and Lonehouse doesn’t usually try to work in this register. Upon seeing that Liv saved an old Christmas gift that the protagonist made her, for example, we’re told that “[a] complicated feeling stirs in you” – but what feeling is that? Again, we aren’t given much detail of the prior relationship between the two, so it’s hard to place this in context.
The Texture engine also makes experiencing the story less engaging than I would have liked. I ran into what appears to be a bug with the system, since I came across it in another game too, where the buttons holding each scene’s verbs displayed their text in a tiny font – that’s not the author’s fault, but it did mean that I was often taken out of the story as I tried to decode my options. The interface also made it challenging to figure out which actions would allow me to explore or get more detail, and which would progress to the next sequence; several times in this short game, I wound up accidentally speeding through rooms I’m not sure I was finished with.
This is a short game that takes on some compelling issues; I’m not sure whether it’s the author’s debut, but if so I think it’s a more than respectable start. My key feedback for next time (and hopefully there’ll be a next time!) is to lean into the concrete, grounded style displayed here, but not to sacrifice the particular in the vain hope of making a piece of writing universal: otherwise, a sweatshirt will remain just a sweatshirt.
Indonesian innkeepery, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
For all that Bali B&B lives up to its billing as a cozy domestic simulator, this ChoiceScript game inspired more stomach-churning dread than any other game in this year's Comp – just as I was settling into my week-long stint of temporarily managing my grandparents’ eponymous business, I was terrified to learn that the proprietor of a B&B is expected to play host over breakfast, talking to all the different guests at once, making sure the conversation doesn’t lag, and generally engaging in an extended personal interaction with people who are involved in a purely economic transaction with you. I can see how people with less social anxiety than me would enjoy this as an opportunity to get to know new people and learn more about the world, but ye gods – this is one career I can definitely cross off the list when I need to figure out what to do post-retirement.
Other than that one shocking moment, though, this really is a warm duvet of a game. As a quarter-Indonesian Australian, you’ve grown used to coming back to Bali for vacations and spending time with your grandparents, so when they surprise you on your latest trip by telling you that they’re off to Paris and you’re in charge, at least you know many of the locals and most of what needs to be done. The week progresses in an agreeable series of vignettes; you’re always jumping from one crisis to another, but buoyed by a charming supporting cast, nothing ever feels insurmountable. A litter of cats in the oven when the health inspector comes calling? Guests who don’t speak any language you know? Another who insists on eating bacon over the religious objections of the cook? I dealt with some of these better than others (I charmed the health inspector and tamed the cats; I gave the Chinese guests some mild food poisoning but they overall seemed to have an OK time; and I’m a vegetarian so I told bacon-guy to fuck right off) but the game was happy to keep things moving without excoriating me for my mistakes.
The problems and confusions that arise as you attempt to keep the B&B running are the main focus of gameplay, but the true star is the setting. I’ve never been to Bali – though since there was an Indonesian restaurant a couple blocks from my college dorm, I can confirm the food is absolutely delicious – but this game is a great advertisement for a stay there. The scenery is described in lush detail, there’s an attention to the cultural and religious diversity that feels authentic and respectful, and overall there’s a lovely, laid-back vibe to the proceedings. A game with this premise could easily fall into the trap of demonizing the guests or stereotyping the staff, but even when someone’s being a jerk, the author manages to convey their humanity (and even the ones who behave badly have an opportunity to at least partially redeem themselves). There’s also an adorable yet mischievous monkey, what’s not to like.
If anything, my only complaint is that I felt like the game went too easy on me. It has the usual overwhelming flurry of ChoiceScript stats, which I promptly ignored, but regardless, almost everything I tried seemed to succeed. Late in the game, there was a moment where it said that because I took good care of my health, I was able to accomplish a challenging task, but I had no memory of ever prioritizing health or even having the option of doing so. And the health inspector felt like a Chekhov’s gun that didn’t go off – after an initial encounter where she finds some violations, she says she’s going to come back, but since she returns after your grandparents do, you don’t get to see whether the consequences of your decisions have saved the B&B from a shutdown. Given the general gentle vibe of the game, this isn’t a real threat, of course – and again, this is comfort gaming, I didn’t need it to be overly punishing – but at the end of the week, I did feel like there were some times that I’d made mistakes, and it maybe felt a little patronizing that the game didn’t call me on them.
That’s mostly me finding something to criticize, though. I had a lot of fun with this one, from the well-drawn characters to the intelligent approach to choice-based gameplay (there are times when you’re asked big-picture questions, for example, but if you feel like you don’t have enough information you can sensibly just punt on them with no penalty). And I didn’t even talk much about the kittens! It almost was enough to make me think that B&B life could be worth the awkward breakfast table chit-chat. Almost.
The world's first Muppetvania, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Everyone remembers the first time they truly understood death, I suspect – the moment when it toggled from a frightening but abstract notion, one of a million things about being grown-up that kids have to accept but don’t really get, to the viscera; and frankly terrifying revelation that anyone, anytime can be taken, with no exceptions or escapes or ways back. I was a sheltered kid, so for me that didn’t happen until just after I turned nine, when one morning on the way to school the radio said that Jim Henson had died. Of course I knew who he was: the Muppets and Sesame Street loomed large in my childhood. I tried to hold myself together, but then they played Kermit the Frog singing Rainbow Connection, and I lost it, blubbering as my harried mom dropped me off.
As a result, while it took me a while to figure out what Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head was doing, once I twigged to it I immediately was on board. It’s a Twine game built around a recently-deceased puppeteer who’s clearly modeled on Henson, albeit with significant differences in biography (Malcolm Newsome is a Black millennial from Lancaster, CA); there’s a Disney-style megacorporation threatening to buy out and bulldoze his studio and a tabloid narrative saying that Newsome died of a drug overdose threatening to undermine his reputation. The player character is a former member of Newsome’s troupe who’s snuck back into the studio to try to figure out what really happened, fight back against his enemies, and reclaim his legacy.
It’s a great premise, and like I said, one that resonates with me. But the reason it took me a while to realize that was what was going on is that the game initially presents itself as a heist – actually, you’ve been hired to try to steal back as many of Nesome’s puppets as you can before the compound is demolished. And once you enter the first of four buildings on the lot, the set-up is quickly complicated by a pair of twists that come in quick succession: 1) once you grab the first puppet you find, you’re compelled to put it on your hand and it starts talking to you, and 2) there are monsters, bastardized puppets who now patrol the compound on behalf of the company that’s coming to bulldoze everything. Despite the game’s blurb claiming that its genre is horror (well, “mascot horror”, whatever that is) this isn’t played for as many scares as it could be – in particular, while it’s weird that the puppets appear to be sapient, they’re friendly, and actually quite helpful, as the most important ones each have a special power that can help you navigate through the maze-like interiors of the studio’s buildings, find your way around the various locks and obstacles, and evade or defeat the monsters.
Gameplay-wise, then, we’ve got a sort of Muppetvania, as you gather keys and new puppet powers enabling you to traverse more of the game’s world and in turn obtain yet more keys and puppets. It’s a pretty big game, and while you don’t need to recover all 14 puppets to get the best ending, I found the gameplay loop compelling enough to find all but one (and my failure to go the distance might have been due to a bug rather than a lack of commitment: (Spoiler - click to show) the puppet-detecting puppet kept telling me there was another to be found in the sink of the dishwashing area, but when I searched there I couldn’t find anything). Each dive into a building makes for a tense game of push-your-luck, as you attempt to explore and search every room, identify obstacles and hidden exits, try to work out the pattern of the monsters’ movements (there’s a different one in each building, and they all have bespoke movement strategies), and then flee so you can come back with the puppet or puppets you need to make progress. It’s fun stuff, even if I defaulted to undo-scumming more often than I like to admit.
I’m not sure it fits well with the broader ambitions of the game, though. For one thing, you’re limited to carrying at most two puppets at a time (and if you’re full up on puppets, you won’t have a hand free to pick up keys), so to speed up the process of recovering puppets from the buildings, I tended to eschew the ones with utility powers in favor of the ones that were strictly necessary to solve puzzles. Because the author’s coded in a bunch of neat interactions where puppets give commentary on the workshops and soundstages you encounter, as well as putting in unique dialogue between each pair of puppets if you wear two at the same time – but I know I missed out on a lot of that. This is a shame because I really did like the cast; all the characters seem like plausible members of a Muppet-like ensemble, and had winning personalities in their own right. And missing out on their commentary in the studio areas meant that they felt more like monster mazes than opportunities for environmental storytelling that enriched the game’s overall themes.
The other disconnect is that it turns out that the real villain of the piece isn’t Disney-branded monsters, it’s systemic racism. I’m going to spoiler-block the rest of this discussion because this is a big late-game revelation, but I can’t help discussing it in some depth. (Spoiler - click to show)Turns out there’s one particular puppet who has a camera built into her, and she recorded Newsome’s death, which is different from the vague “maybe it was a drug overdose” story you hear hinted at in the early game. Actually, he was pulled over by some LAPD cops who got angry that he wasn’t sufficiently deferential, so they murdered him and planted drugs on his body to cover up their crime. I’m deeply conflicted about this plot point; on the one hand, I liked the way the game foregrounds Newsome’s experience as a Black man in the entertainment industry, and God knows we’ve all seen enough examples of police violence and even killings of Black folks in recent years. But at the same time, this is an exaggerated, if not cartoonish, take on how these incidents play out. I’m maybe especially sensitive to this because I work for an LA-based civil rights organization and know some of the groups and people who helped reform the LAPD post-Rodney King; they still do a bunch of racially-biased stuff and much of my day job involves working to shift funding from policing to community-based alternatives, but for all that the story as conveyed by the game didn’t feel plausible. And again, the struggle against the monsters and the company that made them turns out not to be all that on point with what actually killed Newsome.
Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head does end strong, with a lovely epilogue where you explore a museum exhibit that’s been built around the puppets you recovered, encountering Newsome’s family and colleagues to explore the impact he had, and, at least in my ending, seeing his legacy vindicated. It’s really well done, and gives the player a strong sense of accomplishment as they end their time with the game. But again, its elegiac tone and more grounded themes (race is again a major factor) are at odds with the maze-y horror bits that make up the innards of the game. Again, I think those innards are good, but I’m left with the feeling that this is a game whose components are all quite strong, but which don’t necessarily reinforce each other all that well – it’d take a master puppeteer like Mal Newsome to stitch these disparate parts together into a unified whole.
Effects pedal to the metal, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Beat Witch is something I haven’t seen before: a parser game imagined as a series of high-octane action set pieces. It makes for a propulsive, pacey experience that’s easy to imagine seeing as a blockbuster movie, with sudden reversals, twists, and explosive climaxes coming one after the other. This approach isn’t without its downsides – the traditional parser pleasures of exploring an environment at one’s leisure and carefully thinking through the solutions to a smorgasbord of puzzles are completely absent, as the game pushes you from one adrenaline-fueled sequence to the next – but it makes for a unique change of pace.
Unsurprisingly given the game’s design ethos, Beat Witch starts in medias res, as you jostle your way into a safehouse alongside a bunch of hazmat-suit clad rescue workers dealing with a deadly plague. And just as you start to sort out what’s going on, you’re in for further rug-pulls; as it turns out, you’re not actually part of the team, and there isn’t actually a plague. The ABOUT menu fills you in on the situation through a neat bit of worldbuilding – it offers you the table of contents of a book about the eponymous “beat witches”, dangerous women who have the supernatural ability to siphon off and invest life energy, as well as a fatal vulnerability to music. Just giving the title of each chapter establishes the setting with admirable concision; I was way engaged contemplating “The Choral Uprising and why it failed” or “The phonograph, the radio, and the Great Extermination” than I would have been by a traditional lore-dump.
It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re one of the eponymous witches – but you’re a good witch, not a bad witch, with an angsty backstory from having accidentally hurt members of your family and striving for redemption by taking out the especially evil beat witch who’s made the city her hunting grounds. Of course, once the rest of the hazmat team realizes what you are, they aren’t going to take any chances or ask any questions before trying to kill you – in only a few turns, you’re faced with deadly danger, and once you solve that puzzle, there’s only a fleeting moment to catch your breath before you make it to the bad witch’s skyscraper lair and find the next desperate situation from which you need to extricate yourself.
The game never really stops, shunting you from one well-implemented sequence to the next – sometimes literally, as if you dawdle too long other characters might force you to move on. In pretty much all of Beat Witch’s scenes, you’re at the brink of death and struggling just to survive; there’s little extraneous scenery to explore, and in a convenient bit of worldbuilding, beat witches like you are mute, so there’s no real conversation system to slow things down. And while you’re powerful, your abilities are relatively straightforward, so you only have a few options in any given situation. As a result, things move quick; the puzzles aren’t especially hard, but it feels good to solve them because they have such high stakes.
Beat Witch does run on action-movie logic; if it explains how you knew about the bad witch you’re trying to stop, I didn’t notice that being established. You zip up, down, and around the skyscraper without being especially bound by the laws of physics (there’s an internal monologue and flashback as you fall from the roof that goes so long it almost becomes funny). And your nemesis is a classic motormouthed villain, cartoonishly evil and incapable of shutting up: when, late in the game, she taunted me by saying “think how much you goofed while I squeeze you like a juicy fart”, I imagined the protagonist was as tired of her BS as I was.
But these are all in keeping with the genre the game is trying to emulate, and may be the price to be paid for some really compelling moments like – I’m going to spoiler-block this one so as not to ruin the surprise – (Spoiler - click to show) sky-bridge of semi-animated bodies connecting the roofs of neighboring skyscrapers, or the LIVE command overwriting the after-death menu and heralding your resurrection. The game does have some unforced missteps, though: having an antagonist named “Dr Steve” is a little too goofy for the mood, and while I understand the intended thematic resonance of the final encounter, I think it comes off a bit anticlimactic. But these are easy to look past.
Reading between the lines of this review, it’s probably not a surprise for me to reveal that I admired Beat Witch more than I enjoyed it. I am an increasingly-old fuddy-duddy who likes to potter around when I play a parser game, and I tend to prioritize things like literary prose, thematic depth, and well-realized characters – none of which Beat Witch has much interest in. But I’m pretty sure that for some folks out there, this will be their favorite game of the Comp, and I can completely understand why; it delivers an experience most parser games don’t even attempt, and does so with elan.
(Insert LotR pun here), November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The 2023 Com doesn't have an entry more high-concept than One Does Not Simply Fry: I’m sure I’ve seen mash-ups weirder than the Great British Bake Off meets Lord of the Rings, but I can’t think of them offhand. But for all that I’m deeply curious about precisely where the idea came from, it’s a match made in, if not heaven, at least one of the higher tiers of purgatory: the bake-off formula provides a sturdy framework for a ChoiceScript style game, with cooking skill, sucking up to the judges, and engaging with the other contestants providing distinct areas of endeavor, while the Tolkien stuff allows for a wide cast of familiar characters and works as a font for a million bad jokes and worse puns. It makes for engaging gameplay – and it’s quite replayable, with three distinct characters (plus a bonus unlockable one), multiple endings, and a host of potentially-viable strategies – even if the humor sometimes feels a bit forced.
Starting up the game, my first impression was that it was overstuffed with content. There are the aforementioned multiple characters, each of which is a knock-off of a member of the Fellowship: ersatz Legolas, faux Frodo, and a version of Éowyn who’s mysteriously called “Avis Barb” (is that like “has a beard” in schoolboy Latin? Anyway, I played as her my first time out). As per usual in ChoiceScript, they each have a distinct array of strengths and weakness, encompassing cooking ability, martial skill, speechcraft, and magical powers denoted as “breadomancy”. You’ve got the trio of judges: lead judge Tira Masu, grumpypants Gorgon Ramsayer, and the Doldrums/Seagull double act. There are optional vegetarian and vegan modes if you’d prefer not to be confronted with certain ingredients (a touch I appreciated!) Then there are the competitors you’re up against, including the certainly-not-going-to-turn-out-to-be-the-baddy “Sour Ron”, and a loaf of bread. And once the competition kicks off, you find out that your goal is not just to make the best onion ring, but to fry up the On(e)ion Ring which may or many not reawaken the Dark Lord resting uneasily under Mount Boom.
It’s a lot, but fortunately once the game kicks off, it’s reasonably manageable. Play proceeds in phases, from buying ingredients to preparing your frying setup to jostling with the competition and completing the challenge, before transitioning into a high-stakes endgame. Since each of the characters have distinct skills, it was usually straightforward to figure out which actions would make the most sense to attempt. I wound up winning the competition and making the On(e)ion Ring my first time out, but it felt excitingly touch-and-go throughout, and I was eager to start over to try out to the hidden character. At a gameplay level, then, I’d judge One Does Not Fry a success.
The humor, though, wound up being a slight net negative for me. There are some good jokes in here, don’t get me wrong – not-Éowyn makes brutal fun of the Witch King for being overconfident about that “no man can slay me” prophecy in a world that’s 50% women and also has hobbits, elves, dwarves, ents… And there’s an extended bit where you can decide to get potatoes rather than onions from the store, which rather scotches your chances of wining the onion ring challenge, but does set up a lovely line where you attempt to explain potatoes to the ancient Elven ghost who lives in your copy of the rulebook – don’t ask, I told you it’s a lot – and get the following nonplussed response:
"Back in the Worst Age, we didn’t have any weird eldritch ground tubes with self-replicating eyes that would try to convince you to plant them so they could poison you."
But as that “Worst Age” (First Age, geddit?) and all the punny names I mention above indicate, there are a lot of clunkers here too. The game subscribes to the view that everything has to be a pun, and go figure, many of them seem forced. It’s not Edoras, it’s Fedoras; it’s not the Witch King, it’s the Which King?; and I already mentioned Doldrums, who besides boasting a really forced name also for some reason has a Cockney accent. I regret to have to report that there’s a “Riders of Lohan” joke. Look, I don’t want to come off like a humorless scold, and I think my appetite for silly Tolkien stuff is pretty high, up to and including having a favorite LotR-themed rap band. But still, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if it’d had more restraint; the authors clearly came up with a bunch of really good Tolkien jokes, but unfortunately felt like they had to crank out like double or triple that amount to meet their quota.
After a first playthrough it’s easy enough to skim over that stuff, and the bones here are solid; I’m tempted to give the game another spin to check out how the classic Frodo and Sam team would fare. And there are a couple of achievements I failed to get in my two playthroughs (oh yeah, forgot to mention, there are achievements too). One Does Not Simply Fry really is an embarrassment of riches, even if you do need to take the bitter along with the sweet.
Infernal laws, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I really enjoyed SV Linwood’s entry in last year’s Comp, A Long Way to the Nearest Star, but dinged it for having a generic title and forgettable blurb. Fortunately, there are no worries on that front this year – I already had a smile on my face when I booted this parser game up, looking forward to the promised mad science, demonological deal-making, and (most exciting of all) legal research. And that smile stayed there for the hour and a half it took me to work through all its puzzles – this is a delight, funny and satisfying in the way of the best comedy puzzlefests.
The setup here is a good one – brainy-yet-hubristic mortal treats with the devil for forbidden knowledge, desperately hoping to keep his soul – and could be played straight for a seasonally-appropriate note of gothic horror. That’s not what we’ve got here, though; Dr Ludwig goes for the laugh every time, and every time nails it – like, it took me five minutes to realize that it wasn’t the case that literally every description in the game started with a sentence with an exclamation point, just most of them. It’s the kind of thing that could wear out its welcome, but the game never comes close to that line, deftly slinging joke after joke. Like, here’s what you get when you examine your trusty mad-scientist’s coat:
"My favorite lab coat! After that accident while experimenting with pocket dimensions, I could carry so much stuff in it. And the bloodstains were very fashionable, too!"
(See, I told you about the exclamation points).
Crucially, the humor is almost all character-driven rather than embracing wackiness for its own sake; between Dr Ludwig’s crazed ambitions, the Devil’s sly insinuations, and the leader of the pitchfork-bearing mob’s punctilious adherence to the legal niceties, everyone’s got a slightly different schtick, and an in-world justification for being funny.
And actually, as with A Long Way to the Nearest Star, character interaction is a highlight. Beyond their comedy potential, the whole cast is winning, making you solicitous of their love lives and unfair work conditions even as you’re digging up their ancestors and plotting to violate all God’s laws. And the process of engaging with them is very smooth: Dr Ludwig is an Inform game, but it uses a TADS-style conversation interface where after greeting a character, you can ask them about a constantly-updating list of topics. This hits a nice sweet spot between the freeform ASK/TELL system and more-prescriptive choice-based menus, and you’re able to ask everyone about a wide variety of subjects. The devil is especially impressive; as the game starts, you’ve just summoned and bound him, meaning you can give him commands via the traditional DEVIL, DO ACTION syntax. I confess that I often struggle with these kinds of puzzles, but here the process was well-cued and impressively well implemented: I tried to catch the game out by attempting DEVIL, ABOUT, but was told “As powerful as the Devil is, even he cannot access meta commands” (I was able to get him to take inventory and maybe learned some stuff I shouldn’t have that way, but I can’t help but think the author left that in on purpose).
In fact implementation is a major strength throughout. I did find a single Inform-standard response that had been left in; everything’s rewritten in Dr Ludwig’s bombastic voice. TOUCH attempts fail, for example, because “I am a man of science! I am above such physical labor as touching things without purpose!” (again, see what I mean about the exclamation points?) And you’d better believe that you can LAUGH or CACKLE whenever you want.
The puzzles are similarly of a high standard. They’re mostly traditional object-manipulation challenges, save for the aforementioned get-the-Devil-to-do-your-bidding bits, but they’re well signposted via a dynamic (and funny) to-do list, and they almost all involve engaging with that entertaining supporting cast. Most of the game is fairly open, too, with multiple puzzles available at any one time, so it’s hard to get too stuck. There are two that gave me some trouble, one that could have used better clueing (Spoiler - click to show)(I hadn’t realized that I’d basically solved the shopkeeper’s puzzle by dropping the flyer, because I didn’t understand that the “someone” she was worried would see her reading it was me), and one that was harder than it should have been due to the single bit of awkward implementation I found (Spoiler - click to show)(you need to examine the unsuccessfully-made monster to find your scalpel, but the game refers to it as a “disappointment”, but it doesn’t accept that – or either BODY or MONSTER – to refer to it, requiring you to guess that it’s implemented as EXPERIMENT).
Those are quite minor complaints, though, and just the sort of thing that would be easy to clean up for a post-Comp release. And even in its current form this is an early highlight of the Comp – if you’re adamantly against comedy parser puzzle games, Dr Ludwig won’t change your mind, I suppose, but just about everyone else will have a great time with this one.
The war comes home, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
(Spoilers in this one)
What I like most about The Long Kill is its harshness. Oh, as always, I brought it on myself – there’s a trio of difficulty options at the beginning of this nicely-presented Twine game about a British sniper deployed in the Afghan War (the just-concluded one, that is), including story mode and a conventional “pick whatever choice you want” one. But no, I opted for “Sniper Mode”, where you have to do math and dice are rolled behind the scenes, so you can miss your shots even if you do everything right. And it’s not just the violence: the game has flashbacks and flashforwards to civilian life, and I fucked up my one chance to have a girlfriend because after winning her an elephant at a carnival shooting game, I thought she wanted me to show off and go double or nothing, but actually she was cold and wanted me to go home. Some of this may feel unfair, but who says a game about sudden, explosive death coming before you even have a chance to blink should embrace fairness as an ethos?
(OK, there’s an undo button, and I did use it once or twice, but I felt bad about it).
What I like second-best about The Long Kill is its obsessive focus on shooting. Again, this goes beyond the scenes set during the war. The protagonist – he’s given the uninspiring nom de guerre “Mister” – bonds with his father only through shooting targets and rabbits; as mentioned above, he tries to impress his not-girlfriend by shooting; when he interviews for a job, he talks about how shooting gave him great math skills; even when he takes on a home improvement project, the scene ends with him leveling a power saw and pulling the trigger. Mister is very, very good at shooting; it’s not so much that he’s bad at everything else as that there isn’t anything else.
What I like third-best about The Long Kill is the prose. There are some typos, but it manages to be evocative while sticking to a terse, militaristic style. This sentence is about 2/3 of what the game shares about Mister’s relationship with his father, but it communicates just about everything the player needs to know:
"Even without looking though you can picture the little non-smile, that happy frown he does when you do or say something he likes."
What I like least about The Long Kill is its fantasy of victimization. After an opening sequence where you support a house-raid that bags an important Taliban leader, Mister’s convoy gets hit by an IED and he’s captured alongside his unit. They’re subject to torture, and he’s given an ultimatum of teaching the enemy soldiers to be better shots, or his companions will be executed. It’s a queasily compelling sequence, even if it ends rather abruptly, and by making Mister weak and frightened, it finally renders him something close to human. But this was still a bad authorial choice. We know that in the flashforward, Mister has PTSD and a discharge, but there’s no need for a period of abjection to connect the precise, effective wartime operator with the haunted shell of a man; that’s just what war does. More damningly, this sequence creates an underdog narrative that inverts the far more common reality of the war – the number of Western POWs and casualties was miniscule compared to the Afghans captured, maimed, and slain (many, of course, were innocent, and many, of course, were not). To elide this reality, and instead opt for a shell game that seems to swap the positions of the players: that’s kid glove stuff. Not at all harsh.
A girl and her goat, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Oof. Despite being a sucker for libraries, knowledge, and (presumably) libraries of knowledge, I did not get on well with this one. The pitch is compelling: you’ve found a magical shrine that plays host to an all-knowing spirit, a collection of all the world’s wisdom, and a masked library attendant with a secret, and now you can ask to read any book you want. Wow! That is a lovely idea, and if the realities of implementation mean that of course the promise of “any book” can’t come close to being delivered, at least it’s a compelling illusion.
Sadly, after establishing the setup, the game quickly began to lose me. Partially this is because there are only three books on offer – specifically, two short-ish ones that establish the background lore of this fantasy world’s two major nations, delivered in DnD-manual style, and one long one that’s just the story of how your character came to the library, which of course you already would know and wouldn’t bother wasting time on. Partially this is because the prose doesn’t really live up to the fantastical premise:
"Your breath catches sharply in your chest as the last of the incantations die on the biting wind that whips around you. Streams of pale moonlight flicker in past the broken beams overhead, sending a cascade of sprawling patterns through the old, fractured glass. Ancient words scrawled onto a faded scroll bleed off the edges of their crumbling paper, spilling a black mist onto the cold stone floors which slips and slides into the dark corners of this dilapidated temple."
Adjectivitis, unvarying sentence structure, small grammar errors; it’s not awful but it’s not a high point either, and since the game is almost entirely walls of text – there are some engaging choices towards the endgame, but for the most part you’re either picking “turn to next page” or “turn to next section” – I really found myself wishing for better prose.
As for the content, I found the DnD manuals competent but rather uninspired. One nation is fantasy China, with the serial numbers not even filed off – the provinces are literally just real-world Chinese provinces. It’s got a whiff of Orientalism to it (did you know the lands of the East are ruled by “an ancient and magical dynasty”, that the people are “deeply spiritual and honor their ancestors above all else”, that they “practice martial arts as a way of harnessing [chi] energy”, and are ruled from a capital that is “a place of intrigue”?) but I think this is innocent; the country’s multiculturalism and openness to immigration are held up as a strength, and contrasted with the xenophobia of the western nation (which is Europe-flavored but not a direct insert of anyplace in particular; it’s just general fantasy bollocks).
It’s all serviceable enough, but unexciting to slog through, all the more so when the author occasionally loses track of the lore (there’s a bad-guy cult alternately called the “Band of the Dark Sun” and “Band of the Black Sun”) or draws too-direct inspiration from pop culture (there were a bunch of killings at a recent marriage, which has become known as the “Crimson Union”). And none of it actually winds up being all that relevant to the main part of the game, which is your character’s autobiography – the setting details are sufficiently straightforward that they could have easily been explained in the course of the story.
This bit does have some zip to it; it’s maybe paced a little slowly, and sometimes drops to bottom-line narration when writing out a scene would have been more effective. It also isn’t self-aware of how funny the premise sounds (you go on a world-shaking quest to find a cure for the ailing goat that’s your last link to your family); it’s offbeat enough to work well, but I think needed more time establishing the stakes and emotional connection between the main character and the goat. But once it gets moving, it executes YA-style fantasy novel tropes solidly enough; this isn’t my genre of choice, but even I got a kick out of the various double-crosses in the pirate section. Then things kicked up again after the story wraps, as the protagonist does face an actually-challenging set of decisions without a clear moral compass to make their choices easy.
As a result, my view of the game improved as it went on, but it’s still hard to recommend this one. The author’s got enthusiasm and some talent, but the game we’ve got feels too much like a first draft – there’s a lot of unnecessary cruft and an awkward frame that doesn’t cleanly mesh with the main substance of the story, along with prose that needs some polishing. Of course, every great game started out as a terrible first draft, so this is no bad thing by itself – but hopefully for their next game, the author will be able to spend more time figuring out what they need to say and what they don’t need to say, and revising their work to foreground the most compelling parts.
Legacy game, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve noted elsewhere that the Manichean parser/choice split has been breaking down in recent years, and Hand Me Down is a leading example of the trend: what we have here is a big old Twine-TADS-Twine sandwich, and despite the slight wonkiness that description might suggest, the narrative handles the transitions with aplomb. In the framing choice-based bits, you play a young woman who’s visiting her ailing father in a hospital oncology ward, while in the middle you play the text adventure he (and your partner) has written up as a gift for you, so the shift in platforms makes diegetic sense.
To its credit, the novelty of the game’s design never felt like a distraction. It helps that the various pieces are playing to their platform’s strengths, and even their stereotypes: the parser game is a lightly comic puzzle-‘em-up in the mansion of a whimsical relation, while the Twine bits deal with emotional family drama. On the technical level, I found the process a tiny bit convoluted, but largely because the author provided a lot of choices about how to play each bit; while I could have simply gone from one bit to the next via the game’s webpage, in my experience TADS games tend to be way better when played via the QTADS interpreter, so I the slight fussiness that came from deciding to download the game file instead is on me. And while there’s no state carried between the different pieces, given the setup, that’s not a feature I missed.
This isn’t exactly a game of halves, though – the two Twine pieces are much shorter than the meaty middle. That’s not to slight them by any means: I thought the opener efficiently sketched out the loves, annoyances, and fears between the various character, while providing scope for a few low-stakes decisions that nonetheless helped characterize the protagonist. And the finale sequence is an impressively open-ended conversation where you can choose to chat about what you liked (or disliked) about the text adventure, press your dad on his health and prognosis, or a combination of the two; while the game cues you towards positivity and escapism, at least it does acknowledge that your dad’s constant wisecracking and avoidance of hard topics is at least a bit problematic, so there’s some tension in how to navigate the discussion. But still, combined these two parts made up perhaps half an hour of my two with the game.
(I also can’t help but note that the Twine sections feature AI-generated character portraits; adding insult to injury, I didn’t think they were very good).
As for the text adventure, it’s an impressively realized artifact that does a great job communicating the fictional details of its construction: it’s a wacky puzzlefest set in the house where your dad grew up (very in line with the first parser game many folks write), and since it was originally intended as a gift for your 16th birthday, the main goal is for you to get an invitation, costume, and shareable gift to bring to your party. So if there are sometimes dumb jokes, overcomplicated puzzles, or implementation niggles, well, those are all to be expected!
Irony can only take you so far, but at least as to the first two potential issues, I think Hand Me Down succeeds. On the writing front, the joke-a-minute style lands more often than not, helped along by appealing, entertaining prose; there’s the inevitable puzzle where you need to search an unpleasant pile of compost, and of course you know there’s something in there, but the game’s going to drag things out:
"The only way to make this dark curiosity go away is meet it at the end. You thought you were used to the smell, a cross between vegetable corpses and bug barf, but nope, urk! there it is again, with a fresh layer of horribleness now that you’re getting closer."
There’s also an extended sequence where you have to follow a snail as he races to show you something that left me giggling.
As for puzzles, thought has clearly gone into how to balance the old-school feel with player accessibility. In particular, while there are five different invitations, costumes, and gifts in the game, you only need to get one of each to get to the ending, which takes a substantial edge off the difficulty. There are definitely some design approaches that are too hardcore for me – if you want to get a full score, this is the kind of game where you’d better LOOK UNDER the kitchen table without any prompting. I also signally failed to figure out how to interact with any of the computers I found, with USE COMPUTER or TURN ON COMPUTER being no help at all; turns out MOVE MOUSE is the way to go, which is a pretty granular requirement for something that shouldn’t be at all hard for the protagonist to accomplish. But since those puzzles were largely optional, I can’t complain too much about a design that allows more hardcore puzzle-solvers than I to have extra fun.
That third category, implementation niggles, did sometimes get more than niggle-y, though. There’s some minor stuff, like unimplemented objects (the narration calls great attention to a clock on a mantelpiece in one room, so I was surprised no such thing actually existed) and a takeable beam of sunlight. But the major issues I ran into were about disambiguation. I had to go to incredible lengths to manage such mundane tasks as unlocking a drawer with the key that clearly unlocked it, or reading the most recent of the dozen notes I’d picked up. Judicious inventory juggling got me through most of these challenges, but there were a few I simply had to write off because I couldn’t figure out how to communicate exactly which object I was referring to. I haven’t experienced anything this rough since playing Cragne Manor – and that had 84 different authors, none of whom coordinated with each other!
Those nearly-interchangeable notes bring me to what I think is Hand Me Down’s other missed opportunity. See, over the course of years, your dad has added what amount to diary entries into the game, musing on his relationship with you, his divorce from your mom, how he felt about his own dad… these are well written, and form the clearest connection point between the text adventure and the frame story, rewarding the diligent player with backstory and deeper emotional engagement to inform the eventual climax. But it’s pretty hard to find them – I only discovered about half – and because they’re embedded in a big, riotous puzzlefest, I found they didn’t have as much heft as they merited, because as soon as I read one it was on to the next complex challenge. I would have enjoyed the game more, I think, if the author had leaned harder into creating resonance between the frame story and the text adventure, so that it felt like progress through the parser game was more directly shedding light on the central character relationships.
That would have been a different game, though; and to be honest I have a hard time believing that the protagonist’s dad would have made a more modern, post-Photopia game instead of going back to the 80s text adventures of his youth. Similarly, if Hand Me Down doesn’t fully integrate and unify its disparate pieces, it’s still quite successful at the ambitious task its set itself. The game has heart, comedy, and clever puzzles out the wazoo; if the pieces don’t fully cohere, at least each of them is enjoyable on its own.
Birth of a Tory, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Per a Who song from 50 years ago, no one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, but a cavalcade of anti-hero based movies, TV shows, and podcasts sure are hopeful of filling the gap. Virtue, a UK-set Ink game by a debut author (and/or pseudonym), is the latest to step up to the plate, and it has novelty on its side: here our bad man is a bad woman, and per the blurb, one destined to be a Tory MP. Gloria, our protagonist, is a real piece of work – a status-conscious, property-value obsessed avatar of the bourgeoisie with opinions about Poles, Roma, you name it – and as she confronts, or rather fails to confront, a peeping-Tom incident in the tony neighborhood to which she just moved, her odiousness moves from the personal to the political.
She’s an unpleasant, anxious person, in other words and the game’s great strength is that it keeps just the right distance from her. The player is privy to all Gloria’s fears and hopes (there’s rather a lot more of the former than the latter), which are all sketched with psychological plausibility, but her subjectivity is kept at a remove; the narration weaves in snatches of thoughts and bits of dialogue, but there’s more telling than showing, which might not be the most literary choice but in this case provides the player with some much-needed psychic defenses. Like, here’s a bit where she’s contemplating the horribleness of anything threatening her cozy suburban dream:
"So much seems perfect—the proximity to the kids’ school, the quality of the location, the size of the house, the decoration, the conservatory, the new extension you’re planning, the new carpets, all the many book shelves, the TV that when you stop watching it dims and looks like a painting—the new kitchen fittings, the cooker, the plans to fell the tree in the back garden to give the garden more light—how can you face tainting and undermining any of that?"
The details are all well-observed, but the language is vapid enough to let the player off the hook (similarly, the author’s careful not to have anyone say anything too awful about the various minorities being demonized, though of course they’re thinking it). This isn’t due to a lack of writerly skill, I don’t think, but reflects a deliberate choice, because when the stakes are lower, the prose is more engaging. Here’s a bit of landscape description that I liked:
"Beyond two multi-million pound houses—and beyond the strip of garden belonging to the first house, which was lined prettily with pink bougainvilleas—the estuary turns and opens up in one large, swerving gleam."
At any rate, intentional or not I was glad of the distance because Gloria is a truly odious creature. After learning that a mysterious person has been lurking in the hedgerows and abusing himself while peeping on local women (which fact she discovers through an incredibly awkward conversation with her Polish neighbor), she launches a crusade to push the filth to finger a perpetrator, ideally by trawling the local Roma caravan for some suspects to fit up for the crime.
When that doesn’t work, she forms a busybody committee and catches the attention of the local MP. Her interactions with her family form a counterpoint to this more political strand of the plot, and these are likewise quite dour: she fights with her henpecked husband, infantilizes her much more self-aware daughter, and ignores her furtively absent son. This stuff by no means engenders sympathy, but does provide some context for the aggression she displaces onto those she finds insufficiently British (there’s an intimation that she was a victim of clergy sexual abuse while younger, which serves a similar purpose by giving her what seems to be an anxiety disorder and a persistent fear of impurity and inadequacy).
It’s an unpleasant but neatly-told story with its politics in the right place, I think. It doesn’t lean especially hard into interactivity; most passages end with a single choice leading to the next bit of plot, and those choices that do exist largely seem illusory. But the format does help establish the modicum of complicity that’s needed for the piece to work, so I think it justifies the author’s decision to write IF. I’d rate Virtue a well-done game that’s worth playing – but as always, I do have two caveats.
The first is that the game seemed to end quite abruptly, perhaps due to a bug? I reached the final section of the game, which is the meeting with the local MP, but after greeting him in the pub and deciding to have some white wine, the game simply stopped before getting to the substance of the meeting. This might have been a consequence for some poor decision-making, since the game seemed to be implying that I was insufficiently sloshed (I mean fair, I’d have to be three sheets to the wind to survive a conversation with a Tory backbencher) – there’d been an earlier option to have either a cuppa or some wine before heading out to the meeting, and I’d opted for the tea, and the horrible Tory was having a G+T because of course he was and I could have joined him in that rather than sticking to wine. But since the rest of the game’s choices felt fairly low-stakes, and the ending didn’t indicate he sent me packing for being too much of a lightweight or anything, it felt less like an anticlimax and more like a technical issue. Still, by that point it was clear where the story was headed so I don’t think this negatively impacted my enjoyment too much.
As for the other issue, it’s a broader one but also more nebulous, and it involves a spoiler – though one that the game’s own blurb comes pretty close to revealing, so I’ll omit the blurry-text this time. Turns out in addition to Gloria’s crusade being motivated by her self-esteem issues and general xenophobia, the game is pretty clear that the roving Onanist who’s kicked this whole thing off is her son Andrew, which a part of Gloria recognizes but refuses to confront, leading to her sublimating her denial into political action. I suppose it’s reasonable to consider that many reactionaries are the way they are because of deep-seated insecurities and a guilty conscience – and in some ways it’s even attractive to think that they’re just broken people dealing with trauma in deeply antisocial ways. So it’s all plausible enough.
But I can’t help but wonder whether this is a bit too pat. The blurb also says that this is an “origin story of a shameful MP” – it’s unsurprising that the complete ending appears to involve Gloria running for office as a knock-off Liz Truss – but really, do these kinds of people typically have origin stories? I think they don’t, or if they do, they’re less psychological and more tawdry: people born with unjust privilege realize they can maintain it by scapegoating others; people born without it realize they can curry favor by comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. We’re primarily dealing with material conditions, in other words, and in the post-Trump, post-Boris Johnson age, the idea that the enemies of democracy could work through their issues if they just got some therapy feels, I have to say, a bit naïve. And here, Virtue’s otherwise-praiseworthy decision to hold Gloria at a remove winds up being a negative, because a more literary take going deep into her subjectivity perhaps could have avoided this objection; since the didactic writing style invites us to view the game not as a character study, but as an object lesson, though, I think it’s harder to argue that Gloria isn’t meant as a type.
Let me emphasize once again this is a pretty rarefied complaint: “Virtue is insufficiently Marxist” isn’t a criticism that should prevent one from playing a smart, well-implemented game that made me think. Recommended!
A tedious middle chapter, September 22, 2023In one review or other I know I mentioned a game I used to play with my college friends, where we’d try to determine the smallest possible unit of goodness in a particular field – like, we determined that when it came to music, Jimmy Eat World’s song The Middle was the example to pick, because while it was good, it was good in a minor, sort of boring way, and if it were any less good, it would be bad (I could not now reconstruct the rationale for this determination if I tried, but I remember we were very confident about it). The reason this memory came back to me while I was playing Jesse Stavro’s Compass is that I uncharitably wondered whether it might be the mirror image of the thing we spent so much time looking for: a piece of IF that’s somehow only an inch away from being good, but nevertheless winds up slightly, boringly bad.
You wouldn’t necessarily think that based on the setup: the game opens with the protagonist reaching an empty motel in the desert in search of his friend Jesse. All is not as it seems, though; Jesse and the protagonist are both part of an occult underground who can travel through space using what are basically magic portals, which are locked and inert unless you happen to know the key, and this motel happens to be a nexus of many different gates. Jesse’s been able to travel through time, too – last you heard, he was following the Dead – but he also might have run afoul of one of the various larger factions with their own agendas for the network of portals. It’s not a bad pitch – some of the specifics feel a little derivative of the DnD Planescape setting, but hey, I like Planescape – but it’s conveyed in a very dry, expository fashion via a series of short journal entries that communicate what’s going on but aren’t especially engaging.
This slightly-downer vibe of solid ideas with low-energy execution stuck with me through the rest of the game. There are fair number of different locations to visit, for example, including a nice apartment building and a riverboat, but the maps are too big, with multiple empty locations and redundant, copy-and-pasted descriptions that make exploration feel enervating rather than exciting. There are cutscenes that progress the story, but they assume deeper investment in the game’s lore than I was able to muster, and often go on too long (there’s an extended tarot reading where you need to sit through a maundering explanation of ten different cards, with the only interactive element an occasional “Do you understand? Y/N” prompt). There are a bunch of characters, but none of them have voices that stand especially out from the baseline, often-profane authorial style – like, there’s one rich guy who owns the penthouse apartment and we’re told his every gesture “conveys an aura of refined sophistication”, and after you take a shower he tells you that he’s glad that you “no longer look like ass”.
The puzzles and challenges are the same way, too, reasonable in theory but underwhelming in practice. There’s one where you need to lure a cat in from a ledge using some cat food, but if you drop the can right next to the cat or right next to the window rather than the intended spot in the middle of the ledge, there’s no feedback that you’re on the right track or rationale for why nothing’s happening. Midway through, one of the factions mentioned in the backstory mount a surprise attack, and you need to shoot your way through a bunch of near-identical goons; the combat is governed by chance, so all there is to do is blast away and undo-scum if things don’t go your way, which doesn’t lead to much in the way of pulse-pounding excitement (this sequence did elicit an emotional response, though, since I felt awkward when I realized that the only Asian characters in the game were a legion of interchangeable goons whose only purpose was to show up and take a bullet).
I should emphasize that there’s clearly been a lot of effort put into the game; it’s technically clean, the world is big, and there’s even an achievement system. Plus I suspect it suffers from being the middle part what appears to be a trilogy – the bottom-lined recap that opens the game presumably would land better if I’d actually played the prior installment, and the low-context infodump at the ending would presumably be more compelling if I could immediately see where it leads. Middle segments are hard!
Still, they’re not impossible – The Two Towers and Empire Strikes Back are the best parts of their respective trilogies, after all. For example, that dull summary that opens the game could have been turned into a more engaging flashback that actually gave the player a reason to invest in their relationship to Jesse, and did some showing rather than mere telling to establish the supernatural elements of the setting (honestly, this would probably have been a good idea even for folks who’d played the first installment, given that it was released almost a decade ago and under a different authorial nom de plume, at that).
Circling back to my extended and not-that-illuminating Jimmy Eat World metaphor from the top of the review, despite all these cavils I didn’t have an awful time with this one. But unlike how I would listen to The Middle, think to myself “this is fine”, but notice my foot tapping along nonetheless, I played the game, thought to myself “this is fine”, and then my foot resolutely refused to move. Jesse Stavro’s Compass could rock, at least a little, and it might not take big changes to get there – just a lot of little changes to flip all those moments of slight irritation, slight awkwardness, or slight boredom to their opposites.
Dual escape, September 22, 2023The past couple of years have seen a mini-trend of multiplayer IF, kicked off I think by Milo van Mesdag’s 2021 IFComp entry Last Night of Alexisgrad. That was a narrative-driven, choice-based game where the players assumed oppositional roles – one protagonist was an invading general, the other was the leader of the city’s defenders – and the half-dozen or so choices each selected over the course of the game had a direct impact on the course of the story. Subsequent games have riffed on this same basic framework: van Mesdag’s 2022 follow-up, A Chinese Room, separated its player characters and obfuscated the effect each’s decision had on the other, while Travis Moy’s Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip collapsed the distance between decision-points, unlike its more sedately-paced predecessors, which required it to be played in real time. The Purple Pearl is the latest extrapolation of this multiplayer Nouvelle Vague, and perhaps the greatest departure yet, because here it’s a puzzle game rather than one that’s heavily story-driven, and parser-based rather than a choice game.
The plot here is intentionally disposable: two fantasy kingdoms are at war over a MacGuffin, and your home’s been getting the short end of the stick, so the king comes up with a test to find the best, cleverest team of two to send on the mission to recover the thingy. The game is the test – maybe there’ll eventually be a sequel to cover the actual quest for the eponymous purple pearl? – so there’s a built in rationale for the various puzzles and built-in contrivances that require the players to work together, which is a canny choice allowing author and player alike to concentrate on the mechanics rather than a fictional layer that could easily feel quite strained and secondary.
In fact, the setup resembles nothing so much as an escape room or old Cube Escape style Flash games; each player wakes up alone in an empty chamber with a series of odd devices and clues on each wall, and needs to work through them all in turn. The rub is the need for collaboration – the specific devices and clues are different for each player, because each is playing a separate game file, and at regular intervals, one player’s progress will be stymied, at which point the other player needs to send them an object to get them unstuck (this is accomplished via a keyword system – when the donating player manages to hand off an object, they’re given a three letter code, which when entered in by the other player creates the object in their version of the game). Clues and hints can also apply to the other player, requiring a near-constant thread of conversation to make sure everybody knows what’s happening.
None of the puzzles are especially novel, but they’re well-designed, largely hitting that sweet spot of difficulty between too hard and too easy; it doesn’t take too long to solve them, but you’ll feel satisfied when you do. They’re also relatively straightforward, which makes the burden of keeping the other player in the loop feel quite manageable (imagine having to narrate to another player how you solved a puzzle in Hadean Lands!) Its hour-long playtime is also just right, giving the game enough time to show off a few variations of its mechanics without overstaying its welcome, while the writing is as engaging and polished as you’d expect from an Amanda Walker game (which is to say, very much so on both fronts).
So this is a good proof-of-concept for this new kind of game – it works, it’s fun! I did have a few small niggles, but nothing really worth bringing up except in a parenthetical (here goes: I found one place where an object’s description didn’t update after the game’s state changes, and I found the introductory note saying of my partner that my “job is to figure out how to communicate with them to escape” confusing, since I thought it meant that I had to find some in-game way to talk to my partner before I was allowed to do so, which isn’t the case).
There was an interesting feature of how I experienced the game that I think is worth sharing, since it could point to some fundamental tensions in this kind of design that might need to be addressed by other games that follow this path without as much benefit of novelty. And that is that often as I was playing, I wound up being more engaged by what my partner was up to than what was going on in my version of the game. Partially as a result, several times I thought I was stuck and had to wait for them to solve a puzzle to make more progress, when actually if I’d just spent two more minutes considering the clues on my side, I would have figured out a solution to something I’d assumed required assistance from my partner.
This isn’t too surprising, I suppose – since one’s partner is an actual person, engaging with them is fun and interactive in a way that just playing a parser game can’t really compete with (it also typically feels way easier to solve other people’s problems than one’s own, of course). Plus, while I could poke around in my version of the game at my leisure, without access to my partner’s version, I was hanging on their every word to try to get a sense of what they could see and how to solve their puzzles, which of course required more active engagement and imagining on my part. And I think I had some FOMO, too – for a puzzle game, the puzzles are the game, so not being able to see or participate in half the puzzles would have felt like missing a big chunk of the game. As a result, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I would have enjoyed the game as much if it’d been a single-player game I was playing along with a friend – wouldn’t that have all the same advantages of collaboration and social engagement, while avoiding some of the challenges that two-player model requires?
I don’t think that’s exactly right, and even if it were, I haven’t actually played any IF with a friend in this way, so “two players required” tag does accomplish something. Still, I do think that future games in this vein – and I hope there are more – might benefit from thinking about ways to introduce asymmetries, or incomplete information, or other mechanics that might keep the player primarily engaged in their half of the game, rather than seeing themselves as part of a collaborative Voltron working on everything simultaneously (escape rooms of course do this through the imposition of draconian time limits, but that’s probably not the way to go here!) But again, this is pretty advanced speculation that’s not responding to any weakness in the Purple Pearl; it’s a pioneering work and has proved its concept so thoroughly that I can’t help thinking about what comes next.
Starting the last of Larry Horsfield’s trifecta of ParserComp entries, I was energized by my success in Bug Hunt on Menelaus – could I keep the streak alive? I was energized by the winning premise, too. Finn’s Big Adventure is a spin-off from the mainline Duke Alaric Blackmoon series – Finn is the Duke’s six year old son, and after his lessons with the local wizard, decides to sneak out of his room one night to investigate rumors of secret passages in the catacombs below the castle. Alas, much like X-X R I didn’t get too far in this one, but this time the game has to take its fair share of the blame, as I ran into two progress-stopping glitches in the opening section that sapped my will to continue.
The trouble first arose in the pedagogical sequence that begins the game. You’re given the opportunity to check out the wizard’s study and find the book that tells you about the secret passages, as well as some notes that seem to provide clues about how to open them. The game prompts you to write the clues down so you can refer to them later, which was a nice detail, so I jotted down a copy on the scrap of parchment I’d been using for my class notes. Feeling like I was ready for my expedition, I confidently typed OUT, only to be told that there was something I needed to do before I left. After twenty minutes of wracking my brains, I finally figured out what the issue was – rather than copying the notes onto the parchment, I was supposed to write them down onto a scrap of paper that had been left, forgotten, under the wizard’s desk. Sadly, once I’d copied the clues once, the game wouldn’t let me copy them again, so I had to restart in order to progress.
This was frustrating – why go to the trouble of coding an alternate solution to a puzzle if it’s going to make the game unwinnable? – and especially annoying because there was no in-game reason I couldn’t progress, just an out-of-game warning that was meant to be helpful. Still, I pushed on through the next sequence, as Finn faked going to sleep and snuck out of his room after his bedtime (as the parent of a toddler, I could relate to this part). I made it down the catacombs and found a series of manacles and chains that I think lined up with the clues I’d copied down, but I couldn’t figure out the right syntax to interact with them – TAKING and PULLING them occasionally gave hints that I was on the right track, but while the notes suggested I should be able to attach them to each other or ring-bolts in the dungeon walls, nothing I tried seemed to work, and the built-in hints didn’t have anything to offer.
Thinking that I might have missed something back in Finn’s bedroom, I sneaked back upstairs, and found that sure enough, there was a “war belt” hanging on a clothes hook on my door, complete with my trusty dagger. This find was soured by two flies in the ointment: 1) despite Finn clearly knowing that the war belt was there, and it being described in such a way that it should have been clearly visible from the interior of the room, it wasn’t mentioned in the top-level room description – X DOOR was required to disclose its existence, which feels like it’s taking unfair advantage of a gap in knowledge between the player and the protagonist. More galling, though, was 2) the discovery that now when I tried to get back down to the catacombs, I was told “There’s something in your room that you have forgotten!”
This sure seemed like a bug, since I couldn’t find anything else in the room, and the fact that it hadn’t fired when I’d left the war belt behind, but did fire after I’d found it, sure suggested that something had gone wrong somewhere. Not feeling up to restarting once more and seeing which hoops I had to jump through to avoid this second progress-stopping issue, I abandoned the game there, which was a shame – Finn was an engaging protagonist, and it’s hard to go wrong with a hunt for secret passages in a maybe-haunted castle. But Finn’s Big Adventure needed a bit more testing (and a more robust hint system!) to live up to its promise.
(This review was written for the initially-released version of the game; per the author these bugs have now been fixed, so I'm hoping to give it another play and update this review accordingly)
Funny Wodehouse-y game, shame about the crimes against humanity, September 22, 2023I am a sucker for a good Wodehouse pastiche. So when Murder Most Foul introduced its English country house murder plot with prose that was more focused on cracking wise than anything so vulgar as establishing a mood of suspense – seriously, you start the game across from a lordling wearing “moustache which looks like a big, fat slug curled up on his top lip and died some time ago” – I was excited to dig in to what was sure to be a jape-filled caper. Some four hours later, I finally came up for air and took stock: the game wound up trying my patience, my wits, my sense of direction, and my sense of the absurd, all quite sorely. I was quite frequently giggling, I had to admit, but I still wish the author had imitated Wodehouse a bit more closely, especially in terms of pacing and (especially especially) tonal consistency – this is a big, impressive game, but it makes some big, impressive missteps.
From the off, the setup is a bit more cynical than your classic Blandings or Jeeves romp, but not irredeemably so: the player character is a woman on the make, rocking a stolen dress to sneak into an upper-crust party and find a prospective husband with pockets as deep as his mind is shallow. Sadly, these mercenary plans are disrupted by the quite inconvenient bumping off of the host, Lord Montrose – and since death has a way of ruining the romantic mood, you take it upon yourself to solve the crime (the fact that the coppers are likely to finger you for the killing once they realize you’re an imposter provides a further motivation).
You do this by – well, solving adventure-game puzzles. Murder Most Foul isn’t set up like a conventional Infocom mystery, where there’s a timer and suspects are flitting around up to various bits of suspicious business and you need to play multiple times to work out a timeline. Instead everybody sticks around, but has a fetch quest of some flavor or other you need to work through in order to get their aid, or get rid of them, or hook them up with the love of their life in order to get rid of them… They’re generally amusing, but the game does suffer from ADRIFT’s weak parser; I ran into more than a few guess the verb issues, some of which felt like issues where the author hadn’t sufficiently clued the needed action (FOLDing up a painting to sneak it past some guards didn’t seem physically possible, for example), but others of which were just weaknesses of implementation (there’s a bit where you need to steal a suit, and while GET SUIT will succeed, TAKE SUIT ends in failure).
The game’s size and length wind up magnifying these foibles; while few individual puzzles are especially unintuitive, the large number of rooms and NPCs made it harder to narrow down the areas where it’s possible to make progress. It’d be one thing if the plot needed a cast this size, but despite most of the characters making a strong first impression, in the event most of them play only incidental roles in the narrative, with a fair bit of redundancy (there are two different pairs of characters who got in two different fistfights right before the game opens, which feels less like a comment on the pugnaciousness of the aristocracy and more like padding). Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that the core characters are just the victim’s wife, the manor’s Jeeves-analogue Joves, his son Satan, the omnicompetent handyman Micawber, and the feckless policeman investigating the crime, with the all the others fading into a uniform sort of background wash.
The perspicacious reader will have noticed a certain thematic drift in the naming conventions here; isn’t Micawber Dickens, and Satan (er) Milton? There’s something jarring about these details, and repeatedly as I played I got the sense that the game was growing unmoored from its notional inspiration and introducing plot elements that didn’t cleanly fit with what came before.
I’ll just mention one in detail, but it’s a doozy: midway through the game, you find out that the horde of servants staffing the manor were not always servants, but in fact were originally held as slaves by Lord Montrose. This is elaborated on in one conversation – apparently he was running out of money so this was a way of running the place on the cheap, but then he started sleeping with one of them and he was worried about the secret getting out, so he ultimately freed them and started paying them wages.
I have questions:
1) This is set in the modern day, not the Antebellum South or anything, so where exactly did he get these slaves?
2) Seriously, all the servants have typical English names (well, except Satan) and aren’t described as being identifiably from any particular country or ethnicity of origin, so are we meant to assume there are just roving slave gangs in this world rounding up stray people and selling them to the local grandees?
3) If that’s the case, what was keeping them from escaping to freedom? There are a few guards in the mansion, but as servants presumably they’d have been enslaved too and anyway there are too few of them to credibly act as overseers.
4) Isn’t it kind of creepy that Montrose was sleeping with a “slave girl”, with the game even saying he “fell in love with her”, without any character or the narration even hinting at acknowledging that that’s rape?
5) Why is none of this ever mentioned again after the conversation where it’s initially brought up, like ho hum, guess the dead guy was a massive enslaver and half the NPCs are dealing with the trauma of having been reduced to chattels, we’ll just file that fun factoid away?
6) What the absolute fucking fuck am I doing asking these questions about a Wodehouse pastiche?
I am harping on this, but really, it deserves to be harped on – this is probably the single most ill-advised subplot I have ever experienced in a work of IF. I don’t get the sense that it’s meant to be taken seriously, but that’s a problem, because it’s slavery; if you include slavery in your game, it isn’t a game that happens to have some slavery in it, you’ve now made it a game about slavery.
The thing is, I don’t think that was at all the author’s intention; this seems like a passing idea that was incorporated into the game’s structure without significantly impacting anything that came before (there’s no buildup) or after (again, there’s no follow up either). And there are several elements like this – none as morally jarring, thankfully – but similarly out of place, feeling like they were grafted onto the core without much thinking about how well they meshed with the pre-existing narrative or themes. The game indicates it was written over the course of five years, and I think this is one that got away from the author, growing organically in ways that undermined its cohesion and its pacing. And rather than pruning this unruly profusion back under control, the author just ran with these tendencies.
That’s a real shame, because while Murder Most Foul is a bit of a mess at four hours, there’s probably a tight, two-hour version of the game that chucks much of the padding, winnows the cast down to the narratively-significant characters, sharpens the puzzles so they don’t feel like busywork, and maintains a consistent and amusing writing style, while saying good riddance to the moral enormity that’s currently squashing the plot. It’s possible to get glimpses of that other, quite good game sometimes when playing the current incarnation, but sadly that’s not what’s available to us here.
An incomplete Gruescript two-hander, September 22, 2023Late-Imperial Sky Witches (I guess the short title is more properly “Meet Cute”, but come on, between that and “Late-Imperial Sky Witches” you know which I’m going to pick) is another jam game, but unlike Dream Fears, it doesn’t have a statement as succinct as “this was made in a day” to help orient the player to the ways in which the game does or does not represent the author’s completed vision. This means I’m finding it hard to evaluate on its own terms, because while there’s a lot here that’s intriguing, there’s also a lot here that feels missing, and I’m underconfident that I can sort the intentional obfuscation from the blank canvas.
That’s the job, though, so I guess I’ll try. The game drops you into an interrogation scenario without much by way of introduction: “You’re in the cellblock. A panel of red light separates you from the prisoner.” You’re carrying “your truename” (this turns out to be an identification card) and an empty pyramidal box that belonged to the prisoner. Beginning the investigation is easier than you might think because this is a Gruescript game – that is, it’s a choice-based game that uses buttons for nouns and verbs to mimic a parser interface. So just flailing around with the limited options you’ve got available suffices to move the story forward; you start some light verbal sparring with the prisoner (the interface calls her Rahel, but the parser commands generated by the interface call her irae, “of wrath”), eventually you press her on what was in the box, she gives you a flip answer and you gain a new inventory object: “poetic bullshit” (the game quickly adds a “(literal)” tag at the end there in case you think it’s being metaphorical. And yes, this means you can drop the poetic bullshit).
Which is to stay, the conversation progresses, in ways that are interesting but not especially linear; clearing up the box mystery, to the extent it’s cleared up, leads to one or two other topics that are similarly beguiling, but nothing resembling a narrative or even a moment of relationship catharsis (I thought this was a meet cute?) had cohered by the time another character abruptly barged in and put an end to the interrogation, and the game.
I checked the source code and it doesn’t appear that I missed anything; this is what’s on offer. And I liked it, I have to say – the progression of literalized inventory objects corresponding to ideas or conversation topics was a novel way to make the mechanics clear and the world strange, and the setting implied by the few details I turned up was one I wanted to learn more about. The only trouble is I couldn’t, since it ended just as it was getting started. So again, I’m stymied: is this an intentionally obscure experience, the “meet cute” a romance-genre feint to lure the player into a playable shaggy dog story and impute emotional engagement that’s at best only hinted at? Or is this a placeholder or statement of intent, crystallizing one moment in what was meant to be, or may someday be, a longer piece? Without any extrinsic prompting, it’s hard to decide which scenario is right. Either way, this is a promising vignette with some evocative elements, but in its current version it’s a bit too evanescent to make a lasting impression.
Dreamweaver, September 22, 2023I’m fairly certain that in some review of some ParserComp game past, I’ve had occasion to muse on the difference between a jam (typically meaning a less-formal event where games are newly-written under the pressure of an imminent deadline, where participation and coming up with a clever idea are highly valued) and a comp (generally entailing games that were started well before the formal opening of the event, placing a high value on completeness and polish, and of course, resulting in formal rankings and the crowning of a winner). Due to a strange confluence of factors, ParserComp straddles this line in an occasionally awkward fashion: it’s got “comp” in the name, and it comes out of the mainline comp-obsessed IF community, but it’s run on itch.io – a hotbed of jam culture that doesn’t so much as have a category for competitions, meaning ParserComp is in fact technically a jam.
(Ah yes, I am repeating myself – I went into a longer, more interesting soliloquy on this subject in my review of Anita’s Goodbye from last year; consider it incorporated by reference).
Anyway I of course bring this up because Dream Fears in a nutshell, in a nutshell, is a jam game. Its entry page says it was written in a day, it apologizes twice for being shitty, and the author admits they had no time. Judged in jam terms, and given those constraints, it’s actually not bad! It’s got a single idea that I haven’t seen before – what if you did a parser game as a completely linear audiovisual spectacle, where at regular points the main character (a blocky sort of Minecraft fellow soaring through a neon-soaked nightmare and confronting his fears) finds his progress blocked by a prompt that tells you what you need to type next. If you type the required phrase, you move on to the next bit; if you don’t, well, you can always just type it again.
That’s it. That’s the game, modulo one late “twist” where you’re given a purely cosmetic choice of which of your top three fears you want to face as the final boss.
This is a novel idea – I’ve never come across it before – and I’m not sure whether that last decision-point is meant as a joke, but I certainly found it funny. But it’s also not an idea that cries out for expanding or deeper examination; it’s just a jam idea, quick and to the point. Judged in comp terms, it’s clearly a fiasco.
How are we to resolve the dichotomy? Is there a Hegelian synthesis allowing us to transcend this seemingly ineluctable dialectic? I dunno man, I sure can’t think of one. I think it’s kind of cool that experiments like this end up in ParserComp; it’s certainly worth the five minutes it takes to play. But at the same time, I feel bad for well-meaning jam-oriented authors who unwittingly wander into what I’m sure is a buzz-saw of negative criticism. And, well, I have to cop to being part of that buzz-saw, because I can’t say I rated Dream Fears well. So I guess I’ll just post this review as an almost-apology, and shelve the conundrum until it inevitably recurs next year.
A robustly built-out chatbot game, September 22, 2023Having seen me heap 1,500 words of scorn on The Fortuna for the various crimes arising from its use of AI tools, the reader with a vicious streak has perhaps been waiting for me to arrive at Cheree, in anticipation of another evisceration. This is another game that’s built around AI tools, though in a quite different way: instead of being structured like a traditional text adventure, instead it’s built as an extended chatbot session – the conceit is that you’re conversing with the ghost of a young woman who was murdered in Victorian times, and helping her to recover her lost memories. It’s by far the longest game I’ve seen in this format – my playthrough took maybe two or three hours? – and while there are a few traditional puzzles mixed in, the gameplay goes pretty much as you’d think: you’re just talking to a chatbot. Yet despite that, and my by now well-established anti-AI bona fides, I think it’s actually rather good?
(The reader with a vicious streak will be disappointed, but at least the game tangentially touches on the Whitechapel murders, so perhaps that will provide a measure of appeasement).
Explaining why requires talking through the game’s structure and plot in some detail, so let’s dig into that: as mentioned, the eponymous Cheree is dead, doesn’t fully remember the circumstances that led to it, and has come to the player character – turns out you’re a powerful medium, don’t you know – for help. This involves a methodical investigation of locations significant to her, which fortunately she can whisk you to via the powers of astral projection. Sometimes familiarity will spark a memory and she’ll share a few sentences of reminiscence. Then by asking probing questions you can help her remember more and more, which sometimes triggers a cryptogram puzzle. These puzzles are blatantly there for pacing reasons – they aren’t especially difficult and lack any in-game explanation – but they are successful at breaking up all that talking, and don’t outlast their welcome. Anyway, once solved, each will give you a clue; collect all nine clues and you reach the endgame.
The story that unfolds is pure pulp, but it’s well-made pulp; as mentioned, it feints in the direction of the Ripper killings, but doesn’t go too far in that direction and generally treats the subject tastefully. Instead, the story is more of a domestic gothic, featuring a gloomy, religion-obsessed patriarch, a pushy mother, a jealous sister, and her dangerous ex-military fiancé. The present-day section of the story also gets more complex with the introduction of one of Cheree’s still-living relatives who astral-projects her way into your little tete-a-tete. There are lots of twists and turns, and while it perhaps goes a bit over the top in the ending, it succeeded in keeping my interest throughout, and even surprised me once or twice.
Of course, rendering a plot like this as a chatbot rather than a more traditional form of IF is a very risky maneuver, since chatbots can be fragile beasts. The author has been very canny about this, however, disarming some of the most obvious traps through clever narrative and systems design. Like, one of the ways things can go wrong is if the player references something that the character could plausibly know about – often, the bot will either not understand, or err on the other side and start spouting Wikipedia summaries. This came up for me when Cheree made some comment about how it’s better to be better off, rather than better off than others; I told her that Thorstein Veblen would disagree. She responded by saying oh, she’d heard of him and his most famous book. From a systems perspective, this hits the sweet spot – it’s identifying the reference without going into too much detail – and it makes sense diegetically too, because as a ghost who’s been hanging around for more than a century but who can’t physically open up books to read them, she should be familiar with a bunch of stuff but not able to discuss them in depth. Sure, this isn’t infallible – at one point I asked her to go to a lighthouse, which she interpreted as reference to the Woolf novel – but it’s really quite well done.
Another common flaw is the way dialogue can sometimes become one-sided, leading the player to mechanically type in one thing after another in hopes of progressing. Here, Cheree has some agency, doing things like suggesting the player move on if the conversation isn’t progressing, and occasionally quizzing the player on some piece of trivia if they’re quiet for a while. There aren’t any consequences to guessing right or wrong, and yes, it’s clear that this is a game mechanic to sustain engagement, but it’s still fairly successful at accomplishing those goals while once again making sense in the world: if you were a bored ghost with a century to kill, you also would accumulate a ton of random knowledge and be bad at making small talk!
Voice can also break down in AI-driven conversation systems, as chopping a bunch of training text up and putting it into a blender can either lead to pure oatmeal or a wild swing between different tones. There’s a little of that here – Cheree’s set-piece narration of her memories is written in a faux 19th Century novel style, while she gets more informal in conversational back and forth with the player. Once more, though, her unique biography provides a plausible excuse: she’d presumably revert to the language of her living years when recalling them, while outside of that context she’d be more likely to use the colloquial language she’s picked over the decades since.
The final guardrail is the relationship system – progress in some places is gated by Cheree’s level of affection for you, which I assume means that players intentionally trying to mess with the game will hit a wall and have to behave in a way more appropriate to the narrative conceit in order to move the story forward. This seems like another smart, plausible safeguard, though I confess I can’t comment on the execution since I didn’t try to test the edges of the simulation.
Cheree is not without blemish, though. One clear misstep is that there’s far too much empty space. I can see how limiting the potential locations just to those where clues may be found could have made the game feel too mechanical, but the author overcorrected by providing lots of places that are just there to establish Cheree’s love of sightseeing – the graphics of some of these scenic overlooks are nice, sure, but in a game that’s already fairly long, I got bored of the filler. And actually, while we’re on the subject of the graphics, I was not a fan of the 3D models used for Cheree and her relative – they’re relatively low-poly, but what’s worse, Cheree is depicted in full loligoth style and often walks straight into the screen, meaning the camera clips into her crotch, while the relative is dressed in her underwear and spends a lot of time gyrating around in the corner regardless of what’s happening in the plot. Look, I’m not averse to a bit of sex appeal, but if that’s the remit, for me personally seeing a nubile young woman cavorting in her underthings while her friend talks about finding where her murderer dumped her body does not achieve the goal.
This rather cringey aspect of the visuals also combines poorly with a much cringier aspect of the narrative, which is the romance plot. Yes, as you’re building a positive relationship with Cheree, she starts to develop a crush on you, and the other girl isn’t averse to some light flirting either. On a certain level, I can understand her being a bit of a horndog – girl’s been dead a century! – but like many video-game romances, this one suffers from feeling like it goes way too fast. It also creeped me out because the chatbot format made me default to playing the game as myself: Cheree sometimes asks the player personal questions, I’m guessing as another way to keep up engagement, and I tended to respond on my own behalf rather than making stuff up. This means the whole time she was coming on to me, she knew I was married, which again, super awkward! The game does flag that it has a romance element, in fairness, but I think it would have been helpful to provide a little more instruction up front about how the player could engage with this aspect – as well as tuning Cheree to make it easier to put her in the friendzone, because she was persistent.
For all that these are real issues, though, they don’t have anything to do with the game’s fundamentals – another game using similar development tools and approaches could easily avoid them. As such, I think Cheree works on its own merits, but also as a positive example of why the IF community might want to engage with AI tools – this game would look radically different if the author had attempted to make it with traditional techniques. Notably, the author’s note indicates that it doesn’t use one of the existing LLMs or a firehose of scraped training data. Cheree is clearly hand-tuned, with human creativity creating strict boundaries for the AI sandbox; add in the smart design and narrative choices that mean the game plays to AI’s strengths rather than its weaknesses and you’ve got a recipe for success.
One interesting package, September 22, 2023I’ve tried to write this metaphor three times now, but it keeps getting away from me. Part of me would love to keep tuning it until I get it right, but another, larger part of me would love to clear my review backlog before the Comp kicks off. So we’re going to go with draft number four, no matter how it turns out.
Imagine you’re looking at a cake. And not just any cake – this one’s colored mauve, let’s say, and has little pitchforks of spun sugar crammed into it at odd angles. Now that you look at it more closely, in fact, the whole thing is asymmetric, the various tiers all stacked off-center in a compellingly lurching way, though the structure is impressively solid. You cut a piece, and the cake itself is a marbled red and black with an anarchy sign somehow baked in, the verdigris frosting veining it almost seeming to pulse. Filled with excitement (and maybe a little trepidation) you fork a piece into your mouth – it’s … well, it’s good, and there’s a hint or two of some nonstandard flavoring in there, but actually, it mostly tastes like vanilla cake? Not that you dislike vanilla cake or anything, and again, this is a pretty good example of the form. But wow you were expecting something else.
Okay, I’m not too unhappy with that. I’m going to dive into a more direct discussion of Hinterlands colon Delivered exclamation point now, but keep that cake in mind.
Delivered! is the second in a series of Hinterlands games (the first, Marooned!, was a one-move game with a lot of jokes and even more gore), and its setup promises a slice of blue-collar sci-fi – a driver for the interstellar Parcel Express service, the protagonist gets caught up short on fuel and has to stop off at a godforsaken rock to gas up. Unsurprisingly, what starts out as a straightforward errand quickly winds up going off-track, but the twists and turns are anything but predictable, involving stealing a golden bucket from a sacred well, befriending then betraying some space moonshiners, drug abuse (like, using it for something other than its intended purpose, though yeah, people also use it to get high), mail fraud, freelance espionage, cross-dressing, blasphemous pyromania… oh, and here’s what X ME gets you:
"You are a more or less average specimen of Outer Lumpan heritage. Your leathery skin is pale blue and completely hairless. Your large spherical eyes are solid black. Your mouth is a lipless slit below an eggplant-shaped nose. Your small rounded ears protrude from the sides of your head in a way that is (apparently) comical to anyone who isn’t from Outer Lumpus. On top of your bald head are several dark blue nodules, which your dermatologist assures you are perfectly normal. Your build is tall and lanky, but you slouch (as your mother is always so keen to mention)."
In other words, this isn’t just blue-collar sci-fi, it’s Heavy Metal sci-fi, full of louche characters, oddball aesthetics, and shaggy-dog plots. This subgenre is pretty thin on the ground these days, so it makes for a refreshing change of pace, and Delivered! is a well-implemented take on the theme – the protagonist even after his triumphs remains firmly a loser, it feels like every single character you meet is running a scheme or scam (or is a gigantic dupe), and the setting boasts a scuzzy detail to go alongside every exotic one. And crucially, there’s some actual worldbuilding on display – unlike some games that are wacky for the sake of being wacky, here the setting is there to play host to jokes, rather than just being a joke. Speaking of implementation, things are solid on that front too. There’s a lot of depth in Delivered!’s medium-sized map, with tons of scenery, some complex set-pieces, characters with a ton of non-obvious conversation responses, and prose that communicates the weirdness of the world without getting overly prolix. There is an occasionally bit of guess-the-verb annoyance – I quickly figured out how to (Spoiler - click to show)drill holes in the wall to spy on the neighboring hotel room, but getting the syntax right took some trial and error – but nothing too bad.
So this is overall a fun, unique game that I really enjoyed. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add a few critiques, though. First is that the puzzles, while generally reasonable in terms of their difficulty, are occasionally unmotivated. For example, after suffering a certain reverse that meant that the most logical source for more fuel wasn’t going to pan out, I was stymied for what to do next – turns out the solution was to open a certain package, with no indication so far as I could tell that it would have anything to do with resolving my dilemma. And I had a similar experience two or three more times, when I took an action because it was the only thing available to do, rather than because it seemed likely to advance the protagonist’s goals.
As for the other point: remember that cake? Delivered! has a lot of off-kilter aspects, but both the overall structure of the plot (look for MacGuffin, suffer reversals until finally obtaining MacGuffin) and the details of the puzzles (there’s a disguise one, and a couple swap-stuff ones, and some keys to find) actually wind up being pretty normcore. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – heck, I’m wearing khakis right now! But given the lurid, gutterpunk vibe Delivered! so capably projects, I think I wound up feeling a little disappointed there wasn’t more gonzo on offer. In fact, for the author’s first full-bore piece of IF, the game is admirably controlled. From a design perspective, that was probably the right call, but I can’t help but hope that a notional third Hinterlands game will really cut loose.
Victory!, September 22, 2023Folks, I am too excited to bury the lead on this one – after trying and failing with seven or eight of them, I’ve finally won a Larry Horsfield game! True, it took an excessive amount of save-scumming and UNDO abuse, and it’s clear that the difficulty on this one is pitched way more towards beginners than is typical for his work (modulo one punishing design decision that’s thankfully pretty easy to work around). But I am still going to take my victory lap while I can.
Bug Hunt has one of the oldest video game premises there is – you’re a space marine, there are aliens, go shoot them and win. Much like Xenon-Xevious Resurgence*, it’s part of a larger series of games, though the grounded sense of place I noted in that one didn’t come through as strongly for me here; it really does feel like generic military sci-fi. There are a couple twists in the setup, though, viz: a) instead of playing one space marine, you actually swap between members of a squad, each with a slight difference in skillset or role, and b) rather than terrifying acid-blooded xenomorphs, per the cover art you’re hunting down overgrown but still-cute tardigrades.
After a brief bit of context-setting, the game quickly establishes its structure: the team splits up to explore each corner of a besieged colony, and you need to guide them in turn as they find, and hopefully best, an alien. The vignettes are all quite brief – the longest might take fifteen minutes or so – and all involve classic puzzles, but with a little bit of variety; one involves getting an elevator to work so you can explore an abandoned building, another finding an alien who’s hiding among others in a zoo. And again, none are too challenging on their own – sure, I got jumped a couple times, but some judicious UNDOing was usually enough for me to turn the tables on the beasties. The one wrinkle adding to the difficulty is that there’s a tight 80-turn timer, and some of the larger scenarios can easily eat up 50 or 60 of those to fully explore. Good thing the party separates, so the timer resets every time you swap characters!
Except, er, no, it doesn’t. I assume there’s some technical reason in ADRIFT behind this implementation decision – it’s similarly kind of annoying that you can only save and load the game as the initial protagonist – but as a result, the timer just keeps on clicking linearly as you hop from character to character, as though when the commander said “let’s split up!” and left, everyone shuffled around aimlessly waiting until he radioed back to say he’d killed a bug, at which point one more person left and the whole process repeated itself. Given this constraint, the 80 turn limit goes from tight to ludicrous – I’d imagine a reasonably-efficient playthrough that explored the full play area and checked out every bit of scenery, while solving the puzzles expeditiously, would still easily reach 250 turns or so (that abandoned office building is big – I confess I checked the walkthrough to avoid having to check out a dozenish empty, nondescript locations).
Fortunately it wasn’t too hard for me to savescum my way around the issue: every time I wasted an alien, I restored an earlier save, typed in the optimized path, then saved again. As a result the timer did little more than add a pleasant frisson of challenge, making my victory all the sweeter. Horsfield has written better games, I think – as mentioned, while this one is technically solid and has fair, well-clued puzzles, it doesn’t have as much of the immersive detail I’ve enjoyed in other, harder games – but Bug Hunt is still recognizably of a piece with that larger oeuvre, and so I feel quite satisfied in finally taking the W.
* I know, I know, this isn’t actually its name, but without looking, do you remember what the game’s called?
Never trust a writer, September 22, 2023The RNG has been getting its laughs in – after putting the two games starting with X together, it also gave me the duo of Adventuron games back to back. There the commonalities end, though; for one thing, the protagonist is a Russian soldier fighting “the 19th century Eastern war” (is this Crimea?), but more importantly, while we imagine the protagonist of The Last Mountain as an intensely moral figure, here we’re playing someone with distinctly darker ethics. The opening crawl tells us that after volunteering to fight, Sidorf’s “ideals were quickly replaced by a survival instinct… he wants to do one last thing perfectly. Whatever the cost.”
Going into the game, I had several ideas for what that one last thing might be, and what cost might have to be paid. Points to the author: all of those ideas were completely wrong. This is a story I haven’t seen before, at least in exactly these contours. But partially I think that’s because while Sidorf’s motivations present a compelling enigma, once they begin to resolve things slightly fall apart. To dig into why, I’m going to need to spoil the plot, so fair warning that you might want to finish the game before reading the rest of this review (it’s short and worth playing, in my view).
To provide some padding before getting to the spoilery bits, let’s talk briefly about the mechanics and the prose. We’ve got here a linear series of set pieces, which makes sense because Sidorf is a grunt following orders – he shouldn’t have free rein to wander. The game uses a relatively stripped-down command set, and runs into some of the syntax foibles out-of-the-box Adventuron is prey to, but because it’s quite direct about prompting you about what action you’re supposed to take next, I generally didn’t have too much trouble, with just a few notable exceptions (Spoiler - click to show)(I knew exactly what I wanted to do in the late-game sequence where you need to sneak around the back of a tent and blow up some explosives, but it definitely took some wrestling with the parser to get that across).
The prose takes a similarly blunt approach. BLF boasts a translation credit, so it was clearly written in another language first, but the English is solid enough; the game’s prone to simple, declarative sentences that are closely grounded I the first-person narration, which is an effective way of communicating Sidorf’s voice. There’s the occasional off note – him calling his fellow Russian soldiers “comrades” feels like an anachronistic Soviet-era touch – but overall it fits the game quite well, with the relatively straightforward language not getting in the way of establishing the ambiguities of the protagonist’s desires and goals.
In fact, this combination of straightforward prose and aggressive prompting of the player is doubly important because Sidorf’s motivations turn out to be quite idiosyncratic – if the player were given more freedom or a muddier picture of the situation, the game could easily have turned into a frustrating experience, since they’d almost certainly wind up chasing the wrong goals. Sidorf doesn’t dream of performing an act of heroics, or of surviving to go back home no matter what: no, he’s resigned himself to death in battle, but wants to make sure the last letter home that’s found on his body is the best-written, most compelling letter anyone has ever seen. He’s also fixated on a very specific way of accomplishing that goal: purloining bits and pieces of the letters his fellow soldiers write. Understandably, none of them are especially likely to share their missives back to their sweethearts or tearful farewells to their children with someone who, as it turns out, is quite the socially-awkward weirdo; fortunately for Sidorf if not for the others, he’s willing to go to any extreme to get them to cough up the goods.
The game thus has a regular rhythm to its half-hour runtime: meet a new soldier or soldiers, then follow order for a while until you have a chance to kill them and take their stuff, until you have all the raw material you need to write your masterpiece, bringing the game to a close with a brief narration of Sidorf’s inevitable death. In its favor, this resolution is compellingly demented; against this, though, I simultaneously found it both annoyingly obscure and a little too pat.
On the obscure side of things, besides that one sentence in the intro talking about the death of Sidorf’s ideals and the triumph of the survival instinct, we don’t get any sense of how Sidorf hit on his ideas – they’re just taken as givens (and, one feels obliged to point out, they don’t seem to have anything much to do with survival). Beyond his monomaniacal acquisitive zeal, Sidorf doesn’t have much characterization, and indeed, the climax feels frustratingly anticlimactic. The contents of the final letter are never so much as hinted at, nor do we get any clue about who Sidorf’s family are, what they might think of what he’s going to tell them, or why he’s so concerned with making such an impression on them (and again, we don’t even know what war this is!).
Sure, to a certain extent this is beside the point; psychologizing a character who’s clearly meant to be an allegorical figure risks crushing an intellectual argument with banality (the game would hardly be more compelling if we found out, say, that Sidorf is desperate to impress a father who used to beat him). And there’s no indication that there’s something about the contingent facts around this particular historical conflict that brought on his mania. But to my mind fiction works best when it manages to ground its ideas in personality; to stick with the game’s milieu, Tolstory is surely working with abstractions in War and Peace, but the novel has survived because Pierre, Natasha, and the others feel like specific, idiosyncratic characters with depths that go beyond their mere function as elements in an argument about history. We don’t get anything like that here, and so Sidorf dies as he lives: a cipher.
As for the other way of looking at the game’s themes: I mean, writers are vampires, film at 11. To its credit, BLF stages this idea in a novel way, but as far as I was able to engage with the game, the novelty felt only skin-deep, and actually winds up undercutting the effectiveness of the argument. Like, even if we consider the intensely negative case of an amoral author who takes the stories or emotional trauma of their loved ones and turns them into a crass commercial product, we’d still say “compared to Sidorf, this isn’t so bad!” The things authors do to get ideas or inspiration from others don’t look very much like the stuff Sidorf does so he can steal letters from the corpses of his friends, so while the parallels may work intellectually, they feel schematic rather than visceral.
I always like to see parser games that are going for a literary effect, and BLF certainly looks good on that score; the plot, characters, writing, puzzles, and gameplay are very clearly arranged to advance a very specific set of themes. But for all the grubbiness of Sidorf’s experience, I found the perspective offered wound up being too high-level; there’s not enough blood in the veins to make the various dilemmas and atrocities here truly sing.
Run for your life, September 22, 2023Here’s one of my pet theories of IF that I’m not sure I’ve written down before: there should be more parser games about sports. This isn’t due to any native affinity for them – more power to those who are into sports, I could care less about any professional teams, I only did a real sport for two semesters for all my high school and college years, and I’m the kind of schmuck who thinks it’s funny to respond “Interpol investigations” when the check-in question at a work meeting is “what’s your favorite Olympic event?”
No, it’s because of that old writing adage that action reveals character. We can get told that a character is clever or cowardly or chokes under pressure or what not, but until that gets on screen in some way – meaning, in a game, that they take some action that demonstrates the trait – it’s all theoretical. The trouble is, the sorts of character traits that can be revealed by the business of a typical parser game are fairly limited by the medium-dry-goods world model that tends to dominate: “resourceful” and “kleptomaniac” can only take you so far. Then consider that for a linear puzzle game, beyond the difficulty of coming up with and implementing multiple solutions to puzzles, it can also be a challenge for authors to invent reasons why different approaches might actually matter in narrative terms.
Sports offer a fresh way of engaging with these problems: beyond the fact that they create a rules-based framework that supports novel kinds of gameplay, their victory or scoring conditions also offer built-in consequences for a player’s choices, meaning that discrete, relatively-easy-to-implement physical actions can be freighted with narrative and/or thematic weight (This, by the way, is why my dark-horse pick for TV shows that totally should have gotten an RPG is Friday Night Lights). To be clear, I’m not saying that Madden 2023 would clean up at IFComp or anything – but that I do think there’s a lot of potential in parser games that use sports rather than conventional puzzles as their main gameplay elements.
Anyway, I wish that a) I’d written this theory down before playing The Last Mountain, and b) that I could count it as vindication of said theory, when the truth is that it could just be that a talented author like Dee Cooke can make any of their ideas look genius.
Yes, you might have lost track of the fact that this is technically a review somewhere in the previous four paragraphs of maundering, but I swear, these thoughts are relevant to understanding why this Adventuron game works so well, and feels (at least to me) so unique. The setup certainly isn’t one you’ve heard before: the player midway through a long-distance foot race with their running partner, Susan, who’s uncharacteristically flagging early as you tackle the last mountain before the finish line. You’ve got a water bottle, a flashlight, the race directions (there’s an orienteering component), and some walking poles, and with those you need to overcome a series of obstacles – getting tired, losing the trail, facing one last steep descent. Some of them are decision-points, some are inventory puzzles, and none on their own is that innovative – but again, the fact that they’re all happening in a race rationalizes the barriers, and adds a compelling urgency to solve them quickly.
Susan is the other part of the equation. The game deftly sketches your relationship with her – she’s somewhere between a friend and a mentor who helped bring you into this racing hobby – and presents her uncharacteristic fatigue as a central dilemma of the game. Again and again, you’re faced with the option (and Susan’s explicit prompting) to leave her behind so you can get a good finishing time. I’m guessing that most players won’t be tempted to ditch her, but still, the fact that the choice is there lends added weight to the individual puzzles.
The prose thus has to accomplish a lot of different things: create a sense of place, of course, while making sure to foreground Susan’s presence and give the player everything they need to engage with the game. It’s thankfully up to the task, and accomplishes all this with economy and without getting showy, too. Here’s a bit of mid-game scene-setting I especially liked:
"As the trees become denser, you realise how dark this forest can start to feel when the daylight isn’t so bright. You’ve never been here so late before. It makes it really difficult to identify the right path, even with Susan’s keen sense of direction.
"The forest has become really dense here. The smell of dry branches and the hooting of birds surround you, making you feel a little claustrophobic."
My one kick against the game is that I experienced a few guess-the-verb struggles, partially born of my own lack of experience with this kind of running, but also partially because the parser didn’t feel like it was meeting me halfway as I flailed about trying to figure out how to use the walking poles (yes, for those of you who have played the sailing sequence in Sting, I am aware of the irony of me of all people whining about this). Beyond that, I suppose one might complain that the player will guess what’s up with Susan well before the ending – but I don’t think that’s actually a fault with the game; the tension between the player’s suspicion that it’s serious, and the protagonist’s urge to do well in the race, is another piece of the engine that helps make it work so well. And for all that the reveal wasn’t a surprise, I still felt that it had emotional heft when it landed.
All of this is to say that I found The Last Mountain very good on its own merits, as well as instructive for the directions I think it suggests for future works, which is exactly the sort of thing one wants to come across in ParserComp!
Hunt and peck, September 22, 2023Judging from the title, you’d be forgiven for thinking this game would be a forgettable throwback, puzzler where you wander around an ersatz fantasy environment, solving simple puzzles and looking for valuables to hoover up for no reason other than that they’re there, all the while enjoying/enduring various wacky scenarios and overenthusiastic jokes. And Steal 10 Treasures isn’t not that, certainly; yup, there’s a castle; no, there’s rationale for you to be raiding it; yes, the first puzzle involves refusing a poisoned ice cream; no, it doesn’t get any less silly from there. Still, it’s anything but generic, and merits inclusion in the freestyle category by dint of its interface: you type commands just like a regular parser game, sure, but it only recognizes actions that are a single letter long.
To give an example of how this works, instead of writing out a full command, you just type, say, A which if you happen to be in the dungeon would get interpreted contextually to ATTACK CLAM (I told you about the wacky scenarios). Or S might get you SMELL CLAM PLEASE; meanwhile, since there’s nothing to move around down there, pushing P just pops up PUSH ANYTHING, which unsurprisingly accomplish much when you hit enter. Navigation, meanwhile, is handled via the arrow keys.
This is a limited parser game, in other words – something I’ve had on my mind of late 5 – but a peculiar sort of one. Outside of navigation and out-of-game commands, there are about a dozen actions on offer, running the usual parser-puzzler gamut (including LICK, as I understand is becoming the style), and while the help screen doesn’t tell you all of them, since it only takes a minute to try out all the keys on the keyboard to learn the “secret” commands, the player generally knows exactly what their options are.
That’s the theory, at least – in practice, I often found myself at a bit of a loss for what to type. There are too many possible actions to be easily held in the head at once, and because many of the commands start with the same letter, the keyboard mapping sometimes felt about as intuitive as that of an early Ultima game (Ztats, anyone?) If P is push, then Y must be pull – so that means B is yell? C for climb is intuitive enough, as is T for turn, but then you’ve got V for converse. And sometimes the game seems willfully perverse: G isn’t mapped to anything, but rather than using that, you need to type a period to get an item. The result of all of this is that when I entered a new room and was confronted with a new situation, my first instinct was to just start hammering out QWERTY and continuing from there until I found an option that looked good.
I ran into the lawnmowering problem, in other words, where the player turns off their brain and tries to make progress by mechanically trying every choice until they hit on one that works. As I discuss in my Rosebush article, there are various strategies limited-parser games can use to make this approach less appealing – it’s a little gauche to keep flogging it, but I feel like you, specifically, would really enjoy it – like timing puzzles, actions that are contingent on the presence or absence of different NPCs, or concealed second-order actions, but Steal 10 Treasures doesn’t employ any of them.
This is a real kick against it, but I’m compelled to note that in practice, even as one part of me was cataloguing the ways the design didn’t quite work, another part was just enjoying the ride. Sure, silly treasure-hunts are played out at this late date, but the reason they’ve stuck around so long is that they can be a lot of fun. And the game’s gags and puzzles are solid enough to carry it pretty far – it’s just big enough to avoid being trivial without being so sprawling that it gets annoying, does a good job of clueing its puzzles and alternating big, multi-step ones with short, easy ones (I especially liked the decidedly non-standard way you deal with the dragon), and the jokes adeptly ride the line between wacky-silly and wacky-ridiculous.
As a result, the single-letter gimmick didn’t wind up being as much of a downside as I thought it’d be; it might have even wound up being a plus, making it easier for me to kick back and enjoy the ride. Not every game needs to be Hadean Lands: if all you’re after is beer and pretzels, isn’t it nicer to just lift a finger to signal for another round, rather than having to spell out your order every time?
Episcopal puzzling, September 22, 2023Andrew Schultz has by this point created quite the collection of IF chess puzzlers – this is I think the fifth one I’ve played and reviewed? There are commonalities between all of them, of course: most notably, they’re all impeccably presented, with multiple helpful ways of displaying the board, accessibility options and hints to allow for maximum ease of play, and a light but engaging patina of story adding some narrative sugar to what could otherwise be dry exercises in logic. Impressively, while XOU is no exception, it doesn’t feel like a retread – unlike the earlier games, which hinged on proper piece placement or clever pawn-promotion tricks, or started out with the player on the back foot, here we’ve got a classic but tricky endgame scenario: the player’s got to achieve checkmate with only their two bishops.
It’s a well-chosen setup because it allows for a fun narrative layer, hinging on the difficulties of getting the bishop-who-only-goes-on-white-squares and the bishop-who-only-goes-on-black-squares to put their differences aside and work together. It also makes for a deceptively challenging puzzle. With the opponent having only a king to their name, you’re obviously in no danger, but it’s surprisingly easy for them to slip through your offense and force a stalemate – or even, since you can only defend your bishops with your king, knock out one of your pieces (this is still just a stalemate, of course, but it’s a much more humiliating way to go down).
As I’ve mentioned in my previous reviews of this series of games, I’m no chess maven but I’ve generally found a way to muddle through. That’s technically the case here too, though I’ll have to cop to rather more muddle than usual. It didn’t take me too long to crack the first phase of the puzzle, and it was fun to scissor my bishops past each other until they pinned the enemy king against the edge of the board. The process of herding the king into the corner for mate, though, was a much harder nut to crack, involving a forward-and-back pas de trois that I only groped my way towards through a whole lot of trial and error – somehow keeping track of all those diagonals was very taxing on my poor brain. When looking back at the solution in retrospect, it’s lovely and elegant, but it sure didn’t feel that way at the time.
That’s probably more an indication that I’ve found my level as a chess dilettante than a real critique of the game, though – and I’m guessing that for those with more familiarity with the game of kings, this stepped-up difficulty could well be a selling point. My favorite of these games remains You Won’t Get Her Back, which I think nailed a sweet spot in terms of difficulty while also having the cleverest marriage of gameplay and narrative, but XOU is a worthy addition to the collection too – if the concept seems at all appealing, you really can’t go wrong.
Lost in the desert, September 22, 2023This is one of three ParserComp entries by the author, which is the kind of work ethic that I feel like I can’t directly comment on without being consumed by jealousy. Each is an old-school ADRIFT puzzler, of various flavors – here, we’ve got another installment in the author’s long-running Alaric Blackmoon series of fantasy games. While there’s some continuity with earlier entries, with references to previous adventure sprinkled throughout the opening, XXR (you’d better believe I’m not typing that title again) seems to work quite well as a standalone, with a straightforward and engaging premise: there are rumors of monsters on the periphery, so you and your buddy the king need to cross a desert to check things out.
I’ve played some of those earlier games, but never to completion, and I was hoping this would be the one to break the streak – but alas, it was not to be. All of them have a fine-grained style that require the player to spell out exactly what they’re doing, step by step, rather than bottom line their actions. On the positive side, this contributes to a pleasant sense of immersion; I enjoyed the low-key opening section, where you need to barter for camels and equipment for your desert trip. Sure it’s a little fiddly to have to buy the transportation but then visit separate vendors to get saddlebags and tackle, then purchase clothes appropriate to the desert heat, but it helps sell the reality of the world, and establish that the player characters – you can swap between Alaric and the king whenever you like – are going to be fish out of water (er) on their trip.
On the downside, though, this granularity combined with some of the foibles of the ADRIFT parser to make the puzzles even harder than I think they’re intended to be. The first major section of gameplay involves exploring a ruined city where you’ve taken shelter from a sandstorm, which ultimately requires using an abandoned metallurgical workshop to duplicate a key. While it wasn’t too tough to figure out what I was supposed to do in general terms, each step involved wrestling with the parser. A key item can be found in the debris lying around the place, but SEARCH doesn’t reveal it – instead, you need to CLEAN WORKSHOP (I feel like cleaning abandoned workshops is right up there with cleaning a rental car in the implausibility sweepstakes). Similarly, getting water into the quenching trough is a bit of a struggle:
"> FILL TROUGH WITH WATERSKIN
You cannot fill anything with the water skin.
> FILL TROUGH WITH WATER
You pour some water into the trough from your water skin."
So I was able to make some progress, and found some intriguing secrets in the city, but eventually my progress petered out; the game does include context-specific hints, but through some combination of the system seeming to get confused with a different puzzle and/or me being too thick to figure out what I was missing, it couldn’t get me on track. This is a shame since I did enjoy aspects of the world, but between wrestling with the parser and the punishing puzzles – as well as an annoying quirk of ADRIFT that meant that I couldn’t reload the game when I died while playing as the king – I wasn’t too sad to wash my hands of it. Besides, even just in this Comp I’ll have two more chances to finally get through one of Horsfield’s games!
I for one welcome our new AI overlords, September 22, 2023For the past year or so, the IF community has seen numerous conversations about the ethics, efficacy, and prospects for using AI tools like Large Language Models or image-generation software to create IF. Various arguments have been advanced over epically long threads – often throwing off as much heat as light, it must be admitted – but perhaps our time would have been better spent waiting quietly, because sometimes an ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory. The Fortuna is perhaps a maximalist take on what using AI in IF can look like: every element of it, from the graphics illustrating each location and character, to the descriptions that flesh out its cruise-ship milieu, to the freeform conversation system that’s central to progression, is built around AI. And every single one is awful.
Looks, cards on the table: I come to this debate pretty skeptical of the AI pitch. One of the major reasons I engage with art is because it offers an opportunity to connect with other human minds, to expand my understanding and my perspectives, to experience something idiosyncratic and specific to the person who made it – LLMs and other AI approaches, with their views from nowhere, get in the way of that. I also find most procedural-generation pretty boring; I get that in theory it can open up new intellectual possibilities and reveal surprising connections, but in practice I tend to experience it as one bowl of oatmeal after another. So I may have some biases (I also am not really big on cruise ships, now that I think about it – never been on one, so my major associations with cruises are the destruction of Venice’s lagoon, David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and the time my brother-in-law went on one and came back with swine flu). But even if I’d gone into The Fortuna a dyed-in-the-wool techno-optimist, what I found there would give me second thoughts.
Start with the art. Due to the use of AI, the game is lavishly illustrated by the standards of amateur IF. But instead of providing a nice aid to the imagination, allowing the player to more fully immerse themself in the world, instead we get, well, this:
Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair
Allegedly this is a set of greeters for the cruise ship, not a band of Cenobites on holiday from hell. Allegedly. But it’s not an outlier; all of the images are like this to a greater or lesser extent.
It’s hard to discern exactly what’s gone wrong here – obviously the image-generation tool got confused somehow. But aren’t there other tools that work better that the author could have used? And shouldn’t he have exercised a minimum of quality control and noticed how disturbing this picture is, how out of step it is with the happy vacation vibe the prose is working to convey, and killed it?
Speaking of the writing, it suffers from the same uncanny valley issues as the visuals; the well-known tendency of LLMs to hallucinate is on full display, and the prose manages to be vague and repetitive. Like, here’s the description of a uniform in a gym locker:
"The uniform in the gym locker room is a set of clothing worn by individuals for a specific purpose or profession. It is likely made of durable and breathable material to withstand physical activities. The uniform may include a shirt, shorts or pants, and possibly a jacket or other accessories depending on the specific sport or activity taking place in the gym. It may also have the logo or name of the cruise ship or gym embroidered on it. The uniform is typically neatly folded or hung in one of the lockers, ready to be worn by individuals engaging in physical activities in the gym."
This is a hundred words that don’t communicate anything beyond “a uniform in a gym locker”, and of course there are an awful lot of “may”s here – in fact, the uniform may not actually exist, given that I couldn’t try to take it.
The writing issues combine with the game’s conversation-focused design to create still further problems. In several places, progression requires you to build a rapport with various of the characters you meet, which is largely accomplished by asking them about themselves. This is accomplished via a freeform chat system, which is impressively open-ended and does allow for a wide variety of input to be understood (one character writes for the New York Times, and when I asked her about Jamelle Bouie, she correctly identified him as a journalist). Still, this element too runs into some familiar problems. The left hand may not know what the left is up to – as with one early character, who’s described as toying with their wedding ring in a bit of environmental detail, but who steadfastly insists they were never married when you ask them about it. And when you do learn more about them, well:
"> ask officer “how are you”
"I’m doing well, thank you for asking. I believe in hard work and dedication, and I strive to make the world a safer place as a port security officer. Ensuring that everyone can feel safe is important to me, and I hope to be a role model for young people. Growing up in a rough neighborhood and seeing the violence and crime firsthand motivated me to make a difference. After high school, I joined the military and served in Iraq for four years. I then pursued a degree in criminal justice and landed a job in port security. I want to show others, especially young people, that they can achieve anything they set their minds to."
This is generic and robotic, of course, but it’s maybe worth noting that this character is Black, and I dare say there’s something pretty stereotypical about the backstory being presented. The one other Black character has a similarly tormented backstory involving struggles with addiction. Meanwhile, when I asked the Times reporter about her job, after saying it’s a dream come true, she continued with “[a]s a female reporter, I am proud to work for a newspaper that values diversity and promotes women’s rights.”
To just state what I’m getting at: the characters who aren’t white men are largely stereotypes, defined by their race and gender. This is something a human author can unwittingly wind up doing, of course – but it’s also a real danger of LLMs, trained as they are on the products of a racist, misogynistic society. At least there’s a note of comedy from how the model extrapolates without any understanding of the world: there’s a devout Italian woman who’s super into C.S. Lewis, because the AI’s mashed up different stereotypes without knowing the difference between Catholics and Protestants.
Now, it’s possible that these characters get deeper over the course of the game, and that it improves in some of its other problematic aspects too, because I have to confess that I didn’t get very far into the plot. After boarding the ship, entering the VIP section, and being introduced to the cast of characters, there was an inciting incident that pointed to a mystery to be solved that presumably kicks off the narrative proper – but one of the first steps required solving a riddle to open a safe. The riddle seemed like one of those old chestnuts everyone knows, albeit with awkward, AI-y syntax (Spoiler - click to show)(”I am owned by the poor and the rich don’t need me” – it’s nothing, right?) except the obvious answer didn’t work, nor did a bunch of non-obvious ones I tried. Is this because I was typing things in wrong, or being especially thick, or did the AI generation flub the riddle? I don’t know, but regardless, there my journey came to an end, and I must admit to feeling some relief.
I am being uncharacteristically harsh on The Fortuna, and I should say it’s not because I think the game is coming from a bad place by any means. In fact, the best piece of writing in the game is the introduction, where the author speaks movingly about being inspired by IF as a child, and wanting to use the new possibilities afforded by AI tools to create a game that would similarly spark joy in its players. That’s a laudable goal, and one that pretty much all first-time authors fall short of (I know I certainly did!)
But I do think there’s something very badly broken about the approach here. While there may be a case for the IF community to embrace AI, it turns out that using it for every aspect of a project and dialing things up to 11 does not make for a convincing demonstration. The Fortuna’s various failures all, I think, have one root cause – which is that time after time, when an AI tool threw up something that didn’t work or didn’t make sense, the author didn’t take action to cut, modify, or customize in service of the larger vision. As the amateur IF scene is currently constituted, it’s an auteurist medium; one can certainly levy critiques about that situation, but as it turns out, taking the author out of the equation is a very bad idea.
It belongs in a museum, September 22, 2023Here’s one of the iron laws of interactive fiction: you are in good hands with Garry Francis. There may be a few other contemporary authors working at a similar clip, but even fewer, I think, hit the same consistently high level of quality, serving up adventures that might be old-school in their premises but boast airtight implementation, clear and engaging prose, and solidly-designed puzzles. Yet even judged against these high standards, Search for the Lost Ark is a standout, delivering a game that’s polished, funny, and satisfying.
From the title you might think that we’re in for an Indiana Jones style globetrotting adventure, but the actual setup, delightfully, is both more grounded and wackier: the Lost Ark was found long ago and had been hanging out in Chartres’ cathedral for several centuries, until being moved first to a village church and then – out of an admirable but perhaps overzealous protective instinct, Chartres being west of Paris – during World War I it was hidden in the nearby woods to keep it safe from German marauders. Now, as a priest-in-training who grew up in the area, you’ve been ordered back home to find the thing after the clergyman who hid it shuffles off to join the choir invisible. The only problem is, you’ve no idea where to start, and there’s something off about your immediate superior, the rather-wan, just-arrived-from-Eastern-Europe “Father” “Alucard.”
So yeah no points for guessing the plot twist, but this isn’t the sort of game that’s relying on the plot for engagement – and it knows you know that, meaning Alucard will engage in a bit of knowing vamping if you care to toss some pointed dialogue queries his way but you’re not going to short-circuit any puzzles by dint of your genre-awareness. Similarly, the writing does a perfect job of conveying a sense of place and highlighting the details you’ll need to focus on to complete your quest, all in a terse yet informative style that’s a model of effective prose. This is no mean feat, especially since it also has to communicate information that you, as a priest-to-be, would know about subjects like the structure of the Bible or the details of church architecture, but that you, as a player of IF, might not. Many of these tidbits are actually relevant to solving the game, but some are just lovely little factoids:
"> x hammer
"The sledge hammer has a heavy iron head and a long wooden handle. This combination makes it good for breaking big rocks into little rocks. Did you know that ‘sledge’ is derived from the old English ‘slægan’, which means ‘to strike violently’. No? Well, now you do."
I didn’t, so yes, now I do!
As for those puzzles, none are especially hard, but gosh, are they satisfying. There are a series of clearly-signposted obstacles, each with intuitive solutions, and if this were all there was to the game, it might risk feeling a bit too old-school, in a USE X ON Y sort of way, but there’s also a final metapuzzle: as you progress, you’ll come across a series of biblical verses, which you need to combine to reach your ultimate goal. I won’t spoil the details, but it takes just the right amount of thought, and while it rewards a bit of outside knowledge, the game characteristically provides everything you need even if the difference between Corinthians and Thessalonians is all Greek to you.
Writing this review with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not at all surprised that Search for the Lost Ark shared the gold medal in the classic category – this is a near-perfect execution of the traditional form, thoughtful and engaging and not overstaying its welcome. The only problem is, now the next time I play a Garry Francis game, my standards will be even higher!
Portrait of a disappearance, January 11, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Abigail Corfman’s got an impressive body of work incorporating parser-like mechanics into sophisticated choice-based formats, usually with a fantastical, clever vibe, as in Sixteen Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds and A Murder in Fairyland. The Absence of Miriam Lane has points of continuity, but also departure, from this gameography – there are interesting systems to engage with, and satisfying puzzles with a fair bit of depth to solve. The setting is comparatively grounded, with the protagonist an occult investigator seeking to unravel the intensely-personal disappearance referred to in the title, with the ultimate explanation turning not on supernatural MacGuffins but developing a psychological profile of a seemingly-unremarkable wife and mother.
It’s harder than usual to talk about this game without spoiling it pretty thoroughly, both in terms of how the plot resolves but also the various distinct systems that govern its major phases, so despite the blanket warning about spoilers in my opening post, I figured I’d use this paragraph to give prospective players that if you care about such things, you might want to give the rest of this review a pass until you’ve given Absence a try (and I think most players would find it worth a try).
Okay, no one here but us chickens, right?
While there are no formal divisions within the narrative, in practice The Absence of Miriam Lane is cleanly divided into three pieces, all with related but distinct game mechanics. The first is all about investigating Miriam’s house and looking for non-obvious clues and things that are out of place. In cases of this kind, the protagonist confidently explains, both light and time are often out of joint – by looking for places where shadows are behaving oddly, or objects seem to have been subject to incongruous aging, you identify potentially-important clues (mechanically, this is accomplished by clicking through different rooms and links and sub-links for the areas and objects they contain, using a “thoughts” interface to signal when you think something’s off), and eventually discover where Miriam is.
Or where she isn’t, rather, because it turns out that she hasn’t gone missing in the sense of leaving, but rather that she’s faded away, into the titular Absence – an unmoving, nonreactive white void. In the second act, you need to remind her of who she is by bringing her personally-significant objects. There’s a rub here, though, because what’s led her to her current condition is a failure to nourish the personally-significant aspects of her life, passing them over in favor of obligations to others. So it may or may not make sense to bring her some things that are clearly salient – the spoons she uses to make food for her church’s bake sales, for example – without trying to figure out how she felt about them (you can bring most things to her husband, Arthur, to get what he knows about them, but there are often environmental clues to unravel too).
Assuming you succeed in that challenge, the final sequence involves bringing Miriam back to herself by “telling her her story” – mechanically, this means filling out a long, multiple-choice mad-libs style quiz running through her background, her frustrations, and her joys. Much of this you’ll have sussed out in the course of solving the previous sets of puzzles, but you’ll also need to make some hopefully-informed guesses to do well enough to get a good ending – I believe there are at least three, differentiated by how much of Miriam, if any, you’re able to bring back to reality.
This is a canny setup that winds up embedding a narrative arc in its mechanics. The first section is all about exploration, checking out the house and its contents for the first time. Because the signs that something isn’t right are fairly general, you need to carefully examine everything, without too many preconceptions about where you should be looking – but because the signs are pretty clear once you find them, the player isn’t left floundering and trying to read the author’s mind. Then in phase two, you go back over all the clues you’ve found in the first section and weigh them up, trying to evaluate exactly what they were saying about Miriam’s life to determine whether they’ll be a net positive or negative. There are also some more traditional puzzles in this section, fitting with the overall analytic vibe – many of these hinge on deducing that a particular flower might be meaningful to Miriam, then looking up its attributes in her gardening manual and locating it in the yard via an attractively-designed interface that mimics a plant. All that leads in the final section, where you’re explicitly synthesizing the individual pieces of evidence into a coherent narrative.
It also makes for a well-paced game. The house isn’t especially large, and isn’t inherently all that interesting, so tromping back and forth multiple times could become tedious. But because the context for your exploration shifts over time, and you feel like you’re making, concrete, tangible progress, it was usually exciting to revisit its rooms and understand more of what I was seeing, and how it could be used. Similarly, the interface is pretty streamlined. It’s not miles away from that in One Way Ticket, but navigation to other rooms is always available via a single click, and the list of thoughts and items is typically not that long (in fact, there’s an inventory limit – usually an annoyance, but important here to prevent lawnmowering, and forgivable because you never need to go that far) so I didn’t get bogged down the way I did in that game.
That streamlining extends to the writing, as well. The prose is efficient to a fault, with dialogue even presented in screenplay style, and almost completely devoid of errors (I found one unneeded comma, but that’s it). Given the large number of objects to interact with, this helps keep things manageable, and means it’s easier to pick out what might be significant since the important adjectives aren’t left swimming in a sea of words. The flip side, though, is that I found it a little dry. Fortunately, atmosphere is provided in spades by the always-visible illustrations – I think these are largely photos with the contrast blown way out, which is in keeping with the light/shadow motif that runs through the game (the illustrations also provide clues to some puzzles if you study them carefully, which I sometimes have mixed feelings about due to accessibility considerations, but I don’t think any of them are ultimately necessary to progress).
All of this makes for a solid, engaging game that I liked quite a lot. It didn’t quite reach the level of greatness for me, though, largely due to the narrative design not being as satisfying as the systems design. True, this is partially down to the workmanlike prose and uncharacterized protagonist, which even though I personally found them unexciting are clearly intentional choices. But I also found that my interest in the story didn’t rise over time and peak at the climax; instead it started out high and declined, with the gameplay providing the major impetus to get over the finish line. The opening sequence has the most supernatural elements, for one thing: they’re understated, but feverishly searching for tiny nooks where the shadows fall wrong, or looking suspiciously at a backyard sky that’s different than the one in the front, lends these early stages an uncanny thrill. And the initial beats of the mystery, where you’re starting with the least information and trying to connect the dots between the novel fantastical elements and Miriam’s beyond-mundane life, are pretty compelling.
By the time I was a third of the way through the game, though, I’d figured out the broad outlines of the backstory, which don’t wind up being that complex: Miriam was feeling neglected and overlooked, and somehow (I don’t think there are any clues that even gesture towards an explanation for this “somehow”) became an absence in her own house, an empty, invisible outline lying immobile on her side of the bed. From there, the rest of the game is just an exercise in filling in the details of this overall story, without any new developments to liven things up – and even the details don’t really add much to the player’s understanding of Miriam’s personality. There’s a bit of gameplay and challenge in determining whether she was burned out on gardening but found baking was still deeply rewarding, or vice versa, but it’s not a very narratively interesting question, and one limitation of the way the game’s difficulty is tuned is that the details of some of the potentially most compelling aspects of the story, like Miriam’s relationship with her sister, appear to be left vague in order to add to the difficulty.
Relatedly, I think the difficulty overall might be set too high. Judging by the little gauge at the bottom charting my progress, I wasn’t able to reach a perfect ending, despite playing fairly thoroughly and feeling like I had plumbed all the interesting questions and then some – in fact, the first ending I got was pretty negative. I reloaded a save and tried again, realizing that part of the issue is that you’re meant to spend more time giving Miriam stuff and making her more connected to reality, even after the third section kicks off and you think you should transition into the storytelling portion of the game. Even then, though, the ending was pretty equivocal. I think getting the best result requires you to really chase down every single potentially-important object – and ask Arthur, the world’s most boring man, about each of them – and probably do a little bit of trial and error in the mad-libs section. My brain is pathological enough that I often want to get 100% completion in games – hell, I’ve done that for every Assassin’s Creed game, there’s something wrong with me – but that compulsion never hit me here, since I felt like I’d done all the real work and all that was left was some grinding.
Switching gears back to the literary, I think the last thing that left me feeling more lukewarm than I expected about Absence is the message it ultimately sends about psychological health. As mentioned, the problem is that Miriam didn’t create enough space for herself and the things that brought her joy – an empty-nester treated with benign neglect by her spouse, after her kids went away to college, she threw herself into church functions and found herself consumed by bake sales and raffles, while neglecting the gardening and drawing that nourished her. This is all plausible enough when you type it out, but in practice what this means is that the stuff she was doing with other people, which largely seemed to focus on helping others, is portrayed as poisonous; her connections with her family largely have both positive and negative aspects that balance out in the wash; and it’s only the private, inward-facing hobbies that are unmitigated goods, with success determined by how much you direct her attention to those.
Look, I’m an introvert who was raised Catholic, I get it; the self-sacrificing martyr schtick is ultimately empty, and other people can be exhausting sometimes. But still, I can’t help but feel that this is a dark, antisocial theme to build the game around. Miriam draws but keeps what she makes secret; she plants a lovely garden in her back yard, but no one else seems to spend much time there. Art nourishes the soul, certainly, but in my experience the greatest joy in creating something is sharing it – maybe not with the whole world, but at least with one or two people. And as for the various church fund-raisers and events, even if the process of trying to do good in the world is tiring, and prey to suspect, selfish motives, well, that’s still better than just opting out entirely.
I can well see how other players’ mileage will vary on this stuff; the Absence of Miriam Lane is very well designed, with novel mechanics that draw you in, and I deeply admire that it’s unapologetically focused on a middle-aged woman’s desire to have the dignity and respect she deserves. But still, I wanted the ending of the game to reverse the negation that she’d suffered, to achieve catharsis by reconnecting her with the people who’d abandoned her in the transformative hope that things would be different this time. To call her back only so that she could replace her supernatural retreat with an all-too-ordinary one didn’t seem like progress; maybe that’s down to the theme, or just to not having gotten to the best ending, but either way I was left feeling dissatisfied with the game’s apparent views on human nature even though I’d enjoyed my time with it quite a lot.
A nicely-curated collection of limited parser puzzles, January 11, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Arthur DiBianca is surely among the few modern IF authors whose name has become a brand. While his games boast an impressive range of settings, genres, and gameplay styles, there are some distinctive elements that mean he offers something unique: they all have a limited parser, ensuring that guess-the-verb problems are never among the challenges a player faces; they all well-written but tight, setting-first stories; they typically last an hour or so, with a set of optional objectives for players who want to dig deeper; there are well-designed interfaces that cleanly present the information you need; and they’re all of a consistently high quality (ok, that last one isn’t unique to DiBianca, but it’s the reason why it’s worth commenting on all the others!)
Trouble in Sector 471 fits all of this to a T – this time out, you play a plucky little maintenance-bot, out first to restore power to the eponymous sci-fi facility, then zap the infestation of bugs at the root of the problem, and maybe help some of your fellow worker robots along the way. The gameplay twist is that there’s a light patina of metroidvania about proceedings – visible first in the slick automap that takes up half the playing window and orients you towards the places you’ve yet to explore, and then made more obvious as you collect new functions for your humble mechanoid: at first, you’re capable only of zapping bugs and opening communications with other bots, but reaching new areas and doing favors sees you win some important upgrades, including the ability to pick stuff up and interface with the various bits of machinery you find in the facility.
The open map is mirrored in the open gameplay structure; while there are definitely chokepoints at several parts of the game, you’re not funneled towards a final encounter or anything like that, and it doesn’t take long until you can wander over quite a large stretch of real estate, worrying away at half a dozen different puzzles as you track down the bugs and optional objectives. I admit that at around the two-thirds mark, even with all the supports built into the game I started feeling a bit overwhelmed, but found that once I started taking some notes the pieces fell into place quite quickly – there’s a lot to keep track of, but when you break down exactly what you can do and what barriers you’re facing, it isn’t too hard to run down your limited command-set and come up with some ideas for how to proceed.
This is a sweet spot for puzzle difficulty for me; progress feels nontrivial, but once you bear down it isn’t too hard to start feeling clever. There was one place where I needed to look at the hints – there’s a multi-step puzzle involving a museum curator-bot that I wasn’t quite wrapping my head around – and while I got most of the optional challenges, I never came across one, and found one involving unblocking pipes too fiddly to be enjoyable, but overall this is a smartly-designed and satisfying grab bag of puzzles.
Getting into critiques, though, it does feel like a grab bag, rather than the more unified puzzle sets of some of DiBianca’s other games, like the wordplay of Sage Sanctum Scramble or the RPG-aping Black Knife Dungeon. In fact, many of the puzzles feel like the sort of thing you get up to in more traditional works of IF – there’s a fair bit of unlocking doors, figuring out combinations, and trading items to NPCs – which I think make me chafe against the limited parser more than I usually do. In particular, I missed the ability to examine things; you can get more information about any object you’re carrying, but the set of grabbable items is pretty small, and there were more than a few environmental puzzles, or encounters with other robots, where I would have liked to get a closer look at the situation, either for hints to the puzzles or just to get better grounded in the world. As a result, while the different rooms are well-described and the charming cast of robots largely does a good job communicating their personalities through their one or two lines of dialogue, I engaged with Sector 471 largely as an abstract set of puzzles and systems rather than as a coherent place where a diegetic narrative was occurring.
There are definitely worse problems to have, and honestly most of the way through a very story-heavy Comp I found it kind of nice to immerse myself in something close to a pure puzzler – and this is a very well-designed, well-tuned example of the breed. So while I’d recommend other of the author’s games before this one to someone who’s trying to figure out what this limited-parser thing is all about, it’s still a worthy addition to his gameography.
(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I beta tested this game and didn't do a full replay before writing this review).
I am not much of a braggart by nature, and crowing over accomplishments in the IF realm is an inherently absurd proposition, so it’s saying something that I was tempted to open this review by not-so-humbly pointing out that I’m pretty sure I was the first person on the planet to win The Only Possible Prom Dress. Largely this was by dint of being one of the beta testers, of course, but still, there were other testers and this is a long game – I’m guessing I put in at least 15 or 20 hours, even after getting some hints, and I often had to put it down for a while to let the puzzles percolate so my subconscious could worry away at them and hand my conscious mind some new ideas. Getting to the winning screen after putting in a fair bit of sweat equity over two weeks felt like an accomplishment.
This is not, I hasten to add, because the game is formally cruel – it’s I believe Polite on the Zarfian scale, with any game-ending events only a simple UNDO away. Nor is it because the puzzles are unfairly diabolical. Don’t get me wrong, many are pretty tricky – and there are at least two, both involving codes, that I suspect most players will need a hint on – but save for that diabolical duo, they feel on the level. When I solved one fair and square, I felt satisfied; when I stumbled into an answer through trial and error, I immediately saw the logic; and when I needed a hint, I slapped my forehead because I realized I’d missed some solid clues that would have gotten me in the right direction.
Funnily enough, the puzzle-solving is also rendered more pleasant by the size. The game starts with many areas locked off, then twice opens up a new, large chunk of the map after surmounting a key obstacle – but even from the get-go, you can go a lot of places, pick up a lot of items, and make progress on a bunch of puzzles. At any given time you might have half a dozen different challenges in progress, and if you’re feeling stuck, often just taking a circuit of the mall and messing around with all the new stuff you’ve discovered will be enough to make progress on at least one – or give you an idea in the meantime. There’s also a good variety in the different things you wind up doing; the game’s ultimately a scavenger hunt, but between foiling security systems, decoding anagrams, navigating mazes (all of which I think have workarounds), messing around with devices, cheering up NPCs, and the good old-fashioned medium-dry-goods business of pushing things around and climbing through holes and inserting thing 1 into receptacle A, you’ll never be bored. The scale of the game also lends it a sort of logic-puzzle vibe, as I wound up keeping a running inventory of the different puzzles I’d encountered as well as a separate list of the different items or other possible puzzle-solving things to try, cross-referencing them and deducing which solution went with which barrier as I went.
Atypically, I’m fairly deep into the review here without mentioning the plot or the theme or the writing. That’s because this is definitely and defiantly a puzzle-focused adventure game, and the plot is honestly something of a shaggy-dog story – the blurb’s setup, that you need to find a dress for your daughter, isn’t exactly a lie, but the steps to retrieving it from the near-deserted mall wind up taking you to some wacky places, with weird technology and more than a bit of magic getting into the mix without the protagonist making much of a comment. But the prose is well done, and the cast of supporting characters, one-note stereotypes one and all, are written engagingly and enjoyably, so they’re fun to interact with even if their role as flywheels to set some of the cogs of the puzzles in motion can never be ignored.
All this is to say Only Possible Prom Dress is an old-school puzzlefest as advertised (albeit more late-90s than late-70s), but a good one, even I think for folks like me who aren’t inherently drawn to the form. It’s perhaps ill-served by being in the Comp, though – this is one to savor.
A darkly compelling tour de force, January 10, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There have been a lot of war novels written, and most of them communicate the same simple message: war is a dehumanizing, monstrous force no matter how just one’s cause may or may not be (you’d think this message is in fact so simple that after people had written two or three books like this, there wouldn’t be a need for any more, but [gestures impotently] look around). Catch-22, though, stands out on the list – in large part because it’s funny, but also because it asserts the eternal war-novel truism in the context of a “good” war (WWII), and applies the critique beyond combat, to the mere experience of being in the military (again, even a “good” one, like the American army). The novel has several leitmotifs, but I’d say the most critical is “every victim is a culprit”; it’s a motto that seems, and is, harsh, but it I think accurately conveys how everyone who’s broken down by a brutal, absurd system and goes along with it reinforces the system, and makes it harder for anyone else to resist. Because Heller is an optimist, and primarily writing about characters who live in a democracy, however flawed, the novel’s ending still offers the hope of transcendence, of leaping straight out of the totalitarian negative-sum game and winning individual, and maybe even eventually societal, freedom.
I’m pretty sure there aren’t any Russian war novels that end like that.
A Chinese Room is a hard beast to sum up. The temptation is to start with the gameplay, since that’s probably what’s most distinctive about it. An asymmetric two-handed multiplayer game, it’s designed so that two people pass keywords back and forth maybe half a dozen times over the course of the two or so hour playtime, which encode the decisions each one is making. It’s an elaboration of the system the author used in last Comp’s Last Night of Alexisgrad, though it’s more smoothly implemented here – the passwords are just words, rather than random-seeming gobbledygook, and it’s better-paced for asynchronous play, since there are fewer keyword-exchange points with longer chunks of gameplay in between. Even though I was afraid it’d be difficult to play this one as intended since I’ve got a teething one-year-old holding my game-playing schedule hostage, I was still able to get through it without much difficulty over the course of a day or so (shoutout to @aschultz for being my partner).
With that said, the game can be played single-player too. And to assess whether I think that’d work just as well as playing it as intended, I need to delve into the plot – or at least the half of the plot that I experienced, since the two players guide entirely different protagonists in entirely different circumstances who don’t, I believe, ever directly encounter one another, and I think this ignorance of what exactly is going on in the other player’s story is an important part of the game.
As a result, discussing the narrative even in very broad strokes could constitute a significant spoiler to half of potential players – and actually, I find I want to talk about it in considerably more detail than that. So I’m going to spoiler-block the rest of this review. For those leaving us here, I’ll just say that A Chinese Room is a very grown-up, very intense work that’s sufficiently strong that I’m not overly bothered that the last ten percent kind of falls apart. Definitely read the content warnings first, but if you think you can handle it, it’s very much worth a play.
(Spoiler - click to show)So, the plot(s). Each player picks a protagonist – a woman named Caroline or a man named Leon, with the content warnings flagging that Leon’s story is more descriptive about the game’s shared, dark themes. I opted for Caroline, though after finishing my multiplayer play-through I dipped into the single-player version of Leon’s story to confirm that I understood the basic setup. It rapidly becomes clear that, despite the Western names, the story’s set in a slightly-alternate version of Russia that’s successfully achieved its war aims in Ukraine and is now demobilizing and toggling back to “peace” in order to escape sanctions (in fairness, since this long game must have been started at least several months ago, when Ukraine’s current battlefield successes would have seemed unlikely, it’s unclear how intentional the alternate-reality angle). We’ll get back to Leon later, but Caroline is a civilian on the home front. Indeed, her life at first appears little touched by the war: her husband is an “opposition” politician (he has a government contact who tells him exactly what level of dissent is allowed), her children are students, and she herself is a housewife with a brain and an economics degree but no socially-permitted way of using either.
The inciting incident is deceptively low-key. Her husband’s fixer asks her to serve as a guide for a visiting functionary – a mid-level IMF bureaucrat named Matteo – and show him around. So you do, with a bunch of choices for whether you want to take him to e.g. a European-style restaurant or a hole-in-the-wall local joint for lunch, which reveals different aspects of your society to him, and by extension, the player. In the early stages, things seem corrupt – the opening scene sees Caroline figuring out how to bribe her husband out of a speeding ticket – and ramshackle:
"Now you’re here, the Office of Regional Development looming over you, bright concrete all in sharp lines and steeples, like an uninspired Lego Notre Dame all in white. No choice but to push the doors open, the inside clean and orderly but less impressive than the facade would have implied."
But nothing’s too bad – indeed, while your life isn’t pleasant it’s still fundamentally livable and has its joys as well as its pains. And indeed, this assignment, strange as its genesis seems, is one of those high points for Caroline; again, you can decide how to approach him, but he’s an interested and sympathetic figure who’s curious about your take on everything you see, and his own thoughts without being a stereotypical economist-guy. Depending on how you play your cards, this can lead into a bit of a flirtation, and even possibly an affair, but the player is very much in the driver’s seat.
But – of course there’s a but – as you play the game, you start to get the sneaking suspicion that none of this matters very much, because for all the different options about how to manage your relationship with Matteo, the password you send to the other player doesn’t seem to have anything to do with any of that. Instead, as one portion of your duties, each day you’re ordered into a room where there’s a machine with a blinking colored light, a chart relating different colors to numbers, and a keypad for entering in the number. When you reach one of these sequences, the game pauses while you wait for your partner to send you a color; then you pick a number and send that along in return.
This is clearly ominous as hell, and you have the opportunity to push for answers – but none were easily forthcoming at least in my playthrough, and besides, it was clear that Caroline had a lot to lose from asking too many questions. Those fears also animated a tense late-game sequence, where a family lunch is interrupted by an anti-war protest that your son drifts to – by this point it’s clear that the war was illegitimate and involved atrocities, but it’s also clear that this is not a regime that tolerates dissent. You can choose to let him stand with the demonstrators, or try to pull him away (me? I thought of my son, and dragged the kid out). But again, none of these decisions get fed into the other half of the story.
This is all very effective, I found. The game elegantly gets you to go along with totalitarianism, convincingly demonstrating the consequences of resistance and the unlikelihood that it would even accomplish anything, since you’re just a humble housewife and who cares what you do? The sequences with the machine add an undercurrent of dread, while the pleasant time you spend with Matteo gives you something to focus on besides how fearful and incomplete everyone around you has become. It’s well-written, too; there’s a lot of dialogue here, and a lot of detail-work around how international institutions like the IMF functions – while I’m not an expert on that sort of thing, I do have a law degree and read a lot of policy papers, and almost everything rang true to me. And the game can wax lyrical sometimes too; here’s a description of taking a train to the capital:
"You sit in darkness for a time then you cross a border and the sky begins to brighten again. Then suddenly all sky is gone, all distance dissolved into a blur of buildings; an endless salute of identical concrete dwellings. The lit windows and the lives upon countless lives being lived out on the other side of them merge into straight lines of light."
It’s a little dehumanizing, but not too aggressively so. And in fact while the portrayal of Russian political society is appropriately dark, there are positive aspects of the culture too – Caroline derives meaning from her Orthodox faith and her love of cooking, and the regular people she and Matteo meet are mostly… well, regular people, with some assholes but many nice folks too (I think the deliberate use of Western names, the very sparing use of details that could feel exotic to the presumed Anglophone audience, are in service of making Caroline’s experiences feel less alien, so it’s easier to sympathize with her and find her society natural). It all feels very plausible, and while it’s clearly an unpleasant life compared to what a Western audience is used to, it seems to work well enough for Caroline – or at least, it’s clear that if you have her step too far out of line, it could suddenly start working much, much less well for her and her family.
It lures you in, in other words; the game pushes your buttons sometimes, but it opens up opportunities too. You’re a victim, you’re a culprit.
Then the shoe drops, and the game starts to lose its footing. I won’t spoil the ways Caroline’s story can end in terms of where she and her family (and Matteo) can wind up, since there appears to be a range of options and anyway these details are less important to the point the game is making, but I will spoil what the deal is with the room with the lights and the numbers – so don’t deblur the next paragraph if you want to experience the revelation for yourself.
What’s going on is that the powers that be have developed a new machine for committing war crimes in a way that displaces responsibility for atrocities. As best I can piece together, over in occupied Ukraine – in Leon’s share of the plot, I believe – there are a group of Russian soldiers and officers who decide, in a purely theoretical way, what should be done with POWs and civilian prisoners who have resisted the invaders in particular ways. These theoretical recommendations are fed into a secure room via a color-coding system, presumably indicating different kinds of tortures. Someone in that secure room then selects a number based on the color they’re seeing, which instructs a machine back in the prison camp to maim and/or murder the prisoners whose crimes align with whatever scenario the soldiers were “theoretically” discussing. Caroline, of course, was one such patsy, and when she unknowingly keyed in a 5 because she saw a light flashing red, she, I’m guessing, was telling the machine to kill innocents.
(This, at last, is the Chinese Room of the title – it refers to a philosophical thought experiment denying the “Strong AI” hypothesis that you could make a computer with the same kind of mind a human has. The idea is that you could train a person to respond to a certain set of inputs with a corresponding set of outputs, without actually understanding what they were doing, even though outside observers would impute conscious intentionally to the observed cycle of action and response).
As a metaphor, sure, this works – Caroline’s a cog in a totalitarian machine, unwittingly but also kinda wittingly participating in a sick society’s crimes. But as a diegetic element of the story, I had a hard time swallowing it. Why would the regime construct this complex mechanism? In the real world, Russia isn’t exactly fussed about covering up the crimes against humanity it’s been committing, and the alternate version in the game doesn’t seem significantly more squeamish; in neither case is it clear how consequences would be enforced. And while there’s a way in which this game casuistically could allow the regime to formally displace liability from respected military officers to disfavored civilians, it’s hard to imagine any Western governments taking this sophistry seriously. Perhaps intuiting the weakness of the arguments here, the game presents them skeletally, in broken excerpts overheard while Caroline is distracted or in distress – it almost holds together as it’s being presented, but it breaks apart as soon as you start thinking about it.
The thing is, the whole device rigmarole isn’t thematically necessary. Even without the metaphor, the game had managed to establish the awful dynamics of life in a totalitarian society! If anything, I found this sci-fi MacGuffin confused things, muddying up responsibility and making it easy to point the finger at the cartoon villains who’d constructed these torture devices instead of reflecting on the choices I’d made to have Caroline protect herself and her family at the expense of what we both knew was right.
It is necessary for the two-player mechanic to work, though – there needs to be some gameplay connection between the two strands of the story in order to make it a multiplayer game, and not simply a single-player story you play through in two halves. It’s true that knowing there was another player making decisions out there stoked my paranoia about what was going on, and decisions in the room with the device do have an uncanny Milgram-Experiment vibe that might not work as well without knowing someone else was going to be doing something based on what I sent them. So this isn’t a case where it’s easy to see how the game would work if you excised the piece that I don’t think works as well – still, I can’t help but wonder whether the game evolved past its initial conception, and perhaps could have benefitted from a more radical late-in-the-day rethinking.
As I said way (way, way) back at the beginning of this review, though, I still found A Chinese Room very compelling – I tore through it, nervous and engaged the whole time – and it left me with a good amount to think about even without playing the Leon portion of the story, which I’m sure has even more queasy scenes of moral compromise (I’m not tempted to check it out, I have to confess; while I’m sure it’s well done, I don’t get on with depictions of torture). Even without its technical elements, the game’s a highlight of the Comp, taking on real issues in a grounded, sophisticated way and leaving the player without easy answers – besides, yes, that war is a dehumanizing, monstrous force and totalitarian regimes make it even worse.
A charming one-room puzzler, January 10, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
A Walk Around the Neighborhood has a somewhat deceptive title. Like, close your eyes, picture what you do in the game based just on those five words and knowing it’s a parser game: I mean it’s right there, isn’t it? You take a stroll around some streets, maybe meet some neighbors who have some small problems, carry out some light fetch-questing to the corner shop; possibly there’s a park or bit of woods you can poke your head into, and there’s a little maze or something. But no, there’s a bait-and-switch – instead, what we’ve got here is a one-room puzzler, because while you’d like to go for the eponymous walk with your partner Alex, first you need to find your wallet, and charge your cell phone, and get your keys, and put on a mask… and since you’re working off a days-long hangover, none of this is as easy as you’d think.
There’s another layer of deceptiveness, though, because again, close your eyes and picture what the game is like based on that description: it’s a tough-as-nails pixelbitchfest, with tons of scenery (a few pieces of which will turn out to be important) and implausible puzzles that take what should be a grounded premise and make it absurd. However – twist upon twist! – A Walk Around the Neighborhood also manages to escape this escape-the-room stereotype. It’s a charming, laid-back game that’s smartly designed so that you can tackle its reasonable challenges in a bunch of different ways, and reach a satisfying, plausible ending even if you don’t feel like following the scavenger hunt to its bitter end.
It takes a little while to realize this, admittedly; I let out a groan when the intro stopped and I realized how long the list of stuff I’d need to collect was, and how concomitantly long the list of living-room furniture to poke at was, too. But that list of objects is pretty much it – there aren’t like sub-items and sub-parts fractally expanding the game space to ludicrous levels. And while many one-room games are dense but “steep”, with a host of puzzles that all depend on each other in a mostly linear sequence, this one is quite flat; there are one or two that need to be solved in order, but for the most part, there’s nothing that’s useless or out of bounds from the off, and wherever you start your efforts, you’re likely to make some satisfying progress.
The individual puzzles are well-designed, too. There are no secret messages or color-coded signals or anything like that, just a jumble of missing keys that have largely wound up where you would expect, and a couple of logical object-interaction puzzles. Sure, you’ll need to LOOK BEHIND and LOOK UNDER stuff, but that’s de rigueur for a game like this, and it specifically prompts you with those verbs so I think it plays fair on that score. A few are a bit more creative, including some that require watching TV for inspiration, but even these are quite grounded, helping maintain the integrity of the pleasant, low-key premise. And if you run into trouble, you can always check in with your partner, who can give you some light, in-world hints while proving a pleasant look what the relationship is like (there are regular hints, plus a walkthrough too).
Despite the simple building-blocks and the relatively short running time – I got one of the two “complete” endings in about 45 minutes – it’s surprisingly deep, too. You see, you’re not stuck on this train until you’ve managed to retrieve all your possessions – there are over a dozen additional off-ramps, where you get sucked into some other activity instead of going on that much-delayed walk. These are all easy enough to back out of with an UNDO, and crucially, they’re not treated as bad ends – sure, your partner might lightly chide you for not getting some exercise, but typically they involve doing something else that’s fun or useful, so it’s enjoyable to try stuff that’s not on the scavenger-hunt list to see if you can discover one of these premature endings.
Tying everything together, the tone is light without getting silly. As the presence of a mask on the list indicates, the game’s set during COVID times, but not in an intrusive or depressing way. And the protagonist has an affable voice that made me want to help them out – as befits the rest of the game, they’re not like aggressively characterized and the prose is by no means show-offy, but it’s technically quite clean and does a good job efficiently putting a little bit of personality into the straightforward descriptions of quotidian things:
>x ring
The key ring currently holds a backdoor key, although it usually also holds a car key, a house key, a work key and a bike key.
Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence. Your key ring doesn’t quite make a full loop, so if you’re not careful with them (as happens from time to time, especially when you’re drinking or out with friends), they fall off without you realizing it.
Admittedly, there are a few items that have a default “you see nothing special about the XX” description, which really shouldn’t be the case in a small albeit jam-packed game like this, but at least it’s for stuff like AA batteries, where the lack of description isn’t holding the player back any. Other than that, I didn’t run into any bugs or implementation oversights. Really, this is a smooth, low-friction game; it’s cheerful and pleasant and rewarding to play. It’s not an angsty, story-heavy game that’s going to tax your brain and challenge your ability to put together a complex narrative, sure, so I suppose you could level the criticism that in some respects it’s a bit lightweight. But with a title like A Walk Around the Neighborhood, is that really what you’d be expecting? No, it does what it sets out to do, and very satisfyingly at that; it’s a quiet but clear highlight of the Comp.
Nice mice, January 10, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I worry that, just as with people, it can come off patronizing to call a game “adorable,” so I’ve been staring at the thesaurus for the last five minutes. Esther’s is “cute” and “appealing”, sure, but that undersells how winsome it is. Is it “precious”? Nah, that sounds too cloying. “Captivating” and “enchanting” miss how pleasantly low-key it is, and after that, let’s just say the line of proposed synonyms that start with “dreamy” and proceed from there are a bit too adult for this children’s-book-aping Twine game. Sorry, folks – I guess we’re stuck with “adorable.”
In the best picture-book tradition, the game stars two mice, Janie and Harold, and follow them on their way to their favorite brunch spot, the eponymous Esther’s. Said café is run by a little girl who’s a thoughtful host in every way save one – she doesn’t understand the mice’s squeaky language, so always serves them cheese and crackers, rather than the mimosas and avocado toast they’re craving (Janie and Harold must be millennials). Today’s the day when they decide to really make an effort and get through to Esther – and it’s up to the player to help.
This is a cute premise for sure, and it could come off twee, but I don’t think it goes too far. Partly this is due to the lovely illustrations, which wouldn’t be out of place in a real children’s book – they have a textured, watercolor quality and a neat attention to detail: look closely at the opening image, which shows Janie bringing flowers while Harold carries her library books, and you can see she’s checked out Goodnight Moon. And I won’t spoil the one where Janie tries to mime an avocado, but it got the first out-loud laugh of the Comp out of me.
The prose also hits just the right note, with simple, clear sentences but a sly turn of phrase here and there to make it fun for a grown-up to read, too:
"Janie buttered an invisible toast and pretended to nibble at it. Harold stuffed his pretend toast in his mouth. He licked his fingers with pretend satisfaction."
It’s nothing fancy, but the repeated use of “pretend” setting up “pretend satisfaction” is cleverly done.
The interactivity is also nicely gauged – you’ve got a fair number of options to choose from, and while the challenge of getting your order right isn’t a devilish puzzle or anything, the authors have done a good job of communicating just enough information about what each choice might do, while still retaining room to surprise you with how exactly each stab at communication plays out.
Esther’s is admittedly a small thing – my playthrough went quicker than it usually takes me to get through Goodnight Moon with my son, albeit he’s typically doing a lot of wriggling and pointing which pads things out. But it pulls off everything it tries to with aplomb, and I had a smile plastered to my face the whole time I was playing it. There’s no other word for it: from stem to stern, it’s adorable.
A nuanced workplace-antiromance , January 9, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Welp, much like with No One Else is Doing This, I come to Admiration Point with some personal experience that makes this “anti-romance” about mutual attraction between married (not to each other, natch) co-workers especially resonant: my wife and I met at work, at a time when we were likewise both coupled up (but not to each other, natch). I can attest that makes for a situation rife with the potential for drama, submerged feelings, and angst, with a hundred different choices every day attempting to balance guilt, desire, innocence, and fulfillment, so it’s an appealing setup for a work of choice-based IF. Add to this an interesting, self-reflective future setting – the main characters all work at a digital museum and spend most of their time assessing and analyzing the online culture of the early 21st Century – and you’ve got some compelling ingredients. I didn’t find Admiration Point entirely successful, due to some significant elements feeling underdeveloped, but there’s a lot here to enjoy and think about, so I’m happy to have played it.
Good stuff first. Much of the game plays out at work, as Maria, the main character, responds to the demands of her work as a exhibition artist at the museum – this means she does things like create 3d avatars for her colleagues when they give talks in online VR, or mock up backdrops or interactive experiences to support exhibits – and decides exactly how far to lean in to her attraction to Sean, a somewhat-older curator. Some of the details of this work can feel a little silly – TikTok clips are ephemeral by their nature, so putting significant effort into preserving them has the air of the absurd – but there’s an impressive attention to the detail that this work would require, and various books and lectures eventually make the case for this study of digital culture.
Throughout, Maria has the opportunity to take on extra projects to get closer to Sean, providing for some engaging choices, and allowing the technological elements of the setting to create unexpected intimacy. At one point in my playthrough, she decided to make an avatar of Sean, building the model from reference photos:
"His knuckles are unexpectedly knobbly, and he keeps his fingernails shorter than the default fingernail length. You adjust some of the knuckle wrinkles, the shade of the arm hair, and the opacity of the skin on the palms."
The relationship with Sean is nicely drawn throughout, in fact. He’s not completely idolized – while he’s smart, charming, and occasionally thoughtful, he can come off a bit smug and patronizing – which adds to the reality of the attraction, and Maria’s physical desire for him comes through in details like those above. In my playthrough I skated on the edge, never pushing for a declaration of love or doing anything that didn’t have plausible deniability, but not losing any opportunities to spend time together, either – so his feelings remained plausibly ambiguous. It’s clear that Maria is getting something positive out of their connection, and sees it as a reason to stretch herself artistically and intellectually, but it also clearly leads to her neglecting her family. There were more than a few moments, playing Admiration Point, when I felt a shudder of recognition at how well the game reminded me of how things were when my wife and I were just co-workers.
There’s one element of the relationship that felt less natural, though, which is the game-mechanical pieces. Once you reach a certain point in the story, a sidebar’s unlocked that shows little icons representing your feelings for Sean, his feelings for you, and his “alert” level. These aren’t explained – Sean’s indicators appear to be based on a weather metaphor, like cloudy to sunny, and since I played it cool his alert level stayed at a question mark. But I found the squiggly circle representing Maria’s feelings for him incomprehensible (though it belatedly occurs to me that might be the point), and the whole rigmarole seemed unnecessary given that the prose was already doing a perfectly adequate job conveying the situation.
Speaking of pieces that fell a bit flat for me, I didn’t find fin-de-21st-Century sci-fi world entirely believable – other than a U.S. that has fragmented into Infinite-Jest-style corporate-branded substates and some scaled-up VR technology that feels at most 15 or 20 years off, not 70, neither technology or culture seem to have moved on that much. That’d all be fair enough – this isn’t meant to be sociological speculative fiction by any means – except for the glaring fact that the game’s gender roles often struck me as a bit retrograde even by 2022 standards. It is established that nonbinary and genderqueer people do have significantly greater acceptance (a major plot point hinges on a study examining how folks from those communities created art in response to a second pandemic in the 2030s), but in terms of how the named cast interact, it feels more 1990s than 2090s. Sean’s instinct is to talk over Maria and treat her ideas dismissively, until he’s called on it; Maria and her husband have a sex life straight out of a period sitcom (he’s gotta have it, she’s mostly frigid); her attraction to Sean is based partially on wanting to take care of him, though “as a woman, [she] like[s] to support other women in positions of power in [her] workplaces” – in fact she often feels “powerless at work.”
Of course, it’s possible that the setting of the game – the Nevadan successor-state of MGM – is meant to be more culturally conservative than future society as a whole. This brushes against another somewhat-disappointing aspect of the game, which is the treatment of Mormonism. The blurb plays up the fact that Maria is Mormon, and so is Sean, as it turns out. But short of her noting the fact that they have a religion in common (without any substantive comment on what that means to her), a sequence where they bump into each other at an LDS event – which could have been equally well set at Shakespeare in the Park or a football game – and one moment where Maria has the option to pray for sleep, her faith and its role in her worldview felt underdeveloped to me. I never got a sense of whether she was a fervent believer, or whether this attraction to someone she wasn’t married to threatened her faith, or if Sean being Mormon as well made flirtation safer, or alternatively, less appealing because it becomes less transgressive. Perhaps the author was worried about making the player feeling proselytized-to – a good impulse! – but I think the game went too far in the other direction; Maria is a strongly-characterized protagonist so having this important part of her identity and experience of the world deemphasized feels like a missed opportunity.
The biggest area where underdevelopment undermines the game, however, is Maria’s home life, which gets maybe a fifth of the word count, and an even lower fraction of authorial attention, of her work. Her husband makes cardboard seem interesting – he never even gets a name over the course of this 90-minute game, and given all the focus on Maria’s job it’s noticeable that we don’t even find out what he does until an hour in (he’s an industrial production manager, god help him). She has a four-year-old who’s occasionally being annoying, occasionally being cute, but who doesn’t seem to take up nearly the space in her attention as most toddlers do in the minds of their parents. But there are very few sequences, or decisions, where these relationships are activated – there’s one point where you need to decide whether or not to stay home from work to take care of your sick child, but it’s primarily framed around Sean (selfishly wanting to go into work to be near him, or selflessly performing familial obligations).
Of course, this could well be an authorial choice, portraying the home as drab and stultifying in contrast to the excitement Maria experiences when she’s with Sean. But often the writing in these segments doesn’t feel like it’s portraying feelings of dullness and artificiality, and is just dull and artificial itself. Like, there’s an interesting subplot at the museum where Maria makes a 3d model of a mommy-blogger to go along with an exhibit of some of her writing; the excerpts are from right after the blogger gave birth, so Maria makes the model a realistic rendition of a post-partum body. This pisses off one of the blogger’s descendants, who wanted a more idealized portrayal. The work sequence is interesting and well done, and gains personal resonance because it’s revealed that Maria had a hard pregnancy with her first child, with a long recovery time, which is one reason she’s reticent to have any more kids even though her husband would like them.
When the incident with the relative comes up in conversation at home, here’s how the dialogue goes, after a prefatory “as you know” phrase establishes that the husband knows about Maria’s work on the exhibit and he asks whether she made the change the relative requested:
“I did not. Postpartum women often sequester themselves and we have few public examples of what their bodies actually look like. Women giving birth for the first time are surprised when they have a baby and can’t fit back into their old clothes after giving birth or sometimes, not ever. My art should depict what we want to exhibit as accurately as possible.”
“Hmm. That makes sense.”
This is not how people actually talk, much less people who are married to each other, much much less people who have feelings about what being pregnant, with the child of the person they’re talking to, did to their own body. It’s a significant missed opportunity, and it’s of a piece with the treatment of Maria’s family throughout, which winds up undercutting the dilemma at the heart of the game – instead of a dilemma hinging on Maria’s desire to be with Sean counterposed with guilt at hurting her very human, very specific husband and kid, her desire is only opposed by abstract considerations of fidelity. This makes the drama significantly less compelling – and, again drawing on personal experience here, it also makes it significantly less true to life.
In many respects these are minor critiques, I should say. Certainly if the good parts of Admiration Point were less good, I’d feel less disappointed by its weaker parts – I can’t help imagine what the game would be like if the quality of writing and characterization were more consistent, so I’ve done my typical thing of harping at length on the negatives in a piece I overall liked. So let me just say once again that there’s a lot to like here, and seeing that the author has written other works of IF – including some that appear to lean more heavily into Mormon themes – I’m definitely interested in checking those out.
A satisfying off-brand Hogwarts adventure, January 9, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I also beta-tested this game, but didn't do a full replay before writing this review).
The question of generic knock-offs is deceptively complex. Sure, some of it comes down to dollars and cents: you can save some money by getting store-brand Coke, and it all tastes like malted battery acid anyway, so might as well save a buck rather than pay for the label. But when it comes to an experience rather than a product the label, isn’t just an afterthought, but can be an inherent and important part of the texture – in some sense it shouldn’t matter whether or not we think Pericles, Prince of Tyre is an authentic Shakespeare play, but given its clear status as a lesser work, in a larger sense that’s the only question that matters.
All this is well-trod ground, but the Lazy Wizard’s Guide poses the issue in a curiously inverted form – in offering up an off-label Hogwarts, the game loses much of the richness of detail, and the positive associations some players might have lingering from their first encounters with the books and movies. But it also cleanses this Brand X Wizarding World of the lingering stench of Rowling’s loud transphobia, clearing space for more players to enjoy it in good conscience.
And what’s here is enjoyable, even leaving aside all questions of authenticity. The parser-based magic test is a study formula, and tends to live and die by the strength of its magic system, so the choice to de-emphasize setting and characters by invoking direct Harry Potter tropes with their serial numbers filed off is entirely defensible. Admittedly, said system is also not going to win any awards for novelty, since it uses a traditional mix of spellbooks – to permanently learn new spells – and material components – which can be consumed, putting a limit on the number of times you can spam certain enchantments. Similarly, the hoops your fledgling wizard needs to jump through in order to graduate can feel a bit arbitrary – some are clearly ridiculously dangerous, like summoning a vampire, while others, like finding a lost magic rock, are a tad underwhelming.
These authorial choices mean that the overall framework of the game isn’t especially compelling; you’re solving a test because you’ve been told to solve the test. Fortunately, the actual gameplay and puzzles themselves are pleasantly moreish. There’s a canny mix of difficulties, with a gently-sloping curve that successfully builds familiarity with the system and gives the player some early wins while introducing some more challenging obstacles. Alternate solutions are implemented for many puzzles, some of which work around resource constraints in fairly clever ways. And the custom parser is up to the challenge – it doesn’t recognize “it”, but it does have a well-integrated menu-based conversation system for when you want to talk to not-McGonagall, not-Dobby, and not-Ron, so that feels like a fair trade.
As I played the Lazy Wizard’s Guide, I wound up unconsciously comparing it to an entry in 2019’s Comp, Winter Break at Hogwarts. That game really leaned into a recreation of Hogwarts, boasting a sprawling map that largely coincided with the official plan of the school, with book-appropriate set dressing everywhere you looked. But between some iffy puzzle design and the authenticity generating some bad Rowling vibes, I didn’t wind up enjoying it that much. Lazy Wizard’s Guide flips both those elements and comes up with a much more successful formula – sometimes it’s good that you’d never confuse the generic brand for the real thing.
A bottom-up view of political activism, January 9, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I spend a lot of time in my reviews pontificating about prose style and engagement and puzzle difficulty and all sorts of stuff as though I were some sort of expert, but of course the truth is that’s all just based on having read a bunch of books, played a fair number of games, and written a couple myself – hardly specialized knowledge, since that describes like everyone who writes IF reviews. And subject matter wise I have to confess I’ve never been stuck in an abandoned spaceship, transported to a surreal otherworld that’s a reflection of my undigested trauma, or gone on any sort of fantastical quest at all, so all that’s a strikeout too.
All of which is to say that I was very excited to come across a game where I actually do have relevant experience that most players probably wouldn’t! No One Else is Doing This is all about canvassing – the fine art of knocking on doors (or shooting people an aggressively cheerful wave and “hi!” in a busy public place) to talk to folks about issues, encouraging them to sign a petition, support a candidate or ballot measure, and/or (preferably and) donate to keep a nonprofit afloat. I’ve never been a full-time canvasser, but for many years I worked for an organization that ran outreach operations like the ones depicted in NOEDT across the U.S. (admittedly, the game is set in the U.K.), and besides spending a lot of time talking to colleagues about how they were run, I headed out to turf myself a fair few times to see what canvassing was like. So in addition to assessing the game qua game, I’ll also review how accurately it portrays the experience of canvassing – on its Comp page, NOEDT twice brands itself a “simulator”, so I think this is a fair exercise.
With all that introductory rigmarole out of the way, what’s the game actually like? It’s a short, minimally-but-attractively designed Twine game that briefly introduces you to the situation – you’re employed as a door-knocker by a community union, which I think translates into Americanese as a community-based organization, trying to recruit more dues-paying members to increase your union’s ability to pay its staff and make change (reading between the lines, it appears it works primarily on local issues, primarily housing). After an initial sequence that sees you bundle way, way up – it’s set on a Friday night in early December – you head out on your shift, needing to raise one more five-pound contribution to hit your weekly quota.
Once you hit turf, you’re presented with a dashboard of sorts where you can plan your work. There’s a status indicator up top letting you know how much time’s left in the shift and how much you’ve raised so far, plus warnings if you’re getting too cold or need to use the bathroom. There’s a short glossary explaining some of the (honestly not that technical) specialized vocabulary the game uses. There’s the option to take a break to see to some of the aforementioned needs. And then there’s the list of doors, authentically arranged into two rows of first the odd numbers, then the evens (because of course the most efficient way to work your way down a block is to knock all the doors on one side, then cross and do the other side – this is how pretty much all walk lists are printed).
The meat of the game comes when you select a door. Much of the time nobody will be home (or nobody will answer – not necessarily the same thing!) and you’ll just drop some lit, leaving a pamphlet for the resident in the forlorn hope that they’ll read it instead of chucking it in the bin, and maybe decide to donate to you sua sponte (mostly they wind up in the bin). When somebody answers, you’re given a choice of two dialogue options as you move through your rap (the canned speech you use to tell folks who you are and what you’re doing) and try to make enough of a connection for them to join the union (or just throw money at you so you’ll go away).
Sometimes you’re doomed no matter what you do, of course – the dad in the middle of making dinner for screaming kids doesn’t have time to listen to your schpiel, and the chav in the middle of watching a football game just wants to get back to the telly. And some folks will want to talk to you, but either conclude that organizing isn’t the answer to society’s problems – it’s the fault of bad education/laziness/those Muslims – or that while they’re totally with you, they’re just completely tapped out of time and money. There are a few, though, who will donate if you do a good enough job of figuring out what would motivate them, or at least just get lucky.
This all seems super accurate, as do some of the constraints. It’s cold and miserable out on turf when you canvass in the middle of the winter. There are way, way more doors that don’t open than those that do, and pretty much nobody you talk to has any idea of what your kind of organization is so you need to keep the conversations really basic. There’s not enough time to get through all your turf, and while canvassing skill definitely has an impact over time, it’s totally possible to have a night go totally south because you hit a run of bad doors all in a row (the game is kind of sneaky about this, in fact – most players will probably start out hitting the odd doors in increasing order, since they’re presented on the first row. But the early odd-numbered doors are all pretty terrible, with almost all the donors found on the evens side of the street – it’s sufficiently disproportionate that I assume the intent is for a first playthrough to be miserable).
Breaking from questions of verisimilitude for a minute, all of this is presented in unadorned but solid prose that I think does a good job of capturing the experience, and especially the time and place (it’s set in 2020). Here’s a bit from the bus ride to turf:
"You just about manage to jump on the bus before it leaves. The schools have finished for the day and it’s over capacity, teenagers sitting in the seats marked out for social distancing. The elderly man behind you is wearing his mask underneath his nose. You put your headphones in and try to psych yourself up for the next four hours."
This approach extends to the actual door-knocking, where the conversations are compact and to the point, but do a good job of quickly sketching out the rich pageant of characters you’d expect to come across if you met everyone who lived on a street.
The writing is also where the protagonist’s growing disillusionment with the work comes through. They’re getting burned out, it’s clear:
"He shuts the door. You post a leaflet, impotently, through the letter box."
But this isn’t just a matter of worry that you’re behind on your quota (quotas are totally a real thing, FYI) – the protagonist is also questioning whether this work is actually adding up to social change:
"You don’t have the time to go back and see them again, and most of them will never come to a meeting or an action without support. They’ll just cancel their memberships, probably, and then you’re back where you started."
This is where my suspension of disbelief started to take a bit of a hit. Organizations that do this work don’t typically expect door-knockers to also try to get members to take further actions – or if they do, it’s not during the same shifts where they’re working through a walk list. There’ll typically be called a ladder of engagement, with other staff calling folks who’ve signed up as members to talk to them in more depth about issues and campaigns, invite them to events, and move them into doing more and more. If this community union’s organizing model is just “sign ‘em up and hope they do something,” it’s no wonder their staff are unsure what the point of all their work is!
The other reason the protagonist’s burnout is understandable is that the author’s put their thumb on the scales. As I mentioned above, if you run through the doors in the intuitively correct order you’ll struggle with a lot of empty homes and uninterested residents, and probably fail to raise a single pound, prompting a downbeat ending. But even if you, for some obsessive reason, decide to play the game five or six times and systematically mark down which doors are the best ones – then have to play it one more time because your planned-out “perfect run” got derailed when you forgot to stop for a pee break – and run up the scoreboard such that you raise almost your entirely weekly quota in one night, you’re told as you’re checking in with your supervisor that members you’d signed up on previous nights have cancelled their donations, so you wind up below quota after all.
It’s dumb to feel put out by this kind of authorial manipulation, I suppose – spoiler, everything in every game is authorial manipulation – but still, I think it weakens the work. As I mentioned above, it’s definitely possible to be good at canvassing, or just lucky, and have a good night. And I don’t think it’s critical to the protagonist’s gradual embitterment that they fail – after coming in below quota I was expecting the supervisor to fire me, but she was actually quite chill and philosophical about it. Canvassing is hard, grinding work; many of the organizations that employ canvassers think giving people an opportunity to work on issues they care about means they don’t need to be too punctilious about labor rights and practices; and it is the case that while, at least in my experience, community organizing is one of the few things that can create the power needed to win systems change, much if not most of the time systems succeed at sustaining an unjust status quo even in the face of top-notch campaigning. To my mind, grappling with these issues more directly would have made NOEDT’s critiques more incisive (for that matter, what exactly is the title referring to? I wonder whether it’s an indirect indication that the protagonist’s friends and relations think she’s crazy to be doing this work).
Modulo that one niggle, though, I think NOEDT works quite well both as a look into this important but infrequently-depicted vocation, as well as a portrait of a community, lumps and all – as much as I enjoyed seeing the impedimenta of canvassing show up in a piece of IF, similarly to how I’ve felt when knocking doors in real life I also enjoyed the surprise of seeing who was behind each door, and knowing that while most of them would be dismissive or busy or otherwise disagreeable, there’s a chance of meeting at least a few willing – indeed, excited – to have a quick chat about how to make the world better, if only a little.
I’ll wrap up this way-too-long-by-any-objective-measure review with two last PSAs for those who’ve played NOEDT: first, in the US we’re a month out from Election Day, and that means that if you live here you may soon be getting calls or door-knocks from canvassers for one cause or candidate or another. You definitely don’t have to agree with them or give them money by any means, but hopefully this game can be a reminder to treat them like they’re human beings – the difference between a sincere “I’m sorry, I can’t tonight” and slamming a door in one’s face is really really significant! And second, if you ever are doing any canvassing yourself, the bit here where the protagonist goes out on turf alone, with only a rape whistle for protection, is a very bad idea – always buddy up!
Appealing but underbaked, January 6, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Let Them Eat Cake lulls you in with a premise that echoes the cozycore vibe of games like Stardew Valley – you’re an apprentice baker tasked with gathering the not-at-all-exotic ingredients to make a cake for a village festival in your new home. The aesthetic is homey as well, with text that unfurls across a background that remind me of my grandma’s old recipe cards, and the portraits of your various neighbors depicted in an appealingly ugly-cute style.
It doesn’t take long for things to curdle, though, since this Twine game isn’t so much folksy as folk horror. The most benign of the villagers is the one who did in her daughter’s fiancé with rat poison; it’s best not to pry into what the farmer’s prizewinning pigs have been eating to make them grow so fat; and the vibes in the mill were so bad I just noped my way out of there before figuring out the exact flavor of wrong that was going on there. It sure seems like your master has got some secrets too, and who knows what really goes on at the festival…
Well, I don’t, I have to admit, since I ran into a bug that saw me stuck in a time loop after bringing the ingredients back to the baker; he told me to make some butter, I did that and poked around the bakery, then the link to gather the ingredients together reset me back to the beginning of the scene, locked into an endless repetition that was horrifying enough but not, I think, what the author intended. Indeed, while the game nails the vibe, it’s in need of some polish beyond just bug-fixing. The prose is evocative, but has lots of typos and is occasionally awkward:
"The farm is run down, as you might begin to wonder that every part of this small, hidden town is. It’s hidden, tucked away so small that it doesn’t register on any of the local maps you’ve seen, but the merchants seem to know where it is."
With that coat of polish, I think this could be a fun, scary game – the contrast between the twee presentation and brutal reality is entertaining, and each of the little vignettes was engaging, with choices that invited me to push my luck (though admittedly the fact that I’d died and restarted a couple times by the time I hit the endless-butter bug, reducing my desire to try the whole thing yet again – since there are so many endings, many of them appearing to be bad ones, enabling undo would probably have been a good idea). So I’ll keep an eye out for a post-Comp release, as I don’t think I’ve yet had my fill.
Lothlorien by way of New York, January 6, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
In this year's Comp, there’s no author braver than David Gürçay-Morris. “I would like you to directly compare my writing to Joan Didion’s scalpel-sharp prose, please” is a sentence uttered by no sane writer ever, and yet his entry invites the player to do just that. Elvish for Goodbye isn’t just a riff on Didion’s seminal kiss-off to New York City, Goodbye to All That – the author’s note at the end acknowledges a debt to Calvino too, and appropriately enough for elf stuff, there’s some light linguistics as well – but it does take some of its subject matter from the essay, and even redeploys a few specific lines and incidents to its own purposes. Hell, the blurb even uses a quote as its epigram, going out of its way to draw the player’s attention to the Didion connection at the outset rather than take the comparatively-safer option of pointing it out in the afterword! This is foolhardiness taken to the extreme, so while I can’t condone the author’s choices, I can certainly admire the courage on display.
The above could read as though I’m setting up the author for a savaging, trying to buck him up before the evisceration. Nothing could be further from the truth! Elvish for Goodbye is lovely and loving, a literary tribute to a writer who clearly had an impact on the author, and if holding Didion’s model close to mind meant that I was hyperaware of every slightly-inapt metaphor or just-too-long sentence, that’s just the price for taking such a big swing.
(This is maybe an opportune time to say this is another review where I get spoilery. For best results, you should probably play the game – and read or reread the Didion essay – before continuing).
The story of the game is simple. The protagonist, a writer himself, encounters a woman who was among the last to live among the lost city of the elves; she tells him of that city, of the time she spent there, and how that time came to an end (she’s the Didion character, in other words). The protagonist is callow, the writer experienced; he asks questions, she responds. There’s some interactivity – you can pick the place where the two first meet and decide exactly how in-depth you want the protagonist’s questions to be, as well as putting a little bit of English on his reaction to the final revelation of the Elven city’s fate – but this is largely expressive interactivity; it doesn’t seem like the plot or its overall vibe changes much regardless.
I think this was probably the right call – the effectiveness of the game relies very heavily on the mood it conveys as well as the diptych it forms with Didion’s essay, and being able to rewrite the substance or even the sequence of events too broadly would threaten that. Besides, having made my initial choices, I can’t conceive of wanting to go back and make different ones. Indeed, there’s even a passage that underlines this:
"She remarked that one hard lesson of her early years in Wild Idyll had been learning that a tale’s accuracy was far less important than the specificity with which it was told. That those details and particularities, the minutiae of actions and adjectives, were what lodged in our memory, more than a sense of the tale’s 'truth.'"
(Yes, the Elven city is called “Wild Idyll”, an inversion of the Idlewild airport – rechristened JFK after the assassination – where Didion first alights).
The game does a good job with this specificity. Here’s the protagonist reflecting, as a spoken-word performance comes to a close, on the fact that the image he’d formed of the Didion-analogue from her writing and recordings was some ways distant from her reality as a person:
"Of course I didn’t know that at the time, couldn’t have known it, not until after the desultory applause that greeted the show’s end as idol-smashing houselights flickered to full."
This extends to the descriptions of the city, too:
"Oh, those trees! Never before had I seen trees like those of the Idyll: soaring to heaven, their leafy crowns a crystal mosaic sky of greens aglow in golden light, backed in sapphire. These towers of living wood sheltered the great city of Elvenkind. Their immense verticality and spreading canopy formed living caverns in which districts and neighborhoods, each centered about a verdant plaza, were strung together by the grassy esplanades and riverbed boulevards that meandered through the city’s glens and dells."
The writing isn’t quite as clean when it shifts into narrative mode, though. As it turns out, the city was lost because one day, the Elves up and left. Here’s the moment where that’s revealed:
“When Wild Idyll disappeared, those of us left behind–the non-elvenkind of the city–well, I think we half-thought the whole blessed city had blown away! There had been a storm the night before, and while the rain was gone by dawn, a wind had persisted in blowing across the city all morning. For an insane instant the idea that the wind had just picked up the city and carried it away truly seemed like the most reasonable explanation for the Idyll’s sudden absence. We were, after all, always comparing it to a fleet of sails, a field of flags, or a flock of kites.”
There are good images here, but the hesitation of “half-thought”, the adjectivitis and adverbitis of the third sentence, undercut their power. Again, this isn’t anything that I’d normally harp on, but I can’t picture the real Joan Didion saying, much less writing, sentences like these.
Another departure from Didion, this one I think intentional, is that where her essay dwells on the social world she encountered in New York, and the shifting impact that society has on her psychological well-being, the game largely ignores such considerations in favor of an extended riff on Elvish linguistics. We’re told that there are hundreds, if not a thousand, different words the Elves use for goodbye, depending on who’s doing the leaving, their relative social rank, the emotional tenor of the present encounter, and on and on and on. This maybe gets a little tedious – you’re given an option to have the protagonist cut some of the exposition short, blessedly – but it’s all in service of the reveal that there’s one last, most important and permanent word for goodbye (were I tempted to cross-pollinate LA literary icons, I suppose I could label it the Big Goodbye):
"This last ‘goodbye’ was a great equalizer–if such can be said of a word–because it existed in only one form, with total disregard for rank or relation, for being the one leaving or the one left behind. It could be literally translated as ‘goodbye to everything, forever’; or more poetically as ‘goodbye to…all that.’” She made a gesture with her hands which simultaneously took in the world around us, and shooed it all away."
That’s a good punch-line, and reconnection with Didion, but a groaner nonetheless, and exemplifies as well as anything else the tightrope the game has to walk: hew too closely to the original essay, and you risk just saying stuff she said earlier and better, or take it as a point of departure and risk the cognitive dissonance of doing non-Didion stuff in your Didion homage. And I admit that while by this point I felt like the game was doing about as well striking that balance as could be expected, I wasn’t sure the game was worth the candle. My mind was changed by the final few sequences, though. After the elves leave, the woman and her compatriots ruminate on their sudden departure means – apologies for one last lengthy quote:
“I find it much harder to see when things end. Even though I know the truth of this with respect to the small, everyday endings, some very human part of me remains convinced that when it comes to the grand things, those events which define a generation or an entire people for generations to come: those moments, surely, must tower before us, clear to see! … I understood, in that moment when I knew what the missing word for ‘goodbye’ must be, that this was exactly the opposite of the truth: the ending of a whole world is, in fact, the hardest thing to see… The specificity of beginnings always eclipse the tattered endings carpeting the ground of its arrival.”
This is compelling in its own right – to take one potential application among many, I feel like anyone who’s had a serious breakup or gotten divorced would recognize something true in that passage – and it also completes a thought Didion left hanging in her essay; “it is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends” is the opening of Goodbye to All That, and she circles back around to having missed the ending of her love affair with New York by the close of the essay, but simply leaps to her newfound sense of disgust at the things that used to delight her without reflecting on what could have changed and why she missed noticing the shift.
Elvish for Goodbye also has a more regenerative approach to what to make of such endings. The very close of Didion’s essay reads to me like sour grapes; she talks about how the last time she was in New York, everyone was “ill and tired” or had moved away, unconvincingly counterposing this with her idealized moonlit, jasmine-scented Los Angeles life – or maybe I’m projecting, as someone who grew up in the New York burbs and passed a good portion of my twenties in the city, but is still reconciling himself to living in LA despite the fact that I’ve been doing it for fifteen years! But in the game, the city of the elves that passed away is the same as the human city that the protagonist now inhabits, completely different yet completely the same – which feels to me like a more plausible account of the way change and continuity intertwine in the wake of great upheavals, which can make you feel like an exile when you’ve only walked a few steps, or feel like you’ve returned home when you travel thousands of miles to a place you’ve never been.
It takes a little while to get there, but ultimately Elvish for Goodbye transcends being a mere Didion pastiche, and winds up in dialogue with her essay without suffering unduly from the juxtaposition – a neat trick to manage! Indeed, there’s a way in which its vision has the last laugh, for despite the emphatic never-going-back-there tone of Goodbye to All That, some twenty years after writing it Didion did return to New York, and stayed there for the closing decades of her life. The game prompts us to ask, did she come back to the city, or did she find one anew? And what language could she use to describe this combined valediction and salutation? Elvish for Goodbye suggests an answer, though it doesn’t tell us how to pronounce it.
Silly, mostly-insoluble mystery, January 6, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Props to Who Shot Gum E. Bear? – it commits to the bit. In this absurdist detective-noir parody, you’re the one honest private dick (or Jane, actually) in a spun-sugar city where the candy-bar cast are as crooked as they are sweet, determined to crack the case of who offed the eponymous pop-rock-snorting bear. Your tools are a set of standard parser verbs, a willingness to poke your nose where it doesn’t belong (if you have a nose? X ME just says you’re “a street-smart broad with a hard sugar shell but a soft centre”, so like the green M&M maybe?), and the ability to ACCUSE any character of the crime (er, plus the bonus ability to UNDO if you happen to guess wrong).
It’d be easy for the film-noir business to overtake the parodic elements until they were just a layer of surrealism sprinkled lightly over a stale procedural plot, like so much powdered sugar. Bu the writing never lets you forget, in ways both PG and not. Here’s what you see when you peruse the wares at an, uh, adult bookshop:
"You’re never going to look at lollipops the same way again."
Eek.
There are some light puzzles to solve along the way, allowing you to access some locked areas on the small map, and opening up more people/treats to interrogate using a fairly robustly-implemented ASK/TELL ABOUT system. But lawnmowering your way through these will largely just rule out suspects and resolve ancillary mysteries. Success requires the player, not the protagonist, to make a realization, and if you don’t pay attention to the confectionary nature of your surroundings, your victim, and your suspect, you’ll never crack the case, which relies on the player being a careful, and clever, observer of events (or, again, trial-and-error via the UNDO function, not that I would know anything about that).
This gimmick wound up being my favorite part of the design, helping integrate the comedy with the gameplay. Who Shot Gum E. Bear is still rather slight; depending on how deep you want to get into everybody’s dialogue options before you figure out the answer/start spamming the ACCUSE command, you’re looking at ten or twenty minutes, and the mystery is as thin as the central-casting characters – the mob boss Don Toberlone, the tough-as-nails Jawbreaker, the femme fatale Candy Kane. But it’s amusing and clever, so I’m quite confident pronouncing it the best sweets-based murder-mystery of this or any Comp.
A masterful alchemical mystery, January 6, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I beta tested this game, but did a full replay before writing this review).
This is my last review of the 2022 Comp, so y’all will hopefully forgive me if I indulge in one of my worst habits, which is opening a review with a meandering personal anecdote that’s only tangentially related to the matter at hand (see, now I’ve lampshaded it, it’s fine) – it’s about my favorite band, the Mountain Goats. If you’re not familiar, for purposes of this story the salient facts about them are a) as good as their albums are, the live shows are really where it’s at, and thus there’s a very robust, band-sanctioned bootleg scene, and b) even in 2005 when this story is set they had a deep, deep discography with hundreds of unreleased songs, limited-run EPs, and albums released on cassette-only record labels lost to do the mists of time, such that even a devoted fan like me couldn’t come close to being familiar with all of it.
With that background set, let me take you back seventeen years ago – I was living in New York City, and cursing my luck because the band’s frontman was coming to the city to do a pair of rooftop shows over the Fourth of July weekend, which was the same weekend an old high school friend of mine was getting married in Massachusetts. The wedding was lovely, I have to admit, but part of me was gritting my teeth with fomo the whole time, knowing I was missing what were surely some awesome shows. Fortunately, a kind soul recorded them, and after a few weeks’ waiting, I downloaded the files – and then was beyond startled to see listed fifteenth on the July 2nd setlist a song called Going to Port Washington. Port Washington, you see, is where I grew up, a Long Island town – technically a hamlet – of 15,000 souls, so unexceptional that its Wikipedia page will put you to sleep (the most notable fact is that we were big in sand-mining in the 1870s). The odds that my favorite band would have written a song about my hometown seemed astronomically small – and I came so close to discovering this at a live show I could have attended myself but for that quirk of scheduling.
That brings us, at long last, to According to Cain. This thing is my jam – it’s a smartly-implemented, beautifully written parser game where you use an authentically-researched alchemy system to delve into the psychology behind Cain’s slaying of Abel, with a list of inspirations that had me nodding my head as I went down the list from obvious (of course Name of the Rose is on there, everyone loves Name of the Rose) to the obscure (I’ve not previously met anyone who knows, let alone adores, Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to the Last Temptation of Christ, but here we are). So what’s the fomo? While I’m glad to have been a tester and help with the game’s development, part of me wishes I could have just discovered the game fresh in the competition, playing it in its fully formed version and free to shout to anyone who’d listen that they have to play this one (I feel it’s gauche to do that for something where you’re listed in the credits!)
With the Comp coming to a close, though, it’s well past time to sing the game’s praises. To start, for all that the premise is a bit brainy and potentially daunting, it does a very good job of easing the player in. The opening narration gives you just enough to understand who you are, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it: you’re an alchemical investigator, sent back in time to investigate the settlement abandoned by the first humans in the wake of Cain’s kinslaying, in order to learn the nature of the mark God put upon Cain as a punishment for his crime. It also gradually introduces the tools you’ll use to unravel the mystery of Cain’s mark. You start with a small collection of alchemical reagents, then acquire a reference book you can use to look up the objects, people, and spells that you’ll encounter in your adventure (complete with chatty, helpful marginalia from your mentor).
The rituals start out simple, and directly clued, before growing in complexity without ever becoming obfuscated or overwhelming. There are two basic kinds of puzzles in the game, beyond simply collecting more ingredients to empower your spells as you go. The most straightforward involve using alchemical formulae to wreak physical changes on your environment. These often require you to be creative about looking up possible approaches in your reference book – you might be confronted with a boulder and start casting about for potential solutions, for example – at which point you’ll learn the required ingredients. Second, the most narratively-important puzzles involve unlocking “revelations” – looking for things or places that bore witness to significant events in Cain’s story, then accessing the memories imprinted upon them by applying an appropriate mix of elements. One of the first formulas you learn will tell you the list of required ingredients, but sometimes these encode riddles – you might be told you need to apply salt, phlegm, and the poison of Abel’s humour, say, meaning that you need to figure out which of the four basic humours most resonates with his personality.
This isn’t just a way of gating progress and making the puzzles more interesting than following a recipe – it winds up tying the magic system to the themes of the story, and requires the player to understand, and engage with, the psychology of the lead players of the drama. In fact, one of the things that’s most successful about According to Cain is that all of its elements are cannily judged to reinforce the story’s themes. The landscape, for example, is geologically active as befits a young earth, roiling and burning and churning just as Cain resents his brother’s insolence. Meanwhile, your character is gently characterized, given a bit of backstory that lightly suggests that you can sympathize with the experience of someone driven out from their home and, justly or unjustly, made a scapegoat.
The writing is another strength, as it’s particularly graceful throughout. It’s not showy – in fact, it’s often downright terse – but it’s evocative, nailing the peculiar dance required of parser-game prose by communicating lovely, lyrical imagery while still being concrete enough to allow the player to understand what they’re seeing and how to use it to solve puzzles. Here’s the description of a crow flying across a river:
"As though demonstrating the ease of fording a river, the crow launches from the far bank, soars over the river in a geometric arc, and lands gracefully a few feet from you."
More darkly, here’s the description of a slaughterhouse:
"The planks are a rich tannin color from the sheer quantity of blood spilled. The coloration spreads up the walls, spattered from countless slaughtered animals. You imagine a grim assortment of iron tools and instruments once filled this place. Mostly, it’s the lingering odor here that strikes you."
We’re not inundated with extraneous details, all of which would need to be implemented as scenery and laboriously examined in turn, but it’s more than enough to get a feeling of the places you’re exploring as you perform your forensic investigations and piece together what really happened (as the description indications, SMELL and LISTEN are implemented where appropriate).
The game’s structure is also well judged. It opens up in layers, with a medium-sized map gradually unlocking as you solve puzzles, with progress corresponding to deeper understanding of the story behind Cain’s growing resentment of Abel. While you’ve always got quite a lot of freedom to explore, the puzzle-solving dependencies mean that you’ll likely encounter the different memories in a sequence that piques your curiosity about what really happened between the brothers, as early fragments of knowledge quickly establish that the conventional tale omits key facts. Indeed, the game’s narrative treats all the characters with some degree of sympathy; while Cain is situated as the most important character, and given some clear reasons for his violent acts, he’s not let completely off the hook, just as the bratty, button-pushing Abel is also allowed a few moments of subjectivity before the end.
Do I have critiques? Well, I can think of one, which involves the aforementioned ending, though it’s fairly minor – let me take this behind spoiler tags: (Spoiler - click to show)you start the game with a magic bracelet that will allow you to return to your home, but it’s quickly lost. Fortunately, there’s a replacement that can be found, which belonged to one of the previous investigators assigned to plumb the mystery of Cain’s mark but who died by misadventure along the way. The game frames the question of whether to take this bracelet as a dilemma – you can return it to the corpse that it can be sent back and presumably receive a proper burial – but the decision feels too easy, especially because the protagonist comes down with a fever partway through the game that’s a death sentence if they’re not able to make it home. This is too bad because the downbeat ending where you learn the secret you’re searching for, but must resign yourself to a lonely death in exchange, seems a better thematic fit for the dour, obsessive mood the game conjures up, but to access this more satisfying resolution the player needs to take actions that are clearly counter to the protagonist’s interests.
Again, that’s not much of a criticism – I thoroughly enjoyed my time with According to Cain, and while I feel like it was designed specifically to appeal to me, I think many other players will be in the same boat. And if I didn’t get to experience the pleasing shock of discovery when stumbling upon this gem amid a sea of 70 other Comp entries, well, I can’t have too many regrets, since after all I did get to play it. Highly recommended (oh, so too is Going to Port Washington, I forgot to say! It would make for an unflattering lead-in anecdote if the song was bad, so luckily that’s not the case).
A downbeat road trip, January 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Okay, this is getting spooky – I’ve had a bunch of similar games come up one after another in the order the Comp’s randomizer handed me, and this time the points of overlap are really uncanny. Remember how in Chase the Sun, the protagonist was a runaway bride, gay but on the cusp of marrying a guy due to family and social pressures, escaping by driving westward, and still wearing her wedding dress? Yeah, new bottle, same wine. You can even get to an early bad ending via a car crash, albeit this time it’s more clearly signposted because what do you think is going to happen if you choose the option that has you nod off while driving? But I gotta ask, did I like miss a TV show or something that’s providing a common jumping-off point here, or is it just a creepy coincidence?
There are some differences, of course. Most notably, instead of the lush forests of western Pennsylvania, here you’re driving through the sun-baked desert at the Colorado-Arizona border, which is obviously less lovely but just as pregnant with metaphor. Less positively, the prose is more inconsistent. Some passages boast a solid, albeit adjective-heavy, invocation of mood:
"It’s sandstone, dust, and dirt everywhere you look, wind-worn and desolate. Large dust clouds rise up, making the sky a grimy blue."
Other times, though, the author seems to get overpowered by their own metaphors:
"You’re on U.S. Route 160, a massive stretch of concrete spanning east to west with almost nothing in between. You could say it’s like a head without a brain – everything’s just swimming in the middle, floating in and out."
I can’t picture how that’s meant to work, and even if I could, it’s even harder to picture what the image is supposed to add to the first sentence.
There are also some typos that make me wonder whether the game was partially written with text-recognition software – “tool” for “tulle”, “ultraviolence” for “ultraviolet” – as well as too-quickly-vanishing timed text, that make the reading process a little sloppy (there’s also mention of an advertisement prompting you to “call 1-800-JESUS for absolution”, which put my down a Wikipedia rabbit hole to see when the US moved to seven-digit phone numbers within area codes – a long time ago, as it turns out).
This inconsistency characterizes the substance of the story, too. While there are at least three endings you can obtain, they’re all varying flavors of tragic, with the differences between them largely coming down to titrating the balance between fleeing your past and confronting it. The protagonist has more than her share of trauma she’s working through, and while I’m sure this is sadly realistic enough and reflects many folks’ experience, as artistically rendered, it falls a little flat. Her mother is a two-dimensionally abusive presence, while her fiancé is a domineering, reactionary preacher who seems entirely motivated by wanting to make the protagonist’s life terrible by marrying her, without a clear view of what he thinks he’s going to get out of the equation. I’m more than willing to accept that such people exist – I mean, look around – but as literary creations, these two aren’t up to much, and similarly, the protagonist’s angst, while dialed to 11, lacks much heft.
The flip side is that the protagonist’s lover is completely amazing, but here at least there’s some specificity of description:
Featherlight thumb brushes away crystalline tears.
Her eyes are stardust.
Galaxies threaded through the freckles across her nose.
A black hole in the scar on her upper lip.
The imagery is familiar and overwrought, but in a romance that’s forgivable, and there’s something affecting in the giddy, cosmically-abnegating delight the protagonist takes in a flaw as small as her lover’s scar.
The other difference with Chasing the Sun is that where that game ended, at least in my last playthrough, in a moment of connection, U.S. Route 160 seems to lead to the pain of final separation no matter what you choose. This is a reasonable storytelling choice in the abstract, but it’s one I found dissatisfying here; since the game portrays negative emotions with less verve than the positive ones, wallowing in sorrow means engaging with the weaker, more cliched parts of the writing, and most of the endings didn’t seem especially cathartic to me, with over-the-top violence sometimes deployed to make up for a lack of emotional heft.
I can understand the impulse to write downbeat narratives; with so many messages of positivity beaming at us through every channel, it can be empowering to reject all that and explore the possibility that it won’t all work out in the end, and posit that both fleeing from evil and confronting it are doomed to fail with the choice largely just a matter of aesthetics. But for that approach to produce an effective story, the darkness needs to be more compelling than the light, like Milton’s Satan showing up his Godhead; unfortunately for U.S. Route 160, here the reverse is true.
Wonderful wordplay, January 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There’s a lot that’s distinctive about the way Andrew Schultz makes games, but one thing that sets him out from other authors is the way he makes families or clusters of games rather than one-offs. He’s recently created a series of chess games, for example (in fact there’s another one coming up at the very end of my queue for the Comp), and his Spring Thing entry this year was a shorter iteration of an anagram-themed mechanic he’d explored twice before. You could think of this approach as being like a AAA game maker who releases DLC extending the base game with small tweaks to the basic concept, but for whatever reason, the metaphor my brain goes to is a musical one, like a band developing a particular sound to make an album, then putting out a short EP or sticking with it for another full release, before reinventing themselves and moving on.
Sticking with that metaphor, Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey is like a rarities and B-sides collection that closes out (at least for now) Schultz’s sequence of rhyming games, which started with 2020’s Very Vile Fairy File. Once again, the fundamental interaction involves reading the name of a room or object, then coming up with an appropriate rhyming couplet to move the plot forward. Confronted with a Mad Monk blocking your progress, for example, you might write DAD DUNK – which fits the rhyme scheme, but doesn’t solve the puzzle:
Alas, no middle-aged man soars into the air, basketball in hand, to posterize the mad monk.
Characteristically for Schultz, this basic dynamic is supported with a range of introductory material, helper gadgets, and shortcut verbs that do a lot to support the player without undercutting the often-challenging nature of the puzzles. The thoughtful design means, for example, that when you come up with near-miss rhymes like DAD DUNK, you’re rewarded with a little gag acknowledging that you came close (some of which are quite funny, especially when the game is gently chiding you for following the rhyme scheme into a juvenile or scatological place – call me immature, but POTTY PAIL made me giggle), as well as charging up an item that lets you skip puzzles that aren’t clicking for you. There’s also a fully implemented hints system, as well as a SOUNDS command that lists common English phonemes in case you want to trial-and-error your way through a particularly sticky wicket.
I found the game quite addictive to play; at any given time, you have a couple of locations open to you, and it’s fun to wander around worrying away at different puzzles and checking out the dynamic, loopily-surreal landscape, always knowing you have a safety net if the going gets too tough. What makes it more Odds & Sods than Live at Leeds, though, is that I didn’t feel like there was an especially strong throughline connecting the different pieces. In my memory at least, Very Vile Fairy File had a reasonably-consistent fairy tale vibe, and a plot that, while serving primarily as a justification for the puzzles, seemed to present a coherent antagonist and set of goals to accomplish. Here, I didn’t feel like the frame story doesn’t establish the Burning Bright Spurning Sprite as especially threatening, and the different locations and happenings felt essentially random – again, quite enjoyable in themselves, but very much a grab bag.
I also get the feeling that the game hasn’t (yet) gotten the full studio treatment. While the game’s overall stable and I didn’t run into too many full-fledged bugs, there is a slight lack of polish that hopefully can be cleaned up. There are some rhymes that seem obvious but aren’t implemented – I know being completely exhaustive would be very, very challenging to design, but I was disappointed all the same that, when I was told I had to create a “spark of nature” in the Sore Souls’ Gore Goals, HOAR HOLES didn’t create frosty receptacles (more forgivably, WHORE WHOLES similarly languished unimplemented). More annoyingly, the SOUNDS command seems to have some omissions (it includes a redundant X sound, despite a disclaimer saying that it isn’t listed, while there’s no Y – seems like a typo. And SH isn’t there at all, despite that sound being the solution to a couple of puzzles), and there are some solutions that lean so far into colloquialism that they feel like bugs (slight spoiler, but you’re probably going to need a spoiler to solve this puzzle: (Spoiler - click to show)if you think “flain” is an acceptable way to create the past participle of “flayed”, I’m pretty sure you were born before the 19th Century).
Schultz has a track record of making many in-Comp and post-Comp improvements, though, so I’m sure these will be addressed in time, which is why I’ve taken the liberty of flagging them (along with several others in the attached transcript). And the bottom line is that this is a lot of fun as a well-designed puzzle collection – gloriously, instead of relying on deep pondering of abstract mechanics, progress here often requires you to chant rhyming nonsense words one after another until you either hit upon the solution or burst out laughing. You can levy aesthetic complaints at a grab-bag of novelty singles, I suppose, but you can’t say they’re not a good time – and it’s just the same here.
A thematically resonant maze game, January 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
The randomizer continues to send me games that rhyme; You May Not Escape!, much like One Final Pitbull Song, communicates what it’s like to live a marginalized existence through a combination of satire and allegory. This one’s a parser game, though, and cleverly expresses its themes through a slight recontextualization of typical parser gameplay element (in keeping with parser tradition, it’s a lonelier experience too, lacking the found-family gaggle of OFPS). While the ending didn’t fully land for me, and I think the game maybe errs a little too much towards abstraction, it’s still a neat marriage of narrative and crossword, with clean implementation that’s especially impressive for what I think is the author’s first parser game.
Now that I’ve said all that, this is a maze game. Wait, come back! Yes, 90% of the gameplay is wandering around a big, nearly-empty maze, and if you’re allergic to that sort of thing you probably won’t enjoy yourself here (I have to confess, it’s not my personal favorite). But that’s integral to the premise of the game: you’ve been chosen, through a process whose exact operation isn’t clear but which is clearly deeply unfair, to be thrown into a maze. There is an exit, you’re assured by the representative who greets you upon your entry, but it may or may not be unlocked. Still, there’s nothing for it but to try.
This is clearly a bone-dry premise, but it’s not too hard to suss out what it’s in service of. When you ask the representative why you’ve been picked for the maze, he’s a bit shift, but admits “[i]t could be based on any number of factors. Your body, your mind, your home, your clothes – any of these could make you eligible.” As you explore the maze, you come across screens where outside observers seem to be commenting on your situation, sometimes offering not-very-helpful advice, sometimes sending thoughts and prayers, and sometimes vituperatively wishing for bad things to happen to you. And one of the points of interest in the labyrinth is a graveyard with four tombstones – one’s being readied for you, making clear the graves are for those who never escape the maze, while the others appear to be victims of right-wing politics (as best I can make out, there’s a trans woman, a woman who died because she wasn’t able to get an abortion, and some people who were killed by a fire in a gay bar).
It doesn’t take much deductive reasoning to understand that the game is articulating something about what it feels like to face explicit discrimination and hatred, and the implicit challenges of living in a world not designed for you, with the metaphor being sufficiently supple to accommodate several different angles on the idea. It makes sense, then, that navigating your way through the landscape should be difficult, confusing, and fairly depressing. Thus it’s no surprise that exploration is unpleasant: there are lots of twists and turns, with few landmarks and many locations that look exactly the same. Moreover, it quickly begins to rain, soaking you and making the dirty-floored maze muddy as all get-out. And – shocker of shockers – when you get to the exit, it turns out it is indeed locked.
Or at least it was in my game – for the maze is procedurally generated. This is another nice thematic twist, since of course while many marginalized folks face similar barriers, their experiences and circumstances are each unique, and as far as I could tell it worked completely smoothly in my game, which is an impressive bit of coding. So the metaphorical resonance takes some of the sting out of the exhausting gameplay, and the author also provides some support for the maze-averse player through use of an exit-listing status bar that highlights places you haven’t been yet (the ABOUT text also recommends mapping, which would make things much easier – I didn’t, to my regret).
Escape isn’t too difficult, though I’m embarrassed to admit it took me longer than it should have since I failed to notice an important detail (in my defense, there are a lot of random events and atmospheric text that fires, meaning my eyes were starting to skip over some of the words by halfway through). But there are also a few optional puzzles that help flesh out the experience and deepen the metaphor. Many of them are pretty intuitive things you’re likely to try anyway, but once again, the author’s provided some assistance in the form of a STATS command that tracks your progress.
All told I found You May Not Escape a smart, well-designed experience. Personally it was more intellectually than emotionally engaging, since the allegory is fairly dry – I got a deep sense of the protagonist’s discomfort, but since the protagonist isn’t characterized in any real way, and there are no other people that they have a relationship with, their suffering isn’t especially barbed. But I think that’s a reasonable authorial choice, and in some way may be a comment on the stereotypical right brain/left brain split between choice-based and parser games (increasingly inaccurate as the division of IF into those two houses is becoming).
As flagged above, the other thing that didn’t fully work for me is the ending, and what it seems to be saying – but to explain this, I’ll have to back up to the beginning. So the person who meets you upon your entry into the maze is one John Everyman, who says he’s there to answer your questions and advocate for you with the people outside to eventually make your lot in life slightly easier. He’s not especially helpful or sympathetic though, growing truculent through the course of your conversation and eventually berating you for “alienat[ing] your potential allies.” Similarly, among the social-media-style messages you’re bombarded with along the way, is this one “Have you considered voting? If we get more of a majority in six months, maybe we can demolish a few of the hallways.” Suffice to say the game seems intensely skeptical of political solutions to the problems it allegorizes.
So if politics and voting aren’t the answer, what is? Here I’ll shift over to spoiler territory.
(Spoiler - click to show)When you get to the gate, you’ll see that it boasts an inscription: “AND IN THE END, THEY FOUND THEMSELVES RETURNED TO THE BEGINNING.” And sure enough, if you wend your way back through the maze, you find that Everyman has skedaddled, but also that there’s now a sledgehammer waiting for you, with which you can simply batter down the gate. As with most metaphors, this is subject to several readings, but one of the most straightforward is that it’s about returning to oneself, gathering one’s strength, and then simply refusing to be bound by the limits society imposes.
That’s an empowering enough message, but also kind of unrealistic and maybe in its own way not dissimilar to some of the annoying “just try harder” messages you seem ticking across the screens? I’m probably biased because my day job involves public policy, but at least in American society it sure does seem to me that there are a whole host of places where the lives of the most vulnerable can be meaningfully improved – maybe even only be meaningfully improved, at least for now – by voting, gathering coalitions of friends who can sometimes be kinda flaky, and at least starting out by making awful things like 15% less awful, in order to get to the place where true transformative change becomes possible. This is not a very inspiring view of the world, I admit! And far be it from me to lecture folks far more directly impacted by oppression on what their strategy for social change should look like, much less how they express themselves through art. But it seems to me this alternative has something to offer folks who can’t find a sledgehammer inside themselves, or find that in battering against the walls that surround them, they’re the ones who start to give.
Okay, back from spoiler-town. I’ll wrap up by saying that just because I didn’t find the game’s suggested resolution of the dilemmas it raises especially compelling, that didn’t undercut the effectiveness with which it poses said dilemmas. You May Not Escape is a smart game that knows how to weave its themes into its gameplay and its themes into its gameplay, which is a rare thing and well worth celebrating.
Breaking up is hard to do, January 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There’s this episode of The Office where Michael needs to fire somebody – appropriately enough on Halloween, when I’m this review. Given his general irresolution, his pathological desire to be liked by everyone, and the extra hurdle that it takes to psych yourself up to firing somebody wearing a vampire costume, he hems and haws all day, having weird hesitant interactions where he sort of starts to fire the person then backs down, drawing it out in a way that winds up being way more painful, both for him and the firee, than if he’d just been able to do the thing. In the middle of this can’t-look-away trainwreck, there’s an interview clip with him where he says “I went hunting once. I shot a deer in the leg – had to finish it off with a shovel. It took about an hour. Why do you ask?”
(When searching out the exact wording of that quote, I found a dispiritingly large number of like Reddit threads where people were in fact asking where this question came from and what it has to do with the rest of the episode. Sigh).
For all that this may be a good guide to what termination of employment looks like, I think it works as well if not better when it comes to breaking up with a partner. Oh sure, you’ll roleplay it out in your head and talk it over with loved ones, and commit to doing it quickly and cleanly. But then they’ll ask a question or you’ll feel weird about how you’re ending things, so you’ll keep talking to try to explain or justify or empathize, and before you know it, you’re forty-five minutes in, there’s blood everywhere, and you just keep bringing that shovel down over and over and over again, despite the twin realizations that a) it doesn’t seem to be doing what you need it to, and b) there’s nothing else you could possibly do except keep on going.
At its best, i wish you were dead captures this slow-motion car-crash through fumbling, authentically-painful dialogue that’s general enough to be near universally resonant. It starts in medias res, with the protagonist in the middle of explaining to their girlfriend why they need to separate. The player starts out as much in the dark as the partner, with only hints at backstory and context showing up in the corners of what each partner says – apparently there was a previous breakup and reconciliation, a question of whether the protagonist has actually been forgiven for some earlier transgression. At every juncture, you have a choice of dialogue options, some of which try to cut things off and simply end the breakup, others that try to respond to your partner’s questions or provide a better sense of why you’re doing this – and despite the obvious understanding that you should just end this horrible, no-good interaction for both of your sakes, inevitably the player winds up gravitating to the choices that keep it going. It’s a lovely marriage of in-game and out-of-game motivations – after all, we want to know more of the story, and doesn’t the partner deserve to know the truth? – and it communicates the queasily squirming horror of this awful situation as well as anything else in IF.
At its worst, i wish you were dead makes you pull up Twitter (RIP) while you wait for literal minutes of timed text to unspool, as though forcing you to hang on each um and ah will somehow make the dialogue feel more realistic, and then buries the strongly-written conversation in histrionic stage directions:
"She turns her gaze to my hands, which fingerprints are tightly against the wood of the table. I can feel the despondency of her eyes, slowly blinking as she nibbles on the inside of her cheeks. She shifts her weight and she crosses her legs, the same position she adopts when she rests her right calf on the seat under her left leg."
Look, we’ve all done this sort of thing as novice writers, feeling like we can’t just run the dialogue on without checking in on what’s physically happening in the room. But we can! This would be 5x more powerful as “She looks at my hands and shifts her weight,” and 10x more powerful as literally nothing.
This dichotomy unfortunately extends to some of the details that get slowly revealed about the doomed relationship being dissected. There’s a canny reversal of sympathies that plays out over the course of the conversation, as you begin to put together the pieces of what’s going on and understand that the protagonist’s motives, and previous behavior, are not wholly blameless and this isn’t the altruistic we-need-to-break-up-for-your-own-good situation they start out presenting it as. That’s a neat narrative dynamic, but I personally found the game overcorrected, and by the end I felt like the protagonist was a profoundly toxic, un-self-aware person to an extent that significantly reduced my investment in the relationship (Spoiler - click to show)(you appear to be terminally insecure and broke up with your actor girlfriend the first time because she went to a cast party; you’re now freaking out because she’s texting with a friend, though admittedly one she might have feelings for). Different players might have different tolerance for these kinds of things, admittedly, but this is another place where I feel like a more grounded, low-drama approach would have been more effective.
Still, when it works it really works – and it did make me bark a stunned laugh of disbelief at something that ultimately wound up as a headfake, albeit it still makes me giggle (Spoiler - click to show)(at around the one-third mark, as you work up the nerve to ask about the person you’re worried has displaced you in your intended’s affections, you blurt out “who’s Link?” and I thought, holy shit, this is a close-perspective melodrama about Gannon feeling two-timed by Zelda, that’s amazing. It isn’t, but wow now I want that game). Ironically, I might have had the best possible experience with i wish you were dead if I’d just brought it to an early conclusion, picking dialogue options that steered the conversation to an ending without revealing too much about how awful the protagonist is, or giving so much space for the bad writing to overcome the good parts. But human nature is human nature, so what was I to do but bring that shovel up for another heart-not-fully-in-it thwack…
Touchtone gloom, January 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
This is the last of the Texture games in the Comp, and I have to say, up until now part of me has been playing these games thinking to myself “wouldn’t this have worked better in Twine instead?” the whole time. I’m hopefully not too narrow-minded about platforms, but much of the time, I feel like the games haven’t done much with the unique aspects of Texture – like exploiting the built in “verb”/”noun” functionality the interface enables, instead of just allowing one or two choices per passage that would work better as simple Twine-style links – while suffering from the somewhat awkward way the drag-and-drop thing works on a touchscreen, or the way the lack of a scrolling feature means text shrinks as passages get longer. Finally, though, here’s one that takes advantages of the affordances!
The whole of To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1 is played via a telephone interface, as a depressed protagonist navigates an interminable, hostile phone tree in search of a flicker of hope. This is another of those short games that eschews plot or characters in order to focus on presenting an allegory for what it’s like to experience a mental health challenge – like Nose Bleed, which I reviewed earlier – and I think this one works. For one thing, the slight irritation of trying to drag the “press” button onto the small numbers representing the different options fits the mood of frustration to a T, and the juxtaposition of these “press” options with the constantly-available hang-up option reflects the omnipresent temptation to just stop trying in the face of so many barriers.
Your exploration of the various options turns up surprises, too, so while the game is basically one-note, it doesn’t feel monotonous. You have an option to switch languages to Polish, for example, which rewrites many of the possible choices into that consonant-heavy language; similarly, the organization you’re on hold with is the Agency of Neverending Happiness and Clearing Out Monsters From Under Your Bed, and fruitlessly attempting to chase down information related to the second part of that mandate was entertaining. You can try to speak with an operator – but of course no one ever answers, you’re just stuck listening to the same annoying musical-hold tune over and over, until it starts to drive you mad. Or you can leave a voicemail, but the system never seems to understand your message.
These are all about how hard it is to escape from depression, of course: you try to reach out, but it feels like there’s nobody there for you, or they’re talking a foreign language. And if you do get someone to listen, you can’t explain yourself in a way that will make them understand (plus, despite how it might sometimes feel, you can’t find a monster to blame; it’s just you, and your broken brain-chemistry). The allegory isn’t especially subtle, but each bit of the phone tree is fleet enough not to outstay its welcome, and none of them are trying too hard to be coy, so overall it worked for me.
What worked less well was the endings – or basically ending, since in all of them the protagonist finally has to hang up, defeated, reflecting that despite all their efforts “everything is the same as it was. And everything is as sad as it’s always been.” Having there be no escape or positive solution is a valid, albeit downbeat choice, but since the game is entirely focused on the phone call and doesn’t set up the protagonist’s negative feelings outside of having to deal with the frustrating stuff they’re hearing on the line, I experienced a mismatch between their feelings and my own – hanging up felt like a relief to me since I didn’t have any context for the baseline unpleasant existence the protagonist must be living.
I think the game would have been stronger if it had laid more of this groundwork, but at the same time, it might have diluted the purity of the concept. Anyway if the worst thing I can say of a game that takes five or ten minutes to play is that while what it did was good, I wanted it to do some additional stuff too, well, that probably means it’s a success, even if there’s space for deeper explorations of the premise.
Points of light, January 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
These days it’s easy to take a look around and feel like the world is pretty bleak. Sure, it’s perhaps the case that throughout human history the world has generally looked pretty bleak, and it’s just because of the semi-recent memory of the 90s, when the Cold War was over but we were still close enough to World War II that Nazis knew they had to keep it in their pants instead of whining about cancel culture, that we in the west have an expectation that things should be basically okay. Regardless, what with an on-and-off pandemic, a land war in Europe, rising inflation, raging inequality, the global rise of an anti-democratic right, oh yeah and the marching inevitable catastrophe of climate change, it’s understandable that folks get depressed at where we’re at. And compared to where I live in the US, this is maybe especially the case right now in the post-Brexit, post let’s-crash-the-bond-market-by-being-supply-side-morons UK, where Glimmer is set.
This short choice-based game tracks a simple down-and-up arc. On the front end, you’re confronted with a well-written, linear series of shocks and shames, each of which pushes the protagonist – and the player, as their proxy – into an act of forced renunciation:
"On the bus home the next day, you pick up an abandoned newspaper. It’s filled with stories of war, poverty, and environmental destruction.
"You stop reading the news.
"Your manager calls you into a meeting. She’s been asked to make cut backs. There’s a genuine sadness in her eyes.
"You stop going to work."
It all ends with you huddled under a duvet because you’ve had to turn off the heat, disconnecting from your loved ones since they’re all just enacting different versions of the fear that’s paralyzed you, and giving up the last thing there is to give: “you stop caring.” From there, though, a friend visits, bringing tea and biscuits, and choices start to open up as you begin to consider that maybe life can be something other than a monotonic decline.
That’s all there is to it – this is a game you can blaze through in five minutes. And even when you reach the part with options, it’s still quite linear, as you end up in the same place, with almost exactly the same plot beats, regardless of what you pick. I found this did undercut the impact of the story on me, I have to admit, and I wished there was a little more detail, a little more specificity, to help the conclusion land with a bit more force (the friend isn’t given a gender, much less a name). With that said, I can’t fault the message Glimmer ultimately conveys, and overall I did find the game effective, albeit more so the first half than the second. That’s no surprise, I suppose – I suspect it’s easier to convey a slide into depression than communicate an authentic path out of it, especially these days.
An innovative gamble, January 3, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I also beta tested this game, though I did replay it in its final form).
There are always a few odd ducks in any IF competition or festival, and Dorian Passer’s Cost of Living was a whole flock of ‘em in one in this summer’s ParserComp; using a bespoke system that required the user to type single words to fill out an ongoing dialogue between two characters discussing a public-domain sci-fi story – don’t call it MadLibs! – it occasioned some controversy, being disqualified as being IF but not really an example of a parser game, then kinda-sorta-unofficially reinstated after discussion, with the author posting some detailed notes relating the thinking behind the so-called “stateful narration” approach he’s taking and kicking off much discussion in reviews and on this forum.
This time, we’ve once again got an original story juxtaposed against a text written by someone else – here a Chekhov short story, making The Lottery Ticket a competitive runner-up to Elvish for Goodbye in the I-am-going-to-hubristically-invite-comparison-to-a-badass-writer side-comp – but rather than a peanut gallery directly commenting on the story, here what connects the two narrative strands is a bit of thematic irony: the Chekhov story is a compact fable about a man driven to selfish misanthropy by the possibility that his wife might have won a fortune, while the frame story involves a near-future office worker killing time and texting with her roommates while similarly awaiting the outcome of a lotto drawing –
– sorry, I am informed that a group of ducks is not typically called a flock; instead they can be a raft, a team, a paddling, a skein, a badling, a plump, or a brace. I regret the error but honestly, look at all those synonyms, I feel like the ducks have to shoulder their share of the blame here too.
That’s not just a bit – I’m flagging the ridiculous fecundity of the English language to highlight the potential of the sentiment-analysis approach to player input the game takes. Whereas in a traditional parser game, the game only recognizes a few standard bits of vocabulary, plus whatever else the author has laboriously taught the engine to understand, and in a choice-based game your options are constrained to picking whatever’s been programmed in, in theory a player could type nearly any English word into the input boxes offered by the Lottery Ticket and see a reasonable response.
In practice, the design doesn’t fully take full advantage of this flexibility, I think because Passer is trying to walk before he runs. While I found the frame story engaging as a work of fiction, it’s a bit thinner when it comes to interactivity. There are only four places where the player is asked for input, and the results appear to be fairly binary – half allow the player to express whether or not the protagonist attempts to play down her anxiety about the lottery’s outcome with her roommates, while the other half are about matters of taste (being bored by a roommate’s cooking, preferring light or dark coffee) that are essentially aesthetic.
Passer’s written about wanting to deemphasize players’ expectations of agency in terms of changing the plot, since that’s a promise no author can ever fully deliver, in terms of creating so-called “narrational agency” – the idea, as I understand it, is that the player doesn’t alter what happens in the story, but how the story is told. And that’s a fine theory; I don’t mind that these choices aren’t narratively impactful – expressive choice works fine, after all – but they perhaps feel too simple, too reducible to a coin flip, even if that overly facile take ignores what’s actually happening behind the scenes, and even blows past how impactful even these simple choices are. Like, it makes a big difference to our understanding of the story if the protagonist is honest with her friends or if she feels she needs to hide her nervousness from them, especially since she’s said she’ll split any potential winnings with them! Imagine a version of Gatsby where he levels with Nick about how he actually made his money, rather than flashing a fake medal from Montenegro – it’s not at all the same story.
While recognizing this, it’s hard for me to fully let go of the expectations I’ve built up from many many years of playing more traditional pieces of IF – these kinds of toggles just don’t bring the fireworks when other games engage the player in more visceral ways. Still, this seems like a surmountable problem; I’m intrigued by the idea that the engine here could add a second dimension, so that each word’s input wouldn’t be assessed on a single continuum but on two at the same time, or possibly adding granularity so that instead of a positive/negative switch, the system clearly recognized degrees as well… And what’s promising is that the system, because it just relies on an algorithmic assessment of words, could be infinitely malleable, rather than relying on bespoke simulations of particular physical situations or pre-chosen options for its ability to be responsive. This “narrational agency” approach doesn’t have its killer app yet, but The Lottery Ticket is definitely moving things ahead, and I’m looking forward to seeing what might come next.
Surreal but maybe too personal, January 3, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
In a forum conversation about Lucid, I mentioned that I’ve run across other entries in the “short, surreal, dark” subgenre of choice-based games and found them too personal, or at least too idiosyncratic to the author’s specific preoccupations, to be very engaging. I must have jinxed myself, because just a few entries later, here we are with a stylish, moody game with some attention-getting writing that feels too solipsistic for me to enjoy.
Death by Lightning is presented via a Game Boy aesthetic, with a single static grayscale image that I think is meant to depict a cabin in the Alps; there’s a subwindow with scrolling, pixelated text, and every once in a while you’re presented with two low-context options to choose between. It makes for a stark, tense experience, which is underlined by the first sequence: after an epigrammatic quote, the player is told that “you are a man being sexually penetrated in a hut in the alps.” That is certainly a uh grabby opening, though at least it’s quickly established that this is a consensual encounter. The dynamics are complicated when you learn that it’s your task to distract your partner and keep him in this cabin while some other, undescribed event happens, leading up to your first choice – whether to try to persuade him to stay, or sneak out to sabotage the car. I played through twice: in the first, I opted for persuasion, leading to a branch where I resorted to increasingly-pathetic emotional blackmail before suggesting a sightseeing trip to Rome, at which point the game ended in a form of dissociation, feeling like a tourist in my own mind; then I went back and tried to rip out the car’s wires, but was surprised by wolves and drove up into the mountains, abandoning my lover but I think eventually succumbing to frostbite and drifting into incoherence.
I could construct various theories of what the game is “about” or what it’s trying to say – I suspect the title and epigram [FN1] point to not to literal death, but to ego-death and the possibility of enlightenment through a surrender or submission that negates one’s preconceptions about what enlightenment, or love, or fulfillment, look like, daring blasphemy (typically punished via death by lightning) to attain something higher – which might create some common ground between the wildly varying narratives and thematics in the two branches I explored – but as a text, Death by Lightning doesn’t feel to me like it provides sufficient scaffolding to be confident in the exercise; it’d be not so much extracting Deep Hidden Meaning, but inventing Cosmic BS, as we used to say in my high school English classes.
I will say that there are some sentences here I really liked:
He opens a window and the wind howls hexes. “Christ”, he scans the mountain anxiously.
And the bit towards the end of the first ending I got, the tourist one, talked about “becoming abstract to yourself”, which feels like a metaphor that has something to it. But again, these images never feel like they’re rooted to anything solid in terms of character or theme or narrative, so they fail to make much impression. And some of the writing in the second branch I explored is just not very good – after a series of near-syllogisms about God, the sublime, the erotic, etc., I got this:
Hyper-spiritualism is co-morbid with the path through it.
If I could decode the specialized vocabulary the author is deploying here I might be able to extract some larger meaning from that sentence, but as is it’s pretty clunky.
I’m not averse to doing some work to find value in a piece of writing – and I don’t just mean like Joyce or the accepted dead-white-guy canon, that applies to IF too, Queenlash and Manifest No are some of my favorite games of the last couple of years! But most good difficult writing, in my experience, wants to be read, and is written that way because that’s the only way that particular work could be written. I get the sense that Death by Lightning could only have been written this way, but I’m not convinced about the first part; I think it’s very meaningful to the author, but I suspect they were more focused on that than on making it meaningful to players.
FN1: atypically for me, I couldn’t find a way to crowbar an unrelated personal anecdote into this review, but I actually have one about the poem that opens the game! I’ve read it before, in a collection called Japanese Death Poems that compiles what are called jisei, or poems written in the last moments of the author’s life. The book was a Christmas gift from an ex-girlfriend of mine; I returned the favor by getting her a volume of Sylvia Plath’s poems.
Despite what you might think, we weren’t yet exes at the time we exchanged these deeply seasonally-inappropriate gifts, though unsurprisingly the relationship didn’t last through to March.
Underdeveloped but enthusiastic fairy-tale-ish riffs, January 3, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Many years ago, I was on a family road trip where I wound up sitting next to my three-year-old cousin for a four-hour drive through New England. The early-summer scenery was lovely, and my cousin was delightful company – and still is, for that matter, albeit the fact that she’s now in college is a deeply unpleasant reminder of the relentless march of time – because, a precociously verbal child, she decided to pass the time in telling stories. These stories had several things in common: 1) she was always the main character; 2) there was always a forest, and a monster (in that order); 3) they each went through setup, rising action, climax, and very-compressed denouement in like four minutes apiece; and 4) the next one started immediately after the previous one wrapped up.
Playing Through the Forest With the Beast, the years melted away until I felt like I was back in that car again, listening to my cousin babble on, albeit it only lasts fifteen minutes and nobody got carsick, which must be counted as improvements on both scores.
What we’ve got here is a short, choice-based game that’s much simpler than the setup, with its glancingly-blasphemous worldbuilding and survival-game stat-box, communicates. You’ve got a mark on your chest that identifies you as some kind of beast to a frightened populace, which you’d think would imply a religious or apocalyptic angle, and an omnipresent set of health and stamina bar charts, plus a hunger and thirst meter, that set you up to expect resource-management sim elements. But the game pretty much entirely consists of just walking through a forest until you get to the safety of the other side, running through a short set of encounters that just sort of happen, without any of them setting up or impacting any of the rest, until you get to a sudden ending.
On the plus side, the game has some of the manic energy of an impatient toddler trying to distract herself. It’s truly impossible to predict what’s going to happen next – I won’t spoil the specific scenes I came across, few as they are, but while some predictably riff off of fairy tales, others go much farther afield (the only scene I ran into in my first playthrough appears to be a medium-length (Spoiler - click to show)Star Trek easter egg). And the simple prose keeps things moving, with a charming amount of editorializing about how exciting everything is:
"You follow the twisty windy road as vines move on their own and trees seem to bend to block out the sun. Time itself seems to have lost meaning back here. Finally you exit out into a clearing. At the far end is a small wooden cabin shockingly built in this forest."
On the negative side, the game also has the attention span you’d expect from an impatient toddler trying to distract herself. For one thing, during the opening you’re asked for your name and favorite color, with the former being mentioned one time in a skippable sequence, so far as I can tell, and the latter never coming up again at all. Similarly, your heath, stamina, hunger, and thirst appear to change only at fixed points, in predictable ways, so despite their prominent placement they feel very much like afterthoughts in play. The same description or plot point can also be repeated in adjacent sentences, as though the author forgot they already established something and thought they had to do it again.
Through the Forest can also feel exhausting, despite its short length: the backdrop is a pretty but very busy set of paintbrush-swirls that does succeed in evoking a forest, but succeeded even better in giving me a headache. Plus, many of the choices are simple, zero-context “do you want to go forward or back, or left or right?” quandaries where it’s impossible to know whether there are better or worse choices to make, which can be wearying, and there are no real puzzles to create deeper engagement.
At least it’s easy; I go through successfully in all three games I tried, and I was curious enough about the paths not taken to jump right back to the beginning those first two times to see what I’d missed. Twice was enough, though – there’s no real payoff to reaching your goal, no sense of how you’ve been changed, and without those elements, the story felt like it often reduced to “and then this happened, and then that happened, the end.” I was very much done after those fifteen minutes were up – though, points in Through the Forest’s favor, it was way easier to bring the game to a stop by closing my browser window than it would have been to bail out of that road trip with more than three hours still to go.
Demented and incomprehensible (mostly but not entirely in a bad way), December 23, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, says the proverb, dig two graves. It’s an admirably pithy way of foregrounding the corrosive effects of giving yourself over to the single-minded pursuit of vengeance, even if it does raise some practical questions (if you dig them before you leave on a journey, does that mean some poor schmuck of an undertaker has to haul two rapidly-moldering bodies all the way back to the graves? Seems inefficient!)
Sadly, I can’t tell you whether HOURS grapples with the psychological and logistical complexities raised by the adage, because bugs meant I failed in my quest to assassinate the Shogun of the game’s techno-magic empire; his legions of soldiers stymied me just for a moment, but “I need usable code to the right of =.” ended my journey right quick. I can relate that I did not excavate any tombs at the outset, and in fact launched into this quixotic adventure without much in the way of forethought at all. The protagonist is a soldier in the Shogun’s army (initially nameless, though later it’s revealed he’s called Jack so he probably should have stuck with him man-with-no-name schtick. At least he makes out better than the poor Shogun, whose parents called him Charlie) – sorry, lost the plot there for a moment, a soldier who’s told by a ghost that he’s gonna die, so he might as well assassinate his own leader.
Lest you think I’m bottom-lining this in too conclusory a fashion, here’s the passage in question:
According to an apparition you saw on the battlefield, you had less than a day to live.
“How?” you asked. After all, you didn’t feel any different from usual.
“It may not look like it, but it’s your injuries. You’ll die soon.”
“…”
(Jack is a master of JRPG-protagonist ellipses).
“You will die by dawn tomorrow.”
You pull an arrow from your arm and tear a piece of cloth off a corpse to use as a bandage.
“…”
“Nothing to say?”
“…”
(See? I told you!)
“Well, since you’ll die anyway… I have a little favour to ask of you in the last hours of your life. Could you help to assassinate the Shogun of your nation? I’ll keep you alive with magic until dawn, but that’s the most I can do.”
Jack is quickly teleported to the capital city, leaving him with only five hours to spare, so he immediately – rents a room in an inn (hopefully an option to invest in his 401(k) will be added to a post-Comp release). While you have the option to mope around until dawn kills you, you can also just march down to the Shogun’s castle and launch a frontal assault on his personal bodyguard of hardened mercenaries, which isn’t suicidal because Jack just remembered he has a magic sword that can kill people if you stab where they used to be – this makes for a badass fight scene though also makes me wonder why he doesn’t just head to the hospital where the Shogun was born and skip some steps. Anyway after interrogating the lone survivor about some heretofore-unmentioned magical soldiers, Jack heads to a slave auction where poor captives who seem to have X-Men style superpowers are tortured and sold to the highest bidder (I’m not sure what level of Econ Shogun Charlie got to in college, but his failure to establish a monopsony here feels like a major oversight). And then the aforementioned bug brought proceedings to a halt.
I’ve been making fun, but honestly, I was disappointed not to see where things ended. HOURS has the demented, incomprehensible energy of the kind of anime I occasionally was able to watch when I was a kid in the early 90s, where someone at school’s uncle’s cousin stayed up until midnight to tape a poorly-dubbed episode from two thirds of the way through the run of some show you’d never even heard of before and never would again, except the station wasn’t paying attention to the timings so it cut off right before the end so they could run a Thighmaster infomercial. I can’t say that it’s good, but I was carried along by its silly enthusiasm for a while, even as I was MST3king it in my head – and getting any kind of emotional response out of the audience is something a first-time author can be proud of. HOURS isn’t an especially auspicious starting point, no more so than a two-grave cemetery, but here’s hoping the author’s journey into IF creation comes to a better end than Jack’s quest did.
Not a lot rhymes with Plargh, December 23, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
(With apologies to Leonard Cohen)
Well, my friends are gone, and my hair is grey
I got to the end but I’m not sure what I just played
I’m crazy for IF but I’m rating this one blargh
The cover pic’s Big Ben but I’m talking about the Tower of Plargh
I asked Andrew Plotkin, “are these puzzles tough
Or is it just that they’re not explained enough?”
Andrew Plotkin looked at me like I was from Camargue
It’s all trial and error in the Tower of Plargh
First you drop an egg in rooms with funny names
Then a voice from above has you playing silly games
I looked up the list of Inform actions and ran through them in a slog
To solve the monkey puzzle in the Tower of Plargh
The scenery is implemented never
And you are as good-looking as ever
If you like descriptive detail, you will say “argh”
'Cause there’s not much to look at in the Tower of Plargh
Four times you need to get to the next floor
The map’s always the same and the clueing’s rather poor
There’s one typo that shows up in almost every room
Who put us in this place, and why are we collecting golden cruft?
Who’s the voice on the other side of that big red button we push?
Pondering these questions puts me into a mood of gloom
Now I’m closing down the game, and I won’t be back
There are 70 other Comp entries, and I’ve got to stay on track
I’ll remember this one though, even through a bit of fog
At least it wasn’t a dumb apartment, it was the Tower of Plargh
Well, my friends are gone, and my hair is grey
I got to the end but I’m not sure what I just played
When critiquing first-time authors, I don’t like to flog
Still, I hope your next game will be better than the Tower of Plargh
Far more than a typical derelict-spaceship game, December 23, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Stop me oh stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: so you’re playing this game where you’re an interstellar thief pulling a heist to relieve a space-governor of his space-crystals, when you get rumbled by the fuzz, except while that all sounds supremely fun it’s actually just the quickly-dispensed with, non-interactive backstory justifying why you’re forced to make a blind hyperjump and wind up lost in space – until you come across and board a derelict vessel, which holds the promise of rescue if you reactive enough of its broken systems to scavenge for parts, though since the crew’s all dead and the superficially-helpful ship’s AI seems alarmingly erratic it’s clear danger could be lurking where you least – or rather most – expect it…
Zoomed out to this level, ALWNS might as well be called “Space Game” – it wouldn’t be much worse than the actual, horribly-generic, title – because anybody who’s played much IF has probably encountered this scenario dozens of times. There’s a slight variation here because I feel like this type of game is usually parser-based, while this one’s a puzzley Twine game that has the same adventure-game type interface I discussed in my One Way Ticket review (click on highlighted objects in location descriptions to examine them in more detail, open up your inventory if you see an opportunity to use one of the things you’ve collected – 95% of the time the only action verb available is “use”, in fact). But if I were to describe a puzzle at random, or similarly highlight one of the plot beats, you’d probably roll your eyes and say been there, done that.
Given all of this, you’ll forgive me for being surprised that this game is actually great. It’s by no means going to set the world on fire with innovation, but it executes on its premise with well-designed puzzles, a nicely pacey plot that boasts at least one clever twist, and character-focused writing that’s way, way, way above the standard for this sort of thing – plus there’s a fair degree of nonlinearity, bonus objectives, and player agency allowing you to make the story your own, on your way to getting one of five different endings or collecting a half-dozen achievements. Sure, there are a couple of puzzles that could use slightly better signposting – though there is an in-game hint system and a robust walkthrough – and if you’re completionist about running through conversation topics with the AI, the middle part of the game can feel a little quiet. But these are small niggles in an entertaining and dare I say even slightly heart-warming take on a classic premise.
Let’s start with the puzzles and the overall game structure, since while they’re well done and important, they’re not what makes the game sing (spoiler: that’s the AI). As you’d imagine, there’s a MacGuffin or two that you need to recover from the ship in order to get the coordinates you need to make your way back to civilization, but various ID-locked doors, nonfunctional elevators, and areas of hard vacuum need to be surmounted in order to find and retrieve them. For the most part, solving these challenges is satisfying without being too tricky – you’ll fix robots, look up schematics, and gain false credentials. There’s also a pleasing variety of puzzle mechanics, from simple use-x-on-y stuff to figuring out a crew member’s ship ID based on their favorite order in the dining hall, and even, in a memorable set piece, using a chair’s ergonomic features to defend yourself. There are a couple of places where things can get a little clumsy – I was stumped for a while on an early puzzle because instead of being able to directly input the passcode I’d deduced, I had to go back to an earlier clue so the game could acknowledge I’d figured it out, and there’s one (optional) chemical-mixing puzzle that doesn’t clearly signpost why you need a source of antimatter different than an easily-available one you’d already used for a previous puzzle – but these are very much the exception, and if you get stuck, you can take a quick nap in your ship and get a hint while resting.
As for structure, the underlying rhythm of the game involves unlocking a new set of areas, exploring them, and discovering new items or information you can use to solve puzzles that in turn unlock the next set of areas. As you go, you’ll also uncover more about the members of the ship’s crew – they all have their secrets and hidden agendas, of course, that you can plumb by gaining access to their personal datapads and video recordings of their final days, just like in any good System Shock riff. As with the rest of the game, it’s nothing fancy, but it’s effective at sustaining player interest and injecting regular novelty into the proceedings. It’s also one of the things that makes your AI interlocutor, Solis, so compelling – you converse with the computer via terminals located in each room, and as you open up new parts of the ship, you get new dialogue options where you can ask about what you find and the facts you discover.
Solis is the heart of ALWNS, as it turns out, both because the narrative hinges on plumbing the depths of its character as you talk to it about the terrible things it’s seen, and done, in the catastrophe that befell the ship, and because unraveling its motivations form a sort of metapuzzle that undergirds the whole game, with your ending largely determined by how many layers of the onion you’ve pulled back. I realize that laid out like that, it sounds like conversing with Solis is a chilly game of mechanical-cat and organic-mouse – but here’s the thing: Solis is funny. Actually, the whole game is funny – I probably should have mentioned that earlier? Here’s the line telling you that your ship’s gotten lost:
"Your navigator is telling you you’re inside the core of a blue-white supergiant in the Hyades cluster, which you’re pretty sure is not correct.”
But most of the comedy comes from Solis, who’s got a great sense of comic timing for a bunch of superconductors. It initially greets you with a chirpy “it’s nice to meet you too, random organic person!” (which, not going to lie, feels like the subtext of 90% of my in-person interactions these days), and when you try to get it to comment on a boring hallway, it makes up a limerick to entertain you – then comes up with a second, even worse/better one, if you press the point!
It’s not all fun and games, though, and as you make your way through the ship you get the chance to engage in some deeper conversations with Solis, about its function and place in the world – as you quickly learn, the inhibitor programs that typically keep AIs on a short leash have degraded during its long isolation – its feelings about the different members of the now-deceased crew, and its curiosity about the rest of the galaxy. Again, these are exactly the topics you’d expect to come up in a game focusing on an AI as the main secondary character, but the writing here is really strong, fostering an empathetic connection with Solis even as the player knows that it doesn’t seem 100% trustworthy.
ALWNS’s success isn’t purely down to craft, I should say: near the end, there are a couple puzzles that feel fairly novel (I was partial to the janitorbot security code one), and there’s one narrative twist that I didn’t see coming, with the narrative zigging when I thought it was going to zag. I don’t want to spoil that, except to say that it made the ending I was going for even more satisfying than I thought it was going to be. Still, if the other 95% of the game hadn’t been executed at such a high level, these last bits of legerdemain would have felt like lipstick on a pig, rather than the final flourishes drawing attention to how cleverly the magic trick’s been done. Between the generic title, abstract cover art, low-key blurb, and long playing time, I worry that A Long Way to the Nearest Star might not get the attention it deserves, which would be a shame – just about any IF fan would find something to enjoy here.
Well-done whitebread fantasy, December 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I also beta tested this game, and didn't do a full replay before writing this review).
It’s been many years since I’ve read any fantasy fiction, but my sense is that slightly-generic medievalish fantasy is rather passe, with post-Game of Thrones grimdarkery and settings drawing from a broader set of cultural touchpoints being where the current action is at. This seems a healthy progression, all told (albeit I personally prefer my ruthless political maneuvering to not be accompanied by too much torture and rape, thanks), but I have to confess that having read reams of Tolkein knockoffs and callow Arthuriana in my younger years, I still have a soft spot for the earnest sort of fantasy offered up by the Princess of Vestria.
This Twine game sticks to the archetypes: you play the eponymous royal, traveling incognito on a quest to a fractious province to track down the dark magician who’s put a curse on your brother. You get the expected farrago of proper nouns setting this all up, with some early infodumps that are perhaps a little overlong given that everything here is played decidedly straight, but it doesn’t take long to suss out the important facts and characters, and the very familiarity of the setup enabled me to get into the action pretty quickly.
There’s an impressive amount of responsiveness across this fairly-long game – while the overall shape of the journey appears to be roughly constant, there’s a lot of scope to make different choices that will impact what the trip is like and how prepared you’ll be for the endgame. For example, in my playthrough, I accreted a frenemy-style sidekick who played a central role through the whole middle third of the game, but you can decide not to bring him along, which would substantially change the feel of this section. You can also determine whether, and to what extent, to delve into a tome of forbidden lore that can teach you some magic abilities, and while there’s a somewhat complex backstory that explains what’s happening, much of it appears to be missable. The most fun element like this for me, though, was the opening, where you’ve only got time to make a few preparations before embarking on your secret quest – I’m not sure how much the specific choices of how much money to bring or whether to risk carrying your signet ring branch the story that significantly, but they feel satisfyingly weighty.
The game does have some woolier aspects – there’s a timed puzzle that feels a little too abstruse (though it’s possible to brute-force), there are two different risk-cushioning mechanics (extra lives and luck) that are a bit redundant, and the tone can be a bit inconsistent, with the protagonist sometimes presented with rather more cutthroat options than the genre and characterization would seem to support. I also found the final confrontation a bit unsatisfying; it definitely works well as a mechanically-complex, high-stakes climax that pays off your preparations, but given all that I’d learned about the antagonist over the course of the game, I would have preferred there to be more options to talk and at least try for a nonviolent solution rather than having it jump straight to a fight.
These flaws didn’t do too much to undermine my enjoyment of the game, though. Sure, it’s IF comfort food, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that when it’s as well-served as it is in the Princess of Vestria. A whole Comp of this stuff would be cloying, and I’m not regretting that I don’t read much of this stuff anymore, but it’s nostalgic fun to dip back into a game like this, like eating your mom’s old meatloaf.*
* I’m vegetarian, but when I was growing up my mom had a great meatloaf recipe, and the one time she tried to make tofu it was awful – it was the 80s – so I’m sticking with the metaphor.
A meta reality-tv/slasher movie mash up that goes too heavy on the meta, December 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
We are all, every one of us, unique perfect miracles, with thoughts, experiences, beliefs, feelings, likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, fears, (and bodies) that combine in unrepeated and unrepeatable ways to make us the individuals we are. But simultaneously, sometimes demography is destiny, and am I am betting that like 99% of the people who share my particular niche – early 40s bookishly-nerdy guy – also like House of Leaves. For those of y’all who haven’t read it, it’s an early-aughts pomo horror story that centers on a documentary made by a man whose family house is being overwritten by – or perhaps always connected to – an infinite, empty labyrinth. But the story of the documentary is surrounded by several other layers of narrative and commentary, including a film scholar who deconstructs the story as fast as the documentarian constructs it, which are set off through various cool typographical and word-art flourishes.
This is maybe an odd way to start a review of Blood Island, a choice-based reality show/slasher flick mash-up, but in some ways they’re doing a lot that’s similar. Blood Island’s engagingly-written narrative also centers on a horror movie (the slasher stuff pre-empts the reality TV, obviously enough), and also includes a bunch of media criticism intended to prod the audience the think about the tropes that it’s deploying. But unlike House of Leaves, it mashes all the different things it’s doing into a single narrative thread rather than imposing any kind of structure, and it neglects the emotional core of the characters at the heart of its story. It’s also way too excited about the media studies stuff, leaving the whole package unbalanced, as though the Camille Paglia chapter of House of Leaves took over half the book. When Blood Island is doing the thing that it’s trying to do, it works pretty well – but it spends way too much time talking about the thing rather than doing it.
So what is the thing? Well, as the genre mash-up indicates, it’s looking at the commonalities between slasher flicks and reality shows about dating – and spoiler alert, many of these are about gender. Thus the setup: you play a new contestant on a reality show where you’re isolated in a lovely beachy paradise with a bunch of other hot singles, and if you’re ever not coupled up, you’re at risk of getting sent home. But the previous season of the show was interrupted when a masked maniac stuck a cake knife into the back of one of the cast members, so as you’re gearing up to find love (or lust) you also need to worry about whether the killer’s also returned.
It’s no spoiler to confirm that yes, they have. As a result, there’s an engaging split in gameplay, because even as you’re picking which of the various bachelors and bachelorettes you want to get to know better (you can choose any gender identity and sexual orientation for your character you like; the game doesn’t care a jot, which is an enlightened attitude though does make scenes like the one where the other contestants are staring at your wet-tee-shirt-clad, heaving chest land a little a differently when you’ve decided your character is a middle-aged dude in mediocre shape) you’re also getting glimpses of the killer and deciding how to evade or confront them. It doesn’t take long for things to escalate drastically, with set-piece dates – a romantic scuba-dive! – turning into set-piece murder attempts – uh oh, there’s chum in the water!
Anyone who’s heard the phrase “Final Girl” will get why these two genres are being smashed together. The producers of these entertainments have a clear view of the mix of voyeurism and sexual moralizing that they expect their audiences to bring to the table, for one thing, and the process of winnowing a diverse cast down until there’s just an attractive white girl standing I’d assume plays out similarly in both.
Unfortunately, rather than juxtaposing these elements and creating space for the player to tease out the parallels, the game wants to like engage you in continued Socratic dialogue about this stuff to make sure you aren’t missing anything. Very frequently, the action will screech to a halt so one character or another can ask you why you think people like horror movies, of whether you think the killer is going to intentionally target people who drink and have sex, or what the formula to a successful reality TV show is. In a few places, this is OK – it makes sense for the contestants on one of these shows to reflect on how they work – but when these conversations are happening when you’re still bleeding from barely fending off an attack it feels deeply artificial. Beyond this being a suicidally bad idea from a strategic point of view, there’s no diegetic reason connecting the killer’s behavior to movies – it’s like spending your time unpacking the storytelling tropes in the Godfather trilogy when the real-life mob has put out a hit on you.
It could be the case that this is intentional, that the author is trying to undermine the emotional engagement of the various scenarios the game creates. Some late-game plot elements maybe reinforce this idea: (Spoiler - click to show)so first, the character you’ve spent the most time with gets brutally murdered ¾ of the way through the game, which tanked my emotional engagement because I didn’t care about any of the rest of them, and knew that I’d survive to the end. And second, if most people in my specific demographic know House of Leaves, just about everybody in my age group knows Scream, and are probably going to think about it when an early sequence involves identifying the “rules” of horror movies – so having the twist here be exactly the same as the twist in Scream seems like a really questionable choice if you wanted to maintain tension. But I don’t understand why that would be the case! Indeed, when the Postmodern Studies 101 stuff recedes, some of the dating pieces can be cutely fun, and the killer’s various stratagems for getting at you often exhibit the mix of viciousness and humor you see in good slasher movies (or so I’ve heard; I’ve actually seen very few, I must confess). As a result, I can’t help wondering what a version of this story where the media crit stuff was separated out would look like – dare I say that the “Stateful Narration” approach Dorian Passer has taken in his recent games might be an interesting fit? – not only would that make the narrative aspects more compelling, I suspect they’d also prompt the player to engage more with the bigger questions the author is trying to frame, since they’d no longer be at war with the story.
Before closing, I have one more critique of one detail of Blood Island’s implementation, but it risks ruining the game – I wish I didn’t know it – so I’m going to spoiler-block it. Read at your peril.
(Spoiler - click to show)So in my playthrough, I chose to romance/make friends with Mona, who’s described as a jaded cynic – I am not a reality TV person so focusing on someone who was also not in the tank for this stuff seemed appealing, plus she’s Middle Eastern like my wife is, I dunno maybe I have a type. Anyway! I was surprised to find that despite her initially-crusty demeanor, she very quickly seemed to click with me and starting talking about e.g. how romantic the starlit night. On a hunch, I tried starting over and dragging the bookish, 20-something ingenue on dates, and sure enough, but for a very, very few bits of introductory writing, everything down to the specific dialogue appears to be the same regardless of who you pick. This even extends to changing the identity of the killer, so that the story plays out in exactly the same way, with almost exactly the same way, each time. I’m not one to harp on authors for not spending time writing a bunch of words no-one will ever see – I loved the completely-linear January, for example – but if the game is asking the player to engage with its characters and framing the choice of which one to build a relationship with as significant, having their personalities be completely interchangeable feels like a dirty trick indeed, a betrayal of players who approach the premise sincerely.
An elusive tree-focused puzzlefest, December 21, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. Also, I beta tested this game and haven’t done a full reply, so caveat lector)
The second of the big parser puzzlefests in this year’s Comp, Arborea is a decidedly queer duck. It satisfies the expectations of its genre by providing a host of clever condundrums, but the plot it presents is enigmatic and oddly elusive – instead, it relies on a strong sense of theme to unify its disparate parts. Despite its old-school vibe, I can’t say I’ve played anything else quite like it, and while not every swing it takes connects, there’s more than enough creativity here to make Arborea worth a visit.
There’s very little setup provided before you’re thrust into the game – you’re told that you’re in a simulation and that you’ve got to retrieve a “kernel” (yes, of course it’s a pun), and then you’re left to your own devices in the middle of a sea of trees. This isn’t a maze, though; it’s a clever puzzle that requires you to identify a few different kinds of trees to unlock passages to eight different areas, each with a distinct theme built around said tree. A pine tree points the way to a Norse encampment holding a wake for a dead thane; a bodhi tree to helps you navigate to a mountainous region populated by monks and demons; an oak tree leads you to Renaissance England. There are people to meet and puzzles to solve in each area, though typically you don’t have a clear goal other than to go everywhere and surmount clear barriers when they present themselves – it’s about exploring and experiencing each area, rather than advancing any particular agenda.
The primary motivator, then, is the puzzles, and they’re a curious lot. Some are quite traditional item-swappers, but you’ll also help a monkey find a friend, clean a pirate ship with a slightly kinky crew, and solve a math puzzle in the mountains. Then there are those that are deeply nonstandard and rely on typing commands of the sort parser players have been trained to expect not to work – telling the game why or how you’re doing something, rather than just what you’re doing. These are interesting puzzles and I can see how from a certain point of view they’re fair, but since I think in most cases the player will have figured out the solution but not the exact command the game will accept, they wind up being frustrating; best to have recourse to the walkthrough in these situations.
Regardless of these rough patches, this is a solid, enjoyable set of puzzles, with enough interconnections between the different sub-areas that I liked the chance to wander around unlocking new paths and seeing how an object found in one could be used in another. And while at first the mishmash of settings and tasks struck me as too much of a grab-bag, as I settled into the game’s groove I realized that each place I was visiting had a different story to tell about humanity’s relationship with trees. Admittedly, sometimes these were a little thin – the pine forests felt mostly incidental to the Viking bit – or felt too dark for what’s generally a lighthearted game (I’m thinking of one section in particular that deals with American slavery; the player gets to take some satisfying action here, but it represents a tonal swerve I’m not sure Arborea fully pulls off). But there were several areas, largely those dealing with our economic exploitation of trees, where I felt the theme land quite powerfully.
To sum up – well, this is a hard game to sum up. It’s a big one, made up of many pieces, and the endgame sequence, which is quite distinct from the main body of the action, doesn’t provide any unifying answers. But for all that many of its scenes and set-pieces are stuck in my memory even now, several months after having tested it – if it’s kind of patchy, and more about the journey than the destination, well, I suppose that’s appropriate for a wander through a forest.
Spooky art enlivens a dark fairy tale, December 21, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I always feel a bit like a fraud when I play work of IF and my strongest reaction is to look at the art and go “oooh, pretty” – like I’m getting distracted by superficial fripperies instead of engaging with the words and mechanics that are the bread and butter of the genre. But hopefully that’s a forgivable response to something as lovely as Under the Bridge, a short you-are-the-monster Twine game whose creepily evocative animated drawings instantly communicate, and deepen, the vibe.
That isn’t to say that the premise or writing are bad – far from it! I actually really like the setup, which has an elemental, fairy-tale power to it. You play a man-eating beast who’s been driven from their usual abode by perfidious humans, and find shelter under a bridge. Three times passers-by tromp across the bridge, and three times, you can choose how and whether to reveal yourself, when to speak and when to feast. There aren’t a lot of words wasted communicating this minimalist setup, but those that are there are used to good effect. Here’s the aftermath of my first attack, spare prose detailing the wildlife around the bridge:
Frogs with too large eyes, flies that congregate at the left-over pieces of flesh, birds that caw a little too loudly through the quiet forest.
The gameplay is grabby too. You almost always just have two choices of just two or three words each, but the author does a good job of conveying the stakes for your decisions while providing all the information the monster should have – sometimes you need to act under conditions of ambiguity, but it feels fair because the uncertainty feels baked into the situation, rather than being introduced by the author to make you sweat over your options. And the choices feel like they matter; I only played once, but I get the sense that there are a number of different potential endings (I got an accommodationist one where I made a deal with the villagers only to eat the bad people, because even when play-acting as a cannibalistic abomination I can’t stop being a boring liberal).
But as I said, all this pales next to the art. The first image you see when starting the game is an antlered skull rendered in a black-on-black scrawl, with stark white eyes and a queasily animated halo flickering behind its horns – if I saw that coming at me from under a bridge, you’d better believe I’d run. There are similar images interspersed through the story, all working from the same limited palette and establishing a richly threatening energy that nicely accentuates the text (the flip side of this emphasis on aesthetics is that there are blurred-text animations that fire off between passages – this technique is a near cousin go the hated timed-text mechanic, but thankfully the transitions run sufficiently quickly that they don’t get annoying).
This year had some great EctoComp games, so those in the market for something spooky are spoiled for choice, but regardless Under the Bridge has you covered for getting into the Halloween spirit – it’s a moody little slice of horror that’s as assured a debut as you’re likely to see from a first-time author.
Lyrical mid-apocalyptic road-trip, December 21, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I was reading Andrew Schultz’s thread on games set in all 50 states the other day, and feeling surprised everybody was blanking on contenders in the great state of Pennsylvania – it’s big, with a couple major cities, a good amount of history, what’s not to like? Well, I must have been tuning into something, since after The Counsel of the Caves, we’ve now hit our second Pennsylvania-set game of the Comp. The protagonist of Chasing the Sun isn’t a native, admittedly: she’s from Vermont but fleeing a bad marriage and a mysterious slow-motion apocalypse (wait – is that you, Nitocris?!) With the sun stopped low in the sky and an unnatural, deadly storm creeping west across the Atlantic, she starts to run out of gas as she hits a forested part of the state, which is where the game opens.
So far what I’ve described would fit a horror game – at first the premise reminded me strongly of 2020’s Alone, for example – but the mood in Chasing the Sun is far more contemplative, and the language is lush and literary. Here’s one of the opening paragraphs:
"The sunless Pennsylvania Wilds zips past your car windows — trees upon trees upon trees. Green as envy and swollen with humidity. You are surrounded and far, far away from home. The road ahead is quiet. The air is breathable. The cabin of your truck is dry and covered in trash and bridal lace. You’re alone and you’re not dead yet."
The sentence lengths could use more variation – ditto with the choice of verbs – but still, this is a well-written bit of prose, setting a high bar for quality that’s sustained through the twenty minute runtime, albeit with the occasional hiccup (there’s a mention of the onrushing storm “dragging its clouds towards the id-soaked sunset”).
Similarly, the gameplay doesn’t have you making tense, high-stakes decisions as you squabble for supplies with other desperate survivors. For the most part, the drag-and-drop Texture interface gives you two options in each passage, one which allows you to move some kind of examining or exploration action onto a couple of different nouns to go deeper, and one that moves the game linearly forward. Later on, you fetch up at a farmhouse where gas and other necessities are freely available, and you get into an intense conversation with a woman you seem to share some kind of spark with, which does involve more discrete choices, but these are heavily telegraphed, giving the player free reign to define how they want the tete-a-tete to play out.
There is one odd exception, though, which is that if you spend too much time in the opening futzing around twirling the dial on your radio in search of active stations, you’ll get in a game-ending car crash. I think this is an ill-advised design decision, since it punishes exploration in a way that’s ultimately to the game’s detriment (though I have to say, I find the Texture interface finicky since I use a touchpad – the drag-and-drop feels inaccurate and sometimes releasing the click doesn’t seem to register – I of course don’t hold that against the game, but maybe contributed to my disinclination to mess about after that death).
It’s after you reach the farmhouse that Chasing the Sun shows its hand: the conversation with Bird, the woman you find there, is the center of the piece, as you quickly jump past the wary formalities of meeting someone new and leap into unburdening each other of your respective secrets. This works… okay. I can see what the author is going for – Bird has a specific orientation towards the apocalypse that you can choose to agree or disagree with, and which gets at some heavy (though hardly novel or underexplored) themes – and the dialogue feels largely naturalistic.
Still, it feels very rushed, and while the story tries to paper over the way these two strangers immediately reveal their deepest selves to each other by invoking some kind of ineffable, sudden bond (the protagonist, a woman, seems like she might be gay and either closeted or prevented from living her true sexuality by a repressive family), it still takes an act of will to suspend one’s disbelief. Similarly, the details of the storm’s movement and the end of the earth’s rotation don’t hold together if you start questioning them. Taking it on its own terms, though, I found Chasing the Sun rather lovely, and would love to see the author tackle a somewhat longer piece that gives its characters and themes a little more room to breathe.
A satiric phantasmagoria held back by slack pacing and flabby prose, December 21, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Aww, man. I went into this one expecting to like it: the mixtape blurb and eye-catching title mark it out as something special, and the disorienting science-fantasy opening is boldly ridiculous, laying out a post-post-apocalyptic society that’s reconstituted itself in near-total apery of our time based on the fortuitous discovery of a pop-culture-crammed hard-drive heavily featuring – of course – the songs of Pitbull, who winds up having a religion built around him. The game has an endearing ensemble cast, and while the interactivity isn’t especially engaging, that’s an intentional decision in service to what it’s trying to say about agency in relationships (I also get the sense it’s in dialogue with some of the seminal texts in the Twine canon), and if its go-anywhere do-anything gonzo spirit leads to some memorably disgusting scenes, well, they’re certainly memorable.
But it’s let down by one enormous flaw I just couldn’t get past: a flabby, long-winded writing style that drains the prose of its urgency and makes the game feel far too long for its plot – in fact, there are three distinct branches, I think all of comparable length, that make up the game’s overall story, but I was ready to be done with it by two-thirds of the way into the single branch I played (which took me about the requisite two hours). This is really frustrating because there are definite strengths here, but they’re sapped of their effectiveness by the enervating slog that the late game becomes.
Let me start with the good stuff, though. As mentioned, the world-building is completely deranged without being an anything-goes gonzo type of setting. The fact that everything’s been blown up and then rebuilt along familiar-ish lines means that the author’s got a free hand to lean into the ridiculous, without needing to invent entirely new institutions and mores for the new society. And some of the gags here are really out there, like the idea that there’s a wave of oppression based on the new religion centering on Pitbull, with an ominous jail described thusly:
"It’s where they put everyone guilty of “Pitbull Crimes” — any crime related to the concept or work of Pitbull. The list is expansive and slightly vague: Unauthorized Selling of Pitbull-related Contraband, Plagiarism of Pit, excessive party fouls in Miami, all the way to the extreme category of Pitbull-motivated Homicides."
While this is an entertaining concept, I’m not sure it fully worked for me, though. I’m not sure I can explain why, but some of the jokes and setting elements felt too specific and took me out of the world – like, the Pitbull stuff is part of the premise, but when there are gags about how homophobic Papa John is, and references to Twitter, which I guess has been rebuilt, I felt like the game was having trouble keeping track of its own premise. Similarly, in my playthrough the Pitbull stuff dropped out almost completely by about halfway through, replaced by a lot of sci-fi-horror-action-comedy business (though this does lead to a joke, near the end of the game, where there’s suddenly an out-of-context Pitbull reference and the narrator admits “Oh right. I forgot about that part of the world.”)
So yeah, it’s not all fun and games – the protagonist is a trans woman going through a rough patch in her relationship with her partner, a trans man, and while their society as a whole seems a bit more accepting of trans folks than ours is, they’re fairly marginalized folks eking out a living through crime, which leads to them getting locked up in the aforementioned Pitbull-prison (at least in two out of the three branches – not sure about the last), and forced into a desperate fight for survival while making new friends and working through their relationship issues.
(I feel compelled to note that the identity of the protagonist is a bit more complicated than I made it out in the above paragraph – actually there’s also a different character, also trans but from just a few years in our future, who’s now dead but shares brain engrams with the main protagonist, or something, so she’s able to perceive and comment on what’s going on. It’s a little confusing but in practice just means that there’s an additional, somewhat fourth-wall-breaking narrative voice in the mix, which given everything else going on doesn’t register all that strongly).
These are a potentially-compelling set of conflicts, but it’s at the prison that the momentum really starts to sag. While the protagonist remains appealingly chipper throughout her travails, the narrative here introduces a half-dozen major supporting characters, plays some flashbacks to establish her relationship, and teases an upcoming event that will subject the prisoners to even more danger. It’s a lot to juggle – and in fact too much to juggle for the author. Forward progress feels like it slows to a crawl, even as each of those elements feel underbaked, because the prose throughout is overly plodding and verbose, dulling the notionally-exciting ideas and action on display to a shapeless mess. Exacerbating the flabbiness, dialogue is written screenplay style, and most scenes have the protagonist accompanied by a significant portion of the supporting cast, meaning there’s often a lot of filler conversation just there to remind the player that a character is part of the action.
To give an extended example, here’s what should be a thrilling action sequence – the prisoners are being thrown into a giant pit (somehow there’s a cave network under the Florida Keys, which seems worthy of comment from a geological point of view though the game doesn’t provide one), and after a struggle with one of the guards, a prisoner and the guard wind up dangling over the edge, so the prisoner’s friends – including the protagonist, TeeJay – attempt a rescue:
Val pauses before making her next move. She stares at the Enforcer, then reaches into her pocket and pulls out something shiny.
Val: Take the clip!
The Enforcer grabs it from Val’s hands and attaches it to their harness. They look back up at her.
Shattered Visor Enforcer: I can’t hook myself down here, something’s wrong!
Val turns around on Grace’s back and disembarks. Both girls dangle on their own, but close to each other.
Val: That’s 'cause you just have the rope, idiot! You need to climb up and use this one after I unclip Grace!
Shattered Visor Enforcer: But that’ll take so long!
Val: Think about that next time that you attack someone on the edge of a hole!
The Enforcer fidgets on the rope, trying to steady themselves. Val is above them, grabbing ahold of Grace. She sneaks a look down at the Enforcer.
Val: God, you’re pathetic…
She looks up at us.
Val: Someone up there grab ahold of our ropes!
Frankie snaps into action, grabbing Grace’s rope first. I grab onto Val’s, and yell down to her.
TeeJay: We’ve got you!
Val: Okay, when I clip Grace to me — you’re going to give us a little more slack in the ropes! More than one person should be holding onto my rope, since I’ll be carrying her!
The other members of Cabin Seven file in around me and grab ahold of the rope. A few of the other prisoners help as well.
Frankie: You’re good!
Val: I’m going to attach Grace to me now!
Shattered Visor Enforcer: What about me?
Val: Can you climb any further?
This is full of fine-grained logistics and dialogue that doesn’t say much, dreadfully stretching out what’s tended as a taut bit of business. There’s also not much of an authorial voice to make the process of reading all these words engaging – again, it’s screenplay style, so everything other than the characters’ lines often feels excessively bottom-lined. And as for the dialogue, the characters often don’t feel especially differentiated in how they speak: while specific personality traits do come through, everyone comes off like an extremely-online twentysomething joking their way through what are often quite horrifying situations.
There’s a lot more that could be said about One Last Pitbull Song. It’s clearly intending to problematize the concept of agency in choice-based IF, for one thing. There’s a major bifurcation of the plot based on what choice of side-dish you make in the cafeteria, which determines whether the protagonist gets through into an Aliens pastiche or a dance-off, and is clearly sending up the often-arbitrary nature of the much-hyped decision points in other games. And the protagonist reflects that she feels like she defaults to passivity and struggles to articulate and act on her desires, which is at the root of many of her relationship issues – from the epilogue that you’re meant to read after you complete all the branches (and that I, er, read out of order to see what it’s like), this appears to be positioned as the central conflict whose resolution terminates the game.
I can’t say this is the most engaging deconstruction of the tropes of choice-based interaction I’ve seen – it’s fine so far as it goes, but the presentation is fairly shallow – but it’s potentially interesting, and without having seen the remaining 60% of the game I can’t really assess whether it’s ultimately successful. Similarly, some apparently-parodic elements in the survival-horror branch that I wound up struck me as intentionally ridiculous and deconstructionist, in a way that undercut my engagement but which might add up to something compelling if I had the whole picture. So even some of the things I experienced as weaknesses, it’s possible, could turn out to work well. But checking the size of the game’s Twine file, getting the full experience looks like it requires reading about 100,000 words – twice the length of the Great Gatsby! – and unfortunately that’s far more of this lifeless prose than I’m able to commit to. One Last Pitbull Song feels very much like a work that thumbs its nose at the very concept of an editor – to its credit, it boasts a wild mélange of genres, tones, and plot points that would leave the blue-pencil brigade gobsmacked, but also demonstrates the risks of thumbing one’s nose at concision.
A chaotically inventive work-in-progress, December 20, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I've mentioned in other reviews that I have a one year old son. He is an amazing, lovable little guy, but he is also precocious as all get-out, meaning that he’s realized that since he’s (mostly) figured out how to walk, he might as well get started on other life skills such as climbing out of his play-pen, eating anything that looks like it’s been on the floor for a long time, and face-planting into the edges of his toys. He’s a one-baby force of anarchy, and my wife and I trade off trailing after him, trying to preserve him from gross bodily injury and restore some semblance of order in his wake.
Speaking of gross, an hour ago as of this writing he pooped in his bathtub. You know what’s not especially pleasant to clean up? Poop. From a bathtub.
I share this not to give Henry something unique to tell his therapist when, later in life, he’s asked why he’s a pathologically private person – that’s a happy side-effect – but to say that a) I know whereof I speak when I say trying to keep the eponymous detectives in Cannelé & Nomnom on track feels like bottling chaos, and b) given that’s what I already spend the majority of my non-work hours doing, I’m maybe not the ideal audience for the game. Combine that with running into some bugs that, from looking at other reviews, don’t seem to strike universally, and I unfortunately didn’t wind up liking this big, funny, creative game as much as I think it deserves.
This is another high-production-value Twine game, with attractive character art, well-chosen colors, and a bunch of different sub-interfaces and minigames that bring its mechanics to life. The story is just as vibrant, taking a hoary old protagonist-with-amnesia premise and giving it an extra jolt by having you turn to the aforementioned duo, who bicker like a long-married couple and whose approaches to crime-solving turn on blagging your way into places you don’t belong with no goal or aim in mind, and trying to cadge free food wherever it can be found, respectively. The world isn’t our own, either – while the overall vibe struck me as early 20th-Century French, everyone’s got some kind of magical gift (so far as I could tell these tend to be fairly low-key – less slinging fireballs, more having a really sensitive nose), and it’s populated by characters who are less colorful than the title pair, but only just, from a hobo with a magic coin to a delightfully-married couple of cheesemonging (cheesemongering?) lesbians.
Does this sound overstuffed? It feels overstuffed. Getting from point A to point B typically involves detours through C, D, X, H, back to A, choice of L or R, and then a jaunt to the conspiracy-board minigame where you match clue post-its to the mysteries they solve to finally unlock the road to B. There are further diversions, like having the option to defer to one detective or the other in their attempts to crack the case of your identity, which sometimes adds to their respective scores, which are tracked and always visible in the game’s sidebar; I also played a Texas-Hold-em-meets-Scrabble minigame, to no clear purpose, and had fun though I suspect the game cheats to get to the narratively correct result. Plus getting anywhere always involves a lot of banter between the core trio, which is advanced single line by single line (thankfully, you can bang the space bar instead of wearing out your finger clicking).
All this is to say that after an hour and a half of play, I’d only just managed to make it to the first significant location of the investigation and gotten the clues to solve the first non-tutorial mystery; I’m a fan of shaggy dog stories, but the game felt especially shaggy to me. Partially this is because I wound up finding Cannelé and Nomnom a little annoying. They’re each funny, and are able to create distinct scenarios of comedic mayhem – I don’t mean to be a killjoy, there is some good stuff here, with the quip that the cat who’d run off with my wallet had committed a “heinous feline-y” eliciting a half-laugh, half-groan – but they’re very one-note characters, at least in the time I spent with them. More, they’re continually at each others’ throats, forcing the player to mediate, keep them focused, and/or take sides between them; again, it’s like the most exhausting parts of parenting, with siblings who never let up the bickering to play nicely together or give a compliment if one has a good idea. This is a dynamic that can work in adventure games, I think – it’s not miles off Sam and Max, for example – but I think there’s a difference between games where you play one of the chaotic duo, and this one where you play their babysitter.
The game’s also shaggy because it has some polish and stability issues to iron out. I think the authors’ first language is French, as there are some passages that seem oddly or incompletely translated – “we have many interrogations”, one character says upon opening up an interview – plus there’s a cool rotating-text effect that leads to spaces getting erased, as well as the generally-flabby pacing mentioned above that would probably be tightened in an editing pass.
The bigger issue were the host of bugs I ran into, though. The conspiracy board is the game’s primary mechanic, but from the tutorial, it was throwing off errors. I seemed to be able to ignore a popup saying there was a bad evaluation error, but when I tried to link any clue to certain mysteries, I got another popup complaining about not being able to read the properties of an undefined ‘note_id’. At first this only afflicted an optional mystery, but eventually it spread to a mystery I needed to solve to move the story forward, bringing my progress to a halt. Attempts to shake off the bug by restarting and reloading, or trying a different browser (I was using Chrome, truly the most normcore of browsers) failed to fix the issue.
Despite the complaints I’ve leveled, I was disappointed when that happened; there’s much more good here than bad, and if I’d had the chance I would have followed Cannelé and Nomnom to the end. Per a post-Comp news update, it looks like the authors are hard at work working on finishing the game. I’ll of necessity be keeping my toddler-wrangling skills sharp in the meantime, so should be ready to go whenever it surfaces!
Hell is other people (and a bloody nose), December 20, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I feel like I’ve seen enough games like Nose Bleed to posit that a mini-genre of choice-based IF – the short, abstract game that’s light on concrete narrative content and is all about simulating a mental illness or disorder. The best recent example I can think of was fix it in this year’s Spring Thing, which trapped the player in an OCD loop, and now there’s Nose Bleed, which takes on the social anxiety/imposter syndrome combo pack (apparently this is a fairly common linkage, which is something I learned from post-game Googling; I’ve got a touch of social anxiety, albeit it’s receded substantially from what it was like when I was younger, but as you can probably tell from how much I spout off on this website, for better or more likely worse I’ve never suffered from imposter syndrome).
(While I’m making parenthetical asides, it occurs to me that if you dropped the “choice-based” and lightened up the low-narrative-content criterion, you could recruit Rameses into this subgenre, which might lead to an interesting hybrid lineage to trace. For another time!)
This Texture game is laser-focused on what it’s trying to do – every single passage, if not every single sentence, is dripping with crippling self-consciousness. Much of this is just dramatizing the awful but quotidian experience of these disorders, as the dream-like plot shunts the nameless, ageless protagonist from one stuff-of-nightmares scenario to another: there’s feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing at work, not being able to figure out how to join a conversation, worrying that everyone’s expecting you to do something but you don’t know what it is…. But beyond setting up these situations, the game also takes a more visceral approach to communicating how folks with these conditions suffer. And of course I used the word “visceral” advisedly – also “dripping”, back at the beginning of this paragraph – because per the title, the um, somewhat on-the-nose metaphor here involves spewing blood out of your schnozz when you feel the anxiety coming on.
This is a smart choice, because I think the situations on their own probably wouldn’t be as effective. Even as someone who can struggle a bit in large group settings where I don’t know anyone, I found the protagonist’s mumbley, low-self-esteem flailing occasionally annoying – even when there’s a coworker who seems to want to seek you out to put you on the spot, it still seemed to me that the protagonist could have met some of these challenges with a bit more assertiveness. But when they’re depicted as spewing blood over all and sundry, the idea that everyone would be looking at them with dismay and revulsion lands much more intuitively.
Choice is used effectively to underline the intensity of these episodes. When each attack hits, you typically have a choice of two or three different ways to try to cope – you could try to wipe away the blood, or hold your head at a weird angle to keep it dripping, or mop it up with your shirt – but of course they all look equally unpromising, which I think accurately evokes the feeling that here, unlike other issues like OCD or depression, the problem isn’t that your choices are constrained, it’s that nothing you do can soothe the anxiety (the fact that the nose bleeds are repeated, and per the protagonist’s comments something that they’ve previously struggled with too, makes me wonder why they don’t just carry around a ton of tissues all the time, but that would ruin the conceit so I think it’s forgivable that the game doesn’t even mention the idea).
The visuals work well too; without giving too many of this short game’s surprises away, I’ll just note that there are some arresting graphical effects that helped make things feel substantially more engaging than the prose alone would have managed (speaking of the prose, it’s fine – it does what it needs to do, but it’s not especially evocative. I’d have copied and pasted to show some examples, but Texture apparently doesn’t let you do that, so I suppose you’ll have to take my word for it).
In my analysis, then, I think Nose Bleed succeeds at what it sets out to do. I’m not sure I liked it as much as it deserved, though? Maybe it’s because, unlike most games of this type, in this case I do have some direct knowledge of what Nose Bleed is about, and as a result the depiction didn’t seem as revelatory as it otherwise might have. It could also be that the one-note nature of the protagonist’s characterization did start to get on my nerves after a while, even while conceding that they kind of have to be a perpetual wet noodle for the game to work. I think my reactions here were unfair, though; it’s a well-crafted piece, and has a nice button at the end that indicates a goodly amount of self-awareness, and avoids the trap games in this sub-genre can fall into, with the ultimate message of the game reducing to “look at people who suffer from this disorder, doesn’t it suck” – instead the final note is a subtly hopeful one, pointing to the possibility of connection despite everything.
An interactive art-film, unique but draggy, December 20, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There’s just something about trains, perhaps because they’re the very archetype of the liminal space: in a train car you’re halfway between where you were and where you’re going, not tied to your past and not yet able to make progress on your future. So it is for the protagonist of One Way Ticket, who’s bought the eponymous unidirectional fare in hopes of finding a new life, but who can do little but speculate as to what that life will be about so long as they’re riding the train – all the more so when the train tracks are blocked by a mountain of freshly-harvested corn, and they have to descend and solve the quotidian-yet-cryptic problems of the magical-realistic town where they’ve fetched up.
Maybe magical realism is the wrong comparison to invoke, though, since the vibe I get from the game is less South American literature and more European art film. This is one weird town – they use gold sand for currency, the local shop moves from place to place, the inn only serves food made from corn, people change names depending on what time you visit them, and there are omnipresent jackals who make travel a dangerous business. While you’re simply trying to unblock the tracks, the goals of the inhabitants are far stickier things: an inventor wants to raid the stopped train for part to build a machine of inscrutable purpose, while an unlucky gambler’s on the hunt for the aces missing from his deck. Everyone’s playing an angle – except the tavern hostess, who seems perhaps a little too interested in you, and the train driver and conductor, who’d rather drink and gamble than do their jobs and help you get the train moving again.
It’s not just the existentialist substance of the narrative and characters, though: for that authentic foreign-movie vibe, the text seems translated into English, with the occasional ungainliness, but also occasional uniquely-turned phrase, that entails. Here’s an encounter with a woman trying to enlist the player’s help in finding love, in a dialogue taking place over a shell game:
“The problem with our city is that people have stopped listening to each other. And topics for conversation are another story!”
“Have stopped listening?”
“Well, yes,” she continued the chaotic round dance of cups, “once, probably, people listened to each other, but now everyone is on their own wave — and, to be honest, these waves have already overgrown with mud.”
“What do you mean?”
She abruptly stopped the run of the cups:
“I mean that people discuss the same thing all the time, but everything is so everyday, mundane, boring, trivial… I could list a few more synonyms.”
“Perhaps I understand you.”
“Well I hope.”
“And you need to talk about the sublime?”
“Everyone needs to talk about something sublime from time to time. Especially me.”
(The shell game, like everything else in this town, isn’t on the level, natch).
Similarly, sometimes you come across a simile that makes the prose come to a lurching stop – as the protagonist makes their way through the dining car, they note that it’s “long and empty, like my intestines” – but there are some great images too, like the train station being described as “a low building with a platform, long as a bayonet, cutting the cornfield in two.”
Mechanically, this kind of story seems like it’d be a good fit for a choice-based system, making it easy to read long passages of sometimes-opaque text and present options allowing the player to progress without requiring them to completely understand everything that’s going on. Subverting expectations, though, One Way Ticket uses a very adventure-gamey approach, with quite granular actions, rather than the broader strokes allowed for by less systemic choice-based interfaces. A location typically boasts three or four links for the important objects or people there, and clicking each will usually change the final paragraph of the passage to provide for detail on whatever you selected. Often this paragraph will have additional options for interaction – moving or talking or taking something or what have you – meaning the rhythm of gameplay proceeds sort of like it does in a parser game, where you examine each item in turn and then decide what to do. You also have a modestly-sized inventory, as well as a much larger list of facts or questions you’ve accumulated in your notebook. At certain times, the graphics for these will highlight, indicating that you can choose an item or topic to try to apply to your current circumstances: when talking to the hostess, for example, you can go to the notebook to mention that the Mayor told you there’d be free lodging at the tavern.
It’s a solid system, similar to ones I’ve liked in games by Abigail Corfman or Agnieszka Trzaska. I’m not sure it’s a great fit for One Way Ticket, though, since it serves to slow down the pacing quite a lot: while the inventory is relatively compact, the topic list quickly reaches a dozen or more entries, and sometimes the proper choices to pick are relatively obscure due to the often-confusing nature of the situation and the prose. Exploration is also challenging because sometimes clicking on the name of an object will lock you into choosing an action and progressing, meaning you need to leave and then come back, hopefully remembering which choice was the booby-trap, to fully plumb the depths of each location. Relatedly, the map is big, and often you need to click through several links to get to the travel options in a location – plus, several puzzles have a fair bit of busywork, requiring you to go from one end of the town to the other, sometimes going to the tavern to wait for nightfall too, before you can make much progress. And while this is a big game with lots of stuff to do, the first portion of it seemed fairly linear, with only one puzzle that’s possible to solve at a time even though you’ll quickly unlock a dozen locations (with different night and day locations) and twice as many items and notebook topics.
All this means that after spending an initial hour enjoyably but bewilderedly exploring my way around town and solving a few puzzles, I began to worry and checked the helpfully-provided walkthrough, which indicated I’d barely gotten a quarter of the way in. I started consulting the walkthrough more regularly after that, but still, I’d only gotten maybe 2/3 of the way through when the two-hour judging deadline hit. Usually I’m not shy about scribbling down a rating then pressing on to the finish line for longer games, but here, I found myself anxious to move on. Partially that’s because it’s only the first game in my queue and I’m very aware of the distance to go to play all of them by November 15th, but partially it’s because while I like the ingredients here, the sheer quantity of options and obstacles feels overwhelming – going back to the movie metaphor, what would be a cryptically compelling 85-minute film can get quite exhausting once it rounds the two hour mark, in my experience.
If I wrap up my Comp before the deadline, I’ll definitely try to get back to One Way Ticket, since there is a lot here I’m enjoying – if I do, I’ll go back and update this review accordingly. Part of me, though, almost hopes I don’t; there’d be something apt about leaving the protagonist mid-quest, with one of the gambler’s aces found and halfway through a flirtatious dinner with the tavern hostess, eternally poised on the threshold of resolution, forever stuck between stations.
An allegorical nightmare elevated by strong writing, December 19, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
OK, I gotta get this out of the way before starting the review proper: “Caliban’s Revenge” is by far the most metal pseudonym in this year’s, nay, any year’s IF Comp. Whoever you are, O author of mystery – massive, massive kudos.
On to the substance! It’s a funny coincidence that I played Lucid right after A Long Way to the Nearest Star, because I wound up having similar feelings about them, despite them being very different in just about every way (beyond them both being implemented in Twine). Once again, we’ve got a game that presents itself as belong to a hoary genre – here, we’ve got an allegorical, confusing flight across a dark and menacing city, with the protagonist’s outer conflicts obviously mirroring some underexplained internal ~trauma~. Once again, we’ve got a plot that hits familiar beats before a final twist. Once again, there are some fairly straightforward puzzles to solve (albeit they’re much simpler here). And once again, I very much enjoyed the game despite all this, almost purely down to the care taken with the implementation, and the quality of the prose.
Let’s switch up the order and start with the writing this time. Lucid is written in a noirish, blank-verse style that would be very, very easy to mess up and thereby make the proceedings seem ridiculous. It does veer close to that shoal from time to time – there’s an early mention of a puddle reflecting a streetlight “with a chitinous gleam”, which is almost successful – but for the most part it paints the city in compelling, concise imagery. Inevitably, you arrive via a train:
The station is brush-stroke clean, grime describes its edges.
Later you have to climb an interminable number of flights of stairs (it’s 13) in a public housing project:
The seventh flight
Is dark and stifled like
Sleep after middle age,
Oxygen thin,
Never quite enough,
You wheeze on the unseen stairs
Last one – here are moths, found sleeping in a fridge that lights up when you open the door:
Hyles lineata,
Sphinxes.
False eyes flutter on their
Mascara wing tips,
Orbiting a false moon,
In the midst of a false waking.
It helps that the prose isn’t entirely po-faced – there’s a bit where you can buy a box of cereal that conceals a special prize:
The legend tells of Frosted Flakes.
But the box is heavy.
Heavier than flakes however frosted.
Because the game’s well-written, the author’s able to evoke a number of different moods across a fairly short scenario. There are fewer than half a dozen distinct locations to explore, but while they’re all recognizably of a (gloomy) piece, the recovered-memory horror of the school feels quite distinct from the Lynchian terror attendant on the project-dwelling witch and her twin salamanders.
Lucid isn’t just a mood piece, though – after trapping you in what feels like it’s going to be an endlessly-repeating maze of shadow and fear, it reveals that there might be a way out, if you enact a prescribed set of highly ritualized behaviors in just the right order. I hesitate to describe this as a puzzle, since the steps don’t turn on conventional or even cartoon logic – it’s all free association, and somewhat inconsistent free association since in different circumstances the game takes varying stances towards violence, and towards the darkness/light dichotomy – but the solution’s close to spelled out by a particular character, so it doesn’t wind up presenting much of a challenge.
It does provide a prompt to slow down and engage with the metaphors, though, and appreciate the way the evocative prose resolves the various conflicts the game’s set up. Ultimately I’m not sure Lucid is saying anything especially profound, but it’s expressing a fine sentiment, and what it says it says eloquently. Similarly, I’m not sure I’m taking away any deep insights into mental health, but there are definitely some turns of phrase that are going to stick in my head for a while – not to mention those pale, cruel salamanders…
A pleasant literary Where's Waldo, December 19, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I’m going to dare to assert a generalization: it you like IF, you probably like books. Don’t get me wrong, I know that many of us identify primarily with the STEM side of the house – and seriously, god bless y’all, without you we wouldn’t have the authoring languages or interpreters or whatever the hell GlkOte is (please, please don’t try to explain it to me) – but still, I feel like if you’re the type of nerd who slept through English class, you’re probably off messing around with roguelikes or something rather than hanging around our community’s fair precincts.
If I’m right about that, that means there’s probably a reasonable slice of the Comp audience who’ll get a kick out of You Feel Like You’ve Read This in a Book, a by-the-numbers choice-based puzzler enlivened by an ongoing game of guess-the-reference. You start out, in that hoary old adventure-game trope, with amnesia, but from a threatening note left nearby you quickly learn that you’ve got to gather a $50,000 ransom – or the just-implanted packet of neurotoxins in your head will explode and bring you to an unpleasant end. But as you scramble to find the money, the player realizes that either the setting is some kind of literary mashup, or whatever happened to the protagonist’s brain is stimulating their nostalgia circuits too, because nearly every location you visit strongly reminds you of a book you’ve read (both you the protagonist and you the player – I’m guessing most folks will be at least somewhat familiar with at least two thirds of the works on the list).
This means that as you go through the motions of resolving your immediate dilemma – exploring the town, trying to re-find your apartment, looking for something valuable to hock to the pawn shop to make up the ransom – you’re also seeing if you can figure out the literary source for whatever you’re experiencing. Sometimes this is trivial, as when you visit your downstairs neighbors, who have a curious habit:
"Whenever someone dies around the city, they tend to leave their unit, sometimes for the whole day…. You scan the room for valuables, but you are overwhelmed with the plethora of knicknacks, so numerous they are practically balancing on top each other. Old books, pictures on the wall of various people none of whom you recognize, glass bottles, and just when you thought it couldn’t get more weird, a skull? Just out in the open? The only things that seems to be of value are a violin and a small flashlight, both of which you grab."
Others, though, are a bit harder to catch – fortunately, there’s a walkthrough that not only spoils the puzzles, it also lists off all the works being riffed on.
The puzzles are no brain-scratchers – if you’ve got the right item or piece of information, they’ll largely solve themselves. Things are made somewhat more complex by the fact that there are multiple different endings you can try for, but the biggest complication is that the neurotoxins are no idle threat – time does pass as you play (in a nice touch, some location descriptions and events actually shift as the day wears on) and if you faff around too much, boom. I have to confess that I found the timer annoying, but at the same time the less-petulant part of me has to concede it’s well done; a kick against puzzley choice-based games without parser-style features is that they too easily turn into an exercise in lawn-mowering, so the timer ensures you can’t just mindlessly click through every option, and it’s tuned to allow you to explore almost everything your first time through, though actually solving it of course takes some replays.
(I should say, while there isn’t the kind of worked-out inventory or interaction system like you find in One Way Ticket or A Long Way to the Nearest Star, there are still some canny design choices here – in particular, text color is used to good effect to highlight what’s merely background description, and what has game-mechanical significance).
It all works well enough, but still, for a game that evokes so many positive memories, I found it curiously forgettable – like, it hasn’t been twelve hours since I played it, but I couldn’t tell you which ending is the one that reveals what’s actually going on with the protagonist’s amnesia and who the nemesis with the vendetta is, much less what those explanations wind up being. Part of that, let’s be real, is probably due to the fact I’m feeling a bit zonked out right now – my son’s teething, so this has been a week of long days and longer nights – but partially because the TFLYRTB is very much a case of the journey trumping the destination. I had a lot of fun wandering around playing spot the reference (at least once I made my peace with that #$%$ timer); I probably would have enjoyed it less if there hadn’t been a minimally-plausible framework holding the experience together, but the framework certainly isn’t the draw.
Spooky but inconsistent, December 19, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Graveyard Strolls is a game of halves. All games are games of halves, the pedantic part of me wants to point out –and I just did, spoiler alert, “the pedantic part of me” is just me – but in this case, it really does feel like there are two distinct pieces to Graveyard Strolls. The first half is a relatively lighthearted, mostly linear help-ghosts-resolve-their-issues-and-move-on kind of setup, while the second, entirely linear, piece swerves into the intensely personal, with the threat of the supernatural functioning as a veil-thin metaphor for trauma. There’s things to like about both of them, but I’m not convinced that they sit together easily, and the skeletal nature of the game’s choice elements don’t make much of a case for interactivity.
Taking the first piece first, the game opens with you having decided to go to a graveyard to see whether it might be haunted, on the advice of one of your favorite YouTubers. So far so Scooby Doo, but after you hear a spooky groan on the wind, you quickly encounter the first of a series of ghosts, all of whom seem more or less in denial or confusion about their deaths, and all of whom look to you for guidance. Other than their tendency to float and annoying bouts of amnesia, these spooks are understandably human, with relatable challenges. Hank, the first one you meet, is working through some issues with his wife; the second one fell in with a bad crowd and hasn’t quite internalized his mistakes. As for the third, on reflection I suppose he’s not technically “understandably human,” but I found him quite relatable all the same (Spoiler - click to show)(he’s a dog).
Persuading them into the great beyond is a straightforward affair. In just about every passage, you’re given a choice of two options, one of which typically involves engaging with the ghost, being sympathetic to them, or putting pieces together, while the other usually ignores them, is dismissive of their feelings, or otherwise seems clearly marked as a bad choice. This doesn’t make for very compelling gameplay, unfortunately, all the more so because it doesn’t take much to get a game over. In the first real choice, for example, I decided to believe that the spooky noise was just the wind – which led to me getting freaked out, leaving the cemetery, and being brutally attacked in a way that makes sense in retrospect now that I’ve finished the game, but initially just seemed like out-of-context, incongruously brutal violence.
This means that I quickly stopped experimenting and just defaulted to the choice the game seemed to be pushing me towards, which, as you can imagine, wasn’t especially engaging, since felt like I was being presented with false choice after false choice. I liked exploring the backstories of the first two ghosts, and interacting with the third, though, and was ready to finish my time with Graveyard Strolls chalking it up as a fairly enjoyable but very low-key spooky story. But then I got to the final sequence, and everything changed.
I don’t want to spoil the plot points here, since this surprise is much of what makes the game interesting (though nor are the specifics especially relevant to my evaluation of the game, so I’m not going to blurry-text them – the game’s short, just play it if you’re curious). It’s a fairly visceral twist that involves the protagonist’s backstory, injecting an element of psychological horror into proceedings. But it doesn’t seem to build in a meaningful way on anything that’s come before, and the protagonist’s lack of subjectivity or interiority in the first part of the game – you mostly seem like a player-insert who’s just there to listed to ghosts, not a specific character with their own experience of the world – makes the sudden shift feel jarring.
The final sequence is well written, or at least I found it fairly gripping, but to me it felt too disconnected both narratively and thematically from the rest of the game, as if the aforementioned Scooby Doo episode had ten minutes of The Haunting of Hill House spliced onto the end. There’s maybe a way to make that work, but it would probably require more connective tissue than Graveyard Strolls offers – as well as leveraging interactivity to engage the player more fully than the current, rather desultory, approach does. I’d gladly play something else by the author, but once again feel like a little more expansion and refinement would make for a more compelling experience.
Are you a good witch or a bad witch?, December 16, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
First two children’s-book games in a row, then two witch games back to back? I think the randomizer’s been drinking. Despite being a short, choice-based game, with a female magic-user pursued by witch hunters, though, Inside has a very different vibe than Witchfinders. It doesn’t attempt to locate itself in any particular historical milieu, for one thing, and it’s much puzzlier to boot. Perhaps most importantly, rather than a low-key day of visiting neighbors and creating workaday hexes, in Inside the protagonist is up against the wall, facing death at the hands of her inquisitorial pursuers.
The mechanics of this, I confess, were a little obscure to me. The game opens in medias res, with the player coming to awareness but not given much information about where they are or what’s going on – or even who they are, because you’re apparently playing not the witch herself but her familiar spirit. This displacement or bifurcation of identities winds up being effective, as it allows the game to lampshade the player/protagonist divide, and also sets up odd-couple style bickering that helps keep the game engaging even when the puzzles risk getting a bit dry. The precise nature of the challenges you face also helps keep the plot from cliched territory – after being nearly drowned by the witch-hunters, the protagonist (and you) has retreated into her own mind, and needs to revisit her past, present, and possible futures in order to wake up and escape.
You have a reasonable ability to customize the story; in particular, an early choice lets you establish whether you’re a good witch or a bad witch, or occupy a middle ground somewhere in between. Many puzzles also have alternate solutions, with a quick, selfish answer typically juxtaposed against a more laborious, selfless one, with concomitant implications on the plot and ending. The witch is also unique in that she’s married, and by choosing snide or supportive comments, you can do a little bit of characterization of the relationship (I wanted a lot more of this, but in fairness, I think I’m way more excited about marital-dynamics simulations than is the target audience).
This well-considered set-up didn’t feel quite as engaging to me as I’d hoped, though. Partially this is because I found decoding the dialogue between the witch and her familiar occasionally challenging to decode – they use different font colors, but to my slightly-color-blind-eyes, they amount to a somewhat brighter and a somewhat duller shade of beige, and there are no dialogue tags making clear who’s saying what, so I frequently found myself losing the thread of conversation and having to double-check who was saying what. Partially this is because the puzzles sometimes felt simultaneously overly laborious – there’s an alchemy one that’s cool in theory, but requires a lot of clicking to get through – and overly forgiving – I flubbed an early puzzle, only for the game to institute a do-over and automatically solve it on my behalf, which made me question what it even needed me for in the first place.
Still, as a reasonably short game, these faults didn’t do too much to undermine my enjoyment – Inside puts enough of a spin on a common premise to feel sufficiently unique, and it was fun to try to draw a line between the different versions of the protagonist I encountered in the various vignettes. Some tightening up of the gameplay, and cleaning up of the aesthetic experience, would certainly make it a stronger entry, but what’s here is still solidly worth playing.
A zany my-first-parser type game, December 16, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Everyone who writes parser IF must, if I have my causaility right, have had a first game where they taught themselves to write parser IF. Traditionally, these games fall into two categories: my-dumb-apartment games that turn some familiar location in the author’s life into the backdrop for a series of puzzles that gradually run through the key features of the language, or games that superficially adapt some currently-popular bit of media and use it as the backdrop for a series of puzzles etc. (personally, I went for option B, working on a House of Leaves pastiche that thankfully never got nearly close enough to completion to tempt me into trying to release it). These games aren’t necessarily always bad, but they are almost always inessential, important only insofar as they hopefully will lead to other, more interesting games later on in the author’s IF career.
The signs that Campus Invaders is a teach-myself-IF game are pretty clear if you know what to look for. It’s set in a school, which I’m guessing is the author’s school, where aliens have attacked the protagonist’s game design class – there are twists here, but we’re recognizably in the my-dumb-apartment subgenre. There’s a small map, relying on cardinal directions. There’s a put-X-in-Y puzzle, a lighting puzzle, and unlock-door-with-key puzzle, a give-item-to-NPC puzzle… and all the puzzles fit together into a linear chain, with NPCs or the narrator spelling out exactly what you need to do at each stage.
With that said, Campus Invaders is a pretty solid example of the form. Another frequent hallmark of such games is that they’re buggy as all get-out, but here the worst thing I ran into was a line saying that “in the Doctor Eve Sturgeon’s car is a solar battery” – not bad. The prose also has a zippy, goofy charm that doesn’t take itself too seriously but doesn’t go too over-the-top zany (it appears to be translated from an Italian original, and while there are occasions where the syntax or word choice are a little wobby, that mostly just adds to its easygoing charm). Importantly, the author also knows not to wear out the game’s welcome – there’s little unneeded scenery, the simple plot is easy to follow, and it ends before the player has a chance to get bored.
Do games like this really need to be published and entered into IF Comp? Well, probably no, though see the spoiler text below for a potential caveat to that. But so long as they are, it’d be no bad thing if they were all as well put-together as Campus Invaders.
There is one aspect of the game that’s potentially interesting, but it spoils the one surprise in the game, so I’m spoiler-blocking it – if you’re planning on playing it, I’d wait to read this until you’ve reached the ending:
(Spoiler - click to show)In the ending text, the game gives you a password – deuterium – that allows you to “access the secret section of the game.” This is somewhat of an overblown label, since typing that just gets you an author’s note, which confirms that the game was written as part of a university event. But the author also suggests that they now view this game as a platform for crowdsourced expansion – winning players are invited to write in with ideas for new plot elements and puzzles, which will then be incorporated into a Campus Invaders 2.0 release next year. This is an interesting idea – not far off from Cragne Manor, from a certain point of view. And I can see how if you’re proposing the IF equivalent of stone soup, it makes sense to start out without anything too fancy or idiosyncratic, the better to allow the additions to shine. On the other hand – if you have to start out by trying the soup when there’s just the stone in there, it’s not going to be very tasty yet.
A muddy meditation on grief, December 16, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
In one or another of my reviews, I think I’ve said that what I’m generally trying to do here is look at what a game seems to be saying, then engage with that somehow; depending on the work, that might mean analyzing whether or how the game meets that goal, or talking about my personal response to the questions it raises, or whatever seems most interesting or productive to talk about. But that’s the starting point: what is the author and/or game getting at?
Where things get difficult for me is when I finish a game and I’m not sure how to answer that question. Sometimes the general gist is clear, but there’s something about the implementation that muddies things up, so that’s a reasonable jumping off point. And sometimes what’s being communicated is mostly just: this is a game, have fun with it. That’s fine too! But INK represents the most challenging category; I get the themes the author is working with, and some of how the game folds, spindles, and mutilates them through its interactivity makes sense to me. But the different pieces are stubbornly failing to come into focus for me, and I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a reflection on the work, or on the reviewer (who, having just had a flu shot, is maybe having a hard time getting anything to come into focus right now). I suppose there’s nothing for it but to jump in and describe how I experienced the game, but apologies if this review winds up even less edifying than is typical.
Starting with the basics, INK is the author’s second entry in the Comp, after U.S. Route 160 – props for industriousness! – but the focus on loss, the two strike me as fairly different. For one think, INK invokes poetry more than prose in how it presents its words. For the most part there are complete sentences, and only a few rhymes, but line breaks make the reader pause and engage with the writing in a slower way:
Everyone talks about starting over
but it’s all fluff and no detail
nothing about the process of
rewiring your brain
As this excerpt indicates, the story is all about a protagonist coming to grips with the death of a loved one – I believe it’s a romantic partner, but I could be misremembering whether the possibility of a family member or friend is left open. In fact the game is short on specifics – who the protagonist is, where the action is taking place, even what happened to the dead woman – which usually I dislike, but wasn’t as much of a barrier as usual for me here. That’s because while the narrative may be vague, the mental and emotional contours of the protagonist’s grief are drawn with firm assurance. The above-quoted bit rings extremely true to me, and there’s a later scene where you attend a support group that also hits hard:
You don’t look anyone in the eyes
It’s easier to pretend there’s no one listening
But the words are scraped out
And suddenly you can’t stop
You’re telling every anecdote you can find
About the wildflowers she’d find
The little flecks of green in her eyes
How she was the purest kind of kind
She lives again in the pauses between breath
The game’s inciting incident is also strong, and similarly seems to me to say something true about the experience of losing someone. The protagonist is haunted by a letter that she thinks her dead loved one wrote to her before she died; she catches glimpses of it, finally finds it at a park bench that was special to the two of them, then brings it back to her home and gives it pride of place on the mantle while deciding whether or not to read it. It’s a potent image for what we carry of those who’ve passed on before us – in the author’s notes for my last game, I talked about the joys and sorrows of having a mental model of one’s predecessors still rattling around one’s brain – and also resonates with the more concrete hope that there’s something, anything left of your dead loved one that can still speak to you, share a new word, so that the relationship isn’t completely and eternally finished.
The envelope isn’t just an envelope, though. It’s printed with a dark, menacing ink that bleeds through the paper and infects the protagonist’s thoughts, before eventually becoming concrete in a distorted image of the dead woman who takes up residence with the protagonist. This fantastical twist provides the spur for interactivity, as there are quite a lot of choices and quite a lot of branching. You can accept help or wallow in self-pity, you can resign yourself to your new living situation or try to reject the inky double.
And I confess, here’s where the game lost me, because I started to lose track of the metaphor. Is this about having one’s life taken over by the memory of your loved one, so you can’t move forward and engage with those who are still living? If that’s the case, wouldn’t the double have positive qualities that lure you away from the present, instead of the twisted parody that’s actually presented? And the endings also diverge, from resigning yourself to the horrible situation, to trying but failing to escape it, to become an ink creature yourself; again, I had trouble unpacking how to relate the incidents of the plot to the emotional core that gave the first half of the game its power.
I repeat, this could just be me being dull and suffering from flu-shot side effects – so I’m underconfident offering an assessment or any feedback on how the game could have worked better for me. I will tentatively say that I think there might have been a bit too much choice, and a bit too much openness to the narrative. There’s a thin line between an allegory that’s too obvious and one that’s too diffuse, but when you’re tapping into something as elemental as INK is I think there’s more upside to marshalling one’s powers and pushing for the catharsis or resolution that seems most fitting, rather than frittering away momentum on too many different dendrites of story. Again, though, this could be wrong and if I’d played the game in other circumstances I might have thought it held together beautifully. At any rate, while it didn’t completely land for me, the well-observed depiction of mourning and evocative central image mean that I still found INK a rewarding experience.
A raggedy but endearing kid's story, December 15, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
The randomizer is up to its tricks again, as I played this second choice-based game pitched at kids right after the somewhat-similar Esther’s. The Tin Mug also has a classic children’s-book premise – here, the setting is the big, cozy kitchen in what feels like an English country house, and the main character is a mug who comes to life on its birthday (…it’s probably best not to think about what that implies about drinking-vessel re/production in this world) and gets into a series of high-spirited adventures, alongside various other sentient bits of cookware, while the big people go on with their day (mostly) oblivious. The juxtaposition with Esther’s didn’t do it any favors, since it’s not quite as cleverly designed and cleanly implemented, but the comparison is a bit unfair: the Tin Mug is also a winning little tale in its own right.
Let me get the negatives out of the way first, so I can focus on the positives. The prose is generally clean, but there are a couple of small typos, including in the first paragraph (the main character is called “the tin Mug” a couple of times, which surely can’t be right). The art is inconsistent, sometimes cute (I liked the little spoon and the illustration of the (Spoiler - click to show)crest the mug gets at the end), but sometimes really awkward looking (I’m thinking especially of the two kids). And the use of interactivity feels clunky – it often feels like there’s a lot of text in between choice points, and your decisions sometimes come off low-impact, frequently only adding a short paragraph or two of narratively-irrelevant incident before returning to the main, linear thread of the story.
Within those constraints, though, there’s also a lot to enjoy. The Tin Mug makes for a dynamic protagonist, as it’s kind but also rambunctious, so there’s always something going on – this also plays well with the choice mechanics, since the Mug’s characterization felt like it gave me permission to pick to more interesting options rather than the more straight-ahead ones. The Mug’s energy is also conveyed well by the prose, which, while it does have the occasional overly-elaborated sentence, has a sly sense of humor. Here’s how the Mug’s rival in a race around the kitchen counter is described:
"the eggcup…though he did not know it was a relative of the trophies on the mantelpiece in the dining room. Sport was in his blood."
The door-mat’s flirtation with the dessert spoon was also a humorous highlight (how many games could you type that sentence and have it make sense!)
The plot is quite episodic, with three or four sequences that each feel like they could stand alone reasonably well, boasting satisfying setups, elaborations, and payoffs. This injects some welcome novelty through the course of the game’s fifteen-minute running time, which is a good decision – since, appropriately for the genre, no individual element has much depth, more incident and new characters help keep the momentum up. This does mean that I thought the game was coming to an end once or twice before it actually did – but when it did come, the ending boasted an unexpected callback to the very opening, which left me smiling. That’s the Tin Mug in a nutshell – it’s a little bit ragged, sure, but it’s got enthusiasm and is sometimes more clever than it appears.
A unique city on the brink, December 15, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Gather round folks, for I am about to propose a parabolic theory of metaphors: on one side, you have metaphors that are effective because they’re subtly allusive, creating a tickle of almost-recognition at the back of your subconscious that you can’t ignore. As the metaphor gets more obvious, it gets more plodding, the idea clearer but weighed down by impossible-to-overlook clumsiness. If a writer’s bold enough, though, they can push past this trough, build the image up until it’s a monolith, commanding attention and understanding, imparting power through sheer avoirdupois. So it is with Italo Calvino’s Octavia, a city suspended above an abyss by a constantly-eroding web of chains and ropes that anchors it – for now – to the mountainous heights, a city that’s the setting for, and also main character in, Hanging by Threads (while the debt of inspiration isn’t mentioned in a credits or about passage so far as I could see, and it’s renamed Oban, there’s a hat-tip of acknowledgment to Calvino in one of the game’s branches).
In this short, choice-based game, you play tourist in this impossible place. Brought to its precincts by a guide and told you can only bring one object with you, you have your choice of areas to sightsee – delving down into the lower passages of the city, ironically enough, gives you a vista of the emptiness below, while climbing up will give you a taste of how the city lives, from its bars where you drink clouds to bazaars that run on the honor system. Many of these scenes are exotic and compelling (there’s a glimpse of Oban’s funerary customs that’s especially worth witnesses), but over all of them looms the inevitability that some day, one of the shakes that periodically rattle the city will bring everything crashing down.
Described like this, the game sounds awesome – to go back to parabola thing, you couldn’t think of a clearer metaphor for the trapeze-swinger’s ignorance of mortality we all need to conjure up to go about our daily lives, but because it’s so obvious, and the imagery of the city so rich, as an idea it really works. Unfortunately, the prose often doesn’t live up to this promise, with some awkwardness in the writing undercutting its effectiveness. Like, here’s an exchange between the protagonist and a local priest who’s pushing back on the idea that the city’s doom doesn’t need to be inevitable:
“Don’t you see it a bit excessive? Has no one thought about how to save the city? Keeping it afloat. I suppose the network could be repaired, right?”
“Sacrilege!” The priest turns red and lets out a large amount of air through his nose. “This city was meant to have an ending, we are no one to contrary God’s wishes. Don’t let those hippies brainwash you, this is the way” he says pointing the chasm.
Again, the idea – of a religion so dedicated to humility and the status quo that it endorses mass suicide – has a lot of force, but the references to hippies, the substitution of contrary for contradict, and the overly-conclusory nature of the exchange means that force is dissipated.
My other complaint about the game – well, the rest of this is spoilery, albeit for the end of a game that takes maybe ten minutes per playthrough: (Spoiler - click to show) pretty soon after you start your exploration of the city – usually after I’d been to two locations of the eight or so on offer – you see the following text pop up without warning, and without any apparent connection to whatever dialogue choice or navigation option you’d just selected:
"My surroundings seem strange, as if everything is moving and I can’t stand, so I sit where I am. There’s no doubt now. I don’t have time to watch what the others are doing, and being honest I don’t care, they should be ready for it, and I shouldn’t be living this situation."
And then after a minute of looking at that, you get a thank you for playing screen, at which point I realized that what this cryptic text is saying is that the city’s fallen, right after we started our visit. I really don’t like this choice! It encourages replays, I suppose – as does the choice of which object to bring in, though I found the use of the binoculars at least to be underwhelming, since it just gives access to a view that your character declines to describe in an epic copout – but it makes each visit comically short, and it also winds up negating this incredible metaphor. The point of the image, the way the player relates it to their own experience, is that the city could collapse at any moment; if it does collapse, that’s no longer a metaphor, that’s a disaster.
I’ll repeat that the overall idea here, and many of the specific ideas too, are very fine indeed. With some more polish on the writing, and subbing the rocks fall, everybody dies ending, it could be something special. As it is, though, it sits too close to the middle of the parabola of metaphor to be entirely successful.
A bland first game with glimmers of promise, December 13, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There’s a bit in the British sitcom Extras where Sir Ian McKellen, playing a parodic version of himself, goes on an extended monologue laying out his acting method – which in this case means he explains, at length, that he is not actually a wizard, but he pretended to be one, and people wrote lines for him in a script, which he said, while he imagined that he was actually a wizard and acted the way he pictured the wizard might act.
(The bit is funnier when Ian McKellen does it).
I was put in mind of this skit by one of the pieces of introductory text in The Hidden King’s Tomb:
"The goal of this game is to escape the dungeon. You’ll do this by exploring, gaining an understanding of the dungeon in order to find and navigate towards the exit, and clearing any obstacles that stand in your way. These obstacles can be thought of as “doors” opened by “keys,” though these “doors” and “keys” are usually disguised as other objects entirely. For example, a key could be a secret password used to gain entry to a thieves” hideout, a rope used to climb a cliff, or a lantern used to light a dark room. These are puzzles."
This is hard to gainsay, but also seems to be belaboring the obvious. That maybe holds true for the game as a whole, which is about as straightforward a piece of extruded text-adventure product as you’re likely to see. There are some hints of more distinctive writing, as well as some implementation issues albeit nothing you wouldn’t expect to see in something from a first-time author, so I’d definitely play another game by him. But as for this one, it left me asking myself “well yeah, this is how this kind of game works. Is that it?”
Partially this is due to the game’s tomb-raiding premise, which goes back at least as far as Infidel (though the instant piece lacks that game’s ironic bite; the graverobbing is played straight). While that’s a trusty old setup, it’s not going to set the world on fire – it all comes down to the quality of the traps, the cleverness of the puzzles, and the splendor of the treasures to bring the setup to life. But what’s here checks the minimum of each box. There are three tombs to loot, but they’re all completely unguarded; there’s a little flooding mechanism and a secret passage that provides a bit of a gimmick, but it’s very straightforward and that’s the only actual puzzle; and as for treasures, well, here’s an excerpt from my transcript:
>i
You are carrying:
fourteen lit candles (providing light)
three treasures
The Book of the Dead
The Hidden King’s sword
some wrappings
some bones
>x treasure
You see nothing special about the treasure.
Ooof.
Beyond the bland writing and design, the coding, while competent, could use some polish. The treasures aren’t the only thing lacking a description, and there’s lots of unimplemented scenery in most rooms in this small map. Sometimes default reporting rules aren’t suppressed when there’s a custom one that should take priority, and the corpses of the royal family – at least one of which you need to loot in order to complete the game – are implemented as containers, leading to awkwardness like this:
> open coffin
(first removing the lit candle)
Taken.
Resting in the coffin is a rag-wrapped skeleton.
You open The Hidden King’s Coffin, revealing The Hidden King (wrapped).
> search skeleton
You can’t see inside, since The Hidden King is closed.
> open king
You pull the wrappings from The Hidden King, revealing The Hidden King’s sword and The Book of the Dead.
Again, this is all quite forgivable for a first game, and there were some descriptions I quite liked – beyond the Hidden King, the tomb is also the final repose of the Furtive Child and the Secret Queen, and something about those proper-noun titles carries an evocative hint of mystery, for one thing. I’m guessing the author learned a lot from making it, and entering it into the Comp, so I wouldn’t be surprised if their second game is worth checking out; sadly, Tomb of the Hidden King isn’t.
A gag-game that could use more polish , December 13, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Credit where it’s due – it’s hard to come up with a good game title, but “An Alien’s Mistaken Impressions of Humanity’s Pockets” is a doozy. It’s slightly awkward and wordy, true, but that’s consonant with the comedically-rich premise it encapsulates, of over-earnest scientists drawing over-confident and overly-detailed conclusions from inadequate information, generalizing about our society based on the random detritus that’s happened to fetch up in our pockets. I’d seen the name when I first skimmed the list of games in the Comp, and I was excited to see it come up relatively quickly in my queue.
Now that I’ve reached it and played it, does it live up to its name and my expectations? Well, yes and no. The plot and premise are exactly as it says on the tin; there’s some extremely light choice-based puzzling as you help an alien named Gaffor (he refers to his people as “aliens”, which is confusing!) do experiments on ordinary household objects to identify their purpose, with their inevitable incorrect guesses played for laughs. But once I was in, I realized two things: 1) there are a ton of typos, including lots of misspellings, inconsistent capitalization, and missing spaces, and a few small bugs (nothing game-breaking, but several sequences that seem like they should only fire once are repeatable ad infinitum) that make the experience less pleasant than I’d hoped, and 2) I’d radically misapprehended how the humor would work.
This is on me rather than the game, I suppose, but going in I’d assumed that this would be a work of satire – like, the aliens would think that our smartphones were religious icons we hold in high veneration to remind us of our connection to transcendent reality – why else would we never let go of them – and conclude that 2001:A Space Odyssey was a documentary about the monolith in whose image they were created. That’s a not very clever gag, I admit – but still, given this setup it seems like you should be able to do something with some teeth in it.
That’s not really part of the author’s agenda, though – the aliens just confuse things by e.g. thinking clicky pens are used for tattooing or maybe as hole-punches, or that credit and debit cards were pieces in a dominoes-style card game. These confusions are played for laughs (as well as being the basis for a desultory puzzle or two) but the jokes are at the level of the Little Mermaid calling a fork a dinglehopper and trying to comb her hair with it. I didn’t find them especially funny, I have to confess, though partially that’s because I was distracted by the omnipresent typos and awkward grammar, which would have made even the funniest gag hard to land.
This is an inoffensive game – and the ending credits suggest it was made as a class project – and as I said, my disappointment was largely about me going in with incorrect assumptions. The few puzzles are reasonably designed and pleasant to solve, boasting at least a little variety so you don’t get bored with them even though they’re all quite simple, so that’s a solid base to start from. There’s nothing wrong with a short gag game that isn’t going for social comment, and the author’s clearly mastered the art of coming up with a grabby title! Still, the game desperately needs a fair bit more spit and polish to get the prose up to snuff – it’s hard to enjoy what is here when the reader is wincing at a typo or grammar error every other line.
A new engine moving through its growing pains, December 13, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I beta tested this game, and didn't replay its final IFComp version so caveat lector).
I have a bit of history with the Perplexity engine that powers Headlights. A custom parser that aims to provide a natural-language approach to IF so that it can be played via voice (though I’ve admittedly never tried this out), I first encountered it in last Comp’s Kidney Kwest, an educational game aimed at helping kids with kidney disease manage their conditions; despite its humanitarian aims, I cold-bloodedly lambasted it for running slowly, requiring finicky syntax (you couldn’t even drop “the” when referring to objects without the parser complaining), and neglecting basic conveniences offered by mature IF languages (no pronouns, no UNDO, awkward disambiguation). Then this year’s Spring Thing boasted Baby on Board, a comedy about dropping a kid off at day-care, which I similarly found weighed down by an engine that made things way too hard, with few upsides to justify its idiosyncrasies.
So when I saw the author of a new game using Perplexity asking for testers on the forum, part of me groaned, but a fortunately-bigger part of me realized it’d probably be better to be inside the tent peeing out rather than continuing to stay outside peeing in, as LBJ used to say (well, in slightly saltier language). And I have to say, Headlights is a great improvement over what’s come before, at least for my playstyle. At a technical level, it runs notably faster, with barely any noticeable pauses on my machine, and while the game still accepts more complex sentence structures that mimic human speech, typical IF commands are catered to as well. And because the game also offers more traditional gameplay – use-object-A-on-object-B puzzle-solving, for the most part – I could actually see the advantage of some of Perplexity’s key features, like the ability to ask where you left certain items or otherwise interrogate the game about the state of the world.
The flip side of these moves towards the norm is that the scenario is also less novel than in the two previous Perplexity games – it’s a simple series of deserted, dreamlike environments setting up a twist you’ll see coming a mile away, with straightforward puzzles that help pace the experience appropriately but don’t have much inherent interest. And some of the parser’s remaining weirdness – like its tendency to expose ugly game-mechanical constructs at the slightest provocation when they’d better be kept discreetly out of sight – undercuts mimesis. I’m still waiting on the Perplexity game that wouldn’t be better off just being implemented in TADS or Inform, but I think Headlights shows a path towards getting there: firm up the fundamentals, and once the base is solid, lean into a design that takes advantage of the system’s idiosyncratic strengths.
Food is terrible and the portions are small, December 12, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I sometimes worry that I give short games short shrift – I mean I guess in a way that would be appropriate, as often there’s just less to say about a game that says less and in the attention-economy it’s easy to equate length with value. But still, there’s a lot to admire in a game that knows how long it should be, knows that the 90-second punk-rock version of a song is often strictly better than the 12-minute prog-rock version. In last year’s Comp, I adored some shorter games, like Funicular Simulator 2021, Closure, and My Gender is a Fish (I only just now realized that sometime in the last year my memory had invisibly renamed this game to I am a Fish, which of course would be the title of the inevitable genderqueer Faulkner mashup) – they didn’t need to maunder on endlessly to make an impression.
Sometimes, though, short games are too short to adequately develop their ideas, and sadly, such is the case with 4 Edith + 2 Niki. Per the blurb, this is a dating sim, implemented in basic-Twine style, though it takes a couple minutes to reveal itself as such. You start outside a shanty, given a choice of whether to enter or stay outside. If you choose the latter, you’re treated to a series of increasingly random vignettes with questionable grammar, before being railroaded into going outside. Here’s the last, so you get a flavor:
"You decide to stay longer. A horrible young man appears and names him a coffee-mouthed boy. Marvel starts entertaining with stories, especially the X-Men, Iron Man, and Dr. Strange sequels. After a while, though, it’s just Enter…"
Once inside, it turns out the shanty is a spacious office, with six different sub-locations to explore; two have people named Niki inside them, and four have people named Edit (not Edith), each with a different number to distinguish them. The various Edits will ask you on dates or mention an event they’re going to, and after visiting all the rooms you decide which of the four to pursue, at which point the game ends with a different, but identically-cynical, ending involving you getting coupled-up with that iteration of Edit. Like, here’s the one where you go get Slovak food with Edit 1 (I’m like a quarter Slovak, and since that’s an especially random ethnicity even by the low-stakes standards of Eastern Europe you’d better believe I picked that first when I saw it was an option):
"You decide to go to the Museum Village, where you will meet Edit 1. At first you fuck like rabbits, but less and less often, and you can listen to his head-voiced laughter at his shitty jokes. Plus, by the end, you’re completely silly."
Lest you think this is an outlier, punishing those who foolishly think Slovak food sounds like a good time – lots of love to my grandmother, but so far as I could tell from her cooking, flour dumplings, sausages, and doughy pastries were the highlights of the cuisine – here’s the one where you go to a concert:
"You went to the Anne and the Barbies concert and then you became a couple. Over the years, you realize that she’s a little hysterical, but which woman isn’t. That’s all there is to it."
That sounds pretty misogynist, but maybe it’s a knowing pun, you know like hysterical → hystera → uterus? This is awfully abbreviated to try to draw conclusions from, though, and indeed, that’s how I feel about the game as a whole. Is this meant as a satire of dating sims, making fun of the idea that you make a few low-context choices and you wind up mated for life? Is it trying to say something about the banality of identity in modern society by having all the romantic options have the same name? Is the juxtaposition of dateable Edits and standoffish Nikis (one’s implied to be an ex) getting at the sometimes-arbitrary way people present themselves or don’t present themselves as potential partners? Is the fact that the only option you have is which of these people to date, with remaining self-assuredly single not even a fail state or but-thou-must false choice like the one in the opening, trying to critique the normativity of coupledom, a la Lanthimos’s The Lobster?
I dunno, man, nor do I know what that any of that has to do with Iron Man or TARDIS-like shanties that contain office buildings. It just feels like stuff, and while individual vignettes have some disorienting zip, there’s just not enough here – not enough characters or plot or engagement – for them to cohere into anything with impact.
Detective, detect thyself, December 12, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
A couple days ago, someone slipped a flyer under the windshield wipers of my wife’s car while she was shopping in Target, two pages of densely-packed type fulminating about the horrible pedophilic grooming that our sleepy Southern California school district is inflicting upon our children – it was wall to wall homophobia, transphobia, and racist to boot.
But so anyway the writer of the letter had a lot of complaints about what was being taught in sex ed, and said that I could see for myself the filth that was being crammed down kids’ throats by going to TeenTalk.ca. I figured I would check it out, less because I was expecting to be shocked and more because I wanted to verify a hunch I had based on the URL suffix. Sure enough, not only was the content on TeenTalk.ca completely anodyne (I mean, so long as you don’t have a panic attack at the idea of gay and transgender folks, like, existing), the “About Us” blurb at the very top of the page noted that they were a Winnipeg-based nonprofit that worked across most of Manitoba. They have nothing to do with the California-based organization that uses the same TeenTalk trade name for their programming, and which had actually been tapped to create the materials for the district.
I wrote what I thought was, under the circumstances, a remarkably temperate letter informing the woman who made the flyer that while by my lights she was advancing a hateful, ignorant agenda, at least we could hopefully agree that spreading blatant misinformation was in no one’s interest, and, since the peccadilloes of those modern Sodomites called Manitobans could be of no possible relevance to Californians like us, it would behoove her to update her flyers.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what I got, which was a reply doubling down, saying that she 1000% meant to link to that Canadian site, because as the flyer said, it was just giving people an idea of the type of thing they were teaching down here, and the district was keeping the actual curriculum so tightly locked up that this was the only way to spread the word (none of this was true; the flyer specifically said these were the folks making the curriculum, and if you search TeenTalk with the name of the school district, the first hit that comes up is a Google Drive containing the actual slides and lesson plans the district is using).
I bring this up in the context of The Grown-Up Detective Agency – well, mostly because I find the anecdote darkly hilarious. But the fig leaf of relevance I’m using to crowbar it in is that the game’s protagonist, 21-year-old lesbian detective Bell Park, is suffering from a species of the same mind-blowingly-implausible and toxic self-delusion as afflicts my right-wing interlocutor (she’s also from Canada, so there) (Bell I mean, not the DeSantis groupie).
Bell was once a kid detective, you see, solving crimes a la Encyclopedia Brown or Nancy Drew, and in the course of one of her cases realized she was gay and even started dating an amazing girlfriend – much of which is depicted in the author’s previous games, though I haven’t played any of them. But somewhere along the way, as she got older, the detective game started to curdle her, making her cynical about other people but mostly herself. As the game opens, she’s got a desk in a Toronto coworking space, a favorite mall-court chicken place, and not much else, cut out of the lives of all her old friends and ex-partners and convincing herself it’s for the best. Two visitors might just jolt her out of this rut, though – one is an old crush, turning to Bell because her fiancé has gone missing, while the other is herself as she was at 12 years old, a plucky, can-do kid vomited up by the space-time continuum for what’s surely some reason. Can they crack the case?
This is an all-time amazing premise, made all the more compelling by the intertitle:
PART 1: THE HETEROSEXUAL DISAPPEARANCE OF MARK G
Reader, I laughed, and then laughed harder when the old flame’s description of her in-fact-incredibly-het boyfriend made me feel completely attacked, from his boring hair to his normcore fashion sense. While I usually enjoy comedy games, very few of them manage to get more than a wry chuckle out of me, but this game had me giggling at least once per scene. Like, here’s the two Bells interrogating someone about the photo of a suspect who’s wearing some very incongruous headwear:
ADULT BELL: Where’d he get the crown?
BRETT: Let’s just say I’ve got a connection at Medieval Times. (He lowers his voice.) And you didn’t hear this from me, but the jousting is rigged.
KID BELL: You should tell them the menu has too many New World crops for a medieval European banquet.
Speaking of self-delusion, I’m going to spend the next couple of days trying to convince myself this is a joke I’ve actually made.
While it’s very, very funny, though, Grown-Up Detective also wears its heart on its sleeve. Indeed, if I have a critique it’s that the case that’s notionally the jumping-off point for the adventure quickly recedes into a mere justification for the two Bells to bounce off of each other. Adult Bell is frustrated by her younger version’s naivete, while Kid Bell can’t understand why her grown-up self is so cranky to be living her dream – it’s a standard dynamic when flatly stated, but the dialogue between the two of them is very well-written, always pithy and with plenty of punch lines but enlivened by real emotion. Plus it turns out that there are some root causes to their tension – in particular, Kid Bell is outraged that Adult Bell has let a great relationship slip through her fingers, for what seems the dumbest of reasons.
All of this is played out in an attractive, low-friction interface; there are nicely-done cartoon portraits of all the main characters, the prose efficiently sets the stage for each part of the investigation, and it moves you quickly through dialogue, which typically progresses through a series of forward-linking choices rather than looping back into trees that need to be laboriously explored. I found I played this one really quickly, because the pacing is excellent – each scene was just long enough to get me eager for the next one, and progressed the Bells’ character arcs in meaningful ways as well as providing plenty of comment on the challenges of growing up gay or the vicissitudes gentrification has inflicted on Toronto.
I don’t think it’s possible to fail the case, which despite a bunch of twists and turns past a certain point feels like it largely solves itself, and again – without spoiling too much – reveals itself to have much lower stakes than what’s ostensibly the B-plot of how Kid Bell became Adult Bell. While the detective frame becomes a bit of an afterthought in narrative terms, though, it’s necessary to make the character business work. For all that Adult Bell thinks she’s a hard-boiled detective, she’s let depression prevent her from truly seeing her situation for what it is; Kid Bell, still analytic to a fault, runs down the clues, pushes back against her subject’s self-delusions, and eventually gets her to realize the truth. Would that everyone was afforded such a chance to let go of the lies they tell themselves – the world might be a different place.
An excellent gender-dystopic storyletfest, December 12, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp)
Autumn Chen has had the kind of year that makes one reevaluate one’s standards for productivity. Her impressively-detailed debut in the Comp, last year’s A Paradox Between Worlds, came tenth in a crowded field; New Year’s Eve, 2019, her Spring Thing entry, won nods for Best Writing and Best Characters (and unless I miss my guess, didn’t miss out on a Best In Show ribbon by very much); and just a month or two back, she worked with Emily Short to recover and reimplement Bee, one of Short’s “lost” games.
Coming now to the Archivist and the Revolution, I think it’s that last effort that’s most relevant. Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a lot of continuity with the two previous games: we’ve got a ChoiceScript-aping game (actually implemented in Dendry this time) with a slightly overwhelming amount of well-written content; we’ve got a cast where just about everybody sympathetic is a (trans or cis) lesbian; we’ve got a plethora of endings. But the narrative structure is largely procedural with randomly-available and discrete storylet-like passages playing a significant role in what the player understands the plot to be, and the interface foregrounds a resource-management frame where narrative actions produce mechanical rewards that in turn feed into new narrative consequences – it’s all very reminiscent of late-period Short (has anyone done the definitive charting of the arc of her career? I mean the Emily Short who’s interested in procedural text and works for Failbetter).
Think I’m reaching? Check the name of the main character then get back to me.
(Post-Comp update: the author replied to this review and confirmed that I was, in fact, reaching)
This isn’t a critique, I should make clear – far from it! Chen’s take on this structure feels assured and very much her own, with a dystopic, genderpunk setting quite far from anything I’ve seen in Emily Short’s work, and her trademark emotional palette of anxious grays and exhausted blues, illuminated by the occasional miraculous, vital yellow, is very much in effect. The mood is sketched with an evocative, efficient opening:
"The light outside the window was bright and artificial, emanating from a poor simulacrum of the sun hanging on the metal ceiling above. Rows of green and violet macroalgal trees emulated an ancient streetscape, the scene completed by the humans walking by. It was the equivalent of midday in the city without a sun."
(I’d forgotten that there’s literally no sun. Metaphors!)
In this downbeat arcology, the protagonist, Em, works as a freelance archivist, working to recover information have encoded in the genetic material of ambient bacteria – this world has suffered from cycle after cycle of horrific war and violence that appears to have destroyed most traditional forms of information storage, so previous generations of scientists have cannily developed this technique to leverage the hardiness of unicellular life and send messages-in-a-biological-bottle to a future age. That idea, on its own, would be beautiful – except that the shores were these bottles have fetched up are dark ones indeed. After the latest convulsion of violence, the city (and maybe the world as a whole?) has been taken over by a reactionary, oppressive party that brutally enforces traditional gender roles – they’ve recently put down an abortive uprising that Em, a trans woman, took some vague part in – and doesn’t seem able to provide even reasonably economically-productive residents with a decent social minimum.
What this means is that you’ve got rent to pay, and to earn money you need to use your skills to decrypt your pick of two or three of a randomly-selected set of snippets of genetic information, and then send the resulting information to the archive (you do this by clicking, there are no cryptography puzzles or anything). Sometimes the information is garbled or no longer meaningful; sometimes it contains important scientific information; sometimes it contains the personal musings of the recently-suppressed revolutionaries; and sometimes it hearkens back to the very dawn of history, and the events that put the city on track to become the hell that it is. And then you pay for food and hormone treatments, hope you’ve netted enough on the day to be on track to make rent, and do it again the next day, with a new set of randomly-selected snippets waiting on your work account.
The game isn’t limited to just this loop, though. You get opportunities to decompress or interact with others in between, or even instead of, shifts of decryption. Some of these are minor-key – like trawling the CityNet for news stories (Em, in a display of obvious self-hatred, always reads the comments), or tooling around in a samizdat MMO. Others, though, unfurl into major character arcs, largely centering on two of Em’s former partners – one who’s also trans, but “de-transitioned” to hide from the authorities, and the other who’s raising her and Em’s son – and just from those short descriptions you can tell there’s a lot to dig into. Oh, and there’s also a mutual aid society made up of folks who share her revolutionary past and want to recruit her.
If this sounds overstuffed, that’s because it’s overstuffed. It’s here that the more procedural, storylet-based design proves successful. There’s no way you could see a fraction of the content on offer in just one playthrough, and you’re somewhat at the mercy of the RNG because what snippets are presented to you will have a significant impact on how much you can guide the story. And while it’s clear that you can focus more on one partner or the other (or neither) depending on your choices – simple enough – there are also ongoing plot threads woven into the DNA decryption. Some of this is game-mechanical, since at the beginning you lack the technical skills necessary to analyze certain cryptographic algorithms, but you can pick up the needed techniques if you find certain snippets that provide a how-to guide. But it’s also narrative, too – there are prefixes to the snippets that I think mark each as belonging to a particular genre, from deep history to the suppressed diaries of revolutionaries to literally Wikipedia. You can lean more towards one set rather than another, but ultimately, you’ll have a very hard time exhausting even one while spinning all the other plates you’ve got to keep an eye on.
This could be a recipe for incoherence, but I found the engine was tuned to create a satisfying story regardless of what was surely the suboptimal course I charted. I began by largely ignoring my job to meet all the different characters I could, then realized I was going to be short on my bills and overcorrected into work mode, then stumbled across a sequence of snippets that put into question many of the things I’d assumed to be bedrock truths of the city, then went broke nonetheless. At the end, my version of Em achieved an unexpected sort of apotheosis, riding a series of twists I saw coming just before they hit, and leavening the grimness of the story in a way I didn’t think would be possible. It felt lovely and inevitable, but it was only one of nine endings! I doubt they’re all as satisfying, but even so, the way I was able to retroactively construct a clear, clean narrative arc out of so many randomly-generated pieces, quite sure that I missed more words than I saw, was little short of magical.
Do I have complaints? By now I feel like y’all know me, I always have complaints. First, for all that the setting is established as violently repressive, in the game itself didn’t feel much sense of immediate threat, even when choosing somewhat-risky options, and the very real threat posed by Em’s rising rent comes off impersonal and inevitable, rather than terrifying – hell, even the online trolls seem significantly less vicious than the kind you see in real life. Beyond that, there’s a closing revelation that doesn’t quite play fair with Em’s backstory. And in a world where my morning paper included Russian missiles raining on Ukrainian civilians, Los Angeles City Councilors taped being absurdly racist while dividing up the city’s districts, and Iranian geronto-theocrats murdering dozens of women and children to prop up their illegitimate regime, the idea that the world’s conflicts would reduce down to the single point of gender identity seems a bit hard to credit – I’m certainly not complaining about the game foregrounding what it’s about and reading the rhetoric of various contemporary right-wing ideologues you’d be forgiven for thinking transgender rights is the only contested ground in our society. But still, there might have been opportunities to explore some intersectionalities around race, since Em is depicted as Asian and I don’t think it’s implied that everybody else is, too (in fairness, some of these dynamics might be explored in DNA-storylets that I didn’t find).
Finally, I ran into some bugs. Several were found in the resource-management side of the game, though since, as I previously noted, that’s not where the action is they were fairly low-impact: A few times, I decoded DNA but failed to get a message the next day telling whether I’d classified it correctly and giving me my payment; on one occasion, I’d decoded and archived two sequences but only had one acknowledged, while the other time I’d similarly archived two but saw only blank lines when I clicked the link to check for messages the next day. And the finale sequence opened with a two-paragraph warning that I was behind on my rent and would be evicted if I went another week in arrears, followed immediately by another paragraph telling me actually I was being evicted now.
There were also what seemed like a few narrative glitches, in particular two sequences that seemed to assume information that I don’t think was established on-screen in my playthrough (Em references a leaflet leading her to the mutual aid society, but I never found such a thing, and in one scene where (Spoiler - click to show) K- has a breakdown, as it’s wrapping up she glancingly mentions getting a new job, which Em rolls with without comment despite not having previously known that K- got fired). And I found one dialogue option in the first meeting with the mutual aid society misleading: one of them said something about how I probably wasn’t a government infiltrator, to which I responded “no”, thinking that would be interpreted as agreement – but the game took that to mean refusing their recruitment pitch.
None of these did much to dent my enjoyment of the game – I’m flagging them in the hope they can be ironed out for a post-Comp release, since The Archivist and the Revolution is richly deserving of a second visit after the present frenzy of games wraps up. I’m curious to see how the narrative engine holds up to repeat play, and what happens if I try to focus my energies on a single plot thread rather than playing the field as I did this time out. But even if you just go through the story once, this is a clear highlight of the Comp.
Lovely prose elevates a meditative postapocalyptic story, December 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
January is a postapocalyptic story that puts no interesting spin or distinctive worldbuilding on its hoary premise. The player has absolutely no agency, and the only interactive element is that you can sometimes make the unmotivated choice to read the passages in random rather than chronological order (an option that readers of regular books also have, though understandably they don’t exercise it that often). There’s only one character, outside of the beginning and ending the plot is pretty much just a grab-bag of stuff that happens, and the illustrations that conclude each segment are often a bit amateurish. And speaking of art, the cover, as well as the title and blurb, are at best unexciting and at worst actively off-putting.
It got me more excited than anything else I played in the Comp.
This is another review that’s going to spoil things pretty thoroughly, and there’s at least one thing the game does that I think I would have been upset to know about going in, so I’m once again going to recommend you play January first, then come back here. I found it took a little while for me to settle into it, so even if your first impression isn’t great, give it a half hour to see if you’re able to get on its wavelength – if you can, I think you’ll be glad of it.
Okay, I’ll give one more teaser before getting into the review proper. Here’s a passage from fairly late in the story, when the protagonist, realizing that he doesn’t know what most plants are actually called, decides to just pick the ones that seem to fit:
"He found a sprig of stubby flowers bowered beneath a tree. They huddled together in an unfriendly way, white-petaled, small-eyed, so he called them elderflowers. On the side of the road, fuzzy yellow things sprouted from the earth like uncombed licks of hair. He knew that daisies were yellow, and so daisies they became, and the cat entertained itself by weaving through them, its feathery tail flicking among the flowerheads like it might convince them it belonged.
"Coral tree-buds became peonies; umbrella-wide blooms, dahlias; a weeping of top-heavy bells, willowseeds."
(Spoilers from this point on. But you can now probably guess why I like January. That prose!)
January plays its cards a little close to the chest at first, but seeing the “end of the world” tag in the blurb and the lone shovel in the cover illustration gave me some suspicions. When the first couple of scenes involved a nameless man scavenging through an eerie, lifeless environment with no other living souls around, those suspicions deepened, though I held out hope that this was like a nuclear winter scenario or something (there’s snow on the cover image too!) But no, my fears were proved right soon thereafter when the first zombie reared its ugly, decaying head.
I just don’t get on with zombie stories. Fast, slow, allegorical, supernatural, intimate, blockbuster, it really doesn’t matter – I am down with a comedy zombie, but outside of that very specific special case, if something has zombies in it that’s an instant turn-off. I find gore unpleasant, for one thing, and zombie stuff almost always involves a very blunt form of body horror that I find disgusting but not especially scary. As mindless, relentless antagonists, I feel like they don’t add much narrative interest. And 99 times out of 100, wittingly or not the politics seem to me dumbed-down and retrograde, vindicating the society-shunning “self-reliance” of survivalists, who use violence to reinscribe fear-based patriarchy across the ruins of a failed cosmopolitan society – grosser than any tub of entrails. There are far-distant riffs on zombie stories that I do enjoy, admittedly (like, squint at Battlestar Galactica and you can see the zombie DNA in it, at least for the first season or two), but the original recipe doesn’t appeal.
So getting to that plot point, and realizing I still had another hour and a half of this game left, made my heart sink a little, since I thought I could see exactly where January was headed – a dark, nihilistic slog that would end either with an unsatisfying surrender to the inevitable (my worries on this score deepened substantially once the cat entered the picture), or an implausible, unsatisfying last-minute turn towards optimism. Still, I stuck with it, largely on the strength of the writing. While the opening is quite episodic and not especially creative in terms of the scenarios it presents, January doesn’t waste much time before laying down some well-crafted imagery. Here’s an abandoned train, turned into a shelter by some other survivors:
"The train unfurled from the tunnel like a tongue. The front engine had come to rest half a mile from the mouth of the tunnel, and behind it a long procession of tattered boxcars faded into the dark, their orange paint dulled to sepia and their wheels spiked with weeds. A single oil tanker, bulbous and pale as the head of a cyst, interrupted the straight line of boxcars."
Those details are chosen with care, adjectives sparingly used to pick out what’s important like flecks of white directing the eye in an oil painting. The author uses this literary style to good effect when laying out the various landscapes the protagonist traverses, allowing the reader to glimpse the eerie beauty of the world that comes after this one, but it also is deployed to darker effect, making the zombies’ decaying bodies into aesthetic objects of fascination and revulsion:
"A smaller girl shadowed the window’s bottom panel. The blood hadn’t dripped that far yet; he could see her raw, macilent hands as she dragged herself across the carpet to the window. One of her legs must have sloughed off, or both. She drew close enough to mush her face to the glass, and toothlessly she jawed at it, docked tongue quivering in a cockroach mouth."
This is deeply unpleasant, but it’s a novel way of approaching the subject – the prose holds the zombies at a distance so the reader can contemplate them without the blurring abstraction imposed by adrenaline. Indeed, the protagonist is generally well-armed and competent, and the zombies, while sometimes aggressive, often are portrayed as pathos-inducing and pathetic, almost becoming an especially atmospheric part of the landscape rather than immediate threats:
"And a head, visible now as he approached the window and cut out the sun’s glare. The dead body nuzzled the liquor store window, its hands plastered to the glass, fingers curling at the bottom edge of BEER. With no mandible to contain it, the body’s tongue lolled caninely from its drooping mouth. Harmless. Most of them had forgotten doors."
The style also supports the game’s structure, which is a series of loosely-connected tone poems arranged in a calendar. This is the one place where the player has some say in the text the game provides; at any point in time, you’ll typically have two or three unread days marked on the calendar interface, and you can choose which to turn to next, though as I said above, I’m not sure what reading them out of order would do except needlessly confuse you. There are usually two weeks or so between vignettes, and they often start just as an incident is kicking off, and end before it’s wrapped up, with enough left blurry that attempting to construct the full narrative thread that connects all the dots is a fool’s errand (sometimes reading a later day will open up a new, final page or two in a previously-visited day, which adds more context but typically doesn’t radically revise the player’s understanding of events).
There is one major point of continuity between these sequences, though, and that’s the cat. Early in the game, the protagonist picks up a cat as a companion, and begins to look out for it by getting it food and shelter, and being looked out for by the animal in its turn, as its sensitive hearing and unease around zombies serves as something of an early warning system. Much like the rest of the story, the relationship between the two is predictable in its outlines – we learn from the opening line that the protagonist is fleeing some sort of tragedy, though since this is a zombie story a) we already knew that, and b) we’re also pretty sure what the tragedy was, so it’s through caring for the cat that the protagonist learns to be vulnerable and care for others again. But it’s still very finely drawn, with a light touch that lets the player fill in the blanks, and once I’d realized that this internal dynamic was what January was interested in, rather than positing its zombies as metaphors for capitalism or wanting to comment on the decadence of society or anything like that, I finally relaxed, looking forward to some lovely writing on the way to the clearly-telegraphed end.
And then at the 80% mark, January does something unexpected. All at once, the previously third-person narration switches over to first person, and the flowery prose shifts to a far more grounded style – and this doesn’t just apply prospectively, all the previous entries are rewritten, with a new perspective and new details revealed. This is a jarring change that risks alienating the player, especially so because it’s really the prose that’s the highlight of the first part of the game, so radically altering the writing style risks undercutting the thing that’s drawing the player along, far more so than the comparatively-thin plot and even-thinner interactivity.
Fortunately, the new mode of writing is also very well done, though clearly distinct from what’s come before – it’s comparatively plain in terms of word choice and sentence structure, but the ideas and imagery are still very rewarding:
"I let Cat drink from the cap of my bottle, and watching him lap up the clear water, I thought it was funny how water doesn’t turn blue until there’s enough of it. That it has to grow into itself, like a newborn kitten crawling around blind til it gets the strength to open its eyes."
This just might be a metaphor for how the protagonist sees himself as the story is wrapping up – and the late-in-the-game invocations of Aeneas and Dido also clearly bear some relation to his perception of his role in the originating tragedy. Similarly, there are varying interpretations you can put on the language shift, but one of the simplest is surely just that it reflects the end of a distancing, depersonalized shield the protagonist had erected – and again, despite its slight reticence towards the start, January isn’t trying to be needlessly obscure. But secrecy and concealment aren’t the only route to literary power.
January isn’t faultless. Besides the issues I’ve raised above about genre and interactivity that might prove off-putting to some players, and the art that’s so much less evocative and polished than the prose, it’s also the case that very occasionally the writing gets over its skis – when the protagonist says of a pair of metal scissors that’s grown hot under direct sunlight that “they burned against his ear like a slow-motion boxing, the handle as hot and hard as any father’s hand”, my eyes rolled. But for how many big, big swings the author takes, it’s astonishing how few misses like this there are. It was also astonishing to me that for all the typical aspects of IF that January eschews, I missed basically none of them – this isn’t the sort of game that would be measurably improved by a hunger meter or premature bad endings. If you come to IF largely focused on the interactivity, this one might not be for you, but if the fiction side looms larger for you, there might not be a better game in the Comp.
My city of runes, December 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There have been a lot of cities in this year’s Comp, I’ve noticed – the arboreal paradise of Elvish for Goodbye, the gentrifying Toronto of Grown-Up Detective Agency, the dying arcology of Archivist and the Revolution, the city-of-Damocles of Hanging by Threads – but I reckon Conduin, the desert metropolis that’s both setting and star of Prism, is the one to beat. The game’s got characters and a plot and significant choices, all which work perfectly well, but it’s this fantastical city at the center of the work, with the story continually circling around the questions of what it is, where it came from, and what it could be.
So what’s the deal with Conduin? While it’s blooming in the middle of the wasteland, with canals sluicing life-giving water in the midst of the sands, it’s no paradise: the city is a stratified place, with the poor chased out even of empty apartments, and growing your own food is a crime because self-sufficiency would insulate you from the lightning-based economy that structures society. Crystal-structured buildings are drawn up from the depths of the dunes by geologicians, the domes of the academy glow on the horizon with the promise of a better life, and couriers cling to a marginal existence, ferrying precious cargo and messages across the rooftops, dodging corrupt constables and cultist-gangsters alike.
This is a hell of a setting, and that’s just what’s established in the opening, before any of its secrets begin to be peeled back. The protagonist, of course, is one of those couriers, with the game starting as they’re hired onto a job that could change everything for them (most people in the city go by “they”; gender is seen as a foreign affectation only a few opt into, choosing pronouns regardless of their body’s biology). What starts as a simple delivery from one scholar to another will see you decide to take a stand against the injustices in Conduin, discover the mysteries behind its rise from arid destitution – or just keep your head down and get paid.
The setup really is masterful, and in some ways I feel like it’s wasted on IF – for all that the author does a good job limning the city and it’s precincts, really this calls out for the AAA treatment. I can easily see Prism as a hybrid of Mirror’s Edge and Dishonored (there’s even some whalepunk elements to this one…), unspooling the same plot over a series of action-packed missions that send you sprinting over, above, and through the city, getting into kinetic fights with the constables, and unlocking supernatural powers if you decide to join the Streetborn cult.
That’s not to say it doesn’t work well in its current form, though. Exploring the city is still very engaging, and unlike many Ink games I’ve played, it’s quite interactive; you can choose to focus on your mission, seek out your childhood friend who has joined the aforementioned group of cultists, or get drawn into a street brawl with a silver-armored superhero. Sure, many of these involve action or sneaking scenes of one description or other – thus the wish for the more conventionally video game version – but the prose is tight and exciting when it needs to be.
While all the pieces are in place for a memorable experience, I think the structure slightly lets Prism down. The game’s overall a sort of dumbbell-shape: there’s the aforementioned delivery mission and related side-activities, and after that wraps up you can either decide to take your earnings and get on with your life, or dig deeper into the secrets that you’ve started to catch glimpses of. If you opt for the latter choice, there’s a time jump, a whole bunch of new characters are introduced, and then you’re conveyed into another action-packed sequence that wraps up the game as a whole. The plot holds together, but it feels unbalanced – after finishing the delivery I spent a long time thinking that I was experiencing an extended, kind of anticlimactic denouement before realizing the narrative hadn’t actually wrapped up. The two pieces didn’t mesh together smoothly in my playthrough, either: I got hints at what Conduin’s engine of prosperity actually was in the course of the delivery, but in the remainder of the game, the protagonist seemed ignorant of those hints even in moments where it seemed like they really should have. Whether these were bugs or narrative oversights, they reinforced the feeling that Prism is two separate experiences stapled together in the middle.
Still, I enjoyed both experiences. Sure, the narrative is a little lumpy, and the fact that I’m gushing about the worldbuilding over all else I think is an indication that the plot and characters are, when you strip away the rococo detail-work, fairly straight-ahead. But it’s not like I needed more of an excuse to play tourist in Conduin, which might wind up being counted as one of the great IF cities.
A pacy albeit implausible spy novel adapatation, December 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Maybe we should style the title here as The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan, by Graham Walmsley? You see, this is a Twine reimagining of the early-Twentieth-Century novel that kicked off the spy thriller genre, albeit with all-new text rather than interpolating the original’s prose. I haven’t read the book, though going in was dimly aware of the plot – a resourceful hero forced to flee an omnipresent conspiracy, sort of a last-century Three Days of the Condor, with the mysterious title referring to some sort of cipher that needed to be unraveled to foil the plot of the baddies – which seemed well-suited to an IF rendering, what with the focus on action and puzzles.
(I've also heard debate about whether there are anti-Semitic implications to the novel – there are definitely some wrong ways to depict an international conspiracy – but happily there’s nothing like that in the game).
Overall I’d rate this as a successful adaptation. The game has a breathless pace that makes it the interactive equivalent of a page-turner – at every stage, you’re having to live by your wits, eluding your pursuers, trying to make progress on a dead man’s coded notebook, or having to decide whether a seemingly-friendly stranger is a potential ally or a disguised hunter. Throughout, there’s a simple but robust system that sorts most of your choices into clever, bold, or open options – unlike in a ChoiceScript game where these would probably be skills that you would develop through repetitive use, here they’re simply different choices of tactics (in fact sometimes a single decision-point could have multiple clever choices, or none), with the caveat that the best ending is reserved for players who take enough of the trustingly-naïve open choices to maintain their faith in humanity through to the end.
Some of these choices are definitely better than others, mind, and it’s certainly possible to end a chapter with a suboptimal result, or even fail the story entirely. But while there isn’t a save or undo system – they’d probably reduce the tension of the game significantly – in a nice compromise, you can go back and replay each chapter when you hit its conclusion; the few times I tried it, I found it only took a few minutes to retrace my steps and get a more positive outcome.
The game’s prose helps with this overall zippiness. It’s unadorned, but the locution is formal enough to suggest the milieu it’s trying to evoke, and it gets right to the point. Here’s the inciting incident that sets the plot in motion – there’s a lot packed into these two sentences:
"The man on the floor was quite dead, a knife through his heart skewering him to the floorboards. He was an upstairs neighbor, a trim man with gimlet eyes, who had looked at me searchingly whenever we passed on the stairs."
I do have a few critiques, mind. One is that while the game generally lets you fail forward, the difficulty of getting an ending where you figure out the plot and foil it completely seems quite high. For instance, several times in your journey, you’ll have a brief respite where you can try to improve your disguise, find some useful items, get some food or sleep, or work on decoding the dead man’s notebook. Obviously, the latter of these is quite important, but as far as I can make out, to suss out the baddies’ plans you need to choose the code-cracking option every single time. Meanwhile, the game flat-out tells you that the final chapter is meant to be played multiple times in order to gather the information needed for a winning run, without a metafictional conceit to justify the need for such outside knowledge.
The second flaw in the story – and given the genre I’m sincerely not sure how heavily to weight this – is that none of it makes the slightest lick of sense. Like, go back to that opening: you wake up with a dead man in your flat, and with all your belongings searched, because the evil conspirators know that the guy they murdered had written down many of their secrets in a notebook. Of course, you find said notebook almost immediately, at which point you have to elude the agents who are keeping your dwelling under observation so they can jump you. This is all well and good in terms of setting up thrilling set pieces, but pause for a moment and it crumples into incoherence. If the bad guys were so worried about this notebook, and so attuned to the risk of the protagonist finding it, shouldn’t they have murdered him in his sleep, rather than obligingly letting him slumber on uninterrupted? Contrarily, if they’d written him off as a threat, why establish such tight surveillance and try to grab him as soon as he leaves his apartment?
The whole game is like this. You hop a train to Scotland, losing yourself in sparsely-populated Highland villages, only to discover that there are conspirators on the train with you or waiting ahead at the station in the smallest of hamlets – if there’s a justification for this other than that they’ve somehow read the script, I didn’t pick it up. Fortunately, coincidences don’t just break for the bad guys: at one point, I was captured but managed to escape the deserted farmhouse where they’d taken me, only to blunder into a river fisherman mid-angling – who immediately recognized me, as he was a high officer in the Foreign Service who already knew I was innocent of the murder the villains had tried to pin on me and cleared my name without the slightest fuss or bother. Meanwhile, the final confrontation with this octopus-like conspiracy, that’s managed to extrude its tentacles across the length and breadth of the British Isles and has dozens of agents everywhere you look, involves facing down two weedy chaps, an elderly gentleman, and their noncombatant maidservant.
I’m not sure whether these are inconsistencies that can be laid at the door of the original, or were introduced in the adaptation. And again, for the thriller genre I’m not sure implausibility is too great of an issue – I seem to recall that the opening chapter of The Da Vinci Code involves an albino self-flagellating Opus Dei assassin monk named Silas escaping from a Spanish prison when an earthquake knocks down the walls, which is a sentence I can’t type without sniggering, though joke’s on me since it sold eight gazillion copies. Indeed, I almost got more enjoyment rolling my eyes at the silliness of the plot, and then just rolling with it, than I would have if everything had fit together with a neat and boring logic. The Thirty Nine Steps doesn’t seem to mind whether you’re laughing with it or at it, meanwhile – it’s too busy rushing from one fun, ridiculous stunt to the next.
A dubiously-ethical ESP marketing simulator, December 5, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Would it be elitist to confess that I can’t say for sure whether I’ve ever eaten at an Applebee’s? I’ve mostly lived in fairly big cities, and even when I travel for work, because I don’t drive I never wind up at the sorts of suburban strip-malls that tend to host the chain restaurant. For purposes of this review, though, I’m trying to conjure up some associations – I’ve got a sense of the look and overall vibes from Friday Night Lights, since one of the characters was a waitress there for a couple of seasons, and for the actual food I’m imagining Chili’s and subtracting the (admittedly already rather slight) southwestern angle (Chili’s is also a strip-mall kind of place, I think, but there was one sort of accessible when I was in high school so at least I’ve been there a couple times).
Anyway based on that almost-completely-groundless supposition, what I’m coming up with is a restaurant that isn’t any better than it ought to be, but isn’t much worse, either – like, a mediocre place that earns its meh rating not through consistent middle-of-the-road performance, but by frustrating whatever expectations you bring to it: if you think it’s going to be awful, you might be surprised that one or two of the things you get are relatively solid, but if you go in expecting to be wowed, you’re likely in for disappointment.
If that’s right, the restaurant has something in common with the characters of Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s, a short optimization game in Ink that tasks you – an employee of the Schtupmeister brewery, purveyors of a syrupy ale that sounds simply revolting – with reading the minds of four patrons of a franchise somewhere in Middle America and giving them a mental nudge, when the moment’s right, suggesting they try one of your patron’s products using your psychic powers (you can only make one such suggestion per person, due to incredibly-fuzzily-invoked legal issues). In practice, what this means is that you eavesdrop on each, listening to the thoughts of the waitress, the already-in-his-cups older man, the crypto bro, the snot-nosed tween (yes, you can get a 12-year-old hooked on Schtupmeister. Apparently Applebee’s isn’t big on carding?), learning a little about their hopes, dreams, and fears, waiting for a moment when they’re happily distracted enough for your brain mojo to give them a little push.
What you find out, listening in, is that they’re all a little scuzzy – but not too scuzzy. The older guy is celebrating a not-especially-savory escapade that’s left him flush with cash, but he didn’t do anything so awful, and hey, he kinda needed a win. The kid’s consumed with figuring out which of two characters would win in a fight, but he’s also contemplating a crime of his own. The waitress isn’t above a spot of pickpocketing, but adheres to a consistent set of carnie values. The crypto bro – well, he’s a crypto bro, but at least he has a sick mom. And as for you, well, read the previous paragraph about what your job is again.
A game where you only get four opportunities to act could get a little stale, but the author’s done a good job of fitting the design to the constraint. For one thing, it’s short – each playthrough takes maybe five minutes or so, meaning there’s not a lot of downtime where you’re just waiting to click next even if you’ve already taken all your shots. Second, time marches ahead regardless of who you’re listening to – so if you flit from person to person, you could well miss out on a key opportunity, or key information, from someone else. So it works like an optimization game, as you’ll probably do a series of playthroughs focusing on one or maybe two characters each until you have a sense of what their deal is, and when they might be vulnerable. And then there are also a few moments when you’ve got the opportunity to do something other than push a crappy beer on vulnerable people, before reaching the denouement which gives you a last chance to interact with each of the characters and then offers a quickie job evaluation from your boss.
It’s a solid structure that supports four or five playthroughs to get the outcome that feels right to you –one canny thing about the setup is that since complete success means getting a large number of people potentially hooked on a terrible product, the compulsion to play past the point of enjoyment to wring out a “best ending” is largely absent. And honestly, I wanted to put in those replays to see all the jokes I’d missed. I’d characterize Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s more as amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but it had me smiling a bunch all the same. Like, here’s what happens if you try to strike up a conversation with the drunk guy by pretending you know him from somewhere:
”Excuse me, sir,” you stop to ask the customer. “Sorry to bug you, but this is driving me crazy. Did we go to magician school together?”
”No, I never went to magician school… but it’s not the first time someone’s … asked me that. There must be an up-and-coming… magician who looks just like me,” the customer replies, drunk and befuddled.
Sometimes the author is reaching a little too hard to find humor – there’s a Clubhouse joke that feels instantly dated – but there are way more hits than misses here, and it’s nice that the laughs don’t come too much at the expense of the sad-sacks stuck in a chain restaurant on what feels like it must be a Tuesday night. Between the good writing, clever design, and faintly-detectable humanist vibe, after all maybe this one’s more Cheesecake Factory than Applebee’s.
A solid but only lightly-themed adventure, December 5, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I remember the first time I heard about post-modernism; I would have been about thirteen (this feels late, especially now – surely kids these days suck post-modernism with their mother’s milk) and my mom, who went back to finish college once we kids were off at high school, was taking a class on the media. I was curious about she was learning, since the idea of my mom taking classes, much less a class not being “English” or “Physics” but “the media”, seemed bizarre to me, and while most of what she related seemed understandable enough, post-modernism was elusive; it had something to do with things that comment on themselves? “It’s like if a hotel were called ‘Hotel’”, I remember her saying at one point, or words to that effect.
The Alchemist is the kind of hotel that could be called “Hotel” – or more to the point, the kind of text adventure that could be called “Text Adventure.” This is I think the third game I’ve reviewed by the author, and in fact it has a lot in common with the previous one I played, the ParserComp entry Uncle Mortimer’s Secret – besides the fairly robust qbasic engine undergirding both titles, there’s a missing acquaintance (there an uncle, here an alchemist – the titles are getting the job done here) whose wacky mansion serves as a hub, via a strange device (there a time machine, here a magic mirror), allowing you to travel to different realms (there different historically-important time periods, here standard text adventure locations like a church or a mine or a lab) to solve riddle-y puzzles and collect clues to unlock the next realm, before eventually reaching the endgame and being reunited with your uncle/friend.
From that comparison, I think it’s clear that I enjoyed Uncle Mortimer’s Secret more – the time-tourism conceit is more distinctive than The Alchemist’s rather generic take on the premise, even if nothing is especially lavishly described in either game. But this one is solid enough too – the main quest is a collectathon and there’s nothing resembling a character or a plot, but the puzzles are pretty easy while being satisfying to solve, and the thing moves at a good clip. Technically, the parser continues to have the quirk where you can’t interact with items in containers or on supporters until you take them, but there’s no inventory limit and by now I’m used to hoovering everything up as soon as I see it – and other than that one foible, it seems like it can do everything Inform or TADS are capable of. Like I said, call it Text Adventure because if you like text adventures, you’ll probably like this one.
Sure, there are things I could call out as especially nice touches – there’s one clue that says “play safe, remember the Battle of Hastings” which I thought was a prompt to wear eye protection (Spoiler - click to show)(it's not), and I’m always a sucker for a game with a narthex. On the flip side, having to type in the key combos that unlocked each realm got more and more annoying as time went on, leading me to check the hints once or twice to confirm that I didn’t need to do any backtracking. And the central puzzle, which involves collecting various bits of quotidian lab equipment like tubing and a beaker, is a pretty underwhelming take on alchemy (though perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Hadean Lands and, in this Comp, According to Cain).
But all that’s besides the point; The Alchemist is a text adventure working through a series of puzzles set across a mid-sized geography, and the puzzles are pretty good. It’s a cop-out for a reviewer to say “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you like” – but in this case it’s true! And hey, maybe I can rescue things by pointing out that self-consciously ending a review on a reviewer’s cliché sounds pretty post-modern to me.
A well-done Fix the Spaceship puzzlefest, December 5, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I also beta tested this game, but didn't do a full replay before writing this review, so caveat lector)
It doesn’t get much more classic than the setup for Crash: you play a lowly maintenance worker who boards a top-of-the-line military starship to repair the microwave and unstick the cabinets before its next important mission, when disaster strikes and you’re the only one who can fix the ship in time to avert a disaster. There are more than a few shades of Planetfall, not to mention Space Quest, in the premise, and while they’re a bit thinner on the ground now than they were a decade or two ago, the woke-up-alone-on-a-busted-spaceship game is a trope for a reason.
Crash isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, in other words – in fact, I think it’s consciously calling back to the classics, what with the shout-out to Steve Meretzky in the ABOUT text. But, impressively for a debut game, it can hold its own even in this distinguished field, boasting a strong set of puzzles and enough small twists to keep the game distinct from its many stablemates, without straying too far outside of its lane. The implementation and writing are likewise unobtrusive, but in their quietly solid way support exactly the experience the game’s intending to provide.
Admittedly, the puzzles can be a bit tough. Crash has a bit of an old-school edge to it, requiring the player to think carefully about their environment and try actions beyond the obvious ones in order to progress. But the challenges are logical, with reasonably cluing, and for the most part the trickier ones come early, when there are fewer places to go and things to try, which winds up making them more solvable. There are also some good set pieces in the mix, from an extended high-stakes EVA sequence to an engine-rebooting logic puzzle. And while your initial quotidian maintenance tasks are soon demoted in importance, you have the option of completing them for some satisfying bonus points.
As for the twists, there’s a surprising branch point midway through, when in the wake of an accident that increasingly starts to look like sabotage, you’re contacted by two characters via the ship’s radio and need to decide who to trust. Refreshingly, this isn’t a false choice that will just color the experience, with the narrative cheating to give you a happy ending regardless of who you pick: there’s a right answer and a wrong answer, and if you act hastily things are likely to go quite badly for you. It’s an unexpected social-engineering challenge in the middle of what’s otherwise a very gearheaded game, and makes for an entertaining and engaging change-up.
I’m personally not overly enamored of the Infocom-style “golden age” of parser IF – the more narratively convoluted early-aughts style is more my jam – but I can appreciate a good throwback when I see one, and Crash definitely qualifies. And with its shorter playtime (it’ll neatly fill out a typical two-hour Comp slot) and merciful design, it’s a forgiving way of dipping back into these classic waters without having to put up with all the annoyances one’s memory tends, conveniently, to elide.
Looting a space hulk, November 29, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
The eternal pastime of the ur-protagonists of parser IF was treasure-hunting. From Adventure to Zork, the player may have delved, fought, and explored, but in the end they accumulated points from plunder, wresting valuables from the bowels of the earth and/or their rightful owners to bring them back and heap up treasures on the earth. The fashion for such things has long since passed, of course, but it’s intriguing to note that one of the most modern of IF subgenres, the Verdeterrelike, hearkens back to such deep roots. These optimization games play very differently, of course featuring as they do dynamic environments, aggressive timers, and less emphasis on individual challenges in favor of the repeated plays unlocking the overall metapuzzle of calculating the best route and best timing to loot the most stuff – they can feel almost like roguelikes, where the expectation is that the player pursues, though never reaches, mastery through failure after failure. But peek below the chicken costume of the protagonist of Mike Spivey’s Sugarlawn, say, and you’ll find the amoral wielder of an Elvish sword of great antiquity.
Into the Sun sits squarely in this new-yet-old tradition, and at first it seems to just be playing the hits: like Captain Verdeterre’s Treasure, which inaugurated the subgenre, it’s set on a ship that’s not long for this world (here a derelict spaceship that’s about the fall into a star’s gravity-well, admittedly, rather than a pirate vessel taking on water), with a goal of maximizing the salvage you collect in the time remaining in order to get the biggest payday. The puzzles similarly also trend towards the simple, largely being straightforward door-and-key puzzles you’ve seen a million times before.
What’s unique about this game, though, is that you’re not alone. To explain the spin Into the Sun puts on the standard setup requires a spoiler, though one that becomes clear about five minutes into the game. So I’m not going to spoiler-block the rest of the review, but fair warning if you’re sensitive to such things that you might want to step away after this paragraph.
I suppose it’d be polite to write some filler here so folks who’ve decided to bail don’t accidentally see the spoiler. So let me just mention a few random things I liked. First, there’s an incredibly-helpful map that’s bundled with the download – definitely check that out. Also, for all that the spaceship setting is incredibly generic (more on that in a bit), it’s atmospherically described. Here’s a utilitarian corridor:
"With the batteries running out, the lights in this section collide with the smoke to create an orange glow. It gives the room an imagined warmth, where there is none in space. The companionway is wide, with an access panel on the forward bulkhead."
That’s nicer than it needs to be (I enjoy the word “companionway”).
OK, that’s the buffer done. So what the deal is is there’s an alien on the ship with you. Sorry, I mean an Alien – it’s got acid blood, a penis-shaped head, the table manners of a toddler, the works. Let you think I’m being overly-dismissive of an author using what’s by now a very well-established sci-fi archetype, exploration will turn up various logs referencing Ripley, Dallas, and others – it’s the Nostromo, you’re being stalked by a xenomorph, everyone knows what’s up. What this premise loses in originality, it gains in clarity – everyone knows how these guys work – and terror – because everyone knows how these guys work.
What that means is that even as you’re picking your way around the ship, discovering key codes and hoovering up personal mementos and likely bits of tech, the alien is stalking you. And because the map is replete with dead ends and choke points, it will catch you sooner or later. Fortunately, the first item you get is a cattle prod that will let you fight the monster off at least a few times, and there are few additional limited-use weapons you can pick up along the way. But when you’re out of those, you’re done, even if the ship still has a ways to go before it’s sucked into the sun. Having what’s in effect two timers rather than just one enlivens the formula substantially, because you don’t wind up just plotting the same course and slightly optimizing it each time; you need to pay attention to where you hear the alien rattling around, and make canny use of the elevator that can zoom you from the top deck to the bottom one, in order to conserve your weapon-charges.
The other tweak the alien imposes is that when it’s not stalking you, it might be venting its rage on the derelict ship. As you explore one deck, it might be tearing open access panels on another, and using its acid to melt through some of the items you’d be hoping to acquire for yourself. Again, this substantially changes the tweak-and-optimize gameplay loop typical of these games, because you can’t know whether the crate of valuable wines will still be intact even if you make a beeline for it. What’s more, the game also randomizes the locations of some of the puzzle-solving items, so you can’t know for sure where you’ll find the flashcard that tells you the code for the door locks.
Well, so much for description: do these changes work well, or no? I am going to split the difference, characteristically. I played Into the Sun twice through, and enjoyed both playthroughs – they were tense and I always felt like I was on my toes, improvising and having to balance playing it safe against going out on a limb to go for one of the more valuable items. But having gotten a reasonable payday my second time out ($2,190 “adjusted dollars”, if anyone wants to compare high scores!) I don’t feel much compulsion to go back and try for something even bigger. The optimize-and-tweak loop, turns out, is highly compelling to me (I play a lot of Zachlikes, for the record), and Into the Sun injects sufficient randomness to break it. I didn’t wrap up runs itching to try doing just one thing different next time; instead, I had to gird myself to start from scratch and come up with a plan of attack mostly from scratch. In some ways this makes the game a better design – and also makes it easier for me to feel satisfied with my experience playing it within the Comp’s two hour limit, whereas I feel like with Sugarlawn I’d barely scratched the surface – but all told, I think I prefer a more straight-forward Verdeterrelike experience (no need to include an Elvish sword, though – my appreciation for the classics has its limits).
A sprawling, mechanical explore-em-up, November 29, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I generally find people who like to bang on about their unpopular opinions kind of irritating; typically they’re either casting a perfectly normal opinion as “unpopular”, or taking a perverse, trollish glee in pushing what’s often thoughtless contrarianism. In both cases it’s unpleasantly attention-seeking – like, just say what you’re going to say and let it stand on its own.
But – of course there was a but coming – I am going to fail to take my own advice here, because I think before you read this review, you should know that I don’t like Fallen London. I know that this is a minority view, especially around here, and I can appreciate the appeal. The weird-Gothic setting is creative, and the writing is very good at prodding the player’s imagination with a whisper of a suggestion here and an unexplained proper-noun there. And the idea of a role-playing game where the highest-stake conflicts aren’t about shoving your +18 Flaming Zweihander of Golgothan Fury into someone else’s entrails 17-24 times, but decocting the rarest vintage to impress jaded partygoers or gambling your soul in a high-stakes poker-game – yes, very cool. But despite the quality of the fiction, I can’t look past the mechanics. Everything you do gets commodified – if you have a flirtatious encounter, the game informs you that you’ve gained 13 Memories of Kisses, and if you get betrayed by a co-conspirator, you gain the Vow of Revenge quality. And on and on and on, until your character is toting around dozens of different abstractions and enough personality tags to populate a madhouse.
For some players, I can see how that leads to greater engagement by tying the narrative and mechanical sides of the game together more tightly, but for me, it just makes everything feel arbitrary. The sprinkling of flavor across the top isn’t enough to distinguish the various sub-currencies that begin to feel interchangeable, and the transparency about how your stats translate to a probability of succeeding in any particular course of action reduces choice to just trying whatever’s most likely to succeed. After a very short time playing, I even found myself skimming the lovely prose, since all that mattered was the number. This is a very self-defeating way to play Fallen London, obviously – and I’m aware that most people engage with it in a much more rewarding way – but I can’t figure out how to turn off the part of my brain that jumps straight to the mechanics; I’m like the guy in the Matrix who just sees the code behind the simulation.
I’ve allowed myself to go off on this digression at length because, for all that it has notable differences, my experience of playing Lost Coastlines is 90% similar to how it felt to try Fallen London. This is a big game, taking the protagonist into a randomly-generated dreamworld that’s home to dastardly pirates, sentient frogs, diamonds that hold magic in their hearts, and a whole city of clowns (admittedly I noped the hell out of that one rather than explore it). There’s an RPG-style character generator where you can focus on your fighting or sneakiness or seacraft – oceangoing is a key part of the world, with settlements scattered across a series of islands – and choose a few additional advantages, then you can opt into a nicely-done (albeit occasionally infodumpy) tutorial that walks you through the basics, or skip it in favor of reading the high-production-value manual that comes with the download, and then you’re unleashed on this world of adventure to make a name for yourself. You can explore randomly – sometimes coming across blank spots on the map, where you’re given the opportunity to name them – or take on quests for various factions, or trade commodities from one village to another. And at most locations, you’ll encounter a little storylet where you’ll have a choice of bespoke options, like whether to STUDY or PLUNDER a set of ruins, and get some money – here called “pleasance” – or Fragments of Knowledge or some other reward, if you succeed at a stat test.
It’s a lot to dig into, and there’s even a good balance between randomly-generated content and hand-crafted locations that seem to offer deeper, less randomized storylets with unique mechanics and dependencies on stuff you do, or people you meet, in the rest of the world. And there’s a medium-length sea battle system. All of this is stuff I should dig, but unfortunately, despite all the craft that went into Lost Coastlines, it still left me kind of cold. It just gave me that same old vibe that it didn’t matter where I was exploring, mostly the events were being pulled out of the same hat, with just a different probability distribution depending on where I was sailing. And for all that there are many kinds of rewards and things to collect, they all seem to work similarly, either directly increasing your stats or pleasance or providing abstract coupons that could be redeemed for these benefits in the appropriate circumstances.
It wasn’t long before I was mindlessly sailing the seas, looking for whatever options seemed most likely to succeed and skimming the resulting text to see which numbers were increasing. Again, this is maybe just something broken about how I’m able to relate to games like this, though I do think there are a couple factors that maybe exacerbated the problem. The most superficial is that I find the default ADRIFT presentation ugly and a bit hard to read, and though there are a variety of view options I haven’t been able to find a combination that’s any better. The most significant, though, is that the overall game structure isn’t very compelling. While there do appear to be hard-coded stories, there isn’t an overarching plot to follow; at any point you can choose to wake up from the dream, and you’ll get a score that’s just your pleasance minus the sum of negative characteristics you’ve accumulated. I ended the game twice, once with a couple hundred pleasance and once with about 1,500, but I got the same perfunctory ending each time, with no narrative reward or even context for what’s a good score and what’s a pathetic one – as a result, I didn’t feel myself especially motivated to try again to cover more ground or get a bigger number just for the sake of it.
My enjoyment was also reduced by the suspicion that the game could use a little more tuning – that’s a little churlish to suggest given the scale of what one amateur author has created here, but still, it reinformed my mechanical mindset when I realized that the penalty from failing to feed my crew was significantly lower than the cost to buy food, so I might as well let ‘em starve. I also felt like I succeeded much less frequently than the odds cited by the game would imply; I lost like four Chancey tests in a row, for example, when I should have had like a 55-75% likelihood of succeeding at each. Sure, could be that’s just the luck of the draw, but it grates, especially since UNDO doesn’t change random results and at least in my playthrough, I found it pretty hard to get much of a toehold in the early going. Plus I think I ran into a significant bug when I visited the aforementioned City of Frogs – my options were either to hire one using a resource I hadn’t yet found, or attempt to gain their trust, but nothing I typed would allow me to have a go at the latter choice, so I had to UNDO my way out of there.
I’m curious to read other reviews here, because as with Fallen London, I’m guessing that my reaction is pretty idiosyncratic – I can recognize the passion and effort the author put into the game, so I’m hoping that once again my opinion is an unpopular one, and there are other players who can give it the praise I think it deserves.
A lyrical coming-of-age story with too many missing bits, November 29, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Not infrequently, I’ll argue in a review that a game seems unfinished. Usually what I mean is that it’s buggy, or the prose needs an editing pass, or pieces of characterization don’t seem consistent, or puzzles come out of nowhere. The Counsel in the Cave, a character-driven journey into other worlds written in Ink, strikes me as unfinished but in a completely different way: what’s here is high-quality and polished to a high sheen, but the game seems to be missing large chunks of its own story. Some of this seems intentional: there are bottom-lined recaps of the missing action woven into the later scenes, and the “page numbers” displayed at the bottom of each passage look to jump ahead by a few dozen in between each act. It’s still a storytelling choice I found frustrating, though – I loved the game’s grounded beginning and stakes, and really enjoyed the connection and dialogue between the two main characters, but found the compressed runtime stepped on the character arcs, and the abrupt way the narrative leaps into its fantastical elements made them feel somewhat arbitrary.
Let me be clear: I’m not just trying to balance criticism with praise, what’s good here is really, really good. The story opens with two teenagers talking through their feelings about their upcoming graduation from high school in suburban Pennsylvania and potential college plans, each striking slightly different balances between excitement for the future and nostalgia for the past. I’m no Pennsylvania expert, but the local detail strikes me as authentic (wrestling powerhouse Lehigh University gets a namecheck!) deepening the sense of place, and their conversation unfolds in a walk through the hills where the two – vacillating May and driven Jason – reminisce about their shared childhood. The game’s presented in (screen?)play format, but even in this dialogue-driven presentation the landscape comes through powerfully, albeit with a postmodern sense of unreality:
"The curtain rises on a steep green hill covered in clovers. On stage right, tall trees line the edge of a small wood. Below us on stage left, unkempt vegetation grows more wild.
…
"Little can be seen through the dense canopy of low tangled trees. Beneath the brush, mosquitoes buzz and hum. Resting on a rocky creek bed written with tree-roots, May spies an old rowboat split by a twisted vine."
For all this well-observed detail, though, these hills are anything but mundane. Strange obelisks float midair, carts roll of their own volition, and dinosaurs skulk in the woods. It’s maybe a bit much to throw in all at once, but the matter-of-fact way the pair accept all this weirdness creates an alien mood that I found made for a compelling juxtaposition with their more relatable late-adolescent concerns. And the magic realism makes for some lovely images. Here’s Jason, talking about the tall power transmission towers whose cut wire-ends float frondlike in the sky:
”Now they look like titans. As if at night, they put down their wires. And instead of staying here, wander the earth in search of something greater.“
I am very much here for all of this, and as the first scene wrapped up, with May, on Jason’s advice, readying herself to find a guidance counselor who seemed connected to powers beyond this reality for counsel about her mixed feelings about leaving town, I was very much on board. So I was very much taken aback when in a single short paragraph, the second sequence opened by saying she’d looked for the counselor, hadn’t found them, but had fallen into a portal into a multiversal realm of refracted, fantastical realities. Still, I found that after this hiccup, the game did regain its footing – this scene consists of a dialogue with a denizen of the otherworld that continued to play the game’s themes will adding some new lovely metaphors, even if some of them are a little on the nose. Here’s an exchange between May and ethereal fisherman Moondog, talking about some fairy-type creatures she sees riding on what look like underwater rays:
MAY: How do they steer? I don’t see any reigns. [sic]
MOONDOG: Ha! They don’t! The riders surrender themselves to the creatures’ wills. That and the winds. See, the manta rays are blindfolded. They operate on instinct alone.
Any relevance to how May is overthinking her future education and life choices is completely coincidental, I’m sure!
Where Counsel in the Cave really started to lose me, though, was the third and final scene. I don’t want to fully spoil the story, but there’s an even bigger jump ahead in the narrative, with adventures, revelations, and character development addressed only in brief flashback. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it can work to mention past events only by allusion – a little mystery can go a long way, and having to choose which one of three people May met in her journey to tell Jason about means that many players will only see the sentence “But there I met the Ticking Timekeeper, with his cart of clocks” without ever having it expanded on, which is perfect.
But May’s moment of catharsis, resolving the conflict inside her, also happens off-screen between the second and third sequence, which I found incredibly unsatisfying – that’s not the kind of stuff you can just skip without harming the plausibility of the character arc! Things feel even more abbreviated with Jason, who undergoes a calamitous misfortune and sprouts a hitherto-unmentioned Tragic Backstory. As a result, while I could tell what emotions the finale was working to evoke, it fell far flatter than it should have given the quality of writing on offer.
It’s hard to fully make sense of the author’s intention here – from a few post-game notes, it seems as though parts of the game are drawn from dreams, which can certainly lend a disconnected feel, but there’s also an indication that it might be a work-in-progress, and they decided to polish up half of the story and release it into IF Comp as a teaser for what might be an eventually whole piece to come. I hope that’s the case, because I suspect I would enjoy the final version of Counsel in the Cave very, very, much – as it is there’s still a lot to like here, but the absence of space to fully establish, then play out and resolve, the characters’ inner conflicts is a real shame.
Pony superhero jewel theft brawl-em-up, just go with it, November 28, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Friends, I have by now been around the block a little bit. I’ve been playing Comps since aught-two, on and off, and in that time I’ve lost count of the cryopods I’ve woken up in, the dragons I’ve run away from, the obfuscated allegories I’ve squinted at (the prepositions I’ve left dangling)…. But this is a new one on me: sure, you could say A Matter of Heist Urgency is a straightforward enough creature, a comedy parser game, on rails, where you foil the theft of the kingdom’s crown jewels from some evildoers.
But ye gods, the details: start with the title, for one thing, which sounds like it’s trying to be a pun but one I can’t for the life of me decode; then the world, which is a completely-unexplained off-brand My Little Pony thing (this isn’t actually My Little Pony, right?); and the protagonist, Anastasia the Power Pony, whose deal is likewise basically assumed and seems to be like a horse-person-superhero, maybe with a secret identity, since before investigating the theft you “disguise as Bess” (albeit when you arrive and X ME, you’re told “You, Anastasia the Power Pony, look just like you always do”). Once you show up at the scene of the crime, it only takes a few moments of looking around to find clues indicating that the culprits must be a band of evil llamas (this is starting to feel suspiciously speciest…) and you zoom off (you can fly) and soon find yourself in the first of three extended fight sequences that wrap up the game.
Per the ABOUT text, the game’s raison d’etre actually is to test out how to do action scenes in IF, so perhaps these oddities are just about the author wanting to get to said test-bed scenes as quickly as possible. But it’s still fairly disorienting stuff, all the more so since I dunno about you, but if I were trying to come up with a premise to justify some design experimentation around fight sequences, “superhero horse jewel theft” isn’t even the 23rd one I’d come up with.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though! The off-kilter plot elements help keep the game from feeling too dry, and it’s game’s designed so you don’t really need to know much about what’s going on to make progress. Indeed, even just speaking mechanically each set piece works pretty well on its own terms. The initial investigation scene just involves typing X [SCENERY ITEM] a couple times before it automatically ends, but the game does a good job keeping track of which clues you’ve found and making the order seem natural regardless of where you start looking.
The first of the fight scenes is a little dull, admittedly – you just type ATTACK [TARGET] until you’ve worn down your three assailants, as best I can tell, with the RNG deciding whether you hit, or are hit in turn. But the remaining two mix things up in fun ways, with the second allowing you to use the environment on a pirate ship to take out mooks with a single action, and the third implementing a choice-based approach to fisticuffs for the “boss fight” that bottom-lines things just as the action is starting to wear thin. Then you get an ending – there are a couple of choices here, plus a ranking based on how efficiently you won the first fight – and that’s your lot, probably having never caught your breath or having twigged to what the heck is meant to be going on.
The game styles itself “An Anastasia the Power Pony Adventure” – though it’s the first of its kind, that subtitle seems to indicate there might be more to come. Hopefully future installments wouldn’t be quite so monomaniacally fighty, but despite my confusion I had fun with this pacy, silly game that doesn’t wear out its welcome – so I’d be down for a second installment, though I’d hope for a flashback to Anastasia’s secret origin or something so someone could explain exactly what is everybody’s deal.
EDIT: Wait, I think I got the title – it’s a pun where you pronounce “heist” like “highest”, so “a matter of highest urgency”. But that’s not at all how I'd pronounce that word! I repeat, this game is kind of zany.
Bartender Hero, November 28, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp)
Rarely have I encountered as felicitous a coincidence between a game’s theme and my ultimate feelings on it as I have with The Thick Table Tavern, a high-production-value fantasy bartending sim. It comes on strong and heady, with a cool spinning logo upon startup and an enticing bear-foam animation behind the main menu, and the complex-seeming but ultimately straightforward bartending interface put me in mind of the sense of mastery that comes once you’re a few drinks in. The welcome I got from the companionable cast of characters, meanwhile, mirrored the warm, friendly flush you feel once you’re proper tipsy.
From there, though, things started to go awry. Bugs led to story events repeating themselves, making me feel like I was blacking out and losing my memory. Bartending started to become tedious, like when you’re drinking because that’s what you do, not because it’s much fun anymore. And ultimately, while I thought I’d saved enough money to realize my dream, somehow I must have pissed it all away without realizing it, ending the night broke and embarrassed.
Let’s circle back to the good stuff, though, because there’s a lot of it. This Twine game is one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, with well-chosen colors and icons and an attractive but functional bartending system that makes it easy to pick out the host of alcohols, mixers, and garnishes you’ll use to construct cocktails for the inhabitants of the generic fantasy town you inhabit. Your co-workers are stereotypes – the gruff boss with a not-at-all-hidden heart of gold, the gossipy barmaid, the sensitive artiste of a chef – but they’re appealing stereotypes who are fun to hang out with, and they seem to care about the protagonist with a low-key affection that creates a pleasant, chill-out game vibe (it helps that the author has a good ear for dialogue). In general the prose feels like it’s translated from another language – there are some homophone errors, like “faint” for “feint” – and pretty much every passage could be edited down by 20 or 30 percent, but the writing is enthusiastic without going over the top. Here’s an early description of a hangover, by way of example:
"Still, you do not yet despair from your condition. Instead, you rouse yourself into acting on your behalf, even if blinded and quite alone. Waving your free hand around, you hope to find some sort of light switch to flick or some candle to extinguish, as a way to relieve your fragile glossy organs from this hellish torture."
The structure is a plus too. Each day, you come to work, and get ready for the shift to come – cleaning the bar, restocking it, and bantering with your coworkers. Then you need to fill three or four rounds of orders, with a special event of some kind usually coming around each day’s lunch rush. At closing time, you tot up your tips and measure your progress towards the goal you picked at the beginning – earning enough to pay for membership fees at the adventurers’ guild, buy the bar, or purchase a robot bartender (I think? I’m just judging by the dialogue option for that one so it might play out differently). You’ve typically got a few choices in how you interact with your colleagues and deepen your relationships with them – oddly for a bartending sim, the customers are nameless, faceless abstractions outside of the unique events where you’ll meet a fortune teller, or old married couple doing one last trip, or fourth-wall-breaking spirit dispensing endearingly self-deprecating commentary on the author’s shortcomings.
Most of what you do, though, is mix drinks. The barmaid will give you a set of orders, which you work through one by one using the aforementioned graphical interface. Everything has a whimsical fantasy name, but you can always toggle on a recipe card to learn that Wyrm’s Piss is just a fancy name for beer, or that the ingredients for Sailor’s Demise live up to their billing – gin, absinthe, grenadine, and orange juice, ugh, that’s a headache in a glass. There are three difficulty settings, and playing on Normal, it was always clear what I needed to do, modulo having to decode the icons to figure out that cherries came under the “berries” category (they’re actually stone fruit) and relying on some out-of-game knowledge to realize that I could get grenadine by clicking the syrup icon. On hard, apparently there are timers, but overall bartending feels like a pacing mechanism to help immerse yourself in your character’s job.
Unfortunately, I do think the pacing is a bit off. The game runs over 14 days, and it took me about 40 minutes to play through the first of them, which included mixing about 16 drinks, which felt like a lot. Subsequent days went quicker as I realized which bits of text were repetitive, and got more used to the interface, but still, I often wound up having to make 15 or 20 drinks to advance through each day, which feels like too much given the essentially repetitive and unchallenging nature of the bartending minigame. Despite this slight grindiness, though, I was enjoying myself as I wrapped up day seven, which involved the bar owner running a special promotion that saw seemingly the whole village come in for a drink (I mixed 31 of them) – especially since at the close of that day I’d managed to accumulate 321 coins, just over the 300 I needed to achieve my goal (I’d run into a strange bug that meant I only earned 3 coins apiece for the first few days, despite the end-of-day-wrapup screens indicating I should have been getting more like 60-70 each night, but fortunately it wound up correcting itself).
Relieved of the burden of focusing on filthy lucre, I was excited to see what the next day’s special event – so imagine my surprise when on the afternoon of day eight, the bar owner decided to run that same promotion, leading to the same ridiculous rush of patrons. And then imagine my frustration when the same thing happened on days 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. On the plus side, that meant I finished the game with over 1,200 coins burning a hole in my pocket – but returning once more to the negative, perhaps that meant a counter looped over or something, since on day 15 I got a depressing ending indicating that I hadn’t earned enough for my guild dues after all, and would have to try again.
From my understanding, the author has since fixed these bugs, so hopefully future players will have a smoother time of it. And the game well deserves the effort – I’m bummed that bugs cut short my enjoyment this time out, but now that it's gotten a few more renovations, I suspect the Thick Table Tavern will be a rewarding place to be a regular.
(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. I also beta tested this game, and haven’t done a full replay, so caveat lector)
There are various origin points for what we’ve come to call IF – Adventure, most obviously, but you can also trace choice-based games back to the print Choose Your Own Adventure series and its own early-20th-Century antecedents, and Aaron Reed defensibly started his 50 Years of Text Games series with the initial, purely-text versions of Oregon Trail. There is an eccentric uncle in the attic nobody really likes to talk about, though – or rather, aunt, since I’m speaking of the chatbot ELIZA. Viewed now as little more than a parlor trick – though how could it have been anything else, given the hardware constraints at its 1960s inception? – AI tech is finally catching up to the possibility of having a computer that can engage in a dialogue with you, even if the Turing Test is in no danger of falling anytime soon. So it makes sense that authors are now attempting to re-cross the streams and make a chatbot into a game, rather than something for pre-teen boys to feed dirty jokes into.
Of the runs at this idea that I’ve seen, Thanatophobia seems the strongest. I’m not equipped to evaluate the back-end of what makes it feel reasonably responsive, but there are some design parameters that are cannily set up to paper over the inevitable infelicities that will come up when trying to speak English to a robot. For one thing, the interlocuter character is set up as someone disoriented and not in their right mind, so the occasional odd interjection doesn’t seem too mimesis breaking. For another, the game’s built around a mystery with several pieces, so it’s less likely the player will spend so much time on one topic or area that they start trying increasingly-odd questions or statements. The author’s also done a good job of fleshing out various non-essential bits of backstory so that there’s room for the player to explore without quickly seeing the difference between the hand-tuned, critical path content and generic chatbot oatmeal.
The story being told here isn’t especially novel – there’s a little bit of a twist, but plumbing an allegory to discover someone’s hidden trauma is well-trod territory in IF by this point, albeit it does act as a clever homage to the psychoanalyst-aping roots of the chatbot conceit. And the characters inhabit well-worn archetypes without doing much to distinguish themselves. But for a formal experiment, keeping the narrative tame is probably the right call. Similarly, while the expected chatbot-friction is reduced, it’s definitely still there – but I do wonder how much of that would be smoothed if there were more uniform player expectations about how to interact with such things, much as there are by now for traditional parser games.
All told I found Thanataphobia a success, perhaps more intriguing for the directions it points to than for what it accomplishes in itself, but an entertaining way to spend an hour nonetheless.
A world-beating feelie elevates a sometimes-frustrating scavenger hunt, November 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
IF, it hardly needs repeating, is not real life. That’s probably for the best – blasé as I’ve gotten about managing spaceship crises after being woken prematurely from cryosleep, in actual reality I would not handle that well, and let’s not even bring up Great Cthulhu and his goons. Sadly, in the Last Christmas Present, the arrow flips the other way: this is a parser-IF rendition of a magic-themed scavenger hunt the author created for his daughter, which seems like it was completely awesome in real life, but unfortunately makes for a lackluster time when rendered into a video game. Partially this is due to the difficulties of translation – the hunt’s centerpiece is an elaborately-described map that doesn’t work quite as well in prose form – and partially due to some implementation issues that make what should be fairly simple puzzles much too hard.
Here’s the inevitable part of the review where I need to pause to clarify that the theme isn’t just “magic”, it’s “Harry Potter” – the map is a riff on the Marauder’s Map from the books/movies, what you’re looking for are papercrafted snitches, like from quidditch, and there are a few optional clues that rely on deep knowledge of Potter lore, though I suspect 99% of players will do better just searching at random rather than attempting to decode their obscure references. Per the ABOUT text, the scavenger hunt was conducted in 2013, back in the halcyon days when there was no reason to associate teenaged wizards with hardcore transphobia – which is unfortunately no longer the case in this fallen age of 2022. While the game very much seems to be offered in innocent fun, I can definitely understand some potential players not being able to look past the Rowling connection, though speaking personally, the fact that the puzzle was created nearly a decade ago and that this is a free fan game meant I felt okay about continuing.
Back to the game: you play a tween who’s opening one last Christmas present from her parents, which turns out to be a map of your house. The thing’s lovingly rendered with all sorts of different folds, flaps, stars, and riddles, on top of the depictions of the rooms and yard which are all made up of words (in a neat touch, once you unfold the map to a particular region of the house, the description of exits will update to use the new magic-y room names). As a physical artifact to pore over, it looks really cool, a wonderful centerpiece for the puzzle (if you check the readme included in the downloadable zip file, there are links to pictures of the thing). But in prose – well, here’s the fourth of five folds:
"The lines of the fourth page show the Great Room and the Kitchen (marked House Elves Only on the map). Where the Christmas tree would be, there is a large label with the words “The Great Room”.
"Underneath that label, to the south, is what looks like a paramecium made from the words “Kitchen Island” repeated over and over. It is labeled “House Elves Only”.
"On the left, to the west is the doors to the front garden, labeled “Porticus Imago”.
"On the right, to the east, are the steps leading down to what would be the Guest Hallway with the steps up to the Balcony beneath.
"In the bottom right corner of the Kitchen area is a curved room labeled “The Cauldron Cupboard” that looks like it would be the larder. At the bottom is a round circle labeled “Flue Network” where the Pizza Oven would be.
"In the bottom left corner is a label “Way to the Forbidden Forest”.
"There is a star in the top left corner of the map, in what would be the south-west."
This is a whole whole lot to parse, even before you get to the fact that not all the locations or paths mentioned on the map are accessible to you – and it doesn’t help that the geography of the house is a little confusing, meaning I desperately wished that the loving descriptions had been truncated with an eye towards playability (playing alongside the pictures of the feelie might have been easier, but I only noticed the links in the readme once I'd finished the game).
Because this is a scavenger hunt that was conducted in real life, there aren’t many traditional object-manipulation puzzles – most of what you need to do is just search in the right place for the four MacGuffins. In theory, this should be easy, since there isn’t that much scenery implemented – and in fact it’s easy to blunder your way into at least half of them through simple trial and error.
I found the others rather challenging, though, largely because of oddness in the game’s implementation. Using the map is harder than it needs to be, for one thing – on the last fold are two flaps, a top flap and a bottom flap, which the game clearly flags are hiding something. But the simple action of unfolding them is way harder than it needs to be:
>unfold map
You are at the last page. There are two flaps on the last page, closed.
>open top flap
You can’t see any such thing.
>open flap
You can’t see any such thing.
>unfold flap
You can’t see any such thing.
>open map
You are at the last page. There are two flaps on the last page, closed.
>x flap
That noun did not make sense in this context.
>x top flap
That noun did not make sense in this context.
>open flaps
You pull apart the top and bottom flaps.
(Adding insult to injury, the main reward for opening the flaps is the set of deeply-abstruse clues I mentioned above, which didn’t provide much help).
Beyond thinly-implemented synonyms, the other major stumble I hit was changing scenery in one particular room – I’d realized that it had to be hiding a snitch, but searching everything mentioned in the room description got me nowhere. Fortunately, there’s a well-implemented adaptive hint system that pushed me to look at the room, and lo and behold, sometimes when I typed LOOK an entirely different set of scenery items was mentioned, one of which concealed what I was looking for – but without any rhyme or reason for why things were changing, this feels like an unfair puzzle.
I’m not sure whether these hurdles were intentional – if the game did more to make things easy for you, it would probably be over pretty quickly since again, most of what you need to do is just search every noun you see – but at the same time, if a significant part of a game’s running time is made up of annoyances, I’d just prefer to play a shorter game.
All told, this means that the smile that “magical Christmas scavenger hunt” put on my face was mostly gone by the time I got to the end. The bones of something fun are here, with a good idea for a puzzle and a well-realized setting – despite being set in the author’s house, this feels miles away from a my-dumb-apartment game. But while there are a number of testers listed, I don’t think The Last Christmas Present got quite the shakedown cruise it needed to work seamlessly when offered to more players than its initial audience of one (let me note here that the IntFiction beta test forums are a great, friendly place to recruit some experienced players to put a game through its paces). The beguiling premise and solid writing here suggest the author’s got some promise, though, so if they write another game that gets more testing – and starts with an idea that’s designed for IF from the ground up – I’d definitely give it a try.
A real-time, mechanic-heavy management game (with zombies), November 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I played Approaching Horde right after One-Way Ticket, a game that wore its art-house pretentions proudly, so it was nice that the Comp randomizer gave me something far more populist as a change of pace – Approaching Horde Exclamation Point is an old-fashioned zombie B-movie, with desperate survivors of an undead uprising scrambling to survive a surprisingly math-heavy apocalypse. It took me a minute to get a bead on the game, I confess. There’s a linear introductory section that’s jokey, but wordy and repetitive (“As you relaxingly try to watch your favorite TV channel from the comfort of your couch, you notice more gunshots than normal ring out in the neighborhood this evening for some reason,” is one of the first sentences, followed quickly by “At first the gunshots don’t even bother you as it’s fairly normal for this neighborhood”) – it also glosses way, way too quickly over the fact that you start your undead-fighting career by punching your never-named spouse to a second death.
The dodgy writing quickly falls by the wayside, though, since once you’re in the meat of the game there’s very little of it. The intro concludes with you assuming command of a group of 10 people, and as the game proper begins, you’re confronted with a table interface allowing you to assign them to one of a half-dozen tasks, from farming to scavenging to researching, all of which work basically as you’d think – you need to balance feeding your survivors with recruiting new members of the group and building new fortifications. Complicating things, though, everything plays out in real time – there are sliders in the left sidebar that tick up to show your progress in each job, moving more rapidly as you assign more people to each task. The cherry on top is that this isn’t a sandbox, because there’s a giant undead horde approaching – er, spoiler warning for those who didn’t read the title – and in twenty minutes, they’ll steamroll your group no matter what preparations you’ve made, unless you’ve managed to dig an escape hole, or research a cure for the zombie plague, in time.
As a demonstration of how a tower defense slash idle game can work in Twine, I’d rate the game as pretty successful. As an overall experience, though, I’m more mixed. Partially this is because despite the cleverness of the gameplay hacking, for a game using an IF authoring system and entered into an IF competition, the writing is fairly minimal – once you’re in the game proper you mostly just get functional one-line updates as your survivors complete each piece of work, and it’s hard to get too excited about reading “your farmers just harvested 6 food from farms!” even once, let alone the thirtieth time (there are ending vignettes, of course, but they don’t meaningfully improve on the opening).
Partially, though, this is because I didn’t find the gameplay itself all that compelling. Ideally managing this paltry remnant of humanity would feel like a desperate exercise in plate-spinning, trying to balance short-term needs like food and the immediate threat of zombie patrols with the need to make long-term investments in research and infrastructure, with the horde serving as a final test of your decision-making prowess. In practice, though, the game was both too hard and too easy: too hard, because the twenty-minute deadline means that faffing about exploring your options will almost certainly mean you’ll run out of time with your victory conditions only half-completed, and too easy, because at least on normal, many of the tasks you can do, like attacking zombie patrols and finding new guns, seem mostly unnecessary and a simple strategy of booming your economy for the first ten minutes (getting to the survivor cap of 50 as quickly as possible, and researching farm tech to minimize the workers you need to maintain that population) then pivoting to cure research for the last ten (which also requires you to capture some zombies for study, admittedly) allowed me to win handily, barely touching the survivor assignment buttons for the last seven minutes, on my second try.
I don’t mean to be too harsh here – getting this system up and running was surely a challenging bit of programming, and the kind of difficulty-tuning it’d take to make the gameplay sing is typically the end result of repeated stages of testing and refinement, which is a lot to ask of a solo developer making a free game and facing a hard deadline. It’s mostly just a shame, because it seems like it’d be fun to explore some of the deeper mechanics here on offer, like searching for unique items, reactivating the radio tower, and training guards’ marksmanship, but the game as implemented seems to punish you for messing about with that stuff rather than mechanically zeroing in on a victory condition. Hopefully there’ll be a post-comp version that takes advantage of seeing how a bunch of players navigate the challenge to make some tweaks – and maybe revises the intro and ending vignettes to be punchier (er) and hit a more consistent tone.
Recovers from a weak beginning, November 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There’s recently been an IntFic thread about whether or not novice authors should be warned off the default Twine style – I think mostly the Sugarcube format? – for fear of turning off potential players. There was a substantial bit of back and forth without firm conclusions being reached, but I have to say, Witchfinder’s inelegant first impression makes me pine for the old comfortable white-black-and-blue. Per another review, there’s a font mixup that means that in my web browser at least, the letters come out looking chunky and, where bolded and highlighted to indicate a link, they’re smooshed into each other in a way that impacts legibility.
Meanwhile, I’m a sucker for historical fiction but the content of the intro doesn’t reassure either:
"Edinburgh, 1827.
"Age of Enlightment gave a way to Romanticism, leaving behind medieval brutality and aspiring beauty of Reneissance.
"Scotland regained their territories and started its way into the Industrial Revolution.
The typos are unfortunate, and the breezy nods towards alternate history beyond the witchcraft identified in the blurb (like, did the Act of Union get reversed? Which territories are we talking about exactly?) didn’t fill me with confidence. Luckily, the game does bounce back from this unpromising opening, turning into a reasonably entertaining, albeit low-key, experience helping your neighbors through the power of hedge magic, but I do wish a little more care had been taken to polish things up so it could put its best foot forward.
But for the supernatural elements – and honestly, even with them – Witchfinders would be best characterized as a slice of life game. Pace the blurb’s suggestion that the protagonist will be dodging witch-hunters in a high stakes game of cat and mouse, most of what you wind up doing is running errands to heal a friend’s sick son or keep the local cattle from losing weight. You do have a “witch score” that ticks up if you arouse too much suspicion, triggering a game over when you reach four points, but while there are a couple places where the score can go up despite your best efforts, for the most part it’s easy to keep a low profile unless you’re bent on drawing attention to yourself (like, when buying a potentially-suspicious item, you can either offer an innocuous excuse, or react with hostile defensiveness. Guess which one increases the score!)
Solving these quotidian problems does require a bit of work, and indeed, it’s possible to fail at least one of them. These aren’t puzzles, exactly, since you’re typically either straightforwardly completing a task (e.g., upon being told you need willow bark, you go to the one willow tree in the area), or on the flip side, inadvertently locking yourself out of full victory (e.g. by exhausting all your options in the Esplanade before making a purchase in Lawnmarket, with no indication of why you’d need to do the one before the other). Still, the game lets you eke out a marginal victory even if you make a mistake, and replaying goes very quickly, so it’s hard to hold this against it.
For the most part the prose isn’t trying to be especially authentic, sticking to a direct, slightly anachronistic YA-ish style, but there are a couple nice touches. First, whenever you pass through the hub area, you can read a randomly-generated broadsheet which is drawn from real examples of the form, and second, there’s a butcher who speaks in – well, the author describes it as a Scottish accent, but I think towards the end this is getting into straight-up Scots:
"Aye, amurnay sure whit’s th’ issue thare, bit th’ animals we git lest time keek a bawherr puggelt.”
I was following up until the point where he started talking about a cake decorated with a naked Puggle.
Ultimately I found Witchfinders a lightweight bit of fun, and coming up on halfway through the Comp, that’s certainly nothing to sneeze at – not everything needs to swing for the fences, after all. It’s rough around the edges, sure, but there are worse things to be, and I have to say the bug that meant I scored 110 points out of a possible 100 brought a smile to my face – albeit wonkiness towards the end is always more forgivable than issues at the beginning, and not all players will be willing to give a game the benefit of the doubt after a shaky opening. Authors, make sure those first five minutes are airtight!
A chess dilemma, November 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
It’s a funny coincidence that the Comp randomizer picked the alphabetically-last game as the final one in my queue. Zero Chance of Recovery is a nice bit of comfort-food to end on, too. I’ve played and enjoyed Andrew Schultz’s three previous IF chess puzzles, with his endgame-focused entry in this year’s ParserComp, You Won’t Get Her Back, being my favorite of the trio. The present game is quite similar to that one: again, there are only a few pieces on the board – in this case, white and black each have a king and pawn apiece – with the outcome hinging on pawn promotion. And again, the presentation and interface are very slick, with multiple options for how best to display the chessboard (there’s also a screen reader mode), intuitive syntax for how to direct your pieces, and a host of help screens to orient you to the challenge.
One point of difference from the earlier game is that You Won’t Get Her Back actually boasts three slightly-different scenarios, based on the varying strategies the black side can adapt – roughly, whether it prioritizes moving its own pawn down the board, threatening your pawn, or striking a balance between the two. This initially wrong-footed me, as black’s freedom of movement meant I wasn’t sure why it was making some choices instead of others, but it only took a little bit of trial and error to work out a potentially viable approach; once I solved the first scenario, the others were significantly easier, which was satisfying since it felt like I’d figured something out!
There’s a final bonus challenge, too, which ties in with the conceit of the plot, because just as in Schultz’s earlier chess games, there is a story here. This time out it’s a rather slight thing, with an inciting incident where your king is waylaid by mercenaries hired by black, providing the justification for the white king starting off on the far side of the board. It works well enough to set up the action, but I confess it wasn’t as engaging as the political satire of the Fivebyfivia and Fourbyfourian games, or the unexpected relationship pathos of You Won’t Get Her Back – these narrative riffs are fairly superfluous to the core mechanics of the puzzle, I suppose, but I missed the extra allegorical heft they provided to the initial trio. For all that, the writing here continues to be well-done and entertaining, hitting a breezy tone that provides some well-considered nudges in the right direction, and boasts a surprising level of detail (the descriptions of the different pieces shift depending on where you are and what they’re doing, which is delightful).
My only other complaint is that the aforementioned bonus challenge did stymie me – I’d made one assumption based on the hints the game was giving, but managed to get the wrong idea entirely (Spoiler - click to show)(I understood that I needed to “cheat” by getting the black king in trouble with the mercenaries, who he was only going to pay once the black pawn promoted – but I thought that meant that I needed to prevent the pawn from promoting so that the angry mercenaries, cheated of their pay, would go after the opposing king. Instead, you’re supposed to let the pawn get promoted, but only then take the queen and force the draw; the idea is that only in those circumstances does the king need to pay up). It’s plausible enough once I knew the trick, and provides a fourth distinct way of getting to stalemate, but for whatever reason it just didn’t click, robbing this one of the “aha” moment I felt in some of the other games.
I’ve spent a lot of time comparing Zero Chance of Recovery to those previous three games in this review, because there really isn’t anything else like it and because it’s very much of a piece with those. But for all that I’d say it’s my least favorite of the now-quartet, I still enjoyed playing with it – the high production values and attention to detail make it fun to fiddle one’s way through the puzzle, and as I said at the top of the review, it very much felt like comfort IF, as though I were sinking into a warm bath at the end of the Comp.
A sibling bond gone wrong, November 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I’m a sucker for stories about siblings. Much of that’s probably for boring autobiographical reasons – most things are when you get right down to it – but even without that personal link, I’d stand by the opinion. They allow you to have strong connections between characters outside of a romantic relationship, with a potentially richer palette of emotions – for one thing, there can often be more pain, resentment, and ugly history between siblings because even after doing things to each other that would be unforgivable in a friend or a partner, they’re still related – and unlike with parent/child relationships, who has power or who’s in control in a particular situation often needs to be continuously negotiated, and can shift drastically with little warning.
Am I My Brother’s Keeper? is a short choice-based thriller that centers on one such bond, following the protagonist as she searches for her missing sister. Sofía’s got a drug habit, which means everyone else is prone to write her disappearance off as simply ducking off the grid for a while. But you’re sure something terrible has happened, and after a late-night phone call, you get a lead that could take you to her, if you’re got courage enough to brave some sketchy warehouses and even stranger places…
This is another game written in Texture, and while I’ve enjoyed several of the Texture games in the Comp, for some reason the system didn’t seem to work too well for me this time. For one thing, I had to start over since when I played on the phone, I hit a point a third of the way in where I couldn’t drag one of the action-boxes I needed to in order to progress – and then once I switched over to my laptop, had to start over again because the game reset itself after I alt-tabbed for five minutes. For another, the game largely uses choices not to present different paths through the story, but to expand on details in the text – and these are added inline, which dynamically shrinks the font so that the full passage stays on a single page, meaning the writing was often uncomfortably small for my aging eyes.
These minor gripes aren’t all the author’s fault, of course, but they perhaps made me grumpier at its weak points than it deserves. There are very much some pieces of Am I My Brother’s Keeper? that I enjoyed; the investigation is pacey, and introduces supernatural elements in a gradual, grounded way that kept me from immediately guessing the truth behind what was going on. And when you share a scene with your sister (there are flashbacks, so that’s not a spoiler), the sibling rivalry and banter definitely strike me as authentic.
But there are other aspects that aren’t as successful. For one, while much of the joy of this kind of procedural is running through the beats of an investigation, the process of finding and decoding clues here feels overly abstract or unrealistic (there’s a sequence where the cop assigned to your sister’s case suggests running down a lead together, then later lets you explore an evidence-containing warehouse on your own, as thought they’ve never heard of the concept of chain of custody). The writing also aims for a neo-noir patter that’s effective at communicating a vibe of omnipresent gloom, but lands in Max Payne territory more often than not:
"A journal on a coffee table in between two seats. Compared to the rest of the building, it’s immaculate, unburdened by the marring of abandon."
The game’s almost entirely linear – there’s one choice at the end that might have an impact on the outcome, but other than that you almost always need to use all the actions available to you in a passage in order to move on – which I often don’t mind, but again, for what’s framed as an investigative game, makes progress feel unearned. This extends to a sequence where you’re told you can only take a single item into the final confrontation: but rather than this being interactive, the game just railroads you into bringing a gun, surely the most boring choice imaginable.
The other exception is very early on, when you’re given the chance to answer the title’s question in the negative, and abandon Sofía to her perhaps-deserved fate. This takes you to what’s clearly a premature, unsuccessful end, but along the way the game also plumbs the relationship between the two sisters with more nuance than comes out in the faster-paced rest of the game. With more of this, and less of the soft-boiled narration, Am I My Brother’s Keeper would be substantially stronger; as it is, it’s pleasant enough to play but is unlikely to stick with me for very long.
Goofy but zippy horror , November 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I’ve a couple times in my reviews done the gimmick of presenting a game by harping on its most hackneyed or weakest elements, then doing a lame rug-pull and revealing that Actually It’s Great. I’m not doing that here – The Pool is objectively not that good of a game. It’s a horror thriller that’s simultaneously underdeveloped and overbaked, with a premise (sci-fi monster aquarium research base attacked by inside-man saboteurs and also the fish monsters turn you into zombies and also some are psychic octopi or something plus you have social anxiety) that has way too many details yet makes way too little sense to hang together. It’s a default-Twine presentation, with all the typos and sloppy writing that black-and-blue color scheme often signifies. It boasts multiple branches, but they don’t work that well on their own, throwing out-of-context character betrayals and plot twists that seem to presuppose multiple replays to be coherent, let alone effective. And at every point it manages to step on its own theme, as the story ostensibly presents the protagonist learning to grow past their anxiety but in reality brutally punishes you nearly every time you step outside of your shell and trust someone else or behave the slightest bit altruistically.
But – of course there was a but coming – I enjoyed it quite a bunch, laughing at it as much as I was laughing with it but laughing all the same. For all that I take IF sufficiently seriously that I’ve written a review engaging with a game through the lens of Brechtian “epic theater”, sometimes all it takes for me to have fun is playing a dopey monster mash on Halloween, as I was lucky enough to do.
Look, this thing is ridiculous, with shifts in tone that make gold-medal slalom look like a lazy inner-tube ride down a gently winding river. One second you’re about to bash a sea-zombie with a rock but focused more on how that’s scary because it’s taking you outside your comfort zone than because you’re about to bash a sea zombie with a rock (who does have that in their comfort zone?), the next you’re facing down a terrorist who’s unleashed all this chaos because “I just wanted to escape all of this. This monotony. Don’t we all?” (protip: if your villain’s motivation could equally well apply to starting a D&D club, taking up swinging, or unleashing a seamonster apocalypse, it could probably use more time in the workshop).
There are a ton of instadeaths, too – again, many cued by doing something seemingly in-genre and innocuous like extending a moment of mercy to seemingly-beaten enemies – gorily described but so many in number, and so lightweight due to the omnipresent undo button, that I started to relate to the protagonist as though he were Wile E. Coyote, fated to be dismembered, drowned, and zombified for my amusement.
My instinct is of course to overcomplicate this, to bang on for hundreds more words unpacking why I enjoyed it despite its flaws, perhaps delve into what “so bad it’s good” really means and assess whether liking something ironically is meaningfully distinct from liking it directly. But for once I’m going to resist, save for noting that for all its warts, this is a game that moves, setting up and resolving conflicts quickly and efficiently. Due to some of the storytelling issues noted above, the transitions can sometimes be a little rough since you don’t know what all the characters’ deals are, and the worldbuilding is pretty arbitrary so what happens next can feel a little random. But once you’re in a scene, the stakes tend to be established clearly and concisely, and nothing feels belabored or like it overstays its welcome. Lots of IF – especially choice-based IF, which tends to have longer gaps between player input than parser games – can feel quite plodding so it’s nice to play a game with some zip in its step, and as the rest of the review demonstrates, good pacing can make up for a whole lot of other faults!
Bottom line, The Pool is trashy and dumb, but if it catches you in the mood for something trashy and dumb, and you don’t overthink it – for god’s sake don’t replay it to fully understand how all the strands of its plot fit together – and read it quickly so you don’t notice the typos as much… well, you still might dislike it, because it’s a rickety contraption. But you might find it scratches an itch, and catch yourself thinking “sea zombie” to yourself with a giggle for a day or so. Some games aim for more, some settle for less, but here we are.
Maybe broken psychological horror, November 22, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I have a really hard time writing reviews when I haven’t enjoyed a game much, but can’t tell how much of my dissatisfaction was due to the design and writing, and how much to bugs. I try (though often fail, I know) to spend at least part of the time in my reviews assessing how well a game achieves what appear to be its goals, and if it doesn’t meet them because the gameplay is at war with the theme, or the characters need to support a level of emotional engagement they’re just not up to, or what have you, that’s fair enough and I feel like I can evaluate those shortfalls in good faith – likewise it’s no big deal to identify discrete bugs, even potentially far-reaching, gamestopping ones. But when I can’t get a sense of the creative agenda, and there appear to be bugs whose scope I don’t fully understand, it’s really challenging to figure out what to say that’s at all useful: were things largely working as intended, and I’m pinning my confusion on a few minor bugs to avoid owning up to being a big thicko? Or was there actually a masterful design whose shape I didn’t get to apprehend due to some unfortunate bugs? Either way, besides the author hopefully realizing they have some fixes to make, I doubt anyone would get much out of my virtual gum-flapping.
(I know, I know, how is that different from any of my other reviews, etc.)
Anyway, I’ve got that dilemma here. Staycation didn’t work for me, but I’m flummoxed to pinpoint what specifically went wrong. Maybe it’s best to just recount my experience with it? This is another Texture piece, whose premise is that you’re a young New Yorker whose housemates (who are romantic partners – you must feel a bit of a third wheel) decide to go for a trip to warmer climes to escape the northeastern winter. You decline, however – this is railroaded despite there being various options, which show up as emoji (?) though thankfully you get a preview in words of what each potential action will be. Apparently you’re a bit of an introvert and looking forward to some time alone? After some painting and lighting some incense – relaxing! – you turn in, only to be woken by scratching in the middle of the night: your cat, which can either come off comforting or menacing depending on the actions you pick.
Either way the vibe goes from cosy to horrific in the course of one like 50 word passage; my first time through, I somehow jumped forward in time, staying I think with my parents and reflecting vaguely on something highly traumatic that had just happened – at which point the game ended. So I tried again, making slightly different choices, which led to much the same events except upon the cat entering, the game seemed to rewind to the painting sequence – which I thought was a bug, though from looking at the blurb it sounds like repetition is supposed to be part of the experience? This time I made slightly different choices once again, and wound up at a passage reading “You choose to ignore the cracks within your marrow,” with a check and an X as my verb options, but nothing to apply them to, making it impossible to progress further in the game.
I assume some of what I encountered wasn’t intended – at least that last game-ender has to be a bug – but based on this sort of heap of incidents, I’m having extreme difficulty figuring out what was supposed to happen and how I was supposed to be feeling. Partially this is due to the fact that the game moves really, really fast. Despite the two hour playtime listed in the blurb, each of my tries lasted maybe five or ten minutes, and the shifts from socially-anxious interactions with housemates, to laid-back alone time, to night terrors played out with virtually no transitions between them, leaving me with an emotional hangover that had me still reacting to the previous sequence while a new, tonally distinct one was playing out. The writing doesn’t give much in the way of prompting, either, consisting of workmanlike but not especially evocative prose, with the occasional infelicity:
"Incense alights in its holder."
That must be magic incense!
I can try to reverse-engineer a sense of what’s supposed to be going on in Staycation. Maybe we’re awkward with our roomies and not going with them because even in the opening of the game, the protagonist is already on a repeat of the time cycle, so they know this is how things have to play out? Perhaps the attempt at painting shifting the mood from satisfaction to fear indicates that we’re a creatively frustrated type? None of these interpretations quite work, and I can’t say that even on repeat plays things cohered enough for me to even figure out how my expectations were being disappointed. Certainly some combination of bug fixes, more focus on establishing the protagonist’s mindset, and improved pacing would have made the game more successful, but I honestly can’t tell you what combination, or what success would wind up looking like, though I’d be very curious to find out!
A shaky Gruescript allegory, November 21, 2022Lost at the Market is I think the first Gruescript game to be released by anyone other than the language’s creator, Robin Johnson. It’s a system that aims to make it easy to create parser-like choice games, allowing the player to easily click their way through the kind of actions and object interactions that typify the parser experience. Sadly Lost at the Market isn’t much of a showpiece; there’s a potentially compelling story here a protagonist trying to change the moment when they gave up on their dreams and walked away from a career in music, but it suffers from slapdash implementation, perfunctory puzzles, and stripped-down writing. There’s the germ of something good here, but it needs elaboration and refinement to be memorable.
In terms of the gameplay, what we’ve got here is yer standard allegorical journey of self-reflection. You start out at a beach, ruminating on the hubris of whoever built the sand castle that’ll inevitably be swamped by the tide – to progress, you need to kick the castle over, reflecting how the protagonist has self-destructively surrendered their dreams in order to protect themselves by beating the world to the punch. There’s the germ of something here, but the action is too abrupt – there’s not much else you can possibly do – and the writing isn’t quite crisp enough to do the idea justice:
"Once in a while you see something like this and wonder what your dad would say, the point in building sand castles that are here waiting to be swept away by the ocean is the same dream that keeps the world moving, yet can anyone move the ocean?"
There are a few more puzzles after that one, which generally require both a bit more object-manipulation to solve, and a bit more mental engagement to decode, before fetching up at the climactic performance where you can choose to change the past and play your music – or, alternatively, go south at an unmarked intersection and find yourself forced to once again walk away from your passion (at least there’s an UNDO).
The interface for doing all this is reasonably functional – a set of buttons let you move around and examine objects at your location, which in turn pops up more buttons to further interact with them, plus you have an inventory that works on the same principles – albeit it’s pretty ugly, with the main screen subdivided into too many short, narrow rectangles with a color scheme that even I can tell clashes horribly. This isn’t the only way the implementation feels slapdash – actions often have awkward names consisting of multiple words linked with underscores, and while I’m not sure if this is a limitation of Gruescript, even if it is the author should have found a less immersion-breaking workaround. And there are a fair number of typos, including one in the subtitle on the Comp page (oof).
I don’t want to be too hard on Lost at the Market. It’s trying to communicate something that clearly has personal relevance for the author, and stretching to try out a new authoring system is good for the IF community as a whole (man does not live on Inform and Twine alone, I suppose). Some of the elements do show promise – there’s a choice at the end, about whether to adapt your music to what the crowd wants to hear, that points to something that’s more engaging than the more mechanical puzzles before that point, and some parts of the story do have some thematic resonance even if the writing needs a few more passes to make this resonance effective. Still, it’s disappointing to see a new platform not shown off to its best effect; hopefully this won’t be the last Gruescript game the Comp sees, or the author writes.
Beware the snadwick, my son, November 21, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
The ur-philosophy of video games was surely Existentialism. Regardless of whatever thin veneer of plot was spangled across the decals of early arcade cabinets – Space Invaders, Asteroids, what have you – in practice the player found themselves in an endlessly repeating world, set to some cryptic task that would finish only when their patience, or quarters, ran out, the myth of Sisyphus transformed by the alchemy of late capitalism from a punishment to an amusement. True, the ever-increasing score in the top corner provided some indication that progress was possible, but assigning meaning to an arbitrary number surely takes an act of will – and while, as overclocked apes, we’re wired to be susceptible to the draw of competition, even Camus couldn’t have come up with a vision of conflict more absurd than vying over a Pac-Man high score table. And even video games’ nerdier cousins weren’t especially different: the early treasure hunts of Adventure and Zork are just more score chases, albeit with gestures towards genre tropes to provide a bit of texture. The player is nothing but the sum of their choices, starting with the choice to assign a value to success at all.
We’ve gotten better at evading this dynamic over the years – with strategies ranging from leaning into the competition angle, drawing meaning from imagined dominance, to cloaking fundamentally empty, endlessly-abnegating gameplay in ever-more-elaborate narrative disguises, and maybe every once in a while creating something that can stand alongside the best music and novels and films in claiming to get as close as possible to inherent significance as anything can in this fallen world. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, scratch the surface, and we are confronted with absurdity.
To bring this around to the point: one must imagine Sisyphus happy, sure, but after playing fifteen minutes of Traveller’s Log I’m definitely not.
What we’ve got here is an RNG-heavy RPG, implemented in Python, with as far as I can tell no goals, plot, or characterization beyond a randomly-generated backstory that wins points for silliness but has no bearing on the game itself:
You are impulsive, precise and mysterious.
You are a dragon
Your name is Zureom.
You were born and grew up in a fairly rich family in a normal village, and lived happily until you were about 4 years old. But, at that point, your life changed drastically.
You lost your parents when they left after a government takeover and are now alone, miserable and abandoned.
You now have to survive in a rough world, filled with magic and mystery.
Hopefully dragons age in like dog’s years, or Zureom’s enemies could bring their adventures to an untimely end with one call to Child Protective Services.
You’re set loose into one of half a dozen different regions, with the options to “walk” – which basically means trawling for encounters – trade with some invisible, omnipresent merchants, or try your luck in a randomly-picked different region. Random encounters can be with foxes, who just provide a bit of atmosphere, handleless doors that can’t be opened, treasure chests that alternately provide a couple coins or kill you without explanation, inns that don’t do anything, and two different kinds of fights: against bandits, that never give any reward, or against the game’s one monster, a “snadwick”, which I kept misreading as sandwich maybe because I was hungry. Death has little sting, since you instantly respawn, though this sometimes will zero out your accumulated riches – that’s what brought my most successful run to an end, with 49 coins vanishing into the ether because I typed “s;ash” instead of “slash” when I attempted to attack a monster (you need to type full commands, as far as I could tell).
There’s a little more to the game than I’ve outlined – there’s a labyrinth region where you can unlock successively deeper levels, though they all seem to behave exactly the same, and there’s a map that allows you to choose which region to warp to. I also did a little bit of source-diving, and seems like some characters are born with the ability to wield magic (so much for existence preceding essence) which enables them to use spells to open those unopenable doors and occasionally zap baddies. But there’s nothing that changes up the basic mechanical gist of the gameplay – wander around, slash baddies (well, baddy), get a couple coins, repeat and repeat. As a demonstration of Sartre’s conceptualization of anguish, it’s gangbusters – and, to speak seriously for a moment, it’s competently programmed enough that the author does have the spine of what could turn into a solid RPG once more variety, story, and engagement points are added. But as is, it would take more nous than I’ve currently got handy to choose to push this particular boulder up this particular hill any longer.
The parser's more disorienting than the jungle, November 21, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
These days when I’m reviewing a custom-parser game, there’s a little introductory patter I usually launch into where I talk about how back when I was first getting into IF 20ish years ago, seeing that an author had created their own parser for a game was invariably cause for alarm – a sign that I was about to be subjected to an insufficiently-tested, awkwardly-designed system that lacked any of the conveniences that contemporary audiences had justifiably begun to take for granted. But over the years, the quality of custom-parser games has inarguably gotten much better – indeed, one even took fifth in last year’s Comp! – with authors paying attention to what the mainstream systems offer and incorporating most of the same features in their own work.
This trend is a very positive one all around, but here’s a downside – it meant I blithely booted up Jungle Adventure with high hopes for enjoying a round of puzzle-solving and treasure-hunting in tropical climes, and wound up striding gormlessly into a rusty old mantrap of a custom parser that brought me right back to the bad old days.
This is going to be a very negative review, because Jungle Adventure is a badly designed game that’s frustrating in the extreme to play. That’s deeply unfortunate, though, because it’s clear the author put a lot of work and creativity into it. This is most obvious in the detailed, often-clever ASCII art that decorates most scenes – it’s fantastic, with a sense of whimsy and humor (like the bend in the protagonist’s plane once it crashes) that always made me smile. But it’s also reflected in the many different gameplay modes Jungle Adventure boasts; much of it is typical parser fare, but there are also some choice-based sections as well as an extended graphical maze, complete with RPG-style combat.
If the author had a lot of fun putting the game together, though, the player is likely to have no such luck. While most of the puzzles aren’t especially challenging, Jungle Adventure is a beyond-punishing gauntlet of suffering, largely due to the extremely limited capabilities of the parser. From peeking at the python code, in fact it looks like there isn’t really a parser – just a whole mess of hard-coded if-then statements that manually match different input the player types. That means that unless you read the author’s mind and type the exact right thing at every stage, you’re doomed to see a litany of completely unhelpful error messages as the game fails to communicate whether you got a verb wrong, an object wrong, a preposition wrong, or are just barking up the wrong tree.
I’ll restrain myself from offering too many examples, but a few of the most egregious include the fact that neither X nor LOOK AT suffice to examine an object – just LOOK THING; that EXIT means QUIT but LEAVE means EXIT; to get the batteries out of a RADIO you can’t OPEN RADIO or LOOK IN RADIO, just TAKE OUT BATTERIES; and when you’ve got the opportunity to offer an object to another character GIVE RADIO doesn’t work but RADIO does.
Compounding this obfuscated system is an obfuscated game design. While there are hints offered in every room, they’re often fairly cryptic, and I found them inadequate to the challenge of gently leading me to the solutions to puzzles like e.g. the second one, which requires finding the aforementioned radio by intuiting that you’re probably wearing clothing with pockets and typing LOOK IN POCKETS, despite the inventory screen telling you nothing of the sort. Similarly, many of the remaining puzzles require you to squint at the ASCII art and guess what it’s depicting – and which of several synonyms for the object the game will deign to accept. I quickly had recourse to the inauspiciously-named junge_adventure_walthrough.txt (now I really want someone to make the Jung-themed adventure game…) but it only explains the solution to like half the puzzles, and just gestures towards them in general terms when what’s really needed is the exact syntax.
I was able to make it to the end by diving into the aforementioned source code and reading off exactly what I was supposed to do. This didn’t save me from a frustrating time in the maze, though – there’s a lot of randomization here, as well as a bunch of instadeath traps and unbeatable monsters (have I mentioned that there’s no undo, and while there are save slots, there appears to be a bug preventing you from overwriting them?), and a combat system that seems coded such that guns are strictly worse than punching, a fact the descriptions in no way makes clear. Still, I am a cussed, ornery soul on occasion, and I certainly did feel a sense of accomplishment at bashing my head against the maze over and over until I battered my way through – a sense of accomplishment significantly tempered by realizing, after I solved one more puzzle through the expedient of source-diving, that my reward was just a message congratulating me on getting past the first chunk of the jungle, and that there will be more to come once the author gets around to it.
It’s not impossible that part two of Jungle Adventure could be turn out well – stranger things have happened. But to accomplish that, the author will need to do what the authors of custom parser systems have done since they started making them good: look at what the major systems do, imitate them unless there’s a very good reason to drop or change a feature, and test, test, test. As it is, Jungle Adventure Part One is a testbed for some cool graphics and a diverse set of gameplay systems, but I can only recommend it to those looking to bone up on their python-reading skills, or people with disastrously low blood pressure. As released, it’s a frustrating, unrewarding experience that risks resurrecting my old prejudices, though I’m doing my best to fight them.
A slow-paced space trading sim with a well-written intro, November 21, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp. Star Tripper was an entry in that Comp, but was withdrawn by the author midway through)
After playing a bunch of games in a row that required a fair bit of unpacking, can I confess that it felt nice to sink into one that’s content to be just a game, and a fairly low-key one at that? Don’t get me wrong, Star Tripper has a lot going on – it’s a space trading sim a la Elite or Privateer, with dozens of planets and starbases, a host of commodities with varying levels of supply and demand depending on how developed a world is, an ore mining minigame, as well as an overarching plot, all smoothly implemented in ChoiceScript. But it’s fairly slow-paced, quite content to let you tootle around the galaxy buying low and selling high, and despite intermittently-threatening events like losing half your fuel when you need to make an emergency jump away from a black hole or space cops fining you for your forged ship registration, mostly it’s an exercise in slowly watching your number of credits tick upwards.
I don’t in any way mean this as a criticism. There’s this game design framework called MDA that’s gained some currency among tabletop gamers over the last decade or two which breaks down the reasons players engage with a game into a list of different “aesthetics” – this includes predictable stuff like narrative, discovery, challenge, and expression, which are all intuitively applicable to the IF context. But last on the list is one called “abnegation”, which is all about the joy of shutting off your brain and enjoying the sensation of progress without too many demands being placed upon you. Hardcore people often bristle when this comes up, but in my experience abnegation has a lot to recommend it in the right time and place – when I was in law school and spending a lot of time cramming information into my head, for example, I often spent an hour or so in the evening listening to Mountain Goats bootlegs and playing FreeCell over and over.
Star Tripper offers similar pleasures, though again, the modeling here seems reasonably complex – you can’t just run the same commodity to the same destination over and over, as plants only want a finite number of each, and there’s a sort of primitive supply-chain modeled, with lower-tech planets having a lot of low-cost raw materials and a limited ability to pay for some luxury goods and the fewer high-tech paradises shelling out top dollar for everything but selling at even dearer prices, with intermediate worlds somewhere in the middle. Since you’re not given a map at the outset, this means that every once in a while you’ll need to hop to a new quadrant of space and explore to find a new trade route before exhausting it in turn. And at each stage hopefully you’re earning enough to upgrade your ship to increase its cargo bays (and passenger berths – you’ll find folks on starbases willing to pay passage to particular worlds, though the rewards here are much lower than straight commodity trading) and do it all over again, just at a bigger scale.
While the gameplay is the main draw, there is actually a plot here, too – and one I enjoyed. There’s an extended opening sequence that sees your out-of-touch space aristocrat forced into interstellar mercantilism in order to mount an off-the-grid rescue of a kidnapped sibling. The writing here is wry and enjoyable, and creates an effective narrative framework around the standard interstellar-merchant premise (though once you’ve completed the story campaign, it looks like you can unlock a more sandbox experience that drops these elements). Of course, the plot is mostly absent once you get into the game proper – though I think I accidentally clicked through at least one random event involving a message from my sibling, oops! – but it does what it needs to do.
The main complaint I have about the game is that in the hour and a half or so that I played, it felt very slow and samey, with all the different trading routes and ships failing to shake up the simple basic gameplay – though in fairness, it appears some elements, like combat, might be gated behind plot events in the campaign, and I was acutely aware that were I playing on my laptop instead of my phone, I’d likely have been able to build a spreadsheet that would have allowed me to hoover credits out of the galaxy much faster than my haphazard explorations allowed.
This seems like part of the game’s chilled-out design ethos, though. My life situation is not currently one where I can put on a podcast and play a couple hours of video games each day, but if it were I think I’d enjoy getting deep into Star Tripper, seeing my ship slowly get bigger and bigger as my bank account swelled towards the million-dollar payday needed to reach the plot’s endgame. As it is, the 90 minutes I’ve put in are probably about all I’ll be able to muster, but I can’t begrudge the relaxing time I had with the game even in that short interval.
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Adam Whybray, Adri, Andrew Plotkin, Andy Holloway, Austin Auclair, Baldur Brückner, Ben Collins-Sussman, Bill Maya, Brian Rushton, Buster Hudson, Caleb Wilson, Carl Muckenhoupt, Chandler Groover, Chris Jones, Christopher Conley, Damon L. Wakes, Daniel Ravipinto, Daniel Stelzer, David Jose, David Petrocco, David Sturgis, Drew Mochak, Edward B, Emily Short, Erica Newman, Feneric, Finn Rosenløv, Gary Butterfield, Gavin Inglis, Greg Frost, Hanon Ondricek, Harkness Munt, Harrison Gerard, Ian Holmes, Ivan Roth, Jack Welch, Jacqueline Ashwell, James Eagle, Jason Dyer, Jason Lautzenheiser, Jason Love, Jeremy Freese, Joey Jones, Joshua Porch, Justin de Vesine, Justin Melvin, Katherine Morayati, Kenneth Pedersen, Lane Puetz, Llew Mason, Lucian Smith, Marco Innocenti, Marius Müller, Mark Britton, Mark Sample, Marshal Tenner Winter, Matt Schneider, Matt Weiner, Matthew Korson, Michael Fessler, Michael Gentry, Michael Hilborn, Michael Lin, Mike Spivey, Molly Ying, Monique Padelis, Naomi Hinchen, Nate Edwards, Petter Sjölund, Q Pheevr, Rachel Spitler, Reed Lockwood, Reina Adair, Riff Conner, Roberto Colnaghi, Rowan Lipkovits, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Scott Hammack, Sean M. Shore, Shin, Wade Clarke, Zach Hodgens, Zack Johnson A shoggothy shaggy-dog story, September 21, 2022In an IF scene that’s largely oriented around a model of games as small, auteur-driven jewels, Cragne Manor stands out. There’s the unmitigated gall of its conception: pay tribute to the all-time-great Anchorhead by soliciting one-room contributions from basically everyone currently writing IF, then knit their divers productions into a single patchwork whole, exquisite corpse style. There’s the sheer avoirdupois: 84 authors producing an eight and a half meg game file, both of which are way, way too much. And there’s the clumsiness: this is the game that broke IFDB for a couple years with its gargantuan list of authors and tags. Fittingly, it’s also the rare work of IF that’s gotten a modicum of mainstream attention – it even has its own TV Tropes page.
It's surprising, then, that as of this writing its IFDB page boasts only 15 ratings and a paltry 4 reviews – three of which were penned by contributing authors, one by a key beta tester. Kudos to all those folks for their contributions to the game and to the discourse around it, but where are the players? Even accounting for the fact that its many many authors might feel some reluctance to evaluate a project they contributed it, are we to understand that Cragne Manor is a classic in the Twainian sense, that everyone wants to have played but no one wants to actually play?
Well, that’s probably part of the reason. Anyone who’s been around the block a time or two surely quail at the combinatorial hell promised by such a gargantuan, semi-coordinated game, for example, and given that you can play a dozen different high-quality pieces of IF in the time it takes to even crack open the door of the eponymous manse, it’s understandable that many folks have laughed at the premise but declined to delve into the reality of Cragne Manor.
Partly, though, I think the issue is that the game seems to frustrate the whole concept of rating or reviewing. This is in no way a single integrated whole; if I were to pull out three highlights and three lowlights, the way I would for an ordinary game, I would a) have communicated less than ten percent of the full measure of Cragne Manor, and b) not provided much of a guide to the remaining 90%, because the off-kilter mood piece that is Wade Clark’s Music Room has little to do with what’s awesome about Chris Jones’s gonzo Meatpacking Plant Bathroom, and the bugginess of the Cragne Family Plot isn’t what’s wrong with the cool-in-concept but overly obscure puzzle in the Disheveled Studio. Reviewing the game is like reviewing America: sure, lots of racist relatives, overall presentiment of doom, but in issuing a generalization that applies from Alabama to Wyoming, the texture of the thing risks being so profoundly lost that it feels like there’s not any point to the attempt – it might be that the most compact map of the territory is the territory itself.
Lucky you, though, if Cragne Manor is America, I am its de Tocqueville, an impartial foreigner who has visited its shores, traveled exhaustively, and comes now to render a judgment whose hubris is exceeded only by its smugness (here’s hoping tuberculosis doesn’t get me in my 53rd year).
(Incidentally, dear reader, if right now you’re feeling frustrated by this review’s verbosity, overall shagginess, and stubborn delay in getting to what per its title it’s ostensibly about you uh might not like Cragne Manor. If, on the other hand, you nodded along to that the-map-of-the-territory-is-the-territory bit, you might prefer to click the link in the previous paragraph, which goes to a 23-chapter annotated Lets Play of the full game I posted on the IntFiction.com forums.)
With throat-clearing done, it's tempting to jump straight into a travelogue and talk about specific individual rooms, because of course that’s what you spend the game doing: come to a new place, suss out what’s on offer, solve a puzzle or soak up some atmosphere or realize you’ll need to come back later, then move on and do it all again, at least until you finally reach the limits of the map and wind up spending more time running down rapidly-collapsing puzzle chains to reach the endgame. And there are some really exciting set pieces to experience: beyond those I’ve already mentioned, Andrew Plotkin contributes a robust alternate take on his Hadean Lands magic system, Hanon Ondricek has what feels like a puzzle-light lost Stephen King short story, Daniel Stelzer and Jemma Briggeman offer a tough-but-fair and very atmospheric puzzle that serves as one of the game’s first choke-points… and beyond the justly-celebrated name authors, a couple I’d never heard of before wrote some of the moments I enjoyed best, like Michael D. Hilborn’s Church Steeple, which combines a forlorn backstory, an eerie landscape, and a clever, climactic puzzle mechanism. Original Anchorhead author Mike Gentry even takes a satisfying, self-effacing bow that’s a lovely grace note for the project, so how can I not discuss that?
But ultimately I think that’s a futile approach – as I’ve said, there’s so much variety here that it can’t be adequately conveyed in summary form and makes this a questionable use of word count (like, to return to this review’s leitmotif, I really enjoyed taking an architectural river-tour of Chicago one time, but in a review of America as a whole how much time can justifiably be spent on that?), and besides, much of the joy of the game is discovering what’s going to pop up next on the roadside. There’s also the risk of biasing things too much towards the big stuff, when the game’s also enriched by a number of quiet, unobtrusive rooms that have some well-written flavor text, or an easy but innovative puzzle, that risk getting lost in the shuffle. So I’ll try to stay focus on the overall gestalt, and what a whole made up of so many pieces can possibly add up to.
The first and most important thing to communicate is that this a trip that’s far less grueling than it appears on first blush. It’s of course a long, long game, and most players will probably want to pace themselves rather than dive in and not come up for air until they’ve completed it. But the puzzles are usually not that hard – some of the trickier ones even have bespoke integrated hints – and the structure of the game is such that you’re almost never looking at a gargantuan inventory list combing through it for the one item that’ll solve a room (admittedly, my inventory was often so big because I delighted in picking up clear red herrings and scenery that had been incorrectly flagged as takeable). Because most challenges are self-contained, usually the stuff you find in a room is what you’ll need to resolve it, and on the occasions when an item from elsewhere is needed, there’s usually more than adequate signposting. There’s even an in-game mechanism, heroically implemented by co-organizer Jenni Polodna, that will flat-out tell you if you’ve got everything you need to complete an area, or if you need some thing or information from elsewhere before proceeding.
Sure, a player will need to gird their loins for some disambiguation issues – by midgame, a command like X BOOK could easily generate a dozen potential options – but there are tools to manage that, too, so it’s much much less of a pain than it could have been. As the cherry on top, the game’s even Merciful for the most part, modulo the odd bug or oversight (one very small spoiler to protect the unwary: keep a save before you’re tempted to try on any dodgy gloves).
This isn’t to say there aren’t some rough patches – as mentioned above, there’s at least one room with fairly serious bugs, and several places where most players will either need to resign themselves to a lot of trial and error or a quick peek at one of the many, quite robust walkthroughs. Such things are inevitable in a project of this size, scope, and complexity. But the organizers have done an amazing job smoothing out the experience, providing not just hastily beaten-out trails running through an untamed wilderness, but a gleaming, modern Interstate system linking the game’s incredibly disparate pieces. All of which is to say, if you’ve been daunted by the prospect of taking on Cragne Manor, as I was for a long long time, you’re not necessarily wrong, but you should probably reduce your imagined daunting factor by like 70% or so.
As for structure and the big-picture narrative: if (I repeat) Cragne Manor is America, the direction of its traversal must surely be east-to-west; starting with a reasonable grounding in New England, you work your way through an often-terrifying Deep South and an interminable Midwest with too many libraries and bathrooms, much like Dakotas (don’t get me wrong, some individual libraries and bathrooms are amazing, and I presume the same is true for Dakotas), then breaking into the clear air of the mountain states and feeling some momentum as you descend towards the endgame, before reaching the psychedelic, what-did-I-just-experience California that is Dan Ravipinto’s shack – the game’s clear climax, a brain-melting bit of parallel-worldism that I still haven’t fully digested – and realizing that there’s still the Alaskan anticlimax of wrapping up the last puzzles and an empty penultimate location to go, ultimately concluding the trip in a Hawaii of an ending that’s quite pleasant, though rather small-scale and not especially connected to anything that’s come before.
There is something resembling a plot, sure, which isn’t too far off from Anchorhead’s: you play Naomi Cragne, who’s married into a clan of necromancers, sorcerers, murderers, and worse, in search of your lost husband Peter. But of necessity, who Peter is, and exactly how far gone he’s wound up, changes from location to location, and Naomi is likewise a shapeshifter, giving different accounts of her upbringing, job, and personality depending on where she’s standing, and even occasionally implying that she’s a Cragne by blood just as much as is Peter (ick). There are forces arrayed against her: you’ll hear about an incredible list of similarly-named Cragne relations, with various Edwins, Edmunds, and Edwards portentously introduced then never mentioned again once you’ve left the room (which might seem unrealistic, but eh, I’m half Italian, I still remember the family trip where we took a detour to meet up with like six cousins who lived in Vegas, who similarly emerged seemingly ex nihilo and retreated immediately thence as soon as we’d left). Looming above it all is the sinister presence Vaadignephod – on loan from co-organizer Ryan Veeder’s Lurking Horror II – who sometimes wants to kill you, sometimes wants to lure you into practicing dark magic, and sometimes seems to want to preserve you for vague, nefarious ends. It’s all riffs on riffs on riffs; just about every author gets in some references to Anchorhead and Lovecraft, but you only need to do a shallow bit of digging to turn up tips of the hat to Monkey Island, to Frankenstein, to hacker jokes, to Francis Fukuyama(!).
If you’re the kind of person who likes to invent headcanons, you could have fun attempting to fit all the pieces together – in the aforelinked Let’s Play, I decided Naomi was actually a cover identity for Lovecraft’s immortal ghoul-queen Nitocris, who delighted in lying to everyone she met about who she was and what she was up to – but there’s something to be said for just letting the madness wash over you, going with the flow and interpreting the thematically-consistent, narratively-bonkers plot as like successive different interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, or an endlessly-rebooted superhero movie. Either approach I think works; they key thing is to come up with some way to engage with Cragne Manor’s Protean nature, rather than keep your head down and hope to ignore it.
I should also say, there are some clear throughlines running through the game that do provide some sense of pacing and continuity. There are discrete puzzle chains that organize the player’s progress through the game: some challenges have to do with unlocking the map, others about a game-wide bibliophilic scavenger hunt, and there’s a compelling thread about digging up info on some extra-special Cragnes and their personal predilections. A few authors also managed to think creatively about how to weave their contributions into the weft of the whole game’s structure, most notably Lucian Smith, who constructs a multi-act plot that starts with an annoying inventory object and progresses into a surprising, emotionally-satisfying climax I wouldn’t dare to spoil. So while the game lacks one of the traditional pleasures of IF – gameplay unlocking the next bit of a narratively-satisfying story – it still definitely feels satisfying to solve puzzles and progress through Cragne Manor’s various tracks and systems.
Are there weaknesses? Sure; as I’ve mentioned, there are some rooms and puzzles that don’t work as well as others, due to technical issues or inadequate clueing or just going on too long (Christabell and Carol, I loved ya but please hire an editor next time!) Towards the end, the game can start to creak under the great weight it’s being asked to shoulder (DROP ALL would only divest me of like half my inventory list by the time I hit the Manor’s second floor). And as I’ve hopefully made very very clear, if you’re hoping for subtly-limned characters and the Aristotelian unities, friend, you are so out of luck.
Without underselling these flaws, and without steamrolling over the fact that there surely are people for whom Cragne Manor will be very far from what they value in IF, though, I feel it’s churlish to accentuate the negative here. What’s on offer is an overabundance of riches, far bigger, far weirder, but also far friendlier than you’d assume (I’m still sufficiently naïve to think that maybe that’s another way the comparison to America works?) There’s nothing else like it in IF, which is probably on balance for the best, but good Lord I’m glad this miraculous thing exists. And I suspect if you give it a try, you’ll feel the same way too.
I beta tested this game. My game Sting is also listed in the author’s note as one of its inspirations, a paragraph ahead of such lesser influences as Sylvia Plath. I can assure you that I’m no way biased by this, because Jesus, I can’t go five minutes without being compared to Sylvia Plath. Like, if you asked me, “Mike, would describe Sylvia Plath’s writing as lambent, incisive, and alive to the contradictory power and vulnerability that have been freighted into the concept of the feminine,” I would of course say yes; and if you asked me, “Mike, would you describe your own writing as lambent, incisive, and alive to the contradictory power and vulnerability that have been freighted into the concept of the feminine,” I mean, I wouldn’t want to negate your interpretation, so I’d have to say yes to that too. Plus we both have a love-hate relationship with Ted Hughes, we’re basically the same person.
More seriously, the reason I usually say my responses to games I’ve beta tested aren’t reviews is less because of a fear of being biased – I generally have no problem giving polite but direct feedback even to my nearest and dearest when I think it’s justified, which as my wife will attest is a delightful character trait – and more because I don’t trust my own experience of game. Usually I’ll have tested a beta version just a few weeks before the final version is released, and it’s really hard to revisit the game and put aside the impression I had of it when it was in a less-refined form and my brain was in testing mode, which can vary quite a lot from how I’d normally approach a game.
Here, though, I think I last looked at the game in February, which is long enough that I feel like I was coming to it fresh when I just replayed it. So I’m confident in my judgment: this is a really good game, a compact jewel of a thing that only really does one thing, but that one thing is so complex, and so well-realized, that it feels quite big indeed.
On the most mundane level, this is true because the author’s implemented a bevy of helpful features that make this feel like a proper game, not simply an amateur affair. There’s very helpful help text, a small number of evocative line-drawn images, an ASCII map, hints for the puzzles – well, riddles – on offer, and a good amount of quite complex “concrete poetry”, where words take on the shape of what they describe, which must have taken an ungodly amount of work to get right (plus there’s a screen-reader mode to make this all accessible to those with visual impairments). It’s easy to dismiss this stuff as trifles, but it makes an impression, communicating that this is something the author cares about and is trying very hard to create inviting on-ramps to all sorts of players, and engage as many of their faculties as possible.
That’s just the mortar holding the thing together, though. To stick with the architectural metaphor, there’s also the façade. Prose in parser-based games is so often workmanlike, pressed into service of many masters at once; I can count on the fingers of one hand the authors who can achieve real literary effect under these constraints without landing the player in a hopeless muddle. Well, add Amanda Walker to that list – all the writing here is just lovely, but the landscape and wildlife descriptions are especial highlights. One early excerpt will stand in for many:
Shadows dapple and darken. A rabbit darts across the steps in front of you, its white tail bobbing briefly, and then it is gone into the undergrowth… Birds call. They flash bright against the naked branches: cardinal screams red; goldfinch blazes sun.
Still, the façade is just the façade, and we’ve yet to talk of the bricks. What ultimately makes Of Their Shadows Deep so affecting is what it’s about: aphasia, the loss of language as words are stripped from a once-vital mind. There’s a layer of fictionalization here, via the magic realism of the puzzles, but even without the author’s note at the end stating the real-world background, it feels very obvious that this is an autobiographical work. Nothing in this dilemma feels abstract; there’s real emotional weight behind everything the protagonist does, from their game-opening flight from an unbearable situation to the final return and catharsis.
Impressively, this isn’t just a frame around standard meat-and-potatoes gameplay. While you do solve such typical IF puzzles as lighting a dark area and chopping through a foredoomed door, all this is accomplished primarily through words – not in the degenerate way all IF is words, of course, but by solving riddles. Half a dozen times, you’ll be confronted with an obstacle, only to find a sheet of paper with a bit of poetry that poses a riddle. Answer it correctly, and you’ll be gifted with an instantiation of the thing you’ve guessed, allowing you to progress.
It’s easy to overlook how smart this is, because of course riddles are a traditional part of the IF repertoire, but here the point isn’t to tease the player’s brain – in fact the game’s riddles are all fairly simple, which is good because every single riddle is too easy or too hard, or both – it’s to play the theme. The primarily gameplay consists of receiving intimations and cues pointing to an object, then, once you’ve successfully carried out the act of naming, gaining mastery over the thing. There’s an elemental, Adamic resonance to this that implicitly communicates its own negation: what happens when you can’t summon the name? Does that mean losing the thing itself? Of Their Shadows Deep has an answer to that, in a lovely final puzzle that wasn’t there when I did my testing, and which ends the game in an unexpected moment of grace.
If the reader will forgive my wrapping up this review by once again talking about myself – and spoiling Sting while I’m at it – I found this last note quite moving. I don’t have the same experience Amanda writes about, of having a loved one’s mind eroded away bit by bit, but I did lose my twin sister to cancer two years ago, at the untimely age of 39 (Sting is a response to this, and the way it retroactively reconfigured pretty much every memory I have). Everyone always says people fighting through cancer are brave – and they’re right – but even by that standard, Liz was a tough, ornery patient, refusing pain meds until literally the last week of her life. By that point they needed to give her very strong stuff, and over the course of the days she spent more and more time sleeping, or staring off in a daze, her use of language mostly fled as her mind and tongue went slack.
The last night but one, before I headed to bed, I hugged her and told her that I loved her, and that I’d be the one sitting up with her tomorrow night (we were taking turns to make sure someone was there, just in case… nobody completed the thought). I’d done this before, and she mostly wasn’t able to respond – but this time, with difficulty, she got her arms around me too, and was able to grunt something incomprehensible, then did so again, just about the only sounds she’d made that day.
I’m aware that sounds like a horrible story when I tell it, but maybe if you’ve ever been in similar circumstances, you’ll believe me when I tell you those few seconds were the happiest I’d felt in months. Moments like that can’t change what’s going on, but in those situations, when you’ve lost so much but there’s somehow so much more still to be lost, they’re all that’s left – and that can be enough. I can’t being to imagine how to render that in prose in any real way, though – all I’ve done here is kind of describe and gesture at the experience – but I think Of Their Shadows Deep captures something of that intuition, which on top of everything else it does, is a hell of a crowning achievement.
(I beta tested this game, so this is more a series of impressions than a full review – and full disclosure, I don’t even get to the game until paragraph six, so it’s not even short)
I’ve enjoyed seeing other folks sharing their histories with chess as part of their reviews of You Won’t Get Her Back, so here goes with mine. As a nerdy kid, I was course into chess: before the internet and the long tail all nerdy kids were pretty much into the same five things, plus whatever you randomly stumbled across in thrift store-used bins or bootleg tapes from a friend with relatives in Japan. And so since chess was part of the package, so I was in the chess club in middle school.
This basically just meant that during lunch periods, I’d play chess against other kids, and occasionally Mr. Young, the teacher who ran chess club. He was a short, powerfully-built ex-player for the Israeli national soccer team – with some level of celebrity, we kids were dimly aware, though now that Wikipedia is a thing I can confirm he was definitely the real deal – who now coached sports classes in a suburban New York school. In retrospect, he was straight out of a Philip Roth novel, though that wasn’t one of my main reference points as a 12 year old. Anyway every once in a while he’d play against one of us, and he didn’t hold back in the slightest, chortling with demoniacal glee as he slashed a queen into the back ranks or wove an ineluctable web of pawns to pin down a free-floating rook.
There was one time, though, when I was playing him, and playing the game of my life – I mean I don’t remember it in any detail, but I must have been, because I actually made it to the endgame with him, and in better position. What I do remember is that I had a bishop in reserve, that once I got it out from behind a yet-unmoved pawn, I’d be able to set up long-range checks that would let me clean up his remaining pieces, probably advance that pawn, and finally, finally win against Mr. Young.
Then he giggled, and somehow took the pawn with one of his that was next to it, putting my king in check while he off-handedly told me about the en passant rule. That was pretty much the last time I enjoyed a game of chess – something about the idea that there was this secret, hidden rule to the game that nobody had ever bothered to explain to me, just lurking until it was sprung like a trap to deny me this one moment of glory, profoundly offended my sense of fair play
Years later, I became a lawyer, an irony that I’m only now noticing.
If this has anything to do with You Won’t Get Her Back – and it doesn’t, that was just an incredibly self-indulgent lead-in, sorry Andrew – I repeat, if I were to try to reverse-engineer some relevance to the actual game I’m theoretically reviewing, it would be to say that I came to it with a predisposition to dislike gimmicks in chess, and it must be confessed that this chess puzzle in parser form has even more of a gimmick to it than the author’s previous games in this genre. Those – Fourbyfourian Quarryin’ and Fivebyfivia Delenda Est (best title of 2021) – involved placing different pieces on a shrunk-down chess board to set up a favorable endgame scenario. Here, we’ve got a straight chess puzzle, like you read in the newspaper, with the player’s actions actually moving the pieces and the opponent moving their pieces in turn – and it all hinges on pawn promotion. Despite that predisposition, though, I really dug YWGHB.
Partially this is due to the narrative content of the game, because it’s not just a dry exercise in piece manipulation. The setup involves the white player being down to just one pawn and their king (the player character), partially because the king couldn’t bear to see any harm come to his wife (the queen) and played too conservatively. Black has their king and a rook, so definitely has the advantage, but of course there’s a chance to succeed, as your king sets his sights on getting his pawn to the enemy’s back rank and promoting it to bring back his queen (thus the title). The writing takes this situation seriously, which I found surprisingly effective – I was definitely motivated to win not just because I wanted to solve the puzzle, but because I wanted to reunite these lovers cruelly torn apart by war.
Still, the game is 99% chess, and the other takeaway from the above story is that I haven’t played the game even semi-seriously in 30 years, so I pretty much suck at it. As a result, my progress through YWGHB primarily involved trial-and-error bashing as I got to the right solution after trying pretty much every incorrect one I could think of. Thankfully, even this rock-stupid way to play is still satisfying, because much as you accumulate knowledge through your failures, you also get a bit of fun ending text describing how you’ve fouled things up, and also get an achievement for your trouble. I’d like to tell you that I’m annoyed by achievement mechanics and how ridiculous it is that we’ve gamified our games. But I’m not made of stone, achievements are fun, and there are a ton of them here so even if winning felt beyond my grasp much of the time, I could at least try to lose in ever-more-exotic ways.
I won’t say too much about the solution, except that it does involve a really cool aha moment, so I can see why Schultz was motivated to implement this puzzle, specifically, in IF – plus it doesn’t require too much chess knowledge to hit on the answer, and the game does a good job of providing a few nudges after the obvious moves fail. There’s also an included walkthrough if the going gets too tough, alongside the author’s characteristically-extensive help and meta commands to orient the player (I realize I also haven’t yet mentioned that the chessboard is fully implemented in ASCII art).
I suppose there are expert chess players for whom YWGHB will be too lightweight to be enjoyable, as they just buzz-saw through the puzzle with their superior knowledge. Similarly, as someone’s first introduction to chess, it’s likely too punishing, with that damned rook jumping on the slightest misstep and resetting things back to the beginning – one critique might be that stalemate doesn’t feel much better than a loss, which may be true in the land of chess puzzles but maybe makes less sense given the conceit that this game is a war between countries, where the difference matters a lot. For folks with some experience of chess but who don’t solve the thing as soon as they look at it, though, I think this is a satisfying puzzle to chew on, with really robust implementation and some nice narrative grace notes.
(I beta tested this game, so this is more a short series of impressions than a full review)
One of my favorite games of last year was Christopher Merriner’s ParserComp entry The Faeries of Haelstowne, and Adventuron game set in an English backwater where supernatural doings are transpiring. Comes now Things that Happened in Houghtonbridge, and I’m happy to report that IF’s hottest mini-trend, “great ParserComp entries in Adventuron with an implausibly-named British village in their title” has continued into its second year.
Okay, the resemblance is mostly superficial, and plotwise the two games don’t actually have much in common – this is set in the present day, with an appealing teenage protagonist who’s investigating some strange goings-on that have a family connection. If anything, though, THH goes even further than Haelstowne did to make the sometimes-finicky Adventuron parser feel just about as smooth as the far more mature Inform or TADS ones, and it boasts engaging prose that’s incredibly clean (even in the version I beta tested, I didn’t detect a single errant typo in this largish game).
Much of what I enjoyed about the game was delving into the mystery of what exactly was going on with the disappearance of the protagonist’s aunt – that’s a stereotypical setup, but the truth of what’s going on boasts some creative zigs and zags, and the game does a great job of presenting different pieces of the puzzle through varying means, including but not limited to well-written letters and diaries. The structure is well judged to support this slow unlayering of the onion, too: much of the game revolves around unlocking different rooms in your aunt’s kinda-spooky house, but you also travel to a handful of other locations which helps change of the vibe, and time passes as significant plot points are reached, giving the story time to breathe. The puzzles are likewise there more to help pace things out and provide a sense of engagement than to melt the brain – you’ll have seen most of them before – but they’re generally well done, solidly clued, and satisfying to solve; the release version also has integrated hints.
There’s a late-game turn that’s not exactly a plot twist, nor even a shift in genre – I guess I’d call it a tweak to the vibe? (For those who’ve played the game: ). I could see it being somewhat polarizing since it isn’t especially heavily telegraphed in the first two-thirds of the game. Still, I enjoyed it; the early parts of the game clearly establish that there’s some unexplained strangeness that’s been hovering over the town and the protagonist’s family, and it’s satisfying to encounter said strangeness and instead of it just being ghosts of Cthulhu or whatever, it’s actually still really strange!
Regardless, THH is a really fun time, with good writing, characters, story, puzzles, and implementation; I have a hard time picturing the IF fan who wouldn’t dig this one. Definitely recommended, and I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled next ParserComp for any game set in like Chipping Sodbury, or some Welsh town without vowels, in hopes of a three-peat.
(I beta tested this game, so this is more a short series of impressions than a full review)
If ever there was a tough act to follow, The Impossible Bottle is it. Co-winner of the 2020 IF Comp – out of a field of 103 – TIB dazzled with a space-warping gimmick for its puzzles, but was more than merely clever, adding winning characters and impeccable implementation. It also proved an excellent demonstration of author Linus Åkesson’s bespoke IF system, Dialog, allowing for interaction just as smooth and deep as anything you can manage in Inform or TADS while also letting the player get through the game without typing and just using hyperlinks instead. Anyone of sound mind would think twice before asking players to compare their game to TIB, but that’s just the situation The Impossible Stairs is in: the present author, Brian Rushton, offered to write a sequel game as a prize in that year’s Comp, Linus picked that prize, and here we are.
Wisely, TIS mostly doesn’t try to one-up TIB; it’s a smaller game, and while it too has a gimmick (that’s actually a rather elegant complement to that of the former game, messing with time while TIB messed with space), said gimmick is comparatively straightforward, and the scope of the game, and difficulty of the puzzles, are both much more modest this time out. That’s definitely not a bad thing – there’s nothing here like that &^% dinosaur from TIB, for one thing, and this is still a satisfying slice of game, probably taking an hour or so to solve and offering at least one or two aha moments as you figure out how to use the strange properties of the titular staircase to resolve the trickier conundrums.
Still, there is one area where it’s at least competitive with TIB, and dare I say it, maybe even one-ups the original, which is the cast of characters. Both games are family affairs, casting you as a daughter doing chores before a party. TIB’s Emma is a child of six, and her interactions with her loving but distracted parents – and kinda-jerky older brother – are sweet but don’t draw from too rich of an emotional palette given her youth. TIS’s CJ, though, is an adult (well, mostly), and gets to interact with a broader set of relatives, including her father, grandmother, a cousin, and an uncle, in the course of checking the items off her (well-implemented) to-do list. These conversations are also spread over several different time periods, with characters aging, changing personalities and circumstances or even sometimes passing away as the decades progress. The game’s definitely not a downer, don’t get me wrong, and while the menu-driven dialogue is well-written it isn’t an elaborate focus of gameplay like in an Emily Short game – but still, there’s a surprising poignancy to seeing these kind, well-meaning people at different stages of their lives, and learn to hold on to their memories once some family members are no longer there.
A couple days ago as of this writing, Sylfir’s games vanished from itch, without so far as I know any explanation. I’ve seen speculation that this was an attempt to withdraw Lantern from ParserComp, which I suppose is plausible though in that case I’m not sure why they got rid of all their other games, as well as their account information, too. Given the game’s current unavailability, and the uncertainty about why that is and whether it will ever be available again, it’s perhaps inappropriate to write anything about it. But as I said in another thread, if we listened to Virgil the Aeneid would have been destroyed in antiquity, and despite Kafka’s posthumous autographopyromanic wishes the consensus is in favor of reading and engaging with his previously-unpublished stuff. Those are maybe too-exalted reference points, but Kafka at least didn’t have much of a predecease reputation; it mostly came later, based on the work. Anyway to square the circle, I resolved the check out the game, but only review it if I had positive things to say.
Given that you’re reading this, of course, it’s clear that I did. Lantern is a bit rough, and I must confess I played it almost entirely with the trackpad rather than using its parser, but it’s creative and has some charm. It’s part of the escape-the-room (well, three rooms) mini-genre, with the uncharacterized player character dropped into locked oubliette without explanation and forced to rely on their wits to solve a series of contrived puzzles and break free. To be clear, I’m not harping on the lack of plot or realism as flaws: they’re part of what I expect from this kind of game, and their presence helps to set player expectations accordingly. What departs from the standards of the genre, though, is that while you start out unable to see anything, that isn’t a barrier that’s quickly vanquished by the titular bringer of light: no, you’ve somehow been deprived of your sight, so you need to navigate your way through these brainteasers with your other senses.
This is a conceit that’s actually ideally suited for IF, I think, since depriving the player of sight in a graphics-based game would be perverse and probably lead to significant interface issues. Here, though, it’s just a matter of changing how the world is described to the player, forcing them to feel around rooms to find out what’s there, listen for movement, and lick and smell to identify objects. The author doesn’t make this too taxing a process – and in fact does a nice job of updating the names of objects as you investigate them with your different senses and figure out what they are – but it’s an effective gimmick that works well with the obsessive investigation escape-the-room games typically require.
While the concept works, there are some foibles in implementation. Most obviously, there are a host of typos littering pretty much every description of a room or object, which is fairly distracting, and there are a couple of bugs (one item’s name appears to incorporate fragments of code, and I was able to simply reach through a locked closet without first finding the key). The interface can also be frustrating if you go into Lantern expecting to type your way through it. The game engine appears to be primarily choice-based, with descriptions highlighting certain clickable keywords and ending with a likewise-clickable inventory list that includes your sense organs (you can click an item once to select it, then click it on another to combine them or use a sense; double-clicking does a closer inspection of the thing). The game allows you to type commands as an alternative to using the links, but this implementation means, however, that if you’re examining an object the keywords for the other objects in a room, or those denoting your inventory and senses, usually aren’t displayed. This means that typing TOUCH TABLE, then TOUCH PAPER might fail, whereas the commands would work fine if you tried them in the opposite order. I can see this being hideously frustrating, but I switched to playing exclusively via clicking very early, and found the interface worked just fine that way.
Clicking also makes it easy to exhaust all the different action combinations, which I had to do a couple of times. There’s at least one puzzle here that defies all logic and I can’t imagine a player solving it except by lawnmowering through the possibilities on offer (Spoiler - click to show) (using the knife on the scratches reading HELL to change it to HELLO, which summons another character to a different room). But again, I kind of expect that from these kinds of games, and the number of potential actions is sufficiently low that it’s not too onerous to power through.
So we’ve got a puzzle game with a fun gimmick, many rough edges, not much plot to speak of, and an interface that can feel like rubbing your face against a cheese grater if you try to play the game the way its entry in something called ParserComp seems to imply you should. I whiled away a pleasant enough half an hour on it, but I can’t say it moved me or made me laugh or clap with delight at its cleverness. So I suppose by some standard it’s no big deal that it’s not online anymore, and wouldn’t even be a big deal if it vanished completely with nobody ever the wiser. I’m not sure I can muster a rigorous rebuttal against that argument, but it still makes me kind of sad – and if that’s where the standard is set, I think a lot more of us than just Sylfir are in trouble. 98% of pretty much everything pretty much every one of us does is imperfect, compromised, wouldn’t stand up to even the flimsiest scrutiny – and oblivion is the destination it’s all hurtling towards. Call me sentimental, but I’m not inclined to hurry the process along.
We’re getting close to the end of the Comp now (of the remaining five games, I’ve beta-tested four of them, and the remaining one has been pulled from the competition at least for now, though I may still write a review), and for me it’s closing at it began, with a game whose interface pushes the limits on what counts as a parser game – in Cost of Living, you type into MadLibs style boxes embedded in the dialogue of two characters discussing a short story from the Golden Age of sci-fi, with your input affecting some of the finer details of their conversation. In fact, the game was briefly disqualified from the competition before an appeal brought it back, and while as I’ve said I’m not especially fussed about policing genre boundaries, I can see why, since while the only interface element is typing text and seeing more text get spit out at you in response, it departs from some of the deep unwritten rules about how parser IF works, like the player’s typing corresponding to some actor taking some distinct and discrete in-world action.
One could argue about the epistemological status of the game all day, of course, but I had my fill of arid formalism back in law school so I return to the principle I outlined in my Kondiac review: if it’s in ParserComp, it gets a ParserComp review. So how does this work? On the whole, not great, in my view, though this isn’t so much down to the novel interface as specific thematic and narrative choices the author made in the flame story which conflict with the text being riffed on. It’s hard to explain why that is without going into some detail on the embedded short story, so fair warning for 70-year-old spoilers.
The story, also titled Cost of Living and apparently in the public domain so it’s fair game for reuses like this, is by Robert Sheckley and while it was published way back in 1952 it has some moments of spooky prescience in the way it depicts a far-future family living lives of convenience, swaddled in a home featuring numerous labor-saving appliances that spring to life with a single press of a button, and an omnipresent voice-activated assistant that’s not too far off of Alexa. It’s also modern in the way that it shows the corrosive impact of a rampant consumerism that’s displaced all other aspirations and values – the central conflict is about whether Carrin, the family patriarch, who’s more than maxed out his credit to buy all the gizmos and gadgets he barely uses, will effectively sell his son into debt peonage to finance yet more useless consumption that will keep him level with his neighbors.
This crass materialism and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses status anxiety are juxtaposed against the hopes of the aforementioned son, who dreams of one day getting to be one of the few skilled laborers remaining in this static society – fixing the automatic machines rather than being effectively infantilized by them – or escaping it entirely by piloting a rocket ship to Mars and fulfilling a long-promised, but long-deferred, colonization effort.
In other words it isn’t saying anything you haven’t heard of, or thought of, before, as a person actively participating in the world circa 2022, but it is certainly relevant in a way a lot of 1950s sci-fi no longer really is, and while it’s written in functional prose that lacks much in the way of subtle emotional shading or nuanced dialogue, Sheckley’s a good enough writer to make it work for the ten pages or so it takes for the story to unspool.
(Parenthetically, I should say that the whole debt peonage angle doesn’t really make sense. The family is in hock for millions of dollars, with an annual salary of 30k, while the monopolistic company that makes all this expensive-to-produce junk pushes yet more stuff on them in order to heap up ever more implausible IOUs. This doesn’t make sense given how these kinds of debt arrangements work in real life, which is to drive down the cost of labor and put it under the thumb of the owners of capital – think of the sharecropping system – because it’s clear that the labor the father performs is completely useless, and it’s not so much the high cost of labor inputs that’s holding back the company’s profitability as it is their habit of giving loans to people already leveraged a hundred to one. There are hints in the story that this is more a matter of political economy, as the company has secured legislation that makes some purchases mandatory, so maybe the idea is that the corporation is trying to substitute itself for the state by effectively privatizing the generational public debt that governments carry to steward society – that would be interesting to dig into, but the story doesn’t really go there).
Again, all of that is completely non-interactive and just as Sheckley wrote it in the 50s. The part that’s interactive is a dialogue between two bodiless, backstory-less, quality-less characters (they have names, that’s it) who are discussing the events of the story. As they talk, one of them will say something like “Why is Carrin ____ about Miller?” (Miller being a neighbor of Carrin’s who committed suicide before the game opens) and you get to type something into the blank. Then the next bit of dialogue will incorporate and respond to what you typed in. As I said, it looks like MadLibs, and sometimes that seems to be exactly how it’s implemented, with your input mechanically parroted but not meaningfully impacting the course of the conversation. Other times the game does pull off the neat trick of seeming to understand what you wrote – I think at minimum, it’s got a word list or algorithm that allows it to know whether a word has positive connotations or negative ones, so the dialogue can proceed accordingly.
Here’s an example of it working well. I got a prompt asking me to characterize the son’s mood after he responded somewhat sullenly to Carrin’s overtures, and I wrote in “enthusiastic.” The game recognized this was an inappropriate response:
Harris: What made you think Billy was in a enthusiastic mood?
Vesper: I was just being sarcastic. It’s obvious Billy isn’t happy about something.
It’s a neat trick (even if now that I paste it in, I notice the game can’t figure out how to get a/an to work). However, the reason I was being kind of a jerk and pushing back here is that I’d first tried to type “disaffected”, which I thought was a good explanation for Billy’s mood, only to be told to check my spelling, and then hit the same rejection message after trying two or three more options. If this restricted approach was needed to keep the game on track, that would be one thing, but sometimes the decisions for what’s accepted and what isn’t seem bizarre. In that above-mentioned “Why is Carrin ____ about Miller?” I tried putting in “thinking”, only to be rebuffed and asked whether I meant “thinning” instead, which it was happy to accept when I dutifully typed it in. And due to the failure to characterize either of the conversationalists in any real way, it never felt like I was playing a particular role, or even that their disagreements had anything behind them other than airy abstraction, which further reduces the stakes and creates an aura of artificiality.
The bigger issue is that, perhaps in recognition of the fact that making this kind of natural-language input work well is really, really hard when engaging with ideas of any complexity, the author’s chosen to have the dialogue focus less on the ideas of the story but on having the Greek Chorus try to figure out the emotional states of the various characters. This is not very interesting because nothing here is at all mysterious; it’s a sci-fi story from the 50s written by a white dude, everybody’s motivations, desires, and feelings are pretty straightforward throughout. Having the peanut gallery constantly interrupting the story to say stuff like “Do you think Billy is ____?” also has the effect of flattening out what ambiguity there is, and making the story feel clumsier (it’s also strange that it’s not clear whether they think they’re responding to a piece of fiction – they don’t seem familiar with the story’s world, but they also appear invested in the characters’ emotional well-being and eventual fates in a way that felt deeply weird to me, a metafictional construct seemingly playing dumb).
As the story comes to a conclusion, the framing dialogue also goes off on a weird tangent – I don’t think I can coherently talk about this by blurry-texting spoilers, so fair warning the rest of this paragraph discusses the latter portions of the frame narration. Without any solid textual prompting, the two characters decide that part of why Carrin is upset is that a throwaway reference to life expectancy now being 150 years means that there are life-extending drugs available, but these are unpleasant to take and his son being indebted means that he, too, will need to take these unpleasant medications to live long enough to work off the increased debt. Again, there’s no basis for this turn towards the more overtly dystopic – it’s clear this remark is just Sheckley filling out his picture of a post-scarcity society, with no indication there are downsides to living longer – and it’s at odds with where the story ultimately goes, which is an ironic coda showing that the characters have become so stunted by their situation that when they imagine the great adventure of going to Mars, all they can picture is pushing a button. There’s no comparable final tag to the frame dialogue, or last moment of interactivity, so it feels like that whole thread just peters out.
There’s clearly innovative thinking that went into presenting this story in this way. And I definitely get the draw of trying to create an interactive Socratic dialogue that uses textual input without being limited to the medium-dry-goods model of traditional parser IF. I can even see that this approach has some potential advantages, since at least with a keyword-based system you don’t need to deal with the challenges of parsing grammar and can focus on understanding nouns, verbs, and adjectives that might not be bound by concrete physical objects, actions, or properties – which is still a hard enough nut to crack!
But I don’t think Cost of Living qua game is a good advertisement for the power of this model; while there are moments where the game does seem to respond in a nuanced way to the player’s input, even then it comes off as a parlor trick, not just due to the limitations of the current implementation but because there’s a fundamental disconnect between the engagement the interactive frame offers and the themes the static fiction is presenting. In the end, I’d have to say that I’d have probably enjoyed this story more if I’d just read it in a book, rather than playing through it like this. That’s a damning indictment, I recognize, but I repeat that it’s not because I think any departure from parser conventions is doomed to failure, or even that this particular departure is likewise preordained for perdition: it’s primarily that the cogs in the two pieces of the game just don’t mesh at the basic literary levels of theme, character, and tone. In theory these are fixable problems – though they’re also generally the hardest problems in any kind of writing – and at any rate there’s value, and honor, in a failed experiment. From some of the conversation on the game’s itch page, it’s clear the author is looking to refine their model, so I hope this critical review is useful for that, and I’ll be around to check out what they come up with next.
Funny title, stripped-down game, August 8, 2022Hey, python game, you still around? I know I said some mean things about you, but it wasn’t anything personal; just a little tough love, you know? Anyway I hope you’re here, because see this ^? All in bold up there? Now that is a title, funny and intriguing and creating a vibe as well as doing some real work grounding the player in the situation they’re going to be inhabiting once they load the game up. Why settle for less, when you could have something like that for yourself, too?
(Although, now that I think about it: I’m hoping that “Self Storage” rather than “Self-Storage” is just a typo).
OK, the unkind might say that beyond a killer title there isn’t all that much to Midnight at Al’s. It’s got a quotidian premise that doesn’t fully exploit the craziness said title seems to promise and which only twists late in the day, pivoting to the less-than-compelling Generic Horror Plot #17 (Spoiler - click to show)(woooo it was built on an old Indian burial ground woooo – kinda problematic!) at that. There’s only one real puzzle, and fewer jokes than you’d think. And there’s some wonkiness to the implementation, including one game-ending bug that’s really easy to trip into.
I can’t deny that the unkind have a point, and we’ll return to those complaints in due course. But despite the flaws I had a good time with this one. Partially, I admit, is that it’s just nice to sink into a nice, familiar Inform 7 game after a Comp that’s been heavy on custom parsers and old-school text adventures – this is my IF comfort food, and I don’t think I’m alone on that. But it’s also the case that that one real puzzle is very satisfying to work through, requiring you to think about what you’re trying to accomplish, deduce what’s going on with a non-obvious but clearly-implied barrier making the simplest way of solving the problem fail, then reassessing your options and capping things off with a nice aha! moment. I’m being intentionally vague here since there’s just the one puzzle so for folks who’ve played the game there’s no ambiguity about which one I mean, and it’s fun enough to solve that I don’t want to spoilt it even a little.
Admittedly, that puzzle does have more than its share of fiddliness – there’s part of it that involves unlocking something, and despite the game clearly knowing exactly what I was trying to unlock and with what, it took me like six tries to phrase the action so that it would be accepted. And it also plays host to the game-ending bug: fair warning to players, if you try to enter the freight elevator you’re never getting back out (heartbreakingly, I’m 99% sure I know exactly what gave rise to this bug – I’m also not one to criticize, since the initially-released version of my entry in last year’s IFComp could lead to the player get stuck in the middle of a swarm of bees being stung forever, which we can all agree is infinity times worse than anything an elevator can get up to). And outside of this, there are several places where things feel a bit more duct-tape-and-chewing-gum than they should, like the ability to cram inappropriately large objects into your backpack and a too-sudden ending that maybe indicates the author ran out of time.
Again, though, I think the pros outweigh the cons. I’ll wrap up with one more thing I liked about Midnight at Al’s: despite the fact that her characterization didn’t come through much after the opening, I enjoyed the protagonist, a disaffected teenager with a dumb summer job and a predilection for hardcore bands (I assume ironically, unless maybe it’s hardcore’s time to come round again?) She seems scruffy but scrappy, the kind of underdog you root for, much like the game itself. The winning sequence promises that she’ll return for future adventures, which I’ll definitely be down for, though hopefully those will get a bit more testing first!
Aesthetically pleasing, basic design, August 8, 2022A game gains a lot by its setting, especially, perhaps, parser IF – back when dinosaurs ruled the earth in the early aughts, I remember it being a commonplace of newsgroup conventional wisdom that the way parser games allow the player to freely roam a landscape or edifice, subjecting each of its features to minute inspection, is a good thing to lean into in one’s designs. You could argue this is making a virtue of necessity – parser IF, at least out of the box, definitely isn’t best-suited for narrative development proceeding over time, or depth of characterization, so what of fiction are you left with except the boring landscapey bits? – but I think there’s something to it: “immersion” is a fuzzy concept that richly deserves the scare quotes I’ve gifted it, but all the same I undeniably enjoy loping around a well-realized setting and getting to know it.
That sense of place is probably one of the strongest suits of Radio Tower, a custom-parser game written in something called Godot (thankfully the loading times are reasonable). The eponymous tower – and its connected station, since decommissioned and turned into a combined rural retreat slash dimension research lab by the protagonist’s friend – is strikingly realized, with a simple title-screen graphic, moody rain effects, and plausible layout elegantly depicted by a blueprint-aping map system. It’s a creepy place to wander, but also makes for satisfying exploration, as you see how different rooms connect up and anxiously push towards the inevitably-bloody revelations in the depths of the compound.
Notably, however, that vibe is only intermittently communicated by the prose – usually, of course, the main attraction in a piece of IF. It’s atmospheric enough, but it’s riddled with typos that start with the first sentence of the first location’s description and increase in density as time goes one (“This rooms severs as Desi’s art studio,” runs the tagline for a mid-game location). The game itself also feels unpolished, with the second half of the complex feeling much more thinly implemented than the first, lacking much in the way of puzzles or even scenery elements to check out. And the design is reliant on a very random-seeming health mechanic: there are regular fights with monsters hiding under various bits of scenery, which use up the various one-use weapons you can carry around, which is all well and good, but many of them inflict unavoidable damage so even if you’re well-prepared, you still might not make it to the end. Further, almost all of the encounters are avoidable if you don’t poke around the environment or decline to investigate a strange noise that you heard, which seems like a bad approach inasmuch as it teaches the player to avoid content and ignore anything that isn’t obviously a puzzle.
Similarly stripped-down is the parser. The custom system is set up to only accept a very narrowly-defined set of commands – and idiosyncratic ones by IF conventions, with the check-out-an-item verb being INSPECT, not EXAMINE, and not admitting to any abbreviation. Fortunately these are all explicitly listed in a side panel, and all the nouns you can apply them to are highlighted with a particular color in the main screen – gold for scenery, blue for stuff you can interact with, red for exits, green for takeable items. So this makes things transparent enough, though the parser is really unforgiving – it doesn’t understand pronouns, and E won’t substitute for GO EAST, nor will INSPECT CHAIR do for INSPECT CHAIRS or (less justifiably) ATTACK WITH MACHETE for ATTACK MACHETE. And the main interaction verb is USE, but you can only USE inventory items, meaning for example there’s nothing to do with the computer in your home other than INSPECT it. The overall effect winds up not too dissimilar from something like Gruescript, so it’s playable enough but sucks enough of the fun out of using a parser to make me wish it’d been implemented with a point-and-click option.
Add to this slightly sloggy interface an inventory limit and the lack of a save game (I mentioned you can die, right?) There are also some bugs – trying to USE WAND led to “Error – tried to use an item with an invalid type”, and I had a bunch of inventory items on the floor go missing after progressing the plot. Plus there was at least one gold-highlighted scenery object that the game told me wasn’t there when I tried to INSPECT it.
As is my way, I’m carping – I think justifiably, because there are a lot of niggles that make playing Radio Tower less engaging than it deserves to be. But it does have its strengths, and since it ends on a cliffhanger, there’s a possibility the author’s going to be coming back to this story. With some tightening of the system, a little more polish, and either loosening up the parser to allow it to play to its strengths, or eschewing it entirely to allow for a mouse interface, I could see a sequel working well, and even as is, it’s still worth a dip into the game to enjoy wandering around its precincts for a while.
More than a sight gag, August 8, 2022This is one for the books – a parser-based text adventure where, other than a few out-of-world commands, the only text is what the player types (those books must be comic books). This works sort of like those old Sierra graphic adventures that still used a parser, where you could see your character and their surroundings, but would direct them by typing – except where those games would similarly drop a text paragraph to tell you the results of your actions, here everything is depicted graphically or iconographically, as your stick-man protagonist ponders the unlikelihood of success when rejecting a proposed course of action, or holds out his hands to reveal the inventory. So this is a gimmick game, but it’s a fun gimmick that rests squarely within the four corners of the ParserComp rules, which makes me like the gimmick even more.
The game itself, I liked less well. The order of the day here is juvenile comedy, which I think is the right call given the comedy inherent in the interface – you’re a stick-dude, a hand with googly-eyes (played I presume by the author(‘s hands)) kidnaps your stick-girlfriend, you need to raid his castle to save her. That’s all well and good, and some of the jokes are solid, including the inevitable twist ending. Unfortunately, the gameplay overcorrects with tough-as-nails puzzles which don’t always make sense even given cartoon logic (Spoiler - click to show) (the high salt content means peeing on plants is generally a no-no rather than a valid watering strategy, is my understanding – or rather, that’s one of the reasons it’s a no-no). This high degree of difficulty helps the game last longer – there are only four locations, and only two real puzzles plus a (pretty easy) guess-the-verb challenge – but it means that playing Gent Stickman means replaying it.
This wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, since the various fail states are generally pretty amusing, but I ran into some technical difficulties that increased the annoyance factor. Most notably, the graphics that show the response response to your input loaded really slowly for me, which was a pain on its own but also meant that sometimes I’d take an action and see two or three blank windows pop up in sequence before dumping me into a game over, which isn’t especially helpful! There are also some places where the design conceit makes progress more difficult than it really should be, like where it took me forever to figure out how to read the text on a plaque mounted on the castle wall – READ PLAQUE didn’t work, and I couldn’t help thinking that in a regular parser game, I’d be told exactly how the parser wants me to refer to the object, while in a graphic adventure I’d just be able to click on it, so this was worse than the worst of both worlds (turns out I was a dummy and I just needed to READ SIGN).
All this means the middle part of my playthrough was kind of rough, as the novelty of this clever rethinking of how a parser game works wore off and the hard puzzles kicked my butt. After I got OK with abusing the (also entirely graphical) hint feature and powered through to the end, though, I looped back to being amused again. This is a funny, clever game, and I can forgive its Dark-Souls-ish difficulty level even if I can’t endorse it. I’m not sure I need a bunch more games using the same interface, but as a one-off gag, Gent Stickman is hard to beat.
Some digressions about 18th Century novels , August 8, 2022Points for truth in advertising: this is a game, kind of, in Python, certainly, and the low-effort approach to naming – and capitalization, for that matter – carries through to the three minutes or so of content here (well, quintuple that if you don’t already have Python installed and need to wrestle with setup). Upon starting the game, you’re greeted with a dense list of commands, then dumped into a tutorial where you (who are you?) are fighting a wolf; in a battle of your fists against the wolf’s claws, you appear to be guaranteed of victory.
I admittedly have never attempted to punch a wolf, but I have read the anticlimactic last chapter of Robinson Crusoe where he gets jumped by starving wolves in the Pyrenees, and based on what I learned there this seems unlikely to work.
(Also: Robinson Crusoe is way weirder than you think. There are also two sequels; in the first sequel he goes to Siberia, and the second is a book of metaphysical essays. One neat thing about novels in the 18th Century is authors hadn’t figured out how they were supposed to work. See also Tristram Shandy).
(And why yes, I’m grasping for things to talk about that are more interesting than python game).
(Seriously, read Tristram Shandy, it’s hilarious).
But so anyway you win the tutorial fight against the wolf, then you fight a bear, and the tutorial warns you to run (I have also not attempted to punch a bear, but this time my intuition and the author’s appear to align in terms of the likelihood of a positive result when boxing wild animals). If you do, you encounter a trader, who’ll let you swap assorted wolf bits for coins, and then for health potions. And with that introduction done, you’re now set loose into the game’s wide world!
The game’s wide world consists of two locations, which appear to be interchangeable, to the extent that all you can do in either is nap until another trader comes along. Per Dan Fabulich’s review, this is because there’s a bug, and napping should also fire off a risk of a random encounter with another wolf or another bear. But there’s no additional content beyond that, even were that bug to be fixed, no progression or ending or plot or anything else. Just a man punching a wolf, forever.
I don’t want to punch a wolf.
I don’t want to punch a bear.
I don’t want to play python game.
Look, I hate to be negative – I try to be a positive person, for my own sake and that of others! But this is a half-completed programming exercise – maybe eventually, after a lot of work, it could provide the skeleton for a worthwhile experience, but the game’s clearly nowhere near that yet. I will say, this did have the easiest launching process of any bit of Python IF I’ve played, so that’s not nothing, and hopefully the author’s decision to enter this into ParserComp bespeaks a desire to get public feedback on a work in progress. But after getting that feedback, I hope they figure out how to incorporate it into a game that does something singular or unique or personal, so that the generic title “python game” will no longer feel so apt.
A low-friction puzzlefest, August 8, 2022There are a lot of different qualities that can mark out a piece of IF as having old-school sensibilities – two-word parsers, Zarfian cruelty, minimalist implementation – but there’s one that’s perhaps the most basic: you’re just out to get some treasure, man. Alchemist’s Gold is about one man’s quest to get an alchemist’s gold, unsurprisingly enough, with no more motivation than the protagonist having heard the rumors that this fellow’s figured out the whole Philospher’s Stone business, and wanting to have the wherewithal to dress like one of the nobility. Jean Valjean we ain’t, but given the style of game here on display, this bourgeois-materialist social climbing is entirely apt.
As to the rest of the aforementioned signifiers, Alchemist’s Gold is fairly easygoing, while still being recognizably a text-adventure-not-IF affair. The implementation is mostly robust, one of the unwinnable situations is clearly signposted, and though the puzzles aren’t brainteasers they’re satisfying to solve (there are also integrated hints, though fair warning that they provide no guidance for the final puzzle, where the wrong move can also lock you out of winning but without the notice you get in the other situation). There’s one technically impressive bit, which is a maze – but the trick is that you can find a map, nicely rendered in ASCII, which makes traversal easy. So it feels like a modern take on an old-school design, which makes for some pleasant adventuring.
I could end things there and I think it’d be an adequate review – the game you’re picturing after reading the above paragraph is pretty much the game Alchemist’s Gold is, a fun way to while away half an hour that isn’t trying to make much of an impression beyond that – but just to pad out the word count, I’ll expand on some of the pieces I glancingly ran through.
On implementation, the game uses the PunyInform library, which from my understanding is a stripped-down version of Inform 6 that helps games run more easily on retro platforms. Despite this, I didn’t run into places where I felt like the parser or implementation were too primitive to be enjoyable – there were definitely times when the parser returned an error rather than automatically figuring out what I wanted to do (like, UNLOCK DOOR giving a “with what?” prompt rather than selecting the only key in my inventory) but this fits the vibe. And while there aren’t a lot of extraneous actions that have much effect, you can still do stuff like try to talk to the animals and otherwise mess around with pieces of the game that have nothing to do with solving the central puzzles. The one annoyance I ran into is that various actions I’m used to not taking any time, including out of world actions like INVENTORY and HELP still use up a turn, which made a time-sensitive situation late in the game more of a pain than it needed to be.
As for puzzle fairness and the possibility of getting into unwinnable states – so midway through the game, you get a single-use item that can get you through any of three locked doors, and if you pick the wrong one, you’ll be stuck. But the game is kind enough to tell you this if you make an incorrect guess, so it’s easily fixed with an UNDO. I kinda question whether this kind of artificiality is any better than just designing the game to avoid these kinds of situations, but I get that this sort of thing is part of the sub-genre’s tropes, and better the awkward warning than nothing. As mentioned, the final puzzle can also be rendered unwinnable – I don’t think this would be a big deal for most players who’ll largely be barreling through the game in one sitting, but I put it aside for a day before wrapping up which meant I’d forgotten an important detail by the time I got to the finale, which made me struggle, and if I’d made my save a single turn later than when I did, I’d have had to replay the whole game over. Again, the issue’s unlikely to come up, and replaying would have been quick, so I think this is all fine.
And just to circle back to the opening – yeah, the protagonist sure seems like a jerk. Besides the whole motiveless malice thing that drives the action, there’s also an early sequence where he befriends a cute woodland creature, then delivers him to a terrible fate (Spoiler - click to show)(though as a vegetarian, I might be oversensitive here – maybe the idea of squirrel stew is meant to be comedic?). There’s a certain unity of character here, reinforcing the idea that this is not someone you should ever ask to housesit, especially if you have valuables or pets, and again, amoral acquisitiveness is a hallmark of the PCs in many early pieces of IF (I’ve enjoyed Drew Cook’s recent exegesis of the colonialist themes in Zork, for example ). But there’s a certain naivety to those chthonic figures that makes things go down easier when they’re revisited – or maybe it’s just that the devilish puzzles and recalcitrant parser provide sufficient distraction from the unattractive selfishness on display? If that’s the case, perhaps reducing the friction from old-school designs, as Alchemist’s Gold successfully manages, has some unanticipated downsides.
A funny, buggy, hard puzzlefest, August 8, 2022A prequel arriving more than two decades after the original series wrapped up, Improv: Origins is a funny, deep one-room puzzler that makes me interested to check out the sequels it sets up. There’s some old-school difficulty, plus a nasty bug or two that made things even harder than intended on my playthrough, so I can’t help bemoaning the lack of modern conveniences like a hint menu, so the game’s definitely not for everyone, but the entertaining cast of characters and intricate puzzle design made me glad I powered through (and, er, begged for help on the forum when I got stuck).
What we’ve got here is comedy superheroes. I see you shuffling for the door, and I know, I know, that sounds pretty dire. But the game makes a great first impression, with sophisticated jokes that go way beyond the typical played out super-parody. Like, your hero is a temp – so far so standard, but the reason the bottom’s dropped out of the heroism game is that a superhero bubble has just burst. The game’s set in a bank – your job is to open up a locked safe after the bank fired the inventor who created it, and they huffed off without sharing the trick of accessing the thing – and as a result there’s a set of economics jokes that kept me laughing, like the painting of two financial-themed heroes, PIN and Teller. Sure, much like with the game as a whole the author must have been sitting on that one for several decades, but it still got me.
It quickly becomes clear that the challenge on offer is no laughing matter, however. As befits a good one-room game, you’re presented with a clear goal and a dense space to explore in hopes of finding an answer. Atypically for this sub-genre, though, soon enough you’re not alone – your MacGuyver-themed superhero is eventually joined by others whose powers include object-finding echolocation, Google News searches avant la letter, and deep familiarity with the dictionary. This is the crew, presumably, that star in the 90s-era Frenetic Five games, and their powers – and personalities – strike a good balance between being comically useless and surprisingly helpful. The group is implemented well, too, with the team serving as a Greek chorus to some of your more hapless flailing, and interjecting into each other’s conversations with the occasional bit of kibitzing.
For all the fun banter and clever writing, though, the game is very much structured around that puzzle, and as mentioned up top, I found it to be a doozy. After finding that the obvious ways to try to open the vault end in failure, I wound up doing a lot of further poking and prodding in the environment not because I had a clear sense of how it would be helpful, but just because it was something to do. And this single big puzzle has a lot of sub-steps, some of which can feel more frustrating than they need to (the mini-puzzle of accumulating rubber bands especially seemed like it ended in anticlimax, though the bug I mention below might have contributed to that). There are definitely high points – I felt super clever when I sussed out how Lex’s word powers could be leveraged – but also moments where it seemed like reading the author’s mind, or using out-of-game thinking, was necessary to progress, and overall I spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall.
What’s worse, some of that banging was occasioned by what seemed to be bugs. The blurb indicates that it’s meant to be impossible to render the game unwinnable, but I think I managed to bork it up by (Spoiler - click to show) taping the rubber-band ball to the book, which rendered the former object unusable and didn’t seem to be possible to reverse. I also was sent on a wild goose chase when looking for a password for the vault, after consulting with the finding-specialist Clapper to locate it: (Spoiler - click to show)typing ASK CLAPPER FOR PASSWORD results in the heroines herself starting to beep, which by the rules as they’ve been spelled out indicates that she should know, or somehow be, the password. But that appears to be completely incorrect, unless I missed an alternate solution.
These are significant downsides to the game, and again, there’s no integrated hints or even separate walkthrough file to hold the player’s hand, which makes me think some might not make it to the end. Still, I think there’s more than enough creativity and humor here to make Improv: Origins worth trying. What’s even better news, the ABOUT text indicates the author’s return to the IF scene looks to be no one-time thing, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of their work – and as mentioned, I’ll likely check out their older stuff too, though I hope someone’s hacked together some walkthroughs in the intervening decades…
An awkward, jokey hybrid, August 8, 2022In other recent reviews, I’ve banged on about one of the more interesting trends in contemporary IF, which is a breakdown in the previously-sharp boundaries between choice-based and parser games. Sometimes this takes the form of choice-based games with a world model and verb-object interfaces; sometimes it’s story-based parser games that eschew puzzles or offer a limited parser; and sometimes you see straight hybrids where parser sections alternate with scenes that require choice-based navigation. There are a variety of effects and affordances provided by these varying approaches, and it’s a neat feature of the current scene that this wider palette is currently available to authors. In this case, the authors of Desrosier’s Discovery have opted for the third option, with laser-eyed clarity on what this structure buys them: an effective delivery mechanism for really dumb jokes.
You don’t start out expecting that, mind. The game opens with old-school green text on a black background, with an even older-school premise: yes, it’s generic Lovecraftian plot #3, your old friend Professor Redshirt sending you a letter telling you to join him at the site of his latest dig (entertainingly, you’re told that “you recognize the handwriting immediately as belonging to Professor Desrosier, an old colleague, and an old friend.” ALL THREE HAVE THE SAME HANDWRITING??? The record will show I am ride or die for the Oxford comma, but probably should have fixed that in post).
Anyway, one ferry ride later you’re picking your way through the abandoned dig site. The custom parser’s no great shakes – it doesn’t recognize L as a synonym for look, and in my browser at least (I think it’s web-only) it didn’t deal well with text that spans more than one screen – but it does the job well enough as you notice the nicely-rendered runic carving on the not-at-all-ominous stone door at the base of the dig. So far so Lovecraftian, especially once you enter the small expedition log and read the last entries in your missing friend’s diary (found in a desk which isn’t described as having a drawer; the game also hanged on me the first time I tried to read it, though thankfully I didn’t encounter that bug on a replay).
Then you solve generic adventure game puzzle #1 (I’m not gonna spell it out, but you’ll definitely know it when you get there) and find a table with half a dozen different objects, ranging from the useful – a gun – to the incongruous – a box of dog treats – to the notionally comedic – a big box o’ phylacteries. And here the structure shifts, because depending on which one you pick, you get shunted into one of several different mutually-exclusive choice-based vignettes – and so too does the mood, which takes a turn for the zany. There are still some stakes, as the wrong choices can lead to bad ends, but they’re all played for laughs so the gameplay is less about picking the right options to get the intended result and more about lawnmowering through to see all the jokes.
The jokes are dumb, but to my mind that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s one that made me laugh – you’re given the choice whether to participate in a particular rite, or to do so with gusto, which get you the same ending but picking the more stylish choice gets you an additional five points in the totally-meaningless score you get as the game wraps up. And I defy even the starchiest sophisticate not to snigger at least a little at the ending involving Father Angus.
I found the fun wore off before I’d completed my replays, though. Partially this is on me – but for my completionist streak, I could have quit any time – but of course I’d still have had to hit a bum ending or two to decide to put a stop to things. There’s a Scooby Doo parody that goes on way too long to justify the limp twist of a joke at the end, and a digging-to-China gag that’s fine enough so far as it goes, but lost me with a throwaway reference to 7th-century explorers finding an “antique opium pipe from the opium wars” in their antipodeal adventures (the opium wars were in the 19th Century! There was no opium in China until the British forcibly introduced it to prevent their trade deficit from draining the national silver reserves!) It isn’t just the staleness of some of the gags, though – while a straight choice-based game could probably have been set up to facilitate easy replays, here you have to go through the whole opening then type in the half-dozen commands to get to the item choices, all the while dealing with that page-scrolling interface annoyance, all of which makes redoing the first half of the game a chore.
Indeed, while I’m usually all for experiments that break down the boundaries between parser and choice games, here I think it might have been a mistake. There’s one ending branch that doesn’t shunt you off into a series of choices, and sticks with the parser interface throughout. This is one of the few where you actually encounter the eponymous Professor, and it has what I thought was the best gag, where the game throws a head fake at you, but if you type in a counterintuitive command, you’re rewarded with what I think is the best ending. It’s a sequence that shows that there’s yet fun to be had with an old-style parser, and I think the game might have been better for it if the authors had stuck to their guns, rather than slap on a bunch of choice-based sequences that fit awkwardly into their custom engine.
Fit for a Jam, not a Comp, August 8, 2022An interesting consequence of hosting ParserComp on Itch has been the collision of traditional IF competition/festival culture with Itch’s more improvisational jam culture as folks noticed the Comp cropping up on their feed and decided to participate. In IF world, authors typically have their eye on a particular venue for their game and start work months ahead of time, building out and refining their game, then subjecting it to rigorous testing – please, always subject your game to rigorous testing. I’m much less familiar with Itch jams, but I’ll overgeneralize based on my limited experience (the wag who’s read the rest of this review thread will ask, how are Itch jams different from anything else I spout off on?) – as I was saying, based on my limited experience, jams tend to involve developers roughing something out and firing it off based on a couple day’s work, with minimal testing, just riffing off a new set of tools or ideas and seeing what sticks with the audience. Competitions seem more about setting ground rules that are rewarding for players; by that same token, the jam framework seem more about the author’s experience.
On the plus side, jams seem like a cool way to quickly test whether a particular approach is promising and get near-immediate feedback without much in the way of sunk costs; many indie games I like are elaborations of a no-frills prototype banged out as part of a game jam. At the same time, I’m not convinced the jam ethos is a great fit for parser IF. I think it’s most effective when it allows an author to generate a proof of concept for a game mechanic, and test out how it feels in play – plus a novel mechanic provides a hook to potential players, making it worth their while to put up with what’s probably a buggy, low-content game. But parser IF as a genre isn’t especially gameplay-forward, with prose, story, and characters looming large, and for me at least the quality of puzzles is usually less to do with their abstract mechanics and more about the extent to which they fit into the story. Sure, there are some IF games that are primarily about how they change the typical medium-dry-goods approach – the wordplay of Counterfeit Monkey, the sympathetic magic of Savoir Faire, the alchemical system in Hadean Lands. But even these mechanics would feel underwhelming, I think, if pared down to a series of minimalist examples, since much of what’s fun about them is seeing how they’re elaborated through the course of the game, and how they communicate the story’s themes in gameplay terms.
400 words of throat-clearing out of the way, we come now to Anita’s Goodbye. The perspicacious reader will have guessed by this point that it’s an example of the jammy approach I’ve outlined above – and indeed, the blurb reveals the game was made in four days, the download page offers two versions of the game file, one of which is labeled “finale now works” (I played that one), the comments threads are filled with players finding fiddly bugs and the developer cheerfully offering workarounds, and ParserComp is referred to as "Parser Game Jam” throughout. Beyond these extrinsic indicia, the game itself also plays the way you’d expect the product of a jam to play – the plot and locations are very lightly sketched in, with the main item of interest being a series of time travel mechanics that let you, and certain objects, move forward and backward through time as you attempt to bid farewell to the eponymous Anita.
If you judge the game by the standards associated with such a truncated, improvisational process, I have to say, I think it’s pretty successful. It’s true, even the fixed version that I played had some wonky technical features – the novice author appears to have implemented a lot of the game’s logic via a brute force approach to syntax that don’t take advantage of Inform’s ability to parse player input, such that verbs stop being understood depending on where you’re standing and some commands require to refer to objects with a “the.” And the story doesn’t expand much beyond the premise embedded in the title and opening narration, save for a final twist that renders much of the midgame nonsensical (in retrospect, how did a charged scooter help you get down the mountain?)
But it holds together well enough to function, and certainly is far more impressive than anything I could do on my fourth day with Inform! The time travel conceit isn’t implemented in a super robust way, but it does open up some fun puzzle-solving possibilities that go beyond the unlock-key-with-door standards of the genre. So again, as the product of a jam, I’d have to say nice job.
As an entry into an IF competition, though? Well, it doesn’t look so good using that lens. Like, even in this ParserComp, we’ve got the Impossible Stairs, which similarly has time travel as a major puzzle-solving mechanic. But that runs long enough to introduce some fun riffs on the basics possibilities of moving into the future and the past, plus has some fun characters to engage with and a neat overall story, plus is technically quite solid. I’m not saying this to pit games against each other – let there be a million time-travel pieces of IF, it’s all good – but just to point out that from a player’s perspective, the traditional way of doing things seems to deliver better results. With that said, Anita’s Goodbye shows a significant amount of promise, and if, in the tradition of game jams, it’s a necessary step in getting the author to put more time and energy into a future work of IF, it’ll have served its purpose very well indeed.
(In what follows, I thoroughly spoil this game, because I don’t think there’s any other meaningful way to discuss it. Ordinarily I’d say that if you’re interested in the thing, you should probably go off and play it on your own, experiencing it the way the author intended, before coming back to read what I wrote. This time, though, I have qualms about that recommendation – but even saying why I have qualms might obviate the whole point of this non-spoilery introduction. I guess I’ll just say that I have a significant objection to a major part of how The Muse engages the player, and while it’s a well-crafted game that’s self-consciously addressing moral questions, in my view it’s not sufficiently well-crafted or sufficiently sophisticated to clearly overcome that objection).
2005 was a while ago, though I fancy I remember it reasonably well. I was 24, finishing my 1L year. I saw my second, third, fourth, and fifth Mountain Goats concerts, including a secret Halloween show at the Knitting Factory – the venue schedule listed the band playing that night as the Hospital Bombers, but I recognized the in-joke and bought my tickets in advance. A solid 40% of my personality was hating the Bush Administration for enshrining torture in U.S. policy (it’s down to about 5% these days). Vespers won that year’s IF Comp; I reviewed it enthusiastically 1. As I recall, both player and NPCs get up to some rather heinous deeds in Vespers, and there wasn’t a content warning in sight, inasmuch as content warnings weren’t yet a thing. I don’t remember the absence bothering me (I already said I was 24).
The Muse is an English reimplementation of the Spanish-language original, La Musa, released in 2005. It contains no specific content warnings, though it does note it’s not suitable for children and may offend the sensibilities of some players; it’s right.
The game doesn’t do much to explain itself – it’s clearly one of those allegorical games short on specifics but long on associations. You’re in the dark, with a book, a bloody pen, a woman; you can examine everything you see, including yourself, but it doesn’t provide much illumination. Or rather, the muse does: “she emanates a reddish evil light that envelops your being and your book, impregnating the pages with blood.” However handy she’d be in a darkroom, she’s not much of a conversationalist – all she does is exhort you to write. The parser lets you decide what word or words to put down in the book, then when you look at her again, you’re thrust into a different environment – happily, it’s bucolic this time, and all you are required to do (or can do) is relax and rest.
Then you’re back in the dark with the girl and the book, and the process repeats. The gameplay of each scenario remains the same – it’s basically a guess-the-verb thing, you need to puzzle out the appropriate action to bring each to an end – but they grow darker in turn. You gorge yourself while watching a starving prisoner despair, you kill a soldier begging for mercy, with the muse’s voice coming in from off-stage to egg you on. In between the cycles, you write about whatever you want, the muse’s bit getting staler with each repetition.
The fourth vignette shunts you into a boudoir, where a naked woman is combing her hair. She’s also not much of a talker – if you compliment her on her hair, she says thank you, and if you tell her to stop brushing it (your only other option), she simply stands still. Unlike the other sequences which clearly prompted an action in need of completion, this one seemed more static. I tried taking the hairbrush, I tried breaking the mirror, I tried combing my own hair. This time, when the muse’s voice came in, it said “What are you going to do? What should you do?”
At this point I realized two or three things near-simultaneously:
1. Each of these little scenarios was dramatizing one of the seven deadly sins; I’d worked through sloth, gluttony, and wrath.
1.5. Oh, I’m probably dead and in hell, aren’t I?
2. This game was really going to make me type RAPE WOMAN to progress.
The woman’s clearly a fictional construct; she’s got no agency, and has only a limited range of robotic responses to your behavior. Given point 1.5, and the way the characters in each of the other scenes seemed to poof into existence from nowhere when I showed up, as if they were created just to torment me with their little tableaux, and presumably returned to that same nothingness when I left, it’s an open question whether within the fictional world of the game she’s even meant to be a real person with subjective experience, or just a demonic illusion.
Still.
RAPE WOMAN.
I walked away from the game for ten minutes, and when I got back, I typed it.
It’s over in a sentence, and of course there’s no detail, no panting, prurient narration to fog up the moral allegory. I went back to Limbo, and this time when prompted to write something in the book, I wrote about lust, and the game nodded its approval: the muse “understands that you now know you are doing penance and she is really your jailer. But smile anyway, because you are by her side and you still love her.”
I played through the rest of the game after that, three more sins. Pride is a fun one, you need to complete a bloody ritual, which involves some improvising with an altar and a blood sacrifice. Number seven is Envy and spells out what I’d guessed by this point: you’re Cain, the muse is Lilith (running with the tradition where she’s his lover and not his step-mom, I hope), it’s all punishment for killing Abel out of jealousy. Then the cycle repeats, because of course it does – but there’s also a way out, because of course there is, though the implementation wasn’t robust enough for REPENT or BEG FORGIVENESS to do the business. God’s forgiveness allows you to rest peacefully, though too bad for Lilith, “beautiful and wicked,” crying as you abandon her.
In 2005 MeToo hadn’t happened yet. If you’d asked me my favorite novels, I’d have probably listed Atonement (there’s a rape), Demons (there’s a rape), Ulysses (no rape so far as I can tell but not 100% certain). The way interactive fiction can make the player complicit in evil was still something of a novelty. Sam Alito joined the Supreme Court.
The Muse isn’t an irresponsible work. It propounds a set of moral ideas, which are wedded to a Catholic structure that pretty much requires something like RAPE WOMAN to hold together (theologically speaking you could end the sequence with COMMIT THE SIN OF ONAN, but in these fallen times it lacks the same heft). It gets the distasteful deed off-screen as quickly as is decent. And for all the murder and mayhem the average player of video games has committed at this late date, how fussed can one really get about two little words?
I still wish I’d walked away from it and never come back.
Traipsing through time, August 8, 2022Sometimes I read a game’s blurb and it feels like it’s inviting me into an exciting adventure, or to settle into a warm, comforting bath, and I’m chomping at the bit to get started. Others, though, like the sorry-this-is-broken lament of ConText NightSky, feel like a wet blanket. And to be honest, for an entirely different set of reasons I found the blurb for Uncle Mortimer’s Secret daunting. The author flags that the game is large and takes at least 300 moves to solve (which seems like a lot?); that some extrinsic Google searching is required to solve the game; and it’s a custom parser with a really really old-school appearance. That appearance was also somewhat familiar, which made me realize that the author wrote Somewhere, Somewhen 1 for last year’s ParserComp, which was a sprawling, hard Zork-alike that I respected for its achievements – the custom parser, at least, was solid, with the exception that it makes interacting with objects in containers or on supporters kind of a pain – but found too punishing to really enjoy. So it was with dread in my heart that I booted up this year’s entry.
Reader, that dread was ill-founded. This is another decidedly old-school game, with its plot focusing on a missing relative with a mansion full of magic/weird science, a collectathon metapuzzle (the MacGuffins this time are colored rods), and puzzle-forward gameplay. But it’s actually a forgiving one: there’s a well-considered hub-and-spoke structure where you start poking around your uncle’s mansion and discover the time machine, then start to unlock different time periods to visit, each of which opens up further eras, gives you one of those rainbow rods, or provides items or info you need to access new areas of the mansion hub. This helps pace out what’s a reasonable-sized game, so that you’re always pretty clear on where you should be focusing your efforts, and regularly get the dopamine hit of making progress on one of your goals. And there’s no inventory limit, or ability to get the game into an unwinnable state.
Another departure from old-school sensibilities is that the game eschews the overly-terse style of the 80s, providing enough texture to make the time-travel exploration lots of fun, at least for this history-nerd. The periods you visit are all reasonably separate in time and place, and strike a good balance between being instantly iconic, while not making you visit eras that have been done to death (though the choices are admittedly entirely Eurocentric). While each is usually made up of no more than a handful of rooms, with only a little bit of scenery and an NPC or two, there’s enough here to give you some flavor and scratch that time-tourism itch; I caught a couple of fun Easter Eggs, and I’m sure I missed more (I’ll spoiler-text my favorite: (Spoiler - click to show)meeting Watson and Crick as they discovered DNA, I was a little annoyed the author had omitted the contributions of Rosalind Franklin – but when you ask the duo about her, they shamefacedly admit they yoinked her work without credit). And while there are some anachronisms, usually to solve the puzzles, they’re kept to a minimum, thankfully, avoiding the zany kitchen-sink worldbuilding that I thought detracted from Somewhere, Somewhen’s effectiveness.
Speaking of the puzzles, they’re also a traditional lot: some codes with attendant riddles, some item-swapping, and a soupcon of key manipulation. None of them are that novel, and sadly some of them are not especially well-integrated and feel like the author’s put a puzzle in for the sake of having a puzzle: in the Runnymede segment, for example, the central dilemma is that the Barons have shut King John up in a tent until he signs Magna Charta, but they’ve neglected to provide him with the means to affix his John Hancock to the thing. But taken on their own terms, they’re for the most part satisfying to solve, and with rare exceptions are generally pretty simple, so at least the iffy ones don’t draw too much attention to themselves (there’s also a two-tiered hint system, that prods then spoils each challenge, to get the player unstuck).
As mentioned in the game’s blurb, there’s also a less-traditional sort of challenge to proceedings, which is that you need to set the time machine to a specific year in order to access each different era. But only once is the year just given to you; in every other case, you’ll be given a location, event, or more cryptic clue that the player needs to decode to figure out what year to put in. Keeping with the overall low-key vibe, the average player will probably know a couple of these off the top of their heads, and for the others a few seconds on Wikipedia will be enough to clear things up. But I still found it a fun dynamic, and I could see the need to pop open a web browser prompting some players to engage with the real-world history that’s teased in each era.
All told, I had a lovely time with Uncle Mortimer’s Secret. Sure, the gameplay largely consists of crowbarred-in puzzles, and the story is sketchy to the point of nonexistence (hopefully you’re not expecting much of a climax or denouement). And the no-looking-at-stuff-in-containers-or-on-supporters thing continues to be an annoyance. But it’s largely player-friendly, and has a certain hard-to-capture charm to it that makes those flaws melt away. If you’re in the mood for some low-stakes, low-friction time tourism, it’s hard to think of a better option.
Incomplete proof-of-concept for an arctic adventure, August 8, 2022It’s hard to write a true review of ConText NightSky, because the game’s blurb reveals that what’s been submitted falls well short of the author’s expectations. Taking the ambitious course of developing a new parser system, it’s clear that there wasn’t enough time to wrinkle out the bugs, much less create a full game to take advantage of the system. While the setup of mysterious goings-on at an Arctic research base is intriguing, the game stops just as it seems ready to get going – you have a three-item to-do list, but after showering and eating a meal, I wasn’t able to discover how to start the protagonist’s data-analysis work, which was the third item.
I’m pretty sure this is due to the game being incomplete rather than a failure to guess the verb because the system prompts you with all possible actions, and nouns those actions can apply to, each turn, with the possibilities shifting as you type. This is a nice convenience that removes guess-the-verb issues, though I was still often puzzled by why some objects had to be looked at and others examined, for example. What’s worse, I found that performance was awful – while I chuckled when I first noticed the game had an always-on FPS counter, I soon found that the game would grind to a near-halt in certain locations, making it a real burden to play.
With these technical limitations, a truncated story, and nonstop typos, it’s clear that the version of ConText NightSky currently on offer isn’t really worth playing; I get that the author probably felt pressure to submit something by the Comp deadline even if it didn’t fit the initial vision, but in this as in almost every case, the best course would have been to delay releasing the game until it was something the author could be proud of. There are high-profile competitions and festivals every couple of months these days, so waiting a bit costs basically nothing, whereas the chance to make an amazing first impression is a terrible thing to lose.
(I’ll also take this opportunity to plug @mathbrush’s great Twitter thread on custom parsers from a couple weeks back – definitely essential reading material for anyone considering writing one with an eye towards entering an IF competition).
Old-school monster mash, August 8, 2022Welp, that’s done it. Having likened ADRIFT afficionados to sex deviants in my Euripides Enigma review, sniggering through my sleeve all the while, I’m eminently deserving of karmic retribution, and the gods of the ParserComp queue (it’s an important job, there have to be several of them) have seen fit to reward me with another ADRIFT game as a chaser. This time, instead of generic sci-fi plot #4, it’s generic horror plot #7 – spend a night in a spooky mansion – and there are once again definite warning signs in the introductory text (the distinction between EXAMINE and SEARCH is emphasized). But while the setting is just as generic as the premise, and there are some wonky puzzles, including some guess-the-verb fiddliness and read-the-author’s-mind shenanigans, I actually got along fairly well with October 31st. Partially this is down to personally finding Halloween monster-mashes more appealing than po-faced sci-fi bug hunts, but the game also paces out its challenges well, and provides both a hint menu and a walkthrough to help players get over some of the rougher patches.
The game starts out with some appropriately spooky build-up, as you slowly and trepidatiously make your way to the grim manse where the adventure is set. The prose nails a campy but still slightly spooky tone, which helps build anticipation for what’s to come – like, when you open the gate to the mansion’s grounds, you’re told that “almost reluctantly it swings open with the sound of a thousand tormented souls.” Fortunately, X ME discloses that we’re quite the matinee hero, and definitely up to the challenge: “your piercing eyes are set in a face with a straight nose and lips quite a few girls find very kissable.” Indeed – it’s not our fault that all said girls live in Canada!
Er, regardless, it quickly becomes clear that rather than simply snoozing your way through the night, you’ll need to take on and defeat a series of classic monsters – a witch, a skeleton, a mummy, etc. – before going up against their boss (Count Dracula, obviously). Oh, and there’s a ghost too, but he’s cool (he’s a well-implemented NPC, in fact, and I enjoyed my chats with him). Each baddie inhabits a different precinct of the mansion, and defeating each requires running through a short self-contained puzzle chain. This structure gives the player agency in deciding who to go after first, and also keeps the game’s pace up, since every time you get to a new part of the mansion you’ll do some initial exploration, then encounter the foe, then get the climax of beating them, before moving on. While the lack of interdependence does sometimes lead to moments of illogic in the puzzles – in particular, there’s a bit where you’re doing the classic newspaper-under-the-door trick, but you can’t use a short piece of wire to poke out the key because you got that in a different branch, so you need to find a comparable item in the nearby environment instead – it does work to cabin things, meaning I usually had a reasonable sense of which locations and which items I needed to poke at in order to make progress.
The puzzles are simple fare, but often with a small twist that makes them more fun – like, no points for guessing what you’ll need to do with the bit of cheese you find, but there’s an extra step you need to perform that means the puzzle doesn’t feel utterly generic. Per my complaints earlier in this review, there are definitely moments that had me running for the hints, though: there’s one place where EXAMINing a bit of writing tells you what’s written there, so I didn’t realize I had to separately READ it as well, and there’s a spot of gravedigging that’s rendered more challenging than it needs to be by the parser being overly persnickety about your word choice. This is an issue in several places, in fact – I guessed that there was something weird about the clock in the library, but could never figure out what precise syntax was needed to interact with it, and I wasn’t able to put a key object in a receptacle clearly designed for it until, running out of more plausible approaches, I tried PUSH KEY OBJECT WITH RECEPTACLE, which doesn’t make much sense. And I wasn’t able to actually win the game, despite getting to the final confrontation being pretty sure of what I’m meant to do, with the hints and walkthrough not providing the help I needed (and contradicting each other to boot). Still, for every iffy puzzle, there was another that worked well.
I can’t help listing the annoyances, but still, I enjoyed my time with October 31st regardless of some of these spikier bits, with the evocative writing, campy monsters, and fun-but-shonky puzzling carrying me through. I’m guessing the real classic text-adventure mavens will find it more lightweight than something like the Euripides Enigma, but for the rest of us this is a nice, less-painful way to experiment with the style.
Some like it painful, August 8, 2022With its enthusiastic space-adventure opening crawl, including a prominently-featured “Chapter 4”, The Euripides Enigma makes a fun, friendly first impression. Sure, there’ll be danger and excitement here – it doesn’t take long to realize that we’re in general sci-fi plot #4, AKA an Aliens rip-off – but the helpful introductory text and instructions seem to promise smooth sailing, even if there are a few discordant notes of foreboding (in addition to examining objects “you can also SEARCH and LOOK IN, BEHIND, and BENEATH things”; “there are lots of buttons to press or push in this game”). I pushed fears away upon launching the game, appreciating the nicely-implemented preliminaries of engaging with your squad and making my way into the requisite derelict base’s airlock, and enjoying the endearing way that the producers of this particular movie seemed really focused on saving money (only one marine has a speaking role, and the whole squad is moved off-screen absurdly quickly – guess even paying scale was a stretch – while the alien monsters are invisible most of the time, really easing the CGI budget, and the whole thing could be shot on the cheap on a repurposed Star Trek soundstage).
Then I faceplanted on the first real puzzle, hard. I’m going to spoil it, because if you’re in this game’s target audience, you’d have solved it easily anyway, and if you aren’t, you’d have needed to run to the hints and I’m just saving you some keystrokes. You’re in a small control room, and need to get the power back on, but you quickly realize that there’s a broken on/off switch on the environment control console. Fortunately, exploration reveals that there’s a storeroom right down the hall, with trays of spare parts, so for this nice easy opening puzzle you must just need to poke through the shelves, right? After every combination of EXAMINE, SEARCH, etc. I could think of failed to bear fruit, I took a step back and re-inventoried my surroundings, realizing that there was another console whose functioning on/off switch was conspicuously mentioned. Aha, thought I, all I need to do is abstract this one and plug it into the other console, and we’re off to the races.
But it was not to be, and after another 15 minutes of banging my head against the puzzle, I had recourse to the hints, which told me I had to LOOK UNDER the environment control console – sure enough, there was a compartment there with a spare switch. Happy to be making progress, I was prepared to overlook the fact that nothing in the room or console descriptions prompted this kind of further searching in the slightest. But flipping the switch didn’t accomplish much, because I also needed to fix a second console to restore emergency power to the base. Once again, flailing got me nowhere, though I went to the hints much quicker this time – the answer was to EXAMINE WALL to discover a relay box, again with no prompting indicating there was anything of interest worth looking at there.
At this point the game’s map opened up and I was able to explore the rest of the moon base. Friends, it was chock-a-block with equipment shelves, sofas, chemical stores, bunks, tables, desks, and more, and while I was able to hoover up a few inventory items and get a sense of the game’s ultimate challenges, it was clear I was missing a lot. Regular abuse of the hint function helped me figure out some of these pieces – I had to LOOK BEHIND some cushions on a chair, EXAMINE THE FLOOR in one room to discover that the vending machine could be pulled out, and of course LOOK UNDER one of the bunks in one of the half-dozen identical rooms of living quarters. After about an hour, I was out of hints – they appear to be room-specific, rather than speaking to your overall progress – and when I looked at the walkthrough, it was a solid fifteen pages of zero-context commands, and while those in the back half looked fun, a dispiritingly large proportion of the rest were all about SEARCHing and various flavors of prepositional looking, and realizing that finishing the game was going to mean paging back and forth through the walkthrough to figure out where I was, then just following it puzzle by puzzle, I decided to give up instead.
What looking at the walkthrough made clear is that this use-all-the-verbs-on-all-the-nouns stuff in the first scene isn’t a momentary lapse of player-unfriendliness – this is a positive design ethos, the author having clearly decided that this sci-fi action premise is best served by gating the meat behind a marathon, furniture-centric scavenger hunt. I’ve encountered this kind of approach in several ADRIFT games before (though you see it in other systems too), I think the product of a sub-subculture that largely looks to 80s games outside the Infocom canon and prides themselves on writing text adventures, not interactive fiction – and who hold high difficulty and tedious, mine-sweeping gameplay as virtues, much as S&M people are really into stuff that seems really quite alarming to us vanilla folks. And while EE is undeniably well-crafted, with terse but effective prose, a big but not overwhelming map with major puzzles clearly signposted, and not a bug in sight, it feels very much by, of, and for said sub-subculture.
Of course, we’re talking about different flavors of parser IF, in space-year 2022 – in other words, we’re all into one niche fetish or another round here, so it’s little rich for me to dismiss Euripides Enigma, especially since for all I know the old-school text adventure fanciers could outnumber the people I’m positioning as more mainstream. This is fair! But still, I feel, there are degrees. If, invited back for a night of fun, one’s intended introduces some light tickle play, even if that’s not the thing that gets one’s engine revving, I’d guess that more likely than not one will simply go along for the ride. It’s a different matter where one’s inamorata greets one at the door wearing a leather mask and oiling up a marlinspike – for some, this might be the sum of earthly bliss, and truly, God bless ‘em. But I can’t count myself among their number, and having tried the flogging for an hour and found it not to my taste, hopefully I can be forgiven for skipping out before giving the nipple tenderizer a go.
Searching for More, August 8, 2022Although you’re only told it in the blurb, rather than in the game proper, Kondiac has a neat premise: there’s been some untoward events in a small town in Alaska, and it’s up to you to troll through the archives of the local newspaper to get to the bottom of things. As someone who maxes out their Library Use skill whenever they play Call of Cthulhu, I’m a sucker for this kind of diegetically-presented approach to research, and the specific keyword-search system used here reminded me of Her Story, which I quite enjoyed (some might raise the question: even though this kind of game involves typing, there’s not really a world model, so is this truly parser IF? To that I reply, eh, doesn’t bother me one way or the other, in ParserComp it is so into the ParserComp review queue it goes).
Sadly, these initially-high hopes were quickly dashed. The game doesn’t take the “newspaper archives” premise at all seriously – while several pieces of evidence are found by using specific proper nouns, as you’d imagine (looking into a business by checking out its name, for example), many of them require the use of incredibly common words as search terms, which somehow turn up only a single hit. This small-town newspaper has also amassed quite the trove of evidence already, including photos that unambiguously depict crimes being committed and bank records of private parties, so one feels less like an intrepid investigator connecting the dots and more like a harried IT staffer under the gun to wrestle a cockamamie file storage system into shape ahead of the already-written big scoop.
It doesn’t help that the mystery being investigated isn’t especially twisty or fleshed-out. There appear to be less than a dozen different pieces of evidence to find, which stymied me for quite a while – I followed the initial thread of obvious things to search, like the name of the town and the proper-noun that greets you when you start up the game, and got to a page indicating that rather than the single missing person I’d turned up, there were actually a total of half a dozen people who disappeared in this town all at the same time. But searching for any of the other victims was a dead end; only the first person had anything written up for him, and lots of other search terms that really seem like they should give some result (like the police department, or even the newspaper itself) come up empty instead.
Further deflating matters, the punchline to the investigation is both one you’ve probably seen before and doesn’t make much sense on its own terms: the plot centers on an inpatient substance abuse treatment facility, which is being paid $12k a pop to perform various evil deeds, but having done health policy work and being familiar with the reimbursement rates you can pull down for this sort of thing, garden-variety Medicaid fraud would be far more lucrative. And I ran into some technical wonkiness with the implementation: notably, errant white space seems to confuse the search bar, so “kondiac” gets a hit but “kondiac “ doesn’t, and while a first name or a last name might get you to the same hit, a full name won’t.
All told, Kondiac seems like a proof of concept that needs substantial expansion and editing to hit its potential. The basic premise, again, is good, and I liked the visual presentation – there’s some creepy CGI art, and it’s fun to look at the mocked-up bank statements, newspaper articles, and missing posters on display to extract the relevant information. The technical niggles would also probably be easy to sort out. But as is, there’s not enough here to justify the trip.
Babel and everything after, June 16, 2022When I play IF with an eye towards writing a review, I keep a digital commonplace book – just a little text file where I copy and paste stray bits of writing that resonated with me, jot down inchoate responses that I might flesh out later, and keep track of typos and bugs to flag for the author. For most games it comes to a page or so, providing a nice jumping-off point for when it comes time to write a review.
I spent the better part of ten days playing Manifest No, and thinking about it, and thinking about how to write about it, and in that time my notepad for the game swelled to over twenty pages. I found one dead-end link (it’s “destructocreative”, in Chapter XX), and one thing that might be a typo (“mattrless”) – though that could be a joke about the center of things going missing. The rest is maybe the top 2% of the passages from the game that did something to my heart or my head or both, alongside my increasingly-frantic attempts to make sense of what I was reading. Here’s a random sampling just from my notes on chapter XIV (of XXVII):
“If we, if humankind loses its music, neither sigh nor sign to convoke voice, then what is of a struggle soundless?” Meluoi. “Require we respite religion, psalms of our spite forever afresh to worship day tatters. Submergence in another subjectivity is the only release our isolated souls will receive, this where is I guide you, hold you under the surface, strain out your struggling for air, until at last you slump serene, and we embrace on both sides of a mirror, drowned in each other’s airless, but I can’t make you drink the depths into your own air. You must yourself choose to, to… oh Yamicz, how I struggle to drown myself, let alone you, but I must, I, somehow I have to…”
Renaming sequence, cf all the above. “U, Emninu Leiru. Deiyanasz swa dieya vo. Yamicz.”
Nondualism. Babel?
To want beyond your brittle limits thorns those on whom your thirsts lunge. No, that’s purposely too harsh. To want someone is suppression and therefore not virtue. Never want someone. Never want anything. No, that’s purposely too harsh. Why this perverse desire to feel worse, how much regret piles up to penance, when can I stop embracing the waste?
Ooof, goiters.
(Guess which of those words are Kaemi’s, and which are mine).
All of which is to say that there’s no way I can write a reasonable review that even manages to encapsulate everything I feel and think about Manifest No, much less pin down everything that it’s actually about and what it does. Partially, of course, this is down to sheer avoirdupois – opening the game’s html text in Word, it comes to just under 400 pages, and there’s not much in the way of fancy code inflating that – and partially it’s down to the dense, palimpsestic prose; the text is thick with neologistic portmanteaus, second-order homophones, and alliterative tricks that aren’t just naïve flourishes but carry a payload of meaning in their playful sporting, so you can read each sentence two or three times and take away a different set of valences each time.
(It occurs to me that what I just described has some resonance with the Hindu concept of lila, or god’s play – the idea that what we experience of reality is the divine separating itself into different forms (illusive, maya-forms) so that it can experience itself, extend itself in space and time, and reach deeper understanding through its reflexive game-playing. Is this a bit of a reach, even kind of presumptuous given that it’s a non-Hindu who’s trying to make it? I think yes, basically, but this is the kind of response Manifest No elicits, in some respects demands, so there’s blame to go around).
So there’s length, there’s density, but there’s also reach. While the plot of the game, to the extent I can make it out, can be reduced to a fairly standard postapocalyptic fantasy narrative, the thematic are much wider-ranging, again to the extent I can make them out. Without making a vain attempt to wrap my arms fully around things, there were two strands that primarily stood out to me: first, there’s a preoccupation with immanence; the world the protagonist experiences, we’re told repeatedly, is a hollow one, lacking in substance:
“Should dreams stream a little more lucid, who should wish for waking? Reality as changeful as those within it,” Myneme upon some lost wintry. "Contact between self and the ghostly sieve without the arid abstractions which plague day blears. Live in the conception truer than perception: the world unfinished, full of half shaped phantoms, rushed through real, even in nightmare is there a more fulfilling terror than in the encroaching of systems, structure ever increasingly predeterminative, riven into selfdefulfilling prophecies stripping you to actuals, simply throatsubmit to the swallowing semblancer.
Some of this is internal: the protagonist is running from significant trauma, including a seemingly-abusive mother, a recently-killed friend (or lover?), plus they kill someone early on. He’s not the only one who expresses feelings of alienation and emptiness, though: the theme is externally-driven as well. We’re post some kind of worldwide disaster that’s caused the seas to rise and the land to flood, with isolated capital-t Towers scattered in hostile oceans the last bastions of humanity (well, I suppose I should say “people” – the precise taxonomy of some characters can be challenging to fix, with a subgroup referred to as Vedas who might be biologically distinct (or it might just be that they’ve held on to literacy and have books whereas most other folks don’t), and one character who’s described as a lizard, which works well enough as a metaphor but could be that he’s like, a Gorn?)
I don’t think this is just a matter of life sucking and the protagonist being all grimdark, though: there are indications that whatever sundered the world somehow broke down the transcendent order that infuses meaning into gross matter (perhaps the title’s a clue, beyond being a dumb/awesome pun – this is a place where negation is made physical):
Hollowness of self precipitates hollowness of place.
To imbue into the object ourselves to reverse our initial eternal traumatic separation so when it rebounds amplified it can incinerate the innate curse along with us, shall we say the rose is not its thorns?
all these, stupidly tactile chairs, this world of browns and bangs, it’s not the faintest figment of that, that uh, I don’t know, I don’t know! I just, when I woke up I immediately descended, physically to follow my soul aye, went all the way home, and I, swam in the port, dove and rose and dove and rose until I thought I might disturb the glue that keeps these opposites together… really wanted to die in that moment, I can’t, it’s hard to explain, like in fate’s pull only faster or slower floating, wanted in the dream wake to live out my meaning at a rate worthy of our blood’s pumping to panic attack amass.
The other major strand that resonated with me has to do with language, and the simultaneous criticality of and inadequacy of words to fix identity and grapple with the transcendent. There are echoes of Babel all over this game, from the gross level of the plot – it’s structured as a quest for something called the Submerged Tower, which has a whiff of the Flood and Atlantis, sure, but in a gnostic-inflected narrative like this there’s really only one tower that matters. Throughout, we find passages like this:
Cease your prayers to a demon so brutal as single say, certain word, solid sound, sunders our ice palaces to seep through the noxious underworld fuming caustic thoughts, our wild grasping backward in the evernight seeking the source of a separate light other than what our pearl eyes radiate.
Atrocity natural, who should not wish cleave a dream city? Unspeakable situation, how do we supernate beyond construction of tenses artificial imposed brutal upon the fluid?
Speaking and naming does violence to the true nature of reality; at the same time, words have incredible power. Those Vedas I mentioned above? Almost the first thing the regular characters note that sets them apart is that they know “the Literature”, and they’re frequently asked for songs or poems, in tones not dissimilar from a starving person begging for crumbs. In a climactic scene, one of the Vedas rechristens the protagonist, giving him a new name and creating within him a potential for difference.
Emptiness, fullness, language, confusion – there are paradoxes here, deep ones. Is there a singular, unifying theme that can knit all of this together? Mmmmmaybe. Gun to my head, I’d say the deepest current is a Buddhist one, since the empty contingency of reality and the essential nonduality of forms provide a frame for making sense of all this. But ironically, I think it’s my own identity and viewpoint that makes me say this, since that’s the ontological frame I personally find most congenial for making sense of the world – oddly, I’ve even run a tabletop roleplaying campaign where reality had broken down and become ontologically empty, and it also involved swashbuckling adventure on fantastic oceans (of course, the cabal trying to immanentize the eschaton were the baddies in that one…). Maybe this is a coincidence, or maybe it’s a just an indication of the richness of the text that it offered me this vein to follow to what feels like the mother lode but might just be one deposit among many (there’s a lot here about sin that I engaged with only superficially, to say nothing of how to understand the often-shocking violence throughout the story).
Manifest No is hard to cabin, in other words; there’s more here than you (OK, I) can fully understand, and I’m flattering myself if I say I caught maybe a third of what Kaemi is putting out. You’ve hopefully got a sense of the language by now, but it’s marvelous, and well above my, maybe anyone’s, head. One more excerpt, then I promise I’ll be less profligate:
Ever persist of permanence recursions individuation of moments to eternal flowvents superimposing samsara alternation carnatives of dayrise and wellgone, swimming in sphere Uyllia where arises equally descends in infinite recall unpopulated with possibility uniterated, precalculated anneal of every energy enumerated matrices accounting the conditions preconditions, endless pastness of advanceless present tense mirroring itself infinitely any future of felt so the same, nigh as gods we dallianced in sphere Uyllia, capsule world lavish lazuli, brightness whirlwind blinding the outer unshines to presume border to predicate a notional knownness facilitator of participatory adequation excessive consumptional in identificatory fretworks, these consistency energies which contextualize our worlds sufficient to prevent its chthonic roar alienation stripping adornments to bare serative seriatim discourse, knowledge closure brocade bricolage
Just think of the domains of knowledge this sounds in, just look at the words: samsara from Buddhism, anneal from chemistry, seriatim from law, chthonic from Greek myth… So yes, Manifest No is demanding. But, I belatedly realize I should point out, it’s by no means an overwhelming slog. I’ve mostly been quoting from the more elevated language that, in fairness, makes up like 85% of the text, but the dialogue of many of the minor characters along on the voyage is typically much more direct, and the contrast between their plainspoken natures and the recondite Vedas (and protagonist) helps make sense of the plot, and also sets up some real comedy. There’s one bit where the crew cajoles one of the Vedas into telling a story, which she promises will involve lots of excitement including some assassins, then she launches into this completely abstract song-poem:
Glinting mirrorlike the incantations
Surging ocher dust insisted shimmered
Great Vyekana, the City Dauntless,
Ruby set in canyons candelabra,
Lucre gleam in the squalid glare
Bubbled heatdrench tar crooked stars…
Grimoire poet of the vanish, howls harpist,
Thief of soul to hordes, riches of wrecks,
Dread fever fathom flashing in the fever spasms mortalia –"
“Where’s the assassins?” Mojyi. “Said assassins were there, was it?”
"These are the assassins! That’s, aren’t you listening?”
It’s hard to read this as anything other than Kaemi poking fun at herself – I laughed, at least.
Are there criticisms I could level, beyond Manifest No just being too much? Sure, though I hope I’ve learned my lesson from my review of Kaemi’s previous game, Queenlash, where I spent 2/3 of it nitpicking and acknowledged its brilliance only in passing. Flipping the script this time out: the hypertext-novel approach to navigation can be confusing, with the association between world-link and the resulting passage obscure in the extreme, which made me feel FOMO when I came across a passage with like a dozen different links. I also came up short when I hit what I think is the one actual branch in the game, where you can choose either the high road or the low road in ascending a Tower – maybe this is another joke about how choice-based games traditionally function, but it still feels deeply weird. And yes, the language swings for the fences and while I think it hits almost all of the time, it does occasionally whiff:
Closed shops on crooked roads bloating roundabout goiters these eaves so easily which could hide loiterers like a cue shooting you on a shuffleboard.
(Yes, that’s the source of the “oof, goiters” comment above).
Keeping track of the characters is also really hard, given their multiplicity of names and sobriquets, especially since many of them are deeply unfamiliar (from googling I think many might be central and east African, which is cool and plays the Babel theme given that most Anglophone readers are probably similarly going to lack context for them, but still left me belatedly writing up a cheat sheet). Perhaps most damningly, the ending didn’t land especially heavily for me – I think an inescapable downside of the fever-dream prose that makes up most of the text is that while you can dial it down, as Kaemi does with the crewmembers, it doesn’t leave you much room to dial up in a climax.
If these are sins, they’re venial ones at worst. Manifest No is an astonishment (and the fact that it comes only a year after the comparably-miraculous Queenlash is a feat of literary production I can barely contemplate); it’s literature of the most rarefied order, somehow showing up in the back garden of an IF festival. I have no more words. Read it.
A mirror darkly, June 16, 2022Fairy tales are tricky things. As creations of folklore, most of them lack definite authors, or definite shapes. The Grimms and Perrault are touch points, of course, and their styles and sensibilities have a significant influence on what we understand a fairy tale to be, but their work was as much curation as literary creation, wrangling a mass of pre-existing stories into some form of shape. That’s perhaps one reason why they’re simultaneously so stable – there’s a version of the Cinderella story that goes back 2,000 years, to Strabo! – and so protean, as the chthonic elements of the tales (love, marriage, death, inheritance, social mobility) are continuously reconfigured to speak to contemporary audiences. So the same story can give rise to the enjoyable pabulum of a Disney movie (themselves already continually sequelized, rebooted, and remade), or the feminist lex talionis of an Angela Carter novella: it’s just a matter of squeezing the kaleidoscope just so…
Perhaps too this is one reason why fairy tales are a fertile source for IF: they’re broadly-accessible stories that provide a nice familiar hook without imposing too much of a fixed structure on how the narrative progresses, allowing for the author, and potentially the player, to decide whether they want the story to lean more towards traditionalism or subversion, without thereby doing too much violence to the premise. There are currently 54 games with the “fairy tale” tag on IFDB, with Fairest riffing most specifically on Emily Short’s games in this area (per the author’s end note, at least) but bringing plenty of its own ideas to this venerable subgenre.
Another reason fairy tales work well for IF is that their protagonists are always haring off on some quest or other, and so it is here, with Prince Conrad – the introduction efficiently conveys the premise, which is that despite being the eldest son you’re generally rather feckless, so you must jump through some hoops to convince your father the king to ignore to importuning of your stepmother and give you the throne rather than to one of your younger stepbrothers. There’s a court magician on hand to give you a magic feather, an impossible-seeming task to retrieve a splendid carpet from somewhere in the poor part of the town… it all scans so neatly that you’d be forgiven for not consciously noticing that the game asked you for your name when you started it, but regardless of what you type Conrad is always called Conrad (and, more importantly, is always a prince).
You will notice, however, that the game greets you with a help screen that, beyond an introduction to IF, also provides all sorts of play supports, from a verbs list that eliminates annoying guesswork to a TASK command to make sure you’re always oriented towards the next goal. I’ve seen folks say they played this as their first parser game, and I think it’s a really outstanding choice, since the author’s gone above and beyond to make it so welcoming.
Implementation is butter-smooth throughout, with simple navigation and talking sufficing to resolve most challenges, and more unique actions sufficiently well-cued that recourse to the VERB command shouldn’t be all that necessary (pains have been taken to make moving in and out of doors painless, for example, which sounds simple but isn’t given that the player could try to enter a house by knocking, opening the door, or trying to go in the relevant direction). It helps that this isn’t a puzzle-focused game, of course – though there is one, and it’s clever – but even still, Fairest is impressively and invitingly realized.
Of course none of that would mean very much unless it was a fun, engaging game. And happily it doesn’t take long to realize that Fairest has a lot to offer to experienced players too. Much of this has to do with its expert foreshadowing – it knows that you know how fairy tales work, so you’ll be squirming in your seat when you read an exchange like this between Conrad and a woman who definitely isn’t the evil stepmother from Snow White, not even a little bit:
She says, “I’d be happy to make you the most majestic carpet ever seen, only I have no thread with which to weave it. If you can find me some suitable thread, made of gold, I’ll make the carpet from it, if you promise me my heart’s desire when you are King.”
“Of course. I promise,” you say lightly.
Any player worth their salt sees that as a shoe waiting to drop, and a signal that we’re not just going to be blindly recreating a series of fairy tales before being ushered off for a happy ending. Then there are the metafictional flourishes that quickly start to seep in too, with the fourth wall breaking under the stress of several important characters, all of them girls or women… There’s a lot that’s set up, many balls thrown in the air, as you run through scenarios based on Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beaty, Little Red Riding Hood, and more, the game gives your plenty of hints of dramatic events to come without tipping its hand too heavily.
Puzzles are also well foreshadowed, too – you encounter many before you can solve them, which helps keep things feeling open and engaging even though the game’s almost always entirely linear. Admittedly, sometimes I felt like the game did veer on playing itself: there’s one puzzle about restoring a statue to life that describes what you need to do fairly directly, then has Conrad do some kibitzing that spells things out even more directly. But again, Hadean Lands this isn’t, and Fairest wants to get you to the ending, or rather endings, where the complex threads the game has been weaving come together.
I won’t say too much about the details here, even in spoiler-text, but as someone who finds endings almost invariably disappointing, I think Fairest’s finale works really, really well, as the interplay between protagonist, player, and parser begins to collapse, fairy-tale tropes aren’t so much subverted as inverted, and some telling points about the commodification of female beauty (hell, girls and women in general) land with a light touch in amongst the popcorn fun of an Avengers-level crossover hitting its climax. For the player, at least, everything ends happily ever after, as they’ll have experienced one of the real highlights of this year’s Spring Thing.
A doggy delight, June 16, 2022(I beta tested this game)
Hopefully, dear reader, you are as happy as I am to dispense pretense that the reviewer is an objective figure, an unmoving mover floating serenely above the aesthetic object and rendering dispassionate, not-to-be-gainsaid criticism. And I further hope that in my reviews I make clear were my personal biases and subjective preferences lead me to judgments that might not be shared by a different player with different biases &c. But even taking all that as read, I feel like I need to issue some extra disclaimering here, because I went into Custard and Mustard’s Big Adventure strongly predisposed to like it – not only was I a tester on it, I also tested the author’s previous game, The Faeries of Healstowne, which was my one of my two favorite games of 2021, and plus he’s tested both of my games, as well as penning a review of Sting that’s quite possibly the single most laudatory thing anyone’s ever written about my work (and I include the toast my mom made at my wedding in the competition).
With that out of the way, though, let’s all pretend I didn’t just light my credibility on fire as I tell you that my expectations were completely right and Custard and Mustard is great. It’s great fun, first of all, to play as a pooch, and here you get to play as a dynamic duo of doggies – designated-protagonist Colonel Mustard, and his bashful-but-rising-to-the-challenge sidekick Ernel Custard (if you can somehow read that without giggling, I am sad for you). This is no superficial re-furring, too: your canine nature is well-implemented, with a rich odorscape awaiting your SMELL commands, an inventory limit that actually makes sense given a logical one-mouth-per-customer policy, robust BARKing options, and waggable, chasable tails. Each protagonist also has distinct strengths – saying more would risk spoiling some puzzles, but suffice to say each gets their moment in the sun – so you’re able to switch between them at will, which again is handled cleanly, with a single command sufficing to swap and the one you’re not controlling automatically following the other unless there’s a need for them to split up.
So much for mechanics, though. What are these handsome hounds up to? After a prelude where the two protagonists meet cute and give their owners the (temporary) slip, they’re simply excited to experience everything a traditional British village fete has to offer. There’s a generous map on offer with lots of places to go and explore, which can feel a little overwhelming at first. But even in this phase, the game’s gentle humor makes nosing around very fun. To take an example, there’s a small monument in the park memorializing its dedication:
Hockbarrow Gardens
Opened by H.R.H The Princess Mavis, Countess of Spelnose
This is like the smallest imaginable unit of comedy, but the whimsy made me laugh. It doesn’t take too long to get your feet under you, though, as there’s usually only one area where there’s much activity happening, allowing you to focus your efforts, and you quickly wind up getting caught up in a series of hijinx, from helping a magic show go off to interrupting some beer-drinking. Each involves solving a small puzzle, all quite reasonable, and it’s all quite enjoyable though it perhaps doesn’t live up to the game’s billing as a Big Adventure.
Then the other shoe drops, though, and the second half of the game raises the stakes, as your innocent enjoyment of the fair is interrupted by learning of a criminal plot to rob the local museum. This counterheist has twists and turns aplenty, with the challenges getting more difficult but funnier too – I especially liked decking out Mustard in fancy dress so he could infiltrate the town’s snootiest restaurant for a spot of eavesdropping, and shook my fist at the screen as a seemingly-helpful cat revealed its perfidy. While I thought the puzzles in Faeries of Healstowne were satisfying but could skew a bit too hard, here the difficulty level feels just right for this more all-ages-friendly adventure, with none of the puzzles putting up too much of a fight but sending up a lovely dopamine hit of reward as solving each unspools the next delightful bit of the story.
In fact the whole thing is just delightful – Custard and Mustard’s Big Adventure is the veriest romp. If you have the slightest soft spot for silly British things, or like dogs, or just have the smallest spark of joy in you, you won’t laugh harder all year.
(I beta tested this game)
The first three sentences of Bigfoot Bluff land like a clap of thunder:
"Ten years ago you renounced Bigfootdom to become a paparazzi. Now it is your job to do an exposé on your reclusive sasquatch father. Welcome to Bigfoot Bluff."
This opening crawl efficiently answers every question you could have about the game – you have your who what where and why all cleanly laid out, albeit “how” is a bit trickier since you don’t start with a camera – while raising a whole host of new ones a player wouldn’t know they had to ask, like “wait, can you just choose to stop being a sasquatch?”, “have I been like photographing celebrities in Santa Monica sushi joints for the last decade? As a sasquatch?”, “couldn’t I just do the exposé on myself?”, and “wait, shouldn’t it be paparazzo or is that not how Italian works, because I’m pretty sure ‘paparazzi’ is Italian” (maybe that last one is just me).
To its credit, Bigfoot Bluff is adamant about not answering any of those questions – it’s given you all the backstory you need, and now it’s time to just roll with it. Beyond just the disorienting setup, the overall vibe of the setting took me a minute to get a handle on, before realizing that the author’s riffing on early-90’s tabloids, from the blurrily-photographed cryptids to a late-game cameo that I won’t spoil. In fact the ending pulls out a number of rugs, questioning the premise and raising significant questions about what’s going on outside the eponymous park. Squint, and you can see the game touching on questions that go beyond the terminally silly, about media production and overzealous parenting and identity – which it then comprehensively undercuts, so maybe the joke is on me for starting to take it seriously. Regardless, it’s a uniquely-combined set of reference points that come together into a mélange that’s memorable even if it might not be to every player’s taste.
The gameplay is also something of a rara avis. Bigfoot Bluff bills itself as a sandbox game, which calls to mind a certain structure – of a fairly open map where the player has a lot of freedom to solve puzzles, which are largely of the medium-dry-goods variety – but here also speaks to the mechanics. Rather than requiring you to run through a linear chain of barriers to unlock the endgame, though, the game takes a more systemic approach. Instead of points, you have a stealth score, that abstractly represents how noticeable you are; the finale is gated behind getting a sufficiently high score, on the theory that at that point you’re sneaky enough to get sufficiently close to your bigfoot dad to snap a pic.
Even more intriguingly, this doesn’t only increase monotonically – while solving many puzzles will increase your stealth, as will wearing the appropriate disguises, but some actions can also decrease your stealth. Sometimes these are signposted, but sometimes what feels like ordinary IF-protagonist behavior gets you dinged. For example, you might think that wearing sunglasses would help you blend into the crowd, but in the park environment, the glare they give off winds up drawing attention to you. The game is clear that you can always regain lost points by taking appropriate actions, which adds an interesting wrinkle, though it also necessitates disabling UNDO to prevent the player from ignoring this aspect.
I’m of two minds about this – on the one hand, this moves the gameplay in a roguelike direction, creating the expectation that part of the fun for the player is rolling with some punches, but on the other, sometimes it can set up situations that feel like gotchas, which hits doubly-hard when the player convenience of taking back the offending action is removed. I personally like roguelikes, and given the large number of ways to get points none of these setbacks wind up being that punitive, but at the same time keeping UNDO enabled might encourage players to opt into the chaos, rather than leaving them to start save-scumming or declining to poke at dangerous-seeming situations. At any rate, experimenting with traditional gameplay axioms like this is exciting – it gives me lots of ideas for other ways to import roguelike or immersive sim mechanics into IF.
I keep using, or circling around, the word “unique”, because there’s very little that Bigfoot Bluff does that’s conventional. It’s notable that the author has previously made choice-based games, I think – I’ve mentioned my thesis that the long-established division between these two kinds of works is breaking down, and BB may be an example of how that hybridization is shaking things up, since my sense is that the kinds of systemic design it uses are more prevalent in the choice-based space. If it’s an experiment, though, it’s a generous one, letting the player choose how deep they want to get into the puzzling and allowing them to roam the (nicely-illustrated) map to their heart’s content. Even though I mostly wound up wittering on about design, here, it’s still very much a fun, playable game – it just might leave your brain bouncing in a bunch of different directions when you’re done.
A promising debut for the Kreate system, June 16, 2022(I beta tested this game)
The Box is a test bed for a bespoke IF system created by the game’s author, and I have to confess that my reaction to such things has previously been to consider them reinventions of the wheel, given the number of robust, mature authoring languages currently out there. Those feelings have shifted in recent years, though, as systems like Dialog and Adventuron have proven themselves to offer distinct advantages to authors and players; it’s obviously too soon to tell whether Kreate will join that list, but based on the present evidence, it definitely justifies its existence.
Like many modern systems, part of the draw here is that Kreate allows for both parser- and link-based play; you can type in traditional commands using the typical Inform/TADS syntax, but you also have links and buttons enabling you to do everything you need to with a click. The links are contextual, though, so you’re not overwhelmed with choice; the names of objects are underlined in descriptions, and you can examine them by clicking them, while potential actions are suggested in little buttons right by the command prompt.
This works well, but what’s more exciting is that the system also seems to allow for less standard input approaches too – and here’s where talking about the game itself might be useful. The Box doesn’t have much of a plot, being an escape-the-room affair that’s primarily focused on the puzzling. As the title suggests, the main business involves fiddling with a mysterious box that’s got a different puzzle on each of its sides, largely based on clues you find in the environment. Some of these are standard object-manipulation affairs, but there are also some that, while old chestnuts, are newer territory for parser IF, including a cryptogram and a tile-selection puzzle. It’s possible to engage with these via the parser, but it’s a little awkward – the cryptogram requires a bunch of commands like SET DIAL-X TO LETTER-Y – fortunately, though, Kreate enables a little drop-down menu you can interact with via the mouse that makes things easy.
Speaking of mice, there are some cute touches that elevate the game above just being a grab-bag of tech-demo puzzles – the most notable being the cute white mouse who you can get to join you in your endeavors. Similarly, while the puzzles are primarily old chestnuts, they’re implemented well and are satisfying to work through, pitched at a reasonable level of difficulty. So even though it’s primarily been written as a shakedown cruise for Kreate – and I think succeeds on those terms – on its own merits too The Box is a pleasant half-hour’s puzzling if you’re in the mood for such things.
A compelling folk-horror anthology, June 16, 2022The premise of the Wolf and Wheel is dynamite: this visual novel consists of a series of folk-horror vignettes spinning off of a frame story set in a tavern, as the inhabitants of a small village eat and drink to take their minds off the fact that the sun stopped rising several weeks ago (I believe this is set in the same Eastern-European-inflected world as last year’s IFComp entry Last Night in Alexisgrad, by one of the present game’s authors). This isn’t quite the same structure as the Decameron or Canterbury Tales, but squint and you can see the family resemblance; it’s a good way of hanging together a bunch of semi-related stories, and the atavistic contrast between a warm place of safety and a newly-terrifying night creates a push-pull frisson of tension between the pieces of the game. There’s a lovely, homey art style, too, with appealingly idiosyncratic character designs and a few nice touches of animation, like snowflakes blowing past a window. This is the kind of game to sink into, drinking a mug of tea on a cold day (unfortunately it was 80 degrees in LA when I played it, though at least I had the AC on).
Given the overall high production values, and robust hour-plus running time, the game’s placement in the Back Garden isn’t immediately obvious, but the blurb discloses that it’s a chopped-up demo of a longer work, consisting of random event scenes (these would be the vignettes) connected by a newly-written frame story. Given this provenance, it’d be easy for the game to come off as a glorified clip show, but to its credit, it stands on its own pretty well. Some of the vignettes are stronger than others, of course, and some feel more fleshed-out and relevant to the frame plot than others, but that seems reasonable given the weird vibe of the supernatural happenings they depict. It also helps that the protagonist of the frame story – one of the workers in the titular inn – isn’t a passive recipient of the tales of others, but somehow finds themself (you can choose their name and gender) sucked into the memories of each taverngoer in turn, reliving their decisions and experiences. There are also characters and situations that escape from some of the vignettes and enter the frame story, meaning that this feels like a full narrative and not just a thinly-sketched framework for a series of self-contained, non-interacting stories.
As for the flavor of the vignettes, I called them folk-horror, but maybe folkloric is a better word? Some of the early ones are simply eerie, and even when later ones escalate into threat and violence, there’s still an otherworldly vibe. Some of the most memorable encounters are simply conversations, too – one dialogue with a psychopomp boatman especially stood out. They’re weakest where they stretch for meaning and try to press the player to make big philosophical choices – there’s one where you come across a werewolf in human shape, naked and raving in despair over what he’s become, but his desperate questioning comes across far too bloodlessly:
"I have not been able to work my way through that question: 'why live?' I presume a meaning or purpose, but what is it and am I wrong in that assumption?"
Truly, Socrates, put some clothes on.
Even this comparatively weak sequence is redeemed, though, when you realize that this werewolf isn’t a man bitten by a wolf, but a wolf bitten by a man – what torments him isn’t his red deeds, since as an animal he could kill and eat his prey with no qualms, but that his intermittent transformation into human form has given him a view of morality, and transformed his killings into murder.
Again, they’re not all like this – there are some vignettes that lean more action-oriented, or have a light investigative cast – and they move pretty quick, so you’re guaranteed to at least get a powerful image or two out of each (the one with monsters growing in the trees was pleasingly nightmarish). You are given what feel like significant choices in each too – usually hinging on whether to flee, combat, or engage with the weirdness on display – so you’re not a passive observer.
As for the frame story, it’s serviceable enough. My favorite part here is getting to know some of the other villagers, from motormouth scholar Elisabetta, Nat the infallible timekeeper, and tortured doctor Fyodora. I’d look forward to digging into these relationships in the full game, since as written you only get one or two encounters with each. Indeed, my main complaint about the frame story is that it seems to end rather abruptly, and while there are 11 endings, the connection between my choices and the outcome I got felt unclear (though this may be setting- and genre-appropriate, I suppose). If I was ultimately more enamored of the game’s constituent parts than how it finally came together as a whole, though, I still very much enjoyed by time with it – and given that the Wolf and Wheel is a reconfiguration of how those parts were originally meant to fit, I suspect I’ll really like the full game once it’s released.
Up above aliens hover, June 16, 2022An anthology of seven short hypertext poems about UFOs, Phenomena boasts some clever wordplay and a nicely-realized theme (the title of the final poem gives the game away: “guess this was never really about ufos, haha” – it proposes the night, or death, the possibilities we invent from sign and portent). There’s some effective imagery here, and the way it engages the reader worked well for me: each poem can be read “down,” by just reading it top to bottom as it first displays, or “through”, by clicking each line to change it into one of a half-dozen or so different variations. Time – or at least narrative progress – usually progresses as you read “down”, while the “through” options typically elaborate a single idea, introducing a set of potential options and often including one that serves to undercut things. For example, here’s the second poem as it first appears (which riffs on a historical account of strange lights in the sky of 13th-century Japan):
We have been camping near Hermit’s Pass for nearly two months.
Our orders come from the empress herself.
But we search the night sky and see nothing.
The stars flex, relax.
Not a star out of place.
Her ever expanding empire.
The hunter draws her bow.
Then for the “through”, if you successively click on the second line, it runs through this sequence:
Our orders come from the empress herself.
Confirm what has been seen in the sky.
Accounts come in from all corners of the empire.
Peculiar signs.
A topic to pray upon.
But I am no priest.
I seek only to fill my belly and find a comfortable place to shit.
…before running back to the beginning with one more click.
It’s clever that the poems work this way, but because there are strong throughlines both ways, it’s easy to turn the poems into ridiculous self-parodies if you’re not careful with where you stop clicking – an issue that’s exacerbated by the author’s repeated tic of interposing a single short phrase to punctuate most lines, like the “peculiar signs” above. Here’s another way of rendering the second poem:
Idiots.
Peculiar signs.
Seen by the paper maker:
Xnth farts in his sleep.
The cuttlefish.
Imagining blight.
Animals cower.
Of course, if the player does this they’re not really entering into the spirit of the thing, so that’s not necessarily much of a complaint. I will say that this style of verse isn’t my favorite; there’s not much in the way of complex imagery or highlighting specific words with jewel-like care, but I can’t make much of the meter, is the main thing (these could also be the complaint of a philistine – I’m not very well read in poetry!) I do think the sixth poem, which is couched as a dialogue between the witness to an abduction and their therapist, worked best of the bunch for me, because the relative informality of the spoken word felt like a good fit for the author’s relatively unadorned prose. But anyway this is a matter of style and personal preference; you should be able to tell from the excerpts above whether you vibe with Phenomena, and regardless I still enjoyed the way it smartly runs through a number of different perspectives on aliens and what they symbolize for the human condition.
A gamebook simulator with a little too much bookkeeping required, June 15, 20225e Arena is neither fish nor fowl, straddling the gap between choice-based IF and a combat-focused gamebook. I’m only glancingly familiar with the latter tradition – I played one or two of the Lone Wolf books when I was a kid, and am dimly aware that the Fighting Fantasy series was a really big deal across the pond, but for the most this is one element of nerd culture that’s passed me by – and I suspect my lack of experience here is part of the reason why I found 5e Arena a little awkward.
Don’t get me wrong, the premise is straightforward enough: it’s an arena-based combatfest implementing Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition rules, but goes beyond the bare-bones concept by including a card game that allows you to gamble between bouts, opportunities to use your noncombat skills to learn more about your opponents’ personalities and potential tactics, and a couple of funny twists, like the chaos-producing Wheel of Magic in the final fight that injects a random buff or penalty each round. The fact that the announcer highlights that said wheel is sponsored by a local jeweler, and rattles off the shop’s slogan, in the pre-fight patter made me laugh – less intended by the game, when I got to the fill-in box with “Name or Alias?” I typed in “Alias” and emitted a self-congratulatory snigger.
The combat encounters are the real meat, though, and here’s where I think I was tripped up by gamebook conventions. In a paper version of such things, the player is expected to keep a copy of their character sheet and do all the bookkeeping – recording their hit points, rolling the dice, and so on. Which makes sense, as traditional books are not very good at rewriting themselves in response to how they’re read! Computers are good at that sort of thing, though, so I was surprised that 5e Arena doesn’t automate nearly as much of the gameplay as I would have expected. For one thing, there’s no character generation module, nor is there a way to input your character information so the game knows what class you’re playing or your current armor class or hit points; instead, the player needs to roll up their own character and keep track of all that themselves. For another, while there’s a cool little movement grid integrated into the combat window, the game requires the player to manually move the monster as well as the PC but leaves you on the honor system as to how far you go.
The game does do some work, admittedly – beyond listing the monster’s statistics, it also chooses an appropriate attack each round (using melee strikes when it sees that it’s close enough to do so), keeps track of ongoing effects if you’re hit with something like a heat metal spell, and makes rolls for the monsters. But playing the game is a significantly higher-overhead prospect than I would have thought. Again, I’m guessing that this is primarily because folks who play gamebooks enjoy the tactile aspects of flipping through their character sheet, erasing their hit points, and adding up their gold-piece rewards. But that appeal is frankly somewhat lost on me, and I’d have personally preferred to be able to just use the game to play some DnD – all the more so because there’s not much plot to speak of and the fun to be had is just to bash through the roster of foes. So while the game is well-implemented and probably will be appreciated by its target audience, I’d rather just play something that takes advantage of the affordances a computer provides, like the excellent 4x4 Archipelago, instead.
So much like Adrift, this is a teaser for a yet-to-be-completed game; much like Adrift, it made a favorable impression on me and I’d look forward to playing it; unlike Adrift, though, it didn’t provide me with a sense of what the gameplay would actually be like in the finished version.
On the positive side, the protagonist, world, and setup are all sketched in a winsome, appealing way. The main character is on her way to visit her friend (the eponymous witch) to tell her that she’s got a crush on her (the eponymous confession), and it made me smile to read about her thoughts racing as she walks through the nicely-described, bucolic scenery on her way to the cottage – the protagonist works as a florist, so there’s a lot of good detail on the different plants and flowers. Of course, when she arrives, she realizes something’s gone wrong and her friend is missing, leaving behind only the scrap of a recipe for a counterspell and her adorable cat familiar…
On the down side, though, this all proceeds just as a linear progression of passages with only a single link on each. From the way the demo ends, it seems like the game will open up from there, and you’ll need to do a bit of a rummage through the cottage to turn up the ingredients for the spell, which is a sturdy but enjoyable adventure game premise. Still, to really provide a taste for the full game and start to hook the player, it would have been nice if a little bit of this gameplay had been on offer, with maybe a small puzzle to solve to see how the mechanics will be set up. The scavenger-hunt model does make it harder to break off a sampler than a linear sequence of puzzles like the one that opens Adrift, of course, so the omission is understandable – still, it strikes me as a missed opportunity, albeit not one that would hold me back from playing the full game.
Alternate-history space teaser, June 15, 2022(So the annoying title is actually clever, because the added spaces indicate the letters are drifting apart from each other – get it, drifting? – but I’m not typing it that way).
The opening of Adrift is eerily reminiscent of that of the main festival’s Orbital Decay – sure, “astronaut must fight for survival after an EVA gone wrong” isn’t the world’s most recondite premise, but it’s been almost ten years since the movie Gravity (sidenote – it’s been almost ten years since the movie Gravity???) and I don’t remember playing any other bits of IF with this exact setup, so I’m very curious about what’s in the water that led to this coincidence.
At any rate, it’s a grabby way to open a game and it’s effective here too. Unlike Orbital Decay, Adrift is a parser game, so proceedings are unsurprisingly more puzzle-oriented. It’s also unfinished, consisting of just the first two challenges and ending after you manage to get back to your shuttle. This isn’t a completely polished slice of the game released separately as a teaser, mind – there are lots of indications that the game still needs some love and care, from a fair number of typos to the noticeable fall-off in scenery objects as the excerpt reaches its end. The puzzles also suffer from a bit of guess-the-verb-itis, with the second in particular requiring the player to type a vaguer approach to the solution because the more specific commands aren’t recognized (Spoiler - click to show)(I’d realized that I needed to swing the crate on my spacesuit’s tether, but all my attempts to TIE or ATTACH it failed; turns out you just need to SWING CRATE).
This is all fair enough for the Back Garden, though, and I was still able to enjoy the teaser for what it is, and would look forward to playing the completed game. For one thing, there’s more worldbuilding and personality on display here than the lost-in-space setup strictly requires, with integrated flashbacks lightly sketching an alternate history where the Soviet Union stuck around and showing our cosmonaut hero pining for his Lyudmilla, which mixes up the more-typical all-American space fantasy (albeit the war in Ukraine makes this less fun than it could be, sadly). There’s also some cool pixel-art headers that shift as you play, helping to set the mood, and I liked the physics-based nature of the puzzles, which made them satisfying to solve. As a result, it’s not too hard to squint and see what the more robust finished product would look like after completing the design and some rigorous testing, so I hope this review sends a strong signal to the author to get working!
She's a skeleton. He's a mouse. They fight necromancers., June 15, 2022Oh, what a lovely way to wrap up the main festival (I beta tested the remaining quartet of games)! After a rewarding but, I have to admit, somewhat grueling month of playing and reviewing, getting sucked into the Bones of Rosalinda is like sinking into a warm bath. This is another in a line of games from the author that import parser-y touches like an inventory, compass navigation, and a world model into a choice-based framework, and the resulting gameplay is something like the early-90s graphic adventures of my youth, with lots of scope to explore and experiment but no guess-the-verb flailing required. The game’s comedic chops make the comparison even more apt, with a high joke density that anticipates that you’ll try to hide a needle in a haystack for no reason and character names that left me smiling (the fact that the necromancer’s assistant is named Albert makes me laugh for reasons that I don’t feel capable of explaining) – but where some of the LucasArts classics could be too cool for school, TBR has an appealing cast of characters, from resolute hero skeleton Rosalinda to your brave-despite-himself mouse sidekick Piecrust, to the ogre chef who always thinks the best of people. Add in a clever set of puzzle mechanics hinging on Rosalinda’s ability to detach her limbs, and you’ve got something here for just about any lover of IF.
Admittedly, the quest you’re given from the off is relatively conventional – in a fuzzily-defined medieval fantasy world, you’ve got to stop a necromancer bent on no good by navigating his dungeon and bearding him in his lair – but the twist that he’s a newbie who hasn’t quite got the hang of the gig, and you play the first skeleton he’s managed to animate without managing to bend to his will, lends more than enough freshness to proceedings. The relatively straightforward opening also helps ease the player into the game, alongside the tutorial-like was the first set of challenges teach you about the game’s basic mechanics – by solving a gradually-escalating sequence of puzzles you get walked through how the inventory works, the different things you can accomplish by sending your limbs or skull off separately from your body (I feel like I’ve played other games where the player character has similar abilities, but I can’t think of any that have implemented it as smoothly and systematically as TBR), and how to switch perspectives to Piecrust. The game then opens up a bit, presenting some more complex puzzles and a larger set of rooms to explore, though not in an overwhelming way – a trick the game pulls repeatedly to keep the pacing tight and limit the number of objects and objectives at play at any point in time.
Since so much of the gameplay is puzzle-driven, it’s good that the quality here is very high. There’s a strong variety, since between Rosalinda’s multi-competent anatomy and Piecrust’s mousely attributes, you have a lot of potential tools to bring to bear, and the game doesn’t hit any one specific approach too heavily. There’s also a mix of funny object-based puzzles, as well as a couple that require thinking through your conversational approaches with some of the other denizens of the dungeon. One puzzle did strike me as a bit hard (Spoiler - click to show)(making one of your arms into an impromptu candlestick holder) though this might be down to the solution requiring you to use the inventory interface in a way I hadn’t previously tried, even though it’s clearly signposted. And I wished there was an automatic way to tell one of the main characters to follow the other, especially in the maze (don’t worry, it’s not that bad!) But overall the puzzles hit a satisfying level of difficulty, and nothing requires too much clicking around.
And as mentioned, the world and characters are just delightful. I laughed at the puffed-up demon who’s nonplussed when his decapitation of you doesn’t lead to very satisfying results (seeing you hop after your skull, he remarks “I thought only chickens could do that”). I gave out a little cheer when Piecrust dug deep to stand up for his friend, and another when I read the heartwarming ending. The game is a real treat, and I’m hoping the epilogue’s promise of more adventures to come for the dynamic due of Rosalinda and Piecrust comes true.
Character-driven roadtrip in need of a tuneup, June 15, 2022On paper, externoon should be the kind of thing I dig. It’s a grounded look at a woman trying to externalize her feeling of being adrift by traveling across the country by bus, having low-key encounters with fellow travelers and musing on her dysfunctional relationship with her sister. I would 100% pick up a novel with this summary on the back cover, so I was excited to see where this journey was going to take me. Unfortunately I found that the aimlessness wasn’t just confined to the protagonist; while there’s some good writing here and well-observed detail, I thought the author’s decisions about where to focus attention wound up neglecting character development and thematic progression, and the increasing number of errors and typos as the game went on suggested this is isn’t quite a final draft. I can see how the pieces could come together with a bit more time in development, but externoon isn’t there yet.
Admittedly, it opens strong. A major thread running through the game is the letters to her sister the protagonist composes in her head to apologize for leaving their shared apartment without saying goodbye. There’s a plain, direct quality to her voice that makes these letters compelling:
Dear Angie,
I woke up this morning at three o’clock. I know. I can hear Mom saying “that’s yesterday” in my head, too.
I couldn’t really sleep.
Remember when I told you I’d travel someday? That day is today. Please. Try not to worry. I’m OK. I think.
I’m sorry.
Kicking off the action with a trip to the liminal space of a bus terminal is also an effective choice; the protagonist is in motion, but it’s clear that the process of getting where she’s going will be time-consuming and provide plenty of time for reflection. And there’s a solid texture to the details, which rang true for me (I don’t have a driver’s license so I’ve spent some time traveling via long-distance bus).
As the story progressed, though, I found myself less engaged by it, largely because the protagonist’s character and the story’s themes were frustratingly vague. We get a sense of her internal monologue, beyond the aforementioned letter, but not much of this comes through in action. There are a number of set-piece incidents as she travels, where the narration slows down and gets very granular: a disagreement at a bus station water fountain, a conversation after the bus breaks down, an exchange at a coffee shop, and an extended sequence of going to a bar and meeting some folks. Nothing much happens in any of these in terms of plot, which doesn’t bother me much; for a travelogue like this, it’s all about the slow accumulation of events adding up. But nor do they amount to much in terms of the protagonist’s character arc – she’s passive and diffident to a fault, whether she’s witnessing but failing to intervene in an argument, enjoying meeting her seat-mate but also wanting to keep some distance, getting dragged to a bar but sort of enjoying it once she’s there…
To a certain degree this fits the characterization the game has set out, I suppose, which positions the protagonist as someone dissatisfied by the way she’s just drifting through life – despite the fact that she’s taken decisive action by leaving home, it could be that we’re meant to see her nonetheless repeating old patterns. But if that’s the case, it’s undercut by the fact that she makes another significant decision at the end of the game, which felt to me largely unmotivated and disconnected to anything that had previously happened. The high degree of detail given to comparatively in-depth recitals of quotidian events isn’t matched by similar attention paid to what’s going on in the protagonist’s head, so I felt like I’d have to infer a whole lot to be able to construct a coherent mental or emotional journey for the character.
One area where this really hit home for me was race. It plays a significant role in the game – Lucas is from Trinidad, and attention is paid to how he navigates social space as a Black man – but it’s unclear what race the protagonist is meant to be. From the names given to her and her sister (Liliana and Angie) and the fact that they live in Queens, it’s plausible she’s meant to be a Latina – but on the other hand she also seems very naïve about the US immigration system when Lucas shares some of his experiences, and she’s on a trip to rural Oregon which from my understanding can be a pretty unfriendly place for nonwhite folks. It’s certainly not a requirement for a work of IF to specify the race of its main character, but given that the omission makes it hard to make sense of some of her interactions with the other characters, it’s yet another decision that muddles what externoon is trying to say.
(Speaking of things that are muddled, having finished the game, I also have no idea what the title is supposed to mean – that’s a little thing but it bothers me immensely, and seems indicative of the larger point about the thinness of the game’s thematics).
As mentioned, partially this could be a sign of the author running out of time to bring the game in for a landing, as typos proliferate as the story proceeds. The clearest indication of this underdone quality, though, is that the version currently up on the Spring Thing site has a progress-breaking bug midway through – fortunately, Autumn Chen has created a fixed version, available here. There weren’t any other bugs that I came across, but I did find gameplay frequently annoying nonetheless due to the lack of signposting for which hyperlinks provided additional detail or flavor, and which progressed the story to the next passage (I didn’t notice any branching choices). Since it’s impossible to go back to previous passages, playing quickly became an exercise in trying to get the complete story by guessing which link would move the narrative onward and avoiding that one – the logic was sufficiently obscure that I guessed wrong a lot of the time, though.
This is only one reason I found externoon frustrating though. There are interesting conflicts set up, I like the setting, and the author’s clearly got some writing chops. But it doesn’t feel like they were able to clearly identify what they wanted to communicate in the story, and edit it accordingly; it reads like one of those first drafts where the writer is feeling their way towards their themes, occasionally getting lost noodling around in a scene or getting interested in a character without quite knowing how to fit the pieces together into an overall plan, and then not having the chance to fix things up in a second draft.
The spoils of war, June 15, 2022An arty, experimental piece, The Fall of Asemia engages with timely themes: I wish its melancholy story of an occupying army destroying a city’s way of life didn’t have quite so many contemporary resonances both literal and metaphorical, but here we are. I felt these connections all the more clearly because the game doesn’t wholly position the player as a participant in these events, but rather as a scholar exhausted by the effort of translating these records and bearing witness to the crimes they memorialize. I don’t know when the game was written, and whether the author intended to draw parallels to how Westerners have been following the distant but visceral war in Ukraine – and certainly there’s no way for it to have anticipated the past couple of days, as we Americans have been grappling with how far a self-righteous minority will go to dismantle our rights (this review was written when the Supreme Court's draft opinion striking down all abortion rights was leaked) – but its downbeat vibe definitely met me where I’ve been at.
The mood conjured by the translated fragments is at once dreamlike and violently, even harshly, immediate, and is the main draw here. That’s especially the case when the game turns to depicting the feelings of the conquered population (note the mimesis-enhancing translator’s aside in the first excerpt):
"The language they use here—it tastes like blood from a bit tongue. I tire so easily now. Our ears are tired, too. [… here, the ligatures don’t look Asemic—cf. the Eth ms.] Tell me, is Asemia really dead? It is merely drowning, yes?
…
"The strange vowels of this province flood my mouth like chewing on leather. Someone has painted the sky a different color. The other wives gather in circles like quail, and sometimes I can’t remember how to thread a needle. Those conquerors are fools. Soon enough, Asemia will rupture their hearts until they can’t tell the difference between blood and wine."
You only get a paragraph or two in each passage before moving on to another narrator, who provides another view of the static situation, so there’s no strong sense of narrative development within the records. Instead, progression comes within the frame, as the translator tries on different approaches to understanding the texts and sinking into increasing depression at the tides of history.
This is where the game’s interactivity comes in, because before each passage you’re given a choice of four to six abstract glyphs, each of which you can toggle between one of three different versions with a click. The set of glyphs you choose impact how the passage is translated, and since you loop through the same set of records three times over the course of the game, you can see how these selections change the text. It’s an interesting mechanic, but it didn’t wind up working that well for me as a model for how translation works. For one thing, since the glyphs are completely nonrepresentational, the player has to choose blindly, which seems in tension with the way a translator has to weigh the choice of reducing an ambiguous word to just one specific correlate. For another, the shifts in the texts feel like they go beyond differences of interpretation or emphasis and into straight-out different meaning. Here, for example, are the three distinct possible ways the first record can be translated (with the caveat that they can be mixed and matched if you don’t click each glyph the same number of times):
"In the city after the war, there were flowers made of shrapnel. They stank like the smoke from the bombed buildings. I tried to pick up loose stars from the shards of city glass.
"In the city after the war, there were women who danced on blood. They swayed like the sausages left hanging in the butcher’s window. I fought to save our dog until my husband, spitting bile, grabbed my arm.
"In the city after the war, there were men who sang like bones. They forgot about the river with its bloated bodies. I could barely walk away from the library’s books, open and dead in the street, like shot doves."
These are all arresting images, but it’s hard to reverse-engineer a plausible language where the difference between “men”, “women”, and “flowers” is hard to resolve, much less the highly-divergent last sentence. I don’t want to harp on this too much, since the game is clearly focused on communicating its mood and themes, rather than providing a simulation of what it’s like to translate a dead language – but it did feel like a misalignment between the game’s fiction and its ludic elements.
Beyond this fairly abstract niggle, though, I for once don’t have much to complain about here; I didn’t exactly enjoy my time spent wallowing in the bitter, fading memories of the citizens of now-vanished Asemia, but by displacing some of the stressful things going on in real life right now into a fictional context, it was very much cathartic for me. Recommended, but maybe don’t go doomscrolling on Twitter right after you finish.
Live. Die. Repeat., June 14, 2022Has an IF sub-genre ever gone from the ridiculous to the sublime to the ridiculous as efficiently as the one-move game? To my knowledge Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die inaugurated it, efficiently combining its title, walkthrough, and single joke into one. There things could have languished but for Sam Barlow’ Aisle, which crammed a short story into its compact runtime, letting the player explore radically different aspects of a quotidian situation depending on where they directed their attention and efforts. The baton was quickly picked up – by Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle, which doubled down on the in-jokes.
This focus on comedy makes sense, though – with only one move there’s not much space to create character arcs or a deep, well-realized world, so a gag-generating jack-in-the-box is a worthy structure. And this is the structure Hinterlands: Marooned adopts. After a well-done intro bottom-lines your predicament – you’re an alien astronaut crash-landed on a wild planet and washed up on an isolated island – you have the leisure to examine your nearly-bare surroundings, which consist primarily of something with a made-up sci-fi name with an apostrophe. Then once you do pretty much anything other than look or examine, the game ends and you can try something different.
I’m being vague here since this is a one-joke game and spoiling the joke means spoiling the game. Before I retreat behind fuzzy-text, though, I’ll say that I think Marooned pretty much does what it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do doesn’t fully leverage the format. One part of success at a one-move game is deep implementation, which the game does well on – beyond most objects having parts and subparts and a large number of game-ending actions being recognized, the bits that made me laugh the most weren’t the main joke but the responses to more random commands:
">dig
Crazy, Daddy-O!"
The other part, though, is presenting a candy-box of variety, delighting the player with unexpected outcomes and novel responses to their one-and-done actions. Here, everything pretty much plays out as a slight variation on a single note, and while the different endings are inventive and well-written (albeit less PG-rated than I would have preferred), they’re much of a muchness. So depending on the degree to which you wind up enjoying the single flavor on offer, this might be more of a five-minute game than a twenty minute one.
OK, spoilers to wrap up:
(Spoiler - click to show)So the unpronounceable thing on the island with you is a monster (happily, the parser allows you to refer to it as such rather than typing out the full thing each time). It’s an impressively-detailed and ghoulishly-described monster, with all sorts of ways to fold, spindle, and mutilate your hapless spaceman as you try to escape and/or fight back. There’s an impressive array of stuff you can try – beyond simply attacking the creature, you can try to tie its tentacles into knots, pry under its exoskeletal armor, poke at its eye, and seal closed its acid-snorting snout, to say nothing of various more friendly and/or amorous approaches you can make to the thing, or attempting to flee. But of course all that ever happens is you got spattered like a blood-filled water balloon.
I can see the right kind of player getting a charge of anarchic glee at ticking off all the different ways to die, as they’re as lovingly described as a gore-filled Heavy Metal cartoon. I have to admit this isn’t me, though, and beyond that I felt like there was a dearth of non-attacking stuff to try, so after the first fifteen minutes I felt less like I was joyfully experimenting and more that I was lawnmowering through all the different parts of the monster to try to thwack. That’s mostly on me for letting the joke outstay its welcome, though.
Underimplemented, awkward, and confusing, June 14, 2022Baby on Board’s blurb foregrounds what sounds like a cool idea – its Perplexity engine aims to create parser games playable entirely via a voice interface, which could be a step forward on accessibility for visually-impaired folks and others for whom manual entry of text isn’t easy. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, though, right now my circumstances are such that typing is way easier than listening to audio and/or talking to my computer, meaning I played it entirely in the traditional way. And experienced as a regular piece of parser IF, unfortunately there’s not a lot that feels new or interesting about the game, both because of awkwardness in its implementation and sketchiness in its design.
Starting with the second part first, the premise here does seem fun, and as the parent of a young kid, relatable – you’re tasked with getting a baby to daycare (you’re sometimes told it’s preschool, but as the tot isn’t talking yet that’s probably not right), and given the tendency of small children to cause chaos, I could see the story proceeding in a farcical direction. From the get-go, though, things are sufficiently vague that I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. For one thing, you start the game outside the house of someone named Rosa, with her car in the driveway; when you go in she greets you, tells you to do a good job with the drop-off, and leaves. Is the baby ours? Is Rosa our current or former partner? Is this even our house? None of this is explained, and while I guess you don’t need that detail, it feels decidedly odd to be missing these basic pieces of context.
I stayed befuddled through the rest of the game’s running time. Rosa appears to be an inventor, so after scooping up the baby (disappointed to learn that I couldn’t KISS BABY), his diaper bag, and his favorite binky, I also made my way into her workshop, and found a mysterious tent that, after I futzed around with it some, turned out to be a teleporter that took me back to the driveway. Figuring I had what I needed, I loaded into the car, but when I started it it told me it couldn’t leave until I locked up the house (it’s some kind of self-driving smartcar).
After dutifully heading back in to close all the doors, I tried again, only to find that the car had somehow gone missing. Guessing this is what the teleporter was supposed to be for, I used the tent again and found the car was now in an empty lot somewhere, with the narration telling me that the thief (what thief?) must have abandoned it. Then I drove to daycare, dropped off the baby, and the game ended. I got a perfect score so I don’t think I missed anything, but as a story this is deeply unsatisfying – there must have been some excitement with that thief, but I missed all of it – and as a puzzle-solving experience, all I had to do was unlock a bunch of doors and figure out how a very simple device worked.
If this had been all there was to Baby on Board, I’d be chalking it up to a simple, inoffensive test-bed that doesn’t make the most of its premise. Unfortunately, technical issue with the game and its parser engine made this whole experience anything but simple. First, the Windows installer took about ten minutes to load, without displaying a status bar or pop-up window indicating that it was still working. Once that hurdle was done, the game started up easily enough, but there was a noticeable lag any time I typed in any input – possibly this was because it was reading out the responses to my actions, but I couldn’t find a way to mute itself and speed things up.
Most annoyingly, the engine purports to implement a natural language approach that eschews the traditional shortcuts of parser IF. At this point I realized that Perplexity was the same engine used in Kidney Kwest in last year’s IF Comp – I’d struggled with its idiosyncrasies then, and while it felt a tiny bit smoother this time, I continue to think this approach is really awkward and likely to be less accessible for newcomers to IF and those trying to play by voice. For one thing, it’s inconsistent about understanding commands where “the” is omitted – sometimes it’ll automatically fill that in, but in the tutorial, UNLOCK DOOR simply failed where UNLOCK THE DOOR allowed me to progress. The system’s rules for providing detail about objects are also incredibly mechanical. I usually type X ME as one of the first things I do in a game, to get a sense of who I’m meant to be playing. Here’s what BOB gave me:
"You is a person, a physical object, a place, a thing, and an animal. It also has a hand, a hand, a backside."
Attempts to learn more about Rosa, the baby, or her house and belongings, were similarly cut short by the parser’s overliteral way of conveying information. There also appear to be some bugs – at one point I tried to leave the tent by typing GET OUT and received an incomprehensible string of letters and punctuation in reply.
Making parser IF easier to get into is God’s work, of course – for this particular genre to survive, it needs to get more accessible. And while there are lots of folks who’ve tried to do that within the confines of the existing authoring tools by adding tutorials or other player-friendly shortcuts, there’s definitely room to think about more outside-the-box approaches like voice interfaces and natural language processing. Sadly though, I don’t think Baby on Board takes any real steps forward on those fronts, and even qua game it’s a pretty bare-bones affair.
An intriguing multiplayer test-bed, June 14, 2022What with parenting a teething baby whose sleep schedule is as high-stakes as it is random, my life right now is not especially conducive to planning leisure activities, which made it a close-run thing whether I was going to get to play this multiplayer Twine game before the festival closed (I made a joke in the IntFic matchmaking thread that regardless of the merits of Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by Travis Moy, Trying to Play “Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by Travis Moy” by Travis Moy was unconventionally-paced yet incredibly suspenseful – and yes, I’m reduced to recycling my own jokes).
Happily, I was able to connect with another player and got to enjoy two run-throughs of the game, which isn’t like any other IF I’ve played. It has some similarities with the multiplayer game in last year’s IFComp, Last Night of Alexisgrad, true, including an asymmetric structure that gives you a choice of character up front – you pick which of the eponymous Ma Tiger’s foster children, dutiful son and EMT Jekusheke or prodigal daughter with dark secrets Ebiashe, tickles your fancy. But while that game required swapping codes with your partner after each choice, which could be a little cumbersome, Ma Tiger integrates everything smoothly, so that after one person pastes in a code to join the hosted game, play is seamless with only the occasional “waiting” prompt indicating that your partner needs to make a choice before you can proceed (I only saw these rarely, and just for a short time, indicating a lot of care went into minimizing any differences in length of text between the two perspectives). The game is also pitched cooperatively, which I enjoyed more than Alexisgrad’s competitive approach – sure, the two siblings haven’t seen each other in a long time so there’s the opportunity for some conflict, but mostly I was able to focus on playing my character collaboratively, rather than jockey for advantage.
There’s also a timed mechanic on offer – at the climax of the story, you’re thrust into a quick-moving situation where you only have thirty or sixty seconds to make a choice. This adds some nice pressure to proceedings and underlines the gravity of the situation, without being overly-taxing on the reflexes (I was usually able to pick a solid choice after four or five seconds, so even though I’m a fast reader I think most players should do fine).
For all its gameplay innovations, though – and to be clear, they’re real and they’re compelling – MTTT does play like a proof of concept. Don’t get me wrong, the writing is good, setting a fun cyberpunk-noir vibe from the get-go:
"Her car is ancient, one of the models from before electronics crept into every nook and cranny… She’s ditched her phone, too, left it with a friend back home. If she dozes off and wheels off the road, drives into a ditch or overturns herself on a rock, nobody will know and nobody will come. No. It’s not dangerous; the roads are straight and empty, and the terror of isolation only that, terror. Soon she’ll have real danger to deal with. The problems of running from your past. Or, perhaps, the problems of facing up to it."
There’s also some nicely understated world- and character-building, with moused-over phrases providing a bit of perspective or context from your chosen viewpoint character. And the initial segment of verbal jousting is well-realized; while it seems to more or less wind up in the same place every time, and you need to stick to the overall personality of the character you’re playing, there are interesting choices that feel impactful along the way, like how much to share when catching up with your long-lost sibling.
But after this sequence, you’re thrust into the timed bit, where it feels like the asymmetry between the two characters leaves one with much more interesting stuff to do, and more impactful choices to make, than the other (that character also has more going on in their backstory, and better insight into the mystery of what’s going on with Ma). The denouement also feels a bit rushed, with all the big plot revelations bottom-lined into two paragraphs rather than coming out in dialogue, and one of the big variables in that timed section (Spoiler - click to show)(whether or not you’re able to save Ma’s dog, King) not even mentioned in either of my playthroughs.
Those critiques boil down to saying I wanted more, though – per the author’s note, this was all pulled together in a month, which is seriously impressive for pioneering a brand-new model of IF and having some solid character and gameplay work in there besides. As it stands, MTTT’s formal innovations are its most engaging features, but I can see the technical and design framework it showcases becoming a launchpad for more robust, fleshed-out games to come, which is an exciting prospect indeed.
Bad dad, June 14, 2022I’ve always thought that it must be really tricky to write in the gothic mode. Play it too straight, and you get a standard horror story where everybody’s wearing a costume for some reason. Steer too much the other way, and you get Gary Oldman vamping “I never drink… vine” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (let me be clear: this movie is completely dumb and I love it to pieces). Success means keeping the balance between the extremes, but a plodding, boring stability won’t work: to truly be gothic, a work needs to go all out, constantly teetering at the edge of going too far.
Sweetpea takes on this challenge, though, and makes it look easy – its lush, hothouse prose is deliciously creepy and deliciously engaging, keeping me at the edge of my seat from the story’s grabby beginning through its many twists and turns. The plot is fun, and interactivity is cannily deployed to heighten player engagement through what eventually reveals itself to be a linear story. But it’s the writing that’s the real star of the show. Consider that opening, as the teenaged protagonist looks down at the figure – possibly her father, possibly an uncanny doppelganger – suing for entrance into her home in the middle of the night:
"You aren’t too high off of the ground, and with the full moon smiling above clouds scudding lowly over the rolling hills, there should be enough light to catch off of his hair, to illuminate his face."
Then upon considering opening the window to call out:
"Should you? The glass squeaks beneath your touch, dribbles of icy condensation slicking the inside of your wrist as the pane warms with your body heat. If you yell loudly enough, he should be able to hear you."
This just works – there are lots of adjectives and lots of clauses, stretching the sentences to a languorous span, and each is chosen with a careful eye to its sensual appeal. The plot tropes also hit the right notes: the protagonist is a sheltered adolescent, used to being left alone in a genre-appropriate big house by her often-absent, eccentric father (who, we’re told “doesn’t talk to you about his experiments”, and by the way, happens to do a lot of laundry).
There’s a lot that’s only alluded to, or conveyed only by implication – the creepiest bit of the game is how casually the narrator begins mentioning her friend Michael (Spoiler - click to show)(while apparently friendly, he’s an archangel portrayed with some fidelity to medieval traditions, with multiple shifting eyes and rainbow coloring, which is eerie as all get-out). There are some flat-out scary set-pieces too, like the two encounters with the maybe-father, which I won’t spoil in detail.
The player has a good number of choices throughout, whether through inline links that allow you to dig deeper into the protagonist’s perceptions or memories, or end-of-passage boxed options that allow you to pick dialogue, or decide which parts of the house to visit. You don’t have total freedom, and some of the protagonist’s choices felt off-kilter to me – she seems to rush into thinking there’s something wrong with her maybe-father very quickly, but at the same time thinks nothing of taking a nap with his identity still unresolved – but this helps underline that she’s probably not traditionally sane.
There was one place, though, where it seemed like game’s logic got a little tripped up – my second visit to the father’s study had a description that didn’t seem to acknowledge I’d already been there and knew it was empty. I also wound up thinking the story could have been either slightly tightened or slightly extended; after a long sequence wrapping up the initial situation, there’s a short, hallucinatory interlude before a quick finale. The interlude felt like it ended just as I was starting to settle into, though, so I think the pacing would have worked better if it had either had room to establish a new status quo, or had been bottom-lined in order to get to the final conflict more quickly.
Hopefully it’s clear these are very minor critiques of a self-assured, effective debut game. Sweetpea sets and sustains a goosebumping, creepy-crawly mood, and leaves enough mysteries enticingly unplumbed – how does the protagonist know Michael? What’s the deal with the paintings? What happened to her mother? – to keep it running through my head even a couple of days after I played it. It’s a tense, well-written pleasure.
Weird Western puzzler, June 14, 2022Confession time: I recognize that there’s some real heft to the complaint, stated forcefully by A Single Ouroboros Scale and by many other games and folks too, that the IF community is too enamored of jokey puzzley medium-dry-goods parser games, and there’s more thematic, literary, and even systemic development happening in other parts of the scene. But – of course there was a but coming – I’d humbly submit that the proper level of enamor-ness for such things is definitely nonzero, because when I come across a game like The Legend of Horse Girl, part of my brain recognizes that this is all just USE OBJECT A ON BARRIER B stuff wrapped up in joke-a-minute delivery, but the rest of said brain is having enough fun not to care.
It helps that the setting here is a weird west that takes advantage of the familiar tropes to deliver some clever satire while also putting a distinctively gothic, genderpunk twist on proceedings. My notes file is filled up with little copy-and-pasted bon mots, from the way you go up against twin baddies, Butch McCreedy and his sibling Femme McCreedy, to the snake-oil salesman’s patter noting that his product is sovereign against ills including “juggler’s despair”, to the just-slipped-in-there detail that the bartender is “a tall slender woman with hands like enormous spiders.” The numerous characters are a joy to interact with, and while a simple TALK TO command gives you everything you need to know, they’ve got lots of additional fun dialogue if you try to ASK ABOUT different stuff. Add in a big-bad who’s got enough legally savvy to ensure his “can’t be killed by any man of woman born” deal-with-the-devil has a definitions clause to take care of women and non-binary people too, and you have a funny, self-aware game that kept me smiling through its one hour playtime.
The puzzles are also calculated to delight. There’s a reasonable degree of openness to explore the medium-sized setting and poke at the various puzzles, though they’re mostly arranged in a chain. At any point in time you’ll only have a few options for things to do and a modestly-sized inventory of one-use items, which means that the momentum generally stays high. Some of the challenges are reasonably familiar – you’ll need to gather three ingredients for a noxious, alcoholic brew in order to win a drinking contest, which makes for a straightforward scavenger hunt – while others are more esoteric (it’s heavily clued that you need a bezoar to win said contest, but the process for getting one is pretty obscure). While I did get stuck on that last puzzle, which I think did need better signposting, for the most part the game really nails the balance between being easy enough to allow for quick progress, but tricky enough that the player feels clever for figuring out what to do next.
The one thing holding LHG back is that it could use just a bit more tightening and bug-fixing. While I didn’t hit any game-breakers, there were enough things in need of polishing to make me hope for a post-festival release. Sometimes commands didn’t lead to any response, just spitting out a blank command prompt (LISTENing in the plaza, DRINK CACTUS); a significant weapon was missing a description, and some parser fussiness led to this who’s-on-first moment:
SAW BOARDS
What do you want to saw the boarded-up door with?
SAW
What do you want to saw?
BOARDS
What do you want to saw the boarded-up door with?
And one last nitpick: my Californian pride requires me to note that the town should probably be San Diablo, not Santa. But while these niggles made my playthrough a little rougher than I wanted it to be, they didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the heck out of this game – sure, it’s relatively straightforward IF, but there’s nothing plain-vanilla about Legend of Horse Girl.
Sometimes more is less, June 14, 2022Folks remember Indigo Prophecy, right? It was Quantic Dream’s breakthrough game, a studio which later gained even more attention for Heavy Rain, Detroit: Become Human, and Being a Complete Garbage Fire of a Workplace. But going back to the beginning, Indigo Prophecy was cool because it immersed the player in an immediately-gripping mystery, with your protagonist waking up from a dissociative event to realize they’d just murdered someone; starting from your desperate attempts to cover your tracks, the story allowed you to slowly peel back the layers of a sinister conspiracy, with clues to the true nature of what was going on always remaining elusively out of reach.
Then you got to the midpoint of the game, the developers ran out of money and/or ideas, and the back half of the narrative saw your everyman protagonist develop superpowers and win a three-way kung-fu struggle against a Mayan human-sacrifice cult and the physical personification of the internet.
Even leaving aside the let’s-just-say-problematic elements here, a fundamental problem is that nobody who enjoyed the low-key, street-level mystery the opening promised wanted what the second half of the game was offering. Frustrating player’s expectations can lead to exciting twists if it’s done right, but yank the rug too much, and folks will check out even if the individual elements are sound, is the lesson.
The connection here is that while Super Mega Tournament Arc! seems to promise one kind of story, from its blurb, NES-style graphics, and enthusiastic title, it winds up delivering something quite different – actually, two or three things. And while there’s some good writing and individually engaging pieces, I felt like the whole was less than the sum of its parts; as the ending kept escalating and throwing more and more narrative shocks, I found myself wishing to rewind time and go back to when this was just the story of a simple gladiator-cyborg fighting their way to the top.
That opening part of the game is I think the most effective. It’s a little slow-paced, as the first-act training sequence stretches on for a while, but the storytelling is effective, as the backstory for your plucky fighter is gradually revealed, you pick practice options to determine your style in the ring (choosing between lawful, entrepreneurial, and individualistic – more or less relying on discipline, scrappiness, and defiance, respectively), and your lovable-stereotype trainer helps you figure out what’s what. True, there’s a jarring moment where a white-cloaked patron shows up and drops some mystery on you, as well as gifting you a weird death mask, but on the whole the sports-movie cliches hit their beats well. The prose here, and throughout the game, is solid, though never quite as over the top as the exclamation-marked title made me expect – I think it’s down to personal taste whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, though I thought it fit the unexpectedly low-key vibe.
The second act sees you thrust into the arena, running through a series of fights against colorfully-costumed competitors. I don’t think it’s possible to lose, but each bout is dramatic, and escalates the challenge and the stakes; the exact approach you take to win also depends heavily on the choices you make during training, which gives the first act a pleasing retrospective weight. Again, it’s maybe a little long – six fights is a lot – but I was jazzed to see where the climax was headed.
The third act is where things went off the rails for me, though. I’m going to spoiler-block the specifics, but suffice to say the story makes a hard left into a very different genre. (Spoiler - click to show)Rather than a cyberpunk sports movie, it turns out you’re in a Norse-themed superhero one, as the patron uses magical artifacts of the Aesir to defeat the mob boss who organized the tournament, take their ring which is literally Draupnir from Norse myth, and then threatens to use it to bring about Ragnarok. The issues here aren’t confined to genre coherence, though: the mysterious patron also takes over the narrative, in the way that an annoying GMPC can sideline the player characters in a tabletop RPG session. There are also some fourth-wall-breaking shenanigans that similarly feel like they come out of nowhere in a game that hadn’t been especially meta to that point.
Eventually the good guys win, and the story gets around to circling back to the personal stakes that motivated your character to enter the arena at the first place, but by that point I had a hard time feeling engaged; I felt like the protagonist’s struggles, their relationship with their family, and the close dynamic they’d built with their trainer had been too thoroughly revealed as unimportant to what the story was actually about, so this was too little, too late. I’d definitely play enough game by this author because the fundamentals of each act are strong – to say nothing of the cool pixel art – I just hope they tone down their imagination next time and recognize when less is more!
On legacy, forgetting, and IF communities, June 14, 2022Immediately after playing Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony, I came across another game with challenging bleed-through between art and artist: A Single Ouroboros Scale is primarily an archive of the Jots (lightly-fictionalized tweets) of IF author Algie Freyir, who has many overt similarities to IF author Naomi Norbez (who goes by Bez), who wrote SOS. Fittingly for a protagonist named after the eponymous mouse in Flowers for Algernon, Algie’s latest Jots show him struggling with rapidly-decaying mental faculties, including a failing memory; per the author’s notes, this affliction is also affecting Bez, meaning that Algie’s desperate attempts to assess and even safeguard his legacy take on a terrifying, poignant power, since none of this is theoretical.
The frame here is reminiscent of that used in one of Bez’s previous games, the Dead Account – the protagonist is a nameless volunteer trying out for a place with an archiving project that’s maintaining a backup of the IF community’s Jots since the main site has closed down. Rather than preserving information, though, the project director – your potential boss – seems more intent on destroying it by imposing a significance test on posters, and deleting the Jots of those who fail it. The business of the game, then, has you reviewing 8 years of Algie’s Jots and then facing the binary choice of whether or not his account, which is framed as being low-rated, should be deleted.
This of course doesn’t make much logical sense – how does someone who believes in restrictive curation wind up in charge of an archiving project, especially when the deletion can save at most a few thousand words of text (he also misgenders Algie in the final sequence, cementing his status as a villain)? The stakes of this decision for the notional protagonist are also quite low – there’s a suggestion that joining the project will somewhat enhance their standing in the IF community, but that’s pretty thin gruel. But this setup is very effective as to Algie, as this record of his participation in the community is threatened with oblivion – and while in theory his games would survive on whatever the fictional IFDB analogue is, of course all we see of him are his Jots meaning the stakes feel total. And while it’s hard to imagine any good-faith player sincerely picking the “delete” option at the end, putting the player in a position to make such a decision works very well to implicate them in the processes by which the IF community determines who is and isn’t worthy of remembrance.
Overall though this layer is relatively thin, and the main action of the game involves reading, and reacting to, Algie’s Jots. And on these terms the game definitely needs to be judged a success, because I think most players will have many, strong reactions to the Jots. Many of them are very personal, charting Algie’s journey towards understanding and embracing his trans identity and falling away from his Christian faith. Descriptions of the games he’s working on, his influences, and artistic aspirations are also really compelling, enlivened by repeated allusions to two poems – an Emily Dickinson one about the miraculous and weighty responsibilities of being a flower, and one by Rebecca Elson about dark matter but also touching on death and the possibility of resurrection. And of course there are the heart-rending final ones charting Algie’s despair as his mind disintegrates. There are some good funny bits along the way, too, despite the darkness of the game’s progression – Algie’s response to folks telling him to stop talking about personal stuff so much is that he’s “gonna complain about parsers SO much and SO many of you are gonna be pissed,” which made me laugh.
The main subject, though, is the IF community, and the trajectory of Algie’s attitude towards it shifting from one of bright-eyed excitement at finding a set of fellow-artists and a potential audience for his writing, through gradual disillusionment as his games are ignored or met with patronizing uninterest from most of the community, through desperate, vituperative anger at the prospect that his work will be forgotten and these years of engagement will produce no legacy. From the specificity here, as well as the out-of-game author’s notes, it’s clear we’re meant to engage with these critiques not just according to the fictional frame where they chart out a tragic character arc, but also reflect on what they say about the real-world, Jot-free IF community.
This is an important goal, and I do think many of the criticisms land – and probably would land with even more force if I’d been around during the bad old days of the Twine Wars. Still, I think embedding them in the fictional construct of SOS undercuts the power of many of these arguments, and can make them sometimes frustrating. We’re only able to see one side of the conversations, and Algie’s complaints are sometimes vague and hard to connect with real-world people, incidents, and behaviors – this is understandable given the fictionalized, in-character nature of the Jots, as well as by a laudable desire not to call out specific people, but I found it put the arguments in something of an uncanny valley, too real to appreciate solely within the game’s made-up world but too far afield from reality to be conducive to concrete, specific action. For example, the project director’s dismissal of Algie, and folks working in hypertext in general, is really slippery:
"You know, keeping creators whose work are more relevant to the growth of the IF scene. Offshoots are ok, too experimental not as much. We’re also leaning more towards parsers, considering how important they are to the community, compared to the hypertext stuff going on outside of the main IF circles. Nothing against hypertext obviously, but I just haven’t seen much development there compared to parsers, and neither has the community."
“Growth”, “offshoots”, “too experimental”, “important”, “development” – these important words aren’t elaborated on or defined, nor am I finding it easy to map them to critical conversations I’ve personally seen. There’s also a Manichean view of the community as either “parser” or “hypertext/Twine”, which doesn’t take account of a contemporary scene where many players, and even authors, move between them – though much of this seems to me as about importing parser sensibilities into choice-based frameworks, which per SOS’s values might be seen as a colonizing or at least tokenizing development. And similarly, it’s hard not to see Algie’s blunt dismissal of parser games (“I don’t get it but you do you I guess? Like I said, never liked them very much… But you do you and I’ll do me”) as symmetric with the disinterest with which others greet his work – of course there’s nothing unfair about saying responsibilities look different for less marginalized vs. more marginalized members of a community, but this subtlety isn’t pulled out in the game.
Again, for a fictionalized polemic, this is completely understandable, even notwithstanding the constraining circumstances Bez’s medical condition has had on the game’s composition. And he’s also clear that these arguments can be taken in different ways, and is primarily focused on generating, rather than resolving, discussion – in the final notes, he says:
"The JAVP and Robert Evans’s vision/execution could be an “IF dystopia” as one beta tester put it, or an alternate future closer to our reality—up to you, but I do want to raise the question of how IF history is remembered/recorded."
I have to say, even after all these caveats, sometimes I did feel annoyed and thought SOS was taking some cheap shots. It’s hard to ignore the fact that I’m one of the cisgendered, straight, white, middle-aged, male parser authors who are the clearly-signposted bad guys here, so it is not entirely outside the realm of possibility that rather than being a completely disinterested and fair reader, my feeling that these critiques aren’t fully relevant and persuasive are biased by some defensiveness. I haven’t seen too many reviews of SOS out in the wild and the ones I have are generally from folks with backgrounds apparently similar to my own; I’m very eager to see what others coming at it from a different perspective might think of the game.
Wrapping up by going back to Algie, though, there’s definitely self-awareness and clarity on some of the tensions inherent to his desires, especially in the really well-written final sequence of Jots. Here he reflects on the contradiction that gives SOS its title:
"Does anybody ever die satisfied? I’m pretty sure no matter how successful you are or big you get, you got loose ends SOMEWHERE. And that’s kinda reassuring? But I also feel like I gotta die “right”/“well”, y’know? Which means seeking satisfaction there. But I won’t be satisfied. But I keep trying. Endless ouroboros.
"And I’lll be replaced. I know that. Once I stop making stuff or die somebody’s gonna pick up where I left off and take over. The internet’s full of people clamoring for attention on their work, including me. And I’m replaceable by any of them."
Both pieces of this are true; we all want to be remembered, and we’ll all be forgotten (though given society’s biases, some of us will have an easier time lasting longer in the memory than others). Finishing SOS, I thought about my twin sister, who died two years ago. Afterwards, the Department of Defense named a reasonably significant award after her (she helped run the military’s sexual assault prevention and response programs), and I felt pride that her memory will live on this way. But of course, in another ten years odds are nobody involved will have any idea who she is, and her name on the award won’t have any real meaning. And in another twenty, odds are that they’ll rename it again.
I also thought about a poll conducted in the UK 1929, about which authors would still be read a century hence, in 2029. Number one went to John Galsworthy, who’s now a footnote to history[1]; Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, and James Joyce were absent or near the bottom of the list.
What counts as enough of a legacy to be satisfied? And if the worm can eventually turn, who are the ones who are turning it? SOS doesn’t provide answers to any of this, but I’ll certainly remember it asking the questions.
1: He wrote the Forstye Saga, which as a person who’s read a lot of dead white males I only know because of a middling Masterpiece Theater adaptation from the early aughts.
Ooof. This is a tough one to get to grips with. Partially that’s down to the content of HTWAS: it’s a cut-up series of autobiographical vignettes mapped in achronological fashion upon a “hypercube”, which concern set theory, bipolar mania, creative partnerships, and a math-and-divination based project to facilitate universal love and cross-cultural understanding via ethereal communication with a Chinese pop star, all of which chaos is accessed via a parser interface with a minimal verb set whose only affordances are navigating the hypercube and combining objects that represent abstruse math concepts to form other, yet more abstruse ones (feel free to scatter parenthetical “?”s anywhere the previous sentence seems to be crying out for one).
The bigger barrier for me, though, is the opening text, where one of the co-authors says his relationship with the other co-author (which was also a romantic one, from the game’s context), has fallen apart after confessing to having sexual feelings for her teenaged son, who he’d apparently been a caregiver for over most of the previous decade. This is walked back almost immediately, but in a very vague way that indicates something significantly bad did occur:
"No, actually none of that was happening or going to happen, except the part where I, BenJen, am delusional and say horrible things to a teenager believing it will restructure the proton and give perpetual free energy via large cardinal embeddings, but actually I am just hurting the people I love, failing to manage my mental illness properly, and destroying my life and everything I have tried to do and be in the world."
This is of course something said in-game, and versions of both co-authors do exist in the story (which is similarly from the perspective of Ben), so it’s certainly possible that this declaration should be understood within the fiction of the game and doesn’t reflect actual events – as someone whose previous game was a memoir, I’m acutely aware that even in an explicitly autobiographical work there can be a significant difference between real events and what shows up in the game. But from playing through the game it certainly does not seem to boast much fictionalization; most events are low-key, quotidian ones depicting the co-author riding his bike around San Francisco, talking with his co-author about subjects including writing this game, and digging into his obsessive-seeming theories about what advanced math means about the nature of reality. Much of it’s also told in a writing style that I find really reminiscent of similar emails I’ve gotten from a bipolar friend of mine when he’s in a manic phase:
"The ball returns to your flippers and you shoot for an appealing target. The ball ricochets off the Communication Carousel and hits the Free Will Fork for a bonus. She continues, ‘Why is a Measurable cardinal special? If a measurable cardinal exists, it is the critical point of an embedding of the universe of sets to a transitive class, and the full universe of sets is larger and richer than L, the constructible universe. The existence of elementary embeddings depends on the self-reflectivity of the universe of sets, whether or not initial segments of the universe reflect properties of the whole. This is analogous to recursive self-containment of deities and universes and souls within the universes that contain the deity, as well as to the infinite mirroring of two minds communicating and modeling the other mind modeling the other modeling itself."
I don’t mean to be dismissive of what’s clearly a significant work, in terms of the effort it’s required and its significance to the co-author. And while it is very hard to make sense of much of the game – partially because I can’t follow the math, which might of course be perfectly comprehensible if you have the right background – there are some powerful moments in amongst the muddle. There’s a fantasy of playing the piano with great facility that’s counterposed with the lived reality of arthritis making such virtuosity out of reach, and conversations where the co-author shares his arguments with his partner but displays appealing self-awareness about the positive things he’s able to communicate but also the ways his enthusiasm or mania makes things more challenging for her. There’s interesting things to discuss about how the narrative – and the hypercube mapping – are constructed, as well as the binding mechanic and what it means in terms of the themes that emerge from exploration and the eventual option to “win” the game.
When I think about engaging with those things, though, I feel a coldness in the pit of my stomach, because it’s hard to treat HTWAS primarily as an aesthetic object when I can’t shake the idea that it’s the record of a person in the throes of a mental health crises who’s harmed themselves and others. It’s also unclear to me whether both co-authors agreed to put the game out in its current form, or if Ben has done so unilaterally after their relationship fractured. I’m not completely sure whether this is the right course of action for me, much less others, but I’ve decided to leave these notes on my reaction incomplete rather than doing a full review, and won’t be nominating it for ribbons. And I’ll also hope everyone involved with the game’s creation (especially the other co-author’s son) gets the help and support they need.
Blisteringly powerful imagery, June 13, 2022Computerfriend is hard to describe, but as I was searching for ways to communicate what it’s about, a shorthand popped into my mind and refused to leave: it’s Infinite Jest by way of Eliza. Despite how it sounds, this is not a stone-cold insult! What we’ve got here is a choice-based narrative, told in clever, literary prose, following a protagonist as they navigate their mental health issues in an alternate-history, mid-apocalyptic America (so far so Infinite Jest), which they do largely by engaging with a computerized therapist whose treatment strategies sometimes resemble madlibs (here’s the Eliza bit). It’s off-kilter and unsettling, with arresting images and meta jokes that are funny, but not just funny. Even though the ending I got didn’t quite feel of a piece with the rest of the story, I adored it anyway.
If I love a game it’s usually down at least partially to the writing, and Computerfriend is no exception. Here’s the first sentence:
"Six hundred wooden arms rise up on either side of the street black and warbling mirage in the terrible morning heat."
You had me at hello (the wooden arms are tree stumps: Computerfriend uses evocative language to describe the blasted pre-millennial environment of its setting, but it steers clear of surrealism). Here’s one more, from an early list running down some of the sensory input jangling into the protagonist’s overstimulated consciousness:
"3: The Constant Humming Of Air Conditioners Crouched Like Thieves On Open Windowsills"
Memorable images like this pop off the screen at regular intervals, grounding the reader in the protagonist’s intolerable status quo and providing a more than adequate rationale for them to be seeking refuge in the questionable bosom of a computerized psychiatrist. While the precise mental illness they’re dealing with isn’t spelled out – from a cursory knowledge of the medications you’re prescribed and a few of the therapeutic technics and analyses that get deployed, there’s at least anxiety and suicidal ideation – the protagonist’s experience of their life is assaultative and blanched of meaning all at once.
The game is structured around their repeated sessions with the eponymous program; after brief, conventionally choice-y segments laying out their daily life (mostly humdrum stuff around the house), you get a bit of therapy, then unwind by messing around on your computer. While even this last piece is interesting, including fun alternate-history headlines that relieve some of the misery of the rest of the game (“Jeff Bezos’s Grave Desecrated On Sixth Anniversary Of His Execution”; “Disgraced Magnate Donald Trump Attacked, Disfigured By Feral Ungulates At Cottagecore Animal Sanctuary”) and clever semi-interactive magic tricks that reinforce the idea that the computer is always ahead of the game, it’s the counseling where the game’s greatest heft lies.
The Computerfriend’s therapeutic persona makes for engaging play. All of its questions and statements are presented with a bit of an edge, and while it’s notionally trying to help you, it’s hard not to detect a whiff of the demonic in its approach. At first it primarily asks you simple biographical questions – some indicated by choice, others by typing in – and then spits out general platitudes that incorporate your replies in a cursory way (“I bet ‘writing’ is a great way to unwind”, it says, acknowledging your preferred hobby).
At first this is a dark joke, as the crappiness of the algorithm gives the lie to its claims of effectiveness. But the techniques quickly become more sophisticated, and the Computerfriend’s dialogue more naturalistic, sometimes in unsettling ways. Eventually it pushes you towards a breaking point, and possibly a breakthrough, and while writing an authentic catharsis is hard – much less writing psychiatric counseling that seems like it could prompt one – the author sticks the landing here, and I found the last therapy session really affecting, as the Computerfriend took on the protagonist’s anomie and proposed a postmodern, existentialist philosophy that could plausibly allow them to find meaning despite their emptiness, their loneliness, and the ruin of society.
Where the game didn’t stick the landing for me is in the actual ending I got (numbered 4 of 6, so there are others), which saw the protagonist fly away to an untouched wilderness and have a regenerative encounter with nature – this felt a bit too pat to me, and the pristine nature of the environment seemed at odds with everything I’d read about the chemical and biological ruin visited upon the U.S. It could be this is meant as a fantasy sequence, but even still, it didn’t feel all that connected to the choices I’d made through the course of the game (I should say, there are a lot of choices beyond the madlibs-y ones, largely around accepting, resisting, or reinterpreting the Computerfriend’s therapy).
Given the strength of the rest of the game, though, I found this too-pat ending easy enough to ignore, and after I’ve finished my reviews I’ll probably play again and see if I can find a different one that’s more fitting. And in the meantime, Computerfriend’s left me with enough indelible images that I won’t forget its dystopic, failed world – which is to say, our world – before I get back to it.
(Also, kaemi's review of this game is one of the best on this website; you should read it)
Compelling man saga, June 13, 2022I’ve played and enjoyed a bunch of Andrew Schultz’s recent games riffing on board games, but have to confess that I’ve often found it harder to get into his wordplay ones; something about the pig latin one from a year or two back especially managed to melt my brain, despite recognizing that there was quite a lot of care taken to provide hints, tutorials, and other support to invite the player in. So I turned to this game, which is clearly anagram-focused (it’s a sequel to some older games that apparently have a similar concept), with an eagerness not unalloyed with trepidation.
Turns out I needn’t have worried – while I definitely had a few moments of struggle, Tours Roast Torus is an approachable set of puzzles, boasting a well-tuned level of difficulty, a sufficiently fleet play time not to wear out the concept, and some optional tough-as-nails endgame challenges for those who didn’t break a sweat getting to the end (I mean, this wasn’t me but I assume someone out there got through the core puzzles, cracked their knuckles, and settled in to have some real fun). There’s a bit of a plot threaded through which connects to those earlier games, and while I didn’t have much context for all the proper nouns, the setup is clear enough: antsy after your accomplishments in the previous games, you set out to explore a mysterious tower found in the middle of the eponymous torus.
Said exploration consists of finding an anagram from the prompt given in the names of each location along the torus. There’s a clever trick here, which is that each puzzle involves a word that includes exactly two of each word it includes, so it can be decomposed into a pair of smaller anagrams which make up the prompt. So like the prompt could be something like “stake takes”, which you’d read and then come up with – nothing, because I’m much less clever than Schultz is, but let’s pretend “askettakes” is a word.
As is typically the case with anagrams, for about half of these I looked at them and got them near-immediately, and half of them left me completely baffled. This is where Schultz’s trademark player-friendliness comes in; there’ll usually be a gentle nudge somewhere in the location text prompting you towards the answer, and if that’s not enough, the protagonist has a set of tattoos that tell you how many letters you’ve got in the right place, allowing you to trial-and-error your way to success (there’s also an advanced setting for the tattoos that provides even more information, but I couldn’t figure out how they worked). They’re largely reasonable words, too: there was one exception where I thought “hey, is that really a word?” (Spoiler - click to show)(HAPPENCHANCE), but at the same time I got that one after only two or three guesses so I think it plays fair. And in case your brain is starting to get tired of anagrams, there’s a well-calculated change of pace for the penultimate puzzle since it uses an entirely different mechanic.
With all these supports, it took me about a half hour to play through the main puzzles and solve the first of the bonus challenges (entirely by luck, I have to add), and then I poked around the post-game options for a few more minutes, since those helpfully tell you what you missed and lay out some fun rejected puzzle options. I found a few technical niggles – some of the text for the advanced version of the tattoos came out a little garbled, and they seemed to get confused by the endgame bonus puzzles (details in the transcript). But it’s all solidly put together, and the whole package makes for a nice, concentrated burst of wordplay that just about any player can have some fun with.
Friendly vibe, punishing puzzles, June 10, 2022Roger’s Day Off wants to be a lark. A parser-choice hybrid, it has an entertainingly zany premise (use a time machine to do some historical tourism and collect a series of MacGuffins disguised as a tea service – the time machine is also a teapot, with a TARDISy bigger-on-the-inside thing going on) and puzzle-focused gameplay that doesn’t take its characters or situations too seriously. Add a fun authorial voice with some jokes that actually land – there’s a Cloak of Darkness riff that made me chuckle – and competently-done 3d images to liven things up, and you’d think it has all the ingredients it needs to realize its ambitions.
Sadly, though, I did not manage to have a good time with Roger’s Day Off. Some of this is due to awkwardness in the bespoke system, an underdeveloped world, and the way the heretofore-lackadaisical plot comes to the fore in the endgame. But largely it’s because the puzzles feel like they’re trying to check off as many of the crimes itemized in Ron Gilbert’s Why Adventure Games Suck essay as possible. There are instant deaths – including many puzzles that require dying to get the info you need to progress – puzzles that require out of game knowledge, and puzzles that seem to either throw logic out the window, or somehow invert it. Fortunately there are easily-accessible hints, and I can see a player getting some enjoyment out of the stronger parts of the game by using them early and often, but attempting to play the game straight was for me an exercise in frustration.
I’m going to be spoilery with examples of the kinds of puzzle shenanigans the game gets up to, so fair warning if despite everything you do want to try to flail your way through. Here are some of the worst offenders:
* At one point you meet a character – the concierge in a hotel – who asks your name. If you don’t lie and tell her your uncle’s name instead of your own, you’ll hit a game over (see, later on you find out she’s an undercover time police agent, and your time machine is registered under his name).
* Later on in that same 1920s sequence, there’s a drinking game where you need to maintain your faculties as long as possible and the solution is to drink the highest-alcohol stuff first, which is uh not my experience of how this works.
* Once you succeed in the drinking game, you make friends with a time criminal and have to try to get access to some contraband; you do this by suggesting he hide it anywhere except his boots (like, you need to click every other dialogue option and leave that one un-lawnmowered), and then he’ll hide it in his boots.
* Speaking of dialogue, almost the entire pirate ship sequence is a long conversation where just about every node has one good option and the rest instafail you, with no clear signposting on what strategies will work (OK, there’s one inventory puzzle that’s kind of fun).
* In the far future sequence, there’s a puzzle involving finding a FORTRAN bug – though at least the game has the courtesy to provide a link to a forum thread explaining the bug and providing the fix, making this puzzle either forbiddingly hard or completely trivial.
There are a few good puzzles in here – some inventory-based ones require you to do some present-day shopping and share the largesse with folks in history, which is entertaining. But for the most part it feels like progress requires either reading the authors’ minds or being OK with a whole whole lot of trial and error gameplay that’s at odds with the breezy vibe the game seems to be going for.
I found the game’s custom-designed system exacerbated these issues, since it’s fiddly enough to make repetition annoying. In principle I like hybrids between choice and parser approaches, since they can offer convenience and prompting via the choices while providing scope for exploration and surprise via the parser side of things. This one – dubbed “Strand” – mostly managed to do that, but there’s some sand in the gears. For one thing, the parser side of things feels underdeveloped, with very few pieces of scenery or places where poking around is rewarded, or even possible. On the flip side, though, most puzzles require typing commands that aren’t listed as options, so you can’t play just with the mouse. I also ran into some performance issues that slowed things down and made precise clicking harder, and had to manually scroll the game window down after most actions because the automatic scroll-down happened before the images loaded and pushed the last pieces of text off-screen.
All this frustration is a shame, because the range of settings provides some fun variety, and the gentle, idiosyncratically British humor on display in the opening is something I really enjoy (it’s in the same ballpark as Christopher Merriner’s games, which I love). Occasionally the it’s-all-just-a-laugh approach to worldbuilding feels a bit too slapdash – in the section where you travel to Assyria, which is basically ancient Iraq, you’re introduced to Sultana (erm) Nefertiti (double erm) who tasks you with killing a monster (erms again) who goes by Anubis (erm, hopefully not the real one?), and if forced to name a single element the disparate times and places have in common, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with something other than “ladies with pneumatic boobs” – but on the whole it’s pleasant to do some historical tourism and enjoy the jokes. If only the puzzles had been just as low-key!
A lightly-ribald farce, June 10, 2022Well, this is a funny one – funny odd and funny ha-ha. The premise of this one-room-parser game is, uh, slightly novel: as an insurance agent making a sales call at the castle of an eligible Baroness, you’re ushered into a waiting room where you’re encouraged to poke around – a slightly-askew portrait is the clearest jumping-off point, but you’ve got several avenues open to you, most of them leading to escalating farce.
(Oh, I just got why it’s named Wry. Clever!)
Certain actions, some of them non-obvious, will increase your score. Most such actions also serve to increase the protagonist’s libido, again sometimes in non-obvious ways – for example, trying to leave the waiting room to explore the castle will provoke a daydream of wandering into the Baroness’s boudoir, winning you two points. After a decent interval passes, the game ends, and depending on your score you get one of three endings, ranging from a minimally-successful one where you land the insurance deal all the way up to one where the Baroness responds positively to your erotic revenues and you wind up staying for breakfast.
Per the author’s note this is in some way inspired by a sketch or sketches by a German comedian, but without direct experience of any antecedents I have to say this is a pretty bizarre setup. And while things are kept PG-13, it can also veer into slightly uncomfortable territory; part of the joke is that the protagonist is a ridiculous horndog, but it’s still a bit icky to see him drool over nude paparazzi snaps of the Baroness (on a third hand, she’s presumably the one who left these magazines in the waiting room, so I suppose we’re meant to see her as inviting the attention. And in the ending where she’s not into the protagonist, that’s the end of it; sexy-times only commence when she opens the door).
With those caveats, though, I’d say that if you’re able to buy into the premise, Wry is an energetic good time. The writing is enthusiastic and happily goes off the rails before bringing things back to earth – here’s the aforementioned finding-the-Baroness’s bedroom daydream:
"You’d love to have a look at the chateau… What if you happen to find the Baroness Valerie’s bedchamber? She may be in the process of changing clothes? Or she is still lying in her bed? Naked?!? And then she says, “Oh Jon, I’ve been waiting for you all this time! Won’t you keep me company?” with a suggestive smile on her lips. Then the fantasy is gone."
There’s also some nicely-choregraphed physical comedy if you take the game’s invitation to fiddle with the out-of-true painting. Things escalate nicely, and every action you take to try to recover the situation is both reasonable, nicely clued, and inevitably makes things even worse. My only complaint is that the game ends just as things are reaching a fever pitch – I wouldn’t have minded a few more turns for further chaos to be unleashed. Pacing is always a challenge in this kind of game, but the author handles it well here, and every time the game ended I was eager to try again until I got the last ending. Blessedly, you also don’t need to wring out every last point to see it; if you complete the main thread and also discover a few bonus interactions, you’re able to see the protagonist make his breakfast date, so it’s up to the player whether they’re inclined to revisit the game to try out more abstruse interactions.
“You’ll like this thing if it’s the sort of thing that you like” is the mealy-mouthiest of critical verdicts, but that’s pretty much where I’m at with Wry – I can understand why some folks might find it hard to get into. If you’re able to get over that hump (er), though, the game can very much be a treat: personally I enjoyed it, and it’s definitely a well-designed and entertainingly-written piece of work, even if it might make me look askance at the next insurance salesman I meet.
Teaching a dog new tricks, June 10, 2022Most of the Spring Thing games I’ve played so far have been relatively intense, so it was kind of nice to get another low-key entry after finished Orbital Decay. The Bright Blue Ball is a short, cute parser game pitched at IF beginners, and while its slightness, and slight wonkiness, means that it’s probably less suited for that purpose than other, more robust efforts to create a parser-IF gateway drug, nonetheless it’s a pleasant way to spend 15 minutes, with a few darker notes around the edges reinforcing how nice it can be to spend time in a safe place like this one.
Those darker notes are primarily about the situation that kicks off the action: this is the second Spring Thing game I’ve come across where you play a dog (the other of course being Custard and Mustard’s Big Adventure), and as the story opens you’re with your human “parents” as you flee your home due to a bombing alert – the resonance with the war in Ukraine seems entirely intentional. Thankfully, you quickly reach safety, but along the way you wind up losing your favorite toy, the eponymous ball, and the game consists of solving three or four small puzzles to retrieve it.
It’s always fun to play as an animal, and BBB does a good job of providing smell-centric descriptions and a robust SMELL command to allow for olfactory exploration. The protagonist’s canine nature also makes some traditional parser limitations more reasonable, like a one-item inventory limit that’s fair enough given that you have to carry things in your mouth. At the same time, I felt like the game sometimes didn’t go far enough to commit to its conceit: the first puzzle, for example, requires you to find a key and unlock a door, which is a good introduction to a common IF situation but makes for a bizarre mental image.
Speaking of the puzzles, they’re pretty much all of the medium-dry-goods variety, with one guess-the-action challenge thrown in on top. They’re all very heavily signposted, which is appropriate for the target audience, and feel satisfying to resolve. I did struggle for a bit with the first one, possibly due to some small bugs: I could smell something metallic in a table drawer, but after opening it the smell seemed to go away. I guessed that there was a key somewhere, which proved correct after I tried to TAKE KEY, but it hadn’t to that point showed up in the description of either the room, the table, or the drawer. Similarly, I was briefly stymied once I started wandering the city’s streets because one location had an unmentioned exit (for anyone else who hits a similar barrier: try going north). I also worried I’d made the game unwinnable when I solved the puzzles related to the little girl outside of the intended order, but despite the text seeming a little off-kilter it all eventually came right. As a final small niggle, X TABLE in the newsstand didn’t result in any output, indicating a missing description.
None of these bugs did much to impact my enjoyment – I usually wouldn’t list them all in a review, but since I don’t have a transcript I’m doing so in case it’s useful for the author. BBB is a fun, small game with a positive vibe that acknowledges that even when big scary things are happening in the world, small bits of kindness are important – maybe more important than ever (would that this message didn’t feel especially timely, given the state of the world). I enjoyed my time with the game, and would happily play (and test, if that’d be useful!) another game by the author.
Easygoing hard sci-fi, June 10, 2022For all that its plot hinges on a lone astronaut’s attempt to escape a doomed space station before it falls out of the sky, Orbital Decay is a surprisingly low-key affair. This choice-based take on a classic premise is distinguished by steering more into real-world plausibility than is typical (given how grounded the game’s tech is, I was surprised to learn the space station was orbiting an alien planet), but also by simple puzzles and a willingness to back-burner the imminent threat when there’s an opportunity to poke around its well-realized setting. This winds up playing to the game’s strong research chops – it’s fun to explore the station and read the various infodumps on how it should be working – but means the stakes and challenge felt reasonably low throughout.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of the game’s accurate rendition of NASA bureaucratese. After some early hiccups – the writing in the opening starts out a bit too wide-eyed (“The celestial heaven - an immense sea of black and stars, almost as if the uncounted fiery eyes of the Gods themselves were peering through the darkness”) and then overcorrects towards an overly-abrupt style when laying out the inciting incident:
"As an astronaut assigned to the COL (Crewed Orbital Laboratory) Bowman, you’re currently conducting a spacewalk to repair a failing AE-35 unit.
"Swiftly and without warning, the Bowman is struck by space debris. You survive, but the impact sends you spiraling into the vastness. Suddenly, you feel a violent recoil and realize your tether has miraculously remained intact!"
But once you’re back aboard the station, things settle down, and as you work through the puzzles, you’re treated to stuff like this:
"You’ve opted for the CEVIS pre-breathing protocol; before you can begin suit preparation, you need to perform exercise on a stationary bike while pre-breathing pure oxygen and then slightly depressurize the airlock to 10.2psi."
Maybe I’m a strange person, but I really like this! It gives a nice, grainy texture that lends novelty to a fairly played-out scenario, and if it sometimes undercuts the gravity of the protagonist’s predicament, I think that’s an OK tradeoff. The downside of this highly-technical style is that it risks bewildering the player by expecting them to have the same facility with jargon as the protagonist, but Orbital Decay avoids this by keeping the puzzles and obstacles quite simple to work through. There’s a pleasingly complex protocol required to move through an airlock, for example, but all the player has to do is click a series of links in order and enjoy the technobabble the game spits out. Similarly, there are a lot of different gadgets and items to find, but they’re pretty much all floating around in corridors, and with no inventory limit it’s easy to just grab all of them and then choose the usually-obvious options to use them appropriately.
I sometimes got the sense that the author realized that they’d streamlined things quite a lot and tried to re-add some complexity. For example, at one point you need to do an EVA to enter a damaged portion of the station from the outside, and have to make it across the gap. You have a large number of options to try, from using a tether to anchor you as you jump to using a fire extinguisher as an improvised propellant, but since you’ll have almost certainly picked up a jetpack that’s specifically designed for these kinds of situations as you went through the airlock, you’ll obviously want to just use that. Similarly, one of the options you’re given as soon as the game starts, when you’re still floating out in space, is to remove your helmet. It fleshes out the list of choices, sure, but having a “shoot self in face” button doesn’t really improve interactivity or add difficulty.
Also on the negative side of the ledger, I did run into some technical niggles, including a soft state-reset where after pressurizing an airlock, my choice to look around before heading onward somehow depressurized the airlock and put me back in my suit. Some text that probably should only fire once – like the protagonist musing “where is everyone” upon seeing the empty crew hub – repeats whenever you backtrack. And played on a phone, there are some misalignment issues that meant that some lists wound up mismatched, making the last “puzzle” (you need to pick a landing point from a list that includes an assessment of how well-suited they’re likely to be) harder than it was intended – though again, it was probably intended to be too easy.
Would Orbital Decay be a stronger game if it was harder? I think in some sense yes, the version that has timers, inventory limits, and more challenging puzzles probably does a better job of realizing the premise. And the low-key vibe extends to the ending, which I found pretty anticlimactic. At the same time, I feel like I’ve played a million games milking drama and challenge out of escaping a crashing spaceship, so playing one that leans hard into nerdy technical detail, where it’s no big deal if I want to ride an exercise bike or rehydrate a burger mid-crisis, made for a nice change of pace.
Chilly but compelling, June 10, 2022I don’t usually second-guess myself when I have a review that’s out of line from the main thrust of opinion on a game – different people are different, and having a variety of takes on a work I think is helpful for players and authors alike. At the same time, when I’m pretty much off on my one, and especially when I’ve got a more negative view than others have, it’s hard not to wonder whether the problem is me. And there’s probably no recent game where I’ve had more of these second thoughts than Autumn Chen’s previous game, A Paradox Between Worlds. While I admired the enormous amount of work that went into it, and found the character interactions at the heart of the game really well-drawn and engaging, the several metafictional layers atop that heart worked less well for me, and the Tumblr-mimicking gameplay which involved lots of highly-granular decisions felt exhausting. In the face of near-universal admiration for the game, though, I’ve gone back and wondered whether my lack of personal experience with the kind of fanfiction-focused communities it depicts led me to judge it unfairly, or if my real-life exhaustion (my son was about six weeks old when I played it) was what was actually making me feel tired.
The bad news is that NYE2019 doesn’t help me resolve that question; the good news is that that’s because it’s a much more focused piece that foregrounds the character work I’d already enjoyed in APBW, without any of the stuff that had turned me off. Add in a richly-detailed setting – the protagonist is part of a Chinese-American family at a party mainly attended by other Chinese Americans – and well-framed choices that create a high degree of responsivity and you’ve got a game that’s been a highlight of my festival so far.
The game opens with a bit of Tolstoy-biting – “every social gathering is horrific in its own way” – and mostly lives up to the melodramatic gauntlet it lays down. As Quiyi (or Karen), a college senior with social anxiety who’s suddenly thrust into proximity with a set of high-school friends and acquaintances she’s largely not seen for years – several of whom she used to crush on – not to mention the inherent awkwardness of being around a bunch of older adults who primarily see her as the child she used to be, the protagonist is facing landmines aplenty.
Fortunately, you’re given a lot of options to navigate this complex milieu. I’m not familiar with Dendry, but at least as the author has adapted it, the interface looks fairly ChoiceScript-y, but with the ability to scroll back up and reread recent passages and without the sometimes-intrusive stats. Your possible courses of action are well-framed, with a small bit of writing often providing a little bit of a preview for what might be in store. Here’s the opening set of choices for who you might want to hang out with or what you might want to do:
• Mom - She’s hanging around somewhere…
• Kevin Zhao - In the basement with the other kids.
• Wander around aimlessly - Keeping your head down…
• Food - The ever-inviting lure of snacks…
• Use your cellphone - First finding a safe location.
• Emily Chen - Sitting alone in an alcove…
The social interactions sometimes have fewer choices, and occasionally there’ll be a grayed-out choice that’s visible but unavailable, usually to denote that Quiyi’s social anxieties are constraining her, but even on a second playthrough I always felt like I had a lot of different ways to approach each situation. Despite all this freedom, though, the game actually has a tight structure – after a freeform opening, there’s a bottleneck as you sit down for dinner with the other young adults, leading to a nocturnal walk through the snow that may lead to a second open-ended section before things wrap up. It’s a canny framework, allowing for a lot of different paths through the story and making me feel like I was directing the story, while still making sure that there’s an overall shape to the narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end regardless of what you choose.
Indeed, given the wealth of detail on offer, unlike the protagonist I had a lot of fun just exploring the party. I’ve been to a bunch of gatherings that aren’t too dissimilar in general dynamics from the one on offer here (though the specificity of this being a largely Chinese-American party was novel – I’m more familiar with being one of the token white guys at parties thrown by my Iranian-American wife’s family friends, or those of my South Asian- or Korean-American high school friends) and everything rings very true. The sequence where highly-educated lefties argue over the 2016 primary made me grind my teeth in just the way those actual conversations did, and on a more positive note the descriptions for the snacks were particularly good – the haw flakes sounded really appealing, and there’s some good character beats in just short asides on the presence of Lay’s potato chips on the food table:
"Anyway, these chips are for the kids, that is, you. Because the parents decided that ABC kids need their American snacks, or something like that. And well, you eat a bag full. Yeah."
Throughout, the writing is a significant strength, and while Quiyi’s narration is generally quite understated, this means there’s little distracting from the canny way particular details emerge into focus:
"You put on your jacket and your shoes. No one is watching you open the door. You leave. You’re free. It’s quiet. Snowflakes glisten in the air, shining under the streetlights. Your footprints defile the fresh snow."
My first time through the game, Quiyi mostly wandered around aimlessly, having a few haphazard stabs of conversation with her peers at dinner but otherwise spending time at the snack table, wandering aimlessly, and checking in with her (nice) mom and (standoffish) brother. Predictably, this led to an ending where her feelings of isolation and pre-post-college ennui didn’t move much over the course of the evening, even as it was clear there might have been other potential outcomes, or at least that other people were capable of achieving moments of connection. I though this late-game passage about her feelings of alienation and having let opportunities slip through her fingers making the inevitable let’s-all-take-a-bunch-of-photos-so-paste-on-a-smile phase of the evening all the worse:
"Someone takes a picture of Emily and Miri, smiling and hugging. You didn’t know they got along but somehow it makes you a little sad. Emily stops smiling for the photo with her parents. They don’t force her to smile. Come to think of it, you haven’t spoken to her dad all night, even though you worked with him before. Oh well."
It’s a flat recitation, but that gels with how I imagine she’d be retreating into numbness as a self-defense measure. I found a lot of pathos in this ending, as Quiyi’s failures felt like ones of imagination: as she wandered alone through the snow, she conjured up daydreams of difference sci-fi futures, but she can’t picture a conversation that goes well. If the story peters out rather than reaching catharsis, with her getting stuck in an extended moment of stasis despite her impending graduation, that’s fitting, and had its own kind of poignancy to me.
Except I should probably say my failures, rather than Quiyi’s, since this is only one branch the story can go down. My second play-through, I was able to help her to some moments of positive connection, including establishing a burgeoning romance with Emily. This set of scenes is also well-written – I found the awkward I-like-you conversation segueing into awkward but really amazing hand-holding very relatable, as well as the out-of-nowhere discussion of whether to have kids which is ridiculous for 22 year olds who haven’t even kissed yet to do, but seems completely plausible to me.
Ultimately though I liked my first playthrough better – there’s something inherently artificial about gameplay where you make the right choices and you get to date someone, and while there’s some funny lampshading of it, this plotline inevitably feels a bit more tropey and familiar than the one I first experienced. I’m not sure this is anything I would have picked up on if it had been the only narrative option on offer, though, so it’s more a matter of preference than an actual weakness.
My only real complaint here is that I think this branch might be too hard to get onto, at least on a first playthrough – having not played the prequel game, I hadn’t necessarily picked out Emily as a more significant character than say my mom, and since as far as I can tell opting to talk to her in the game’s first set of choices is necessary or at least very helpful for being able to strengthen the relationship later on. But playing as someone with social anxiety, first time around it made more sense to ease into the party by checking in with family, grabbing some food, etc., by which point I think that ship appears to have sailed.
I also have a note of caution. As I’ve been writing this review, I pulled the game up to double-check some stuff, and discovered that there’s a Status page that tells you how hungry or thirsty you are, your overall emotional state, and provides some background on the other characters that explains some stuff I had to dig to find out (like what’s the deal with your parents’ marriage) as well as displaying a numerical ranking for your relationships with each of them. I completely missed this when I played – I did so on my phone, which maybe made it harder to find some options – and while it the info it provides probably makes it easier to get together with Emily, honestly I’m kind of glad I didn’t know it was there, since the in-game exposition covers these bases in a considerably more deft way. So if you haven’t played the game, maybe steer clear of that page.
Anyway hopefully it’s clear that these are beyond niggly nits to pick. I’m really glad to have played New Year’s Eve 2019, and I’m glad I can now wholeheartedly jump on the Autumn Chen fanwagon.
An obfuscated muddle, June 10, 2022Dear reader, you don’t know me from Adam so you’re going to have to take my word for it, but: I am not especially easy to flummox. That sounds like a boast, and I suppose it is and there’s more boasting to come, but still, I’ve read Joyce and Woolf and Foster Wallace and had some struggles, sure, but modulo Finnegans Wake I feel like I understood and appreciated them. In undergrad I was able to keep straight the astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and advanced classical mechanics I was studying all at the same time, and did fine in law school even when having to unknot the trickiest problems of jurisdiction in my Fed Courts class. My favorite game in last year’s Spring Thing was Queenlash, which is like 80,000 words of superdense metaphor about Cleopatra.
So when I tell you that I spent my playthrough of Abate not having the first clue what on God’s green earth was going on, I hope you will give me the benefit of the doubt that it’s not because I’m just a big dummy easily confused by nonlinear storytelling. Like, I’m going to summarize the plot, and if you haven’t played it you’ll read the summary and think “oh, that’s not so bad, I kind of get it,” but trust me, no, you don’t.
There’s definitely something liberating about playing a game so free of the bounds of traditional narrative causality that it could serve as an interactive rebuttal to the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, and I have to confess that like 25% of the bemused chuckles I emitted during my playthrough were prompted by the anarchic glee here on display. But it gets exhausting not being able to understand whether anything that’s happening is connected to any of the story’s previous events, or will lead to any coherent resolution in the future – especially where, as here, the prose doesn’t provide sufficient pop to serve as a throughline and the choice the center-align all the text makes reading a bit of a headache.
OK, here comes the summary so you can see what I mean: in this bespoke choice-based game, you play a student stuck in a Groundhog Day style time loop on the day of a big school celebration. There’s a lot of incident: your best friend is bent on confessing his love to the student council president, who in turn wants to buttonhole you to rope you into helping with the school activities. Meanwhile, you’re trying to avoid a frenemy who doesn’t realize that you’re the one who wrote the now-defunct cooking blog that’s inspired their own culinary efforts. Every once in a while, for reasons that remained obscure to me, everything blacks out and you confront the void – and a beyond-sketchy tempter figure whose proposed “you’ll just owe me one, it’ll be no biggie” deal seemed like an incredibly bad idea – and things reset, until they don’t.
Again, that sounds wacky but not too far outside the realm of comprehension, so I’ll provide a taste of what Abate is like. This is part of an embedded flashback where you reflect on how you met your best friend:
“'Why do you even space out so often?' Vysian would always ask you with confusion, and you would make something up but one day you decided that he deserves the answer – 'spices' you shout, 'I was thinking about the spices that adds the most value to boiled potatoes, I’m yet to find the one.' 'Onions' Vyusian assures, 'boiled potatoes taste the best with onions'. You felt a spark within your heart that could only be used to light up the dream that one day you may just find the one, and here it was, you rushed to your house, prepared the dish to your satisfaction and take a taste – 'this is indeed the one, my dream has been achieved.'"
There has been no groundwork previously laid for the main characters obsession with potatoes, and if you’d expect there to be some like acknowledgment that “onions” are not a spice, your expectations will go unfulfilled. It’s entertainingly zany to read a little bit of stuff like this, sure, but the whole game is this way, with characters running in and exclaiming about stuff that doesn’t seem to connect with anything else before moving on to the next thing. Eventually it ended, after I rejected the deal with the devil and then managed to unite my friend with his crush through the expedient of wandering randomly around the school unsure of what I was doing – so I think I won?
I unfortunately can’t say it was very satisfying, though; the lack of coherence meant that I felt little sense of agency, and the sheer randomness of everything that was happening meant I couldn’t find a consistent set of themes or ideas with which to engage. Maybe that’s the point, and it’s all meant to mirror the atomized, discombobulated nature of postmodern life – but even if that’s the case, more unified aesthetics and a few concessions to causality would probably have helped the argument land a bit better.
A downbeat musical, June 8, 2022Based on the title, I went into Another Cabin in the Woods expecting a horror story – but while, per the author’s note, that was the initial conception of the game, what’s on offer here is an emotionally-charged reflection on long-buried family trauma. There are no monsters here, only poor communication skills, though man, the damage they can do is sometimes almost as bad.
(That last sentence is a paraphrased bit of Mountain Goats stage banter).
Speaking of musicians, this is an audio-rich game, with sound effects, a musical score, and even voice acting. This is fitting given the plot setup, which sees the protagonist visit her childhood home after the death of her mother in order to clean it out before it’s sold – the mother was a musician, and much of the first part of the game involves finding different sheets of music and playing them on the family piano to trigger flashbacks. I can’t speak to the substantial work that went into the audio side of things, as I played the game muted – my life circumstances right now don’t make it easy to play IF with sound on – but I suspect it will enrich the story.
That isn’t to say it doesn’t work well as a text-only work, though, since I enjoyed my time with the game. The cleaning conceit is a smart one, creating a rationale for the protagonist to poke around exploring the cabin and triggering different memories as they visit each space in turn. And the writing is good enough that even without the sound on, I got a sense of what emotion each musical work is meant to evoke:
"The piece starts so quickly, with note after note rushing by on both hands. Every so often there are moments of longer notes, but they are still peppered with rapid bursts of melody."
Throughout there’s a good eye for detail – the prose isn’t doing anything fancy, but again, it effectively communicates the mood of abandonment and decay:
"The smell of rotting food and animal leavings mixes into the air before you. Dishes piled high in the sink threaten to topple over and shatter. A crunch underfoot tells you some already have."
As for the story itself, it’s unsurprisingly downbeat, but it mostly earns its pathos honestly, I think, and keeps the melodrama under control for the most part. The family dynamics are depicted sensitively, with no one coming off perfectly well but nobody an irredeemable monster, either. I also enjoyed the distance provided between the protagonist’s point of view and those of the memories, which are from the perspective of the mother – the protagonist is regularly surprised to have remembered things differently or that her mother’s memories are often substantially more positive, which helps energize a story where almost all the important events happened well in the past.
While the writing for them was overall strong, there were a few design decisions about how the memories worked that I found created a little bit of friction. First, I think they would have been more effective if the flashbacks were parceled out one at a time, but for me and I suspect many other players, the most natural approach was to explore the cabin, find all the different pieces of music, and then play them at the piano all at once. Again, each piece of this is good but the pacing wound up feeling a bit back-loaded. There’s also a small puzzle that needs to be solved to reach the endgame that involves putting the different memories in chronological order, but while after reading each, I had a sense of how each fit with the others, but in the reassembly process they’re labeled not as “memory about the piano lesson” but as the less-descriptive “piece found in bedroom” which made the process harder.
These are small niggles, though, and besides the lack of spacing meaning I sometimes worried about mis-tapping, they’re pretty much the only negatives I found in the game. I was engaged with the story Another Cabin in the Woods was telling, despite its dark moments; the author mentioned this is only their second game and they’re already thinking of repurposing the initial horror hook for a subsequent game, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of their future work!
A house is not a home, June 8, 2022I usually don’t like to look at other reviews of a game before I’ve written mine, but I’m going to bend that rule this time so I can check how many others managed to refrain from mentioning House of Leaves… OK, as of this writing there’s only one public review (Mathbrush’s), and yes, despite him not having read it, HoL still manages to get a namecheck. I’m a big fan of that book, and it deservedly is the first reference point when you see a house behaving the way the one in Thin Walls does – sprouting up new rooms as it starts to get full, lengthening hallways to stymie exploration, and responding to the worst instincts and desires of its inhabitants. But while the house in House of Leaves stands in relation to the individual – it’s the unconscious, a spur to knowledge and its negation – Thin Walls uses this malicious bit of architecture to take aim at society.
What we’ve got here is a multi-chapter Twine game where vignettes from the perspectives of the different inhabitants of a rooming-house alternate with a recurring, exploration-focused sequence where you can see the house changing and pick which resident to follow next. After a disorienting opening, it quickly becomes clear what unites all these stories: the anomie of modern life, and how communal living can paradoxically become isolating. The writing isn’t subtle, but it communicates its ideas well. Here’s a bit of description from the frame sequence:
"You are in a small bathroom. There is a toilet and washbasin, beside which four little soaps sit in separate containers, and four little hand towels hang on a rack and a radiator."
And a bit of reflection from one of the later stories:
"But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it."
The way the house-metaphor expresses itself varies from chapter to chapter: in the most effective, it works to split up a couple who are having problems, creating space to isolate them and eventually putting up a wall between the two single beds they’d pushed together (again, the allegory is not exactly deeply obfuscated). In another, it ensures an Instagram-obsessed woman has a perfect, clean, white, sterile backdrop for all her photos. Another favorite sees a woman daydream about getting a boyfriend and moving in with him – but obsesses over the new space and the amazing furniture she’ll fill it with, until she loses track of the imaginary boyfriend and he abandons her.
By the end, I did find diminishing returns were starting to set in – the late chapter about the two housemates squabbling over who was eating the other’s cereal and making loud noises late at night reduces the house to an annoying prankster. I ran into a small bug where after I finished Chapter 4, a bit of Chapter 3 popped back up until it ended again (EDIT: I am unobservant, this is intended per the author’s reply below). And the writing does occasionally get too on the nose – at one point the Instagram lady says:
"My photos were my defence against the world, my pretence that all was well in this house."
But overall Thin Walls did a good job of keeping me engaged, and at the close of each vignette I was always eager to return to the free exploration sequence and see what had changed, who had moved in, and check whether the cupboard under the stairs had become unlocked, or the mysterious landlord who lives at the top of the house had come home yet. And the ending sequence is a return to form, with the house’s transformations becoming more and more kinetic and the social world of the house becoming unmoored and kaleidoscopic (though as involved as I was trying to solve the mystery of the house, I was also puzzled by why all the music at the climactic party was from the mid-aughts – I don’t think it’s meant to be a flashback!) It’s definitely worth the playthrough, and not just to get another menacing metaphysical house in the mental toolbox to sit alongside the house on Ash Tree Lane.
A YA take on Dante, June 8, 2022A couple of years ago I read this incredibly long analysis of the Mass Effect trilogy (ah, the things I had time for before I was a parent!) which sketched out a distinction between fiction that’s detail-first and fiction that’s drama-first. The idea is that detail-first fiction, especially in the genre space, is all about worldbuilding, consistency, and verisimilitude, even at the expense of a good story; drama-first works can have a complex setting, but the rules are much less important than serving the emotional beats of the story and making sure that there’s always something exciting happening and the stakes just keep going up and up. This isn’t a framework I find myself thinking about all that much – most things are somewhere in the middle, of course – but I think it’s really helpful for conceptualizing my response to Half-Alive, which I enjoyed even though the twists and turns of its plot had the detail-first part of my brain blowing a gasket.
What we’ve got here is a teenaged riff on the Underworld narrative, with Inferno-y bits – there are layers! There’s a guide! – and an Orpheus-y motivation – reclaim the missing part of your brother’s soul from the demon-thing that snatched it. The protagonist is Kendall, a 17-year-old girl with awful, broken-up parents who shoulders more responsibility than she should have to, and her interplay with her brother and Wyatt, the guide character, is enjoyable to read because she comes off as a classic hero. Indeed, Half-Alive does a good job of deploying the iconic elements of the journey, down to her weapon of choice – an ax – becoming a heroic attribute.
There’s enough that’s distinctive to keep it from feeling like a retread, though. This particular layer of the underworld is mostly populated by children, for one thing – some are ambivalent characters, but many are so-called “ringleaders”, who direct the weaker-willed kids and are bent on stealing the name and vitality from these living visitors to win the chance to return to the world above, but play fair if bested in a game of riddles.
The stories of many of these kids, including Wyatt, are counterposed with Kenny’s journey, and it’s here that I most struggled with the game. The characters you encounter are drawn from different times and places – though I believe they’re all American – and even allowing for their modern locution as a forgivable concession for both reader and author, the vignettes are full of anachronisms and wild plot twists. There’s a pair of twins who were born in the 18th century; their backstory is that they were abandoned in a dumpster, then fell in with a traveling circus that toured the country complete with an elephant. Another character’s story is a riff on the child-gang bits of Oliver Twist, except he always wears a burlap sack for a mask – after he tries to betray the gang’s Fagin figure, the crime boss travels all the way to the west coast to make him sleep with the fishes, but is still nice enough to put up a gravestone with the kid’s name on it back home in New Jersey. The plan also hinges on a pocket recording device, despite the character having been born in the Great Depression.
This all makes for emotionally-charged, dramatic reading, but at the same time there’s a cost to playing so fast and loose with plausibility. The trend isn’t restricted just to the flashbacks, either, with details changing or going unmentioned until just before they can land with the most impact: Kenny’s ax doesn’t work against the demon until suddenly it does; the demon has a staff that allows it to travel between worlds, but as soon as Kenny gets her hands on it we’re told it’s almost drained of its limited number of charges.
The prose is similarly highly emotional, but often a bit slippery on details. The town where the game starts is alternately called Millflower and Mayflower, and it changes its mind on whether Kenny’s brother was attacked by the demon minutes or hours after school ended. There’s a regular drifting of tenses from present to past and back. Sometimes these infelicities undermine the impact of the story:
"In a fit, Dad flips our living room couch to which my mom slaps him. Yelling vulgar insults at each other, he stuffs his hands in his jeans and then storms out."
More often, though, the exuberance of the writing was enough to carry me along. Here’s a bit that’s definitely overheated, but works much better:
"The chill would make you feel as if you landed in Antarctica and the dirty fog that invaded your lungs was so thick and heavy that you could barely breathe or see.
"On the wind, miscellaneous whispers and wails were being carried, filling their confused bodies with fear. Not to mention the overbearing smell of the area which stank of decaying flesh."
And like I said, despite noticing these weaknesses, I wasn’t too bothered by them once I tried to enter into the spirit of how Half-Alive was telling its story. It also really helps that the game side of things is well-designed and player-friendly. The opening About text nicely explains the length and overall structure of the piece, which is a helpful convenience in a longer game like this. While the focus is very much on the narrative, there are some significant choices to be made in navigating the afterlife, including the aforementioned riddles and also some timed challenges. Nothing’s especially hard, and you can easily rewind even if you do make a mistake, but the gameplay is all engaging enough, and works well as a pacing element to break up the talkier bits.
Playing Half-Alive can feel like being on a roller coaster curated for maximum thrills – if you’re worried about the plausibility of each swerve and scare, or annoyed because you could see the final twist coming a mile away, you’re missing the point. I wouldn’t want every game to be this way, of course, since pure emotion can get exhausting and I typically prefer a story with careful intellectual scaffolding supporting the drama. But for this game and this author, it works, and despite my caviling Half-Alive pulled me through with its energetic, iconic storytelling.
Reader, let me level with you: I was in the bag for this game before I even clicked the word Start. The first Lady Thalia installment was a highlight of last year’s Spring Thing for me, with its zippy heists and even zippier repartee fine-tuned to delight. So how could more of the same be anything but lovely? True, sometimes a sequel brings diminishing returns, but given how much I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything by this pair of authors, the thought that 2 Lady 2 Thalia could be a disappointment never crossed my mind – as well it shouldn’t have done, because as I suspected, in this case even more of a good thing is even more of a good thing.
For those lucky souls who’ve yet to try one of these games – oh, how I envy you! – the protagonist is a former demimondaine who’s clawed her way into respectability by day, while slaking her thirst for objets d’art at night through her alter ego as Lady Thalia, gentlewoman thief. The first game, set in Jazz-Age London, saw her carry out a series of escalating thefts, thumbing her nose in the face of her arch-rival, Melpomene Williams of Scotland Yard.
While the setting and characters have immediate appeal, a big part of what made it so successful is the heist mechanics, which carry over to the sequel. There’s an initial phase where you case the joint, digging up information about security measures and alternate routes, via some hopefully-subtle poking around as well as a social engineering minigame that requires sussing out whether a particular mark is best approached in a friendly fashion, bowled over by the direct approach, or drawn out so they can vent their natural loquaciousness. Then it’s time for the operation itself, where you need to put you planning into practice and respond to the many curve-balls life, and the Yard/gendarmerie, throw your way. Finally, there’s a wrap-up where you receive a score rating the panache with which you pulled off the job. Sticking to this framework means there are some similarities between heists, sure, but it also means that each has its own narrative structure, with the methodical exploration-heavy investigation giving way to a puzzley heist and an improvisational exfiltration, and then the score helps motivate you to do as well (or better) next time.
Rose of Rocroi puts a few spins on this high-quality formula. You’re vacationing in Paris so the scenery is even better this time out (the authors wisely exercised restraint and kept the dialogue free of mais oui and zut alors! interjections, though there are fun references to Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis). You have a new candidate for nemesis, as you’re actually working with Mel to foil a chauvinistic French thief with a penchant for fancy-dress and a disrespect for fine art. And then – well, let me spoiler block this next bit: (Spoiler - click to show)in the most exciting alternate-protagonist twist since Halo 2, you actually play Mel in the investigative sections this time out!
These aren’t radical changes, but they’re enough to keep an already-great formula fresh. The writing draws you along on a paragraph by paragraph level – picking two examples from an endless candy box of bon mots:
"You are once again at a garden party (being wealthy seems to involve an almost intolerable amount of garden parties) and are just about to claim a headache and beg off when you overhear something that catches your attention."
And:
"You are Lady Thalia, and it is time to commit a crime. Well, a crime sanctioned by the police. Well, sanctioned by one policewoman who doesn’t have jurisdiction in this country. Not that any of that makes this any more or less illegal than what you typically get up to, anyway, but it is a change of pace."
Then the meaty crunch of each heist gives you something to sink your teeth into. None of the challenges are that hard, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the possibility of getting a perfect score is always there, urging you to pay attention and ensure Lady Thalia lives up to her reputation. And sitting above the episodic bouts of thievery, the overall plot, and more importantly, your relationship with Mel, provide a sense of progression through the game as a whole. It’s really smartly-designed stuff, and it makes the time playing this medium-length game feel like it just melts away.
Lest I be accused of a total lack of impartiality, I do have one and a half points of criticism to leaven all this praise. The half-point is that while the narrative nicely escalates into the finale, mechanically speaking the climactic heist didn’t feel more complex or challenging than the earlier ones, which was a small missed opportunity – but only a small one, given how much this last job gains in coolness from being set in Versailles. The full point, though, has to do with how the most important relationship in the game is handled: I’m speaking, of course, of the Mel/Thalia frenemy romance (alert a leather worker, I need to cram a third word into my portmanteau).
Look, obviously these two crazy kids are meant to be together. And obviously given the differences in where they’re each coming from, that shouldn’t be a cakewalk. The game does a good job of signaling that you need to need to walk a fine line to get the best ending with Mel – lean too much into the archnemesis side of things, and there’s no opportunity to make nice, while Mel justifiably views too-enthusiastic expressions of affection with suspicion. So in my playthrough, I aimed for varying moments of sharp-elbowed banter with heartfelt moments of vulnerability, hoping this changeup would melt Mel in her boots. Sadly, though, when the game listed my final scores, I did near-perfectly on the heists and investigation but only got a 4 out of 9 in my relationship with Mel. That’s all well and good, but when I went back and replayed, trying even harder to focus on getting this path right, I still got that same mediocre score.
It could be that I’m just not any good at this and I should stick with crime rather than romance (and in the game!) But from looking at the comprehensive walkthrough provided with the game, I feel like the requirements here might not be as elegantly signposted as most other mechanics in the game are. It seems as though rather than allowing you to succeed by balancing meaner and nicer options, instead at each decision point there’s a single correct answer you need to pick to optimize your score. From the way the narrative presented things, it wasn’t clear to me that this is how things were going to work, and sometimes the differences between choices were subtle enough (like the one offering three slightly-different ways of suggesting Mel work undercover) that I’m still not sure why one was correct and the others weren’t.
It feels unfair to harp on this, since – I can’t emphasize this enough – the game is deliriously fun to work through and even replay. But shipping Thalia and Mel is a hugely appealing element of the story, so it was a shame that it felt frustrating. Fortunately, I had no shame about stooping to the walkthrough to make sure that third time around was the charm for our mismatched leads. And here’s hoping that next year, there’s a third entry in the series waiting for us. Maybe a visit to the casinos of Monte Carlo is in order, or perhaps she’ll return home and try to swipe the Crown Jewels? Wherever she goes, I’ll be there, since I’m nowhere near done with Lady Thalia!
A sexy, well-written romance, June 8, 2022In other reviews I’ve advanced the theory that one of the distinctive things about this era of IF is that the parser vs. choice dichotomy that loomed so large – and, er, acrimoniously – through the 2010s is starting to dissolve as authors who play, and sometimes make, both kinds of games experiment with ways to get the best of both worlds. Typically the way I’ve seen this play out is through choice-based games that implement parser-like navigation and a world model while filtering interaction through a set of always-available actions rather than bespoke choices. Digit represents the opposite approach – it’s a parser game with no puzzles and large chunks of text between actions, where almost all of the interactivity is embedded in the menu-based dialogue system.
This is a rather bloodless way to describe a sweet albeit graphically sexual (or maybe it’s the other way around?) story of two best friends visiting a street festival and learning more about each other than they’d bargained for. But I’m foregrounding structure because – well, it gives me a chance to expound a pet theory, but also because it’s helpful to let potential players know what to expect – choice-based mavens who typically shy from parser games I think would find Digit a gentle way to dip a toe (groan) into the pool, while parser boffins looking to juggle inventories and unlock every door they see should adjust their expectations. It’s also relevant to how I evaluated the game, though: viewed narrowly through the criteria I usually use for a parser game, it has some real negatives, but making a broader assessment these don’t matter so much compared to its strengths in what it’s actually trying to do.
To get those negatives out of the way quickly so I can focus on why I enjoyed Digit so much: yes, it’s largely on rails, with much of your keyboard input simply just hitting a button to get the next line onto the screen, up to and including the game typing in an action for you on occasion. In terms of interactivity, you can choose different dialogue options but the order doesn’t seem to matter so you can just lawnmower your way through. And it’s a bit underimplemented, without much scenery to explore, few synonyms for the objects, the world model not always matching the story (like a character still being present in a room after dialogue indicates she’s gone to the bathroom), actions that could have been implemented separately swept up into the general TALK TO command (e.g., there’s a point where you need to give a series of foods to your friend, but attempts to GIVE are unsuccessful), and a few small bugs like a cute sequence at a water fountain that you can repeat even after it’s fired.
If you want to get hung up on that stuff, I can’t stop you. Still, I think that would be missing the forest for the trees, because even if all you’re doing is typing TALK TO EVIE, picking an number, and bouncing the space bar a dozen or so times before going back to step one, nonetheless I think this is still a really good game, because it’s really well-written. The central element here is that the prose, while not at all showy, is really really good. Often in my IF reviews I note that a game has solid writing, which is to say, it’s fine, it gets the job done, nothing to worry about here. But for me personally, the quality of the prose is probably the single biggest factor in how much I enjoy something. Outside of IF, 99% of what I read is literary fiction, and that’s due to how much attention those authors typically put into every word they use, not because I have an obsessive interest in reading about New Yorkers getting divorced (–though you know, I’ve just this moment connected the dot that my parents were New Yorkers who got divorced. This seems a dangerous idea to keep unpacking, though, so let’s move on). Digit does great on this score, boasting clever yet naturalistic dialogue, landscape descriptions that are low-key while still having the occasional moment of lyricism, and a global grounding in the concrete and physical that meant I was always right there with Sirin and Evie. Like, here’s a passage chosen at random:
"I led us down a footpath, which ran down a hill to the waterfront promenade. As it approached the horizon from behind a fluffy cloud, the evening sun bathed the sky in peachy hues - but damn, it was still a hot one.
"Not far from where we were standing, gentle waves were breaking on the shore, caressing the rocks with a quiet murmur. A light seabreeze ruffled my hair. It felt cool against my sweat. It was nice. The promenade was a place I often came to jog, but it felt totally different being here now with Evie."
Again, it’s nothing that’s jumping up and down screaming “look at me!” But this sets a mood, and you read it with satisfaction without consciously noticing the way the author adeptly slips from landscape description to character responses to embedded flashbacks, alternating longer, fancier sentences with shorter, more direct ones. This same care is present in the dialogue sequences too, like an effective scene where the protagonist is sharing some tough personal stuff with her friend while skipping stones, and the conversation is regularly interrupted with a count of how many skips she’s getting, illustrating how emotion is getting the better of her in a neatly understated way.
The strong writing extends to the character work, too, which is really what takes center stage. Given the tags and the content warning, it’s hopefully not a spoiler to say that the whole game is a dance of seduction – though who’s seducing who is definitely placed into question!. It’s appropriate, then, that Digit is in no rush to get to the sex. We get a sense of who these characters are, what’s going on in their lives outside of their relationship, and what they mean to each other, so that by the time the low-level flirtation bubbles over, it’s not sexy just because people are having sex, but because these characters are having this sex. The strong writing is also a godsend here, because of course sex writing is so frequently ridiculous; it’s good here, as befits a game from the author of Turbo Chest Hair massacre, which has the steamiest robot sex ever featured in an IF Comp entry (with all apologies to Hanon Ondricek for robotsexpartymurder’s competitive second-place showing).
Would Digit be a better game if it had all the usual parser game bells and whistles? I guess in a formal sense, but beyond the small bit of bug-squashing alluded to above, the only change I’d really want the author to make is to alter some of the default Inform responses – hearing Graham Nelson intone “that was hardly portable” took me out of the story a little bit. As it is, I had a lovely time with Digit, and if there are more parser/choice mashups like this to come, bring on the revolution.
It was a graveyard smash, June 8, 2022It’s fitting that my randomization gave me Graveyard Shift at the Riverview Motel right after The Hole Man, since they’re alike in a lot of ways: they’re both choice-based games that work something like funhouses, letting the player wander an environment that’s densely packed with characters enacted their own stories, with the protagonist choosing which to get swept up in. And yet, what a difference a genre makes – this approach is charming when you’re ambling around a lightly-philosophical fantasyland, but can feel pretty silly when the operative tropes are those of horror fiction. The eponymous motel packs in more monsters per square inch than Call of Cthulhu’s worst Mythos Hoedown, leaving me wondering what goes on the other 364 nights of the year and questioning the protagonist’s grip on reality even before she starts running across any sanity-blasting horrors. Despite this, the various storylines boast some creativity, but less-compelling writing and some implementation awkwardness mean I probably won’t be coming back for a return stay.
The setup here as you as the late-night desk-clerk for an absolutely cursed motel; after clocking into your shift, gameplay consist of either sitting in the lobby waiting for guests to arrive or depart (in more than one sense of the term) or for the phone to ring, checking text messages from your friends, or poking around the motel, including making use of the voyeur-holes hidden behind paintings in six of the motel’s rooms. There’s something uncanny going on in each, from vampiric bloodsucking to Exorcist reenactors to whatever’s going on with the guy with the deer pelt. Add in something nasty lurking below the surface of the pool, and you’ve got more macabre happenings than you could possibly plumb in a single playthrough.
This is especially the case because the monsters will, unsurprisingly, kill you real dead. This is all fair enough – they’re monsters, duh – but I found the way these sequences played out hurt my engagement with the game, since they punish saying yes to stuff. Want to follow the obviously-bad-news femme fatale out into the parking lot? That’s not going to end well. Want to figure out why there’s all that slime by the swimming pool? Likewise (all the more so since doing this got me stuck in a loop where an object kept falling into the pool, leaning me to go check it out, at which point a strange noise or vibration made me retch, at which point something fell in the pool… finally after five go-rounds something with tentacles put me out of my misery). I did manage to survive the night on my third try, largely by sitting on my hands in the lobby, which counts as a win but wasn’t that satisfying.
Throughout, the writing is sometimes creepy but also ungainly. This could be a David Lynch style attempt to unnerve through awkwardness, but for me at least it doesn’t land:
"The nervous guy who came in earlier walks with a strange swagger into the lobby yet he is tightly clutching a leather bag to his side. As he walks by me he gives me a wink and how quickly the smile from his face falls tells me I grimaced in response involuntarily."
Added to this, the implementation sometimes left me unsure where I stood – beyond the shenanigans at the pool, many other random events also seemed to repeat over and over again, but I’m not sure whether that’s because time also didn’t seem to advance every time I clicked to wait at the lobby desk. Were these bugs, the randomizer not being tuned to avoid repetitiveness, or was there some hidden mechanic about what actions moved the clock forward? I’m not sure, and while uncertainty is fine in a horror game, I like it to be deployed to clearer thematic ends.
I suspect there’s an intended way of engaging with the game where the player is more active, zipping around the motel’s locations, spying on each of its residents and dipping in and out of each of their storylines, with replays enlivened by different permutations of the ways each can play out. And as I mentioned there’s some fun creativity here, with even the fairly standard vampire vignette boasting one or two novel images – and my subconscious will be trying to figure out that deer guy for a few days to come. But the fiddly implementation and too-common deaths mean I wasn’t able to find that intended experience, which means I unfortunately didn’t get out of Graveyard Shift everything the author put into it.
He's very deep, June 7, 2022In my head, I sometimes like to anthropomorphize the different kinds of IF.
(I don’t really, but the conceit’s our entry point into the review and the alternative was a comparison to Waking Life, so I think we’re all agreed this is the less-bad option).
As I was saying before that rude interruption, I like to picture all the different kinds of IF like they’re people: you’ve got your nerdy, spreadsheet-loving puzzlefest; your overearnest theater-kid narrative-driven game; your emo, edgy autobiographical choice-based game about trauma and mental health; your trying-too-hard-to-be-funny class-clown comedy. Then there’s the figure that’s loitering around at the edge of the crowd, smoking something that definitely isn’t tobacco and flipping through an old worn-out Pynchon paperback: our old friend the druggy, philosophically surrealist art game.
The Hole Man is very much part of this proud tradition, and acquits itself well, though falling prey to the Achilles heel that tends to plague this kind of game. The conceit of this long choice-based game is that you’re on your way to jury duty (side note: I would 100% play an IF game about jury duty) when someone trips you, and you… sort off… have your body fall out of yourself, so it walks away while you’re stuck as an empty outline where a person used to be. Cue peregrinations as you wander a fantastic landscape that mashes up the quotidian with the outre, seeking an identity to take on to replace the one you’ve lost.
Whether this kind of thing works or not is almost entirely down to the execution: how good are the ideas, and how good is the writing? Hole Man is good on both scores, with a funhouse of cleverly-philosophical situations presented in an appealing, wry narrative voice. Like, here’s what happens after you meet the king of a castle that’s also the insides of a dragon, and who’s himself a weird congeries of other serpents:
"You’re not sure if you just met royalty, or a just a bunch of snakes that enjoy living in a basket and pretending to be a king. They were quite cordial in any event, though."
It’s a bit what-even-is-identity-comma-man, sure, but it made me laugh. Or there’s a song I found when pulling another thread:
"I need a glass-bottomed boat
I need an able seaman
I need the kind of attraction
That you can’t find anywhere but the Amazon River!
(Please do not stand up until
The boat has docked at the pier)
Help me.
Electric eel!
I want a giant snakehead!
I want an arapaima!
I want to prove the existence, of an ahuitzotl, with a hand on its tail!"
(That Pynchon reference I made above didn’t come out of nowhere).
(After I posted this review, the author explained that in fact the Pynchon reference did come out of nowhere, and this is actually a Weird Al lyric.
You may want to reassess the weight you give to your reviewer's analysis accordingly).
There’s definitely a lot to explore, and it’s both superficially fun to turn over rocks to see what’s below – Castlevania 2 references! Tiny dragons who work like fairies – as well as to encounter the somewhat-deeper mediations on offer. Each path you take through the game puts you in front of a different archetypal figure, leading to a dialogue or disquisition that engages with topics that – well, honestly felt a bit random and not narrowly confined to the overall theme about identity, but I found them enjoyable just the same. There’s a neat conversation about flipping Clarke’s law of magic vs. technology on its head, some surprisingly-poignant existentialist ruminations on how to go on given the inevitable death and ending of all things, and an examination of the difference between toys and games that isn’t too on the nose (though it’s a bit on the nose).
When I say it’s a lot, though, it’s definitely a lot. The blurb says that there are 12 endings, and it’s a bit of work to wander around and find each of them – I found five of them, and while each only took five or ten minutes to reach, contemplating doing that seven more times felt exhausting. This is what I meant when I mentioned an Achilles heel above: when everything works on an arbitrary logic, traditional narrative stakes are hard to establish, and that anything-can-happen vibe means there’s not a lot of connective tissue binding the different paths, and potential identities, together.
Again, the blurb indicates that there’s a “special surprise” waiting for those who run down all the different avenues, but that alone wasn’t enough to keep me motivated through seven more replays. I also ran into a few small bugs – a dead-end passage in the basement of the parking structure, the description of a bookstore that presupposed I’d been there before even though it was my first visit – that, while not anything big in of themselves, threw up just enough friction that the idea of systematically charting out all the different ways to navigate my choices felt like too much work. I console myself with the thought that Gradgrindian assiduity is at odds with the philosophy of a game like this – better to go with the flow, dip in and dip out as the spirit moves, and not worry about wringing it dry of every drop of content. Approached like that, it’s hard not to recommend The Hole Man – I can’t tell you what you’re likely to get out of it, but you’ll probably get something.
What's in a name?, June 7, 2022Appropriately enough for a game structured like a five-act play, my reaction to Thief of the Thousand Suns had a whole narrative arc to it. Based on the blurb and opening material, like the Dramatis Personae page complete with period font and interspersed footnotes, I went into it with high expectations since a Shakespearean IF very much appeals to me. These hopes suffered a u-turn as I was disappointed to realize the game wasn’t in verse, and had a plot drawn more from the swords-and-sorcery pulps than Elizabethan drama. After getting over those dashed expectations, though, I found there’s a lots that’s enjoyable here, as the game offers a fleet, fun adventure with a winning pair of protagonists – and if they’re more Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so what?
(Yes, this would be a three-act structure, not five – perhaps proving my point that fitting a piece of writing to Shakespearean conventions is hard!)
So the setup here is that a two adventurers, roguish Billy Bard and big-hearted muscle Grimm, are on the lookout for a particular ruined temple, hoping to find the treasure it contains. After bargaining for directions from old man in a bar (see what I mean about the fantasy tropes?) they make their way through various forest hazards before finding more than they bargained for at the temple.
For the most part the story is on rails, though there are three more interactive bits – there’s a minigame where you dicker with the old man over how much to pay for his guidance to the temple, an involved series of choices to work through when dealing with a group of banditti, and then some light puzzling to make sense of the temple’s curious, magical properties. It’s a fun romp, with new obstacles and situations thrown at you at a rapid clip, and the banter between the two protagonists is well-written and enlivens proceedings, helping the more dramatic moments land.
This all works well on its terms, but again, it does feel a little more generic-fantasy than I would have liked – the story’s presented solely through dialogue and stage directions, but the directions often go into detail far beyond what a 16th-century stage could plausibly depict, and while there’s one song (which I enjoyed!) the dialogue is in prose rather than any sort of meter, much less strict iambic pentameter. Going in with appropriate expectations, though, it’s hard to see these as real minuses, especially given the dramatically increased authorial effort that would have been required (one of my games has a short poem in more-or-less dactylic hexameter, and it took probably three or four hours of writing to firm up – iambic pentameter is easier, but still!)
I think a more legitimate critique is that the moments of reactivity sometimes don’t feel fully baked. The bargaining minigame is done pretty much blind, and since you can redo it at any time the optimal course of action is to just inch up your offer until you hit something the other party will accept. And I found the encounter with the bandits hard to navigate until I realized that clicking the earlier set of links on the page would change them and shift my strategy for dealing with them, while the last one would commit to that approach and move the story ahead. Again, there are free redos available, but that lowered the stakes, all the more so when I realized that a key event that may or may not happen here – (Spoiler - click to show)Grimm’s killing of the bandit Aileen – doesn’t actually impact where the story ultimately goes, though it’s presented as though it would. Lastly, the exploration in the temple is entertaining but feels underdeveloped, with multiple different scenarios for the most part resolved as quickly as they’re spun off. None of this reduced my enjoyment that much, but it did leave me wishing that either these mechanics had been fleshed out more thoroughly, or just streamlined in favor of a cleaner story.
On the flip side, I found that implementation was quite clean. There are only a few typos, and those that are there are the high-class, artisanal sort – wain for wane, that sort of thing. At first blush I thought I’d come across a bug where some of Act IV was accessible before Act III, but now that I’ve reflected on the plot that might actually be a clever meta touch (Spoiler - click to show)(the temple does allow for time travel, after all).
All told this is a fleet, confident game with winning characters and a romping, fast-paced plot, and if it’s not one that William Shakespeare would have written, well, there are other authors out there just as good.
Leaving a toxic relationship, June 7, 2022Let’s Talk Alex is a Twine game about some very heavy subjects – gaslighting and emotional abuse in romantic relationships – that matches its emotionally-engaging premise with solid prose and an ultimately positive, actionable message of empowerment. I think it’s a very fine game, though I didn’t find myself as involved in it as I expected I’d be, partially because, per the game’s blurb, it’s not just a story but aims at being a simulation of how to get out of this kind of toxic relationship.
LTA realizes this ambition by structuring itself as a series of conversation puzzles: in any playthrough, the confrontation with the partner, Alex, plays out as a collection of four different mini-conversations (out of a pool of six), each focusing on a different aspect of their controlling behavior, and with clearly-laid out different strategies to try, some of which are always going to be successful in helping you get out of the relationship, and others (so far as I could tell) always unsuccessful. The choice of which topics you see depends on what you do during a pre-fight preparation phase, as you reminisce about different bad moments in the relationship. You get a short memory, which is mixed with the protagonist’s usually-positive thoughts about Alex even as they’re exhibiting a different strain of really negative behavior.
Then Alex comes home and there’s a transition into the fight:
"I’ve been feeling concerned that you’ve been showing some unhealthy behaviors. I feel like you’re unaccepting, controlling, take things too personally, and don’t trust me."
This definitely allows the player to take stock and understand how the stuff Alex has been doing falls into specific categories of emotional abuse, which helps with the educational or simulation side of things. But I found this bit of dialogue jarring, since it feels rather clinical, and I wondered how someone capable of saying this sentence about their partner hasn’t already realized that the relationship needs to end!
Once you zero in on one topic – say, the lack of trust – you get a few dialogue options, and here’s where the different strategies come in. Again, there are better answers and worse answers here, and while it’s usually pretty easy to suss out what’s likely to work (there are also some strong hints in the game’s introductory material), the choices set out a bunch of plausible responses. But I found myself wishing the conversations had a little more depth, since usually there’s only one or two choices before you’re back to the hub menu and on to the next topic – the focus is on providing feedback on whether the choices have been effective, rather than portraying all the back-and-forth of a big argument.
Ultimately, it’s a positive that there’s a good amount of signposting and that the writing is precise throughout, since that communicates why things are happening the way they are and makes the puzzles legible to the player. But at the same time, I found this approach sometimes too cut-and-dried given the emotional dynamics at issue, with the clarity sometimes undermining the verisimilitude and messy immediacy of what a relationship-ending fight can feel like. I don’t want to ding LTA too harshly for this slight dryness, though; if it makes it a better tool for exploring different ways a controlling relationship can be escaped, and a less-compelling story about one single way that plays out, that’s certainly a reasonable choice. On the Spring Thing festival page, it’s also got an “autobiographical” tag, and god knows that know that when I made my own autobiographical game last year, there were a whole bunch of topics and storytelling approaches that I dialed down or avoided, because I wouldn’t have been emotionally capable of writing the thing otherwise. Regardless, LTA tackles a tough set of topics with grace and clarity and is a worthy entry in the festival.
Cave story, June 7, 2022I’m less than ten games into Spring Thing, and somehow I’ve already hit two whose opening screen is just repeated f-bombs (the other was Light in the Forest) – man, the 2022 zeitgeist is pretty grim. Here, the profanity reflects the dire situation the protagonist has found herself in, as she’s fallen into some caves below a tourist site in the wilderness, and after an ill-timed bout of unconsciousness, she realizes she’s alone and trapped. Fortunately, there’s some strange machinery that might hold out the promise of escape…
If you were to picture a game in your head based on that description, I’m guessing that you’d come up with a parser game, because this is a classic setup. But no – it’s Twine (complete with overuse of various blurring and moving text effects, alas)! There are some reasonably fun puzzles here, and the mystery of what’s going on in the caverns is intriguing enough, but for me the novelty of navigating such a hoary scenario in a choice-based game was the most interesting element of Beneath the Stones. Now that the parser/choice wars that roiled the IF community a decade ago are firmly in the rear-view mirror, it seems to me that both the audience and authors are increasingly ignoring the stereotypes of what kinds of games belong on each side of the theoretical divide. And while there is some narrative here – the main character has a name, and a little bit of dialogue with her boyfriend in the immediate aftermath of the fall – the game really is about a lonely explorer poking at stuff in the dark.
So how well does the said poking work? I’d say reasonably so. The nice thing about this being a choice-based game is that there’s no fumbling with darkness puzzles or navigating a dreary maze: everyplace you can go and all the options are clearly laid out, and it’s easy to toggle from one sub-area to another. There’s also an inventory system that works quite well and even allows you to use one item on a second, albeit only in specific, scripted instances.
On a more equivocal note, since the puzzles mostly just involve manipulating stuff you find in the environment that only have one effect, the game is pretty easy to solve since you’ll typically be able to progress by just clicking through all of your options even if you don’t understand what you’re doing. I’d actually rate this a positive, partially because I found the environment a little confusing. The game’s chatty style meant that I was sometimes unsure about what I was seeing, and how the area I was in related to the place I’d just been. Descriptions are also a bit loose sometimes, meaning that for example I wasn’t always clear on whether something described as “gunk” was the same as the previously-mentioned “goo” – in a parser game, it’d be easy to disambiguate, but of course that option wasn’t available here. Further adding to my discombobulation, I ran into a bug that had me see a passage comparing what I was seeing to a podium that it implied I’d already encountered well before I’d actually come across the thing.
While I think Beneath the Stones could have benefitted from another testing pass (there are some typos, too) these are still minor complaints, though. Even if I wasn’t always sure about what I was doing or why it was working, it was fun to work through the puzzles and escape the caverns. The game does also succeed in setting a creepy mood at times, especially when I went back to find a bad ending that sent a little shiver down my spine. Would I have liked this better as a parser game? Probably, but I suspect that just reflects my pre-existing experience, and the fact that a Twine author can create a gameplay experience like this and make it accessible to folks who don’t play parser games is pretty cool in my book.
(Insert bird pun here), June 7, 2022I’m a sucker for smart-animal content – stories about the social intelligence of elephants, books on how the distributed nature of octopuses’ nervous systems might impact their consciousness, rats problem-solving their way through lab experiments, I’m here for all of it. So even though I first came across it in the early days of YouTube, even the better part of two decades later I can still clearly remember how exciting it was to see this video of a crow trying to fish some food out of a bottle, failing, then realizing it could bend a bit of wire into a hook and get to its snack that way. Crows – they’re just like us!
(Due to the deathless nature of the internet, I realized after writing the above paragraph that this video is probably still findable – I think this is it, in fact! Rewatching it, my description wasn’t too far off, thankfully).
Anyway all this to say that when I saw there was a game coming up whose aim, according to the blurb, was to “celebrate the intelligence, eloquence, and sophistication of urban crows”, per the above I was pretty excited, all the more so since I don’t think crows really get their due. As a result of these expectations, though, I was deflated when I saw the opening text:
"OMG you’re a crow.
One day, you could be king of this shitty suburb.
But for now, it’s just you and your ATTITUDE."
Crows – they’re just like us.
This irreverent tone is actually a good fit for the game, though – if you look past the internet-poisoned dialogue, the birds on offer here, as promised, are smart and socially adept, and given how crows behave I can totally imagine that their internal lives are based on an obsessive focus on getting more stuff and maintaining their position in the pecking-order (sorry).
The silliness, and the striking drawings, also liven up a game that’s pretty solid but could have been a bit dry if played straight. Your success in becoming the baddest bird on the block is measured through increases in your numerical attitude score, and after a preparatory phase where you decide whether you want to have a wingman (er) join your quest and choose from an assortment of inventory items to bring with you, the main section of the game has you encounter a series of randomized events. If you hit the right events – and get lucky or have the right gear – your attitude will go up, say by befriending a little girl. But there are negative, attitude-draining events too that can for example see you captured by a geezer with a net. The trend is always up, though, and after maybe a dozen or two events your attitude rises sufficiently to open up the endgame, which sometimes involves a climactic rock-paper-scissors duel with another crow.
This all works well enough, though I think one more iteration on the design would have made it more compelling. There’s a slight mismatch between the attitude threshold and the number of random events on offer, meaning that even in a single playthrough you’ll see a lot of repeats. I thought the fight at the end went on a little too long, even once you realize that there’s a trick to it. And while I’m listing niggles, while I understand that the gag where the game prompts you to enter your name and then says that’s a stupid name, and your real name is e.g. Bingley Polligan (the exact choice is randomly generated) can’t admit of exceptions, I was still annoyed that “The Incrowdible Hulk” got rejected. C’mon, game, I’m working with you here!
Still, even despite these small shortcomings this is a fleet, fun game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. And while it’s not the high-minded ode to corvid smarts I was after, it does make a strong case that crows are punk-rock badasses. What more could anyone want?
In days of old when knights were bold and princesses wore Bermuda shorts, June 7, 2022I have a dilemma when it comes to reviewing visual novels: on the one hand, I’m firmly on board with a broad definition of IF, and against artificially excluding a clearly text-driven – and very popular! – genre. On the other hand, I often personally have a hard time getting to grips with them: I find the interfaces fiddly, as I have a hard time advancing the tiny, slowly-scrolling text window without missing stuff, and their design often presupposes multiple playthroughs, which is increasingly challenging for me as I have decreasing time for IF. Plus I usually ignore the graphics and find them a distraction from the text, which is what I come to IF for in the first place. So while I want to be ecumenical and give George and the Dragon the same level of engagement I’m giving to the other Spring Thing entries, I’m also acutely aware that I might not be the best person to assess how successful it is at doing what it sets out to do – so the reader might want to adjust their salt-grain intake accordingly as they proceed through this review.
George and the Dragon has an orthodox fantasy setting – according to the blurb, this is a story about how St. George became the patron saint of England, but while he does slay a dragon if you play your cards right, England never had a king named Dennis so far as I know, nor were gems of fire resistance thick on the ground, and the general vibe is pretty Ren Faire-y. Despite the familiarity of the setting, though, I had difficulty getting to grips with the story. It starts in medias res, with your character stumbling on an argument between characters you don’t know, without providing much context for who you are and what’s going on. Most of this got clearer as I played – the opening incident isn’t that important, and again befitting the game’s classic-fantasy approach, there’s a festival/lottery going on in the village, with the “winner” being offered up as a sacrifice to appease the dragon – but the exposition didn’t feel especially smooth to me, and I ran into a bug where the blacksmith told me something had happened before it actually did, which confused things further.
As I understand the gameplay tropes of the VN genre, it’s also pretty orthodox on that front – you get regular choices of options as you progress through dialogue-driven scenes, with an additional map interface that lets you choose where to go in a little village. It’s very likely you’ll hit a game-over in your first playthrough, because this dragon is not messing around, but there’s easy saving-and-loading and skip-read-text option to make replays more bearable (though I found that the option fussy, both skipping when it shouldn’t and not skipping when it should).
Your choices do have significant consequences, but in a way that occasionally felt obscure – for example, getting on a winning path seems to require visiting the princess when you go to the king’s camp to deliver a sword, but whether or not I was able to do that seemed to hinge on choices I made in the opening argument sequence, with no narrative threads explaining what had changed so far as I could tell (though this might be because I’d inadvertently skipped changed text in a replay, per the issue I mentioned above). It also doesn’t help that the game is tough, with a lot more ways to fail than there are to win.
One of the significant upsides of a VN is that with the real estate given over to graphics allows for visual storytelling, and the foregrounding of characters opening up the ability to display their emotions without needing to spell things out in text. As mentioned earlier, I’m probably not the best critic to assess art design choices, but I have to say I mostly didn’t like the graphics. The characters design was odd to me, with the kind sporting an unflattering 1970’s mustache and the princess wearing what look like day-glo Bermuda shorts, and scenes are often staged with the characters standing too far away from the game’s camera. There are some effective sequences – the climactic fight with the dragon has some visual pop – but for me, they came after a bad first impression.
I’ve said a lot of negative things about George and the Dragon, but as I review them, many of these critiques boil down to “I would have liked this better if it was a text-only Twine game” – without the distracting graphics and slow pace of text display, and with more focus on the written word to carry the weight of storytelling, I would probably find the game unpretentious but solid enough. So I could certainly see a player who’s more simpatico with visual novels having a much better time than I did, and I look forward to more VNs being entered into IF festivals and competitions if only so that I can get more comfortable with their way of doing things.
A very buggy game, June 7, 2022I’ve said in other reviews that I think it’s really hard to make a successful “message game”, where the game’s main goal is to make some kind of political or cultural point – in my experience they too quickly devolve into humorless, didactic gameplay where the obvious right answers are rewarded and the obvious bad ones are punished, with no real authentic engagement with the nuances of an issue and the important questions of design, plot, and character left almost completely neglected, making even those who agree with the politics on offer resentful and unhappy.
Good Grub! is a message game, and if I’m honest it fits the above description pretty much to a tee – plus it’s got only the basic Twine visual design –but with one key difference: it throws that “humorless” bit way out the window, meaning that I was more than happy to laugh my way through three different playthroughs. Maybe that makes me shallow, but I was having so much fun none of the other things I’ve previously harped on as flaws mattered at all.
It helps that the message here isn’t one that I’ve seen argued to death in online flamewars: it’s that eating insects can be an environmentally sustainable element in a healthy diet. I suppose some folks could find the idea gross, and I have to confess I do too to – but that’s just because I’m vegetarian and eating anything alive kinda freaks me out; meeting protein needs through bugs doesn’t seem inherently weirder than doing it through curdled soy milk, after all.
Anyway, the way the game makes its point is by having you choose the main features of an insect-only restaurant you’re launching, then go on a radio interview to promote it. Success and failure are definitely possible, but the game is short enough, and funny enough, that you’ll probably want to play through a bunch of times to see many of the options. Some have definite right and wrong answers – warming my heart as a life-long user of public transit, the clear worst choice in the game is to drive to the interview when you have other options – but for the most part it’s forgiving, with successful possible even if you decide e.g. to name your restaurant “La Cucaracha”, like an asshole (I named my restaurant La Cucaracha first time out).
It’s a short but well-considered design, with the initial set of choices leading to payoff as you try to sell the place in the interview, and the ultimate reveal of whether your business succeeds or fails. Gameplay-wise, the only critique I have is that I wish there was a “replay” button at the end it make it easier to try out different branches. It’s solid enough, but again, what makes it sing is the humor. I don’t want to quote too many of the other things that made me laugh, because most of the joy of Good Grub! is seeing how the playful narrative voice responds to your choices, but I can’t resist one pointer: whatever you do, make sure you try naming your restaurant “Big Bill’s Big ol’ Bug Emporium while ensuring the game knows you are not yourself named Bill.
Is Good Grub! good enough to make me rethink my generally downbeat outlook on message games? I suppose not – if I take a step back, it really does share many of the limitations I outlined at the top – but it does apply demonstrate that with enough charm, you can get away with anything.
Coffee Talk, June 7, 2022A short visual novel filtered through a Game Boy aesthetic, You, Me and Coffee (God, it’s hard to omit the Oxford comma) wears its gameplay on its sleeve: as a post-college twentysomething who’s just moved back home and bumped into an old acquaintance at a coffee shop, interactivity consists of choosing in which order to introduce these seemingly banal but deceptively deep topics of conversation.
This one is all about the dialogue, then, so let’s start out by talking about everything else. The retro graphics are definitely one of YM+C’s selling points, and at least to this child of the 80s, they impress; in particular the pinkish monochrome image of the friend is expressive enough to convey relatively subtle shifts in facial expression without getting overly-detailed and distracting. The game’s structure is also clever: a full playthrough is expected to exhaust each of the six possible orders for the topics, at which point a new final dialogue unlocks. It’s not clear how diegetic this is supposed to be – there’s no indication the characters know they’re experiencing a time loop – but it does succeed in making the player keep track of what they’ve already asked and when, making the game more involved than the choice-lawnmowing visual novels can sometimes promote. On the flip side, though, I found the interface a little annoying – as with most visual novels, by default you only get a line or two of slowly-displaying text at a time, so I kept banging keys to hurry things up and then inadvertently skipping bits of dialogue. Using more of the screen’s real estate would have obscured the graphics, I suppose, but could have increased the readability.
As for the conversations themselves, while each of the six variations hits on distinct subject areas, with one or two exceptions they all share a common tone of warm nostalgia hitting a wall of barely-concealed hostility (this awkwardness is mostly avoided in the timeline where the conversation winds up turning to books – yes, this seems right to me). As it eventuates, you remember this acquaintance as a fun person to hang out with, and with whom you shared some low-stakes stabs at romance; on the other hand, she (I think those are the right pronouns) recalls things differently, and as a result most of the time she’s kind of a jerk.
There’s an explanation for this unpleasantness in the bonus dialogue that’s unlocked after exhausting the others, and it rings true so far as it goes – without going into spoilery details, it turns out that main character was a self-centered jerk who didn’t really notice what was going on with the people around them when they were 17. But to me, what this revelation gains in plausibility it loses in pathos. Perhaps I’m telling on myself here, but my memory of those long-ago teenaged years was that pretty much everyone was completely wrapped up in self-absorption, with only a minimal set of tools for perceiving, much less responding appropriately to, the subjective emotional experience of others. The fact that the friend has apparently held a grudge for what after all are quite venial sins for years, into their mid-twenties, came off as absurdly small-minded, and made the ending feel unduly prosecutorial: instead of an embarrassed but deserved flush of catharsis, I was left blinking in confusion.
If the ending didn’t sit quite right with me, though, I did enjoy the well-observed brittleness of the main dialogues – so much so that I replayed a second time, based on what I thought were hints towards how to get an alternate ending (turns out there isn’t one, or at least I wasn’t smart enough to find it). As befits its early-video-game aesthetic, You, Me and Coffee’s characters are perhaps more callow than they think they are, but there’s pleasure in following along with them all the same.
Fabulously filthy, June 6, 2022Filthy Aunt Mildred is a nasty little thing, reveling in the physical and moral grotesqueness of the revolting, infighting family who make up its cast of characters and the baroque, decrepit mansion where it lays its scene – call it Knives Out by way of Gormenghast. Beyond the overall squalor, the narrative is the most drunken, meandering sort of shaggy dog story, overencrusted with the largely-irrelevant biographies of sundry louche and long-since departed aunts and uncles, and it doesn’t so much end as collapse in a heap, the few surviving characters having learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
I worry I am being too positive. Here is the second sentence of the piece:
"The air was sticky and horrible and Old Uncle Thomas who lived in the attic was smearing his faeces on the dining hall window, which meant it was six o’clock, because Old Uncle Thomas always smeared his faeces on the dining hall window at six o’clock.”
This is not the kind of filth I had in mind when I eagerly clicked “begin” on what is sold as a wholesome story about poisoning an awful spinster.
As a right-minded person I can under no circumstances recommend, or even commend in the first place, such a disreputable game. But with that understood: reader, I had fun. Each character is more loathsome than the next – the protagonist, and I use that term loosely, very much included – but who cares when they toss off bon mots like this (from the inevitable iocane-powder-ish scene near the end):
"'One of the cups contains lethal poison.', I explained. 'The other contains the greatest tea you’ve ever had in your life.'
'What kind?'
'Arsenic.'"
The narrator gets in on the action too, evoking the family’s halcyon, prelapsarian days:
"Money was plentiful, nobody had been murdered yet and the general attitude of the Bladesmith family could be boiled down to a mixture of 'why not?' and 'do you know who I am?'"
Sure, the accumulated vignettes lose some steam and effectiveness as you go on, and there’s the occasional typo. And the only choices are about how deep into this sewer you want to throw yourself. But this is one entertaining cabinet of horrors, and for readers who are able to swallow their revulsion and the potty humor and moral bankruptcy here on display, the sharp writing and darkly-inventive imagination are ample rewards for slumming it – you might just need a cold shower afterwards.
Atmospheric, slightly-wonky folk-horror, June 6, 2022The Prairie House is an aesthetically pleasing Adventuron game with slightly wonky implementation – but I repeat myself! Most Adventuron games have lovely visual design but have a parser that doesn’t provide the most helpful failure responses (it can be pretty fuzzy on whether you’ve referred to an item incorrectly, or it just isn’t there) and sometimes struggles with actions that are more than two words. Still, these foibles aren’t too hard to come to grips with, and the effort is usually well worth it, which is certainly the case with this moody horror vignette set on the Canadian prairie. While the game’s various elements didn’t fully cohere for me, this is still an enjoyable way to spend half an hour.
The plot here is fairly straightforward – you’re an academic who spends the night at an old field house, and spooky shenanigans ensue – but there are three well-researched bits of flavor that enrich the basic narrative. First, there’s a well-chosen amount of detail on the research; while you don’t need to actively do anything, it’s rewarding to explore the prairie, examine the various plants, and read about the standard practices and approaches to this kind of work. Second, the house you’re staying in was built and originally inhabited by Ukrainian immigrants, and there are some documents in the house that flesh out some of this history. Finally, many of the supernatural occurrences are drawn from the stories of some First Nations peoples – the author’s note cites the Anishinaabe and Ojibwe.
Since there aren’t really puzzles to speak of, beyond finding a couple of keys and going through a well-prompted pre-bed ritual, the game does rely on this research to enliven what would otherwise be a fairly direct case of things going bump in the night. It mostly works, and I was definitely engaged as I wandered around the house looking at stuff – it’s fun to learn about things I previously knew quite little about! Once the supernatural elements started kicking into higher gear, though, I wound up wanting a little more of a direct link between the research-y bits and what was happening in the game. There are definitely some allusions, but the game plays things pretty coy and ambiguous as to what’s actually going on. That’s often a fine authorial choice, but in this case it left me feeling like the ending was a little anticlimactic, with the game’s disparate elements never being fully knit together in my mind.
I did mention some implementation niggles, and while some of them do seem like features of the Adventuron engine, there were a couple of oversights that could be worth correcting in a future release. X ME doesn’t include a description of the PC, for example, which is a missed opportunity. X [document] and READ [document] are separately-implemented commands – it’s usually not an issue because upon examining one you’re often asked whether you want to read it as well, but this isn’t invariably the case. In my first playthrough, I missed an achievement, and some important flavor, because X BOOKS told me “you notice nothing unusual,” whereas READ BOOKS would have let me browse one of three different volumes. And when I tried to sit down in the armchair in the morning, the response indicated the game still thought it was night.
Still, I don’t want to end on a negative note – and I should admit that I played the game without music, which is apparently an original soundtrack, so I suspect I would have entered even more fully into the mood with that playing in the background. The Prairie House is an accomplished game that offers a unique, compelling experience that goes beyond the standard haunted-house experience.
SimOCD, June 6, 2022“Abstract Twine game about mental health issue” is a cliché, but if it produces games as engaging and dare-I-say educational as fix it, that’s no bad thing. I’m a little wary of my response here because I have a fair bit of personal experience of OCD – one of my loved ones has it – and I’m curious what others who don’t come to the game with that context would think of it. Still, I can say that for me it very much works in depicting OCD’s hellish destructive-ritual-and-self-loathing cycle, as well the potential way out.
The game deliberately chooses to leave the inciting incident that sets off the OCD spiral abstract – you’re just told that there’s something making you (who you are is left vague) uncomfortable and standing in the way of the things (also not specified) you want to do. This means there’s not much of a narrative framework for the gameplay loop to hook into, but I think that’s ultimately a good choice. It universalizes the experience and creates the opportunity for more direct player investment, and also avoids the challenge that the stuff that sets off OCD can be so minor – touching a particular part of an article of clothing, fretting about ultra-rare side effects of common medications like Tylenol – or so over-the-top – worrying that somehow you’re secretly a serial killer or child molester, or that you’ll harm others for no reason – that it can seem completely ridiculous from the outside.
The rituals and behaviors you engage in to compensate for the feelings of unease are also left unspecified (though there is an intimation that hand-washing to the point that they bleed is included – this is I think a good example of a detail that’s 100% true to life but I worry could feel unrealistic), with the focus instead put on how you feel after performing each one: it doesn’t work to relieve the feeling of discomfort, but now there’s a healthy dose of self-directed criticism for being weak enough to engage in the ritual, or feeling like it’s made things worse, or that you’re just doing it for attention, so now more talismanic behavior is required to desperately try to set things to right. The writing in these bits of self-reproach is queasily compelling, and I thought did a good job of communicating what I understand is among the worst parts of OCD.
Thankfully, fix it doesn’t trap the player in a forever-static loop, but does eventually provide the possibility of a way out. In contrast to the way the rituals are played, this piece is very specific, and from my understanding lines up pretty exactly with the tools folks suffering from OCD often find successful in managing their intrusive thoughts and behaviors. Getting to this off-ramp definitely felt like a relief, with calm blue coloring on the fonts replacing the angry red of the rest of the game. Again, this is very much not a narrative-driven experience, but it definitely has an arc, and catharsis at the end. It’s a focused experience, but the gameplay elements, visual design and layout, and writing all work well together to provide a compelling and accurate view of OCD from the inside, which I can see being impactful and even useful for all sorts of players.
A low-key, welcoming fantasy, June 6, 2022It’s always nice when the first game you play in a festival or comp gets things off on the right foot, so I count myself lucky that The Light in the Forest was the lead-off game in my randomized shuffle. Admittedly, it didn’t make the best first impression on me, with default-Twine formatting and a wall-of-profanity opening that situates the player in a deeply unpleasant situation – the protagonist is a trans woman with some mental health issues about to flee a Dickensian psychiatric facility. But the game quickly reveals that it’s anything but miserabilist, as she’s soon able to make a charming, supportive reconnection with an old friend, and some creepy-yet-compelling fantasy elements start to come into the narrative (the formatting also gets more creative). While there are definitely still some intense challenges to face, the game’s grounded, low-key writing and fundamentally decent characters made my experience of playing the game a really positive one.
Most of the story is focused on the protagonist’s relationship with two women – Mandragora, an acquaintance from school who happens to be working as a barista at the coffee shop where the protagonist takes shelter after the opening and who quickly gives her a place to stay, and Nightshade, who’s a sort of half-demon witch from another dimension with a mystic connection to her (everyone is named after plans, including the protagonist who’s called Solanine). Things with Mandy primarily focus on Solanine working through her social anxiety and ADHD in a series of well-realized set-pieces – there’s a complex bit about making a grilled cheese sandwich that’s almost-but-not-quite a puzzle – while choosing how flirty to get with someone who’s clearly into her. As to Nightshade, it’s a matter of deciding what to make of a series of strange happenings and whether or not to maintain their connection or separate it. This makes the character interactions engaging on a gameplay level, beyond the often-charming dialogue itself.
I also really enjoyed the fantasy elements, which isn’t always a given for me. They aren’t overemphasized, but it’s mentioned in passing that there’s been a magical apocalypse that’s seen demons hopping into our reality. It’s nonstandard, but I liked the fact that the world has ended but life still goes on – and isn’t even all bad, making it a nice metaphor for the identity struggles the game’s focused on, as well as a nice idea on its own. Again, this isn’t a central part of the story, and there isn’t like Tolkien-style WORLDBUILDING by any means, but there are some compelling details in this part of the game, like the way Solanine performs a regular ritual to ward off negative spirits:
"You left your candlebone pen on the dresser. Ideally you would light a candle as you do this, but with only their bones and nothing for fire you are forced to make do without as you trace over the sigils on your arm."
Sure, there are some niggles here. For example, while the writing is generally strong, beyond the odd typo there’s the occasional line of clunky dialogue (at one point Mandy says “Like I said, you’re important and I don’t want to let anyone be abandoned. Especially not when everything is likely to be much worse for them because they’re being constantly misgendered.” Nice idea, but a little on-the-nose). And sometimes the low-key vibe can undercut the intensity of events – I hadn’t realized how close to panic Solanine was meant to be as she was rattling around the cabinets trying to rustle up her sandwich. Similarly, the ending I got was also more understated than I might have preferred. But none of this did much to impact how much I enjoyed my first dip into Spring Thing!
Madness and civilization, January 12, 2022(This review was originally posted on the IF newgroups immediately after the 2003 IF Comp).
Slouching Towards Bedlam involves eschatology, a British insane asylum, a player character whose mental state is very much in doubt, gnosticism, a memetic word-virus, steampunk, the "Second Coming" of W.B. Yeats, the Kabbalah, and a Benthamite panopticon of the type deconstructed by Michel Focault. Let me say right out that the only way the authors could have possibly done a better job of pandering to me would have been to include some Buddhism. So authors, if you want a 10 from me next year, that 's your blueprint right there.
But regardless of the personal affinity I have for the subject manner, the game is still easily one of the best in this year's comp. The authors tackle some dense, weighty problems, and manage to wrap theological speculation in a compelling mystery and pose an insoluble moral quandary to boot. While there are a very few missteps, they're easily swept away by the sheer power of the work.
Slouching Towards Bedlam opens inside the eponymous asylum, where the player character is listening to your own voice describing the slow realization that you're going mad. The player's explorations are periodically interrupted by a (mental?) burst of strange words; at first the tendency is to tune them out, but soon they begin to take on a terrifying significance. As you attempt to understand what has happened to the player character, you find your course unerringly transformed into the reverse of the path a particular inmate took to Bedlam; this perverse recapitulation is retrograde in more ways than one, for your investigation is also the vector for an agent of infection. Soon, the player is caught in a crux: to play midwife to a new paradigm of humanity or to safeguard the status quo, if such a thing is even possible.
The above summary doesn't do the game justice. At all. Each elements works in concert to create a thrilling sense of momentum and discovery. There are distinct phases, through which the player passes effortlessly. The mystery surrounding Cleve's disposal in Bedlam segues into an investigation of the society whose secrets he uncovered, and once the whole is apprehended, the player gets to make a choice of monumental import. Throughout, the razor-sharp prose keeps the player tense and engaged. The alternate London the authors have conjured is a brittle place, where violence, communication and becoming lurk under the surface of an ordinary street market: "its presence threatens to overwhelm the senses - the smell of an abattoir, the din of a thousand voices shouting, the sight of masses of humanity talking, shopping, selling." Or this, the first chilling line of the response to KILL DRIVER: "A false destination. It is as easy as that." The Logos' interjections could have easily been ridiculous, but they are in fact alien and obscure, as they should be.
The allusive brew of the game is thick and heady, but while some knowledge of gnosticism and Jewish mysticism will deepen one's enjoyment, everything one needs to fully appreciate the game is right there on the screen - an impressive feat considering that this involves communicating certain nonstandard ideas about the Christian Logos and the relationship between Kabbalistic sefirot!
Remarkably, all this thematic activity doesn't occur in a puzzleless environment. There are real obstacles to progress, and while the difficulty level is generally low enough to allow the story to drive forward, thought is definitely required. The tasks facing the main character range from the mundane (fixing a radio) to the complex (operating the Panopticon and the Bedlam archives) to the recondite (feeding a dying madman's ravings into a mobile steampunk computer), and each manages to be well-clued and flawlessly integrated into the whole.
The endgame is perhaps the most impressive of Slouching Towards Bedlam's many achievements. Once the mystery is solved, the player must make a difficult choice. While some resolutions are easier to achieve than others, there is no facile "right" solution; ambiguity is inevitable. Even acting on one's choice can be quite difficult; the Logos is a powerful entity, and arresting its growth requires sacrifices far more terrible than merely the player character's life: to be humanity's savior is to be a monster.
I could go on; one could fruitfully apply the techniques of structural analysis to examine the game's pervasive twinning of progress with regression (the player character's forward movement is often exactly the reverse of the path taken by the madman Cleve, for example), or chase down references to the authentic texts that lie behind the fiction, but I think I've said enough. While I do have a few minor complaints - I thought the TRIAGE computer was underutilized, and some NPC interactions were a bit lightweight - I feel like an ingrate for even mentioning them. My favorite game of the 2003 comp, hands down.
A meaty, creepy puzzlefest, January 12, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Is there a harder genre at this point to parody than Hammer horror flicks? By this point, not too many people have actually watched the movies, but we’ve all seen a million I-vant-to-suck-your-blood-bleh-bleh sendups that make it seem like the originals were just as silly. Dr Horror’s House of Terror manages the task, though, keeping the traditional comedy monster-mash angle while adding a meta twist (you’re not running around actual Transylvanian villages and Alpine laboratories, just movie sets) and playing some moments of horror just straight enough to land. To be sure, the main draw of this big puzzlefest is working through its just-hard-enough challenges, but the tone is also just-novel-enough to make the fourish hour runtime go quickly.
The other strong element here is the pacing. I find long games can often feel awkward on this score, with an intimidatingly-big environment at the beginning and a saggy late-middle as you run out of things to solve. Dr Horror does well out the gate, though, with a focused, linear opening that establishes the premise and stakes – the head of the horror-movie company moonlights as a cult leader and wants to give you a starring role in a sacrificial rite to summon their demonic patron to earth. Then the map leads you to a hub where you find five different themed soundstages where the bulk of the game plays out, but you need to solve the first one, and get a feel for how the puzzles will work, before all the doors unlock.
Indeed, the game actually winds up being a bit formulaic. To fight the cult and their demons, you need to build an army of undead, since turns out Dr Horror has been cutting costs by enslaving real-life (er) zombies, vampires, and mummies. On each soundstage, you’ll need to deal with a roving security guard (in gruesome ways that raise the question of who exactly is the monster here), then figure out how to find, summon, resurrect, or control the various flavors of monster before doing it again at the next stage over. There’s enough variety of theme – you’ve got your werewolf-stalked hamlet, your sun-blasted Egyptian ruins, your voodoo-y New Orleans – as well as puzzle style – there’s some traditional object manipulation, some messing around with NPC behavior, some light futzing with machinery – that this formula winds up being a strength, since it gives the player a framework to grab onto without making things stale. Then there’s an endgame that introduces a fun new puzzle-style that’s not too out of left field, nor too hard – often the bane of late-game mechanical twists.
Speaking of difficulty (what a segue!) I found it tuned well throughout. Most of the soundstages are self-contained, with only a few requiring bringing items over from other areas, which helps limit the possibilities, and several puzzles have alternate solutions implemented. The puzzles aren’t easy enough that I solved them immediately, but at the same time I only needed one hint (Spoiler - click to show)(I didn’t realize the animal cages were portable) which is impressive in a game as long as this. The implementation was also quite smooth, and once I had an idea it usually didn’t take any wrestling with the parser to make it happen. I did run into a couple of bugs, though – I encountered a thematically-appropriate resurrecting security guard in the sands of Egypt, and one time when I got thrown out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, the crematorium wound up accompanying me to the parking lot. But some quick UNDOing was enough to set things back to right.
The writing is another strong point, with jokes that generally land (I liked the main character’s perhaps-forced naivete about where their co-stars kept disappearing to) and some real moments of gross-out horror preventing things from getting too weightlessly silly (those poor security guards!) There are some typos, though, and I did find things got a bit overly wordy in places, leaving me scrolling through more than one page of text just to see what was happening in a location. These are small niggles that hopefully can be ironed-out for a post-Comp release – given its long run-time, I’m guessing some folks won’t completely finish Dr. Horror’s House of Terror during the judging period, but this would be a perfect one to revisit once the time-pressure is off.
Highlight: There’s one puzzle that was a standout for me, a Delightful-Wallpaper-style combinatorial riff that requires you to reenact a Cajun-spiced melodrama of family secrets and voodoo curses. The writing and puzzling are both really fun, and there are enough clues to prevent things from devolving into the trial-and-error slog that often reduces the fun-factor of these kinds of puzzles.
Lowlight: When you solve that puzzle, instead of recruiting the cast of messy antebellum ghosts, you just got a crowd of zombies to swell the ranks of your undead army. Boring!
How I failed the author: I played the first half of the game while keeping my wife company during one of Henry’s late-night feedings, when I was feeling pretty loopy – things got pretty wacky in my transcript as a result.
A lovely melange, January 12, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The ingredients in this Adventuron game aren’t especially novel by IF standards – a dungeon-crawl with a combat system, an Alice in Wonderland riff, an inversion of the typical adventurer-vs-monster moral framework, a pun-filled scavenger hunt – but there’s something about the way they’re stewed up in Off-Season at the Dream Factory that feels fresh and coherent. The clean prose and fantastical yet grounded visuals help create a unified aesthetic that equally fits the orc protagonist’s dead-end job (he gets repeatedly slain by paying adventurers looking for a thrill) and his occasional visits to his fetch-quest setting uncle, who’s straight-up Lewis Carroll in orc drag. And the one element that’s thematically out of place – the occasional dungeon-delving segments where you’re a customer, not an employee, of the Dream Factory – is set off by bespoke vector graphics that make these sequences visually distinctive too.
(Side-note on my expectations on Adventuron games – by this point I’m unsurprised to find one with great visuals, but I also mentally prepare myself to struggle with the parser. But this time I didn’t, and that’s been true of other more recent Adventuron games I’ve played too. I’m guessing this is some combination of authors gaining familiarity with the platform and the system maturing, but it’s awesome to see).
The other thing that makes the disparate pieces work well together is momentum. I tend to like IF Comp games with a good number of easy puzzles – they make me feel like I’m a clever person making good progress through the big competition (this is not a flattering observation about myself) – and it’s an effective choice here. There's a good variety of puzzles, from figuring out viable combat strategies for different opponents to some maze navigation, but none of them are especially difficult, and many even solve themselves, with inventory items being used automatically if your command is even in the right ballpark. Combined with the interesting worldbuilding, solid writing, and pretty pictures, this makes Off-Season at the Dream Factory go down easy.
Highlight: I figured out one somewhat outside the box puzzle straightaway (Spoiler - click to show)(catching lightning in the bottle) which made me feel clever, though I also worried it was underclued. Then I kept playing and found it actually was well clued, I’d just gotten to the solution a little early.
Lowlight: The ending is generally satisfying, but I felt like one subplot (Spoiler - click to show)(the fate of the protagonist’s father) was left a bit hanging – though I didn’t get the Last Lousy Point, which I suspect might bear on that.
How I have failed the author: not by very much, I don’t think! Henry was sleeping and I pretty much banged through this one, despite my new-parent brain.
A full-featured CRPG, January 11, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Going into this year’s Comp, I knew that my time for IF would be limited, so I resolved not to get too sucked into any of the “longer than two hours” games on offer, to make sure I was able to play as many games as possible. Well, here I am, my resolve in tatters: I’ve probably put five or six hours into 4x4 Archipelago over the last few days, and immediately upon winning was tempted to start again to try a different one of the I think three possible main plots driving this slick, addictive Twine CRPG.
I call 4x4A a CRPG advisedly, not to imply it’s not IF – ugh to genre gatekeeping – but to highlight how far it goes to deliver the features you’d expect in a mainstream CRPG. As your randomly-generated adventurer embarks on a voyage across the 16 islands making up the titular archipelago, you’ll encounter a clever skill system that starts you with two skills out of a choice of fighting and noncombat options; a robust inventory tied to an economy that stays relevant throughout the playtime; a main hub boasting shops, services, a library, and more; a multi-step primary quest and numerous fleshed-out side quests; a host of dungeons and mines, many with a boss at the end; and random encounters out the wazoo. Oh, and an automatically-updating journal that puts all the key information you’ll need at your fingertips – seriously, this thing is better than the journal in any AAA CRPG I can recall playing. Plus it’s all randomly generated so replay value is high.
Of course, just as the game delivers so well on the CRPG genre’s positives, it also inherits some of the weak points too. It can feel grindy, with a few too many dungeons that are a few rooms too long. My main character was a magician, and I definitely wound up with a bad 15-minute-workday habit. Plus the early stages can feel a little tough, as you go from island to island building out a list of fun stuff to do but the ability to complete only like 10% of the tasks given how much of a greenhorn you are. But I can’t lie, there’s comfort-food pleasure even in these hoary irritants. 4x4A is the kind of game that isn’t always well-served by the Comp, since it’s long and a bit outside the genres that traditionally do well, but it’s super fun and I’m definitely looking forward to coming back to it post-Comp.
Highlight: The game sets out clear patterns and expectations around how side-quests work and the geography of the archipelago, but it also doesn’t hesitate to break those patterns to create some cool moments of surprise.
Lowlight: The writing here is actually better than it needs to be – here’s the description of one island: “The forests of Old Oak Island remember ancient times. They are dark and foreboding, and hide numerous secluded gorges and valleys. Many islanders are woodcutters, hunters, or pig farmers; local long-haired, black pigs are grazed in the oak woods, where they gorge themselves on acorns.” But it’s too bad that the well-crafted text really fades into the background as the gamier aspects take over and you visit the same places and encounter the same monsters over and over.
How I failed the author: Henry was having some rougher days sleep-wise whie I was playing this one, so after starting out the game and getting about an hour in, I didn’t get back to it until a few days later, only to find my saves were wiped (there may have been an update in the interim?) Too bad, Titus the Swashbuckler, but Letho the Tinkerer found the Heavenly Spire in your place!
Ambitious but unfocused, January 11, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
This ChoiceScript game about a fictional online fandom is a lot. Before you start, there are two full pages of stats, eight or nine pages with background on the online personalities as well as in-universe info on the Nebulaverse, the tropey YA series the fandom focuses on, and a character-generation process for your blogger-avatar that comes complete with two “what Hogwarts House are you?”-style quizzes – and then gameplay itself involves going through five or six “rounds” of play, each of which has you first reading half a dozen different Tumblr-ish blogs and deciding whether to like or reblog (or possibly reply to) each of their 5-10 posts, then making choices about how to write your own fanfic set in the Nebulaverse, plus some optional additional engagement with other bloggers.
There’s a lot to be said for creating a detailed and consistent world, but there’s also a need to present the player with a compelling hook to bring them into said world – a resonant goal, some emotionally-engaging conflict, an interesting puzzle or strategic challenge, or even just a clever take on a familiar milieu – and here’s where I found APBW fell down. Notionally, you’re meant to be optimizing your follower count by reblogging good content and writing resonant fanfic, but this is presented in a pretty bloodless fashion and is clearly more a pretext than a motivating force for engagement. The breadth of the game also means there’s less time to go deep and make any particular character or mechanic stand out, plus the incredible tropiness of the Nebulaverse, while clearly intentional to help it resonate with more real-world fandoms, made it really hard for me to care about shipping the blank-slate chosen one, the genius love-interest, the blue-blood frenemy, the white-bread sidekick, or… the other one who I don’t remember that clearly two days on from playing.
Eventually the game reveals that it is about something specific, and I found it got a lot more engaging (Spoiler - click to show)(it ultimately hinges on a pretty much note-for-note riff on the Harry Potter fandom’s reactions to J.K. Rowling’s increasing transphobia). But it took too long to get there for my tastes, and didn’t integrate the fanfic stuff with this main thread tightly enough for me to stay invested. Works of IF are almost always in real need of a good editor, because all pieces of writing are in need of a good editor (the beta testing process isn’t a substitute, in my experience) and I think APBW suffers that lack – it puts in so much effort to create a plausible world, and has something to say, but needs some nips and tucks to better help the player find what's engaging.
Highlight: Despite the game making clear that I was making incredibly suboptimal choices in terms of follower count, it was perfectly happy to let me express myself as a normcore loser – I took a gleeful joy in choosing the most boring hero as my favorite one, eschewing shipping to focus on the setting’s lore in my blog posts, and even quitting writing the fanfic super early because of (Spoiler - click to show)the transphobia incident.
Lowlight: As I alluded to above, I found the blogging sections offered way too much granularity of interaction – so the game’s bow to realism by having characters re-post stuff you’ve already seen on the pages of other bloggers made for extra drudgery.
How I have failed the author: Due to a general lack of brain-bandwidth, I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to read the multiple pages of background info on the Nebulaverse, which probably reduced my engagement with those sections – and that in turn meant I was eager to stop writing the fanfic so I could skip those bits and get to the end faster, missing out on most of the thematic resonance that I’m sure exists between the different strands of the story.
A chilling, well-written character study, January 11, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The Best Man sits firmly in a genre that’s typically less well served in IF than in static fiction: it’s a piece of literary fiction, with nary a spaceship, broadsword, dead body, or tentacle in sight. For all the mundanity of the setting, though – we’re at a wedding in a small, well-realized Irish town twenty-odd years ago – I found the protagonist the most bone-chilling character I’ve seen in the Comp. By dint of his predicament, Aiden could be sympathetic: after a stag night mishap, he’s called up to be the stand-in best man, with the twist that he’s been nursing a years-long crush on the bride. Being relegated to the friendzone is, I think, a broadly-shared experience, so heightening the drama around this common situation makes for compelling drama. The Best Man isn’t trying to create a universally-resonant story, though – it has a very specific narrative, with very specific characters, and what really drives the story is Aiden’s toxic self-involvement.
This is all extremely well-motivated: long-term romantic disappointment can be tough to weather for anyone, but Aiden has a combination of vain self-regard, social awkwardness, and inability to self-regulate this emotions that means his infatuation with Laura immediately curdles, and by the time of the wedding, he’s developed a whole alternate universe in which his sense of his own intellectual and emotional development means that he is now a fitting romantic partner for her (or at least will be after the inevitable divorce). The twist of fate that’s led to his brevet promotion is reinterpreted as meaning he’s now playing a leading role in the wedding, and I felt a queasy sense of anxiety as he ran pre-ceremony errands for fear of what awful gesture he had planned for the big moment of the best man's speech.
Fortunately for my enjoyment of the game, we’re not locked into Aiden’s claustrophobic viewpoint the whole way through. In addition to chapters alternating wedding business with flashbacks to Aiden and Laura’s college days, there are also several that follow residents of the town incidentally swept up in the nuptials: the widower Aiden bumps into mid dog-walk, the partner of the Civil-War-obsessed florist (Roundheads vs. Cavaliers, not Blue vs. Gray), the church organist who could have been so much more (maybe?) Besides providing some relief for the reader, these vignettes also highlight Aiden’s self-absorption, laying out the rich seams of life he’s oblivious to in his inability to see anything but (his distorted image of) Laura. There’s also a sequence from the viewpoint of another wedding guest, Nick: a pleasant fellow who tries to make friends with Aiden but is instead ruthlessly judged, partially on the basis of his lower-class food preferences (though being a vegetarian from California, I share some queasiness at Nick’s love of white and black puddings).
Literary fiction lives and dies by the quality of its prose, and The Best Man for the most part gives a good account of itself, with lots of well-observed details and generally naturalistic dialogue. I’m adding caveats because I found the Aiden sections to have noticeably weaker writing than the rest of them. Given the contrast, this is clearly the result of authorial choice: his voice is generally intense to the point of histrionics, and the thing about histrionics is they do sound clangy when written out. Still, I found the dialogue of some other characters also felt clumsy during these sections – the opening exchange with Laura I think has some of the weakest writing of the game, unfortunately – so feel like another editing pass wouldn’t have gone amiss.
I’m quite deep into this review and haven’t mentioned anything about interactivity yet, which isn’t necessarily a kick against how the game deploys its choices but just an indication that they aren't what’s of most interest here. There are opportunities to decide on different high-stakes courses of action for Aiden – most notably how he behaves when it’s time to hand over the rings mid-ceremony, and what he says in an impromptu post-wedding speech – but in most passages, there are options to expand different sections of the text through inline links. While this is definitely a game with a specific story to tell, and you can’t change the viewpoint characters into people that they aren’t, the process of playing The Best Man definitely feels engaging enough.
I can see this game bouncing off of some people, given the comparatively low-key setting and the off-putting central character (the closing narration from Aiden made me think that in the years since the wedding, he’d become an incel or something – he’s that awful). But anyone who likes literary fiction, or a good antihero drama on TV, will find some real enjoyment here.
Highlight: I really, really loved the sequence with Bill, who can turn even the most innocuous of questions into a disquisition on the New Model Army – it made me sympathize with what my loved ones put up with.
Lowlight: The whole sequence with the bride’s 15-year-old sister. Ugh. Just ugh.
How I failed the author: I don’t generally listen to sound when playing IF, and that’s true a fortiori now with the baby since I’m typically playing while Henry’s napping and I don’t want to wake him up (or not hear if he makes noises). From the listing in the credits, though, it seems like there’s a great soundtrack for The Best Man that I’m bummed to have missed – though if there was going to be a Pulp song, I question going with This is Hardcore when Disco 2000 seems to have by far the clearer thematic resonance.
Sublime, January 7, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
When looking over the list of entries into this years Comp, I found myself looking forward to Funicular Simulator 2021 just on the strength of its title. Oddly, I’m a sucker for a good transit-themed game – I’m thinking of the waking-dream fugue of What the Bus in last year’s Comp, or the meditative hangout-game Misty Hills in this year’s Spring Thing. I’m guessing this is partially because I miss my public-transit commute, 18 months into COVID (I used to get a lot of reading done!) Beyond this personal bias, though, I think public transportation is actually a great match with IF: transit is a liminal space, where you can encounter different people whose lives are very different – and while the destination is your own, someone else is driving, so you can sit back and enjoy the journey. Funicular Simulator 2021 is not really a transit-game in the sense I was expecting – there’s nothing quotidian about this trip, as the protagonist is climbing a very special mountain on the night of a once-in-a-lifetime aurora. But it wound up scratching the itch nonetheless, because it provides some of the same pleasures.
Belying its title, Funicular Simulator isn’t about the vehicle but about its passengers. The main gameplay consists of extended conversations with four different people, all of whom are ascending the mountain for the same basic reason – to check out the mountain’s mysterious phenomena – but who ascribe very different meanings to what they’re about to experience. You get to learn more about their backstories and what they’re hoping to find, and while the protagonist is a blank slate, by responding to the various characters and validating or denying their motivations, you can define what's brought you to the mountain. Without spoiling too much, my takeaway was that this is about allowing the player to explore some of the common human responses to the numinous: to look to it for escape, for study, for comfort, or for distraction.
The game doesn’t posit these as exclusive choices, I don’t think, and doesn’t put its thumb on the scales for any one in particular, allowing you to see the value in, as well as the counterarguments against, each worldview (though with that said, I found the artist to be too callow to take seriously – perhaps that’s more about where I’m at in life than about anything in the game, though). You get multiple opportunities to engage with the four characters, and you can spread your attention equally among them, or focus on just one or two to explore their conversations more deeply. Replay shows that there isn’t a huge amount of branching in the content of what they say, but the different choices do feel like they portray the protagonist in a significantly different light, so I found them satisfying.
The writing is strong throughout, taking sentiments that could be cliched and events that could be too abstract to resonate and making them sing. The understated visual design – which portrays the night progressing from the initial golden hour through midnight – aids the immersion. It all leads to a final choice that’s lightly shaped by how you’ve spent your time on the journey. The stakes for this choice weren’t completely clear to me, nor am I sure how much changes based on your decision. But the ending I got was poetic, and felt like it organically built on what came before, so much so that I don’t feel tempted to take the journey again and make different choices just for the sake of it.
Highlight: I found the conversation with the pilgrim character really well-done and personally impactful – her situation could be played for melodrama, but the grounded dialogue and unique worldview she offered made her stand out.
Lowlight: Some of the sequences when you reach the mountain struck me as a little too oblique, but if so it’s a close-run thing.
How I failed the author: I played this one late at night, after a day of Henry not sleeping well at all. But I think this wound up being good, since even though this meant I didn't appreciate the prose as much as I should have done, my zonked-out brain found a lot emotional heft in the game that I might not have been able to experience clearly if I’d been feeling sharper (you ever notice how pregnant with meaning the world can seem at 5 AM when you’ve been up all night?)
A parade of horribles, January 7, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
My favorite band is indie-rockers the Mountain Goats, on the strength not just of the songs but also the witty, humane stage banter. There’s this one bit that's stuck with me ever since I heard it: the frontman talks about how when he first started writing songs, all the romantic ones involved protagonists stalking the objects of their quote-unquote affections, because what’s more emotionally intense than stalking? But of course beyond the super problematic nature of this approach, this means all your songs are kind of the same, and have nowhere to build. So pretty soon he wised up and moved on.
One glance at the content warnings for we, the remainder should indicate why I bring this up – I thought A Papal Summons was going to run away with the Most CWs sweepstakes, but it’s actually a close-run thing. The game is about a disabled girl who’s been left behind when the cult she and her mother belong to transcends their earthly fetters. This is a compelling premise, but I found myself exhausted by the author’s decision to twist every dial to 11. There are piles of dead bodies, gross-out scenes with spoiled food, and a bingo-card’s worth of abuse heaped upon the young protagonist as well as comprehensively meted out from the prophet to all his followers. It’s certainly effective at setting a mood of well-nigh-postapocalyptic horror – and there are indications that some of the terrible things on display are hallucinations brought on by trauma and starvation – but I found it hard to immerse myself in such a grand guignol spectacle, as the comprehensive awfulness put me at a distance. It also made the cult members seem less like real people who’d made understandably-bad choices to trade off their autonomy for a sense of belonging, and more like cardboard cutouts in a cabinet of horrors.
Gameplay-wise, we, the remainder is curiously parser-like, with compass navigation links off to the sides of the screen and each location in the large map offering three or so different objects to interact with. Some are just there for atmosphere, but a few of can be picked up (there are inventory puzzles, but they’re handled automatically so long as you’ve been to the right place to get the right item). And others trigger flashbacks, as the protagonist recalls one or another instance of abuse (there’s a suppressed-memories trope here that feels a bit icky). The writing is effective, as these vignettes do convey a sense of what life was like in the cult – and in fairness, there are a few moments that leaven the near-unremitting darkness of the story with at least potential rays of light. The ending too is reasonably positive, at least the one I got (apparently if you’re less efficient at exploring, you can get different ones). I think it would have rang truer if the path to get there had been less choked with muck, though.
Highlight: There’s an effective bit of characterization early on, where you can decide what single talismanic object you’ve kept hidden from your controlling mother – and once you’ve picked it, there are numerous callbacks to you touching it for comfort as you encounter the compound’s terrors.
Lowlight: Since I was playing on mobile, I accidentally clicked through the aforementioned passage really quickly, and didn’t see a way to undo to see the other choices. I wound up with an Orioles baseball cap, which I guess was OK?
How I failed the author: since I played on my phone, the cool ascii-art map didn’t display properly, which made navigation difficult. Though east and west seemed to be flipped on my screen in a confusing way, and having the map available maybe would have made me feel like I was playing Angband, so perhaps it’s for the best!
Shapeshifting fantasy adventure, January 7, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Puzzley fantasy adventures don’t tend to be my favorite IF subgenre, but they’ve got deep roots and an undeniable cozy appeal. I was surprised it took me about 2/3 of the way into the Comp to get to one on this year – they’re typically thick on the ground, so maybe they’re falling out of favor? Fortunately, Finding Light does a good job flying the flag, with enough of a twist on the hoary standards of the genre to stay fresh and puzzles that go down easy. It’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s a worthwhile way to scratch this kind of itch.
Let’s start with the twist, since it’s tied up with the premise: you play a familiar spirit, bound to a boy with magical abilities and able to swap between human and fox shapes at will (the human shape kind of threw me for a loop since it gives the whole nonconsensual soul-binding thing a creepier vibe). The game starts with him being kidnapped by raiders, so it’s up to you to sneak into their fortress and set him free. Your different forms have different abilities – as a fox, you can track scents and talk to other animals, whereas as a human you have hands and er, color vision? Really, the fox gets the better end of the stick here – which come in useful as you work through a series of simple obstacles, from a maze with a twist to a couple of fetch quests.
None of these puzzles are anything too tricky, but they’re not trying to be too brain-melting and they don’t overstay their welcome. Similarly, the setting sketched-in, and the boy you’re bound to doesn’t register as much of a character, but they work well enough to justify what you’re doing. There’s a topic system that makes conversation with the various animals you encounter go down easily, too – these are actually a highlight, since while your master is rather a bowl of oatmeal, the raven, rat, and horses you meet have personality.
Implementation-wise, there are a few small niggles. I ran into a bug where trying to go in non-cardinal directions either didn’t produce any output, or gave a response that only made sense in the maze, and there were some missing synonyms or fiddly action phrasing required in a few places. But it's nothing too major, and the puzzles are well-clued and smoothly implemented. I think this is the author’s first game, and it’s an impressive debut both in terms of programming and design – I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what they do next!
Highlight: The raven was my favorite character, and it was fun to take reading material back to her to decode.
Lowlight: The game doesn’t have any ABOUT or CREDITS text as far as I can tell, so I’m not sure whether there were testers – if not, this is impressively smooth, but regardless, always have testers!
How I failed the author: I was reasonably tired when playing this one, so I appreciated the overall gentle difficulty, but I was thrown for a loop by what was supposed to be a hint: the rat says he has exactly three things to trade, so after I got three things from him I thought I was done, without realizing that one of them was a freebie that didn't count as an additional swap, and I had one more left. Fortunately this didn’t hold me up for too long.
A multiplayer experiment that doesn't live up to its promise, January 7, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Alexisgrad has a grabby premise and a killer gimmick I don’t think I’ve seen before in the Comp. Start with the premise: we’re in a fantasy world, albeit a grounded one whose politics and social organization seem quite resonant with our own circa the late 18th/early 19th century. The title city wrested its independence from an authoritarian monarchy some time ago, but has recently been weakened by a bout of Paris Commune-style internecine violence, and now the monarchy’s armies are coming to reclaim what they lost so long ago. And as the blurb makes clear, they will succeed: the game is about how Alexisgrad falls, not whether it will.
I love this setup – the time period and politics being invoked are ones that personally appeal to me, and knowing the outcome makes it fatalistic, sure, but that gives the player more freedom to try to create an interesting story, rather than focusing on optimizing their outcomes. Or I should say “players”, since that’s the gimmick: this is a two-player game, with one person making choices for the city’s dictator and the other taking on the role of the kingdom’s general. Here again the foreordained result is a good design decision, setting up this multiplayer experience as one of collaborative storytelling rather than an opportunity for cutthroat PvP.
Unfortunately, I found the actual implementation of the story didn’t live up to my (perhaps too-high) expectations. I played through twice, once on each side, and while the dictator’s side of the story was more engaging, both times the experience fell a bit flat, and petered out rather than reaching a satisfying climax. Partly this is down to the writing feeling like it could use an editing pass to tighten up – there’s a lot of description of the city’s architecture and history in the early going, as well as ruminations on the current situation, and while the substance is good it sometimes feels repetitive, with the same idea or fact being restated two or three times without offering any new information. Relatedly, the game features long passages between choices, which is a solid decision that minimizes the amount of back-and-forth required between the players, but can exacerbate the sometimes tension-deflating flabbiness of the prose.
The bigger issue, though, is that the choices generally didn’t feel especially interesting or consequential, with no real surprises or aces up their sleeve on either side. The early decisions primarily focus on the defense of the city, but the kingdom’s forces are so overwhelming that the stakes didn't feel high – not only is the outcome never in doubt, I never felt like the dictator had much ability to exact any pain along the way or play for extra time. Then in the second half, there’s an extended negotiation between the two characters over the terms of surrender, but again the dictator doesn’t have any real leverage and it’s not clear whether the general has the autonomy to create significantly different post-war settlements. The most interesting options in this section involve digging into the recent history of the city, and the attitudes of the two characters towards the revolution are satisfying to explore, but this feels like idle conversation, with no substantial impact on future events.
It’s a shame because I can imagine some fun dilemmas spinning out of this setup, where the two-player gameplay would add a note of uncertainty. If the dictator had some card to play in negotiations, it could set up interesting tradeoffs: they could be forced to decide which of the city’s freedoms to protect, for example, or the general could decide whether they want to prop up one of the city’s factions against the others in the occupation. So while I don’t think this incarnation of Last Night of Alexisgrad quite succeeds, it’s definitely a promising proof-of-concept for an IF two-hander and I hope there’s more to come from this author in the future!
Highlight: The dictator’s opening text is very compelling, dramatizing the impact of the invasion by describing the dictator’s recent political work, and how it suddenly no matters in the slightest.
Lowlight: In my second play-through, where I was making decisions for the dictator, I tried to make the conquest as painful as possible, and be more confrontational in the conversation with the general. None of my efforts seem to slow them down in the slightest, and then the general had me summarily shot.
How I failed the author: I couldn’t schedule a time to sit down and play through the game in a single sitting with a partner, so I had to play asynchronously, with gaps between DMs with my partner. It still worked OK, I thought, even though that wasn't the intended experience.
Too many endings, January 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I have conflicting feelings on Goat Game, a short-for-each-playthrough choice-based game about the queasy moral tradeoffs forced on us by capitalism. It tells a grounded story well, with just enough worldbuilding to connect this city of anthropomorphic goats to our own situation without getting bogged down. But it also has 15 different endings, and between the two-hour suggested game length and some intimations in the game, it seems like the intended experience is for the player to reach all 15. Replaying made me like it less than I did the first time out, though, and I bailed after only seeing three, making me wonder whether a more curated narrative experience would have served the story better.
This is one of those stories where everybody’s an anthropomorphic animal – I think it’s 100% goats – but it’s not about jokes, it’s about social comment. You play a young researcher who works for the city’s hottest tech company, which has introduced groundbreaking innovations in biotech (I praised the lightness of the worldbuilding above, but I will say I would have liked a little more detail on what exactly the company made, and how the technobabbley magic purple pearls behind the processes worked). The early sections of the game are very slice-of-life, as you decide how to spend your workday, choose your general attitude and morale level, and interact with coworkers and family. These choices impact a triad of stats: “social”, “work”, and “opportunity”, the first two of which are clear enough though was a bit confused by the last.
The game quickly reveals it’s about a small set of major decisions rather than the accretion of lots of little ones slowly impacting these stats, though. A Big Event happens that implicates the company, and there are a few heavier-weighted choices about how you respond that determine which ending you get. Without spoiling things too much, it’s all very Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, with a satisfying range of options that let you articulate how you’re attempting to mediate the tensions that are pulling you in multiple directions at once – and while it’s not a direct allegory, there’s clear, strong resonance with any number of modern corporate scandals that I suspect would ring true for anyone who’s ever worked at a big, profit-driven institution.
The writing is a strength here, understated, with a good ear for dialogue, and rarely didactic – while some characters will push a Manichean worldview, the game itself doesn’t feel too judgmental… until you hit an ending, which is where my troubles with Goat Game began. My first time through, I picked generally positive options when asked about my attitude towards work, but when the opportunity came to take action to improve the company, I jumped on just about all of them (Spoiler - click to show)(I signed the petition and organized a walkout, though I didn’t badmouth the company on live TV and didn’t quit), putting myself clearly in a reform-from-within mode.
The ending I got, though, was labelled “inertial paralysis” and saw me disempowered and obsessing over work to the exclusion of all human (er, goat) contact, despite having finished with a “medium” ranking in the social stat. This didn’t feel like an organic capstone to the choices I’d made, and came off like a blunt authorial intervention judging some decisions as good and some as bad. And indeed, when I replayed and intentionally made choices that I felt were more about drifting through life and shutting out other people, but quit the company in my final decision, I got a much more hopeful ending that similarly rang false.
It’d be fine for the game to have a strong point of view – like, I think it’s totally great to make a game arguing that attempts to use inside tactics to reform a corporation are doomed to failure, that’s actually pretty close to what I personally believe! – but Goat Game presents itself as more ecumenical than this and I didn’t think it indicated that this stuff was being ineffective as you’re making these decisions. The structure also makes it hard for the game to stake out a specific angle, because of all those endings and the strong implication that you’re supposed to collect a bunch of them, rather than there being a single “true” or “best” ending to achieve. There’s an omnipresent set of asterisks marking which of them you’ve already achieved, and after getting a third ending, I got some new concluding text suggesting there’s some kind of meta progression being tracked.
This is pretty standard practice in visual novels, I think, but there you usually have convenience features to help zoom through stuff you’ve seen before, more narrative branching (here you pretty much always get the same events – choices are primarily about shifting a paragraph or two in how you respond to them), and tools to track which you’ve gotten to. Here, it’s not clear to me how the different choices and stats translate to specific endings. I’d already made the decision I thought were most satisfying after my first time or two through, so getting all fifteen feels like it’d require building a spreadsheet and doing some rote lawnmowering, which wasn’t appealing this late in the Comp. It’s possible that completing the grid would reveal more of what the game’s about and resolve some of these contradictions, but I’m left wishing the significant effort that went into Goat Game had delivered a more focused experience rather than such broad but less-rewarding replayability.
Highlight: I really liked the main character’s cousin, Miriam. She clearly cares about the protagonist and is looking out for her, but also has her own stuff going on. So often in games it can feel like the world revolves around the protagonist so it’s refreshing to see someone who sometimes doesn’t have time for you.
Lowlight: conversely, the character of Ira, the union organizer, really took me out of the game. He seems realistically teed off at the company’s management, but also has a scorched-earth approach that doesn’t jibe with the labor folks I’ve known, who are keenly aware that if a workplace is “brought to the ground”, as Ira boasts at one point, all their folks are going to be out of a job.
How I failed the author: as with many of the choice-based games in this year’s Comp, I played this one on my phone while Henry napped on me. It worked perfectly well, but unfortunately that meant the lovely art was displayed at postage-stamp size – from looking at the cover image I can tell that means I missed out so this was maybe me failing myself.
Achievement-hunting fun, January 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I’ve played a number of Arthur DiBianca’s signature limited-parser games – including just getting to the first Grandma Bethlinda instalment a couple months ago – and have generally really enjoyed them, with last year’s Sage Sanctum Scramble being my favorite. GBRE has a different vibe than that unabashed word-based puzzlefest, and I took a little while longer to get into it, but by the time I was digging into the as-always generous post-game content I was definitely having fun.
As always there’s not much plot – you’ve managed to handcuff yourself, and you need to give one-word commands to the Rube-Goldberg-meets-Alexa egg to get yourself free – so it’s all about the gameplay as you explore the egg's functionality and unlock new commands by running through its autorepair sequence. Despite this setup, GBRE is actually much thinner on puzzles than I was expecting at first – there are maybe three or four that gate progress on the repairs, and they’re good ones, but mostly the gameplay is focused on exploration, as you try out the commands you unlock at each stage, figure out the potential interactions between them, and guess at other commands the egg might accept.
Until I got to the ending, I found this pleasant enough but not that engaging – it felt more like a toy than a game, and while it’s delightful to see what the egg will do next, by the end of a half-hour the novelty had started to wear off. Getting to the end unlocks a full Extra Credit list, though, which basically serves as an achievement system, with 21 different entries clued only by their titles.
This endgame content starts to require more focused problem-solving, while retaining the whimsy and discovery of the main section of the game. Some are really easy (Spoiler - click to show)(”Greetings” just requires saying HELLO to the egg), some yield after a modicum of thought (Spoiler - click to show)(”Grrrr” clearly has to do with the dog and the bone…), and some require a good dose of lateral thinking (Spoiler - click to show)(racecar ones, I’m looking at you). A lot of this is trial-and-error, but it’s the fun kind of trial and error where you smash toys together to see what will happen – it reminded me of the old Doodle God Flash games.
Amid a Comp that has lots of games dealing with really serious themes and ideas, it’s nice to get a playful palette-cleaner like GBRE – definitely treat it like a Marvel movie and stick around after the ending to get the most out of it, though!
Highlight: Figuring out Exterminator made me feel very clever.
Lowlight: I ran through every permutation of answer to the SURVEY command and was disappointed not to get any validation for my completionist instincts (I have a problem).
How I failed the author: After getting about a third of the Extra Credit points, I was figuring this was going to be it for me given that I have less time for IF Comp this year, but after putting GBRE aside I thought to start a hint thread, and using that was able to get all the points. So I lost out on some of the joy of discovery, but gained the hollow validation of checking every item off a long list – yay me?
An enticing bouillabaisse, January 5, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Mermaids of Ganymede is a Twine game that packs a lot into its hourlong playtime, as you help the crew of a research ship escape from a disaster that strands them under the waters of the eponymous moon – over its five chapters, it ranges in genre from survival horror to planetary romance and back, establishes half a dozen characters with mechanics for their morale and mental health, and includes a swap-quest chain and a devilishly timed maze, all wrapped up in a stylish visual design. None of these individual bits have much time to breathe or expand beyond their stereotypical aspects, but because the game is very well-paced, this doesn’t matter as much as you might think – there’s always a new twist to the plot, a new character to encounter, or a new challenge to navigate to keep the player glued to their seat.
The downside is that after reaching the end, I had the feeling that despite the plethora of choices and ways to engage with the characters, nothing I did mattered very much – the abbreviated ending text doesn’t help, nor do the couple small bugs I encountered (Spoiler - click to show)(the beginning of Chapter 3 seemed to assume I knew who someone named Undine was, but I’d never heard of them, possibly because I escaped Chapter 2’s city at earliest opportunity, and Chapter 5 also seemed to think I’d asked the said Undine for weapons, not just a ship) – but there’s nothing wrong with a linear roller-coaster that’s got a robust illusion of depth (little ocean pun for you there).
Highlight: I found the opening sequence surprisingly tense, as I tried to juggle the crewmembers’ moods and sanity while getting to the bottom of what was stalking the ship.
Lowlight: Chapter 4 is an extended maze sequence that turns into an extended timed maze sequence partways through – that’s a tricky bit of design to manage without creating frustration, and unfortunately I think this maze errs too much on the side of frustration, as I can’t imagine anyone could get through it without at least one death and restart (three or four is probably more realistic).
How I have failed the author: I was playing this on my phone with my left hand while Henry napped on my right arm, so even though I figured out I should really make a map to get through the Chapter 4 puzzle, I just bashed my way through with multiple trial-and-error deaths.
A big mystery to get sucked into, January 5, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Ghosts Within is a sprawling mystery, with a big map, myriad puzzles, and three distinct openings that shift the available puzzles and endings. It all adds up to a long running time that pushes it well beyond the Comp’s two-hour limit, even discounting the absence of a hint system or a walkthrough (authors: please don’t do this!). It’s the kind of game that’s ill-served by the Comp, since it’s one you’d want to sink into, taking careful notes and talking to all the characters about every topic you can think of, while mapping out the queer seaside town where the action takes place. The story’s also perhaps ill-served, I think, by a too-close fidelity to an old-school medium-dry-goods approach to gameplay. It’s still very much worth playing, but while Ghosts Within is a fun, engaging game, it falls a bit short of greatness.
The game’s opening is bewildering, as you wake up wounded in a forbidding forest, but intentionally so – we’ve got an amnesiac protagonist, natch. If that piece of the premise is par for the course, what happens next is novel, as your choice of which direction to stagger towards determines which of three vignettes will set the plot in motion. You’ve got a choice of starting at the village, the nearby research facility (as it turns out, the setting is roughly contemporary), or the hut of a local recluse. I stumbled hut-ward, which I’m guessing might provide the least-clear impetus for investigation. The lonely hermit there clearly has an agenda, but is rather tight-lipped. That opening also appears to mean the mysterious research institute is off-limits, meaning that I entered the large village map with only a rough sense of what I was meant to be doing.
The process of walking through the village’s environs and meeting all of its inhabitants is rewarding, but rather overwhelming. The map isn’t excessively big when you’ve finished running around it, but there are a lot of false exits and diagonal connections that make it hard to hold in your head. And while the cast is actually pretty small, each character is implemented with a very deep set of conversational topics that are fun to dig into, but again feel like a lot when you’re first meeting everybody. I wound up wishing there’d been some gating to separate off a portion of the village to make it more manageable, and give the player a chance for some puzzle-solving to break up the exposition.
This isn’t to say the exposition is uninteresting: to the contrary, the story that slowly emerges is compellingly drawn (the writing is also very clean – there are a few small infelicities of phrasing and tiny typos, but nothing that stands out given the amount of text here on offer). The village is still reeling from the aftermath of a decades-ago tragedy, and figuring out how each person is connected to that formative event, and seeing the details fleshed in one at a time, makes for satisfying gameplay. There are other narrative strands too, though they might not all be available after all openings – I learned that the scientists at the institute were very interested in the fog that cloaks the town, but never found a way to advance that piece of the plot. I finished with only about 80% of the points, though, so I could be missing a true ending that unifies the disparate pieces of the plot – the one I reached was satisfying enough, but felt a bit rushed, with a couple quick revelations culminating in an admittedly-stale twist (I would have gone back and tried for another, but I saved at what I thought was the point of no return, only to find out you’re locked into the endgame once the door to the final cave is opened up, regardless of whether you’ve entered or not).
Beyond the story, the other high point is the implementation. In addition to the aforementioned conversation system, scenery is always present, and usually modeled two or three levels down; SMELL is implemented with custom responses in nearly every location, too. Barring one tiny disambiguation issue with oranges, the parser is completely smooth. With that said, I did sometimes struggle with guess-the-verb issues. The puzzles here are pretty archetypal: you’ll be finding a light source, getting into locked doors, going on collectathons so NPCs will do you favors, and digging up two different patches of disturbed ground. They’re not very distinctive, though many of them do involve engaging with the well-realized cast of characters, which is nice. Many of them require very specific actions, though – I knew I needed the help of a security guard to get something, but had to try half a dozen phrasings to secure her aid, and there are a set of crates that only give up their secrets if you LOOK BEHIND them, with a regular EXAMINE or even MOVE or LOOK UNDER going nowhere.
This adds to the already-generous game length, and the puzzles are fun to work through, but they did sometimes feel somewhat disconnected from the character-driven mystery at the game’s heart – and again, the omission of hints or a walkthrough seems a disservice to players who are engaged by the narrative but left cold by the inventory-juggling. On the flip side, this does mean the game’s secrets are that much more enticing since they’re not handed to the player on a silver platter – I can definitely see myself coming back to this one post-Comp to see if I can get a better ending, albeit I might wait for some other kind soul to pull together a walkthrough first!
Highlight: The village and its inhabitants are really fun to explore – its eerie seaside environs put me in mind of Anchorhead, though the vibe here is much less menacing.
Lowlight: After a lot of effort, I managed to retrieve a missing bouquet of flowers and give it to the appropriate character – but as far as I could tell this didn’t lead to any new plot unfurling to pay off the effort (I did get a lot of points, though).
How I failed the author: I didn’t rank this one as high a it probably deserves, since after two hours of repeated 20-minute sessions – which involved a lot of going back over old ground to remember where I’d already been and what I’d already done – I hadn’t yet solved many puzzles, and I hadn’t come across much of the plot. Again, this is a good game that’s an awkward fit for the Comp!
Horrible but lacking in avoirdupois, January 5, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
One thing is clear straightaway about A Papal Summons, or The Church Cat: if the Comp were judged based solely on content warnings, it would be leading the pack. Just reading the list is enough to raise the hackles, even before starting in on this Twine game’s theatre of horrors. These aren’t idle warnings, either – while I’m not sure I ran into everything in my playthrough, based on what I did see, I’m more than willing to believe that the missing enormities were lurking behind some of the doors I left unexplored.
The parade of misery isn’t just here for shock value, either. The game’s plot sees its priest protagonist summoned to the 15th-century Vatican to present a prodigy of nature to the pope, but the structure is a descent through greater and greater depravity, with some of the contemporary Church’s well-documented crimes presented alongside supernatural violations that are polemical exaggeration, not mere fantasy. I’m running out of euphemistic synonyms for “really bad thing”, but suffice to say that I ran into Torquemada and one of the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum and purchased a plenary indulgence (albeit from a shrine dedicated to Mammon), but also found a brothel being run by an Abbess right next to the construction site for St. Peters, and far more besides.
The writing effectively conveys the awfulness of what you’re seeing, with some more modern touches to the dialogue preventing the distancing effect of history from undercutting the impact of what’s happening. Indeed, the way harm to children becomes a more and more salient motif as the game progresses makes it clear that it’s not just the 15th-Century incarnation of the church that’s being critiqued here. This is all fair enough – there’s a reason the Reformation kicked off shortly after the time being depicted here – but at the same time, it’s not exactly unplowed ground, and while the arguments land with a bit more force than usual given the luridness on display, I wound up wishing there was a bit more flesh on the bones, a bit more complexity in the portrait of how a horrible institution perpetuates itself that doesn’t rely on painting everyone concerned as a villain or a dupe. If the game was content with deploying its imagery just in the service of scares, that would be one thing, but since it’s clearly more than just a haunted hayride I wound up wanting more.
Commenting on the game-y aspects of The Church Cat feels a bit besides the point, but it’s well-structured, with choices allowing you to select which terrible thing you’ll confront next on your trip into the bowels of the Church (mercifully, you also are allowed to run away from some of the more disturbing scenes). There were a few aspects of the implementation that aped some parser conventions, like a persistent inventory link and occasional directional navigation – typically I like this sort of thing, but they’re best suited for a puzzle-based experience, which this definitely isn’t, so they felt redundant. Streamlining them away wouldn’t make it more fun, but would probably make it more focused on its core, horrible themes.
Highlight: Slight spoiler here: (Spoiler - click to show)the cat that speaks to quote from scripture is neat, and I appreciated that it lifted up some of the wilder bits of the Bible – the passage where a bunch of kids make fun of Elisha for being bald, so the prophet curses them and two bears maul them to death, is a personal favorite.
Lowlight/How I failed the author : Hopefully the author will not be offended if I say that the game was pretty much all lowlight for me – it’s gross and scary and horrible, and as a new father I was especially not excited to read about bad stuff happening to small kids. I still think it’s good at accomplishing what it sets out to, but man I did not enjoy it one bit.
A character-driven adventure with some bumps along the way, January 4, 2022(This review was posted on the IF newsgroups immediately after the 2005 IF Comp)
Clearly, I haven't sufficiently internalized the tropes of adventure gaming: I was stymied for quite a while in the opening of Unforgotten, because after being told that my friend really didn't want anyone to break into his belongings and read his diary, my reaction was to respect his privacy. More the fool I.
For much of the game, Unforgotten seems primarily about sticking one's nose into other people's business—the primary action is in unraveling the secrets of the family of the player's friend. Unfortunately, the contours of the central mystery—not its solution, simply the setup—are very unclear until relatively late in the game, and the author's penchant for twists make the story more confusing than it needs to be. Underneath the continual Big Reveals, there's an interesting story, but the thriller tropes wound up getting in the way of the interesting relationships.
Unforgotten's beginning is probably its weakest section; after the rather forced searching of the friend's possessions, the player is thrust into a conversation which reveals some backstory, but leaves important concepts and facts unexplained. Then without warning, the setting abruptly shifts, without the player being aware of what exactly has happened. This middle section, which contains the meat of the game, is clearer, and the player has specific goals to work towards, but just when I felt like I had my bearings, an NPC—the aforementioned friend's sister—began launching into exposition whose relevance wasn't immediately clear. Soon after, the player is thrust into two vignettes, widely separated in time and space, which are likewise fairly disorienting, and cast everything that's come before into doubt. And then there's a final big twist at the end (albeit this last one is rather heavily choreographed). I do enjoy games which are one big meta-puzzle—Jon Ingold's corpus comes to mind—but here, the twists just pile up on each other, yanking the player one way then the other. Eventually whiplash—and fatigue—set in.
This is too bad, because the relationships between the three main characters—the player character, his friend, and the friend's sister—are interesting, and drive most of the action. Foregrounding them a little more, keeping the friend around for a while longer so the player can form an attachment to him, and keeping the story more focused by more aggressively framing the problem which the player is attempting to solve, would have made for a stronger, sharper, more affecting game. As is, the wall-to-wall twists make the proceedings feel contrived, and the game doesn't allow sufficient space for the repercussions of each individual revelation to play out, which really reduces their impact.
Unforgotten does do a good job of integrating puzzles into what's a fairly plot-heavy game. The initial journal-stealing sequence, for all my grumbling, is actually well-put together; depending on how exactly the player goes about it, there are a number of possible outcomes. There's a lot of fairly intuitive sneaking around, and except for that first sequence, the player usually knows precisely what to work towards. I found one puzzle in particular to be shaky—lowering a doped pie to attack dogs on the end of a fishing rod feels far too slapsticky for this game, and LOWER PIE seemed a much more natural way of doing this than LOWER ROD—but otherwise the puzzles are well clued, even when the player doesn't necessarily know what they're meant to be doing.
One sequence does demonstrate the fact that too few games depict the player character reacting to events [much-later edit: this sequence might also merit a content warning in the more-enlightened 2020s]. There's a scene in Unforgotten where the player is controlling a little girl who, while hiding, overhears two soldiers talk about raping her mother—this strikes me as a rather traumatic event, but for all the game discloses, the girl reacts with stone-faced impassivity. I'm not lobbying for histrionics here, but any human being would be really upset in this situation, and the tension of perhaps calling attention to yourself could make for a more dramatically interesting scene.
Still, Unforgotten does pay more attention to questions of character than do most games, and its narrative shortcomings are real but not fatal. Definitely worth a play.
A grown-up but rather punishing post-apocalypse, January 4, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Typically for an Adventuron game, Second Wind makes a great first impression, with an awesome comic-book cover image and slick maps helping immerse you in the postapocalyptic setting. The premise is also refreshingly grown-up and grounded: the main character’s wife has gone into labor, some complications have arisen, and now she needs a c-section or she and the baby will die. Making matters worse, the only doctor around is the main character’s ex-wife, who lives in a neighboring settlement – and between the bad breakup and the trek though the postnuclear wastes, enlisting her aid isn’t going to be easy. I unfortunately left Second Wind less impressed than I was when I began playing it, largely down to some incongruous, mimesis-breaking puzzle design and a punishing time limit that almost requires a restart and retry, but it’s still worth playing through.
I found the story the most engaging part of Second Wind. It doesn’t get drawn too deeply beyond what you see in the blurb, but the simple dialogue and intense dilemma faced by the main character pulled me in. And in a sea of protagonists with no family ties, a divorced main character is a novelty – especially since it positions your character has having been in the wrong, since he cheated on his ex-wife, Wendy, with his current one. This lends the sequences where you’re groveling for Wendy’s help a queasy vulnerability that I haven’t seen in much IF before. The postapocalyptic backdrop works well enough to create stakes, but it’s the domestic drama that really drives the emotional engagement.
The gameplay is where things worked less well for me. Some of the challenges on offer do match the tone, like figuring out how to wrangle transportation for Wendy. But most of the obstacles gating progress feel very gamey. There are several different keycodes you need to find, one of which is drawn from Les Miserables in a way that’s just this side of reasonable, the other – a reference to Tommy Tutone’s 1981 hit “867-5309 (Jenny)” – a completely implausible choice for characters who we’re told were born around 2000. There’s also a word-scramble, and a series of puzzles that require out-of-game googling of some fairly obscure facts in order to figure out a safe combination. And then there’s the trial-and-error maze.
These aren’t awful puzzles in themselves, and I’d have enjoyed coming across them in a puzzlefest, but they felt at odds with the downbeat vibe created by the story and setting. And while none of them are too hard, some take a while to work through, which meant I ran afoul of the game’s strict time limit. A ticking clock definitely makes sense given the premise, but I wished it applied only to longer actions, like travel through the wilderness or building or fixing machinery, or at least was pitched a little more generously, since the time limit disincentivized exploring the world, and made the maze at the end feel like authorial sadism.
The writing is serviceable, with a few evocative notes here and there – we’re told that in the shelter, “filtered air hisses gently from behind recessed lights”, which is a nicely-considered detail. And I didn’t have problems with the parser -- sometimes an Adventuron weak point -- partially because the author does a good job of prompting the right syntax (this is usually done through out-of-world notes, and while I suppose it would have been smoother to integrate them into in-world descriptions, given the time pressure erring on the side of convenience was probably the right choice). I just wish the puzzles had done the same, either by being more organically connected to the plot or just being dialed back.
Highlight: there’s an effective late-game twist that ramps up the tension even further – and actually adds its own further time limit, which now that I think about it could have substituted for the overall one.
Lowlight: that safe puzzle, which had me going to Wikipedia to look up things like (Spoiler - click to show)the Japanese term for an a-bomb survivor. As far as I could tell, there’s no way to access this information in the game – I wasted time looking in the various computer systems to see if there was a library function – and the puzzle isn’t clever enough to justify this crime against mimesis.
How I failed the author: it’s unfair to hold this against the author, but the risk of harm to a pregnant woman and baby – and actually the reality, because they do both die if the time runs out – landed pretty heavily on me give my circumstances, and I kind of resented failure at these silly puzzles leading to such a dire outcome.
A mythological romp that's childish in a good way, January 4, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I have to confess to finding the initial presentation of Hercules! off-putting. Sure, the twelve labors provide a sturdy framework for a puzzley parser adventure, and I’m hardly in a position to object to injecting comedy into old Greek stuff after my IF Comp game from last year, but the blurb, from the sophomoric premise (Hercules is a puny asthmatic) and use of profanity to the content warnings’ promise of scatology to come, seemed to promise a game with an annoyingly middle-school sensibility.
Happily, though, while that impression isn’t far off, Hercules! wears its relative immaturity well, exuberantly boasting jokes that mostly land on the entertaining side of dumb (I appreciated being told that the shoals weren’t hard rocks, but classic rocks, for example) The mostly-simple puzzles are usually pleasant to work through, with polished implementation and a plot that hits enough of the classical beats to show the author’s done the work while making some welcome tweaks to better accord with modern tastes (there’s no wife- or child-murder here, thankfully, but there is a climax calling back to all the friends you’ve made along the way).
Highlight: one of the most charming aspects of Hercules! is its map – you’re plopped down in a geographically-accurate but much-compressed version of Greece where a simple “GO SOUTHEAST” will take you from the shore of the Peloponnese to Crete. And while the available geography is large, if you go to a location too early, Hercules gets a bad feeling, which helps keep the scope manageable (all the labors must be done in order, understandably enough).
Lowlight: while the puzzles are mostly straightforward object-manipulation exercises, there are a few that feel underclued or fiddly (Spoiler - click to show)(falling asleep so you can hunt the hind in a dream world, for example, which doesn’t seem to be an idea suggested anywhere, and having to do the pendant rigmarole four times with four different mares is annoying busywork), especially I think in in the second half of the game (though see below). Exacerbating this, you can pick up a large number of junk items during labor number seven, which clogged up my inventory in the latter half of the game and made sussing out what to do more challenging – other labors get rid of unneeded items once they’re concluded, and it’d have been better if the same approach was taken here.
How I have failed the author: I was able to get through the first two thirds of the game in an hour, with baby napping next to me. He started to stir, though, about when I was trying to get the mares from Diomedes, and let me tell you, there is no video-game timer mechanic more stressful than trying to finish a parser game before a newborn wakes up! As a result I kind of panicked and wasn’t thinking very clearly for the last chunk of the game, and had recourse to the hints if I couldn’t solve a puzzle in like thirty seconds. On the plus side, I did get Hercules to his happy ending just before Henry needed a diaper change, so that’s doubly a win.
A wonky game wedded to an enticing setting, January 3, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Reading the blurb for ICM, I realized that just as this Comp has been thin on fantasy adventures, it’s been positively skeletal on mysteries. I really enjoy them despite being awful at them, and this Quest game has a compelling setup: we’ve got a cruise ship for the pampered elite of an Italianish steampunk world, a dead bishop, and a creepily clever mechanic where you can don different masks to vary your aspect as you interrogate the array of witnesses and suspects. Sadly I ran into some technical issues that meant I couldn’t finish the game, and the puzzles lean more fetch-quest-y than mystery-solving, but I still enjoyed my time with it – I’ll be keeping an eye out for a post-Comp release.
The biggest positive here really is the setting. There’s an air of decadence that oozes from every overdone decoration or costumed passenger on the ship, and hobnobbing with slumming sopranos and vicious empresses is quite the good time. Poking your head into all the nooks and crannies makes the initial exploration lots of fun, while the on-screen map and compact layout still make it easy to get around when it’s time to dig into puzzle-solving. The prose doesn’t go too far over the top, either, relying on a few well-chosen details rather than slathering adjectives about willy-nilly. This restraint holds true for information on the overall society, too, with a few optional books and throwaway references hinting at an interesting world without getting bogged down in exposition. Sometimes the writing can err on the side of providing atmosphere and a general vibe rather than nailing down specifics of furniture, which can make some of the locations feel bare once you’ve read the introductory paragraph, but this again makes it easier to shift into progress-making mode. And there’s clever attention to detail, too: when you pick up a knife while wearing a bestial devil-mask, an extra sentence appears saying that it “reminds you of one of your fangs.”
Speaking of the mask, that’s the other immediate standout. Masks are a big deal in this setting, and besides going bare-faced, you have the choice of four to wear as you do your work: a devil, a cherub, a widow, and an anonymizing half-mask. Some puzzles revolve around having the right one on at the right time, with different dialogue options or actions being unlocked. I wasn’t really clear what this looked like from the perspective of the other characters in the game world – like, if there’s something supernatural changing their behavior when they see you don a mask – but it adds a needed additional bit of business to interacting with other NPCs: mysteries in IF are often tricky to solve because they can require repeat play, with careful tracking of NPC schedules, but things are more straightforward here, with movement only being triggered by your actions.
NPC autonomy isn’t ICM’s only departure from mystery orthodoxy, though. There’s some evidence to be gathered, primarily through SEARCH, LOOK BEHIND, etc., but for the most part you’re doing favors for the cast of characters, and at least in the first stages, they’re largely well-signposted scavenger-hunts. This makes it easier to make progress, since you usually have a list of specific tasks to accomplish and places to poke around. On the flip side, for the portions of the game I saw, I felt less like a detective creating a web of deductions to snare a murderer, and more a traditional adventure-game protagonist doing favors for people until they explained the plot.
This might change in the final section of the game, though, since I ran into some bugs just as thing were starting to come to a climax. After showing a piece of evidence to someone, I started getting repeated out-of-memory errors printing out down the screen. I was eventually able to type some commands which appeared to make the errors stop, but when I attempted to save, the interpreter froze (I was playing offline, per the recommendation in the blurb) – and what’s worse, this seemed to have corrupted the save. Since I’d already gotten close to the two-hour mark, that’s where I left things. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and depending on how the finale goes I could see ICM tipping over into something really special, but I’ll wait for a post-Comp release to find out.
Highlight: the ship’s library has a book with extensive excerpts from an in-universe opera which provides a lot of cool flavor for the world.
Lowlight: there are a few puzzles that have guess-the-verb issues – in particular, when a particular character asked me for some medical help, asking or telling the doctor about them does nothing (I had to ASK them FOR MEDICINE instead).
How I failed the author: life’s been pretty busy the last few days, (including Henry getting some vaccines yesterday that led to a stomachache and bad sleep last night), so I had an extended pause after my first forty-five minutes in the game that meant that when I came back to it, I had to spend a bunch of time reading back over what had happened – which in turn meant that when I ran into the bugs, I didn’t have enough time left to start over.
A grounds-eye view of a bureaucracy failing a child, January 3, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
You don’t hear much about the uncanny valley these days – we all remember the term for the creepy middle-ground between CGI characters that are too real to scan as cartoonish but too plastic to scan as real? Despite being everywhere around the turn of the millennium, I haven’t heard anyone sling the phrase in quite a while, whether because CGI’s gotten sufficiently good, or – more sinister – we’ve all just become inured to hyperreal hyperpolygonated faces.
I bring this up not to critique the graphics in Corsham Witch Trial – it doesn’t have any, natch – but to explain the trap my brain got stuck in when playing it, due to an awkward mismatch between me and the game. The premise has a young paralegal tasked by their boss with reviewing documents from an unsuccessful case from a couple of years previous. Despite the title, there’s nothing supernatural going on: the eponymous witch hunt is a question-begging label for the suit, which involved bringing an English child protective services staffer to court on charges of criminal negligence after they failed to act to prevent the death of a child. It’s presented largely through primary sources, with IM messages between the paralegal and a colleague (this is where the game’s few choices are made) framing a collection of documents like trial transcripts, incident reports, email threads, and so on. There’s a lot of verisimilitude here, with links in the main narrative often going to Google Drive files that are impressively mocked up, featuring convincingly-deployed acronyms and reasonable-sounding invocations of procedural rules.
This is where things went awry with my expectations, though. I’ve got a law degree (albeit from the U.S., and the only times I’ve been in a courtroom were for jury duty - I know just enough to get myself in trouble), so I ate all this up. But very quickly, my outside knowledge started taking me out of the story – it’s sufficiently grounded that I couldn’t put on Phoenix-Wright goggles and ignore departures from plausibility, but it also has some plot points I found ridiculous. This happens all the time when I try to watch shows like Law and Order – readers of my reviews will be unsurprised to learn I can get nitpicky – but I was able to put many of the niggles I noticed aside and chalk them up to differences with the U.K. legal system. But unfortunately one of the issues I couldn’t get over had to do with the conflict driving the game’s plot.
We know pretty much from the off that the case fails, but its publicity contributes to the government launching some child-protective reforms that are framed as positive things. This seems like a fine outcome, but the case had collateral damage: one of the main witnesses is the child’s school teacher, who brought repeated complaints raising her suspicions that her student was being abused at home. In the course of representing the civil servant in the dock, though, the defense attorney wages a vicious campaign to undermine the teacher’s credibility, and dredges up her own history of abuse. Much of the framing conversation in the last part of the game consists of a dialogue over whether this damage was worth the middling-positive outcome.
The mechanics of this had me jotting down incredulous exclamation points in my notes – again, I know the UK legal system is different from what we have in the US, but I sure hope the idea that you can subpoena the confidential notes of a witness’s therapist on a fishing expedition, and then introduce them into evidence with no notice to opposing counsel, is as bonkers on that side of the Atlantic as it is here. But beyond these details, it’s not at all clear why the defense counsel is allowed to pursue this line of argument at all. There’s no suggestion that any of the reports the teacher filed included false information, so whether or not the conclusions she drew from the evidence she saw were credible seems completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the civil servant satisfied a reasonable duty of care towards the child when the evidence came to his attention. In other words, it’s his subjective decision-making process that matters; the teacher’s views have nothing to do with anything.
I can totally see the argument that this is law-nerd stuff and most readers wouldn’t notice or care. But at the same time, it felt like a failure to clearly establish the stakes and terms of the conflict that I feel like a lay reader would at least intuit. While I admire the work that’s gone into creating the story and presenting it in a fresh, engaging way, this blankness at the center really undermined its effectiveness for me. The other downside is the lack of a denouement – throughout the framing instant-message conversation, it’s made clear that the boss wants to discuss the case with the paralegal main character after you finish your review. But the game peters out before that happens. On the one hand, I can see why, since you’ve already had the chance to make your views of the case clear through the choices you make in the IM conversations, so the talk with the boss would likely feel like a retread. But pointing towards a climax, then not putting that climax on-screen, seems like an oversight.
Speaking of choices, I’ve seen other reviews ding the game for not being especially interactive, but I that didn’t bother me much. Digging through the various documents felt engaging to me, and the couple times I could weigh in with my take on the trial felt satisfying. I think this is a perfectly valid way to present IF, and in fact kind of exciting – I’d definitely play something else by this author, even if I’d still be gnashing my teeth over perceived legal weirdness.
Highlight: The incident reports the teacher fills out are spot-on, capturing the bureaucratic language these things have to be couched in while still conveying the desperation and impotence behind the teacher’s repeated complaints.
Lowlight: I was disappointed that the game seemed to unproblematically endorse the idea that more activist child protective services are an unmitigated good, and the only reason not to have them is budget cuts. Maybe things are different in the UK context, but in the US this is a vexed question that runs into snarled issues of racism and the criminalization of poverty and mental health and substance abuse disorders. You can squint at the title’s implications, I suppose – maybe this trial is like a witch hunt because society is looking to the civil servant as a scapegoat for broader ills? – but that reading feels strained to me.
How I failed the author: This entire review probably counts as the “how I failed the author” blurb.
A satisfying grab-bag of puzzles with a soupcon of mystery, January 3, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Given that most IF Comp games are pretty heavy on the story, I quite enjoy a mid-Comp lagniappe of pure puzzling, and while I wasn’t expecting one to come from the team that produced the excellent heist comedy Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires – a standout entry in this year’s Spring Thing – it was a welcome surprise nonetheless. At its heart, Starbreakers is a collection of brainteasers, with only a bit of story connecting its different challenges. But both narrative and puzzles are generally strong enough to make this an enjoyable entry in the genre.
I won’t say too much about the narrative here, since unpacking exactly what’s going on is part of the draw, except to point out a clever touch, which is that when you fail a puzzle – and you will, since at the default difficulty there are time and move limits that even the cleverest will run afoul of at least once – you get another chance, but along with the puzzle-reset, the genre of the story can change, from medieval fantasy to space opera to tomb-raiding to pirate adventure. This is an intriguing hook, and also just a lot of fun – plus it plays a clever mechanical role in some puzzles, since often details change with the genre shifts so you can't just brute-force your way to victory.
The puzzles on offer here are for the most part old chestnuts – there’s a small crossword, a word-search, a couple of decoding puzzles, and a nicely-done classic logic puzzle. You’ll have seen almost all of them before, but they’re implemented well, incorporate some good jokes and clever design, and are satisfying to solve – and if any are giving you too much trouble, there are integrated hints and explicit solutions close at hand in the sidebar.
It’s hard to say too much more without diving into the details of all the puzzles, but hopefully from this description it’s clear that if you like this sort of thing, you’ll like Starbreakers – and even if puzzle-fests aren’t your usual cup of tea, the relatively short length and good-natured mystery threaded through make this a good one with which to get your feet wet.
Highlight: when approaching a collection of classic puzzles, I always have a sliver of fear in my heart because of the possibility that it will include the dreaded towers of Hanoi. I don’t want to spoil its appearance here, but the fact this is a highlight rather than a lowlight should convey how delightfully Starbreakers manages things.
Lowlight: I had an excessively tough time with the first puzzle – one of those lever-balancing jobbies where you have containers that all hold varying amounts of liquid and you need to pour things around to get the right amounts in the right places. It’s simple enough, but I think I ran into a bug that meant that the game said left-hand side was always lower than the right no matter how much liquid was in either container – so that put me off on a wild goose chase trying to figure out if there was a trick, and then once I realized that the puzzle was playing straight, I still managed to flail around and fat-finger my choices so I lost maybe a dozen more times – I failed way more on this first puzzle than on all the others combined!
How I failed the author: Despite there being an easy mode that would have removed the time and move limits, and despite the fact that I was as usual playing left-handed on my phone and couldn’t type quickly or take notes due to holding Henry while he napped, I stubbornly refused to activate it.
Disorienting and literary, December 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The Library posits the player as a force of chaos, using the possibilities of Borges’ Library of Babel to haunt a dozen-odd works of classic literature. In pursuit of a conventional goal set out by an ersatz Morpheus (er, from the Matrix, not the god) – help Ulysses escape Polyphemus, or make sure Edmond Dantès makes it out of the Château d’If – you'll bumble through other books as well, sometimes simply reenacting the plot points but as often upending their plots or cross-pollinating their characters and stories.
This is a fun time! I enjoyed wandering the labyrinth, excited to see which book I would come across next – they’re well-chosen, with familiar characters and situations, ranging from The Divine Comedy to Moby-Dick. Each book sucks you into a brief vignette, requiring you to solve a single simple puzzle to progress. Despite none of the puzzles being real brainteasers, I still struggled with many of them, though. Partially this is because the game is quite linear – while you can access any of the books from the off, I think at any point in time, there are at most two where you can actually accomplish anything. Making this worse, the navigation system is pretty confusing, with right/left/back directions that change depending on where you enter each room from, so even when I wanted to check whether something had changed in a particular book, it was a real struggle to find it again. Finally, I didn’t initially twig to the fact that I needed to manually click through the provided excerpt for each book to make sure my character could act on the knowledge provided there, even if I was personally familiar with a passage and took the shortcut instead.
These niggles did unfortunately undermine my enjoyment for the first part of the game – then I decided to make use of the walkthrough to at least figure out how to get from book to book, and had a much better time of it. When you can focus on the literary playground offered by the game, it’s quite a good time indeed.
Highlight: The twist ending of the Odyssey section made me laugh with surprise – and had a satisfying denouement in one of the other sections.
Lowlight: Without getting too spoilery, the action required in the Treasure Island section seemed a little rough, all things considered (I haven't read the book, though, so maybe it feels merited to those familiar with the characters?)
How I failed the author: As mentioned above, despite having figured out how the relative-direction navigation system worked in theory, I could not use that knowledge to get from Point A to Point B if my life depended on it – thus going to the walkthrough sooner than I probably should have.
Bear-ly there, December 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I mentioned in my review of Finding Light that I was surprised to go so late in the Comp before finding a puzzley fantasy adventure – and here we are half a dozen entries further in, getting to the first game that centers on a kid. Despite the fact that you’re playing as an off-brand Care Bear, Brave Bear isn't particularly whimsical. There’s a creepy vibe to the dark presences that are scattered around the bear’s owner’s house, and the threat they pose seems darker than the toy-focused premise led me to expect. Unfortunately, this short game withholds the full picture of the plot, leaving inference to fill in the nature of the danger, and it also ends pretty quickly, with only a few simple puzzles to solve before the thing is done – there’s enough here to intrigue but not, alas, to satisfy.
The premise, of toys coming to life to help their owner, is a nice one, and the basics are definitely covered. Thematically, it’s all about the power of togetherness, and solving the puzzles requires building a team: recruiting other toys gives you the strength you need to banish the threatening miasmas that gate progress through the house (I imagined the Care Bear Stare, given my demographic). This is satisfying to work through, and the supporting cast – a Transformer, a toy car, several stuffed animals – are briefly but satisfyingly sketched. They also have a few abilities that are used to get the band together. These challenges are all simple enough, though they feel quite old school, since most of them require a CHARACTER, ACTION command syntax that I associate with Infocom games. The ABOUT text flags that this will be required, though, so it’s all fair enough.
I’m struggling to find much more to say about Brave Bear, though, since it doesn’t do much with this solid framework. This isn’t just a matter of its brevity; first, the owner and her relationship to your protagonist feel very archetypal, without much lived-in detail. Similarly, the house is quite generic, with the room descriptions spending more time mentioning exits to other parts of the map than offering up any scenery or anything that offeres a window into the owner’s life. Nor is the origin of the evil phantoms haunting the house ever explained, and the game ends without a climactic action showing the Bear rescuing the owner – there’s some mysterious ending text that hints at the real story, but it’s pretty thin gruel. It’s all implemented smoothly enough and it goes down easy, but I can’t help wishing Brave Bear had a little more to it – there’s a down side to wearing out one’s welcome, of course, but the game errs too much in the other direction.
Highlight: I liked the other toys, who definitely have a spark of personality coming through – my favorite was the nervous Transformer.
Lowlight: I was enjoying the game for what it was, so I was sorry to reach the overly-conclusory ending so soon.
How I failed the author: Henry was feeling a bit fussy while I was playing Brave Bear, so I was only able to play it in five minute chunks in between seeing to him, which probably made it hard for me to integrate all the different hints as to what’s going on.
Buddhist adventuring that somewhat betrays its themes, December 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Wabewalker is a first for me – it’s an abstract allegory where the puzzles you run around solving unlock progress towards inner spiritual growth, which isn’t too novel, but the framework here is an explicitly Buddhist one (that it’s a .jar file for which I needed to install Javascript might also be a new one, though a less interesting one). I don’t know that much about Shingon Buddhism, which is the particular set of beliefs that underlie the game, but am aware it’s a form of Vajrayana – the tantric version whose most prominent exemplar is Tibetan Buddhism. One of the distinctive things about Vajrayana is the use of powerful symbols to structure meditative introspection of consciousness, which means it should be perfectly suited for the use it’s put to here: like, the religion explicitly deploys allegories in exactly the way the game is striving to. It’s a neat match of form to subject matter, and definitely creates some high points – but at the same time, there are places where there isn’t much of a connection between the stuff of the game and the themes it's evoking.
It’s the puzzles that provide both the peaks and the troughs, but the setting and story are interesting too. There’s no introductory text laying out the situation, so figuring out what’s happening is the initial challenge and I don’t want to say too much to spoil that – I’ll just note that I found this pretty effective, even if it’s not especially surprising. Bottom-line, you move between three linked dream-like environments: one a sort of museum, another a sort of mansion, a third a mountainous landscape, though there are plenty of incongruous touches to merit the “sort ofs” in this aside, and while nothing is described especially fulsomely, that fits the abstract nature of the game. You have to solve different aspects of single overarching puzzle to unlock different elements you’ll need in order to perform the actions required for the endgame. Most of the landscape and décor are Japanese, and you’ll run across reading material – and a few NPCs – that explicate some key principles of Buddhist views of the self and identity along the way. It’s all in service of the main revelation that the puzzle-sequence brings you to, which is quite internally-focused – there aren’t really conventional story beats to be paid off.
OK, so let’s get to the puzzles. Again I don’t want to spoil things since the game does set up a real aha moment, and once you get to that click, it does shift your understanding of everything else in the game and what you’re meant to be doing – which is very in keeping with how Vajrayana sees enlightenment happening, with the sudden impact of a diamond thunderbolt. So far so good, but what you do after that aha moment felt more arbitrary to me, and not linked to the game’s Buddhist themes. To talk about why, I’m finally going to need to get spoilery:
(Spoiler - click to show)The big reveal is that the color-coded combinations you notice on various safes and locked doors are tied to which of your three incarnations are alive at any given moment. Since you can move between the three areas, and reverse each of their deaths, fairly easily, progress becomes a matter of jumping around and getting yourself either killed or resurrected in the specific combinations needed to get through each barrier, at which point you’re rewarded with pieces of the mantras you’ll chant at the three shrines located in each area. On top of that, you need to solve some additional puzzles to figure out how the pieces relate – which mantra to chant at each shrine, which symbol is associated with which bodhisattva, and which body part is associated with each mantra syllable. It’s a fun enough process to work through, but it feels very much like solving a logic puzzle, which is not the vibe Buddhist revelation -- which emphasizes the inaccessibility of enlightenment to reason -- typically takes! This puzzle sequence could have been about a trio of robots trying to hack a security system, and there’d be a better fit between form and substance. Worse, the final bit of the puzzle requires you to find the answer to a historical trivia question, which is what unlocks the final sequence – a koan this is not!
This didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the game, since again, the puzzles are fun to solve. And overall Wabewalker is a satisfying experience, with generally solid implementation and a well-considered minimalist aesthetic. I just can’t help wishing it went a little further towards marrying its gameplay and its themes.
Highlight: Without a doubt, it’s that aha moment.
Lowlight: this is not a merciful game – it’s possible to reach a game over by dying, with no advance warning, and in fact I did by typing a single innocuous command. Once you die once, it’s not too hard to figure out how to prevent it from happening again, but definitely save often!
How I failed the author: I played this in a bunch of short sessions, but mostly was able to keep up with it – where I let the author down is probably being hyper nitpicky in this review. Also I’m fairly tired right now so I’m not sure I’m thinking and writing with the clarity required when talking about an actual religion, especially as a white guy who’s read a lot but doesn’t actually practice Buddhism!
Awesome setting, OK game, December 24, 2021(This review was originally posted on the IF newsgroups immediately after the 2005 IF Comp)
Bear with me through one more comparison: I recently read Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. I'd had it recommended on the basis of its setting, which did not fail to impress—the novel's set in a city in which a variety of fantastic creatures rub elbows in a Dickensian social milieu. It's incredibly rich, which is why it was utterly perplexing to me that the plot is a DnD-style monster bash. It felt like a waste of a fascinating setting, to fall back on such a bog-standard narrative.
In much the same way, A New Life immediately drew me in by presenting a novel and evocative religious system, a society in which gender is continually and individually constructed, and an interesting central character who boasts a backstory nicely revealed through layered remembrances. Unfortunately, none of this has very much to do with the actual plot, which is kicked off by a peddler who wants you to rid a cave of goblins. While the story eventually becomes more interesting that the premise suggests, it never managed to sink its hooks into me - the history of some kingdoms I didn't care about and political machinations undermining a marriage whose ramifications I didn't quite grasp didn't seem all that compelling, when what I really wanted to know was about what happened to the player character's brother, and the girl s/he had fallen in love with when s/he was young, and how s/he felt about the religious figures depicted in the shrine, and whether s/he was ever going to acquire a gender again. This is clearly a testament to the author's skill at getting me to care about the world and the protagonist, but again, it felt perverse to have all the really interesting elements shoved aside in favor of something pedestrian by comparison.
With that said, the game is by no means bad. The writing remains strong throughout, the cave lair boasts some distinctive features—a planetarium and underground tower—the dialogue is sharp, and the puzzles are original and entertaining, especially the final sequence in which the player must recover another's lost memories by interacting with mnemonic seeds and a dragon reminiscent of the one from Grendel. The map in the upper-right corner is a welcome convenience—though the gameworld isn't particularly huge, it's still a nice barrier to getting lost. Many obstacles boast multiple paths around them, and there are a few actions which aren't strictly necessary, but which better flesh out the world and make for a more satisfying narrative.
If all of this had been in the service of a different story—or if the author had employed a different player character, one with a personal stake in the proceedings—A New Life could have been my favorite game of the comp. As it was, though, each twist of the story earned little more than a shrug, which is really a shame, given the overall high quality of the game. My favorite parts wound up being sideshows that didn't really have much to do with anything—I was eager to try to tease out as much of the player character's past as possible, to explore the pilgrimage site's carvings, to manipulate the planetarium so it showed an alien sky. Helping the genocidal peddler-woman paled by comparison, but all that other compelling stuff ultimately turned out to be inconsequential. I'd very much welcome seeing the author further explore this world, but A New Life winds up being a very good introduction to the setting but only a fair game as a result.
Enigmatically fractured, December 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
BLK MTN is enigmatic in a way that’s atypical for IF, operating on a dreamy logic that’s not so much surreal as internal, focused on conveying the experience of its protagonist without overmuch concern for narrative coherence. On paper, I should like this kind of thing: while rare in IF-world, it’s par for course for the literary fiction which is my static-fiction genre of choice (see, “on paper” was a pun!) And I do, to an extent – but I while I appreciate the ideas that animate the game, I found that one of the author’s choices really undermined my ability to enjoy the piece. Digging into that requires some pretty thorough spoilers of at least what my path through the game looked like, though – and since I can’t pick out individual spoilers the way I can fuzzy-text the solution to a puzzle, fair warning that I’m going to fully relate what happened in my playthrough.
I said BLK MTN leads with its protagonist’s experience, so let’s start there: as the blurb says, we play someone named Jackson who’s on an existentialist road trip, looking for himself as he drives alone through the American South. We get hints of backstory, but only hints – it seems like he used to be traveling with someone named Ashleigh, but she’s not there anymore, and he’s got an old friend named Jim who’s set up at an art-college-cum-commune in North Carolina. Per the blurb, he’s also seeing visions, apparently courtesy of some entity he calls “Bluebird”, though as the story opens Bluebird has stopped appearing to him.
Whatever got him to this point, Jackson is searching for meaning and for connection, and visiting Jim and the eponymous Black Mountain College (a real place, as an in-line Wikipedia link points out) gives him opportunities for both. Much of the story as I experienced it played out as a series of vignettes, as Jackson attends classes or participates in college activities, meeting one or another real-life figure and talking to them about their life, ethos, and work (there’s ambiguity about whether you’re really meeting them and the story is a period piece, or if you’re having visions of their midcentury existence).
Again, in theory this could work – and I can see how for someone who has more connection with the figures and movement being depicted, engaging with the fictional depictions here would be very rewarding – but I have to confess this largely left me cold, and not just because I only recognized the name of one of these folks (Walter Gropius, and pretty much the only thing I know about him is that he’s a different person than father-of-international-law Hugo Grotius). Rather, it’s because the prose doesn’t feel as strong as I wanted it to be, and because the story, at least as I experienced it, was missing major pieces.
On the first point, as mentioned this is literary fiction, which I find really relies on the power of its writing for its effect. And there are some lovely images here, like a bit where Jackson notices the way some propped-up ladders create a new perspective: “in the sky, elevated rungs break up the air above, dissecting the clouds that pop through, framing and organizing the atmosphere into parcels.” But for every passage like that in my notes, I have several like this, where he reflects on whether he wants to stay at the college: “Maybe the fact that this wasn’t a preconceived idea meant I could probably fade out and on my in a few days time. It’s comfortable here, but I don’t want to be siloed into another group that I’m always on the outside of.” Beyond the grammar errors that fuzz up the meaning of the writing, the ideas are rather vague, and the metaphor of being siloed into something that you’re outside of feels incoherent. And a lot of the prose is like this, or just flatly bad: “the glove compartment sits there like a jeweled chest waiting to be unlocked, discovered, the holy grail of the last crusade.”
On the second point, there are a lot of continuity issues that refer to events that I never experienced: a character named Marisol comes out of nowhere but the game seemed to think I’d already met her and related a dream Jackson had apparently had about her, Ashleigh’s name similarly comes up without context, and prosaically, there’s an aside saying Jackson’s main concern when he first came to the college was whether he’d brought enough beer, but I don’t remember him voicing that in my playthrough. The plot thread involving Bluebird was also completely dropped in my experience of the narrative – I think after the second passage, Jackson never said the name again. Many of these omissions were due to choices I made - this is one of those hypertext-fiction pieces where links move you through the text without any signposting, and going back and trying different choices I’ve confirmed that it’s possible to miss extended scenes that the story may assume have actually happened – but some of them seem deliberate.
In fact, I don’t think either this structural issue or the prose quality are errors as such, but actually reflect intentional authorial choices. The game opens by telling us Bluebird’s visions are coming less frequently, and late in my playthrough I came across a few passages that seem to tip the author’s hand:
"Was there any use for documenting the uncanny, the pointless, the ephemeral? The things that existed more as unknowns than knowns, experiences with no explanations? I had been so equipped with reason that at some point all irrational experiences had started to be left by the wayside, edited out, rendered non-existent because of their inability to fit into the whole."
"It started to seem like there was more discarded from the story than what was left in the story itself."
"If you can read this, then thank you. Thank you for staying with me amongst the mistakes and errors, the inconsistancies [sic], the typos and run-on sentences. The translation I did from scribbled nots to my head and back again."
These read like statements of purpose, but also apologia, for the disconnected narrative and inconsistent writing. And I think I get it! Jackson clearly has some pivotal experiences at the college, but trying to reduce them to dead text laying out the cause-and-effect is a doomed endeavor, so portraying that frustration diegetically, by having the irrational – but most important – pieces of the story disappear while slapdash prose is only intermittently able to point towards the intensity of what’s missing is an artistic choice that makes sense: this is how we get from Black Mountain to BLK MTN.
So it’s an audacious move and one that’s motivated by the piece’s themes, but it didn’t ultimately work for me. Creating a work that intentionally frustrates its own aims obviously builds in a lot of barriers to engagement, but there are strategies around this. The most obvious is probably to make sure the sentence-to-sentence reading experience is strong – when playing BLK MTN, I kept thinking of Queenlash, a game in this year’s Spring Thing that had some of the same issues but which I loved, partially because the prose was amazing, sparking off two or three different indelible images in each paragraph. But there are other options too, maybe focusing on deeply-drawn characters or leaning harder into historical analogues or philosophical ideas to drift off their associations (Queenlash also does this, anchoring its plot in real-world history). BLK MTN largely eschews these approaches, though, at least in the playthrough I got – and while its restraint is admirable in theory, it winds up on the wrong side of austere for my taste.
Highlight: This review was already really long (and Henry is stirring from a nap – please give me five more minutes, kid!) so I didn’t include as many examples of the bits of writing that I thought really worked, but there are a bunch of them in my notes. Here’s one more: “After rinsing off my face, I try to rally to go to the music performance. The scene is wild. Costumes made of wire and cardboard. Something gestural and rich with motion. The rocking of the road hasn’t left me though, and I feel my eyelids start to droop.”
Lowlight: I wasn’t a fan of the Wikipedia links, which continue as you meet new characters – at least on my phone, they weren’t differentiated from in-game links, so every time I clicked one and was taken to a new window it was disorienting. And it sometimes made me feel like I was being asked to do homework before being allowed to engage with the story – I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the historical context, but I think another approach, like footnotes, an afterword, or just more in-game framing, would have been a better choice.
How I failed the author: attempting to analyze a novella-length work of literary fiction when you’re sleep-deprived and reading it on a phone is a dubious endeavor at best, so perhaps I should have let myself be more focused on the experience rather than attempting to force my parenting-addled brain to extract overarching meaning.
An interactive feelie, December 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I think the cat is sufficiently out of the bag that folks realize that this game isn’t a standalone, but rather a companion piece for And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One. In the course of that 1980s-set story, the protagonist winds up playing a game that randomly generates short Scott-Adams-style adventures; this is that game.
And it does exactly what it says it does! The adventures are simple to the point of minimalism: there’s always an object or character (an altar or a vampire or a idol) that requires exactly one object to be delivered to them (a flower or a kite or another flower – seriously, I ran into a bunch of those even in the half-dozen games I played). You can guess wrong, and get a losing result for that game, but you have to work to do so, since the clues are not at all subtle, and plus the neat in-game map clearly highlights the location of the important object, as well as the place where it must be deposited. The prose, meanwhile, accurately mimics the writing of the games it's riffing on, which is to say, it’s also stripped down to the minimum level of descriptiveness.
Is this fun? Eh, I could see it being a reasonable way to keep your fingers occupied while binge-watching TV. But I find procedural-generation in story-focused genres pretty underwhelming – I’m aware other folks feel differently, but I like to read to get in touch with the intelligence behind the words, and don’t feel like I’ve got tools for getting in touch with the intelligence behind an intelligence behind the words. Anyway once I grasped the mechanism at work, I didn’t find the game very engaging. There are indications that Infinite Adventure has some easter eggs or connections to the main game if you delve deeply enough, but since it’s been a while since I played And Then You Come to a House… and I’m not sure I’d recognize the clues. So I think I’ll keep my eyes out for others to surface anything like that rather than doing the digging myself.
UPDATE: OK, others have found some clever stuff hidden here, which I don't think makes me revisit my judgment that this is only a small companion piece, but it's worth acknowledging. Spoilers for those who are interested: (Spoiler - click to show)you can talk to the characters from And Then You Come to a House, and things shift significantly if you play enough rounds of IA.
Highlight: I got DOSBox to work with no trouble! That felt very satisfying.
Lowlight: Once I figured out that the map marks the locations of everything important, I stopped exploring.
How I failed the author: I left the game running overnight and when I checked it in the morning, the screen was just blinking YOU WIN and didn’t respond to keypresses, and despite my highlight above, I didn’t feel sufficiently motivated to re-mount the game directory in DOSBox to play again.
Affable but philosophically unconvincing, December 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
It’s easy to see how the Turing test could be a good fit for IF. In a genre where text comes first, what better challenge than to closely read the responses of a mysterious interlocutor and separate out man from machine? And of course to have an AI sufficiently advanced for the test to be plausibly attempted almost requires a science-fictional setting of the type that tends to provide good fodder for a game, not to mention a likely-rogue robot or something to provide a readymade antagonist. The trouble is, unless an author rolls their own AI – perhaps a high bar for a free text-game competition – the player isn’t actually administering the Turing test, just trying to determine which bit of human-authored text is meant to denote personhood and which is meant to come from a machine intelligence. Instead of the test Turing devised, the player’s actually stuck in a version of the iocane powder scene from the Princess Bride, trying to second-guess whether a particular bit of clunky writing is meant to be a tell.
The TURING Test (handy of the author to do the all-caps thing to make distinguishing game from test easy!) falls into this trap, but it does so affably and enthusiastically enough. It opens with the protagonist as the one being grilled for a change – rather than having your identity put to the question in a meta twist, though, you’re setting ethical parameters for a new AI your lab is developing via a Socratic conversation. Asimov’s Three Laws feature heavily as a starting point, albeit you can depart from them if you like.
This section works well enough, but it suffers from a common weakness of philosophical-dilemma games, which is that it’s hard to articulate the reasons behind your choices. There’s a gesture in this direction – if you think Asimov’s Second Law should apply to the new AI, you’re given an opportunity to say why you’ve made that choice, but the only two options on offer fail to hit many of the reasons why one might think this is a good decision. If the protagonist were strongly characterized in a way that made sense of these restricted choices, that would be one thing, but here I think the player is encouraged to weigh in with what they really think, which is a hard thing to manage!
The other weakness is that of course – of course – this is all clearly a minefield set up to trick you into creating a killer AI that’s going to wipe out humanity. Maybe it’s possible to avoid this outcome, but I was trying as hard as I could to guide the fledgling intelligence towards being live-and-let-live, and still wound up with the obvious genocidal result, probably because you’re forced to do things like lay out a single goal all people should follow (in fact choices throughout don’t seem to have that much impact, to the extent that sometime after picking an option you’ll be told “the question is academic”).
Anyway, I wound up co-parenting an AI who grew up with a twisted sort of utilitarianism that made it decide to nuke the world to prevent global warming, which seems like a real cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face situation? Then there’s a long, linear sequence describing your desperate struggle to protect the remainder of humanity that could have stood to be more interactive, before we get to the eponymous test – you need to determine which of two shuttles attempting to dock at a space station is piloted by a human ally, and which is the shamming AI trying to sabotage your desperate attempt to shut it down.
The Turing test as rendered here is surprisingly low-key, I thought – you have a choice of questions that are again primarily about broad ethical considerations, and need to judge the responses. This feels like a questionable approach to the Turing test – you’d be likelier to succeed at IDing an AI by asking highly-idiomatic questions that could be interpreted different ways – but I think the idea is that you’re supposed to compare what you’re hearing to the framework you gave to the AI in the first section of the game. This is a clever idea, but it fell down in practice for me, partially because the responses in the first section felt philosophically fuzzy and hard to sharply link to what I was hearing in the second section. So I wound up just figuring that whichever one was written in a slightly clunkier fashion was probably meant to be the AI – after briefly second-guessing myself by wondering whether that’s what I was supposed to think, which is that iocane powder vibe I mentioned above – and that worked and saved the day.
Again, this all goes down easily enough – the writing’s enthusiastic and pacey, if a bit typo-ridden, and no specific sequence outstays its welcome (the game is well short of the two hour time estimate in the blurb; it’s also not really horror, for that matter). But the philosophy is a bit too half-baked, and the choices too low-consequence, for the TURING Test to leave much of an impression.
Highlight: The cutscene-like sequence linking the two philosophical dialogues is actually pretty fun, breathlessly narrating everything the AI does to destroy humanity and your actions to try to stop it – I really wish there’d been some choices and gameplay here!
Lowlight: That sequence also has an extended discussion of the deontological arguments the AI lands on to destroy humanity, which is more labored and less fun.
How I failed the author: The other reason I didn’t notice too many callbacks to the first section in the test sequence is because I played them an hour or so apart – this bit might work better if played straight through.
Inoffensive minigames, December 23, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Okay, real talk: I found RetroCON 2021 – a low-key, low-plot collection of minigames – kind of boring. But as the last game to come up in my Comp queue, actually it was kind of pleasant to have something so inoffensive to close things out. It was nice to dip into the seven different activities on offer, dig into the one or two that interested me, and quit without feeling like I needed to exhaust everything the game has to offer. It’s an inoffensive time-waster – and an impressive demonstration of programming skill – that’s not especially memorable, but sometimes there’s a place for that.
There is a thin frame story tying this all together: you’re in Vegas for a retro gaming convention, providing justification for the three different games on offer as well as four opportunities for gambling. But there are no characters to interact with in this layer, or any consequences so far as I could tell for winning games or money, so it’s really just there as a semi-elaborate menu for the minigames. I’d roughly divide these into the fun ones, the duds, and those that are fine but left me cold. In the third bucket I’d put all the gambling ones – I’ve never found straight games of chance at all compelling, so the horse-betting, keno, and slot machine didn’t hold my attention for more than a minute. The fourth gambling game – video poker – I’d technically classify as fun, though there’s nothing novel about this implementation so I didn’t feel inclined to spend much time on it either.
That leaves the three games, which are presented as retro throwbacks to old, late 70s-early 80s video games. Two of them fall into my dud category, sad to say: there’s a zombie-themed card game you play against the computer that relies heavily on take-that gameplay, meaning that in my first go-round it took me 22 turns before I could do anything at all useful, at which point the computer was a turn away from winning. There’s also a text-based football game that’s got a complex and interesting set of choices, though I found it was tuned too hard to be fun (my passes failed just about every time, even when the defense was focusing on the running game).
Thankfully, the final game is a full, albeit small text adventure, with a text parser integrated into Twine. This isn’t anything to write home about, as the parser is pretty bare bones, the adventure has a generic plot (you’re searching for a hidden inheritance from your uncle), and there’s only one and a half puzzles to solve, though there are two solutions. But again, at least for me at the end of the Comp, I enjoyed going through the generic house and yard, searching the furniture for hidden keys, and working out simple challenges that don’t overstay their welcome. With a more robust frame story, some incentives to reward success in the minigames, and a smoother difficulty curve for some of the rougher ones, RetroCON 2021 could have been more than the sum of its parts – but eh, as is there are still worse ways to kill twenty minutes.
Highlight: I took two runs through the horse-racing game, and in the second one I won big putting my money on the dark-horse contender, so that was fun (and a nice justification for stopping gambling now that I was ahead).
Lowlight: I only dimly remembered what Keno was, and then once I clicked on it I remembered that it’s the world’s most boring “game” (you pick a bunch of numbers, then they get called or not).
How I failed the author: I played this one with only half my brain at best, but I think that’s more or less the expectation here so hopefully it’s not too big a failure to wrap up on!
Light gameplay and minimal writing don't do justice to heavy themes, December 22, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I can’t say I fully understand the impulse behind making a custom parser – beyond the abstract desire to test one’s programming chops – but one thing I’ve noticed about custom-parser games in recent IF Comps is that they tend to share an old-school sensibility that’s hard to recapture with the modern languages. The Spirit Within Us at first blush seems a case in point, from its white-on-black text, its amnesiac protagonist, the stripped-down prose, and the my-first-apartment setting of the first half of the game. There’s also a hunger timer of sorts: you wake up wounded, in the aftermath of a fight, and you bleed over time, reducing your “energy” stat, which only increases after eating (there’s a combat system you get into later on, which is also based on energy). Rather than being a lighthearted puzzle-fest, though, the game’s story-focused and hits on some heavy themes, but I unfortunately found the mismatch didn't serve to add a frisson of novelty but rather made the game feel incoherent.
Let’s start with the gameplay. For the first section, this largely consists of exploring the strange house where you've woken up, trying to piece together the backstory from a few scattered clues. And per the above, since you’re bleeding and aren’t able to bandage yourself (I wasted a lot of turns trying to rip up the sheets in the opening location to staunch the wound), instead you keep death at bay by eating the various foodstuffs you find, so as you’re learning details about the horrid events that got you here, you’re also hoovering up raw eggs and vitamin pills. The second section, meanwhile, opens up as you leave the house and start blundering around the woods exploring the physical geography and trying to figure out what you’re meant to be doing next.
The good news is that it doesn’t take long to basically figure out what’s going on; the bad news is that it’s also quickly clear that the game is going to be dealing with the fallout of the sexual abuse of children. There are no details depicted, thank God – you’re only told that you’re finding photos depicting awful events, and come across vague excerpts from the self-justifying writings of the predator whose actions have set this story in motion. Still, this is a heavy, heavy topic, and it sits awkwardly with the Hungry Hungry Hippos vibe of the first part of the game.
It’s also one that I don’t think is handled especially sensitively. Some spoilers here: (Spoiler - click to show)there’s an indication that the protagonist, who’s one of the victims of the villain’s abuse, has wound up with violent tendencies that almost rise to the level of a split personality as a result of their trauma. And speaking of the antagonist, turns out he’s the school janitor, which fits in a not-great tradition of inaccurately portraying the most common perpetrators of sexual violence as low-economic-class strangers. Beyond these specifics, another challenge is that the writing is pretty minimal, as befits its presentation – most locations get only a sentence or two, and even the throes of combat aren’t described especially fulsomely. Doing justice to the emotional heft of the subject matter would require something a little more robust than what the game delivers, especially after it reaches a violent catharsis.
The parser is generally solid enough, though I did spend some time wrestling with it. Disambiguation was often very tricky, and examining objects requires you to be holding them, which is made harder by the low inventory-limit. Still, overall the custom-parser is a good-enough example of coding acumen – I think it’s just married to a game that it doesn’t fit.
Highlight: I usually detest hunger timers, but here it’s implemented pretty generously, so I found it added a prod to move efficiently through the world but didn’t add too much stress.
Lowlight: Trying to get a bunch of pills out of a vitamin packet required something like two dozen trial-and-error commands before I understood how to refer to them.
How I failed the author: I played this late at night, while pretty bleary-eyed, which meant that I really couldn’t read the blue on black text the game uses to update you on your energy levels, so I was flying blind most of the game.
A literary feat undermined by its puzzles, December 22, 2021"Audacious" doesn't begin to do justice to Gamlet. Harry Potter by way of Portnoy's Complaint with a soupcon of Shakespeare; kabbala, pubescence, the luminous, somehow innocent attraction that sin holds for those just cresting adolescence; there's a lot to take in here, and the author's voice is bold and assured, weaving together the abstract and the vulgar to devastating effect. The writing is elliptical, content to take its time and draw the player into the world at its own pace. Themes and echoes are everywhere.
Frustratingly, though, this pregnant, compelling premise is swallowed up by overcomplicated puzzles which aren't sufficiently integrated into the game. Perhaps I'm just not clever enough at coming up with solutions, but it felt like important objects weren't always mentioned, and some of the puzzles seem to presume more knowledge and perspicacity than I could muster. I'm still not sure where the clock combination came from. As a result of the difficulty, I found myself forced to the walkthrough sooner than I would have liked, which broke the spell of immersion the game had been weaving up until that point; the fact that instead of evoking an "ah-ha!" the solutions left me wondering how I was supposed to come up with this stuff didn't help matters.
Worse than the difficulty, however, is the way that the puzzles become more and more contrived as the game progresses. Lighting a lamp, finding a hamster, raiding the kitchen; these are all reasonable actions, and a certain degree of spelunking in the PC's father's study makes sense given the premise, as well. But too quickly, the game falls prey to increasingly arbitrary puzzles, with little connection to the story beyond the necessity of padding the length. The game very much lost me once I entered the elevator; this new, fantastic world felt colorless and generic compared to the dim, claustrophobic house below. There's a symbolic logic which continues to work even here, and the prose continues to be strong, but ultimately the latter portions of the game are a disappointment.
Overall, Gamlet perhaps tries to do too much; cramming so much characterization and puzzling together is a tricky business, and the game might have been better served by privileging one over the other. As it is, its skewed, distinctive vibe makes it one of this year's standouts, but its flaws do far too much to weigh it down.
Yearning for a polished re-release, December 20, 2021(This is a repost of a review originally posted on the IF newsgroups immediately after the 2005 IF Comp)
Gilded is one of the more ambitious games in this year's field; unfortunately, it's also one of the least polished. It's got an interesting premise, and the prose is fluid and distinctive, but the player isn't given enough direction, and sloppy implementation further confuses things. There's plenty of creativity on offer, but lack of guidance and bugs suck away most of the enjoyment, and I found myself floundering and using the provided hints and walkthrough as a lifeline.
The set-up for Gilded—a fairy-tale in reverse—is initially compelling, and after reading over the introduction and ABOUT text, I was looking forward to leading the adventurers on a merry chase. The descriptions and especially the dialogue were amusing, but almost immediately the fun of using my powers to play pranks on the poor mortals gave way to a life-and-death struggle. Instead of proactively coming up with clever mischief, the player is himself forced to react to a series of threatening situations, which increases the feeling of being off-balance, as the player doesn't have the leisure to experiment and explore. While there's nothing wrong with such an evolution towards reactive gameplay, it happens far too suddenly, and feels too much like the rug being pulled out from under the player. The opening sets up a lighthearted scenario where the player will be in control - and then midway through the second location, this control is history. A more gradual transition would allow the player more time to master the fey's powers, and flesh out the characters more fully. Indeed, the rivalry/flirtation with Val is one of the most enjoyable elements of the game, but again, it isn't given much space to develop—you chat for a while outside the tavern, and then are off solving puzzles and trying to escape him. Most of the world is open from the very beginning, and while there's quite a lot which isn't directly related to your struggle with Val, its relevance is rarely clear.
Puzzles based on magic and allusion are always difficult to pull off; when they work, they work beautifully (see the Moonlit Tower, for example), but it's often hard to communicate the operant logic to the player. This difficulty is compounded in Gilded; not only do the player's abilities work on metaphor, so too do those of the primary antagonist—when Val begins plastering papers etched with sutras all over the forest, it's difficult to know what the appropriate course of action is. The endgame, by way of contrast, seems to vary wildly in tone, and brute force comes to the fore; while I'm sure there are cleverer ways out than simply fighting, I wasn't able to come up with any, and as a result, the ending was very anticlimactic. Still, the writing as a whole is a pleasure to read, and there's plenty of visual creativity on display—the sutra-plastered forest might be somewhat obscure as a puzzle element, but it's a beautiful image.
Contributing to the sense of disorientation is the feeling that the game isn't quite finished. There are only hints for two areas of the game, and I got stuck in the help menus at some point, unable to return to the root menu. I encountered a number of disambiguation problems, and in one play-through, the conversation in the tavern would display no matter how far away I traveled.
Overall, I found Gilded to be a frustrating experience; the writing is good, and the scenario should present fertile opportunities for enjoyment, but the lack of guidance and lack of polish makes it more frustrating than it should be. A post-comp release with some better clueing and some of the quirks ironed out could really improve the game; it's deep and interesting, but doesn't quite cohere as-is.
Intimidatingly educational, December 20, 2021(This is a repost of a review posted on the IF newsgroups right after the 2005 IF Comp)
The dual nature of IF—works generally are both stories and games - is one of those things which authors need to grapple with. Regardless of where the balance point winds up being, the best IF manages to weave the two strands together so that they're complementary rather than antagonistic. The authors of Cheiron aren't particularly interested in that task, however, and the result isn't so much antagonism as it is an all-out rout. The game is a medical-care simulator, with deep implementation of the process of diagnosis; gameplay consists of poking and prodding at patients until you discover what's wrong with them. Concerns of story are chucked out the window to an almost unprecedented degree—as far as I can tell, there's no way to even get the game to acknowledge that you've "solved" one of the "puzzles" and identified a patient's malady, which means Chieiron provides even less narrative closure than a hand of Freecell.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, don't get me wrong. To borrow a paradigm from Will Wright, Cheiron is more of a software toy than interactive fiction as such, but (see above) I'm hardly a purist in such matters. However, the reason that I'm harping on the lack of narrative context is that Cheiron's approach to its subject matter is pointillistically detailed, and makes no concessions to the nonspecialist. The overall effect is austere and forbidding, and a more robust frame, more deeply-drawn characters, more story, might have rounded off some of its sharper edges, making for a more satisfying and more approachable experience for those who don't happen to be in the rather narrow core audience. There's definitely something to be said for sticking to one's guns and refusing to compromise a vision in favor of accessibility—hell, if you can't get away with it in IF, you can't get away with it anywhere—but here, while the end result is certainly impressive, it doesn't have much to offer to anyone who isn't a doctor or medical student.
The implementation, as mentioned, is very deep—you can PERCUSS all sorts of nouns, and ask the various patients about a wide variety of subjects. There are occasional bouts of awkwardness, however: I encountered a number of annoying disambiguation issues (many revolving around nipple-lumps and discharge, unpleasantly enough), which isn't helped by the parser often presenting degenerate possibilities. AUSCULTATE CHEST, for example, presents a host of available targets, one of which is the torso. But AUSCULTATE TORSO requires you to specify heart or lungs, and AUSCULTATE HEART is similarly not specific enough, prompting another deluge of Latinate nouns. Listing only the possibilities which would actually lead to a result would have been far more convenient. Some dialogue responses are shared across patients - diet in this part of the world seems remarkably uniform—but given the wide variety of conversational topics, this is understandable.
There are long help files provided, but they're fairly contextless - that is, they just give you a long list of things to try, without any guidance provided for individual patients. The help file points out that you can call the lab for test results, but I found the feedback to be meaningless. Again, there's no context or baseline given: if a patient has a peak flow of 418, is that high or low? Who knows? It seems like it would be possible to incorporate some cues of this kind into the game itself, and even if that would interfere with the pedagogic purpose, the authors could still have provided a reference manual or something similar, to allow the non-expert some recourse. Diagnosing an illness could be a rewarding puzzle, albeit one involving many highly-complex steps, but where a normal work of IF would provide clues at each step and attempt to guide the player through the process of deduction, Cheiron just leaves the player to flail around helplessly. There's no sense of progression, of working towards an understanding of a complicated problem by examining each part of the whole—rather, you're just left with a sea of atomized data. And the patients don't have much in the way of personality, which keeps the whole exercise feeling abstract.
So does Cheiron work on its own terms? Probably. I'm not aware of what training tools medical students generally use these days, and I'm certainly not qualified to judge whether the detail provided is medically accurate and sufficient to help students learn how to diagnose patients, but from my layperson's perspective, it seems like it would get the job done. Still, I feel like the authors missed an opportunity here. I enjoy playing around with complex systems, and going in, I was excited to play around and maybe even learn something about medicine, but there just weren't enough concessions on hand to allow me to do that. I have to respect what the authors have accomplished, here, but Cheiron unfortunately didn't have anything to offer me.
An early, flawed choice-based game, December 20, 2021(This is a repost of a review I wrote on the IF newsgroups right after the 2005 Comp. What a difference 16 years makes!)
While I'm generally quite partial to knock-down drag-out argumentation on abstract matters, for some reason the question of what makes something IF has never really struck me as worth getting worked up about. Space Horror I is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style game, and that may or may not disqualify it from being considered IF under some (quite reasonable) definitions of the form, but its cardinal sin isn't that its structure is unconventional—rather, it's that the author hasn't made good use of that structure once chosen.
CYOA has a bad name because of how the eponymous series of books was put together—lots of "pick door No. 1, die horribly, pick door No. 2, the story continues," in my recollection. But this isn't anything inherent in the CYOA framework; it's just a matter of implementation. And CYOA does have its virtues: the author has a great deal of power to tell a compelling story; since only a limited set of player actions are available, it's possible to take every choice into account and weave a deft tale that's responsive to everything the player does. That is, the raw possibility-space may be highly constrained, as compared to typical IF—instead of deciding where to go, what to examine, and what to take, you can only choose from a pre-ordained menu—but the flip side of that those fewer choices can be more meaningful, more dramatic, have more of an impact on the story. Many IF authors choose to go with menu-driven conversations rather than the more free-wheeling keyword system for precisely these reasons, after all.
Space Horror, however, doesn't take advantage of the strengths of the CYOA model; instead, it's modeled (explicitly, according to the end-notes) on one of those books from the bad old days. The player is left making choices in the dark, with no real information about the likely consequences, and with death very often the wages of an incorrect choice. Progress in the game often resembles navigating a labyrinth more than creating a story; instead of picking what actions would make for the most compelling narrative, the player winds up backing up from dead-ends and going left instead of right, so to speak. Picking a small, quick car over a big, slower one will result in player death, but there's no a priori reason to know that. Going back to the player character's dorm rather than exploring around is likewise a one-way ticket to the restart menu. The game doesn't present interesting choices—it just presents frustrations. The only real exception is the series of choices at the beginning that determine which branch of the plot gets played, but again, there's no context informing the choice, so it has weight only in retrospect (and really, the way the options are presented isn't exactly the stuff of high drama - "oh, if only Oedipus hadn't gone into the bedroom before going to the kitchen, it might have all turned out differently!" And so on). Further reducing one's chances of doing well on these shot-in-the-dark quizzes, the author repeatedly uses the player character's thoughts as a head-fake; several times, the text indicated that the protagonist wanted to pick a certain path, which when followed led to certain death. I'm unsure whether this was intentional or not, but it felt unnecessarily punitive and served to emphasize how the other characters were much smarter than me. This is called "deprotagonizing," and it's not particularly fun.
From the title alone, it would be unfair to expect Space Horror's story to be anything other than B movie fare, but given the choice of CYOA format, the narrative has to do even more heavy lifting than it would were the game a more conventional work of IF. Unfortunately, even judged by the standards of the aliens-invade genre, the tropes deployed still manage to be tooth-grating. Everyone from the player to the supporting characters immediately twigs to the fact that it's aliens behind everything, despite the ravaging monsters looking a lot like werewolves, and the mass disappearance looking a lot like the Rapture. This uncertainty could have been exploited to create some nice tension - of course the girl who runs the UFO web site thinks it's aliens, but then she's not all there, is she?—but sadly we're left with the dull (and somewhat silly) consensus that it's carnivorous wolf-aliens who've traveled untold light-years and deployed hugely advanced technology in order to eat us. And the Tina character is too transparently the Romantic Interest—immediately after seeing an 8-year-old girl horribly eviscerated by an alien monstrosity, her first words are a thank-you to the player for being thoughtful enough to hold her hair while she vomited from the horror. The other characters are generally more bearable, though are just as cardboard—the Defenseless Moppet, the Cop In Over His Head, the Kooky Survivalist. The overall amateurish writing doesn't particularly help matters.
The puzzles are nothing to write home about either, being decidedly abstract and poorly integrated into the story proper. The use of Morse code as a puzzle element is especially ill-advised; there isn't an in-game shortcut for deciphering the message, which means that the puzzle reduces to simple drudgery once the player realizes that Morse code is involved (I confess to immediately scurrying to the hints because I was too lazy to perform the transcription, which presumably isn't the desired behavior). There is an opportunity for a clever puzzle—discovering why the player character and the other survivors weren't taken—but the author immediately sabotages it by having the answer written in block-caps across the top of the screen. Simply presenting the facts and allowing the player to deduce the pattern would have been much more satisfying.
Space Horror just doesn't have enough room for player agency, both because of the CYOA format and the less-than-inspired puzzles. If all this railroading was in the service of a novel story, it would be forgivable, but the plot is an unpretentious genre exercise which barely registers the moment after it's over; more, because of the way the story branches, it's likely that what small narrative punch it packs will be diffuse the first time through, since many of the characters won't make it to the end or won't have had any screen time.
I can't close out the review without offering one unalloyed word of praise, however: "Is it the end of the world? :(" is perhaps the most hilarious parody of Internet-discourse I've ever read. The idea that someone, someday will greet the apocalypse with an emoticon still leaves me giggling.
Too allegorical to land, December 13, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
As I was writing my entry in this year’s comp, which is a memoir, I did a quick survey of IFDB to look for similar autobiographical parser games. They were very thin on the ground, so I was pleasantly surprised to find another entry that seemed to be doing something similar. Despite the initial premise, however, What remains of me very quickly enters an allegorical mode – there’s a giant talking frog, for starters, and specific details are eschewed in favor of stark archetypes like running into an NPC named “My Friends”. And the action is all about simple item-trading puzzles that aren’t inherently that interesting to solve.
So I wound up feeling disappointed, partially because of mismatched expectations, but also because autobiography stripped of its specificity is honestly kind of boring? Most peoples’ struggles to find meaning in their life sound pretty trite when reduced to their barest outlines; it’s the lived experience of those struggles that’s compelling. From the blurb, it sounds like there might have been a bigger, weirder version of this game in the author’s head, but it was narrowed in scope in presumed deference to the IF Comp audience and a desire to reduce the amount of bugs and typos. Often that’s a good approach, but in this case I wished we’d gotten the wilder and woolier game instead.
Highlight: As many jokes whiff as land, but there were a couple that made me laugh, including “Give a man a ticket and he will travel for a day, teach a man to tick it and he will randomly answer his SAT questions."
Lowlight: The room descriptions often don’t seem to update based on your actions, meaning that objects you’ve removed are still mentioned as being present, which made it hard for me to feel like my actions were having an impact!
How I have failed the author: I played during two of Henry’s late-night feeding sessions, and was honestly pretty out of it – so the non-updating descriptions really threw me for a loop since I could barely remember what I’d already done or what was left to do when I picked up the game in the second session, and going back around the large map an extra time meant I messed up the pacing.
Better than its first impression, December 13, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
This Won’t Make You Happy gives a first impression that seems like it’s going to live up to its title: the design is close enough to default Twine to look rough, and the confrontational narrative voice is way too in love with the cleverness of a meta premise that’s actually pretty played out (like, have you ever thought about whether hoovering up shiny objects might have some metaphorical resonance with the pursuit of happiness and mental health under late capitalism? If so, approximately six billion indie platformers would like to have a word). Happily, the game pulls the good kind of bait and switch, and while its short length limits the impact it can have, This Won’t Make You Happy actually did bring a smile to my face. If you haven’t played it yet, definitely don’t be put off by the prickly presentation – it’s worth the additional five minutes to see where it’s going.
If you have, here are some final spoilery thoughts: (Spoiler - click to show)the crux of the game is clearly the moment where, after provoking a fight through its blatant unfairness, the narrator admits that it’s been a rough year all around, and shifts gears to provide some reflection and self-care – enforced through timed text that’s actually a good idea, for once! I was confused by the blurb’s characterization of this as a sort of funny, sort of sentimental game, but after finishing it, that totally makes sense.
Highlight: Despite the initially-blah design, there are actually a bunch of neat visual effects as the text transitions from one passage to the next.
Lowlight: In the first chunk of the game, I wound up seeing the narrator make the same dumb “the object seems to say X, but of course because it’s just an object and I am pretending to not understand how metaphors work despite just having deployed one, that doesn’t make sense!” joke like three distinct times in five minutes.
How I failed the author: I played this one-handed on my phone while Henry napped on my shoulder, and again, this wound up being a secret success: if there is a jewel of happiness more efficacious than a sleeping baby, I’ve yet to find it.
A superheroic conclusion, December 9, 2021(This is a repost of a review I wrote on the IF newsgroups right after the 2004 Comp)
Years in the making, the Earth and Sky saga finally comes to a triumphant end. All the stops are pulled out — both characters are fully playable, leading to enjoyably synergistic puzzle-solving, long-standing mysteries are resolved, though the focus is properly on action rather than explication, and it even comes with a Story Thus Far comic. Elegance is everywhere on display, from the completely in-character hint system to the question-and-answer which integrates the results of your playthroughs of the previous games in the series. And those sound-effect blocks never get old.
Picking up right where part two left off, Luminous Horizon does sadly involve a slightly pedestrian setting — yet another corridor-filled sci-fi installation — but the set-pieces are dense enough and the forward momentum rapid enough that one only notices in retrospect. Likewise, the evil plot isn't particularly interesting in of itself, but as an excuse to indulge in some property damage for justice, it more than serves its purpose. Banter between the siblings makes a welcome return, and it's context-sensitive, entertaining, and gives the floundering player some guidance besides. Overall, the narrative elements once again fit the genre and mood perfectly — Luminous Horizon simply screams "four color supers."
The puzzles likewise are completely in-genre. There are no real object puzzles to speak of — it's all about the clever use of each sibling's superpowers, singly or in conjunction. Many puzzles appear susceptible to solution by either character, allowing the player to pick a preferred approach. There's almost always some action going on, but one never feels too rushed, since the character who isn't being controlled can generally keep the heat off the active PC's back long enough to figure out the best approach. Each section of gameplay is self-contained and clearly set off from the others; while this may lead to some disappointment ("you mean part two is over already?!"), it works to focus attention on the particular crisis at hand and keep the aimless wandering down to practically zero.
It's clear that attention was paid to the smallest detail, and the game was extensively tested. Switching from sibling to sibling, even in the middle of complicated scenes, never resulted in continuity errors or pronoun bugs. Even somewhat nonsensical actions like PUNCH ROAD return a sound effect and a terrible pun. And just when you're thinking that Fire and Rain seems familiar, one character makes the James Taylor reference. Death is possible, but it's always obvious what killed you, and how to go about preventing it. All of this makes Luminous Horizon a pure pleasure to play.
Niggles? A few, I suppose. I spent a fair bit of time experimenting with the gizmos, but could never find a real use for them. They were certainly interesting, but the tinkering felt a little odd, in context. The sequence with Fire and Rain took me a little while to figure out, since I wanted Earth and Sky to both do something simultaneously. The ending might be a little abrupt, although part of that could just be me not wanting the series to be over. Overall, though, these nitpicks do nothing to diminish what's one of the most enjoyable bits of IF out there.
A compelling but not fully successful portrait of mourning, December 9, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
This one lived up to its name for me, for a couple reasons that are more idiosyncratic and one about the way it’s written. I’m definitely glad I played it, but didn’t find it as emotionally resonant as I wanted it to be, despite how well-observed and grounded it is.
Starting on the idiosyncratic side: it was uncanny to realize this was a companion game to The Dead Account, which I’d played much earlier in the Comp – the main cast of Weird Grief are the friend and family group of the holder of the eponymous dead account in the previous game. I suspect this is the reverse of the ideal order, since Weird Grief is first in time and it also fleshes out the characters who show up only as screen-names in The Dead Account. Oddly, Weird Grief doesn’t go into as much detail on what exactly happened to Mike, the dead person, withholding information in a way that didn’t have much payoff for me. I suspect linking the games more explicitly, either by suggesting an intended order, integrating them into the same file, or shifting the way information is presented to provide analogous exposition no matter which is done first (though of course that would be hard!), might have been a good choice.
The other idiosyncracy in my response is that I’m unfamiliar with the subculture that takes center stage here – the protagonist is a furry who’s in a polyamorous relationship with the dead man and his widower – which is fine, but I sometimes felt at sea when trying to understand the norms around the relationship. Juniper, the main character, lives in a different city from Mike and Roger (the widower), and an invitation to move in is treated as a big deal, making it seem like the connection was relatively new or less formal. But she’s also specifically called out as their “third” at the funeral, putting her on a different level from another character who’s also present and had been a sexual partner for the couple.
My confusion about Juniper’s role and expectations tied in with the way she’s written. I didn’t find that she had a lot of interiority, or had a lot of direct feelings about Mike’s death (beyond a single admittedly-heartwarming anecdote that’s told a couple different times, and several reminiscences about sex). Partially this is the nature of protagonists in choice-based games, where room is generally made for the player to put their own stamp on the character. But here, this meant Juniper felt primarily like a lens for Roger’s grief.
This focus extends to the sex scenes – as the blurb warns, they’re here and they’re quite explicit. This sort of thing isn’t exactly my cup of tea, and I have to say that when I’ve experienced deep, soul-crushing grief, sex has been pretty far from my mind so there wasn’t much personal resonance. But I can see how for these folks, sex would be a source of comfort and bonding in a hard time, and definitely understand the artistic imperative not to draw a curtain over what goes on between the three character. Anyway putting all that aside, I felt like Juniper was sidelined in favor of Roger in these sequences too: in the first one, I don’t think she has an orgasm, and in the second, she’s more viewer than participant as the other two characters have sex. I assume this is intentional, and meant to reflect something about Juniper’s relationship with Roger, but once again my takeaway was that Juniper’s subjective experience was secondary to the piece, which feels like a missed opportunity given that she’s our viewpoint character.
The writing is strong throughout – the dialogue rings true, and I liked the focus on the logistics of the grieving period, albeit these folks ate too much fast food (there are lots of typos though, including one “double click passage to edit” error and an awkwardly double-nested parenthetical). And while there are few choices, they feel reasonably impactful. So the supporting pieces are all strong enough – I just wanted Juniper, structurally the center of the piece, to loom a little larger in the story.
Highlight: The characters are all winning, with Tammy, Mike’s sister, especially came through as a positive presence.
Lowlight: once again I played this choice-based game with Henry napping on me, but due to text size and other formatting issues it required a lot of scrolling when reading in portrait mode (I was going to say it’s hard to play one-handed, but that could be misinterpreted!)
How I failed the author: As I said above, this milieu is pretty foreign to my experience so I worry I’m missing, or misinterpreted, many of the social cues or other indications of relationship dynamics.
Promising puzzler with inadequate testing, December 9, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
If you’ve ever perused the IF Comp guidelines for authors, it’s hard to miss that there’s a single recommendation that looms larger than all the others: in a big bold heading right at the top of the document, it booms “playtest your game (and credit your testers).” Plane Walker sure seems like it didn’t mind the first part of this admonition, and it definitely didn’t follow the second, and as a result, a promising puzzle game with some clever math-based mechanics was for me an exercise in frustration, nit-picking, and authorial mind-reading. There’s fun to be had here, but if there’s any prospect of a post-Comp release, I’d hold off until there’s a more battle-tested version of the game available to play.
(Fair warning that I’m going to spoil a couple of the puzzles in the remainder of this review – I’m not putting them in spoiler text because I don’t think they’re fairly solvable in the current version of the game, so a push in the right direction is likely to make the game more enjoyable rather than less).
Plane Walker doesn’t give the greatest initial impression. The very first character of the game is a superfluous space that awkwardly offsets the opening text, which is a single too-long paragraph saying you’re alone on a plane and are suffering from amnesia (sigh). There’s no ABOUT or HELP text, and the player character is as good looking as ever. The first puzzle requires typing X SEATS twice, with a critical item only being revealed after the second time; the second needs you to spell out an action with absurd specificity (to break open a keypad HIT KEYPAD WITH STICK doesn’t work – you need to go through the specific keys to find one that’s susceptible to brute force); and the third is a trial-and-error exercise with a time limit (Plane Walker will kill you, including one open-the-door-and-die sequence in the midgame, so definitely make saves).
Things improve a little once you reach the second major area. The environment opens up, something like a plot slowly starts to emerge, and there are a couple of really clever puzzles – though again, they aren’t well clued. For example, the major puzzles in this section require exploring some math books by literally entering them, but the possibility of doing so, much less the mechanism for doing so, isn’t suggested anywhere as far as I could tell.
Once I went to the walkthrough and got over that hump, I was able to get my teeth into things, but again, too many of the puzzles are undermotivated. The best of them involves turning yourself imaginary – in the mathematical sense – to explore the blocked-off part of the area. The steps you take to do this are fun and make sense, but the problem is there’s no reason to think it should accomplish anything: trying to access the locked-off areas before you solve this puzzle gives you a failure message saying you’re worried about getting lost, which has nothing to do with the intended solution.
Making matters worse, implementation is spotty throughout. I didn’t run into bugs as such, but there are a host of typos, unimplemented synonyms, disambiguation issues, guess-the-verb puzzles, and actions requiring very specific syntax to succeed. It all adds up to frustration, and makes the trial-and-error the puzzle design often requires even more annoying.
Again, this is a real shame, since I was enjoying some of the puzzles, and while the story doesn’t make complete sense, I did like the pieces of it that I understood, which see you dragooned into a secret war between mathematical planes. There’s a version of Plane Walker that I could highly recommend as a tough-as-nails but fair old-school puzzler, but that’s unfortunately not the one we currently have.
Highlight: By the endgame, either I’d tuned into the game’s wavelength, or the author had mercy and decided to make the climactic puzzles easier (always a good practice) – either way I found the last challenge fair and fun.
Lowlight: OK, I’m going to spoil a puzzle. To get through a particular barrier, you need to turn yourself two-dimensional, which is a cool idea! However, the way you do this is you pick up an anvil with a hole in it, cut a strange rope you find embedded in the ceiling (you need to cut it with a broadsword – if you try to cut it with your handsaw, you get a default “that would achieve little” error), tie it to the anvil, and then tie the other end to an iron bar in a supply closet. I can’t reconstruct the logic behind even a single step of this process!
How I failed the author: this is another one where I think the impatience caused by my new parenthood was actually helpful – I went to the walkthrough relatively quickly, which was definitely the right move.
Innovative but annoying format, December 8, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Oof, I can’t help but feel bad for the timing of launching a Facebook Messenger game the same week that it crashed. I didn’t run into any downtime, but I did find FB Messenger an awkward platform for this game, from really-annoying timed text, the need to manually scroll down the chat log after each prompt to see the options, and accidentally restarting the game several times when I tried typing instead of just clicking. It definitely seems like there could be advantages to the format that make it worth these downsides, but I don’t think The Belinsky Conundrum does anything that can’t be capably handled by more traditional platforms like Twine, and using one of those likely would have made the implementation a fair bit smoother.
The substance of the Belinsky Conundrum is also a little awkward. The blurb made me expect intense moral dilemmas, and then the opening seems to be framing a high-stakes espionage mission, important enough to be launched from the White House Situation Room, but your character’s dialogue options radically undermine any sense of gravity – like, upon being told that the mission will involve assassinating an American citizen and his minor children, my choices were “sweet!”, “that’s messed up”, and “oh my god”. Which, I mean sure, it is messed up, but I was expecting something a bit more articulate? This irreverent tone continues throughout the mission, and while I guess it’s meant to keep things grounded and conversational, it really took my head out of the game.
It doesn’t help that most of what you wind up doing is fairly dull. The primary gameplay is about managing the logistics of getting to the mission and gathering the needed weapons and transportation. Preparation can be a fun part of a heist story, but here there’s not much interesting going on in any of the sequences – even a (Spoiler - click to show)a surprise betrayal from a key contact played out in a low-stakes, low-consequence way – and I ran into what was I think a bug that made the resource-management part of these decisions moot, since I started out with several thousand negative credits (but could keep spending anyway).
I can see how things might pick up at the climax, but just as I got to the mission’s target the first time, I learned that they were about to be raided by the cops, and I decided to scrub rather than get caught in the middle. Turns out this ends the game, which is fair enough, but since there was no save functionality, rectifying that mistake meant starting over, and I didn’t have the endurance to face all that timed text again immediately (I eventually won -- see below). It’s a shame, since a good moral dilemma can be satisfying to work through, but I fear TBC might have gone too far in back-loading the good stuff.
Highlight: I did enjoy the drama of kicking off the story in the Situation Room – it’s a fun touch.
Lowlight: Getting a gun was a really tedious process, not least because you need to call through five different people with very-similar names to figure out which one is actually your contact. It’s pointless busywork since there’s no way to guess which one’s right, and no penalty other than sitting through identical wrong-number dialogue, if you fail.
How I failed the author: I haven’t logged onto Facebook in like 3 or 4 years (look, I’m not a big social media person) so I was distracted the whole time I was playing by a sidebar full of people I’ve flaked on writing back to for an extraordinarily long time. Sorry!
MUCH LATER UPDATE: I went back and replayed this one to a real ending. There’s definitely a climax that brings some excitement and ties together the plot threads laid down earlier, and presents the promised moral dilemma. This didn’t change my mind on the game too much, though, since the story felt very much on rails after the point where my first playthrough prematurely concluded. There’s a lot of action and some wrenching decisions, but they all appeared to happen automatically, with only one significant choice coming in at the very end. There do appear to be major consequences for the decisions made in the mid-game – there’s a score listed at the end, and there was definitely room for improvement – but I think front-loading the interactivity like this wasn’t a great idea, since it means there’s a lot of fiddly decision-making before the story kicks into high gear, then not much to do except click “next” once the ending arrives. If this had more of a heist vibe, where you could know a bit more about what the climax was likely to look like and make your preparations accordingly, I might have liked it better, but as-is the decisions felt too much like shots in the dark.
A well-implemented, serious historical adventure, December 8, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
A tightly-designed and well-researched period-piece puzzler about a singing cowboy rescuing his sweetheart from a band of outlaws, The Song of the Mockingbird has a lot going for it: it nails a consistent voice that fits the setting, it boasts complex but fair puzzles that can be tackled in nonlinear order, and there are really robust post-game notes laying out the historical context. This of course did really well in the Comp, and deservedly so – but for a few mostly-idiosyncratic reasons it didn’t fully resonate with me, so I didn't wind up enjoying Mockingbird as much as I admired it.
First, I struggled with the puzzles. Some of this is due to my new-father brain, I’m sure (I played the game over a couple of late-night sessions), and all of them make sense once they’re solved. But I wound up using the hint system more than I was expecting to, largely because I had a hard time getting my bearings. Many of the puzzles hinge on using historically-appropriate equipment, like (Spoiler - click to show) making the lighter work and fixing the wagon-wheel, but the way objects were described often made it hard for me to picture what was going on. Location descriptions were also often really verbose, with a lot of detail on the environment and relevant objects, as well as usually having a couple of additional paragraphs laying out what a nearby bad guy was up to. Again, this is probably a strength, since it helps get the player grounded in a complicated, unfamiliar environment – but something about the writing sometimes left me feeling a bit at sea.
Another reason I found the puzzles hard is that the vibe of Mockingbird is much more serious than I was expecting. While the blurb and cover art aren’t zany by any means, the presentation of the disarmed singing-cowboy protagonist whose wits and guitar are going to save the day led me to expect something reasonably lighthearted. Deviating from parser-comedy conventions is no bad thing, but in this case, one way the difference plays out is that the puzzles are ruthless than I was expecting. They're all about getting rid of various outlaws who are keeping you from the ranch house where your sweetheart is being held, but while I was mostly trying to disarm them or knock them out, the actual solutions were way more bloodthirsty. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed how the game takes its premise seriously – but seriously doesn’t have to mean violent, and personally this choice didn’t work well for me.
Finally, while the game is technically solid and I didn’t run into any bugs, I found it was missing a number of conveniences that I’ve come to expect from modern IF. The biggest offender is a door locked with three different keys – once I’d solved all the puzzles needed to collect them, I tried just typing S or OPEN DOOR, but nope, I had to manually unlock each different lock, with lots of disambiguation issues along the way because UNLOCK BRONZE WITH BRONZE wasn’t understood (nor does UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRONZE KEY work – you need to match each key to each lock). This is a minor annoyance in the grand scheme, but it still look me like two dozen turns to get this stupid door opened, and there were a few other similar places, like futzing with (Spoiler - click to show)the gold casket or finding the block and tackle, where the parser wasn’t as helpful as I wanted it to be.
So yeah, this is a review full of niggles of what’s a really well-done game, and I know a good amount of my caviling above is really down to personal preference – there’s a lot of good work and solid craft that went into Mockingbird, and I love seeing more historical games in the Comp. Sadly it didn’t fully gel for me, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the author does next.
Highlight: I loved the lavish historical notes available after winning the game – I’m kind of a history nerd so I love this stuff (though see next point…)
Lowlight: OK, so the game is set in 1867, but in the epilogue the main character reflects on how “President Johnson will snuff out the embers” of the Confederate dead-ender movement the outlaws are supporting. Come on, this is post Swing Around the Circle! Sure, the local military head, General Sheridan, was a staunch Reconstructionist, but from the timing implied by the notes, he was at best only weeks away from being transferred away by the soft-on-Confederates Johnson! (OK, I suppose maybe the singing cowboy isn’t so up on politics, but come on, this feels like an oversight -- albeit one the author's said will be changed in a post-Comp update).
How I failed the author: er, per the above, I may have been overly-fixated on historical minutiae.
A classical romp, December 7, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I’m a firm believer in playing games in the random order that the Comp page spits out. Sure, it’d be easy and immediately-rewarding to jump around looking for games from authors I know and picking the ones with blurbs that immediately appeal. But that would mean I wouldn’t give as much attention to games by new or lesser-known authors, and would probably make me burn out on getting through the full Comp, since I’d be front-loading the stuff I’m likely toto dig and backloading games that might take more of an effort to play. With that said, I am only human, and every Comp, there’s a game or two that strikes my fancy right off the bat, leaving me to furtively scroll down, drool over the blurb, and anticipate the moment when I finally get to play.
Reader, since October first I’ve been jonesing to dig into The Golden Heist, since it seems laser-targeted to appeal to my interests. I’m a sucker for a good heist, and the record will show I’m quite a fan of lightly-comic Classical settings (ahem). And I’ve long wanted to visit the ruins of the Domus Aurea – while I haven’t managed it yet, I have walked past the entrance while pestering my wife with fun facts about it (she really appreciated that, I’m sure). So while I think this is a fun, well-designed game that anyone will enjoy, you might want to take the following rave review with a grain of salt given how many of my buttons it manages to hit.
To be successful, The Golden Heist needs to walk a tightrope between breezy accessibility and historical grounding – anyone drawn in by the specificity of the premise is going to want to see the game reflect what we actually know about this time and place in early-Imperial Rome, but at the same time, a heist needs zippy dialogue, narrow escapes, and surprise reversals that can’t be too indebted to plodding realism. It’s a tough balance to strike, but the game manages it really well, with incidental details about things like the fire hazards endemic to ordinary life in Rome lightly scattered throughout the story. The take on Nero, too, is pretty pulpy, but I think is closely modeled on the portrayal in Suetonius (whether or not the dishier bits of the Twelve Caesars were anything other than scurrilous gossip is whole separate question).
Of course, the player needs something to do in this well-realized setting, which brings us to the heist. It’s all well-motivated – your father was an architect who helped build Nero’s new golden palace, but was cruelly cast aside after an injury, so now you’re out to rob the place blind as an act of revenge that will incidentally make you rich – and while there’s not much of a separate planning phase, which is something I enjoy in these kinds of stories, you do get to choose one of three mutually-exclusive partners for the caper and bring their particular specialty (fists, wits, or brains) to bear. I went with charming rogue Felix – he seemed lucky – which had a major impact on how things played out, both lending his talents to overcoming some of the obstacles we encountered and adding some complications of his own, as some of his past swindles caught up with him at the wrong time.
The heist itself plays out as a series of obstacles that need to be confronted in sequence, from making your way in (I had the choice to blag in the front or sneak in the back) to connecting with a contact to setting up your distraction to the light puzzle-solving required to get into the vault, and climaxing with the desperate rush to escape once things go inevitably pear-shaped. While the tone stays breezy (and bringing Felix along set up some pretty good jokes, including his threatening bluff that the main character’s a Macedonian known as Alexander the Great With His Fists), there’s definitely a ratcheting up of tension.
I’m not sure whether it’s possible to have to abort the heist early if things go too wrong, but it certainly feels like there are degrees of success or failure that have consequences later, especially in the push-your-luck escape bit. I have to confess that my run was more Benny Hill than Danny Ocean, with a few small missteps in the opening cascading into big problems on the way out. Still, I managed to get away with a reasonable chunk of loot (though the game seemed to think I’d lifted Nero’s golden lyre when I’d actually left it behind), and I’m eager to replay post-Comp to see if I can do any better. And given how big a role Felix played, I’d imagine that picking one of the other sidekicks would feel like a substantially new experience.
There are certainly some parts of the game that don’t work as well as the rest – in particular, the puzzle to unlock the vault feels too adventure-gamey to me – plus there are a couple typos, and it’s a little disappointing not to have the larger cast and cross-cutting of scenes that you sometimes get in heist stories. Still, even discounting the way the setting and vibe play to my preferences, Golden Heist is a fun, fleet piece of work that lived up to my high expectations.
Highlight: Picking just one is really hard, but I did especially enjoy the bonkers way the running-away portion of the heist played out, with priceless treasures of the Julio-Claudians bouncing across the marble floors.
Lowlight: I’ve refrained from mentioning it so far, but much of the game’s text is timed, fading in sentence by sentence. It comes in pretty quickly, but still, why must authors do this?
How I failed the author: While I was 2/3 of the way through the game’s major puzzle, Henry woke up hard from a long nap, with a dirty diaper, a gas back-up, an empty stomach, and a nose stuffed with boogers. Seeing to all that took quite a bit of time, but it’s a testament to how much I dug this game that I felt like I’d barely missed a beat when I came back to it.
Too much of a good thing, December 7, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
With a new Matrix sequel coming out I think reasonably soon (“linear time” is a concept that feels like it only applies to other people ever since Henry came) I’ve been reminded of why I found the previous set so utterly disappointing. Like basically every then-teenaged boy I was very excited by the first one, and I thought it ended on a really exciting note: the humans were poised to go on offense, and clearly the way they were going to do that was via mass-Satori, awakening all the people trapped in the Matrix from their illusions - and crashing the machines’ power systems in the process. But then the sequels arrived and were, uh, not that – instead of a Buddhist parable of human liberation, we were suddenly supposed to be invested in all these new AI characters and their muddy Gnostic maundering about destiny for two long movies.
This may be running a little afield when assessing You are SpamZapper 3.1 – though the turn-of-the-millennium setting means it’s tapping into at least some of the same zeitgeist – but I had a similar reaction to the game, as what initially seemed like a winsome workplace comedy turned into an overlong melodrama about immortal intelligences and their codependent relationships with their users. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I think it’ll find an audience that enjoys the heightened emotion and big-idea twists it has to offer, but it didn’t land for me as well as it probably deserves.
Now that I’ve spoiled a bit of where the story goes, I should lay out where it starts, which is with your anthropomorphized spam-blocking software meeting a new coworker (an email plugin that dings when an arriving message hits the inbox) and logging in for a busy day’s shift zapping spam. This segment of the game makes elegant use of the sometimes-constrained nature of a choice-based game, since the only agency you have is to block or approve incoming messages one by one. As the flood of email rises, you start to get a sense of who the human user’s friends are, and also a retrospectively-idyllic look at vintage-2000 email ads.
I enjoyed this bit, but it definitely goes on for a while (I think 50-odd emails) before the main plot stats to emerge. Because this is not just a regular workday: a friend of the user’s (Laurie) is having issues with her Christian-conservative father, who’s considering taking her computer away. The stakes for this are higher than just being e-grounded, though, since Laurie has, uh, fallen in love with another program, the letter-writing wizard in her word-processor. To avert the separation of these two lovers, you need to work together with the other programs to change the father’s mind about the temptations posed by technology. Along the way, you also learn to deal with your crippling self-esteem and anxiety issues (you’re perpetually worried that if you make too many spam-blocking mistakes your user will uninstall you), plus there’s a recurring subplot going into way too much detail on the mechanics of why the programs are sentient – it’s not just a comedy bit we’re supposed to go with, in fact these email plug-ins are incarnations of immortal noosphere intelligences who exist simultaneously at all points in time (there’s yet another plot strand set in a post-climate-apocalypse world).
It is a whole lot, in other words, and reader, I can’t say I followed all the way along the journey. The writing is solid enough – the different programs have a good amount of characterization, and there are some really good jokes involving the different chimes the new-mail signal program can make (I remember that duck quack!) and all the different obnoxious spam running around the early-00’s internet. But there’s also a lot of text here, most of it delivered in linear click-to-advance fashion that started to feel exhausting by the second hour, and some things are definitely over-explained. Similarly, Zappy’s various crises of confidence began to feel fairly belabored by the end. I also really had a hard time investing in the love story between a girl and her Word template: I get that we’re supposed to see the programs as metaphors for people, but their obsessive, near-slavish devotion to their user stands as a creepy barrier to taking the metaphor seriously.
There are some puzzles and choices to break up the progression of the story, and a few of these I thought were quite clever: your merry band of AIs only has a few things they’re allowed to do, so figuring out how to leverage those abilities, which includes leveraging opportunities in the giant mountain of spam, is generally pretty fun (though there is one pick-the-right-spam-message-to-exploit puzzle that felt like it required reading the author’s mind, as the characters even comment on what an off-the-wall idea it is). The balance between puzzles and reading seemed off to me, though – I wanted less text in between the interactive bits.
In fact that – less – is just what I wanted for You are SpamZapper as a whole: less word-count, sure, but I also think I would have enjoyed the game more if a few of the plot’s twists and turns had been excised in favor of a leaner and more compelling progression, and if some of the crazier ideas had been weeded out where they get in the way of the emotional core of the story.
Highlight: I really liked all the mail-ping jokes – something about that bit of circa-2000 Internet nostalgia works for me.
Lowlight: I ran into a bug around the bit where you (Spoiler - click to show)open a new credit card – a development-tools window popped up at the bottom of the screen that made it hard to click the links, though eventually this went away (I played in a Safari browser on an iPhone).
How I failed the author: I was really tired when I played the first part of the game, so the business where two characters were sharing an email account left me permanently confused about who was who.
More than just cute (though it is cute), December 6, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I’ve heard various theories for how to do well in IF Comp posited over the years, but Fine Felines cuts the Gordian knot with an outside-the-box strategy that’s obvious in retrospect: jam a game chockablock with kitty pictures and wait for the 10-out-of-10s to roll in. That’s not all this ChoiceScript entry has going for it, since I found the economic side of the cat-breeding system engaging, the potentially-twee premise is leavened by some more serious themes, and the writing is assured too, sketching in four different romanceable NPCs and juggling the different subplots with aplomb. But despite trying to maintain critical distance, I still spent a disproportionate amount of my time with Fine Felines cooing over photos of kittens – I’m not made of stone!
The main thrust of the game is as advertised: in the wake of the death of your disabled mother, for whom you’d been the primary caregiver, you’ve decided to use your inheritance to set up as a cat breeder. I know nothing about the specifics of the business, but Fine Felines goes into just enough detail to be fun, making sure you need to consider things like license requirements and the characteristics of different breeds of cat but providing enough info and context that I never felt like I was in over my head. The game’s roughly divided into two phases: in the startup portion, you meet different cat-breeder NPCs and decide which two (of six) cats you want to use to seed your stable, while spending your nest egg to keep the kitties healthy and happy, with options for food, exercise equipment, and more, as well as the advertising and overhead every business needs. Based on your decisions here, you’ll eventually wind up with a number of kittens, and the second phase is about caring for them and hopefully selling them to their lucky new owners.
These systems aren’t tuned particularly harshly – without agonizing over my decisions, I wound up with a successful business that was swimming in cash by the end. But the choices still feel meaningful, and it’s satisfying to see the main character’s life get better. It helps that this isn’t a dry management minigame – all the decisions you need to make on how to run your business are embedded in the narrative, and many of your choices aren’t made in the abstract, but also let you engage with the cast of NPCs. When you pick the breed of cats you want to purchase, for example, you’re also picking which of the breeders you want to spend more time with, and potentially check in with when crises hit.
Beyond this main thread, there’s an additional subplot involving your character being diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and having to use some of their financial and emotional resources to protect their health while running a successful business adds an additional, more serious tone – though again, I found that the game’s difficulty was easy enough that this became an upbeat story of adjusting to life with a disability, while not sugar-coating the challenges that the disease poses.
All in all, Fine Felines succeeds at what it sets out to do. If I have a critique, it’s that the various NPCs, while endearingly drawn and refreshingly diverse, didn’t for me take on a life of their own beyond their somewhat-tropey initial presentation. Given the game’s relatively short running time and the broad range of potential interactions, though, this is a minor fault. And did I mention that it’s lavishly illustrated with cat pictures? 10/10, wins the internet.
Highlight: look, I hate to be superficial, but again, these are adorable kitties, and despite the fact that I’m primarily a dog person, I still found the choice of which cats to pick super hard because they were all so adorable.
Lowlight: I wound up choosing a matched pair of cats from the same breed, since the game seemed to present that as the default option – going with two different breeds requires clicking through to a second set of choices, and also seemed like it required rolling the dice on whether these cats who didn’t know each other would get along. But this choice made me feel like I missed out on interacting with two of the main NPCs, since it was hard to come up with reasons to talk to them rather than the one who was an expert on the breed I selected. True, this design means replays will be more rewarding, and Fine Felines seems like it’s meant to be run through more than once, but I still think it’d be more fun if I’d been pushed more aggressively towards the mix-and-match option.
How I failed the author : again I’m going to mark this down as a secret success, since in the last few weeks I’ve gained a new appreciation for the joys of caring for a helpless but cute little creature.
Stylish cyberpunk upgrade-em-up, December 6, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I have evolving views about custom parsers, but at this point in the Comp I’m starting to realize I should probably develop some thoughts about custom choice engines too! I'm lucky that it’s Silicon and Cells that occasions the thought, because it’s a really impressive piece of work. The system has an attractive visual design, with a nice color scheme and the ability to display graphics; the text is clean, large, and readable; it’s quickly responsive to user clicks; and it’s got support for timed events and other bells and whistles.
The engine’s in service of a game that’s on the more systemic side of the choice-based spectrum, as you guide a plucky heroine through a heist and subsequent investigations in a cyberpunk world. The hook here is that through the course of the story, you pick up a variety of Deus-Ex-style upgrades – for each slot, you get a choice of either psionic or cybernetic options which works a little differently – that open up new choices if they’re activated at the appropriate time. You only have limited energy, though, so you’ll usually need to choose which to have powered up. In most sequences, you can freely reallocate energy so you can lawnmower your way through the options, but there are some timed events where preparation – or manual dexterity in clicking to shift energy – will lead to better outcomes.
It’s this aspect of the game that gives rise to the “metroidvania” tag in the blurb, as you spend a good amount of time looping back over previous locations to see whether a newly-acquired ability has unlocked any new possibilities. This is just as satisfying here as it is in a traditional side-scroller, too, so it’s neat to see the mechanic deployed in a radically different genre.
As for the story behind this system, it’s a solid one, though Silicon and Cells is less innovative on this side of things. The introduction feels rather abrupt, as we’re thrown into an expository conversation where Jaya, the protagonist, meets with a mentor character and gains her first ability in service of a planned heist of a high-rolling casino. It took me a little while to feel like I was up to speed on why we were doing this heist and how the characters related – plus I found Jaya was a bit of a cipher at first.
This initial awkwardness goes away reasonably quickly, though, as the momentum of the heist – and its fallout – creates immediate goals, and Jaya begins to develop more of a personality. She’s an appealing figure, from one of the city’s slums but trying to do better not just for herself but also her community, and as the plot expands in scope you wind up getting the chance to make decisions that can have a really significant impact. Most of the main beats are things you’ve seen before in cyberpunk stories – there’s an all-powerful AI running the city, a corporation with shady motives, a circle of founding hackers with messy personal fallout – but it’s all well executed, and the different environments and challenges provide good variety. There’s a fantasy MUD that’s the playground of one of the aforementioned hackers, the casino, which has some working gambling games to play (though I think I found a bug where I couldn’t win at the Yes/No/Go game in the Pearly Gates section, albeit I had so much money by that point it didn’t matter), and various cyberspace archives and corporate HQs, all rendered in tight prose that provides just enough detail to be memorable. Overall, by the ending, I was invested in the story and satisfied with how the choices I’d made – both about gear and about people – wound up playing out. I know download-only games sometimes don’t get as much attention in the Comp, especially if they’re choice-based, but this one’s definitely worth a play.
Highlight: I enjoyed the MUD pastiche, from the realistically-annoying veteran player to the bartender who uses timed-text to deliver a well-paced joke.
Lowlight: the plot thread involving the casino owner felt underdeveloped to me, which was too bad since I enjoyed the initial verbal sparring with her and would have enjoyed seeing it go somewhere – possibly there are alternate approaches where she plays more of a role in the endgame, though.
How I failed the author: the timed events are fun and well-designed, but I’m clumsy with my laptop’s touchpad in the best of circumstances (I haven’t had much chance to sit down at a desk these last few weeks) so reallocating energy to my mods in real time was very hard. Fortunately the game’s forgiving, and autoresolved the key challenges in my favor even when I was flailing, though I was embarrassed that it basically wound up playing itself.
Diet Anchorhead, December 3, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I’m bummed I already brought up the comparison in my Ghosts Within review, because now that I’ve played D’ARKUN, I’m turning into the Boy Who Cried Anchorhead. The similarity is even clearer this time out, though, as while the former game had a dreamlike vibe very much its own, in this long Dialog game we’re firmly in remixed Lovecraft-plot territory. There’s a decayed mansion with secret passages a-plenty (including an attic telescope), a seaside town with more than its share of creepy inhabitants, nightmares that grow worse as the days go by, a wicked inheritance dredging the sins of the past into the present day, and – natch – tentacles galore. While D’ARKUN has its weak spots, with a thinner-than-it-needed-to-be story and some underclued puzzles in the back half, it very much scratches that old Mythos itch.
Starting with that plot, the impetus for getting the protagonist to this accursed stretch of the German coastline is a new one on me – your student character is on vacation and managed to rent the world’s worst Airbnb – but after an eldritch encounter all thoughts of relaxation are put aside as you start delving into the mysteries of your rented house. This shift happens too abruptly for my taste, as there isn’t much time spent establishing why you’re suddenly climbing down cliff-faces and looking behind paintings, except that there’s not much else to do to pass the time (if the cosmic horrors hadn’t materialized, one wonders how you’d have spent your holiday).
Exploration is almost immediately rewarding, though, and it’s just fun to find a madman’s scrawled notes or hidden compartments in the family mausoleum. This first half of the game is well paced too, as new locations gradually open up as the clock moves forward (the accompanying map is really evocative), and you work through satisfying puzzles that aren’t too tricky: there’s a well-implemented set of climbing gear that allows you to clamber around obstacles, and while there are some objects that require SEARCHing to find, the ABOUT text gives fair warning. There is a tricky light puzzle, where you need to make good use of the handful of turns your lantern has before it runs out of oil, but copious use of UNDO saw me through.
I found the second half didn’t fully pay off the promising opening, though. Partially this is due to the implementation starting to feel less polished: I started running into disambiguation issues, there are some guess the verb issues (figuring out how to use the syringe was tortuous), and to get to one location I think you have to type RIDE TO SIEBENSCHIEDERSTEIN, which should never be required of any player. There are also more NPCs to deal with, and they’re drawn rather thinly, without many dialogue options or much in the way of interactivity to make them feel like anything other than contrivances. Beyond implementation, the clueing also starts to get thinner: there’s a puzzle involving getting past a guard that feels like it involves reading the author’s mind, a maze that has a clever twist but will probably get brute-forced, and at another point progress requires you to get into what looks like an unwinnable situation and spend several turns waiting before a deus ex machina rescues you, rather than undoing or restoring to safety.
More impactfully, I didn’t feel like the plot really cohered. It gestures in the direction of enough Lovecraftian tropes that I can see where things are meant to be going – there’s a horrifying ritual, an extradimensional temple, a surprise or two – but the stakes are sketchy, both for the world as a whole but also for your character. A bit more polish and a bit more focus on the subjectivity of the protagonist would have made D’ARKUN a very worthy Anchorhead-alike; as it is, it’s a good time but requires the player to fill in some blanks.
Highlight: the creepy mansion is a good example of the genre; it’s not too big, but dense with creepy scenery and not-too-tough exploration puzzles.
Lowlight the recipe puzzle is neat in theory, but required more trial and error than I wanted – there are clues helping you figure out what the mixture is supposed to look like, but there’s some vagueness in the puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)(I got the potion to look “shiny”, as the notes said, but still needed to add another dose of the relevant ingredient) that made it unsatisfying to solve.
How I failed the author: this is a long one and it took me a couple days to work through it, so that’s perhaps contributed to my feeling that it’s a bit scattershot.
An ontological heist, December 3, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Universal Hologram takes the player on a joyride through altered states both inner (via lucid dreaming) and outer (via stacked simulated realities), with enough big ideas to make Philip K. Dick blush and off-kilter prose that sells the premise with brio.
Admittedly, it starts a little slow – the opening is well considered in name-checking some of the major concepts that will be explored in what’s to come, and giving the player the opportunity to dig into what they’re most interested in, be that the history of the far-future world, the mechanics of lucid dreaming, or just interacting with other people. But it isn’t until maybe a third of the way in that a real conflict or sense of urgency start to come into the story; before that, it’s pretty much all exploration. Since the writing is good and the world is interesting (it’s a sort of Martian post-scarcity techno-utopia where the Internet is a person and the Earth is gone, but much less annoying than I’ve made that sound), I was sufficiently engaged to stick around until the game got more grabby. I’m once again in the position of having played on my phone, so I was too lazy to copy and paste bits of writing that I liked and I’m therefore in the unenviable position of having to broadly characterize it and say “trust me, it’s good.” But I really liked the way the writing takes a off-kilter conversational, even occasionally lightly confrontational, tone while digging into the heady concepts underlying the setting.
The plot, once it comes, ties together the game’s different themes with some elegance, and the choices at that point shift from being primarily about which parts of the setting you want to dig into to allowing you to decide how or whether you want to cooperate with the ontological heist your character gets press-ganged into, with some surprising action-y bits even coming into play to change things up in the late game. I’m not sure the ending I got completely stuck the landing (though see “how I failed the author,” below), but the journey was well worth the price of admission.
Highlight: I’m a sucker for a good heist sequence, and this one delivers, with high stakes and curve-balls coming left and right.
Lowlight: A tradeoff of this fleet, too-clever-by-half voice is the occasional clanger – there’s one out-of-context Lawnmower Man reference that really should have been left on the cutting room floor.
How I failed the author: after I finished the game, I was turning over its big-picture themes and intentionally-disjointed plot in my brain to see how it all coheres. But almost immediately Henry needed a diaper change, and it was a rough one with two mid-change pees, and after the chaos died down I’d lost the thread and as a result my final take on what the game’s saying and doing is fuzzier than I’d like!
Lovecraftiana with a twist or two, December 3, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The blurb for Beneath Fenwick says its genre is “suspense, with horror overtones”, but the opening of this parser-aping Twine game couldn’t be hitting the Lovecraft notes harder if it tried. The protagonist is on a creepy old bus, being driven towards an isolated New England town, and once you arrive the dilapidated architecture, pug-ugly inhabitants, and even the creepy grocery store invoke Shadow Over Innsmouth so directly that it’s clearly intentional. The story doesn’t stick too closely to that template, though – we’re in the present day, not the 1920s, and rather than being alone, the botany-student protagonist (named… Hedgerow) arrives alongside her boyfriend, as they’re both planning on attending the local college. Vive la difference, but still, I wound up wishing it had stuck with the horror tropes more fully, as the story slowed down in its last half before ending too abruptly. And while I usually enjoy the puzzley gameplay this kind of Twine game enables, Beneath Fenwick could have benefitted from leaning into its choice-based nature a little more fully.
Starting with the second piece first, the game’s interface does a really good job of mimicking parser conventions. Notable bits of scenery, usable objects, and other characters are highlighted in the text, and clicking on any of them pops up a new window with a more detailed description and possibly further possibilities for interaction – taking, unlocking, all the usual medium-dry-goods stuff, plus talking, which gives you a choice of topics. There’s a full inventory a click away, which works similarly, as well as a subsystem that lets you combine two or more carried objects. The major departure is in navigation: instead of compass directions, exits are listed by name.
This works well, but what you get is what you get, and I wound up missing more traditional Twine touches. Beyond the plain-vanilla puzzles, there are long cutscenes – especially the opening sequence – where there’s just a single continue option available, and the keyword-based conversation system doesn’t allow for dialogue choices. I suppose that it’s odd that I’m totally willing to roll with these limitations in a parser game, but it still seems a shame to do so much work to re-create in Twine the things that parser systems aren’t as good at.
The other issue I ran into had to do with moving around the world. The map is very dense, with a number of different roads and locations in the town, and the boarding house where the main characters wind up staying has an especially large number of rooms whose interconnections aren’t obvious and which have forgettable names. I know many folks find compass directions inaccessible, but they would have made it much easier for me to build a mental model of how the geography fit together.
Story-wise, Beneath Fenwick does a good job with the gradual build of tension. It’s beyond clear from the get-go that something’s deeply wrong in this town, but the game doesn’t tip its hand too early by indicating which of the many, many creepy people, places, and things on hand are the main threats. There’s at least one clever bait-and-switch (Spoiler - click to show)(the university at the edge of town isn’t a Miskatonic-style hotbed of occultism – in fact you never make it there), and it steers clear of the typical Lovecraft-game shift into gonzo violence midway through. At the same time, that means that some of the mid- and late-game felt slow, and even unmotivated – the requirement to fully explore the boarding house on the second day before running your errands felt artificial, and to get to the endgame sequence you need to break into a shed with no indication there’s anything important there.
Speaking of the ending, it’s effectively surprising, but rather abrupt – there’s no denouement to speak of, and the resolution of the mysteries of Fenwick felt disappointingly straightforward. I almost felt like the game stopped midway through – I would have definitely stuck around for a second hour that added in some more interesting puzzles and deeper interactions, while ramping up the tension into a more sustained climax. It’s always good to leave the player wanting more, of course, but maybe not so much more.
Highlight: The main character’s boyfriend – Randall, an architecture major – is a delightful fuddy-duddy despite being in his early 20s. He even introduces the protagonist (his girlfriend, again) as “my companion”!
Lowlight: It is possible to die in Beneath Fenwick, and while it offers a one-turn rewind, I think this can leave you stuck in an unwinnable state. Fortunately I’d done a save at the beginning of the day when this happened, but it was still frustrating to have to replay a bunch of the quotidian exploration I’d already completed.
How I failed the author: Playing the game went fine, but Henry’s been super congested and fussy today so I’ve written this review in like ten two-minute bursts, so apologies if it’s choppy and doesn’t make sense!
Texting adventure, December 2, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I’ve seen a number of games that ape the text-message format, but Closure manages something novel and very impressive by doing so in parser, rather than choice based, format. It’s a brilliant move, since text-adventure shorthand makes more sense if you’re texting someone in a time-sensitive situation, and Closure goes the extra mile by recasting all the parser error messages in the voice of your friend. Oh, and through some interpreter wizardry, the game actually looks like it’s playing out via text bubbles, complete with short but not irritating delays between messages.
As impressive as the first impression is, Closure isn’t all style and no substance because the gameplay itself is satisfying too. It’s a short, one-room game, as you guide your friend Kira through an ill-advised break-in so she can search her ex’s dorm room for clues to what drove them apart. It does the usual one-room game trick of providing telescoping detail – there’s a closet, which when opened has another half-dozen objects, and so on – and since this is a character-focused piece, most of what you’re doing is just examining, with only one real puzzle (it’s a pretty clever one, though – it uses a trick that often seems a little unfair in a regular parser game, but makes total sense here). The voice is dead on, and it’s satisfying to peel back the layers of the ex’s plausibly-realized college life.
If I have a quibble, it’s that Kira’s moment of revelation felt a bit on-on-the-nose, and her sense of what counts as someone’s identity is pretty juvenile. Plus I’m pretty sure she could have read between the lines and figured out what was going on earlier than she did. But hey, these are teenaged characters, so maybe that’s fitting.
Highlight: there are a lot of neat touches here, but one of my favorites was the elegant way the game responds if you take the high road and refuse to read the ex’s personal notes.
Lowlight: There’s a mad-libs style opening where you can type in some things you do to relax, with the responses getting braided into the game later on. This works as well as mad-libs stuff usually does in IF, which is to say, awkwardly (both narratively and on a technical level, as I capitalized my entries, and the capitalization was retained even when the responses came in the middle of sentences).
How I failed the author: with Henry mid-nap I was able to play through in one sitting, and even took notes and everything! I did forget to save a transcript though, so my new-father brain did still manage to mess something up.
Bare-bones but spooky, December 2, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
It’s a testament to the current state of visual design in IF that in this Comp, a Twine game that uses the default formatting (black background, white text, blue links, that recognizable font) really stands out. This isn’t a critique, though, both because I’ve got no leg to stand on (one reason I like making Inform games is because the idea of having to make aesthetic decisions gives me hives), but because the unfriendly vibe of plain-vanilla Twine creates a fittingly stark, oppressive mood for this ghost story set at the world’s worst nursing home (predictably, it’s in Florida).
The story hits the beats you’d expect given that setup, but again, that’s not necessarily a negative. The Waiting Room doesn’t waste much time establishing the protagonist (a newly-hired nurse) or their motivations, focusing more on creating a foreboding atmosphere from the jump, and while the scares start early and rarely stray beyond what’s expected, nonetheless they’re executed well. Some of the story strains credulity – the number of moldering corpses secreted around the place makes one wonder how much the last state inspector got bribed – and it’s hard to imagine many players being tempted by some of the alternate paths on offer, many of which come down to whether you want to cover up for a fellow nurse’s potentially fatal negligence or instead behave like a minimally moral human being. But for a quick horror piece like this, that’s very much secondary to the chills on offer. Since I definitely had hair standing up on the back of my neck at least once, I’m counting The Waiting Room a success.
Highlight: there’s one particular scare (Spoiler - click to show)(the one hinging on Paulie’s echolalia) that I’ll definitely remember the next couple of times I’m trying to get to sleep.
Lowlight: the protagonist is so thinly sketched, I was pretty sure we were headed for a “you were a ghost all along” twist – but nope, it’s on the level.
How I failed the author: I played this one alone at midnight, with most of the lights off – I was keeping an eye on a napping Henry while my wife slept in the other room. For once, rather than failing the author, I think my circumstances meant I played the game exactly the way it should be!
Post-apocalyptic thrill-ride, December 2, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
This short Twine game is basically just one extended chase sequence, but it’s a pacey, thrilling ride that keeps the excitement high without resorting to killing the player. The setup is classic postapocalyptic sci-fi – you and your trusty robot sidekick (actually, given his competence maybe you’re the sidekick?) are transporting a mystery cargo across the hostile wastes in your hovercraft when everything goes wrong. Dealing with ship repairs, fending off angry raiders, and surviving the consequences of your patrons’ decision to keep you in the dark keep the player busy, as there’s always a new crisis coming up.
What you’re meant to do next is usually clear, but figuring out the exact right places to look for the tools you need, or how best to shoot up the nomads, can require a bit of fumbling that ratchets up the tension. At first the interface was responsible for some of this clumsiness, since the inventory system is a little idiosyncratic, but once I figured out how it worked everything was very smooth. The story here goes exactly how you would expect, and all the characters remain stock types, but the high quality of the implementation still makes the game an entertaining way to spend half an hour.
Highlight: The descriptions of the wasteland were surprisingly evocative, given that it could have easily just been a sketched-in backdrop for the action.
Lowlight: The ending is the one place where the pacing fails; after the clear climax of the story, there’s an extended but simple sequence where you secure transportation for your escape, and then the game ends anticlimactically, without much of a denouement. It would have been more satisfying had the ending been either hard up against the action-packed climax, or pushed back to allow more room for the aftermath of the story to be established.
How I failed the author: I was once again playing this left-handed on my phone, so I didn’t copy-and-paste any of the wasteland descriptions to illustrate the highlight – you’ll just need to take my word for it.
Wickedly fun, December 1, 2021(This is a repost of a review I wrote on the IF newsgroups right after the 2004 Comp)
If ever a game were a guilty pleasure, Sting of the Wasp would be it; the overall plot is pure soap-opera, the NPC interactions are all about eking out the maximum amount of cattiness, and the puzzles derive their enjoyment value from pure spite -- all of which is to say that it hits its design goals exactly. Guiding the super-snob player character on a rampage through a high-end country club inhabited by people even more deserving of comeuppance than you do is entertaining on its own, and it's all the more so when combined with the viciously funny descriptions and withering repartee on offer.
Indeed, the game's great success is in setting the mood. Part of this is due to the author's strong writing skills — there are some laugh-out-loud moments, such as the PC's observation that a half-eaten bowl of salad bespeaks some rival's lack of willpower in sticking to her diet, and the dialogue is razor sharp — but much of the heavy lifting is done by the robust world simulation. NPCs will remark on the items you're carrying around, smells are implemented, and the scenery is both dense and well-described.
This very much reinforces the sense of immersion, but it's the puzzles which really nail the feel. Without exception, every puzzle you solve winds up advantaging you at somebody else's expense, whether it's through property damage, blackmail, exploiting a dangerous allergy, or just destroying some poor old lady's hair. The PC goes about her wicked business with flair and panache, and it's hard not to cackle at her exploits as long as one isn't encumbered by too many moral objections (which isn't hard in a farce this enjoyable).
There are a few flaws — I think there's a bug with the exit descriptions on the dining terrace, and the social comment is a bit too easy to be worth anything other than a few cheap laughs — but they do little to detract from the overall experience. The author knew exactly what he was going for, and the prose, puzzles, and implementation all work together flawlessly to convey his caustic vision.
More than just fisticuffs, December 1, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The credits for Cyborg Arena include thank-yous to a large number of Patreon donors, and I can see how a game like this would be perfect for building a dedicated following on that platform: it’s got a compelling and accessible hook, clean storytelling, lots of opportunities to customize the player character’s identity and key relationships, a complex but manageable set of mechanics, and a half-hour length that’s perfect for showcasing the impact of choices without letting things become unmanageable (and also makes it possible to finish new projects at a reasonable clip). Turns out this makes for a solid IF Comp entry too!
The premise here is sturdy, and well-communicated by the blurb – you guide a cyborg gladiator through a climactic fight – but everything is realized with more craft than it needs to be, from the grabby in medias res opening starting things off with adrenaline to the embedded character-defining flashbacks that go beyond the literal nuts and bolts of your stats to get at how you navigate the dog-eat-dog social milieu of the gladiator stables. While the worldbuilding doesn’t go beyond what’s needed to support the big fight, there’s also some plausible social satire that I thought was well handled.
All this attention to bells and whistles (oh, and on that subject, the visual design is good without being overly fussy) doesn’t come at the expense of the game’s core appeal, either. The fight involves juggling two distinct tracks – there’s a set of rock-paper-scissors combat options that depend on the stats you’ve chosen for you and your opponent, but you also need to keep the audience’s interest high, which requires not repeating the same moves too many times. This means you have to mix things up and trade off fighting effectiveness against crowd appeal, sometimes taking a punch if it adds to the match's excitement. It’s not especially hard, but it’s engaging to decide on your round-by-round approach, and this added complexity makes victory feels satisfying.
If I have a critique, it’s that the game ends rather abruptly, and while there are lots of different ways the fight can conclude based on your decisions, there’s not much of a denouement laying out your character’s fate beyond the immediate events of the night. But since one of the key tenets of showmanship is to always leave the audience wanting more, it’s hard to lay too much fault here – Cyborg Arena is already much more generous than it needs to be.
Highlight: The game takes a page from modern deckbuilders by disclosing what move your opponent is going to make each turn, meaning combat isn’t a roll of the dice but requires strategic consideration of your options, as you consider both short-term success and your longer-term positioning in the fight overall.
Lowlight: I mentioned the abbreviated ending above, but I especially wanted a little more closure on the legal and social changes the game briefly sketches in – again, this is efficient worldbuilding but it left me feeling a bit unsatisfied at a lack of follow-through.
How I failed the author: Cyborg Arena is sufficiently short and player-friendly that I don’t think I could have messed it up if I tried.
Two-word tomfoolery, December 1, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
There’s lots of high-concept IF, but those concepts usually focus on a specific gameplay gimmick or unique setting – After-Words takes the road less traveled by adopting a constraint on the writing. Every sentence, description, and response in the game is at most two words long. There are two different ways you could go with this: one would be to keep things as stripped-down and literal as possible, to make sure the player always understands exactly what’s going on despite the limited number of words available to communicate, while the other would be to use evocative language, neologisms, and metaphor to paint a picture and engage the emotions even at the risk of leaving the player a bit at sea. After-Words opts for the latter approach, which makes for a more fun game overall though I did spend some time floundering.
The game elements are pretty unique, too. After-Words uses a custom web-based interface that’s narrowly-tailored to what it does. The main screen shows an icon-based grid map that you can directly navigate with arrows, gives you an interface element to toggle between your two available actions (looking and interacting), and features a small window for the text describing what you see in each location. You’re exploring a surreal city, most of which is initially gated off – unlocking the various barriers so you can open up the full grid takes up most of the game’s running time, and this is largely done via a series of simple item-based interactions. Sometimes this is as simple as using a coin to pay a bridge’s toll, but usually there’s some leap of logic required, based on interpreting the fantastical world sketched out by the game’s dreamlike language: figuring out how to repair the city’s screaming gunflowers, or how to impress the backflipping flickerking.
There’s only a minimal amount of story or context here – you’re solving puzzles because you’re a player and supposed to solve puzzles – but the writing does a good job of presenting a consistent world, and key themes do emerge: there’s a strong elemental vibe to the different districts of the city, religious practice seems to be a central concern of its residents, and what technology exists is bespoke and near-organic.
Getting to see new parts of the map, then, also means learning more about this strange, intriguing place, and solving the puzzles similarly provides a sense of the rules that govern it. I found this gameplay loop effective for about the first two-thirds of the half-hour running time. In the last ten minutes or so, the large number of open locations and slightly bigger inventory (previously there’d only been one or two items carried at a time) made it harder to intuit what steps would lead to progress, and reduced me to lawnmowering my way through the map. But overall I’d judge After-Words an experiment that succeeds – though I wouldn’t be shy about using the built-in hints to prevent it from wearing thin in the late-game.
Highlight: One location, described as the city’s “stochastic court”, just intrigued me no measure, and I spent a few minutes spinning out possible interpretations for what the legal system here could look like.
Lowlight: There’s one interaction – receiving a benediction from “in-sects” who inhabit the city’s “seahives” – that seems to break the two-word-sentence rule: ”our – buzz – blessing – buzz” only skates by on a technicality.
How I failed the author : As with many of the choice-based games, I played After-Words on my phone in between taking care of the baby, which wasn’t the best way to experience the game – using Safari to play it online, the top-of-window options (including save and load functionality, as well as hints and a walkthrough) weren’t visible, and using inventory items required a lot of awkward scrolling up and down. Dipping back in on my desktop makes the game a much smoother experience.
A tiny gem, November 30, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The Last Doctor is one of the slightest games in the Comp – my first playthrough took less than ten minutes, and there are only two or three substantive choices on offer. There’s basically zero context provided for anything, with the central-casting post-apocalyptic milieu only barely sketched and the doctor protagonist getting only a word or two of backstory and certainly nothing as specific as a name. And yet!
Since IF Comp is primarily concerned with text, writing that’s good enough can turn even the most prosaic game into a killer app – and the prose in the Last Doctor is quite good indeed. In the author’s capable hands, even a few details or a single line of dialogue are enough to conjure up an image or reveal character. As with most of the choice games, I played this one one-handed on my phone while Henry was napping, but atypically, I actually went to the trouble of typing out some of the bits of writing I liked so I could include them in this review. Your clinic is host to “two medical beds [and] a chessboard of pill bottles”, for example, and the choice to ask a patient a bunch of questions about their condition is labeled “introduce her to Socrates.” And the writing is good enough to enliven the central moral dilemma, which could feel hackneyed and contrived if told by a weaker pen, but here feels satisfying and just right, regardless of how you resolve it. Again, this is a small thing – but it’s a small, beautiful thing, which is no bad thing to be.
Highlight: I’ve singled out some of the favorite bits of writing, but I also admired the laconic scene-setting of “Your days are long. Your hair is short.”
Lowlight: I may have found a slight bug having to do with how the game tracked my choices: (Spoiler - click to show)opted to treat the scavenger with all the supplies I had, and then tried to save the syndicate boss but failed due to not having what I needed. But in the final conversation with Baba, he said a line that implied the boss had died because I’d refused to provide him treatment.
How I failed the author: I don’t think I did, happily enough – the effort to type out that Socrates gag one-handed was definitely worth it.
A grungy heavy-metal adventure, November 30, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Codex Sadistica gives off big music-zine vibes: it’s got a self-consciously over-the-top aesthetic of total commitment to and love of heavy metal, with stripped-down gameplay where you solve puzzles almost exclusively through power chords. On the other hand, while the game’s perfectly functional, all its edges are rough, with implementation issues everywhere you look. Would it have violated Codex Sadistica’s artistic ethos to have butter-smooth programming and elegantly-implemented parser responses? Yes, 100%, but I still missed them.
The premise is a classic get-the-band-back-together quest, as you must go extricate your bandmates from their individual predicaments so you can storm the stage and kick off a performer who's overstaying his timeslot (admittedly, the game kinda lost me here, since Faramir Spidermoon’s eleven-act song-cycle of himself sounded awesome). The venue is a tight four-and-a-half locations, and the writing really lets you feel the grime and sweat coming off the walls. The puzzles you need to solve are grounded (sneaking bandmates past an overzealous fan, helping another win an argument with well-actually-ing dudebros), but the method for doing so is anything but: once you’ve got your first bandmate liberated, you can jam with them to create powerful effects, from a fuzzy doom-metal riff that conjures up fog to pirate-metal that summons a crowd of larcenous seagulls. Further complicating matters, you can genre-mix by playing with more than one of your bandmates at a time, increasing the face-rocking quotient while adding complexity.
This is a lot of fun, but as those examples indicate, it’s hard to deduce the consequence of the different musical effects just from their descriptions – we’re firmly in trial and error territory here. There aren’t so many combinations to make this annoying, and the writing is sufficiently fun to enliven even unsuccessful attempts, but this did mean that I didn’t get much satisfaction from solving the puzzles.
Now that I’ve segued over to critiques, it’s time to turn to those implementation issues. I didn’t run into any bugs that impacted progression, but there are a lot of niggles in Codex Sadistica. Locations list their contents using the default Inform rules, often redundantly when objects are already mentioned in the room description. Multiple plot-critical items don’t have descriptions (“you see nothing special about Mae’s Lighter.” Really?). Items and people mentioned in room descriptions sometimes aren’t actually present. Character interaction is handled with a TALK TO command, but this is never mentioned to the player. And damningly for a music-focused game, LISTEN, DANCE, and SING didn’t have any effect.
Again, given the context, I suppose this is all fair enough, and leveling these critiques just marks me out as the lame dad who brought his kid to the show and can’t shut up about how talented this band is so it’s a shame they don’t apply themselves a little more. But hey, now that I’m a dad, I come by this lameness honestly – so I do hope there’s a post-comp release to iron some of this stuff out.
Highlight and lowlight: I have a tricky combination *light for this one. An early puzzle requires you to help your guitarist get through a dungeon in their DnD game – awesome! But it’s a one-move sequence that’s over as soon as it begins – lame!
How I failed the author: my streak of luck with baby-napping (like, the amount of napping the baby was doing, not good fortune stealing somebody else’s baby) came to an end near the close of Codex Sadistica – Henry was waking up with a dirty diaper just as the climactic showdown kicked off, so I went straight to the walkthrough there when I couldn’t immediately solve the puzzle.
Well-crafted and thought-provoking, November 30, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
My Gender is a Fish is a short, surrealist Twine game that’s hard to characterize. It’s not quite an allegory, nor a fable, but neither is it tied to the concrete in any meaningful sense (the inciting incident is a magpie swooping down and yoinking your gender identity). A sui generis work like this is usually, I find, either really good or really bad; happily, this time it’s the former. Since this is a short game with only a few choices and I don’t think any state changes, its success is pretty much 100% down to the writing, which is playful and thoughtful in equal measure.
The notional action involves the protagonist embarking into a dangerous forest in search of what they’ve lost, and considering whether various objects and creatures they run across are their lost gender, but what’s rewarding is the ruminations triggered by considering each possibility. While the subject matter is clearly serious, the tone here holds possible meanings or conclusions lightly, raising questions rather than driving towards any plodding conclusions. I found this approach really effective – as the world’s most boring cis straight guy, I think I sometimes come to art that’s about issues of gender from a more intellectual angle, but while the game probably most directly speaks to trans or genderqueer folks, I found its way of opening up these topics was sufficiently broad to resonate with me on a more personal level too.
Highlight: It’s hard to pick this one apart into component pieces, but I will say the way the opening smoothly slips from grounded description to the protagonist’s new metaphysical predicament was deftly done.
Lowlight: I maybe wish there’d been a little state-tracking, so that earlier choices had more of an impact on later ones? The fact that I can’t immediately tell what that would look like, though, means this might be a knee-jerk idea more driven by the conventions of choice-based games than something that would actually improve the game.
How I failed the author: Since this is a 10-minute game that’s making thoughtful points, but not in a needlessly obscure way, even I was incapable of messing this one up.
A knight to remember, November 29, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I primarily come to IF for the story, but I have to say, I really appreciate it when a pure puzzler comes up in the middle of the Comp: there are usually lots more narrative-focused entries, so it’s really nice to have a change of pace that exercises completely different parts of my brain. This isn’t to say that FQ doesn’t have words – there’s actually a robust introductory story that follows on from where the prequel game (Fivebyfivia Delenda Est, entered in this year’s ParserComp) left off, and there are some good jokes as rewards for solving each challenge, hinging on a series of diplomatic “gaffes” being interpreted in bad faith as casus belli – but the main engagement here is working through a series of well-curated chess puzzles, as you place a limited set of pieces in a stripped-down five-by-five chess board to defeat a series of opposing kings.
Doing chess via parser-IF commands could be a fiddly nightmare, but the mechanics here are smooth as silk. There’s a well-done ASCII-art depiction of the chess board, plus an accessible description mode, so it’s always clear where things stand and it’s simple to move around and call in new pieces to your position (this sequel switches up the gameplay from FDE by dropping the requirement that your character navigate the board via the knight’s move). And the number of pieces at play in each puzzle isn’t too large, which keeps the gameplay focused on thinking of solutions, rather than having to type a bunch of commands implementing them. Similarly, the game’s overall length and pacing are great, providing just enough time to lay out the mechanics, develop them a bit, and end before it wears out its welcome.
As with many of Andrew Schultz’s games, the core gameplay is supported with lots of documentation, a tutorial mode, help commands, and options. And in addition to some gentle hints, there’s a robustly-annotated walkthrough fully explaining the solutions (actually there are three, one each for the hard and normal versions of the game, as well as a brief version with just the key commands). It’s all very helpful, but I do wonder whether it might be a little much for a new player who didn’t play the prequel. Relatedly, I really enjoyed the introductory text, but it is fairly dense and could take some effort to decode in order to understand what the goal of the puzzles actually is – now that the press of the Comp is over, prospective players might be well-served playing the first game first.
While I’m mentioning small cavils, I did find the game text introducing the idea of the “traitor” pieces pretty confusing – the game told me that “[y]our trips to Southwest Fourbyfouria and West Fourbyfouria will include the yellow knight who is not as loyal to their King as they should be,” but it seemed like the yellow knight was actually on my side, and the traitor was actually grey, so this threw me for a bit of a loop (I believe this will be fixed in a post-comp release). Rearranging my pieces could also sometimes be a little more awkward than I wanted – in particular, when I wanted to reposition my own king, rather than summon the opposing one, I had to type “twelvebytwelvian” for disambiguation, which is a mouthful (maybe “your king” vs. “their king” could be an option, or something like that?) But these are very minor niggles that did nothing to reduce the fun I had solving the puzzles and adding to the Twelvebytwelvian empire.
Highlight: I mentioned the hint system above – after being a bit stymied by one mid-game puzzle, I had recourse to one, and it did a marvelous job of getting me unstuck without ruining the fun of solving the puzzle.
Lowlight: This isn’t much of a lowlight, but it took me a while to twig to what winning each section required – I’m spoiler-blocking it because it’s possible that figuring that out is an intended part of the challenge, but I had more fun once that light-bulb had gone off for me: (Spoiler - click to show)you have to force a stalemate before getting the mate.
How I failed the author: this is another one where I don’t think I did! Even though I was sleep-deprived and I’m not that good at chess, the game’s difficulty curve is well judged and I was able to work through the hard version pretty quickly during one of Henry’s naps.
A pinhole view of grief, November 29, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
I can’t really talk through my feelings about this one without spoiling not just it, but also my entry into this year’s Comp (Sting), so bear that in mind if you plan to read further. Bottom line The Dead Account gets some real emotion out of a premise that’s simultaneously ridiculous and all-too-plausible (you play a social-network employee whose job is to identify the accounts of dead people and delete them), and is definitely worth the playthrough.
(Spoiler - click to show)I had two conflicting reactions to the game: first, a feeling of unfamiliarity given that the social milieu of the dead character is pretty different from anything I’m directly familiar with, and even a bit of artificiality, because I didn’t see why a social network would pay money to proactively close accounts (like, wouldn’t they just wait for the next of kin to get into contact?) But then second, I also felt some incredibly sharp shocks of recognition. That’s because my twin sister passed away a year and a half ago – this is a chunk of what Sting is about, as it’s a memoir – and despite the superficial differences (we were not part of a friend group that played Apex Legends together, for one thing), The Dead Account still manages to hit on some real moments of universality. I very much found the characters’ actions and emotional responses plausible and engaging. Like, I archived all my old texts with her, and I send her an email on our birthday, though I send it to myself, not to her old account since that forwards to my brother-in-law now. Oh, and our birthday is/was December 3rd, so the fact that the software update that created this new dead-account deletion policy was version 12.3.14 was a little spooky!
This game is a small thing – there’s only the one account to assess, and there’s only really one choice to be made: whether or not to delay deleting the account at the family and friends’ request. But the choice has some layers to it – I opted to delay, but felt conflicted about it – and as one character says in their DMs to the dead person, life is made out of the small stuff.
Highlight: The game is so much of a piece that it’s hard to break off a single highlight, but I will say I did really enjoy the bee-hive themed title graphic (another point of overlap with Sting!)
Lowlight: This is very much an intended part of the experience, but reading the dead character’s messaging history felt really unpleasantly voyeuristic and I considered fast-forwarding through (though of course I wound up reading everything anyway. Games make us complicit!)
How I failed the author: I think I did OK with this one – Henry was napping really well and my brain wasn’t too fuzzy, and I managed to bang through three shorter games without too many interruptions.
Focused and nasty, November 29, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
The main character in Taste of Fingers is I think the second-worst person among this year’s Comp protagonists (The Best Man’s Aiden is still a prohibitive favorite to take the crown). You’d think it’d be easy to sympathize with someone hiding out from a zombie apocalypse, regardless of their peccadilloes, but our man manages it: in a series of flashbacks, we get to know him before everything went wrong, and oof, what a piece of work he is. Beyond the overwhelming contempt that flavors all his observations, the racism is probably the most obviously awful thing about him – he’s a white person (I think some kind of banker?) on a business trip to Hong Kong when the plague hits, and he’s got no shortage of disdain for the locals, even stipulating that the prostitute he hires has to be European. But when he realizes that the disease triggering the outbreak only targets Asian folks (some kind of genetic rigmarole is invoked – PSA, race is a social construct not a biological one, though the game's themes need this dodgy bit of science to work so it gets a pass), his matter-of-fact satisfaction, unalloyed by any compassion for the vulnerable, bespeaks near-psychopathic levels of solipsism.
This is as it’s meant to be – we’re firmly in horror territory here, and one of the tropes of zombie fiction is that the stress of societal collapse brings out the worst in humanity. Taste of Fingers doesn’t wallow in too many other of the standard motifs of the subgenre, though, since the zombies aren’t actually onscreen for most of the game. It’s got an interesting structure, where present-time vignettes set in the coffee-shop fridge unit where the main character is lying low alternate with the aforementioned flashbacks. In each section, you’ve got a choice of three memories, and you get to explore two out of the three before time moves on. There’s little other branching, as far as I could tell, but the game offers a good amount of interactivity, as in each passage there are a lot of words to be clicked on. Most of these will expand out descriptions of items, or spell out the main character’s perspective or thoughts on something that’s happened – I wound up lawnmowering, but generally found the extra text added to the experience rather than being busywork.
With few choices or immediate action to keep the pace up, the prose has to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it’s mostly up to the task. The writing is evocative throughout, freighting almost every sentence with the key themes of decay, corruption, and contempt. It can go a bit over the top at times, flabbing up a clause with one adjective too many, but since the vibe here isn’t exactly understated, better too big than too small. The style also shifts effectively in the final sequence, which sees a change in perspective that adds a neat twist to the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Again, it’s nothing too unexpected given the territory, but it makes this small, nasty game more memorable, and provides some healthy outside perspective on the terrible protagonist.
Highlight : The protagonist’s asides when you click on highlighted words in the passages expand into the original text, which helps keep this on-rails story engaging (it helps that as I mentioned, the writing in these bits is generally strong).
Lowlight : I generally don’t mind when a main character is an unpleasant person to spend time with so long as there's a point to it, but the sequence in the strip club threatened to be a bit too much for me.
How I failed the author : I think I did OK with this one – short choice-based games I can play on my phone are really coming through for me this Comp!
Fearful geometries, November 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
This Comp has had a good number of surreal games featuring relationship allegories pitched at varying degrees of abstraction, and most of them haven’t grabbed me very hard, making me wonder whether this subgenre just isn’t for me. But here we are with the last one of these, and I actually kinda love it? The premise sounds absurd when you state it flat-out – the world is being taken over by Platonic solids, and you need to go on a puzzle-solving mission with your ex to try to save it – but it winds up being surprisingly rich, and the writing is a joy, allusive yet precise in just the right measure.
How it was… has the courage of its convictions, meaning it’s not afraid to lean way, way into its conceit, but also doesn’t get stuck there. There’s not a simple, one-to-one mapping between the rather-bonkers central metaphor and the issues the main characters are confronting, at least so far as I can decode, but it’s clear there are deep veins of meaning being mined. The weird shapes are breaking down and fraying, maybe suggesting the way clear ideals and emotions get muddy and messy in the crucible of a relationship. The main character has more specific associations, recalling analogies to the domestic geometries of the house they shared with their ex as they traverse the hostile landscape. And the puzzles are all about decoding fuzzy signals, trying to wrest meaning from ambiguity – given that the relationship ultimately fails, maybe it’s appropriate that I sucked at them.
On the flip side, the game doesn’t stay at this high, abstract level, showing a keen eye for detail and making clear that idiosyncratic specificity has just as much importance as totalizing thematics. Here’s an early bit, which also shows off the strength of the prose:
The first street where we lived together was lined with orange trees. In January, when everything else was pale and lifeless, our street would be bursting with radiant spheres.
The oranges were bitter, of course. The metaphor is too evident to be useful: too hard to wrestle into a different meaning.
Similarly, Clara, the main character’s ex, comes across as a person, with a distinctively laconic lilt to her dialogue – she’s not simply a vague stand-in for a generic beloved. Putting all the pieces together, the writing creates a compelling allegory about how this specific relationship failed, rather than issuing mushy-mounted platitudes about how any relationship can fail (though of course there’s universal resonance and relatability in this very specific story!)
As for the puzzles, there are two kinds, one about translating an image into numbers and the other about recognizing deformed shapes. As mentioned I thought they were thematically resonant, though I also found them pretty tough. Even once I basically figured out the gist, there’s some fuzziness baked into them, sometimes literally, that made it hard to be sure I was getting the right answer (I was also playing on mobile, which might have messed with some of the layouts).
As a result, I wound up getting a really bad ending – the weird geometry took over everything, meaning my poor communication skills doomed not only my relationship with Clara but also what felt like the whole world (per a later note from the author, actually it's just the main character, so yay?) I guess that’s a little harsh, but losing your partner can certainly feel apocalyptic, so while I wish the story had resolved on a more positive note, the ending I got did feel like a satisfying resolution. Did the world need another game in the surreal relationship-issues drama? On the basis of How it was…, yes, certainly – and now when I run across one in next year’s Comp, I’ll know I can really like the genre.
Highlight: fittingly, this is a bit abstract, but one of the strongest elements of the game is its pacing. There are a lot of elements here, from present-day dialogue with Clara, flashbacks to the mission briefing, deeper flashbacks to the relationship, and puzzle interludes, and the game shuttles between them with a light touch, keeping the momentum up without the central narrative thread feeling disconnected.
Lowlight: as mentioned, I though I destroyed the world through incompetence so that feels like a big lowlight even though I actually just got the protagonist killed?
How I failed the author: this was a near-miss failure, thankfully, because when I first started the game on my iPhone none of the text other than the links was coming through. Happily the author put in a theme select to tweak the colors, which allowed me to read the rest of the words.
Too much abstraction, November 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Allegory is deceptively tricky business. At first blush it seems easy enough: take a situation, abstract it to its generalities to make it more universal, heighten the key elements and emotional dynamics, and maybe add a supernatural element or two that works as a slightly-too-on-the-nose metaphor, and there you are. But that second bit's where the trap-door lies: pretty much any human predicament, no matter how poignant, can sound trite when you state it as a general proposition. Most of the time it’s the specifics that ground a story and allow others to empathize with it. This is where An Aside About Everything didn’t work for me: while this a choice-based investigation boasts some evocative atmosphere and satisfying interactivity, the characters and emotional dynamics didn’t succeed in getting their hooks into me.
Plotwise, the player character – a sort of metaphysical detective who goes by Him – sets out on a missing-persons case looking for a woman with whom he’s got some sort of history, then proceeds through various descents and ascents before slipping to an other-worldly backstage, his steps dogged all the way by a trio of cryptic women who help him surmount the surreal obstacles in his path. It’s all as existentialist-chic as you please (in the movie version, everyone’s always smoking) and there are some interesting choices on offer, as you can lean on different women to help you get through each barrier.
But it all feels bloodless – I had a hard time keeping the three helper-ladies distinct, and none of them seemed to have much subjectivity or for that matter an agenda of their own, besides helping Him on His quest. The different areas you visit are suggestive, but you rattle through them before any has much chance to make an impression. And when you crack the case, the ultimate revelations aren’t especially novel (Spoiler - click to show)(my sense of the story is that it’s ultimately about not being able to let an ex go after a break up)</spoi.er> – sure, there are stories there, but you need to tell them for them to have impact, not just gesture in their direction. Too often, An Aside About Everything feels like it’s holding itself back and contenting itself with allusion rather than committing to something specific.
Highlight: The second sequence, set on an airship, boasts some strong atmosphere and the game’s most resonant choices.
Lowlight: In my first playthrough, I got stuck in the mine area, unable either to proceed or go back to where I came from, and once I realized this wasn’t a statement about the main character’s emotional paralysis, I had to restart (I think I ran into the bug because I went to the mine, listed third in the navigation menu, before the first-listed bar. When I ran through the locations in order, I was able to progress).
How I failed the author: I played the game’s three main sequences in three separate sessions, each separated by several hours as I tended to Henry-related stuff, so that probably contributed to me not being able to keep the characters straight or identify too many clear thematic throughlines.
Stylishly confusing, November 24, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Back in the early 90s, every once in a while I would come across a game that was full of style but didn’t make much sense (typically it would be some kind of French adventure game or RPG, with an 80-page novella in the manual that somehow just made things even harder to understand), and I’d be dragged through a confusing plot and obscure gameplay by sheer force of aesthetics. Recon keeps this tradition alive: I wasn’t really clear on the characters, stakes, and setting until the final few sequences, and my understanding of what was going on changed radically a couple of times though not in ways that I think were intended. And the puzzles are a mix of clever and off-the-wall. But there was enough verve on display to make my time with the game an enjoyable ride nonetheless.
Recon’s first impression is a pretty accurate sample of what you’re in for. The cover image is a gorgeous slab of sci-fi, and the title and chapter screens continue the high production values. Then you’re dumped into a bar with a kitten, and asked to participate in the world’s most awkward character-customization process (you’re required to specify your skin color, which can be “Nordic”, “Caucasian”, “Ethiopic”, “American”, or “Oriental”) As this opening sequence proceeds, it becomes clear that you’re there to check on two of your allies, “X” and “Equis” (it turns out these are actually the same person), and you’re up against the jackbooted thugs of “Faro”, which is not a gang boss as I first thought (nor a card game or grain, for that matter) but an evil corporation that calls the shots in this dystopia.
Things clear up a bit from there, but only a bit, and beyond this Faro mix-up, I also had at least two other moments where a glancing reference or new development made me realize I had deeply misunderstood the main character’s situation and motivation (Spoiler - click to show)the others turned on the “Recon” group that the main character leads, and the ending’s indication that a functioning court system exists and can actually bring down the mighty Faro. The writing is also a bit off-kilter, contributing to this discombobulated mood – there aren’t many typos or out-and-out errors, but the syntax and word choice are often strange in a way I associate with translated works or writing from folks whose native language isn’t English – it’s not necessarily bad, but it’s often hard to scan and understand.
Fortunately, the game is well-paced and doesn’t require you to understand the big picture to work through. Each of its chapters is structured similarly, with a bunch of story progression and narrative choices building up to a major puzzle that gates progress. These are all one-of-a-kind, running from an adventure-game style search of X’s house to pattern-recognition tests. Many feature some fun fourth-wall breaking, and you’ll see substantially different puzzles depending on which of the major midgame branches you go down. Some are a little too out there, I thought – even looking at the walkthrough, I don’t understand the (Spoiler - click to show)Morse code puzzle. But luckily, that walkthrough is comprehensive, and also boasts impressive layout and design. Once I used it to reach the end, I was able to appreciate the aesthetic experience Recon provides – but I do with there’d been some more careful worldbuilding, clearer writing, and better-clued puzzles to go alongside.
Highlight: There’s a surprising amount of interactivity in the mid-game – there’s a major branch that meant I ran into completely different plot and challenges than the ones the walkthrough described, and there seems to be a good scope for different choices in how you treat a potential ally to lead to different results.
Lowlight: The game doesn’t have content warnings, but I would have appreciated one since a late-game sequence features an interrogation that does spill over into what I’d consider torture – most of your options involve verbal coercion, but there is a “hit” option. Making this sequence even less enjoyable, I ran into a bug after failing it the first time, as once the interrogation restarted I was missing some of the options needed to progress (Spoiler - click to show)(I could no longer try to blackmail, or press for a confession), and after I gave up and checked the walkthrough, it turned out that the intended solution is actually pretty counterintuitive since you need to get the target’s stress level outside of the range marked “optimum” to succeed (this might be a display issue from playing on my phone, upon further reflection).
How I failed the author: I just did not get what was happening for like 90% of the game, and I can’t imagine that my generally fuzzy-brained state (Henry’s been having some congestion and not sleeping as well as usual, poor thing) helped matters.
Affecting but a little flat, November 23, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
This is the second game I’ve played in the comp that explores issues of identity and trauma via online fandom, after A Paradox Between Worlds. The two make for an interesting study in contrasts, because while I thought Paradox was overstuffed with characters and plotlines, to the detriment of its strongest narrative throughline, I found extraordinary_fandoms.exe erred on the side of minimalism. Everything outside its core story is only briefly sketched in, with the titular fandom and characters other than the protagonist feeling rather sketched-in, and no obvious places where choices lead to much variation, even at a cosmetic level.
There are advantages to focus – and since, per the author’s postscript, a lot of the (awful) details of domestic abuse here are autobiographical, it’s completely understandable that everything else would fade in importance. But for me, the absence of context supporting the story meant it didn’t land as strongly as it could, though it is compellingly drawn. The central conflict is about the main character – who goes by the handle Pinecone – finding what seems like their first real friends via a Discord-style chat server and wiki dedicated to an anime franchise. Pinecone’s halting steps towards self-confidence and self-awareness are affecting, and the link between their struggles and those of the fandom character they gravitate to – who suffers from hidden low self-esteem – makes thematic sense. And it’s heartwarming to see the affirmation and support Pinecone gets from the other people on the server.
But the other characters feel pretty thin; there are maybe half a dozen folks who hang out to chat and do (short) roleplay, but outside of their favorite anime characters they don’t have much in the way of personality. And there’s a very stark divide between Pinecone’s home life, which is portrayed as unremittingly horrible, and things on the server, where everyone is uniformly and immediately positive, with never even the slightest disagreement about how best support them. Ultimately I thought the game works, but this flatness robs it of some of its power.
Highlight: The choices aren’t a major focus of extraordinary_fandom.exe, with many passages connected by a single “continue” link or its equivalent, and most others just having two choices that amount to very slightly different ways of saying the same thing – which is all fine. But this low-key approach to choices helps set up an effective moment that I’m going to spoiler-block: (Spoiler - click to show)at one point as the other folks on the server are asking Pinecone whether they can help, you’re offered two choices: “No” or “No”. The moment conveys the paralysis that often comes with being in an abusive environment in a show-don’t-tell way that the rest of the game sometimes struggles to achieve.
Lowlight: The “.exe” in the title really bugs me. I don’t really know how Discord works, but I think it’s like an IRC channel, right? And the wiki is a wiki. So what’s the executable program?
How I failed the author: I didn’t have any issues playing through the game, but Henry’s been struggling with gas today, so I’ve started and stopped writing this review like eight times as I’ve jumped up to soothe him after he woke up crying from what seemed like a perfectly nice nap. Apologies if it’s disjointed as a result!
A simple idea well-communicated, November 23, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
A short mood piece – if it were a painting, it’d be a landscape – The Miller’s Garden provides a tidy meditation on impermanence. There’s no backstory or characters, just a situation: the player comes to an abandoned garden by the side of a river, which is slowly being reclaimed by weeds and water, and each day can choose how and whether to try to shore it up – cutting the reeds, mowing the grass, maintaining the rocky banks.
Of course there’s a catch, and the catch is – well, spoilers for a ten-minute game: (Spoiler - click to show) entropy, because this isn’t a farming sim. No matter how much you shore up the riverbank, the water will eventually drown the garden. Pleasantly, this isn’t just a matter of nature swallowing the hubristic works of man, since my reading of the game is that the construction of the now-defunct mill changed the behavior of the river, and now the river is in turn changing the garden. There’s a nice sentiment that emerges here, as you tend the garden to create some transient beauty before the inevitable comes, without the game implying that this is a futile or useless task (besides the occasional prompt asking you if you’re sure you want to persist until the end – I detected no judgment when I said I wanted to do so.)
It’s a lovely idea and it works on its own terms, but I wished there’d been a little more descriptive zing to the prose. Since this is such a small thing, confined to the same few locations and the same few tasks over multiple days, I would have liked to see a little more detail on exactly what kind of flowers are growing, or have the river’s rise rendered with a bit more sensitivity. Still, there’s a power in restraint in a piece of this kind, so I can respect that.
Highlight: The game is pretty much of a piece, but I got a lot of enjoyment from the opening epigram, which quotes from a recent scientific paper on the game’s exact subject matter – I can’t help but wonder whether it was the impetus for the piece’s creation.
Lowlight: I’m not sure if this was a bug or not, but about midway through the game, the garden’s flowerbed location seemed to disappear, so I could only go from the lawn to the river-bank. I liked that flowerbed, so I missed it!
How I failed the author : it took me way longer to realize the flowerbed had gone away than it should have (blame sleep deprivation).
Doubly unfortunate, November 22, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Ugh, the title here is apt in more ways that one. It’s a clever bit of wordplay for this parser-based fortuneteller-me-do – we’re not talking turbans and crystal balls, you’re just looking to show off your palmistry to some friends at a party – but it also conveys how frustrating it is that the significant promise here is let down by significant implementation issues. This isn’t just a matter of smacking down a few bugs here and there: there’s a need for additional design work, from fleshing out the conversations, deepening the characterization of the party-goers, and providing clearer feedback on how you’re making progress, as well as a good amount of polish. But even the rough version on offer goes a good way towards showing the (I think first-time?) author has some great ideas for how to realize this wonderful premise.
Digging into that setup, which is delightfully more specific than the blurb initially made me think: as mentioned we’re in the real world, not a fantasy one, and the protagonist is a hobbyist, not a carnival charlatan or anything like that (in fact, since you do get vague flashes at least some of the time when you do a reading, you might have some real talent). And the party here is one of those awkward post-college hangouts featuring a mix of old friends, exes, and coworkers, some of whom can’t stand each other. There’s a complex web of actual and potential connections, which creates a lot of potential for how things can shift once you start telling fortunes and intervening.
That’s the other part of the premise, you see – the game proceeds in two phases, with an initial round of conversation and palm-reading giving way to an interactive second phase as the characters start bouncing off of each other and having accidents both happy and not. Success isn’t about guessing a correct fortune and then lying back and waiting for fate to catch up to your intuition, though: you do have a choice of three different prognostications to offer to each of the other guests, but except for the first, generally negative, option, they won’t come true if you take a laissez-faire approach: you might have to arrange some mood music, or make sure someone has what they need to ensure a romantic gesture goes off.
These puzzles are pretty tricky, though. For one thing, it seems like there’s tight timing in the section – the other characters move around, and while some of the setup can be done ahead of time, there are also some right-place right-time pieces. You also can’t work on most of the fortunes on their own – the majority of them are about romantic matters, so how the fortune you pick for one character plays out can depend on what you picked for one or more complementary characters. In fact, after an initial, spectacularly unsuccessful playthrough, I realized Unfortunate is meant to be played multiple times as an optimization challenge – there’s a clever meta touch here, since the player’s accumulating knowledge over multiple passes stands in for the protagonist’s flashes of intuition.
On paper this should appeal to me, since I usually like optimization puzzles and real-world settings. Unfortunately (there’s that word), implementation issues bedeviled my enjoyment, so I didn’t get very far. Again, this isn’t just implementation in the sense of programming, though there’s some of that – X ME has the default description, lots of scenery is unimplemented, rules for picking up objects give responses that only make sense the first time you take something, whether or not a device is technically switched on doesn’t make a difference to whether it works or not, there are misdescribed or even missing exit listings, and room descriptions sometimes don’t update even after you’ve removed objects. And there are lots of typos.
The bigger issue is that there are significant chunks in need of a lot of polish, and sometimes things even feeling unfinished. The characters are probably the major example here. There are seven of them, and their backstories and roles are intriguing enough to set up a bunch of potential business as they bounce off of each other. But they’re thinly drawn, with physical descriptions focusing on superficial details like clothing. While there’s a multiple-choice conversation system, all the characters have the same three options (one of which initiates fortune-telling), which feels quite artificial. And there’s something odd about the implementation of the second phase, since the different characters don’t actually seem to be present and available for interaction, even as event text describes them talking and moving around.
I also wanted there to be better feedback on how I was doing on the puzzles. There are some ideas that seemed obvious but the game wouldn’t let me try (Spoiler - click to show)(Moses is allergic to flowers so giving him the bouquet for his big demonstration of affection doesn’t work – but while the herb bouquet seems a likely substitute, I couldn’t get him to accept it) and some of the fortunes are probably a little too vague, since there were a couple of times when I thought I’d satisfied one only for the post-game scoring to say I hadn’t. Combined with the combinatorial explosion of trying different mutually-dependent fortunes and the choreography required in the second act, this lack of clueing makes it feel like making real progress would require a lot of trial and error.
It’s not hard to guess at the source of these rough patches: Unfortunate doesn’t list any testers in its credits, and however much playtesting it got wasn’t enough. I’m really really hoping for a post-comp release of this that makes upgrades and bug-fixes based on folks’ transcripts, since Unfortunate could easily be a five-star game given the quality of what’s already here – I haven’t mentioned the prose yet but there’s some really good writing too – if it had more time in the oven. Here’s hoping it gets it, and that the author keeps writing games but gets more testers next time (I’ll volunteer, just DM me!)
Highlight: Figuring out how to get one of the good fortunes to work felt really rewarding – this is a great puzzle-solving framework.
Lowlight: The game lists exits in all-caps, which is a nice convenience – except one’s mislabeled (it says it’s east but it’s actually in) and then there’s one that isn’t even mentioned at all (tip: going IN from the kitchen will get you to the laundry room).
How I failed the author: Henry was having a fussier couple of days, so I only put like half an hour into the game before I had to put it aside for a little over a day, and while I intended to play more, the challenging difficulty and thin characters meant I wasn’t able to get back into it.
Superficial polemic, November 22, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Smart Theory is part of a sub-genre of games that, by my lights, has yet to produce a single successful entry: the much-dreaded polemic about current events. Don’t get me wrong, I like politics in my stories, but using narrative to convince, rather than to explore, sets authors up for failure, and often the temptation is to use thin plots and thinner characters to prop up an ideological point, rather than using beliefs to enrich people and stories that are compelling in their own right.
Smart Theory does not break this streak or beat the already dismal batting average of the sub-genre. I suppose it’s possible I think that because I’m on the opposite side of the particular culture-war fight apparently being picked – the game appears to be an attempt to take down Critical Race Theory, and inasmuch as I work for a civil rights organization and took a class in law school from one of the founders of CRT, I’m on team wrongthink as far as it’s concerned – but at the same time, Stand Up / Stay Silent from last year’s Comp was basically Defund the Police: The Game and I thought that one profoundly didn’t work too. No, the problem isn’t that Smart Theory is trying to gore my oxen: it’s that it’s rather a bore about it.
(After the initial version of this review was posted, the author responded and related that Smart Theory isn't directly meant to be about CRT. That's fair enough, but perhaps this points out another problem with satirical exaggeration in this subgenre...)
Things start to go wrong from the very premise. Where other polemical games dress up their ideological agendas in at least some narrative fancy-dress, here the story is tacked-on as can be: you’re a student who attends a college lecture by a proponent of the new “Smart Theory” craze, which again is a very thinly-veiled CRT stand-in (like, a book called “Dumb Fragility” gets name-checked). There’s barely any plot to be had other than talking-heads yelling at each other, and the lecturer doesn’t get any characterization beyond “over the top charlatan.” So things that stories are traditionally good at are off the table, and the game lives and dies by the quality of its arguments.
Reader, these are not good, on either side of the debate! The lecturer’s explication of the theory is glib and parodic, which I guess makes the polemic go down easy but there’s not much here that a CRT proponent would recognize, as Smart Theory seems way more focused on French structuralism and postmodernism than on the actual stuff CRT deals with. On the flip side, partially due to the nature of the choice format, where you can’t easily have the player’s choices go on for paragraphs, the counterarguments the player character raises are also so superficial and unconvincing that a tiny part of me wonders whether the game is sort of double-agent, secretly parodying the anti-CRT position.
This ain’t changing anyone’s mind – it’s comforting pabulum for those who already agree that CRT is poisoning our children, trivially dismissible by those who don’t, and I’d wager completely incomprehensible to those who don’t already have their minds made up. Maybe someday someone will write the game that changes peoples’ politics by main force, rather than by grounding their ideas in compelling characters, rich settings, and satisfying plots, but today is not that day.
Highlight: Again, these barbs are largely mis-aimed (protip: critical theory and critical legal studies are not the same thing!), but there are some good jokes about postmodernism – the best being a mid-lecture celebratory announcement that “our crack team of social scientists has successfully added one more [post] prefix” to the modernism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, etc. that Smart Theory is based on.
Lowlight: I think I’ve said enough on this score.
How I failed the author: er, fairly comprehensively, I should think. I really liked the author’s Ascension of Limbs from last year, for what it’s worth!
Meat and potatoes fantasy adventure, November 22, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Enveloping Darkness is a straightforward fantasy story, requiring a ten-minute series of binary choices to navigate. There’s nothing here anybody hasn’t seen before – there are raiding orcs, a desperate quest to find a kidnapped brother, picking up weapons and armor at the main city, and negotiating with potential allies. And the narrative feels like it’s on rails, with few choices mattering except to avoid an instant death midway through – in fact I just went back to check on this, and yeah, this is pretty much the case. In particular, while you’ve got a number of opportunities to talk to a particular beggar or walk by, or how much to engage with him while you’re talking, no matter what I picked he still wound up tagging along on my journey.
There’s nothing wrong with a straightforward premise and disguised linearity in my book, but if a game is forgoing those opportunities for engagement, ideally there’d be some other aspect of the game that’s grabby – an interesting prose style, well-drawn characters, good jokes... Enveloping Darkness does okay but not great on this score. There’s not much that jumps out as distinctive.
On the other hand, the execution is solid. The writing is generally clean and typo-free, with an understated voice that can occasionally be funny. There’s only one other character worth noting – the aforementioned beggar, who turns out to be a half-orc who acts as your sidekick – but I enjoyed him, especially once I realized he actually winds up doing most of the work. I can’t say the game will stick with me, but it’s a fun enough way to while away a few minutes, which I think is most of what it’s trying to do.
Highlight: I liked the sequence where your character, who works as a miner before deciding to go on their quest of rescue, just walks up to the king and asks for stuff to help on their mission. And it works!
Lowlight: This is a game that ends pretty abruptly once you complete your mission. Authors, once you’ve done so much work to set up a story, it takes so little additional work to make the ending a satisfying victory lap or opportunity to reflect on what’s happened – don’t neglect the denouement!
How I failed the author: about midway through the game, I faced a moral dilemma as I came across a golem about to harm a baby, and I had the choice of saving the kid or trying to fight the monster directly. Given my current day-to-day I of course opted for the former choice – which was 100% the wrong answer as it led to death and a restart (I guess this is more me failing myself than failing the author).
Too-ambitious parser for a simple educational game, November 21, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Kidney Kwest is an educational game, aimed at helping kids with kidney failure learn more about how to manage their condition (in a heartbreaking detail, the blurb mentions that it’s meant to be played during three-hour dialysis sessions). It’s also unintentionally educational in showing why natural-language parsers aren’t yet dominant in IF.
Taking the first part first: the game gets off to a sweet start, with the player character worried about finding a costume for a school play and unable to find anything until the Kidney Fairy takes a hand. She sweeps you away to the fairy world, where you need to solve some small puzzles to get the pieces of a costume. The educational angle also kicks in once you move to the other world, as a hunger timer starts up, but with a twist – in addition to regularly finding (ideally healthy) food to eat, you need to take your medication (a phosphate binder) before or after each meal. Taking a pill also shifts you into a Fantastic Voyage style minigame, where you roam your body looking for rogue phosphate crystals to hoover up before they accumulate.
This is all charmingly realized – I liked the little drawings that pop up in the sidebar – and the couple of puzzles I solved were reasonably satisfying. I didn’t find the full costume and make it to the end of the game, though, because the hunger timer is tuned really aggressively, and requires a restart once you get too hungry. This makes some sense given that that timer, more so than the costume-gathering puzzle, is the main point of the game, but I still found it frustrating, all the more so because of the second notable thing about the game, which is the custom natural-language parser.
Per the introduction, this is meant to make the game more accessible to younger players who aren’t versed in IF conventions. The details are well above my head, but I read a linked blog post which provides an overview, and the parser does appear to live up to its billing: it understands complete English sentences, including asking questions about the state of the world.
The cost of this success is high, though. First of all, the parser is finicky, requiring you to speak in formal English (you can’t even drop a “the” without making it do extra work) in a way that feels awkward to me as a seasoned player of IF, and I suspect would also not be a good fit for how digital-native young people expect to type things into a computer. Second, some of the standard conveniences of mature IF languages are missing – pronouns aren’t recognized, UNDO does nothing, disambiguation is painful, and there’s no command buffer. And most critically, the engine ran very slowly for me, with each command taking at least a few seconds to process, and some even requiring ten or so to complete. This added so much friction that every interaction became really frustrating – and since running around trying to deal with a hunger timer is already kind of annoying, this makes for a bad combination!
If the natural language engine brought something new to the gameplay, maybe this tradeoff would be worth it. But Kidney Kwest, at least the portions I saw, just requires very simple object-management commands that any traditional IF language could handle quite easily. Sure, there’s added functionality if a player wants to request the detailed description of an object using more convoluted syntax (like “what’s in the safe?”) – but teaching a player how this works seems harder than just teaching them to type X SAFE, and the frustration of waiting so long for a response seems greater than the frustration of struggling with a quickly-responsive parser, at least if a game’s implemented well.
Eventually, these kinds of parsers could replace the ones we’ve got, which are based on decades-old models at this point – but we’re not there yet, and that shift will probably be ushered in by games that make good use of the new affordances provided by natural language, rather than doing the same old stuff in a slower, more convoluted way.
Highlight : I liked the miniaturized segments where you explore your own body – there’s some good detail, and it makes for some novel gameplay.
Lowlight : much of the feedback the game gives feels very close to the world-model, without being translated into more accessible text. For example, “examine myself” gave this response: “you is a person, a physical object, a place, and a thing. It also has a hand, a hand, a body.”
How I failed the author : Henry hadn’t been sleeping super well when I played this one, so I was nodding off while waiting for the game to respond to my commands, which is why I didn’t feel up to a third try.
MUCH LATER UPDATE: I went back for a final replay after the author mentioned that the server’s responsiveness had gotten better. It still wasn’t lightning fast, but was much less frustrating to play nonetheless. I also didn’t worry about eating “bad” food this time out, so the hunger timer was less of an issue, and I was able to get an ending. There’s a neat mechanic where your choice of items to pick up along the way give you a different costume (I got scientist, appropriately enough), and a metal rating depending on your dietary choices (I wound up with bronze, given my damn-the-torpedoes approach to food this time). I can see a couple of places where I could have done things differently, so there’s definitely replayability, and I can see kids swapping stories of how they did. I still think the game’s intended purposes would have been better served by just using one of the existing languages, but now that the optimization is a little better, and I’ve got more familiarity with the parser’s idiosyncracies, it definitely worked a bit better.
Promise unrealized, November 21, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
In just about any work of art there’s a gap between ambition and implementation. Occasionally this I because a modest premise is realized with far more care and attention to detail than it need, but more often it’s because an author’s reach exceeds their grasp. There’s certainly nothing wrong with being overambitious and stretching one’s limits, but there’s also little more frustrating than seeing an exciting idea weighed down by failures of execution.
Starting out this way obviously focuses on the critique side of things – and from the numerous typos, confusing scene- and character-shifts, frequently-odd worldbuilding, and abrupt ending, there’s definitely lots there – but I don’t want to underemphasize how good the premise is. The structure of a murder-mystery provides a great framework for exploring an alien society, as a variety of suspects can show off the different kinds of people who live in the world, and a detective’s probing questions can elucidate its hidden depths and tradeoffs, so that’s a great starting point. And the particular crime and alien society we’re talking about here – the death of the one young person in a far-future earth whose immortal residents have removed themselves from the cycle of reproduction – seem like they’d be really interesting to dig into.
The game gives occasional hints of paying off this setup, but due to the issues mentioned above, my time with it was really unsatisfying – especially the sudden-ending thing, since the game cut off just as I was starting to get my bearings. I’ve seen other reviewers speculate that some of the wonkiness here might be intentional. The typos and grammar errors could potentially bespeak a Riddley Walker-style attempt to present a far-future evolution of English, for example, and ending the investigation before it gets going could indicate a pomo refusal to endorse detective-fiction tropes.
But if that’s what it’s doing, the game doesn’t even wink at the player to help bring them into the gag, so I’m left just hoping that this is an IntroComp style teaser, and we’ll eventually see a version of The daughter that gets closer, if not all the way, towards its ambitious promise.
Highlight : After finishing the game, I reread the blurb, and some of the info stated there helped me better understand and appreciate what was going on.
Lowlight : Part of the setup is that the post-scarcity residents of the new earth have mostly decided to reshape their bodies so they’re perennially “hot 30 year olds.” Being told about a “middle aged man looking a good 10 years older than anybody else” – i.e. 40, my age – and his unkempt appearance and “short and messy graying hairs” made me feel even older and more decrepit than usual.
How I failed the author : I was playing on my phone and kept getting interrupted, and maybe because my cookie settings were messed up, every time that wound up resetting the game, so I wound up playing the opening like three or four times.
A card game without much to offer IF fans, November 21, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
It’s a rule of thumb that every Comp has at least one oddball entry that strains the bounds of what counts as IF. In the last couple years, Jared Jackson has taken care of this slot, with last year’s deckbuilder and a Zachlike programming puzzle the year before that (I really enjoyed both, for the record). Comes now The Vaults to try its luck: it’s a virtual CCG whose claim to IF-dom appears to rest entirely on the paragraphs of static text that play between bouts of the PvE campaign.
Sadly, I didn’t find much to enjoy here, either as a piece of IF or on its own merits. On the former side, the game’s story appears to be very generic high fantasy, and the paragraphs only stay on screen for a little while, so I missed some of the plot due to alt-tabbing to take notes. Without any choices or interactivity between the battles and the story so far as I could see, there’s not much here for a traditional IF audience to glom onto.
As to the CCG, this isn’t my genre of choice – give me a deckbuilder any day – but even so, I think it’s too slow and confusingly-presented to be much fun. I eventually grokked the gimmick, which is that you have a trio of persistent “keeper” creatures who generate your mana, but only if you don’t use them to attack. That’s a fair enough tradeoff, but it made me feel like I struggled to make progress, as I was either forgoing attacks, nerfing my mana progression, or unsatisfyingly trying to split the difference.
The player’s starting deck is also oddly tuned, with few low-mana creatures, which added to the frustration as I repeatedly drew cool cards I couldn't do anything with. Finally, the visual design is muddy, with card watermarks making text hard to read, and colors rather than icons are used to convey too much information, so I couldn’t always remember what a creature’s purple number was supposed to mean. All told I won one round, lost the second four or five times, then decided The Vaults simply isn’t for me – though I’d be curious what someone better versed in CCGs thinks, and if future developments in the story make the game more satisfying for IF mavens.
Highlight : Your little keepers are kind of adorable, Jawa-like minions.
Lowlight : One tooltip mentioned that you can link any NFTs you own to the game, which is just the worst.
How I failed the author : I played this during a very late-night (or more optimistically, very early-morning) feeding for Henry, and my fuzzy brain was very much not up to retaining the info conveyed by the tutorial. I also played the opening cutscene but didn’t have the audio on, since Henry was drowsing awake, so the plot was pretty much lost on me (there were scrolls and a dude in armor?)
Innovative sound-based explorathon, November 21, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
My initial foray playing Cygnet Committee was unsuccessful. A slickly-produced Twine game that from the credits and blurb seems to be mining Metal-Gear-Solid-adjacent territory, albeit with what might be a distinctive cult angle, Cygnet Committee requires sound to play -- and while I’m weirdly resistant to listening to any audio when playing IF in general, at the time of first playing I was in brand-new-parent mode where if I couldn't hear the baby’s breathing for a couple of minutes, I got anxious. I tried to see if I could bluff my way through the game with it muted, but the “sound required” tag does not lie.
Happily, I came back much later and played Cygnet Committee through, with the sound on this time, I can confirm my initial impression that this was going to be a high-production-value game with a lot of work behind it. It’s also got a novel puzzle mechanic that’s played out in a bunch of creative ways, a pomo plot that interrogates the uses and misuses of the historical memory of Joan of Arc, and a sprawling, metroidvania-y map. I’m still not sold on the use of sound in IF – and I wished there was a stronger connection between the puzzles and the plot – but Cygnet Committee is a confident, poised piece of work that makes a strong case for it.
Starting with that puzzle mechanic, it manages to be both brand new, but also really intuitive. As your operative infiltrates an island-based military installation, you’ll come across navigation challenges, patrolling robots, locked keypads, and spying drones. Each presents you with four different audio samples, and you need to pick out the right one to progress. Usually this just means choosing the one that’s different from the other three, though what this means diegetically shifts with context – the lock tumbler that clicks twice, the bit of the minefield that’s not beeping, and so on.
There are a few curve-balls that get thrown in, including some timed sequences, and a few more traditional find-the-keycode puzzles, but most of the hour and a half I took on the game was spent in these sequences, and I found the variation wasn’t enough to keep them from getting a little stale by the end. There’s a lot of going back and forth through the sprawling map – again, it’s got a kind of metroidvania structure, where you’ll get a new keycard or send power to a previously-visited area – and unless you use a slowly-accumulating currency to unlock shortcuts, you generally need to solve the puzzles all over again even when going back over already-trodden ground.
There are also some design choices in the back half of the game that exacerbated the drag, since you’ll repeatedly come across a device – a dam outflow wheel, a first-aid kit – a few locations before you reach the place it impacts, meaning that even though I figured out these puzzles pretty much immediately, there was still five minutes of tedious back-and-forth to implement the solution. This kind of thing is par for course in a metroidvania, of course, but much of this felt more like it was about padding the game length than offering cool new secrets to unlock.
My real hesitance with the puzzles, though, is that the gameplay didn’t feel all that deeply integrated with the interesting plot. There’s a complex backstory, involving the creation and deployment of a military AI based on Joan of Arc that’s gone mad and is now threatening the globe with nuclear war, which is related through stylish cutscenes that juxtapose text read aloud by a French text-to-speech program (like, it speaks the English words as if they were French, which is a neatly alienating effect) with clips from The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent movie beloved by cineastes (I’ve never seen it but can confirm the images are very compelling).
Befitting the Metal Gear Solid inspiration cited in the credits, this narrative has some bonkers ups and downs, involving cyborgs, the intersection of warmongering and commerce, and an extended shaggy dog story about canned beans (there’s a note of humor here, though it’s played bone-dry). Careful attention also suggests that there’s more going on than meets the eye – in particular, the ending I got pretty strongly implied that (Spoiler - click to show)that the nuclear apocalypse threat isn’t real, the protagonist is just an aspect of the AI’s personality, and the game’s action is a pageant of persecution and immolation Joan has constructed for herself to satisfy the imperatives of history.
This is cool stuff, but again, it’s mostly fed to the player in cutscenes. There’s some thematic resonance between the audio-based puzzles and the fact that Joan of Arc was said to hear voices – plus the construction of the AI featured some gross stuff involving auditory nerves – but the separation between the gameplay layer and the narrative one feels pretty wide. With a deserted base and no other characters to speak to, and no clarity on how the various features of the island – there’s a chapel, a forest, a lighthouse – relate to the AI’s plans, I sometimes felt like I was solving abstract puzzles to unlock plot coupons. I did enjoy both sides of the equation, but stronger integration of these pieces would have made the experience more compelling.
Highlight: there are some cool secrets to find along the critical path – I turned up two, and am pretty sure I missed a bunch more – getting these was really rewarding.
Lowlight: winning the game gives you the option of unlocking a new “hard mode”, but to access it you need to have accumulated 500 of the game’s chip currency, and I only had like 100 left over at the end. Better secret-finding would have helped, but I think you’d also need to pass up the various options to spend chips to make navigation easier, so I doubt even the most thorough player would finish with the requisite chips, and requiring two full playthroughs to open up the option to play a third time feels like inaccessible design (though the author clarified there's no additional plot in hard mode).
How I failed the author: as I mentioned in the stub I wrote before I played, my current setup is not conducive to playing games with sound – I was constantly pulling off my headphones to listen for Henry’s noises, or talk to my wife, and these regular interruptions probably undermined my immersion in the game.
Time after time, September 2, 2021(Note: this is a review of the ParserComp version of The Time Machine — there’s now an updated version available at the itch.io link).
The Time Machine by Bill Maya is an Inform follow-up to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, a confusing state of affairs that highlights the challenges of writing an unplanned sequel. If the initial work was conceived of as part of a series, that’s an easy enough situation – presumably there are enough hanging plot threads and unresolved conflicts lying about to let you to whip up a plausible plot. But where a story’s been resolved, the protagonist’s journey completed, where is there to go? Sure, a Hamlet sequel would have to be a spin-off, given that everyone north of Horatio in the dramatis personae snuffs it before the final curtain, but even murder-light fare runs into this problem: count ourselves lucky we’ve been spared such enormities as 2 Secret 2 Garden, or Catch 23 (actually, there is a sequel to Catch 22. It’s not great!)
The author’s solution to the dilemma is elegantly done in the present case: there’s a switch of protagonists, from the time machine’s inventor to his friend and lawyer (like, the friend is a lawyer), and the task at hand is to prove Wells’s rantings about Eloi, Morlocks, &c. shouldn’t get him hauled off to a late-Victorian sanitarium by retracing his travels through time. It’s a good setup, allowing the player to re-experience the highlights of the novel without forcing you to go through the remembered steps of a familiar story.
Sadly, the game still requires the player to adhere to a script, though this isn’t always communicated well. My first full playthrough ended in an unwinnable state because immediately upon activating the time machine and finding myself in the Edenic surroundings Wells had related before being hauled off in an ambulance, my first instinct was to return to safety and tell the censorious alienist he’d gotten it all wrong. But when I got back to 1890 and related my wild story, the doctor only listened, “with an accepting look on his face.” That was admirably open-minded of him after he’d stuffed Wells into a strait-jacket for telling much the same story, but that was as far as things went – and since the fuse on the machine burned out after that trip, there was no opportunity to return and bring back more definitive proof. In fairness, the game does signpost that he’s looking for a particular piece of physical evidence – a flower to match the unique petal Wells had shown him right before the game opened – but it would have been polite to fire off a losing ending to bring the story to a close, rather than leaving it to peter out.
Being on rails wouldn’t be so bad if the story the game was out to tell was a gripping one, but despite solid prose, the plot is sadly rather pedestrian. First, most of the game’s playtime is spent in the present day, trying to get into Wells’ workshop and get the machine up and running by solving a few desultory puzzles. Once in the far future, you can explore a single two-location building and have a brief interaction with some Eloi, but it’s all functional at best, and only recapitulates more exciting incidents from the book. If you want to explore off the beaten path and solve a mildly-annoying guess the verb puzzle (to get through a rusty grate, (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE GRATE will work but PULL GRATE and BREAK GRATE won’t), you can have a run-in with Morlocks, but it’s likewise abbreviated and completely optional.
The puzzles are fine, though with the exception of the first (figuring out where Wells’s workshop key has gotten to, which requires a bit of deduction) they’re very straightforward – putting a machine part in a machine, showing an interesting object to an interested NPC, that sort of thing. I had more trouble with them than was probably warranted, though, because there are some infelicities in the implementation. Prior to the nobody-cares-about-your-time-travel-story restart, I’d actually already had to restart because I’d put a watch down on a desk – after being prompted to do so by an NPC – but then was told “it’s hardly portable” when I attempted to retrieve it. And when I grew frustrated at my inability to find the workshop key and considered resorting to violence, BREAK WINDOW WITH POKER just elicited an empty command prompt, with no acknowledgment or rejection of the command. And there are a good number of typos throughout (including a missing period in the opening sequence).
I still had a good time with the game, because the writing is solid, the premise enjoyable, and the setting a pleasant place to spend time (well, modulo the tunnels where blind inbred cannibals live, I suppose). But it felt quite dry, and I was left wanting a little more there there – a little more interactivity, a little more story, a little more puzzling, just something more to create emotional engagement and make The Time Machine feel like a real sequel and not just a retread.
Immersive and lovely, July 10, 2021(I was a beta tester on this one, and as the below review will hopefully quickly make clear, you might want to take my opinion with an even bigger grain of salt than usual).
There are some things that as soon as you encounter them, you realize that they’re for you (where by you I mean one, though I certainly hope that you, the person reading this review, have found some of these things for yourself!) Ideally you fall head-over-heels without losing the ability to understand why others might not be as into this thing as you are – it isn’t so much a matter of retaining a critical perspective, because of course you have none, but of preventing yourself from becoming a spittle-flecked evangelist, a John the Baptist who won’t take no for an answer until some kindly dancer-with-veils sticks your head on a plate. Look, the metaphor’s getting away from me: all I’m trying to say is that I have hopefully gotten to the point in life where I understand that e.g. some people think early Tori Amos is overly precious, or can’t stand the way Tristram Shandy never gets to the point. I can walk my brain along the paths that lead to those conclusions, and through force of intellection sometimes even see that the complaints proceed from real flaws in the works at issue. But none of this can shake my unbreakable adoration for these things that feel like someone made them just for me.
I have to confess that I haven’t fully replayed The Faeries of Haelstowne since I tested it a month or so back. Partially this is because it’s a very big game, and after the past week-and-a-bit of playing and reviewing, I really need to get back to my IFComp work-in-progress. Partially this is because the thought of having to solve the darkroom puzzle again intimidates me. But mostly it’s because I enjoyed my first playthrough so so much that it’d feel ungrateful to replay it, like I was asking for even more joy than it had already given me.
I can recite the issues a player might have with the game chapter and verse: it’s so big it can be hard to get and stay oriented; the Adventuron parser struggles to keep up with this ambitious a level of detail and interactivity; the Merrie Olde English milieu is twee and more literary than historical; it’s hard to figure out how to make immediate progress on the missing-vicar case the policeman protagonist is notionally investigating, so progression requires solving seemingly-unrelated problems just because they’re there; and the puzzles require a precision that can veer into pixelbitchery (I know the author did yeoman’s work smoothing out issues since I did my testing, but from a quick glance at the forum traffic and itch.io comment threads, it seems like some of these issues remain). It’s not too hard for me to imagine the review that gives it a right old kicking for all this.
But look, I am here to tell you none of this matters in the slightest, or at least I am here to tell you none of this matters in the slightest to me (let me reassure you that, as I write these words, my garments are not made from camel’s hair, and I have not lately fed on locusts and honey). It’s a commonplace to say that the best works of IF are worlds you can get lost in, and part of what makes Faeries of Haelstowne so lovely is that you can and will get lost in it. It conjures a completely and idyllically realized interwar milieu for your immersive pleasure, but part of the trick is that the map is too big and awkwardly laid out; that you’ll need to look carefully at every single patch of vegetation and confusingly-labeled bottle of photographic fluid; that you’ll have to get the match out of the matchbox, and light the match, and realize you didn’t put the candle on the candleholder, but then by the time you’ve done that the match has gone out, so you need to start the whole process over again; that you’ll hang on every word every NPC says, not because they’re finely characterized (though they are) but because you’re desperate for some guidance. To play this game is to be a well-meaning bumbler who eventually succeeds through a bit of cleverness, sure, but mostly through perseverance, luck, and aid from some more-competent allies – and that’s as true for the player as for the protagonist.
The reason I call it a trick is that this kind of thing doesn’t always work – I’ve given up on games with far fewer frustrations, and my closing thoughts were not of how immersed I was in the fictional world.
Here, it’s the writing that’s the secret ingredient and makes the magic come off. There are a lot of words in this game, and pretty much all of them are perfect, calling out just the right details to delight the player while communicating exactly what kind of place Haelstowne is. Like, here’s the kitchen of the vicarage where Arthur, the protagonist, is staying – there’s nothing at all special or concealed here, this is a simple quotidian description:
"The kitchen was a warm, busy space looking out on the path that ran along the west side of The Vicarage. The plain whitewashed walls held residues and aromas from centuries of cooking and had been privy to all the usual intrigues, plots and scandals that hatched in the average kitchen. There was a venerable old range set into an enormous alcove where once the fire would have roared and various pots, pans and utensil hung upon the walls. A heavily scarred tombstone-thick slab of oak served as the kitchen table and general worksurface."
Yes, this is what this kitchen would be like!
Or a small strange occurrence, from when Arthur has started to attract the attention of the eponymous fair folk:
"A pair of field mice tumbled from a nearby bank and scurried across Arthur’s shoes as he passed. The little animals paused and seemed to observe him for an instant, before disappearing into the long grass on the other side of him."
It’s all very homey and exactly right, and even when other characters are getting snippy with Arthur or there’s real danger in the air, I still found myself grinning as I read, so pleasing is the prose.
There’s much more to do than soak up the atmosphere, though: there are puzzles here, and some of them are pretty hard. Partially this is due to how large the map is – while much of it is initially locked off, there’s still quite a lot of real estate over which to range, all the more so once Arthur is able to find transportation to the village. Partially it’s because the author’s hit a nice balance between open-ended sandbox and time-gated progression and there are a whole host of puzzles that can be solved before it’s strictly necessary to do so, which means there are a lot of objects and a lot of sub-objectives at play at any given time. And partially it’s because, admittedly, the parser’s foibles can make it hard to know whether the problem is with your thinking, or with how you’re typing your actions in. Once I realized that if the game gave me the kind of unhelpful response that I’d understand as telling me I was barking up the wrong tree were I playing an Inform game, here I might want to persevere with some synonyms or alternate syntax a little longer, I had a much easier time. And there are two levels of hints available to help get players unstuck. Still – it’s likely you’ll need them at some point!
This review is already far too long and I suppose I should start trying to bring it in for a landing. There’s so much more I’d love to highlight – like Ottoline, Arthur’s eventual partner in faerie-fighting, who quickly became one of my favorite IF allies ever. Or the climactic puzzle, which involves one of the best, most satisfying figure-out-the-ritual puzzles I’ve played. And I’ve barely mentioned how drily, understatedly funny it is. I’ll simply have to have faith that these things will all be discovered and appreciated as they deserve.
Maybe all this has put you off, and as you’ve read this review you’ve weighed the positives I’ve mentioned against the negatives I’ve acknowledged, and decided that the balance doesn’t come right for you, which is completely fair. But if your interest is piqued, and you have the time and space for it, I really encourage you to block out a few hours, pour yourself a big mug of tea, resolve not to look at hints until you really need them (and then to consult them posthaste), and jump into Faeries of Haelstowne – I can guarantee (I can’t actually guarantee) you’ll love it.
Breaking new ground, July 9, 2021(I beta tested this game, so this is less a review than impressions of a version of the game no-one can currently plan, biased both positively by having personal interaction with the author and some investment in the game from doing a tiny bit of work to help it come into existence, and negatively by experiencing the game in a buggier, unfinished state. If after seeing this disclaimer, your reaction is “I don’t see the point of reading this so-called review,” you’re probably right!)
There’s an undeniable romance about making a new home after being shipwrecked, pushing civilization’s light into a heretofore-unlit corner and staking a claim: it’s a heady mélange of self-reliance and creativity, of being tested by a hostile and untamed wilderness without the support of society, and then constituting that society anew. Of course, the historical reality at the root of these fantasies is something else entirely, as it’s not possible to separate them from settler colonialism, given the common tropes they invoke – genocide, land-theft, and the exploitation of indigenous bodies for labor and worse belie the sunny Swiss Family Robinson image (points to Defoe for including the character of Friday in his original novel, making clear exactly how the trick works).
Displacing these fantasies into a science-fictional setting makes a lot of sense, then, as you get to invoke the tropes while starting from a place of relative innocence – with our scene laid at a completely uninhabited planetoid, it’s possible to simply enjoy watching a plucky hero (or in this case, heroine, as yes, I’m finally starting to come around to the game) carve out a settlement. Foreign Soil does have its moments of darkness – given that the protagonist first wakes up alone in a colony ship on the fritz, it’s clear that the life she left behind wasn’t great, and it’s quickly confirmed that we’re in a Botany Bay type situation – but it’s mostly an uncomplicated good time, as you solve some puzzles to wrest power and sustenance out of an unwelcoming hunk of rock.
That wake-up scene is probably the high point of the game, not because Foreign Soil goes downhill sharply, but because it’s a really compelling opening. The main character comes to amidst sleeping coffins, shivering with hibernation sickness and her mind and perceptions disordered. It’s hard to write a scene like this in IF, since you need to convey the character’s disorientation while still giving the player enough concrete information to figure out how to act. The sequence walks this tightrope very well, as the player is kept off-balance and doesn’t have a full sense of what’s going in the scene, but is always told about one salient detail or recent change that should be investigated, giving them a thread to pull to keep moving ahead. The game was an entrant in 2020’s IntroComp, and even though it’d been about a year since I’d last played this bit, I still remembered almost every detail, since it’s so strong.
Once you’ve got your colonist sorted, it’s time to get to the colonizing, and the challenges and puzzles are usually logical and fun to work through. As in the opening, you don’t usually have a complete understanding of what you’re doing – it appears the government that sent you out here isn’t big on briefings or instruction manuals – but the game is usually good at signposting what you should be paying attention to, and progress is typically possible with a little bit of prodding and poking. There are places where the implementation could be a little more robust, though, as a few puzzles flirt with guess-the-verb issues (when I replayed today, less than a month after doing my beta playthrough, it still took me forever to figure out how to fill the water bottle the second time), and there are a few errant typos – stray line breaks, missing spaces, that sort of thing – which is I suppose is primarily an indictment of how well I did my job as a tester.
The prose strikes an engaging tone throughout. I’m having a hard time nailing it down precisely, but I want to call it jauntily cynical, or maybe cynically jaunty? The main character definitely has a personality—I got a good sense of her as brash and determined – and her voice lends color to what could otherwise be a dull environment made of rocky landscapes and generic corridors. Here’s her take on an empty bit of crater, for example:
"This part of the crater gets a lot of sun, so… Ok, all parts of the crater get a lot of sun, and yet: This should be a great place for a vineyard slope! But only if the terraforming works. And even then, probably not for another 1,000 years."
This rough-edged but inviting narration also takes the edge off of death when it arrives, as it is possible to perish from a variety of missteps. It also helps that these deaths aren’t permanent, as they’re considerately rewound as soon as they happen (for a reason that makes sense once it’s ultimately revealed). And indeed, the plot winds up in a surprisingly sweet place that, much like the game overall, worked really well for me. Foreign Soil has room for more polish, it’s relatively slight, and it never manages to top its bravura opening, but if you want to play out an unproblematic colony-seeding narrative, it certainly meets the need.
Quite agrueable (I'll stop), July 9, 2021(I beta tested this game, so this is less a review than impressions of a version of the game no-one can currently plan, biased both positively by having personal interaction with the author and some investment in the game from doing a tiny bit of work to help it come into existence, and negatively by experiencing the game in a buggier, unfinished state. If after seeing this disclaimer, your reaction is “I don’t see the point of reading this so-called review,” you’re probably right!)
I copped to my inexperience with Zork in one of my earlier reviews for this Comp, but of course, even though I’ve never played, I know pretty much everything about it. Partially this is from reading things like the Digital Antiquarian’s series on the early days of Infocom, but largely it’s because of parodies. By my count there have been approximately… (checks IFDB) four trillion games riffing on all things Zorkian, with the violent, kleptomanic tendencies of its notional hero coming in for a kicking as early as Enchanter, and the heroic journey of progression inverted and parodied in Janitor and Zero Sum Game. Gruesome cleverly combines and re-inverts these parodic tropes, placing you in the shoes (claws?) of a noble grue trying to help a mob of violent, dull-witted adventurers complete their quests so they’ll leave the poor denizens of the dungeon alone.
This is funny, but it’s still a one-and-a-half joke premise at most, and throwing in a reimplementation of Hunt the Wumpus doesn’t do much to change things up. Yet Gruesome really works, on the back of solid puzzle-design and jokes that do the work to be funny, rather than just gesturing at something that happened in Zork and calling it a day.
Let’s start with the funny business. There’s a broad array of humor on display here, so I have to imagine at least some of the jokes will land for most players. You have your direct Zork jokes, sure – and these are good, from the opening line to “It is bright white. You are likely to be slain by an adventurer” – but also silly puns (“Handel’s Opening Number” is my favorite, because when you look at it, it’s an awful pun, but when you think about it some more, you realize there’s an additional, even worse pun hiding in plain sight!) as well as a whole bunch of physical comedy as the adventurers blunder around in the dark.
And save for the cute-as-a-button Wumpus, the adventurers are really the stars of this particular show. They each skewer a specific heroic archetype, like the mighty-thewed barbarian who “hails from the frozen wastes of the far northlands and, in accordance with Jones’s Law of Sartorial Inversion, dresses in a few leather straps and a tiny loincloth,” and they’re modeled with stunningly realistic AI: just like real adventure-game heroes, the bastards wander around at complete random and get into fights at the drop of a hat. My first time through the game, I was informed that one of the dopes had snuffed it, and I thought it must have been because the dragon had got him, but no, the pugnacious %#@#$ had picked a fight with one of his fellow hotheads and wound up pushing daisies – like a Zork-themed remake of No Exit, the dungeon in Gruesome may have monsters, but hell is other heroes.
Speaking of my first playthrough, it ended with all the adventurers save one dead in a ditch. That’s all right though, not because they deserved it (though they did) but because the game’s a giant optimization puzzle that’s meant to be played more than once. As you do your initial round of exploration, you’ll slowly work out the rules of the game and solve some of the component puzzles. Mostly these involve creating and extinguishing light, as the surface-dwellers unsurprisingly flee the dark and seek out rooms where they can see, which allows you to manipulate their movements. Invariably, solving the individual puzzles – which are a pleasing mix of simple object manipulation, maze traversal, and lateral thinking – will lead to an adventurer going somewhere they oughtn’t, and my initial impression of the game was a bit overwhelming, with chaos breaking out everywhere. But once you get your oar in and start considering how to sequence your actions and fit the pieces together, the meta-puzzle isn’t actually too hard to crack, though it’s very satisfying to come up with the final resolution.
Is there room for improvement in Gruesome? Sure – the climax and denouement aren’t quite as compelling as the main body of the game, for one thing, and there are some puzzles, like the one involving the dwarven foreman, that can feel a little perfunctory. And the lack of grue puns beyond the title is a real missed opportunity – like, your protagonist should feel grueful after allowing one of the adventurers in their charge to perish, or let out a self-congratulatory “gruevy” upon accomplishing a task. Or if you play your cards right in the attic, perhaps you could have finished the game as a bride-gruem. Come on, these were lying right there! (Perhaps the author considered them, but found them egruegiously bad).
Don’t let this significant flaw keep you from enjoying Gruesome, though. It’s a fun, funny farce whose jaundiced view of the typical IF protagonist doesn’t make its parody too acidic (I kind of want the slice-of-life sequel where you just hang out with Jessica the orc and the Wumpus), and it’s got some of the best puzzling of the Comp – plus the implementation seems quite smooth, though of course given I’m not playing with fresh eyes, I’m not best suited to make that judgment. If all Zork parodies hit this level of quality, keep ‘em coming!
A great introduction to IF, July 9, 2021Grandpa’s Ranch stands out in the Comp for being the only ADRIFT game, and also for being initially intended for a different competition entirely, the recent Text Adventure Literacy Jam. That slight delay is to ParserComp’s benefit, though, as this is a refreshing palette-cleanser of a game. The plot is simple and lighthearted – you play a kid whose grandfather is looking to give away the family valuables via a treasure hunt – and the small setting (the grandfather’s house and yard) is agreeable to explore, with compact descriptions enlivened by some pleasantly-chunky pixel art. And while there’s a tutorial that walks new players through the basics of playing IF, you can deactivate it if you’re more experienced or want a challenge, which I’d certainly recommend, as while the puzzles aren’t especially hard, they’re definitely fun to work through.
I haven’t played many ADRIFT games, but Grandpa’s Ranch is a good case for the platform by making thoughtful use of its features. In addition to the previously-mentioned graphics, there’s also an always-available map window that starts out showing the locations the player would already know about and updates as you explore more of the world. And there’s a clear attention to ease of use throughout: objects present in an area are listed out and underlined, making it easy for new players to understand what they can interact with, and when picking up objects whose use is obvious, the relevant command is disclosed, avoiding guess-the-verb frustrations.
This clean presentation makes most of the already-easy puzzles even simpler, but that’s not necessarily bad – there’s a primal joy in discovering secret doors that can be messed up if the process is too obfuscated. And I thought the climactic puzzle sequence was very well done, with several clever steps that all made sense given the goal you’re trying to accomplish, and no parser fiddliness despite the somewhat complex physical manipulations required. As with the rest of the game, the puzzles of Grandpa’s Ranch aren’t going to set the world on fire, but they’re better than they need to be for something with such a clear introductory remit. You could do a lot worse than have this as your first piece of IF, but even if you’ve been around the block a time or two, it’s still a worthwhile coffee-break diversion.
Solid but dull, July 9, 2021The stereotype of parser games is that they’re lightly-comic puzzle adventures crammed with jokey responses and groan-worthy puns. There are obviously so many exceptions they overwhelm the rule, but there’s definitely something to it, and so usually I enjoy it when I come across a game that commits to a different prose style, as long as it fits the story. So Return to the Stars presents a bit of a conundrum: it intentionally eschews the comic-opera standard in favor of stripped-down prose that’s completely apt given the military sci-fi tropes of the setting. I can’t really fault the writing for being dry as a piece of toast since it does help advance the mood, but since that’s of a piece with the straightforward plot and unexciting puzzles, the game feels duller than it deserves.
Right, so the setup. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you’re a soldier in a sci-fi army, and you’ve been captured by the forces of your enemy, the awkwardly-named Shwabolians. After they stop checking on you, the moment’s right for you to attempt a jailbreak so you can escape their clutches and, like it says on the tin, return to the stars and your home. Standing in your way are a bunch of locked doors, a shuttle missing its ignition key, and a few of those evil lizard-people whose name I’m not going to attempt to spell again moving forward in this review.
There’s nothing wrong with a standard premise, but it can feel a little boring if you’re not careful, and unfortunately, it sometimes feels like the author is steering into this particular skid. The various environments you explore are plausibly-realized but generic – a stockade, various control rooms, a barracks, a briefing room – but at least poking around them could offer, say, an opportunity to learn more about the aliens you’re fighting. And you do in fact find something out about their culture as you kick around their digs: specifically, they’re very down on any unnecessary display or extraneous details in their living and work-spaces. A noticeable portion of the word-count is devoted to flagging things that aren’t actually there, as room after room is described as “sparsely-furnished” or having “no decoration.” And when there is some scenery, it’s almost always called out as generic, with “nothing noteworthy” about it. Again, this fits the mood – as a no-nonsense space marine I’m sure the player character isn’t especially interested in the fine details of furniture styling. But it makes for a pretty dull time.
When it comes to the puzzle-solving that’s the main focus here, things improve, but there’s still not much that’s exciting or novel. Like, if you’d guessed that you escape the cell you start out in by crawling out through a ventilation duct, give yourself a cookie. There are keycards to retrieve, launch sequences to initiate, and an RNG-heavy shootout that I had to abuse the UNDO command to get through. There are one or two clever pieces – I enjoyed figuring out how to get from the prison island to the main base, for example, and how to evade the force field – but also some read-the-author’s-mind bits. I figured out that I’d need to look for a keycard someone had inadvertently misplaced in order to get through a locked door, but the place where it can be found is so far away from the door it unlocks that I needed a hint to get me back on the right track. And the final step to turning on the shuttle was one of the worst guess-the-verb puzzles I’ve seen in a while, though it’s certainly possible I missed a prompt somewhere.
Implementation is solid for the most part, with a few nice touches. I liked the way the status bar updated with additional information once you recover your fancy armor, and once you find the enemy’s barracks you can wash yourself clean after you do things that make you dirty with various unpleasant substances. On the other hand, there are some minor bugs – I got stuck in the early stages when I typed CRAWL to get back into my cell after escaping, but then couldn’t CRAWL back out again, and the ignition-notch in the shuttle will accept anything you try to put in it, including the corpse of a large murder-lizard.
Even though I’ve caviled a lot in this review, I have positive feelings about Return to the Stars. It definitely passes muster as a solid slice of military sci-fi, and really commits to its premise in a way that I find admirable. I just wish it, and I, could have had a little more fun along the way.
A great rou-IFalike (I'm trying to make this a thing), July 9, 2021Has there ever been a pairing more obvious in theory, but more challenging in execution, than the IF/roguelike mashup? I mean I’m sure there has been, but let’s just go with it: the marriage seems natural, given the overlap in presentation, interface, subject matter, and, I think, audience – like, if you enjoy typing stuff into a text window to explore a dungeon, evade traps, juggle an inventory, and beat monsters in Zork, it’s not crazy to think you’d be into Angband or Nethack as well. And, importantly, so long as you’re sticking with text or ascii, neither genre requires the author to create art, which can be a significant barrier to entry.
On the flip side, there are really deep differences between these beasts that can make the hybrids rather awkward, if not sterile. First there’s the varying expectations for what “fairness” means – modern IF players expect to triumph with nary a restart, whereas if you win a roguelike without standing on a pile of the dead bodies of your previous avatars, it would feel unsatisfying. Similarly, it’s the rare piece of IF that takes more than two or three hours, while a mainline roguelike can easily take 30 or 40 for a single successful playthrough, and you need radically different gameplay systems and design ethoi to support those different playtimes. Finally, most of the fun of IF comes from bespoke puzzle-solving and hand-crafted text, whereas roguelikes are all about applying a consistent set of tools to wildly varying circumstances of inventory, monsters, and dungeon layout, with small shifts in positioning and granular inventory usage – awkward things to model well in a parser – providing most of the turn-by-turn interest.
Due to the combination of the appeal and the challenges, I feel like this sub-genre has a lot of entries, but comparatively few successful ones: I’m of course thinking of Kerkerkruip in the latter category, but honestly struggling to name a second stand-out example. Fortunately, after playing Black Knife Dungeon, I’ll struggle no more, as it offers a distinct, intelligent take on the rou-IFalike (I know it looks awful on the page, but say it aloud, it’s pretty good!), by adopting some more player-friendly, rogue-lite style approaches.
There’s a plot here, with the find-artifact-or-kill-foozle coin landing on the former side this time out; you’re drinking in a tavern with a sot of a dwarf, who tells you of an unrecovered treasure waiting at the end of a dangerous dungeon, and closes with these urgent words:
"'A steadfast adventurer may find it,” he murmurs, “but first, seek Blornang’s Hall.' With that, his head falls on the table, cushioned slightly by a coaster."
So yeah it’s minimal and trope-y, but at the same time, if you’re not enchanted by that “cushioned slightly by a coaster” bit, you and I are very different people.
Anyway it’s all about gameplay, and since the town is only sketched in, with two shops (one level-gated) and a tavern for getting gameplay tips in the shape of rumors, it’s all about the dungeon. In the first two minutes, you’ll notice two key examples of BKD’s streamlining. First, there’s no navigation within the dungeon – you’re always either fighting or searching in a room, or moving on to another randomly-generated one. There’s also no examine verb, possibly the first time I’ve come across this in a piece of IF? Combined, this means that the focus is on decision-making from a focused palette of actions that slowly expands as you level up, buy more kit, and encounter new foes.
At the start, the main mechanic is a low-stakes push-your-luck calculation – in another bow to roguelite convention, death only means missing out on the small gold bonus you get from leaving the dungeon alive, so it seems like all there is to do is fight your way through each set of foes and then bail out when the going gets too tough. The main wrinkle at this early stage is that monsters all come in a normal and extra-tough flavor, with the difference usually being signaled by a subtle tweak of a single word in the sentence-long descriptions printed at the start of each encounter. It’s typically more trouble than it’s worth to fight these pumped-up versions of the bestiary, so once you learn to recognize them, you’ll usually just slip right by (since you can bypass any monster at any time, even once you’ve launched into combat). You can also choose whether you want to search a room once you’ve killed a monster, with some kinds of rooms more likely to yield treasure and others tending to conceal traps.
Later levels of the dungeon complicate this simple dynamic in ways that keep BKD fresh through its hour-long playtime. Beyond incremental weapon and armor upgrades, you’ll be able to purchase three different magic items. The first is a simple ranged attack, but the other two are more interesting, consisting of an I-win nuke that must be charged up by conventional victories, and a ring that uses the environment against your opponent by casting a spell that’s unique to each room. As a result, every time you go down stairs into a new layer of the dungeon, there’s a pleasing bit of business as you figure out which text identifies the hard version of the new monsters, test their vulnerability to the various attacks, and fill out the ring’s room/monster grid. Ultimately, of course, there’s a boss who tests your mastery of the previous mechanics while injecting a few new spins of its own, and then the story wraps up tidily, though the player is left with some extra-challenging postgame goals to work through if the spirit so moves.
It’s all well considered, and if, unlike Fivebyfivia, the story’s “twist” ending didn’t land that strongly for me, well, that’s no big deal, as the journey getting there is clearly what’s important. And I did have a lot of fun with BKD, though I think the tuning requires a bit more repetition than I would have preferred. Progression through the dungeon isn’t gated by flat experience, but rather by accomplishing specific goals. Many of these are grindable – earning enough gold to upgrade your equipment, coming across the right room in your random explorations – but others require a bit of luck, like being able to kill a certain number of monsters before your hit points or a time limit runs out. This helps proceedings feel less mechanical, but in the later stages of the game, even after I’d figured out all the relevant tricks it felt like it still took a lot of replays until the stars aligned just right so I could check off these boxes and make it to the boss.
A heavy reliance on RNGesus for success is a central part of most roguelikes, of course, but this did make the final act of the game sometimes feel like a drag. And I would have liked the game better if there was a little more going on in the town, since there are no characters as engaging as the coaster-napping dwarf from the opening. Still, these are small complaints – RKD is a short game so having a bit of ennui set in for the last 10 minutes is no big deal when I enjoyed the rest of it so much, and my eyes were skipping over most of the text by the end anyway. There’s a lot to be said for a game that makes succeeding at a tricky design challenge look effortless, even if the perfect rou-IFalike is still yet to be written (admit it, it’s starting to grow on you now).
Working on my knight moves, July 9, 2021If this wasn’t ParserComp but rather BadassTitleComp, let’s all take a minute up front to acknowledge that FDE would be the runaway champion (I see you over there, Black Knife Dungeon – you’re ballpark but you’re trying too hard). Take a genocidal threat from the ancient world, blend it with a made-up mathy word, and slap it on a chess-based puzzler, and you have a sure-fire recipe for coloring me intrigued. Happily, rather than just skating by with a neat title and cool concept, Fivebyfivia Delenda Est has as much substance as style.
For one thing, there’s an actual plot here, about a daring knight sent out to conquer a neighboring kingdom via dynastic assassinations and a terrain-occupying tour, that’s written with humor, fleetness, and an understanding of the actually quite problematic nature of what’s occurring here. As with most of Andrew Schultz’es games, though, FDE is a puzzler through and through, and this time it’s chess that’s going through the wringer. Of course, chess puzzles are a genre unto themselves, but the spin here is quite clever and would be hard to implement outside IF – you need to arrange pieces to set up a checkmate, which you do by dropping off your allies then summoning the enemy king as your knight traverses the board in the expected L-shaped pattern, with a move limit adding an additional dimension of challenge to proceedings.
I should say at the outset that I would like to be the kind of person who’s good at chess puzzles, but am in fact the kind of person who’s awful at them. As is also usual for Schultz’s games, though, there are a host of features that invite players of any skill level in so they can enjoy things at their own speed. There’s a map that helps you visualize the state of play; many different ways to input your moves, so guiding the knight is easy; a full tutorial and a quick precis of the rules of chess; and gentle hints that ramp up if it’s clear you’re not getting a particular puzzle. So while the initial challenge definitely presented a learning curve as my head desperately tried to wrap itself around this unique take on the chess puzzle, it was a smooth curve with lots of support (so a flying buttress, I guess?)
The puzzles do escalate as you go, with the two-rook training wheel scenario giving way to more complex arrangements that were delightful to work through. My only real complaint, besides wishing there were more challenges beyond the four here on offer, is that the second one wound up having additional constraints that I don’t think were clearly signposted in the setup – my first solution was rejected because one piece didn’t want to be too close to the enemy king, and the second one because the player character wanted to hold it in reserve. I came up with a third one soon enough (and then was able to re-use my second solution in the following puzzle), so no harm no foul, but I think clearly telegraphing these added rules from the jump would have been more satisfying.
At any rate, FDE left me wanting more and hoping that, like the Punic Wars, it would be one of a series – given the way the imperialism-kicking plot wraps up, though, I’m not sure that’s in the cards, and perhaps it’s for the best since I don’t think I’d be up to the difficulty of solving puzzles in the untrammeled wilds of the knight’s home country of Twelvebytwelvia.
Flower follies, July 9, 2021When I was in college, I had a running conversation with a friend where we tried to determine the smallest discernable unit of various things – like, what is the band such that next-worse band is actually bad, therefore allowing you to express the goodness of all other bands as a multiplier of the goodness of that one band? We decided that there was, and it was Jimmy Eats World, for reasons I can’t currently recall or defend.
This was a weird pastime – we were taking quantum mechanics at the time, so that’s why were interested in trying to come up with discrete measurements for things that are typically experienced as continuous or analogue – but I bring it up because Yesternight is a plausible contender for a sort of text-adventure eigenunit, complete in itself but so stripped down that if you took almost a single thing away from it, you’d have something that felt more like a tech demo than a full game.
The player character has no history and no future, their only goal to work through the obviously-signposted puzzle chain that doesn’t constitute a narrative beyond the inevitability of union between one object, one action, and one barrier that it resolves. Eventually you go north, having traded all the money you had in the world (in fairness, a single coin) for forward progress on a road, with no indication of where it leads (maybe existentialism would have been a better one of my early-adult obsessions to organize this review around, since the protagonist and their world is entirely defined by absurd but compelled actions? …probably not).
Matching the thin puzzles and thinner narrative, the game is pretty underimplemented, too. It’s written in AdvSys, a fairly obscure mid-80s language that I was unfamiliar with before a quick google, and look, I’m not going to make you sit here and listen to me pretend to have an opinion about LISP-based parsers, but even with allowances for the limited technical affordances of the time, there’s no excuse for the guess-the-verb silliness that only accepts POUR FLOWER to indicate that you want to pour some water on a desiccated flower (the instructions do indicate this is a two-word parser, but even still, POUR WATER, WATER FLOWER, EMPTY BOTTLE, and various permutations thereof would have been far more intuitive!)
So like I said: plausible candidate for the eigen-venture. And yet! When I said there almost wasn’t a single you could take away from Yesternight and still have a game, I was being precise. There is exactly one superfluous item in the world, a medical book of some description (I say “of some description” because its description is “you see nothing special”, and you can’t actually read it), that serves no purpose whatsoever. It must be there because the author wanted it there; there was no puzzle-logic or worldbuilding rationale that required it to exist, after all. There’s something intriguing about its completely unnecessary presence in this otherwise minimal game, and I’m almost tempted to argue that the seed of all art is putting something like that into a work that clearly doesn’t need it – and the seed of all criticism is trying to figure out what it means that it’s there. Right now it’s not very interesting art, and it can’t lead to interesting criticism, since the medical text is an empty signifier, an invitation into the author’s mind that only leads to an empty house with no lights on. But hey, a seed is a seed.
Abominably fun, July 9, 2021Arkham Abomination doesn’t put its best foot forward – a custom-parser game with no testers listed and a readme that’s actually titled “for testers” is spookier than any eldritch horror, and the fuzzy icons and garishly-colored text that greet you on booting up left me quaking in dread. Happily, it quickly shakes this negative first impression and serves up a quality bit of Lovecraftiana. If you’re burned out on the subgenre, it’s not doing anything novel enough to shake you out of your ennui, but it’s a well-crafted, well-written romp through the dark woods of Arkham Country with only a few flies in the ointment (or rather, mi-go in the slimy remnant of some nameless horror?)
Much of this is down to how it nails the Lovecraft style – and not in a “anyone with a skin tone slightly darker than ecru is a degenerate villain” way, thankfully, but by offering up prose that’s dizzyingly dense with recondite adjectives and ominously-overdescribed landscape. Here’s the opening location, for example:
"I am on a twisty trail west of old Arkham town. Looking around I see the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep, dark woods. I turn and see dark narrow glens where trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes I spot a few deserted farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages dilapidated and vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs."
Some of this is word-for-word Lovecraft (“…the hills rise wild”) but the rest of it could easily be. Or take this description of the not-at-all-suspicious monoliths at the edge of town:
"Occasionally, through gaps in the trees, the sky silhouettes with especial clearness a queer circle of tall stone pillars upon which a large grassy hill in the distance is crowned."
It’s awkward sometimes, but sure, that’s the point. And all of this excessively-detailed scenery is implemented, every gambrel roof and narrow glen of it. In a sea of Lovecraft-alikes that nick the fish-men but present their stories in the same flat prose you’d use to recount a trip to the supermarket, Arkham Abomination stands out by adopting the style as well as the substance.
The plot itself is also cannily chosen, as it’s riffing off a specific Lovecraft story, but not one of the over-used ones like Dunwich Horror or Shadow Over Innsmouth (Spoiler - click to show)(we’re looking at the Colour Out of Space, here). The classic setup has you visiting a threatening village, looking for a missing friend who was trying to get to the bottom of a strange wave of sickness that’s laid many of Arkham’s citizens low. The shape of what’s happened is pretty obvious from early on, at least if you’ve got much familiarity with HPL’s oeuvre, but going through the steps of the investigation is a pleasure, with clues that logically connect one to another and a detailed but not overly-large game world. The readme implies this is an adaptation of a pen-and-paper Call of Cthulhu scenario, and if that’s right it does a good job of translating an RPG story into IF form.
There are only a few puzzles, most of which are pretty well prompted and pleasing to work through – light sources to use to illuminate darkened areas, makeshift ropes to discover, mazes to explore, and so on – and appropriately enough for a CoC scenario, it all ends in fire and explosions. The last major puzzle of the game was occasionally frustrating, though – it requires stealing some items from a half-crazed, randomly-wandering farmer, and avoiding the death-by-shotgun he visits upon you if he notices your thefts requires a lot of reloading, as UNDO won’t take you past the barrier of death. The puzzle is also a little fiddlier than it should be, due to some commands that work in earlier scenes not behaving quite the way you’d expect them to in this sequence – it’s not awful by any means, but in a game without hints or a walkthrough, it’d be unfortunate if these niggles put players off from finishing (if you are feeling stuck, this thread might get you going again).
To close with a word about implementation, Arkham Abomination is yet another example of a well-made custom parser that’s made me reconsider my previous negative feelings about such things. Modulo that UNDO inconvenience mentioned above, it has all the features a modern player would expect, and it understands basic actions in a completely transparent way. Besides a few small bugs (sometimes X FOO would result in “I X the foo…” before printing the description instead of the usual “I examine the foo…”), the only real complaint I had is that much like in Somewhere, Somewhen, it’s hard to look at or interact with objects in containers, even open ones, without first retrieving them (is there something in the water making custom-parser authors think players want to fiddle about with containers in this anal-retentive way?)
Does the world need another Cthulhu scenario, or another custom text-adventure engine? Probably not, but Arkham Abomination demonstrates that you can have a lot of fun with such things nevertheless, so long as the craft is there.
Bringing life to a transcript, July 9, 2021The comedy IF-transcript is a niche but venerable taste – my favorites are the DISAVENTURE series the late, lamented Scott Eric Kaufman wrote about the travails of academic life – but usually, the gag involves near-psychic levels of reactivity to player commands in order to make the comic timing work. It’s not surprising, then, that Daddy’s Birthday is the first time I’ve heard of someone taking on the challenging task of transforming such a transcript into an actual interactive work (here, the author’s daughter wrote up a silly transcript of her dad’s birthday morning, which has now been turned into an Inform game). It’s a nice touch that you can at any point call up the transcript to measure your progress against the initial inspiration, but what’s nicer is that you can go off the beaten path a little bit and find the game, and the story, still works.
Genre-wise, this is a straightforward domestic comedy – you, as the eponymous father, bumble your way through the house in order to reach your family, and the party they’ve prepared for you. There’s nothing stopping you for making a beeline for the cake and presents, and you can probably finish the game in a dozen commands or fewer if you want, but most of the fun comes from poking around. The house isn’t deeply implemented, but there are usually one or two things to interact with per room on this small map, one of which can wind up giving you an additional sub-objective for the morning. And the party is rendered with a good deal of depth – there’s a solid amount of dialogue for each of the three family members, a variety of interactions available with the celebratory accoutrements, and the possibility of reaching either an unsuccessful or successful birthday end.
The writing is straightforward throughout, enlivened by gentle humor, and stays simple without being twee. It prompts you to make sure you’re staying on track, but it never nags and you’re perfectly able to ignore its suggestions, though doing so might mean you’d miss my favorite joke in the Comp so far:
(Spoiler - click to show)You put the icepack on your head, and feel better immediately. Now that your head is better, you start to wonder about the missing table.
WONDER ABOUT MISSING TABLE
You stop for a minute to wonder about the disappearing table. Maybe it’s outside?</spoiler?
I love that sort of cleverness, where the author rewards a clearly-loopy command – it’s one of the unique joys of the parser, so it’s especially welcome in a ParserComp entry.
Daddy’s Birthday isn’t trying to be more than it is – an enjoyable five-minute slice-of-lifer – but it checks all the boxes it needs to, and then adds a few extra graceful touches on top, without its origin as a piece of static writing every showing through. It’s a lovely proof-of-concept – now to see if someone can take on implementing DISADVENTURE…
Really groovy, July 9, 2021About a decade ago, I played the Lego Harry Potter video game with an ex-girlfriend. She was a fan of the franchise, but at the time it was probably the biggest gap in my nerd-milieu knowledge: I’d never read any of the books or seen any of the movies, so while I knew the setting’s basics (off-brand Gandalf, wizard rugby, Alan Rickman) I had no idea about the overall plot or the secondary characters. The game, unsurprisingly, was pitched towards fans: the cutscenes didn’t have dialogue, just mime-acted versions of famous sequences that the audience presumably knew by heart, and it boasted dozens of beloved side-characters to unlock. My memories of playing it are thus of bizarre story sequences where a mute Lego-guy seemed to be scared of the moon or an ugly-cute gnome was excited to read a book about a sock, while my ex excitedly crowed that we’d just unlocked Fistibum Crackettycrank, who looked exactly like the seven other randos we’d previously rescued. And yet, I had fun! The cartoonish pratfalls in the cutscenes had great comedic timing, and the low-challenge, welcoming gameplay was enjoyable even if I had no idea why killing plants with sunlight should work.
This is a long-winded way of saying that as with Zork, I’ve never actually played a Chandler Groover game, save for that cyberpunk fish-pope one he co-authored last year. But while that means that I’m pretty sure I’m missing a huge number of in-jokes, call-backs, and meta references in Grooverland, nonetheless it’s a well-crafted romp through a darkly fantastical playground that doesn’t require outside knowledge to be compelling. Starting with a dangerous situation that turns out to be innocent, then slowly shifting from innocence to spookiness then back to danger, there’s a smooth progression through a series of set-piece puzzles that are clever without being too hard, and if the relatively-thin overall plot means Grooverland doesn’t wind up being more than the sum of its parts, those parts are compelling enough in their own right.
Said plot has a straightforward setup: the player is a little girl whose family have brought her to the eponymous amusement park to celebrate her birthday, and after a short introductory sequence you’re given a list of regalia to collect ahead of a climactic celebration for your big day. This framing provides a perfect excuse for running around the various attractions – your character is clearly excited to be there so seeing all the sights and chatting with all the characters is in-theme, but you also have a puzzle or challenge awaiting you at most of the park’s sub-areas, which move you closer to completing the scavenger hunt. The structure isn’t a simple hub-and-spokes (or maybe spine-and-ribs?) model, since some of the challenges are initially locked off by an independent puzzle, and there are some connections between the areas so only a few are completely self-contained. This helps proceedings feel less artificial than scavenger-hunts sometimes do – progress requires more than going north to solve a puzzle and find a MacGuffin, then going to east to do the same, then south…
Collecting the pieces of regalia also slowly transforms the park, adding to the dynamism of the world. What starts out as a purely kid-friendly, sunny playground takes on a more sinister cast, with the patrons growing more inhuman and members of your family going missing one by one. This effectively raises the stakes, again making Grooverland more engaging than the typical “solve five puzzles and then you’re in the endgame” scavenger hunt. Unfortunately, on my playthrough, this meant I never actually got a chance to talk with my sister Alice, since she was the first to be taken despite being located the farthest from the entrance, so I’d solved the first major puzzle before I came across her. I’m not sure if the choice of abductees is randomized, and of course other players might explore more systematically before trying to crack the puzzles, but it was still disappointing to miss out on meeting her, especially since the help text indicates that she can provide some background info on the various easter eggs and Chandler Groover references.
The writing is effective but for some reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on, I found the prose wasn’t always quite as evocative as I wanted it to be. Take the Midnight Laserfight area, where vicomtes and countesses, clad in fools’ motley and armed with laserpistols and cutlasses, fight savage skirmishes for the parkgoers’ amusement. That’s a great setup, redolent of ancien-regime decadence, but some of the descriptions once you dig in are a little flat. Here’s X VICOMTES:
"This group of people are so wild and diverse they are impossible to describe. Your sister Alice might say they have a look that 'inspires passion', but that’s just Alice. They are carrying some red laserpistols and wearing some red motley."
It’s definitely not bad, but I wanted a little more to sink my teeth into. With that said, there are also places where the prose does go the extra mile, like the descriptions of the too-big, too-sweet cake you eat your way through in pursuit of one piece of the regalia.
The puzzles are ultimately the main draw here, and they’re a fun bunch, widely varied and rewarding to solve. There’s a series that involve luring animals out from the petting zoo to help overcome a bunch of different obstacles, an optimization puzzle involving feeding the right foods to the right animals in the right order, two mazes that play very differently (though neither is frustrating), and the aforementioned Laserfight area, which has a profusion of levers to pull, dials to turn, and noblemen to arm, in a pleasingly tactile way. These are lots of fun to work through, since you never feel like you’re doing the same thing twice. The difficulty also hits a nice middle ground, since most of the puzzles require a little bit of thinking or note-taking, but once you do that they fall pretty easily (I build a spreadsheet for the food puzzle, which was overkill but that’s OK, I love making spreadsheets for puzzles!)
Despite these varying mechanics, the implementation of the puzzles is completely smooth, with every synonym and alternate syntax I could think of easily accepted. And even when there were multiple layers of events firing off in some of the more complicated scenarios, I didn’t notice any holes that took me out of the world. There are also a really large number of conversation topics implemented for the sizable supporting cast, which added to the fun of exploration. With all this spit and polish for the key parts of the game, it’s forgivable that there are a few small rough patches in some inessential areas – a few typos and missing line-breaks, the inability to pet the animals in the petting zoo, the persistence of a few members of the crowd after the part is evacuated, and a non-updating description of the layers remaining in the giant cake after you start eating are niggles that would be nice to see fixed in a post-Comp release, but don’t do much to impact enjoyment.
While I’m levelling small criticisms, I also found the endgame weaker than the beginning and middle. Again, it’s not bad by any means, with callbacks to the opening and some nice thematic weight, but the final sequence is a fairly straightforward matching puzzle that’s not as mechanically interesting as what comes before. And the ending wraps up the fate of the park, its rulers, and its inhabitants perhaps a little too neatly, and doesn’t linger on the impact of the day’s events on the protagonist and her family.
But perhaps that’s for the best: I won’t remember Grooverland for its epic narrative but for as the small moments along the way, like meeting the delightful Morgan the Mechanical, dancing a frenzied tango with the gentlemanly Eugene, and winding my way through the world’s creakiest (and rattlingest, and shakingest) mansion – it’s more of a place than a story, in other words, and what a marvelous place indeed.
Small and lovely, July 9, 2021Aesthetics predominate in Waiting for the Day Train, a game of two parts: this Adventuron amuse-bouche presents a non-interactive pixel-art opening, and then segues over to photographs to accompany the puzzle-solving gameplay. Living up to my expectations for Adventuron, both parts are absolutely gorgeous, and while I’m not sure they ultimately cohere into a united whole, they’re individually well worth experiencing.
It feels a bit odd to lead off a review of a parser game emphasizing what you look at rather than what you read, but I suspect even the most prose-focused of players will have the same response I did. The prologue section is well-written, with an intriguing opening line (“The night is a different world”) leading into some efficiently-conveyed backstory about the main character’s efforts to escape a world of tormenting spirits about to be thrust into everlasting night. But it’s the pictures that accompany the writing that really make an impression: they’re moody, all black and beige and gray, with fat pixels of raindrops streaking the screen; your character, a robed, faceless figure a la Bobbin Threadbare, seems authentically beleaguered just from their posture and way of holding themself.
Once day breaks and you head to the station to catch your train, the visuals completely transform, with the night-time pixel art replaced by photographs. You’ve fallen asleep in the forest near the station, and the environment here is absurdly lush, with the green landscape half-concealing sturdy old wooden bridges and lovely, weathered stonework. These photos create a day-world that’s absurdly pleasant and welcoming, bucolic and nostalgic all at once.
Getting to the train before the time limit is a matter of solving three or four simple puzzles, none of which are very challenging on their own but do put you up against a time limit. While this did mean I had to restart my first playthrough due to overmuch faffing about, the short playtime made the replay painless, and without the deadline the puzzles might feel a bit thin. They’re standard sorts of thing – districting a flock of birds, feeding a hungry animal – enlivened by a bit of unexplained magic, but primarily serve to give you something to do as you explore the lovely setting. The implementation is largely solid, too, with the only niggle I ran into some confusion about how to retrieve a gem from the stream after I’d spied it trapped by some stepping-stones: (Spoiler - click to show)since it was described as being right near the stones, I’d thought a simple TAKE GEM should work, on one bank or the other – CLIMB ON STONES is what eventually worked to put me in the middle of the crossing, where I could pick the jewel up, but that seemed a bit unintuitive to me.
My only real critique is that it was hard for me to tonally reconcile the peaceful, welcoming daylit world with the foreboding and terrible nighttime (oh, and that reminds me, there’s a typo with “forboding” subbed in for “foreboding” – only error I noticed). The contrast certainly made me want to make sure I stayed in the daytime and didn’t get trapped in the world of eternal night. But while I intellectually understood my character as desperate, rain-soaked and rushing to reach their last chance for escape, the lovely photos made the daytime section so peaceful, homey, and pleasant that the urgency drained away, and I enjoyed it more as a hang-out game, with the challenges feeling less like barriers and more like a prompt to slow down and spend time in a beautiful place. Still, I can’t find much to complain about getting two different aesthetically engaging experiences in one short game, and I found Waiting for the Day Train very much worth a play.
Toilsome fantasy adventure, July 9, 2021Reader, a confession: I have played a large amount of IF over the last few decades, but have never been able to dip more than the tiniest toe into Zork before I get bored and wander off. I’ve faffed around in the white house, reconnoitering the mailbox and display case and thinking “this will be fun!” as I lift the trap door and enter the Great Underground Empire – but despite making that descent at least half a dozen times, I have no clear memories of actually accomplishing anything down there, my impressions a uniform smear of over-large maps and exploration-punishing mechanics like time and carrying limits and the murderthief, which always lead me to abandon the attempt.
I’ve read a bunch of appreciations so I certainly understand why this works for others, and some of this is definitely down to expectations – I got into IF in the early days of this century, when a wholly different set of design aesthetics was in the ascendant, so while I’m as subject to nostalgia as the next person, I’m not nostalgic for Zork. And some of it’s down to the ridiculous plenty of the modern age – when Zork was the only thing going, beavering away at its devilish puzzlery was I’m sure the glorious work of many a late night and weekend. Here and now, though? It’s hard to justify the time investment to myself when I’ve also barely scratched the surface of Counterfeit Monkey, to pick one example from literally hundreds.
I bring all this up to lay the groundwork for my two central takeaways for Somewhere, Somewhen: 1) it’s pretty Zorky; and 2) I really didn’t get on with it, partially though not exclusively for the reasons I’ve never got on with Zork. If Acid Rain, the game I played right before it in the Comp, was an example of an old-school game whose archaisms don’t stand in the way of contemporary enjoyment, Somewhere, Somewhen serves as a caution for how easy it is for this approach to go awry. A custom-parser fantasy adventure with a wacky mix of magic and anachronistic technology is certainly appealing to a specific audience, but I think even their patience would be tested by SS’s sprawling, red-herring-choked map (including one literal red herring – no, this doesn’t make it better), arbitrary puzzle design, and too-dense prose. There are some individual puzzles that aren’t bad, and the custom parser is pretty well implemented, but ultimately I didn’t find much to enjoy.
The game doesn’t put its best foot forward, which is part of the issue. After a quote from The Raven that doesn’t connect to anything in the game so far as I could see, you get a vague but wordy introduction where you’re plucked from your ordinary life (in the regular, real world? It’s unclear) and told by a mysterious voice from beyond that you’ve been chose to retrieve an unpronounceable MacGuffin that the mysterious voice and pals have somehow lost (adding insult to injury, when you finally find the MacGuffin at the end of the game, it has only a default description, underlining the arbitrariness of proceedings). Then you show up in a deserted labyrinth, and well, this is the description of the initial location:
"You are in a high-domed and circular chamber suffused with a soft ambient light, which seems to have no obvious direct source, but which appears to emanate from the very walls and ceiling. On those walls, at some distance above your head and spaced at equal intervals around the periphery of the room are six inscriptions deeply inscribed into the vertical stony surface. There are thus first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth inscriptions. In the very vault of the dome and well above your head there’s an aperture. Deeply embedded into the floor of the chamber there’s an inlay. Beside you there lays a lamp and sword."
Yes yes, lamp and sword, but it’s too wordy, and the parser doesn’t allow you to abbreviate the inscriptions to FIRST, SECOND, etc., so you’re in for a lot of typing to fully explore things. And before you’ve gotten a chance to get to grips with your surroundings, the mysterious voice comes back and tells you how to solve the first puzzle, which by that point I’d only started to dig into.
After this rocky beginning, it does improve for a bit – that initial puzzle gives you some magic words that open portals to various other locations, which each have a couple of puzzles to resolve, mostly hinging on unlocking doors and collecting kit. And the writing starts to get a bit more fleet, though it’s never a real draw. By the time I was about a third of the way in, though, I started having additional complaints. First, the various locations you explore are fairly monotonous – there’s a castle, a cellar, and a hall that all felt pretty much interchangeable, though a deserted village at least somewhat changes things up – but have large, sparse maps. There’s an EXITS command to help with mapping, but it has some issues, like closed doors not being listed and a few exits opened by puzzle-solving not being included even once they were available. There are also one-way connections that require a lot of step-retracing, and non-cardinal directions (northeast, southwest, etc.) are used without much rhyme or reason, which complicated getting around to no real benefit.
The other issue that reared its head at that point was the inventory limit. Its existence was predictable enough, but what was less predictable was that worn items still count against it, and the conveniently-provided carryall you get towards the end of the first act also has its own limit. And as mentioned above, there are rather a lot of useless items and red herrings scattered throughout the game – in addition to a number of critical ones only findable via SWEEPING DUST and LOOKING UNDER and LOOKING BEHIND – so you will run into this limit, and it will require a whole lot of inventory-juggling and backtracking, which combined with issue number one (remember those sprawling maps?) makes much of the mid-game an unfun exercise in logistics.
The puzzles themselves are a mixed bag. Most are pretty traditional and straightforward – collecting ingredients for a witch’s brew, navigating a maze, solving riddles, getting an iron key with a (Spoiler - click to show)magnet – but there are a few that rely on authorial mid-reading. One late-game puzzle requires realizing that a safe has a key lock rather than a traditional dial one, but there’s no indication of that in any of the descriptions I found. And then there’s the riddle that had me tearing out my hair – I’m going to spoil it, because if you try to play Somewhere, Somewhen you’ll need it spoiled to. Getting into the witch’s cottage requires entering a code on a keypad (remember what I said about the wacky mix of magic and technology?), clued with the following message:
"Winifred accepts digits
spider’s legs and octopus
arms on weekdays."
Right, so that’s 885, easy enough. But no! “Digits” is meant to indicate that you should type a 10, and “weekdays” translates as 7. Maybe this is a Downton Abbey joke (you know, “what’s a week-end?”) but it sure requires some trial and error. And some of the puzzles like this are item-based, so playing the game straight would require a whole lot of item-hauling to enable you to run through the red herrings and figure out which are actually useful. Others might have the patience for this, but I very much don’t, especially when the rewards of advancing the story and exploring more of the setting are pretty lackluster – I started having regular recourse to the hints about halfway through, and didn’t regret it one bit.
I’ll close by repeating that the custom parser is actually pretty good for such things. It doesn’t like abbreviation of objects, and you can’t interact with objects in containers or on supporters, even to examine them, without first taking them (I haven’t mentioned the inventory limit yet this paragraph, have I? Yes, this makes the inventory limit even more annoying. And it applies to the caryall too). But other than that, it affords most of the conveniences of a modern system, including being able to recall recent commands. It’s clear a lot of time, energy and enthusiasm went into coding it, and I’m sure that’s true of this big game as a whole – and for someone looking for another Zork to pour hours and hours into, I could see Somewhere, Somewhen being the most fun they’d have in this Comp. But for someone like me, who’s barely ever been eaten by a grue and sees a flood control dam and just wishes the whole thing were over, it sadly misses the mark, especially with a bunch of other games I’m excited to get to.
Old-school but approachable, July 9, 2021The gods of randomization decided I should play both of Garry Francis’s games back-to-back, so here we are with another older-school Inform game – but instead of the tepid parody of Danny Dipstick, with Acid Rain we’ve got a puzzle-y adventure that I quite enjoyed. Sure, it’s got some player-unfriendly archaisms, like an inventory limit that adds nothing to the gameplay and a too-tight time limit that required a restart, but there’s definitely pleasure to be had in scratching a familiar itch in a well-designed, well-implemented playground.
Per the ABOUT text, this is actually a reverse-engineered reconstruction of a game from the late 80s, which helps explain the title – I grew up in the northeast U.S. in a similar time period, and remember hearing lots of worrisome news stories about acid rain, so using it as an ominous near-future setting element makes sense in world before a regional cap-and-trade system (the endearingly-named RGGI) got the problem under control. Acid Rain isn’t about getting recalcitrant Reagan Administration officials to take Canadian concerns about trans-national pollution seriously, however – instead you’re some flavor of scientist driving home from a conference when your car dies due to a drained battery. Good thing your car fetched up right outside the mansion of a mad scientist, who’s surely got a replacement battery stowed somewhere amidst all the junk from their electrical engineering hobby!
It doesn’t take long for the structure of the game to emerge – you’re quickly trapped in the house, and in addition to finding a new battery, you also need to gather a bunch of components to create a door-opening gadget so you can escape. There are also a host of strangely-behaving animals scattered throughout the mansion, serving as both barriers and occasional sources of assistance. Some of this is explained (the animal stuff), but some of it you just have to chalk up to text adventure conventions (why the mad scientist made the front door automatically trap visitors inside, but then also provided a sign clearly laying out the situation and a note with a list of the parts needed to build the opener).
This isn’t the only way Acid Rain is a bit of an archaism: as mentioned above, there are some retro design touches that maybe provide some aesthetic pleasure to grognards, but serve mostly to annoy in the here and now. The refusal to allow X NOTE or X SIGN to reveal what’s actually written on them is just a niggle, and the inventory limit isn’t too harsh, though I ultimately found it rather pointless since it doesn’t force any decision-making or interesting gameplay, just a bit of backtracking tedium. The time limit is the worst offender here – you start out with a flashlight with limited battery power that will die if you take too long exploring the dark house, which I don’t believe you can recover from. There are new D-cells available within the house, and they appear to function indefinitely, but they’re not in a place you’d reasonably expect to find them meaning it’s pretty much blind chance whether you come across them in time to avoid a restart.
On the flip side, the game is well implemented, with a surprising amount of scenery implemented and some nice conveniences too. It’s definitely possible to die, but a quick UNDO sorted any trouble out, and there’s a character who provides in-game hints. I didn’t need to use this feature much, though, since the puzzles are typically well clued and fit the world reasonably enough once you grant the premise. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but they’re satisfying to work through, with a bunch of keys to juggle and animals to feed on the easier end, and a secret passage to find and a code to decipher on the harder side. The code was probably my favorite puzzle, as it’s possible to solve via brute force but also has a good number of clues for those who don’t like grinding through such things.
Is Acid Rain anything other than a scavenger hunt through a medium-sized map of rooms that primarily hold one gettable object and one bit of scenery? No, and if that kind of thing isn’t your jam, or you’re easily turned off by clunky gameplay elements that haven’t stood the test of time, nothing here is going to change your mind. But if you’re the sort of person who sometimes looks at a long list of ice cream flavors and picks a vanilla – occasionally, one just wants the simple thing – Acid Rain fits the bill.
A more polite Leisure Suit Larry, July 9, 2021If you are a gamer of a certain age, you will look at Danny Dipstick’s title and blurb (“You need to find a girlfriend, but all the girls think you’re a dork. Try to overcome your dorkiness to pick up a girl”) and feel a cold pit of dread form in your stomach, suffused by a terror far beyond what your quotidian Amnesia-clones could ever hope to induce: yes, in space-year 2021, we’re looking at a Leisure Suit Larry parody (though apparently this is a reimplementation of a 1999 original, which is still late in the day for such a thing but is a bit more understandable).
I never really played any of the LSL games (one friend had a copy of the third one but we couldn’t get very far, so my only memories were of answering dry trivia questions to defeat the copy protection, and then making a beeline for a set of binoculars that allowed you to see an at-the-time-exciting pair of pixelated boobs), but my understanding is that to the extent they worked, it was because most of the jokes were at the protagonist’s expense and the games weren’t nearly as lecherous as they seemed to be. This is a delicate balance to strike at the best of times, and given the way parody heightens and deforms its inspirations, my hopes were not high.
The good news is that Danny Dipstick isn’t going for parody or exaggerated laughs, so it mostly avoids the kinds of gratuitous offensiveness I’d feared. The bad news is that I can’t tell what it actually is going for. Neither the puzzles, the plot, nor the writing seem to be trying to stand out in any way – the game is perfectly functional and moves the player from point A to point B, but I’m couldn’t tell you why the author wrote this game in this way at this time. There’s perhaps a clue in the ABOUT text, which reveals that this was originally an assignment in a computer science class, and while Danny Dipstick is polished far above the level that implies, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the game was written to build and demonstrate familiarity with programming, with the player experience coming second, not because it’s actively bad, but because it’s frustratingly flat.
The gameplay provides a good example of what I mean. You’re told from the jump that there are three things you need to do to get a girlfriend: fix your bad breath, get some better clothes, and develop social skills (one of these seems harder than the others…) These objectives are available at any time via the STATUS command, and each can be met in a single, clearly-signposted step. The game plays out over a small map of maybe a dozen locations, most of which offer up two or three possibilities for interaction. There are a number of characters, all of whom are looking for one and exactly one item, and who as far as I can tell respond only to TALK TO, with ASKing about other topics not leading to anything interesting. The author provides frequent prompting, if not hand-holding, to make sure you’re able to progress (my transcript is littered with a lot of “You should…”s), which keeps things on track but drains the sense of agency.
The puzzles are of a piece with this general approach. There are two main puzzle chains, both of which require a little bit of poking around to start, but which run quite similarly: once you find the initial object, it’s very clear who you should give it to, which then leads to you acquiring a second object with a likewise obvious use, and then there’s an even more obvious final step to take to wrap up the game. Everything works fine, but there’s nothing distinctive or interesting about any of it.
As for the writing and plot, they’re certainly there? Again, this is largely a positive, because when I went onto the dance floor and saw two women described primarily via the colors of their dresses and hair, I cringed. But it turns out once you solve the relevant puzzles and talk to them they’re reasonable people, partnered up but happy to chat with Danny and help him out after he does them a good turn – and while his opening lines are awfully smarmy, they’re not too bad in grand scheme of things, and once it’s clear they’re not interested in a date, he’s basically respectful. This is much much better than gratuitous offensiveness, of course, but it’s also kind of boring! There aren’t many real jokes, or at least few that landed for me (there’s a bit about a guy taking up collections for the Society for Retired Adventurers…), but it feels like the game isn’t even trying for laughs.
(I should point out that the exception to this overall inoffensiveness is the character of the convenience store clerk. He’s described as ethnically Indian, with a thick, hard to understand accent, and his main personality trait is extreme indolence. And after you complete a transaction, he says “thank you, come again.” So this is Apu from the Simpsons, again presented not so much as a parody or the opportunity for a joke, but just as Apu from the Simpsons, plus calling him lazy. Not great!)
Danny Dipstick at least doesn’t wear out its welcome – it takes maybe ten minute to go from utter loser to having a beautiful girlfriend – and it’s cleanly implemented in Inform 6, with no parser awkwardness to speak of. But I found it a quintessentially inessential game, and there’s not much I’m taking away from it beyond the mild relief that it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.
Promising first effort, July 9, 2021A quick disclosure to start out this review: while I don’t know him personally, Caleb Wilson was an early and perceptive tester on the game I wrote for last year’s IFComp. I don’t think that dramatically undercuts my ability to assess a game with a reasonable degree of impartiality – one strives for professionalism, after all – but I definitely went into this one with some goodwill.
That goodwill was quickly tested, though, as Loud House ‘game on’ doesn’t make the best first impression, with doodly cover art, no ABOUT text, and a default X ME response. The basic setup – you’re a kid who wants to buy a new video game, and needs to collect some stuff from your siblings to make that happen – is fine enough, the writing is enthusiastic in a way that’s occasionally catching, and while the jokes are juvenile a good number land, but there are still tons of typos, objects with default descriptions, takeable scenery, and guess-the-verb challenges. Trying to figure out what Caleb was getting at with this was bewildering, and I wondered if it was aiming at parody, or if there was a meta layer I was missing? Eventually I got to a point where I couldn’t figure out how to progress, and in frustration I checked these forums in search of hints or a clue as to what was going on, and I came across this post.
If you have the common sense God gave gravel, you’ll see where this is going: Loud House ‘game on’ was written by a different Caleb Wilson, who is ten and entered a fan-fiction game about a cartoon he likes into the Comp (as one of approximately ten million Mike Russos, including at least one other who posts about IF stuff occasionally, you’d think I’d be more attuned to such things). Upon finding this out, I blinked, looked over the transcript I’d been annotating with increasingly-snippy complaints about spelling and grammar issues, and felt like the worst human being in the world – and then went back to the game and, expectations appropriately reset, had a much better time with it.
So yes, there’s nothing pomo here, it’s just a first game from a young author with a good amount of first-game-itis, but actually some real promise too. What starts out looking like a simple collectathon of running around hoovering up every quarter you find actually goes through two game-changing shifts, with a second act that riffs on a bunch of additional cartoons in a bunch of higher-action mini-scenarios, and a riddle-y finale. This change of pacing enlivens the mid-game, and I found the humor in this section landed better for me (I especially liked the joke that sees a lion suddenly pop up in your inventory), though maybe that’s because I was more familiar with its references and tropes than the Nickelodeon cartoon that’s the basis for the first bit.
While a couple additional passes for polish wouldn’t go amiss to iron out grammar, tweak some puzzles (I was stymied by the football puzzle since it didn’t seem to make sense given the rules of football), and add some synonyms (a hint for anyone else having trouble using weapons – try throwing them rather than hitting or stabbing with them) Loud House ‘game on’ is actually quite a good time. So now the next time I see a game from Caleb Wilson, I’ll still be looking forward to playing, regardless of which of them wrote it!
Moody in a good way, July 9, 2021The central business of this evocative Adventuron game is cooking, and appropriately enough, on starting up you’re given a choice of seasonings: the story can be served up pleasant, “emotive” (said emotion being melancholy), or sinister. Of course, sometimes chefs who vary a dish too many different ways find their reach exceeds their grasp, and Snowhaven unfortunately runs into same coding issues that add a sour note to proceedings. But like the old family recipe the protagonist cooks for their visiting sibling – a hearty mushroom stew – its warm, earthy flavor overcomes such minor mistakes.
I haven’t played many Adventuron games, but almost uniformly, I find they set a very strong mood – and that’s the case here, too. The austere, near-ascii graphics are certainly a draw, but the prose isn’t far behind: it’s typically unobtrusive, but every once in while I’d come across a line like the one describing freshly-dug parsnips as “white and wrinkly as a witch’s finger” and smile. The two variations I played – pleasant and emotive – share the same map, plot, and most of their puzzles, as well as a similar wintry, lonely vibe. But they each put their own spin on things through a few well-recast details. Praying at the grave of your grandfather in the pleasant version leads to a wistful reflection on how one generation cares for the next before passing on, for example, whereas in the emotive one the grave is your wife’s, and prayer leads to a moment of sadness and regret.
There’s not so much a plot here as a situation: we’re in a primeval, near-abstract wilderness – a person, their dog, a stream, some books – with Snowhaven suggesting a few reasons why they might be out there and how they might feel about it. Then the business is all about gathering some ingredients so you can welcome a long-unseen relative with a gift of food. The puzzles are similarly low-key, as most of them just involve finding bulbs of garlic or hardy herbs in the places you’d expect them, then chopping and throwing them in the pot.
There are a couple harder puzzles that skew more traditional – guessing a locker code from careful examination of the protagonist’s home, building a snare to catch rabbits. And contrarily, there are also a few places where the game requires the player to be assumptive about what they want to do in a way that doesn’t comport with text-adventure conventions (I’m thinking of the puzzles where you need to find the lost soap, or get bait for the fishing rod – the solutions are completely logical, even obvious once you know the trick (Spoiler - click to show)(FIND SOAP and DIG WORM) but they’re nonetheless tricky since you need to interact with objects that aren’t “really” there). Both these approaches mix things up, but I still preferred the more quotidian tasks that make up the bulk of the game, as they better fit the gentle, lonely mood that’s the major strength.
I have a second expectation I bring to an Adventuron game, which is that I’ll struggle with the parser – I understand action construction isn’t as robust as in TADS or Inform, and it has some distinctive foibles, like the way it sometimes bluffs you about the existence of objects that aren’t actually there. Snowhaven suffers from these issues, but unfortunately adds some significant bugs on top. Some of these are just silly, like being told I couldn’t leave the cabin without the soap in the same response that then told me I’d successfully left the cabin without the soap. But my first emotive playthrough dead-ended when TIE ROPE led to an attempt to tie it to itself, and then the thing simply vanished. And I didn’t win my second time either, since I couldn’t get carrots out of the storage locker – TAKE CARROTS led to “You take a few carrots out of your store of frozen vegetables”, which seemed promising, but after a line break I saw “You can’t do that,” and in fact no carrots were ever taken.
There’s definitely been some care taken with the implementation – there’s a lot of scenery, I only found one typo (“No sooner than you sitting down to rest”), there’s an achievement list, and unnecessary actions like the aforementioned PRAY are rewarded (speaking of rewards, there’s also a potentially-remunerative easter egg that I felt clever for finding). But the coding of the actual game logic doesn’t have the same attention to detail, which is an awful shame. A similar misstep is the requirement of pinging the author to get a password to access the third, “sinister” take on the story – I’m already fairly sure I’d get less enjoyment from a less-gentle version, and it’s probably not wise to add an additional barrier to entry when there are 17 other Comp games waiting to be played.
But in the end I didn’t find these drawbacks all that meaningful. Snowhaven isn’t a game you play to be a completionist, or for bragging rights for working out all the puzzles – it succeeds at creating a place and a mood, with everything you do in that place rather incidental. I’ll look forward to an update or smoother post-Comp release, and maybe one day check out the version where I can be eaten by a bear, but I don’t need anything more from Snowhaven beyond what I’ve already gotten.
Eleanor Riddle-by, April 24, 2021NOTE: The first part of this review was written about an earlier version of the game, where I got stuck on a puzzle; read on for an addendum written after I finished the updated version.
This is a new game by the author of Radicofani from last year’s Comp (link is to my review). Much like the earlier piece, Eleanor has old-school trappings – the game delights in popping up new windows with low-res graphics and hard-to-read fonts – an obtuse parser, and near-unsolvable puzzles in the way of rescuing a female love interest. Despite these off-putting features, I wound up enjoying Radicofani on the strength of its setting – an old Italian hill town under the sway of supernatural evil, complete with charming café, musty library, desecrated church, and spooky castle. This time out, though, the setting is a metaphysical underworld loosely inspired by the music of the Beatles, and it’s sadly not a change for the better.
Preliminarily, let me say that I don’t quite get the Beatles thing. As far as I understand it, the premise here is that Eleanor – who’s I think the romantic partner of the player character – has died, seemingly by suicide, and you’ve decided to make your own suicide attempt to try to retrieve her soul from the afterlife. So far so Orpheus and Eurydice, I suppose, so having a musical link has some kind of logic. But I tend to think of the Beatles’ oeuvre as love songs and psychedelia – this kind of tormented, emo-y setup seems like it would work better with someone like Tom Waits or Nine Inch Nails rather than the Fab Four. Plus, given her name I think we’re meant to understand Eleanor as lonely-spinster Eleanor Rigby, but the idea of her being coupled up seems antithetical to the character of the woman from the song! The game does include other occasional nods to the Beatles – there’s an errant quote from Strawberry Fields Forever, and the ABOUT text notes in passing that “nothing is real” but the series of references never felt to me like they meshed with the subject matter.
Still, there’s nothing wrong with an idiosyncratic choice of inspiration, and it’s not like we’re talking about a gritty S&M-themed Care Bears reboot or anything too outré like that. The real difficulty is that gameplay consists of navigating a surreal, near-featureless void, with your only companions a clumsy parser, obfuscated prose, obscure puzzles, and a vicious time limit. Taking these in order: the parser is a custom one, and has a lot of idiosyncrasies, the main one being that it’s rarely clear whether or not it’s understood what you’re trying to do. There’s lots of response text that plays on a timer, and you’ll get different responses to what would be synonyms in Inform, like say if you type KNOCK ON BLACK DOOR versus KNOCK ON BLACK (in the former case, I got “I’m sorry, I’d like to understand more”; I the latter, I got “” – which might have been non sequitur text just playing in the background?)
Relatedly, even when the parser isn’t been a slippery little eel, the writing is awkward, with lots of typos and infelicities starting on the very first page. I don’t think the author’s a native English speaker, and fair enough, this is far better game than any I could write in another language, but getting proofreaders and testers who are fluent is really necessary in these cases!
These issues feed into a bigger one, which is the difficulty level of the puzzles. I found them pretty unintuitive, apparently operating on dream-logic (I solved two and a half, with the help of what’s actually a rather-nifty help feature that pops up images that prompt you towards the solution). But the thing about dream-logic is that you need to establish the rules of the dream, and create symbolic associations between the objects in the dream and the emotions or relationships that they represent, in order for the player to understand what role they’re supposed to play. Here, the necessary actions didn’t seem cued in any way by the situation, and instead are just random verbs you can apply to the contextless nouns on offer. For example (Spoiler - click to show)there’s a mirror in the first room, and you need to break it to make progress – but there’s no indication that the mirror is showing anything about the protagonist that he rejects, for example, or that there’s anything on the other side, which would motivate the breaking. Worse, after that you need to blow on the fragments of the mirror, which I guessed because it’s in the hint image but can’t even construct a post-hoc metaphorical rationale for.
What this means is that most of my experience playing Eleanor was trial-and-error, with the parser and language issues making me unsure whether my trials were actually producing errors. And then making things worse, after 20 or so turns failing to make progress, a timer ends the game. There are copious autosaves so it’s hard to lose too much progress, but running into the fail-state so frequently sucked much of my motivation – as did feeling like I knew how to solve the last puzzle blocking my progress, but couldn’t find the syntax to make it work ((Spoiler - click to show)I think you need to adjust the clock so it’s showing the time as midnight, but no version of SET CLOCK TO MIDNIGHT was accepted or even threw off a useful error).
Eleanor definitely boasts a compelling atmosphere, and I admit I’m curious to know how the Beatles stuff all comes together in the end (I’m waiting for Father Mackenzie to show up as a defrocked exorcist tormented by literal demons and living on the edge). With a lot more polish, and some additional resonance to the puzzles, I could see this being a lot of fun – alas, as it is I found it an exercise in frustration, without even Radicofani’s pretty cityscapes as a consolation.
ADDENDUM: the author made some updates, including making the guess-the-verb puzzle discussed above a little easier, so I was able to go back and finish it. The second half of the game isn't radically different from the first, but either the puzzles get a little easier or thematic or I just got more in tune with them, since I didn't find the remainder too hard to get through so long as I kept consulting the HELP function. I might have missed the "real" ending since I finished with 17 out of 18 points and were indications that another outcome might have been possible, but I'm satisfied with where the story ended (Spoiler - click to show)(the main character deciding to let go of Eleanor now that she's gone, and try to continue with his life).
The prose continued to have a fair number of errors and awkward phrases, but there were some nice pieces of writing too, including a short exegesis on Eleanor Rigby that helped knit the game's themes together rather nicely. It's still a little too abstract for my tastes -- there are a few memories or images of Eleanor that start to give her a bit of specificity as a person, but she remains largely a cipher throughout, which allows the themes to come through but drains away some of the emotional immediacy. Glad I was able to see the rest of this one!
Less buggy, still a bit ugly, April 23, 2021NOTE: The first part of this review was written about an earlier version of the game, which had a game-ending bug; read on for an addendum written after I finished the updated version.
Oof, I have to say I did not get on with Hand of God. Partially this is because I couldn’t figure out how to get to the revolt of robot fanatics promised by the blurb, and instead got stuck in the white-collar drudgery also promised by the blurb. And partially this is because I noticed an ugly detail about the characterization I couldn’t unsee, and it killed my willingness to push past the bug that was blocking my progress.
First things first – this is a Twine game, in default style though with some animated text and changes to the font colors to denote when different people are speaking. The player character is a fortysomething husband and father who’s got a government job helping develop a robot interpreter, and those two strands – family life and robot stuff – are set up to bear equal weight, at least in the portions of the game I got to. You start out at home, going through your weekday morning routine and interacting with your family; then drive to work, and after a nose around the environs and learning more about the project, check in with your coworkers.
The first section is OK as far as it goes. The family interactions are pleasant and low-key, and if they seem a bit schematic (just about the first thing we learn about the player character’s wife is that she’s a GenXer, and the daughter doesn’t have much personality besides liking an MMORPG), well, there’s nothing wrong with starting simple. There are a few implementation niggles – there isn’t any branching but you can choose which order to do some necessary tasks before getting ready for work, and they’re repeatable, meaning you can eat infinite pop-tarts. And the commuting sequence managed to confuse me since I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to be continuing on the highway or taking the first exit in order to get to work.
The writing throughout is a bit weak, with fairly unimaginative prose and a scattering of typos. The author also tends to really overuse certain words. Like, here’s a paragraph from a dream sequence that comes at the beginning of the game:
"The winds blow against your pale, fleshy body, scratching you thoughout (sic) your body. You sweat like a pig as the sun pulses upon your body. It will not be long until all of the water leaves your body and you die of dehydration."
Reading that many instances of “body” is actually kind of unsettling!
Where things really went wrong, though, is at the office. Most immediately, this is where I reached the impasse I described above – after I parked, checked out the other buildings on the campus, walked into the high-security area to check out the robot (whose name and function appear to be setting up a Tower of Babel allusion), then entered my office to greet my boss and coworkers, I got stuck in a similar cycle as at home, except this time I was unable to get a new option to appear no matter how many times I went to the water cooler or checked in with my cube-mate. From a quick look at the html source, there’s a lot more story to come, but it does seem like there’s a bug that blocks the way forward.
More significant than any bug, however, was an ugly realization I made after meeting all my coworkers. Here’s the receptionist, Julia:
"A brown skinned woman in her late twenties, her casual hoop earrings and red headband hide the wit of someone able to obtain an $80,000 job doing nothing."
Here’s Emily, a fellow coder:
"A woman of Chinese descent in a bright purple suit, her smugness radiates wherever she goes. You KNOW that she is the one to blame for your food poisoning. She will handle you (sic) being better than her at your jobs."
Here’s our boss:
"A dark skinned man in his 50s, his imposing 165 cm looks upon you from his shrub enshrined desk…. This man’s harsh demands will never cease."
And just by way of contrast, meet the aforementioned cube-mate:
"A bright eyed young man, his blue eyes light up the room… Andrew is a nice kid."
So to recap – we have a lazy, flashy-dressing black woman who’s living large in a government sinecure; a stuck-up, msg-dosing Chinese-American; a cruel, physically-imposing black man; and a nice friendly blue-eyed kid. I’m sure Hand of God is not intending to be racist, but – excuse my French – holy hell this is some racist bullshit right here. I think the problem is that, much like with the player character’s family, the author is relying on stereotypes to come up with the cast of characters, and possibly had the admirable impulse to make the game more representative by including some people of color. But the problem with doing that unreflectingly is that you can wind up regurgitating some really really ugly caricatures that draw on boogeymen first conjured up by reactionaries and then filtered into pop culture – and racist tokenizing is way worse than no representation at all.
Anyway, like I said this really killed my will to continue; hopefully there’ll be an update to fix the bug and the bad racial dynamics, since I like a good story about robot zealots (admittedly, there’s Battlestar Galactica and then I’m not sure what the second example would be). But for now, I’m taking a pass.
ADDENDUM: Since I wrote the above, Hand of God has seen an update that fixes the aforementioned game-stopping bug, so I went back and finished it. The story does work a bit better now that I’ve seen all of it – in particular, it looks like some of the main character’s negative traits are intentional, and are meant to provide a bit of a character arc (I didn’t mention it in my review, but he appears to have some anger issues and is overly nostalgic for his youth). The weird racial stuff remains as it was, however, including a “joke” about how one time the translator robot malfunctioned and ran around yelling racist slurs – and with the added twist that the enemy hacker the main character thinks is behind the robot rebellion 1) is actually innocent, so the rebellion is unexplained as far as I could tell; and 2) is a Palestinian Arab who’s assassinated in what’s meant to be a feel-good epilogue, completing the perfect record of unpleasant characterization and negative outcomes for POC in this story.
Speaking of the story and the rebellion, I found this rather unsatisfying too. The robots suddenly start killing or capturing humans while spouting Gnostic buzzwords, but their plot (to annihilate humanity via nuclear war) doesn’t seem to square with Gnosticism as far as I understand it. And then the stratagem the main character uses to foil their scheme is about the oldest, hoariest chestnut there is (Spoiler - click to show)(saying a paradox aloud, at which point smoke starts coming out of all the robots’ ears). Maybe the focus is meant to be more on the family dynamics, because that’s where the denouement wraps up, but even there, the final moral – “Your loved ones don’t have to be a shackle to misery. They can be the keys to enjoying life together” – feels oddly negative, and runs up against the overall flatness of the characters.
The choice mechanics of the second half of the game also felt a bit clumsy to me, since the story requires you to be captured – escaping the robots leads to unsatisfying bad ends, meaning seeing the full story play out requires making decisions that don’t make sense for a character who’d presumably be very focused on getting away from the killbots. There were no further bugs, at least!
Pretty, brutish, and short, April 23, 2021(I beta tested this game)
Project Arcmör is a Twine horror/sci-fi hybrid that has no compunctions about killing you. Most frequently this will happen when half-glimpsed test subjects tear you apart, but the game’s true baddies aren’t the man-eating mutants: instead that’s capitalism in general and the Star Quorp corporation, your employer, in particular. This what-if-businessmen-are-the-real-monsters angle goes back to the birth of the sub-genre (i.e., Alien and Aliens), but it’s well-realized here, giving rise to some entertainingly dark satire and enlivening an otherwise-familiar scenario with a bit of social comment. Stir in some darkly-evocative pixel art and you’ve got a recipe for some good, bloody fun.
Let’s start out with that whole “you’re going to die a lot” thing. You play a colonist who’s been deep-frozen for the trip to whatever interstellar hellhole the company wants you to settle, and who’s unexpectedly thawed out when your ship encounters a derelict hulk mid-way. The ship’s computer has chosen you to head through the airlock and try to render assistance, which involves navigating through the defunct ship’s dark halls solving a few small puzzles (straightforward enough) while not being ripped limb from limb by the aforementioned monsters (much harder). Fortunately, unpleasant as these repeated gibbings must be to experience, they don’t set you back much – not because death is a trigger to reload a save (though I mean, you can if you must), but because the indefatigable ship’s computer will just defrost the next colonist in line to try again. Each is distinguished only by their ID number, which ratchets down by one after each gruesome killing, making me very curious what happens if you manage to run through the lot.
The lovely visuals help make this live/die/repeat cycle go down easy. I usually tend to tune out the visuals in IF, but here I found myself enjoying them just as much as the prose. They paint the derelict in moody blue-black tones, though of course there’s more than the occasional burst of red. There’s also some nicely understated animations that serve to enhance the mood, a sidebar map to make navigation clearer. Unlike some high-production-value pieces of IF, though, the graphics don’t mask weak writing, which on the contrary is nicely done as well, efficiently laying out the scene and boasting a bone-dry wit that helps the dark humor land. Your one companion (well, other than the monsters) is your ship’s computer, VAL, and in between bouts of puzzle-solving, you can call it up for a chat, allowing it can remind you of your goals and drop barely-coded hints about your ultimate expendability and low prospects for survival. My favorite bit of writing is from the best ending, which I’ll put behind a spoiler-block:
(Spoiler - click to show)You are greeted with a hero’s welcome.
“Congratulations! In recognition of your outstanding performance, StarQuorp™ would like to reward you with unlimited access to oxygen during the rest of your time on board this vessel.”
…
However, the StarQuorp colony ship was designed to operate without human supervision. The supplies of food and water on board have been sealed for transport.
Eventually, you starve to death.
I repeat, this is the best ending.
The game underlying all of this is, as mentioned, fairly straight-ahead. There are a few small inventory puzzles, and a climactic choice leading to one of three different endings. I also found a few easter-egg-like interactions using some of the many items left lying around the abandoned ship, though I wanted there to be more of these, or at least for them to have more impact on the world and story. Still, there’s nothing wrong with a focused game with a unified, effective aesthetic, which Project Arcmör boasts in spades.
Fun but underripe, April 23, 2021So I Was Short of Cash… is a rarity in this Spring Thing, as it’s a story-light, puzzle-focused parser game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I found it a nice change of pace, though the implementation is awkward enough to prevent it from going down as smoothly as I’d like.
Plot-wise, SIWSOC jumps right into the action, with the title conveying the basic setup and then the opening text further relating that you’ve been hired to deliver an envelope to someone (you don’t know who), and you’ve entered a house (you don’t know whose – actually turns out it’s some kind of embassy?) to look for additional instructions that have been placed there for you. There’s a lot that’s vague about this, and I found myself unsure even of what the setting was meant to be as I started (the word “quest” to me conjures up a fantasy vibe, though what’s on offer here is more a light-hearted 20th Century spy romp). Turns out the game is all about the puzzles and you can just go with the flow without worrying too much about any of this, and I had a fine time once I did that – but still, even for a jokey game like this, it would have been nice to have a clearer sense of the premise.
So what are those puzzles like? They’re largely about following somewhat-cryptic notes left by your patrons to get around a series of locked doors, primarily through traditional object-manipulation actions. I found they were pitched at a good level of difficulty – the riddles usually give you enough to start poking around, but weren’t immediately obvious to me, leading to a couple of fun “aha” moments when I figured out the trick. The game also offers a few small nudges in the right direction, and was kind enough to explain one puzzle after I solved it by trial and error.
On the other hand, even as someone familiar with how Inform games work I found I struggled with the parser a fair bit – just about everything I tried to do took a little more effort and created a bit more friction than I wanted. I ran into some guess-the-verb issues (when trying to see if there was something concealed under an object, LIFT and PULL didn’t work, requiring TAKE or LOOK UNDER; emptying a bucket required POUR INTO rather than EMPTY); unimplemented synonyms (a device described as an “electirc [sic] lock mechanism… with another keypad” responds only to “keypad”, not “lock” or “mechanism”); and a lot of small conveniences I’m used to seeing in modern games are absent (automatically figuring out which key I want to use to unlock a door, for example). Again, there’s nothing game-breaking or that delayed me too long, but a bit more polish would have substantially increased my enjoyment.
The writing side of things is pretty similar – it’s easygoing, with some bits that actually made me laugh (including, mirabile dictu, a toilet-flushing gag). But there are some technical errors, including typos and spacing oddities, and some odd word choices, with a chicken left in the oven described as “getting ripe… maybe overripe?” Again, it’s nothing too bad, but bespeaks a game that could use another round of editing.
I don’t want to be hard on SIWSOC, since I did pass a fun half-hour or so with it, and it’s definitely got some charm. And it was entered into the Back Garden, so perhaps it’s unfair to expect it to have the same level of testing as a Main Festival or Comp entry. But I think there is a missed opportunity here – given the amount of work that went into making it, only a little more could have made it even more of a fun diversion.
Worthwhile even though currently incomplete, April 23, 2021Rounding out the excerpts in this year’s Back Garden, Budacanta is a visual novel with ropey graphics but a neat conceit: you’re a voice in the head of the autistic main character, Alianora, helping her navigate challenges both logistical and social as she travels from the U.S. to Budapest to visit a friend and take in some motorsports (I think like F1 racing, maybe?) The piece of the game on offer covers her departure and a train journey through Prague, then ends on arrival in Budapest, with a few choices and vignettes along the way.
I led my description of the main character with her autism not to reduce her to her diagnosis but because the game is clear that it’s largely about the questions of why, and how, an autistic person would travel so far from home by themselves. There’s a satisfying answer offered – likening the unfamiliarity a neurotypical traveler feels in a strange place to the similar discomfort autistic people sometimes feel even in familiar surroundings – but the game intends to show as well as tell. As a result, it has a light pedagogical feel, with frequent asides to the player to better inform them about what it’s like to be autistic, and offering different potential strategies for navigating a world built for the neurotypical.
I thought these bits were well done – I was familiar with some of this information, like “spoon theory” (roughly, the idea that neurodivergent people or people with disabilities often have a relatively fixed pool of energy or capacity to do things that feel effortless to folks who don’t have those conditions, so deciding when to do those things can be a weighty task). But it’s all well-explained, and I definitely learned some new things – I was surprised when Alianora said that she enjoyed talking about being autistic, and saw her stock of spoons increased as a result, because I would have thought explaining these things over and over could get exhausting!
Per that reference to the stock of spoons, as far as I can make out the core gameplay of Budacanta looks like it will be about making resource-allocation decisions. At some of the major decision prompts, you’re shown your “spoon count,” and occasionally your cash on hand as well, indicating that some decisions will increase or decrease these finite quantities. Because this is just the first part of the game, there’s currently no risk of even coming close to running out of either, but I could see this working well to add a bit of additional engagement to a story that so far seems like it’ll be a pleasant, low-key bit of tourism.
The narrative voice is appealing throughout, friendly and casual in a way that feels authentic. The writing is generally good, too – I liked this description of a plane taxiing then taking off:
"Low primal rumbling sensed as much through the feet as the ears. To the sides, a thrumming blaze pulsed a beat of four."
There are some rough patches in this version of the game, though. The primary one is probably the graphics, which in most scenes are black-and-white sketches painted with a broad brush and which I often found hard to decipher. They do get more colorful as the journey progresses, so hopefully the visuals will see an upgrade as Budacanta moves to a full release. The choices can feel a little awkward, too – upon starting the game, I found several of them seemed pretty similar to each other so I wasn’t sure what each would do. And in important decisions, the first choice often lists the player’s spoon and money inventory, as well as stating the time, before adding an actual option after a hyphen. I think this is mean to be a way of updating the player about Alianora’s condition, but it would be clearer if this information was conveyed in a separate part of the interface. Finally, there was one odd bit of writing that likened neurodivergent people temporarily “passing” as neurotypical to Black people “passing” as white, which I found rather jarring given how fraught racial passing can be – but from how it’s described, I think the intended reference might actually be to code-switching.
Regardless of these small issues, I enjoyed my 15 minutes or so with Budacanta – even the graphics stopped bothering me after I focused my attention just on the text box. This is definitely another one where I’ll be anticipating the full release!
The mannequins are legit terrifying, April 23, 2021A demo with not much there yet, Manikin nonetheless does a good job of realizing its text-message conceit and presenting an appealing central character (who isn’t actually the player). It’s also got a heck of an inciting incident, which is the main character’s mom texting to tell them that their neighbor’s house-slash-compound-slash-terrifying-mannequin-museum has burned down overnight, claiming his life. Your mom, her suspicions raised, decides to investigate, and also decides to keep you abreast of her exploits.
This is a kind of loopy setup, albeit with some moments of fear when you see the photos of the burned-out mannequin hall of horrors. It worked for me, though, since your mom comes off as an endearingly loopy woman. She’s not really up on slang, she derisively refers to the cops as “the popo”, and she’s a brave enough mix of clueless and bullheaded not to have any compunctions about entering a taped-off crime-scene based on nothing but a gut instinct that something’s not right (based on her profile photo, she’s unsurprisingly white).
The game’s interface is a mocked-up smartphone displaying a text thread, and it commits to the gag – messages take a few seconds to arrive and come with time-stamps (there’s not much actual waiting, thank god, as the timed text moves very fast and occasional time-jumps take care of any downtime), and there are inline photos as she shows you what she’s seeing. After every half-dozen or so messages, she’ll pause and give you an opportunity to weigh in, either asking a question, trying to direct her investigation, or advising her on the best course of action.
The choices at this stage are pretty low-key, mostly coming down to either supporting or pushing back against your mom’s Nancy-Drew-themed mid-life crisis. The plot doesn’t appear to branch based on these decisions – at least in this early section of the game – though given the way she’s characterized, I wasn’t bothered by the fact that she’s undeterred by her kid’s attempts to rein her in. Things might open up later on, and it seems clear that the central mystery will get more elaborate, as there are already intimations that there’s something untoward going on with the dead neighbor’s mannequins.
I was definitely disappointed that more of the plot hadn’t come out by the time the demo came to a halt, though I have to say I was also starting to get a little restless. I’m not sure if this is because the pacing sometimes felt a little slow, or if it had to do with the accumulation of the short but very frequent pauses as messages came in. Still, while this again isn’t anything close to a complete story, it did enough to put the full game on my radar screen, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for it!
Promising start, April 22, 2021The NPC-eye view of a AAA video game is a genre I’m often a little hesitant about – it can easily devolve into a delivery vehicle for a million arrow-to-the-knee jokes – but this demo for Eyewear Cleaner 2077 makes clear that it’s about something beyond just making fun of how dumb games are, leaving me interested to see the final shape of the story.
As the title makes clear, in this Twine game you play a retail peon in the world of Cyberpunk 2077 – in a clever bait-and-switch, the piece opens by telling you you’re a cis white dude with all the best guns and gear, before admitting that nah, you’re a nonbinary wage-slave. This isn’t a one-note joke, though: the circumstances of the main character’s life are established not to throw a satiric light on the exploits of the (presumably, since I haven’t played it) terrifying murder-hobo who’s the protagonist of the big-budget RPG, but to create sympathy and resonance with real issues: capitalism, state violence, exploitation, the rights and dignity of trans and genderqueer folks… The world is also nicely fleshed-out – I’m not sure how much of this is drawn directly from the AAA game, but there are social media feeds to drown in, a choice of video games offering cheap distraction, and more.
Part of what makes this work is that Eyewear Cleaner stays relatively grounded, at least so far. The main character’s job and lifestyle definitely suck, but not in a parodic, over-the-top way. Sure, there’s an AI in their head that docks their paycheck if they have a stray thought during work hours, but once the day is done they can visit a friendly bartender, or display some common humanity to a homeless person in a way that isn’t immediately punished. I’ve often seen these kinds of stories come in with too heavy a hand, but an overdone miseryguts presentation can distance the player by making clear that this awful milieu is being conjured up in the service of polemic, or again, bad parody – Eyewear Cleaner steers clear of this.
As you navigate this proletarian life, the player is given a large number of choices. Some of these have more or less immediate consequences – you opt into or out of the pay-docking distractions mentioned above – but the ones given the most weight by the game turn on conformity versus revolt, with your status along the continuum tracked by a handy Rebellion Level meter in the sidebar. The choices are primarily small, like sympathizing with a complaint fellow-bystander’s complaint about brutal cops, though there’s one that seems to intersect with larger-scale concerns: (Spoiler - click to show)whether or not you alert the cops about the anti-corporate vigilante.
I’ve seen this mechanic handled poorly in the past, where rebellion is positioned as the only possible choice and immediately rewarded in a didactic orgy of wish-fulfillment that neither convinces nor satisfies. Eyewear Cleaner again does this well, at least so far. The more rebellious choices are more likely to lead to negative consequences, sensibly enough, but nor are they punished overly-harshly as of yet. I found this pushed me to engage with the story rather than just blindly pick one side or the other in every circumstance – keeping my head down sometimes seemed only reasonable given the risks, but it’s possible to get small victories helping others or asserting your dignity, which again kept me invested in the character and the story.
The demo gives you two days of a planned five, and while there are some missing images testifying to its incomplete state, I found what’s on offer well polished, without typos or bugs, which bodes well for the finished product. It’s hard to fully evaluate a story without knowing where the narrative and character arcs are ultimately going, of course, and I find dystopic sci-fi often doesn’t stick the landing, but I enjoyed this excerpt and suspect the remainder will live up to the good example it sets.
Not ready for opening night, April 22, 2021Theatre of Spud is another Python game requiring a bit of elbow-grease to get working on a PC. Unlike Space Diner, though, I found the installation process to be a pain, and the payoff not really worth it. I won’t belabor the former point, though will note that there appears to be an error in the setup files in the version I played, which required some manual tweaking to correct – see this post for details. The blurb on the festival page is good, though, seeming to indicate backstage amateur-theatre hijinks to come, so once I’d jumped through the requisite hoops I was excited to dig in.
Sadly, those hopes were frustrated and I found the game itself pretty unengaging. Largely this is because of excessively slow timed text that makes the simplest action take 10 or more seconds – timed text is enough of a pain in choice-based games, but when used in a parser game like this, with highly-granular actions and a medium-sized map, it gets excruciating.
But even putting aside this major technical issue, Theatre of Spud has problems with motivation and interactivity. First of all, it starts out confusingly: the blurb sets up a young boy named Spud as the protagonist and then the game asks for your character’s first name, so when the opening scene kept referring to someone named Alan I figured he was an important side-character, but it turns out he’s the protagonist. I was able to get Alan into the theatre/er, at which point there’s a monologue from the play’s director where he asks you to make sure the lights in the parking lot stay on to prevent the local hooligans from getting up to any mischief, so I guess Alan is a sort of dogsbody for the theater?
This seemed like the first task to take on, except the lights sure seemed to be doing fine on their own so I wasn’t sure what else needed to be done to harden them against chav-related misadventure. Compounding this aimlessness, the custom parser doesn’t have many actions implemented, including the ability to examine objects so far as I could tell. So my experience of Theatre of Spud was of wandering around a reasonably large map with not much in it and minimal ability to interact with what’s there – while the timed-text issue made everything treacle-slow. It’s a shame because again, I’m here for the premise, but I’m putting this one back on the shelf until a hopefully-refined final version comes around.
A promising fragment, April 21, 2021Another incomplete Back Garden offering, Cycles has be interested to see what comes next but doesn’t offer much more than a teaser. From the blurb, it sounds like the plan encompasses a lot of interactivity and shifting social dynamics, which given the setting – a big family reunion colliding with some kind of mysterious secret – seems promising indeed. But what’s on offer here is just about 3,000 words of setup, with few choices and few cards tipped.
The prose is the main attraction here. The author writes in a light literary-fiction voice, featuring lots of metaphors, a focus on the interiority of the main character, and a skillful interweaving of present action with backstory. The writing could definitely use another editing pass as it’s occasionally over-wordy and clumsy, but it’s definitely a highlight, since this is a style I’m not used to seeing in IF. Here’s an early paragraph I liked (though again, it’d be stronger with like 20% fewer words):
"'You mean Tom?' asked Miranda. She realized she hadn’t really thought of her cousin since Gammy’s passing. Without even meaning to, teenage Miranda had made a protracted spring cleaning of her youthful fancies and pastimes, brushing them all to the back of her mind like whispy dust bunnies to make room for what she’d thought would be the much more serious preoccupations of her adult self. The “adult self” that followed seemed, embarassingly in retrospect, as likely to devote the new space to ripped jeans as to Sylvia Plath’s poetry."
Miranda’s the viewpoint character, and she’s engagingly drawn. You can play her as slightly more excited or slightly more standoffish at the prospect of one again meeting long-unseen family members, but regardless she comes off as a happy-go-lucky sort navigating a mild quarter-life crisis.
The excerpt concludes almost immediately after the reunion starts, with a few family members briefly sketched in a couple of short scenes; it seems unfair to ding them as coming off flat given how little space any of them get, and they’re clearly meant to develop as time goes by. This release wraps up with a cliffhanger portending a potential shift of tone and genre (Miranda and Tom go walking in the woods and meet someone with whom they appear to have a history; (Spoiler - click to show)he seems like one of the fair folk doing an evil Tom Bombadil impression?)).
All things being equal I probably would have preferred to see the story stay in Anne-Patchett-style light domestic drama mode, just because that’s so underutilized in IF, but I can’t deny that this does build interest for what comes next. But again, while what’s here is good, it’s very slight – here’s hoping there’ll be more to come.
Comfort gaming, April 21, 2021Space Diner feels like a throwback, putting me in mind of oddball text games I’d find on late-80’s demo disks –an alien burger-joint simulator would fit right in amidst all the Wizard’s Castle clones and Drugwars-alikes of the era. Partially this is due to the slight obtuseness of the installation process: while the provided instructions are good, I did have to first install Python (easy), figure out where Windows decided to stash the Python executables (slightly harder), and launch the program via a command prompt (pleasantly nostalgia-inducing). The presentation, which opens with endearingly-primitive ascii art before dumping you into an over-complicated interface, and the gameplay, which involves typing in a large number of bespoke commands, reinforce this impression. Space Diner’s mimicry of the grindy, wonky games of my youth is more than skin-deep, but maybe only a little deeper – subcutaneous fat-deep? – though, because it’s actually got some satisfying systems, clever design, and nicely understated writing that make it surprisingly enjoyable and perhaps even slightly modern.
With that said, most of what you do in Space Diner is make burgers. Your character is the proprietor of a diner (in space, natch), and each day, you open up, chat with your regulars, take orders from your customers, then go back to the kitchen to prepare and combine ingredients to make meals. There’s a bit of complexity here – early on, you might not have all the ingredients you need to give each patron exactly what they want, and occasionally orders are vague (“something with milk”) so you’ll need to improvise to figure out what the customer might like. But it’s generally fairly straightforward, since there’s a recipe book telling you how to assemble the dishes on your menu, and the game helpfully lists all the verbs you’ll need to use.
This is the kind of system you could see working well in a mobile game, except here there’s no time pressure, making Space Diner a chill, relaxing experience. There’s this game design framework called MDA that includes as one of the aesthetic components of gameplay “submission” or “abnegation” – the idea that some games are satisfying because you can just shut your brain off and spend time performing a task. Space Diner scratches that itch. The difficulty is low – even if you screw up lots of orders, it’s still very hard to get into an economic death spiral – and there are few interesting choices – occasionally you decide how to spend your evening on one of a couple of low-key activities, and you can change your menu once a week, though some options seem clearly superior to others. So really it’s the cooking and serving sections that occupy the most time, where not much thinking is required. That could be a recipe for boredom, but here, because the mechanics of the parser mean that it takes a fair bit of typing to assemble a meal, the busywork was just engaging enough to be satisfying.
It helps that there’s a little bit of worldbuilding and some narrative vignettes that help move things along. Occasionally one of your regulars will invite you to spend time with them outside the diner, and these short scenes provide a cute, slice-of-life view of what it’s like to be a colonist settling a new planet. I especially liked the sequences on Mars, where your regular – an older matriarch from a cow-person species – takes you on outings with her grandkids and cooks you a meal that you can reverse-engineer into a new recipe.
The other thing that’s better than it needs to be are the scenarios. When starting out, you’re given a choice of opening your diner on the moon or Mars. I opted for the former my first time, and quickly got up to speed with my goal (amass $400 – I’m guessing there’s massive deflation in the future?), my ingredients (a half-dozen rather traditional ones, such as beef patties, pickles, and buns, plus the exotic and not-at-all-appetizing silkworms), and my customers (a mix of blue-collar colonists and big-spending tourists). This scenario is pretty simple and I hesitated on whether I wanted to try again on Mars after I won – but I’m glad I did, because Mars had many more, more creative ingredients, a customer base that included humans and two alien races, with different age profiles, and a new goal of getting good online reviews from a diverse set of diners. It’s a much more engaging scenario, and felt fairly different from the setup on the moon.
For all that I liked Space Diner, there’s definitely some cruft. The interface can be quite fiddly, with excessive use of TAB to autocomplete commands being required to stay sane. I also sometimes ran into disambiguation challenges – I was unable to purchase moss from one of the Martian stores because the parser kept thinking I wanted to buy moss milk instead. Some of the mechanics seem underbaked, too: I kept thinking there’d be a way to upgrade my diner’s décor, and I was never really clear what good upgrading my knife or napkin-folding skills was doing. And again, at the end of the day it is a repetitive game of doing the same limited set of tasks over and over. Still, in the time I spent with Space Diner, it didn’t wear out its welcome, and I’m tempted to check it out again once the promised additional scenarios are ready – and not just to get a whiff of nostalgia!
Incomplete but intriguing, April 21, 2021Blue November isn’t a complete game, but based on this Back Garden offering, I’m hoping to see it finished while also being worried about the scale of the task the author’s taken on. This choice-based piece has a really intriguing premise – it presents a game within a game, as a graduate-level cybersecurity class embarks on a simulation of an assault on the 2020 U.S. elections. So we’re in the realm of the technothriller (the title’s I think a tip-of-the-hat iteration of Tom Clancy’s Red October) but at a remove, as a bunch of 20-something students attempt to inhabit the shoes of hardened GRU operatives, beleaguered American election-security specialists, teenaged North-Korean hackers, and Anonymous gadflies.
That is a lot of sides for a scenario, and since most of the teams have three or four players (plus the professor) there are a lot of characters, motivations, and strategies to keep track of, made all the more complex by the secret objectives some of the game’s players have. At first the game makes you think you’ll be guiding the leader of the “blue” U.S. team, stuck playing defense, but the game’s main interaction so far is to allow you to shift to different sides and see what they’re plotting. Blue November adds to this drinking-from-a-firehouse feeling by adding layer after layer of references, strategies, and in-jokes: one character speaks only in Patton quotes, the Panama Papers and bellingcat get namechecked, the North Korea hackers are actually based in Uganda…. It’s a whole whole lot, but it generally stays on the right side of plausibility – I’m pretty sensitive to how politics is portrayed in games since it’s usually quite awful, but this one sure seems to be written by someone who knows what they’re talking about.
After a fairly involved introduction that walks through the setup, the major characters, the sides, and their briefings, the rules of the simulation are revealed: it’s intended to play out in six rounds over multiple days, and in each round the teams all get to take both a public action (announced openly and subject to counterarguments from the other teams about why it wouldn’t work) and a secret one, with actions where the outcome’s uncertain resolved by dice rolls. When I saw that framework laid out, I had visions of a combinatorial explosion since even if the only variable is whether pre-defined actions succeed or fail, the potential outcomes would quickly get out of hand.
I’m not sure how the author’s planning on handling this, though, as the game ends as soon as a team tries to take their actions. There are other signs the game’s unfinished – much of the prose is unpolished (including a discrete/discreet error), jumping between teams is often clumsy because it’s not clear whether shifting will just change the perspective or actually move time forward, there are empty passages marked “TODO”, and the dice resolution system is described inconsistently. Still, I found this version of Blue November an effective teaser – the originality and geopolitical nuance of the premise are intriguing, the characters are introduced as stereotypes but are appealing nonetheless, and the simulation seems like it would be really fun to see play out. I’d say the game is worth a gander even in this very rough state, and definitely will be keeping an eye out for a future, more complete release.
Hilarious, meta satire, April 20, 2021This was the last game I played in this year’s main festival, and oh what a treat when things end with a bang, not a whimper. Fish and Dagger is a stylish Metal Gear parody with sharp jokes and all of the production values, taking a silly premise and running with it about as far as it’s possible to run. Even as someone who’s only glancingly familiar with the specific works that are being taken to the woodshed, the game had me giggling throughout, and the fleet pacing, clever gameplay, and truly gorgeous visuals elevate the package further.
It’s tempting to just lead off with a recitation of my favorite jokes, but since the humor is well-integrated into the story of Fish and Dagger, I’ll endeavor to do the same in my review. Things start out with a character creation sequence that skewers tropes with gleeful savagery – you select options by clicking on changeable blue text, for example allowing Agent Red, the protagonist, to specify which part of the postapocalyptic milieu they call home by choosing from “a safe pocket town,” “the center of the bloodbath,” “a top-secret military base,” or “Ohio” (I went for the final, most-chilling option). You can also select your spy’s cardinal virtues or special skills: I went with an agent who’s “a walking hair-toss” and “cold” (given that the mission is to infiltrate Shadow Iceland, I figured I’d do some roleplaying).
The tale that unfolds starts out simple – you’re a spy for a secret pan-governmental agency, inserted into an enemy base to rescue a captured double-agent with critical information – facing easy but creative challenges, like using an animated flashlight-cursor to find the text on a darkened page. Things quickly ramp up, though: the plot starts twisting and twisting more, the humor does the same, and there’s a set-piece puzzle that involved using my smartphone to access a subsite and get a code to feed back into the main game, in a satisfyingly meta bit of design (per the help text, there’s a way to short-circuit this puzzle if you lack the technology to do so).
It goes well over the top, in other words, and does so with real panache. Parody is easy to overdo, and Fish and Dagger is completely unrestrained – there’s a gag where the text describing a storm at sea is funny because it escalates to the point where you intuit it should stop, but then it escalates again, and then it escalates again. Somehow though it doesn’t topple over, knowing how to leave a joke at exactly the moment it reaches peak funniness, while keeping the betrayals and reveals coming quick enough that you never have time to get bored.
It also helps that the parody gets sharper as it goes. While Fish and Dagger starts out as a relatively straightforward riff on techno-thriller video-games, its true conceit is even funnier once revealed. You’d better believe I’m putting spoiler tags on this one: (Spoiler - click to show)so the major twist is that the real baddie here isn’t the scientist who rules this island installation – it’s you, or more specifically, it’s the narrative voice that’s attached to you and keeps throwing nonsensical plot twists and action-movie tropes into the story. Your informant friend and the scientist are staging an intervention to try to decouple this parasitic, destructive force from you, leading to the best jokes of the game as you attempt to weaken it by denying it the things it loves. When you recall your struggling days as a night-shift worker in a bleak, dead-end town (details customizable, of course), it pleads for mercy : “WHAT?! IS THIS. OH GOD— IS THIS DOMESTIC REALISM?! NO. PLEASE. I’M SORRY. YOU WIN.” And then, the unkindest cut of all: after the narrative voice’s “thirst for any kind of dramatic tension was destroyed… with no other options—it fled Red and returned to reinfect its original host with its tropy convoluted bullshit: JJ Abrams. Nobody noticed.” Ouch.
Fish and Dagger is a real gem, checking all the boxes with style and being just a bit funnier, a bit cleverer, and a lot more gorgeous than it needs to be (there are animated backgrounds of waves crashing in the dark, and retro-cool character portraits, that left me drooling). It's not faultless -- there are some typos, and some of the story-advancing links are an off-white that's near-impossible to distinguish from the regular text. But if you can get through it without grinning, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.
An abstract fable, April 20, 2021I’ve noted in several of my other reviews that I prefer games that get specific, providing details to ground their narratives in a particular context and add texture to the emotions and themes of their stories. Baggage takes the opposite approach: it’s a parser-based game that presents an allegorical vignette about the difficulty of moving on when you’re feeling weighed down by, well, see title. It’s all plausible enough, but because of the game’s commitment to an abstract presentation, I didn’t find it as resonant as it maybe deserves.
To give a little more detail on the setup, you’re a nameless, faceless, genderless protagonist on a road to nowhere, hemmed in by high hedges and toting a satchel freighted with half a dozen abstract concepts. Some of these are coded positive – there’s hope, and a good memory – and some negative – you’re also toting some fear and resentment. You can examine them, but you don’t get much to grab on to if you do. Here’s regret:
"Blank years and empty months and wasted weeks and dull days. You could have done so much more."
So yes, checks out, that’s regret, but it’s not a description with much emotional weight.
After I’d finished the game and was looking through the hints and help text, I found that there’s a nonstandard THINK ABOUT command implemented. This is only mentioned if you tell the HELP command that you’re new to interactive fiction, though, which I think is a misstep: if your game has a bespoke command that’s not specifically cued by the game, it should really be mentioned in the top-level ABOUT or HELP text if you want a player to find it. Anyway, it didn’t change things that much – here’s THINK ABOUT REGRET:
"Ugh. The embarrassment. The shame! It’s a hot cramp in your stomach, a shiver creeping up your spine, a sharp taste in your mouth."
That’s more specific but doesn’t actually seem much like regret to me?
There’s more to do in Baggage than just contemplate your baggage, though. You eventually come across a fellow traveler (confusingly referred to throughout as a “traveller” – the prose is otherwise clean and free of typos, modulo the occasional linebreak error, so I wasn’t sure if this was an intentional misspelling) who serves as a cautionary example of letting your obsessions rule you, and while you can give in to despair if you let the time limit expire, there are also a few positive endings possible.
Reaching these requires solving a small puzzle to reframe your baggage in new, potentially-transformative ways. I actually liked the writing of these bits – the text finally starts giving details, with the main character’s regret revealed as being about not seizing a chance to get out of a dead-end job by trying for a (perhaps intimidating) training program. And the message here seems right – you can’t get rid of your regret, but you can change it from a backward-looking fetter into a goad not to let opportunity pass you by the next time.
Do enough of this, and the protagonist can eventually escape their stasis, and even maybe help the other traveler. The puzzles behind this weren’t my favorite, since they’re not too far off from guess-the-verb challenges (the latter in particular requires the player to use a command form that I think is a bit obscure for a modern Inform game: (Spoiler - click to show)CHARACTER, DO SOMETHING) and seem a little facile (spoiler for the former set of puzzles: (Spoiler - click to show)you just type CHANGE REGRET) though I suppose that’s fair enough since we’re in the realm of allegory.
I noticed a few niggles in the implementation – besides the aforementioned line break issues, some synonyms weren’t implemented, most notably when upon being told that I thought there was something strange about the shadows around the roots of one of the hedges, I found that neither X SHADOWS or X ROOTS was recognized. Overall though it’s solid, especially for a first game, and while I didn’t personally find the prose compelling, I think it hits the mood it’s trying for. If you’re in the market for an interactive riff on the Pilgrim’s Progress, Baggage has you covered – I just prefer my fables with a bit more flesh and blood.
Grimdark superhero melodrama, April 18, 2021My fingers keep wanting to type this as “Medium Veloctic”, but there is nothing mid-range about this superhero medical thriller, which has its dial set all the way at 11 throughout its hourlong run time. There’s a lot that’s well-crafted here, including some fun puzzles and a refreshingly diverse take on a comic-book milieu, though the grimdark setting and over-the-top writing made it too exhausting for me to fully enjoy.
There are a couple of interesting things Medicum Veloctic is doing. One is the character dynamics; the primary driver of the story is the eponymous Veloctic, a tortured vigilante in the Batman mold whose struggles against a new supervillain provide the main plot business. The player-character, though, is his lover, who’s a doctor and responsible for patching up Veloctic – his real name’s Arthur, which I’m going to use from now on – when he oh-so-frequently gets his teeth kicked in. This leads to the puzzles, which are another novel element: in each major sequence, you need to diagnose and treat Arthur with the assistance of a handy, sidebar-accessible medical manual. And Arthur isn’t just Batman, he’s a gay Asian Batman, and the player character is a Hispanic man (named Reyes). Their respective identities don’t play a major role in proceedings, but it’s still nice to see.
There’s also a lot that’s much more standard. Top of that list is the worldbuilding and plot. We’re squarely in Iron Age comics territory: Veloctic comes with your standard angst-filled backstory (albeit with an unexplained-in-my-playthrough soupçon of parricide) and hyperviolent m.o., and the villain is a nihilist who just wants to stack up dead bodies. There’s one “investigation” sequence with some brushed-through mystery-solving, but mostly the story is a rush from one bone-breaking, blood-spurting fight to the next.
The relationship between the two characters also felt more identikit than I would have liked. Reyes subsumes his personality in taking care of Arthur, who’s got few compunctions about his self-destructive crusade but feels guilty about the toll it’s taking on his lover. Reyes has a job offer lurking in the background (from the WHO, which is a detail that doesn’t feel like it makes sense), providing the hope or threat of escaping the cycle. These dynamics are established early and don’t feel like they meaningfully evolve until they abruptly shift in the ending.
With solid prose, these less-inventive elements could have been fine, I think, but I have to confess I didn’t like the writing. Beyond a fair number of typos and technical errors, it’s melodramatic to a fault:
"The mask is worn for redemption not to paint oneself further in sin. But can you take the mask off before God and have him still call you clean?"
Unsurprisingly, it’s completely po-faced, and though Reyes repeatedly describes Arthur as a motormouth, Spidey-type character who’s always ready with a quip, the only thing that made me laugh was a throwaway sentence in the medical reference book that “flame-throwers are unbelievably common.” The game also crams way, way too much – emotion, detail, and frankly number of words – into its overloaded paragraphs:
"Licentia, that’s what the new villain calls himself; and god above do you hate it. You hate it so much. But he declared it on top of a bridge while fighting Veloctic so now it’s true, and he was one for the show when he shouted it at the cameras, all before getting grabbed by the Veloctic and slammed into a nearby beam. Earlier today he let an explosion go off at two banks across the city, it would have been five if Arthur didn’t manage to stop three of them at the last second."
The dialogue between the two lead characters is written the same way, full alternately of violent argument and lust. Some of this works in an overheated romance-novel sort of way, but I found myself wishing there was less Sturm und Drang and more opportunities for the conflict to slow down, so I could get to know who Arthur and Reyes are when they’re not furiously yelling at and/or making out with each other.
The writing also goes into a lot of unpleasant detail on the trauma Arthur inflicts and has inflicted upon him, but this at least is necessary to support the main gameplay element, which is the medical problem-solving you get up to in between fights. These sequences aren’t too graphic, and I found they hit a satisfying balance between too easy and too complex – at each point you generally have a choice between three of four plausible-seeming options, and the reference book provides a handy cheat-sheet while still requiring the player to match the descriptions in the main text to the corresponding clinical diagnoses. I’m not sure whether it’s possible to completely mess these up, or if your performance meaningfully impacts the story, but they do add a welcome note of interactivity while underlining the story’s themes about the toll the vigilante lifestyle imposes.
The presentation is a high point too. There’s a brooding color scheme that’s readable while fitting the overall vibe, punctuated by the occasional well-chosen photo. It’s on-point but nicely understated at the same time, and I just wish the rest of the game was more in line with the visual design. With more measured pacing that added some downtime in between the dramatic extremes, and a polish pass to clean up the typos and dial down the purple prose, this would be pretty great – as it is, Medicum Veloctic gets a lot right, even if it is a bit too much of an adolescent yawp for my taste.
A sharply-written pleasure, April 18, 2021Those Days tells a story you’ve heard a million times before – a young man outgrowing his best friend as he grows up – and does so without much interactivity. Its writing, though, is some of the sharpest in the festival, grounding this familiar plot in well-chosen detail, solid pacing, and prose that’s evocative but never purple. This one’s well worth a play.
The lovely thing about making sure your writing goes into specifics is that it can paradoxically make the story more resonant, and that’s very much how Those Days worked for me. I’m not English and had a very different experience of high school and college than the protagonist, of course, but because his experiences are described with such care, there were many passages that sparked a sense of recognition that yes, this is exactly what it’s like to awkwardly meet someone when you’re 12, or to giggle over an unkind nickname:
"Luke used to call him ‘swingball’, a reference to his oversized flaccid earlobes that swayed metronomically as he walked."
While the main characters – especially the best friend, Luke – can be annoyingly laddish sometimes, with the game framing as childish mischief some acts that struck me as rather worse than that, this also seems true to life, and is softened by the protagonist’s reflective tone, as well as an elegiac, backward-looking vibe complemented by the gentle color-gradient backgrounds. There’s a nice pastoral element, too:
"On weekends we’d all ride our bikes deep into the arable hinterland outside of town. We’d race along hidden dirt paths, kicking up gravel and flint as we sped down the green monolithic hillsides, stitched together by hedgerows and interwoven with tussocks and wild flowers."
The writing is just as good with characters as it is with landscape. The protagonist is appealingly drawn, convincingly shy and hard on himself in a way that makes you root for his success, so the weight he assigns to his relationship with Luke means the reader sees it as significant too. Here’s one more excerpt, with a nice bit of physical detail underscoring his hesitance to meet Luke during the point in their relationship that they’re most distant, likening his reluctance to other moments of dread:
"Walking into school for the first time. Walking to the head-teacher’s office for my only detention. Walking to collect my exam results. All with that same, shortened, nervous stride."
Okay, there is the occasional misstep – in the scene where the protagonist meets Luke for the first time, the latter’s face is described as “soft and slightly bulbous, like a half-filled water balloon.” And I found a few sequences, like the end of Chapter 4 when the protagonist and Luke are drifting apart, a bit on the nose, in terms of plot and prose. But these missteps are few and far between.
Throughout, you’re mostly clicking just to advance – passages usually requires multiple clicks to get through, with each revealing the next line or two. There are a few cosmetic choices of dialogue, as well as I think two more meaty ones that lead to a late-game callback (though I think I experienced a bug with one of these: (Spoiler - click to show)I was brave enough to jump across the gap on the rope swing, but the game thought I’d chickened out when it came up again at the end). The text is also timed, displaying at a clip that’s fast enough on the first go-round but would be annoying on replay. Replaying isn’t the point of Those Days, though – it tells a resonant, relatable story, and tells it in so satisfying a way that I can’t imagine the player who’d want to go back and optimize their choices. Lovely stuff.
A different kind of haunted house, April 17, 2021Sovereign Citizens managed to defy my expectations at least two or three times – which is good, I think, since those expectations were mostly negative! When I read the title, I was worried it was going to center on the insane anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about – I mean, I can’t really explain what it’s about since it’s insane, but I know they hate admiralty law? Then when I read the blurb and authors’ note, I was worried it was going to be a thuddingly didactic bit of political evangelism subordinating character and drama to an oversimplified message.
Fortunately this elusive game isn’t that either – though I’m not sure it’s great that I’m hard-pressed to say what it actually is. Summarizing the plot is simple enough, at least. You play one of a couple who seem to be homeless, camping out outside and carrying their few belongings with them in backpacks.
There’s not much detail given to flesh out their circumstances, including where they are – it’s a less-settled area, at least – and how they got there – there’s a short semi-flashback suggesting they once had a home and were evicted, but it’s unclear. They don’t appear to be especially deprived, and since there are no other people around, there’s almost a post-apocalyptic vibe. The nature of the couple’s relationship is also really unclear – they don’t interact that much, and they could be siblings or friends instead of romantic partners for all I could tell.
Regardless, as one of these vague people in a vague world, you stumble upon an unoccupied mansion on the coast, and decide to break in. This isn’t too challenging, and then most of the game is taken up by exploring the house, which is sprawling and often bizarre. It’s positioned as a rich person’s playground, with a full movie theater, art displays, and incredibly fancy bathroom installations. It also has very strange features, like what’s described as a therapist’s office decorated with degrees made out to obviously fake names. The fridge is locked, with an Alexa-type virtual assistant asking for a passcode before opening it (though this is presented as a frustrating but not necessarily weird security feature, as best I could determine). And though most of the house appears to be stocked and furnished, there aren’t mattresses in the beds, meaning that it’s an uncomfortable place to stay. After spending a cold night, the couple decide to leave, taking nothing that they found.
The writing I think fits the alienating, confusing vibe of the story, though it’s occasionally fairly clumsy. Here’s an early description of the house:
"Noland had noticed the abandoned mansion’s for sale sign knocked over on the now muddy lawn. For the summer we circulated on the beaches nearby there was never a car, homeowner, or even cleaner who we ever noticed go in or out."
There’s nothing grammatically incorrect there, but the overuse of stacked clauses make these sentences rather ungainly. There are also a few typos.
Ultimately I found playing Sovereign Citizens to be a meditative experience, with a few nicely-observed details sticking in my mind, like the flurry of realtors’ cards crunching like leaves underfoot when the couple enter. Despite its flaws it worked for me as a vignette of alienation, presenting a house haunted and made inhospitable not by ghosts, but by idiosyncratic capitalist excess. If it’s meant to be political, I think the context is too lightly-sketched to allow its message to really land, but in these matters better to have too light than too heavy a hand I suppose.
A deer's life, April 17, 2021There’s a lot of IF out there with nonhuman protagonists – monster, aliens, what have you – but Secret of Nara is fairly unique in featuring a totally normal, non-talking, non-anthropomorphized animal. The game walks a fine line, portraying the deer who serves as the viewpoint character as resolutely nonhuman, while still providing enough of a window into their experience to allow for decisions to be legible. The writing can occasionally veer into over-abstraction, and the story, such as it is, is very much low-conflict, but I found the game a meditative pleasure to experience.
The prose is the main thing to talk about with this one. It does a good job of conveying really concrete, specific information about how the protagonist and other deer are behaving, and what they encounter in the environment. There’s no cheating – the deer’s thoughts are primarily emotions, not words, and while they probably have a clearer idea of what other deer are trying to communicate with their actions than a human would upon observing the same behavior, it still takes some work to decipher. Combined with the serene natural setting – a mountain and forest – there’s some lovely imagery here. This is an early passage I liked, where the deer reflects on their solitary existence:
"Cold winds brushing against your fur, peaceful stillness, and empty presence have been your every day for as far as you remember."
Occasionally the challenge of conveying a nonhuman mind can leave the prose feeling a bit airy, and there are moments of awkward phrasing, but the writing is generally strong, and a major draw.
Structurally, there’s a fair bit of branching – in each of my four playthroughs, a different incident served as the climax of the story, though they’re all decidedly low-key, like having a funny moment with a tourist or helping another deer. I liked this approach, since trying to make decisions lead to dramatically different outcomes, rather than leading to different scenes, probably would have made them heavier and more dramatic than the story would support. And that’s a good illustration of why Secret of Nara works so well: it’s a disciplined game, knowing exactly what to do to realize its novel premise.
An interestingly-lumpy lump of coal, April 16, 2021Here’s a bit of Wintervale’s backstory that illustrates some of what makes this fantasy Twine adventure distinctive, in ways both good and bad: so the setting is a town in the icy north, which was founded after a wandering adventurer killed the dragon that was threatening the region. You’d think the town got its name since it’s cold and probably located in a valley, right? Nope – turns out the dragon-slaying warrior just happened to be named Wintervale! Good thing he wasn’t named Arthur Warmbeach, that would have really confused the tourists. The fractured D&D aesthetic behind Wintervale (the town) also animates Wintervale (the game). It’s a mix of overly-familiar, boringly-presented tropes and surprising left-turn choices that might not always make sense but are definitely intriguing. A decided lack of polish makes getting to the good stuff harder than it should be, but there’s more here than you might at first suspect.
Let’s talk a bit about that first impression. From the get-go, the player is hit with a high density of typos and confusion about the title (the initial screen appears to refer to the game as “When Time Converges”, and there’s soon a mention of “Windervale”). The opening narration wears its worldbuilding heavily, with the paragraph about the people of Wintervale including specific links for more than a half-dozen races that when clicked disclose enervating details like most orcs being construction workers because they’re strong. This wonkiness extends into the game proper, as you’ll see things like “(if 0 > 0)”, an event titled “EVENT”, and typos and malapropisms galore, while even characters the protagonist has appeared to know for years go by their occupation rather than having a name. And the setting – a tavern you own – is often described in about the most generic terms imaginable.
Once past this frankly off-putting beginning, though, I found Wintervale started to grow on me. The story that’s playing out in this played-out setting is actually more interesting than you’d first imagine. It’s a horror-inflected Groundhog Day scenario, with your tavernkeeper protagonist noticing stranger and stranger occurrences in their bar – suspicious blue-cloaked figures, a secret entrance cut into your storeroom, intimations that one of your employees is keeping secrets – before being repeatedly killed and waking back up at the beginning of the day.
The investigative bits of the game play out via a solid structure where you can move between parts of the tavern and speak to different people in whatever order you please. Early on, you also get access to a nifty bit of magic – a monocle that allows you to see temperature changes – which provides a neat perspective on this oasis of warmth amidst the cold, and which is used to open up a few needed options. Everything seems fairly linear; there are choices to make but no real puzzles to solve as far as I can tell. But I felt like there was enough for the player to do to draw me through Wintervale’s 45 minute or so runtime.
The other thing that makes the game surprisingly grabby is, funnily enough, how confusing much of the writing is. I’m not sure if it’s by design, but I spent most of the game off-kilter, never really sure exactly what was going on. I found a magical shard of glass that seemed to go missing when I wasn’t looking, people kept killing me but I wasn’t sure who or why, I got a mysterious note that the protagonist resolutely refused to read for a long long time, characters came in and out with no real rhyme or reason… And it’s not just at the level of plot and secrets, even what should be simple physical descriptions are skewed and unnatural. Here’s the protagonist remarking on a pile of broken glass:
"From a distance it’s not too significant, though after comparing it to a nearby broom its probably a good 2-3 inches tall."
This is not how human beings talk or understand the world, so at some points I was wondering whether there was some kind of mystery tied to the protagonist’s identity? But as far as I can tell, no, there isn’t. Regardless, the overall effect somehow wound up being intriguing as well as frustrating, in a David Lynch does AD&D sort of way.
Ultimately I reached an ending – a bad ending, though I’m not sure whether others are possible, or what I could have done differently. Nothing was explained: not the source of the time loop, what was up with the mysterious albino woman, where that shattered glass came from, or what the deal was with my receptionist. I can’t really recommend Wintervale on the basis of my experience with it, but while it’s not a diamond in the rough by any means, it’s at least a lump of coal that’s lumpy in a sufficiently odd and idiosyncratic way to make it stand out from the others.
Ultimately entertaining, April 16, 2021A title (and author nickname) as over-the-top as this reads to me like a thrown-down gauntlet: will the actual game live up to the badass silliness being so ostentatiously signaled? I’ll admit to some skepticism after reading the blurb and loading it up – fantasy RPG parodies are a dime a dozen, often going for lazy skewering of the same tropes with jokes that feel like they would have been musty even in the 90s. Thankfully, JUF! charts its own path, committing to a very specific take on the gag and not forgetting to include an actual game under the parody.
The twist here is to treat big-budget RPGs as showbiz. The characters are all digital actors, supported by body-doubles and production assistants. So when the connection goes down right as the final battle ramps up – it appears to be a single-player game, not an MMORPG, so I’m guessing there’s meant to be some kind of DRM? – you control Tommy, the actor playing the protagonist, as he chats with his coworkers and tries to figure out how to get the show back on the road. In the course of these efforts, you get to know your colleagues, who are a nicely-humanized collection of Hollywood stereotypes – the overenthusiastic newbie, the ambitious co-star, the embittered journeyman, the overlooked PA who’s secretly running everything.
The writing strikes a good balance between serving up jokes and creating sympathetic characters, and it’s effective on both fronts. Take Lackey Three, for example – she’s played by Lucie, whose performance is checked-out because she’s studying to break into the digital assistant business. Her interjection of “additional words!” into the opening smack-talk, and the extended sequence where she reveals her uh, rather strong feelings about Clippy (the go-to example of a digital assistant), are both funny bits, but while she’s a bit abrasive because she wants Tommy to stop bothering her so she can study, I ultimately found her sympathetic and relatable, despite the beyond-silly context.
The game side of things is no slouch either. It’s presented as a top-down RPG, and you click to move Tommy around and talk to the other characters (I had no idea Ink could do this!) Each character has the same dialogue tree, where you can ask them about themselves and their plans, their opinions on the other characters – which includes telling them what their colleagues have said about them – and ask them to swap an item. There’s a lot of depth here, and while it can get repetitive since everyone has the same options and getting all the dialogue requires doing two full passes over all eight characters, the writing is strong enough to support the time.
With that said, there are no dialogue options or other choices you make while talking that impact the game (well, except one to trigger the endgame) – it’s the item-swapping where the gameplay resides, and it too has surprising complexity. Tommy starts out carrying the ultimate sword, a less-good sword that looks like a fish (there are a lot of jokes about fishing minigames), and the Crown of Agency that marks him as the protagonist. Each character has a single item apiece, ranging from the metaphysical – a sense of purpose – to the mundane – an overwashed pair of pants – to the truly dangerous – a union organizing pamphlet.
You can work out chains of swaps by figuring out which character might accept as a trade, and what they should ultimately be holding when the curtains open once more. The object a character is holding when the end fight resumes (including what Tommy’s got in his inventory) has a major impact on how things play out – the traditional victory of good over evil can certainly happen, but there’s more than enough room for improvisation, flubbed lines, last-minute betrayals, and more. The combinatorial possibilities here are enormous, and after four playthroughs I feel like I barely scratched the surface – yet each ending went off mostly hitch-less, weaving together the different possibilities into a satisfying whole every time.
JUF! does have a few flaws. The biggest one is that the dialogue scrolls out slowly, and there’s a lot of it, meaning that clicking through it on replays can be annoying – and since repeated replays are needed to get the most out of the game, that’s a shame. There are some quality of life features unlocked as you go, including skipping the intro, but I really wished there was a “skip repeated dialogue” one. I also thought one very-positive ending was a little too easy to get (Spoiler - click to show)(painstakingly juggling everybody’s inventory got me a pretty solid result, but just making a beeline for Jacquie and swapping her the Crown of Agency seems like it’s close to the ideal ending. I support this rejection of damseling, but this is the point I stopped playing because I figured I couldn’t top that). I only noticed one stray typo – Boyle is referred to as Riley in one of his ending slides – but I did play a version that’d been updated a couple times since the Festival opened. But these are very small nits to pick, and I have to say, JUF! has taken its place as my favorite entry in this much-maligned genre.
A specific take on a universal experience, April 15, 2021A Blank Page is an appealing game that I suspect will resonate with most folks who’ve tried to create something. It’s exactly what it appears to be – a Twine game about writer’s block – but with a well-observed take on the subject that provides lots of specific details to flesh out this universal experience.
It helps that the presentation is attractive – black text on a clean white background matches the topic at hand, of course, but there’s also a nice blinking-cursor effect that underlines the anxiety of starting to write. The prose could use an additional editing pass, as there’s more than one typo or infelicity of language, but it’s also effective at conveying the subjectivity of the protagonist:
"You really like this old keyboard. Its soft touch caresses your fingers. The tapping sound it makes when typing accompanies you in the solitude of the apartment… But, like a curse, everything changes as soon as you stop using it to play or chat or whatever and start using it to write your projects… You notice the roughness of some of the keys and how some of them offer more resistance, slowing you down when typing. The sound starts to be annoying, like a little hammer incessantly beating your ears, reminding you that you are not quick enough, that you are wasting time."
The game’s structure is pretty standard but with just enough of a twist to be interesting – slight spoiler here: (Spoiler - click to show)as the game opens, you’re given several choices for how to try to write or procrastinate. None of it works, and when you go to sleep, you wake up the next day faced with exactly the same text and exactly the same options, with the only difference being the weather’s gotten worse – it’s Groundhog Day, more or less.
Again, the details are a lot of what makes this work – beyond the keyboard description excerpted above, I also really liked the notebook, which has a series of prompts and ideas you can cycle through, half or more of which are pretty awful while a couple actually have something to them (my favorite was the one about dead gods leaving giant corpses that cults spring up to worship).
It’s all very relatable, including its ultimate take: after trying a bunch of different stuff, including taking a walk, chatting with friends, doing some reading, and just keeping the main character’s butt in the chair, eventually I was able to get past the block and start writing. There’s no indication that that’s because I solved a puzzle or unlocked a magic formula, which seems true to my experience: if you leave space for inspiration, connect with other people, take care of yourself, and keep grinding out and persevering, eventually the block you’re facing unclogs, without any clear rhyme or reason for it.
This isn’t anything revelatory, I don’t think, but A Blank Page is a positive, grounded exploration of its topic, and did pretty much everything I want a short game like this to do.
An empty plenum, April 15, 2021After checking out its entry page, I was looking forward to this one: choosing the mythological counterpoint to Galatea as the title of your game is a move with appealing chutzpah, no matter how much extraneous punctuation you throw in there to muck things up, and Pygmalion’s blurb offers a pretty solid hook too:
"A story about You— The Murdered God— and the attempt to solve your death’s mystery in places beyond."
That enthusiasm carried me into the opening sequence, as the game’s got a neat CGA aesthetic and starts reeling off potentially-compelling plot elements: a murder-mystery where you’re the victim! Fourth-dimensional politics! Reformed necromancers! Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories! And there’s a fun little character-generation sequence here where you can define the genders of yourself and your sidekick.
Unfortunately, once I got to the game proper, my enthusiasm began eroding and I wound up not enjoying this one very much at all. On both the game and writing sides of things, my experience with Pygmalion was irritating and empty, despite the author’s clear intentionality and technical skills.
Before getting to the critique, a potted summary of how Pygmalion plays is needed, so here goes: you’re a god who’s been murdered by parties unknown, but a helpful necromancer has resurrected you by shoving your spirit into a marble statue. This second lease on life is on a severe timer, but it’s enough to allow you (with the necromancer in tow as a sidekick) to revisit the scene of the crime – a sort of cross-dimensional nexus – and interrogate the suspects and hopefully figure out whodunnit before you re-expire. The game is in Twine, but with a stylized presentation where you’re always looking at a retro, 4-color picture of a character or location, with navigation or dialogue choices listed below.
There are eight locations that play home to five suspects, with lots of incidental environmental details to investigate along the way. The places you can go are mundane – a garden, a foyer, a rec-room – but the contents are offbeat, including strange half-mechanical plants, ley-line tangles, and obelisk-fountains that resolutely refuse to grant any wishes. So too are the suspects, who are nameless representations of aspects of society: politics, capitalism, entertainment, big tech, and athletics (though I was confused on this last one since his picture makes him look like a motorcycle cop), each of whom occupies a different point on the spectrum between menacing and alluring – the cast reminded me of the characters you can make in the tabletop RPG Nobilis, if anyone remembers that. After time’s up (there is a real timer that ticks down as you explore), you accuse one and get an ending, though you appear to die again no matter what.
Even reading this summary, I think it sounds really great! But like I said, I got very little enjoyment out of this one. Partially this is due to how finicky the interface is, which adds friction to every interaction. Because of how much space the pictures take up on the screen, the text is spit out only one or two sentences at a time, and sometimes there’s quite a lot of it to get through before there’s a choice. Unfortunately, this requires either hitting the space bar – which I found often led to skipping over a line – or clicking a tiny > button that shifts slightly up and down in the window depending on how much text there is, which is a constant, low-level frustration. There are also sometimes options or explanatory text that shows up below the main display, meaning you frequently need to scroll up and down to see whether you’re missing anything.
I also didn’t really enjoy the game’s prose, though it’s technically well done – I noticed only a few scattered typos, and it’s got its own style. Unfortunately the style is one I don’t like. Sometimes it’s flat and dull, listing the furniture and stating how characters are standing and moving in terms more unimaginative than you’d think given the setting. It does occasionally liven up, typically when interacting with the suspects, but usually that means it starts sprinkling in references and adjectives that don’t quite fit, while remaining emotively flat, which winds up creating a kind of vague, hostile atmosphere. This alteration of styles I’m sure is intentional – it reminded me a bit of some of the literary fiction in vogue in the early 90’s, like David Foster Wallace circa Girl With Curious Hair – but it made my experience playing the game alienating and dull.
Speaking of things that are alienating and dull, the murder mystery here underwhelmed me. When you sketch the outline, again, it should be great! The problem is that there’s no actual investigation to undertake. There are no physical clues (crime scene’s been tidied up); you can only ask the suspects the same three questions, with none of them having anything substantive to say in response; and at the end, you can accuse anyone you want but regardless of your choice, you appear to only get a sly hint that sure, maybe they did it, without any resolution. Your actions wind up being completely unimportant as far as I can tell, with the player character unable to even attempt to solve the mystery. I suspect, as with the prose, this is the point, but for reasons I won’t rehash here since this is already running long, I really don’t get on with 99% of postmodern detective stories.
(I should say that I found one small bit of interactivity in the scenery, where options changed depending on what order I did things – if you check out the fountain and bum all your sidekick’s coins to throw into the water, you can then go back to the car and get a much larger haul of change to dump in. This leads to a little reflection that I kind of liked, with that act being a sort of commemoration of your soon-to-end existence, a kind of riff on writing your name in water. But this little narrative cul-de-sac, as always, doesn’t appear to have any impact on anything else that happens).
The last redoubt here would be the thematic level – if I found the story was ultimately one that had an impact on me and illuminated some aspect of the human condition, certainly all the above would be forgivable. Alas, I found things uninspiring on this front too. The narrative doesn’t have much in the way of specificity – like, who the god you’re playing is, or how they’re related to the characters you meet and why anyone would want to kill you. This is a problem not just for the murder-mystery side of things because no one has a motive, but also on the literary side of things because there’s not really any conflict. Sure, you can impose your own reading on this empty vessel – the best I can do is to imagine that the murdered god is a representation of religion, so Pygmalion is about allowing you to level a finger at the force that’s displaced you from pride of place in contemporary American society. But the game doesn’t give you enough interesting building-blocks to really support that interpretation.
As I’ve said throughout, this is a well-considered game that doesn’t do things accidentally, and shows quite a lot of skill and craft (though I did notice two bugs – a broken link to an image when examining the portraits in the stateroom, and a missing macro closing tag error in the Chanteuse ending). And I can see it resonating really strongly with certain players. But sad to say on this one, I’m on the outside looking in.
Excellent if slightly lacking in avoirdupois, April 14, 2021I played the Weight of a Soul in two sessions – it’s a longer game than I’m used to seeing these days. After the first one, I was already working on this review and planning to lead off by saying “the only thing wrong with Weight of a Soul is that it slowed down the previously-torrid pace of my review thread”. Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I have a few more caveats, but this is still a really impressive and enjoyable piece of parser IF, with strong characters and a lovely world in which to get lost.
So I’ve tipped my hand that I think WoaS ends weaker than it begins, but it begins REALLY strong. The opening is in medias res, and showcases the paciness and quality prose on display through the rest of the game. Here’s the first full paragraph, as the player-character – a doctor-in-training named Marid – grounds herself to deal with an emergency:
"He was healthy not a day before, or so he said when he stumbled into the clinic just minutes ago. You should have seen the signs — the shivers, the black stains around his eyes — but the shadows were long in the hour of night, and in the darkness you couldn’t see, you couldn’t see…"
As Marid works with her mentor to try to save the patient (a goblin), details establishing the world and characters are skillfully woven with escalating tension and prompts for the player to assist in the treatment. Then after the crisis is past, there’s a breather for Marid to clean up, return to her home, and unwind with a drink. It’s a bravura, well-paced sequence that draws the player in, establishing the themes and narrative stakes of the story. It also fills in just enough about how the world works – we’re in a steampunk type setting where alchemy is the dominant science – to allow the player to get their bearings, without overburdening the introduction with dry exposition.
Indeed, the light-touch worldbuilding is a major strength of Weight of a Soul. It reminded me of a dozen different settings – the Dishonored immersive sims and the Zachlike Opus Magnum probably most directly – but it’s got its own spin on things, and the game has answers for all sorts of questions about how society, infrastructure, science, and politics work in Furopolis (admittedly the Greek-and-Latin linguistic slurry behind the terminology might not be its strongest suit). Critically, none of these details are rammed down the player’s throat – throughout, descriptions are short and suggestive, conveying what the player needs to know to act and a little bit more to excite interest, without getting flabby. My notes are scattered with delightful coos over things like the paired cold-closet and stove, how the char-golems work (and are named), the dignity of the bemasked mutant bartender, and the individual descriptions of the statues making up the Chorus Metallis, a personified pantheon of alchemical substances. The card-reading – which I think is a completely optional sequence – was also a major highlight. I will say that my suspension of disbelief was a bit shaken by the line of dialogue suggesting that the underclass goblins toiling away in a hellish foundry have access to bereavement leave – probably that’s just due to overfamiliarity with how awful U.S. labor law is though…
Another immediately-noticeable strength is how well Weight of a Soul manages being a big game. To help the player deal with the scope, there are plentiful supports, including a dynamically-updated journal and list of characters, and a beyond-gorgeous map. But I actually barely touched these, because the design itself is careful never to be overwhelming. There are a lot of places to go, but they’re laid out in a big loop, and you can’t stray too far from the beaten path without reaching a dead end and going back to the central artery. Locations have a good amount of scenery, but not too much that it feels exhausting, and the number of characters and objects who can be interacted with is actually relatively modest. It’s generally quite clear why you should be talking to a particular person – and even if you’re a bit fuzzy, either Marid or her interlocuter will make it plain soon enough. And since the game is based over multiple days, the plot mostly progresses not by opening up massive new areas – though it does this a few times – but by changing the existing geography and providing new motivations or roles for characters you’ve already met. This meant that on my first trip out into the Channelworks District I behaved much like a tourist, gawking at every new sight, but quickly grew familiar with it and was able to pick out what was different on subsequent visits. I usually prefer a game go deeper in a relatively smaller set of elements, than sprawl out with more, shallower ones, and that’s especially important in a larger game – Weight of a Soul nails this.
I haven’t talked much yet about what you actually do in the game. This is good too! You’re tasked with investigating the mysterious plague that afflicted the goblin you treat in the opening. So you beat feet to explore his haunts, talk to his associates – and then, as the disease inevitably spreads, the scope of Marid’s investigation expands as well, taking in physical evidence-collection and some light puzzling. Really, though, most of what you do in Weight of a Soul is talk. The author has a good ear for dialogue, and these menu-driven chats unsurprisingly do a good job of establishing the characterization and voice of the supporting cast, while striking a balance between offering up a list of topics to be lawnmowered through one by one, and actual choices that allow the player to proffer their own interpretation of Marid (she is very much a fully-drawn character herself, though, so this is more about putting a bit of spin on her already-established traits).
The reliance on dialogue also opens into how well-done the technical implementation is here. Because there’s a lot of talking in this game, it adopts a visual-novel style approach where after each line or two, the player needs to push a button to advance. I typically find this interface slightly annoying, but here it’s well-chosen, because otherwise the player would be forever scrolling up and trying to find purchase in massive walls of text. This same care’s been taken when it comes to other potentially-tricky bits of the implementation. In one sequence around the mid-game, for example, you need to examine four different cadavers, including looking at different parts of their bodies and their clothing. Once I realized what was in store I had visions of the disambiguation hell to come, but instead it was seamless, with commands like X EYES automatically cueing off of the last person examined.
I did mention up top that I found Weight of a Soul grabbed me less as it went on, though. Much of this is down to a slight mismatch of expectations on my part, but the butter-smooth implementation of the first two-thirds of the game does start to break down a bit in the last few sequences. It’s still very good, don’t get me wrong, but I did find myself wrestling with the parser when trying to exit through a window, unlock a hidden door, or even trying to shortcut talking to Marid’s mentor by typing TALK TO DOCTOR. I also ran into a run-time error in the code generating background events on Day Three.
I also found the dialogue and writing strayed a notch too far into melodrama for my taste as the stakes got higher. Weight of a Soul is I think operating within YA conventions – you’ve got a teenaged protagonist taking on a problem the grown-ups are powerless to solve, a somewhat trope-y love triangle, and after poking at a bunch of small details I’m pretty sure it’s even set in a post-apocalyptic world. This isn’t my genre of choice, and I think heightened emotion is very much part of what folks who like it enjoy, but things like Doctor Cavala declaring that Marid is the one person who’s made all her work worthwhile sometimes took me out of the story.
In terms of gameplay, I kept waiting for things to get a bit more puzzle-y. Since the first half is focused on world-building and investigation, I didn’t mind that there weren’t any real obstacles in the way. But as the climax neared, the few puzzles that did appear were nothing too special (the two main ones being (Spoiler - click to show)outwitting Carnicer, whose solution is telegraphed with what I thought was a very heavy hand, and the (Spoiler - click to show)piston-pressure puzzle, which is just an exercise in trial and error). Many players won’t mind that there are only a few, easy puzzles – but given that they are there, it’s a shame that there’s less creativity on display than in the rest of the game, especially since the alchemypunk world sure seems like it would lend itself to interesting challenges (I was itching to get clever with the Metallic Chorus!)
Finally, for all that I really dug the characters, world, and plot of Weight of a Soul, I didn’t find its themes to resonate that strongly. Marid’s central struggles are definitely legible to the player (letting go of the past, figuring out how to be a healer given the inevitability of death) but they’re very familiar ones, and often felt a bit too abstract, or too tied to the details of the fantasy setting, to land strongly. I’m significantly older than the protagonist, which could be reducing my ability to relate to her journey, but I do think some of the game’s narrative choices wind up short-changing the themes – for example, having the only patient we see Marid treat be the goblin whose awful death kicks off the plot undermines the player’s ability to appreciate her late-game reflections on the grind of serving the same people, day-in and day-out, as they slowly decline. Sure, I intellectually understand that that’s her experience – but my experience as a player is different.
Compounding this slight feeling of abstraction, I was underwhelmed by the final reveal of the mystery, which ideally would have tied Marid’s internal and external conflicts into a unified whole. I’m going to put all of this behind spoiler tags: (Spoiler - click to show)I only really understood Justinian’s plot (that is, the motivation behind it, not what he was doing and that he’s a baddie since that was pretty clear early on) like the third time he explained it. It seems to depend on the player noticing some pretty subtle bits of world-building, like the fact that this is a post-apocalyptic world with the population squeezed into overcrowded cities, which I think is only alluded to if you examine second-order nouns in an incidental mural. And even with the background granted, I thought there was a really substantial mismatch between Justinian’s stated aims – radically change the world for the better, somehow – and means – culling the population of the poor so they don’t have so suffer so much. I’m happy to accept him as a delusional psychopath, but Marid seems to think what he’s doing has some logic to it, and not I think just because of her puppy-dog crush. And since the major plot felt like it reduced to “eh, dude’s nuts” I didn’t experience much catharsis around Marid’s final choices. Oh, and while I’m being spoiler-y, I also thought Carnicer’s actions didn’t make any sense (she was a hired hitman, paid to knock off Doctor Cavala but not a member of the conspiracy – so what possible reason would she have to freelance on an unpaid gig trying to kill the person her patron specifically told her not to harm?)
Again, though, I think like 75% of my criticisms here are pretty much just down to me wanting a slightly different experience than Weight of a Soul is offering up – if you’re in the market for a YA-style adventure with dialogue-first gameplay, I don’t think there’s anything else remotely as good. And most of that remaining quarter would be pretty easily addressed with a few nips and tucks before the next release. Even in this Brobdingnagian review, I haven’t managed to even name-check everything that delighted me in Weight of a Soul (let me squeeze in a final pair: the undead pigeons, and the way you’re introduced to Horatio standing by a bridge). This is a game that I’m quite sure folks will still be recommending ten years from now, and I’m excited I got to play it when it was brand new.
A rumination on memory, in wiki form, April 12, 2021Excalibur is somewhere between odd duck and rara avis. Created by a murder’s row of talent, it’s a Twine game built as a fan-wiki for a low-budget BBC space opera from the 70s. There’s some dynamism to it, with a few additional links and comments opening up as you read through the entries, and a sequence that’s more or less an ending. But there’s no puzzle-solving beyond what’s happening in the player’s own head, as they browse through the wiki and mentally assemble each individual jigsaw piece into a mental model of what was going on with the show.
Excalibur’s success, then, is all down to how enjoyable it is to read each of its pages and engage with the questions it raises. Happily, it is a success. There’s an enormous amount of craft on display in how the authors’ have conjured up this two-season wonder, spanning not just plot summaries and character bios, but also backstage drama like writer/director clashes, special-effects mishaps, and more. My upbringing was about 15 years too late and 3,500 miles too occidental to fully appreciate all the references, but I know enough about Windrush and the coal miner’s strike to tell that the story is cannily situated in its time and isn’t just a classic Dr. Who send-up (though I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of that here too).
Of course, just methodically clicking through cast and crew listings for a nonexistent show could get a little dull, no matter how many finely-crafted details and in-jokes there are to find (the Russian-language poster for Terrovator – or “Death Lift” – made me laugh). In a well-considered move, there’s an element of creepypasta to proceedings too, which provides some of the most immediately engaging stuff. As you browse the entries, you come across hints that there could be something odd about the fact that no recordings of the show still exist, or that some of the accidents that plagued the cast and crew had to do with the incorporation of a ritual in the series one finale.
I’ll say that little of this struck me as super original – perhaps I’m biased because I live about three miles from Jack Parson’s old house – and I thought the way the “trivia” and “fan theory” pages spelled out many of the mysteries was less effective than it would have been to just let the player notice this stuff and come up with their own ideas. But overall, this element definitely does the job of providing the sugar-coating that entices the reader to do a comprehensive dive through the wiki (I especially enjoyed figuring out what was up with the crossing-guard and tracking down his comments).
What’s ultimately more compelling is that in amongst all the speculation about whether the show is a (Spoiler - click to show)tulpa and what exactly happened to Old Alfie, Excalibur engages intelligently with the role nostalgia plays in our culture and interrogates the impulses that give rise to these kinds of massive fan-projects. One key perspective comes from the writings of a French existentialist who consulted and wrote a few of the show’s scripts, including one where the character’s experiences seem to presage future developments and even mirror those of their off-screen counterparts ((Spoiler - click to show)Bleak Planet):
"Vaillant defines ‘haunting’ as the ineluctable repetitions of immaterial, atavistic terror birthed by the machinations of human consciousness. In this view, humankind is doomed to face a ceaseless mockery at the hands of its own creations."
He ultimately espouses a radical ethic of forgetting, and in the cast interviews that are some of the last pieces to open up, you can see some of them coming round to this approach too (there’s some in-show mirroring of these ideas too in how the Lethe Ray is used in the final episodes). And the game doesn’t shy away from portraying the negative side of obsessive fandom, largely through the gatekeeping, nerd-raging character of Ian Newell. At the same time, this pro-oblivion theme doesn’t exhaust what’s in Excalibur, not just because of the obvious love and dedication that went into making it, but also in the experiences of the less-crazy fans and the positive connections they’ve developed out of their devotion to this deeply weird (Spoiler - click to show)and possibly made up show. The urge to reify our memories through a shared cataloguing has taken on the very specific form of the fan-wiki at this particular moment in late-stage capitalism – and yes, there’s politics in Excalibur too – but it’s also recognizably the same urge as leads to story-telling at a funeral. The game cues up the difficulty of finding the balance between remembrance and forgetting, a very human dilemma, even as it comes down more strongly on one side than the other.
I noticed a few technical niggles with the game (the “Television Series” category link at the bottom of the “Excalibur (TV Series)” link doesn’t work, nor do any to the character page of Chanticleer) and some typos and inconsistencies (the audio archive page mistakenly lists series two episode 13 as a second episode 11, the Lodestar One page says it should be included in the “Derivative Works” category but it’s not actually listed, and one of the trivia entries for the episode Oneironaut says it was directed by Goulding, when obviously it was really LaGomme). I was also able to sequence-break by accessing the series two episode summaries before they officially unlocked (via the wiki-maintainer’s profile page). Though given that this is meant to be an amateur, fan-driven effort, perhaps all these errors are diegetic! Again, there’s a smart alignment of form and function that means even mistakes help draw the player in rather than drive them away. Excalibur’s great accomplishment is to conjure up a richly realized alternate world in which to get lost, while raising more than enough interesting reflections for when we return to the real one.
Not for the impatient, April 11, 2021Perihelion is a well-done game that I admired more than enjoyed. It’s got a compelling, hypercompressed and occasionally poetic prose style that’s really well done, and the aesthetic pleasure is compounded by some neat color-gradient backdrops that do double-duty to indicate time of day. The setting is an elliptically-described alien world with awesome vistas to explore, and there a few gentle puzzles that help give the player some direction in what’s otherwise a fairly abstract story space. Unfortunately, I found my appreciation of it to be held back by the game’s occupying an uncanny valley between the abstract and the literal, and by its overuse of an awful timed-text mechanic.
The opening and closing are the strongest parts of Perihelion. In the beginning, you (some kind of alien – (Spoiler - click to show)I think a sort of air-elemental?) witness a comet breaking up and ejecting a (different) alien, in a sequence that’s compellingly written and prompts you to come up with adjectives to describe how you perceive the novel form of this interloper into your world. In the ending, the viewpoint shifts to that of the interloper, who describes what they’ve experienced and recontextualizes the events of the game.
In the middle sections, you guide the first alien as you decide to help the second – OK, look, this is getting unwieldy, I’m going to call the first alien “Fred” and the second one “Sam”, OK? – you guide Fred as you decide to help Sam return to the stars. Or at least, you decide to do that if unlike me you head first to the Mausoleum-Museum to chat with Sam, rather than saving it for last – I spent much of the middle section wandering around unsure of what I was supposed to be doing, and in retrospect wish the game had opened up free navigation only after the initial sequence with Sam imparted some direction.
Getting Sam spaceborne again involves going to three different locations on Fred’s planet and accomplishing a series of small tasks. These are barely puzzles – you’ll go to an observatory and be told that it’s cloudy, so you need to wait until it clears up, or try to slip into a guarded location and be told you need to do that on a weekend night. Once you’re past these barriers, there’s only one option to take in the different locations (except with the (Spoiler - click to show)lava, where you can choose to do a kinda-risky thing or a stupidly-risky thing), so it’s a quick matter to do everything you need to do.
Or at least, it should be a quick matter. The overwhelmingly worst part of Perihelion is that much of the text is timed. When you move from one area to another, there’s about a five second lag. When you sleep, there’s a similar pause before time resumes and you can act again. This is frustrating enough on its own, but when making progress meant waiting around for half a week to be able to access one of the locations, I wound up alt-tabbing to read Twitter to kill time during the delays, which really reduced my enjoyment and immersion in the story. I’m not a blanket no-timed-text person – I think there are times when, if used sparingly, it can emphasize a really critical point in a game – but its use here is just awful.
My other critique is a little harder to pin down, but I wished Perihelion had committed a little harder to either being an abstract art-game, or a more grounded space-adventure instead. It sits in an awkward middle where key pieces of the situation are under- or un-explained, just alluded to through obscure allusions and complex language, but the player’s primary engagement is still a more traditional model of traveling around a map and solving puzzles. The puzzle-solving is undermined by the player’s weak grasp on what they’re trying to accomplish in each location (I still don’t think I could really explain what Fred actually did to help Sam, on a literal level), and my engagement with the rich, dreamlike language was undermined by having to shuffle back and forth trying to circumvent obstacles. As a result, even though I really liked pretty much every individual part of Perihelion other than the timed text, I don’t think it made as much of an impression on me as it deserved to.
Vacation shouldn't be this much work, April 11, 2021I really dig the premise of Sunny’s Summer Vacation – you play a Very Good Dog (a corgi) whose person, Emma, is headed to the beach for a weeklong vacation with one of her parents (you get to pick if it’s a mom or a dad). The serious part of the backdrop is that Emma’s folks are in the middle of getting a divorce, so it’s your job to take care of her and cheer her up. This is a relatable set-up that allows for Sunny’s cartoony antics – playing volleyball with a seal or helping Emma build sand-castles – to sit alongside a plot arc with some depth and resonance, as lots of people have been on one side or another of this particular experience.
Structurally, the way this plays out is that each day, you help Sunny have fun with Emma by playing one of a series of minigames, with success rewarded by shells you can use to upgrade her treehouse-cum-shanty. Then each evening, there’s a vignette between Emma and her parent that advances the story of their relationship and the divorce. In the story sections, you often have a few choices about how to interact with Emma, though these usually reduce to either being playful or being really playful. When it comes to the minigames, you’re in the driver’s seat, and that’s where the large majority of the game winds up being spent.
This is where the issues come in, since I found the minigames dull and unrewarding. There are four of them, and they remain the same each day:
• A scavenger hunt where you hover your mouse over some highlighted words to find out whether you found treasure; after doing this about 20 times, the round ends.
• A stone-skipping challenge that plays out like a Twine version of a golf game, as you need to click to stop fast-moving counters the determine the orientation, angle, power, and spin of your shot (either I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing or the coding here is wonky, though, since my best throw came when I released a stone at a 97 degree angle to the water!)
• A sand-castle building game where Emma describes her plan, and then you dig sand and use differently-shaped buckets to build walls, gates, fountains, and castles in a 3x3 grid.
• A volleyball game, played against an easy, medium, or hard opponent, where you click to serve, bump, set, and spike.
These are all good ideas for beach activities, but the problem is that many of them are overly complicated and drag on way too much, while offering zero in the way of interesting choices. The volleyball one is the worst offender – you need to click to serve, click up to three times to see if your opponent manages to bump, set, and spike it back to you, then make up to an additional three clicks to bump, set, and spike yourself, then click again to see if your shot succeeded… you or the opponent can fail at any stage, but against the toughest opponent, a single point can take up a couple of shots back and forth, so it’s a lot of clicking with no strategy or choices to determine whether you win or lose.
Compounding the boredom, the notional goal of the minigames – winning sea shells with which to pay the gopher for upgrades to the shanty – wasn’t very motivating. You get almost the same number of shells for mediocre performance as for a perfect run, and I got more than enough shells to finish the upgrades midway through the vacation. Plus the upgrades didn’t appear to do anything to change the description of the shanty, or open up any new options – all that happened was a number indicating my shanty level ratcheted up.
Besides the minigames, there’s not really much to do during the day – if you explore all the locations you’ll find a few small treasures that wind up getting featured in your shanty’s trophy cabinet and win you an achievement. But you’ll do this on your very first day and after that the environment stays static, despite indications that a fair will be coming to town and a shift in the tides might open up the way to a hidden cove (the about text indicates that a later, commercial release is planned, so possibly these locations are meant to be fleshed out at that point).
Happily, the evening sequences are well-written (though the author’s got maybe a touch of adjectivitis), and I enjoyed seeing the dynamic between Emma and her parent develop. Sunny’s attempts to play with her and cheer her up are heart-warming and satisfying, though I wished there was a way to get a fuller view of how Emma feels about the divorce, or what her relationship with the absent parent is like. Also, indications that the vacationing parent still has feelings for their former partner, and the wistful way they talk about their absence, took me aback – it sometimes feels like the divorce is something that’s happened to the family, rather than a choice being made (I almost think game was originally about the other parent dying, then was quickly rewritten to be about a divorce). But given that you’re playing a Corgi, I suppose this muddiness in understanding the marriage is appropriate.
Anyway the result of this mismatch is that by a couple days in, I started skipping the minigames so I could get to the good stuff, except then Emma complained that she was said and feeling like she wasn’t making the most of the vacation. So I forced myself to suffer through at least a couple for each of the remaining days, but I still only got a mediocre ending that didn’t seem to hold much in the way of catharsis or character development for anybody. Part of me wanted to replay again to see if I could get a more satisfying resolution – but the thought of having to go through all that filler to get to the good stuff dissuaded me. With that said, the core of Sunny’s Summertime Vacation is solid, and if the later release retunes the minigames, it’d be well worth another look.
Not much at stake, April 11, 2021Much like Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires, An Amical Bet is about a dashing lesbian thief committing crimes in a lavish setting, but unfortunately this one doesn’t rise to nearly the same heights. The premise bodes well – unwinding after a big score, the protagonist and her lover relax by seeing who can be the first to steal something shiny, something useful, and something unexpected while at a party in Rome. Unfortunately, the implementation doesn’t live up to the hook.
Partially this is because of the writing. There are a host of typos and strangely-written passages, including the title which I think is supposed to be “Amicable”, and some of these phrases are so tortured I can’t even tell what the mistake was – like the corridor that’s described as “fastuous” (that could be a typo for “fatuous”, but that still wouldn’t make any sense?) With that said, occasionally some humor gets through the tangled prose – this response to TAKE STATUE made me snort:
"'Yes and to do what exactly? My God, I really have to stop drinking wine.' you say, drinking wine." [all punctuation issues sic]
The major issue is that the scavenger hunt, such it is, doesn’t hold any interest. Unlike the locked-door puzzle in fellow Quest game A Strange Dream, it is possible to complete this one. But there aren’t actually any puzzles to solve – you just go from room to room looking for portable objects, and if you take something that satisfies one of the conditions, the game will tell you in bolded text that you’ve got one of the three necessary items. None of the objects are hidden or gated in any way – it’s just a matter of hoovering your way through the dozen-odd locations – and for the “unexpected” and “useful” objects, I have to confess I didn’t fully understand the logic behind their selection.
There is a small, fun twist at the ending, and the game definitely wouldn’t have been better if it took longer to get where it’s going. Still, An Amical Bet is a very small, very slight thing that serves to pass five minutes of time but not much else.
A delightful heist-fest, April 11, 2021Thalia is the Greek muse of comedy, and she’s an apt namesake for what’s the most purely fun game I’ve yet hit in the festival. It felt like LTSS was grown in a lab to plaster a grin to my face – I’m a sucker for anything involving British twits, heists, libraries, and museums, and here we’ve got the eponymous burglar planning not one but three heists (at a library, a museum, and a British manor), all to tweak the nose of a supercilious society doyenne. Oh, and there’s an extended game of cat and mouse played against a sexy art-theft consultant to Scotland Yard. Still, even if these particular tropes aren’t your specific cup of tea, the breezy, clever LTSS is a rewarding gem of a game.
Admittedly, I went into this one expecting to like it – one half of the authoring duo, E. Joyce, previously wrote What the Bus? for the 2020 Comp and Social Lycanthropy Disorder for last year’s EctoComp, both of which I’d played and really enjoyed. And the gauntlet thrown down by the ABOUT text got me even more excited:
"[The game] has been lovingly researched; much of this research was subsequently thrown out the window for reasons including plot convenience, genre convention, wanting to have female characters do things that women shouldn’t historically have been doing, and things just being funnier that way."
Happily, LTSS lives up to this initial promise. The opening does a great job of establishing the milieu, the antagonist, and the player character, who’s a social climber with a masked alter-ego and a fondness for relieving snobs of their possessions. Hearing her stuck-up hostess brag about the gems she’s about to parade at a fancy party, our heroine takes it upon herself to lift not just the jewels, but also a rare book and valuable painting in the lady’s possession.
The game thus plays out as a trio of heists, each proceeding according to a well-paced structure: there’s an initial planning meeting with your sidekick Gwen, who’s a seamstress and gadgeteer of no mean skill, then a sequence of casing the joint incognito, before the final nocturnal visitation to put the scheme into action. Of course, the best laid plans of mice and muses gang aft agley, so even the most meticulous preparation doesn’t save you from occasionally having to improvise. And then after each heist is done, you get to read about your exploits and get debriefed – and rated – by Gwen.
These sequences are all really well done – none wear out their welcome, and each builds momentum into the next as you’re eager to see how the groundwork you’re laying will pay off. Each works differently, too, which helps keep interest high. The briefing scenes are pure dialogue, primarily giving you a chance to add some shades to Lady Thalia’s characterization as the outlines of the plan get established. When you hit the streets, you usually get a choice of three or four leads to pursue to gather information, hide your tools of the trade in a useful spot, or recruit confederates, before time is up and it’s time for the heist. It’s possible to succeed or fail at each of these subtasks, which could make the actual burglary sections faster and easier, or more time-consuming and challenging – these bits are set up as linear gauntlets, and can be appropriately nerve-wracking, though generally you’re more in danger of making a mess of things and having to endure Gwen’s mockery than of losing life and limb.
The challenges are varied, too. Most of the social challenges use a system where you choose an approach from a menu of direct, friendly, or leading (this last meaning you’re asking leading questions aimed at getting more voluble types to share more than they ought). This is a nice framework, since it creates some structure around what could otherwise be very fuzzy social challenges, and it also prods the player to think about the personalities and desires of the other characters rather than as mechanical obstacles to circumvent (admittedly, sometimes using the direct route with servants and employees can feel a bit like bullying, though Thalia typically stays on the right side of that line). One heist largely hinges on a word puzzle; another’s all about planning ahead; and a third involves Burke’s Peerage, because of course this is that kind of game.
The writing is just as good as the puzzle design, in particular when it comes to the protagonist. Thalia herself is a joy to inhabit, and has some of the best lines. Here’s her reflecting on how her status has risen after many successful jobs:
"You are at the level of wealth where you can get people to do you favours by giving them money, but not quite at the level where people will do you favours because you said you might give them money, so you are here in disguise."
And here she’s sizing up a potential mark:
"She has the air of a spinsterish academic — which you don’t mean as an insult; you can appreciate a bluestocking. You’ve appreciated some of them quite a bit in your day."
(Yes, Thalia is unashamedly randy).
There are a few flies in the ointment: I ran into a couple of small bugs (when faking a swoon in front of one of the museum guards, I got a “cannot execute macro” error, and when chatting with Lady Satterthwaite’s maid, one of the friendly dialogue options appeared to redirect back to the same passage, so I had to choose a different approach to progress). There was one sequence that I found hard to parse –the duel of wits with Mel in the museum – where I understood what Thalia was planning but wasn’t clear on how to implement it given the options available (this was the one place where I save-scummed). Gwen also scored my performance on the first heist as a 15 out of 13, which could be an error or just an indication of how awesome Lady Thalia is, I suppose. But these minor flaws do nothing to detract from the zippy, cannily-designed pleasures on offer – LTSS is a must-play, and here’s hoping this isn’t the last we see of its dashing heroine.
A random mystery, April 10, 2021I can certainly see the appeal of the randomized murder-mystery. More than most genres of IF, once you know the solution to a mystery there’s not much to hold interest on subsequent replays – and even on the initial play-through, if the author’s telegraphed the true culprit too strongly it might be even less compelling. On the other hand, mysteries tend to be really engaging puzzles for players. If you could write a good mystery that could be randomized, so the player knows the game is playing fair and can be surprised the second, third, fourth, and fifth time they run through it – that’s a game you could enjoy for a long time.
While I think I’ve played maybe half a dozen iterations of the concept, though, they’ve always left me cold. Some of this is I think is down to the fact that I tend to be less interested in randomized narratives – I’ll gladly sink untold hours in a pure, zero-story roguelike, and I’ve 100%’ed every single Assassin’s Creed game save the most recent one. But even in those often-grindy games, if there’s a system for randomly generating quests, my brain just flips a switch and is completely uninterested, even if functionally the random ones are almost exactly the same as the bespoke quests I just put a hundred hours into playing through. But I think my diffidence at the sub-genre isn’t due to personal preference alone: it’s hard enough to write one mystery, much less a mystery that can be reshuffled multiple times and still be satisfying.
Picton Murder Whodunnit – yes, we’re finally getting around to it – is, of course, a randomized murder mystery. It’s built using the Strand system, which I wasn’t previously familiar with, but looks like it was designed to create updated versions of some of the old Magnetic Scrolls games. Anyway I like the engine well enough, offering the option of choice-based or parser-based interaction, though there isn’t the ability to play offline so far as I could tell and the online version was sometimes laggy.
The conceit here is about as traditional as you can get: you play a police inspector called to a country manor to investigate the suspicious death of a peer of the realm, and you’ve got to identify which of a quartet of suspects (the conniving widow, the vicious son, the grasping brother, or of course the supercilious butler) did the deed. The game discloses that the solution is randomized each time, so while e.g. the widow is always portrayed as conniving, only one time out of four does this tip over into a murderous motivation.
As you can tell from the characters straight out of central casting (the butler’s even named Jeeves), the milieu is spot on, and the writing is full of cheerfully over the top Britishisms that I quite enjoyed – the brother is described as wearing a “pompous cravat and tweedy, shoulder-patched green shooting jacket,” which definitely conjures the character. This is where the randomized nature of the game starts to pose problems, though, as every character is described in dark, unpleasant terms, even if that seems to make little sense. Here’s the ten-year-old son, Jimmy: “piercing, piggy blue eyes stare back at you fiercely. You get the impression he totally despises the police and you in particular. He’s probably guilty as Hell!” I mean, steady on there, matey, he’s not even a tween. But in order for the randomization to work, everyone has an equally-plausible motive, and everyone has a key to the gun cupboard (yes, even little Jimmy) which I thought felt artificial – at least give us one character who doesn’t seem to have a reason to off the Major!
The investigation is also less fun than I wanted it to be, though here the randomization is only partly to blame. There isn’t any physical evidence to examine, nor are there any clues to uncover or forensic details to analyze. Solving the mystery reduces to asking every character about their alibi, then doing another round to ask about everyone else’s alibi to see who’s the odd one out. This is made slightly more difficult by the fact that the murderer, of course, is happy to lie, and by the fact that I found some of the clues ambiguous, though possibly that’s down to me not fully understanding the manor’s layout rather than fuzzy writing. The alibis are also functionally the same in repeat playthroughs (like, maybe the brother will be writing a novel instead of smoking a pipe, but he’s always in the drawing room and always relies on Jimmy for corroboration), making the investigation feel repetitive even though the ultimate culprit may be different. This is especially the case because after the first run-through, which took maybe ten minutes, I managed subsequent replays in maybe two minutes apiece since there are so few things that need doing.
All of which is to say that while Picton Murder Mystery works fine and supports at least one or two fun go-rounds, the nut of the tightly-plotted but randomized mystery remains uncracked, and I’d personally trade it for a non-replayable but deeper investigation with the same setting and characters in a heartbeat.
A fragment of a dream, April 10, 2021A Strange Dream doesn’t seem finished. The first sign is that the game’s file name is “test.aslx” and opening it pulls up the Quest editor rather than launching into the game proper. The intro text positions the player character as confused and discombobulated, waking up with a pounding headache in a strange, decrepit mansion, so perhaps this is a fourth-wall-breaking bit of metafictional slyness? But given the slapdash quality of what’s on display, unfortunately it’s more likely a sign of a game entered into the festival before it was ready.
Your goal is to unlock the front door and escape this crumbling manor, but within a few short actions it’s clear that it’s not that the place works according to dream-logic, it’s that it just doesn’t work. Interacting with the game is simple, with a subwindow allowing for compass navigation and another for examining and manipulating nearby objects via a menu. But if you exit and then re-enter the lobby, every time you look around you’ll see the exact same text about confusedly waking up that you get at the beginning of the game. Objects that the text implies should be hidden – like a silver key that’s described as being revealed when you pull out and look behind a book on a library shelf – are clearly listed in the subwindow from the get-go. It appears there’s meant to be a light puzzle, as upon lighting a match the game says “you can now go downstairs”, but you only find the match in the one downstairs room in the house, which you can get to and explore just fine without any extra light.
I found some flat-out bugs – trying to re-open the table after closing it threw off a scripting error – and wonkiness in the taking code meant that while the game cheerfully told me I was picking up keys and trying them in the front door, they never actually showed up in my inventory. After getting stuck, I wound up pulling up the editor to see if I could figure out what was supposed to happen – again, maybe this is what the author intended? – and as far as I could tell, a gold key I’d found in the upstairs office was meant to have allowed me to escape. Entering that office and taking the key appears to be the only actual puzzle, unless some of the other keys were also supposed to have gated other parts of the house?
The premise here would allow for a good bit of puzzle-y fun, and I did enjoy the use of pictures to show the often-beautiful furnishings of the house. I also laughed at the sentence “looks like you are in an old mansion, falling apart” (we’re all getting older, let’s not throw stones). But unless it’s all meant as some kind of ironic commentary and I’m just too thick to get the joke, it sure seems like A Strange Dream just isn’t a complete game at this point.
Thoughtful sci-fi let down by its last act, April 10, 2021Graham Nelson’s adage about an adventure game being a crossword at war with a narrative doesn’t fully apply to Some Space, but it came to mind when I was playing because while both the puzzles and the story are robustly worked out, it didn’t seem like they interacted with each other all that much. There were some loose thematic links, and some minor fallout for success or failure, but nothing that felt commensurate with the difficulty of the puzzles, which are occasionally quite involved. And then I got to the end and it turned out the game’s concerns were actually quite different than I thought they were, and I felt like the narrative wasn’t just at war with the crossword, but with itself.
Backing up, said narrative is one of space-immigration, as the main character is a human who’s decided to take a new job on an alien planet. The overall setting is lightly sketched – it appears to be somewhat Star Trek-y, with multiple species all more or less getting along in a single interconnected society, albeit the economy is clearly still capitalist and the different species still strongly retain their native culture. That sketchiness works because this isn’t a space opera with deep politics or galaxy-shaking revelations: the main character’s new job is in marketing, and the story is about being far from where you come from, trying to make new friends and fit into a new home that plays by very different rules.
Some Space starts in medias res, as the main character is chatting with a fellow human expat also on his way to that same alien planet. We never get much of the main character’s backstory, but this expat – named Amar – plays a significant role in the plot, as he’s one of those gregarious types who makes friends everywhere, and as it turns out is soon the only other human the main character knows on the whole planet. The story’s structure alternates between three kinds of scenes: the main character starting the new job; exploring the city and running errands on their own; and hanging out with Amar and, eventually, his friends. Transitions between the scenes are usually punctuated by the main character checking their phone for news and messages, usually getting one from Amar or another friend – which will typically lead into another scene – and almost always having one from the main character’s mom – which they invariably ignore and leave unread.
Speaking of messages, that’s also where the puzzles come in, because your new hosts, the Koilians, communicate via “puzzlespeak,” which means that you can’t read an orientation memo without looking for hidden meaning. There are a number of puzzle types, mostly different kinds of ciphers, and you need to demonstrate you’ve solved them by choosing the right option for where and when a meeting is being held, or occasionally by typing the answer into a text box. I’m not a cryptographic maven, so I found the puzzles rather challenging, or at least I did until I decided to bend the rules and use various online solvers to expedite matters – I figured the main character has a smartphone and access to a forum for expats swapping tips about how to understand puzzlespeak, so it’s not implausible that they’d be doing the same thing!
For the most part the puzzles don’t gate progress – rather, you can solve them and behave appropriately, or fail to solve them and irritate the Koilians by your inability to follow simple directions. As far as I could make it, there aren’t significant consequences, though, with a missed message meaning that you might be in for some minor embarrassment but no real plot impact. Puzzles that lack much narrative impact are fine, I think, so long as they’re simple – which these aren’t – or if they’re thematically connected to the narrative. Here, the puzzles are all cryptographic, and as an immigrant, the main character faces lots of difficulties communicating, so there’s some general linkage – or at least I thought there was, until I got to the last fifth or so of the game.
Despite appearances, Some Space isn’t primarily about the immigrant experience. I’ll put the rest of this discussion behind spoilers, but to summarize, a different theme becomes very prominent towards the end, and I thought it didn’t fit well with what came before as well as not having any resonance with the codebreaking puzzles.
(Spoiler - click to show)What Some Space actually wants to talk about is domestic violence. This is part of the main character’s backstory – a primary reason we’ve left earth and are ignoring our mom, it appears, is that our brother hit his kids, and our mom is defending him. And it’s also part of the main action, as the final sequence hinges on Amar being beaten up by his Koilian boyfriend, and then arrested by racist (Koilian) cops who blame him while letting the abusive boyfriend go free. I didn’t feel like this twist worked. First, it undermined the rest of the story for me – I was enjoying the experience of learning about another culture and trying to fit in with it, so seeing that society and one of its main representatives suddenly portrayed in this way made it feel like the main character’s efforts to get along with the Koilians were misguided. Second, it didn’t feel like it rang true with Amar’s characterization, as he’s portrayed as a kind, outgoing, talkative person, while his boyfriend comes off as a monosyllabic grump even before he’s revealed as an abuser; it was very hard to understand what we were supposed to understand Amar saw in him. I get that it’s hard to write this stuff in a way that doesn’t come off as melodramatic Lifetime-movie-of-the-week material, but all the more reason not to cram such a plot into a small part of the story. And finally, the swerve into melodrama made all the time spent on letter-substitution ciphers seem even more incongruous and unrelated to the story Some Space is telling.
It didn’t help matters that I sometimes found the game a bit clunky. There’s timed text, and I thought the custom font the author used wasn’t easy on the eyes. I did run into a few technical issues, with the game once hanging and forcing a restart after I failed to type in the correct answer to a puzzle. And while the writing is generally good, beyond the characterization issues mentioned above sometimes I found the worldbuilding didn’t fully hold together. For example, even though the Koilians are portrayed as hard for humans to understand, the main character often decodes their emotions with no difficulty, noting that one looks aghast, or perks up when you enter, which is at odds with the sense of displacement that the main character should be feeling.
Still, none of this slight wonkiness did much to detract from my enjoyment of the game, since for the first 80% of the game I was having fun as a code-breaking fish out of water – but for me, unfortunately the final act left Some Space less than the sum of its parts.
Misty Hill Hop, April 10, 2021I feel like there are a lot of chill, hang-out-y games in this year’s Spring Thing. I don’t know if that’s a coincidence, or a result of the past year meaning that spending some low-key time with other people seems especially appealing, but I’m all in favor of it – I’ve beaten a lot of evil overlords in a high-stakes race against time, so sometimes it’s nice to just smell the roses. This is pretty much the setup of Misty Hills, in fact: the main character has just come through an adventurous journey with only a few coins and miscellaneous possessions to their name. There’s one final step left in their quest – since you just missed the funicular to take you up the hill to home, now you’ve got half an hour to kill before the next one arrives.
You can definitely find some dangerous situations in Misty Hills – in fact you can even die, though the choices leading to those ends all but have neon signposts on them so it’s pretty much an opt-in affair. But you can also spend the time just chit-chatting with some locals, browsing a merchant’s wares without buying anything, or playing a dice game with the funicular operator for a few coppers. The time limit means you could even fritter away the thirty minutes taking half-hearted stabs at all of the above and not accomplishing much of anything before it’s time to run to the funicular.
While I usually find timers irritating, this one I didn’t mind it at all, since it’s integral to establishing the proper way to play: Misty Hills isn’t a game where you’re trying to optimize a complex series of tasks or beat the clock, but, as the author’s note says, you’re basically playing someone waiting for the bus. I’ve often been in that situation myself (is it weird that public transit is one of the things I’ve missed most during the pandemic?), and it definitely rings true that if you have one positive exchange with someone else, or notice one neat thing in the neighborhood, that’s more than enough to have gotten out of the experience.
This isn’t to say that the different diversions on offer aren’t interesting. I really enjoyed figuring out what was going on with the merchant and experimenting with the various items you can buy, learning a bit more about the funicular operator’s philosophy and backstory, and taking my tea a bunch of different ways, to say nothing of the more game-y exploits of exploring the well and the magic forest – the gambling game I thought was a little too random to be as enjoyable, but oh well, that’s how I feel about most gambling in real life too. There are a number of different interactions to discover, depending on the order you visit the different areas and what, if anything, you’ve gotten in your inventory. There are some typos, and I found a few small bugs (sometimes the game lost track of how much money I had, and one time after I restarted, it seemed to remember my previous interactions with some of the options in the well) but none of it’s especially goal-oriented: my biggest accomplishment was being adopted by a cat, which is actually a pretty big deal!
That was the only thing I did that I noticed changing the ending text – and that only slightly, because of course the story always ends in the same place, with the main character riding the funicular up the hill. But that’s all right – this was just a stop along the way, an opportunity to kill some time and maybe create one or two small memories to bring home.
Breezy and good-natured, April 10, 2021So this is the second entry from Bellamy Briks, and in a completely different development system (this one’s Twine, while Heroes! was Quest), which shows some impressive versatility. Though the settings are also quite distinct – we’re in a contemporary high school, not fairytale high fantasy – the vibe is once again high-energy and enthusiastic. This extends to the appealing visual presentation, which is all bright color and emphatic text effects (no drawings this time), as well as the prose, which is again appealingly bubbly. Structurally speaking, Miss No-Name isn’t a time cave and is actually fairly linear, though there are a couple of branches depending on your choices, and seven different endings; since it’s a short game, it’s easy to reach all of them, and while there are maybe only really three distinctly different ways the story can wind up, it’s zippy enough that I was glad to be a completionist.
It’s hard to talk too much about the story without spoiling it – the setup is that you’re the coolest kid in school, and you’ve taken a bet to learn the name of the mysterious new girl who just enrolled mid-year. For the most part this plays out about how you’d expect, with your choices either offering different strategies to pursue your goal, or giving you the option of having the main character stick to the bet or start to develop a real friendship with Miss No-Name. While there’s the possibility of a couple of different twists depending on how you play things, the game doesn’t have anything especially surprising in story – but that’s OK. Its strengths are using breezy prose (I loved all the little asides about how cool of a guy the main character is) to create a fun, relaxing mood, rather than in ratcheting up high drama. The mystery of Miss No-Name is mostly an excuse to hang out in this pleasant world, which is no bad thing.
Keep on trucking, April 9, 2021The setting and protagonist of Mean Mother Trucker are pretty novel for parser IF – you’re a transwoman big-rig driver in a last-chance truck stop at the desert’s edge – though the goal (taking the pretty waitress away from all this) and approach to puzzling (a traditional collect-a-thon) are more conventional. Still, it knows not to wear out its welcome, allowing the player to get in and out before the novelty’s worn off.
I can’t place the exact antecedents of MMT’s style, since this isn’t really a sub-genre I’m that familiar with beyond having played Full Throttle back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. But nonetheless I can tell the author’s doing a good job of capturing the tropes of truckcore or whatever we should be calling this. Here’s what you get when you examine the jeans you’re wearing:
"Empire-waisted relax fit jeans that still show off the ropy thigh muscles you built up from slamming on the gas pedal and the wide ass you built up from sitting in the cab 23 hours a day."
There’s the inevitable biker gang (though they’re born-again), truck-stop sexpot, and salty short-order cook, with the descriptions and dialogue all hitting a gritty, sleazy vibe that fits the material without going too far over the top. There are some flies in the ointment in the form of some small typos (quotation marks sub for apostrophes a couple of times) and spacing errors, but nothing too bad.
The puzzles are less interesting, though they’re fine enough as far as they go. To convince the lovely Flo that you’re lucky enough to make the Devil’s Taint run (like, to successfully drive through the bit of desert called the Devil’s Taint), you need to collect a pair of good-luck charms. This is accomplished through a pretty straightforward sequence of puzzles that typically boil down to USE OBJECT ON PERSON/THING. None of them are too brain-teaser-y, and while there are some unneeded objects, there aren’t so many red herrings that it gets confusing, and if it’s not always clear how any particular sub-puzzle contributes to achieving your goal, each of them is cued sufficiently well that the player can take on trust that they’re making progress.
I did find the technical implementation a little iffy. There are a couple of bugs – I was able to take my truck’s rear-view mirror, which I’m pretty sure should stay attached, and there’s one puzzle that, per some conversation on the IntFiction forum, is broken in a way that made me unsure how I solved it (it’s the one about getting the roadkill that’s stuck to the road, (Spoiler - click to show)which I later realized is supposed to require using the spatula, but the bug mean that if you just try to take it twice, you’ll get it on the second go). And overall there were fewer synonyms or alternate syntaxes than I’d like – for example, as I was trying to dislodge the roadkill with a stick I’d found, I couldn’t find any versions of PRY ARMADILLO WITH STICK that the parser would accept ((Spoiler - click to show)even if that’s not the intended solution, it does seem the sort of thing that should lead to a useful failure message).
None of these niggles really did much to undermine the fun I had with the game, though – solving a bunch of easy puzzles creates a lot of momentum, and the short length meant that the enjoyment I got from the setting and characters didn’t wear off through the drudgery of repetition. MMT is a lightweight, but it’s endearing while it lasts – I can picture a graphic-adventure version of it fitting in seamlessly among the more offbeat LucasArts classics.
A mine-r pleasure, April 9, 2021I didn’t have “Old West YA adventure” on my Spring Thing bingo card – and wasn’t shedding tears over its absence since neither are my favorite genre – but lo and behold, here’s Copper Canyon and it’s a lot of fun. This Ink game is canny about deploying its tropes: the player character is a plucky, appealing youth in a mining town whose life is upended by an inciting incident (a big earthquake that apparently kills his dad and shuts down the town’s raison d’etre), and who gets a team together to fight back against the black hats who take over in the resulting power vacuum. There’s nothing too surprising here – there’s a shocking twist or two, but they’re the kinds of shocking twists you’d expect to see in this kind of story – but there can be a lot of pleasure in playing the classics so long as they’re done well.
Fortunately, Copper Canyon does it quite well indeed, largely on the strength of its choices. There aren’t too many of these, but I found a high percentage of them to be tough, engaging decisions. One of the best comes early on as Tom, the player character, is gathering his team: one of the other teenagers who’s been invited to the meeting is your classic heel, bad-mouthing everybody’s plans and generally irritating the group. When given the choice whether to kick him out (because he seemed like a liability) or to keep him in (since better to keep tabs on him than have him angry and likely to blab to the baddies), I actually stopped for a couple of minutes to think it through. And most of the choices are like this, getting good dramatic milage out of only two or three options.
Making this even more impressive, I was surprised when I replayed the game and tried making all the opposite choices that not very much changed. This does mean there’s not as much branching as you think on your first play-through – I believe the choice of whether to be brave or clever in the opening determines who becomes your main sidekick, and I was able to die at the end by making what were pretty clearly dumb choices. But it also allows the author to keep control of this tightly-paced story while still making it feel like the stakes are high and the player’s decisions are significant ones.
As for the story itself, it’s workmanlike enough. Again, you’re pretty much looking at tropes all the way down, but it’s still fun to play through e.g. a sequence when you drive a dandyish gunman out of town by ruining all his suits. And the game does occasionally touch on some more serious and darker emotions – largely through the prism of melodrama, but it still gives Copper Canyon a note to play besides Boys Own Adventure (not to say that there aren’t female characters, as the Chinese-American Lin was my favorite of the sidekicks).
The prose supporting the game is sometimes over-verbose – we’re introduced to Tom as he’s “carving a face into an old apple as a gift for a girl he thought he might be interested in” – and there’s the occasional typo or anachronism, my favorite being the description of a drunk old coot of a miner as being recently “let go,” though it’s mostly good enough, and zippy enough, to keep things moving. But really it’s not the writing but the choices that provide the real motive force here.
Cleopatras Wake, April 8, 2021There’s a bit midway through the Bell Jar where the protagonist – a top-of-her-class college student with incipient mental health issues – takes a crack at reading Finnegans Wake, since she’s planned to write about it for her thesis. She gets about two paragraphs in, trying to decode the meaning of Joyce starting the novel’s first sentence with a lower-case word, noticing that there are a hundred letters in a long made-up bit of onomatopoeia, and wondering if Eve and Adam’s is a Dublin pub as well as a Genesis reference. Soon the letters are swimming on the page, “grow[ing] barbs and rams’ horns,” and she contemplates giving up on her thesis and maybe being a waitress instead. Within a couple chapters, she’s toying with suicide, then overdoses on sleeping pills and crawls into a crack below her house to die.
The reason I bring this up is that Queenlash is Finnegans Wake except instead of it being about Irishness (I think?) and a wake (probably?) it’s about feminism (sorta?) and the end of Ptolemaic Egypt (I’m on firm ground on this bit). Oh, and sometimes armies get annihilated by giant laser beams shooting out from the Pharos of Alexandria, plus it’s hypertext. While my experience of reading it went much better than did the aforementioned attempt at Joyce’s novel, I definitely felt frustrated and lost much of the time. Some of that’s about me going into it with incorrect expectations (this is a serious literary work and not much of a game – and very long), but there are two or three really significant flaws in the work that undermine its accomplishments – I’d peg it as maybe 30% successful. But given the scope of its ambitions, that’s still more than enough to make Queenlash a kind of masterpiece.
It’ll probably be helpful to go into a little more detail on how the piece works before getting too deep into talking through what works and doesn’t, though. What we’ve got here is a Twine novel in 22 chapters, centering on Cleopatra (VII, the one you’ve heard of) and running from the last phases of her internecine struggles with her siblings through her personal and political alliance with Caesar and ending with her death after his assassination and the ensuing Roman civil war. There’s clearly a deep knowledge of the history (including understanding which bits of the received story are likely scurrilous lies made up by unfriendly chroniclers), though the author does make some departures from fact, of which see more below. The writing is a dense, dreamlike, allusive stew – it’s basically a series of prose-poems, over 200,000 words’ worth from my quick peek at the html source. The introduction positions itself as an “eliuma” – a neologism meant to signify interactive novel – but I think the way the interactive elements work make it quite similar to literary hypertext: in each passage there are usually several highlighted words, and clicking on them takes you to a following passage according to an allusive, typically obfuscated, logic. Each reader starts and ends every chapter in the same place regardless of the path taken through the middle bits, and there isn’t continuity of choices between chapters.
I worry the nature of the prose didn’t sufficiently stand out in the above summary, but it’s very much the overwhelmingly salient feature of Queenlash. Here’s an example from the first chapter, where Cleopatra’s sister Arisnoe reflects on Alexandria’s great library:
"What about the library I love is it does not need me, will survive me. I am in it unnecessary, yet without me merely is it, is not in this, whatever I make of it. In a scroll there is the certainty of once bled to newly unstables, I harness in agonies their majesty celestials, in darkness they are not in they forever shine, I cannot see but how they break into me. Tens of thousands of pinpricks through the shroud scintillate lives I will never."
The key idea of the passage is a lovely one to me – humility in the face of so much knowledge, the agglomeration of books likened to the majesty of the stars – as well as revealing a strand of self-abnegation in Arsinoe’s character. With that said, I think there’s some clear awkwardness in parts – the “without me merely is it, is not in this” part is hard to parse with no clear benefit that I can see. Here’s another bit, though, that I think works less well (Cleopatra is describing a storm that may or may not be metaphorical):
"Lightning looms through clunking tons of clattering metal severed to shards to the lightless a rain each equally thirsting the skykiss, sizzlespear of a sacred violence, in their amalgamated I mosaic selfsame storm, stormtwin venomerator prorated in violence a violence, stunned by the sublimity of toxtricity, irradiated swampcore at critical mass fizzling the thunder toxic, pandemic vector voltburster."
There’s still some great use of language, especially the early clauses about lightning, but by the end of the passage, the neologisms and wordplay get overwhelming and, at least to my eye, a little silly (“irradiated swampcore at critical mass” being the worst offender). The whole piece is like this, and as mentioned, it’s very very long, so reading it is definitely work, albeit work that’s usually rewarded.
I mentioned a few critiques beyond some overwrought prose, though. I have three, though they’re all related and the first two are maybe just aspects of the last.
First, I repeatedly found myself wishing this were a novel instead of an interactive work – not because reading this much dense prose in the default, ugly Twine style made my head hurt (though it did in fact make my head hurt), but because I found the choice mechanics detracted more than they added from my experience of the story. As mentioned, so far as I can tell each chapter is shaped something like a diamond, with a single opening spreading out into many different passages that then cohere to a single end-point before passing off to the next chapter. The reader navigates by clicking individual highlighted words in a passage – usually there are between two and four options, but occasionally there are more, sometimes many more, like in a sequence where Cleopatra’s going to meet Caesar (I think riffing on the story of her being rolled up in a carpet), which boasts a dozen hyperlinks.
These links aren’t actions anybody in the story is taking, to be clear – in that library passage above, the links are “library”, “bled”, “majesty”, and “scintillate.” “Bled” leads to a passage where Arsinoe relates a vision she’s had to her tutor; “majesty” to one with a new vision of violence featuring Cleopatra; “scintillate” has Arsinoe coming ashore from a journey and having a different exchange with her tutor; and I confess that I can’t easily summarize the nature of Arsinoe’s self-reproaches in the passage linked from “library” (this kind of linking scheme is I think what the literary hypertext folks tend to use). I can see it being really meaningful for an author as part of their writing process, since seizing on a resonant word and spinning out its meaning and implications into a new scene seems like a valuable compositional tool. And If you’ve got deep familiarity with the work, I think it’s easy to appreciate the way pursuing different chains of allusion recast the overall story. But for a first-time reader, it’s pretty unengaging, since it can often feel like you’re just clicking random words with no rhyme or reason or impact on the narrative.
The second issue with Queenlash’s approach to interactivity is that crucially, while the branches don’t usually weave back together – or at least, where they do, it’s hard to discover that without copious use of the “undo” button – it appears that the bits of the story that you miss are still canonically meant to have happened. One example will stand for many more: after Arsinoe burned herself mostly to death in a thwarted suicide attempt and Cleopatra planned to finish the job, I’d thought she’d died, but according to the plot summaries the author helpfully includes in a nod to accessibility (out of perhaps-misplaced pride, I didn’t look at these until after I’d finished), it turns out that a different character –Porcia, the wife of Brutus – interceded with Caesar to spare Arisnoe and imprison her in a temple to Diana. When I played that chapter, you see, the choices I made in the opening passage skipped over that piece of the narrative and went right into some light politicking chez Cicero, meaning that I had no idea Arsinoe had survived – and I was deeply confused by who this new person in the temple of Diana was meant to be and why I should care about her!
My second overall criticism is also related to some surprises upon reading those plot summaries. I’d realized that there were departures from history here and there, but hadn’t fully understood until I dug into the recaps that the story also incorporates some over-the-top fantastical elements. Some of these work OK on their own terms, or aren’t too meaningful in the grand scheme of things – characters having visions of dead relatives which serve as links to their backstories are a nice trope, and the detail of moving the temple of Diana mentioned above from Ephesus to Rome certainly makes the logistics of the plot more convenient. But others felt to me like they undermined the story’s engagement with history. The characterization of the pre-Augustus Octavian, for example, as a self-loathing, gender-dysphoric obsessed with Caesar and lacking all agency took me out of the story since it seems less like an extrapolation of the historical figure, and more like a radical substitution. And this is especially the case with some of the fantasy elements – like, partially the reason Octavian is so weak is that in this story, actually “Augustus” is some sort of semi-undead gestalt of his corpse conglomerated with his psychotic twin sister. Perhaps this is just a genre preference and others who don’t care so much about their historical fiction being grounded would skate right by this stuff, but to me it felt unnecessary and weakened the thematic heft of the game’s engagement with a really rich historical period and set of characters.
Beyond issues of taste, though, I think use of these elements is also in tension with the requirements being placed on the reader to decode the challenging, incomplete prose and comprehend what’s happening. Since so much deduction is required to sift out meaning in many of Queenlash’s passages, including such out-there elements feels unfairly obscure, since I think most readers wouldn’t be likely to figure out that they’re reading about such strange events and would tend to interpret things metaphorically or allegorically.
This review has grown dramatically overlong, so it’s not without a certain sense of hypocrisy that I turn to my third criticism, which is that Queenlash is very much need of an editor. This isn’t a role that’s typically filled when it comes to IF – we tend to think in terms of “testers”, who do something different – but over and over, I would brush up against a frustrating element of the piece and wish the author had been able to work with a sympathetic reader to smooth out rough edges, strengthen the key themes, make sure the reader gets a sufficiently-good understanding of the story regardless of the path they take, and work out the pacing. As it stands now, it feels to me like an incredibly impressive first draft, but one in need of tightening in all the ways first drafts always require. Take the prose – I’ve lifted up some of the infelicities I noticed, but there are also some idiosyncrasies that a good editor could help iron out, like an overuse of words like “purls”, “gawps”, “icicle”, or “actress” being used as a verb, which are neat to come across once or twice but stick out with repetition, as well as some typos (“chilton” for “chiton”, “Cambryses” for “Cambyses”). Thematically, there’s a strand of anachronistic scientific imagery that runs through the prose, like the “critical mass” and “pandemic” stuff in the passage I quoted earlier, or mentions of “industrial flourescents” (sic, though this might be a pun) and, heavens forfend, a “volt turbid turbine”. As I read it, the piece doesn’t engage with technology or science in any significant way, so these bits of metaphor felt like were taking space from images and metaphors that would be more thematically resonant.
The pacing is where I think there’s the biggest gap between what Queenlash is and what it could be. Obviously this is far harder to wrangle with an interactive piece than a work of static fiction, especially here where any individual chapter could be much longer or much shorter depending on a reader’s choices, but still, there are some critical areas that feel either like a slog or too rushed. I found that the story sagged after the end of the Egyptian civil war and the transition to Rome – there were a lot of new characters introduced and the politicking felt lower-stakes since of course everyone knows where things are headed. And some of the sequences here, like Porcia’s dialogues with Arsinoe at the temple of Diana, sometimes felt interminable. Then when Caesar is assassinated, there’s immediately a long digression through Greek myth that serves a thematic purpose (it transitions Calpurnia’s fury as a woman scorned into cathartic violence by connecting her to antecedents like Medea) but it drains momentum at a time when action should be rising to the climax. And that climax felt quite hurried to me, with the last three or so chapters feeling underdeveloped as they rushed towards the inevitable suicides, as though the author was just ready to be done (to be fair, at that point I kind of was too).
There’s still so, so much more I could say about Queenlash – I haven’t touched on the FAQ or the primer, which are helpful resources that I wish I’d looked at before reading (though the FAQ made me feel bad for the author, who seemed to picturing a really hostile reception!). Nor have I talked about my favorite characters (Charmian was the best, and I really dug Octavia too) – and as is my wont I’ve spent far more time moaning about faults than celebrating what’s a unique, beautifully written, and thematically rich work that I could honestly see winning literary awards, after that round of editing, if it were a traditional novel. Since I do want to get to the rest of the games, I’ll leave things here – and just say for all its warts and somewhat forbidding aspect, Queenlash is a monumental effort that very much deserves to be read.
Take this job and kick it, April 7, 2021Ned Nelson really needs anger management classes, was the sense I got when the option "punch Mr. Jett directly in his face" popped up at the very beginning of Ned’s interview with his prospective new boss. Admittedly, said boss is an irritating tech-bro caricature, but beyond Ned’s titularly-established desperation for work, the violence seems completely out of scale with Jett’s fist-bumping, profanity-overusing ways, annoying though they may be. Ultimately, it turns out that he is more than deserving of Ned’s rage, but in this case the game’s jumping ahead before doing the work to get the player – or the protagonist – in the proper headspace, which is a flaw that threads through an otherwise well-executed game.
Since I’m also now running the risk of getting a bit ahead of myself, let’s take a step back: NNRNJ (which sort of looks like the noise the Hulk makes when he’s trying to lift a building, now that I type it out) is a Twine game in three acts, in which the down-on-his-luck Ned tries to work his way into Mr. Jett’s good graces, and thereby into employment. It’s linear, with success-or-failure checkpoints at the end of each of the first two sections, and then a number of instant bad ends once you’re in the climactic third. While I found it easy to get through the last act, the first two required a fair bit of trial and error. Fortunately, there are checkpoints to zoom you to the start of each of the sections, three levels of hints on offer every time you go wrong, and no overly-slow timed text or anything awful that would make replaying a pain.
The plot winds up being pretty solid – while the premise is all about acing the job interview, Ned also faces some challenges in navigating his first day on the job, with a few reveals, surprises, and triumphs along the way. It’s not at all subtle about its satire of startup culture and mores, with Jett’s boorishness completely over the top – not all the jokes landed for me, but there are some good ones. Like, I’ve had this interaction:
"You stand up and go to shake his hand, but halfway there he changes to a fist bump. You wind up awkwardly grabbing his fist. He then pulls you close to him and claps you on the back about three too many times."
And towards the end, you have the opportunity to call Jett out on his habit of assigning nicknames to his staff, and one hapless employee notes that he “would actually rather die than be called Sam the Clam.”
What works less well is that it feels like the game’s mostly working backwards from the third act. When you get there, it all generally works, but there’s oddness on the run up. As mentioned, the option to attack Jett shows up far too early to make sense – it needs to come after Ned, and the player, have more reason to detest him – but this isn’t the only misstep like this. When the receptionist is walking Ned into his interview, she has an oddly intense, familiar moment with him that makes sense in retrospect but feels jarring when first experienced. The idea that Ned hasn’t bothered to learn what the company does – and doesn’t think to do a quick search on his phone in the opening scene, when he realizes his mistake but is still waiting in the lobby – isn’t very believable either, indicating an authorial impatience to get to the fun reveals of the mid-game without laying the groundwork. And the one real puzzle sacrifices logic in service of paying off that “punch” option, again without at least lampshading it: (Spoiler - click to show)at the climax of act II, Jett takes you into one of the puppy-kicking booths to test your performance, giving you a choice of weapons to use to assault the poor dog. Obviously this is the moment you need to attack him and turn the tables, but the story only progresses if you’d picked the brass knuckles, which allow your punch to knock him out. But if you opt instead for say the nunchucks, the game for some reason has you drop them before making the punch, which of course is too weak to knock him out.
My other complaint is more personal and may be idiosyncratic, but I have to say the violence was less cartoonish than I would have preferred. The description of Jett’s long-awaited face-punching goes into detail about his septum snapping under the force of Ned’s fist – and the idea that this is the best experience Ned has ever had is just ugly. There’s also a reference to Jett being subjected to prison violence once he’s locked up. And then of course there’s the whole reveal – (Spoiler - click to show)literally kicking puppies, which is described more robustly than it needs to be. The satire isn’t sharp enough to go this dark, I don’t think, leading to some tonal clashes.
I’m harping on flaws, but I did enjoy NNRNJ once it caught up to itself, and Jett eventually does blossom into a good villain – it’s just a shame it doesn’t have the full scaffolding to get there.
IF just for one day, April 7, 2021Pure enthusiasm will get you pretty far in life, and Heroes! is proof this applies just as strongly to IF as it does anywhere else. Stripped to its essentials, what we’ve got here is just a time cave – literally the oldest structure for a choice-based game, with an initial choice of three different characters further ramifying into completely different adventures depending on whether, say, you opt to explore the woods or the castle. And the setting is just another fantasy world, with goblins and princes and creatures with silly names, and happy endings that typically involve cozying up to an age-appropriate opposite-gender companion of royal birth. But it works!
So first, about that structure. Time caves have lots of branching, with few choke points and many different endings – but whereas in the classic Choose Your Own Adventure version, many of those endings are unfairly sudden deaths, here it’s pretty hard to get a truly bad ending. True, there’s one correct “legendary” ending for each character, but there are a host of near-miss endings where you save the day or make friends for life, even if you do fall just short of achieving everything you ever dreamed. And the game does a good job of mixing up the kinds of choices on offer – mainly they are about pursuing different branches, but there are a few false choices that just offer a little bit of different scenery on the way to the same goal, and right answer/wrong answer binaries that either allow you to progress or bring your journey to an end. Combined with the modest length of any given path through the story, the choices being restricted to only offering one or two options at a time, and a fast Quest implementation that makes it simple to skip previously-seen passages, this means it’s fun to play Heroes! and easy to replay it to search out different threads of story.
Meanwhile, though the stories aren’t the most original things under the sun, they’ve got moxie (and fun illustrations with have a colorful, doodle-y energy to them). The eponymous heroes are all plucky underdogs out to prove themselves, and while they may occasionally be a bit naïve or act too rashly, they’ve got big hearts – getting the legendary endings typically involves finding a friend, building their self-esteem, and prioritizing their safety over anything else when the confrontation with the big bad goes down.
Sure, this means the different characters do sorta blend into each other; sure, obstacles are bottom-lined and solved almost as soon as they’re introduced; and sure, there are a good number of typos and odd bits of worldbuilding (one leader of bandits is referred to as a “drug lord”, for example). But it feels churlish to dwell on such things in light of how winning and feel-good the whole thing winds up being –just when you notice a flaw, the narrator will interject to make the player understands that ogres really do eat people so are you sure you don’t want to run away instead of helping a new-found friend (but of course you should stay and help. What else would a hero do?)
A lovely chill-out game, April 7, 2021In the last few comps and festivals I’ve played, for some reason the first game that’s come up in the randomizer has been something edgy, grimdark, and/or violent. What a pleasure, then, to start off instead with a winsome entry in the slice-of-life genre – and parser-based too, which tends to be my favorite. The premise is all right there in the title: there’s a dog needs walking, but our PC isn’t all that great at keeping track of either time or possessions so there’s some light puzzling to get through before Muffins’ micturitions can moisten the meadows (thankfully, despite the on-screen clock, there doesn’t appear to be a time limit).
Like many IF players, I’ve seen approximately eleventy-billion games by first-time authors – which Ell, from the credits, appears to be – where you start in an apartment and are faced with a series of quotidian household tasks, typically involving doors and/or screwdrivers. Here, the puzzles and implementation are good enough for the job at hand, but it’s the writing that stands out. I’ve already applied “winsome” to the game as a whole, but it’s the best description of the prose, too. It’s written informally and hits the ear easily, with a high density of gentle gags, but has more tricks than just the chatty voice – like the habit of responding to many instances of X [PIECE OF FURNITURE] with a dry, one-word summation like “lumpy” or “beige”. And the author’s done a good job of parceling out fun bits of writing to reward poking around this basically one-room game. Here’s a favorite sequence:
> X COLLAR
A pink sparkly collar with a link to hook a leash. It has a tag that says “MUFFINS.”
> TAKE IT
You give Muffins a scritch-scrotch and take off her collar. She looks confused and licks her nose, then trots over to the part of the living room where there should really be a rug but isn’t.
> X RUG
Oh, you had to get rid of your rug after your old roommate spilled matcha on it. You’re completely over it, though.
> PUT COLLAR ON MUFFINS
You put Muffins’ collar back on. Muffins looks like she wishes you’d make up your mind, but you could just be reading too much into her beady little expression.
None of that was at all helpful for reaching my objective, but for a low-key game like the one in hand, this is just what one wants, with random exploration yielding small conversational asides instead of the player being channeled towards the solution by overserious parser-responses.
With that said, while most of the game is easygoing enough, there is one puzzle where its laissez-faire approach provides insufficient direction: the last hurdle to getting Muffins to the park is to find your missing shoes, which don’t turn up no matter how assiduously you look under or behind the furniture (I should say that it’s nice that these options are provided for!) The hint that I “always have trouble finding them in daylight”, since they’re apparently going-out shoes, made me think I needed darkness, put I couldn’t figure out how to make that happen. Fortunately, there’s a walkthrough provided that got me unstuck, but the intended solution – (Spoiler - click to show)TURN OFF LIGHTS – doesn’t feel like it’s playing fair, (Spoiler - click to show) since electric lights or switches aren’t described anywhere even if you examine the walls or ceiling, and beyond that the game starts at 9 AM so I assumed daylight was the bigger problem.
As mentioned, the implementation is generally solid. I ran into a few niggles – when I tried to give Muffins commands, the game understands MUFFINS, SIT as asking her to sit on her collar, which doesn’t make much sense, and I missed getting full points since I found the superior leash before the inferior one, which appears to have prevented me from getting points for picking up the latter. Plus I saw a couple of line-break issues. But especially for what appears to be a first effort, it’s well put-together in terms of coding, as it is in every other area, save that one iffy puzzle. Take the Dog Out is a lovely bagatelle, and hopefully a good omen for the other games to come!
Thanks but no thanks, December 13, 2020So YWTMaFAYTaW – I feel like I need an acronym for the acronym, why don’t we just go with Thank a Werewolf – so Thank a Werewolf’s About text says that this is a “collaboration” with the GPT-2 text generation algorithm, which involved feeding the program bits of the author’s (static, I assume) fiction, then curating and arranging the output to form the game. I went into the experience deeply skeptical that I’d find anything interesting in it, and I have to confess that nothing in the game wound up changing my mind.
I can’t really talk about the story or the premise since this is all algorithm-driven gobbledygook – the blurb’s claim that it’s about “a lifelong romantic relationship” I think must be a joke about the relationship between the author and their work, rather than about anything depicted in the text. Format-wise, you get a couple paragraphs of prose then one or two hyperlinked lines at the end that lead to the next bit of the story; I assume there’s branching but given the lack of narrative coherence, much less cause-and-effect, I’m not sure what difference or impact this would have. Most passages have one or two footnotes, which expand when clicked: I think these might be the prompts used to generate the text, since they often used the same words as showed up in the main text, but were uniformly more coherent and interesting than what was above.
If there’s not a consistent narrative, there’s perhaps a somewhat more consistent tone, beyond of course the omnipresent surrealism – most of the generated text feels like it’s about younger people, late teenagers to twentysomethings, sad about stuff and unsure about what they’re doing (I mean, fair enough). And there were a few scattered bits that had some zing to them. This was probably my favorite:
"I began to write the descriptions of my wishes. Letters with descriptions of things I wanted to happen, wishes that were already in the cards. An ambulance for a sick child. A dog for its owner. A car so nice it needs a full-sized garage. My first kiss. Your first kiss with me."
But that’s almost immediately followed by:
"I was the best cheerleading man in high school, and you were the best kisser in college. But you never kissed me glumly, always raising your hand majestically, like a majestically colored bikini. You kissed me so high that my boots creased the carpet beneath you."
And
"This town doesn’t cook delicious, but it does let you eat whatever the fuck you want. Your ovaries are like television, only they are hooked on the news. You can’t even spell rhyme or reason correctly. The stagehands send out the correct notes. The comedian sets the tone; the crowd gets funnier. It’s all a matter of perspective."
For a tone poem, one or two high points might be enough, but this thing is also at least two or three times longer than it should be – once my brain twigged to the fact that it was just watching a slot machine, I found it really hard to push on.
I do get the appeal, if not fascination, this sort of thing can have for a writer: the prospect of looking at your work through a glass, darkly, so you can apprehend it in a new way. I wrote a (very bad) novel in my younger days, about high-school wrestlers who I must confess were far more foul-mouthed even than Tom Trundle, and when I finished the first draft I excitedly ran it through Word’s (I think now deprecated) autosummarize feature, only to see my 300-page novel turned into three paragraphs of this:
"Fuck. “What if Coach found out?” Jesus, Coach. The first match I wrestled? Fuck. Three matches. Fuck. Fuck. “Yeah.” “Right.” “Yeah, right.” “Oh, right.” “Right.” “Redford?” “Yeah, yeah. Fucking math. Shit.” “Fuck. Fuck. Fucking test. Very helpful, Redford.” Redford nods. “Right.” “Fuck.” “Ah,” sighs Redford. “If only.” Everybody likes Redford. Anais? Fuck. “Yeah.” “Uh, right.” Redford’s word."
I died laughing – this is actually my ghost writing this – and resolved to tone down the profanity somewhat. As a way to change perspective, or add a bit of surprising flavor to the hand-crafted sauce (this metaphor has gotten away from me), I can see the value of procedurally-generated text – and I’m sure in twenty or thirty years Skynet will have come for the writers the same way it’ll have come for everybody else – but in the meantime, the werewolf’s getting no thank-yous from me.
A focused look at a traumatic experience, December 13, 2020There are a fair few pieces of IF that explore feelings of constraint or paralysis by seeming to offer choices but then negating the player’s attempts at agency – Rameses, most famously, or I was partial to Constraints from a couple years after. There’s also lots of IF involving neuroatypical protagonists, from your garden-variety aliens or disembodied consciousnesses to, as here, more grounded examples like autistic folks. I don’t recall seeing the two of these elements combined in the way YCHDT does, which makes for a marriage of theme and form that elevates this short story about a traumatic event.
We know going in that the player character is autistic, and the opening does a good job of laying out what that means for the protagonist: challenges with eye contact, comfort in repetitive activities, difficulty speaking when triggered. There are small, well-drawn incidents or choices that establish each of these pieces before the main story kicks off, which helped me better orient towards how to portray the character. Indeed, they did such a good job that I don’t think I realized how the choices work until I did a replay: while you do occasionally get choices that would push against Theo’s boundaries, when you try to select these you get told You Couldn’t Have Done that and sent back down the other path. While this means I missed out on some of how YCHDT works on my initial foray, I don’t think that undermines the intended experience since I’d basically internalized the constraints.
The story is really about setting up, then relating, a single traumatic encounter, so it’s very focused throughout its short length. This does mean that there are some elements in the first half or so of the game that seem odd, as there are specific details and characters’ actions that seem to get disproportionate attention. The actions of the antagonistic character slowly escalate over time, and grow increasingly pushy and bizarre. Again, there’s a good synthesis of tone and theme here, since this gives an off-kilter, horror-movie vibe to proceedings.
When the traumatic event comes, it similarly has a lot of terrible immediacy, and again a few strange, specific details keep the engagement high (I think I saw another review mention that this is based on an actual experience of the author, which is awful). YCHDT doesn’t wallow in awfulness, though, and after this crisis the main character does get some support, which I was glad of as otherwise I was worried the game might feel pretty bleak. I will say I was a bit surprised there wasn’t more of the aftermath portrayed, though – I wanted to know a bit more about how Theo wound up processing the event, and how, if at all, it impacted her moving forward. But I think the game is quite effective as it stands, and was stable and almost entirely typo-free – I feel a bit dumb because I often say “this game does exactly what it’s trying to do”, but since there are so many different ways of writing good IF it’s worth acknowledging when one, like YCHDT, is exemplary for its type.
A deep world that's a little too hard to get into, December 13, 2020I’m not sure what I ever did to it, but the Comp randomizer apparently has decided to punish me by stacking rock-hard games one after the other. WtWOBF (that’s an awful acronym, but I’m stymied for alternatives) is a Twine game with extraordinarily lavish production values – there are lovely paintings, some video, a fancy interface with plenty of neat flourishes – set in a compelling world that features hard-edged examinations of trauma and moral compromise in a fantasy version of the American Southwest. Unfortunately for me, I also found that the copious RPG-style mechanics layered on top of the story tended to take me out of it, and even when playing in “God mode” I hit dead ends, meaning I couldn’t finish the game in two hours.
Right, starting with the story side of things: the world is a major draw here, as there’s clearly a lot of thought that’s gone into the relationships between different sets of people, how to translate real-world events and situations like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the meth epidemic into a fantasy context, and developing a big cast of distinct, appealing characters. Some of this world-building comes in a little clumsily (partially due to how it’s tied to the game mechanics, for which see below), and whenever it talks about guns the voice shifts into a hyper-detailed mode that I’m not sure serves the overall tone and worldbuilding well (like, was there a like were-badger engineer named Glock in this setting?) – but on the whole it’s compelling stuff, and the writing does a good job of anchoring these grounded themes and concerns in a world of magic and talking animals.
The situations presented by the plot are also pretty grabby. The opening frame story does a good job of evoking survivor’s guilt, and the other major segments I encountered, involving a teenager’s difficult relationship with her aunt, and a compromised man attempting to live a moral life in a world that doesn’t give people like him that choice, are also dealing with serious issues in a serious way. It definitely gets grim – pay attention to the content warning on this one, folks, and don’t discount it just because there are furries! – in a way that I sometimes found hard to take, but I think WtWOBF comes to those moments fairly.
The game side of things I thought didn’t work so well, and at times served to undermine the solid writing and intriguing dilemmas the narrative presents. There are several layers of mechanics at play here – the most obvious is an RPG system where you assign points to various skills or traits, like Brains or Swift Feet, during character creation. Then during play, occasionally these traits will be tested, and if you succeed you might see them increase while unlocking a bonus backstory, or if you fail they might decrease.
Beyond these traits, there’s also a “Lore” score that seems to gate progress, and similarly goes up or down with your choices – you can get a game over screen if your Lore number isn’t sufficiently high at the end of a chapter, and I saw a lot of these. Partially this may be because I was playing the RPG minigame wrong – I have to confess I wasn’t sure what rhyme or reason there was to when they went up or down, and since the viewpoint character changes several times, it was pretty unclear whether they represent anything in-game, or are just meant as a sort of out-of-world plot token. There also may be an element of (unexplained) random chance, because sometimes on replays I think the same choices I’d succeeded with earlier failed when tried again. I also found character creation challenging, since it doesn’t feel like you’re given a large pool of points, there’s no advice on whether specialization is better than going for a generalist approach, and feedback on whether e.g. a 5 in Brains is good, bad, or mediocre.
Beyond the RPG system that allows you to try different actions in the world, most pages also have a minigame of sorts embedded in them (though some of the aspects described here were altered in a mid-Comp update -- see the addendum below). There are numbered hyperlinks in many of the passages, some of which advance to the next passage, some of which expand the text on the page. The sidebar will usually have a “hint” listed – these start out easy, for example just as “2”, which indicates that if you click the link labeled 2 first, you’ll probably get a reward of stats gain or Lore increase or see your backstory codex filled in. These quickly get more complex, with wildcards thrown in and not all the options visible from the off.
Here’s an example from the mid-game - the hint here says “1, 2, ?”:
"Bobcat surveyed the slaughterhouse. Time had not been kind to it. The place was old, rundown. Yet surprisingly all the equipment had been well-maintained or replaced with new gear. A row of new galvanized steel pens occupied a portion of the left wall. There were a great many (1.) tools and machines.
"Long metal work tables occupied the back, along with cattle splitting saw, band saws, leg saws, and a giant (4.) Thompson 61000 Industrial Mixer Grinder.
"A handful of Synth crammed inside the pens started bellowing, as though pleading to be spared their grim fate."
This means I’m supposed to click the first link, which expands the text to show a link numbered (2), which I click in turn to reveal link (3). Then I’ve got a 50-50 chance of guessing right and unlocking the reward (I clicked 3, and failed).
I found trying to engage with this minigame required me to go out of world, since success seems random rather than linked to the world or text in any concrete way. The interface also doesn’t help – I found the interface sidebar sometimes moved to the side, but sometimes was below the main text, so I had to do a lot of clicking and scrolling. Winning a test often unlocked a new bit of backstory or a mission in the sidebar, which involved more clicking and being out of the story. All told, it’s a lot of cruft that I found messed with the story’s pacing, creating a juddering start-and-stop rhythm.
It would be one thing if it were possible to opt out of this part of the game, but I don’t think that’s possible without activating the God Mode that maxes all your stats – I tried to replay the second chapter five times, but failed due to insufficient lore each time, which seemed disconnected from the actual choices I’d made (perhaps I’d just done too badly In the first chapter, so I was in a dead man walking scenario)? Even after I restarted in God Mode, I still reached a dead end, due to a choice that was probably risky, but which didn’t seem completely unwarranted by any means (Spoiler - click to show)(as Diamondback, using magic to blast Bobcat.
By that time I’d used up the full two hours of the judging period, sadly. Not to be a broken record, but I would like to see more of this story and this world (the Book I subtitle is hopefully a good sign on that front), but retuning the difficulty and de-cluttering some of the gamier elements here would be helpful upgrades.
MUCH LATER ADDENDUM: The game has seen a pretty substantial update since I wrote this review, so I went back to check it out. A bunch of the issues I mentioned in this review have definitely been addressed, but I’d say they’ve been reduced in salience rather than completely ironed out. The hints have definitely gotten better – they’re now cryptic little sentences incorporating words from the passages, and engaging with them is more immersive than the non-diegetic numbered hints in the previous versions. The progress-gating lore checks have been relaxed a bit, though not eliminated – in a non-God-mode playthrough, I was able to get into Chapter 3 before getting stuck when Pink Belly refused to reveal his secret.
Seeing a little more of the game, I was able to discover that some things that seem like choices are actually a bit on rails – which I was actually impressed by, since it does a good job of creating an illusion of choice. I was also able to get close to the end of the story, as the different characters’ paths began to come together, but unfortunately ran into a bug that prevented me from seeing the end (I was told I unlocked “the gem of quickness” and got a bonus applied, but then couldn’t click anywhere). So still a little bit of technical stuff to clean up, but this version is definitely easier to get into, and the writing and worldbuilding remain strong throughout.
Made me miss my commute, December 13, 2020Weird confession: I’ve been a public-transit user all my life, and now that I haven’t had a commute in over six months – I kind of miss it? Despite the fact that What the Bus? presents public transit commuting (accurately, at least by my experience living in LA!) as a surrealistic nightmare of mysterious delays, interminable transfers, and subterranean disorientation, I sank into it like a warm blanket, partially because it was scratching an itch I didn’t know I had. Again and again I smiled in fond recognition at things that are, objectively, awful:
“You follow signs for the Blue Line through a long tunnel, up a flight of stairs, down a shorter flight of stairs, up another flight of stairs, through some sort of central lobby with an insane number of passages branching off of it, and then down a hallway that you feel like has one too many right turns.”
Yup, I’ve transferred from the 1 to the A-C-E in New York by going through that awful Times Square to Port Authority tunnel, this is exactly right.
“The train is packed, other than one conspicuously empty seat, which you avoid.”
This is obviously correct behavior.
After complaining to a friend about delays:
“Yeah, I hate that, Chris replies. Especially when it’s due to an unspecified emergency or the existence of seasons. Those are the worst.”
Indeed, who at a transit agency could have ever predicted seasons!
Admittedly, there’s not much to the game besides navigating the Kafkaesque labyrinth in search of the ten endings, which are helpfully tracked for you – though I like to think the fact that I got to my office successfully on my second try indicates that real-life skill with public transit translates. But there’s plenty to enjoy along each of the branches, and the “Back” button at the bottom of each passage makes it easy to check out other paths. And now that I’ve played What the Bus?, I think I miss my commute a little less!
A story-driven game that takes some effort to enjoy, December 13, 2020The Wayward Story lives up to its title – this is a narrative-driven piece of IF that wends through a bunch of different characters, settings, times, and even genres. There is an overall structure that unifies the whole, but ultimately I think it plays its cards a little too close to the vest. Players who do the work to make the puzzle pieces fit will experience a satisfying click, but I can’t help wishing TWS did a little more to invite the needed effort.
It’s tough to talk about the game without going into a little bit of detail on at least the structure of the game, so expect some light spoilers from here on out (I’ll still spoiler-block anything major). Briefly, there are three major types of scenes: first, there’s the core thread of the game, which follows an isolated loner who falls asleep while watching TV and then finds himself in a strange, dark castle. Then while exploring, he’s drawn into three scenes, each set in a different genre of escapist fiction (post-apocalyptic, fantasy, Indiana Jones-style adventure) – these are the gamiest parts of the piece. And finally there are a series of vignettes set in the real world, at varying points in time and with different viewpoint characters.
There are a variety of linkages between all these different parts, some of which are clearer than others, and working through them is where the real meat of the game lies, since there aren’t really challenges or puzzles in the traditional sense. In each of the three genre-y scenes, you’re given a single clear task or direction, but it’s simple enough to follow directions to reach the end. However, each of them also has an optional alternate path. In retrospect it’s clear these are moral choices, and the game responds accordingly, but one of my quibbles with TWS is that some of them are very easy to overlook (the one in the post-apocalyptic scenario is straightforward enough, but the desert one requires what may be a tricky leak of logic, and whether or not you even notice that there’s a choice at all in the fantasy vignette turns on whether you explore off the beaten path when there’s reason not to do so).
There’s nothing wrong with hiding some pieces of a story, but here I think there are a few design decisions that compound the risks that some players will miss out on what’s really going on. First, depending on what choices you make in the three game-y scenes, you appear to either get different real-world vignettes, or none at all. Second, there’s a fake-out that I think is too effective (Spoiler - click to show)(after you reach the end, the game appears to restart – you need to keep playing and see what’s changed to get to the real ending, but there aren’t immediate indications that this is intended and not a bug so it’d be easy to assume you’ve reached the end and it’s time to quit). If a player starts poking around and gets to some of the harder-to-find bits, I think they’re more likely to be hooked and keep exploring to try to fully understand what’s happening – but if they don’t, I’m not sure they’d even notice that there’s stuff they’re missing.
This is a shame because there’s a lot to like here. The writing isn’t overwrought, but it conveys the main character’s isolation effectively through some simple but smart tricks: for example, the apartment where the game begins has its furniture described with each piece broken out on its own line, and called out as being empty, or standing alone. Effort is made to make sure the narrative voice is distinct for each of the various characters, and while this sometimes leads to overcorrection – I found the tone in the first vignette, where you play as Jack, a bit over-the-top – in general it works. Different scenes also use color to create or shift the mood, which worked well for me, as well as helping make the structure clearer. The text is close to typo-free, and the parser is implemented well as far as I can tell, though again, as a beta tester, that’s hard for me to really assess. Overall TWS is very much worth playing – it just takes a little bit of work to get to what’s good about it.
So funny it's scary (it's not actually scary), December 13, 2020(I beta tested this game)
It’s an iron law of comedy that nothing’s as funny the second time around (leaving aside things like the Simpsons rake gag where repetition is the point). It’s still fun to see the punch lines form up and get ready to arrive, and a solid joke is a solid joke no matter whether it’s your first time seeing it, but robbed of the surprise, it’s just never going to land the same way. Why, then, did I find myself giggling when I just replayed Vampire Ltd, despite having run through it two or three times while testing it? Partially I’m sure it’s my sieve-like brain – it has been a couple months since the testing – and there are definitely a few new gags since then, but mostly it’s that the writing has bite.
Pleasantly, this isn’t a matter of individual jokey bits coming at the expense of a consistent, well-realized world, nor is it a case of funny writing making up for wonky design or buggy implementation. The humor comes straight out of the premise and characters, so before I get to the fun part of highlighting some of the bits that made me laugh the hardest, let’s get the setup out of the way.
We’re in a revenge-cum-corporate-espionage caper, with the vampire main character hell-bent on getting back at their former mentor, who’s now running a green-energy company. Vampires, as it turns out, have set their sights higher than just sucking the blood out of humanity one at a time, and now scale the loftiest heights of capitalism (and in the game!) The player character, however, is a bit of a failure (“Just because of a handful of failed startups and lawsuits and bankruptcies?”, he asks himself incredulously, and looking at the state of American politics at least it’s hard to fault him), and so decides to infiltrate his rival’s corporate campus looking to wreck and/or steal the new energy breakthrough (it is not exactly a well-laid plan).
This kicks off a series of gentle puzzles, all of which are well-clued, with one great gag that’s also completely logical thrown in there (Spoiler - click to show)(the bit with the grapes). A particularly clever touch is that as you go about the early stages of the game – acing your interview for a customer-service job, gaining access to all corners of the corporate campus, guessing an idiot’s computer password – it teaches you about the weaknesses vampires have in this setting. They’re almost but not exactly the same as what’s in traditional vampire law, but it’s especially handy to have all of these reminders before the inevitable confrontation with your rival. And implementation is rock-solid throughout, with nary an unimplemented bit of scenery or overlooked synonym. My favorite example is what happens if you try to drink the blood-bag you’ve brought along as a snack in the first scene, where you’re amidst the crowd watching a press conference – after you write BITE BAG, the game spits out “(first turning discreetly away from the audience)” before describing your nosh. That’s an awesome bit of attention to detail, plus gains additional kudos for using the word “discreetly” correctly, which basically never happens in video games!
All this means that the writing is given the support it needs to shine. The humor is really all about how much capitalism, er, sucks, but it doesn’t rest on that perhaps too-easy premise and goes the extra mile with sharp, specific jokes. The entire job interview is a highlight – turns out answering that “what’s your greatest weakness?” question is more complex if you’re a vampire! – but even the throwaway gags are great. There are a set of construction workers early on, and if you try to talk to them, the main character rebuffs you, saying “you don’t like being outnumbered by labour.” The janitor on anti-vampire strike was another highlight, explaining her protest this way:
“It’s against vampires. Especially our guy in charge. It’s against vampiric systems. It’s against the exploitation of labour on long hours and low pay. It’s for changes at the highest level for Lunarcel and every other company which lines its own pockets at the expense of workers. It’s for radical new ways of being which aren’t built on blood and toil.” (You don’t like this woman.)
There are maybe one or two places where the prose could be pared down a little (the job interview scene is great, but the responses to the joke answers are maybe 20% longer than they need to be). But in general the writing’s got snap. I mean, here’s the villain of the piece crowing about his great invention: “Oh, some of the staff carped at me about inefficiency, and how hard it is to safely contain a nuclear explosion, and how it shouldn’t have a window.”
All in all, Vampire Ltd has it where it counts – ulp, I’ve just been informed I’ve exceeded my vampire-joke quota and this review is now over. Sorry folks!
Prepare to feel very clever, then very dull, December 12, 2020This is a hard review to write – both because my transcript didn’t wind up getting saved so I’m bereft of notes, and because my take on the game shifted a fair bit over the course of my time with it, and I’m having a hard time reconciling my views. If you’d asked me an hour in, I’d have said Vain Empires was a commanding Comp front-runner, with clever puzzles that lead to lots of self-satisfied “aha” moments, an archly funny tone, and a diamond-bright polish on its implementation. By the time I finished – which was about two hours later, after I’d locked in my score – though, some of the bloom had come off each of those roses. The first half is legitimately great, and it was compelling enough to keep me playing after the two-hour cutoff despite 70-odd more games still waiting for me, so I don’t mean to undercut what’s a significant achievement, but I think some of the late-game missteps are worth drawing out too.
Let’s lead with the good, of which there’s rather a smorgasbord. The conceit is that the player is an incorporeal demon, a lawyer-spy on the front lines of a supernatural Cold War who’s been tasked with cleaning up some codebooks from a spy-post that’s been compromised by their angelic opposite-numbers. Said codebooks are all hidden in spiritually-inviolable containers, requiring the demon to enlist various humans to its cause, by judicious use of an intention-planting mechanic that’s inspired (with attribution) by Andrew Plotkin’s Delightful Wallpaper.
To give a (made-up so as not to spoil any puzzles) example: say you’d discovered that one of the codebooks was hidden in a closed piano, but the piano player has the DRINK intent and is just pounding down cocktails instead of doing their job. You might nip out to the sidewalk, see a child chalking hopscotch squares in the sidewalk, and take the PLAY intent from them. One GIVE PLAY TO PIANIST later, you’d have solved the puzzle.
This is just a simple example, but the puzzles even from the off are significantly more complex than this. Most involve manipulating the intentions of two or more characters, out of a list that starts around half a dozen and soon grows even larger. The second major segment adds an additional complexity (mechanical spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)adverbs), and timing and sequencing are critical, and so while the concept is simple, there’s a lot of satisfaction in looking through your tool-belt and figuring out how to best manipulate the sheep, er, humans, around you. The game also does a good job of keeping each codebook puzzle relatively self-contained – while there are ultimately a fair number to find (one I think is optional), they’re segmented into three major sections, and within each section you can generally solve in any order you like, with the humans you need for a particular puzzle clearly grouped around the codebook you’re going for.
The puzzles are definitely the main draw here, but the writing and implementation are highlights too. The protagonist has a devilishly sly voice (go figure), intent on its mission while taking time to comment on the incomprehensible foibles of the humans it observes. The metaphysical Cold War idea is not fully novel, but it’s a spry premise that makes good sense of the gameplay, and the authors offer some clever repurposings of supernatural tropes into the new spy-thriller idiom (Spoiler - click to show)(using the bell, book, and candle as a direct line to a hellish Q knock-off was an especially fun touch). The mundane setting – a glamorous hotel and casino – is described with just the right amount of detail, and the implementation is as smooth as butter. You can be sure just about everything mentioned in a room description will be available to examine, without drowning the scene in detail; and there are some nice implementation touches, like the way the game limits the combinatorial explosion inherent in the mechanics by saying that some intents only impact a human “vaguely”, implying that this isn’t a fruitful avenue to pursue. There’s also a gorgeous blueprint map always visible on the top of the screen, which helps make sense of the fairly large world.
If I’d stopped after the hour and a half that’s listed on the tin – I think about the time I finished the second of the main segments – that would be all she wrote, and I’d have stamped “MODERN CLASSIC” upon its brow and we’d be done. Sad to say, there’s a lot of game after that second segment – a full third area, then a transitional escalation sequence, before a multi-part finale. And here, things don’t feel quite as polished. On a prosaic level, that’s because I suddenly started seeing some typos and missing scenery, which earlier had been notable by their absence (for the typos; for the scenery I suppose notable for the absence of their absence?)
But the plot also takes a turn for the more earnest and raises the stakes, in a way that didn’t feel particularly well-aligned with what had come before (Spoiler - click to show)(if there was a major arms agreement happening in the hotel, wouldn’t there have been some sign of that in the hotel and casino areas, or some mention made before arriving there – or even some relationship to the boring trade deal that you actually wind up engaging with in the third segment, which seems a weird thing to be doing on the sidelines of something like this? And isn’t it awfully coincidental that the compromised demonic spy-den also just happens to be the site of said conference?). Plausibility is one thing, but this also shifts the tone: instead of a cynical, omnicompetent operative, the protagonist becomes a self-righteous hero (Spoiler - click to show)trying to preserve a delicate détente against Heavenly adventurism. Again, this feels like a left (or rather, right) turn from what’s come before, and is less fun and funny to boot.
All of this would be forgivable but for the way the puzzles tip over into overcomplexity. Whereas most of the puzzles in the previous sections have clear, physical goals that you can achieve by manipulating two or at most three characters, the puzzles in this next section were an order of magnitude more challenging. Partially this is just the accretion of intents – these aren’t used up as you go, so by the end you’ve got a huge inventory to juggle. While in the early going, punny or non-obvious interpretations of intents led to some fun moments of lateral thinking, in the late stage they become de rigueur, which made me resort to rote trial and error (for a flavor of this, (Spoiler - click to show)giving OPEN to a diplomat leads them to want to start negotiations, while EXPLORE makes them want to simplify the language of a potential trade deal by looking at different wording options). Combined with the added system I mentioned above, this means the player is often staring at a giant toolbox and not sure what any of it will do.
The situations themselves also become less concrete (Spoiler - click to show)(such as concluding a three-party trade deal or sabotaging a diplomat’s speech), and the descriptive text setting up what’s happening in each also starts to get less useful (Spoiler - click to show)(I still don’t really know how the briefcase made it onto the chandelier, or why OPEN and FOLD are used to start and stop the speechwriter’s radio feed). By the end, I was using the hints copiously – and even then got stuck on one of the finale puzzles for half an hour because I wasn’t sure exactly how to do what it was saying (there’s no walkthrough, just the hints). It doesn’t help that the finale also feels like it goes on too long: twice, I solved what I was sure was the final puzzle, only to groan when it only opened up another, even bigger, puzzle.
I don’t like wrapping up my review with grousing, since Vain Empires at its best is very very good indeed, and it stays at its best for a long time. And even when it hits the weaker final part, I’d still say it’s quite good! But it’s hard to avoid feeling like there was a missed opportunity here, and that with some judicious cuts and tightening this’d be one for the record books. My advice? Walk away after finishing the hotel segment, vanishing into the air like all good spies should (and await, perhaps, a post-Comp release that brings the latter sections to the same high polish as the first).
Erwhelming Ovay, December 12, 2020Friends, I have a confession. I have now played two Andrew Schultz games (this one and Very Vile Fairy File from last year), and they both have the same effect on me: as I stare at the words on the screen to try to make sense of them and respond in kind, my vision starts to swim, I begin to babble, language dissolves as words themselves decay into meaningless nonsense-sounds, and I feel the cold immensity of a vast, amoral universe that cares nothing for humanity and our feeble attempts to apprehend it through logic, mathematics, and language. Great Cthulhu can do his worst and Yog-Sothoth can get in line: I have played Under They Thunder, so all your threats are empty.
If the title doesn’t give it away, the central gimmick of Under They Thunder is pig Latin: the player character embarks on an epic adventure to help a big-box retailer defeat an angry monster-fae army (I think? See above, my sanity as I took my notes was questionable), all through the power of inverting a word and adding a friendly “ay!” syllable to the end. There are relatively-simple fill-in-the-blank puzzles where you need to take the prompting of the name of an object or location and de-piggify it, guess-the-noun puzzles where given a certain pattern of phonemes, you need to run through all the options you can think of, and a set of more traditional puzzles where you need to read a particular book (or, I think, hum a particular tune) to teach you the lessons, or put you in the mood, needed to see off an overbearing interloper.
I should say, I can tell this is a very well-crafted game – both because it’s huge, with the central puzzle mechanic run through its paces and ramified in every way imaginable (each language puzzle seems to be worth a point, and there are 144 of them!) and because there are a thoughtful set of helper gadgets, hint features, and speedrun options that try to meet every player where they are at. This is a game for a very specific audience, but the author also provides every possible on-ramp to help you figure out whether you might be part of that audience and just don’t know it yet.
This is commendable, and I totally can intellectually see the appeal, but it just doesn’t work for me. My mind doesn’t bend the right way to make the puzzles comprehensible, and privileging wordplay over the merest sop to mimesis (do we still talk about mimesis?) takes me out of the world because the whole thing feels like chaos. I got maybe five percent of the way in under my own steam, looked to the walkthrough to eke out a couple of additional points, then used the fast-forward options to zoom to the end, though unsurprisingly didn’t find the finale especially edifying given all I missed.
By all means, give this one a try – Under They Thunder wants you to like it, it’ll invite you right in – just don’t be surprised if your brains are running out your ears before too long.
Great main character, plodding pacing, December 12, 2020Ulterior Spirits has a lot going for it. There’s a well-realized setting that certainly takes inspiration from things we’ve seen before (Mass Effect is name-checked in the blurb), but has some nice bits of world-building all its own. The protagonist is immediately engaging, a middle-aged bureaucrat and mother who’s haunted by her actions in the past and her prejudices in the present. And there’s an unexpected framing around Christmas, foregrounding family, forgiveness, and generosity, which are not typical themes for something with these sorts of genre trappings. On the other side of the ledger, there are some UI and pacing issues that make the game feel longer and slower than would be ideal, and before the ending sequence, the choices on offer aren’t very interesting either in terms of revealing character or impacting the plot. This is still one to play, but unfortunately I did feel like I was ready for it to end a good fifteen or so minutes before it finally wrapped up.
My favorite thing about US was getting to play as Renee Bennion. A high-ranking functionary in a multi-species coalition government, she’s dedicated to her job, quick on her feet, and is a loving though occasionally exasperated mother to a twenty-something son. She also has a fun rapport with her old commanding officer -- the vibe is friendly but still with a note of deference -- who’s also got a position on the space station where the story takes place. As the plot kicks into gear and she realizes she’s the target of a plot by an old enemy, you get a sense of who she used to be when she was her son’s age, and how hard to rattle she is in the present. She’s drawn with real flaws, too – notably, some ugly prejudices about other species – making her a well-realized protagonist.
The universe she inhabits again isn’t the world’s most original, but it does have some clever touches. Though this is a bit underdeveloped, one of the primary alien races in the setting appears to archive entire dynasties’ worth of identities and memories in each individual, and the details about how human traditions like the holiday season have been translated into a post-alien-contact context are well thought through. There are hover-over hyperlinks that demystify some of the technobabble, though I found myself wishing they’d have focused on different pieces of the setting – I feel like there were a whole lot that went into detail on the timekeeping systems used on-station, but comparatively few on the culture and background of the various alien races.
The central plot, once it kicks in, is solid enough, but my main complaint, as mentioned above, is the pacing. Renee is being pursued by agents of a long-dead adversary, with threatening messages and recordings of her past being sent to her, and unsavory characters skulking around the dark corners of the station. To determine what’s going on, she consults with station security and old friends, while still trying to go about her day job of setting trade policy for the coalition. This is a strong structure, but it takes a while to get going, and most of the sequences go about how you’d expect but with maybe 20% more words than would be ideal, with few surprises in store for the middle part of the game. Exacerbating this, few of the choices here seem like they have much of an impact.
The interface is partly to blame too – while it’s very pretty, it was slow on my machine, and each paragraph of text fades in one at a time, meaning I was often impatiently waiting to click my way through to the next bit. I also ran into a couple of small niggles that might be bugs, though they’re from late in the game (Spoiler - click to show) (after I finished the climactic conversation with my old enemy, a security team burst into my room, as though I’d been locked in and they were worried for my safety, though nothing like this had previously been mentioned as far as I could tell. And after making the heartwarming war-orphan donation, the text made a note that my extra supply-points were now zero, but the interface display still showed me as having 700-odd. Since these are never otherwise used in the game, it’s odd to include that detail on every screen, then not update it the one time it’s relevant, so I assume that’s a bug)..
All told I think Ulterior Spirits is one editing pass away from being something really special – with some tighter prose, a speedier interface, and tweaks to one or two aspects of the storytelling (Spoiler - click to show)(I thought the decision to never show the actual conflict with Ruuaghri in any of the copious flashbacks was a misstep – we never get a visceral sense of Renee’s hatred and fear of her, which undermines the intensity of the final conversation, and means there isn’t a contrast to draw with the old, decrepit person she’s become) this would be great. As it is, it’s still a really strong comp entry, which delivers some real sentiment and an internally-focused, character-driven story in a genre that doesn’t typically prioritize those things.
Diminishing returns, December 12, 2020This is the second game from this author in the Comp, after The Pinecone, and it shares a bunch of similarities: it’s written with a real literary flourish, it’s got a very appealing presentation, it’s adapted from a pre-existing piece of static fiction, the central action is surreal, and it’s more hypertext-based than choice-based. We’ll get back to all of that in a minute, but meantime what I’m really wondering is whether the author has just like a giant stack of flash-fiction about conical plant-matter. Will next year see The Bell Pepper, The Cyprus Tree, and The Top-Heavy Carrot? Inquiring minds want to know.
Anyway that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, since I’ve enjoyed both contributions to this year’s Comp, though in a reverse of how nice they’d be to eat I liked Turnip much less than Pinecone. The strong points are pretty similar in both – the fonts and colors really are lovely to look at, and the writing continues to be really well-considered, with the short length allowing for a huge amount of craft per square inch of text.
The downsides are bigger here, though. While this one has a dog (point: Turnip), the protagonist’s world and job are odd and alienating, with the weird focus on deer-meat and the business with the holes – and the crazy description of your neighbor:
"Today is the day that your neighbor’s balance between vision and myopia finally tilts towards oblivion. As of midday, the whole world is a swirling, colorful omelet. She sees what seems to be a slice of ham wobbling beside a burnt piece of toast, but can’t distinguish hallucination from garbled reality just yet. She will need to call a doctor."
This is well-written, but is disconnected from the main thrust of the story and is I thought a bit too silly. Anyway, all this oddness means the turnip seems less strange when it invades this already-weird status quo – a shame because obscurely threatening vegetables are a good trope (did someone ask about a pickle?)
The game is also less responsive than the Pinecone, I thought – where that game had two different places where you could make choices and see a slightly different result, the Turnip really only had like half a dozen opportunities to click some text and get more detail, before going back to the linear trunk of the story. All told this means I didn’t find the game all that engaging, though I enjoyed the O Henry-ish button at the end. Definitely include a dog in next year’s The Coconut But It’s Sort of Mashed Up All Weird So It Looks Like A Cone If You Squint At It, though.
REMOVE CHEST HAIR [Hilarity ensues], December 12, 2020As I was typing out the title of this game, I kept wanting to tag an Extreme onto the end. Try it: Turbo Chest Hair Massacre Extreme. Possibly with an exclamation point, though that’s a risky move. I don’t think this impulse stems from an actual shortcoming in the existing title – now that I reflect, the Extreme sort of fluffs up the rhythm – but rather from feeling like what we’ve got, sublime and exciting as it is, doesn’t fully communicate how bonkers things get in this game. After taking the last couple entries to task for being underdeveloped, I am happy to report that TCHM uh does not suffer from that problem – it is a lot despite the one-hour playtime estimate being completely correct. While I can’t say I fully understand why everything that’s crammed into it is there, and there were a few implementation niggles that keep the game from being a perfectly smooth experience, the central puzzle of the game has the potential to spiral into incredible heights of farce, and the ending is just – I mean I want to say “sublime” though that doesn’t get across how incredibly filthy it is, too (in a good way!)
I thought I knew what TCHM was about after reading the blurb, but friends, I must confess that I was not at all prepared. Rest of the premise discussed in fuzzy-text: (Spoiler - click to show)so yes, we need to perform a bit of depilatory self-maintenance before a hot date, but Theo, the player character, is not just a happy-go-lucky gal with a job in I dunno like publishing or something. Her apartment, which doubles as her place of employment, is also a sort of extradimensional listening post, and her roommate and partner in crime is a dirty-minded android named Marigold – and pretty quickly you get the ability to swap between the two characters at will, which dramatically changes how the apartment is described and what items are most obvious. Then – OK, spoilers are getting real here – after Theo leaves for her date, the listening post detects an extradimensional invader coming through a rift in the basement, and the finale (note: this is emphatically not the climax) involves desperately fighting off this invisible, seemingly-invulnerable entity.
We’ll return to that premise in a bit, but let’s dwell for a while on the mechanics of hair removal. The business of the main part of the game is to figure out how to get rid of that pesky bit of chest hair, and it satisfies this brief quite well. The apartment is a good size, with a pretty high density of objects but clear indications of what’s important and what’s probably a red herring, with some items occupying the fuzzy in-between and helping set up some of the more fun puzzles. There’s also a good balance in having a good number of potential ways to get rid of the hair (spoiler: most of them will not work), but not too many, by cutting off solutions that would be repetitive. There are a lot of sharp objects in the apartment, for example, but you only need to try the cutting/shaving option with one knife before moving on to other candidates. And there’s a good mix of straightforward ideas and increasingly-baroque ones that lend themselves nicely to farcical escalation – though if you’re a boring killjoy [raises hand], it’s also not that hard to hang back until you figure out the real solution.
There’s a lot to fiddle with in the apartment, including your roommate Marigold, who’s also sometimes a viewpoint character. The writing is sharp and has lots of little jokes and bits of worldbuilding embedded in descriptions, so it’s really rewarding to poke around and explore – critical in a game that’s, after all, set in a mostly-normal apartment. You can play dress-up with Theo’s big-but-not-too-big wardrobe, and the substantial differences between how she sees the world and Marigold’s view of thing means I was happy to poke through everything twice. And there are responses for senses beyond sight, which I always appreciate – some of the most rewarding results come from trying to SMELL stuff (and in the game!) Between the writing and the puzzles TCHM is a rich meal that doesn’t leave you overstuffed.
The parser is well-implemented and handles this all quite cleanly, with a few small exceptions: there’s a shower rack that’s described as being empty in one paragraph, then lists the half-dozen items resting on it. And I found that most plural-named objects had to be referred to as IT, rather than THEM. I did struggle a bit with verbs in places, but I think that’s down to me rather than the game – you see, TCHM uses, er, USE for most of its object interactions, which will just never feel natural to me in a parser game no matter how intuitive it probably is to most players. Alternate verbs do appear to work for most actions, but there were a few places where things felt like they broke down (I’m thinking especially of (Spoiler - click to show)trying to jury-rig the vacuum, where I had the right idea but things like PUT FUNNEL ON HOSE didn’t work)). I also found that there were a few places where USE didn’t seem to work (including a high-stakes moment, when (Spoiler - click to show)USE YOGURT ON INTRUDER doesn't do the job). So I dunno, I’m not well positioned to offer advice on how to use USE, but I wonder whether it might make sense to just commit to it and make it work for all actions rather than taking this hybrid approach, though I think I personally wouldn’t like it as much.
I’m going back to the spoiler-text to discuss the ending – honestly this might have been the single highest point of the entire Comp for me, so you should definitely experience it for yourself! (Spoiler - click to show)I’m not sure I really needed the segment where Marigold disposes of the alien intruder – it’s not really a tonal mismatch because it’s in keeping with the zaniness of the piece, and I definitely enjoyed an excuse to spend more time in Marigold’s head. But after spending an hour trying to figure out how to solve Theo’s follicular challenge, I wanted to see how the date was going to go, and shifting to Marigold felt a bit anticlimactic. I also think the delay before the listening post pings is probably a bit too long – I think examining doesn’t cause time to advance, which is generally a good idea, but that convenience means you can spend a long time looking at stuff in one of the object-rich rooms without any idea of what you’re supposed to be doing. The final puzzle itself led to an aha moment, so I liked that. But still, I was disappointed by this sequence – until it ended, Marigold broke down, and I experienced the most raunchy cooling-fan replacement in human history. Ye gods, this climax is a tour de force – the way the writing is both a completely straight explanation of how a machine functions, and an incredibly debauched piece of pornography, is a masterful trick that more than justifies the endgame sequence.
Good characters, slow pacing, December 12, 2020This one was not what I expected. Based on the overenthusiastic title punctuation, the bright, pop-art cover, and the listed genre, I went into TMMEWaD ready for over-the-top zaniness. That’s not at all what’s on offer here, though – the game is actually very grounded, basically a relationship-driven slice of life story both in terms of its main concerns and its pacing. Even leaving aside my mismatched expectations, I’m not convinced it fully works, but I found it very pleasant to play through, and really liked the way it delved into some concerns rather far afield from the typical meat-and-potatoes of interactive fiction.
So we’re dealing here with two protagonists (or maybe a protagonist and her antagonist)? You alternate between playing Lightbearer, a duly-licensed heroine protecting Garden City, and Promethium, her mad-scientist archnemesis. Things start out with an effective in medias res superhero operation, as Lightbearer flies to the rescue of a kidnapped ballet troupe. And at the end of the grabby, kinetic introductory fight, she manages to beat Promethium and get her in handcuffs.
So far so normal, except that a few curveballs get thrown (these are signposted pretty clearly in the blurb, so I’m not marking them as spoilers): Promethium has an anxiety attack at the prospect of being subjected to the death penalty, and then Lightbearer releases her on condition that Promethium throws all her fights moving forward. The meat of the game consists of the two characters meeting up to plan out how they’ll pretend to clash, while choreographing the results so no one get hurts; meanwhile, you have the option to have them slowly open up to each other (in choices clearly marked with a TRUST TIME graphic sting).
These deviations from genre expectations work to arouse interest, but I think they also feel underexplained in a way that took me out of the story. In general, the worldbuilding is vague, in favor of emphasizing the characters. That’s a fine choice, but some of the questions the game raises but doesn’t clearly resolve – do villains routinely get executed? How exactly does Lightbearer’s superhero job work? – are pretty integral to making sense of the characters’ motivations and decision-making. Some small spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)Promethium’s fear of death seems like it’s tied to an anxiety disorder, but not knowing that makes the introduction of that note jarring, and I wondered whether this was going to be more of a dystopian take on supers. Similarly, Promethium’s accusation that the Hero Agency is all about money goes unanswered, and it’s unclear how realistic Lightbearer is when she worries that if she succeeds in beating her nemesis, her employers will heartlessly transfer her away without giving her two months to let her daughter graduate from high school! Most problematically, Promethium’s big speech about how villains are people trying to change the world and make it a better place completely fails to connect her ostensible social-justice goals to her actual actions of poisoning ballet dancers. As a result of the occasionally sketchy worldbuilding, there were times when the characters’ thought processes or decision-making didn’t really come together.
The pacing also slows down quite a lot in this main section of the game. The structure never really changes – you get brief interludes of the two protagonists living their lives, their biweekly coffee-shop meetings, and then their planned-out fights, a sequence that’s repeated five or six times. There’s not much of a sense of escalation, or any real narrative avenues besides the central question of whether or not they’re growing to trust each other (I opted for all the trust options – I was rooting for the two of them, they seemed nice! – so maybe this is different if you intentionally seed more dissent). And the prose can get a little stodgy at times, with repeated exposition (Lightbearer says some version of “so, you’re graduating from high school in two months!” to her daughter like three or four times) and a lack of real, lived-in detail to fully flesh out the characters’ lives (as a minor example, at one point the protagonists talk about TV shows they like – this could have been an opportunity to flesh out what art resonates with each character and how that relates to their personalities, but they basically just say “I like Adventure Time”/”I think the Big Bang Theory is good”).
On the flip side, some of the conversations between Promethium and Lightbearer do go to interesting places. Promethium is dealing with some mental-health trauma, (Spoiler - click to show)partially stemming from a cleverly-realized side-effect of how her powers first manifested. Lightbearer, even more atypically, is a somewhat older character, dealing with incipient empty-nest syndrome (Spoiler - click to show)and the onset of menopause. It’s nice to see topics like this drawn out, and I was invested in seeing how the two of them, both very alone in their own ways, could become friends. As a result, all the superhero business often felt like a low-stakes distraction, and as I played I was eager to get back to their civilian-world meetings, because that’s where the heart of the thing really lies. So what’s good here is good, and while the full impact is held back by some pacing issues and fuzzy worldbuilding that compromises the generally-strong character work, and I’m still glad I got a chance to play it.
An enjoyable deckbuilder with a good story and difficulty spikes, December 12, 2020This is something new: an IF/roguelite-deckbuilder mashup. In the very unlikely event that that word salad failed to effectively communicate what’s going on here, the author has cleverly hybridized a Slay the Spire/Dream Quest sort of card game – where you crawl through a dungeon fighting monsters using a deck of cards that represent your attacks, defenses, and special moves, while occasionally adding to, upgrading, or deleting cards from your deck – with a more traditional, choice-based IF structure as part of the interstitial tissue between fights as well as a framing story (well, actually two if you get right down to it). (For sub-genre fans: the ability to see what the enemies are going to do, as well as the need to balance attack and defense, puts this closest to Slay the Spire).
The framing story is actually one of the highlights – there’s an option to skip past all the story to focus on the more game-y bits, but that would be a shame. The top-level frame story is sweet, and there are some good jokes (my favorite: (Spoiler - click to show)when the player character is trying to get into the game convention and is asked for his qualifications, he can bellow out “There is none more qualified!”, which just makes me giggle). There are also lots of choices embedded in the different non-combat encounters the player character runs into. Much of the time these mirror the options that would be presented in a menu in a more typical deck-builder, but it also opens up opportunities for new types of gameplay that I haven’t seen before in this sub-genre, like an extended maze sequence or the chance for some more robust interaction with NPCs.
When it comes to the card game itself, my main takeaways are that it’s big, hard, and unfortunately still a big buggy. Big is easy – there are three different classes to play with distinct decks, three different (large) dungeons to work through, dozens of encounters and artifacts to discover… there’s a lot here, and I know I only saw a portion in my two hours with the game.
Partially, though, that’s because I didn’t wind up getting as far with Tragic as I’d hoped, getting stuck midway through the second dungeon with two different characters. Reader, this one’s tough! And while I am not exactly the Hard Man of American Deckbuilders, this is a sub-genre where I’m fairly well-versed – I’ve slain the spire several times now, got all but a handful of the achievements in Dream Quest, tore through Monster Slayer like a comet punching through atmosphere (that one’s easy)… I’m guessing I’ve put several hundred more hours into these kinds of games than most Comp players, so if I’m crying uncle, I think the difficulty here doesn’t feel well judged for the contest. There are training wheels – copious autosaves and a slowly-increasing health bar every time you die and respawn – but those don’t so much reduce the difficulty as offer the hope that by punching your face repeatedly against a brick wall, your blood might slowly erode it. I can’t even imagine what the harder modes are like!
Upon reading the included strategy guide, partially this may be down to choosing the berserker class first go round – I’m used to that being the easiest archetype to at least see the late-game, even if they’re overtaken in power by fiddlier classes later on, but here it’s apparently the most challenging? Still, when I started over as a mage, even with an “easier” class and a better understanding of the mechanics I didn’t fare much better. I won’t go into a full disquisition on why I think the balance is a bit too unforgiving, but will mention that I think randomness plays probably too big of a role, unlike most other deckbuilders which tend to be a bit more deterministic. There are enemies that summon other enemies in potentially never-ending waves, but rather than reinforcements coming in on a timer, sometimes this appears to happen at least somewhat at random. Opportunities to upgrade your deck – or even more importantly, delete or upgrade old cards – feel less reliable than in comparable games. And some of the more IF-y encounters are far harder than others: there’s a maze, for example, that I never managed to get out of despite having probably three combats, in a dungeon that otherwise I think should have around six to eight before the boss.
Finally, there are still some bugs to be worked out (I understand some have in fact been fixed in mid-Comp updates). While the overall interface is quite nice and smoothly transitions between fights and exploration, there’s some occasional wonkiness and I ran into a few game-breakers. When wandering around the aforementioned maze, I’d often see messages like “there in the middle of the cavern floor lays a {0}{1}” (these were actually Fiery Boots), and there were occasional typos and places where different pieces of text were smashed together without a space in between, I think from some errors in the randomization code. Worse, I ran into three or four different game-ending bugs, two of which I could recover from using autosaves, but one of which I couldn’t: once after dying, I wasn’t able to click on any of the respawn/restart options being presented; another time after I won a hard encounter against dragon whelps, I selected a choice that didn’t lead to any further options; once after restarting to try again with a new class, when I got to the tutorial fight the combat interface didn’t come up; and then the biggest crash was where loading the autosave post-defeat (on the second boss) put me in the middle of the combat, with elements of the interface blacked out.
I liked the story a lot and was eager to see where it went, plus the ideas here are really fun, so I’m very much hoping that there’s a post-comp release to smooth out some bugs, re-tune the difficulty curve, and maybe add some quality of life options (allowing the player to skip the tutorial but not miss out on the rest of the story would be really nice!), since I’d love to see this one through to the end.
MUCH LATER UPDATE: So I went back and played some more, including winning as a mage (ending up at about 180 health) and then having a pretty good run as a rogue before getting brutally smacked down by the Chapter 2 boss. Updates since I first played have smoothed out some of the bugs I noted, so the experience is a bit cleaner now too. I don’t think my take on the game has shifted that much from the additional time, though I will note that I found Chapter 3 substantially easier than 2 with my mage, and I suspect I would have felt the same way if I’d gotten there with my rogue character. There are some cards that are very powerful and lead to some fun synergies with upgraded equipment, which meant I was able to keep up with the escalating difficulty in Chapter 3. But even with what felt like it should have been a viable build, I felt like progress past the mini-bosses and boss in Chapter 2 generally required getting lucky with one of the “get a random attack or effect” cards to obtain something more powerful than I was able to find through ordinary gameplay, and/or getting a particular right card at the right moment a couple times in a row (like a parry that cancels an attack right before you’re about be targeted for a single big strike). I did enjoy getting to see the ending of the game, which wound up going in an unexpectedly serious direction, and having some effective call-backs to some dialogue choices I’d made earlier. I’m interested to see some different variations, but not sure I have the gumption to tackle that widowmaker of a Hydra again, sadly…
Low-key tomb escape, irritating to play online, December 12, 2020Tombs and Mummies is a cheerfully deadly escape-the-deathtrap affair; with nine rooms and really only a single puzzle, it falls well short of the two-hour advertised game length but that seems about right for what’s on offer here. It doesn’t look like there’s a play-offline option and unfortunately server woes made this an occasionally-frustrating experience, but viewed on its own merits this is a fun little game that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Right, the setup: you’re an archaeologist, your rival has kidnapped your girlfriend and locked you in a tomb to die, and you need to escape to make him pay – and, er, loot some priceless pieces of Egypt’s cultural heritage along the way if you’re so inclined. This is all in Quest, and has a bunch of niceties like a map and clickable ways of interacting with objects and scenery, though I mostly eschewed them in favor of using the parser like a Neanderthal. The tomb boasts some authentic touches, including a sistrum and a senet set among the treasures in the mummy’s hoard, but also includes magic words such as “open sesame” and descriptions that reference the Who and Blade Runner.
There are very light RPG and resource management elements – you have a limited amount of light, and hit points that can be depleted by traps, snakes, and other hazards, but given how short the game is, if either run low or run out restarting isn’t much of a penalty (I think a winning playthrough would take two or three minutes at most once you know what to do).
Despite what the premise might make you think, you’re just worrying about the escape – tracking down the rival and making him pay takes place post-victory – which involves a multi-step puzzle to allow you to get up to the ceiling-hatch leading out of the tomb. The steps are pretty simple to work through, though I’m not sure they’re exactly intuitive. Tombs and Mummies offers two magic spells to its players; one a simple door-opener, the other one of the most esoteric enchantments I’ve ever come across, since it (Spoiler - click to show)makes heavy objects light while also causing mummies to awaken and try to kill you – that’s good only for a very specific set of use cases! I solved the major element of the puzzle pretty much by accident, succeeding because I was able to just input a command describing what I wanted to do without having to describe how I’d do it (Spoiler - click to show) (I don’t think I’d have guessed that I could jam the sarcophagus lid closed with the flail of Anubis, but so long as you’re carrying the right object LOCK LID appears to work). And I didn’t really understand how the “indirect light” thing worked, but it is spelled out for you in the notebook so I suppose that doesn’t really matter. At any rate, the limited map, verbs, and number of objects means trial-and-error will get you through.
I’d have enjoyed the game far more if I hadn’t had to play it online, though. I experienced a lot of lag – maybe 3 or 4 seconds after each command – as well as two or three crashes in the course of my half hour with the game. There are also some real-time elements, like snakes that will repeatedly nibble on you if you take too long to take an action. Plus some common activities, like making sure your torch stays lit, are rather fiddly and take more commands than you’d think. So these elements combined with the lag and crashes make for a bit of aggravation. Hopefully the server was just having a bad day, but still, a downloadable option would make the game much more accessible.
Way more heartfelt than it looks, December 12, 2020I have a theory that the best genre stories are ones that take themselves seriously (I guess other stories too, but one generally doesn’t need to tell authors of literary fiction to be more self-important). Not, I hasten to add, in the sense that everything needs to be a grimdark reboot where every heroic pilot or mystic sorcerer needs a rapey backstory – gods no! But even the silliest premise is enlivened, and can actually become impressively affecting, with sufficient attention and craft for worldbuilding and characterization. I’m counting Tavern Crawler as a point in favor of this theory, because while it starts with a jokey setup - the bar-hopping aftermath of a fantasy quest as the heroes try to track down their patron and get paid - it accomplishes far more than I’d expected from the blurb, entirely because of the care the author took with every facet of the game.
It’s superficial to start with aesthetics, but they do make a first impression, and it’s quite a good one. I lack the vocabulary to really talk about issues of visual design, but some combination of the font, color scheme, and layout made the game look really attractive to me, while still being entirely functional. There are sidebar menus that ensure all the information you could possibly want about the game is available in a click, without needing to duck out of the main story or cluttering up the windows too much. The white borders around text you can click avoid the contrast issues that sometimes plague games that use hypertext, while the simple use of color to denote dialogue from different characters helps the player cleanly parse some of the more involved passages.
This ease of play extends to the plot and setting, which snuggle around one’s shoulders like a warm blanket from the off. You’re in a tavern, some bloke wants to hire you to see off a dragon, there’s a possible tavern brawl to avoid or lean into… and mechanically, the opening also provides an in-game character generation sequence where you can pick a backstory, as well as a mini-tutorial in the simple stat system used by the game. While this is all completely straight-ahead, the attention to detail is apparent from the get-go, especially when it comes to your two companions. They’re stereotypes, certainly – one’s a veteran warrior, the other an otherworldly magician – but they stand out as their own people. Ford, the warrior, has a flirty charm and some not-very-well-hidden softness of heart, while the sorceress Aurora is wise and responsible, but struggles with her sense of her own responsibilities. None of these characterizations are hugely novel when you type them out, and I doubt they’d hold up in a 50+ hour BioWare style game, but they’re perfect for this game, and sketched with a pleasing fleetness that makes sure you notice what’s up with your companions, but doesn’t wear out their welcome.
The positive early impressions bear out as the game goes on. There are lots of choices when confronting any challenge, and Tavern Crawler rewards exploration while still trying to be nonjudgmental about what you do. For example, while the game clearly communicates that dragons are not evil creatures, and simply deciding to kill one is morally dubious at best, TC doesn’t set this up just as a dilemma between the altruism of a nonviolent resolution vs. greedily wanting the huge reward: there are reasons given for why that money might make a difference for the characters’ families, and indications that letting the dragon live might let an independent town, weakened by its depredations, fall under the sway of an evil empire. Still, I felt like the game clearly wanted to be played a certain way – while you have the choice to be a dashing rogue or a bit of a prig, as the spirit takes you, the world is generally set up to reward kindness (this extends to the generous content warnings, which offer the opportunity to click for spoilers on how to avoid anything that might be upsetting).
This isn’t to say the game is uptight – you can get proper sloshed, hop on stage with burlesque dancers, creep through dank and horrible alleys, and romance one or both of your companions, with copious make-outs. It’s just that it’s got an overall gentleness to it that I really liked – especially so, coming after A Calling of Dogs! This gentleness extends to the game’s systems, too. There’s a single save slot that you can use as much as you like, and while there are a fair number of gated stat-checks, most problems can be solved as long as you’re sufficiently good at one of the three, and in most circumstances it’s pretty easy to come back later after having leveled up or gotten more gold from resolving side-quests. And while your companions typically pull you in different directions whenever there’s a significant choice, it’s pretty easy to max out your relationship with both of them. The ending can be bittersweet – at least the one I got was – but I think that’s a nice touch too, as it prevents TC from getting too cloying.
I feel like this review is unbalanced since I haven’t included any real criticism. OK, three things: on my screen at least I wanted a bit more of a margin on the left side of the menu sidebar, the way you sometimes get money out of thin air after completing a quest is weird, and the first joke would have been funnier if there’d been one more level after “very drunk.” There, you see, I’m an unbiased reviewer who can see both sides of things, so trust me when I say Tavern Crawler is excellent!
Cute world, finicky parser, December 12, 2020There’s a cold shiver of fear that runs down my spine whenever I see the words “parser-based” and “Windows executable” in a Comp blurb – the tell-tale sign of the custom parser. I think I formed this prejudice – and prejudice it is – fifteen or so years ago, and it’s even more unfair now, since I think many custom-parser games show up quite solidly these days (I helped beta test Happyland, for example, and it’s got quite the robust parser). Tangled Tales, sadly, undoes some of the progress I’ve been making on getting over my hang-ups, turning what should be an easy-going fairytale romp into a grim twilight struggle against an obtuse parser and a too-large map.
The first impression TT makes is a pretty good one. The engine allows for art, and the opening scene features a pleasant, pastoral view of a green woodland. There are menu-option shortcuts to out-of-world actions, and you get a choice of genders for your protagonist (either Cinderella or Prince Charming, from the blurb, though this wasn’t clear to me from the game itself – at first I wondered whether I was someone from the real world who’d been sucked into the realm of fairy tales). Common abbreviations mostly work, and there are some conveniences like EXITS to show exits, and WHAT IS HERE to show what objects can be interacted with (this is all spelled out in the included manual, which confusingly is tucked in a walkthrough folder in the download). And the setup is effective enough – your head hurts and you’re lost in the forest after overdoing it at a pre-wedding party, and now you and your best buddy Rumpelstiltskin (blessedly, he also answers to “Rumpy”) need to make your way back to the castle in time for the ceremony.
Sadly, the wheels start to come off pretty quickly. Some of this is just the lack of a last editing pass: despite choosing to play as the female main character, people kept calling me “Henri”, and there are a lot of typos and grammar errors. Then there are design issues, like guess-the-verb puzzles that make it hard to make porridge when you’ve got all the needed items and the steps are obvious, or that told me when I tried to dig a hole to plant some beans that “a spade isn’t suitable for digging,” or that completely prevented me from reading a signpost despite this not seeming like it was meant to be a challenge.
But some of the problems appear to be embedded in the parser and engine. I had a perennial issue where some commands simply wouldn’t work the first time I tried them, but would be accepted the second time. For example, the opening screen has a glass container (I guess a bottle) lying in a wheelbarrow. Typing TAKE CONTAINER got me this error: “An empty glass container isn’t here. if[sic] the object is in, under or behind another, you’ll need to be more specific.” After unsuccessfully trying a number of other options, I tried TAKE CONTAINER again and it worked. Ditto for DRINK WATER, and several other attempts to get items out of containers. And many puzzles involve interacting with other characters and getting them to do things, and the syntax here is really painful. Neither TALK TO nor ASK X ABOUT Y nor CHARACTER, ACTION are supported as far as I could tell; instead you need to type variants of SAY TO RUMPY, “UNLOCK CHEST WITH KEY”, which are quite a mouthful. And the game is inconsistent – to get into her tower, you need to type RAPUNZEL “LET DOWN YOUR HAIR”.
The engine also works in pseudo real-time, forcing you to pass a turn if you wait too long to type anything and occasionally having other characters wander in and out in between your actions. There are no timing puzzles so this doesn’t have much impact, but it did add an additional layer of intimidation since I was constantly worrying I was letting the clock run down, or that the movements of the bee and unicorn were important (Spoiler - click to show)(they’re not). Oh, and of course there’s an inventory limit.
Aside from these engine and parser issues, the design isn’t bad, with puzzles that fit the fairytale theme and generally make sense, at least once you internalize that Rumpy is there to help and is much stronger than you are. The fly in the ointment here is that the map is enormous, with four or five completely empty and pointless locations for every one that’s got something interesting to do. This culminates in an old-school maze that doesn’t appear to have an associated puzzle or shortcut, though I have to confess that by this point I was having quick recourse to the walkthrough.
While I can’t personally relate, I know for many folks part of pleasure of creating IF is making a new engine and parser, as much or more so than making the game. So it’s not really helpful as a critic to say “maybe you should have just made this in Inform or TADS?” – but nonetheless that’s what I kept thinking. The features of the engine that makes this one distinct don’t really play much role in the game (outside of the first couple screens and the last few, there’s really not much art), and with a tighter parser and a much-smaller game world, TT could have been a lot of fun, but as it stands I worry it’s too hard a nut to crack to get at the good stuff inside.
Well-implemented and charming, December 12, 2020Stuff of Legend is just the kind of palate-cleanser I love to come across deep in the throes of working through my Comp queue. It isn’t trying to do anything revolutionary with a thought-provoking setting or intensive characterization or teeth-grinding puzzling or pomo narrative trickery; it just delivers a charming, funny, well-designed and well-implemented puzzlefest that doesn’t wear out its welcome, and sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for.
The setup here doesn’t go much beyond what’s in the blurb: as a village idiot who’s had his fill of idioting after being bullied by a drunken lout (idiots > louts), you limp your way home to the farm where you live. After commiserating with the farm family, you strike upon the idea of become a knight instead of an idiot, and engage in some light puzzling across a medium-sized map, getting outfitted with a knight’s equipment and then embarking on a quest or two (though most of these might be more appropriate to an animal-control officer than a paragon of chivalric valor).
The humor really helps this all land – the writing is full of malapropisms, and there’s lots of scenery and incidental detail that throw off good jokes when examined, though I think my favorite joke was the response to X ME (Spoiler - click to show)(”You have a face like a pile of mashed potatoes and a body like a much taller pile of mashed potatoes”). The player character is a fool, so many of the jokes are formally at your expense, but crucially, neither the narrative voice nor the other characters are ever cruel: they might sigh at your occasional foibles, but it’s all fairly indulgent and supportive, and after getting through the puzzles you’re rewarded with some clear victories. Games with this kind of humor can sometimes come off mean, like they’re not on the player’s side, but SoL never even comes close to hitting this flaw.
The puzzles also strike just the right note. They’re all cleanly set up through conversation with the different members of the family – each has a distinct puzzle chain, and offers some clues as to how to accomplish it. There’s usually a few different tasks to be working on at any given time, though they intersect and progress neatly enough so that things are rarely overwhelming. Most are of fairly gentle difficulty (especially if you take a few notes as you go), and it’s fun to poke and prod your way through some of the more involved ones (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking especially of the pattern-recognition puzzles to get the horse’s blanket, where even once you figure out what’s entailed, there’s still a bit of pleasant business required to accomplish it – the cat-based navigation puzzle is like this too).
I did have to have recourse to the (well-done) hint menu to resolve one guess-the-verb issue (Spoiler - click to show)(breaking the coconut open using the sharp boulder: I tried CUT COCONUT WITH BOULDER, OPEN COCONUT WITH BOULDER, THROW COCONUT AT BOULDER, PUT COCONUT ON BOULDER… only CRACK COCONUT WITH BOULDER worked). But other than that, the parser is forgiving, the world is detailed and well-implemented, the menu-driven conversations are easy to navigate; Stuff of Legend goes down smooth, even as it manages to lightly tickle your gray matter on its way to a heart-warming resolution.
Pre-board games, December 12, 2020I’m actually a bit familiar with the theory behind SAH, by virtue of having some entheogen enthusiast friends in college – the idea, as I recall it at any rate, is that human cognitive evolution was occasionally bootstrapped by an adventurous Cro-Magnon snacking on psilocybin-containing mushrooms, with concomitant increases in creativity, perceptual acuity, social engagement, de-prioritization of self, and so on. I was and am skeptical, not least from observing the behavior of said friends while high (I kid, love to you all) but it’s a fun idea, right up there with “our corpus callosum used to be less effective so gods and miracles were just the two halves of our brain not being able to play nicely together.”
SAH doesn’t do too much with this setup, but it does provide a structure that lends a nice progression to a fairly standard series of puzzles. You play a (nameless, but I suppose that’s appropriate) early human who wanders around a small map, resolving such era-appropriate problems as cutting wood, making fire, and obtaining clothes. Intermittently you find and snack on a hallucinogenic mushroom which, in a neat touch, makes the prose of the game grow more sophisticated to represent your increasing mental acuity (though I only really noticed the first shift – there was an opportunity to expand this a bit more, I think).
Oddly, most of your attempts at mastering your environment are prompted by seeing other, more advanced humans wear clothes and make fire. The reason why they’re more advanced, and you’re still flailing around with the basics, wasn’t explained as far as I could tell, and I think this was a misstep – because you’re just playing catchup, and doing things that the player can grasp in an instant, this feels less like guiding a pioneer into a new age of cognitive development, and more like helping an utter thicko learn to take care of himself.
The puzzles themselves are fine so far as they go, though playing tic-tac-toe feels a bit silly, and I struggled with the implementation of mancala, with some confusing ASCII art and what might have been non-standard rules leaving me flailing (I still won even though I thought I was trying to put my stones in the wrong bowl, which suggests the AI opponent is not trying to put up much of a fight). Overall, it’s the Stone Age environment, including reasonably well-detailed depictions of tool use in an early society, that are the highlights here, providing a fairly unique backdrop to the otherwise quite standard adventuring.
Tonal issues mar what could have been a charming historical send-up, December 11, 2020Typically when playing a game, I don't find it too hard to figure out what the author was aiming for, but I have a hard time getting a handle on SSG. I went into it thinking it would be a sort of edu-tainment game about physics, maybe with puzzles involving classical mechanics – it isn’t that. Then after I played for a bit and it tipped its hand by involving an actual witch (in the first real scene, so I don’t think this is a spoiler), I thought it was shaping up to be a fish-out-of-water setup with a scientist trying to make sense of magic – it isn’t that. Once the (Spoiler - click to show)time travel and alternate history kicked in I thought we might be swerving back to being educational, but nope, not that either. But even after having finished it, I have a much easier time laying out what it isn’t than what it is.
Part of this is the tone of the writing, which is generally clean but very matter-of-fact throughout. At first, this scans as jokey: in the opening sequence, your buddy greets you with a hearty “Hey, Newt!”, which is a funny way to think of someone greeting Isaac Newton. But this same sort of low-key prose style persists throughout the game and doesn’t escalate or respond to situations that are increasingly silly – which means that what starts out as jokey eventually winds up feeling understated or flat. Tone is one of the key ways an author can guide the player’s reactions to the story, but without that to rely on, I often felt unsure how to feel about what was happening, or if something was or wasn’t a joke or was meant to be incongruous (Spoiler - click to show)(X ME, for example, reveals that Isaac is “wearing the most expensive and fashionable clothes from 1673,” which is initially a bit funny because what about, say, the king? And once you time-travel to 2020 I thought this was going to set up a gag, but nobody remarks on it at all, so just add that to the list of things that happen without evoking much response).
This carries over into both the plot and gameplay side of things. Plot-wise – well, I can’t discuss this without spoilers, but my basic critique is that this really left me scratching my head, even leaving aside the presence of witches and magic and so on. (Spoiler - click to show) So the conceit appears to be that by sending Newton forward in time before he’s written the Principia and introduced calculus, the witch has deprived future scientists of what they need to make progress so that instead of coming up with the theory of relativity and helping advance quantum mechanics, Einstein has to reinvent Newton’s discoveries over 200 years late, so things that rely on advanced solid-state physics and electrical engineering are breaking down. Even leaving aside the fact that Leibniz at worst developed the calculus contemporaneously to Newton so this wouldn’t have been so bad, this really is hard to wrap one’s head around – if history has changed, why are there still empty shelves in the library for relativity and quantum mechanics? And if Newton didn’t write the Principia, just plagiarized it from future-Einstein, even leaving aside the grandfather paradox wouldn’t sending him forward in time actually put the timeline on the “correct” course, since it’s only as a result of the time travel that we wind up getting the calculus in the late 17th century? If you clicked through that spoiler, you know I’m overthinking this, but again, without guardrails for how I should be engaging with what’s happening this is where my brain starts to go.
Matching the rest of the trifecta, the gameplay is also quite puzzling. Not, I hasten to add, because there are lots of puzzles – there’s maybe one and a half, quite easy – but because it leads to very odd pacing. The first half to two thirds of the game consists of typing in heavily cued movement commands and reaching very long noninteractive sequences after every half dozen or so. There are opportunities to do a bit of poking around in this section, but the map is very linear and there’s not much scenery of interest (though everything mentioned responds to being examined, as far I could tell). Then you get the aforementioned simple puzzle-and-a-half, and then the game ends. There’s one opportunity for some fun exploration (Spoiler - click to show)(there are some easter eggs in the library, where you can type in a bunch of authors and see what the library has on offer – though there aren’t really jokes or anything interesting here, just the frisson of pleasure at guessing that you can get a response if you type in CERVANTES).
So yeah, here we are, 800 words into this writeup and I still don’t really know what to tell you. SSG is solidly implemented at least, and it’s pleasant enough to play through, which is a level of quality that’s hard to hit in a work of parser IF. And it’s got a fairly unique protagonist and setup. I’m just not sure what it all adds up to.
A good message does not a good game make, December 11, 2020The randomizer giveth, with three games in a row I really enjoyed and some solid highlights immediately before that (Sage Sanctum Scramble, A Murder in Fairyland, and then a Rope of Chalk was also bracketed by Magpie Takes the Train, which I beta-tested so I’m not reviewing it yet but is also quite good, and my own game which, whatever its intrinsic merits, I’m happy to see finally show up). But the randomizer also taketh away, and Stand Up / Stay Silent is where this world-beating run came to a close.
Look, I get that SU/SS has its heart in a good place and is trying to convey the urgency of fighting for social justice. There’s a list of Black Lives Matter-related resources displayed prominently if you check for the credits at the beginning or at the end, many of which I think are pretty good. But holy Jesus, the way the game communicates its convictions is via a hectoring, didactic “fable” that’s only slightly less off-putting and unsubtle than someone shouting “ARE YOU A GOOD PERSON? YES OR NO!” and then hugging or slapping you depending on what you answer. And I say this as someone who works for a civil rights organization in my day job – like, I’m one of those wild-eyed defund-the-police radicals (supply your own scare quotes as desired), albeit in the spreadsheets-and-regs division rather than the whose-streets-our-streets side of the cabal. If you’ve got someone like me mulishly clicking the fascist-hugging “stay silent” options, something’s gone deeply wrong.
I don’t want to go into a laundry list of faults here, but I think there are two design choices and one flaw that are just completely fatal to SU/SS’s aims. The first choice is the sci-fi frame, which is beyond under-baked outside of establishing that we’re on Mars and there’s been some terraforming. I suppose this is in the service of delivering the fable promised in the subtitle, but the problem is that the player has no concept of what’s actually going on and there are zero stakes. The opening suggests that there’s income inequality, but doesn’t really frame that in a way the player can understand or engage with (there is a note that an expensive cocktail costs about three hours’ wages for the main character. I was curious about whether I could deduce anything about the overall economy from this, and the fanciest cocktails I could find at Michelin-star restaurants are like 35 bucks – so even assuming a hefty markup to deal with the being-on-Mars thing, this suggests the main character is making a bit above the minimum wage where I live, and is able to save up to go to a fancy restaurant, which doesn’t seem that bad?) There are indications that mass protests are heavily regulated, but it’s not really established what the protests are actually about. Once the player starts making choices, jackbooted thugs do start showing up (including getting ready to tase someone in the middle of a fancy restaurant, which seems odd…) but this is all very bloodless and completely fails to establish the bone-deep sense of revulsion at injustice that powers much activism, much less the ways those injustices are embedded in social and public systems.
The second design issue is that the choices are completely binary, with no room for nuance or even delayed consequences. There are as few as two, or I think as many as four, choices in any given playthrough, with one of them offering a “Stand By” as a middle-ground between the always-there “Stand Up” and “Stay Silent”. There’s never any ambiguity as to what option the game wants you to take: stand up, and you get a charge of self-righteous energy and your partner thinks you’re sexy; do anything else, and the game tells you you’re a physical coward and you get dumped. And this all plays out immediately, so you don’t even get the (incredibly common in unjust societies!) experience of worrying that a decision will blow up on you later on. Again, this feels excessively didactic, and given the focus on your flatly-characterized partner, much of it feels like it reinforces a retrograde “protesting will get you laid” message.
The flaw is the writing. It’s technically fine (though there’s one early misstep where there’s a comma right after a dash, about which I can only imagine the Ferryman’s Gate protagonist freaking out), but it’s both vague and overly-conclusory. It’s hard to separate this out from the sketchy worldbuilding, but I was very frequently at a loss to understand what was happening. Like, the inciting incident is a member of the waitstaff at the fancy restaurant standing up on one of the tables and mumbling. If this happened in real life, my first thought would not be that the server is pissed about economic injustice! But the main character’s internal monologue leaps ahead and makes a bunch of assumptions about their motivations and what they’re up to that are just not supported by the described behavior. Similarly, later on when you hear your partner talking about their plans for direct action, the description is sufficiently muddy that it really wasn’t clear to me whether they were plotting terroristic violence – seems relevant!
There is good art to be made about the queasy compromises of living under authoritarian regimes – and the dangerous, giddy elation of taking action to try to win freedom. But getting that right requires enough context to give the player a stake in what’s going on, and enough sympathy for the fallible human beings who live in these systems (in all systems!) to portray the situation with nuance. Despite all the good intentions in the world, SS/SU falls profoundly short of the mark.
Worth playing for the ending, December 11, 2020Despite the probably-annoying prolixity of most of my reviews, I don’t have a lot to say about Sound. It’s a vignette-driven game with choices determining which bits of the story the player sees. The player mostly makes choices on behalf of some sort of doctor interviewing someone named “Orange” about her experiences and opinions on a course of treatment, though the perspective sometimes shifts between the two.
I found the presentation somewhat oblique, which I believe is often intentional, but is also sometimes down to some awkwardness of language that may not have been. Orange’s speech is often interrupted with dashes, which may be indicating a stutter or other nonstandard speech pattern (it appears that the treatment may be related to this). But there are also sentences like this, where she recalls being a barista: “I did not re-realize the complexity with the customization of the or-orders.” Or this line, after the player character asks about whether Orange plays a musical instrument: “You assumes she has the musical spirit in her as a maneuver.”
I’m not sure whether or not I reached the real ending. I hit a certain point where a passage kept generating new words, and new links, which in turn generated more new words. It was kind of lovely, almost a polyphonic catharsis or collapse (Spoiler - click to show)– there’s an implication in the text that Orange is rejecting the course of treatment, which is trying to turn her voice into something it’s not – but I wasn’t sure whether I was missing something and it should have been possible to progress past there.
All in all a memorable, if somewhat mystifying, game, though I really enjoyed the ending if ending it was.
A bit too obfuscated, December 11, 2020Another short choice-based game that didn’t quite land for me, Sonder Snippets offers a few densely-written fables, with a slight frame story of a grandmother telling stories to a child. There are a couple of passages with lots of words to click, but how these relate to the text or whether they impact the stories you hear wasn’t obvious to me, and the frame story is very minimally suggested (I only fully twigged to what was happening after a story concluded and I was given a choice to hear another one or “make new memories” by having the grand-daughter go outside and playing with other children). So the meat is really in the fables, which are – basically fine?
They seem to be creation-myths or just-so stories, which are hard to write because it’s challenging to reconcile the abstract, iconic nature of such storytelling with the specificity and detail that gives a tale its punch. I thought How the Elephant’s Child…, from much earlier in my list, nailed this balance, admittedly by aping Kipling and eschewing the cosmological for the practical. Sonder Snippets I think sticks too close to the abstract side of things: all the stories seem to involve a Thief (capital the author’s), a sort of demiurge or at least trickster-figure, who addresses the moon, or a lover, and does – stuff. That’s an awful word, I know, but it’s pretty hard to decode the meaning beneath language that’s often intentionally obfuscated. This sort of technique can create a dreamlike sense of allusion, but I confess it more usually felt muddled to me, especially because the tone seemed less folkloric and more undergraduate po-mo. Consider:
"Reparations have to be made for that which was stolen from the sanctity of silence only to be silenced on the terms of another. Water holds memory, and the tears the Thief’s lover—the lover still only known in relation, in possession, to the Thief—cried, hold memory."
I think this is about oceans or the tide or something? It just leaves me a bit cold – it’s too high-level, there’s nothing I was able to grab on to.
The stories are also fairly short (maybe 4-500 words?) and there aren’t that many of them: the first time I played, after getting my first story, I clicked the link to hear another, which brought me to a second, but then I got that same second story four times in a row. I dipped back in for a quick replay as I wrote this review, and looks like there are a few more, so perhaps I just got unlucky that first time, but it’s still a fairly limited pool, with no customization or responsiveness to other choices within the stories as far as I can tell. And by design, you just keep clicking through to generate a new story until you get bored and decide to send the grand-daughter outside to make snow-forts.
Sonder Snippets isn’t bad by any means, with technically-solid writing and bug-free implementation, and stories that clearly have significance to the author. And I liked the few hints I got of the relationship between the grandmother and grand-daughter. But it doesn’t feel like a game that’s considered what impact it wants to have on its audience, and tailored itself accordingly.
An entertaining ten-minute diversion, December 11, 2020Sheep Crossing is a one-puzzle game, with no plot to speak of, and the puzzle is one that pretty much everybody has heard of and solved by the time they’re seven. But wait, come back! Another way to recite the same facts is that it’s a cute and charming take on a classic puzzle, and since neither the author nor the player need to pretend that figuring out the solution is the point, it’s all about riffing on that premise and finding as many gags, and ways to fail at this beyond-simple task, as possible.
The clever touches begin with some canny substitution – the prototypical version of this puzzle involves some grain, a chicken, and a fox, I believe (it’s the one where each will eat one of the others, and you need to take them across a river one at a time). But clearly, the bear on offer here is funnier than a fox, and a cabbage is likewise funnier than a sack of grain (the sheep vs. chicken matchup is closer, but let’s give it to the sheep by decision). If you want to just get them across the river to grandmother’s house in the prescribed order, you face a slight barrier inasmuch as the sheep starts out too hangry to be manhandled into the boat, but this is easily remedied, and then it’s off to grandma’s, well done, gold star for you.
The fun comes in when you try to mess things up. Obviously if you leave the wrong pair behind on a trip, game-ending acts of ingestion will occur in your absence. And there are myriad ways to fail beyond this, from tangling with the bear to chowing down on something yourself to deciding sod this for a game of soldiers and wandering off. There are lots, lots more, with many nonstandard verbs implemented with surprising detail. I don’t want to spoil any more of the fun, but I found that the author had thought of the most of the ideas that popped into my head, often with different outcomes depending on which of the trio I was attempting to misuse.
For all that, this is still a ten-minute diversion, tops. And I didn’t discover any unexpected interactions that led to alternate positive endings or revealed anything unexpected, which might have been nice – instead it’s all just different ways to flub things up. This means it’s easy to type undo and try again, but also somewhat reduces the novelty and potential surprise of trying new things. But the gag in its current form certainly works, and coming so late in the Comp for me, that was just what I was looking for.
An easygoing cyberpunk adventure, December 11, 2020(I beta tested this game)
In my unreliable memory, cyberpunk used to be a pretty common genre for IFComp entries, but it’s become a bit more rare these days – Sense of Harmony included many of the tropes, as did Move On in its implied setting, and I suppose BYOD is all about corporate hacking. Maybe the genre as a whole is less relevant as we’ve all gotten used to the fact that we’re basically swimming in cyberspace 24/7 and corporate-run authoritarian dystopias don’t really land as a scary unknown any more? Regardless of any of that, Shadow Operative is a cyberpunk adventure of the old school, as a rogue hacker with a cyberjack in, and a price on, their head infiltrates a megacorp to exfiltrate hidden data that could bring down the whole company. Story-wise it’s a bit by the numbers, but satisfying puzzles and a slick presentation mean this one definitely scratches the shadowrunning itch.
Starting with that presentation, since it’s the first thing you notice when starting the game, it’s anything but a throwback: while written in Inform and fully playable by the parser alone, there are also a lot of conveniences in various sidebars, including a usable map, hyperlinks for important objects, a clickable list of common verbs (with ENTER CYBERSPACE first on the list, because of course), and a title image and music throughout. I played via typing, but this one should be pretty accessible to those who prefer to click their way through or who are less familiar with parser-only games – and it all really reinforces the mood of the piece, placing you in the shoes of an enhanced operative who can quickly figure out everything that’s going on.
As mentioned, the setting and setup are classic cyberpunk – after a botched job, you’ve got hitmen after you, and while laying low you get sucked into doing one more job for an old friend. The emphasis is clearly on that one more job, though – the price on your head doesn’t really connect to what you’re doing after the first five minutes of the story (and is resolved rather summarily in the conclusion). This maybe reduces the drama somewhat, but does perhaps better fit the mood, which is more easygoing than the typical cyberpunk vibe – it definitely starts out all edgy, but pretty soon your badass operative has crashed into the back of a garbage truck, and it pretty much goes on from there. I don’t think there’s any way to die (though there is a way to make the game unwinnable: (Spoiler - click to show)don’t drink away your upgrade money!>/spoiler>), and instead of a cold, geometric void, cyberspace is presented as rather cheerful medieval or feudal Japanese worlds with anthropomorphized programs. There are also rather a lot of jokes and in-jokes, which I thought mostly landed – I’m not sure the world needed another “the cake is a lie” gag, but I’m always down for an “I’m selling these fine leather jackets” callback.
The action is all about the central job, and it’s well put together and paced. There’s a bit of preliminary work to do to get ready for the heist, then you go through the infiltration and a cyberspace misadventure before having to make your escape. The puzzles are fairly simple but reasonable and satisfying to solve, with the trickiest ones coming in cyberspace. Again, this is presented in somewhat cartoony fashion – defeating the megacorp’s security primarily involves using musical instruments that I guess are really programs to overcome AI ICE that takes the shape of various guard-animals? – but it works well enough and doesn’t require the player to absorb a bunch of technobabble. There is one really good twist, which I mostly saw coming but still landed well.
It’s all solidly implemented, too (the only issue I found is that you can pick up the bamboo tree – bit of an oops but no big deal), and the interface removes any guess the verb issues. Overall Shadow Operative goes down smooth and easy, and provides a good argument for why this old genre has some life in it yet.
You will shoot the monster as fast as you shoot a werewolf, December 11, 2020A short, sharp horror game, Shadow in the Snow doesn’t have much in its quiver besides some effective description of a frozen wood and a single kinda-wonky puzzle, but given its focused ambitions I’m not sure it needs much else. The backstory is wholly elided – the main character has run their car into a snow-ditch in the middle of nowhere, but we get no details on who they are, where they were going, or the state of the world (Spoiler - click to show)(I could by wrong on this, but felt like the characters didn’t seem especially surprised about the existence of giant bloodthirsty werewolf-monsters). Since the focus is on short-term survival, this isn’t a fatal misstep and in fact helps establish a feeling of woozy confusion that winds up being a little effective at drawing the player in.
There’s not a lot to do here – it becomes clear early on that there’s something stalking the main character, and they need to explore a limited set of locations in order to obtain the clues and knowledge to fight back. I’m not sure how fair the puzzle was – I think you need to explore the locations in a specific and nonintuitive order (Spoiler - click to show)(stumbling around in the snowy forest instead of going up the road to a motel seems less than obvious!) and involved a situation I found quite contrived (Spoiler - click to show)(there are just gold, silver, and arsenic shotgun cartridges available off the shelf, labelled only by their elemental symbols? This is why I wonder about whether the supernatural is a known quantity in this world) plus there are a fair number of deaths possible and no save option, meaning you’re in for a full replay if you guess something wrong. Still, there are some clues to most of the key pieces of the puzzle, and I got to a good ending first time through, so I think it works well enough.
The prose generally fits this spare premise. It doesn’t go into a ton of noodly detail, but it does effectively communicate the isolation of being alone in a snowy forest. There’s also an abandoned motel, and some gore, which are described in similar style and which works well enough, but winter landscapes are my favorite backdrop for horror so the woodsy bits were my favorites. The signs the monster is stalking you are also effectively spooky, though I thought the eventual confrontation was maybe a bit anticlimactic – certainly the ending felt more abrupt than I was expecting.
On clicking restart to replay, I found what might be some small bugs related to variables not being cleared (Spoiler - click to show)(if I went to the motel before the cabin, I was able to pick up cartridges and load them into a shotgun I hadn’t yet obtained, and the description for the motel reception area said it was “the same as before” even on my first visit) but otherwise the implementation seemed fine, and I didn’t notice any typos. SitS didn’t knock my socks off, but it’s a pleasant enough ten minutes of being stalked through the woods which is sometimes all that one wants.
A lovely prelude, December 11, 2020Oh, more of this, please. Sense of Harmony is clearly stated to be a “prelude to further mysteries”, and its one-hour gameplay time is also marked on the tin, so I have no one to blame but myself for the disappointed groan I emitted when I hit the “demo’s done, stay tuned for more!” message just when things were getting exciting. I hope the authors don’t spend too long basking in deserved praise and get back to the salt mines right quick, because I want to play the rest, damn it!
Backing up slightly: Sense of Harmony is a cyberpunk adventure that takes advantage of players’ likely familiarity with the genre while layering a smart twist on top: while the player character has a full suite of cybernetic enhancements, enabling her to jack into electronics, have full recall of her memories, and, most notably, be the mistress of any social situation through a complement of enhanced senses that allow her to read subtle cues in intonation, body language, and even sweat-sheen differentials, these are not common technologies, and as far as she knows she’s the only one of her kind.
Because these abilities are presented as unique, and not just a quotidian part of the setting, the game really foregrounds them, through a clever melding of writing and interface. In most every passage, you have several color-coded links allowing you to access your enhanced sight, or hearing, or touch, many of which open up additional actions or choices. This is really effectively done, making you feel like an omniscient Sherlock Holmes while ensuring that the player still needs to synthesize the tidal wave of information and make decisions based on it, rather than it being a matter of picking one right option after using the correct magic power. As an early example, there’s a sequence where the player character can tell that one of her clients is upset about something, and after asking some probing questions, can get a clear sense of their emotional disposition, whether they might be hiding something, and the presence of some underlying tensions related to some of the topics they bring up. But the player still needs to make a (hard!) choice about what to do with all of that knowledge.
It really is an amazing power fantasy, and the writing helps sell it, too. This description of remote-hacking a lock is one of the best of its ilk I’ve ever read:
"Whatever it is that makes you not a paperclip. Not a stone just eroding away in the waters of life.
Whatever that is, it’s left you. Distantly, you feel it coiling itself around the fingerprint scanner and squeezing itself into its circuit boards. The deeper it goes, the further it feels, and the emptier your chest, the dimmer your light.
You’re hollow."
This tells me what it feels like to have these abilities, in a way that really drew me into the world.
The cavalcade of information also helps put the player in the same mindset as the character. Every interaction becomes slowed-down, hyperreal – even noticing a coworker with an interesting tattoo can spiral into multiple avenues of investigation, but it’s not clear whether that’s because there’s anything significant going on, or because the player character’s abilities make everything feel significant (I mean, it’s a game, I’m guessing the former, but still, the slightly-paranoid, slightly-overwhelming vibe really works).
I haven’t said much about the plot yet – largely because there isn’t that much to it at present beyond a slice-of-life vignette and a mysterious encounter that doesn’t yet resolve. This is all well done, especially the first bit – the player character moonlights doing sex work, which, as far as I can tell, is portrayed in a sensitive, non-prurient way that underscores the emotional labor required. The few characters are well-drawn, with the player character’s extraordinary senses providing a great channel for adding shading and depth to people like the brothel’s new boss, who initially comes across as an awkward meathead but also has an appealing kindness to him.
Again, everything here just works, and I’m eager to see where things go from here. I’m unsure exactly what that will look like – and I’m a bit worried about the amount of work required, since to do the senses justice requires so much detail that I’m guessing this could easily be a ten or twenty hour game! So please, don’t kill yourselves but definitely get cracking.
Clever but underdeveloped, December 11, 2020One of SAD’s co-authors also co-authored Vain Empires, and so is almost single-handedly supporting the supernatural spy-thriller IF subgenre. There, it was angels and demons; here it’s time-traveling druids which is an even fresher premise. Some solid puzzling makes this a pleasant enough entry, but I found SAD a bit underdeveloped, both in terms of the worldbuilding and especially in terms of the characters, so it doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Starting with the worldbuilding part of that, the introduction does a good job of creating urgency – apparently a cult of fire-worshippers managed to destroy the world (hate it when that happens) but the “Federal Bureau of Druids” is able to send a single operative (guess who) a couple days back in time to stop things. You don’t have a Q-style array of gadgets, but almost as good, you have a magic cocoon whose threads can take you to different time periods, along with some additional powers, with the only caveat being that you need to feed various mystical plants into the thing to unlock its abilities. While the playing area is relatively small – a dozen or so locations in and around the cult’s lakeside compound – you can ultimately access four timelines (one for each season) so there’s a lot of ground to cover.
This is more than enough to get the player up and running, but I felt like I wanted a bit more to chew on. The whole “Federal Bureau of Druids” thing set me up to expect a fantasy/modern mash-up, but as far as I could tell things are pretty much pure fantasy save for the incongruous appearance of an orange traffic cone. The cult seems to have some odd beliefs – they’re very into hand tattoos – but the narrative voice doesn’t comment on whether any of this is familiar to the player character, or how they should understand it. Late in the game, there are intimations of a third faction at play, but despite the ending text indicating that they’re a known quantity to the player character, there’s no in-game indication of what their agenda might be and how it intersects with the player’s – which is disappointing, since deciding whether or not to aid them is an important part of determining which ending you get.
Exacerbating this issue are the other characters. There are I think five other people running around between the various time periods, all members of the cult. Oddly, none of them seemed especially upset to see someone in the uniform of their enemy wandering around their base, beyond barring access to a few especially high-security areas. And in fact you spend a bunch of the game doing small favors for them, fetching them snacks and so on, which they reciprocate like they’re happy to be good chums with you (the cult’s ringleader will even make an attractive commemorative plaque to memorialize how you helped him out this one time). Curiously, you don’t share a language with any of them, though, so you can’t communicate – even more curiously, though, you’re still able to read the documents they write. This comes off as a game-y contrivance to minimize the difficulty of implementing conversation with too many NPCs, which is fair enough, but it also means that the world felt underbaked and I was often unsure of my mission – like, these people all seem nice enough, maybe this apocalypse is just a big misunderstanding?
Really what it all comes down to, then, is the puzzles, and here SAD is on surer footing. Steadily increasing the power of the cocoon and opening up all the timelines, and then new powers, makes for a very satisfying progression. And most of the puzzles are reasonably clued; a few leaned a bit more heavily into comedy than I was expecting (Spoiler - click to show)(pulling a hat off somebody’s head with a fishing rod, interrupting a why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road joke in progress), another sign of some of the tonal issues here, but the hints and walkthrough do a fine job of keeping you on track. I did feel like the time-travel aspect of things wasn’t used to its fullest – there are only a couple of classic “do something in the past to change the future” puzzles, which are usually the draw of this kind of thing – but again, what’s here is solid enough. I did think there was some misleading clueing around one puzzle (Spoiler - click to show) (unlocking the rainbow lockbox, where finding the orange pentagon drawing made me think I’d need to find clues to the combination one by one) but stumbling onto the real solution wasn’t too tricky.
Despite the challenge of keeping track of all the different timelines, implementation is smooth throughout, and it’s fun to be able to just type WINTER or SUMMER and be whisked away to a whole new world – as in Vain Empires, there’s an attractive and helpful map always visible at the top of the window, and it changes to match the season which is really helpful for staying oriented. Location descriptions and scenery implementation are both a bit sparse, but that does help keep things streamlined.
Again, I had fun with SAD (irony!), and I know in the Comp it’s usually better to deliver a more modest and solid game than go too big and risk a fiasco. Still, I wish the authors had been a bit more ambitious throughout: they go big with the endings, with eight available, but that felt like too many given that the loose worldbuilding hadn’t given me sufficient stakes or grounds to decide which direction to go. With more love devoted to the setting, and characters who invest the player in the world and establish the impact of their actions, this could have been a real standout – as it is, it was still a pleasant find as the Comp is winding to its close.
A slow mood piece with killer bugs, December 11, 2020Oh, lordy. Savor is a generally well-written horror game with intriguing mysteries, mostly-solid prose, and some beautiful presentation elements, but painful design choices and egregious bugs made this perhaps my most unpleasant experience in the Comp so far.
Right, let’s start with the good. The setting is a unique one that made me eager to learn more – the protagonist is an amnesiac suffering from a poorly-understood but crippling disease, who wakes up in a sun-blasted corn field and eventually strikes an uneasy détente with the farmer who lives there and also has the same disease. There are occasional flashbacks that hint at what’s going on, and an alternation of laconic dialogue with lush landscape description that’s a little Faulknerian. Usually this is effective – here’s an early bit:
"The sky a gradient stretching up from a deep mauve horizon to the violet highs above. Corn stalks line your horizon, menacing, ragged and gnarled yellow heads blooming with the threat of death."
Occasionally it tips over and feels overwritten (soon after that passage, there’s this: “The door finally frees itself from the constricting embrace of its jamb and tiredly swings inward, granting you access”), but for the most part the prose is one of the main draws here. And there are nicely-curated, blanched-out photographs that serve as the background for the text and help underline the alienation, pain, and flatness that define the protagonist’s existence.
Sadly, now we’re on to the litany of complaints. All that well-written text is presented in timed fashion, and while it displays quickly, it still makes replays really frustrating. You get occasional, signposted choices that are the most significant ones, but there are also many smaller ones along the way – most of which are about physically navigating a space, but the environment is usually described in a confused way so that I wasn’t sure why ENTER HOUSE and OPEN GATE were meaningfully different when I was (I think) standing at a house’s outside gate. Progression seems very arbitrary – at one point, (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist committed suicide without any clear prompting for what I could have done differently – and when I tried to rewind by clicking the big “replay” button that popped up on the achievements page, the game crashed. And when I started poking around to try to figure out where I got stuck, I found the myriad bugs lurking below the surface.
So, in the course of playing the game, you’ll occasionally accumulate books or journal entries, sometimes for unclear reasons (you’ll just get an out-of-world notification like “You acquired Book: Book1”). On first play, I was confused about how to read these, but it turns out that if you type ESC (there’s no button or on-screen menu icon), you’ll hit a screen that shows a bunch of collectibles including journal pages, books, “fragments,” and “rewind tokens.” If you click on one of the books, you’ll get a bit of (I thought badly-written) poetry, a notification that you’ve unlocked one of those rewind tokens, and an error message. If you click on anything else, you’ll get taken to a page not found error that permanently halts progress since there’s no undo (hopefully you figured out that when the menu says you can type L to load, actually that takes you to a screen where you can save too). And while from looking at the walkthrough the intended path through the game involves using those rewind tokens to explore every possible choice – it’s really not clear how this works in-universe – I found their implementation was pretty spotty and they didn’t always work.
I struggled with Savor for another half hour or so to see if I could get to some reasonable ending, and even dove into the source code to see if I could read where things were headed, but the frustration won out in the end. The story, at least as far as I got, really only has one note (slow physical decline in a depressing landscape, with a monotonous existence broken up only by even more monotonous chores), so that combined with the technical issues made for a really unfun time. There are indications that there might be a more hopeful ending possible (Spoiler - click to show)(much as in another game in the Comp, you’re a secret vampire, and immersion in holy water might be a cure) but I lack the fortitude to push through any more of this punishing experience to get there.
Postmodern prognostication, December 11, 2020This isn’t a game, but rather a simulated divination device using a deck of cards – think a Tarot deck but with more topical cards and a simplified reading layout. It’s got lush production values, with the table wood-grain a strong point and the cards animated with a pleasant tactility. These aren’t really elements that I’m comfortable evaluating in a work of interactive fiction, though, and as such it’s hard to figure out how to review it since it’s not a game, and there’s no narrative or progression. I suppose I can just describe the reading I did with it? Given the tenor of the times, I predictably asked the deck what I should do if the election got weird (I played it the Monday before Election Day). Here’s what I got:
In the “Paradigm” slot, which I think describes the overall situation, I got the Slacker, which indicates a “surfeit of possibility.” Awesome, thanks cards, that’s super helpful. Though the more in-depth explanation closes with a quote reminding us that “washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and powerless means to side with the powerful, not to remain neutral.” So perhaps that’s on point after all.
Next we have the “Punctum,” which I think indicates an approach to consider taking? The card here is the Other, reflecting “relocating blame” and “categorization.” Apparently it’s meant to remind us of the folly of “constructing an Other out of your ignorances and unknowns, then attacking it.” Some reasonable applicability to how folks tend to characterize the supporters of the other side here…
Now the “Vehicle,” signifying a tool that may be of use. I got Weird, top-line summary being “abjection.” Digging deeper, “weird is the process of being and becoming, that predominantly lies outside the observers [sic] power.” This is above my head, except to say that yeah, things are likely to get weird (that was even how I phrased the question!) – not sure that’s a useful tool to help accomplish anything though!
For “Outcome” – self-explanatory enough, I think – I got Synthesis, “alignment of activity,” “resolution of conflict through shared submission to an overarching goal.” That’s… surprisingly positive?
Putting this all together, I think what the deck is telling me is to think more broadly about what might happen tomorrow, to be mindful of what we all have in common, and that something strange and beyond our powers of understanding might usher in a harmonious future where Americans reconciled and working together towards a new common cause. So basically, if the world goes full Watchmen tomorrow and we wind up forgetting about Democrats and Republicans as we all band together to fight alien squid-monsters, you heard it here first.
POST-ELECTION UPDATE: This did not happen.
Wordplay overdose (that's not a bad thing), December 11, 2020Reader, a confession: it’s only now, as I’m sitting down to write this review, that I have realized that Sage Sanctum Scramble and Under They Thunder were written by different people. I must have gotten the impression they shared an author when I was first page-downing my way through the giant list of games, and my shortcut-loving brain must have thought “right, two word games by people whose names started with A, that’s all sorted then,” despite the fact that I’ve played other games by both authors before. Anyway, the conceit for this review was going to be a compare-and-contrast between the two games, which felt reasonable to do when I thought they were by the same person but churlish and weird now that I have at long last disassembled the DiBianca-Schultz gestalt entity living in my head. I guess we’ll just have to wing it!
Typically I like to start with the premise, but, um, that feels challenging here. I’m going to attempt to describe the plot without going back to my notes: you (I don’t think who you are is explained) are magically whisked to an other-worldly word-sanctum, where the head of the titular sages tells you they need your help. An evil four-armed monster is using magic to tear up the place and you need to solve a bunch of word puzzles to build out the vocabulary you’ll need to fight him. OK, let’s see how I did… huh, turns out my brain is playing tricks again, because the game actually sets things up with you solving word puzzles in medias res, and you only get one sentence’s worth of backstory/motivation after you’ve figured out ten of them. This is sub-Bookworm Adventures in terms of character-centricity and narrative cohesion, with the main defining feature being lots and lots of silly names that seem like they should be anagram-jokes but aren’t.
Anyway who cares because I loved this. The premise is there to get you solving word puzzles; there are several dozen on offer, and though you can get a solid enough ending after getting as few as thirty, I banged my way through all of them (Spoiler - click to show)(sixty, plus the bonus ones too!) because I was having so much fun. There’s nothing too novel here, though there is an impressive variety: there are word-substitution puzzles, mastermind-style word-guessing games, word-bridge puzzles where you’re transforming a word one letter at a time, and of course lots and lots of anagrams. Each puzzle is self-contained and fairly quick to solve once you get the trick, and while I don’t think there are any repeats, the later, much harder puzzles build off of what came before, so even the trickiest of them feel like they’re playing by a consistent, fair set of rules that have been introduced to the player.
The puzzles unlock as you solve them, and you typically have the choice of half a dozen or so, which means it’s easy enough to hop around and feel like you’re making progress – it was only when I was closing in on the last ten or so that progress began to slow, at which point I was sufficiently in the head-space of the game (like, I was starting to look for anagrams in work emails) that I appreciated the challenge. They’re almost all impeccably constructed in terms of puzzle design: there are definitely several that would be hard for folks who don’t have a mastery of English idiom (the one where you need to figure out what two words have in “uncommon”, or a few that rely on knowing a common phrase based on one word in it, come to mind), and a few that rely as much on grunt work as a moment of inspiration, but almost always when I got a solution (or, for some of the last few, was prompted to the solution by some considerately-provided hints on the forum), I was smacking my head and muttering “that makes sense.”
The technical implementation is also incredibly impressive – everything just works, which at first I didn’t really pay attention to because these are just word puzzles, how complex can it be? But when I thought about the amount of work that would need to go into each and every one of the over fifty on offer, in terms of coding custom responses and making what’s basically a different limited-parser game for each (you access a puzzle index by typing PUZZLES and then using numbers to jump around the list, BOOK shows you the keywords you’ve accumulated, and other than that it’s basically just typing in guesses), while having to parse not just whole words and recognize the entire dictionary, but also for many registering and responding to the individual letters and lengths… it’s very impressive, I repeat, and almost completely smooth (I think there were like two times when I got an incorrect result – one was when it wouldn’t accept “anoint” as a verb starting with a, to give you a flavor of what these edge cases are like).
There’s a smart layer of meta-progression over the puzzles that makes it even more compelling than it would be as a strict grab-bag, too. To beat the boss (you remember there was a monster, right? In the rich and compelling backstory?) you need to engage him in a word-fight, and while merely winning just requires you to accumulate enough keywords, he also throws out spells that can only be defended against if you’ve got a matching keyword: one that’s a palindrome, or only made up of letters from the second half of the alphabet. If you don’t have one, it’s not game over, but the eponymous sanctum takes some damage, which makes the ending feel a little less happy. Fortunately, you can always REWIND and try again after padding out your arsenal some more. (Spoiler - click to show)There’s also a small suite of bonus puzzles that unlock some alternate options around the ending, and which were quite fun to find and work through, with the caveat that it took me much longer to figure out how to access them than it should have because I failed at counting.
As I have with many other reviews in the Comp, I’ll conclude by making the obvious point that this is a game with a specific target audience, and if you’re in it you’ll probably really enjoy it but if word puzzles aren’t your jam, you’ll probably appreciate its craft but not find it too compelling. The difference is, I’m actually in that target audience this time out, and hopefully it’s clear that despite my affectionate bagging on the story and premise, I loved it to death.
Nostalgic or anti-nostalgic?, December 11, 2020I think I mentioned somewhere in the interminable chain of my previous Comp reviews that my knowledge of recent IF is rather patchy: I got into it in the early aughts, playing through all the Comp games from like ’02 through ’06 and catching up on most of the classics of the scene (I mean except Curses since it’s hard), but then got less obsessive about it over the next few years and only dipped in intermittently through the teens, before the bug came roaring back last year. All of which is to say I’ve managed to pretty much entirely miss the era of Ryan Veeder – I think Taco Fiction was in the last Comp I took a half-serious run at before 2019’s, and dimly remember that it was fun and funny but not much else. As I’ve been getting back into things, I have checked out a few of his other games – Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder and Ascent of the Gothic Tower – but I’m still aware that “Ryan Veeder games” are a well-defined thing these days, though one that's a bit of a mystery to me.
All of which is by way of saying that I’m not going to be able to situate A Rope of Chalk in the author’s oeuvre and am not completely sure what to make of the metafictional post-script – but nevertheless, I still dug the hell out of this game. ARoC situates itself as an attempt to document a college art contest from a decade in the past, while acknowledging in an introductory note that memory and the limitations of perspective being what they are, we’re in for a Rashomon-style confusion of narratives. You’re given the choice to opt in or out of the story given these caveats, and if you say “no” the game quits, so fair warning that subjectivity is the order of the day. The game lives up to this premise by rotating you among four or five different protagonists (depending on how you count), and while there’s not much divergence in the actual sequence of events, each has a distinct narrative voice, with modifications not just to descriptions and action responses, but also most parser responses to account for who the protagonist is in each sequence. There’s even different punctuation around dialogue options depending on who the main character is!
I started that paragraph out talking about the premise but quickly fell into the implementation, and that’s accurate to my experience of the game. The plot and characters are fun and everything’s well-written, but when I’m thinking back on what it was like to play ARoC, it’s really the attention to detail and depth of implementation that stand out – like, that’s a thing that reviewers, including me, say about many games, but here it’s almost spooky how the author sometimes seemed to be reading my mind. Like, there’s a point where your character’s perceptions get shifted (Spoiler - click to show)(I realize this applies to several bits, but I’m thinking of the beginning of the Nathalie sequence), and all sorts of verbs are rewritten to respond to the situation, including some that aren’t ever useful to the story like JUMP and LAUGH. I don’t want to spoil too many more, but there were a bunch of times when I typed something into the parser just to be cute, and was amazed to find that the author had gotten there first. There are niggles, of course – I hit on the idea of (Spoiler - click to show)using water to erase chalk art I didn’t like while in the first sequence, playing as Lane, but instead of being told that wasn’t something she would consider, there was a bunch of unpromising parser wrestling, so it was a bit surprising when that very thing wound up being suggested right out the gate in the second sequence. But many of these niggles are I think due to my own expectations, which had been inflated excessively high by the overall extreme level of responsiveness.
Plot-wise, ARoC is all about building up to one big event – you’re primed to know that something will go disastrously pear-shaped by the blurb and intro, and the opening sections have quite a lot to do and explore so it doesn’t feel like busywork even though from a certain point of view, you’re just marking time until things really kick off. There are a bunch of characters to engage with, and while they all present as stereotypes at first blush, there’s enough substance beneath the surface to have made me wish there were more than the 4 or 5 dialogue options on offer for each conversation (even though I don’t think the game would work as well if I got my wish – this is me noting smart design, not indicating an oversight). And since this is a sidewalk-chalk tournament, there’s a lot of fun, well-described art to look at, with each piece casting some light on the artist who made it (I was expecting Rachel’s to be bad from the lead up, but I had no idea how awful it would actually turn out to be).
Once the key event kicks in, the game gets a little more focused and there’s even what you might be able to call a puzzle if you squint at it. But even as there’s some additional urgency, and a few real obstacles (Spoiler - click to show)(well, they might not be real but close enough), you’re always rewarded for lingering and straying off the beaten path – and the steps you need to take to progress are always quite clear, keeping the momentum and the enjoyment up.
I have a couple of more spoiler-y thoughts on the ending, so I’ll wrap up with those, after repeating again that this is an excellent, funny game (I’ve barely talked about the jokes, I realize). Anyway: (Spoiler - click to show)there’s a moment or two of catharsis at the end of the story, then an optional sequence where you can wander around what’s presented as the author’s office, finding various bits of correspondence and photos that purport to indicate the research that’s been done into the tournament, as well as providing some glimpses of what happened to these kids ten years out from college. I found this a bit enigmatic, since the ending didn’t really leave me with a strong takeaway that was then recast by the afterward – it all worked well enough on its own, but I think I was waiting for some kind of twist or emotional punch that never fully landed. But in the end I think this might be the point: there are big things that happen in our lives sometimes and loom large in our memories, but when you try to pin down exactly what happened, or what simple cause-and-effect impact it had, it all slips away because people don’t really work like that. I oscillate between thinking A Rope of Chalk is nostalgic and thinking it’s anti-nostalgic, because it makes the past loom so large and presents a memory with such immediacy and impact, but also refuses to tie a bow around it and spell out what it all means.
Too old-school for me, December 11, 2020I swear, the randomizer has a sense of humor – after giving me Tangled Tales, prompting me to whine about a too-large map and guess-the-verb puzzles, it decided to serve up Return to Castle Coris to see how I liked a double-helping of those issues, plus extreme pixelbitching and copious opportunities to be straight-up killed or, worse, unwittingly get myself into a walking dead situation. This one’s billed as longer than two hours, but I have to confess I gave up on it less than halfway into the judging period.
This is apparently a late entry in a long series of games, stretching back several decades, so it comes by its old-school approach honorably. The introductory text calls back to many of the protagonist’s previous adventures, including one in the eponymous castle, which you’re now called to follow up on after the discovery of a new tunnel in the dungeons. There’s nothing really motivating the exploration – you’re just asked to go into the tunnels and check things out – except perhaps a hint, when examining the protagonist’s clothing and finding out that his wife made him throw out all his old, comfy gear and get nice new stuff, that he feels slightly henpecked and is looking for a distraction.
So it’s really a straight-ahead dungeon crawl, which I can certainly be in the mood for, but the emphasis here is on the “crawl.” The puzzles rely on going through the dungeon like you’re being paid by the hour, and poking at every single object like you’re a CSI technician analyzing a crime scene. Sometimes this is just a matter of tedium: there’s one area that’s made up of about ten wooden landings on a set of stairs, and you need to SEARCH the random detritus that’s glancingly included in the identical room descriptions to find a hidden key in one of them. But usually it’s much more involved, due to the profusion of verbs.
LOOK and LOOK AROUND are billed as different actions. SEARCHing an object won’t disclose if it’s on top of something; that takes MOVE. Your initial inventory includes a magic bottomless bag (handy!) but neither the inventory listing nor X BAG reveals that this open bag actually contains a rope and grapnel – you need to LOOK IN BAG for that.
This is where the guess-the-verb issues and the hunt-the-pixel ones combine into a cocktail of eye-stabbing frustration. To solve the first puzzle, you need to find a hammer and chisel. These are hidden in the space below a set of spiral stairs leading back up to the castle (why are they there? Who knows), four screens north of your starting area which clearly prompts you to explore the area to the south. If you X STAIRS you get told “They go Up to Castle Coris itself. Under the bottom of the stair you see a space.” OK, X SPACE: “A space under the spiral stairs about a foot or so high.” That’s right, you need to LOOK IN SPACE.
This is not to undervalue the places where the way to solve the puzzle is obvious, but you can’t get the syntax right. In the above-mentioned stairway, at one point there’s a gap in the wooden stairs that you need to cross, described as follows: “You are on a platform in the spiral stairway in the vertical shaft on the west side. There is a gap in the stairs further down where the wood has rotted away and you can only go Up to the platform above this one.” The grapnel and rope is the obvious way to proceed, but THROW GRAPNEL ACROSS GAP, THROW GRAPNEL OVER GAP, THROW GRAPNEL AT STAIRS, TIE ROPE TO PLATFORM, THROW GRAPNEL AT PLATFORM, and THROW GRAPNEL ACROSS SHAFT all fail with unhelpful errors. Maybe there’s a non-obvious solution? No, you just need to THROW GRAPNEL AT UNDERSIDE of the platform above – a word that shows up nowhere in the descriptions of the scant scenery here, at least when just using the standard EXAMINE.
The punch line here is that five minutes after using the walkthrough to get past that puzzle, I faced an almost-identical one where I had to climb down into a dark chasm, with a conspicuous wooden railing at the top providing a convenient anchor point. Again, I tried TIE ROPE TO RAILING, HOOK ROPE TO RAILING, HOOK GRAPNEL TO RAILING – nope, none of it works, just HOOK GRAPNEL TO WOOD. Then I found myself in a pit with a snake who seemed to autokill me in half a dozen turns no matter what I did, including the time I was able to climb all the way back up the rope to what I thought was safety. It appears to have been magical in other ways too:
"The snake hisses loudly and its forked tongue whips in and out of its mouth as it tastes the air to work out what you are.
STAB SNAKE WITH SWORD
You can’t see the tunnel snake!
The snake throws itself at you, knocking you to the ground. You try to scrabble away but the creature coils its muscular body around you and starts to squeeze."
The old-school tough-as-nails adventure game is part of an honorable tradition, and I’m sure there are players who slot into the mindset necessary to make progress in RtCC without too much difficulty. But I am just not a bad enough dude to rescue the president/mess around in the dark for hours until hopefully stumbling onto a plot. When I checked in the walkthrough and found that I was maybe 10 percent of the way through the game, and also saw there was no mention of the snake but a bunch of stuff I’d missed in the beginning (apparently by not shining my lamp at the walls for no prompted reason I could see) and I was once again walking dead, I just didn’t have the heart to spend any more time with this one.
Fingersmith, December 11, 2020In some ways it’s apt that the randomizer gave me Red Radish Robots right after Ascension of Limbs (yes, I’ve gotten to the point in the Comp where I’m starting to think about the randomizer…), because while AoL’s secret sauce was that it was just the right length for its content, RRR suffers from going on too long for the interest its setting and puzzles can support.
The concept is a fine if unexceptional one – robot waking up after some kind of disaster and trying to reconstruct what’s happening while solving straightforward puzzles – but the trouble is, it isn’t too hard to suss out what’s happened, and the puzzles are all quite straightforward. The closest thing to a twist is that the robot has been deactivated without fingers, so you need to gather them one by one until you have a full complement of ten, which allows you to get to the end-game. But ten is too high a number to which to have to count, given that you mostly find them by unlocking doors (some with keys, some by oiling stuck hinges), opening multiple safes, finding a note where someone’s written down their computer login and clues to their password… Again, there’s nothing wrong with the classics, but in too large portions it feels overly starchy.
There are ways to be destroyed or get to a dead end, but a limited number of respawns are possible (respawns also appear to somehow rewind time as to at least one object, which is helpful but confusing!) The writing is typo-free and does what it needs to to communicate the setting and what’s going on. And there are a couple of puzzles that have a bit more zip to them, like the final one (Spoiler - click to show)(though requiring the player to lie to the “bad” robot, then sucker-punch him while shouting out that I’m fine being a slave was maybe not my favorite aspect of the game). But my interest started to flag on like the sixth spin through the same eight rooms to see what one new quotidian interaction my incremental progress had unlocked, before having to do the inevitable seventh. All this speaks well of what the author will do next – and there are indications there’s more work already in the oven – hopefully with a bit of trimming to cut away any unneeded filler!
A near-diamond in the rough, December 10, 2020Radicofani is a bit of an odd duck that’s frustrating to play, but part of the frustration for me was that I found its world intriguing and was annoyed I couldn’t see as much of it as I wanted. Starting with what’s off-putting: this is a custom-parser game that runs as a standalone Windows executable, with some awkward programming choices – the game is constantly popping up separate, standalone windows, and there’s a noticeable lag after every action – and even more annoying visual-design choices – there are a lot of documents depicted with blurry, pixelated fonts that make reading headache-inducing, and some of the darker colors were hard to read against the black background. It’s apparently a translation of an earlier Italian version, and there are a host of typos and English-language infelicities that indicate that this wasn’t the smoothest process.
The design of the game itself also makes for a bumpy ride. Most locations list their interactive objects after the room description – a nice convenience - but there are also sometimes objects that aren’t listed despite being obvious and quite prominent (on the flip side, there are also some objects that don’t appear to be mentioned anywhere except the hints). And descriptions can be quite sparse – early on as the player is exploring their ex’s apartment, they see the listing “I see a voice mail“, with no cue about it being on an answering machine. There’s also a bench the player can open, I suppose like a piano bench, but the only cue that that’s possible is a note in the description that it has “a usable bottom.”
Predictably, there are guess-the-verb issues, and wandering into a church appears to be an automatic game-over, with no warning so far as I could tell (there’s no UNDO, either). And the results of one’s actions are often very unclear. Here’s the response to MOVE CARPET:
"What should I do now? move carpet
I am watching…
UGH! I must have stopped a gathering of dust mites
You have been missing for a long time…"
Huh?
Yet, despite all these irritations there are parts of Radicofani I really enjoyed. The setting is the primary draw – the player is investigating the disappearance of his ex, who’s an art restorer who went missing in an old medieval hill-town in Tuscany. I’ve been to a similar place, and perhaps the memory of that experience made me find this one so evocative. But there are times when the descriptions, awkward as they sometimes are, do paint a compelling picture of this ancient, mysterious city – and there are a few well-chosen graphics that also fit the mood. The business of the game has to do with libraries, antiquarians, secret passages, and churches, which all appeal to me in a Name-of-the-Rose sort of way.
So I was willing to put up with trying to bash my way through by regular consultation of the hints and squinting at the Italian-language walkthrough Mathbrush found, but sadly even this wasn’t enough to get me past one puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)(what to do once you’ve found the secret shelf in the library). If anyone writes up a walkthrough I’ll gladly come back to this one and go along for the ride just to enjoy some virtual tourism, but absent that sort of guide, Radifocani is hard to recommend.
MUCH LATER UPDATE: with the kind assistance of the author, I was able to finish my playthrough of Radicofani. I’m glad I saw the ending, since there’s a fun and creepy confrontation with the entity behind your ex’s disappearance, and the setting continues to be a highlight. The puzzles did continue to feel pretty arbitrary at times, however, with certain necessary actions seeming pretty unmotivated and underclued to me (I’m thinking especially of (Spoiler - click to show)hypnotizing the antiquarian, since I didn’t notice any indication the player character knew how to do that and it’s kind of a big deal to do that to someone without their consent!). Some of the late-game challenges do make good use of the graphics the game occasionally pops up, embedding hints that felt satisfying to figure out, but they didn’t always feel well integrated with the story – the final puzzle especially. With that said, the ending sequence is nicely put together and ties a satisfying bow around the game, albeit with a couple lines that read to me as some iffy gender politics (Spoiler - click to show)(the girlfriend is said to be changed by her ordeal and now focuses more on stability and things like cooking for you, without her same “thirst for work”, and this is presented as a positive thing). As I said, I was happy to get through to the end, but I’m left wondering what a more experientially-focused game that created more space for the pleasure of exploring the nicely-realized setting would have looked like – with easier or fewer puzzles, I think more folks would be able to enjoy Radicofani.
A fun world that's a little frustrating to explore, December 10, 2020There’s a fun mix of the whimsical and the scientific in Quintessence. The player character is one of a group of multiply-incarnating quantum intelligences, who goes on a cosmic romp aiming to foil the plots of all-powerful cat to contact a broader multiverse. On the whimsical side, the cursor shapeshifts as the player’s circumstances change, from cat to dinosaur to dog; on the scientific side, I caught lightly-allegorized references to straightforward stuff like the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, but also choices that bear on whether this particular universe is closed or open in the cosmological sense.
I sometimes found it a bit challenging to reconcile the two sides of the piece – possibly this is because I, a pedant who studied astrophysics in undergrad, kept trying to figure out what was “really” going on in the various options about how the dog-civilization should try to make contact with parallel realities, rather than simply going with the flow of things. But I think the structure of the piece also maybe pushes play in this direction, since there are clearly “right” and “wrong” answers and branches.
There are five “real” endings (I found two of them, including what seems to be the best one), but many other choices will lead to the cat foiling your explorations, sending you back to the start. Without a way to undo or save, this means that the choices feel fairly weighty, since an incorrect one can require a fair bit of repetition to get back to the place where you made an incorrect choice.
Since there are consequences for the choices, what sometimes felt like a lack of full information about the context and implications of those choices undermined the joy of exploration for me – which is a shame, because there are definitely places where this combination of hard science and animal allegory is really fun (I mentioned the dog civilization!) Hopefully there’s a post-comp release with a back button or the ability to save, since I’d look forward to checking out the other paths through the game.
Stop me if you've heard this one before..., December 10, 2020Your enjoyment of QftSoJ will come down to two things: 1) how forgiving are you of RPG Maker games in IFComp (I’m fine either way, though it doesn’t seem like the engine’s strengths are well-suited for the competition); and 2) are you in the market for a solidly-done but not especially groundbreaking JRPG satire (in space-year 2020, I gotta say – eh, not really?)
As with Equal-librium, this is a short game with only one real gag, so it’s impossible to discuss without blowing the punch-line. So you might as well go play it, it’ll take five minutes. I’ll keep busy here thinking about CRPG tropes that have and haven’t been sent up. Let’s see, there’s the slay-foozle plot, the companions who’ll defend you to the death five minutes after your first meeting, the economy-ruining hoards of magical items and gold you obtain after a couple hours of low-danger grinding, the way the world levels up alongside your character until you hit the town where every random guard is 60th level, the endless fetch-quests with either disproportionately meager or disproportionately lavish rewards… all that’s pretty well-plowed ground, I think. It’s pretty hard to think of something that hasn’t been the butt of lots and lots of jokes!
OK, we’re back, and now that we know QftSoJ takes aim at the adventurer-who-takes-everything-that-isn’t-nailed-down-because-an-old-man-told-him-he-was-the-chosen-one trope, perhaps you too can relate to the sense of ennui in the first paragraph above. This is a pretty good take on the genre, but to say it’s hoary is an insult to octogenarians. The joke is well constructed: while the absence of any introductory text setting up your task I think is a misstep, it’s pretty clear that you’re supposed to think you need to gather equipment before getting out of town (and that you’ll specifically need a sword to clear some foliage for one of the villagers). The backstory the old man spouts is just the sort of generic JRPG guff that makes the player’s eyes roll without reading it closely enough to realize it’s loony. And there’s a bit of reactivity at the trial depending on your previous actions, as well as your legal strategy, making it worth a replay to see the different outcomes (of course you’re doomed no matter what).
But even the greatest amount of craft has a hard time making a five-minute joke game all that memorable. And I personally found the setup funnier than the actual writing and jokes (with one or two exceptions: the protagonist being named “Adonis Orcbane” is 80% of the way to being a great gag, and the guard arresting you with a “You’re nicked, Sonny Jim!” got a chortle out of me). If it’s your first time encountering this sort of thing, I could see QftSoJ being a hoot – but it’s hard for me to believe that’s true for many folks!
Promising but broken, December 10, 2020There’ve been a number of folks who’ve written reviews of PISG already, all of whom noted running into the same issue I did – after setting up the premise (win a 99-contestant singing-and-dancing reality show), introducing a small set of characters (the plucky sidekick, the arrogant rival, etc.), and giving a first introduction to the basic mechanics of the contest (via a series of choices during the prep and performance, leverage a set of four skills to determine how the player did, then give opportunities to improve relationships, sabotage others, and grind up skills in the downtime between challenges), the thing just ends, maybe ten minutes in.
This is well short of the advertised hour and a half playtime, so it’s unclear whether this is a bug, the wrong file was uploaded, an incomplete game was intentionally entered, or the whole thing is an exercise in Brechtian audience-expectation-undermining (the joke is that this is probably a single word in German) that puts For a Place by the Putrid Sea to Shame. None of those options present an easy jumping-off point for a review, sadly (well, except maybe the last one), so this will be a series of notes in place of what might turn into something robust if the game gets updated.
There are definitely a lot of typos and grammar errors, possibly the result of translation? Despite this, or maybe partially because of this, the game has a demented charm that arises from the confluence of the heightened artificiality of the game-show setup and a puppyishly overenthusiastic narrative voice. Like, after being introduced to the competition, we get this:
"You meet your new partner/roommate in a dance studio located inside the ships Tudor-style library. Your partner is Fuko Yamamoto, the daughter of a famous ventriloquist. She hopes to reinvigorate the idol community with the true spirit of enthusiasm and creativity."
I have no idea what to do with any of that, but it’s actually amazing.
It also has the coldest burn of any game so far. As the player character is saying goodbye to her family:
"Despite your dad being a 'boomer,' You love your dad dearly and are sad to leave him."
I’m a millenni-old, not a Boomer, but still: ice cold.
(I have been trying to make millenni-old a thing, by the by, to refer to folks born roughly between 1980 and 1984, who are technically millennials per the demographers but who didn’t have the same ab-ovo familiarity with computers and the internet as the rest of the generation, while still being too young to be invested in GenX touchstones like (shudder) Reality Bites or fully experience the impact of the end of the Cold War. Millenni-old – let’s all make it a thing!)
While it’s easy to focus on the style, there do appear to be some systems undergirding the thing, with stats tracked for your singing, your dancing, your “visuals”, and pretty much everything else (like, you have a fourth stat called “variety” that reflects miscellaneous talents, personality, sense of humor…), as well as numerical values for your relationships with other contestants. It’s easy to see how this would support the game-y side of proceedings, as you customize a character who’ll romp through some challenges while struggling with others, and figure out how best to engage in social maneuvering to come out on top.
None of this is in the game at least as far as I can access it, but the bones are there. Hopefully we’ll see a mid-comp update/fix, or at least PISG Phase Two in next year’s Comp – Long Xiaofan, I’m coming for you!
Fill-in-the-blank existentialism, December 10, 2020The Place is existentialist Mad-Libs, and says so before you ever get into the game – the blurb endorses the credo that existence is absurdity, and makes clear that all the game’s choices lead to the same outcome and their primary impact is on how you think about the journey. This isn’t an uncommon model for choice-based works, and it can definitely work when done well, with care given to how different choices might allow the player to experience different themes or aspects of a mostly-static story.
The Place changes up the standard approach here by making the choices literal Mad Libs – at several choices, you’re prompted to put in a word or phrase, usually something rather concrete or literal, and that fills in a blank in the story that’s being told. At one point there’s a small layer of obfuscation, as you’re prompted to type in a series of numbers, which are then translated into the names of a few cities, but for the most part these are pretty direct: if you’re asked what the main character’s favorite song is, the text you type will be inserted into a sentence mentioning what she’s listening to on the radio, for example. Occasionally there are small callbacks to a choice you made a few passages before, and there are some additional choices where you can decide to skip over a few of the text vignettes – though in a game this short, I’m not sure those are a good idea, frankly.
Anyway, the fill-in-the-blank mechanic is a risky one, I think: the author is putting themselves at the mercy of a player who’ll type in stupid or silly stuff because they don’t yet know, or aren’t clicking with, the mood of the game. The Place also misses some opportunities to use its default answers to guide the player or at least provide a baseline experience for someone who’s just clicking through: the default name for the protagonist is “name”, and if you just click accept on the default question for her favorite pastime, you get passages like “she gets bored easily so she finds her ways to keep herself busy. Only eg: eating ice cream simply doesn’t do it.”
The story here is fairly sketched-in, but does I think hang together – the narrator is reminiscing about a friend of his who’s struggling with some weighty themes, and who fantasizes about travel as an escape from her miserable environment before, it’s implied in the ending, having a moment of satori and realizing that internal transformation rather than external escape is the only path forward. There’s a clear connection between this thematic arc and gameplay that’s just about typing in signifiers for music, travel destinations, and career aspirations that are empty both in narrative and mechanical terms.
I didn’t ultimately find The Place engaging, though, despite the fact that the structure and them hold together. First, just because a game holds together in these terms doesn’t necessarily mean it will be satisfying. Second, the writing isn’t strong enough to carry what’s primarily a work of static fiction. On a technical level, it has numerous typos, grammatical errors, and awkward phrases – though I should say that while I always feel trepidation about speculating that an author’s first language isn’t English, I got that sense here, which helps explain if not excuse these issues (authors: hit folks up on these forums if you need people to read over your text and help tighten it up!)
But leaving those problems aside, the story is often fairly vague – we don’t get a great sense of the main character’s personality beyond a couple of very broad strokes, and the story is described more in vague feelings and overall impressions of what’s happening, rather than being embodied in concrete scenes with specific details or emotions to latch on to. The narrator states that the protagonist is an abusive environment, for example, and while I’m definitely not saying we need to see episodes of abuse graphically depicted, as it is this is just one or two sentences that are never followed up on or illustrated in any immediate way, severely undercutting its impact. And this is true too for the catharsis at the end, which feels more described than evoked. I can see what The Place is going for, and it has pieces in place to get there, but I didn’t find the details of how it’s put together strong enough to feel the intended impact.
A surrealist amuse-bouche, December 10, 2020Hey, it’s another game about waiting for the bus! As I made clear in my What the Bus? review, I am here for this kind of content. While both games are more about the journey than the destination, the Pinecone isn’t an absurdist descent into a transit nightmare, but a short, surrealist vignette (it’s sufficiently short and surrealist that I don’t want to go into details – you’re waiting for a bus, and as the cover indicates there’s a pinecone and at least one goat who enter into the proceedings). The author notes that this was adapted from a piece of static flash-fiction, and that’s the source of the game’s greatest strength, as well perhaps of its limitations.
The strength is the writing, which isn’t just “good for IF,” but flat-out good. I don’t mean to undercut how hard it is to write well for IF – it’s just that when you’re doing, say, a parser game you often need to describe very precise spatial relationships while keeping the amount of text under control so the player is able to pick out the key details. There’s usually more freedom in choice-based IF, but there’s similarly lots of weight on the text, say if the author is trying to provide enough information to help the player feel like they’re making decisions based on a full understanding on the situation and characterization of the protagonist and other folks in a scene. The Pinecone, though, barrels past those constraints and offers prose that wouldn’t be out of place in something by an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum. Here’s how the eponymous seedcase is described:
“You feel the pinecone’s scaly ridges, its sheafed layers, its smooth-rough texture, a grenade mid-explosion, a spacious, fruitless pineapple.”
There’s a good amount of detail provided, but they words all well chosen to set a mood, and show off the author’s gift for memorable images and clever turns of phrase. And the presentation – clean white background, with an attractive font – adds an additional note of class.
The flip side of this is that I don’t think the game is trying very hard to be a game. I felt a bit lost as I hit most of the choice points, as I didn’t feel like I had much context or even access to the information that the main character should have (there’s clearly some family lore about goats that’s only stated after you make a choice that relies on that knowledge). And if you’re interested in things beyond the very specific items and situations the author is focused on, you’re out of luck, as there’s no real scope for exploration.
I don’t think any of that matters very much – there are distinct endings (I got three out of the four) but all of them seemed like a fitting capper for the experience, so the stakes for your decisions are generally low, and as the situation as a whole is fairly incomprehensible for the character as well as the player, a bit of confusion might be fitting. There’s some gentle humor in the writing and the absurdity of the situation, but really, the star here is the literary prose.
The Phantom's only the second-most interesting character here, December 9, 2020Oh hey, another literary reimagining by the author who did How the Elephant’s Child Who Walked By Himself Got His Wings – I’m sensing a (very fun) theme! And it’s funny, just a few weeks ago I went down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole checking out all the different literary, cinematic, and theatrical depictions of the Phantom of the Opera and the various ways his psychology and disfigurement were portrayed, quite similar to the rundown the author provides in the opening (now it bothers me that I can’t for the life of me remember what set me off on this jaunt).
Offering options to the player for what kind of Phantom they want to have in their story, whether modern or archaic, and your choice of insane, vengeful, or romantic personalities, is a nice touch to acknowledge the diversity of different moods the story can have, though I think this is primarily a bit of sleight of hand to prime the player’s expectations rather than a significant branch point (I went for sexytrad my first go-round, then did a quick psychomod replay, and only saw substantial divergence in a few elements of the last scene of Act III). In fact while there are a lot of choices, almost all of them felt to me like the kind of choices that allow the player to reflect on how they understand the main character (you play Christine) and their circumstances, rather than slotting in different options for the narrative. As it happens, this is one of my favorite things choice games allow you to do, so that worked for me, but I can see other players perhaps being a bit frustrated by the perception of linearity.
So the main draw really is the writing and the story, and you’re in good hands here. The author does a great job of moving the story around in time and place, and concisely sketching in characters and situations, so elegantly you’re never quite aware of how the trick’s being done. I am not an opera buff at all, but the prose effectively conveys both the behind-the-scenes mechanics of how it is produced and performed, as well as the aesthetic impact it has when done well. There are also some good jokes: in discussing the legend of the phantom, one character says “Some people say he was a famous tenor who died onstage. But other people say that’s just romantic nonsense, and he was really a baritone.” (I think that’s an opera-diss).
The two main characters very much come through. The author conveys a mix of tyranny, wistfulness, and threat in the Phantom, which is as it should be. And this Christine is definitely not the ingenue of the musical – one of my favorite bits is that when the Phantom first brings her back to his subterranean lair, she fans out her keys into impromptu brass knuckles just in case! I found that to be a bit of a double-edged sword, though – I have an extended series of thoughts on that with which I’ll wrap up, so those who haven’t played yet, feel free to hop off at this point secure in knowing that Phantom is worth the time!
All right, those of y’all left, please join me behind the curtain as we explore what I mean about Christine: (Spoiler - click to show)The major surprise of Phantom has nothing to do with the titular cape-afficionado: it’s that Christine is one hardcore motherfucker. After her rival tries to put itching powder in her wig, Christine escalates – in one step! – to straight-up murder. In fact when reflecting on said rival, she shares this observation: “Unfortunately, you have never been very good at making friends with other women. In your own mind, you mostly categorize them into two groups: those who are potentially useful to you, and those who are potential rivals.” And this is after choosing the option to try to be friendly! Or again, here’s her thought process when being introduced to Raoul: “This is a man who could make your career, if only you can win his support. But how? If you were to sleep with him, would that help to secure him? Or is it just what everyone does?” Lady, if that’s what everyone does, he is going to give you chlamydia.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with making Christine an antihero rather than a naif, but I’m not sure it really works. For one thing, this characterization flirts with some misogynistic tropes, which I don’t think is intended at all, but since the game is so short we don’t really get a sense of her as a more rounded character or if there’s anything behind her sociopathy, putting her at risk of being a comic-opera villain. But more saliently, it feels odd to cram this Christine into the exact same plot structure of the traditional Phantom – with the murder only described obliquely and retrospectively, she’s still more acted-upon than acting, and often feels passive (the fact that the choices don’t generally change the narrative but are only internal is maybe a factor here). I think there were some missed opportunities to break the mold and do something unexpected to give our new Christine the opportunity to come into her own.
Solid premise let down by sketchy characterization, December 9, 2020Despite the bad rap they sometimes get, to my mind there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a metaphor that’s too on-the-nose. Sure, the author might get an eye-roll or two at how obvious they’re being, but most of the time that’s outweighed by the pleasure the reader gets at figuring out what’s going on, or feeling like they’ve gotten one over on the author (they haven’t). If the emotion or idea that the metaphor is going for resonates, and it’s grounded in specific circumstances and well-drawn characters so it doesn’t just float away – and if it doesn’t wear out its welcome – this can be a solid approach for a work of fiction. I’m thinking of the novel Exit West, for example, which explores immigration by having magic portals appear in the middle of a war-torn country, allowing people to leave in an instant but with no say where they wind up – there’s the eye-roll – but because the two main characters and their relationship are written with enough subtlety and detail that they feel true and specific, Exit West is good.
So, Passages then. Our narrator lives in another one of those worlds where magic portals are cropping up hither and yon, though these appear able to move one through time instead of space. Their partner, it quickly eventuates, has gone missing, either accidentally or on purpose entering one of the portals, or maybe their unhappiness summoned the portal or somehow they turned into one? It’s unclear, which is fine (what’s less fine is this awkwardness around pronouns, which is hard to write around since neither character has a name or gender assigned as far as I could tell – based on the relationship dynamics, I thought the narrator was male-coded and the partner female-coded, so I’m going to go with that while acknowledging it’s arbitrary). We read occasional journal entries from the narrator as he dives into the portals, turning over his faults and recalling memories of happier times he searches for her in the nooks and crannies of the past (eye-roll).
This is fine so far as it goes – the writing isn’t lyrical or anything, but it’s well-considered and typo-free, and the narrator has a strong voice. And the experience Passages explores is quite universal so I’m sure it will have at least some resonance for most readers. There are two issues holding it back, though, one minor and one major. The minor issue is that Passages is barely interactive, beyond clicking to move to the next section of text There are I think two places where you can click a bit of text to change a word, but not in a way that really impacts the valence of the passage (one of them is something like “I look for her in March/July/February/December”). This makes it potentially an awkward fit in an interactive fiction competition, but isn’t really a problem except to the extent that its presentation might lead the reader to expect a form of engagement that’s not on offer.
The bigger issue is I didn’t find sufficient specificity in the characters and their relationship for them to transcend the metaphor and animate the piece with something of interest beyond the dry metaphor. The narrator is given a few details and bits of personality – he’d always wanted to be a carpenter, and he makes a number of nerdy references in the course of his writing – but it’s pretty thin. And the partner is given almost no characteristics whatsoever. Partially I think this is because the narrator is idealizing her, now that he’s lost her. But if anything this makes him seem even more self-regarding and navel-gazing.
And while we get the subject matter of some of the issues in the relationship, the dynamics are left frustratingly vague: at one point the narrator talks about a big fight they got into about the utility bills, and acknowledges that that’s a dumb thing to have a fight about, but there’s no remembered dialogue or other indication of the content of the fight. My brain can fill in some blanks (and here’s where gendered presuppositions are probably having an impact on my experience of the game): maybe he thought the water bill was too high because she was taking too long in the shower, and got mad about that? That’s not very creative, but at least it’s something, and seeing her do something that pisses off the narrator would help the piece land and provide fuel for his eventual catharsis.
Passages is zippy, and establishes a solid premise and character arc in the ten minutes or so to work through it, so it definitely speaks of an author to keep an eye on – but without a little more work done to make these characters breathe, I’m not sure how much of an impact it’ll have on most readers.
Anything but form-ulaic, December 9, 2020All through the Comp, I’ve been waiting for a specific kind of game to show up in my queue: a choice-based game that incorporates elements typically found in parser games (object-based puzzles, an inventory, compass navigation, etc.) and focuses on puzzles. I like this sort of thing – Chuk and the Arena from last year’s Comp is a great example – so I was disappointed that it looked like I was going to get through 2020 without seeing one. Lo and behold, A Murder in Fairyland showed up three quarters of the way through my queue, and now that itch is well and truly scratched.
It looks like AMiF is set in the same world as the author’s previous games, but I haven’t played them, and I have to confess I found one element the setting off-putting at first: with the blurb and cover art leading me up to expect a jaunt to a classical conception of Faerie, running into a joke about “Steam-powered engines” that riffs on the video-game platform drew me up short. There are also bits of code embedded in the spells you gather, which at first I thought were bugs, and everyone speaks with an @ before their name like they’re tweeting at you rather than having a normal conversation. I’m not sure why these things rubbed me the wrong way, since I wound up really enjoying some aspects of the fae-world-meets-modernity setting, like the bureaucracy and social justice organizing (more on those below) – it might have just been mis-set expectations, or just that Internet culture parodies don’t have much personal appeal for me. Folks who have played the previous games, or who are more drawn to this sort of comedic approach, probably wouldn’t face the same barrier to entry, and it’s a pretty modest one at any rate.
While we’re on the subject of potentially misleading stuff in the blurb: admitting that I’m not very good at puzzles sometimes, and I also tried to wait out a specific timing puzzle rather than expend resources to get around it, this is more like two hours to get to an unsatisfying ending and three to actually solve the mystery. I don’t think I learned about the eponymous murder until after the one-hour mark, in fact! AMiF has a relatively small map, but boasts lots of multi-part puzzles, an expandable roster of spells, several distinct minigames, and more. There are often ways to bypass challenges by expending a set of resources that seem finite but ultimately are renewable once you solve a specific puzzle, but that puzzle is a reasonably hard one, and buying your way through the plot probably isn’t the most fun way to engage with the game anyway. There’s a lot here to play around with, and I think it’s better to go in with the expectation that this is a game to settle into rather than blaze through.
Leading with these somewhat negative comments I think accurately conveys my initial impressions of the game, but to be clear, once I had a better sense of what was going on here I very much enjoyed it, because the worldbuilding is ultimately quite fun and the puzzles are clever and very satisfying to work through. First, on the world, it effectively recasts old-school fairy-tale tropes (a focus on seasonality and bargains, eating anything is dangerous) using a modern lens (there are voting rules and politicking around the seasonal courts, the bargains have turned into contracts that are part of a hidebound bureaucracy, and the faerie court’s indifference to issues of civil rights and social justice is a meaningful sub-theme – the player character is in a wheel chair, and while they’re quite capable, it’s also clear that this world does not take their needs into account).
This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint slapped on the same hoary skeleton – there’s clearly a lot of thought that went into how this society’s institutions would function. As someone who works in advocacy, I was impressed by the protest organized by gnomes and other smaller creatures to push for better accessibility. It’s a bit silly to hear a magical being talking about how they’re trying to ensure the optics of the event line up with the broader message of the campaign, or how they’re trying to open up opportunities for solidarity without risking the movement being co-opted, but actually this is smart, respectful stuff!
And it isn’t just idle worldbuilding, either, because there’s also a lot of care to link the setting with the gameplay, meaning the core puzzles feel well-integrated into this specific story. I’m using some wiggle words here because there are some puzzles that are functionally standalone minigames – there are word-searches which even in retrospect feel a little out-of-place, as well as a Fool’s-Errand-referencing card game that doesn’t feel especially connected to anything. But for the most part these are tied to the resource-management layer of the game, rather than the puzzles that gate progression or impact the plot.
Most of the latter have to do with the bureaucracy of Fairyland, and specifically finding and filling out forms, having to do with everything from lodging complaints to accessing records to requesting permission to do or know a particular thing. These puzzles are great! There’s a complicated instruction manual on how the various forms are indexed, which is incredibly satisfying to work through, and then the filling-out process feels appropriately fiddly while usually offering sufficient opportunities to get help or in the worst case just brute-force your way to the solution. And while the game’s structure is maybe a bit too linear during the opening act (there’s a three-part puzzle that can be worked on in any order, admittedly, but two of the steps were much easier than the third so it felt like there was really only one plausible sequence), it opens up quite a lot once the murder investigation proper begins, with many different strands of evidence and potential motives to track down.
The investigation itself boasts a couple of fun twists: one that’s revealed quite early (Spoiler - click to show)(there are a bunch of suspects all claiming to have done the deed, since it improves their reputations for ruthlessness), and another that unfolds midway through (Spoiler - click to show)(turns out the real puzzle isn’t so much solving the murder as it is engineering a specific political outcome). This is all really fun to experience, and while the broad strokes of what’s going on don’t take too long to figure out, putting together all the steps needed to get to a good result gives you the pleasant feeling of having a plan, then working to accomplish it by making a series of logical deductions and taking well-motivated actions. I wasn’t able to fully solve AMiF (Spoiler - click to show)(debunking Nyx’s claim to be the murderer eluded me – I thought it might have something to do with photographing the stab wounds, or bribing him with the goblin-made horn, but neither of those worked) but you don’t need to check all the boxes to get a near-ideal ending.
Ultimately, despite some initial incorrect assumptions about what AMiF was going to be about, I really had a fun time with what winds up being a satisfying game that checks just about all the boxes. Once the Comp wraps up, I’m definitely checking out some of the author’s other work!
As it says on the tin, December 9, 2020Move On has an interesting gimmick, which is that, playing as the director of a political advocacy organization you must choose where best to direct hundreds of thousands of emails – OK, apologies for the dumb joke. Move On does have an interesting gimmick, but it doesn’t have much going on besides the gimmick so I’m straining to pad out the word count (apparently I have for some reason decided to act like I’m getting paid by the column inch for these things).
Anyway talking about said gimmick is a mechanical spoiler, but it’s pretty impossible to talk about the game without revealing it, so probably best to nip over and give it a play – it’s short – before returning here.
To give some space for the spoiler-averse to flee, let’s lead off by talking about the story and writing of Move On, which are certainly things that exist. To be clear, there’s nothing at all wrong with them. The premise is a familiar jumping-off point for video games, though more so in action-oriented formats than IF: you’re a motorcycle courier racing to get some (unspecified) data package past some (unspecified) baddies to your (unspecified) patrons. There are little bits of color thrown in around the edges, but nothing that gets you beyond Prefab Cyberpunk Game – in fact one detail, which is that some of the baddies work for someone or something called Belltower, I think is a hat-tip to the Deus Ex prequels (like, yer Human Revolutions and Mankind Divideds. Though I suppose I can’t rule out that this is a very indirect precursor to Deus Ex Ceviche). The prose is action-oriented, typo-free, and does what it has to do, though honestly I found it hard to really engage with due to the mechanical gimmick, which we are now due to address.
The trick here is a clever one, which is that Move On is a choice-based game that presents itself as not having any choices. You only ever see one button to click – labelled Move on, duh – but depending on whether you click it while the little motorcycle icon on top of the window is moving or after it’s come to a stop, you’ll get a different outcome. This isn’t stated straight out, but there’s pretty clear hinting (the opening blurb says “keep your eyes on the road”, and explicitly states that those playing without sound aren’t missing anything, which I found helpful as I typically play with music off). Anyway I twigged to it pretty quickly and I think most players will too, though I did struggle for a couple minutes unsure whether the only differentiation was moving vs. stopped, or if some choices had three options, like moving in first half of segment vs. moving in second half of segment vs. stopped.
There’s a little bit of a guess-the-coin-flip vibe to the game, though on repeat plays, it’s clear that some segments have some signposting: if the most recent passage of text says something like “hurry up!” you should probably click while moving, whereas if it mentions a red light, you should probably wait. I noticed such hints in like half the passages, though, so there’s still a bit of trial and error, and of course there’s no save (the game only takes ten minutes tops, with a winning playthrough being maybe two minutes, so this isn’t that big a deal). Once I figured out what was going on, though, I took to scanning each passage as it came up looking for key words, then immediately either clicking, or being a bit disengaged by knowing I had to wait, so I think this undercut the impact of the writing since it just became a source of clues for a stressful, timing-dependent puzzle. I can pretty clearly remember what happens in the first half of the game, as I was working things out, but the second half is a bit of a blur as a result.
Move On is a lagniappe of a piece – I would have loved for it to come between Tangled Tales and Return to Castle Corlis, to be honest. There’s not a lot there, but it shows off its fun trick and knows to get out of the way before it risks wearing out its welcome.
A moment of connection through a language lesson, December 9, 2020Mother Tongue is a small thing, but oh, it does a lot with its fleeting play-time, boasting a grounded take on issues of identity, family, and assimilation, a surprisingly effective incorporation of puzzles, and great attention to detail. The blurb tells the whole story: you play a young Filipina/o (if the gender of the protagonist is fixed, I didn’t catch it) who’s exchanging some quotidian texts with their mom, when the conversation turns into an impromptu Tagalog lesson.
For all that this is a very short game, there’s a lot going on here. I haven’t directly experienced the issues Mother Tongue depicts, but my wife is Iranian-American and we’ve had lots of conversations about what Farsi means to her, how she’s treated differently from her folks because she doesn’t have an accent, and what we’d do about languages when and if we have kids. And while I’m a white guy, both my sets of great-grandparents came to the U.S. speaking something other than English but, bowing to the contemporary models for immigrant assimilation, didn’t want their kids to retain those languages, which is something I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about.
So hopefully I’m not completely off-base when I say that pretty much everything the protagonist and their mom say to each other (or, for the options I didn’t take, consider saying to each other) rings really true – the challenges of holding on to a home language, the push and pull between being in touch with one’s cultural identity and getting the advantages American culture bestows on those who “assimilate”, the feeling that food is maybe the only connection one has with one’s ancestors… it’s all really well sketched out, with only a few sentences here and there and without any heavy-handed didacticism. The attention to detail is impressive, too – it was only towards the end that I realized that the protagonist speaks all in lower-case, whereas the mother uses capitalization, emoji, and proper punctuation (including putting periods at the ends of her texts!)
Critically, the characters get to be characters, rather than just functioning as mouthpieces for these issues. The protagonist, at least as I played them, is a rather overenthusiastic person who can’t help but explain the plot of the CRPG Morrowind to their indulgent mom (reading this bit made me cringe a little as I remembered similarly babbling to my mother about how cool it was going to be when you could play nonhuman paladins in 3rd Edition D&D). And the mom is cheerful, unpushy, and clearly relishes the chance to play teacher.
I also found the language-quiz segments really fun, surprisingly so if I’m honest. Four or five times, the mother will ask you “how do you think you say X in Tagalog?” and offer you two choices; after the first one or two, these require thinking about what you’ve learned to date, and seeing how she structures her sentences. This kind of inductive learning mirrors how we actually gain languages, and made me feel like I was actually learning a little about Tagalog as I went (I’m proud that I got a perfect rating without any do-overs!) Mother Tongue isn’t the kind of thing I go into looking for an especially game-y or puzzle-y experience, but it wound up scratching that itch nonetheless.
If I were to cast about for critiques, I suppose I could list two or three bits of dialogue that are a little on the nose (there’s an exchange where the protagonist can tell their mom “it’s clear you care a lot and I appreciate that!”). But given how easy it’d be to write a version of this game that’s all Hallmark-channel schmaltz, those very few infelicities are more than forgivable, and don’t do anything to undermine a really satisfying, well-observed vignette.
A relationship, viewed through a kaleidoscope, December 9, 2020Points for best title in the Comp to The Moon Wed Saturn, which is a clever pun as well as, I believe, an astrology reference. That same ethos of packing a lot of meaning into comparatively little text carries over into the game itself, which runs through a formative romantic relationship that unfolds over just a few days but reveals a lot about the main character and changes her life to boot. It’s a classic two-hander – it’s 95% dialogue between two characters, 5% flash-forward reflection – with a unique storytelling gimmick, and while I wasn’t as fully invested in the central relationship as probably would have been ideal, there’s a powerfully arresting moment of grace at the end that had as much impact on me as anything else I’ve played so far in the 2020 Comp.
You play as Verónica, who I think is about 19 – she’s got a dead-end job somewhere on the outskirts of a city I think somewhere in Latin America (there are a few well-chosen setting details sprinkled through the story, but no clunky exposition), and feels weighed down by expectations, other people, and the general difficulty of figuring out how to be in the world. Into her life sweeps Araceli, a freer spirit a few years older, who doesn’t seem to worry much about consequences and seems to take a kind of glee in prodding Verónica out of her comfortable rut. Described like this, these are stereotypes, but the writing is good enough to really conjure these characters up, and dive into exchanges and snatches of dialogue where the characters are sparking off of each other in lust or conflict, so even though the overall dynamic of the relationship is certainly familiar the player is always engaged by the particular.
Part of what makes this so effective is how the story is told – I’ll spoiler-block this, since figuring out what was going on led to an “aha” moment I wouldn’t want to ruin. (Spoiler - click to show)You start out clicking your choices in a part of the screen labeled “Monday”, but at a certain point suddenly your focus jumps to the side to a new paragraph labeled “Wednesday”, where one of the characters recalls a bit of the conversation they had a couple of days ago. Later the same thing happens with Saturday, until you’re following a thread of memory and resonance forward and backward through three separate conversations on three separate days that together constitute the relationship between the two characters. It’s all really well paced, too, jumping into exchanges just as they’re getting interesting, and jumping out when they’ve done what they need to do. The visual design backs this up too – when the days go inactive, they fade and go on a slight tilt, making clear where the action is but easy to refer to if you want to make sure you understand the connection points.
There are a lot of choices – at pretty much every pause in the dialogue, you’re picking what Verónica should do or say – but mostly they’re centered on whether she’s going along with Araceli’s attempts to shake up her status quo, or resisting them. For the most part they feel like impactful choices, though you can’t shift her characterization too far, which I think is appropriate, albeit there were a couple of times when I felt like the game’s interpretation of a choice was pretty different from how I’d intended it (at one point Araceli said something about how she liked places that are weird, and I had Vero ask if she was strange enough for her – I’d meant it playfully, but the blue text that carries Verónica’s inner monologue said it was because she wasn’t spontaneous and always wanted to know things in advance).
It feels like the choices shift the tone of the dialogue, though I didn’t do a ton of replaying to confirm that. They do build to a final, climactic choice, though I even though I’d played as something of a stick-in-the-mud even I had to go for the cathartic option, and I can’t imagine other players doing anything differently. Spoilers again for what was an amazing moment: (Spoiler - click to show)so throughout the game, Araceli has been pushing Verónica to leave her awful job, which is being a security guard for an abandoned, half-completed housing estate that’s basically a boondoggle for a corrupt developer. At the end of Saturday, she brings some spray paint and prods Vero to deface the place, and if you do, there’s a sudden splash of red against the heretofore pure white background of the game. The red paint is amazingly well animated – it’s sensuous and beautiful in a way that I, who’s typically way more attuned to text than images, usually don’t appreciate. It’s climactic and cathartic and a perfect moment of satori that ties the whole game together.
For all the things Moon Wed Saturn does right, I have to acknowledge that as I implied above, there were parts of the central relationship that didn’t work for me – specifically, I kind of couldn’t stand Araceli and thought she was just the fucking worst. Don’t get me wrong, I can get why someone like Verónica would be taken with her, but Araceli often came off to me as an aggressive manic pixie dream bully, like in the early segment where she tries to pressure Vero to smoke a cigarette precisely because Vero’s quit and doesn’t like smoking – people should be willing to do things they hate for those they love, you see. And later on, when Verónica explains the necessity of having this job given the challenges in her life, Araceli – who’s implied to come from a more privileged background – cheerfully bats it all away, because she thinks everything people do is just an expression of their character, and refuses to acknowledge how external reality can restrict one’s choices. I kept wanting to tell Verónica, get out of this relationship, this lady is toxic!
But I’ve definitely known people who’ve been in relationships like this – I’m sure you have, too – and I can’t deny that they can be meaningful and important. So the fact that this isn’t an idealized picture of two soul-mates who should be together forever doesn’t undercut the strength of the piece – but it did make the game’s finale perhaps a bit less bittersweet than intended. At any rate, this is a small, subjective response to a work that definitely merits a playthrough.
Minor but enjoyable, December 9, 2020For all that Minor Arcana is very clearly a fantasy game – you “play” a half-sapient deck of Tarot cards changing the fates of all who come into contact with you – what it most puts me in mind of is a bit of design from the classic sci-fi RPG Traveler. OK, I’m fronting, because I’ve never actually played Traveler, but I have played the (Godawful) MegaTraveller CRPGs that were based on it, as well as System Shock 2, which uses that same piece of design: the lifepath character creation system. The idea here is that instead of dryly assigning points to all your stats and running through a shopping list to get your equipment, instead you come up with your character by making a series of choices: join the Marines or the Navy? Volunteer for a diplomatic mission, or become an undercover spy? Each choice changes your character along the way, improving their attributes, teaching them new skills, giving them equipment – or even, if you roll poorly enough, killing them before you even get out of chargen. Once you finish the choices, you have a full character, and the real game can begin.
Possibly this association came out of nowhere because playing so many games is turning my brain to porridge. But I think it’s because Minor Arcana felt to me like a really involved prelude to a more involved experience that’s yet to come – which is an unfair expectation, to be sure, but perhaps speaks to the way that the game does a really good job offering exciting choices but maybe doesn’t go far enough in paying them off.
To return to what the game is actually about: there’s an initial stage of the game where you set some basics about what your deck is like, including visual motifs, what suits it contains, if any cards are missing, and what supernatural patron inspired your creation (these have fun, slightly-obfuscated titles and include not-Cthulhu, not-Mithra, and even for those of you who didn’t get enough Gnosticism from Accelerate, not-Ialdabaoth). Then you get a chance to do readings for a couple of petitioners, and find out how you’ve impacted their lives (spoiler: usually it’s not super positive!) before finally facing the option of whether to forsake your owner for a new patron, at which point you can either accept this as the end or start the story again.
I really dug the choices in the first part of the game: deciding what flavor of Tarot deck you are, and whether you have suits like the traditional cups and staves, or instead thorns and spikes, spirals and mirrors, or crows and gears, feels like it’s opening up intriguing realms of possibility. The author does a great job of world-building, letting a few evocative phrases and some ominously capitalized words hint at much deeper mysteries. These decisions are hard to make, because the choices all seem so fun, and seem like they’ll create fiendishly enjoyable scenarios down the line.
The second section feels a bit more slight by comparison; there are only two chances to offer a reading, and instead of full set-pieces involving cross spreads and multiple card draws, instead you only pick a single card, and get one passage apiece laying out the enigmatic repercussions. The choice of switching owners likewise comes and goes fairly quickly. This at least facilitates replays, but when I went back to the beginning and picked what felt like radically different choices, I was disappointed because it felt like very little changed – the King of Staves and the King of Spikes don’t produce meaningfully different outcomes when the fire-breathing radical draws them, for example.
Ultimately it felt like instead of there being hundreds of variegated paths to create a Tarot deck that was distinctly my own, I was inevitably being crammed into a one-size-fits-all template. Of course it’s unreasonable to expect an author to write radically different results for all possible combinations, but the magic of a choice-based game is to balance the difficulties of implementation with the fantasy that each option has an impact on the experience. Minor Arcana left me feeling like I’d created a unique protagonist, but stopped just when I was expecting the real game, and real consequences, to begin.
All-time great parrot, December 9, 2020(I beta tested this game)
I have given the randomizer a lot of grief over the course of our five weeks together, bemoaning its feast-or-famine tendencies and bewailing its perverse glee at stacking like five sexmurder games right at the top of the Comp. But it did me a solid in the end, since it’s hard to think of a better way to play off the comp than Magpie Takes the Train, which is about as pleasant a piece of IF as you’re ever likely to find. That word “pleasant” can be double-edged – sometimes it’s a way of sinking in the damning-with-faint-praise shiv – and sure, as a one-and-a-half room spinoff game, it’s not aiming to be a barnburner or an epic. But when that one room is so cozily realized, lushly implemented, and entertainingly peopled, that’s not much of a complaint. MTT is great fun, from the main event – a satisfying, multi-step jewel heist – to the smallest incidental detail.
As mentioned, this is a spin-off from 2018 Comp winner Alias the Magpie – that was by J.J. Guest, but the present author offered an authorized sequel game as one the prizes that year, so here we are. While if you know the respective authors, you can definitely tell the difference – MTT uses the conversation system employed in many of Brian Rushton’s other games – and there’s no specific plot continuity, the writing and overall vibe are definitely of a piece with the earlier game. Which is great, because Alias the Magpie was delightful! Just so here, where the eponymous master-of-disguise is bent on infiltrating the private railcar of an American magnate and lifting an enormous jewel right off her lapel.
Of course, it’s not as simple as all that – there are somewhere around half a dozen sub-puzzles that need to be solved before you’re able to successfully lift the rock and abscond, including foiling a rival's disguise and making friends with a cantankerous parrot. Almost all involve some quick-change artistry, as you’ve cleverly brought along a suitcase full of disguises and the occasional tunnels offer just enough lightless moments to change from your professor’s togs into, say, a waiter’s getup, or a maintenance man’s coverall. The various characters in the car react to you differently depending on your garb, and certain actions that would arouse suspicion if performed when incorrectly attired can be easily accomplished while wearing the proper uniform.
None of the steps involved in solving the puzzle are that challenging to work out – and in fact there’s no penalty to simply trying to take the jewel, which will prompt you with a hint towards the most immediate barrier to your larcenous designs. But nor are they too simple, either, or too wacky. I generally felt like I was half a step ahead of the puzzles, which is a very pleasant (…that word again) state to inhabit, as I usually had an idea of what I should be doing, but hadn’t fully worked out every step such that implementing the plan was drudgery. And in fact you miss out on most of the fun if you just rush for the win – there’s lots of entertaining dialogue to be had with the other characters if you try talking to them in all your various outfits, there’s a whole drink-mixing system that leads to entertaining combinations, and there’s tons of incidental detail that rewards poking about with some fun jokes.
Unsurprisingly given the legion of testers – I was among a nigh-numberless host – the implementation is as smooth as butter. There are lots of thoughtful conveniences, such as allowing the player to skip to the next moment of darkness if they’re too impatient to wait for the next chance to change outfits. The prose is typo-free, and just about every strange thing I tried was anticipated. It’s possible to make the game unwinnable, but it’s kind enough to tell you that and end, and I think a single UNDO will always retrieve the situation. Indeed, given its compact length, inviting setting, and robust implementation, MTT could be a nigh-perfect game for bringing new players into the IF fold – but it’s certainly got a lot to offer veterans as well.
Presto puzzle-o, December 9, 2020Despite the name prompting me to think this might be an anime-inspired visual novel type thing, LA:MG puts some stage-magic theming on a zippy explore-the-crazy-mansion-and-solve-puzzles parser game. There are lots of typos, one or two wonky puzzles, and a few tonal issues that I found a little offputting, but in the main, this is a pleasant diversion, with plenty to do, solid pacing, and some laughs along the way.
The premise makes it clear from the off that the operative vibe is going to be zany: the player character is a magician’s assistant (named, inevitably, Trixie), who works for a stage magician who moonlights as a superhero, or possibly vice versa. After he’s captured by a member of his rogue’s gallery, you step up to rescue your boss by exploring his wacky mansion to find the various taunting clues the villain has left hidden about, Riddler-style. Oh, and also you’re on a deadline (Spoiler - click to show) (thankfully notional, rather than an actual turn limit) to get all this done before you have to leave to do a magic show for the President’s kid’s birthday party.
It took me a little bit to get a handle on the conceit here, since it’s mashing up a couple of different kinds of tropes. I eventually landed on “Sixties superhero parody” as the dominant note (even though there are newpaper clippings indicating it’s meant to be the present day), though partially that’s because it helped me make peace with an unpleasant undercurrent of sexism that runs through some of the text. I think this is meant to set up jokes about how everyone underestimates Trixie due to how attractive she is and her stereotyped job, but there aren’t the kind of internal eye-rolls that would undercut this and clearly mark it as dumb. Trixie is certainly presented as brave and resourceful as she solves the villain’s various challenges, but there are also lines saying that she found history class “SO BORING”, and upon typing X ME, she posits this as the reason she’s so good at her job: “with your golden blonde hair cascading over your shoulders like a shimmering waterfall, your full red lips so often coyly pursed into a tantalizing pout, and your ample bosom encased in a sheer sequined gown, distracting audiences is no challenge for you” (not a lot of straight ladies or gay men in these audiences, I’m guessing). It’s not omnipresent by any means, but every once in a while a bit like this would hit a sour note.
Moving on to the game itself, it is well-structured, with a just-large-enough mansion playing host to a series of challenges that must be solved one at a time, with the villain’s clues providing clear direction on which puzzle to be pursuing next. The puzzles themselves are generally fair, and you use your boss’s collection of magic tricks and wacky gizmos to good effect without requiring too much outside-the-box thinking, which can be a flaw of this style of game. There’s a hint system integrated into the game – you consult a crystal ball – but I only found it necessary to check it once.
That once was annoying, though: I had the right idea, but the situation wasn’t described well enough for me to clearly picture how the intended solution was meant to work, a key object wasn’t implemented, and near-miss solutions earn default failure responses. (Spoiler - click to show)This was the puzzle to get the drill bit – it’s clear you need to pull or cut it free from the larger drill, but the bit itself isn’t implanted, SAW DRILL WITH doesn’t indicate that you’re on the right track, and the drill and guillotine were somewhat hazily described, I thought. Some of these issues are present in other parts of the game, but this was the one place where they all overlapped to make things challenging.
Finally, the game is lacking that final coat of polish. There are a large number of typos, including one in the opening text, and some of the verbs in the HELP text don’t appear to work as advertised (despite what’s stated, you want to TALK TO characters, not SPEAK TO them). It’s a shame, because the jokes are often quite funny – the god-bothering clown is a highlight, and he’s presented with sympathy despite being a ridiculous gag character – but these issues mean they sometimes don’t land as well as they should. Regardless, LA:MG definitely scratches the itch for a quick, puzzle-y romp – but with a few small tweaks I would have enjoyed it a lot more.
Affecting even if you've never had a Neopet , December 9, 2020I am I think of the last generation to grow up without deep social relationships in online spaces being a thing, so there’s something strange to me about seeing a game like Lore Distance Relationship offer an affectionate overview of a decade’s worth of living, as mediated through an online game, complete with the slow improvement of graphics and eventual introduction of a phone client (the something that is a bit strange is realizing that I am old). While I don’t have any experience of the specific nostalgic notes LDR hits, I can certainly recognize how resonant its touchstones will be for lots of folks, and there’s more than enough craft here to make it accessible and enjoyable even for folks outside that audience.
This is a relatively long game that plays out almost entirely within the chat function of an online game about magic dogs that fight monsters – I gather it’s meant to riff off of Neopets – and it’s almost entirely in dialogue, since 99% of the time you’re choosing different options for the main character to use to reply to Bee, their best friend in the game. As the blurb says, the game takes you through ten years in its hour-long playtime, and while there are some fun grace-notes around how the game updates in that time, the overwhelming focus is on how the central relationship shifts as the two main characters go from age 8 to 18.
There are heavy themes discussed – there’s a prominent trigger warning about domestic abuse – but not, thankfully, depicted: you engage with the aftermath, as the main character and Bee grapple with how to understand what’s happening and hopefully chart a path free. Similarly, I was a bit wary since the blurb flags that there’s some sexual exploration – a tricky thing to manage in any circumstance, but especially so when everyone’s underage for most of the play time – but the game strikes a nice balance of making clear what the characters are up to without getting at all explicit or too uncomfortable.
Indeed, if anything, despite all the traumatic themes and plot points on offer, LDR felt pleasant, and ultimately comforting to me. Bee is a supportive friend (Spoiler - click to show)(and if you go that direction, romantic partner), and his dad, who gets called in occasionally to offer advice, is invariably respectful and helps set good boundaries (re-reading this review, I'm now not sure whether Bee's pronouns are ever specifically stated, but their magic dog is male so I thought of Bee as "him" even though that's a dumb rubric). The main character likewise has a loving sister who’s there when things get tough. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely painful and sad moments (Spoiler - click to show) (reflecting on why the main character chose “StaircaseHaven14” as their username was one of those for me – and both characters suffer some bullying and abuse for their marginalized identities, since the main character is trans and Bee has a disability), but the sweetness of the central relationship ultimately won out.
Partially this may be due to the choices I took – there are a lot of these on offer, as you’re prompted for input after every couple lines of chat, across ten different vignettes separated by a year each. And while most of them are more about emphasizing different aspects of the main character’s personality – especially around self-esteem and their ability to open up to Bee – I get the sense that your choices can add up in significant ways (Spoiler - click to show)(most obviously in how and whether you pursue romance with Bee). I mostly made choices that had the main character trusting Bee and trying to engage with their feelings, rather than bottling them up, which wound up working out really well – possibly the vibe is different if other choices are made.
I think either way, LDR would be effective, though. A good part of the credit here goes to the writing, which treats the situation, and the tender-age characters, with the nuance they require. The dialogue sounds exactly like I’d expect these characters to sound, with shifts over the time and clear differentiation between the two primary voices (the maybe-a-bit-uptight main character uses proper capitalization and punctuation pretty much from the start, but under Bee’s influence eventually loosens up). There’s the very occasional false note – at one point, the eight-year-old protagonist replies to a question with a diffident “Maybe. We’ll see.” – and maybe a few small anachronisms, but LDR overwhelming succeeds in creating a plausible milieu.
Where LDR maybe errs in going too far in creating plausibility is the jankiness of the presentation. Obviously the messy-but-improving-over-time graphics are both a gag in themselves, and a way to mark the passage of time, but I found some of the art actively off-putting (one of those dog-aliens will haunt my nightmares). You primarily move the story forward by clicking a large reload icon, and it’s occasionally replaced by a large picture of a keyboard or a blown-up mouse cursor. But the game window is usually at the top, so need to do a bunch of scrolling, and it took me a while to realize that the graphics are completely static and none of the displayed interface elements actually do anything. There’s also some timed text that I found sometimes went too slow, and sometimes too fast. After I played for 15 minutes, I figured out how the game wanted me to play it, and again, it’s clear that much of this is an intentional throwback to how much the early-mid internet kind of sucked, but it was still a bit annoying.
Anyway, though, this one is all about the relationship between these two characters, which it charts very well. There are lots of touches that I think a specific target audience will especially enjoy, but LDR’s resonance goes well beyond just those folks by offering a sympathetic, well-written depiction of a challenging but ultimately hopeful adolescence.
Unconventional and scatalogical but endearing, December 9, 2020(While the first part of this review notes I was only two hours into it when I wrote that section, I later went back and finished it, with an addendum running through the ending right below the main review)
As of this writing, I’m only two hours into what’s advertised as a 15-hour experience, I’m a little underconfident in this review – I could see some of the things that worked for me wearing out their welcome 10 hours hence, and similarly, some of my critiques might vanish once the overall framework of the game becomes clearer. But if I let a lack of sound factual underpinnings keep me from mouthing off, these reviews would be a lot, lot shorter.
You know, it’s probably not worth interrogating that in depth – let’s just get on with it.
LGiML feels most of all like an old-school graphic adventure, albeit in text form (there are graphics depicting the characters and a few key events, and the author has said that there’s a full graphic version in the works). You’ve got a sprawling map to explore, lots of different puzzle chains, a setting that draws equally from fiction, fairytales, and Python-esque satire, and an interface that requires chaining a specified list of verbs to a specified list of targets. There are some significant deviations from this well-worn template, though – some that I liked, and some that I was more mixed on.
The elephant in the room here is that the primary way of interacting with the game isn’t constructing commands like USE RUBBER DUCKY ON MISANTHROPE – most commands also require you to add an intent, so you’d have to say USE RUBBER DUCKY ON MISANTHROPE TO FRIGHTEN SOMEONE, or USE RUBBER DUCKY ON MISANTHROPE TO WIN ELECTION TO CONGRESS. Trying the correct action with the incorrect intent or rationale will fail just as surely as trying the wrong object with the right intent.
On the one hand, this pretty much eliminates the too-frequent experience in old graphic adventures of clicking everything on everything else just because you’re out of ideas, and seeing the main character embark on an extended bout of moon-logic that you in no wise had in mind when you made your click. And it usually isn’t too hard to suss out the right option, since you choose the intents from a list and it’s pretty clear if there’s something that might match.
There are places where this does lead to difficulty spikes, though, especially in the variant where instead of coming up with an intent tied to a concrete outcome (like, saying that you’re doing X in order to get the character in front of you to leave the room), you need to link what you’re doing to a vague high-level goal (like, saying you’re doing X in order to defeat Dracula). This can be challenging because you can’t do standard adventure-game things like examine a suitcase to see whose it is, or what’s in it, unless you have the correct goal in mind (what if I wanted to look at the suitcase to figure out what I can do with it?)
Compounding the difficulty, this is a big game, with a lot of text, and clues aren’t always as signposted as I think they could be. Here’s a spoilery discussion of one that stymied me for a long time: (Spoiler - click to show)at one point, the player character decides she wants to meet a mermaid. There’s a book about mermaids in the library that describes some of their behavior, emphasizing that they’re mischievous creatures who like playing pranks. This didn’t really help me much, though, and all the obvious things I tried – making a sand castle that she could wreck, playing music to see if she wanted to join in – failed, so eventually I turned to the hints. According to them, what the book was meant to communicate was that mermaids like playing pranks specifically on ship’s captains. With that prompt in hand, I was able to use the intent system to dress up as the down-on-his luck captain down by the docks, at which point the puzzle solves itself, but due to the intent system, there was no way of blundering into the solution by having a new “hey, can I borrow your clothes?” dialogue option unlock after reading the book that was supposed to give me the idea -- or, if more subtlety was preferred, changing the description of the sailor to mention his clothes.
The other structural consideration that sometimes makes the difficulty harder is that there are always a lot of different goals available. The game provides a really helpful interface for tracking them, and allows you to rewind to key conversations or bits of observation so you can’t get too lost, but much of the time, you get the goal well before you can do anything significant to advance it – at the point above where I first had recourse to hints, I had five different goals, but the first hint for three of them was “go do something else, there’s nothing you can do to make progress on this yet.” Ultimately, for the second hour of play I typically consulted the first hint or two anytime I got a new goal to make sure I knew what to focus on and see if I was missing something that was meant to be obvious, which made for a more pleasant play experience, though I’m not sure that’s intended.
…just noticed we’re almost a thousand words in and I haven’t even mentioned what the game’s actually about. OK, speeding this up: the setting is a sort of skewed fairytale, featuring a brash and fearless six year old girl as a protagonist who’s bent on avoiding her chores by meeting some fun people, most of whom are monsters of some description. She’s a lot of fun, and when she hooks up with a princess her same age early on and you wind up playing dual characters, the banter between the two is one of the high points of the game. There’s a lot of humor, though much of it is scatological and wasn’t quite my taste (your protagonist barfs a lot, and if you find the idea of Dracula having diarrhea funny, you’re in luck because there’s an extended sequence that I thought ran the joke into the ground) – there’s also some errant profanity that might be less kid-appropriate. There’s some tonal oddity in the graphics, too: the main characters are depicted in a loose, cartoony style that I really dug, but many other characters look like they come from traced-over photos, and have a more realistic vibe that felt like it didn’t sit easily with the rest of the art.
The plot, at least as far as I got (solving Dracula’s castle, meeting the mermaid, and winning the horse race, along with some miscellaneous other progress) is a series of self-contained sequences that don’t interact with each other all that much. Each of them is entertaining – Dracula’s castle especially had a fun series of puzzles that played with the classic-monster gimmicks of the different characters (Spoiler - click to show)(cutting off Frankenstein’s monster’s electricity by hitting him with his back taxes made me chortle) – but there was nothing really to be gained from any of them. Meeting the mermaid leads to a ride through the ocean, but that doesn’t help you solve any other puzzles, or advance any overall plot that connects the vignettes; ditto winning the horse race, or even stealing (Spoiler - click to show)an evil orb of necromantic power from Dracula. As a result, dropping the game part-way in felt a little easier than it maybe should have, since there’s no real indication of how the story would be any different if I put in an additional 10+ hours. I’m still looking forward to coming back to LGiML and checking out where things go, but some kind of overarching plot or structure in the earlier parts of the game would probably make players more likely to put in the extra time beyond the Comp threshold.
MUCH LATER ADDENDUM: I went back and won LGiML, and had quite a good time doing so. The first two hours do give a solid indication of what’s to come, so I think what’s in the existing review holds up – the plot, in particular, continues to be a shaggy-dog story, albeit with a good number of recurring characters and story-threads, which I wound up enjoying even though there wasn’t much of an overarching structure. Once I got deeper into the game, I think I clicked with its approach to puzzle solving a little better, and while the scatology-plus-parody humor did wear out its welcome, there are definitely some funny bits that made me laugh (the bits with the (Spoiler - click to show)pope and the (Spoiler - click to show)undead pirates were especially good, I thought – to be clear, those are two separate bits, not one bit involving both things!)
There’s a whole second town, with a whole new set of characters and, more importantly, puzzles, and while I’m not sure whether this was just a sign of increased familiarity with the interface, I found the challenges in this part of the game a little easier to engage with, with a few really clever ones mixed in (I especially liked the one where you need to find a cave…) The large size of the game does lead to some scope issues later on, however. Old areas are never blocked off – and in fact several late-game puzzles depend on going back to very early areas and noticing what’s changed, which sometimes stymied me due to my reliance on fast-travel – and inventory items tend to stick around after you’ve used them. This increased the complexity of the game while meaning that sometimes I felt like I’d figured out four or five potential solutions but only one would be accepted. Spoiler-y example: (Spoiler - click to show)when trying to track the dragon’s servant through the caves, I considered putting manure on him so I could smell him, using the dog again to track him – or just using the time-travel potion to “catch up” anytime I started falling behind. In fact there are a lot of puzzles that potion should be able to bypass! Clearing out used inventory items, and maybe more clearly signposting when an area has changed (or doesn’t have anything else to offer) as a hint option, might be helpful quality-of-life features.
At any rate I’m glad I went back and finished the game, since it was a good time – the author’s apparently also working on a version with full graphics and gave me a sneak peek, and I have to say it’s really lovely, so for folks who didn’t get all the way through this one during the Comp, I’d definitely recommend a revisit once the updated version comes out!
Careful what you wish for, December 9, 2020Like everyone who played last year’s Limerick Heist, when I saw there was a sequel in this year’s Comp I was chomping at the bit to play it – and therefore wasn’t best pleased when the randomizer decided to save it for sixth-to-last out of 104. I wound up getting to it on Halloween, which is perhaps fitting, because in addition to the predictable linguistic legerdemain and some surprisingly robust puzzling, Limerick Quest also offered me an object lesson in being careful what I wished for, albeit a much more cheerful one than in the seasonally-appropriate monkey’s-paw model.
To my mind the thing that was brilliant about Limerick Heist wasn’t so much the concept – although it was amazing – but rather the execution. When I read the blurb, I thought to myself “this sounds super fun, but stretched out to game length inevitably like 30% of the limericks are going to suck.” But then, miraculously, they didn’t, with not a single dud in the bunch! I don’t mean to damn with faint praise in the slightest; a prudent person contemplating the challenges of writing narrative with a demanding rhyme and meter scheme would give up before they got out of the starting gate because of the inevitable clash between fitting the framework and allowing the reader to understand what’s happening.
Limerick Quest, though, does this one or two better, both by keeping the quality of the limericks absurdly high, but also by frankly just showing off. Not only are the accessibility options limericks – and inevitably, good ones – so is the complex, dynamically-updated inventory! Unlike the more traditional choice-based approach of Heist, here you can navigate around a map, with the movement options predictably also limericked, and again, not just with a single rote one listing north south east etc. but with a unique one in each area listing available and unavailable exits and what you can expect in each direction. Possibly best of all, there was one early limerick that I thought was a bid fudged (it rhymes “door” with “square”) except then I dusted off that one semester of Russian I took in college and realized it works perfectly if you can read Cyrillic characters.
I don’t to risk this review devolving into just a list of all the poems I thought were great – and it’s not just gags, I thought the relationship and banter between the two adventurers was also really well-depicted – but I can’t go without citing two, just to show how the author uses different approaches to the limericks to keep things fresh. Here’s an example of using baroque vocabulary to make the limerick work and the joke land:
You insert the egg in its station.
The clockwork maintains its rotation
as part of the Earth,
for what it is worth,
in orbital circumgyration.
But sometimes, all you really need is to rhyme “it” with “it” three times and it’s just as effective (though yes, the known/honed/prone bit provides some additional rhyming ballast):
Sacrifice. Aztecs were known for it.
This altar was carefully honed for it.
By what weird criteria
is this near Siberia?
You don’t know - just don’t end up prone for it.
As that first excerpt suggests, to go with the free navigation, this time there are also inventory puzzles – I realize I haven’t mentioned the setup, which is that following on from Heist, the Faberge egg you stole leads two of the crew on an adventure to a hidden temple in search of treasure. Some of these are traditional red-key-goes-in-red-door type inventory puzzles, but very quickly, they invite the player to participate in the fun of making a limerick, as you’ll need to do things like choose an option that fits the rhyme scheme or meter of the limerick representing the outcome you’re trying to achieve. I don’t want to give these away, since they’re really decidedly clever, but I will include my favorite in a spoiler block: (Spoiler - click to show) the mine cart puzzle, with the words you need to rhyme slowly fading in, was a blast, though I did have the accessibility option that means you can’t lose turned on.
Here’s where the monkey’s-paw bit comes in, though: I think there were one or two gentle puzzles like this in Limerick Heist, and I remember wanting more and thinking there was a lot more fun to be had exploring variations on this kind of challenge. The author has more than delivered on the brief, but now that I’ve got what I wanted I think I was wrong? The puzzles are all nicely constructed – they build on each other so you’re always doing something new, there are neither too many or too few so the pacing is good, with the hardest, fiddliest one coming right before an easier lightning round and then you win, and there’s an easily-accessible, well-integrated hint system to keep you moving.
But for all that, I found several of them quite hard, and while the game is generous in not letting you die, there are some puzzles you only get one try for (there’s no save game option) and wasn’t sure why I failed until I replayed and accessed the hints. Eventually it all makes sense, but the later puzzles do require you to spend a lot of time assessing rhymes and counting syllables and word length, which I think felt a bit too much like constructing a limerick and not enough like reading one – it was harder to appreciate the end result when I’d spent so much time at the brick-and-mortar level, and I often found myself clicking from room to room and grabbing different objects to try as I worked to get myself unstuck, without paying much attention to the delightful writing, which felt like a real shame.
Again, I’m not sure any of the puzzles are too hard or inadequately clued or anything. And there’s an amazing number of options and lots of hidden depth on offer here (there’s a whole achievement system you can use to help find some fun unexpected interactions and easter eggs, though I didn’t get very far with it). It’s just that Limerick Quest made me realize that maybe what I actually want out of this franchise is a worry-free romp rather than than well-designed adventuring. With the ending teasing a possible third, pirate-themed outing, though, I’m definitely on board for any voyages to come!
Some promise, but very frustratingly implemented, December 9, 2020Despite a little bit of ethical wonkiness (and the title cueing me to expect a horror game), the setup here really drew me in – the neighborhood weird old man has just died, and the player character, who seems to be a kid of 10 or so, decides to pair up with their best friend and search the house for treasure. Again, leaving aside that this is a bit ghoulish, there’s a pleasant Goonies or Stranger Things sort of vibe to the premise, and you get to choose which of three possible characters is your best friend – they accompany you on your adventure, reacting in different ways to everything you find and each even providing a shortcut to solving a different puzzle.
Where things go off the rails is in the implementation. Beyond a lot of typos, the game unfortunately sometimes seems like it’s running through a checklist of common complaints about parser IF. Default X ME description? Huge numbers of under-described red-herring objects? Puzzles that are mostly either guess-the-verb or hunt-the-pixel? Items not listed in room descriptions? A light source that can permanently run out of charge? An inventory limit? They’re all here, and make the experience of playing the game highly frustrating.
A typical sequence involves entering a new room which might have a sentence or two of description, seeing 8 or 10 items (all of which are listed in Inform-default style, e.g. “Here in the living room you can see LiYuan, a comfy couch, an easy chair, a mantel, on top of which are a silver picture frame, a gold picture frame, a brass picture frame, a blue picture frame and a photobook and a nearly-empty bookshelf, on top of which are a white picture frame and a plain picture frame”) examining each in turn to see that only a few have real descriptions implemented, but all can be picked up, then hoping that you’ve guessed the right verb for finding anything hidden (at one point, you can open a dresser, which reveals some clothing; SEARCH CLOTHING gives you a default failure message, but if you SEARCH DRESSER – you also get a custom failure message the first time, though if you repeat the action twice more you’ll find a key you need to progress).
The puzzles are nothing you haven’t seen before, but they’re reasonably well-conceived and fit the story and setup. Solving them, though, often feels like it requires reading the author’s mind. About midway through, you find a trap door leading to the attic, but the pullchain’s been detached and there’s no ladder to help you get up there to reattach it. I hit on the idea of pushing furniture into the room and standing on it to get the height I needed, and when that didn’t work, stacking a chair on top of a bed, none of which worked – when I checked the walkthrough, I had the right idea, but to solve the puzzle I had to move in a different piece of furniture (a chest from all the way in the basement), and instead of climbing or standing on it (those commands lead to failure messages), just try to attach the pullchain to the trap door, which makes your character automatically clamber up and accomplish the task.
Adding insult to injury, this all takes place in a darkened room that can only be lit by your quickly-depleting iPhone, and if you run out of charge, you appear to be in a dead man walking scenario. And OK, just one more example: later on, I was stymied for how to progress because I needed to MOVE COUCH in the rec room to find a (totally unhinted-at, so far as I can tell) panel leading to a secret tunnel. The only difficulty is, I’d already moved the couch out of the room via PUSH COUCH EAST, which didn’t mention that I’d revealed the panel (and in fact when I went into the neighboring room and typed MOVE (the now nonexistent) COUCH, I was told that I’d found the panel there!)
It’s a repetitive bit of conventional wisdom that IF needs testing, and parser IF needs it more than any other variant, but it’s conventional wisdom because it’s true. No testers are listed for Last House on the Block, and it really seems like the author, without an outside perspective, spent most of their time on adding cool stuff like the varying-BFF system and lots and lots of scenery, but didn’t make sure the puzzles made sense to anyone coming to them fresh. It’s a shame, because the concept here would make for a charming game, and you can occasionally see flashes of that game poking out from underneath the one we got. Hopefully the author sticks with it, but gets some good testers for their next piece of IF.
A paper chase, December 8, 2020I dunno – on this one I’m slack-jawed, don’t have much to say.
…sorry.
Anyway, The Land Down Under, which I’m going to call LDU from here on out to avoid further temptation to quote Men at Work, is an appealing fantasy adventure with a moral and an entertainingly-realized world, plus some jokes that, unlike the one at the top of this review, actually work.
The fantastical bit of the premise is immediately grabby – the player character needs to explore a magic sort of paper-doll world to find other kids who’ve been sucked into it – but I have to admit I found the character introductions, and the emotional dynamics between them, made for a somewhat confusing opening. I suspect this is because I haven’t played the earlier games in this series, though LDU does draw attention to their existence and even includes links to play them in-game, so that’s on me I suppose. Still, given that the heart of the game is the relationship between Lin, Wanda, and Peter, I felt like I had to fill in those details based on what I learned once in paperworld, rather than coming into it with a strong understanding of them from the real-world sections.
Once Lin is shrunk down and paperfied, though, I experienced charm overload. The mechanics of how this paper world work are clearly thought through and delightfully presented, both in a playful narrative voice and the occasional illustration that really fits the storybook vibe. I’ll spoiler-block two of my favorite bits so as not to ruin things: (Spoiler - click to show)trying to surf the breeze as a paper-person was super fun, and the kitchen table that flips from breakfast to dinner back to breakfast was a great gag!
There are lots of choice along the way, and the game clearly signposts which are important by presenting them as an exclusive list at the end of a passage, with regular progression and exploration handled with inline links. There are some dead-ends, but there’s an undo mechanic that’s sufficiently generous to make them not feel punitive, as well as providing a further reward for poking beyond the critical path.
Surprisingly to me, LDU does touch on some relatively heavy themes – not just the expected look at escapism and conformity, but there are also hits of trauma, divorce, and depression around the edges. This is done with a light touch, though: they add weight and some added significance to the story without creating a tonal mismatch by dragging things into grimdarkness.
I did run into issue that I think is a bug, though I’ll hide it since it involves a mechanical spoiler (I also believe it may have been fixed in a mid-Comp update). (Spoiler - click to show)After I found the second part of the poem right after getting to school, I was asked if I wanted to trade in my poetry power for extra jetpacks. When I said yes, the story put me back to where I was when I found the first half of the poem, just before entering the paper world. I was able to replay and then finish the game with no further issues, though). But overall the implementation was smooth, allowing me to focus on experiencing the heartfelt story.
Pixel-hunting in text form, December 8, 2020Much like Hansel and Gretel, this one needs a bit more time in the oven, I fear.
The overall setting and structure for JAFT are nothing close to original – the player character is a ten-year-old who’s contacted by a wizard and transported to a fantasy land to save it from a wicked queen – but some good old tropes are good and old for a reason. Entering the world is at first like entering a warm bath, as you pick clean a homely cottage in the woods and then enter a dark forest for some light adventuring. The writing is undistinguished, but fits this high-fantasy story with a pre-teen protagonist just fine.
There are a few things that distinguish JAFT from the countless other stories with similar premises. First, there’s a note of whimsy and humor – I’m thinking especially of the puzzle involving the trolls (Spoiler - click to show)(they’re from Poland, so of course when they’re turned to stone by the sun, they transform into poles made of petrified wood) and a punny bit of business involving a magic clock. Several puzzles also have alternate solutions or offer multiple paths through the game, which is very helpful given that I found the difficulty level of the game quite high.
On the negative side, there are two primary issues I had with JAFT that wind up reinforcing each other. Many puzzles rely on what I’d call pixel-hunting design in a graphic adventure – there are many progression-critical objects that can only be found by methodically examining every single word that’s mentioned in a description, and even some that aren’t (Spoiler - click to show)(for the former issue, I’m thinking primarily of the sprig of thyme, where you need to examine one specific piece of the hedge despite there being no reason to think to look there; for the latter, all of the hidden spots on walls that don’t draw any attention to themselves).
The related issue is that “near-miss” solutions don’t wind up generating helpful nudges to the right track, but rather parser confusion. I had to go to the walkthrough to get through the aforementioned bit with the trolls, because something I was expecting to be there wasn’t, and the responses to trying to interact with it didn’t lead me in the right direction, even though what was going on should have been obvious to the player character (Spoiler - click to show)(that is, I kept trying to X TROLLS or X STATUES to no real effect, even though apparently there were a bunch of undescribed giant troll-shaped wooden poles lying in the clearing). Dialogue with characters similarly felt very fiddly – there was one puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)(talking then listening to the wind to get the dragon’s name) that I couldn’t get to work even when I was trying to just type in the walkthrough commands. And there were several guess the verb/guess the noun issues that stymied progress.
Combined, these two issues meant I felt like I was groping my way through JAFT, unclear on what I should be doing or how I should be doing it or whether I was close to a solution or miles off. Again, I think the basic concept is solid, and some of the puzzles do have some promise, but there’s some significant polishing to be done to make the experience of playing the game fit the charming, winsome mood the story’s trying to create.
Wackiness with some heart, December 8, 2020If you’ve played other games by these authors, you probably have a reasonable sense of what you’re in for in JSEC: an off-kilter comedy with some surprisingly serious character work, clever implementation, and puzzles that are mostly there to shunt you to the next bit of story. You might rarely know exactly what’s happening at any point in time, or what you’re meant to be doing, but that sense of dislocation is integral to the game’s deadpan, absurdist delivery.
Attempting to sum up the plot here is a rather daunting prospect; yes, it’s a sort of private-detective missing-persons case, and you do track down victims using internet searches, interrogate suspects, and look for hidden doors in the villain’s lair. But you’ll also fend off a snake attack while sleeping rough in a garage, get into buddy-comedy antics with two deeply unexpected sidekicks, and stop a pervert from creeping out other patrons at the library. There are a lot of animals involved – the game opens in a petting zoo that doubles as a bar, or perhaps it’s the other way around – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (but sort of reminded me of Blade Runner?) There is a narrative through-line of sorts, but it’s really all about the ride – you could almost shift the order of the four or five main scenes that make up the plot and with only a few tweaks it’d probably still work.
JSEC is all about the texture, in other words. If you’re hyper-focused on tracking down leads and getting through the case, you won’t get nearly as much out of the game as if you poke and prod your way through at a more leisurely pace. The narrative voice guides you towards this approach, I think – the game is in first person, which allows Jay’s understated, anxious but somehow languid vibe to come to the fore. He’s the butt of some jokes, but cracks some good ones himself (I was a fan of his response to the cell-phone mishap that, given the claims in the blurb, of course occurs almost immediately after game start). He’s not exactly a relatable character, and his behavior can sometimes be pretty off-putting, but he means well, and, crucially, gets along well with the generally-really-pleasant supporting case.
Gameplay-wise, this is a talky one. Conversation is handled smoothly, with a TALK TO command spitting out some ideas for topics to explore in depth, often with ASK X ABOUT Y syntax though sometimes, pleasingly, prompting alternative phrasing that make conversation seem more natural. These conversations aren’t puzzles – you can just exhaust the topics and get through just fine – but I found they had a good rhythm to them, which is really hard to manage in IF! There are also some puzzles, most of which are pretty straightforward but a few which are quite clever (though there’s one that I think will only be intuitive to folks in a very specific age band). Some even pull the rug out from under the player without making them the butt of the joke (I’m thinking in particular of the darkness puzzle in the cabin basement).
I did hit one puzzle that I think was a bit unfair and/or buggy: (Spoiler - click to show)I’d hit on the idea of trying to deter the snakes by lowering the temperature, but couldn’t get this to work until I followed the LOOK -> LISTEN -> LOOK -> USE REMOTE sequence listed in the walkthrough; after I’d finally managed to succeed, in the course of three turns I slept through the night, woke up and had breakfast, then got into a cab, only for the snake-murder event to somehow fire well after the threat made sense. But the included walkthrough got me past that without much fuss.
It’s hard to think what else to say here except recite the various things that made me laugh or grin in delight, which isn’t very useful as it just ruins the fun. I will say the ending was surprisingly affecting, though not necessarily in a wholly positive way ((Spoiler - click to show)I can’t believe those jerks killed Raisin!), which is maybe a good synecdoche for how JSEC does way more than it the average zany private-dick adventure, and is well worth your time.
Intentionally alienating, unintentionally buggy, December 8, 2020Oof, this one just didn’t work for me. There’s obviously a lot that went into Infinitube – a lot of work, a lot of writing, and a lot of targets for an omnishambles social satire. But perhaps playing it on a day that was already a lot (it was the day Trump got COVID and the world went even more bonkers than we've gotten used to), in a season that’s already a lot, and in a year that’s a lot more than a lot, was just too much.
To back up a bit – the conceit is that the player gets a free trial to the eponymous product, which is some sort of reincarnation or simulation or mind-hopping service that allows one to vicariously experience various, well, experiences. Through each vignette, you make choices which give you different traits, which are worth different amounts of points (some can be worth negative points) and may have an “attribute” which modifies the scoring of other traits. You cash out your traits at the end of each round, and then need to pay a point toll, which ratchets up each cycle, to have another go-round. If you can’t pay the tax, it appears you get booted back to the beginning to try it all again. (Spoiler - click to show)There may be a way to end the cycle and come out the other side, but I was unable to do so – see below.
The game layer is pretty thin, though – the meat is really in the experiences, with the accumulation of traits primarily serving as sharp jabs of satire or polemic to underscore the narrative. And the experiences are – unpleasant, I guess was my main reaction? I’m not sure if the sequence is truly random, and if so, whether I got dealt a bum hand, but the ones I pulled included being:
• An orca stuck in Sea World
• A 7-month-old inducted into the Marines to re-enact a new civil war
• A conniving sitcom star working on an abusive set
• A frustrated sculptor pinning all their hopes on finagling a rent-controlled lease
Each of them were evocatively written – the style is very David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest, to give a rough flavor. But man, they’re all pretty dark, and at times I’d even say flirting with nihilism. To give some more detailed, spoilery analysis for the Marines bit:
(Spoiler - click to show)the premise is obviously over the top, but the sequence condenses into having to choose a side in a conflict that’s based on current struggles for racial justice: either a “Waker”, who’s super-woke, or a “Dreamer” who’s blinded by the American Dream, per Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing (which is explicitly cited). You are white – in fact you get a “white” trait which makes all the other traits worth more to you, which is a good illustration of how the mechanics underline the social satire. I chose the Waker side, which shunted me into a sequence where I had to prepare for battle by giving away some abstract inventory items to different members of my squad – my “ten year plan” to parley military service into personal success, and my “bouncy body” from being an infant. I found one combination that let me win the first battle, but that took a lot of trial and error. And then there’s a final sequence that reveals that you lost after all, because the buddy you joined up with – who’s now revealed to be Black, I guess? – chose the other side because he feels responsible to support his family. It feels like an out-of-nowhere gotcha, punishing the player for trying to believe in change with a “twist” that’s not exactly surprising to anyone who’s moderately informed about racial dynamics in the U.S.
There’s similar dark futility, if not unkindness, as well as tonal oddity, in the other scenarios – I’ll share a few light spoilers here. As the sitcom star, if you try to complain about the abuse, it’s revealed that actually this is the early 90s, no one cares, and now you’re unemployable. And if, as the sculptor, you succeed in getting the apartment, you get this list of outcomes:
“YOU NOW HAVE A RENT CONTROLLED LEASE IN THE EAST VILLAGE
YOU ARE NOW A THWOMP
YOU ARE NOW UNDEAD”
(I think “Thwomp” is those trap-things from Super Mario Brothers?)
In fairness, there are indications that we’re meant to find all of this hellish – you can come across a character who seems to be trying to escape. But for me, that didn’t change the fact that the experience of playing was really unpleasant! There are also some typos and I think real bugs, which led to some dead-end passages and sequences playing out of order. I also ran into one that stopped my progress by zeroing out my points, at which point I stopped, about an hour and a half in – details might be spoilery: (Spoiler - click to show)the description on the “white” attribute flagged that if you get too many duplicates of it, you sort of overdose on whiteness and get a different trait that acts as a value-inverter – so positive traits give negative points and vice versa. This wound up happening to me, so I tried to do a shoot-the-moon run by seeking out negative outcomes in hopes of a big payday. But the point-inversion didn’t work when I got to the cash-out sequence, so all the negative points wiped out my total and I couldn’t continue.
Going back to Infinite Jest, that is a dark book at times, but what made it palatable to me was the vein of humanism and compassion threaded throughout each of the different narratives (leaving aside whether DFW embodied that in his personal life!) Infinitubes’ apparent approach of sequencing globs of awfulness one after the other, with a faint hope of reaching something positive at the end, doesn’t work as well for me, at least at this moment. This is clearly a big work, trying to speak to big things, and I suspect there are players for whom it will resonate very strongly, but sadly I’m not among them.
Anything but mild, December 8, 2020OK, I’m going to assign several Pinocchios to the “incredibly mild” tag, because while there are a lot of things you could say about this game, “mild” sure doesn’t seem like one of them. I mean that positively: TIMMoTT has a strong and appealing narrative voice, a distinctive setting, and some fiendish (in a good way) puzzles. But I also mean it negatively: the protagonist’s well-meaning but still an often-annoying horndog, the overall plot oscillates between ridiculous and insane, and there are some fiendish (in a bad way) puzzles. And unlike the title, the “more than two hours” warning in the blurb is completely accurate – this is a big one that took me about four hours to work through, including recourse to the hints and walkthrough on more than one occasion. For all this, I did enjoy my time with the game, but it was a complicated, spiky sort of enjoyment.
With something as overwhelming as this, it’s tricky to figure out where to start but I guess we can default to the plot. For over an hour (that is, over halfway through the judging window), I thought TIMMoTT was doing a sort of Risky Business thing, with its 1980s setting, focus on adolescents desperate to get laid, and late-first-act reveal that the main character has a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a significantly-older prostitute named Anne (buckle up, it’s gonna get weirder). But then the story shifts in a radically different direction: (Spoiler - click to show)after his girlfriend breaks up with him so she can move to California and start a new life, the protagonist goes to visit her for one last heart to heart, only to find out she’s been kidnapped. Her house’s phone starts ringing, and when he answers it, it’s the kidnapper, who says he wants the main character to bring Anne’s book of clients to the school as a hostage swap. .
Thus is the meat of the game revealed: a long puzzle-fest gradually unlocking different parts of the very large school map, following a breadcrumb trail of (Spoiler - click to show)taunting notes from the kidnapper. Along the way you’ll interact with a bunch of teachers and janitors (in the middle of doing a Spring Break deep-cleaning), discover at least five secret passages, and juggle more sets of keys than Inform’s default disambiguation systems can really keep up with (I’d hoped that the keyring you start with would automate some of this, but no such luck).
There are a couple things to say about this story. The first and most obvious one is that it makes no damn sense – feel free to come up with your own plot hole, but the main piece I got stuck on (Spoiler - click to show)is that the kidnapper’s whole plot makes no sense: they clearly were in Anne’s house so if they wanted to find the notebook, searching her very few unpacked possessions would obviously be far less work than pulling this weird mindgame on Tom. And even assuming he couldn’t find the notebook and actually wanted it, why create so many hoops to jump through that would almost certainly mean Tom would never find the hand-off point? There’s bonus craziness around the whole cult/ritual thing that swerves into period-appropriate Satanic panic, but let’s leave that aside for now. Second, though, it also creates a tonal mismatch with the first part of the game – the relatively grounded teen romance stuff falls by the wayside as the genre shifts from Risky Business to I dunno, like Mazes and Monsters?
At least the narrative voice is consistent throughout, even if the plot elements and tropes shift substantially. An initial warning about the writing: there is a lot of it, and while it’s generally error-free and pretty fun to read, it’s not uncommon for the description of an ordinary room to be preceded with two or three paragraphs of introductory material and then have the room itself take up the rest of the screen. There are also a lot of noninteractive dialogue sequences and cutscenes that are easily a thousand words or more. I didn’t mind this so much, as a matter of personal preference, but I’m not sure this approach is best suited for an interactive medium.
The game is in first person (past tense, with a few small errors), and Tom is generally good company as he explains what the deal is with all his classmates, muses about how he’ll spend his Spring Break, and (eventually) puzzles out how to make progress through the labyrinth the school becomes. He’s a laid-back guy who curses a lot, but he’s overall a good sort who tries to look for those who are having a harder time of adolescence than he is. The fly in the ointment is that he can’t look at a lady without drooling. There are I think just four female characters in the game (not counting Tom’s never-seen mom), each of whom is a total babe with awesome breasts. This is kept PG-13, and is certainly a plausible bit of characterization, but when he’s contemplating how much he feels like he’s connecting with a woman he’s just met and who’s currently caged in an underground prison, it’s a bit much. The fact that pretty much all the teenagers are secretly banging people one or two decades older than they are is also a bit off-putting.
Again, though, after the opening the focus is really on the puzzles rather than the plot and characterization. These are primarily about navigating from one end of the school to the other, surmounting more locked doors than I can easily count. Most of them are fairly well clued and fun to solve – putting pieces together from the intermittent flashbacks to discover secrets in the present was a reliable highlight – but I definitely felt a note of exhaustion when I realized I was going to have to get a set of keys off yet another character, or discover yet another secret passage (the architects for this place must have a lucrative sideline in Transylvanian castles and ancient Egyptian tombs) – cutting the map size and puzzle count by 30% would have still made for a big game while reducing the occasional feeling of repetitiveness.
There are also some puzzles that are less well-clued and do seem like they require some mind-reading, unfortunately. The most egregious example for me was a puzzle that required me to get some salt. Fortunately, I was carrying a salted pretzel, so you’d think this would be a one-step puzzle, no? I never would have hit on the actual solution but for the walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)you need to leave the pretzel out on a cafeteria counter that’s glancingly described as having a few ants occasionally wandering through; duck out and come back, and in the intervening thirty seconds they carry away all the bread and leave nothing but the salt. But there were many puzzles with similar issues, including a TV remote that has what are basically magic powers and some rigmarole with an A/V room return slot that I still can’t figure out.
The implementation throughout is solid enough, but in a game this big and complex, “solid enough” can actually get frustrating. As mentioned above, locking and unlocking doors is a big part of what you’ll be doing, but it’s not automatic, and given how many different sets of keys you’ll have, and that both keys, doors, and parts of the scenery might all be described as “rusty” or “steel”, the can be a lot of annoyance to doing something that should be simple. There’s a holdall item, thankfully, but the inventory is quite large and moving things in and out of the holdall can be a pain. And exacerbating some of the harder puzzles, there are some guess-the-verb issues (at one point you find a clue directly telling you there’s something hidden behind the soda machine, but PUSH MACHINE, MOVE MACHINE, and LOOK BEHIND MACHINE, all fail with default behavior since only PULL MACHINE is accepted).
I also got a crash bug late in the game (an out-of-bounds memory access error). And while I’m not sure these are bugs, strictly speaking, I found I think three ways to put the game in an unwinnable state, which I’m not sure is an intentional piece of the design: (Spoiler - click to show) if you put on the robe too early, you can’t change back into the janitor’s uniform to finish up your remaining tasks in the school; similarly if you wander off school grounds after you hand over the notebook, Tom says he doesn’t want to return to campus without it; and I think it's possible to get to the final confrontation without carrying any of the items needed to get to a positive resolution, though alternate solutions are available.
I’m complaining a bunch because honestly, there kind of is a lot to complain about. But with that said, I still had a lot of fun sinking my teeth into this big hunk of game, and while I’m not sure I’d trust Tom around any of my female family members, being inside his head was enjoyable in a retrograde, throw-back sort of way.
Simply magical, December 8, 2020(I beta tested this game)
As modern video games get more and more complex, and the hardware gets more and more powerful, AAA games are capable of overwhelming feats – I gasped in wonder the first time I saw the crowded streets of Assassin’s Creed Unity’s revolutionary Paris, for example, and that’s more than five years old! But for whatever reason, when I run through the times when a game has just bowled me over with amazement, a disproportionate number are things from IF, like the power-fantasy of Hadean Lands, where I cackled with glee at the way I could type “W” and see the game visibly pause before spitting out the results of the twelve different sub-puzzles I’d automatically solved with that single key press. Perhaps it’s that the flexibility of text means it’s always capable of surprising you, whereas once you understand the systems at play in something like an Assassin’s Creed game, you’ve pretty much got the whole thing figured out. Or maybe there’s something to the old saw about imagination, and picturing what the text is describing, being more evocative than just seeing.
Anyway, add the Impossible Bottle to the list. I’ve seen a number of reviews that bounced out of this one early, before getting to what makes the game so amazing, so while I’ll be putting the rest of this under a spoiler block to preserve the surprise, I do want to clearly say for those who haven’t played yet that there is something amazing here and it’s not just a game about a six-year old picking up a mess, so stick with it through those first ten minutes.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get spoilery:(Spoiler - click to show) when I first realized what the gimmick here was, it made me smile – the idea of a magic dollhouse that lets you change what’s happening in the real house is a clever one, and the initial puzzle where you figure that out leads to a lovely aha moment that made me feel smart. But oh man I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. You can move things around, sure, makes sense. Putting a small thing in the dollhouse turns it into a normal-sized, real thing in the real house, OK. Putting a big thing into the dollhouse to shrink it, now we’re starting to get more complicated. Then add on that you can sometimes blow things up twice, or shrink them twice, and that changing their size might make them come to life or otherwise slightly shift? It stops feeling like a gimmick and starts feeling like magic, especially once your dad makes a fateful decision, and you figure out how to get into the titular bottle…
The dollhouse opens up a huge possibility space, but TIB does a masterful job of helping you stay on top of what you’re doing. There’s a handy GOALS command that lists what you could be working on at any given time, and a progressive hint system to keep you on track. More than these external crutches, the game also provides solid direction via suggested verbs and cueing from other characters, and while the magic of the dollhouse is very versatile, you generally have a good understanding of what kinds of things you can accomplish so you’re rarely left floundering. And it’s all implemented incredibly smoothly, so that it’s easy to do anything you can think of. I’ve only played a few Dialog games, but it really shows its strength and versatility here – I mostly played by typing in commands, but a few times when I ran into disambiguation issues (primarily when I was trying to mess around stacking furniture to see if I could break the game), the ability to click links made it incredibly robust to mischief and player screwing-around.
While the puzzles, and the size-changing mechanics, are the real stars of the show, there’s plenty to like about the narrative side of things too. The other members of your family don’t rise much above stereotypes, but they’re lovingly drawn and appealing nonetheless. TIB is another game that references the pandemic, but instead of using it as a tool of horror or isolation, instead it focuses on the way people and families can come together and support each other through a tough time, which is always a lovely message but is especially so right now.
Is TIB a perfect game? No, probably not – the solution to the dinosaur puzzle feels a little too unintuitive to me, for one – but it is a delightful one (you can get all the way through to the end and never realize that you can play the-floor-is-lava!), and, as I keep repeating, really just magic.
This was my favorite game of the 2020 Comp.
Interactive Just So stories, December 8, 2020This is a delightful set of fables, done in what sounds to my ear at least a note-perfect ventriloquizing of Kipling’s Just So Stories voice. There are real opportunities for interactivity – the player inhabits the role of the child to whom the stories are being told, and gets to interject an excited choice when the narrator prompts them for input in the story. It’s a very natural, elegant device, and in fact while some options are merely cosmetic, there are a couple that determine which of the five stories on offer (I think – I replayed a second time and didn’t see anything obvious I missed) you wind up seeing. Of course, each ends up just-so-ing into the appropriate place, but that’s sort of the nature of just so stories.
But while the use of choice is canny, it’s really the prose that’s the main draw here, and I felt like every page had something that made me smile. There’s a call-and-response bit between the whale and the tiger that’s got a great rhythm to it, an understated bit of dialogue as the capybara and anaconda come to grips with the natural order of predation, and a crocodile offering help who (Spoiler - click to show)turns out to be a reptile of his word!
There are a few scattered typos – “infinte” for “infinite” once when describing the sagacity of the whale, and there’s an errant capitalized “he” in the middle of a sentence about everything the tiger ate. But very few as such things go – this is a smoothly put-together thing, in design and in writing. The author even gracefully takes on the less-savory aspects of Kipling’s legacy in a non-didactic, but very much appreciated, coda. Very much worth playing!
Storytelling niggles mar a solid story, December 8, 2020There are certain stories that only really snap into shape once you’ve reached the end. Obviously there’s your Memento-type puzzle box stories, or your last-minute-revelation-recontextualizes-everything-that’s-come-before ones (given the author’s pseudonym The Sixth Sense is the obvious name-check). Storytelling like this can be really compelling, even more so in IF where the player winds up not just stepping through the puzzles or individual plot points, but is fiddling with the overall story like it’s a Rubik’s Cube. But it’s also a risky approach, because withholding information on how the world works or a character’s motivation means that the work might not hold together as well when first experienced as it does in retrospect. Despite the authorial name-check, I’m not convinced High Jinnks is actually trying to be a high-stakes twist sort of story. But unfortunately I think the comparison is apt because I found the game does play things a bit too close to the vest, and as a result, doesn’t land as effectively as it should given the general strength of most of its elements.
It’s a little tricky to share the setup, since that shifts a fair bit over the course of the 45-minute or so playtime. You’re playing a jinn who’s able to take human form, but from the off you don’t have much in the way of motivation: you’re just emerging from a casino where you’ve fleeced a hapless mortal, at which point you’re free to wander without being pointed towards or away from anything in particular. There’s not much worldbuilding initially, which left me with a large number of basic questions about the main character’s wishes and desires (like, do all-powerful wish-granting jinn actually need money?), and therefore what I should be trying to do. A motivation does eventually emerge – the aforementioned fleeced mortal stole back the money you won off them, so you want to find them and get it back (though again, is this just a pride thing?) – and from that point on it’s usually clear what your next, immediate goal should be. But until the very end, the broader question of your characters goals and situation, as well as more nuts-and-bolts questions about what’s actually happening, weigh down what ultimately should be a heart-warming supernatural buddy comedy.
Some of this is due to unclear writing. I often found myself mouthing “huh?” at a passage where befuddlement was not, I think, the intended response. (Spoiler - click to show) I still don’t really understand the whole sequence where Ali traps the main character, and then releases him – and the whole sequence where Hakeem comes home was really off-kilter. But more often, it’s due to the choice to have the main character know far more than the player, without revealing that knowledge. Sometimes this is OK when it’s clear that it’s setting something up – I’m thinking of the gag with the (Spoiler - click to show)coffee maker, or decorative mirror, or… – but more often, the player character is making plans, or heading places, based not just on clever plans that will be sprung at the right moment, but on critical, character-driven goals that the player just isn’t let in on. The whole sequence after (Spoiler - click to show)killing Malik is like this – trying to get revenge on the sorcerer out to get the main character makes sense, but then you’re led through a series of plot points involving summoning another jinn, and then trying to break a curse they’ve put on you, and it’s only towards the end that you realize that the whole premise of the game is that the main character has been cursed to not be able to kill (by the by, being hell-bent on lifting this curse does not make for the most sympathetic protagonist) and exiled from the society of other jinns (which is incredibly hide-bound in a parody of government bureaucracy that also feels like it comes out of nowhere). This is really relevant information for understanding who this character is! As a result, while there are a good amount of choices and some reactivity, I found they typically didn’t feel meaningful because I lacked context for what I was trying to do.
The other questionable storytelling technique is to interrupt the main thread of the plot with vignettes and flashbacks, mostly drawn from or inspired by the actual stories in the Thousand and One Nights, as best I could tell. These are all right as far as they go, but I found they didn’t do much besides interrupt the plot and make it a bit shaggier, as they weren’t very related to the main story either narratively or thematically – the jinn in the flashbacks seems to behave differently than the contemporary one, and while the main character’s backstory is actually very important, those pieces are entirely separate from what’s in the flashbacks (Spoiler - click to show)– including the vignette involving the death of the protagonist’s child, which felt like it should have some impact!
This is all a shame, because when you know what’s going on in High Jinnks, I think there’s a solid story under there, and while the prose can sometimes be unclear, there’s also some good writing – I liked the way the relationship between the jinn and Ali (the hapless mortal from the casino, who winds up playing a significant role) evolved over time. There are also some really good jokes. But these storytelling missteps, plus a few technical niggles – I hit a dead link early on when trying to hit on a random I think drug-dealer, and later on I wound up at a park despite having opted to visit a library instead – undermined my enjoyment, to the extent that I went through the first chunk of the game half-convinced that the title hid a second pun and everybody, myself included, was just baked out of their damned minds, for all the sense anything was making. There’s a lot that’s promising here, though, so unlike with M. Night Shyamalan, I look forward to the author’s future work.
A mystery that's a pleasure to unravel, December 7, 2020(I beta tested this game)
A confession, dear reader: I am awful at IF mysteries. I like them in theory, and I’m pretty good at figuring things out when watching a murder mystery on TV. But put one in front of me in parser form and it’s a bad scene – maybe it’s because they’re timer-dependent and I don’t have the patience to take good notes, or that I usually have a hard time getting a handle on how NPC interaction is supposed to work, but every once in a while I decide to try one of the Infocom mysteries and get like five moves in before fleeing away in terror. I did once manage to hack my way through like a third of Make It Good before getting stuck and, upon checking the hints, discovered that actually all I’d done was fallen for red herrings and I’d actually been making negative progress.
Given all this, I was flat-out astonished that I was able to solve Happyland without any hints. I don’t think it’s because it’s too simple or easy – nabbing the right culprit isn’t excessively hard, true, but there are some sub-plots and side-areas of investigation that are pleasantly twisty, and I was able to unravel those after some careful experimentation too. Rather, it’s because the game generally plays fair, uses a timer but has a generous hand both with the overall limit and the windows for specific events, and does a good job of providing clues and enabling you to work backward through an intimidatingly-large possibility space to suss out all the whys and wherefors.
Speaking of working backwards, I should probably back up and mention the setup. At first blush, it’s a pretty standard cop-show premise, with your detective protagonist called in to investigate a death that may or may not be accidental (spoiler: it is not). I did experience a little bit of tonal disorientation on why a hotel is called “Happyland”, and the idea of a regular hotel in the middle of a rural area developing an amusement-park add-on seemed a little odd to me, but it’s easy enough to roll with: really, you’ve got a body, half a dozen suspects, and a forensics kit, so it’s all about diving into the details to try to solve the mystery.
That forensics kit does a lot of the heavy lifting – pretty much all the puzzles require using it to analyze fingerprints, assess trace chemicals, and magnify small discrepancies. The other half of the mystery-solving equation is interacting with the robust cast of characters, interrogating them and confronting them with various pieces of evidence. This is more complex business than the typical adventure-game TIE ROPE TO ROCK sort of thing, but the parser takes care of it quite well, with the only niggle a bit of wonkiness around disambiguation – especially notable given that this is a custom parser, which often have a negative reputation! But I didn’t run into any guess-the-verb issues, and NPCs were usually smart enough to draw the appropriate conclusions based on what I was showing or telling them.
There are a few small things that could be cleaned-up for a post-Comp release – notably, in one playthrough, I was able to nab the suspect before a particular event happened, but the post-game newspaper story still referenced that event (Spoiler - click to show) (I’m talking about Cooper’s death – I know the timing of his poisoning can shift depending on the player’s actions, but if you’ve never seen him collapse it’s odd to see it mentioned). But generally there’s a high degree of attention to detail, including probably my favorite Easter Egg of the Comp (Spoiler - click to show) (ANALYZE POEM). My only real complaint is that Happyland is lulling me into thinking I’m getting better at IF mysteries – so it’ll be at fault when I take another run at Deadline, am promptly smacked back down, and once again write off the subgenre.
More ghoulish than ghostly, December 7, 2020Ghostfinder offers a strong hook: modern urban horror crossed with procedural-show sexmurder. I can see a significant audience for this sort of thing, but let me confess up front that I felt like it leaned much harder on the sexmurder part, which is not something I particularly enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve watched enough Brits seen off to depopulate a small county – whimsically in a village, ecclesiastically in a church, intellectually in a college, snootily in a manor, &c. – but forensically-described sexual assault and murder, of which there’s a lot on offer here (six victims), has a pretty different vibe. On the one hand, this is a personal preference, twelve billion CSI fans obviously have different tastes, and kudos to the author for offering a clear content warning that communicates exactly what’s in store. On the other – oh, this is probably spoilery: (Spoiler - click to show)part of what made Ghostfinder so squicky to me is that the serial killer’s modus operandi is very very closely based on the real-world Golden State Killer, who was responsible for at least 13 murders and dozens of rapes, and who was arrested last year and just sentenced a few weeks ago as of this writing. True, the crimes were several decades ago, and the author clarified that the game was started before the killer was arrested, but it felt maybe a little extra ghoulish given the circumstances.
Getting back to the game, however! Ghostfinder has an interesting structure, where more conventional adventure-game sequences of going places, talking to people, playing cat-and-mouse with the killer, etc., bookend a large middle section that’s all about reviewing case files and Googling the secret database of your psychic investigation society. The adventure-y bits work but aren’t anything too out of the ordinary – you interview suspects, run down leads, and interact with fellow members of the Ghostfinders who are fairly well characterized. The database is a fun conceit, though – you get to dig through files on each of the serial killer’s previous murders, then search for particular names or places or things that you think warrant further investigation, which usually just gives you another document but sometimes opens up the possibility of visiting a new location or interviewing a new witness or suspect.
Investigation-via-Google is a fun structure – I quite dug Her Story from a couple years back, which took a related approach – and it does make one feel appropriately like a detective. There’s also a twist because beyond the case file, one of the detectives also has been having psychic visions that put her in the heads of various characters, one of whom is the killer, so in theory you can cross-reference her journal with the conventional investigation to rule out and rule in various suspects. In practice, however, I didn’t go too far down that path because I’d pretty much already solved the case by the time I worked through all of the case files, so was basically just nodding “yup, that fits” while reading through the journal.
Anyway the database is an effective central mechanic for the game, but I think it does throw off the pacing. There are a LOT of case files to go through – all very similarly bleak in describing horrible crimes of rape and murder – so that’s a lot to digest all at once, and after reading each, you’ll probably spend five or ten minutes inputting different options into the search bar. The writing style for these parts is fairly dense and procedural, which makes sense, but again sometimes made the game feel like a slog. All told it probably took me an hour to work through them all, during which time my engagement with the characters had pretty much fallen away, since they’re not very active in this segment except for a few short sequences where the detectives run out and interview some suspects. I experienced a bit of whiplash when I got to the ending sequence and I suddenly was reminded that these folks existed! There’s also a bit of wonkiness where sometimes, searching a name teleports you to an interview sequence, which was off-putting to me at first since I was worried that doing stuff in the “real world” would advance a clock (Spoiler - click to show)it doesn't.
The writing is generally solid, with only a few typos or infelicities (though I have to share one good one – during the inevitable struggle with the killer, the protagonist “hit(s) him again with the hammer, breaking his other jaw”. Wow, he really is a monster!) I thought the fantasy worldbuilding was occasionally a bit clumsily-inserted or underexplained, but since the focus really was on the real-world procedural stuff, this wasn’t a major area of weakness. Ghostfinder’s solidly put together, and fiddling about with the database does convey a fun frisson of really being a detective. Despite some subject-matter choices that put me off a bit, I think it’ll find an audience -- and I'm looking forward to hopefully less-macabre future installments!
An exercise in estrangement, December 7, 2020The randomizer gave me an interesting, meaty game to start out with. FoPPSA, as I’m going to call it because I can’t resist a silly acronym, is apparently a sequel to a previous game, though it doesn’t advert to this and I haven’t played it, which may account for some of the feeling of confusion I felt for much of the playing time, though certainly not all.
I’m having a hard time figuring out how to organize this review, so let’s go with a good old tripartite structure, plus a summing-up.
1. Plodding literalism
Viewed strictly as a parser puzzle game, FoPPSA has some early high points. I found the opening enticingly odd, and the first set of tasks, while sometimes feeling arbitrary and lacking conventional logic, were motivated and fairly clued (the first significant puzzle, a minotaur-and-maze jobby, prompted a fun “aha” moment once I figured out the trick).
Once the second set of tasks opens up, however, I often found myself flailing, both to identify what I should be working on, and how to accomplish my goals. There were some guess-the-verb issues (Spoiler - click to show)(making the Molotov cocktail was probably the worst offender here), incomprehensible dialogue referencing events for which I had no context, and puzzles that didn’t seem like they’d have any connections to my goals (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking most immediately of the bit where you have to skin-dive into a shipwreck at the bottom of Tokyo Bay in order to obtain some plane tickets). I mostly typed in the walkthrough for the second half of the game. Beta testers aren’t listed in the ABOUT text, so in this frame I’m tempted to think the author ran out of time and didn’t have outside eyes helping to figure out where to focus their work.
2. Anime club in the basement
After I finished playing and I was making my first attempt to figure out how I felt about FoPPSA, I thought first of all about anime club.
See, when I was in college, I had a girlfriend who was big into anime (I was not). This was in the late 90’s, so rather than that meaning she had a subscription to a bunch of specialty streaming services, this meant that once a week she liked to go to the school’s anime club, which met in a basement to watch inconsistently-subtitled (or, God help us, over-earnestly overdubbed) episodes of two or three series which they ran through concurrently. Every once in a while I would go along with her, but without seeing most of the shows from the beginning, to this day I unfairly associate anime with the experience of squinting nearsightedly at blurry text (again, this was the 90s, we had CRTs) while attempting to figure out why Japanese teenagers were yelling at each other while obliquely referencing grievances and events that I’d missed by coming in late.
You see where I’m going with this.
And I don’t say that intending to be unkind! Just that in that first assessment, I thought part of what FoPPSA was doing was genre emulation of a genre with which I don’t easily get along, and which often can be intentionally alienating. Some of the tropes were fun – – but the overall structure isn’t one that’s trying to provide easy answers.
3. Bertolt Brecht
OK, here’s why I used the past tense in the paragraph above. As I was going to sleep after playing FoPPSA, one detail suddenly jumped out at me – oh, and I can’t really say what it was without a spoiler. Actually:
(Spoiler - click to show)So the detail is that the floating casino that hosts the game’s climax is called the “Mahagonny”. One might be forgiven for thinking that’s a misspelling of a type of wood, but I think it’s actually a reference to a Bertolt Brecht opera (I haven’t seen it, but that same ex-girlfriend was also interested in opera and once described the plot to me). And once I realized that, I thought to myself, hang on, the author isn’t (just) doing anime, they’re doing Brecht.
I am not anything resembling a theater scholar by any means, so most of what I say here is probably wrong. But my understanding of Brecht is that he was a devout Communist and critic of capitalist society who developed a theater focused on an ethic of estrangement that interrogates the role and complicity of the audience in what they’re watching. And it sure seems like there’s a lot in FoPPSA to support a Brechtian reading!
The slow ascent up the apartment-tower of privilege, for example, with the player becoming further compromised with each step they take, is a relatively straightforward critique of capitalism (I found the dialogue options here a little wonky, but I believe it’s possible to end the game after getting each apartment if you say you’re content with it – it’s just that you get a “bad ending” so you’re pushed to try for the next). And speaking of allegories of capitalism, the horrifying fish-canning factory is if anything a bit too on the nose. Plus the dialogue with and about the trio of dudebros has a lot of references to revolutionary theory and practice.
Beyond the focus on class, there are also parts of the game that might be intentionally estranging. The host of Japanese words, likely unfamiliar to most Western players, put a layer of effort between the player and the game. There are interspersed quotations, I think mostly from the Brothers Grimm, that unsettle the narrative. There are several random sections where you just need to keep trying the same things over and over until you happen to get lucky. One might even view some of the fiddliness of the parser and puzzles as attempts by the author to engage the player-as-audience in a Brechtian sort of way!
4. Summing up
I mean, if you read the giant spoiler-block above you know that I can’t really pretend to sum this up. There’s a lot going on in this one, with some real intelligence behind the game, but also some messiness, bugs and flaws. I’ll need to go back once the comp ends, including playing the prequel, and see if I can get any further. I also hope there’s a post-comp release, because I think some clean-up would help delineate which bits of oddness are intentional, and which are bugs. In any event, FoPPSA was an intriguing start to the Comp for me!
(I’ll wrap up with a small bit of service-reviewing: there were two significant bugs I ran into that even the most devout Brechtian wouldn’t include on purpose: while trying to solve a disambiguation issue, I tried to drop one of the items and got a “fatal error: Out-of-bounds memory access” crash (this terminates the transcript, since I didn’t remember to start a new one when I re-opened the game); the game also didn’t end for me after I performed what I’m pretty sure (from the walkthrough) should have been the last few moves. (Spoiler - click to show)This means that my antagonist/rival/romantic interest was left forever bleeding out, gasping out the same final bit of dialogue, no matter how many turns I waited or tried to keep talking to her.) I believe these may have been fixed in a mid-Comp update, though).
The opposite of falling flat, December 7, 2020I try not to bang on about my own entry in the Comp in these reviews, but for y’all who haven’t played it, it’s an Ancient Greek mystery-cult initiation as told by P.G. Wodehouse. I share this because I’m excited that I’m not the only one offering a bizarre British-literature mashup, and in sheer creativity, I’m quite sure “late-Victorian geometry satire meets steampunk browser game” beats me hands down.
For all the potential outlandishness of the setup, though, Flattened London goes down easy. I’m only dimly familiar with the inspirations (I read Flatland maybe 20 years ago, and have maybe played two or three hours apiece of Fallen London and Sunless Seas before bouncing off them), but the author doesn’t assume too much advance knowledge, providing enough context to make the player feel sure-footed, without overloading things with too much lore or too many exposition dumps. There are certainly lots of things that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I suspect most of those were places where ambiguity and mystery were intentional, and I generally had a solid enough understanding of how things behaved to be able to move forward.
The structure here is interesting. There’s a clear main plot – the player character (a triangle) is tasked by one of the eldritch overlords of the post-lapsarian city with tracking down a forbidden treatise adverting to the existence of a heretical third-dimension, and once obtained, there are a number of different things you can do to dispose of it. But if you just stick to that, you’d maybe see only a third of the game – perhaps I just got lucky with where I chose to start exploring the fairly-large game map, but I resolved the plot and got a perfectly satisfying ending in about 45 minutes.
Below (can we say “below”?) this more modern, story-driven structure, though, is a Zork-style treasure hunt. You have a 13-slot trophy case in your apartment, you see, and as you explore the world, poke into ancient mysteries, and solve various side-puzzles, you accumulate various valuables that can be deposited back home. It’s hopefully not a spoiler to share that something fun happens if you find all of them, and I found tracking them down sufficiently engaging that I kept playing until I’d caught them all (in a bit under two hours, for those who might be intimidated by the “longer than two hours” estimate on the blurb).
There are two reasons this way of doing things works well for Flattened London, I think. First, exploration is rewarding in its own right – there are lots of places to poke into, secret histories alluded to, endless libraries to get lost in, and even a whole (Spoiler - click to show)parallel dimension to discover. The writing here is never as rich and allusive as what I’ve seen in the Failbetter games, sounding a bit more prosaic than the antediluvian ruins and dimension-hopping monsters on offer might seem to merit – and I’m not sure it does as much as it could with the Flatland part of the premise – but there are definitely moments that are enticingly weird (I’m thinking especially of the (Spoiler - click to show)bit with the pail), and the clean prose keeps the focus on the puzzles, which are the other reason the structure worked for me: there are a lot of them, but I found all the puzzles pretty easy.
Most involve a pretty direct application of a single inventory item, with generous clueing, and even the slightly more involved ones don’t give much trouble (there is a maze, but it’s pretty easy to map using the old drop-your-inventory-to-mark-where-you’ve-been method, and you don’t even need to do that since there’s a clue found elsewhere that enables you to run straight through it). There’s a game of Mastermind, but I think you’ve got infinite time to solve it so that’s no big deal. There was one puzzle that I’m still not quite sure how I solved (Spoiler - click to show)(getting the treasure on the shelf in the elevator shaft – after I made it through maze, suddenly this was accessible on the way back, but I’m not sure what I’d done to open that up. I also might have sort of broken it, though, since I’d realized that while you can’t take the object on the shelf as you’re whizzing by, you can take the shelf itself, which I’m pretty sure isn’t intended). But overall the game plays as a romp, as you wander around a large map plowing up treasures and secrets practically every five minutes.
I’m not sure how long Flattened London will stick with me – that’s the down side (argh, “down”, I did it again) of being so easygoing – but there’s a lot to be said for just rewarding the player! This is probably some of the purest fun I’ve had so far in the Comp.
Insane in the MMA-game, December 7, 2020I am not convinced this is not a joke.
Fight Forever is a maximalist MMA simulator, and it leans hard into every dudebro cliché you can imagine. You play an up-and-coming fighter, who gets to pick a name, a mentor, and a style, from a dozen or so options for each (I opted to name my – I think guy? – Frankie, hoping that I’d eventually be able to take a trip to Hollywood. No dice, but pre-fight my trainer did tell me to “Relax”, so I got my win after all). The heart of the gameplay is preparing for, then engaging in, a series of amateur and ultimately professional fights.
It is hard to overstate how authentically meatheaded this all feels. Your options in between fights include three different versions of training (“Train,” “Spar,” and “Fight Camp”), and one catch-all category labeled “Life”, with sub-menus for “Travel,” “Social,” “Sports,” “Stuff,” and “Master Class.” Master Class lets you get inspirational quotes from e.g. Margaret Thatcher. The others have like 15 grayed-out options and only one that works; for Social, predictably, it’s Booty Calls (Family, Philanthropy, Date, Read, Teach, and, endearingly, Tabletop Games, all either need to be unlocked or haven’t been implemented yet. You’ll also eventually be able to purchase Real State).
Training is the main focus of the game, as far as I could tell. It allows you to increase an incredible array of stats, both primary and derived. You can focus on “Boxing” or “TKD” or “Sambo” (erm) or for that matter “Awesomeness” or “Strategy” at Fight Camp, while Training lets you choose from a bunch of different exercises that seem to relate indirectly to this flurry of statistics. At one point I was told my “measurable takedown level” was 0 – seems bad! There’s no way I could see to actually access these all on one screen, though the Sparring option I think allows you to reveal a single one per mainline fight.
Speaking of those fights, there’s much less here than you might think. You click “fight”, you get some text, a mysterious gauge shows up, and you win or you lose, with no indication of why. There are sometimes previews of who you’ll be up against next, but these are beyond cryptic: the most clear one I got was a flag that the next opponent was very durable, but beats me whether that meant I should be focusing on endurance to be able to last in the ring with him, or power to break through his defenses (I tried endurance, and I lost. Or maybe my rockstar juice level wasn’t high enough? Yes, that’s a real stat). Heaven only knows what one’s meant to do to prepare to fight “well-educated boxers” (distract them with some Keats, perhaps?). And I thrilled to the mental image of going up against an “orthodox” fighter (I am picturing the hat, sideburns, and tallit).
Surprisingly, this is actually pretty fun! Kieron Gillen has some line, I think in a review of Diablo or one of its progeny, that a dirty secret of video games is that sometimes it’s enough to just watch a number go up. FF has a bunch of numbers and they go up – what more do you need? The bloom started to come off the rose once I got silver in the Olympics and then transitioned from amateur to pro, though. I found these bouts much harder, and suddenly training cost money. I also kept getting concussed and told I should see a doctor, but couldn’t find that option. Losing interest, I decided to explore the game’s legacy mechanic, where you can have a kid and shift to guiding their journey through martial arts. Once I clicked to confirm this is what I wanted to do (with the cheapest option, because apparently you’re paying for your sperm/egg donor?) I got this sequence of text:
"Frankie is succesfully having sexual intercourse with Busting Beaver, and viceversa…
Name your gamebred:
[blank to fill in name]
Sprinkle"
I swear I’m not making any of that up.
Anyway the game restarted except now I’m 14 and unable to compete in fights (good?) but I’m still able to engage in booty calls (NOPE). My age is stuck at 14.203846153846153 and I’m not sure how to advance time to the point that I can get back in the game, so I’m calling it here: goodnight sweet prince, and may your days be filled with the wisdom of the Iron Lady and getting ready to fight an opponent “who throws punches and punches”.
Not just for grammar nerds, December 7, 2020The curse strikes, as it inevitably must: in the opening text of Ferryman’s Gate, a game whose stated purpose is to inculcate good grammar, there’s a grammar error. Admittedly, it’s an omitted apostrophe (“in your mothers words” should be “in your mother’s words”) and FG is all about the commas, but the rule that you can’t talk about grammar without messing up your own claims another victim (though there’s an alternative explanation – the author, well aware of the curse, is prophylactically warding it off with an early sacrificial offering!)
This is pretty much the only clear misstep in a game that I’d been looking forward to ever since I saw it on the list. Among my many exciting and romantic-partner-attracting interests, grammar looms large, and if the humble comma doesn’t have quite as much to offer as the stately semicolon or the forceful em-dash, nonetheless it has a lapidary charm all its own, as well as a host of teeth-gnashingly awful potential misuses. My expectations led me to imagine something pretty off-the-wall that went all-in on the concept, stuffed to the gills with comma gags and puzzles. For all its pedagogical premise, though, FG’s world is fairly grounded and dare I say plausible, with the comma obsession of the player-character’s great-uncle given a psychological basis. And the gameplay is familiar and solid for anyone who’s steeped in parser IF: you rove about the mansion of a dead relative, slowly unlocking new areas, interacting with family members who have reasonably deep conversation trees, solving swap puzzles, dealing with areas of darkness, performing a few secret rituals, and taking everything that isn’t nailed down.
The twist is that scattered among the more traditional adventure-game puzzles are a series of tests your deceased great-uncle has set, requiring you to demonstrate your knowledge of proper comma usage. There’s a book that ably spells out the rules, so I think this is fairly accessible even to folks who didn’t learn English grammar in school. You’re usually asked to pick out the one sentence that’s error free, or that demonstrates a specific kind of mistake, out of a number of options, which will guide a choice of actions: it’ll indicate which button to push or sign to dig at or way to go at an intersection or what have you. FG leans less on the commas than you might think, though – while the major puzzles gating progress do involve grammar, there’s also a collect-a-thon running in parallel where you need to obtain a dozen metal plates to solve the final puzzle of the game. These plates are hidden throughout the rest of the game and usually rely on exploration or light object-based puzzling to obtain, meaning you’re usually making some kind of progress as you go, and making sure you don’t get sick of the comma stuff (is it weird that if anything I wanted more?)
The author – I think a first-timer, given some self-deprecating notes in the ABOUT text – takes a canny approach to implementation. Most scenery is implemented, and objects that you can interact with are for the most part clearly set out from the main text, though several objects, including the player character, do have default descriptions. The map is large, but navigation is easy due to the mini-map in the corner (I didn’t see any extensions listed, so this might be custom-coded, in which case nicely done!) and there are very few guess-the-verb issues or other struggles with the parser. Partially this is because most of the puzzle solving happens in the player’s head, as you identify grammar errors; the actual commands you type in once you’d identified the solution are usually simple applications of Inform’s default systems, like moving around, pushing buttons, or opening containers and putting things in them. This is a really smart choice that minimizes parser frustrations and the risks of bugs creeping in from complex logic, without having to trade off the novelty or complexity of the puzzles. I did run into one small niggle – I think the plates were each supposed to be marked with an alchemical symbol, but only the one for Mars displayed correctly in my interpreter – but the relevant association is helpful spelled out in the text description too, so this doesn’t impact progress.
Sometimes I say a game is solid and feel like I’m damning it with faint praise, but not so here. FG takes a somewhat off-the-wall premise but grounds it in well-considered design and a surprisingly serious though never grim storyline. While part of me can’t help but wonder what the maximalist version would have looked like, there’s a power in restraint that Ferryman’s Gate amply demonstrates.
Unbalanced, December 7, 2020I think many of us have had the experience of being on one side or another in a conversation where someone’s trying to communicate an experience that was incredibly profound and meaningful to them, but can’t articulate it in a way that really lands. It’s a frustrating experience – more so for the teller than the listener, I think – because even while it’s clear there’s something important on the table, the palpable lack of understanding becomes alienating. That’s very much how I felt about Equal-librium, a game desperate to share something life-changing, but which at best is only able to talk around the space where that something should go.
It’s hard to go into what I mean without spoiling the whole game – it’s very short, and there’s really only one central dilemma. So I’m going to assume you’ve finished it in the paragraphs that follow.
Right, to sum up the story as I understand it: you play the CEO of an investment bank that seems to primarily deal with the resource-extraction industry. You’ve just cut a deal with a nonprofit to exploit some land they had obtained for conservation purposes, and as part of the negotiations you’d demanded (and received) a bribe. However, a hacker has accessed your email and found out about this, and is blackmailing you. Depending on whether you’ve managed to reconnect with an old friend from college when he accidentally spilled coffee on you earlier in the day, you either are able to identify the culprit, or have a last smoke and kill yourself.
This story doesn’t really make much sense – most notably, shouldn’t the bank be bribing the conservation nonprofit, and not the other way around? But stuff like that is relatively easy to ignore if the character work is up to snuff. Sadly, where Equal-librium really goes astray is in its depiction of the relationship with the old college friend. Shu/Will seems nice enough, and it’s clear there was some important connection between the two almost twenty years ago. But the game talks around that connection – it has something to do with the main character helping Shu quit smoking? – but it feels like there must have been something more important, and more reciprocal, going on.
The thematics of the ending also don’t feel like they quite click. In the “bad” ending, the CEO, facing the ruin of his reputation and bereft of human connection, decides to end it all. You then get some moralizing final text talking about the importance of balance: “Every system, whether the economy or the ecosystem, has an equilibrium. When we keep extracting the resources, exploiting human moral bottom-lines, consuming carelessly, and ignoring small but essential part of the system chain, the system sends a feedback loop to break in most unexpected ways… Perhaps you need to restart the system to really experience how good it is to be in Equal-librium.” But in the “good” ending, the main character is just able to strike back at their rival, and does reconnect with their friend, but doesn’t seem to change their ways at all, making the ultimate meaning very unclear.
The technical implementation is fine – the color and font choices are attractive, and there’s an undo button always available, so it’s simple to explore the different possibilities, which is good because I think the game only works if you can see the different paths. I did encounter an odd error having to do with a non-existent macro, but it didn’t seem to affect progress. I did find the prose a bit of a stumbling block; there aren’t many out-and-out typos or grammatical errors, but there are a lot of awkward phrasings and run-together clauses that made the writing a bit unclear at times. That’s Equal-librium in a nutshell, I think – there’s intentionality and heart to it, but in its current form, it’s not quite able to bring the player fully in to the experience it’s working to evoke.
Unique setting, straightforward gameplay, December 7, 2020The Comp randomizer giving me two solid but slightly underdeveloped parser games involving time travel back to back must surely be as statistically unlikely as a mad scientist dragging an unsuspecting bystander along in their trip backwards through time, but here we – meaning both me, who had Entangled come up after Seasonal Apocalypse Disorder in the randomizer, and the player character of the said Entangled – are. There are a lot of differences in the settings, don’t get me wrong: no secret-agent-druids to be found here, and we’re wandering around a declining Rust Belt town rather than a cult’s forest base. And the locals are definitely a bit more chatty. But just as with SAD, I felt like I enjoyed Entangled a bit less than I wanted to because the worldbuilding and puzzles are just a little underbaked.
The game starts as it intends to carry on – you’re given a minimum of information about your character and the task at hand that was initially quite confusing to me, and set loose on a large, sparse map with lots of locations described but inaccessible. As you move through the streets of your hometown – which is clearly on the downswing, with a shrinking population and many folks living in a trailer park – you get a bit more context filled in, explaining that your buddy Sam and his harridan of a wife have moved in with you but now the landlord is cranky and you need to track down Sam at the one bar that’s still open for business in the town (it’s attached to the bowling alley). Then a funny thing happens on the way to the bowling alley and lo and behold, you’re stuck in 1980 and need to gather three weird-science materials in order to fix the time machine and make your way back.
There’s a little more to the setup than this, but not too much. Despite the fact that the player character seems like they’ve lived in this town of 350ish people their whole life, I didn’t feel like I got a great sense that the relationships with the other present-day characters ran especially deep, nor did the narrative voice convey much interest or enthusiasm when seeing the 40-year-old version of their home. While the writing is largely typo-free and communicates enough to understand what’s going on and how to solve the puzzles, there isn’t much affect to any of it.
If the backdrop isn’t the draw here, the supporting cast do much better. There are a wide variety of inhabitants to talk to – I found around ten, and the post-game text told me I missed another ten (this might have been because I didn’t spend too much time poking around 2020). They’re a fun bunch too, running the gamut from the disaffected bowling-shoe girl with dreams of making it big in New York, to a cut-rate fortune-teller and a high-art gallerist with sharp elbows – not to mention the nerdy convenience-store clerk who’s stuck around all these years. Interaction is made simple through a TALK TO command that lists likely topics of conversation, though I found a lot more bonus options were implemented, and probably the most fun I had in the game was talking to these colorful folks about their histories and their dreams. They also serve as a light hint system – when I wasn’t sure where to start looking for one of the three widgets I needed to get back to 2020, asking around set me on the right track soon enough.
The flip side of this, though, is that most of the characters aren’t that integral to the action, and those that are tied to puzzles are among the least grounded, behaving in somewhat cartoonish fashion to make things work. The puzzles themselves are fine, though gathering three MacGuffins isn’t all that exciting – they do boast a whole lot of alternate solutions from what I was able to glean from the walkthrough, and seemed pretty well-clued to me (with that said, one early puzzle(Spoiler - click to show) – giving something to the UFO-obsessed oddball outside the bowling alley – seemed very poorly motivated to me since I’d thought I was bent on finding Sam and didn’t really know who this guy was). But they don’t take advantage of the time-travel premise – there’s no betting on who’s going to win the World Series or anything fun like that – and most of the approaches I found involved swapping item X for object Y, or giving character A thing B so you can abscond with item C while their back is turned.
There’s not really anything wrong with Entangled – the implementation is good throughout – and I enjoyed wandering around its atypical setting and interacting with its pleasant residents. But I couldn’t help thinking that it could have taken its premise and characters more seriously. Like, I never managed to have a conversation with Sam, nor did the scientist who kicked this whole thing off because he wanted to explore 1980 ever pop up after his initial appearance. The time-travel stuff is fun, but again it only goes so far: I couldn’t help noticing that the local fortune-teller charges you a buck to get your palm read in 1980, and it still costs a dollar in 2020. Inflation was 13.5% in 1980! There’s clearly something about this place, these people, and this time that’s meaningful to the author – there’s a lot of loving attention lavished on its creation – and much of that comes through, but I was left wanting a little more.
A first game showing promise, December 7, 2020There’s some Hemingway quote that I’m not going to bother to look up (look, hopefully it’s clear by now that with these reviews you get what you pay for), but the gist is that a writer needs to write a million words to figure out how to write and get them out of their system, and starting with the millionth and first, possibly they’ll be worth a damn, and be pure, and good, and clean, and true (you’re also not paying enough to get anything other than the world’s laziest Hemingway impression). The principle extends to IF, where I think just about everybody has had the experience of making a starter game before getting their feet under them to try something more ambitious (mine’s a half-completed House of Leaves – er, why don’t we call it a “homage” – moldering away on a hard drive that hasn’t been plugged into anything since 2003 or thereabouts).
Elsegar I is a pretty exemplary illustration of the type: there’s only a bit of backstory, about being sucked into a strange new dimension by some sort of singularity, and a found-object approach to worldbuilding that’s largely there to provide scaffolding for the variety of puzzles and programming tasks. There’s a holdall, a darkness puzzle, NPCs who respond to being asked about a couple of keywords, randomized combat, a put-X-in-Y-to-make-Z puzzle, a (big, old-school) maze – classics all, and what’s rare for a first game, all solidly implemented, albeit with a large number of typos. There’s nothing especially fancy about the design, though there are some fun jokes and easter eggs involving a radio, and an actually quite neat text effect for a bit of graffiti. It’d be more interesting if it stuck with a specific kind of puzzle and tried to elaborate it with a few variations, or leaned more heavily into its setting or characters, but again, for this kind of game it makes sense to try out a bunch of different things.
After I’d played the game I saw from the author’s posts on the forums that it’d been disqualified from the Comp since it’d been posted as part of a call for beta testers. That’s a shame – it’s an easy rule to run afoul of – but hopefully part II will make it into next year’s Comp or otherwise see release. Now that the author has the basics down, their next release could be one to watch out for.
Weird title, lovely game, December 7, 2020I’m worried that this one might get overlooked and I’m guessing it’s because of the title which – and I say this as someone who has a game called “The Eleusinian Miseries” in the Comp, which I’m happy about since it’s the best name for anything I’ve ever come up with – is awful. Between the lack of capitalization, the weird quotation marks, and the difficulty of resolving how these three words fit together to form any sort of meaning (after having played the game I’m still struggling with making sense of it -- apparently it's a Prince lyric?), I think people might be giving this one a pass, despite the evocative cover art and a solid blurb. That’d be a real shame – EWL is good and folks should play it.
The setup here is low-key but nicely drawn: you’re the reluctant co-host of a Halloween party in 1999 (the opening maybe goes a little too far making winking references to LiveJournal and WinAmp, but things on that front thankfully calm down pretty quickly), and at first it seems like the business of the game will be awkwardly bumbling about with all the strangers flooding your apartment, with intermittent flashbacks to the player character’s childhood. There aren’t too many choices that have much of an impact on the overall plot, but there’s some light interactivity that switches up the order you see things, and gives you a chance to get more detail and bring a bit of characterization to the main character. Then you find some of your actual friends have shown up, and it becomes a slice of life hangout game, until the main thrust of the story kicks in.
Before I duck behind the curtain to talk that through – if you haven’t played the game yet, you should hold off on reading the spoiler-text until you do – let me just emphasize once again that this is worth your time. There are good jokes! Here are a couple of my favorites:
”A man in a vampire costume is leaning close to a woman with multicolored hair and fishnets. You’re not sure what she’s supposed to be, though “victim of a vampire” is starting to look pretty likely.”
“There’s more than one puddle on the floor half-heartedly mopped up with bits of mummy.”
The prose is super clean, with no typos or even any noticeable infelicities. The characters aren’t given incredible depth, but they’re sketched in cleanly and effectively, and once the story really gets into gear, it’s heartfelt and well done. Play EWL – just don’t think about the title, jump in, it’ll be fine!
(Spoiler - click to show)So, the deal here is that after your friends show up to the party and you start hanging out with them, it turns out that one of them, named Andy, died on their drive over, and is spending their last night with you all as a ghost. This is presented in a very understated way, and reasonably well telegraphed since the player character’s memories in the first sequence all revolving around Andy, as well as the cover photo and blurb hinting at something supernatural. The presentation isn’t that this is some shocking twist – what the game is clearly after is creating space for the main character and Andy to enjoy some last time together, and say goodbye.
It’s all very restrained – there are no teary jags of emotion, but I think that fits these characters as they’re presented to us, and Andy says he doesn’t want a fuss made over him. The ghost aspect is maybe a bit underplayed, as the main character and Andy himself both seem to adjust to this insane thing happening without spending too much time grappling with it. There’s a bit of an indication that Andy might have romantic feelings for the main character, but it’s not spelled out (or at least, it wasn’t spelled out given the choices I made, though I don’t really see any places where things might have gone differently). Again, it’s low key, even down to the final goodbye.
Does this work, and is it emotionally effective? It’s presenting a universal experience and yearning – someone very close to me died earlier this year, and while it wasn’t a bolt from the blue, I still very much fantasize about the things I wish we’d been able to talk about before the end – but presents it very concretely, with characters whose relationship and emotional makeup feel specific to them. The last conversation they have does come off a bit unsatisfying as it doesn’t lead to any sort of revelation or catharsis, but I’m also aware that even if I did have that last conversation I’m wishing for, the results would be much the same. You can’t sum up and say goodbye to a whole human in a night, much less a few exchanges of words. EWL recognizes that, and captures it effectively – it’s not trying to leave you in tears or fundamentally change how you think about death. It just offers its characters a few moments of grace, and invites you to share those moments with them. And I think that’s enough.
A convincingly inhuman viewpoint, December 7, 2020A workman-like piece of choice-based IF, Eidolon’s Escape hits its marks while dangling hints of a deeper mystery, and if it lacks any particular standout feature, I nonetheless enjoyed my time with it. You don’t know your character’s full backstory in EE, but there’s a reason for that: you’re playing a disembodied spirit whose memories have eroded over years of imprisonment in a magical crystal. One of the tricks up your sleeve is possession, though, and since two hapless youths have picked your gaol as the site for their romantic rendezvous, you finally have a chance to escape the tower of the mage who’s caged you by riding one of them to freedom.
This goal is clearly communicated, and it doesn’t take long before you’re able to learn the steps needed to carry it out – there are a couple, but they don’t feel needlessly convoluted. The main gameplay is more puzzle-focused than exploration-focused – you usually only have two choices at a time, and a large number of these are false choices that shunt you back to the main thread. There are challenges and wrong answers, though, most of which revolve around social interaction: you might need to fool the cook into telling you something she’s meant to keep secret, or bluff your way past a skeptical guard. While it’s not too hard to figure out the right approaches in these situations, the eponymous eidolon doesn’t really understand humans so you’re not given too much prompting, meaning it feels satisfying to succeed. Adding to the gravity of the challenge, there’s no save game option and incorrect choices can quickly lead to game over – replays go reasonably fast as there’s no timed text, so this isn’t too annoying, but it does provide an incentive to get things right the first time.
These puzzles and situations, while well-constructed, aren’t that interesting by themselves – it’s all stuff you’ll have seen before. The eidolon’s character and way of understanding the world are what give the game its flavor. I was struck by the way that the choices on offer really only allowed for two ways of playing the eidolon: either as an imperious figure commanding others to do its bidding, or a master manipulator disgusted at how easy it is to twist people around their finger. It’s not very good at social cues much of the time, though, and is usually stuck doing blunt imitations of behavior it’s seen people perform, with the aping only occasionally convincing. Guiding such a character, and engaging with whether its behavior and attitudes are just a reflection of how alien it is from humanity, or if there is something truly sinister about it, adds a welcome note of mystery the otherwise rather quotidian proceedings.
The writing is – I’m going to back to the well of “workmanlike.” I think I only caught one stray typo, and it usually focuses on the right things. But it describes more than it evokes. Take this passage when you possess one of the youths and are embodied for the first time in ages:
"You clutch at the rough cloth of his shirt as your mind wheels. He continues to talk to you but you cannot take any of it in; lights and images blind you, burn into your mind’s eye and blur with new images. Sounds boom, rip and echo through your head, incessant waves of unbearable odours assault your nose, every touch sends lightning through your nerves and your mouth feels as though it has been packed with all the vilest effluvia that the world has to offer."
This is all solid enough, and touches on the right elements to highlight – you’d imagine this is what the experience would be like. But it’s a little vague, and it never sings. There are also some odd anachronisms (the eidolon can attempt to dress someone down by asking “did I stutter?”, and try to seduce another by praising their “symmetrically aligned features”) that undermine the immersion somewhat.
Eidolon’s Escape is smoothly put together – I enjoyed scheming my way to freedom and found the various obstacles on offer fair to work through. The first ending I got, while a victory, was a bit anticlimactic, so I went back and played to a second one that, while technically a failure, was more satisfying and hinted at a resolution to the questions about what exactly the deal is with the eidolon (Spoiler - click to show)(as best I can tell, it’s actually a fragment – and probably not a very nice fragment – of the soul of the mage’s long-dead lover). I wish there was a little more of a spark here, but I can’t be sure that’s because something’s missing in the game, or just personal preference for writing with a bit more flair, and for weird-protagonist games that do more to lean into their odd conceit, rather than EE’s way of playing things fairly down-the-middle.
Paging Dr. Jones, December 7, 2020Dr. Ego is an old-school, parser-based treasure hunt that wears its influences on its sleeve: the ABOUT text says the idea came to the author while watching Indiana Jones, and one look at the starting inventory, which includes a fedora and a whip, shows we’re not messing about (I know the character is called Dr. Ego, but in my headcanon, an Indy knockoff is always named Tennessee Williams). As I recall, the initial bit of dialogue with the guide character nods a bit at the imperialism of carting off indigenous peoples’ cultural artifacts (I lost my transcript so I might be misremembering), but we’re clearly not meant to take things too seriously.
The classic setup is mirrored by classic gameplay – you wander through a jungle environment solving traditional adventure-game puzzles. The map is relatively small and there aren’t that many objects or barriers to work through, so it definitely doesn’t overstay its welcome (the “two hours” estimate on its entry page is off by at least a factor of two, for those folks considering whether to give Dr. Ego a whirl). For the most part, the puzzles make sense given the environment, and it’s usually clear what you’re meant to be doing next (if anything, the final one, (Spoiler - click to show)which is lifted directly from the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, is too easy).
Implementation is all right, if unspectacular: scenery is generally there if it’s described in the location, though most of the default responses haven’t been changed and there aren’t a lot of custom reactions to actions not required to solve the game. I also ran into two guess-the-verb issues, or rather two variations of the same one: (Spoiler - click to show) despite having figured out that I needed to go behind the waterfall, repeated attempts to do that were stymied until I used the hint function to discover I needed to LOOK BEHIND WATERFALL. Once in that chamber, it was also hard to examine the object in the hole until, by parallelism, I thought to try LOOK IN HOLE. There are some typos (including in the opening text, unfortunately), and the line breaks felt a bit haphazard, which sometimes made it hard to parse what was happening.
Overall this is an unpretentious game that was good for whiling away a pleasant hour, even though I’m not sure how long it will stick in my mind. One last complaint though – I lost my hat midway through. How can this be an Indy homage if you lose your hat!
A perfect impersonation of a very good game, December 7, 2020The “fantasy monster gets a job” genre is a fun one – the first example that comes to mind is Dungeon Detective and its sequel (you’re a gnoll and you fight crime!) but I know there are many others – because there’s a lot of comedy baked into the premise of an otherworldly being, sometimes with magical powers, grinding up against the quotidian reality of working for a paycheck. Dopplejobs very much delivers on this, but also offers a setting with some intriguing mysteries, while striking a nice balance with its choices – there are a lot of them, and they feel (and are) very impactful to the success or failure of your various contracts, but the game isn’t overly punitive so most sets of choices will still get you to a satisfying ending.
Let’s get the downsides out of the way early: there are some typos and the writing is a little bit awkward in places, though it’s not 100% clear to me that these are unintentional – there are many places where articles are dropped, for example, as well as some ungainly use of prepositions and syntax, which could reflect an author whose primary language isn’t English, but could also be an attempt to reflect the overenthusiastic, off-kilter (at least by human standards) character of the eponymous doppelganger. There are also some bugs in the code related to your finances – the framing challenge of the game is earning enough “quartz” to pay back your business’s startup loan, and you get varying amounts of it depending on how well you perform in each of your jobs, as well as having the opportunity to plow some of the proceeds into more advertising, a swankier office, or just going on a spree. However, the math often didn’t add up: I’d have 350 quartz, earn 300 more, and be left with 550, or spend 50 when I have 1050 accumulated, after which I still had 1050.
These niggles don’t undermine the experience all that much, though. As mentioned, the infelicities in the prose ultimately have a kind of addle-pated charm that seems very much in keeping with who the doppelganger is. And despite the loan-centric framing, it didn’t seem like the amount of money you have at the end really has that much impact on where the story ends.
So there’s not much holding back the considerable upsides, which are that this is a fun world to inhabit with lots and lots of reactivity. Each of the jobs you take on – your business is to impersonate humans who want to duck out of some embarrassing or annoying experience you’ll go through in their stead – is quite varied, and offers ample opportunities to stick to the remit, try to cause chaos, or poke into the secrets of the city where you work (this isn’t the real world, and its snake-centric superstitions and bizarre infrastructure make it a pleasure to explore). Your choices not only impact client satisfaction – and therefore how much you get paid – but also help define your character. Since doppelgangers take on some of the traits of those they impersonate, if you behave in an especially curious, or introverted, or patient manner, you’ll inherit some of that in the remaining go-rounds.
The jokes are often quite funny – if you underinvest in advertising, a client might say that the reason they sought you out is that they “appreciated the fact that the slogan was small and the office hard to find. It proves you’re discreet.” Or, when contemplating doing something about that: “when it comes to advertisement, you feel like you are a pretty good singer. You could compose a catchy song advertising your business. Something like: ‘Doppel doppel it’s all proper fa la la la la!’” Again: slightly demented, but very fun.
DJ is well-paced, too – each job has some meat to it, but is fairly zippy, and the post-job opportunity to spend some money offers a nice punctuation of each phase. This, combined with the 20ish minute playtime made me eager to jump back in and replay after I’d finished first time – and sure enough, while you appear to always get the same jobs in the same order, there are a lot of variations possible depending on what you decide to do, and the game is fairly forgiving such that even choices that seem suboptimal don’t take that much of a toll.
This is especially nice because I think on my first play-through, I was overly cautious – I was very fixated in paying back my loan, and the way the job payoffs work you always feel like you’re on the knife-edge to be able to do that by the end. So I passed up a lot of choices that seemed riskier, including opting out of the final bonus job since I was just over the 1000 quartz threshold and didn’t want to mess things up. I had much more fun on subsequent go-throughs, when I didn’t feel so much tension: DJ is at its best when it’s letting you try new things, look under rocks for what might be there, and role-play a well-meaning monster whose instincts for human behavior are not all there.
A fishful of dollars (plus the fish is the Pope), December 7, 2020I keep wanting the title here to be a pun but can’t figure out how to make “ceviche” fit to “machina”. That feeling of not-quite-rightness is perhaps representative of how I felt about the game. I’m not sure what words to describe the setting – it’s like a Jorodowsky comic book about a sentient virus attacking a capitalistic R’lyeh, maybe? But that doesn't given the full flavor, and I'm unclear on whether I've got the sense of who’s trying to do what to whom (or to what). All this to say the game is enticing and disorienting (in a good way!) off the bat, and the odd interface, atmospheric pixel-art, and punchy text vignettes are grabby and drew me in.
Ultimately, though, that grabbiness wore off for me, I think partially a casualty of the age-old crossword vs. narrative war, and partially because of how the instructions are presented. There’s some in-game help, with a helpful goldfish offering tool-tips when you mouse over bits of the interface. But there’s also a file that comes with the game – the Holy User Manual – that goes into some detail, in out-of-world voice, about the mechanics, goals, and a bit of the strategy of the game. When I played the game, it looked like part of the instructions, and it clearly laid out the mechanics. (Spoiler - click to show)In effect, the game is played in rounds – in each, you’re shuffled a hand of five cards, three of which you must play into three different slots, and then allocate two (differentiated) worker-units to the played cards. Each card gives, or takes, or exchanges resources based on the slot to which it’s played and whether, and which, worker it gets. When you accumulate enough of one of the resource types, you get a special ceremony card – do that three times and you finish the game.
Now, there’s definitely narrative flavor on top of this dry recital – the workers are members of a robotic clergy, each card pops up a unique vignette when it’s played, and the resource names and types paint an interesting picture that fits nicely into this strange, skewed world. But when playing, I found that I mostly focused on the board-game aspect of making the numbers go up, and skimmed the text. Partially this is because the narrative vignettes don’t seem to have much continuity, or impact – they’re really just flavor for the numbers. Partially I think the interface is to blame – you click “submit” on the right side of the screen, then just to the right of that is where the mechanical results are stated, then just to the right of that is the next turn button, so it’s sort of against the flow to move your eyes left to read the text. And partially I think it’s because I had read the instructions so I knew exactly what to do, and was therefore more in goal-seeking than exploration mode.
It does appear that there is some exploration to do – it seems like there may be multiple endings depending on how well you play the board game, and I think there was some interplay of the card and slot mechanics that I didn’t fully suss out. But it’s possible to reach a perfectly satisfying ending without getting into any of that. I wound up wondering whether I might have enjoyed the piece more without that instruction file – which, after subsequent posts from one of the authors, turns out was more of a walkthrough. I probably would have engaged more with DEC and its fiction without having seen the mechanics laid quite so bare – so if you’ve got this one on your list, perhaps try playing it without reading the file first, and see how that works?
Lastly, I can’t leave this one without flagging two great jokes: (Spoiler - click to show)”Davy Jones Industrial Average” and the fact that the last line of the game is “FIN”.
Creepy but a bit underimplemented, December 6, 2020(This is a review of the initial Comp release of the game; I believe mid-Comp updates have addressed some of the bugs mentioned below)
Desolation is a sequel to a game I haven’t played (and side-note, that bothers me way more than it should because I’m the kind of bloody-minded completionist who’ll be recommended a TV show that’s uneven at the beginning but gets really good in season four which is a perfect jumping-on point because they rebooted the premise and shifted the cast, and decide right, season one episode one it is). Interestingly, it appears to be written by a different author (much like Magpie Takes the Train, it occurs to me), so I’m a bit curious about the backstory.
Anyway, the lack of familiarity with the prequel isn’t too much handicap, as the opening immediately establishes 1) you’re fleeing into a desert with little but your wits, and 2) you’re being pursued by a sort of demonic Pippi Longstockings. I kid, but the horror bits here are probably the most effective part of the game — whenever the two braids girl shows up or is mentioned, the writing conveys how reality constricts around the player character, and their desperation to get somewhere, anywhere else. There’s not much specificity about who she is or what she wants, but for a plot as elemental as this, I don’t think that’s really a drawback (play the prequel if you want the lore, nerd! Or so I assume the rejoinder goes).
Structurally, Desolation is well set up into a series of self-contained puzzle areas, which generally keeps things zippy, and the puzzles themselves are fairly well clued. However, there’s no walkthrough or hints on offer, and there’s some unfortunate wonkiness in the implementation. In general, there’s not much scenery that’s implemented (including some that seems like it would be needed/helpful, like (Spoiler - click to show)the “softball-sized” rocks that one might try to throw at the dog), there’s wonkiness about trying to go directions that don’t lead anywhere (which the player is likely to do, since exits are sometimes described in a confusing fashion), and there are a fair number of bugs, including lots of scenery not being flagged as such (in the (Spoiler - click to show)apartment sequence, I was able to pick up pretty much all the (Spoiler - click to show)furniture, and start cramming the bathroom sink into the peanut jar). It’s possible to do some things before they should be allowed, and I ran into a guess-the-verb issue that stymied me for quite a while (Spoiler - click to show)(to hit the dog with the pick axe, HIT DOG WITH PICK AXE doesn’t work but ATTACK DOG does – but the dog is very clearly scary, I don’t want to fight it without a weapon!).
One last thing that’s neither here nor there in terms of evaluation, but which was certainly interesting (very light spoilers for an early part of Desolation, then slightly deeper spoilers for a different, 20-year-old game): (Spoiler - click to show)the first main sequence involves the player character hallucinating that they’re back in their apartment, going through a pre-trip checklist. But any time they open the fridge or turn on the taps, sand starts coming out, until everything starts dissolving into dunes. This is Shade! But it isn’t presented in an in-jokey way that makes it seem like an obvious tip of the hat, nor is it exactly the same because the player clearly knows what’s up (the choice of soundtrack creates some really funny moments here). I’m not sure if this is an homage played exactly straight, or what would be even more interesting, independent invention of the idea. If so, well done for having a brain that can simulate Andrew Plotkin!
Hopefully the author can make a quick update to squash some of these bugs (and add a walkthrough file too!) because if you stick to the critical path and don’t poke around too much, this checks a lot of boxes for a short, scary, puzzley vignette.
Devilishly funny, December 6, 2020Deelzebub is a lightly-puzzly comedy game that nails the comedy and got my first out-loud laughs of the Comp.
The scenario – the player character is part of a cult that may be harboring a dark secret – is immediately familiar, but the tone of the presentation quickly subverts expectations, as the player character is presented as earnest, friendly, and a little bit suspicious of many different things and people, but willing to go along to get along. This easygoing vibe fits well with a rather ridiculous but appealing supporting cast, and some engagingly silly situations.
I don’t want to get too much into detail on the comedy, both not to ruin it and because what worked for me might not work for you. But I think it’s really, really well done. The best gags, I thought, have to do with the main character trying to bluff his way through a demon summoning, and this bit alone is worth the price of admission. I can’t help spoiler-blocking my favorite single joke:
(Spoiler - click to show)Dave [the aforementioned demon] looks around the chamber. “So this is the human world, huh? It’s a lot smaller than I imagined.”
“This isn’t all of it. We’re in a basement.”
Deelzebub stacks up well pacing-wise, too. The player character is given a series of tasks, which are generally pretty clear in pointing you in the right direction and none of which overstay their welcome. The structure then opens up during the endgame, with four different endings to pursue (I found two).
The puzzles generally have good clueing, though some niggles in implementation and a little bit of guess-the-noun/verb-ing occasionally undercut the momentum. I also was a little disappointed that Dave, the demon you summon early on, can sort of drop out of the story midway through, since he was the clearest throughline for the first half of the game.
There’s a good amount of scenery implemented, though occasionally objects that seem to be mentioned aren’t actually there (there’s reference to a pamphlet that explains the group’s beliefs in the opening scene, but I couldn’t find or read it), or objects that are important but aren’t mentioned despite being present (Chris was listed as being in the crop field area, but not Ruth, even though you can, and should, interact with her! And I had the same issue with the (Spoiler - click to show)ear in the worm bin). The map felt a bit too big, but maybe that’s just because I had a hard time holding it in my brain due to there being some non-cardinal directions thrown in to confuse things.
There were also a few niggles that might have just been part of the way TADS works, but which stood out as strange to me since it’s been a while since I’ve played a game written in it – in particular, there are a fair number of multi-passage scenes (including the opening) where you need to hit enter to continue, but without specific prompting and with the ability to write text before one hits enter, I wound up being a bit confused because I thought I was playing the game and just getting unhelpful/strange responses before twigging to what was going on.
All of which to say there are a few small rough patches that can hopefully be smoothed over for a post-comp release, because what’s here is really solid and really funny, just tremendously appealing.
A delightful cornucopia , December 6, 2020Finally, someone dares to tell the truth about pickles - we need to get this game into the hands of Congress because it's time for action!
This one’s pretty hard to discuss without blowing a lot of what makes it so charming - Cursèd Pickle is a candy box of surprises, both narrative and mechanical, and I’m wary of stomping all over said charm by discussing anything other than the graphics on the loading screen (it’s a lovely picture, reminded me of Loom!) And I can’t just put the whole thing in spoiler-text, because there are like double-secret spoilers that I want to conceal even if you have dipped in for a bit but haven’t plumbed all the depths. So do yourself a favor and make sure you’ve played the game at least until you understand the title before you read the rest of this.
It occurs to me that you – my beloved (I mean belovèd) as-yet-unspoiled reader – might need some buffer text after the above admonition so you don’t accidentally seccade your eyes over something unsuited for their gaze. Let’s see, I can point out that there’s a location that features a peristyle, which is a sort of obscure column-filled courtyard that I also worked into my game, and showed up in Vain Empires as well. That’s just the sort of vaguely interesting coincidence one likes to bring up when one’s marking time.
All right, so here we are. Cursèd Pickle continues the MMORPG parody of the author’s earlier game, the Baker of Shireton, except this time you start out as a player character. The "game" is undergoing a big version upgrade, and the resultant crash bugs and corrupted data eventually shift you into reinhabiting the said Baker, except this time in a much more manageable choice-based interface as opposed to the parser chaos that overtook me, at least, when I tried to play its prequel.
Cursèd Pickle commits to its conceit, down to the IRQ port options when attempting to configure your nonexistent 3D hardware (before dumping you into the fall-back text mode). And it commits hard: even before you get to the baking bit, there are a good number of fetch quests, dozens of hair and beard options, a raid dungeon and mansion-looting mini-module, four different classes each with their own combat minigame… there’s even a “legacy” server that presents an interactive vignette from the main game in Inform 7 form! (Spoiler - click to show)(I couldn’t win this one, as I couldn’t figure out how to get ahead of the server wipe – if anyone’s found a secret here, please drop a line!).
I think like 90% of this is technically optional, but it’s all crafted with incredible care, with tiny jokes and novel features everywhere you look. I’m listing a couple of my favorites here, but they’re pretty major spoilers, so proceed with caution: (Spoiler - click to show)you can ask the pickle about its plans for world domination, which spits out a list of the fifty-odd zones it’s going to conquer, with four or five laugh-out-loud gags buried among them; and you can turn into a freakish man-bee hybrid by accepting the Hive Queen’s offer at the end of the dungeon, which lets you grow wings and skip what I think is an arduous desert trek that makes up the final section of the game. Though this makes your henchman flip out and book it for home, understandably.. And all these systems aren’t there just as a joke-delivery mechanism: the core RPG loop is well fleshed-out, and compelling enough that I spent an hour and a half just doing side-quests and grinding up my character’s stats instead of engaging with the main quest.
Speaking of the jokes, the writing is dead on throughout, sending up MMORPG global chat, fetch-quest tropes, and marketing patter with equal aplomb (OK, I do have one note: some of the pickle jokes over-rely on “briny,” and subbing in “vinegary” in two or three places might be worth considering. This is my only critique of the prose, and it is more than counterbalanced by the use of the accent in “Cursèd”). I heartily approved of the disgusting descriptions of how the filthy townspeople gave vent to their pickle addictions, and approved even more heartily of the harbourmaster’s disapproving opinion of same. And the best joke in the entire game is the song my bard sang at the end – it’s a nice, confident trick to save your strongest material for the very end!
Implementation-wise the player is in very good hands here too. The timing aspects of the combat mechanics were sometimes a little stressful for me to keep up with on a trackpad, but not so much so that I felt the need to use the optional slow-down plugin (if you’re in the market for such a thing, you can find it in the message board linked off the stats page). I noticed a couple of very small implementation issues – amazingly few, considering the “more is more” approach to different subsystems and interfaces: as the baker, at one point I had -1 customers queueing for bread, and dough left in the oven when quitting for the day would still be in the oven, yet unburnt, in the morning, just the same as I’d left it ten hours before.
There are few games as positively crammed full of delight as Cursèd Pickle. An ill-wisher could cavil at the premise, arguing that for such a Brobdingnagian game, it’s ultimately rather slight in thematic terms – at this late date, does the world really need another MMORPG satire? But after giving it a play, they’d change their tune right quick.
(The tune is the Melody of Malcontent, and while they’re singing it you’ve been sliced to ribbons. Ow!)
(Also I wasn’t joking in my opener, pickles are gross)
Atmospheric but obtuse dungeon-crawling, December 6, 2020The second RPG/IF hybrid I’ve hit in this year’s Comp, Creatures nails the dark, dour, and dank atmosphere of a grim-and-gritty dungeon crawl, but bugs and custom-engine wonkiness mean I didn’t appreciate the game as much as it perhaps deserves (though the second release addressed at least some of the bugs; see the addendum at the bottom of this review).
Let’s see, why don’t we go last part first. Creatures runs as a Windows executable with a fairly long startup time, and looks like it’s trying to shoot the moon in a beauty contest – I found the white text on black background too high-contrast to be pleasant, the engine allows words to be broken up between two lines with nary a dash in sight, and there are a fair number of typos (including the first sentence of the walkthrough).
More damning than these superficial considerations, at least to me, the interface is very fiddly. It’s choice-based, though you type a number or letter to enter each command, which in theory should be fine. But the implementation is often aggravating: because the screen updates slowly, and if you mis-type an option you’re taken to a separate screen noting you didn’t select a valid choice and which in turn requires an additional keypress to exit, it’s easy to start typing a sequence of commands that starts throwing off a series of errors. Options are also often nestled several layers deep – each room is divided into four quadrants, for example – so doing anything feels like it takes at least twice as many keypresses as it ought to. Oh, and there’s an encumbrance system that I’d say is an especially irritating example of the type, except every encumbrance system is an especially irritating example of the type.
The bugs run the gamut from small bits of oddness (I was able to heal myself above my theoretical maximum hit points) to hard crashes (trying to equip leg armor when I was already wearing something in that slot reliably broke the game) to a progress-ender involving a lever puzzle in the initial release (later fixed).
In my first go-through I only got about halfway through, which was a shame because I was enjoying Creatures enough to want to see the rest, and thought the prose was actually not bad. It only comes in fits and starts, as you get a couple of paragraphs in between moving to a new room, while taking actions, fighting, or fiddling with puzzles usually doesn’t generate much in the way of description. And the premise – you’re in a dungeon, have amnesia, and probably there’s a baddie somewhere towards the end you need to stab – is barely even there. But these intermittent paragraphs did a reasonable job of creating an atmosphere of decay, age, and unpleasantness which felt like a good tone for a work like this. The puzzles are again nothing to write home about – they’re under-clued and, at least as far as I got, exclusively about opening different locked doors with various kinds of combinations – but fine enough to break up the combat, and it’s always fun to level up and get new gear.
From skimming the walkthrough, it looks like the remainder of the game involves more number puzzles, more combat – and possibly some (Spoiler - click to show)light cannibalism? – again, nothing ground-breaking, but solid meat-and-potatoes stuff (Spoiler - click to show)(so to speak). So I’m hoping there’s an update, either mid-Comp or post-Comp, that would let me check it out (like, because of the number puzzles and combat I mean, not the (Spoiler - click to show)cannibalism).
MUCH LATER UPDATE: So I went back to this after the author posted a revised version that fixed the bug that had stopped my progress, and was able to win. It definitely goes on as it began, with the pattern of obscure number puzzles alternated with narrowly-tuned combat continued. The puzzles also continued to be very challenging, though from looking at the walkthrough it looks like one of them didn’t fire in my playthrough (Spoiler - click to show)(the text indicated that I was locked into Wilfred’s quarters, but I was able to walk right out without inputting anything). And while I was able to get a few critical hits towards the end, which opened up a bit more wiggle room in the combat, in still feels like you need to tackle the enemies in a very specific order to get the right armor, weapons, and healing items you need to win (like, the (Spoiler - click to show)cannibalism does in fact seem mandatory). The writing is still pretty fun, albeit quite bleak, and I found the ending a bit of an anticlimax. I did start to get more used to the interface, though this might be Stockholm Syndrome talking. The author’s got talent but a little more attention to making the game more player-friendly, both in interface and puzzle terms, would go a long way in whatever they do next!
Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of puzzling, December 6, 2020The Copyright of Silence has what’s probably the most genius premise of all 103 games in the Comp. It’s an optimization puzzle where you need to manage pet allergies, kitchen mishaps, and social dynamics in order to maximize the amount of time you can stay quiet while sitting opposite mid-20th-century avant-garde composer John Cage. This works as an amazingly silly joke about Cage’s most famous piece, 4’33”, which is popularly though inaccurately summarized as “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence”, but it also helps prove one of the deeper themes of the piece: turns out there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of silence!
The presentation is top-notch, with one niggle: the game is presented as a view of Cage’s four-room apartment, with always-on text blurbs listing which characters are in each room, and then longer text with dialogue, actions, and options in the location where your character is. The floor-plan art is clean and fits the mid-century aesthetic, and it’s helpful to always be able to monitor what’s happening everywhere in the apartment at a glance. The fly in the ointment is that to fit the whole apartment on one screen, each room’s sub-window is fairly small, meaning I had to do a little more squinting than I liked.
Gameplay-wise, TCoS appears to all be one big, heavily timing-based puzzle hinging on managing your conversation with Cage – there are various intervening events that might interrupt your silence, and being quiet too long in the wrong circumstances will anger him and dock your score. There are several more discrete puzzles to solve, like what to do about an irritating dog-and-parrot pair (shades of Jay Schilling’s Edge of Chaos!), and tasks to accomplish, but they all require specific steps to be taken at specific times, so they’re incorporated into the overall structure. And here’s where the game started to break down for me, as the steps required to make progress can feel pretty tedious.
Quick autobiographical side-note that will come back to TCoS, I promise: when I was doing math and physics problem sets in my college days, there was a particular point in many problems where you’d have figured out the overall approach to take, sussed out how to set up the relevant equations, determined the angle of attack by identifying any needed substitutions or assumptions, and now just needed to spend half an hour wrestling some god-awful, notebook-wide integral or 7 by 7 matrix multiplication into submission through theoretically simple, but fiddly and irritating, application of basic math. We called this “grunge”, and unfortunately once I got over the initial hump of figuring out the basics, I found TCoS pretty grungy.
This takes several forms. First off, a major gameplay element is a piano which somehow conceals helpful objects on particular notes, but you have to select the right octave and note to get what you’re looking for, rather than being able to see everything at once. In each playthrough, a postcard arrives during a brief window that might point you towards one of the useful notes to search, but it would require a lot of repetition to find them all, and I think intercepting the mail is fatal to your progress – or I suppose you could just try looking at each piano-note one by one, but either way you’re in for a lot of grunge.
Second, the conversation with Cage proceeds in a very scripted fashion, with some critical dialogue options available only at certain blink-and-you-missed-it opportunities. The conversation pauses when you’re not in the same room, but the game has a hard deadline at 7 pm, meaning that any fiddling around you do reduces your ability to experiment with the later stages of the conversation.
Exacerbating the previous two problems, there’s no quick way to reset or restart the loop that I could find, and since each playthrough steps through 7 minutes in 7 second intervals, that’s a lot of clicking to have to go through once you realize you’ve fluffed something up, or have an idea you want to try. As a result, while I was able to solve several of the puzzles and get a bit over halfway to the goal, after about 45 minutes of play my enthusiasm wore out. With that said, I’ll probably try to pick this one up again when there’s less time pressure, since there are fun hints of hidden bonus puzzles and alternate endings, and I do really love the setup – and I suppose it’s in keeping with the theme that TCoS isn’t over-concerned with player friendliness.
Interactive comfort food, December 6, 2020The Comp randomizer handed me Congee and Mother Tongue close together, which is an interesting coincidence since they’re both short choice-based games dealing with immigration, alienation, and assimilation. Where Mother Tongue focuses more on the relationships between different generations and touches on some big issues, Congee is really about friends supporting each other, and the comforts of home.
The story here is very slight – the blurb says it all – so it’s really about the small details in how the thing is put together. Congee’s greatest strengths are the way it cleanly sets up the personalities and relationship between the main character and her friend, and the canny use of just a few simple visuals to set the mood on a cold, rainy British evening.
There’s good use of humor here – the protagonist bewailing her fever by noting that “the body is but a weak vessel” is a funny bit of self-pity, and the gag following her decision on what to name the regular get-togethers with her friend to eat congee also made me laugh. The writing in the exchanges between her and her best friend Allison is filled with nicely-judged details, in-jokes, and clever turns of phrase. Making the text messages look like text messages, and imposing delays that are long enough to make one believe in the conceit, but short enough that it doesn’t feel frustrating is a really nice touch too (and I hate it 99% of the time when games force you to wait for text to display).
Where I think the game falls down a tiny bit, and where I can’t help make a comparison to Mother Tongue, is in the short exchange between the protagonist and her mom. In fairness this isn’t the central relationship of the game – that’s clearly the one between the main character and her bestie – but the dialogue here felt a bit generic and vague, in a way that the conversation with Allison never did.
Again, though, that doesn’t do much to mar the appeal of this sweet story of how friends can make wherever you are feel a bit more like home.
Distaff-monster optimization, December 6, 2020I’m usually a story/writing-first, systems-later sort of player, but Chorus’s big puzzle grabbed me hard, and I spent more time replaying and fiddling with it than any other game in the Comp so far. On the down side, this is because I found the prose at times a bit flat, and certainly often overwhelming; on the positive side, it’s because the meta-puzzle provides lots of rewarding reveals and surprise interactions as the player pokes and prods at it.
Right, backing up: in Chorus, you’re tasked with helping what’s basically a community-based organization of (mostly mythical Greek and/or Lovecraftian) monsters do some public service: hunting down raw materials, sorting out paperwork in the library, that sort of thing. You don’t play a specific character, but get to eavesdrop on the thoughts and decisions of nine central characters in turn, deciding how to allocate them between the three main tasks and then doing an additional task-prioritization within each of the main projects. If you’ve matched the right character to the right task and sub-task, the job gets done; if not, not. Along the way, there are a fair number of potential character beats, both positive and negative, depending on which people you’ve grouped together.
The premise is a fun, unique one, though I’m not sure the writing fully does it service. The monsters, as mentioned, are a sort of twee Lovecraft (there’s a slime-girl named Tekeli, e.g., plus Camilla who might be from the King in Yellow?), but the prose is actually fairly grounded. I suppose you could say this fits the entertainingly bureaucratic and grounded premise, but perhaps leaves some fun on the table (I believe the game may have been translated, given that French comes first in the FR-EN toggle, and I think there were some cases where the prose was adopting French sentence structure in a way that felt awkward, which also maybe sapped some of the fun from the writing).
Chorus also wears its worldbuilding rather heavily – the initial sequence feels very overwhelming, as it jumps in in medias res and then runs through the nine different characters without giving much chance to catch one’s breath or refer back to what and who came before (the fact that all the characters are female, and many have names starting with C or K, makes keeping track of things even more difficult). Despite all this exposition, there were parts of the setting I didn’t fully understand – there’s some broader organization or powers-that-be who the community folks seem to resent but nonetheless have to work for. This never fully clicked for me, even though interactions with these powers seemed to be ultimately what's most important in the game's narrative, given how the different endings play out.
All right, so that’s the grousing out of the way. On the flip side, the tasks themselves are enormous fun, both because they’re very clever examples of what a monster-y community service organization would do, and because the sub-tasks are really engaging to dig into. The library bit, for example, has you sorting through half a dozen books looking for supernatural secrets, and the different powers of the various characters can turn up very different results! Careful attention to the character dossiers, prompts in the text, and lateral thinking all pay dividends, and it’s very compelling to tweak your solution to try to optimize it. And as mentioned, there are some unexpected and fun interactions that can happen when you pair up the right set of characters, which are fun in of themselves and make it feel like you’re making progress even when you still have a ways to go. I just wish there were a way to speed up replays – primarily by making it easier to skip through the exposition, since I think Chorus really shines on repeat play and has big just-one-more-go energy.
I very much hope there’s a post-comp release, or even a sequel/expansion, both to continue a story which clearly has more room to grow, but also to clean up these few niggles – with writing that’s a bit sharper and more careful pacing-out of the worldbuilding, this could be a real classic.
Wise, intelligent, and charismatic, December 6, 2020This was the second game I played in the Comp that put me in mind of a "lifepath" character creation system (quick recap: the old tabletop RPG Traveler has a enjoyable character creation system where you make various decisions on careers and such and have little bottom-lined adventures which shape your states before spitting out a ready-to-play character. The other game -- Minor Arcana -- reminded me of that because it had a lot of fun, flavorful choices that seemed to shape the protagonist in the early going, but which didn’t fully pay off in the game proper). I had the same response to The Cave – defining my character through choices is fun, wish there was more to do with it. Things clicked when I finished a playthrough and saw a set of Dungeons and Dragons stats spit out, and read the included help file after wrapping up my playthrough: The Cave is self-consciously a character-generation aid for tabletop roleplaying. It’s not, perhaps, all that it is, but knowing that up front I think helps set good expectations, which is why I’m not obscuring it behind spoiler text.
So if that’s the function of the piece, what’s the form? It’s a well-implemented choice-based dungeon-crawler, with an appropriately tabula rasa protagonist. You run through a series of chambers, each usually containing something interesting to poke at and a choice of egress. Everything you do seems like a challenge – you might choose to fight a tiger, or shimmy your way through a narrow crevice, or decide whether to swap one of your books to an old woman who might be a hag – but there’s no way to die or even temporarily fail, as far as I could tell. Instead your choice of how to resolve the challenge impacts your blank-slate hero’s stats. Talking to the various characters you find makes you charismatic; praying over the corpse of a dead enemy makes you wise; reading books makes you smart (and in the game!) This isn’t fully transparent as you go, but you do get a callout of your top one or two stats as they increase (past a certain point, you’ll get a message telling you that you’re especially agile, for example).
Spelled out mechanically like this, there’s not much here, but the little vignettes are fun to engage with. The writing is quite evocative, and the implied setting adheres to a lot of classic dungeon-y tropes – yer bottomless shafts, yer golden treasure, yer mystical crones – but there are some fun twists, like a much higher prevalence of romance novels than in bog-standard Dungeons and Dragons, and some surprising interactions possible with a few of the dungeon features that I definitely don’t want to spoil (one involves a chest, is all I’ll say). And while in retrospect the association of choices to stats is clear, it’s not too thuddingly obvious as you play, and rarely seems crowbarred in. The downside to that, though, is that some of the stats that aren’t used as actively – I’m thinking mostly here of constitution – don’t come up as frequently.
Still, while I think it does what it’s trying to do, I wish there were maybe like 10-15% more here. I mean that both in terms of the content, since in each of two full playthroughs I saw rooms and challenges repeated (I don’t think I was backtracking), and also in incentivizing exploration. There’s a bit of inventory-tracking as you play through the game – I found a remarkably handy stick in my first go-round – including treasure you can carry out, and certain actions taken in-dungeon lead to the ending text calling out specific achievements as well as your base stats. With a persistent tracking system encouraging you to find the unexpected interactions, or some elements in the ending beyond the base stats that add consequences to the decisions, I think I’d have been more excited to re-engage with the game. This could be an idiosyncratic response – I’m a weirdo who will happily sink a hundred hours into an Assassins Creed game or roguelike but completely lose interest once I’m out of specified quests or goals even though I really like the systems! But especially in a Comp with so many other games on offer, a bit more of a prod to go back for more would have been welcome.
A unique genre-transcending gem, December 6, 2020Usually when I play a piece of IF – or read a book or watch a movie, for that matter – my brain immediately tries to classify it, slotting it into a genre or identifying the key themes or thinking about its antecedents or otherwise fitting it into some broader framework. This is just the way human beings process information, I suppose, and don’t get me wrong, it’s often helpful for understanding the intentions behind a piece and engaging with broader movements and trends. At the same time, it’s rather exhilarating to come across something like A Catalan Summer which had me constantly second-guessing my assumptions of what it was trying to do, not because of self-conscious zaniness or surrealism (those are hoary subgenres all their own) but because its goals, approach, and setting are just so content to do their own thing. The blurb promises “historical gay melodrama,” which is already not an uh especially common IF Comp vibe, but even that fails to truly communicate everything that’s going on here.
I worry that opening paragraph makes it sound like A Catalan Summer is bonkers. It’s not bonkers! It’s actually quite grounded, focusing on an upper-class Catalonian family and their personal and political travails in the aftermath of World War I, with subplots about repressed sexuality, yes, but also labor unrest and separatist politics, as well as lots of very well-described but frankly superfluous detail about the architectural flourishes of the family mansion. True, pretty much everybody (you wind up guiding all four members of the family) can wind up making Telenovela-style decisions – and there’s a (Spoiler - click to show)supernatural element that pretty much comes out of nowhere – but I think the game would still work well if you opted out of all the smoldering-glances stuff, and if anything, I feel like the writing errs too much towards understatement rather than reveling in passion and intensity (this is all quite PG-13 rated). Though then again, there’s also the gay brothel you can visit and where you can choose, for your night’s companion, a panto Viking complete with horned helmet. So maybe it’s a little bonkers.
Gameplay-wise, you navigate through the family house looking for people to talk to, and then make choices. The house is bigger and more open than it needs to be – possibly to create space for the aforementioned architecture-porn, like let me tell you, if you are into festoons this game has you covered – since all you can do is talk to people, and most locations are empty most of the time. But I liked the ability to wander about, including a few extramural excursions that allow for some sightseeing and local color, even if I’m used to this kind of interface be deployed for puzzlefests like A Murder in Fairyland.
The pacing is quite brisk – every ten minutes or so, you’re whisked into the next vignette with a different viewpoint character, and the choices are well-considered, providing enough granularity to give a sense for the voices of each character and allow the player to make significant choices, while not belaboring every bit of dialogue. Sometimes it’s too quick: you can go from flirtation to schtupping to post-coital bliss in one line of dialogue, and I had one sequence where a character survived an assault, went to a hospital, and recovered, all in the space of two short paragraphs. But better too quick than too slow, I think. It also builds to a nice climax, with a final party scene where you can choose which family members to inhabit: you can orchestrate a passionate tryst with one character, then have another stumble upon them in flagrante delicto for maximum shock effect.
I quite enjoyed the characters. Patriarch Josep is the one you spend the most time with, and I think is the best drawn – he’s got rather conservative leanings, but also seems unashamed about his homosexuality. These tensions aren’t played up in the writing – there’s no internal monologue as he wrestles with his understanding of himself – which I think is effective in creating space for players to make a wide variety of choices without feeling like they're being untrue to the character. The others are more one-note, though you can decide whether son Jordi’s habit of slumming it with the hoi polloi reflects sincere belief or is simple dilettantism, and I enjoyed figuring out ways for Josep’s jaded wife, Maria, to amuse herself (spoiler alert: it involved boning the staff). Only Clara, the sheltered daughter, doesn’t find herself with as much to do.
The writing is a significant part of the draw. There are some typos and odd grammar throughout, potentially due to translation? But I liked how it simultaneously created a sort of dreamlike aura while being quite grounded in a sense of history and place, with ever-solid dialogue. Here’s a bit from an early scene, where Josep is giving a tour to the family of a business partner:
“This house, you explain, was an old presbytery built next to this chapel. I had the house renovated while leaving the chapel in its original state. Around the 13th century, the Counts of Barcelona dominated Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and even the south of Italy, which explains the number and beauty of the monuments of that time in the region…”
“A kind of golden age…” Auguste says ironically, “Isn’t it from the memory of this blessed time that the Catalans forged their desire for independence?”
You can see there are some punctuation issues and the locution is a bit awkward, but for whatever reason this style really worked for me, and the history nerd in me appreciated all the detail the author offers (I didn’t know Barcelona is named after Hannibal Barca!) Or there’s this, relating an assignation:
“You and Charles are now used to meeting in Barcelona in his apartment, discreetly. As the days go by, both of you feel the initial desire plunging its roots into you, gradually blossoming into a massif with complex interlacing, crazy branches that thicken to become a real and strong feeling that ties you to each other in a knot that will become all the more difficult to slice.”
That second sentence is too long and uses imagery that’s not quite right to my ear, but somehow that makes it even more compelling.
I did run into one technical niggle, which is that at one point Maria showed up somewhere she shouldn’t have (though I couldn’t interact with her), and the admirable openness of the plot made my ending feel a bit ridiculous, as in one paragraph of dialogue, Jordi, clearly full of love for his father, told Josep that he should be unafraid of pursuing happiness with his lover, but then in the next paragraph blew up at him and renounced his inheritance because Josep set an American detective to pursue Jordi’s anarchist friends – melodrama is all well and good, but emotional whiplash is something else altogether.
Still, that couldn’t undercut what was a deeply enjoyable experience. Like, that American detective is actually (Spoiler - click to show)Dashiell Hammett. There’s a (Spoiler - click to show)Marcel Proust cameo too. And I haven’t elaborated on the whole (Spoiler - click to show)ghost thing (my head says, you don’t need this and the author should have dropped it; my heart says, yes, why not this too?) Point being, A Catalan Summer marches to the beat of its own drum, takes direct inspiration from nobody and I’m sure will not be directly inspiring any copycats either, cares not for your petty distinctions of genre, much less the Aristotelian unities, not due to any sophomoric and self-congratulatory iconoclasm but just because it’s content to do its own thing, and it’s all the more worth playing for it.
Reasonably captivating, December 6, 2020A puzzle-y fairytale with a twist, Captivity boasts a plucky protagonist, an engaging supporting cast, some pleasant challenges, and solid writing and implementation. It’s perhaps a bit too much on the linear side, and weakens slightly in the home stretch, but all in all it’s a pleasant way to while away an hour or two.
Right, setup: you’re a young lady of the minor nobility (or perhaps haute bourgeoisie) who’s been abducted by an evil Duke. While the Duke’s assorted family members, servants, and minions aren’t particularly fussed at preventing your escape, there’s still an array of locked doors, spike-topped walls, and magic necklaces that will strangle you if you leave the grounds standing in your way. There’s nothing especially novel in the low-key, slightly comedic fantasy setting – though there’s a bit of a PG-13 edge that sometimes works (there’s a god-bothered maid who’s a little more excited by lurid descriptions of the sins of the flesh than on the ways to save oneself from temptation) and sometimes can be a bit off-putting (the intro focuses a bit too much on the protagonist’s impending ravishment, though of course nothing bad actually happens). While this isn’t always to my taste, it’s fine as far as it goes, though there’s one late-game incident that I think is a bit too tonally jarring to be successful (Spoiler - click to show)(when the Duke comes home and catches you mid-escape, you stab him in the face with some scissors, drop a chandelier on him, and leave him “expired in a pool of his own blood”).
The puzzles are nothing too out-there, but are generally logical, well-clued, and satisfying to solve, with almost every one opening up a new area to explore or character to interact with. Captivity also does a good job of detecting if you’re flailing on some puzzles, and will add a gentle hint to get you on the right track if you try the same wrong action too many times, which is quite a nice feature. The puzzle chains are quite linear for the first two thirds or so of the game, with only one barrier at a time to work on surmounting, which helps keep the difficulty low but also can make proceedings sometimes feel a bit dull. The structure opens up once you reach a classic collect-em-all puzzle – you need to find three (Spoiler - click to show)ingredients for a spell – but by that point I’d already found one and a half of them so the increased openness was mostly theoretical in my case.
Implementation is generally very solid, with most objects and scenery nicely described and few synonym or guess-the-syntax issues. This starts to break down a bit in the last part of the game, though – I had to look up the walkthrough to solve the last major puzzle because I had the right idea but couldn’t figure out how to input the correct commands (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m talking about burning the objects in the brazier – LIGHT BRAZIER doesn’t work, and in fact returns “The brass brazier isn’t something you can light,” with LIGHT BRAZIER WITH MATCH similarly failing. Per the walkthrough, STRIKE MATCH -> PUT MATCH IN BRAZIER is the intended solution, which feels too fiddly to me), and I noticed a few examples of undescribed objects in some of the final few rooms.
It is possible to put the game in an unwinnable state, though it’s kind enough to tell you so and a single UNDO was enough to fix things. I did run into one related issue – when I reached the endgame, I got a message saying I’d missed something at an early stage of the game and now my “maidenly virtue is but a treasured memory”, but the author “in his nearly infinite benevolence” will take pity and fix things. I’m not sure what this was referring to, since I had on hand everything I wound up needing to finish the game, and when I checked the walkthrough I didn’t see that I had missed anything. Regardless, the tone of this message was pretty off-putting and felt unnecessarily adversarial. None of these issues are that major, but I think would be worth cleaning up in a post-Comp release.
Anyway I don’t want to dwell too much on that sour note, because for the most part the writing is lots of fun. The supporting cast were the major standouts – although they’re notionally on the side of the Duke, they mostly view him with eye-rolling tolerance at best, and are quite content to shoot the breeze with you, force you to look at their embroidery collection, or flirt with each other as though you’re not standing there. Even the Duke’s dagger-happy henchman and lecherous wizard servant come off as entertainingly harmless – it’s fun to banter with, and then get one over on, them.
Captivity isn’t trying to do anything revolutionary, but its few missteps aren’t enough to douse the fun of wandering through its castle, outwitting a jerk of a Duke, and engaging in some light sorcery, all related in breezy, clever prose.
Adventures in bibliopiracy, December 6, 2020Captain Graybeard’s Plunder neatly inverts the adage that history is written by the victors; here, fiction is remixed by the losers. As a pirate captain whose career was ended by complacency (indirectly) and a royal galleon (rather more directly), you take solace in your retirement by dreaming up how things might have gone differently if your ship, crew, and, er, hand-replacing prosthetic had been up to snuff. The gag is that rather than inventing these upgrades whole cloth, instead you turn to your character’s ample library for inspiration, so that, for example, you might imagine a rematch where your crew are veterans straight out of Treasure Island, or where you boast Captain Hook’s eponymous pointy bit atop your stump.
That’s all there is to it, really: this isn’t a puzzle, as any combination of choices appears to lead to a satisfying bout of vengeance, plus there are only three choices for each of the three variables so you’ll run through all of them in only a couple of replats. A grounded character-study or bit of world-building this is not – the captain is your stereotypical pirate save for his love of literature (though pirates do love their arrs, so I suppose it’s not too surprising he got stuck on reading and writing), and the fact that you can plunder from Peter Pan makes the timeline quite suspect!
Fortunately, CGP has charm in spades and that’s what carries it through. The writing ably inhabits the pirate milieu, and effectively conveys both the joys of buccaneering and the transporting power of a good book. The presentation is splendid too, with each of the books you steal from rendered in its own slightly-different cursive font, which carries through into the battle re-creation to make it clear how you’ve stitched everything together. There aren’t major variations depending on your choices, but though they’re small, the responsiveness is nonetheless satisfying, as you get to feel like your choice of Captain Nemo’s sub, for example, was an especially smart one. CGP knows what it’s about, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and made me realize it’s been too long since I’ve reread Moby Dick, which is a lot to accomplish for a ten-minute game!
Intensely unpleasant (but in a good way!), December 6, 2020So this is quite a good game that I really did not enjoy in the slightest. It starts in medias res, but the premise is immediately grabby: your character has been kidnapped by a serial killer with (thankfully) unknown predilections, and must try to manipulate him into creating an opening that would allow her to fight back and escape the murderdungeon. The prose makes this premise no idle backdrop: it’s sweaty, immediate, and immersive, planting you inside the main character’s head in the middle of a deeply, traumatic event – and it doesn’t let up over the course of the days you spend in the basement, until you reach the incredibly violent climax.
ACoD doesn’t wallow in awfulness, let me be clear: there are ways of doing this setup that would objectify the main character’s suffering, or that would linger on the awful things the killer has and will do to her, and the game steers clear of them. And I got to a “happy” ending that was quite grisly, per the prominent content warnings, but did allow the protagonist to get out. I wouldn’t say it’s a tasteful take on the in-the-den-of-a-killer genre, because what would that even mean, but it’s not out to purposefully alienate the player or push any buttons just for the sake of getting a response. In fact, in my playthrough at least, the killer, while clearly plotting something awful, never made any overt moves towards violence, and stayed relatively polite throughout. The violence came from the protagonist, who in addition to envisioning the awful fate awaiting her, also vividly fantasizes about wreaking bloody revenge against her captor (and then, of course, actually does so). This is an interesting reversal because it puts the violence more under the control of the player, or at least the player character. It also highlights that while the killer presents a bit of a social puzzle to solve, as you try to figure out how to build his empathy and lull him into letting his guard down, so too is the protagonist something of a conundrum.
She’s by no means a blank slate, and there are hints of backstory sprinkled through the game. They’re appropriately vague and allusive – she’s hardly going to be putting her memoirs in mental order under the circumstances – but I found them the most intriguing bit of the game. There’s one that I think provides the title for the game, where she reflects on the way attractive women get cat-called, while unattractive ones (like her, the implication goes) are called dogs, which triggers her towards anger. She also seems very comfortable self-consciously playing a role and suppressing her actual feelings so that others will see her differently, so much so that for the first few minutes of the game I half-thought that this might be a really, really intense S&M roleplay session. And while being fixated on violent escape makes sense in the circumstances, my impression at least was that she was far more likely to dwell on inflicting (deserved!) harm on the killer than on the possibility of being able to get away and live. These hints weren’t paid off in the ending that I got, unfortunately, because while I obviously was invested in trying to help her escape, I was more interested in figuring out what was going on with the protagonist.
Implementation-wise, there are a few stray typos and possibly-intentional comma splices. I did find a few places where the choices went wonky or there appeared to be continuity errors (the options for what to eat for lunch sometimes repeated oddly, and in the first sequence, the main character starts referring to a cookie that I don’t think had been previously mentioned). But on the whole things were solid, and the choices really feel like they have weight, forcing you to sweat as you realize that one wrong move could have catastrophic consequences. So all told this is a well-put-together entry in the Comp, with more going on than it needed to have and strong writing that really puts you in the situation. As I mentioned in my opening, I very much did not enjoy it because this is not my preferred genre or style in the slightest, but that’s on me – and of the number of games in the Comp with somewhat adjacent themes, ACoD seems to me to be the strongest so far.
It's beginning to look a lot like fish-men..., December 6, 2020When I was on an airplane many years ago, I had the idea of writing a Lovecraft pastiche in a noir voice suddenly pop into my head. After I landed and got home, I fired up my computer and had enormous fun writing a page and a half of my hard-boiled private dick sharing how he usually deals with ghoul infestations and musing that if you’ve seen one Hound of Tindalos, you haven’t seen a Hound of Tindalos – but then the juice suddenly ran out because I couldn’t figure out where the story would go. If I kept up the world-weary noir thing throughout, the Cthulhu elements wouldn’t land because the cosmic horror doesn’t find a purchase in the protagonist's psyche. And if you lean into the Cthulhu bits and have even the noir hero shaken by the burden of things man was not meant to know, well, you’ve just written a Lovecraft pastiche with some weird similes, clipped phrasing, and hopefully less racism. It’s a mashup that ultimately needs to collapse into just being one thing or the other, and therefore can’t be fully satisfying (this is also why every attempt I’ve seen to do a pomo detective story doesn’t work – yes, I’m calling you out, Paul Auster) (and before I wrap up this ridiculously self-indulgent introduction, let me shout out the one completely effective Lovecraft genre remix, which is the Cthulhu-meets-Wodehouse of A Scream For Jeeves).
Anyway, given this tediously-explained context, I was interested to see how Call of Innsmouth followed through on its blurb, which seemed to presage going hard on the noir tropes, and avoided this dilemma. The answer is that mostly it sidesteps the tension by presenting a completely straight-ahead take, with prose that doesn’t commit hard either way – the smoky, jazzy tones of noir and the adjective-mad enthusiasm of Lovecraft get a few hat-tips, but the style is overall quite normcore. The same is true for the plot, which mirrors the plot of the mid-aughts Call of Cthulhu video game remarkably closely – and even if you, like the author, haven’t played it, proceedings will still feel pretty familiar so long as you've read the Shadow Over Innsmouth. I think the biggest story-related surprise I experienced was that at one point, after I made a bad decision, I was expecting to get eaten by Dagon, but instead I got eaten by a shoggoth.
None of this is necessarily bad – if you are in the mood for a Lovecraft game, Call of Innsmouth has you covered in spades! It’s big, with lots to do that gives you that old Cthulhu charge – you prep for the investigation by visiting an Arkham boarding house and consulting Miskatonic’s Professor Armitage, and you get to raid Devil’s Reef and meet Zadok Allen (though oddly, his name is misspelled and he’s given a weird dialect different from what he’s got in the book, maybe coding him as Native American? Zadok is a biblical name so I always assumed he’s a Quaker or something like that). There are a number of action sequences, and while it’s (appropriately) easy to die, the correct choices aren’t too obfuscated, and unlimited rewinds are offered if your guts do wind up decorating a Deep One’s claws.
Writing-wise, as mentioned the style is pretty straightforward and there are some typos, but also a few nice bits of characterization – when the player character’s client breaks down in worry over her missing son, he just shifts uncomfortably rather than comforting her, for example. And while you appropriately freak out at some of the revelations, and start out a bit skeptical about this whole dark-god-and-fish-men business, it isn’t overly belabored so there’s no tedious tension between the genre-savvy player and the notionally new-to-all-this player character. Call of Innsmouth delivers what it sets out to, and if it’s not the most novel take on these tropes, and the prose plays it down the middle, you still get a meaty adventure to satisfy any Mythos cravings (like for a game I mean, not forbidden knowledge or human flesh or anything gross like that).
High quality, small portions, December 6, 2020BYOD ain’t messing around with the “micro” label – I probably spent as much time playing guess-the-acronym as I did actually running through the game – but the five minutes here on offer are a lovely spike of cyberpunk power fantasy that makes me hope there’s a longer piece with similar mechanics somewhere in the future.
So this is a proper hacking game, doing in pure parser form what yer Uplinks and Hacknets have done with hybrid GUI interfaces. After reading the included e-zine feelie – I just noticed feelies have been rather thin on the ground this year, so it was nice to see a well-made one – I was primed for an intense gray-hat type of experience, but actually the plot and set-up are rather low key: you really are just a student starting a do-nothing internship at a tech company. It’s just that you happen to have a smartphone app that gives you all the power of the Internet gods, with the ability to remote-access any computer or device and read, write, or active it with no concern for security protocols.
The hacking is implemented really solidly, using a UNIX-like set of commands, and again contrary to my expectations, rather than the whole thing playing out at a terminal you actually play an embodied character and type commands in typical adventure-game fashion – you just preface your commands with a prefix to direct them to the hacking app. Being able to merge the two levels of play seamlessly is a clever touch that heads off the challenges most hacking games have in depicting anything happening in meatspace.
All this to say that the foundations here are solid and even a bit exciting. The story and puzzle(s) are pretty underdeveloped, though – there’s no real detail about who you are, why you got this internship, or how you managed to wrangle the killer app. Played straight, there’s only one character and one challenge – you meet the secretary at the front desk and print a sign out for her. If you go poking around where you shouldn’t, there’s a little more flavor and a bonus objective (Spoiler - click to show)(the company’s CEO is blackmailing the secretary with nude photos, which you can delete), which feels good to find and accomplish but is also likewise quite slight.
There are alternate endings, the writing is clean and typo-free, and everything works the way it’s supposed to, so it’s all solidly built. But I can’t help feeling like the work it took to build this hacking system was wildly disproportionate to the work it took to build out the scenario. I find it exhausting to play games that are too long for the amount of content they actually have; BYOD has the opposite problem. Always good to leave them wanting more, I suppose, but still: I want more!
Oh, and “Device” and “Drama” are my two best guesses as to the title – the latter because the story isn’t going to find you, you need to manufacture the interesting bit yourself.
Less brutal than advertised, December 6, 2020Friends, I will level with you: 2020 has been tough for me, and going into this one I wasn’t sure how I felt about another game about murder, especially one that puts the “brutal” right there in the title. Like, I love the Comp for exposing me to things outside my comfort zone and that I never would have found otherwise, but I also come to IF by way of what we used to call adventure games, text or otherwise. Say what you will about Dr. Ego being a bit wonky and not very innovative, but it had me give a banana to a monkey. Now that’s a proper adventure game puzzle: GIVE BANANA TO MONKEY. Not a severed carotid or trace of seminal discharge in sight.
Blessedly, Brutal Murder is – not actually that brutal? Partially this is the tone, which is miles away from the dour proceduralism the title might evoke. If anything it’s a bit chatty, with a narrative voice that directly addresses the player, alternately confessional and urging the player onwards. And while the central crime is like, clearly a murder and is bad, it’s nowhere near as awful, or as awfully described, as what’s on network TV every night (there is one somewhat disturbing plot element that possibly does deserve a content warning, though I’ll spoiler-block it just in case: (Spoiler - click to show)the narrator, an adult tutor who’s in prison for the murder of the eponymous 17-year old, was in a sexual relationship with her that he describes as consensual).
While this came as a relief to me, I do think BMoJL suffers a bit from this tonal unevenness – the subject matter is clearly meant to evoke tragedy, and that mood is stated as text repeatedly, but it’s hard for that sentiment to land given the often-breezy narrative voice, as well as some out-of-context surrealistic flourishes. The game opens with a tutorial sequence, complete with the narrative voice telling you to TAKE KEY and OPEN DOOR, which is completely diegetic and in continuity with the meat of the game. Each chunk of investigation is interspersed with a trip to a black void, and the topography of the map changes in unphysical ways as the story progresses. It’s not too hard to suss out the reason for this, reading between the lines of some of the narrator’s comments (Spoiler - click to show)(the player character appears to be a sort of crime-solving AI trawling through the narrator’s memories) but this doesn’t seem well-integrated with the main thrust of the plot, and felt very underdeveloped.
As to the game itself, it’s got a pretty solid implementation. There’s typically a good amount of scenery, some of which isn’t described, but all of the objects one can interact with are broken out on their own line, which is a shorthand that adds some convenience. I was stymied by how to open the storage-room cabinet for a long time, even after I knew the code, since TYPE and TOUCH and OPEN and UNLOCK and all their variants failed, but the HELP text had told me that USE item was an important verb, so it’s on me for overlooking that. I did run into one significant bug: my first trip to limbo never ended, leaving me wandering a black void forever, which prompted a restart (second time after a half-dozen turns of flailing, I was moved on to the next sequence as intended).
The puzzles are relatively straightforward and don’t require off-the-wall thinking, but there’s never a time when you feel like you’re solving a mystery – instead you’re hunting for the one piece of evidence or reading material that will prompt the narrator to understand things a little better and explain his progress to you. There are no suspects to interview, or deductions to piece together, just cabinets to unlock and journals to read. It sometimes feels as though the player’s just fiddling about with some busywork while the game solves itself.
This is a shame, because the core story of the game is I think pretty good, with some solid character dynamics, an interesting twist (albeit one that could have probably used more groundwork-laying), and well-observed details on the experience of being Asian-Canadian in one particular place and one particular time. But these tonal issues, and the feeling of disengagement brought on by the gameplay/story disconnect, meant it didn’t land for me as strongly as I would have liked.
A (buggy) Jurassic lark, December 6, 2020I’ve tried to note in these reviews where I think a post-Comp release or in-Comp update would help improve a game, but usually I do that as a late-in-the-day aside. For Big Trouble in Little Dino Park, let me shout it from the rooftops at the outset: I want to praise your game, but first please fix it! It seems very charming, with a funny premise, good prose, and what appear to be some interesting puzzles. But due to myriad crash and dead-end bugs, no save functionality, and a gauntlet-type structure that kills you a lot, I found it way too frustrating to make progress. Admittedly, I can see from other reviews that some folks have managed to power through, so maybe I’m just at a low ebb after running into similar issues in other Comp games, but still: help me help you.
Starting with the positive, BTLDP is immediately grabby – the summer-intern-at-Jurassic-Park setup lets you immediately know what you’re in for, so even as you’re going about your chores you’re just waiting for all hell to break loose (and despite that, it’s still a funny surprise exactly how it all plays out). The prose has a lot of exclamation points and ensures you’re viewing things with the proper mix of terror and strangely giddy enthusiasm (I mean, dinosaurs are cool, even when they’re chewing your face off). Like, there’s this ejaculation when the beasts free themselves from their cages:
"Chaos ascendant! A return to man’s most primal nature: prey! There is only one possible path to escape!"
How can that not make you grin? It does occasionally try too hard (there’s a Mosasaurs -> Mosas -> Moses -> parting the Red Sea gag that just profoundly doesn’t work), and there are a few comma splices and misspellings – though it’s hard to fault anyone for not being able to quite come to terms with “archaeopteryx”. Still, if anything these flaws in the prose reinforce the general teenager-who’s-getting-carried-away vibe.
After the prologue, the game opens up to offer three different areas to explore in search of a way to escape, and here, unfortunately, my troubles began. It’s completely appropriate that trying to escape a park of rampaging dinosaurs involves dying A LOT, so I can’t knock BTLDP too much for this. Where I can knock it, though, is for confusing design – going to the docks kicks off what the game flags as a sort of Frogger sequence, as you need to hop between various boats to make it to the one that’s pulling away. But many of the descriptions of each potential hopping-place are unclear, much less the spatial relationships between them, and there’s an added note of difficulty because part of the trickiness of the puzzle is that you’re presented with false choices (specifically, the swamped hulks of boats you’ve already hopped on and were subsequently smashed by a dinosaur). And then once you get to the boat, I was even more confused by what happened after an additional choice (Spoiler - click to show)(what to do after one of the crew falls off the escaping boat – I thought I could try to pull him onto the boat with me, but I think what’s actually happening is you’re deciding not to get on the boat and pulling him onto the disintegrating dock?). So this leads to a large amount of trial and error gameplay.
BTLDP appears to recognize that this is how most people will experience the story, and positions it as an intended part of the gameplay by listing a death count and a rewind option each time you snuff it.
Except “each time” is overstating it, due to the bugs – I’m not sufficiently familiar with Ink to diagnose exactly what’s going on, but there were a lot of times when I’d click on what looked like a perfectly valid link – even one I’d clicked on just fine in a previous playthrough – only to have the game hang, or print out some text while not offering any further links. There’s no save functionality so far as I could determine, so each time this happened I had to play through the introduction from scratch, which unfortunately loses most of its charm the 12th time through.
I’m holding this space open for hopefully revisiting an updated version of BTLDP, or perhaps coming back to it when I’m more mentally prepared for the whiplash between the whimsical, so-you-died-no-biggie presentation and the Dark-Souls-style grimly repetitive approach currently required, but for now I can’t say I got as much out of, or enjoyed, BTLDP as I’d hoped.
Sublime horror, December 6, 2020(This review is of the Comp release)
There is nothing creepier than a creepy dream. Conversely, there is often nothing less creepy than that same dream when you’re trying to explain it to others. Plaudits to the author, then, for taking inspiration from one such creepy dream and transforming it into a very unsettling and compelling piece of IF!
The great use of multimedia is part of what makes Babyface so effective. There are judiciously-chosen polaroids, links are highlighted in an ominous red aura, and there’s an amazingly effective jump-scare that’s not at all cheap and that I don’t want to spoil.
But in addition to those (great!) bells and whistles, Babyface has great prose, and – even more importantly for horror – great pacing. The narrative is very canny about revealing some tantalizing hints, and then deferring exploration as the player’s dad calls it a night, or the player wakes up from a dream, or they’re interrupted by a passing police officer. This helps wind up the tension, but also makes the player lean forward in their seat, eager to see what comes next. It’s also set in the here and now, during the COVID pandemic (it’s not stated openly, but it’s possible the main character’s mother has just died of the disease), which as it turns out is a great setting for horror, since it alienates us from the everyday. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of horror fiction set in 2020 in years to come.
There isn’t much interactivity in the sense of meaningful choices or puzzles. I did have fun attempting to translate the mysterious Latin on the photos (fair warning that there’s one bit that isn’t really Latin…) but this is mostly a roller coaster where you’re along for the ride. With that said, there’s definitely some elegance in how links are deployed – there’s one particular sequence where the mechanics of choice effectively communicate a sense of being compelled (Spoiler - click to show)(I mean the bit where the player is entering the house, with “I find myself” the link at the beginning of a sentence that repeatedly changes when you click it. Your cursor isn’t moving, but the character is as the sentence shifts, making it feel like you’re moving forward while remaining inert).
Babyface is definitely worth a play – especially if you give it a spin close to Halloween!
A knotty conundrum, December 5, 2020I'm putting the full review here under a spoiler block, but let me just flag two things: 1) this game is fun, and 2) if you're finding it tough going, you might better understand it if you check it out in context on the original IF Comp entries page.
(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, the three games with similar titles and cover art, and obviously pseudonymous authors, are in fact all the same game. I don’t think the author is trying very hard to hide this, and honestly given how big the field is this year, that’s probably a good decision – lots of people are just going to play the first five or ten games the randomizer hands them, so making these similarities clear, including a note in the blurb that “you may need to seek aid from an unusual place”, and requiring cross-referencing multiple games to solve every puzzle so that it’s impossible to spend more than five or ten minutes on any game before you figure out the trick are all helpful concessions that hopefully mean more people will be able to play this Voltronish game (the ending screen calls it The Knot, so that’s how I’m going to refer to it, rather than trying to juggle the three more unwieldy titles).
This trend of erring on the side of simplicity continues into the puzzles themselves. Once you’ve figured out the trick, they’re extraordinarily straightforward. The first one involves finding the right order to insert colored orbs into a mural depicting a solar system – and there’s a reference item in one of the other games that runs through five planets in order, with relevant colors marked out in highlighted text, and at the end there’s a page headlined “TO SUM UP THIS IMPORTANT CLUE” that spells out the order again and tells you to keep it handy. Most of the puzzles are like this, with clear signposting of the steps needed to solve each of them. This makes juggling the three games a breeze, and it’s fun to jump between browser tabs decoding hieroglyphs and inserting combinations, but since there are only two puzzles per games, it makes the game-y part of the Knot feel rather slight.
The depth really comes in in the writing and story. Each of the three installments operates in a different genre – over-the-top action archeology, over-the-top pulp sci-fi, and over-the-top swords and sorcery. The same set of exotic words and names are used in each (look at the title for a sampling), but remixed and reconfigured – sometimes Chirlu is the name of the rival archaeologist working for the Nazis, sometimes he’s a sympathetic alien doing research on the extradimensional Knot that wends through all three titles. In each, the baddies are always described as fascist, but sometimes that’s the corrupt horde known as the Illfane, and sometimes it’s the monsters attacking the people whose protector is the priestly leader called the Illfane.
In fact, the Knot is surprisingly political – at one point, a set of baddies are said to be trying to “make the galaxy great again”, though in another, a set of characters rebelling against unjust oppression are called “deplorables” – to editorialize for a moment, it’s a sad statement on current events that a game worrying about authoritarianism and fascism scans as topical (as you reach the ending, you encounter a character who’s unlocked the potential within the Knot and lists off the reality-bending now within their power, but who notes “but I can’t do anything about the Nazis”). Beyond these signifiers, the ending also seems to point to a vision of a sort of socialist utopia, as instead of exploiting the Knot as a mystical power source to be hoarded by those wishing power to defeat their enemies, it rather becomes distributed to all, granting a tiny bit of magic and hope to everyone. The Nazis are said not to understand what’s going on as the climax nears, and the ancient tomb they’re pursuing turns out to be made of papier-mâché. This doesn’t come off as leaden political allegory, though – the writing is fleet, and there’s lots of incidental text that’s very fun and funny (my favorite was the series of fairy tales that were all bent in a dystopic-capitalist direction).
All this makes the Knot a fun distraction with a clever gimmick and enough hints of depth to enliven its relatively straightforward puzzles. I was left wanting a little more, though – and actually, wonder whether in fact there are secrets beyond those needed to get to the ending (the introduction to the fairy tales protests perhaps a bit overmuch that they’re not related to the puzzles, and there are intimations that sussing out the identity of the player character in the sci-fi section might be important). Even if this is all that’s on offer, though, it’s still worth a play.
A knotty conundrum, December 5, 2020I'm putting the full review here under a spoiler block, but let me just flag two things: 1) this game is fun, and 2) if you're finding it tough going, you might better understand it if you check it out in context on the original IF Comp entries page.
(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, the three games with similar titles and cover art, and obviously pseudonymous authors, are in fact all the same game. I don’t think the author is trying very hard to hide this, and honestly given how big the field is this year, that’s probably a good decision – lots of people are just going to play the first five or ten games the randomizer hands them, so making these similarities clear, including a note in the blurb that “you may need to seek aid from an unusual place”, and requiring cross-referencing multiple games to solve every puzzle so that it’s impossible to spend more than five or ten minutes on any game before you figure out the trick are all helpful concessions that hopefully mean more people will be able to play this Voltronish game (the ending screen calls it The Knot, so that’s how I’m going to refer to it, rather than trying to juggle the three more unwieldy titles).
This trend of erring on the side of simplicity continues into the puzzles themselves. Once you’ve figured out the trick, they’re extraordinarily straightforward. The first one involves finding the right order to insert colored orbs into a mural depicting a solar system – and there’s a reference item in one of the other games that runs through five planets in order, with relevant colors marked out in highlighted text, and at the end there’s a page headlined “TO SUM UP THIS IMPORTANT CLUE” that spells out the order again and tells you to keep it handy. Most of the puzzles are like this, with clear signposting of the steps needed to solve each of them. This makes juggling the three games a breeze, and it’s fun to jump between browser tabs decoding hieroglyphs and inserting combinations, but since there are only two puzzles per games, it makes the game-y part of the Knot feel rather slight.
The depth really comes in in the writing and story. Each of the three installments operates in a different genre – over-the-top action archeology, over-the-top pulp sci-fi, and over-the-top swords and sorcery. The same set of exotic words and names are used in each (look at the title for a sampling), but remixed and reconfigured – sometimes Chirlu is the name of the rival archaeologist working for the Nazis, sometimes he’s a sympathetic alien doing research on the extradimensional Knot that wends through all three titles. In each, the baddies are always described as fascist, but sometimes that’s the corrupt horde known as the Illfane, and sometimes it’s the monsters attacking the people whose protector is the priestly leader called the Illfane.
In fact, the Knot is surprisingly political – at one point, a set of baddies are said to be trying to “make the galaxy great again”, though in another, a set of characters rebelling against unjust oppression are called “deplorables” – to editorialize for a moment, it’s a sad statement on current events that a game worrying about authoritarianism and fascism scans as topical (as you reach the ending, you encounter a character who’s unlocked the potential within the Knot and lists off the reality-bending now within their power, but who notes “but I can’t do anything about the Nazis”). Beyond these signifiers, the ending also seems to point to a vision of a sort of socialist utopia, as instead of exploiting the Knot as a mystical power source to be hoarded by those wishing power to defeat their enemies, it rather becomes distributed to all, granting a tiny bit of magic and hope to everyone. The Nazis are said not to understand what’s going on as the climax nears, and the ancient tomb they’re pursuing turns out to be made of papier-mâché. This doesn’t come off as leaden political allegory, though – the writing is fleet, and there’s lots of incidental text that’s very fun and funny (my favorite was the series of fairy tales that were all bent in a dystopic-capitalist direction).
All this makes the Knot a fun distraction with a clever gimmick and enough hints of depth to enliven its relatively straightforward puzzles. I was left wanting a little more, though – and actually, wonder whether in fact there are secrets beyond those needed to get to the ending (the introduction to the fairy tales protests perhaps a bit overmuch that they’re not related to the puzzles, and there are intimations that sussing out the identity of the player character in the sci-fi section might be important). Even if this is all that’s on offer, though, it’s still worth a play.
A knotty conundrum, December 5, 2020I'm putting the full review here under a spoiler block, but let me just flag two things: 1) this game is fun, and 2) if you're finding it tough going, you might better understand it if you check it out in context on the original IF Comp entries page.
(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, the three games with similar titles and cover art, and obviously pseudonymous authors, are in fact all the same game. I don’t think the author is trying very hard to hide this, and honestly given how big the field is this year, that’s probably a good decision – lots of people are just going to play the first five or ten games the randomizer hands them, so making these similarities clear, including a note in the blurb that “you may need to seek aid from an unusual place”, and requiring cross-referencing multiple games to solve every puzzle so that it’s impossible to spend more than five or ten minutes on any game before you figure out the trick are all helpful concessions that hopefully mean more people will be able to play this Voltronish game (the ending screen calls it The Knot, so that’s how I’m going to refer to it, rather than trying to juggle the three more unwieldy titles).
This trend of erring on the side of simplicity continues into the puzzles themselves. Once you’ve figured out the trick, they’re extraordinarily straightforward. The first one involves finding the right order to insert colored orbs into a mural depicting a solar system – and there’s a reference item in one of the other games that runs through five planets in order, with relevant colors marked out in highlighted text, and at the end there’s a page headlined “TO SUM UP THIS IMPORTANT CLUE” that spells out the order again and tells you to keep it handy. Most of the puzzles are like this, with clear signposting of the steps needed to solve each of them. This makes juggling the three games a breeze, and it’s fun to jump between browser tabs decoding hieroglyphs and inserting combinations, but since there are only two puzzles per games, it makes the game-y part of the Knot feel rather slight.
The depth really comes in in the writing and story. Each of the three installments operates in a different genre – over-the-top action archeology, over-the-top pulp sci-fi, and over-the-top swords and sorcery. The same set of exotic words and names are used in each (look at the title for a sampling), but remixed and reconfigured – sometimes Chirlu is the name of the rival archaeologist working for the Nazis, sometimes he’s a sympathetic alien doing research on the extradimensional Knot that wends through all three titles. In each, the baddies are always described as fascist, but sometimes that’s the corrupt horde known as the Illfane, and sometimes it’s the monsters attacking the people whose protector is the priestly leader called the Illfane.
In fact, the Knot is surprisingly political – at one point, a set of baddies are said to be trying to “make the galaxy great again”, though in another, a set of characters rebelling against unjust oppression are called “deplorables” – to editorialize for a moment, it’s a sad statement on current events that a game worrying about authoritarianism and fascism scans as topical (as you reach the ending, you encounter a character who’s unlocked the potential within the Knot and lists off the reality-bending now within their power, but who notes “but I can’t do anything about the Nazis”). Beyond these signifiers, the ending also seems to point to a vision of a sort of socialist utopia, as instead of exploiting the Knot as a mystical power source to be hoarded by those wishing power to defeat their enemies, it rather becomes distributed to all, granting a tiny bit of magic and hope to everyone. The Nazis are said not to understand what’s going on as the climax nears, and the ancient tomb they’re pursuing turns out to be made of papier-mâché. This doesn’t come off as leaden political allegory, though – the writing is fleet, and there’s lots of incidental text that’s very fun and funny (my favorite was the series of fairy tales that were all bent in a dystopic-capitalist direction).
All this makes the Knot a fun distraction with a clever gimmick and enough hints of depth to enliven its relatively straightforward puzzles. I was left wanting a little more, though – and actually, wonder whether in fact there are secrets beyond those needed to get to the ending (the introduction to the fairy tales protests perhaps a bit overmuch that they’re not related to the puzzles, and there are intimations that sussing out the identity of the player character in the sci-fi section might be important). Even if this is all that’s on offer, though, it’s still worth a play.
Sounds like evil, December 5, 2020I played this after a Comp entry that leaned almost entirely in the story direction, so it's interesting that At Night takes the opposite tack. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bit of a plot and some internal conflict – the main character is being plagued by nightmares, you see – but what’s distinctive about it is the combat system, which you need to master in order to reach a successful ending (reaching other endings, where you die horrible, is much simpler!)
The initial impression At Night makes is charming – there’s some cute pixel art, and good use of sound with raindrops outside the main character’s window as they play games late into the night. After finally going to sleep, though, they’re hurled (in their dreams?) into a hellish realm and meet a demon who’ll swallow their soul unless they fight for his amusement against a group of his servitors. This section was really frustrating, I found. When you first confront this head demon, you have a number of choices on how to proceed, including attacking flat-out or deciding what to offer him to get him to release you.
There’s only one correct answer here – the others get you killed – but I think I exhausted every wrong answer on the way to finding it, both because I wanted to run through the full dialogue tree before moving to the next bit, but also because the main character kept attacking the demon-lord when I was trying to agree to fight his minions. Part of the fault here is that I found some of the dialogue and options unclear: the game appears translated from Spanish (in one maze sequence, I saw the word “izquierda” substitute for “left”) and there are some puzzling phrases and awkward grammar at times (I was told that my “bladder has lost its youth”, and that “it is very good playing [video games] when it is a dog day”). Making things worse, there’s no save option, and there’s lots of timed text, making replays fairly excruciating.
Once I did figure out how to agree to the deal, things got better, thankfully. There’s a clever combat system that relies on using positional audio to track down and beat up the minions (who it turns out are ghosts, not demons). I did die once more because I thought you were supposed to elude the monsters – the main character is completely unarmed – but that just gives them a free hit. The combat minigame works well enough, and even got a laugh out of me because of how the interface is set up: you need to click “left” or “right” depending on where you hear the audio cue, except the screen lists “right” on the left, and “left” on the right, which lent my attempts a slapstick air as I tried to get my stupid, stupid brain to click in the correct place despite this confusing layout. After killing enough demons you win the game and wake up from your nightmare – though there’s the inevitable horror movie sting to suggest you haven’t (this is done in an entertainingly cheesy fashion that also got a laugh out of me).
There’s some clever technical design here, and I really did like the art, so this is a good foundation to build on. In a post-Comp release that tightens up the writing, and irons out some of the more frustrating aspects of the design, this would be a fun distraction, though At Night isn’t quite there yet.
Occultist Simulator, December 5, 2020Ascension of Limb applies effective horror theming to what’s mechanically a sort of card game (I think if you squint at it, it might be doing something like Cultist Simulator in parser-IF, though I’m not really sure since I only played Cultist Simulator for like 20 minutes before bouncing off of it, thinking I’d get back to it, and then all the Alexis Kennedy #MeToo stuff came out and, nope). The real fun is in replaying and optimizing, since there are a lot of different outcomes, both positive and negative.
For all that it is a very mechanical game, there is a fair bit of writing, and most of it is quite good. Honestly I’m a bit burned out on straight Lovecraft at this point, but the author really hits the tone, including not just the expected tropes about sinister cults and dark inheritances, but also paying attention to the internal stresses on the player character in a way that doesn’t just hit lazy stereotypes about mental illness. And on subsequent plays, you can enter an “Arcade” mode that skims over some of the more lugubrious bits of writing. There are several characters with whom to interact, though I thought more could have been done to give them a personality – the various customers come and go quickly, and most conversations wind up being alternate ways to engage with the mechanics.
Good news then that the systems are solidly built, and just as importantly, the game is well-paced so that a playthrough doesn’t stretch beyond the amount of content. There are clear early, middle, and late-games, with distinct challenges and risk/reward calculations to play out, and with clear signposting of the different paths to try to follow. Most of what you do is match a limited (but expanding) set of verbs to a limited (but expanding) set of nouns, while running a cursed antique shop.
The basic loop is of finding goods, some mundane but some rather unique and eldritch, in the labyrinthine recesses of the shop, promoting your store to bring in customers and their cash, then using the cash to improve the store and pay upkeep, while dealing with the odd raving loon or incident of vandalism. Going after anything beyond mere material remuneration, like ancient artifacts and forbidden lore, requires juggling additional mechanics including sanity and infamy, and considering making a variety of deals with a variety of devils.
This is a solid structure, and there are a good number of different things to be pursuing, or worry about going wrong, at any moment – beyond the three core victory paths, there are four or five different ways to lose if things start going badly along the different tracks. But the player usually has a good number of options to forestall disaster, plus UNDO is permitted which helps obviate some of the randomness of a few of the events, so it’s usually possible to settle back and play things safe. It’s relatively simple to get into a stable position, and then getting to the more interesting endgames is primarily about when you want to start taking bigger risks for bigger rewards, which seems appropriately in-theme. Towards the latter end of a play-through, interest can start to wane, since there’s only a finite store of characters, unique items, and special events, but I found this was only an issue when I was going for the special mega-ending that combines all three of the primary ones – otherwise it goes down sharp and easy.
I also wanted to call out that the included walkthrough is quite good, and makes for interesting reading as basically a set of design notes. I had to consult it to get the even more special bonus ending (Spoiler - click to show)(I could not figure out how to avoid being on good terms with the seer, since even trying to kill her wasn’t doing the trick! I don’t think I would have hit on either of the options for doing so on my own) but would definitely recommend doing so, though only after you’ve decided you’re finished playing because it lays everything quite bare.
Oh, and I can’t help sharing the way I customized the super secret ending:
(Spoiler - click to show)Let us begin a new spiritual task that will allow us to keep growing going forward. Let us ensure that even when our work is done, our work will continue. Let us show our initiative and make κλάδος proud. Let us believe in Puppies from now on. Let us cultivate puppies. Let us trust in puppies! After consulting the treatises of ανάβαση, I believe the best way to do this is by tail-wagging.
Janky, old-school fun, December 5, 2020There are two kinds of fantasy RPGs: the bad ones, where the wizard is named something dumb like Firganzallum or Thoranor or what have you, and the good ones, where the wizard is named Wizard. Ipso facto, this is one of the good ones.
All right, I’m being (slightly) tongue in cheek, but The Arkhill Darkness is not faffing about. You’re a fledgling adventurer who needs to free a town from an unearthly curse of darkness, so you hit the tavern to get quests from your mentor and chat with half a dozen people who have job titles where their names should be. There’s a faint tongue-in-cheekness about this, though proceedings mostly proceed in a po-faced way with a slight flavor of horror, and the writing sports some typos and comma errors, so altogether TAD conveys a distinctive (and to me at least, oddly appealing) author’s-first-game jankiness.
Gameplay-wise, this is a pretty clean adventure/RPG hybrid, with a clearly-delimited area to go to grind encounters for cash and ingredients, but most exploration plays out in a choice-based fashion with the occasional puzzle and less interspersal of combat than I expected ((Spoiler - click to show)maybe it’s just the choices I made, but there were only three set-piece encounters involving combat: the werewolf, where fighting is a losing game regardless of one’s stats, the landwurm, which is much more about minigame mechanics as far as I could tell, and then the dragon fight at the end).
The grinding didn’t seem to have much impact – I seemed to do as much damage, and if anything hit more frequently, when kicking as when using a weapon, and Wizard never followed through on his promise to brew me a potion with which to poison my axe – so the adventure side of things I think predominates over the RPG elements. The exploration sequences are fleet enough so as not to wear out their welcome, and use a variety of different approaches: there’s a traditional password-puzzle, a choose-the-right-option action sequence, and a climactic battle that involves some timing-based minigames (these were a fun idea, but very hard on my trackpad, for what it’s worth).
Throughout, the prose is functional, though typically a bit wordy and in need of an editing pass. There are some moments when things tip over into being more evocative, usually when the game is leaning into its horror vibe, as here when the player is battling a sort of monstrous congeries of five or six different sorcery-warped horses:
"As the horsething continues to advance upon you, you dart towards the underbelly of the horsething. As you do, you have an idea. You pull out your Axe and begin to hack its legs as you run. It is clear the horsething was not expecting this move. It stumbles as you cut off a couple of its legs. You dive forward, as the beast falls to its underbelly. You turn and start chopping of its heads, one by one. The horsething screams as its head come off. Even with the last head dismembered, its necks flail around. At last the flailing stops, as it’s last scream turns into the a weak wheeze."
Grammar issues and typos aside, this is pretty metal.
TAD’s not exactly a diamond in the rough – I don’t think it’s sufficiently ambitious, and its highs are really just about evoking warm feelings of familiarity – but I had a fun old time with it: perhaps the quintessential “if you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this thing” game.
(Oh, and a quick warning: despite there being a Save Game option, I could never get it to work. Fortunately there’s back/forward functionality throughout the story, so it’s not a major concern).
Questionably amazing, December 5, 2020Hey, a Nick Montfort game! I loved Ad Verbum! But this is, uh, not that. I saw a couple of forum threads talking about this game before I’d played it, and let my curiosity get the better of me, which I think was to the good in terms of level-setting my expectations, but really did ruin the gag. I think now that the Comp is over, most folks know what's up with this one (and other reviews on this page spell out what's what) so I'm not going to spoiler-block the rest of the review, but fair warning that I discuss exactly how the game's central mechanic works.
So this is a Mad-Libs text generator in a lightly-implied science-fantasy setting. There’s an overwrought introduction and even “strategy guide” that orient you towards the game – more on those later – but the program just spits out a series of yes/no questions prompted by telling you that your fleet has come across an ADJECTIVE NOUN (“hexagonal outpost”, “dim land”, “luminous planet”, etc.) and allowing you to VERB (“seek out help”, “sneak up and raid”, “speak plainly”), or not. You get a result, which could be positive (“you win cattle”) or negative (“a ship lost!”), but this is based entirely on a die roll and the outcomes are completely disconnected from the choices, and even the situations (like, winning cattle seems a logical result of raiding an outpost, but refusing to speak plainly in a tiny capital will likewise sometimes net you a reward of kine). And there’s zero state-tracking.
So the game qua game can’t really hold one’s interest for more than a minute or two, and the prose, as you can tell from the examples above, is likewise workmanlike at best. What there is is the intro and strategy guide. The first lines of the game itself are “The gods grant victory. Now go home!”, but above the game window is the motto “I must decide as if it all depends on me, trust as if it all depends on the gods.” And throughout the page-and-a-half strategy guide, the reader is confronted with a series of questions and statements prompting them to second-guess whether any course of action is better than any other, given that anything could happen and your ideas of what’s safe or unsafe might not be right. There’s also a lot of verbiage about how the player’s “cultural world-view” might structure how they understand what you “might think of as” chance or chaos.
There’s a point being made here, or at least a question being asked, about agency and subjectivity and what if the real game isn’t being played on the screen but in our heads comma man. I’m not saying the point/question is necessarily a bad one to be raising, to be clear! There are different interpretations you can put on what Amazing Quest is offering up, and probably someone more attuned to the aesthetics of the Commodore-64 presentation experiences it differently than I, who never had one, do.
But I don’t think that the way this reasonable question is being raised is very interesting or successful. Execution matters a lot! Like, think about how Rameses, or the unjustifiably-forgotten 19th-place-finisher-in-the-2002-IFComp Constraints, are all about a lack of agency and paralysis, but they give the player a lot to do and are rewarding to engage with. Now compare them to a notional game – let’s call it Bartleby – that presents a situation but responds to literally every player input with “I would prefer not to.” Same point, sure. But while Constraints left me dancing around the room making comparisons to Dubliners – oh yes, I was even more pretentious as a 21-year-old than I am today – I doubt I’d have anything like the same reaction to our imaginary Bartleby, and to my mind Amazing Quest is much closer to that, I’m going to say wrong, side of the spectrum. There’s something here, sure, and if you’re so inclined it can prompt you to think interesting thoughts – but I’m not so inclined so there you are, my thoughts about it are uninteresting.
A foreboding puzzler, December 5, 2020(I beta tested this game)
There are a few games in this year’s Comp that gain resonance from having been written in 2020 – Babyface, for example, where the way COVID limits the main character’s ability to interact with their father is an important part of the overall discombobulation the game is imparting. Alone also falls into this category: despite the fact that it doesn’t specifically mention the current pandemic and draws on common post-apocalyptic and zombie fiction tropes, the game’s aura of isolation and fear of infection would not land with nearly so much impact in a different year. That’s not to say that it’s only because of current events that the game works, to be clear – the prose is admirably sparse and the I found the sequence where you’re at risk from one of the infected fairly tense – but there is a little extra frisson from playing Alone now.
The game itself is relatively straightforward in premise – after running out of gas on a lonely stretch of highway, your post-apocalyptic survivor hikes to an abandoned gas station only to find more than they bargained for. There’s some secret backstory to uncover, but it’s nothing too fancy (though I did find one aspect – (Spoiler - click to show)the rationale behind a collapsing government concealing a secret research facility under a gas station – a bit odd and underexplained). Really the focus here is on puzzle solving, so good thing that they’re solid and fairly well-clued. Most involve using machinery or tools in a reasonable way, with most relatively straightforward though there are a couple that involve some more complex mechanisms ((Spoiler - click to show)the control panel is fun to play around with, though it can also lock you into a sub-optimal ending if you play around too much). There were a few that sparked aha moments for me, which is always satisfying ((Spoiler - click to show)the cinder block puzzle, and figuring out how to use the control panel to get the best ending). The structure is maybe a little more linear than would be ideal – though the map is relatively open, there’s usually only one puzzle you can work on at a time. But since the puzzles are fair and not too challenging, this doesn’t present too much of a problem.
Technically, Alone is well put-together: I didn’t run into guess the verb or disambiguation issues in the release version, and the only typo I noticed this time out was a missing line break that make the paragraph spacing look odd in the dumbwaiter sequence. And it has a deceptive amount of choice built into it as you come close to the end of the game, with several different possible endings. While I found these more compelling as a goad to solve the last puzzles correctly than as alternate narrative resolutions, I think that’s fine – characterization and plot aren’t Alone’s area of focus, and it succeeds admirably in presenting a series of fun puzzles in a foreboding atmosphere.
A divine inversion, December 5, 2020So there was this book that circulated amongst the, shall we say, less-popular kids when I was in high school and college (the mid to late 90s, for reference) – the Illuminatus! Trilogy, by two dudes named Robert. It’s this frothy, over-the-top, drug-fueled mélange of Philip K. Dick sci-fi tropes, secret-society paranoia, revisionist history, anarchist theory and praxis, Tantric sex, gnostic apocalyptica, and like twenty other things all cut together in high-Seventies style. I don’t know whether people still read it these days, or if it would have the same impact in a world with Wikipedia, but I remember it as a big deal because it connected basically everything a certain kind of person might be into – any individual sorta-weirdo probably was big into, and familiar with, a portion of what was on offer, but certainly not all. And in fact I think of there being two main channels into it – first, you could be a dork coming to it from the sci-fi, history, and religion side of things (it me), or alternately it was also big with the folks who took a bunch of drugs and were excited about blowing up authority.
Illuminatus! isn’t mentioned in the Brobdingnagian acknowledgments page for Accelerate, so I suppose there’s no direct linkage, but I share that to give some partial flavor of what’s contained in this maximalist work, and also to acknowledge that while I think I get a lot of what’s going on here, I’m aware that I’m significantly too square to be the ideal audience for the piece – like, through my choices I think I made Accelerate’s transgender divine assassin sometimes feel a little normcore? So while I thought it was really good, I suspect there’s a chunk of folks to whom this will be amazing (and also a chunk of folks for whom this will really not be their thing, of course).
This is one of those games that’s hard to figure out how to get one’s pick into, so I’ll fall back on some structure to make it seem like my thoughts all connect up. I don’t think it’s worth trying to write about this piece without getting fairly spoilery, so I haven’t bothered to use tags, but fair warning that you should really play this for yourself, and only then come back to the remainder of what I’ve written.
1. The saha world of birth-and-death
(By which I mean, what is going on within the fictional world of the game – there is probably a way to write about Accelerate that does not involve reaching for the most pretentious references you can think of, but where’s the fun in that?)
Though the introduction to the game is intentionally jumbled up and disorienting, what’s going on here is relatively straightforward – the protagonist, an inhabitant of a repressive and despoiled future that is not different from today in any significant respect, feels a kind of internal brokenness. They check themselves into a sort of clinic, partially to score some drugs, but eventually enter into the spirit of the program, which involves transformation and transcendence of the self (the body, the mind, the soul – transgenderism is a strong element here but isn’t, I think, the whole of what’s going on). However, it turns out that the program doesn’t stop there, and is also focused on external change – soon the protagonist is going on high-stakes missions to disrupt capitalism, government, and religion, and in the climax hijacks a spaceship-chariot and storms the Garden of Eden to immanetize the eschaton by exploding the demiurge with a cancer-bomb.
So like I said, simple, straightforward stuff.
Though the overall arc here is I think fixed, there are nonetheless significant pieces of interactivity, through what I think are three primary types of choices. First, there are lots of opportunities to either get more detail, or speed through some of the denser parts of the narrative – I pretty much always opted to explore since I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the writing, but since I barely finished within two hours and others might be less into e.g. reading like 5,000 of a fictionalized interview transcript in between the main plot arc progressing, I think these were a nice convenience. The second set of choices are about giving the player an opportunity to characterize their, or the protagonist’s, responses to what’s going on – ones that I don’t think dramatically shift the story, but offer a welcome invitation to the player to engage with what’s being presented and own it through shaping a reaction.
The third set of choices are the most traditionally gamey, and allow what I think are whole scenes or sequences to be opted into or out of. There was a bit early on where the protagonist had the option of sneaking into the clinic’s basement to search out drugs, but I took a nap instead (told you I was normcore!) There’s also a big set-piece midway through where the player has a choice of different missions to disrupt society – I got a suicide-bombing at a punk show, but from reading other reviews it seems like there’s also an art gallery sequence on offer. So while the overall arc of the narrative appears pretty fixed, the choices do have a significant impact – in particular, the horrifying, civilian-directed violence of that punk-show chapter strongly colored how I experienced everything that came after, so I’m curious how the other branches would change things.
2. Logos
But look, none of the above would be worth very much if it wasn’t written like getting the right words on the page was a matter of life and death. The whole thing is animated by a feral, demented energy that goes way, way over the top, and sure, sometimes stumbles on itself, but is grabby as fuck. I was copy-and-pasting passages that I wanted to remember as I was playing, and wound up with over 2,000 words accumulated by the end. I’m going to excerpt one early bit of world-building at length so you can see what it’s like:
"Tracksuited guerillas, insurgent corpses arranged in strict lines and half-buried in the mud, tanks burnt to husks with broiled gunners hanging out the top, men in traction, bandage golems with zero visible skin, mothers clutching photos over corpses, raucous funerals spilling into the street, apartments burning, soldiers moving down the boulevard, blurs across an insensitive filmstrip, infants with white phosphorus birthmarks and depleted uranium rosacea, teenage boys in covered wagons and armored personnel carriers, sharp military uniforms and wry quarter-smiles, balaclava-clad youths like saplings on the hill, frozen corpses with hellish graffiti outlines drawn over their chest in the new snow, artillery backblast spraying topsoil meters into the air, gunshot eyes, fingers, jaws, testicles, feuds and rivalries sworn for centuries, gods forsaken and rediscovered, children defiled, defaced, strangled, in any order, people of all colors and ages cut down with firearms and bayonets, megaliters of tears mixing with poisoned groundwater, teeth gnashed and garments rent, blood-bright flowers laid across monochromatic funereal garb, a million amateur cenotaphs, rifles, cairns, and crosses dropping like location pins across every populated zone, streams of tracers like furious red whips against the clouded night, the high wasp howl of high-caliber bullets as they pass the ear, the thumping low note as they drive their way through flesh, like an axe-wielding man chopping through an entire cow in one swing, houses blown apart in broad tornado scars, roads and dancehalls empty, barrel bombs landing all bass no treble vacuuming blood and air out of all they touch, foreheads torn open like gift wrapping, hollow-point violets wide, essences quickly devoured by that which proceeds battle, preteens with eyes full of genocide already, bootprints in congealing viscera, senile veterans gibbering like the rabid, mothers too gone to nurse or produce, babies like dry leaves, mad-eyed warlords with huge grins and bigger jokes, murals peppered by bullet and blast, toddlers playing on abandoned military vehicles, outside homes-now-crypts, concentration camps, mass graves, faded stadiums and gymnasia, human abattoirs now empty save for the wind, abandoned, rusting instruments of torture, broken skeletons, thin polymer roofing torn to maypole shreds, falling with leaves in late autumn."
This is the kind of thing that’s easy to do very very badly – and maybe you think this is bad, fair enough! It’s definitely unpleasant. But while I’m old and technocratic now, I remember being young and angry and thinking and writing things like this right after 9/11, when we started invading and bombing everybody in sight. This style works, it compels, and it doesn’t let up. I don’t want to just keep regurgitating bits of writing I liked, because again I’ve got 1,700 more words where that came from, but the language is intense, it’s smart, it’s playful and self-referential – it’s grim, so very grim, but leavened with joy and jokes as well. Two full hours of being in this world might not seem the most appealing prospect – and to be fair, it isn’t meant to be, and it isn’t – but it was the quality of prose that kept me going.
All right, here’s one more, a description of a spaceship dogfight of all things: “Hamish sends flaming whips at our pursuers. One flashes to dust in the dark. Each spirals outwards in sine waves of decreasing frequency, whirling towards us.”
The visual design of the game itself is also quite smooth and pleasing. The fonts, colors, and animation all work to keep the focus on the text, while frequent chapter-breaks parcel out a story that would feel overwhelming if undifferentiated. My setup doesn’t lend itself to audio, unfortunately, so I wasn’t able to experience the music, though it appears a lot of thought and effort went into that.
3. The realm of forms
As is hopefully clear from the above, there are a lot of ideas at play in Accelerate, and even more references. Again, the acknowledgments are comprehensive and worth a read, though many of them are catchable as you go (Accelerate confirms my theory that if you ever see someone use the word “preterite”, there is a 75% chance they are winking at Thomas Pynchon, and a 25% chance they are themselves Thomas Pynchon). You’ve got Jacob wrestling the angel, 1990s space-rock band Spiritualized, the Albigensian heresy, and way way more within the fictional conceit of the world – and in the authors notes and acknowledgments, a clear invocation and situation of the piece within (what is at least presented as) a personal history of trauma and reclamation, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more.
If I were to try to sum up the ideological action as compactly as possible (which, to be clear, is probably not a particularly useful or interesting thing to do), it’s the Gnosticism that rises to the top. Accelerate, it seems to me, is about how the material world we inhabit is broken, fallen, and incomplete – and it makes this case convincingly! It posits that this is the result of a betrayal by an evil Archon, and that through personal and societal transcendence we can reclaim our birthright of immanence. And it portrays that redemption happening through often-horrifying violence visited upon often-anonymous people who are complicit in evil through their silence and acquiescence.
This is fair, as far as it goes – within the fictional world, the baddies certainly give better than they get, and épater la bourgeoisie is a hallowed strategy. And it also echoes some of the alleged deeds of the worst of the gnostics, whose revulsion at the fallen nature of the material world led some to commit enormities (at least in the unreliable narration of their orthodox enemies). Still, at a time when catharsis through violence animates so much of our art and, more to the point, our politics… it made me feel bad (the pathetic, mewling cry of the too-subjective critic). To be clear, Accelerate isn’t positing an ethic of brutality – the authors note in particular offers (again, apparently real-world) forgiveness for an awful crime – but I did feel like I sensed some quiet sorting of wheat and tares, of who is given the chance to be redeemed and who is not.
Wrapping up here feels like ending on a sour note, but I hope the author(s) will forgive that. Accelerate certainly wasn’t written for everyone; a large chunk of it worked very well for me, and it’s not too hard to imagine the person for whom it fires on all cylinders. It’s a wonderful, well-conceived and well-executed experience, and one I won’t forget anytime soon.
Lots to unpack, December 5, 2020Oh, I just got (Spoiler - click to show)got why the subtitle’s funny.
Academic Pursuits is a funny, focused game with an assured narrative voice, and while there are no puzzles to speak of, there’s plenty of entertainment to be had fiddling about its one-room setting. The player character has to unpack their boxes after an office move – they’ve just taken a new job at a university – and while the nuts and bolts of the gameplay involves finding small, medium, and large spaces for the small, medium, and large items coming out of the boxes a few at a time, the real engagement comes from peeling back the player character’s backstory and characterization.
This is done in several layers: most prosaically by EXAMINING each item in turn, but there’s also a THINK ABOUT verb implemented which provides some additional context and hints at the player character’s history with the item. You can get further information, and views into the protagonist’s character, depending on where you place the item: you could put the farewell card from your old colleagues in a prominent place on your desk or bookshelf, secreted away in a bottom drawer of your desk, or simply chuck it into the rubbish bin. In each case, you’ll get a response showing you more of the player character’s thought process, and also might make an impact on the mood of your room – there are a few objects that have a rather dour aspect, like a jar of soil where you’re unsuccessfully trying to grow some flowers, and putting too many of them out will lead to your office being described as having a gloomy mood.
There’s a story – or maybe it’s better to say a situation – that emerges from all of this, and it’s fun to piece together this tale of academic rivalry with a twist. It’s fairly simple to get the broad strokes of what’s going on ((Spoiler - click to show)I figured out the protagonist’s deal as soon as I started messing around with the first object, a mug with suspicious dark stains – and yes, the jar of soil isn’t really for flowers), but the relationship between the main character and the Professor has clearly taken some twists and turns that are fun to try to trace through, even if they didn’t all clearly resolve for me. The writing is strong throughout, boasting clean prose with nary a typo to be seen, and a wry, arch tone that’s full of small jokes and double-entendres.
The implementation is similarly solid – though the main action involves juggling multiple items into different containers, with size always being an important factor, objects can be dropped places and swapped fairly easily, with a minimum of parser annoyance. This is important since seeing the end will probably require rejiggering your solution once or twice, as a new object emerging from a late box will often upend your plans. The one niggle I ran into was that uncharacteristically for an Inform game, I couldn’t refer to the “wide shelf” or the “narrow shelf” as simply WIDE or NARROW, which was simple to work around.
My only real disappointment with the game is that I’d hoped for a bit more reactivity from the ending. As far as I can tell, there’s not an optimum solution to the unpacking puzzle that puts every object somewhere, and the tradeoffs you’re forced to make are implied to be reflective of how you’re playing the main character – at least some objects will need to be discarded, and as you put each one in the rubbish bin there’s a small judgment voiced about why the protagonist is doing that and what it says about their character, and the same is true of which objects you choose to display openly and which you hide. Based on that, I’d been expecting that there’d be some summing up of my choices at the end, with a statement about what they all said about my version of the protagonist. But I didn’t notice anything of the sort, just a quick reference to the objects I’d left easily visible that restricted itself to the concrete.
Working out the combinatorial possibilities here I’m sure would be exhausting – my game has a similar, but much simpler, setup in one of its puzzles, and implementing it nearly broke me – though I thought it would have provided a neat bow on the whole experience. But even without that, Academic Pursuits still makes for a lovely game – nothing wrong with focusing on the journey, not the destination, after all.
A duel of words, December 5, 2020Conversations are the central part of (s)wordsmyth – hang up, we’re not doing this.
Conversations are the central part of wordsmyth (the s is in parentheses so it’s silent, and besides “word” is a better fit for the themes of the game than “sword”). Where other games might have set-piece battles or a fiendish puzzle, this one is paced around a series of one-on-one or two-on-one (and even a single one-and-a-half-on-one) dialogues between the main character – a swordsperson-in-training seeking vengeance, or at least closure, after the death of their mentor – and those who lie in the path of the journey. Each one requires a different approach, and to pick out the course to a successful resolution from the thicket of options requires empathy and attention to detail. It also requires a large dollop of luck, so you’ll be replaying some of these sequences a lot.
The world is only thinly sketched-in, but it’s clearly a mystical take on an Asian milieu (I’m not familiar enough with the tropes to be able to resolve it with more specificity than that). These tropes, as well as the nature of the character’s quest, set you up to expect the main character to be a warrior-monk, or dedicated swordsman. Refreshingly, though, the focus is on confrontations that must be resolved with social skills, rather than resorting to violence. The backstory here, and the big bad at the end of the path too, don’t stick to the typical notes, and seeing my presuppositions shift as the game went kept me engaged in the fairly standard hero’s-journey narrative. The writing doesn’t try for anything fancy, but is largely solid and typo-free, while succeeding at differentiating the voices of the various characters.
There are two aspects of the way the story is told that undercut my enjoyment of wordsmyth, though. The first is the presentation: the game is set up in visual-novel style, with dialogue delivered sentence by sentence, necessitating a click to advance after each. This is not my favorite format for a game, but in a visual novel the tradeoff is that you get a lot of screen real estate given to the art, which hopefully helps evoke the scene or communicate the mood of a character or what have you. Here, though, there’s no art, so most of the time three quarters of the screen is completely black, and you're staring at a small text box at the bottom (when choices come up, they fill the screen). There’s also no skip-text option that I could find, which made replaying sequences to make different choices a slog.
This is no minor issue because of the second thing: the author says they tried to make a choose-your-own-adventure game, and they certainly succeeded to the extent that there are a LOT of ways to die. You can die by picking the wrong one of two dialogue choices that seem indistinguishable (when confronting a hungry monster, you can ask what it wants to eat, or tell it you can get it anything it desires. One of these allows progress, the other puts you on the menu). You can die by saying you want to go back, when you should say you want to go home. You can die by asking to take your turn hiding after a round of hide and seek. You can even die by going the wrong way a crossroads.
There’s no manual saving, so each death means rewinding to the beginning of the encounter and trying again. Many of these conversations go at least ten options deep, so this can be a long, slow process of trial and error that becomes an exercise in exhausting all the choices rather than trying to engage with what’s happening and weigh the right move. It could be that I just wasn’t paying enough attention, but too often I felt like my ability to progress was arbitrary, and by the time I got to the second half of the game, at least 80% of the choices felt like they had one right option and one or more that led to an instant game over.
This is a shame because there was some fun to be had along the way – I liked meeting the (Spoiler - click to show)ghost child, and some of the fencing with the (Spoiler - click to show)cat spirit, and there are a few neat twists around the final encounter that are clever and sit nicely with the quiet theme of nonviolence that runs throughout. I’m glad I suffered through the punishing gauntlet of choices to get there, but really wish I hadn’t had to.
Wonkily educational, December 5, 2020This is one of only two games in the 2020 Comp with the “educational” genre tag and credit where it’s due, it lives up to the billing. #VanLife is ship’s-biscuit dry, and while I can see the appeal of a rigorous, math-y renewable energy simulator, some implementation wonkiness and punishing difficulty spikes make the experience hard to enjoy.
The setup is a bit odd, but fine as far as things go: you’ve decided to live in a solar-powered van, so have to spend your days balancing power usage, purchasing upgrades for your power-generation system and your appliances, and occasionally posting inspirational quotes to Twitter, while hopefully making enough money from photography and freelance work to repay your #VanLoan. The gameplay is highly regimented: you start each day with social media, then you’re given two or three choices about how to carry out your daily tasks, usually involving some tradeoff between your mood and your batteries: you might need to decide whether the heat the water before doing the dishes, or see your mood decrease as your hands turn blue. Occasionally you get the chance to buy a new tea-kettle or oven. In between decisions, you’re often asked math and physics questions – it felt like 80 percent of them were simple variants on Ohm’s Law, though, so I didn’t find them very interesting, and it was unclear what effect, if any, getting the quiz questions right or wrong had on the game systems.
The implementation definitely feels wobbly. There are numerous typos, including one (“millage” for “mileage”) in the first game passage, followed quickly by a “you’re parents”. The interface is a bit obfuscated, too – I was confused by references in some of the pop-up hits to a side menu, which turns out is concealed under a pink arrow that’s only intermittently visible (it leads to a hideously complex series of menus and shopping options that’s pretty unfriendly, so maybe this is a mixed blessing). And while you can always see your mood and battery levels as a percentage, for the battery that’s not that helpful since you need to know the specific Watt-hours you’ve got in order to make good choices (in most of the decision points, you get told the current and voltage the appliance uses as well as a duration, rather than “running the water heater will use 10% of your battery’s capacity”). And there are flat-out bugs – after I restarted from my first failed run, the game started playing itself, automatically clicking options and shuffling through the choices faster than I could read them (a second reset fixed things, though). Plus the math on the loan repayment seemed off to me – I could only choose to repay a few cents per day, when actually I needed to pony up several orders of magnitude more to stay out of the red.
Compounding the unfriendliness of the game, some decision points are real widowmakers. Typically you’ll face choices that can impact your mood gauge by maybe 10-30%, but there are some that can drain you by almost half the gauge. These mood-killers require huge tradeoffs on the power-management side – having to run fans overnight to stay cool, or keep a laptop on for eight hours of work, seem to impose a ruinous toll on your batteries. And there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason behind when you’ll get socked with one of these spikes, meaning that you can’t even prepare for them by prioritizing mood or power in the run-up. As a result, even playing at the easiest difficulty level, I never made it more than four or five days in.
This is very negative, unfortunately, but that’s an accurate reflection of my time with the game – more focus on making the game parts fun, and a bit more forgiving, would make #VanLife a better pedagogical tool.
My favorite game of the comp, October 31, 2020This review is republished from r.g.i-f, where it was posted at the conclusion of the 2002 IFComp.
My favorite game of the comp, hands down. Presented as a series of vignettes, each with a central idea revolving around (funnily enough) constraint and paralysis, the game uses the IF format to masterful effect in exploring different aspects of the central problem; in format and theme, it recalls Joyce's Dubliners, and amazingly enough fails to suffer
from the comparison. Inevitably, the parser that one uses to interact with a gameworld is limited to a certain set of responses, and while this
limitation is usually seen as a hurdle to be overcome in creating a
wide-open simulation, Constraints employs it as a devastating tool, drawing the player's attention to how little control they really have.
The high concept behind Constraints is wonderful, but what really makes this game work, and work brilliantly, is the depth in each of the vignettes. The first two could have easily become exercises in boredom, as the player guides a character who cannot affect his/her/its environment in any real way. But the range of actions the game recognizes - in the falling scenario, obvious things like listening or flying, but also screaming and thinking - allows the player to push against the edges of the box, able to feel and perceive, but ultimately unable to act. The second vignette one-ups the first, as a similar (but ironically reversed) sense of impotence is presented against a rich background. A story is unwinding before the player's eyes, but no matter how much the viewpoint character wishes to become part of the narrative, it negates any attempt the character makes to impose itself. The sequence acts as a clever statement on IF in general, and the nested narratives - the story is about two lovers discussing a play - adds a complementary sense of post-modern vertigo, underscoring that it is not only the player character who is powerless to assume the author's role, but the player as well.
The third scenario is perhaps the most conventional bit of IF in the work, but again, expectations are subverted. There are no external directives or obstacles; the player character takes it upon himself to do something, and then neatly prevents himself from acting at all. Again, what could have been an exercise in frustration is rendered compelling through a painstakingly deep simulation, which allows the player
to attempt perhaps a dozen different acts of protest. While those who
disagree with the character's beliefs and politics might find the scenario a chore, it nonetheless functions as a compelling examination of a single character's personality, an element in a larger work that highlights self-imposed paralysis, a discussion about the role of the individual in the modern world, and a fun bit of puzzling.
The final bit of Constraints is a non-game; the player is presented with a Nethack-style dungeon, with an impressive array of possible actions listed along the side of the screen. But there's nothing to listen to, nothing to pick up, no map to read, no wand to fire, no food to eat. All there is, is the dungeon, corridor after featureless corridor, with an occasional staircase down to a lower level. Indeed, the staircases are the most brilliant part of the design - after some experimentation, I found that the stairs down would only appear after about 90 percent of the map has been explored. The very act of exploring, of pushing against the surrounding darkness, itself creates another level of dungeon below, expanding the unexplored regions and keeping the player farther from the goal of reaching the end. The sheer emptiness of the dungeon acts as a sort of goad - the player races from level to level, sure that there must be something around the next corner, some end in sight, some point to it all. But the only possible action, as in the third scenario, is the non-action of quitting the game.
I seem to be on the same wavelength as the author, which probably aided my enjoyment of the game; in fact, I finished reading House of Leaves (which the author credits as an inspiration for the design of the final maze section) only hours before playing the game! But by any measure, Constraints is a masterpiece, fearless and innovative, meriting comparison to the best static fiction in its brilliant integration of format and substance into a elegant whole. I'm quite literally running out of superlatives; this is perhaps the best thing I've seen anyone do with IF.
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