Reviews by Mike Russo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This extends to the effects of the flood, too:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What have you been up to?”

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

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

“Plently.” She lets the conversation die there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last year’s THON was my introduction to the Lewd Mod extended universe – as of this writing, IFDB lists 13 different games, demos, and excerpts, the relationship and interconnections between which are obscure to unpack. They appear to all share some curious idiosyncrasies, though. The most obvious is that they’re pornographic games that present images pandering to an exceedingly specific demographic: people turned on by naked ladies drawn with MS-Paint-style graphics and no eyes. The fact that they have no eyes is never diegetically commented on, to my knowledge (in fact, Noir, which will get to in a moment, has two separate times when a character draws attention to eyes, one mentioning her “angry glare” in one picture or another drawing attention to a character’s “shifty eyes”. This feels like some kind of lampshading, but I don’t get it).

The structure is also fundamentally the same: the interface looks like a phone, you chat with a sexy lady, choosing dialogue options to move the conversation along in between the sexy pics. And they all seem to act as free teasers for full, paid games (the author’s Patreon is prominently mentioned) where, presumably, the really hot stuff lies.

Noir changes things up in adding an additional layer of gameplay. Here, you’ve been recruited by a spy agency to help them catch whoever’s surveilling their agents; you do this by reviewing a bunch of photos and flagging whichever depict one of their spies. How, you might ask, are you to identify these mistresses of the unknown? Well, these are special spies who always wear red hats. So if there’s a red hat in the picture you push the right-hand button, otherwise you push the one on the left (how finding the red-hat people, and not the people spying on the red-hat people, is supposed to help, is not explained).

While this does serve to break up the dialogue, everything about this is incredibly dumb, and as with the eyes, the game insists on drawing attention to itself – your main interlocutor this time is named Agent Scarlett, and you can ask her where these photos are coming from, and she has some hand-wave about social media feeds, hacked red-light cameras, and so on. But like, there are pictures of random ladies alone in their showers, I’m pretty sure the red-light cameras aren’t looking at that! Meanwhile, if you ask about the name of the agency you’re working for, you get this deathless prose:

It’s the hats, OK?

We wear Red Hats.

So we call ourselves the Red Hats.

Satisfied?

Anyway, it is easy to make fun of how unrealistic this is, and of course this is not exactly feminist-friendly porn that respect’s women’s bodies and identities; a major plot element is that Agent Scarlett treats you with barely-disguised contempt because her former partner was also her lover, but he slept around on her because her boobs were too small (I’m no expert on bra sizes, but from the nude pics you of course eventually get of her, Scarlett is rocking at least a C cup).

But playing two Lewd Mod games last year clued me in on the secret interpretation that makes these games a lot of fun: you just assume that these people are married thirty-somethings trying out some sexy roleplaying on the one night a month they’ve got babysitting, so while they’re extremely horny they’re also extremely bad at all this. Like, clearly they thought up this spy theme, and thought the red fedora thing seemed sexy (possibly they got spies confused with private detectives) so they Google image-searched “red hats porn” and ran with it, yes-anding the first ideas that popped into their heads and talking like hormone-poisoned teenagers whose tongues are way, way ahead of their brains (when Scarlett – not a girl’s girl – runs down her ex-partners’ paramours, she says they were “full of tits and easy with them.” Meanwhile, the less said about the PC’s dialogue choices, the better).

And so it’s no surprise how my playthrough ended: after a sexy striptease involving Scarlett pouring liquor all over her body – which would have been hotter if she, y’know, had eyes, like a significant majority of the human race – she suddenly realizes this might not have been the best idea:

Look, I gotta go.

I’m suddenly out of booze??

And kind of need a shower.

Godspeed, Agent Scarlett. Better tip the babysitter so you can try again next month.

The art of naming fictional places is a tricky one (and one I’ve never had much facility with), so kudos to take me to the lakes… for nailing it. Lake Dioscuri invokes the twins Castor and Pollux – one a demigod, the other fully human, due to Greek-mythological shenanigans one shouldn’t inquire too closely into – which is a more than apt reference for the game’s themes of reflected identities. But to my ear, in combination with the title it also calls to mind Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley told the story that became Frankenstein to an audience of poets: if there’s a monster in take me to the lakes…, it’s one whose misdeeds can’t be meaningfully separated from its creator’s.

Presentation-wise, this is a Decker kinetic novel – so while the only interactivity is clicking to advance to the next bit of story, the electronic presentation makes perfect sense; Decker’s moody monochrome art is a perfect complement to the text, painted in glistening grayscale stipple-effects like someone put a film noir classic on a mid-80s Mac. Of course this is something you’d play on the computer!

The noir vibe is completely on point given that things open with the trenchcoat-clad protagonist monologuing about a body being found in the lake. We never get outside that subjective POV, even as the story takes some twists and turns, making meaning – much less truth – a slippery thing. The pas de deux (Spoiler - click to show)(or… pas de une?) between the narrator and Elizabeth, a poet who is the object of their obsession, is well realized, with abstract considerations of identity, inspiration, and jealousy grounded in a blunt corporeality:

"You knew the way it breathed, the way it sighed… and it’s all gone now. All gone with her."

(The “it” is Elizabeth’s body).

My one small kick against the writing is that it occasionally undermines its effectiveness with repetition; “all [Elizabeth’s] poems were about one of two things: love and drowning” is a great line, making the unnecessary follow-up (“Elizabeth was obsessed with the vision of sliding down into the lake and disappearing without a trace”) seem limp by comparison. And the ending likewise has a couple sentences that feel like they’re going over already-plowed ground.

But these are minor nits to pick, and the climactic move of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(revealing that the poet wished to be a muse instead) is a unique and satisfying way to bring things to a close. Meanwhile, I’ve got no critique at all of the visuals – I don’t usually spend a lot of time on graphics in IF, but my notes are filled with oohing and aahing at the pictures (there’s one of a hand reaching out from the waves that I especially liked). That great place-name is just one of the well-chosen details that make take me to the lakes… a unified and engaging aesthetic experience.

Between last year’s THON and this one, I’ve played a bunch of super-short games, which has been a novel experience for me – since I mostly just play things I’m going to review, I don’t typically seek out jam entries as my sense is the typical entrant isn’t necessarily looking for a nitpicky review longer than their game was. It’s been illuminating to see different theories about craft play out – or fail – on the unforgiving stage of a game whose text could fit on one or two pages, and Habeas Corpus is no different. This 1,000 word Twine game has cool visual design reminiscent of the early 90s, all pixelated fonts and chunky buttons, and some parser-like gameplay elements allowing you to visit different areas and solve a (simple) inventory puzzle. It’s also got some individual moments of arresting imagery. But the lesson it teaches is the importance of focus: without a strong central spine around which these pieces can cohere, I was left feeling like the game is less than the sum of its (each quite cool) parts.

Start with the title: the great writ of habeas corpus is one of the foundational legal protections against tyranny, as allows the sovereign to be brought to court to confirm whether it’s detaining someone, and if so, what authority justifies their incarceration and where they can be found – the Latin literally means “you have the body”. It’s a title pregnant with possibility, but any relation to the game is hard to suss out: rather than a crusading lawyer, you play a (amnesiac?) cipher exploring a mostly-deserted base. One ending allows you to rescue a harpy-phoenix whose torment seems to provide power to the facility, so I suppose there’s kind of a thematic link there if you squint, but the other ending sees you go to sleep forever in a bunk next to a dying man, which feels farther afield. Meanwhile, the blurb reveals that the theme for the jam that produced this game was “ENVIRONMENT”, so I guess the harpy is actually a fossil-fuels allegory? And who knows what this has to do with the 90s, or the subtitle of “abandoned spaces, perpetual motion.”

A really strong prose style could do a lot to knit things together, but while there are some individually memorable phrases, there’s frequently an indeterminacy to the writing that’s frustrating in a piece that’s in need of nailing down. Like, here’s a line from the opening:

"The room around you feels still as a held breath despite the ceaseless motion of the structure itself."

That’s an interesting idea, but it’s sure self-contradictory, and the implications of what it says about the PC or the situation aren’t explored. There are similar oppositions embedded in this description of the facility’s doors:

"The remaining doors each bear plaques beaten from dark, glittering alloys. Light seems to drip from their deeply engraved words."

The puzzle, meanwhile, is about as stripped-down as it can be (there’s exactly one takeable object in the game, and exactly one situation in which you’re prompted to use it), and of the five room you can visit, one seems to exist just to hold the aforementioned object, while enough doesn’t even have that much going on. Thin gameplay in a short game is no big deal, of course, but in the absence of compelling characters or a dramatic plot or electric writing, it’s one more opportunity to provide a strong central element that the game passes up.

The counterargument here would be to argue that sometimes heterogeneity has a charm all its own – some acknowledged IF classics are more or less pieces of bricolage, going back to the crazy-quilt that is Zork. And that can work, I agree, but even in those cases I think there’s typically some unifying vibe structuring the experience, and, crucially, enough time for the player to settle in while they consider which elements resonate for them. In a short game, the need to grab the player is commensurately higher – my main complaint about Habeas Corpus is that it ended before I had a chance to decide what I think it’s about, which isn’t an issue I’ve run into even with Neo-Twiny Jam entries that have half the word-count. Maybe 1,000 words is just a tough length to work from, since it’s too much for a sharp spike of a punk song, but too short for a prog epic; still, I can’t help feel that a catchier hook could have made the disparate pieces of this game sing.

Rarely has a theory been as tempting, and as wrong, as the Whig view of history – which is to say, history that views the past through the lens of the present, imposing a progressive, if not teleological, interpretation on all that’s come before. It’s an easy habit of mind for us moderns to slip into, because so much of our experience does tend to fit this frame (it’s no coincidence that this approach gained ascendency in 19th-Century Britain, when evolution, technological development, and the shrugging off of the vestiges of feudal oppression really did make it seem as though it was an iron law that previous developments would lead to an ever-better future). But of course it’s not true: things happen for their own reasons, on their own terms, and the chains that connect them to their consequences are often nebulous, contingent, and far easier to see in retrospect than they ever were at the time. As for the idea that all forward motion is upward-striving progress – well, at least the 21st century has mostly disabused us of that notion.

Sadly, identifying the trap is a far different thing from evading the trap, so while I know it’d be a far better critical practice to view Ataraxia as a player first engaging with it in 2022 would have, I can’t help seeing it as a spiritual ancestor to Eikas, the author’s two-years-later cook-for-a-community-kitchen Comp entry. This isn’t pure error on my part, since the games have quite a lot in common – they’re both farming/crafting sim-ish Twine games with a long runtime, and a handful of appealingly-drawn NPCs to woo or just hang out with, set in an isolated, vaguely-British area of rural splendor. The central gameplay loop is often quite similar, too, with the day starting by popping out to your garden to harvest some produce, then a trip to town to sell your goods and pick up a few bits and bobs for your crafting projects, before wandering in the woods and perhaps visiting the lighthouse-keeper or innkeeper for tea and some light flirting.

This is all grand, let me be clear! I love that one of the main engines of progress is buying new books, since they teach you recipes or help you learn more about the island where you’ve arrived to settle (I dig how grounded the history is, literally in the case of the discussion of the economics of coal-mining). Meanwhile, being able to buy a pet helps make your home that much homier, and the ability to play the field with the four NPCs is lovely since they’re all a great, cozy hang (albeit perhaps not the most passion-inspiring partners), and it’s nice that very few interactions with them are gated behind the romance Y/N toggle. And the writing richly evokes an Atlantic idyll that I just want to snuggle into, even when it’s a bit forbidding:

"The sky hasn’t made its mind up about what colour it wishes to be, and the pale vastness of it is mottled in slate-grey, cobalt, lilac. Gulls wheel in the briny air, squawking impatiently at one another. The wind is cooler than you are used to."

There’s a painterly eye for detail, and a naturalist’s for the evocative use of names:

"The island is at its most pastoral here; grass speckled with cowslips and gentian, black-tailed sheep grazing on the distant slopes, light reflecting off the surface of the water. As you round a bend you see an old red-painted windmill, its sails unmoving."

While the nature of Ataraxia’s gameplay does mean that there’s a lot of repeated text as you once again comb the beach for seaglass or visit the bookseller for one more fix for your reading habit, this lovely prose meant I was always alert to any new words I might get to enjoy. There are also a few – well, I was going to call them “quests” or “adventures”, but that gives too intense of a vibe; let’s go with “diversions”, maybe? – that nicely break up your quotidian routine. Some of these are one-offs, like the island’s regular series of festivals where you can observe some local customs, catch up with one of your neighbors, and maybe do some gambling. Others kick off longer investigations, where a mutilated sheep or distant shipwreck will prompt you to poke your nose into other people’s business, learn more of the island’s history, and choose how much you want to drag the past into the present.

So Ataraxia is grand, and I had a lot of fun! …but here lurk the Whigs, because I also couldn’t help seeing at as step along the way towards Eikas. Crafting here can sometimes either feel pointless or overdetermined: at first you’re building things just to make money, but there are more efficient ways to do that, and later, you’ll need to build specific things to complete events, but you know the exact recipe so it’s just a matter of spamming the gather-ingredients task in the appropriate place until you get what you need. There’s also not much sense of time pressure, which also means there’s not any need to prioritize or focus your actions; as a result, I wound up bouncing around between different plot threads. Eikas’ cooking-focused structure resolves a lot of these issues; planning a meal means you’re looking for synergies between different recipes, and the wide variety of ingredients means the crafting system has more constraints, and more room for improvisation and creativity. Meanwhile, the regular schedule of feasts adds shape to the days, and gives you lots of short-term goals to work towards.

Some of the systems here can also feel slightly underbaked by comparison with the later game. Money stops being useful about a third of the way in, since you can’t buy most ingredients, until suddenly you need to spend a bunch of money to unlock the endgame. Taking an idle stroll around the island’s biomes is also separated from ingredient-gathering, where they were linked in Eikas – which means I almost never took in the scenery except when I had a task that specifically prompted me to do so.

And then there are a few notes that seem slightly out of place with the general vibe. Why are the achievements named for tarot cards when nothing else in the game does much with that imagery? What’s with the somewhat-thin four-humours-based personality system, which doesn’t seem to do much except gray out the occasional dialogue option? Since the game’s title comes from a philosophy of equanimity in Stoicism or Epicurianism, maybe you’re supposed to keep them balanced, but I never figured out how that would be possible, as it seems to shunt you two a couple main ones and then doesn’t let you revisit those choices (for that matter, the title and concept don’t feel like they’ve got a strong connection to the game’s themes as a whole – unlike Eikas, an also-Epicurean community celebration).

This comparison with Eikas is deeply unfair, since as I said, Ataraxia is a great game that’s easy to recommend to anyone who’s remotely interested by the pitch; prose that conjures up a real sense of place, engaging characters, gameplay that throws up just enough friction to be enjoyable, but not enough to stall things out. And having the later game in mind did make me appreciate the places where the earlier one does something different – in particular, there’s a vein of folk-horror that runs through much of the story, lending some welcome spikiness to proceedings (the forest-spirits sequence has some genuinely unsettling imagery!) even though it never wholly undermines the island’s appeal. So if you’ve played Eikas, stuff your inner Whig into a closet and you’ll have a grand old time. And if you haven’t, well, you’re even luckier since now you’ve got two things to look forward to.

Is there a pun in English more groan-inducing than knight/night? That obvious, superficially rich but in reality kind of banal equation is understandably catnip for wannabe poets[1], as well as the Marvel comics writers responsible for the character whose name makes me do a double-take when reading this game’s title. But the thing is, a person in armor, and feudal relationship with a liege, really bears very little resemblance to the dark time of day, even though each of those things is awesome on its own – the pun is just wordplay, it’s not really saying anything.

What the Moon’s Knight presupposes is, maybe it is? This Neo-Twiny Jam entry makes one of the cannier moves for dealing with the 500-word limit by leaning hard into poetry, personifying the moon and mythologizing the knight so that the two can fit in the same frame. They’re not on the same level, though: that possessive clearly indicates that the moon is the one wielding gravitational influence over her knight. The knight is the more relatable figure (the game’s one choice focuses on them) and the conflict they face is with a terrestrial army, but that outer combat is only a pale echo of the angst they experience from daring to be the moon’s lover.

The plot is heavily bottom-lined, in order to spend scarce word-count on evocative imagery – there’s an implication that the knight seeks out battle because when arrows blot out the sun, that darkness might bring out the moon even during the day, which is both more romantic and more bad-ass than the line from Herodotus that inspired it. The prose throughout cleaves to this lyrical, heavy-metal vibe:

"Morning - Death - lies beyond the ridge-border. Atop it, the Moon caresses your cheek longingly."

For all that the setup, conflict, choice, and payoff are necessarily condensed, there’s still room
for specificity in the details – I especially liked the ampoule of starlight the knight wears at their throat. And it’s hard not to feel invested in a doomed love that’s bound to end in tragedy no matter what, either the knight or the moon inevitably weeping over their misfortune at the finish. While I’m not sure the game fully sold me on how the corporeal battle that’s the subject of the plot relates to the emotional tug-of-war between the two main characters, I can’t deny the drama and poetry here on display: the moon is awesome, knights are awesome, both together are awesome.

[1] This is a digression so long and discursive that even I couldn’t figure out how to cram it into the intro, but since this is a relatively short review I’ll allow myself a footnote to explicate it: the secret origin of my dislike of the knight/night pun goes back to Jewel, a notably successful singer-songwriter of the mid-90s Alternative scene. She was a great performer with a bunch of songs I enjoy to this day, but her lyrics, standing on their own, were enough to make you contemplate the inevitable heat-death of the universe with barely-repressed yearning. I’m spoiled for choice, but “You’ll be Henry Miller/and I’ll be Anais Nin/but this time it’ll be even better/we’ll stay together in the end” was a standout, because 1) I guess toxic narcissists deserve each other, but good Lord, in what universe would that be “better”? and 2) the meter, oh, oh, the meter. Anyway she released a book of poetry alongside her second album, it was called “A Night Without Armor”, I can still remember perusing it out of morbid curiosity in a Long Island Barnes and Noble and almost swooning.

Playing and reviewing Heaven Alive immediately after Machina Caerulae makes for a study in contrasts. They’re similar enough that those contrasts are interesting – they’re both New-Twiny games with a 500-word limit, they both have cool visuals and custom interfaces to reinforce the vibe, and they’re both two-handers centering on an abusive relationship where you play the weaker figure, so we’re not comparing Nord and Bert and SPY INTRIGUE here or anything. But where Machina employed a stripped-down prose style and only branched at the very, very end, Heaven Alive takes a more conventional approach – each conversation option spins out into a unique bit of dialogue, which, while terse, are rendered in full sentences. It just about works, but the effort of cramming a more traditional choice-based IF structure into the brutal wordcount cap is too-often visible.

This isn’t to say the game doesn’t know how to communicate with economy: the game is a conversation between your character, a sort of cybernetic major-domo, and your master, an amoral interstellar caudillo, and so the interface presents all the text in two windows, one for him and one for you. The fact that his is bigger, and labelled “EXECUTOR”, and yours is smaller and labelled “WRETCHED”, is all you need to know (there’s also a cool barcode visual that goes with the names; the collage backdrop is cool too). Similarly, while the details of the inciting incident are a bit vague – there’s a ship in need of rescue, but it seems like it’s going to take more effort than Mr. EXECUTOR wants to expend – the power dynamics are clearly at the forefront, with the sci-fi technobabble more or less irrelevant. Again, the interface does a good job of making this visible, with a tracker labeled “approval” always visible in the upper-left corner (with that said, the interface might be slightly over-baroque – it took me a while to realize that the arrows under “approval” were in fact the passage forward/passage back buttons).

But where Heaven Alive starts to sprawl, it runs into difficulties. There are two different nodes, with three choices apiece, before you reach the binary endgame choice, which is an impressive breadth of options, but the consequence is that things can seem to escalate extremely quickly. Like, my first playthrough involved me calling the boss by his first name in an attempt to establish rapport, which he clearly didn’t like, so I apologized. He seemed to be mollified (and the approval meter, after swerving to -1, went back into more-or-less safely neutral territory), but then I had to choose whether or not to “subjugate myself.” Unsure of what that meant, I decided to stay the course, at which point I ripped a cyber-doohickey out of my own neck – I think it was somehow controlling me? – snarling that he was nothing without me. With a little more room to breathe, this ramp-up might have been dramatic and compelling, but as it was it felt too abrupt to land.

After some repeat plays, I found that there were some variations that didn’t come off quite as intense (in particular, if your approval is positive, defiance just leads to punishment rather than a definitive rupture). But regardless, I found the details of the relationship were too fuzzy, and race to the finish line too quick, to establish effective stakes for the final submission/defiance choice; to me the WRETCHED and the EXECUTOR came off as plot contrivances rather than people. Now, this might partially be due to the fact that I never explored the first set of options – real talk, I live in LA and Trump’s currently got the military deployed in our streets, I am not in a headspace where I can click “subjugate myself” to a tin-pot dictator – so perhaps those branches lead to more satisfying outcomes, with pathos arising from the main character’s attempts to rationalize making accommodation with brutality. Still, if, in a project of 500 words, half the endings don’t fully click, that’s probably an indication you’ve got too many of them.

In the early aughts, a documentary called The Aristocrats got a bit of buzz by digging into an inside-baseball joke structure widely used by comedians doing a set in front of other comics, but much more rarely presented to the general public (this was the middle-ish days of the web, so inside baseball as a concept still had a couple more years to go). I won’t go into detail on what, exactly, the joke is, since the whole point is that it’s extraordinarily filthy and changes every time, but the important part is that it’s a sort of shaggy-dog story with a set beginning, end, and punchline, which isn’t actually very funny. But there’s an extraordinary amount of craft that can go into filling in the middle part; because so much of the joke is already determined, it’s a stress-test of the comic’s pacing, delivery, and other technical skills.

There are some jam concepts that can be similarly restrictive, and Machina Caerulea clocks two of them – as a Neo Twiny jam entry, it’s got to operate under the absurdly stringent ceiling of 500 words, and since it was also in the Bluebeard jam, you pretty much know how the plot is going to go from the jump (the game was actually quadruple-listed, also qualifying for the Love/Violence and Anti-Romance jams, but those are much more spacious concepts in comparison). But while it doesn’t boast much in the way of surprises, it winds up as a really well-done example of intelligent implementation of a narrow brief.

Given the limited word-count, it’s smart that the setup is so archetypal: you wake up, amnesiac, in a sci-fi laboratory, get a couple choices to get your bearings, before the Bluebeard figure wakes you up, drops some exposition, and gives you the don’t-go-through-that-door warning. It’s not something that needs to be belabored, and the prose style leans into parsimony as a result:

"Arms interlocked. Cold floor. Faint smile. Sad eyes.

“Breathe in deeply.”

It’s effective in its own right, while leaving space for an exploration sequence with reasonably robust detail, and a climactic choice leading to three different endings – each of these pieces are short and focused, as they have to be, but they deliver just enough texture to work. The game also has some nice visual bells and whistles – a blue-shaded interface, cool-looking buttons, text that sometimes fills in from the middle of the screen instead of just the bottom – that sell the alienated sci-fi vibe without running down the scarce word-count.

It’s true, the endings do go pretty quick, and on the Bluebeard disturb-o-meter Machina Caerulea rates pretty low (admittedly, that scale goes quite high) – when I decided to desperately struggle to kill the husband character, it was more because it felt like the thing to do than because what he’d done seemed all that beyond the pale. But as with the Aristocrats joke, the punchline isn’t the point: as a demonstration of how to do a lot with a little, and fill out a familiar premise with verve and concision, this is an impressive piece of work.

For a couple years in the mid-90s, one of the best things in life was the monthly PC Gamer CD. You see, in those long-vanished days, most video games had demos, but it had historically been hard to get them. Reliable internet bandwidth was nowhere close to a thing, so occasionally a publisher would throw a promo for one of their other games in when you bought one, but other than that your main option was shelling out a couple of bucks for one of the questionably-legal floppies loaded with shareware or demos software stores would put in a rack by the checkout counter.

But then CDs made storage cheap, and the magazines all figured out they could collect demos from all the publishers and distributors they had connections to, pack them onto a CD, and get the hoi polloi to pay a couple extra bucks for their subscriptions. In retrospect it was all crass commerce, but at the time it was a revelation: for a game-starved teenager, getting a couple dozen demos every single month for functionally-zero marginal cost was amazing. Sure, most of them were usually stinkers, but there were typically at least a handful that even in their incomplete state were lots of fun – and in an age where there were many fewer games, and fewer still that I could afford on my allowance, that feeling of excess, of more free games than you knew what to do with, was a rare treat.

The magazine CD of course didn’t survive the rise of the internet, as the publications all shifted online and broadband meant anyone could pick and choose the demos they wanted to try rather than getting a collection pushed to them each month. And beyond that, demos fell out of favor through the aughts and teens, as I understand it because the big publishers realized making a special miniature version of the game and giving it away for free cost them money, which they’d rather be spending on licensing butt-rock songs for poorly-edited trailers and tie-in energy drink promos. But then the worm turned, as indie developers realized they couldn’t compete with the advertising budgets of the big companies, but they could give prospective players a taste of their game, no strings attached.

The return of the demo is objectively great, but speaking personally, the context of my gaming has changed so much since then that I often find I like them more in theory than in practice: there are now 12 billion games released every femtosecond, my leisure time is way more of a limiting factor than money (especially since most IF is free), and I’m already sitting on a backlog that conservatively would last me to the heat death of the universe. Instead of a cornucopia to fill my game-starved hours, demos now can feel like an imposition, like a free perfume sample aggressively spritzed on you when you’re just trying to sneak into the department-store bathroom. The question isn’t just “is this demo good enough to sell me on the full experience?” but “does this demo, standing on its own, justify the time I spent on it instead of just waiting for the actual thing?” Which I’ll acknowledge is a high, probably even unfair, bar to set.

So yeah, Resurrection Gate is a demo, and I have some feelings.

(For those of you who haven’t read my reviews before, since it’s been a year-ish since I’ve been on the grind: hi! I’m Mike! And yeah, that was 500 words whose relevance to the game I’m ostensibly talking about is tangential at best, that’s just how we roll in these parts).

What we’ve got here is a fifteen-minute slice of what looks like it’ll be a lavishly-produced high fantasy IF/RPG hybrid. There are multiple playable characters, who boast a handful of stats, a couple bespoke and flavorful traits, and limited customization (you can make Yasha, a battle-scarred veteran, an introvert or a horse person, for example. I decided to lean into role-playing and picked the latter). Richly-colored pixel graphics illustrate the key characters and backdrops, and there’s a lot of incident packed in: the demo starts in media res, on the run from an army that just beat your own and killed your liege, hoping to make it to an allied city offering shelter; then an action-horror sequence as undead attack and drag off a camp-follower, and you enter the belly of the beast to save them. There’s a last-minute rescue, sexily mysterious characters entering stage left and dropping lore and plot hooks, and then a perspective-shift to a more politically-connected character that sets up some higher-order conflict before the inevitable cliffhanger.

It’s all kinetic enough, while the fantasy setting has some steampunk and body-horror grace notes that keep it from feeling too generic – and the aesthetics really are great, too. I’ll confess that this style of epic, all portent and proper nouns, isn’t my favorite these days, but it’s very hard to complain about execution this lush. As a teaser, I think it works – I have questions, and unused skills on my character sheet, so yeah I’d keep playing to see what comes next.

As a complete experience, though, I’m not quite so convinced. Partially that’s because the demo feels so desperate to get the game’s key elements on screen that it sometimes runs out of breath. Like, the opening sequence had me focused on the danger of being caught by scouts from the pursuing army – but the attack came from previously-unmentioned undead, and I’d hardly wrapped my head around that shift before the aforementioned bishy GMPC suggested that actually there were other powers at play far beyond my comprehension. Everything is a pretty standard fantasy trope so it’s not like things were moving too fast for me to keep up – but the velocity meant I didn’t have enough time to get too invested in any given conflict. Similarly, the RPG elements weren’t given enough space to get their hooks in; the one time I could choose to use a stat (one I was allegedly very good at!) it just injured Yasha without having any visible impact on the plot.

The intentionally-obfuscated prose style also doesn’t work as well in a shortform piece, I think. An orotund style can be a good fit for fantasy, but there’s some clunky verbiage, and descriptions of often tilt ambiguous (especially in a few cases where a character’s singular they/them pronouns aren’t clearly delineated from standard plural they/thems referring to different folks). There are some strong images peeking through the cruft, don’t get me wrong:

"The ostentatious design and the hardy sleekness of the mount would suggest a rider of some distinction, a high-ranking cavalry. But there had been no sign of the rider, save for perhaps the dried blood in the mount’s mane, the blackened stain frozen in the same pattern it sluiced down the horse’s withers."

But while in a longer piece, I would have eventually figured out who was who and gotten more on the author’s wavelength over time, in the demo context the spikiness felt more, well, spiky.

I’m having a hard time resolving Resurrection Gate’s contradictions because ultimately that hinges on evaluating its success as a marketing strategy – like, I don’t think this demo is a great piece of IF, but it could be that it’s a teaser for one. Based on what I’ve experienced so far, I’d play the full game, sure, so I guess that means it worked! But I also suspect I’d enjoy the complete piece more if I hadn’t played this teaser – which is a sad comment on how far I’ve come from the excited 14-year old shoving the new PC Gamer disc into the CD drive, intent on devouring its contents no matter their quality or my pre-existing interest. I’m sure Yasha would agree: you just can’t go home again.