Reviews by Mike Russo

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.