Reviews by Mike Russo

The Antediluvian Weapon, by Daniel M. Stelzer

An interesting thing about the Review-a-Thon is the way it recontextualizes its entries. The IF scene being what it is, just about every game is made as an entry in some particular event, jam, or competition, each with its own design constraints, thematic points of departure, and intended audience. And while this is all generally happening under the umbrella of the larger IF community, plucking games out from their points of origin and plopping them down in the new RAT context necessarily involves some flattening and some reconfiguration, and potentially also some fuzziness of purpose – like, the emphasis here is of course on evaluation, but how much should said evaluation incorporate a rubric proper to a game’s original home?

These wooly maunderings brought to you courtesy of The Antediluvian Weapon, an entry in this year’s Text Adventure Literacy Jam, which as I understand it is an event focused on creating games that can provide an entry point to parser IF for those unconversant with its interface and foibles. Judged on its own merits, it’s quite good, a small-scale limited-parser game in all but name with some clever uses of its core mechanic and a fun, breezily-established setting with an early-modern vibe and supernatural elements focusing on magical use of, er, the elements. As an intro to parser IF, though, I’m not convinced it’s a great fit. Admittedly, this is a tough remit, but the puzzles can be rather tricky, as a limited-parser game it barely touches on the majority of standard interactions, and the tutorializing is pretty light, primarily focusing on how Dialog’s (admittedly slick) hyperlink interface works – the ABOUT text does promise a series of accompanying articles to come, but I think those are meant to be more about the process of writing the game than support in playing it, and at any rate though don’t appear to be yet in evidence.

I’m just going to leave all that aside though, because the THON isn’t the place for such critiques, and as an increasingly-grizzled veteran of the scene I’m not best suited to judge what makes for an easy intro, anyway. Antediluvian Weapon is great! I often find Stelzer’s games contain elements that I find especially appealing, and the same is true here, from the title (I am pretty sure we both picked up “antediluvian” as a cool-sounding word from being exposed to Vampire: the Masquerade at a tender age) to the Renaissance magicpunk espionage setup, which recalls Jon Ingold’s All Roads (I should really replay that one of these days…) But even if you’re a tradfantasy or sci-fi type, I think you’ll have fun here: the worldbuilding is very efficiently sketched, conveyed in a short scene of dialogue and environmental storytelling through a couple of frescos – it’s enough to sketch out the history and provide some gaps your brain can worry away at if that’s your thing, but if it’s not the mission is clear, and doesn’t require engaging with the lore if you don’t want to.

Said mission is a rescue and recovery operation, with the emphasis on the latter: another agent located the eponymous device in the fortress of a rival power before going dark, so you’re inserted via teleportation to steal the weapon, get out, and if possible help your predecessor escape. You purloin the weapon as soon as the introduction is over, so the game is entirely structured around learning what it does and deploying it in slightly different ways to overcome a series of obstacles. I won’t spoil the details, but I think it works well – the weapon’s function is relatively simple, but figuring out how to leverage it to evade the guards out to catch you requires a bit of lateral thinking, meaning the puzzles are satisfying to solve and largely hit a sweet spot in terms of difficulty.

Rescuing the other agent is a bit trickier, and turns on realizing that there’s something slightly unintuitive about how the weapon works – I think there probably would have been a way to create a smaller puzzle prompting the player to make this leap, but as it is this is an optional puzzle, with InvisiClues hints to boot, so it’s hard to complain. Meanwhile, the climactic puzzle is great, one of those set-pieces that requires you to act quickly and think outside the box, but with enough cueing and foreclosing of alternate actions to ensure that it clicks with a minimum of frustration. And while the writing is clearly in service to the puzzles – prose is generally terse and there’s a minimum of decoration, with an emphasis on clearly communicating to the player details about their environment and movement that are needed to overcome the obstacles – it manages to accomplish that goal while still being evocative and engaging.

So all told this is a great game, and I’d gladly play more with the same protagonist or the same setting; it seems a sturdy premise for unique-magic-device based IF, which can be a lot of fun. I’m not sure I’d rank it as highly as I do were I encountering it in the TALJ, but I’m not, so I do, and I’m doubly glad for playing it in the THON instead!

This is my third year of review-a-thoning, which means I’ve now played five different entries in the Lewd Mod series – though I believe several of these demo versions have been pulled from the same mainline (paid) game, while others are discrete, and the titles of these excerpts don’t provide much clarity about any of this, meaning there’s a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about how the various games relate to each other. And there’s also a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about what the heck the series title is supposed to mean; the “lewd” part is clear enough, inasmuch as the throughline is clearly the hand-drawn no-eyes, no-nose porn, but as for the other bit, is the conceit that these are like a XXX mod to some other, entirely innocent choice-based game about avoiding heat-stroke when the office AC is on the fritz? Beats me, but heck, I watched my law school roommate play through the second Kingdom Hearts game with no context, I know how to roll with a punch.

Comes now Lewd Mod: No Butts, though, and finally we have an explanation! This fundamental (er) text for the series establishes that the protagonist has just been hired as a content moderator for a social media site, responsible for ensuring that only innocent selfies, and not detestable smut, hits the feeds of its innocent users. This is of course a job that exists in real life, one that inflicts such terrible horrors that it drives even LLMs into psychosis, but there must be a super intense pre-screening process before people are allowed to register accounts on this particular network, like early Facebook’s creepy Ivy-League-only rule, except for hot babes obsessed with showing off their butts and sometimes their feet (there’s the occasional boob shot, but they’re conspicuously rare). Interaction primarily consists of reviewing a series of pictures and either letting them go through if they comply with the rules, or blocking them if they’re too hot to handle. In between batches, there are short choice-based dialogue exchanges with your supervisor, who starts sexually harassing you within about two minutes (she can dish it out but can’t take it – if you give her a compliment after she, mid-Zoom-call, shows off and fingers her example of the only symbol on the numpad naturally occurring on the human body, she gets demurely self-conscious).

This is silly and, if you took it the slightest bit seriously, deplorable, but I think Stockholm Syndrome has set in for me – No Butts is too goofy to be mad at. Like, during your orientation, your boss explains that a selfie has to contain a face to be OK to post, clarifying that means “it must show lips or eyebrow”, because of course, there’s nothing else that goes on a face, right? And maybe I’m judging on a curve, but the details of the rules, including the way they change mid-game to allow more risque pics (there is a lot of po-faced belaboring of the precise definition of “buttcrack”), strikes me as an entertaining satire on the absurdist moderation policies of actual social media companies, even as it’s clearly just a mechanic to make sure you need to shell out for the full game before you get the spiciest stuff.

Is No Butts worth playing? No, but it answered questions about Lewd Mod lore I didn’t know I had, so at least that’s something – we’ll just have to see if this year’s second installment in the series, which I’ll get to in about fifteen more reviews, manages to justify its existence.

I work in policy advocacy and one of the big no-nos in that corner of the world is Christmas trees. That doesn’t mean actual Christmas trees, of course – the forces of godless heathendom haven’t advanced that far yet; it’s just a term of art for campaign platforms that amount to a bunch of disparate issues and policy ideas with only the thinnest of connective tissue explaining how these things are related or why they’d work well together, much as a gawker looking at a really first-rate Christmas display finds their eye drawn to one bauble after another, barely paying attention to the timber and fir-needles providing the scaffolding.

There are sound reasons to deplore these things in politics (ideally your platform should tell a cohesive story, and bring people who support one piece of it to endorse the others too). But in real life? Christmas trees are great, they’re super pretty and there’s no inherent reason why it’s bad to be drawn to one ornament after another rather than come to a considered and mature appreciation for the branches upon which they hang.

Turns out the same is true in IF! requiescat, spruced up from its original showing in last year’s Ectocomp, doesn’t have an especially unique spine. It’s a choice-based relationship drama that relies more on sudden dramatic escalation than deep character work or originality of plot to generate interest – the core story is fine enough, but it’s a bit too abstract to be memorable. Similarly, the prose is unexceptionable but unexceptional, and I can’t point to any particular thing the game does to put its own spin on the premise.

And yet, there are a bunch of nice flourishes, interesting ideas, and clever pieces of implementation which don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts, but still add quite a lot to the experience. For one thing, there’s a slight element of comedy threaded throughout the game, especially in the excited, slightly-defensive bits of dialogue that close each passage and provide a clue that the great romance depicted in the early parts of the story is a bit of a pretense. For another, the game does occasionally slow down to provide some specific details that provide color to the sweep of the game’s arc, like a karaoke night that proved a turning point in the central relationship. And I liked the use of text-expansion links: on most pages there are several places where you can click to get an additional sentence or two of context or elaboration, which occasionally are daisy-chained one after another and take the reader to quite a number of different places in a short paragraph or two – it’s an accumulation of effect that left me enjoyably bewildered. The thing that I liked the most was the way the game turns back on itself to recast some of its earliest scenes in light of the final revelations, which helps them sink in and lends some needed depth to what at first seems like simple puppy love.

Admittedly, there are some issues here that do drag these high points down – in particular, the way the game skips over a decade of the main characters’ married life only to have a completely mundane incident trigger a shocking act of violence, with no apparent warning signs or buildup, makes it very hard to see the characters as anything but playing pieces being moved around, semi-arbitrarily, to reach a preordained end (either that or one of them is incredibly thick). That kind of thing is hard to completely avoid in a five-minute game, though, and again, the central story elements aren’t the major draw here: the nice thing about being distracted by a Christmas tree’s lights and tinsel is that the luster of the trunk is neither here nor there.