Reviews by RainbowDarter

My relationship with Pokemon is a bit of an odd one; I never played the games as a child, despite being surgically attached to my Nintendo DS from ages seven to fifteen, and didn't even understand what genre they were until I was in high school. When I got my first smartphone, I downloaded a crummy GBA emulator and decided to see what all the fuss was about with Pokemon Emerald, whereupon I ran a team of six Zigzagoons until I couldn't get any farther, then gave up entirely. Later, I did get quite into Pokemon Sun, but for a long time I just figured the franchise wasn't my thing.

It's good, then, that My Friends the Monster Trainers is not about Pokemon, legally speaking. Instead, it's about...well, monsters. Their alignments are planetary in nature, rather than elemental, and their designs tend towards the simple "regular animal that's a funky color" side, which I find quite endearing.

What makes My Friends compelling, to me anyway, is that the gameplay isn't Pokemon inspired in the slightest. In fact, it's a deduction game, not unlike Jamwitch's other titles The Archives of Trevosa and The Case of the Dungeon Descent. Of the three...this one may be my favorite. It's simpler, to be sure, and consequently quite a bit easier. But the interface is fun, the writing is breezy, and filling out each card is satisfying. What's not to like?

My Friends is probably a bit too easy for most adults to sink their teeth into, but it's still a fun little diversion. However, if you want to introduce kids to IF, especially kids already into Pokemon, My Friends the Monster Trainers might just top my list of recommendations.

(Spoiler - click to show)(We can all agree that Vincent is coming back to town, primarily, to do your mom, right?)

I get so giddy every time I see this team post something new. I don't always love their games, but I can always count on them to be solidly made, cute, and have at least a nugget of an interesting conceit. Also, this one isn't IF but I wanted to mention it, The Daily Spell is my favorite word puzzle game of all time, and I wish every piece of literature ever could be adapted into its format.

What were we talking about again? Oh, yes, The Case of the Dungeon Descent. A member of what I've taken to calling the "place-and-time puzzle" microgenre, Dungeon Descent wears its Type Help inspiration on its sleeve, but I think its closest cousin is The Red Pearls of Borneo by Bushmonkey. Both games emphasize linking objects to a scene, rather than just people, and both are much more visually-oriented than Type Help. The difference is, Dungeon Descent puts the format into, essentially, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, rather than WWII-era Borneo. I'm not accusing either of being some kind of rip-off, mind, but I'll mention that Dungeon Descent came first.

The plot of Dungeon Descent is interesting, it gets a bit metaphysical near the end, but I wouldn't classify the prose itself as anything special. It's mostly dialog, and much of it mid-combat at that, so don't expect any musings on the nature of existence or in-depth explanations of the universe's magic system. The game doesn't exactly hurt from that exclusion, though; sometimes, it's nice to just have a fantasy world where everything works exactly how you've come to expect.

This review is a fair bit shorter than my usual madman ramble, but don't let that dissuade you from checking Dungeon Descent out. It's a fun time, a neat little concept and some very striking artwork, but I can't say it really stuck with me like Red Pearls or its more distant cousin Kinophobia. That's okay though; I'm not always in the mood to watch The Act of Killing. Sometimes, I just want Simpsons reruns.

Feel free to scoff at this, veterans of Interactive Fiction, but I found a lot of the puzzles in Violet pretty obtuse. None are outside the realm of figuring out without hints, but when I found myself throwing a wooden stool against every seemingly solid surface in the room, I decided I might need a little hand-holding. Perhaps a bit more lenience with the wording of solutions is in order, or maybe I'm just not very smart.

So if I found the "game" part of this game unsatisfactory, why the five star rating? Because Violet is so well written, so wry and poignant and clever and sappy, that every solution could be "use hands on thing," and I'd still recommend it.

In Violet, you play as a Wisconsin graduate student with the most severe case of ADHD in the history of fiction. Your Australian girlfriend, the titular Violet, has threatened to leave you if you don't finish your thesis today, and has already booked a flight back to the land down under. As a last-ditch effort, you conjure a sort of Violet-shaped tulpa in your head, who always has a sly comment or word of encouragement for you. That may sound like a spoiler, but I think it's better to go in knowing the main character hasn't actually dragged their poor, maligned girlfriend to watch them write for five hours.

One of my favorite details in Violet is how (Spoiler - click to show)nearly every sentimental object in your office gets destroyed by the end. It's both funny (Violet's increasingly withering commentary on your annihilation of her handicrafts was a highlight for me) and meaningful; these are just objects, and none of them are half as important as your love for each other.

I found Violet to be ruinously relatable, but someone who doesn't need prescription stimulants to function as an adult may, instead, find irritation. You'll know which camp you fall into within the first few paragraphs, so, as Violet would say, just sit down and try, wombat.

The last thing I'd like to mention is the "heteronormativity switch"; the default player character in Violet is male, but your gender can be toggled at any time. While it changes very little in the grand scheme of the plot, I really appreciated this option, and, personally, I found the story much more compelling when playing as a woman. Maybe I am a misandrist after all.

...Is it blasphemy to say I like The Red Pearls of Borneo more than Type Help? Well, if it is, then darn me to heck, because I like The Red Pearls of Borneo more than Type Help.

As an American and also an idiot, I didn't know, well, anything about British colonial Borneo before starting this game; in my subconscious mind, World War II didn't actually start until the invasion of Pearl Harbor, and everything before that was just, as the Brits would say, a bit o' banter. While I obviously can't speak to this game's historical accuracy, I found the story deeply intriguing, on both the character drama and broader narrative levels.

Gameplay wise, Red Pearls takes the core "who was here at what time?" premise of the author's previous title What Happened to the Crew? (and its spiritual predecessor Type Help, for that matter) and cranks up the user-friendliness until the dial breaks off. Gone are the days of needing a spreadsheet, some scrap paper, and a professional stenographer to take your notes; just open up a menu, click on a bubble, and you can see everyone who hasn't been assigned a place at any given hour. It's glorious, and it makes returning to Type Help or What Happened feel like amateur hour. Notes can be added to everything and anything, and the main character's psychic object affinity means you rarely have to go through the rigamarole of trying every possible combination of characters for a given hour blindly. Having said all that...is this a better system? I'm not sure. Some of the magic is lost for me without the parser interface; Red Pearls lacks the feeling of being an overworked but doggedly determined archivist that made What Happened so immersive despite its heaps of malarkey.

Unfortunately, just like What Happened to the Crew?, Red Pearls comes to a screeching halt at about the halfway mark. At that point, the multilayered puzzles and varied-perspective storytelling completely stops, and the game turns into several hours of clicking "next scene." Technically, the last act is optional...but c'mon. I'm not gonna get that far into a story only to say "well that was a lovely cliffhanger, time to move on with my life!" There's one last swan song of extra-hard puzzles right near the end, but then it turns back into nothing but boring dialog. Again, I did finish the whole game (more than once) so it can't be that bad, I just...wish it was different.

Forget about my (mostly) joking historical ignorance from the second paragraph, I think I need to speak seriously for a moment. Red Pearls, at times, presents an uncomfortably rosy view of British colonialism. It's a rather difficult thing to pinpoint, but between the unceremonious deaths of the only non-white characters, the constant use of anti-Japanese slurs (granted, you can choose to censor them at the start of the game), and the hero-worshiping of British military intelligence...I don't know, it all made me a bit wary. I don't think the game or its creator are deliberately racist, but it'd feel irresponsible for me to not at least bring these issues up.

I hope the length of this review speaks to just how much there is to say about Red Pearls, both good and bad. It's a rare treat to get something so unique with this degree of polish, and at the bargain price of free, I think it's well worth at least getting to the end of the main plot. Bushmonkey is currently working on a sequel to Red Pearls called Green Mist Over Portland, and I can't wait to play it.

This game makes me desperately wish IFDB allowed half-stars in their ratings, because What Happened to the Crew? is my textbook definition of a three-and-a-half star game. I'm about to say some things that sound quite harsh, but I want to make it clear that I did, in fact, enjoy my time with What Happened, and if you've played and enjoyed Type Help by William Rous and the author's other game The Red Pearls of Borneo, you should give it a try. Just...temper your expectations a smidge.

Now that we've established that I do, in fact, like this game, let's get to the mean stuff.

It feels unkind to profile a developer with only two games under their belt like this, but I can't help but notice that Bushmonkey seems to have a habit of front-loading all their interesting puzzles, then slamming on the brakes for the last act. Red Pearls becomes almost completely linear for the last half of the story, which is boring but at least easy. What Happened, meanwhile, wraps up by making the player do five rounds of Wordle in a row. No, I'm not joking, and I'm not marking that as a spoiler because, if you do decide to give this game a shot, you should look up a walkthrough for at least that part. After that, if you want to unlock every document, the game all but requires repetitive guess-and-checks in every room; that part didn't bother me all that much, but if you're blanketly opposed to search-scumming, it's probably best just to quit without 100% completion.

One of its saving graces, in my opinion, is that the writing of What Happened is quite good. The characters are rather bog-standard archetypes, but that's all they really need to be. (Spoiler - click to show)The premise reminded me a lot of Doom, in a very nostalgic way; combining alien and demonic forces is, I think, a lot more interesting than either on their own. The over-arching plot is far from mind-blowing, but it was engaging enough to keep me going to the end, which must be worth something.

All in all, while I have my fair share of gripes with What Happened to the Crew?...I'll always be a sucker for the "who was here when" microgenre. Type Help and Red Pearls might be better, but, well, a less-good cake is still a cake.

The first time I tried to play Excalibur, I bounced off it hard. Surely, I thought, reading a fandom wiki shouldn't count as interactive fiction. When do I get to press buttons other than Next Page? Yes, technically, as you read pages more of the wiki unlocks, but you do have to be in more of a reading mood than a gaming one to get the most out of this "game." That being said, get yourself into the right mindset and Excalibur is dreadfully immersive.

It takes real talent to make a wiki entry feel authentic without being, for lack of a better term, a little too cringe, but Excalibur pulls it off. The entries feel fan-written, occasionally tangential and sometimes toeing the line on speculation, but edited well enough to pass as a genuine attempt at archiving. The premise of the show also feels quite authentic, the kind of halfway house mess that came from showrunners fueled by big dreams and expensive drugs clashing with network executives who just wanted their own Star Trek. I especially liked the profiles of the show's behind-the-scenes staff, the directors and writers in particular, and how each of their personalities influenced their respective episodes.

I came away from Excalibur wanting more: more entries, more episodes, more fandom drama burbling just under the surface, more explanations for all the weird stuff (Spoiler - click to show)(what the heck was going on with Terrence Lannark?). But, and please forgive my pretentiousness here, is that not the point? Excalibur the show was a victim of its time; an attempted revolution foiled by incompetence and erased by the powers that be. The Excalibur wiki, in-universe, is an attempt to reclaim something that is now fundamentally incorporeal, surviving only in a handful of photographs, a collection of amateur transcripts, and the aging memories of the people who loved it. Like trying to bottle smoke from a campfire, the result will only ever be a pale imitation of what once was.

A later reveal is that (Spoiler - click to show)one of the most dedicated users on the wiki was actually born long after Excalibur was lost. They know the show, much like us, only from secondhand accounts and the crumbs of the original vision left behind. I found this detail very touching, and I think it speaks to the inherently compelling nature of lost media, as well as its melancholy. Within all of us exists a starved explorer, an urge to discover and collect and uncover and share. Sometimes, it just takes a Doctor Who knock-off to whet that appetite.

I'm rambling now, but Excalibur is the kind of work that makes one want to wax philosophical. I've barely even mentioned how funny it is. If you take anything from this review, let it be that you should give this one a try (or two). Let it suck you in, and you might find yourself also wishing you could watch just one episode of this strange little gem.

I want to say right off the bat that Kinophobia gets brownie points for having the map and list of commands as separate webpages, rather than having to navigate the parser to bring them up. This is a game where you have to keep a lot of mental plates spinning, and I found myself making lists of important search terms so I wouldn't forget to research them. Having to interrupt that to bring up an in-game map rather than just clicking a tab over would have driven me bonkers.

Besides its commendable formatting, Kinophobia has a lot of great things going for it. The standout for me is the writing: scenes are beautifully and clearly set, documents feel authentic to both time period and format, and the world is so fleshed out it was sometimes hard for me to tell what was fully fictional. There isn't much in the way of dialog (until the climax), but what was there I found uniquely clever and witty, a welcome respite from all the horror and asbestos.

While it may initially seem like a standard haunted house-type exploration game, the core puzzle element of Kinophobia is actually research. In fact, I only recall two environmental puzzles in the entire game, which does bring somewhat into question why we didn't just do all this Googling before we started wandering around Health Hazard Studios, but whatever. As I implied in my intro paragraph, the documents and articles you find aren't merely a straight line of inquiry, one prompt into another. They branch off, spider into each other, lead to dead ends and cul-de-sacs. I found myself frequently following a string of informational pearls I thought would have all the answers, only for it to loop back onto itself, or for the reveal to be something I already knew. This wasn't frustrating, it was engaging.

What was frustrating was the way the game organizes the items and information you've collected. Maybe it would be a betrayal of the spirit of the parser game, but I really think Kinophobia would benefit from a side menu where you could see your notes and inventory alongside the main text. I tried keeping track of everything in a separate document, but quickly found that keeping everything up to date was a puzzle unto itself, and a crappy one at that. Oh, and while I'm complaining, the psychic vision mechanic didn't gel with me at all. That may be because I forgot about it until the end of the game, and had to go through my entire inventory and touch everything one after another in hopes of a ghost popping up.

Still, I wouldn't be giving it five stars if I didn't think Kinophobia made up for those shortcomings. If you want the thrill of urban exploration, the satisfaction of uncovering forgotten facts, and the scares of a great ghost story, I can't recommend this one highly enough.

(This review is for the free, 2023 version)

When compared to swashbuckling space adventures, Lovecraftian horror epics, and sizzling 17th century romances, a "genealogy simulator" sounds like a slog through Snoozetown. Indeed, for someone who prefers fast-paced, think-on-your-feet puzzling, The Roottrees Are Dead would probably be an excellent sleep aid. If however, you're like me, and can lose hours of time in the depths of Wikipedia, or has fond memories of the days when hyperlinking someone on your blog was the highest honor one could gift another human, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

I won't go too deep into the plot, both because of spoilers and because it's honestly a bit thin, but the core gameplay loop consists of looking up keywords in one of several databases and using deductive (inductive?) reasoning to place the information you find on a family tree. Names are placed via a dropdown list, so you do have a fallback "rub everything on everything else"-type solution if you get stuck, but the game is generally quite forgiving with search terms and the like. I had to look up some hints near the end, but that was the result of me missing a few obvious signposts.

My 5-star rating is genuine, I do think Roottrees deserves that, but it's not flawless. I would describe most of the writing as "text" rather than "prose," and it bothered me how many of the historical documents used very modern-feeling language, but I also understand that flowery or unclear verbiage would be much more frustrating to parse useful info from. As previously stated, the framing device isn't all that great; the premise is kind of flimsy, and every time I was thrown into dialog I found myself skimming, trying not to lose my investigative chain. There's a big emotional reveal at the end that I actually found quite effective and poignant, but I'm not confident everyone will feel that way.

In spite of my criticisms, I still find myself wishing I could somehow wipe my brain and replay this fresh all over again, and I think that's the mark of a truly great puzzle. If you've never played it before, you have the chance to do just that.

As an addendum, I want to talk about the art. There's certainly an argument (several, truthfully) to be made that AI art shouldn't exist at all. If there's anywhere that it ought to be used, though, I think this is the project for it: Roottrees has a lot of artwork, most of it human faces, and all those people have to be recognizable across multiple photos. Most importantly, AI art is only used in the non-commercial version, and the full game uses hand-crafted artwork. Call me a shill for Big Tech if you must, but I'd rather a game be released (for free) with generative artwork than simply not be released at all.