Ratings and Reviews by RainbowDarter

First things first: Gnomes and Orcs being closely allied, sharing cultural artifacts and inviting each others ambassadors to their museums? Absolutely inspired choice, 10/10, gno gnotes.

I want to love this game so badly, and don't get me wrong, it's fun! But I can't praise it without caveats. A deduction game where you play as a museum curator in a fantasy setting is exactly my kind of thing, and this one does hit the mark in more ways than it doesn't. As Gnat Gnimblebrush, you're tasked with repairing, identifying, and tastefully arranging a variety of artifacts in a museum, using the magical powers of...your eyeballs. That's another little detail I love; I think fantastical worlds where you play as a regular guy are inherently funny.

Befitting a TALP entry, the parser is quite generous (I did have to snap myself with a rubber band every time I wrote "place" instead of "put") and the puzzles generally easy. I would have appreciated the difficulty ramping just a bit higher, but I also understand that could easily scare off some absolute beginners to the genre. I want to give special attention to the lore, though: plenty of fantasy titles have well-developed worlds with buckets of history, which I rarely end up caring about. The Gnomish Treasury, however, makes its history relevant to you, the player, and thus feels far more impactful. It's one thing to be told a great battle happened at some point in the past, but it's another entirely when the details of that battle are relevant to the puzzle you're solving right gnow.

Gnow for the part of the review that feels like I'm breaking a gift horse's legs. I mentioned the difficulty level in the last paragraph, and yes, it's probably as easy as it is so gnewcomers to IF don't get frustrated and quit, but perhaps that's been a tad overtuned? For later artifacts (Spoiler - click to show)you have to identify them by their presence in various portraits and tapestries throughout the museum, rather than via a list in your inventory. This is very cool, but it left me expecting there to be some "final super special bonus point challenge" or something, maybe an item that revealed an unexpected or deliberately concealed fact about the world. Then again, it feels churlish to criticize the Gnomish Treasury for not revealing itself to secretly be a political conspiracy thriller at the last minute.

Unfortunately, I did encounter a game-breaking bug: (Spoiler - click to show)mislabeling the Copper Helm as the Armor Set (a mistake I can't imagine I was the only one to make) locks the incorrect label in place, thus preventing a perfect ending. I ended up wandering around with an unlabeled set of gnondescript armor for the last part of my first attempt, trying in vain to tie it to any potentially relevant painting. In fact, that's probably where my expectation of a final revelation originated; see, I'm gnot an implacable whiner, it's the game's fault!

As it currently exists, the Gnomish Treasury is a gneat little puzzle box, ideal for gnewcomers to the parser format but still fun enough to engage veterans. I just can't shake the impression that it could have been better. I think a sequel or spiritual successor with a meatier challenge and more mechanics to play with could easily be one of my all-time favorites, so I'll be keeping an eye on Lamp Post Projects.

"What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?"
- Fred Rogers

A Paradox Between Worlds taught me something very upsetting about myself: I miss being an active Tumblr user.

I was just a hair too young to be in the thickest part of the "Harry Potter" fandom. Which is an odd thing to admit, because I was very much into the series, more than almost anyone I knew in real life. By the time I started using the internet, though, HP fans already had their own complex lexicon, favorite fan theories, websites, conventions, and so much more that I got a little scared off. I just liked the fun wizard books, I didn't want to marry Snape.

So when JKR decided to pivot from authorship to eradicating gender variance, I didn't feel the same kind of betrayal many of my contemporaries did. Mostly, I was just sad. I parted with my merch, made the conscious decision not to engage financially with the property anymore, and washed my hands of the whole mess. I understand this is a somewhat privileged position, and that many people had hung large parts of their identity on a series that was now stabbing them in the back, but I wasn't one of them.

A Paradox Between Worlds is a dive into the psychology of a group of people who were exactly that kind of fan. The game is split between two parts: the first is a cringingly accurate depiction of mid-2010s Tumblr fandom blogs, complete with Bee Movie scripts, "Do you love the color of the sky?", and a haunting expy of the "All or Nothing" pitch; the second is a "fanfiction writing simulator," where you choose the details of an epic, universe-jumping "Nebulaverse" story that (Spoiler - click to show)will all but inevitably go unfinished.

The details are accurate down to the letter, in a way that only someone intimately familiar with this sort of community could write. The posts from the self-proclaimed "fandom mom" were so spot-on, in fact, that I found myself searching for a phantom unfollow button every time I opened their blog. Nevertheless, scrolling posts and deciding what to like and reblog was far and away my favorite part of the game, and I think a whole narrative could have easily been drawn from that loop alone.

The other part I am...less enthused about. It's not bad by any means, but I can't help but be reminded of the feeling of writing a book report on a novel you merely skimmed. The fictional-within-fiction Nebulaverse has an impressive amount of lore, but I found it hard to keep track of who was who. To the game's credit, you can access nearly an entire fan wiki of info about the setting at any time, but I found it a bit flow-breaking to have to click a menu away in the middle of a scene because I forgot who Tycho was. The narrative also gets increasingly meta as you continue to write, reflecting your more and more complex relationship with the source material; this is good, thematically, but also exacerbates some of the issues I just mentioned.

I'm about to go completely off the rails of game reviewing for a moment, so if you don't care about the personal media hangups of some white dude from Ohio feel free to skip the next three paragraphs. I mentioned not exactly being a dyed-in-the-wool Potterhead, but I'm no stranger to the feeling of a piece of art that meant something to you revealing its hand as morally repugnant.

I first played the Last of Us at a rough time in my adolescence. I was about to start my sophomore year of high school; I didn't really have any close friends; I had just lost my first grandparent, with whom I had a very complicated relationship; and I thought I had everything figured out. Up until that point, the games that defined me most were the "Mass Effect" and "Dragon Age" series, and I took their ultra-utilitarian approach to right and wrong to heart. In my depressed, dysphoric mind, I felt confident that, should the time ever come, I could sacrifice everything and everyone I love for the greater good. This put some...strain on my interpersonal relationships.

The Last of Us showed me that was utter bull. In the penultimate level, (Spoiler - click to show)I mowed down every Firefly in my path with reckless abandon. I was going to save Ellie, or die trying. It was only when I looked at the path of corpses that led me into the operating room that I realized I had violated my self-proclaimed values. And I would have done it all again.

When the Last of Us Part II came out, I loved it just as much as, if not more than, the first, but there was something...off. What's up with the weird religious cult with no real reason for existing? Why introduce a whole new, underdeveloped faction, when raiders are already well-established? The answer, unfortunately, is that (Spoiler - click to show)tLoUpII, and the series as a whole, is anti-Palestinian propaganda. The Seraphites are savage vermin squatting on the turf of the complex but, ultimately, justified W.L.F. The game seems to try and paint the conflict evenhandedly, with hints that W.L.F.'s aggression may not be entirely justified, but casting one side as transphobic, animalistically violent zealots shows its political hand all too well.

What is there to do, then? Do I disavow the series entirely, as though it meant nothing to me? Do I try to make excuses for it, to pretend the themes are somehow not about what they've very clearly been stated to be, or, worse yet, act as though it's the kind of fair exploration it thinks it is? Do I pretend the politics aren't there at all, the "Hatsune Miku wrote HP" approach? What do I do with the mad that I feel?

A Paradox Between Worlds didn't give me the answer, and I don't think it was trying to. What it did do, however, was demonstrate that mine is not a lonely situation. It showed that my choice to engage with a work I felt betrayed by is exactly that: a choice. It's not one free of consequences, but it's my choice to make. The Last of Us, more than anything else, demonstrated I have a capacity to love that I'd never before explored, and perhaps that's all I needed from it. I think Luna and Karla would agree.

And hey, maybe I'll start using Tumblr again. Maybe.

Woof. This may be the most wholly discomforting game I've ever played. You need to try it, right this second.

In some ways, I feel unequipped to write this review; the Archivist and the Revolution is a dizzyingly deep experience, and in reaching the end credits I feel I've barely scratched its surface. Nine endings, heaps of lore about the world, probably hundreds of decodable documents, not to mention all the games, TV shows, Tweets (they aren't called that but they are absolutely Tweets), and incidental dialog. Seeing any of it requires expending energy, and that is far and away your most limited resource. Suffice it to say, if I fail to mention something important, that's probably because I either missed it entirely or was so caught up in worrying about making rent that it slipped my mind.

The last game I reviewed, Every day I get emails by Emery Joyce, I thought would have been well-suited to a filing or document-analysis mechanic. Somewhere out there, a monkey's paw must have heard my plea and curled in upon itself to bring me to this game, because Archivist has exactly that, and it's absurdly stressful. Every document is labeled with a letter and set of numbers, with no real indication of its contents until you decode it. Once decoded, each article has to be filed as one of five extremely arbitrary, frequently overlapping categories. Oh, and you can only decode about three of them in the average workday. Mislabel something? Oops! Ten bucks deducted from your pay. Decode a document that's unimportant? We're only willing to part with half your usual rate for it. Your rent is late, you're out of food, and your immune system is currently waging a civil war? Bootstraps, bootstraps, bootstraps.

While it's not listed as a direct inspiration, the game Archivist reminds me of most is Papers, Please by Lucas Pope. Besides the grim, dystopic settings and general classification as "paperwork simulators," both Archivist and Papers test the player's willingness to maintain their principles in the face of economic ruin. The biggest difference, meanwhile, is that a run of Papers, Please can be decently optimized by a skilled player, to the point that running out of money may never be an issue; in the world of the Archivist and the Revolution, everything always sucks all the time. You'll never make enough to be comfortable, rent is always going up, food is always running out, and the only way to maybe (maybe!) get enough to skirt by is to beg your ex-lovers for funds, which they could rescind at any time. It's not fun exactly, not satisfying in the way that Papers can be, but it is starkly effective.

The most central theme of the Archivist and the Revolution is that of the destructive power of transmisogyny. The world it takes place in is a wasteland, a barely-held-together dystopia, but it sometimes seems like you're the only person you know deep enough in the quagmire to see how bad things have truly gotten. History is being, at best, censored, at worst, erased, right under your nose. Everywhere you look, you are confronted with the way the world sees other trans women ("women like you" is a major thematic remark), and all you can do is try not to make yourself more of a target. On a cosmic level, the game seems to imply that this is merely another era of regression, that the pendulum won't stay this far right forever, but it's small comfort for the here and now. The world of Archivist isn't one completely devoid of hope, but it makes it clear that your life in it will not be an easy one.

And it is very specifically transmisogyny that drives all this, not just transphobia. There's a movie you can watch on the in-game television (Spoiler - click to show)that depicts a heroic guardswoman who disguises herself as a man in order to save a group of children from a pedophilic caricature of a trans woman. The message is clear: the transgender man, while still not to be encouraged, is a justifiable response to extreme circumstances; the transgender woman can only be understood through the lens of perversion. If this makes you uncomfortable, good! This is exactly how most real transmisogynists think, and it's exactly why so many of them seem more willing to give trans men a pass. So long as we tow the party line and acquiesce to being called "biological females," we can be accepted into the fold as wayward sisters. Archivist isn't throwing trans men under the bus; it's trying to explain that we don't face the same specific, deadly intersection of bigotries our sisters do. Hey, who put this soap box under my feet?

If it seems like I'm struggling to make a point here, that's because I am. The Archivist and the Revolution had such a profound emotional impact on me that even recalling its plot details sends anxiety through my lungs and dread into my belly. The closest I've come to this feeling from another game was The Last of Us Part II, and that was my favorite game of all time (my feelings on it are are...more complex now). So now maybe Archivist is my new favorite? But I also kind of never want to touch it again.

So yeah. Two thumbs up.

Apologies for the juvenile self-censorship in the title, but I like writing these silly little reviews, and I'd rather not risk a ban for something as pointless as saying a naughty word.

My mom has worked in Human Resources for longer than I've been alive. I think if I showed her this game it would give her night terrors, and I mean that as a compliment. Every day I get emails is a horror title exploring one of late-stage capitalism's most insidious poisons: The Squeeze. I'm no economologist, so take my word with a grain of salt, but in layman's terms, The Squeeze is what happens when a corporation realizes they're nearing the limit of how much money they can make by improving themselves, so now the infinite growth demanded by shareholders must be wrung from cuts. Take a grocery store: after raising prices to the limit of what consumers will accept, ensuring they buy product at the lowest cost possible, and patching any holes in their business that pennies might be slipping through (notice how many more places charge you for bags after COVID?), where else can they scoop out an increased profit margin from last quarter? Well, cutting their cashiers on staff by half and adding more self-checkouts, maybe. Or tasking one person with the stocking responsibilities that would normally go to three. Of course, you'll chew through personnel a lot faster this way, but that's a problem for the next fiscal year. Who cares?

Well, you should, and Every day is an example of exactly why. It's somewhat unclear what specifically the player character's job is, but it clearly has something to do with science textbooks, so it's not some do-nothing "team cohesion innovator" position. As days wear on, though, you're slowly pulled away from your job, into sales, and printing, and tech support, and god knows what else. Surely, your main role must suffer, typos and incorrect info must slide under your nose with much greater ease now that you're doing seven jobs at once. Not to mention the effect it has on your psyche: home-cooked dinners and an hour of reading before bed get traded for eating shredded cheese out of the bag and doomscrolling on the couch until you pass out. Marx would have a field day.

I've been trying to move away from "what could have been"s when doing these reviews, but man...this game would have been so cool with a Papers, Please sort of approach, where you have to actually look up a staff directory to see who you need to forward each email to. I kept finding myself wishing I could read the actual content of each message, rather than just the PC's summary, and I honestly think a proofreading/fact-checking minigame is exactly the kind of mechanic I would lose my mind over. On the other hand, this was a comp game, and was made in under four hours; to implement any of that even in the Grand Guignol category would probably require either a full production staff or a particularly ruinous manic episode. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that Every day is a vastly better game than the one I've been knocking around in my head for years but haven't actually opened a design doc for yet, if for no other reason than you can actually play it right now.

Every day I get emails is exactly the kind of title that makes me excited for Ectocomp. It's short, and in some ways a bit basic, but the central conceit does more than enough to carry it. Plus, it gave me an excuse to ramble about the evils of capitalism in this review, and that's always welcome.

Seriously, even if you don't plan on playing this one, just open it up and get to the second page of text. Try and tell me that didn't get you instantly hooked.

16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds was recommended to me as one of the titles that inspired Social Lycanthropy Disorder, a game I enjoyed a lot but wished was just a bit more game-y. Lo and behold, that's almost exactly what 16 Ways is: a timed, supernatural, one(ish) room multi-solution puzzler where one of the biggest challenges is to not be weird. There don't seem to be many ways to get a bad end (which I did on my first go-around - I'm skilled like that), so the objective is mainly in trying to achieve a specific ending. I like this approach; Social Lycanthropy did it as well, and it reminds me of the design ethos behind immersive sims.

The puzzles themselves trend towards mostly easy, signposted solutions, but with the sheer number of endings and elements I think the alternative would be supremely frustrating. The bit where (Spoiler - click to show)you have to correct the wording of Corinthians, The Shepherd's Psalm, or St. Francis's prayer was neat, but, full disclosure, I just looked it up immediately. I thought it was a funny bit of roleplaying to have my character check her phone while being proselytized to.

You may have noticed I have yet to talk about the plot of 16 Ways. That's because the title tells you nearly all of it: you're a vampire hunter; you're in a McDonald's; there is a vampire. It's a classic boy-meets-girl meets heart-meets-stake. The story may be about as meaty as one-ply toilet paper, but the writing is still excellent. It starts strong and stays great, save for one extremely dated meme reference (2016 memes are dated now...god, I feel old).

The second highest praise I can give 16 Ways, after the title of this review, is that it engaged me enough to sit through its long, unskippable intro multiple times just to keep interacting with the world. That's a notable feat, since it does the older Twine game thing of text appearing on screen at timed intervals, no matter how fervently you click. 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds may be a little dated, and not all of the endings seem to have been crafted with the same level of care, but it's still as fun as it (presumably) was ten years ago.

Edit: the intro is, in fact, skippable. I'm leaving this up as-is, however, in tribute to man's hubris. Remember to double check your reviews before hitting publish, kids.

I'm writing this review a few days after "finishing" Very Vile Fairy File, which normally I'm opposed to. I find that my memory very quickly muddies after the credits roll, and in some cases I even keep the game open while I write in case there's a mechanic I want to make sure I'm describing properly. In this case, however, had I written this immediately after I gave up playing and read to the end of the walkthrough, I'd have just taken a big, steaming poo all over it, which isn't really what Very Vile deserves. I'll explain in a bit.

Very Vile Fairy File is a wordplay puzzle adventure, as one should expect from Andrew Schultz. This time around, rhymes are the name of the game, which I found both more intuitive and more rewarding than the spoonerisms and anagrams of the author's other titles I've tried. Environmental description is minimal, but that means almost everything you see can be incorporated into a puzzle, and I still found my imagination working with what little set dressing there is. A lot of time and effort has also been put into acknowledging rhymes aside from the intended solution; if it's acceptable in Scrabble, the game will probably give you a witty retort and golf-clap your cleverness.

...Therefore, it's baffling how buggy the current release is. Now, I'll fully admit this may be my own fault: I play IF exclusively in-browser on a low-end laptop, and it's very possible that I could have avoided the issues I'm about to complain about if I just downloaded the thing, or played in a different interpreter. Maybe I'm due to clear my cache, or maybe itch.io is doing something funky to the file, I don't know. My point is, the seemingly most up-to-date version of the game as it is currently available to play had some non-gameplay issues that ultimately ruined my enjoyment, and they might happen to you, too.

First, and most crucially, the save feature is broken. Trying to save or restore a session would freeze the entire game, and only a full page refresh would fix it. The game isn't very long, so I eventually decided I'd just finish it all in one go, but that was only after having to restart the whole thing something like four times. The first few puzzle solutions are now going to occupy valuable space in my brain for the rest of my life. What made me quit completely, though, was a moment right at the end. I had run the gauntlet, explored every nook and cranny and was feeling quite smug about my poetic memetics...(Spoiler - click to show)when I died by being too hasty to enter the gate to the final area. Oh well, that's all part of the genre, and the warnings were pretty clearly signposted. Just type undo.

Whoops! Undo didn't just go back to my last turn; it dropped me at the halfway point of the plot, with no clue which of the mid-game puzzles I had to go back and do over. It was at this point I decided that I wasn't having enough fun to justify a fifth playthrough, and just read the cheat sheet to see how everything ended.

If Very Vile Fairy File had worked for me as intended, it would get a hearty recommendation. As it stands, so long as you go in knowing not to trust the system commands and you're a big Dr. Seuss fan, it's still probably worth your time. I'll be playing the rest of the series, because I do like the central wordplay gimmick, but I don't know if I'll ever trust an undo feature again.

I was always going to like this one. "Gay werewolf social anxiety simulator," besides describing my transition timeline, is a premise that caters so specifically to my tastes that the game would have to send angry bees to my house upon every death for me not to like it. Even then, I'd probably still give it two stars.

In Social Lycanthropy Disorder, you play as Mia, a werewolf who has accidentally agreed to attend a Halloween party on the night of a full moon. Being more afraid of the definite faux pas of cancelling last minute than the potential faux pas of turning into a dog in your friend's living room, it's now up to you to keep up social niceties, make small talk, and stay just long enough to not look suspicious, while avoiding touching anything silver or peeing on the carpet.

I'm still quite new to narrative rather than puzzle-based IF, so it's possible this isn't all that salient a comparison, but Social Lycanthropy reminds me most of Brian Patrick Hennessey's work, specifically Birdland. Both games have a core conceit of a protagonist going through a decidedly supernatural event without letting anyone around them know about it, and I think they share a similarly offbeat sense of humor and overall optimistic messaging about the human condition.

Unfortunately, in that comparison, Social Lycanthropy lags behind in two major ways. The first is in the depth of side characters; this is understandable, since Lycanthropy is substantially shorter than Birdland, and your interactions with the other party guests are meant to be somewhat awkwardly brief. The second is that Lycanthropy lacks any kind of central gameplay gimmick besides "mill around a party for a while." This is...fine, I guess, and okay, yes, there is a "discomfort meter," but it's such a minor part of the narrative that you're unlikely to notice it unless you specifically shoot for a bad ending.

I think there was real potential here to lean even further into the "werewolf instincts" aspect: as the night goes on, maybe you have to ensure you don't hover around the snack table too long, lest your inner beast decides to hork down the whole charcuterie table. Maybe you have to avoid the host's cat so you aren't tempted to chase it. The game is still perfectly fine without these things, I just think they would have added a nice little zhuzh to proceedings.

I've found I have some trouble giving an ultimate verdict on heavily story-based games, since, so long as they have a basically cromulent narrative structure and no game-breaking bugs, there's very little in them I feel equipped to declare universally "good" or "bad." For what it's worth, I enjoyed my time with Social Lycanthropy Disorder, and I think you might too.

Now, who wants a treat?

I feel a bit like I've stumbled into someone's high school reunion while trying to find the hotel vending machines. Quirky Test is an unapologetic love letter to the halcyon days of the text adventure game...which I'm about ten years too young to have experienced. I've tried the classics, the Zorks and Colossal Cave Adventures and the like, and usually found myself scared off by a puzzle that seemed designed by someone who locks their front door each morning by breaking their key in thirds and feeding the pieces to a flock of ducks. Say what you will about newer IF titles, but at least they're more likely to commit the sin of incompetence than malice.

As an outsider, then, Quirky distinguishes itself with colorful presentation, whimsical prose, and puzzles that reminded me, in a good way, of Counterfeit Monkey. The tone of the writing I think deserves special mention; especially with the tutorial on, it feels like a kindly teacher talking you through a subject they're passionate about. References to the classics and the tropes therein abound, but Quirky makes a commendable effort to rebuke the cruelty that often mars its forebears.

You do have to like wordplay to make it through Quirky Test, but hopefully you already figured that out. If the title of this review makes you groan, trust me, it gets worse. Personally, I found the dad-jokey charm of the spoonerisms pleasant enough, but I wouldn't call it laugh-out-loud funny.

Quirky Test is a brief, good-natured little diversion, with a fun central mechanic. Its greatest fault, perhaps, is a lack of ambition, but not everything in this world needs to try and be Anchorhead.

Intelligence is an object lesson in polish. Fundamentally, it's closest in kinship to Kinophobia by Bruno Dias or Jeremy Johnston's The Roottrees are Dead, albeit with a fraction of the objectives of either. As a mid-level military intelligence officer, you are tasked with deducing the fate and location of eight human starships, as well as seven alien assailant vessels. So far so good, but what makes this game truly shine is its presentation.

Intelligence is neither parser nor choice-based, but is presented as a star map stretching from Earth to just beyond Saturn. Progress is made by inputting data into a variety of tools (telescope for coordinates; engine signature analysis for electromagnetic traces; etc. etc.), and comparing that against archival info to deduce the characteristics and current status of each unknown ship. If that sounds boring to you...well, it might be, but I found collecting and logging each new scrap of info riveting, in a way that typing "hit goblin with sword" has never done for me.

I'd be remiss not to call specific attention to the game's visual design. Fully graphical IF is already a rare treat, and Intelligence may be one of the most striking; classic sci-fi with elements of modern computer-aided astronomy. I find that some games trade a more traditional UI for slick graphics and lose the sense of playing as a beleaguered underdog, but Intelligence keeps just enough clunk and clutter to feel like the player is fighting against a system that doesn't want them to find out more. Which, of course, is a polite way of saying "you can neither resize nor move the text windows, and if you have more than two of them open at a time it looks like a productivity tool designed by Satan," but I interpreted that as part of the challenge.

There's a (non-IF) game called Stellaris; a grand strategy RTS that, in gameplay, isn't really my thing, but I keep coming back to it because the atmosphere is so captivating. Nearly every campaign, while my contemporaries are researching new ways to blow me to smithereens, I find myself glued to the archaeology track, colonizing just far enough to get first dibs on digging up ancient technology spread across the stars. Then, of course, one of my well-armed neighbors usually decide my society needs liberating from the primitive throes of democracy, and all of my piddly scout ships get turned into expensive space trash. Intelligence scratches the itch I keep looking for in Stellaris, without the keyboard abuse that usually follows.

There are gripes to be had, sure. Veterans of the deduction game genre and people with more than three brain cells to knock together may find Intelligence a bit too easy, because I thought the difficulty was just right. The progressive hints feature is nice, but I think the gap between the penultimate tip and "here's the full solution, you big dumb baby" is a little broader than it ought to be. Finally...there are minigames. You can turn them off, so it feels unfair to rag on them, but they range from "kind of clever, once or twice" to "there is no way organizing rocket fuel is part of my job description."

While I'm complaining about things, I suppose I should mention that the plot of Intelligence isn't exactly revolutionary. I found the background details interesting, lots of corporate outposts with knowledge they really shouldn't have and research stations with their funding mysteriously slashed after a breakthrough, but the main twist is a bit of an an eye-roller. (Spoiler - click to show)Turns out, the aliens are only attacking because humanity wantonly destroyed one of their defenseless colony ships. As reveals go, it's only slightly less predictable than "they were secretly humans all along."

Nothing I mentioned in the last two paragraphs actually reduced my enjoyment, though. Intelligence is so good it makes me want to break IFDB's policy on profanity, just to emphasize how much I love it. If it weren't for the ego boost I get from seeing "2 people found this review helpful," I would have written nothing here but "game gud go play it," and that would have probably been a more accurate depiction of my infatuation with this title. I only wish there was more of it...(Spoiler - click to show)and maybe a different ending.

This review will likely be a bit shorter than is typical for me, since I don't know how much of my personal business I want to share with all seven of IFDB's active users, but make no mistake; you should try End of Life Care.

Twine games have a bit of a reputation of being all twine and no game, as it were, and this one is no exception. It's an entirely linear experience, with the interaction limited to clicking your next line of dialog from a list of...one option. Nonetheless, I found the choices to be minimal and logical enough that I was never thrown out of the experience by being forced to say something I didn't think made sense. Moreover, part of the point of End of Life is that what you say doesn't actually matter.

The core conceit of End of Life Care is the black comedy inherent to seeking treatment as a suicidal depressive. After all, how do you convince someone to jump through dozens of hoops in the healthcare system for a life they don't even want in the first place? Why engage with a system so rampantly inefficient it borders on cruelty, when you could just give yourself up to the void? Why even try, when the world demands more water from your bone-dry cup, just so you might someday return to the well?

At the risk of making this review more about myself than the game, End of Life actually reminded me more of my experience seeking gender-affirming care than of my experience with depression. Phone calls upon faxes upon six-month follow-ups upon recommendation letters, all to be told that I got some wrong information along the way and need to start all over again. Now, pay us eight thousand dollars and take three weeks off work, just to take a baby step towards having the kind of bodily integrity most people take completely for granted.

I apologize for speaking so little about the actual game, but much like Excalibur brought out my inner rambling philosopher, End of Life Care provoked the part of me that still simmers with frustration at how I've been treated by the healthcare system. Even if you don't find it as relatable as I did, End of Life is a heartfelt, honest, and darkly funny story that I heartily recommend.

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.