Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/21/25
Playtime: 1hr, Demon Hunter(2), Healthy Appetite(1); 2 playthroughs

If there is a category of reviews I struggle with, it is for trauma- or therapy-based IF. Don’t get me wrong, IF is a TREMENDOUS tool to use to build empathy, sympathy, and commiseration for people that can probably use a bit of daylight in their lives. It’s just, if I am not afflicted with the particular concerns of the work, my takes are always a bit suspect. The BEST I can do is approach from an empathy perspective, and even then, I am subject to debilitating blind spots in my engagement.

This is a work whose protagonist struggles with crippling, depressive self-doubt compounded with emotional family trauma. The nature of the work is to explore the protagonist’s apartment, struggle to accomplish daily tasks against a backdrop of near-insurmountable motivation gaps, and experience shadowed flashbacks when considering takeout menus. Ok, rereading that last sentence, that is way more glib than I intended. Food and food preparation are integral touchstones for the protagonist, so the conceit is not unjustified.

Moment by moment it works pretty well. The ‘marketing’ descriptions on the menus are particularly well done, and the contrast between them and their less idealized memories is wryly impactful. If you probe the menus deeply enough you are confronted with representative (Spoiler - click to show)mental demons that are evocative, nicely metaphorical and attractively illustrated. These are all very strong aspects of the work.

The interactivity is where I could feel my blind spots encroaching. On the one hand, atop the screen are three attributes that seem to gauge the player’s effectiveness and mental state. Not only did I not detect an impact to those, I did not seem to be able to modify them in a predictable way. In particular, if I deliberately chose the most (Spoiler - click to show)unhealthy responses, the stats remained resolutely unchanged. Nor did that seem to influence future possible choices.

Further, there was little to no back pressure when selecting the most (Spoiler - click to show)optimistic, constructive choices. Given the dramatic language of the inner monologue, this felt.. too easy? This culminated in gameplay that unveiled (Spoiler - click to show)more food menus if you just kept cleaning, well beyond a threshold even nominally healthy me would be capable of!

Another dissonant tone for me was the breadth of the menus (not all of which I encountered during one playthrough!). A wide variety of ethnicities is represented in restaurants. All of which can trigger childhood memories of family preparation? That is a VERY cosmopolitan family! The language used to describe this SEEMED to lean into handed-down legacies, but were so broadly applied I went from experiencing a SPECIFIC family story to a muddied, ‘wait, what is their heritage now?’

So, all of these things kept me at a bit of an arm’s length, until I considered it in retrospect. What if this was NOT intended to be a rigorous recreation of mental struggles? What if, instead, this was a determinedly encouraging work, aimed at players commiserating with the protagonist? The message was not ‘this is what it feels like’ but ‘you CAN do this, even if it doesn’t feel like it.’ ‘No matter how bad your past choices, you can make a different choice next time.’ The work was simultaneously acknowledging that life experiences can suck and put nearly unsustainable pressures on us, while offering that it is still in our power to grapple with it. We need not be defeated even when it feels like we have been. What I initially read as ‘reductively easy problem solutions’ became instead a cheerleading of some kind, offering hope. And maybe even a bit of wish fulfillment to sweeten the pot.

The blurb for the work seems to echo this take for me, and elevated the whole thing beyond my clinical ‘realism’ knee jerk. The fact that a work of subtle optimism and support can be wrapped in (and punch through!) a graphical package of such evocative darkness is kind of… wonderful.

Horror Icon: Leatherface
Vibe: Wrestling Demons
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would be forced to acknowledge that I was pretty unprepared to engage this subject matter. I would focus, then, on maybe sharpening the protagonist’s ethnic heritage a bit. Pick a few each runthrough to center a family experience on and steer other menus to a different, less immediate shading. I say this in the full acknowledgement that it could double the word count!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 45m, 13/8 bailed without unlocking Guide sections

Light-fantasy parsers run the risk of become samey in a player’s mind. Both in the moment and more so on reflection. They are such a staple of the field, you really have to cut new ground somehow to get them to stand out. Similarly for slice-of-life relationship dramas, though those at least have the hook of (usually) singular character work. Y’know what I can’t accuse of saminess? Weird poetry- and art- driven works that marry an impish sense of humor, playfulness of form and nearly opaque bizarrity.

Those things stick with you. I offer PWW as Exhibit A here.

The conceit, such as it is, is to select a series of abstractly themed art inspirations, to nominally sketch for an installation. Choose six times from a pool of four categories, three of which are delightfully random. The fourth being ‘a cat.’ In return you get a pithy line, a spot of poetry, a quasi-parser room description, or an anecdote, all very evocative and also standalone and unrelated to each other. All of it presented under a mutating boilerplate ‘restart’ title-author.

Y’know one way to get me to stop complaining about ‘poetry’? Make it good. Y’know the other way? Keep me so off balance, mentally, that I don’t have time to fuss with that, consumed as I am with clawing for mental purchase against the opaque logic of the thing. PWW does BOTH of those things! It would be easy to push into a state where I would just throw my hands in the air in desperation and futility and abandon things. Which I eventually did. But MAN did it take a long time!

The playful vibe of the thing is its overriding impression, just dazzling with inventiveness and unexpected text. This is augmented by a “guide/help system” that seems to be as playful as the rest of the work, if a bit more structured. I say ‘seems’ because I never actually got to consume much of it.

Oh, I was gamely playing along, no doubt about that. I was really enjoying it. After each set of 6, there was a portentous “status is X out of eight” message. Clear enough, right? As I closed in on 8 though, after hitting its wild themes in many combinations.. nothing changed. Well, one thing changed, I started to get some repetition. This did not itself break things, those repetitions were scattered among many novel ideas, but it did make me think ‘if you KNOW the player is going to go for 6x8 = 48 of these things, wouldn’t you have at least that many in the chamber, front-loaded?’ That was only a mild ripple compared to what happened when I closed the 8th run.

Which was nothing. No newly available guide sections were unlocked. No achievements noted. No textual acknowledgement other than the score itself. If the end note highlighted anything, it did not read as significant or different than the wryly fantastic observations of the other 7. So I kept going. 9/8, 10/8… all the way to 13/8. More and more repetition, but nothing new of note. Ok that’s a crazy thing to say about this work. SO MUCH new playful text. Just nothing new ludically.

I mean, I clearly missed the point of this. Let me tell you one more thing about how I engaged this piece. This Spring Thing has inflicted on me a variety of feline-influenced works at this point. You KNOW I am bull headed about this. For the first 8 runthroughs, I ignored that inspiration and only played with the other 3 in many varieties and combinations. All of 1, alternating, cyclical patterns, drum rudiment patterns. I flirted with a lot of them. At pass 9, my thought was ‘ok, maybe the work NEEDS me to bring in the Cats.’ So I tried that, begrudgingly. To no apparent effect. Did this perverse playstyle of mine trip over some subtle code artifacts? Don’t know.

I DO know the repetition got more dense. I suspect there is some sort of selection patterning that might be decodable. I find it hard to believe that 4 full sections of Guide are headfakes, including a bit on Sylvia Plath (whose work I was previously unfamiliar with, but who this piece encouraged me to explore). But after spending so long with it, enjoying the wild disconnects and playfulness of form, I was kind of unwilling to go back and treat those as logic puzzles. They just worked so WELL as disconnected shots of joy, I didn’t WANT to gamify them. It felt.. disrespectful.. to treat these wonderful bits of wordplay as functional puzzle pieces when their appeal was SO not functional.

I mean:

"You are a lot of not much to look at."
"Those who burn meat
to please the gods
know little of meat or gods"

Why do I want to do ANYTHING with that other than just titter delightedly? I am 100% sure I did not crack the code of this thing, and may in fact have confounded it. I am equally sure that it lived up to its FIRST boilerplate title block:

"A fun activity <3 by Drew Cook
Release Nulla / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

"This is a fun game with a gimmick."

That is true even if you never tumble to the gimmick.

Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Creative Chaos
Polish: Gleaming or Textured, depending on the function of that 13/8 score
Gimme the Wheel! : What would I do next if this were my project? Hm. It is so clearly NOT something I’m capable of, so that’s hard to answer. I guess I would poke into that ‘nothing happens at 8/8’ artifact (which I think the author did?). Either sharpen the artistic statement for the dummies in the back row, or fix any bugs that need fixing.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 1hr total, 8 games, what a bargain!

The Senica student anthology has become an indispensable part of the Spring Thing in my head. Probably because it’s been here as long as I have, I’ve never seen a Thing WITHOUT one! I look forward to it every year. So much creativity in such small bundles, ripe for rapid consumption and enjoyment. The low-pressure uniting theme (this year is ‘found on a riverbank/seashore’) giving a form for the inspiration to follow. What a great part of this community, and what a great batch of games this year.

If I did the ‘blurb/learnings’ thing again, it would cast that in stone going forward, so instead I am going to break and do it more freeform. I will close with a ‘my favorite thing…’

A Brand New World /by Raiden/ (15m, 3 endings)
I would love to be coy and teasing with ‘what do you think is found on the beach..?’ but its right there in the title! Probably not what you expected, no? There was a really nice twist in this one, as some background text hinted that people were going missing, but it turned out (Spoiler - click to show)they just didn’t want to come back! That was a really clever twist on what we might expect to be a horror premise. Instead, the player gets an all-to-brief introduction to an imaginative and playful fantasy world.
My favorite thing: I really like the long paragraphs of deep description. The author took the time to paint a vivid picture of their fantastical setting, and really conveyed it well.

BOTTLE /by M.A.S./ (5m, 5 endings)
Ok, this one ALSO telegraphs the found object in its title! It’s a classic, but this one ups the tension a bit with a large branch of endings that jump on you quickly and impactfully. This is a very streamlined, interesting branching game, very replayable due to its tight depth.
My favorite thing: The IF version of jump scare is the text message that both the player and protagonist character read together. If there is a two-word phrase MORE charged than (Spoiler - click to show)You’re Next! I don’t know what it is.

Fragments of the Nile /by Storyteller/ (5m, 4 endings)
Here’s a story that hides its found object from the title! The player is an archeologist, interacting with a find that has some secrets. I am a horror fan (I mean the whole conceit of this year’s reviews attests to this), so this story was right up my alley. There are quite a few endings available, and interestingly some tie together building a fuller picture of the threat. This is a very good use of multiple ending IF!
My favorite thing: I think this one really went the extra mile to establish its Eqyptian archeology setting. There are a few screens worth of table setting that really bring the player into the story very effectively.

Nothing /by Gooseberry/ (5m, 6 endings)
Here we find a book on the shore, one that we are continually presented with opportunity to reject, neglect, or read and follow. As game players we are likely to want to engage, but the continual variations on ‘ignore it’ are kind of funny and present a low-key realistic picture of life. We might as easily forget things we stumble across as engage them! If we do engage, we are treated to a time travel scenario where we might learn a bit… and might suffer some unexpected consequences!
My favorite thing: This game rewarded investigation. Careful players can find clues down one branch to keep from dying in another. This kind of player driven setup-payoff is one of the stronger aspects of IF - letting the player have a fair chance at navigating its more dire outcomes!

POWER TURTLE /by 3N/ (5m, 5 endings)
What might we find at the shore, other than shore life? Here, the player rescues a.. well, you see it in the title. From there, you are treated to a VERY broad branching decision tree, leading a large array of outcomes. It is very ambitious and very well done. Every branch seems fully fleshed out with the consequences and subsequent choices to make. It was kind of thrilling how wide the space got, very quickly.
My favorite thing: I explored a lot of endings, and what was really cool was while they were all very different, depending on player choices, they were all pretty ‘good’! Just in very logical and satisfying ways! Conditioned to expect shock twists, or ‘good/bad’ endings, this was a delightful surprise.

Those voices are getting louder, captain. /by Mushroom/ (5m, 2 endings)
This is a quick dialogue tree game, where the protagonists is talking to a shipmate about something he may or may not have seen. The ‘found object’ of this game. The game does a good job of presenting varying responses you might take to the poor man’s ravings, culminating in a neat twist that fully reflects how seriously you have taken his ravings!
My favorite thing: I am torn. On the one hand, my favorite thing was the use of color cues to reinforce the endings. Default color/font schemes put all the emphasis on text to carry the load, but graphical flourishes are very much part of IF and should not be neglected! On the other hand, The author does something cheeky with their choice dialogue, where the main character’s thoughts are parenthesized and italicized. They form an often quite amusing inner dialogue that contrasts humorously to the spoken dialogue, and in some places soft-guides the player.

Untilted by BB-Anon (5m, 6 endings)
This particular found object leads the player on a mini-exploration of a section of the beach. I really liked the real sense of geography the game conveyed. I could picture the beach/cliff/road area I was wandering around in. Depending on choices I made, I might not get farther than the investigation, or I may get to some really funny-bananas endings. I don’t want to spoil it, but I had no idea that was ANYONE’S wish, let alone mine! :]
My favorite thing: As a wannabe game designer myself, I really liked how this author reconverged their choices where it made sense. If you go down one branch, you may find yourself on a different branch due to how those choices bring you to a similar state. This is very important tool in the IF author’s tool box, and I love seeing it here!

Wonder of the Woods… by Leontine (& Eudokimos) (15m)
Wow, this one blew me away. The graphical presentation, scripted font, the wonderful character and animal illustrations.. the enthusiasm and love in the project really came through. As a player, you get to explore a quartet (quintet?) of friends, each of which has an animal "familiar", as they try to engage their section of river and a difficult friend of theirs. It is both deep and broad, and really paints a full picture of friends cooperating in a very busy, very important afternoon.
My favorite thing: It would be easy to say that the graphical care was my favorite, but I actually think I liked the game setup even more. Being able to play as four different girls, each with their own animal friend was plain fun. All four were different, and their adventures varied. And they all came together at the end in a satisfying, choice-driven way. Yeah, I’m sticking with the game design as my favorite.

Viva la Senica Thing!

Horror Icon: Crypt Keeper. Ok, he’s not one of the icons I pre-selected, and I was VERY tempted to go “Children of the Corn” here, but no. I have pitched this year on year, so Crypt Keeper is reserved for Senica.
Vibe: Anthology
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : No. Give MORE students the Wheel!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 20m, 2 endings, 9/10 on quiz

For a change of pace, let me ignore my own angsts and instead plumb the angsts of a first time author! There is something heady about the raw, unfiltered creativity of engaging a new communication medium. The thrill of learning new skills, and putting them in service of a creative vision, it is a boiling, bubbling, embarrassment of riches, a swirling soup of enthusiasm that latches on to the prose, the construction, and carries to the reader. This was my overwhelming sense of this piece - an enthusiasm to pack if full of graphics, external educational links, meaningful choice points and classically-informed mini puzzles. Stir it all together into a wonderful, asymmetric stew of an experience.

I particularly liked how it simultaneously functioned as an education vehicle (on the myth of Atlantis and a primer on ecological responsibility), and an unsentimental view of human history. As we navigate the events via our time-lost bottle, two options loom large. To view the last days of Atlantis (whose parallels to modernity seem very deliberate), or to pen a missive of warning hoping to avert that end.

That latter effort received with a resolutely cold “Time is a great wall, and my message is only a stone thrown against it.” The work acknowledges the limits of communication when communication is rebuffed, but somehow nevertheless infuses a stubborn optimism IN THE VERY ACT OF IT. And makes LEARNING an act of defiance.

Yes, the work carried artifacts of an author engaging new tools but was considered and complete nevertheless. And its cautionary, defiant enthusiasm more than compensated any rookie missteps.

Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Stealth Education
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : I would not deign to seize the wheel of anyone’s first effort. The joy of completing a project, of capturing messages you feel compelled to share in a medium that continually offers new mechanisms for it.. everyone should experience that without me grabbing the wheel!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Cat protagonist. This is what we’ve come to. If my credentials as a reviewer of superhuman dedication are ever in question, I call your attention to this review.

This is a light work whose overriding atmosphere is welcoming. From its friendly, warm wordsmithing, to its forgiving and increasingly nudgy gameplay; its limited vocabulary (meant as a design choice, not a criticism), to its stated purpose, as a feature showcase to budding Inform authors… all of it just conveys “C’mon in the waters fine, and not nearly as scary as you think.”

While I am clearly not the primary audience for any of these things, least of all its protagonist, the nature of its amiability is that it is impossible to begrudge the time spent. The presentation goes a long way to this feeling. From its care paid to Scene change formatting cues, its ascii cat ‘pause for more,’ its scorecard rendition, it is all very deliberate and polished, conveying we are in strong, gentle hands for the duration of this modest puzzle fest. Against a backdrop of parsers often characterized by an intimidating, minimalist and cold greater-than prompt, this work goes out of its way to make every part of the experience less vexing.

I could talk about what it sacrifices in service of that, but… why? I mean, it would be wild if I criticized Smokey the Bear for his inability to explain the difference between colon and semi-colon. Meet the big guy where he lives, yeah? This is a work that has a specific goal, and is SO successful at it other things don’t matter. Its creative tradeoffs are uniformly successful in service of that goal. Were I a blank slate at the beginning of my artistic journey, filled with unspecific ambitions and preoccupations and completely asea on how to even start, this work would be a godsend - both a reassurance, a first step, and a glimpse of what success could like.

It would feel outright inspirational, if not for the nagging feeling that its protagonist choice is a subtle and portentous warning. That the only cost the aspiring artist might pay is THEIR ENTIRE SOUL.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Welcoming
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, it would be focused on TADS, not Inform. Just that one small change. Well, maybe just one more.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 1.5hr dying all the time, even in Easy mode?

Is there less invigorating an experience than to dive deep into the rules and setting of a game, tentatively conclude it is probably not going to be for you, then see that borne out exactly as you foresaw? Oh, I know! It would definitely be less invigorating to read a ‘review’ that only had that to say!

Chronicles codifies a very maximalist TTRPG-kind of experience. Deep world lore, informed by a bespoke magic system that translate to specific game mechanics. Evolving powers, abilities and capabilities that unfold as you progress. Learning the strengths and weaknesses of all those abilities as a kind of problem-solving toolkit to apply to continually varying challenges. An ethos of progression through conflict, where most interactions are framed as mortal combat-focused encounters. Young me would have fallen head over heels for this kind of thing.

And one presented so slickly: its uniform artistic esthetic (described a AI assisted? pushing my boundaries here!) and card-reminiscent stat-catalog graphical design underscore its RPG bones. It is also boldly attractive in its own right.

Older me is not so easily won over. Or, probably closer to the truth, less open to it. I struggled mightily with the magic/combat system. I never really tumbled onto an HP-recovery mechanic, meaning I would go from encounter to encounter being worn down by enemy steel AND MY OWN SPELLS, until numbers went to 0. Some encounters did provide a healing goose, but in a way that seemed to underscore its exceptional and scarce nature. I just did not have it in me to explore the interplay of spell/weapon values and combat sequence to discover optimal, effective strategies.

The NPCs I encountered, even the central mystery were all quite interesting and engaging. For me, it just continually ran aground on seemingly unavoidable combat that I never mastered the subtleties of, gatekeeping all that stuff I really wanted. I died and restarted (on ‘middle’ setting) so many times I finally just capitulated to Easy/Story mode.. and still died in combat? I did not detect the promised ‘encounter bypass’ mechanism, so much so I question whether I was actually in easy mode at all? Is there a bug there? Or just a player missing an obvious out?

I guess my conclusion is I liked everything about it EXCEPT the combat, but found the combat inescapable, and ultimately pushed me away, unfinished. So in an effort to provide any value at all to this abortive review, let me say: if you like dense lore translating to complex, subtle fighting mechanics, this will likely thrill you. The supporting story and graphical elements are dynamite draws to that central suite of mechanics you could just d20 with all day. Certainly I could see younger me doing that!

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Lore Heavy RPG
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would repair the Easy mode. Who’m I kidding, what I’d really do is ignore the other two modes! This is why so many projects are NOT mine to fiddle with.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 30m, two endings

There is a fundamental problem with “good vampire” narratives. It is all that gosh-darn subtext. In some ways that subtext is helpful - the exotic ‘other’ both feared and desired, a tailor-made receptacle for bigotry and bias. The problem is, in the text of vampire lore, that bigotry and bias turn out to be COMPLETELY CORRECT. They SHOULD be feared. They ARE a menace to the living.

“Some good, some bad” have it worse. If we posit an “all good” vampire tale, we might at least subvert cultural expectations with story-specific lore refuting the mythic presuppositions, expose them as true prejudices. With the “some” narrative we are into much greyer, much more human space. Yes, some illegal immigrants commit crimes. Does this give us permission to villify them all, as a monolith? Does that fact cancel all imperatives for empathy? That’s rich soil to work. I don’t feel that was really RI’s aim, however, to its tonal detriment.

The antagonists of this story, a religious order of vampire hunters, are positioned as cruel and implacable. But, they are not obviously WRONG to be so. Yes, we want our hero to live, but we come from a starting position closer to the bad guys than good. Worse, by our glimpse into the protagonist, we have seen that he is (and presumably all of his kind are) prey to dark vectors pushing them in murderous directions. Resisting, so far, but forever? All of this dilutes the inciting conflict, I think, muddies it in ways that detract from the drama. Immigrants deserve empathy because they are just as human as we are. Vampires are, textually, ACTUALLY BIOLOGICALLY PREDISPOSED TO MURDER.

Fortunately, this is NOT a good vamp v bad religion story. Well, it is, but it’s not PRIMARILY that. This is a character study of a vampire coming to grips with his undead afterlife, the sacrifices it demands, and the pressures it presents. Ultimately asking questions about the value of free will when a decision’s stakes are not and cannot be really understood. This tension I found much better realized than world lore. The details of his turn were nicely grounded, the tactile struggle to escape his trap visceral, and oh that encounter with the transition Demon(?). This last was the showpiece scene of the work. Kembrael (said demon) was delightfully witty, wry and charismatic. That scene alone is worth the price of admission. All these pieces fed a much more personal story of change (only vaguely understood at first) and ongoing struggle.

Before I could embrace the character study though, there was another aspect of the work that pushed at me. The language is formal and flowery, hearkening to a Victorian or Gothic setting in its sentence construction. Any work that uses this much ‘twixt’ and ‘yet’ instead of ‘between’ and ‘still’ is trying my patience, making me think of the dreaded ‘P’ word. And it did for sure, but it also had some real bangers in there:

“Paladins and fiend-flayers and their growing hordes of frothing zealots punished ever more obscure sins.”
“enough of his blood still lingered brainward”
“To consign that much silver to a vampire death trap required hatred with extravagant funding.”

In the end, these were the phrases I grabbed to remember, not that other stuff, so bullet dodged!

I played through twice. There was a weird artifact where one playthrough skipped part 6? Jumped straight from 5 to 7? I think? That was weird, but undamaging to the narrative. The varied endings did have something to say about the value of trust in a climate that discourages it which, while heartening, didn’t really coalesce with other elements in any kind of thematic unity.

And maybe that is the biggest danger vampires pose to a narrative. Their archetypal status, encapsulating so many themes and subtexts, immediately cue certain readers to madly scramble for messages and metaphor. Certain maybe-trying-too-hard readers like me. Maybe I should just settle down, stop trying so hard, and enjoy a more personal, character-based story?

Horror Icon: Babadook
Vibe: Vampires But Good
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel!: If it were my project, I would be unable to resist taking an editing knife the more flowery passages. Sharpen those up just a little to really let the strong lines shine.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 20m 3 playthroughs

Synaptix is a work that posits a present/future where economic opportunity is so limited, human workforce so underserved by machines-are-cheaper capitalism, that the protagonist seeks out medical experimentation as a viable way forward. Ridiculous, right?

The scenario is painted clearly enough, with some endearingly detailed specifics on the protagonist’s living situation. Any reservations we have are repeatedly buried under a ‘guess there’s no choice’ shrug of compliance. There follows a series of dosages where the drug’s effects ramp up, modestly impact our protagonist’s daily life, give him some hallucinogenic visions, then (Spoiler - click to show)just settle into the background of ‘something I guess I did.’

It seems to present a dispiriting tale of no real choices. Even when presented with choices, they were quickly revealed as dead ends of wasted time. The real impactful choice seems to be your initial motivation for seeking the money in the first place. The side effect hallucinations cluster around that motivation, though seeing things through doesn’t really resolve uniquely.

There is one additional impactful choice: do you violate your non-disclosure to score some side money above and beyond your initial contract? It is an interesting problem to posit. While the terms of the experiment you sign on to and people conducting it are relatively benign, there is always the chance the side effects could be really bad. And the corp doesn’t care, not really, about that outcome, just needs the data. Arguably, the whole scenario is part of the system that led to rolling dice with your health to get money. Yet, pushing back against that system (Spoiler - click to show)is not better. You get rich but make the world demonstrably worse. Underlining that ‘success’ in this social system is still optimized and incentivized to personal gain over public good. By trying to break with a single available path, you are shown to be doubling down on that path after all.

All this is interesting to reflect on, but very light and underplayed in the work itself. The work is no-frills, ‘here’s what you want to do, you do it, (Spoiler - click to show)temporary win.’ That underplayed narrative tone does as much as anything to sell the impotence of choice when following the script of this post-capitalist dystopia. I appreciate the soft-sell approach to its dark premise, but the selling is SO soft it also kind of shrugs your engagement away. I see what happened to the protag. What choice did he have? What impact did he expect? Fiction doesn’t HAVE to inspire or terrify, but it could do… more than this?

Horror Icon: Carrie
Vibe: Big Pharma
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel!: If this were my work, I would feel compelled to use the purported function of the drug to enhance the themes of the piece directly, stitch another linkage into the story’s fabric. As it stands, while the drug in question is intended to confer useful abilities, it rarely seems to do more than generate some scenario-specific hallucinations. You could squint and see how the drug maybe enabled THOSE hallucinations, but I would take the squint out of it in my project.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 20m, two playthroughs, Marco stepped in both times

This is a work in direct, confrontive conversation with its predecessor, with community response to its predecessor. I was one of those respondents, having a truly whiny litany of complaints with the former work. “I don’t like AI art.” “Why is it so hard to do simple things?” “Why is the game haranguing me for not knowing things it hasn’t told me yet?” I believe I called it an “All Thumbs Simulator.”

EM is a sequel to that work, using its familiar characters with full memory of both the previous work AND ITS RESPONSES to usher through another low stakes morning ritual as gameplay. Buy and make some coffee. Buuut is that really the work’s aim? Or is it to taunt and double down, not trolling exactly, more like playfully tweaking self-important blowhards like me? Yeah, it’s definitely the latter.

Here’s one of innumerable examples:

- In the first game I complained about having to search pockets for something the protagonist knew, player did not, and game refused to acknowledge.
- Remembering that experience, the FIRST thing I did this time was a painstakingly thorough search of my pockets.
- To be followed by this:

"Hey look!" Monica claims your attention "There are the shorts
you love, the ones that drove so many people crazy with their
pockets in your last game."

"It's better not to mention it," you suggest "I don't want players
to run away thinking they have to search all the pockets for the
wallet."

I honestly laughed out loud at that. I mean that’s pretty unambiguous, yeah? Game’s having a go at us. This meta-teasing is the overriding vibe of the piece, from photos of the previous game’s aftermath that critics (just assume I mean ‘me’ when I try these lame misdirections) bemoaned weren’t part of the game, to some in-your-face fourth wall breaking. Even to interrogating the word ‘shrew’ which drew comment in the last game.

All of it coming to a head with the game’s dramatic climax of… pouring coffee. At that point, the setting becomes explicitly fourth-wall compromised with characters and narrator coming onstage to address the player directly. The impetus for that… it’s got to be deliberate. The game’s NPCs berate you for not reading instructions, where earlier gameplay provided

>get sheet
You take the written paper sheet.

>read sheet
A folded sheet of paper with the words "READ ME FIRST!"
clearly visible.

That response alone is kind of hilarious, I mean I was TRYING to read it and reading just told me to read it! The trick I did not tumble to, which I expect the game EXPECTED me not to tumble to, was to first (Spoiler - click to show)unfold it. Because in this world of micro-detail, implicit actions are for losers! All the better to later berate me for not accomplishing.

I did find there to be an excess of bugs and implementation issues which clouded the water a bit. Manipulating my credit card eventually just led to me unable to pick it up off the counter where I could see it. Many physical rituals had exactly one bespoke way to accomplish it, rather than any number of reasonable synonyms. Just try running water in the sink, or doing any damn thing with the moka. Even buying strong coffee seemed bizarrely out of reach. These implementation gaps made it as much a chore as its predecessor, and cast uncertainty on the ‘bug or creative choice?’ boundary.

But by directly engaging these artifacts in the text of EM, basically carrying the throughline from last game forward, it kind of takes on a hilariously confrontive tone. “Yo dawg, I heard you didn’t like some stuff so I TRIPLED DOWN ON IT FOR YOU.”

There is no better sum of this than the extensive, almost pathological use of AI art in its instruction and quick start manuals. I am in the camp of rejecting this ‘art’ as uncanny valley plundering of real, human accomplishment. “I hear you,” says EM, “how 'bout you drown in it?” I mean look at those dead eyes and faces. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING TO ME, AND ARE DEFYING ME TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. They are absolutely SMUG about this!! Check the accompanying docs if you don't believe me!

That is absolutely hilarious. I can’t help but wonder how something like this can possibly play outside its critical context. Without the first game and some critics (my) reservations as part of the text, how does this land for new players? Does it matter? It is so clearly FOR US, why not enjoy it that way?

If you can under the relentless gaze of that shark-eyed couple.

Horror Icon: Freddie
Vibe: Trolling
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would need to seek professional therapy, as clearly development would have devolved into an extended, schizophrenic shouting match with myself.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 30m, 2 fire dies, finished

This was a tight, light puzzle fest, exploring the interactions of waking and dream realities. As a relatively compact link-select work, it enabled ‘lawn mowering’ through its variations as a near default gameplay style. This is not necessarily a negative thing, especially if the aim was not ‘punishing logical challenges.’ Which it is not. Rather, the centerpiece of the work is its really wild dream scenarios, so ushering us through them all is the goal. Lawn mowering is a legitimate way to accomplish that.

This is a work that glories in the randomness of dream logic. Embracing that is to embrace a very specific challenge. True randomness is both hard and unsatisfying. A True random generator in your music player would occasionally deliver the same song, back to back, perhaps more than once. Despite it being ABSOLUTELY random, it FEELS less random to us because… pattern! No, the trick to satisfying-feeling randomness is to absolutely inform subsequent selections with prior ones, if only to DISTANCE from them.

This is also hard! It is not enough that you come up with an amusing random scenario, it must also explicitly NOT resonate with any prior scenarios. The more you create, the harder that gets. Here is where, I thought, ATFD succeeded most unambiguously. The scenarios were delightfully whimsical, hilariously specific, and admirably broad both in setup and solution. They didn’t quite flow together in a dreamy stream of subconscious, but were successfully random FEELING.

Stitching through this dream journey was a ‘real world’ need to keep a fire burning so you don’t freeze to death. This part was.. less compelling? The campfire setup was kind of light in tone, noting you want to keep warm but refraining from any dire admonitions. When the worst does happen, it is reported pretty impersonally as well, not really providing tension, uniting the work, or providing any thematic utility. It’s fine, try again! I don’t think I would be looking for ‘super realistic, tragic death’ in this work, that would feel just as out of place. Just some stronger linkage between the two gamestates.

That said, there is one sequence of dream scenarios that ABSOLUTELY play off the waking state in a neat twist on the formula. Definitely needed, as otherwise the waking state quickly becomes drudgery that must be endured, away from the dreamstate showpieces, to keep the game going.

Overall, I found this to be a light, pleasant affair, not too challenging, delivering an amusingly large array of nifty mini-scenes. Geez tho, I wish I could fall back asleep as readily as this protagonist does. I get up to pee, I struggle, nevermind playing with fire!

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Slumberland
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : This dreamy, multi-scenario conceit is crying for graphical playfulness. If this were my work, I would spend some time pulling the work away from Twine Sugarcube (I think?) default esthetic. It kind of flattens the technicolor dream worlds being presented, and even simple changes in font and color would emphasize the waking/sleeping differences much more impactfully.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.