Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

For many years, my wife worked in civic Storm Water infrastructure. A lot of it is vital but unrewarding civic communication, badgering businesses for compliance when it is easier to pay fines, dealing with politicians interested in uneven enforcement and so on. Her favorite part of the job, and by extension mine, was going after Pumper Dumpers. These usually fly-by-nite Commons Parasites charge companies to pump hazardous waste under promise of proper disposal, effectively immunizing companies from liability, then just dump the waste into sewers and storm drains, uncaring of the potentially catastrophic effect to infrastructure and environment. Seriously, screw those guys.

In my favorite tale, neighbors called in a tip, and (before the days of hyper-miniaturizations) the city fab’d a fake utility box and filmed the miscreants doing their dirty deed. It was Law and Order: H2O!

This background is necessary to understand the dread this work evoked in me BEYOND its horror-tinged narrative tensions. The game MADE ME a Pumper Dumper, the lowest of the low! I’m not gonna lie, just encountering this setup in IF was a Spark all its own. It is so niche, so off in the weeds of modern life, it was a real ‘worlds collide’ moment for me.

In the end, I think I am forced to admit it was the biggest spark of the whole thing. Gameplay is a bit clumsy. For one, items are strewn about the truck that are only accessible from one location, one SIDE of the truck. This effectively creates 4 truck locations, and the text does not successfully establish this convention. Items are described in one location that are link-inaccessible, making it unclear where it would be in reach. The mechanics of its puzzle are pretty straight forward, it falls into the class of work ‘I know what I want to do, but the game is pretty opaque on how I can.’ Giving the hose two sides for example is a simplifying implementation choice that comes off clumsy to the player. So it is all about exploring, dying, restarting, and figuring out which clicks get you to the solution you have grok’d almost immediately. Works that better balance their technical challenge and cluing can elicit sparks with this gameplay, but works that are too opaque and under-described don’t. For me, this work tilted to the latter.

There is added tension in a lurking monstrous presence that threatens from multiple angles, is initially (Spoiler - click to show)repulsed by light but quickly outgrows that. Your work then is complicated by needing to avoid this threat, and further complicated by fussy machinery that needs constant goosing. The nature of the threat is nicely understated, and sets up an eventual mild charge of ‘oh, I see what that is!’ But the gameplay again makes navigating this threat more difficult than not through opacity. I think I would have been more motivated had success NOT been defined as (Spoiler - click to show)emptying your toxic tank into a lake. As it was, I kinda cheered for the monster in every pass? To the point, once I identified all the moving pieces needed to solve the puzzle, I declined a final run implementing them to get the ‘win.’ It was enough I could see how to do it, without actually seeing the Dumper (me!) escape. Screw those guys, monster fodder is what they deserve. (sidebar: there was an achievement that telegraphed an ending I would wholly endorse, though again, the mechanics of navigating the puzzle were daunting enough to discourage achieving it.)

So yeah, Sparks for sure, but very idiosyncratic sparks, very aligned to my personal life experiences. The more generally-relatable aspects of gameplay were just confounding enough to fall short.

Played: 9/27/24
Playtime: 1hr, died 5 times, got the gist
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notably clumsy navigation and manipulation
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete.

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I love the genesis of this work unreservedly. An anthology of sorts, multiple authors coming together to build a dream-logic museum that needs escaping. The conceit is just dynamite, and by virtue of its broad author pool allows for many different visions of weird art and distorted history. Its many voices are every bit as integral as individual narrative beats in establishing an off-putting environment that constantly surprises and keeps the player off balance.

It also makes for a variety of self-contained room puzzles, from moon logic leaps to more traditional find-carry-use. From the jump, with its inhumanly cheerful and contradictory usher, the mission is clear. Explore and escape a dream-logic environs, more soaking in it than ‘solving’ it. It was always going to hinge on how compelling this weird subconscious space could become.

There is a reason David Lynch is such a singular creator. He seems, perhaps naturally perhaps supernaturally, attuned to a collective well of subconscious imagery that he leverages to tell tales that defy and-then construction, but nevertheless FEEL right every step of the way. In lesser hands, his works would be overwhelmed by incoherence and befuddling choices. (Some charge that Lynch himself does not always escape this.)

Now imagine attempting a Lynchian anthology. The defining challenge would be, who do you pair with him? What cast of creatives can match his singular connection to our ID, yet ALSO have a uniquely compelling voice of their own? You can be forgiven stalling on the problem of who could even play in that field. And what would that finished work look like, how would it hold together?

My impression of MG was that as much as its patchwork instability was served by its multiple authors, inevitably it was going to be uneven: some areas were going to be more effective than others. I don’t think I am interested in doing a full vignette comparison, it’s not clear how much of the perceived differences I could resolve beyond my own head to anything of general interest. I will highlight two I really responded to though: there was a Tiny Art room that presented some inventive miniature imagery and the surreality of the Hungry Room really landed like gangbusters for me. Both of those had a surge, not only of strangeness that was present throughout my explorations, but of danger that were not as present elsewhere. Those were bright hot sparks, no doubt. They recognized, as Lynch often does, that the strange is often implicitly THREATENING. Either because it is untethered from our fleshy concerns and constraints, or because of its repudiation of a reality that has gotten too comfortable. Strangeness, without threat, just has a little less charge for me.

In the end rooms without that charge landed less resoundingly. Couple that with a work that, by design, stitches together visions of reality that are gleefully at odds with each other, and the player is left off balance, renegotiating the game with every new room. The downside to this approach is that the game never establishes a rhythm of its own, it is very much of its disconnected parts. This constant start-and-stop of rules reset pushed back against my engagement - any time I started to get a grip on a room, a gameplay style, it was time to start over with a new one. I just didn’t get into a flow.

I cannot stress enough that this is not a WEAKNESS of the game - this is its core design, the major effect it is aiming for! With that in mind, I openly admire the folks charged with stitching it all together, both in mechanics of coding, in integration of sound design, and delivering a complete package. The subject matter may jar in its divergent visions, but the player’s experience is as smooth as possible, ensuring the creative dissonance is no more or less than its intended. It is a bold, successful experiment, greater than its Sparky parts, but also not escaping its inherent asymmetry and conflicts that keep true engagement from ripening.

Played: 9/27/24
Playtime: 2hr, Part4/4 Hungry Room
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: I honestly don’t know - its contradictions have left me adrift!

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Clive Barker was a formative author in my horror-entertainment journey. I encountered his books first, where somehow his reputation developed schoolyard buzz back when the internet wasn’t the primary medium for such things. I consumed a lot of his fiction and his talent was compelling as hell for young me. His wildly offputting imagination, narratives that piled human venality on strangeness in compellingly intricate ways, it was a heady mix executed with dark confidence. I’m not sure where I am on the zeitgeist here, but I personally find the movies based on his works imminently rewatchable and always at least partially successful. Stephen King wishes he had that filmography!

One of my favorites, though probably the most in need of forgiveness, was Nightbreed. It has a long history of studio meddling, mercurial story telling, and has had multiple, multiple re-edit versions over the years. Its constant revisions tell a fascinating meta-tale of creative preoccupation. As befuddling or confounding as its multiple versions are, there is a magnetic core concept that demands revisiting, augmented by Barker’s singular creature creations.

It’s about an underground city of monsters, beset by a persecuting world of humans and internal politics.

I’m not sure when my neurons decided the Saltcast were Midians, but once they did, the work had my unqualified fealty. Here, you are a desperate peasant woman, taking on an impossible task for the King to either secure a life-changing monetary reward or die trying. For your family. By going to Midian.

Like Barker’s work, it is as much metaphor as physical adventure… actually it may be MORE metaphor here. As deep and interesting as the lore and mechanics of the monsters were, I felt like the physical adventure was shortchanged by two choices. 1) it is never clear what the protagonist brings to the proceedings besides desperation and opportunities for empathy; and 2) the narrative attaches her (you) to a team that brings a LOT to the table. So much, it is unclear why they need the protagonist at all. Granted I’m only two hours in, that revelation could still be ahead of me. The first is given an interesting spin, in that (Spoiler - click to show)empathy is not always rewarded, sometimes it is punished! That is a Barker-worthy twist that on the one hand was VERY welcome over its somewhat trite alternative, but that also had the effect of undermining the protagonist’s only real contribution! Too, the blocking of the adventures didn’t really gel, cinematically. The protagonist’s companions are a mix of super-distinctive and… hind-leg animals. More of the former please! In particular, the (Spoiler - click to show)ghost with the giant metal anchor-hand was a high point. But, when the narrative needs them to hide or skulk about, the overriding impression is “wait, how would that work, exactly?” Couple that with your companions’ capable adventuring skills and suddently their occasional deference to your IF decision making feels… unconvincing.

The adventure part didn’t quite land for me, but the setting sure did. Yes, some of the creatures felt like they were phoned in, but so many more did NOT. For every ‘this one is a raccoon’ you get ‘this one was a riot of interconnected limbs that roiled and surged across the floor, accomplishing a jerky motion that more resembled tides than strides.’ (Not from game, just a flavor) Room designs were fun and idiosyncratic. The writing was occasionally inspired, bringing in fanciful images that surprised with the protagonist’s unique viewpoint. A favorite ACTUAL quote:

“Your gaze is met with an iridescent constellation shining in the light of your lantern, coruscating like the hands and throat of a well-decorated noblewoman.”

There is real meat in the concept here, as the never ending Nightbreed versions can attest. There is real flair employed in this telling. Creature conceptions are as often inspired as shortchanged. These are all Sparks in the work. The mechanics of its plot did not reach the same level for me, so that when the timer ran out, I never got BEYOND sparks.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 2hr, nearly exiting mirror maze
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless</

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Ah, the life of a fantasy reporter. It’s not all vapid princely press conferences, exposing necromancer corruption, and spotlighting entrenched knightly race-based slaying. Sometimes you get some softball red-carpet celebrity events to just enjoy overengineered hors d’oeuvres and showily old wine. Why not? You’ve earned it hammering out scrolls into the wee hours to meet Editor Rumplestiltskin’s insane deadlines. It’s almost not fair when events go south and it’s up to you to get to the bottom of things.

Like most journalism, it’s one parser based puzzle after another, as you assemble the event’s back story as well as enough armor to challenge the invading dragon. Seriously, why do we even HAVE a Round Table if they can’t be bothered to step up here? What, too busy stopping and frisking orcs to deal with crown excesses? And after all the catapults we’ve integrated into their departments, on our tithe dollars.

The investigation ends up being a very smooth, very low key affair. Its aims are established early and clearly. Most puzzles are signposted clearly enough, with, uh, singposts? A lot of signage and found paper scraps usher you through one armor-dispensing puzzle to the next. Points for clarity, and very much appreciate the anti-cruelty of its challenges. That overt signposting does have a distancing effect on engagement, though. When in-game instructions are aimed so clearly at the player, without camouflaging it (much) in world building or lore, the urgency of the world itself diminishes a bit. This is not necessarily an inherent problem, plenty of games showcase puzzle solving over storytelling. For me, the puzzle design was just a little too light to shoulder that burden, here (though I will shout out to the keypad/maze puzzle, that one required a few moments’ noodling).

The storytelling itself was similarly somewhat shorthanded. It uses the well-worn trope ‘finding important scraps of paper’ to pass on backstory. This is always a compromise in a game - kind of a narrative monologue/infodump. It’s a classic, no doubt about it, but the more successful games either find ways to vary the formula a bit, justify the artifacts narratively, or just plain make them fun to read. Here, they were more functional than anything else, in service of a story with two twists. Neither of them were dramatic crescendos, but amusing enough and of an emotional scale consistent with the rest of the game.

It all added up to a work that was pleasant to play and consume, whose heart was in the right place the whole way, that made the player feel very welcome, but that never really sparked for me. I liked the setup idea, Fantasy Front Page, but in the end the Sword WAS mightier than my quill and that kind of deflated too. If I was gonna slay it anyway why did I need to be a journalist? It seems tailor-made for Knight-aganda. As a work, it never really exceeded the sum of its parts, pleasant as those parts were. Look, you work the castle beat as long as this reporter, you get a bit jaded. You’ve seen too much venality and corruption, the light slice-of-life stuff feels puffy. Maybe as a fresh-faced cub reporter this would’ve landed harder.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 45m, win, score 18/18
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

If there is a more effective hook in IF than “what the HELL is going on here?” I am hard pressed to come up with it on the spot. The pre-cursor text to Brew makes a WTF? promise that the work well and fully keeps here. You start, exploring a shared apartment uncovering a series of unsettling artifacts that soon blossom into full blown bonkers world building and lore. The ‘bonkers’ in that last sentence applies to BOTH predicates.

It is fairly tight in geography, an immediate neighborhood with a lot going on never mind the snowstorm allegedly happening around you. When focusing on discovering lore, the game sparks like mad. This is due to the fever-dream psychedelia of the world building that includes (Spoiler - click to show)time loops, murder cults, immortality and maybe-metaphorical but also definitely-not-metaphorical (Spoiler - click to show)cannabalism. All of it drip-fed through slow paced discovery, whose relaxed pace is an amusing contrast to the shocking lore it reveals.

Everytime you think it will explode into full on fiery engagement though, implementation gaps trip up just enough to drag things down. A notable number of missing synonyms (singular items are almost never present when plurals are). Incomplete directional cues. A staggering amount of ‘No response’ dialogue options cloud gameplay when related topics are a MUST to progress, yet the ‘no response’ cues that the NPC will not know anything. The most standout gap though, is its destructive use of default messages.

When creating a parser game, modern systems come with default responses to common commands as a convenience. The breadth of human communication makes this convenience nearly indispensable. To have to come up with those on your own is daunting and unrewarding to the potential author. It can also be CRUCIAL to the success of your work. There is a secret about the protagonist that gets explored early in the game. The standard response to >x me actively undermines this revelation in a way that clouds and blunts its impact for way too long. The same problem occurs with unimplemented dialogue options as observed above.

The cumulative weight of these gaps ultimate prevented the work from being truly engaging, though the puzzle design might also have done that, eventually. You are on a deceptively simple mission, and there is some amusement to be derived from the ludicrously escalating complications that ensue. However, once it escalates to (Spoiler - click to show)actual murder we have developed a tone problem that the bananas lore undermines as much as justifies. The problem is that the lore is SO bananas, it vacillates wildly between comedic and serious. We never really stabilize into a single tone. This is not inherently bad in and of itself, but then when we are asked to do dire things we have no frame of reference to decide ‘is this funny or not?’ Our protag’s response is so cold and removed, in the context of their secrets we similarly are adrift in ambiguity of interpretation. A stronger anchor in one direction or another would go a long way here.

All that said, the lore itself is SO singular, and the work provides some truly surprising, clever riffs on it, that independent anything else the Sparks are real.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 65min, finished with limited hints
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Four panel cartoons are in the twilight of their cultural ubiquity for sure. There have been a few spikes in relevance over the century-and-a-half or so of their existence - the formative years of convention establishment in Crazy Cat, Nemo and Li’l Abner, their 50’s bittersweet sophistication with Peanuts and Pogo, the heyday of revelance in the 80’s and 90’s where Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbs and (ehh) Garfield were full on pop culture phenomena. This cultural potency didn’t survive the marginalizaion of newpapers, at least not in their classic form.

But what a great setup for IF! Clicking through four separate panels to decode and assmeble a full story. Between the implied motion of the four panel setup, making for intuitive navigation, to the uniqueness of each panel facilitating multi-layered puzzle play, it was equal parts sparky and natural. Is this the first time this has been done? First time I’ve seen it, and what a great insight. This conceit alone earns it good will points it can spend with impunity. I hope more authors would take this idea up, there seems to be a LOT of ground to explore here!

I kind of wish the story had been as engaging. It is a more straight-forward police tale of cornering an offscreen suspect via an intermediary. Seemingly a middle portion of a larger story. As a story element, it didn’t really stand on its own, nor might it feel necessary to do so. As a standalone work, this does keep the piece from becoming truly engaging I think. Also, it requires multiple restarts to win, where the player must carry knowledge and sequencing from previous iterations to succeed. Lacking a central ‘time loop’ mechanism (which would be a tough fit here), a ‘successful’ story run actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. Looking in isolation at the final run, the detective would need to know things he had no way of knowing. It was only through prior failures the knowledge was gained. Ehh, its fine, it is a game after all. Certainly the loops are tight enough, and subject to enough variety that it never gets tiresome. I think the four-panel format helps here, it constrains things to not need TOO much repeated depth. But it would be nicer if the story held together a bit better.

This leaves me with a truly unique IF entry that leverages its strengths quite well, whose story is just shy of engaging to me. I think maybe it will really shine in a collected volume of the whole story some day. Y’know. Like Bloom County, or Mark Trail. Actually, just imagining a full page of independent four-panel adventures I could execute one after another is giving me late nite Doonesbury Onmibus vibes. In the immortal words of Bill the Cat: “Ack!”

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 15m, ~12 loops
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless, bonus for clever ui
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Neitzsche famously said “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” I prefer the terser “grapple not with monsters, lest monster ye become,” but hey Neitzsche was an idea guy. Less well known was Neitchze’s playful rewording, “truck cautiously with cliches, lest cliche’ ye become.” No, he totally said that, I think in a bar maybe? Discussing a play or something? I absolutely didn’t just make that up.

The way to tell if something is cliche’ is if it becomes such a trope of standup comedy that it gets a recurring SNL character. The ‘problematic uncle at Thanksgiving,’ ‘Drunk Uncle’ if you will, is one such. Couple that with a closeted (at least family-closeted) protagonist, and it’s fair to say my expectations for this work were unfairly lowered. Hey, sometimes I am a prisoner of my biases, I’m the victim here!

Cliches become cliches because they are rooted in real, resonant experience. Every cliche’ starts life as ‘oh, hey, I recognize that dynamic!’ They do not need to justify their existence, but do need to breach the trap of their familiarity. The plot and setting beats were firmly rooted in that familiarity, that’s not where the work achieved escape velocity for me. I found the characters mostly stock-ish, with some minor variations. (Though I did appreciate the titular Physics Curriculum as code for ‘things in college student’s life that relatives will never understand.’ That was a cool resonance.) Where the work came alive, I think, was its use of multi-perspective flashback and insightful employment of interactivity.

While the ‘present day’ activities were maybe not so compellingly painted, I was intrigued by the flashback structure. Background is presented as flashback, where we inhabit a DIFFERENT character than our present day protagonist. These flashbacks may not introduce dramatic recontextualizations, but they DO introduce new viewpoints and formative events that enhance our understanding of the (mild) present day drama. I found these enhanced the proceedings at every turn, providing empathy and rounding for the NPCs that in ‘present’ day might seem one dimensional.

My favorite part of the piece, however, was how it leveraged the unique asset of its medium to enhance the entire thing. I speak, of course, of interactivity. An early example that snapped me to attention was an innocent question pregnant with landmines.

“And how’s your school going, Jay?”
[with the options presented as:]
I’m going to fail Ph 229.
I’m in so much debt.
Am I wasting my life?

Selecting ANY of those responses replaces them all with a single option:

(Spoiler - click to show)Fine

That is just a perfect employment of interactivity to first represent the troubled mindset of our protagonist, then turn to a social self-edit that is all too familiar. Kudos, author. There were two other employments of interactivity that were more subtle, and even more affecting. One was an opportunity to open up in a real way with an NPC. To that point in the narrative, the NPC had been presented as clumsy but well meaning. The choice was actually quite agonizing! Do I risk entrusting this NPC with personal vulnerability, unsure they would welcome it, and even if they do, that they might mishandle it anyway? It wasn’t the choice that was so well done, it was the buildup that made that choice so agonizing.

My favorite though might be the unheralded, but conspicuous in their absence, choices to interact with the protagonist’s father. We see enough of his character to suspect he is not of similar cloth to Drunk Uncle, and certainly struggling with his own demons. Yet the entire work, we are not once given the option to interact with him in a meaningful way (more poignant, given our flashback experience with him!). This LACK of interactivity speaks worlds to the protag-father relationship and actually tarnishes the protag’s character in a very realistic and dramatically satisfying way. He is so caught up in his own drama, he can’t even conceive of reaching out to his dad, either for comfort or to connect with HIS problems. It simultaneously diminishes the protagonist, subverts the driving drama of the piece while also adding complexity to the overall narrative.

It is also a point only appreciated once the work is complete. The flashbacks and interactivity were definite Sparks of Joy here. In the moment, the main plot was just too rote to fully Engage me. This is definitely a work that improves on reflection.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 30m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There is inarguably some distortion inherent in IFCOMP’s format that has a deforming effect on reviews and to some extent judging itself. No, this is not my entre’ into hate-click Youtube Bad Takes ™. “IFCOMP is BAD, ACTUALLY…” of course not. But it does not help us to pretend this phenomenon does not exist, and disadvantage some kinds of works. The most obvious impact is to games that are longer than two hours, the IFCOMP judging time limit. Comparing a work with no ending (in the 2hr limit) to one that ends is a pretty big handicap. It still feels like the right compromise, especially for the prospective judging pool.

Verses reveals a second order compromise that I’ve danced around but never confronted as directly as here. For those of us that presume to speed run IFCOMP, in the interests of getting through the entire field, mindshare is a finite resource. Beyond the raw playtime, there is reflection and review composition (and revision) time. Works that wear their intent on their sleeve are relatively easy to consume and discuss. Works that require a serious mental marinade to decode can be shortchanged by the pressures of ‘so many more to get to.’

Longtime readers, I have a shameful confession to make. Even after a disproportionate amount of mindshare, I still do not understand this work. It presents initially as a vague dystopia/fantasy world where the protagonist is analyzing historical artifacts to uncertain purpose. Their environment is sketched loosely, not too many details to distract, but also not enough details to resolve into anything concrete. You know how you can draw a horse in three lines? You can also draw three lines that confound interpretation. Not only is the world tantalizingly out of focus, the plot progression sees the player interact with cryptic NPCs, then watch their job morph, without comment, from object to text analysis. And the protagonist morph (Spoiler - click to show)to something vaguely monstrous? Every progression seemingly without clear cause-and-effect or motivation, culminating in truly opaque scenes and developments. The below text, for example, was not only the first mention of ‘towering cells’ but its construction defied my brain’s ability to form coherent images.

“As you approach the coast, the sky clears, but the soft-edged shadows remain. When one of these towering cells blocks the road, you get out and bite into it, chewing and swallowing, letting its liquid gush onto the earth.”

All of this steers to an inevitably metaphoric interpretation of somehow-stark-AND-imprecise impressionistic events. Which after several days of reflection, I still cannot decode. This review nearly did not make it to IFDB, as it is hard to justify a review with nothing to say beyond “this work is beyond me.”

The only reason it's here at all is the work's inclusion of Romanian Poetry. The author credits Romanian Poetry for inspiration, and there is a good amount of it, both inline to the story and as optional sidequests. My first takeaway is, “Romanian poetry is pretty damn good.” Not that it needs my approval, but for a guy who openly professes ambivalence to the art, it was noteworthy to me.

My second takeaway is that I have never seen as compelling yet simple demonstration of how fraught any translation but especially poetry can be. By changing links incrementally, from raw word transposition, to grammar infusion, to poetic interpretation it is made crystal clear what an imprecise endeavor this is. Where does the work of the poet stop and the translator begin? Is the translated work, ultimately, an unwilling collaboration, as much of the translator as the author? How challenging is it for the translator attempting to minimize this? All of this was conveyed by masterful use of interactivity, without a word of text applied or needed. I found myself translating poetry on the side because the mechanism and conundrum were so compelling (and not for nothing, easier to get my head around than the rest of the work).

I have to believe there is some linkage between the poetry, the act of translating, and the narrative, but I am damned if I could suss it out. Does translation eat away at you until you are a rabid consumption machine? I’m not a translator, but I don’t see how it would do that. It is unclear if I could EVER find the linkages here, but under the constraints of the COMP, for sure no. Outside the translation mechanism, there was nothing concrete enough for me to grab onto, and ultimately this made it a Mechanical work for me. Dousing me with images I could not cohere, into a plot I could not follow. I have never been more tempted to peek outside my review bubble for help. Mike and Victor probably understand this, and have stunningly insightful takes. For me, this line from the work so summarized my experience, to the point I laughed out loud when I read it:

“What you can’t understand and may never understand is that you are not here to understand.”

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 70m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for innovative translation mechanism
Would Play After Comp?: No, brain hurty too baddy

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

On behalf of IF players on this side of the Atlantic, let me thank this work for contextualizing ‘Right Turn’ to its native traffic laws. This would have been a much shorter, or more baffling work in America.

While (Spoiler - click to show)no choice IF is a subgenre I am not particularly attracted to, I have seen a lot of iterations over the years that make real strength out of its constraints. As confining as this subgenre is, I am continually delighted at the disparate themes authors find to express this way. This is yet another completely unique yet thoroughly resonant application of its conceit. It is also playful both in its thoroughly trivial central problem, and the comically endless complications it throws in the player’s path.

I can appreciate all these things at a meta level. The work does, though, labor under a central tension kind of intrinsic to its construction. The longer things go on, the funnier the overall joke is but the more tedious the actual gameplay becomes. The low stakes of this setup humorously underscore the mismatched labored difficulties, while also denying the player any strong investment in the proceedings.

These contradictory forces ultimately left me with two competing impressions - appreciation for the FACT of it, but total lack of engagement with it as an interactive endeavor. For me, the humor rested in its completely reasonable setbacks, expressed mildly and matter-of-factly, that just never ended. This was a mild humor, a bit too mild to sustain itself even over its short span. I can envision a version of this work where the setbacks escalate hilariously, with decreasing realism and increasing left field slapstick. In my head, real belly laughs could be had, keeping things bubbling along and engagement high. It would ALSO lose its core wry turn: that this is NOT outlandish, just endlessly, needlessly defeating. That’s also kind of funny as an observation.

For me, conceptual strength did not overcome its necessary gameplay restrictions. It was ultimately a Mechanical exercise I appreciated for its novel application of a confrontive game style. Shout out to its graphical design too - its functional map cleanly depicted the core challenge in a way words would struggle to concisely define. It is also the first time I’ve encountered Adventuron WITHOUT its trademark pixellated font, so, novelty on novelty!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 15m, made turn
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for commitment to its wry concept
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

“Oscar Bait” is a pejorative term sometimes lobbed at movies. There is every likelihood I have used it as such in the past. It is used to describe artworks perceived as cynically and soullessly leveraging dramatic tropes to check perceived ‘high art’ boxes that will be applauded by award panels. High concept, high emotionality works that are perceived to be manipulative are tarred with this unkind epithet as a way to diminish them. Seemingly even before people consume the work in question.

I have come around to the idea that while satisfying some unpleasant aspect of human nature (our need to feel better by tearing earnest things down) this is almost always a hollow, uncharitable and unfair criticism. Yes, cynicism is justified around the studio system of movie making. Yes, creators that crawl up their own butts during the echo chambers of gruelling promotional junkets feed that impression. But, these are at their base still artistic endeavors that marry many talented artists into an emerging vision that someone, somewhere, felt was important. When they fall short of their artistic goals it is worth analyzing. When they achieve their artistic goals, they are worth celebrating. It is an ungenerous impulse to attribute cynical motives to works because they appear to aim too high, then dismiss them completely on the grounds of that assumption. Lord knows I would never do that.

I lead with this because Imprimatura is the most compelling case against this impulse I have yet encountered. On paper, the conceit of exploring a dead mentor/family member’s artwork to get a better understanding of them and yourself rings high concept, high emotionality. It seems on some level like an ur-Oscar Bait concept. You do yourself an injustice letting that inform your engagement.

I found this to be just about the best possible realization of this premise. No surprise, the MVP of this effort is the prose. The writing here accomplishes two things crucial to selling the proceedings: terrifically insightful and specific observations about the character under scrutiny; rendered in compellingly sharp prose. The player choice in this game is to select 7 paintings among a wealth of them as a bequeathment. The choices you make among the distinctively described works of art inform a collage picture of the lost relative. Subject matter, style and colors all allude to an emotionality behind the works that by selecting, you concretize. Like Schrodinger’s Art Studio - the personality of your mentor is made real only when observed. It is a real accomplishment that the selections seem widely varied and nuanced, yet not contradictory. The effect is to build a full, complex person in your head as the sum of different dynamics. It is ‘I am Large, I Contain Multitudes: The Game’

A quick by-the-way shout out to the sound design of this work. The melancholy music, overlaid with tightly focused folio work, really set the scene and enhanced the proceedings in a subtle but affecting way. A moment that stood out to me was a human sigh, perfectly tuned to the gameplay conveying the mismatched physical and emotional effort of the protagonist. Really effective.

As I was playing, I was swept up by the confident, effective writing and sound design. There was something nagging in the back of my head though. “Why am I reading descriptions of paintings, when you could just show them to me?” I mean, the obvious answer is “because it would take months to compose compelling art that I can describe in minutes.” No sooner had I reconciled myself to that answer than the endgame kicked in. Where you (Spoiler - click to show)compose an artwork that acts a final collaboration with the deceased, summarizing your collected memories of them. Again, a potentially precious conceit that resoundingly delivers in execution. The game decodes your prior selections into a subject/style/palette (Spoiler - click to show)that is superimposed over an incomplete early sketch in a deeply satisfying way, then crucially lets you tune it. It gives you the language of interpretation, but allows you final word in how you express it, based on YOUR responses to the artworks selected. Without this crucial last step, the work would be telling you how to feel, and if it misguesses, would neuter its impact immeasurably.

From its insightful and powerful prose, to its clever use of graphical synthesis, to its deeply mature employment of interactivity I really responded to this piece. It may have been assisted by indirectly resonating with a personal loss of my own. The cleverness of the piece is that loss is a universal experience, as is the complexity of people lost. This piece captures both those dynamics expertly. I found this a Transcendent use of the medium.

In the interest of completeness, there was one distracting technical issue. As you go through and ‘unwrap’ new paintings, I encountered the same painting multiple times, presented as newly discovered. While I could see revisiting them AFTER the stock had been exhausted, this seemed random to me, and sometimes the same painting appeared three or four times. Yes, a speedbump, but an inconsequential one in the face of its other accomplishments.

This is a very understated, finely observed dynamic character study overlaid with an interactive representation of grief processing. Its prose is unadorned enough to let the player build the emotional responses, not dictate them. The interactivity is sensitive enough to honor that emotional response. The unspoken cool thing about ‘Oscar Bait’ is that, sometimes, it deservedly catches ‘Oscar Fish.’ Yum! I LOVE Oscar Fish!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 25m, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: I just might

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless