Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/10/24
Playtime: 1.5hr, 4 endings of at least 5

I really like what this game is doing, and I’m working out if the frictions I felt ended up being completely necessary and justified.

The piece opens on an adult woman adjusting to her first night in a new apartment. At one point I cynically wrote down “Moving In Simulator” in my notes. I stand by the accuracy, if not dickish tone, of that note. For the first forty minutes I explored a small studio-ish apartment of fairly deep implementation, doing some last few chores before going to bed. In the course of that, I learned some background about my situation - it was not a desired relocation - and most especially the geography and layout of the place. It took me forty minutes to get to the title screen! I’d be lying if I said I was enraptured by the proceedings to that point.

Turns out I needed that intro, as I was awakened by a potential intruder and… from there it was off to the races where that intro knowledge was CRUCIAL. The work also shifted at that point to future conditional tense (WHAT???) and mental gears clashed for a moment but I quickly adjusted. Now we’re playing cat and mouse with a hostile intruder in a small, dark apartment, in an awkward syntax. This section of the game is just as deeply implemented as the first half, with many different possibilities and outcomes in this tight feint and counter-feint. The genius thing is, by using future conditional tense, after one finish (which you are allowed to accept or reject), (Spoiler - click to show)the whole thing is recast and revealed to be a lightning fast mental excercise by the protagonist, deciding how to react by playing things out in her mind! What an elegant, satisfying and unique replay/‘RESTART’ conceit! The final words of the game on finding an acceptable run (which you, not the game, gets to decide on) are just PERFECT.

The other thing gameplay did quite well is align player and protagonist. We’ve only had a single evenings’ introduction to the surroundings, but SO HAS SHE. Any fumbling we do with the environment is very much in-game and resonates with her perfectly. Couple that with its reasonably deep implementation and it has a lot going for it.

I don’t even think I want to talk about ‘flaws,’ maybe ‘compromises?’ For one, as a percentage of time, fully half my playtime was spent on setup. On reflection, I concluded this was appropriate, but in the moment it was not compelling. I also found the intruder to be less terrifying than the game wanted me to think. I am not sure whether it was the language, the discernible pattern of movements, the restart conceit, or the sometimes unfairness of his actions ((Spoiler - click to show)I would have expected more reprieve from a locked bathroom door) that put me into ‘game’ mode rather than ‘hunted’ mode. Again, I think it might have been NECESSARY to do that, so the game didn’t become a long fight against a randomizer, but it did undermine the tension a bit. In one notable case, I could not bend the parser to my will (Spoiler - click to show)trying to push the chair to wedge the front door to buy some time. Ok, that last I won’t forgive, but the rest ultimately is necessary to let those final words ring so nicely.

So yeah, in game I had reservations and frictions, but it all felt completely and satisfyingly justified by the ending. I especially liked the 4 different endings I found - all very varied but earned dramatic closures to the scenario, deeply respecting but also not coddling player choice. Yr in a tough spot, girl, you make the call on what success looks like! I will take a moment-by-moment confounding work that sticks the landing this well over an absorbing work that fumbles on the goal line 7 out of 10 times. Y’know, in my Gymnastic Football metaphor.

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: The Strangers
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : Ok, it’s not my project and good thing. I’d be afraid anything I did to try and ‘fix’ it would disturb the ending and I can’t justify that.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/10-12/24
Playtime: 4.25hrs

Well, this was just delightful. I’ve not had cause to reference “Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise” in a while, apparently saving it for now. This is a Twine work, repurposed to support a parser-like gameplay style. There are inventories, spell lists, maps to navigate, items to search out and use or combine. I don’t know that I have seen a better implementation of this. The UI was deeply intuitive and natural, including navigating among multiple POV characters and even body parts! I was rarely lost in narrative flow or paths forward (just three times, actually, of course I’ll get to those).

The case against link-based parser play is that it enables ‘lawn mowering,’ exhaustively clicking all links in all combinations, until something works. ToR is not immune to this, but it resists it better than anything I’ve seen. I think it is a combination of the permutations available and the lovely prose of its story. Most object links can be clicked by any number of characters or sub-characters, and AGAIN in conjunction with any number of inventory items and spells. It can mushroom into an untenable amount of permutations, which encourages a more thoughtful approach to the puzzles.

The prose though, hoo. The prose is the beating heart of this thing. The tone is light, a deeply optimistic, just barely-short-of-naive positivity. This is conveyed economically, matter-of-factly, and so consistently that you can’t help but be swept along by it. Yeah, even me, the guy that hates poetry! The prose is ALSO soft cluing paths forward. And of course carrying the plot. Oh, and setting geographies and settings. Character too, it’s also providing voices and agency to a wealth of characters. SO MUCH TO ACCOMPLISH, ISN’T THAT INSANE?!?!?!

Okay. I hear your snorts of derision. “Reviewer,” you snootily say, “literally EVERY WRITTEN WORK does all those things. Its kinda written-narrative’s thing.” Yeah, well do they do it so EFFORTLESSLY? So CRISPLY? So gosh-darn SWEETLY??? We are talking mostly terse paragraphs of description and dialogue that do ALL that, plus provide soft cues to keep you progressing, PLUS warm your cold cynical hearts, you ivory tower bastards. I cannot overstate what a delight the prose style was in this work, how it carried me through some tough times and created a world it sucked to leave. I don’t know why, but this line just exemplifies what I’m talking about so perfectly:

"The upper ruins were not held together by magic, but, apparently, they were supported by the lower parts."

That wry, matter-of-fact voice, ah, I’m smitten. The other thing the above blurb captures is just how well-thought out the world and plot is. Despite being a fantasy of heroic undead, magic spells and artifacts, light geopolitics, everything works together in such a satisfying way. Most especially in puzzle construction. The ability for Rosalind to disassemble to solve puzzles was endlessly varied and invariably fun. Spell usage was a little more straightforward, but no less fun. Setups and payoffs abound every step of the way but especially in endgame. This is a work where SOMEONE IS TALKED OUT OF PREJUDICE and somehow my response was NOT ‘oh c’mon.’ Would it work that way in the real world? YOU DON’T KNOW, ROSALINDA AND TEAM HAVE NOT TRIED YET.

It gives me no joy to report there are some frictions, but I’ll try to dispense with them quickly. For one, the UI had an unfortunate scroll length where some options went unnoticed below the window’s edge. This caused me to spam/lawnmower the insanely large space, made more painful than normal for its breadth. Check your scrollbar first is my advice for those stuck.

There are some unanticipated solutions I wish had been addressed in game, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)not being allowed to feed a Tinctured Piecrust to a catfish and being unable to (Spoiler - click to show)get Ormund to help with crystal grabbing or plate-standing. I didn’t need those to work, just explained. Minor quibbles to be sure.

There was one puzzle I considered unfair, which is code for hard but not in a SATISFYING way, a (Spoiler - click to show)search only one character can complete, in one specific location, with no hints I spotted that that might be necessary. There was another that was SUPER fair, and I just missed it, but chuckled in glee when I tapped the progressive hint that clicked it into place.

…aaaand I’m done with the negative. This was not a mind-blowing game changer of deep human insight. This was a frothy, pulpy fantasy lark of unremitting positivity and cleverness, buoyed by text it was a treat to read. And not for nothing, an elegantly architected Twinesformer experience that will forward be my gold standard for these kinds of things. Kudos author, I enjoyed every minute. Most minutes. All the minutes worth talking about.

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Plucky Fantasy
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, most folks in my life would question who I really was, how I deceived them so long, but could they keep this new guy anyway? For me though, I think I would plumb some of those alternate solutions into text, either with playful rejections or as alternate solutions. This is probably not a simple ask, given the large permuted space already accommodated, but since the work makes it LOOK so easy, it must BE easy, yeah?

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review, English version

Played: 4/9/24
Playtime: 1.75hrs, all but 1st on FF, 3.5 endings

Epistolary works - fictions composed of purported real world text artifacts - are a compelling conceit. They allow for indirect world and character building where the reader is assembling an oblique narrative in their head. Part of the joy of these kinds of work is watching it evolve and click into place. The other part is the charge ‘real world documents’ give to the proceedings. A lot hinges on the form of those documents - they need to be a fine balance of plausible and informative. In particular, any sense that the documents are aimed at a third party reader (us!) instead of their in-world targets can undermine everything it wants to achieve.

I am delighted to report Jeangille just crushes the form of it. From its graphical presentation, its font use, to the measured content of the faux-missives we are drip-fed a tale of forbidden love and forbidden… other stuff. I found it unimpeachable in its conceit, almost never cracking to the pressures of info-dump to uninformed third party. Rather, it was deliberate in alluding to events the correspondents clearly understood in a way to slowly and naturally bring us up to speed. In particular, the mercurial tone of the author was nicely observed - they are not in the same monotone mood throughout their notes. Longing, anger, depression, new fascinations, petty jealousy, all are on display underscoring the fullness of the protagonist and the emotional passage of time. The crucial element here is the correspondents’ fascination with ‘gossip,’ allowing for plot-relevant events to be conveyed without artifice.

The language of the letters equally does some heavy lifting here. Its Romantic formality is the right balance of omnipresent but conceding to modern sensibilities in a way that allows us to acknowledge but not be distracted.

The interactiveness of the piece leverages its strengths in a dynamite way - periodically we are given opportunity to shade emotions, events and attitudes by selecting among alternatives. When done well, it has the precise flavor of composing a letter! Toying with a variety of subjects and phrasings to convey exactly what we want and putting us firmly in the protagonist’s chair. If I had any notes here, it would be that it was more powerfully realized when the page was blank below the choice, and filled in after, rather than embedded in otherwise unchangeable text. That underscored the ‘composing a letter’ dynamic that was so cool.

Through these interactive choices, the plot proceeds to a climax of which, depending on how your choices landed throughout the correspondence, I found 3.5 possible endings. And here’s where I can’t keep being coy about the plot, will try to spoiler my way through it.

We all know what is arguably the most famous epistolary novel, right? (LINK IS A SPOILER) It’s so foundational, it becomes a trope of that genre in other works. (LINKS ALSO SPOILERS) Ok, fine. (Spoiler - click to show)Vampires. The prior art is Vampires. Those resonances are so pronounced that even the slightest supporting event, alluded to most obliquely, immediately sets off alarm bells in the head and everything forward is contorted through that lens. We are ahead of the narrator, biting our nails for the inevitable escalation. Or better, awaiting the knowing twist from the author that crushes our expectations most delightfully.

The latter does not happen here and in another format that might be a slight let down. I mean it is here too, but it is more than compensated by the interactivity. As a player, we can low-key steer things into various endings in a VERY satisfying way so what we lose in meta-surprise we more than gain in the narrative collaboration. There is still a slight issue here, so slight I hesitate to bring it up, but I’m in this far. At the climactic decision we are meta-empowered to drive to a conclusion, clearly conveyed by the choice wordings. On a single playthrough, it is not clear how deeply our prior choices inform things, and we might be tempted to metagame it in an unsatisfying way. I didn’t, but I dwelt on the choice enough to recognize the peril. That musing itself pulled me out of the narrative flow at least a little bit. In one sense it might be more powerful if those final choices were less broad, instead informed by prior selections. (Turns out there are other options that ARE so constrained.) In another sense though, that might backpressure replayability, burying its strengths under opaque gameplay that the wordiness could not sustain. After much reflection, I think the right choice was made. What a relief for the author!

Because even this minor quibble faded on repeat plays. My admiration only increased for the work in the sense that the 3.5 endings I got were all different, yet satisfying conclusions to a choice architecture that allowed me to build naturally to each one. Ok, not the 1/2 ending, that one made me play-mad, but the rest for sure.

So that’s my conclusion. A well-realized, graphically compelling, tightly controlled work with satisfying plot arcs under player control. Who knew tampering with post could be so fun?

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Snail Mail
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : I think, were it my project, I would double down on the ‘composing a letter’ paradigm and stage the text rather than provide inline options. Now I SAY that, but there is every possibility the reality of that would not be as satisfying as I think, and I’d end up reverting it anyway.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/9/24
Playtime: 2hrs

It is rare for me to see the ‘Interactive’ and ‘Fiction’ aspects of a work as truly separate things. Sure, I sometimes lean on those aspects when writing about IF works because its honestly pretty convenient, but the alchemy is how they come together to form a new, more interesting thing. I mean, isn’t that why we’re here? Fiction without interactivity is a story. Interactivity without fiction is a parlor game. There is always an implicit question about the combo, ‘what does interactivity bring to the table v like, just reading a book?’ (That is somehow a more interesting question than ‘what if bingo had a character arc???’)

I’m not an academic, and there’s probably much better thought out constructs than whatever I’m about to type next but let me try to call out some explicit things interactivity can bring to a narrative.

- collaborative character building through choice architecture and prioritization, more strongly investing the reader in a protagonist
- narrative pacing for dramatic effect
- dynamic graphical flourishes to enhance specific moments
- collaborative plot development, letting reader input influence events; at its most pronounced resulting in multiple, orthogonal stories (all of which provisioned by the author in some way)

There is a temptation to categorize based on the latter. Is it a linear story enhanced by Interactivity? A pass/fail narrative of puzzle solving? A full branching narrative of ever-richer complexity and text volume only the minority of which is presented in any one playthrough? None of these are inherently better than any other, just different aims.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this explication, while nominally discussing Alltarach (seems I gotta get there sooner or later). I’ve done that because this is the first work I concluded the interactivity might have detracted (though not completely!) from the experience. So, let’s surgeon scalpel this thing and talk story first.

This is a deeply accomplished story with a compelling central conceit: that Irish Myth and Christianity (specifically its lore) coexist on equal footing with each other. That Cu Chulainn and Saint Patrick are basically peers, and exist and influence mortal affairs in qualitatively similar pro-active ways. What an amazingly subversive and challenging premise! I honestly gasped when I realized what it was about. It takes the trappings of Mythic lore and applies them to a time of growing Christian influence in a Battle of the Gods. CHRISTIANITY IS EXACTLY AS TRUE AS MYTH. Whooo, swinging for the bleachers! I love the unrestrained chutzpah of it! It does make for some really shocking and strange juxtapositions, like when Christianity (as the newcomer) is positioned as the more liberal, accepting strain of belief. I didn’t read that as a fault though, more as a bold-faced CHALLENGE. It is a gutsy, supercharged take of pure audacity and I love it for that.

And it is EARNED. Thanks to a detailed bibliography, its mythic trappings are comprehensive and well thought out, employed progressively through a story of escalating scope. The text veritably oozes with Irish authenticity. Literally so, if you read the copious footnote bubbles as pushing through the story, so dense that the story cannot keep them contained. Between the richness of the tone, its authentic patina and pure audacity, it is easy to be swept along by this tale and I was.

So let’s talk about that tale: a sister searching for a lost brother and uncovering mythic truths and family secrets. The brother is portrayed as a stoic but compelling mystery, the protagonist as detached and a bit helpless, and both grow and change throughout the story. They are mostly up to the task of navigating this deeply compelling world, but for different reasons can’t help but pale a bit next to it. The WAY they pale though, almost always devolves to the way interactivity is employed.

Let’s start with the protagonist. She is our main interactive avatar for most of the story. We set her priorities in how we pursue the investigation. We set her character in how we choose to interact with other characters. We collaboratively build and invest in her… to a point. The story is often good at integrating our input, but significantly also often whiffs on it. In my play, there was a local boy of repellent ego who I rejected at every turn. Nevertheless, the story insisted on a path I had avoided. Similarly, another boy I flirted with amounted to nothing. Choices I had intended to be mild reproach turned into bitter, over-emotive outbursts. Discussion topics I prioritized according to an inner character priority read out of order, emotionally. It all had a distancing effect where my Brid was at war with the piece’s Brid.

Similarly the brother. While I liked the graphical cues when the narrative shifted to his perspective, his interactions struck me as distinctly different than his early characterization. I could rationalize early scenes, where he was alone and presumably we were seeing an inner life he shields from others. But when reunited, if anything, he gets MORE emo and expressive, as presented in dialogue choices I might select. Okay, that was a bit glib. Admittedly he was going through some stuff. Even so, the contrast to his early characterization (unremarked upon by our protagonist!) was jarring. The cumulative effect of both of those things was characters at war with the narrative because of interactivity.

Perhaps its biggest deflation was in plot influence. The climax is structured as a conversation between the siblings to decide the results of the quest. Interestingly, the player gets to cycle between them, taking both sides of the dialogue. I liked this in concept. On the sister’s side I felt this was reasonably well implemented, and fit a dialogue-based game paradigm of ‘can I convince him through topic selection?’ The other side though, felt kind of all over the place - inconsistent characterization, uncanny and incomplete response availability and ultimately a BIG DECISION. My problem was, until the end none of it felt strictly under my control despite my nominal driving, to the point the final real choice felt untethered. Because I could form no coherent character in my head, I actually had no idea what me-as-brother would do, or even why those choices were available at that specific point. So I cheated, and chose what the sister wanted (she earned it!). And didn’t feel great about it.

To walk back some negativity, let me say other aspects of interactivity - graphic flourishes and text pacing - were done very well, and to advantage. In particular the POV cues in color and font were really nicely rendered.

So where does that leave me? A piece whose setup and background are top tier that I can’t express enough admiration for. Whose employment of Irish Myth was entrancing. Whose take on Christianity was confrontive and challenging. Whose language and narrative are superb. And that only fell down when it let ME get involved. So, who’s the problem here?

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Mythic
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would marvel that I had anything this transgressive and marvelous in me. Then I would, with great regret, excise the brother’s side of interactivity and focus on sharpening the sister’s choices, responses and climactic gameplay. Because y’know, SAYING I’d do that is just super easy.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/8/24
Playtime: 25min, Master of Politics, 4/7 deaths

If there is a more fraught topic to mine for slapstick comedy at the moment than US politics, I’d like to know what it is. Biting Satire? Caricature? Anarchic Absurdism? Absolutely. Anything with a point of view and an edge, the sharper the better. But slapstick requires a much lighter devil-may-care tone, especially if you’re going to have the player engage in cartoon violence with actual fatalities. Due to an accident of birth coinciding with narrative cues, I can only interpret this work through the lens of US politics. I apologize to anyone looking for different.

The work seems to understand its comedic challenge, and opens by positioning itself atop three super-exaggerated supports. 1) Ossified Bureaucracy cynicism. 2) Both-sides-equivalence-ism. 3) Narrative Simplification to the point of abstraction. The latter, I think, is the one that gives this piece its fighting chance of working. The unsung hero of support #3 is the illustration style. There is no better clue that nuance and accuracy are not welcome here than its visual palette and artwork style. I do not intend it backhanded when I say it is reminiscent of childlike doodlings. In fact, it is quite crucial that it is. The visual/artistic shorthand gives permission in a sense for the other two legs to stand unashamedly.

Absent the graphical cues, legs one and two seem hopelessly misguided against the last decade. We are not pretending to distort and mock actual politics here, we are exaggerating inadequate cliches about politics as a backdrop for madcap antics. The player intro drives this home superbly - our goal is to pass the most hilariously inoffensive law imaginable. Just the one. These low-seeming stakes in this alternate-reality West Wing divorces us from having to parse real-world parallels, or suss out layered meanings. So when bizarre character turns, hidden labs, Looney Tunes violence happen, we are not bound to decode them, we can just roll and play in the space. Even the ending that provided the most hope was a funny bit of cynicism that would be actively appalling played against a more real backdrop.

I was game to do my best to go along for the ride. I committed to and suffered cartoon violence. I found all the non-death endings. I freely sampled the actual death endings. I don’t think I ever fully escaped the spectre of its inadequacies in reflecting its purported subject matter but I got pretty close. There was a detail that troubled me about this more than any other - that the unnamed opposing parties were colored red and blue. For me, I needed to be pulled OUT of that space, and those colors were a counter-productive reminder. Literally any other colors, I dunno, pink and teal?

Ultimately, it didn’t quite succeed for me in replacing our dire reality with its own. But there were sequences that absolutely did pull me into its mad orbit for a few moments of subversive glee. At its best, it kind of made me long for ITS version of toxic politics over what we are actually living with.

Mystery, Inc: Scooby
Vibe: Slapstick
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure I would change those colors, if this were my project. I would also try to infuse other touches to further distance from current reality, and sell the Bizzarro Congress. The zanier the better.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/8/24
Playtime: 2hrs, unwinnable at 1.5. Restarted, 1.25hrs later ANOTHER unwinnable state? score 260/300, Read spoilers, done

An old school lightly-horror-themed parser? Seems like this entry would be talking my love language. Thing is, my intro to the hobby decades ago is definitely seen through rose colored glasses. There are aspects to parsers that I enjoyed when we didn’t know any better but DEFINITELY don’t want to revisit forty years on.

Let’s start with the good callbacks. I have referred to something I call the “Implementation Horizon” in parsers - the level of implemented detail that acts as a soft signal to the player where to stop poking. Zomburbia integrates this horizon deftly into its gameplay by leaning to VERY SHALLOW. This is not a problem, in fact it is very much a strength. Because the implementation is shallow, area descriptions are terse, punchy, and signal interesting items clearly and crisply. There is no futzing about with smothering detail, hunting out the one interesting noun in a sea of them. You don’t need to be TOLD you need the brooch. Its simple presence indicates that quite clearly. This should not be underestimated as a creative choice, it really smooths out player frictions and drag in a seemingly broad space.

The shallow implementation also dovetails nicely with old-school brevity. Descriptions are not flowery and dense, they convey their imagery and importance economically and crisply. The net effect is to make this mid-sized game kind of zippy. Couple that with a good-natured, quirky setup and cast, light humor (especially in death scenes) and it enables a very amiable old school experience. One of my favorite touches was (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist slowly turning into a zombie. A great little goose to the proceedings. Kevin was also just delightful.

It definitely has gaps though. It is one thing to have a shallow implementation horizon, it is another to not fully plumb that horizon. There are a LOT of unimplemented synonyms, inadequate disambiguation prompts, and bugs (in one instance, dropped items were not listed in room location, and needed me to reread my transcript to figure out what needed picking up.) Some papers were coldly listed as ‘not flammable’ as I sparred with a particular puzzle. It did not fully recognize game state, in one instance telling me "You can’t find anything wrong with the broken hedge trimmers." Those broken ones you mean? Nothing notable comes to mind?

All of that could definitely have been forgiven had the game not also leaned into my two LEAST favorite old school tropes: inventory management and unwinnable states. The former was never really entertaining as a puzzle, it was a misguided attempt at ‘realism’ in works that didn’t need or want it. Its effect is book-keeping drudgery of the least entertaining kind. And this from a guy that plays with spreadsheets. Unfun wastes of my time grate here, particularly when the overall vibe is otherwise so fleet.

Which brings me to the unforgivable sin (according to Monsignor McC) of this game: quietly unwinnable states. My first playthrough, after two hours I stumbled into two of them. One of them was at least clued by in-game warnings, another… just happened? I was on the edge here: was the game enjoyable enough for a replay, two hours in? Its attitude was so friendly, I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, so I plowed back in. Took me ~40 minutes to retrace my steps which was longer than I wanted at skim-speed, but then got back in the flow. Thirty-five minutes later I had racked up 260 points and was firmly into endgame… when I think I hit another one. I say ‘think’ because I had a flash of something I should have done, but at that point was beyond my UNDO window to revisit. It is possible that the game could have provided NPC business to reopen that window, but nothing in my experience so far indicated that was likely.

Ok, yes, not having a savepoint is on me. I knew what I was in for at this point, I’m an adult with some level of object permanence and cause-effect understanding. What can I say, I let the breezy environment lull me. So here I am, maybe two steps from end, do I go back AGAIN, maybe another hour’s worth of replay? I do not. Old school parsers didn’t have a wealth of alternatives vying for our time. They were what they were, was up to us to meet them on their own flawed terms. Today? I got choices, man. I chose to read the Hint sheet to see what I missed and yeah, I was on the right path. Yay? *sigh* I woulda really liked that, had I not needed to rewind so far.

Mystery, Inc: “Z-z-z-ZOMBIES?!?!” Shaggy
Vibe: weirdly enough, Scooby-Doo Horror
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would eliminate any and all possibility of unwinnable states. Just kill them with fire. If that doesn’t sate my blinding rage, then nuke the inventory management too.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/8/24
Playtime: 45min

How smart are Octopi? One list had them #8 in ranked sub-human IQ, below Orangutan/Chimps, Dolphins, Elephants, Crows (wow, you go crows!), Pigs and Dogs. Other fun facts: Chimps and pigs have played video games. Smarter dogs have learned basic Parser vocabulary and Verb-Noun syntax. I mean, none of my dogs for sure, but some.

What drove me into that divergence was concern that I might not be as smart as an Octopus.

This is a one-room parser game. As a pet octopus (probably a thing, right? Some folks keep tigers and alligators, so sure), your goal is to change the view from your aquarium, and not get in trouble doing it. It is a wry, tight little game - maybe a three step puzzle with some red herrings to sort past. The nature of the puzzles were clever enough, yet because I declined to (Spoiler - click to show)>X ME still required a hint. Followed by a headslap.

The humor here is gentle, mostly of the baffled-Octopus-take-on-weird-humans variety (I particularly liked the ‘For Neptune’s Sake’ expletive). If nothing else, the image of a baseball-cap wearing mischievous Octopus is a gift to all of us. If you imagine a balance-scale, with gameplay frictions on one side and puzzle challenge/raw entertainment on the other, a great IF experience would tilt noticeably to the latter. The greater the goods, the more frictions can be shrugged off. Here, the challenge/humor was lighter, and correspondingly, minor frictions suddenly became impactful to the balance.

There were quite a few: vocabulary was notably lacking in synonyms. Pillows but no pillow. Cap but no hat. Bathtub but no bath, and on. You were able to put items on the dresser before knowing how to retrieve them. Missing verb/nouns previously referenced in the prompt text. A continual need to resubmerge, but no shortcuts (that I found) to long form >GET IN AQUARIUM. (Spoiler - click to show)Inability to >JUMP past an open drawer. None of these are fatal, but do accumulate against its lighter charms.

The final puzzle solution itself is probably the funniest part of it, and even that is a LITTLE weird because I-the-player landed on it super fast, but I-an-OCTOPUS would never have any idea to do that, nevermind what the outcome of my actions would be. There was a bit of a subversive charge to that dissonance that made for a high note ending. So, maybe I am smarter? Maybe it’s not a competition though, maybe the real competition is who is less delicious? Which I win HANDS DOWN! Hopefully unverifiably so.

Mystery, Inc: Scooby
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : Ironing out the vocabulary frictions for sure would be my priority if this were my project. This is a clever, wry little game. Getting the parser out the way would let it land without caveat.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hrs, (Spoiler - click to show)Stayed in city, joined a faction

For as big a horror fan as I am, vampire-fetishism has never been my bag. To the extent that I have any tabletop RPG history it would be more Call of Chtulhu than V: Masquerade. Despite leading with its inspiration (the latter), I was very pleased with the smoothness Loose Ends got me up to speed on the deep background of factions, norms and abilities. Trickle feeding lore as it was needed was so much more engaging than a massive infodump would have been.

I was positively delighted that gameplay and story owed a lot more to Noir Detective than RPG sourcebook. Like a lot of great Noir, it uses a very specific political and social backdrop to inform a more-than-appears mystery, with a hard-boiled, out-of-their-depth outsider player-detective. It also seems to be a pretty deep implementation, supporting a variety of play styles. A handful of selectable skills and abilities seem to permute the player space in a nicely customized way.

It is a choice select mystery. This is a challenging paradigm for mysteries, as without careful curation, even simple absence/presence of options can provide unearned or mimesis threatening cluing. Loose Ends is not perfect here, but it is pretty darn good at it. Its biggest compromise on this front is marking options that may hold information with icons. It acts as a stealth hint system, that often wasn’t needed due to well-connected chains of clues. In one case though it did generate a repeat visit I might not have otherwise bothered with. I think on balance its value as a soft ‘director’ outweighs its downsides.

In addition to enabling a variety of player capabilities, the work also seems to enable a variety of player motivations and story paths. With diligence you can solve the (pretty cool) mystery, but what you DO with that solution seems to be up to you! That’s just nifty. It leverages Telltales’ ‘X WILL REMEMBER THAT’ mechanism to great effect, rewarding player choices with faction alignment that potentially changes the levers of power in the city. (Sidebar: Is there a more important narrative-game innovation in our lifetime than that pregnant phrase? I guess barring folks old enough to have seen the genre invented in the first place.)

My biggest quibble with the game is its lack of state awareness. Many times throughout the game, stock location descriptions include objects that have been removed, refer to dialogue that is no longer relevant, or concatenate game state text in jarring ways. In its most egregious artifact, it allows recovery of clues that have been destroyed. Below is an intrusive example:

(Spoiler - click to show)"[...] Lucille freezes—then a spasm runs through her body as her control of her own nerves is severed, muscles and tendons moving as Varkonyi directs. With another gesture he shuts down a bundle of nerves, sending her sprawling to the floor. For a moment she can do nothing but twitch, but with effort she staggers back to her feet.

"Lucille stays close to your side, watching and waiting for the right moment to strike—and then she finds it. In a split second she’s right in the middle of everything, laughing wildly as she whirls around in a flurry of steel. Another split second and she’s thirty feet back, covering your advance."

I have some forgiveness for these kinds of artifacts and even so, the work had enough to push itself past my ‘just ignore it’ threshold.

The only other off note for me was the denouement. As these things do, it kind of summarized the net effect of your choices on the ultimate outcome. I was unpleasantly surprised to see my choices showed me aligning with a faction I had no intent of aligning with. In fact, I had deliberately attempted to preserve faction-free independence throughout the game. I suppose some combination of my final actions and who I chose to ally with swung the algorithm on me, but I was not expecting it.

So yeah, slightly sour ending but engaging through its runtime for sure. Here's the big twist though: the authors have since updated the game, seemingly addressing many of these issues! I can only report my own experience, but assuming they did as good a job on the updates as the base game, they likely turned a 4-star experience to a 5-star one!

Mystery, Inc: Shaggy, though a strong argument for Velma too
Vibe: Vampy Noir
Polish: Textured -> Smooth?
Gimme the Wheel! : Absolutely my version of this project would try to polish its state awareness as a first priority. I think I would also try to soft hint faction alignment implications to give a little more player information and influence on the outcome. To the extent this was done... backseat driving works ya'll!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hrs, 4 plays, 4 fails

Have we culturally saturated ourselves on Star Trek riffs? I won’t leave that hang: No. No we have not. VoM leverages a deeper-cut aspect of its inspiration to tremendous advantage: reductive two-fisted approaches to complicated problems.

Let me start by acknowledging ALL narrative is reductive. Figuring out what to reduce to tell a compelling story is a core challenge of storytelling. What details are important to the tenor of the piece? What details destroy the piece with abject ‘realism’? Adventure fiction in particular uses two-fisted action either as metaphoric shorthand or as a mechanism to deliver morally-unambiguous thrills. In our post-COVID world, the idea of sending an under-fueled, under-gunned boat of cure through enemy territory with insufficient resources to get there… ridiculous! This is a diplomatic/large military operation of infinite complexity and nuance!

In Star Trek world though? THIS IS EXACTLY THE CORRECT APPROACH. Evoking that vibe bypasses any quibbles we might have and puts us smack into the right frame of mind. The piece does not provide thinly veiled caricatures of familiar characters. Why would it? There’s plenty of that out there already. Instead, it crafts a series of Trekky scenarios in just the perfect combination of unique and familiar. We are essentially watching a season-long arc (presuming Trek trucked in that) on fast forward. Our familiarity plays off these scenarios in exactly the right way to maximize our enjoyment and minimize drag. We don’t need the details, we get it. It is a terrific choice, implemented confidently, and lands like gangbusters.

We are blindly exploring a sensor-defying nebula, searching for the route to a plague-ridden planet. Encountering all manner of alien species, strange phenomenon and ancient artifacts, not to mention meddling Glingons. And solving them all via WWKD. (What Would Kirk Do?) Each mini-encounter is an abbreviated television episode where we are trying to wring out fuel, weapon upgrades or information and not lose TOO many redshirts. These encounters are satisfyingly broad, varied and dangerous. If we seize initiative and power through, with a little luck we might save the day.

First time, I didn’t . Ran out of gas. Barely skimmed the endscreen before cycling back in for more. On repeat play, some gameplay artifacts started showing. For one, encounters started repeating. Obviously I was more successful second time. For another, the path through the nebula randomized, meaning every game would feature blind exploration, with many possible deadends and backtracks. I failed again, this time as a result of an encounter decision I had no way of deducing. Just guessed wrong. Then out of fuel again on a third run.

Then a playthrough that broke me. Applying what I had learned to by-now-familiar scenarios, and focusing maniacally on refuel opportunities I explored to within four jumps of the end, with three doses of fuel. It was in sight! I was presented with a wormhole that promised to shoot me… somewhere. No way to predict, just guess. I guessed… wrong. It shot me so far from the goal, and provided no opportunity to refuel. I conclude: 1) the randomizer is not adequately constrained for balanced gameplay and 2) waaay too much weight is placed on blind guessing problem solving. The latter is bad, but at least manageable through repeat gameplay. Coupled with blind exploration, the former is death. To know that I can exhaust fuel through no fault of my own, or be placed in unwinnable state by random luck… these are deeply unsatisfying experiences.

Even with all that though, the charm of the setup and encounters still shines through. Yes, maybe they get a little tiresome once ‘solved’ but they haven’t yet chafed. Yes, it was a fun, immersive experience for the first few runs. No, it is not compelling enough to fight the randomizer until you win. But honestly, you still get plenty of grins without that.

I realize, due to my stream of consciousness ramblings, I have neglected to praise the MacIntosh-1bit graphics which are just delightful and resonate with the retro-narrative vibe in a terrific way. For whatever reason, Ink continues to showcase superior graphic design, and Marigold is a proud member of that fraternity.

Mystery, Inc: “We’ve got a Mystery on our Hands, Gang” Fred
Vibe: Boldly Going…
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would pay attention to the route randomizer, and ensure refueling opportunities are presented frequently enough to avoid dead runs. I would ALSO double, maybe triple the encounter mix, so that replays have a decent chance of showing some new ones in with the old. Reward replays with new challenges and opportunities to bellow loudly at the sky. GGGLLEEEEEEXXX!!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 15min, two passes

I know I just said two passes, but this is a one playthrough game. It pretty crisply tells you exactly what it is up front - an exploration/simulation of the grey area between sleep and wake. The presentation is terrific - swirling backgrounds of symbolic dream images or sleepiness-contorted real world fragments. I think the plunging, swirling staircase was my favorite. It also plays with font and layout in intriguing and evocative ways very much adhering to its mission statement.

The story it tells is drowning in specificity, to its great benefit. It’s not trying to be a general dream state, with shadowy details that might or might not resonate with you the reader. It presents a protagonist of specific experiences, well and tightly described, then sleepily distorts those vignettes. That is its true power. Those specific details are our entry into this halfway-state. Only by understanding what clear looks like to we appreciate the depths of murky. I was swept along in its thrall, and happily report it delivers its intent with panache and confidence.

My first playthrough left me in a happy fog, kind of like an hour into an evening of edibles. Uh, so I’m told. Always leave them wanting more, right? Well, when I want more, I want MORE. In this case, that meant revisiting this short work.

Peppered throughout the proceedings are occasions where you get to select sleep v wakefulness. I decided to poke a bit, see what those choices amounted to. This was a mistake. During first playthrough, my selections had everything to do with the ebb and flow of the dreamstate. Where did it FEEL like I was going. That was cool.

Second time, deliberately playing with it, it looked to me like those choices had no effect on the narrative. Worse, the way I determined that was making a choice, then going back and making the other choice. Sometimes this was not possible, but when it was I detected no difference in the subsequent text. It didn’t seem to matter which choice you made. Except it did, because making a choice and rolling with it kept you in the flow of the piece. Stutter-stepping back and forth shattered that calm and effectively destroyed the mood of the piece. Which was really its whole point!

Learn from my mistakes, team. This is a really cool one-off experience. Like my oft-cited butterfly, examining it closely wrecks it.

Mystery, Inc: Shaggy. You know why.
Vibe: Pre-Munchies Fog
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : What would I do if it were my project? Good question, it is very accomplished at going after its goals. I think I would expand the use of music. Ambient sounds often try to reflect the current scene, but their transitions to new scenes are usually abrupt. Rather than disrupt the flow, I think I would commit to an unbroken, dreamy soundtrack. Music could powerfully underline the mood it is going for. Even better if you could engineer smooth thematic changes as the game progresses and avoid those jarring cuts.

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