Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

James A. Michener (JAM! called by no one. UNTIL NOW.) was a singular author, wasn’t he? His most famous, well-received works were meticulously researched historical tapestries. They were fiction, or maybe fictionalized narratives where he portrayed broad sweeps of history through created characters (often generationally related). He crafted historical mosaics composed of individual, detailed shards of fiction. Characters were sketched only roughly, kind of subordinate to the march of time but just present enough to shade events in human terms. Michener was pretty good at it. He also was SPOT on about the American Electoral College, but I digress.

Anyway, Michener has nothing to do with anything. Shanidar is a tale that… no of course he is relevant. Shanidar is strongly Michener-esque. Michenery? JAMmy! Those JAMmy synapses closed in my brain early and stayed with me through the entire piece. A work could do far worse than to evoke that comparison!

Before we really invoke JAM though, let’s start with presentation, because it is noteworthy. The work is choice-select, with each choice pulling up a window of text, overlaid on a (mostly) black and white illustration. The illustration style is tuned directly to the narrative. It is reminiscent of cave drawings, often conveying things with almost abstract line work. When it does ahistorically increase detail to capture a character’s emotion or likeness, it retains the flavor of cave drawings, which is enough. It is a really nice effect, enhancing the proceedings at every turn. I particularly liked the rendering of (Spoiler - click to show)the group’s emergence from a tunnel to their new home.

It is all underlaid with music and sound effects similarly tuned to the current scene. The choice to make individual text blocks short and concise gives the sound work its best shot at not over- or under-staying. Text discipline was also an evocative choice. Mostly two to three very short paragraphs conveying the action and a bit of environment and off to the next. This is where the JAM of it really rang out for me. You see just enough of the onscreen cast to get a feel for them, but as much or more of the community impact on and from their actions. To be clear, I found this a compelling narrative choice.

The story itself is told in three parts: an initial tense escape, some community building, then a final migration to a new home. I didn’t get it right out of the gate. There were two things that made the work harder to engage for me, I think. For one, the cast is just on the fat side of ‘wait, who is that again?’ Particularly early on, a lot of names are thrown at us, some of them phonetically similar, though only a few get ‘screen time.’ Names without scenes are just names to a reader. (Notably, Michener himself has sometimes fallen into this trap.)

If not clear by now, this is an interactive fiction, not a game. The interactivity is a nifty thematic echo/expansion of broad sweep storytelling. Let’s think of a JAMmy story thread as a series of discrete action snapshots, implicitly connected by the reader into a larger timeline. Are you thinking of it? Just do it, humor me. We’ll call that the X direction. In the Y direction, we have discrete characters intersecting or not with each other, each with their own suite of discrete scenes that march forward along X. The interactivity lets us decide which threads to look in on. It makes us a drone of sort - where our autonomy is expressed in what we choose to watch while concurrent actions happen outside our view. We are experiencing two-dimensional historical sweep with a one-dimensional camera! Y’know LIKE WE DO EVERY DAY OF OUR LIVES. The corresponding downside to this is that characters we DON’T follow remain opaque and maybe even forgettable to us. The story sometimes concedes ‘flashback’ options to catch up on concurrent activities, but that seemed unevenly applied to me.

The author does one really vital thing - allows a ‘restart this chapter’ option at the end, so the reader can maybe go back and drone-stalk threads they missed the first time. Really the presence of this option is what won me over. I intellectually appreciated the 2D approach, but found it sometimes made the narrative difficult to follow and engage. By letting you cycle a few times, you can explore the entire two dimensional space. Don’t sleep on this capability, fam!

The middle part of the narrative to me was where the work fired on all cylinders. Characters introduced, short one-off scenes with subsets of cast members, deeper intersections between the threads (and maybe fewer to manage) all painting the picture of a community coming together two or three characters at a time. I mostly had the cast in hand by this point. Strong, effective stuff, no notes.

The third part pulled away from me again. It is presenting a much larger time window than the prior two parts, so the sampled character work has a lot more to do and doesn’t quite succeed as well. Characters age, life events that plausibly happen in large timeframes are mentioned in passing leading to a ‘well I guess that happened offscreen?’ kind of feeling. The follow-a-thread architecture meant you were missing a lot MORE of the other threads as time whizzed by. It had a distancing effect, or at least more distancing. I feel if it had adhered more to the fuel-air mixture of part two, or even accelerated more evenly to the faster pace I would have better enjoyed the ride. As it was, it started to feel not just like acceleration but also getting thinner?

I don’t want to sound too down on this thing. Despite the taffy pulling sensation of part 3 it nevertheless really captured the sweet melancholy of time passage and generational handoff. And it paid off many of the recurring characters. This work stands out in epic sweep and subject matter; in narrative style; in thematic use of interactivity; in whole-package presentation. I really really liked it, but couldn’t quite overlook the minor burrs on the way. Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, bonus point for a thrilling mix of uncommon artistic flexes.

…

Ok, you may be asking ‘why just Mostly Seamless?’ Was hoping I could just drop that and run. Part of it was the sometimes jarring time jump transitions in the third part, not fatal but noticeable. But really the big thing was, and I’m putting reviewer-is-petty blur on this: (Spoiler - click to show)At one point, in lieu of the evocative illustrations we instead get a 3D modeled archeological artifact. It felt unwelcome in the moment, but by the end there was a scene with actual archeologists. WHY WAS THIS NOT USED THERE INSTEAD? I don’t know why this obvious-to-me missed opportunity is such a rock in my mental shoe, but there it is. Look, the gap between Mostly Seamless and Seamless is pretty thin and doesn’t even affect the score. You gotta give me a pass on this.

Played: 10/17/23
Playtime: 35min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, bonus for kicking out the JAMs!
Would Play After Comp?: No, but I will probably check out the rest of the series

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Reading the title, I immediately assumed I was in for a black and white hard-boiled mystery joint. I was mildly chuffed when I realized it was not that. Surely the implications of a title with a punch like that were invoked on purpose? Suffice to say that though noir-less, the title is firmly justified by the end of the work.

This is a lightly interactive novel. Or maybe more than lightly, it is hard to tell, which is mostly a compliment. It took me a while to synch with the rhythm of this prose. The first scene wrong-footed me a little, when the protagonist seemed to respond to banter that was not as amusing as it purported to be. They were obviously in a different place than I was, and the disconnect was distancing. I think though that the key choice that reversed this was the choice to abstract the protagonist’s dialogue. Rather than hear the protagonist’s ‘voice,’ we are only ever informed what was said via narration. We ‘hear’ every other voice, but only absorb the content of the main character’s dialogue. It is a powerful way not only to remove barriers between us and the protagonist, where phrasing may jar or push, but to subtly encourage our own voice to creep in behind the text.

I am not sure if the writing shifted gears after that first scene, or if I just adjusted, but either way notwithstanding infrequent burrs I mostly got on board with the narrative after that.

The setup is a time jumping narrative of an army sniper’s life, showcasing their life’s arc before, during and after a harrowing service in Afghanistan. It is overwhelmingly linear. I counted three choices that felt consequential in the moment over its runtime, with maybe four times that overall. After the final scene though, I have to wonder. Certainly the preamble and blurb to the story suggest many different ending possibilities and I am at a loss to figure out what choices would have led to different outcomes. If true, this is really subtle writing! Every choice I made felt almost inevitable, and organically reflected in subsequent events. If it was truly a branching narrative, getting it THAT right on my specific path was pretty admirable.

I particularly appreciated moments of LACK of choice, in Afghanistan in particular. Offering true choice in some situations would likely betray the setup and reality of the piece in destructive ways. Further, I felt the time jumps were ably managed - it was typically quite clear when I was within a sentence or two even before the date/location headers were established in my head. The narrative overall built steam, brought me into its rhythms and was compelling to read.

All of these were Sparks of Joy to be sure, some developed slowly over time which is kind of at war with the Sparks metaphor I’m using but whatever. I would say two things held me at remove, ultimately. The first was the ending I got. It was a beach scene where (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist threw his phone in the ocean. Despite the previous 50 minutes, I had no idea why we were doing that. Only to find that that was the Big Finish! It left me perplexed, though somehow didn’t render the story pointless. Just unclosed. Did the text somehow misfire on my choice path? Maybe that was the intended effect? Ok, but that final action was not needed for that effect! Why was it there???

The second was that of the three time periods portrayed, the early years percolated with promise and dramatic tension. The wartime scenes positively crackled. The post-war scenes fell flat to me. Their purpose and resonance eluded me. Again, maybe lack of resonance WAS the point, but… that feels like it kind of denied the impact of the war? The protagonist felt aimless to start with, submitting to their father’s priorities irrespective of their own. The war was horrific and impactful, and afterwards the protagonist kind of … stayed aimless just without the push? Made more so? I can’t tell how much of that was my choices vs authorial dictate. Again, this is to the author’s credit. But with a story this long, with so few actual choices to make, maybe a heavier authorial hand is warranted? It is long enough and linear enough a narrative (which is kind of a wild thing to say about a time jump structured story) that I don’t think I want to retry, which in some sense speaks to not breaching into full Engaging for me. Really Seamless integration of choices though.

Played: 10/16/23
Playtime: 50min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, my experience is complete, and bar to creating another feels high


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This is a short choice-select story about saving a threatened space station and perhaps the ground population beneath it. It is attractively, liberally illustrated. I find myself increasingly preoccupied with the “is this human or AI?” question when I encounter this style of art these days, and I hate it. The question I mean. On the one hand, enabling artistic expression for everyone, including all-thumbs illustrators like me, is a powerful creative tool. On the other, the massive-scale corporate theft necessary to feed it is despicable. In this case, the art was in fact NOT AI-generated, sidestepping that particular concern for another day.

Though if the artist had been AI, at least here it’s kind of thematic?

The setup is you are a commando engineer, called to fix an injured space station. The presentation is reasonably good, illustrations wrapped by text with choices at the bottom. I liked the darkening of old text as a way to emphasize the new, though the illustrations more often than not provided sufficient break that it wasn’t really necessary. The choices on offer are sufficient to make progress, if a bit constrained. The blocking is a bit weird though, you have a full exploration cycle before encountering the ship’s boss?

The story itself ramps quickly from ‘well, what’s going on?’ to ‘ok, dire decision to make!’ I think the story kind of sabotaged itself on two fronts though. For one, nearly the entire plot, certainly the player’s main conundrum, is completely exposed (Spoiler - click to show)in the blurb! Before the player has started playing! That’s some spoiler-Inception there BTW, spoiler-blurring some spoiler spoilers!

The second way it sabotaged itself was with the writing - it pretty routinely telegraphs its intentions in advance of the narrative in a way that both jars and dilutes whatever surprises might be coming. It applies an urgency to your work, before the need for urgency is uncovered. An NPC (unprompted!) alludes to a difficult choice long before any such choice is apparent. Even the text pacing is off - after some scene setting we get some observations by the protagonist, followed by a REsummary of the setting and setup! It is a jittery focus - from macro to micro back to macro.

There are other choices that jar in the moment - stilted, unnatural dialogue, choices being forced when there are clearly other options possible - that latter maybe ultimately gets some measure of justification? The question mark is because it is not clear that the narrative recognizes these things NEED justification or not. It is possible I am doing more work than the narrative there! Anyway, you make your choice then things proceed to an ending with a reveal that is interesting but also kind of confounding on its mechanics. All in all, the text consistently put me just off my center enough that it never crested beyond a Mechanical exercise for me.

Played: 10/16/23
Playtime: 15min, finished

Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless after bugfix
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete. Well half complete, but complete enough.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

I am starting to worry the “Here There Be Poopdecks” nautical review sub-series is going to take over the main series! Unsurprisingly, with a name like The Ship we are up to part 6. An argument could be made to call it part 7 as well, but that’s a false accounting. HTBP is counting stories not instances.

This is a choice-select driven work. The choices are either embedded in descriptive text (when ‘free roaming’ for want of a better term) or in a postscript list when conversing. Most of the roaming choices are descriptive: things to look at, places to go, NPCs to talk to. When you click on a character you get conversation topics to cycle through. Only rarely do choices seem to have divergent narrative impact, beyond moving the plot forward. Even then, it seems mainly to affect relationship scores that at 2hrs have yet to affect the proceedings. The net effect is that yes, there are things to click, but functionally might as well be turning pages. Makes sense, as the work is decidedly narratively driven.

The narrative concerns two journeys, linked across time, by two captains asea for purpose and… self-awareness? It’s not a terrible setup, but by its introspective nature requires some heavy lifting in character and tone to usher the player along. For me, I don’t think the prose was up to the task, and sometimes the available player choices also deflated the objective.

The scenario opens with an urgent pounding on a protagonist’s door - pounding that is ignored to briefly explore surroundings. Certainly the scene-setting is necessary, but having the protagonist ignore what seems an urgent issue outside shades both the character and the narrative unflatteringly. It is a weird choice, because it would have been child’s play to enable casual exploration, then interrupt with urgent pounding later - it’s an unforced error. This lack of control over the narrative manifests often.

Open ended IF, where exploration and interactions occur at the player’s initiative, are an authorial challenge. Your text has to make sense regardless what order they find, say, the vampire and the holy water. With a constrained choice architecture, the author has more control and is able to make transitions feel more natural. Ship inexplicable cedes this advantage. Selections often introduce jarring mixes of non sequitur wordplay or sudden emotional swings as if the author did not anticipate the sequence. In one notable area, the protagonist goes from blind fury to playful friendship with the thinnest of transitions.

Character voices similarly suffer inelegant writing. While there is an attempt to give each character a unique voice, the voices chosen don’t quite ring true and are inconsistently rendered. For one, despite having characters from hundreds of years in the past and future, most have a decidedly contemporary use of profanity. Where the voices are different, they also feel… wrong? Inappropriate familiarity from crew members, a computer that occasionally dips into slang, contradictory emotional swings (one character reacts to a protagonist with both paternal fondness and abject terror). All of it undermines the settings and keeps the reader from Engaging. It is not helped that some conversation options never go away (while others do!), but when selected repeat context and information both characters have experienced before.

I’m not sure why but this example, where one protagonist’s belligerent avoidance of self-reflection is described, particularly rubbed me the wrong way:

Endless ways to avoid taking a peek within, finding out one’s
true call, this elusive idea that defines you, that drives you.

The Captain: “Maybe what drives me is precisely this: that I have
no idea what drives me.”

The text is explicitly saying the character resists introspection, except the VERY NEXT LINE is an out loud self-analysis. And talking to who, the narrator? The narration itself could easily have provided this insight, but the choice for the character to do it awkwardly contradicts exactly what it is asserting!

Narrative IF lives and dies on its prose. For me the clumsy moments accumulated over two hours and ultimately disconnected me from the story. There are other aspects around the periphery - some neat minigames tangential to the narrative, a simple but pleasant use of player-state icons, but the main thrust of the work did not click for me.

Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished, 3/7 chapters complete, 7/20 Achievements
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably jarring choice transitions and architecture
Would Play After Comp?: No, can’t get past my prose distractions


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Adventuron, that’s a thing! An authoring tool that explicitly enables and embraces 8/32/64 bit adventure games. I love that it exists. It’s like a web-enabled portal to the past. If I read the background right, this particular game was originally developed 35ish years ago and reimplemented today? As a guy who reengaged the hobby after a similar gap, what a powerful way to make cross-time connections in your life - reconnecting with ancient passions and enhancing and expanding with the life lived between. I whole-heartedly endorse. Even if it were fake meta-text, I endorse that spirit.

Adventuron presentation is evocative, well-serving its core mission, not the least of which with its comfort-food font options. The, lemme say 32-bit? graphics are terrifically reminiscent too, presenting a variety of Italian scenery with rakish aplomb. All of it transports the play experience to the dawn of computer imagery, just past mainframe text only, and just before home PCs were powerful enough to do more.

The gameplay here mimics that also, and I am taking the authorship claims at face value here. The game has tight descriptions, bounded interactivity, and many unimplemented nouns. All of which precisely reinforce gameplay of the purported era. There is instant death which can only be avoided through un-deducible and unrelated coincidence. There are puzzles that don’t make immediate sense, but are still the right vibe ((Spoiler - click to show)cf the hacksaw in a bottle). The plot is a PG Golden Age Bond Movie type riff (and a breezy, fun one!), but you are nevertheless talking to Witches and repairing statues. Mapping is not strictly essential, but probably time saving. There is a late losing state very easy to blunder into. I HIGHLY recommend SAVING as you go, certainly once you get to the (Spoiler - click to show)Control Room. It is an interesting alchemy: gameplay is not Mostly Seamless by modern standards, but IS a Mostly Seamless pastiche! It seems very much of its 80’s pedigree and effectively weaves a ‘game out of time’ spell.

So the question I found myself asking as I played it was… what is the value of nostalgia, and how far does it go before it runs out of juice? Offering nostalgia without commentary, without sly subversion, without subtle updates or contrasts with the intervening years’ culture, norms and gameplay conventions… what is the value of a fake time capsule when REAL ones are still available? To be clear, it is not valueLESS, but how satisfying is it, ultimately?

Mental exercise: what if Adventuron somehow became the dominant or even just a prominent authoring tool for IF, does that ultimately help the hobby? Does it hurt? Does it make for soft historical shackles and somehow back pressure innovation and modernization? (A charge that has been leveled at Parser IF for a while now). I mean, it is a fake mental exercise. Adventuron’s presence is really just MORE flavors available, not LESS of other things. But playing modern Adventuron games today, I kind of feel should trade in just a little more. Doesn’t have to be alot!, but just a little. There was a Spring Thing 23 Adventuron game I thought managed this well - while gameplay and presentation were bound to the 80’s there were more sophisticated narrative elements that tweaked the formula just barely enough to make an interesting frisson. Codename Obscura is not about that and doesn’t care to be.

Look, there’s a reason nostalgia exists. It works. It Sparks. This is nostalgia-bait for ME specifically, and I am powerless before its siren call. But at this point, I don’t think nostalgia without a twist gets beyond Sparks.

Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished, Schwarzberg escaped which I think can’t be avoided?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly 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 IFCOMP23 Review

The term Interactive Fiction, just the term now, implies technology but leans heavily into literary tradition. But we call them GAMES more often than not. Does that seem right to you? I get it, its the ‘Interactive’ part. It creates a deep intersection with the game experience. Sure, and it’s also the march of history - the early ouvre’ was decidedly game based not narrative based. And who am I to snippily try to draw a line between two things that have lived together in one big muddy swamp for decades anyway?

So Vambrace is a game. A full on ascii-map, fight-the-monsters game. On firing it up I felt I had its measure instantly: Rogue-ish RPG-lite dungeon crawl. It wasn’t stunning insight on my part, the blurb told me that right up front. I settled in for what I knee-jerkingly presumed would be a Mechanical experience because knee-jerks are the province of REAL jerks. I further dug a hole for myself when I looked up vambrace (and I do like learning new words) to find it is forearm armor. That you put power gems in. Yeah, I’m Thanos now.

What a dickish way to engage a game, right? Thankfully, early on a single detail threw my preconception baggage out the window and forced me to engage it with unbiased eyes. That detail? One command was named INVESTIGRAB. I can’t stop smiling at that goofy portmanteau. I wish I had come up with it. The syllables sing with sincere, silly poetry. When I used that command (the single letter ‘I’) I consistently proclaimed in dramatic timbre INVESTIGRAB!. Mostly in my head, but occasionally out loud to the deep consternation of my family. Hey, IF like no one’s watching, right?

[Time to queue up this review’s soundtrack!]

That single ridiculous, wonderful word temporarily flushed the self-satisfied a@%hole out of my system and let me meet the game on its own terms. It is an ascii map, navigated and interacted with in single letter commands. This UI choice pops ya’ll. There is almost no friction between you and game progress. Pop! Pop! Pop! While you were reading this, I just ran end to end and killed two monsters! This super-fleet implementation choice, along with tight humor and legit puzzles delivered on the frothy good-time promise made by INVESTIGRAB.

As the game progresses, your suite of frustratingly mild-effect spells grows organically so as not to overload your progress with ‘what all can I do now?’ The Ascii map is similarly poppy and crisp - exactly the details needed to zip around. And it builds its puzzle space as well. You start with ‘hey I know this spell, use it and win!’ to ‘Yikes, none of these spells are Aces, I need to start building combos.’ It ends up being way more puzzle than RPG, to its extreme benefit.

Now, some of the puzzles didn’t click for me - they required using spells in ways that are counter-intuitive, (Spoiler - click to show)like using GUST to also mean PRESS OR SELECT. I think I consulted the walkthrough twice and was glad I did. But others were EXACTLY right, and still others challenging, but delivering that sweet sweet endorphin rush of ‘hey that’s a clever puzzle AND I SOLVED IT!!!’ I think maybe I am slower than average, I did not finish in two hours. Two hours in, the thing pops with Sparks of Joy. A little too light and a shade too ‘need the walkthrough’ to be truly Engaging, but peppy fun for sure. Notwithstanding puzzle design that sometimes was not quite there, a Seamless experience with a great, simple, transparent UI design.

PostScript: As I was playing, I kept comparing it mentally to last year’s Trouble in Sector 471. Turns out there’s a good reason for that! For me, this one (wait for it…) popped just a little bit more.

Played: 10/13/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: I mean, yeah, I’m gonna finish this. It is light, friendly, amusing and more fun than frustrating.

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

[You can kill the soundtrack now. You probably got the gist.]

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Part 4 of the “Playing with Matches” IFCOMP23 Texture review sub-series. Recap: as an IF tool, Texture must be tightly managed due to its 1) potentially powerful drag and drop UI and 2) deeply challenging presentation choices. The latter in particular can cripple a work if the Chaos Twins (Text Hunting and Font Dancing) are allowed free reign.

It is with near religious ecstasy that I report Sculptor has tamed that infernal duo! By my count only a single page was subject to resized font, and that only a single step. Text Hunting was banished altogether. How was this miracle performed? Through exacting text formatting and page size discipline. New text was metered tightly, sometimes replacing, sometimes adding and bar one always with an eye to the fully displayed page. What an ungodly relief this was. It is actually distressing to me how much joy I derived from this basic craftsmanship. Too, the text formatting was clean enough, the options delineated effortlessly to make new text intuitive and not distracting. Occasionally the text would get laid out on the page in modest flourishes that further kept things clear when modified. Barring anything else I am about to say, this is the standard for future Texture authors to consider.

I wish I could report that the narrative and gameplay provided as much joy. Let’s start with narrative. It is a short work about a sculptor at the end of his life, having sacrificed everything to create his magnum opus, then making a decision about it. If your first impression on reading that is ‘art about art, its going to be artsy isn’t it?’, then you and I are on the same page. And we’re both right. It is a work flowing with elevated, poetic language, capturing the passion and sacrifice of an Artist (and only that), as well as more than a little self-pity. All in the kind of overwrought language that leaves me cold:

“And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.”
“Regardless of all, yet another comes to deny your craft.”

It’s the kind of work that uses the phrase ‘gird your loins’ unironically, straight faced, and portentous. Maybe it’s just me, but that phrase seems best employed in full acknowledgement of its stiff pretention. I don’t want to belabor the point, suffice to say I am not the audience for this kind of prose.

So let’s move on to gameplay, or more accurately interactivity. Here too, I felt the work undid itself a bit. For one, while the work tamed the Texture Big Two (which let’s not lose sight of that tremendous achievement), it did nothing to leverage the power of its drag and drop interface. Options were connected without surprise, the connection bubbles offered no nuanced comment on the connections being made. It was largely mechanical, punctuated with baffling choices. At one point you are asked to connect “Sand” to “Still”. I’m not sure a typo’d ‘Stand Still’ made any more sense there and am just at a loss. Elsewhere, two connection choices provided different linkages when one was “Examine” and the other “Gaze Upon.” None of this is fatal, mind, just missed opportunity.

A more damaging gameplay artifact is that the game was undecided how much player-protag autonomy it wanted to allow. Now despite some strong traditions, IF doesn’t REQUIRE protagonist autonomy. Books are famously entertaining, requiring only the occasional player page turn. IF could use interactivity to enhance the reading experience while still presenting a linear narrative. Many works do. You could argue that Texture is specifically engineered to enable that kind of work.

Sculptor can’t quite make up its mind. It offers the player opportunity to mold the protagonist with choices how to react to events. This gives the player latitude to tailor the character somewhat, to build a character in their head. But not always. At one point it requires (Spoiler - click to show)pleading with a lender in a way that clashes with other character choices the player (me) might have made. These are off notes that come to a head at the climax decision. The work has VERY specific ideas about the final choices and their import. But given the prior decisions available to a player, it is possible that these choices, and their narrative characterization, feel false. I know it is possible because it was my experience. The game WANTED me to feel a way (boy did it), but had let me build a protagonist in my head that just DIDN'T feel that way. As a result the climax fell flat and unconvincing. This is an IF work I think would benefit from LESS player choice, and more focus on using interactivity to shepherd the reader to the final destination.

Between the prose and cross-purpose interactivity I could not connect. It was a Mechanical, Mostly Seamless experience for me. But I don’t want to lose sight of the Texture Taming accomplishment. That is real and significant.

Played: 10/12/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly 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

Exactly one third into comp at this point, and the gauntlet is well and truly thrown. This game is the whole package, ya’ll.

- Off-kilter spin on horror theme
- Constant, often laugh out loud, funny
... A comedically overconfident protagonist
... Enables player clowning one example of many: (Spoiler - click to show)close door in Hans’ face while he’s talking
... Incidental text in contracts, books, notes, gravestones, everywhere really
- Organic, story-based puzzle design
... Well but not overtly clued
... Progressive hints if needed
... Includes a (Spoiler - click to show)TRANSUBSTANTIATION puzzle fr cryin out loud!
- Rich NPC conversations (a few anyway)
... Some more than one (funny) dimension!
... Resist uncanny valley better than most
- Default Messages that don’t break mimesis even for unimplemented nouns
- A SEAMLESS PARSER IMPLEMENTATION

Let me let that last one sink in. Parser games are TOUGH to code and write. You have to somehow anticipate the actions of dozens (or hundreds if lucky) of independent consciousnesses. You have to lead all those myriad consciousnesses through a story with a razor’s balance of less-than-too-much, more-than-not-enough prodding and not make it FEEL like prodding. You have to balance the tone and detail of your descriptive text, because without discipline you open space for the player you can’t hope to accommodate. And you have to entertain with prose and (often) puzzles and narrative. Here’s an example of how far this author went: when engaging an NPC, whose beverage was total scenery, nothing to do with anything…

>spill beer
That’d just have made a big mess!
>*how is that even implemented??? awesome
(Noted.)

Now I’m not blind to the possibility I am just on this author’s wavelength and they are on mine. Elsewhere in reviews, I made some throwaway joke about “Olde Englifh.” Actually calling that a joke is way overselling it, I’m reasonably sure most folks gloffed over that without notice. Not this author! There were “afpiring daemonologist” and their ilk everywhere! I crackled and cackled through this thing like a greedy older child on an Easter egg hunt, running rings round their toddling siblings. Yeah, maybe its a vibe thing, but 100% of what I can report aligned with this work!

Even the ‘don’t see/can’t do’ messages were tightly crafted. Little is more deflating than "You see Z. >X Z “You see no Z.” Contrast that to “There was no such thing in sight! Or, if there was, it was beneath my notice.” Adding that second sentence changes it completely from a programming issue to a character one, and happens to align with this protagonist precisely! I don’t know how to generalize that trick for all scenarios, but what a simple, super-effective nuance! Everything about this game is just that tight.

I’m gushing. All this analysis pales before the entertainment power of the game itself. If you can’t see how jazzed I am by this thing I don’t know what else I can say. Every moment you are reading this blathering nonsense you are NOT PLAYING DR LUDWIG AND YOU NEED TO FIX THAT, STAT.

Engaging. SEAMLESS. “Come at me, rest of Comp” it’s saying.

Played: 10/12/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless A SEAMLESS PARSER GAME
Would Play After Comp?: Every possibility, to remind me what’s achievable


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Another terrific work from my favorite Russophiliac! Here we are presented with an ambitious interactive play, a play informed by periodic audience choices. Then repurposed into IF where the player takes the role of audience. So there are a lot of layers here! Let me diagram it, with ‘->’ shorthand for “inhabiting role of”

player (you and me, in our homes, in front of computers) ->
modern audience or audience member (maybe?) ->
post-War Soviet audience/member, making choices
about play's progress

With me so far? This is the worst of it, we’ll get there. It’s all made reasonably clear with some clunky but effective preamble. So, this is a morality play in the truest sense where the morality system in question is Stalinist Communism. That thought immediately conjures horrific collisions between Stalinist social expectations and actual human ethics. All these layers create a wonderful confusion. What is the point of the interactivity? Are we meant to play AS a Soviet audience, implicitly being judged by our ominous narrator/Guide as we make choices? Are we exploring Soviet-era ethical dilemmas from a smugly comfortable remove? So much promise in plumbing those questions.

The play itself is terrifically realized. To my only-superficially trained eye, the details of Soviet life and politics, and the charged paranoia of life under surveillance ring true. The cast are carefully curated to maximize drama, each an avatar for heightened social forces but also a character in their own right. By casting the proceedings as a play, we are expecting a certain artificiality of performance, where motivations, personalities and actions are tilted to the dramatic for performative effect. I found this aspect of the work also spot on. It read (and sounded in my head) like a live dramatic performance, where nearly every interaction was fraught with nonverbal tension and subtext. No casual, “Hey did you pick up some milk?” mundanities here! There are plentiful stage directions, the most powerful of which was “unless otherwise specified, all dialogue is whispered.” C’mon, top shelf stage conceit right there!

The plot is probably exactly what you dread: Stalinist society running roughshod over human wants and dignity, and real tension is wrung as the setups telegraph their climaxes. At the end of many scenes, the Guide comes on to ask the audience how a key decision point should break. The first few are fraught with overlaid pressures - “will this choice only reflect on the play, or am I, the audience also at risk here? Will a counter-Soviet choice even be honored?” It is a great and subtle use of the power of IF.

Aaand now I am courting spoiler territory. I am loathe to give up too much of the plot. Suffice to say, the choices are meaningful, and the resultant scenes are consistently well written. But you only get a few choices all-told, maybe five or six? before the play ends. I ultimately wanted more. Not even more choices, just more consequences. Early on, our Guide makes it clear that as a morality play, we are free to choose counter-Soviet paths, as a way to be instructed by the true depths of these awful Westernized choices. That messaging neuters half the tension, the crowd involvement half! Regardless of which audience I am, I’m not at risk! Additionally, most of the choices themselves unlock nifty scenes and dialogue, (Spoiler - click to show)but do not impact the arc of the play except in detail. Granted some details can be poignant. On the one hand this is almost certainly the artistic aim of the putative Soviet-author, if not the author-author. On the other, it is also kind of the most OBVIOUS construction? There is one choice though that… crap, helmsman, engage blur:

(Spoiler - click to show)At the climax you the audience can choose to rebel against Soviet doctrine and impose Liberal Western Mercy. Should you do so, the play capitulates to your demands in a wryly insincere way. What is the message of that? That collective action can overthrow autocracy? That seems too pat. That because the victory is so artificial it was a lie, that the Guide was still going to meet quota outside the theatre? That even if all you can manage is making the powers that be uncomfortable, still do it anyway? I felt like I wanted more payoff there, given that is the only (Spoiler - click to show)unique one of many endings.

Perhaps the best use of interactivity would NOT be IF, but an actual live audience, where you couldn’t undo, check other options and assess the entire artistic space. Maybe the best payoff would be endlessly asking yourself “Why did I make those choices, and how might it have gone differently?” IF format couldn’t deliver that particular punch with a determined clicker like me.

If you are familiar with my long litany of personal biases, this work hit so many sweet spots I was deeply Engaged. Hell I explored the entire choice tree and THEN reread the script! It was a Seamless implementation for sure. I am applying a penalty point because I felt like the interactivity itself didn’t live up to its own promise (both for the IF player, and a putative live audience), and boy are there lots of my biases baked into THAT assessment.

Played: 10/11/23
Playtime: 1 hr finished, another 1/2 hour exploring all branches
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless, penalty point for interactivity left wanting
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 IFCOMP23 Review

It is with a head hung heavy in shame I must confess to you, dear reader, that I have hit another milestone in my short reviewer's life. This one is somewhat ignominious. For the first time as a comp reviewer/judge I did not persevere past an hour and a quarter playtime of a long game. As with many other prior failures, I had cause to reflect on larger issues and learn a bit about myself in the experience.

Witch wants to be an old school parser. REALLY old school, like dawn of IF old school. These formative IF works were notoriously opaque and cruel, the gameplay PRESUMED innumerable restarts and experimentation to make progress. They were also necessarily spare - they were often operating within hard storage limits so wit was applied where room was available. Mostly it was a tight, shallow “only what’s necessary” implementation. If assessed on a ‘unique text/hour’ metric, the numbers would be shockingly low. They would complicate progress with things like inventory limits, need for food, water and sleep. Quiet, unwinnable states were commonplace. Instant death with no reasonable foreshadowing. Hey, they were busy inventing the form, cut them some slack!

The net effect of early state-of-the-art was to make the puzzles punishingly hard, deeply trial-and-error, extremely time sinky, so many restarts, and triumphant once finally beaten. At some point, people started questioning, 'was the triumph really all THAT great, compared to the chore needed to achieve it?' The consensus answer seems to be ‘no,’ but it is true that it was a very specific pleasure that is hard to come by these days.

I have fallen into the trap of over-explaining what this community is well aware of.

Witch doesn’t initially present itself as that. It presents itself as a flawed, incomplete implementation. The game is rife with “You see Z; >EXAMINE Z; You can’t see any such thing.” RIFE with it. At first it I attributed it to “unimplemented nouns, amirite?” Parser IF is riddled with this, it comes with the territory, you pretty much have to have some forgiveness to engage at all. But it is one thing when scenic elements that have no gameplay function are missing. It is quite another when a key puzzle is undermined by it.

“You see a (Spoiler - click to show)magic tree.” >X (Spoiler - click to show)TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” >(Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” To later learn via walkthrough that you need to (Spoiler - click to show)>UP. A key puzzle requires you to engage with an object, but refuses to acknowledge its existence! The player can be forgiven never thinking to try this, even through Herculean trial-and-error.

The game is crammed with this kind of thing. Later, the one complicated puzzle I solved refused to acknowledge I had solved it because I did it out of order. And treated me to bafflingly contradictory state messages until I spammed things into the right order. I did endure for an hour and a quarter, wandering around collecting things, performing teeth-grittingly unrewarding inventory management. I eventually got to a point where I needed to consult the walkthrough.

And there, dear reader, is where my resolve abandoned me.

On the first few pages of the walkthrough I realized: 1) there were two puzzles (including the above) I would never have solved on my own, requiring me to detect where the game was actively deceiving me; 2) solving the above case leads to a throwback trial-and-error maze which, classic yes, but good riddance; 3) another puzzle I would only have solved through belligerent spamming then BEEN INFURIATED by the solution; and 4) that I had put myself into not one but two unwinnable states, with no hint that I had done so.

Dear reader, I had until that moment considered myself made of sterner stuff. It was not rage that undid me, it was stunned incomprehension.

Now the framing story for this is similarly old-school. Occasionally playful generic fantasy with unapologetic anachronisms among the setting. But even back in the day that was a super thin framing device, unique when it started, exhausting its novelty very quickly. Nothing is done to burnish the tropes here: no unique twists, no knowing asides, no innovative variations. Even when flashes of wit present themselves, the game quickly abandons them. I had a sinking feeling when up front this sequence played out:

>I
You're carrying:
a plain flagon (which is closed)
a headache
regret

>X REGRET
Are you familiar with the term "intangible"?

Yes, amusing in its inclusion, but why abandon the bit so perfunctorily? Absent compelling story or bouying humor, the gameplay bounced me hard. I am of the camp that all history does not need to be repeated, some is best left in the past. While I am amused by 80’s hairstyles, I will never purchase a feathering comb. It’s fine that it’s of its time. I was tempted to rate it Unplayable, but was it really THAT much more unplayable than early IF?

I kind of respect the author’s effort here in one sense. In this day and age to develop a game of this size (36 pages of walkthrough!) committed to this style of gameplay… it is an old saw to “make the art you want to see in the world.” I hope it finds its not-me audience.

Also, thankfully, at least the Elves here aren’t racist.

Played: 10/11/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, seems got to two unwinnable states, score 10/150, declined to restart
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusively buggy gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, my nostalgia only reaches so far


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