Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a sprawling work that is doing a LOT. The word I keep coming back to is ‘unfocused’ though, and I think it has to do both with how much it is trying, and how those things play off each other. Here is a laundry list of elements at play here:

.zombie apocalypse
.corrosive preconceptions
.marginalized populations, and socio-political aggressions
.audio acting(!)
.safe space creation and policing
.inter-generational aggression
.family loss

All of these things ricochet around the narrative, caroming off each other, as often as not to cross purposes rather than building to something.

The piece opens with an underplayed ‘zombie apocalypse’ sweeping the planet. Our core cast of characters then proceed to basically treat it like background noise to their lives of creative pursuits and online community. The thorough and complete disconnect from the world around them, and lack of consequences in that world!, put me in the mind of the cast of Seinfeld. Deeply self-absorbed people, impervious to the outside world in the cocoon of their own drama. Notwithstanding the walking dead, one character wanders aimlessly outside, looking for photo ops. Another lets his daughter play in the neighborhood! An early scene in a supermarket establishes the perceived threat, but makes no impression on any of the main cast beyond ‘did you see the news?’.

The world itself seems to be adjacent to our own, except that surprisingly dog-/cat-/and snail- people exist. But so do dogs that are only pets! I guess in this world that’s just the way it is, but MAN does that open so many wormy cans that go unexamined. Nothing is done narratively with this by the way, it just is.

The online community itself, an enclave of high school friends and acquaintances who all found artistic outlets and non-mainstream sexual identity journeys, reinforces this disconnect at every turn. As society is presumably in turmoil, they are preoccupied with reconnecting, establishing their journeys, and policing a not-quite-empathic-enough member. Yes, his transgression is clumsy. But it is hard to believe as a longtime member of this community that this is either a) his first transgression or b) that he hasn’t absorbed norms by being corrected before now. Instead it generates great drama, ECLIPSING THE ACTUAL APOCALYPSE. This presages an exchange between the protagonist and the MOST generous, MOST sympathetic NPC where the PC reveals their sexual identity, then reacts really intensely to the confused response.

Before I wander further onto that VERY thin ice, let me sidebar about gameplay/interactivity. The choices are really two varieties: exploration and protagonist character building. Depending on how generous/enthusiastic/wounded/angry you choose to play, you are building a character in your head. As far as I can tell, there is no impact to plot in these choices, though that is definitely not a criticism. Similarly, your explorations are either geographical, or whom you choose to IM. For the most part, you get one explore, one IM, a group interaction (where you shade responses) and a similar 1-1 facetime for ~10 days of gameplay spread out over months of narrative time. The exploration is interesting, and provides some latitude to privilege some interactions over others. The heavy lifting though is in pure character build.

Ok ice, here I come. The chance this ends with a cold dunking is very high. After some collaborative protag character building, we reveal that they are aroace (not a spoiler, in the blurb!). Our most sympathetic NPC responds, conveying their emotional loss at that revelation. Is that a great response? No obviously, they did take the fraught revelation and make it about them. The resonance with the previous episode casts the most sympathetic character in the same role as the oblivious deplorable. On the one hand, this demonstrates that no one is immune to empathy blind spots which is certainly an insightful message. On the other, it seems to enshrine indiscriminate righteous anger as a the corrective tool of choice. Isn't that just an exhausting social prescription? Is there no other way to engage this? I am ill equipped to critique this as a character beat, but as a resonant narrative choice it really grated on me.

I can hear the ice cracking under my feet. The Awful Right has this narrative that ‘wokeness’ is nothing more than a ‘cancel-happy gotcha machine.’ Because these are the only incidents we see, and because the perpetrators are SO different, this work inadvertently plays into this toxic narrative.

That apparent dissonance was compounded by another plot development. At one point you have opportunity to meet a character who tells you, in no uncertain terms, they want no interactions, please go away. If you ignore them and revisit anyway, you are thanked for getting them ‘out of their shell.’ (Lol, that’s funny for reasons). You see the issue? You are explicitly asked to respect a character’s choices, violate their wishes, then are thanked for it??? How is this not a GREATER transgression than what was so dramatically escalated above? Yet is REWARDED?? On the one hand, I think this is a very subtle and effective nod at the complexity of these issues where people sometimes get trapped in their own mind. On the other, that very complexity requires MORE grace, not less, and makes the above stark condemnation even worse!

Hey, we’re barely halfway through this. WHOO! This water is cold.

So that zombie apocalypse? Turns out it’s fine, actually. Yeah, there are now zombies in the world, but no worries. They seemingly don’t eat people anymore? And now zombies are a repressed population, drawing ire of reactionary right dickheads? Sounds about right. Our core cast is suddenly MUCH more engaged in this (not the least of which via a neat twist where one’s brother is left zombified). There is a lot of social business that gets observed and then resolved, but our core cast is not really involved except as spectators, one of whom has big stakes in the matter. As a story arc it was interesting but backgrounded enough that it failed to engage. There are also SO many unanswered questions that really muddy the waters. Do zombies eat people? Seems like they did at some point. Can they ‘turn’ others against their will? Seems like they did at some point. These questions corrode the situation enough that there’s a lot more grey than the narrative acknowledges and instead kind of hand waives away, leaving the player at a loss.

There is also the matter of the protag’s mom. An aggressive ‘no, you are my SON’ shrew of a woman, swallowing the Awful Right party line so hard (Spoiler - click to show)it literally kills her. She is portrayed as irredeemable and unpleasant and I pretty immediately avoided her like the plague. When she develops health issues, the game suddenly got real. She was no less irredeemable, arguably more so by denying the evidence of her eyes. But, as protag, my choices suddenly became much more constrained. Leaving her to her own devices, which might have been my first choice, was not an option. Above, I decried authorial choice steering that made the protag react in ways I did not believe in. The crucial difference here is, the limited choice in this scenario was not only COMPLETELY BELIEVABLE, it was a powerful use of interactivity to drive home the awful complexity of these toxic relationships. Lack of true choice was a powerful narrative tool that made me understand and empathize with the protag MORE, not less. I found this entire sequence difficult, complex, infuriating and powerfully realized. It was the showcase sequence of the work, I think.

So, where does this leave me? A patchwork of dramatic preoccupations that narratively, with one very notable exception, missed more than hit. I kept coming back to the question ‘why zombie apocalypse? It is mishandled so often, why is that even in the narrative at all?’ Then it occurred to me. What if I treat the world of this work as PURE metaphor, not story at all? Holy crap do things open up then. Animal beings become a broad range of perplexing humanity our only duty is to accept as is. Online communities become echo chambers that can be equal parts supporting and blindering.

The zombies become a masterstroke of genius. The concept of ‘zombie’ is pretty universal at this point, beyond mechanical details. As a consumer of pop culture, we bring all those preconceptions to the table. As I reflect, it occurs to me the NARRATIVE does not confirm zombies’ threat, it is us (and their world) that ASSUMES it. So later, any inclinations we have to question zombie personhood comes from a place of preconception and prejudice. What a powerful, amazing choice! It puts the reader squarely in the difficult place of having to combat their own prejudices! While I rebel at the narrative storyline of the zombies, the METAPHOR is an incredible, subversive choice. It also retroactively forgives some character choices that do not presume flesh eating.

As a story, the work was too all over the map for me, with too many jarring, baffling, and unconvincing choices. (And one searingly effective plot point.) As a metaphorical construct to challenge the player, it positively sings. It also opens up what I feel is its crowing allusion: that the zombie apocalypse is NOT about zombies themselves! It is about surrendering to the shittiest side of our nature. THAT is the real apocalypse. Unlike most zombie fiction, we’re not just the worst part of the apocalypse, WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE ITSELF.

Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1.5hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging beats in parent storyline and metaphor, offset by bouncy beats elsewhere, average to Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless outside audio
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

I would be negligent if I didn't address the audio acting, but I really think I can’t top that final line. So think of this as an appendix.
On balance, I think the audio detracts more than enhances. Like timed text, it has the effect of making the player (who has already read the page) wait for the game to catch up, with the attendant impatience that can generate. There are definitely some great performances, highlighted by the insufficiently empathic friend Nekoni, but the lack of ambient background sound (when warranted) further detracts from the overall effect. Newsroom, crowd, workplace, etc settings make it glaringly obvious when background noise is missing. It is also distracting when the text notes a beeping sound absent from the soundtrack! Lastly, the mix seemed a bit off. In particular the volume difference between Laz and Nekoni went from barely audible to quite loud, and was jarring.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I think I respond to a murder mystery like I do pizza or sex. Even when it’s not that great, it’s still pretty great. The intersection of human drama and intellectual puzzle is just a time tested winner. Arguably, while it took a few years, those same impulses power large swaths of IF as a whole. I will say, this one challenged itself with some first impressions that gave up a lot of ground it would have to recover.

It opens with a view of a murder. So specific a view, it seemed to pretty definitively narrow the suspect pool (and motive space!) with out-of-character knowledge. As a ‘you-solve-it’ this was a wild choice I still don’t understand and am not sure the work loses anything by dropping. The second early misstep was in the setup: an FBI rookie, fresh out of the academy, flying solo on her first case. Don’t they pretty famously partner those folks up? For LOTS of reasons? Strike two.

The third strike was leaning into a ‘die roll v attribute’ tabletop paradigm. I have a quibble with this mechanism, including on the table. When testing things an rpg merely simulates, say swordsmanship, sure, roll away. Probability is a big numbers game, have at it. Mysteries only KIND of do that. They are more cerebral, more explicitly testing player ability to connect dots and form theories. Making a die roll in that kind of thing both reduces player initiative and introduces an unwelcome guest to the thinking party - random chance. Do you notice the clue? <die roll> Nope. How about the next one? <die roll> Bad luck, no again. Yes you have RPG-like stats to deploy to swing the odds but no guarantees. This mechanism raises the prospect that through no fault of your own, the fates will not provide enough data. That flies in the face of the cold, logical underpinnings of murder mysteries! And BOY does that impression loom large over every failed die roll. Yeah, I understand probability and big numbers but I NEED THAT FOOTPRINT!!!

Fortunately for KiW at three strikes in, the rules of baseball allow for, I wanna say, five strikes? Five strikes. After digging a hole for itself, the actual investigation started. Here, we just smoothly shifted to a new gear and never looked back. There is a very useful map highlighting the geography and clue locations that updates with the investigation. You interview lots of folks, suffer lots of die rolls and generally start assembling the picture. It’s not a full strike, maybe a foul ball, but I do wish location text varied after the first visit. Continually seeing the same introductory text for two straight days chipped at immersion and would be easily fixed by {if (first visit) else (default) } type coding. Even so, the choices started logically, then bloomed over time into a large web of possible connections (and red herrings) to untangle. NPCs were simple yet believably distinct, events transpired with clear motivations and consequences, it was just solidly constructed. It’s not perfect. Some failed die rolls block clue paths that you CLEARLY could just call someone else to help with, but at this point progress was assured enough that the misses grated less. More importantly, as the implacable hand of big numbers asserted itself I did get disconnected clues to wrestle with. Before I knew it, my decrying of die rolls had cycled from irritation with the mechanism to full on engagement in the mystery.

It rewarded my engagement. The mystery was a satisfying procedural romp that seemed to have multiple paths to solve, and to be at least first-order resistant to bad die rolls. I do wonder had I chosen a more physical protagonist, given the die rolls laid out for me, would their path have been as resilient? Maybe the challenges presented are tuned to the investigator in some way to ensure fairness? As a one-solution mystery I’ll probably never know. Certainly the physical rolls I uncovered were statistically small enough to make that a concern.

By the end, I had developed a solid enough theory but had acted more deliberately than urgently (Spoiler - click to show)and people paid the cost. This was a cool and legitimate outcome of my approach! I did manage to solve it (puffs chest) despite my die roll misgivings. I had climbed, however tentatively out of the first impressions hole it had dug into a really good time, capstoned with earned accomplishment. I just wish I hadn’t labored so long under the shadow of those first impressions to really enjoy the ride start to finish. As it was, I will have to split the difference between Sparks and Engaging.

Since I opened with a sex metaphor, then segued into a baseball one, I have a question. What is the sexual equivalent of fifth base? There’s five of those too, right?

Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 45m, 5/5 solved as Negotiator
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy->Engaged/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

ALRIGHT! A horror-themed, noir-adjacent investigation jam! About TIME we got one of these!

Notwithstanding that snarky opening, I am in fact quite positively disposed to this genre. If not QUITE as rare as the above paragraph intimates. You are one of 3 investigators in a vampire-politics world, charged with maintaining a semblance of human-vampire peace. By whom? Unclear. Resourced and staffed by? Uncertain. Relative authority in the shadow world? Unspecified. This slipperiness of setup is actually not a problem, at least not ALWAYS a problem, as a stage-setting infodump would be far worse. Its lack of detail often allows us to assume the best, or hand wave gaps, to keep things bubbling.

Before we get there, let’s talk characters. You get to choose to play one of three. I chose the “Hollow, Seasoned, Stubborn” one. What? Don’t read too much into that. This put me in media res into an investigation of a previously captured vampire that had transgressed through inexperience. Already though, there was a disconnect. The illustration topping the page seemed of a young person, clearly not me, so I assumed must have been the charge I was investigating. Nope! This grizzled, ex-cop, ‘too old for this…’ curmudgeon looked all of 19. Ok, vamps don’t age physically but background suggested I was a cop BEFORE turning. That was a dissonance with the piece.

Here’s another dissonance. The link-select paradigm produced what I believe to be an unintended consequence. Like a lot of links, it was bolded and underlined to convey its UI purpose. It was ALSO almost always the last sentence on the page. Reading a bolded, underlined sentence conveys a weight, an import to those words. THESE WORDS HAVE MEANING, READER! Here, read these two passages and see how they play differently in your head:

“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”
“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”

Right? You can HEAR the swelling musical DUN DUN sting! Now, imagine that on EVERY PAGE. It quickly establishes a rhythm in your head, an offputting one of the narrative throwing import at you, so often unearned. It is hard to overstate how distracting this becomes by the end. I think, textually speaking, the work would have been better served by a simple > prompt or somesuch at the end of a page rather than distort the text itself. Even a different color without highlighting markup might be less intrusive and still serve the UI purpose.

The last dissonance I want to observe is plot-execution-based. Despite its mostly obscured nature, when the operation of the detective agency WAS detailed, it was unconvincing. In an early sequence, the third playable character, a young vampire, (Spoiler - click to show)is turned to an undercover agent. This turn was ill-justified and unconvincing in the text. The reasons AGAINST the development were well established, then summarily discarded seemingly with a shrug. The fact that my character, the grizzled-seen-it-all ex-cop, took this turn at face value despite GREAT reasons not to… I didn’t buy it. The fact that it never paid off later kind of made it worse. Then to GIFT this (Spoiler - click to show)new recruit with a uniform known far and wide as the organization’s calling card… (Spoiler - click to show)TO AN UNDERCOVER AGENT??? Later, during a climactic confrontation, a fight scene seemingly depended on antagonists standing stock still while the protagonists executed increasingly complex moves. The work was peppered with details like this that just didn’t land.

I have gotten the negatives out of the way, and since many of them showed up early, I can’t say I was ever truly engaged in the work. (Well, except… I’ll get there.) That said, there were as many or more positive details I simply loved, not the least of which was the character of my PC and another playable agent, Declan. They had agency, voice, awesome personalities and showed admirable competence more often than not. Legitimately interesting character creations.

Another strength was the in media introductions of other organizations and their casual conflict/intersection with our heroes. This was employed as an effective way to embiggen the world, and often with just enough detail to entice and not too much to draw questions. I particularly liked the bureaucratic incompetence of the California branch.

These treats, enjoyable as they were, were to be eclipsed by a midpoint scene that rocked me out of my ossifying impressions. To that point in the story there had been a lowkey connection between two characters, one I had been nurturing when presented with choices to do so. It exploded into a scene of such incredible emotional nuance I literally sat straighter in my chair as I devoured it. It EASILY could have been stock mutual confessions set to swelling music. Instead, it honored both characters (and my prior choices), and presented a bittersweet emotional realism and earned drama the work had not telegraphed it was capable of. The prose was note perfect. It flashed then removed choice links, tantalizing me with what could have been, but wasn’t. What a powerful use of IF that was! I honestly mentally slow clapped by the end of the scene. It was powerful, compelling and landed like gangbusters. It was immediately followed by an abstract ‘passage of time’ sequence that was almost as affecting, and a joy to read. These two sections, back to back, minimized all my prior complaints. If I hadn’t been taking notes, it could have flushed them from my head. How much was the unique product of my choices v authorial hand I couldn’t say, but I DO say that sequence, at least temporarily, rocketed me into true engagement.

The climax fell short of that height, but in the afterglow of that super effective scene I was a lot more forgiving. I did restart the game to play again as the other well-defined character, but quickly realized the plot wasn’t going to change, and it was hard to justify a second playthrough. That said, that gift of an emotional scene well justified the play.


Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1hr as Lynette, 15min as Declan
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

This presents as a graphically handsome choice-select, of the (Spoiler - click to show)choices don’t matter subgenre. Like most of this genre, its effectiveness comes down to its thematic resonance and its use of interactivity to enhance that. These works typically flirt openly with devolution to short fiction, which is not as prejudicial as it sounds.

I found the interactivity here effective when it leapt beyond the page-turning-link default. Presenting illusory choice, click-to-continue as a way to convey the tension of forced progress were both used effectively, if sparingly. They ably underscored the central point of the work - and the protagonist’s duress.

The theme I found a little too light. Its most obvious interpretation seemed to be of (Spoiler - click to show)a home-schooled vegetarian child with aggressively contrarian parents, with all the deep and despairing angst that scenario produces. There were some interesting comparisons drawn between software constructs and life in this state that were a highlight for me. The education level there did call into question a young child’s experiences and maybe pointed to a more sinister (paranormal question mark?) adult situation. It was all left so unclear and implicit though, that any number of interpretations could fit. Clearly the player is aligned with the protagonist, and meant to feel the despair and coercion. Coercion bad, right?! It also felt… overly dramatic? In a way that spoke to perhaps some immaturity of the protagonist?

I did a mental exercise. What if the coercion in question was vegetables, broccoli say, with the protagonist determined to eat nothing but twinkies. The angst and despair of a young PC would still feel completely of a piece and would require almost no changes to text. But boy would it change the theme of the piece, no? Look, I am absolutely NOT drawing an equivalence between vegetarian ethics and immaturity. I am saying that the theme here was unfocused enough to allow both interpretations and by extension that distasteful connection. The work’s heightened melodrama, coupled with the spare underlying details, called its premise into question in a way that was kind of interesting but begged all kinds of questions it couldn’t answer. And it was certainly undermining to the narrative presented.

Ultimately, this disconnect was too great to move me beyond a mechanical engagement with the piece. Ambiguity in art is very interesting, if that ambiguity swirls around a core central theme. Ambiguity OF that theme is not as compelling, and can drive some actively objectionable connections.

Played: 9/2/24
Playtime: 5 min
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

(Get it? Cause Shane is a famous Western...? How did I get this far up my own butt?)

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I have taken to calling this “link-select UI on otherwise parser-based gameplay” stripe of game “Twinesformer.” I am resigned to not being able to make ‘fetch’ happen, but am too enamored of it to drop it. This may be the most intricate version of this paradigm I have yet encountered. Deep parser constructs like “attach to…” “put in…” “pour on…” are provisioned here. A vast array of nouns are available in most locations and conversation trees. This is a two edged sword. On the one hand, it successfully mitigates one criticism of this style: ‘lawn mowering’ all possible command combinations to get a result. The command space is so large, and includes enough clearly incorrect combinations to cast doubt that it is worthwhile to try.

On the other hand, in order to provision all those combinations it takes, 3,4,5 clicks to build the commands you would type into a command prompt in a fraction of the time. Maybe a tablet/phone player would find some economy here, but anyone with a keyboard will chafe at these decisions. The UI is implemented as a semi-standard NAV block, inventory block, command expansion line, and system command block. Unlike other implementations of this, it is printed inline to the transcript and is just dynamic enough to require a full read every time. Often requiring searching lists of text for the noun you want. Meaning its layout regularity does not turn into command efficiency. If I could make one recommendation, it would be to put this ‘control’ section in a static pane away from the transcript. That would go a long way to reducing the clumsiness of it.

The story is a comedically engaging one - you are an Old West gunslinger’s sidekick, whose task is keep your charge alive and on task ridding a town of baddies, fighting his unearned confidence every step of the way. It is a tried and true formula, and the setup here is capably rendered. The local color NPCs are amusingly portrayed, for all their terseness. The environment and scenarios are pleasantly silly and occasionally laugh out loud funny. It is a great playground, economically established.

It does feel though, that the vibe it is striving for is at war with its gameplay. The ‘help’ command generated real dread when it revealed the presence of two benighted old-school tropes: unwinnable states and inventory management. Are these ever fun? Ok, unwinnable states has its defenders, but I am DECIDEDLY not one of them. There was at least a mode option to inform you the moment the game became unwinnable, which I appreciated. I instead played ‘standard’ mode, a deliberate choice to give the game opportunity to try and convince me of unwinnability’s merits. It did not, but to be fair, the scenarios themselves telegraphed their unwinnable decisions well enough that ‘UNDO’ was usually pretty obvious. There were also some insta-deaths that were funny enough to mitigate any frustration. Even so, I can’t escape just how often I was clicking ‘UNDO.’ Yes, much less onerous than a restart. Still well short of fun.

Let me scratch a bit at these unwinnable states. One inescapable feature of this gameplay choice is that the player will revisit, sometimes often, flavor and setting text. When that text is cold and concise, it kind of disappears into the problem solving focus. When it has personality and humor, for me anyway, it devolves into a grim reminder of the fun I COULD be having, instead of retracing old ground, over and over.

There is another way the game commits to its old school vibe - hiding things around town expecting the player to find and pick them up, with their use only becoming clear waay down the road. This is a perfectly legit and time-tested approach. However, it ALSO becomes baffling when confronted with the puzzle that needs them, but no text hinting what might be needed. Ie, if you didn’t already FIND the magic thing, you won’t have any idea it’s even available, let alone necessary to solve the puzzle. The text did no work to point you to missing possibilities. So you try so so many ill-fated and unsupported things. And then UNDO repeatedly. Add some timers to those puzzles and it can be many iterations before you realize you don’t have what you need. It is no exaggeration to say UNDO was, by FAR, my most utilized command. In retrospect, perhaps I should have consulted the walkthrough sooner, but it does speak to the piece’s strengths that I chose not to for so long.

So what we have is a delightfully engaging setting, chock-a-block with wry humor (and surprisingly cold, and funny for it, deaths), married to a PUNISHING gameplay paradigm and clunky UI. There are infrequent but notable bugs: “since the itself fills most of the space”; “There’s currently You are here.”; a donkey that follows you even if its enticement is not present. These are notable, but not overly intrusive in and of themselves, though the latter definitely falls into an ‘absent magic item’ puzzle category.

In the end, for me, the amusing prose and setting could not escape those contrary gameplay choices. And I didn’t even talk about the deeply unrewarding inventory management click-drudge. Lots of bouying Sparks, but too many notably intrusive counterweights dragging it down. And so, so, …so…so

…SO much UNDO.

Played: 9/1/24
Playtime: 2hr, score 3/17
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable UI and gameplay fighting
Would Play Again?: No, saturated on UNDO

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is about as close to a bare metal parser as you can imagine. In an undefined space, with two undefinable objects, get out! Gameplay here is the key, the focus being on experimenting with the almost-nothing you are presented with to determine the rules and ‘reality’ of the scenario. It’s language is kind of belligerently, hilariously unhelpful, striding a line of meaninglessness and JUST enough nuance to tickle your logic ganglia. For me, the language started as frustrating, but almost immediately became a strength of the work. It is doing WAY more than raw word count might indicate.

I haven’t played many of these “experiment to find rules of the world” games, but the ones I HAVE played have often been more baroque and frustrating than rewarding. Maybe it was the scope of this one, maybe the engineering of its feedback and soft wording, but this really hit a sweet spot for me. Just opaque enough to be mysterious, just responsive enough to reward experimentation. The solution was very much in reach, in just a few moves. I was kind of flabbergasted at a sudden ah-hah moment only to realize that was the end of the game!

What do I do with this? Probably because of its opacity, the moments of clue revelation provided a legitimate charge of joy, almost immediately segueing into triumphant conclusion. Its word choice was just about perfect for its conceit. Those were undeniable Sparks this work elicited from me. And yet, because of its brevity, that was really ALL it offered. I didn’t have enough time to ramp into Engaged. It was a seamless implementation, and yeah its brevity helped make that manageable, but I have seen plenty of short works that couldn’t wring out their technical issues, so still noteworthy.

I got a charge out playing it for sure. Its brevity means it is impossible to be a waste of your time. But its modest goals were also kind of …insubstantial? My white hot triumph almost immediately faded to “that’s it?” And then, “what’s next?”

That’s fine, though, right? We eat M&Ms too!

Played: 9/1/24
Playtime: 5 min, escaped
Artistic/Technical Ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Why does anyone do this reviewing thing? No one reason, obviously. For me it started as a simple impulse: to try to give something back to the community in advance of asking it to consider my own efforts. It quickly got a lot more complicated. It turns out that the prospect that my words might help someone refine their art gives me hope that I have more to offer than raw snark and good intentions. Underpinning a lot of it is admiration for the medium and the artists that continue to transform it beyond anything dreamt of in the early days. There is so much negativity in the modern age, an opportunity to find things to gush about makes me just a little more resilient and centered.

So yeah, it’s all about me.

The common thread to this miasma of feelings is connecting with the work of another human, then further connecting with humans that have also explored that connection. So. What does this mean in the encroaching age of generative AI? This is a work that embraces new technologies to produce art, acknowledging its debt to automation to produce text. But most IF, especially parser IF, IS text. Where does human authorship stop, and machine authorship begin? Is there a line where machine authorship reduces the human part of the art? At what point am I inadvertently connecting with machine? And why on earth, given the things that motivate me to hammer out words for you, would I want to do that?

There is an argument of ‘so what? What does it matter if the work makes you feel something?’ Ok, fine. But what if it doesn’t? What if the words are capably rendered, the scenario clearly and adequately painted, but ultimately just flat? Then what? If authorship were unambiguously human, I would endeavor to show where and how that impression developed or missed the mark. But if it is because machine? I have NO interest in providing feedback to a machine that in the best case, has no way to digest my observations, and in the worst makes itself BETTER at a human endeavor I wish it weren’t involved in in the first place.

This is a Greek Myth IF, where as the titular protagonist you are asked to free your god brethren by solving IF puzzles. Last few years there was a spate of art that recontextualized and transformed Greek Myth in fascinating and revitalizing ways. This is not that, this is a pretty straight-ahead representation. Find some trapped gods, solve puzzles, on to the next. The gods themselves have no particular character or personality hooks, no neat twists, and rarely escape their familiar lore. If fact, if NOT for that lore their characterization would be nearly non-existent. How much of that is AI, and how much author choice? It certainly seemed to be missing a spark of some kind.

It isn’t helped that the gameplay is demanding in the least satisfying way. Early on, the difference between traditional cardinal directions, ‘go to,’ and ‘sail to’ is unclear. Its nouns are wildly uneven in their implementation - meaning most small details respond with ‘you see no.’ This trains you not to poke too deep. Until some puzzles REQUIRE deep dive into nouns no more or less prominent than their neighbors. NPCs, arguably the MOST human-adjacent aspects of IF, are similarly completely shallow (dare I say, robotic?). They have information to impart, but with almost no character voice of their own. Interactions outside that functional purpose generate a ‘you get no response’ Even when asking about, say, a trapped spouse they have just asked you to find!

The effect of all this is to highlight the mechanical moving parts at the expense of idiosyncrasy and unique human voice. Then to try to hide those parts behind capable text that more obfuscates than enthralls. The combination of all that is that puzzles are much harder than they should be - depending on if you poked at the right noun or not. It was pretty clear what needed doing in most cases, but the mechanics of finding missing pieces to do them were obtuse. In one case I literally turned rings to a near-random combination and it worked. In another I waited until the solution presented itself, just waited. The combination of obtuse yet also anti-climatic was off putting for me.

It also hit what seems a pretty big bug. Per the text in one location, both the Agora of Thebes and Mount Olympus were N. Going N though took you to an empty location. I think this made the game unwinnable (intrusive if not unplayable, per my rubric), as a pair of gods needed to complete your rescue were clued as being there. I spammed some commands just to see if I could power past to no avail.

I’m not thrilled that my first review of COMP24 comes across so negative. There is every possibility that being told AI was involved colored my response, I leave that to the reader to decide. There is every possibility that the work’s shortcomings have nothing to do with AI at all, and just needed more refinement. Between the flatness of the scenario and characters, and uneven puzzle implementation I guess I would RATHER attribute these things to AI. For sure, I want more humanity in my art!

Jeez, first game of Comp, and I am spiraling into existential angst and techno-paranoia. Buckle up folks, I’m turning into a curmudgeon before your eyes!

Played: 9/1/24
Playtime: 2hrs, score 30/maybe 90? (4 gods rescued)
Artistic/Technical Ratings: Mechanical/Intrusive Implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, engage IF for different thrills

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

Played: 7/27/24
Playtime: 2.25hrs, 3 deaths, ‘won’ with walkthru

This is a companion piece to A1RL0CK, and I do recommend playing the two together. I also recommend playing in order, as I think the denouement of this game would not work as well out of order. Initially, it felt to me like an improvement in every way on the prior work - which I had found narratively very strong, but burdened by overwrought language, implementation gaps and (a few) inadequately clued puzzles.

Early in the proceedings of RU1N, I found it much smoother and linguistically more disciplined. Here, the protagonist is a blue collar space/underwater worker, notably different than the previous protagonist and much more relatable in his down-to-earth, no-nonsense voice. He is immediately thrown into an alien environment and asked to navigate. I found the language employed here very obfuscative and scattered, in a very effective way. My inability to mentally create a navigable geography or even a clear view of my surroundings seemed a clever way to evoke the disorientation of sudden immersion in an alien environment. I also liked how descriptions changed dramatically, where the protagonist’s first impressions were nightmarishly horrific, only to be supplanted with a more mundane reality. It was an effective way to convey hair-trigger panic at the distressing surroundings.

This impression carried me quite far, and was enhanced by a challenging folding-in-on-itself map that was navigable but just offkilter enough. I wish that early experience was sustained. Implementation issues seemed to become increasingly intrusive as time went on. From clumsy disambiguations

>x glass tube
Do you mean the narrow glass tube or the small device?

to LOTS of synonyms and missing nouns

> x aliens
Sorry, I don’t understand what “aliens” means.
> x alien
They are not much different from the fish you are used to.

to narrative phrasing that has either typos or baffling word choice

GOING AGAINST ME WILL GET YOU ANYTHING, JAY TEE. DOWN YOURWEAPONS AND JOIN THE CAUSE.

x panel
The panel is open, and shows a series of beaks facing the opening, like a rake.

In the most frustrating example, combining two objects produces a third, but the narrative does not announce either the disappearance of the components or the creation of a new one. I assumed it was a bug for a distressingly long period, only eventually noticing an addition to my inventory. As frustrating as these were, they nevertheless still represented an improvement in the prior entry.

A larger disappointment, for me, was the gradual transformation of the prose from its early punchy, unadorned simplicity to more melodramatic and overwritten. Contrast this early piece:

“So we’re screwed: it’s as dark here as in Satan’s colon. And there’s nothing up, down, left or right. Give me some pointers, Cart. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed.”

to this:

“Cursed is the shadow of hell,” you voice loudly.

While there may be a fictional character that can plausibly say both those things, I did not find this protagonist to be that guy. Similarly, the narration took a similar turn, forfeiting its early punchy gains for less appealing baroqueness (baroquery?). By the end, it felt linguistically fully of a piece with its predecessor.

Its final puzzle ALSO felt like a let down. Overall, RU1N was a much cleaner puzzle experience for me. Some challenging leaps, but mostly rewarding diligent examination and satisfying once completed. That final puzzle though - specifically the final step of the final puzzle. After having a series of moving parts to decode, manipulate and sequence, all of them satisfying, the difference between success and failure was one final move I found to be completely opaque. There is a mild hint in death, though I interpreted that hint quite differently and never got there. Walkthrough showed me the answer which, eh ok.

Now that I have fully and completely whined about this stuff, let me turn again. All of those artifacts were there, detracted from my experience, but all of them were both less pronounced than previously AND more than compensated by RU1N’s strengths. In addition to the early characterizations and scene setting called out above, this one included lots of ‘fiddles’ (minor atmospheric messages that emphasize the dynamic nature of the environment) that were positively creepy and unsettling and terrific mood setters. Most importantly, I found the plot of this one to be super strong, and the timing of its beats even MORE capably dispensed than its predecessor (which was a strength of that work too!). Its horror was more horrific, its revelations more organic and interesting. They were timed to ‘unlocking’ areas of the map, but given the relative smoothness of its puzzles translated to a steadier, more engaging pace of revelation. Yes, the protagonist character lost the thread a few times (peevishly damaging his equipment in a way that beggared credulity for his situation, strong physiological reactions that rang untrue), but the antagonist and NPCs stepped in to carry things ably to a strong finale, even if spoilers were needed to fully experience it. The antagonist’s final revelation in particular was both foreshadowed and surprising in a satisfying way.

So to sum up, feels, like its predecessor, that it could use more polish and prose editing. Its bones though are even stronger, and it accomplishes more with language than its predecessor attempted. Barring a sour final step, its puzzles were also both fairer and more satisfying. I turned this into an outright comparison. Didn’t mean to do that. Both are worth your time. (But this one is better.)

Played: 7/27/24
Playtime: 5min, 3/3 endings

Back before the internet enabled pervasive access to, euphemistically, “externally authored texts”, students had to work much harder to find shortcuts for research papers and book reviews. (Well, maybe just ‘harder.’) Cliff’s Notes were the legendary black-and-yellow pamphlet size books of sweet, sweet relief from hundreds of pages of droning on about, I dunno, whaling practices. While indispensable for adolescents that wanted a social life, they could be… clinical. They described plot beats, explained literary flourishes, notable prose characteristics, historical context. Great for impressing English teachers (who, in retrospect, were probably not as fooled as we kids believed). Not so great for actually EXPERIENCING the celebrated prose, thrilling to plot beats, or watching the author’s mind unveiled in its idiosyncratic glory.

NYX is a repudiation of Cliff’s Notes cold distillation. “I’m not gonna EXPLAIN (Spoiler - click to show)Alien to you,” sez NYX. “Imma speed run it for you.” Framed as a last transmission from a doomed spaceship with a single player choice, it packs an entire dramatic arc into an insanely tight time frame, with an earned choice of diverse denouments. To me though, this was not the most interesting thing about it.

I am a fan of this genre, this story’s most obvious inspiration, this subculture, and this author. There was NO chance I wasn’t going to like this. What I found most noteworthy though was the prose. Here’s why. Early on, the protagonist makes the well-known observation ‘we should send poets, not engineers, to space.’ Leaving aside the driveby on engineers there, have you READ THIS AUTHOR BEFORE? I mean, there is no one else I would send into space!! They have got to be on the launch shortlist, once NASA validates the poetry priority. Which made it so impressive to me that the voice for this work was exactly as aliterary as the work claimed. Chameleon-like, the author delivers a protagonist’s voice that is consistently, believably workmanlike and technical, which sold the story that much more solidly. It’s almost unfair and, given how DISTINCTIVE their most flourishing prose is, astonishing it is done this well. So sure, delivers punch in tight package, interesting alternative arcs, bla bla bla. Still, the RANGE of authorial voice is the compelling part. That was my big takeaway.

That, and the importance of self-destruct subsystems.

Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 1hr, finished

This is billed as a beginner parser, and ok maybe. Certainly, veterans will find the puzzle play pretty straightforward. But a lot of what might uncharitably be called ‘training wheels’ by my strawman companion, I would characterize as ‘quality of life improvements.’ The work’s use of color to telegraph bespoke verbs and interesting nouns is particularly welcome. Room and object descriptions are so terse that they convey interesting details economically with no distracting prose chaff. Conversation trees were laughably shallow, having the effect of not distracting the player with misinterpretable color and ANY response being immediately flagged as useful. It’s not trying to give the illusion of alive NPCs, they are game pieces serving their purpose with clarity. Making the experience as friction free as possible is certainly a boon for new players, but honestly helps all of us!

The production strongly leverages its Adventuron platform: its thematic meandros borders crisply provide exit listings and major feature lists above its ‘work area,’ guiding proceedings without drama or heavy hand. The prose itself is crisp, yet delightfully empathic, developing a pleasantly generous, propulsive vibe that is just a delight to marinate in. The story itself is similarly warm, bending Greek mythology into a friendlier posture. The welcoming tone of the piece does as much as any gameplay innovations to signal ‘Parsers welcome everyone, not just crusty old fraternity members.’

If I may be so bold, there were a few burrs I detected that could be further buffed away: in the start room >GET SACK gave me both
you can’t take it
you pick up the sack of grains (which I clearly did not)

In another room, the sack description was SO terse I believed them a pile of empties and was surprised to (Spoiler - click to show)pull grain from them. One NPC knew about keys, but not the associated gates, making for a bit of conversation clumsiness and friction. I would also break up the verb inventory into categories - basics/system commands and spoilers. The opening screen characterized the verb inventory as spoilery, so I avoided it. In so doing, I missed its bespoke >TSCRIPT command (game rejecting the more standard >SCRIPT) and only at the end learned I could have provided one. Two categories of verbs, spoil and no-spoil might be a useful refinement.

Anyway, all that is further polish on an already terrific ambassador for parser games. The Adventuron platform itself should not be overlooked here, and was presumably chosen deliberately. With its overt old school aesthetic and vibe it conjures a time when IF was shiny-new and filled with promise. LnM’s warm story and welcoming play expands on that to open the hobby to those that might otherwise fear its legendary opacity and cruelty. By extension, LnM makes all of US look less inbred and niche. Thanks LnM!