Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 1hr, with hints and transcript

This is an established fact about humanity: that there are dog people and there are cat people. It is further an established fact that cat people deserve empathy for life events that led them to welcome into their hearts a being that at best greets their suffering with complete disinterest, and at worst passes the days mentally creating Final Destination fan films where their owner is every victim.

// What is this feeling suddenly possessing me, of being alone in a vast minefield surrounded by shadow-born trebuchet? Probably just the wind. //

Sacred Shovel of Athena is a notionally fantasy IF about befriending a cat, then fighting. Boy does it whitewash the first half of that.

Stepping away from the premise a bit, this was mechanically a rough ride for me. There was a lot of guess the noun/verb. There were some positional dependencies not well flagged, where the right action in the wrong location failed without explanation. There were descriptions that didn’t quite convey the mechanics of what was happening, and inconsistent levels of detail. There were successes without clear explanation what I did to make them succeed. All of this led to an overwhelming feeling of constantly fighting the game to make progress.

Other games have these challenges for sure. The tone, stakes and narrative act as motivation in those instances to push through. Here though? The narrative is really thin, it’s intended as a puzzle fest. The tone is occasionally wry, but not overly humorous. The stakes are low, which by itself can be admirable. Low stakes can still be compelling stakes, and even when they’re not, if the game play is short and light you may not notice. But an hour, mostly fighting this thing, is not the right balance for these stakes. Not when the stakes are befriending a creature that would kill me in my sleep if that would grant him my opposable thumbs.

// Eyes fierce with determination, I gaze upward at the distant lip of the pit. Ignoring the old man’s counsel, I redouble my efforts to dig free. //

The bug that ultimately crashed my experience was the Hint system. When I tried to use it in Gargoyle, I got 18 lines of help topics, notably short of what I needed. I got the same when I played the downloaded HTML, or the online link. It was only when I cribbed another reviewer's transcript that I even realized more were available (not sure what interpreter they were using). This left me in the unenviable position of trying to solve some obtuse guess-the-sequence puzzles via someone else’s similarly struggling transcript.

For me, this was way too much work for too little reward. I fully acknowledge that Cat People may find a better experience here. But don’t they already have ENOUGH cross to bear?

// And lo, a chill wind surges and the clouds darken. Too late, the peril is revealed. I dared trifle with Pet Forces Beyond My Ken, and my reckoning will be swift and violent. //

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Fantasy-Lite
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! Ok, if this were mine, the Hint bug clearly needs addressing one way or another. But my first stop I think would be to internalize as many transcripts as possible to a) add noun and verb synonyms that make sense and b) add cluing prompts and feedback in areas where complicated sequences are required. “The cat curls up snugly. You can’t imagine that angelic face being anything but pleased once it wakes up.

“AND MURDERS YOU.”

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 10min, happy ending

Well, this work was a nice change of pace from the pretty narrow “Pulp or Funny Only” algorithm that seems to have inhabited my Spring Thing randomizer up to now. This is a relationship drama piece and stands out in direct contrast to everything else so far. It is specifically a tale of two lovers working through some doldrums and tensions in their relationship. It travels a clear path to success, by committing to the details of the characters in question and selling us on the reality of those.

Early on I was worried. A conversational path had a bug that delivered non sequitor text that both jarred and cast a pall worrying whether more glitches were to come. I happily report they did not.

A smart choice the game makes is to alternately put you in one, then the other’s head, back and forth as the drama progresses. It takes the additional step of providing a unique graphical cue for each protagonist which was a nice touch. The author uses this conceit to nice effect - contrasting their respective concerns and highlighting their dissimilar emotional priorities. This contrast (and neither character’s acknowledgement of the difference!) was a very mature, very interesting, and very well observed artifact of relationships. If I had a quibble here, it is that I found Yaan (the older, more powerful member of the pair) much better rendered than his young lover Kel.

As we are introduced, Yaan seems congnizant of the power imbalance between the two but not OWNING it, if that makes sense. He is further struggling with work anxieties and pressures. Between the background descriptions and the potential actions he might take, I felt he was really effectively painted with few strokes. Now that picture is a little skeevy, but it rings complex and true and interesting.

Kel on the other hand, despite having lots of concerns, felt less clearly drawn to me. He wants to befriend cats. (A clear cry for help… no, this is not the place.) He’s aware of the power imbalance. He wants closer relations with his family. He likes an old theatre. In particular, the options provided for him felt less nuanced and more melodramatic, most especially around the theatre topic. Which honestly, is really not their relationship problem, yeah? That comment was too flippant. The text is clearly using the theatre as a catalyst to air their deeper grievances in an indirect way. But it didn’t always come off that way for Kel’s options.

The game allows multiple gameplay styles. You can try to “two hand solitaire” it, and role play both characters, or you can “I’m the director” it and orchestrate the drama. For me, the latter made more sense because 1) I didn’t want to be skeevy and 2) Kel was harder to get a bead on. So in gameplay, I tried to work against 1) and find ways to add complexity to 2). And I got a satisfying drama and a good ending doing it! Well done, author!

Now the Achievements page told my there were 4 more endings, and two more achievements I might find. I don’t think I want to go for those though. I really enjoyed the character study I went with, and don’t think alternate ones will satisfy my sensibilities insomuch as it requires choices that were not as compelling to me. I’m happy enough with the story I got that I don’t need to poke the sleeping bull.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Relationship Drama
Polish: Smooth, bar one.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d fix that dialog bug next (which I believe author did). That sounds easier than the jeweler’s tool precision of character refinement.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 1.5hr, 3 endings

Is it me, or did it get heavy in here?

My hands are kind of frozen immobile above my keyboard as I figure out what I just read, and what on earth I have to say about it. Ok, they WERE frozen immobile, but I coaxed them into action to type that they were immobile, and now momentum is just chasing the ouroboros down this typing about typing path. I’m struggling to get my brain out of the hypnotic tarpit of Protocol and my go@!$#^mn fingers are going on about what good typists they are. Yeah, that’s the kind of work this is.

It’s fiction, not a game. Not really. There’s only a handful of choices and a limited plot. The story is set in space, aboard a damaged space station. With a large swath of the crew gone, the protagonist is wakened, injured and amnesiac, to repair the damage. Now in standard IF, this is a framework on which to hang lots of clever find the gimcrack and weird use of item puzzles. Here, the narration takes care of all that for you. And it does it under a deluge of language. It’s like there is so much impressionistic description, you are watching the plot unfold tens of feet below you, under water. Or maybe even you are tens of feet under water looking up to the plot above the surface. It is distorted and wavering and sometimes easier to just focus on the water itself, with its hypnotic rhythm and surging beauty of its own.

I can be a bit fussy about language. I balk at long compound sentences, packed with an overrun of syllables and clauses, and metaphors on metaphors. (Lord knows I don’t do any of that.) If you’re going to throw barrage after barrage of syllables at me, you better know what you’re doing. Poetry is the wobbly apex between histrionic and pretentious and if you falter even a moment you’re going to tumble down one side or the other.

I think maybe Protocol defies the odds to proudly plant its flag at the summit.

There is a tension between poetry and science, and slamming the two together is inherently fascinating. (Yes, to me. I’m writing this, everything here is according to me!) The opening prologue are science lessons, or reminders of them. They are rendered in cold, scientific language. But SO coldly and SO scientific it takes on a patios of its own. Before you even get to the story, it has started enmeshing you in its rhythms. Then the first page talks about stars, and hoo boy are you through the rabbit hole. I was seduced by the confident complexity of the metaphors, tying scientific phenomenon to human biology. And the language consumed me. Even as the plot wound through injuries, dopplegangers, cramped then expansive physical passages, you were never far from the soaring descriptions and contemplations of the void. And most of it worked. Really, really, really well.

Its not 100% perfect, according to my sensibilities. I feel like it went once or twice too often to the ‘overwrought emotional reaction to pretty specific physical activity’ well. Also, while it struck me as very competent in underpinning its poetry with realistic mechanics of space work, there were a few glitches that stood out: tethering and hand trucks were both sacrificed to drama. Looking at my notes, I captured a few passages that lost me, and a few that grabbed me, but to repeat them here does the work a disservice. It is really the cumulative use of language whose effect was so impactful. Miraculously, after every stumble, the work managed to time and again claw its way back to the summit.

To proudly stand there when the tale ends. The endings (and I looked at 3 readily available to me) were fine I guess. I chafed a bit at what felt an artificially limiting triad of choices - three variations of one idea really. But this is definitely a work where the journey is more important than the destination. And man, did that thing take me on a trippy, mesmerizing journey.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Surreal Sci-fi
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! What would I do next, if I wrote it? Publish it, then engage whatever the literary equivalent of a decompression chamber is, to twist my brain back to mundane conversational English.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 1hr

Oooh, this was a fun one. Retro font, graphics and sensibilities married near perfectly to retro gameplay. The game makes really smart decisions, limiting the verbs available to a very small list. This effortlessly casts aside the vocabulary guessing part of parser play and focuses on the story and puzzles. It also has a perfect in-game rationale. You’re a crow, how many verbs do you need? (Feel free to use that as a cover blurb.) It is hard to overstate just how well all these elements play with each other. At no point are you thinking “well, this would never have actually been on screen back in the day.”

The text is a full partner in the time warp surrounding the game. Descriptions are tight, evocative, with just the right blend of concrete detail and suggestive back story. If there’s a noun, you better believe there’s a description. (paraphrasing, wish I’d grabbed it)

">X BIRDS
A flock of birds flying past. You don't recognize them."

Lol, that is just old school personality right there. Not a word wasted!

The art is also spot on. Every location has an 8-bit rendering whose distinctive image matches text description, and carries the mood effortlessly. Your encounters on way to gathering the spell elements you need are varied and melancholy. It’s not high adventure, it’s encountering people and places with full histories you just happen to intersect with briefly, so they can give you stuff. Just like life!

There’s a few things I might wish for: maybe one or two more verbs to add nuance to simple puzzles; an alternative to crow backpacks; a subversion of (Spoiler - click to show)an enemy’s all-too-expected endgame return; some minor typo and bug fixes. But none of those are hugely impactful. This work has excellent moving parts that combine to make something even greater - a precisely paced, pitch perfect portal to the past.

Pastiche/homage is hard to do well, near impossible to do this well, and often unappreciated as an endeavor. I’m here for it. I SEE YOU, CROW!

Spice Girl: No Spice Girl! Will go with “Jem and the Holograms” here, as 80’s predecessor. I’m reaching, there’s no true connection there.
Vibe: Old School
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would probably spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to eliminate the backpack, only to conclude that every solution made gameplay more frictiony and less fun. Like a LOT of time coming to that conclusion. So many attempts, each worse than the last. Then just go back to the backpack. As an afterthought, I would fix some bugs and typos, to somehow legitimize all that wasted time.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 45min, 4 cycles, 2 unique endings

Author’s Comment: “For those with jewel-eyed ancestors.” LOLWUT? You got my attention game!

Mood is a tricky beast. Every word on the page builds on every previous word to weave an atmosphere, a vibe of the piece that can work on you, independent of the narrative it is conveying. (I kinda wish I had opened this door in my review of Protocol but we can tackle it here. I wasn’t thinking this clearly after that one.) Hemingway’s big literary revelation was that Less is More - that you can convey ideas, events, emotions and mood as or more effectively with minimal typing.

But you know what else is More? More is More. Just ask Melville! You can also use carefully curated metaphors, nuanced adjectives and cross-sentence resonances to build mood out of scale to the words you put down. It is very delicate business, though. Done inexpertly, it can become jarring or worse self-parody.

Gothic Horror leans more heavily on the More is More tradition, and Etoliated Light leans into Gothic Horror. I don’t want to say I’ve cracked the code, but EL gave me a hypothesis I’m going to test in front of you all. Elaborate verse is most effective when it presents an interesting new idea (or a new expression of an old idea), and also reinforces the developing mood and/or narrative of the piece. I found EL pretty competent at this, but not without faults. Here are two early examples I think work really well:

"One smiles and the others’ face slackens, as if the expression is something they’re passing back and forth between them."

"You’re pleased by this because you’re a child. It feels wonderful to be bigger and stronger than others."

Both have mood, novel observations, and reinforce other spoilery parts of the narrative. Here’s one I don’t think is as successful:

"You grab onto your mother’s skirts and bury your face in that comfort yet again."

While arguably nicely observed and expressed, it actually came out of nowhere that the comfort was wanted or habitual, and did not resonate with any other text around it. It felt like a showy/writery statement mostly thanks to its isolation. Overall, I credit EL with a pretty high nice/clunk ratio. Certainly it was high enough to competently build the Gothic mood that powers this story. I’m going to call the language here a win, with an asterisk.

The presentation is pretty bare bones - black screen, white text, blue selection links. You are launched into the story without cover page, cover art, acknowledgements or preamble. The intent seems to be to put you into the young protagonist’s not-quite-sure-what’s-going-on mindset but it had the side effect of making it feel more amateurish. A more robust presentation could have offset that. You get some nice atmosphere, set some genders and names, then find out (Spoiler - click to show)you’re being married off. I’M SORRY WHAT?? It’s a nicely executed shock.

Fast forward and you are living on a remote island with a sickening, that is to say ill, spouse and an elusive caretaker. The requisite family revelations, historical horrors and physical dangers unroll on cue which sounds condescending phrased that way. I found it to be quite effective actually, mostly on the strengths of the mood the text continued to weave. The details of the threat were unique and creepy enough to be effective. It also had quite a bit to say, metaphorically speaking, and for me at least the combination of mood and monster just clicked. The protagonist selection options for conversations and actions were similarly nicely curated. They were clearly steering you into the plot, but they allowed a good latitude of control over the mindset of the protagonist, which really swept you into the proceedings.

I will say, the ending was a mild letdown. (Spoiler - click to show) For one, the resolution suddenly demanded a sacrifice including a child option that somehow was not mentioned earlier at all. Also concerningly, there was no non-sacrifice option. I would say the endings I found were THEMATICALLY on point, but NARRATIVELY ill-justified. It’s possible other story branches covered that ground. But my narrative choices seemed to enable a branch that was unceremoniously cut from beneath me. I’m on record as appreciating (Spoiler - click to show)no-win horror. But I do need the work to do the work to convince me and not just TELL me.

It’s probably a clue how much text you’ve seen on this entry that it did stick with me. Yes, I had quibbles. I always do. Always. ALWAYS. ahem. But the combination of prose mood setting, really effective Gothic Horror, nice interactive character building (until the end), monster-as-metaphor, and even the maybe not earned but appropriate endings… that combo really came together. I’m only 2/3 the way through the Thing, but for me this one is in the ribbon conversation.

Also, it improbably but convincingly justified that “Jewel-eyed” teaser.

Spice Girl: Scary/Posh Spice
Vibe: Gothic Horror.
Polish: Textured.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would do another pass of editing, with an eye to trimming easy lines that are flourishy but don’t serve the narrative or mood. Also ones that are a little too on the nose.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 4.5hrs of contradictions, finished

NCBFFTT seemed like it had an attitude about it from the start. It simultaneously flies in the face of convention, and embraces what consensus seems to categorize as the worst aspects of early IF. Instant, not always clear why death. Magic nouns and verbs with incomplete synonyms. Extended puzzle sequences that can play as hurdles for the sake of hurdles. Incomplete descriptions that require just the right sub-component EXAMINE to shed important details. Repetition of lengthy, specific, random interaction scenes. A CONVENTION-DEFYING NAV SYSTEM THE AUTHOR THEMSELF STUMBLES ON.

It is reasonably fair play, in that most of these things are told to the player right up front. There isn’t any confusion of mismatched expectations. Just confusion of WHY. Any one of these things could just sink an IF work outright, vanishing without a trace in the pool of “too much work.” Most of these have established best practices to manage or mitigate. Punters, sez NCBFFTT. So how on earth did I manage to last 4.5 hrs?

NCBFFTT has a big thing going for it. Its setting is loosely based on an ancient sci-fi satire rpg, Paranoia. For the uninitiated, this was a deeply cynical, deeply funny sci-fi dystopia where the main feature was repeated, arbitrary death at the hands of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Where incompetence was if not a virtue, certainly a pervasive force to be reckoned with. Where the resistance was basically as disfunctional, just with less resources. So much good satire and slapstick to milk from that premise.

And NCBFFTT is pretty good at it! For a while. The protagonist’s back story, death scenes, the wry newspeak descriptions of locations and items, the random newscasts and interactions with NPCs, these are consistently funny and biting and kind of sad. It buoys things along for quite a while. It is fighting the good fight, but man the moving parts of the game do not make it easy. Opaque descriptions, usually unclear paths forward, inconsistent levels of detail, all challenge the player. In an environment where the learning curve is punctuated by constant death/restore/undo. In the first 3 hours, I found myself on the verge of rage quitting practically every 5 minutes, but something about the alchemy of the setting, the wry text, *just* enough unhinted progress kept me afloat. Even though there was no escaping the Hint System.

So yeah, the hint system was used early and often. It is complete, I’ll say that. There is a special kind of anger though when consulting a hint “How do I open door?” (Spoiler - click to show) “Turn the Wheel” When the room description mentions the door but no hint of (Spoiler - click to show)wheel. >X DOOR Oh yeah, did I not mention there’s a wheel on it? That’s my own paraphrase, btw. Doesn’t it seem like its trolling you on some level?

To make matters worse, here’s my analogy for the hint system. Take a complete set of progressive hints and navigation menus. Then shuffle them. Shuffle them, like you’re a Vegas blackjack table on the Card Counters World Tour. Shuffle them like the penalty for two spades in a row was death. Then tell the player to find the Queen! Every trip to the hint system felt like a minigame of its own, trying to guess where the relevant clue was. It was actually perversely engaging (because I am damaged), in that it felt less like cheating, more like you EARNED that daggum hint.

For the first 3 1/2 hrs, it felt like the game was crossing the room with a towering, inverse pyramid of jello desserts. Every step pitched dramatically one direction, its thundering crash a seeming certainty. Yet somehow a quick sidestep changed the angular momentum enough to forestall disaster, only to wobble precipitously in a different direction. FOR 3 1/2 HOURS! I mean that exhausting endeavor alone kind of has its own majesty.

At the 3 1/2 hour mark though, there is a narrative choice that ultimately torpedoed me. (Spoiler - click to show)To solve a puzzle, the protagonist commits mass murder. Including of innocents and children. And seems fundamentally unaffected by it. On the strength of the hint system, I assume this is an unavoidable outcome. I might complain that the text (and a death-fail) kind of led me to believe that would not be the outcome, but really, the clues were there, I just ignored them. (Spoiler - click to show)I mean it was called 'Cleansing Fire of God" or somesuch.

Now even that didn’t HAVE to be a destructive narrative choice, but in the version I played, somehow the wry comedic tone that had kept things from crashing until this point chose that moment to take a bathroom break. (It probably says a lot about me that I’m half convinced even a choice that dire could be salvaged with the right tone. I accept your judgement.) The text shifted to a near cold, journalistic description, and THEN tried to overlay a jarringly light comedy puzzle.

To be fair, I understand the current revision to have modified tone somewhat here, which will DRAMATICALLY improve the experience, at least for me.

There is some subsequent fun business in the final boss, but in my play the jello was already on the floor so to speak. Which is ABSOLUTELY going to be a catch phrase in my reviews going forward.

So in retrospect, I still grapple with this one. Far and away the biggest time investment of the Thing so far. So much of it in fighting the parser, the physical descriptions, and omigod dying. A lot of it skimming big blocks of repeated text. A lot more of it fighting the Hint system. But the breadth of the puzzles was cool, the amount satisfyingly large. Often, the hints left me with, “hey pretty cool, wish the text had given me more to go on.” The fact that the amusing text and puzzle mix kept the jello aloft that long, against those challenges, is noteworthy. Fixing the tone of that one plot turn probably gets the jello to the table.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Dystopian Satire
Polish: Distressed
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I mean if it’s mine, it’s gotta be rewriting that climactic scene/puzzle, no? At least for tone if not rethinking it completely. You could assemble a year’s long to do list of text/puzzle/hint cleanup, but without addressing that I think you’re still back to “Oh, no. No no no.” Author agreed?

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Rating omitted from total, as from previous version

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, bad ending

RDYD has a really nifty setup - school age girls playing what seems to be a party-hypnotism game. The writing is just perfectly on point. There is significant risk of potential confusion between competing reality layers (one mostly dialogue, another mixing dialogue and surreal scenery). But between font cues, authorial voice and crisp writing it is all conveyed seamlessly and compellingly. It was understated in the best way, accomplishing a lot with minimal verbosity, just precise and pitch perfect tone.

The surreal mindscape you navigate is pretty bare, deliberately so, but punctuated with one-off colorful details that reinforce the unreality of it all. At one point the game uses the word “uncanny” and I’m like, “Well yeah, that really sums it up, doesn’t it?”

I think what really won me over though was the upper layer dialogue between the un-hypnotised girls. You have a lot of interesting dialogue choices and all of them are crisply rendered with the character of the speaker. Really well executed, natural dialogue set the perfect backdrop to this tale, and really sold the plot when things got weird.

It’s a parser game, and the bareness of its environs nicely contain the description space to minimize the noun/verb implementation gaps. Even so, weirdly, the longer I played, the more I seemed to trip over stuff. Maybe its not so weird. Exploring/looking/collecting is more straight forward than anticipating every crazy player object manipulation, and the former dominates early game play.

An hour in, I felt like I had exhausted the map. Thanks to some clues, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do, and what I DIDN’T want to do. Suddenly, the game got combative with me. I could not figure out how to do what seemed easy enough: (Spoiler - click to show)pick up some rotten meat with a plastic bag. I spent a crapton of time trying and getting nothing but “nope,” and not even gently steering or cajoling “nope” just cold, stock “nope.” It felt like a noticeable departure to what had until this point been a pretty convivial, immersive conversation between me and the game. That’s where I went looking for HINTS to help me.

Yeah, there’s no HINTS. Or walkthrough. I wasn’t prepared for how much it vexed me, and I think I know why. I think of HINTS as weakness. Sometimes, on the part of the game where puzzles are unfair or inadequately clued. Sometimes my own because missing the obvious is my brand. HINTS are usually how I tell the difference. “Well, this is on you game, you expected me to guess MASTICATE when you didn’t even implement CHEW.” “Ooh, yeah that’s a clever puzzle. If I’d just remembered the speed limit sign and turned both dials to 5…” Due to reasons maybe only a therapist could explain, the NOT knowing is the worst. “Whaddya mean it could have been my fault BUT I’LL NEVER KNOW FOR SURE??” It was made worse, I think, because the tone of the thing, and the smooth progress I had to this point had kind of convinced me the game and I were on the same frequency. Like a skeevy parasocial relationship, I presumed the game thought more of me than it did. It stung a little!

So that whole spiral put me on tilt. What I SHOULD have done is internalized “ok, clearly this is not the path I thought it was, what am I missing or how do I approach this differently?” Where instead, I went with “WHY CAN’T I DO THIS?? FINE, I’M JUST GONNA DO THE THING I DON’T WANT TO DO INSTEAD.”

So I did it, and it was bad. Outcome wise I mean. Narratively, I was still in capable hands despite the maybe under-justified leap the plot took.

I can already feel the wheels turning in my psyche though. Like the memories of an immature first infatuation, I am losing the crappy way I ended it and dwelling instead on the early attraction and heady honeymoon period. Not sure how long it will take, but will undoubtedly take another run at this, when I’m mature enough to handle it. What? That day could come.

Spice Girl: Scary Spice
Vibe: Psychological Horror
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would let the reviewer know it wasn’t him at all, it was me. And as a peace offering to show what we have is REAL, I’d implement a hint system so robust, he’d come running back and we’d have a glorious future together of running hand in hand across sunny fields, feeding each other expensive food at sunset and relaxing in inexplicably matching outdoor bathtubs. Yup, that’s what I’d do.

If it were my project.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 30min, 6/10 tracked endings plus 1 untracked

I’ve been down this path before. When you play a lot of games in a short burst, inevitably similarities emerge. We’re humans, we’re wired for pattern recognition. EATQOTSK is a short option-select joint, oozing with comedic tone, whose main point is to collect all the endings. It’s not the only such experience this Thing, but has its own strengths and weaknesses in this emerging subgenre.

You are the titular Elf, called to solve a fantasy mystery, how to end a curse that forces everyone in the kingdom to yell at the top of their lungs. Excepting the protagonist and their manservant. This is only the thinnest of premise, used to connect a variety of unconnected subquests, each with a wry twist on expectations, tropes, or just an excuse for old fashioned slapstick. The tone is self-aware, with characters commenting on everything from screen layout, to fantasy and rpg tropes to the game itself.

The paths are of varying lengths, but none are long. The formatting is creative, and lent itself to quick digestion. I got a lot of dry chuckles at it and it was done! It could easily fit in what I have come to think of as the Adventure Snack product line - short, funny, does not overstay its premise. Is this the Showbiz Pizza to Adventure Snack’s Chuck E Cheese?

There did seem to be some technical issues. One of the setup’s conceits was a header and footer with inessential RPG-like stats. Those seemed to reappear and disappear during subsequent loops without obvious pattern. It was particularly unfortunate when the text was riffing on rpg tropes that were not on screen. There was also a tracker, showing you the endings you found, though it appears not all endings are tracked? I found one with no accounting.

Like a downhill mountain biker, none of that stopped things - it was moving fast enough to roll over those bumps, where a slower pace would have caused the bike to spill. Momentum compensates a lot! I feel like maybe I’ve said it three different ways by now, but it’s short, it’s funny, it’s pace makes it’s shortcomings non-impactful. Like potato chips, it’s a lot of satisfying if not good for you crunch, and once the bag’s empty, you can get on with your day.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d have to get the disappearing header/footer addressed. I might even tweak some meaningless values during game progress to underline the arbitrariness. Y’know, while I was in there.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, die twice, then win

At this point, I think we sometimes agree to pretend that parser IF will be enjoyed equally by novices and old hands alike. That as a form its evolved norms have made parser IF more friendly and less obtuse. There is some truth to this, of course. Certainly modern games are less cruel than their ancestors. Everyone who has a second is going to have a first IF experience and it COULD be any modern game in the archive. Even so, there are many informal norms that are deduced over time, like:
* If it’s listed, it will likely be important sooner or later.
* Walls and ground are rarely, but sometimes, interesting.
* Any location not connecting other locations has a purpose as a source of clues, objects or puzzles.

Despite having recently returned to the hobby (and enjoyed discovering the intervening years’ progress), my game play can never not be informed by the informal norms of the form. (“…informed by the informal norms of the form.” I wasn’t even trying and look what my brain came up with!)

It doesn’t feel calculated, so I’m going to say Marie Waits effortlessly leverages these informal norms to make a rarefied parser experience. The game opens with you, a plucky English detective, captured by villains and needing to escape before time runs out and their plan comes to fruition. There are objects to find, locked places to escape, and backstory and clues to discover. The text is constrained, with terse descriptions of environs and objects. The places are tight - each location with just a few things to interact with, maybe lugging around to be used later, maybe needed now. This has the nice side effect of constraining the noun/verb space within the bounds of normy actions. The ‘can’t do that’ messages seem fair and few. The spark of this game is the time limit. You are given three hours to secure your escape, and minutes tick by maddeningly fast.

Between the text, the location design, tight vocabulary space and the time limit, after two missteps I felt like this game put me in some Platonic Ideal IF Player zone. Leisurely trying random things to see how deep the implementation was was not going to be rewarded. There was a premium on leveraging meta norms to search, poke, prod at high payoff areas and shed distractions. And they were almost always rewarded! (Spoiler - click to show)There’s a bush here. Imma needa dig that soon as I can." “Can’t find exit, check the walls.” “Got a match, gonna need to light it when it gets dark.” It sounds like I’m running this game down, but I don’t mean it that way at all. It really felt like I was in the IF Zone, clicking along with the puzzles because of the tight adherence to metagame in a way that felt harder for newbies than me, but made me feel like a king.

Everyone who has a second whiskey has had a first. And it suuuuucks. The mouth experience runs contrary to millennia of species-preserving evolution. It’s kind of a miracle anyone ever has a second. But maybe you take it with coke for a few years in college, then someone introduces you to a perfect Old Fashioned, and before you know it, you’re having two fingers at night just to stay sane. I mean, you have grown to appreciate the nuances of the flavors. You even start differentiating whiskeys from each other as better or worse, but really as what is the best whiskeyness for your palate.

That’s what this felt like to me. Not a super sweet combination of spirits drowning in fruit juice. An unadorned experience that showcases the learned pleasures of a very specific flavor for someone who has trained themself to appreciate it. A perfect two fingers of cask strength IF to be savored and enjoyed, but quickly before those thugs come back.

A quick note on the narrative. The game makes an interesting choice to foreground the ‘escape from bad guys’ stakes (that is where the urgency lies after all), but background the underlying mystery that got you caught in the first place. As you navigate the spaces, bolting for freedom, you periodically find clues that trigger flashbacks. These flashbacks provide discrete snapshots of mystery pieces, puzzle pieces if you will. Some that snap into others to expand your knowledge, others that are in empty spaces of the puzzle tantalizingly hinting at a larger picture. The incompleteness of the mystery both underlines how inessential it is to the urgency of the escape, yet implies a compelling larger struggle outside the bounds of this 3 hours (game time. less than half that clock time.) It is just the right spice, the bitters to the cocktail if you will, that make this a crisp, satisfying experience.

So, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing this game to a perfect cocktail for the spirits enthusiast. The dirty secret is, when I really enjoy a perfect cocktail, I usually want another one behind it! Marie? You gonna keep me waiting?

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: In Media Mystery
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I see that this is an entry in a series of games, which is absolutely what I was about to recommend. If it were mine, I might entertain a deconstructed mystery approach: a series of short IF showcasing discrete sequences of an overarching mystery. Perhaps out of order. Standalone IF type puzzle games, (or even disparate IF forms: a Twine detective relationship game! A Texture code breaking excercise! An I dunno Ren’Py point and click!) whose full mystery only makes sense when fully assembled. If this was already the path… points for guessing it?

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/17/23
Playtime: 4.25hrs score 23/33

I, ah, wow.

Boy do I owe my randomizer an apology. Deferring this particular work to the end absolves whatever sins I attributed to it. The Thing would have been an altogether different experience if chance had front loaded RTE. This is an incredibly layered work, taking on a broad collection of themes and commentary with some central conceits that I found… deeply dispiriting in that it kind of shamed any similar artistic ambitions of my own.

But because I am a heroic reviewer of Epic Scale I must cast all that aside to describe what a wonder Repeat the Ending is. The game purports to be a “25th Anniversary, Critical Directors Cut Rerelease” of a technically crippled but thematically unique 1996 IFComp game. The remainder of this review takes that claim at face value.

There are at least 5 layers to this work: 1) the original troubled magical realist/mental health focused game (itself with several layers!); 2) the historical context of psychological narrative IF and its reception 3) the updated version of the game, most especially the significance of the modern changes; 4) tropes of IF, including “post-puzzle” tropes; and 5) the critical analysis of all that.

It is a collected work, a collage, the playable portion of which is the minority. There is companion text in separate pdf-eelies and integrated into the hint/GUIDE system. There are context-building historical blog posts, critical essays and reviews. Exhaustive explications of the limitations of the original game that act as stealth training. Deep annotations by a trio of critics that act as hints as well as context builders. I was over a half hour in before typing my first command. I was still reading for 45 minutes after typing my last command. It is deeply effective in portraying a body of discourse surrounding the work, compelling in its breadth and vision. Each component of the patchwork has a distinctive voice, especially the trio of critics that are our guides (with varying levels of esteem for the project), and the author themself whose wry commentary peppers everything with suspect honesty.

All of it tonally perfect, from the erudite critiques, the playful and perhaps disingenuous hints, to the raw sometimes immature game play at the heart of the work. As I do, I grabbed a few lines that tickled me early on, before the scope of the work overwhelmed me and I just clung to the dashboard for the rest of the ride.

"In a recent survey of parser IF fans, four out of five respondents were found to care far less about mimesis than they initially believed."

"author's hegemony" (which you are conseled to fight)

"Cook's use of 'score' is almost certainly ironic. Audiences who consider themselves too sophisticated for such outdated narrative features might better enjoy themselves by referring to it as a 'failure index,' 'success deficit,' 'flop quotient,' or, more portentously, a 'present assessment of counter-narrative guerrilla action.' "

It would be easy to just grab funny/well-written/cutting quotes, but man, out of context they are insufficient, and even somewhat deceptive, in conveying the scope of the work.

There is so much to latch onto here. The historical context stuff was a clever, yet melancholy series of observations about artistic endeavor. The way the author subverted his own game, by layering a counter-narrative motivation that started funny but got increasingly unpleasant. The critical commentary that was in some ways a gentle parody of facile criticism, of the insufficiency of both fawning and ‘takedown’ critiques. Girded with legitimate caveats and observations that acknowledge the simultaneous importance and unachievability of full perspective.

(Sidebar: I topped out my “flop quotient” at 23/33 by choice. While my completist nature initially pushed to get all the ‘soft’ endings reflected in the score, the tongue in cheek humor sublimated to something altogether uncomfortable as time went on and made completism less attractive. This seems a deliberate, and effective, artistic choice.)

Awash in all that, to me the most compelling thread was the contrast between the original work and the 25-year-later revision. The early work rings like the work of a young artist - in love with their narrative conceits, possessed by a powerful emotion demanding documentation, convinced of the importance of their artistic vision to the exclusion of mundane craftsmanship. And fraught with an epic helplessness, a not uncommon youthful preoccupation. The modern revisions (some small, some dramatic) showcase a more mature artist, actively rebutting his younger self with nuance, generosity and insight. "Yes, and"ing his earlier work, both acknowledging its power, and offering additional perspective. And, not for nothing, smoother game play. The picture is a compelling one, most especially in the progressive ‘new’ endings created for the later revision, suggesting a final gift of freedom from the raw suffering inherent in the original work. (Spoiler - click to show)It’s not just the devastatingly gentle rebuke of those alternate endings, but the fact that the way to achieve them is to actively resist the defeatist track of the main story. UNTIL THAT RESISTANCE ITSELF BECOMES DEFEATIST! How perfect is that?? Yeah, I don’t know why that observation deserves a spoiler and not the whole rest of it, but that’s just where my head’s at twisting over this thing.

The work is simultaneously super controlled and shaggy as life. As a reader/player, you can bounce around this vast creative space engaging any or all of these themes as your mood strikes. It is a rich environment, with many ecosystems, each with their own marvels - some standalone and no less compelling for it, others that shed new light on previously superficially understood areas.

It is a compelling achievement. Deeply immersive. Demanding a lot from the reader, but pretty consistently rewarding for it. I hate how much I love it.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Psychological Meta
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If this were my project I would burn it to the ground, and deny its existence forward. I’d probably take legal action to silence the beta testers and even the cast of Spring Thing 23. Just expunge this thing from the record and people’s memories. I wouldn’t want this impossible miracle to POISON THE GROUND FOR THOSE THAT MIGHT COME LATER.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.