Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Hey, can you see me? Can you hear me? There’s this giant elephant just sitting here, happily trumpeting away. I wanna review a really interesting IFCOMP23 entry, can you hear me ok? This thing not in the way? It is? How about if I stand over her… no? Here? No. Maybe if I TALK LOUDER… Can we try to work around “TRRUUUUMMPETT.”

Ok fine. Let’s talk about the elephant first.

This work boldly engages one of IF’s most troubled conventions, the dreaded
Timed
…
…
Te…
…
…xt

I get why this is often problematic - it presumes to render a dramatic intonation and pacing that plays off an actor’s (or narrator’s) line delivery and stage business. The problem is SO MUCH of a performance goes into those things, and in text, the reader supplies most of it. The odds that a reader will have the EXACT same mental performance as the author is extremely small and requires a writing talent that few, so very, very few, are capable of generating, let alone sustaining. And when it misses, hoo boy, it can be borderline offensive in its abuse of the reader’s time.

This is a work about a day in the life of a person struggling with her stutter. It shows its cards almost immediately with a dream sequence featuring timed text. My heart sunk a little as I struggled with the wading-through-jello pacing only to be delighted when the dream was revealed! Yeah, that felt like a slo-mo struggling dream! Then to be deflated again when I realized, no, waking world behaved that way too… kind of.

When applied to the protagonist and their difficult attempts at communication I thought the delayed text worked like gangbusters, especially when infrequently paired with quavering font for extra spice. Just a super strong thematic use of the technology - I was right there with the protag, feeling their frustrated discomfort! Where the timed text did not work was when applied to anything outside the protagonist, ESPECIALLY NPC dialogue or actions. If I had one suggestion it would be this: trust the reader to block ‘normal’ (boy do I regret that word) dialogue and events in their mind without the delay crutch. Including the protag’s mental process, there is no reason for that to be slow either. Eliminate all instances of timed text EXCEPT where reflecting the protagonist’s communication struggles. Not only is it perfect there, it would even further contrast her struggle with the world around her. And maybe keep it for that opening dream sequence too. Also the typing effect during flashbacks was pretty good. Really, just be more judicious and intentful about it.

There, have we dispensed with the elephant? Get outta here Jumbo. Wait, before it lumbers off I want to clarify, notwithstanding some NPC drag, on balance I found the delayed text upside far outweighed the downside. Clear? Ok, off you go big guy. No wait! I also want to say… no, now I’m just trolling you. Silly elephant. Buh-bye.

So how about the rest of it? Low key excellent. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t trade in High Drama. It builds its drama through mundane tasks and activities, complicated by the protag’s stutter. Crucially, it is not an endless slog of failure and misery. It is a series of minor victories and defeats that just build into an affecting portrait of CONSTANT low burn struggle. The use of colored text to indicate options that were going to be more difficult was really powerful. As the day went on, I got a small charge of angst whenever red text showed up. The prose did that! The work smoothly and effectively laid the groundwork!

I also appreciated the use of text-entry boxes, which can be a point of friction for me. When asked to name the protag, which was before I really had the measure of the piece, I did my usual “roll fist on keyboard” and delivered “Mkhcgd.” Jeebus I really did her no favors there. Later I applied my new favorite expletive “Hoobidy” and documented my love of Pie and well known antipathy for Broccoli. It’s not on the game that the protagonist is meant to struggle with the former, but sail through the latter… which is kind of hilariously counter-narrative. None of these I considered game breaking, rather, the sad humor shone through maybe more clearly because of my inadvertently adversarial choices. And I got to be periodically delighted with outbursts of ‘Hoobidy’.

Sad Humor is really a great phrase for this piece. Gimme a sec to just pat my back. When ordering a card game gift, I cry-laughed at the title “Tricky Troubling Trivia.” Noooo world, why you do that to us??

I didn’t even realize how warmly this game had crept up on me, until I recognized the sheer dread this particular choice prompt evoked:

- (Focus on giving the best possible answer.)
- (Focus on being fluent.)

There was real white-knuckle tension during the (Spoiler - click to show)job interview and I had somehow gone from ‘quietly critiquing the artistic choices’ to ‘deeply Engaged’ without even realizing it. The outcome was just crushingly perfect too. I can’t get away from calling the timed text overapplied and Notable to gameplay, but despite that the writing, plotting, choice architecture and winning protagonist moxie got me Engaged without even realizing it. I considered replaying when done, but timed text is REALLY a barrier to that, and a quick peek at achievements suggested other variations wouldn’t speak to me as strongly and directly as my first playthrough. So I left it lie.

Though reading that one achievement was titled “I’ll have what she’s having” was a hair’s breadth away from pulling me in anyway.

Feels like the elephant should make a final appearance to tie this review together, doesn’t it? Jumbo? No? Man when he leaves the room, he LEAVES THE ROOM.

Played: 10/31/23
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable intrusion
Would Play After Comp?: No, I feel like the story I got was the most appealing to my sensibilities?


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Title is relevant, I promise.

Summitting Everest, as a concept, has had a weird journey during my lifetime. It used to be shorthand for “The pinnacle of human achievement, technically doable but laughably out of reach for all but a handful of the best of us.” Now it is, “Yet another achievement available to the sufficiently privileged at unjustifiable and ignored social and ecological cost.” It is a flaw of us, as a species, that it still captures our imagination and cannot completely shake that first symbology. Honestly though, isn’t Everest itself at least partially to blame? C’mon, tallest mountain in the world (yeah, lets not get into technical height minutia, this is a rhetorical device)… Tallest Mountain in the world? It was always going to be more symbol than place. You brought this on yourself, Everest.

So Everest as an achievement. The first phase is getting to base camp, which is a nontrivial physical challenge of its own. Climbers, at least responsible ones, often turn back once hitting it. If there weren’t this haunting peak looming behind it, it could conceivably be a celebrated physical challenge of its own. Except, of course, no one would bother EXCEPT for the peak behind it.

MBTP accomplished the enviable feat of getting me to base camp, but could not get me to the summit behind it. It is an interactive novel, decidedly not a game. The entire purpose of the interactivity is to pace the text for dramatic effect. This is a full on legit use of interactivity, and it often works here. I think I have more patience for timed text than most and by and large its employment here was ok, though there were infrequent moments of ‘I’m waiting, story…’ The presentation is very attractive - blurry graphical backgrounds suggesting the protagonist’s lack of engagement with her surroundings were a really nice touch. The portrait art was very appropriate for the story, grounding its specifics around the characters in an unsettling style. The graphically interesting background that set up the post-death conceit nicely conveyed its “sidebar” deployment.

The text presentation was good, adding and replacing text to nice dramatic effect with one exception that really undid a lot of its good work. Probably due to some default browser settings, sometimes the protagonist’s thoughts or observations were rendered in a dark grey against a black background that was ALMOST impossible to detect, and definitely impossible to read. The only way to consume it was to highlight the text with a cursor, which on my browser meant a color palette deeply at war with the words and mood it was trying to build. If a deliberate artistic choice, I can squint and see why it might be made: to force the reader to probe a bit deeper to get into the protag’s head. But between the clumsy mechanics and mood-disrupting colors it was so not worth it. Maybe a cleaner way to get this effect would be a less fussy mouseover that the author could better control color choice? If it was not deliberate, just really, really unfortunate.

Even so, I would say the presentation was an overall positive, just deeply undermined by the dark font choice that made it rougher than it should have been.

The narrative is about a sister, conversing with her (Spoiler - click to show)abusive brother who through interestingly enough reasons has about a week of post-death pseudo-consciousness. The protagonist relives her (Spoiler - click to show)childhood trauma, inflicted by the brother. The early stages of this story really worked for me. Her deeply conflicted feelings, estrangement, guilt, yearning and poisoning relationship with her mother. It pretty sure-handedly got me to base camp, despite the presentation challenges. In particular the protag’s assertions of love felt deliciously like trying to convince herself of something expected but not felt. Base Camp achieved!

There is a summit to this work, and here I think I got lost on the way. My narrative guide suddenly started leaping ahead miles at a time, like some Kryptonian mountain goat, leaps I couldn’t follow and could barely track with my eyes. I’ll focus on two, and they are super spoilery. After the careful step-by-step buildup we are delivered to a wonderfully conflicted emotional place. Looming large over it all was the question of the mother. (Spoiler - click to show)How did she let it get to this place? What is HER culpability? This was kind of ignored by the text, and in fact seemingly exonerated her without examination. How do I make that jump Supergoat? You have to show me that!

The climax of the piece has a different problem. While I can conceivably head cannon the protagonist’s mental state from base camp to summit, so many precise steps are needed to get me there and none of them were documented. “Here we are at base camp, let me tie my shoe, where did you go Supergoat?, holy crap how did you get THERE?” It doesn’t help, I think, that the central mechanism of the post-death conversation is a pretty shaky construct. If it is a hand-waive, that’s kind of ok when it’s just an excuse to enable the conversation. But when it suddenly needs to carry plot load it is way too fragile, evokes way too many mechanical questions it can’t answer, and collapses under the stress. Thank goodness it was not a ladder bridge over a chasm that the guide marched me onto!

Ok I have officially tortured this metaphor into war crime territory. To sum: really capable emotional setup. Super effective graphical presentation, except disproportionately undermined by one sour choice. Took jumps to climax I couldn’t follow. Sparks of Joy for sure, Notable graphic intrusion.

Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notably hard to read
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Well this work presents an interesting review question, doesn’t it? Do I evaluate the story in isolation, or in conjunction with the novel, emerging IF platform it is showcasing? It’s not like I open every Twine review extolling the virtues of Point-And-Click, that would be weird. Counterpoint, I belabor Texture’s strengths and weaknesses with literally every review. For a lot of IF, how well it integrates its user paradigm can be a key element in its overall impact, for good and bad. Here, NOT acknowledging its novel approach seems incomplete, given the platform’s developer is ALSO the author. I guess it was a more straightforward question than I thought.

In its most superficial read, I can’t help but call it the opposite of a Twinesformer. This is not a parser masquerading as a point-and-click, this is a choice-select masquerading as a parser! Yes, you are typing command line instructions, but only those the story gives you, beat-by-beat. It’s a DeceptaTwine! Ok, contextually it’s much more than that, I just couldn’t resist the gag.

Plotopolis, the new authoring platform, repurposes IM applications to deliver IF. What a great Mission statement! It is kind of ingenious, I mean the command prompt has just been sitting there THIS WHOLE TIME. It also immediately casts the experience as a dialogue with a storyteller, which is a really cool way to leverage IM. Given the cold reception timed text receives, I will be curious to see others’ takes on this. For me, the out-of-the-box tuning was pretty good - more often than not new text became available just as I finished reading the previous. Certainly the user commands to slow and speed things should provide knobs for everyone.

I have to note this story chooses not take advantage of the dialogue paradigm, which pretty quickly reverts back to a limited-choice DeceptaTwine experience. This is not a problem per se, and probably a good way to communicate to future authors that it doesn’t HAVE to be dialogue. It does strike me as an incomplete showcase because of it though.

The story on offer is really offbeat and weird in the best way. You wake up in the belly of the whale. A series of impossible-to-predict things happen from there. As a fundamentally choice-select tale I found this to be about ideal in leveraging the form. Choice-select can falter in a lot of ways: incomplete choice availability given the logic of the world; choices the player can interpret differently than the subsequent text jarringly delivers; choice incompatibility with narrative goals that then must be forced back into line; reconvergent choices that don’t justify the divergence. When choice-select is BEST employed, every choice has a purpose: either to build player affinity with the character or narrative thread or branch the narrative into a new thread. Most authors seem to have a handle on the latter, but the former is REALLY HARD TO DO. It requires casting a spell with words that naturally pull the player in a direction, yet still cedes enough control to make it not feel on rails.

Let’s take an example from literature. The Telltale Heart, a classic. You the reader are unlikely to ever murder someone because you didn’t like their face, then be driven insane by it. Uh, spoilers? Poe’s prose is highly stylized and singular, and not something you would encounter in everyday life. However, it magnetically and precisely carries the protagonist’s deteriorating mind in a way that the reader engages despite themselves. It is fully the magic spell of words that accomplishes this, that takes you somewhere you never thought you would go. If you could conceive of an IF version of TTH, would it end any differently? My thesis is NO on the strength of Poe’s prose, and since it is purely hypothetical I can just declare I’m right!

Whale successfully delivers this alchemy for me. I played through four times, each time getting a different result (many threads!), but each time the text led me naturally and hypnotically to some really, objectively speaking, bonkers places. Three of them ended up being really satisfying stories, qualitatively different from each other. (The fourth was blindingly short, so not too discouraging with its comparative shallowness).

Was it perfect? No. As a parser-like experience, I often bemoaned the lack of abbreviations for general commands like ‘continue.’ The illustrations were too large for my window, requiring panning backwards to see them, a screen-slice at a time which kind of ended up fighting the UI. While I liked the ‘Sanity’ score as a gauge of sorts to soft-guide the proceedings, CALLING it ‘sanity’ often felt wrong given the choices we were making and the places it led us. Probably most disappointing to me was not really using the conversation paradigm to serve the narrative. This tool is CRYING for that! A slightly less than seamless experience.

All that said, between the promise of a really cool new IF platform and a compelling story(ies?) told with it, I kind of have to give this a Transcendent nod. Innovator’s privilege! Also, the characterization of dolphins as prankster-assholes of the sea delights me to no end.

The fact that one of this author’s previous projects was a POETRY GUMBALL MACHINE has no sway over my score, but c’mon, there’s gotta be recognition for that somewhere too!

Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, four playthroughs, sanity 8/10/10/21
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but interested to see other works in this format


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Buckle up, this one fired me up a bit

This is a murder mystery. A barista protagonist survives a car crash to find her signature figured into a string of doomed deliverymen, and she is the prime suspect! Relive the previous days to see if you can successfully finger the perpetrator. It is a fairly limited-choice work, more fiction than interactive until the final j’accuse.

I would say up until the final choice, the work has two defining features: 1) very attractive, cartoony artwork, and 2) offputtingly intrusive prose. Word choice is routinely awkward, to the point I stopped grabbing examples after a while. I am not exaggerating when I say every other text box elicited a grimace of “phrasing, please!” “Jackie’s shoulders stricken immediately,” “Until close! No butts!” (wrong kind of ‘but’), a selectable “Group Handle” which to this day I have no idea what it is even after grabbing it. It appears to have had a good supply of play testers, I hope this is not a case of A@%#ole American Reviewer coming down on translation gaps. Best I can say is regardless of source it was endlessly distracting. It is also nowhere near the most infuriating thing about this work.

The character work is pretty light, but when it is applied, everyone feels kind of selfish excepting maybe the college student. A conversation with her best friend about the protagonist’s boss: “I am running the shop this week. Maggie’s on vacation.” “Again??" Casey groans, “That whore. […]” MeYOW, Casey.

The protagonist herself is maybe the worst at this. Her response choices seem to vary between “petty” and “rude” with the occasional “begrudgingly doing her job.” It makes her unsympathetic and kind of a drag to spend all our time with, and something I rebelled against whenever choice opportunities presented themselves. While maybe this is narratively justified… I’ll get there. For sure in the moment it is offputting. Given no alternative, we work with her through four increasingly tense nights as a stalker seems to haunt the perimeter, then suffer a car crash, and hit endgame.

So, who is the killer? As a mystery I would say, drily, it is not very tight. While there are a lot of events that happen, the game goes to lengths to show that any of the suspects might plausibly have a hand in them, or at least can’t be ruled out. When asked to finger a suspect, I went with one whose actions had the least plausibly innocent explanations. Initially it seemed like I was maybe right, or at least in the ballpark? This was far from any kind of smoking gun, btw, but, yay me? Murder motive, a linked robbery, mechanics of the crash, none of those made sense for ANY of the suspects including the guilty party. I could easily have washed my hands at this point, assuming I had ‘solved’ a kind of unsatisfyingly constructed mystery. It was a Mechanical, Notably glitchy prose experience, until I tried to restart from a save game. There seemed to be a bug in the web-play implementation where the savegame was not found and I got error messages, pushing it to Intrusive.

So I replayed from start, laboriously retracing the entire game just to see what happened. I made some different choices that resulted in new incidental text but no new information, and landed again on the “who do we accuse?” And chose someone different. Holy s@#$. Okay, here is the I-promise-its-relevant suspect list: spoilers I guess? (Spoiler - click to show)an African American student, an undervalued Hispanic receptionist, an Asian immigrant, and a spoiled rich White Girl. I reiterate, at this point, I had no convincing clues of ANYONE’S guilt. Instead of my initial guess, I kind of randomly fingered the (Spoiler - click to show)African American student. Not only was I wrong this time (as expected), I unintentionally caused a POC to be gunned down by Police! WTF GAME?!?!?! Is this the game I was playing all along? There is no way I was going to subject other suspects to alternate endings at that point, so I reran again, and this time accused (Spoiler - click to show)no one giving me a reveal that (Spoiler - click to show)I WASN’T EVEN WHO I THOUGHT I WAS???

Quick recap: Blind guess #1: “correct.” Blind guess #2: SO SO VERY WRONG. #3: The “real” ending I guess? (Assuming for a moment this ending made a lick of sense, which it very much does not.) How do I parse this? In a traditional fiction narrative, this would fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, but it might not be actively offensive. As an IF work though? The game has specifically put us into a mystery solving role. The player is both invested and complicit in getting it ‘right’. With the first solution, you are convinced ‘yeah I got!’ by uncertainly pointing the blame finger and through no active agency or knowledge, seeming to serve justice. That EXACT SAME process, pointed elsewhere led to atrocity. If I hadn’t taken the third path, what would this be saying? Certainly it is saying racial profiling is bad, I get that. Why did it “reward” me for a guess then? Is it saying, God forbid, to serve Justice you sometimes just have to GUESS?? Does it actually make a difference WHO you point an unsure finger at? SHOULD IT??? What clue did I have, other than some time remaining in IFCOMP judging period, that I should keep playing, that this WASN’T the message of the piece?

When you add in the possible third ending, “WHY IS THE GAME EVEN RAISING THESE KINDS OF QUESTIONS AT ALL WHEN IT ISN’T TRYING TO ENGAGE THEM?” As a player, I was complicit in ALL the endings, why is the game sucker punching me, then moving on like its shoddy construction had no role in this?

So let’s engage that third ending. (Spoiler - click to show)If you accuse no one, it is revealed you are actually the murderer, stealing the identity OF THE PERSON YOU FRAMED FOR THE MURDERS. Like, murderer? Literally steal ANYONE ELSE’S IDENTITY but the person you PERSONALLY have ensured the police will scrutinize most closely! And you only learn this because you REFUSED to give the police another angle to pursue, NOT EVEN YOUR OLD IDENTITY, which maybe should have been plan A in this branch!? Nevermind the whole thing coming down when the stolen identity’s COP FATHER swung by to check in. It doesn’t work at all on its own. In some sense the whole piece would at least be more coherent if this ending DIDN’T seem to work, if the police noticed the same inconsistencies and the murderer ended up being too deranged to put together a coherent plan.

Had it done that, it might have retroactively recast the other endings as ‘oh snap, murderer actually got away with plan!’ Or maybe been a slightly more coherent scheme if #1 and #3 were combined. There’s still plenty of gaps for sure, but maybe get at least a slight charge before it crumbled on closer inspection? What gets me is, this thing put me on a journey of player complicity that was deeply uncomfortable. If it had followed through on this in any way, had something to say about it, maybe it would be justified? But in service of AND SUBORDINATE TO a clumsily executed shock twist, it is clear all that turmoil was not the point of the piece, may have even been accidental. That made it kind of offensive. At best, I found it thematically unfocused and deeply illogical. At worst actively Bouncy.

Played: 10/29/23
Playtime: 45min, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusive restore bug, language
Would Play After Comp?: No, do not poke the bear. Twice, I mean.


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Man did this work intersect some weird slices of my life. I minored in Philosophy years ago. A good chunk of my worklife was spent in a corporate environment where “Meritocracy” was a near-religious tenet, with all the orthodoxy injustice that implies. And my gaming history with choice-select dialogue is lukewarm at best. When I encounter it, my knee-jerk reaction is ‘This game is either going to prevent me saying what I want to say, or garble and twist it unaccountably.’ Oddly, that last attitude was cultivated mainly through commercial gaming, where my IF experience has often been better. In any case, it remains my first impulse.

This is a work about a career student engaging some philosophy questions on return to the classroom. I have to say with one sentence it INSTANTLY put me on its side: “Most discussions or debates generally orient towards the loudmouthed people leaving others confused while going home with some sort of a win.” What a great observation to make at the top of a game about verbal fencing.

The game then almost instantly forfeited those gains with several stumbles. I think most impactful to me (and most fixable!), were the very frequent instances of typos, spelling errors and off grammar. The premise of the piece is intellectual sparring with deeply erudite NPCs in a place of higher education. Sloppy prose undermines that premise more deeply here than say a story about Bikini-girls fighting space jellies.

Secondly, you are told “You play as an individual who has so far struggled to make a living juggling between jobs in an attempt keep their education going…” (Arts majors, amirite?) But the wide-eyed intellectual thirst of the protagonist seems much more appropriate for a new student, not a battle-tested veteran of academia and the cold job market. There are long passages about their intellectual engagement that just ring hopelessly naive and at odds with their purported background. (This will be mirrored by what I might call ‘unnuanced analyses’ later in the game.) I guess maybe credit where due, if they can actually keep their enthusiasm after those bruising life experiences, more power to them? But simply making the protag a new college freshman eases so many of these dissonances.

There is also a pacing problem. The details of the protagonist’s morning (including an extended ‘whoops I’m in the wrong class’ scene) are lengthy and ultimately don’t really serve the meaty dialogues that are the center of the piece. Particularly up front I found myself snarking in my head waiting for the game to ‘start.’

It did start, eventually. We enter some dialogues with a professor (and one kind of with ourselves?) about argumentation fallacies and aspects of meritocracy. Here is where the choice-select dialogue concerns cropped up, and it gives me no joy to report here my knee jerk was exactly correct. When they were presented, dialogue choices uniformly lacked what I wanted to say, and the options available railroaded me into statements I didn’t fully agree with.

Philosophy is tough, man, as evidenced by my academic transcript (sick burn, past me!) Nuance is everywhere and precision is super important! Choice-select paradigm may be the only practical way to deal with this, but requires a LOT more nuance of crafting. The protagonist, as defined in text and especially player choices was not equipped to deal with this. Even the Authority NPC, the professor, came up short often as not. In the first discussion, the prof goes on at length about ‘evaluating arguments on merits’ but dismisses a colleague with the same lack of engagement they display to him! Eventually, the prof does lead into a more nuanced discussion of this, but this initial glitch is never acknowledged.

Later, when the concept of meritocracy is introduced, the protagonist immediately imagines a debate where each side adamantly maintains the concept is ONLY composed of the aspects dearest to their own viewpoints and just keeps repeating them. I mean, not a bad simulation of current political debate, but...

Then the player is asked to choose which side of two Reductio Ad Absurdum positions they align with! I mean, it seems obvious that any real discussion has to honestly engage the merits of BOTH positions instead of just bashing them into each other over and over. The Prof does agree, eventually, but boy does the work take its time catching up to the player there.

An unconvincing setting, incomplete arguments, long stretches of </click to continue/> being the predominant interaction, and infrequent restrictive/deceptive/limited choices are all a recipe for a Mechanical exercise. The gameplay was seamless, but the typos and grammar Notably intruded, given the academic setting of the piece.

And yet.

Notwithstanding the conclusions available and unconvincing plot steps, this thing had breadth and depth. Its foundational explications were pretty good. What it had to say about Meritocracy (on both sides!) were pretty on point and NEED to be part of the discussion. Not sure I agreed with the application of the Trolley Problem (a crucial part of the classic ethical dilemma focuses on the act of throwing the switch, which this resource allocation formula sidesteps), but certainly the questions the prof raises about APPLICATION of meritocracy are vital to consider for any champion of it. The deep dive into ad hominem and source reliability is similarly particularly vital and interesting in today’s world. I really dug encountering these things playing IF, even as I was constrained by gameplay and narrative. For a dormant Philosophy minor, these were undeniable Sparks.

Played: 10/29/23
Playtime: 50min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notable cracks in prose and academic rigor
Would Play After Comp?: No, now ready for Graduate Thesis

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

So this is an Escape Room, full stop. If that sounds prejorative, that's because it is. I’m not here to pretend Escape Rooms aren’t fun. They are like the puzzle parts of IF married to the tactility, collaboration and physical presence of LARP. That’s a very successful marriage, like the couple in your lives that 20 years on are just SO happy with each other it is a burden to everyone around them. (Just shut up already, Tim and Marcie.) With that puzzle/LARP pairing you can forgive Escape Room's often tissue-thin narrative or ridiculous logical leaps.

But if you take the LARP out of it, those things run a real danger of corroding the experience. Successful IF implementations will realize this and replace it with SOMETHING. Lunium actually brings two things to the table, one of the them WAY spoilery, so be warned.

The non-spoiler element is its top-notch graphical presentation. The author’s previous work displayed really impressive graphical design chops and it was no fluke. From layout to UI to image curation it is a constant pleasure to interact with. It makes the claim that the images are not needed to play, but that’s like saying sugar is not needed to bake cookies. Technically true, but what would be the point? (I actually wonder about that assertion in any case. For my play, SO much information was conveyed graphically I’m at a loss to see how that would work. Certainly the experience would be degraded.)

Anyone else engage online Escape Rooms during COVID? We did a few and the experience was ehhh, ok? Zoom collaboration was fun but the loss of tactility and sense of place was keenly felt. None of them were as graphically immersive as Lunium.

Let’s pause here and pretend I didn’t already tell you there was a second ace up its sleeve. If I were to rate this game based on what I’ve told you so far it would be a lie to say it wasn’t Engaging, but I would feel compelled to give a penalty point for hyper-accurately replicating something whose translation loses what makes it unique and leaves only a pale shadow of what the new media is capable of. It would be like creating an elaborate stage production of people performing a scripted podcast. (Ok, that’s an imperfect metaphor but I’m on a time crunch here, roll with me.)

So here’s the SPOILER part, as promised. As is probably apparent, my biggest beef with the conceit is its inherent artificiality. Inescapably, this was my skeptical mindset at game start. Thrillingly, as the game progresses and the secrets unfold, time and again the game JUSTIFIES its artificiality. Amnesiac? (Spoiler - click to show)You’ve been drugged! Lots of keys and combinations? Narratively justified! Well, to a point, but more than it needed to be. A close set of suspects in a murder mystery? (Spoiler - click to show)The solution was tied to the PRESENCE OF THE ESCAPE ROOM ITSELF. It was that last touch that won me over. There are a satisfying array of suspects available, in the sweet spot of ‘enough to be non-trivial’ and not ‘too many to manage,’ and all with enough characterization to be distinct. When asked to solve the crime, I overlooked some in-narrative clues but instead somewhat pugnaciously declared (not out loud, in my head. I’m not insane): SERIOUS SPOILER (Spoiler - click to show)“The only way these puzzles make sense is if the protag made them. It just makes no sense otherwise.” AND THE GAME AGREED! The game traded its central mystery on the Jigsaw level contortions needed to even have an Escape Room with these protag-specific details in the first place. Well played author, you have defeated my Penalty Point puzzle!

Played: 10/28/23
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless, Penalty Point AVERTED
Would Play After Comp?: No, solved!

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

If my review series has a brand, it is sloppy-pouring my so-called personality all over works that really deserve better. When I’m just blathering on about, I dunno, a Pixie PI solving an eldritch horror crime aboard a Tall Ship that is also somehow in space, it’s all in good fun. After no fewer than four awkward attempts, I am forced to conclude my approach is singularly UNsuited to works of memoir.

I have some thoughts on presentation, mainly on offer to the author in recognition of their artistic choices. I am unsure why, but the load times for my browser were insanely long. I nearly closed the window thinking it was hung. Maybe a loading indicator or text could signal that everything was ok?
I really liked the two pane approach: map/photos on one side, text on the other. It was a crisp and attractive presentation. The museum map was also an interesting choice. It’s most significant effect was to guarantee non-linearity. By scattering exhibits loosely around irregular grids, the geography seems carefully chosen to avoid an implied reading order, freeing us to experience things as a collage. I might recommend considering a consistent navigation link layout - sometimes I would try to jump two spaces N, but the shifting directional links shunted me aside. If links were in the same spot on every page, that would make navigation just a little nimbler.

I feel safe talking about presentation suggestions. Regarding content, I see deep, turbulent water ahead of me and am going to steer around pretty quickly.

This is a work of brutal, moving honesty. It is a collection of commentary on artifacts from a recovery journey whose personal specifics are heartbreaking and inspiring. It is not my place to interpret another’s experience when they so capably speak for themself. (Actually, I’m not sure communication skills are a prerequisite in any case.) Thoughts like: “respect towards my queerness was a given, not something I needed to earn,” offered with full context are both cathartic and depressing that the basic acceptance I take for granted is a daily looming threat to so many. I am grateful Bez chose to share this. While I think of myself as a functioning, empathic human being, there is a gulf between sympathizing and experiencing. Works like this help bridge that gulf which only helps all of us.

Played: 10/28/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Are you kidding me? Assign a quantitative score to THIS? No f-in way.
Would Play After Comp?: Experience devastatingly complete


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

WARNING. The following review comes from a place of ignorance. As a recent entrant into IF culture, I had no clue Stiffy Makane existed, let alone its storied position in the IF corpus. As such, the following review evaluates Citizen Makane as a stand alone work, devoid of any of the context that gives it life and meaning. I accept your 'unhelpful' judgements unreservedly. I have also elected not to include my rating in the game's average for this reason.

This happened to me last year also. At some point in the IFComp, when you have achieved a critical mass of gameplay, the brain shifts gears from “Hm, let me objectively dissect this,” to “Hm, this bears the most superficial resemblance to Z, let me dwell on that!” It doesn’t help in this case that I self-importantly had this to say in my review of Ribald Bat Lady:

"The sex scenes themselves were also employed unevenly. They were most successful when erotic activity was actually incorporated into the gameplay as puzzles."

“What’s that you say? Noted!” said the author, somehow hearing this ill-considered advice through a temporal wormhole and acting on it in time for IFCOMP23. The setup is: you are a man, awakened from cryo-sleep to an all-female world, for the purpose of reintroducing heterosexual sex to the species. Kind of an ur-porn-plot. You do this by becoming Sex Yu-Gi-Oh.

If you take out the sex, as a game, it has implementation issues. It is spare, the map is small and limiting. Objects have almost random permanence (sometimes the food I ordered the previous day was still on my table in the cafe! other times not). The conversation system is limiting, repetitive and clunky, and often provides options that the game rejects when selected. The puzzles (again, talking the non-sex version of this game) are few and pretty straightforward. Its most egregious fault though is its screen management. It often throws giant walls of text at you, which scroll to the bottom. Requiring you to scroll back to read it all. As the game progresses, and your in-window text grows and grows, it becomes increasingly fiddly to scroll just the right amount. With the ubiquitous, decades-old availability of the [More] technology it is a baffling, infuriating choice.

When it does try to manage text pacing, it creates different issues for itself. There are times when conversations, or tv shows, or lectures happen around you. If you are inclined to listen in, you must wait as they play out block by block. Not great, but not terrible. But the messages you get… you get to hear some pretty horrific things, and:

"The professor continues. "In the late 21st century, unspoken tensions between
the sexes started turning into open hostilities, and finally culminated in a
series of devastating conflicts known as the Gender Wars. It was a terrible
bloodbath, raging for decades, with immense losses on both sides."

>z
You relax.

That is the most awful response to that news! The other message is “you chill” which actually could be read as ‘get the chills’ so that would have been a bit better?

Now, let’s get that sex back in (that’s what SHE… NO! Actually, that feels kind of inevitable). There is a battle-card based sex minigame that needs to be grinded (ground? it all sounds bad in context) to get your physical prowess to a game-ending level. There is like one, maybe two nuances to it that are apparent after two plays. After that it is the most eye-glazing, mechanical exercise imaginable. And you need to do it A LOT. There is a read of this game that its mini-game implementation and shallow character work are a next level PARODY of dire porn games. There is ample evidence to support that here, including nearly interchangeable random partners, wafer-thin foreplay, and ubiquitous sexual availability. To me though, it reads like it kind of wants to have it both ways - like watching porn ‘ironically.’

[Sidebar: in our post-satire world, is it even POSSIBLE to parody porn? Is there anything so exaggerated and extreme that there isn’t a corner of the internet that wouldn’t embrace it at face value?]

Man, my grip on my pearls got a bit tight. So let’s talk about two things the game does almost exactly right. The first is it’s protagonist’s alternating ‘please don’t pinch me if I’m sleeping’/‘you’re sure this is ok?’ attitude to his situation. Often played for laughs, and lands more often than not. The second though… hoo boy. During your mini-games you are treated to descriptions of the sex that are just the most inappropriate, offputting, and HILARIOUS phrasing. I grabbed A TON, but they are the game’s super power so to just get the flavor:

Some of the ways sex is described is (para) (Spoiler - click to show)“like that one guy clapping too loud” “like an elephant marching in an empty theatre” “like a spaghetti on the floor getting inhaled by a vacuum cleaner” “LIKE A FISH BEING SLAPPED ON A ROCK” and so so many more.

Despite the limited mini-gameplay, these blurbs more often than not justified the effort. It is actually worth the price of admission just to experience all that. Even after topping out my stats, I would sometimes engage the mini-game just to refresh my good will. Really. That’s why I did it. For sure.

In the end, I think I call the humor a single Spark albeit a bright one. Not enough to escape Mechanical gameplay, but more than enough to sweeten the pot since I was playing anyway. I go back and forth on whether the scrolling issue pushes it from Notably to Intrusively glitchy. I’m staying with Notably, but there is an argument to be made.

Played: 10/27/23
Playtime: 2 hrs, level 5, 1/3 quests complete
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notable
Would Play After Comp?: No, despite not finishing I think I’m done (that’s what she…WOULD YOU STOP THAT??)


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

One room IF has a special place in my heart. The authorial challenge of stuffing multiple arcane, challenging puzzles into a single location, and have them be thematic and natural is a kind of uniquely interesting one. Extra points if it doesn’t feel blatantly Escape-room-y. As a player it can be distracting because part of me is so busy admiring the accomplishment, the story may not get my full attention. TSIAS seems to recognize that tension and plays along with just enough story to set expectations and ground rules, then sits back and lets you flail. Adrift on a sinking boat, throw everything overboard against the wishes of your oblivious captain. GO!

Part of the scene setting, arguably its strongest facet, was the language, especially dialogue. It is all stilted early 18th century (not Victorian, no!) pirate talk, very well rendered, playful and amusing, and consistent throughout. Commitment to the bit is not a problem for TSIAS. The language peppers everything with wry humor, which is a time-tested method to generate Engagement.

The central mechanic of a sinking boat was also clever, a sink timer that requires periodic bailing to keep from going under. The counter starts at 10 turns! You have my attention, game! It was the perfect scenario spice to really put you in the story. Yes, it kind of broke the central premise, as conceivably one could bail indefinitely rather than throw anything overboard, but ooh look away! I easily forgave this with ‘need to row to shore’ head canon.

So you’ve got a great premise, some really effective mechanical chrome, terrific use of language and humor. All that’s left is puzzle play! I liked the weird mix of booty that needed manipulating, not the least of which being an aggressive carnivorous plant. I was particularly delighted by the "steampunk" (Spoiler - click to show)exploding dye pack. The game did a reasonable job of presenting different kinds of ‘get this overboard’ challenges. It just felt to me there were enough burrs in implementation and design to flicker me in and out of Puzzle Solving Flow.

For one I found the noun and verb space very fussy - unimplemented synonyms, weird verb constructs, there were enough of these that I often struggled to accomplish what I wanted, and what the game needed me to do. Not so much that I got blocked, but enough that things felt harder than they needed to be. A few times the physical descriptions let me down - one key puzzle traded on spatial knowledge that the text did not firmly establish, or if it did, did it so subtly that it escaped me and was not confirmed through repeat observation. Another traded on counter-intuitive object examination. While I certainly should be expected to eye my boat companion’s clothing, it is unclear I should be able to (Spoiler - click to show)look in his pockets from across the boat! Text could have clued me in there, but didn’t. This didn’t torpedo my Engagement in the game, but it cropped up consistently enough to call it Notable. Thankfully, both a robust progressive Hint system and Walkthrough are provided, the former well designed when I needed it to push me forward.

As good as the writing was, there was a point of friction for me there too. Through the course of the game, your relationship with the Captain gets increasingly prickly in a very amusing way. However, when bailing the incidental text quickly gets repetitious and largely reflects the relationship state at the beginning of the game, nevermind all the growing tension! Look, dialogue repetition is an unavoidable artifact of IF NPCs (I guess until AI rears its ugly head). It is easily forgiven, and can be artfully accommodated. Here though, the contradictory relationship context jarred. It was a rare narrative off note for me.

It seems I have a probably not-uncommon problem of dwelling on the negative, at least when measured in word count. Don’t make too much of it. Notwithstanding occasional frictions, this was an Engaging work, bubbling with wry humor. Full commitment to the bit, terrific use of language and a nice puzzle set spiced with prodigious small, immersive gameplay touches. I be on board Cap’n!

Played: 10/25/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished after dying once
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable gameplay frictions
Would Play After Comp?: No, but will def track down other entries

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This was my introduction to a series that seems to be picking up steam, with 5 of its 7 episodes coming out in 2023! Seriously author, tap the brakes. You’re making the rest of us look bad. In other media, I despair of jumping into in-flight series, preferring to reach back and ploddingly work the back catalog. IF seems friendlier to in media res, at least the ones I’ve dipped into so far. LMG4 is no exception, I was brought up to speed in the blink of an eye. It is a whimsical Dickens/Anderson/Whedon/Moffet mashup which maybe sounds more precious than it is.

I’m kind of feeling like with only a single, late episode exposure, maybe I’m not the one to explain LMG. The community probably knows this property a lot better than I do. But I’m gonna do it anyway because it’s just so GOOD. Anderson’s urchin Match Girl, through events, becomes a time traveling, vampire hunting ward of Ebeneezer Scrooge, serving Victorian England in averting a Faerie war (presumably on leave from her patronage with Poseidon?). With a six-shooter and empathy. What kind of drug-fueled fever dream produced THAT narrative stew?? Her name is Ebeneezabeth?!?! GET ME THAT COCKTAIL!

It’s structured as a treasure hunt, assemble MacGuffin pieces from a primeval past of dinosaur societies, an Old West silver mine, two different flavors of Pirates (Future Space and Musical Theatre), and a modern vampire conclave. I regret calling it whimsy, because as frothy and fun as it can be, there is an edge to this thing. Our protagonist is a zesty mixture of generous, earnest and no-nonsense. Yes, her first impulse is cooperative, but can flip surprisingly fast to cold anti-hero. In less deft hands it could feel disjoint and all over the place, but no. Here it somehow coalesces into a charged kind of narrative where anything could happen. The puzzle play is light but clever, assembling parts from across time periods to make headway with some nicely flavored environs. The mechanics of time travel are novel and kind of a mini-puzzle/maze of its own.

There are implementation issues, unimplemented nouns that are offputting early, before you get the measure of the piece. Soon though, the urgency of the mission takes over and sluices you easily into the work’s tightly controlled main thread. You are so engaged in the proceedings you have no interest in pulling at the fringes.

So many delightful in-the-moment touches. The escalating bad vampire brainstorming. The madcap disguises. A monologuing gunfight. Cross-timeline shenanigans. Interacting with incidental scenic elements, which is often daffy and rewarding. A fave:

> talk to roadrunner
“Hey,” you say. “Hey,” says the roadrunner, without stopping to look at you.

Lol, he’s got things to do, he’s got no time for you! This is what really makes the work sing - the ALIVE feeling of the universe. This is not a universe frozen in stasis until the player shows up. E-beth pops into others’ stories, (Spoiler - click to show)even her own!, gets what she needs and only disrupts things if she has to! In one instance with surprising pathos. As often as not, events continue to happen without needing or wanting her involvement. It’s a unique, really fun, vivid, breathing universe of casually weird genre mashups and bonkers timelines. Couple that with a generous but fierce protagonist, and I’m here for it. I got me some homework it seems.

Played: 10/24/23
Playtime: 2hrs, timer expired during epilogue!
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but will def track down other entries


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