Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/16/23
Playtime: 30min, 3 cycles

This one was an interesting experiment: implementing a parser interface into the historically link-select driven Twine. The presentation was very attractive, the clean font, blue on black graphics were unique and sharp. It was also quite well written. The story conveys a coming of age ceremony in some unspecific post apocalyptic future, maybe not even with humans. You are pretty limited to surveying the ceremony’s location, minimally attending (or not) the instructions given to you, remembering things, then making a choice about your future. The descriptive text is clean, conveying a lot without being showy or distracting. You have good latitude to engage or ignore details, depending on your mood.

As a proof of concept, I would call it a success, but as a polished for play feature, a few burrs to buff off. There was a hint mode, which I think turned interesting nouns bold but don’t think the feature actually toggled so I still don’t know if I was playing in HINT mode or not. Despite being told I could use N/S/E/W navigation, only one direction seemed to be implemented. This was consistent with the scenario setup, but an odd thing to advise when invariably I got “cannot go that way” responses.

Again, not sure if HINT mode is to blame, or a legit design choice, but I found if I typed bolded text, I almost always got something interesting. Begging the question, “This is different from link-select how? More work?” Now it wasn’t ONLY that. I found non-bolded nouns that had interesting descriptions too. And a lot that were “can’t do that.” Occasionally, I needed to enter a hidden noun or verb to make progress. It wasn’t awful, the text gave enough info to trial and error, but it seemed inconsistent. HELP also sometimes provided additional guidance, and sometimes didn’t.

All that summed up to a UI that never quite disappeared into the background, and perhaps colored my responses to the text. Which itself was crisp and clean and friction free (a bigger compliment than it sounds). You get a lot of background, character, setting, and then you are told to make your choice. I think I did 3 cycles, (Spoiler - click to show)and all of them were bad endings! I might have done more, but the game did not allow UNDO, and provided no FF feature to arrive at the decision point again.

As much as I belabored the UI above, I think my net takeaway was positive. Certainly, the text itself was seamless and propulsive. It was the ending, and interpolating the message behind it, that pushed at me the hardest here. At my most generous (and discounting a dramatically DIRE ending), it seems to resonate with the title in the sense that given a single impactful, no-return choice, we are doomed forever to an unanswerable “what else should I have done?” That is an interesting statement, but only works if you don’t take ALL paths. Which I didn’t. Good job me!

If I had though, then I would have to grapple with the author’s statement on the universe of outcomes. The alternatives are (Spoiler - click to show)either that all choices are in fact bad, or that there are good ones but you have no way of predicting which they are. These are unconvincing artistic statements to me in general, and the text did not try to convince me otherwise. I already rebel at the assertion that any one choice can be so life-defining. (Well, barring that dire ending. I do get that.) These assertions run aground against my fundamental belief that life is long and varied, and all but the worst decisions redeemable, mitigable or minimizable over time. Especially decisions whose consequences are so arbitrary, meaning agency and intent are effectively nullified. While acknowledging the world is not ours to control, I can’t help but feel our responses to that world ARE. At least to some extent. TRNT, I respectfully disagree!

So all that said, I do think the trail this game blazes, of adding parser capability to Twine, is a pretty cool one. I could see future efforts leveraging the expanded interface to good effect. It is this game authorship achievement that I find most compelling here, and that is where I land on Spice Girl.

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Social Sci-Fi
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d scrub the UI in general for friction. I think there is an interesting mix in here, of combined parser/click input, worth playing around to refine.

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: 4/18/23
Playtime: 45min, died same way 4 times, caught in same apparently unwinnable state 4 times

Here’s something I knew nothing about before Thing23: Mamertine. For weeks, when I read it in the list, I rhymed it with “Hammer Time,” and mentally included the distinctive musical sting. I am still enamored of that reading, tbh. According to the Internet WHICH NEVER LIES, Mamertine is variously ancient Roman mercenaries or an ancient Roman prison that housed the Apostles Peter and Paul. Seems this work is referencing the latter. One of the few descriptive blurbs on the work suggests escaping a cult which is a really subversive connection, if intentional.

The work itself has a tremendously attractive facade - the graphical interface design is slick, functional and appealing (standard taste disclaimers apply). The moody background music, effective. It implements a click-based parser of sorts, providing a stripped down menu of standard parser verbs, and highlights potentially relevant matching nouns when selected. You are effectively building parser commands with your mouse. It is a not unsuccessful choice! You deliberately trade command speed for guaranteed valid entries. My personal preferences may lean the other way, but this was as slick an implementation as I could hope for. “Why is this a back garden?” I asked myself. “Seems pretty polished.”

The narrative may have been a first clue: it was pretty bare bones. Hinted backstory of betraying a master landing you here, environs to navigate that presented more mystery than coherent story, an NPC much more concerned with their immediate surroundings than any background or table setting. Now this artifact is far from unique in IF, particularly in puzzle driven IF. Here though, the puzzles encountered were minimal and straightforward (at least partially an artifact of an interface that inevitably allows for exhaustive permutations if all else fails), so not the star. It kind of left the piece without compelling plot, story, character or puzzles. What is left?

And then I got to the game play. It opens with timed text, deliberately dragging the introduction. While I have seen timed text used effectively in support of artistic choices, without a compelling justification its use can easily become tedious. The game play itself harkens back to an earlier time, where death arbitrarily follows seeming benign choices. Where you can blunder into locations without crucial items and get locked into an (unacknowledged) unwinnable state. And I’m not sure you can achieve anything OTHER than that. I couldn’t. I made a good faith effort to restart and explore all location branches and that’s all I could find - death or purgatory. Maybe I wrote off the puzzle complexity too soon. Certainly there might be more business with the only NPC that could help me, but no clues guided me nor paths suggested themself. Not ruling out that I somehow missed a path (I didn’t actually map it out), but I did plumb my memory hard before throwing up my hands.

Which is where the lack of HINT/HELP systems became important. None exists here. I guess I am more forgiving of this omission in a Back Garden entry, but without that tool I kind of had to give up.

In the end, the star here was the pseudo-parser implementation, including the graphical flourishes. Those were pretty successful I thought! As a showcase of what the platform is capable of, it makes its case pretty well.

Apropo of nothing: CAIN’T TOUCH THIS! (doo-do-do-doot. yeeeah, yeah)

(Post Comp update: seems like what I interpreted as unwinnable state was an ordering problem. Game - 1, me - 0)

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Maze
Polish: Both Gleaming and Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If the engine were mine, I would focus on adding Hint/Help capabilities. That tool is crucial for a fully usable IF authoring system, as it is the surest tool to get players past brick walls, authorial or personal. If the GAME were mine, I would take a hard look at unwinnable state handling and engineer those out as best I could - or at least put the poor player out of their misery. And maybe also provide a walk through, pending the hint system release.

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: 4/18/23
Playtime: 30 min, all 4

An IF anthology! I LOVE that idea! (Notwithstanding from a certain remove Spring Thing itself is a functioning anthology.) This seems to be an umbrella release of 4 new-to-authoring student projects. Packaging together is a great move, as they are too slight to stand on their own, but that compactness is a strength in anthology format. Particularly since the common “use mirror somehow” prompt gives a unifying theme that still elicits maximum individual creativity.

In that spirit, I am changing my approach here, each substory will get a “Marketing Blurb” “Great” “Learning” and “Notable” reading.

Mirror by Mihi:
Blurb: “You’ve won the lottery, plan a trip! Wait…”
Great: Really liked the prioritized tasks/choices after the lottery - fun in specificity.
Learning: Choices that immediately reconverge are not choices! Easy to code, not too fun to play.
Notable: Leans more into the fiction than interactive, with legit narrative twist!

Mirror by Liliane:
Blurb: “If a mirror is a portal, it is a fragile, unforgiving one.”
Great: Smoothly surfing the ST23 zeitgeist of “find all the endings, and make them WILD”
Learning: A score of ‘endings found out of total’ is a tried and true way to keep player engagment.
Notable: Loved the embrace of arbitrary, bonkers end states

Mirror by Filter James:
Blurb: “If this is your house, why is everything…off?”
Great: Embraces classic IF find/unlock/explore tropes, but at breakneck speed.
Learning: Arbitrary puzzles and deaths work when pace is fast, would be contentious in longer works.
Notable: Mixes narrative and puzzle play! Always a winner!

Mirror by Dr. John:
Blurb: “Where are you? WHO are you? And why is IXI so interested?”
Great: This had the tenor of an abstract puzzle, compounded by intriguingly enigmatic players.
Learning: If it was an abstract puzzle, a ‘reset’ capability is key to giving the player deductive agency.
Notable: If it wasn’t an abstract puzzle (I didn’t solve it), the fact that it MIMICS one so well is actually kind of funny. The kind of gag well suited to short anthology.

Spice Girl: A whole band!
Vibe: Anthology
Polish: Distressed
Is this TADS? No. Get on that teach!
Gimme the Wheel! If this were mine, I’d take the extra step to wrap these 4 shorts into a single Twine interface. Maybe as simple as introduction/table of contents. Maybe a much cheesier Crypt Keeper type host and intro, replete with groan-inducing puns. Honestly? Definitely the latter.

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: 4/18/23
Playtime: 50min, finished

Man do I love how omnivorous this author is in subject matter, narrative interests, puzzle creation and platform engagement. If you’d told me ahead of time this was his next project my response would have been, “Are you kidding?? Where did THAT come from??” [pause, thinking] “Ok yeah, I see that.”

As is a my wont, a quick digression about ME. I have a long history with coding, starting from any number of BASICs, Pascal, Fortran, Intel and Motorola assembly, to C, C++, verilog, vhdl, Java, Javascript, BASH and Cshell, Tcl/Tk, TADS of course, and on… I am deeply unafraid of new languages which I condescendingly characterize as “where does the semicolon go?” Various programming languages come easier or harder, depending on how their syntax and operators align to my own thought patterns and algorithm organization. One language has long towered above all others as just GETTING ME. I speak of course of PERL, God’s Own scripting language.

As a Perl zealot, there is a special contempt for non-Perl scripting languages. Ruby, inessential. AWK, aimed at alien intellects.

Python. Sterile, pale, uncanny valley of scripting languages.

As a veteran of the Scripting Language Wars, arguably on the losing side (but the right side of history!), I have so many feels when I see Python. Boy do they surge when I need to fire it up, or worse, DOWNLOAD ADDONS TO A LANGUAGE I WOULD AS SOON PURGE FROM MY DISTRO.

Anyway, all that is inessential to this review, but was essential to my mental health.

WOR is a clever math puzzle, overlaid with a writer’s block simulator. You are given progressively more interesting rules about balancing writing and reflection, and asked to derive the variations (under the guise of ‘finishing a chapter’). Each correct variation you enter is accompanied by amusing mini-narratives about staying on task. Or not. I quickly got immersed, at first using fingers to brute force enumerate possibilities, then pencil and paper trying to math them out. This is my kinda fun! It did pull me down a rabbit hole of abstract thought, so much so that the choice to engage this right before bed was revealed to be a deep miscalculation. I found myself spinning on the same thoughts a little too frequently, blunt as my mental auger was. Reluctantly, I put it down. Next day, refreshed and caffeinated, I readily closed it out.

There were either a few bugs, or a joke that went over my head. I got “New ideas form. They should be more specific, but I forgot to fill them in! This is a bug that I should fill in, in wor1[or 2].txt.” quite a few times. I understand these bugs to have been subsequently fixed.

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Fun Math
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No. It is THAT LANGUAGE THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine? Re-implement in Perl. Obviously.

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: 4/19/23
Playtime: 45min, finished

Maybe I should have done some preview reading at the start of the Thing. In my review of The Kuolema I wrote:

"Of course, in five years, I’ll be typing 'Live IF via GMAI, what even is my life right now?' ”

5 Years? It was TWELVE DAYS!! Now I’m playing an AI-assist generated IF! Even the DARPA Grand Challenge took 2 years before self-driving cars completed the course.

The implementation is a hybrid click-select/parser set in Greek Myth. In practice I found that to be… pretty ok. It even seemed to handle my mischievous “click on link near top of page, after subsequent commands.” In practice the link acted as a ‘canned’ command for the parser, but did not preclude full parser input. My usual complaints with hopping input devices were kind of addressed here, at least addressed enough, and it was kind of… convenient.

The presentation was attractive, nicely evoking classical mythic art. That’s got me a little conflicted, tbh. Chokepoint Capitalism (ref. Cory Doctorow, 2023) has already transferred huge swaths of revenue from artists to rent takers/platform monopolists. Voice artists are under siege from AI audio, visual artists from AI artwork, now the extremely rarefied sector of IF?? We’re hardly a pot of gold waiting to be raided here! With that charged background I take no delight in saying: the art was pretty attractive and evocative. That’s how they getcha.

I take significantly more delight in saying the IF work shared a lot of shortfalls that beset pre-Beta human-created IF. I wish I could have transcripted it, but I understood the online interpreter to be required. There were lots of typos (a “fairly plan->plain corridor,” “later” instead of “latter” among others). There were many unimplemented nouns, including many samples of the evergreen “You are by the side of a river…” “>X RIVER” “You see nothing like that here.” There were issues with state awareness. (Spoiler - click to show)After freeing Narcissus, the room description still had him mesmerized, but trying to X him yielded “not here.” There was some overwrought prose: a cave mouth described with fangs instead of stalactites.

Wait.

Did we feed the corpus of IF art to a machine, and it decided THESE THINGS WERE FUNDAMENTALLY PART OF THE FORM?? WHAT DOES THAT GO@^#$%#MN MACHINE THINK OF US EXACTLY???

Before I get too paranoid, I am going to attribute human agency to some key elements of SD. For one, the overarching plot is very much aligned with modern, revisionist Myth interpretations. From Broadway to video games there has been an impulse to infuse these classic stories with modern sensibilities and twists and by and large I’m for it. Why not? Cultural currency. We got a Winnie the Pooh horror movie, can’t wait to see the same thing done with Micky !@#$%^ Mouse. SD is very much in the former vein. (Not so much the latter, but I would also watch the crap out of an Achilles Slasher movie. “Andromeda, he’s not dead! Get him in the heel Andromeda, the heel!”) Don’t know that I was clamoring for a redemption arc for (Spoiler - click to show)Narcissus but why not? On the other hand, its more generous take on (Spoiler - click to show)Phaedra was nice. Cause man could that have gone a different way.

I think my favorite dear-god-I-have-to-believe-this-was-a-human moment came in an error statement. Instead of “You can’t do X with Y,” or “I don’t understand that,” I got “That’s -not- Greek to me.” I guffawed aloud at that, not the least of which because the piece is pretty straight drama otherwise. I swear to god if you tell me a machine produced that line I’m going to go full Kaczynski. (Minus the postal terrorism of course, Jeezuz.)

In sum, I found this to be a promising work. It suffered a lot of the issues that plague pre-release hand crafted IF, but none fatal. Its premise was neat and well executed. The story was contained and linear, but I understand that also to be a work in progress. Look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Greek Mythology
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would institute a world wide pause on AI while we enlist our best thinkers to really plumb what it means for humanity to offload increasing amounts of cultural, technical and legal authority to inauditable, evolutionary systems. And for once, create guard rails and policies that keep technology in service of us, rather than letting clumsy, flawed systems run roughshod over the social order to keep enriching fewer and fewer. I mean, after I submitted this for a grade of course.


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: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min

A lifetime ago, I began my fascination with the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, and to a lesser extent the dime novels and serials of the 00’s and 10’s (the last ones). Of course Sherlock Holmes played in that space, he practically loomed over it. There are a lot of qualified charms to those stories that still appeal to me. Not the least of which is the purple prose that was a hallmark of so much of it, at least until John D MacDonald and his peers entered the scene.

In a handful of reviews, I have complained about what I called ‘poetic verse.’ I have NOT called it Purple Prose. This is deliberate on my part. While the majority of the world may not see a difference between the two I very much do, no doubt due to my formative fascination with pre-war low culture. My personal distinction between Overwrought Poetry and Purple Prose is that I really like the latter in an only semi-ironic way, while the former pushes me away. What’s the difference? I couldn’t really articulate a grammatical definition, but in application it seems to be one of stakes. If you scale a mountain to leap for the heart of a universal truth… and then fall short it is heartbreaking and hubris-revealing. If you bend over with dramatic flourish to brush lint off your shoes and stumble, that’s kind of funny. The contrast of high language and low stakes is near irresistible.

Secret of the Black Walrus feeds that beast. It apes the tropes and the vibe of Victorian mystery stories in creating an Asian super sleuth, then aiming her squarely at a locked room murder. The language does a lot to settle us in with bangers like:

"the freshest in our bloodthirsty city’s contemptible compendium of heinous crime."
"Bixby had a mind like a lightless cellar."

among others. If anything, I wanted MORE of that! No, it’s not realistic dialogue. Yes it goes out of its way to make its point. That IS the point! That overwrought energy is as much a hallmark of the genre as the Deerstalker hat. I fist pumped in delight whenever it showed up, and was sad when too many screens went by without. Shout out to the pastiche language of the thing in general. Even when too restrained for my taste it ably carried the vibe of its inspiration.

The mystery itself is nicely fit to its conceit, plenty of a->b clue following and twists and peril. It’s not particularly revolutionary but is a nice representation. Mysteries are tough in IF, particularly when your protagonist is a superhuman detective and the player is very much not. Walrus takes the tack of letting you point the protag in an investigative direction, but then letting her do the heavy deductive lifting. Nothing wrong with that, but in providing limited options that can be exhaustively selected it can take on the feel of a wind up toy. Yes, I periodically give it a twist, but all the motive energy is its own doing. I’m not saying I know a better way to do it, I’m saying these kinds of characters are uniquely challenging in IF (see also Lady Thalia).

I wish that those were my only lingering impressions of the work, but there is another heavier impression I carry. Pre-war pulps were deeply racist. There is an entire sub-genre called “Yellow Peril.” When I first engaged these stories, fandom approached this artifact as “awful of course, and kind of quaint in its ignorant hate.” That take itself has not aged well, and my (and society’s) tolerance has shifted significantly. There is an impulse when doing pastiches of pulp stories to underline the racism, as a way to show you are not blind to the faults of the form. This comment comes not from a place of condescending judgement, but of lived experience. I wrote some pulp pastiches decades ago that have aged REALLY BADLY. (I took it even further than Walrus. In a pre-post-satire world I thought the perfect takedown was to exaggerate for satirical effect, to drive home how awful it was. When all I was doing was creating more of it in the world. What was I even doing wading into that anyway? Was my big insight “Hey guys. Hey guys. Racism is BAD ACTUALLY.”??)

Thankfully, Walrus didn’t follow me down that ruinous path, but it did belligerently embrace the ‘don’t forget the racism’ impulse. At this point in my life, I am pretty convinced that just starkly OBSERVING racism (or sexism or sexual abuse or any number of awful things), without having anything to say ABOUT them weighs a work down. Especially when looking back from a different (and hopefully better) cultural context. If the narrative is a light lark meant to thrill or amuse, it is particularly defeating. I think there are defter ways make the protagonist uncomfortable that don’t unintentionally make the reader uncomfortable. Some complain about “woke culture” ahistorical racial diversity and acceptance in fiction like say Bridgerton. Those snowflake whiners somehow don’t care that the practical effect of what they champion is that wish fulfillment fantasy becomes only pleasant to the historically privileged. What are they defending here, the ongoing right to exclude people from WISH FULFILLMENT FANTASY??? If you’re not making historical documentary or pointed polemic, let everyone play! I am swayed by the idea that realistic racism has no place in a light, high society romance.

I am kinda done with “historically accurate racism” in pulpy detective adventures is what I’m saying. Didn’t mean to take this all out on you Walrus, but you stirred up some Stuff for me. I guess its good to know I can get spirited over things other than cats, broccoli and python.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Victorian Whodunit
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would cut out most or all of the racial stuff, and replace it with MOAR PURPLE PROSE!!!1!!1!!

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 an IFCOMP22 Review

In reviewing some IF works, I’ve grappled with poetic language that clashed with my own sensibilities. I seem to have a heightened sense of "ehhh that's trying too hard." Superficially, this should have tripped my hair trigger, but somehow the language here just sung for me. It was consistently evocative and surprising and carried a rhythm that was somehow both measured and propulsive. When I tried to figure out how this succeeded for me where other works did not, I think the best I came up with was EfG minimized the use of extravagant simile and metaphor, and just straight up described stuff. Elegantly, evocatively and beautifully. This offhanded passage early on was just so precise in its socio-political observation, its multi-syllable employment doesn’t end up diluting or obfuscating it. (look at me! so many multi-syllable words of my own!)

"to the glittering glitterati of the donor class, those brahmins of the City whose funding feeds the fringe-work (performance, poetry, painting–even it turns out, mythohistoric research), fattening it up until it can pass as avant garde, or perhaps–if you’re lucky–even 'cutting edge.' "

For the first chapter or so, it's all narration, and the language rolls like a manuscript from the protagonist - its half-academic half-poetic tone seems about right for the background they’ve presented to us. Quickly they meet with a poet they’ve idolized, let’s call her Didi Joanion. Just pulling syllables out of thin air here. The rest of the work is a dialogue between the two about Didi’s time among the Elves. Settle down spoiler-police, it's in the title.

Let me break for a moment to talk about the interactivity - it's kind of inessential. There are some exclusive choices early that shade how the protagonist understands the world. I was a bit put out at those, because every option I selected had text that thrilled me, and I wondered how much MORE thrilling the choices untaken might have been. I wanted to select them all! Later though, when choices stopped being exclusive and I had to select all (or just most) of them I was like “why am I even selecting here? shouldn’t these just be page breaks?” You can’t win with me game, ask around, that’s just how I am. A lot of the time, the interaction was straight-up page turning, but even when it wasn’t, it was. Every now and then there was a nice pacing effect in the interactivity, but very much the rare exception.

So back to the text. As soon as Didi started talking things jarred for me. She spoke in the same evocative, deliberate, erudite voice as our narrator. And she did it describing things from decades ago, with a precision and clarity that … eeehhhhh. Here:

“[…] hanging from every horse-drawn troika and gondola poling its langorous streams, […]”

“Poling its langorous streams”? “POLING ITS LANGOROUS STREAMS???” Does that sound like something one human would say to another human in human conversation? I want you to try something: work the phrase “poling its langorous streams” unironically into any conversation with anyone in your life, and report their reaction back here. Some homework for you.

Something about putting quotation marks around it shifts the way the words work, and it drew the wrong kind of laughter. I considered, “maybe this is the protagonist’s recasting of her words in flowery manuscript as they’re being written down” except that previously they made a point of how diligently they were capturing her exact words. Then I thought, “well, she is a renowned poet in the text of the piece, maybe this is less an authentic conversation, and more her slipping into some well-rehearsed bit.” Which the story later outright confirmed! Ok story, you got me!

It did it twice more. Once, it noted there are 20,000 elvish words but only 3 for hello. (Is that the number? It was presented as a lot more than we have, but that feels super low.) I’m like, “c’mon that doesn’t make any sense, we have more in English.” Story was like “yeah that’s weird, hold my beer, let me tell you about ‘Goodbye’.” Elsewhere they’re talking about her silk flooring in her fabric house and I’m like “fr reals story? Doesn’t it rain there?” Next scene, rain! I felt like an overconfident amateur chess player realizing the unassuming player across the table was actually a prodigy.

So yeah, the language in dialogue never really felt ‘real’ but it was cool. I mean, I really liked reading it even if it wasn’t ‘believable’. So if I’m sluicing through this joyful, vibrant literary rapids why am I not Engaged? Why? Its about Elves. (IT'S IN THE TITLE, IT'S NOT A SPOILER.) Elves are racist bastards, that’s just facts. You see how they treat Dwarves in those Rings/Hobbit movies? Screw those Elf Supremacist dickheads.

Wow. That got away from me. There’s a possibility that was not about Elves.

So this work is about a gloriously conceived fantasy city and culture whose inhabitants are not important. And it's basically a long, super-evocative and thrilling to read description that only kind of barely crests to a dramatic resolution. It’s a beautiful artifact that doesn’t do much, consistent with its unnecessary interactivity. Is there a place for beauty? Of course! I just need a little more to get Engaged. That may be on me.


Played: 11/5/22
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? 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 IFCOMP22 Review

This is definitely an interactive novel, not a game. It is structured as a series of irregular calendar day snapshots of life after a zombie apocalypse. Really the only choice on offer is what day (as denoted by circles on a calendar) you want to see. At first I just went monotonically forward in time, until still in the first cycle I periodically decided to “skip ahead” and fill in gaps after. (Spoiler - click to show)Really just to see if the cat lived. As you work your way to December, you sometimes revisit days you’ve already seen where the narrative expands or changes but you do arrive. Then the entire year opens up AGAIN. This time, I went backward just to see how it played.

The narrative itself pushed hard on me at first. A few early examples of text trying way too hard and totally not landing for me: “The train unfurled from the tunnel like a tongue.” “Now the swollen joint rolled in his boot like a marble.” “Thirst serrated him.” These are super representative of persistently showy prose that pulls you away from the apocalypse you are nominally watching in a very distracting way. There are plot choices that are as equally confounding/challenging. The protagonist seems simultaneously very clever about apocalyptic survival (I particularly liked the hinting that he was salvaging kibble because it was overlooked by other survivors), and just not smart. He is a wanderer, yet winters in snow and ice?

But but I gotta say the pace of this thing, so slow and deliberate, couples with the language to kind of weave a mesmerizing, melancholy spell. This is not a survival tale of high stakes action setpieces and heightened relationship melodrama. It’s a taciturn dude and his cat figuring it out as they go. At the half way mark, it had eroded away all my complaints with its slow, steady rhythms. The language didn’t get less florid, not at all, but its omnipresence kind of became… atmospheric. I didn’t live in a real, or even realistic world anymore. I was here instead. It was kind of… comforting? It was weird to realize I had been so effectively seduced by the offputting language of this thing. And I was cool with it!

The presentation is consistently inventive and interesting. The days you click on play tricks with layout and text, almost always in unexpected ways. It crucially adds illustrations, very much of the vibe of ‘amateur drawing in his diary’ which is just perfect for the presentation, and crucially signposts when you subsequently revisit certain days. The presentation reinforces and becomes of a piece with the language to really draw you in over time.

Again, but but but. At the halfway point you get a 4th wall break that is so jarringly inconsistent with everything that has come before it's like a slap to the face. I’d been mesmerized by sirens leading me, willingly!, to my doom only to break the spell at a crucial moment. Story, you pushed your excesses in my face up front, then in a cocksure demonstration of your power confidently and slowly won me over anyway. Why would you push me away again? This proved to be hubris it couldn’t recover from. In fact, my choice to do reverse order on the back half was kind of a passive-aggressive dare. “Ok story, you wanna slap me? Let’s see how you fare backwards.”

Now, that choice to Will Smith the reader is clearly deliberate. From post-play discussions, one of the work's themes was (Spoiler - click to show)constructed, edited memories, and the slap arguably provided a dose of cold water showcasing exactly that. The problem is, the florid language ALREADY lent it an air of (Spoiler - click to show)interpreted, artificial construct. I didn't need the metaphorical violence to get that. Maybe if I got the sense that there were dramatic beats of self-deception now stripped from the protagonist this would have stuck better for me, but that's not what I got. What I got was (Spoiler - click to show)one big omission, that was pretty understandable, all things considered and a series of what seemed to amount to minor detail changes. For me, there was no big payoff to this sudden sea change, just a lot of minor nuances.

With the spell broken, the work kind of boxed itself in. In revisiting the past, all the textual excesses were exposed a second time and the additional shading insufficient to dilute them. The graphic inventiveness continued, the drama ramped ever so slightly, but I was lost, and it's really that stunningly jarring 4th wall choice that did it. It doesn’t help that the story doesn’t build to a dramatic or thematic resolution either. I’m not sure how it could, since it ceded control to me (mostly). You get more information, more backstory, but none of it comes together thematically to any kind of crescendo. I actually wonder, had not that one scene freed me, what would have happened to me at the end? If I’d remained under its spell as it wound down like a music box to no finale? Would my wife have found me the next morning, blankly staring at the screen, a shell of my former self?

I kind of have to honor the spell it was able to weave as Sparks of Appreciation. Seamless, technically. Bonus point for inventive presentation, penalty point for that violent mid-story slap and lack of closure.


Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? 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 IFCOMP22 Review

Students of comedy and interested rubber-neckers like me are aware of a joke comedians tell each other called “the Aristocrats.” If you’ve never heard of it, do yourself a favor and watch the documentary about it (on AMZ Prime if that’s your garbage billionaire of choice). Ancillary to my reason for bringing it up, there was so much to Bob Saget most of us didn’t get to see. To the point here though, the joke hinges on the insanely wild disconnect between setup and punchline. Not just conceptually but narratively as well. However long and meandering the setup goes, the punchline is a whipcrack of two words. Thanks to Legally Blonde we can now call this the “Bend and Snap” effect. (I am loathe to dive deeper into “the Aristocrats” than that for those that haven’t seen the doc.)

There is another comedic tool, one we’re all familiar with: repetition. This has a lot of forms - escalation, recontextualization, deadpan emphasis, and its most overworked form, the callback. You’ll see all these variations a lot in televised comedy once you are sensitive to their use. It is tried and true. The callback in particular is the wobbly prop on which improv is built. I’m no statistician but 86.224% of improv skits end with a callback. SNL skits may be higher.

Since I’ve taken the time to steer the conversation this way, you may now be asking, “Reviewer, what if an IF work were to somehow put the two of those comedic devices together?” To which I would coyly touch the corner of my mouth with my pinkie and reply “Perhaps bake them together… IN A CAKE?” And now it is clear to you why I explain comedy instead of DO comedy.

LTEC presents as a vaguely-medieval or renaissance small village bakery setting. Your task is to assemble ingredients in a cake, with the gentlest of “and don’t be too nosy” as a caution. The author knows full well neither the protagonist nor player gives that advice a moment’s consideration. So off you trot, probably whistling, I’m pretty sure whistling, to the miller, farmer, neighbor and church. The presentation, in screen layout, in use of font and illustrations is I’m going with pastoral. It is nicely evocative of the Canterbury Tales of it all. The language is slightly formal but light and breezy, also of a piece.

Until you let curiosity get the better of you and SNAP (Spoiler - click to show)you are treated to an over-the-top horrific excess completely divorced from the pastoral amble you started with. Kind of like a David Lynch movie, if those didn’t start by telegraphing the utter creepiness of their seeming banality. And also played for laughs. So, nothing like a David Lynch movie. (Spoiler - click to show)And you probably die horrifically too. It’s fine, you can restart.

Then the piece builds on itself, echoing, recontextualizing and escalating, so that somehow it gets funnier each time as you try to anticipate where your why-can’t-I-just-resist curiosity pokes free. That’s the game: go fetch the flour! Bend… and Snap. Now the eggs! Bend… and Snap. Now the milk, sugar! Bendbend… and Snapsnap! Fine! you say. I’ll put my blinders on and just make the damn cake! At which point, the finale finally breaks down and invokes a callback that ALSO rockets into a whole new level of narrative leap. BEND AND SNAP M-FER!!! Repetition!

I really liked my playthrough, I thought it built on itself marvelously, and had me trying things I DEFINITELY didn’t want the protagonist to do just to see what would happen. (Spoiler - click to show)I died a lot, learning stuff as I went. Comedy is super-precise though. I couldn’t help but wonder if the building effect that was bouying me along so actively was really just a happy accident of my choices. If I’d made different choices would the repetition not have felt like escalation at all, but deflation? Is every judge getting the same potent dose of comedy? Seems like they wouldn’t have to?

It’s not seamless. There are some screen layout issues where the illustrations (just lovely - also pastoral with an unsettling edge to them) corrupt the choice prompts and make them hard to click. There are narrative paths that reconverge and reuse text in a frictiony way. (Spoiler - click to show)And the restart after dying mechanism. After you’ve experienced the worst of a particular sub-quest, had a good laugh at it, then just want to get your ingredients - it was a fairly clicky prospect that no longer had any surprises for you. And God forbid you (Spoiler - click to show)die after having collected 2 or 3 ingredients. You have to do it all over again! A much better design decision would be to introduce a “Just collect X option” after you’ve managed it one time. It really introduced a drag into the experience.

Lastly a note about Engagement. From an IF perspective, the Achilles’ Heel of these two comedy tropes is that they are appreciated at a Meta, not Immersive level. This is not gentle character-based comedy or acerbic personality driven comedy. These are metajokes which work best when NOT engaged. So Sparks for me!

Quick shout out to that cover picture, btw. Chef’s kiss.


Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 20min, 1/8 endings; 3/? bonus endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy, Notable
Would Play Again? 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 IFCOMP22 Review

Everything about the pre-game hit my brain pleasure centers and put me in this thing’s corner. Grown Up Detective Agency is just a fantastic title. Time jumps? Mystery solving? The phrase “follow the trail of a missing heterosexual”?? It’s like a marskman-level glee sniper.

The work itself did not disappoint. The 2-in-1 protagonist was incredibly well realized. Their dialogue crackled with wit and personality and was simultaneously, recognizably same and different. The time gap shenanigans were not overplayed, just tossed in like precise seasoning. (I laughed out loud at “why are people getting more deliveries?”) I simultaneously felt bad for Kid and understood Adult perfectly. There were a few times I chafed when remembering this world-weary gumshoe was all of 21, but the text was strong enough to get me past that.

Secondary characters didn’t fare as well, but with one exception it was actually fine. Most of the non-protagonist cast was pretty one-dimensional, but in an amusing and winning way. We don’t NEED them to be fully fleshed out, they just need to be fun in their respective roles and most of them very much are. The bros, the bartender, the club owner, the furry… unique and consistent and funny. Even the client filled her role, though I suspect if I’d had more exposure to the other games in the series she would be more fleshed out. We’ll get to the love interest in a minute.

The mystery itself was extremely clever, in the sense of everyone’s motivations making perfect, hilarious sense, however surprising their reveal is. But the mystery-solving gameplay? Less clever. It relies a bit too heavily on NPCs withholding information more for plot than character reasons. It also appeared that player choice in following clues and interrogation tacks ultimately didn’t make a difference. You were always going to be able to visit every clue site, and get relevant info regardless of dialogue choices. I don’t know this is true, I could just be an Ace Detective. Honestly though, it's definitely not that. Which led to a thought mid-game that popped in my head unbidden. “Would I be enjoying this pretty much exactly the same if it were traditional fiction? Yeah, I think I would.” As soon as that thought popped in, I realized I was not engaged because of the interactivity, it was the story and characters. My clicks were less about participating in progress and more like turning pages. Is this a problem? Maybe? Didn’t feel like it in the moment, I was still Engaged in the narrative and enjoying myself immensely.

Really the only narrative shakiness for me was the love interest sub-plot. Characters made admiring assertions about them that I didn’t see corroborated in the narration or the character’s own dialogue. If I can be forgiven the pronouns for a moment, my reaction was basically straight out of Arrested Development. “Her?” Maybe this was a ‘play the previous episodes’ thing too.

As I roll up the score, I am again confronted with the inadequacy of my judging criteria. I was Engaged, no doubt about it. But I feel like the interactivity of IF was inessential and irrelevant to the experience, and I think I want to count that as ‘notable technical intrusion.’


Played: 10/11/22
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Notable
Would Play Again? Probably Not, but the rest of the series, likely

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