Reviews by JJ McC

Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 5min, ah, finished

This is a linear piece of short erotica. Interactivity is mainly used in mouseover phrases to dive deeper into a particular moment, usually to increase the explicitness of the proceedings. Otherwise you are turning pages, and not so many, until done. Oh yeah, your carnal partner is the Devil. Lucifer. Ol’ Scratch (in more ways than one, amirite??). Ok, I am going to endeavor to reign in my inner juvenile as I go forward. History suggests my success will likely be mixed at best, but know it is not from lack of trying.

Writing in general attempts to elicit emotions from the reader. Humor makes us laugh, tragedy makes us ache, horror unsettles us then gives us catharsis. Erotica speaks to a pretty specific and powerful human impulse. But here’s the thing, it ALSO has to contend with centuries of stigma, much of it socio-religiously sourced. Humans have a singular mechanism to deal with this level of discomfort: reductive humor. Especially transgressive humor which sublimates pretty quickly to profanity. Now, profanity is a lot of things, but for most of the world it is NOT a representation of the beauty of its subject. It is a challenging misdirection that derives its charge from its audacious defiance of convention, NOT the power of its purported subject.

So here we have this amazing physio-chemical trick our bodies can do, that in the best case interacts with our emotional wiring to build a transcendent experience of joyful linkage with another human being. But it finds itself wedged between socially indoctrinated shame and trivializing profanity. Finding the sweet spot in between is an insanely difficult needle to thread. It is a testament to the power of human sexuality that so many try.

But wait, effective erotica has still another enemy! While shared in the general among much of the population, carnal specifics are as varied as the people who pursue them. One person’s turnon is another’s kink, is another’s safe word deal-breaker. Specifics matter to those whom find it appealing and ALSO matter to those who don’t! An author really only has once choice here - relinquish hopes of universal appeal in favor of perfectly nailing it for the subculture that appreciates it. (See, look how heroically I resisted ‘nailing it’ riffing!)

To sum up. Thread a narrow needle for a specific segment of like-minded humans. When you write, the only tool you have to find this impossibly narrow path is words. This work has the right idea, I think, in that its prose leans poetic with occasional shots of enticing physical specificity. Poetry has the promise of capturing complicated human interiority, it’s kind of its north star. It’s almost unfair that this work, with all the above challenges, now must additionally contend with a reviewer whose patience for poetic prose is thin. While I did like the contrasting mouse-over unveilings of physicality, the rest of the text left me at arm’s length, just aiming a little TOO high to land.

I do admire that in its choice of partner, the work is explicitly, perhaps defiantly, running directly into the face of erotica’s socio-religious stigma. Couple that with some pleasantly jarring uses of profanity and you have a work that seems confidently determined to play with the boundaries of erotica. If anything, I do think more could have been done with the conceit. The text did not seem to acknowledge or leverage that super-interesting aspect of the pairing beyond some sly physical observations. Lastly, the work was a short description of a post-/pre- coital interlude without much dramatic arc. It actually ended kind of abruptly to my way of thinking, neither cresting nor teasing its forward path.

Note I did not use the word climax in that paragraph even once. I am a giant in my field.

It is a pretty short piece, a portrait of physicality that many of us humans are inherently interested in. It does admirably and effectively challenge the restrictive guardrails of profanity and stigma. Now, it comes down to personal sensibilities, both in prose and carnal preferences. For a work this well composed, I have no doubt there is an audience for THIS mix out there.

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 15min, 3/3 rescues, 2/4 fails, 3/5 awards

This is an entry for a Comp I do NOT judge! Weirdly, as EctoComp’s organizing principle (spooky Halloween fun) is slap in the middle of my road. Hey, I gotta pick and choose though, right? I intend to have a creative life of my own, and not just vicariously latch onto the heady works of my betters, then pepper them with whatever is happening in my brain chemistry at the time! I too have a dark passenger that needs servicing! Anyway, he’s in the backseat now so pepper away I shall.

The premise is exploring an old church and dealing with (Spoiler - click to show)the horror inside. It is basically a linear story, with a variety of details in the player’s hands (including the nature of your companion) that fan out into a series of replayable, collectible achievements. Achievements, more than any other mechanism, encourage ‘collect all the endings’ style of play, so that is how I engaged it.

I found the prose in this one more than it needed to be, in a very good way. In exploring the church, we learn our protagonist might have been raised religious but has since lapsed. The language was very good at conjuring a reverence of iconography and environment that, once seeded, still has a hold on us despite our subsequent spiritual journey. It was a nifty observation and mood to set, unnecessary for the horror that followed, but uniquely well-observed all the same.

After some short ((Spoiler - click to show)optional) exploring, you encounter the antagonist, make some choices and it ends. It is very disciplined, in that it understands replays will be less concerned with exploring and repeated text and thankfully provides for shorter paths to plumb its outcomes on subsequent plays. Of particular interest is the ability to choose the relationship of your companion. This choice opens different climax options and variations. I think my favorite was the (Spoiler - click to show)acquaintance whose fail ending made me laugh out loud.

So yeah, this was a MEIF (multi-ending IF), nicely tuned to its repeat play paradigm, offering a healthy variety of branches and written much better than it needed to be. Worth a play or 8-12!

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: Act I (2x) 5min; Act II (3x) 5min; Act III (4x) 8min

I made the call to review these three Acts together, given their relative brevity and presumed linkages in the author's RGB Cycle. After playing them, I stand by that decision. These are three very short games, linked in formatting and variations on horror themes. In each, you are playing a potential victim’s role in a horror story. The setups are economically conveyed, crisply establishing dramatis personae and blurry setting, not wasting a word on unnecessary details or background. The dramatic resolution of the current scene is the whole focus, and given their dire urgency, appropriately so. Background details are dribbled out organically based on your choices and responses. It is a powerful, very successful approach to horror this short.

In the first act, a wife is confronted by a monstrous (pirate) husband. The second showcases a man trying to find his way out of darkness. The last is a man responding to a panic-inducing revelation. The pieces are thematically linked, though they share no common characters or setups. The ‘cycle’ in question seems deliberately named, and I am going to show my whole ass trying to explain what I could be completely wrong about. The name "RGB Cycle" carries two meanings I think. The more playful of the two is the use of color implicitly and explicitly in the works. On one level it is purely a graphical/presentation choice, implicitly linking characters across these narratives. On another level (and here I risk creating theme in whole cloth), each act is a different shade (ah? ah?) of culpability and agency in monstrous circumstances.

I am running out of non-spoiler room here. Each Act presents a life-or-death scenario of (Spoiler - click to show)predatory murder. Each Act features subtly different gameplay, from dialogue trees to modest puzzle solving, to dark room exploration. Each Act also provides (Spoiler - click to show)a single ending while perhaps head faking multiple endings, as far as my limited playthroughs could determine. When individual games do this, there is clearly a point to it. If the point is not surprising and/or thematically laser focused, it can land with an ‘eh, ok, I get it.’ When a TRYPTYCH of games do this, their impacts expand and multiply. When the genre of those games is horror, that choice rings loud and impactful. In particular, the variance in scenarios and motivations underline that the situations kind of don’t matter. The different roles of the 'colors' underline that personalities don't matter. Motivations and innocence don’t matter. These are all tones of a horrible, horrible rainbow whose overriding arc is impervious to its specific shadings (and most distressingly, impervious to (Spoiler - click to show)attempts to alter it).

That is a really cool conceit, deftly implemented, and landed for me like so much more than the sum of its parts. So yeah, three Acts cresting into an overarching message of effective horror. One review. Would be weird to only review Broadway productions scene by scene, wouldn’t it?

I would be remiss if I didn’t observe that Act II’s title is maybe my favorite IF title of all time. Certainly of those I can remember at the moment.

Boy will my face be RED if the last installments of this cycle contradict what I'm saying here. I'm getting GREEN in the gills thinking about it. And kinda BLUE. At least you know I'm not too YELLOW to post my thoughts!

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 8min, 4 endings

Hitting quite a run of these Short Story IF works. I suspect (and only suspect, not having participated in Jams of my own) Jams encourage this style of IF. Broad puzzly works, with complicated moving parts, player initiative anticipation, and their attendant debug and tweaking are a lot harder to force into a tight development timeline than a controlled linear narrative. Not a dig, linear narratives after all are the PROTO narratives. Should not be a surprise that there is a Jam that acknowledges this directly, the One Choice Jam. Makes the subtext text!

This is a story about mourning and reconciling difficult parent-child relationships. Per the one-choice conceit, you must select one of four artifacts to honor your mother, with mini-sections giving context on each of the choices. Actually, ‘difficult’ isn’t quite the word I want, though it is technically accurate. The story is not more or less difficult than any portrait of two differing lives squashing together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frictions, and further burdened by unfair and/or tone deaf expectations on both sides. Y’know, standard interpersonal relationship stuff.

This is a pretty good representation of that dynamic, I found. The artifacts represent samples of different aspects of this relationship. The One Choice offers conflictory impulses. On the one hand, it asks the player to select only one aspect of the relationship to foreground. A relationship that is explicitly NOT one thing, but a synthesis of them all. The very act of selection betrays the reality of the relationship’s complexity and flattens the fullness of it.

On the other hand, the player is deciding which memories to prioritize, in some way acknowledging that the complexity need not be uniform. That some traits might loom larger and more accurately summarize the relationship than others. Or more importantly for the protagonist, maybe the complexity was noise that distracted from the aspects that loomed largest.

There is a subtle on the third hand here, begging the handiness of the metaphor. Because the player is making the choice, the choice becomes what the player/protag WANTS to be true, almost independent of the deceased. It becomes more about the survivor than the deceased, and more revealing of their needs and wants. This feels like a stunningly well-observed insight into how ALL human relationships work, especially ones relegated to memories and not new experiences.

The work then hinges entirely on this one choice. I find it telling that the denouement is (Spoiler - click to show)not materially affected by the choice - funerals are scripted ritual after all. But the choice itself is what makes all the difference, to the protag and the player’s experience.

Hrm. So while I seem to have successfully avoided narrative spoilers, I have nevertheless completely spoiled the emotional content of the work. Does that count? Is there a mask for that?

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs

At some point, I review enough work from a single artist that my impulse is to turn a current review into a body-of-work overview. I need to resist this impulse, not because Death of the Artist (why would I want that???), but in fairness to the current work. Or perhaps, in fairness to the remaining body of work. To this point, I have admired almost all of this author’s works that I presumed to review, sometimes with qualifiers. Those caveats have given me things to talk about, digest, and clown on a bit.

DOL-OS, for me, was an unqualified, un-caveated success. You’re tying my review hands, work! It presents as an ooooold computer terminal, some archaic dawn-of-windows-like OS. Monochrome (mostly) terminal, visible-pixel fonts, all of it. And the design is just terrifically evocative, down to the messy desktops, the stray game and (working!) internet apps, the trashcan of nearly-deleted files. No clues what to do, just log in (initially as guest) and poke around a bit.

There, you are treated to a wide array of files, images and programs (among a field of ‘corrupted’ ones) that build a mosaic picture of a future dystopia. I cannot stress too highly how well done this is - the graphical presentation is just perfect, from its squiggly ‘corrupted’ files, to its program start screens and tones, to its broken internet. Too, the documents at your disposal are varied, redacted and fragmentary, presenting a picture of life under state paranoia and its often dire consequences. And the puzzles this enables! A clever set of puzzles dialed in specifically to this conceit and environment, integrated in a satisfyingly organic way.

Eventually, you can piece together the password to a user account and… learn of the genesis of the dystopia and perhaps the seeds of its fall. Only then is it clear that you are interacting with (Spoiler - click to show)a distant past, though honestly, the graphical presentation couldn’t clue it more openly. And you engage a final artifact from those times: (Spoiler - click to show)an AI created to render passionless legal judgements, most often capital. At that point you enter a dialogue (on keyboard) until a final, impactful decision.

This was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. Its verisimilitude was top tier, and sucked me in immediately to its world building. I relished the desktop playground constructed for my spelunking. I devoured all the files I could find, for 2/3 of the runtime hopelessly lost in the loose, seemingly disconnected puzzle pieces it was presenting. Then the game masterfully closed the gaps, fit the pieces in a satisfying pop, and built to a final conversation of great import. These kinds of mosaic narratives are catnip for me, and finding one this well done makes my heart sing.

So here is the part of my review where I would back off and whine about some detail, some gameplay artifact, some prose flourishes that didn’t quite… whatever. NOPE. I got none of that here. This is a winner folks, a straight up winner.

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 5min

You guys are really throwing down the gauntlet here, aren’t you? Ever shorter lengths, ever tighter conceits, its almost like you’re daring me to spoil! A dual Jam entry this, it is structured as a letter from sibling to sibling. The interactivity is of the page-turning variety, adding more text to a long letter in small chunks until it is done.

The letter itself is just sad, full of regret for a lifetime of (Spoiler - click to show)neglect and emotional isolation of its addressee. There are depressing details, nicely observed, that sell the specificity of its setting. There are equally depressing omissions on the author’s part that paint a pretty complete picture. A sad, complete picture. I found it effective in its brevity, if a bit of a downer. Which, I expect, is the whole point of it. I mean, writing is exercise in empathy, no? Trying to evoke emotions in others (horror, swooning, catharsis, tragedy, horniness, laughter, whatever) is one of the written word’s most common uses. Until advent of motion pictures, it was the main mass market vehicle for it (not to sell stage productions short). RTWYT15 ably steps into that legacy with its brief, cold shot of empathy. Really nice last line too.

Yah, this is shorter than most of my stuff, but it is scaled to the work, I promise!

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 15min

My second played work from the Goncharov Jam, and hoo boy quite different. This is a tragic love story, where interactivity is used to provide different insights and flashbacks into the central relationship, between a (Spoiler - click to show)gangster and a killer seemingly hired to kill him. An early charge I got from this work was this super loaded phrase in the Content Warning: - Brief cannibalism. LolWUT???

The cover art was actually the FIRST charge I got from this work. It is evocative, compelling, and very much of a piece with the 70’s movie conceit of the jam. So much is packed into that illustration, its dramatic layout, its swirling brush strokes, the dynamic lettering, the details in those swirls, I could stare at it for minutes. I could mount it next to my Vertigo poster as a full partner.

Another aspect of the work that landed precisely for me was its use of inline links. There are three types of them: 1) third person flashbacks; 2) first person internal monologue/observations; 3) advance the story. Each of these has its own interactive paradigm and color cues, very effectively segregating three intertwined narrative threads. If I had a quibble, it is with the default color scheme, which seems at odds both with the purported inspiration and the narrative itself. If it was intended as ironic frisson, it didn’t quite land that way for me. Small quibble, but there it is.

The story itself is a relationship study of two flawed men. The prose used here is quite magnetic, employed in both first and third person to simultaneously flesh out the deep attraction (Spoiler - click to show)and the tragic destiny of their relationship. The language flows from character-focused descriptions of physical and emotional attraction to horrific acts of violence, and does so in a shockingly consistent voice - the juxtaposition enhanced by the language thread that unites them.

It was a compelling read, no doubt, but like another recently reviewed work it engaged the ‘romancing the villain’ trope. It’s a work of fiction, I get that, but real or not there is some level of atrocity where I just stop caring about perpetrator heartache. I don’t want to make too much of it. It’s my own hangup. If you find that trope compelling, it is hard to see how this work would disappoint.

Played: 7/21/24
Playtime: 30min, 8-10 runs lost track, 634/752 (should be more)

A clever little jam entry asking you to optimize your thieving in a ten minute guards-are-coming window. This time, I went straight to the web implementation and had no issues with ADRIFT (in linux). Well, no platform-based issues. Per the rules of the JAM, it was implemented in a two week window which, ok, that buys it some forgiveness. Because for parsers, that is insane.

You are tasked to steal as much as you can carry and get out before you are caught, in a museum with a limited number of objects worth stealing. (Beyond the painting you secured that started the alarm timer.) That’s it! As an optimization game, on repeat plays you will divine the value of each object and figure out how to make away with the most value in your short window, until you decide you are done. It’s an interesting, if shallow logic problem, requiring some classic parser object manipulation.

And some classic parser fighting. Probably as an artifact of the short development time, you will often burn precious time guessing verbs or struggling with incomplete synonyms. Sometimes you quietly drop things you think you are carrying, other times objects are mysteriously not reported. Most vexing, in at least one scenario your final haul is not tallied correctly, where items in your inventory are not present in the final scoring.

Look, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who need to fill in every last cell in Sudoku, and those that are satisfied knowing it is solved once it tips past critical and don’t need to mechanically complete it. I know what you’re thinking. “Given every word you’ve written you are CERTAINLY the former, Reviewer! Just no room for doubt.” Seems likely doesn’t it? But NO! I CAN leave blocks unfilled once solution is certain! I AM FULL OF MYSTERIES AND CONTRADICTIONS, MARVEL AT MY UNKNOWABILITY!!!

So yeah, it ended up being an engaging enough puzzle for its tight scope. I figured out how to get high payoff items, but decided the mechanics of closing the score (including bug and syntax fighting) wouldn’t improve my experience further. Because I am ALSO composed of unimpeachable integrity (as well as so much bacon), I am only reporting a score the game alotted to me, above. As a two-week Jam game, its sins are easily forgiven and the its achievements against that time frame admirable. Also, not for nothing, quite fun.

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 30min

This is an opening chapter demo of a more ambitious project that includes music, voice, graphics and gameplay. Its title/logo was the first clue that I HAD to play it. The logo is insanely well conceived and executed, and an immediate draw to the work. The graphics in the game itself, on the other hand, take some adjustment. They are noticeably cruder than the game’s logo. They are rendered in primitive powerpoint style, with lots of overt geometric shapes, bright, limited palette colors and almost crude artistic short hands. The opening scene, in a ‘real world’ day care center was a bit jarring and off-putting. By the time we transition to the strange ‘Backrooms’ though, I found the art to be an increasingly mood-setting asset. I attribute this to NPC character design. While arguably as crudely rendered, NPC images rely on more fluid, freehandy shapes. They are also wildly imaginative, making for some evocative illustrations that hit far above their tooling limitations. The protagonist too is chockablock with low-res details (like the duck pattern on her jacket!) that combine to multiply- rather than sum-of-their-parts.

It helps a lot that the Backrooms are intended to be offputting and weird. My first impulse was ‘I’m in the Black Lodge!’ (from Twin Peaks), which, if there is a quicker way to get me on a game’s side I’m hard pressed to identify it. That knee-jerk is not totally without merit, as the titular ‘Backrooms’ are explicitly sourced from a memetic construct around weird liminal spaces featured in fan chats and copypasta. This take on the meme was engaging. Physics and logic are second thoughts that may or may not apply, moment by moment. I was as much put in the mind of Wizard of Oz as Twin Peaks in the unnaturally comfortable introduction and engagement of the deeply weird. You are introduced to a coterie of allies, then set about trying to return to earth. Complications (and villains) ensue.

Gameplay is pretty limited. There are a few moments of choice, but it is unclear how much this impacts the broad strokes of the story. Mostly you are clicking links that turn ‘pages’ (or advance powerpoint slides?). The focus of this demo chapter is orienting the player on the strange world they will be exploring. Or more like DISorienting, amirite? Thankfully, the narrative is propulsive and off-kilter enough that it speeds forward past some limited (so far) NPC characterizations and occasionally unconvincing dialogue. In particular, the protagonist adjusts to her new situation questionably fast, though frankly this choice helps the story’s mood and forward momentum more than it hurts. I found it to be an engaging read of constant surprise whose shortcomings are blink-and-you-miss-them. (And may be mitigated in a longer narrative anyway.)

All that said, there is one aspect that felt neglected. The game describes itself as an otome, which the internet dutifully informed me is a female-centric romance game, often characterized by choice-based romantic/emotional gameplay. The fact that I needed this explained might make me not the best critic here. Notwithstanding my genre ignorance, the romance aspect of the game was completely missing in this opening chapter. Now, given the plot events careening through this demo devoted to establishing the weird, weird setting, I agree there wasn’t really time for that. It ALSO means though that the demo doesn’t really give a taste of gameplay presumed to follow. Is this going to discourage fans of otome? Dunno, can’t speak to that, but feels like a missed opportunity in a demo.

All in all, the graphical and setting charms of this work far exceed any other quibbles. Apparently, there is voice acting and of course subsequent chapters to follow. Unindoctrinated to the draw of otome as I am, cannot say for sure that it will ultimately be for me or not, but ‘Find Love in the Black Lodge’ is a sly way to get me to try!

Played: 7/20/24
Playtime: 5min, lost count of playthroughs, so many

Just when I think IF has shown me all it has to offer, works still manage to surprise me. Ok, that’s a statement of unearned hubris. This work though, is a one-conceit jam whose hook is discovering that one conceit. And that one conceit is surprising and unique, once discovered. So yeah, another work whose impact can really only be discussed with spoilers. Here’s what I’m gonna do: try it without, then clarify that exercise in opacity behind spoiler protection.

This is a conversation tree of sorts, where you are selecting a word at a time until you reach critical mass and a sentence is revealed. It lives completely in replays, where the narrative (such as it is) is assembled from multiple, multiple endpoints. It momentarily gives the appearance of agency, but is quickly revealed to be an excavation exercise not a building one. The player is more assembling the variations in their head than guiding their creation. It is a unique formula I had not seen before and ultimately the revelation it builds to is unexpected if not necessarily dramatic. It also has a point of view on its surprise.

Um, it is default Twine also? I think I am out of non-spoiler gas. Ok then.

(Spoiler - click to show)As the final sentences multiply, the player gradually realizes these are all post excerpts from an unnamed, toxic online discussion thread. The sentences are curated specifically to capture the anonymous rancor, the self-righteous high grounding, and petty ad hominem attacks of its inspiration. The surprise understanding of what we are reading is the game’s one conceit, and the surprise is effective. It is also… incomplete? No, that’s not the word. Lacking? Hmm, no. Unsatisfying? Kind of. What it does well is capture sentences of generic application, such that devoid of context they still ring completely true to the conceit. There is also some slyness to the idea that common word choices can lead to very different outcomes, hinging on a single word. This itself feels like a condemning comment on its inspiration, and not an unwarranted one. But because it is devoid of context, it is unclear (Spoiler - click to show)WHOSE rancor is being skewered. The likely intent is that ALL of it is, but some of the entreaties actually change pretty significantly if interpreted with one context vs another. Meaning, some sentences come off as earnestly high ground, but whose meaning could curdle pretty quickly in specific context, and it is not clear the author sees that. It has the effect of coming across as authorial reproach rather than cold documentation. That perhaps unintended undercurrent, for me, made the work more difficult. Intellectually, I presume the author does not intend this, that the lack of context alone should telegraph the intent. (Spoiler - click to show)But the phrasing of some it is somehow… sympathetic? In a way that suggested to me some amount of ‘Monday Morning Zinger’ agenda, like some phrases were more right than others. That language artifact, which I presume is what it is, diluted what could have been the work’s more powerful message for me.