Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This is a melancholy work about Francis Bacon, the troubled violence artist. I know the blurb denied this but I am unconvinced. The player is in a small, three room museum, examining three triptychs spanning the artist’s career. In a quite literal sense, the game is a dialogue with the works, thematically tied to Bacon’s demons and how those demons impacted his relationship with his longtime muse/model/lover. Ok, yeah it’s nominally about the muse, but Bacon himself is the dominant force over all of it.

The most prominent feature of this work is the writing. It is soaring and often sublime. The game is strongly NPC-driven, and between the crazy-broad conversation branches, the subjects you are steered to pursue and the nifty voices of the characters it is Engaging right out of the gate. Here’s some examples that really resonated with me. If you don’t recognize these quotes as top tier writing, blame me for yanking them from context:

“I will be his father and his patron and his lover and his lover and his lover and so many more of his lovers, and one day I will be him. It is inevitable, as much as I wish it weren’t.”

“That’s why The Underworld, or Hell, or whatever you want to call it works, you know. Because you have no sense of solidarity.”

The game also performs a minor miracle… actually I don’t want to call it that. It implies some kind of providence or accidental confluence. The author’s wordsmithing talent and painstaking word-by-word precision has rendered deeply affecting, wide-ranging, almost natural conversations on super heavy topics of mortality, trauma, art, unhealthy sexuality, and corroding relationships. I know, right? With parser-IF NPCs!

There are two tricks the author leverages, and again I don’t want the word ‘trick’ to cheapen the achievement. Firstly, the use of TOPICS provides a quickly-disappearing gentle steer into all that great dialogue. Second, the nature of the NPCs provides just the barest distortion that papers over whatever uncanny-valley glitches might be there. These choices ensure the dialogue shines bright without the slightest scuff. And boy howdy, the stories they tell are complex, tragic and affecting. By the time I had plumbed the depths (breadths?) of the triptychs, I was ensnared in the tragic history and surrounding discourse.

And then the thread ran out? The art narrative had pulled me along with ever deepening ideas, drama and tragedy, and then kind of stopped without climax. (Or perhaps a tragically understated one.) Had the game ended there, it would have been fine. Had the painting climax been echoed or integrated into a larger ‘real world’ climax it would have been better, and we might be talking Transcendent. What it did instead was segue to a different kind of wry but simple puzzle collection.

The story all along was signposted by ACHIEVEMENTS. I think I understand this choice. It kind of refreshingly kept things from becoming too self-serious and provided a teasing counterweight when exploring the paintings. Buuut they also triggered my inner Ash Ketchum, and so I started chasing other achievements. Much more mundane ones. And I interacted with other NPCs that didn’t have the… distortions… that the paintings did and felt just the slightest off because of it. I don’t want to be too down, these mini-puzzles and real human interactions were sparky and joyful and fun. Objectively, stronger NPC implementations than 95% of parser games. The (Spoiler - click to show)barista’s reaction to the philosophical topic list was particularly giggly. But they were qualitatively a step down from the central story of the art (barring one interaction with the (Spoiler - click to show)guard that DID subtly resonate in a complex hopeful/creepy way).

So I’m left with a work that was deeply Engaging for 1/2 of its runtime, then downgraded to the finish line. This seems unfair as I’m thinking through it though. The second half was actually Engaging as a parser puzzle, it just wasn’t the SAME Engaging as the first half. After expertly cycling me into an affecting dramatic state, it asked me to take a breath, then just play around a while. Am I really complaining that I had to deal with two different flavors of Engaging IF? I think I have to acknowledge that Engaging+ added to Engaging- is still Engaging. Yeah, maybe I could have wanted more connection between the two halves but maybe I should just shut up and not look an IF gift horse this wonderful in the mouth. Engaging it is.

Two final disconnected notes. Don’t limit yourself to provided topics, these characters have DEEP wells of things to say. Beyond the tour de force dialogue implementation, the whole package is the most robust amateur parser implementation I’ve seen to date, in terms of fully implemented nouns and organic ‘can’t do/talk about that’ messages. I have the vague sense there were glitches around characters remembering-but-not-remembering you, but have no specific memory of them. Vanishingly close to Seamless.

Played: 10/3/23
Playtime: 2hrs, 12/17 achievements
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, ~Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Yes, more achievements please!


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

What a lovely palate cleanser this is. A short, unadorned Twine game about thieving, that is to say, finding. Fine, heisting. I had to laugh out loud when my chosen thief Quinn noted biscuits and gravy were their favorite. Mine too, I see you Quinn! Now, my position on felines is publicly documented so I won’t weigh in on the client. Suffice to say, for me and Quinn a job is a job. After being given your target, off you go to improvise some crime! A quick glimpse of the city (I was partial to the pocket museum) then down to tacks.

You explore a 5x5 grid of Egyptian displays, avoid cameras and cops, engineer the crime and get out. In general the text is terse and tight. Not a lot of flair or adjectives, just some concise tangible details to set locations in mind. A few nice environmental changes on revisits so things don’t get too static. A little bit of character work with a tour guide. All of it with a light, deft hand. Don’t want to spoil any of it, but exploration is rewarded and you eventually cobble up a multi-phase plan and execute. I appreciated the gentle nudging the game provided. Notwithstanding the clearly signposted puzzle elements, the player still feels some agency and initiative thanks to the neutral text. Things progress with light tension. If your plan fails to disarm the alarm, you have a timer on your escape (which ups the tension!). The puzzles are logical and satisfying if not brain burny, then you get to see the achievements screen and done. I might have wished for a little last minute sass from O’Brien, or Agatha(!) but success is its own reward I suppose.

Only one possible bug found - after a few tries at using (Spoiler - click to show)a thieving box it disappeared from my inventory, and a cursory cycle through the museum did not turn it up. Also not enough text detail (Spoiler - click to show)to make camera positioning clear, though in retrospect I have a pretty good idea what to do. Probably lost some endgame points for those, but had enough other tools to complete the job.

It was start to finish a breezy, pleasant outing. Just a bit too slight to be Engaging, enough personality to Spark, a great way to shake the weight of some longer games.

Played: 10/2/23
Playtime: 35min, 82/100 after some timer backups
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless
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

IFCOMP23 had a weirdly prominent nautical subcurrent. In recognition, this is the inauguration of the review sub-series “Here There Be Poopdecks.” We'll kick off the sub-series with a shipboard murder mystery. The setup is this - two down on their luck brothers find work aboard a foreign cargo vessel, only to be accused of the murder of the only person that speaks their language! Now one brother must solve the mystery before they arrive in port and are committed to foreign justice. Also, it is an airship. Still counts!

It is a confidently compact setup, both in the tight map and the crisp text renderings of the environs. Maybe a little too crisp? The first puzzle, getting tools to escape your quarters, is straight forward enough. But the timing is a little wonky. There is a reveal about the nature of your boat that feels surprising, except it is so underplayed that it initially reads as buggy text. It is not actually clear if the author intends it as a reveal, or they believe you already knew.

Great swaths of the game are like that. My initial impression was that the world building was half-baked. But the more I played, the more I realized the world building was actually pretty robust, it was just communicated through oddly underplayed or weirdly timed details. It made it hard to get a bead on what was happening, and made the puzzles harder than their construct.

During another early sequence, you are navigating a space with two parallel hallways fore/aft. To do so requires counter-intuitive ‘port/starboard’ directions to get into the right passage, then ‘fore’ to continue. Particularly when avoiding speedy NPCs, its just enough to trip up. At other points, when handling containers, the text refers to them by contents you haven’t seen yet. You don’t meet the crew exactly, they breeze past you with vanishingly small expository text. There is machinery maddeningly, opaquely described. It all added up to a first hour and three quarter where I made slow, steady progress, but often wasn’t clear why things were working or failing, and only a hand drawn map keeping the geography clear. If asked to stop and rate at an hour and a half, I likely would have rated it a mechanical exercise of clever puzzles and inadequate (and occasionally misleading) text.

But something happened with 15 min to go - the cumulative weight of the drip-fed world building, the opaque NPC movements, the clues that had been slowly accreting, even the arbitrary-seeming game mechanics suddenly crystallized. I hit some sort of informational critical mass and the machine of the game revealed itself to me, and it was pretty cool! On the heels of that revelation came a second: the author had super effectively put me in the shoes of a man stranded in a society not his own, outside looking in. It was kind of opaque to me because it was kind of opaque to him too! Slow clap, author, slow clap.

Unfortunately, these revelations were not in time to finish the game, at two hours it remains unfinished. I had spent too much time adrift to call it engaging, but under the wire the game sparked white hot.

I would fix those premature contents messages though.

Played: 10/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Buzzer beating Sparks of Joy, recasting Notably Buggy descriptions into Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Most likely yes, now that I finally feel the click.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

It occurs to me that due to some accident of providence over the last year I have seen very few ChoiceScript games. The ones I have seen have had respectable polish, so I’m starting to think of it as the luxury car of IF authoring brands. OKS makes a case for itself here early. The graphical components utilize a crisp iconography that quickly establishes a visual identity. There are some very nifty tricks with font (I particularly liked what I called “arcane crossword puzzle font”) to build atmosphere.

There is even a generous dose of sound and music, albeit somewhat less successful. The pages of text tended to be long. Not a problem, the work had a lot to say. When the sound mapped to top-of-the-page text it was pretty ok - the sound punctuated the text you were reading. When the sound was relevant to a passage halfway down the page it created incongruity. At the top of the page, you got an irrelevant noise that only made sense a few seconds further down. Notwithstanding that artifact, the presentation overall made for an ambitious package.

The ambition seemed to be promised in gameplay as well - a pregame peek at the status screen showed an RPG-like character page full of intriguing stats, customizable descriptions and character background.
You’ve set quite the expectations here, game!

The setup is an encroaching Arthurian Apocalypse with only polo players to save us! THE HORSE KIND OF POLO!! This work inaugurates a Heroic Polo genre!! I mean, huge points for innovation there.

Our protagonist is suffering some outre’ incidents that quickly escalate. Actually, quickly is not the word I want to use there. The work does something I admire in theory: it attempts to have you define and customize your character via narrative. Theory. So that immense character sheet I mentioned earlier? You go through page after page of text and selections to fill out that sheet. Its not enough to know I have brown hair, I need to define the SHADE of brown. The process took 1/2 hour before I could leave my apartment. The whole time, I am given tantalizing hints of the drama to come, and presumably my reactions to it are helping frame characteristics, but it got chafing fast. You’re telling me about all this cool stuff, but I can’t engage that until my eye color is established?

Then finally, you are off to polo practice (I know! Such a WEIRD detail, I love it!) and introduced to some supporting cast, then more plot prologue. At this point I want to stop describing the details of the plot, though I will say I found the urban magic/horror aspects pretty effectively done. Instead, let’s talk about pacing. ChoiceScript is, unsurprisingly built around choices. Each generous page of (pretty well-written) text ends with a series of possible choices. Select one and presumably some game effect will payoff down the road. These games live and die on the choices offered, and they are DEEP here! With every development you are given a broad array of nuanced (and often funny) responses to choose from, and your choices are acknowledged deftly on the next page! It really does feel like the narrative is listening to your choices, regardless of the stakes, and that is gratifying. But. Then you get the NEXT dense page of text with a deep array of choices. And the next. The effect of all those words, and evaluating and selecting among nuanced choices, is to slow things to a crawl.

As the prologue creeps forward, another curious narrative choice was made. Now, given the deep decision tree that got me there I can’t be sure it wasn’t my own choices that boxed me in, but when the action started in earnest… the game sidelined me. I was a spectator while NPCs did all the work. Sure, I still had lots of words to read, and decisions to make, but I couldn’t DO anything. If I tried, the narrative quickly shut that down.

Part of it was a (Spoiler - click to show)mind-control attack of some kind. The mechanism for this was kind of cool: you are presented with a full slate of choices, but only able to SELECT what the bad guy (or circumstance) allows. I could SEE the other options but was powerless to choose them. The author was super clever with variations on this, sometimes for drama, sometimes for laughs. As GAMEPLAY, when I was struggling to do anything, it was taunting me.

This sidelining happened not just during real peril by the way. THE GAME DIDN’T EVEN LET ME PLAY POLO WITH MY TEAM.

There were some other odd choices: remember that character sheet? Yeah, you were still filling it out, even when the action got going. In particular, as you were fighting to get involved with the plot, suddenly you need to pause and choose a secret backstory. Boy did that chafe. Not just because the choice is completely orthogonal to the urgent action around you, but also because at this point you have painstakingly established a clearly defined character, and now you are asked to decide how that was partially a lie! You might imagine a narrative where that was a cool twist. Maybe if I felt any kind of agency, or if it was related to any action in progress to that point it might have.

So two hours in I had exhaustively established a character and some NPC relationships, been along for the ride in some actions sequences and got PARTWAY through an infodump background exposition. And never really saw those character sheet stats employed in a meaningful way. You ask too much of me game. I liked the writing, found the choice architecture often very clever, respected the graphical presentation, LOVED BEING A (what??) POLO PLAYER ((Spoiler - click to show)even though yeah, that’s just an excuse to get on a horse later, innit?) but eventually time and my patience ran out.

The game on display is so much bigger than the 2 hrs of IFCOMP. It is not well served by the judging limit. There were lots of in-the-moment sparks and a seamless implementation, but I am assessing a penalty point for infuriating slow-motion player impotence. If I’m honest, even if it turned out to be a 100hour game, 2 hours is just too long to get where I got. At least I made it to the (Spoiler - click to show)amazing pop culture Merlin list. I at least got that. But c’mon, you coulda let me play polo.

Played: 10/2/23
Playtime: 2hrs, infodump w/ (Spoiler - click to show)Merlin
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless, penalty point for 2 hrs of escalating impotence
Would Play After Comp?: It is hard to imagine having that much free time.


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

So human sexuality, that’s a huge thing innit? Nearly universal in concept, infinitely unique in application. I am hard pressed to think of a tougher genre to write broad-audience-targeted fiction in - the variations are SO numerous and SO personal finding the magic combo that hits broadly with an audience is statistically laughable. The easiest, most knee-jerky response is going to be “works for someone I guess, not for me.” Gonna resist that. The OTHER easiest response would be a throaty “I’ll be in my bunk.” Will set that aside too.

RBLPQ does a few things right, out of the gate. By choosing a sexually aggressive female protagonist, we simultaneously acknowledge, parody and skirt eggregiously toxic male sexuality which looms like a cancer over a lot of sexual entertainment. It also fundamentally understands that humor and sexuality are great partners. Cultural shame is best combated by reminders of how FUN healthy sexuality can be, and humor is the weapon of choice in that war. Here, the humor on display so far rests on two pillars: 1. The over the top Alpha behaviors of our heroine and 2. Juxtaposing stilted “olde Englifh” fantasy-speak with brazen, in-your-face sexual descriptions.

I found the first to be consistently pretty good - her bog-simple motivations and confidence are consistently entertaining if not laugh out loud. All her NPC interactions were fun, but in particular her distaste for NPC backstory brought some earned chuckles. She is helped by at least one legitimately entertaining plot twist that she gets to react to. We are paired with a fun protagonist, inhabiting an engaging narrative.

For the second pillar of humor, well, assume spoiler mask is ALSO NC-17 mask for this review. You’re going to want to find these funny in close proximity: (Spoiler - click to show)“I shall plan thee a grand feast,” she spake. “Every accoutrement and revel shall be accounted for, and naught awry.” “his girthy, slick schlong flopping down on his meaty pubic mound with a satisfying plop…” And here, I think the composition choices maybe undermined the work a bit. When it worked best was long stretch of florid, then short punch of profane. That’s a winning combo. Too often, I felt the reverse - long passages of profane with tepid thou’s and thee’s peppering the outskirts. There was one encounter in particular where the sexual acts were described WITH the olde Englifh flourishes. That actually worked kind of ok until it fell apart, reminding me what a tightrope walk this was.

The sex scenes themselves were also employed unevenly. They were most successful when erotic activity was actually incorporated into the gameplay as puzzles. Ok, I don't know where your mind is going now, but hear me out. You’re playing IF, right? If you just want raw titillation boy has the internet got you covered, no problem, you’d probably be there right now. But playing IF it is not unreasonable to say, ‘ok, but I’d like something in an interactive option.’ Too often, it felt like the erotica was pasted on the side, separate from more standard ‘find the…’ ‘give the…’ ‘use the…’ parser puzzles. For long stretches it felt like big mode switches: EROTICA ON, IF OFF; EROTICA OFF, IF ON.

Even when the game leveraged its unique power, it had a new challenge: how do you make IF sex fun? Humor is the key there, and I consistently felt it was ALMOST but not quite there. See, a less disciplined reviewer would make an ‘edging’ joke here, but not me, nossir. I am too dignified for that.

Now all of this is circling the most challenging issue of this game: gameplay. There are a lot of parser implementation issues, most of them Classics. Incomplete nouns are everywhere ("A few low, wooden benches were set about the place, … " >look under bench “She couldn’t see any such thing.”), NPCs are not described as being present in room, making it a shock when they speak. Exits that appear in banner are not implemented. Debug messages still in the game? (>x crate “Insert uh.”) There are inadequately clued puzzles ((Spoiler - click to show)one character is interested in a trade, but the descriptions don’t really gel and it gets solved with trial and error TBF, that particular puzzle was wryly amusing.) You are wearing a cloak that does not appear in inventory, nor can you manipulate it. Not seeing a ladder you just climbed. YOU HAVE WINGS BUT CANNOT FLY. I think maybe if the technical issues were more polished, the work could breath a little better.

In the end the amusing protagonist and plot couldn’t quite escape the implementation issues and text choices to provide the Sparks of Joy I wanted them to. And yeah, I promised I wouldn’t but the erotic content “works for someone I guess, but not for me.”

Played: 10/1/23
Playtime: 1hr, 50min, 2nd Act stuck above public house
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable Implementation gaps
Would Play After Comp?: Unlikely, not my kink

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/5/23
Playtime: 20 min, finished 76%

Off to the races! Using a personal randomizer for Spring Thing, and it did right by me. Great game to launch the Thing with. BMUS is a wryly funny word game. It’s what happens at a pitch meeting when 8 people are brainstorming, and seven say “Whatever we do, we have to avoid Guess-the-Verb. People hate that.” Then the eighth says, “Team, I got it! The game IS Guess the Verb!” I am just giddy at the subversive audacity.

Ultimately it is a word game/vocabulary test. But if a spoonful of sugar famously helps the medicine go down, what does a cascading deluge of sugar do? Makes you cackle like a rooster in a madhouse is what. You launch from one terse absurdist scenario to another with the perfect amount of lubricating text: almost none. And you guess the verb. All you know is, it starts with B.

The tone is just perfect for this game. It opens with over-the-top exaggerated denial of the obvious that builds on itself recklessly. I am a sucker for blithe denial of the obvious when it’s not being used to corrode democracy. Then it smoothly shifts gears to serially casting NOT familiar characters into absurd scenarios, all to wring that B-verb out of you. I wasn’t counting, but you get 10-15 of these and you’re done!

This game knows exactly what it is, clicks along crisply, delivers the chuckles, and finishes without overstaying. Like an appetizer at a 5 star restaurant - it’s gone in a moment, but lovely while it lasts.

Only a few notes on polish: I found early inclusion of images set a graphical expectation the rest of the game did not deliver on. Would strive for a more consistent application: more or none. Really dug the combination of hyper links and parser input. Also liked the text color fading for older input and bright for new, though in a few instances the new text faded with the old. Would have gone with icons instead of loose “I” (inventory) “L” (look) and “U” (undo) letters in the corner. Nits really, a really smooth presentation.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful.
Polish: Smooth.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I would focus on making failure more fun. The PASS capability is nice, keeps things from dragging which would be death for this thing. In one instance, I failed to guess, hit pass, and the transition text obliquely let me know what it was I failed to guess. It brought a knowing laugh at myself - of course that was the word, dummy! It seemed very much in the spirit of the game but I did not see that again. (Yes, I PASSed more than once.) I would do that every time. Alternately or additionally, I might add some code to detect multiple failed guesses (say, 3) then have one of the NOT Enterprise crew chime in with a hint. Both seem in the light spirit of the game, and would smooth out the drag of “I just can’t think of it!”

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/5/23
Playtime: 40 min, 26+ Endings

Talk about right-footing me. Something about “An enthralling tale with more than 25 endings!” when the title proclaimed 26 just tickled me. The intro screen further cemented my good will by providing 4 hilariously disparate possible endings, only to sadly tell me no, those don’t count. Between the instructional text and these examples, the stakes and purpose of the game were communicated economically and amusingly: FIND ALL THE ENDS!!

After that it is a click-select exercise to explore all the narrative branches. Some very short, others long and extended, only a few reconvergent. The scope of the game is about right to keep all branches in your head, almost. Like most time loop games, after reading text once, you madly click past text on subsequent cycles to get to the new stuff. A bit of a chore for long paths, but the game is smart about rewarding your perseverance with skip-ahead, jump to branch-point, and achievement unlocks to keep things moving after you collect enough endings.

There is ample wit on display. Which is about the coldest, least convincing way to convey the pleasant humor of the piece. (“Oh really, ample wit you say? Well ha ha HA indeed.”) It was at its best when it ramped from mundane to transcendent dizzyingly fast. I chortled aloud at (Spoiler - click to show)“Have you touched the divine?” Mostly I was just kind of smiling as I went.

At about the 30min mark, I started questioning myself as I continued, “Is this too long for what it is?” Just asking that question felt like a yes. The more interesting question is, “Why so?” Here’s what I came up with: the early promise of the game was 26 wildly divergent endings and paths, the humor residing in the disparity. I didn’t count, but it felt like the truly disparate endings (and make no mistake, they’re in there!) amounted to a third or less, the rest being variations on them. Meaning you get a few unique, then 4-6 variations of one, 2-3 another, 3-5 of another and so on. To me, this chipped away at the early promise enough to let me feel the time. And some of these variations were noticeably less ambitious than others. If they had been more audaciously varied, I think it would better justify the length.

The work was well polished, no noticeable bugs. Most interactions are single-screen easily digestible chunks. The early warning screen was notably longer, and by notably I mean I didn’t realize I needed to scroll for an embarrassingly long time. Otherwise, definitely a smooth presentation.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Comedic Time Loop
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would invest in committing to the bit: reduce or even eliminate the endings that are modest, reasonable variations. The more tortured the logic, the funnier it’ll be. Just test myself to see how many unconnected bananas end states and scenarios I could pack in. More than 25!

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: 4/6/23
Playtime: 1hr, in tutorial mode with Sneak off, escaped!

Ok just up front, let me say I’m going to do my best to stay neutral on this but you should know my biases:

1. I’m a TADStan. Full bore. While clearly pushing me one way, there is also some back pressure in that I can’t help but constantly think ‘ooh, nice use of OutOfReach Container object…’ ‘aah, they maybe implemented it this way…’ ‘ehh that prepositional variable is off…’ which fights engagement.
2. Triggered is too strong a word. Maybe Tweaked. I get tweaked by ‘things stalking you’ games. It gives me anxiety way out of proportion for a guy typing on a keyboard.
3. The TADS author group is populated by a wonderful cast of Mensch and SuperMensch. Even among that Menschy population, Joey stands out among the Menschiest.

What I’m saying is you will have to judge how successfully I put all that aside. Anyway, this is surely the best game of the Thing, probably the year, maybe all time.

No, let me try to run at that again.

The setup is, you are a new life form in a sci-fi closed base setting, pushed into a life and death game of cat and mouse by a chatty but mostly unseen Adversary. WHY ARE WE ALWAYS THE MOUSE IN THESE THINGS??? There are two supporting docs you should absolutely secure before playing. A map and a rule book. I was a bit put off by the rule book. It is certainly complete. It also throws a LOT of information, gameplay reveals, and commands at you, before you have any game context. I definitely felt information overload reading it, the anxiety of needing to remember lots piling on my ‘I don’t like being prey!’ anxiety. Which is weird, because I am also a board game guy, and it certainly is not excessive in those terms.

On the other hand, the map is both cool and vital. Don’t try to play without it.

After the preliminaries, you wake up from your sci-fi cocoon and must parser your way to freedom! Despite the nervous wreck it made me, the stalking aspect is absolutely crucial to this game. Between that and the Turn Counter (or, as I though of it, the Stalker Progress Tracker) you are immediately focused on optimizing everything you do. Given I was playing in baby mode, maybe I didn’t need to be so nervous but whatever. The environs are economically described, in the sweet spot of having personality but not weighing down with repetition. There are some ‘gamey’ aspects (like letter coding segments of corridor) that at first feel weird to read, but quickly settle into transparent map orientation shorthand. Though god forbid you don’t have a map. (To be fair, there are accessibility hooks I did not test drive that may alleviate this.)

I really dug the parkour element of the game, though I chafed at calling it ‘parkour.’ Practically speaking, what it amounts to is finding hidden areas and exits in rooms by scrambling over stuff. That’s cool! As a word though, ‘parkour’ evokes a kinetic, acrobatic dance of sorts, and this is not that. This is finding hidden areas and exits. What it does do is make even the most spartan of rooms intriguing with possibility, and often rewarded! There seemed to be a few glitches once you parkoured (yes, I will be making up verbs in this series of reviews too), specifically around what was visible/reachable from different perches, but rarely and nothing fatal. At least on baby mode.

Two more quick quibbles. One, I think the Adversary needs just a little more spice. The impulse to let the reader’s imagination do the work is good, as I think we are meant to be unclear whether they are human or not. (Sidebar, there are some enigmatic things you can find that beg all kinds of intriguing questions.) It would be even better with just a few unexplained and disconcerting details. “The voice somehow catches when making glottal sounds, in a way human tongues never do.” “Every now and then, a dragging sound accompanies the footsteps.” “I catch a glimpse of cold, unblinking eyes. I’m not sure if it’s a trick of the light or if they glowed with a frigid inner light.”

Second, I think the search puzzle could be a little harder. Thanks to a quirk of the randomizer, (Spoiler - click to show)I found over half my escape items in one place! Though maybe I shouldn't complain about being Too Easy on Baby Mode.

Yeah, I’m overcompensating on the negative. I really had a blast playing this, and in particular liked the additional nuance of the parkour mechanism. Notwithstanding the mechanic’s name, it made what could have felt limiting and sterile breathe a bit with its own vibe. And I didn’t mention the stealth capabilities which were also crucial to this! You can manage or be tripped up by slamming doors. You can peek into and around areas before bumbling into your pursuer. There are atmospheric cues that help you gauge how close your pursuer is. All of these really push you into the role in an effective way and make the game feel more fair. While I didn’t include my IFCOMP metric of 'Would play after comp?' I definitely will.

Prolly also devour the source code like a novel.

Spice Girl: Scary Spice
Vibe: Controlled Panic
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? YES, oh gods of my fathers! Lo’ the clouds didst part and the skies were rent with sweet music… sigh

Feels like I took the long way around on this gag.

Gimme the Wheel! While spicing the villain seems an obvious next step, if it were me I think I would instead focus on internalizing the rule book into the game. Not just cut and pasting it into HINTS/HELP, ( I mean definitely do that, but the author seems to already have that planned) but introducing mechanisms through early gameplay. “He’s almost caught me! As I duck into the Lab, I reflexively SLAM the door behind me. I hear his satisfying cry of pain and the sound of feet staggering. That gave him pause, I reflect with momentary satisfaction. What do I do with the bought time?” If narrative alone can’t get the job done, “(I have unlocked SLAM DOOR!)”

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: 4/7/23
Playtime: 3hrs, finished, good guess author!

IF in Google Forms. What even is my life right now? Of course, in five years, I’ll be typing “Live IF via GMAI, what even is my life right now?” I guess I should enjoy the ignorant bloom of youth. (Because that phrase TOTALLY applies to me.) Look even if Kuolema were terrible, the chutzpah of a Google Forms implementation alone would rack up goodwill points from me.

But its really not. Terrible I mean. Yes, it’s a Clive Cussler-esque abandoned mystery ship carrying a terrible secret on stormy seas. But it’s a pretty good abandoned mystery ship carrying…etc. Roger Ebert famously said (paraphrasing) “It’s not WHAT it’s about, it’s HOW it’s about it.” And Kuolema has a long laundry list of things it does really well. For one, it feels like a well thought out ship, inhabited by a well-thought out crew. Every location has a reason for being, its absent inhabitants real motivations and impact on their environs. The puzzles have at least some rational motivations, though lordy the code pads. The mystery is capably rendered with the requisite twists that satisfy, if not amaze. The overarching plot is that nearly impossible sweet-spot balance of grounded and goofy. All of this is upper tier IF stuff.

I think though, its not so secret strength is its art. The rendered style is moody, a little dark, but consistent and immersive. Most especially the artifact and document art, which smoothly integrates you into the experience. You get to see corporate letterhead, “hand” written journals and notes, technical manuals, promotional posters, scientific and casual computer screens, and all of it feels perfectly designed.

In most ways, it might as well be a worthy choice-select IF from any number of systems. So let’s talk about the strengths and challenges of the GF implementation.

The game goes out of its way to, ungenerously, apologize, or more generously, set player expectations for the GF experience. The first caveat that drew extreme skepticism from me, was the statelessness of it: the game would only intermittently remember your inventory, or things you knew. You would have to track them on your own, in a separate document. Pencil? Paper? Like a STREET CORNER BOOKIE??? But man did I get whiplash turning around on that. Turns out, the quickest way to get me to engage deeply is to write stuff down. I actually knew this about myself, I often map as I play, but to be told I HAD to was a shock. Regardless, once I accepted the inevitable, I got into a rhythm of game screen/note screen that was just fun and immersive. Look, spreadsheets are a hobby of mine, leave me alone.

So points for GF on that one. Definitely making a limitation into a strength. On the downside, statelessness also meant that revisiting locations, you were often treated (with minimal shading) to outright repetition. You can have the same conversation as many times as you want, (mostly) without acknowledgement that you’ve had it. To be fair, GF is far from the only platform to see games with this weakness, and even games that successfully mitigate it, do so with caveats of their own. Minimal points off.

I think I’d call it an unmitigated success, except for one thing that bugged me all out of proportion. In order to advance the story, most pages would close with a radio button list of options, and a BACK/NEXT button pair. Meaning every time you wanted to move on, you needed two clicks: radio-select option, next button. That is twice as many clicks as necessary. It didn’t help that oh so frequently a page down was necessary too. It sounds small but man did it grate! I really enjoyed the game, but I think I would have enjoyed it twice as much with half as many clicks. Could GF really not support direct links there? Or was this a perverse choice by the author? What did I DO to them???

As far as polish, the artwork and page layout lent a really professional air to the proceedings. The only thing that kept it from being gleaming was some wonkiness in the progress tracker. I think maybe I solved a few puzzles “out of order” and got to watch my progress meter dance back and forth a bit. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a distraction. Don’t start me again on the radio buttons.

Spice Girl: Scary Spice - I may never look at Refresh buttons the same way.
Vibe: Pulpy
Polish: Smooth++
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! Dear God I would drive myself to the madhouse fixing that double click. I would engineer a hostile takeover of Google for the express purpose of deploying their entire software development capability on only this until it was fixed. If that’s what it took.

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: 4/7/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 endings

This entry lives up to its title, without doubt. There is a loose plot about finding a job, but so not the point of it. This is another (the third so far in Spring Thing23!) IF patterned after a joke: setup and punchline, no goal but to make you laugh. This one struggled a bit to find its footing, I felt. It is rife with misspellings, awkward sentences, and questionable grammar. An early gag about mistaking computer for social networking was structured too loose to land, but there was something there. It just felt like the language was making me do a lot of the work to find the humorous core of the idea.

When comedy is most effective on me, not only do I not have to work, the language is a full partner in laughs. It is the sharply honed needle that injects that uncut, industrial strength funny right into my brain. Which is not to say that there were no chuckles. In selecting a book (after selecting your wardrobe) to prepare for your party-cum-interview-opportunity, two options are:

"2. How to gain friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie :
"Talk about networking while networking to network the network
"3. Business at the speed of thought by Bill Gates:
"Business business, business is to business what business."

The first one tickled me, but right on its heels I was brought up short by “I don’t know how to read that.” There were some other amusing bits: (Spoiler - click to show)the protag’s spider sense, continually misnaming the ex (once I realized it was not a typo), and especially one ending reveal about your host. The sum of these and other gags leaves little doubt that the protag is not going to be a model employee wherever they land. For all the successful gags, there were as many or more that elicited “I think I see what they were going for there” instead of a laugh.

It’s short, as far as I can tell at most 3 potential jobs you choose from, then done. While the selection of potential bosses was daffy, I felt they could be MORE widely disparate to really land the absurdism. A (Spoiler - click to show)sentient cactus and an urbane donkey felt somehow more similar than different to me? Maybe that’s just me?

All in all, I found I was working too hard through the language to find the humor. There were a lot of frenetic, goofy ideas on display, but more often than not they were undermined by the sentences they had to inhabit. It was thankfully short, a soul of brevity and all. But I appreciate it more when I don’t have to work so hard for my laughs.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! For sure spell and grammar checking are the next stops if I drive this bus. It would both sharpen the laughs and improve the polish in one fell swoop.

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.