Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

To Be Clear: Review title refers to Character, not Game
Played: 4/8/23
Playtime: Distracted timekeeping, maybe 2.5-3hrs

IF feels like a nice match for heist/crime caper stories. Between the logic problem of defeating security, the think-on-your-feet crisis management during the inevitable reversals and complications, and even the manipulative work to defeat physical barriers it all just synchs nicely with IF strengths. Unlike, say, punch punch kick punch I win fighting. Throw in some quirky character work, and maybe a relationship or two and you’ve got a great stew boiling.

Here, you are renowned GentleLady Thief Thalia. (I know Lady is the proper feminine to Gentleman, but by aliasing it to 'woman' so often, it kind of sheds that essential ‘Upper Crust’ connotation.) I understand this to be part of a series, but this was my intro, and the game eased me into the setup smoothly and seamlessly. In no time I was hosting a social event, crossing mental swords with intellectual inferiors and plotting an intro heist. While this worked well to set the table for the main event, I found myself at a remove, and it took me a bit to understand why.

Either through the staging of the introductory sequence, or due to the choices I made, LadyT was consistently the smartest, bestest, most capable person in the room. And knew it. Boy did I find her tiresome. She was surrounded by amusing bumbling wannabes, socially awkward gadgeteers and conflicted adversaries. In particular, I enjoyed the Q character Gwen, who only near the end of a conversation did I realize was actually a Scoreboard telling me my score from the previous scenario! It was a delightfully subtle bit of writing. Every one of the supporting cast was fun to read and engaging to interact with. If only the protag half of the interactions wasn’t such a chore.

Now fiction is full of these kinds of characters. Characters like Doc Savage work because you spend more time with his colorful, flawed assistants and he acts more like a walking Deus Ex. Superman has endearing humility. Classic Bond works thanks to his sociopathic sense of humor. The immediacy of IF puts us IN the protag, where remove is not possible and an absence of mitigating personality is pronounced. I am given to understand that this negative impression may be an artifact of jumping into the series cold, which, fair enough.

As the game shifted to the main heist planning, I was further thrown off by narration telling me I had a map. This led me to believe I didn’t need to do paper mapping, as the protag/game would take care of me. Boy was that not true! I was a few rooms in before realizing, wait a minute, I’m lost and shoulda been mapping all along. It’s not that the museum is geographically difficult, it was just a bad expectation.

So I’m in a hole, enjoyment wise, and then the game does the most perfect thing. It introduces an adversary character who is EVEN SMARTER than LadyT! Mechanically, this character is basically a reversal generator to keep the plot fun. But CHARACTER wise she has the crucial function of putting our protag off her game, getting her worried and frustrated and second guessing herself. She is so much more interesting this way. It was compounded by me the player totally bollixing an interview. LadyT’s frazzled self recriminations (due to my ineptitude) were perversely amusing. The protag was much more fun when I was doing badly!

This turnaround came at a crucial time. From here, we are off to the races in the Big Heist. A quick word about the setup here. This game made some really smart game play choices, specifically in the preparation (recon! interviews! staging! NPC coordination!), giving real perceived agency in getting things set, and how easy or hard the endgame would be. While I suspect failure would be really hard (if not impossible) to achieve here, the illusion of creating success was strong. Not to mention the detailed work of engineering a heist was just plain fun. Ditto managing the inevitable escalating reversals, culminating in a nice bit of character work (if you’d done your homework earlier!) to secure your escape.

Overall, I spent about half the play time at a remove, a quarter of time “ooh wait, I like where this is going,” and the final stretch fully engaged. This game dug a hole for me, then through a few tightly choreographed twists, propelled me to a very satisfying end. Seems about right for the genre!

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Crime Caper
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I think my next step might be to create an in-game map. Either as a pdf-eelie, or better yet use that Twine dead space left window to implement a dynamic map that grows as you explore. You might need to rotate the museum 90 degrees (the map is wider than tall, but turning on its side could take advantage of that narrow window). In addition to realizing the promise of the text, it would add a nice graphical flair to a bare bones presentation.

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: 4/8/23
Playtime: 30min

Depending on how you approach it, this one either packs a lot into its short runtime, or not enough. It’s a Monster of the Week kind of setup, an in media res supernatural investigation with personal stakes. It’s also very linear, very few choices to make and most of those adding details without changing anything. For sure, the narrative is the star here, not the game play.

To the narrative’s benefit, the writing style is smooth and confident, and plays with itself in fun ways. At various times it subverts itself with humor, and elsewhere falls victim to the powers of the monsters it is documenting. The latter in particular is a really fun tweaking of form that works better in IF than it might on the page. All in all, the writing style is a solid foundation to support the story.

But the writing’s biggest strength I think also ends up ham stringing it. The narrative leans a lot on implied back story, loric details tossed out without much explication, leaving the reader to speculate/fill in the gaps. It is a powerful technique, and the details dispensed are singular, odd, evocative and intriguing. (Spoiler - click to show)Rainwater Death filters, reality bending creatures, god shards, there is a lot to tantalize, but because it’s new to you but not the characters you only get oblique hints. It really engages the reader’s imagination.

Unfortunately, the same remove that makes the backstory so tantalizing is also applied to the main character and their relationships. This works less effectively, and makes the protagonist a bit of a blank. Interesting things are happening to and around them, but they remain enigmatic at the center of it. There are relationships presented as fact, but without details that showcase the emotional underpinnings that have to be there. While the reader’s imagination is fully engaged in theorizing the setting’s details, it’s quite a different thing to ask us to ALSO plumb the main character’s personality and emotional history. Most especially because of the personal stakes in the plot.

As the story drew to an end, the most overpowering impression I had was that I had just read an outline, rather than a fully fleshed out story. A really intriguing outline, with details I’d love to hear more about, but needing a lot more meat on its bones.

Spice Girl: Scary/Ginger Spice
Vibe: Horror Outline
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would focus on fleshing out the protagonist’s character. Let the reader see more of their inner life, either through dialogue, actions or direct access to thoughts (a bit easier to do in IF). Most especially the two relationships that are at the heart of the story. The plot and background can get away with leveraging the reader’s imagination. The protagonist and their emotional life is going to be more powerful delivered on the page.

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: 4/9/23
Playtime: 2 hrs, finished. FOR NOW.

Like [REDACTED] years ago I went through a phase where I was fascinated by the pulp magazines of the 30’s and 40’s. High Adventure, against a backdrop of first draft wild ideas and third-hand science knowledge, delivered on an insane monthly deadline. These ingredients created some propulsive, wonderfully goofy, imminently readable stories. Not for nothing, the source of the word ‘pulpy’ as a narrative type. (Also yes, so much racism and sexism.)

Galaxy Jones is a wonderful echo of those tales - Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon without the White Man’s Burden. The game makes the crucial choice to cut away all the problematic baggage without comment or fanfare, and give us the straight uncut adrenaline. It would have to REAAALLY drop the ball to lose me, and it didn’t.

As a parser game, there were rough spots. Quite a few unimplemented nouns:

"[...] the dock features several dozen speeder bays. Only a few are
filled right now. [...]
">x speeders
"There's nothing like that nearby."

Or worse, then:

">x speeder
"(the speeder)
"Galaxy One [...]"

This kind of thing happened often enough that it left an impression, but the piece is so tightly paced it doesn’t let you dwell on it in the moment. Most commands give a concise and often amusing 1-2 lines max in response. The thing is sprinkled but not drowned with dry humor and pulpy spice, letting your internal Buck Rogers fan fill in what’s necessary behind the nicely thematic cues. This gives the whole narrative an internal momentum, like ‘no time for details, here’s what’s important, quick, what’s next?’ It is such a successful marriage of form and function. The pace is further reinforced with relatively spartan locations, again discouraging extended loitering. When you do get more than 4 lines of response, it immediately conveys, ‘wait, this is big!’

The puzzles are, for the most part, also pretty streamlined. It is uncommon that things you need are not a room or two away. I struggled with one ledge-related puzzle but was otherwise fine. (I particularly like the task boards, though I was crestfallen that adding ‘solve my puzzle’ to the board didn’t actually get it done. :] ) I go back and forth on whether the relative simplicity is a drawback or a feature - it certainly supports the dynamic momentum of the story to not spin excessively on locked doors. Given all that, the presence of inventory items (some of which were tricky to collect) that were ultimately unused was confusing, unless some puzzles had multiple solutions?

The game further endeared itself to me by implementing in-game hints in the form of your ‘gal behind the keyboard’ over comm link. For sure the positive outweighed the friction by a good margin, and that’s even before the part that had me giggling and clapping like a toddler getting a new woobie. Which I will spoiler because the surprise is part of the delight.

(Spoiler - click to show)The piece opens with an ascii-banner, the logo of our heroine. Itself, just a perfect mood setter for the vibe of the piece. Then, after the first significant victory, the logo flashes beneath your success text, “GALAXY JONES!” It is the most perfectly surprising, evocative, and delightful touch, and you get it with every subsequent major success. I am on record calling that the best 8 lines of IF in 2023. I stand by that assessment.

After a whirlwind of action/adventure, it ends on a cliffhanger, promising another episode! A really well executed homage, crisply translating classic pulp fiction’s narrative momentum into the IF medium. Also translating retro-pulp into the new millennium, come to that.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Sci-Fi Pulpy
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I would take time to scrub the noun universe, and to a lesser extent verb responses. There were enough glitches for me to notice them, even at the speed I was moving. The skeleton and muscles of the game are there. At this point, it’s all polish.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“AND MURDERS YOU.”

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/11/23
Playtime: 20min, finished as prizefighter

When I first found Adventure Snack in IFComp, I went bananas. What a lovely thing to exist in this world. Bite size IF for the busy guy/gal on the go. YPATDL is very much on brand. It is a pretty stripped down hog farm simulator, with post apocalyptic flavor in the tasks (like shoveling toxic dung or Road Warrioring). (I promised new verbs.) You have more tasks than you can complete in a day, but rudimentary prioritization schemes seem to work just fine in keeping the oinkers happy until you can figure out what you want to do next with your life. In my case, apparently, fight in death matches.

The text is consistently fun and light, more bemused chuckle than belly laugh. The graphical presentation is nicely informal. The algorithm is pretty forgiving with only slight time management tension. It appears, based on what you prioritize that you might get different end game careers. And then it’s done! I feel like an extended review a) would miss the point of these things and b) would be less successful than Adventure Snack itself in navigating the value/time equilibrium.

Adventure Snack indeed. So far, every one I have encountered (YPATDL included) is a testament to Oscar Wilde’s ‘brevity is soul of wit’ observation. It is impossible to begrudge even the goofiest premise or constrained gameplay when it is so deeply, and wryly, respectful of your time. The word I want is impish.

“Adventure Snack: what’ll those scamps get up to next?”

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! What would I do if this were my project? I mean, clearly start working on the next Snack.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 1hr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating omitted from total, as from previous version