Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Part five of the review sub-series “Twinesformers: Parsers in disguise.” The latest reviewed work to derive gameplay from parser traditions, but bend Twine to the task. In gameplay, I found this to be on the rough side of the spectrum. There is a main story pane, which has links to interesting objects inside location descriptions, and a side pane which contains command buttons (Explore, Go, Action, Talk, Cast). You bounce back and forth between location pane and command pane, often needing two or three clicks to get anything done. In my head, this seemed like an interesting paradigm to maybe apply to Texture, building on what All Hands showed us was possible. Here, not only was it clumsy, it was also… visually unappealing? New links could spring in above the text in a disruptive and laundry-listy way.

The spell system has a nice idea behind it, but similarly suffers inelegant UI. You learn spells throughout the game, eventually discovering (Spoiler - click to show)prefix/suffix combos can be recombined to do new things! That is a really cool mechanism, narratively well timed! It is undermined a bit by text choice. You get SO many of them, it is almost impossible to keep them all in your head, so casting becomes a (Spoiler - click to show)lawnmower of combining sub-words until you get the effect you want. The prefixes at least have some kind of mnemonic juice to them, the suffixes felt totally, unintuitively random. The puzzles are mostly straightforward, more pushing at the interface model than brain burning, but there is a nifty time loop one.

In isolation, these gameplay challenges kind of straddle the Notable/Intrusive boundary. Against a bland narrative they would be the dominant takeaway and tip Intrusive. Boy oh boy is this narrative not bland!

It throws a lot of things against the wall, without having any idea how to unify them. The main narrative tone is light bro-comedy, a fraternity of wizards literally called BRO engaged in a low stakes paintball game. It is twisting Potter lore for comedy, but also background, and can’t decide which it wants more. Sometimes Potter lore is fictional, sometimes real depending on the needs of the scene. It is also an allegory for persecution and prejudice, diving into dissonantly serious flashbacks of disturbing magic-user abuse by not-even-thinly-misnamed Muggles. It kind of inverts the whole Potter engagement with these topics without a lot of thought or control or comment on the inspiration’s takes. It also feels a bit off. The wizards in question are uniformly white dudes. Casting them as an oppressed minority has kind of a squicky, coopted ‘no, I’m the victim here’ vibe that doesn’t sit right. Or it wouldn’t EXCEPT…

It is ALSO, and this is my favorite, weirdly homo-erotic! There are almost no females in the game, barring one whom the protagonist showed complete ambivalence toward in the face of her clear romantic interest. The frat bros are super emotionally supportive of each other, a tack not typically associated with sexist Animal House vintage comedies. And OH those wand descriptions. Yeah, wands. Y’know sometimes wands are just cigars. Deeehfinitely not here though. Paintball attacks are openly, gleefully ejaculatory. The spell to paint an opponent is SPLORT. One character’s wand is, and I’m spoilering this not because it’s not great, but because you’ll laugh more if you find it while playing, (Spoiler - click to show)TURGID. It is sold I think by the completely deadpan delivery. It’s not QUITE clear the narrative knows what it’s doing here, even though it definitely does. This playful comedy subtext lends deniability to the ‘poor, persecuted white dudes’ angle. Not a lot, but maybe just enough.

So I guess it’s a gay Potter prejudice-trauma bro-comedy? Well now that I see it written out, there’s almost certainly slashfic of this out there. Despite its loose stitching and contradictions, I kinda love it for that? I think the tone saves it - even its most dire parts focus on the puzzle in play, backgrounding the worst excesses in shadow. Kind of. Usually. Also, isolating the harder themes to flashback provides a narrative break from the lighter, subtext-oblivious paintball sections. You can see I’m bending over backwards to try to justify this strange, strange melange. I’ll tell you one thing, with all this going on, for sure the UI paradigm was NOT my main focus as I was playing!

Just too internally dissonant for Engaging, but raging, bouncing Sparks of Joy showering the place, just splattering all over a Notably intrusive UI.

I am so, so sorry for that. I am an adolescent.

Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 2hr, not finished, 4/5 foes, 4 medallions
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notable kludgy interface, bonus point for unhinged narrative stew
Would Play After Comp?: Yeah, I kinda think I have to… (oh no, I just, I have no excuse…) …finish.


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

Here is my history with this very beloved property. I was introduced waay back in high school by a friend who had acquired cassette tapes of the original radio show. I DEVOURED them, instantly obsessed. Then I read the books, including Fish and later Harmless. Some time after that, I watched the BBC miniseries on PBS with the laughably endearing special effects. Then the big budget movie whose cast was insanely awesome, but the story suffered lack of breathing room. [sidebar: that is still the order I would rank the works in.] Is that all of it? Did I miss anything? Nope, I think that completely covers…

Uh, the game.

Due to an accident of history my interest in computer games had waned temporarily during the crucial window, and I somehow never got around to playing it. Years later (extending to present day) it was its reputation as an idiosyncratic brain burner that convinced me I needed to somehow steel myself for the experience and never quite got there. So for me, the timelines have just never lined up. Why not just jump into a fan-created sequel? asks IFCOMP23.

Douglas Adams brought an off-kilter, hyper logical, left field sensibility to his work. It’s like fractal humor. From the High Concept premises (many of which are just window dressing) down to the word-by-word phrasing all of it is of a piece - delighting with its insane, unique connections yet clicking together like precision engineering. So, a singular voice, a beloved property, a highly regarded milestone of IF. What an act to presume and follow! “Hold My Beer” doesn’t begin to cover it!

So how did the DICK MCBUTTS scale testicles fare in this effort? Better than you might expect. This game comes from the cruel design school, presumably aligned with its predecessor. That is decidedly not my favored slice of the spectrum, but I agreed to embrace and play the game on its terms.

The game opens with some Adams-tribute text and acquitted itself pretty ok. RE Marvin: “something bad to happen to himself, which it always does.” RE the Heart of Gold: “(which seems like quite an unlikely occurrence, considering the ship you are currently in is very likely to do unlikely things)”. I might eliminate the words “to himself” in the first one, but in the zone. I’m already on its side. Might’ve been worth an offhand mention that we are traveling with Arthur but I assumed. Let’s start exploring!

In early going, I died four times in 65 moves, topping out at a score of 5! This opening, I think, is kind of ingenious. I understood it was going to be cruel, but by opening with so many random deaths it really drove expectations home and kind of neutered whatever objections I might have. Undo/Save/Restore would be constant companions, understood game. No further questions.

Puzzle design, divorced from the mythology trappings, did not enthrall me in their inherent elegance. Buried details, arbitrary timer puzzles with incomplete UNDOs, unsolvable states (thankfully highlighted by the game, though letting you run on for some time before informing you of it). I kind of did enjoy the nonsensical maze that changed with every runthrough, mocking my map. I not even mad, game! (Spoiler - click to show)When hiding behind the Great Device, going one way seems to be soft fail of endless waiting, while the other does what lore had me expecting. In two hours I completed 3 puzzles - two via consulting walkthrough for nudges and one via my prior knowledge of the property and was maybe on my way to #4. (To be fair, at this point who is going to engage Milliways without some prior exposure?) 3 puzzles in two hours is low, like shockingly low.

Still not mad! Getting the opportunity to play in this familiar space, maybe a little diluted but unmistakably echoing Adams’ style, was just fun. Dying, resetting, retrying over and over - this is not a gameplay flavor I seek out but here it felt kinda smooth. Other games have failed to convince me of the value of this cruelty level but somehow Milliways did. Puzzles didn’t quite click together crisply enough to call it Engaging, but Sparks for sure.

It was with real disappointment I hit what appears to be a game breaking bug. In Milliways itself I could not reenter the kitchen without hanging the window. The third time I hit this bug my score had topped out at 80/400 at the 1:55 mark. Too late to consult the walkthrough for a workaround. I am given to understand that maybe this is fixed in subsequent releases, and since this SO impacted my enjoyment, am not including my rating in the average.

Somehow Milliways dodged all the obvious ways to fail. It respectfully honored its inspirations. It ably paid tribute to Adams’ prose. It improbably got me to ENJOY its cruelty and embrace its puzzles. Passing all those daunting challenges, it feels heartbreaking and deeply unfair that it was brought down by something as mundane as a technical bug. A big, brutal, blocking technical bug. For sure worth revisiting once fixed.


Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 1hr, 55min, hung for last time, score 80/400
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Unplayable
Would Play After Comp?: Once fixed, yeah, I think I will. After finally playing Hitchhikers


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

The last entry in the IFCOMP23 Texture work review sub-series “Playing with Matches” This is a riff on the Robert Johnson/artist deal with devil mythology. It is aided by tremendous cover art, maybe my favorite of the COMP. The myth has staying power because of what it implies: that there is something so compelling about music (despite being an endeavor honestly tangential to our survival as a species) that even our immortal soul is a fair trade. Yes, all of Art is kind of included but really, MUSIC SPECIFICALLY has this primal pull that we are tempted to believe… maybe worth it? I mean we GET the tradeoff even if unwilling to make it ourselves.

It’s been a while, let me recap Texture (again). Lots of possibilities in drag and drop UI, deep presentation challenges thanks to the chaos twins Font Dancing and Text Hunting, keep it on a super short leash. I am happy to report that the twins are all but neutered here, to the piece’s credit. It exerts tight control on page size, both adroitly shifting to a new page before shrinking and providing limited space for new text to hide. This is far and away the Most Important thing to control in Texture, well done game. It is less successful leveraging the the drag and drop interface (with one exception) to do anything a Twiney choice-select couldn’t accomplish.

The exception was a choice to (Spoiler - click to show)tell the truth or lie. At first, I thought it was a bug that the game wouldn’t accept one of the choices. It got a wry grin when I realized, no, the protag is INCAPABLE of (Spoiler - click to show)telling the truth here. It was a nice use of interface to catalyze a narrative escalation.

The text had a different problem which interestingly only manifested SOME times. Depending on the order of your command selection, sometimes the paragraphs jarred with bad transitions. But sometimes the paragraphs worked regardless of order! I love that! The fact that it EVER worked seems to suggest the author paid attention to this, but was unable to make it work every time. I really appreciated the effort. (I actually wonder if Texture makes this harder than it should be. Can an author not define new text ordering tightly? Must it be at the whims of the player only? That is a high degree of difficulty!)

The opening quote felt right for the piece: “No amount of talent trumps hard work.” I been telling my kids the same thing for years! From the jump, we are positioned to disdain the protag and his easy short cuts. Which honestly is no surprise, given the setup telegraphed in the title, art, blurb and protag’s whole attitude. That’s fine, it is clearly not intended to be a surprise.

Unfortunately, given how much we see of the work’s cards, there isn’t really ANY surprise in how it plays out. I got three endings which seemed to be the entire space. Died twice, had my talent repossessed and humiliated myself on stage once. None of those endings gave even the slightest tweak to what I expected when I first connected PLAY to STORY. Regardless of the work’s other merits, that made for a Mechanical exercise. Props for reigning in the Texture pitfalls, but more consistently managing dynamic text ordering, and more considered use of the drag and drop (and text bubbles!) would be needed to elevate this thing. Also, not leaning hard into the mythical MUSIC side of this felt like another missed opportunity. Here, the protag seemed more concerned with the trappings of success than making music. This might just as easily have been “trade soul for good at chess.” Robert Johnson’s myth is so compelling because of the MUSIC, not the Art of the Deal. (sorry)

Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 20min, three endings - two deaths, one walk of shame
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, Experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

The setup is: you are an elf (right? Those guys again…) whose goal is to prepare dinner for their friends. You need some missing ingredients, find 'em! ‘Save the world’ is overrated as a plot motivation, no?

This is a translated work, and there are some glitches to be sure. I took it on myself to note them in my transcript, but started second guessing myself halfway through. Where is the line between ‘robotic adherence to Funk and Wagnalls’ and ‘interesting new language rhythms’? I’m sure not the one to pinpoint that inflection point, but this work actively made me question it.

You know those guys that play doctors on TV, then proceed to give medical advice? My stolen authority is, I’m married to an amateur baker and I’m going to give a baking metaphor. One that will convince you ‘this guy has no idea what baking even is. Maybe should be restrained from entering a kitchen.’

As a game it feels weirdly underBAKED (ah? ah? yah, I did that) with spots of ‘baked to perfection’ inside. Normal cakes bake and the outside firms up first, but you need a toothpick test to determine if the inside is done. Well, this is like a cake that somehow bakes itself inside out! The outside framework is still a bit gooey and loose, but inside there are pockets of firm, fluffy resolution. You wake up in a lab and explore your way through a pretty empty house until finding the kitchen… where the game begins. (In my case 40 MINUTES INTO GAMEPLAY.) So many unimplemented nouns and a slow build setting. The first object I could even examine closely was a toilet pot, and lemme tell you the mental dance my character did on approach was UN. SETTLING. It was a half hour before it was clear I was in a fantasy setting! (Longer before I realized I was an ELF ptoo, ptoo.) You can imagine when one of the first details was ‘I sometimes pee in my backyard,’ how weird THAT came off! Honestly I’m not sure it got any better once I was an elf.

Then, you eventually stumble into the library and a whole tapestry of setting and backstory unfolds before you, liberally peppered with ‘gonna throw fantasy words at you and you’re just gonna have to context your way through.’ I actually really like that approach. In IF, without some careful mood setting, it always strikes me a bit off when the characters explain something they already know for the benefit of the player. Here it comes across as tantalizing world building we don’t completely understand. This is how tantalizing works! If we understood it we’d have a different response: admiration or disappointment. It seems this background is part of a shared world the author intends to flesh out in subsequent works. The glimpses here make a convincing case to keep watching. The world building was the most firm part of this weird, inside-out cake I’m describing, and where most of the text is devoted.

The gooey outside is the gameplay. I mentioned the unimplemented nouns, that are practically ubiquitous. Weirdly ‘UP’ is listed as an exit in every location, but the messaging says, ‘no, don’t try that.’ I can only assume there was a levitation mechanism at play early on that got cut? At least one outdoor location mentions a roof when it rejects you, but maybe the whole thing just should have been trimmed. The puzzles are pretty unchallenging ‘find the stuff,’ most of it laying around or minimal-step sub-questable. One item needs to be marinated in a pond, but the game rejects (Spoiler - click to show) >PUT or >DROP and only accepts (Spoiler - click to show) >THROW . As you go, you get occasional tantalizing backstory details - NPCs you don’t really interact with but have rich things to say; descriptions of the town. Still some baked nuggets in the goo!

So far, flashes of engaging background in a pretty Mechanical experience, right? Well, I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite touch in this game. The HELP system doubles as the author’s DVD-like location-bound commentary track. I resisted initially because I didn’t want spoilers. When it became clear I was walking through a minimally implemented set of rooms, I broke the seal. The author’s voice here is frank and engaging and shot through with the uncertain grasping of a creator struggling with details in service of a goal. That was charming and irresistible, not least of which because it so precisely captured the creative tradeoff process with all its uncertainty, dread and regret. I mean, I’ve felt all of those things in projects of my own ALL THE TIME. In some ways the commentary was more compelling than the underlying game!

What do I do with this physically impossible cake? Between the commentary and the tantalizing background it generated Sparks. Yeah, when cakes are generating sparks I have lost all control over the metaphor. Intrusively under-implemented. Stealth launchpad for the game to follow!

Played: 11/4/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Intrusively under-implemented
Would Play After Comp?: No, but I look forward to seeing the next game in this universe. Which maybe was the point of the thing?

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

It’s not that CYOA and Twiney choice-select have ever been that far apart. The multi-pane user interface and coding hooks of the link paradigm certainly enable creative variations way beyond physical media which muddy the water a bit. But at its unadorned, most vanilla core, choice-select is CYOA with automated page turning. This PDF work really connects those dots explicitly, not the least of which with its bare “Go to page X” in-text links. It’s an IF missing link - like if Lucy also had carpal tunnel and was found with her wrist-brace.

EYP is a work with super appealing, light, cartoony illustrations in service of very serious themes and situations. That contrast is tried and true (like in Maus!). It serves to smooth reader identification and provide some punch when suddenly confronted with protagonist strapped to a bed! Some choices are seductively amusing. Who WOULDN’T want to solve the ‘formula of the world’?? Other choices capture a broad array of defeating and empowering actions, running the gamut from ‘try to stay with treatment’ to ‘run afoul of official intervention’. The looping nature of the story is deliberate… no matter how hopeful or dire a cycle is, there’s always more behind.

Between the wildly disparate places your choices can lead (not gonna lie the wanna make some money? path sent my heart into palpitations) and the wonderfully evocative illustrations, EYP had constant Sparks.

It is super short. Its message is clear through a few sadly amusing loops and then you are invited to end the game embracing the fact of the loop and mitigations. Made sense! Kind of. Because you get there after a ‘have you cycled three times?’ question, it seems to imply you will naturally get there after ‘sufficient’ spins. I think it would have worked better with an indeterminate ‘are you ready?’ or ‘had enough?’ player initiative kind of question. For me anyway. Ok, let’s wrap up… wait, there’s more?

One more to be precise, a second possible ending. If you go a certain path, you are invited to run away from everything. This ending confounded me a bit. How do I interpret this? A single ending I understand. Author has a tight narrative, player settle in to receive it. A branching narrative requires more work - all of its possible branches should be equally satisfying to a player that hunts them out. Equally true to the narrative. Because there are only two paths (discounting a literally endless loop which rings sadly kind of true, but is impractical for me to attempt.)… because of that this ending takes on a near equal footing as the first. But that can’t be right can it? It seems to imply dropping out ‘solves’ the mental issues but missing family is the downside, and to get them back you need to re-engage your mental troubles. I’m not a doctor, but that can’t be right can it? Wouldn’t you just have the same mental challenges in a new place, eventually? This time without your safety net? I’m kind of unsure of myself here, because the author definitely seems to know what they’re on about, but is that right? If it is, the work should hold the hand of the uninitiated a bit more to get us there.

Its brevity is to its credit. It knows what it wants to say, says it and gets out. Sparks for sure, a great mix of sad, funny, and no-nonsense with endearing illustrations. Mostly seamless other than that one bug. Penalty point for 50% of the endings that did not land for me.

Played: 11/4/23
Playtime: 10min, both endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, penalty point for seeming uncontrolled message
Would Play After Comp?: No, Experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

So Ink is the platform that in my head has become synonymous with “Attractive, High quality presentation.” This piece initially leverages Ink’s graphical power, but doesn’t fully capitalize. On the one hand, the font and color scheme are very appealing. On the other, they don’t really reflect or resonate with the work on offer. This was the first time I felt the platform’s presentation strengths were not adequately utilized. There was also a notable typo density.

These were notable, but not fatal to the narrative. Much more fatal, to me, was the bizarre narrative/plot dissonance. The protagonist is introduced as an uber-competent police officer, at least in their own mind. They are called on to resolve a bank/hostage situation. The protag has SUPER strong negative opinions about Wall Street, reporters and other cops, confidently expressed to create an air of cynical cool. However, the protag’s actions, as reflected in choices they might make, are laughably amateur hour. If they seize the microphone to dress down a Nosy Newsman, they are immediately reduced to a flustering mess and need rescued. Despite having the final say on tactical approaches, they can take choices that other police question, justifiably, as silly. Including an option to, per the text of the piece, ‘Die Hard’ it. Why are those options even available? In one egregious section, you cannot avoid making an OBVIOUSLY CATASTROPHIC comment to the kidnappers unless you tried to take a smoke break earlier? A smoke break minutes into a crisis situation??? Who is this clown?

It’s not helped by narrative dissonances all around the character. An NPC is furious at him (though also a subordinate?) then friendly with only a single click between those mood swings. That same NPC is professionally composed in description and action, but then referred to as ‘twitchy.’ The street officers are referred to as Grays, when NYPD famously wear black uniforms. Early on, I was wondering if this was an Alternate, Fascist Timeline ™, but no.

There are bugs: a choice to select a basement entry replays an upper floor exploration - up instead of down. A side entrance seems to hang the game completely. Since you’re looping replays anyway, not catastrophic but off for sure.

I played through 7 times, exploring the space. I killed 5 assault teams, victims of a supernaturally effective terrorist plot. I lost hostages to an obviously bad choice that should never have been on offer, and I knew it when I made it. I ‘rescued’ the hostages, only to discover the robbers had just left under my nose. Running out of patience and things to explore I started to feel a turn in my head.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to succeed? Maybe this game is a next level critique of Copaganda by offering that cops are actually self-important bumbling idiots in love with their own mythology? Whose fragile victim mindset curdles into adversarial relationship with those they serve? Whose belief of their own unassailable Rightness makes them a menace to themselves and society? I love that read! As soon as it occurred to me, I stopped playing because it would fall apart if I stumbled into a ‘winning’ scenario.

I actually don’t think this is the case. The disjoint narrative, typos and careless character and phrasing work don’t suggest this kind of tight control. The face value game Bounced me hard - what it seemed to be trying pushed at my sensibilities, and the clumsy narrative undermined even that. But I kind of love how it played out for me, and the conclusions it let me draw. I think I have to rate the game on what it presents as, not what I made it. This is not easy though, because I SO love my read… no, stick to my guns.

Woof, unfortunate turn of phrase there.

Played: 11/4/23
Playtime: 45min,5 dead cop endings, 1 dead hostage ending, 1 getaway ending
Artistic/Technical ratings:Bouncy, Intrusive bugs and language
Would Play After Comp?: No, I so WANT it to be left here.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

With a title like that, and a first screen where your default name is VELMA… you have set some expectations let me tell you. You wake up in Literature Club sans glasses, talk to 3 suspects maybe romance, maybe fight, rinse and repeat to see all the permutations!

Collect-all-the-endings games are relatively new to me. I think I encountered my first last year. That said, in that short year I’ve seen a LOT of them. The ones that work for me are the ones that branch out into bonkers disconnected end states, that startle me with just how far they are willing to diverge. I think they kind of have to? Ok, that’s ridiculous, I don’t make the rules for these things. But if they DON’T they have to justify repetitive gameplay and diminishing returns on comedy text some OTHER way. Generally the shorter the return trip and the sooner the branches become available the better. The deeper the branch point and narrower the divergence, the less it feels justified without some other kind of spice.

I think I need more than what Help! is set up to provide. For one, despite the premise, the lack of clear vision is often DESCRIBED, but does not seem to affect gameplay in any interesting way. Why call me Velma if I can’t grope blindly for a while!!! For another, aside from the choice of what your glasses look like, there is a LOT of linear clicking at the beginning before you get to divergent choice points. Certainly the consequences and plot turns those later choices produce have little connection to the paths you clicked making it essentially a ‘blind binary search simulator,’ where your agency in determining path is effectively zero. This is not unheard of in this genre, but puts all the weight on the endstate. Until you get there, your eyes glaze a lot over repeated text screens. I’m not sure how many loops I did… 8? 10? The endstates I found were unique, but didn’t stray far from each other in particulars or vibe. I found less than half the listed achievements, but I did eventually find my glasses (though achievements did not note this?). After the first pass the sly humor could not hold up, the endstate diversity did not dazzle, and it quickly became a purely Mechanical exercise.

Now that I think about it though, there is a kind of subversive read on this. My repetitive looping, then arbitrary clicking… confusing things all around me I can barely make out let alone navigate… that is kind of a META groping in the dark! Each loop, words flashing past as a barely acknowledged blur. Slapping my hand down with no idea what I’m hitting, how it will play out, just hoping against hope I somehow come up with glasses this time? Maybe this was a better blind search simulator than I gave it credit for! Doesn’t change my score, but I think this read on it is making me just a little happier. We good, Help!, we good.

Played: 11/2/23
Playtime: 30min, score 70/200, 4 achievements, found glasses, no achievement?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, got the gist.


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Thanks to the 2hr time limit, there are a few behaviors I find myself repeating when judging IFCOMP. For long games, it is not uncommon for me to be surprised by the timer expiration and just cold stop, a really frustrating experience for all. If I notice it ticking down, I may try to get to what I perceive to be a clean break spot, perhaps short of 2hrs. For shorter pieces I almost always replay a few times to get the breadth of a work, except for works that have been so frustratingly or perfectly rendered that a single playthrough feels like the right way to capture my experience. All these cases are typically orthogonal to hint/walkthrough consultation,which is instead driven by a frustration trigger.

Honk! is the first work where I felt the puzzles were great fun to play with on my own (I mean, it is in the title!), but I went to the hints anyway. I realized the final step of one puzzle wasn’t going to let me finish by the time limit and had a mini puzzle of my own to solve: what is worse, losing a full solve opportunity, or not reviewing the full game? I made the right choice, I consulted the hint system and finished at 2hrs. That decision’s difficulty feels like a compliment! [sidebar: strong hint system implementation!]

This is a save-the-circus piece. Clown protagonist must prevent the Phantom from sabotaging three acts and so preserve audience goodwill and stop the unfeeling hands of progress. It had a few things stacked against it from the start: #1, preserve noble, quaint entertainment against Cold Capitalism has kind of run its course with me? No that’s wrong. Unnuanced ‘Cold Capitalism’ I mean. I don’t line up with Corporate interests, I’m not a monster, but how many times can I be expected to engage this plot, basically the same way? #2, if you’re going to invoke as bland a villain as a Phantom at the circus, I can forgive not referencing Tobe Hooper’s Funhouse, but not referencing the seminal formative text Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park just feels intellectually dishonest. #3, YOU MADE ME BE A CLOWN, GAME. Why do those things even exist, let alone get turned loose on CHILDREN???

I am happy to report, the sweet humor and light tone of the piece almost instantly made me forget all of those objections. No, not true. Made me forget TWO of those, and periodically forget the third. The prose and jokes are not laugh out loud funny, but just universally winning in creating a jolly, bubbly mood. Yeah, it’s people’s livelihood’s and the death of a quirky, dated institution, but it doesn’t have to be DOUR, sez game. I agree! The tone of the piece is its primary strength and it is rock solid start to finish. I grabbed some fun lines as I played, but quickly realized in isolation they suffer a bit. It’s really the riffing they do within the holistic mood of the piece that is so pleasant. So you just have to read them for yourselves! I will note that some puzzles actually trade on the mood of the piece in a natural and satisfying way, which is also fun. Though this line did seem unintentionally, humorously cruel:

"Freda fills the poky camper like how custard fills a pie dish,"

LOL, Is that what you meant to say game?

Implementation wise it was robust, with notable gaps. There are a LOT of things you might try that have funny ‘no, not this’ responses, more than there needed to be which is always appreciated. That made the gaps maybe jar a little more? Gaps like stock text about wandering through a crowd appearing while you are on a roof. Balloons floating away while in a cage that explicitly noted the presence of a gridded top. Dialogue presuming things not yet revealed if you hadn’t >X SPEAKER before hand. As robust as it was otherwise, I also spent a good amount of time trying to solve puzzles reasonable ways and getting rebuffed, and without the humor I might have expected. In particular, I would have hoped using the ladder for the rabbit, making noises with balloons and/or breathing helium, or trying to get helium balloons to lighten the Phantom would be some easily anticipated alternate solutions deserving of humorous rebuttal.

Those are all easily forgiven in the face of some left field puzzles with fun ‘real’ solutions, fair play cluing, and terrific mood. It was the kind of a game where I was repeatedly rebuffed, had to take a break for unrelated reasons during which alternate possible solutions flowed like rivers. Some even ended up being right! That’s a special kind of Engaging for sure. The anxious race for the finish against my timer was also a thing I only experienced once before during IFCOMP23 and speaks well of the piece.

Notwithstanding the shambling horror I was forced to inhabit for two solid hours, it was a fully Engaging work of fun puzzles and sweet humor. I particularly liked the completely subversive tweaking of the ‘what a surprising reveal about this prominent NPC!’ unmasking trope. And a ROCK SOLID updog implementation. Enough glitches and unanticipated puzzle paths to make it Notable, but barely so. Totally justified itself against concern #1. There is no possible justification for #2 and #3.

Played: 11/3/23
Playtime: 2hrs, finished with one hint to make time
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable gaps given robust overall implementation
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

This was a work I super strongly WANTED to like. The cover art just sang off a specific set of neurons, so perfect in its capture of getting a new game back in the day. Now I was never a Commodore guy, so it wasn’t a specific yearning. That made it even MORE enticing I think, like inviting me into a subculture that shares a common language but with an evocative and appealing accent.

It kind of needed that charge, because there was prework: installing VICE on my Linux machine, figuring out how to work it!, a lengthy cycle of manual and feelies to consume all before starting. Despite chafing to GET STARTED, the material was attractively composed and fun to read.

The emulator experience was a quick shot of ‘coool,’ followed by a long, slow deflation of ‘oh no, its actually not that cool.’ I suspect this was an artifact of maybe full hardware emulation? I actually kind of hope it was, because the alternative is that the emulator coders lovingly recreated THE INSANELY SLOW LAG of early computing platforms. This would be like lovingly crafting fully detailed restagings of childhood bullying episodes. That is totally NOT the nostalgia experience I ever want! Verisimilitude is a LIABILITY there. I would have thought my modern, high powered machine could have managed that better. Towards the end I started ‘one-one thousand’ counting lag between command and response. The record was 11 - 11 simulated seconds. Rarely was it less than 2. And the lag didn’t limit itself to output - if I typed too fast, it would miss letters, requiring a backspace, then slower retry. WAS THAT WHAT IT WAS LIKE? Viva la progress!

I subsequently learned there are emulator hooks to ameliorate this. If you intend to play, I strongly recommend consulting this thread first.

Is it fair to penalize a work for its platform? No OTHER IF work I've played took me on this specific journey. Certainly, embracing this ancient platform is the most obvious thing about the work. I think yeah, it owns this.

The story itself is a murder mystery: fulfill the post-mortem contract of an art dealer convinced he would be killed, and yup! Spot on! He is! The style of thing is very much of its time, and precisely so. A mappable location (or two), no nouns except those called out in contents lists, short descriptions, limited dialogue, often reused between characters. Rudimentary manipulation puzzles. The promise of the game was deduction, and the means/motive/opportunity tracking looked like an elegant way about this, a mechanic I was eager to engage. I willingly shrugged away modern expectations to embrace it as was. Over time I think my resolve wavered because only being able to ask characters about nouns I had physically touched, and often hearing word for word identical responses inevitably brought me back to ‘well, thank goodness we fixed that at least!’ There were quite a few implementation holes: I used a flashlight before I had one, yet things were still “too dark.” Buttons disappeared yet were still present when examined. The Gallery navigation was complicated by N connections in one direction, but W instead of south to return. I uncharitably started to think, ‘ok, par for the course back then, but if you’re making me be super slow, couldn’t we quietly clean these up?’

For all its supplemental material, and there was a lot and it was cool, it somehow STILL fell short. The manual notes that X should alias to EXAMINE but it does not, and the full word must be typed EVERY TIME. This is not even a modern innovation, yet somehow missed! The command card does not document PULL, begging the question what other verbs did I not know were available? (And if not exhaustive, what was its purpose anyway?) Conversely, ANALYZE - a custom capability of the game - is never mentioned EXCEPT on the card, and unclear what it meant. That is forgivable certainly, but given the deep instructions felt like an out of place omission. There are feelie items outside the Feelie package, intended to be read only when uncovered in gameplay. There is no mention of these anywhere, and only after a vexing search through the download hierarchy was it clear what to do.

It is possible the above paragraph was addressed in a subsequent release, presence of PULL in the feelie might be a clue.

As you can see, I was powering through! Maybe at a snail’s pace but doing it! I’m the hero here! The one that really got me was a puzzle (maybe?) (Spoiler - click to show)Knowing I needed to "] DRIVE TO GALLERY" I could tell the ACT was possible from the command card, but nowhere else in gameplay or feelies could I detect any hint that this was not a one location game. Here I needed to add a specific noun and unlike ANALYZE, the game was no help cluing what that might be. Sure, given the background I could infer it existed, but I could infer a LOT of things existed that weren’t implemented! I had been trained to only try nouns explicitly mentioned! Consulting the walkthrough provided the answer, and it was not a joyous moment of epiphany, it was an ‘oh c’mon.’

I had like 15 minutes after that and thanks to the protracted command loop, my timer expired not close to finishing. I really WANTED to like this. I still really love that it exists, that so much effort was poured into this loving recreation. I hope it provides joy to those who remember their Commodore days fondly. For me, it was more a ‘rose-colored glasses off’ experience that made me grateful for modernity. I know. That’s not so fashionable these days.

Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, for maybe an hour of progress
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusive emulation and gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, a glut in Nostalgia content available these days, will look elsewhere

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This is a character piece, speculating on a conjugal visit between Socrates and Xanthippe (his 2nd wife) the night before the infamous hemlock cocktail. The player is given the goal “get your husband to have sex with you!” but that is kind of a wonderful trick. It ensures the player is aligned with the protagonist (clearly X is the protag. I hope we don’t need to argue about that.) in creating an initially awkward, and kind of misguided, series of advances on a man with understandable distractions. That one little gamesmanship trick allows the author to execute sleight of hand, have Socrates’ response generate interpersonal drama, and at that point, we are fully at the piece’s mercy.

It is first and foremost a character study collaboration between player and story. I am not sure how much branching is actually possible in the narrative, but that does not appear to be the goal of the piece anyway. In the forward the author lays his cards on the table - the piece is about giving X a more robust afterlife than history could be bothered with. We are clearly not building HER character, history has ensured that is not possible. But we are building a nuanced, vital character whose complexity represents and pays tribute to the real, complex, full woman she actually was.

It is kind of a touching and depressing observation - death takes the breadth of a person, and reduces it to the ever-dimming memories of others and if lucky, artifacts that live on. Or in Socrates’ case, completely superimposes a mythology instead. Flattering or unflattering, whatever remains cannot conjure or preserve the fullness of who we were. The thought of us becomes a distorted echo, maybe retaining a sliver of us, but maybe not. Maybe including things we never were. This work offers the kind of beautiful idea that if we can’t remember the full complexity of a person, the least we can do is acknowledge that there WAS complexity. What a gift of empathy for someone history has ignored or abused.

What, am I getting too maudlin for you? Am I, you cold, unfeeling husk? YOU’RE the outlier here, not me and this wonderful work. Check your heart, you emotionally shut down robot. You probably won’t even kiss your dad, will you? Or do you prefer to call him “Father”? Fine, I’ll get back to your “game” “review.”

The interactivity here is navigating a series of conversations exploring prickly personality conflicts, long-standing frictions and affections, shared emotion and history, sexual playfulness and tension, common intellectual passions and shared pet name in-jokes. In short, an amazing tour of a full, adult relationship that honors the specifics of historical Socrates as a jumping off point for emotional extrapolation. The interactivity comes from the player defining X’s character (within an author-set series of ranges, obviously, it is choice select). Right out of the gate, is she the kind of woman who calls her husband “Honey” or “Big Man”? Will she apologize, or double, triple, quadruple down? Is she demure or bawdy, or just a filthy, filthy animal? Is she sad, bemused or betrayed by infidelity? There are so many many options the author has offered through some setpiece conversations about mortality, Socrates’ choices, their relationships, making CAKES … and you are collaborating to put a specific HER into all those conversations. The author has gone out of his way to make a breathtaking span of options available. How much affects narrative thread? Maybe none? Doesn’t matter, it is the character building that matters here. The text is so very deft to not dishonor your choices that it feels natural and rewarding.

This game snuck up on me. I fell for the initial trick, got irritated S wouldn’t play, then got mesmerized by the option to keep quadrupling down on the cow conversation way beyond S’s patience… and before I knew it I was just Engaged. About halfway in, I realized the trick played on me, silently tipped my hat to the author, then X and I just dove back in. I really appreciated the cheekiness of inventing Plato’s famous Cave as a goofing conversation between the two, the implication being Plato totally stole that from Xanthippe later. Relax, Plato can take the driveby.

Stepping back, how impossible is what I just described? Collaborate with the player to create a fully three-dimensional person, through the medium of choice-select options during wide ranging conversations? Do you see how DIFFICULT that is? You have to create a conversation flow that spans light-hearted joking, deep drama, personal history, fear of death, horniness… and you have to create dialogue options at every step that give character building latitude but don’t derail the narrative or later contradict itself? Not only did it hold together, it didn’t even CRACK. Slow clap, author.

Ultimately, it ended the way it had to. But yeah, we totally banged him.

Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 35min, finished. 35 min? Holy crap I spent twice that WRITING about it.
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: I don’t know. I’m always afraid experiences this sublime suffer on revisiting.

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