Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, bad ending

RDYD has a really nifty setup - school age girls playing what seems to be a party-hypnotism game. The writing is just perfectly on point. There is significant risk of potential confusion between competing reality layers (one mostly dialogue, another mixing dialogue and surreal scenery). But between font cues, authorial voice and crisp writing it is all conveyed seamlessly and compellingly. It was understated in the best way, accomplishing a lot with minimal verbosity, just precise and pitch perfect tone.

The surreal mindscape you navigate is pretty bare, deliberately so, but punctuated with one-off colorful details that reinforce the unreality of it all. At one point the game uses the word “uncanny” and I’m like, “Well yeah, that really sums it up, doesn’t it?”

I think what really won me over though was the upper layer dialogue between the un-hypnotised girls. You have a lot of interesting dialogue choices and all of them are crisply rendered with the character of the speaker. Really well executed, natural dialogue set the perfect backdrop to this tale, and really sold the plot when things got weird.

It’s a parser game, and the bareness of its environs nicely contain the description space to minimize the noun/verb implementation gaps. Even so, weirdly, the longer I played, the more I seemed to trip over stuff. Maybe its not so weird. Exploring/looking/collecting is more straight forward than anticipating every crazy player object manipulation, and the former dominates early game play.

An hour in, I felt like I had exhausted the map. Thanks to some clues, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do, and what I DIDN’T want to do. Suddenly, the game got combative with me. I could not figure out how to do what seemed easy enough: (Spoiler - click to show)pick up some rotten meat with a plastic bag. I spent a crapton of time trying and getting nothing but “nope,” and not even gently steering or cajoling “nope” just cold, stock “nope.” It felt like a noticeable departure to what had until this point been a pretty convivial, immersive conversation between me and the game. That’s where I went looking for HINTS to help me.

Yeah, there’s no HINTS. Or walkthrough. I wasn’t prepared for how much it vexed me, and I think I know why. I think of HINTS as weakness. Sometimes, on the part of the game where puzzles are unfair or inadequately clued. Sometimes my own because missing the obvious is my brand. HINTS are usually how I tell the difference. “Well, this is on you game, you expected me to guess MASTICATE when you didn’t even implement CHEW.” “Ooh, yeah that’s a clever puzzle. If I’d just remembered the speed limit sign and turned both dials to 5…” Due to reasons maybe only a therapist could explain, the NOT knowing is the worst. “Whaddya mean it could have been my fault BUT I’LL NEVER KNOW FOR SURE??” It was made worse, I think, because the tone of the thing, and the smooth progress I had to this point had kind of convinced me the game and I were on the same frequency. Like a skeevy parasocial relationship, I presumed the game thought more of me than it did. It stung a little!

So that whole spiral put me on tilt. What I SHOULD have done is internalized “ok, clearly this is not the path I thought it was, what am I missing or how do I approach this differently?” Where instead, I went with “WHY CAN’T I DO THIS?? FINE, I’M JUST GONNA DO THE THING I DON’T WANT TO DO INSTEAD.”

So I did it, and it was bad. Outcome wise I mean. Narratively, I was still in capable hands despite the maybe under-justified leap the plot took.

I can already feel the wheels turning in my psyche though. Like the memories of an immature first infatuation, I am losing the crappy way I ended it and dwelling instead on the early attraction and heady honeymoon period. Not sure how long it will take, but will undoubtedly take another run at this, when I’m mature enough to handle it. What? That day could come.

Spice Girl: Scary Spice
Vibe: Psychological Horror
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would let the reviewer know it wasn’t him at all, it was me. And as a peace offering to show what we have is REAL, I’d implement a hint system so robust, he’d come running back and we’d have a glorious future together of running hand in hand across sunny fields, feeding each other expensive food at sunset and relaxing in inexplicably matching outdoor bathtubs. Yup, that’s what I’d do.

If it were my project.

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: 4/15/23
Playtime: 30min, 6/10 tracked endings plus 1 untracked

I’ve been down this path before. When you play a lot of games in a short burst, inevitably similarities emerge. We’re humans, we’re wired for pattern recognition. EATQOTSK is a short option-select joint, oozing with comedic tone, whose main point is to collect all the endings. It’s not the only such experience this Thing, but has its own strengths and weaknesses in this emerging subgenre.

You are the titular Elf, called to solve a fantasy mystery, how to end a curse that forces everyone in the kingdom to yell at the top of their lungs. Excepting the protagonist and their manservant. This is only the thinnest of premise, used to connect a variety of unconnected subquests, each with a wry twist on expectations, tropes, or just an excuse for old fashioned slapstick. The tone is self-aware, with characters commenting on everything from screen layout, to fantasy and rpg tropes to the game itself.

The paths are of varying lengths, but none are long. The formatting is creative, and lent itself to quick digestion. I got a lot of dry chuckles at it and it was done! It could easily fit in what I have come to think of as the Adventure Snack product line - short, funny, does not overstay its premise. Is this the Showbiz Pizza to Adventure Snack’s Chuck E Cheese?

There did seem to be some technical issues. One of the setup’s conceits was a header and footer with inessential RPG-like stats. Those seemed to reappear and disappear during subsequent loops without obvious pattern. It was particularly unfortunate when the text was riffing on rpg tropes that were not on screen. There was also a tracker, showing you the endings you found, though it appears not all endings are tracked? I found one with no accounting.

Like a downhill mountain biker, none of that stopped things - it was moving fast enough to roll over those bumps, where a slower pace would have caused the bike to spill. Momentum compensates a lot! I feel like maybe I’ve said it three different ways by now, but it’s short, it’s funny, it’s pace makes it’s shortcomings non-impactful. Like potato chips, it’s a lot of satisfying if not good for you crunch, and once the bag’s empty, you can get on with your day.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d have to get the disappearing header/footer addressed. I might even tweak some meaningless values during game progress to underline the arbitrariness. Y’know, while I was in there.

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: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, die twice, then win

At this point, I think we sometimes agree to pretend that parser IF will be enjoyed equally by novices and old hands alike. That as a form its evolved norms have made parser IF more friendly and less obtuse. There is some truth to this, of course. Certainly modern games are less cruel than their ancestors. Everyone who has a second is going to have a first IF experience and it COULD be any modern game in the archive. Even so, there are many informal norms that are deduced over time, like:
* If it’s listed, it will likely be important sooner or later.
* Walls and ground are rarely, but sometimes, interesting.
* Any location not connecting other locations has a purpose as a source of clues, objects or puzzles.

Despite having recently returned to the hobby (and enjoyed discovering the intervening years’ progress), my game play can never not be informed by the informal norms of the form. (“…informed by the informal norms of the form.” I wasn’t even trying and look what my brain came up with!)

It doesn’t feel calculated, so I’m going to say Marie Waits effortlessly leverages these informal norms to make a rarefied parser experience. The game opens with you, a plucky English detective, captured by villains and needing to escape before time runs out and their plan comes to fruition. There are objects to find, locked places to escape, and backstory and clues to discover. The text is constrained, with terse descriptions of environs and objects. The places are tight - each location with just a few things to interact with, maybe lugging around to be used later, maybe needed now. This has the nice side effect of constraining the noun/verb space within the bounds of normy actions. The ‘can’t do that’ messages seem fair and few. The spark of this game is the time limit. You are given three hours to secure your escape, and minutes tick by maddeningly fast.

Between the text, the location design, tight vocabulary space and the time limit, after two missteps I felt like this game put me in some Platonic Ideal IF Player zone. Leisurely trying random things to see how deep the implementation was was not going to be rewarded. There was a premium on leveraging meta norms to search, poke, prod at high payoff areas and shed distractions. And they were almost always rewarded! (Spoiler - click to show)There’s a bush here. Imma needa dig that soon as I can." “Can’t find exit, check the walls.” “Got a match, gonna need to light it when it gets dark.” It sounds like I’m running this game down, but I don’t mean it that way at all. It really felt like I was in the IF Zone, clicking along with the puzzles because of the tight adherence to metagame in a way that felt harder for newbies than me, but made me feel like a king.

Everyone who has a second whiskey has had a first. And it suuuuucks. The mouth experience runs contrary to millennia of species-preserving evolution. It’s kind of a miracle anyone ever has a second. But maybe you take it with coke for a few years in college, then someone introduces you to a perfect Old Fashioned, and before you know it, you’re having two fingers at night just to stay sane. I mean, you have grown to appreciate the nuances of the flavors. You even start differentiating whiskeys from each other as better or worse, but really as what is the best whiskeyness for your palate.

That’s what this felt like to me. Not a super sweet combination of spirits drowning in fruit juice. An unadorned experience that showcases the learned pleasures of a very specific flavor for someone who has trained themself to appreciate it. A perfect two fingers of cask strength IF to be savored and enjoyed, but quickly before those thugs come back.

A quick note on the narrative. The game makes an interesting choice to foreground the ‘escape from bad guys’ stakes (that is where the urgency lies after all), but background the underlying mystery that got you caught in the first place. As you navigate the spaces, bolting for freedom, you periodically find clues that trigger flashbacks. These flashbacks provide discrete snapshots of mystery pieces, puzzle pieces if you will. Some that snap into others to expand your knowledge, others that are in empty spaces of the puzzle tantalizingly hinting at a larger picture. The incompleteness of the mystery both underlines how inessential it is to the urgency of the escape, yet implies a compelling larger struggle outside the bounds of this 3 hours (game time. less than half that clock time.) It is just the right spice, the bitters to the cocktail if you will, that make this a crisp, satisfying experience.

So, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing this game to a perfect cocktail for the spirits enthusiast. The dirty secret is, when I really enjoy a perfect cocktail, I usually want another one behind it! Marie? You gonna keep me waiting?

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: In Media Mystery
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I see that this is an entry in a series of games, which is absolutely what I was about to recommend. If it were mine, I might entertain a deconstructed mystery approach: a series of short IF showcasing discrete sequences of an overarching mystery. Perhaps out of order. Standalone IF type puzzle games, (or even disparate IF forms: a Twine detective relationship game! A Texture code breaking excercise! An I dunno Ren’Py point and click!) whose full mystery only makes sense when fully assembled. If this was already the path… points for guessing 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: 4/17/23
Playtime: 4.25hrs score 23/33

I, ah, wow.

Boy do I owe my randomizer an apology. Deferring this particular work to the end absolves whatever sins I attributed to it. The Thing would have been an altogether different experience if chance had front loaded RTE. This is an incredibly layered work, taking on a broad collection of themes and commentary with some central conceits that I found… deeply dispiriting in that it kind of shamed any similar artistic ambitions of my own.

But because I am a heroic reviewer of Epic Scale I must cast all that aside to describe what a wonder Repeat the Ending is. The game purports to be a “25th Anniversary, Critical Directors Cut Rerelease” of a technically crippled but thematically unique 1996 IFComp game. The remainder of this review takes that claim at face value.

There are at least 5 layers to this work: 1) the original troubled magical realist/mental health focused game (itself with several layers!); 2) the historical context of psychological narrative IF and its reception 3) the updated version of the game, most especially the significance of the modern changes; 4) tropes of IF, including “post-puzzle” tropes; and 5) the critical analysis of all that.

It is a collected work, a collage, the playable portion of which is the minority. There is companion text in separate pdf-eelies and integrated into the hint/GUIDE system. There are context-building historical blog posts, critical essays and reviews. Exhaustive explications of the limitations of the original game that act as stealth training. Deep annotations by a trio of critics that act as hints as well as context builders. I was over a half hour in before typing my first command. I was still reading for 45 minutes after typing my last command. It is deeply effective in portraying a body of discourse surrounding the work, compelling in its breadth and vision. Each component of the patchwork has a distinctive voice, especially the trio of critics that are our guides (with varying levels of esteem for the project), and the author themself whose wry commentary peppers everything with suspect honesty.

All of it tonally perfect, from the erudite critiques, the playful and perhaps disingenuous hints, to the raw sometimes immature game play at the heart of the work. As I do, I grabbed a few lines that tickled me early on, before the scope of the work overwhelmed me and I just clung to the dashboard for the rest of the ride.

"In a recent survey of parser IF fans, four out of five respondents were found to care far less about mimesis than they initially believed."

"author's hegemony" (which you are conseled to fight)

"Cook's use of 'score' is almost certainly ironic. Audiences who consider themselves too sophisticated for such outdated narrative features might better enjoy themselves by referring to it as a 'failure index,' 'success deficit,' 'flop quotient,' or, more portentously, a 'present assessment of counter-narrative guerrilla action.' "

It would be easy to just grab funny/well-written/cutting quotes, but man, out of context they are insufficient, and even somewhat deceptive, in conveying the scope of the work.

There is so much to latch onto here. The historical context stuff was a clever, yet melancholy series of observations about artistic endeavor. The way the author subverted his own game, by layering a counter-narrative motivation that started funny but got increasingly unpleasant. The critical commentary that was in some ways a gentle parody of facile criticism, of the insufficiency of both fawning and ‘takedown’ critiques. Girded with legitimate caveats and observations that acknowledge the simultaneous importance and unachievability of full perspective.

(Sidebar: I topped out my “flop quotient” at 23/33 by choice. While my completist nature initially pushed to get all the ‘soft’ endings reflected in the score, the tongue in cheek humor sublimated to something altogether uncomfortable as time went on and made completism less attractive. This seems a deliberate, and effective, artistic choice.)

Awash in all that, to me the most compelling thread was the contrast between the original work and the 25-year-later revision. The early work rings like the work of a young artist - in love with their narrative conceits, possessed by a powerful emotion demanding documentation, convinced of the importance of their artistic vision to the exclusion of mundane craftsmanship. And fraught with an epic helplessness, a not uncommon youthful preoccupation. The modern revisions (some small, some dramatic) showcase a more mature artist, actively rebutting his younger self with nuance, generosity and insight. "Yes, and"ing his earlier work, both acknowledging its power, and offering additional perspective. And, not for nothing, smoother game play. The picture is a compelling one, most especially in the progressive ‘new’ endings created for the later revision, suggesting a final gift of freedom from the raw suffering inherent in the original work. (Spoiler - click to show)It’s not just the devastatingly gentle rebuke of those alternate endings, but the fact that the way to achieve them is to actively resist the defeatist track of the main story. UNTIL THAT RESISTANCE ITSELF BECOMES DEFEATIST! How perfect is that?? Yeah, I don’t know why that observation deserves a spoiler and not the whole rest of it, but that’s just where my head’s at twisting over this thing.

The work is simultaneously super controlled and shaggy as life. As a reader/player, you can bounce around this vast creative space engaging any or all of these themes as your mood strikes. It is a rich environment, with many ecosystems, each with their own marvels - some standalone and no less compelling for it, others that shed new light on previously superficially understood areas.

It is a compelling achievement. Deeply immersive. Demanding a lot from the reader, but pretty consistently rewarding for it. I hate how much I love it.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Psychological Meta
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If this were my project I would burn it to the ground, and deny its existence forward. I’d probably take legal action to silence the beta testers and even the cast of Spring Thing 23. Just expunge this thing from the record and people’s memories. I wouldn’t want this impossible miracle to POISON THE GROUND FOR THOSE THAT MIGHT COME LATER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait.

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

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

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

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

Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.

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


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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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