Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Say you have a friend that is REALLY into flossing. We all know flossing is important, right? It’s kind of inarguable. For this friend though, flossing is their WHOLE DEAL. There is no conversation, no pop culture experience, no shared activity that won’t in two short steps become a diatribe about Gum Nobility or the evils of Big Corn Cob. Even when you try to agree that flossing is good, 45 minutes later it becomes apparent that you still don’t get JUST HOW GOOD it is. When asked to say three things about this friend your best effort is: “1) They are a flossing champion! 2) uh, they are ANTI-FLOSS’ worst nightmare and 3)…pass.”

Lake Starlight is the IF version of that floss-stan friend. It says some strong things about techno-capitalism and patriarchy. And while the thesis is totally defensible, it is also flat declarative, unnuanced, dripping in contempt and takes every opportunity to remind you of this. It’s biggest sin isn’t that it’s WRONG, it’s that it can’t get over how RIGHT it believes it is.

It doesn’t help that the non-polemic parts of the narrative are a bit unfocused. Let’s start with interactive opportunities. When you are asked to interact you almost never have sufficient information or agency. You are prompted for a name, before the protagonist’s (very specific!) gender and background are revealed, so my 14-year old Hispanic girl carried the name “Gritty.” Her favorite color is orange, and favorite fruit peach, but not sure those choices even mattered. Elsewhere, choices you make are rejected. “Which roommate do you want to hang with?” </select one/> “Nope, sorry, you get this one instead.” You earn “Intuitive Whispers” which I interpreted to be guiding hints, but the one I tried was opaque and unhelpful. It was frustrating enough that when presented with a seemingly-meaningful choice NOT to go to the titular camp (Camp Hogwarts For Girls?), I took it to see what would happen.

It was meaningful alright! Would you believe that a 14-year-old’s choice NOT to go to camp resulted in (Spoiler - click to show)a stifling marriage, casual drug use, and emotional distance from a shrug of a daughter all on the way to an early death? FOR SKIPPING CAMP THAT ONE SUMMER??? Reran with the other path because clearly the work needed me to, begging the question against a field of such limited choice, why was THAT choice even available?

Mostly, there isn’t much interactivity, just continuing to next page for LONG blocks of text about the virtues of nature-based magic and feminine power. Even there the monotone of it is the biggest takeaway - every character we meet has a tale of family tragedy wrought by techno-colonizing males. (Almost) every character is super supportive and capable. For sure, they are all female. (There is a Good Guy Uncle who gets a walkon, but he is the only male we see.) I mean, given what we’re told about the world, I am at a loss why these women haven’t just Lysistrata’d things into order!

Look, I don’t need fiction to be about me. I kind of love it when it challenges me. But if it wants to yell at me (about something I’m already on board with!), maybe try to entertain me also? Instead, I found myself grimacing more than 'yeah sister!‘ing. It doesn’t help I think that the subculture presented as Inarguably Good is much more sus than the narrative believes. Story background establishes an ill-defined Mean Girls’ cult as Bad. I initially thought of that as kind of clever world building. But the reality of our protagonist’s indoctrination into her Magic School… that put off really strong cult vibes. To the point I started questioning, “wait a minute, do we really know how bad this other one is? I really only have the narrator’s word for it, and Cult Camp is getting a total pass from them.” Elsewhere, on the heels of a diatribe against technology, we learn one of our key Role Models is a herbalist? We don’t get a lot of details, but there’s a reason your doctor warns you against herbal remedies. Recent history has shown that there is very little daylight between homeopathy advocates and anti-vacc’ers, where are we on THAT spectrum? If I question the narrator’s assertions on what is Good, maybe what is Bad is in question too?

It is awesome that specific-perspective fiction exists outside CWM wish-fulfillment. It is awesome that THIS long-neglected perspective fuels a fantasy empowerment story. For me, a lighter hand would have gone a long way. I found the narration to be suspect and off-puttingly one note. The protagonist’s primary characteristic was “self-doubt” and was mainly lectured at by Unimpeachable Authorities from behind metaphorically shaking fingers. Those two things made this a Mechanical exercise for me. Lack of meaningful interactivity, except when it was TOO impactful, felt Notably intrusive to the experience.

Seriously though, you gotta floss.

Played: 10/19/23
Playtime: 1.5hr, two playthroughs, 1 short, 1 to end of Book 1.
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably buggy
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

Let’s imagine IF as a dance between Interaction and Fiction. What else you got to do right now? Imagine with me! Sometimes Fiction leads, establishing steps and rhythms while Interaction follows - the player trying to keep up with the gameplay goals the author is setting, swept along in sure hands. Other times, Interaction leads, the player pushing on the environment and story flaring and prancing in response, the author rewarding intricate moves. Some works are structured to have a single lead, start to finish. Other works trade leads back and forth one or more times in a rapturous full body collaboration, ramping excitement and tension as the music builds and builds and gameplay swirls around narrative around gameplay around… I’m getting the vapors. You get the idea.

What happens though, when NEITHER takes the lead? When Interaction’s attempts to coax that cute story out for a spin, are politely rebuffed. And not even during a slow song, the Cha Cha Slide! Meanwhile, Fiction sits in the corner playing on its phone, too cool to come to the dance floor? A painfully fraught middle school dance happens, that’s what. Everyone has a vague idea they should be doing SOMETHING, but no one has any idea what, so there’s just a lot of foot shuffling and awkward glances. An angsty adolescent Thing of Wretchedness.

You start as an elderly woman, snowbound with the titular Thing, trying to figure out how to poison it. Now, that opening is already super sus. If the first (and almost only) thing you know about a person is that they are ready to poison something, it is fair to question how reliable that person is. Particularly when, through their eyes, the Thing is too horrible to behold, but its actions are just not that threatening. It just seems to be wandering around aimlessly, not so different from the protag. After some exploration I even had cause to ponder, (Spoiler - click to show)hey, this is the husband, isn’t it? It wasn’t. Probably.

The environment is spare - 8 rooms and a mailbox, none of it bursting with objects to interact with. And wandering and exploring reveals next to nothing about the protagonist, the Thing, or suggests tension outside the protagonist’s mind. But you can do two things: (Spoiler - click to show)poison the Thing or mail a letter. Since I was unconvinced of the protagonist’s motivations, I chose the latter and the game ended! By which I mean cut to new layer of narrative without resolving anything. And it EXPLICITLY told you that the former would likely not work.

huh.

So I restarted, knocked around a bit, continued to not trust the protag’s sense of threat when tangible evidence was lacking, and got nowhere. Eventually I consulted the walkthrough. Turns out (Spoiler - click to show)the Thing was a menace. It could get angry and start attacking and breaking things. First playthrough I had heard loud noises, but the environment seemed to weather things fine, so I felt no peril. Certainly I shared the room with the Thing often and suffered no harm or even unease. The trick was to wait, (Spoiler - click to show)and maybe poison it (even though the first failure ending told me not to bother!). At that point though, is it maybe acting in self defense? Don’t DO anything, just wait a lot. Until a randomizer exploded. Then, if you didn’t die you could get a vital object to unlock a final area where ANOTHER object led you to a better ending.

Well, the text claimed it was better. Certainly your interaction with the object was opaque and not obviously problem-solvey, but it did? It led to another layer of metatext that only obliquely resolved things for the old woman you’d spent all your time with. The work is apparently part of a series but claims no knowledge of the rest is needed. Maybe not, but missing knowledge of stakes, consequences and cause and effect should be provided somewhere.

I’m a horror guy, October is my primetime. The title made promises to me. My goodwill (and Engagement!) is a horror game’s to lose. Here, the gameplay decisions were its undoing. The protagonist was afraid, that was clear. As a player I was at a loss to see why, and actually suspicious of her fear. While my suspicion of the protagonist was kind of fun, it was deeply counterproductive to the narrative. The work really needed to sell the Thing’s menace better, with concrete, observable consequences outside the protagonist’s mind. To some extent, reliance on a randomizer may exacerbate the problem. The author cannot guarantee a sense of menace if they delegate the threat to a die roll. Without a walkthrough, I’m not sure I would have had the patience or inclination to wait around (doing nothing!) to see if it got worse. Getting exactly the WRONG message from my first failure didn’t help either.

The work had a moderate amount of unimplemented nouns and disambiguation issues between clocks and boxes. In a work so spare they stood out as Notable, where a more engaging work might better weather the glitches. I will say, as a horror fan, evoking Middle School Dance was maybe the most chilling thing about it.

Played: 10/19/23
Playtime: 1hr, 2/3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably buggy
Would Play After Comp?: No, Middle School was DIRE


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Comedy is a macro phenomenon, a numbers game really. Success is predicated on getting just the right formula that resonates with the most people. A “Marketplace of Laughter” if you will. There are tricks to maximize purchase. Surprising, off-kilter connections is a prime mechanism - recasting or contrasting things the audience knows about human behavior, communication, and/or shared culture. So to generate a laugh you need one of those common baselines, and a twist on or connection with it that folks will respond to.

Human behavior is probably the hardest of these - it requires savant levels of empathy, observation and understanding. If you’ve ever bought a complete dud of a birthday present you understand how hard a deep understanding of one individual is, nevermind crafting a more general observation of mass resonance. Communication humor is a more cerebral exercise, playing with the context, meanings and interplay of spoken or written words. (This formulation does require you to concede that even the lowest brand of humor, Puns, is somehow cerebral. Which I am loathe to do and understand if you are done with this analysis.) Shared culture may be the easiest to engage. All you need to know is that a thing exists, and other people know about it.

Easiest does not have to mean laziest! And an easy baseline does NOT mean easy laughs! It’s the audacity of the connection that brings the chuckles, the baseline is just the platform for it. I think of it like Olympic Diving. It is a greater athletic achievement, with commensurate reward, to execute a high degree of difficulty. But even with lower difficulty, precise execution is still OLYMPIC ATHLETE LEVEL OF WOW.

ODNSF is clearly trading in cultural humor. As a macro numbers game, I can only report one data point, my own. Through no fault of the author, my cultural relationship with the Rings property is… I mean its fine? Once you get past the Elvish racism I mean. And “get past racism” is really a whopper of a phrase to have hung on you, isn’t it? Cooking shows are… also fine? So yeah, these are things I know exist, but my affection for them is shallow and quickly expended. ODNSF trades on affectionate connections and twists here, so it was going to need some really audacious leaps to work for me. It’s ok that it doesn’t.

The work was peppered with some fun turns of phrase, though the ones that landed best for me were unconnected from the underlying setup. Talking about skinning cats, this nifty phrase turned up: "or why in the Realms the methods to do it are something people have devoted time to enumerating. " And I don’t know why but my loudest laugh came from “Although your parents died in a showboating accident …” THAT TURN OF PHRASE HAS BEEN AVAILABLE THIS WHOLE TIME!

There were wry smiles around the periphery throughout, but its main-quest commitment to the mashup was its engine and that didn’t speak to me. I think maybe if it clowned in that space for a while, but used it as a springboard for more character-based or bonkers escalation humor untethered from the inspirations it’s goofing on, that might have worked better?

Or maybe more compelling gameplay? I played as Froyo 3 times and granted I was probably not the most attentive, strategic-thinking player. I pretty handily won the cook-off. It seemed to trade on character/stat synergy in a way I needed to recognize, but not manage to any degree of finesse. Coupled with random die rolls outside my control. That same scenario/stat synergy seemed to leave me unprepared to (Spoiler - click to show)defeat the final boss where choices either traded on Froyo’s lowest stats or pure randomization. I’m pretty sure I see what Froyo’s path would need to be, but after 3 cycles was content to leave it be.

Mechanical, Seamless for me. If you have strong affection for the inspirations and don’t need ambitions beyond that, you would likely enjoy this more.

…

Ok, real talk. I’m a Gimli guy. Dude knows who he is, doesn’t apologize for it, and is open to character growth without drama. At my house, “And my Axe!” is a pretty common response to “Hey, you wanna come to the store with me?” This is the makeup of MY psychological stew. Game did itself no favors sidelining him. While I did appreciate the nod in background, HE IS MORE THAN HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH AN ELF.

I’m also a Hufflepuff.

Played: 10/19/23
Playtime: 1hr, 3 cycles, won bakeoff 2/3, beat Sour Ron 0/3
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Time Loop stories have been with us for over a hundred years, but it seems fair to say that their broad cultural impact is back loaded to the last 30. One might be forgiven thinking “Groundhog Day” (1993) inaugurated the sub-genre in whole cloth, given its quantum leap in cultural awareness. Of course nothing is new under the sun and there are ALWAYS precursors.

It is hard to believe the rise of video games as mainstream entertainment isn’t a factor, what with restart/respawn/try again being a fairly ubiquitous game mechanic. It kind of gives people the experiential touchstone and familiarity to launch the riffing. There’s also something very human about believing if we try hard enough and long enough we can ‘do over’ to make things right. Or maybe just wanting to believe, really badly.

At first, LVD suggests it might be feeding that desperate, yearning beast in us. It quickly dispels that notion. The setup is, our protagonist picking up Valentine’s Day tokens for their lover on a short walk through the city and home. (Spoiler - click to show)There they get some hearbreaking news. Then the day seemingly repeats.

This is going to be hard to talk about with minimal spoilers. LVD kind of presents as a time loop story, but puckishly isn’t really that. Broad strokes locations, events and encounters echo themselves, (Spoiler - click to show)but each time different in a way difficult to dismiss as mere ‘interpretation’. It is definitively the same Holiday, and kind of has to be the same year, but many details evolve over multiple cycles, independent of player actions. The world, including NPCs, physical objects, and even the weather, take on shades and details that reflect an evolution in the protagonist. It is all very competently done. The story is documenting some dramatic emotional changes through external details rather than internal monologue, but in discrete, nuanced steps with each loop. I found the stages of progress to be well done in conveying its gradual, perhaps inexorable, flow. The changing landscape leaves the player/reader somewhat at sea. Are we actually Time Looping? Are we revisiting a scene, gradually removing delusions from the protagonist to get to an underlying ‘reality?’ Are we able to affect anything about subsequent loops at all? It is kind of a nifty uncertainty the story holds us in.

I think though, that the mystery has a specific answer that feels quietly satisfying but on reflection falls apart a bit? There’s no way around this, sorry. (Spoiler - click to show)Through the looping (for want of a better word), the protagonist goes from denial, to heartbreak and loss, to healing. Intriguingly, empathy seems to be a key factor in that slow transition. It’s a touching narrative, carefully curated step by step. That slow building makes the final pass feel earned and hopeful and what kind of monster doesn’t appreciate that?

Well Rhaaah, Rhaah, (brandish claw hands) I guess? There are two things that kept me from fully embracing the work, and I think they both trace to that central looping conceit. The first is that in order to take this deliberate, detailed emotional journey we have to start with a deeply oblivious protagonist. That would be fine if we had something else to latch onto about them, but it’s kind of their defining characteristic. To the point I’m like "Wait, if this blindsided you, maybe the problem was you to begin with?" And sure, that could lead into the self-delusion interpretation, but doesn’t that kind of make them EVEN LESS sympathetic?

The interactivity underscores (or can underscore) this gap. If you play as a reasonably empathic human being to NPCs, the protagonist’s seeming obliviousness with their primary relationship jars MORE, not less. Interestingly though, as things progress, (Spoiler - click to show)that empathy reads as a key factor in healing which is both a more subtle and more satisfying message. The message that I think was omitted was any kind of awareness or resolve around how it got to that point in the first place.

[sidebar: this kind of begged the question to me how much influence the interactivity had on things. Late in my run I made a deliberately counter-empathic choice to see if it changed anything, and it didn’t feel like it? Maybe I was already baked at that point per the game’s algorithm, hard to know.]

The second sticking point for me is the central metaphor itself. As a metaphor, time loop can cover a lot of bases. Self improvement. Expanding narrow perspectives. Recognizing importance in everyday things. Value of perseverence. Control (or Lack of it) of your own destiny. The one thing it REALLY doesn’t convey is “passage of time.” It’s all the same day! The story seemed to be making a case that some hurts (Spoiler - click to show)get worse, a lot worse, before they get better and you just keep moving forward until they improve. Told through the lens of NOT moving forward, but repeating! Kind of a 12-step program on 120xFF. Next day, you’ll be fine! It is certainly a hopeful climax for the protagonists’ journey, but the time loop conceit really muddied it for me.

Look, these kind of meaty emotional and metaphorical dissections are my crack cocaine. I am grateful that IF so often provides opportunity to ham-handedly indulge it. I am grateful THIS work did! The emotional narrative was well written, and I thought building empathy into the interactivity worked well. Clearly I was on board for the central conceit! These are Sparks for me. My own obsessive over-analysis just kept it from Engaging is all.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the biggest Sparks, the (Spoiler - click to show)total trolling headfake of its blurb: “You find yourself in an inexplicable time loop, reliving the same day over and over again. Can you find a way to stop your lover from leaving you?” THAT is some top-tier (Spoiler - click to show)artistic bait and switch.

Played: 10/18/23
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings:Sparks of Joy, 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

Excerpts of interview between JJMcC from a future where he has played DMcBGKitN, and JJMcC from the past, right before playing. For clarity they will be post-McB and pre-McB, respectively.

post-McB: “You won’t believe the crazy chain of events that led to this, but I’m, WE’RE, a TIME TRAVELER now!”
pre-McB: “This is bananas, tell me all about it!”
post-McB: “Where do I start? Well, on the eve of the Texas Inquisition of '25…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“… our Postmate driver population the whole time…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“… chants of ‘Martha, Martha’ with a lowing, droning ‘Steeeeewart’…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“…K-POP KABAL and their meme bombs…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“…and I ended up here!”
pre-McB: “Wow, what a story! You know what this means?”
post-McB: “I mean, so many things. What are you thinking of?”
pre-McB: “Now I can do REAL Reviews Out Of Time!!”
post-McB: (nonplussed) “That’s your takeaway?”
pre-McB: “I was about to play Dick McButts in IFCOMP23 and I have a few preliminary notes, lemme run those past you. Gonna be a lotta testical synonyms, yeah?”
post-McB: (off balance) “Uh, yeah. So, so many.”
pre-McB: “I mean I’m expecting a lot.”
post-McB: “You will not be underserved.”
pre-McB: “I’m also expecting outlandish escalations.”
post-McB: “Yes, oh for sure, but also less than you might think.”
pre-McB: “Less? Really?”
post-McB: “In raw volume. (wry smile) Hoo, the midpoint though…”
pre-McB: “Spoilers!”
post-McB: “I’m you from the future. The only thing we have to talk about is spoilers.”
pre-McB: “We have shared memories!”
post-McB: “And what would we have new to say about those?”
pre-McB: (brief, awkward silence) “Next question, is it funny? Can it sustain the bit?”
post-McB: "Well, understand there are two branches, one outright player trolling. Fortunately we don't get that one."
pre-McB: "Wow, thanks winds of Fate! So it was funny?"
post-McB: “Yesss, mostly, but it’s better when it’s surprising.”
pre-McB: “Is it review proof?”
post-McB: “Iron clad. Impossible to write about.”
pre-McB: (skeptical) “I’ll figure it out, it’s not like I’ll just phone in a cheap gimmick. Oh! Can we say it together?”
post-McB: “Sure. 1,2,3…”
Both: “Sparks of Joy! Seamless!”
pre-McB: (laughing) “I figured…”
post-McB: (laughing) “Dude you haven’t even played it yet.” (laughter dying) “Wow, we really had NO integrity in this did we…”
pre-McB: (oblivious, still laughing) “Is the gameplay worth discussing…?”
post-McB: “WHOAH! Something weird is happening, oh crap I can feel a slip coming on. Quick let me tell you about the Great Collapse of …” (rest inaudible behind…)
pre-McB: “DON’T GO! YOU HAVE TO TELL ME DO I GET TO RACK HITLER?! DO I GET TO… FUTURE ME DON’T…”

//TRANSCRIPT ENDS

Played: 10/17/23
Playtime: 35min, finished after 4 crushings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience is complete


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

James A. Michener (JAM! called by no one. UNTIL NOW.) was a singular author, wasn’t he? His most famous, well-received works were meticulously researched historical tapestries. They were fiction, or maybe fictionalized narratives where he portrayed broad sweeps of history through created characters (often generationally related). He crafted historical mosaics composed of individual, detailed shards of fiction. Characters were sketched only roughly, kind of subordinate to the march of time but just present enough to shade events in human terms. Michener was pretty good at it. He also was SPOT on about the American Electoral College, but I digress.

Anyway, Michener has nothing to do with anything. Shanidar is a tale that… no of course he is relevant. Shanidar is strongly Michener-esque. Michenery? JAMmy! Those JAMmy synapses closed in my brain early and stayed with me through the entire piece. A work could do far worse than to evoke that comparison!

Before we really invoke JAM though, let’s start with presentation, because it is noteworthy. The work is choice-select, with each choice pulling up a window of text, overlaid on a (mostly) black and white illustration. The illustration style is tuned directly to the narrative. It is reminiscent of cave drawings, often conveying things with almost abstract line work. When it does ahistorically increase detail to capture a character’s emotion or likeness, it retains the flavor of cave drawings, which is enough. It is a really nice effect, enhancing the proceedings at every turn. I particularly liked the rendering of (Spoiler - click to show)the group’s emergence from a tunnel to their new home.

It is all underlaid with music and sound effects similarly tuned to the current scene. The choice to make individual text blocks short and concise gives the sound work its best shot at not over- or under-staying. Text discipline was also an evocative choice. Mostly two to three very short paragraphs conveying the action and a bit of environment and off to the next. This is where the JAM of it really rang out for me. You see just enough of the onscreen cast to get a feel for them, but as much or more of the community impact on and from their actions. To be clear, I found this a compelling narrative choice.

The story itself is told in three parts: an initial tense escape, some community building, then a final migration to a new home. I didn’t get it right out of the gate. There were two things that made the work harder to engage for me, I think. For one, the cast is just on the fat side of ‘wait, who is that again?’ Particularly early on, a lot of names are thrown at us, some of them phonetically similar, though only a few get ‘screen time.’ Names without scenes are just names to a reader. (Notably, Michener himself has sometimes fallen into this trap.)

If not clear by now, this is an interactive fiction, not a game. The interactivity is a nifty thematic echo/expansion of broad sweep storytelling. Let’s think of a JAMmy story thread as a series of discrete action snapshots, implicitly connected by the reader into a larger timeline. Are you thinking of it? Just do it, humor me. We’ll call that the X direction. In the Y direction, we have discrete characters intersecting or not with each other, each with their own suite of discrete scenes that march forward along X. The interactivity lets us decide which threads to look in on. It makes us a drone of sort - where our autonomy is expressed in what we choose to watch while concurrent actions happen outside our view. We are experiencing two-dimensional historical sweep with a one-dimensional camera! Y’know LIKE WE DO EVERY DAY OF OUR LIVES. The corresponding downside to this is that characters we DON’T follow remain opaque and maybe even forgettable to us. The story sometimes concedes ‘flashback’ options to catch up on concurrent activities, but that seemed unevenly applied to me.

The author does one really vital thing - allows a ‘restart this chapter’ option at the end, so the reader can maybe go back and drone-stalk threads they missed the first time. Really the presence of this option is what won me over. I intellectually appreciated the 2D approach, but found it sometimes made the narrative difficult to follow and engage. By letting you cycle a few times, you can explore the entire two dimensional space. Don’t sleep on this capability, fam!

The middle part of the narrative to me was where the work fired on all cylinders. Characters introduced, short one-off scenes with subsets of cast members, deeper intersections between the threads (and maybe fewer to manage) all painting the picture of a community coming together two or three characters at a time. I mostly had the cast in hand by this point. Strong, effective stuff, no notes.

The third part pulled away from me again. It is presenting a much larger time window than the prior two parts, so the sampled character work has a lot more to do and doesn’t quite succeed as well. Characters age, life events that plausibly happen in large timeframes are mentioned in passing leading to a ‘well I guess that happened offscreen?’ kind of feeling. The follow-a-thread architecture meant you were missing a lot MORE of the other threads as time whizzed by. It had a distancing effect, or at least more distancing. I feel if it had adhered more to the fuel-air mixture of part two, or even accelerated more evenly to the faster pace I would have better enjoyed the ride. As it was, it started to feel not just like acceleration but also getting thinner?

I don’t want to sound too down on this thing. Despite the taffy pulling sensation of part 3 it nevertheless really captured the sweet melancholy of time passage and generational handoff. And it paid off many of the recurring characters. This work stands out in epic sweep and subject matter; in narrative style; in thematic use of interactivity; in whole-package presentation. I really really liked it, but couldn’t quite overlook the minor burrs on the way. Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, bonus point for a thrilling mix of uncommon artistic flexes.

…

Ok, you may be asking ‘why just Mostly Seamless?’ Was hoping I could just drop that and run. Part of it was the sometimes jarring time jump transitions in the third part, not fatal but noticeable. But really the big thing was, and I’m putting reviewer-is-petty blur on this: (Spoiler - click to show)At one point, in lieu of the evocative illustrations we instead get a 3D modeled archeological artifact. It felt unwelcome in the moment, but by the end there was a scene with actual archeologists. WHY WAS THIS NOT USED THERE INSTEAD? I don’t know why this obvious-to-me missed opportunity is such a rock in my mental shoe, but there it is. Look, the gap between Mostly Seamless and Seamless is pretty thin and doesn’t even affect the score. You gotta give me a pass on this.

Played: 10/17/23
Playtime: 35min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, bonus for kicking out the JAMs!
Would Play After Comp?: No, but I will probably check out the rest of the series

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Reading the title, I immediately assumed I was in for a black and white hard-boiled mystery joint. I was mildly chuffed when I realized it was not that. Surely the implications of a title with a punch like that were invoked on purpose? Suffice to say that though noir-less, the title is firmly justified by the end of the work.

This is a lightly interactive novel. Or maybe more than lightly, it is hard to tell, which is mostly a compliment. It took me a while to synch with the rhythm of this prose. The first scene wrong-footed me a little, when the protagonist seemed to respond to banter that was not as amusing as it purported to be. They were obviously in a different place than I was, and the disconnect was distancing. I think though that the key choice that reversed this was the choice to abstract the protagonist’s dialogue. Rather than hear the protagonist’s ‘voice,’ we are only ever informed what was said via narration. We ‘hear’ every other voice, but only absorb the content of the main character’s dialogue. It is a powerful way not only to remove barriers between us and the protagonist, where phrasing may jar or push, but to subtly encourage our own voice to creep in behind the text.

I am not sure if the writing shifted gears after that first scene, or if I just adjusted, but either way notwithstanding infrequent burrs I mostly got on board with the narrative after that.

The setup is a time jumping narrative of an army sniper’s life, showcasing their life’s arc before, during and after a harrowing service in Afghanistan. It is overwhelmingly linear. I counted three choices that felt consequential in the moment over its runtime, with maybe four times that overall. After the final scene though, I have to wonder. Certainly the preamble and blurb to the story suggest many different ending possibilities and I am at a loss to figure out what choices would have led to different outcomes. If true, this is really subtle writing! Every choice I made felt almost inevitable, and organically reflected in subsequent events. If it was truly a branching narrative, getting it THAT right on my specific path was pretty admirable.

I particularly appreciated moments of LACK of choice, in Afghanistan in particular. Offering true choice in some situations would likely betray the setup and reality of the piece in destructive ways. Further, I felt the time jumps were ably managed - it was typically quite clear when I was within a sentence or two even before the date/location headers were established in my head. The narrative overall built steam, brought me into its rhythms and was compelling to read.

All of these were Sparks of Joy to be sure, some developed slowly over time which is kind of at war with the Sparks metaphor I’m using but whatever. I would say two things held me at remove, ultimately. The first was the ending I got. It was a beach scene where (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist threw his phone in the ocean. Despite the previous 50 minutes, I had no idea why we were doing that. Only to find that that was the Big Finish! It left me perplexed, though somehow didn’t render the story pointless. Just unclosed. Did the text somehow misfire on my choice path? Maybe that was the intended effect? Ok, but that final action was not needed for that effect! Why was it there???

The second was that of the three time periods portrayed, the early years percolated with promise and dramatic tension. The wartime scenes positively crackled. The post-war scenes fell flat to me. Their purpose and resonance eluded me. Again, maybe lack of resonance WAS the point, but… that feels like it kind of denied the impact of the war? The protagonist felt aimless to start with, submitting to their father’s priorities irrespective of their own. The war was horrific and impactful, and afterwards the protagonist kind of … stayed aimless just without the push? Made more so? I can’t tell how much of that was my choices vs authorial dictate. Again, this is to the author’s credit. But with a story this long, with so few actual choices to make, maybe a heavier authorial hand is warranted? It is long enough and linear enough a narrative (which is kind of a wild thing to say about a time jump structured story) that I don’t think I want to retry, which in some sense speaks to not breaching into full Engaging for me. Really Seamless integration of choices though.

Played: 10/16/23
Playtime: 50min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, my experience is complete, and bar to creating another feels high


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 short choice-select story about saving a threatened space station and perhaps the ground population beneath it. It is attractively, liberally illustrated. I find myself increasingly preoccupied with the “is this human or AI?” question when I encounter this style of art these days, and I hate it. The question I mean. On the one hand, enabling artistic expression for everyone, including all-thumbs illustrators like me, is a powerful creative tool. On the other, the massive-scale corporate theft necessary to feed it is despicable. In this case, the art was in fact NOT AI-generated, sidestepping that particular concern for another day.

Though if the artist had been AI, at least here it’s kind of thematic?

The setup is you are a commando engineer, called to fix an injured space station. The presentation is reasonably good, illustrations wrapped by text with choices at the bottom. I liked the darkening of old text as a way to emphasize the new, though the illustrations more often than not provided sufficient break that it wasn’t really necessary. The choices on offer are sufficient to make progress, if a bit constrained. The blocking is a bit weird though, you have a full exploration cycle before encountering the ship’s boss?

The story itself ramps quickly from ‘well, what’s going on?’ to ‘ok, dire decision to make!’ I think the story kind of sabotaged itself on two fronts though. For one, nearly the entire plot, certainly the player’s main conundrum, is completely exposed (Spoiler - click to show)in the blurb! Before the player has started playing! That’s some spoiler-Inception there BTW, spoiler-blurring some spoiler spoilers!

The second way it sabotaged itself was with the writing - it pretty routinely telegraphs its intentions in advance of the narrative in a way that both jars and dilutes whatever surprises might be coming. It applies an urgency to your work, before the need for urgency is uncovered. An NPC (unprompted!) alludes to a difficult choice long before any such choice is apparent. Even the text pacing is off - after some scene setting we get some observations by the protagonist, followed by a REsummary of the setting and setup! It is a jittery focus - from macro to micro back to macro.

There are other choices that jar in the moment - stilted, unnatural dialogue, choices being forced when there are clearly other options possible - that latter maybe ultimately gets some measure of justification? The question mark is because it is not clear that the narrative recognizes these things NEED justification or not. It is possible I am doing more work than the narrative there! Anyway, you make your choice then things proceed to an ending with a reveal that is interesting but also kind of confounding on its mechanics. All in all, the text consistently put me just off my center enough that it never crested beyond a Mechanical exercise for me.

Played: 10/16/23
Playtime: 15min, finished

Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless after bugfix
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete. Well half complete, but complete enough.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

I am starting to worry the “Here There Be Poopdecks” nautical review sub-series is going to take over the main series! Unsurprisingly, with a name like The Ship we are up to part 6. An argument could be made to call it part 7 as well, but that’s a false accounting. HTBP is counting stories not instances.

This is a choice-select driven work. The choices are either embedded in descriptive text (when ‘free roaming’ for want of a better term) or in a postscript list when conversing. Most of the roaming choices are descriptive: things to look at, places to go, NPCs to talk to. When you click on a character you get conversation topics to cycle through. Only rarely do choices seem to have divergent narrative impact, beyond moving the plot forward. Even then, it seems mainly to affect relationship scores that at 2hrs have yet to affect the proceedings. The net effect is that yes, there are things to click, but functionally might as well be turning pages. Makes sense, as the work is decidedly narratively driven.

The narrative concerns two journeys, linked across time, by two captains asea for purpose and… self-awareness? It’s not a terrible setup, but by its introspective nature requires some heavy lifting in character and tone to usher the player along. For me, I don’t think the prose was up to the task, and sometimes the available player choices also deflated the objective.

The scenario opens with an urgent pounding on a protagonist’s door - pounding that is ignored to briefly explore surroundings. Certainly the scene-setting is necessary, but having the protagonist ignore what seems an urgent issue outside shades both the character and the narrative unflatteringly. It is a weird choice, because it would have been child’s play to enable casual exploration, then interrupt with urgent pounding later - it’s an unforced error. This lack of control over the narrative manifests often.

Open ended IF, where exploration and interactions occur at the player’s initiative, are an authorial challenge. Your text has to make sense regardless what order they find, say, the vampire and the holy water. With a constrained choice architecture, the author has more control and is able to make transitions feel more natural. Ship inexplicable cedes this advantage. Selections often introduce jarring mixes of non sequitur wordplay or sudden emotional swings as if the author did not anticipate the sequence. In one notable area, the protagonist goes from blind fury to playful friendship with the thinnest of transitions.

Character voices similarly suffer inelegant writing. While there is an attempt to give each character a unique voice, the voices chosen don’t quite ring true and are inconsistently rendered. For one, despite having characters from hundreds of years in the past and future, most have a decidedly contemporary use of profanity. Where the voices are different, they also feel… wrong? Inappropriate familiarity from crew members, a computer that occasionally dips into slang, contradictory emotional swings (one character reacts to a protagonist with both paternal fondness and abject terror). All of it undermines the settings and keeps the reader from Engaging. It is not helped that some conversation options never go away (while others do!), but when selected repeat context and information both characters have experienced before.

I’m not sure why but this example, where one protagonist’s belligerent avoidance of self-reflection is described, particularly rubbed me the wrong way:

Endless ways to avoid taking a peek within, finding out one’s
true call, this elusive idea that defines you, that drives you.

The Captain: “Maybe what drives me is precisely this: that I have
no idea what drives me.”

The text is explicitly saying the character resists introspection, except the VERY NEXT LINE is an out loud self-analysis. And talking to who, the narrator? The narration itself could easily have provided this insight, but the choice for the character to do it awkwardly contradicts exactly what it is asserting!

Narrative IF lives and dies on its prose. For me the clumsy moments accumulated over two hours and ultimately disconnected me from the story. There are other aspects around the periphery - some neat minigames tangential to the narrative, a simple but pleasant use of player-state icons, but the main thrust of the work did not click for me.

Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished, 3/7 chapters complete, 7/20 Achievements
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably jarring choice transitions and architecture
Would Play After Comp?: No, can’t get past my prose distractions


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This IF work juggles a few dimensions at once. A unique user interface. Narrative elements meant to be appreciated as a reader, perhaps informing but disconnected from the rest of the game. Mechanical puzzles where the protagonist manipulates environmental items to achieve goals set by the game.

Some games manage these facets by integrating them tightly together, making for a seamless, holistic experience. For great swaths of IF, they can be judged on how effectively these (and perhaps other) elements meld to achieve something greater than the sum of their parts.

Kaboom seemed unconcerned with any of that. It presented a spare problem of two finicky mechanical puzzles. It utilized a choice-select UI that echoed parser-like mechanics, earning a spot in the review sub-series "Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise." Kaboom's implementation has an inconsistent and befuddling paradigm. It included a disconnected-from-rest-of-game, tantalizing maybe-metaphorical dream sequence of intriguing pith. Its premise could easily have been cloying but was SO unsentimental and spare that it wrapped around to sweet again. And it nodded to an understated interpretation that played off that cold sweetness to offer real poignancy.

Say I gave you four fabric dyes: red, blue, green and yellow. You could carefully measure each color to be blended into a specific shade of subtle beauty. That’s one way to go. Slap it on a T-shirt and soak up the "I’ve never seen that on fleek shade before, girrrrl!"s Yeah, I don’t know why you are sharing it on TikTok either. The other way to go would be to tie dye - create a wild swirling pattern where the colors swirl around each other in a nearly fractal pattern that never actually blends them together. The sum is actually the pattern of distinct, contrasting, undiluted shades.

My assertion is that Kaboom is a tie dyed IF that creates its own vibe without ever attempting to blend its disparate elements, and is singular because of it. Let me pull at the individual components.

UI - this is belligerent and confusing. There is main text, the page-specific selection links and an “Inventory.” Which is a weird thing to call it as you are a stuffed rabbit with no pockets and the strength of cotton. Your Inventory are your legs. Just legs. Sometimes there are illustrations - really evocative illustrations - whose impact is minimized by the page layout that strands them in swaths of black and disrupts the text. And that also just kind of stop appearing half way through? I for sure missed them when they were gone. A horizontal multi-pane construct could have mitigated most of the layout issues at least.

That’s how it presents to you. Now let’s talk about the command selection paradigm. It is clunky and clumsy. You must LOOK AT ROOM; LOOK AT OBJECT; SELECT ONE THING TO DO WITH IT. Then start again at the top, cycling round and round to manipulate items. Except sometimes, options show up in your hidden Leg inventory. Since you are nominally doing everything with your legs I never figured out why sometimes things showed up in main text and other times as inventory options (which again, hidden unless you explicitly look). Can’t solve without them though!

That made manipulation puzzle solving difficult, drudgy and punishing. It was further compounded by having at least two silently unwinnable states that required restart.

The narrative was mostly unadorned, unsentimental prose. The first puzzle is (Spoiler - click to show)using a child’s blood as lubricant! I promise it is nowhere near as dire as that sounds, but opposite of cloying, no? Underpinning the cold proceedings is an assumed, understated bond between the protagonist and the mistress. The spare descriptions allow this feeling to establish itself without fanfare, and gradually fill the space with something approaching real depth.

The exception to this default prose mode is a meaty dream sequence filled with surreal, psychedelic abstractions. What a weird, cool choice!

So here’s the thing about tie dye: my wife hates it. (Probably influenced by cultural baggage inherited from her Baby Boomer Dad tbh which maybe breaks my metaphor a bit, so let me recast it as ‘esthetic objections’ without challenge.) The pattern is either going to speak to you, or you’re going to focus on “Geez I really hate that Green and it’s way too prominent.” The UI was super intrusive to me, it quickly pushed me into Mechanical, Super Intrusive gameplay (particularly when I got an unwinnable state).

That’s what I felt for 99.5% of its runtime.

Final twist. There is a dedication in the credits that sang off the setup in such a specific way, it hammered my heart. It is never explicitly stated, but the work supports an interpretation that the bunny and her mistress are (Spoiler - click to show)Ukrainian civilians suffering a missile attack. That gut punch of a thought shook me into reconsidering. I had undervalued the absurdist flourishes of the dream sequence and the understated emotional vibe that set me up for that final poignant punch. This was not Mechanical at all, it was Sparky but took a shock for me to see it. It gets a further bonus point for so effectively wolloping me with that final gut punch.

Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished after a few restarts
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Appreciation, Technically Intrusive, bonus point for unsentimental poignancy
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete. Also, my heart is fragile.


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