Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Adventuron, that’s a thing! An authoring tool that explicitly enables and embraces 8/32/64 bit adventure games. I love that it exists. It’s like a web-enabled portal to the past. If I read the background right, this particular game was originally developed 35ish years ago and reimplemented today? As a guy who reengaged the hobby after a similar gap, what a powerful way to make cross-time connections in your life - reconnecting with ancient passions and enhancing and expanding with the life lived between. I whole-heartedly endorse. Even if it were fake meta-text, I endorse that spirit.

Adventuron presentation is evocative, well-serving its core mission, not the least of which with its comfort-food font options. The, lemme say 32-bit? graphics are terrifically reminiscent too, presenting a variety of Italian scenery with rakish aplomb. All of it transports the play experience to the dawn of computer imagery, just past mainframe text only, and just before home PCs were powerful enough to do more.

The gameplay here mimics that also, and I am taking the authorship claims at face value here. The game has tight descriptions, bounded interactivity, and many unimplemented nouns. All of which precisely reinforce gameplay of the purported era. There is instant death which can only be avoided through un-deducible and unrelated coincidence. There are puzzles that don’t make immediate sense, but are still the right vibe ((Spoiler - click to show)cf the hacksaw in a bottle). The plot is a PG Golden Age Bond Movie type riff (and a breezy, fun one!), but you are nevertheless talking to Witches and repairing statues. Mapping is not strictly essential, but probably time saving. There is a late losing state very easy to blunder into. I HIGHLY recommend SAVING as you go, certainly once you get to the (Spoiler - click to show)Control Room. It is an interesting alchemy: gameplay is not Mostly Seamless by modern standards, but IS a Mostly Seamless pastiche! It seems very much of its 80’s pedigree and effectively weaves a ‘game out of time’ spell.

So the question I found myself asking as I played it was… what is the value of nostalgia, and how far does it go before it runs out of juice? Offering nostalgia without commentary, without sly subversion, without subtle updates or contrasts with the intervening years’ culture, norms and gameplay conventions… what is the value of a fake time capsule when REAL ones are still available? To be clear, it is not valueLESS, but how satisfying is it, ultimately?

Mental exercise: what if Adventuron somehow became the dominant or even just a prominent authoring tool for IF, does that ultimately help the hobby? Does it hurt? Does it make for soft historical shackles and somehow back pressure innovation and modernization? (A charge that has been leveled at Parser IF for a while now). I mean, it is a fake mental exercise. Adventuron’s presence is really just MORE flavors available, not LESS of other things. But playing modern Adventuron games today, I kind of feel should trade in just a little more. Doesn’t have to be alot!, but just a little. There was a Spring Thing 23 Adventuron game I thought managed this well - while gameplay and presentation were bound to the 80’s there were more sophisticated narrative elements that tweaked the formula just barely enough to make an interesting frisson. Codename Obscura is not about that and doesn’t care to be.

Look, there’s a reason nostalgia exists. It works. It Sparks. This is nostalgia-bait for ME specifically, and I am powerless before its siren call. But at this point, I don’t think nostalgia without a twist gets beyond Sparks.

Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished, Schwarzberg escaped which I think can’t be avoided?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

The term Interactive Fiction, just the term now, implies technology but leans heavily into literary tradition. But we call them GAMES more often than not. Does that seem right to you? I get it, its the ‘Interactive’ part. It creates a deep intersection with the game experience. Sure, and it’s also the march of history - the early ouvre’ was decidedly game based not narrative based. And who am I to snippily try to draw a line between two things that have lived together in one big muddy swamp for decades anyway?

So Vambrace is a game. A full on ascii-map, fight-the-monsters game. On firing it up I felt I had its measure instantly: Rogue-ish RPG-lite dungeon crawl. It wasn’t stunning insight on my part, the blurb told me that right up front. I settled in for what I knee-jerkingly presumed would be a Mechanical experience because knee-jerks are the province of REAL jerks. I further dug a hole for myself when I looked up vambrace (and I do like learning new words) to find it is forearm armor. That you put power gems in. Yeah, I’m Thanos now.

What a dickish way to engage a game, right? Thankfully, early on a single detail threw my preconception baggage out the window and forced me to engage it with unbiased eyes. That detail? One command was named INVESTIGRAB. I can’t stop smiling at that goofy portmanteau. I wish I had come up with it. The syllables sing with sincere, silly poetry. When I used that command (the single letter ‘I’) I consistently proclaimed in dramatic timbre INVESTIGRAB!. Mostly in my head, but occasionally out loud to the deep consternation of my family. Hey, IF like no one’s watching, right?

[Time to queue up this review’s soundtrack!]

That single ridiculous, wonderful word temporarily flushed the self-satisfied a@%hole out of my system and let me meet the game on its own terms. It is an ascii map, navigated and interacted with in single letter commands. This UI choice pops ya’ll. There is almost no friction between you and game progress. Pop! Pop! Pop! While you were reading this, I just ran end to end and killed two monsters! This super-fleet implementation choice, along with tight humor and legit puzzles delivered on the frothy good-time promise made by INVESTIGRAB.

As the game progresses, your suite of frustratingly mild-effect spells grows organically so as not to overload your progress with ‘what all can I do now?’ The Ascii map is similarly poppy and crisp - exactly the details needed to zip around. And it builds its puzzle space as well. You start with ‘hey I know this spell, use it and win!’ to ‘Yikes, none of these spells are Aces, I need to start building combos.’ It ends up being way more puzzle than RPG, to its extreme benefit.

Now, some of the puzzles didn’t click for me - they required using spells in ways that are counter-intuitive, (Spoiler - click to show)like using GUST to also mean PRESS OR SELECT. I think I consulted the walkthrough twice and was glad I did. But others were EXACTLY right, and still others challenging, but delivering that sweet sweet endorphin rush of ‘hey that’s a clever puzzle AND I SOLVED IT!!!’ I think maybe I am slower than average, I did not finish in two hours. Two hours in, the thing pops with Sparks of Joy. A little too light and a shade too ‘need the walkthrough’ to be truly Engaging, but peppy fun for sure. Notwithstanding puzzle design that sometimes was not quite there, a Seamless experience with a great, simple, transparent UI design.

PostScript: As I was playing, I kept comparing it mentally to last year’s Trouble in Sector 471. Turns out there’s a good reason for that! For me, this one (wait for it…) popped just a little bit more.

Played: 10/13/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: I mean, yeah, I’m gonna finish this. It is light, friendly, amusing and more fun than frustrating.

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

[You can kill the soundtrack now. You probably got the gist.]

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Part 4 of the “Playing with Matches” IFCOMP23 Texture review sub-series. Recap: as an IF tool, Texture must be tightly managed due to its 1) potentially powerful drag and drop UI and 2) deeply challenging presentation choices. The latter in particular can cripple a work if the Chaos Twins (Text Hunting and Font Dancing) are allowed free reign.

It is with near religious ecstasy that I report Sculptor has tamed that infernal duo! By my count only a single page was subject to resized font, and that only a single step. Text Hunting was banished altogether. How was this miracle performed? Through exacting text formatting and page size discipline. New text was metered tightly, sometimes replacing, sometimes adding and bar one always with an eye to the fully displayed page. What an ungodly relief this was. It is actually distressing to me how much joy I derived from this basic craftsmanship. Too, the text formatting was clean enough, the options delineated effortlessly to make new text intuitive and not distracting. Occasionally the text would get laid out on the page in modest flourishes that further kept things clear when modified. Barring anything else I am about to say, this is the standard for future Texture authors to consider.

I wish I could report that the narrative and gameplay provided as much joy. Let’s start with narrative. It is a short work about a sculptor at the end of his life, having sacrificed everything to create his magnum opus, then making a decision about it. If your first impression on reading that is ‘art about art, its going to be artsy isn’t it?’, then you and I are on the same page. And we’re both right. It is a work flowing with elevated, poetic language, capturing the passion and sacrifice of an Artist (and only that), as well as more than a little self-pity. All in the kind of overwrought language that leaves me cold:

“And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.”
“Regardless of all, yet another comes to deny your craft.”

It’s the kind of work that uses the phrase ‘gird your loins’ unironically, straight faced, and portentous. Maybe it’s just me, but that phrase seems best employed in full acknowledgement of its stiff pretention. I don’t want to belabor the point, suffice to say I am not the audience for this kind of prose.

So let’s move on to gameplay, or more accurately interactivity. Here too, I felt the work undid itself a bit. For one, while the work tamed the Texture Big Two (which let’s not lose sight of that tremendous achievement), it did nothing to leverage the power of its drag and drop interface. Options were connected without surprise, the connection bubbles offered no nuanced comment on the connections being made. It was largely mechanical, punctuated with baffling choices. At one point you are asked to connect “Sand” to “Still”. I’m not sure a typo’d ‘Stand Still’ made any more sense there and am just at a loss. Elsewhere, two connection choices provided different linkages when one was “Examine” and the other “Gaze Upon.” None of this is fatal, mind, just missed opportunity.

A more damaging gameplay artifact is that the game was undecided how much player-protag autonomy it wanted to allow. Now despite some strong traditions, IF doesn’t REQUIRE protagonist autonomy. Books are famously entertaining, requiring only the occasional player page turn. IF could use interactivity to enhance the reading experience while still presenting a linear narrative. Many works do. You could argue that Texture is specifically engineered to enable that kind of work.

Sculptor can’t quite make up its mind. It offers the player opportunity to mold the protagonist with choices how to react to events. This gives the player latitude to tailor the character somewhat, to build a character in their head. But not always. At one point it requires (Spoiler - click to show)pleading with a lender in a way that clashes with other character choices the player (me) might have made. These are off notes that come to a head at the climax decision. The work has VERY specific ideas about the final choices and their import. But given the prior decisions available to a player, it is possible that these choices, and their narrative characterization, feel false. I know it is possible because it was my experience. The game WANTED me to feel a way (boy did it), but had let me build a protagonist in my head that just DIDN'T feel that way. As a result the climax fell flat and unconvincing. This is an IF work I think would benefit from LESS player choice, and more focus on using interactivity to shepherd the reader to the final destination.

Between the prose and cross-purpose interactivity I could not connect. It was a Mechanical, Mostly Seamless experience for me. But I don’t want to lose sight of the Texture Taming accomplishment. That is real and significant.

Played: 10/12/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete


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

Exactly one third into comp at this point, and the gauntlet is well and truly thrown. This game is the whole package, ya’ll.

- Off-kilter spin on horror theme
- Constant, often laugh out loud, funny
... A comedically overconfident protagonist
... Enables player clowning one example of many: (Spoiler - click to show)close door in Hans’ face while he’s talking
... Incidental text in contracts, books, notes, gravestones, everywhere really
- Organic, story-based puzzle design
... Well but not overtly clued
... Progressive hints if needed
... Includes a (Spoiler - click to show)TRANSUBSTANTIATION puzzle fr cryin out loud!
- Rich NPC conversations (a few anyway)
... Some more than one (funny) dimension!
... Resist uncanny valley better than most
- Default Messages that don’t break mimesis even for unimplemented nouns
- A SEAMLESS PARSER IMPLEMENTATION

Let me let that last one sink in. Parser games are TOUGH to code and write. You have to somehow anticipate the actions of dozens (or hundreds if lucky) of independent consciousnesses. You have to lead all those myriad consciousnesses through a story with a razor’s balance of less-than-too-much, more-than-not-enough prodding and not make it FEEL like prodding. You have to balance the tone and detail of your descriptive text, because without discipline you open space for the player you can’t hope to accommodate. And you have to entertain with prose and (often) puzzles and narrative. Here’s an example of how far this author went: when engaging an NPC, whose beverage was total scenery, nothing to do with anything…

>spill beer
That’d just have made a big mess!
>*how is that even implemented??? awesome
(Noted.)

Now I’m not blind to the possibility I am just on this author’s wavelength and they are on mine. Elsewhere in reviews, I made some throwaway joke about “Olde Englifh.” Actually calling that a joke is way overselling it, I’m reasonably sure most folks gloffed over that without notice. Not this author! There were “afpiring daemonologist” and their ilk everywhere! I crackled and cackled through this thing like a greedy older child on an Easter egg hunt, running rings round their toddling siblings. Yeah, maybe its a vibe thing, but 100% of what I can report aligned with this work!

Even the ‘don’t see/can’t do’ messages were tightly crafted. Little is more deflating than "You see Z. >X Z “You see no Z.” Contrast that to “There was no such thing in sight! Or, if there was, it was beneath my notice.” Adding that second sentence changes it completely from a programming issue to a character one, and happens to align with this protagonist precisely! I don’t know how to generalize that trick for all scenarios, but what a simple, super-effective nuance! Everything about this game is just that tight.

I’m gushing. All this analysis pales before the entertainment power of the game itself. If you can’t see how jazzed I am by this thing I don’t know what else I can say. Every moment you are reading this blathering nonsense you are NOT PLAYING DR LUDWIG AND YOU NEED TO FIX THAT, STAT.

Engaging. SEAMLESS. “Come at me, rest of Comp” it’s saying.

Played: 10/12/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless A SEAMLESS PARSER GAME
Would Play After Comp?: Every possibility, to remind me what’s achievable


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Another terrific work from my favorite Russophiliac! Here we are presented with an ambitious interactive play, a play informed by periodic audience choices. Then repurposed into IF where the player takes the role of audience. So there are a lot of layers here! Let me diagram it, with ‘->’ shorthand for “inhabiting role of”

player (you and me, in our homes, in front of computers) ->
modern audience or audience member (maybe?) ->
post-War Soviet audience/member, making choices
about play's progress

With me so far? This is the worst of it, we’ll get there. It’s all made reasonably clear with some clunky but effective preamble. So, this is a morality play in the truest sense where the morality system in question is Stalinist Communism. That thought immediately conjures horrific collisions between Stalinist social expectations and actual human ethics. All these layers create a wonderful confusion. What is the point of the interactivity? Are we meant to play AS a Soviet audience, implicitly being judged by our ominous narrator/Guide as we make choices? Are we exploring Soviet-era ethical dilemmas from a smugly comfortable remove? So much promise in plumbing those questions.

The play itself is terrifically realized. To my only-superficially trained eye, the details of Soviet life and politics, and the charged paranoia of life under surveillance ring true. The cast are carefully curated to maximize drama, each an avatar for heightened social forces but also a character in their own right. By casting the proceedings as a play, we are expecting a certain artificiality of performance, where motivations, personalities and actions are tilted to the dramatic for performative effect. I found this aspect of the work also spot on. It read (and sounded in my head) like a live dramatic performance, where nearly every interaction was fraught with nonverbal tension and subtext. No casual, “Hey did you pick up some milk?” mundanities here! There are plentiful stage directions, the most powerful of which was “unless otherwise specified, all dialogue is whispered.” C’mon, top shelf stage conceit right there!

The plot is probably exactly what you dread: Stalinist society running roughshod over human wants and dignity, and real tension is wrung as the setups telegraph their climaxes. At the end of many scenes, the Guide comes on to ask the audience how a key decision point should break. The first few are fraught with overlaid pressures - “will this choice only reflect on the play, or am I, the audience also at risk here? Will a counter-Soviet choice even be honored?” It is a great and subtle use of the power of IF.

Aaand now I am courting spoiler territory. I am loathe to give up too much of the plot. Suffice to say, the choices are meaningful, and the resultant scenes are consistently well written. But you only get a few choices all-told, maybe five or six? before the play ends. I ultimately wanted more. Not even more choices, just more consequences. Early on, our Guide makes it clear that as a morality play, we are free to choose counter-Soviet paths, as a way to be instructed by the true depths of these awful Westernized choices. That messaging neuters half the tension, the crowd involvement half! Regardless of which audience I am, I’m not at risk! Additionally, most of the choices themselves unlock nifty scenes and dialogue, (Spoiler - click to show)but do not impact the arc of the play except in detail. Granted some details can be poignant. On the one hand this is almost certainly the artistic aim of the putative Soviet-author, if not the author-author. On the other, it is also kind of the most OBVIOUS construction? There is one choice though that… crap, helmsman, engage blur:

(Spoiler - click to show)At the climax you the audience can choose to rebel against Soviet doctrine and impose Liberal Western Mercy. Should you do so, the play capitulates to your demands in a wryly insincere way. What is the message of that? That collective action can overthrow autocracy? That seems too pat. That because the victory is so artificial it was a lie, that the Guide was still going to meet quota outside the theatre? That even if all you can manage is making the powers that be uncomfortable, still do it anyway? I felt like I wanted more payoff there, given that is the only (Spoiler - click to show)unique one of many endings.

Perhaps the best use of interactivity would NOT be IF, but an actual live audience, where you couldn’t undo, check other options and assess the entire artistic space. Maybe the best payoff would be endlessly asking yourself “Why did I make those choices, and how might it have gone differently?” IF format couldn’t deliver that particular punch with a determined clicker like me.

If you are familiar with my long litany of personal biases, this work hit so many sweet spots I was deeply Engaged. Hell I explored the entire choice tree and THEN reread the script! It was a Seamless implementation for sure. I am applying a penalty point because I felt like the interactivity itself didn’t live up to its own promise (both for the IF player, and a putative live audience), and boy are there lots of my biases baked into THAT assessment.

Played: 10/11/23
Playtime: 1 hr finished, another 1/2 hour exploring all branches
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless, penalty point for interactivity left wanting
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

It is with a head hung heavy in shame I must confess to you, dear reader, that I have hit another milestone in my short reviewer's life. This one is somewhat ignominious. For the first time as a comp reviewer/judge I did not persevere past an hour and a quarter playtime of a long game. As with many other prior failures, I had cause to reflect on larger issues and learn a bit about myself in the experience.

Witch wants to be an old school parser. REALLY old school, like dawn of IF old school. These formative IF works were notoriously opaque and cruel, the gameplay PRESUMED innumerable restarts and experimentation to make progress. They were also necessarily spare - they were often operating within hard storage limits so wit was applied where room was available. Mostly it was a tight, shallow “only what’s necessary” implementation. If assessed on a ‘unique text/hour’ metric, the numbers would be shockingly low. They would complicate progress with things like inventory limits, need for food, water and sleep. Quiet, unwinnable states were commonplace. Instant death with no reasonable foreshadowing. Hey, they were busy inventing the form, cut them some slack!

The net effect of early state-of-the-art was to make the puzzles punishingly hard, deeply trial-and-error, extremely time sinky, so many restarts, and triumphant once finally beaten. At some point, people started questioning, 'was the triumph really all THAT great, compared to the chore needed to achieve it?' The consensus answer seems to be ‘no,’ but it is true that it was a very specific pleasure that is hard to come by these days.

I have fallen into the trap of over-explaining what this community is well aware of.

Witch doesn’t initially present itself as that. It presents itself as a flawed, incomplete implementation. The game is rife with “You see Z; >EXAMINE Z; You can’t see any such thing.” RIFE with it. At first it I attributed it to “unimplemented nouns, amirite?” Parser IF is riddled with this, it comes with the territory, you pretty much have to have some forgiveness to engage at all. But it is one thing when scenic elements that have no gameplay function are missing. It is quite another when a key puzzle is undermined by it.

“You see a (Spoiler - click to show)magic tree.” >X (Spoiler - click to show)TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” >(Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” To later learn via walkthrough that you need to (Spoiler - click to show)>UP. A key puzzle requires you to engage with an object, but refuses to acknowledge its existence! The player can be forgiven never thinking to try this, even through Herculean trial-and-error.

The game is crammed with this kind of thing. Later, the one complicated puzzle I solved refused to acknowledge I had solved it because I did it out of order. And treated me to bafflingly contradictory state messages until I spammed things into the right order. I did endure for an hour and a quarter, wandering around collecting things, performing teeth-grittingly unrewarding inventory management. I eventually got to a point where I needed to consult the walkthrough.

And there, dear reader, is where my resolve abandoned me.

On the first few pages of the walkthrough I realized: 1) there were two puzzles (including the above) I would never have solved on my own, requiring me to detect where the game was actively deceiving me; 2) solving the above case leads to a throwback trial-and-error maze which, classic yes, but good riddance; 3) another puzzle I would only have solved through belligerent spamming then BEEN INFURIATED by the solution; and 4) that I had put myself into not one but two unwinnable states, with no hint that I had done so.

Dear reader, I had until that moment considered myself made of sterner stuff. It was not rage that undid me, it was stunned incomprehension.

Now the framing story for this is similarly old-school. Occasionally playful generic fantasy with unapologetic anachronisms among the setting. But even back in the day that was a super thin framing device, unique when it started, exhausting its novelty very quickly. Nothing is done to burnish the tropes here: no unique twists, no knowing asides, no innovative variations. Even when flashes of wit present themselves, the game quickly abandons them. I had a sinking feeling when up front this sequence played out:

>I
You're carrying:
a plain flagon (which is closed)
a headache
regret

>X REGRET
Are you familiar with the term "intangible"?

Yes, amusing in its inclusion, but why abandon the bit so perfunctorily? Absent compelling story or bouying humor, the gameplay bounced me hard. I am of the camp that all history does not need to be repeated, some is best left in the past. While I am amused by 80’s hairstyles, I will never purchase a feathering comb. It’s fine that it’s of its time. I was tempted to rate it Unplayable, but was it really THAT much more unplayable than early IF?

I kind of respect the author’s effort here in one sense. In this day and age to develop a game of this size (36 pages of walkthrough!) committed to this style of gameplay… it is an old saw to “make the art you want to see in the world.” I hope it finds its not-me audience.

Also, thankfully, at least the Elves here aren’t racist.

Played: 10/11/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, seems got to two unwinnable states, score 10/150, declined to restart
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusively buggy gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, my nostalgia only reaches so far


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Part 5 of our nautical sub-series “Here There Be Poopdecks.” And its about time we got us some eldritch horror, no? In the Assembly review I alluded to an Elder Gods + X formula, but I didn’t give you the whole thing. Here it is:

Elder Gods + humor + X = PROFIT!!

I guess X here is a fish factory? Hey, the formula does not require that X be High Concept all the time. Don’t complain to me, the math is the math. The game is a lighthearted battle at sea on an underpopulated fish factory. Eat the Eldritch is a delightful wordplay of a title, perfectly matched to the spunky artwork that sets the tone out of the gate. And that tone is its biggest asset. Some favorite quotes:

“You have a screwdriver in your ha… hm… You have a screwdriver, but you have no hands. Whatever.”

After encountering (Spoiler - click to show)an elder beast of epic proportions: “It’s fascinating, you really don’t see that every day.”

I have gotten good at curbing my impulse to just throw lots of stolen funny quotes at you, so I stop here. In addition to pervasive wry humor, there is red meat for Lovecraftics - (Spoiler - click to show)Randolph Carter makes an appearance, as well as an unseen crew from either Arkham or more likely Innsmouth. All in service of that gloomy but somehow also bubbly tone. There is modest puzzle work at play here as well, and for quite a long time things clicked along at a crisp, breezy pace. The puzzles were up and down the fiddly/clever scale, as well as the story-organic/puzzle-for-puzzle-sake scale, but reasonably well clued so it moved.

The biggest flaw though is the climactic puzzle. Somehow, here the nudging signposting ran out, and you were foiled repeatedly by specific word and sequence requirements. There is a special kind of ire reserved for a puzzle where you have assembled all the component parts, deduced a clever way to employ them, then spend 30min failing to get the game to accept it. Shrugging, you resign yourself to checking the hints (which, sidebar, I really liked the backwards text format to prevent glimpsing unwanted information. not sure how that plays for accessibility but worked for me) to see where you have gone astray AND THEY TELL YOU TO DO EXACTLY WHAT YOU’VE BEEN STRUGGLING TO DO.

THEN YOU SPEND ANOTHER 15min TRYING TO MAKE IT WORK. Yes, I spent more than a third of my playtime on one puzzle. A puzzle I had a fair idea what needed doing. I did manage to finally get it, finessing a sequence nuance the hint fails to mention, but time ran out and I could not complete the game. So for something this fizzy and light, how do I justify that much time on one puzzle? Is it me? Did I get hung up on a fatal blind spot? Maybe, probably. As a judge am I empowered to take it out on the game? I mean yeah, if my experience was frustration, how do I NOT? I will justify that decision by saying that somehow the cluing text, crucially including failure text, that had serviced so well to that point suddenly abandoned me. Simultaneously the forgiving puzzle flow suddenly became super finicky about position and timing. It was a recipe for getting it wrong with no help identifying WHY. If you make finicky puzzles, provide the player failure feedback, that’s MY hint. If not the puzzle mechanics, then at least if you provide hints, ensure you provide COMPLETE hints.

But. The fact that I was so mad about it is a clue how Engaged I was with the story. It is not heavy, nor revolutionary. It is wry and playful and a very fun hang kind of game, where you agree with the author to just do some IF Lovecraftian clowning. Then drink some sake.

Played: 10/10/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished, score 45/55
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notably Buggy error messages and infuriating final puzzle
Would Play After Comp?: No, will finish after locking review and score, then experience will be complete


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This one shares some DNA with Hand Me Down and some more with Spring Thing 23’s Repeat the Ending. That is excellent DNA to share! Like a champion livestock breeding program! Ok, not that DEFINITELY not that. As with those very worthy titles, LAKE Adventure is a modern (or near modern: COVID-era), nostalgic look at IF creations intersected with family trauma.

Here, you the player are Zooming with a friend during COVID, playing a recently-rediscovered DOS-based adventure game they authored as a teenager. The implementation is spot on. From the 32-bit graphics to the DOS bootup screen, the font, everything rings immediately, immersively true. Threaded through all that is constant commentary by your embarrassed friend, slowly recalling their personal history with the game’s development.

The game itself is so perfectly realized: the limited descriptions and telegraphed noun space, clever but imperfectly coded puzzles, the sometimes awkward gameplay, all befitting its putative tween author. It weaves a spell on the player (maybe moreso for players with experience in the inspirations?) where implementation gaps that might otherwise draw stern “Intrusive!” proclamations instead elicit wry smiles of ‘yeah, that’s about right.’ Talk about turning bugs into features!

Insta-death, childhood home as setting, author as protagonist, repeated respawns, mazes of sorts, all de rigueur for its time and author, rendered sweetly melancholy by the helpful and embarrassed modern narrator. The narrator’s voice is vital to the proceedings, by turns embarrassed, sad, deflecting with humor, helpful and forgiving of their younger selves. The interplay between the game progress and their recollections are natural, understated and impactful, as well as subtly guiding the player forward through the narrative. The underlying adventure is not the star here, it is a character, painted not by adjectives and nouns but by gameplay. The whole thing just so effectively captures both youthful grappling with tragedy via unsophisticated but earnest fantasy, and the bittersweet remembrance by the older author.

If there was an off note, I would say the timed intro/outro sections - they were too fast for me to devour the details I wanted (I barely clocked my ‘score’ before it vanished!) Yeah, that’s it. All the other stuff I usually complain about was here and it was PERFECT. Geez, I didn’t even mention the spiral Mead pdf-eelie that was note perfect as a youthful development logbook. Yeah, its a hint/walkthrough of sorts but even if you don’t need it, check it out when you’re done.

Oh, it was Engaging. So very, very Engaging. Yeah sorry though, not counting it for “Here There Be Poopdecks.”

Played: 10/10/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished, 748/750 points
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, mostly Seamless, and when its not, in JUST the right way
Would Play After Comp?: Probably not? I mean experience feels complete, but such a lovely time… maybe?

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

The classic closed room mystery makes an appearance! Here, a bloody body with no wounds, and a somewhat spare residence to extract clues from. It’s a parser game, so you are X’ing everything you can find, and asking your partner and the victim’s landlord anything you can think of. It’s a fairly quick play, but man is there a twist at the end.

For most of its runtime you are pushing against a Notably incomplete parser implementation where puzzles are harder than they should be due to terse descriptions that hide lower level details. The most egregious will not let you manipulate objects, but if you X an incidental object, only then moves items around for you. Puzzles like these are tough, because when you find let’s call it the Implementation Horizon, the level below which parser commands yield only ‘you cannot’ or ‘there is no,’ as a player you might conclude ‘this is a dead end, there’s clearly nothing more here.’ But this game will pierce that Horizon randomly with super important low level details amidst a sea of gaps.

It also has a few code breaking type puzzles - one of which is clever enough, but the other defies in-world credulity. It is nominally a mnemonic for a password, but it is the most convoluted mnemonic imaginable and nothing anyone would actually use. But it is a puzzle, and it can be solved, so there’s that.

Conversation similarly has a an Implementation Horizon problem - talking to the two NPCs about everything you find yields information, until you start getting ‘no answer.’ (Ignoring you is a curious choice for this messaging, given you are actively trying to solve a crime the NPCs are notionally invested in!) Made worse with incomplete synonyms. If you ask for details about the victim by his LAST name, you get an answer that suggests there’s nothing to learn. If you ask about his first name, hey, info! (Spoiler - click to show)If you ask about an autopsy you are told its not done yet. But lower level medical details are still in the chamber!

Inhabiting this unevenly implemented world are a protagonist and NPCs that are all but ciphers. The most human personality you encounter is through investigating the victim, and even there the details are spare and incomplete. All of this combines to a kind of representational reality, a parser-based psuedo-world, rife with simplifications, non sequitor logic puzzles, and short-hand logic leaps. Like animators only drawing three fingers because that’s representationally good enough.

Thankfully, the game does come with actually helpful hints to point the way through the darkness, at least as far as the parser-search. When you exhaust your environs, it’s time to solve the murder, via answering Who/What/Why questions. The first two questions reasonably trade on what you might have learned from your first half gameplay. But for that third… it’s like you jumped from an abstract cartoon mystery into the middle of a busy emergency room!

That final question encompasses DEEP cuts of biology, science and tragic inferences. Where most of the game was soft and well-meaning, suddenly the last question was gritty, clinical and super detailed! Boy, if you could have seen those options FIRST, before stopping the inquest… because it turns out, that you COULD ask about a lot of that. Based on the light gameplay, there was no hint that you SHOULD, but you could. I ended up taking reasonably educated guesses and hitting it, but it didn’t feel earned. The fact that that last question was so out of place relative the prior gameplay was shocking and kind of subversively fun. The fact that that level of detail was also implemented in conversation (if you go back and try it) was amazing. Sure, all of it deeply unfair, but amazing. I can’t say it justified the unnecessary struggling or elevated it above Mechanical, but I’m glad I saw it.

Played: 10/9/23
Playtime: 40min, “solved”
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably uneven implementation
Would Play After Comp?: No, mystery solved!

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This work is a masterful mashup of Elder Gods and Ikea-based gameplay. Sure, I know what you’re saying. “sniff At this point, haven’t we had pretty much Allll the possible Elder Gods + X mashups?” Yeah, that’s what you sound like with that question. Because NO. We have NOT had an IKEA and Elder Gods mashup, Captain Buzzkill! As with most mashups of this kind, the glee comes from the wildest possible disconnect between Elder Gods and X, where X here is deeply in the sweet spot of ridiculousness.

Assembly makes the crucial decision to commit to its bit completely and totally straight-faced. It has the (justified!) confidence of its premise to not apologize for, nor snark at, itself, the best way to completely sell the conceit. It commits not just tonally, not just as reflected in cutscene backgrounds and scene setting, but in gameplay itself.

See, if you divorce the outre’ aspects from this, what you are left with is a pitch perfect parser IKEA simulator. Not an outright reimplementation, but an interpretation that replicates the feel of the experience through the unique milieu of parser IF.

And prefab furniture is a right of passage for most young adults at this point, no? Those weirdly efficient fasteners, precisely milled parts and cartoon instructions. An endeavor that despite the exacting Nordic engineering and studied graphical communication, can go horribly wrong with the slightest misstep. Assembly distills that experience down to (usually) three precise steps that you better follow to the letter. ATTACH X to Y is the given instruction, but if you ATTACH Y to X, you are suddenly asea, falling in a deep space you only had the thinnest of tight rope wire to support you through. Just like real life if you stray from your cartoon orders! Assembly has reduced the IKEA assembly experience to its essence, distilled and streamlined it, translating it representationally to parser IF play in a way direct transcription would fail. Could you imagine a 40-step sequence of fussy parser tool work?

Then it repeats the feat with the shopping experience! The “twisty little maze” (chortle) of showroom is both unnavigable and forgiving in gameplay, giving you the essence of the box store experience without falling into parser-nav hell. You are introduced to a handful of inexplicably named furniture, then it is pure IKEA/parser gameplay. It is all very tightly integrated, paced well with a few VERY organic puzzle variations, then out before its welcome starts wearing.

It feels ungenerous to rate it shy of Mostly Seamless, because it has taken on the Herculean task of representing half a dozen or more pieces of furniture, each with multiple components and fasteners, and not falling into the “Which screw do you mean, the screw, the screw, the screw, or the screw?” trap. It is a testament to the author’s diligence and creativity that it fails so infrequently. Perhaps inevitably there are glitches though, most notably with the instruction books. Toss in a handful of unimplemented nouns and just shy is where we land.

But those complaints are nits that do not detract from the Engaging experience. The combination of inspired gameplay engineering and unblinking straightface against its ludicrous premise is winning.

“That is Not Assembed, Which Leftover Parts Can Lie”

Played: 10/9/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, short of Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete


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