Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 10m, two playthroughs

Given that there is an annual Queer Vampire Jam in the IF community, it should come as no surprise that a disproportionate amount my IF review corpus features bloodsuckers. It is to the community’s credit that so little of it feels repetitive or derivative. mbnb is no exception there. It presents a satisfyingly unique setting: introducing the possibility of vampires in a hunting/gathering native society scrabbling for survival. I say possibilities because here the concerns of the piece are quite distant from any elements of vampirism. So much so, if not for the proclaimed context of the piece, it could easily be read as vampire-free. (Ok, maybe not EASILY, but certainly POSSIBLY.)

This is a visual novel, the player/reader’s input confined (it seems?) to page turning. The most immediate and satisfying part of the work is its visual presentation. A moody soundtrack of wind matched to 16-bit animations of buffeting branches in blues, blacks and greys. It very effectively conveys a harsh, barren environment where humanity can barely eke out a life. This is complemented by the font: a dark, frazzled rendering that seems as battered by the elements as the story’s setting.

Into this hard-scrabble wasteland, we are introduced to a wife caring for an ailing maybe-vampire husband. (I say ‘maybe’ because while she does indeed provide the titular fluid, it is animal blood which, if not for outside-game context, could be susceptible to a non-vampire ‘indigenous medicine’ interpretation.) The CONCERNS of the piece have little to do with any of that. The wife-protagonist feels an imposter in her home, including but not limited to ambivalence in starting a family and subversive folklore engagement. None of it having anything to do with the putative needs of her husband.

The graphical vibe was nicely evocative, but thanks to the vampire headfake, the story ended up feeling unfocused. The protag’s self-alienation was quite independent of her setting, her husband’s outre' nature and really anything beyond the pervasive mood. I haven’t yet addressed the most challenging aspect to the work, which is its user interface. Not only does the work make extensive use of the dreaded timed text, it ups the ante by ALSO using timed transitions. Very, very slow timed transitions. On top of that, there is a confounding UI element. On some screens, a targeting cursor follows your mouse, suggesting a pixel-hunting paradigm. Except, not only is the cursor more reminiscent of modern scope-mounted weapons, it is unclear if anything actually needs targeting. I think I concluded it was meant to represent bird hunting, but it is all so obliquely implemented it ends up being effectively little more than MORE delay. The feedback on this mechanism is completely missing, meaning I could easily be just reading this into the work where it is not intended. So yeah, a bit too slow and unfocused to really land.

Even so, still worth it for the impressive graphical flourishes. Wouldn’t come in with my heart set on vampires tho.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 1hr, demo complete

I am from the Southwest, let’s get that out of the way right up front. Setting a magical realist work in that setting is almost certainly starting life on third base for me, as it were. The work does a lot of things right. Its adrift young adult protagonist is hovering between high school and college, enduring a fraught home situation in a town of limited opportunity. It is all so specific, so matter-of-factly rendered that it can’t help but draw you in. Our protag is starting a summer job, meeting new people, reacquainting with childhood friends and trying to keep a simmering home life from boiling over.

Among the many positives in the work, the artwork is the most prominent. Despite its southwestern setting, the palette is dark: greys and blacks where you might expect brilliant sun and tans. This choice, particularly when rendering southwest scenery, creates a kind of Lynchian mood, of rendering the familiar odd and off putting through aggressive presentation. It seems to suit the work particularly well, setting the tone of the piece nicely.

The rendering also contrasts to the more prosaic parts of the narrative, where new friendships and complicated old dynamics are awkward and sometimes uncomfortable, but in a grounded, realistic way. It has the effect of never quite letting us settle into the slice-of-life narrative we are experiencing. The artwork is aided in this mood setting by offhand references to an absent father that hint at outre’ family history but never MORE than hint. I found this portion of the work engaging - there is an admirable variety of interpersonal relationships built up, creating a full impression of the protag’s life.

The piece really came alive for me when it introduced the supernatural. It took the time to ground our protagonist and flesh her out, so that her reactions and engagement with the strange felt natural and not-quite-in-an-intriguing-way relatable. The details of the supernatural (barely introduced in this demo) are tantalizingly weird, specific and singular. To me, they sang off the southwest setting in a wonderful way, alluding to a unique-feeling mythos that was mostly in shadow. This choice let the details we DID see tickle our antenna in weird, inscrutable ways, effectively doing what much supernatural fiction fails to do: convey the existence of mechanisms beyond our physics that are at once fascinating and scary.

All this was in the work’s favor. There were, however, some elements to the work I struggled with. For one, I felt it did not QUITE fully land its setting. It will probably not shock you outlanders that the most salient element of the southwest is HEAT. Devil’s Liminal really glosses over the unavoidable central feature of this lifestyle. The amount of time the cast spends out of doors is questionable, though not unheard of. Not acknowledging the suffering that entails is less forgivable. Further, not making an overt point of always carrying water, and ACTIVELY CHASTISING FRIENDS WHO DON’T is deeply counter to my experience. If I had to put a finger on a defining detail of my southwest life, that would be it. Its absence chafed at me, not gonna lie. This is ARIZONA IN THE SUMMER. We ENDURE it. Rarely this gracefully.

Despite the ire I just poured on it, that is ultimately a quibble. Certainly it would have no impact on outlanders’ enjoyment of this work. A much bigger reservation, for me, was the revelation that (Spoiler - click to show)our protagonist is a Special, Chosen One. The work had really effectively painted a unique, strange supernatural element that felt singular and intriguing (no mean feat against the wealth of prior art!). I couldn’t help but feel disappointed when it regressed into that familiar trope - it felt like I was losing something that made this special.

My last reservation was a little more subtle, and I’m not even sure it will outlast this demo experience. When creating interactive works, there is a spectrum of protagonist engagement. From a faceless adventurer whose entire character is supplied by the player, to super-specific visual-novel character the player can observe but not really influence. (Here I am talking about the nature of the character, not the puzzle-solving actions they must take, though admittedly there is not a hard line between those two.) Somewhere in the middle is a protagonist with shades of behavior and reactions the player can tailor while the narrative is mostly unchanged. That is where we seem to live here. I just don’t think it quite landed for me. Interactions and developments typically have few choices of response, whose specifics are more alike than different. This kind of choice is an authorial challenge, no doubt about it. The cumulative weight of such choices must be provisioned throughout the length of the game. Many such choices can lead to a very subtle collaborative character that can be undone with clumsy text that does not fully honor those prior choices. It can create a spiderweb of if-else adjective space. Its LACK however is just as awkward. Here, I felt the choices were bounded by a protagonist character so closely as to render the choices too constrained to satisfy. The work seemed to SUGGEST I could collaborate on the protag’s character, but not follow through on it. This is a peril pretty specific to early game, I would say. As the plot picks up steam this would likely not be as foregrounded. But for this demo, where so much is about establishing character and setting, it looms large.

Where does this leave me? I think the things it does right DO outweigh these misgivings and I do recommend checking it out to see if this is for you. In particular, the promise of bouncing all of these deftly established relationships off the supernatural twist is particularly promising. I am on the fence at the moment whether I can let go of my quibbles and pursue the final work when released. That’s probably a me thing, not a you thing though.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 10m

Hollandspiele is a pretty singular boardgame company. Contrary to what its name might suggest, it is an American studio whose owners are deeply concerned with historical injustice. (And dinosaurs, not relevant here.) They produced a game about slavery in America. About resisting (and overcoming resistance to) women’s suffrage. About cigarette manufacture and marketing. About the politics behind the Nicaean council and religious orthodoxy. Really heady stuff, with clever and evocative mechanisms whose main tripping point might be that someone has to sign on to be just the worst villains history has to offer. And then maybe ‘win’ the game as them.

Our own Autumn Chen might have solved this dilemma with the Social Democracy series, offloading the reprehensible side of gameplay to an unfeeling machine. (A choice that… could it be more poetic?)

Playing those games is pretty cool, but I hear you asking, “What would be it be like to BE those game developers? IN NAZI GERMANY???” Enter Lilac Song. The protag of this short work is a game developer, modeling social transformation as the Nazi party is starting its ascendance. Their mentor is a seasoned humanist with a long history of struggle for social justice, who is watching their good work regress before their eyes.

It is kind of a fascinating lens to view this dynamic through. Your humble reviewer is not going to pretend this is not a fraught acknowledgement of the horrific political ascendance of fascism across the globe, and especially in my own home country. Here, we get to see two facets of resistance: a seasoned warrior watching hard-won progress being reversed in blindingly short time, and an intellectual grappling with the new order via the most innocuous of pursuits, deluding themselves into thinking that grappling will somehow give them power over it. The former’s disillusion and resignation is more immediately powerful, while the latter’s relatable immersion in invention is more subtle. Both are ultimately tragic.

I can be accused of reading too much into things. Let me embrace that here! Given the deep mechanics of the Social Democracy series, isn’t there a read of this work as the author’s critical self-analysis? Of reflecting creative pursuits against social upheaval and finding them ultimately wanting? But of recognizing that IGNORING the encroaching hellscape is also not an option? I find both of the characters painfully sympathetic here, even if the work is ultimately kind of pessimistic and distressing. Yes, there are more obvious paths of resistance unaddressed here, but in their omission the work kind of obliquely wonders if those are any more effective. Dear God, I hope so. I don’t particularly want to die in jail.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 10m, all places and sidebars

Every now and then, my wife and I fall into a shallow rabbit hole of Real Estate Virtual Tours. Those things are compelling. Walking through a virtual tour of a home, via a UI that often feels like super-high-res Myst. It is a lot of things at once. Transgressive, like you are SNEAKING through someone else’s home. Wondrous in the technology that puts you so solidly in that sense of place. And an always-just-below-surface artificiality. You only have to navigate a close friend’s virtual home to appreciate the difference from the REAL experience. The staging, lighting, shot angles designed to make everything feel bigger, cleaner and more generic that the real counterpart. It’s an appealing unreality that always has a shadow of falseness to it.

This work is a Virtual Tour of a small hamlet. It resoundingly sheds Virtual Tour artificiality, making this a grittier, more rewarding experience. It feels like it is a combination of the unsentimental photography, the concise historical context, even the map geography that accomplishes this. Unlike trying to sell a house by showcasing (and distorting) its broad, sanitized appeal, Blossom revels in the awkward, specific messiness of this small enclave. It feels more authentically than performatively cool.

What Blossom DOES share with its corporate cousin is the impetus to put its reader/player in the driver’s seat. We recognize the appeal of self-directed discovery as a foundational pillar of IF. OF COURSE its power will be harnessed by Capital. While this harnessing might be an indictment of the West’s social system (barring some increasingly tone deaf defenders), Blossom puts this mechanism to a less-compromised purpose. To convey the thrill of discovery. The specifics of Blossom, NY are unique to it of course, but the breadth of it is not. EVERY place in America has that depth of lore. The Eastern Hemisphere has even DEEPER lore. If I’m honest, Blossom is interesting, but not particularly compelling in that. What IS compelling is marrying the exploration to an IF paradigm where the ACT of exploration is as or more enjoyable than the details unearthed.

If I have a regret with this work, I am sorry that its ties to human sacrifice cults, Cosmic Terrors, or pre-human otherness didn’t come to light in this short visit. How far could it be from Arkham?

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 15m, Trusting, reassured, guilted, deflected, heard

It seems the internet in general, and especially this IF series, are never going to let me break free of Vampire Subtext - a work’s conversation with traditional vampiric themes of predation and consent. This is the fourth(?) in a series of mortal-vampire romance vignettes, snapshotting moments from a long relationship. What I like about the series is its delving into deep cuts of romantic experience. It uses the particulars of its vampire lore to cast a dramatic spotlight on real relationship dynamics. Until this piece, it had quite nimbly (I thought) avoided Vampire Subtext pitfalls.

Here, our pair are tentatively addressing the discomforts of Vampire feeding - one of the most problematic of the subtexts. Traditional feeding tropes play directly into questions of consent and victimization. This work appeared to be trying its damnedest to answer and refute that subtext. Except I didn’t find the WAY it tried that convincing.

My read of the work was that it was capturing a very specific, very fraught relationship dynamic of mismatched sexual desire. Of one partner whose needs were out of scale to the other, leaving the relationship to negotiate the compromise. This is a dark, often glossed over dynamic that casts a long shadow. While the temptation might be to cast it as a minor issue to be worked through, any missteps can lead to unfulfilled resentment. It is totally worth questioning whether a long term relationship is deep enough to weather this, or whether both are better served finding a closer match. I found the rendering of this dynamic very economical and powerful. The characters come to an understanding in the moment, but that understanding is CLEARLY acknowledging the seeds of future discontent. Interestingly, this seemed to be true in all five of the endings I achieved. I LOVED this! By not providing (at least in my five) a ‘fairy tale’ resolution, it fully acknowledged the serious peril this dynamic presents! This read on the work has the effect of recasting the problematic Vampire subtext into something very human, and acutely observed.

Here’s the thing though. The work, in the most explicit way possible, REFUTED this read! Quoth the work: “It’s easy to think of it as analogous to someone having sex they’re not into – [but not]” Uhhh, yeah, it is easy. So easy! AND SO NARRATIVELY REWARDING TO DO SO!!! If I accept the narrator’s word here though, what am I left with? Maybe it is trying to paint a very specific human-vampire social interaction in the interests of emotional fantasy? Ok, but what do I do with all this LIVED HUMAN EXPERIENCE that is singing off the setup so perfectly? And even if I can escape that, DOESN’T THAT PUT ME RIGHT BACK TO VAMPIRE PREDATION, now with an EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL COMPONENT???

It doesn’t help that the human perspective continually highlights the seeds of the relationship’s destruction in other ways. “As if you could manage his feelings if only you had enough information to avoid ever doing or saying anything that might make him feel bad.” I mean, THAT doesn’t sound healthy does it? Regarding the feeding: “But six months has taken the shine off.” Feels like sunsetting an initial carnal infatuation to me. “It doesn’t make him a predator, or you a victim.” Well, now that you’ve brought it up, THAT question is going to linger and smell of denial… All of these dovetail so nicely with the asymmetric sexuality read of a white hot infatuation cooling to reveal the seeds of its destruction. WHY ARE YOU DENYING THAT, WORK???

As a final evidence of relationship foreshadowing, I offer the fourth ending I found (mild spoilers). Each of the endings is characterized by the dynamic used to power through the issue. The fourth one is called ‘Heard’ meaning the two have aired and acknowledged each other’s position. Except the choice I made to secure that ending was (Spoiler - click to show)“Try not to be like that?” Isn’t that the OPPOSITE of being heard? It’s being denied! As an acknowledgement that things are fraying that is a great development. But if not intended as such, what is it?

In the end, this work put me in an uncommon (but not unprecedented) headspace: one of deeply admiring the subtle dynamic I felt it captured, once I decided to IGNORE THE PLAIN TEXT OF IT.

(In the interests of covering my bases, I should note the possibility that the denial was in fact the human protag’s unreliable rejection of the true dynamic. That perhaps the dynamic WAS at play, but the participants were not able to identify it yet. Maybe. If so, I for one could have used some subtle narrative cuing that this was the case.)

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Single-Choice
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 20m, two playthroughs

University is an exciting, challenging time for a young person. Trial and error adulting. An array of new people all attempting to build a social order on a blank canvas. Complex realities colliding with simplistic expectations borne of sheltered upbringing. It is one of very few times when the world seems ours to write, bounded only by negotiations with others attempting the same feat. The thrill of discovery colors it all - discovering new rules to the world, encountering expectations and perspectives we could not dream of on our own.

In the face of that wonder, it might be easy to forget that not all motives are generous and personal safety is simply not a priority. This is a single-choice work that puts you in the role of a student, getting to know an off-putting classmate with a singular perspective. I am loathe to put it more clearly, as that will be well and truly spoiler territory. As a single-choice work there’s really two criteria to bring to bear: the effectiveness of the table setting and the impact of that choice.

As far as table setting goes, the specifics of the setting were a bit muddy to me. We see the protag cleaning up a common area, only to later be told they live alone. Now, this COULD be quad-room situation, but the text declines to clarify. Similarly, the physical description of the key NPC, specifically their eyes, are given a lot of attention, but the descriptions kind of seem at war with each other. All of this could be a deliberate attempt to put the player off, to generate discomfort and mystery aligned with the protag’s own. I don’t think it quite landed though. There is a gulf between struggling WITHIN the story, and struggling to GRASP the story. The nature of the NPC becomes clear enough, so baldly in fact that the earlier murkiness doesn’t seem to pay off?

I would say a more effective use of table setting was in the protagonist themselves. Starting as a blank slate we are seemingly invited to stamp ourselves onto, as the story progresses their questions and priorities nudge us away from that vanilla impulse with pleasantly surprising choices. The protagonist is revealed to be every bit as singular as the NPC.

The latter is what really makes the single choice land. The work toys with the subverting-expectations aspect of uni, and ends up including the player’s POV in that subversion. When given our single choice, its tradeoffs and consequences are ambiguous. What might seem obviously bad has been clouded - perhaps making it that much more dangerous for its reasonable doubt. Or perhaps it is refuting misconceptions in a way that only open engagement with the world can reward. Interestingly, the possible PRICE for the choice is never resolved. Maybe it is also subverted? Or maybe some expectations are COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED? The story ends before consequences are discussed leaving us in the newly-crafted space of the promise of our choices before it collides with a potentially cruel reality. It uses horror tropes to evoke the real world thrill of its setting, not forgetting the underlying terror and fragility of it. Ultimately, I think ending on that ambiguity makes the work stick better than playing out to a definite conclusion. The suspension of suspecting but not knowing is more interesting than either possible concrete outcome.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/22/26, 4/24/26, 4/28/26
Playtime: 1.75 hrs over four sessions, won

Am I capable of opening a review of a TADS work without proclaiming my unwavering fealty to that authoring system? My track record might suggest ‘not at all’ but I’m going to try it here. Except that first sentence kind of… D’OH!

Unseelie really goes out of its way to bias you under-appreciate it. The ABOUT screen lays out its genesis, not as a passion project, but as an undercooked assignment that got out of control. Then a half-hearted “might as well” ST submission, with self-confessed shortfall in aspirations. On the one hand, little risk of unachievable expectations. On the other, what a wild choice to SO prime the player with reservations. It’s already in the back garden, we KNOW there are caveats! Sure, points for transparency, but for me the invitation to dismiss it was so prominent it kind of colored my play of it.

That low-expectation level setting does immunize it from disappointment, but it also partially closes our mind to its charms. Every typo and gameplay glitch that follows can’t help but be seen through the lens of what it could have been. The narrative is very shallow - the protag is bumped into an otherwordly portal by dimensional travelers, then left to navigate a quasi-liminal set of tunnels. This is not a ding on the work, it harkens to very early parser traditions where the wandering and puzzle solving was the point. It does though, put a premium on the construction of those puzzles.

Here, I think, is where the undercooked nature of it works against the player. It has very clear “obstacle-circumvention” gameplay. A prisoner that must be freed. A faucet that must be turned on. A creature that must be distracted. The puzzles are a mix of classic “find key” and some more clever discoverable mushroom capabilities. I identified two things that ultimately prevented me from fully embracing the work.

The first was the absence of soft cues. This seems a deliberate design choice, putting a premium on player experimentation and exploration. There is nothing inherently wrong with this choice, in fact the biggest charges I got from the game came from connecting mushroom effects to puzzle solutions. The question this inevitably raises though is “What happens when player runs out of ideas?” Historically Hints or Walkthrough provide the goose necessary to keep going. Or progressive cuing text. Absent all that, players will sooner or later run into a wall. And here is where the expectation setting undermines things. By so thoroughly disarming us, we don’t really have a narrative hook to keep driving us past blockages, nor a confidence that the game itself is not blocking us. This was compounded by the inclusion of multiple locked doors, a (Spoiler - click to show)card reader, and an (Spoiler - click to show)unknown nest object that ended up being red herrings. Absent soft cues, they represented potential puzzles a player might spend an INORDINATE amount of time spinning on. For me, this added up to four separate game sessions of trial and error with fits and starts in progress, each time with decreasing enthusiasm. It is unclear, if this had not been a TADS work, if I would have bothered.

The second barrier to full embrasure is fear of puzzle design I am calling “steps for steps sake.” Some puzzles are rendered as multi-step. Freeing the prisoner requires finding an item to free them, only to be told “no you need more.” Same for the faucet with multiple valves. These are a tried and true tradition of parsers, no doubt, but the construction of multi-step puzzles is a delicate thing. The way they SHOULD work is a tiny shot of endorphins when a step is completed, egging the player further and providing some reward for the work to date. When the ‘reward’ is a repeated “NOPE, you have uncovered more blockage” that crucial shot of motivation is leached away, and you start to lose faith that further progress will not be met with MORE blockage. Yes, for sure there is an ultimate success waiting for you, but no real sense how far off that is, and how many blocks the game will throw in your path before you get there. These represent an increasing ‘enjoyment debt’ that threaten to overwhelm the stuck player, particularly if this is a common outcome of several concurrent, in-flight puzzles. I am glad to report that the chain of blockages is in fact quite shallow, and all of these puzzles DO reward tenacity! It turns out it was only a FEAR of steps-bloat, not actual bloat! It’s just, given the warnings we were given (particularly since I was solving things in parallel), not to mention distracting red herrings, a good deal of the playtime was under a shadow of dread. Then, because the puzzle solutions transition to game end so unexpectedly and abruptly (when red herrings were implying further gameplay), I never really had a chance to ENJOY the sense of accomplishment the puzzles DID provide!

Per the portentous ABOUT warnings, there are quite a few implementation issues as well - stray words and messages polluting object descriptions; a closed box reporting open; LOTS of missing nouns; iffy punctuation; some spelling typos; and most egregiously mushroom disambiguation and repetition issues. It seems overwhelming when put in a list like that, but honestly? Not as intrusive as a cold list would suggest.

So yes, despite ALL of that whinging, there is a lot more going on here than the ABOUT disclaimers suggest. The setting is solidly rendered with a consistent “Implementation Horizon,” effectively painted by tight, efficient writing. It leverages some more advanced TADS capabilities like Dispensers and AccompanyingState in its structure. The NPC is more deeply implemented than you would think, including acting as a soft HINTer if asked the right questions. I’m not sure I could engineer this tight an experience in only two-ish weeks. If the Back Garden is not custom made for this kind of work I don’t know what it IS for. It is a fully realized collection of TADS puzzles, ultimately a bit more mature than its disclaimers would have you believe, stocked with traditional game play and some nice mushroom-based curve balls.

That ABOUT disclaimer set a trap of underestimation I just barrelled into. Thanks to its clever construction, I did eventually claw my way out and enjoy it. I just wish I hadn’t spent so much time ensnared in misconception! Even partially-realized TADS works are still TADS!

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Part-time Parser
Polish: Rough (despite head faking Distressed)
Gimme the Wheel! : Were this my project it would OF COURSE be TADS. The most obvious things to address gameplay-wise would be either HINTS or WALKTHROUGH, missing nouns, or typo/grammar/stray message fixing. But I think my code wonkery would push my first priority in a different direction. There were awkward disambiguations throughout the work, most especially once you realize you can pick as many mushrooms as you want. I think I would plumb TADS’ isEquivalent and CollectiveGroup capabilities to tame that field as a first priority. Honestly though? Softening the ABOUT disclaimers would have the biggest impact on my enjoyment!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/24/26
Playtime: Just under an hour, all in

On the heels of confessing my besmirched admiration for the insect world, Senica Thing comes along and gives us an anthology of works with a (loose) bee common theme! Bees may be second only to spiders atop my Pyramid of Cool Bugs. Kind of the same way Senica Thing is atop my Pyramid of Most Anticipated Works of Spring Thing. I am an unabashed fan of this annual tradition, so to couple it to BEES, then have one work be called A SWARM OF SPIDERS??? If you are just shamelessly pandering to me YOU ARE DOING A GREAT JOB, PLEASE KEEP IT UP!

There also emerges an insect-adjacent common take to some of these works that I found intriguing, though maybe it is best to let it emerge through individual feedback. Let us delay no longer!

Yellow Swarm by HOT (10m 4 endings)
This was a great piece to start with, one that leaned into an action hero inspired tale of base infiltration against a little-a alien threat. It was very economical in its implementation: its protagonist and world were so thoroughly painted in a few ‘previous case’ details and periodic Schwarzenesque™ one-liners, quickly getting out of the way of its breakneck action pacing.

Beyond the really fun setting and frenetic pacing, there were two things that really elevated the piece. The most obvious is its graphical design. Given the Senica Thing authors - many students new to IF - it is quite notable when graphical flairs are added to the narratives. And so well done here, the font and layout choices really enhance and echo the setting of the work. The second aspect that delighted me was its ‘collect the ending’ architecture. Despite its deliberately tropey setting where it seems two-fisted Justice will be almost perfunctorily dispensed by an impervious hero, YS instead lets the player steer into a broad variety of endings, running the gamut from Action to Tragedy to Horror. All of them were interesting and fun to find!

Also this work leaned into an aspect of SWARM that many of the other works would ALSO lean into (and surprisingly so): a not-necessarily-unsympathetic depiction of hivemind.

WHAT A MESS by THK (5min, all endings)
Ok, I know I started by belligerently flouting my creepy entomophilia in your face, but one of the strengths of this format is the wild flights of inspiration of its various authors. Here, the swarm is a swarm of RABBITS. Dafug?? Also ROFL. This seems to be a collaborative work, where different branches might have been engineered by different primary authors. This is a very effective way to synthesize dissonant creative visions into absurdist fun. This is a work where your fictional partner may perish, marry you, or mistake your fart for an earthquake! What possible response to that is there but delighted giggling? This piece also leans into the multiple-ending paradigm which might well be a natural way for new authors to engage IF. For me, the success of that model is ALWAYS about how bonkers you can make those. Boy did MESS deliver.

Despite the seeming simplicity of branching narratives (at least conceptually), I am impressed by how many of these works go beyond pure combinatorial explosion, and implement reconverging branches. That is a crucial construct in the IF author’s toolbox, and seeing it explored in a maiden work (like here) is terrific.

The Underground Dungeon by ASM (5m all endings)
Another multi-author work, this one impressed me by how narratively tight it was. It was a collect-the-ending work, but rather than try to disarm with absurdity, it was more tightly linked to a story about palace intrigue. The possible endings were… ok not COMPLETELY shades of each other, but perfectly viable narrative paths. It did not read at all like the product of different authors, it easily could have been the product of a single mind. That is some next level collaboration! (and also somehow a reflection of the emerging hivemind theme?)

It also felt subversively cynical? The motives of the protagonist are unceremoniously selfish. Their king is shaded as problematic, but nowhere near the extent of say Game of Thrones, making our protag’s actions kind of hilariously worse-than-the-problem. Which narrative branches might reward, but more often deliver some over-the-top comeuppance. This work (like the first) showcased that collect-the-endings can succeed even if NOT an exercise in comedic breadth. Which is not to say I didn’t laugh.

Swarm of Thieves by SKIT (10min, endings 1,2,3,4,5,6)
This was a deceptive work of social-justice metaphor… Metaphor? That word kind of implies a level of indirection NOT present in the text: presenting a protagonist named TRUTH, along with companions JUSTICE and FREEDOM, struggling against an autocracy named KLEPTOCRACY. There are multiple paths this struggle might take, curiously many more optimistic results than cynical ones. It also subtly raises some questions, particularly about JUSTICE. While TRUTH and FREEDOM are philosophical constructs, JUSTICE expands to encompasses Social Systemics. Notionally we are playing as TRUTH (lending a bit of weight to our actions!), but functionally we are asked to perform JUSTICE. (I mean, we want those two to be close, right?) This is further complicated by aligning the protagonist with a SWARM - a word that typically does not imply nobility or fairness (let alone FREEDOM), but predatory massmind might-makes-right. All of these choices made the work much more complex than its surface choice-select construction. Just giving TRUTH choices AT ALL undermines the expected singularity of it. If we can choose multiple, incompatible paths, how can they all be products of TRUTH? It begs us to interrogate whether TRUTH is living up to its name, or are our decisions arbitrary and as their author we simply choose to CALL that TRUTH? And is JUSTICE really a universal concept at all, or just expedient control masquerading as something nobler?

Was any of this intended by the author? I have no way of knowing that, but SOT really spun my mental wheels in intriguing ways.

(One quick note to author, it appeared that TRUTH’s gender wavered throughout the work? If this was intended, I didn’t tumble to its desired effect.)

Join The Swarm by SAT (5min, 3 endings many times)
This presents as a horror work - the player is beset by sinister voices egging them on to some unsettlingly unspecific transgressions. This formless swarm seems to have verbal capabilities! The setting is an empty (except for protagonist) house, where the darkness outside is fraught with unseen threats. This all builds a terrific atmosphere of horror lurking below the everyday, emerging to torment us once the sun goes down - a wonderfully primal fear from our collective unconscious. The choice select work presents as a series of choices how to engage/avoid/combat these voices and the tension they are building. I appreciated the divergence from standard Twine formatting here, the red link choices really popped. The work funnels your choices into three possible endings, all hinging on a last minute twist worthy of The Twilight Zone. I found it interesting to replay. After experiencing the twist the first time, the story shifts to melancholy on replay, when you know what is coming.

The only glitch in my gameplay came from the audio track. At startup you are advised to crank up the volume, which I dutifully did. If there was a soundtrack associated with the work it did not seem to play for me. Which is too bad, because a just-shy-of-audible-muttering would have been an amazing mood-setter here!

Jouin Le Swarm by Neural (5min, endings 1, 2, 3, 4)
This is another story that elevates its default Twine formatting with playful font work. The fact that first time authors engage this arguably optional nuance gives me hope for the future of art. Or at least artists. This work explicitly grapples with the two sides of “SWARM” as a hive mind. On the one hand, a perceived loss of freedom. On the other, an end to loneliness and promise of community. I was pleasantly surprised at the nuanced treatment of this dynamic. Western Democracy has decided individualist FREEDOM is our highest aspiration (which to be fair, when presented with authoritarian alternatives does seem better). This simplistic prescription seemingly ignores our evolutionary grounding as a deeply SOCIAL species. I would not have guessed this doctrine to be questioned so explicitly in the entries of this year’s Senica! Does that speak to hivemind or a series of resonant free-thought exercises? Or to the possibility that the whole construct could be somehow a false dichotomy? Many of the works gestured at this tension, but this one foregrounded it. In particular, it had the maturity to acknowledge that while assimilation CAN BE violent to the individual, it does not HAVE to be! I liked the nuance there.

John The Swan by Vitali Blinov (5 min, 4 ends)
I am not a poetry guy, I trust that has become clear. If I am going to engage poetry though, it is best when it is playful. Join the Swarm → John the Swan is a subversively funny baseline for a sly wordplay poem. First runthrough, I thought the timed text worked pretty well, particularly, the ‘late link’ final step. It played out just slowly enough to force me to engage it, but not so slowly as to frustrate progress. It ended up pacing well enough to let its wordplay land with all the absurdist fury of Suess poem. From a default position of 'poetry - no thanks, ’ JtS was tight and fun enough to get past my barriers. If I had a quibble, it was on repeat plays. What at first was playful delay, compensating drag with surprise, once the surprise was eliminated the drag became uncompensated. I would recommend accelerating the pace of timed text during subsequent iterations, particularly for screens the player has already seen.

It’s Here by Chaos (5min)
Ok, if Jouin Le Swarm opened the door to reevaluating Western Orthodoxy’s fetishization of Freedom, It’s Here charges through that door and starts flipping tables. This Swarm is conceived of not as a threat to, but a negotiation between the collective and the individual. It posits that the individual need not be lost to the Swarm, just the opposite, that the swarm is enriched by the presence of each of its individual constituents. I don’ t mean for it to sound condescending when I say I was not expecting this from Senica Thing! I mean that as a compliment, but I understand SAYING it may not make it so. The amount of insightful and challenging thought packed into these small games is really a revelation and a credit to the authors. I really like the subtle reinforcement of that in the game’s construction, which I’m going to spoiler because I like it so much. (Spoiler - click to show)Every path of acceptance or rejection you might try to take ends with the same text! The architecture of the game is reinforcing its central message that there is no RIGHT or WRONG way to engage the collective. The Swarm is enriched by all of it! That meta-linkage is even more impressive to me than the always welcome formatting experimentation!

Dystopia by Creator (10m, multiple endings)
So Dystopia distinguishes itself in the field by having the most extended (and grounded) narrative in the collection. It is an amateur game maker’s baptism into the world of work. Sure, it’s a deeply CYNICAL narrative but that is a virtue, not a sin. It conceptualizes the Swarm as relinquishing individuality and creativity in the name of a collective. But not a nuanced collective of symbiotic benefits, a fully exploitative collective that its members just agree to because… social and financial inertia. When these ‘Rage Against the Machine’ narratives appear they are not served by nuance or ‘ok, but..’ In fact their complete LACK of measured fairness is the whole point. It is a polemic driven by anger, and since when does anger care to take time to hear the other side? It’s seen all it needs to, now is time for RAAAGE. Here, in cold black and white, it is possible my words might be misinterpreted as condemning this impulse. Far from it. This is the youthful Punk Rock ethos that refuses to excuse Exploitation with tepid ‘Trickle Down’ dissembling. It is a throat punch to a social order whose creative vampirism benefits only a very few. ALL my favorite music plays this song, and I LOVE IT. It doesn’t need to be an accurate portrait of all work, whatever that even is, it only need decry a model that EXISTS, and give it ABSOLUTELY NO QUARTER.

I might suggest three refinements here: first the illustration that appears 2/3 of the way in is HUUGE. Even on a full-screen window it bleeds over. I would resize (shrink) this to fit within the text. Also, while I as always appreciate the experimentation with presentation, some links are rendered in a maroon color that practically disappears on the black background. Lastly, there are early choices to reject the story before it starts. Sometimes it leads to an abrupt and unsatisfying end, long before its anger manifests. Another time it results in the game basically telling you ‘No, take the other option.’ Both of these are kind of counter to the narrative, and if taken before the game has been played through once, have no real power. Given the narrative really takes off only if the initial overture is accepted, it is perfectly ok to force the player to accept, and provide story reasons for it. “My family would have a fit if they found out I didn’t even consider the job. Maybe I’ll go ahead and check it out.” Particularly since meaningful accept/reject choices (arguably the point of the work!) occur later, early railroading would not be a terrible gameplay choice.

A Swarm Of Spiders by DiBa (5min, 5 endings)
And here, in our final entry, we get the eagerly anticipated SWARM OF SPIDERS!! The work presents a half-dream late night exploration of unusual spider activity. It can end with going back to bed, DYING, or… no not gonna spoil it, … or another ending that I laughed right out loud at. Vindication for Arachnophiles! This was a very short, very amusing way to close out this year’s theme and collection. The perfect amuse bouche to clear the palate of some of the heavier works ahead of it, and end on a playful, fun note. I do appreciate that one choice (perhaps the most meaningful in the game) was telegraphed as important. If I had a suggestion it would be to make the options of that choice more naturally suggestive of their outcomes, even if only in retrospect. Something like (Spoiler - click to show)Your adrenaline must have played with the spider venom in a catastrophic way… Otherwise, a great finale to this year’s premier IF anthology!

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Buggy (I mean, not COMPUTER buggy… you get it) Anthology
Polish: Various
Gimme the Wheel! : We have established that nothing in my makeup lends itself to this incredibly vital service to this hobby. This is a wheel I am content to leave in Ondrej’s firm, sure hands.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/21/26
Playtime: 10 min, 2 chars x2 personalities

“Welcome to the rest of your life, Mr. Menfer.”

That quote from Exchange presents as a mic drop moment, doesn’t it? In isolation like that, it can’t help but beg the question ‘is it earned in context?’ Don’t worry, it’s kind of my job to explore that, and if have my measure you know you’re going to get PARAGRAPHS of answer.

Exchange is a choice select work set in a near-future medical facility. I am loath to expose too much of its sci-fi conceit which anyway is kind of tangential to this first Act of a work. The piece is billed as Act I of III, and as you might expect is mostly used to establish characters and background. All of it in service of a narrative that promises to explore (Spoiler - click to show)billionaire privilege colliding with (Spoiler - click to show)underprivileged resentment. I mean, I am totally here for THAT.

It presents as a dual narrative, letting us play as both doctor and patient. It further lets us characterize each of those along the “well-meaning → @sshole” axis. This is a very interesting choice architecture. As far as I can tell, neither of those choice-chains influence the narrative directly (not in THIS Act anyway), but they very much shade the narrative with divergent characters and motivations. You can basically construct 4 separate narratives by permuting the two characters: 2 mirror image “good guy v bad guy” configurations, a cynical “dual-jerks” tale, or perhaps a tragic “dual-angels trapped in unfeeling system” one. It’s an interesting approach where the EVENTS are the same, but the characters the player creates are so different as to mold the story around them, thematically.

Learning that this is part I of III really sets some expectations here. For one, this act is pretty short, at least in a single runthrough. If the subsequent acts are to scale, this will end up being a blindingly fast narrative. My initial impulse is that it couldn’t possibly achieve its goals on this extrapolated time scale. That’s probably an unfair take though. The author is under no obligation to make the Acts symmetric, so perhaps this line of thinking is misguided. It also presumes things about the narrative I have no true insight into. Granted it wouldn’t be the FIRST time I wildly attribute a dire future on the thinnest of justification. Maybe I won’t do it here? Yet?

More interesting is the tension this structure sets up. In a (very) short Act I, practically a prologue, the degree of difficulty in enabling those four narratives is not SO high. It is still a noteworthy accomplishment, but it’s kind of like a free throw or an unchallenged layup. It’s one thing to ESTABLISH character and motive. It will be another challenge altogether honor those choices in a fuller narrative, where they might be expected to influence the plot directly.

Then too, there is the meta-narrative expectation. This is not four separate stories, this is a single work encapsulating the four. Yes, branching narratives CAN represent unrelated stories, customized stories if you will, where the intended experience is a single playthrough that honors player choices. This work though explicitly begs you to replay, presumably to at minimum see both principle actors. By opening that box though, you are also invited to plumb the permutations. Which then begs the question, “Will there be an over-arching meta-narrative that somehow unites these permutations into a larger statement?” How cool would THAT be???

Through those lenses, I found this to be a very effective opening. It set up stakes and conceits that are inherently in my wheelhouse of interest, compounds it with a challenging narrative structure that I see more pitfalls than reward. This is the perfect setup to surprise and delight me! It’s like having our hero dangling by a vine over a steep precipice. It was a fun romp to see them get there, and now HOLY COW HOW ARE THEY GOING TO GET OUT OF THIS???

So is the mic drop justified? All depends on whether the next two acts can turn a free throw into a buzzer-beating, game-winning three pointer. For sure the game is compelling enough not to stop watching at halftime.

Spaceship: Tardis (because.. DOCTOR…)
Vibe: Multiversal Medicare
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I would address one thing more explicitly. As a billionare-v-commoner narrative, I think the work needs to do a little more to establish that the DOCTOR is taking the commoner role. Today’s world places medical professionals closer to billionaires than the rest of us (in esteem, if not financially). The seeming goals of the piece might be better served to show why in the near future this is not so. I mean the corporatization of Hospitals and Health Care provides a ready-made path to this.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/11/26, 4/19/26
Playtime: 1.25hr stalled on first mystery; 45min w/ heavy walkthrough

Some tightly constructed mysteries seem to be written backwards. The author conceives of the crime, then plumbs characters, happenstance, clues and motives to drive towards its solving. Finally, they usher the protagonist through those items in a deliberate way, burying conclusions among red herrings that all make sense in the end. On the one hand, this is good - writing in the other direction could lead to meandering, contradictory and unsatisfying details that undermine the coherency of the puzzle.

It’s also a bit like navigating a trail network backwards. Imagine if you will a motivated hiker starting at a beautiful scenic overlook, the terminus of a particularly rewarding but signage-free trek. MOST hikers will start at the beginning: encountering junction after junction of intricate trail crossings, needing to suss out the ONE path that leads forward. Over and over again, perhaps with some false starts and retracing of steps. Our backwards outdoors enthusiast however, they do NOT experience this. For them, every junction has a SINGLE path backwards, with all the other trails clearly meandering in the wrong direction. For our reverse-pilgrim, the confounding network is anything but, and they speedily and confidently navigate back to the trailhead.

Ok, this metaphor has screaming gaps. Somehow our reverse hiker is also creating the trail system? AND the view at the end? What I am getting at is that, armed with foreknowledge of the mystery’s solution, a mystery author might lose sight of the bafflingly broad possibilities for explorers running it the OTHER WAY. I wouldn’t have spent so much time fumbling with this increasingly over-engineered metaphor if I wasn’t going to apply it to CCC.

For MY hike, I spent over an hour at the very first junction: arguably, the best signposted junction in the game. It wasn’t that the clues weren’t there, some of them anyway, it’s that the clues pointed to more paths than maybe the author acknowledged? After seeking other hikers’ input, I secured the trail map, blazed past that first crossroads, then hit the same artifact again and again. Logical conclusions that made sense BACKWARDS, but FORWARDS were not the only possible path. Ultimately, this repeated artifact meant EVERY STEP was ushered by the walkthrough, not under my own power. This much hand waiving at (if not outright IGNORING of) alternatives could not help but undermine the hike’s reward (and our faith in the deductive powers of the protagonist), regardless of the final vista.

BUT. The work had other charms. For one, despite having consumed a LOT of detective games over the years, the deduction minigame was a thrillingly new mechanic for me. You are presented with 2-4 questions to answer WHY a character might be lying to you. If you successfully navigate the dropdown options, BOOM! you catch the lie and the picture gets clearer. The dropdown was kind of ingenious - it presented facts you had uncovered as options (so many facts!) that both resisted lawnmowering in their breadth, but ALSO triggered you to think about specific aspects that might apply to this suspect/witness. Honestly, it was this mechanism, coupled with the construction of the mystery, that kept me at it, long after I had resigned myself to the walkthrough experience.

The construction of the mystery was ALSO intriguing. It turns out (Spoiler - click to show)EVERYONE is lying to you for all kinds of reasons! Penetrating those details gives you an increasingly clear picture of the sequence of events that notionally lead you closer and closer to the truth, culminating in the biggest lie by the perpetrator themselves. What a revelation of gameplay these two elements created! It felt like a new take on mystery solving that was both thrillingly novel and provided a narratively satisfying scaffolding.

THIS game didn’t quite realize the promise of this architecture for me though. Each junction was fraught with questions that did not parse against their dropdown options, options that encapsulated conclusions in opaque ways, and conclusions that made more sense backwards than forwards. I suppose if the narrative itself had been stronger, or tenser or funnier, that could have bubbled me along. I kept coming back to “Wait, our Thinking Machine organization is prioritizing THIS nearly stakes-free crime?? Are there so few Locked Room mysteries left in the world?” Don’t get me wrong, our protagonist was appealingly humble, the suspect pool diverse and distinct, and the setting confidently painted. But none of that could escape the shadow of the central mystery’s problems.

Ultimately, I am thinking of this as a training hike. I think there is a TERRIFIC game waiting to be trail blazed with this mechanic and construction. Those two choices are an innovative and enticing bedrock to build a game on. I think I just need a bit more attention paid to how it plays FORWARD to realize its promise.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Hallmark Mysteries
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : I think I have made it pretty clear what I would focus on, were it my work? I think the most important takeaway though is that I would DEFINITELY CREATE MORE MYSTERIES WITH THIS TEMPLATE. Given the fictional detective organization established as background, the serial potential is RIGHT THERE.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.