Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Zombies have had quite the cultural arc, haven’t they? From their racist beginnings, to Romero’s definitive lo-fi masterpiece, to gorehound cutting edge horror to ubiquitous then backlash to now just a cultural staple. I mean there are zombie musicals, comedies, heist pictures(!), romances, its just a whole thing. Somewhere along the way their metaphorical power was diluted, but is still endlessly malleable (not unlike vampires).

Surprising no one, the genre is a great fit for a a tower defense/resource allocation game. My first introduction to the game was trepidation - I’ve learned to be wary of this engine’s graphical presentation which errs just on the side of Notably Intrusive most of the time. Some early spelling and grammar errors also were a little concerning. There was some clumsy action sequence blocking where mid attack, suddenly the zombie was still approaching but almost immediately the tone not only saved it but started leading the charge. (Spoiler - click to show)As you are being attacked by the shambling remains of your spouse, the narration observes (para) “…normally a good thing…” This really cemented the breezy tone that had been building to that point, and set the stage perfectly. After this, to the extent that spelling and grammar were an issue the tone easily sailed you past.

As you segue to the defense portion, the graphical presentation really starts to shine: the simple but effective use of screen, color, task selection dropdowns, and status bar tracking made for a seamless and pleasant cockpit to steer your crew of hardy survivors. As it is a timed game, especially appreciate that scrolling is almost never needed. The roles you need to juggle are well thought out, and crisply implemented. The tasks all make sense, in the logic of the game, and like a real apocalypse it's not clear where to focus your energies at first so you wing it and fire and adjust. All in the face of a doomsday timer in the form of an incoming zombie horde.

You’re balancing survival/happiness against crucial future building tasks, on a timer. The timer started to move a touch slow (actually I was probably moving faster) as the game went on, I could see tweaking to subtly speed that up as the game progresses but definitely not at first. Even as you are in a frenzy of your survival balancing act, the wry tone periodically keeps you smiling. At one point my zombie researchers, after quite a long research effort, concluded “zombies cannot be reasoned with.” Lol, no sh*t researchers, why are we feeding you again?

And then its over! A short denouement and you get to read about your score in an amusing news story. This is a kind of slight, short game, but it is such a winning mix of tone, tension and logistical puzzle that I have to say I was Engaged. It does what it wants to really well, and knows to leave before it wears out its welcome. I would call it “Notably Intrusive” for its occasional writing clunks and slight drag before the end. None of that degraded my enjoyment for sure.


Played: 10/29/22
Playtime: 40 min, 8 survivors, down from a peak of 21
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Notable
Would Play Again? Very likely. It’s somewhere between an Adventure Snack and a full meal. Second Breakfast?

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This is an uneasy marriage between a paranormal adventure and a sibling relationship drama. Let me start by answering the question posed in the title. “No, you are your SISTER’S keeper.”

Now I am on record as admiring the Texture interface. I think an author can do a lot with the drag and drop mechanism, particularly what options you make available, associated with what text, and through creative use of the “balloon text” when you do connect the two. I don’t think this work leveraged the power of that interface to its narrative fullest. On many early screens you are presented with two options. Turns out they are not exclusive, you actually need to connect both to advance. Worse, each choice reveals a subsequent paragraph, but they are not position independent. If you choose to reveal the ‘second’ paragraph before the ‘first’ the text doesn’t really flow right. Or if it does, the insertion of the final paragraph dispels that equilibrium. Now creative text choices could use that to advantage, to lead the reader on a different mental path depending on order. Here, I couldn’t detect that. It just felt like a single page that required two pulls to see. It didn’t connect prompt and choice in an interesting way and didn’t leverage that delay for dramatic pause.

I’m not sure why, but I also hit some issues that I think belong to Texture and not the author. It's weird to me how much Texture work I consumed before this registered. I don’t know enough about Texture to know if other authors were able to mitigate these artifacts better or if Texture’s luck just ran out here. For one, the VERY distracting “font resize” issue reared here. (Is it just me? I complain about it a lot, like a LOT a lot, and I’m starting to question whether this is a fundamental flaw of Texture itself.) Texture appears to do an HTML-like dynamic formatting for line wrap, paragraphing, etc. Which suggests that like HTML, an author would need to do some extreme intervention to tightly control their screen. In HTML, when text overruns the available window space, it scrolls. In Texture it seems to shrink the text until it fits. Man is that an intrusive choice.

There was another presentation glitch that I noticed for the first time here. The “text balloons” that hover over the prompt word do not recognize edge-of-window. If your prompt is on one side or the other of your window, and you have more than a word or two of bubble-text, it disappears under the window’s edge making it useless. Since Texture appears to auto-wrap, its not clear how the author could mitigate this, and yet this is the first work I saw this artifact so consistently. Bad luck?

Leaving aside the distracting formatting, the narrative was a little too bare bones for me. It’s a missing sibling search, that culminates in a Big Bad dream-dimension battle for freedom. It has always been true that horror is a genre practically screaming for metaphor. The supernatural stakes are completely at the author’s whim, and creative authors have crafted innumerable monsters as sophisticated metaphor for real-life horrors. Buffy the Vampire Slayer famously did so for years until the true monster was revealed! I wrote that line as comedy, but it actually makes me a little sad.

Here, the Big Bad doesn’t strike me as having any metaphorical resonance, it's just a (really cool!) monster. Its realm, whose description is also a high point, similarly doesn’t seem to serve a metaphorical purpose. The central sibling relationship seems to be crying out for such a treatment, but no. So it ends up being a pretty straight-forward, unnuanced pulpy adventure.

I don’t think it succeeds as that either though. It's not moving fast enough to paper over its plot contrivances, which is crucial for pulp. If it’s not a white knuckle thrill ride, the audience will have time to question, “Wait, he rode all the way to Germany CLINGING TO THE OUTSIDE OF A SUBMARINE???” Zip them past that, author, that’s totally not important! I get no joy from listing “plot holes” so I’m going to spoiler these just so we don’t have to read them. If the author is curious what didn’t work for me, here are a few plot choices that jarred loudest: (Spoiler - click to show)finding not one but 2 crucial clues, in minutes, that a presumedly much longer police search failed to turn up. Keeping the police out of the loop before the supernatural angle was obvious. Reading about the savior MacGuffin, that the sister suddenly has, but does not realize how to use. Why else would she have it?

I think though, that all of those I could have forgiven with a taut sibling drama, and I feel let down here too. The missing sister was presented as flighty, disappearing for long stretches without reason, the implication being she can’t take care of herself. More traditional use of spoiler-mask: (Spoiler - click to show)At the climax, the sister is begging, pleading to be trusted to effect her own rescue, or at least effect a heroic sacrifice. The game does not even give you an option to honor her wishes, and so the protagonist siezes the agency, denies the sister, and saves the day. The real answer to the question in the title “Am I My [Sibling]'s Keeper?” is apparently “Yes. Yes you are and always will be.” This is like the least satisfying answer to that question.


Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 15min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? 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 IFCOMP22 Review

Another default(?) themed Twine entry, this one set on a research vessel out at sea with a crew of young oceanographers. The black/white/blue color scheme serves this game a little better than others given its horror theme, but barely so. During I think the 5th play through I did stumble on a nifty use of dynamic font, would have loved to see more of that but as far as I can tell that was a one-off.

The tone on this one was noteworthy. The protagonist is not dynamic, they either perfunctorily or begrudgingly follow the choices you make. They got some stuff they’re dealing with, and not particularly effectively. It’s an unusual choice which at first puts the protagonist at a remove from the player. This is reinforced if you try to goad them into action – things don’t really working out if you do. Heroic-feeling choices either outright fail or come with significant unforeseen drawbacks. Driving this PC is kind of like pushing jello - you can’t always get them to go the direction you want, and even when you can its never very responsive and requires more work. Fortunately, they are surrounded by much more dynamic NPCs which definitely give some welcome propulsion to the action. First play through I never did synch with the protagonist (and kind of admired the NPCs) and was left at a remove.

Construction-wise there are long linear sections of action, punctuated with choices you have no real way of assessing, meaning things can feel arbitrary. Some of them do allow you to build the character, or maybe shade them at least. Normally, this design choice frustrates me if there isn’t a thematic reason behind it. There’s two reasons why here, this actually kinda works? The first is that when the action gets furious in the third act (really there’s only two acts, so second act), making choices in a spur-of-the-moment panic probably isn’t going to result in deliberate, fully-informed decisions. This tracks. The second reason it works, and why the character choices can work, is only really revealed on subsequent playthroughs.

There seems to be a lot of plot divergence available here. Early choices take you down very different plot paths. It is a short game, but nevertheless it feels very broad. This is not a ‘plot will always reconverge, it's the friends you make on the way that change’ design. The protagonist/player alignment benefits from these multiple playthroughs. It’s not a long game, and it's a race to see if you will come around on the protagonist before the end. First play through I did not, not even close. But on subsequent playthroughs, because the plot varied SO much, you weren’t revisiting the past, it was like you got more time with them. I wouldn’t say you ever really like them, but you at least get past “would you just step up??” to some early stage of sympathy.

But the real secret that multiple playthroughs reveal is how deeply cynical and hopeless the whole thing is. First play through you might assume “well I made some bad choices, sorry dead characters.” (Spoiler - click to show)I played to 6 endings and they’re ALL bad! The ‘best’ was physical survival but very depressing and it went down from there! That’s not necessarily pleasant or enjoyable, but it is… bold. Pet Cemetery is one of my favorite Stephen King stories because it is so unremittingly tragic. There is no ‘magic book/shaman that saves the day at the climax.’ Uh, spoiler. It is a no-compromise approach to horror that dares you to appreciate it. Which I kinda do? (Someday I’ll figure out why it works for King, and fails so spectacularly in Halloween Kills. Probably because it's King, right?) I did not try to determine if there were NO (Spoiler - click to show)optimistic endings, but I do kind of hope there aren’t.

So where does that leave me? Play through wise, between the difficult protagonist, limited and arbitrary choices, mostly vanilla presentation it was Mechanical and Seamless. (Spoiler - click to show)But it gets a bonus point for committing to its bleakness across multiple endings.


Played: 11/1/22
Playtime: 30min, 6 endings.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again? 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 IFCOMP22 Review

This was my first exposure to Texture pieces. Maggie H’s use of it, including formatting, color choice, response management and graphics use felt like an extension of their expressive prose in setting an overall mood of the piece which I’ll call ‘lazy disquiet.’ Even where the choices were limited to one or just a “next” button, the text blocks, breaks and changes all felt deliberate and evocative in a really nice way.

But there were bugginess issues. In particular, it seemed that regardless of my choices (and boy did I try a lot of permutations of them) I could only get at most two nights’ sleep that ended either in waking up with an unexplained loss of time that seemed narratively important, or on a page whose bug was that none of the presented choices allowed you to leave the page. Stuck.

I hit both of these end states within 15 minutes and spent the next hour and a quarter trying choice combinations and failing to achieve a different result. Early on, this actually seemed intended (stuck bug notwithstanding), striking a “Russian Doll” / “Edge of Tomorrow” / “Happy Birthday to Me” vibe which generally is catnip for me. (Just realized I didn’t invoke “Groundhog Day” above. Is this where we are now? We’ve now got so many it’s lost its primacy as naming this genre?) If that was not the intent, boy did I misread it, though it was that read that motivated me to try and push through.

According to my arbitrary judging criteria, my first few playthroughs elicited true Sparks of Joy in turn of phrase, surprising interactions, creepy description variations. This was not to last. Repetition, especially in time loop type games relies on setting narrative expectations, then either building on them or infinitely and creatively varying them. Without either, there are two possible progressions: long blocks of text will be ignored and clicked through mechanically; short bursts of text will be read so frequently that, like rapidly repeating words for a not-so-long period of time they will lose all meaning. Both happened here, though a third thing did also. Maggie H’s prose is wryly singular in a way that sustains it for a while. But with repetition, many passages seemed to undergo distillation - with every cycle, they concentrated. Not unlike boiling sugar water until it sublimates from lightly sweet liquid to way-too-sweet syrup. An example: the game poetically presents a few things as “gaping.” That is an insanely powerful word, immediately invoking a symphony of feelings. But the more you read it, the stronger its impact is, until you start engaging it with “Is this really the right word here?” “This is saying a lot more than it should.” “Oh my God please stop saying ‘gaping.’”

So I’m left with very positive feelings of my first half hour, quickly eroded away through repetition and lack of progress. My criteria shows its flaws: while my impression showed “Sparks of Joy” initially, repetition eventually sanded those moments down to “Mechanical.” Alternately, if repetition was NOT the point of the game at all, maybe my experience was due to “Intrusively Buggy”-ness. (There is a third option. That I was too dense to make progress, missing some obvious out for over an hour. I acknowledge the possibility but “Just Know Something You Can’t Figure Out” has never been actionable feedback for me.)


Played: 10/3/22
Playtime: 1.5hrs, stuck for 1.25 of it
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy -> Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? Maybe, If reminded and bugfixed

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

I was cautiously looking forward to this one. Looking forward, as my fondness for early text adventure is just a thing about me by now. Cautious because those early days are much more enjoyable in my head than in front of me. And as a standalone app, unless Paul was building on a rock solid parser there were decades of learnings he’d need to implement.

I was right to be cautious. Part of it was my fault. I was bringing TADS-like parser dialect to this game. I did reasonably quickly figure out my blindspot and adjusted to this new parser syntax. But man was it frustrating. So much guess-the-noun, guess-the-verb. A tried and true way to combat this is to artfully provide valid words in descriptions and error messages. Not only do we NOT get that here, the text actively steers us wrong. An early puzzle involves getting out of a thick copse of trees, but…(Spoiler - click to show)it requires you pull an object out of your pocket, which I never thought to do as a ‘status’ command had previously told me I was carrying “Nothing, zilch, nada.”

Other tried and true ways to combat search-the-X problems is the hint system and walkthroughs. The hint system is context aware, but pretty primitive in that its suggestions are of limited help and relevance. But the walkthrough, I’m not sure what to do with that. I explicitly tried commands suggested by the walk through to be variously met with “Be more specific” or “you can’t do that.” Why are you taunting me, walkthrough?

To be fair, early games sometimes used “You can’t do that” as a synonym for “You don’t need to do that yet.” I certainly tried to embrace the experience with that in mind. So for 40 minutes I exhausted the hints and walkthrough and just typed variation after variation trying to hit the magic combo that would do what I wanted (as told by the walkthrough!) to do. I gave up at the 1 hr mark.

It’s a shame the parser problems are so dire. The bones of the game seemed amusing - the ASCII art was the perfect note of blast from the past, and much of it was really well done. It was SO well done I could even use the pictures to suggest relevant nouns, but that ended up being unevenly implemented. The few puzzles I encountered were simple but very evocative of early text adventures and would have elicited wry smiles had it not been so hard to bend the parser to my will.

Really, it feels like this would be a warm happy play if the parser could get out of the way. It would probably take heavy coding, but parser work alone wouldn’t solve it. Even with the current parser, the author could do a lot more in descriptive text to cue the players, and in beta testing to wring out contradictory, even deceptive text. I kind of hope they do, as this is a thing that makes me happy it exists, but the parser won’t let me enjoy it.

And at a minimum, ensure the walkthrough gives actual commands that work! It is the promise of this that pushed it from a 1->2 for me. A valid walkthrough would be a good way to show it is not Unplayable. Yes, I am committing the cardinal sin of critiquing on content that doesn’t actually exist.


Played: 10/5/22
Playtime: 1hr, stuck for 40min of it
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? Probably not but Maybe? If hint/walkthrough and in-game guidance significantly improved.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

I don’t know what to make of this entry. It presents as a super light, highly randomized FRPG kind of thing. You get an apparently randomized starting character with a name, race, some traits and background. None of those come into play again, except maybe magic use. Then you walk, trade and warp until you either win, decide you’ve had enough, or a bug ends the game. I achieved two of those in 45 minutes of pretty repetitive playtime.

You have a short list of items, effectively a status screen, that tells you what you have or don’t (helpfully pointing out you can GET them). Walking and warping lets you navigate the world, such as it is, but there is no map per se, just an endless series of terse, repeating random encounters that kill you, give you money, or neither. When I say no map, I mean your location has no discernible effect on your encounters, or even your relationship to other areas. You can still find Inns and Houses inside a Labyrinth for example.

And you can die. Either because you randomly encounter foes you are not yet equipped to beat, or you just open a box. It’s not really that big a deal, as you immediately respawn with most of your stuff, but is that fun?

In practice, gameplay is just as repetitive as the encounters. You walk (dying as often as you need to) until you have enough money to get stuff (some of which has game effect, others do not as far as I can tell). Or you warp to some area you’ve been before, but if locations don’t matter not sure why you would. Repeat many many times. I don’t think I’ve ever typed the word ‘walk’ that many times in 45 minutes before.

I did hit a small bug - I would lose money if I couldn’t afford an expensive item but already had a sword and tried to trade. I hit a big bug — an ‘out of range’ crash on something called TT. But the game asked so little of me, neither elicited a reaction. Ultimately, I stopped playing when I jerked awake to see that I had typed ‘wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww’ on the command line.

So yeah, what is this? Is it art, a wry commentary on FRPG gameplay? A zen mindfulness exercise? An impressionistic IF that you bring the story to from your head? I don’t think any of those things are for me.


Played: 10/10/22
Playtime: 45min, 1 crash, 1 quit, so many respawned deaths
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Notable
Would Play Again? No, not my cuppa

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Can you like a game for pointing out how shallow you are? Cause I kinda really do. When I get in a IF consumption mood, it sometimes turns into a gluttonous, overindulgent frenzy. There’s times I may not be completely zen when I power these things up. The moody, pixelated black and white artwork shoulda been a clear clue. The melancholy music shoulda been a clear clue. The fact that it shattered my preconceptions within minutes when I went from “yeah yeah, help an old man remember, got it” to “crap, wait, there’s supernatural in here.” That shoulda been a clear clue too.

Not for Inspector Bull of the Chinashop PD, no sir. I hammered my way through the house like a warrantless entry, clicking nouns like they were Ticketmaster tickets on opening day. I was able to slow down enough to appreciate the early mechanism: connecting supernatural investigative thoughts to picture and word clues, but only just, and hammered into phase two where you (Spoiler - click to show)bring artifacts to the spectral presence you are trying to save. Only to be justifiably punished for trial and error in a completely narratively satisfying fail. This caused me to rock back. I’d made a terrible mistake here.

I poured myself two fingers of calm the F down, and restarted, and this time I tried to breath the atmosphere of this thing on its own pace. Holy crap you guys, it is the complete package. The artwork resonated so finely with the music, the page layout, the mental connection investigation mechanism… I went from ENGAGED, I’M ENGAGED, OUTTA MY WAY ENGAGEMENT COMING THROUGH to…

engaged.

The conceit of (Spoiler - click to show)effecting the rescue of a woman who was essentially so unseen by her family and so self-denying that she faded away. And that rescue requiring that you see HER, and not all the things that are not-her that clogged her life, and then TELL HER THAT YOU SEE… And the genesis of all that not being evil forces from beyond, just casual, amiable taking-for-granted from those that notionally love you. What a heartbreaking story whose only solution is to understand the heartbreak squarely and fully. You have to (Spoiler - click to show)assemble her story from artifacts in the house, then deduce what they mean to her when others may not have bothered to. Yeah, some of the artifacts’ meanings are not revealed as well as others but the whole tapestry of artifacts, spread logically and perfectly throughout the house, builds as complete a picture as you care to deduce. It is a super rewarding, tightly constructed, fragmented narrative that builds like a puzzle regardless of the order of your discoveries. It really is a terrific achievement. It is hard to believe the author was not also commenting slyly on Inspector Bull as well - if you as a player insist on treating her as a problem and not a person, your rescue is doomed to the same forces that put her there to begin with. You have to consciously care about her story, and her as a person to succeed.

Wait, was I like, the perfect IF player-partner, whose bad behavior textbook showcased the full breadth of the author’s artistic vision??? You’re welcome AML! Also shocking twist ending, even with what I thought was extreme due diligence, I needed still more focus to get the best ending! That is just the perfect thematic capper. It’s not enough when I think it is, she is the only arbiter of that.

Were there issues? Yeah maybe two. The connect-thought and inventory-use mechanisms were very clicky, required a lot of motion to do a little. That could be streamlined. And maybe when one puzzle is (Spoiler - click to show)the name of the victim DON’T PUT IT IN YOUR TITLE. That’s all I’ve got. It was so deeply Engaging if there were other flaws they totally didn’t register.


Played: 11/3/22
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished after restarting to adjust my attitude, “there is hope” ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Yes, bring her all the things!

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This is another nifty little puzzle game. You are a 'bot squashing bugs via a series of unlocking-style puzzles. Either explicitly unlocking doors, or unlocking new abilities needed to solve subsequent puzzles. The puzzle design is reasonably pleasant and seems to play pretty fair. It does require some logical leaps or guesses, even trial and error from time to time, but that is far from rare in IF, classic or modern. The text descriptions are succinct with a light, breezy feel that keeps things chugging along and doesn’t grate when you re-enter rooms multiple times.

It does a few things really well. For one, I really dug the ascii maps. They were easy to parse, eminently useful, and exuded an old-school vibe that matched the text tone nicely. The game seemed to disconcertingly read my mind at one point. I realized there were a few interesting items littered about behind me, but I really didn’t remember where and was not looking forward to exploring to find them again. No sooner did that sour thought form than BAM I unlocked “ITEM mode” on the map to helpfully point them out! Had to be a coincidence, right? The alternative is super creepy.

While the game did not really implement deep NPCs (most are one-response once their puzzle-state responses are exhausted), like the room descriptions their dialogue is short and to the point with a splash of personality. Since they are bots anyway, this doesn’t really jar - making a strength of its limitations! Same for the limited vocabulary - as a relatively simple bot, there isn’t really an expectation of full autonomy and the limited action palette feels pretty natural. Between the marriage of form and function, the enjoyable puzzles, crisp page and map layout and snappy writing there were plenty of Sparks of Joy. There was however also a friction-y design choice and one small but really annoying bug.

Bug first. It’s a parser game, and the web implementation autoscrolled on command entry for a while. Until it didn’t anymore - instead, it autoscrolled whey you typed the NEXT command. What this meant was, you would go say W(est). The descriptive text of the new room would appear below the bottom of the screen, and only after you input a character THEN it would scroll up for you to see. This had the effect of needing to type something/anything after your command, then maybe erasing that and putting the real command in. Eventually I figured out I could hit Enter-Backspace to force the scroll but man was it annoying. I don’t really have a bead on if it was the author’s bug or maybe the web implementation.

The second was in command choice. This is a parser game, but it implements very few commands. It tells you what they are, that’s fine. Most of the frequently used commands (cardinal direction, look, wait) are implemented as single letters. This has the effect of keeping things light and moving quickly. There are some mode and status commands which are full words, but as they are rarely used that’s not impactful. However, the special powers you accumulate, and use all the time (sometimes in elaborate sequences), are 3 letters. Now, you are instantly thinking less of me because I am going to complain about three letter commands instead of 1. While that is 300% more typing, I accept your scorn. But in a game this light, with a vocabulary this limited, having to repeatedly type the same 3-letter words just starts feeling unnecessary. Especially when all of the ones I unlocked could have started with unique single letters!

The cumulative weight of these frictions led me to a point where after a particularly involved surprise side mission (which I had mistaken for a ‘core’ mission) I didn’t feel compelled to finish the game. So, definite Sparks of Joy, short of Engagement. As I look at the ‘intrusive elements’ above (buggy text scroll, why can’t I type less?) while it for sure informed my experience they don’t really rate as ‘notably buggy.’ Just a spot where more lubrication could have been applied. Hey-O, that’s what sh… no. Just don’t.


Played: 10/30/22
Playtime: 1.5hr, did not finish
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? doubtful, got the gist

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Aaaah, TADS. Like slipping my feet into a warm bath. This is the parser-based IF experience I look for. Amazing, goofy premise and quest, large map, many puzzles from lever-and-button to locked-door to coerce-NPCs to (probably) wildly inappropriate and satisfying uses of everyday objects. The narration is capable and fun, integrating game-facilitating pointers and sly humor in equal measure. It’s not perfect: one NPC seems to attach to you without much lubricating text; a few incidents of can’t-do-that would benefit from a variable list; dense place descriptions without subsequent shorter summaries and/or bolded direction cues.

But really, those feels nit-picky. Especially in the face of a tremendous effort to flesh out nearly every noun with flavor text that makes poking around rewarding in the best traditions of early IF. Even the relatively limited NPCs which won’t make you fear the singularity, they are imbued with enough personality to remind you of NPCs of days gone by. Yes, they are code constructs, but they are amusing and welcome ones.

And that map! A gloriously dense and elaborate multi-level map to explore. Daunting even. Many locations have 4 or more cardinal exits and maybe some ups and downs too. Navigating the map was a treat - most locations have personality too, unique and idiosyncratic: weaving flavor and nav puzzles all over the place.

And here’s where my unfortunate game experience intrudes. For the first hour I wandered around mapless. I was so caught up in the delightful spell the place descriptions were putting on me I darted from one shiny exit to another without much rhyme or reason. And boy did I get lost. Over and over again. It was fun doing it! But eventually I realized I was never getting the dress this way. So I saved my game at one hour, determined to pick up next day with graph paper in hand.

Next day I went to restore my save… and couldn’t. It turned out to be an artifact of my own inexperience, exacerbated by some unfortunate HELP text (subsequently clarified to prevent others following my misguided path). It ended up being a happy accident though, as my flailing for solution showed me that there were maps (and walkthrough) available! Armed with those maps, I decided efficiency would make up the difference.

At the second one-hour mark I had fully recon’d the mall (locked doors notwithstanding) and a bit of its grounds, but only really ‘solved’ two puzzles. Plenty more were tantalizingly laid out before me. The narrative tone is friendly and fun, details plentiful and unique, and puzzles littering the joint. I found myself typing faster and faster as I noticed the clock running out, trying to eke out just one more location, conversation or search. If that's not the textbook definition of Engaged, I don't know what is!

This thing hums with love for the traditional IF form, and is a wonderfully capable pastiche in the best possible sense of that word. It stands fully on its own with wit and verve, and echoes all the best traditions of IF.


Played: 10/6/22
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Of course. Calls to me like a Siren from the 80's.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

I had been low-key looking forward to this one for a while - both due to the philosophical connotations of the title (originally posited to refute the concept of ‘sentient AI,’ there is some nice resonance to IF design itself) and because as a former Cold Warrior… Russophile is not the right word. I need a suffix for “morbid fascination with.” How about Russophiliasis (second ‘i’ is long)? What I’m saying is I have an unhealthy fascination with modern Russian culture, especially the more Kafka-esque aspects of it.

I was faintly disappointed when I once again encountered the black/blue/white Twine formatting. If ever a game was crying out for all-greys, with an occasional splash of impactful color this was it. That superficial reaction was quickly dispelled when I noticed it was a double game, of interlocking IF stories. That’s a cool conceit. And it can be simultaneously played by two players? Loving the ambition. Checked in as Caroline first (as advised) and off to the races!

Caroline is a housewife, mother of two near-adult children, married to a minor politician. Her life is one of quiet burden that she shoulders matter-of-factly. This part I found really nicely painted. Here the use of interactivity, specifically lack of choice, really resonated when contrasted to her undramatic acceptance. The husband is obliviously self-absorbed but not an absolute dick. She ekes out joys for herself with cooking and her kids. This table setting for me was super impactful to what follows. It so cleverly aligned me with the protagonist: both my sympathies and my wearied acceptance of the-way-things-are. The latter is challenging to pull off. As game players, a natural impulse is to be WAY more action-hero than real life would support. This first section defuses that impulse in an impressively successful way.

I think this is going to end up being more spoiler-y than most of my reviews, let’s see if I can keep it coherent. It’s after the protagonist gets involved in a political job that a some serious cracks intrude. To this point in the game, I am basically welded to the protagonist - kudos for that! Then choices start presenting themselves that do not resonate, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)possibly flirting, then pursuing an affair with your ‘boss’. For me this failed on two counts: 1) the object of these decisions is not compelling. Like at all. So much so that even the presence of the options felt jarringly wrong. At best the character in question is an amiable blowhard which sure, maybe better than a self-important blowhard but really not a sufficient upgrade. 2) there is text that portrays the protagonist as reacting much more strongly to this character than any of my decisions and attendant prior text suggested. It felt unjustified and contrary to the protagonist we had carefully crafted to that point and I kind of rejected it. This showed me the second edge of the IF sword. While a traditional narrative can sometimes get away with “I don’t get what they’re doing… but whatever, I guess the plot needs it” if you have invested the energy and skill to get the IF player aligned with the protagonist, those disconnects suddenly become personal.

So that was a sour note. Conversely, there is some dramatic business with the kids late in the story that landed like gangbusters. It had everything to do with how real-feeling the interactions with the kids (and husband!) were prior to that point. Whether the text actively accommodated prior player choices, or was at least deft enough not to contradict them, it was so, so much more successful.

Then there’s the matter of the ending. I should make clear at this point I was playing solo. Shite, I guess I just need to… (Spoiler - click to show)Ok, throughout the middle of the game, you are periodically ushered to a mysterious room, have a colored light flash at you, then given the option to match or not-match the light. There’s no rhyme or reason to this, but it is faintly sinister. Cool. Turns out you were torturing people somehow?!?!? At least, that’s what the government said about you in court. Nevermind that it was a government(?) functionary that coerced you to do it (probably deniably so, to be fair). The court scene kind of fell apart for me, top to bottom, and not because I rebelled at the premise. (Spoiler - click to show)A totalitarian government politically prosecuting an individual on absurd charges is absolutely believable and horrifying which was almost certainly the aim of the piece. The implementation details just torpedoed it for me. Up until this point, the narrative employed precise use of no-choice interactivity. It’s super-effective! Here, as the protagonist is (Spoiler - click to show)literally battling for her life, the ‘no choice’ takes the form of adhering to advice from her lawyer. Yet that lawyer came across as kind of hapless at best, and a possible prosecution functionary at worst. At one point the game even rubs this decision in your face by headfaking a choice that doesn’t exist. The equation had shifted and acquiescence suddenly became a mimesis liability, not a feature. It was further exacerbated when (Spoiler - click to show)the options I chose in the mystery room were not used against me. To the contrary, the state seemed to imply I took actions I decidedly did not. Now they can lie, sure, but at that point why even bother with the mystery room? How much more effective would it have been to map (Spoiler - click to show)my ‘crimes’ to actions I had actually taken? And the decision to only obliquely allude to (Spoiler - click to show)the horrors my oblivious button-pushing caused, that was an opportunity to drive home some personal horror just forfeited.

I think the game makes one final small mistake with a disproportionate impact: it spends a lot of time detailing (Spoiler - click to show)the ‘strategies’ being used in the court room. This has the effect of underlining again and again the absurd nonsensicality of the prosecution argument, and to a lesser extent the ineptitude of the defense. (Also, I’m not sure I agreed with how the Chinese Box problem was employed in these arguments, but I’d need to look at it closer.) None of this is the problem, it actually could be parlayed into a strength, (Spoiler - click to show)showing how hollow the prosecution is. But it isn’t, because (Spoiler - click to show)the text also alludes to actual humans in the audience being persuaded. It’s almost a throwaway scenic element but it does so much damage to the reality of the scene I didn’t recover. How much more effective would the horror have been, if it was clear the audience saw it too?

Above, I burned two and a half small paragraphs on what I liked, and three large paragraphs on what didn’t work for me. This is deeply unfair. I actually liked what those two and a half paragraphs describe SO INCREDIBLY MUCH, I think that caused me to take the subsequent shortfall way too personal. What it did right were white hot Sparks of Joy straight out of Flashdance. Those two crucial misfires though kept it from breaching into Engaging. I can’t help but wonder how the interlocking second story is going to play out, and whether that ultimately overcomes some of this or not.

Yeah, I’m definitely playing that other half. Also I kind of dig the thematically appropriate (Spoiler - click to show)‘redacted’ feel this review took on.


Played: 11/3/22
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished 1/2 stories
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? Of course. When your Russophiliasis flares up, its best to let it run its course.

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