Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait.

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

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

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

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

Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.

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


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

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Everything about the pre-game hit my brain pleasure centers and put me in this thing’s corner. Grown Up Detective Agency is just a fantastic title. Time jumps? Mystery solving? The phrase “follow the trail of a missing heterosexual”?? It’s like a marskman-level glee sniper.

The work itself did not disappoint. The 2-in-1 protagonist was incredibly well realized. Their dialogue crackled with wit and personality and was simultaneously, recognizably same and different. The time gap shenanigans were not overplayed, just tossed in like precise seasoning. (I laughed out loud at “why are people getting more deliveries?”) I simultaneously felt bad for Kid and understood Adult perfectly. There were a few times I chafed when remembering this world-weary gumshoe was all of 21, but the text was strong enough to get me past that.

Secondary characters didn’t fare as well, but with one exception it was actually fine. Most of the non-protagonist cast was pretty one-dimensional, but in an amusing and winning way. We don’t NEED them to be fully fleshed out, they just need to be fun in their respective roles and most of them very much are. The bros, the bartender, the club owner, the furry… unique and consistent and funny. Even the client filled her role, though I suspect if I’d had more exposure to the other games in the series she would be more fleshed out. We’ll get to the love interest in a minute.

The mystery itself was extremely clever, in the sense of everyone’s motivations making perfect, hilarious sense, however surprising their reveal is. But the mystery-solving gameplay? Less clever. It relies a bit too heavily on NPCs withholding information more for plot than character reasons. It also appeared that player choice in following clues and interrogation tacks ultimately didn’t make a difference. You were always going to be able to visit every clue site, and get relevant info regardless of dialogue choices. I don’t know this is true, I could just be an Ace Detective. Honestly though, it's definitely not that. Which led to a thought mid-game that popped in my head unbidden. “Would I be enjoying this pretty much exactly the same if it were traditional fiction? Yeah, I think I would.” As soon as that thought popped in, I realized I was not engaged because of the interactivity, it was the story and characters. My clicks were less about participating in progress and more like turning pages. Is this a problem? Maybe? Didn’t feel like it in the moment, I was still Engaged in the narrative and enjoying myself immensely.

Really the only narrative shakiness for me was the love interest sub-plot. Characters made admiring assertions about them that I didn’t see corroborated in the narration or the character’s own dialogue. If I can be forgiven the pronouns for a moment, my reaction was basically straight out of Arrested Development. “Her?” Maybe this was a ‘play the previous episodes’ thing too.

As I roll up the score, I am again confronted with the inadequacy of my judging criteria. I was Engaged, no doubt about it. But I feel like the interactivity of IF was inessential and irrelevant to the experience, and I think I want to count that as ‘notable technical intrusion.’


Played: 10/11/22
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Notable
Would Play Again? Probably Not, but the rest of the series, likely

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

“The world is ending, and you are still paying rent.” Ah game, you had me at tagline.

This piece collects a handful of speculative fiction ideas, each of which was so deeply, deeply cool it could support an entire story on its own I think. Then it mixes them together in a surprising and unique heady brew of world building. World building is a delicate balance of information and reader-filling gaps, and it kind of has to be carefully tuned to the tone, themes and length of the piece. You can’t let the detail overwhelm the narrative, but you need enough so that contextual dramatic moments hit big. TAatR feels like it hits exactly the sweet spot for its narrative, and does so while juggling multiple Big Ideas. By the end screen, I raised a proverbial glass to the accomplishment.

The central mechanism is filing: in order earn money you must file snippets of data from “the past” on behalf of a faceless bureaucracy. You’ve got to do enough of it to make rent. So much good stuff is wrung out of this mechanism. For one, the “snippets of data” are world and personal background, which you navigate based on your interest. You will start to recognize narrative threads based on data “encodings.” As you assemble more background, you realize the protagonist was more than an impartial observer to some of these events, and then get to decide how much you actually want to give the government. This in turn can create a money problem that the game offers character-defining ways to solve. This mechanism melds grind, data dump, and character moments in a very compelling and Sparky way.

You’re already like 4 layers deep in your IF parfait, and more to come! On top of all this, the protagonist’s uniquely complicated personal life gets folded. Here’s where things pushed at me a little, and I can’t figure out if the text needed to do more, or maybe if I did. There are choices to make about how the protagonist prioritizes and interacts with other cast members. Only (very!) belatedly did I realize I was fully empowered to collaborate on defining those things. Early on, I thought I was trying to pick the ‘right’ choice based on the character so far presented. As such, some choices made no sense to me and felt false. Often the results left me wanting more. If I shift the blame, I think the text could have nudged the narratively collaborative nature of its choices a little better. I realize this is weird feedback to give an INTERACTIVE FICTION piece. It could be I am just a dummy. I will say, once I realized (whoever’s) mistake, I appreciated that the choices were actually really interesting and varied and opened up the dramatic space tremendously.

There was another narrative, I don’t want to say ‘problem,’ how about ‘inelegance’? Because you are selecting which historical and personal events to pursue in juggling your day job as data filer, and because you cannot pursue all of them (I guess you live in a world with no coffee?), you will not see the breadth of narrative possibility in one sitting. This is cool! It effectively conveys a world so much bigger than what you see. However, it also doesn’t guarantee a fully satisfying narrative arc. In my case, the ending ended up leaning directly on less than 10% of my overall gameplay, and maybe indirectly on another 25%. I did dig the ending as a story twist fwiw, just didn’t find it fully satisfied my investment. I can’t help but wonder if I bypassed a key file or two that would have driven it home for me.

This game did so much that is hard to do, and did it so well, I feel a little ashamed that I couldn’t push past (lots of!) Sparks of Joy. The perceived but probably false choice steering, and not-quite-crisp narrative closure just kept me out. That said, this game is probably the first Sparky game I’ll revisit after close of IFCOMP.


Played: 10/20/22
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished 1 of 9 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I think I will, once I work off my backlog

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 definitely an interactive novel, not a game. It is structured as a series of irregular calendar day snapshots of life after a zombie apocalypse. Really the only choice on offer is what day (as denoted by circles on a calendar) you want to see. At first I just went monotonically forward in time, until still in the first cycle I periodically decided to “skip ahead” and fill in gaps after. (Spoiler - click to show)Really just to see if the cat lived. As you work your way to December, you sometimes revisit days you’ve already seen where the narrative expands or changes but you do arrive. Then the entire year opens up AGAIN. This time, I went backward just to see how it played.

The narrative itself pushed hard on me at first. A few early examples of text trying way too hard and totally not landing for me: “The train unfurled from the tunnel like a tongue.” “Now the swollen joint rolled in his boot like a marble.” “Thirst serrated him.” These are super representative of persistently showy prose that pulls you away from the apocalypse you are nominally watching in a very distracting way. There are plot choices that are as equally confounding/challenging. The protagonist seems simultaneously very clever about apocalyptic survival (I particularly liked the hinting that he was salvaging kibble because it was overlooked by other survivors), and just not smart. He is a wanderer, yet winters in snow and ice?

But but I gotta say the pace of this thing, so slow and deliberate, couples with the language to kind of weave a mesmerizing, melancholy spell. This is not a survival tale of high stakes action setpieces and heightened relationship melodrama. It’s a taciturn dude and his cat figuring it out as they go. At the half way mark, it had eroded away all my complaints with its slow, steady rhythms. The language didn’t get less florid, not at all, but its omnipresence kind of became… atmospheric. I didn’t live in a real, or even realistic world anymore. I was here instead. It was kind of… comforting? It was weird to realize I had been so effectively seduced by the offputting language of this thing. And I was cool with it!

The presentation is consistently inventive and interesting. The days you click on play tricks with layout and text, almost always in unexpected ways. It crucially adds illustrations, very much of the vibe of ‘amateur drawing in his diary’ which is just perfect for the presentation, and crucially signposts when you subsequently revisit certain days. The presentation reinforces and becomes of a piece with the language to really draw you in over time.

Again, but but but. At the halfway point you get a 4th wall break that is so jarringly inconsistent with everything that has come before it's like a slap to the face. I’d been mesmerized by sirens leading me, willingly!, to my doom only to break the spell at a crucial moment. Story, you pushed your excesses in my face up front, then in a cocksure demonstration of your power confidently and slowly won me over anyway. Why would you push me away again? This proved to be hubris it couldn’t recover from. In fact, my choice to do reverse order on the back half was kind of a passive-aggressive dare. “Ok story, you wanna slap me? Let’s see how you fare backwards.”

Now, that choice to Will Smith the reader is clearly deliberate. From post-play discussions, one of the work's themes was (Spoiler - click to show)constructed, edited memories, and the slap arguably provided a dose of cold water showcasing exactly that. The problem is, the florid language ALREADY lent it an air of (Spoiler - click to show)interpreted, artificial construct. I didn't need the metaphorical violence to get that. Maybe if I got the sense that there were dramatic beats of self-deception now stripped from the protagonist this would have stuck better for me, but that's not what I got. What I got was (Spoiler - click to show)one big omission, that was pretty understandable, all things considered and a series of what seemed to amount to minor detail changes. For me, there was no big payoff to this sudden sea change, just a lot of minor nuances.

With the spell broken, the work kind of boxed itself in. In revisiting the past, all the textual excesses were exposed a second time and the additional shading insufficient to dilute them. The graphic inventiveness continued, the drama ramped ever so slightly, but I was lost, and it's really that stunningly jarring 4th wall choice that did it. It doesn’t help that the story doesn’t build to a dramatic or thematic resolution either. I’m not sure how it could, since it ceded control to me (mostly). You get more information, more backstory, but none of it comes together thematically to any kind of crescendo. I actually wonder, had not that one scene freed me, what would have happened to me at the end? If I’d remained under its spell as it wound down like a music box to no finale? Would my wife have found me the next morning, blankly staring at the screen, a shell of my former self?

I kind of have to honor the spell it was able to weave as Sparks of Appreciation. Seamless, technically. Bonus point for inventive presentation, penalty point for that violent mid-story slap and lack of closure.


Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/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

I’ve always had a soft spot for opera, but it's always been very tightly bounded spot. The music is just really vital - soaring and complex and dynamic. But man GOING to the opera is a LOT. There are minimalist productions to be sure but straight-up classical opera? Costumes and set design are hat on hat on hat on hat - pageantry for its own sake. The audience too, maybe the last place in the world you can see capes worn unironically. Maybe it is ur-cosplay? And then there’s been one or two productions that have decided either to sing in English or provide electronic scrolling subtitles. Hoo boy does that take the shine off in a hurry. When you don’t understand the words, the vocals are a featured instrument, weaving into and above the orchestra and engaging directly with what makes us human. When you understand it though? Swelling, compelling music in service of “What does the gypsy boy want? The gypsy girl the gypsy girl the gypsy gi…iiirl.” For cryin’ out loud opera, you were better when I didn’t know.

Obviously I mention this because Prism evoked imperfectly analogous feelings. The most prominent feature of this work is its language. Like opera it can be by turns deeply satisfying or so over the top as to be kitsch. I grabbed a bunch of quotes, examples of both, on my playthrough, too many to incorporate here. Let’s use an early one [annotated]:

"The thought strikes you in perfect time with the dry-storm lightning above. [I mean, no, that didn’t happen. Perfect time? Statistically, what are the odds?] It works into your chest like truth [ooh, that’s a nice phrase] as electricity strikes from rotating hexagonal clouds above into the humming cylindrical basin at your back [wait, what are you describing here? I understand those shapes but not in that context]. "

The overriding atmosphere here is poetically over-written, except when the poetry resonates just perfectly. The problem is, when it is perfect, it kind of draws attention to itself. When it’s not it ALSO draws attention to itself, and also the fact that it’s not perfect.

Now all this poetry is pressed into service, not by philosophers or y’know poets, but by hard-scrabble street dwellers. This is not a fatal choice, but certainly a challenging one. It clashes with the stark practicality of their day to day struggle in a way that is never truly resolved. You could forgive the poetic narration matching the protagonists’ voice, if you assume their inner voice is also the narrator. But everyone in the world talks like that, except the beings that talk MORE that way. There are beings whose alienness is conveyed in a very specific, kind of cool but nearly impenetrable patois. It is alternately admirable and confounding. And unfortunately showy, as the protagonist by turns seems to converse just fine (like dialogue with adults from Peanuts), then call them out as POEM TALKERS. Mr. Kettle, maybe don’t throw that particular stink at Mr. Pot.

There is some impressive world building in the first half of the game. I want to say in spite of itself, but really no, the over-descriptive poetry is every bit a core element of the city as the neighborhoods, buildings and infrastructure that are lovingly described throughout. As a setting it is nicely conceived: physically specific but also impressionistically singular through the language used to describe it. Like Scorcese’s New York but fantasy, if that doesn’t feel like too much of an overreach. Looking back, this is the most prominent achievement of the game, and its biggest Spark.

I have just described the first half of the narrative I experienced, which comprised more than 3/4 of the playtime. At the turn - probably not coincidentally when I chose to leave the city - suddenly what had been an almost meditative, expansive, exploratory, quasi-open-world experience contracted to a limited-choice rushed plot on rails and almost no setting. The pace and interactivity shifted gears with an audible thunk. Ok, that’s crazy, clearly I didn’t hear anything. I think the style is leaching into me. If the language made it a struggle to Engage the work in the first half, this shift really made it a lost cause. And yet, the story still found a last sentence that was so nicely resonant I couldn’t just dismiss it either.

It appears, based on the options I didn’t take, to have many narrative paths to explore. That’s always nice in IF. Not sure whether I’ll explore more later, or just let that final sentence ring.


Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1hr, 1 ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? Not ruling it out, with the right mood

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Goot eev’ning. Before I was a horror movie nerd, I was a Hitchcock nerd. I do appreciate that the game very quickly squashed any expectations on that front (39 Steps was an early Hitch film, based on the same source material). Sometimes it’s best to just pull the bandage off.

The presentation was spare, but attractive and efficient. The black/white/green palette was functional and compatible with the on-the-run thriller story. The music was really top notch. The author apparently composed it himself, and it could easily have fit in the background of any of Hitch’s black and white works. I know the disclaimer explicitly said ‘not inspired by film’ but take the win, game! Just about perfect for the story. I was vaguely disappointed it only presented during chapter breaks. A much lower volume background could have worked in a few set piece spots.

The game presents you/the protagonist with three general approaches to decision-making: Open (ie truthful), Sneaky and Bold. Characters and scenes seem to be informed by which of those you lean on in given circumstances. I like the mechanism overall. It allowed you to define the protagonist as whatever mix of the three you-the-player wanted to work with. I vibed with the concept of that approach and about half the time it seemed to work pretty seamlessly. The other half kind of pushed me away from Engagement, unfortunately. Some of the options seemed MUCH more appropriate to some decision points than others, watering down the open-endedness.

Not all decision points were structured around the three OPEN/SNEAKY/BOLD choices, some had more or less unaligned alternatives. Those were also hit or miss. I can remember seeing a few options laid out and thinking ‘why would that be an option?’ Eventually I tested it out by selecting what seemed an obviously bad choice, and yup, it sure was.

Another design decision that was smart for gameplay but pushed against my Engagement was the option to replay each chapter before moving on to the next. This worked in conjunction with italicized text that acted as a hint system of what should be accomplished in a given chapter. Because it's a thriller, it is definitely dependent on cause and effect so I understand the impulse. I also appreciated that it wasn’t a full game reset. But I would hope that kind of thing could be implemented more organically in the text. Until the final chapter, it was a take-the-bad-with-the-good thing. The balance definitely tilted when the hint up front set expectation that you’ll need to replay the final chapter multiple times to be ‘successful.’ This sapped all the immediacy out of what thrillers famously deliver.

Narratively, it was also a little uneven for me. On the one hand, the protagonist went from ‘hey a dead body’ to ‘omg I’m surrounded by enemies’ blindingly fast, in a way that didn’t ring true to me. It could be that the sequence of decisions I made didn’t quite cohere the way the author intended, but I passed through a phase where I thought he was a raving paranoid. Uh, the protagonist, not the author. There were actions taken (Spoiler - click to show)hiding the MacGuffin from the bad guys that seemed to have obvious impact on the finale, yet went unremarked upon. On the other hand, there was real tension in some of the chase set pieces. The overall language of the piece was delightfully evocative of early Hitchcock thrillers, in that earnest and slightly stagey way. The author really nailed the black-and-white film language and tone, just nailed it. I know what you said Game Disclaimer, you’re not the boss of me.

So many Sparks of Joy here in the setting, the language, the music(!), the decision framework. Just enough clanky narrative and gameplay choices to keep me from truly engaging. I did smile a LOT while playing.


Played: 10/21/22
Playtime: 30 min, replayed final chapter multiple times for 4 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I could see revisiting it after a Hitchcock marathon. Not the boss of me, game!

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

You’re selling beer WITH YOUR MIND. As one does. You can probably guess where.

…

…

I’ve stared at those 3 sentences for a while now, trying to decide on the best path forward, and I’m kind of concluding it will take me longer to type, and take you longer to read, than to go ahead and play the thing. So just hit me with your questions.

Was it parser based? No, option-selection.
Was it a game? Barely but yeah, you have sales goals to meet and powers to employ.
Were there puzzles? Only loosely.
Was it Interactive? About the same as any option-selection game.
Was it Fiction? You’re kind of phoning these questions in aren’t you? Well, psychic powers are fake, so yes its fiction. There’s a plot and a twist too I guess. It counts.
Were there NPCs? Yeah a few of them, and their inner monologues are pretty funny.
Can you lose? I mean yeah, but how much can you really lose in 5-10 minutes of IF? Assuming you’re not driving.
Were there bugs? No. Not enough moving parts to draw them.
Was it Mechanical? No, too funny for that.
Was it Engaging? No, too slight for that.
So it was Sparks of Joy? You’re catching on to how this works.

What was your favorite part? Honestly? “Adventure Snack turns your inbox into an adventure with new interactive email games twice a month. Subscribe at AdventureSnack.com.” This thing was an ADVENTURE SNACK! That is just the most perfect description possible and so succinctly captured my exact feelings about this thing that every word of this review that isn’t ‘Adventure’ or ‘Snack’ is just self-indulgent bullsh*t. You guys, a thing called Adventure Snack exists!

…

Are you just a paid shill for Big Adventure Snack? I am. WITH MY MIND.


Played: 10/25/22
Playtime: 10min, two runthroughs.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience feels complete. I might could go for a snack later though…

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Alchemist is a homebrew parser game, with a retro font and block-graphics sensibility. Retro puzzle-heavy gameplay too, as you are experiment-sitting for an eccentric alchemist, wandering around his mansion using magic and unlocking rooms!

I hit an early block with the parser dialect, where container/surface contents were listed, then made out of scope to subsequent commands without first removing them. Once I dialed into the command structure, I adjusted easily enough. It periodically re-intruded. You can jump ACROSS but not OVER things (or maybe the other way?) but I came away more impressed than not with the implementation. Given the daunting prospect of fifty years of parser technology to learn from this was the most complete effort I have yet seen. The QBasic implementation also was lightning fast, the command-results loop positively popped with energy. Between that, the ability to chain commands(!), and the insanely generous amounts of shortcut keys (including definable ones) the whole thing practically burst with propulsive momentum. I think I may be burying the lead here. A FULLY FEATURED HOME BREW PARSER THAT FLIES!

The puzzles themselves were zippy too - they were mostly pretty well signposted and clued as you went along, including an enigmatic but solveable clue book and robust hint system, which I really only needed for occasional dialect corrections. There are one or two spots of alternate solutions disappointingly ignored, but no real bouts of spinning on what to do next. One might be underwhelmed that the puzzles were fairly straightforward, but the choice pays off as the thing really moves!

Writing is solid, descriptive as it needs to be (though some unimportant rooms suffer lack of definition. There is a cupboard with no shelves or contents?). Sometimes you don’t get room exits, most times you do, but it's always just an X away in any case. There is light wit, particularly with the naming of the active machines and magic items, but its not really a chuckle-fest. All in all, the writing is completely transparent, rarely elevating but never distracting, which is kind of the Hippocratic Oath of Writers: First, Do No Ornamentation. Maybe heavier on the “repetitive recharge of expendables” sequences than I prefer, but more than compensated by multiple use puzzle elements.

Between the solid if straightforward puzzle design and lively, peppy pace it was seamlessly Engaging. Calling it Notably intrusive in parser dialect gaps, but easily enough accommodated and bypassed. All in all a great wrap for IFCOMP22, closing out on a high note.


Played: 11/13/22
Playtime: 2.5hrs, score 300/300, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/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

I am bad at puzzle IF, this is what I have learned. I got stuck in a 5 room spaceship for almost two hours. Yes, 5. Captain’s door (a likely 6th room) never yielded to me for the dumbest of reasons. But let’s flash to the beginning before we expose my shortcomings to the world.

You are a spaceship repairman, just punchin’ the clock when disaster strikes and now you are adrift on a small spacecraft trying to repair your way home. Sounds simple right? You’d think. It is a classic parser format, decently written with clear, unadorned declarative statements. Not a lot of flair, but not needed by the setting, and kind of nicely underscored the workaday view of our technician protagonist. I don’t know why this one ended up so opaque to me. In classic parser style, you go everywhere, open-examine-and-take everything you can, then try to figure out how to use them. There’s even a hint system! To no avail.

Here’s a puzzle I did solve, and why it felt like more work than it needed to be: (Spoiler - click to show)To fix the airlock door, you needed to find, then cannibalize a toy bear for parts. This was all as involved but solvable as you might imagine, no qualms here. Then it came time to replace the part, but first you needed to stand on something to reach it. Here are the ways that don’t work: you can’t stand on your toolbox; you can’t fill a cardboard box with MREs to make it sturdy enough to stand on, you can’t push either a large cabinet or a large piece of equipment closer, you can’t use your magnetic boots to climb the walls, you can’t stick the part on a knife with bubblegum to reach it into place. You CAN get the game-approved trunk to stand on then go. Now it is clearly unfair to ask an author to anticipate every crazy thing a player is going to try and have a reasonable reason why it doesn’t work. But some of them, maybe? Or even have alternate solutions available? Lots of others probably tried the right thing first time and never had cause to pepper the air with profanity like I did. It just felt like I was spending disproportionate energy on the least interesting part of the puzzle. This will be a throughline.

The ‘puzzle’ that blocked me the longest, probably 45 minutes or more, was (Spoiler - click to show)FINDING A FLIPPING SPARE FUSE. Just finding it. Nevermind the rest of the puzzle, just finding that one thing. IN 5 RELATIVELY SPARTAN ROOMS. And again, though I found many items or locations that plausibly could have what I needed, none of them yielded. Not the (Spoiler - click to show)bear (he’s got electronics, right?), the handheld videogame, the other panels in other rooms, the microwave, the big engine in the basement, the fuses in the panel that controlled other things, the electronic locks, none of them. This doesn’t even account for the energy I spent (Spoiler - click to show)trying to find or make a small wire to act as a bypass. When I first posted this review for IFCOMP, I knew what would happen. I saw the future as clearly as a carnival psychic - some kind soul would reply to the review letting me know the insanely obvious location I somehow missed and I WAS GOING TO JUST TOTALLY LOSE MY SH*T BECAUSE I BANGED MY HEAD ON SPACESHIP BULKHEADS FOR ALMOST AN HOUR!! Here was the HINT text provided for this particular thing:

3/7: (Spoiler - click to show)Looks like we need a new fuse. Have you found one?
4/7: Okay great, you found (Spoiler - click to show)a fuse and replaced the old one. Now close the panel.

Hey game? I didn’t. I didn’t find it AT ALL.

Puzzles are satisfying because we humans love to feel smart by solving things. It confirms that the world is conquerable by only the power of our human brains. Suck it rest of animal kingdom! The harder the puzzle, the smarter we feel, the higher the endorphin rush. Sooner or later though we get to puzzles we can’t solve. There is still joy to be had in those, even the mooniest of moon logic puzzles, because the solution once revealed in all its baroque, intricate glory can still delight as an intellectual construct. “OMG I’d’a never put that together, but man those parts just click right into place don’t they?” But within the parameters of the puzzle, if 5 solutions are plausible, but only 1 is ‘right’ it is our nature to ask “Why? The other 4 obeyed the rules too, why are they wrong?”

The answer of course is that IF authors are at the end of the day people with their own problem solving habits and viewpoints and are no more omniscient than the rest of us. Sorry you had to hear it from me! For whatever chain of chemical events that led to my brain and this author’s brain being so divergent, all I can say is viva le difference?

As a reviewer is it fair to penalize this work because I am a moron? Games that more successfully accommodate my… limitations… do a better job nudging in the text, or being explicit in hints, or not leaving reasonable but invalid solutions all over the place. But do puzzle games owe me that? No, solving the puzzles is the whole point. Given the sparse narrative it was always going to be the quality of the puzzles that brought the Sparks or Engagement. Fiction is a dialogue between the author and the reader. Puzzles are a challenge set by the creator to the solver. In both cases, there are authorial choices that can push the audience away or make the work unsuccessful. But what happens when the creator is operating in good faith, with seeming competence in their craft, and through no fault of theirs some portion of the audience just can’t engage? What on earth can a reviewer say about that that is of general interest?

All I can say is that for me, this was so, so much unrewarded trial and error. Mechanical and mostly seamless implementation. (There did seem to be one bug - if you re-examine the airlock panel you fixed, y’know (Spoiler - click to show)LOOKING FOR A FUSE, the text seems to indicate it is not fixed, and still needs to be. Thankfully, the to-do list is still correct. That was a bad moment for me.)

Twist ending: my prescient prediction was only half true. While some kind soul did flirt with my total mental collapse by providing a hint, turns out it was because of a completely wrong assumption I had made. I'm not sure why that's better, but it was.

Also, I understand that the HINT system has been subsequently updated. I can't say for sure it was my total freakout that drove that, but I can't say NOT either. Because this review was for a previous version of the game, am omitting rating from the total.


Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, score 1/10, another 15 min was not going to get me anywhere
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Likely, newer version. Why do I do this to myself??

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