Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This was a fun story divided into 7 chapters, that played out in three phases for me.

The first phase was “the setup”, and I found it to be deftly and confidently executed. The stakes were established efficiently and effectively in very few screens. There was a lot of political, magic/religious and historical context to establish, as well as family background. There were three terrific choices right out of the gate: 1) the political/historical complexity was just right for this size game - specific and intriguing with enough breadth to feel lived in but not so much to drown in details. 2) the information was conveyed using multiple different scenes and interactions rather than a single massive textdump. 3) integrating it with player choices that also established the protagonist’s character. It doesn’t seem like the early choices have far reaching implications (maybe barring one), but they do give a chance to establish the Princess’ voice in the choices the player is making. All in all a very strong start.

The second phase was “the escape and journey”. This was a series of moral and physical peril scenarios (ie series of player choices) that would either establish character or set up potential future stakes or both. By and large I also enjoyed these. The fact that I paused to agonize over options a few times is a good indication that I’m sucked into the stakes of what’s going on. Most of them gave you a chance to flex different dimensions of the Princess’ character and skills. One of them though, involving an abusive street performer, added a new twist that I wasn’t crazy about it.

Prior to this encounter, the choices could result in death, or “luck” loss, but you had a few of those to give and if you didn’t hit a death scene, you got info or character established. With the street performer encounter, the game explicitly warns you if you want “success” you need to navigate a magic sequence of actions. On the one hand, appreciated the warning, make sure to save. On the other it changed the tenor of the game. No longer were you collaborating with the author to establish the princess character and story, or even how much backstory you were exposed to. Instead, you were guessing a puzzle sequence. Further, there were no discernible clues in the choices to inform your guesses. It devolved to trial and error where the focus was on ‘beating’ the scenario, divorced from any prior character or goal choices.

Unfortunately, the last “destination/resolution” phase was more in line with this previous encounter than the first 2/3 of the game. There are timed puzzles that lock out interesting story information. More guess-the-magic sequence encounters. But most disappointingly to me, a final boss fight that had little narrative surprise, nuance or complexity. Through the course of the game, the lore was a key underpinning of the quest, gaining more knowledge of the true vs reported history of the realm. While yes, arguably this lore informed the motivations of the final boss, that final battle didn’t build on or modify or subvert anything that came before. Given how strong the world building had been throughout the game, it felt like a let down.

Ultimately, it leaves me with Sparks of Joy where the first 2/3 of the game were that spark. Its always a shame when the ending is a let down, because that final flavor can overshadow everything that came before. In this case I want to refocus on the first 2/3 that were a true accomplishment of character and world building. Here’s the metaphor I am committing to: its like you get so much pleasure from the sound of two lego blocks clicking together, then you suddenly look up and realize you built a scale model of the Parthenon. Even if you smash the Parthenon after that, that is pretty cool.


Played: 10/10/22
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished w/ final battle walkthrough
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly 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 am a big horror movie nerd, and marrying deep genre love to a reality show setting? We’re firmly in catnip territory here.

Billy’s informal writing voice perfectly capitalized on my goodwill. They adopted a confident, playful and straightforward tone that quickly sucked me into this goofy world with a time-honored genre trope, deftly executed. Throughout the game there are just enough winks to keep the wry feel, but not so dense that they erode the narrative tension. It was a nice and consistent tone achievement. I also admired that a broad range of human gender and sexuality seemed to be accommodated in NPC casting and player choices, and done so organically and naturally. (At least for the choices I made)

The playful voice is most evident when engaging the NPC contestants. They are a varying mix of familiar archetypes and archetype subversions. I think this is a crucial choice actually, as the cast is somewhat large and all introduced at once. Without an initial archetype hook it would be impossible to keep them all in your head. I wouldn’t say any of them are truly 3- dimensional but the story doesn’t need them to be. Really the story only needs 1 dimension and still delivers between 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 depending on character.

Billy’s menu-based interactions were also well done. Which is good, as it is the driving mechanism of the game. When I encounter this system in video games it is rare that I don’t chafe under the constraints of responses and reactions I want to give, but the author has failed to accommodate. Or worse, cues that suggest a response I want to make but instead deliver something I NEVER intended when clicked. Blood Island menu cues are refreshingly concise and clear, and at least for me, never betrayed expectations. It feels ungenerous (in a way Blood Island never is) to quibble that missing responses did crop up. I mean it as a compliment when I say this was infrequent enough that it felt jarring when it happened, as my expectations had been consistently raised and met. It was those relatively few times that caused me to “Mostly Seamless” it. Too, the game’s responses to player choices were smoothly integrated into text blocks, both in format and voice, with none of the jarring “<<CHAR_NAME>> heard your answer and is <<CHAR_EMOTION>> at you.”

I won’t talk about the plot, obvi, except to say that it embraces deconstructionist horror ala Scream/Leslie Vernon/Final Girls (the movie) and integrates Final Girl (the trope) critical commentary in an engaging if not completely organic way. At least for me. This is totally my jam. I could see where someone less taken with the source inspiration might find the commentary clunkily intrusive. Let them write their own review, I dug it!

It was also noteworthy that the setpieces had propulsive urgency, twists and shocks and strong feeling of stakes in them, as the best of its inspirations do. Is there an M Night Shyamalan “oh snap no way!” moment? No. But there are heaping helpings of “yeah you did!” smiles and fist pumps. It is an old saw that horror/comedies only elevate when they succeed equally in both. If I assume that would also apply to reality/meta commentaries, Billy is tackling all FOUR of those. They succeed with a thoroughly winning light, wry and generous touch.


Played: 10/4/22
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Definitely! So much comfort food.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Mostly polished parser adventure, squarely in my wheelhouse. There is some opening business about a holodeck type setting, but it feels like a bare bones justification to allow you a walking tour of 8 wildly different arboreal climates. That’s a great design choice, actually. It hand waves at the background and quickly ushers you to the main exploring event.

I really liked the ambition of it. 8 different ecosystems, 8 different sets of locations and puzzles, many of which interact with some of the other 7. There is some classic puzzle gameplay in evidence, as well as some nicely novel ones. It's probably not a spoiler to say you bounce back and forth between them to resolve many puzzles. The puzzle text was mostly descriptive. NPCs are minimally rendered which on the one hand feels shallow, but on the other does nicely skirt the “ok this NPC is slowly transforming into a parrot” problem. I liked the “on the right track” hint messages. Still not sure where I land on the parenthetical “you still have the X” messages. Points for clarity, but jarring compared to surrounding text. I was either 1/5 or 1/8 complete at the 2 hr mark depending on how you score it. Right at the 2hr mark, there was what I’m going to call a bug in deceptive text. (Spoiler - click to show)It involves an object landing at your feet at a joust, but the nouns in the text prompt are unrecognized by the game, and per walkthrough the noun you need to use was never mentioned.

Other than that glitch, the puzzles seem capably rendered and satisfying. It feels like the variety and choices of settings are the true showpiece here though. The narration is well up to the challenge of immersively depicting very different ecosystems and geographies. Initial entry also provides a header quote of scientific or cultural interest, in a way that effectively conveys global scope. The variety of settings chosen plays deftly into that as well, creating a really epic feel.

If I scratch a little closer at it though, I’m not sure the 8 chosen settings click together smoothly. Half the settings use the unique trees/ecosystems as background for light puzzle play. The trees themselves little more than scenic/puzzle elements. Hoo boy the other half though. Fully half of them engage deeply dire ecological and/or sociological issues. On first impression I kind of dug it. Since I encountered a few lighter settings first (just by random chance), the heavier settings came as a gut punch. “Look at all the pretty trees… holy crap WHAT!!!” I do wonder how someone who chose differently would react - experiencing a dramatic REDUCTION in stakes. In any case two hours in, the contrast is dramatically jarring in a narratively intriguing way that totally sucked me in.

But but but. I am now petrified. I am petrified that the 4 different very fraught issues are not well served by the puzzle solving mechanic so far on display. That they could be reduced to background setting like the other 4, and effectively trivialized in a way that could be glib and offensive. So far the text has nimbly avoided this to its credit. It has given me no reason to fear I am in incapable hands. But the risk is so large I can’t help but feel trepidation. In particular, confidently invoking (Spoiler - click to show)‘strange fruit’ (google if you need to) feels like stomping your foot on thin ice and boldly declaring “I got this.”

I am Engaged, and also extremely nervous about what lies ahead. Bad time for 2hr timer to expire!


Played: 10/12/22
Playtime: 2hrs, did not finish, 21/100 score with one walkthrough lookup
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Notable Bug
Would Play Again? Almost certainly, as I chew fingernails to nubs

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

A very short mood piece with some sharp if narrow observations to convey. As a web-driven experience I appreciated the integrated mood audio and the restrained but clever use of font (especially dug the protagonists’ ‘voice’) and layout. The art was hit or miss, with the notable exception of the various renderings of the monster protagonist, which I found compelling and evocative.

Taken together with the prose, the whole package effectively conveyed an underlying melancholy behind a handful of setpiece encounters. The experience was brief - in a half hour I completed 7 or 8 circuits and got 5 different endings, with little left unexplored (I think). This tight scope and short duration achieved a slightly different effect than many “Play Again?” prompt games. Rather than a time loop or full narrative reset effect, this rather felt like exploring a multiverse where we are granted a god’s eye view of all possible outcomes of this combination of character and situations. While simultaneously building some larger understandings.

What sparked my joy was how these runs, most especially the endings, played off not only each other, but more significantly off the protagonist and NPC expectations and biases that are revealed across the runs. A single run showcased a moody cause and effect chain. Across all runs, a full and consistent picture of the protagonist, the world, and human society is assembled and contrasted to intrinsic biases. Because this feels like the ace in the piece’s sleeve, I am reluctant to write more clearly about it. Thematic spoilers are real things too! Suffice to say there is more subtlety here than its form and scope would suggest.

I don’t want to oversell it - this is a very brief piece, with limited meaningful choices. It is not a puzzle to solve, or maybe is at its best when it doesn’t have to be. I appreciate that it builds some sharp commentary and effective mood with relatively few moving parts. It is a melancholy short story I was glad to spend time with, but probably won’t need to revisit.


Played: 10/4/22
Playtime: 30 min, 5 endings
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 really dig the Texture “drag and drop” interface, that is what I’ve learned. It feels like you are connecting ideas more organically than a cold click-one-or-other selection (looking at you, Twine). It also seems to open more authorial possibilities by contrasting the connecting ideas, or conveying information about what ideas should be connected (or can’t!) for story purposes.

This story is well-served by the user paradigm. Its an intriguingly imprecise apocalypse tale, focusing on one woman’s reactions in face of impending doom. As she makes her way through a nicely-specific Western Pennsylvania, the interactivity gives us personal and global background and character beats whose ordering and selection (or not) allow the player to collaborate in fleshing out. The whole thing is packed with specific details that really bring the setting and characters to life. It is a short game, but allows multiple endings directly impacted by player choices, and those choices have everything to do with how the player wants to define the character. This is Sparky.

The only unfortunate note, and for me it was an impactful one, was that one ending was arbitrary and unsatisfying and it was the first one I got. It lowered expectations so much for me, that subsequent playthroughs carried a shadow over them. That particular ending was ALSO noteworthy in that the background setting work it did (and was unavailable on other paths) was captivating. I could envision a version where the lead up perhaps leaned thematically more into the ending provided, but I didn’t detect that.

That is unfortunate, because the endings I achieved after that were so much more satisfying and complete. A key attraction to Apocalypse stories is the “what would I do?” question. Here, by providing just the right amount of specifics and back story, the better endings were exploring variations of “what do I want the protagonist to do”? That there were multiple choices leading to different conclusions, and that they still felt consistent with both player choices and the overarching narrative felt really cool. It feels ungenerous to drag down the score due to one possible path. Is a work as good as its best moment? Or as bad as its worst? Or some work-specific function of them all? I dunno man, I’m just winging it.


Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 20min, multiple runs, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly 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

I reference this work in another review. Fair's fair, crosslink to US Route 160.

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

There is a really great game in here, struggling to get out. The setup: (Spoiler - click to show)You are an amnesiac in a magic city trying to figure out who you are and what happened to you. You choose singularly bad detectives to help you. A lot of the writing is flat out delightful. Your frenetic, bickering partners have character and unique voice, and their banter is often lively and fun, as is the protagonist’s increasingly exasperated or impatient reactions. The Mind Map is a really cool mystery solving mechanism, and the clues provided are plentiful enough that solution is not intractable, but neither is it mechanically easy. The graphical use of color, font, static images and animation is really attractive, functional and appealing. The swinging pull string alone is just an amazing touch. There is also a “scoreboard” that tracks when one or another of the rival detectives “scores points” against the other. I laughed out loud when I realized what it was for. It doesn’t seem to have any other game function, and I kind of hope it doesn’t. What a great detail.

The mystery is engaging (lower case) too! It leverages the fantastical setup, tweaking the premise in a way that builds on the most interesting pieces of the fantasy background. Amnesia is a well worn IF trope, but here it seems to serve a larger plot purpose in an intriguing way. I would be lauding any work that accomplished two or three of the hundred things this work accomplishes. I haven’t even talked about the sound, the graphic flourishes, the hundred delightful turns of phrase (“somehow shriller voice” “Hoboolean coin” “DEFECTIVE AGENCY” so many more).

So why did the game make me fight it to enjoy it?

For everything it does right, the game seems to make equally misguided decisions. The pace of this thing is sooo slow. It took 45 minutes to leave the detective office! Part of this is an artifact of the writing. There is an extended “water drop” introduction that meanders through the city before the protagonist is even introduced. When this is done in cinema, the point is to establish the geography of the setting, and maybe show off the production value a bit. Here, the journey is too narrow both in description and path taken to do either. It’s not helped that the water drop has an insanely large surface cohesion, such that not only does it move frictionlessly through the city, it won’t even merge with other water! And it goes for a bit. As far as I can tell, that entire sequence should be the first thing to hit the cutting room floor. But even initially humorous scenes either go on too long, or are injected into the story as elaborate cul-de-sacs. A briskly paced piece can afford some pointlessly funny side quests, but when you are already struggling to make headway it feels… disrespectful?

The interactivity also deliberately, maddeningly slows things down. You are asked to hit the space bar
for [space]
every [space]
sentence [space]
in the text. Even in long blocks of descriptions. Even in dialogue, when only one person is speaking. It is a maddening choice that slows things down so much. Even when it is used for comedic impact, the effect is so blunted by repetition as to be lost. At a minimum paragraph breaks would be an improvement. “Reviewer,” you might be saying, “chill out! Just spam the space bar, it’ll be fine!” Except frequently you are called on to click a player interaction with the mouse. Many times with only a single option! You are shifting from one input to another for no narrative reason! (Well maybe not “no reason.” There is a difference between affirming protagonist action and ungating narrative. How about “…for narratively intrusive reasons.”)

The mind map also frustrates over time. It is implemented as a small window that you can pan around, drag, arrange and connect yellow sticky clues. It is a delightful idea, except the implementation is inexplicably frictiony. You quickly accumulate a super dense amount of clues, so many that organizing them becomes a slog of click-drag-pan, click-drag-pan, click-drag-pan. No zoom out. No “fullscreen mode.” And even the underlying workspace ends up being crowded despite the pans! Its a virtual desk, why is it so constrained? The graphics and constrained space end up meaning, once the clues get dense, that you grab objects you don’t mean to SO often, introducing more drag. I went from playing with it because I could to dreading when it would be needed in less than an hour. Even ‘solving’ with the mind map has unnecessary delays. If you connect everything right, the mind map itself does not tell you that. You need to go back to the text interaction and click, then be told if you solved or didn’t.

Aaand there’s minigames that don’t serve the narrative. There is a clever gambling word game whose interactivity (again tied to excessive space bar/mouse clicks) impacts its enjoyment, in turn making you anxious for it to be over so you can get back to the mystery. It doesn’t end for a while. There’s a timed ‘avoid disaster’ sequence that requires excessive input after the point of ‘oops this isn’t going to work’ before you can try again.

In the end, the friction in the game overwhelmed its many, many charms and that’s a shame. Fireworks shows have fewer Sparks of Joy than CNDA. But when I hit the chapter break at the 1:45 mark it was almost relief. “Only 15 minutes, no point starting this.” That’s not a great reaction. Its not buggy per se (maybe one - the text attributed a “point to Nomnom” that the scoreboard didn’t score during a coin toss). But the interactivity choices were Intrusively impactful. This feels fixable though, right? Some nip and tuck in the text, some coding changes in the spacebar break points, a zoom/fullwindow for the mind map, tighten up the minigames… It’s like a chunky, craggy slab of granite with Michelangelo’s David patiently waiting to be freed!


Played: 11/10/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, finished chapter 3
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive (frictiony)
Would Play Again? No, too much friction, but would ABSOLUTELY play a greased up update!

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Nose Bleed is a very short work that attempts to use interactivity to bring immediacy to a tightly focused horror story. The impulse to treat social anxiety as a horror premise is really a great idea. Popular media is overrun with social anxiety stories that mine childhood bullying for drama. Few of those are horror stories, despite having truly horrific events depicted, and much more commonly leverage the horror for the cathartic overcoming of it.

Adult social anxiety is a significantly less-trod ground, and a horror focus is even more rarified air. I seem to have slipped into a mountain climbing metaphor, not sure why. The mechanism of a nose bleed as source for that social anxiety is also kind of a genius choice - it is something we have no control of and is plausibly not serious enough to push people past irritated inconvenience to empathy. The choice of workplace was also a crucial one, as it is one of few places adults HAVE to interact with people they don’t want to. Points for really interesting and challenging thematic concept!

The chosen implementation fell a bit short is my sense. For a few reasons. The graphical presentation didn’t really serve the narrative. I couldn’t help but see missed opportunities here. That said, there were two instances, about 2/3 into the game where the graphical choices were surprising and effective. I would have liked a lot more of that throughout the playtime.

Ultimately, the graphical presentation is not a minus, maybe even a minor plus. Choices made to leverage interactivity for this story were harder to get past. Social anxiety works a little differently in 3rd person stories than first person IF. In the former, the trick is to get the reader on the protagonist’s side by making them some combination of relatable, sympathetic and/or rootable. This is commonly done via non-anxiety scenes where we can care about the protagonist to empathize with them when their social group turns on them. Here, the work is aiming to invoke anxiety in the player by having them ‘experience’ it directly. Which is an excellent use of horror IF if it works!

By omitting the shell of a separate protagonist though, you need to craft a narrative that the player buys into. It didn’t come together for me that way. For one, the descriptions of the injury grew increasingly horrific, in a way that made the NPCs ignoring it look decreasingly human, in turn making me less invested in their social pressure. The situation didn’t quite gel for a few other reasons. Often the choices you are given don’t fundamentally change anything except narrative texture. Adding up to a feeling of lack of agency, without clear narrative reasons for it. A lot of early game is interacting with a single other character. Social anxiety is most effective when you feel isolated from the entire community around you. When its only one person, it’s just as likely they’re just being a dick which is a whole different dynamic. Later in the game when the community expands, there isn’t a narrative reason why the PC is with them. Adults have many degrees of freedom to avoid toxic communities, like say Ubering separately to work functions. I’m not saying it's super easy to avoid toxic life scenarios. I’m saying the game didn’t do the legwork to convince me I was trapped.

Without that legwork, I was often thinking “well there are a lot of different ways that could be avoided” which had the effect of me decoupling from the protagonist that was supposed to be me. I started to think of them as willingly submitting… which again is definitely a real thing. The story just didn’t get me there. Instead it actively disconnected me from the protagonist. So that’s how I got to a Mechanical playthrough. Really only the short duration and the nifty graphic flourishes kept it from being Bouncy. I think this reaction is actually a testament to the author in one sense: they attempted a unique horrific experience and while not getting me there, clearly their themes elicited some response.


Played: 10/8/22
Playtime: Less than 20min, finished
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 is a fine example of a work that embraces deeply weird, vaguely sinister and supernatural-tinged narratives. But rather than commit to the well-laid Twin Peaks tracks, instead has the nerve to be its own thing instead! I'm sorely tempted to add a special grading system for this stripe of game. I have a great hook for it too, the pseudo-Lynch scorecard!

Is there cherry pie/coffee? Kind of. There’s (Spoiler - click to show)corn liquor
Is there a Log Lady? Eeh, no but there is a (Spoiler - click to show)Contemplator
Is there a Laura Palmer? No
Evil behind a cookie cutter face? Can’t tell at the 2hr mark, no.
Imagery pulled straight from our collective unconscious? No
Lynch-ledger: 1.4/5, Between Dune and Blue Velvet.

The protagonist finds themselves on an unscheduled stop on their bid for a new life, in a tiny town, just left of normal. Must solve puzzles to resume journey! The presentation is appealing. Crude uSoft Paint geometrical pictures and jaunty music pepper the experience. There is a map to follow, with a unique NPC guardian at each location. The map amusingly changes state with the world in a nicely weird touch. The NPCs range from deadpan, to flighty to just deeply weird, all of it combining to present a deliciously off-kilter vibe. The puzzles have some flair, but don’t seem to match the environment in weirdness. They are oddly pedestrian (Spoiler - click to show)deliver envelope, find matches, buy stuff. The main mechanism is simultaneously clumsy and clever - matching narrative notes or items to characters/places. It has a little more textual flair than TELL X ABOUT Y, but it requires multiple clicks on multiple screens to effect, and can devolve to mimesis-breaking exhaustive trial and error.

There’s a lot to like here, but a lot of it is qualified. None more so than the text itself. At its best, the text disappears and just straight-forward describes the weirdness around you. All too often though, it throws in flourishes that come out of left field in a distracting way. “long and empty like my intestines” “Tall green pillars stuck out their immature cobs like rattlesnakes” “door opened the silence of the room, releasing it right in my face.” See if you can guess what this one refers to:

"However, the snake opened its mouth, and I got out of this bell, as a lost sound finally flies out of the French horn, scrolling and traveling through all its convolutions, bends and nooks."

(Spoiler - click to show)Exiting a series of alleys! I had literally just done it, and took a minute to realize that’s what it was describing. I think it's the snake that doesn’t work there, I probably could have gotten on board with just the French Horn. Between the textual excesses and the puzzles that didn’t seem on the same level as the rest of the narrative, I couldn’t breach into Engaging here, but definite Sparks of Joy. No bugs found!

FTR, the Lynch Ledger scoring system:
0 - The Straight Story
1 - Dune
2 - Blue Velvet
3 - Twin Peaks original series and movie
4 - Lost Highway
5 - Eraserhead


Played: 11/11/22
Playtime: 2hr, Day3 (incomplete)
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, my sweet spot is Blue Velvet+

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Here’s something you hear every year around Oscar time: “Comedy is hard, why isn’t it respected like manipulative, obviously thirsty, overwrought sob-fests?” Well, you mostly hear it phrased like that at my house, but the sentiment is trotted out pretty consistently. This is going to be relevant in a few minutes.

Historically I like some things about parser IF better than others. Way at the bottom is the ‘search’ ‘look under’ ‘look behind’ mechanics. Its classic, I get it, but it feels so unrewarding to both look at something then look again ONLY IN A MORE SPECIFIC WAY. AWAN, you have turned me around on this. This is a one-room joint where you have to find a comedically large number of things in an exasperatingly spartan environment. And you do and its hilarious! Using all of those mechanics deliberately and precisely, this game is a perfect “I know its around here somewhere” simulator. Its the first time I’ve ever seen them used so effectively.

Here’s another thing I’ve never really liked: abrupt, non-foreshadowed instant endings that require restart or undo. AWAN fixed that too! The 3 abrupt endings I got were laugh out loud non sequitor funny and I happily Undid to see more. Usually my spoilers are kind of vague, but this is a no-fooling overt one: (Spoiler - click to show)OMG Try calling everyone on the red corded phone. DO IT!

I always appreciate a narratively integrated hint system, but AWAN upped the ante even further. You can call out to your partner to a) solve puzzles, b) get hints and c) get snarky offhand replies to dumb questions. To the point where I decided to be the Ikea guy just to see how far I could push things. (If you don’t know what I mean, google “IKEA Donna youtube puns.” Totally worth your time.) I really wanted to preface every conversation thread with “Hey Donna. Hey Donna.”

I don’t want this review to just be listing delightful things, though maybe we could use some of that these days. (Spoiler - click to show)Wait’ll you get the TV on. There are so many to find on your own. The implementation is mostly seamless, light, and amusingly frustrating but in a way we can all satisfyingly relate to. And it does it all with economy and verve. It gets in, makes its impact, and gets out while you still want more.

It also does some small things absolutely seamlessly: its choice of characters allows the player to slip cleanly into place, regardless of gender/sexual preference without fanfare or menus. In particular there is a point where you might want (Spoiler - click to show)to open a window before you’ve found your shirt. The game handles this lightly and elegantly with no false notes.

So here’s where I strike back at the Oscars. AWAN is just consistently and effortlessly its own funny thing that had me completely Engaged and often grinning in delight. Get on up here, AWAN!

We will play you off though.


Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 45min, 4/18 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Was thinking no, until the game told me there were 18 endings. So yeah, probably.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This one feels like an IF poem more than anything else. Mechanically, it is mostly an exploration through a dream/nightmare slice of a world with dream logic attached. The language is doing most of the lifting here in setting this tone. And boy do you get a lot of it.

As a narrative it is, I think the word I want is 'emphatically', overwritten. Metaphors and similes fly fast and furious on nearly every page of text. More often than not, word choice is doing way more than it should, in an intrusive way. For example: “your mouth is eating your heartbeat.” There is a dollop of poetry here, that puts the heartbeat squarely in the throat, and has the protagonist gnawing at their own fear. But that additional active nuance does not play in a resonant way, it jars. I don’t want to just list text here, but this excessive use of doing-too-much descriptions both adds to the dreamlike quality of the place and as quickly pushes the reader away with ‘wait, is that the right word here?’ I cannot overemphasize how pervasive and consistent this use of language is, it is the defining characteristic of this work.

There are bright spots of language in here. Among the bright spots, I really enjoyed the phrase “Maybe every other sunrise was dumb luck” and especially “Sommeliers are liars. Fight me.” The latter was a delightfully unexpected infusion of humor in an otherwise moody game. In other places, there were wild swings in the same sentence. Where my response was “no I don’t think… oh but yeah that works.” What I’m saying is your response to this game will have everything to do with your response to its language rhythm.

There is an underlying reality to the narrative, I think, however deeply buried under language. (Spoiler - click to show)There is a vague sense that this is all going on in the protagonist's mind as they suffer some unnamed physical debilitation in the ‘real world.’ It is only ever a hint, which is fine, but at least my playthrough never developed into anything thematically or narratively resonant. Primarily, this was due to a maddening gameplay choice. There are multiple ways to end the scenario, some blindingly, arbitrarily abrupt and fast, others after lengthy exploration. The end of which auto-restarts at the same entry point. I subsequently learned this was a ‘cycle until you find a different ending’ thing, but at the time I found nothing in the text to hint that this was possible. Instead, the vibe was very much, ‘you are infinitely trapped here.’ Which, if there were thematic resonances could have worked just fine. Instead it just felt like I was trapped in a sea of simile to no clear end, where my only escape was to stop playing.

Scoring wise, I’m in a bit of a conundrum. The overall surreal tone was effective, and there were blocks of text I really dug. There were a lot more that pushed me away, and the looping ending really bounced me out. So I end up averaging Bouncy and Sparks of Joy.


Played: 10/17/22
Playtime: 30min, 1 or 5 playthroughs depending on how you count
Artistic/Technical rankings: Both Bouncy and Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, think I’m topped off with the experience

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