Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

You’re all familiar with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yes? Twenty+ years old now, the first comics mini-series assembled a collection of Victorian adventure literature characters into a super-team of sorts, fighting Victorian villains. They were all public domain characters like Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr Jeckyll, etc. Mssrs Moore and O’Neill then proceeded to jam the limited series with a confounding amount of well-known and obscure story references, directly, indirectly, and in the background of the main plot. I mean JAMMED the frickin thing. There are page by page annotations (Extraordinary Gentlemen+ Annotations). It was considered a critical and sales success (spawned a less-said-the-better movie), and 3 years later we got Volume II. The two were qualitatively completely different works.

Vol I was first and foremost a ripping pulp yarn, as I believe it was called back then. It pitted a team of mismatched anti-heroes against Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty, with a plot that used these pre-existing texts for settings, MacGuffins and motivations. It had surprisingly dark edges but fundamentally was a love letter to adventure tales, taken from mismatched parts of other stories and somehow put into a shining clockwork of its own.

Vol 2 was a slog. It was like the takeaway was “People really love these references! Maybe if we phone in the plot and characters we have room to jam in EVEN MORE!” (It was also a good deal meaner, but I think consensus is this had more to do with Mssr Moore’s contemporary professional dissatisfactions.) It was not a clockwork, it was a jumble and characters and plotlines that contorted more and more wildly to accommodate just one more reference. The linking story was unpleasant and unsatisfying to read, so at its best it was an illustrated trivia contest.

The message here is references in narrative are a dangerous will-o-the-wisp. You can totally lose your way pursuing them and whatever promise you think is in those dancing lightballs is insubstantial. You will need to provide the substance yourself, in the form of how you use those references. LoEGv1 did exactly this. YFLYRTiaB showed us what that could look like too. In the single best moment of the game, the amnesiac protagonist figures out his identity and they’re… warning, this is the biggest spoiler in this game do yourself a favor and assume my point is valid, don’t look until you’ve played it (Spoiler - click to show)The amnesiac protagonist is the Man in the Yellow Hat! Yah, the one with the busy-body monkey!! I laughed out loud at the audacity of that, it was a terrific recontextualization of that particular reference in a surprising and creative way. As far as I can tell, that was the ONLY reference that was recontextualized.

As far as gameplay goes, it is really limited exploration from one referential map location to the next, shuttling minimal objects to unlock other locations then finish. Call it what it was, it was an excuse to usher you across the chain of references. I’d say I picked out maybe half of them? Above I sneeringly called LoEGv2 a ‘trivia contest.’ I’ll take the sneer off that. Trivia contests are fun! If I think of this as an IF implementation of a trivia contest, that’s probably how it best succeeds (complete with ‘answer key’ if you want to grade yourself!). No one says puzzles have to be complicated logic or wordplay. Trivial Pursuit is an all-time best seller boardgame for a reason. Certainly IFLYRTiaB drew from an admirable breadth of high and low literature. But for me? I’m not much of a trivia guy. That one twist was the only time it felt alive to me. It was predominantly Mechanical.


Played: 11/7/22
Playtime: 10min, survived
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 one feels like an anthology of sorts. The protagonist is walking through a graveyard, interacting with unconnected stories of spectral apparitions. Initially, I didn’t approach it that way, but ultimately, that’s where I landed.

The presentation suffers some issues, one much bigger than the others. A smaller one is palette choice. The opening screen spends some time talking about the greyness of the location (incidentally in a way that could definitely use some better word choices). But the game is presented in tans and browns! That is a real missed opportunity to use the presentation to reinforce the mood of the piece. It does integrate a single picture in one thread, but because it is the only picture ever used it kind of jars. Even graphically, its blue clashes with the tan in a way that gives the page a slapdash look.

The biggest presentation issue by far however was font sizing, an apparent artifact of the Texture engine. As you make selections throughout the game, text gets added to the screen. Distressingly often, the entire screen font size shrinks, often more than one size, to accommodate the additional words. I cannot overstate how intrusive this was to the experience. At first it wasn’t clear that you weren’t seeing an entirely new screen. Then you had to parse an entirely unfamiliar block of text to find the new stuff (which was not always at the end). Then next choice, BAM, new screen of much larger font. It was distracting and off putting all at once. I’m calling this Intrusive. Though not a bug per se, it had the effect of one.

Gameplay was also uneven. I got two end screens in maybe three clicks by choosing not-obviously-wrong paths. This is a personal points-off for me - if I can ‘die’ due to not-obvious choices within two minutes (and there doesn’t seem to be an artistic reason why), I’m already not on the game’s side. It's punishing me for something I have no way of knowing is ‘bad.’ I did dive in again, and trained to go a different way, I did. That’s where the anthology approach opened up for me, which does kind of partially mitigate the quick-death thing. There isn’t really a through line to worry about.

The engagements were uneven. Some felt arbitrary, some pulled with unearned emotion, one dark and personal. All of them peppered with the font sizing issues. But one was notable - an encounter with a spectre who had… niche beliefs… in prior life. The decisions for this encounter seemed varied and impactful, and the decision path I took through was surprisingly nuanced, generous and touching. Definitely more nuanced than the other encounters. If that font hadn’t kept jumping in my face, this could have been a Spark of Joy.

As it was, I found this entry mostly Mechanical and unpleasantly Technically Intrusive.


Played: 10/21/22
Playtime: 30min, 4 different endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
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

As an IF setting, "mind palaces" and dreams carry a lot of the same advantages: ability to lean into IF limitations as features, ability to ignore real-world logic, full-on integration of symbology and metaphor. In a way they're kind of the same thing. I mean its not like dreams occur somewhere else.

I liked the central conceit of this one: two (Spoiler - click to show)(or is it one??) witches trapped in one of their mind palaces due to some kind of unnamed real world threat and needing to escape by passing through replayed key events of the host’s life. Escape by solving puzzles! Sure, I’m in.

In practice, I had unanswered questions about the implementation. For example, it seems like the host is at most a middle-aged adult, yet there was an encounter from old age they hadn’t lived yet. There was an encounter as a baby which doesn’t seem like it could be remembered. And in one encounter, it seemed you could effect the past in the ‘real world.’ It is possible, I suppose, that the mind palace incorporated time portals and those were not memories but ‘real.’ There was nothing in the text to imply this, and the unreal nature of the puzzle solving ((Spoiler - click to show)at one point a tiny hand reaches out of a cat’s ear) suggest otherwise. This game doesn’t owe me anything, it has every right to be what it is without my permission. But I felt those choices traded away some of the power of the setting without getting enough in return, dramatically speaking.

Gameplay is mostly puzzle solving, the exploring aspect is pretty limited, maybe 8 rooms. I liked that there were often multiple ways to solve puzzles, that tracked to whether you wanted to be ‘good’ or ‘evil’. The puzzles themselves were a mixed bag. Generally, the text didn’t provide a lot of nudging or feedback on your choices, so solving felt a bit arbitrary. The solutions did not come with that ‘oh, that’s why that worked!’ feeling. I got the sense that either I got lucky a lot, or the puzzles had multiple solutions. Even that is not terrible if the solutions had some kind of thematic through line to draw them together. I did not detect such.

I did like what the final escape implied about the physical fate of the witches, and really liked how understated it was. There was some nice ambiguity about the true nature of the dual protagonists, but the finale only hinted at resolving it which was maybe TOO understated. All in all I think the setting is a strong foundation that would support much tighter thematic construction and payoff. If I awarded points for ‘potential Sparks of Joy’ this would deserve it. Unfortunately, I typically do not.


Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/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

Now that it’s been pointed out to me that a few works here are the product of short-burn IF workshops, the thought rises unbidden when engaging some of these pieces. It feels super patrician to assume this background for any given game and I am actively resisting it. In my defense though, CI is set AT A SCHOOL WITH AN IF WORKSHOP. C’mon, how much do you expect of me? It even implements the IF teacher as a character! IF this was a workshop product and IF there were grades involved, I hope the author’s naked flattery got them an A. There is something bold and admirable to pandering this overt.

As a game it was small, less than two dozen locations and filled with relatively simple puzzles, many of them signposted baldly. “X tells you to give Y to Z” Give. “Z tells you to get Q” Get. There was one puzzle with no signposting, whose solution felt pretty arbitrary, but given the relative shortness of the work was well within bounds of trial and error. There were a few paths that led nowhere. There was a mix of feature implementations which felt as much coding exercise as puzzle, but at least implemented with flair. There was a smattering of missing descriptions, and one puzzle where the game blocked you because you were missing information, but didn’t provide a narrative reason for the block. Frankly, these were the exceptions though. It was a fairly Mechanical experience, but very competently done.

And here is the part where I make an ungenerous observation that makes you think less of me. Not so fast reader! Fortunately for me, Zeno’s Dichotomy paradox famously noted that to get to a destination you must first travel halfway there. Then halfway of that smaller remaining distance. Then halfway again and again, infinitely bisecting smaller distances so you can never actually arrive at zero. The lesser known corollary to this is that to start that journey you must travel halfway. But to get halfway, you must first travel a quarter of the way, after traveling an eighth. Because this distance can also be infinitely subdivided you can’t even START your downward journey of contempt for me! I AM IMMUNE TO CRITICISM AND ACCOUNTABILITY!!!

With that armor in place, I can safely note that this appears to be the work of a non-native speaker. The setting and much of the text hint at a joyfully casual, light and snarky tone. But it rarely lands because of awkward phrasing. Early on, even descriptions took effort to parse, though I think I got synched reasonably quickly. I’m not a monster, I’m not going to penalize the work for this, but it also was just intrusive enough that it defused potential Sparks of Joy before they could land. I guess I am a monster. Fortunately, still armored! Look, if I tried to write these reviews in say Spanish, it would be hot garbage word salad. Ensalada de palabras basura caliente. More so, I mean. But I can really only report on the experience I was having, right?

This was a small, good quality exercise, not particularly complicated, with hints of Joy that couldn’t quite land. Wait. Does Zeno mean I can only give 1’s and 5’s as scores?


Played: 10/30/22
Playtime: 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 actually the third full review I’ve written of this work. It is my habit to let a review mature for a few days before publication. The reason I do this is to make sure my thoughts are captured to my satisfaction, and to try and scrub obvious grammar and spelling mistakes. The latter only imperfectly. In Ink’s case, for reasons I’ll cover, the settling process was tough on me.

This one is quite poetic in its narrative, and it deals with the protagonist’s grief. With one exception, I’m not having a great run with poetic verse in IF Comp22. More often than not I end up feeling like the text is trying too hard in what it wants to accomplish and calls attention to itself. I get some of that same vibe here. Like similar works, there are enough ‘hits’ in the verbiage to keep me going, but not enough to pull me into its orbit. Additionally though, the poetry here inserted itself between me and the central metaphor in a way that challenged me.

The setup is this: (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist has lost their partner, and its every bit as devastating as that can be. While trying to grapple with their grief, they get a mysterious letter, perhaps from their partner before or after death. In fact though, it is an I’m going to say “grief-demon” exploiting their tragedy. So far so good, nothing wrong with any of that. But the choices the game gives you, and how those present are pretty bleak. There are times when you seem to have the choice to (Spoiler - click to show)push past grief, to reject wallowing in it. Selecting those, inevitably brings you back to the same state. (Spoiler - click to show)You can try to reject the letter as unhelpful, or try to embrace it as a loving goodbye, but none of those choices actually play that way - the protagonist inevitably remains in their paralyzing grief. Then the grief-demon starts intruding.

My initial read, and it was strong, was that the game seemed to be showing that there was no escape from grief, and even wanting to push past it was wrong and needed to be punished. Boy did that NOT appeal to me. In a rubbery, conservation of energy kind of way. I found supporting evidence in the narrative where every single attempt the player can make to (Spoiler - click to show)deal in a healthy way is ineffective. Then, given no other alternative, when the player goes down the only road left, the text is unforgiving.
(Spoiler - click to show)
"Something reassuring but altogether cold
Telling you to give in, give up
Unmake your pain in exchange for something that feels like a remedy
Maybe not her but something in between
You know you shouldn’t
But something like selfishness (Spoiler - click to show)takes root in your body
You can’t help but drown willingly"

You see? Trying to find a way out of grief is something you should resist! That can’t be the message of the piece, can it?? Sure, in context this is a (Spoiler - click to show)demon’s seduction but that’s the metaphor! For what, healing from grief? Nooo, surely not. Let’s take a hard look at the word ‘selfishness’ above. The protagonist is clearly suffering here, and has tried multiple times, unsuccessfully, to get out of the spiral. This is selfishness? No, this is hopelessness. That single bit of poetic license muddies the metaphor so much with its Puritanical judgement that I spun for days. One word!! (Well, in combination with the narrative choices.) Is it selfish to want relief from grief? Is endless self-flagellation the only honorable response to tragedy?

So if not grief itself what even is the (Spoiler - click to show)grief-demon then? I mean there are definitely unhealthy ways to handle grief: alcoholism, drug abuse, suicidal ideation. Maybe those are the metaphor? Ok, but then what is the story saying? (Spoiler - click to show)That no matter what the protagonist tries, its gonna end there? Is that better or worse? If this is a cautionary tale, what is the untaken option that the player tragically rejected?

Now, I played through a few times. There is one path where you can enlist a therapist for aid. It is very possible this path could answer everything I grappled with above. Unfortunately, that path seemed to have a bug, where I got stuck on a screen and could not progress. So all I’m left with is a work that consistently rejects or refutes player attempts to deal with grief, and metaphorically casts the effort of trying as (Spoiler - click to show)inevitably (and cravenly) submitting to a demon! If the therapist was the ‘good path’, that was a supremely unfortunate and impactful bug.

There is another alternative. Rather than as a Metaphor for Grieving, this could be read as a simple, tragic character study/horror tale, where (Spoiler - click to show)a damaged protagonist, unable to let go of grief is doomed by that. If so, the poetry and interactivity of the work is fighting against the narrative. Poetic prose with its pithy clauses, unnatural rhythms and imagery is biased to the abstract, actively encouraging a metaphorical read. Character studies live and die by their details, by their lived-in specificity. A tragic character study would have been much better served by spare, concisely-observed natural language, most especially because you need to sell the player on why their choices aren’t working.

I held it up as many ways as I could think of, and none of them worked for me. I welcome reads that show me where I got it wrong. Was it Bouncy? Oh my yes, for several days. Was it Engaging? I mean, technically yes, I couldn’t stop coming back to it, long after I’d played and written reviews of other works. Was it Engaging in the sense I meant when I set that criteria? Not really, no. It wasn’t pulling me into the author’s creation, embracing and delighting in the author’s vision. Is my delight the most important thing though? Where is the place for Challenging? Is a Challenging work without a coherent challenge anything other than hollow provocation? I think I’m left where I started: Bouncy and Intrusively Buggy (both the stuck path, and Texture's in-your-face font resize problem). I’m so sorry work, I tried, I really tried.


Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 20min, 2.5 endings.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Intrusive
Would Play Again? How masochistic do you think I am???

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Tin Mug presents as a children's book IF, though less like a picture book and more like say Winnie the Pooh. There is some disconnect between the subject matter, text, and presentation that made it hard to conjure a consistent imaginary child-co-pilot. Which is the perfectly normal and understandable thing I do when presented with kid lit. Winnie the Pooh, for all its young child appeal, notably invests in its characters, and is as much character as plot driven, maybe more so. The characters are all quite distinct and relatable to all ages. There are a few very distinct characters in Tin Mug to be sure, but there are as many kind of interchangeable ones. This choice feels younger than the piece’s presentation.

Too, there are narrative choices that skew older. In a world of sentient dishware, the story opens with what feels like a casual murder. (Spoiler - click to show)It is undone at the end, but since it was left to ride the entire time, it can only partially undo the lasting impression. Also the mechanism of its undoing was way younger than a lot of the narrative. I’m not here to poke at ‘plot holes’ in a child-targeted work, that’s a dick move. But I am highlighting that these presentation and plot and character choices feel like they target slightly different maturity levels in a way that keeps the work from coalescing.

Even gameplay has inconsistent notes. There are many points of exclusive choices in the game - A OR B. Choices that determine a course of action or character reaction seem perfectly fair. Choices that force you to choose to only interact with one of two characters, without narrative justification for the exclusion, that feels like it doesn’t reward a child’s natural curiosity. Even though I couldn’t get my child co-pilot to materialize into a specific age, nevertheless I clearly heard a whine in my head “why CAN’T I go talk to the bread basket now? I’m done with the… [other one that I can’t remember right now.]”

I can’t stress enough that these are not ‘broken’ story choices in any way. They just seem less crisply focused.

There are technical issues too, the most notable of which is screen management. Very often, a choice will produce a large block of text or oversized illustration that pushes huge chunks of text outside the window. You need to actively scroll upwards to read the text you missed. In many cases the illustration is too large to be seen in the window, and you end up panning across its height. This intrudes further into the experience in a way that would try a child’s patience, I think. It did mine.

Without a (virtual) child co-pilot, and because I am dead inside, I couldn’t wring Sparks out of this, though I could theorize multiple children could get different Sparks at different times. For this curmudgeon it was Mechanical.


Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 10min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
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

Holy crap was this one a roller coaster ride. Let me dispense with the non-narrative parts first because this will be quick. The presentation was simple but effective. In particular, the use of background colors and to a lesser extent fonts was tightly aligned to the narrative in a satisfying and resonant way. I wish more games would take the simple steps taken here. There is sound, but I’m not sure if it was infrequent or downplayed, I only remember it registering once during gameplay.

Gameplay? I’ll need a different word. This is a super linear narrative. There are infrequent opportunities to click on internal monologues for additional insight, but otherwise you might as well be turning pages. Except for exactly one choice you get to make. Actually, over two hours I had forgotten I had made ANY choices, until reminded. Other games have had similar implementations for sure, but this one really eschewed any attempt to use other interactive tricks, like using page size and interactivity for narrative pacing, or character-defining but narratively-irrelevant decisions to align the reader more closely to the protagonist. I mean that’s fine, right? Half of Interactive Fiction is Fiction. I hear books can be pretty darn entertaining. Let’s talk narrative.

The plot covers a lot of ground. (Spoiler - click to show)What starts as a hilarious multi-thousand-year sweep of history, segues to a heist and relationship melodrama, to a gritty pan-gender prison story, to a cave survival horror story, to climax in a conversation with Future Adam (but not Eve) and …a dance party. Now, you look at that list and first impression is, hell yeah, buckle me up for THAT roller coaster ride! There’s an assumption built into that reaction though, that the ride is built with tight control over your safety. In this metaphor, the plot is the kinetic design of the ride, how it connects turns, climbs, loops, and drops into a thrilling experience. The characters are the car that carries you start to end. And super importantly, the tone is the track that supports your characters. However wildly the course turns, it smoothly zips you along.

OFPBS really doesn’t do any of that. The coaster design is an early work from the architect that went on to design R’Lyeh, where they were still fleshing out their non-Euclidian geometries. I’m saying the plot twists cross dimensional barriers with their impossible turns. The car is transplanted from some 1950’s Tunnel of Love, earnestly vandalized stem to stern with lavishly ornate “TeeJay loves Sam” adolescent graffiti. Uniquely UNsuited to the kinetic demands of the wild ride, and while adorably sentimental at first, quickly sublimates to “we get it, Sam is dreamy. Can we maybe focus on this insane curve coming up instead?”

Given those two extreme and incompatible choices (plot and character), the only way to salvage the experience is with a perfect tonal track. Unfortunately, the discipline is just not there. In the first few scenes the tone swings wildly from humor, to melodrama, to violent grit, but keeps some semblance of internal in-the-moment consistency. By the time the cast is chasing through caves it does not keep a coherent tone even within a scene. It puts on the reader the entire burden of synthesizing (Spoiler - click to show)starkly cast violent physical peril with porn ‘money shot’ parody with acres of pan-gender John Hughes romantic mooning with origin of man mythology. The text and language does no lifting to spackle the disconnects with humor or whimsy or farce, just presents it all and dares the reader to weather the discord. If the ridiculousness of the scenario WAS the farce, it was a miscalculation not to let the tone cue the reader.

And man, does that first climax take a non-Euclidian turn. It is a complete betrayal of the seriously-cast character deaths, of the mortal terror they felt. Good horror movies know how to manage tone. The stakes of Devils Rejects for example are starkly different than Final Destination. The former wrings tension from raw fear of evil, the latter plays deaths as elaborate punch lines. Both work! They would decidedly not work in the same movie. Sean of the Dead shows that varying tones can coexist with the right narrative grease. That’s what’s missing here.

In the end, despite a strong opening and brief sections of notably effective chase horror, the tonal shortcomings have a predictable if cliche’ effect on our metaphorical roller coaster. The first climax Bounced me clean off the rails.

However, this is conceived of as a long story. It seems my 2hr investment was maybe 1/3 of the overall narrative? I will be omitting my score from the average in deference to the idea that my view of the author's vision is likely incomplete. It's not for me, I'm clear on that, but there seems to be more to chew on here, if this is your taste.


Played: 10/26/22
Playtime: 2hrs, finished one playthrough, 1/3(?) of total narrative
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Notable (Lack of interactivity)
Would Play Again? Would take a lot of metaphorical Dramamine

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

A short exploration IF of a tantalizing setting. There are some early nods to a specific protagonist that needs a cane, including one nice bit of business on a bridge. That specificity seems to fade into the background pretty quickly, and doesn’t seem to inform the experience beyond that. Personality-wise the protagonist is a blank slate, which is not uncommon in IF that wants the player to step in.

There are choices to make, both in wandering direction and equipment. In all cases that I hit, there was little to no indication of what effect your choices could have, so they all ended up being arbitrary. None of them seemed character based. That’s not so terrible in the wandering around part. It does convey the exploring-a-new-city feeling of not even knowing where the interesting stuff might be. In the case of equipment it does rankle a bit, particularly when depending on your arbitrary choice some areas of the city might be closed off later.

The setting is really the star here and in concept it's a pretty cool one: a city suspended on ropes and chains between two mountains. The narration that describes it varies from scene to scene. Some scenes are wonderfully painted with vertiginous heights, colorful skies, physically hefty and sagging environs. But there are just as many scenes where details jar to the point of ‘I don’t think that’s how that’d work.’ If your city is suspended by ropes, then torches and holy crap bonfires seem like a REALLY bad idea. Kids play with rocks which, where are they getting those exactly? Most egregiously, the ropes are repeatedly described as fraying and worn. I would think rope maintenance would have to be top priority for the city council. I mean they don’t need to worry about sewer or trash collection right? (Though dear lord the land dwellers beneath them) At first I was thinking maybe it was the poorer sections that suffered neglect, which would have been a nice detail. But no, that was me me adding things.

There is definitely something to be said that nit-picking details in stories is garbage criticism. When you start complaining about the realism of fantasy, what is even the point? (see also incel criticism of Rings of Power race in fantasy races. Actually, that’s a little different. I’m not talking about racism masquerading as ‘realism’ Forget I brought it up.) While I think the prescription to embrace fantasy on its own terms is a strong idea, that doesn’t change that effective use of tangible details helps immersion. Despite the prodding of the angels on our shoulder, tonally inconsistent half-baked details can jar us.

Yes, Sparks of Joy wandering around, but as many ‘I don’t think…’ moments. Maybe more disconcertingly, your ability to wander is limited. In some cases you can’t go back to explore untaken paths. In others, sections are shut off because you took the wrong equipment. And then it ends - practically out of nowhere. In two playthroughs, I went down completely different paths but ended at the same abrupt and narratively unsatisfying end screen. There was no arc to what I’d seen and the end text did not wrap up my experience in any meaningful way. It just ended. I think there is a really powerful nugget of setting here, but for a truly satisfying experience, it should be polished a bit, and some sort of narrative arc applied to it.


Played: 10/16/22
Playtime: 20min, two playthroughs, same ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/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

Extremely short and small parser-based exploration game. Escape the Tomb you’ve been pushed into! The opening is very efficient, immediately setting stakes and goals, then turning you loose. You are piloting a blank slate protagonist, which is fine as this is definitely not a character driven game.

This one feels like a learning exercise more than anything. It is a very small 6 room tomb (not counting connecting hallways). It does have more than its share of objects to collect and to lesser extent manipulate, but almost none of those objects do anything useful even for scoring purposes. You can move them around, admire them in your inventory, and mostly be told “you don’t need to” when trying to apply them to the environment.

The text is serviceable enough, mostly descriptive, although insufficient for mapping. For example you are told there is a crack in the wall through which you can see something interesting, but nowhere are you told WHICH wall, should you want to explore that direction. In the end the map is small enough not to matter, but it does interfere with your ability to hold it in your head. More distressingly, where the room descriptions are more fleshed out, the nouns are not implemented. So you can be told “there is a river here” but when you try to examine it “there is no such thing here.” That feels like a pretty quick and easy rule of thumb: if you mention a noun, have a response when the player examines the noun. It doesn’t impact the gameplay, but definitely adds polish to the product.

There’s really only one puzzle to solve, and it's reasonably straightforward, befitting the scope of the piece. The geometry of the tomb doesn’t immediately suggest the answer, but is imprecise enough that it doesn’t contradict it either. As you progress in solving the puzzle, the descriptive text could be more state aware. (Spoiler - click to show)When water runs through the tomb, only some of the rooms acknowledge the presence, and depending on the room, the volume of water is inconsistent.

As a coding exercise, I would call it functionally complete. No major bugs, no unwinnable states I could observe, consistent object behavior. Would definitely recommend fleshing out the noun space. The most bang to buck would come from polishing the descriptive text to make the thing internally consistent and clear. As is, a Mechanical excercise.


Played: 10/17/22
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/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

This was a small game, showcasing Alien scientists excavating modern human artifacts, and being mildly bewildered by them. It felt like a working prototype in a lot of ways.

It is small, 6 rooms not counting hallways? There are NPCs with limited and unvarying interactions. There are puzzles to solve, interacting with objects the player has (mostly) no issue recognizing, but amusingly befuddle the aliens. They are pretty linear and mostly obvious. It does incorporate state awareness, opening up options naturally as you play through. It is all pretty bare bones though, narratively and graphically.

Graphically, it's not very interesting - the font and color selection have no particular resonance. A lot of sentences and choices are all lower case which is a stylistic choice I assume, but serves no real purpose. Options are stacked vertically, but not ordered so that if an option is not yet available to you it looks like a stray blank line between other options. There is no consistent organization of choices screen to screen - sometimes it is a complete-or-not vertical list, sometimes it is integrated into the descriptions themselves. There are spelling errors, including in the title screen. It incorporates pictures, but incompletely. There is some light humor in the contrast between how the aliens describe the objects, and the academic photo of the actual object. This does bite the game where the object with the most obtuse description does not have a picture like the others. While I guessed at its use, I never did figure out what it was supposed to be.

The text descriptions also left money on the table, as it were. For one, the lab space, hallways and other rooms are described in suspiciously human terms. If there was an alienness to the setting, it would have much better reinforced their bafflement. As such, I kind of pictured Star Trek aliens - one prosthetic but otherwise human - when so much more was possible. There were technical glitches as well - the game did not seem to recognize when you were carrying something and let you pick it up repeatedly. Even your ultimate goal is not well signposted. While its never unclear what needs to be done next, the end screen came as mild “oh I guess that’s it then” surprise.

None of this was fatal, just unpolished. The graphical presentation was unpolished enough that it never really faded from my consciousness, and that feels Intrusive to me. The text could use some rework. The framework is there for a diverting game, just needs a bit more to start Sparking. The introductory text suggests this was a class assignment of some sort. Makes sense - as a time-constrained assignment its completeness is to its credit. The polish can come later.


Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
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