Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This is a parser based game, but the implementation feels like it is fighting convention kind of just to fight it? The attempt is to get the user to type commands more naturally, in complete sentences. I can see why intellectually this may make some sense (and certainly as a hook for voice-based accessibility), but practically speaking it feels misapplied in a keyboard-based IF. The mainstream tradition and promise of IF is to ‘put the player in the story.’ Now, since this form predates VR goggles by decades, it needed to do this in text. Text is already a layer of disconnect though, right? You aren’t ‘walking north’ you are TYPING ‘walk north.’ The more you think about typing, the less immersion you have. (Excepting of course sly little games that integrate typing-at-a-keyboard into its conceit. Those minxes!) This is why one letter abbreviations are so prevalent in IF - ‘examine’ is so many letters to type, it drags immersion, especially when done repeatedly. The more you can do this the better. The power of parser IF of course is that it presents the illusion of limitless nouns and verbs. WE know that’s not true, but that is the tradeoff we’ve negotiated over several decades: type any word, but common ones give shortcuts. I mean, I’ve personally never finished an IF game thinking, “that was pretty cool, but I really wish I could have typed more.”

So Headlights wants to renegotiate that. Sure, why not, no sacred cows, right? I think I tried twice then said, “I’m typing way too much about this,” and reverted to more standard verb-noun and abbreviation conventions. To its credit, Headlights’ parser handled it. To its detriment it put what appeared to be debug messages after every command.

>OPEN DOOR
[I heard: ‘open the door’ → Say ‘as spoken’ to repeat exactly as you said.]
The door is open.
>N
[I heard: ‘go north’ → Say ‘as spoken’ to repeat exactly as you said.]

AFTER EVERY COMMAND. Other than actively berating me for not typing articles, I’m not sure how much MORE intrusive it could be. At a minimum there should be a command to shut that off. So I didn’t care for the new parser capabilities. Sure I could have made more effort to meet the parser on its own terms, but I think I would have chafed as much or more at the extra typing.

It had some issues re-implementing other parser features as well. Objects were sometimes listed via their code relationship, not necessarily their physical description. X GROUND in one spot yielded “Inside a meadow is a physical object, a place, a side, a thing, and an inside.” It aliased verbs inelegantly like when I TOUCH LIQUID, I got “you have petted the liquid.” I think my overall favorite was USE TOILET… “I don’t know what to do with a toilet.” Wow game, your parents REALLY let you down. These gaps were not as common as the debug messages, but still overwhelming.

Ok, so the parser implementation was Intrusive. How about the story? It was pretty bare bones. 4 or 5 chapters of 4-9 room exploration and minimal ‘get X from room2, use in room4’ kind of puzzles. The maps were all pretty linear, the descriptions pretty minimal. Usually a sentence of where you are, then a line by line list of objects in the room. That was useful at least, as there wasn’t a lot of searching. My favorite puzzle was (Spoiler - click to show)letting yourself get bit by a spider for extra strength, leading me to exclaim “I’m Spiderman now!” Honestly, it felt like a test drive for the parser more than a complete work of its own. There is a climax and payoff, but the stakes never really register as more than a dry IF puzzle.

Will be interesting to see where this parser implementation goes from here though.

Played: 11/12/22
Playtime: 40min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

4 Edith + 2 Niki proclaims itself a dating sim, but this game is not what those words suggest to me. It all feels very slapdash. You enter on the grounds of psychiatric hospital I think. This setting is almost never referenced again. I guess you work there, because you are presented with a corridor of offices to visit. The descriptive text of what is on this corridor does not match the choices on offer. This is a befuddling choice. Twine lets you embed the destinations in the description itself, it’s MORE work to provide two (incompatible) versions! You visit all 6 rooms, barely interact with their occupants, then pick one to date. One of the choices here is a date that was not referenced in ANY of your initial conversations so you kind of have to deduce who it’s referring to. Did I mention one of the interactions has a weird sexual harassment vibe?

Selecting the date presents an end screen. That’s it. No time to build Sparks of Joy let alone Engagement, though the text was really too awkward to supply either of those anyway. Besides its really rushed presentation, the thing that sticks out most is the amped up Bro tone of the thing.

Bear with me while I expand a bit on the genus and phylum of Bro-tone. All Bro-tone comes from the same extended lineage that culminated in the 80s/90s teen sex farces. Its key hallmarks were 1) faintly knuckleheaded cis dumbasses 2) carefree good humor 3) treating women as sex objects to achieve and 4) inhabiting narratives where the world happily rewarded all of those. (There was another gene, 5) Gay Panic, that is not relevant here.) And it was toxic as hell, once we looked at it close enough. Prominent in movies like Porkies, and I don’t know Joy Sticks (deep cut!), but really you couldn’t swing a dead cat in a cineplex and not hit one back then. Nowadays it is most readily identified by its excessive, prejorative use of the word ‘woke.’

There was a key mutation in the late 80’s that forked the line. I’m speaking of course of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. This mutation dramatically diluted gene #3 above, and somehow made the species stronger. Suddenly, knuckleheaded amiability could rise unfettered by toxicity. Subsequent mutations actually flipped the gene to engage women as people, and even modified #5. At first haltingly in supporting characters in American Pie, then fully-fledged in Neighbors or its Final Boss form, Josh Segarra in his roles in She-Hulk and The Other Two. Spoiler alert, this is NOT the Bro-tone phylum 4E+2N showcases.

The Bro-tone main line had another mutation in the last 4-7 years - a new gene of mocking self-awareness. Where the joke is how awful the main line is by subtly amplifying the meanness of the worst if its excesses. A great example of this line is Michael Che’ on SNL’s Weekend Update. He deadpan advocates the most insane, exaggerated Bro-tone behaviors for laughs. Colin Jost’s role here is indispensable - his comedically beleaguered disapproval is vital to the identification of this strain. Superficially it is so similar to the main branch they can easily be mistaken for each other.

And these separate-but-similar Bro-tones are where we are in 4E+2N. My first ending I was presented with (Spoiler - click to show)"Over the years, you realize that she's a little hysterical, but which woman isn't."

My impulse was to hear it in Michael Che’s voice and snorted in amusement. My second ending had a less over-the-top but clearly still Bro-tone blurb that made me question what I was looking at. As I contemplated a third run, I realized I was holding a Schroedinger’s cat box. At this point, the game was in superposition between the two Bro-tone lines. If I opened the box with a third run, it was going to concretize into one or the other. I don’t think I want that.

Played: 10/31/22
Playtime: Less than 10min, two runthroughs.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? I dare not trifle with the quantum superposition.

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