Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

There is a danger in digesting any comedy work that has even a hint of provocation or social commentary. The danger is that its intent can be horribly misread by the baggage that provocation carries with it. Now, this is not a ‘rabid bear in area’ danger, just one of pouring so many wasted and misguided words onto a page that reader and reviewer alike will never get those minutes of their lives back. The whole endeavor is fraught with interpreting intent and meaning. Even super well controlled satire is subject to misunderstanding, nevermind less focused efforts. Humor in particular can defuse or contradict satirical intent by simply bringing the warm feeling of funny to topics that are really best served cold.

This is a self-proclaimed satire. We are a white male of suspect politics, riding a subway with people with no social boundaries. It is competently and amusingly rendered, with a small coterie of fellow passengers who have no problem verbalizing their thoughts to the car. Not INconsistent with my experiences on public transit. Other than looking around, the main point of the game is to (Spoiler - click to show)interject a take on fascism into a couple’s loud argument.

On first playthrough, even this spoilered goal is unclear. Like most parsers, I tried to interact with most of the environment and NPCs, to be rebuffed in ways that felt inelegant if not broken. Efforts to engage anything BUT the loud argument were rejected, often in clumsy and unconvincing ways. Then it ended. And here I made a crucial decision. Via its ending, I decided I understood what the goal of the game was meant to be. This choice recast what felt ‘broken’ earlier as pure gameplay-focus choice. Once you tumble this way, the peripheral elements of the game kind of vanish into goal-focused trial-and-error work. The amusing but shallow environment (which does seem to randomize on repeat plays, but not in a way that justifies the time to read the new content) really fades to a count: last time I tried N. Let’s try N+1. Just hammer that keyboard until I get there. Over and over again until you get to a different ending. Whatever light bemusement the environment elicited on first pass is just so much blurred, barely-read words, whizzing by until the next restart iteration. You are not listening to the car anymore, just waiting to pounce with your insights.

I will confess once I finally got the different ending I did chuckle. Not because it somehow paid off my diligence in replaying (over 20 times!). But because it emphatically did NOT. The game was trolling me, and while deeply UNentertaining in the moment, really the most mechanical experience I can recall since I first started calling things ‘Mechanical,’ the meta narrative it built was kind of hilarious.

The Satire is in the gameplay here, belligerently so, and in a very inspired way. See, by letting the player ‘discover’ the goal of the game, at the end of the first pass there is a choice. Restart to pursue the goal you (probably) failed to achieve, or don’t. If not, fine, this game has nothing to say to you. If you DO restart, you have committed yourself to its goal. At this point, everything about the gameplay is satirizing THIS COMMITMENT. The text that becomes a blur of unread/skimmed and ignored input? The frantic reassertion of your goals, essentially independent of the dialogue and events around you? The increasing urgency after each repetition to make yourself heard? Then, the final coup de’ grace when you ARE heard? All of this is a sublime evocation then puncturing of our political preoccupations, and righteous self-importance. The gameplay creates in us, the player, an urgency to inflict BIG TOPICS on an audience whose immediate concerns want nothing to do with them. And frames this impulse as (social) (Spoiler - click to show)failure! This is EVERY OUTRAGED PARTY GUEST YOU KNOW, THE GAME.

The ludonarrative IS the satire here, and that is a truly next level use of IF. The playing of game was decidedly NOT engaging. In fact it was annoyingly mechanical. But the satire in that gameplay was simply Delicious. I award that a Spark AND a bonus point for innovative ludosatire. I ain’t afraid of no bears.

Played: 11/6/25
Playtime: 20m, 20+ playthroughs, all endings?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless with some headfaked Notable Gaps, bonus point for ludotroll
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

There is a saying, “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Imperial Throne is the polar opposite of this. IT asserts, “When you see a nail, grab your screwdriver, because hammers are for SUCKERS!” The hubris of this is kind of breathtaking. Never mind common carpentry practices, I know it’s not a screw but BY GOD I’m using a screwdriver anyway. IT basically implements a kingdom simulator in parser. This is a simultaneously reckless and compromised choice and I kind of love it for that. To a point.

Most impressively, the game implements a variety of verbs completely appropriate to the conceit, way deeper than it needed to be. “Ally with” “Censure” “Trade With” “Promote” and my favorite “Marry” These all drop like giddy surprises from your interactions with the game, like Santa’s sleigh exploded overhead and the subsequent deluge of gifts is yours, all yours. To even try this: to implement insanely open ended ruling proclamations as unclued parser syntax that the player must trip over, and to so frequently reward these things. Every time it worked it provided a jolt of wonder that has so long been buried by decades of encrusted parser conventions. Like the first time you ‘talk to npc’ expecting nothing but actually getting simulated dialogue!

It also has at its disposal a daunting array of (perhaps randomized?) military, political, economic and religious events to manage, respond to and prioritize. Despite its very large scope, it never really devolved into repetitive text, events or challenges. Nor did game state become confused and contradictory (excepting perhaps regarding a royal betrothal). The impression of an evolving geopolitics was practically seamless. This is also an amazing accomplishment!

It is with deep sadness that I must conclude, despite those two VERY strong assets, that the game’s reach escaped its grasp. More, that this specific empire-resource-management and event-mitigation gameplay is not only ill-suited for parser paradigms, but it cannot help but bring to mind gameplay paradigms MUCH better suited. I say this with lingering, deep admiration for the HEROIC effort IT made to assert otherwise. Here’s three reasons I say this.

1. Notwithstanding my admiration for the game’s vocabulary, over a full hour of gameplay not only did the vocabulary let me down more than it rewarded, the joy some baroque verbs generated made the simpler gaps WORSE. I can “Execute” but I cannot “Jail.” I can “Raise” but not “Recruit” I can “Attack” but not “Send Ambassadors” I can “Promote” but not “Reward” and so on. All of which needs to be discovered through traditional parser trial-and-error. In some sense, by rewarding so many wild verbs, we end up trying so many MORE things than we might otherwise only to come up empty. It is a paradox of raised expectations!

2. The game implements an empire geography of regions, each with a garrison of troops and a leader with strengths/weaknesses, as well as bordering hostiles. As text descriptions. This is something a graphical game would just present as your gameplay cockpit, adjusting it for game state, probably with some cheeky thematic artistry to set the mood. Here, I had to ask enough questions to extract information, then draw it on paper. This is not awful, by the way, scratchpad noodlings are a pretty good way to increase my engagement. However, this paradigm is crippled with super dynamic gamestate that requires multiple commands to suss out what changed, then manually update them. Constantly. It pretty quickly became drudgery of probing new information for legion counts and evolving border relationships, then updating my increasingly crowded and scribbled out map. And could not help call to mind how EASILY this would be implemented in a graphical interface. Or a boardgame of wooden pieces.

3. Most egregiously the command space opacity intruded into gameplay in one CRUCIAL way. Despite spamming the command prompt for 20 minutes, I could not figure out the magic command to move legions from anywhere besides the capitol, to redeploy them where needed. This had the effect of me watching vulnerable borders getting chipped away, while rested masses of troops resolutely REFUSED to go to their aid. This infuriating gap was exacerbated by cluing text that read: “You could try moving troops from a different province.” Could I? COULD I??? Well boy, I sure did TRY and it never never never worked. I am sure, in the finest guess-the-verb parser tradition, there was a way to do it, but I never found it. Eventually, I just threw up my hands and Z’d my way to inevitable defeat. An ignominious end to my empire and my gameplay session.

So at the end of it, what am I left with? Immense admiration for the hubris of the thing, shot through with Sparks of Joy whenever left field commands were rewarded. That ultimately succumbed to the weight of its screwdriver-driving-a-nail baggage.

Played: 11/6/25
Playtime: 1hr, lost empire
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable Implementation gaps
Would Play After Comp?: Probably not, would just grab a hammer

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

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Email!
Played : 7/18-26/25
Playtime: 12m over 6-9 days, bittersweet ending

Three years into my game review career, I sometimes think my body of work is actually a weird autobiography in IF review format. I have the vague sense that a motivated sleuth (or casually cruel AI spiderbot) could assemble a 100% complete picture of me by extracting offhand references in these reviews. Why do I continue to taunt the beast like that? I’m supposed to be a privacy paranoid, yet have sprinkled my life liberally into seemingly innocuous reviews. You have all the clues!

Anyway, here’s some more pieces for the life puzzle: I am a third generation Polish American who recently visited his ancestral homeland to reconnect to his roots. My extended family spent a week in Krakow (that my Dad’s misguided 23AndMe told us is where our genetic stock springs from) (I mean seriously Dad, I BEGGED YOU NOT TO) last year. This review is not about the joy (and weight!) that visit generated, well not fully. As part of our trip, we toured both Auschwitz and Nowa Huta - a Soviet-era Model Communist City. What was striking was the prevalence of FIRST HAND ACCOUNTS of all of it. This is not some abstract history, this is living memory that actual people actually lived through. People I COULD STILL TALK TO. Between the two sites, so close both geographically and historically, it is impossible to not feel the whirlwind forces of history and their uncaring abuse of people caught in their wake. It is probably some flavor of heritage-exceptionalism that wants me to say “Poland is a unique lens for the last two generations of social turmoil.” More likely, it’s just MY best lens.

And also this work’s lens! Starting in post-war, pre-Soviet Union times, the protagonist (and also you, the player) get to experience the torrent of history where your wants and dreams are so much loose detritus to the social pressures swirling around you. This could not be more centered on my interests and drives unless maybe it featured Cosmic Horrors. Though honestly, history itself embodies that terror just fine.

Its construction is uncommon for this space - a series of emails, each culminating in a single momentous choice that will inform the next phase of life. This is a form that evoked an uncommon, conflicted mindset in me. Usually when I talk about works “I wish I liked more” there is a vague sense of disappointment, of promise unfulfilled. This may be the first time I entertain that thought with a work I REALLY, REALLY LIKED ANYWAY.

Content-wise, I was captivated and invested. The broad passages of time that encapsulated all-too-frequent sea changes in lives at the mercy of historical changes. From Communist purges and generational labor struggles, to collapsing-order financial chaos and desperation, this work steadfastly centers personal experience of these events. Through specificity, it paints an extremely affecting portrait of history’s callous disregard for the people populating it. And of people finding their way anyway.

The form of it I think I unfairly wanted more from. As an email-driven story, that features presumably time-period-accurate postage stamps, the story was BEGGING to be epistolary, told in letters between principles. That approach seemed SO obvious and SO natural, I actually felt let down when that WASN’T the conceit! Only a little. The other area that felt shy of its full potential was the granularity of it. By encapsulating decades with each daily message, large swaths of life passed without choice. Where that lack of choice was driven by social and political forces, that felt quite natural and earned. There were however, large swaths of PERSONAL choices (most notably relationships with romantic partners) that lived on the same un-forking tracks. This I chafed at a bit. Yes, the overriding theme is clawing out dignity in a rigid world that is actively hostile to your desires. This was expertly conveyed. I just felt that it would be MORE keenly felt and observed if the protagonist exerted initiative, however trivial, more than once every few decades. Most especially in arenas that were less directly at the mercy of history.

Even without that though, the frequently on-rails life I led ended in a strongly bitter but faintly sweet ending. In many ways, my fate was defined by forces outside my control, including consequences of decisions both unanticipated and unforeseeable. The denouement I earned was one presented as lonely and empty, but nevertheless nodded to a newfound initiative denied through most of my ‘youth’. That initiative itself felt remarkable and maybe, given what history taught me to expect, sufficient compensation. What a subtle, melancholy and satisfying end state!

Earlier this 'Thon, I lauded the benefits of a short work’s glimpse into the author’s preoccupations. This is a work that takes less than two minutes a day for less than a week. The amount of drama it packs into those minutes is staggeringly out of scale to your investment. That punch is enhanced immeasurably by the enforced time passage between chapters - underlining the implacable march of forces outside your control.

You get it. This one goes to ‘11’

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: choice-select
Played : 7/21/25
Playtime: 30m demo

This work is a fantasy game demo, an introduction to a larger work to come. Its overriding strength is its graphical presentation and UI. The thing oozes with art-driven character and mood. From its deliberately unidealized portraits, conveying non-movie-star characters of flawed human features, to its RPG UI interactions, to its moody location background work, the whole thing blends into a very attractive and functional package that is a pleasure to interact with.

The game it is in service of is promising as well - you are walked through playable character introductions, including some assigned RPG-like traits and selected buffs to tailor your gameplay. Interestingly, in the short demo you are given opportunity to inhabit two (of three?) playable characters, showcasing the breadth of the game system and narrative perhaps at some cost to depth.

The story itself blends High Fantasy tropes with horror tropes. While the former often leave me cold, I am a sucker for the latter, and this combination (uncommon if not completely novel) worked for me. I mean, undead have ALWAYS been in DnD, why have we not been freaked out by it until now???

The demo is accomplishing a lot, showcasing a lot of gameplay. Just how much is driven home by the work’s somewhat abrupt end. I was actually surprised to see it took a full half hour, considering the relatively modest amount of story I ultimately consumed. The mechanical introductions were not DRAGGY, thanks to the UI and art, but they definitely consumed more time than the story. As an intro this is not a terrible choice. Showcasing gameplay, particularly when the mechanics are this capably implemented does seem like highlighting its strengths. It’s just, I’ve rarely (not never!) encountered mechanics that were so compelling it was the main reason to engage a work. Story, especially in narrative works, matters, and can provide a much more emotional, compelling hook than fun swipes of mouse. Other than showing its horror-leaning, heh, bones, heheh, the character beats, background setup and lore felt underserved here? Not given room to heh, flesh out, heheh into compelling elements in their own right. As a demo, I feel like there’s room to expand on this half of the work.

There are a few other burrs in presentation, mostly in text cleanup. At one point the text asserts: “footsteps do not echo” while the soundtrack is clearly playing echoing footsteps! Elsewhere, my character stats reported I was not particularly superstitious, only for incidental text to later inform me I was too superstitious for a course of action. These are not fatal oversights by any means, but make for glitches in the experience that run counter to the mostly seamless presentation.

All in all a very admirable and engaging demo that showcased its undeniably strong UI, but neglected its narrative core. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: choice-select
Played : 7/21/25
Playtime: 15m, 3 endings

This "Penny Pinching Parity" work, another sub-500 joint, takes an interesting tack on the challenge. What better way to save word count than to dispense with subject-verb-object and articles, definite and otherwise? That’s a lot of linguistic dead weight, right?? Think how many more sentences can you get with one and two word constructions!

Our protagonist awakens from sort of sci-fi sleep pod. The reduced language of the piece conveys a deep disorientation, like the world in all its detail is simply TOO MUCH for the protag (and us) to process and the best we can do is loose impressions and sporadic detail focus. It cleverly puts the player on the same footing as the protag, grappling with overwhelmed senses to understand the truth of our situation. Seriously, no notes, just a wonderfully deliberate and effective use of wordplay to underscore the dramatic theme of the work. It’s hard to tell whether the Jam spurred this particular mood, or the mood found perfect lodging in this specific Jam - either way it ends up being a super good match.

In a Jam game this short, it is no criticism to say that this textual achievement is the showpiece and central achievement of the game. Its characters, and to lesser extent plot twists, are dispensed rather expeditiously in the three endings. Constrained by format to almost speed run its revelations, the work firmly embraces Twilight Zoney tropes and mood. (Or maybe Outer Limits-y?) It’s the kind of work that shows its limitations and mitigating strategy boldly, openly, but STILL feels natural and unconstrained in its discipline. It gets where it wants to go with precision and calculated effect, and succeeds extremely well at it. It feels for all the world like a super controlled narrative of intriguing mood that HAPPENS to conform to this Jam’s rules, not something force fit.

My only friction with this work was not with its narrative, not at all, but with its technical choices. As a link-select work, its links are presented inline, with highlighted words to expand or direct the story in specific ways. This is implemented as a continually-building screen of text, where clicking (when not wiping the screen for a new ‘scene’) adds lines of text to the display. Until it gets too big for the window where it must scroll. Yet subsequent links remain stranded at the top of the page and not repeated. The effect of this choice is to require a back and forth scrolling: click link at top of page, scroll to bottom to read, return to top for more linkage. This mechanically clumsy interaction mode forced a level of fiddly clarity that worked against the impressionistic language and mood it was building. My sense is the work would be stronger with a different, less deliberate and mechanical UI model.

Otherwise, pitch perfect.

Another sub-500 review achieved! I am powerless before my conceits.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: choice-select
Played : 7/21/25
Playtime: 30m demo, 2 playthroughs

Some erotica embraces a kind of “alternate universe” vibe. A world very much adjacent to our own where physical pleasure is never more than two moves away from any, and I mean ANY social interaction. When done poorly, its seams and artificiality can feel squicky or worse. When done well it has a kind of charm to it, where full character and inner lives are replaced by an irrepressible joi de vive and horny transgressions are embraced with a twinkle.

It is cartoony in the less-used sense of the word - people reduced to iconic shorthand, emphasizing (in this case) bawdy aspects for humorous and exaggerated effect. Like say Peanuts. We recognize the heart of the exaggeration and accept the abstraction and falsity as representative, not simpy ‘off’. I mean, imagine for a moment interacting with a child whose physiognomy and droll melancholy matched Charlie Brown. So unsettling! No, our brains are quite prepared to shrug that off given the emotional core that rings through the distortions around it. Once that leap is made, we play in this universe, knowing it is unrepresentative but able to carry the core of its resonance into new places.

LM-N seems to want to play in this space, but it takes its time trying to get there. You open doing photograph analysis work (remotely it seems? by VPN I hope!), notionally scanning images for evidence of entirely unsubtle espionage. Y’know amongst the nudity. The task is kind of shadowy and hand-wavy in a way that at first synchs with the singular drives of Earth-XXX. It quickly gets sharper as your two female superiors engage your work and deeper cross-purposes are exposed, where you will have to choose between ‘sides’ of a barely-sketched conflict. Both of these superiors are very happy to reward your allegiance with (Spoiler - click to show)lewd selfies, y’know, like bosses do?

The dramatic conflict is very much aligned with its ‘Noir’ title and contrasted to the visual presentation of the piece, creates some unexpected… and this word may not be the best choice here… tension. Both dramatically and in the impulse of the game itself. Stories categorized as Noir are hallmarked by a deep cynicism towards humanity, starkly rendered. Where good intentions are mocked and punished by betrayals and cupidity. (Hey, how weird is it that CUPID is the root of that word? In the context of this review??) This tone is somewhat jarring against the otherwise gleeful Earth-XXX excesses. The mood it evokes It is not entirely unsuccessful, just unexpected and certainly unresolved. The lack of resolution is presumably due to this being a demo, an introduction to deeper plot twists and nudity to come in the full version.

It would be a disservice to the work, given how visually focused both the analyst mini-game and the erotica itself is, to ignore the art. The art is very distinctive. In Noir mode (where I feared I would lose color clues crucial to the proceedings! but didn’t, whew), it was 3-4 colors, large blocks of shadow and light, super iconic. All art is subjective of course, but I found this to be reliably well composed and pleasant to look at. It is a real strength of the game. Which it would kind of have to be, against its aims. The text is not (by and large) carrying erotic content, that all falls to its representational artwork. The art is every bit as abstract and representational as its narrative, and manages to bridge the gap between its fleshy and dramatic impulses, leverages its icon-oriented construction to unify the piece as much as it can.

After my second playthrough (exploring different sides of the conflict), that unresolved thematic tension was far and away the overriding impression - outweighing its female-body gaze-centered sexuality and the moody wheels-within-wheels plot mechanations. As a demo, designed to entice further engagement, I am hard pressed to imagine a better end state. It will all come down to how compelling you find that unique ‘noirotica’ flavor combination, and how confident you are that the resolution of that tension does not dissolve into dissonance. I honestly could see it going either way on that last score.

Also, sorry about your algorithm. Now that I have put Peanuts and ‘erotica’ this close together, you might get some interesting search results for the next few days.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: RPG/choice-select
Played : 7/20/25
Playtime: 30m

I have previously asserted that High Fantasy is not my chosen fabulist genre. Nor, to the extent that I have engaged TTRPG, is DnD my chosen system. To the extent I have engaged these things before… which, I live in this world in this time, don’t I? To the extent I have engaged these things it has been predominantly as a Rogue. Make of that what you will. Collectively, these dynamics suggest that High Fantasy DnD where I cannot play a Rogue is going to face an uphill climb with me.

Which was my experience here. Interestingly, if I squint a bit, I can see an experience just adjacent to SOV that would engage me. SOV sets the table with some interesting dynamics: possibility to romance other characters, including full gender selection; a plot that subverts dungeon crawl into a more dynamic scenario TAILOR MADE FOR ROGUING; legitimately interesting and diverse characterizations of two of your three companions. These bright spots highlighted something I kind of knew: when I TTRPG, I am much more enamored of the RP than the G. DnD’s mechanical systems (predominantly combat) I find pretty fiddly and uninteresting in their own right. They are a randomizer delivery system, whose main benefit is to unpredictably alter the story’s progression and provide RNG optimization puzzles to solve/survive.

Here, the implementation consistently (though not uniformly!) steered into those aspects that hold the least fascination to me. Let’s start with its exploration mechanism. At various points you are presented with multiple choices, directions to explore. Pretty consistently, there is no context to those choices, no knowledge that informs the possibilities. Meaning, you are going to need to try them all until you find the one that works. This is not inherently a bad mechanism, it emphasizes the ‘exploration’ nature of the setup. It is, however, not so rewarding when the construction is ‘dead end,’ ‘dead end,’ ‘objective.’ Would be nice to have incidental encounters, sidequesty wonders to experience, or even clues, anything to justify the diversions. Otherwise, what is the point of the choice? Instead, it becomes a fairly mechanical ‘try until success’ exercise.

Similarly, combat was rendered not as an open-ended, interactive challenge. Instead, it was a series of die rolls (without opportunity to change approaches mid-combat!) that just played out. That parenthetical part is crucial to what I perceive as the appeal of of TTRPG combat. The ability to try wild things, to adjust based on how things develop, heck to run away before grinding to death on bad rolls. Here, you get one choice at the start, then die roll your way to a finish. Happily, my playthrough I survived all encounters, however if truly left in the hands of cold Dame Fortune, it seems unsatisfying death, as a result of no choices on my part, was a real possibility. Randomization is not the compelling part of these mechanisms, its the agency to mitigate and optimize the random effects that are. That feels missing here.

Where the work is most alive, is when interacting with NPCs. Lorelei and Aenwyn are both rendered as pretty specific personalities, whose agency and drives are nicely varied. In this short demo, Cassian suffered a bit, feeling more like Lorelei-minus than a unique thing of his own. It feels like the romance is teased in this early going, but not really fruit-bearing yet. This is fine, enough of the romance mechanics are introduced that the flavor is there, and while not cutting new ground (yet) is certainly serviceable enough. Non-romantic character interactions are pleasant enough too, in particular when the opportunity reveals more NPC character. Other, non-mechanic-tied choices feel a bit better too. Things like player-driven investigative approach, whether to lean into DnDs brand of casual murder or not, these spice up the proceedings in a welcome way.

So yeah, a mixed implementation bag for me, but none of that is my overriding impression of the work. Hovering over it all is what I can only describe as a “first draft feel.” The work is rife with typos, awkward grammer and coding bugs. I captured examples of these as I went, and communicated samples to the author. Beyond a wealth of spelling, verb tense and clumsy wordings, there were some specific technical issues: a gender variable appearing untranslated in text, even an alarming warning about unclosed markup. It all added up to an unpolished vibe, that could’ve benefited from playtesting and more editing.

So, where do we land here? For all prospective audiences, I would recommend another round of polish, bugfix and editing. For a DnD-philic audience, this seems to reasonably hit expected beats, and augment it with character and plot development in a nice way. For me, those augmentations are more interesting than the game’s bones, which just tells me there is a more squarely targeted audience out there.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: choice-select/Visual Novel
Played : 7/18/25
Playtime: 10m

What a cool, unique combination of story and presentation. Its presentation is very dawn-of-pixel-graphics, with pixel fonts and art that are evocative of 80s monochrome computers. Its story does not particularly NEED this conceit, nor does it seem to resonate with that choice in a meaningful way. Rather, it plays as a time capsule, a squarely narrative work from a time where that was a rarity, exploring the graphical capabilities of a medium not yet mature enough to enable that organically. It is actually very successful at that, pushing against its out-of-time constraints to build a specific mood in support of the story. In particular, the ‘blurring effect’ used in profile and reflections are stunningly well realized both thematically and in the context of its technically-limiting conceit. It was less an ‘overcoming of its arbitrary technical limitations’ as ‘this is what drama could FEEL like under those limitations.’ It felt like finding an overlooked, ahead-of-its-time work from a time gone by.

The story is tight and effective, and positively sings off its implementation choices. I feel like a work this short, any words I give to the story will spoil it a little bit, and it is worth experiencing unspoiled. The story’s command over its progress feels super controlled and precise, augmented by inventive uses of its technical presentation. The story generates genuine pathos and surprise in its short runtime. I go back and forth on what is MORE memorable, its narrative or its presentation. That more than anything tells me the balance between the two is just about perfect.

So this is weird. This may be my favorite work this 'Thon (so far), yet I find myself unable to bleed words about it without getting into unwanted spoiler territory. I know, who even am I right now? I hope the brevity of this review doesn’t induce unwanted ‘not worth discussing’ inferences in the reader. Regardless of how deft I am in discussing the work, for sure I highly recommend EXPERIENCING it. It was pretty singular.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: choice-select
Played : 7/18/25
Playtime: 10m 2 playthroughs

It occurs to me I have gone quite deep in the 'Thon before referencing “Twinesformer: Parsers in Disguise” - my shorthand for choice-select works that lean on parser-style explore/collect/unlock gameplay. This is a very capably implemented iteration, portraying a PC trying to escape a flood-ravaged town. By exploring, collecting and unlocking!

I found Deluge to be very well conceived and implemented, its locations and challenges very organic to the setup, including its trickling revelations about the protagonist’s life. This is both harder and more exceptional than it sounds. Some Twinesformer puzzle solving tropes (and the parser source on which they are based) have evolved into accepted practices by the form. Intellectual puzzles are overlaid onto narratives in sometimes staggeringly artificial ways. But as players, we just accept and hand wave that artificiality as inherent in the form. We do not trade in real-life realism, there is a Twinesformer/Parser realism we accept as adjacent to that. When we encounter works whose puzzle integration is this organic, it is notable and highlights that tradeoff we have agreed to over the years. This is a true strength.

Its setting is doing a lot of work here. Exploring a nearly post-apocalyptic setting, a pocket of chaos in an otherwise normal world, has a particular flavor of desperation and hope that the work produces quite effectively. It also presents a situation where the tropes of parser puzzles ARE the most effective (if not only) path forward. The types of things the protagonist is asked to secure are aligned with the scenario, and progress naturally through the game. The protagonist’s background and aims are similarly conveyed and shaped effectively through the course of the work. The player’s focus is cleanly aligned with the discovered lore, both that lore and the immediate tasks evolving with increased understanding.

Where the work glitched for me, and really, given the tightness of the story was only a small part of the experience, was its inclusion of less welcome old-school parser tropes like uncued instant death, and occasional choice narrowing. What I mean by the latter is, in some locations, there is no ability to back out or disengage from a developing situation. It is an infrequent, and notable for its infrequency, gameplay railing. Again, in a work this short, not a disqualifier by any means, just a slight sour note, where the work seems to temporarily suspend agency without serving a narrative purpose.

Of a piece with this is the uncertainty of navigation. One parser convention this Twinesformer implementation rejects is compass point navigation. This is both thematic and narratively justified here - the protagonist knows the town and NOBODY I MEAN NOBODY IN THE REAL WORLD USES COMPASS NAVIGATION IN DAILY LIFE. This is an unrealistic parser artifact we have all just accepted because the service it provides is crucial spatial organization that makes mapping and mental conception possible. Absent that, we are trailing a protagonist that knows their town supremely well, where we can’t assemble a coherent mental map. Locations become networks of connectivity, not a lived-in topography. To my way of thinking, compass points need not be integrated into navigation, but maybe some subtle text could align us on the relative locations as we navigate to get us on the same footing as the protag. I never REALLY felt at home there (which, post-flood, fair enough), and that gap led to maybe some ill-advised choices I imposed on a protag that probably knew better.

I characterized those two artifacts as ‘glitches’ and that feels right to me. The work does so much good work, developing a melancholy back story with streaks of hope that mirror the town’s current misfortune in interesting and affecting ways. Its puzzle play is about as well integrated as these things can be. In a work this short, that is what you will take away, not the compromises that I whined about.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: parser
Played : 7/18/25
Playtime: score 13/14; locs 13/14 10m 3 playthroughs

I am fascinated at the mental space this particular work settled into for me. It is a parser implementation, using the MOST niche GAGS platform. As an aspiring IF author I fully understand and endorse the active pleasure of engaging an uncommon platform and producing something functional with it. It the impulse that drives the Engineer subclass of our population, and for those so smitten a source of great personal satisfaction. It is true, though, that as a CONSUMER, a parser game’s implementation language is almost never interesting. If anything, all parsers look the same from the outside and are often burdened with common expectations. On some level players have no reason to CARE what happened before the > prompt.

As an author's training vehicle toy, what does this work offer the player? A pretty solid, spare parser experience of navigation, pick stuff up, find goal. It certainly has the unimplemented noun/synonym problem of many parser games, but not defeatingly so. Its very small size puts it in the category of “no wasted time,” even in the face of its unambitious narrative and puzzle construction.

More, as a parser fan, I really appreciated its palate cleansing properties! My randomizer slyly slotted this in the middle of the 'Thon for me, which ended up being about perfect. I have no beef with choice-select/Twine, it’s a perfectly serviceable interface. But I do have a soft spot for parser play, and this tiny little shot of gameplay was just the perfect amuse bouche in the run of this 'Thon. A little treat to spice up this endeavor.

I do wonder, outside the context of the 'Thon, is there an audience for this? Where a cascade of fully realized parsers are just a click away, will this plucky little trifle register? Seems like no? That’s certainly ok. Not all art must be timeless, how much pressure would THAT be? For me, in this moment of 'Thon 25, it served a very specific, very welcome function and I’m glad it’s here. Feels like more than enough to justify itself.