Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/18/26
Playtime: 45min, 2 endings, 1 achievement

There are honestly a LOT of things I like that just flat baffle my family. I don’t mean ‘oh that’s not for me, but it makes him happy’ like IF. I mean ‘HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU LIKE… WHAT DID GRAMMA AND POP POP DO TO YOU, DAD??’ Tinned sardines are one such item. Spiders and insects are another. In my life I have spent SO MUCH energy trying to explain to loved ones why these creatures are FASCINATING, ACTUALLY and it only ever made me more of a monster in their eyes. Somehow my hair trigger passionate defense of Bug’s Life has become a punch line when I AM TOTALLY RIGHT ABOUT IT. So I’m just going to accept my fate as a specist paraiah without explication. Bugs are cool. I accept your scorn.

Bugs that are also musicians? Are you just cherry picking from my brain pan now?

This work is a really tight parser, marrying anthropomorphised insects with ‘getting the band back together’. It is Bug’s Life meets Blues Brothers and SAY NO MORE, I AM YOUR UNCRITICAL CHAMPION. Your mission, young Flick, is to assemble a band to honor the moon. Each of your four bandmates are beset by predators or their own damaged psychology and you can free them with the power of music. And cleverness. The puzzles are nicely diverse - each requiring slightly different approaches, but culminating in a common (organically established) musical capstone. Each of your fellow musicians have unique stories and engaging personalities. The vibe of the whole thing is so generous, so empathic, even the (scary) external threats are clearly not EVIL, just doing their food chain-given work. Except maybe that demonic mole rat.

So what you have is a work that drove DIRECTLY into the most shunned, shameful corner of my interests, presented me with fun parser puzzles and a warm story, and you want me to nit-pick it? Maybe ask my family, I am ON BOARD. Everything about this work appealed to me: its hand drawn map, its bugs-eye-view environs, the heavy lean into folklore surrealism. Not least of which its prose. I am in the habit of grabbing quotes from text to support my claims, but here the only quote I grabbed was “pungent enthusiasm.” That wonderful phrase was deeply representative of the piece, conveying its sardonic warmth with every sentence. If you have no room in your life for the wry absurdity of that construct, I feel bad for you.

If I had a complaint, it would be that it was too short a work. Seems like good news on that score too: this appears to be set in a shared universe of (hopefully) more works to come. Have I ever penned a review that didn’t have at least ONE substantive quibble? It doesn’t feel like me, yet here we are. This is the best I can do. My quibble is I WANT MORE. Jake Blues, help me out, I have turned into a shallow, cheerleading shill. How can I close this fawning review?

“We’re on a Mission from MOON.”

(Hey is it a character flaw that my positive reviews are often MUCH shorter than my critical ones? I’ve got to figure out a wordier way to say “I really liked this!”)

Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise
Vibe: The BeEtles. Seriously, THE BEE…
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I would beef up the drummer-bug’s puzzle and role. Really center the narrative around him, dig into his background, his quirks, his musicianship. Maybe engineer some rhythm-game gameplay into his vignette. I would also… what’s that? I am a drummer, but I don’t see how that’s…

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/18/26
Playtime: 45min

I don’t have the unbroken runway with this hobby to know if “pull-forward” games (the opposite-yet-not of “throwback”, where ancient implementations are dragged kicking and screaming into today’s IF scene) are a recent phenomenon, or a low-key throughline throughout IF’s history. Aaron Reed, you have left me unprepared here! Certainly in my 4 years of engagement I have seen enough of them to recognize the category. This iteration is a reimplementation of the author’s unpublished Commodore 64 work, complete with online C64 emulator.

These implementations have a specific aura to them: they simultaneously harken to a day when computer capabilities were more tantalizing promise than reality, and invoke a youthful creative impulse, getting its hands around virgin technology and bending it, however imperfectly, to its will. You get both of those in spades here - a very small, very tight geography of locked doors to navigate around, littered with sometimes useful, sometimes red herring objects.

I found it to be reasonably smooth (with two exceptions), especially notable given its Italian-language authorship to this English reader. A key design choice, which I question whether was present in the original, was to highlight interactable nouns in the text. This compromise runs the risk of leeching away some of the promise of parser play, but in exchange bypasses the ‘flounder for implemented noun’ pockets that can occur. Especially for a work (at least initially) created by a new-to-form author, this tradeoff is WELL worth it and made the experience pretty robust.

The story this is in service of is hilariously of-its-(original)-authors-age: you must cheat your way to passing a test! No moral judgement, no exploration of transgression, just a very pragmatic this-must-be-done task. The completely un-self-conscious tone of the protagonist’s execution of this mission is a subversively funny baseline that sturdily supports the whole thing. The puzzles themselves are pretty uncomplicated affairs: finding keys, tools, or other artifacts to unblock obstacles until the test key is finally yours. For its age, I found it amazingly friction-free, much more so than games I played back in the day.

There were two aspects that did grate at me over time. The first was its emulator performance. Either through code complexity or as a deliberate design choice, the emulator seemed to recreate the key lag of 80’s hardware, so much so my 2026 fingers routinely outpaced the UI, skipping letters I for sure typed. This happened a lot. This is a piece of the experience that does not weather the intervening years well. Like watching 1970s cinema, the PACING is the ‘of its time’ artifact that holds up the least. Our contemporary expectations are just too far removed to see it as other than intrusive.

The second artifact seems pretty specific as well. You can >TAKE objects, but not >GET them. Now, this is petty for sure, but as a parser fan those neurons are burned pretty deep. My fingers stretch for the ‘G’ key before I know what I’m doing. By FAR the most repeated sequence of the game was:

>GET [something]
%@#$($#
>TAKE [something]

So, so many reps. There was a flash of red in my vision every time it happened, but honestly both those artifacts were also kind of endearing? They served as omnipresent reminders of WHAT I was engaging with, which, given the modest nature of the narrative, deserved its place at the table. It is telling to me that even its most dated gameplay paradigm - inventory management - did not spark my ire. It felt fully of a piece to the rest of the work and I (acharacteristically) just rolled with it.

This was a slight, sly, simultaneously smooth and chunky experience that evoked its provenance quite well, and unlike others of this pedigree never wore out its welcome.

(I should note the 'GET' shortcoming seems to be subsequently updated, so future players be comforted!)

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Too Cool for (Old) School
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would have to engage Vax/VMS instead. Is there an emulator for that? Y’know what, don’t bother looking it up. OF COURSE THERE IS.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/16/26
Playtime: 2.75hrs, used walkthrough for goosing, failed in tombs (repeatedly, due to remote open door), eventually undid to try an accusation but soft-locked out? Officially score 43/55

The closer you are to something, the more unique it becomes. This is a completely reasonable compromise between physics and evolution. In the unthreatening distance, we need know nothing more than ‘cow’ or ‘coyote.’ The fact that light attenuates over range makes it biologically convenient to deprioritize. (Not ignoring you, Sharp-Eyed Hawks, but until you start playing IF I don’t have much to say to you.) Up close though? Boy do I want to SEE small thorns before finding them other ways.

This works metaphorically too. To my wife, for whom all IF is “Colossal Cave” (technically, it’s all ‘that thing JJ does that is at least quiet’), OLOT’s charms might not feel so unique. To me, who is so close to parser development I may as well be wearing it, authorial voice is a strong distinguisher. OLOT’s voice is really polished, most obviously in its authoritative command of its setting. The monastery is so well conceived and complete, I might accuse it of being implemented from a real-world floorplan. The language used to describe it is consistently jargony, in a way that sets the scene AND slowly integrates us into monastic life. Obviously, I liked this, but I found the work’s more subtle writing even more impressive.

If you’ve consumed some amount of my reviews, you know I am fond of what I call the “Implementation Horizon.” The level of detail (and inherent cuing needed) that the game operates at. Parser players are well comfortable with the idea that we will never get thread count when examining sheets. We agree to operate at the level of the game. It is up to the game to 1) cue us where that level is and 2) then be consistent about it. OLOT takes a specific tack here: the level is deeper than it appears, and absent cuing that might suggest it. But it is, to my playthrough, completely consistent. This meant that I kind of had to discover the Implementation Horizon on my own? Learn the dialect of this game as it were. I needed a walkthrough goose to get there, but once I did, the consistency of it was reassuringly firm and nearly always rewarded. This had the effect of building a very coherent, very robust world to knock about in, whose unspoken limits became as much a part of the scenario as the prayer schedule. I don’t know if I’ve seen it done better.

On top of this is imposed a clock of sorts - the day resolutely dribbles by, alternating between daily duties (where the cast is conducting their daily chores, and available for interview) and Offices (where the cast is collected in the Chapel, leaving their locations unguarded and explorable). It is a nice gameplay feature: predictable, alternating NPC states that you can exploit to different ends. It also marks a game timer - if you do not solve the crime in time Cruel Tempus will halt your investigation.

Yes, you are solving a Monastery Murder - a classic of the ‘closed setting mystery’ genre. You must establish method of death, motive and suspect via decidedly lo-tech forensic work of tasting and smelling. As well as the usual interviews and poking your damn novice nose where it doesn’t belong. There is a large cast. Almost too large to be manageable, but wisely with at least a job-personality quirk combo to sort things. I found it (mostly) really well constructed: puzzles integrated naturally into the setting, deep curiosity both needed and rewarded, red herrings and dead ends sprinkled realistically throughout, but unambiguous clues once found.

I felt a few glitches where puzzle solutions might seem to run counter to the setting, most notably the completely casual ‘climbing on altars’ move which, as a testament to the writing, I felt REALLY bad doing. Glitches like that were very much the exception though. I liked that disturbing your Brothers’ rooms might trigger their suspicions. That points were awarded for monky behaviors unrelated to the mystery. That you spend so much time smelling plants.

As a way to convey how well-tuned the prose was, let me share my very frustrating endgame performance. Patience, dots will connect. I found my way into the Crypt during an afternoon Office, meaning all monks collected in the Quire. I had foolishly left a door open that I should have shut. This put me into a tight box: I needed to explore and escape a dark crypt while the game timer only had limited turns before my snooping was discovered and Game End.

This awkward situation meant 1) try a bunch of stuff until 2) timer expires and you lose, then 3) UNDO a WHOLE LOT to give yourself a tight block of additional moves. Repeat. A Lot. Eventually I find my way out, into the in-Progress Office where I am informed hey, I can SHOUT an accusation to solve the mystery! Only I couldn’t. Despite being told BY THE GAME that I could end things (and having assembled enough clues to have confidence I could do so), I ended on a failure. Jeebus was that frustrating! I think it was a bug?

Now this kind of endgame kludginess could reasonably be expected to poison the whole experience. Backing into a hard time limit because of something I neglected to do 10s of moves earlier, needing to recycle with UNDOs SO MANY TIMES, eventually getting to a legitimate solving position, only to be soft-locked OUT by a seeming bug. Here’s where I connect the dots back to the writing.

Thanks to the cumulative effect of the previous gameplay not only was I thoroughly invested in the solution, the constraints I backed into made me MORE motivated to find it! Even after the ultimate failure, I kind of ignored that, mentally readied my accusation, and read SOLUTION. I credited myself with a “Justice” ending that the game did not award me! I solved the mystery IN SPITE OF THE GAME, and with no hard feelings! In the face of all that mechanical awkwardness, I left the game satisfied and impressed.

DESPITE A BLOCKING BUG AT THE VERY VERY END, the writing had laid such a strong foundation, the mystery had clicked together so smoothly, my overriding takeaway was “hey, that was pretty good.” It was not diminished (much) by its glitches. How many times can writing in IF survive that? DOTS CONNECTED.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Echoes of Eco
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : The ‘cannot SHOUT’ bug at the end is most obviously in need of addressing.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/16/26
Playtime: 30min, 2 passes, mutual love, unspoken ending

Ok, I just need to start thinking of Ren’Py as a straight-up ‘visual novel’ engine, don’t I? It seems to have provisions for branching gameplay and dialogue trees (and I think I’ve seen pixel-hunt hooks before?), but I have encountered way more narratives than mechanics. Not a problem at all, just an observation.

BSM has some branching choices to make, scattered through its impending-life-change narrative. Ultimately, this does lead to alternate possible endings, but the central story is mostly static: you are spending your final week with a childhood friend (and sardonic third wheel) just as your feelings are becoming more adult.

Ren’Py as a platform centers its experience graphically, and BSM inadvertently tripped into a pet peeve of mine. Not pet peeve. Thorn in my paw? I don’t know, a creative choice that I probably read way too much into, but just can’t stop. Mismatched anime-character graphics against photographic or painted backgrounds have always suggested an artificiality to me. I understand the choice to some degree: humans famously embrace cartooning because iconic representations are easier to empathize with than uncanny valley ones. Thing is, Garfield outside his common-linework surroundings would be just horrific. Asymmetric art styles are visually jarring - characters feel removed from their surroundings. This can be used to effect. It is an economical way to convey alienation from one’s surroundings. Here, that does not seem to be the intended effect, and its dissonance is compounded for me by the nature of the narrative.

Melancholy is one of the most subtle narrative moods. It can be deeply affecting, but it is VERY nuanced. I found the narrative of BSM to be very well done: the protagonist’s emotional paralysis and looming decision point were deftly conveyed in the text and interactivity. This is no mean feat, and arguably the work’s strongest achievement! I found it undone a bit by limited character animations. I think there were 4-5 character emotion models? All textual content had to be reflected via those models, and they were cartoony shorthand that were NOT up to the subtlety of the narrative. The flatness of exaggerated ‘sad/neutral/shocked/pleased’ as an emotional palette was at odds with the far more subtle and affecting text. In some cases they seemed to be trying to indicate a narrative ‘path’ that did not map to text in a crisp way.

This central Melancholy (and the protagonist’s resolution of it) was the focus of the work, so anything that diminishes it is regrettable. But maybe it’s just me? Anime as an art form was embraced by the generation behind me - I’m certainly at a disadvantage parsing its visual dialects. I don’t THINK a Larson-esque character design would change my reservations, but maybe?

It is to the story’s credit that, three paragraphs later, dissonant art is not my overriding impression of the work. The story’s emotional content, most especially using its choice infrastructure to highlight the protagonist’s clay feet, are really well done. The language of the piece is natural and unadorned and carries the emotionality so much better for it. The scenario and characters are vivid, as are the choices to make (including ones not possible!). Even the multiple ending structure, presumably hinging on choices made throughout the game, allow the player to dial in a SPECIFIC melancholy in the protagonist, then honor the final choice against the carefully crafted backdrop. I did not exhaustively explore the space, but the two endings I achieved seemed completely justified and consistent with the choices I made throughout.

I also found the trio of main characters initially tropey, but blossoming over the narrative to fully realized characters in their own right, even the ones I was not driving directly! Overall, it was an accomplished work, conveying nuanced emotion. If I can (mostly) get past my artistic hangups, you probably can too.

Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise
Vibe: St. Elmo’s Fire
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : The easiest change I would make, were this my project, would be render the background setting images in the same style as the character models. A common visual scheme is the easiest way to NOT make the characters stick out. I think I would also create a LOT more character models to better mirror the emotional complexity of the work - some of the models maybe leaning into Mona Lisa-like ambiguity. I am trusting that, unlike myself, “Become a Competent Artist” is a pre-requisite task most Ren’Py authors have already accomplished.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/16/26, 4/22/26
Playtime: 40min (4 iterations, 3x0 plot fails, a week later 1 dastardly success)

Before I start my review, let me just finish this tea you thoughtfully provided me. ya-aw-awn Oh Spring Thing, I know it’s time to review another entry, but today was sooo long. I’m just going to close my eyes for bit, I’ll get to… it.. soooooooon.. SZRXNNN…

This work gets HUUUGE points from me for its unabashed commitment to its bit. Its inspiration is a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of Gothic pulp literature. Its central systems are based on a hilariously reductive analysis of the genre’s villain, protagonist and setting tropes. Even as a non-fan of the source, the IMPULSE to clown on its straight-faced conceits is so something I would do. To then gamify it? I am aligned with everything about this, author!

The parodic playfulness is doing a lot of lifting here. As a player, how do I choose between Withering Gaze and Overconfident Monologuing??? They are both so DELICIOUS!!! In the end though, I didn’t find the elements beyond its central conceit to be as weight-bearing.

For one, for a work so committed to the MOOD of its inspiration, portraying it in bland, default Twine formatting felt like a missed opportunity. A presentation more steeped in browns and greys (black was well covered), perhaps with evocative location backgrounds and Gothic fonts… back it with a portentous parlor music soundtrack… such flourishes would have really elevated the goals of the piece, I think.

Aesthetics aside, there was a bigger issue with my playthroughs - I question whether the game systems are ‘fair.’ This is a conclusion I jump to all too often, as the alternative is “well, reviewer, you are just BAD at this.” Certainly it is ONE of those two things, and in the end, does it even matter which? My experience was the same - baffling failure after baffling failure. The work provides some measure of ‘rules’ for you: that some (randomized) weather and locations will confound your randomized antagonists while others will buttress them. Intimidate them to ‘0’ and win; if failure leaches your ‘plot’ to 0 or your timer expires, lose. This suggests a pretty specific play style: confront your opponents where weakest, defer engagement where strong. This strategy was laughingly ineffective. I routinely failed (and lost Gaze capability!) where those thrice-damned heroes were weakest and occasionally succeeded where they were strong? In EVERY case, my plot points drained to zero much faster than any headway against my foes.

I do not know the mechanisms at play, but it FEELS like unconstrained randomness. Randomness in opponents whose FIBER scores combine to make your GAZE goal: on repeat plays I experienced some goal totals that were TWICE previous ones! If I can’t Wither “12” before my plot runs out, how will I EVER Wither “24”??? (This might be a bug? On repeat plays I ALSO got to see the previous randomized Heroes, making me wonder if I was getting harder goal scores due to non-reset, compounding game state. Or are some heroes just WAAAY more resilient?). To set scale, the path to success was 3-6 TIMES longer than the path to failure.

Further, there was cuing text that seemed to occur before and after an implicit “die roll.” Ie I might get a message "You are well prepared." That conveyed, 'ok, strategically on the right track! ’ To be immediately followed by (para) "The heroes laugh at your efforts. (Your Gaze score has decreased.)" How do I parse THAT combination? I tried the right thing, and failed anyway? The work strongly implied your GAZE score was the basis for randomization, but also seemed to modify your score based on results? This is a really punishing mechanic, if true. It reinforces results, making it MORE likely to succeed or fail next time based on the current roll of the die. Statistically, this means if you ever dip below 50%, you are increasingly likely to be on a resolute path to 0 plot. Which was my experience EVERY SINGLE TIME.

(SZNrr.. just a little more, donwannagetup…)

In addition to seemingly deceptive strategy guidance, some commands implied stat improvement by “practice.” Trying that (many times) did not seem to yield impactful improvements, and were just advancing my timer to the lose threshold. The gameplay was conveyed both too clearly (this is the strategy that SHOULD help) and inadequately (WHY DIDN’T IT???). Certainly, I did not tumble onto any cues that refined my understanding of dynamics under my control. Just one baffling failure after another.

Ultimately, it felt unbalanced? Randomization in games is a specific type of mitigation challenge - deduce how to optimize your chances of success against capricious fate, trusting probability and big numbers to not create unwinnable scenarios. This requires balancing the math in your randomization to not create a ‘failure drain’ and communicating action effects clearly enough for players to deduce mitigation strategies. My play experience was that neither of these things were accomplished? Since it is MY choice whether I call this “Game Design” or “Player Incompetence” you might guess which way I am leaning.

Despite those conclusions, I still carry a warm feeling about Perilous Plot. The scampish impulse to poke fun at something you love, then commit to it so HARD… I can’t stay mad.

SZZrxxXX, huhWhosat…? yawn Did I nod off? I just had the weirdest dream. Yeah, I was playing Perilous Plot, but it was different somehow. The hero-based faint targets were lower. Also my powers were more effective, in ways the game helped me anticipate? And I started with no items instead of two… Weird thing to dream about, yeah? It’s almost like I dreamed about a different game. Or am I dreaming now, and the randomization led to a circumstance where positive feedback launched me to success with the same inevitability as the prior failures? Has the game been altered, or has Dame Fortune trapped me in a dream within a dream? I DON’T KNOW!

CURSE YOU PERILOUS PLOT! DID YOU DRUG MY TEA??? BY MY HEAVING BOSOM YOU SHALL NOT GET AWAY WITH THIS GASLIGHTING SKULLDUGGERY!!!

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: “Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond…”
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d really have to dig into the math. DO I have a fun drain? If so, what is the math that mitigates it, and how do I cue players towards these mitigations? I’d prioritize that over the graphical presentation, at least initially. OR DID I ALREADY DO THAT???

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/14/26
Playtime: 30min, 5 playthroughs (4x2, 1x3 captured)

Cryptids are Horror adjacent. While the world is large, and there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in philosophies (Horatio knows what I’m talking about), cryptids occupy the twilight intersection of folklore, the thrill of the unknown, and monsters-among-us. Certainly Horror entertainment has embraced them as fodder, and this work’s outre creations lean hard into that. This work plays to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tradition of turning the human-victim/monster-marauder dynamic on its head. As the title plainly states, we are a HUNTER of cryptids. Suck it, stuff-of-nightmares!

The game is conceived as a contract for the titular protagonist: search out and capture 3 cryptids with specific characteristics for your employer. It is somewhere between an interesting challenge and a flaw that I found it so hard to do. The characteristics requested are clear enough, its just the cryptid descriptions only laterally map to many of them. It requires some logical leaps that are as often wrong as rewarded. Am I dumb or is the game obtuse? Both? It took me five repeats before I could assemble the requested bunch. The game is small enough, and the pantheon distinct enough, that iterations aren’t a chore.

As gameplay it was pretty trial-and-error. The showpiece of the work are the creature creations, and accompanying illustrations. I really liked them! 5/6 of them were unsettling, monstrous and wildly unique. (One was (Spoiler - click to show)a horse. Hey, at least it wasn’t redundant!) Their design is doing a lot of the Horror-adjacent work, as the actual captures were somewhat anti-climatic. Our resourceful protag has all the needed tools, and is never really in any danger. Thankfully, the creature designs stand on their own and carry the piece’s dramatic load. Even after a few iterations when their novelty is reduced.

This work is short, non-obvious and moody and successfully pulled my ‘replay’ levers until I managed to collect all 3. So the ending. The ending was not a surprise to me. It kind of telegraphed itself during the initial contract setup. There’s a line between subtle clue dropping and hamfisted foreshadowing, and this work was WAAY over it. So much so, I knew how I wanted to respond well before the work copped to its conceit. Sure enough, desired option available! I liked the IMPULSE of it, just found the implementation a bit too obvious to enthrall.

So what do I make of an unsatisfyingly difficult puzzle, in service of a telegraphed plot twist, with really cool monster designs? I’m sorry, all I heard was “hrma-grma-zrma REALLY COOL MONSTER DESIGNS.” Does my tunnel vision not surprise you? Moth Man may be an existential mystery of primal unknowability. Your humble reviewer, not so much.

Spaceship: Nostromo
Vibe: Vegan Curious
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I think I would more tightly bury the twist. Use more indirect adverbs to convey the suspect nature of the mission, but not its character. It’s a worn but not worn-out premise, and would breath better as a bigger surprise.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/14/26
Playtime: 30min, 4 endstates reached, 10/15 branches taken

Bait and Switch is a well-known pejorative at this point. Promises made, only to dissolve into nothing and be substituted with something far less attractive, commonly in service of a scam of some kind: monetary, emotional, whatever. Seems like a wild way to open a review of a work whose blurb is “A short story with hyperlink branching.” That’s like marketing Stephen King’s The Stand as “A thick book of pages, each with a lot of words.”

“Reviewer, how can this be bait and switch? That looks like a pretty naked hook to me!” Absent literally ANYTHING to hang on to, all we have left is every single IF game we have ever played. IF is a wonderfully broad canvas. Might we be in for a work of Gothic/Body/Cosmic Horror? Some hard-science or pulpy sci-fi? Light fantasy, puzzlefest, romance, slice of life, some REALLY MOTIVATED vampire erotica? Even in the face of that impossible expanse, you can be forgiven not finding room for “Multimedia Philosophy Lesson.”

This is not a lick on CFN1, in any way. The work arguably went out of its way NOT to set expectations, so much so our pattern recognition brains inevitably reach inside, attempting to frame what is to come. By avoiding any expectations of its own, the work puckishly lets our imagination flail around, knowing we will be flummoxed once it is fully revealed. It is a bold subversion of expectations on all fronts, so much so that it carves out for itself a truly novel IF experience, in some way echoing full on Augmented Reality Games.

The piece opens with some absurdist characters exploring a town, possibly investigating some ill-defined supernaturally-philosophical threat. The kind of thing Grant Morrison might conjure in his sleep. You are given choices on how to engage the town, but right away, things are a little off. As with any number of choice-select works, choices are embedded in the text, loosely associated with one of three characters. But there are also links beneath the transcript, meta-commands of some kind. They carry distinctive but contextually empty meanings. In most scenes this presents a bewildering number of options, some concrete, more just baffling. I want to say “all” in the next sentence, but since my data is anecdotal I must in good conscience downgrade myself to “most.” “Most” modern browsers (that I have used) highlight the http address of links you hover over. It took a moment’s exploration to determine that the inline links repeated the ‘meta’ links. This created a new mystery! How are these obtuse words aliasing to concrete actions in the text of the game? Why are THOSE two things driving to the same destination? That frisson alone, of trying to decode the game’s architecture, was a pretty uncommon experience in IF, and the novelty of it really hooked me.

Nothing in its very short runtime suggested any answers. Each screen presents MORE of these action/arbitrary word aliasing as a meandering story of no true climax plays out, inhabited by characters more avatar than alive. Except eventually, you find one link that does NOT alias to the labels at the bottom. Instead it takes you to an essay! Well, this is new! The essay makes it clear that what you have experienced is an implementation of a taxonomy of election-to-action. A State Machine model of human behavior in the finest tradition of Constructionalist Philosophers. You even get a bubble diagram!

Suddenly, the opaque decision making, the flat but elevated language of the work, the common links all make sense! You were not inhabiting a protagonist (or three) on a fictional mission, you were experiencing the model through example! Guided by rhetorical tools, personified. Example-before-theory is kind of a backward way to teach, but a powerful one! It gives us fresh, concrete experiences to crystallize around the abstract theory, immediately clarifying it. I found this to be simultaneously a very effective way to convey abstract theory, and somehow a completely new IF paradigm where multiple media converged to make my education a detective game! How did I get to an education Switch, from IMPLIED Bait???

It will not surprise any longtime readers to hear that now, I HAD to explore the game multiple times, armed with new understanding and using the state machine as a game ‘map.’ I explored its narrative structure as if it were a rudimentary colossal cave. Math checks out! Every branch of the construct was sure enough mapped to narrative action, a complete implementation of its thesis.

So. Your enjoyment of this will depend on how open you are to starting on Danny the Street, and finishing on Sesame Street. Given how liberally I sprinkle real-world grains of my life into these reviews, I must have previously mentioned my Philosophy Minor in college, years ago. For me, this work was a joyous surprise, engaging neurons I hadn’t fired in decades. From its intriguingly opaque narrative and befuddling construction, it encouraged my mind into an exploratory state, EXACTLY the mentality needed once its true purpose was revealed. This was an anti-narrative puzzle whose solution was every bit as satisfying as the most obtuse parser construct.

The focus of this review has left one observation adrift: the language of it. Once its purpose is understood, the language turns out to be much more engaging than necessary. The below is an example passage that just tickled me green. I’m sure that’s the expression?

“Whatever can exist, does exist”
“Then why haven’t we seen it before?”

A pretty pithy reference to this work!

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I doubt I would have focused on THIS construct. While rigorous and intellectually interesting, I’m not sure I was convinced of the UTILITY of the model. Understanding a conceptualization is inherently rewarding, but I’m not sure THIS conceptualization has enough predictive utility to live beyond this work for me. Had I authored it, I probably would have centered a model more immediate to my own interests. Which is kind of a ‘who cares’? The point of the work felt like a PROCESS more than a message. Certainly, that’s what I responded to!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/9/26
Playtime: 1hr, endings 1,2,5,6,7,12

What a delight this Twinesformer work is. It checks so many boxes for me: cruel capitalism (and AI!) satire, wry humor, creative, multi-use puzzle gameplay. You play as an alien mechanic, working on a space-factory whose management is pursuing labor-elimination measures in the most literal way possible. Your task is to assemble the robot that will replace you, in service of an organization that is so dehumanized it can’t conceive why that might be unappealing.

Follows a domino-tumbling sequence of tasks to not only assemble the damned thing, but then to try and mitigate its grim purpose. The puzzles are a veritable showcase of well-cued lateral-thinking, multi-use, object combination posers. They are also charged with humor and pathos, making things zip along practically friction free. The UI is a tremendous asset here. Objects can be Examined, Combined, sometimes Read, and Used. Combining or Using items causes the text to be populated with gear icons on nouns that might apply. It is a very efficient UI, simultaneously cuing things to try and executing commands. There is enough variety in the noun space to not make things trivial, and enough clarity in the scenarios that lawn mowering is unlikely to be necessary. Even when the things that are asked of you are objectively bananas. The UI really strikes the sweet spot of efficient command execution and soft-guiding progress without being intrusive.

But really, who plays IF for the UI? Robot people whose humanity has been consumed by social media algorithms, that’s who! For the rest of us, a clumsy UI might damage a work beyond salvation, but the BEST it can hope for is to fade to invisibility and let our brains eddy along with the flow of the narrative. The fact that choice-select parser-play so often tilts former makes this accomplishment worth noting, but it will rarely be a work’s defining feature.

No, the showpiece here is the amusing puzzle play, married to pervasively winning, wry humor. The temptation to dip into the details runs the risk of breaking the dam on a deluge of spoilers, which I am loath to do. As a beleaguered blue-collar alien, you are at the mercy of mercurial management, aggressive security personnel, the implacable momentum of automated manufacturing and supercilious bureaucrats. And one friend. Just the one. All of this building to 12 possible endings, most of which are very fun variations on a theme.

And here is where I might call into question my credentials as player AND reviewer. None of the above is what excited me most about this work. No that credit goes to the tiniest of implementation details that spoke to really next-level game engineering by the author. Late in the game, once the titular assembly was in its final stage, it was clear the narrative was entering a ‘no return’ moment. An accomplished player, trained by years of consuming such games, would absolutely have saved their game at this point. Your humble servant? Drunk on endgame momentum, I plowed ahead without, got an ending, then was confronted with the unhappy consequences of that choice. Should I actually restart? The game was short enough to make it a possibility, but complex enough to promise unsatisfying, repetitive clicking.

So I peeked at the save screen. THE WORK HAD AUTOSAVED FOR ME, AT THE CRUCIAL DECISION POINT!!! I’m not sure what prompted me to look, whether the game had subtly indicated this would be true, or whether I discovered this design gem through providence. Either way, it had the same effect. I powered through five more endings, restoring each time, and each time getting giddier and giddier that the work made even this, the most transactional of IF tropes (collect the endings) smooth and friction free! What a gift for the impulsive, slave-to-the-moment player! The fact the game was so generous to its most incompetent players where it might justifiably punish them spoke to a kindness of spirit that was practically moving. Contrasting with the cold satire of its narrative in a way that threw the setting’s lack of empathy into high relief and was essentially a meta-statement showing an alternate, better path.

Yeah, I just said we can save ourselves from Exploitive Capitalism with… AUTOSAVE. Am I overreading this? Absolutely not. I mean, I would give ANYTHING to have an autosave that could restore to 2023.

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Monkey Wrenching
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : This was such a complete package, I think the only thing I might tweak would be to cue the acid pool a little stronger. It really feels like crossing it is possible, but that was the one (thankfully optional) puzzle I didn’t tumble onto.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/9/26
Playtime: 30min, no progress without walkthrough

What is a form of a thing, without the heart of the thing? Kind of a homunculus of sorts - carrying its shape but missing the animating elements that give it true life. This feels like an unkind opening to a review, especially for a new author, but cannot instead this observation serve as a tribute to the learning process? The Mona Lisa could not exist, were not Da Vinci a master of his medium. The Craft is what enables the Art. For Frankenstein to rise, stitching the body was a crucial first step.

Parser IF, from its dawning, encapsulated the promise of author-player engagement through the vast medium of language. Constrained in syntax, perhaps, but as wide as the dictionary. Of course this audience knows this to be an illusion (for now! AI may one day deliver on that promise, the clearest possible example of ‘be careful what you wish for’). Illusion is not a pejorative here - all Art has illusory components. That brunette is not entrancing with an enigmatic smile - she’s only two dimensional! That marble shepherd is not poised between action and indecision, he’s a rock shaped like a naked dude! Parsers don’t actually understand all of your native language!

MCC (hey! that acronym seems familiar!) is a fully functional parser game, in the sense that it plays to completion with no blocking bugs. It decidedly is NOT an effective illusion of open world gameplay. The key to effective parser illusion is for the author to anticipate, as much as possible, how a player might engage the world being presented. An author need not provision every possible engagement, so long as they successfully steer the player to satisfactory engagement. Take the simple case of a closed door. If attempting to open it yields:

> open office door
It's locked.

> unlock office door with key
You can't unlock that.

The simple declarative response carries the weight of Reality: this door is an impenetrable barrier. The universe told me so. What should be soft cued here is an alternate entry method. If that method is:

> push office door
The door gives out a faint click.

the overarching question is, "How would the player know to try that after the universe’s unambiguous ‘YOU JUST CAN’T’. This is a soft cue in the text - it DISCOURAGES further attempts. Instead of ‘can’t’ if the message was You don't have a key that works on this door. that would cue a player ‘ok, I need to find a different key!’ If the message was along the lines of There isn't a keyhole on this door. that would cue the player ‘ah, I need to try non-key methods.’ Soft cuing is both the problem and the solution! This is not a new parser dynamic, it is in fact a hallmark of mature parser construction.

Such contradictory or opaque cuing is pervasive in this work. If I can’t LOOK UNDER a mat, how would I know to MOVE it? How would I think to HIT a solid clump of candy? If I can’t PUT CUP UNDER DRIP, how would I think that PUT CUP IN PUDDLE would accomplish this? Practically every step of the way, these artifacts blocked me. For me, the work was unplayable without the walkthrough. Good call providing one though!

“Ok, smug reviewer, how can an author possibly anticipate what all might need cuing?” The useless answer is “think about it.” Sure, as an author becomes more familiar with their craft, SOME opportunities will start to come naturally. But what a dick move it is to advise “Just think of those things you are not thinking of.” Parser tradition does provide a more useful answer though: Alpha/Beta play testing! What better way to suss out how players behave than watch player behavior? This is a work that SCREAMS for play test. It has the hallmarks of a prototype where the ‘success path’ was engineered and implemented, probably tested by author, but none of the gameplay grease needed by an actual player was added.

This textual inadequacy extends to scenario-setting and motivations as well. The piece introduces itself with "A perfectly normal mystery." Hey, I’m always on board for wry understated humor, but from there we are navigating and interacting with objects without motivation or sense of goals. If you did not read the blurb on the comp site, you would have no idea what you were expected to accomplish here! Now, parser expectations do some of this lifting: a locked door almost always means ‘find key’ in parser-ville. Guards almost always mean ‘circumvent.’ It’s not a functional gap per se, but it is a very big narrative one. Without an overarching goal though, it becomes an exercise of outlasting obstacles.

But! As a first effort, just assembling that working prototype is an accomplishment worth celebrating! Its core multi-step puzzle is an amusingly complicated one: (Spoiler - click to show)create tainted tea to send the guards rushing to the toilet. It is pretty funny with a satisfying variety of steps. Maybe my initial take is exactly backwards. Maybe the heart of the parser is in tact, infused with a budding love of the medium. Perhaps it is the body whose stitching needs a bit more work. If one were to recast its current state as Alpha, then solicit some testers…

…like those you might find in the audience of a comp…

…ready to play and provide feedb… Oh, Clever Girl

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: First Draft
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would undergo a round of Beta testing to see how players are engaging the world, and diligently provision everything they tried. Most especially including all the missing nouns!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 1hr, score 94/100, Confident, Playful, Upgraded, Right Suspect, Maestro in the Making

What is it with the desire to fuse genres and conceits? At its core, it’s kind of the most unsubtle echo of the creative impulse itself. All creativity is synthesizing myriad experiences, knowledge and entertainment into a specific-to-artist blend whose novelty springs from both the unique composition of its sources, and unique voice of the synthesizing artist. Narrative-setting fusion is just the most obvious realization of this phenomenon. To the reader it is often the first thing communicated about a work - the ‘hook’ to drive engagement, then ideally inform plot, character, and narrative voice. Entire fictional genres have sprung from this: looking at you, Steampunk.

Know what I haven’t seen before? Operapunk. Theatre of Memory centers on, to quote the work, “crimes targeting the performing arts.” It is a Theater Kid-High Fantasy-Detective Fiction fusion! What a delightfully bonkers mix! Also, what kind of world is it where this specific mix IS A FULLY LEGITIMATE CAREER PATH?? Where criminal investigation is sparked by BAD DREAMS??? I kinda love the unapologetic, completely straight-faced goofiness of it.

Too, the game has bespoke role-playing characteristics and achievements, with latitude to customize the character through game and narrative choices. This is not strictly necessary, in the sense that these choices do not increase or reduce your odds of ‘winning,’ even with attendant die rolls shading game responses. Instead, they present an opportunity for player identification with the protagonist. This is one of IF’s central promises, well executed here through role-playing mechanics. And isn’t role-playing catering to our internal theatrical impulses anyway? I mean, it’s right there in the name.

The mystery itself is very satisfyingly constructed: interrogations, suspects, red herrings, connecting anecdotes and evidence to draw unexpected conclusions Turns out these connections work in physical ‘Lead Pipe in the Conservatory’ space, as well as thematically and philosophically. The mystery itself has a theatricality to it, its clues and evidence as anchored in dramatic crescendos as any Renaissance Opera. It was all so tightly integrated, every moving part echoing one or more element of the overall tale, I couldn’t help but wonder: this was so SPECIFIC, so tightly coupled, HOW MANY MYSTERIES LIKE THIS COULD THERE EVEN BE? I mean, real PIs are 95%+ infidelity cases, what does that translate to here, understudy sabotage? Upstaging the principles? MURDERING A LINE READING??

SHOULD I HAVE MINORED IN WOODWORKING, JUST IN CASE, LIKE DAD SAID???

The presentation was endearing as well - generous character and setting illustrations in watercolor, providing a unifying visual palette that further emphasized the warm, bespoke vibe of the thing. This is where the High Fantasy of it all manifested most strongly. The relevant cast of witnesses and suspects is quite large, populated with an insanely diverse collection of Fantasy races. With a cast this large, images act as mnemonic devices to help keep things straight. It’s just easier to remember: “Hey that guy’s a bull!” than “This one has a deep voice.”

I guess I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge one of the core challenges of Detective IF. If the player is tasked to solve a mystery, that mystery is ultimately the Most Significant Digit of the experience. All the theater-kid, half-elf chrome you pile on will always be subordinate to it. There are two relevant dimensions here: 1) how challenging/intuitive are the mechanisms of the mystery and 2) how satisfying is the final solution? The first directly engages the player’s capabilities. If the clues are too baroque or subtle, the prospect of player failure must be integrated into the narrative. Here, that seemed to take the form of narrative compensation - ie even if the player missteps, the narrative will correct them. This kind of minimizes the player’s consequence a bit, but the very nature of mystery-solving-IF doesn’t have a universal solution to this problem. It is as valid as any other, though no more satisfying. TOM, at least for me, dodged this by (for the most part) clicking. I didn’t NEED the narrative correction often enough to feel cheated, the clues and text nudged me in the right direction, giving me those sweet “hey, I noticed that!” endorphins.

The second dimension is maybe the weakest here? Ultimately, you are trying to identify the (illegal) source of the bad dreams via corroborating witness testimony with suspect interviews. The suspect pool is pretty shallow, but with some ambiguity to not make it trivial. Earlier, I asserted the construction of the mystery was satisfying, and I stand by that. I am drawing a super, SUPER fine line between its CONSTRUCTION, and its SOLUTION. The clues were all interesting and interlocked in satisfying ways. It’s just, the core crime… it was BAD DREAMS. Not murder. Not an elaborate heist. NIGHTMARES. The narrative assured us this was quite transgressive but it never really felt so? It came across more as an extended inconvenience. Even the final unmasking fell prey to shaky foundations. The perpetrator’s motives (Spoiler - click to show)were grounded in a desire to be seen, be remembered. Yet the narrative also tried to excuse them by assuring us the dreams were unintentional and/or too embarrassing to actually try to correct once manifested. I mean was it the motive or wasn’t it? It felt shaky, and when compounded with the serious finale consequences to a seemingly benign crime, didn’t quite gel for me.

The good news is that the MECHANICS of solving the crime (not to mention the thematically strong linkages in clues themselves) were satisfying enough that any sketchiness in the SOLUTION were minimized. Its well-crafted infusion of fantasy and theater only further stacked into positive territory such that the overwhelming result was a very enjoyable, supremely goofy in all the right ways, romp. That maybe spoke to some needed criminal justice reform in this world.

Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise (the entertainment was literal Space Opera!)
Vibe: Glee presents Clue
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : I guess if it were my work, I would hammer on the perpetrator’s motives a bit harder. Try to tighten that to the level the detecting itself operated at.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.