Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Ah, the life of a fantasy reporter. It’s not all vapid princely press conferences, exposing necromancer corruption, and spotlighting entrenched knightly race-based slaying. Sometimes you get some softball red-carpet celebrity events to just enjoy overengineered hors d’oeuvres and showily old wine. Why not? You’ve earned it hammering out scrolls into the wee hours to meet Editor Rumplestiltskin’s insane deadlines. It’s almost not fair when events go south and it’s up to you to get to the bottom of things.

Like most journalism, it’s one parser based puzzle after another, as you assemble the event’s back story as well as enough armor to challenge the invading dragon. Seriously, why do we even HAVE a Round Table if they can’t be bothered to step up here? What, too busy stopping and frisking orcs to deal with crown excesses? And after all the catapults we’ve integrated into their departments, on our tithe dollars.

The investigation ends up being a very smooth, very low key affair. Its aims are established early and clearly. Most puzzles are signposted clearly enough, with, uh, singposts? A lot of signage and found paper scraps usher you through one armor-dispensing puzzle to the next. Points for clarity, and very much appreciate the anti-cruelty of its challenges. That overt signposting does have a distancing effect on engagement, though. When in-game instructions are aimed so clearly at the player, without camouflaging it (much) in world building or lore, the urgency of the world itself diminishes a bit. This is not necessarily an inherent problem, plenty of games showcase puzzle solving over storytelling. For me, the puzzle design was just a little too light to shoulder that burden, here (though I will shout out to the keypad/maze puzzle, that one required a few moments’ noodling).

The storytelling itself was similarly somewhat shorthanded. It uses the well-worn trope ‘finding important scraps of paper’ to pass on backstory. This is always a compromise in a game - kind of a narrative monologue/infodump. It’s a classic, no doubt about it, but the more successful games either find ways to vary the formula a bit, justify the artifacts narratively, or just plain make them fun to read. Here, they were more functional than anything else, in service of a story with two twists. Neither of them were dramatic crescendos, but amusing enough and of an emotional scale consistent with the rest of the game.

It all added up to a work that was pleasant to play and consume, whose heart was in the right place the whole way, that made the player feel very welcome, but that never really sparked for me. I liked the setup idea, Fantasy Front Page, but in the end the Sword WAS mightier than my quill and that kind of deflated too. If I was gonna slay it anyway why did I need to be a journalist? It seems tailor-made for Knight-aganda. As a work, it never really exceeded the sum of its parts, pleasant as those parts were. Look, you work the castle beat as long as this reporter, you get a bit jaded. You’ve seen too much venality and corruption, the light slice-of-life stuff feels puffy. Maybe as a fresh-faced cub reporter this would’ve landed harder.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 45m, win, score 18/18
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

If there is a more effective hook in IF than “what the HELL is going on here?” I am hard pressed to come up with it on the spot. The pre-cursor text to Brew makes a WTF? promise that the work well and fully keeps here. You start, exploring a shared apartment uncovering a series of unsettling artifacts that soon blossom into full blown bonkers world building and lore. The ‘bonkers’ in that last sentence applies to BOTH predicates.

It is fairly tight in geography, an immediate neighborhood with a lot going on never mind the snowstorm allegedly happening around you. When focusing on discovering lore, the game sparks like mad. This is due to the fever-dream psychedelia of the world building that includes (Spoiler - click to show)time loops, murder cults, immortality and maybe-metaphorical but also definitely-not-metaphorical (Spoiler - click to show)cannabalism. All of it drip-fed through slow paced discovery, whose relaxed pace is an amusing contrast to the shocking lore it reveals.

Everytime you think it will explode into full on fiery engagement though, implementation gaps trip up just enough to drag things down. A notable number of missing synonyms (singular items are almost never present when plurals are). Incomplete directional cues. A staggering amount of ‘No response’ dialogue options cloud gameplay when related topics are a MUST to progress, yet the ‘no response’ cues that the NPC will not know anything. The most standout gap though, is its destructive use of default messages.

When creating a parser game, modern systems come with default responses to common commands as a convenience. The breadth of human communication makes this convenience nearly indispensable. To have to come up with those on your own is daunting and unrewarding to the potential author. It can also be CRUCIAL to the success of your work. There is a secret about the protagonist that gets explored early in the game. The standard response to >x me actively undermines this revelation in a way that clouds and blunts its impact for way too long. The same problem occurs with unimplemented dialogue options as observed above.

The cumulative weight of these gaps ultimate prevented the work from being truly engaging, though the puzzle design might also have done that, eventually. You are on a deceptively simple mission, and there is some amusement to be derived from the ludicrously escalating complications that ensue. However, once it escalates to (Spoiler - click to show)actual murder we have developed a tone problem that the bananas lore undermines as much as justifies. The problem is that the lore is SO bananas, it vacillates wildly between comedic and serious. We never really stabilize into a single tone. This is not inherently bad in and of itself, but then when we are asked to do dire things we have no frame of reference to decide ‘is this funny or not?’ Our protag’s response is so cold and removed, in the context of their secrets we similarly are adrift in ambiguity of interpretation. A stronger anchor in one direction or another would go a long way here.

All that said, the lore itself is SO singular, and the work provides some truly surprising, clever riffs on it, that independent anything else the Sparks are real.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 65min, finished with limited hints
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Four panel cartoons are in the twilight of their cultural ubiquity for sure. There have been a few spikes in relevance over the century-and-a-half or so of their existence - the formative years of convention establishment in Crazy Cat, Nemo and Li’l Abner, their 50’s bittersweet sophistication with Peanuts and Pogo, the heyday of revelance in the 80’s and 90’s where Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbs and (ehh) Garfield were full on pop culture phenomena. This cultural potency didn’t survive the marginalizaion of newpapers, at least not in their classic form.

But what a great setup for IF! Clicking through four separate panels to decode and assmeble a full story. Between the implied motion of the four panel setup, making for intuitive navigation, to the uniqueness of each panel facilitating multi-layered puzzle play, it was equal parts sparky and natural. Is this the first time this has been done? First time I’ve seen it, and what a great insight. This conceit alone earns it good will points it can spend with impunity. I hope more authors would take this idea up, there seems to be a LOT of ground to explore here!

I kind of wish the story had been as engaging. It is a more straight-forward police tale of cornering an offscreen suspect via an intermediary. Seemingly a middle portion of a larger story. As a story element, it didn’t really stand on its own, nor might it feel necessary to do so. As a standalone work, this does keep the piece from becoming truly engaging I think. Also, it requires multiple restarts to win, where the player must carry knowledge and sequencing from previous iterations to succeed. Lacking a central ‘time loop’ mechanism (which would be a tough fit here), a ‘successful’ story run actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. Looking in isolation at the final run, the detective would need to know things he had no way of knowing. It was only through prior failures the knowledge was gained. Ehh, its fine, it is a game after all. Certainly the loops are tight enough, and subject to enough variety that it never gets tiresome. I think the four-panel format helps here, it constrains things to not need TOO much repeated depth. But it would be nicer if the story held together a bit better.

This leaves me with a truly unique IF entry that leverages its strengths quite well, whose story is just shy of engaging to me. I think maybe it will really shine in a collected volume of the whole story some day. Y’know. Like Bloom County, or Mark Trail. Actually, just imagining a full page of independent four-panel adventures I could execute one after another is giving me late nite Doonesbury Onmibus vibes. In the immortal words of Bill the Cat: “Ack!”

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 15m, ~12 loops
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless, bonus for clever ui
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Neitzsche famously said “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” I prefer the terser “grapple not with monsters, lest monster ye become,” but hey Neitzsche was an idea guy. Less well known was Neitchze’s playful rewording, “truck cautiously with cliches, lest cliche’ ye become.” No, he totally said that, I think in a bar maybe? Discussing a play or something? I absolutely didn’t just make that up.

The way to tell if something is cliche’ is if it becomes such a trope of standup comedy that it gets a recurring SNL character. The ‘problematic uncle at Thanksgiving,’ ‘Drunk Uncle’ if you will, is one such. Couple that with a closeted (at least family-closeted) protagonist, and it’s fair to say my expectations for this work were unfairly lowered. Hey, sometimes I am a prisoner of my biases, I’m the victim here!

Cliches become cliches because they are rooted in real, resonant experience. Every cliche’ starts life as ‘oh, hey, I recognize that dynamic!’ They do not need to justify their existence, but do need to breach the trap of their familiarity. The plot and setting beats were firmly rooted in that familiarity, that’s not where the work achieved escape velocity for me. I found the characters mostly stock-ish, with some minor variations. (Though I did appreciate the titular Physics Curriculum as code for ‘things in college student’s life that relatives will never understand.’ That was a cool resonance.) Where the work came alive, I think, was its use of multi-perspective flashback and insightful employment of interactivity.

While the ‘present day’ activities were maybe not so compellingly painted, I was intrigued by the flashback structure. Background is presented as flashback, where we inhabit a DIFFERENT character than our present day protagonist. These flashbacks may not introduce dramatic recontextualizations, but they DO introduce new viewpoints and formative events that enhance our understanding of the (mild) present day drama. I found these enhanced the proceedings at every turn, providing empathy and rounding for the NPCs that in ‘present’ day might seem one dimensional.

My favorite part of the piece, however, was how it leveraged the unique asset of its medium to enhance the entire thing. I speak, of course, of interactivity. An early example that snapped me to attention was an innocent question pregnant with landmines.

“And how’s your school going, Jay?”
[with the options presented as:]
I’m going to fail Ph 229.
I’m in so much debt.
Am I wasting my life?

Selecting ANY of those responses replaces them all with a single option:

(Spoiler - click to show)Fine

That is just a perfect employment of interactivity to first represent the troubled mindset of our protagonist, then turn to a social self-edit that is all too familiar. Kudos, author. There were two other employments of interactivity that were more subtle, and even more affecting. One was an opportunity to open up in a real way with an NPC. To that point in the narrative, the NPC had been presented as clumsy but well meaning. The choice was actually quite agonizing! Do I risk entrusting this NPC with personal vulnerability, unsure they would welcome it, and even if they do, that they might mishandle it anyway? It wasn’t the choice that was so well done, it was the buildup that made that choice so agonizing.

My favorite though might be the unheralded, but conspicuous in their absence, choices to interact with the protagonist’s father. We see enough of his character to suspect he is not of similar cloth to Drunk Uncle, and certainly struggling with his own demons. Yet the entire work, we are not once given the option to interact with him in a meaningful way (more poignant, given our flashback experience with him!). This LACK of interactivity speaks worlds to the protag-father relationship and actually tarnishes the protag’s character in a very realistic and dramatically satisfying way. He is so caught up in his own drama, he can’t even conceive of reaching out to his dad, either for comfort or to connect with HIS problems. It simultaneously diminishes the protagonist, subverts the driving drama of the piece while also adding complexity to the overall narrative.

It is also a point only appreciated once the work is complete. The flashbacks and interactivity were definite Sparks of Joy here. In the moment, the main plot was just too rote to fully Engage me. This is definitely a work that improves on reflection.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 30m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There is inarguably some distortion inherent in IFCOMP’s format that has a deforming effect on reviews and to some extent judging itself. No, this is not my entre’ into hate-click Youtube Bad Takes ™. “IFCOMP is BAD, ACTUALLY…” of course not. But it does not help us to pretend this phenomenon does not exist, and disadvantage some kinds of works. The most obvious impact is to games that are longer than two hours, the IFCOMP judging time limit. Comparing a work with no ending (in the 2hr limit) to one that ends is a pretty big handicap. It still feels like the right compromise, especially for the prospective judging pool.

Verses reveals a second order compromise that I’ve danced around but never confronted as directly as here. For those of us that presume to speed run IFCOMP, in the interests of getting through the entire field, mindshare is a finite resource. Beyond the raw playtime, there is reflection and review composition (and revision) time. Works that wear their intent on their sleeve are relatively easy to consume and discuss. Works that require a serious mental marinade to decode can be shortchanged by the pressures of ‘so many more to get to.’

Longtime readers, I have a shameful confession to make. Even after a disproportionate amount of mindshare, I still do not understand this work. It presents initially as a vague dystopia/fantasy world where the protagonist is analyzing historical artifacts to uncertain purpose. Their environment is sketched loosely, not too many details to distract, but also not enough details to resolve into anything concrete. You know how you can draw a horse in three lines? You can also draw three lines that confound interpretation. Not only is the world tantalizingly out of focus, the plot progression sees the player interact with cryptic NPCs, then watch their job morph, without comment, from object to text analysis. And the protagonist morph (Spoiler - click to show)to something vaguely monstrous? Every progression seemingly without clear cause-and-effect or motivation, culminating in truly opaque scenes and developments. The below text, for example, was not only the first mention of ‘towering cells’ but its construction defied my brain’s ability to form coherent images.

“As you approach the coast, the sky clears, but the soft-edged shadows remain. When one of these towering cells blocks the road, you get out and bite into it, chewing and swallowing, letting its liquid gush onto the earth.”

All of this steers to an inevitably metaphoric interpretation of somehow-stark-AND-imprecise impressionistic events. Which after several days of reflection, I still cannot decode. This review nearly did not make it to IFDB, as it is hard to justify a review with nothing to say beyond “this work is beyond me.”

The only reason it's here at all is the work's inclusion of Romanian Poetry. The author credits Romanian Poetry for inspiration, and there is a good amount of it, both inline to the story and as optional sidequests. My first takeaway is, “Romanian poetry is pretty damn good.” Not that it needs my approval, but for a guy who openly professes ambivalence to the art, it was noteworthy to me.

My second takeaway is that I have never seen as compelling yet simple demonstration of how fraught any translation but especially poetry can be. By changing links incrementally, from raw word transposition, to grammar infusion, to poetic interpretation it is made crystal clear what an imprecise endeavor this is. Where does the work of the poet stop and the translator begin? Is the translated work, ultimately, an unwilling collaboration, as much of the translator as the author? How challenging is it for the translator attempting to minimize this? All of this was conveyed by masterful use of interactivity, without a word of text applied or needed. I found myself translating poetry on the side because the mechanism and conundrum were so compelling (and not for nothing, easier to get my head around than the rest of the work).

I have to believe there is some linkage between the poetry, the act of translating, and the narrative, but I am damned if I could suss it out. Does translation eat away at you until you are a rabid consumption machine? I’m not a translator, but I don’t see how it would do that. It is unclear if I could EVER find the linkages here, but under the constraints of the COMP, for sure no. Outside the translation mechanism, there was nothing concrete enough for me to grab onto, and ultimately this made it a Mechanical work for me. Dousing me with images I could not cohere, into a plot I could not follow. I have never been more tempted to peek outside my review bubble for help. Mike and Victor probably understand this, and have stunningly insightful takes. For me, this line from the work so summarized my experience, to the point I laughed out loud when I read it:

“What you can’t understand and may never understand is that you are not here to understand.”

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 70m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for innovative translation mechanism
Would Play After Comp?: No, brain hurty too baddy

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

On behalf of IF players on this side of the Atlantic, let me thank this work for contextualizing ‘Right Turn’ to its native traffic laws. This would have been a much shorter, or more baffling work in America.

While (Spoiler - click to show)no choice IF is a subgenre I am not particularly attracted to, I have seen a lot of iterations over the years that make real strength out of its constraints. As confining as this subgenre is, I am continually delighted at the disparate themes authors find to express this way. This is yet another completely unique yet thoroughly resonant application of its conceit. It is also playful both in its thoroughly trivial central problem, and the comically endless complications it throws in the player’s path.

I can appreciate all these things at a meta level. The work does, though, labor under a central tension kind of intrinsic to its construction. The longer things go on, the funnier the overall joke is but the more tedious the actual gameplay becomes. The low stakes of this setup humorously underscore the mismatched labored difficulties, while also denying the player any strong investment in the proceedings.

These contradictory forces ultimately left me with two competing impressions - appreciation for the FACT of it, but total lack of engagement with it as an interactive endeavor. For me, the humor rested in its completely reasonable setbacks, expressed mildly and matter-of-factly, that just never ended. This was a mild humor, a bit too mild to sustain itself even over its short span. I can envision a version of this work where the setbacks escalate hilariously, with decreasing realism and increasing left field slapstick. In my head, real belly laughs could be had, keeping things bubbling along and engagement high. It would ALSO lose its core wry turn: that this is NOT outlandish, just endlessly, needlessly defeating. That’s also kind of funny as an observation.

For me, conceptual strength did not overcome its necessary gameplay restrictions. It was ultimately a Mechanical exercise I appreciated for its novel application of a confrontive game style. Shout out to its graphical design too - its functional map cleanly depicted the core challenge in a way words would struggle to concisely define. It is also the first time I’ve encountered Adventuron WITHOUT its trademark pixellated font, so, novelty on novelty!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 15m, made turn
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for commitment to its wry concept
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

“Oscar Bait” is a pejorative term sometimes lobbed at movies. There is every likelihood I have used it as such in the past. It is used to describe artworks perceived as cynically and soullessly leveraging dramatic tropes to check perceived ‘high art’ boxes that will be applauded by award panels. High concept, high emotionality works that are perceived to be manipulative are tarred with this unkind epithet as a way to diminish them. Seemingly even before people consume the work in question.

I have come around to the idea that while satisfying some unpleasant aspect of human nature (our need to feel better by tearing earnest things down) this is almost always a hollow, uncharitable and unfair criticism. Yes, cynicism is justified around the studio system of movie making. Yes, creators that crawl up their own butts during the echo chambers of gruelling promotional junkets feed that impression. But, these are at their base still artistic endeavors that marry many talented artists into an emerging vision that someone, somewhere, felt was important. When they fall short of their artistic goals it is worth analyzing. When they achieve their artistic goals, they are worth celebrating. It is an ungenerous impulse to attribute cynical motives to works because they appear to aim too high, then dismiss them completely on the grounds of that assumption. Lord knows I would never do that.

I lead with this because Imprimatura is the most compelling case against this impulse I have yet encountered. On paper, the conceit of exploring a dead mentor/family member’s artwork to get a better understanding of them and yourself rings high concept, high emotionality. It seems on some level like an ur-Oscar Bait concept. You do yourself an injustice letting that inform your engagement.

I found this to be just about the best possible realization of this premise. No surprise, the MVP of this effort is the prose. The writing here accomplishes two things crucial to selling the proceedings: terrifically insightful and specific observations about the character under scrutiny; rendered in compellingly sharp prose. The player choice in this game is to select 7 paintings among a wealth of them as a bequeathment. The choices you make among the distinctively described works of art inform a collage picture of the lost relative. Subject matter, style and colors all allude to an emotionality behind the works that by selecting, you concretize. Like Schrodinger’s Art Studio - the personality of your mentor is made real only when observed. It is a real accomplishment that the selections seem widely varied and nuanced, yet not contradictory. The effect is to build a full, complex person in your head as the sum of different dynamics. It is ‘I am Large, I Contain Multitudes: The Game’

A quick by-the-way shout out to the sound design of this work. The melancholy music, overlaid with tightly focused folio work, really set the scene and enhanced the proceedings in a subtle but affecting way. A moment that stood out to me was a human sigh, perfectly tuned to the gameplay conveying the mismatched physical and emotional effort of the protagonist. Really effective.

As I was playing, I was swept up by the confident, effective writing and sound design. There was something nagging in the back of my head though. “Why am I reading descriptions of paintings, when you could just show them to me?” I mean, the obvious answer is “because it would take months to compose compelling art that I can describe in minutes.” No sooner had I reconciled myself to that answer than the endgame kicked in. Where you (Spoiler - click to show)compose an artwork that acts a final collaboration with the deceased, summarizing your collected memories of them. Again, a potentially precious conceit that resoundingly delivers in execution. The game decodes your prior selections into a subject/style/palette (Spoiler - click to show)that is superimposed over an incomplete early sketch in a deeply satisfying way, then crucially lets you tune it. It gives you the language of interpretation, but allows you final word in how you express it, based on YOUR responses to the artworks selected. Without this crucial last step, the work would be telling you how to feel, and if it misguesses, would neuter its impact immeasurably.

From its insightful and powerful prose, to its clever use of graphical synthesis, to its deeply mature employment of interactivity I really responded to this piece. It may have been assisted by indirectly resonating with a personal loss of my own. The cleverness of the piece is that loss is a universal experience, as is the complexity of people lost. This piece captures both those dynamics expertly. I found this a Transcendent use of the medium.

In the interest of completeness, there was one distracting technical issue. As you go through and ‘unwrap’ new paintings, I encountered the same painting multiple times, presented as newly discovered. While I could see revisiting them AFTER the stock had been exhausted, this seemed random to me, and sometimes the same painting appeared three or four times. Yes, a speedbump, but an inconsequential one in the face of its other accomplishments.

This is a very understated, finely observed dynamic character study overlaid with an interactive representation of grief processing. Its prose is unadorned enough to let the player build the emotional responses, not dictate them. The interactivity is sensitive enough to honor that emotional response. The unspoken cool thing about ‘Oscar Bait’ is that, sometimes, it deservedly catches ‘Oscar Fish.’ Yum! I LOVE Oscar Fish!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 25m, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: I just might

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A pleasant, slice-of-life work about two young people vacationing in the mountains, poised to enjoy beautiful views, hikes, and each other. What monster is going to be negatively disposed to that? I know it feels like me asking that question is setting up a ‘ooh, look at me, I’m a monster’ turn, but no. I’m on board.

Well, for all of five minutes. There is a class of parser puzzle that has always rubbed me the wrong way - the PLAYER needing tiresome trial and error to ‘solve’ a mundane interaction that the CHARACTER has full knowledge and competence in. These fall into three broad categories:

1. Endlessly searching for objects the protagonist has full knowledge of
2. Determining magic verbs to accomplish obvious tasks
3. Difficult world interactions that working sight would render trivial

Actually, there is a fourth - cluelessly exploring environs the protagonist is well familiar with. That is the one category we are NOT treated to here. Yes, this is ‘Stumble Through the Obvious: the Game.’

When I encounter these puzzles in the wild, my only real defense is to think, ‘ok, this is a gameplay compromise. I need to discover X on my own, to catch up to character knowledge.’ If the game quietly creates an atmospheric bubble around this information gathering, I can pause my engagement to get spun up on background, then reengage the main puzzles, pretending that dissonance never happened. Not great, but a compromise I have agreed to over time.

But when the game proceeds to punish or CHIDE me for this lack of knowledge? “S’matter player? Just show your passport!” >look for passport in drawer “Nope. You’re a moron player, just give me the passport.” >look for passport in jacket “Nope. I swear you are just awful at this.” Then it was (Spoiler - click to show)IN YOUR POCKET THE WHOLE TIME??? Screw you game, you’re just having a go at me. It feels like the game is being deliberately provocative here, by refusing to (Spoiler - click to show)list inventory in your pockets then MAKING YOU (Spoiler - click to show)SEARCH THEM ONE BY ONE. This is clearly a deliberate choice, as once you discover items (Spoiler - click to show)in your pockets, they are dutifully listed going forward.

Another mechanism that compounds this is stingy inventory management. You spend so much time juggling things in things in things, just to get them to your hand and use. This is not fun when it injects friction into unrelated puzzles. Here, it seems to be conceived of AS the puzzle itself! I don’t struggle this hard in real life, why should I here? More importantly, why is this fun?

With a work a this committed to blocking progress at the most trivial interactions, incomplete implementation effects are magnified. Being told repeatedly that you cannot (Spoiler - click to show)take a knife, but the only way to progress is to (Spoiler - click to show)>cut X with knife is next level progress-trolling. This moment actually brought unintended laughter as I pictured an observer’s view of the PC fumbling his hands all over a juice bar, ineptly unable to work objects in plain sight. Another laughable moment was being trapped in a bathroom because environmental descriptions omitted details that were necessary to progress. I imagined my game-partner outside, hearing me bang about for a half hour before escaping… a closed door.

If you think the game could not be MORE confrontive about its labored choice architecture, hoo boy it’s got a card left to play. This game really ups the ante by pairing you with an impatient romantic partner that will chide you repeatedly for NOT doing the simple things the game makes difficult. Then up it further by ominously noting ‘Your partner has asked you this X times.’ Is there anything more portentous than “I’ve asked you this three times, young man!” She was unsympathetic to my cries of “I’m trying, it’s not me, it’s the game!” At one point, the narrator describes the partner as ‘shrewish.’ In the moment I rebelled at that - that is a LOADED word narrator, surely that’s not what you meant?! By endgame I was forced to conclude, no, that was a pretty deliberate application. When you are fumbling to do the simplest thing, having someone repeatedly OBSERVE that to you is just the worst.

The crowning indignity of the game is that after subjecting me to a series of unforgiving, inadequately clued and implemented puzzles of mundane activity… after all that, the game ended BEFORE OUR FIRST NATURE HIKE. It was the triple crown of low stakes, high difficulty and no payoff.

Part of me actually admires this. The idea of gamifying an unspoken clumsy trope of parsers, of leaning it into it so hard it is the WHOLE GAME, there is a subversive charge to that. Marrying it to prose that is light, warm, and perfectly conveys the pleasant anticipation of holiday with great company makes its chutzpah GREATER. I can see the same wry playfulness of its prose in the game’s central conception. There is a difference though between ‘playing along’ and ‘being played’ and for me, this experience was so much the latter not the former. So yes, I can admire the conceit, but that admiration doesn’t make the playing of it less Mechanical.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 1hr, got out of bathroom
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Intrusive fussiness
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

One of the best experiences in IF is encountering a work that is NOT MY THING, then watching it, improbably, BECOME MY THING. My wife is the cook in our home, barring the stereotypical barbecuing, smoking and brewing. Yes, I am a walking cliche. I have my own hobbies (you can probably name one!), but that is hers and she is GOOD at it. While I can appreciate the mix of technique and knowledge that drives the fascination, there is just no motivation for me to dig in when I get all the benefit with little of the work. (Barring the dishes, of course. So many dishes.) A game centered on cooking is just aimed away from me.

This is a game where you (the protagonist) take on a probationary job, where your task is to thrill a community with your chef skills, and integrate into their daily life. I think making it BOTH of those things is a stroke of genius. It ably underlines how food is culturally so much more than raw nutrition AND introduces gameplay elements beyond ‘plan menu-assemble ingredients-check results.’ If it were only that, the game would quickly become mechanical. Instead, there is mild tension between balancing daily priorities of securing ingredients you don’t have QUITE the resources to afford and socializing and making an impact on the community, most notably through three important NPCs. The game effectively cues this with ‘approval’ scores that start at 0 and CLEARLY MUST GO UP.

The key thing this work excels at is matching gameplay urgency to its social vibe. It is not unnecessarily hard - if it were, player tension would undermine the amiable nature of making good friends and creating food art for art’s sake. If it were a nail biting pressure cooker of inadequate resources and hard alternatives, the vibe would be way more transactional and goal-based. Which as everyone knows is the BEST vibe to bring to new relationships. No, instead the difficulty is just present enough to keep you on task, but lax enough to let you marinate in the chummy world and relationship building, letting them unfold more… I’m so sorry… organically.

It helps that the writing is pitch perfect across the game’s concerns. Very little text is repeated through the game, leaving the player constantly engaged in a dynamic environment. The food preparation is a perfect mix of confident details and effective summarization - not drowning in too much detail. The food descriptions are concise, evocative and specialized. Its NPCs have their own voice and concerns, and dialogue is a pleasure to read. It all builds to an immersive warm bath of a game, carrying you from one well paced mini-climax to the next. Before I knew it I was Engaged despite myself. Yes, every now and then things got a bit mechanical. Yes, every now and then the tension lagged enough that I questioned whether failure was even going to be possible. These concerns were present enough to keep the work from becoming Transcendent, but did not chip away at my Engagement.

To call it a low stakes game is unfair. Its stakes are uncommon, and welcome for their novelty. It’s seeming low difficulty is so well aligned to its aims, that also does not feel like the criticism it could be. This is a very pleasant work of confident, effective prose that gave me every reason to reject it, yet won me over anyway. Thank you, chef!

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 2hr, 25/30 days, 15/20 stars
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There is a reason John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic. Ok, there’s a lot of reasons, but a big one relevant to W-O is the setting. A tight setting, isolated by a vast, hostile environment, trapped with an entity you can’t identify bent on harm… that is pure, cask strength drama right there. My adrenaline is already pumping, now make it a murder mystery? Where that tension is an active gameplay force that must be constantly reckoned with? Holy Crap game, I’m only human!

With that pitch line, you would have to almost deliberately poison the well to earn my dissatisfaction. No fear. Not only is the writing effective, the gameplay mechanisms engaging, the research prominent but not overwhelming… not only all that, the mystery itself is really well constructed! A murder close to the protagonist/player occurs. Thanks to alibis at the time, six of the station’s number are suspects. You are on the clock to solve the mystery before the clumsy, incompetent hands of outsiders let the killer go free. (Ok, that last seems unlikely but I’ll go with it.)

Follows a series of forensic facts, interrogations, relationship, clock and mental health management that all impact your ability to get clues and not completely dissemble. And full-on legit deductive processing of data, forming and testing hypotheses to narrow down the suspect pool. This is tough to pull off, but oh so rewarding. We should not underestimate the social/mental management aspect of this. It is the extra charge that elevates its challenge, compounding a purely cerebral exercise with real tension and tradeoffs. Augment this with external dramatic turns by an active adversary and it is part Agatha Christie, part Cat and Mouse and part One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those are some pretty great parts!

It is not flawless. At several points, the text attributed knowledge or facts to the proceedings I had not previously discovered (one example being (Spoiler - click to show)store camera footage expressing suspicions not previously aired). My notes describe funkiness with a Missing ID, though the details elude my memory. Some descriptions (Spoiler - click to show)specifically the handedness of one suspect are repeated in a per-suspect summary screen. Other crucial data points that should be immediately and easily obvious, you are never given opportunity to establish. Yeah, hiding information that should not be hidden is grating in the moment, but there are so many other interlocking details to navigate that that frustration is momentary at best.

As engaging and compelling as the gameplay and mystery were, the ending really tied it all up for me. I managed to develop a confident guess at the identity of the killer by eliminating the other suspects one by one. Mentally, not violently! I’M not the killer! I had some likely hints to motive, but nothing conclusive or prosecutable. Here’s the problem with mystery game replays: once you solve the mystery, what is left? This game did something I’ve never seen before. It responded to my incomplete conclusion with a correspondingly ambiguous end screen! Sure, I’ve gotten PLENTY of ‘the killer got away’ game climaxes. So, so many. I’m like a one man rubber stamp parole board. What I haven’t seen before is ‘I guess you PROBABLY got it, but… here’s some things that maybe… just think about it, okay?’ I mean, I’m 75% sure I got it, but that last 25% is DELICIOUS. The end screen I got was a masterful combination of closure and ambiguity that felt precisely tuned to my gameplay accomplishments. I’m not sure how granular those ending messages are, how many will fit as well as that one did, but my climax was the most satisfying ‘MAYBE’ I’ve ever experienced. It may just drive me to another play to resolve.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, solved? pretty sure solved, but open questions
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: Actually, I just might

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