Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

There is no real graphical flourish to this work, little interactivity, and the few puzzles you need to solve there are no clues to decode to succeed, making it effectively random. I think I have complained about all of these things in other reviews. But here, my reaction was exactly opposed – I unreservedly loved it. The intro text probably is the key to this. It sets the stage with the fruitless grind of the work, the dieing optimism, the modest yet still out of reach goals, and does so unsentimentally and resignedly. Before you know it, you are knocking on doors, really just clicking house numbers, one after another until the time runs out.

And oh my god the neighbors. Many are just not home, and sometimes the text makes it clear that’s a good thing. When they are home, each is uniquely and specifically unhappy to see you, but you still have to engage. Sometimes you inadvertently say the right thing, sometimes you say exactly the wrong thing and they slam the door. It's not that you don’t have control (it seems), it's that you have no way of knowing what motivates or sets people off so you take your best shot. And it's thrilling when it works, and self-recriminations and if-onlys when it doesn’t. But, still gotta get to the next door and do it all over again.

I am kind of in awe at how finely calibrated the game is. Its individual interactions are either disappointingly abrupt, or whirwind verbal fencing matches, but every encounter is exactly the length it needs to be. Neither victory nor defeat is dwelled on, because on to the next. A quick click washes the previous encounter away and is charged with promise of the next one. A pee break if you’re lucky, then your shift ends at what feels like the narratively perfect point, leaving you with regret over the houses you didn’t get to. Text and screen organization within and between encounters pace every step of this experience just so. Until its unceremonious ending, you simultaneously feel “this shift just keeps going” and “I need more time.”

“A Community Organizing Simulator” is its subtitle. Before you start, you would probably be thinking "it's funny because it's too small a game to be a simulator." After you’ve played, including that chef’s kiss of a denouement, you’re definitely thinking, "OMG IT IS THE MOST ACCURATE SIMULATOR EVER MADE." I am saying that this work marries IF interactivity to its subject matter so thoroughly and precisely it is what most aspire to when they talk about form-function synergy.

Frankly, I am only resisting calling this Transcendent due to my suspicion that my recent grass-roots volunteer experiences may be coloring my reaction. Thanks Lauren?


Played: 10/10/22
Playtime: 15min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Seamless
Would Play Again? Sadly, living it

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Students of comedy and interested rubber-neckers like me are aware of a joke comedians tell each other called “the Aristocrats.” If you’ve never heard of it, do yourself a favor and watch the documentary about it (on AMZ Prime if that’s your garbage billionaire of choice). Ancillary to my reason for bringing it up, there was so much to Bob Saget most of us didn’t get to see. To the point here though, the joke hinges on the insanely wild disconnect between setup and punchline. Not just conceptually but narratively as well. However long and meandering the setup goes, the punchline is a whipcrack of two words. Thanks to Legally Blonde we can now call this the “Bend and Snap” effect. (I am loathe to dive deeper into “the Aristocrats” than that for those that haven’t seen the doc.)

There is another comedic tool, one we’re all familiar with: repetition. This has a lot of forms - escalation, recontextualization, deadpan emphasis, and its most overworked form, the callback. You’ll see all these variations a lot in televised comedy once you are sensitive to their use. It is tried and true. The callback in particular is the wobbly prop on which improv is built. I’m no statistician but 86.224% of improv skits end with a callback. SNL skits may be higher.

Since I’ve taken the time to steer the conversation this way, you may now be asking, “Reviewer, what if an IF work were to somehow put the two of those comedic devices together?” To which I would coyly touch the corner of my mouth with my pinkie and reply “Perhaps bake them together… IN A CAKE?” And now it is clear to you why I explain comedy instead of DO comedy.

LTEC presents as a vaguely-medieval or renaissance small village bakery setting. Your task is to assemble ingredients in a cake, with the gentlest of “and don’t be too nosy” as a caution. The author knows full well neither the protagonist nor player gives that advice a moment’s consideration. So off you trot, probably whistling, I’m pretty sure whistling, to the miller, farmer, neighbor and church. The presentation, in screen layout, in use of font and illustrations is I’m going with pastoral. It is nicely evocative of the Canterbury Tales of it all. The language is slightly formal but light and breezy, also of a piece.

Until you let curiosity get the better of you and SNAP (Spoiler - click to show)you are treated to an over-the-top horrific excess completely divorced from the pastoral amble you started with. Kind of like a David Lynch movie, if those didn’t start by telegraphing the utter creepiness of their seeming banality. And also played for laughs. So, nothing like a David Lynch movie. (Spoiler - click to show)And you probably die horrifically too. It’s fine, you can restart.

Then the piece builds on itself, echoing, recontextualizing and escalating, so that somehow it gets funnier each time as you try to anticipate where your why-can’t-I-just-resist curiosity pokes free. That’s the game: go fetch the flour! Bend… and Snap. Now the eggs! Bend… and Snap. Now the milk, sugar! Bendbend… and Snapsnap! Fine! you say. I’ll put my blinders on and just make the damn cake! At which point, the finale finally breaks down and invokes a callback that ALSO rockets into a whole new level of narrative leap. BEND AND SNAP M-FER!!! Repetition!

I really liked my playthrough, I thought it built on itself marvelously, and had me trying things I DEFINITELY didn’t want the protagonist to do just to see what would happen. (Spoiler - click to show)I died a lot, learning stuff as I went. Comedy is super-precise though. I couldn’t help but wonder if the building effect that was bouying me along so actively was really just a happy accident of my choices. If I’d made different choices would the repetition not have felt like escalation at all, but deflation? Is every judge getting the same potent dose of comedy? Seems like they wouldn’t have to?

It’s not seamless. There are some screen layout issues where the illustrations (just lovely - also pastoral with an unsettling edge to them) corrupt the choice prompts and make them hard to click. There are narrative paths that reconverge and reuse text in a frictiony way. (Spoiler - click to show)And the restart after dying mechanism. After you’ve experienced the worst of a particular sub-quest, had a good laugh at it, then just want to get your ingredients - it was a fairly clicky prospect that no longer had any surprises for you. And God forbid you (Spoiler - click to show)die after having collected 2 or 3 ingredients. You have to do it all over again! A much better design decision would be to introduce a “Just collect X option” after you’ve managed it one time. It really introduced a drag into the experience.

Lastly a note about Engagement. From an IF perspective, the Achilles’ Heel of these two comedy tropes is that they are appreciated at a Meta, not Immersive level. This is not gentle character-based comedy or acerbic personality driven comedy. These are metajokes which work best when NOT engaged. So Sparks for me!

Quick shout out to that cover picture, btw. Chef’s kiss.


Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 20min, 1/8 endings; 3/? bonus endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy, Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

In reviewing some IF works, I’ve grappled with poetic language that clashed with my own sensibilities. I seem to have a heightened sense of "ehhh that's trying too hard." Superficially, this should have tripped my hair trigger, but somehow the language here just sung for me. It was consistently evocative and surprising and carried a rhythm that was somehow both measured and propulsive. When I tried to figure out how this succeeded for me where other works did not, I think the best I came up with was EfG minimized the use of extravagant simile and metaphor, and just straight up described stuff. Elegantly, evocatively and beautifully. This offhanded passage early on was just so precise in its socio-political observation, its multi-syllable employment doesn’t end up diluting or obfuscating it. (look at me! so many multi-syllable words of my own!)

"to the glittering glitterati of the donor class, those brahmins of the City whose funding feeds the fringe-work (performance, poetry, painting–even it turns out, mythohistoric research), fattening it up until it can pass as avant garde, or perhaps–if you’re lucky–even 'cutting edge.' "

For the first chapter or so, it's all narration, and the language rolls like a manuscript from the protagonist - its half-academic half-poetic tone seems about right for the background they’ve presented to us. Quickly they meet with a poet they’ve idolized, let’s call her Didi Joanion. Just pulling syllables out of thin air here. The rest of the work is a dialogue between the two about Didi’s time among the Elves. Settle down spoiler-police, it's in the title.

Let me break for a moment to talk about the interactivity - it's kind of inessential. There are some exclusive choices early that shade how the protagonist understands the world. I was a bit put out at those, because every option I selected had text that thrilled me, and I wondered how much MORE thrilling the choices untaken might have been. I wanted to select them all! Later though, when choices stopped being exclusive and I had to select all (or just most) of them I was like “why am I even selecting here? shouldn’t these just be page breaks?” You can’t win with me game, ask around, that’s just how I am. A lot of the time, the interaction was straight-up page turning, but even when it wasn’t, it was. Every now and then there was a nice pacing effect in the interactivity, but very much the rare exception.

So back to the text. As soon as Didi started talking things jarred for me. She spoke in the same evocative, deliberate, erudite voice as our narrator. And she did it describing things from decades ago, with a precision and clarity that … eeehhhhh. Here:

“[…] hanging from every horse-drawn troika and gondola poling its langorous streams, […]”

“Poling its langorous streams”? “POLING ITS LANGOROUS STREAMS???” Does that sound like something one human would say to another human in human conversation? I want you to try something: work the phrase “poling its langorous streams” unironically into any conversation with anyone in your life, and report their reaction back here. Some homework for you.

Something about putting quotation marks around it shifts the way the words work, and it drew the wrong kind of laughter. I considered, “maybe this is the protagonist’s recasting of her words in flowery manuscript as they’re being written down” except that previously they made a point of how diligently they were capturing her exact words. Then I thought, “well, she is a renowned poet in the text of the piece, maybe this is less an authentic conversation, and more her slipping into some well-rehearsed bit.” Which the story later outright confirmed! Ok story, you got me!

It did it twice more. Once, it noted there are 20,000 elvish words but only 3 for hello. (Is that the number? It was presented as a lot more than we have, but that feels super low.) I’m like, “c’mon that doesn’t make any sense, we have more in English.” Story was like “yeah that’s weird, hold my beer, let me tell you about ‘Goodbye’.” Elsewhere they’re talking about her silk flooring in her fabric house and I’m like “fr reals story? Doesn’t it rain there?” Next scene, rain! I felt like an overconfident amateur chess player realizing the unassuming player across the table was actually a prodigy.

So yeah, the language in dialogue never really felt ‘real’ but it was cool. I mean, I really liked reading it even if it wasn’t ‘believable’. So if I’m sluicing through this joyful, vibrant literary rapids why am I not Engaged? Why? Its about Elves. (IT'S IN THE TITLE, IT'S NOT A SPOILER.) Elves are racist bastards, that’s just facts. You see how they treat Dwarves in those Rings/Hobbit movies? Screw those Elf Supremacist dickheads.

Wow. That got away from me. There’s a possibility that was not about Elves.

So this work is about a gloriously conceived fantasy city and culture whose inhabitants are not important. And it's basically a long, super-evocative and thrilling to read description that only kind of barely crests to a dramatic resolution. It’s a beautiful artifact that doesn’t do much, consistent with its unnecessary interactivity. Is there a place for beauty? Of course! I just need a little more to get Engaged. That may be on me.


Played: 11/5/22
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: 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 IFCOMP22 Review

So right out of the gate, I knew I wanted good things for this game. After the legally mandated Noir-first-sentence-about-rain, and before anything else, it called me a “Bubble Gumshoe.” The noise I made in the privacy of my own home you have no choice but to call laughter because you didn’t hear it. This entry committed to the bit without question. If you have a low sugar or pun tolerance, this is not the game for you.

Gameplay itself is infrequently searching 6 or 7 locations for clues, but mostly interviewing 4 maybe 5 NPCs depending on how you score it. Then trying to piece together additional things to ask others based on the answers. Cycle through NPCs until ready to Accuse. The dialogue and character business is bizarre and fun, like the Toblerone who smokes candy cigarettes without arms. Because, y’know, no arm candy. (badoom-CH) It was fun for a while poking at characters to see what they could answer and how, and often rewarding to do so.

But then there was a turn. When the topic pool started to dry up, you would cycle through, hear the same things again and get nothing new. Then, the fact that all NPCs use the same, generic, “is no reply” when you ask something they don’t know starts to grate. Searching for clues in unimplemented nouns starts to grate. Asking the owner of a candy strip club about their VIP Lounge and having them say “I wouldn’t know about that” is just lolwut? I mean if not you, who WOULD know? Asking a character about the wedding they JUST TOLD YOU ABOUT and having them give no answer… you get it. I got stuck and I redirected my humiliation to anger at the NPCs.

Mystery IF has a big issue to address, what do you do with insufficiently clever players? Tonight, I will be playing the part of the Insufficiently Clever. Y’know, strictly as a public service. If the mystery hinges on the player asking one specific thing to one specific NPC, you have to at least give a thought to your humble servant who just won’t think of it. The tried and true brute force solution is a hint system, either metagame or in-story (Donut could have admirably served this purpose.) Walkthroughs are even MORE brute force, also established technologies. More elegantly, I recently read some insanely well-thought-out RPG advice that proposed always leaving three clues to every mystery story chokepoint. If you want to get super fancy, design multiple paths with intersecting information chokepoints, each with their own trio of entries! The idea being much harder to miss 3 clues than just one. It seems like there could even be some kind of ‘player not making progress’ algorithm out there, just waiting to be discovered.

This is relevant because there is no conceit so amusing, no joke so funny, that it can survive the self-hating stench of player failure. I’m going to head off what you probably all see coming as a deep digression into “what is a game, and can there be success without failure?” Instead let me pivot to advocating for the Insufficiently Clever who are totally not me. Humans forget nothing so quickly as kind service rendered to them. For players that don’t need the hints, they never need encounter them and can enjoy your game as designed. For the IC, your timely help will quickly fade into the delusion of ‘oh yeah, I’da got that’ and they will end up appreciating it as well! Its really win-win for you, the game author.

So yeah, Sparks of Joy right from the start. And while a not a bug, spinning with no way out was an intrusive break into the experience. Speaking for a friend. Ok, review over, the rest of you can go. Author, can you hang on for a sec?

…

Hey, if you did plant 3 clues and I missed all of them, can we not tell the others? Please?


Played: 11/1/22
Playtime: 1hr, randomly accused wrong candy, failed. Allegedly.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusively Unhelpful
Would Play Again? Maybe with a hint system?

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Yeah, it’s a maze (maybe procedurally generated?). A very thin dystopia skin on top of a maze. It’s a fair play maze, it graphed on graph paper exactly as you’d expect. Along the way, there is NPC interaction, (limited), items to pick up, a few unique scenery or locations and many more repeated ones, a series of heckling message scroll boards to read. Other than the clear motivation to escape the maze, there wasn’t much in the way of guidance or story. Intellectually, I think I kind of liked that about it. There was stuff, samey rooms, text to read but it was all ancillary to just getting out. If you did more with the stuff there, great. If not, just fine too.

I got the sense that maybe there were a few second level puzzles to suss out, particularly with the message boards. My end stats showed there was at least one big thing I could have accomplished before escaping but didn’t. In fact it showed a whole series of scores, some of which I achieved others I did not. Even the ones I achieved, it was fully without prompting by the game. I just did them, then turns out there was a score involved. That was kind of subversively fun, too. But all that fun was cold, meta disassociated fun. Emotionally there was nothing, presumedly deliberately so.

Without a story, humor or character hook of any kind, you’re really just wandering around, drawing on graph paper, and picking up minimally rendered items to no clear end. Yeah I played with some items just for fun, and game did enable me to do so to its credit, but it was just killing time. My perverse perseverance pushed me through to the end, but if at any time the game crashed I could have just shrugged and not restarted. Only one bug, error message “runtime error p50, empty menu list” I believe, but it didn’t stop the game. Or break any mimesis or even jar the experience. Just kept walking and mapping.

This was really a poster child for Mechanical execution. There is a place for this of course. Soduko still has its fans, picture puzzles relax millions of folks. Find-a-words, pencil mazes, all of that. A solid implementation in that category if that’s for you.


Played: 10/9/22
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Wordplay games are so cool. They marry the math and lateral logic of abstract puzzles with the messiness and context of human language. But they also have a slightly uphill climb, in that they explicitly ask the player to break the mimesis of language and consider problem solving at more of a remove. LKLJJ crucially engages this problem the best way possible, playfully and winkingly. The setup is absurdist beat poetry in the best possible way that just catapults you into an extended, lightly-geographic wordplay puzzle.

From there it is all about rhyming placenames with mostly clever cause and effect phrases. The Sparks of Joy were flying so fast and furious it was like a metal grinder, or a daycare class dancing with sparklers. The game is quite generous with problem solving helpers, from a codebreaker feedback item, a limited use “auto solve” item you can earn, a log of useful-just-not-now solutions, options to close off branches when exhausted, and hints. Most of them tunable to personal challenge/handholding preferences. Its a quite impressive array of tools that shows an understanding of the possible sticking points in its loose tale.

The absurdist milieu is a two edged sword. On the one hand it would be almost impossible to facilitate this kind of rhyming wordplay without it. Conversely, it sets up a universe where words and actions may not behave the way you expect them to, or even think of. The tools above crucially help close that potential gap. As does the author’s completely winning use of language. I can’t even imagine the claustrophobic development garret, overrun with yellow-sticky rhymes, linked with yarn like a Qanon war room. The effort to create puzzles, solutions, and locations that all alliteratively rhyme, AND to accommodate snarky responses to guesses that don’t solve the puzzle. Respect.

Its not completely seamless. The game sets a very high standard on good rhymes so you are trained to ignore imperfect rhymes and when they show up, it jars. There are also one or two prompts that don’t adhere to the two-word descriptions standardized everywhere else. Its not unfair, in that you can deduce the two-word pair from context. The problem is, its not obvious you need to do that, given the standard set throughout the game. Yeah, I’m reporting a puzzle that flummoxed me. Those all feel like quibbles though, especially as the helper tools readily power you past them.

LKLJJ is a winning, extended puzzle set in a hilariously Dada world of clever wordplay. So many Sparks I might ignite. Why not engaging? I think the arbitrariness that is part of its joy has a side effect: there is no continuity thread that pulls you back for “oh I gotta know what happens next.” It kinda doesn’t matter what happens next. Its going to be fun and amusing, no doubt, but I could pick it up tomorrow or next month, whenever I want my next fix. This is not a lick on the game - it does exactly what it wants really, really well. It’s like a book of crossword puzzles - not a page turner you can’t put down, but ready to pick up anytime you want a dose of joy in your life. Assuming you can support a metaphor where crossword puzzles are joyful.


Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete, score 29
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Will be unable not to

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Thanks to a quirk of the randomizer (also known as “randomness”) I reviewed this uncomfortably close to Chase the Sun. I say uncomfortable because there are enough common superficial details it bends my brain to try and compare them, and I really don’t want to. (Spoiler - click to show)Two Runaway brides fleeing a union their communities endorse but their own heart denies. Two solo roadtrips through unpopulated stretches of road. Strong supernatural elements. Strong religious influence on the narrative. A looping ending, allowing you to explore different paths, but strongly linear outside a few key choices. A common abrupt car crash ending. Um, wedding dress still on.

That’s reductive isn’t it? It feels super reductive. Especially because notwithstanding my manipulative list above, the two are different in the ways that matter most: themes, tone and impact. I hope I got it out of my system above, US Route 160 deserves its stand-alone focus.

This is a very dark work. The mood is overwhelmingly oppressive and hopeless, even before the story starts unfolding. I am put in the mind of a writing exercise from decades ago, where the class was asked to convey someone’s mood only through scene description. 160 would have aced that assignment. Words are used like blunt weapons to convey the desperation of the protagonist. It is often effective but… ends up being a bit one-note. That note is really strong and crescendic (c’mon that’s totally a word, no need to look it up), but without variation around it, it starts losing its punch. It is not helped by some unfortunate grammar or spelling which breaks the spell. One that stood out was (paraphrase) “ultraviolence soothed her skin” Now I’m pretty sure from context, that was supposed to be Ultraviolet. If not it was jarring for different, word choice reasons. And yet elsewhere I was gifted with the phrase “corset of lies” which I unreservedly love in and out of context.

Besides the rhythm of the text itself, the main weapon in its mostly linear runtime is dramatic text pacing. 160 doubles down by using both interactivity and more traditional sentence/paragraph structure to regulate its cadence. Like the above, I think this is done so pervasively that the effect becomes muted by the end. It too would benefit from some variation in intensity and application.

The story being told is Tragic in the colloquial (not Greek Drama) sense. The protagonist’s life as told through flashback is heartbreaking. Their western journey is fraught with the rubble of those ancient battle scars. It is pleasantly surprising to me then, given the relative homogeneity of tone, that the three endings I found were so wildly different from each other and the rest of the piece. One managed to find a whole new level of tragic, one was melancholy and slightly …hopeful seems too strong but that’s all I’ve got, and one was delightfully ambiguous. But only one of them felt like a legitimate result of player choice, the others were kind of arbitrary given the choices that brought you there.

It feels …bad… to talk about “Sparks of Joy” for this piece, how about “Sparks of Appreciation?” When the tone worked it really worked, and there were some excellent turns of phrase. And that one ambiguous ending had me smiling in its audacity. But those were counterbalanced by the unremitting ambience, occasional format or word choice clunks, and some arbitrary-feeling endings.

So, to compare to Chase the Sun… godDAMNit brain!


Played: 10/18/22
Playtime: 40min, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive (lack of variation)
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This one crawled into my head a bit.

IWYWD is a linear character study, where the character in question is a relationship in intensive care. I nearly got bounced off the first page, for what I think was an unintended artifact? The intro screen starts with a dedication to the heartbroken, then flashes the title. Yes. (paraphrase) “to those recovering from heartbreak: I wish you were dead.” Wow, author, just wow. I say with some confidence that this was unintended.

The entire game is a dialogue between the player/protagonist and their lover. (Spoiler - click to show)The player is trying to break up. There is so much I feel I want to say about this entry I can’t even get two sentences in without plummeting into the spoiler pool.

The dialogue is overflowing with very sincere emotion, and hurt, and history. It’s achingly cringy how unprotected the two characters are and I mean that in the most laudatory way. I found the dialogue very naturalistic, which is really the only way this could work. As a modern man, I have been relentlessly taught to flee screaming from this level of emotional honesty. Even the slightest crack in believability would have been an excuse to bolt for the exit. No such luck. I think it was this naked honesty that drew me in so quickly where other linear studies were less successful. In the end, it is a tribute to the writing, pure and simple. Both the character voices, and the specific and compelling shared history that emerges as the game progresses.

It is a linear narrative, though it appears you can make impactful dialogue choices. The act of making those choices felt like a torturous tradeoff of honoring the truth and honestly wanting to minimize pain. I cannot recall a single instance of inelegant post-choice dialogue - even when, as is definitely true in life, what you try to say has nowhere near the effect you intend. God this game is so smart about fraught emotional conversations.

The author makes another important choice, that I’m only mostly aligned with. The dialogue plays on a timer. Meaning the dialogue, hurt and emotional and unsteady, comes completely on its own pace, impervious to the wants of the player. This is such a smart choice. It forces the player to ‘listen’ rather than mash buttons to get to their next choice. When it works, it paradoxically rejects player input, and the effect is MORE INTERACTIVITY. My head is exploding here. It also allows the author to pace the dialogue precisely for effect. There was one sequence burned into my head in response to a yes or no question:
(Spoiler - click to show)
I don’t –
No.
I don’t know.
Reading my non-paced recreation of it you may be unimpressed (you heartless bastard). But how it was revealed on the screen in fits and starts conveyed the pain of the speaker like a bullet to the heart.

Now, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes the pacing doesn’t quite ring true, or is perhaps clumsy in a way that doesn’t reinforce the dialogue. Also, when there is more than a screen’s worth of dialogue, the page does not autoscroll, ultimately forcing the player to interact in a way that defeats the effect a bit. An auto-scroll functionality would have been so much better here. There is a bit of backstory rationing too - two specific plot points get kind of headfaked in one direction (a not very satisfying one) only to be revealed as something much more real, nuanced and uncomfortable. One of those reveals felt at odds with the carefully crafted player/protagonist alignment. The protagonist clearly knows the history, a sudden reveal to the player disconnects them temporarily. I should also mention that while I found the dialogue crackling, there were some narrative descriptions that suffer word choice. A teardrop ‘exploded’, something else was ‘infected’, a second pass editing could have buffed those burrs out.

Not perfect, but between the dialogue and the story choices those quibbles kind of fade away. And that ending. (Spoiler - click to show)It masterfully recontextualizes the “Play Again?” trope as endlessly revisiting what-I-shoulda-said in our most heart-wrenching, emotional Monday morning quarterbacking. Kidding ourselves that all we needed were better words to have made it go any differently.

For me, the ending cemented it as a Transcendent game. Sofia created and conveyed a real and insanely wracking scenario, then used interactive tools to tremendous effect, pacing dialogue for dramatic impact and mimesis and integrating the player directly into the narrative. God do I not want to play it again.


Played: 10/16/22
Playtime: 30min playtime, more than twice that thinking about it
Artistic/Technical rankings: Transcendent/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I’d have to be made of much sterner stuff. But if I’d just said…

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

The other day, I was just kind of lounging on my couch thinking “Y’know what I could go for? An automated phone service simulator! Something that really captures the tension and mystery of navigating an audio menu!” Of course I wasn’t thinking that. No one has, ever. And yet TPEEP1 (lol, what?) comes along and says “maybe you should!”

This is a quick play. It models a supernatural/emotional support line that is no better at customer service than your cable company. This thing carries off an amazing balancing act, wringing dry chuckles from a first impersonal then somehow VERY personal bureaucracy exacerbating an emotional spiral. See, you read that sentence, and you’re like “what kind of sociopath would get chuckles out of that?” This is the dark alchemy TPEEP1 pulls off.

As you navigate the menu, and there are quite a few paths through, the responses get increasingly personal, unhelpful and belligerent in a somehow hilarious way. The story is almost completely conveyed in phone menu options, both the text of the option and what is an option, which itself is fun and unexpected. My first few paths were giddy with surprise.

But as I navigated a few different paths, there was a common thread that struck me. Somehow, TPEEP1 (yeah, I’m now addicted to squeezing that abbreviation in as often as I can) pulled away from committing to its own bit. Despite presenting menus begging to build on the conceit, instead you cycle through duplicated “no, repeat” responses, and not in a compellingly, thematically resonant way. There are two possible explanations I can think of off the top of my head. Either this was an entry that was pressed on submission deadline, or the impulse was to not milk the joke. “Brevity is the soul of wit” is a bedrock pearl of wisdom, no doubt. To this I say fie! A joke should be as long as it needs to be and no longer. These could be longer! If deadline-bound, should the author decide to expand the entry, I would gladly pick it up again to see where it went.

A note on presentation, though let me say nothing here figures into the scoring as I am speculating on alternate presentations which isn’t fair to the game. I was put in the mind of a phone menu mini-game in Kentucky Route Zero a compellingly odd, uneven and fabulous commercial graphical adventure. In its implementation, you are confronted with a desktop phone, and have to mechanically navigate the audio menu. This is maybe the first Texture game (an engine I am a normally a fan of) that doesn’t really benefit from its drag and drop mechanism. An actual number pad input would have been stronger here, as would an audio ‘beep.’ End of tangential digression which, if you have seen my other reviews, you have probably become pretty inured to by now.

So that’s where I land: TPEEP1 elicits Sparks of Joy, Seamlessly implemented, but wishing it would more fully embrace its strengths.

TPEEP1.


Played: 10/29/22
Playtime: 15min, 6 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? If expanded, sure!

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

TPEEP1.

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Of course I’m not the first to observe that interactivity doesn’t have to mean story branching. Interactivity in linear stories can accomplish at least two things: 1) it can invest the player in the protagonist more deeply than raw text and 2) it can carefully manage the pacing of the text to enhance emotional effect. I am saying this to the population that least needs this explained.

Glimmer is very much a short, linear study of depression and to varying degrees attempts both of the above. Because the subject matter lends itself to spiraling introspection and lethargy, there was a particularly nice fit with form here. The player can dive into tangential mental rabbit holes. Scene changes are paced slowly, with small blocks of text where the act of interacting slows down the proceedings. The formula is subtly shifted as the narration proceeds, the interactive pace as much as the words conveying the protagonist's mindset. All of this displays a nicely deliberate marriage of form and function.

As far as protagonist investment, Glimmer didn’t quite get me there. Early game events were fairly dispassionate, showing the protagonist with flattened response to increasingly important events in their life. I understand the intention here, that the protagonist is increasingly withdrawn such that events do not register like they should. It seems that because we are introduced to this mental state before we have built empathy, there is an unnecessary hurdle to our investment. For me, I didn’t get over it until way later and was playing catchup to the narrative all the way to the end. Meaning when the protagonist had a subsequent shift I was also behind.

Stephen King (or was it Alan Moore?) famously said something to the effect of “Horror is seeing your neighbor dismembered through your bedroom window. Terror is when the killer notices you.” There’s gotta be an empathy/sympathy analog to that idea that seems relevant here. While I admire the precise pacing effect of the work, the killer did not see me, leaving me at a remove.


Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 15 min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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