Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Here’s something you hear every year around Oscar time: “Comedy is hard, why isn’t it respected like manipulative, obviously thirsty, overwrought sob-fests?” Well, you mostly hear it phrased like that at my house, but the sentiment is trotted out pretty consistently. This is going to be relevant in a few minutes.

Historically I like some things about parser IF better than others. Way at the bottom is the ‘search’ ‘look under’ ‘look behind’ mechanics. Its classic, I get it, but it feels so unrewarding to both look at something then look again ONLY IN A MORE SPECIFIC WAY. AWAN, you have turned me around on this. This is a one-room joint where you have to find a comedically large number of things in an exasperatingly spartan environment. And you do and its hilarious! Using all of those mechanics deliberately and precisely, this game is a perfect “I know its around here somewhere” simulator. Its the first time I’ve ever seen them used so effectively.

Here’s another thing I’ve never really liked: abrupt, non-foreshadowed instant endings that require restart or undo. AWAN fixed that too! The 3 abrupt endings I got were laugh out loud non sequitor funny and I happily Undid to see more. Usually my spoilers are kind of vague, but this is a no-fooling overt one: (Spoiler - click to show)OMG Try calling everyone on the red corded phone. DO IT!

I always appreciate a narratively integrated hint system, but AWAN upped the ante even further. You can call out to your partner to a) solve puzzles, b) get hints and c) get snarky offhand replies to dumb questions. To the point where I decided to be the Ikea guy just to see how far I could push things. (If you don’t know what I mean, google “IKEA Donna youtube puns.” Totally worth your time.) I really wanted to preface every conversation thread with “Hey Donna. Hey Donna.”

I don’t want this review to just be listing delightful things, though maybe we could use some of that these days. (Spoiler - click to show)Wait’ll you get the TV on. There are so many to find on your own. The implementation is mostly seamless, light, and amusingly frustrating but in a way we can all satisfyingly relate to. And it does it all with economy and verve. It gets in, makes its impact, and gets out while you still want more.

It also does some small things absolutely seamlessly: its choice of characters allows the player to slip cleanly into place, regardless of gender/sexual preference without fanfare or menus. In particular there is a point where you might want (Spoiler - click to show)to open a window before you’ve found your shirt. The game handles this lightly and elegantly with no false notes.

So here’s where I strike back at the Oscars. AWAN is just consistently and effortlessly its own funny thing that had me completely Engaged and often grinning in delight. Get on up here, AWAN!

We will play you off though.


Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 45min, 4/18 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Was thinking no, until the game told me there were 18 endings. So yeah, probably.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Hey, there are IF works for new readers! This was an absolutely delightful interactive rendition of a children’s book. When first few clicks showed no choices, I grew uneasy. The illustrations were note perfect for the milieu, but my family situation is quite removed from kid-lit. Turning virtual pages was not significantly different than leafing through a kids book which I never do. (I mean, Seuss excepted, what am I a monster?)

That ungenerous thought couldn’t even gel before the choices started. At that point the illustrations, text and choices played off each other wonderfully. Even then, I wasn’t won over immediately because I am damaged. For whatever reason after a few choices I spontaneously conjured an imaginary child next to me… what? you don’t know my life! Reading this work, imagining a small child sounding through, making choices, then experiencing the results of that choice — that’s when it clicked into place for me. The playful problem solving, character frustration, trial and error, evocative illustrations and unexpected outcomes would play like gang busters to a new reader, and through that imaginary child’s eyes I could experience their delight.

Older IF fans take as writ that interactivity is the differentiator in this medium. The (however illusory) perception of choice, narrative influence and immediacy provides a whole new dimension of immersion to the reading experience. Esther’s uses its new reader format to remind me that even the most tired, hoary cliche’ is going to be someone’s first time and that initial exposure can be deeply revelatory. That came out wrong, I’m not suggesting Ester’s is cliche’d, just using that as a poorly chosen metaphor for IF in general. What I’m driving at is that its deliberate invocation of children’s lit tone, illustration style and whimsical content re-presents the form in a first timer perspective. How magical is that? At least that’s what I got from my imaginary co-pilot.

Scoring this feels like a no win situation. I mean would I criticize the narrative voice in “Hop on Pop?” The graphic compositions in “Hungry Caterpillar?” Like this work, they meld text and illustration into a product aimed at delighting children. That’s really the only metric worth discussing I think. Esther’s stands shoulder to shoulder with its paper inspirations, even before it ups the ante by integrating interactivity. While I wouldn’t say I found it engaging, I did get Sparks of Joy watching my imaginary companion’s delighted introduction to IF.

This review was brought to you by the word ‘delight.’


Played: 10/6/22
Playtime: 10min, finished.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? Maybe to share with grandkids WAAAAAAAY down the road

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This is a deeply adult work, and I don’t mean in the sense of “tee hee nudity and devil worship.” I mean actual experiences and challenges relevant to actual adults. You are a digital artist working in a near-future digital art gallery. It's kind of an office drama, and it is crackerjack. The lived in setting of the office, the casual jargon-filled interactions, the constant tension between satisfying your creative urges and getting the job done, the highly specific triumphs and failures that are impenetrable to outsiders. All of this is painted so crisply, so matter-of-factly it is instantly immersive.

The characters in the workplace similarly feel organic. Over time you get enough background to establish with certainty why they are in the business they’re in, and where they are satisfied or dissatisfied with the work. It is insanely lived in. No notes! It also makes the crucial decision to effortlessly establish that it is these common intellectual and artistic passions that provide a baseline attraction, not “ooh, hotty!”

It is all so satisfyingly subtle. The piece builds attraction through dry academic texts and deeply technical dayjob project work, so that when the inevitable “wow those bike shorts” injects it feels like the involuntary chemical reaction it is - as much a result of what came before as “wait, humans can just be horny.” Now I can’t decide how much this resonated for me because I happen to ALSO be deeply interested in the digital issues the protagonist and 'love' interest are. (Which by the way, loved every single detail of the future corporate/online/cultural world building. There is a special place in my heart for (Spoiler - click to show)The Handmaid’s Tale video game being used to hawk makeup) Would someone less fascinated by these topics find this as compelling? Dunno, irrelevant to my experience!

The interactive choices on display here were similarly just perfect. You were choosing small, harmless(?) actions, so small they often didn’t register as choices in the sense of steering the game. The writing in the choices was laser precise - it was clear WHAT you were doing, but the game steered super wide of WHY. Are you flirting up to a tittilating line? Filled with shame? Actively looking for something new? Lying to yourself about your motivations? Only rarely did the game weigh in on any of that, mostly that was between you and your mouse. What a powerfully immersive choice that is, a fragile illusion you are creating that is so easily dispelled by incautious word choice. AP almost never cracked.

I’m gushing here. 3/4 the way through I was already crowning this Transcendent in my head. I was anticipating equal subtlety all the way to the end, where my mental model of the protagonist and dramatically chosen world events collided in a natural and unpredictable way. I was positively crestfallen, when amidst the super slow and organic building of tension, I was abruptly confronted with a metagame choice: (Spoiler - click to show)do you pursue an affair, try to stay friends or cut off contact? This choice was so different than everything that came before: it was blunt and confrontive and shattering of carefully constructed character self-delusions. I could see a scenario where narratively this brutality could be justified in-story and even be rewarding, but that wasn’t the case here. I could similarly conceive the game jumping in and saying, ‘all that subtlety was self-deluding lies, because here’s the reality of all that weaseling.’ Which it kind of was? I needed more text for any of that to land, I’m afraid. Without that, all the work the game had done was discarded with inadequate compensation.

In the end, this was such an impactful design choice it eroded the Transcendental experience I was having. It redeemed somewhat when I reloaded and explored the alternatives, only to find (Spoiler - click to show)it didn’t change the ending! I’d already baked the character and it was gonna be what it was. Adultery is a choice you make for sure, but its not a choice ONLY you make. That was kinda cool. This is a top 5, maybe top 2 game for me. Its application of interactivity and world building was qualitatively more mature and nuanced than almost everything else so far. I wish that one thing didn’t undermine it right when I was soaring but it got me so high in the air, I had room to drop.

Also quick shout out to the phrase “using steamed baby carrots to expore her facial orifices.” That is now just endlessly echoing in my head behind everything I’m doing.


Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 1hr, 1 ending 3 different ways
Artistic/Technical rankings: Transcendent-/Seamless
Would Play Again? Yeah maybe, if I can get past the fear that I’ll destroy the butterfly by looking too close

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Old School Parser IF, like yr momma used to make! The setup is fun: a lazy wizard student trying to fake his way through finals to graduate from not-Hogwarts. Notwarts? Notwarts. He is 100% a not-Hufflepuff. (sidebar - Hufflepuff is totally the party house right? The other three houses are wrapping themselves around the axle with “evil returns” or whatever, these guys are doing keg stands and bong rips. That’s just canon.) It is super light in tone, puzzle solving and narrative. It’s components are consistently light in a satisfying way - no part seems out of place, it is a unified experience.

There are some really nice touches too. It has a components-based spell system, adding spell component quests (and often creative use of spells) to the puzzle tree. In particular it does what many satisfying puzzle IFs do: (Spoiler - click to show)require you to use an object or spell different ways for different puzzles. That is inherently more satisfying than one-and-done items that just take up pocket space after their only use. There are one-offs as well, to be clear, but I always appreciate the effort when they’re not ALL that way.

The implementation is solid - no glaring bugs, lots of scenery to examine with short, amusing blurbs. Not a huge map, but not cramped either. A character-based hint system that’s a step up from mimesis-breaking commands or menus. It makes some smart gameplay choices too, for example restocking expendables automatically rather than having you slog across the map to replenish every time. The NPC conversation menu tree is effective (and snappy!) and often context aware, adding discussion options as you learn about them. It really is a very complete experience.

So why does it peak at Sparks of Joy and not into Engaging? There are some text burrs to be sure. One spell’s description explicitly notes it will only work on (Spoiler - click to show)people of lesser intelligence then proceeds to work on a character that does not answer that description. The Hinting Jinn who is your sometime companion will randomly beam into the room to say ‘hi’. Some of his ‘arrival’ and ‘present’ text bump against each other in weird ways. Characters will still try to give you things you’ve already got, and seemingly not remember they gave them. The game sometimes thinks you have expendables you have, well, expended. These kinds of things happen often enough that it is notable without interfering in anything. Unlike other Notably Buggy entries though, these present as really minor - either because the light tone of the text lets them slip past without fanfare, or because it does SO much without these glitches that they are diluted with volume. I think I have to split the difference and round up here. Its not mostly seamless, its not, but its Notable bugs somehow intrude less.

That’s kind of dodging the question though. The above paragraph asked about Artistic Response, and answered Technical Intrusiveness. Notwarts just seemed to be missing something. There was a soucance of wit in the text but it was a light sprinkling, not a consistent feature. The setting, for all its interesting map was word-rendered kind of lacklusterly. There is nothing of those crane shots in Harry Potter that pan over the magical majesty of the dining hall, or the slippery stones of the underground rivers. Notwarts is kind of low rent that way.

Hogwarts has classrooms suffused with elaborate antique woodwork, rough hewn stone, iron candelabras and a palpable sense of ancient mystery. Notwarts has a bunch of desks in front of a chalkboard. Hogwarts has sumptuous holiday feasts, magically preparing themselves on the table in a festival atmosphere. Notwarts has an overworked gnome in a cramped kitchen making sandwiches. Now this is actually an amusing contrast, but the text does not sufficiently mine it for laughs, just lets it lay there. I don’t want to imply it was free of humourous Sparks, it definitely was not. The puzzles were fun, the tone was pleasant. But it couldn’t crest into Engaging because it didn’t draw me in. I don’t need Notwarts to be Hogwarts. I actually kind of like that it isn’t. But I would like to enjoy how MUCH it isn’t a good deal more.

This is a rock solid entry I enjoyed spending time with. That’s cool, right?


Played: 10/31/22
Playtime: 2hrs, almost finished, 74/93 pts, 7 achievements
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable rounding up to 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

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

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

I really dig the Texture “drag and drop” interface, that is what I’ve learned. It feels like you are connecting ideas more organically than a cold click-one-or-other selection (looking at you, Twine). It also seems to open more authorial possibilities by contrasting the connecting ideas, or conveying information about what ideas should be connected (or can’t!) for story purposes.

This story is well-served by the user paradigm. Its an intriguingly imprecise apocalypse tale, focusing on one woman’s reactions in face of impending doom. As she makes her way through a nicely-specific Western Pennsylvania, the interactivity gives us personal and global background and character beats whose ordering and selection (or not) allow the player to collaborate in fleshing out. The whole thing is packed with specific details that really bring the setting and characters to life. It is a short game, but allows multiple endings directly impacted by player choices, and those choices have everything to do with how the player wants to define the character. This is Sparky.

The only unfortunate note, and for me it was an impactful one, was that one ending was arbitrary and unsatisfying and it was the first one I got. It lowered expectations so much for me, that subsequent playthroughs carried a shadow over them. That particular ending was ALSO noteworthy in that the background setting work it did (and was unavailable on other paths) was captivating. I could envision a version where the lead up perhaps leaned thematically more into the ending provided, but I didn’t detect that.

That is unfortunate, because the endings I achieved after that were so much more satisfying and complete. A key attraction to Apocalypse stories is the “what would I do?” question. Here, by providing just the right amount of specifics and back story, the better endings were exploring variations of “what do I want the protagonist to do”? That there were multiple choices leading to different conclusions, and that they still felt consistent with both player choices and the overarching narrative felt really cool. It feels ungenerous to drag down the score due to one possible path. Is a work as good as its best moment? Or as bad as its worst? Or some work-specific function of them all? I dunno man, I’m just winging it.


Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 20min, multiple runs, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/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

I reference this work in another review. Fair's fair, crosslink to US Route 160.

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