Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/6/25
Playtime: 30m, 4 playthroughs

The Sandman is a horror-tragedy of helplessness. The setup is a small group of people, huddling in isolation, trying to escape a devastating plague that infects when you sleep. A desperate family finds a purported shelter with only a single remaining occupant, and they weather the days together waiting for rescue (Spoiler - click to show)that never comes.

It is structured as a series of days, during which you get 3 actions, and goads you into engaging conversations that provide opportunity to frame the protagonist (and player’s) thoughts on life, afterlife, truth; y’know the kind of things our human brains fascinate with when not overwhelmed by daily routine. The plague is kind of a lens bringing these philosophical problems into focus, and foregrounding our human desire to grapple with them. It is a legitimately interesting setup, reinforced quite capably by both the graphical presentation and its sound design. Collectively it really creates a dire, compelling mood.

I wish the gameplay, and even the conversations it sparked, rose to the same level. Here’s the thing. As a player, you inhabit the mother-of-two protagonist. You are told that falling asleep will kill you. Of the three actions allowed you must choose between: 1) keep yourself awake; 2) keep child #1 awake; 3) keep child #2 awake; 4) have deep convo. You see the problem? How on earth does #4 EVER rise to the top of the priority list??? What does it say about you and the protagonist if it does??? The game CLEARLY incentivizes you via end score and achievements to embrace those conversations, but remains quite mum on the implicit costs.

An initial playthrough reveals how (Spoiler - click to show)futile trying to save your family is. Ok, maybe this is the game’s way of saying “Might as well prioritize inner life, its the only agency you will have.” Sure, so… then what? Then of the available choice selections, WHICH option do I forsake to choose option #4? It is not a passive acceptance, it is an ACTIVE CHOICE to sacrifice loved ones to… have a midnight dorm-room conversation?

Assuming you can get on board at all (which, yikes), that puts a LOT of weight on those conversations, and for me, they were not up to the task. The back and forth seemed pretty shallow, usually culminating in “enter your thoughts into text box.” The driving force of the game is not bad, providing opportunity for player to reflect on deeper thoughts. We could probably all use more of that. But the scenario provided is a problematic launch pad. It doesn’t help that game world developments continually remind us that maybe chatting is not our best pursuit at the moment. Specifically, as loved ones (Spoiler - click to show)start passing not only is this glossed over, it is not even prioritized as a conversation worth having! Meaning a community is choosing to philosophize on everything BUT grief and interpersonal loss, while nominally suffering that in spades. I mean, in what world?

So yeah, I appreciated the impulse of the game’s aims, but could not embrace its setup even a little bit. It doesn’t help that the prose was to the ‘trying too hard’ side of my sweet spot. I think an editing pass would sharpen that up dramatically. Here are a few samples of prose that feel overdone, but could be sharpened into something better:

“she moves to the beat of forgotten water dripping from a loose pipe”
“scraping stridently across the cement floor”
“her exhausted body sits up with fervor”

There are examples of prose that did land for me, so it does feel in reach:
“light returns to them [eyes] like an old, abandoned, phone powering on”

While the overall presentation was very well done, there were some game artifacts too. Conversations didn’t seem to track game state, so if I delayed talking until day 6, dialogue informed me I “got here yesterday.” A major character disappears at some point, a disappearance unremarked upon by narrative or characters. Daily task selections were sometimes repeated in the menu to no obvious purpose.

There is a nice bit where seemingly obsolete options are revealed as very much in story, but their presence only undermines the artificiality of the philosophy discussions MORE. After four playthroughs, I was left with admiration for the presentation and impulse of the game, but a rejection of its dramatic construction. It was time to sleep.

Horror Icon: Leatherface
Vibe: Resignation
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, wow, what do I do? I guess maybe I would try to foreground the deep conversations in a way that DIDN’T require actively horrible player choices. And I think we would be well served to engage the scenario directly, steer the deeper conversations to the very vital events surrounding us, at least initially, and build to the less tethered concerns.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/4/25
Playtime: 30m two playthroughs

One point must be made clear from the very start. I am not now, nor ever have been, an adolescent girl. I raised one. I married one (well obviously not AS an adolescent, Jeebus). That feels a little like I’m saying “I watched Roots so I am an expert on racial issues,” which, be assured I very much am NOT saying. I am highlighting that I approach this work from a place of empathy, not sympathy.

With that framework established, know I immediately liked this work. The graphical design was very compelling and attractive: a low-resolution representation of early 90’s styling cuing both its recent-past setting and the concerns of the protagonist. Gameplay is basically navigating the protagonist’s online journal and IMs as she ages from 13 to 21. Almost always driven by her adolescent/young adult poetry.

“But reviewer, you famously despise poetry!” I hear you say, intimately familiar as you are with my inescapable cultural impact. Ok, ‘despise’ is strong, but yes, poetry’s appeal is more often lost on me than not. Here it serves a few purposes beyond its intrinsic wordplay, and does so magnificently. Firstly, it is used as shorthand for ‘adolescent yearning’ which strikes me as perfect. A hallmark of adolescence is struggling for relevance and truth while mimicking tools used to explore those goals absent mature understanding of them. Poetry is a pitch perfect and smashingly economical shorthand for that. Second, the rendition of that poetry is (almost) as revelatory as its presence. Now, these things are inevitably informed by personal biases, and as established boy do I have those. To me, as the protagonist’s journey progressed, I found the poetry progressively more effective, and less.. reach-escaping-grasp-y. I could feel the protagonist maturing, as reflected in maturing and more impactful poetry. Up until the final entry, which… I’ll get to in a few.

Established that I found the presentation and poetry conceits compelling and successful, lets talk plot a bit. This poor girl. Presented as a series of annual impactful collisions between newly-found puberty-spurred yearnings (often but not exclusively romantic) and real world complications, our protagonist struggles to reconcile the two. Yeah, that is a bland wash over what actually happens. With few (though critical) exceptions, her hopes and desires are pretty uniformly (Spoiler - click to show)crushed in the most dispiriting ways possible. We watch a ball of hope and expectation gradually and dramatically (Spoiler - click to show)reduced to a self-destructive shell of unfulfilled and presumably now unfulfillable aspirations. My first playthrough, I found this heart-rendingly successful as a tragedy, and a deeply sad indictment of the pressures on girlhood. The only off note of that first playthrough was that I felt the final, most mature round of poetry was not up to the standards of its evolving predecessors. I think it would have been a more impactful resonance if these final poems were the most accomplished, underlining the tragedy in the full bloom of maturity as a final repudiation of adolescent dreams. (And with something as difficult and personal as poetry, I totally get an author-note to ‘write better poetry’ is essentially useless.) But I think there is a generous read that allows for this as well: her journey has undermined even her most private aspirations to the point she just phones that in too.

In any case, warm in the glow of a dynamite, deeply affecting story I did something I regret. I played it again. Spoilers follow.

Here’s the thing. At several points you are given plot-redirecting choices. Entire swaths of narrative are bypassed and entirely new ones available to you. I mean, this is IF, that’s not really a surprising phenomenon. It is in fact an ENTICEMENT to replay. Thing is, the first time you played through, events sometimes blossom into horrific violence, emotional trauma and just plain misery. This leads inevitably and tragically to the very affecting endgame. This is clearly the dramatic aim of the piece, so the trick the author has to play is, without guiding the player’s direction, how do they ensure that arc lands via every branching path? The answer is they ensure EVERY choice has unique but equally (negatively) impactful consequences, all reconverging to the same absolutely justified ending.

This is where my limited empathy let me down, hard. What played in the first run as an extreme but not IMplausible scenario, on repetition became decreasingly effective. EVERY choice and aspiration explodes into the MOST extreme, dire outcome. It started to take on the tenor of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the increasingly implausible outcomes become almost comedic in their unremitting extremity. Ok, 'comedic' is a deeply tone-deaf word to use there. By enabling exploration of ‘alternate-universe’ sequences, and resulting in the same over-the-top outcomes, the meta-message is “this is girlhood. It will always break you.” It changes from a singularly tragic character study to (intended or not) a comment on ALL girlhood. No, no, no! I don’t want that for my wife and daughter! I have reason to believe that was not their sum experience. It would break my heart if they were hiding this from me!

Without benefit of sympathy, it is a dark and repellent thesis. Again, I do not presume to take on the ‘truth’ of this artistic statement, that is not mine to weigh in on. I am relating the impact on my empathic engagement, and how it corroded on replay. My very specific, very adjacent perspective is this: do yourself a favor. Savor a compelling narrative, expertly rendered and written. Savor it once. Repeat engagements require more empathy (or sympathy) than apparently I can summon.

Yes, that is definitely on me.

Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would be rightly excoriated for presuming to tell a story I am horrifically unqualified to tell. And undoubtedly would handle it really badly.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/4/25
Playtime: 30m, 3 playthroughs

Welcome game! So glad you could make it today, the panel and I liked what we saw in the CV. If you don’t have any questions for us, shall we get started? Wonderful! It says here you name is.. oh, that.. oh. That’s unfortunate. I see here we are conducting an Interview Interview Interview. Hrm. Well nothing for it but to power on, yes?

Let’s establish the basics. You are a Twine-based Dialogue tree game, yes? Oh no, it’s fine. The recent regime has insisted we ARE allowed to ask these kinds of questions. It may be mandatory. So, Dialogue Tree? Yes, good.

And playable in 30 minutes or less? No, we don’t have a specific requirement, just like to know where we stand. 30 minutes, then, good.

I see here you feature statistics and achievements, yes? Presumably to encourage replay? Don’t be embarrassed, no one is judging you. On THAT I mean.

Excellent, you’re doing great, now let’s get a bit deeper. Are you satisfied that you achieved your mission statement of *checks notes* I’m going to paraphrase, ‘exploring the artificial characters we create of ourselves in interviews?’ Well yes, it is an open ended question, that’s kind of how these things go. Ok, I’ll focus the question for you a bit. You present a few different scenarios: a fawning, celebrity interview, a traditional job interview, an interpersonal service interview, and a romantic ‘interview.’ For most of those, you present four, and only four lanes of response each with its own layer of artificiality. What’s that? Oh no, you definitely CAST one as ‘truth’ but that’s not really accurate, is it? I mean, unless the player happens to share EXACTLY the same neuroses as the protagonist, it’s just another role being played, this one to perhaps satisfy the game rather than the interviewer. You don’t see it? Hm, let’s drill into the personal trainer then.

The trainer scenario distinguishes itself as breaking the mold of the others by presenting binary yes/no questions rather than a range. Should the player not meet the trainer’s expectations, they are rejected. The binary questions are cast as even more tightly exploring the ‘truth/not truth’ boundary. Except, sometimes a PLAYER’S actual ‘truth’ response is interpreted as falsehood, and the way to progress (or at least lock in a game-motivating achievement) is to falsely align to the interviewer’s perception of truth… why are you smiling? Oh I see. You are exposing how goal motivation can pervert even a nominally ‘true to yourself’ path into another flavor of ‘navigating what the interviewer wants to hear.’

*laughs* Well, that makes this whole interview a bit awkward, doesn’t it? Heh, let’s power on anyway. Two final questions. Are you aware of the dissonance in the romantic interview? By casting it as fully artificial as the other scenarios, the work rejects the intrinsic value of true romantic partnership, making the ‘prize’ less desirable but nevertheless casting the player as seeking it anyway. (For a bit at least) Yes, certainly I see the resonances it is trying to strike for a protagonist struggling with insecurity. By ignoring other, more obvious motivations in that encounter though, the very scenario impeaches itself as perhaps not as universal or resonant as portrayed. What is my question? Hm, right, I don’t seem to have one there after all.

The final question is spoilery, so members of the panel that have not finished the game should recuse themselves now. Given the final denouement, which draws a pretty clear line between ‘satisfying interview goals’ and (Spoiler - click to show)‘mechanical responses of a lizard brain,’ not to mention the cheeky author-insert who refuses to clarify things, how do we come away with a higher understanding of goal-seeking artificiality, other than just recognizing ‘yup, that’s a dynamic?’ What I mean is, both in text and meta, the message is ‘when presented with artificial choices, we respond artificially.’ Sure. Agreed. What is the game telling us about that, other than the dynamic’s existence, and perhaps its inherent ludicrousness? The stated goals of the work were about ‘deforming reality by responding to artificiality’ but we didn’t see that. We saw responses in kind, insulated from reality but too obviously transactional to actually impact that reality. Was there something we missed?

Hmmm. Yes, ok, thank you, we’ll make a note of that. And thank you for coming by today, we appreciate your interest. What? Oh, we’ll take a few days, discuss your case and let you know. Yes, we’ll call… what’s that? You have some questions for me? Wait, are you really attempting to conduct an…

Interview Interview Interview INTERVIEW???

Bold move, Cotton.

Horror Icon: Freddie, though a case for Carrie
Vibe: Absurdist
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : No, we haven’t made a decision yet, but the panel would like to provide some constructive feedback. We think perhaps stating the goals of the work so baldly, and in such elevated terms, in the “About” section actually undermine the impact of the work. It sets a very high bar the work cannot quite clear. The work still has clever things to say, and true panache in its construction, there is no need to set lofty expectations that unfairly burden it. We would recommend trimming it to just the first three paragraphs.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/4/25
Playtime: 1.75hr, disgrace

Among the most uncommon experiences I have, here in my modern engagement with IF, is the tremendously enjoyable failure. I don’t mean failure of the game, I mean failure of me, the player. Games I beef so hard they leave welts, yet still look back on fondly. There are two flavors of those, both utterly remarkable for their accomplishments. The first, arguably more subtle, are a cold dose of water, exposing the REASONS for my failure as of a piece with the work’s themes. These games finesse my failure into the artwork itself. The more brute force way is “simply” to present such overwhelmingly enjoyable gameplay, such delightful prose and plotting that even the stink of failure doesn’t diminish my esteem for it. In some ways these are the spiritual Yin to the “It’s Not You, It’s Me” Yang.

I kind of showed you my cards with that intro didn’t I? The game presents a supernatural investigation into a mass killing scenario nearly a hundred years old, to free a ghost from purgatory. Why not? You then spend the game exploring beautifully described and illustrated carnival remnants looking for clues to solve things. Why didn’t police find these clues back then? Eh, who cares? You proceed to wade through old artifacts, notes and journals piecing together the events and characters from that fateful day. It is all so vividly rendered, which is a tribute to the prose. Both the decay around you, and the inner lives of long dead characters are painted so clearly that despite a reasonably large cast all of them feel alive and unique. Honestly, as a novel I would eat it with a spoon.

As a game, the link-select gameplay lets you navigate around the tattered tents, kicking up new clues with each revisit (to a point), all to the purpose of using a Clue-like scorecard to eliminate suspects, weapons and locations to solve a specific murder. Clue seems to have fallen out of favor as a deduction game this century, with so many stronger modern innovations stepping up, but its process-of-elimination bones are solid, especially when grafted to a well written series of vignettes that require player intuition to translate into “elim this one.” Other gameplay nods include tracking your return visits (as a soft pointer to potentially more information), reviewable lists, testimony and artifacts all supporting your ‘can I eliminate anyone/anything/anywhere?’ gameplay. As is my nature I tried to EXHAUST the information available before cycling to endgame. I took copious notes, even creating a spreadsheet to track character interrelations. I was one roll of yarn away from a full on Mind Map.

Along my investigation, there were more technical glitches than could be overlooked. The wonderful illustrations only actually loaded about half the time. More seriously, periodically I would get red bars of doom saying things like: “(mock-visits:) cannot be used outside of debug mode.”,
“A custom macro (with no params) didn’t output any data or hooks using (output:) or (output-data:).” Or other such. I don’t THINK they affected my ability to gather clues, though one appeared when I tried to retrieve a needed key that might have locked me out of something. There was still enough meat to power past those until I exhausted the environs and it was time to put up or shut up.

I did, like a good pro-player, save at this point. Foreshadow.

Here is where I must now discuss and dissect my epic fail. While technically not spoilers as, again, FAILURE, know what you are in for if you continue to read these, let’s call them ANTI-SPOILERS. Here’s the thing. This was a mass murder event, right? Despite what I am going to call too-soft steering that the goal was to solve ONE murder, I assumed, and played as if, solving them all would solve the one. Through that lens, there is no better alibi than ALSO BEING MURDERED. The game made this fun by sometimes identifying bodies, but sometimes requiring you deduce bodies’ identities to eliminate them. At the end I was able to narrow to two potential survivors/suspects. Only one of them had a plausible motive for mass murder (though that was admittedly a HUGE logical jump), so, boom! Suspect identified. Similar logic was applied to weapon: if I found it, it couldn’t be the murder weapon because the murderer clearly must have run off with it. Shut up, my logic is unassailable!

Yeah, the game didn’t think so either. Two strikes right off the bat with my two possibilities. Dafug? Ok, maybe the mass murder theory was blindering me - who remaining had reason to kill the victim even if they were somehow later murdered, unrelated? Strike three. Y’know how in baseball, after strike three you are out? In Hauntless, after strike three you are (Spoiler - click to show)DEAD.

Wow mystery, you have my attention, let me just restore that savegame I foreshadowed earlier and…
“The (dropdown:) macro was given a bind to $saveLoader and the string “guess 1”, but needs 1 more value.”

No restore possible. Well, crap. This left me at a crossroads. Do I really comb through ANOTHER at least hour and a half, retracing every one of my steps to revisit this scenario absent my initial assumptions?

I think I do, but maybe like in a few months when the technical problems have been fixed. I really was engaged deeply in this thing, loving the environment, gameplay and prose. The fact that I got it SO wrong hurt a bit, but hey, I’m resilient. I just don’t think I can give it that much time NOW, and not in its current state. ESPECIALLY without a functioning save-restore. (I was subsequently informed that the opening menu might have successfully allowed a restore, but too late to help me.)

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Supernatural Cluedo
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : I mean, if it were my project, fix all those bugs, natch. Starting with that patently cruel RESTORE one.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/3/25
Playtime: 30m, two playthroughs

This is a melancholy tale of a (queer? maybe? not explicit but possibly implicit?) person hearing a familiar name linked to an air disaster, then having dreamlike memories of their time with them. Its vocabulary and design are quite wide of my sweet spot, venturing in both form and text into poetic verse. This is a style choice that often leaves me cold. To the work’s credit, its graphical and sound design were very evocative and convinced me to at least try to shed my baggage. It really raised the level of difficulty for me in a few ways though, seeming to actively pit its interface against any attempt to meet it on its own terms.

For one, when its really beautiful dreamstate backgrounds kick in, the text nearly vanishes due to unfortunate font color choice. For many screens, I had to highlight nearly the whole thing just to read it. It also uses a pane paradigm, where the presentation is a small pane, mid window (depending on how big your window is). The pane is not always visible, sometimes it is the same color as the rest of the window. Meaning text that needs scrolling to read gives no indication that scrolling is even possible! Early on, I nearly quit thinking there was a bug that masked a missing progress link, only to finally realize I needed to scroll an invisible pane to find it.

This was exacerbated by ANOTHER choice on some screens to only provide exit links after some “dramatic” delay, again leading me to believe I had stumbled into a bug when instead the game was toying with me, watching me jitterbug the pane until it deigned to allow me to move on. These technical issues were so consistently present, so consistently interrupting my experience, that I never really developed opportunity to accommodate to the poetic style of the prose. Again, I grant you that I probably need more centering than most to get into the flow of this kind of thing, so for me it was particularly defeating.

Here is the metaphor that came to me: I’m some, I dunno, post-war steel worker ok? I come home from a long day… steeling… and my young wife has decided we should get into yoga! Now, I can think of nothing I want less than to NOT get a beer and a shower, but since I love my wife, I gamely put down my lunch pail, take off my hardhat and kneel on the mat she lovingly laid out for me. Yeah, it was tough day riveting or whatever, but I force myself to try relaxing. I’m breathing and ohm’ing.. its a whole thing but by cracky I’m really trying. Then before I even get a fighting chance, the damn dog starts barking and barking and barking and won’t stop. As much as I love my wife, at some point, can’t we agree the dog is telling us to try again later and I just get the beer?

What, doesn’t everyone jump to full-narrative metaphor?

The game’s narrative took a curious turn at one point. For most of its buildup, it seemed to leave its present-grounding behind and vacillate between ‘real’ and dream memories. It had a solid enough throughline until… maybe 3/4s in it took a turn in specificity that both rejected the inputs it let me make prior, and introduced specificity that was jarringly.. not unrelated, but read like a second anecdote that shared resonances with the first. Like two friends telling different stories that had enough similarities that made them worth sharing. This effect was cemented by a closing screen that seemed to reference an entirely DIFFERENT work called Echoes and Traces. Like I had started one work and at some point it transitioned to a resonant but entirely different work.

Like my steelworker finally got the dog to shut up, closed his eyes, and when he opened them, his wife had gently seated a dozen acupuncture needles in him. C’mon doll, am I ever getting that beer?

That was actually kind of a cool effect, honestly. I just wish the work hadn’t been fighting me the whole time and I could have appreciated the ride and sly closing subversion more.

Horror Icon: Babadook
Vibe: Meditation interrupted
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would toss a coin. Heads, I would rework the view pane paradigm: give clear indications when scrolling was needed and eliminate the timed text additions of links. Tails, I would think about fixing the font color to better contrast against the background, but then probably flip the coin again.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/3/25
Playtime: 3hr, finished

It seems every comp/thing/thon I wade into, there is a game or two that bears two distinct hallmarks: 1) Its conceits, prose, wit and composition seem engineered to trigger every pleasure center in my brain; but 2) for reasons I have yet to convincingly diagnose, familiar gameplay somehow suddenly baffles me. I have in the past inaugurated review sub-series to club works with common elements together. This particular combo has never merited one, as they are pretty rare within the confines of a single comp. Across multiple comps though, I could indeed create a meta-sub-series, probably titled “It’s not you, it’s me.”

RL is chockablock with hallmark number one. The central conceit (spycraft via a gun that transmogrifies things into their english-word reverse-order counterpart) plays into a rich IF wordplay subculture. We might call it a Schultzian-inspired game, though the conceit certainly predates our modern master. The writing here is strong in some areas. It has fun banter between the protagonist and principle NPC. The whole thing is oozing with wit, setting just the right tone to embrace its ridiculous premise and go along for the ride. There is a great detail where the companion NPC just reverses words when they talk for silly reasons. As an ongoing bit it is just fun.

It is further a competent parser implementation - spare enough in description to keep the weeds low, but with gratifyingly deep pockets of implementation. For example, despite only spare descriptions of beds that never mention subcomponents, you can nevertheless try to fiddle with pillows, mattresses and sheets. Another example: smells are frequently alluded to and never omitted if you subsequently interrogate them. Most importantly, scenery objects you might expect the magic reverser to work on almost always have wry comments on why that’s not a great idea. It’s attention to gameplay detail that both reassures the player they are in strong hands, and rewards player commitment. To a point.

Based on my intro, you know where this is going. To my ongoing shame, and in spite of its great achievements in hallmark #1, RL fell squarely into hallmark #2 during gameplay for me. It is inarguably my fault. I spent an hour spinning in the very first room because I interpreted a direction notation in a room description as color, not travel option. Later, I spun unnecessarily, convincing myself I had entered a silent no-win scenario because I simply neglected to examine an object before trying to use it. These are parser basics, something the author has every right to expect a player to be fully competent in, yet there I was, handful of thumbs, head bashing on screen. This dynamic repeated so often, it is my overriding memory of the game.

It didn’t help that the in-game hint system (conferring with your NPC-behind-the-screen) was only intermittently helpful. Like the author, that NPC likely assumed a base level of competence that I failed to supply, and so the hints and help were as often confirming directions I had already achieved as alluding to next steps without sufficient detail.

When I try to diagnose WHY some games reduce my normally suave, Bond-like mastery of my environment to Jerry Lewis level incompetence and fumbling, I generally focus on the combination of language and implementation. Spare descriptions tend to train the player that close examination is unnecessary. Clumsy disambiguation (at one point asking me “which spare part, the spare part or the spare part from freezer?” a phrase that can never resolve to the former) cast doubt on one’s ability to effectively interact with the world. Inability to consistently access information (for example, unable to >X OFFICE through an office window) implies that information is unnecessary when it very much is not. All of those phenomenon were in evidence here, but I think the central construction also impacted me. Ignoring some subtle parser conventions, like either lumping navigation directions together in text at top or bottom, having them explicitly listed in title bar or via >EXITS command, invites parser-savvy folks to miss things. The cumulative weight of these things represented a barrier between me and game.

“But reviewer, you finished the game - why are you bellyaching?” There was an additional peril in the exciting conceit of the game, perhaps more impactful than anything above. Wordplay games live and die by their cleverness and variation within their own arcane logic. The best such games provide a steady stream of laughing recognition of THIS wordplay solution. While there are some pretty great ones here ((Spoiler - click to show)drawer especially elicited a grin of delight, and the final puzzle was truly wonderful), there are many more that rely on words WAAY out of common use to the point of eliciting, “uh, ok” where the glee should have been. The work seems to acknowledge this, having our NPC guide us past those, but it has the effect of undermining the promise inherent in the conceit. Reversing words to create new objects is really only satisfying if WE ARE THE ONE DOING IT. This disconnect is further compounded by inobvious ways to USE reversed words, making deducing them that much harder. If (Spoiler - click to show)a tip is going to help me solve a puzzle, it should be obvious WHY that will help. Having to be walked through it by an NPC is not itself satisfying. I need more than hand-wavy explanations why core rules of the wordplay sometimes do and sometimes don’t apply. If not, I’m just reversing everything, hoping for a next step to materialize.

The unfortunate nature of the “It’s not You, It’s Me” hallmarks is that however accomplished and winning #1 is, #2 will nearly always trump it. It’s math. If the spinning drags a 45m game to three hours, it’s because over two hours of it is ineffectual self-recrimination. Why do I want that in IF, that is my all-day standard mode! (I should note, in fairness, that the final puzzle ALMOST rescued the whole thing for me, as a multistep variation that used normal words and was quite satisfying for it.)

Anyway game, I appreciate all the things you did right, I really do. I hope we can still be friends.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Cheeky
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d buff the HINT system for morons like me. I would be reluctant to damage the in-world hint conceit that makes such hinting next level enjoyable, so once I got to the limits of that, I think I would produce a walkthrough. Just in case.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/3/25
Playtime: 1hr, lost to Bolsheviks

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of my literary heroes. I find his prose magnetic EVEN IN TRANSLATION. I can only imagine how glorious it must be in the original Russian. I am one of maybe 4 people in the US who started (in good faith) his Red Wheel novel cycle as it started to be translated into English. Red Wheel is a sprawling, epic, fictional account of the events dramatized by this game. Its four volumes start massive and grow to thousands of pages, increasing as the work drives on. Its translation is also incomplete, the initial English language work halted by the publisher after only two volumes were released. The third volume has subsequently been split into 4 hardbacks by a different publisher which I have not yet read, waiting for paperback releases. The final volume has still not even been translated, nearly 35 years on. Solzhenitsyn! What the hell world, what are we waiting for??? This is how capitalism fails us.

I offer this to establish I have a passing, though (vis a vis the game) debilitatingly incomplete knowledge of this setting. I also have a hunger to know more! When I first saw this game, it did not click for me exactly how it would resonate. Instead, my initial reaction was “OMG I loved the original, it is still in an open tab on my desktop! The original features NAZIS, how could this POSSIBLY measure up?” Only when I dove into the required preamble reading and party- and character-names started ringing for me did I grasp the full grip this author has on my psyche.

Don’t get me wrong. Like its predecessor, 1917 is a COMMITMENT. SO much detailed background, more than you can possibly internalize before playing. (And bear in mind, I have a head start here!) I spent a full quarter of my first playthrough reading background! How can you possibly justify that investment? Who on earth would possibly commit to this?

Besides me, I mean. Kinda like the Red Wheel itself.

This game builds on its predecessor in daunting ways. Where the previous was juggling multiple competing faction alliances, social unrest, government management, and population service with woefully inadequate resources, this game increases scope in nearly every dimension. It substitutes two new dimensions “Government” and “Economy” as indirect windows into the former games’s “Polls.” I didn’t do a full comparison, but each tab FEELS like it has more variables to watch.

It shares the card-driven paradigm of the first, with multiple decks based on what your party has secured control over. As before, you have a limited hand of options, a limited (though configurable) slate of ‘advisor’ cards to bust out for special powers, and must-face ‘event cards’ that demand responses every turn. The amount of variables in play is untenably large. You cannot possibly keep them all in your head, and while you have a vague idea how to influence many variables, there is no truly predictable cause and effect. “The peasants are hungry” “Let me spend resources to feed them!” “Well, the numbers barely move and it is unclear how well that worked.” As a card game trying to minmax to victory, this is frustrating beyond justification. As a simulation of governing, where you have clumsy, uncertain levers to influence complex problems it is PERFECT. Ditto the concurrent game of adjusting policy and actions to keep an effective coalition that doesn’t usurp your priorities for their own.

Like its predecessor, while technically a work of interactive fiction, its gameplay is just outside what that label generally implies. Also like its predecessor, that caveat is immaterial. I adore these games. I am overwhelmed by these games in the best possible way. At some point, I am going to cede some fraction of my RAM to Autumn. This is the second game that will just be permanently open on my desktop. I guess I kinda already have ceded that space.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Big Box Boardgame
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : I recommended its predecessor be Kickstarted as a cardboard implementation. Even then, I underestimated the wooden-counter cost of reflecting its breadth of variables, nevermind the mechanical demands of keeping them updated with every action. 1917 has shown me how ill-advised that actually was. No, if it were mine, I would use the full weight of my subject matter authority and clout to see the final volume of Red Wheel translated and published. That kind of seems more in reach than the Kickstarter. UPDATE: I see that the fourth volume has a publication date of Nov 2025. Thanks Autumn!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/2/25
Playtime: 15m, 3 playthroughs

Why make fiction interactive?

I ask this question sincerely, in full knowledge of the forum it appears in. What is the point of it? Oh, sorry, I should clarify. I’m not asking you, the reader of my winkingly labeled ‘reviews.’ I’m asking you, the would-be IF author. What is it about your work that makes interactivity intrinsic to its form or function? How do you expect interactivity to impact the consumption of your work - its plot, themes and characters and/or overall experience? It feels like a ‘gotcha’ question and it kind of is one. I see Interactivity as an attempt at a more personal engagement from the reader. By giving them some agency in a story’s progress, the reader develops investment, insight, and personal alignment with the proceedings. More intimate than even the best novel.

Maybe. The trick for the author is to nurture and develop that dynamic into an artistic statement. HOR (heh, loving the acronyms this year so far) takes several steps, deliberately or otherwise, to use interactivity to push the reader away. This feels misguided, if intentional. Really, I think it is the intersection of ambiguity and interactivity that misses the mark for me.

Let’s start with setup. This is kind of cleverly done by using mouseover to change dialogue options. We are presented with “coworkers” and “Boss” that become “Knights” and “Commanders” as our setting reveals itself to be an order of knighthood. That played pretty fun, though it did have one effect: it let we the players know that we are NOT aligned with the protagonist. Despite making conversation and thought(!) choices for the protagonist, we don’t really know their life. Now, this will always be true in IF - I have not lived my life as a hobbit or detective, I just haven’t. The trick is to maximize opportunities to align the reader and minimize overt disconnects. Unless tied to the theme of the work, choices that HIGHLIGHT that disconnect work against us.

A far more serious disconnect evolves through the creative choice to bounce the player back and forth between two sides of a conversation. The knight stuff is really just (interesting) background in a ‘you don’t appreciate me’ conversation between two… friends? Lovers? Something in between? Not knowing is another level of disconnect. We see and inform the STRENGTH of the protagonist’s angst, but develop no true feel for the SOURCE of it. Which is kind of important if we presume to carry half the conversation! Not understanding the source made the heat of it unsatisfying and ultimately baffling. Perhaps we are intended to supply it? That puts the cart before the horse a bit - asking us to watch an escalating emotional spiral, then retrofit motivations that make sense.

Further distancing player and protagonist, any attempts I made to defuse the angst (for example to focus on ‘are they maybe hurt?’ rather than ‘they hate me’) seemed to be basically ignored by the narrative. I was left with the strong perception that while I could try to shade things, I had no true ability to alter the conversation’s path. This is not automatically a problem if tied to the theme of the work (which it very much seems to be here), but it does have a distancing effect between player and protagonist. My input is roundly ignored, diluting my investment in the proceedings.

Worse, by occasionally being given the opportunity to drive the other half of the conversation, and by extension getting a glimpse of the partner’s inner life, we are underwhelmed. Nothing about the partner’s conversation choices suggest any level of worthiness, any level of justification for the protagonist’s angst. Rather, we are left in the position of confirming that yes, the partner is an obliviously smug and selfish person that the protagonist is well rid of. We saw their thoughts! We know this!

There is a read that maybe we are not seeing the partner’s thoughts at all, but the protagonist’s PRESUMPTION of their thoughts. Thing is, that may redeem the partner (though their objective actions are still an unanswered indictment), but it further exposes the protagonist as not ready for the relationship they want, and whose paranoid projections are decreasingly sympathetic.

All of which makes the bodice-rending, chest beating, wailing of the protagonist fall so, so flat. We don’t understand their investment, either internally or externally, and it comes off as needy drama they should just let go of. And it was interactivity that got us here!

All this plays into a theme (intended or not!) of alienation, of our interpersonal relationships being little more than projections we ourselves bring to the table. Both protagonist and player are caught in a spiral of having to assume thoughts, motivations and mindset of others instead of, y’know, having a real conversation about them. Yes, interactivity provides the tools to include the reader in this dynamic rather than simply presenting it. But to what end? The protagonist’s responses feel SO exaggerated they are off putting. Our need as player to fill in gaps feels less ‘universal truth’ than railroaded authorial hand. CAN this dynamic exist? Of course! MUST it exist? The work has not convinced me of that. The opposite, by using interactivity to alienate the player, the message feels unnaturally imposed. This is famously an ineffective way to work with people. Entire countries have been founded rejecting this!

Horror Icon: Carrie
Vibe: Doomed Relationship
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : While I’d be tempted to charge after the low hanging fruit of technical issues, I’d be better served to reassess the interactivity of the piece, sharpen its use against my narrative goals. Right. The highest possible fruit on the tree.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/2/24
Playtime: 45m

This is an ambitious look back at and interrogation of an underserved character in the Monkey Island franchise. It bounces back and forth between old style point-and-click play (translated to Twine link-select), and some authorial side bars and digressions into the franchise history, the character, and their engagement with both. This kind of thing is very appealing to me.

From the outset though, it seemed plagued with technical burrs and frictions. For one, it makes use of the dreaded timed text. I find myself more forgiving than most in the community, but this implementation tested that sorely. For one, the opening scrolled intro both had no concept of window size, nor any concept of screen integrity. What I mean is, the text played out, below the bottom of the window requiring scrolling. If you found yourself fussing with slide bars and fell behind… the entire screen wiped before you finished it to start playing out the next one! Eventually, I full-screened the window (which you DEFINITELY HAVE TO DO), but still found myself unable to keep up. It was simultaneously too slow and too fast. For SURE there must be a pause for more at the end of every intro screen. (I am given to understand the current release tweaks these artifacts to some extent.)

This was not the end of the technical woes, however. There were link chains with no back or reverse, which, if you clicked on you needed to cycle through the entire thing again before returning to start. Different colors were used for character dialogue, at least one of which was chromatically close to the color used for links, resulting in link confusion. Graphic elements overlapped words or were completely missing. And oh that timed text, pervasive and stalling through it all. It seemed to be reaching for a conversational paradigm, the author/work talking to you in ‘real time.’ I can squint and see that. Honestly, waiting for text to present itself gave me time to do that.

You get it. Technically it is problematic. I will waste no more time belaboring the point. It is unfortunate that the technical issues intruded so deeply. There was real wit and verve in its homages to the Monkey Island era fonts and layouts.

The content of the game is more rewarding, assuming you can fight through to it. The light ‘point and click’ style puzzles were evocative of, though nowhere near as challenging as, its inspiration. Part of that is that while you can mimic the motions of mouse-to-hotpsot with mouse-to-link, pictures are famously worth orders of magnitudes of words, and you just get fewer hotspots with the latter. While unsatisfying as a puzzle, it surprisingly and pleasantly echoed that playstyle. It is the first time in a long time the Twine paradigm seemed more than an arbitrary UI choice.

Far more interesting was the interplay between that puzzly work, and the author’s inter-scene commentary on the game, the character and the history that informed both. It used the textual complexities of the inspiration to openly engage the boundaries between PC and NPC, and what ‘reality’ means in the context of fiction and gaming. Clearly the author had cause to pour a lot of thought into a character they found compelling but the narrative did not, and how that tension kind of exploded the whole thing for them. Leaving them to pick up and examine all the different pieces without the distraction of the functioning whole. Explosive deconstruction, baby!

There was a really encouraging amount of depth to engage here. Which made the ending kind of anti-climactic. Towards the end, after some time toggling between light puzzle/escape-the-boat play and digressions into lore both real and fictional, it unexpectedly and abruptly turned into (Spoiler - click to show)Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead territory. All the talk of ways to appreciate, deepen and reclaim the character, including actually PLAYING as her!, were (Spoiler - click to show)abruptly forsaken into..literal nothingness.

It is a jarring climax. After all the explorations of ways to interpret the character, to confer agency or broader depth, it nevertheless ends with a repudiation of that very effort. Is it a comment on fan culture’s propensity for putting emotional weight on elements not meant to carry them? (see the first 20 years of Boba Fett fandom) On the tyranny of narrative, whose choices are quite literally the final word? Or are we supposed to cling to the sweetness of that exploration in the face of its doomed fate against an unchanging lore?

Honestly? I don’t know. And that’s kind of cool, but also kind of unsatisfying. Which, why should I have it any better than Elaine?


Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Memoir-y
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure the first MUST DO is to add ‘pause for more’ inputs to every opening screen. While doing that, I would seriously revisit the timed text implementation, to make sure its use was intentional, strictly under control, and far less intrusive. Then, either fix or eliminate the Journal. Unless its inaccessibility was also part of the commentary…?

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/2/25
Playtime: 15m

I am on record as observing that the RPG Maker gameplay paradigm is not exactly my cup of tea. Successful games (for me) on this engine are brief, light on repetitive combat, and heavy on attitude - that ineffable quality of distinguishing itself from the sameness that can plague such a strong gameplay and graphical tool kit. So let’s check out WSASTRAS (wizastrous? WIZASTROUS??? I just like it more now).

Is it brief? Oh yeah it is. Hard to believe I’m saying this, but maybe too much so? You get to meet maybe six characters, all but two of which are pretty functional, solve a mini-mystery and make a final choice. The stakes are established both clearly but also incompletely so that choice is as much about the player’s proclivities as it is the objective scenario. This is actually the most interesting thing about the game! It’s a nice dynamic: forced to choose with incomplete information, informed by your own internal biases. Y’know like life.

Does it have combat? Nonexistant. The BEST choice for this engine! (for me)

Does it have attitude? WSASTRAS distinguishes itself from the field, at least a little bit, in two ways. Graphically it is reminiscent of the primitive pixellated standard for RPG Maker, but more line-driven and cruder. It is just different enough to be notable, but not different enough to undermine the gameplay engine. These things are always esthetically personal. For me I liked it well enough, though it did introduce some fiddly artifacts of aligning sprites just so to interact, as well as seeming to cue interactable elements that turned out not to be so. After some onscreen jittering to be sure. Not fatal, just the slightest of frictiony. The other way it distinguished itself was its light, playful vibe. Most NPCs are functional - giving quests, background or choices, but their dialogue is spiced just enough to allow that they might not be info robots. The egg custodian was a particular standout here. All of it added up to a pleasant enough, if undemanding time. Tweaking its toolkit-driven gameplay in the right direction, if only modestly so. Building to an interesting-for-its-ambiguity final choice. Those ‘ifs’ kind of loom large in the summary I suppose, but at least it is consistently on the right side of things!

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I might try to double down on the NPC personalities. Give everyone the attention that the custodian got.

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