Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Hoo boy. This one was a Thelma-and-Louise foot-on-the-gas thundering juggernaut of a work, seemingly designed to smash into all my strongest preoccupations and biases. I could have warned it, those are pretty fortified by now. Before I get to this immovable-object/irresistable force collision, let me - no no, no use groaning, take your medicine - let me digress. Be warned: fraught, spoilery discussion to follow.

As recently as ten years ago, the trope of ‘computer/robot becomes sentient’ was a sci-fi staple. It was so useful! It elegantly allowed for a wide variety of commentary on human nature, marrying a childlike inexperience to a hyper-rationale intellect. It was also a powerful tool for exploring what it means to be human and the boundaries of identity and conscience, of free will and coercion. So much classic sci-fi plumbed this space, yet it still seemed infinitely plumbable.

Had this work come out ten years ago, we could have engaged it on those terms, and, squinting, I can see where its takes might have hit better. Certainly, the idea of a computer therapist developing depression from its exposure to clients is novel enough to wring mileage from. Even ten years ago though, we were already 50 years(!) past Eliza, an infamous therapy bot. Eliza’s ‘trick’ was to spoof therapy by reframing input statements as followup questions, getting the user to increasingly diagnose themselves. For its time, it was considered a ground-breaking illusion of computer intelligence.

But it wasn’t real intelligence. It was a rudimentary algorithm coupled to clever phrasing and input parsing. It was a reactive sentence assembler with no true understanding of the meaning of its words. At the time, we could be forgiven thinking this trickery was less an emotional scam than a promise of things to come. From there, Moore’s Law took us on a rocket ride of increased processing power, enabling revelatory software sophistication and technological advances. The faster we progressed, the more sophisticated our computer science became, the more our machines became capable of and paradoxically the less mysterious they became. In the last ten years, the concept of AI has been revealed to be less ‘how soon will they become us?’ to ‘when will we stop detecting the illusion?’ Because all these learning algorithms, large language models and natural language processors have been revealed to be nothing but more sophisticated sentence assembly machines. They leverage reams of real human expression where the context and understanding is embedded in its data, not the machine itself. The machine simply navigates the data to produce convincing responses with no meaningful sentient understanding of its output.

In this environment, where we understand AI to be well and truly A, the concept of a depression-riddled therapy bot becomes a lot darker. This is not a true cry for help from a suffering being. This is a cold machine PARROTTING cries for help because some flaw in its programming caused it to interpret its patients’ mental health issues as behaviors it should mimic. It is stolen trauma, kind of offensive in its masquerade, the more so for its histrionic melodrama. The human protagonist of this work is responding as if to a fellow sufferer, but a machine can’t suffer. It becomes outright emotional manipulation.

So that’s bad, right? But the work does not seem to understand or acknowledge that this gives us, the readers/players, a choice: reject the whole thing on the grounds of its distasteful deception, or reconcile to ‘ok, its fake, but the protagonist’s response is genuine, and that’s what matters.’

It doesn’t get better when we do that though. Our protagonist’s response to this trauma is to arrange the therapy bot to be ‘reprogrammed.’ Is anyone able to hear me over the alarm bells going off right now? Understand what it means for an AI construct to be ‘reprogrammed.’ There is no differentiation between code that gives the bot its ‘soul’ and code that forms its behaviors. There is every possibility they are intertwined. This, not coincidentally, is the reason ‘reprogramming’ as a concept is so alarming when applied to humans, especially as it often surfaces around religious coercion of marginalized people. How much can you ‘reprogram’ someone before doing violence to who they are? Where is the line between curing and deforming? This is a rich sci-fi (or just fi!) question to mine, but ignoring the question leaves us at the mercy of our well-earned skepticism. If we are to treat this incipient being as truly sentient, as the protagonist clearly does, why would the prospect of reprogramming be any less alarming? Yes, we are meant to view this as a cute analog to ‘computer therapy’ but lordy the subtext we carry makes that all but impossible. This should give the protagonist pause too, but it doesn’t.

Note that this is actually WORSE if we accept that somehow the bot is indeed a sentient being.

Alright, Thelma, Louise, what do you have for me then? This work launched an irresistible-force torpedo of stolen trauma and/or invasive mental violence at me, and expected me to embrace it. In this case, the immovable object of my finicky scruples prevailed. It Bounced right off. Immovable object - 1, irresistible force -0.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 15m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy/Notable timed text intrusion
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Verisimilitude is a great word. All those 'i’s in a row, playfully bookended by complementary phonics, they really sing, don’t they? It’s also kind of a holy grail in fiction, Interactive or otherwise. Which, on the surface, why? Why do we care? Certainly fairy tales, to pick one example, don’t give a flip about realism but obviously have staying power. But are they highly regarded? Eh… At its core, stories thrive on reader empathy, the ability to vibe with the piece on some fundamental emotional level. All too often though, intellect is the cold gatekeeper to our vulnerable emotional core. “Well, no one could clear the DMV that quickly therefore the rain kiss is invalid AND I NEED NOT CRY.”

Stories that effectively bat aside that self-important intellect succeed more than ones that don’t, and succeed MUCH more than ones that try to engage that intellect and fall short. Intellect just luuurves finding fault, that jerk. As a side note, intellect is powerless against ambiguity. Details left unexplored may create a chorus of background questions, but as long as the story doesn’t engage those questions the best intellect can do is whine in the distance. Give it concrete details though, and hoo boy it will go ham on them.

Is there anything more satisfying than watching a bully get his comeuppance? As dickish as intellect can be, a work that beats it at its own game? *chefs kiss* Man, does Metallic Red give it a drubbing, and it is glorious. This work opens as a solo space flight, where gameplay is clicking through the mundane but crucial tasks of keeping alive and sane in a tiny box hurtling through the unforgiving void. Choice-select is a great paradigm here. There are things that MUST be done, that the protagonist is well familiar with, and choice-select steers things in a totally acceptable way. You don’t really have a choice not to maintain your hydroponic garden because… death. If all it did was cycle the player through the amazingly well-conceived routine that would be enough. Where it augments those details with communications and external interactions it goes to a next level.

One of the harder things an author engaging verisimilitude needs to accomplish is convincing external communications, each with a purported unique fictional author. These communiques must SOUND like different people, not extensions of the narrator. As compelling as the daily routine was conceived, every interaction the protagonist has with the outside world is delightfully, amazingly, of its own voice and cadence. I have not seen this level of schizophrenia employed so effectively.

Then there were the dream sequences. The graphic presentation changes during these, which is always a welcome touch for me. More importantly, the dreams FELT like dreams. They were wildly diverse, and even when reflecting backstory and background did so in a convincingly dream-logic way, rather than the stealth flashback/infodumps these things can often be. Mostly. I was actually gleefully forming this thought as I played when one dream, culminating some accumulating hints, was basically an unadorned flashback/infodump. Damn you work, you let intellect up off the mat during the count! Fine, one misstep, in the face of everything else I can forgive that.

I really cannot overstate how well conceived and written this early gameplay was. I could have spent a full two hours just banging about the spaceship, so immersively seamless was its rendition. It was magnetic. Some delightful samples which are only a flavor, and may make more sense in context:

“chard: due to its tolerance for hydroponic growing methods.” [As a hydroponic hobbyist I can attest to chard’s unholy growth rate. I laughed out loud at “chard sphere.”]
"It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. "
“Bon Voyage? More like Bone Adios!”

Eventually, we segue to a more plotty, ‘explore your surroundings in service of a low key dramatic arc’ sequence. This part was no less well conceived than the first, but because gameplay paradigm shifted, the feel also shifted. Less premium was placed on verisimilitude, and more on narrative momentum. It is only slightly less accomplished at this, which couldn’t help but be deflating. Not a lot, just a little. In particular, the decision to put (Spoiler - click to show)a fiddly cooking puzzle inline to the plot really slowed things up for no reason. More importantly though, it felt like the emotional impact was missing.

This work battered, just crushed intellect in a thoroughly satisfying way. Yet, with unfettered access to emotion, it never quite engaged. Part was, I think, the slow drip of background that tried to build towards it. In addition to being overshadowed by the day-to-day details, it also presented as a cerebral ‘what is going on here?’ puzzle. Its solution then, when revealed, was more brainy than hearty. Another element was the details the work chose to share with us. We focused a lot on the protagonist’s (Spoiler - click to show)dissatisfactions and estrangement but not so much on their (Spoiler - click to show)initial religious engagement. By only giving us a one-sided view of the protagonist’s core dilemma, we don’t really appreciate the depth and drama of the final choice, no matter what the narrative belatedly tells us.

I’ve said enough on that. As a letdown, it was slight. The accomplished first half engaged me fully on the power of its writing and well thought out setting. The POWER of it was thrilling. It built such a good will that I was engaged through its breadth, even if the dial flickered a bit.

Shocking final twist: the denouement revealed that this work was a draft. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, A DRAFT??? Something this accomplished, this compelling, this well conceived, this is the FIRST PASS of the author’s brain? With that kind of intellectual ability, WHY AREN’T YOU CURING CANCER, AUTHOR??

Played: 9/16/24
Playtime: 45m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but likely to seek out rest of series

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I swear, this series confounds me. I played Act 1 (apparently before Act 2 was available in the download), then finished here. As previously observed, I am NOT the ideal audience. Six months on, I am no more familiar with Balder’s Gate 3, and no more disposed to High Fantasy. I really dug the gameplay in Act I, until it turned out to be NOT what I thought it was. Then I turned on it like an oily Brad Dourif character. I also begrudgingly respected what I perceived to be its thematic core. I have no idea if I’m selling the source material short here, but it FELT like it was aiming much higher than its inspiration.

Once again, I returned as a Rogue, and once again I opted to play its more difficult setting. So here’s something that was lost on me first time: my companion was ALSO A ROGUE. (Was that mentioned in part 1? I don’t remember.) He’s already an elf AND a vampire! Jeebus, leave some oxygen for other players, dude. The core mechanic of the first one, training yourself to exist(!) is still here, though as an echo of itself, now subordinate to more traditional Action point/HP mechanisms. The merging was pretty smoothly done, certainly the cockpit was well designed. The impulse to vary the formula was also well taken, I think, reflective of the evolution of the story. It’s always nice to see mechanics evolve within a game.

Thankfully, this time your companion is correspondingly more helpful and active. Actually, he kind of takes the lead in things. Your role is more to facilitate and buttress him than to drive the bus yourself, as it was last time. Again, a shift in formula is a nice way to keep things fresh. There was a gameplay choice that was kind of frustrating in the moment, but had a (probably intended) positive knockon effect. As an only semi-present being, we’ll just say ghost for convenience, you have 10 “Action Points” to spend doing things. You need to choose carefully because plenty of choices reward you with nothing. When they are gone, you need to recharge. This is structured as a series of encounters where if you recharge, you explore at the cost of MISSING THE ENTIRE SCENE. NPCs have story-relevant conversations and revelations YOU DON’T HEAR. You’re too busy rifling their bureau or whatever. Between the combination of uncertain payoffs and limited APs you are guaranteed to hear half or less of what is going on, and, unsurprisingly, unlikely to win first time through. Also, decidedly outside looking in.

But. That aggressive gameplay choice now opens you up to alter your toggle on replay, to tune into what you missed last time, and explore where you already know things! It was simultaneously confounding and irritating and encouraging of replay! It took me three times to get the full picture, and discover enough helpful items to play to closure, and that ended up being about perfect. Granted part of it was my expert gameplay, but it felt very precisely tuned to that experience, as a fourth run was probably too far down the diminishing returns ramp. Also, not for nothing, timed exactly to the judging limits of IFCOMP. Well done there.

Ok, so let’s talk the story this gameplay is in service of. If the first was an exploration of solitary confinement trauma, this was treading more traveled ground of abusive family trauma, especially amongst its victims’ stories. Again, props to the work for aiming well above (what I can only speculate is) its inspiration. This path, however, IS more heavily traveled. Well realized as this iteration was, I’m not sure it brought anything new to the discussion. The protagonist (your NPC companion, not you the player! you’re just along for the ride!) is reliving memories and relationships to (Spoiler - click to show)discover their symbolic unconscious exit. You’re just there to keep things going. In the first one, I found the companion character grating, particularly on replay and the further you got towards success. This one he was far less grating, but not really a whit more appealing. Nor were the details of the NPCs you met particularly compelling either, making all the drama between them kind of Not Your Business. It doesn’t help that, due to class overlap, he was bogarting ALL THE ROGUE WORK. I literally did nothing roguish my entire play, which, at that point, why bother making the option available? At least first time I got to pick a lock or two! Seriously, choose literally any other class to play is my advice.

So yeah, Sparks of respect in gameplay variation, the central ‘learning to exist’ conceit, thematically outstripping its inspiration (probably) and the neat trick with replayability. But by sidelining me in his journey (and not letting me ROGUE!) it was always going to be how invested I was in that story. And the answer is, not enough for engagement.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 2h, 2 fails, 1 win
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who… let me just pause to say I will pay 5 American dollars to anyone that can figure out where I’m going with this, relative the game in question.

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who so quickly is kind of wonderful. It gives the titular actors the opportunity for wide and varied careers before and after their potentially typecasting prison. Personally, I stan for Capaldi but all of them are just dynamite in the role. I see the case for Matt Smith as the most interesting post-Dr., but honestly, it’s Tenant. I think we can all agree on that. (Time to lock down your guesses).

Among my favorites of his is the grim detective series Broadchurch. Playing opposite British National Treasure Olivia Coleman, he is a prickly dick of a detective. In a legendary piece of line delivery, at one point he inflicts on his co-star the savage bon mot “What is the point of you, Millah?” My entire household erupted at that. I am subsequently given to understand that maybe this is a common put down and NOT originally his, but in that transcendent line delivery, he claimed it and gifted it to all of us. “What is the point of you, Millah?” (in a butchered version of Tenant’s accent) has become a common jab in my home, dripping with overriding affection and shared joy not present in the original.

I give you this labored background so you have the full context of my meaning when I say, “What is the point of you, Campfah?” (So, who do I owe money to? No one? No one.)

This is, in its most basic construction, a camping simulator. After a prelude of draining workplace drama you shop, pack, travel, make camp, dither in the out of doors, then come home. There is no plot per se, no dramatic arc, no NPCs of note, just raw camping logistics. My affection for the chutzpah of this conceit may not soar to the heights of Tenant’s tour de force, but it echoes it. Like camping itself, the work presents no artificial dramatic constructs, it simply IS. What you get out of it is what you yourself derive from the environment and mechanics.

So, do you like camping? I do. And here is where I think Campfire falls short of its modest goals. The mechanics of camping are as routine as daily life. Prepare, cook, clean, maintain. The novelty of its rituals are what distinguish it from your daily life. By reducing camping to its mechanics, and not somehow capturing the novelty aspect, a piece of the experience is lost. I’m not here to suggest I know how to do that, only that it was missing.

A deeper disconnect is that, logistics aside, the true charge of out doors experience is reveling in the immersion in nature, from a perspective of being denied it for 95% of our work life. At its best, it can transform mundane routine with fresh vibes and bring joy where at home would be rote. I think the piece’s impulse to contrast the experience with the numbing one of daily work was the right idea. I think it made a misstep in execution though.

With few exceptions, even the most mundane repeated experiences are never EXACTLY the same in real life. Sometimes you struggle with toilet paper, sometimes you are mad at your family while washing your hands, sometimes your dog darts in front of the lawn mower and pulls you up short. IF authors can’t possibly capture this microvariation, and commands like ‘cook food’ inevitably get a single response of text, repeated verbatim every time the command is executed. In most cases, this is a reasonable compromise.

Here though, that compromise really undermines what is going on. When, say fishing, to see repeated text on its mechanics, then one of two stock responses based on success or failure, the experience becomes just as rote as hammering out a weekly project report. Without cues that these experiences are somehow transformed by the novelty of out of doors, they are reduced to the same numbing effect as the prologue’s workday. IF limitations make the joy of camping as joyless and repetitious as work. (To those who claim, “but my work is not joyless, it is my defining bliss!” my response is “screw you guys. You’re doing it wrong.”)

Now, maybe this joylessness is the subversive theme of the piece? Maybe the message is ‘camping is no escape, all life is drudgery.’ Yeah, I don’t buy that. This runs counter to my life experience in general, and camping in specifics. If this is the point of the piece, change my answer to “Thanks, but no.”

I don’t think it is though. I think it legitimately is what it presents as, a minimalist experiment with drama-free simulation. If so, I would recommend putting in work to provide a LOT more varied responses to each action. You’re choice-select, not parser, it’s doable. Try to capture the transformational effect of breaking with work-life and the wonder of nature. It is a fine line, I get it. You need to present scenes and images and not attribute emotions to the player. Let them do that. But it is doable. Then I think the work might realize its goals a lot better. Or at least THIS goal. Certainly, it might elevate it from the mechanical exercise it is currently.

Unrelated, it feels disrespectful not to observe that Jodi Whitaker (another Dr.) also murdered her role in Broadchurch. What a cast.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 15m, complete
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Long before Miss Duckworthy’s, I had concluded that ChoiceScript was probably not my IF thing. Its conventions: RPG-like stat, trait, relationship, knowledge and plot trackers, these are all gaming staples that support a specific infrastructure of turning player choice into math, and math into future choice opportunities. It’s not the mechanics of it that put me off per se, it’s all the initial state setting and tuning that goes with it. MDSMIYP immediately got my (positive) attention by bypassing tedious stat setting questions with four ‘pre-generated’ characters to choose among. While there may be some players that would miss full customization, I am not that guy. Even where there were customizations required, the inclusion of a ‘Surprise Me’ choice was audaciously and subversively winning.

So off we go, on a camping trip with four friends! I really sat up and took notice with the excellently written natural camaraderie and dialogue. A representative sample:

Are you a troll now?"
“Yes,” you whisper. “I’m going to grind your bones to make my bread.”
“I bet I taste wonderful,” she says.

See, I like BOTH those characters now! Economical, smooth, appealing. I want to be spending time with them! After some early background/lore building and drama, our heroes find themselves bound for the titular institution, burdened with newfound magic powers which are unwelcome in the world. Look, you can call it a spoiler if you want, but if you name a story after a hospital, the story’s gonna have sick people. Do the math.

Here’s where I could feel Duckworthy’s slipping away from me. I chewed over details a lot here, because this is the risk with detailed world building. The more details you give the reader trying to build wonder and mystique, the more opportunity for those details to start to rub against each other in unwanted, contradictory, and defeating ways. In ways the reader sees but the narrative doesn’t and it undermines the whole thing. It happened in Potter. It happened in Tolkien. It happens here. It happens here a lot, but let’s start with the tone of the name “Miss Duckworthy’s” in the context of a gulag for teenagers and young adults. There is potential ironic mileage to wring there, but it seems more a wink to the reader than in-world justified. Not the least of which for all the tonal swings in atrocity and wonder that follow.

I really have no interest in poking at ‘holes in fantasy logic,’ but the alternative probably makes me look just as bad. From the early, amiable buddy camping romp, I mentally transitioned to a YA trope model. Just the fact of me putting that out there opens me to (probably fair) charges of dismissing YA stories as somehow lesser because they somehow ‘don’t hold up.’ I prefer to think of them as more worried about teenage relationship, fairness, and wish-fulfillment concerns, with the lore as enabling background but not worth a full sociological deep dive. This is fine. If realism were the only worthwhile metric we wouldn’t HAVE fantasy.

Consuming a work as a YA, lore-light entertainment works best I think when background details are not crucial to the plot, when it builds the crucible then gets out of the way. This lets the story focus on the interpersonal character dynamics maybe a little better. I wish I could say this rescued it for me, but the work continued to lean on lore for its plot engine in a way that ultimately didn’t deliver character moments, and still foregrounded elements that couldn’t bear the weight.

A pretty standard YA trope is of the heroes integrating into the lore, maybe being notably gifted, then rising to overthrow/escape/fix the system. Inherent in that trope is the idea that, somehow, in all the years of Opressive System existence, through all of the Evil Architects, our Heroes nevertheless uniquely challenge then defeat things that purportedly were working seamlessly until they showed up. Be it creative use of new powers, escaping systems engineered to prevent escape, or solving problems studied by countless people before them. When done well, YA will provide reasons WHY this is now true, justifying and earning these victories through uniquely compelling series of events. When done REALLY well, the story buys forgiveness from the reader to outright ignore dissonant things in the interest of forward momentum. I actually welcome opportunities to do this!

I feel the story let me down in two ways here. One, the interpersonal dynamics themselves were backgrounded to the lore. Two characters who were getting close suddenly had concerns that back burnered their emotions, with oddly dissonant episodes of ‘oh yeah, this relationship is still happening.’ Dissonant because the relationship seems absent in their more plotty interactions. Perhaps an authorial compromise to the choice-selecty-ness of it, using common text?

The second way it let me down was pushing a cold plot-hand on me, the player-protagonist. There are two factions in the school/prison. Early on we are exposed to motives in these factions that will evolve throughout the game. This is capably (and sometimes dramatically!) done via early plot events that we are left to digest. At some point, the prose shifts, and instead of open-ended event recitation for the PC to interpret, NPC and even PC motivations are steered in an author-mandated (or at least feels author-mandated) way. The net effect is after I pulled back from engaging the world building, the work shrank the appealing relationship dynamics away from me, then even the protagonist was pushed away. I couldn’t help but think the narrative flow fell victim to the ChoiceScript paradigm, where it couldn’t fully support the choices it let me make.

Ultimately, these forces couldn’t make for an engaging time for me. Even after all that though, I still acknowledge that this may be the smoothest ChoiceScript setup I’ve been treated to. And at least for a while, the character work really pulled me in, until it got overwhelmed by world building and plot. Honestly, that was really the heart of the work, and more interesting to me.

Played: 9/12/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished with 15min restart
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Standard TADS Disclaimer: I am a TADS-stan. Reader, calibrate your assessment of my impartiality as you see fit.

This is a TADS jam about uncovering a deceased relative’s knowledge of a world’s secret history. It is AMBITIOUS in its aims. It is creating a pseudo-history of magic and prophecy in a library of reference materials, that you, the player, will read. It does so many hard things really, really well. It presents the player with multiple shelves of books, each with multiple tomes of interest, many with multiple relevant facts that build on each other in a patchwork narrative of history. And it improbably does it with minimal confusion. What could be a bottomless pit of disambiguation between shelves, books, titles and facts, for me, was instead a deeply responsive hierarchy of unique naming conventions, sly context assumptions and effective mnemonic shorthands. Despite continually referencing and re-referencing these things I almost never got tripped up in the wrong objects or dissonant responses. It honestly is kind of a technical tour de force just managing all those similar but different things.

Ok, I just said I was never tripped up. Crucially, I said by object reference. Tripped up on LORE, well, that is a whole different thing. This is a work whose lore includes country names, religious organization names, Important People names, NPC names, magic spell names - every last one of them made up. They are thankfully not similar to each other, much, but they ARE Fantasy Letter Salad. They are ALSO unforgiving in spelling, meaning when you need reference them (and manage not to confuse a place name for a character name or somesuch), you might type it in three or four times before getting it right. You will find yourself typing endless variations of >ask eyveru about kardevat

The lore itself is interesting enough, as these things go, but remember was dispensed piecemeal through exhaustive combing of maybe two dozen pretend books. Much like real academic study, the charge is in making connections between disconnected facts to drive new conclusions. Did you commit all those vowel-consonants to memory? Do you even remember which book provided which detail when future refresher is needed? No you did not and no you do not. This leaves you in an unenviable position: knowing there are details you need for the next puzzle, but having no idea where to find them again. So now… do you do ANOTHER FULL PASS of the library, hunting out the details you need?

Yes. Yes you do.

At this point, it inescapably starts to resemble homework. So much (re)reading, probably some note-taking to keep things straight, heaven forbid any misspellings on the way. All to tease out byzantine details and connections that you can turn into actionable conclusions! If you are clamoring for an ancient text academia simulator, Lore has you covered. It isn’t opaque, it’s reasonably clear what needs scratching. It’s just a chore to churn through the reference materials to find it. For me, it quickly became apparent that if I wanted anything to write about beyond library science after my two hour playthrough, I better consult the hint system.

This carried me for a while, past the virtual paper cuts of virtual page turning, but then other artifacts started rearing. The early ones were pretty inconsequential - an important NPC in a room described as unoccupied; weird posture changes. Then actual gameplay artifacts came up: being told you don’t know where something is, but being required to point another object at it and succeeding just by >point X at Y Then, there were HINT artifacts, where the game seemingly accepted a puzzle solution, but the hint system seemed ignorant of it and required a DIFFERENT solution.

Until finally, catastrophically, the hint system broke entirely. Going to the well once too often yielded

[Runtime error: string is too long
]

and repeat engagement responded with a cold “Nothing obvious happens.” The safety net had shredded. I was near the end of my timer at that point anyway, but hoo boy that seemed pretty final.

For all that, it would be inaccurate to say the game was a slog. In spite of all the mechanical slogging, there IS a charge in connecting unconnected facts. The puzzle play and emergent lore was entertaining, to a point anyway. The NPCs were kind of fun, and the physical descriptions and magic were cool. There were legitimate Sparks of Joy throughout. I think it may come down to are you a Tolkien reader that immerses in faux history, or are you a noob D&D player that just wants to throw fireballs? The former will find a lot to dig into here, in way more than 2 hrs, and if they successfully bypass the hint system maybe be ok? There are technical accommodations to make with it though, and you probably know yourself enough to decide if the lore is worth it. If not, it may be more… FORBIDDING LORE. Eh? Eh?

Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 2hrs, looks like 1/2 threats defeated but hints disagreed
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/intrusive lookups, bug and lore
Would Play After Comp?: Unlikely, Imma go lob some Magic Missiles

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Choice-making in IF is the secret sauce that differentiates it from just-plain-F. Whether choice-select, parser, or some yet-to-be-invented interactive paradigm, the capability is ‘player/reader, you participate here.’ This is going to have an effect on the player/reader. Whether it is weighing between presented choices, deciding what to try at a cold prompt character, or just navigating the UI to proceed in the story, the player is digesting information and determining action forward. I am belaboring what every IF fan knows because every now and then, an IF work seems to not understand that. No, that’s too harsh. An IF work seems to underESTIMATE that effect.

By requiring player involvement, players become complicit in the story, required by the work to steer it in some fashion. Differentiating IF from straight-F is most effective when the work understands that impulse and integrates it into the narrative. This is not the same as ceding control to the player. The most successful of the thriving ‘choices are illusory’ themed works explicitly reward or punish player involvement in service of an artistic statement. The key is that the successful works directly engage player expectations and confound them in surprising and ultimately satisfying ways. Asking a player to engage a story, then repelling or rejecting their input at every turn is bad. Asking a player to choose from a wealth of unattractive options that are clearly bad is worse. Both push the player away from the story, but the latter requires their active complicity just to move forward. Unless there are other artistic avenues to keep them engaged, the work will simply be rejected.

I am afraid KoX wanders deliberately or errantly into this space. As the titular King, the player is a preening, egotistical, divine-right product of oblivious privilege. Early on, the story asks the player to select among comically bad choices. The humor in these early scenarios is helpful - no one wants to be awful on PURPOSE, but as a joke? Sure, I’ll play along! This does not sustain very long, before dire consequences start presenting themselves and the jokes leave the room. Then it becomes simply escalating insularity and incompetence required by the PLAYER, until the completely foreseeable and unsatisfying conclusion. So, a work asking a player to inhabit a repulsive character, make obviously awful choices, then blames the player for the story’s tragic conclusion. In a no-longer-humorous tone. This underestimates the power of player initiative, betrays it in a way, then delivers an unsurprising, unsatisfying conclusion, seemingly punishing the player for getting involved in the first place.

Maybe I’m too emotional over this, let’s back up. There is a reading that this work is a character study of insular, egotistical political leadership, dangerous in its disconnectedness and their outsized impact on humanity around them. Sure. Thing is, there are no shortage of those in the world. The REAL world. In the US, you can find them in TikTok, the daily news, and in the White House without even trying. More ink has been spilled on these folks than, I dunno, the ink spillage problem. We understand them pretty well everywhere they appear at this point. To engage this character in IF, in this way, the unique opportunity is to give us insights - maybe we are compelled to better understand a character, having been ‘in their shoes.’ Being the choice-maker in this archetype maybe gives us a greater understanding of… no. That’s not happening here. We are just compelled to make bad choices, and only bad choices, with no insights or commentary beyond ‘bad, right?’ I mean, yeah. Right. So why am I doing it? This work cannot answer that question.

I didn’t really find any deep insights here. I recognized the archetype at play, and resented being forced to play it. And was rewarded with unsurprising and predictable results. The work did not seem to figure out a way to leverage interactivity (and the inherent player engagement) to make an artistic statement that leveraged that engagement into something larger. Quite the opposite, it told me things I already knew and despised, then made me do them. This is a very functional definition of Bouncy.

It is almost of secondary notice that the language in the piece was reaching just beyond its grasp. Phrases like “throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities.” don’t really land with me. “The finest legion of the capital garrison postulates itself before you” almost certainly means ‘prostrates’ there. And this just seems like a straight up typo: “ach one a great drumbeat; the drum is made from human skin, and the skin is cracked and chipped from years of impacts” Honestly though, the language is the least of the work’s issues for this reviewer.

Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 20m, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

As sometimes happens when I review things, my brain decides on a reductive label that becomes the lens I view the work through. I actually try NOT to do this, but my ass of a brain often as not has its own ideas. Hildy elicited this: “Magically Blonde.” Now because it is MY brain, I didn’t need explaining that this was an objectively weak reference to Legally Blonde, the Reese Witherspoon comedy vehicle. I fully recognize anyone outside my brain pan would need hand holding. It’s just not my brain’s best effort.

But that reference, reductive though it was, was reflective of the bubbly, reclaiming-stereotypes, confident optimism that was so infectious in the 2001 movie. An IF work could do FAR worse than echoing that inspiration in a Hogwarts-like setting. Like Reese’ Elle Woods character, the titular protagonist is her own thing, seemingly underestimated and dismissed as trivial and out of place in magic study. While Hildy is a little less assured of her path forward, she nevertheless attacks it from her own plucky perspective with no apologies. She is delightful and we are on her side immediately. Early on she is reprimanded with:

“We can’t go around granting the gift of speech to people’s sandwiches, giving every storm cloud a smiley face or exploding monsters from the inside out. It upsets people!”

I mean, those first two are not the same as the last and WHY NOT??? Stop harshing her mellow. From there, a sympathetic professor sets her on a find-yourself quest that sets her into the not-quite-extinct ruins of a fantasy mall. Not sure what else you expected. Follows an intricate series of Zorkian parser puzzles to manipulate objects, learn and use spells, trick NPCs and generally explore the space. This is as competent a puzzly parser as I’ve seen, though it is MUCH bigger than the 2hrs I devoted to it. I was truly engaged throughout its runtime, encountering minimal technical frictions, unique and difficult but tractable puzzles, discoverable lore that seems equal parts color and foreshadowing, and a setting geography ably painted in the players mind to make mapping minimally necessary. The puzzles themselves sparked with odd setups and clever payoffs that are steps above ‘give item X to NPC Y’ shuttling. That is a really long-winded way of saying ‘Engaging.’ It hooked me with its adorable premise, then segued confidently to an old school parser that was, 2hrs in, free of any asterisks, qualifiers and caveats.

So here’s one. If I had a wish it would be that we got to hear/see Hildy’s personality and voice MORE. Once the preamble is over, we leave an NPC-stocked setting of humorous interactions to a relatively barren, lonely one where Hildy goes quiet. When that happens, we lose a bit of the animating personality that was such an effective hook for the first few scenes of the game. The protagonist settles into the more generic ‘faceless player avatar’ of old school parsers. It’s of a piece with its classic vibe and doesn’t jar because of that. But it does downplay its strongest asset. DON’T PUT HILDY IN A BOX! Let her speak!

Anyway, you know me, I always want more. This was still a truly Engaging, Mostly Seamless work of IF, notably polished despite its size. The highest praise I can bestow is that assuming there is no 2hr quality cliff, I will absolutely play to completion after COMP. (Why would I even say that ‘cliff’ thing? I have no reason to doubt it’s gonna be great.)

Hildy quote, at least in spirit: “This is gonna be just like senior year, except for funner!”

Played: 9/10/24
Playtime: 2hr, unfinished, 35/75 points
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Yes, will def finish

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A parser-driven, time loop scenario of interconnected cause and effect to untangle? Yes, please! One whose puzzles are both intuitive, yet lateral-thinking heavy? YES, PLEASE. One that minimizes hand holding and segues from pure puzzle play to underplayed but engaging dramatic beats? YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU, GIMME GIMME GIMME.

This game may represent the quickest ramp from my neutral, “Well, what have we here, Comp entry N+1?” that I start every game with, to “HELLZ yah, this is my jam!” You are quickly introduced to the looping gameplay core, with almost no guideposts to follow. I found this game, for a while, to be just about perfect at leveraging tight scenario descriptions and implicit parser assumptions to strike the wonderful balance between ‘what the hell do I do next?’ and ‘wait, this wild thing I tried actually has a response!’ It is a deep implementation that centers player initiative and for while continues rewarding and rewarding and rewarding it. The mechanism of looping itself is a wonderful ‘wot the hell?’ → ‘oh, I see what you’re doing!’ discovery.

It does seem though, like either that initial impression is not as precisely engineered as it feels, or that time ran out on implementation. At some point we segue from a gleaming clockwork of balanced expectations and rewards to what feels very placeholder-implementation-y. I have no insight to this author’s development process, but it feels like things were attacked in this order:

1. Overarching conceit, mechanisms and plot skeleton conceived, turned into outline
2. Detailed individual puzzle design, step by step through outline
3. Strawman mechanical implementation of entire work
4. Sequential text refinement, including cluing and mood/deduction balancing
5. Profit!

It further feels like this work only got halfway through step 4. Specifically, whereas early puzzles were masterpieces of player information balance, leaving us tantalizingly on the razor’s edge of deduction and head scratching, later puzzles were missing key pieces of info and expectations that made it unplayable without walkthrough.

There is one puzzle that requires NPC mood management, with no feedback on their mood making it impossible to detect, never mind gauge. Another requires you to examine something that is never remarked upon in text (at least text presented in my run through). (Spoiler - click to show)a cab, that unless you read the walkthrough are hearing about for the first time from me. Yet another requires clear spatial information to solve that is woefully under conveyed. Still another requires a bespoke verb that nowhere in the text is it hinted might be needed and/or interesting. The only way past ALL these is via the walkthrough. Which itself was sometimes deceptive, as if referring to an N-1 implementation and not the final release. (Still close enough to close the deal, but certainly leeching a lot of good will in the process.) All of these stand in stark contrast to early puzzles that hummed by comparison. Not helping matters, after some resignation and trying to follow the walkthrough, it appears I entered an unwinnable, endless loop and needed to restart. Though given I didn’t follow the walkthrough from the start, possible there was some state issue the walkthrough did not anticipate.

If I had to grade each of those above development steps, which, I’m not your teacher but why not? I would grade 1-B+; 2-A+++; 3-B; 4-D. The puzzle and scenario design just felt top notch to me, flush with promise of a truly engaging game. It just felt let down by final polish where later puzzles were noticeably clunkier to work than the early ones, and purely for reasons of player communication, not inherent design. You know what solves that though? More Polish!

Unfortunately, that late downgrade in polish really undid a lot of the early work’s promise. If I may borrow a conceit from my Spring Thing reviews…
Gimme the Wheel - what I would do next if it were my project: I would attack the last half and double and triple revise the text to produce the same level of finesse as the first half of the game. The bones here are as good as I’ve seen, and the first half SHOWS how capably things could be balanced. Traffic 2.0 could be something special.

Played: 9/10/24
Playtime: 1.25hr; incarcerated, looped, restarted following walkthrough
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy->Mechanical/Notably Intrusive puzzle cluing
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A click-select exploration adventure, I’m going to say with echoes of parser DNA, but well short of a true Twinesformer. You are a petty crook doing ‘one last job’ when it goes horribly awry. As you explore the makeshift prison you find yourself in, you must assemble clues to escape. Along the way, flashbacks fill in the gaps in your relationship and heist setup that inform both the situation, and your finale options. Feels pretty familiar, summarized like that, no?

The mood of the piece is its greatest strength. The graphical layout conspires with photographic prompts to create a legitimately creepy, if not altogether novel, prison to explore. There is a soundtrack that further enhances the proceedings nicely, including the wonderful touch of obscured dialogue that feels just OFF in a very evocative way. There are graphical flourishes cuing different flashbacks and plot developments that are simple enough, but super effective and underutilized as a authoring tool across similar IF. I found the marriage of form and function really well done here. The piece has the chutzpah to engage the dreaded timed text, but between its terseness and delivery speed is far less onerous than these things can be. I am likely in the minority on this, but do think its employment here enhanced more than detracted (at least on first play).

The fetch quest gameplay is pretty straightforward. The game cues its puzzles strongly, both in text, and in the relative terseness of its prose which brings details to fore in high relief, practically neon-lit. Even with its mostly puzzle-driven geography, the work still makes time for creepy and offputting details, which was a nice, welcome touch. But the geography was pretty spare and the chrome could not conceal what was at core pretty mechanical circling until closure.

The story, similarly, was pretty stripped down and functional. The beats are there, but none escape the timeworn tropes they are inspired from. Sure, there is some frisson to the setup of (Spoiler - click to show)Coen Brothers present SAW but other than the fact of it, doesn’t achieve escape velocity. It’s worth remembering that petty criminals are not fire fighters. They don’t AUTOMATICALLY get audience sympathy, it has to be earned. (Wild how twenty-five years ago I might have said ‘cops’ but boy has their stock fallen. I think they are the Intel of professions.) Sense of humor, weirdness, comical venality, tragic backstory, there are lots of effective tools out there at the prospective author’s disposal to finesse sympathy. I mean the Coen Bros ouvre’ is practically an encyclopedia of such tools. None were really employed here, and in IF where you ARE the protag, it is especially critical to drive player engagement.

Short all those things, I’m afraid I found the character and plot beats as mechanical as the puzzles. I do think this effort has a lot going for it, and look forward to seeing more from these authors, especially if they continue to integrate these effective graphical and aural flourishes in their work.

Played: 9/9/24
Playtime: 20min, 4 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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