Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This one crawled into my head a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

TPEEP1.


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

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

TPEEP1.

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

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

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

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

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


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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

I love how broad the IF domain is, and in turn how foolish I was to think a two-column criteria could possibly cover that breadth. Here is the latest in my frequent review sub-series “What Do I Do With This?” I mean I am just jumping back into IF after 20+ years, cut me some slack! My parents didn’t teach ME to swim by throwing me in the deep end!

This is an experimental work, showcasing the (modern author's) "Stateful Narration" ideas. “Stateful Narration.” I, ah, ok so… hmm. Just play it then? Do I need to be checked out on the equipment first? Am I qualified to run this thing, let alone critically evaluate it? I infer this is an exercise in giving the reader ability to interject feelings and interpretations that the text will conform to naturally, but not fundamentally branch the narrative? That seemed to be my experience with it anyway. There were maybe 4 interactive entry points in the text. One felt pretty seamless, the other two pretty I guess ineffectual? The text effectively characterized my input as “faking it for my friends” which is legit narratively but felt too easy. The last one I think confounded the parser. I wasn’t trying to do that, but I wasn’t not either. I used the word ‘giddy’ and the text said “Who am I kidding? I’m very nervous. That’s why I’m digging into my fingers…” Feels like giddy connotes some level of nervous energy that compromised the answer? I dunno man, I get that this was a unique experimentation slash proof of concept, I hope the author is getting useful data out of this! Let me retreat to something I’m more comfortable with, how’d the narrative go?

My most memorable exposure to mixing Great Author works with contemporary augmentation was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. My overriding impression there was that the original work was SO much better written than the new stuff. Notwithstanding the author’s bold attempt to match voice, it was nevertheless painfully obvious where the stitch lines were. LT instead takes the tack of treating the original text AS original text, then putting narrative around it that resonates with the story. It seems unfair to engage the Chekov portion of the narrative, so I’ll just focus on the contemporary wrapper.

It was good! It mirrored and contrasted Chekov’s stream of consciousness exploration in a fun way, but specific to our modern characters. The interactivity didn’t impose much on that path, and it built to a minor climax and amusing denouement. Even discounting Chekov, there were Sparks of Joy in the gentle mirroring. 3 out of 4 interactive instances were pretty ok, that’s a ‘C’ I guess? So Notably Intrusive? I’m pot committed to this criteria by now, so I guess that’s where I land, but hard to believe rating this thing is even close to the point of it.

Also, Chekov was a pretty good writer, huh?


Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 15min, twice
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? I mean I guess I would if my data is helping.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

And now for my first review sub-sub-series of my review sub-series “What Do I Do With This?” This review sub-sub-series is entitled “What in the Name of a Gentle and Loving God Do I Do With This, It’s Full of Stars, the Horror, the Horror, Rosebud.”

It opens on an 80’s eight-bit graphics rendition of a snowbound station of some sort, with chunky 80’s graphics font. It’s kind of endearing, but quickly becomes surreal, depending on the branch taken.

My first playthrough, I got a quick one room drama of sex and violence over whether one character can leave another. Motivations were only loosely sketched, it was more about the physicality of the interactions. There was little investment in anything going on, Mechanical at best. But oh, that lonely, isolated building took on a Lynchian aspect as the actions described behind the closed door were fleshy and concussive. The impassive snowy facade seemed strained, somehow barely holding its bland, 8-bit face against the raw passions and furies within.

My second playthrough, boy did I step through the looking glass. Making a different choice on how to ‘restrain’ the second character, led to what was likely (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist slowly dying of exposure. This playthrough was so much longer. No less mechanical, mind, but infinitely weirder. There are choices to make, and lots of text to read, but to call it stream of consciousness is like calling Hurricane Ida a ‘brisk blow.’ This was a deluge of consciousness, rapid fire word play, and mental white noise. (Spoiler - click to show)Probably all in the protagonists’ mind as their brain freezes them to death?

Y’know how most people who smoke pot are giggly and mellow, but there’s always that one person who gets super uncomfortable, a little paranoid, and loses all patience with the giggly mellow people around them? I felt like I was that poor buzzkill dude that tried to smoke in good faith and peer pressure, but just totally skunked it for everyone. NO, I CAN’T TASTE COLORS, WHY ARE YOU ALL LAUGHING SO SHRILL??

It didn’t work for me as poetry, as paradox, as surrealism, as Dada, it just didn’t work. In fact it Bounced me so hard I started having a mild panic attack mid-game trying to figure out how I was going to deal with this in a review. I’M STILL WORKING THAT OUT! And that whole time I’m flailing through that crisis of confidence? That damned 8-bit snowbound station is staring at me with its single darkened-window eye (weirdly not the door or lit window), scornfully bemused by both my and the protagonist’s shared sufferings. It just loomed there, quietly displaying its imperviousness to our pain, rather than invite us back inside.

I played it twice more, but at that point, I think I had seen the extremes and these felt … limper? There was another violent episode, and a 4th wall breaking unwinding-music-box kind of ending, but neither had the power of the first two. The station was just a picture. Yeah, this one Bounced me hard. That said, it wedded some truly bonkers narrative experiments that had no business being together into a tottering Frankenstein of mismatched parts. Most especially that 8-bit picture. The result was really singular. It certainly provoked a reaction from me.
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Played: 11/2/22
Playtime: 15min, 4 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, why would I do that to myself?

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

10 word summary: “Your community doesn’t like you for superficial reasons, run away!”

This is a simple, short game. You give your character a name and favorite color(?) which are dutifully repeated back to you later in the text but don’t seem to serve any narrative purpose. This kind of thing is often used to nudge the player to invest in the protagonist, but does it work? Maybe in the early days of IF, but nowadays with the customization available in video games the bar is much higher than two traits, one of which is any random string of characters. Beyond our input, the only additional character fact we are given is the reason for their self-imposed exile so notwithstanding customization, the protagonist ends up being a bit of a blank slate.

The game has a pleasant presentation - a moody forest scene with an appropriate wildlife sonic backdrop. That kind of worked, but the author set a challenge for themself by using artwork dark on the left and light on the right. Meaning the choice of overlaid text color has to be read across the entire screen. The right side of the screen was notably harder to read than the left. They also included a health/status box that unfortunately was too small for the information it wanted to hold! Text often disappeared beneath box boundaries making its utility questionable.

There were writing issues throughout the piece. Descriptions that only kind of worked like “trees bend to create a path of sunshine” Consecutive sentences that start with the word ‘however.’ Descriptions that were insufficient to understand the stakes like “room covered in glass” which from context we later realize should have been “room covered in glass shards.” Those are notably different mental images! There are even descriptions that don’t parse without way too much work like “Luckily the metal was sharp to an entrance punched into this strange metal wreckage.” Proof reader feedback could have addressed a lot of this.

Gameplay was fairly limited, and flouted convention in a key way that made it harder. It was a linear affair first playthrough, the only options were to press forward and every now and then go back. You had health and stamina stats, but were never presented with an option to manage them so just for tension then? However, linearity is not uncommon in IF, but that choice really puts all the Engagement burden on the text and narrative. However here between the writing, the narrow goal (and background) which was crying for but never received explication, and the extreme brevity there wasn’t much opportunity to elevate the forest/site exploration quest. (See, you thought I was being too nitpicky. Dual use of ‘however’ is offputting, right?)

Then there was a wild design choice. After the first runthrough, I was like “I didn’t get to make any choices, dafug?” So next runthrough, I took the only alternate choices the game made available, to go BACK in certain spots. In most IF, if you start in Room A and go north, the assumption is south from Room B gets you back to A. “Ho, ho! Not so fast!” saysTtFwtB. Going back unlocks new paths - not only does it take you in a new direction, there is actually no way to retrace your steps! Thematically doesn’t seem to have any justification (unless its saying ‘you can’t go home again’ just saying it super super low key) and a weird choice when “Left and Right” were still available. When you go back, a few other paths open up to you, and those are marginally less linear. They are some consequential choices that aren’t completely arbitrary, but not super well laid out either. Only one path seemed to offer one choice to manage your health/stamina. And two of them felt kind of samey: find cabin, interact with female head of household.

It was light and quick, but didn’t provide enough meat to really chew into. It’s a reasonable framework to layer a deeper narrative and more fleshed out gameplay onto. Never breached beyond Mechanical for me, unless Head Scratching over Design Choices counts.


Played: 11/7/22
Playtime: 15min, 2 survived, 1 died
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

This work feels more incomplete than the ones I’ve reviewed to date. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but it feels like the work of someone at the front end of their authorship. There are gaps kind of across the board: in concept, narrative, use of interactivity and coding. Everyone that writes has been here, where ideas are clamoring to get out, but the tools are still blunt and clumsy. Using them is the only way to hone!

Conceptually, the setting is an interesting (fuedal?) Japanese, military magic/mutant exploitation jam. Depending on choices, you get more or less of the background and all of it is loosely sketched. The looseness is not a problem per se. Sometimes you accomplish more with detailed hints that allow the reader to do some mental lifting to fill in the gaps. The danger is that if the reader lifts TOO much, and you subsequently contradict their mental image it is jarring. The trick is knowing where to proscribe and where to sketch. For me, the use of swords and historical Japanese vocabulary crashed in my head once guns were mentioned (but never employed?) Or when a prominent character’s name was revealed as (Spoiler - click to show)“Charlie.”

Narratively, the protagonist is initially presented as resisting the call, only to then acquiesce. Of course, this Campbellian Construct is deeply ingrained in popular storytelling. But it isn’t free. In particular, the Refusal is the least interesting part of the Journey and really requires some selling by the author. I mean, we WANT the adventure. The longer and less convincingly the protagonist resists, the more the reader rejects them. Conversely, if their acceptance does not organically refute this refusal, the character comes across as petulant which is not endearing either. There are other unsatisfying narrative choices, like the protagonist having exactly the tools needed in the moment, without foreshadowing or establishing shots. Again, tone could help sell this, but not here.

Interactivity is all but missing. I think there is exactly one narratively important choice the player can make, and one of the alternatives is unattractive and unsatisfying. Instead there are a series of choices presented that at best provide more backstory and at worst have no impact on the narrative at all. Now there are a lot of ways to use interactivity: to align the reader with protagonist, to give the player agency in the narrative, to provide mental and emotional puzzles to grapple with. None of these are at play here. It devolves to page turning, which effectively shines a brighter light on the Concept and Narrative.

Technically, there is a bug where one potentially impactful decision puts the game is a stuck state without resolution. (Spoiler - click to show)If you attempt to buy a slave (to save their life presumedly), you get stuck on a page with a “markup contains mistake, need usable code right of =” error. Elsewhere, a potential choice seems unimplemented and stalls until you make a different choice. With a game this small and linear, it is hard to understand how playtesting the entire decision tree was not done before release.

I honor the ambition of the effort. As a player, this is not engaging, but as a first step there is plenty to learn from and build on.


Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 15 minutes, multiple playthroughs, 2 endings, 1 game ending bug
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

I sometimes forget about pure puzzle IFs. I do a range of paper puzzles, but tend to be biased to think of IF as narrative, and so scratch different itches. Which is kind of wild, because ‘classic’ IF are so much more puzzle than narrative. Is the narrative framework, however rich or thin, really that important to the experience? Intellectually, shouldn’t have to be, but emotionally I guess it is for me. We are a species of storytellers and some of our most popular media suggests the stories don’t need to be that sophisticated or even novel. Sick burn, culture!

Now, I do like logic puzzles, but the ones that engage me are ones that jump straight to application of deduction and/or knowledge. It is a fair point that no-rules puzzles do in fact require this, they just require the additional prerequisite step of discovering the rules as you go. Puzzles don’t need frameworks of wordplay, trivia knowledge, spatial cues. Nor do they demand hint systems, either buried in clues and prompts or to the side as a reference for the stuck. Cure for cancer is famously a puzzle with no clues, prompts or hint system.

So what does this have to do with Tower? The game is a no clues/no rules/no hints puzzle. You need to divine the rules from literally nothing but experimentation. Like cancer research! It also seems to change its rules with every level (of the tower, presumedly?) It seems to deliberately provide no fail feedback other than the fact of the fail, meaning it becomes a guess-the-verb, guess-the-rules exercise. Your enjoyment will depend directly on 1) how energizing you find that sort of thing and 2) how mentally nimble you are to not drive into a mental cul-de-sac of ‘no idea what’s left to try.’

I can’t tell if the game is buggy or just obstinate in that it doesn’t always give you immediate feedback even with success. For review purposes, I am treating both those cases as Bug - either coding or psychological. In an early notable instance I left a room where I tried something to no apparent success, only to return later and see, “Wow, I guess it did work after all.” Objects have names you recognize, but don’t really behave like their real world counterparts. Autonomous objects disappear from your sight, rather than move through observable space. Reasonably expected functions of everyday objects don’t work. To the point where their names are just familiar sequences of letters whose behavior is its own puzzle. Continued failure is frustrating, and achieving brute force solutions to seemingly arbitrary puzzles provides more “sure, I guess” than cathartic rush.

If opaque, experimentation-type puzzles are your jam I would recommend you join the fight against cancer! If your schedule doesn’t allow that, Tower is for you. For me, a narrative justification would be one way to increase engagement. Medical research isn’t motivated by the super-opaque trial-and-error puzzle solving. Its getting the cure! Narratively, maybe it could be getting the treasure. Or freedom! Love Interest! Magical Rune that apocalyptically eliminates selfishness from the range of human behavior! Another way would be to craft clues/hints/experiment feedback to learn more than simple fact of success-or-fail with each experiment. Without either of those, its too Mechanical an exercise for me.


Played: 10/11/22
Playtime: 1.75hrs, 3 floors complete.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? Doubtful, not my kind of puzzle

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

Ah, the classic ‘adrift in space with a suspect AI.’ In my head, I kept calling it ‘HAL.’ I don’t mean that in a reductive way, it is a welcome setting, skillfully rendered. The game shares a lot of DNA with classic parser based IF. There is a map to navigate, items to find and manipulate, puzzles to solve to unlock rooms or achieve other progress. All if this rendered in wry text that spikes to sarcastic or sentimental without being jarring. All in all, nicely textured, narratively speaking.

Graphically, I think I expected more. Early on, the white-on-black presentation is very evocative, when the vastness of black space surrounds you, or when your spaceship is darkened. The glowing blue and green screens pop against this background, and their respective fonts nicely convey different variation of machine interface. I was vaguely disappointed when the lights came on, but the interface didn’t change, making me wonder if I was giving too much credit to the graphical presentation? I still like those terminal screens though.

The protagonist is kind of a minimally rendered space-rogue type that at least so far is an amusing vessel for the player to amble around in. What little opportunity you have for deeper character glimpses are nicely done, really loose sketches that allow you to mentally flesh out your host without derailing the story. Same for the tonal choices in how you interface with your AI partner. Mostly though, its about navigating this puzzle-filled-ship.

I go back and forth on the Twine interface for this game. On the one hand, having highlighted text to navigate and manipulate nicely avoids any hunt-the-noun exercise. It does box you in in a somewhat restrictive framework. Ultimately, I think the writing and design saves it here. While theoretically, highlighted choices could break mimesis by channeling the player in a constricted way, there are enough options anticipated, and enough shiny things to pursue that it never started to chafe. The text is also very clever in sprinkling hints and nudges that your path usually feels organic and not forced, nevermind the limited boxes available to click. Most successful IF must succeed at this (parser or not), and ALWTTNS does.

The object interface was less successful for me, and boy is this a petty complaint. As the game goes on, your inventory expands, but does so one line per item. Meaning if your screen is wider than high (which I presume most are), you have a scrolling list of items with huge black real estate on the right of the screen doing nothing. I don’t know boo about Twine, but if it were possible to put all inventory items in multiple columns - fill the screen and eliminate scrolling I would have much preferred that.

Another petty gripe: the Notes screen captures information it would be tedious to look up separately and acts as a soft hint system. Great idea. Could it have been its own option, and not buried in the scrolling inventory? And also, either quietly drop or separate notes once no longer needed, because you have completed a relevant task? As the notes grew longer, it got more intrusive to skim the list to find what you need, and increasingly jammed with notes I (presumedly) didn’t need any more.

These are petty gripes, I own this. I also never presented myself as above pettiness. Of course in the end this did not block my Engagement. I had a really good time bouncing around the puzzle space with some nicely intuitive and occasionally challenging posers. The central mystery of just how sus is HAL is clicking along at a rewarding pace. Its posed as a 2hr playtime, so maybe I’m getting close to the end? On the one hand I hope not, but on the other I’ve liked the pace of revelations and plot so far and wouldn’t want it to draw out for its own sake. I have no reason to doubt the author has a firm grasp on the length and pace of the story and I’m here for it.


Played: 10/16/22
Playtime: 2hr, incomplete, not stuck
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Likely, though I am developing a backlog…

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

I was really drawn to the conceit of this thing - a merging of historical murder mystery (the FIRST murder!) and alchemical deduction. All wrapped in a classic parser IF milieu. There were a few minor technical and text glitches 2 hrs in: a firepit is not recognized for some actions, while the stones that compose it are; the memory mechanism which I’ll touch on later sometimes lags the player’s knowledge; word choice is occasionally intrusive like a beam that “dissects” the opening of a well when 'bisect' was right there… there’s moments like that throughout.

Those are so minor though I really only included them to show how even handed I am as a reviewer. I really dug this entry. The setup is economical and efficient. In particular, it felt very modern-video-gamey in that it dealt out key alchemical concepts and equipment slowly and interactively, effectively training the player in their use which is crucial to the gameplay. I mean this as a compliment, it was smoothly and effectively done. Too, the map unfolds rather deliberately. Comfortingly linear at first while you are busy learning alchemy, then opening up as you have more confidence in the world and environs.

The mystery solving is also very satisfying. Mystery games have an uneasy tension to resolve: if the player is insufficiently clever, the mystery could go unsolved and that is the opposite of fun. Conversely, if the clues are presented under bright spotlights the mystery solving is unsatisfying as the player feels no agency in the solution. The alchemy mechanism is kind of brilliant in that it integrates ‘find the ingredients’ classic IF puzzles with ‘if A, then not B, and C lives in a red house’ deduction problems. This very much puts the player in the driver’s seat of crimebusting while nicely avoiding “if only I’d thought to ask the maid about the missing dog collar” endings.

The setting itself is also a treat - fleshing out 4 cipheric biblical figures into more lived-in humans. Their characters are well thought out, extrapolated from the relatively little established about them in a satisfying way (so far). The puzzles have so far been tractable and engaging. In general, great time and energy has gone into rendering nearly the entire world as examinable or look-up-able(?) which really makes the game a complete experience. Even the ‘can’t do that’ text often feels like an extension of the world and not an arbitrary boundary the game has imposed. Notwithstanding my obligatory quibbles above it is a nicely polished experience with narrative heft. Dare I say immersive?

And I haven’t yet mentioned the crucial player aids: there is a MEMORIES command which helpfully lists important steps completed, and others not yet complete. As the game opens up it would be easy to lose track of these. This is a welcome and oft-typed command. There is a RECALL command which replays key scenes should you not immediately memorize them, which you won’t. There is the wonderful implementation of your how-big-is-this-book-exactly? encyclopedia the Pharmakon. A stunning array of entries are available, so far avoiding the ‘book is suspiciously narrow as a resource’ artifact. These three mechanisms are deftly woven into the mystery and gameplay such that they become as second nature as the alchemy itself. A central gameplay function, the alchemy mechanism feels to me like the exact sweet spot of complexity between too-trivial-to-justify-the-typing and unnecessarily-baroque. Collectively, these mechanisms put enough spin on the traditional IF formula that it feels fresh. You’re doing chemistry and solving mystery!


Played: 10/19/22
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? You can't stop me.

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