Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

Where is the line between evaluating a work on its intrinsic merits, and in the context of its ongoing franchise? I don’t mean in the sense of specific observations about a work - those are not so difficult to categorize, usually. I mean in the sense of reviewer responsibility? Is it more dishonest to pretend the work has no prior art that informs a player’s experience? Or to dote on that prior art, shortchanging the merits of individual entries? Is it even possible to talk about, say Buffy the Vampire Slayer and NOT contrast seasons 3 and 6?

“Reviewer,” you say, “surely you can do BOTH?” To which I say, “Well, I don’t see you in my Patreon Supporters feed, do I?” It feels like this abbreviated IFCOMP25 review cycle of mine has thrown this question into high relief. Fully 5/10 of the works I chose to review are part of an ongoing series - chosen in part BECAUSE of their lineage and my engagement with them. This is a naturally human impulse, right? To want to reengage something that previously delighted you? It’s not a failure of imagination or discipline on my part? …Right?

As a standalone parser game, Phobos is squarely in the puzzle tradition of IF. A series of code-locked doors that gate plot revelations and objects useful in future puzzles. All to foil a plot to keep an errant moon from being propelled at inhabited Mars like a cosmic cue ball. Just another day at work for Galaxy Jones! I found the puzzles (alien language code breaking and math tricks) to be a series of really satisfying variations on a theme, that built in complexity in a very natural way. It was rare that I was unsure what to try next - the codes rewarded experimentation and lateral thinking. A particular fave was one that incorporated background environment noise into its solution.

Additionally, you possess a gimcrack that slowly translates that alien language, metering out background revelations in a very satisfying and well-paced way. There was one moment that brought an audible gasp from me, when that omnipresent voiceover was revealed to be (Spoiler - click to show)a countdown!. It was a great moment of tension amidst as capable and tight a collection of parser puzzles as I’ve seen in a while, rewarding attention to environment and background lore in equal measure.

There was another gasp elicited from me during gameplay. In the single greatest moment(s) of the previous game, perhaps in all of IF 2023, the ascii messages that accompanied point-earning accomplishments was a shot of pure joy, doing so much to set the tone of the first work. I knew it was coming, I had seen the preview screenshots, yet it still thrilled me when it showed up!

The second time it showed up, I knew I would be unable to complete this review without leaning on comparison. See, the prior work was a high speed pulp adventure. GJ was an action hero of infinite resourcefulness. In my memory, every instance of point earning was through derring-do and unapologetic two-fisted action. That reward text underlined and emphasized her action hero bona fides, announcing that YES! Galaxy Jones is DOING HER THING!

This entry is a more deliberative puzzle solver. Not puzzles couched as action setpieces, or use-objects-in-weird-way gymnastics. Actual logic, code-breaking problems. Now OF COURSE GJ can handle those. It’s just, I wasn’t quite prepared for her to EXCLUSIVELY handle those. Fully two thirds of my awarded points were code breaking. It made for an odd dynamic. The puzzles were MORE engaging and much more tightly crafted. But narratively it felt neutered compared to the messy, propulsive heart of the first episode. The puzzle solving banner is less a full-throated celebration of our protagonist, as it is a marker of task accomplishment. I kinda loved the former more?

Of a piece is the action-based climax. It built on a surprisingly complex bit of lore, leaning on empathy and tragedy in a very sophisticated (the more impressive for its brevity and conciseness) way. Which is to say, NOT the black and white of pulp adventures. This was very well done! This was also ever so slightly at odds with the tone of its predecessor. I did a quick mental exercise. What if I encountered these two in reverse order? Would my opinion of either of them change?

I don’t think so. I liked each of these for their disparate charms and strengths. Both easily outpaced any glitches or implementation issues (which were fewer here, though still occasional). I’m just a little asea because I can’t quite fit them together. Nor can I, much as I feel like it’s probably my reviewer obligation to try, RESIST DOING SO. It feels like that is an abuse of the series-review tension? A pretty damning failure of my imagination on my part.

Played: 11/10/25
Playtime: 1.25hr, score 9/11 with three deliberately engaged obvious death endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless, totally unfair penalty point for inheritance dissonance
Would Play After Comp?: I do feel like I will be revisiting both of these in the years to come.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

If you are here for a dispassionate, critical deconstruction of this work and series, boy do I have bad news for you. At this point, the third entry in this ongoing candy-detective series, I am so thoroughly in the bag that I might as well be gift wrapped. My history with this series is unabashed appreciation for the goofy, completely committed premise of a candy-based noir world. Every over the top candy pun is another brick (sugar cube?) in this towering edible edifice, and I just gobble it up like a day-after trick-or-treater. This work seems to have a bottomless supply of witty candy iterations (Wax Lips a personal fave this time), and I am here for it.

My problem with this series has always been the gameplay, not the premise or writing. This iteration made a few key improvements on that front that were much appreciated. First, it introduced a subtle but very welcome tunable noun highlighting feature, that emphasized interesting nouns to focus the player on relevant words. This subtle textual tweaking goes miles to make things player friendly in a non-intrusive way.

Even better, there is a new paradigm to the detective work. Rather than navigating a completely open ended setup of interviews and evidence gathering, there is a focusing structure at play. Find artifacts that directly speak to motive and culpability, then use those to elicit a confession. One without the other is just too deniable to hold water. These two developments feel like a deliberate maturing and refining of the series, a welcome evolution, blunting the more challenging portions present in the previous entries.

Blunting, but not eliminating. At several points, I still fell into the trap of knowing what the game wanted to happen, but being unable to get the game to understand my efforts. In one particularly egregious instance, the game could not progress until I committed an act that, even in the logic of Candyland, felt (Spoiler - click to show)jarringly cannibalistic. At other points, I envisioned multiple alternate solutions to puzzles that were rejected for unconvincing reasons. Honestly, notwithstanding the VERY WELCOME gameplay adjustments mentioned above, I floundered a few times with puzzle solutions that did not satisfy once revealed. If you happen to encounter this review before the walkthrough or hints are available, here are few FULL ON SPOILERS: (Spoiler - click to show)To stop the motorcycle, you must >EAT RED. To block the confessional you must >INSERT BAR. To get the keys (after retrieving TAFFY and SKEWER), you must >LICK TAFFY to get it sticky enough. The latter was particularly vexing as a completely different action was necessary to accomplish essentially a similar effect elsewhere. Nor, despite being surrounded by a WORLD OF CANDY that included soda rivers, syrup rain(!) and nougat everywhere, was there any other way to make something sticky.

Here’s the thing though. These kinds of opaque gameplay artifacts have been part of the series from day 1. If you enjoy this series as much as I do, you have already made your peace to continue to play in this wonderfully goofy, fun space. Cost of doing business in Sugar City, cupcake. It’s a cost I was ALREADY glad to pay, but now you have refined gameplay with its new soft prompts and more satisfying mystery structure? Are these my membership bonuses? MHIP I guess, cause I was already a satisfied customer!

Yeah, I was fully Engaged in this third visit to Sugar City. Though it did not completely address the gameplay glitches that characterize the series, it absolutely DID add gameplay elements that elevated the mystery solving. This is a case where the cold math of my rubric does not actually reflect the glee of playing it. It also very ably integrated settings and characters from previous entries in a way that was more organic and satisfying than “Hey, remember this?” This entry is the most enjoyable yet. <your pun here, about how sweet that is!>

Played: 11/9/25
Playtime: 2.25hrs, two false accusations (one correct but premature), solved
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Notable implementation gaps.
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

Games about games. Is there anything more inbred navel-gazing? (JOKE SETUP: this will pay off in 2027/28. Oh you will laugh so hard when it does!) It’s not really surprising why these show up here is it? IF was arguably among the FIRST of computer games. Anyone conversant with IF, especially golden age IF, has a good chance of having affinity for early computer gaming as they all evolved simultaneously. Small wonder a healthy subgenre of game/gaming reflection has sprouted in IF. Have we been treated to one this playful yet? I don’t know that I have.

You are a co-conspirator in a PS1-era industrial espionage/heist of real-life maverick developer Kenji Eno. Its structure is reminiscent of this spring’s Elaine Marley and the Ghost Ship - bouncing back and forth between link select gameplay and historical explorations. I don’t mean to lessen either game by comparing them - both are fully their own thing that just seem to bear similar structure and resonant preoccupations. This is pure surface level. The playing of KOATGD (cottage?) is light, breezy, and fun. Its link-select architecture provides soft guidance into puzzle play that is just short of lawn mowering. It is not insanely difficult, but neither is it trivial, and requires some engagement with its parser-IF informed puzzles. These puzzles? Wrangling a turtle of inconceivable dexterity as it wanders about the place, distracting Eno from giving you the McGuffin you need.

A framework like this can be sturdy when in strong hands, which it very much is here. The back and forth saves the historical explorations from wall-of-text belaboring. The imaginative and playful gameplay is dispensed in tight little bursts of lateral thinking, energizing the player for the next cycle. The fact that the two do not (really) inform or enhance each other in any meaningful way does not mean they don’t PACE the story very well. It never drags or confounds, the back and forth makes for some steady momentum.

It helps that Eno is a very compelling historical figure, the legend of him as interesting as the facts. It also helps that the more IF-y gameplay skews from wryly humorous to laugh-out-loud fun. Not least of which as the nature of the protagonist and his partner become increasingly clear, then doubled- and tripled-down upon. This is not a case of a sucker punch plot twist so much as an increasingly urgent “This is what this is, right?” “This has GOT to be what this is.” “OMG IT TOTALLY IS!!”

This is a colloidal suspension of a work: two incompatible substances entwined and swirled with each other but never actually mixing together or transforming. Yet that combination is STILL compelling for all its disuniformity! In the end, it leans increasingly on its humorous conceits through a final climax and plot twist. At the very end we get a convergence of sorts, the climax drawing from both elements. This was an expertly paced combination of light, fun gameplay shot through with sly humor, and deeply interesting gaming history. Paying off interest in both, even though most of its runtime was a pendulum swing from one side to the other.

I should mention that there is an extended denouement, which brings in even MORE left field tangential references, completely justified by its setup, but every bit as unrelated as the two major parts that preceded it. Look, KOATGD is not a tight thematic weaving of disparate parts informing each other. It’s an unapologetic amalgam of disparate elements whose main interplay is pacing and cheap laughs. And it is a BLAST to play.

Played: 11/7/25
Playtime: 45m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

This series has sunk into my brain a bit. The first entry I found to be challenging - unconvincing character and plot beats scrambled with DEEEPLY convincing character and plot beats, and undergirded with a metaphor deployment of unqualified genius. The second, a lighter, stagey script-like affair of similar mix, that ended on a left field plot beat that demanded followup.

This is not that followup. This, my third entry here, is yet again a shift in gears. This is a meta-textual exploration of grief, when the loss is of an actively harmful relationship. It drafts off the most powerful elements of the first work, but is resolutely its own story. Great swaths of world building are ignored here, in favor of third wall playfulness and memoir-fiction line blurring. In this emerging umbrella of a series my appreciation grows with each new entry. Each one carves out unique gameplay and preoccupations, developing its own vibe in a beautifully asymmetric patchwork. It is also true, though, that I find every one a mix of wonderful and confounding elements.

HoG is structured as a time loopy game - a fraught one-time memorial service prologue followed by loops of therapeutic reflection and support from the friend group. Except the time loopiness of it is not really in-world time looping, it is explicitly NARRATIVE looping. You and your friends have full memory of every loop. There is no reason it had to be a loop - it could have been a series of phone calls in real, one-way running time. No, the Loop was explicitly the player’s choice to keep digging v giving up at safe but superficial understanding. Plumbing the same ground for more meaning. That was cool. We come to an ending, complete with credits, only to be prompted by the narrator to keep digging, to continue exploring the myriad dimensions of pain and connection.

Each iteration, the narrator gently cajoles us to not settle for a single, or even a few self-aggrandizing ‘endings.’ It is explicitly saying “Sure that’s part of it, but if you stop now, you won’t have the full picture and are probably missing some important artifacts.” Its choice architecture reinforces this in a wonderful way - the player will bias towards explorations they are more comfortable with, leaving increasingly uncomfortable options to loom larger the closer we get to finale. We are enjoined to not stop playing until we have unearthed the full truth, most especially the least flattering aspects and artifacts of years of mental abuse. Thematically this was a creative use of format for a very specific effect, recasting its artificiality as deliberate and evocative. It is all very intriguing, but also somewhat distancing? The more we loop, the closer the narrator and protagonist become - acknowledging the artificiality of the game format, the limits and power of fictionalized emotion, and even the reader/player’s engagement. By continually highlighting the various identity disconnects it seems to reframe any emerging empathy as at least partially artificial. This disconnect colored every iteration, increasingly so as we neared the end. It is a fascinating approach of deliberately challenging complexity, plumbing the limits of the medium.

There was an even bigger narrative confrontation, though. See the whole thing is built on (Spoiler - click to show)eating your dead Mom’s ashes. The work announces this before any serious emotional excavation has started. How are we supposed to react to this with anything but revulsion? It was such a stark, in-your-face choice. It back footed me so hard, every subsequent character and dramatic moment was overshadowed by its visceral punch. Ultimately, it felt very much of a kind with the first in the series: unconvincing and offputting ‘reality’ in service of very powerful and subtle metaphor. Here’s the thing though - metaphor is intellectual. Revulsion is visceral. The latter wins the moment EVERY TIME, and can only be conquered in retrospect. Meaning, we are continually trying to reconcile how something that feels SO off is GOOD, ACTUALLY. Humans are not built for that kind of contradiction and I was never able to fully shed its shadow. Even as I acknowledged the depth of the metaphor against the aims of the piece.

It is formally and thematically accomplished, playing with function and metaphor to very strong effect. But it underestimates the power of its imagery and the blurring of narrator/protagonist/author/player is as confounding as it is effective. For sure, this series has not become LESS interesting!

Played: 11/7/25
Playtime: 30m, restarted until game stopped telling me to
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Motive, Means, Opportunity. Any consumer of detective entertainment has heard this mantra many times. It is so ubiquitous it kind of loses its meaning a bit, becoming shorthand for ‘slow down: procedural ahead.’ LM is a work that, if you let it, attempts to shed the cultural crust and expose the beating heart of this hoary old formulation.

I contrast this explicitly with what I have come to think of as detective games’ predominant paradigm: Catch The Lie. I do not assert this is the ONLY paradigm, just that it is prevalent enough that it is the default one, at least to me. Under CTL, the gameplay involves getting NPCs to give you detailed information, finding facts that contradict that info, then tugging on that lie to Confession. I do not mean to impugn this formula, it is ALSO hoary and tried and true. It has the dual benefits of playing to the extremely powerful human need for “GOTCHA!”; and being a laser-focused implementation problem. Here are facts A-Q. Here are Testimonies R-V. Aha, G cannot lead to T! I WIN, SUCK IT MURDERER!!!

To my chagrin, I first engaged the game on the latter terms, and was not having a good time of it. Facts, facts, so many facts, but NPCs who resolutely refused to lie to me (for the most part)! I spun around a long time gathering evidence, sending everything not nailed down to the lab (thank goodness our budget and 1937 tech was up to the task!), and circling the mansion like a vulture with a busted turn signal. And was unable to rule ANYONE out! Holy crap, this thing will never get solved! I actually got a little mad at the game, starting to think its construction was flawed and opaque and NOT FUN.

I’m not sure what flipped the switch in my head, whether there was some gentle nudge in the game itself, or just a random bubbling of detective entertainment in my head that surfaced MMO at exactly the right time - after all the legwork while I was scrambling for a path forward. Why not, let’s analyze all our suspects against the classic MMO trio. (Which, MOM is right there, cops. Have you no sense of whimsy? Actually, stupid question. Any culture which is so committed to body cam sabotage, NO you do NOT.)

Uh, back to jolly old England. When reflected against MMO/MOM the mystery shed its opacity like an exhausted carapace and blossomed into a butterfly. Methodology spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)a simple spreadsheet of suspect v MMO, attempting to slot all available information was the key. And a super satisfying one! Analyzing and grading each atomic intersection, then digesting what that meant led inexorably to a clear best theory. Then, when the game threw a curveball into additional crime, the same approach solved that too! It was as satisfying a clouds-parting moment as you could hope for in detective gaming - surprising in its uncommon approach, but completely justifying and rewarding its conceits!

And yet, as satisfyingly rigorous and robust as its construction was, something tickled at me. Why was MMO not leaving me as triumphant as CTL games have? I have two theories and they both hinge on one inescapable fact: MMO is essentially CIRCUMSTANTIAL. My first theory is that GOTCHA is a powerful human impulse. More than delivering physical justice, it also delivers MORAL justice - humiliating malefactors as well as punishing them. Oooh that is so sweet, the more so as it so rarely happens in real life anymore, now that hypocrisy and shame are outmoded ideas. MMO leaves deniability on the table, and belligerent antagonists need not acknowledge their crimes, even after jury verdicts. Was justice even served if we don’t get the epic dissembling??

The second theory is that, on some level, MMO is actually not PROOF. While we can exercise the formula, we recognize on some level this is crime solving without smoking gun, a “likelihood of guilt” analysis. In the context of reality, this feels completely accurate but also highlights how imperfect justice can be. In the context of FICTION it is worse. So, so many clever mysteries play with the gap between appearance and proof that we EXPECT likely answers to be refuted by plot twists. We have been trained by years of detective media that without proof, we set ourselves up to be bamboozled by tricksy authors.

It’s not the lack of verisimilitude that undermines our triumph, it is the unfair sense that ‘isn’t there a missing twist here?’

None of this is against THIS game, well not directly. I went from Engaged to Frustrated, then to SUPER Engaged in my playing of it. I am not pining for a different game and laud the novelty of its construction, forcing a new engagement of something so familiar. This is an admirable twist of its own! I don’t WANT LM to be recast along more familiar lines, I LIKE its unique approach. I can’t help that human evolution puts this particular formula on a different endorphin footing than CTL. This is a more real-feeling investigation that eschews the cheap tricks detective fiction has adopted to tickle our lizard brain. Leaving our lizard brain just a bit put out.

Played: 11/7/25
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Seamless, penalty point for entitled-ass lizard brain
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

There’s a tension in creative endeavors we don’t talk about much, among all the tensions we DO talk about. The first tension is artistic tension - the artist’s muse that compels them to create at all, to shape a vision into a coherent thematic statement. The second tension is craft, wrestling that ineffable vision into a concrete, real-world artifact for others to experience. Once that’s done, the hard work is behind the artist. All that’s left is to get it before an audience. This is the under-discussed tension: marketing this shiny new artifact to a world overrun with artifacts all desperately screaming for our attention. In the context of IFCOMP, this is the BLURB.

Blurb crafting is its own artistic mini-game. How much do you reveal of a work without diluting any intrinsic surprises and twists? How do you convey its conceits to drive that all-important engagement, without inadvertently creating expectations in the audience that color their experience? What is the sweet spot of sinking the hook without intruding on the art itself?

This tension may not be as under-explored as I think. Maybe it’s just a new revelation to ME. For an ambitious reviewer like myself, who presumes to consume ALL THE THINGS in a given IF event, the blurb is rarely more than prologue. This season though, where I am using blurbs to decide yes or no on a self-imposed engagement budget, it is one of two criteria in determining which seals to crack at all. Credit where due, 3XXX’s blurb is MAGNETIC. Crafted as an in-fiction-world commentary it economically and masterfully announces itself as a SHARP sexual-political critique/satire/polemic. That particular stew of preoccupations and tone rang like a dinner bell to hungry ranch hands. Yes, yes, a thousand times YES.

And hoo boy did the prologue deliver on that promise in spades. The work is lightly interactive, mostly a short story construct where the decisions FEEL tangential to the plot. Mainly present to let the player/reader collaborate in creating a protagonist. The world building is fully in the author’s hands and of course it is. No one gets to choose the world they inhabit. The conceit of a dystopic society where pearl-clutching fear of sexuality is concretized into over-the-top absurdist biology is exactly the kind of thing speculative fiction is made for: holding a fun house mirror to reality to expose fault lines through exaggeration. It is every bit as pointed and bitter that I could have hoped, condemning hypocritical Puritanism at the top of its lungs. Yes, yes, a MILLION times yes.

And then we segued to the 3 Act structure, which quickly dispensed with this setting to settle into a far more character-driven exploration of individual sexuality, repression, and awakening. The pointed vitriol of the blurb and prologue were sidelined in favor of a more hopeful, tender and PERSONAL tone. The details of the world are both backgrounded and muddied. For me, this created the most unwanted of feelings - slight disappointment? Not that the personal drama wasn’t raw, compelling and brave in its own right (especially in a late act when the author (Spoiler - click to show)steps into frame). Had I encountered the work cold, it is unlikely this turn would have registered so jarringly. It had everything to do with the very specific enthusiasm the blurb and prologue generated in me, only to left turn completely away.

This is not an unheard of technique - defying the expectations of your marketing CAN be used to great effect to land the surprise twist. Here though, the blurb inadvertently created expectations in me the work was never intending to deliver on. It had to fight all the nebulous promise in my head with its concrete alternatives. That’s just an unfair fight. It doesn’t help that in making its shift, the work undermined its conceit in a weird way. What was initially implied to be Puritanical excess as the backdrop for the world, was clouded by occasional allusions to that most boogey of conservative boogey-men, Political Correctness. Multiple times over-enthusiastic thought policing was identified as an element of the world’s over-the-top sexual repression. I’m not saying this is an unworthy statement (though I personally would need a lot more convincing) just that it further muted, blunted and muddied what started as super sharp.

There are other elements to the work that didn’t quite land for me. The transition to a personal story also had some off-feeling subtext. At one point, a character’s identity journey was identified as being partially the result of society’s chemical interference. That’s weird, right? To attribute sexual transition as an outcome of repression, not an individual’s self-actualization? Irony, yes, but at what thematic cost?

Then, the choice to fast forward between Acts, effectively creating new characters, tensions and themes in (almost) every one, left me more adrift than not. Any one of those acts could have blossomed into a full, focused narrative. The work was not built that way though. It was defiantly broad, trading sharp focus for a wide-ranging exploration of its troubled, human core. Not ineffectively, not at all, just… unexpected.

As a review, this feels unsatisfying. This work closes as a deeply personal, mostly unresolved, bittersweet grappling with extremely raw sexual identity issues. Is my best take really “Ok, cool, but more Harrison Bergeron, please”? And I trace it all back to how I consumed the blurb of the piece. For sure Sparks of Joy despite what you may think from my whining, even after the turn. My advice? Unsee the blurb and experience it without the crippling preconceptions I did.

Played: 11/6/25
Playtime: 30m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

There is a danger in digesting any comedy work that has even a hint of provocation or social commentary. The danger is that its intent can be horribly misread by the baggage that provocation carries with it. Now, this is not a ‘rabid bear in area’ danger, just one of pouring so many wasted and misguided words onto a page that reader and reviewer alike will never get those minutes of their lives back. The whole endeavor is fraught with interpreting intent and meaning. Even super well controlled satire is subject to misunderstanding, nevermind less focused efforts. Humor in particular can defuse or contradict satirical intent by simply bringing the warm feeling of funny to topics that are really best served cold.

This is a self-proclaimed satire. We are a white male of suspect politics, riding a subway with people with no social boundaries. It is competently and amusingly rendered, with a small coterie of fellow passengers who have no problem verbalizing their thoughts to the car. Not INconsistent with my experiences on public transit. Other than looking around, the main point of the game is to (Spoiler - click to show)interject a take on fascism into a couple’s loud argument.

On first playthrough, even this spoilered goal is unclear. Like most parsers, I tried to interact with most of the environment and NPCs, to be rebuffed in ways that felt inelegant if not broken. Efforts to engage anything BUT the loud argument were rejected, often in clumsy and unconvincing ways. Then it ended. And here I made a crucial decision. Via its ending, I decided I understood what the goal of the game was meant to be. This choice recast what felt ‘broken’ earlier as pure gameplay-focus choice. Once you tumble this way, the peripheral elements of the game kind of vanish into goal-focused trial-and-error work. The amusing but shallow environment (which does seem to randomize on repeat plays, but not in a way that justifies the time to read the new content) really fades to a count: last time I tried N. Let’s try N+1. Just hammer that keyboard until I get there. Over and over again until you get to a different ending. Whatever light bemusement the environment elicited on first pass is just so much blurred, barely-read words, whizzing by until the next restart iteration. You are not listening to the car anymore, just waiting to pounce with your insights.

I will confess once I finally got the different ending I did chuckle. Not because it somehow paid off my diligence in replaying (over 20 times!). But because it emphatically did NOT. The game was trolling me, and while deeply UNentertaining in the moment, really the most mechanical experience I can recall since I first started calling things ‘Mechanical,’ the meta narrative it built was kind of hilarious.

The Satire is in the gameplay here, belligerently so, and in a very inspired way. See, by letting the player ‘discover’ the goal of the game, at the end of the first pass there is a choice. Restart to pursue the goal you (probably) failed to achieve, or don’t. If not, fine, this game has nothing to say to you. If you DO restart, you have committed yourself to its goal. At this point, everything about the gameplay is satirizing THIS COMMITMENT. The text that becomes a blur of unread/skimmed and ignored input? The frantic reassertion of your goals, essentially independent of the dialogue and events around you? The increasing urgency after each repetition to make yourself heard? Then, the final coup de’ grace when you ARE heard? All of this is a sublime evocation then puncturing of our political preoccupations, and righteous self-importance. The gameplay creates in us, the player, an urgency to inflict BIG TOPICS on an audience whose immediate concerns want nothing to do with them. And frames this impulse as (social) (Spoiler - click to show)failure! This is EVERY OUTRAGED PARTY GUEST YOU KNOW, THE GAME.

The ludonarrative IS the satire here, and that is a truly next level use of IF. The playing of game was decidedly NOT engaging. In fact it was annoyingly mechanical. But the satire in that gameplay was simply Delicious. I award that a Spark AND a bonus point for innovative ludosatire. I ain’t afraid of no bears.

Played: 11/6/25
Playtime: 20m, 20+ playthroughs, all endings?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless with some headfaked Notable Gaps, bonus point for ludotroll
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review

There is a saying, “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Imperial Throne is the polar opposite of this. IT asserts, “When you see a nail, grab your screwdriver, because hammers are for SUCKERS!” The hubris of this is kind of breathtaking. Never mind common carpentry practices, I know it’s not a screw but BY GOD I’m using a screwdriver anyway. IT basically implements a kingdom simulator in parser. This is a simultaneously reckless and compromised choice and I kind of love it for that. To a point.

Most impressively, the game implements a variety of verbs completely appropriate to the conceit, way deeper than it needed to be. “Ally with” “Censure” “Trade With” “Promote” and my favorite “Marry” These all drop like giddy surprises from your interactions with the game, like Santa’s sleigh exploded overhead and the subsequent deluge of gifts is yours, all yours. To even try this: to implement insanely open ended ruling proclamations as unclued parser syntax that the player must trip over, and to so frequently reward these things. Every time it worked it provided a jolt of wonder that has so long been buried by decades of encrusted parser conventions. Like the first time you ‘talk to npc’ expecting nothing but actually getting simulated dialogue!

It also has at its disposal a daunting array of (perhaps randomized?) military, political, economic and religious events to manage, respond to and prioritize. Despite its very large scope, it never really devolved into repetitive text, events or challenges. Nor did game state become confused and contradictory (excepting perhaps regarding a royal betrothal). The impression of an evolving geopolitics was practically seamless. This is also an amazing accomplishment!

It is with deep sadness that I must conclude, despite those two VERY strong assets, that the game’s reach escaped its grasp. More, that this specific empire-resource-management and event-mitigation gameplay is not only ill-suited for parser paradigms, but it cannot help but bring to mind gameplay paradigms MUCH better suited. I say this with lingering, deep admiration for the HEROIC effort IT made to assert otherwise. Here’s three reasons I say this.

1. Notwithstanding my admiration for the game’s vocabulary, over a full hour of gameplay not only did the vocabulary let me down more than it rewarded, the joy some baroque verbs generated made the simpler gaps WORSE. I can “Execute” but I cannot “Jail.” I can “Raise” but not “Recruit” I can “Attack” but not “Send Ambassadors” I can “Promote” but not “Reward” and so on. All of which needs to be discovered through traditional parser trial-and-error. In some sense, by rewarding so many wild verbs, we end up trying so many MORE things than we might otherwise only to come up empty. It is a paradox of raised expectations!

2. The game implements an empire geography of regions, each with a garrison of troops and a leader with strengths/weaknesses, as well as bordering hostiles. As text descriptions. This is something a graphical game would just present as your gameplay cockpit, adjusting it for game state, probably with some cheeky thematic artistry to set the mood. Here, I had to ask enough questions to extract information, then draw it on paper. This is not awful, by the way, scratchpad noodlings are a pretty good way to increase my engagement. However, this paradigm is crippled with super dynamic gamestate that requires multiple commands to suss out what changed, then manually update them. Constantly. It pretty quickly became drudgery of probing new information for legion counts and evolving border relationships, then updating my increasingly crowded and scribbled out map. And could not help call to mind how EASILY this would be implemented in a graphical interface. Or a boardgame of wooden pieces.

3. Most egregiously the command space opacity intruded into gameplay in one CRUCIAL way. Despite spamming the command prompt for 20 minutes, I could not figure out the magic command to move legions from anywhere besides the capitol, to redeploy them where needed. This had the effect of me watching vulnerable borders getting chipped away, while rested masses of troops resolutely REFUSED to go to their aid. This infuriating gap was exacerbated by cluing text that read: “You could try moving troops from a different province.” Could I? COULD I??? Well boy, I sure did TRY and it never never never worked. I am sure, in the finest guess-the-verb parser tradition, there was a way to do it, but I never found it. Eventually, I just threw up my hands and Z’d my way to inevitable defeat. An ignominious end to my empire and my gameplay session.

So at the end of it, what am I left with? Immense admiration for the hubris of the thing, shot through with Sparks of Joy whenever left field commands were rewarded. That ultimately succumbed to the weight of its screwdriver-driving-a-nail baggage.

Played: 11/6/25
Playtime: 1hr, lost empire
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable Implementation gaps
Would Play After Comp?: Probably not, would just grab a hammer

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

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Email!
Played : 7/18-26/25
Playtime: 12m over 6-9 days, bittersweet ending

Three years into my game review career, I sometimes think my body of work is actually a weird autobiography in IF review format. I have the vague sense that a motivated sleuth (or casually cruel AI spiderbot) could assemble a 100% complete picture of me by extracting offhand references in these reviews. Why do I continue to taunt the beast like that? I’m supposed to be a privacy paranoid, yet have sprinkled my life liberally into seemingly innocuous reviews. You have all the clues!

Anyway, here’s some more pieces for the life puzzle: I am a third generation Polish American who recently visited his ancestral homeland to reconnect to his roots. My extended family spent a week in Krakow (that my Dad’s misguided 23AndMe told us is where our genetic stock springs from) (I mean seriously Dad, I BEGGED YOU NOT TO) last year. This review is not about the joy (and weight!) that visit generated, well not fully. As part of our trip, we toured both Auschwitz and Nowa Huta - a Soviet-era Model Communist City. What was striking was the prevalence of FIRST HAND ACCOUNTS of all of it. This is not some abstract history, this is living memory that actual people actually lived through. People I COULD STILL TALK TO. Between the two sites, so close both geographically and historically, it is impossible to not feel the whirlwind forces of history and their uncaring abuse of people caught in their wake. It is probably some flavor of heritage-exceptionalism that wants me to say “Poland is a unique lens for the last two generations of social turmoil.” More likely, it’s just MY best lens.

And also this work’s lens! Starting in post-war, pre-Soviet Union times, the protagonist (and also you, the player) get to experience the torrent of history where your wants and dreams are so much loose detritus to the social pressures swirling around you. This could not be more centered on my interests and drives unless maybe it featured Cosmic Horrors. Though honestly, history itself embodies that terror just fine.

Its construction is uncommon for this space - a series of emails, each culminating in a single momentous choice that will inform the next phase of life. This is a form that evoked an uncommon, conflicted mindset in me. Usually when I talk about works “I wish I liked more” there is a vague sense of disappointment, of promise unfulfilled. This may be the first time I entertain that thought with a work I REALLY, REALLY LIKED ANYWAY.

Content-wise, I was captivated and invested. The broad passages of time that encapsulated all-too-frequent sea changes in lives at the mercy of historical changes. From Communist purges and generational labor struggles, to collapsing-order financial chaos and desperation, this work steadfastly centers personal experience of these events. Through specificity, it paints an extremely affecting portrait of history’s callous disregard for the people populating it. And of people finding their way anyway.

The form of it I think I unfairly wanted more from. As an email-driven story, that features presumably time-period-accurate postage stamps, the story was BEGGING to be epistolary, told in letters between principles. That approach seemed SO obvious and SO natural, I actually felt let down when that WASN’T the conceit! Only a little. The other area that felt shy of its full potential was the granularity of it. By encapsulating decades with each daily message, large swaths of life passed without choice. Where that lack of choice was driven by social and political forces, that felt quite natural and earned. There were however, large swaths of PERSONAL choices (most notably relationships with romantic partners) that lived on the same un-forking tracks. This I chafed at a bit. Yes, the overriding theme is clawing out dignity in a rigid world that is actively hostile to your desires. This was expertly conveyed. I just felt that it would be MORE keenly felt and observed if the protagonist exerted initiative, however trivial, more than once every few decades. Most especially in arenas that were less directly at the mercy of history.

Even without that though, the frequently on-rails life I led ended in a strongly bitter but faintly sweet ending. In many ways, my fate was defined by forces outside my control, including consequences of decisions both unanticipated and unforeseeable. The denouement I earned was one presented as lonely and empty, but nevertheless nodded to a newfound initiative denied through most of my ‘youth’. That initiative itself felt remarkable and maybe, given what history taught me to expect, sufficient compensation. What a subtle, melancholy and satisfying end state!

Earlier this 'Thon, I lauded the benefits of a short work’s glimpse into the author’s preoccupations. This is a work that takes less than two minutes a day for less than a week. The amount of drama it packs into those minutes is staggeringly out of scale to your investment. That punch is enhanced immeasurably by the enforced time passage between chapters - underlining the implacable march of forces outside your control.

You get it. This one goes to ‘11’

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: choice-select
Played : 7/21/25
Playtime: 30m demo

This work is a fantasy game demo, an introduction to a larger work to come. Its overriding strength is its graphical presentation and UI. The thing oozes with art-driven character and mood. From its deliberately unidealized portraits, conveying non-movie-star characters of flawed human features, to its RPG UI interactions, to its moody location background work, the whole thing blends into a very attractive and functional package that is a pleasure to interact with.

The game it is in service of is promising as well - you are walked through playable character introductions, including some assigned RPG-like traits and selected buffs to tailor your gameplay. Interestingly, in the short demo you are given opportunity to inhabit two (of three?) playable characters, showcasing the breadth of the game system and narrative perhaps at some cost to depth.

The story itself blends High Fantasy tropes with horror tropes. While the former often leave me cold, I am a sucker for the latter, and this combination (uncommon if not completely novel) worked for me. I mean, undead have ALWAYS been in DnD, why have we not been freaked out by it until now???

The demo is accomplishing a lot, showcasing a lot of gameplay. Just how much is driven home by the work’s somewhat abrupt end. I was actually surprised to see it took a full half hour, considering the relatively modest amount of story I ultimately consumed. The mechanical introductions were not DRAGGY, thanks to the UI and art, but they definitely consumed more time than the story. As an intro this is not a terrible choice. Showcasing gameplay, particularly when the mechanics are this capably implemented does seem like highlighting its strengths. It’s just, I’ve rarely (not never!) encountered mechanics that were so compelling it was the main reason to engage a work. Story, especially in narrative works, matters, and can provide a much more emotional, compelling hook than fun swipes of mouse. Other than showing its horror-leaning, heh, bones, heheh, the character beats, background setup and lore felt underserved here? Not given room to heh, flesh out, heheh into compelling elements in their own right. As a demo, I feel like there’s room to expand on this half of the work.

There are a few other burrs in presentation, mostly in text cleanup. At one point the text asserts: “footsteps do not echo” while the soundtrack is clearly playing echoing footsteps! Elsewhere, my character stats reported I was not particularly superstitious, only for incidental text to later inform me I was too superstitious for a course of action. These are not fatal oversights by any means, but make for glitches in the experience that run counter to the mostly seamless presentation.

All in all a very admirable and engaging demo that showcased its undeniably strong UI, but neglected its narrative core. Will be interesting to see where this goes.