Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Talk about a masterclass in establishing stakes. The beer has GONE BAD. FIX IT, STAT!!! My GOD game, say less, I’m on it! Ethan Hunt, I CHOOSE TO ACCEPT THIS MISSION!!!

This is a parser game, set in an Old World pub and your mission could not be more vital. It could be more… responsive? or challenging? though. There is some rudimentary early exploration, talking to NPCs, comfortably deep scenery implementation, all of which smooth enough but not so long on clues and leads to pursue. Until you encounter an NPC that can help. If I did anything to spur this development, I am at a loss to describe what it was. It rather felt like HE found ME.

Thanks to this helpful NPC you learn some more, then are ushered to the source of the contamination and presented with one puzzle to try and resolve the issue. Ok, step back everyone. Yeah, we spun our wheels for a while but now Impossible Mission Force is on the job. Cue some disguises and stunts (and that PEERLESS theme song) and let’s wrangle this into shape! NOW the Beer Hero can kick into gear and… wait, its done? And I failed to solve the puzzle? (Spoiler - click to show)But the beer is saved ANYWAY??? Let me go back and try again. Hah! This time I did solve it! (Spoiler - click to show)And yeah, side mission victory, but beer’s fate is unchanged?!? Maybe IMF was a bit overkill on this one? Feels like the mystery was very capably solving itself?

It really felt like the story was playing out, just steaming right along, and not only did it not need me to advance it, it kind of didn’t care what I did between beats. It was odd to feel this outside-looking-in in INTERACTIVE fiction. Which is a wild takeaway, on reflection. There are plenty of choice-select IF that are really short stories whose main interaction is turning pages. (I’ve got to figure out a better way to say that because it always sounds like I’m talking down and I don’t mean to be.) BB was not objectively less interactive or player-focused than those works. Might I be holding Parser IF to a different standard? Might Parser IF, by explicitly making the player the protag and ceding control on every single move, might that imply an unspoken promise of a deeper interactivity, even if that is only “suss out how to use weird thing A in location B?” What if this was more of a short story-like IF, where my one job was to hit return to keep going? Maybe it was toying with my expectations to deliver something else entirely? Maybe it was SHAMING me that I was so into a trivial puzzle problem, when making a small but real difference was a possibility for me. All that is conceivable I suppose, but even the difference I could make was pretty muted, in terms of dramatic impact. Maybe it was a comment on the shallowness of NEEDING high levels of difficulty and dramatic resolution when true, meaningful accomplishment should be enough?

That I can be shallow cannot be a shock to anyone at this point. I’m not sure I need a game to thematically highlight that. Look, it was a very well-crafted, modest parser where story-wise I just didn’t matter much. Yeah, I’m disappointed I couldn’t really be the Beer Hero of my fantasies but it did enough right to keep the sparks going. Granted, the biggest spark was the unfulfilled promise of BEING a Beer Hero, but there were still plenty of sparks to be had.

Turns out it was my self-importance that was destined to self-destruct in five seconds.

Played: 9/8/24
Playtime: 30m, 1 fail, 1 succeed
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

This is the latest of the hoary old ‘mysterious invite to spooky house’ setup. If you are asking, ‘how many of these can we be expected to encounter across the run of IF history?’ my answer is ‘as many as it takes to encounter THIS one.’ With point-select works, the fun is a very precarious balance between ‘lawn mowering’ link combinations to make progress your brain can’t find, and a mechanical exercise of following a trail of links with no uncertainty or frisson in their construction. If my own sampling can be considered statistically valid, far more fail in one direction or another than succeed.

I am tempted to take you on a faux-discovery journey as I pretend to explore how this one succeeds when others do not. Both as a click-select adventure AND as the latest trotting out of this staid old warhorse setup. I could propose disingenuous theory after disingenuous theory, engage them with pie-eyed dishonesty before sadly concluding, ‘no that doesn’t quite explain it.’ All before revealing with performative wonder the BIG SECRET of the work. I could do all that, but the truth is, it’s pretty obvious EXACTLY why this one succeeds.

Its writing and NPCs are delightful.

That’s really it, the BIG SECRET. Yes, it is pretty good at balancing clear-but-not-crystal clear progress paths and clues. Yes, you might need to do some conversational lawn mowering, but the work rewards you with fun anecdotes and business so you don’t feel the time is wasted. Yes, the overarching setup and final plot beats are pretty bog-standard. But everything in between is just a joy to marinate in. Goofy, funny, inventive, wacky and fun. Even the language of the thing is endlessly playful. This is a work that uses the word ‘perspicacity’ correctly, but also delves into slime humor. I captured so many lovely images and bizarre turns of phrase and decided this one best summed up how on-my-vibe this piece is: “the mundane atticly ephemera of a lifetime” A work that gleefully makes up nonsense words side-by-side with multi-syllable jawbreakers is my art-work from another mother.

Everything about midgame was a joy to work with, from the moon logic puzzles that flow naturally from setup, to the zany cast, to the environment descriptions of its tight geography. Not only are the NPCs well conceived, sharply characterized, gifted with their own senses of humor (and pettiness), they also track state VERY well for this sort of thing, and engage (or don’t) you exactly as events would have you expect. Just not necessarily the WAY you would expect. Equal parts gleefully surprising and rigorously internally consistent.

It doesn’t quite achieve technical seamlessness, there are a few state issues. In one case, a teddy bear you moved continues to be present in its initial location. But these issues are vanishingly small in number, and further reduced by all the good will the rest of the package generates. The prose is almost immediately and pervasively Engaging. (Quick shout out to the sound design, which provides a great baseline atmosphere for the thing. Cuts out an aural space for you to play in, away from the cold logic of the world around you. That has no place here.)

So all you IF authors laboring painstakingly in a finely tuned code base to wring nuanced puzzle play out of cold algorithms: forget all that stuff! Just write really well and delight your player/readers! What could be simpler?

Played: 9/7/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/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

A Javascript-coded HTML text-entry parser game. What won’t they think of next! The infinite flexibility of the motivated creator never ceases to impress me. This is a work with a clean HTML presentation with just enough graphical flourish to sell its cyberpunk theme, yet still stay out of the player’s way. It engages cyberpunk staples of body mods, hacking, future noir in a pretty straight forward way. It establishes the facts of the setup with minimal embellishment, leveraging our expectations to quickly get to the core puzzle execution. I would say the whole esthetic, from graphics to plot to character to puzzle play is pretty stripped down.

On the one hand this definitely minimizes friction, playing comfortably within our expectations at every turn. It was never really unclear (barring a notable exception or two) what needed doing next, or how to get it done. Like classic parsers, explore everything, take what you can, use it when needed. Its gameplay showpiece, the hacking mechanisms, were introduced and integrated very smoothly, quickly becoming reflexive commands nevermind their novelty. All this is to the game’s credit.

On the other hand ‘never breached expectations’ isn’t exactly a sought-after compliment in art. There is for sure room in all endeavors, IF included, for successful journeyman work. If anything their value is underrated. But it is hard to escape that they are inherently less impactful than transgressive, boundary-shattering works. Or even emotionally swelling melodrama that pulls our internal empathy levers. I was committed to the story, but emotionally detached due to the fairly vanilla characters and clean but unchallenging fetch-then-use plot beats. Sparks of Joy in its cleanliness and well-executed story beats, but lacking that emotional hook for true engagement.

Except, lets talk puzzle play. Part of the hacking conceit is that you solve encryption keys and AR token slotting (sometimes with AR security programs). These puzzles were pretty ok! The work did not tell you how to solve them, which provided some early trial and error head scratching before clicking into place. A word game in particular seemed to delight in subverting any Wordle-based preconceptions you might have before unlocking its gameplay, then proved legitimately as interesting as Wordle itself. Similarly, the AR based hacking let you discover the rules, then added a security element once you thought you had it mastered. I find it telling that the mini-games, simple and elegant as they were, stayed with me more than the story itself! Too often, I find mini-games the least enjoyable part of a work - drudge work I need to complete to get back to story. Here, they were thematically as clean as these things can be, while still respecting the ‘play’ in gameplay. Not only that, provided a legitimate charge of fun in the proceedings! My recommendation to future players would be to bypass the extra-turn body mod to keep mini-game play sharp. That, or limit yourself to ONLY real words as guesses.

As an overall rating, we have a legitimately Sparky, well executed story that both makes a strength of its reliance on tropes but also doesn’t really escape them. Integrates hacking gameplay and commands as smoothly as one could hope for. And is married to legitimately engaging mini-game play. All of it mostly seamless+.

Played: 9/7/24
Playtime: 1.25hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless+, bonus point for engaging puzzle play
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

Is there such thing as pedigree in IF? Actually, is pedigree itself ANYTHING??? Other than a socially imposed privileging system? Wow, got off track there. What I mean to ask is “Scott Adams approved this homage of his work. HOW COOL IS THAT??” Is there anything more rewarding than getting the imprimatur of an artistic inspiration? I feel like Claymorgue has already won … something… and anything we say about it from here is just gravy. Kudos author, and kudos Scott for top-tier menschhood. Just positivity on positivity.

I think it says a alot about the chill, supportive vibe of that whole background that it did not unfairly raise my expectations in any way. The whole thing was so generous and earnest it encouraged me to engage the work in a similar positive spirit. This is a team-investigates-mysterious castle jam. It leverages an underused gameplay design of NPC specialists, who can be employed in their specific areas to solve puzzles. I know I’ve seen it before, but infrequently, and it is a welcome change of pace when I do. It also is fully committed to its pixel-art esthetic and I am here for that. It puts the piece squarely of a time with its inspiration.

Its gameplay is Twinesformer - parser gameplay via link-select UI. This choice necessarily restricts command space in a way that kind of echoes restricted-verb parsers of bygone days, but with more modern link-select chrome. Its presence is, in the context of 2024 IFCOMP, a clear case of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Other 2024 works had me clamoring, clamoring!, for a paned UI paradigm. Along comes Claymorgue and here we go! Was it all I hoped for??

Ehhh, no.The paning did unclutter the transcript portion of the game, that’s a plus. But it broke it into 3 separate panes, on extreme quadrants of the screen, ensuring maximum inconvenience in swiping cursor around. It further compounded inconvenience by requiring a MINIMUM of 4 clicks to get anything done. Character-Verb-Noun-Enter. A default actor and enter-on-noun could have cut that in half in most cases. I’m not in the business of comparisons, but this is NOT what I had in mind. Interacting with the game was, and I take no joy in saying this, a chore.

It was further compromised by implementing a crucial pane as scrolling, with no visual clue that this was true. In at least three cases, information (portable items!) necessary to progress were hidden below the pane bottom, with no indication I should scroll to find them. It was further, further compromised by changing its entry norms for character interaction where selecting a second character works differently than initiating action. All in all, I never stopped fighting the intrusive interface start to finish.

How about underlying (parser adjacent) gameplay? Again, I wanted more. One artifact of Twinesformers is that you have a limited verb roster to select among. This means, often, you need to play a ‘which not-quite-right verb can I contort to get things done?’ game. There are bigger issues though. For one, despite having the ability to highlight interesting nouns (a way to quietly steer the player to areas of interest), the highlighted nouns here were overrun with red herrings. Not just red herrings that you couldn’t interact with, red herrings that gave generic ‘you cannot’ messages, even when just trying to examine them! WHY WERE THEY HIGHLIGHTED IN THE FIRST PLACE??? There are ‘fiddle’ messages, random comments or business from your companions to remind you they are there. These messages are sometimes trivial, sometimes nonsensical, but sometimes read like hints or events that need addressing ASAP! They never are though, which I can attest after many fruitless attempts to engage them.

Puzzle play is similarly challenged. There were puzzles that required you to examine something twice, when the first examine gave NO clue you had not exhausted its value. Other puzzles required you to dawdle in locations for random amounts of time, despite NOTHING interesting to hold your attention there! In a key final puzzle, you needed to have told one character to read things turns ago, THEN read something later, and only if those two unconnected and unhinted things were done, was a final location unlocked.

What I’m saying is, it was unplayable without the walkthrough. I appreciate walkthroughs and/or HINTS in IFCOMP (and generally) as I have a propensity to get off a game’s vibe and struggle. With IFCOMP’s punishing time limit it can be instrumental to get unblocked to see a fuller picture of a work. If my reaction on reading HINT/walkthrough spoiler is “JJ you IDIOT, that puzzle is GENIUS!!” I know I’m in good hands. If my response is “Uh, wot?” … that’s trouble. In a particularly egregious example, the climactic ‘you have won’ text was ONLY present in the walkthrough, it was not presented to me in-game! Without walkthrough, I would not have known the game was over!

So yeah, this was a full two hours of unnecessarily difficult struggle. But. That easy-going, positive vibe? It was EVERYWHERE. In the color text. In character interactions. In room descriptions. In object descriptions (when provided). In discoverable lore documents. As much as I struggled with the gameplay and UI, the prose and the underlying pixel art were just… welcoming. Despite all those good reasons above, I couldn’t stay mad at the game, it continually sparked with earnest good will. Despite it all, I nevertheless felt Sparks of Joy. I’m not a monster.

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished (everyone satisfied) via walkthru
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive ui/gameplay
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

Postscript: I think my favorite moment, which I feel compelled to document, was (Spoiler - click to show)finding detailed instructions to transmute lead into gold. The step-by-step featured a complicated setup, complicated finishing, but whose middle step was “Do the Transmutation.” I laughed long and loud at this. Classic Step 1/Step2/PROFIT!! gag.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

It seems every year there is an entry or two that just catch me so offguard, that are so unabashedly playful and bonkers, that I can’t help but play right along. This is nominally a detective/mystery solving game, but in its blindingly fast playtime displays neither. It cycles through one bananas setup after another, with little regard (until the end) for how they connect. You meet bank robbers, a corp-slave artist and a marginally engaged detective. On the way you get meaningless choices to make, each with snicker-inducing specificity and daffy breadth, where the whole time you are basically white knuckling along a ride that doesn’t seem to care how bad it whipsaws you and is unclear it even knows where it’s going.

But the ride is so zippy and good-natured it kind of doesn’t matter. I feel like I want to give an example, but the work is so short I’m cheating you just a little. I can’t resist, here it is:

(Spoiler - click to show)This case is a dead end. All the contacts are hippies. They’re all probably ‘fishing for trout’ in their private trout-fishing lake.
The criminal Balding wanted to capture had stolen all the angst left in an aging punk drummer. Right before the trial the drummer moved back to Ohio to start a new life. The criminal was freed.

Those are not two separate quotes, just one continuous flow. Don’t even get me started on the wonderfully incoherent sentences that form the UI links! The whole thing makes very little sense, but in the most appealing way possible. By the end, the detective has been engaged by the corpdrone for reasons, and ‘ravens’ have been established as somehow being a connective thread. All of this, as the title suggests, will be worked in a future episode. Yeah, it doesn’t end at all, it just stops. McFly-y-y? It’s a Prologue McFly!

Ordinarily this lack of meaningful choice, lack of clear characterization, lack of narrative throughline or plot and certainly lack of closure would infuriate me. Or disappoint me. Or repel me. But here, the language, the flights of fancy are just SO enjoyable I kinda don’t care about any of that. It was a terrific ride for its short duration. I have only the vaguest of ideas what I just experienced, but am damn sure I will engage the next episode. Yeah, this scattered focus probably can’t sustain an extended multi-chapter mystery. There are signs the threads COULD come together though, and that’s good enough for me. Viva la bizarre!

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 10min, 2 playthroughs, likely 100% of text
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/seamless
Would Play Again?: No, but followon has my attention

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

ONE YEAR LATER

Mc23a: “How are you back here again, time traveling future me? Wait, before you say another word, GIVE ME STOCK TIPS!”
Mc23b: “Wait, look at our names, past me. They’ve changed, we’re no longer pre- and post- McB.”
Mc23a: “Duh doi, I’ve played Dick McButts by now. So those STOCK TIPS…?”
Mc23b: (waving hands impatiently) “But why numbers? What could that…?”

<flash of light>

Mc24: “Hail and well met good me’s!”
Mc23a: “Oh god, we buy fedoras???”
Mc24: “What? No, you can see I’m not…”
Mc23b: “You’re us from further in the future aren’t you?”
Mc24: “Oh I see, no. Time travel is so 2023. No, we’re MULTIVERSAL now. These numbers…”
Mc23b: “Universe identifiers, got it. So your universe?”
Mc24: “One where my IFCOMP24 randomizer put the McButts sequel first, yes. So I’ve played it and you haven’t.”
Mc23a: “We got turned into a douche by a randomizer?”
Mc24: “What? No, I was always, wait, wh… aaaah.”
Mc23b: “The sequel you say? Ok, I admit I was intrigued seeing it in the entries. Is it going to hold up?”
Mc23a: “It’s literally the next game on our list, couldn’t we maybe talk stocks instead?”
Mc24: “What happens when you go to a one joke conceit a second time?”
Mc23a: “Great. Fedora AND Socratic method. You live alone, don’t you?”
Mc23b: (ignoring Mc23a) “Oooh, That’s tough. You kind of have to escalate things or twist things pretty dramatically, don’t you?”
Mc23a: “Why are you humoring him??”
Mc24: (ignoring Mc23a) “Yes, but, what if you don’t?”
Mc23b: “Diminishing returns? I’m starting to see your point, Mc23a.”
Mc23a: “Is there someone else we can talk to?”

<flash of light>

Mc420: (slowly massaging side of face) “Wooah. Dudes. This is too, too trippy.”
Mc24: (peevishly) “I kind of had this.”
Mc23a: “I’m not getting any stock tips, am I?”
Mc23b: “New guy, have you played Rod McShlong?”
Mc420: “Oh fr sure my dude. It was a lark, but didn’t really take off until it technicolor’d in the middle. Like, into a dimension of shlong punching.” (eyes go vacant, considering implications)
Mc24: (miffed) “Yeah, I was getting to that. That was the most fun part of it.”
Mc240: “I mean the gags were solid, right in line with McButts.”
Mc23a: “I can’t help but think stock tips are a better use of…”
Mc23b: “Solid but not escalating?”
Mc420: (thinking way too hard before…) “Yeah I guess so. But that trippy center part was the tits.”
Mc24: “I can see where that might land harder in… his universe.”
Mc23b: “Hm, yeah. Anyone else we can talk to?”
Mc24: “I’m still here!”

<flash of light>

Mc69: “Hey guys, we talking Rod McSchlong?” (waggles eyebrows)
Mc23a, 23b, 24: (in unison) “NOPE!”

<exit in flash of light>

Mc420: “Hold it! Everyone STOP! STOP! Rod? ROD MCSHLONG?!?!?” (giggles uncontrollably)

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 20min, 1 win, 9 ‘losses’
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/mostly Seamless, bonus for midpoint graphical experimentation
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Full disclosure: I am a Beta tester for the game this work is a prelude to. Meaning, this is not my first introduction to these characters and this world. (It isn’t yours either if you played Creative Cooking or The The Portrait)

This cheekily-named piece is doing a lot of table-setting work, both in world building and character and relationship building. Its interactivity is minimal, primarily of the information-exploration variety, cast here (initially) as the protagonist’s wandering mind during an eventful day. It is more short story than game, its links of a page-turning variety.

As a short story, it is burdened by the demands of lore dump. Ultimately, I think, overburdened. If it were me, I think I might have split this into two separate works: world background in one and interpersonal drama in the other. Each of these components has an arc to describe with dramatic crescendos and my sense is allowing each to breathe on its own would be a more satisfying experience than muddling them together. Not the least of which because the super, super non-vanilla fantasy world envisioned here is so… singular. It takes a LOT of oxygen. Too there are narrative decisions that in isolation might be more digestible, but when compounded on each other strain even the most willful attempts to play along.

The setup is a young elf’s (sidebar - ok, I know, when elves come up, I historically froth maniacally against their anti-dwarf racism and overall superciliousness. If nothing else, this world’s elves have so far admirably challenged my OWN biases)… where was I? Right, protagonist is a young elf entering magic school. As a world building conceit this allows a few things: 1) to detail how magic works; 2) to provide some social history of the world via a ‘welcome address’; and 3) to provide a flavor of its pan-species population. Their introduction is the same as ours, a welcome address.

I can hear you whining away out there. “Oh man, an in-story lecture? The info-dumpiest of info-dumps!” Well yes, but the narrative choice to focus the lecture on physical artifacts and first-person flashback accounts mitigates a lot of that. It provides immediacy and stakes to what could be cold history recitation. Rather than droningly relating “Alamazix begat Byrrrhana begat Chatham begat…” we are treated to two dramatic anecdotes that summarize the formative conflict of the world… 10,000 years ago.

Ok, Utopian world building (cause that’s what this is), has a serious challenge for non-Utopian audiences. We know how miserable societies can be, and we have seen any number of promised Utopias impaled on the twin spikes of time and human nature. In about 5000 years of recorded history. In that time innumerable societies have risen and fallen, and never for being TOO GOOD. We need to be convinced that such a thing is possible AT ALL, nevermind over an extended period of time, by implicitly refuting the lessons of our own history. Now compound that challenge by reflecting on how something 10,000 years old could even be relevant today, let alone defining. Strangeness (and boy do we have that in spades here!) is the best tool available. Yes, long-lived mortals shrink the march of time, that’s one help. Living memory is a powerful (though as the 2024 US election shows, somehow not powerful enough) sustaining force. If we had just a little extra push… maybe (Spoiler - click to show)Magic Breast Milk??? It’s so crazy it JUST… MIGHT… WORK!

As wild as this world’s lore is, of which my spoilered three word summary only scratches the surface, it nevertheless helps bridge that cynical gap. Its shock value to modern sensibilities is an asset here, rocking us from our smug cynicism with a cold slap of 'WTF?'. It is even more powerful once you get past the shock value and digest it metaphorically. (heh, digest.) A ritual recreation at about the halfway point nearly manages that impossible task, and notwithstanding quite a few melodramatic quibbles is the strongest crescendo of the piece. This should have been the narrative climax of a standalone work.

It wasn’t. That first climax leaves us off balance in this very metaphysical, very sexual, very utopian world. The work has successfully used shock value and dramatic crescendo to get us over the hump. Rather than let us settle into place, consolidate our gains and regain our equilibrium, it instead piles on additional leaps and shocks, each more rushed, less earned and so less dramatic than the one before. The core thruple’s meet cute, (Spoiler - click to show)Special Magical Destiny and (Spoiler - click to show)Hidden Eternal Bond are really just too much, for one sitting at least. These pretty big revelations get nowhere near the buildup as that first one, and are presented at an escalating pace that we have no chance to get comfortable with.

All this would be helped, I think, by separating into two stories. Establish the background in the first, including the capstone ritual. In the second, focus on student life and allow the thruple’s romance to blossom and bloom. THEN introduce revelations. Stand on a cured, hardened bedrock of established lore for that second story, rather than molding all the clay at once. For me, the formulation we are given improbably generated Sparks with its bonkers world building and legit first climax. The continual piling on of rushed Revelations after that just pushed me back from Engagement.

Now, the above reviews the piece purely as a standalone work of IF/short story. Dramatically I think it overburdens itself against that goal. But what if, as seems exceedingly likely, that is not the goal at all? What if the goal is purely and simply to lay the groundwork for the work that follows, to allow IT to focus more narrowly on its narrative aims? Provide that bedrock to build off of? Maybe it is accomplishing exactly what it needs to do in service of the author’s vision for the next work.

Played: 9/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable translation artifacts
Would Play Again?: No, except maybe for scientific research

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a sprawling work that is doing a LOT. The word I keep coming back to is ‘unfocused’ though, and I think it has to do both with how much it is trying, and how those things play off each other. Here is a laundry list of elements at play here:

.zombie apocalypse
.corrosive preconceptions
.marginalized populations, and socio-political aggressions
.audio acting(!)
.safe space creation and policing
.inter-generational aggression
.family loss

All of these things ricochet around the narrative, caroming off each other, as often as not to cross purposes rather than building to something.

The piece opens with an underplayed ‘zombie apocalypse’ sweeping the planet. Our core cast of characters then proceed to basically treat it like background noise to their lives of creative pursuits and online community. The thorough and complete disconnect from the world around them, and lack of consequences in that world!, put me in the mind of the cast of Seinfeld. Deeply self-absorbed people, impervious to the outside world in the cocoon of their own drama. Notwithstanding the walking dead, one character wanders aimlessly outside, looking for photo ops. Another lets his daughter play in the neighborhood! An early scene in a supermarket establishes the perceived threat, but makes no impression on any of the main cast beyond ‘did you see the news?’.

The world itself seems to be adjacent to our own, except that surprisingly dog-/cat-/and snail- people exist. But so do dogs that are only pets! I guess in this world that’s just the way it is, but MAN does that open so many wormy cans that go unexamined. Nothing is done narratively with this by the way, it just is.

The online community itself, an enclave of high school friends and acquaintances who all found artistic outlets and non-mainstream sexual identity journeys, reinforces this disconnect at every turn. As society is presumably in turmoil, they are preoccupied with reconnecting, establishing their journeys, and policing a not-quite-empathic-enough member. Yes, his transgression is clumsy. But it is hard to believe as a longtime member of this community that this is either a) his first transgression or b) that he hasn’t absorbed norms by being corrected before now. Instead it generates great drama, ECLIPSING THE ACTUAL APOCALYPSE. This presages an exchange between the protagonist and the MOST generous, MOST sympathetic NPC where the PC reveals their sexual identity, then reacts really intensely to the confused response.

Before I wander further onto that VERY thin ice, let me sidebar about gameplay/interactivity. The choices are really two varieties: exploration and protagonist character building. Depending on how generous/enthusiastic/wounded/angry you choose to play, you are building a character in your head. As far as I can tell, there is no impact to plot in these choices, though that is definitely not a criticism. Similarly, your explorations are either geographical, or whom you choose to IM. For the most part, you get one explore, one IM, a group interaction (where you shade responses) and a similar 1-1 facetime for ~10 days of gameplay spread out over months of narrative time. The exploration is interesting, and provides some latitude to privilege some interactions over others. The heavy lifting though is in pure character build.

Ok ice, here I come. The chance this ends with a cold dunking is very high. After some collaborative protag character building, we reveal that they are aroace (not a spoiler, in the blurb!). Our most sympathetic NPC responds, conveying their emotional loss at that revelation. Is that a great response? No obviously, they did take the fraught revelation and make it about them. The resonance with the previous episode casts the most sympathetic character in the same role as the oblivious deplorable. On the one hand, this demonstrates that no one is immune to empathy blind spots which is certainly an insightful message. On the other, it seems to enshrine indiscriminate righteous anger as a the corrective tool of choice. Isn't that just an exhausting social prescription? Is there no other way to engage this? I am ill equipped to critique this as a character beat, but as a resonant narrative choice it really grated on me.

I can hear the ice cracking under my feet. The Awful Right has this narrative that ‘wokeness’ is nothing more than a ‘cancel-happy gotcha machine.’ Because these are the only incidents we see, and because the perpetrators are SO different, this work inadvertently plays into this toxic narrative.

That apparent dissonance was compounded by another plot development. At one point you have opportunity to meet a character who tells you, in no uncertain terms, they want no interactions, please go away. If you ignore them and revisit anyway, you are thanked for getting them ‘out of their shell.’ (Lol, that’s funny for reasons). You see the issue? You are explicitly asked to respect a character’s choices, violate their wishes, then are thanked for it??? How is this not a GREATER transgression than what was so dramatically escalated above? Yet is REWARDED?? On the one hand, I think this is a very subtle and effective nod at the complexity of these issues where people sometimes get trapped in their own mind. On the other, that very complexity requires MORE grace, not less, and makes the above stark condemnation even worse!

Hey, we’re barely halfway through this. WHOO! This water is cold.

So that zombie apocalypse? Turns out it’s fine, actually. Yeah, there are now zombies in the world, but no worries. They seemingly don’t eat people anymore? And now zombies are a repressed population, drawing ire of reactionary right dickheads? Sounds about right. Our core cast is suddenly MUCH more engaged in this (not the least of which via a neat twist where one’s brother is left zombified). There is a lot of social business that gets observed and then resolved, but our core cast is not really involved except as spectators, one of whom has big stakes in the matter. As a story arc it was interesting but backgrounded enough that it failed to engage. There are also SO many unanswered questions that really muddy the waters. Do zombies eat people? Seems like they did at some point. Can they ‘turn’ others against their will? Seems like they did at some point. These questions corrode the situation enough that there’s a lot more grey than the narrative acknowledges and instead kind of hand waives away, leaving the player at a loss.

There is also the matter of the protag’s mom. An aggressive ‘no, you are my SON’ shrew of a woman, swallowing the Awful Right party line so hard (Spoiler - click to show)it literally kills her. She is portrayed as irredeemable and unpleasant and I pretty immediately avoided her like the plague. When she develops health issues, the game suddenly got real. She was no less irredeemable, arguably more so by denying the evidence of her eyes. But, as protag, my choices suddenly became much more constrained. Leaving her to her own devices, which might have been my first choice, was not an option. Above, I decried authorial choice steering that made the protag react in ways I did not believe in. The crucial difference here is, the limited choice in this scenario was not only COMPLETELY BELIEVABLE, it was a powerful use of interactivity to drive home the awful complexity of these toxic relationships. Lack of true choice was a powerful narrative tool that made me understand and empathize with the protag MORE, not less. I found this entire sequence difficult, complex, infuriating and powerfully realized. It was the showcase sequence of the work, I think.

So, where does this leave me? A patchwork of dramatic preoccupations that narratively, with one very notable exception, missed more than hit. I kept coming back to the question ‘why zombie apocalypse? It is mishandled so often, why is that even in the narrative at all?’ Then it occurred to me. What if I treat the world of this work as PURE metaphor, not story at all? Holy crap do things open up then. Animal beings become a broad range of perplexing humanity our only duty is to accept as is. Online communities become echo chambers that can be equal parts supporting and blindering.

The zombies become a masterstroke of genius. The concept of ‘zombie’ is pretty universal at this point, beyond mechanical details. As a consumer of pop culture, we bring all those preconceptions to the table. As I reflect, it occurs to me the NARRATIVE does not confirm zombies’ threat, it is us (and their world) that ASSUMES it. So later, any inclinations we have to question zombie personhood comes from a place of preconception and prejudice. What a powerful, amazing choice! It puts the reader squarely in the difficult place of having to combat their own prejudices! While I rebel at the narrative storyline of the zombies, the METAPHOR is an incredible, subversive choice. It also retroactively forgives some character choices that do not presume flesh eating.

As a story, the work was too all over the map for me, with too many jarring, baffling, and unconvincing choices. (And one searingly effective plot point.) As a metaphorical construct to challenge the player, it positively sings. It also opens up what I feel is its crowing allusion: that the zombie apocalypse is NOT about zombies themselves! It is about surrendering to the shittiest side of our nature. THAT is the real apocalypse. Unlike most zombie fiction, we’re not just the worst part of the apocalypse, WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE ITSELF.

Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1.5hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging beats in parent storyline and metaphor, offset by bouncy beats elsewhere, average to Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless outside audio
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

I would be negligent if I didn't address the audio acting, but I really think I can’t top that final line. So think of this as an appendix.
On balance, I think the audio detracts more than enhances. Like timed text, it has the effect of making the player (who has already read the page) wait for the game to catch up, with the attendant impatience that can generate. There are definitely some great performances, highlighted by the insufficiently empathic friend Nekoni, but the lack of ambient background sound (when warranted) further detracts from the overall effect. Newsroom, crowd, workplace, etc settings make it glaringly obvious when background noise is missing. It is also distracting when the text notes a beeping sound absent from the soundtrack! Lastly, the mix seemed a bit off. In particular the volume difference between Laz and Nekoni went from barely audible to quite loud, and was jarring.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I think I respond to a murder mystery like I do pizza or sex. Even when it’s not that great, it’s still pretty great. The intersection of human drama and intellectual puzzle is just a time tested winner. Arguably, while it took a few years, those same impulses power large swaths of IF as a whole. I will say, this one challenged itself with some first impressions that gave up a lot of ground it would have to recover.

It opens with a view of a murder. So specific a view, it seemed to pretty definitively narrow the suspect pool (and motive space!) with out-of-character knowledge. As a ‘you-solve-it’ this was a wild choice I still don’t understand and am not sure the work loses anything by dropping. The second early misstep was in the setup: an FBI rookie, fresh out of the academy, flying solo on her first case. Don’t they pretty famously partner those folks up? For LOTS of reasons? Strike two.

The third strike was leaning into a ‘die roll v attribute’ tabletop paradigm. I have a quibble with this mechanism, including on the table. When testing things an rpg merely simulates, say swordsmanship, sure, roll away. Probability is a big numbers game, have at it. Mysteries only KIND of do that. They are more cerebral, more explicitly testing player ability to connect dots and form theories. Making a die roll in that kind of thing both reduces player initiative and introduces an unwelcome guest to the thinking party - random chance. Do you notice the clue? <die roll> Nope. How about the next one? <die roll> Bad luck, no again. Yes you have RPG-like stats to deploy to swing the odds but no guarantees. This mechanism raises the prospect that through no fault of your own, the fates will not provide enough data. That flies in the face of the cold, logical underpinnings of murder mysteries! And BOY does that impression loom large over every failed die roll. Yeah, I understand probability and big numbers but I NEED THAT FOOTPRINT!!!

Fortunately for KiW at three strikes in, the rules of baseball allow for, I wanna say, five strikes? Five strikes. After digging a hole for itself, the actual investigation started. Here, we just smoothly shifted to a new gear and never looked back. There is a very useful map highlighting the geography and clue locations that updates with the investigation. You interview lots of folks, suffer lots of die rolls and generally start assembling the picture. It’s not a full strike, maybe a foul ball, but I do wish location text varied after the first visit. Continually seeing the same introductory text for two straight days chipped at immersion and would be easily fixed by {if (first visit) else (default) } type coding. Even so, the choices started logically, then bloomed over time into a large web of possible connections (and red herrings) to untangle. NPCs were simple yet believably distinct, events transpired with clear motivations and consequences, it was just solidly constructed. It’s not perfect. Some failed die rolls block clue paths that you CLEARLY could just call someone else to help with, but at this point progress was assured enough that the misses grated less. More importantly, as the implacable hand of big numbers asserted itself I did get disconnected clues to wrestle with. Before I knew it, my decrying of die rolls had cycled from irritation with the mechanism to full on engagement in the mystery.

It rewarded my engagement. The mystery was a satisfying procedural romp that seemed to have multiple paths to solve, and to be at least first-order resistant to bad die rolls. I do wonder had I chosen a more physical protagonist, given the die rolls laid out for me, would their path have been as resilient? Maybe the challenges presented are tuned to the investigator in some way to ensure fairness? As a one-solution mystery I’ll probably never know. Certainly the physical rolls I uncovered were statistically small enough to make that a concern.

By the end, I had developed a solid enough theory but had acted more deliberately than urgently (Spoiler - click to show)and people paid the cost. This was a cool and legitimate outcome of my approach! I did manage to solve it (puffs chest) despite my die roll misgivings. I had climbed, however tentatively out of the first impressions hole it had dug into a really good time, capstoned with earned accomplishment. I just wish I hadn’t labored so long under the shadow of those first impressions to really enjoy the ride start to finish. As it was, I will have to split the difference between Sparks and Engaging.

Since I opened with a sex metaphor, then segued into a baseball one, I have a question. What is the sexual equivalent of fifth base? There’s five of those too, right?

Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 45m, 5/5 solved as Negotiator
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy->Engaged/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

ALRIGHT! A horror-themed, noir-adjacent investigation jam! About TIME we got one of these!

Notwithstanding that snarky opening, I am in fact quite positively disposed to this genre. If not QUITE as rare as the above paragraph intimates. You are one of 3 investigators in a vampire-politics world, charged with maintaining a semblance of human-vampire peace. By whom? Unclear. Resourced and staffed by? Uncertain. Relative authority in the shadow world? Unspecified. This slipperiness of setup is actually not a problem, at least not ALWAYS a problem, as a stage-setting infodump would be far worse. Its lack of detail often allows us to assume the best, or hand wave gaps, to keep things bubbling.

Before we get there, let’s talk characters. You get to choose to play one of three. I chose the “Hollow, Seasoned, Stubborn” one. What? Don’t read too much into that. This put me in media res into an investigation of a previously captured vampire that had transgressed through inexperience. Already though, there was a disconnect. The illustration topping the page seemed of a young person, clearly not me, so I assumed must have been the charge I was investigating. Nope! This grizzled, ex-cop, ‘too old for this…’ curmudgeon looked all of 19. Ok, vamps don’t age physically but background suggested I was a cop BEFORE turning. That was a dissonance with the piece.

Here’s another dissonance. The link-select paradigm produced what I believe to be an unintended consequence. Like a lot of links, it was bolded and underlined to convey its UI purpose. It was ALSO almost always the last sentence on the page. Reading a bolded, underlined sentence conveys a weight, an import to those words. THESE WORDS HAVE MEANING, READER! Here, read these two passages and see how they play differently in your head:

“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”
“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”

Right? You can HEAR the swelling musical DUN DUN sting! Now, imagine that on EVERY PAGE. It quickly establishes a rhythm in your head, an offputting one of the narrative throwing import at you, so often unearned. It is hard to overstate how distracting this becomes by the end. I think, textually speaking, the work would have been better served by a simple > prompt or somesuch at the end of a page rather than distort the text itself. Even a different color without highlighting markup might be less intrusive and still serve the UI purpose.

The last dissonance I want to observe is plot-execution-based. Despite its mostly obscured nature, when the operation of the detective agency WAS detailed, it was unconvincing. In an early sequence, the third playable character, a young vampire, (Spoiler - click to show)is turned to an undercover agent. This turn was ill-justified and unconvincing in the text. The reasons AGAINST the development were well established, then summarily discarded seemingly with a shrug. The fact that my character, the grizzled-seen-it-all ex-cop, took this turn at face value despite GREAT reasons not to… I didn’t buy it. The fact that it never paid off later kind of made it worse. Then to GIFT this (Spoiler - click to show)new recruit with a uniform known far and wide as the organization’s calling card… (Spoiler - click to show)TO AN UNDERCOVER AGENT??? Later, during a climactic confrontation, a fight scene seemingly depended on antagonists standing stock still while the protagonists executed increasingly complex moves. The work was peppered with details like this that just didn’t land.

I have gotten the negatives out of the way, and since many of them showed up early, I can’t say I was ever truly engaged in the work. (Well, except… I’ll get there.) That said, there were as many or more positive details I simply loved, not the least of which was the character of my PC and another playable agent, Declan. They had agency, voice, awesome personalities and showed admirable competence more often than not. Legitimately interesting character creations.

Another strength was the in media introductions of other organizations and their casual conflict/intersection with our heroes. This was employed as an effective way to embiggen the world, and often with just enough detail to entice and not too much to draw questions. I particularly liked the bureaucratic incompetence of the California branch.

These treats, enjoyable as they were, were to be eclipsed by a midpoint scene that rocked me out of my ossifying impressions. To that point in the story there had been a lowkey connection between two characters, one I had been nurturing when presented with choices to do so. It exploded into a scene of such incredible emotional nuance I literally sat straighter in my chair as I devoured it. It EASILY could have been stock mutual confessions set to swelling music. Instead, it honored both characters (and my prior choices), and presented a bittersweet emotional realism and earned drama the work had not telegraphed it was capable of. The prose was note perfect. It flashed then removed choice links, tantalizing me with what could have been, but wasn’t. What a powerful use of IF that was! I honestly mentally slow clapped by the end of the scene. It was powerful, compelling and landed like gangbusters. It was immediately followed by an abstract ‘passage of time’ sequence that was almost as affecting, and a joy to read. These two sections, back to back, minimized all my prior complaints. If I hadn’t been taking notes, it could have flushed them from my head. How much was the unique product of my choices v authorial hand I couldn’t say, but I DO say that sequence, at least temporarily, rocketed me into true engagement.

The climax fell short of that height, but in the afterglow of that super effective scene I was a lot more forgiving. I did restart the game to play again as the other well-defined character, but quickly realized the plot wasn’t going to change, and it was hard to justify a second playthrough. That said, that gift of an emotional scene well justified the play.


Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1hr as Lynette, 15min as Declan
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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