Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
WARNING: Review is from an early, incomplete version of the game

Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 2.25 hrs >7 fails until win?

I made a good-faith attempt to spoiler-protect this thing, but my responses are so specific… caveat emptor.

New as I am to the modern hobby, I am occasionally blindsided by obvious-in-retrospect conceits that are likely not surprising to others. I am familiar with the fanfic phenomenon - enthusiastic amateurs writing about copyrighted properties simply because they love it so much. It should not be a surprise that fanIF also exists in the world. Presumably less porn-focused, but hey I’m not judging either way.

This is a fanIF riffing on Balder’s Gate 3, a D&D-based AAA console RPG. I have no relationship with that property (Alan Wake/Remedy Games is more my speed), but c’mon I grew up in the modern world, I know what D&D is. Dream ably catches me up on what I need to know to provide a much tighter bottle scenario: escape a one room mental tomb with a vampire compatriot. It also lets you pick your D&D Class which, hey, if you invite me into the party you’re getting a Rogue. You just are. If you didn’t want a Rogue you shouldn’t’a invited me. That’s on you.

I ended up on roller coaster with this thing, and I’ll use an early quote to shepherd us through:

"This game does presuppose that your character cares what happens
to Astarion [the vampire party member in question -jj]. If you
don't like him (which is a very legitimate opinion to have, he is
an asshole) you should probably not play this game."

I laughed out loud encountering this the first time, as that could easily have been my knee-jerk had the game not warned me to play along. So I played along. The one room escape is a fiendishly clever Dark Room. Due to reasons, you have to teach yourself how to interact with the world, including seeing, speaking and touching. As you teach yourself, you haltingly explore a pretty spare crypt and have to figure out how to escape. I played in ‘Balanced’ mode, and it is CHALLENGING! Your companion’s health leaches away every day, and if Astarion dies, you die. You can slow the bleeding by talking and comforting him, but every moment you spend doing that you are NOT improving your abilities to facilitate escape. Events happen around you to increase the challenge, and there are few clues what the ‘right’ mix of activities is. He died in a half hour the first time.

But I was metaphorically trapped in this puzzle! The balancing act was interesting and fun. Deducing cause and effect, what is important, where things might go, USING MY ROGUE POWERS, all of this was magnetic in gameplay. I cycled more times, almost maniacally poking into new corners here, engaging the poor sap differently there, leveling up at different rates, always learning. It was Time Looping. I was Time Looping and I loved it more and more except…

…except it became more and more clear that the way to success was to (Spoiler - click to show)emotionally buttress my fellow prisoner, to slow his decay. Thematically I get it, its really clever actually. In PRACTICE it was increasingly irritating, on a geometric progression. Not only because I was spending greater swaths of my day just (Spoiler - click to show)holding his hand, when I could be, y’know, THIEVING SOME ESCAPE TOOLS. But also, with every loop, I got smarter while he didn’t get an iota less Needy. If anything, by keeping him alive longer, I was treated to increasingly unwanted codependent behavior! Yeah, I’m trying to set up a finely calibrated sequence of sensory growth, exploration and guard interaction, but BY ALL MEANS LETS TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS FIRST.

Look, I KNOW it’s thematic. I KNOW it’s plot justified in the most elegant way. I KNOW it was slyly subverting dungeon adventure tropes for emotional narrative and an extremely vital exploration of the trauma of solitary confinement. I don’t even begrudge well-chosen gameplay compromises like after 150 days only NOW does his decay escalate; or famously immortal vampires cracking under pressure of advancing time. My problem is, after looping so many times, I was pot committed to a High Adventure rescue. I was not receptive to a segue to (Spoiler - click to show)slashfic. If that was the piece’s aim, it certainly held its cards close while I built contrary expectations. Additionally, I think there is a missing piece. It is clear what Astarion needs from the PC. It is not clear at all what Astarion provides the PC, emotionally or otherwise, why the PC should care. Maybe the original IP provides this? For a noob like me though, by repeating his neediness over and over via gameplay loops, it curdles to Cling. Have we not established at this point that I am an emotionless husk? This cannot be surprising to you.

Inevitably, I saw the writing on the wall. There was no High Fantasy rescue in my future. I needed to do what I needed to do to get him out of the fox hole. So I hid the pity in my eyes, looped 3 or 4 more times (over two hours total) and nursed him through. Things seemed to be progressing, and then ACT 1 ended.

Ok, that was progress! We didn’t die! (Spoiler - click to show)His clammy hand was clingy and we hadn’t escaped yet, but things were moving in the right direction at least. I had seen in Menu that there were three acts. I had presumed I got to play all three of them. Nossir. It seems the other two are not implemented yet? So after all that, the game ended and I DIDN’T EVEN (Spoiler - click to show)ESCAPE??? WHAT THE HELL AM I HOLDING THIS NEBBISH’ HAND FOR THEN???

There was a noise that came out of me I would not have believed I could make. For a game that needed me to care about Astarion, after I had gamely agreed to do so, it went to great lengths to break me of that then just left me twist. I am so sorry, that is just classic Scrappy.

Mystery, Inc: Classic Scrappy
Vibe: Gothic Escape Room
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would perhaps engineer a High Fantasy Escape solution that balanced emotional maintenance with daring-do. If that was really anathema to the purpose of the piece (which it well could be), I would better clue the intent up front, then focus on Astarion - pay attention to how looping affects his character and give the player reason to care, rather than demand it as a prerequisite.

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

In deference to the idea that this is both incomplete and clearly not for me, I am omitting my rating from the average.

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 1hr, 14/16 clues, right cause of death, wrong drug

If I part the opaque mists of time, push back untold eons to my reentry to this hobby, reaching, reaching nearly two entire trips around the sun to the barely discernible epoch of Fall 2022… this authorspace was virgin snow to me. Every game came as single line on a blank slate - no context of author idiosyncrasies, platform biases, tell-tale prose and fascinations. Just the raw work itself. Ah, such a simple, untarnished time and state for a reviewer full of unearned confidence and bluster.

An interminable 18 months later finds the withered, corrupted husk before you: penetrating brilliance and revelatory insights dimmed and drowned beneath a cacophony of prior art and superficial connections. You require evidence of my tragic artistic collapse? Not even past the cover page of this game, the eureka that pushed all other thoughts from my head was “Oooh! Oooh! I know this!” For a mad minute, I thought it could even be a Twine reimplementation of that former parser effort.

As final, damning evidence of my intellectual bankruptcy let me now proceed to review this work, liberally comparing it to its predecessor.

IT IS BETTER IN EVERY WAY.

The Twine platform is used to great effect in this work - its game-pane setup, liberal use of mood-setting graphics, case file/interview subscreens, and even text organization all combine to immediately cast the player in role of no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma’am detective. The Twine command paradigm of selecting highlighted links on the page provide a superior framework where links only allow actions that support the investigation, as opposed to a parser’s need to accommodate any number of mimesis-breaking player fumblings.

The mystery is very capably put together - enough red herrings and dead ends to make searching out truths fun and challenging, not too many to drown the player. Many different items and leads that branch and intersect in interesting ways. Even the flourishes like timed text are used to advantage that could easily be intrusive.

The author uses all these tools to push the player into the role of Forensic Detective, then opens the door on clinical test results, chemical names and lateral thinking. My biggest beef with the previous game was that it didn’t sufficiently show its stripes, and let the player muck about with parser puzzle toys instead. It wanted Quincy, but let you be Clouseau. This time, the player is aligned from the jump - get that Keystone Cops nonsense outta here, pros are at work! The work is better focused, and better showcases its strengths, for it.

I really had fun with this one. In the end, I drew satisfaction from legitimate deduction and clue connection to determine cause of death. I failed however to identify the chemical source of the problem. I did miss two clues somewhere, perhaps those held the final piece I needed. OR PERHAPS NOT. Because the first thing I did after informed of my failure was Google search some chemicals, and ON THE FIRST RESULTS PAGE, THE MYSTERY WAS SOLVED.

I COULDA USED GOOGLE TO HELP SOLVE THE MYSTERY ALL ALONG! God, I love that so much. This thing made me a detective and with just one more bit of extra-game lateral thinking I might have closed the case. LIKE A REAL DETECTIVE. I can’t remember a failure so satisfying, and the credit goes to the real-world, clinical vibe the game created through graphic layout, mystery construction and tight UI control.

I kinda can’t wait for the next one in the series. You better BELIEVE I will be testing if it measures up to this one. [spoiler aside to author - that said, there is a discernible pattern in these two works that casts a shadow… beware!]

Mystery, Inc: Velma
Vibe: Forensic Detective
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, only one tweak: the body’s apparent sex is left unrevealed when examined, leading to a strange few minutes of disconnect when finding female name references around the apartment. Yes, it can be deduced but doesn’t feel like that detail should need to be.

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/2/24
Playtime: 45min

We’ve been using ‘Interactive Fiction’ as synonym for ‘text-based game’ for so long, it’s like repeating a word rapidly until it loses all meaning. Hey, there’s a term for that! Semantic Satiation - a term that probably requires less reps than most for its meaning to dissolve. Anywho, we’ve been doing it to IF for so long we lose track of full meaning of ‘Interactive’ ‘Fiction.’ Thanks Quickenheath for the reminder!

It has been a while since I’ve seen a work this gamey land this far on the ‘fiction’ side of the spectrum, longer for one this accomplished at its mission. Yes, there are IF trope aspects of searching locations, collecting inventory, solving password and poetry clue-based puzzles, but they all spring from narrative so organically that they don’t feel like puzzles. More like the natural flow of events we’re just swimming along with. I don’t mean to imply it is on rails, its mostly not. I mean the world building, character motivations, important artifacts and events are all painted so crisply and clearly that the story itself makes it clear where we need to be with barely any artificial nudging or narrative-killing false paths.

It is a rogue’s love story of adventure, rescue and hidden legacy. Crucially, the non-daring-do aspects are given more weight, making for a reasonably fresh take on the genre. And by “fresh take” I mean “showing my whole @$$ with ignorance of romantic literature”. The story itself sells its earnest emotionality with matter-of-fact prose that conveys the sweet emotions without becoming cloying. The world building is precise: just enough to intrigue and bring wonder, and crucially fuel the plot, not too much to overwhelm or generate unanswerable questions. If I had a plot quibble, it is the love interest’s revealed identity. Isn’t it wild enough that they are (Spoiler - click to show)a fairy? Did they need to be a (Spoiler - click to show)fairy PRINCE(SS)? But y’know what? Those kinds of things are pretty de rigeur for this kind of narrative. The ultimate climax was still a natural, satisfying product of the entire plot, made more vivid through interactivity.

A lot of that credit goes to the narrative, but the presentation and technical choices are doing a lot of work here too. The different font work, use of color and layout, are all just to the perfect side of the ‘evocative-intrusive’ line. Most especially effective are the aside-links, that provide flashback details when clicked, and even more the links that cycle words and phrases on the page. Those latter so crisply evoke a character struggling with a concept or idea by testing phrasings and leverage IF’s strengths to do so more effectively than static media. Really, the whole package does that - combines interactive flourishes and techniques to perfectly enhance a narrative that deftly enables their employment.

Viva Valentine and Aubrey! Viva la narrative! Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva Viva viva viva viva

See? Semantic Satiation. It’s a thing.

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Fairy (ah? ah?) Tale
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, honestly not sure I would feel compelled to do anything here. It’s perfectly coherent in form and function. Get onto that next project, author!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/2/24
Playtime: 20min, two endings, 4 cycles

I can’t remember the last time I laughed, out loud, where I could be heard by others, on the opening screen of an IF. Yes, I’ve done it midgame at particularly good gags. Heck I’ve repeated the word ‘INVESTIGRAB’ aloud an unjustifiable amount of times during one game. But at the jump? Unprecedented. The artwork in this game is exceptionally expressive and delightful. If I thought I could get it past my wife, I would search out a framed copy for our house.

Talk about right-footing, I immediately wanted nothing but good things for this game. Charged with bringing peace to humans and their sentient potato neighbors? No further details needed, I’m on board! It gives me no joy to report I did not repeat that initial high during subsequent gameplay.

It is a limited choice game, often with screens of no choice, or ultimately inconsequential ones until the final scene. This is fine, some of the choices bring chuckles which is legit. Often though, the focus seemed to drift. There are tons of potato puns and witticisms, though nearly all of them revolve around cooking potatoes. That’s weird, right? It’s like if all our aphorisms revolved around cannibalism. At one point you are invited to eat potato chips. World of sentient potatoes. Feels unsettling seeing it written, doesn’t it? I’m not saying that can’t be used to good effect. Heck, maybe the potatoes in this world just LIIIVE to provide culinary joy, like maybe its their whole thing! What’s weird is not NOTING that its kinda weird, narratively. I don’t want to pile on this too hard, it’s not like I’m looking for sociologically sound world building with sentient potatoes. Its more like opportunity lost to milk some more fun from the bonkers premise.

Missed opportunity rings out throughout. There is a mystery to solve, except the prologue reveals its solution completely. Nevertheless, you still flashback to the entire (failed) investigation as midgame, only to arrive exactly where you left off during prologue. Missed opportunity to flesh out the humor or better set up the endgame.

I will say, the closure was stronger, in that it presented actual meaningful choices including a nice observation of hum…er potato nature. It also seemed to lose the farce of its setup and might as well have been commentary on US electoral politics. Well, except that that delightful artwork continues to tickle the funny bone throughout.

Those narrative/prose quibbles are real, but kind of incidental. Honestly, the potato-based UI and artwork alone would have buoyed me past all that if not for larger issues. It needed a little more …baking… to be done. (Eh? like a potato?) I hit lots of issues that kind of compounded on each other. Despite my giving it a fullscreen window to play in, the UI pushed control buttons off the bottom of the screen, often. Sometimes even selectable text choices. The mouse was somehow super finicky, many times it registered a double click, skipping me past dialogue screens. No other window on my desktop suffers this, it had to be the game. Lack of Undo/Back means I had to full restart to recover those. The protagonist, according to illustration, is clearly a woman, yet one character refers to her as a guy. Maybe my presumption, I suppose, but never clarified. I cycled four times, got an unnumbered ending twice, and the same ending another two times, once numbered 2, the other time #3. This is ignoring some jarring emotional escalations during dialogue. Combined, it lent an ‘unfinished’ air to the work.

Even at that, my overwhelming impression is still a lingering goodwill and appreciation. Look, it could be sharper, it could be more polished, sure. But I’ll always have the gift of that opening screen.

Mystery, Inc: Scooby all day long
Vibe: Political Farce. So, y’know, Political.
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure the technical issues would be first priority, were it my project. Clean up text, UI, window management. Get that out of the player’s way and jump on the back of that tremendous artwork.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/1/24
Playtime: 30 min, two playthroughs

I don’t get the sense that Frank Miller particularly cares what you think about his legacy, which is his prerogative as an artist. 80s/90s US comics fascination with Western-idealized Japanese culture can sure use some re-evaluation though, and his name will loom large over it all. I raise this spectre because despite being a reasonably well-read, well-traveled adult, nevertheless that is the main touchstone I have to bring to bear to this piece. (Well, along with dim memories of the miniseries SHOGUN, no the earlier one, that my parents looooved.)

This is relevant to my review because leaving aside any specific cultural details, the overwhelming VIBE of Miller’s works’ was amped-up, self-serious melodrama, preoccupied with a vaguely defined but super urgent all-caps HONOR. It is kind of hard to tell where Chris Claremont stops and he begins. What was expressly missing was any sense of humor. Given the works he now says should be read as comedies, this is probably a good thing.

A Simple Happening drives unknowingly into that cultural baggage with a parser game of samurai committing seppuku (ritual suicide). There is every probability Miller’s corpus is an unfair backdrop to this work, that the resonances are unintended and purely my own invention. I accept this. Certainly, the work attempts to cue its mischievous heart early, in describing the offense that brought the player to the solemn ritual.

Even without Miller though, between the relatively spare descriptions of place and setup, and the charged ritual hanging over everything, its tone cannot help but be somber and suffocating. The early game observance of ritual, again described in tight, almost journalistic sparity, reinforce the solemnity of the proceedings. In particular, the cheeky ‘death poem generator’ is a subversive bit of humor, except that the straight-laced randomized phrases themselves don’t play along with the joke. A bit of compounding wry humor there could have done worlds to try and blend the tones. When the game shifts to an escape, and one filled with clear slapstick moments, the effect is jarring. Not unpleasant, mind, but decidedly dissonant.

The game presents as a dire melodrama, but anytime the player goofs, the game goofs right back, then quickly re-establishes its somber mood. In many cases it REQUIRES the player to goof to make progress. It makes for a very conflicted tone to the work - clearly intended comedy threaded through Miller-esque all-caps HONOR. And some not-for-laughs murder. All reinforced by the abrupt end to the journey.

As a comedy it is often funny. It just doesn’t try to reconcile its two tones into anything larger: not ironic contrast or pathos or even subversion. I played it twice to see if it was me. (Which is a wild claim. I mean, it was clearly ALWAYS ME.) The second time, I deliberately goofed early and often and was surprised that many of the gags themselves were terse and truncated, like the jokes themselves thought they were intruding. Even when I leaned hard into the comedy, I felt like the game was holding itself back. In the end I didn’t have a bad time - just one that couldn’t reconcile its two tones in a satisfying way.

Fair’s fair though, SO much funnier than Dark Knight Strikes Again.

Mystery, Inc: A somewhat muted Scooby
Vibe: Conflicted
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure, if it were my project, I think I would thread the playfulness more clearly into the early going, both with the poem generator and certainly the (Spoiler - click to show)attack to escape. Some slapstick in the latter would go a long way to a more coherent mood. Maybe also some words from (Spoiler - click to show)the wife to segue tones into pathos.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/1/24
Playtime: 1hr, 2 endings, but trashed my success poem!

If you were going to pitch the anti-JJMcC work, like the work engineered from ground up to push me away and keep pushing until I fell into an ocean, well, let’s just eavesdrop on the pitch in progress:

“… see the hero is sentient AI, right? And what it wants is to save humanity from its sterile profit-driven doom. But get this, what will save them is ART!!! Keep up, son, we’re still accelerating. So the game protagonist is not the hero though, they will be a corp-drone sheeple redeemed by art… what? Seriously? A drone’s initiative impact narrative, are you hearing yourself? Be realistic. Forget the sheeple, they’re just the player’s shell. The point is the art, only not just any art, are you ready for this? Are you ready? What brings down dyscapitalopia is… PEOTRY!!”

Imma stop you there made-of-straw pitchman. So many anti-JJMcC boxes in such short time. AI valorization; hopelessly naive Art-stronger-than-profit; marginal player agency; Poetry. Longtime readers will recall a certain antipathy for what I have called Poetic Verse. Y’know what is teeming, just chock-a-block with Poetic Verse? POETRY. For me, at it’s best, Poetry is glib, amusing wordplay. Far more often it is overwrought linguistic excess that I have no patience for.

Well, Prosper.0 is evidence why clearing these pitches past me is a BAD idea. Is it guilty of all the things it pitched? Yeah, it kinda is. But it adds two things so crucial to the proceedings as to completely transform the entire experience: a clean, simple, but immersive graphical presentation and a POETRY minigame. The latter being the heavy hitter here.

Setup first: the player is a worker drone in a dystopian Corporate far future, purging art from computers and summarizing entire civilizations in a handful of reductive categories. Uh, kinda like what you see at the bottom of this review. The graphical presentation endeavors to put you at that far-future terminal, madly sorting those bits in soul-crunching mouse clicks. It is a clean, evocative design (not the least of which the teletype and reverse teletype word presentations) Until the hero AI pops in and… brings the poetry.

Nevermind the flimsy narrative justification, nevermind the logistical problems of the setup, nevermind the straight-faced and totally committed assertion of Poetry’s potency in the face of uncaring capitalist incentives... you gonna write some poetry. And that is where things take off.

The poetry minigame is somehow completely winning, a thoroughly engaging exercise of madly clicking words as they vanish before your eyes, then trying to make coherent poetry out of the resulting word salad. IT IS ENTHRALLING. My first attempt was a too-cool-for-school parody that couldn’t even maintain its ironic remove to the last line. Against my own nature and sensibilities I found myself TRYING to get usable words, then honor the subjects as best I could, THEN ACTIVELY BEMOAN MY LIMITED SKILLS IN AN ENDEAVOR I HAVE LITTLE REGARD FOR. Ultimately, the plot contrivances were immaterial. The game wanted me to believe in the power of poetry and wisely decided the only way I would is to MAKE ME DO IT. With just the perfect amount of evolving artificial/randomized constraints to keep things fresh. It also has a bit to say about the limits of expression and the inherent loss of depth in any documentation that add the right sour/salt to keep things from getting too cloying.

You cycle through a series of slightly varied exercises, then come to some final narrative choices that impact you but not the plot. Then you get to see your poetry one last time! The alchemy that generated that engagement kind of moots any objections the setup might provoke - I kinda didn’t care how contrived the setup was, it was barely but just enough to push past all my reservations and rejections. It did what it needed to do to showcase its centerpiece statement: Poetry is kind of an act, not a product.

I swear to God, five stars for a POETRY work??? Who even am I anymore?

Mystery, Inc: Velma
Vibe: Geeky but winning High School English teacher
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : My only quibble with the game was my inability to recover poetry lost to an ‘explore alternate ending’ option. Would try to keep those available, even with an alternate path exploration.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/1/24
Playtime: 20min, all endings

Tired of typing words? Flummoxed by modern graphics engines and their obsession with triangle counts? Ready for some relentlessly optimistic affirmations and low-key puzzle/exploration play? TAP! has you covered, fam!

Its roots would be discernible even without its billing as an enhanced class project, and I don’t mean that negatively. Any class that focuses on Atari-Adventure era game esthetic has my support. If you’re gonna pillage and pervert our educational institutions with reactionary politics and the tyranny of STEM, this approach at least tilts at all the right windmills!

It does show its cards a bit with typos (maybe the most impactful, sometimes getting the wrong letter of “And now you know what [letter] means!”), off grammar and inelegant path choices in places, but nothing too distracting. There is a mild 3-pass puzzle of hidden entrances and code-repeating that lead to an ultimate final truth, and hidden path ala Adventure’s famous Easter egg. Nothing here is earthshaking, but conversely neither is it sour or offensive. Just unnuanced positivity which, what kind of monster is down on that? Ok, often me, true. Not this time though.

As a training/first game it is appealing and friendly, if slight. Look forward to seeing where the author goes from here.

Mystery, Inc: Velma
Vibe: Atari Adventure, with compassion
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would feel the pride (Ah-ahh! didn’t even do that on purpose!) of accomplishment, then channel that momentum into the next project. TAP! is great where it is for what it is!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/1/24
Playtime: 15 min, 3 endings

This is a very short, stock-format Twine entry, with very few choices telling a mostly linear story. I exhausted the choice space in three cycles (though not the permutations of those choices, if that makes a difference). The choices provided more information, background and color and notwithstanding some different events were variations on a single theme. I feel like exhausting the space was the most satisfying way to consume this piece.

So, it was shallow and repetitive and on rails then? No, not at all. I am deliberately being vague as the few moving pieces the work offers mesh so precisely with each other that pinning any piece of it down might rob the reader of the ability to watch the gears flow together naturally. You know me though, I gotta try.

Hm, lemme try this. The work presents a dream-like and offscreen post-apocalypse setup with uncertainly reliable protagonist and antagonists. The blurriness of its details paradoxically are executed with extreme narrative precision, including ultimately-satisfying but jarring-in-the-moment descriptive choices. The reality of the situation dances in your peripheral vision but refuses attempts to focus on it. Seemingly key details are omitted entirely, only to later be resolved as maybe not so key after all. Almost by magic all these slippery and fractured story elements resolve into a complete whole by the end. It’s an admirable narrative sleight-of-hand, including its limited use of interactivity to underline key elements. It’s like if Chris Nolan adapted Little Nemo but not quite so fanciful.

It probably helps that themes of autonomy and control feel desperately vital just now, and the conceits of this particular dream logic build-a-story-by-innuendo approach enabled some legitimate insights, however oblique. Actually, the obliquity(?) helped sell things I think, in a way polemic or monologue would not.

If there is a downside, it is that between the deceptively limited individual components, and the ephemerality of the combined narrative construct I can’t talk about it without just trashing it for you all! You want me to pull apart a butterfly while assuring you it is beautiful despite its screams? Of course you don’t, and that was waaay too dark a metaphor. I would say enjoy it, submerse yourself in the dreamy vibe of it, let the connections come organically. You are in capable hands.

Not dissecting it does carry its own perils though, as even now I can feel its gossamer architecture slipping between my fingers. Down the road, will there be anything left to discuss…?

What were we talking about again?

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Dream Horror
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel!: I wouldn’t dare touch the thematic clockwork, but if it were my project I might spend some time reskinning the presentation. Non-stock font/color and layout choices could easily enhance the proceedings and further stitch the work together.

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

If, through some strange quirk of the hyperlink-chain that got you here, my words are the first you are reading about this game know this: Quisborne is a mammoth game. It took me over 37 hours, 2 full weeks, start to finish. I laughingly said at start "This may take me longer than Spiderman 2." It didn't, BUT IT COULDA. With a game of such epic scale, my normal review approaches strain and buckle. Would you want to read a five hour summary? A three hour thematic deconstruction and post-mortem? Heck, a forty-five minute riff on prose style and craftsmanship? Of course you don't. You wanna know if it's worth your time, and since I probably shocked and awed you I'll just flat say: It definitely is.

Charged with mentoring a young, sheltered Prince, the player pursues an epic quest to fulfill the youthful monarch-to-be's dreams of making himself worthy of his legacy and love interest. Yeah, it involves solving puzzles. So many puzzles. If at this point you are starting to think, "Oh ok, I have the measure of this game," I promise you do not. Every image you have in your head of a puzzle-driven IF fantasy quest is technically accurate. It's just laughably inadequate - like a grainy, faded, off-center and out-of-focus Polaroid of the ACTUAL Quisborne.

Actual Quisborne is a wide-screen, technicolor, surround-sound experience of deep world building, epic scale, vivid characters, challenging logistical and mechanical puzzles, and sweet charm. And wordplay. So many jokes, puns and poems. It's like the man said, "If you didn't laugh at that one, don't worry, three hundred more are coming right behind it."

From the jump it pulls you into its thrall with its graphical presentation. (do use QTADS as your interpreter. You only hurt yourself by not) The graphical flourishes and music are evocative, disciplined and delightful, and marry with the PDF map to create the perfect fantasy-road-novel vibe.

Quisborne is also probably the most tightly crafted parser you will ever play, certainly the tightest one I've played. For all its scope and depth, there is exacting precision in its player experience. Great thought has been put into Quality of Play features, designed to reduce or eliminate player frictions. A frankly deranged amount of time has been devoted to incidental dialogue, atmosphere, scenes and vignettes that suggest a wild, vibrant world around you. NPCs have arcs, memories and call backs, situational awareness and so, so many stories. A staggering amount of unique responses to player actions give a near conversational feel that defies IF repetition fatigue better than any game I've seen. So many, that I suspect even the most leisurely playthrough may experience less than 50% of the text in the game. Is it flawless? No. At its size, statistically it CAN'T be. I found a few bugs (since fixed), you probably will too. I can say, as a percentage of its runtime, the bug impact is in insignificant digits.

On the topic of gameplay engineering, its multi-tiered hint system is amazing. From subtle, unsolicited "by the ways" from your companion, to a pre-hint NUDGE command, to task lists, memories and a top-tier progressive HINT function, your vast problem space may feel overwhelming, but the game provides whatever level of lifeline you prefer.

There are accommodations to make with the game for sure, even beyond its raw scale. The first is its prose. Springing from a tradition of tiny, memory constrained machines, classic IF leans to the terse side of description. Bringing that expectation here is a mistake. Quisborne will inundate you with words - I once uncharitably described it as Class IV torrents of words. They're pretty great words, but man are there a lot of them. They very much do the work of establishing the lore and atmosphere of the world but you will need to adjust to their pace.

These words also weave a finely detailed tapestry. At one point, I had cause to compare it Where's Waldo. There are SO many fine details, picking out important ones becomes a puzzle of its own. Quisborne demands and rewards your attention to detail. It is easy to lose sight of that amidst the heroic scope of the thing but DO NOT FORGET. It is a cold, uncaring fantasy world, it is not your friend. WATCH IT CLOSELY.

The next accommodation is its breadth of puzzle play. You are going to be served a delightful buffet of varied puzzles: (modest) mazey mapping, logic posers, hide and seek, crafting, bizarre logic jumps, creative misuse of objects, so many more. Inevitably, some will hit your brain's precise chemical cocktail better than others. While there are masterful setpieces everyone will clap with glee at, likely there will be a few that chafe more than delight. HINT your way past those is my advice. There's 300 great ones right behind it. I mean by the time you get to the Witch's House... ahhh, no. I want to but I can't.

So, I haven't talked much about the story all this is in service of yet. Y'know how some stories are thrill-ride, twist-a-minute shockers that gut punch with surprise after surprise? This is not that. This is a road novel in IF form, building character and story through a series of idiosyncratic vignettes around a tight thematic core. It is slower, sweeter, and richer for it. The ending it builds towards is just about perfect, thick with deeply earned emotion. When finally finishing, you will get the same mix of satisfaction and regret as from a great novel.

It's very funny. It's EPIC. It's challenging. It's a lot. It's expertly crafted. It's DEEP. It's rewarding. 37 hours well spent.

Played: 3/12-26/24
Playtime: 37.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging in the moment, Transcendent in realized scope, Mostly Seamless

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

During IFCOMP judging, I consider myself pretty disciplined about embargoing spoilers or opinions of other reviewers prior to publishing my own. Towards the end I gradually, then increasingly frenzied, read reviews of entries I’ve already published. I’m pretty good at glazing my eyes when I detect titles I haven’t played/reviewed yet. Certainly, I don’t read WORDS. LINKS though… those damn light blue bastards cut through my self-imposed fog quicker than I can back-link away.

Damn you to a fiery hell of a thousand suns @EJoyce !!! In a review of this game, WHY OH WHY did you cite Detective: A Modern Crime Boardgame??? WHY DID YOU HIGHLIGHT IT IN GLOWING NEON BLUE??? Which you did deliberately, don’t play coy! I had forgotten I glimpsed it, which reviewer I was catching up on, but as soon as AnC4 fired up I KNEWKNEWKNEW a) that I had in fact seen it; b) that it almost certainly had to be in a review of this game; and c) I WOULD BE ABLE TO THINK OF NOTHING ELSE ITS ENTIRE RUNTIME. Obviously, I have since tracked you down, @EJoyce, before you can escape judgement for your crime! You may face justice, but I have to live FOREVER with the stain on my integrity.

Damn you even further @EJoyce because you are RIGHT to invoke it.

For the uninitiated (which @EJoyce probably already brought you up to speed, but Imma do it just in case), D:MCB is a card-driven, cooperative mystery game, where you play your investigation over several game days. It owes big parts of its gameplay to the prior boardgame Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. You select clue cards that provide leads, interviews, forensics (and red herrings), and that take a variable number of hours from your timer. At the end, you answer a questionnaire whether you think you’ve solved it or not! I don’t know if it was an inspiration for AnC4, but they sure share DNA. And why not? It is great DNA! My family and I play a scenario most holidays and have great fun putting up mind map boards with yellow stickies and colored yarn. Our hit rate is pretty good, but far from perfect. Our favorite was the LA Crimes scenarios - they were fun mysteries but also tied into a kind of fun-bonkers overarching plot.

I digress. When I first fired this game up, AFTER MY CRISIS OF INTEGRITY, I nearly shut it down thinking, ‘this would be great to play one weekend with my remote son!’ Sadly he was unavailable through the span of IFCOMP23 judging so with great reluctance I solo play/dual screened it. This is very much NOT the best way to enjoy this game. I mean, its fine? It’s just, the table talk/wild speculation/jockeying for pet theories and lines of inquiry, that’s part of the fun. Not covered in this review.

The dual screen conceit had its charms though. From my god’s eye view, I could see the text was slightly different between the two. It appeared to be flavor, appropriate to the character but not carrying different mystery information? Or even questioning options? That was cool, but would have been better if it had different info/options too! I was also hoping there would be opportunity to ‘split up’ and cover more ground, though did not seem to. Both of those would have been a nice tweak of the formula (though the latter could def lead to some post-game finger pointing! “What do you mean you forgot to mention the FINGERPRINTS??”)

The mystery itself was nicely broad - a wide array of suspects and possible motives. Some concrete clues to follow up on. The writing was clean and effective - it carried a bit of character for our dual protagonists, their Girl Friday, and most of the suspects themselves had distinct voices. Motives and opportunity were ably planned and believably trickle-revealed through interviews. As predisposed as I was to this PARTICULAR flavor of gameplay, I devoured it for sure. I didn’t do a great job establishing a strong theory, but I was missing my co-detectives. These things are kind of review proof in one sense anyway. Between probably chasing bad leads and insufficient cleverness, there are so many ways it could be my fault, I’ll likely never know if the mystery was ill-constructed. Sure didn’t feel like it!

I wish I could report that I got as far as the final poll then shut off, saving the spoiler to play again later with family. I was simply too Engaged to think of it until too late, and now that is lost to me. @EJoyce, somehow you are responsible for that too! It was a Seamless implementation of this mystery system, one I am deeply predisposed to.

The only off note for me was - why all the famous names and this bizarre Antiquity/Historical/Golden Age of Hollywood mashup? No, that’s not the question. The setting is delightful. The question is why not USE this inspired setting to advantage? D:MCB gives you shell characters, but with slightly different skills that may not encourage deep role playing, but at least give everyone something unique to bring to the mystery. Our protagonists here were mostly interchangeable, despite having a leg up name recognition wise to their boardgame counterparts! As it was, we could as easily have been sharing a single screen for game planning and execution. The protagonists are surrounded by an idiosyncratic cast of characters, but none of them (excepting perhaps Rasputin) evokes any fun connection to their namesakes. The mashup setting kind of faded into the background as the plot went on. Yeah I was talking to James Dean, but had little sense it was THAT James Dean. Were the famous names just mnemonics? That felt like an unconscionable missed opportunity to elevate the material in a fun way.

What? I already told you I was in the bag for this thing, I can’t ask for just a little more? Don’t answer that @EJoyce. You’ve done enough.

—

Aaand now I’ve read @Ejoyce’s review and it is a really insightful dive into the nuts and bolts of this game. A much deeper and more clear-eyed evaluation than my “Hey this reminds me of that thing I like!” take. Y’know what though? I DID really like it. But that review gives you more to chew on. Stinkin’ @EJoyce. Yeah, the irony of linking to it is not lost on me.

Played: 11/9/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished, accused innocent person
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged, Seamless, penalty point for not fully leveraging fun setting
Would Play After Comp?: Well, I can’t now, can I? CAN I @EJOYCE???

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