Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played : 7/15/25
Playtime: 30m

This is a visual novel that (Spoiler - click to show)headfakes a supernatural premise as a tool to cast fraught family dynamics (and possible mental health issues?) as horror. It occupies a similar space as Turn of the Screw, playing with audience expectations of supernatural stories to cast its protagonist (and family) in high relief. I found it pretty effective at this. That frisson of ‘is what’s going on what they SAY is going on?’ is a constant engagement to the reader, keeping the mind open and probing so that adjacent emotionality can get past any disbelief or detachment and get purchase. It is a very effective narrative tool, well employed here.

Over its runtime, it also does something interesting with its characters. The same suspicious dissonance that keeps us engaged, allows (most of) its characters to grow from initially painted one-dimensional extremes to more fully realized characters. Most especially the mother and sister. This is accomplished tangentially, as we internalize seemingly conflictory story beats that are well crafted to paint a picture in our heads without outright explaining things. The father character never really rises to that level, though this is not necessarily fatal, he is somewhat orthogonal to the story’s aims. The protagonist is slightly different, no less powerfully painted. Here the fact of interactivity is used to flesh out the character via the reader’s engagement rather than any imposed plot beats.

The multi-media presentation is very winning - abstract, pastel fog spaces over a moody soundtrack are excellent choices to reinforce the slippery, out of focus nature of the narrative. The text itself is attractively wrapped in a cool graphical box. It is timed text, but crucially plays out faster than we (ok, I) could read, meaning we get the “realtime conversation” vibe without slowing things down. The only off note I felt here was an early screen that seemed to be out of synch - a second, visually incompatible screen crowding up from the bottom. Later, such a graphical dividing line is used to good effect but early on it felt more like a bug than an artistic choice. The fact that this “bug” was not repeated suggests it might be deliberate, even if it didn’t read so.

There are a few further dissonances. Most notably, the narrative plays with POV. The protagonist, the character we are nominally aligned with as reader, is rendered in first person. We have full access to their inner life and to the extent we feel proactive, it is with this POV character. It is somewhat jarring then when a later character is referred to in second person, explicitly casting them as the reader! The first effect of this is to nicely reframe some prior text that felt applied to one character as another’s. The price we pay for that neat twist though is a weird space where we understand/empathize/and align with the “ME” of the narrative, not the “YOU.” In fact, notwithstanding that we are consistently called “you” by the narrative, it does not produce a dramatic tension within us or the story, it just kind of jars things. I have no doubt there was a purpose to this explicit choice, but whatever that might be was lost in the confusion.

My other main quibble is that the ending felt… arbitrary. It just kind of ended, resolving little of the tension of the work. To be fair, there is real resolution for one character as well as the ‘what really happened’ plot. Between the reader alignment confusion, and the fact that the narrative continued to power on for a bit after those climaxes, I was left feeling like the story outran its own aims. Instead of crescendoing with resolution of plot closure, it lingered on. The message here is unmistakable - there is no CONCLUSION, life continues past things like plot climaxes. True, but… isn’t the power of stories heavily tied to closure and climax? Even “nothing ever ends” is a meaningful ending, but it should be underlined in the reader’s head to land as actual ending. For me, my mindset was just a bit too muddled to get there.

All that said, I would still recommend this work - it does many things right, creates a wonderfully enigmatic vibe for much of its runtime, portrays some interestingly fraught family dynamics and has impactful revelations to dispense.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played : 7/15/25
Playtime: 5m, three playthroughs

Another in my review sub-series "Penny Pinching Parity," where I attempt to match review wordcount to IF Jam limits! In this case, the count in question is 498.

This is a two-hander, a dialogue based lightly sci-fi game of living with mismatched power. It is a relatively short game of trying to influence a mercurial lord to engage a rescue mission, when said lord is more preoccupied with their own inter-personal potence. It doesn’t take many viewings of Game of Thrones to understand the dread of this scenario, of LIVING it. Ultimately, you choose between (Spoiler - click to show)self-respect and (Spoiler - click to show)physical abuse.

I think this dynamic is pretty well understood (if quite timely), and deeply unpleasant. This familiarity could undermine impact pretty quickly. So much so that having it be the entirety of the work’s artistic aims presents a challenge to the author. The solution? Make the game short. A distilled, heightened representation, that has its say and lets you stew in the aftermath before you fully realize it is done. This is the perfect way to realize this message.

If I had a quibble with the game, it was in its multimedia choices. Not all of them. For example, the “Approval” score being the only game stat was a kind of genius way of underlining how primarily important this lord’s opinion was in the scheme of things. There is no “happiness” score, no other score AT ALL. Similarly, the sound choice was nicely evocative of the mood of the piece - omnipresent dread, even behind seemingly transactional conversations. Highlighting that the content of the words is only half the story.

Its visual presentation is what I find less focused. To my eyes, there is just a bit too much going on, in a way that doesn’t coalesce together. The background conveys “generic sci fi background” where its sci-fi-ness is the least necessary thing about the work. The bar coding is a very powerful choice, emphasizing the property aspect of the characters… except the lord ALSO has a barcode? That feels like a mixed message for this particular work. The title screen also feels unfocused: its logo and title fonts feel like too many disparate graphical elements that don’t resonate with each other. “Heaven” is one sci-fi font, “Alive” a more organic one, and the barcoding a third, only the latter resonating with the background in any meaningful way. Graphical dissonance is not a BAD impulse, but to my eye, this feels like one too many. I might suggest recasting “Heaven” to more align with the barcoding, to maximize the visceral punch of the “Alive” choice.

Don’t let these quibbles get you down though. As we have established, brevity and focus, even imperfectly realized, are overriding virtues. Don’t make me COMMAND you to play it… that might undermine your APPROVAL stat… and nobody wants that…

Feeling word-parity smug. Exactly 498!

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Graphical playfulness seems to be the least-utilized tool in the IF author’s toolbox. I don’t mean to imply it is unique, certainly examples WELL predate the internet and IF, going all the way back to illuminated bibles. I am tempted to say it engages a different artistic muscle than the more writerly “words’ meaning are the canvas” approach. Maybe I’m just defining IF too narrowly? Or perhaps focusing too narrowly? What are words but graphical representations of ideas, intended to evoke an intellectual and/or emotional response? Different than paintings only in the steps necessary to create and consume them? Against this definition, IF (and all computer art. except AI “art”. f*@$ that s#!@) is just another medium, this one using its inherent tools of time and dynamism to enhance that same impulse. I mean, Super Mario conjures very specific human engagement, nevermind The Last Of Us.

This specific approach though, of using words both for their meaning and as graphical elements, this feels under-exploited. MIMM is a poster child for the potential of this approach. It uses dynamic graphical layout of conflicting snippets of internal monologue to drive home how messy, fragile and conflicted we can be behind the face we present to the world. Words tumble over each other, entwine in the full breadth of two dimensions, flicker, cloud and clarify all at once. I found this to be insanely well executed. A marriage of form and function that perfectly sing off each other to unify into an artistic statement more effective than its disconnected parts.

Two things ensure that this central conceit neither overruns the narrative premise, nor becomes a distracting flourish undermining the experience. The first is the work’s brevity. It neither overstays its welcome, nor dilutes its own impact. The choice to slowly but noticeably ramp the visual chaos in synch with the narrative is exactly the right one to maximize its punch. The second is the high melodrama/low detail plot. It is a heightened emotional story, almost Twilight Zony in its distilled dramatic shorthand. This resonates with the high artificiality of its construction. A choice this visually dramatic married to an appropriately dire melodrama allows both to flourish, rather than one or the other taking all the oxygen. It is less like form in service of function and more a collaboration of equals. Either in isolation could easily slip into schmaltz or histrionics, off-putting in their exaggeration. Together they resonate in a way that reinforces both.

I really liked this small dose of artistic playfulness. It felt novel, well realized, well tuned, and perfectly sized.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played : 7/14/25
Playtime: 5m, two playthroughs, all 497 words

Another in my "Penny Pinching Parity" review sub-series. Microgame jams are a practically review-proof endeavor. If we take the reviewer’s task to its most transactional core, the question at play is ‘Is it worth a player’s time?’ Of course this question is nuanced. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is so heavily steeped in the reviewer’s biases and fascinations that without context it is practically useless.

So we try to build context, frame our reactions. Readers can ideally extrapolate their own response based on this, either in sympathy or opposition. Y’know what that takes though? Words, man, lots of words. So.. at what point does the review become out of scale to its subject?

In service of a sub-500 word game? I’m not sure I can decide on a MOVIE to watch in fewer than 500 words, let alone capture complicated feelings from art! And for these short works, length matters. Investing in gameplay for multiple hours, to be underwhelmed is opportunity cost frittered away from other things you COULD be enjoying more. Investing in review reading is time you could instead be playing the game in question! I mean, I’m pushing half this game’s word budget, and haven’t said a damn thing about it yet!

Let’s just posit that 5 minute art IS worth your time. You will waste far more than that on far less rewarding elements of your day. Like reading these reviews.

Of, say, The Moon’s Knight! Art thrives under constraint, and MK is no exception. Every word is crucially important, and must cover multiple bases: mood, character, plot, scene. This is actually true of all writing, but the clarity of hard limits drives it home. I am an unabashed fan of this author’s prose. Their longer works cast a spell on me through the power of carefully crafted, moody sentences. It is a fair question, if I pretend I don’t know the answer, whether shorter works would clip these wings too short to fly. Well, no, not at all. MK makes the perfect decision to tightly constrain narrative focus - a study of a mythic, doomed romance set against a backdrop of brutal warfare.

Ok, writing it out like that doesn’t sound clipped, nor does it feel so in the moment. We are treated to visceral yet lyric passages that feel exactly as elaborate as needed to weave this particular tale’s spell. There is no sense of pushing against an arbitrary boundary, only the incredible sharpness of it. The discipline comes in what to leave out: backstory that is more powerfully inferred anyway; rounded character traits that are immaterial to the central conflict; world building that is so much chrome. Jettisoned or gestured at without belabored fanfare. This is a focused work that lets its prose breathe where it needs to, and does not waste time where it does not.

Do yourself a favor. Spend the 5 minutes. (497!)

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/21/25
Playtime: 1hr, Demon Hunter(2), Healthy Appetite(1); 2 playthroughs

If there is a category of reviews I struggle with, it is for trauma- or therapy-based IF. Don’t get me wrong, IF is a TREMENDOUS tool to use to build empathy, sympathy, and commiseration for people that can probably use a bit of daylight in their lives. It’s just, if I am not afflicted with the particular concerns of the work, my takes are always a bit suspect. The BEST I can do is approach from an empathy perspective, and even then, I am subject to debilitating blind spots in my engagement.

This is a work whose protagonist struggles with crippling, depressive self-doubt compounded with emotional family trauma. The nature of the work is to explore the protagonist’s apartment, struggle to accomplish daily tasks against a backdrop of near-insurmountable motivation gaps, and experience shadowed flashbacks when considering takeout menus. Ok, rereading that last sentence, that is way more glib than I intended. Food and food preparation are integral touchstones for the protagonist, so the conceit is not unjustified.

Moment by moment it works pretty well. The ‘marketing’ descriptions on the menus are particularly well done, and the contrast between them and their less idealized memories is wryly impactful. If you probe the menus deeply enough you are confronted with representative (Spoiler - click to show)mental demons that are evocative, nicely metaphorical and attractively illustrated. These are all very strong aspects of the work.

The interactivity is where I could feel my blind spots encroaching. On the one hand, atop the screen are three attributes that seem to gauge the player’s effectiveness and mental state. Not only did I not detect an impact to those, I did not seem to be able to modify them in a predictable way. In particular, if I deliberately chose the most (Spoiler - click to show)unhealthy responses, the stats remained resolutely unchanged. Nor did that seem to influence future possible choices.

Further, there was little to no back pressure when selecting the most (Spoiler - click to show)optimistic, constructive choices. Given the dramatic language of the inner monologue, this felt.. too easy? This culminated in gameplay that unveiled (Spoiler - click to show)more food menus if you just kept cleaning, well beyond a threshold even nominally healthy me would be capable of!

Another dissonant tone for me was the breadth of the menus (not all of which I encountered during one playthrough!). A wide variety of ethnicities is represented in restaurants. All of which can trigger childhood memories of family preparation? That is a VERY cosmopolitan family! The language used to describe this SEEMED to lean into handed-down legacies, but were so broadly applied I went from experiencing a SPECIFIC family story to a muddied, ‘wait, what is their heritage now?’

So, all of these things kept me at a bit of an arm’s length, until I considered it in retrospect. What if this was NOT intended to be a rigorous recreation of mental struggles? What if, instead, this was a determinedly encouraging work, aimed at players commiserating with the protagonist? The message was not ‘this is what it feels like’ but ‘you CAN do this, even if it doesn’t feel like it.’ ‘No matter how bad your past choices, you can make a different choice next time.’ The work was simultaneously acknowledging that life experiences can suck and put nearly unsustainable pressures on us, while offering that it is still in our power to grapple with it. We need not be defeated even when it feels like we have been. What I initially read as ‘reductively easy problem solutions’ became instead a cheerleading of some kind, offering hope. And maybe even a bit of wish fulfillment to sweeten the pot.

The blurb for the work seems to echo this take for me, and elevated the whole thing beyond my clinical ‘realism’ knee jerk. The fact that a work of subtle optimism and support can be wrapped in (and punch through!) a graphical package of such evocative darkness is kind of… wonderful.

Horror Icon: Leatherface
Vibe: Wrestling Demons
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would be forced to acknowledge that I was pretty unprepared to engage this subject matter. I would focus, then, on maybe sharpening the protagonist’s ethnic heritage a bit. Pick a few each runthrough to center a family experience on and steer other menus to a different, less immediate shading. I say this in the full acknowledgement that it could double the word count!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 45m, 13/8 bailed without unlocking Guide sections

Light-fantasy parsers run the risk of become samey in a player’s mind. Both in the moment and more so on reflection. They are such a staple of the field, you really have to cut new ground somehow to get them to stand out. Similarly for slice-of-life relationship dramas, though those at least have the hook of (usually) singular character work. Y’know what I can’t accuse of saminess? Weird poetry- and art- driven works that marry an impish sense of humor, playfulness of form and nearly opaque bizarrity.

Those things stick with you. I offer PWW as Exhibit A here.

The conceit, such as it is, is to select a series of abstractly themed art inspirations, to nominally sketch for an installation. Choose six times from a pool of four categories, three of which are delightfully random. The fourth being ‘a cat.’ In return you get a pithy line, a spot of poetry, a quasi-parser room description, or an anecdote, all very evocative and also standalone and unrelated to each other. All of it presented under a mutating boilerplate ‘restart’ title-author.

Y’know one way to get me to stop complaining about ‘poetry’? Make it good. Y’know the other way? Keep me so off balance, mentally, that I don’t have time to fuss with that, consumed as I am with clawing for mental purchase against the opaque logic of the thing. PWW does BOTH of those things! It would be easy to push into a state where I would just throw my hands in the air in desperation and futility and abandon things. Which I eventually did. But MAN did it take a long time!

The playful vibe of the thing is its overriding impression, just dazzling with inventiveness and unexpected text. This is augmented by a “guide/help system” that seems to be as playful as the rest of the work, if a bit more structured. I say ‘seems’ because I never actually got to consume much of it.

Oh, I was gamely playing along, no doubt about that. I was really enjoying it. After each set of 6, there was a portentous “status is X out of eight” message. Clear enough, right? As I closed in on 8 though, after hitting its wild themes in many combinations.. nothing changed. Well, one thing changed, I started to get some repetition. This did not itself break things, those repetitions were scattered among many novel ideas, but it did make me think ‘if you KNOW the player is going to go for 6x8 = 48 of these things, wouldn’t you have at least that many in the chamber, front-loaded?’ That was only a mild ripple compared to what happened when I closed the 8th run.

Which was nothing. No newly available guide sections were unlocked. No achievements noted. No textual acknowledgement other than the score itself. If the end note highlighted anything, it did not read as significant or different than the wryly fantastic observations of the other 7. So I kept going. 9/8, 10/8… all the way to 13/8. More and more repetition, but nothing new of note. Ok that’s a crazy thing to say about this work. SO MUCH new playful text. Just nothing new ludically.

I mean, I clearly missed the point of this. Let me tell you one more thing about how I engaged this piece. This Spring Thing has inflicted on me a variety of feline-influenced works at this point. You KNOW I am bull headed about this. For the first 8 runthroughs, I ignored that inspiration and only played with the other 3 in many varieties and combinations. All of 1, alternating, cyclical patterns, drum rudiment patterns. I flirted with a lot of them. At pass 9, my thought was ‘ok, maybe the work NEEDS me to bring in the Cats.’ So I tried that, begrudgingly. To no apparent effect. Did this perverse playstyle of mine trip over some subtle code artifacts? Don’t know.

I DO know the repetition got more dense. I suspect there is some sort of selection patterning that might be decodable. I find it hard to believe that 4 full sections of Guide are headfakes, including a bit on Sylvia Plath (whose work I was previously unfamiliar with, but who this piece encouraged me to explore). But after spending so long with it, enjoying the wild disconnects and playfulness of form, I was kind of unwilling to go back and treat those as logic puzzles. They just worked so WELL as disconnected shots of joy, I didn’t WANT to gamify them. It felt.. disrespectful.. to treat these wonderful bits of wordplay as functional puzzle pieces when their appeal was SO not functional.

I mean:

"You are a lot of not much to look at."
"Those who burn meat
to please the gods
know little of meat or gods"

Why do I want to do ANYTHING with that other than just titter delightedly? I am 100% sure I did not crack the code of this thing, and may in fact have confounded it. I am equally sure that it lived up to its FIRST boilerplate title block:

"A fun activity <3 by Drew Cook
Release Nulla / Serial number 12345 / Inform 7 v10.x / D

"This is a fun game with a gimmick."

That is true even if you never tumble to the gimmick.

Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Creative Chaos
Polish: Gleaming or Textured, depending on the function of that 13/8 score
Gimme the Wheel! : What would I do next if this were my project? Hm. It is so clearly NOT something I’m capable of, so that’s hard to answer. I guess I would poke into that ‘nothing happens at 8/8’ artifact (which I think the author did?). Either sharpen the artistic statement for the dummies in the back row, or fix any bugs that need fixing.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 1hr total, 8 games, what a bargain!

The Senica student anthology has become an indispensable part of the Spring Thing in my head. Probably because it’s been here as long as I have, I’ve never seen a Thing WITHOUT one! I look forward to it every year. So much creativity in such small bundles, ripe for rapid consumption and enjoyment. The low-pressure uniting theme (this year is ‘found on a riverbank/seashore’) giving a form for the inspiration to follow. What a great part of this community, and what a great batch of games this year.

If I did the ‘blurb/learnings’ thing again, it would cast that in stone going forward, so instead I am going to break and do it more freeform. I will close with a ‘my favorite thing…’

A Brand New World /by Raiden/ (15m, 3 endings)
I would love to be coy and teasing with ‘what do you think is found on the beach..?’ but its right there in the title! Probably not what you expected, no? There was a really nice twist in this one, as some background text hinted that people were going missing, but it turned out (Spoiler - click to show)they just didn’t want to come back! That was a really clever twist on what we might expect to be a horror premise. Instead, the player gets an all-to-brief introduction to an imaginative and playful fantasy world.
My favorite thing: I really like the long paragraphs of deep description. The author took the time to paint a vivid picture of their fantastical setting, and really conveyed it well.

BOTTLE /by M.A.S./ (5m, 5 endings)
Ok, this one ALSO telegraphs the found object in its title! It’s a classic, but this one ups the tension a bit with a large branch of endings that jump on you quickly and impactfully. This is a very streamlined, interesting branching game, very replayable due to its tight depth.
My favorite thing: The IF version of jump scare is the text message that both the player and protagonist character read together. If there is a two-word phrase MORE charged than (Spoiler - click to show)You’re Next! I don’t know what it is.

Fragments of the Nile /by Storyteller/ (5m, 4 endings)
Here’s a story that hides its found object from the title! The player is an archeologist, interacting with a find that has some secrets. I am a horror fan (I mean the whole conceit of this year’s reviews attests to this), so this story was right up my alley. There are quite a few endings available, and interestingly some tie together building a fuller picture of the threat. This is a very good use of multiple ending IF!
My favorite thing: I think this one really went the extra mile to establish its Eqyptian archeology setting. There are a few screens worth of table setting that really bring the player into the story very effectively.

Nothing /by Gooseberry/ (5m, 6 endings)
Here we find a book on the shore, one that we are continually presented with opportunity to reject, neglect, or read and follow. As game players we are likely to want to engage, but the continual variations on ‘ignore it’ are kind of funny and present a low-key realistic picture of life. We might as easily forget things we stumble across as engage them! If we do engage, we are treated to a time travel scenario where we might learn a bit… and might suffer some unexpected consequences!
My favorite thing: This game rewarded investigation. Careful players can find clues down one branch to keep from dying in another. This kind of player driven setup-payoff is one of the stronger aspects of IF - letting the player have a fair chance at navigating its more dire outcomes!

POWER TURTLE /by 3N/ (5m, 5 endings)
What might we find at the shore, other than shore life? Here, the player rescues a.. well, you see it in the title. From there, you are treated to a VERY broad branching decision tree, leading a large array of outcomes. It is very ambitious and very well done. Every branch seems fully fleshed out with the consequences and subsequent choices to make. It was kind of thrilling how wide the space got, very quickly.
My favorite thing: I explored a lot of endings, and what was really cool was while they were all very different, depending on player choices, they were all pretty ‘good’! Just in very logical and satisfying ways! Conditioned to expect shock twists, or ‘good/bad’ endings, this was a delightful surprise.

Those voices are getting louder, captain. /by Mushroom/ (5m, 2 endings)
This is a quick dialogue tree game, where the protagonists is talking to a shipmate about something he may or may not have seen. The ‘found object’ of this game. The game does a good job of presenting varying responses you might take to the poor man’s ravings, culminating in a neat twist that fully reflects how seriously you have taken his ravings!
My favorite thing: I am torn. On the one hand, my favorite thing was the use of color cues to reinforce the endings. Default color/font schemes put all the emphasis on text to carry the load, but graphical flourishes are very much part of IF and should not be neglected! On the other hand, The author does something cheeky with their choice dialogue, where the main character’s thoughts are parenthesized and italicized. They form an often quite amusing inner dialogue that contrasts humorously to the spoken dialogue, and in some places soft-guides the player.

Untilted by BB-Anon (5m, 6 endings)
This particular found object leads the player on a mini-exploration of a section of the beach. I really liked the real sense of geography the game conveyed. I could picture the beach/cliff/road area I was wandering around in. Depending on choices I made, I might not get farther than the investigation, or I may get to some really funny-bananas endings. I don’t want to spoil it, but I had no idea that was ANYONE’S wish, let alone mine! :]
My favorite thing: As a wannabe game designer myself, I really liked how this author reconverged their choices where it made sense. If you go down one branch, you may find yourself on a different branch due to how those choices bring you to a similar state. This is very important tool in the IF author’s tool box, and I love seeing it here!

Wonder of the Woods… by Leontine (& Eudokimos) (15m)
Wow, this one blew me away. The graphical presentation, scripted font, the wonderful character and animal illustrations.. the enthusiasm and love in the project really came through. As a player, you get to explore a quartet (quintet?) of friends, each of which has an animal "familiar", as they try to engage their section of river and a difficult friend of theirs. It is both deep and broad, and really paints a full picture of friends cooperating in a very busy, very important afternoon.
My favorite thing: It would be easy to say that the graphical care was my favorite, but I actually think I liked the game setup even more. Being able to play as four different girls, each with their own animal friend was plain fun. All four were different, and their adventures varied. And they all came together at the end in a satisfying, choice-driven way. Yeah, I’m sticking with the game design as my favorite.

Viva la Senica Thing!

Horror Icon: Crypt Keeper. Ok, he’s not one of the icons I pre-selected, and I was VERY tempted to go “Children of the Corn” here, but no. I have pitched this year on year, so Crypt Keeper is reserved for Senica.
Vibe: Anthology
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : No. Give MORE students the Wheel!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/13/25
Playtime: 20m, 2 endings, 9/10 on quiz

For a change of pace, let me ignore my own angsts and instead plumb the angsts of a first time author! There is something heady about the raw, unfiltered creativity of engaging a new communication medium. The thrill of learning new skills, and putting them in service of a creative vision, it is a boiling, bubbling, embarrassment of riches, a swirling soup of enthusiasm that latches on to the prose, the construction, and carries to the reader. This was my overwhelming sense of this piece - an enthusiasm to pack if full of graphics, external educational links, meaningful choice points and classically-informed mini puzzles. Stir it all together into a wonderful, asymmetric stew of an experience.

I particularly liked how it simultaneously functioned as an education vehicle (on the myth of Atlantis and a primer on ecological responsibility), and an unsentimental view of human history. As we navigate the events via our time-lost bottle, two options loom large. To view the last days of Atlantis (whose parallels to modernity seem very deliberate), or to pen a missive of warning hoping to avert that end.

That latter effort received with a resolutely cold “Time is a great wall, and my message is only a stone thrown against it.” The work acknowledges the limits of communication when communication is rebuffed, but somehow nevertheless infuses a stubborn optimism IN THE VERY ACT OF IT. And makes LEARNING an act of defiance.

Yes, the work carried artifacts of an author engaging new tools but was considered and complete nevertheless. And its cautionary, defiant enthusiasm more than compensated any rookie missteps.

Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Stealth Education
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : I would not deign to seize the wheel of anyone’s first effort. The joy of completing a project, of capturing messages you feel compelled to share in a medium that continually offers new mechanisms for it.. everyone should experience that without me grabbing the wheel!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Cat protagonist. This is what we’ve come to. If my credentials as a reviewer of superhuman dedication are ever in question, I call your attention to this review.

This is a light work whose overriding atmosphere is welcoming. From its friendly, warm wordsmithing, to its forgiving and increasingly nudgy gameplay; its limited vocabulary (meant as a design choice, not a criticism), to its stated purpose, as a feature showcase to budding Inform authors… all of it just conveys “C’mon in the waters fine, and not nearly as scary as you think.”

While I am clearly not the primary audience for any of these things, least of all its protagonist, the nature of its amiability is that it is impossible to begrudge the time spent. The presentation goes a long way to this feeling. From its care paid to Scene change formatting cues, its ascii cat ‘pause for more,’ its scorecard rendition, it is all very deliberate and polished, conveying we are in strong, gentle hands for the duration of this modest puzzle fest. Against a backdrop of parsers often characterized by an intimidating, minimalist and cold greater-than prompt, this work goes out of its way to make every part of the experience less vexing.

I could talk about what it sacrifices in service of that, but… why? I mean, it would be wild if I criticized Smokey the Bear for his inability to explain the difference between colon and semi-colon. Meet the big guy where he lives, yeah? This is a work that has a specific goal, and is SO successful at it other things don’t matter. Its creative tradeoffs are uniformly successful in service of that goal. Were I a blank slate at the beginning of my artistic journey, filled with unspecific ambitions and preoccupations and completely asea on how to even start, this work would be a godsend - both a reassurance, a first step, and a glimpse of what success could like.

It would feel outright inspirational, if not for the nagging feeling that its protagonist choice is a subtle and portentous warning. That the only cost the aspiring artist might pay is THEIR ENTIRE SOUL.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Welcoming
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, it would be focused on TADS, not Inform. Just that one small change. Well, maybe just one more.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/11/25
Playtime: 1.5hr dying all the time, even in Easy mode?

Is there less invigorating an experience than to dive deep into the rules and setting of a game, tentatively conclude it is probably not going to be for you, then see that borne out exactly as you foresaw? Oh, I know! It would definitely be less invigorating to read a ‘review’ that only had that to say!

Chronicles codifies a very maximalist TTRPG-kind of experience. Deep world lore, informed by a bespoke magic system that translate to specific game mechanics. Evolving powers, abilities and capabilities that unfold as you progress. Learning the strengths and weaknesses of all those abilities as a kind of problem-solving toolkit to apply to continually varying challenges. An ethos of progression through conflict, where most interactions are framed as mortal combat-focused encounters. Young me would have fallen head over heels for this kind of thing.

And one presented so slickly: its uniform artistic esthetic (described a AI assisted? pushing my boundaries here!) and card-reminiscent stat-catalog graphical design underscore its RPG bones. It is also boldly attractive in its own right.

Older me is not so easily won over. Or, probably closer to the truth, less open to it. I struggled mightily with the magic/combat system. I never really tumbled onto an HP-recovery mechanic, meaning I would go from encounter to encounter being worn down by enemy steel AND MY OWN SPELLS, until numbers went to 0. Some encounters did provide a healing goose, but in a way that seemed to underscore its exceptional and scarce nature. I just did not have it in me to explore the interplay of spell/weapon values and combat sequence to discover optimal, effective strategies.

The NPCs I encountered, even the central mystery were all quite interesting and engaging. For me, it just continually ran aground on seemingly unavoidable combat that I never mastered the subtleties of, gatekeeping all that stuff I really wanted. I died and restarted (on ‘middle’ setting) so many times I finally just capitulated to Easy/Story mode.. and still died in combat? I did not detect the promised ‘encounter bypass’ mechanism, so much so I question whether I was actually in easy mode at all? Is there a bug there? Or just a player missing an obvious out?

I guess my conclusion is I liked everything about it EXCEPT the combat, but found the combat inescapable, and ultimately pushed me away, unfinished. So in an effort to provide any value at all to this abortive review, let me say: if you like dense lore translating to complex, subtle fighting mechanics, this will likely thrill you. The supporting story and graphical elements are dynamite draws to that central suite of mechanics you could just d20 with all day. Certainly I could see younger me doing that!

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Lore Heavy RPG
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would repair the Easy mode. Who’m I kidding, what I’d really do is ignore the other two modes! This is why so many projects are NOT mine to fiddle with.

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