Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 45min

My introduction to this author was via their prose which typically lands squarely in my thirsty, thirsty brain. It is so singularly confident, eloquent and evocative it just pulls me along regardless of the tale it is telling! I have also come to revere their sly use of interactivity and links. Rarely as true alternatives, link choices are instead used build contradictions in the protagonist, often more effectively than simply explaining them. This work in particular, with its changing and unselectable options paints a clear picture of a protagonist struggling unsuccessfully against their own nature, and does so with uniquely effective interactive techniques.

This work also leverages the dreaded timed text in an ultimately successful way, representing a campfire conversation being lived, not laid out to consume at leisure. I will confess to some trepidation before its use was fully exposed. It is NOT a terrific way to consume story-based works, but it works here as both a graphical cue of its framing sequence and is evocative of its setting.

As a campfire tale, an Old West supernatural story, its setup is enthralling: a stolen identity to mask a deeper secret; a tempting offer that does not go optimally (I mean, do they EVER?); all cresting to some sort of resolution and twist. It’s a terrific formula, and the FORM of it is deeply appealing. Let me break it into four acts: ACT I - the setup and mini-climax; ACT II - a short transition; ACT III - a doomed, joyful interlude; ACT IV - turn and finale.

Despite a terrific plot frame, ACT I prose (acharacteristically for this author) pushed at me. It felt like an unedited first draft? I say this because the prose that so often effortlessly pulls me in, pushed at me here. In one dimension there was the disconnect between the language/imagery and its uneducated, hard scrabble protagonist. In another I found the sentences themselves over-claused? This author’s prose style is NOT Hemingway, not at all. But here, it felt like their typical discipline slipped and where extended sentences and modifying clauses usually flow and ebb but close with a punch, ACT I felt overridden with sentences that continued and continued and continued… and closed in confusion. It really felt of a different piece than the ACTs to follow. Because it was the FIRST ACT, it also pushed me away a bit, even as lots of plot (and notably inventive link architecture!) was happening. This was an uncomfortable, unwelcome conclusion for me. Judiciously turning some commas into periods would make a WORLD of difference here, to me anyway.*

For me, the most successful acts were the middle two. In particular, ACT II plays directly to the prose strengths of this author. I could remove this act from context and read it over and over again. Will resist spoiling what it is describing, but let’s just say it uses food chain specifics to paint passage of time (and obliquely evolution of protagonist) in a singularly magnetic way. This stands among the strongest sequences by this author. Because ACT I did not click in so crisply, this was a breath of relief as well.

ACT III delves into emotional interiority in a way that felt both earned and suitably shadowed for the tale. The prose employed to do so remained singular, unintrusive and propulsive. There were some logistical questions not quite clarified… a new character was able to pierce the veiled identity of a new body somehow… but the emotional content felt right. My specific question: (Spoiler - click to show)The host seemed to recognize the protagonist’s biological sex during a bath despite currently inhabiting a body the text leaned into as a male. Layered on top of this was deep sadness over the implications of the ACT I deal, agreed upon with no anticipation of ACT III’s fleeting joy. I found story beats, language and emotional content all clicking together smoothly and satisfyingly here.

ACT IV disappointed me in a different way. There was, throughout the work, some tension in the protagonist’s character. Early self-isolating choices pointed strongly one direction, only for later longing choices to contradict those earlier ones. In ACT IV, choices and mental anguish seemed further disconnected from plot beats and character motivations in a distracting way. In one sequence, the protagonist bemoans the impossibility of locating someone, despite having been told they are the local sheriff. Is it really that hard to find a sheriff when you need one? That seems like a pretty good lead to me! The anguish felt overwrought, given the circumstances. In general, the runup to the final scene felt more of a piece to ACT I than II and III, though the sentence structure definitely carried more discipline.

I am happy to report the final scene absolved a lot of that. A final plot twist is actually quite satisfying, leading to a final tragically impotent choice and open-ended climax. Then a campfire stinger appropriate for the narrative. While I initially rebelled at the open-ended climax, the narrative engaged it directly and turned me 180 on it in like two screens. That is some story-telling power!

So, overall impression: two frictiony acts, two banger acts, and a strong close. Sure, would prefer them all to stitch together cleanly, but if not, that’s good enough for me!

*It is not lost on me that the above criticism is fairly leveled at MY style as well. But this isn’t about me!

Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 10min, 3/3 endings

It is kind of gratifying to watch an artistic arc. So much art is consumed one-and-done in this day and age. Honestly, that does seem to be the model that makes the most sense anyway. Artists spend inordinate time and energy refining and honing a piece of art to stand on its own, encapsulating a complete artistic vision, and hopefully resonating with an audience in an engineered way. (Art IS engineering. Fight me.) While repeated engagement may be deeply gratifying to the artist, its impact on the consumer is usually dominated by that first encounter.

There is serialized art of course. Novels and comics have long engaged in serialization, most famously pulpy entertainment of recurring characters in genre adventures. I am not talking about a FICTION or STORY arc, however, I’m talking about an artistic one. When a single artist is behind serialization for an extended time their intellectual and artistic growth can become part of the story, a compelling subtext to another round of puncheminnaface. If you’ve never read Dave Sim’s complete Cerebus, it is a rollercoaster of artistic preoccupations and before-your-eyes evolution. Its latter half in particular is so dominated by the artist inventing Bad Takes (TM) before our eyes as to be equal parts mesmerizing and repellent. That arc ultimately overwhelmed the fiction it was nominally creating.

This is not what’s happening here, to be clear. I invoked it as one type of artistic arc. Another, more relevant arc is when an artist returns to some theme several times, exploring it in different ways and to different effect. This work seems to be connected to two others by this author, as a trilogy of sorts, all exploring the intersection of entitlement and romantic relationships. The author acknowledges this work’s debt to a crackerjack earlier work that I personally really enjoyed. It also shares overt similarities to a subsequent work I reviewed this 'Thon. The artist of course has naming privileges, but absent their input I will call this “The Entitled Heart Trilogy.”

This strikes me as a middle work both thematically and temporally. The first ‘entry’ engaged a troubled but redeemable relationship with a dangerously biased power dynamic. The third delivered a cold ‘masks off’ condemnation of full on toxicity. This one bridges the gap by using fantasy time loops to explore the surprisingly grey border between romantic manipulation and earnest will-to-change. In some ways it is the most subtly challenging of the three, particularly when exploring all possible endings. The author ultimately has some specific ideas about where things land, and in the construct of their fiction of course is the authority. I nevertheless appreciated that prior to the endings, the language remained open enough to challenge the player’s presumption of protagonist motives, conscious or otherwise. The fact that the ambiguity doesn’t extend to (one of) the endings is kind of a cutting rebuke of self-delusion lurking in the border tension. The fact that there are three endings further muddies the waters - toxicity is not fore-ordained!

I really enjoyed the first one. I appreciated the third one, which was much more straightforward, terse and confrontive. I may have liked the fleeting ambiguity of this one best of all, and the damning but open ending space it carved out. I really like all three of these together, and the artistic arc they collectively describe.

And unlike Cerebus, the artist is not reduced by their arc!

Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 5min, 5 playthroughs, 5 deaths

The 'Thon has exposed me to a higher density of (Spoiler - click to show)choices-don’t-matter works than I have previously encountered. Seems like tight time frame Jams draw these out for completely understandable reasons. Thing is, this type of game hinges so completely on its artistic theme that everything else pales, and it becomes the dominant lens to view the work by.

Unless… you are sending up that very type of game!

The player-protagonist is a crash test dummy. Famously without initiative or agency. You achieve consciousness and have precious little time to try and do something. This is a very attractively put together example of the sub-genre. Its color scheme, aggressive layout and interface are both attractive and functional, and satisfyingly evocative of the protagonist’s identity. The choices on offer are surprisingly numerous, given the character in question, and it takes a few playthroughs to feel like the space is satisfactorily explored. Though even after a single play, you get a sneaking suspicion what the work is on about, the message is dutifully reinforced through repeat plays. One choice in particular - use of dreaded timed text - ups the ante in a kind of hilarious way. (Spoiler - click to show)Not only can you not influence your fate, you can’t even control how you get information!

This reads so clearly like a playful spoof of these types of games, and goes above and beyond to really twist the knife. From the protag’s identity, to gameplay, to timed text presentation, it is cheekily poking at other games of its ilk and outright taunting players who play them! “Hey, that crash test dummy? That’s YOU player! Strap in and shut up!” As a one-joke jam game, for IF nerds like me, it is the exact correct mix of taunting insult and loving send up to elicit “yah-you-got-me” laughter. You can have your (Spoiler - click to show)tragic fate, your helpless victimization, your cynical statement no-choice games. I think this is my favorite game of this type.

Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 5min, ah, finished

This is a linear piece of short erotica. Interactivity is mainly used in mouseover phrases to dive deeper into a particular moment, usually to increase the explicitness of the proceedings. Otherwise you are turning pages, and not so many, until done. Oh yeah, your carnal partner is the Devil. Lucifer. Ol’ Scratch (in more ways than one, amirite??). Ok, I am going to endeavor to reign in my inner juvenile as I go forward. History suggests my success will likely be mixed at best, but know it is not from lack of trying.

Writing in general attempts to elicit emotions from the reader. Humor makes us laugh, tragedy makes us ache, horror unsettles us then gives us catharsis. Erotica speaks to a pretty specific and powerful human impulse. But here’s the thing, it ALSO has to contend with centuries of stigma, much of it socio-religiously sourced. Humans have a singular mechanism to deal with this level of discomfort: reductive humor. Especially transgressive humor which sublimates pretty quickly to profanity. Now, profanity is a lot of things, but for most of the world it is NOT a representation of the beauty of its subject. It is a challenging misdirection that derives its charge from its audacious defiance of convention, NOT the power of its purported subject.

So here we have this amazing physio-chemical trick our bodies can do, that in the best case interacts with our emotional wiring to build a transcendent experience of joyful linkage with another human being. But it finds itself wedged between socially indoctrinated shame and trivializing profanity. Finding the sweet spot in between is an insanely difficult needle to thread. It is a testament to the power of human sexuality that so many try.

But wait, effective erotica has still another enemy! While shared in the general among much of the population, carnal specifics are as varied as the people who pursue them. One person’s turnon is another’s kink, is another’s safe word deal-breaker. Specifics matter to those whom find it appealing and ALSO matter to those who don’t! An author really only has once choice here - relinquish hopes of universal appeal in favor of perfectly nailing it for the subculture that appreciates it. (See, look how heroically I resisted ‘nailing it’ riffing!)

To sum up. Thread a narrow needle for a specific segment of like-minded humans. When you write, the only tool you have to find this impossibly narrow path is words. This work has the right idea, I think, in that its prose leans poetic with occasional shots of enticing physical specificity. Poetry has the promise of capturing complicated human interiority, it’s kind of its north star. It’s almost unfair that this work, with all the above challenges, now must additionally contend with a reviewer whose patience for poetic prose is thin. While I did like the contrasting mouse-over unveilings of physicality, the rest of the text left me at arm’s length, just aiming a little TOO high to land.

I do admire that in its choice of partner, the work is explicitly, perhaps defiantly, running directly into the face of erotica’s socio-religious stigma. Couple that with some pleasantly jarring uses of profanity and you have a work that seems confidently determined to play with the boundaries of erotica. If anything, I do think more could have been done with the conceit. The text did not seem to acknowledge or leverage that super-interesting aspect of the pairing beyond some sly physical observations. Lastly, the work was a short description of a post-/pre- coital interlude without much dramatic arc. It actually ended kind of abruptly to my way of thinking, neither cresting nor teasing its forward path.

Note I did not use the word climax in that paragraph even once. I am a giant in my field.

It is a pretty short piece, a portrait of physicality that many of us humans are inherently interested in. It does admirably and effectively challenge the restrictive guardrails of profanity and stigma. Now, it comes down to personal sensibilities, both in prose and carnal preferences. For a work this well composed, I have no doubt there is an audience for THIS mix out there.

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 15min, 3/3 rescues, 2/4 fails, 3/5 awards

This is an entry for a Comp I do NOT judge! Weirdly, as EctoComp’s organizing principle (spooky Halloween fun) is slap in the middle of my road. Hey, I gotta pick and choose though, right? I intend to have a creative life of my own, and not just vicariously latch onto the heady works of my betters, then pepper them with whatever is happening in my brain chemistry at the time! I too have a dark passenger that needs servicing! Anyway, he’s in the backseat now so pepper away I shall.

The premise is exploring an old church and dealing with (Spoiler - click to show)the horror inside. It is basically a linear story, with a variety of details in the player’s hands (including the nature of your companion) that fan out into a series of replayable, collectible achievements. Achievements, more than any other mechanism, encourage ‘collect all the endings’ style of play, so that is how I engaged it.

I found the prose in this one more than it needed to be, in a very good way. In exploring the church, we learn our protagonist might have been raised religious but has since lapsed. The language was very good at conjuring a reverence of iconography and environment that, once seeded, still has a hold on us despite our subsequent spiritual journey. It was a nifty observation and mood to set, unnecessary for the horror that followed, but uniquely well-observed all the same.

After some short ((Spoiler - click to show)optional) exploring, you encounter the antagonist, make some choices and it ends. It is very disciplined, in that it understands replays will be less concerned with exploring and repeated text and thankfully provides for shorter paths to plumb its outcomes on subsequent plays. Of particular interest is the ability to choose the relationship of your companion. This choice opens different climax options and variations. I think my favorite was the (Spoiler - click to show)acquaintance whose fail ending made me laugh out loud.

So yeah, this was a MEIF (multi-ending IF), nicely tuned to its repeat play paradigm, offering a healthy variety of branches and written much better than it needed to be. Worth a play or 8-12!

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: Act I (2x) 5min; Act II (3x) 5min; Act III (4x) 8min

I made the call to review these three Acts together, given their relative brevity and presumed linkages in the author's RGB Cycle. After playing them, I stand by that decision. These are three very short games, linked in formatting and variations on horror themes. In each, you are playing a potential victim’s role in a horror story. The setups are economically conveyed, crisply establishing dramatis personae and blurry setting, not wasting a word on unnecessary details or background. The dramatic resolution of the current scene is the whole focus, and given their dire urgency, appropriately so. Background details are dribbled out organically based on your choices and responses. It is a powerful, very successful approach to horror this short.

In the first act, a wife is confronted by a monstrous (pirate) husband. The second showcases a man trying to find his way out of darkness. The last is a man responding to a panic-inducing revelation. The pieces are thematically linked, though they share no common characters or setups. The ‘cycle’ in question seems deliberately named, and I am going to show my whole ass trying to explain what I could be completely wrong about. The name "RGB Cycle" carries two meanings I think. The more playful of the two is the use of color implicitly and explicitly in the works. On one level it is purely a graphical/presentation choice, implicitly linking characters across these narratives. On another level (and here I risk creating theme in whole cloth), each act is a different shade (ah? ah?) of culpability and agency in monstrous circumstances.

I am running out of non-spoiler room here. Each Act presents a life-or-death scenario of (Spoiler - click to show)predatory murder. Each Act features subtly different gameplay, from dialogue trees to modest puzzle solving, to dark room exploration. Each Act also provides (Spoiler - click to show)a single ending while perhaps head faking multiple endings, as far as my limited playthroughs could determine. When individual games do this, there is clearly a point to it. If the point is not surprising and/or thematically laser focused, it can land with an ‘eh, ok, I get it.’ When a TRYPTYCH of games do this, their impacts expand and multiply. When the genre of those games is horror, that choice rings loud and impactful. In particular, the variance in scenarios and motivations underline that the situations kind of don’t matter. The different roles of the 'colors' underline that personalities don't matter. Motivations and innocence don’t matter. These are all tones of a horrible, horrible rainbow whose overriding arc is impervious to its specific shadings (and most distressingly, impervious to (Spoiler - click to show)attempts to alter it).

That is a really cool conceit, deftly implemented, and landed for me like so much more than the sum of its parts. So yeah, three Acts cresting into an overarching message of effective horror. One review. Would be weird to only review Broadway productions scene by scene, wouldn’t it?

I would be remiss if I didn’t observe that Act II’s title is maybe my favorite IF title of all time. Certainly of those I can remember at the moment.

Boy will my face be RED if the last installments of this cycle contradict what I'm saying here. I'm getting GREEN in the gills thinking about it. And kinda BLUE. At least you know I'm not too YELLOW to post my thoughts!

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 8min, 4 endings

Hitting quite a run of these Short Story IF works. I suspect (and only suspect, not having participated in Jams of my own) Jams encourage this style of IF. Broad puzzly works, with complicated moving parts, player initiative anticipation, and their attendant debug and tweaking are a lot harder to force into a tight development timeline than a controlled linear narrative. Not a dig, linear narratives after all are the PROTO narratives. Should not be a surprise that there is a Jam that acknowledges this directly, the One Choice Jam. Makes the subtext text!

This is a story about mourning and reconciling difficult parent-child relationships. Per the one-choice conceit, you must select one of four artifacts to honor your mother, with mini-sections giving context on each of the choices. Actually, ‘difficult’ isn’t quite the word I want, though it is technically accurate. The story is not more or less difficult than any portrait of two differing lives squashing together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frictions, and further burdened by unfair and/or tone deaf expectations on both sides. Y’know, standard interpersonal relationship stuff.

This is a pretty good representation of that dynamic, I found. The artifacts represent samples of different aspects of this relationship. The One Choice offers conflictory impulses. On the one hand, it asks the player to select only one aspect of the relationship to foreground. A relationship that is explicitly NOT one thing, but a synthesis of them all. The very act of selection betrays the reality of the relationship’s complexity and flattens the fullness of it.

On the other hand, the player is deciding which memories to prioritize, in some way acknowledging that the complexity need not be uniform. That some traits might loom larger and more accurately summarize the relationship than others. Or more importantly for the protagonist, maybe the complexity was noise that distracted from the aspects that loomed largest.

There is a subtle on the third hand here, begging the handiness of the metaphor. Because the player is making the choice, the choice becomes what the player/protag WANTS to be true, almost independent of the deceased. It becomes more about the survivor than the deceased, and more revealing of their needs and wants. This feels like a stunningly well-observed insight into how ALL human relationships work, especially ones relegated to memories and not new experiences.

The work then hinges entirely on this one choice. I find it telling that the denouement is (Spoiler - click to show)not materially affected by the choice - funerals are scripted ritual after all. But the choice itself is what makes all the difference, to the protag and the player’s experience.

Hrm. So while I seem to have successfully avoided narrative spoilers, I have nevertheless completely spoiled the emotional content of the work. Does that count? Is there a mask for that?

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs

At some point, I review enough work from a single artist that my impulse is to turn a current review into a body-of-work overview. I need to resist this impulse, not because Death of the Artist (why would I want that???), but in fairness to the current work. Or perhaps, in fairness to the remaining body of work. To this point, I have admired almost all of this author’s works that I presumed to review, sometimes with qualifiers. Those caveats have given me things to talk about, digest, and clown on a bit.

DOL-OS, for me, was an unqualified, un-caveated success. You’re tying my review hands, work! It presents as an ooooold computer terminal, some archaic dawn-of-windows-like OS. Monochrome (mostly) terminal, visible-pixel fonts, all of it. And the design is just terrifically evocative, down to the messy desktops, the stray game and (working!) internet apps, the trashcan of nearly-deleted files. No clues what to do, just log in (initially as guest) and poke around a bit.

There, you are treated to a wide array of files, images and programs (among a field of ‘corrupted’ ones) that build a mosaic picture of a future dystopia. I cannot stress too highly how well done this is - the graphical presentation is just perfect, from its squiggly ‘corrupted’ files, to its program start screens and tones, to its broken internet. Too, the documents at your disposal are varied, redacted and fragmentary, presenting a picture of life under state paranoia and its often dire consequences. And the puzzles this enables! A clever set of puzzles dialed in specifically to this conceit and environment, integrated in a satisfyingly organic way.

Eventually, you can piece together the password to a user account and… learn of the genesis of the dystopia and perhaps the seeds of its fall. Only then is it clear that you are interacting with (Spoiler - click to show)a distant past, though honestly, the graphical presentation couldn’t clue it more openly. And you engage a final artifact from those times: (Spoiler - click to show)an AI created to render passionless legal judgements, most often capital. At that point you enter a dialogue (on keyboard) until a final, impactful decision.

This was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. Its verisimilitude was top tier, and sucked me in immediately to its world building. I relished the desktop playground constructed for my spelunking. I devoured all the files I could find, for 2/3 of the runtime hopelessly lost in the loose, seemingly disconnected puzzle pieces it was presenting. Then the game masterfully closed the gaps, fit the pieces in a satisfying pop, and built to a final conversation of great import. These kinds of mosaic narratives are catnip for me, and finding one this well done makes my heart sing.

So here is the part of my review where I would back off and whine about some detail, some gameplay artifact, some prose flourishes that didn’t quite… whatever. NOPE. I got none of that here. This is a winner folks, a straight up winner.

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 5min

You guys are really throwing down the gauntlet here, aren’t you? Ever shorter lengths, ever tighter conceits, its almost like you’re daring me to spoil! A dual Jam entry this, it is structured as a letter from sibling to sibling. The interactivity is of the page-turning variety, adding more text to a long letter in small chunks until it is done.

The letter itself is just sad, full of regret for a lifetime of (Spoiler - click to show)neglect and emotional isolation of its addressee. There are depressing details, nicely observed, that sell the specificity of its setting. There are equally depressing omissions on the author’s part that paint a pretty complete picture. A sad, complete picture. I found it effective in its brevity, if a bit of a downer. Which, I expect, is the whole point of it. I mean, writing is exercise in empathy, no? Trying to evoke emotions in others (horror, swooning, catharsis, tragedy, horniness, laughter, whatever) is one of the written word’s most common uses. Until advent of motion pictures, it was the main mass market vehicle for it (not to sell stage productions short). RTWYT15 ably steps into that legacy with its brief, cold shot of empathy. Really nice last line too.

Yah, this is shorter than most of my stuff, but it is scaled to the work, I promise!

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 15min

My second played work from the Goncharov Jam, and hoo boy quite different. This is a tragic love story, where interactivity is used to provide different insights and flashbacks into the central relationship, between a (Spoiler - click to show)gangster and a killer seemingly hired to kill him. An early charge I got from this work was this super loaded phrase in the Content Warning: - Brief cannibalism. LolWUT???

The cover art was actually the FIRST charge I got from this work. It is evocative, compelling, and very much of a piece with the 70’s movie conceit of the jam. So much is packed into that illustration, its dramatic layout, its swirling brush strokes, the dynamic lettering, the details in those swirls, I could stare at it for minutes. I could mount it next to my Vertigo poster as a full partner.

Another aspect of the work that landed precisely for me was its use of inline links. There are three types of them: 1) third person flashbacks; 2) first person internal monologue/observations; 3) advance the story. Each of these has its own interactive paradigm and color cues, very effectively segregating three intertwined narrative threads. If I had a quibble, it is with the default color scheme, which seems at odds both with the purported inspiration and the narrative itself. If it was intended as ironic frisson, it didn’t quite land that way for me. Small quibble, but there it is.

The story itself is a relationship study of two flawed men. The prose used here is quite magnetic, employed in both first and third person to simultaneously flesh out the deep attraction (Spoiler - click to show)and the tragic destiny of their relationship. The language flows from character-focused descriptions of physical and emotional attraction to horrific acts of violence, and does so in a shockingly consistent voice - the juxtaposition enhanced by the language thread that unites them.

It was a compelling read, no doubt, but like another recently reviewed work it engaged the ‘romancing the villain’ trope. It’s a work of fiction, I get that, but real or not there is some level of atrocity where I just stop caring about perpetrator heartache. I don’t want to make too much of it. It’s my own hangup. If you find that trope compelling, it is hard to see how this work would disappoint.