Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

IFCOMP23 had a weirdly prominent nautical subcurrent. In recognition, this is the inauguration of the review sub-series “Here There Be Poopdecks.” We'll kick off the sub-series with a shipboard murder mystery. The setup is this - two down on their luck brothers find work aboard a foreign cargo vessel, only to be accused of the murder of the only person that speaks their language! Now one brother must solve the mystery before they arrive in port and are committed to foreign justice. Also, it is an airship. Still counts!

It is a confidently compact setup, both in the tight map and the crisp text renderings of the environs. Maybe a little too crisp? The first puzzle, getting tools to escape your quarters, is straight forward enough. But the timing is a little wonky. There is a reveal about the nature of your boat that feels surprising, except it is so underplayed that it initially reads as buggy text. It is not actually clear if the author intends it as a reveal, or they believe you already knew.

Great swaths of the game are like that. My initial impression was that the world building was half-baked. But the more I played, the more I realized the world building was actually pretty robust, it was just communicated through oddly underplayed or weirdly timed details. It made it hard to get a bead on what was happening, and made the puzzles harder than their construct.

During another early sequence, you are navigating a space with two parallel hallways fore/aft. To do so requires counter-intuitive ‘port/starboard’ directions to get into the right passage, then ‘fore’ to continue. Particularly when avoiding speedy NPCs, its just enough to trip up. At other points, when handling containers, the text refers to them by contents you haven’t seen yet. You don’t meet the crew exactly, they breeze past you with vanishingly small expository text. There is machinery maddeningly, opaquely described. It all added up to a first hour and three quarter where I made slow, steady progress, but often wasn’t clear why things were working or failing, and only a hand drawn map keeping the geography clear. If asked to stop and rate at an hour and a half, I likely would have rated it a mechanical exercise of clever puzzles and inadequate (and occasionally misleading) text.

But something happened with 15 min to go - the cumulative weight of the drip-fed world building, the opaque NPC movements, the clues that had been slowly accreting, even the arbitrary-seeming game mechanics suddenly crystallized. I hit some sort of informational critical mass and the machine of the game revealed itself to me, and it was pretty cool! On the heels of that revelation came a second: the author had super effectively put me in the shoes of a man stranded in a society not his own, outside looking in. It was kind of opaque to me because it was kind of opaque to him too! Slow clap, author, slow clap.

Unfortunately, these revelations were not in time to finish the game, at two hours it remains unfinished. I had spent too much time adrift to call it engaging, but under the wire the game sparked white hot.

I would fix those premature contents messages though.

Played: 10/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Buzzer beating Sparks of Joy, recasting Notably Buggy descriptions into Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Most likely yes, now that I finally feel the click.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

It occurs to me that due to some accident of providence over the last year I have seen very few ChoiceScript games. The ones I have seen have had respectable polish, so I’m starting to think of it as the luxury car of IF authoring brands. OKS makes a case for itself here early. The graphical components utilize a crisp iconography that quickly establishes a visual identity. There are some very nifty tricks with font (I particularly liked what I called “arcane crossword puzzle font”) to build atmosphere.

There is even a generous dose of sound and music, albeit somewhat less successful. The pages of text tended to be long. Not a problem, the work had a lot to say. When the sound mapped to top-of-the-page text it was pretty ok - the sound punctuated the text you were reading. When the sound was relevant to a passage halfway down the page it created incongruity. At the top of the page, you got an irrelevant noise that only made sense a few seconds further down. Notwithstanding that artifact, the presentation overall made for an ambitious package.

The ambition seemed to be promised in gameplay as well - a pregame peek at the status screen showed an RPG-like character page full of intriguing stats, customizable descriptions and character background.
You’ve set quite the expectations here, game!

The setup is an encroaching Arthurian Apocalypse with only polo players to save us! THE HORSE KIND OF POLO!! This work inaugurates a Heroic Polo genre!! I mean, huge points for innovation there.

Our protagonist is suffering some outre’ incidents that quickly escalate. Actually, quickly is not the word I want to use there. The work does something I admire in theory: it attempts to have you define and customize your character via narrative. Theory. So that immense character sheet I mentioned earlier? You go through page after page of text and selections to fill out that sheet. Its not enough to know I have brown hair, I need to define the SHADE of brown. The process took 1/2 hour before I could leave my apartment. The whole time, I am given tantalizing hints of the drama to come, and presumably my reactions to it are helping frame characteristics, but it got chafing fast. You’re telling me about all this cool stuff, but I can’t engage that until my eye color is established?

Then finally, you are off to polo practice (I know! Such a WEIRD detail, I love it!) and introduced to some supporting cast, then more plot prologue. At this point I want to stop describing the details of the plot, though I will say I found the urban magic/horror aspects pretty effectively done. Instead, let’s talk about pacing. ChoiceScript is, unsurprisingly built around choices. Each generous page of (pretty well-written) text ends with a series of possible choices. Select one and presumably some game effect will payoff down the road. These games live and die on the choices offered, and they are DEEP here! With every development you are given a broad array of nuanced (and often funny) responses to choose from, and your choices are acknowledged deftly on the next page! It really does feel like the narrative is listening to your choices, regardless of the stakes, and that is gratifying. But. Then you get the NEXT dense page of text with a deep array of choices. And the next. The effect of all those words, and evaluating and selecting among nuanced choices, is to slow things to a crawl.

As the prologue creeps forward, another curious narrative choice was made. Now, given the deep decision tree that got me there I can’t be sure it wasn’t my own choices that boxed me in, but when the action started in earnest… the game sidelined me. I was a spectator while NPCs did all the work. Sure, I still had lots of words to read, and decisions to make, but I couldn’t DO anything. If I tried, the narrative quickly shut that down.

Part of it was a (Spoiler - click to show)mind-control attack of some kind. The mechanism for this was kind of cool: you are presented with a full slate of choices, but only able to SELECT what the bad guy (or circumstance) allows. I could SEE the other options but was powerless to choose them. The author was super clever with variations on this, sometimes for drama, sometimes for laughs. As GAMEPLAY, when I was struggling to do anything, it was taunting me.

This sidelining happened not just during real peril by the way. THE GAME DIDN’T EVEN LET ME PLAY POLO WITH MY TEAM.

There were some other odd choices: remember that character sheet? Yeah, you were still filling it out, even when the action got going. In particular, as you were fighting to get involved with the plot, suddenly you need to pause and choose a secret backstory. Boy did that chafe. Not just because the choice is completely orthogonal to the urgent action around you, but also because at this point you have painstakingly established a clearly defined character, and now you are asked to decide how that was partially a lie! You might imagine a narrative where that was a cool twist. Maybe if I felt any kind of agency, or if it was related to any action in progress to that point it might have.

So two hours in I had exhaustively established a character and some NPC relationships, been along for the ride in some actions sequences and got PARTWAY through an infodump background exposition. And never really saw those character sheet stats employed in a meaningful way. You ask too much of me game. I liked the writing, found the choice architecture often very clever, respected the graphical presentation, LOVED BEING A (what??) POLO PLAYER ((Spoiler - click to show)even though yeah, that’s just an excuse to get on a horse later, innit?) but eventually time and my patience ran out.

The game on display is so much bigger than the 2 hrs of IFCOMP. It is not well served by the judging limit. There were lots of in-the-moment sparks and a seamless implementation, but I am assessing a penalty point for infuriating slow-motion player impotence. If I’m honest, even if it turned out to be a 100hour game, 2 hours is just too long to get where I got. At least I made it to the (Spoiler - click to show)amazing pop culture Merlin list. I at least got that. But c’mon, you coulda let me play polo.

Played: 10/2/23
Playtime: 2hrs, infodump w/ (Spoiler - click to show)Merlin
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless, penalty point for 2 hrs of escalating impotence
Would Play After Comp?: It is hard to imagine having that much free time.


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

So human sexuality, that’s a huge thing innit? Nearly universal in concept, infinitely unique in application. I am hard pressed to think of a tougher genre to write broad-audience-targeted fiction in - the variations are SO numerous and SO personal finding the magic combo that hits broadly with an audience is statistically laughable. The easiest, most knee-jerky response is going to be “works for someone I guess, not for me.” Gonna resist that. The OTHER easiest response would be a throaty “I’ll be in my bunk.” Will set that aside too.

RBLPQ does a few things right, out of the gate. By choosing a sexually aggressive female protagonist, we simultaneously acknowledge, parody and skirt eggregiously toxic male sexuality which looms like a cancer over a lot of sexual entertainment. It also fundamentally understands that humor and sexuality are great partners. Cultural shame is best combated by reminders of how FUN healthy sexuality can be, and humor is the weapon of choice in that war. Here, the humor on display so far rests on two pillars: 1. The over the top Alpha behaviors of our heroine and 2. Juxtaposing stilted “olde Englifh” fantasy-speak with brazen, in-your-face sexual descriptions.

I found the first to be consistently pretty good - her bog-simple motivations and confidence are consistently entertaining if not laugh out loud. All her NPC interactions were fun, but in particular her distaste for NPC backstory brought some earned chuckles. She is helped by at least one legitimately entertaining plot twist that she gets to react to. We are paired with a fun protagonist, inhabiting an engaging narrative.

For the second pillar of humor, well, assume spoiler mask is ALSO NC-17 mask for this review. You’re going to want to find these funny in close proximity: (Spoiler - click to show)“I shall plan thee a grand feast,” she spake. “Every accoutrement and revel shall be accounted for, and naught awry.” “his girthy, slick schlong flopping down on his meaty pubic mound with a satisfying plop…” And here, I think the composition choices maybe undermined the work a bit. When it worked best was long stretch of florid, then short punch of profane. That’s a winning combo. Too often, I felt the reverse - long passages of profane with tepid thou’s and thee’s peppering the outskirts. There was one encounter in particular where the sexual acts were described WITH the olde Englifh flourishes. That actually worked kind of ok until it fell apart, reminding me what a tightrope walk this was.

The sex scenes themselves were also employed unevenly. They were most successful when erotic activity was actually incorporated into the gameplay as puzzles. Ok, I don't know where your mind is going now, but hear me out. You’re playing IF, right? If you just want raw titillation boy has the internet got you covered, no problem, you’d probably be there right now. But playing IF it is not unreasonable to say, ‘ok, but I’d like something in an interactive option.’ Too often, it felt like the erotica was pasted on the side, separate from more standard ‘find the…’ ‘give the…’ ‘use the…’ parser puzzles. For long stretches it felt like big mode switches: EROTICA ON, IF OFF; EROTICA OFF, IF ON.

Even when the game leveraged its unique power, it had a new challenge: how do you make IF sex fun? Humor is the key there, and I consistently felt it was ALMOST but not quite there. See, a less disciplined reviewer would make an ‘edging’ joke here, but not me, nossir. I am too dignified for that.

Now all of this is circling the most challenging issue of this game: gameplay. There are a lot of parser implementation issues, most of them Classics. Incomplete nouns are everywhere ("A few low, wooden benches were set about the place, … " >look under bench “She couldn’t see any such thing.”), NPCs are not described as being present in room, making it a shock when they speak. Exits that appear in banner are not implemented. Debug messages still in the game? (>x crate “Insert uh.”) There are inadequately clued puzzles ((Spoiler - click to show)one character is interested in a trade, but the descriptions don’t really gel and it gets solved with trial and error TBF, that particular puzzle was wryly amusing.) You are wearing a cloak that does not appear in inventory, nor can you manipulate it. Not seeing a ladder you just climbed. YOU HAVE WINGS BUT CANNOT FLY. I think maybe if the technical issues were more polished, the work could breath a little better.

In the end the amusing protagonist and plot couldn’t quite escape the implementation issues and text choices to provide the Sparks of Joy I wanted them to. And yeah, I promised I wouldn’t but the erotic content “works for someone I guess, but not for me.”

Played: 10/1/23
Playtime: 1hr, 50min, 2nd Act stuck above public house
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable Implementation gaps
Would Play After Comp?: Unlikely, not my kink

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