Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Played: 7/21/24
Playtime: 30min, 8-10 runs lost track, 634/752 (should be more)

A clever little jam entry asking you to optimize your thieving in a ten minute guards-are-coming window. This time, I went straight to the web implementation and had no issues with ADRIFT (in linux). Well, no platform-based issues. Per the rules of the JAM, it was implemented in a two week window which, ok, that buys it some forgiveness. Because for parsers, that is insane.

You are tasked to steal as much as you can carry and get out before you are caught, in a museum with a limited number of objects worth stealing. (Beyond the painting you secured that started the alarm timer.) That’s it! As an optimization game, on repeat plays you will divine the value of each object and figure out how to make away with the most value in your short window, until you decide you are done. It’s an interesting, if shallow logic problem, requiring some classic parser object manipulation.

And some classic parser fighting. Probably as an artifact of the short development time, you will often burn precious time guessing verbs or struggling with incomplete synonyms. Sometimes you quietly drop things you think you are carrying, other times objects are mysteriously not reported. Most vexing, in at least one scenario your final haul is not tallied correctly, where items in your inventory are not present in the final scoring.

Look, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who need to fill in every last cell in Sudoku, and those that are satisfied knowing it is solved once it tips past critical and don’t need to mechanically complete it. I know what you’re thinking. “Given every word you’ve written you are CERTAINLY the former, Reviewer! Just no room for doubt.” Seems likely doesn’t it? But NO! I CAN leave blocks unfilled once solution is certain! I AM FULL OF MYSTERIES AND CONTRADICTIONS, MARVEL AT MY UNKNOWABILITY!!!

So yeah, it ended up being an engaging enough puzzle for its tight scope. I figured out how to get high payoff items, but decided the mechanics of closing the score (including bug and syntax fighting) wouldn’t improve my experience further. Because I am ALSO composed of unimpeachable integrity (as well as so much bacon), I am only reporting a score the game alotted to me, above. As a two-week Jam game, its sins are easily forgiven and the its achievements against that time frame admirable. Also, not for nothing, quite fun.

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 30min

This is an opening chapter demo of a more ambitious project that includes music, voice, graphics and gameplay. Its title/logo was the first clue that I HAD to play it. The logo is insanely well conceived and executed, and an immediate draw to the work. The graphics in the game itself, on the other hand, take some adjustment. They are noticeably cruder than the game’s logo. They are rendered in primitive powerpoint style, with lots of overt geometric shapes, bright, limited palette colors and almost crude artistic short hands. The opening scene, in a ‘real world’ day care center was a bit jarring and off-putting. By the time we transition to the strange ‘Backrooms’ though, I found the art to be an increasingly mood-setting asset. I attribute this to NPC character design. While arguably as crudely rendered, NPC images rely on more fluid, freehandy shapes. They are also wildly imaginative, making for some evocative illustrations that hit far above their tooling limitations. The protagonist too is chockablock with low-res details (like the duck pattern on her jacket!) that combine to multiply- rather than sum-of-their-parts.

It helps a lot that the Backrooms are intended to be offputting and weird. My first impulse was ‘I’m in the Black Lodge!’ (from Twin Peaks), which, if there is a quicker way to get me on a game’s side I’m hard pressed to identify it. That knee-jerk is not totally without merit, as the titular ‘Backrooms’ are explicitly sourced from a memetic construct around weird liminal spaces featured in fan chats and copypasta. This take on the meme was engaging. Physics and logic are second thoughts that may or may not apply, moment by moment. I was as much put in the mind of Wizard of Oz as Twin Peaks in the unnaturally comfortable introduction and engagement of the deeply weird. You are introduced to a coterie of allies, then set about trying to return to earth. Complications (and villains) ensue.

Gameplay is pretty limited. There are a few moments of choice, but it is unclear how much this impacts the broad strokes of the story. Mostly you are clicking links that turn ‘pages’ (or advance powerpoint slides?). The focus of this demo chapter is orienting the player on the strange world they will be exploring. Or more like DISorienting, amirite? Thankfully, the narrative is propulsive and off-kilter enough that it speeds forward past some limited (so far) NPC characterizations and occasionally unconvincing dialogue. In particular, the protagonist adjusts to her new situation questionably fast, though frankly this choice helps the story’s mood and forward momentum more than it hurts. I found it to be an engaging read of constant surprise whose shortcomings are blink-and-you-miss-them. (And may be mitigated in a longer narrative anyway.)

All that said, there is one aspect that felt neglected. The game describes itself as an otome, which the internet dutifully informed me is a female-centric romance game, often characterized by choice-based romantic/emotional gameplay. The fact that I needed this explained might make me not the best critic here. Notwithstanding my genre ignorance, the romance aspect of the game was completely missing in this opening chapter. Now, given the plot events careening through this demo devoted to establishing the weird, weird setting, I agree there wasn’t really time for that. It ALSO means though that the demo doesn’t really give a taste of gameplay presumed to follow. Is this going to discourage fans of otome? Dunno, can’t speak to that, but feels like a missed opportunity in a demo.

All in all, the graphical and setting charms of this work far exceed any other quibbles. Apparently, there is voice acting and of course subsequent chapters to follow. Unindoctrinated to the draw of otome as I am, cannot say for sure that it will ultimately be for me or not, but ‘Find Love in the Black Lodge’ is a sly way to get me to try!

Played: 7/20/24
Playtime: 5min, lost count of playthroughs, so many

Just when I think IF has shown me all it has to offer, works still manage to surprise me. Ok, that’s a statement of unearned hubris. This work though, is a one-conceit jam whose hook is discovering that one conceit. And that one conceit is surprising and unique, once discovered. So yeah, another work whose impact can really only be discussed with spoilers. Here’s what I’m gonna do: try it without, then clarify that exercise in opacity behind spoiler protection.

This is a conversation tree of sorts, where you are selecting a word at a time until you reach critical mass and a sentence is revealed. It lives completely in replays, where the narrative (such as it is) is assembled from multiple, multiple endpoints. It momentarily gives the appearance of agency, but is quickly revealed to be an excavation exercise not a building one. The player is more assembling the variations in their head than guiding their creation. It is a unique formula I had not seen before and ultimately the revelation it builds to is unexpected if not necessarily dramatic. It also has a point of view on its surprise.

Um, it is default Twine also? I think I am out of non-spoiler gas. Ok then.

(Spoiler - click to show)As the final sentences multiply, the player gradually realizes these are all post excerpts from an unnamed, toxic online discussion thread. The sentences are curated specifically to capture the anonymous rancor, the self-righteous high grounding, and petty ad hominem attacks of its inspiration. The surprise understanding of what we are reading is the game’s one conceit, and the surprise is effective. It is also… incomplete? No, that’s not the word. Lacking? Hmm, no. Unsatisfying? Kind of. What it does well is capture sentences of generic application, such that devoid of context they still ring completely true to the conceit. There is also some slyness to the idea that common word choices can lead to very different outcomes, hinging on a single word. This itself feels like a condemning comment on its inspiration, and not an unwarranted one. But because it is devoid of context, it is unclear (Spoiler - click to show)WHOSE rancor is being skewered. The likely intent is that ALL of it is, but some of the entreaties actually change pretty significantly if interpreted with one context vs another. Meaning, some sentences come off as earnestly high ground, but whose meaning could curdle pretty quickly in specific context, and it is not clear the author sees that. It has the effect of coming across as authorial reproach rather than cold documentation. That perhaps unintended undercurrent, for me, made the work more difficult. Intellectually, I presume the author does not intend this, that the lack of context alone should telegraph the intent. (Spoiler - click to show)But the phrasing of some it is somehow… sympathetic? In a way that suggested to me some amount of ‘Monday Morning Zinger’ agenda, like some phrases were more right than others. That language artifact, which I presume is what it is, diluted what could have been the work’s more powerful message for me.

Played: 7/20/24
Playtime: 1.5hr, all 3 endings, 170/185

This is a wake-with-amnesia-in-sci-fi-base jam. It is pretty up front about its narrative aims, to dribble story at you while exploring and puzzle solving until the full narrative is clear. Its also pretty darn good at it. The challenge in these kinds of narratives is to make the background lore/flashbacks organic to the work and not a jarringly disconnected series of infodumps and background reading. There is enough variety in mechanism (loud speaker dialogue! found documents! mental impressions!) that things bubble along pleasantly if not COMPLETELY organically. That engineering should not be underestimated in a work where the author has limited control over player sequencing. There is a bit of monologuing right at the end that maybe crosses the infodump line, but has the benefit of kind of being de riguer for this kind of narrative.

The story itself is interesting and surprising enough that while not COMPLETELY revolutionary is still unguessably unique and packed with rewarding details and callbacks. The story architecture is its strongest feature, and definitely worth the price of admission.

There are implementation issues with gameplay - at points you are informed you must drop an object you are no longer holding, many unimplemented nouns, some document disambiguation issues. Most are forgivable, though sometimes these artifacts were actively intrusive. One message pushed me to a walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)If you try to >GET or >PUSH a grate, you are told ‘That’s fixed in place.’ Yet it must be >OPEN’d which thanks to messaging I never tried. Another >VERB NOUN fail message seemed so conclusively ‘NO’ that I was discouraged from trying >VERB NOUN WITH OTHER-NOUN. Yet another puzzle was so insufficiently clued that the moon logic solution was out of grasp for me.

Armed with a walkthrough I did power past most of that, though am not sure I would have persisted without. That always casts a pall over things. The other notable aspect of the work is its prose. I am famously fussy about language, and while this is nowhere near the most indulgent I have encountered, its excesses were a bit beyond my comfort zone. This is of course a personal choice, and your experience may vary, depending on your patience for phrases like “The whales listen with interest to the arabesques of your mind.”

In the end, neither of those artifacts sank the work. Its confident, drip-fed central narrative is its strength and ultimately pulls you through to its worthy ending. With help of walkthrough.

Played: 7/17/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs, 3playthroughs, 23 of 46 memories

I like mice. They have a clear-eyed view of cats.

This work is a choice-select piece, pretty much exactly what the title suggests. You are recalling incidents from a long mouse life to the Murine Reaper before your final curtain. The world is from a mouse based RPG, which, why not? There was a Watership Down one too. The big memory choices present as cards in a hand - you choose what scene to ‘play,’ then refine that scene with a series of subordinate choices. Ultimately, you have created a specific memory of your mousy life. After a series of these, during which a long and varied life is assembled via anecdotes, some pronouncements are made on your mousy character and… well, conversations with Death

I found it to be an interesting, melancholy, and effective construct. The variety of possibilities give some player authority to influence the mouse’s life; the limited number of ‘cards in hand’ effectively represent worldly events outside our control. By contributing to an entire lifespan, the seeming disconnected nature of these anecdotes actually thrive a bit. You could easily take snapshot memories from your own life - a patchwork that is technically accurate, but whose connective tissue is entirely missing and must be inferred. It is not an unsuccessful approach, and encourages the player (as we ourselves do in our own lives) to connect the dots.

But not totally. In life, we can’t help but carry ourselves forward in a continuum. If there is enough space to infer the continuum, great! But when details clash, or seemingly large events get summarily dropped or contradicted later in life (or in the body of the vignette itself!)… the seams show a bit. Most egregiously in two of my playthroughs my gender appeared to change during my life. (If that happens to mice, that is news to me!) Other times, my collection of ‘end words’ seemingly contradicted my life story, like when I was described as lonely after having a successful litter or a passionate first love. Let’s poke at that last one a bit. In presentation, first love was sold as a tremendously powerful event, as first love often is. Certainly for most of us, that first love is important, though need not define every subsequent relationship or even make our end-of-life top 10. But in a patchwork view of life, if it is important enough to BE in the top 10, wouldn’t the subsequent heartbreak/longing/supercession be equally or more important? It’s not that we HAVE to marry our first mouse love. It’s that if it’s important enough to recall on our deathbed, how that turned to loneliness (or lifelong partnership, or subsequent lifelong relationship) is maybe MORE important!?

Similarly, the language and lore of the place was 90% there, but seams showed. When world building with human-adjacent species, the temptation is to try to describe human artifacts through other species’ (here, mice’) eyes. When done well, it is very powerful to the human reader, and can really sell the alternate worldview. When not quite there, descriptions can be bafflingly opaque, where the reader is less drawn into the mouse’s eyes than pulled away to wrangle ‘just WHAT is being described here’??? The other pitfall is to throw up hands and occasionally just call them human things. This latter particularly jars, after the reader has grown accustomed to off-kilter mousey descriptions. The work is like 90/5/5 on those.

In the end, while I can’t shake the seams, the overall construct remains sound. The vignettes themselves are wildly divergent (as you would hope in a long life!), each with their own emotions and resonances. Their variety is fun, well written, and allow for player-driven maturation, trauma and changing approaches to life. (I think my favorite might have been a singular image of water, disconnected from context, that inexplicably stuck in my mousey memory. That kind of incomplete memory rang powerfully true.) The unspoken imperative to stitch these memories together in the player’s head is a powerful gameplay choice. The graphical presentation underscores that somber, reflective tone quite well. And the melancholy they assemble into is affecting, even with seams clearly showing.

Played : 7/19/24
Playtime: 10min, 1hr of setup/source code reading

There are games, in IF a LOT of games, that hearken back to the golden age, dawn of IF. Successful examples can match the tone, humor and idiosyncratic fussiness to make for a warm experience. Thanks to the dynamite efforts of heroic fans across the years, a lot of original games are still available to modern audiences either through emulators or explicit porting and of course the legendary Z-machine legacy.

History has crowned some classics in the field, some games that even in their own time rose above their peers in gameplay, drama or humor, that delighted legions of fans and are rightly revered to this day. What we might forget is that for those games to rise, there was a veritable deluge of games from which they rose. Games that didn’t capture the imagination, whose opaque puzzles didn’t generate the mass-mind engagement, maybe whose limited platforms never got the market purchase to showcase their offerings. Thanks to computer literacy and pioneering efforts of motivated fans, we still have access to some of those today, too.

Sunburst Contamination is one such afterlife-gifted game, from the ranks of the lesser-knowns. Originally a Commodore 64 game, it was ported to ZMachine for its own stab at immortality. For me, it was the wrong kind of nostalgia. Nevermind I needed to install Frotz just to play it (which, honestly, why didn’t I do that sooner?), because modern interpreters like Gargoyle, Lectrote and Parchment can’t run it. Once I did fire it up in Frotz, it just kind of lay there. The game itself didn’t give me any clues what it wanted me to do, though thankfully the IFDB page did. I navigated its limited vocabulary, its largely empty spaces of unimplemented nouns, its wildly uneven implementation horizon, its bugs(?) - in one area I was able to bypass a gatekeeper without solving a puzzle, just using a different directional command. Then I got stuck on a door I couldn’t open, which, in fiction, I CERTAINLY would have known how to. I battered myself against it for enough time to know this was not where I wanted to be spending my time and quit. UNPLAYABLE is a hard word, and certainly back in the day, with expectations of frustrating trial-and-error would not necessarily apply here. Against modern standards, I found it so. Not all wine ages gracefully!

If you consume a lot of nostalgic IF, it is hard not to appreciate modern evolutions. By buffing down the cruelty and subtly expanding from the opacity of early efforts the FEEL of early IF can be evoked without the frustration that peppered so much of it. Interestingly, it has also reduced the need for online communities to trade hints and discoveries just to make progress. Between robust hint systems and walkthroughs, that forced community pressure is all but gone. Yet, here we are anyway!

My first stop after being stuck was to parse some existing reviews for hints. I didn’t get any, but I DID tumble onto a generous review that likened its gameplay to a Scott Adams spoof. What a bold, ephemeral choice! The reviewer claimed, which I have no reason to doubt, that the ‘bad’ gameplay, seemingly buggy implementation and even typos were all spoofing that particular style of IF. If you were deeply conversant in that playstyle, immersed in that zeitgeist back in the day, maybe this would land a lot better. Maybe its Adams-ness would trade on some cultural knowledge that clued its gameplay better, and made its frustrations funnier. Cultural Comedy often has the shortest shelf-life. 40 years on, gameplay norms have evolved significantly and what might in fact be hilariously cutting subversions of well-known tropes, now is just… unworkable. Like, if there was a SIDE-SPLITTING joke written in Aramaic - I totally wouldn’t get it, and may not even recognize it as writing.

My second stop after being stuck was so much more rewarding. I downloaded and started to parse the source code. My initial motivation was to parse the code directly to find the solution to my blocking hatch. I quickly lost myself in the sheer, willful majesty of the Basic code. What a treat that was! Spoiled as we are by modern languages with innovations like named variables and object orientation, even the code itself was a puzzle to understand! The mechanics of its primitive parser, the spaghetti of its gotos and gosubs, where puzzles were organized BY THE VERB USED TO SOLVE THEM. You may not know exactly what I mean here. What I mean is for objects that, say, need you to attach something, across the entire breadth of the game, ALL of it is implemented under if/else trees under the ATTACH verb! Authors were adding puzzle solutions inline, disconnected from all context! I didn’t get quite there in decoding my specific puzzle, but what an astonishing insight into those old author mindsets. How insanely motivated and lateral logic-mired must those authors have been?!? I love, love, love that this was preserved, and that I dove into it. The game itself left me pretty cold, but the IMPLEMENTATION was mesmerizing.

Played: 7/19/24
Playtime: 2hrs, 2 false starts, good ending

I don’t know what it is with these alternate platforms for me. Just getting the game to launch was a mini-game of its own. Initially I tried to create an account on the hosting site, only to be told “there is an error, please try again.” Trying again, I was told my username/pwd was already in use, but no email (with confirmation link) was ever sent, meaning I was locked out. Then I just decided to play it without account, meaning I would not be able to save. Without a net baybee!

Unfortunately, the web hosting was not great. Periodically, I would encounter fits of extreme lag between command entry and response. Which looked like unaccepted commands, so I would keep retrying until eventually the first command response came back. Until eventually that didn’t work either and after 5 minutes of wait I concluded it was never coming back. That safety (save-ty?) net would have really come in handy at that point.

So I reloaded the game to try and fly back to stall point, only this time a crucial (and unfair) event failed to happen like last time. Consulting walkthrough, the prerequisites SEEM to have been met, so maybe something about reloading corrupted state? Killed window, started again. This time was able to play through, but with nearly 1.5hrs invested in frustration. Let me put all that aside though (assuming I can), and focus on gameplay.

It is an old school throwback design, deliberately evoking the primitive Apple II graphics and limited vocab gameplay. It did some nice work introducing its command particularities while simultaneously setting the mood with a charming opening sequence of ‘sit down and play.’ The illustrations were amateurish, but in a fun, loving homage kind of way. Early puzzles went fairly smoothly, though there were lots of glitches in vocab, mystery verbs (>LOWER VINES) and weird longhand sequences (>PUT KEY IN KEYHOLE instead of >UNLOCK DOOR (WITH KEY)). I found myself consulting walkthrough almost always to figure out how to key in a solution, not because the solution was unclear. Given the energy spent early to acclimatize players, these occurrences felt like a gap?

That said, fussy verbs, incomplete synonyms and janky syntax were not unheard of in early days, so it didn’t feel out of place, and maybe part of the nostalgic vibe? I did appreciate that instant death and unwinnable states had guardrails put around them which might not have been there in the old days.

Aside from fighting syntax, the puzzles were lowkey fun, probably in the middle/low end of difficulty with one or two moon logic ones, but often amusing and satisfying nonetheless. If I could tease out my frustrations with the platform, would be a recommend for anyone needing a shot of greyscale graphics adventures. Its not cutting any new ground, but it is faithfully and warmly recreating welcome old ground.

I trust others’ experiences with the platform will not be so fraught.

Played: 7/15/24
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished

This is the kind of game I could easily fall into for days and not come out until the Palooza was done, bleary eyed and wondering how my beard got so big. It is a big, single puzzle maze parser game. As a librarian mouse(?), you are tasked to protect your library from encroaching adventurers, bent on looting the place. The rules and constraints of this party-and-mouse game are not at all clear at the outset, despite an ‘Employee Manual’ that introduces you to the limited-vocabulary verbs at your disposal.

The arbitrary rules you must follow (build a maze of 20 rooms. open it to pursuers. direct LOS with your pursuers will kill you. limited control over pursuers’ path. some magic items to employ) really hit a sweet spot for me. Just opaque enough to engage my inner explorer-scientist. Just limiting enough to make a real challenge. Just flexible enough to encourage broad experimentation. I can’t remember the last time I was this high on the fumes of a SINGLE PUZZLE.

Its structure definitely supports it: it’s two phases really. 1) build your maze. 2) dodge through it, eluding pursuers and setting traps until victory! Both phases are engaging in different ways, tight and short enough that neither wears out its welcome in repeat plays. I felt like I could bounce back and forth forever, learning from failed attempts to inform the next build; experimenting with the build to inform the run/trap pattern. None of it too large to get in your head, complex enough to prohibit trivial solution. Just super, super great fun.

As a parser fan, I tend to favor narrative-driven works with notable NPC implementations, over-the-top humor, or clever lateral thinking twists. This has none of that unless you stretch a bit on the latter. But it still carved out an engaging puzzle, with fun, absurd chrome, that lived in my brain until solved. I forced myself to put it aside to review other works, but it stayed right there, open on my desktop. Beating away like Poe’s Telltale Heart, slowly driving me mad until it was all I could think of. So, thanks for that game?

Played: 7/13/24
Playtime: 2.5hr, stuck, unfinished

If ever I WANTED to like a game more, I can’t think of it just now. This is a 50s B-Movie Space Horror spoof, with strong Ed Wood Jr connections. Stop already, I think I’m getting the vapors! The game has an insanely good ambient music/soundtrack just perfect for its theme. Seriously, it is a perfect mood setter, don’t even TRY to play without it. The work is also funny, from an endless parade of funny tombstone epitaphs, to your pugnaciously willful partner, to the bonkers plot turns, to just outright winning prose. A fave: “everything carvable has been carven to within an inch of structural collapse” In my first half hour I was gleefully giggling, romping from one area to another, just having a grand time. Then it came time to start solving puzzles.

Man do I wish puzzle play synched with me like literally every other aspect of the work. There are a relatively spartan nine areas whose midgame puzzles just slammed things to a crashing halt. I consider myself reasonably experienced in these things, but after two hours of no progress whatsoever, the charms of the piece kind of washed away in torrents of frustration. Consulting the location-sensitive hints were only marginally helpful, sometimes offering opaque hints, sometimes reinforcing what I WANTED to do with no pointer HOW, and other times just plain missing. Lots of seemingly arbitrary deaths, funny the first few times, defeating after great stretches of no progress. In desperation, I consulted prior reviews that helpfully pointed out that (Spoiler - click to show)if you give your bag-of-instant-death to your partner and let him open it, it will no longer kill you when you do so. No story justification, mind, no text cluing that this might work, and once accomplished no text stating it in fact did. The helpful review characterized that move as a bug, but honestly, I’m not sure how ELSE it could be accomplished, and for sure it was needed to solve multiple puzzles! I blundered forward for a while after that, starting to make some progress, then again ran aground with no more internet help to guide me.

There are other, more traditional, buggy behaviors - text that addresses the partner before he arrives on scene; objects that should be consumed reappearing without comment - but these are exactly the kind of things that are easily forgiven in works that sing, and SO not the problem in works that make me struggle.

It doesn’t help that I tried SO SO MANY THINGS in the meantime that just didn’t work. Catching fireflies for light! Begging my partner to use his lighter! Wearing a helmet to avoid toxic fumes! Using objects as reach extenders! So many different gorilla entreaties! These are not spoilers, as none of them worked. It was the more frustrating because there was one puzzle I really liked, and tumbled into in what felt a ‘normal’ problem solving flow. I also seemed to be assembling some fun, intriguing pieces towards endgame, currently unemployed. I am forced to conclude that as on-my-vibe as this was in EVERY ASPECT BUT ONE, that one aspect we were just completely disconnected, this work and I.

It makes me unutterably sad that THIS game, of all games, rejected my puzzle-solving advances so resoundingly. A prohibitively opaque High Fantasy Cat People V Broccoli People RPG would not produce this level of regret in me. At this point, after slogging 2.5hrs in, it is pretty clear the relationship problem is not the game, it’s me. I’m in pain now, but with time I hope I can find it in me to become friends again.

Played: 7/11/24
Playtime: 15min

Let’s say I gave you infinite monkeys, y’know, as a birthday gift. Following year, I gave you infinite IF workstations. Never mind the HARROWING year you just suffered. In the even more bedeviling year that followed, let’s say those infinite IF monkeys submitted to infinite IF Jams and I reviewed every one of them. See, it’s not just you suffering!

So after those three years, math tells us YWAtaSW would be produced by that ill-considered simian gift army of mine. I call BS. There is no universe, irrational number based or not, where the conceit of this work is replicated, never mind its execution. Redo the math. If it tells you it could, the math is wrong. We made a fundamental error somewhere in history and are stranded down an untenable path, prisoners of our bad calculus. This explains quantum entanglement and energy teleportation too.

So yeah, YWAtaSW has a pretty singular premise - that you are playing a work of IF created by an entity you briefly swapped consciousness with, expressing their experience back to you. The identity of the swapper is not exactly a secret, but it is delightfully, bafflingly, bonkers as hell. I am torn between just outing the interloper’s identity and not. It is not a secret at all, but the implementation is so daffy I am reluctant to color it with any interpretation of my own.

If I had a wish, it would be that the work committed to its premise MORE. Most of it is a delightful ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ ‘fish out of water’ look at the prosaic corners of human life. The mundane object inventories are particularly welcome. Like each artifact, however trivial to us, is worthy of deep marvel. Its ruminations on green and grass made me snort aloud. It is so good natured and pie-eyed about it, it is overtly winning. I had a nagging feeling though that the specifics of your timeshare partner could be more foregrounded. When the specifics show up they are clever and winning, but as often it feels more generic? Like any arbitrary alien identity’s experience? I don’t want to be too down on this, it is super successful in the general, wanting more specifics is just me being greedy. I particularly liked the sexual politics guilelessly left behind for the protagonist to untangle. Hey if I didn’t know what sex was, I’d sure be curious too. Not that my curiosity is COMPLETELY sated by full knowledge.

A totally bananas conceit, in a very fun, very funny implementation. Not the work’s fault I am fascinated with gifted equine denture.

Also, a REAL friend would have included infinite bags of monkey chow that first birthday. That’s on me.