Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

With a title like that, and a first screen where your default name is VELMA… you have set some expectations let me tell you. You wake up in Literature Club sans glasses, talk to 3 suspects maybe romance, maybe fight, rinse and repeat to see all the permutations!

Collect-all-the-endings games are relatively new to me. I think I encountered my first last year. That said, in that short year I’ve seen a LOT of them. The ones that work for me are the ones that branch out into bonkers disconnected end states, that startle me with just how far they are willing to diverge. I think they kind of have to? Ok, that’s ridiculous, I don’t make the rules for these things. But if they DON’T they have to justify repetitive gameplay and diminishing returns on comedy text some OTHER way. Generally the shorter the return trip and the sooner the branches become available the better. The deeper the branch point and narrower the divergence, the less it feels justified without some other kind of spice.

I think I need more than what Help! is set up to provide. For one, despite the premise, the lack of clear vision is often DESCRIBED, but does not seem to affect gameplay in any interesting way. Why call me Velma if I can’t grope blindly for a while!!! For another, aside from the choice of what your glasses look like, there is a LOT of linear clicking at the beginning before you get to divergent choice points. Certainly the consequences and plot turns those later choices produce have little connection to the paths you clicked making it essentially a ‘blind binary search simulator,’ where your agency in determining path is effectively zero. This is not unheard of in this genre, but puts all the weight on the endstate. Until you get there, your eyes glaze a lot over repeated text screens. I’m not sure how many loops I did… 8? 10? The endstates I found were unique, but didn’t stray far from each other in particulars or vibe. I found less than half the listed achievements, but I did eventually find my glasses (though achievements did not note this?). After the first pass the sly humor could not hold up, the endstate diversity did not dazzle, and it quickly became a purely Mechanical exercise.

Now that I think about it though, there is a kind of subversive read on this. My repetitive looping, then arbitrary clicking… confusing things all around me I can barely make out let alone navigate… that is kind of a META groping in the dark! Each loop, words flashing past as a barely acknowledged blur. Slapping my hand down with no idea what I’m hitting, how it will play out, just hoping against hope I somehow come up with glasses this time? Maybe this was a better blind search simulator than I gave it credit for! Doesn’t change my score, but I think this read on it is making me just a little happier. We good, Help!, we good.

Played: 11/2/23
Playtime: 30min, score 70/200, 4 achievements, found glasses, no achievement?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, got the gist.


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Thanks to the 2hr time limit, there are a few behaviors I find myself repeating when judging IFCOMP. For long games, it is not uncommon for me to be surprised by the timer expiration and just cold stop, a really frustrating experience for all. If I notice it ticking down, I may try to get to what I perceive to be a clean break spot, perhaps short of 2hrs. For shorter pieces I almost always replay a few times to get the breadth of a work, except for works that have been so frustratingly or perfectly rendered that a single playthrough feels like the right way to capture my experience. All these cases are typically orthogonal to hint/walkthrough consultation,which is instead driven by a frustration trigger.

Honk! is the first work where I felt the puzzles were great fun to play with on my own (I mean, it is in the title!), but I went to the hints anyway. I realized the final step of one puzzle wasn’t going to let me finish by the time limit and had a mini puzzle of my own to solve: what is worse, losing a full solve opportunity, or not reviewing the full game? I made the right choice, I consulted the hint system and finished at 2hrs. That decision’s difficulty feels like a compliment! [sidebar: strong hint system implementation!]

This is a save-the-circus piece. Clown protagonist must prevent the Phantom from sabotaging three acts and so preserve audience goodwill and stop the unfeeling hands of progress. It had a few things stacked against it from the start: #1, preserve noble, quaint entertainment against Cold Capitalism has kind of run its course with me? No that’s wrong. Unnuanced ‘Cold Capitalism’ I mean. I don’t line up with Corporate interests, I’m not a monster, but how many times can I be expected to engage this plot, basically the same way? #2, if you’re going to invoke as bland a villain as a Phantom at the circus, I can forgive not referencing Tobe Hooper’s Funhouse, but not referencing the seminal formative text Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park just feels intellectually dishonest. #3, YOU MADE ME BE A CLOWN, GAME. Why do those things even exist, let alone get turned loose on CHILDREN???

I am happy to report, the sweet humor and light tone of the piece almost instantly made me forget all of those objections. No, not true. Made me forget TWO of those, and periodically forget the third. The prose and jokes are not laugh out loud funny, but just universally winning in creating a jolly, bubbly mood. Yeah, it’s people’s livelihood’s and the death of a quirky, dated institution, but it doesn’t have to be DOUR, sez game. I agree! The tone of the piece is its primary strength and it is rock solid start to finish. I grabbed some fun lines as I played, but quickly realized in isolation they suffer a bit. It’s really the riffing they do within the holistic mood of the piece that is so pleasant. So you just have to read them for yourselves! I will note that some puzzles actually trade on the mood of the piece in a natural and satisfying way, which is also fun. Though this line did seem unintentionally, humorously cruel:

"Freda fills the poky camper like how custard fills a pie dish,"

LOL, Is that what you meant to say game?

Implementation wise it was robust, with notable gaps. There are a LOT of things you might try that have funny ‘no, not this’ responses, more than there needed to be which is always appreciated. That made the gaps maybe jar a little more? Gaps like stock text about wandering through a crowd appearing while you are on a roof. Balloons floating away while in a cage that explicitly noted the presence of a gridded top. Dialogue presuming things not yet revealed if you hadn’t >X SPEAKER before hand. As robust as it was otherwise, I also spent a good amount of time trying to solve puzzles reasonable ways and getting rebuffed, and without the humor I might have expected. In particular, I would have hoped using the ladder for the rabbit, making noises with balloons and/or breathing helium, or trying to get helium balloons to lighten the Phantom would be some easily anticipated alternate solutions deserving of humorous rebuttal.

Those are all easily forgiven in the face of some left field puzzles with fun ‘real’ solutions, fair play cluing, and terrific mood. It was the kind of a game where I was repeatedly rebuffed, had to take a break for unrelated reasons during which alternate possible solutions flowed like rivers. Some even ended up being right! That’s a special kind of Engaging for sure. The anxious race for the finish against my timer was also a thing I only experienced once before during IFCOMP23 and speaks well of the piece.

Notwithstanding the shambling horror I was forced to inhabit for two solid hours, it was a fully Engaging work of fun puzzles and sweet humor. I particularly liked the completely subversive tweaking of the ‘what a surprising reveal about this prominent NPC!’ unmasking trope. And a ROCK SOLID updog implementation. Enough glitches and unanticipated puzzle paths to make it Notable, but barely so. Totally justified itself against concern #1. There is no possible justification for #2 and #3.

Played: 11/3/23
Playtime: 2hrs, finished with one hint to make time
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable gaps given robust overall implementation
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This was a work I super strongly WANTED to like. The cover art just sang off a specific set of neurons, so perfect in its capture of getting a new game back in the day. Now I was never a Commodore guy, so it wasn’t a specific yearning. That made it even MORE enticing I think, like inviting me into a subculture that shares a common language but with an evocative and appealing accent.

It kind of needed that charge, because there was prework: installing VICE on my Linux machine, figuring out how to work it!, a lengthy cycle of manual and feelies to consume all before starting. Despite chafing to GET STARTED, the material was attractively composed and fun to read.

The emulator experience was a quick shot of ‘coool,’ followed by a long, slow deflation of ‘oh no, its actually not that cool.’ I suspect this was an artifact of maybe full hardware emulation? I actually kind of hope it was, because the alternative is that the emulator coders lovingly recreated THE INSANELY SLOW LAG of early computing platforms. This would be like lovingly crafting fully detailed restagings of childhood bullying episodes. That is totally NOT the nostalgia experience I ever want! Verisimilitude is a LIABILITY there. I would have thought my modern, high powered machine could have managed that better. Towards the end I started ‘one-one thousand’ counting lag between command and response. The record was 11 - 11 simulated seconds. Rarely was it less than 2. And the lag didn’t limit itself to output - if I typed too fast, it would miss letters, requiring a backspace, then slower retry. WAS THAT WHAT IT WAS LIKE? Viva la progress!

I subsequently learned there are emulator hooks to ameliorate this. If you intend to play, I strongly recommend consulting this thread first.

Is it fair to penalize a work for its platform? No OTHER IF work I've played took me on this specific journey. Certainly, embracing this ancient platform is the most obvious thing about the work. I think yeah, it owns this.

The story itself is a murder mystery: fulfill the post-mortem contract of an art dealer convinced he would be killed, and yup! Spot on! He is! The style of thing is very much of its time, and precisely so. A mappable location (or two), no nouns except those called out in contents lists, short descriptions, limited dialogue, often reused between characters. Rudimentary manipulation puzzles. The promise of the game was deduction, and the means/motive/opportunity tracking looked like an elegant way about this, a mechanic I was eager to engage. I willingly shrugged away modern expectations to embrace it as was. Over time I think my resolve wavered because only being able to ask characters about nouns I had physically touched, and often hearing word for word identical responses inevitably brought me back to ‘well, thank goodness we fixed that at least!’ There were quite a few implementation holes: I used a flashlight before I had one, yet things were still “too dark.” Buttons disappeared yet were still present when examined. The Gallery navigation was complicated by N connections in one direction, but W instead of south to return. I uncharitably started to think, ‘ok, par for the course back then, but if you’re making me be super slow, couldn’t we quietly clean these up?’

For all its supplemental material, and there was a lot and it was cool, it somehow STILL fell short. The manual notes that X should alias to EXAMINE but it does not, and the full word must be typed EVERY TIME. This is not even a modern innovation, yet somehow missed! The command card does not document PULL, begging the question what other verbs did I not know were available? (And if not exhaustive, what was its purpose anyway?) Conversely, ANALYZE - a custom capability of the game - is never mentioned EXCEPT on the card, and unclear what it meant. That is forgivable certainly, but given the deep instructions felt like an out of place omission. There are feelie items outside the Feelie package, intended to be read only when uncovered in gameplay. There is no mention of these anywhere, and only after a vexing search through the download hierarchy was it clear what to do.

It is possible the above paragraph was addressed in a subsequent release, presence of PULL in the feelie might be a clue.

As you can see, I was powering through! Maybe at a snail’s pace but doing it! I’m the hero here! The one that really got me was a puzzle (maybe?) (Spoiler - click to show)Knowing I needed to "] DRIVE TO GALLERY" I could tell the ACT was possible from the command card, but nowhere else in gameplay or feelies could I detect any hint that this was not a one location game. Here I needed to add a specific noun and unlike ANALYZE, the game was no help cluing what that might be. Sure, given the background I could infer it existed, but I could infer a LOT of things existed that weren’t implemented! I had been trained to only try nouns explicitly mentioned! Consulting the walkthrough provided the answer, and it was not a joyous moment of epiphany, it was an ‘oh c’mon.’

I had like 15 minutes after that and thanks to the protracted command loop, my timer expired not close to finishing. I really WANTED to like this. I still really love that it exists, that so much effort was poured into this loving recreation. I hope it provides joy to those who remember their Commodore days fondly. For me, it was more a ‘rose-colored glasses off’ experience that made me grateful for modernity. I know. That’s not so fashionable these days.

Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, for maybe an hour of progress
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusive emulation and gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, a glut in Nostalgia content available these days, will look elsewhere

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This is a character piece, speculating on a conjugal visit between Socrates and Xanthippe (his 2nd wife) the night before the infamous hemlock cocktail. The player is given the goal “get your husband to have sex with you!” but that is kind of a wonderful trick. It ensures the player is aligned with the protagonist (clearly X is the protag. I hope we don’t need to argue about that.) in creating an initially awkward, and kind of misguided, series of advances on a man with understandable distractions. That one little gamesmanship trick allows the author to execute sleight of hand, have Socrates’ response generate interpersonal drama, and at that point, we are fully at the piece’s mercy.

It is first and foremost a character study collaboration between player and story. I am not sure how much branching is actually possible in the narrative, but that does not appear to be the goal of the piece anyway. In the forward the author lays his cards on the table - the piece is about giving X a more robust afterlife than history could be bothered with. We are clearly not building HER character, history has ensured that is not possible. But we are building a nuanced, vital character whose complexity represents and pays tribute to the real, complex, full woman she actually was.

It is kind of a touching and depressing observation - death takes the breadth of a person, and reduces it to the ever-dimming memories of others and if lucky, artifacts that live on. Or in Socrates’ case, completely superimposes a mythology instead. Flattering or unflattering, whatever remains cannot conjure or preserve the fullness of who we were. The thought of us becomes a distorted echo, maybe retaining a sliver of us, but maybe not. Maybe including things we never were. This work offers the kind of beautiful idea that if we can’t remember the full complexity of a person, the least we can do is acknowledge that there WAS complexity. What a gift of empathy for someone history has ignored or abused.

What, am I getting too maudlin for you? Am I, you cold, unfeeling husk? YOU’RE the outlier here, not me and this wonderful work. Check your heart, you emotionally shut down robot. You probably won’t even kiss your dad, will you? Or do you prefer to call him “Father”? Fine, I’ll get back to your “game” “review.”

The interactivity here is navigating a series of conversations exploring prickly personality conflicts, long-standing frictions and affections, shared emotion and history, sexual playfulness and tension, common intellectual passions and shared pet name in-jokes. In short, an amazing tour of a full, adult relationship that honors the specifics of historical Socrates as a jumping off point for emotional extrapolation. The interactivity comes from the player defining X’s character (within an author-set series of ranges, obviously, it is choice select). Right out of the gate, is she the kind of woman who calls her husband “Honey” or “Big Man”? Will she apologize, or double, triple, quadruple down? Is she demure or bawdy, or just a filthy, filthy animal? Is she sad, bemused or betrayed by infidelity? There are so many many options the author has offered through some setpiece conversations about mortality, Socrates’ choices, their relationships, making CAKES … and you are collaborating to put a specific HER into all those conversations. The author has gone out of his way to make a breathtaking span of options available. How much affects narrative thread? Maybe none? Doesn’t matter, it is the character building that matters here. The text is so very deft to not dishonor your choices that it feels natural and rewarding.

This game snuck up on me. I fell for the initial trick, got irritated S wouldn’t play, then got mesmerized by the option to keep quadrupling down on the cow conversation way beyond S’s patience… and before I knew it I was just Engaged. About halfway in, I realized the trick played on me, silently tipped my hat to the author, then X and I just dove back in. I really appreciated the cheekiness of inventing Plato’s famous Cave as a goofing conversation between the two, the implication being Plato totally stole that from Xanthippe later. Relax, Plato can take the driveby.

Stepping back, how impossible is what I just described? Collaborate with the player to create a fully three-dimensional person, through the medium of choice-select options during wide ranging conversations? Do you see how DIFFICULT that is? You have to create a conversation flow that spans light-hearted joking, deep drama, personal history, fear of death, horniness… and you have to create dialogue options at every step that give character building latitude but don’t derail the narrative or later contradict itself? Not only did it hold together, it didn’t even CRACK. Slow clap, author.

Ultimately, it ended the way it had to. But yeah, we totally banged him.

Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 35min, finished. 35 min? Holy crap I spent twice that WRITING about it.
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: I don’t know. I’m always afraid experiences this sublime suffer on revisiting.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

This is an Ink piece where you are Osiris solving the mystery of your mortal life’s murder. Presentation-wise it is attractive - nicely curated palette, page layout, music and illustrations. Don’t know if Ink lends itself to strong presentation, or it attracts authors with strong skills, but it’s getting a rep in my head.

The prose style is an often amusing mix of stilted old-timey patter and modern turns of phrase for spice. It Sparks more than not, but does make for some probably unwanted artifacts like this:

"I run my fingers down the pipe, to where the hot embers are, and let it burn my bandaged fingers. Just to see if it hurts. It does, but I seem to recover instantly, with no long term ill effects. Good to know that I can still feel something."

Without the mixed tone, this might not have come across as jarringly emo as it does. Later, a full on sex scene introduces yet another dissonant tone, however well written it was for these types of things. (I should highlight it is later (Spoiler - click to show)narratively justified, though I sat with the awkwardness of it for a long time.)

There were a lot of Sparks of Joy in this, I particularly enjoyed the ability to pet Anubis, which I did at every opportunity. (This was privately hilarious to me, as thanks to my annual Halloween bad-horror movie binge, I had recently watched The Pyramid which features a decidedly… different… Anubis.)

This is a choice-select piece which I am coming to believe is the more challenging mystery-solving paradigm. For an author I mean. Part of the charge of mystery solving is filling in the vast space of possibility through a series of logical conclusions until you can derive the solution. By its nature, choice-select, just the mechanism of it, seems to do more of it than the player. If presented with an option “Confront X on their flimsy alibi,” if the player wasn't actually suspicious, the space is filling in and mystery solving itself without them. To me, this piece did not successfully navigate that challenge, though I do appreciate that presenting expended dialogue options as “Ask about X (Again)” is a nifty way to both red herring and clue an evolving understanding.

As I exhausted the clue space, I was presented with one option of suspect to accuse. It is possible, I suppose, that I blundered past other clues that might have opened more to me. I am at a loss to see what I left unclicked though. In any case, real or not, it FELT like the game was steering me to a specific accusation and absent other options I took it. (Interestingly, it gave me an “Are you sure?” question, which No, I was not! Felt like a frameup! Sadly that did not change anything.)

(Spoiler - click to show)Sure enough, frameup. The real killer was dutifully revealed without any need for me the player to get involved. This really took the wind out of my sails. The entire game I was led to believe my efforts would solve the case, when in the end the game just did it all. It overpoweringly felt like the game was always on rails, and I only had the ILLUSION of mystery solving. Since I WAS the protagonist, the Epilogue sting in particular fell really flat for me because of this.

Between the occasional awkward text moments and the bait and switch “YOU solve it! LOLNVM I got this.” it could not breach into Engaging. Definite Sparks though. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? aNUBis is… aNUBis is, yes he is!”

Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 50min,finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks, Notable headfaked player agency
Would Play After Comp?: No, mystery solved!


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

“sigh Another standard-format Twine entry, front loaded with typos,” said I on firing it up. “I know where this is going…”
“No. No you most certainly do NOT,” said the game, appropriately pointedly.

Ten minutes later, after exploring I think the entire breadth of it I just laughed and laughed at the unhinged stream-of-consciousness audacity of it. I kinda don’t want to say anything about it. Experiencing it cold, LIKE REVENGE, is the best way to experience it. Whatever you think you’re prepared for here you are NOT. It’s only ten minutes, go play it, then read the rest of this.

Right? (Spoiler - click to show)Memes, Videos, ChatGPT screenshots, lightly researched historical context, JUMPING OUT OF THE GAME ENTIRELY TO A WEBSITE ON HOW TO RAISE A LION CUB. What is this, post-modern? Post-narrative? Post-stuffy old fuddy-duddiness? In the middle of a full month binge of exactingly crafted, tightly engineered IFCOMP entries, what a delight this manic garbage pile was.

To do a deep explication, withering analysis, or self-important metaphorical model all miss the point of its anarchic, throw it all out, ‘can’t be bothered to see if it sticks, got more throwing to do’ vibe. I do wonder, and by wondering kind of know the answer, whether it plays this successfully in isolation, or whether the CONTEXT of methodical IFCOMP play is crucial to its success. Not a lick on it at all, just wondering. Even without that context, it is hard to imagine begrudging its extremely tight playtime.

I’m going to stand on what I’ve said so far, and finish my review in a precisely assembled, thematically appropriate series of links:

Initial Review Insights
Subsequent Deeper Analysis
Overall Thematic Synthesis
Critical Conclusion and Summary


Played: 10/31/23
Playtime: 12min, fully explored?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Like a sparkler, once lit, constant Sparks of Joy. Seamless implementation of its shaggy UI and presentation.
Would Play After Comp?: No, best appreciated for its singularity, in the moment.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Hey, can you see me? Can you hear me? There’s this giant elephant just sitting here, happily trumpeting away. I wanna review a really interesting IFCOMP23 entry, can you hear me ok? This thing not in the way? It is? How about if I stand over her… no? Here? No. Maybe if I TALK LOUDER… Can we try to work around “TRRUUUUMMPETT.”

Ok fine. Let’s talk about the elephant first.

This work boldly engages one of IF’s most troubled conventions, the dreaded
Timed
…
…
Te…
…
…xt

I get why this is often problematic - it presumes to render a dramatic intonation and pacing that plays off an actor’s (or narrator’s) line delivery and stage business. The problem is SO MUCH of a performance goes into those things, and in text, the reader supplies most of it. The odds that a reader will have the EXACT same mental performance as the author is extremely small and requires a writing talent that few, so very, very few, are capable of generating, let alone sustaining. And when it misses, hoo boy, it can be borderline offensive in its abuse of the reader’s time.

This is a work about a day in the life of a person struggling with her stutter. It shows its cards almost immediately with a dream sequence featuring timed text. My heart sunk a little as I struggled with the wading-through-jello pacing only to be delighted when the dream was revealed! Yeah, that felt like a slo-mo struggling dream! Then to be deflated again when I realized, no, waking world behaved that way too… kind of.

When applied to the protagonist and their difficult attempts at communication I thought the delayed text worked like gangbusters, especially when infrequently paired with quavering font for extra spice. Just a super strong thematic use of the technology - I was right there with the protag, feeling their frustrated discomfort! Where the timed text did not work was when applied to anything outside the protagonist, ESPECIALLY NPC dialogue or actions. If I had one suggestion it would be this: trust the reader to block ‘normal’ (boy do I regret that word) dialogue and events in their mind without the delay crutch. Including the protag’s mental process, there is no reason for that to be slow either. Eliminate all instances of timed text EXCEPT where reflecting the protagonist’s communication struggles. Not only is it perfect there, it would even further contrast her struggle with the world around her. And maybe keep it for that opening dream sequence too. Also the typing effect during flashbacks was pretty good. Really, just be more judicious and intentful about it.

There, have we dispensed with the elephant? Get outta here Jumbo. Wait, before it lumbers off I want to clarify, notwithstanding some NPC drag, on balance I found the delayed text upside far outweighed the downside. Clear? Ok, off you go big guy. No wait! I also want to say… no, now I’m just trolling you. Silly elephant. Buh-bye.

So how about the rest of it? Low key excellent. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t trade in High Drama. It builds its drama through mundane tasks and activities, complicated by the protag’s stutter. Crucially, it is not an endless slog of failure and misery. It is a series of minor victories and defeats that just build into an affecting portrait of CONSTANT low burn struggle. The use of colored text to indicate options that were going to be more difficult was really powerful. As the day went on, I got a small charge of angst whenever red text showed up. The prose did that! The work smoothly and effectively laid the groundwork!

I also appreciated the use of text-entry boxes, which can be a point of friction for me. When asked to name the protag, which was before I really had the measure of the piece, I did my usual “roll fist on keyboard” and delivered “Mkhcgd.” Jeebus I really did her no favors there. Later I applied my new favorite expletive “Hoobidy” and documented my love of Pie and well known antipathy for Broccoli. It’s not on the game that the protagonist is meant to struggle with the former, but sail through the latter… which is kind of hilariously counter-narrative. None of these I considered game breaking, rather, the sad humor shone through maybe more clearly because of my inadvertently adversarial choices. And I got to be periodically delighted with outbursts of ‘Hoobidy’.

Sad Humor is really a great phrase for this piece. Gimme a sec to just pat my back. When ordering a card game gift, I cry-laughed at the title “Tricky Troubling Trivia.” Noooo world, why you do that to us??

I didn’t even realize how warmly this game had crept up on me, until I recognized the sheer dread this particular choice prompt evoked:

- (Focus on giving the best possible answer.)
- (Focus on being fluent.)

There was real white-knuckle tension during the (Spoiler - click to show)job interview and I had somehow gone from ‘quietly critiquing the artistic choices’ to ‘deeply Engaged’ without even realizing it. The outcome was just crushingly perfect too. I can’t get away from calling the timed text overapplied and Notable to gameplay, but despite that the writing, plotting, choice architecture and winning protagonist moxie got me Engaged without even realizing it. I considered replaying when done, but timed text is REALLY a barrier to that, and a quick peek at achievements suggested other variations wouldn’t speak to me as strongly and directly as my first playthrough. So I left it lie.

Though reading that one achievement was titled “I’ll have what she’s having” was a hair’s breadth away from pulling me in anyway.

Feels like the elephant should make a final appearance to tie this review together, doesn’t it? Jumbo? No? Man when he leaves the room, he LEAVES THE ROOM.

Played: 10/31/23
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable intrusion
Would Play After Comp?: No, I feel like the story I got was the most appealing to my sensibilities?


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Title is relevant, I promise.

Summitting Everest, as a concept, has had a weird journey during my lifetime. It used to be shorthand for “The pinnacle of human achievement, technically doable but laughably out of reach for all but a handful of the best of us.” Now it is, “Yet another achievement available to the sufficiently privileged at unjustifiable and ignored social and ecological cost.” It is a flaw of us, as a species, that it still captures our imagination and cannot completely shake that first symbology. Honestly though, isn’t Everest itself at least partially to blame? C’mon, tallest mountain in the world (yeah, lets not get into technical height minutia, this is a rhetorical device)… Tallest Mountain in the world? It was always going to be more symbol than place. You brought this on yourself, Everest.

So Everest as an achievement. The first phase is getting to base camp, which is a nontrivial physical challenge of its own. Climbers, at least responsible ones, often turn back once hitting it. If there weren’t this haunting peak looming behind it, it could conceivably be a celebrated physical challenge of its own. Except, of course, no one would bother EXCEPT for the peak behind it.

MBTP accomplished the enviable feat of getting me to base camp, but could not get me to the summit behind it. It is an interactive novel, decidedly not a game. The entire purpose of the interactivity is to pace the text for dramatic effect. This is a full on legit use of interactivity, and it often works here. I think I have more patience for timed text than most and by and large its employment here was ok, though there were infrequent moments of ‘I’m waiting, story…’ The presentation is very attractive - blurry graphical backgrounds suggesting the protagonist’s lack of engagement with her surroundings were a really nice touch. The portrait art was very appropriate for the story, grounding its specifics around the characters in an unsettling style. The graphically interesting background that set up the post-death conceit nicely conveyed its “sidebar” deployment.

The text presentation was good, adding and replacing text to nice dramatic effect with one exception that really undid a lot of its good work. Probably due to some default browser settings, sometimes the protagonist’s thoughts or observations were rendered in a dark grey against a black background that was ALMOST impossible to detect, and definitely impossible to read. The only way to consume it was to highlight the text with a cursor, which on my browser meant a color palette deeply at war with the words and mood it was trying to build. If a deliberate artistic choice, I can squint and see why it might be made: to force the reader to probe a bit deeper to get into the protag’s head. But between the clumsy mechanics and mood-disrupting colors it was so not worth it. Maybe a cleaner way to get this effect would be a less fussy mouseover that the author could better control color choice? If it was not deliberate, just really, really unfortunate.

Even so, I would say the presentation was an overall positive, just deeply undermined by the dark font choice that made it rougher than it should have been.

The narrative is about a sister, conversing with her (Spoiler - click to show)abusive brother who through interestingly enough reasons has about a week of post-death pseudo-consciousness. The protagonist relives her (Spoiler - click to show)childhood trauma, inflicted by the brother. The early stages of this story really worked for me. Her deeply conflicted feelings, estrangement, guilt, yearning and poisoning relationship with her mother. It pretty sure-handedly got me to base camp, despite the presentation challenges. In particular the protag’s assertions of love felt deliciously like trying to convince herself of something expected but not felt. Base Camp achieved!

There is a summit to this work, and here I think I got lost on the way. My narrative guide suddenly started leaping ahead miles at a time, like some Kryptonian mountain goat, leaps I couldn’t follow and could barely track with my eyes. I’ll focus on two, and they are super spoilery. After the careful step-by-step buildup we are delivered to a wonderfully conflicted emotional place. Looming large over it all was the question of the mother. (Spoiler - click to show)How did she let it get to this place? What is HER culpability? This was kind of ignored by the text, and in fact seemingly exonerated her without examination. How do I make that jump Supergoat? You have to show me that!

The climax of the piece has a different problem. While I can conceivably head cannon the protagonist’s mental state from base camp to summit, so many precise steps are needed to get me there and none of them were documented. “Here we are at base camp, let me tie my shoe, where did you go Supergoat?, holy crap how did you get THERE?” It doesn’t help, I think, that the central mechanism of the post-death conversation is a pretty shaky construct. If it is a hand-waive, that’s kind of ok when it’s just an excuse to enable the conversation. But when it suddenly needs to carry plot load it is way too fragile, evokes way too many mechanical questions it can’t answer, and collapses under the stress. Thank goodness it was not a ladder bridge over a chasm that the guide marched me onto!

Ok I have officially tortured this metaphor into war crime territory. To sum: really capable emotional setup. Super effective graphical presentation, except disproportionately undermined by one sour choice. Took jumps to climax I couldn’t follow. Sparks of Joy for sure, Notable graphic intrusion.

Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notably hard to read
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Well this work presents an interesting review question, doesn’t it? Do I evaluate the story in isolation, or in conjunction with the novel, emerging IF platform it is showcasing? It’s not like I open every Twine review extolling the virtues of Point-And-Click, that would be weird. Counterpoint, I belabor Texture’s strengths and weaknesses with literally every review. For a lot of IF, how well it integrates its user paradigm can be a key element in its overall impact, for good and bad. Here, NOT acknowledging its novel approach seems incomplete, given the platform’s developer is ALSO the author. I guess it was a more straightforward question than I thought.

In its most superficial read, I can’t help but call it the opposite of a Twinesformer. This is not a parser masquerading as a point-and-click, this is a choice-select masquerading as a parser! Yes, you are typing command line instructions, but only those the story gives you, beat-by-beat. It’s a DeceptaTwine! Ok, contextually it’s much more than that, I just couldn’t resist the gag.

Plotopolis, the new authoring platform, repurposes IM applications to deliver IF. What a great Mission statement! It is kind of ingenious, I mean the command prompt has just been sitting there THIS WHOLE TIME. It also immediately casts the experience as a dialogue with a storyteller, which is a really cool way to leverage IM. Given the cold reception timed text receives, I will be curious to see others’ takes on this. For me, the out-of-the-box tuning was pretty good - more often than not new text became available just as I finished reading the previous. Certainly the user commands to slow and speed things should provide knobs for everyone.

I have to note this story chooses not take advantage of the dialogue paradigm, which pretty quickly reverts back to a limited-choice DeceptaTwine experience. This is not a problem per se, and probably a good way to communicate to future authors that it doesn’t HAVE to be dialogue. It does strike me as an incomplete showcase because of it though.

The story on offer is really offbeat and weird in the best way. You wake up in the belly of the whale. A series of impossible-to-predict things happen from there. As a fundamentally choice-select tale I found this to be about ideal in leveraging the form. Choice-select can falter in a lot of ways: incomplete choice availability given the logic of the world; choices the player can interpret differently than the subsequent text jarringly delivers; choice incompatibility with narrative goals that then must be forced back into line; reconvergent choices that don’t justify the divergence. When choice-select is BEST employed, every choice has a purpose: either to build player affinity with the character or narrative thread or branch the narrative into a new thread. Most authors seem to have a handle on the latter, but the former is REALLY HARD TO DO. It requires casting a spell with words that naturally pull the player in a direction, yet still cedes enough control to make it not feel on rails.

Let’s take an example from literature. The Telltale Heart, a classic. You the reader are unlikely to ever murder someone because you didn’t like their face, then be driven insane by it. Uh, spoilers? Poe’s prose is highly stylized and singular, and not something you would encounter in everyday life. However, it magnetically and precisely carries the protagonist’s deteriorating mind in a way that the reader engages despite themselves. It is fully the magic spell of words that accomplishes this, that takes you somewhere you never thought you would go. If you could conceive of an IF version of TTH, would it end any differently? My thesis is NO on the strength of Poe’s prose, and since it is purely hypothetical I can just declare I’m right!

Whale successfully delivers this alchemy for me. I played through four times, each time getting a different result (many threads!), but each time the text led me naturally and hypnotically to some really, objectively speaking, bonkers places. Three of them ended up being really satisfying stories, qualitatively different from each other. (The fourth was blindingly short, so not too discouraging with its comparative shallowness).

Was it perfect? No. As a parser-like experience, I often bemoaned the lack of abbreviations for general commands like ‘continue.’ The illustrations were too large for my window, requiring panning backwards to see them, a screen-slice at a time which kind of ended up fighting the UI. While I liked the ‘Sanity’ score as a gauge of sorts to soft-guide the proceedings, CALLING it ‘sanity’ often felt wrong given the choices we were making and the places it led us. Probably most disappointing to me was not really using the conversation paradigm to serve the narrative. This tool is CRYING for that! A slightly less than seamless experience.

All that said, between the promise of a really cool new IF platform and a compelling story(ies?) told with it, I kind of have to give this a Transcendent nod. Innovator’s privilege! Also, the characterization of dolphins as prankster-assholes of the sea delights me to no end.

The fact that one of this author’s previous projects was a POETRY GUMBALL MACHINE has no sway over my score, but c’mon, there’s gotta be recognition for that somewhere too!

Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, four playthroughs, sanity 8/10/10/21
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but interested to see other works in this format


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

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

Buckle up, this one fired me up a bit

This is a murder mystery. A barista protagonist survives a car crash to find her signature figured into a string of doomed deliverymen, and she is the prime suspect! Relive the previous days to see if you can successfully finger the perpetrator. It is a fairly limited-choice work, more fiction than interactive until the final j’accuse.

I would say up until the final choice, the work has two defining features: 1) very attractive, cartoony artwork, and 2) offputtingly intrusive prose. Word choice is routinely awkward, to the point I stopped grabbing examples after a while. I am not exaggerating when I say every other text box elicited a grimace of “phrasing, please!” “Jackie’s shoulders stricken immediately,” “Until close! No butts!” (wrong kind of ‘but’), a selectable “Group Handle” which to this day I have no idea what it is even after grabbing it. It appears to have had a good supply of play testers, I hope this is not a case of A@%#ole American Reviewer coming down on translation gaps. Best I can say is regardless of source it was endlessly distracting. It is also nowhere near the most infuriating thing about this work.

The character work is pretty light, but when it is applied, everyone feels kind of selfish excepting maybe the college student. A conversation with her best friend about the protagonist’s boss: “I am running the shop this week. Maggie’s on vacation.” “Again??" Casey groans, “That whore. […]” MeYOW, Casey.

The protagonist herself is maybe the worst at this. Her response choices seem to vary between “petty” and “rude” with the occasional “begrudgingly doing her job.” It makes her unsympathetic and kind of a drag to spend all our time with, and something I rebelled against whenever choice opportunities presented themselves. While maybe this is narratively justified… I’ll get there. For sure in the moment it is offputting. Given no alternative, we work with her through four increasingly tense nights as a stalker seems to haunt the perimeter, then suffer a car crash, and hit endgame.

So, who is the killer? As a mystery I would say, drily, it is not very tight. While there are a lot of events that happen, the game goes to lengths to show that any of the suspects might plausibly have a hand in them, or at least can’t be ruled out. When asked to finger a suspect, I went with one whose actions had the least plausibly innocent explanations. Initially it seemed like I was maybe right, or at least in the ballpark? This was far from any kind of smoking gun, btw, but, yay me? Murder motive, a linked robbery, mechanics of the crash, none of those made sense for ANY of the suspects including the guilty party. I could easily have washed my hands at this point, assuming I had ‘solved’ a kind of unsatisfyingly constructed mystery. It was a Mechanical, Notably glitchy prose experience, until I tried to restart from a save game. There seemed to be a bug in the web-play implementation where the savegame was not found and I got error messages, pushing it to Intrusive.

So I replayed from start, laboriously retracing the entire game just to see what happened. I made some different choices that resulted in new incidental text but no new information, and landed again on the “who do we accuse?” And chose someone different. Holy s@#$. Okay, here is the I-promise-its-relevant suspect list: spoilers I guess? (Spoiler - click to show)an African American student, an undervalued Hispanic receptionist, an Asian immigrant, and a spoiled rich White Girl. I reiterate, at this point, I had no convincing clues of ANYONE’S guilt. Instead of my initial guess, I kind of randomly fingered the (Spoiler - click to show)African American student. Not only was I wrong this time (as expected), I unintentionally caused a POC to be gunned down by Police! WTF GAME?!?!?! Is this the game I was playing all along? There is no way I was going to subject other suspects to alternate endings at that point, so I reran again, and this time accused (Spoiler - click to show)no one giving me a reveal that (Spoiler - click to show)I WASN’T EVEN WHO I THOUGHT I WAS???

Quick recap: Blind guess #1: “correct.” Blind guess #2: SO SO VERY WRONG. #3: The “real” ending I guess? (Assuming for a moment this ending made a lick of sense, which it very much does not.) How do I parse this? In a traditional fiction narrative, this would fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, but it might not be actively offensive. As an IF work though? The game has specifically put us into a mystery solving role. The player is both invested and complicit in getting it ‘right’. With the first solution, you are convinced ‘yeah I got!’ by uncertainly pointing the blame finger and through no active agency or knowledge, seeming to serve justice. That EXACT SAME process, pointed elsewhere led to atrocity. If I hadn’t taken the third path, what would this be saying? Certainly it is saying racial profiling is bad, I get that. Why did it “reward” me for a guess then? Is it saying, God forbid, to serve Justice you sometimes just have to GUESS?? Does it actually make a difference WHO you point an unsure finger at? SHOULD IT??? What clue did I have, other than some time remaining in IFCOMP judging period, that I should keep playing, that this WASN’T the message of the piece?

When you add in the possible third ending, “WHY IS THE GAME EVEN RAISING THESE KINDS OF QUESTIONS AT ALL WHEN IT ISN’T TRYING TO ENGAGE THEM?” As a player, I was complicit in ALL the endings, why is the game sucker punching me, then moving on like its shoddy construction had no role in this?

So let’s engage that third ending. (Spoiler - click to show)If you accuse no one, it is revealed you are actually the murderer, stealing the identity OF THE PERSON YOU FRAMED FOR THE MURDERS. Like, murderer? Literally steal ANYONE ELSE’S IDENTITY but the person you PERSONALLY have ensured the police will scrutinize most closely! And you only learn this because you REFUSED to give the police another angle to pursue, NOT EVEN YOUR OLD IDENTITY, which maybe should have been plan A in this branch!? Nevermind the whole thing coming down when the stolen identity’s COP FATHER swung by to check in. It doesn’t work at all on its own. In some sense the whole piece would at least be more coherent if this ending DIDN’T seem to work, if the police noticed the same inconsistencies and the murderer ended up being too deranged to put together a coherent plan.

Had it done that, it might have retroactively recast the other endings as ‘oh snap, murderer actually got away with plan!’ Or maybe been a slightly more coherent scheme if #1 and #3 were combined. There’s still plenty of gaps for sure, but maybe get at least a slight charge before it crumbled on closer inspection? What gets me is, this thing put me on a journey of player complicity that was deeply uncomfortable. If it had followed through on this in any way, had something to say about it, maybe it would be justified? But in service of AND SUBORDINATE TO a clumsily executed shock twist, it is clear all that turmoil was not the point of the piece, may have even been accidental. That made it kind of offensive. At best, I found it thematically unfocused and deeply illogical. At worst actively Bouncy.

Played: 10/29/23
Playtime: 45min, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusive restore bug, language
Would Play After Comp?: No, do not poke the bear. Twice, I mean.


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