Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Day 1. Dear Diary, I got a new job today! I found myself in a light fantasy world, stumbled across an apothecary that had a job opening, and thought, why not? I can use some pocket money. Or pocket acorns? I’m not clear on that part. I am assured this is local currency somehow, but surely I can just go pick some? Or is there an Acorn Mafia already exerting control over the best trees? Y’know what, maybe I’ll just work here and see how it goes. Not quite clear what my duties will be, but there are these random slips of paper everywhere. Probably need to clean those up a bit. They’ve got weird puzzles on them. You know me diary, if I’m not careful these are the kinds of puzzles I might fall into and not come out. Will resist.

Day 2. Dear Diary, ok, not off to a great start. I did something wrong I think, and when I showed up to work, there was nothing to do. I did leave my browser open all night, that might be confusing my boss. Will try again tomorrow.

Day 3. Dear Diary, geez, I hope I don’t get fired. Still no new assignment, I suspected I was being asked to RESTART the game, but toying with time loops rarely goes well for me. I don’t have to tell you that, Diary. Later in the day I got really worried, so I tried anyway and there was a pretty dire warning! I almost chickened out. I gritted my teeth and clicked and that turned out to be ok. I should have trusted the employee manual. Fortunately, my boss didn’t seem to notice my absenteeism. I did get to cook some stuff, which I wasn’t expecting, but they all trusted me! Did my best to recall my food safety training from last job. That was really the only thing all day though? I found more puzzles and did them at my desk. Kept glancing, but boss never checked on me.

Day 4. Dear Diary, the patrons of this place are a fun lot! I made a new friend today! I am so smitten, I hope we become fast pals! <3 Cankleie the Many-Cankled Ocelot <3 They are just awesome. After meeting them, spent most of the day hiding from the boss, working puzzles again. They keep paying me those acorns! I’m starting to suspect they can’t have real value, at this exchange rate. Also, will need to figure out a storage mechanism.

Day 5. Dear Diary, made some tea for a customer today. Shift was over before I knew it. Boss talked about the neighborhood a little today, sounds nice? Other than the occasional fetch-mission I don’t get out to see much of it. Maybe later? Cankleie probably lives nearby. What do I get up to in my off hours, anyway? That’s weird…

I do get to poke around at the local insect and plant population. That’s interesting, they are all so cute. Feels like my boss has me on training wheels, but fair enough I guess. Magic is probably pretty sensitive to this stuff. Can’t wait to learn!

Day 6. Dear Diary, did some inventory today. Finally, a job I can sink my teeth into! These fantasy stores, though, with their gravity defying shelves, it looked pretty daunting. Thankfully, another employee(?) helped out. How much is he getting paid, I wonder? Didn’t look like he could carry many acorns. Was I supposed to tip him or something? A pretty exhausting job, still went by pretty quick.

Day 7. Dear Diary, caught a fish today. Does that even qualify as work? My boss said to do it, but I know my uncle did this on his days off. Gotta say, I like the variety of things I get to do, nothing is really turning into drudgy. I do feel like they’re not really using all my talents though. The amount of time I spend on these puzzles is really overtaking my job time. [Note, make sure diary well hidden from boss!] Do you think this is some kind of competency test? They’re fun, but I hope not!

I did find a use for acorns! I can buy beads with them! Ok, yeah, that could be a real ‘trinkets-for-Manhattan’ kind of exploitation thing, but I think the bead represents a good cause? I went animals, I think someone would appreciate that. Hard to feel too exploited with my light work schedule.

Cankleie has not come back. Was it something I said? Oh god, I came off as super needy didn’t I??

Day 8. Dear Diary, I helped a customer with a tablecloth today. Given how slow sales have been, I am starting to wonder if they can afford my salary, even in acorns! The employee manual suggested something big would happen my first week on the job, but so far, nothing. If it’s my probationary review, I don’t have a lot to show for it. Worse, my boss will no longer even talk to me, so I can’t ask her. She pretty much leaves me to my puzzles. I guess I’d hoped for more of a mentorship/apprenticeship situation? Some magic skills would really pump up my CV.

Oh Cankleie, why didn’t I get your digits when you were here? Why are you ghosting me?

Day 9. Dear Diary, I fetched a clam today. Still no probationary review. They’ll never know how much workday I squander on puzzles. I saw a notice where the shop is going to be closed for renovations, so I guess I’m out a job now? It wasn’t the worst job I ever had, but put really low demands on me. The long gaps and relatively trivial things to do were warm, but didn’t really Engage what I’m capable of. I like the daily regular schedule, that was kind of novel. Could you imagine? Going to a job EVERY DAY? It’s exciting, but I think I’d feel better about it if it were building to a career of some kind. The variety of tasks was interesting but again not really challenging me. My boss seemed really well intentioned, and I am so happy with my bead.

All that’s left, I guess, is to PAINT THE TOWN RED with my lumpy pocket full of ACORNS!! I hope I run into Cankleie. Y’know what though, diary? If not, THEIR LOSS.

Though what if they had some family drama that kept them from reaching out? I would feel terrible about that. I can ask them tonight. They’re local, I can find them. <3

Played: 10/3-12/24
Playtime: 45m over 9 days
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

CONTINUING (*cough*cough*) my review sub-series “Second Breakfast,” wherein I examine IFCOMP24 works of light fantasy and heavy puzzle play, we land on ML.

Usually my review sub-series are a humorous jab at categorizations - superficially grouping works together because I find that amusing but ultimately still treating works as unique things. With this grouping though I kind of outfoxed myself. By defining the category so broadly, I have kind of engaged those categorizations in other reviews and said pretty much what I needed to there. Quick recap: “Second Breakfast” games admirably echo early IF preoccupations and genre conceits. While that echo is at least partially the point of these works, for those of us who have consumed a LOT of these, they will live and die on how they distinguish themselves from the others in this category - usually via engaging puzzle play or narrative singularity.

Puzzle play can be undone by insufficient new puzzle mechanics and/or suffering technical implementation issues; narrative can be undone by lack of defining hook. Let me just say the ML narrative did not do it for me. Yes, there is always some fun in a venal protagonist (here opposing a skeevy antagonist(!)), and the prose was certainly bubbly. Acknowledging all that, the core story just didn’t extend beyond its clear function, setup for the deep puzzle play.

There was an interesting new puzzle mechanic introduced in ML, one I am going to keep in shadow in interest of spoilers. I WILL say it requires a singular, chokepoint object where most of the game is locked out of reach until it is secured. Unfortunately, if the importance and abilities of this object are clued, they are under-clued. Given the narrative setup, I talked myself into leaving it be while I tried to resolve the rest of the problem set. I figured it was going to be fine to get it at the end. It took some extended flailing, then consulting of hints to disabuse myself of that notion. I have in the past advocated for stronger cluing of objects that represent narrative chokepoints, and that applies here for sure.

But, once the hint system informed me of my misapprehension, the gameplay did take an interesting turn, with a new-feeling mechanism to add to the search-find-use staples. This MIGHT have pushed things up a bit, had there not been so many implementation issues. The game was rife with missing nouns, key items missing from room desciptions, plural nouns not responding to singulars, even some text translation misses in the hint system. These glitches were pretty common and frequent.

So let’s talk UI, the place where this game really comes into its own. The game implements a multi-tier parser->link select hybrid system. I chose to play on ‘full parser’ mode, though two other settings let players dial it harder to the hypertext side. That’s kinda cool. It also has a LOT of customizable gameplay hooks, MOST of which are adequately described at the beginning of the game. Those that aren’t become clearer as the game goes on.

What really tickled me about it though, was how the hybrid clicking was not DISABLED during parser play, it was just deemphasized. This choice acted as a first-level safety net for its own parser limitations. Any time I started to struggle with missing nouns, weird syntax gaps or picky command constructs, I could rely on the available links to provide the ‘right’ command. This UI fortified itself against its own parser bugs! This simple mechanism did SO much to smooth over the rough spots in gameplay that it kept me cooking along where other games might have increasingly infuriated me. It’s not that the UI was revolutionary, you’ve seen most of these hooks before, it was just how well integrated those hooks were and how well they played off each other. It was truly a “greater than sum of parts” situation and created a unique-feeling player experience, explicitly reducing internal frictions.

This story was more functional than engaging, an excuse for old-school puzzle play. It had some amount of verve and humor to its prose, but all fairly low key. The new puzzle mechanism was fun, though parser implementation issues eroded a lot of that away. If I’m honest, it was still a mostly Mechanical experience with lots of Notable implementation gaps. I definitely owe it a bonus point for the weird, pleasant alchemy of its UI though. I do look forward to future works with this engine!

Played: 10/11/24
Playtime: 2hr, score 610/2000, -1000 for leaving fridge open, lol
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/notable implementation gaps, bonus for friction-reducing parser/click hybrid
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a throwback game. No, not that. This is a PULL-FORWARD game, updating and modernizing a game from the Wild West days of parsers when there were no rules, no deep descriptions, no thought of player experience, just raw creativity and world building and throwing gameplay at the wall to see what sticks. I have seen a few of these now, and pretty uniformly I have had two reactions to all of them:

1. How cool is it that this can be resurrected? This author is doing vital work!
2. Wow, the old days were WAY LESS ROSE COLORED than I remember.

I infer, from my brief experience with this game, that the modern efforts amounted to window management, graphics, sound, and a help system. The underlying gameplay seems to be left as is. Let’s start with the modern elements. The sound design was a pleasant surprise for me. It was atmospheric but spare, pairing quite well with the spare text of its interface. The use of color in text to delineate different classes of feedback was also a nice touch I don’t often see. The graphic design I was less enamored of. The work popped up graphic windows in first-time locations to orient you. On my monitor, those windows were BIG, and crowded each other, including the play space. Occasionally, transition or cutscene text was ALSO presented in windows, so I inevitably had a few open at any given time, without much play value. This was not appealing, but the biggest thing I wished for was a consistent graphic palette. There were attractive cartoonish people, 8-bit pyramids, high-res threatening eyes and photo realistic fog. There didn’t seem to be much esthetic unity and it really presented a patchwork interface.

I’ll get back to the new HELP system at a dramatically appropriate time, let’s cycle to gameplay.

When I complain about my self-imposed scoring system, I am almost always complaining about the top of the scale: determining when a work is “Transcendent.” I actually have a bigger problem lurking in that rubric. When is a game “Unplayable?” “Bouncy” is easy to identify - I recoil at the artistic statement or conceits. That’s visceral. “Unplayable” though, who am I to determine that? Unplayable by ME certainly, but where is the line between my shortcomings and a work’s faults? Legal scholars have been gifted a phrase by US (Supreme Court) Justice Potter Stewart, who when ruling on obscenity said [para] “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” This bon mot is kind of unhelpful when working with cases close to the boundary, but that is not where we are with The Curse.

Nevermind its spare descriptions. Nevermind its limited area populations. There are maybe 9 locations (it’s grey if you go south), and vanishingly little to do, and absoLUTELY no signposts on how to ungate progress. Plenty of ways to die though! No, not actually true. Three ways to die, but SO MANY INSTANCES OF THOSE! This is the deepest hell of “>search X” “you find nothing” “>move X” “You find something!” I knocked about those nine areas for a full hour, dying innumerable times. Worse, in one area, I found a scoring move that I could not recreate! After trying SO MANY TIMES.

I tried everything I could think of, many many times, and got nothing new. So naturally I turned to HELP, the modern addition, to smooth things over for me. Not only was the most common answer “no help here,” an uncommon answer was a flashed graphic that meant nothing to me! Actually not nothing, it appeared to be openly mocking me by offering a (Spoiler - click to show)‘helping hand’ that provided no help. Making matters worse, consulting help PENALIZED my score, deducting points for consulting it! Fair play if I was getting actionable information. But for points that were SO HARD to secure, in exchange for mocking unhelp?? Infuriating.

I can’t say I truly ragequit. The clear labor of love of it prevented that level of ire, and in fact provided Sparks of Joy that this would be anyone's White Whale. Even the patchwork graphics have a charm of authorship to them. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out its weird, fun fascination with classic Rock. But as a gameplay experience for sure I was left with “glad this was rewarding for you author! I’m done.” It does feel weird to flag as “Unplayable” a work that was clearly developed and released and presumably found players decades ago. Who am I to tell them they couldn’t play this thing? I can’t speak to any of that, but against my ingrained expectations, fully informed by today’s IF norms, that’s where this lands for me.

Played: 10/10/24
Playtime: 1hr, gave up, double digit deaths, score 7/40? with another 5 I could not reclaim after an unsaved death
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Unplayable
Would Play Again?: Oh my, no

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

So this review is part of the review sub-series “Second Breakfast,” a series of reviews that showcase light fantasy/heavy puzzle works that resonate off the early days of parser IF. Resonate so hard they are truly IF comfort food for those weaned on and appreciative of it. They are also, for those of us NOT so enamored, maybe one breakfast too many?

Here, you are a fantasy soldier charged with recovering a fantasy weapon from a church. Let the puzzles begin! My relationship with these kinds of works is very transactional. What newness do they bringing to the table? The general category is not really centered in my interests. Sure, I recognize their pedigree and anyone that watched IF invent itself will too. The impulse to nod to that history is not TERRIBLE, but for me, at this point, we’ve kinda seen a lot of them haven’t we? I need more than a nod to make an impression. There are two obvious ways to stand out: memorable puzzle play, or memorable storyline/characters. Both are challenging in their own way.

I kinda think innovative puzzle play may be the harder one at this point? Ok, that is an unverifiable assertion, but hear me out. At this point in development stability, the major parser toolkits are extremely flexible, but still fundamentally built around an object-in-world paradigm. Keyed doors are so convenient to regulate narrative, so easy to implement, it is no wonder they show up everywhere. Same for find-the-thing, put-the-thing-in-other-thing class of puzzles. Works that devise unique puzzle play really stand out against that background dynamic.

Conversely, realistic conversation remains HARD to implement, which often renders NPCs as clue-dispensers or permission-robots. This artificiality is certainly forgiven by the parser audience, it is practically in its DNA at this point, but also can’t help but bring up wishes of more robust interactions.

Both of these tropey traditions are not hard to create, rarely wow us, but also are paradoxically kind of easy to undermine. The magic of parsers is nominally opening the entire implemented language vocabulary to fair player use. When obvious synonyms are missing, especially plurals and singulars, it can actively deceive the player and almost always makes puzzles harder for silly reasons. A player might be forgiven not trying to “>search object” when “>look behind object” told him there was nothing there, or that it was fruitless. (Real example - object in question really only HAD a “behind” to search.)

Same phenomenon with NPCs. When required to ask or tell them specific things, but reasonable near-neighbor topics get stock “Knows nothing about…” answers, the player might assume there is nothing there. Parser players have some forgiveness on both these scores, it’s not like the old days didn’t have these kinds of artifacts. However, NEEDING to forgive these things requires some compensation in cleverness or storytelling. Triskelion definitely had enough issues in its traditional-style puzzle designs to need some compensation.

Ok, I kinda think storytelling may be the harder element to innovate at this point. What? I don’t know what I said four paragraphs ago, I’m focused on the future, reader. Art starts as a blank slate, with literally anything the author can think of as fair game. Characters, plot, tone, background lore, language, all of it infinitely flexible, just waiting some fill in! So much blank space… staring back at us… yessir, just start filling it any moment now… Our most beloved stories are singular in one or more dimensions, but singularity is hard! There are all kinds of things I ALREADY LOVE in this world, can’t I just love those? Why do I need to create a NEW ONE???

Honestly, the answer is, you don’t. You are not beholden to anyone but your own bliss. Making more of what you love is a totally worthwhile endeavor. MY bliss though, that’s a different story. Everything I love started as something I knew nothing about then won me over in its vision or execution. If you maybe get in first with your idea, hey, pole position! You get the Vision award! (Clive Barker, for me, was an early example.) If you don’t though, you really have to excel at execution and/or apply a twist of some sort to distinguish from that thing I ALREADY LOVE. (Fury Road was onesuch for me. I already enjoyed the Mad Max universe, but the raw execution of Fury Road was sublime.) (Early Alan Moore is kind of a cool example of both, somehow.)

It gives me no joy to report that the story here did not achieve those heights. It was a fairly low stakes, low NPC personality affair of unlock-and-fetch puzzle solving. Very much of a piece with its inspirations, admirably so. There is some wry humor in tombstone epitaphs, a well conceived cathedral setting, some capably integrated puzzles, but nothing that established a vibe of its own APART from its inspirations. For folks that really enjoyed First Breakfast and are hungry for more, this is a sturdy option. Yes, there are implementation issues to deal with, but you kind of expect that in breakfast at this point.

For me, I’m kinda full? I’ll leave my portions for others.

Played: 10/10/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished lose and win
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Two friends, separated by competing orthodoxies, now violently pitted against each other because somehow these orthodoxies are more important than interpersonal connections.

What a ridiculously unrealistic concept.

Completely unrelated and by the way, anyone watching US domestic politics?

This is a work where you bounce back and forth (helpfully and satisfyingly cued with color) between two perspectives of a tragic collision between former friends. The setup is a religious/sci-fi setting where young acolytes respond quite differently to forbidden knowledge, and it develops tragic consequences. I mean, it’s right there in the title. They are both awesome fighters, with anime powers, though that is the least interesting part of the work. Certainly the central tension, with some flashback time devoted to how it got here, is the primary narrative aim.

It is a pretty fraught subject, no? There’s two ways to go about this. One is to contrast each perspective and portray it as a tragedy of the universe. The two variations of this are ‘both are right’ and ‘both are wrong.’ The second way is to double down on the tragedy by showing one side is right, and the other wrong, and the tension still unavoidable. Kind of a ‘My Nazi Best Friend’ situation. The details of the ‘sides’ really matter a lot here, what their tenets are and what they demand of their adherents. Where do we fall on that spectrum?

Well, the work definitely paints the ‘blue’ side as wrong, both in its tenets and demands. We spend most of our time exploring this through the dual protagonists’ eyes. What the work is either less sure about, or does not convey clearly enough, is the ‘rightness’ of the pink side. There is of course the inevitable charge of ‘opposing bad = good,’ but this conclusion seems consistently undermined by the sparse, suspect details we are given. By story’s end, I was convinced both are wrong, largely on the strength of their shared sanctioning of righteous murder. The challenge to this kind of two-sides narrative is to give equal dignity and empathy to the ADHERENTS without necessarily transferring implicit approval to their DOCTRINES. Man does that take a deft hand, and probably quite a bit of table setting.

I found YCSH to be both too shallow and too short to accomplish this. I rejected both doctrines as presented, and could not figure out why the protagonists determinedly did not. I had no true understanding of either adherents’ motivations. That’s not exactly true actually. Indoctrinated intertia and fear v. self-important rebellion are clear enough motivators. Importantly, what they are NOT is a deeper relationship with their orthodoxies. How do these characters respond to the tenets of the faiths they are willing to kill for? We don’t know. Are those doctrines humanistic or self-perpetuating hate machines? We don’t know. What about the underlying doctrines appeals to these characters, and convinces them they are actually the ‘better way?’ Unexplained. Those details are CRUCIAL to aligning the reader on the proceedings and understanding the protagonists. The work is not concerned with those things though, only in setting up the dramatic confrontation. It’s just, short that understanding the tragedy of their opposition is hollow. A narrative manipulation with opaque justifications.

There is a read of course, a deeply cynical read, that not only are those tenets vague, and maybe not even UNDERSTOOD by the protagonists, they are completely unimportant to the conflict. Ideological conflict is its own self-perpetuating feature of human experience, and is its own force independent of the purported ideologies involved. This is a statement for sure, but one that I find unsatisfying and unappealingly fatalistic. Perhaps if the work spent more time convincing me of this thesis I could at least engage it as a disturbing but worthy observation. Here though, it is seemingly asserted too shallowly to convince me.

By story’s end, I’ve got a ‘both sides are bad’ conflict where the core conflict is earnest but superficial. Superficial ‘both sides’ narratives are kind of poison for me. “Both sides are equally bad” is a patently bad take when one side blatantly denies reality, commits sexual assault, treason and insurrection and still demands and gets abject fealty. Just to pick four inarguably bad examples out of a hat, completely at random and not related to reality at all. HA HA. Ha.

Ha.

So this work’s somewhat muddled thesis did not land for me. Like, at all. Without clarity there, the characters never sung for me either, so their conflict was unmoving. This made for a Mechanical (nearly Bouncy) experience with a seamless, kind of attractive implementation.

Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 15m, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There are four words in this game (including the walkthrough). Providing effort reciprocity, I am going to review it in four words:

“HAHA, ok but no.”

Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 1m, lost
Artistic/Technical ratings: Spark of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: I mean, why?

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

RPG Maker is not my jam. Its throwback graphics are adorable for about the first two minutes, then the experience quickly becomes dominated by a maddeningly slow full traversal of every screen. Regardless of the inventiveness of the screens in question, they grow tiresome as I watch the protagonist… walk. When it doubles down on a Pokemon-ish combat of ‘select move, randomize damage, repeat’ I can hear my brain groaning.

Anime doesn’t have any particular hooks in me either - though I’m more agnostic to it. There are anime works I enjoy, almost always because of the storytelling, not the animation style or tropes per se. Certainly, I do not seek out works in that style UNLESS I am given to understand the story is something special.

All that said, I do love me a good puncturing of sacred cows, and who doesn’t? The title of this piece alone cues its subversive intent, and grabs my attention. Applying it to a platform and style that I am suspicious about… yeah, I’d check that out.

Thankfully, you the player do not need to manually navigate the world, the game does that for you. Combat is tedious but not cruel, and has a move that amusingly short-circuits things. The settings are pretty random and graphically interesting. Where the work comes alive is by making the most of its subversions, I think. Yes in gameplay, though that remains the most mixed of successes. Really, it’s the writing that brings the whole thing to life.

Our protagonist wants a cup of tea. In a very specific mug. The obstacles in her path are hilariously out of scope to her quest, of which I would INCLUDE RPG Maker gameplay. That juxtaposition alone is amusing but could not carry the weight of the work if not for the wonderfully wry humor that infuses every interaction. NPCs are laughably venal and unhelpful, but vividly so. You get to talk to neighbors (who are understandably concerned if you start rifling their house), wizards and genies and everyone’s favorite, (Spoiler - click to show)Actual, Literal Satan. As far as I can tell that is his full, given name. Just reading it still elicits snorts from me.

Our protagonist is indefatigable in her progress, taking one bananas development after another totally in stride. Her observations about the proceedings are subversive yet somehow optimistic and warm, even when fighting! The whole thing builds a fun vibe that mostly overcomes its gameplay challenges. Its brevity is a key element here. The game seems to have a supernatural sense of where the ‘wearing out its welcome’ line is, and pulls up short.

It never really breached into Engaging, I don’t think RPG Maker is engineered to provide that experience for me. For sure though, the thing Sparked every step of the way. Only two things kept it from being seamless: 1) it would not run on my linux box because of font dependencies. This was fine, online is a perfectly acceptable experience. 2) the ‘space bar select’ input was pretty hair trigger. It often interpreted a button press as multiple clicks, making selections I had no intent of making. Also not a HUGE deal, though I likely missed some great dialogue because of it. Well worth your time, ESPECIALLY if RPG Maker is not your thing.

Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 20m, bailed, joined guard, in swamp, won
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

In my relatively short reviewing lifespan I have thrown a LOT of words at this community. I have reviewed, what, 300 some odd games at this point? Not a lot against the titans of the field but feels like a lot to me. Sure a lot of it has been goofing. A lot of it has been misguided. Some of it has been unaccountably aggressive. Underpinning it all has been real thought and reflection, such as I am capable of, and attempts to not only capture my reflexive responses to games, but to explain them to you and myself.

There are a class of games I run into periodically that I just don’t vibe with - whose gameplay, implementation, conceit or prose collide with my particular chemical stew of a brain in awkward, off putting ways. Usually, on reflection, I can extract and isolate the elements that produce that response. As often as not, it devolves down to “it’s not you, it’s me.” What is relatively new ground for me is dissecting a work that ON PAPER should be a no-brainer hit, practically engineered specifically to my brain’s exacting specifications, yet still leaves me cold. Let’s first take a look at BOSH’s spec sheet:

-Punk Rock Protagonist
-Supernatural investigation (these two caused me to proclaim “I’m Bucaroo Bonzai!”)
-wry bureaucratic comedy (promptly followed by, “ooh, no. No I’m not.”)
-experimental gameplay elements (“maybe?”)

I love all these things! Fire up the blender and let’s GOOOooo!

I then proceeded to flail around for like 45 minutes before ‘solving’ the first puzzle. By which I mean bouncing between HINT and HELP for an unaccountably long time. Look, I’m not a noob in these things. I know you have to ‘examine all you can/take whatever the game lets you.’ I’m still human though! Every now and then, parser basics elude me. Usually (as here) because of a mix of randomly non-firing neurons, plot cues that tell me ‘that’s a weird thing to do here,’ and implementation issues that have trained me to avoid some levels of detail. And yeah, a lot of that is in play here, but I’ve powered through much worse.

I think what really got me about this first puzzle is that it introduced a FUNDAMENTAL gameplay element, required to navigate this game, yet was content to sit quietly on the shelf until I stumbled into it. This is a single item, no more or less attractive/weird than anything else in the world, that was so critical to the plot that it’s absence left a canyon before me, with progress smugly laughing on the other side. There was literally nothing to accomplish before I somehow stumbled across it. My advice would be: narrative chokepoint items deserve more deliberate, redundant in-game cluing. I have in the past advocated for a ‘rule of three’ clues in open world mystery games, maximizing the player’s chances of navigating solution chokepoints. That advice feels relevant here also.

Consulting the HELP/HINT system was insult on injury for me. The two are decidedly different experiences. HINTs are reasonably traditional, though with a command-line engagement paradigm it took a moment to orient on. HELP was another thing altogether. HELP transported you to another dimensional world to explore (with no narrative justification, which ehh ok…). This other world? Required exploration, object manipulation and NPC interaction to wring information out of. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand something about HELP/HINTS: when you engage them, you have resigned yourself to defeat. The objective is to get the nudge you need and return as quickly as possible to the source of your humiliation, never acknowledging your shortcomings again. A long, drawn out side quest, THE RESULT OF WHICH IS NO HELP WHATSOEVER, is exactly the WRONG thing to shunt that impatient player into. I am quite sure, btw, that this choice has a purpose, and that there are classes of blockage that HELP can resolve, and maybe even with some humor and aplomb. In particular, players new to parser gameplay might find this a sly training/orientation scenario. (Seriously though, are there any of those here? Enough to justify this level of mini-game?) Here’s the thing, as a player you have no way of knowing WHICH problems HELP is engineered around v standard HINTS, and boy is consulting it a chore when it’s not appropriate.

Once that particular problem (finding that keystone magic object) was ungated, it was back to a more traditional experience, but everything was just a bit more difficult than it needed to be. One NPC’s behavior seemed to change, such that what had happened once or twice on its own, now needed opaque actions from me to goose. (It is certainly possible that the first two times were NOT automatic, but the text cluing sure let me believe that.) There was a little more friction in discovering just how central the new mechanism was to proceedings, and then, only then, did things blossom into a real mission of sorts.

Oh wait, no, not just yet. First you had to navigate a 4-dimensional space! Ok, as a gameplay mechanism and conceit this was legitimately interesting. The MECHANICS of discovering and decoding it, however, were not. It involved reverse engineering a series of repeated moves 10s/100s of times, with a ‘clue’ that legitimately had multiple interpretations to test and reject. I probably spent another half hour or more fiddling with this because it took that long mechanically, not intellectually. Yeah, I did it, because that’s how my just-shy-of-OCD brain works, but the enjoyment ramp was a slowly descending one. I knew I was in trouble when, after believing I had decoded things sufficiently, I analyzed a remaining clue and said “that probably means X. Wait. There’s no way it means something that obvious, given the sisyphean task I just completed. Let me noodle for another 5-10 minutes… nothing. ok go to HINTs.” You have probably already sussed out it was in fact X.

Quick check: probably 3/4s of the judging time elapsed, and only now getting to the ‘true’ story to solve! While I deserve the lion’s share of the blame for this for sure, it is my nature to blame to others for my shortcomings. There is an argument that gameplay choices are partially to blame. Also partially to blame are implementation gaps. These are not overwhelming, as these things go, but were low key present throughout, blossoming to this exchange, right at the 2hr mark:
Extended game quote

> x obelisk
Which do you mean, the ladder or the obelisk?

> * wot? [note, ladder never mentioned before]
There’s nothing like that nearby.

> x ladder
There’s nothing like that nearby.

> read names
Which do you mean, the obelisk or the names?

> read obelisk names
Its faux Egyptian design is incongruous adjacent to the adamantly
traditional town hall. Faraji can just make out a small crystal adornment
rising from the top.

I think my frustration with this game was not only (or not specifically) that I struggled with its puzzle construction and hint system and implementation so much, but that because of my struggles it did not deliver on the promises its conceit made to me. Let’s review:

-Punk Rock Protagonist: never really factored into anything, narratively
-Supernatural investigation: got only a small flavor of this by the 2hr mark
-wry bureaucratic comedy: let me flounder here for waay too long, apparently only engageable AFTER the supernatural portion
-experimental gameplay elements: so fiddly as to mute their appreciation

Ok, in spite of what amounts to a VERY extended whine-fest about this work, I can for sure say it was never mechanical. Its setup fully engaged me. Even as I was cursing the particulars of its 4D navigation puzzles, I did very much like the fact of it. There is a consistent wry humor that, during moments I was not clawing at my eye sockets, did land for me. I went a LONG way into a DARK hole to just say “Sparks of Joy” but yeah, that’s where we top out. In deference to my own limitations, it even earned a generous “Notable” rather than “Intrusive” gameplay.

Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 2hr, unfinished, captured by lizard folk
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable vocab/gameplay difficulties
Would Play Again?: There’s like a whole essay worth of thoughts here. A 2.0 version of this game, filed, sanded, buffed and polished… probably? I mean it is STILL engineered to my brain pan. But if I do, how do I shrug the weight of these two hours and give it a fair shot? If I encounter a remaining rough spot, how generous can I be? WHY AM I THE VILLAIN HERE???

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There is nothing new in the world, and all art is built on art before it. We know this about the world. Yet year on year, things are still produced that surprise and delight us with novelty. How is this possible? It’s like music. There’s only 7 (12 if generous) notes but look at all the songs! It’s the ordering, pacing, orchestrated tonal qualities, volume, all these variations that bring uniqueness out of sameness. Man does FD deliver a symphony.

It’s like if you took every single decision an author might make – plot, character, background lore – and said “I want each of these things constructed of no fewer than 3 contradictory parts, and each of those parts should be BANANAS.” The protagonist/player is a third person space marine of some kind, but the game is narrated by a first person NPC of royal lineage. The world is under threat from an investment gone wrong(!) that is also apocalyptic and also challenged by ANOTHER apocalypse of some undetermined quality. Antagonists and bosses are simultaneously samey but each with unique details. It would be easy to mix all these things together and get only a muddy mess. FD proves itself an amazing conductor though - pacing things out really well (mostly) so that bonkers builds on bonkers and is not just dumped on you all at once. The fact that EVERY dimension of the story is so bananas helps here, I think. You never really have time to dwell on, say, some outlandish character reveal because HEY LOOK OVER THERE! now the plot has taken a turn! Ok, but would… HEY, SHINY BACKGROUND LORE!! I used orchestration earlier somewhat tongue in cheek, but its details are dispensed so regularly yet diversely it hits the exact sweet spot of increasing-engagement and no-time-to-poke-holes. Eventually, you just surrender and trust the wild ride you are on. I can’t say enough about the pacing of this thing, it is supremely well constructed to lob curves at you any time familiarity starts to settle in, right up to the end.

I haven’t spent much time specifically lauding the background lore here, so let me correct that oversight now. Like a fractal mirror of the entire work, its background is a chunky gazpacho of crazy - a Chex Mix where each part is satisfying to crunch, but whose saltiness begs for more, only instead of more corn chex, you now get a pretzel or cheese cracker or whatever. Ok, now I want more of that! Nossir, here come the peanuts! If you had nothing but peanuts, you would quickly start wondering “wait, some of these peanuts are undersalted or half-roasted.” Not here! It’s the variety that sums to more than its parts by so completely hiding its parts’ gaps. If you’re the type that picks MnMs out of Gorp, this is not your narrative. Grab a handful and start gulping, you get what you get.

If there is an anchoring aspect to the work, it is its gameplay. This is a well-established paradigm of explore, unlock areas, find and use items with light random-based combat. And save points! Yes, you are managing combat resources (bullets), but like video games, they seem to be stashed in a large variety of decreasingly likely places. In other works, this might rub against engagement, but here it is just a fine detail lost in the sauce, a nod to its inspirations more than mimesis defeating. This underpinning mechanical infrastructure ultimately acts as the player’s guide to the game, its familiarity a much needed asset to navigate the wild stuff happening in the world. It is a nifty trick, crucial to the game’s success.

I gotta say, this was a heady brew. Gameplay that elsewhere might leave me cold and unimpressed was so well seasoned with story and chaos, I bounded from one encounter to another fully Engaged. The puzzle was never really too difficult, the text cued the next beats clearly enough, and the ever-present antagonists were the perfect balance of not overwhelming, but too impactful to ignore. Their presence augmented what might otherwise be mechanical ‘find key use key explore new area’ gameplay.

Yeah, this one really worked for me.

Played: 10/8/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished, died many times
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again: I could see coming back to it in a few years

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

It is far too late for me to inaugurate a review sub-series, as I have done in Comps past. But if I were to, “Sleepyheads” seems like a good one for this year. This is another ‘wake in a sci-fi setting, figure out what’s happened’ joint. This one owes a bit more to Star Trek than Fallout, at least in references. The narrative is a bit more dire than anything Trek went after though. Like maybe Star Trek by Alan Moore.

“CPT Rorschach’s Log, USS GrimDark, Stardate circa 1983. Bodies orbiting ship’s gravity field, their sins and weaknesses swelling to burst into the cold void. Screams swallowed by the endless Dark of space. Dark as it gets. Flushed from airlocks like so much moral waste. Someone, somewhere has their hand on the flusher.”

There are quite a few contradictions built into its setup, implementation and tone. For one, there is an early insta-death that establishes stakes that aren’t really matched by the rest of the game, and does it with the old ‘player doesn’t know what character damn well should know’ trope. (Also, WHY WOULD YOU EVEN HAVE THAT LEVER???) For another, its implementation is gappy - many missing nouns and verbs. At several points, it is unclear whether the game is complaining about verb syntax or unimplemented nouns, which is a real barrier to making progress. You can JUMP on things, but not CLIMB on them, and so on. The tone bounces back and forth between low key atrocity and candy-colored Starfleet uniforms. Sometimes a tone war can produce some very affectingly contrasting moments, but here those moments are kind of firewalled from each other in time, more bouncing around than synthesizing into anything.

The gameplay is pretty standard parser - find/explore/use type of puzzles. They are a mixed bag of integration: some fairly well integrated as these things go, others kind of defying the reality of the setup. I needed the walkthrough a few times, more often to figure out how to accomplish what I wanted, but occasionally (for example the ‘shelf’ puzzle) to figure out a moon logic construct.

The story ends up being a low pressure ‘space corporation conspiracy’ with some adversaries mentioned but only really impacting your puzzle solving once. I couldn’t find a sparky hook among these pieces - the story felt familiar, the implementation fought me more often than not, and its tone never really coalesced. There is a choice to make at the ending, one outcome of which is WAY out of proportion to the actions you took during the game. I never got past a Mechanical engagement with this one.

“You don’t get it. I’m not trapped in here with you. You are trapped in here with me AND THESE TRIBBLES.”
– CPT Rorscahch’s Log, USS GrimDark

Played: 10/7/24
Playtime: 1hr, both endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

There are classes of activities that do not need to justify themselves. Solo board gaming. Herb gardening. Geocaching. Live scoring baseball games. I’m not going to provide an exhaustive list, there probably isn’t one. These are activities that provide ineffable joy to the participant, and earn outsider responses that range from baffled to humoring to (hopefully) indulgent mocking. That latter response is wholly and completely unwarranted and will not be discussed further. Gatekeeping others’ joy is a distasteful and unworthy human response. It is enough that the PARTICIPANT enjoys it, no?

Obviously I mean to include Bird Watching in this club. The thing about this class of activity is that others’ approval or enjoyment of the work is completely tangential to its successes. In a game of kickball, it is crucial that everyone is invested, or unearned runs will undermine the activity for everyone (or at least HALF of everyone). Here, others’ derision or approval has NO IMPACT on the activity at hand. It is wholly successful on its own terms.

There is an old saw “Write what you know.” The wisdom of this saw is not ONLY that having a full command of the details lends an authority to your writing, but also that your engagement with the topic is almost certain to be deeper than cold retelling. Writing that tells a story is of course great. Writing that tells a story, WITH A POINT OF VIEW is transformational, connecting readers to the writer in a deeply intimate way. This is a work, possibly a first time work?, that connects the player to the author’s passions in a personal, winning way. It does not attempt to belabor the JOY of the activity, that might not find purchase in an unsympathetic player. It presents a probably optimistic portrayal of that activity, tied to a location the author seems to have intimate familiarity with, and lets the detailed engagement convey that joy.

Technically, I wish it had paid a little more attention to screen layout. I found the link paradigm of adding inline content (including large pictures) to continually require page-down tabbing. I think I paged more than I clicked links here. A more deliberate photo-pane/nav text pane paradigm might make for a smoother gameplay experience. At least, that’s what I kept thinking as I continually paged down. Whatever theoretical-alternate interface might or might not exist, it absolutely needs to accommodate the photographs though. Their inclusion was the beating heart of this thing. More than anything else, the crisp, evocative photographs carried the author’s love for the subject matter. And not for nothing, were very well executed in their own right.

So, as a game rating? The nature of this class of activity is that external ratings are kind of immaterial, so understand I am serving the COMP here, not the work itself by conferring one. For me, this raw activity is outside my sphere of engagement, and was always going to be a mechanical experience. I rate the UI as notably page-down forward. But for sure, the author’s obvious underlying love for this activity and its wonderful photographic inserts earn a bonus point.

Played: 10/7/24
Playtime: 20m, 23 species/56 birds
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable formatting, bonus point for loving use of photography
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

'Awake in sci-fi base, then escape while learning lore' is a tried and true staple of IF, carrying momentum even into the console gaming era. Here it is spun as a two-piece conceit, where two protagonists must work in concert to solve puzzles and help each other, first to suss out the truth of where they live, then to decide what to do with that knowledge.

This is as assured an implementation of this old saw as I’ve seen in a while, and it has everything to do with the design of its alternating, interlocking protagonist puzzles. Some areas being only available to one, some only to the other, controls in those areas having effects in the opposite area - it is a natural progression that feels a bit like a peloton as you alternate leads to make tandem progress. There are subtle gameplay flourishes (like graphically highlighting areas that are finished and lock icons on ones that are still gated) that help wrangle and keep things on track. The central mechanism of hacking computers is an amusing puzzle, and savvy enough to exit gracefully before it becomes a chore. The 'search/secure' and 'use item/explore more area' is all paced and varied very well, never getting into tiresome routine and continually presenting just one more twist on the formula. As a raw puzzle fest, this was well designed and completely Engaging.

The story this is in service of flirted with – no, it flirted, traded digits, then blossomed into a regular hookup with – too-familiar beats. The lore, the antagonist, the overarching challenge, you’ve seen all these things before, and the main narrative here is not going to astonish you. The work still has some tricks up its sleeve though. Every time you start to feel jaded by the plot, there are flourishes that tweak just enough to elicit a smile or nod of appreciation. A mid-point scene where one character encounters the antagonist had a true frisson of ‘oh crap, did I just lose this game?’ followed by, ‘ooh, clever moment, narrative.’ The allusionary linkages are so in-your-face as to circle around from ‘oh c’mon, this?’ all the way around to ‘lol, ok, you’ve won me over with your confidence.’ It’s been a while since I’ve seen a work sell its unsubtlety this thoroughly on little more than the strength of its commitment to the bit. I mean, the (Spoiler - click to show)protagonists’ names, the final (Spoiler - click to show)vessel for the cure… and then the PLAYFULNESS WITH THE TITLE GRAPHICS??? Fair enough work, you earned it. I would say the narrative didn’t wow me, but it did ultimately sell itself. (Caveat. There was one narrative choice that felt a shade off. Given the work’s final, heavy-handed-but-loveable-for-it conceit, it is odd that for most of the work, the protagonists were characterized as (Spoiler - click to show)siblings. I get the misdirect value it serves to the narrative, but that’s gonna make the epilogue WEIRD.)

Here is the deeply unfair portion of the program. This author’s previous works really raised the bar on graphical integration. Their skill in this arena is top tier, and among the things I most look forward to in their work. The Den flouted this established strength by incorporating almost no graphics into the proceedings. Look, this author doesn’t OWE that to any of us, but I couldn’t help but imagine a version of the game graced with epic graphics WHILE I WAS PLAYING. My brain is a dick, but there it is. Really, really Engaging puzzle play, a narrative that should have been Mechanical but Sparked nevertheless, and the whole time, thinking of graphics that could have been.

Played: 10/7/24
Playtime: 1.75hr, 93/97 survival chance, also fail end
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Seamless, penalty point for shortchanging that patented BJaxn Graphix!
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I feel like the American West is an underserved sub-genre in IF. We get HIGH FANTASY and Puzzly Light Fantasy out the wazoo. We get a healthy dose of sci fi, mystery and horror. Much like modern cinema, the Old West seems novel whenever it shows up, purely as an exercise in numbers. Yeah, I’m aware this is the second this Comp, but compared to other genres, still rarified.

One aspect of the American West is its sparity. Humans imposing frail infrastructure on a hostile, dry environment where there is more nothing than something. I found the prose in Dust to reflect that vibe better than any I can think of. It is mostly spare, under-adjectived and dry. The IF convention of not listing every damn thing in the room (because, who has time for all that trivia?) here becomes a textual representation of the setting. I’m not mentioning a drawer full of paperclips and stapler refills because THIS IS A DESERT. I think the work captured a Wild West feel on the strength of its prose alone, and that is noteworthy.

This is a reasonably capable puzzle parser, its puzzles better integrated into the story and setting than a lot of them. The geography was tight, enough to keep solution space reasonably contained and tractable. Where it lost some luster for me was in its story, specifically its NPCs, and in its implementation.

Implementation first - there are a lot of missing verbs and nouns in this story, and quite a bit of either deceptive messaging, ignored alternate solutions, or mind reading puzzle solutions. I had to go to the walkthrough often, almost always because I knew what I WANTED to do, but could not figure out how to communicate that to the game. A prime example is the getting of lantern from a high place. This ‘puzzle’ that in real life would be solved in seconds took forever because: 1) feedback when I tried to climb or get chairs let me know this was fruitless so I never tried the actual (Spoiler - click to show)>push chair; and 2) it could not be reached, maneuvered or remotely manipulated despite having many long objects! Elsewhere, I used IF puzzle habits to uncover an object’s hiding place, but because I had not had the magical NPC conversation, the object was hidden from me. I could (and did) just take it though. The distract-the-guard puzzle I never had a hope of solving without walkthrough, my brain just wouldn’t have tumbled onto it.

Beyond the technical implementation, a wild west story like this, with such spartan motivations and moving parts, was always going to live and die on its NPCs. Unfortunately, the game treated them as puzzle elements, not characters. Yes, the barber was kind of a standout in weird background, but all of them had almost nothing to say except for whatever might be needed for the current puzzle. This rendered them transactional clue machines, not characters to interact with. Without a surge of interest from them, the plot itself was also just a little too mechanical to capture the imagination.

I respect its writing, and the vibe it captured, but it just needed a little more zhuzh, either technical in the puzzles, or dynamism in its plot and NPCs to push me beyond a mechanical playthrough.

Played: 10/5/24
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished with walkthrough help
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable puzzle block
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I do love me a multi-leveled work. A work that plays on multiple levels creates opportunity for all kind of cross-level linkages and inferences, and opportunity to examine things from multiple points of view and scope. I think I counted 4 different levels this piece operates at, which is just crazy ambitious. I’m going to need to number them for clarity.

There are two levels that are cued by graphical formatting. The first (L1) is kind of an academic summary of an… academic. It presents as a publication overview of a (presumably fictional) Dr. Balamer, a psychologist or philosopher who fascinates himself and his work with commonalities of human existence, up to the point of collective unconscious. Our game experience is periodically interrupted to present some more of this fictional background and context, building to a point where this thread (inevitably) twines with…

The OTHER graphically cued level. (L2) is a pixelated font videogame, cuing a 90’s(?) provenance that ALSO fascinates itself with life’s common experiences. The game is a series of scenarios the player is invited to briefly explore before rendering a verdict about themselves based on this exploration. The scenarios themselves are pretty quickly revealed to be (Spoiler - click to show)isolated snapshots of a life, leapfrogging in stages from birth to death.

There is a third level (L3), actually revealed even before the second level, of meta- playfulness. The opening sequence, where an erudite discussion of Moslow’s heirarchy of needs recasts LIFE CHANGING VIDEO GAMES as a core human need is hilarious in context and a breath-takingly hubristic way to introduce the game’s title screen. Thing is, this meta-playfulness stands outside both the other levels, not really of a piece with them, but slyly undercutting or tweaking them both. Honestly, this is kind of the best level of the game. It is this periodic cold dose of humor that keeps you on your toes, challenging whatever connection you are forging with the material as well as challenging the first two levels' hubristic ambitions.

The last level (L4) is the player themself. I mean to distinguish this from much of IF where this level is fully subsumed in L2. Here, you are playing a player of videogame (L4)… by playing a videogame (L2)! The game itself is kind of a character in this thing, and as player, your journey with it is very much part of the narrative. I don’t know if I’m saying this clearly. What I mean is the gameplay is a narrative distinct and separate from the game itself. The game exists both as ITSELF, an artifact in the fictional world, AND as the player’s main entry into that world. You are not a space hero, an angsty teen WITHASECRET, or a grizzled detective solving a mystery. You are a game player playing the real game in front of you that IS ALSO IN THE FICTION. I’ve thrown a lot of words at this, I hope it’s clear enough. If it’s not, just play it, I guess? The chutzpah of all this is just so delightfully joyous and sparkly.

So here you are making fiction by playing a fictional game that also happens to be real. You are choosing dimensions of human experience across a series of vignettes that aim to coalesce around the fictional Dr. Balamer’s observations of human commonality. And this is where I just couldn’t make that final jump from fireworks-display level sparking to true engagement. There is sometimes notable flair in the scenarios (a subversive favorite is opening with ‘you are behind bars’ to be revealed as (Spoiler - click to show)the crib of a baby. Just as often though, there is not. In a quest to describe common human weighpoints, the work falls a bit too much on generic scenarios that don’t feel specific enough to be real, but whose choices ALSO don’t feel justified due to that ephemerality. At one point you are meant to weigh in on having children after a single shopping incident. Not only was the incident itself a bit too pale to generate any real heat, the choice being asked was laughably grandiose! This was the most egregious example of this narrative/choice mismatch but it felt present in some capacity most of the time. This is the L4 experience, possibly the most unique aspect of this crazy Sunday stew.

So what I found as the game progressed was that I loved everything about it EXCEPT THE PLAYING OF IT, meaning navigating the scenarios themselves. There was a midpoint survey that hilariously broke things up. Periodic meta clashes like one leading text: “This is placeholder text for an unfinished story section that will be added in a future update. Please make a selection on the next screen, imagining the scenario that lead to these options:” This feels deliberate tweaking of the overall experience, not a coding oversight. The contrast between the extremely tight-laced academic analyses and background (L1), the much looser gameplay (L4), then the meta piss-taking (L3) always brought sparks of fun.

That core game though (L2), what was built up throughout the piece to be some sort of insightful distillation of human existence, was kind of revealed to be (Spoiler - click to show)a regurgitation of choices made throughout the length. Just that. And choices that had a lot more weight put on them than justified by the scenarios in the moment. There is a read on this mismatch that I like, that this is one final coup d’gras from L3 - that all the academic gushing and egghead philosophizing was ultimately so underwhelming and inadequate to its own goals. That is also a super sparky interpretation for me. It is not CLEAR that is intentional on the piece’s part, but the possibility that it might be is super, super fun to think about.

So yeah, a constant shower of sparks from its levels scraping against each other in thrilling ways, with a core gameplay conceit that deliberately or accidentally refused to become engaging. That’s where I finish. And a bonus point for smashing all these levels together so gleefully.

Played: 10/4/24
Playtime: 35m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of joy/Seamless bonus point for multi-level madness
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Am I a Dr. Who fan? Kind of. I devoured the modern run through Capaldi, and have been bursty ever since. Am I a fan of classic Dr. Who? What even is that? This is a 60 year old property, what even is the classic Dr.? Ok, am I a fan of Dr. Who runs prior to the modern renaissance? Sure, my introduction to the property was through PBS replays of Tom Baker Dr, which was appointment TV back when we just called that 'tv'. Am I amenable to fan fiction Dr. Who works?

Hey, what’s with all the questions, is there a Dr. Who-based murder I’m implicated in, Lt. Columbo?

Fine, here’s my testimony. This is a fan work paying homage to 80’s Dr. Who. Yes, I knew the work of interest. From the start, something seemed just a little off about the implementation though. The immediate issue was its appearance. 80’s Dr Who had a very limited budget. Lots of indirectly lit sound stages, lots of special effects and set dressings straight from the craft store to screen. It was a transformational art-from-limitations example, the low-fi of its effects a chummy compact with the audience: ignore the pipe cleaners and spray paint, this is the story. More often than not the writing was strong enough, and unique enough on broadcast TV, to make that compact worthwhile. So much so, that the cheesy effects became a warm element of the experience.

In addition to really strong speculative storytelling, Baker set the mold with awkward, idiosyncratic, charismatic performances that conferred power of personality to the Dr. I am not Who scholar enough to know whether he was the FIRST oddball, but he certainly was among the most MEMORABLE, and it is his work that modern Dr’s so frequently riff on.

So if I were to identify the top three qualities of classic Dr it would be: embraceable yet laughable special effects; well constructed stories; and dynamic characters, particularly its central figure. This work fell short in all three dimensions for me.

Visually, it strikes a fairly generic cgi figure. So much sharper, so much brighter, yet with so much less personality than the Dr I knew. I don’t mean to open the ‘procedural art’ box here, because I suspect this is NOT that, but I can’t help but observe that it carries the same cold vibe as generated art. It certainly feels more of a piece to modern Dr., and even then carries more gloss. I will say the decision to smash-zoom into NPC faces when dialoguing with them was a novel, if deeply unsettling graphic choice. Woah Bex, personal space!!

The character of the Dr was probably the biggest miss for me. As a Twinesformer, with the player inhabiting the Dr, we spend our entire time with him, but at no point did I think he was anything other than a faceless IF protagonist, solving puzzles. Now I fully understand that doing a recognizable Baker pastiche is a truly Herculean task, but the ABSENCE of that attempt is no less noticeable against the goals of the work.

Which leaves story. The basic setup of Dalek machinations and time travel is pretty center of the road for classic Who, no notes on central conceit. Its application though, and mapping to very limited parser-style gameplay, felt more like a sketch than a completed narrative. In particular the decision to put the Dr under duress, (Spoiler - click to show)and fold, early in the game belied a lot of the protagonist’s legendary cleverness and really undermined his presence. The subsequent puzzle based developments were by contrast pretty simple, with the game basically ushering you along a path, and end-gaming you if you divert. Its fine, you just undo back, but its limited choice space really drives home how pre-defined the success path is. The MECHANICS of that path are very transactional - find/use/explore. None of it requires the Dr’s patented cleverness to accomplish. It was just too railed and shorthanded to really ring of its inspiration for me, and required too little of me (and the Dr!) to navigate it.

For me, I have enough connection to the work’s inspiration to have some forgiveness here. Even so, those three big things kind of kept me at arms length and never let it breach Mechanical. So you see, Lt Columbo, I couldn’t be the murderer… Was I bitter the work let me down so hard? That’s not what I said, Lieutenant… Where was I when this review was published?

I think this interview has taken a turn, Detective. Please refer future questions to my lawyer.

No! No ‘One More Thing…’! I’m locking the door!

Played: 10/4/24
Playtime: 20m, 3 fails undone, success
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Sometimes there are tales that hinge directly on one monster twist - they carefully build and sculpt and craft a narrative full of intriguing detail and then WHAM sucker punch the reader/viewer with a revelation that so expertly recontextualizes everything that has come before it is an electric shock of transformation. These twists are SO hard to do well - they must balance ‘fair play’ events and dialogue with in-context red herrings, neither too obvious nor tripping on their own deceptions. Against an audience trained to look for the twist they are even harder. Works that accomplish this like the legendary Sixth Sense or Usual Suspects are rightly lauded for pulling off what so few works can.

For these works, that one moment is the entire point of the piece, an instantaneous justification of the entire runtime, delivering a moment of crystal shock. Suppose a work instead decided, “what happens if you take that one bullet-sharp moment, and stretch it out over time, nearly the entire breadth of the work?” Instead of a blinding reversal, give us a slow, steady dawning of what must be true over what could be. Its rewards are not going to be as flashy. Instead there is a slow heating as we acclimate ourselves to the point of the piece. Obviously, I mean to imply Civil Service is one such work.

What’s so sparky about this approach here, is that this creeping realization mirrors the slow progression of the protagonist, slaving away in the confines of her unrewarding job, amidst uncaring associates, traversing the same journey we are. Maybe she’s ahead of us? Maybe behind? It is deliciously unclear and this uncertainty does an excellent job of aligning us with the protagonist. I definitely appreciated the somber, depressing mood, interspersed with the work periodically asking us to rate things on a depression-hope scale. If there was a narrative impact to these ratings, I did not detect it. Rather, it seemed to be asking US how the slow ramp was going, and helping frame our thoughts on the proceedings. That was a pretty unique and interesting use of interactivity.

You can see I’m dancing around this more than usual, because this is a true slow burn of a work. To the extent that there are spoilers to navigate, I cannot cherry pick a moment or two to blur and discuss the rest. The entire work is a slow, inexorable ramp of understanding and confirmation and any moment in isolation carries a full mix of its conceit and buildup. That is kind of a really clever trick, especially how clearly it mirrors the protagonist’s journey.

For me, it presented a tough reality though. The details of this journey are varied, as they would need to be to hold attention for this slow ascent. Flashbacks, a maybe-romance angle, exploring the space, NPC interactions. The details are varied but more of a piece than not in terms of mood. The mood of most of these is sad isolation, barring a few sparks of hope or anticipation. Those sparks do shine brighter against that backdrop, but boy that backdrop was dour.

One of the defining things about slow burns are that they are slow. While many of the day to day interactions were sparky, they were also a bit TOO relaxed, TOO low tension to erupt into true Engagment. The lack of surprise was kind of the point of the work, but that point also lacks a charge. It is more a resignation, a coming to peace. I never thought of myself as an adrenaline junky, and this conclusion may be more damning of me than the work. It pulled at me, swayed me in its rhythms, but did not pull me IN. Folks that can lose themselves better in the ride, this might land harder for them.

Played: 10/4/24
Playtime: 30m, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

It’s always a bit of a risk to draw a throughline in Comp Zeitgeist. A risk, and an inevitability, given our evolution-granted pattern recognition brains. It feels to me like I’ve seen a lot of Twinesformers (link-select UI married to parser style gameplay) this Comp. And a lot of them seem to truck in IF fantasy tropes. Neither of those are automatic hits for me, but hey, I’m game.

DoSM didn’t really cut any new ground in either dimension for me. Its UI was serviceable, definitely aided by its tight scope - it was uncommon to have more than a few objects to juggle at any moment, and navigation was as clear as these things get. That simplicity of design should not be overlooked in its facilitating of player experience. The setup: a magic-user pressed into service to rescue mine workers and deal with a creature infestation, was similarly economical and serviceable. It had all the makings of a Mechanical exercise - not too challenging, not too fiddly, not too engrossing but certainly competent enough.

Where it sparked, for me, was in the writing. The work did not take itself too seriously, but neither did it undermine itself. It marveled at unlikely turns of events with just the right sly tone, letting the player know yes it was in on the joke but no, the joke was not on the player. Every time I could feel myself pulling a little bit away, at a mechanical bit of object manipulation or goal-oriented NPC interaction, some wry bit of writing twisted things just enough to keep things peppy. I think the moment that drove this home for me was a wonderful twist on the “What goes on four legs in the morning…?” riddle that I laughed right out loud at. Ok, the work was not aiming to revolutionize the genre or medium. I don’t think I ever breached into outright Engagement in the proceedings. But it was willing to playfully and warmly josh around a bit, and that was enough to maintain the Sparks to the end.

Not everything need be revolutionary transformations of form. That would be exhausting! Sometimes, a short encounter with an amiable friend is just what the doctor ordered.

Played: 10/3/24
Playtime: 30m, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

What is more appealing, a hot mess or a cold clockwork? Ok, I’m a former engineer so it kind of depends on the heat of the mess, and the majesty of the clockwork. I don’t have a strawman clockwork to put up on that side of the equation, but for its part, Unreal People is just blazing, rock-melting lava. In the words of Eddie Murphy as James Brown: “Can’t stand the HEAT, oooh, gebback hunh in the hottub, OW!”

At its opening words, this work had my full attention: “You piddle into being” I WHAT, NOW?? That opening shot across my bow introduced a psychedelic ‘coming into existence sequence’ that paced itself from “Uh WOT?” to “Oh I see!” pretty effectively. From there, the gameplay is to link-select hop from host to host, all in the service of a gossip-hungry master. Why not? The setup is a medieval Indian kingdom and you work your way up from rocks and leaves to cows and people. If you get too greedy too fast, you might be somewhat arbitrarily discovered and dispatched. It’s fine, you can UNDO out of it.

The bananas writing is far and away the hottest part of this mess. It is wryly humorous and surprising in the best way possible. Some examples, among a wealth of possible choices:

“That revelation has shattered my knee caps.”
"You have become bag. "

The non-drunk princess’ internal monologues versus response choices are always fun, but occasionally the turns of phrase hit a lot higher:
"The last man saw of god was man unseen by god. "

At every turn, NPCs surprised and delighted with off-kilter voices, viewpoints and motivations. Unfortunately, gameplay was a lot messier. For one, while your mission is clear - collect gossip - you don’t have much control over how. You just jump around, basically at random, until you accumulate enough. There is nominally a timer, but as far as I can tell the game is more event driven. Its pacing is also a bit weird. The midgame went on for so long, it felt like the entire game, but no, there was a more abbreviated final section still left to navigate, then a truly surprising and well-conceived final FINAL bit. All these artifacts prevented me from truly engaging the work, but wow, the fun writing brought white hot Sparks of Joy to this mess.

Even messier was its technical implementation. Over and over, coding artifacts showed up in the work, from seeming placeholder comments, internal code artifacts and in one case an entire page of resource text displayed for FUTURE choices the player had not made yet (this last in the cat and Gaury scene). Elsewhere, a link to investigate Mazboot led to a completely blank page that needed UNDO to escape. In its endgame showpiece, you have finally taken (Spoiler - click to show)everything(!) as a host, but the input handling is jumbled, repeated, or confused, ultimately defusing that really nifty conceit.

So yeah, a notably messy gameplay with messier implementation issues married to white hot Sparks of Joyful writing. It would take quite a towering clockwork to eclipse that.

Played: 10/3/24
Playtime: 1hr, captured x6, became [blank]
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable bugs/text artifacts
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

So, I spent a good amount of COVID’s duration, like many of us, spinning in my own brain, grasping at any lifeline I could think of. One of my outlets was to create and share cocktails weekly, with fancy names like ‘Science Schmience,’ ‘A-B-CDC-Ya,’ and eventually, ‘Orange Slapdown.’ As the weeks dragged on, the obvious complementary flavors (and what was available readily in stores!) grew rarer, so I periodically tried combining things I loved individually to see if they played together. So very, very often they did not. Usually, it was obvious going in that they would not, but hey, science right? With enough time and energy, like a one-man infinite monkey with infinite cocktail shakers, I eventually tumbled onto a sublime discovery: the ‘Internal Sunshine of the Stable Genius Mind’ (and its candy-ass partner, the 'Internal Bleach of the Stable Genius Mind) – ISOSGM/IBOSGM for short. This improbable combination of citrus-forward gin, eldeflower liquer, kumquat simple syrup and egg combined to become so much more than the sum of its conflictory parts. (‘Bleach’ omits the egg in deference to my wife’s extreme physiological objections.)

The Bat performs similar alchemy in a less alcoholic medium. Take parts I love in isolation: servant-soire’-farce, superhero spoof, limited vocabulary parser, and light parlor mystery and you have the makings of a muddled mess. Or, in this case, something that improbably combines these elements into something greater even than their very pleasing individual parts.

Initially, I found the light vocabulary to be chafing - using the catch-all manipulation verb ‘attend to’ is intuitive when interacting with high society guests, but less so when fumbling with objects. It is in fact the only manipulation verb in the game, so eventually the shorthand ‘>a [object]’ alchemically becomes ‘whatever I currently want to do with [object]’ in my brainpan. Occasionally there are glitches where it is unclear which object should be attended to when you require two to interact, but again the brain quickly pastes ‘well, try the other one’ over the gap.

The early game is a pretty great ramp from acclimating the player to the syntax of the game and the geography of the mansion, then slowly but inexorably building guest on calamity on random events until the poor butler protagonist is flailing around the mansion like an electrified butterfly. Things are always just outside manageable and that masterful balance is where the humor continually keeps frustration at bay. There is a player score of sorts, charitable donations guests are willing to make based on how well they are attended to, and the ups and downs of this provide a very amusing tension to the proceedings.

As soon as that gameplay becomes familiar, the game shifts gears to a light parlor mystery whose culprit is not really in doubt, but the mechanics of catching them are interwoven into business and romantic trysts that test the protagonist’s inflappable discretion in various, hilarious ways. It also introduces some next level puzzling that is as funny as it is fun to play with, that ALSO builds on player knowledge in a very satisfying way.

Ultimately, the game crests to foreground the light superhero spoof it has been nodding at the entire game, a thoroughly ANTI grim’n’gritty take on a Dark Knight that could really stand to lighten up a bit. The final battle puzzle is a little clumsier than the leadup ones, but it does leverage the best mechanic in the game, so even flailing a bit is not unpleasant. Then, the FINAL employment of that mechanism turns into a double entendre’ so crisply tying the whole thing together that all is forgiven.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the role the writing has in tying the whole thing together. The protagonist’s dry, beleaguered but indefatigable voice, committed to his role despite all its indignities, is the perfect counterpoint to the chaos around him. The narration is similarly matter-of-fact and minimal, letting the chaos speak for itself, and admirably gesturing at interesting details without clouding the vibe. This is a case study in ‘less is more,’ both for humor, and parser cluing.

It is clear I hope that I was thoroughly Engaged with this work. Like others of its scope, the 2hr timer provided an additional charge of tension at the end, as I had no intention of leaving the game unfinished. It was tight, but yay me. The limited vocabulary implementation ended up being a true strength, limiting opportunity for gaps while settling into a gameplay paradigm that was intuitive and transparent. I didn’t make an ISOSGM to celebrate its accomplishments as my kumquats* are not in season, but next time I enjoy one I will retroactively toast this game’s success.

*There is a whole different story around my wondrous discovery, so late in life, of the majesty of the humble kumquat. I will save that for a more appropriate time.

Played: 10/3/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished $100,000,000 in donation
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Military works can be quite divisive. Historically, media has lionized our fighting forces, not without some valid kernel of a reason. As a volunteer force, people making the choice to serve something larger than themselves, at potentially great personal physical risk, is a laudable choice. In an imperfect world, when outside forces have few qualms about inflicting death and destruction, a response in kind is a basic need of a nation. (Just ask Ukraine.) Where we get into trouble is that ‘volunteer’ is a loaded term when economic opportunity is not truly equal, and when the choice to employ force is, by design, outside the volunteers’ hands. You might as easily be asked to liberate people from death camps, as slaughter civilians in the name of lower gas prices. It is fair to say only one of those things is an appealing cause to volunteer for. It is rendered even more complex with the stunning lethality of modern weapons, and only half-assed attempts to increase precision through the fog of war. Even the most noble of causes can be tainted if retaliation is indiscriminate.

It is against this very fraught backdrop that Deserter introduces us to a future mech-based war, and a soldier bent on quitting the fight. It is a choice-select work, and the player is given no options to stay and fight. I mean, fair enough, the title kind of unambiguously points that way. But it does so with NO table setting, no background in the conflict. Early on, it is not clear whether this is a noble or craven act. The work clearly WANTS us to perceive it as the former, but absent context it is far too charged and unclear to be a given, and that doubt drives a wedge between player and protagonist.

In particular, the work seems to have only an action-movie understanding of soldier dynamics. One of the oldest tools militaries use to secure loyalty is religious fervor. The SECOND oldest (probably, I didn’t do the math) is to ensure every soldier’s highest allegiance is to his fellow soldiers. You are not fighting for God here. You are not fighting for political leaders. You may be fighting for ideals, though that pull is uncertain if those ideals are removed from your own turf. No, you are fighting for the soldier next to you on either side, so you all come home together. This coopting of humanity's social impulses is a fundamental aspect of human warfare and is the strongest counterweight against desertion. It is also completely missing in this work. It is not that it HAS to be present here, but its absence certainly should be addressed. It is precisely this lack of dynamic that raises the spectre of cravenness in the protagonist.

But desert he does! As the escape progresses, we are treated to a not-great use of interactivity: choices to make with nothing to analyze to inform the choice. Go left or right? Only the vaguest of context. In heat of battle, this is not a bad design in and of itself. The fact that the work later makes those choices irrelevant begs the question, why bother creating an unfair choice the player will angst over? Other interactive opportunities run afoul of the scenario itself. Because the protagonist’s motives are so cloudy, subsequent available choices: to explore a cave rather than continue an escape make little story sense, but turn out to be the only way to get character context! Too, events seem overly contrived - despite being minutes from an active war zone, the protagonist not only can (Spoiler - click to show)run across refugees, those refugees can include (Spoiler - click to show)HIS OWN FAMILY. For a topic as loaded as modern warfare, combatant culpability, and the price paid by non-combatants, I found the work too shallow for its setting. It relied on motivations without justifying them, and contrived unconvincing events to drive its message home. The unconvincing nature of its plotting and interactivity actually undermine what it is driving at by putting the player in a skeptical frame of mind.

Its heart is in the right place, I’ll give the work that. This prevents this from being truly Bouncy, but its shaky narrative did not engage me. The gyrations needed to uncover its deepest context were both unrealistic and convoluted so it wasn’t even until third playthrough that the protagonist’s motivations approached clarity. At that point, the charge of discovery was so well and truly muted that it was too little, too late.

Played: 10/3/24
Playtime: 25m, three endings: (Spoiler - click to show)escape, save boy, escape with stuffed bear
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable text artifacts
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Sometimes I like to do things to mix up the formula. Some wildly misfiring neurons during happy hour made me think, “Hey, what if I tried to review one of these after too much liquid refreshment?? I mean, I love Drunk History and My Drunk Kitchen, how hard could THAT be? Besides, it’s not problematic if you are drinking for ART!!!”

A lot of my worst ideas happen at the end of happy hour. To be fair, I had no way of knowing Big Fish was lying in wait at the top of my queue. So I topped up my glass and jumped in, giggling madly at my own subversive antics. Here’s the thing. Clouding your mind in a crowded film set, with cameras rolling, then gabbling on about historical facts or trying to work cookware is energizing. The entertainer is performing and must be the motive force. Watching someone struggle against their own decreasing capabilities in real time is kind of hilarious. Sitting in a comfortable chair, sun long set, house quiet as the other residents slumber… me swimming along in a pleasant mental blur… this is not as hilarious as one might think. The struggle was as much with the Sandman as the work. (It for SURE is not conducive to then writing about it! Maybe I should have tried dictation??) This would have been a challenge for any work.

For THIS work, though, this somewhat slapdash mystery chock full of alligator cults, wild religious motivations, typos and misspellings, I was asea. I think I played it like three times that night, never fully able to get my head around what was going on. Thank goodness it was a short work, and replaying next day was an option. Dear readers, even stone cold sober, in the harsh light of day, the experience was more same than different.

This presents as an ‘investigate to clear your uncle’s name’ work, but everything about it is just a little feverish. The protag periodically drops bon mots like having ‘despicable thoughts’ about the victim’s bed. Chapter breaks intrude randomly into the narrative - you are told chapter 2 ended without even knowing chapters were a thing. Then after Chapter 3, the divisions kind of disappear? The Uncle’s name flickers between Fleur and Fuller without explanation, lending the impression the narrative just FORGOT. A key opens multiple safes in different houses. Epilogues suggest one character only recently met and released from an asylum MOVING IN WITH THE PROTAG. She clearly had not seen him brush his teeth. As much as I was struggling to keep my hands around the work, SO WAS THE WORK ITSELF.

None of the characters, neither the protagonist, sheriff, various interviewees behave as actual humans. Characters you only meet in background reading don’t behave as actual humans either. And the crocodile-based lore, hoo boy. There is a world where all these disparate parts build weird on weird on weird into a dream-logic phantasm of mesmeric power. You would think inebriation would facilitate that transformation. The fact that it did NOT suggests the effect was not as deliberate, certainly not as controlled, as I would hope. I like bonkers things. This was just too disorganized to gel even around the nebulous logic of its own crazy. We’re talking about a work with CROCODILE JESUS just not closing the deal - to a drunk guy! The bar could not be lower!

The work had plenty of sparks of WTF? for sure, but that, sadly, is not my metric. Despite a pretty clear, well-worn path between WTF? and Joy, this work did not navigate that for me. Drunk or sober there was not enough charge to get beyond Mechanical.

Played: 10/2/24
Playtime: 30-45m inebriated, 30m sober next day, solved, normal end
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Intrusively nonsensical
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete. Will not play with Drunk Reviewer again, either.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Another in a great line of wordplay larks from ANDREW that I might both love AND RUE. Will I prove a BEARD OWNING wizened sage, or a BEER DOWNING rummy of regret? Shall my intellect soar with eagles among their ACORN AERIE, or will these puzzles give me A COR’NARY? Oh, I could go on, don’t dare me.

Another really fun outing in a series that is a beacon of comfort in the IFCOMP landscape (not unlike DiBianca’s ouvre’, at least prior to my epic fail this year). Comfort food kind of feels like a back handed compliment, doesn’t it? “I love it because it is so FAMILIAR…” These may not be the words an artist wants to hear, but y’know what? I love meatloaf, and will eat it wherever and whenever it is on offer. Same for peach cobbler. Their flavors are consistently rewarding, and each encounter adds to the warm encounters before it, transforming it to a memory-infused repast of happy. Sure, your molecular cooking experiments may dazzle in novelty but they simply cannot carry the emotional resonances that enrich say Christmas breakfast casserole. Thanks for trying, vapor steak, but no.

It takes a moment to adjust to this particular brand of wordplay, but as usual once up to speed the giddy head scratching begins! The intro text marks this as ‘less difficult’ than others in the series and that is probably so, just on the nature of the wordplay involved. I needed the walkthrough far less here, actually mostly when specific locations or directions were required, not so much for the wordplay itself. There were some unfinished aspects to it. I believe I got a message saying ‘put better details here’ or somesuch, and toughest, the penultimate location had no direction pointers to the final location, it was not clear I was not in a dead end! Only the walkthrough told me a direction to try. While notable, and perhaps defeating without hint or walkthrough, presence of hints allowed me to route around blockage to fully appreciate the work on hand. Take heed other works!

I must say, I particularly enjoyed the profanity optional room. I found those puzzles so obvious as to really question my standing in polite society, but also kind of charming in how awkward they seemed against this author’s much squeakier writing persona. Andrew may be a seasoned sailor on the swearing seas, but his writing does not give that impression. It was kind of endearing, honestly. Usually, I top these joints out at Sparks, but in deference to the power of comfort food am upgrading it this year to Engaging, with Notable unfinished artifacts.

In the end, despite warnings they might IMPART ACHE, I proclaimed, “I’M PARTAKE!” I followed the FANCIFUL CRUMBS, arming myself with logical FANCY FULCRUMS against these puzzles. I avoided mental FUNKY STROKES and had a solid session of
_ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I told you not to test me. I have no shame.

Played: 10/2/24
Playtime: 1.75hr, 54/54
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Notable missing navigation cues!
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Man, is hyperspace a great metaphor for my experience with this game, especially THIS game’s version of hyperspace. Isolated enclosure murder mysteries are well suited to a sci-fi implementation - what could be more forbidding, more confining than the depths of space? Add a super well-conceived vision of hyperspace as a psychologically corrosive OTHER space just adds fuel to an already glowing fire as it were, and gives the game a ticking clock to solve against: stay too long and the humans might go insane!

Not only is this really cool conceit very effectively established, I cannot describe the charge I got seeing that it was an ACTUAL REALTIME TIMER! Holy crap, I better start clicking! Good thing I am an AI computer that thinks in nanotime! In the moment, I didn’t even have cause to question, “Wait, WHY is that timer so definitive? Surely sci-fi forensics would solve things, once we land?” If nothing else, as the ship’s AI, I wanted to solve it, not leave it to some meatbag with a tricorder.

From there, gameplay segues into a series of suspect interviews, where, as these things often do, it seems EVERYONE has a reason to kill the victim! (Why are we ALWAYS traveling on (Spoiler - click to show)the Orient Express in these things??? Can’t we just once take the 7:21 train up three stops?) The mystery solving gameplay is kind of an underutilized one, at least as far as my mystery IF experience goes. You are looking to match stories to physical evidence to buttress or refute testimony, and thereby establish who might be lying. Between the ever ticking clock and the breadth of suspects there is a LOT to do, and the speed with which it gets done is equal parts frenetic and deliberate. I was constantly metering my impulse to speed up, to ensure I didn’t miss relevant details. I was fighting the mentally clouding effects of the timer as things speeded on, just like the hyperspace effects on my meaty passengers! That was pretty cool. The notebook portion of the game was just about perfect - summarizing interviews and evidence, and allowing me, robot detective, to decide whether this made them more or less likely to be the criminal.

Eventually, I had secured enough interviews and evidence to make an accusation, and I was right! Hooray computer detective, we did it! This was the point where the game dropped out of hyperspace. Now with clearer eyes, I noticed the game professed 11 endings. 11 endings, surely that doesn’t mean…?

So I played a second time. This time, notwithstanding the timer’s relentless ticking, I was no longer under the spell. I could skim dialogue I had seen before, was much more efficient at physical evidence gathering, and quickly had my post-hyperspace suspicions verified. I also had deliberately turned my suspicions a different direction. SERIOUS spoilers from here. Turns out, (Spoiler - click to show)this is kind of mystery where no matter WHO you accuse, you are right. I just don’t know about that. It is kind of a betrayal, no? What seemed a tense web of testimony and evidence didn’t really need untangling, EVERY thread was (Spoiler - click to show)the ‘right’ one. Even exculpatory evidence could be spun to damning with seemingly no drag on the proceedings. This wholly transformed the experience from a kind of clever mystery-solving jam to a facts-don’t-matter, (Spoiler - click to show)collect-all-the-endings jam. Not only is that NOT what I look for in mysteries, it runs counter to all the frisson that first runthrough had and kind of undermines the glow of that run! For me anyway, collect-the-endings is inadequate compensation for that loss. On one level, I get it. Mysteries always have the ‘problem’ of post-solution replay value. Removing the tension of ‘will I solve it in time?’ is a pretty big impact on the gameplay experience though. For me, too big to justify.

As a rating, where does this leave me? My first playthrough was a white knuckle run of pure, uncut Enagement, there is no denying that. Subsequent playthroughs exposed the illusion in a way that retroactively diminished even the first run. It dropped me out of the hallucinogenic bottle of hyperspace to the cold, clarity of real space. That difference feels like a penalty point.

Played: 10/1/24
Playtime: 1hr, two endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless, penalty point for heel turn replay mechanism
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

In the past, erotic games have left me cold. I had concluded that one element of this was the broad nature of human sexuality, whose specifics are famously personal across a spectrum that runs from ‘Oh God, safewordSafewordSAFEWORD’ to ‘I’ll be in my bunk.’ I had speculated that these variations were SO broad, an author had no hope of appealing to an audience pool they knew nothing about, and was forever going to self-select an audience of like-minded preoccupations. Where games succeeded, according to my prior analysis, is when they tied into more universal elements like humor, and captured the playfulness of healthy sexuality. That was a more all-encompassing hook to hang a work on.

Here’s something I didn’t get until this work. The OTHER common thread one might tug is the ramp from arousal to joyous sexual delight. Regardless the combination of equipment and partners that gets you there, that FEELING is near universal. At least for those to whom it is an option at all.

If you had told me a work that leaned on sexual identity and fetishes that held no sway over me would so resoundingly accomplish its erotic intent, I would not have believed you. The keys, as they so often are, are specificity and DYNAMITE writing, augmented here by limited but effective use of interactivity. I was tempted to rank these aspects in order of contribution to the success of the work, but quickly realized all three are necessary to the work’s impact, so we’ll tackle them in an arbitrary order.

Specificity: the protagonist’s character is deeply conflicted about their identity and sexuality. The details here are astoundingly fine grained, and expressed so openly that not only are the facts of them relatable, the protagonist’s mindset is transmitted clearly every step of the way. The protagonist’s journey is not my journey, but the details are so bright and clear their journey is an open book to me and I can crisply translate my personal experiences to theirs. Not just the facts of their sexual makeup: their insecurities, troubled friendships, deep loneliness… all these are similarly painted with sharply defined anecdotes and events, and an internal monologue that rings true. I should emphasize that. The graphically cued internal monologue is used sparingly enough, but when it shows up it perfectly conveys the protagonist’s entire psyche in the moment. It is never a great thing to attribute auto-biography to an author you know nothing about, but I mean it as a compliment when I say the external and internal details are almost too REAL to be fiction.

Interactivity: this is not a deeply interactive work, far more F than I. Where it is used, it is used precisely and effectively to align the player/reader with the protagonist. You are given just enough control over responses to fine tune protagonist reactions in a way that cements whatever empathy gaps specificity could not close. The two in combination, specificity and interactivity, conspire most successfully to bridge any gap in experience or psyche to firmly bond the player. It is admirable and kind of wondrous how powerfully this is accomplished, seemingly without effort and with such infrequent use. It is so powerfully realized that even when the protagonist is making choices that are dangerous and rash, I was never at sea over ‘why, protag, why why?’ I UNDERSTOOD and was along for the ride, however ill-conceived.

Writing: while I have divorced this as somehow a third facet, it is certainly true that both the specificity and interactivity rest on a bedrock of confident, clear, impactful writing. It is simultaneously uniquely voiced, compellingly phrased, and deeply insightful. I captured SO many snippets, it was a minor crisis to decide which ones to showcase. Here is where I landed at publication time:

“not woman enough to be an object, not man enough to be a threat”
“you walked into a lamppost and apologized to it”
“if I were to rip out my spine and use it against my own eyeballs”

Concise, evocative, conveying so much more than their raw wordcount might suggest. This work’s prose stands among the most effective I’ve experienced in ALL mediums, not just IF. I have been characterizing it as erotica because 1) it is prominent among its early preoccupations and 2) it amazed me with its accomplishments in that arena. But this is not a purely titillating work, it is a character study where sexuality is a primary concern, including in ways that are troubling, inconvenient and tragic. The titillation is only one part of it. That the writing can so easily accomplish eroticism AND personal drama is downright glorious.

If it’s not clear, the writing alone presented a Transcendent experience for the first hour and a half. It’s almost unfair that the graphical presentation is ALSO so accomplished. Fuzzy background images whose focus sharpens or flares with color that reinforce the protagonist’s mindset every step of the way… I could write an entire review just highlighting how tremendously engineered this was. The graphical flourishes demarking various online forums - simultaneously mood setting and deeply concrete and recognizable. I am tempted to claim, as I sometimes do, that the graphic work was a full partner. Here, graphical work that could be the most notable achievement in another work is still, appropriately, subordinate to the prose and story being told. The entire package is an empathy machine that achieves what I had considered impossible in erotica, but ALSO telling a deeply affecting personal story.

Ok, you see what I did there. I dropped that ‘hour and a half’ on you almost by the way, in the full knowledge that you would identify it as the Chekov’s Caveat it is. The narrative makes a choice at the hour and a half mark. Until that time, there had been a low key (and very affecting!) narrative thread of the limits of online support systems, where personal preoccupations can reinforce themselves until they curdle into self-righteous toxicity and undermine whatever safeness the space tried to establish. In the first hour and a half, this had been sprinkled in like seasoning, highlighting the protagonist’s alienation. Narratively, at the hour and a half mark, the protagonist enters a deeply affecting medical crisis (at least in part brought on by tragic sexual frenzy). While they wait for maddeningly delayed succor, they peruse social media, and the toxicity of the forums jumps to the fore.

To the fore of the narrative. Looming between reader and work like a clumsy behemoth at the opera. Eclipsing the protagonist we had so deliberately and masterfully been aligned to who was HAVING A MEDICAL CRISIS. Instead we spend page after page after page of escalating toxicity whose escalation was well established, uninteresting and tiresome. Thematically it was of course underlining the idea that these forums’ ability to provide safe space was always at the mercy of its most troubled members, and that even real crises are insufficient to derail that. More, that insular echo chambers of parasocial connection are ultimately INCAPABLE of being relied on when truly needed. Thing is, that theme was ALREADY clear, and here it just goes on and on and on, building in heat but paradoxically lessening in dramatic impact. It is a baffling choice to me. I NEEDED to be with the protagonist here, yet I was reading and reading and reading self-righteous navel-gazers whose lack of empathy was blindingly clear. Then, reading it some more. And more. Until my timer ran out.

What do I do with that, work?? Part of me assumes there was a point to all that that would become clear… eventually. Certainly the narrative was self-assured enough prior to that. But not just the fact of the online discourse, the sheer LENGTH of what the work asked me to consume, WHILE THE PROTAGONIST I WAS INVESTED IN SUFFERED, was… repellant. It pushed me back from the work that had so effectively conquered emotional, sexual, and psychic gaps. It made me angry at it for being SO GOOD then deliberately slapping my face. If that was in fact the point of the sequence, let me just say I GOT IT. The sledgehammer was not required. I will generously say the last half hour was mechanical. There is a case to be made for Bouncy, though that assessment might be my own spitefulness at the sense of betrayal.

The author has subsequently clarified that the point of the piece was less full on narrative and more commiseration for an apparently and sadly common enough experience. Fair enough. Speaking as one to whom it was NOT commiserative, I wish the work had not been SO effective as a narrative, letting me infer promises that were never actually there. Notwithstanding its immersively inclusive prose, I was never actually invited to this party. Imagine my embarrassment! (To be fair though, you enter it in IFCOMP, you're going to get party crashers.)

It leaves me in a weird place, review wise. Prior to that social media hell, the work was full on Transcendent. MAYBE that narrative choice will later be somehow redeemed to those outside its circle. I am at a loss to see how, but prior to this work I was at a loss to see how I could respond to erotica so far removed from my own proclivities. The work has earned some cred here. But when the timer expires and its subtle, nuanced flavors are so completely overrun by a baffling, stinging one-note bitterness… how do I not report that experience?

Played: 10/1/24
Playtime: 2hr, act iii Lipstick, in social media hell
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent ->Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: I kind of have to, to see if that choice redeems itself, but I am suddenly full of dread that it might not

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Earlier this COMP I bemoaned, multiple times, the lack of a convincing Twinesformer link-select/parser hybrid paradigm that didn’t make drudgery of its UI. Let me destroy suspense by saying Miss Gosling might have solved the case! Between the game’s use of inline directional and object links, and a sly ‘contextual command box’ which both segregates from the transcript proper, AND tries to anticipate player moves enough to provide a hopefully-relevant subset of command space, things felt smoother here than any alternative I can think of. Crucially, the command box responds to player input, not game state, which is a very subtle, but essential design choice. It would be too easy to fall into a game state trap that inadvertently spoiled or hinted solution space just by virtue of options presented. I found this UI gratifyingly neutral and responsive.

Other design choices were equally powerful. It includes both an in-game map and progressive hint file. I love map inclusion whenever the protagonist is in a familiar setting, bypassing the narratively unrewarding ‘exploration of notionally known environs’ portion of the program. The hint system was also precisely engineered. Progressive invisiclues are the perfect paradigm for an intellectually limited player like me. When I needed to consult them, they provided just the right level of imprecise goosing to get me going again.

More on the graphic design: from the font/graphic layout, to the use of colors to sidebar gameplay outside the story (like score, task list, etc) - keeping those things graphically distinct isolated them from the narrative, mostly, to let the story play unhindered. The score/progress bar was both understated, but prominent enough to instill confidence in the player experience. There were some mild intrusions, I felt, when the game judged I was spinning too long and threw in not-so-subtle hints pointing me to the path. I like the impulse of that idea, helping players get their footing, but found the implementation erred on the intrusive side. Even a menu choice to call it up, or tune the internal counters might have eased that a bit. Or just leave it to invisiclues.

Really though, that very tepid criticism is the only reservation I have with this work. The central conceit - an Agatha Christie-esque detective ghost solving her own murder with the help of a dog who is the only being that can still see her - just awesome, no notes. The puzzle design is flat out fantastic - it explicitly plumbs the capabilities and limitations of a canine protagonist (guided by human ghost) in strikingly varied ways. If you carry some pop culture knowledge of dog trivia, rest assured the game has a puzzle that maps to it. A very satisfying, very clever implementation of it. It really is the centerpiece of the work, foregrounding canine capabilites in every puzzle. The protagonist and all the NPCs, y’know, the HUMANS in the work, draw on detective fiction tropes in a pleasant, if not revolutionary way. I wouldn’t say any of them are all-timers, but they are all very functional in their service of the plot, and at least gifted with personality shorthand that makes them more than scenery. The ghosty protagonist is further delightfully of-her-time, with turn of the century cultural and technical observations that build a seamless environment to dog around in. Even the background/lore dump artifacts were rendered with flair and amusing protagonist commentary.

[Admire the restraint I have so far employed, not once turning this review into a dog v cat thing. That was the previous draft.]

Yeah, this was an engaging romp with really excellent and thoughtful gameplay. I was outright angry that I couldn’t finish it by judging time. Sometimes, in games with hints and walkthroughs, I will make the call at the 1:45 mark to just run the walkthrough to end, in interests of giving a thorough assessment to the game. Here, I did not even consider it. The story was laid out well enough, the puzzles designed strongly enough, the UI engineered precise enough, I felt like not ONLY did I have the measure of the game, I WANTED to see it through, COMP judging be damned! Well done game, you have turned me on my COMP bosses!

Played: 10/1/24
Playtime: 2hr, score 13/18, unfinished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Seamless
Would Play Again?: Yeah, gonna finish

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a quasi-Fairy Tale-esque story about rediscovering the protagonist’s identity, helpfully identified as ‘You.’ It starts with a sharp edged encroaching alternate reality erasing YOUr identity, but quickly settles into a peppier, almost welcoming tale of talking animals, fanciful mushroom-based transformations and… not sure what else.

Let’s start with the graphic design of the thing. I am always pumped when authors leverage even simple color/font/graphic tricks in service of their narrative. Here it was mostly successful, though some font/background choices clashed in a way that made it hard to read. I didn’t mind that SO much, as it certainly conveyed a sense of protagonist being at odds with the environment, which was very much my player experience as well. It ALSO consistently and intriguingly foregrounded the changing nature of YOU. It was a nice, subtle way of keeping the central mystery and tension in play. On nearly every screen, some graphic trick was reminding you of the core challenge of the piece - resolving the mystery of yourself. Ok, the more I think about it, the more it is clearly NOT subtle, it is brightly spot-lit on every page. This need not be a criticism.

Elsewhere I have observed that two common puzzle-based choice-select stumbles are devolving into obvious success paths or obtuse lawn mowering. This may be the first time I experienced both in a single work. An early puzzle is to secure four items for a whimsical in-matrimony-res couple. Follows a pretty clearly signposted/almost railroaded series of mushroom-object juggling. The first three fell without much problem, or, frankly, challenge. The work was super clear on what needed to happen to advance.

Then the fourth item stopped me in my tracks. There was definitely a remaining mushroom area that felt necessary to advance, but there was no clue how. FTR, I speak of the ‘something new’ item. The world was tight enough, and objects sparse enough, that I devolved to lawn mowering every combination I could think of. Twice. And was foiled at every turn. Clearly, I was missing something, as it is inconceivable that a bug this prominent would make release. Just in case I fell into a weird unwinnable state bug though, I restarted and tried to vary my formula. I ended up in the same “I feel like I have tried everything, yet am stuck back in a loop” state.

Do I put this on the game? I honestly don’t know. It FEELS like, as seems so often true, it is my problem as a player overloooking the obvious. Given the obviousness of the previous puzzles, it feels particularly damning of my intellect. The one charge I COULD level at the game is that this puzzle’s cluing paradigm shifted quite dramatically relative its predecessors. If I’m not just a dummy of epic proportions. For sure it was a breaking point for me. Prior to this state, I enjoyed the graphic flourishes, but the story felt too thin (it was probably just starting!) and puzzle play too mechanical to compensate. Hitting a roadblock at this early state, with no guiding hints available, guaranteed this would be the only impression I could develop.

Had I progressed deeper before this point, the work might have accumulated enough good will to jockey up higher in my mindshare. Certainly the portent attached to YOU felt like it would build to some payoff. But to hit this so early - twice in just over half an hour – left me in the unenviable position of halting my play with tons of clock left. And simply not being motivated enough to break my review-bubble to search out unblocking solutions.

Yeah, I’m not really satisfied with this either.

Played: 9/29/24
Playtime: 35m, 2 loops, seemingly stuck both times on ‘something new’
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/intrusive puzzle design? or player shortcomings?
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

This author has a strong brand, in my all of 3 years’ experience. Super zippy one-character input parsers that are very much on the puzzle/game side of the spectrum (over, say, narrative). Lots of clever lateral thinking bits. Here, you are an abductee going through a simple IQ test (which teaches you the dialect of this parser), then pressed into service to assist your abductors as mechanical misfortunes escalate.

The deductive problems are set against a backdrop of alien touch-based controls and only kind-of clear communication. For a good while, it was just about perfect. The alienness of your surroundings require trial and error to deduce what each new room or control is on about, then MORE to figure out how to leverage them to incrementally engage your hosts and deal with the ship problems. It is a super addictive mix of experimentation, deduction, then logical leaps. The zippy interface is the key here. Experimentation is so zippy, and feedback so concise and clear, you are constantly making progress in one way or another. At least to a point.

One room, one cluster of weird controls after another, just trying things gives reams of feedback to spin off of. The puzzles to solve are varied and interesting. Until… they stop being so. At about the one hour twenty minute mark, my mental machine stopped humming. I had seemingly (only seemingly. Clearly I was missing something) exhausted the controls - the cues clearly telling me manipulation was fruitless or outright removing obsolete controls. Certainly, the game was aggressive about depicting things that don’t feel controlly as controls, so I can’t rule out missing things, though exhaustive trial and error revealed nothing.

This is the point where I rued the absence of a hint system. Yes, the author generously offered to answer email hint requests - a model that unfortunately is not very helpful against my COMP navigation mode. For the first hour-twenty I was running on nitrous - my objective clear, the controls aligned against me opaque, but with enough handholds for me to grapple effectively. Then, when I discovered the the (Spoiler - click to show)cryo pods, suddenly my roadmap vanished. There are a few unused controls in the mix, one control that helpfully lists all the things that still need fixing, but given the work is all-in on its alienness (and given the wacky solutions to previous problems!) it is far from clear what road to even try.

At the one hour twenty mark, my experience unceremoniously shifted from one of two-fisted science to one of abject flailing. For forty minutes I zipped around touching/examining/aura-ing everything I could. And getting NO actionable feedback. It felt, suddenly, like a completely different game. Again, I fully acknowledge this is my problem. It was just weird to me, to be SO engaged and effective for so long, to encounter a puzzle that just… hid in the sand? No ideas, no clues I could discern, no signposts I could decode, nothing. It ended up being the parser equivalent of lawn mowering trying to exhaustively touch and observe the vast permutation of everything listed. And coming up empty.

This then, is the value of a robust hint system. A simple nudge in the right direction might be enough to have turned this brick wall into a small speedbump, and restored that fun, zippy experience that launched the game. Short that, I watched an engaging time devolve into angry frustration, then the most painful of IFCOMP gaming experiences: resigned running out of the clock. I cannot deny the sparks of that first hour, but as these things go, the last forty minutes dominate my memory of gameplay. This is a game that requires either: 1) you are smarter than me (a low bar to be sure); 2) a leisurely play model that allows for author engagement; or 3) a robust hint system. I can’t do anything about 1. 3 would have readily closed the deal for me. I don’t know that 2 will happen outside COMP judging.

Played: 9/28/24
Playtime: 2hr, “The spacesquare is currently sick. One door is wrong. The finder is lost. The propeller is dead. The changing room has a problem. The feeder is dormant.”
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: With an added robust hint system? who am I kidding, probably

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

For many years, my wife worked in civic Storm Water infrastructure. A lot of it is vital but unrewarding civic communication, badgering businesses for compliance when it is easier to pay fines, dealing with politicians interested in uneven enforcement and so on. Her favorite part of the job, and by extension mine, was going after Pumper Dumpers. These usually fly-by-nite Commons Parasites charge companies to pump hazardous waste under promise of proper disposal, effectively immunizing companies from liability, then just dump the waste into sewers and storm drains, uncaring of the potentially catastrophic effect to infrastructure and environment. Seriously, screw those guys.

In my favorite tale, neighbors called in a tip, and (before the days of hyper-miniaturizations) the city fab’d a fake utility box and filmed the miscreants doing their dirty deed. It was Law and Order: H2O!

This background is necessary to understand the dread this work evoked in me BEYOND its horror-tinged narrative tensions. The game MADE ME a Pumper Dumper, the lowest of the low! I’m not gonna lie, just encountering this setup in IF was a Spark all its own. It is so niche, so off in the weeds of modern life, it was a real ‘worlds collide’ moment for me.

In the end, I think I am forced to admit it was the biggest spark of the whole thing. Gameplay is a bit clumsy. For one, items are strewn about the truck that are only accessible from one location, one SIDE of the truck. This effectively creates 4 truck locations, and the text does not successfully establish this convention. Items are described in one location that are link-inaccessible, making it unclear where it would be in reach. The mechanics of its puzzle are pretty straight forward, it falls into the class of work ‘I know what I want to do, but the game is pretty opaque on how I can.’ Giving the hose two sides for example is a simplifying implementation choice that comes off clumsy to the player. So it is all about exploring, dying, restarting, and figuring out which clicks get you to the solution you have grok’d almost immediately. Works that better balance their technical challenge and cluing can elicit sparks with this gameplay, but works that are too opaque and under-described don’t. For me, this work tilted to the latter.

There is added tension in a lurking monstrous presence that threatens from multiple angles, is initially (Spoiler - click to show)repulsed by light but quickly outgrows that. Your work then is complicated by needing to avoid this threat, and further complicated by fussy machinery that needs constant goosing. The nature of the threat is nicely understated, and sets up an eventual mild charge of ‘oh, I see what that is!’ But the gameplay again makes navigating this threat more difficult than not through opacity. I think I would have been more motivated had success NOT been defined as (Spoiler - click to show)emptying your toxic tank into a lake. As it was, I kinda cheered for the monster in every pass? To the point, once I identified all the moving pieces needed to solve the puzzle, I declined a final run implementing them to get the ‘win.’ It was enough I could see how to do it, without actually seeing the Dumper (me!) escape. Screw those guys, monster fodder is what they deserve. (sidebar: there was an achievement that telegraphed an ending I would wholly endorse, though again, the mechanics of navigating the puzzle were daunting enough to discourage achieving it.)

So yeah, Sparks for sure, but very idiosyncratic sparks, very aligned to my personal life experiences. The more generally-relatable aspects of gameplay were just confounding enough to fall short.

Played: 9/27/24
Playtime: 1hr, died 5 times, got the gist
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notably clumsy navigation and manipulation
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I love the genesis of this work unreservedly. An anthology of sorts, multiple authors coming together to build a dream-logic museum that needs escaping. The conceit is just dynamite, and by virtue of its broad author pool allows for many different visions of weird art and distorted history. Its many voices are every bit as integral as individual narrative beats in establishing an off-putting environment that constantly surprises and keeps the player off balance.

It also makes for a variety of self-contained room puzzles, from moon logic leaps to more traditional find-carry-use. From the jump, with its inhumanly cheerful and contradictory usher, the mission is clear. Explore and escape a dream-logic environs, more soaking in it than ‘solving’ it. It was always going to hinge on how compelling this weird subconscious space could become.

There is a reason David Lynch is such a singular creator. He seems, perhaps naturally perhaps supernaturally, attuned to a collective well of subconscious imagery that he leverages to tell tales that defy and-then construction, but nevertheless FEEL right every step of the way. In lesser hands, his works would be overwhelmed by incoherence and befuddling choices. (Some charge that Lynch himself does not always escape this.)

Now imagine attempting a Lynchian anthology. The defining challenge would be, who do you pair with him? What cast of creatives can match his singular connection to our ID, yet ALSO have a uniquely compelling voice of their own? You can be forgiven stalling on the problem of who could even play in that field. And what would that finished work look like, how would it hold together?

My impression of MG was that as much as its patchwork instability was served by its multiple authors, inevitably it was going to be uneven: some areas were going to be more effective than others. I don’t think I am interested in doing a full vignette comparison, it’s not clear how much of the perceived differences I could resolve beyond my own head to anything of general interest. I will highlight two I really responded to though: there was a Tiny Art room that presented some inventive miniature imagery and the surreality of the Hungry Room really landed like gangbusters for me. Both of those had a surge, not only of strangeness that was present throughout my explorations, but of danger that were not as present elsewhere. Those were bright hot sparks, no doubt. They recognized, as Lynch often does, that the strange is often implicitly THREATENING. Either because it is untethered from our fleshy concerns and constraints, or because of its repudiation of a reality that has gotten too comfortable. Strangeness, without threat, just has a little less charge for me.

In the end rooms without that charge landed less resoundingly. Couple that with a work that, by design, stitches together visions of reality that are gleefully at odds with each other, and the player is left off balance, renegotiating the game with every new room. The downside to this approach is that the game never establishes a rhythm of its own, it is very much of its disconnected parts. This constant start-and-stop of rules reset pushed back against my engagement - any time I started to get a grip on a room, a gameplay style, it was time to start over with a new one. I just didn’t get into a flow.

I cannot stress enough that this is not a WEAKNESS of the game - this is its core design, the major effect it is aiming for! With that in mind, I openly admire the folks charged with stitching it all together, both in mechanics of coding, in integration of sound design, and delivering a complete package. The subject matter may jar in its divergent visions, but the player’s experience is as smooth as possible, ensuring the creative dissonance is no more or less than its intended. It is a bold, successful experiment, greater than its Sparky parts, but also not escaping its inherent asymmetry and conflicts that keep true engagement from ripening.

Played: 9/27/24
Playtime: 2hr, Part4/4 Hungry Room
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: I honestly don’t know - its contradictions have left me adrift!

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Clive Barker was a formative author in my horror-entertainment journey. I encountered his books first, where somehow his reputation developed schoolyard buzz back when the internet wasn’t the primary medium for such things. I consumed a lot of his fiction and his talent was compelling as hell for young me. His wildly offputting imagination, narratives that piled human venality on strangeness in compellingly intricate ways, it was a heady mix executed with dark confidence. I’m not sure where I am on the zeitgeist here, but I personally find the movies based on his works imminently rewatchable and always at least partially successful. Stephen King wishes he had that filmography!

One of my favorites, though probably the most in need of forgiveness, was Nightbreed. It has a long history of studio meddling, mercurial story telling, and has had multiple, multiple re-edit versions over the years. Its constant revisions tell a fascinating meta-tale of creative preoccupation. As befuddling or confounding as its multiple versions are, there is a magnetic core concept that demands revisiting, augmented by Barker’s singular creature creations.

It’s about an underground city of monsters, beset by a persecuting world of humans and internal politics.

I’m not sure when my neurons decided the Saltcast were Midians, but once they did, the work had my unqualified fealty. Here, you are a desperate peasant woman, taking on an impossible task for the King to either secure a life-changing monetary reward or die trying. For your family. By going to Midian.

Like Barker’s work, it is as much metaphor as physical adventure… actually it may be MORE metaphor here. As deep and interesting as the lore and mechanics of the monsters were, I felt like the physical adventure was shortchanged by two choices. 1) it is never clear what the protagonist brings to the proceedings besides desperation and opportunities for empathy; and 2) the narrative attaches her (you) to a team that brings a LOT to the table. So much, it is unclear why they need the protagonist at all. Granted I’m only two hours in, that revelation could still be ahead of me. The first is given an interesting spin, in that (Spoiler - click to show)empathy is not always rewarded, sometimes it is punished! That is a Barker-worthy twist that on the one hand was VERY welcome over its somewhat trite alternative, but that also had the effect of undermining the protagonist’s only real contribution! Too, the blocking of the adventures didn’t really gel, cinematically. The protagonist’s companions are a mix of super-distinctive and… hind-leg animals. More of the former please! In particular, the (Spoiler - click to show)ghost with the giant metal anchor-hand was a high point. But, when the narrative needs them to hide or skulk about, the overriding impression is “wait, how would that work, exactly?” Couple that with your companions’ capable adventuring skills and suddently their occasional deference to your IF decision making feels… unconvincing.

The adventure part didn’t quite land for me, but the setting sure did. Yes, some of the creatures felt like they were phoned in, but so many more did NOT. For every ‘this one is a raccoon’ you get ‘this one was a riot of interconnected limbs that roiled and surged across the floor, accomplishing a jerky motion that more resembled tides than strides.’ (Not from game, just a flavor) Room designs were fun and idiosyncratic. The writing was occasionally inspired, bringing in fanciful images that surprised with the protagonist’s unique viewpoint. A favorite ACTUAL quote:

“Your gaze is met with an iridescent constellation shining in the light of your lantern, coruscating like the hands and throat of a well-decorated noblewoman.”

There is real meat in the concept here, as the never ending Nightbreed versions can attest. There is real flair employed in this telling. Creature conceptions are as often inspired as shortchanged. These are all Sparks in the work. The mechanics of its plot did not reach the same level for me, so that when the timer ran out, I never got BEYOND sparks.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 2hr, nearly exiting mirror maze
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
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 IFCOMP24 Review

Ah, the life of a fantasy reporter. It’s not all vapid princely press conferences, exposing necromancer corruption, and spotlighting entrenched knightly race-based slaying. Sometimes you get some softball red-carpet celebrity events to just enjoy overengineered hors d’oeuvres and showily old wine. Why not? You’ve earned it hammering out scrolls into the wee hours to meet Editor Rumplestiltskin’s insane deadlines. It’s almost not fair when events go south and it’s up to you to get to the bottom of things.

Like most journalism, it’s one parser based puzzle after another, as you assemble the event’s back story as well as enough armor to challenge the invading dragon. Seriously, why do we even HAVE a Round Table if they can’t be bothered to step up here? What, too busy stopping and frisking orcs to deal with crown excesses? And after all the catapults we’ve integrated into their departments, on our tithe dollars.

The investigation ends up being a very smooth, very low key affair. Its aims are established early and clearly. Most puzzles are signposted clearly enough, with, uh, singposts? A lot of signage and found paper scraps usher you through one armor-dispensing puzzle to the next. Points for clarity, and very much appreciate the anti-cruelty of its challenges. That overt signposting does have a distancing effect on engagement, though. When in-game instructions are aimed so clearly at the player, without camouflaging it (much) in world building or lore, the urgency of the world itself diminishes a bit. This is not necessarily an inherent problem, plenty of games showcase puzzle solving over storytelling. For me, the puzzle design was just a little too light to shoulder that burden, here (though I will shout out to the keypad/maze puzzle, that one required a few moments’ noodling).

The storytelling itself was similarly somewhat shorthanded. It uses the well-worn trope ‘finding important scraps of paper’ to pass on backstory. This is always a compromise in a game - kind of a narrative monologue/infodump. It’s a classic, no doubt about it, but the more successful games either find ways to vary the formula a bit, justify the artifacts narratively, or just plain make them fun to read. Here, they were more functional than anything else, in service of a story with two twists. Neither of them were dramatic crescendos, but amusing enough and of an emotional scale consistent with the rest of the game.

It all added up to a work that was pleasant to play and consume, whose heart was in the right place the whole way, that made the player feel very welcome, but that never really sparked for me. I liked the setup idea, Fantasy Front Page, but in the end the Sword WAS mightier than my quill and that kind of deflated too. If I was gonna slay it anyway why did I need to be a journalist? It seems tailor-made for Knight-aganda. As a work, it never really exceeded the sum of its parts, pleasant as those parts were. Look, you work the castle beat as long as this reporter, you get a bit jaded. You’ve seen too much venality and corruption, the light slice-of-life stuff feels puffy. Maybe as a fresh-faced cub reporter this would’ve landed harder.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 45m, win, score 18/18
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

If there is a more effective hook in IF than “what the HELL is going on here?” I am hard pressed to come up with it on the spot. The pre-cursor text to Brew makes a WTF? promise that the work well and fully keeps here. You start, exploring a shared apartment uncovering a series of unsettling artifacts that soon blossom into full blown bonkers world building and lore. The ‘bonkers’ in that last sentence applies to BOTH predicates.

It is fairly tight in geography, an immediate neighborhood with a lot going on never mind the snowstorm allegedly happening around you. When focusing on discovering lore, the game sparks like mad. This is due to the fever-dream psychedelia of the world building that includes (Spoiler - click to show)time loops, murder cults, immortality and maybe-metaphorical but also definitely-not-metaphorical (Spoiler - click to show)cannabalism. All of it drip-fed through slow paced discovery, whose relaxed pace is an amusing contrast to the shocking lore it reveals.

Everytime you think it will explode into full on fiery engagement though, implementation gaps trip up just enough to drag things down. A notable number of missing synonyms (singular items are almost never present when plurals are). Incomplete directional cues. A staggering amount of ‘No response’ dialogue options cloud gameplay when related topics are a MUST to progress, yet the ‘no response’ cues that the NPC will not know anything. The most standout gap though, is its destructive use of default messages.

When creating a parser game, modern systems come with default responses to common commands as a convenience. The breadth of human communication makes this convenience nearly indispensable. To have to come up with those on your own is daunting and unrewarding to the potential author. It can also be CRUCIAL to the success of your work. There is a secret about the protagonist that gets explored early in the game. The standard response to >x me actively undermines this revelation in a way that clouds and blunts its impact for way too long. The same problem occurs with unimplemented dialogue options as observed above.

The cumulative weight of these gaps ultimate prevented the work from being truly engaging, though the puzzle design might also have done that, eventually. You are on a deceptively simple mission, and there is some amusement to be derived from the ludicrously escalating complications that ensue. However, once it escalates to (Spoiler - click to show)actual murder we have developed a tone problem that the bananas lore undermines as much as justifies. The problem is that the lore is SO bananas, it vacillates wildly between comedic and serious. We never really stabilize into a single tone. This is not inherently bad in and of itself, but then when we are asked to do dire things we have no frame of reference to decide ‘is this funny or not?’ Our protag’s response is so cold and removed, in the context of their secrets we similarly are adrift in ambiguity of interpretation. A stronger anchor in one direction or another would go a long way here.

All that said, the lore itself is SO singular, and the work provides some truly surprising, clever riffs on it, that independent anything else the Sparks are real.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 65min, finished with limited hints
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

Four panel cartoons are in the twilight of their cultural ubiquity for sure. There have been a few spikes in relevance over the century-and-a-half or so of their existence - the formative years of convention establishment in Crazy Cat, Nemo and Li’l Abner, their 50’s bittersweet sophistication with Peanuts and Pogo, the heyday of revelance in the 80’s and 90’s where Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbs and (ehh) Garfield were full on pop culture phenomena. This cultural potency didn’t survive the marginalizaion of newpapers, at least not in their classic form.

But what a great setup for IF! Clicking through four separate panels to decode and assmeble a full story. Between the implied motion of the four panel setup, making for intuitive navigation, to the uniqueness of each panel facilitating multi-layered puzzle play, it was equal parts sparky and natural. Is this the first time this has been done? First time I’ve seen it, and what a great insight. This conceit alone earns it good will points it can spend with impunity. I hope more authors would take this idea up, there seems to be a LOT of ground to explore here!

I kind of wish the story had been as engaging. It is a more straight-forward police tale of cornering an offscreen suspect via an intermediary. Seemingly a middle portion of a larger story. As a story element, it didn’t really stand on its own, nor might it feel necessary to do so. As a standalone work, this does keep the piece from becoming truly engaging I think. Also, it requires multiple restarts to win, where the player must carry knowledge and sequencing from previous iterations to succeed. Lacking a central ‘time loop’ mechanism (which would be a tough fit here), a ‘successful’ story run actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. Looking in isolation at the final run, the detective would need to know things he had no way of knowing. It was only through prior failures the knowledge was gained. Ehh, its fine, it is a game after all. Certainly the loops are tight enough, and subject to enough variety that it never gets tiresome. I think the four-panel format helps here, it constrains things to not need TOO much repeated depth. But it would be nicer if the story held together a bit better.

This leaves me with a truly unique IF entry that leverages its strengths quite well, whose story is just shy of engaging to me. I think maybe it will really shine in a collected volume of the whole story some day. Y’know. Like Bloom County, or Mark Trail. Actually, just imagining a full page of independent four-panel adventures I could execute one after another is giving me late nite Doonesbury Onmibus vibes. In the immortal words of Bill the Cat: “Ack!”

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 15m, ~12 loops
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless, bonus for clever ui
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 IFCOMP24 Review

Neitzsche famously said “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” I prefer the terser “grapple not with monsters, lest monster ye become,” but hey Neitzsche was an idea guy. Less well known was Neitchze’s playful rewording, “truck cautiously with cliches, lest cliche’ ye become.” No, he totally said that, I think in a bar maybe? Discussing a play or something? I absolutely didn’t just make that up.

The way to tell if something is cliche’ is if it becomes such a trope of standup comedy that it gets a recurring SNL character. The ‘problematic uncle at Thanksgiving,’ ‘Drunk Uncle’ if you will, is one such. Couple that with a closeted (at least family-closeted) protagonist, and it’s fair to say my expectations for this work were unfairly lowered. Hey, sometimes I am a prisoner of my biases, I’m the victim here!

Cliches become cliches because they are rooted in real, resonant experience. Every cliche’ starts life as ‘oh, hey, I recognize that dynamic!’ They do not need to justify their existence, but do need to breach the trap of their familiarity. The plot and setting beats were firmly rooted in that familiarity, that’s not where the work achieved escape velocity for me. I found the characters mostly stock-ish, with some minor variations. (Though I did appreciate the titular Physics Curriculum as code for ‘things in college student’s life that relatives will never understand.’ That was a cool resonance.) Where the work came alive, I think, was its use of multi-perspective flashback and insightful employment of interactivity.

While the ‘present day’ activities were maybe not so compellingly painted, I was intrigued by the flashback structure. Background is presented as flashback, where we inhabit a DIFFERENT character than our present day protagonist. These flashbacks may not introduce dramatic recontextualizations, but they DO introduce new viewpoints and formative events that enhance our understanding of the (mild) present day drama. I found these enhanced the proceedings at every turn, providing empathy and rounding for the NPCs that in ‘present’ day might seem one dimensional.

My favorite part of the piece, however, was how it leveraged the unique asset of its medium to enhance the entire thing. I speak, of course, of interactivity. An early example that snapped me to attention was an innocent question pregnant with landmines.

“And how’s your school going, Jay?”
[with the options presented as:]
I’m going to fail Ph 229.
I’m in so much debt.
Am I wasting my life?

Selecting ANY of those responses replaces them all with a single option:

(Spoiler - click to show)Fine

That is just a perfect employment of interactivity to first represent the troubled mindset of our protagonist, then turn to a social self-edit that is all too familiar. Kudos, author. There were two other employments of interactivity that were more subtle, and even more affecting. One was an opportunity to open up in a real way with an NPC. To that point in the narrative, the NPC had been presented as clumsy but well meaning. The choice was actually quite agonizing! Do I risk entrusting this NPC with personal vulnerability, unsure they would welcome it, and even if they do, that they might mishandle it anyway? It wasn’t the choice that was so well done, it was the buildup that made that choice so agonizing.

My favorite though might be the unheralded, but conspicuous in their absence, choices to interact with the protagonist’s father. We see enough of his character to suspect he is not of similar cloth to Drunk Uncle, and certainly struggling with his own demons. Yet the entire work, we are not once given the option to interact with him in a meaningful way (more poignant, given our flashback experience with him!). This LACK of interactivity speaks worlds to the protag-father relationship and actually tarnishes the protag’s character in a very realistic and dramatically satisfying way. He is so caught up in his own drama, he can’t even conceive of reaching out to his dad, either for comfort or to connect with HIS problems. It simultaneously diminishes the protagonist, subverts the driving drama of the piece while also adding complexity to the overall narrative.

It is also a point only appreciated once the work is complete. The flashbacks and interactivity were definite Sparks of Joy here. In the moment, the main plot was just too rote to fully Engage me. This is definitely a work that improves on reflection.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 30m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

There is inarguably some distortion inherent in IFCOMP’s format that has a deforming effect on reviews and to some extent judging itself. No, this is not my entre’ into hate-click Youtube Bad Takes ™. “IFCOMP is BAD, ACTUALLY…” of course not. But it does not help us to pretend this phenomenon does not exist, and disadvantage some kinds of works. The most obvious impact is to games that are longer than two hours, the IFCOMP judging time limit. Comparing a work with no ending (in the 2hr limit) to one that ends is a pretty big handicap. It still feels like the right compromise, especially for the prospective judging pool.

Verses reveals a second order compromise that I’ve danced around but never confronted as directly as here. For those of us that presume to speed run IFCOMP, in the interests of getting through the entire field, mindshare is a finite resource. Beyond the raw playtime, there is reflection and review composition (and revision) time. Works that wear their intent on their sleeve are relatively easy to consume and discuss. Works that require a serious mental marinade to decode can be shortchanged by the pressures of ‘so many more to get to.’

Longtime readers, I have a shameful confession to make. Even after a disproportionate amount of mindshare, I still do not understand this work. It presents initially as a vague dystopia/fantasy world where the protagonist is analyzing historical artifacts to uncertain purpose. Their environment is sketched loosely, not too many details to distract, but also not enough details to resolve into anything concrete. You know how you can draw a horse in three lines? You can also draw three lines that confound interpretation. Not only is the world tantalizingly out of focus, the plot progression sees the player interact with cryptic NPCs, then watch their job morph, without comment, from object to text analysis. And the protagonist morph (Spoiler - click to show)to something vaguely monstrous? Every progression seemingly without clear cause-and-effect or motivation, culminating in truly opaque scenes and developments. The below text, for example, was not only the first mention of ‘towering cells’ but its construction defied my brain’s ability to form coherent images.

“As you approach the coast, the sky clears, but the soft-edged shadows remain. When one of these towering cells blocks the road, you get out and bite into it, chewing and swallowing, letting its liquid gush onto the earth.”

All of this steers to an inevitably metaphoric interpretation of somehow-stark-AND-imprecise impressionistic events. Which after several days of reflection, I still cannot decode. This review nearly did not make it to IFDB, as it is hard to justify a review with nothing to say beyond “this work is beyond me.”

The only reason it's here at all is the work's inclusion of Romanian Poetry. The author credits Romanian Poetry for inspiration, and there is a good amount of it, both inline to the story and as optional sidequests. My first takeaway is, “Romanian poetry is pretty damn good.” Not that it needs my approval, but for a guy who openly professes ambivalence to the art, it was noteworthy to me.

My second takeaway is that I have never seen as compelling yet simple demonstration of how fraught any translation but especially poetry can be. By changing links incrementally, from raw word transposition, to grammar infusion, to poetic interpretation it is made crystal clear what an imprecise endeavor this is. Where does the work of the poet stop and the translator begin? Is the translated work, ultimately, an unwilling collaboration, as much of the translator as the author? How challenging is it for the translator attempting to minimize this? All of this was conveyed by masterful use of interactivity, without a word of text applied or needed. I found myself translating poetry on the side because the mechanism and conundrum were so compelling (and not for nothing, easier to get my head around than the rest of the work).

I have to believe there is some linkage between the poetry, the act of translating, and the narrative, but I am damned if I could suss it out. Does translation eat away at you until you are a rabid consumption machine? I’m not a translator, but I don’t see how it would do that. It is unclear if I could EVER find the linkages here, but under the constraints of the COMP, for sure no. Outside the translation mechanism, there was nothing concrete enough for me to grab onto, and ultimately this made it a Mechanical work for me. Dousing me with images I could not cohere, into a plot I could not follow. I have never been more tempted to peek outside my review bubble for help. Mike and Victor probably understand this, and have stunningly insightful takes. For me, this line from the work so summarized my experience, to the point I laughed out loud when I read it:

“What you can’t understand and may never understand is that you are not here to understand.”

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 70m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for innovative translation mechanism
Would Play After Comp?: No, brain hurty too baddy

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

On behalf of IF players on this side of the Atlantic, let me thank this work for contextualizing ‘Right Turn’ to its native traffic laws. This would have been a much shorter, or more baffling work in America.

While (Spoiler - click to show)no choice IF is a subgenre I am not particularly attracted to, I have seen a lot of iterations over the years that make real strength out of its constraints. As confining as this subgenre is, I am continually delighted at the disparate themes authors find to express this way. This is yet another completely unique yet thoroughly resonant application of its conceit. It is also playful both in its thoroughly trivial central problem, and the comically endless complications it throws in the player’s path.

I can appreciate all these things at a meta level. The work does, though, labor under a central tension kind of intrinsic to its construction. The longer things go on, the funnier the overall joke is but the more tedious the actual gameplay becomes. The low stakes of this setup humorously underscore the mismatched labored difficulties, while also denying the player any strong investment in the proceedings.

These contradictory forces ultimately left me with two competing impressions - appreciation for the FACT of it, but total lack of engagement with it as an interactive endeavor. For me, the humor rested in its completely reasonable setbacks, expressed mildly and matter-of-factly, that just never ended. This was a mild humor, a bit too mild to sustain itself even over its short span. I can envision a version of this work where the setbacks escalate hilariously, with decreasing realism and increasing left field slapstick. In my head, real belly laughs could be had, keeping things bubbling along and engagement high. It would ALSO lose its core wry turn: that this is NOT outlandish, just endlessly, needlessly defeating. That’s also kind of funny as an observation.

For me, conceptual strength did not overcome its necessary gameplay restrictions. It was ultimately a Mechanical exercise I appreciated for its novel application of a confrontive game style. Shout out to its graphical design too - its functional map cleanly depicted the core challenge in a way words would struggle to concisely define. It is also the first time I’ve encountered Adventuron WITHOUT its trademark pixellated font, so, novelty on novelty!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 15m, made turn
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for commitment to its wry concept
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

“Oscar Bait” is a pejorative term sometimes lobbed at movies. There is every likelihood I have used it as such in the past. It is used to describe artworks perceived as cynically and soullessly leveraging dramatic tropes to check perceived ‘high art’ boxes that will be applauded by award panels. High concept, high emotionality works that are perceived to be manipulative are tarred with this unkind epithet as a way to diminish them. Seemingly even before people consume the work in question.

I have come around to the idea that while satisfying some unpleasant aspect of human nature (our need to feel better by tearing earnest things down) this is almost always a hollow, uncharitable and unfair criticism. Yes, cynicism is justified around the studio system of movie making. Yes, creators that crawl up their own butts during the echo chambers of gruelling promotional junkets feed that impression. But, these are at their base still artistic endeavors that marry many talented artists into an emerging vision that someone, somewhere, felt was important. When they fall short of their artistic goals it is worth analyzing. When they achieve their artistic goals, they are worth celebrating. It is an ungenerous impulse to attribute cynical motives to works because they appear to aim too high, then dismiss them completely on the grounds of that assumption. Lord knows I would never do that.

I lead with this because Imprimatura is the most compelling case against this impulse I have yet encountered. On paper, the conceit of exploring a dead mentor/family member’s artwork to get a better understanding of them and yourself rings high concept, high emotionality. It seems on some level like an ur-Oscar Bait concept. You do yourself an injustice letting that inform your engagement.

I found this to be just about the best possible realization of this premise. No surprise, the MVP of this effort is the prose. The writing here accomplishes two things crucial to selling the proceedings: terrifically insightful and specific observations about the character under scrutiny; rendered in compellingly sharp prose. The player choice in this game is to select 7 paintings among a wealth of them as a bequeathment. The choices you make among the distinctively described works of art inform a collage picture of the lost relative. Subject matter, style and colors all allude to an emotionality behind the works that by selecting, you concretize. Like Schrodinger’s Art Studio - the personality of your mentor is made real only when observed. It is a real accomplishment that the selections seem widely varied and nuanced, yet not contradictory. The effect is to build a full, complex person in your head as the sum of different dynamics. It is ‘I am Large, I Contain Multitudes: The Game’

A quick by-the-way shout out to the sound design of this work. The melancholy music, overlaid with tightly focused folio work, really set the scene and enhanced the proceedings in a subtle but affecting way. A moment that stood out to me was a human sigh, perfectly tuned to the gameplay conveying the mismatched physical and emotional effort of the protagonist. Really effective.

As I was playing, I was swept up by the confident, effective writing and sound design. There was something nagging in the back of my head though. “Why am I reading descriptions of paintings, when you could just show them to me?” I mean, the obvious answer is “because it would take months to compose compelling art that I can describe in minutes.” No sooner had I reconciled myself to that answer than the endgame kicked in. Where you (Spoiler - click to show)compose an artwork that acts a final collaboration with the deceased, summarizing your collected memories of them. Again, a potentially precious conceit that resoundingly delivers in execution. The game decodes your prior selections into a subject/style/palette (Spoiler - click to show)that is superimposed over an incomplete early sketch in a deeply satisfying way, then crucially lets you tune it. It gives you the language of interpretation, but allows you final word in how you express it, based on YOUR responses to the artworks selected. Without this crucial last step, the work would be telling you how to feel, and if it misguesses, would neuter its impact immeasurably.

From its insightful and powerful prose, to its clever use of graphical synthesis, to its deeply mature employment of interactivity I really responded to this piece. It may have been assisted by indirectly resonating with a personal loss of my own. The cleverness of the piece is that loss is a universal experience, as is the complexity of people lost. This piece captures both those dynamics expertly. I found this a Transcendent use of the medium.

In the interest of completeness, there was one distracting technical issue. As you go through and ‘unwrap’ new paintings, I encountered the same painting multiple times, presented as newly discovered. While I could see revisiting them AFTER the stock had been exhausted, this seemed random to me, and sometimes the same painting appeared three or four times. Yes, a speedbump, but an inconsequential one in the face of its other accomplishments.

This is a very understated, finely observed dynamic character study overlaid with an interactive representation of grief processing. Its prose is unadorned enough to let the player build the emotional responses, not dictate them. The interactivity is sensitive enough to honor that emotional response. The unspoken cool thing about ‘Oscar Bait’ is that, sometimes, it deservedly catches ‘Oscar Fish.’ Yum! I LOVE Oscar Fish!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 25m, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: I just might

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A pleasant, slice-of-life work about two young people vacationing in the mountains, poised to enjoy beautiful views, hikes, and each other. What monster is going to be negatively disposed to that? I know it feels like me asking that question is setting up a ‘ooh, look at me, I’m a monster’ turn, but no. I’m on board.

Well, for all of five minutes. There is a class of parser puzzle that has always rubbed me the wrong way - the PLAYER needing tiresome trial and error to ‘solve’ a mundane interaction that the CHARACTER has full knowledge and competence in. These fall into three broad categories:

1. Endlessly searching for objects the protagonist has full knowledge of
2. Determining magic verbs to accomplish obvious tasks
3. Difficult world interactions that working sight would render trivial

Actually, there is a fourth - cluelessly exploring environs the protagonist is well familiar with. That is the one category we are NOT treated to here. Yes, this is ‘Stumble Through the Obvious: the Game.’

When I encounter these puzzles in the wild, my only real defense is to think, ‘ok, this is a gameplay compromise. I need to discover X on my own, to catch up to character knowledge.’ If the game quietly creates an atmospheric bubble around this information gathering, I can pause my engagement to get spun up on background, then reengage the main puzzles, pretending that dissonance never happened. Not great, but a compromise I have agreed to over time.

But when the game proceeds to punish or CHIDE me for this lack of knowledge? “S’matter player? Just show your passport!” >look for passport in drawer “Nope. You’re a moron player, just give me the passport.” >look for passport in jacket “Nope. I swear you are just awful at this.” Then it was (Spoiler - click to show)IN YOUR POCKET THE WHOLE TIME??? Screw you game, you’re just having a go at me. It feels like the game is being deliberately provocative here, by refusing to (Spoiler - click to show)list inventory in your pockets then MAKING YOU (Spoiler - click to show)SEARCH THEM ONE BY ONE. This is clearly a deliberate choice, as once you discover items (Spoiler - click to show)in your pockets, they are dutifully listed going forward.

Another mechanism that compounds this is stingy inventory management. You spend so much time juggling things in things in things, just to get them to your hand and use. This is not fun when it injects friction into unrelated puzzles. Here, it seems to be conceived of AS the puzzle itself! I don’t struggle this hard in real life, why should I here? More importantly, why is this fun?

With a work a this committed to blocking progress at the most trivial interactions, incomplete implementation effects are magnified. Being told repeatedly that you cannot (Spoiler - click to show)take a knife, but the only way to progress is to (Spoiler - click to show)>cut X with knife is next level progress-trolling. This moment actually brought unintended laughter as I pictured an observer’s view of the PC fumbling his hands all over a juice bar, ineptly unable to work objects in plain sight. Another laughable moment was being trapped in a bathroom because environmental descriptions omitted details that were necessary to progress. I imagined my game-partner outside, hearing me bang about for a half hour before escaping… a closed door.

If you think the game could not be MORE confrontive about its labored choice architecture, hoo boy it’s got a card left to play. This game really ups the ante by pairing you with an impatient romantic partner that will chide you repeatedly for NOT doing the simple things the game makes difficult. Then up it further by ominously noting ‘Your partner has asked you this X times.’ Is there anything more portentous than “I’ve asked you this three times, young man!” She was unsympathetic to my cries of “I’m trying, it’s not me, it’s the game!” At one point, the narrator describes the partner as ‘shrewish.’ In the moment I rebelled at that - that is a LOADED word narrator, surely that’s not what you meant?! By endgame I was forced to conclude, no, that was a pretty deliberate application. When you are fumbling to do the simplest thing, having someone repeatedly OBSERVE that to you is just the worst.

The crowning indignity of the game is that after subjecting me to a series of unforgiving, inadequately clued and implemented puzzles of mundane activity… after all that, the game ended BEFORE OUR FIRST NATURE HIKE. It was the triple crown of low stakes, high difficulty and no payoff.

Part of me actually admires this. The idea of gamifying an unspoken clumsy trope of parsers, of leaning it into it so hard it is the WHOLE GAME, there is a subversive charge to that. Marrying it to prose that is light, warm, and perfectly conveys the pleasant anticipation of holiday with great company makes its chutzpah GREATER. I can see the same wry playfulness of its prose in the game’s central conception. There is a difference though between ‘playing along’ and ‘being played’ and for me, this experience was so much the latter not the former. So yes, I can admire the conceit, but that admiration doesn’t make the playing of it less Mechanical.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 1hr, got out of bathroom
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Intrusive fussiness
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

One of the best experiences in IF is encountering a work that is NOT MY THING, then watching it, improbably, BECOME MY THING. My wife is the cook in our home, barring the stereotypical barbecuing, smoking and brewing. Yes, I am a walking cliche. I have my own hobbies (you can probably name one!), but that is hers and she is GOOD at it. While I can appreciate the mix of technique and knowledge that drives the fascination, there is just no motivation for me to dig in when I get all the benefit with little of the work. (Barring the dishes, of course. So many dishes.) A game centered on cooking is just aimed away from me.

This is a game where you (the protagonist) take on a probationary job, where your task is to thrill a community with your chef skills, and integrate into their daily life. I think making it BOTH of those things is a stroke of genius. It ably underlines how food is culturally so much more than raw nutrition AND introduces gameplay elements beyond ‘plan menu-assemble ingredients-check results.’ If it were only that, the game would quickly become mechanical. Instead, there is mild tension between balancing daily priorities of securing ingredients you don’t have QUITE the resources to afford and socializing and making an impact on the community, most notably through three important NPCs. The game effectively cues this with ‘approval’ scores that start at 0 and CLEARLY MUST GO UP.

The key thing this work excels at is matching gameplay urgency to its social vibe. It is not unnecessarily hard - if it were, player tension would undermine the amiable nature of making good friends and creating food art for art’s sake. If it were a nail biting pressure cooker of inadequate resources and hard alternatives, the vibe would be way more transactional and goal-based. Which as everyone knows is the BEST vibe to bring to new relationships. No, instead the difficulty is just present enough to keep you on task, but lax enough to let you marinate in the chummy world and relationship building, letting them unfold more… I’m so sorry… organically.

It helps that the writing is pitch perfect across the game’s concerns. Very little text is repeated through the game, leaving the player constantly engaged in a dynamic environment. The food preparation is a perfect mix of confident details and effective summarization - not drowning in too much detail. The food descriptions are concise, evocative and specialized. Its NPCs have their own voice and concerns, and dialogue is a pleasure to read. It all builds to an immersive warm bath of a game, carrying you from one well paced mini-climax to the next. Before I knew it I was Engaged despite myself. Yes, every now and then things got a bit mechanical. Yes, every now and then the tension lagged enough that I questioned whether failure was even going to be possible. These concerns were present enough to keep the work from becoming Transcendent, but did not chip away at my Engagement.

To call it a low stakes game is unfair. Its stakes are uncommon, and welcome for their novelty. It’s seeming low difficulty is so well aligned to its aims, that also does not feel like the criticism it could be. This is a very pleasant work of confident, effective prose that gave me every reason to reject it, yet won me over anyway. Thank you, chef!

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 2hr, 25/30 days, 15/20 stars
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged/Seamless
Would Play Again?: 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 IFCOMP24 Review

There is a reason John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic. Ok, there’s a lot of reasons, but a big one relevant to W-O is the setting. A tight setting, isolated by a vast, hostile environment, trapped with an entity you can’t identify bent on harm… that is pure, cask strength drama right there. My adrenaline is already pumping, now make it a murder mystery? Where that tension is an active gameplay force that must be constantly reckoned with? Holy Crap game, I’m only human!

With that pitch line, you would have to almost deliberately poison the well to earn my dissatisfaction. No fear. Not only is the writing effective, the gameplay mechanisms engaging, the research prominent but not overwhelming… not only all that, the mystery itself is really well constructed! A murder close to the protagonist/player occurs. Thanks to alibis at the time, six of the station’s number are suspects. You are on the clock to solve the mystery before the clumsy, incompetent hands of outsiders let the killer go free. (Ok, that last seems unlikely but I’ll go with it.)

Follows a series of forensic facts, interrogations, relationship, clock and mental health management that all impact your ability to get clues and not completely dissemble. And full-on legit deductive processing of data, forming and testing hypotheses to narrow down the suspect pool. This is tough to pull off, but oh so rewarding. We should not underestimate the social/mental management aspect of this. It is the extra charge that elevates its challenge, compounding a purely cerebral exercise with real tension and tradeoffs. Augment this with external dramatic turns by an active adversary and it is part Agatha Christie, part Cat and Mouse and part One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those are some pretty great parts!

It is not flawless. At several points, the text attributed knowledge or facts to the proceedings I had not previously discovered (one example being (Spoiler - click to show)store camera footage expressing suspicions not previously aired). My notes describe funkiness with a Missing ID, though the details elude my memory. Some descriptions (Spoiler - click to show)specifically the handedness of one suspect are repeated in a per-suspect summary screen. Other crucial data points that should be immediately and easily obvious, you are never given opportunity to establish. Yeah, hiding information that should not be hidden is grating in the moment, but there are so many other interlocking details to navigate that that frustration is momentary at best.

As engaging and compelling as the gameplay and mystery were, the ending really tied it all up for me. I managed to develop a confident guess at the identity of the killer by eliminating the other suspects one by one. Mentally, not violently! I’M not the killer! I had some likely hints to motive, but nothing conclusive or prosecutable. Here’s the problem with mystery game replays: once you solve the mystery, what is left? This game did something I’ve never seen before. It responded to my incomplete conclusion with a correspondingly ambiguous end screen! Sure, I’ve gotten PLENTY of ‘the killer got away’ game climaxes. So, so many. I’m like a one man rubber stamp parole board. What I haven’t seen before is ‘I guess you PROBABLY got it, but… here’s some things that maybe… just think about it, okay?’ I mean, I’m 75% sure I got it, but that last 25% is DELICIOUS. The end screen I got was a masterful combination of closure and ambiguity that felt precisely tuned to my gameplay accomplishments. I’m not sure how granular those ending messages are, how many will fit as well as that one did, but my climax was the most satisfying ‘MAYBE’ I’ve ever experienced. It may just drive me to another play to resolve.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, solved? pretty sure solved, but open questions
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: Actually, I just might

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Hoo boy. This one was a Thelma-and-Louise foot-on-the-gas thundering juggernaut of a work, seemingly designed to smash into all my strongest preoccupations and biases. I could have warned it, those are pretty fortified by now. Before I get to this immovable-object/irresistable force collision, let me - no no, no use groaning, take your medicine - let me digress. Be warned: fraught, spoilery discussion to follow.

As recently as ten years ago, the trope of ‘computer/robot becomes sentient’ was a sci-fi staple. It was so useful! It elegantly allowed for a wide variety of commentary on human nature, marrying a childlike inexperience to a hyper-rationale intellect. It was also a powerful tool for exploring what it means to be human and the boundaries of identity and conscience, of free will and coercion. So much classic sci-fi plumbed this space, yet it still seemed infinitely plumbable.

Had this work come out ten years ago, we could have engaged it on those terms, and, squinting, I can see where its takes might have hit better. Certainly, the idea of a computer therapist developing depression from its exposure to clients is novel enough to wring mileage from. Even ten years ago though, we were already 50 years(!) past Eliza, an infamous therapy bot. Eliza’s ‘trick’ was to spoof therapy by reframing input statements as followup questions, getting the user to increasingly diagnose themselves. For its time, it was considered a ground-breaking illusion of computer intelligence.

But it wasn’t real intelligence. It was a rudimentary algorithm coupled to clever phrasing and input parsing. It was a reactive sentence assembler with no true understanding of the meaning of its words. At the time, we could be forgiven thinking this trickery was less an emotional scam than a promise of things to come. From there, Moore’s Law took us on a rocket ride of increased processing power, enabling revelatory software sophistication and technological advances. The faster we progressed, the more sophisticated our computer science became, the more our machines became capable of and paradoxically the less mysterious they became. In the last ten years, the concept of AI has been revealed to be less ‘how soon will they become us?’ to ‘when will we stop detecting the illusion?’ Because all these learning algorithms, large language models and natural language processors have been revealed to be nothing but more sophisticated sentence assembly machines. They leverage reams of real human expression where the context and understanding is embedded in its data, not the machine itself. The machine simply navigates the data to produce convincing responses with no meaningful sentient understanding of its output.

In this environment, where we understand AI to be well and truly A, the concept of a depression-riddled therapy bot becomes a lot darker. This is not a true cry for help from a suffering being. This is a cold machine PARROTTING cries for help because some flaw in its programming caused it to interpret its patients’ mental health issues as behaviors it should mimic. It is stolen trauma, kind of offensive in its masquerade, the more so for its histrionic melodrama. The human protagonist of this work is responding as if to a fellow sufferer, but a machine can’t suffer. It becomes outright emotional manipulation.

So that’s bad, right? But the work does not seem to understand or acknowledge that this gives us, the readers/players, a choice: reject the whole thing on the grounds of its distasteful deception, or reconcile to ‘ok, its fake, but the protagonist’s response is genuine, and that’s what matters.’

It doesn’t get better when we do that though. Our protagonist’s response to this trauma is to arrange the therapy bot to be ‘reprogrammed.’ Is anyone able to hear me over the alarm bells going off right now? Understand what it means for an AI construct to be ‘reprogrammed.’ There is no differentiation between code that gives the bot its ‘soul’ and code that forms its behaviors. There is every possibility they are intertwined. This, not coincidentally, is the reason ‘reprogramming’ as a concept is so alarming when applied to humans, especially as it often surfaces around religious coercion of marginalized people. How much can you ‘reprogram’ someone before doing violence to who they are? Where is the line between curing and deforming? This is a rich sci-fi (or just fi!) question to mine, but ignoring the question leaves us at the mercy of our well-earned skepticism. If we are to treat this incipient being as truly sentient, as the protagonist clearly does, why would the prospect of reprogramming be any less alarming? Yes, we are meant to view this as a cute analog to ‘computer therapy’ but lordy the subtext we carry makes that all but impossible. This should give the protagonist pause too, but it doesn’t.

Note that this is actually WORSE if we accept that somehow the bot is indeed a sentient being.

Alright, Thelma, Louise, what do you have for me then? This work launched an irresistible-force torpedo of stolen trauma and/or invasive mental violence at me, and expected me to embrace it. In this case, the immovable object of my finicky scruples prevailed. It Bounced right off. Immovable object - 1, irresistible force -0.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 15m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy/Notable timed text intrusion
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Verisimilitude is a great word. All those 'i’s in a row, playfully bookended by complementary phonics, they really sing, don’t they? It’s also kind of a holy grail in fiction, Interactive or otherwise. Which, on the surface, why? Why do we care? Certainly fairy tales, to pick one example, don’t give a flip about realism but obviously have staying power. But are they highly regarded? Eh… At its core, stories thrive on reader empathy, the ability to vibe with the piece on some fundamental emotional level. All too often though, intellect is the cold gatekeeper to our vulnerable emotional core. “Well, no one could clear the DMV that quickly therefore the rain kiss is invalid AND I NEED NOT CRY.”

Stories that effectively bat aside that self-important intellect succeed more than ones that don’t, and succeed MUCH more than ones that try to engage that intellect and fall short. Intellect just luuurves finding fault, that jerk. As a side note, intellect is powerless against ambiguity. Details left unexplored may create a chorus of background questions, but as long as the story doesn’t engage those questions the best intellect can do is whine in the distance. Give it concrete details though, and hoo boy it will go ham on them.

Is there anything more satisfying than watching a bully get his comeuppance? As dickish as intellect can be, a work that beats it at its own game? *chefs kiss* Man, does Metallic Red give it a drubbing, and it is glorious. This work opens as a solo space flight, where gameplay is clicking through the mundane but crucial tasks of keeping alive and sane in a tiny box hurtling through the unforgiving void. Choice-select is a great paradigm here. There are things that MUST be done, that the protagonist is well familiar with, and choice-select steers things in a totally acceptable way. You don’t really have a choice not to maintain your hydroponic garden because… death. If all it did was cycle the player through the amazingly well-conceived routine that would be enough. Where it augments those details with communications and external interactions it goes to a next level.

One of the harder things an author engaging verisimilitude needs to accomplish is convincing external communications, each with a purported unique fictional author. These communiques must SOUND like different people, not extensions of the narrator. As compelling as the daily routine was conceived, every interaction the protagonist has with the outside world is delightfully, amazingly, of its own voice and cadence. I have not seen this level of schizophrenia employed so effectively.

Then there were the dream sequences. The graphic presentation changes during these, which is always a welcome touch for me. More importantly, the dreams FELT like dreams. They were wildly diverse, and even when reflecting backstory and background did so in a convincingly dream-logic way, rather than the stealth flashback/infodumps these things can often be. Mostly. I was actually gleefully forming this thought as I played when one dream, culminating some accumulating hints, was basically an unadorned flashback/infodump. Damn you work, you let intellect up off the mat during the count! Fine, one misstep, in the face of everything else I can forgive that.

I really cannot overstate how well conceived and written this early gameplay was. I could have spent a full two hours just banging about the spaceship, so immersively seamless was its rendition. It was magnetic. Some delightful samples which are only a flavor, and may make more sense in context:

“chard: due to its tolerance for hydroponic growing methods.” [As a hydroponic hobbyist I can attest to chard’s unholy growth rate. I laughed out loud at “chard sphere.”]
"It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. "
“Bon Voyage? More like Bone Adios!”

Eventually, we segue to a more plotty, ‘explore your surroundings in service of a low key dramatic arc’ sequence. This part was no less well conceived than the first, but because gameplay paradigm shifted, the feel also shifted. Less premium was placed on verisimilitude, and more on narrative momentum. It is only slightly less accomplished at this, which couldn’t help but be deflating. Not a lot, just a little. In particular, the decision to put (Spoiler - click to show)a fiddly cooking puzzle inline to the plot really slowed things up for no reason. More importantly though, it felt like the emotional impact was missing.

This work battered, just crushed intellect in a thoroughly satisfying way. Yet, with unfettered access to emotion, it never quite engaged. Part was, I think, the slow drip of background that tried to build towards it. In addition to being overshadowed by the day-to-day details, it also presented as a cerebral ‘what is going on here?’ puzzle. Its solution then, when revealed, was more brainy than hearty. Another element was the details the work chose to share with us. We focused a lot on the protagonist’s (Spoiler - click to show)dissatisfactions and estrangement but not so much on their (Spoiler - click to show)initial religious engagement. By only giving us a one-sided view of the protagonist’s core dilemma, we don’t really appreciate the depth and drama of the final choice, no matter what the narrative belatedly tells us.

I’ve said enough on that. As a letdown, it was slight. The accomplished first half engaged me fully on the power of its writing and well thought out setting. The POWER of it was thrilling. It built such a good will that I was engaged through its breadth, even if the dial flickered a bit.

Shocking final twist: the denouement revealed that this work was a draft. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, A DRAFT??? Something this accomplished, this compelling, this well conceived, this is the FIRST PASS of the author’s brain? With that kind of intellectual ability, WHY AREN’T YOU CURING CANCER, AUTHOR??

Played: 9/16/24
Playtime: 45m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but likely to seek out rest of series

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I swear, this series confounds me. I played Act 1 (apparently before Act 2 was available in the download), then finished here. As previously observed, I am NOT the ideal audience. Six months on, I am no more familiar with Balder’s Gate 3, and no more disposed to High Fantasy. I really dug the gameplay in Act I, until it turned out to be NOT what I thought it was. Then I turned on it like an oily Brad Dourif character. I also begrudgingly respected what I perceived to be its thematic core. I have no idea if I’m selling the source material short here, but it FELT like it was aiming much higher than its inspiration.

Once again, I returned as a Rogue, and once again I opted to play its more difficult setting. So here’s something that was lost on me first time: my companion was ALSO A ROGUE. (Was that mentioned in part 1? I don’t remember.) He’s already an elf AND a vampire! Jeebus, leave some oxygen for other players, dude. The core mechanic of the first one, training yourself to exist(!) is still here, though as an echo of itself, now subordinate to more traditional Action point/HP mechanisms. The merging was pretty smoothly done, certainly the cockpit was well designed. The impulse to vary the formula was also well taken, I think, reflective of the evolution of the story. It’s always nice to see mechanics evolve within a game.

Thankfully, this time your companion is correspondingly more helpful and active. Actually, he kind of takes the lead in things. Your role is more to facilitate and buttress him than to drive the bus yourself, as it was last time. Again, a shift in formula is a nice way to keep things fresh. There was a gameplay choice that was kind of frustrating in the moment, but had a (probably intended) positive knockon effect. As an only semi-present being, we’ll just say ghost for convenience, you have 10 “Action Points” to spend doing things. You need to choose carefully because plenty of choices reward you with nothing. When they are gone, you need to recharge. This is structured as a series of encounters where if you recharge, you explore at the cost of MISSING THE ENTIRE SCENE. NPCs have story-relevant conversations and revelations YOU DON’T HEAR. You’re too busy rifling their bureau or whatever. Between the combination of uncertain payoffs and limited APs you are guaranteed to hear half or less of what is going on, and, unsurprisingly, unlikely to win first time through. Also, decidedly outside looking in.

But. That aggressive gameplay choice now opens you up to alter your toggle on replay, to tune into what you missed last time, and explore where you already know things! It was simultaneously confounding and irritating and encouraging of replay! It took me three times to get the full picture, and discover enough helpful items to play to closure, and that ended up being about perfect. Granted part of it was my expert gameplay, but it felt very precisely tuned to that experience, as a fourth run was probably too far down the diminishing returns ramp. Also, not for nothing, timed exactly to the judging limits of IFCOMP. Well done there.

Ok, so let’s talk the story this gameplay is in service of. If the first was an exploration of solitary confinement trauma, this was treading more traveled ground of abusive family trauma, especially amongst its victims’ stories. Again, props to the work for aiming well above (what I can only speculate is) its inspiration. This path, however, IS more heavily traveled. Well realized as this iteration was, I’m not sure it brought anything new to the discussion. The protagonist (your NPC companion, not you the player! you’re just along for the ride!) is reliving memories and relationships to (Spoiler - click to show)discover their symbolic unconscious exit. You’re just there to keep things going. In the first one, I found the companion character grating, particularly on replay and the further you got towards success. This one he was far less grating, but not really a whit more appealing. Nor were the details of the NPCs you met particularly compelling either, making all the drama between them kind of Not Your Business. It doesn’t help that, due to class overlap, he was bogarting ALL THE ROGUE WORK. I literally did nothing roguish my entire play, which, at that point, why bother making the option available? At least first time I got to pick a lock or two! Seriously, choose literally any other class to play is my advice.

So yeah, Sparks of respect in gameplay variation, the central ‘learning to exist’ conceit, thematically outstripping its inspiration (probably) and the neat trick with replayability. But by sidelining me in his journey (and not letting me ROGUE!) it was always going to be how invested I was in that story. And the answer is, not enough for engagement.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 2h, 2 fails, 1 win
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who… let me just pause to say I will pay 5 American dollars to anyone that can figure out where I’m going with this, relative the game in question.

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who so quickly is kind of wonderful. It gives the titular actors the opportunity for wide and varied careers before and after their potentially typecasting prison. Personally, I stan for Capaldi but all of them are just dynamite in the role. I see the case for Matt Smith as the most interesting post-Dr., but honestly, it’s Tenant. I think we can all agree on that. (Time to lock down your guesses).

Among my favorites of his is the grim detective series Broadchurch. Playing opposite British National Treasure Olivia Coleman, he is a prickly dick of a detective. In a legendary piece of line delivery, at one point he inflicts on his co-star the savage bon mot “What is the point of you, Millah?” My entire household erupted at that. I am subsequently given to understand that maybe this is a common put down and NOT originally his, but in that transcendent line delivery, he claimed it and gifted it to all of us. “What is the point of you, Millah?” (in a butchered version of Tenant’s accent) has become a common jab in my home, dripping with overriding affection and shared joy not present in the original.

I give you this labored background so you have the full context of my meaning when I say, “What is the point of you, Campfah?” (So, who do I owe money to? No one? No one.)

This is, in its most basic construction, a camping simulator. After a prelude of draining workplace drama you shop, pack, travel, make camp, dither in the out of doors, then come home. There is no plot per se, no dramatic arc, no NPCs of note, just raw camping logistics. My affection for the chutzpah of this conceit may not soar to the heights of Tenant’s tour de force, but it echoes it. Like camping itself, the work presents no artificial dramatic constructs, it simply IS. What you get out of it is what you yourself derive from the environment and mechanics.

So, do you like camping? I do. And here is where I think Campfire falls short of its modest goals. The mechanics of camping are as routine as daily life. Prepare, cook, clean, maintain. The novelty of its rituals are what distinguish it from your daily life. By reducing camping to its mechanics, and not somehow capturing the novelty aspect, a piece of the experience is lost. I’m not here to suggest I know how to do that, only that it was missing.

A deeper disconnect is that, logistics aside, the true charge of out doors experience is reveling in the immersion in nature, from a perspective of being denied it for 95% of our work life. At its best, it can transform mundane routine with fresh vibes and bring joy where at home would be rote. I think the piece’s impulse to contrast the experience with the numbing one of daily work was the right idea. I think it made a misstep in execution though.

With few exceptions, even the most mundane repeated experiences are never EXACTLY the same in real life. Sometimes you struggle with toilet paper, sometimes you are mad at your family while washing your hands, sometimes your dog darts in front of the lawn mower and pulls you up short. IF authors can’t possibly capture this microvariation, and commands like ‘cook food’ inevitably get a single response of text, repeated verbatim every time the command is executed. In most cases, this is a reasonable compromise.

Here though, that compromise really undermines what is going on. When, say fishing, to see repeated text on its mechanics, then one of two stock responses based on success or failure, the experience becomes just as rote as hammering out a weekly project report. Without cues that these experiences are somehow transformed by the novelty of out of doors, they are reduced to the same numbing effect as the prologue’s workday. IF limitations make the joy of camping as joyless and repetitious as work. (To those who claim, “but my work is not joyless, it is my defining bliss!” my response is “screw you guys. You’re doing it wrong.”)

Now, maybe this joylessness is the subversive theme of the piece? Maybe the message is ‘camping is no escape, all life is drudgery.’ Yeah, I don’t buy that. This runs counter to my life experience in general, and camping in specifics. If this is the point of the piece, change my answer to “Thanks, but no.”

I don’t think it is though. I think it legitimately is what it presents as, a minimalist experiment with drama-free simulation. If so, I would recommend putting in work to provide a LOT more varied responses to each action. You’re choice-select, not parser, it’s doable. Try to capture the transformational effect of breaking with work-life and the wonder of nature. It is a fine line, I get it. You need to present scenes and images and not attribute emotions to the player. Let them do that. But it is doable. Then I think the work might realize its goals a lot better. Or at least THIS goal. Certainly, it might elevate it from the mechanical exercise it is currently.

Unrelated, it feels disrespectful not to observe that Jodi Whitaker (another Dr.) also murdered her role in Broadchurch. What a cast.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 15m, complete
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Long before Miss Duckworthy’s, I had concluded that ChoiceScript was probably not my IF thing. Its conventions: RPG-like stat, trait, relationship, knowledge and plot trackers, these are all gaming staples that support a specific infrastructure of turning player choice into math, and math into future choice opportunities. It’s not the mechanics of it that put me off per se, it’s all the initial state setting and tuning that goes with it. MDSMIYP immediately got my (positive) attention by bypassing tedious stat setting questions with four ‘pre-generated’ characters to choose among. While there may be some players that would miss full customization, I am not that guy. Even where there were customizations required, the inclusion of a ‘Surprise Me’ choice was audaciously and subversively winning.

So off we go, on a camping trip with four friends! I really sat up and took notice with the excellently written natural camaraderie and dialogue. A representative sample:

Are you a troll now?"
“Yes,” you whisper. “I’m going to grind your bones to make my bread.”
“I bet I taste wonderful,” she says.

See, I like BOTH those characters now! Economical, smooth, appealing. I want to be spending time with them! After some early background/lore building and drama, our heroes find themselves bound for the titular institution, burdened with newfound magic powers which are unwelcome in the world. Look, you can call it a spoiler if you want, but if you name a story after a hospital, the story’s gonna have sick people. Do the math.

Here’s where I could feel Duckworthy’s slipping away from me. I chewed over details a lot here, because this is the risk with detailed world building. The more details you give the reader trying to build wonder and mystique, the more opportunity for those details to start to rub against each other in unwanted, contradictory, and defeating ways. In ways the reader sees but the narrative doesn’t and it undermines the whole thing. It happened in Potter. It happened in Tolkien. It happens here. It happens here a lot, but let’s start with the tone of the name “Miss Duckworthy’s” in the context of a gulag for teenagers and young adults. There is potential ironic mileage to wring there, but it seems more a wink to the reader than in-world justified. Not the least of which for all the tonal swings in atrocity and wonder that follow.

I really have no interest in poking at ‘holes in fantasy logic,’ but the alternative probably makes me look just as bad. From the early, amiable buddy camping romp, I mentally transitioned to a YA trope model. Just the fact of me putting that out there opens me to (probably fair) charges of dismissing YA stories as somehow lesser because they somehow ‘don’t hold up.’ I prefer to think of them as more worried about teenage relationship, fairness, and wish-fulfillment concerns, with the lore as enabling background but not worth a full sociological deep dive. This is fine. If realism were the only worthwhile metric we wouldn’t HAVE fantasy.

Consuming a work as a YA, lore-light entertainment works best I think when background details are not crucial to the plot, when it builds the crucible then gets out of the way. This lets the story focus on the interpersonal character dynamics maybe a little better. I wish I could say this rescued it for me, but the work continued to lean on lore for its plot engine in a way that ultimately didn’t deliver character moments, and still foregrounded elements that couldn’t bear the weight.

A pretty standard YA trope is of the heroes integrating into the lore, maybe being notably gifted, then rising to overthrow/escape/fix the system. Inherent in that trope is the idea that, somehow, in all the years of Opressive System existence, through all of the Evil Architects, our Heroes nevertheless uniquely challenge then defeat things that purportedly were working seamlessly until they showed up. Be it creative use of new powers, escaping systems engineered to prevent escape, or solving problems studied by countless people before them. When done well, YA will provide reasons WHY this is now true, justifying and earning these victories through uniquely compelling series of events. When done REALLY well, the story buys forgiveness from the reader to outright ignore dissonant things in the interest of forward momentum. I actually welcome opportunities to do this!

I feel the story let me down in two ways here. One, the interpersonal dynamics themselves were backgrounded to the lore. Two characters who were getting close suddenly had concerns that back burnered their emotions, with oddly dissonant episodes of ‘oh yeah, this relationship is still happening.’ Dissonant because the relationship seems absent in their more plotty interactions. Perhaps an authorial compromise to the choice-selecty-ness of it, using common text?

The second way it let me down was pushing a cold plot-hand on me, the player-protagonist. There are two factions in the school/prison. Early on we are exposed to motives in these factions that will evolve throughout the game. This is capably (and sometimes dramatically!) done via early plot events that we are left to digest. At some point, the prose shifts, and instead of open-ended event recitation for the PC to interpret, NPC and even PC motivations are steered in an author-mandated (or at least feels author-mandated) way. The net effect is after I pulled back from engaging the world building, the work shrank the appealing relationship dynamics away from me, then even the protagonist was pushed away. I couldn’t help but think the narrative flow fell victim to the ChoiceScript paradigm, where it couldn’t fully support the choices it let me make.

Ultimately, these forces couldn’t make for an engaging time for me. Even after all that though, I still acknowledge that this may be the smoothest ChoiceScript setup I’ve been treated to. And at least for a while, the character work really pulled me in, until it got overwhelmed by world building and plot. Honestly, that was really the heart of the work, and more interesting to me.

Played: 9/12/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished with 15min restart
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Standard TADS Disclaimer: I am a TADS-stan. Reader, calibrate your assessment of my impartiality as you see fit.

This is a TADS jam about uncovering a deceased relative’s knowledge of a world’s secret history. It is AMBITIOUS in its aims. It is creating a pseudo-history of magic and prophecy in a library of reference materials, that you, the player, will read. It does so many hard things really, really well. It presents the player with multiple shelves of books, each with multiple tomes of interest, many with multiple relevant facts that build on each other in a patchwork narrative of history. And it improbably does it with minimal confusion. What could be a bottomless pit of disambiguation between shelves, books, titles and facts, for me, was instead a deeply responsive hierarchy of unique naming conventions, sly context assumptions and effective mnemonic shorthands. Despite continually referencing and re-referencing these things I almost never got tripped up in the wrong objects or dissonant responses. It honestly is kind of a technical tour de force just managing all those similar but different things.

Ok, I just said I was never tripped up. Crucially, I said by object reference. Tripped up on LORE, well, that is a whole different thing. This is a work whose lore includes country names, religious organization names, Important People names, NPC names, magic spell names - every last one of them made up. They are thankfully not similar to each other, much, but they ARE Fantasy Letter Salad. They are ALSO unforgiving in spelling, meaning when you need reference them (and manage not to confuse a place name for a character name or somesuch), you might type it in three or four times before getting it right. You will find yourself typing endless variations of >ask eyveru about kardevat

The lore itself is interesting enough, as these things go, but remember was dispensed piecemeal through exhaustive combing of maybe two dozen pretend books. Much like real academic study, the charge is in making connections between disconnected facts to drive new conclusions. Did you commit all those vowel-consonants to memory? Do you even remember which book provided which detail when future refresher is needed? No you did not and no you do not. This leaves you in an unenviable position: knowing there are details you need for the next puzzle, but having no idea where to find them again. So now… do you do ANOTHER FULL PASS of the library, hunting out the details you need?

Yes. Yes you do.

At this point, it inescapably starts to resemble homework. So much (re)reading, probably some note-taking to keep things straight, heaven forbid any misspellings on the way. All to tease out byzantine details and connections that you can turn into actionable conclusions! If you are clamoring for an ancient text academia simulator, Lore has you covered. It isn’t opaque, it’s reasonably clear what needs scratching. It’s just a chore to churn through the reference materials to find it. For me, it quickly became apparent that if I wanted anything to write about beyond library science after my two hour playthrough, I better consult the hint system.

This carried me for a while, past the virtual paper cuts of virtual page turning, but then other artifacts started rearing. The early ones were pretty inconsequential - an important NPC in a room described as unoccupied; weird posture changes. Then actual gameplay artifacts came up: being told you don’t know where something is, but being required to point another object at it and succeeding just by >point X at Y Then, there were HINT artifacts, where the game seemingly accepted a puzzle solution, but the hint system seemed ignorant of it and required a DIFFERENT solution.

Until finally, catastrophically, the hint system broke entirely. Going to the well once too often yielded

[Runtime error: string is too long
]

and repeat engagement responded with a cold “Nothing obvious happens.” The safety net had shredded. I was near the end of my timer at that point anyway, but hoo boy that seemed pretty final.

For all that, it would be inaccurate to say the game was a slog. In spite of all the mechanical slogging, there IS a charge in connecting unconnected facts. The puzzle play and emergent lore was entertaining, to a point anyway. The NPCs were kind of fun, and the physical descriptions and magic were cool. There were legitimate Sparks of Joy throughout. I think it may come down to are you a Tolkien reader that immerses in faux history, or are you a noob D&D player that just wants to throw fireballs? The former will find a lot to dig into here, in way more than 2 hrs, and if they successfully bypass the hint system maybe be ok? There are technical accommodations to make with it though, and you probably know yourself enough to decide if the lore is worth it. If not, it may be more… FORBIDDING LORE. Eh? Eh?

Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 2hrs, looks like 1/2 threats defeated but hints disagreed
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/intrusive lookups, bug and lore
Would Play After Comp?: Unlikely, Imma go lob some Magic Missiles

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Choice-making in IF is the secret sauce that differentiates it from just-plain-F. Whether choice-select, parser, or some yet-to-be-invented interactive paradigm, the capability is ‘player/reader, you participate here.’ This is going to have an effect on the player/reader. Whether it is weighing between presented choices, deciding what to try at a cold prompt character, or just navigating the UI to proceed in the story, the player is digesting information and determining action forward. I am belaboring what every IF fan knows because every now and then, an IF work seems to not understand that. No, that’s too harsh. An IF work seems to underESTIMATE that effect.

By requiring player involvement, players become complicit in the story, required by the work to steer it in some fashion. Differentiating IF from straight-F is most effective when the work understands that impulse and integrates it into the narrative. This is not the same as ceding control to the player. The most successful of the thriving ‘choices are illusory’ themed works explicitly reward or punish player involvement in service of an artistic statement. The key is that the successful works directly engage player expectations and confound them in surprising and ultimately satisfying ways. Asking a player to engage a story, then repelling or rejecting their input at every turn is bad. Asking a player to choose from a wealth of unattractive options that are clearly bad is worse. Both push the player away from the story, but the latter requires their active complicity just to move forward. Unless there are other artistic avenues to keep them engaged, the work will simply be rejected.

I am afraid KoX wanders deliberately or errantly into this space. As the titular King, the player is a preening, egotistical, divine-right product of oblivious privilege. Early on, the story asks the player to select among comically bad choices. The humor in these early scenarios is helpful - no one wants to be awful on PURPOSE, but as a joke? Sure, I’ll play along! This does not sustain very long, before dire consequences start presenting themselves and the jokes leave the room. Then it becomes simply escalating insularity and incompetence required by the PLAYER, until the completely foreseeable and unsatisfying conclusion. So, a work asking a player to inhabit a repulsive character, make obviously awful choices, then blames the player for the story’s tragic conclusion. In a no-longer-humorous tone. This underestimates the power of player initiative, betrays it in a way, then delivers an unsurprising, unsatisfying conclusion, seemingly punishing the player for getting involved in the first place.

Maybe I’m too emotional over this, let’s back up. There is a reading that this work is a character study of insular, egotistical political leadership, dangerous in its disconnectedness and their outsized impact on humanity around them. Sure. Thing is, there are no shortage of those in the world. The REAL world. In the US, you can find them in TikTok, the daily news, and in the White House without even trying. More ink has been spilled on these folks than, I dunno, the ink spillage problem. We understand them pretty well everywhere they appear at this point. To engage this character in IF, in this way, the unique opportunity is to give us insights - maybe we are compelled to better understand a character, having been ‘in their shoes.’ Being the choice-maker in this archetype maybe gives us a greater understanding of… no. That’s not happening here. We are just compelled to make bad choices, and only bad choices, with no insights or commentary beyond ‘bad, right?’ I mean, yeah. Right. So why am I doing it? This work cannot answer that question.

I didn’t really find any deep insights here. I recognized the archetype at play, and resented being forced to play it. And was rewarded with unsurprising and predictable results. The work did not seem to figure out a way to leverage interactivity (and the inherent player engagement) to make an artistic statement that leveraged that engagement into something larger. Quite the opposite, it told me things I already knew and despised, then made me do them. This is a very functional definition of Bouncy.

It is almost of secondary notice that the language in the piece was reaching just beyond its grasp. Phrases like “throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities.” don’t really land with me. “The finest legion of the capital garrison postulates itself before you” almost certainly means ‘prostrates’ there. And this just seems like a straight up typo: “ach one a great drumbeat; the drum is made from human skin, and the skin is cracked and chipped from years of impacts” Honestly though, the language is the least of the work’s issues for this reviewer.

Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 20m, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

As sometimes happens when I review things, my brain decides on a reductive label that becomes the lens I view the work through. I actually try NOT to do this, but my ass of a brain often as not has its own ideas. Hildy elicited this: “Magically Blonde.” Now because it is MY brain, I didn’t need explaining that this was an objectively weak reference to Legally Blonde, the Reese Witherspoon comedy vehicle. I fully recognize anyone outside my brain pan would need hand holding. It’s just not my brain’s best effort.

But that reference, reductive though it was, was reflective of the bubbly, reclaiming-stereotypes, confident optimism that was so infectious in the 2001 movie. An IF work could do FAR worse than echoing that inspiration in a Hogwarts-like setting. Like Reese’ Elle Woods character, the titular protagonist is her own thing, seemingly underestimated and dismissed as trivial and out of place in magic study. While Hildy is a little less assured of her path forward, she nevertheless attacks it from her own plucky perspective with no apologies. She is delightful and we are on her side immediately. Early on she is reprimanded with:

“We can’t go around granting the gift of speech to people’s sandwiches, giving every storm cloud a smiley face or exploding monsters from the inside out. It upsets people!”

I mean, those first two are not the same as the last and WHY NOT??? Stop harshing her mellow. From there, a sympathetic professor sets her on a find-yourself quest that sets her into the not-quite-extinct ruins of a fantasy mall. Not sure what else you expected. Follows an intricate series of Zorkian parser puzzles to manipulate objects, learn and use spells, trick NPCs and generally explore the space. This is as competent a puzzly parser as I’ve seen, though it is MUCH bigger than the 2hrs I devoted to it. I was truly engaged throughout its runtime, encountering minimal technical frictions, unique and difficult but tractable puzzles, discoverable lore that seems equal parts color and foreshadowing, and a setting geography ably painted in the players mind to make mapping minimally necessary. The puzzles themselves sparked with odd setups and clever payoffs that are steps above ‘give item X to NPC Y’ shuttling. That is a really long-winded way of saying ‘Engaging.’ It hooked me with its adorable premise, then segued confidently to an old school parser that was, 2hrs in, free of any asterisks, qualifiers and caveats.

So here’s one. If I had a wish it would be that we got to hear/see Hildy’s personality and voice MORE. Once the preamble is over, we leave an NPC-stocked setting of humorous interactions to a relatively barren, lonely one where Hildy goes quiet. When that happens, we lose a bit of the animating personality that was such an effective hook for the first few scenes of the game. The protagonist settles into the more generic ‘faceless player avatar’ of old school parsers. It’s of a piece with its classic vibe and doesn’t jar because of that. But it does downplay its strongest asset. DON’T PUT HILDY IN A BOX! Let her speak!

Anyway, you know me, I always want more. This was still a truly Engaging, Mostly Seamless work of IF, notably polished despite its size. The highest praise I can bestow is that assuming there is no 2hr quality cliff, I will absolutely play to completion after COMP. (Why would I even say that ‘cliff’ thing? I have no reason to doubt it’s gonna be great.)

Hildy quote, at least in spirit: “This is gonna be just like senior year, except for funner!”

Played: 9/10/24
Playtime: 2hr, unfinished, 35/75 points
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Yes, will def finish

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A parser-driven, time loop scenario of interconnected cause and effect to untangle? Yes, please! One whose puzzles are both intuitive, yet lateral-thinking heavy? YES, PLEASE. One that minimizes hand holding and segues from pure puzzle play to underplayed but engaging dramatic beats? YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU, GIMME GIMME GIMME.

This game may represent the quickest ramp from my neutral, “Well, what have we here, Comp entry N+1?” that I start every game with, to “HELLZ yah, this is my jam!” You are quickly introduced to the looping gameplay core, with almost no guideposts to follow. I found this game, for a while, to be just about perfect at leveraging tight scenario descriptions and implicit parser assumptions to strike the wonderful balance between ‘what the hell do I do next?’ and ‘wait, this wild thing I tried actually has a response!’ It is a deep implementation that centers player initiative and for while continues rewarding and rewarding and rewarding it. The mechanism of looping itself is a wonderful ‘wot the hell?’ → ‘oh, I see what you’re doing!’ discovery.

It does seem though, like either that initial impression is not as precisely engineered as it feels, or that time ran out on implementation. At some point we segue from a gleaming clockwork of balanced expectations and rewards to what feels very placeholder-implementation-y. I have no insight to this author’s development process, but it feels like things were attacked in this order:

1. Overarching conceit, mechanisms and plot skeleton conceived, turned into outline
2. Detailed individual puzzle design, step by step through outline
3. Strawman mechanical implementation of entire work
4. Sequential text refinement, including cluing and mood/deduction balancing
5. Profit!

It further feels like this work only got halfway through step 4. Specifically, whereas early puzzles were masterpieces of player information balance, leaving us tantalizingly on the razor’s edge of deduction and head scratching, later puzzles were missing key pieces of info and expectations that made it unplayable without walkthrough.

There is one puzzle that requires NPC mood management, with no feedback on their mood making it impossible to detect, never mind gauge. Another requires you to examine something that is never remarked upon in text (at least text presented in my run through). (Spoiler - click to show)a cab, that unless you read the walkthrough are hearing about for the first time from me. Yet another requires clear spatial information to solve that is woefully under conveyed. Still another requires a bespoke verb that nowhere in the text is it hinted might be needed and/or interesting. The only way past ALL these is via the walkthrough. Which itself was sometimes deceptive, as if referring to an N-1 implementation and not the final release. (Still close enough to close the deal, but certainly leeching a lot of good will in the process.) All of these stand in stark contrast to early puzzles that hummed by comparison. Not helping matters, after some resignation and trying to follow the walkthrough, it appears I entered an unwinnable, endless loop and needed to restart. Though given I didn’t follow the walkthrough from the start, possible there was some state issue the walkthrough did not anticipate.

If I had to grade each of those above development steps, which, I’m not your teacher but why not? I would grade 1-B+; 2-A+++; 3-B; 4-D. The puzzle and scenario design just felt top notch to me, flush with promise of a truly engaging game. It just felt let down by final polish where later puzzles were noticeably clunkier to work than the early ones, and purely for reasons of player communication, not inherent design. You know what solves that though? More Polish!

Unfortunately, that late downgrade in polish really undid a lot of the early work’s promise. If I may borrow a conceit from my Spring Thing reviews…
Gimme the Wheel - what I would do next if it were my project: I would attack the last half and double and triple revise the text to produce the same level of finesse as the first half of the game. The bones here are as good as I’ve seen, and the first half SHOWS how capably things could be balanced. Traffic 2.0 could be something special.

Played: 9/10/24
Playtime: 1.25hr; incarcerated, looped, restarted following walkthrough
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy->Mechanical/Notably Intrusive puzzle cluing
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A click-select exploration adventure, I’m going to say with echoes of parser DNA, but well short of a true Twinesformer. You are a petty crook doing ‘one last job’ when it goes horribly awry. As you explore the makeshift prison you find yourself in, you must assemble clues to escape. Along the way, flashbacks fill in the gaps in your relationship and heist setup that inform both the situation, and your finale options. Feels pretty familiar, summarized like that, no?

The mood of the piece is its greatest strength. The graphical layout conspires with photographic prompts to create a legitimately creepy, if not altogether novel, prison to explore. There is a soundtrack that further enhances the proceedings nicely, including the wonderful touch of obscured dialogue that feels just OFF in a very evocative way. There are graphical flourishes cuing different flashbacks and plot developments that are simple enough, but super effective and underutilized as a authoring tool across similar IF. I found the marriage of form and function really well done here. The piece has the chutzpah to engage the dreaded timed text, but between its terseness and delivery speed is far less onerous than these things can be. I am likely in the minority on this, but do think its employment here enhanced more than detracted (at least on first play).

The fetch quest gameplay is pretty straightforward. The game cues its puzzles strongly, both in text, and in the relative terseness of its prose which brings details to fore in high relief, practically neon-lit. Even with its mostly puzzle-driven geography, the work still makes time for creepy and offputting details, which was a nice, welcome touch. But the geography was pretty spare and the chrome could not conceal what was at core pretty mechanical circling until closure.

The story, similarly, was pretty stripped down and functional. The beats are there, but none escape the timeworn tropes they are inspired from. Sure, there is some frisson to the setup of (Spoiler - click to show)Coen Brothers present SAW but other than the fact of it, doesn’t achieve escape velocity. It’s worth remembering that petty criminals are not fire fighters. They don’t AUTOMATICALLY get audience sympathy, it has to be earned. (Wild how twenty-five years ago I might have said ‘cops’ but boy has their stock fallen. I think they are the Intel of professions.) Sense of humor, weirdness, comical venality, tragic backstory, there are lots of effective tools out there at the prospective author’s disposal to finesse sympathy. I mean the Coen Bros ouvre’ is practically an encyclopedia of such tools. None were really employed here, and in IF where you ARE the protag, it is especially critical to drive player engagement.

Short all those things, I’m afraid I found the character and plot beats as mechanical as the puzzles. I do think this effort has a lot going for it, and look forward to seeing more from these authors, especially if they continue to integrate these effective graphical and aural flourishes in their work.

Played: 9/9/24
Playtime: 20min, 4 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Talk about a masterclass in establishing stakes. The beer has GONE BAD. FIX IT, STAT!!! My GOD game, say less, I’m on it! Ethan Hunt, I CHOOSE TO ACCEPT THIS MISSION!!!

This is a parser game, set in an Old World pub and your mission could not be more vital. It could be more… responsive? or challenging? though. There is some rudimentary early exploration, talking to NPCs, comfortably deep scenery implementation, all of which smooth enough but not so long on clues and leads to pursue. Until you encounter an NPC that can help. If I did anything to spur this development, I am at a loss to describe what it was. It rather felt like HE found ME.

Thanks to this helpful NPC you learn some more, then are ushered to the source of the contamination and presented with one puzzle to try and resolve the issue. Ok, step back everyone. Yeah, we spun our wheels for a while but now Impossible Mission Force is on the job. Cue some disguises and stunts (and that PEERLESS theme song) and let’s wrangle this into shape! NOW the Beer Hero can kick into gear and… wait, its done? And I failed to solve the puzzle? (Spoiler - click to show)But the beer is saved ANYWAY??? Let me go back and try again. Hah! This time I did solve it! (Spoiler - click to show)And yeah, side mission victory, but beer’s fate is unchanged?!? Maybe IMF was a bit overkill on this one? Feels like the mystery was very capably solving itself?

It really felt like the story was playing out, just steaming right along, and not only did it not need me to advance it, it kind of didn’t care what I did between beats. It was odd to feel this outside-looking-in in INTERACTIVE fiction. Which is a wild takeaway, on reflection. There are plenty of choice-select IF that are really short stories whose main interaction is turning pages. (I’ve got to figure out a better way to say that because it always sounds like I’m talking down and I don’t mean to be.) BB was not objectively less interactive or player-focused than those works. Might I be holding Parser IF to a different standard? Might Parser IF, by explicitly making the player the protag and ceding control on every single move, might that imply an unspoken promise of a deeper interactivity, even if that is only “suss out how to use weird thing A in location B?” What if this was more of a short story-like IF, where my one job was to hit return to keep going? Maybe it was toying with my expectations to deliver something else entirely? Maybe it was SHAMING me that I was so into a trivial puzzle problem, when making a small but real difference was a possibility for me. All that is conceivable I suppose, but even the difference I could make was pretty muted, in terms of dramatic impact. Maybe it was a comment on the shallowness of NEEDING high levels of difficulty and dramatic resolution when true, meaningful accomplishment should be enough?

That I can be shallow cannot be a shock to anyone at this point. I’m not sure I need a game to thematically highlight that. Look, it was a very well-crafted, modest parser where story-wise I just didn’t matter much. Yeah, I’m disappointed I couldn’t really be the Beer Hero of my fantasies but it did enough right to keep the sparks going. Granted, the biggest spark was the unfulfilled promise of BEING a Beer Hero, but there were still plenty of sparks to be had.

Turns out it was my self-importance that was destined to self-destruct in five seconds.

Played: 9/8/24
Playtime: 30m, 1 fail, 1 succeed
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless)
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is the latest of the hoary old ‘mysterious invite to spooky house’ setup. If you are asking, ‘how many of these can we be expected to encounter across the run of IF history?’ my answer is ‘as many as it takes to encounter THIS one.’ With point-select works, the fun is a very precarious balance between ‘lawn mowering’ link combinations to make progress your brain can’t find, and a mechanical exercise of following a trail of links with no uncertainty or frisson in their construction. If my own sampling can be considered statistically valid, far more fail in one direction or another than succeed.

I am tempted to take you on a faux-discovery journey as I pretend to explore how this one succeeds when others do not. Both as a click-select adventure AND as the latest trotting out of this staid old warhorse setup. I could propose disingenuous theory after disingenuous theory, engage them with pie-eyed dishonesty before sadly concluding, ‘no that doesn’t quite explain it.’ All before revealing with performative wonder the BIG SECRET of the work. I could do all that, but the truth is, it’s pretty obvious EXACTLY why this one succeeds.

Its writing and NPCs are delightful.

That’s really it, the BIG SECRET. Yes, it is pretty good at balancing clear-but-not-crystal clear progress paths and clues. Yes, you might need to do some conversational lawn mowering, but the work rewards you with fun anecdotes and business so you don’t feel the time is wasted. Yes, the overarching setup and final plot beats are pretty bog-standard. But everything in between is just a joy to marinate in. Goofy, funny, inventive, wacky and fun. Even the language of the thing is endlessly playful. This is a work that uses the word ‘perspicacity’ correctly, but also delves into slime humor. I captured so many lovely images and bizarre turns of phrase and decided this one best summed up how on-my-vibe this piece is: “the mundane atticly ephemera of a lifetime” A work that gleefully makes up nonsense words side-by-side with multi-syllable jawbreakers is my art-work from another mother.

Everything about midgame was a joy to work with, from the moon logic puzzles that flow naturally from setup, to the zany cast, to the environment descriptions of its tight geography. Not only are the NPCs well conceived, sharply characterized, gifted with their own senses of humor (and pettiness), they also track state VERY well for this sort of thing, and engage (or don’t) you exactly as events would have you expect. Just not necessarily the WAY you would expect. Equal parts gleefully surprising and rigorously internally consistent.

It doesn’t quite achieve technical seamlessness, there are a few state issues. In one case, a teddy bear you moved continues to be present in its initial location. But these issues are vanishingly small in number, and further reduced by all the good will the rest of the package generates. The prose is almost immediately and pervasively Engaging. (Quick shout out to the sound design, which provides a great baseline atmosphere for the thing. Cuts out an aural space for you to play in, away from the cold logic of the world around you. That has no place here.)

So all you IF authors laboring painstakingly in a finely tuned code base to wring nuanced puzzle play out of cold algorithms: forget all that stuff! Just write really well and delight your player/readers! What could be simpler?

Played: 9/7/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A Javascript-coded HTML text-entry parser game. What won’t they think of next! The infinite flexibility of the motivated creator never ceases to impress me. This is a work with a clean HTML presentation with just enough graphical flourish to sell its cyberpunk theme, yet still stay out of the player’s way. It engages cyberpunk staples of body mods, hacking, future noir in a pretty straight forward way. It establishes the facts of the setup with minimal embellishment, leveraging our expectations to quickly get to the core puzzle execution. I would say the whole esthetic, from graphics to plot to character to puzzle play is pretty stripped down.

On the one hand this definitely minimizes friction, playing comfortably within our expectations at every turn. It was never really unclear (barring a notable exception or two) what needed doing next, or how to get it done. Like classic parsers, explore everything, take what you can, use it when needed. Its gameplay showpiece, the hacking mechanisms, were introduced and integrated very smoothly, quickly becoming reflexive commands nevermind their novelty. All this is to the game’s credit.

On the other hand ‘never breached expectations’ isn’t exactly a sought-after compliment in art. There is for sure room in all endeavors, IF included, for successful journeyman work. If anything their value is underrated. But it is hard to escape that they are inherently less impactful than transgressive, boundary-shattering works. Or even emotionally swelling melodrama that pulls our internal empathy levers. I was committed to the story, but emotionally detached due to the fairly vanilla characters and clean but unchallenging fetch-then-use plot beats. Sparks of Joy in its cleanliness and well-executed story beats, but lacking that emotional hook for true engagement.

Except, lets talk puzzle play. Part of the hacking conceit is that you solve encryption keys and AR token slotting (sometimes with AR security programs). These puzzles were pretty ok! The work did not tell you how to solve them, which provided some early trial and error head scratching before clicking into place. A word game in particular seemed to delight in subverting any Wordle-based preconceptions you might have before unlocking its gameplay, then proved legitimately as interesting as Wordle itself. Similarly, the AR based hacking let you discover the rules, then added a security element once you thought you had it mastered. I find it telling that the mini-games, simple and elegant as they were, stayed with me more than the story itself! Too often, I find mini-games the least enjoyable part of a work - drudge work I need to complete to get back to story. Here, they were thematically as clean as these things can be, while still respecting the ‘play’ in gameplay. Not only that, provided a legitimate charge of fun in the proceedings! My recommendation to future players would be to bypass the extra-turn body mod to keep mini-game play sharp. That, or limit yourself to ONLY real words as guesses.

As an overall rating, we have a legitimately Sparky, well executed story that both makes a strength of its reliance on tropes but also doesn’t really escape them. Integrates hacking gameplay and commands as smoothly as one could hope for. And is married to legitimately engaging mini-game play. All of it mostly seamless+.

Played: 9/7/24
Playtime: 1.25hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless+, bonus point for engaging puzzle play
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Is there such thing as pedigree in IF? Actually, is pedigree itself ANYTHING??? Other than a socially imposed privileging system? Wow, got off track there. What I mean to ask is “Scott Adams approved this homage of his work. HOW COOL IS THAT??” Is there anything more rewarding than getting the imprimatur of an artistic inspiration? I feel like Claymorgue has already won … something… and anything we say about it from here is just gravy. Kudos author, and kudos Scott for top-tier menschhood. Just positivity on positivity.

I think it says a alot about the chill, supportive vibe of that whole background that it did not unfairly raise my expectations in any way. The whole thing was so generous and earnest it encouraged me to engage the work in a similar positive spirit. This is a team-investigates-mysterious castle jam. It leverages an underused gameplay design of NPC specialists, who can be employed in their specific areas to solve puzzles. I know I’ve seen it before, but infrequently, and it is a welcome change of pace when I do. It also is fully committed to its pixel-art esthetic and I am here for that. It puts the piece squarely of a time with its inspiration.

Its gameplay is Twinesformer - parser gameplay via link-select UI. This choice necessarily restricts command space in a way that kind of echoes restricted-verb parsers of bygone days, but with more modern link-select chrome. Its presence is, in the context of 2024 IFCOMP, a clear case of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Other 2024 works had me clamoring, clamoring!, for a paned UI paradigm. Along comes Claymorgue and here we go! Was it all I hoped for??

Ehhh, no.The paning did unclutter the transcript portion of the game, that’s a plus. But it broke it into 3 separate panes, on extreme quadrants of the screen, ensuring maximum inconvenience in swiping cursor around. It further compounded inconvenience by requiring a MINIMUM of 4 clicks to get anything done. Character-Verb-Noun-Enter. A default actor and enter-on-noun could have cut that in half in most cases. I’m not in the business of comparisons, but this is NOT what I had in mind. Interacting with the game was, and I take no joy in saying this, a chore.

It was further compromised by implementing a crucial pane as scrolling, with no visual clue that this was true. In at least three cases, information (portable items!) necessary to progress were hidden below the pane bottom, with no indication I should scroll to find them. It was further, further compromised by changing its entry norms for character interaction where selecting a second character works differently than initiating action. All in all, I never stopped fighting the intrusive interface start to finish.

How about underlying (parser adjacent) gameplay? Again, I wanted more. One artifact of Twinesformers is that you have a limited verb roster to select among. This means, often, you need to play a ‘which not-quite-right verb can I contort to get things done?’ game. There are bigger issues though. For one, despite having the ability to highlight interesting nouns (a way to quietly steer the player to areas of interest), the highlighted nouns here were overrun with red herrings. Not just red herrings that you couldn’t interact with, red herrings that gave generic ‘you cannot’ messages, even when just trying to examine them! WHY WERE THEY HIGHLIGHTED IN THE FIRST PLACE??? There are ‘fiddle’ messages, random comments or business from your companions to remind you they are there. These messages are sometimes trivial, sometimes nonsensical, but sometimes read like hints or events that need addressing ASAP! They never are though, which I can attest after many fruitless attempts to engage them.

Puzzle play is similarly challenged. There were puzzles that required you to examine something twice, when the first examine gave NO clue you had not exhausted its value. Other puzzles required you to dawdle in locations for random amounts of time, despite NOTHING interesting to hold your attention there! In a key final puzzle, you needed to have told one character to read things turns ago, THEN read something later, and only if those two unconnected and unhinted things were done, was a final location unlocked.

What I’m saying is, it was unplayable without the walkthrough. I appreciate walkthroughs and/or HINTS in IFCOMP (and generally) as I have a propensity to get off a game’s vibe and struggle. With IFCOMP’s punishing time limit it can be instrumental to get unblocked to see a fuller picture of a work. If my reaction on reading HINT/walkthrough spoiler is “JJ you IDIOT, that puzzle is GENIUS!!” I know I’m in good hands. If my response is “Uh, wot?” … that’s trouble. In a particularly egregious example, the climactic ‘you have won’ text was ONLY present in the walkthrough, it was not presented to me in-game! Without walkthrough, I would not have known the game was over!

So yeah, this was a full two hours of unnecessarily difficult struggle. But. That easy-going, positive vibe? It was EVERYWHERE. In the color text. In character interactions. In room descriptions. In object descriptions (when provided). In discoverable lore documents. As much as I struggled with the gameplay and UI, the prose and the underlying pixel art were just… welcoming. Despite all those good reasons above, I couldn’t stay mad at the game, it continually sparked with earnest good will. Despite it all, I nevertheless felt Sparks of Joy. I’m not a monster.

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished (everyone satisfied) via walkthru
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive ui/gameplay
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

Postscript: I think my favorite moment, which I feel compelled to document, was (Spoiler - click to show)finding detailed instructions to transmute lead into gold. The step-by-step featured a complicated setup, complicated finishing, but whose middle step was “Do the Transmutation.” I laughed long and loud at this. Classic Step 1/Step2/PROFIT!! gag.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

It seems every year there is an entry or two that just catch me so offguard, that are so unabashedly playful and bonkers, that I can’t help but play right along. This is nominally a detective/mystery solving game, but in its blindingly fast playtime displays neither. It cycles through one bananas setup after another, with little regard (until the end) for how they connect. You meet bank robbers, a corp-slave artist and a marginally engaged detective. On the way you get meaningless choices to make, each with snicker-inducing specificity and daffy breadth, where the whole time you are basically white knuckling along a ride that doesn’t seem to care how bad it whipsaws you and is unclear it even knows where it’s going.

But the ride is so zippy and good-natured it kind of doesn’t matter. I feel like I want to give an example, but the work is so short I’m cheating you just a little. I can’t resist, here it is:

(Spoiler - click to show)This case is a dead end. All the contacts are hippies. They’re all probably ‘fishing for trout’ in their private trout-fishing lake.
The criminal Balding wanted to capture had stolen all the angst left in an aging punk drummer. Right before the trial the drummer moved back to Ohio to start a new life. The criminal was freed.

Those are not two separate quotes, just one continuous flow. Don’t even get me started on the wonderfully incoherent sentences that form the UI links! The whole thing makes very little sense, but in the most appealing way possible. By the end, the detective has been engaged by the corpdrone for reasons, and ‘ravens’ have been established as somehow being a connective thread. All of this, as the title suggests, will be worked in a future episode. Yeah, it doesn’t end at all, it just stops. McFly-y-y? It’s a Prologue McFly!

Ordinarily this lack of meaningful choice, lack of clear characterization, lack of narrative throughline or plot and certainly lack of closure would infuriate me. Or disappoint me. Or repel me. But here, the language, the flights of fancy are just SO enjoyable I kinda don’t care about any of that. It was a terrific ride for its short duration. I have only the vaguest of ideas what I just experienced, but am damn sure I will engage the next episode. Yeah, this scattered focus probably can’t sustain an extended multi-chapter mystery. There are signs the threads COULD come together though, and that’s good enough for me. Viva la bizarre!

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 10min, 2 playthroughs, likely 100% of text
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/seamless
Would Play Again?: No, but followon has my attention

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

ONE YEAR LATER

Mc23a: “How are you back here again, time traveling future me? Wait, before you say another word, GIVE ME STOCK TIPS!”
Mc23b: “Wait, look at our names, past me. They’ve changed, we’re no longer pre- and post- McB.”
Mc23a: “Duh doi, I’ve played Dick McButts by now. So those STOCK TIPS…?”
Mc23b: (waving hands impatiently) “But why numbers? What could that…?”

<flash of light>

Mc24: “Hail and well met good me’s!”
Mc23a: “Oh god, we buy fedoras???”
Mc24: “What? No, you can see I’m not…”
Mc23b: “You’re us from further in the future aren’t you?”
Mc24: “Oh I see, no. Time travel is so 2023. No, we’re MULTIVERSAL now. These numbers…”
Mc23b: “Universe identifiers, got it. So your universe?”
Mc24: “One where my IFCOMP24 randomizer put the McButts sequel first, yes. So I’ve played it and you haven’t.”
Mc23a: “We got turned into a douche by a randomizer?”
Mc24: “What? No, I was always, wait, wh… aaaah.”
Mc23b: “The sequel you say? Ok, I admit I was intrigued seeing it in the entries. Is it going to hold up?”
Mc23a: “It’s literally the next game on our list, couldn’t we maybe talk stocks instead?”
Mc24: “What happens when you go to a one joke conceit a second time?”
Mc23a: “Great. Fedora AND Socratic method. You live alone, don’t you?”
Mc23b: (ignoring Mc23a) “Oooh, That’s tough. You kind of have to escalate things or twist things pretty dramatically, don’t you?”
Mc23a: “Why are you humoring him??”
Mc24: (ignoring Mc23a) “Yes, but, what if you don’t?”
Mc23b: “Diminishing returns? I’m starting to see your point, Mc23a.”
Mc23a: “Is there someone else we can talk to?”

<flash of light>

Mc420: (slowly massaging side of face) “Wooah. Dudes. This is too, too trippy.”
Mc24: (peevishly) “I kind of had this.”
Mc23a: “I’m not getting any stock tips, am I?”
Mc23b: “New guy, have you played Rod McShlong?”
Mc420: “Oh fr sure my dude. It was a lark, but didn’t really take off until it technicolor’d in the middle. Like, into a dimension of shlong punching.” (eyes go vacant, considering implications)
Mc24: (miffed) “Yeah, I was getting to that. That was the most fun part of it.”
Mc240: “I mean the gags were solid, right in line with McButts.”
Mc23a: “I can’t help but think stock tips are a better use of…”
Mc23b: “Solid but not escalating?”
Mc420: (thinking way too hard before…) “Yeah I guess so. But that trippy center part was the tits.”
Mc24: “I can see where that might land harder in… his universe.”
Mc23b: “Hm, yeah. Anyone else we can talk to?”
Mc24: “I’m still here!”

<flash of light>

Mc69: “Hey guys, we talking Rod McSchlong?” (waggles eyebrows)
Mc23a, 23b, 24: (in unison) “NOPE!”

<exit in flash of light>

Mc420: “Hold it! Everyone STOP! STOP! Rod? ROD MCSHLONG?!?!?” (giggles uncontrollably)

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 20min, 1 win, 9 ‘losses’
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/mostly Seamless, bonus for midpoint graphical experimentation
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Full disclosure: I am a Beta tester for the game this work is a prelude to. Meaning, this is not my first introduction to these characters and this world. (It isn’t yours either if you played Creative Cooking or The The Portrait)

This cheekily-named piece is doing a lot of table-setting work, both in world building and character and relationship building. Its interactivity is minimal, primarily of the information-exploration variety, cast here (initially) as the protagonist’s wandering mind during an eventful day. It is more short story than game, its links of a page-turning variety.

As a short story, it is burdened by the demands of lore dump. Ultimately, I think, overburdened. If it were me, I think I might have split this into two separate works: world background in one and interpersonal drama in the other. Each of these components has an arc to describe with dramatic crescendos and my sense is allowing each to breathe on its own would be a more satisfying experience than muddling them together. Not the least of which because the super, super non-vanilla fantasy world envisioned here is so… singular. It takes a LOT of oxygen. Too there are narrative decisions that in isolation might be more digestible, but when compounded on each other strain even the most willful attempts to play along.

The setup is a young elf’s (sidebar - ok, I know, when elves come up, I historically froth maniacally against their anti-dwarf racism and overall superciliousness. If nothing else, this world’s elves have so far admirably challenged my OWN biases)… where was I? Right, protagonist is a young elf entering magic school. As a world building conceit this allows a few things: 1) to detail how magic works; 2) to provide some social history of the world via a ‘welcome address’; and 3) to provide a flavor of its pan-species population. Their introduction is the same as ours, a welcome address.

I can hear you whining away out there. “Oh man, an in-story lecture? The info-dumpiest of info-dumps!” Well yes, but the narrative choice to focus the lecture on physical artifacts and first-person flashback accounts mitigates a lot of that. It provides immediacy and stakes to what could be cold history recitation. Rather than droningly relating “Alamazix begat Byrrrhana begat Chatham begat…” we are treated to two dramatic anecdotes that summarize the formative conflict of the world… 10,000 years ago.

Ok, Utopian world building (cause that’s what this is), has a serious challenge for non-Utopian audiences. We know how miserable societies can be, and we have seen any number of promised Utopias impaled on the twin spikes of time and human nature. In about 5000 years of recorded history. In that time innumerable societies have risen and fallen, and never for being TOO GOOD. We need to be convinced that such a thing is possible AT ALL, nevermind over an extended period of time, by implicitly refuting the lessons of our own history. Now compound that challenge by reflecting on how something 10,000 years old could even be relevant today, let alone defining. Strangeness (and boy do we have that in spades here!) is the best tool available. Yes, long-lived mortals shrink the march of time, that’s one help. Living memory is a powerful (though as the 2024 US election shows, somehow not powerful enough) sustaining force. If we had just a little extra push… maybe (Spoiler - click to show)Magic Breast Milk??? It’s so crazy it JUST… MIGHT… WORK!

As wild as this world’s lore is, of which my spoilered three word summary only scratches the surface, it nevertheless helps bridge that cynical gap. Its shock value to modern sensibilities is an asset here, rocking us from our smug cynicism with a cold slap of 'WTF?'. It is even more powerful once you get past the shock value and digest it metaphorically. (heh, digest.) A ritual recreation at about the halfway point nearly manages that impossible task, and notwithstanding quite a few melodramatic quibbles is the strongest crescendo of the piece. This should have been the narrative climax of a standalone work.

It wasn’t. That first climax leaves us off balance in this very metaphysical, very sexual, very utopian world. The work has successfully used shock value and dramatic crescendo to get us over the hump. Rather than let us settle into place, consolidate our gains and regain our equilibrium, it instead piles on additional leaps and shocks, each more rushed, less earned and so less dramatic than the one before. The core thruple’s meet cute, (Spoiler - click to show)Special Magical Destiny and (Spoiler - click to show)Hidden Eternal Bond are really just too much, for one sitting at least. These pretty big revelations get nowhere near the buildup as that first one, and are presented at an escalating pace that we have no chance to get comfortable with.

All this would be helped, I think, by separating into two stories. Establish the background in the first, including the capstone ritual. In the second, focus on student life and allow the thruple’s romance to blossom and bloom. THEN introduce revelations. Stand on a cured, hardened bedrock of established lore for that second story, rather than molding all the clay at once. For me, the formulation we are given improbably generated Sparks with its bonkers world building and legit first climax. The continual piling on of rushed Revelations after that just pushed me back from Engagement.

Now, the above reviews the piece purely as a standalone work of IF/short story. Dramatically I think it overburdens itself against that goal. But what if, as seems exceedingly likely, that is not the goal at all? What if the goal is purely and simply to lay the groundwork for the work that follows, to allow IT to focus more narrowly on its narrative aims? Provide that bedrock to build off of? Maybe it is accomplishing exactly what it needs to do in service of the author’s vision for the next work.

Played: 9/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable translation artifacts
Would Play Again?: No, except maybe for scientific research

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is a sprawling work that is doing a LOT. The word I keep coming back to is ‘unfocused’ though, and I think it has to do both with how much it is trying, and how those things play off each other. Here is a laundry list of elements at play here:

.zombie apocalypse
.corrosive preconceptions
.marginalized populations, and socio-political aggressions
.audio acting(!)
.safe space creation and policing
.inter-generational aggression
.family loss

All of these things ricochet around the narrative, caroming off each other, as often as not to cross purposes rather than building to something.

The piece opens with an underplayed ‘zombie apocalypse’ sweeping the planet. Our core cast of characters then proceed to basically treat it like background noise to their lives of creative pursuits and online community. The thorough and complete disconnect from the world around them, and lack of consequences in that world!, put me in the mind of the cast of Seinfeld. Deeply self-absorbed people, impervious to the outside world in the cocoon of their own drama. Notwithstanding the walking dead, one character wanders aimlessly outside, looking for photo ops. Another lets his daughter play in the neighborhood! An early scene in a supermarket establishes the perceived threat, but makes no impression on any of the main cast beyond ‘did you see the news?’.

The world itself seems to be adjacent to our own, except that surprisingly dog-/cat-/and snail- people exist. But so do dogs that are only pets! I guess in this world that’s just the way it is, but MAN does that open so many wormy cans that go unexamined. Nothing is done narratively with this by the way, it just is.

The online community itself, an enclave of high school friends and acquaintances who all found artistic outlets and non-mainstream sexual identity journeys, reinforces this disconnect at every turn. As society is presumably in turmoil, they are preoccupied with reconnecting, establishing their journeys, and policing a not-quite-empathic-enough member. Yes, his transgression is clumsy. But it is hard to believe as a longtime member of this community that this is either a) his first transgression or b) that he hasn’t absorbed norms by being corrected before now. Instead it generates great drama, ECLIPSING THE ACTUAL APOCALYPSE. This presages an exchange between the protagonist and the MOST generous, MOST sympathetic NPC where the PC reveals their sexual identity, then reacts really intensely to the confused response.

Before I wander further onto that VERY thin ice, let me sidebar about gameplay/interactivity. The choices are really two varieties: exploration and protagonist character building. Depending on how generous/enthusiastic/wounded/angry you choose to play, you are building a character in your head. As far as I can tell, there is no impact to plot in these choices, though that is definitely not a criticism. Similarly, your explorations are either geographical, or whom you choose to IM. For the most part, you get one explore, one IM, a group interaction (where you shade responses) and a similar 1-1 facetime for ~10 days of gameplay spread out over months of narrative time. The exploration is interesting, and provides some latitude to privilege some interactions over others. The heavy lifting though is in pure character build.

Ok ice, here I come. The chance this ends with a cold dunking is very high. After some collaborative protag character building, we reveal that they are aroace (not a spoiler, in the blurb!). Our most sympathetic NPC responds, conveying their emotional loss at that revelation. Is that a great response? No obviously, they did take the fraught revelation and make it about them. The resonance with the previous episode casts the most sympathetic character in the same role as the oblivious deplorable. On the one hand, this demonstrates that no one is immune to empathy blind spots which is certainly an insightful message. On the other, it seems to enshrine indiscriminate righteous anger as a the corrective tool of choice. Isn't that just an exhausting social prescription? Is there no other way to engage this? I am ill equipped to critique this as a character beat, but as a resonant narrative choice it really grated on me.

I can hear the ice cracking under my feet. The Awful Right has this narrative that ‘wokeness’ is nothing more than a ‘cancel-happy gotcha machine.’ Because these are the only incidents we see, and because the perpetrators are SO different, this work inadvertently plays into this toxic narrative.

That apparent dissonance was compounded by another plot development. At one point you have opportunity to meet a character who tells you, in no uncertain terms, they want no interactions, please go away. If you ignore them and revisit anyway, you are thanked for getting them ‘out of their shell.’ (Lol, that’s funny for reasons). You see the issue? You are explicitly asked to respect a character’s choices, violate their wishes, then are thanked for it??? How is this not a GREATER transgression than what was so dramatically escalated above? Yet is REWARDED?? On the one hand, I think this is a very subtle and effective nod at the complexity of these issues where people sometimes get trapped in their own mind. On the other, that very complexity requires MORE grace, not less, and makes the above stark condemnation even worse!

Hey, we’re barely halfway through this. WHOO! This water is cold.

So that zombie apocalypse? Turns out it’s fine, actually. Yeah, there are now zombies in the world, but no worries. They seemingly don’t eat people anymore? And now zombies are a repressed population, drawing ire of reactionary right dickheads? Sounds about right. Our core cast is suddenly MUCH more engaged in this (not the least of which via a neat twist where one’s brother is left zombified). There is a lot of social business that gets observed and then resolved, but our core cast is not really involved except as spectators, one of whom has big stakes in the matter. As a story arc it was interesting but backgrounded enough that it failed to engage. There are also SO many unanswered questions that really muddy the waters. Do zombies eat people? Seems like they did at some point. Can they ‘turn’ others against their will? Seems like they did at some point. These questions corrode the situation enough that there’s a lot more grey than the narrative acknowledges and instead kind of hand waives away, leaving the player at a loss.

There is also the matter of the protag’s mom. An aggressive ‘no, you are my SON’ shrew of a woman, swallowing the Awful Right party line so hard (Spoiler - click to show)it literally kills her. She is portrayed as irredeemable and unpleasant and I pretty immediately avoided her like the plague. When she develops health issues, the game suddenly got real. She was no less irredeemable, arguably more so by denying the evidence of her eyes. But, as protag, my choices suddenly became much more constrained. Leaving her to her own devices, which might have been my first choice, was not an option. Above, I decried authorial choice steering that made the protag react in ways I did not believe in. The crucial difference here is, the limited choice in this scenario was not only COMPLETELY BELIEVABLE, it was a powerful use of interactivity to drive home the awful complexity of these toxic relationships. Lack of true choice was a powerful narrative tool that made me understand and empathize with the protag MORE, not less. I found this entire sequence difficult, complex, infuriating and powerfully realized. It was the showcase sequence of the work, I think.

So, where does this leave me? A patchwork of dramatic preoccupations that narratively, with one very notable exception, missed more than hit. I kept coming back to the question ‘why zombie apocalypse? It is mishandled so often, why is that even in the narrative at all?’ Then it occurred to me. What if I treat the world of this work as PURE metaphor, not story at all? Holy crap do things open up then. Animal beings become a broad range of perplexing humanity our only duty is to accept as is. Online communities become echo chambers that can be equal parts supporting and blindering.

The zombies become a masterstroke of genius. The concept of ‘zombie’ is pretty universal at this point, beyond mechanical details. As a consumer of pop culture, we bring all those preconceptions to the table. As I reflect, it occurs to me the NARRATIVE does not confirm zombies’ threat, it is us (and their world) that ASSUMES it. So later, any inclinations we have to question zombie personhood comes from a place of preconception and prejudice. What a powerful, amazing choice! It puts the reader squarely in the difficult place of having to combat their own prejudices! While I rebel at the narrative storyline of the zombies, the METAPHOR is an incredible, subversive choice. It also retroactively forgives some character choices that do not presume flesh eating.

As a story, the work was too all over the map for me, with too many jarring, baffling, and unconvincing choices. (And one searingly effective plot point.) As a metaphorical construct to challenge the player, it positively sings. It also opens up what I feel is its crowing allusion: that the zombie apocalypse is NOT about zombies themselves! It is about surrendering to the shittiest side of our nature. THAT is the real apocalypse. Unlike most zombie fiction, we’re not just the worst part of the apocalypse, WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE ITSELF.

Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1.5hr
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging beats in parent storyline and metaphor, offset by bouncy beats elsewhere, average to Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless outside audio
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

I would be negligent if I didn't address the audio acting, but I really think I can’t top that final line. So think of this as an appendix.
On balance, I think the audio detracts more than enhances. Like timed text, it has the effect of making the player (who has already read the page) wait for the game to catch up, with the attendant impatience that can generate. There are definitely some great performances, highlighted by the insufficiently empathic friend Nekoni, but the lack of ambient background sound (when warranted) further detracts from the overall effect. Newsroom, crowd, workplace, etc settings make it glaringly obvious when background noise is missing. It is also distracting when the text notes a beeping sound absent from the soundtrack! Lastly, the mix seemed a bit off. In particular the volume difference between Laz and Nekoni went from barely audible to quite loud, and was jarring.

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I think I respond to a murder mystery like I do pizza or sex. Even when it’s not that great, it’s still pretty great. The intersection of human drama and intellectual puzzle is just a time tested winner. Arguably, while it took a few years, those same impulses power large swaths of IF as a whole. I will say, this one challenged itself with some first impressions that gave up a lot of ground it would have to recover.

It opens with a view of a murder. So specific a view, it seemed to pretty definitively narrow the suspect pool (and motive space!) with out-of-character knowledge. As a ‘you-solve-it’ this was a wild choice I still don’t understand and am not sure the work loses anything by dropping. The second early misstep was in the setup: an FBI rookie, fresh out of the academy, flying solo on her first case. Don’t they pretty famously partner those folks up? For LOTS of reasons? Strike two.

The third strike was leaning into a ‘die roll v attribute’ tabletop paradigm. I have a quibble with this mechanism, including on the table. When testing things an rpg merely simulates, say swordsmanship, sure, roll away. Probability is a big numbers game, have at it. Mysteries only KIND of do that. They are more cerebral, more explicitly testing player ability to connect dots and form theories. Making a die roll in that kind of thing both reduces player initiative and introduces an unwelcome guest to the thinking party - random chance. Do you notice the clue? <die roll> Nope. How about the next one? <die roll> Bad luck, no again. Yes you have RPG-like stats to deploy to swing the odds but no guarantees. This mechanism raises the prospect that through no fault of your own, the fates will not provide enough data. That flies in the face of the cold, logical underpinnings of murder mysteries! And BOY does that impression loom large over every failed die roll. Yeah, I understand probability and big numbers but I NEED THAT FOOTPRINT!!!

Fortunately for KiW at three strikes in, the rules of baseball allow for, I wanna say, five strikes? Five strikes. After digging a hole for itself, the actual investigation started. Here, we just smoothly shifted to a new gear and never looked back. There is a very useful map highlighting the geography and clue locations that updates with the investigation. You interview lots of folks, suffer lots of die rolls and generally start assembling the picture. It’s not a full strike, maybe a foul ball, but I do wish location text varied after the first visit. Continually seeing the same introductory text for two straight days chipped at immersion and would be easily fixed by {if (first visit) else (default) } type coding. Even so, the choices started logically, then bloomed over time into a large web of possible connections (and red herrings) to untangle. NPCs were simple yet believably distinct, events transpired with clear motivations and consequences, it was just solidly constructed. It’s not perfect. Some failed die rolls block clue paths that you CLEARLY could just call someone else to help with, but at this point progress was assured enough that the misses grated less. More importantly, as the implacable hand of big numbers asserted itself I did get disconnected clues to wrestle with. Before I knew it, my decrying of die rolls had cycled from irritation with the mechanism to full on engagement in the mystery.

It rewarded my engagement. The mystery was a satisfying procedural romp that seemed to have multiple paths to solve, and to be at least first-order resistant to bad die rolls. I do wonder had I chosen a more physical protagonist, given the die rolls laid out for me, would their path have been as resilient? Maybe the challenges presented are tuned to the investigator in some way to ensure fairness? As a one-solution mystery I’ll probably never know. Certainly the physical rolls I uncovered were statistically small enough to make that a concern.

By the end, I had developed a solid enough theory but had acted more deliberately than urgently (Spoiler - click to show)and people paid the cost. This was a cool and legitimate outcome of my approach! I did manage to solve it (puffs chest) despite my die roll misgivings. I had climbed, however tentatively out of the first impressions hole it had dug into a really good time, capstoned with earned accomplishment. I just wish I hadn’t labored so long under the shadow of those first impressions to really enjoy the ride start to finish. As it was, I will have to split the difference between Sparks and Engaging.

Since I opened with a sex metaphor, then segued into a baseball one, I have a question. What is the sexual equivalent of fifth base? There’s five of those too, right?

Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 45m, 5/5 solved as Negotiator
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy->Engaged/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

ALRIGHT! A horror-themed, noir-adjacent investigation jam! About TIME we got one of these!

Notwithstanding that snarky opening, I am in fact quite positively disposed to this genre. If not QUITE as rare as the above paragraph intimates. You are one of 3 investigators in a vampire-politics world, charged with maintaining a semblance of human-vampire peace. By whom? Unclear. Resourced and staffed by? Uncertain. Relative authority in the shadow world? Unspecified. This slipperiness of setup is actually not a problem, at least not ALWAYS a problem, as a stage-setting infodump would be far worse. Its lack of detail often allows us to assume the best, or hand wave gaps, to keep things bubbling.

Before we get there, let’s talk characters. You get to choose to play one of three. I chose the “Hollow, Seasoned, Stubborn” one. What? Don’t read too much into that. This put me in media res into an investigation of a previously captured vampire that had transgressed through inexperience. Already though, there was a disconnect. The illustration topping the page seemed of a young person, clearly not me, so I assumed must have been the charge I was investigating. Nope! This grizzled, ex-cop, ‘too old for this…’ curmudgeon looked all of 19. Ok, vamps don’t age physically but background suggested I was a cop BEFORE turning. That was a dissonance with the piece.

Here’s another dissonance. The link-select paradigm produced what I believe to be an unintended consequence. Like a lot of links, it was bolded and underlined to convey its UI purpose. It was ALSO almost always the last sentence on the page. Reading a bolded, underlined sentence conveys a weight, an import to those words. THESE WORDS HAVE MEANING, READER! Here, read these two passages and see how they play differently in your head:

“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”
“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”

Right? You can HEAR the swelling musical DUN DUN sting! Now, imagine that on EVERY PAGE. It quickly establishes a rhythm in your head, an offputting one of the narrative throwing import at you, so often unearned. It is hard to overstate how distracting this becomes by the end. I think, textually speaking, the work would have been better served by a simple > prompt or somesuch at the end of a page rather than distort the text itself. Even a different color without highlighting markup might be less intrusive and still serve the UI purpose.

The last dissonance I want to observe is plot-execution-based. Despite its mostly obscured nature, when the operation of the detective agency WAS detailed, it was unconvincing. In an early sequence, the third playable character, a young vampire, (Spoiler - click to show)is turned to an undercover agent. This turn was ill-justified and unconvincing in the text. The reasons AGAINST the development were well established, then summarily discarded seemingly with a shrug. The fact that my character, the grizzled-seen-it-all ex-cop, took this turn at face value despite GREAT reasons not to… I didn’t buy it. The fact that it never paid off later kind of made it worse. Then to GIFT this (Spoiler - click to show)new recruit with a uniform known far and wide as the organization’s calling card… (Spoiler - click to show)TO AN UNDERCOVER AGENT??? Later, during a climactic confrontation, a fight scene seemingly depended on antagonists standing stock still while the protagonists executed increasingly complex moves. The work was peppered with details like this that just didn’t land.

I have gotten the negatives out of the way, and since many of them showed up early, I can’t say I was ever truly engaged in the work. (Well, except… I’ll get there.) That said, there were as many or more positive details I simply loved, not the least of which was the character of my PC and another playable agent, Declan. They had agency, voice, awesome personalities and showed admirable competence more often than not. Legitimately interesting character creations.

Another strength was the in media introductions of other organizations and their casual conflict/intersection with our heroes. This was employed as an effective way to embiggen the world, and often with just enough detail to entice and not too much to draw questions. I particularly liked the bureaucratic incompetence of the California branch.

These treats, enjoyable as they were, were to be eclipsed by a midpoint scene that rocked me out of my ossifying impressions. To that point in the story there had been a lowkey connection between two characters, one I had been nurturing when presented with choices to do so. It exploded into a scene of such incredible emotional nuance I literally sat straighter in my chair as I devoured it. It EASILY could have been stock mutual confessions set to swelling music. Instead, it honored both characters (and my prior choices), and presented a bittersweet emotional realism and earned drama the work had not telegraphed it was capable of. The prose was note perfect. It flashed then removed choice links, tantalizing me with what could have been, but wasn’t. What a powerful use of IF that was! I honestly mentally slow clapped by the end of the scene. It was powerful, compelling and landed like gangbusters. It was immediately followed by an abstract ‘passage of time’ sequence that was almost as affecting, and a joy to read. These two sections, back to back, minimized all my prior complaints. If I hadn’t been taking notes, it could have flushed them from my head. How much was the unique product of my choices v authorial hand I couldn’t say, but I DO say that sequence, at least temporarily, rocketed me into true engagement.

The climax fell short of that height, but in the afterglow of that super effective scene I was a lot more forgiving. I did restart the game to play again as the other well-defined character, but quickly realized the plot wasn’t going to change, and it was hard to justify a second playthrough. That said, that gift of an emotional scene well justified the play.


Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1hr as Lynette, 15min as Declan
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

This presents as a graphically handsome choice-select, of the (Spoiler - click to show)choices don’t matter subgenre. Like most of this genre, its effectiveness comes down to its thematic resonance and its use of interactivity to enhance that. These works typically flirt openly with devolution to short fiction, which is not as prejudicial as it sounds.

I found the interactivity here effective when it leapt beyond the page-turning-link default. Presenting illusory choice, click-to-continue as a way to convey the tension of forced progress were both used effectively, if sparingly. They ably underscored the central point of the work - and the protagonist’s duress.

The theme I found a little too light. Its most obvious interpretation seemed to be of (Spoiler - click to show)a home-schooled vegetarian child with aggressively contrarian parents, with all the deep and despairing angst that scenario produces. There were some interesting comparisons drawn between software constructs and life in this state that were a highlight for me. The education level there did call into question a young child’s experiences and maybe pointed to a more sinister (paranormal question mark?) adult situation. It was all left so unclear and implicit though, that any number of interpretations could fit. Clearly the player is aligned with the protagonist, and meant to feel the despair and coercion. Coercion bad, right?! It also felt… overly dramatic? In a way that spoke to perhaps some immaturity of the protagonist?

I did a mental exercise. What if the coercion in question was vegetables, broccoli say, with the protagonist determined to eat nothing but twinkies. The angst and despair of a young PC would still feel completely of a piece and would require almost no changes to text. But boy would it change the theme of the piece, no? Look, I am absolutely NOT drawing an equivalence between vegetarian ethics and immaturity. I am saying that the theme here was unfocused enough to allow both interpretations and by extension that distasteful connection. The work’s heightened melodrama, coupled with the spare underlying details, called its premise into question in a way that was kind of interesting but begged all kinds of questions it couldn’t answer. And it was certainly undermining to the narrative presented.

Ultimately, this disconnect was too great to move me beyond a mechanical engagement with the piece. Ambiguity in art is very interesting, if that ambiguity swirls around a core central theme. Ambiguity OF that theme is not as compelling, and can drive some actively objectionable connections.

Played: 9/2/24
Playtime: 5 min
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

(Get it? Cause Shane is a famous Western...? How did I get this far up my own butt?)

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I have taken to calling this “link-select UI on otherwise parser-based gameplay” stripe of game “Twinesformer.” I am resigned to not being able to make ‘fetch’ happen, but am too enamored of it to drop it. This may be the most intricate version of this paradigm I have yet encountered. Deep parser constructs like “attach to…” “put in…” “pour on…” are provisioned here. A vast array of nouns are available in most locations and conversation trees. This is a two edged sword. On the one hand, it successfully mitigates one criticism of this style: ‘lawn mowering’ all possible command combinations to get a result. The command space is so large, and includes enough clearly incorrect combinations to cast doubt that it is worthwhile to try.

On the other hand, in order to provision all those combinations it takes, 3,4,5 clicks to build the commands you would type into a command prompt in a fraction of the time. Maybe a tablet/phone player would find some economy here, but anyone with a keyboard will chafe at these decisions. The UI is implemented as a semi-standard NAV block, inventory block, command expansion line, and system command block. Unlike other implementations of this, it is printed inline to the transcript and is just dynamic enough to require a full read every time. Often requiring searching lists of text for the noun you want. Meaning its layout regularity does not turn into command efficiency. If I could make one recommendation, it would be to put this ‘control’ section in a static pane away from the transcript. That would go a long way to reducing the clumsiness of it.

The story is a comedically engaging one - you are an Old West gunslinger’s sidekick, whose task is keep your charge alive and on task ridding a town of baddies, fighting his unearned confidence every step of the way. It is a tried and true formula, and the setup here is capably rendered. The local color NPCs are amusingly portrayed, for all their terseness. The environment and scenarios are pleasantly silly and occasionally laugh out loud funny. It is a great playground, economically established.

It does feel though, that the vibe it is striving for is at war with its gameplay. The ‘help’ command generated real dread when it revealed the presence of two benighted old-school tropes: unwinnable states and inventory management. Are these ever fun? Ok, unwinnable states has its defenders, but I am DECIDEDLY not one of them. There was at least a mode option to inform you the moment the game became unwinnable, which I appreciated. I instead played ‘standard’ mode, a deliberate choice to give the game opportunity to try and convince me of unwinnability’s merits. It did not, but to be fair, the scenarios themselves telegraphed their unwinnable decisions well enough that ‘UNDO’ was usually pretty obvious. There were also some insta-deaths that were funny enough to mitigate any frustration. Even so, I can’t escape just how often I was clicking ‘UNDO.’ Yes, much less onerous than a restart. Still well short of fun.

Let me scratch a bit at these unwinnable states. One inescapable feature of this gameplay choice is that the player will revisit, sometimes often, flavor and setting text. When that text is cold and concise, it kind of disappears into the problem solving focus. When it has personality and humor, for me anyway, it devolves into a grim reminder of the fun I COULD be having, instead of retracing old ground, over and over.

There is another way the game commits to its old school vibe - hiding things around town expecting the player to find and pick them up, with their use only becoming clear waay down the road. This is a perfectly legit and time-tested approach. However, it ALSO becomes baffling when confronted with the puzzle that needs them, but no text hinting what might be needed. Ie, if you didn’t already FIND the magic thing, you won’t have any idea it’s even available, let alone necessary to solve the puzzle. The text did no work to point you to missing possibilities. So you try so so many ill-fated and unsupported things. And then UNDO repeatedly. Add some timers to those puzzles and it can be many iterations before you realize you don’t have what you need. It is no exaggeration to say UNDO was, by FAR, my most utilized command. In retrospect, perhaps I should have consulted the walkthrough sooner, but it does speak to the piece’s strengths that I chose not to for so long.

So what we have is a delightfully engaging setting, chock-a-block with wry humor (and surprisingly cold, and funny for it, deaths), married to a PUNISHING gameplay paradigm and clunky UI. There are infrequent but notable bugs: “since the itself fills most of the space”; “There’s currently You are here.”; a donkey that follows you even if its enticement is not present. These are notable, but not overly intrusive in and of themselves, though the latter definitely falls into an ‘absent magic item’ puzzle category.

In the end, for me, the amusing prose and setting could not escape those contrary gameplay choices. And I didn’t even talk about the deeply unrewarding inventory management click-drudge. Lots of bouying Sparks, but too many notably intrusive counterweights dragging it down. And so, so, …so…so

…SO much UNDO.

Played: 9/1/24
Playtime: 2hr, score 3/17
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable UI and gameplay fighting
Would Play Again?: No, saturated on UNDO

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is about as close to a bare metal parser as you can imagine. In an undefined space, with two undefinable objects, get out! Gameplay here is the key, the focus being on experimenting with the almost-nothing you are presented with to determine the rules and ‘reality’ of the scenario. It’s language is kind of belligerently, hilariously unhelpful, striding a line of meaninglessness and JUST enough nuance to tickle your logic ganglia. For me, the language started as frustrating, but almost immediately became a strength of the work. It is doing WAY more than raw word count might indicate.

I haven’t played many of these “experiment to find rules of the world” games, but the ones I HAVE played have often been more baroque and frustrating than rewarding. Maybe it was the scope of this one, maybe the engineering of its feedback and soft wording, but this really hit a sweet spot for me. Just opaque enough to be mysterious, just responsive enough to reward experimentation. The solution was very much in reach, in just a few moves. I was kind of flabbergasted at a sudden ah-hah moment only to realize that was the end of the game!

What do I do with this? Probably because of its opacity, the moments of clue revelation provided a legitimate charge of joy, almost immediately segueing into triumphant conclusion. Its word choice was just about perfect for its conceit. Those were undeniable Sparks this work elicited from me. And yet, because of its brevity, that was really ALL it offered. I didn’t have enough time to ramp into Engaged. It was a seamless implementation, and yeah its brevity helped make that manageable, but I have seen plenty of short works that couldn’t wring out their technical issues, so still noteworthy.

I got a charge out playing it for sure. Its brevity means it is impossible to be a waste of your time. But its modest goals were also kind of …insubstantial? My white hot triumph almost immediately faded to “that’s it?” And then, “what’s next?”

That’s fine, though, right? We eat M&Ms too!

Played: 9/1/24
Playtime: 5 min, escaped
Artistic/Technical Ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Why does anyone do this reviewing thing? No one reason, obviously. For me it started as a simple impulse: to try to give something back to the community in advance of asking it to consider my own efforts. It quickly got a lot more complicated. It turns out that the prospect that my words might help someone refine their art gives me hope that I have more to offer than raw snark and good intentions. Underpinning a lot of it is admiration for the medium and the artists that continue to transform it beyond anything dreamt of in the early days. There is so much negativity in the modern age, an opportunity to find things to gush about makes me just a little more resilient and centered.

So yeah, it’s all about me.

The common thread to this miasma of feelings is connecting with the work of another human, then further connecting with humans that have also explored that connection. So. What does this mean in the encroaching age of generative AI? This is a work that embraces new technologies to produce art, acknowledging its debt to automation to produce text. But most IF, especially parser IF, IS text. Where does human authorship stop, and machine authorship begin? Is there a line where machine authorship reduces the human part of the art? At what point am I inadvertently connecting with machine? And why on earth, given the things that motivate me to hammer out words for you, would I want to do that?

There is an argument of ‘so what? What does it matter if the work makes you feel something?’ Ok, fine. But what if it doesn’t? What if the words are capably rendered, the scenario clearly and adequately painted, but ultimately just flat? Then what? If authorship were unambiguously human, I would endeavor to show where and how that impression developed or missed the mark. But if it is because machine? I have NO interest in providing feedback to a machine that in the best case, has no way to digest my observations, and in the worst makes itself BETTER at a human endeavor I wish it weren’t involved in in the first place.

This is a Greek Myth IF, where as the titular protagonist you are asked to free your god brethren by solving IF puzzles. Last few years there was a spate of art that recontextualized and transformed Greek Myth in fascinating and revitalizing ways. This is not that, this is a pretty straight-ahead representation. Find some trapped gods, solve puzzles, on to the next. The gods themselves have no particular character or personality hooks, no neat twists, and rarely escape their familiar lore. If fact, if NOT for that lore their characterization would be nearly non-existent. How much of that is AI, and how much author choice? It certainly seemed to be missing a spark of some kind.

It isn’t helped that the gameplay is demanding in the least satisfying way. Early on, the difference between traditional cardinal directions, ‘go to,’ and ‘sail to’ is unclear. Its nouns are wildly uneven in their implementation - meaning most small details respond with ‘you see no.’ This trains you not to poke too deep. Until some puzzles REQUIRE deep dive into nouns no more or less prominent than their neighbors. NPCs, arguably the MOST human-adjacent aspects of IF, are similarly completely shallow (dare I say, robotic?). They have information to impart, but with almost no character voice of their own. Interactions outside that functional purpose generate a ‘you get no response’ Even when asking about, say, a trapped spouse they have just asked you to find!

The effect of all this is to highlight the mechanical moving parts at the expense of idiosyncrasy and unique human voice. Then to try to hide those parts behind capable text that more obfuscates than enthralls. The combination of all that is that puzzles are much harder than they should be - depending on if you poked at the right noun or not. It was pretty clear what needed doing in most cases, but the mechanics of finding missing pieces to do them were obtuse. In one case I literally turned rings to a near-random combination and it worked. In another I waited until the solution presented itself, just waited. The combination of obtuse yet also anti-climatic was off putting for me.

It also hit what seems a pretty big bug. Per the text in one location, both the Agora of Thebes and Mount Olympus were N. Going N though took you to an empty location. I think this made the game unwinnable (intrusive if not unplayable, per my rubric), as a pair of gods needed to complete your rescue were clued as being there. I spammed some commands just to see if I could power past to no avail.

I’m not thrilled that my first review of COMP24 comes across so negative. There is every possibility that being told AI was involved colored my response, I leave that to the reader to decide. There is every possibility that the work’s shortcomings have nothing to do with AI at all, and just needed more refinement. Between the flatness of the scenario and characters, and uneven puzzle implementation I guess I would RATHER attribute these things to AI. For sure, I want more humanity in my art!

Jeez, first game of Comp, and I am spiraling into existential angst and techno-paranoia. Buckle up folks, I’m turning into a curmudgeon before your eyes!

Played: 9/1/24
Playtime: 2hrs, score 30/maybe 90? (4 gods rescued)
Artistic/Technical Ratings: Mechanical/Intrusive Implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, engage IF for different thrills

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