Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/11/23
Playtime: 20min, finished as prizefighter

When I first found Adventure Snack in IFComp, I went bananas. What a lovely thing to exist in this world. Bite size IF for the busy guy/gal on the go. YPATDL is very much on brand. It is a pretty stripped down hog farm simulator, with post apocalyptic flavor in the tasks (like shoveling toxic dung or Road Warrioring). (I promised new verbs.) You have more tasks than you can complete in a day, but rudimentary prioritization schemes seem to work just fine in keeping the oinkers happy until you can figure out what you want to do next with your life. In my case, apparently, fight in death matches.

The text is consistently fun and light, more bemused chuckle than belly laugh. The graphical presentation is nicely informal. The algorithm is pretty forgiving with only slight time management tension. It appears, based on what you prioritize that you might get different end game careers. And then it’s done! I feel like an extended review a) would miss the point of these things and b) would be less successful than Adventure Snack itself in navigating the value/time equilibrium.

Adventure Snack indeed. So far, every one I have encountered (YPATDL included) is a testament to Oscar Wilde’s ‘brevity is soul of wit’ observation. It is impossible to begrudge even the goofiest premise or constrained gameplay when it is so deeply, and wryly, respectful of your time. The word I want is impish.

“Adventure Snack: what’ll those scamps get up to next?”

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! What would I do if this were my project? I mean, clearly start working on the next Snack.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/5/23
Playtime: 20 min, finished 76%

Off to the races! Using a personal randomizer for Spring Thing, and it did right by me. Great game to launch the Thing with. BMUS is a wryly funny word game. It’s what happens at a pitch meeting when 8 people are brainstorming, and seven say “Whatever we do, we have to avoid Guess-the-Verb. People hate that.” Then the eighth says, “Team, I got it! The game IS Guess the Verb!” I am just giddy at the subversive audacity.

Ultimately it is a word game/vocabulary test. But if a spoonful of sugar famously helps the medicine go down, what does a cascading deluge of sugar do? Makes you cackle like a rooster in a madhouse is what. You launch from one terse absurdist scenario to another with the perfect amount of lubricating text: almost none. And you guess the verb. All you know is, it starts with B.

The tone is just perfect for this game. It opens with over-the-top exaggerated denial of the obvious that builds on itself recklessly. I am a sucker for blithe denial of the obvious when it’s not being used to corrode democracy. Then it smoothly shifts gears to serially casting NOT familiar characters into absurd scenarios, all to wring that B-verb out of you. I wasn’t counting, but you get 10-15 of these and you’re done!

This game knows exactly what it is, clicks along crisply, delivers the chuckles, and finishes without overstaying. Like an appetizer at a 5 star restaurant - it’s gone in a moment, but lovely while it lasts.

Only a few notes on polish: I found early inclusion of images set a graphical expectation the rest of the game did not deliver on. Would strive for a more consistent application: more or none. Really dug the combination of hyper links and parser input. Also liked the text color fading for older input and bright for new, though in a few instances the new text faded with the old. Would have gone with icons instead of loose “I” (inventory) “L” (look) and “U” (undo) letters in the corner. Nits really, a really smooth presentation.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful.
Polish: Smooth.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I would focus on making failure more fun. The PASS capability is nice, keeps things from dragging which would be death for this thing. In one instance, I failed to guess, hit pass, and the transition text obliquely let me know what it was I failed to guess. It brought a knowing laugh at myself - of course that was the word, dummy! It seemed very much in the spirit of the game but I did not see that again. (Yes, I PASSed more than once.) I would do that every time. Alternately or additionally, I might add some code to detect multiple failed guesses (say, 3) then have one of the NOT Enterprise crew chime in with a hint. Both seem in the light spirit of the game, and would smooth out the drag of “I just can’t think of it!”

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/5/23
Playtime: 40 min, 26+ Endings

Talk about right-footing me. Something about “An enthralling tale with more than 25 endings!” when the title proclaimed 26 just tickled me. The intro screen further cemented my good will by providing 4 hilariously disparate possible endings, only to sadly tell me no, those don’t count. Between the instructional text and these examples, the stakes and purpose of the game were communicated economically and amusingly: FIND ALL THE ENDS!!

After that it is a click-select exercise to explore all the narrative branches. Some very short, others long and extended, only a few reconvergent. The scope of the game is about right to keep all branches in your head, almost. Like most time loop games, after reading text once, you madly click past text on subsequent cycles to get to the new stuff. A bit of a chore for long paths, but the game is smart about rewarding your perseverance with skip-ahead, jump to branch-point, and achievement unlocks to keep things moving after you collect enough endings.

There is ample wit on display. Which is about the coldest, least convincing way to convey the pleasant humor of the piece. (“Oh really, ample wit you say? Well ha ha HA indeed.”) It was at its best when it ramped from mundane to transcendent dizzyingly fast. I chortled aloud at (Spoiler - click to show)“Have you touched the divine?” Mostly I was just kind of smiling as I went.

At about the 30min mark, I started questioning myself as I continued, “Is this too long for what it is?” Just asking that question felt like a yes. The more interesting question is, “Why so?” Here’s what I came up with: the early promise of the game was 26 wildly divergent endings and paths, the humor residing in the disparity. I didn’t count, but it felt like the truly disparate endings (and make no mistake, they’re in there!) amounted to a third or less, the rest being variations on them. Meaning you get a few unique, then 4-6 variations of one, 2-3 another, 3-5 of another and so on. To me, this chipped away at the early promise enough to let me feel the time. And some of these variations were noticeably less ambitious than others. If they had been more audaciously varied, I think it would better justify the length.

The work was well polished, no noticeable bugs. Most interactions are single-screen easily digestible chunks. The early warning screen was notably longer, and by notably I mean I didn’t realize I needed to scroll for an embarrassingly long time. Otherwise, definitely a smooth presentation.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Comedic Time Loop
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would invest in committing to the bit: reduce or even eliminate the endings that are modest, reasonable variations. The more tortured the logic, the funnier it’ll be. Just test myself to see how many unconnected bananas end states and scenarios I could pack in. More than 25!

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/6/23
Playtime: 1hr, in tutorial mode with Sneak off, escaped!

Ok just up front, let me say I’m going to do my best to stay neutral on this but you should know my biases:

1. I’m a TADStan. Full bore. While clearly pushing me one way, there is also some back pressure in that I can’t help but constantly think ‘ooh, nice use of OutOfReach Container object…’ ‘aah, they maybe implemented it this way…’ ‘ehh that prepositional variable is off…’ which fights engagement.
2. Triggered is too strong a word. Maybe Tweaked. I get tweaked by ‘things stalking you’ games. It gives me anxiety way out of proportion for a guy typing on a keyboard.
3. The TADS author group is populated by a wonderful cast of Mensch and SuperMensch. Even among that Menschy population, Joey stands out among the Menschiest.

What I’m saying is you will have to judge how successfully I put all that aside. Anyway, this is surely the best game of the Thing, probably the year, maybe all time.

No, let me try to run at that again.

The setup is, you are a new life form in a sci-fi closed base setting, pushed into a life and death game of cat and mouse by a chatty but mostly unseen Adversary. WHY ARE WE ALWAYS THE MOUSE IN THESE THINGS??? There are two supporting docs you should absolutely secure before playing. A map and a rule book. I was a bit put off by the rule book. It is certainly complete. It also throws a LOT of information, gameplay reveals, and commands at you, before you have any game context. I definitely felt information overload reading it, the anxiety of needing to remember lots piling on my ‘I don’t like being prey!’ anxiety. Which is weird, because I am also a board game guy, and it certainly is not excessive in those terms.

On the other hand, the map is both cool and vital. Don’t try to play without it.

After the preliminaries, you wake up from your sci-fi cocoon and must parser your way to freedom! Despite the nervous wreck it made me, the stalking aspect is absolutely crucial to this game. Between that and the Turn Counter (or, as I though of it, the Stalker Progress Tracker) you are immediately focused on optimizing everything you do. Given I was playing in baby mode, maybe I didn’t need to be so nervous but whatever. The environs are economically described, in the sweet spot of having personality but not weighing down with repetition. There are some ‘gamey’ aspects (like letter coding segments of corridor) that at first feel weird to read, but quickly settle into transparent map orientation shorthand. Though god forbid you don’t have a map. (To be fair, there are accessibility hooks I did not test drive that may alleviate this.)

I really dug the parkour element of the game, though I chafed at calling it ‘parkour.’ Practically speaking, what it amounts to is finding hidden areas and exits in rooms by scrambling over stuff. That’s cool! As a word though, ‘parkour’ evokes a kinetic, acrobatic dance of sorts, and this is not that. This is finding hidden areas and exits. What it does do is make even the most spartan of rooms intriguing with possibility, and often rewarded! There seemed to be a few glitches once you parkoured (yes, I will be making up verbs in this series of reviews too), specifically around what was visible/reachable from different perches, but rarely and nothing fatal. At least on baby mode.

Two more quick quibbles. One, I think the Adversary needs just a little more spice. The impulse to let the reader’s imagination do the work is good, as I think we are meant to be unclear whether they are human or not. (Sidebar, there are some enigmatic things you can find that beg all kinds of intriguing questions.) It would be even better with just a few unexplained and disconcerting details. “The voice somehow catches when making glottal sounds, in a way human tongues never do.” “Every now and then, a dragging sound accompanies the footsteps.” “I catch a glimpse of cold, unblinking eyes. I’m not sure if it’s a trick of the light or if they glowed with a frigid inner light.”

Second, I think the search puzzle could be a little harder. Thanks to a quirk of the randomizer, (Spoiler - click to show)I found over half my escape items in one place! Though maybe I shouldn't complain about being Too Easy on Baby Mode.

Yeah, I’m overcompensating on the negative. I really had a blast playing this, and in particular liked the additional nuance of the parkour mechanism. Notwithstanding the mechanic’s name, it made what could have felt limiting and sterile breathe a bit with its own vibe. And I didn’t mention the stealth capabilities which were also crucial to this! You can manage or be tripped up by slamming doors. You can peek into and around areas before bumbling into your pursuer. There are atmospheric cues that help you gauge how close your pursuer is. All of these really push you into the role in an effective way and make the game feel more fair. While I didn’t include my IFCOMP metric of 'Would play after comp?' I definitely will.

Prolly also devour the source code like a novel.

Spice Girl: Scary Spice
Vibe: Controlled Panic
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? YES, oh gods of my fathers! Lo’ the clouds didst part and the skies were rent with sweet music… sigh

Feels like I took the long way around on this gag.

Gimme the Wheel! While spicing the villain seems an obvious next step, if it were me I think I would instead focus on internalizing the rule book into the game. Not just cut and pasting it into HINTS/HELP, ( I mean definitely do that, but the author seems to already have that planned) but introducing mechanisms through early gameplay. “He’s almost caught me! As I duck into the Lab, I reflexively SLAM the door behind me. I hear his satisfying cry of pain and the sound of feet staggering. That gave him pause, I reflect with momentary satisfaction. What do I do with the bought time?” If narrative alone can’t get the job done, “(I have unlocked SLAM DOOR!)”

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/7/23
Playtime: 3hrs, finished, good guess author!

IF in Google Forms. What even is my life right now? Of course, in five years, I’ll be typing “Live IF via GMAI, what even is my life right now?” I guess I should enjoy the ignorant bloom of youth. (Because that phrase TOTALLY applies to me.) Look even if Kuolema were terrible, the chutzpah of a Google Forms implementation alone would rack up goodwill points from me.

But its really not. Terrible I mean. Yes, it’s a Clive Cussler-esque abandoned mystery ship carrying a terrible secret on stormy seas. But it’s a pretty good abandoned mystery ship carrying…etc. Roger Ebert famously said (paraphrasing) “It’s not WHAT it’s about, it’s HOW it’s about it.” And Kuolema has a long laundry list of things it does really well. For one, it feels like a well thought out ship, inhabited by a well-thought out crew. Every location has a reason for being, its absent inhabitants real motivations and impact on their environs. The puzzles have at least some rational motivations, though lordy the code pads. The mystery is capably rendered with the requisite twists that satisfy, if not amaze. The overarching plot is that nearly impossible sweet-spot balance of grounded and goofy. All of this is upper tier IF stuff.

I think though, its not so secret strength is its art. The rendered style is moody, a little dark, but consistent and immersive. Most especially the artifact and document art, which smoothly integrates you into the experience. You get to see corporate letterhead, “hand” written journals and notes, technical manuals, promotional posters, scientific and casual computer screens, and all of it feels perfectly designed.

In most ways, it might as well be a worthy choice-select IF from any number of systems. So let’s talk about the strengths and challenges of the GF implementation.

The game goes out of its way to, ungenerously, apologize, or more generously, set player expectations for the GF experience. The first caveat that drew extreme skepticism from me, was the statelessness of it: the game would only intermittently remember your inventory, or things you knew. You would have to track them on your own, in a separate document. Pencil? Paper? Like a STREET CORNER BOOKIE??? But man did I get whiplash turning around on that. Turns out, the quickest way to get me to engage deeply is to write stuff down. I actually knew this about myself, I often map as I play, but to be told I HAD to was a shock. Regardless, once I accepted the inevitable, I got into a rhythm of game screen/note screen that was just fun and immersive. Look, spreadsheets are a hobby of mine, leave me alone.

So points for GF on that one. Definitely making a limitation into a strength. On the downside, statelessness also meant that revisiting locations, you were often treated (with minimal shading) to outright repetition. You can have the same conversation as many times as you want, (mostly) without acknowledgement that you’ve had it. To be fair, GF is far from the only platform to see games with this weakness, and even games that successfully mitigate it, do so with caveats of their own. Minimal points off.

I think I’d call it an unmitigated success, except for one thing that bugged me all out of proportion. In order to advance the story, most pages would close with a radio button list of options, and a BACK/NEXT button pair. Meaning every time you wanted to move on, you needed two clicks: radio-select option, next button. That is twice as many clicks as necessary. It didn’t help that oh so frequently a page down was necessary too. It sounds small but man did it grate! I really enjoyed the game, but I think I would have enjoyed it twice as much with half as many clicks. Could GF really not support direct links there? Or was this a perverse choice by the author? What did I DO to them???

As far as polish, the artwork and page layout lent a really professional air to the proceedings. The only thing that kept it from being gleaming was some wonkiness in the progress tracker. I think maybe I solved a few puzzles “out of order” and got to watch my progress meter dance back and forth a bit. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a distraction. Don’t start me again on the radio buttons.

Spice Girl: Scary Spice - I may never look at Refresh buttons the same way.
Vibe: Pulpy
Polish: Smooth++
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! Dear God I would drive myself to the madhouse fixing that double click. I would engineer a hostile takeover of Google for the express purpose of deploying their entire software development capability on only this until it was fixed. If that’s what it took.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/7/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 endings

This entry lives up to its title, without doubt. There is a loose plot about finding a job, but so not the point of it. This is another (the third so far in Spring Thing23!) IF patterned after a joke: setup and punchline, no goal but to make you laugh. This one struggled a bit to find its footing, I felt. It is rife with misspellings, awkward sentences, and questionable grammar. An early gag about mistaking computer for social networking was structured too loose to land, but there was something there. It just felt like the language was making me do a lot of the work to find the humorous core of the idea.

When comedy is most effective on me, not only do I not have to work, the language is a full partner in laughs. It is the sharply honed needle that injects that uncut, industrial strength funny right into my brain. Which is not to say that there were no chuckles. In selecting a book (after selecting your wardrobe) to prepare for your party-cum-interview-opportunity, two options are:

"2. How to gain friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie :
"Talk about networking while networking to network the network
"3. Business at the speed of thought by Bill Gates:
"Business business, business is to business what business."

The first one tickled me, but right on its heels I was brought up short by “I don’t know how to read that.” There were some other amusing bits: (Spoiler - click to show)the protag’s spider sense, continually misnaming the ex (once I realized it was not a typo), and especially one ending reveal about your host. The sum of these and other gags leaves little doubt that the protag is not going to be a model employee wherever they land. For all the successful gags, there were as many or more that elicited “I think I see what they were going for there” instead of a laugh.

It’s short, as far as I can tell at most 3 potential jobs you choose from, then done. While the selection of potential bosses was daffy, I felt they could be MORE widely disparate to really land the absurdism. A (Spoiler - click to show)sentient cactus and an urbane donkey felt somehow more similar than different to me? Maybe that’s just me?

All in all, I found I was working too hard through the language to find the humor. There were a lot of frenetic, goofy ideas on display, but more often than not they were undermined by the sentences they had to inhabit. It was thankfully short, a soul of brevity and all. But I appreciate it more when I don’t have to work so hard for my laughs.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! For sure spell and grammar checking are the next stops if I drive this bus. It would both sharpen the laughs and improve the polish in one fell swoop.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

To Be Clear: Review title refers to Character, not Game
Played: 4/8/23
Playtime: Distracted timekeeping, maybe 2.5-3hrs

IF feels like a nice match for heist/crime caper stories. Between the logic problem of defeating security, the think-on-your-feet crisis management during the inevitable reversals and complications, and even the manipulative work to defeat physical barriers it all just synchs nicely with IF strengths. Unlike, say, punch punch kick punch I win fighting. Throw in some quirky character work, and maybe a relationship or two and you’ve got a great stew boiling.

Here, you are renowned GentleLady Thief Thalia. (I know Lady is the proper feminine to Gentleman, but by aliasing it to 'woman' so often, it kind of sheds that essential ‘Upper Crust’ connotation.) I understand this to be part of a series, but this was my intro, and the game eased me into the setup smoothly and seamlessly. In no time I was hosting a social event, crossing mental swords with intellectual inferiors and plotting an intro heist. While this worked well to set the table for the main event, I found myself at a remove, and it took me a bit to understand why.

Either through the staging of the introductory sequence, or due to the choices I made, LadyT was consistently the smartest, bestest, most capable person in the room. And knew it. Boy did I find her tiresome. She was surrounded by amusing bumbling wannabes, socially awkward gadgeteers and conflicted adversaries. In particular, I enjoyed the Q character Gwen, who only near the end of a conversation did I realize was actually a Scoreboard telling me my score from the previous scenario! It was a delightfully subtle bit of writing. Every one of the supporting cast was fun to read and engaging to interact with. If only the protag half of the interactions wasn’t such a chore.

Now fiction is full of these kinds of characters. Characters like Doc Savage work because you spend more time with his colorful, flawed assistants and he acts more like a walking Deus Ex. Superman has endearing humility. Classic Bond works thanks to his sociopathic sense of humor. The immediacy of IF puts us IN the protag, where remove is not possible and an absence of mitigating personality is pronounced. I am given to understand that this negative impression may be an artifact of jumping into the series cold, which, fair enough.

As the game shifted to the main heist planning, I was further thrown off by narration telling me I had a map. This led me to believe I didn’t need to do paper mapping, as the protag/game would take care of me. Boy was that not true! I was a few rooms in before realizing, wait a minute, I’m lost and shoulda been mapping all along. It’s not that the museum is geographically difficult, it was just a bad expectation.

So I’m in a hole, enjoyment wise, and then the game does the most perfect thing. It introduces an adversary character who is EVEN SMARTER than LadyT! Mechanically, this character is basically a reversal generator to keep the plot fun. But CHARACTER wise she has the crucial function of putting our protag off her game, getting her worried and frustrated and second guessing herself. She is so much more interesting this way. It was compounded by me the player totally bollixing an interview. LadyT’s frazzled self recriminations (due to my ineptitude) were perversely amusing. The protag was much more fun when I was doing badly!

This turnaround came at a crucial time. From here, we are off to the races in the Big Heist. A quick word about the setup here. This game made some really smart game play choices, specifically in the preparation (recon! interviews! staging! NPC coordination!), giving real perceived agency in getting things set, and how easy or hard the endgame would be. While I suspect failure would be really hard (if not impossible) to achieve here, the illusion of creating success was strong. Not to mention the detailed work of engineering a heist was just plain fun. Ditto managing the inevitable escalating reversals, culminating in a nice bit of character work (if you’d done your homework earlier!) to secure your escape.

Overall, I spent about half the play time at a remove, a quarter of time “ooh wait, I like where this is going,” and the final stretch fully engaged. This game dug a hole for me, then through a few tightly choreographed twists, propelled me to a very satisfying end. Seems about right for the genre!

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Crime Caper
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I think my next step might be to create an in-game map. Either as a pdf-eelie, or better yet use that Twine dead space left window to implement a dynamic map that grows as you explore. You might need to rotate the museum 90 degrees (the map is wider than tall, but turning on its side could take advantage of that narrow window). In addition to realizing the promise of the text, it would add a nice graphical flair to a bare bones presentation.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/8/23
Playtime: 30min

Depending on how you approach it, this one either packs a lot into its short runtime, or not enough. It’s a Monster of the Week kind of setup, an in media res supernatural investigation with personal stakes. It’s also very linear, very few choices to make and most of those adding details without changing anything. For sure, the narrative is the star here, not the game play.

To the narrative’s benefit, the writing style is smooth and confident, and plays with itself in fun ways. At various times it subverts itself with humor, and elsewhere falls victim to the powers of the monsters it is documenting. The latter in particular is a really fun tweaking of form that works better in IF than it might on the page. All in all, the writing style is a solid foundation to support the story.

But the writing’s biggest strength I think also ends up ham stringing it. The narrative leans a lot on implied back story, loric details tossed out without much explication, leaving the reader to speculate/fill in the gaps. It is a powerful technique, and the details dispensed are singular, odd, evocative and intriguing. (Spoiler - click to show)Rainwater Death filters, reality bending creatures, god shards, there is a lot to tantalize, but because it’s new to you but not the characters you only get oblique hints. It really engages the reader’s imagination.

Unfortunately, the same remove that makes the backstory so tantalizing is also applied to the main character and their relationships. This works less effectively, and makes the protagonist a bit of a blank. Interesting things are happening to and around them, but they remain enigmatic at the center of it. There are relationships presented as fact, but without details that showcase the emotional underpinnings that have to be there. While the reader’s imagination is fully engaged in theorizing the setting’s details, it’s quite a different thing to ask us to ALSO plumb the main character’s personality and emotional history. Most especially because of the personal stakes in the plot.

As the story drew to an end, the most overpowering impression I had was that I had just read an outline, rather than a fully fleshed out story. A really intriguing outline, with details I’d love to hear more about, but needing a lot more meat on its bones.

Spice Girl: Scary/Ginger Spice
Vibe: Horror Outline
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would focus on fleshing out the protagonist’s character. Let the reader see more of their inner life, either through dialogue, actions or direct access to thoughts (a bit easier to do in IF). Most especially the two relationships that are at the heart of the story. The plot and background can get away with leveraging the reader’s imagination. The protagonist and their emotional life is going to be more powerful delivered on the page.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/9/23
Playtime: 2 hrs, finished. FOR NOW.

Like [REDACTED] years ago I went through a phase where I was fascinated by the pulp magazines of the 30’s and 40’s. High Adventure, against a backdrop of first draft wild ideas and third-hand science knowledge, delivered on an insane monthly deadline. These ingredients created some propulsive, wonderfully goofy, imminently readable stories. Not for nothing, the source of the word ‘pulpy’ as a narrative type. (Also yes, so much racism and sexism.)

Galaxy Jones is a wonderful echo of those tales - Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon without the White Man’s Burden. The game makes the crucial choice to cut away all the problematic baggage without comment or fanfare, and give us the straight uncut adrenaline. It would have to REAAALLY drop the ball to lose me, and it didn’t.

As a parser game, there were rough spots. Quite a few unimplemented nouns:

"[...] the dock features several dozen speeder bays. Only a few are
filled right now. [...]
">x speeders
"There's nothing like that nearby."

Or worse, then:

">x speeder
"(the speeder)
"Galaxy One [...]"

This kind of thing happened often enough that it left an impression, but the piece is so tightly paced it doesn’t let you dwell on it in the moment. Most commands give a concise and often amusing 1-2 lines max in response. The thing is sprinkled but not drowned with dry humor and pulpy spice, letting your internal Buck Rogers fan fill in what’s necessary behind the nicely thematic cues. This gives the whole narrative an internal momentum, like ‘no time for details, here’s what’s important, quick, what’s next?’ It is such a successful marriage of form and function. The pace is further reinforced with relatively spartan locations, again discouraging extended loitering. When you do get more than 4 lines of response, it immediately conveys, ‘wait, this is big!’

The puzzles are, for the most part, also pretty streamlined. It is uncommon that things you need are not a room or two away. I struggled with one ledge-related puzzle but was otherwise fine. (I particularly like the task boards, though I was crestfallen that adding ‘solve my puzzle’ to the board didn’t actually get it done. :] ) I go back and forth on whether the relative simplicity is a drawback or a feature - it certainly supports the dynamic momentum of the story to not spin excessively on locked doors. Given all that, the presence of inventory items (some of which were tricky to collect) that were ultimately unused was confusing, unless some puzzles had multiple solutions?

The game further endeared itself to me by implementing in-game hints in the form of your ‘gal behind the keyboard’ over comm link. For sure the positive outweighed the friction by a good margin, and that’s even before the part that had me giggling and clapping like a toddler getting a new woobie. Which I will spoiler because the surprise is part of the delight.

(Spoiler - click to show)The piece opens with an ascii-banner, the logo of our heroine. Itself, just a perfect mood setter for the vibe of the piece. Then, after the first significant victory, the logo flashes beneath your success text, “GALAXY JONES!” It is the most perfectly surprising, evocative, and delightful touch, and you get it with every subsequent major success. I am on record calling that the best 8 lines of IF in 2023. I stand by that assessment.

After a whirlwind of action/adventure, it ends on a cliffhanger, promising another episode! A really well executed homage, crisply translating classic pulp fiction’s narrative momentum into the IF medium. Also translating retro-pulp into the new millennium, come to that.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Sci-Fi Pulpy
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I would take time to scrub the noun universe, and to a lesser extent verb responses. There were enough glitches for me to notice them, even at the speed I was moving. The skeleton and muscles of the game are there. At this point, it’s all polish.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 1hr, with hints and transcript

This is an established fact about humanity: that there are dog people and there are cat people. It is further an established fact that cat people deserve empathy for life events that led them to welcome into their hearts a being that at best greets their suffering with complete disinterest, and at worst passes the days mentally creating Final Destination fan films where their owner is every victim.

// What is this feeling suddenly possessing me, of being alone in a vast minefield surrounded by shadow-born trebuchet? Probably just the wind. //

Sacred Shovel of Athena is a notionally fantasy IF about befriending a cat, then fighting. Boy does it whitewash the first half of that.

Stepping away from the premise a bit, this was mechanically a rough ride for me. There was a lot of guess the noun/verb. There were some positional dependencies not well flagged, where the right action in the wrong location failed without explanation. There were descriptions that didn’t quite convey the mechanics of what was happening, and inconsistent levels of detail. There were successes without clear explanation what I did to make them succeed. All of this led to an overwhelming feeling of constantly fighting the game to make progress.

Other games have these challenges for sure. The tone, stakes and narrative act as motivation in those instances to push through. Here though? The narrative is really thin, it’s intended as a puzzle fest. The tone is occasionally wry, but not overly humorous. The stakes are low, which by itself can be admirable. Low stakes can still be compelling stakes, and even when they’re not, if the game play is short and light you may not notice. But an hour, mostly fighting this thing, is not the right balance for these stakes. Not when the stakes are befriending a creature that would kill me in my sleep if that would grant him my opposable thumbs.

// Eyes fierce with determination, I gaze upward at the distant lip of the pit. Ignoring the old man’s counsel, I redouble my efforts to dig free. //

The bug that ultimately crashed my experience was the Hint system. When I tried to use it in Gargoyle, I got 18 lines of help topics, notably short of what I needed. I got the same when I played the downloaded HTML, or the online link. It was only when I cribbed another reviewer's transcript that I even realized more were available (not sure what interpreter they were using). This left me in the unenviable position of trying to solve some obtuse guess-the-sequence puzzles via someone else’s similarly struggling transcript.

For me, this was way too much work for too little reward. I fully acknowledge that Cat People may find a better experience here. But don’t they already have ENOUGH cross to bear?

// And lo, a chill wind surges and the clouds darken. Too late, the peril is revealed. I dared trifle with Pet Forces Beyond My Ken, and my reckoning will be swift and violent. //

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Fantasy-Lite
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! Ok, if this were mine, the Hint bug clearly needs addressing one way or another. But my first stop I think would be to internalize as many transcripts as possible to a) add noun and verb synonyms that make sense and b) add cluing prompts and feedback in areas where complicated sequences are required. “The cat curls up snugly. You can’t imagine that angelic face being anything but pleased once it wakes up.

“AND MURDERS YOU.”

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 10min, happy ending

Well, this work was a nice change of pace from the pretty narrow “Pulp or Funny Only” algorithm that seems to have inhabited my Spring Thing randomizer up to now. This is a relationship drama piece and stands out in direct contrast to everything else so far. It is specifically a tale of two lovers working through some doldrums and tensions in their relationship. It travels a clear path to success, by committing to the details of the characters in question and selling us on the reality of those.

Early on I was worried. A conversational path had a bug that delivered non sequitor text that both jarred and cast a pall worrying whether more glitches were to come. I happily report they did not.

A smart choice the game makes is to alternately put you in one, then the other’s head, back and forth as the drama progresses. It takes the additional step of providing a unique graphical cue for each protagonist which was a nice touch. The author uses this conceit to nice effect - contrasting their respective concerns and highlighting their dissimilar emotional priorities. This contrast (and neither character’s acknowledgement of the difference!) was a very mature, very interesting, and very well observed artifact of relationships. If I had a quibble here, it is that I found Yaan (the older, more powerful member of the pair) much better rendered than his young lover Kel.

As we are introduced, Yaan seems congnizant of the power imbalance between the two but not OWNING it, if that makes sense. He is further struggling with work anxieties and pressures. Between the background descriptions and the potential actions he might take, I felt he was really effectively painted with few strokes. Now that picture is a little skeevy, but it rings complex and true and interesting.

Kel on the other hand, despite having lots of concerns, felt less clearly drawn to me. He wants to befriend cats. (A clear cry for help… no, this is not the place.) He’s aware of the power imbalance. He wants closer relations with his family. He likes an old theatre. In particular, the options provided for him felt less nuanced and more melodramatic, most especially around the theatre topic. Which honestly, is really not their relationship problem, yeah? That comment was too flippant. The text is clearly using the theatre as a catalyst to air their deeper grievances in an indirect way. But it didn’t always come off that way for Kel’s options.

The game allows multiple gameplay styles. You can try to “two hand solitaire” it, and role play both characters, or you can “I’m the director” it and orchestrate the drama. For me, the latter made more sense because 1) I didn’t want to be skeevy and 2) Kel was harder to get a bead on. So in gameplay, I tried to work against 1) and find ways to add complexity to 2). And I got a satisfying drama and a good ending doing it! Well done, author!

Now the Achievements page told my there were 4 more endings, and two more achievements I might find. I don’t think I want to go for those though. I really enjoyed the character study I went with, and don’t think alternate ones will satisfy my sensibilities insomuch as it requires choices that were not as compelling to me. I’m happy enough with the story I got that I don’t need to poke the sleeping bull.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Relationship Drama
Polish: Smooth, bar one.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d fix that dialog bug next (which I believe author did). That sounds easier than the jeweler’s tool precision of character refinement.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 1.5hr, 3 endings

Is it me, or did it get heavy in here?

My hands are kind of frozen immobile above my keyboard as I figure out what I just read, and what on earth I have to say about it. Ok, they WERE frozen immobile, but I coaxed them into action to type that they were immobile, and now momentum is just chasing the ouroboros down this typing about typing path. I’m struggling to get my brain out of the hypnotic tarpit of Protocol and my go@!$#^mn fingers are going on about what good typists they are. Yeah, that’s the kind of work this is.

It’s fiction, not a game. Not really. There’s only a handful of choices and a limited plot. The story is set in space, aboard a damaged space station. With a large swath of the crew gone, the protagonist is wakened, injured and amnesiac, to repair the damage. Now in standard IF, this is a framework on which to hang lots of clever find the gimcrack and weird use of item puzzles. Here, the narration takes care of all that for you. And it does it under a deluge of language. It’s like there is so much impressionistic description, you are watching the plot unfold tens of feet below you, under water. Or maybe even you are tens of feet under water looking up to the plot above the surface. It is distorted and wavering and sometimes easier to just focus on the water itself, with its hypnotic rhythm and surging beauty of its own.

I can be a bit fussy about language. I balk at long compound sentences, packed with an overrun of syllables and clauses, and metaphors on metaphors. (Lord knows I don’t do any of that.) If you’re going to throw barrage after barrage of syllables at me, you better know what you’re doing. Poetry is the wobbly apex between histrionic and pretentious and if you falter even a moment you’re going to tumble down one side or the other.

I think maybe Protocol defies the odds to proudly plant its flag at the summit.

There is a tension between poetry and science, and slamming the two together is inherently fascinating. (Yes, to me. I’m writing this, everything here is according to me!) The opening prologue are science lessons, or reminders of them. They are rendered in cold, scientific language. But SO coldly and SO scientific it takes on a patios of its own. Before you even get to the story, it has started enmeshing you in its rhythms. Then the first page talks about stars, and hoo boy are you through the rabbit hole. I was seduced by the confident complexity of the metaphors, tying scientific phenomenon to human biology. And the language consumed me. Even as the plot wound through injuries, dopplegangers, cramped then expansive physical passages, you were never far from the soaring descriptions and contemplations of the void. And most of it worked. Really, really, really well.

Its not 100% perfect, according to my sensibilities. I feel like it went once or twice too often to the ‘overwrought emotional reaction to pretty specific physical activity’ well. Also, while it struck me as very competent in underpinning its poetry with realistic mechanics of space work, there were a few glitches that stood out: tethering and hand trucks were both sacrificed to drama. Looking at my notes, I captured a few passages that lost me, and a few that grabbed me, but to repeat them here does the work a disservice. It is really the cumulative use of language whose effect was so impactful. Miraculously, after every stumble, the work managed to time and again claw its way back to the summit.

To proudly stand there when the tale ends. The endings (and I looked at 3 readily available to me) were fine I guess. I chafed a bit at what felt an artificially limiting triad of choices - three variations of one idea really. But this is definitely a work where the journey is more important than the destination. And man, did that thing take me on a trippy, mesmerizing journey.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Surreal Sci-fi
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! What would I do next, if I wrote it? Publish it, then engage whatever the literary equivalent of a decompression chamber is, to twist my brain back to mundane conversational English.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 1hr

Oooh, this was a fun one. Retro font, graphics and sensibilities married near perfectly to retro gameplay. The game makes really smart decisions, limiting the verbs available to a very small list. This effortlessly casts aside the vocabulary guessing part of parser play and focuses on the story and puzzles. It also has a perfect in-game rationale. You’re a crow, how many verbs do you need? (Feel free to use that as a cover blurb.) It is hard to overstate just how well all these elements play with each other. At no point are you thinking “well, this would never have actually been on screen back in the day.”

The text is a full partner in the time warp surrounding the game. Descriptions are tight, evocative, with just the right blend of concrete detail and suggestive back story. If there’s a noun, you better believe there’s a description. (paraphrasing, wish I’d grabbed it)

">X BIRDS
A flock of birds flying past. You don't recognize them."

Lol, that is just old school personality right there. Not a word wasted!

The art is also spot on. Every location has an 8-bit rendering whose distinctive image matches text description, and carries the mood effortlessly. Your encounters on way to gathering the spell elements you need are varied and melancholy. It’s not high adventure, it’s encountering people and places with full histories you just happen to intersect with briefly, so they can give you stuff. Just like life!

There’s a few things I might wish for: maybe one or two more verbs to add nuance to simple puzzles; an alternative to crow backpacks; a subversion of (Spoiler - click to show)an enemy’s all-too-expected endgame return; some minor typo and bug fixes. But none of those are hugely impactful. This work has excellent moving parts that combine to make something even greater - a precisely paced, pitch perfect portal to the past.

Pastiche/homage is hard to do well, near impossible to do this well, and often unappreciated as an endeavor. I’m here for it. I SEE YOU, CROW!

Spice Girl: No Spice Girl! Will go with “Jem and the Holograms” here, as 80’s predecessor. I’m reaching, there’s no true connection there.
Vibe: Old School
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would probably spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to eliminate the backpack, only to conclude that every solution made gameplay more frictiony and less fun. Like a LOT of time coming to that conclusion. So many attempts, each worse than the last. Then just go back to the backpack. As an afterthought, I would fix some bugs and typos, to somehow legitimize all that wasted time.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 45min, 4 cycles, 2 unique endings

Author’s Comment: “For those with jewel-eyed ancestors.” LOLWUT? You got my attention game!

Mood is a tricky beast. Every word on the page builds on every previous word to weave an atmosphere, a vibe of the piece that can work on you, independent of the narrative it is conveying. (I kinda wish I had opened this door in my review of Protocol but we can tackle it here. I wasn’t thinking this clearly after that one.) Hemingway’s big literary revelation was that Less is More - that you can convey ideas, events, emotions and mood as or more effectively with minimal typing.

But you know what else is More? More is More. Just ask Melville! You can also use carefully curated metaphors, nuanced adjectives and cross-sentence resonances to build mood out of scale to the words you put down. It is very delicate business, though. Done inexpertly, it can become jarring or worse self-parody.

Gothic Horror leans more heavily on the More is More tradition, and Etoliated Light leans into Gothic Horror. I don’t want to say I’ve cracked the code, but EL gave me a hypothesis I’m going to test in front of you all. Elaborate verse is most effective when it presents an interesting new idea (or a new expression of an old idea), and also reinforces the developing mood and/or narrative of the piece. I found EL pretty competent at this, but not without faults. Here are two early examples I think work really well:

"One smiles and the others’ face slackens, as if the expression is something they’re passing back and forth between them."

"You’re pleased by this because you’re a child. It feels wonderful to be bigger and stronger than others."

Both have mood, novel observations, and reinforce other spoilery parts of the narrative. Here’s one I don’t think is as successful:

"You grab onto your mother’s skirts and bury your face in that comfort yet again."

While arguably nicely observed and expressed, it actually came out of nowhere that the comfort was wanted or habitual, and did not resonate with any other text around it. It felt like a showy/writery statement mostly thanks to its isolation. Overall, I credit EL with a pretty high nice/clunk ratio. Certainly it was high enough to competently build the Gothic mood that powers this story. I’m going to call the language here a win, with an asterisk.

The presentation is pretty bare bones - black screen, white text, blue selection links. You are launched into the story without cover page, cover art, acknowledgements or preamble. The intent seems to be to put you into the young protagonist’s not-quite-sure-what’s-going-on mindset but it had the side effect of making it feel more amateurish. A more robust presentation could have offset that. You get some nice atmosphere, set some genders and names, then find out (Spoiler - click to show)you’re being married off. I’M SORRY WHAT?? It’s a nicely executed shock.

Fast forward and you are living on a remote island with a sickening, that is to say ill, spouse and an elusive caretaker. The requisite family revelations, historical horrors and physical dangers unroll on cue which sounds condescending phrased that way. I found it to be quite effective actually, mostly on the strengths of the mood the text continued to weave. The details of the threat were unique and creepy enough to be effective. It also had quite a bit to say, metaphorically speaking, and for me at least the combination of mood and monster just clicked. The protagonist selection options for conversations and actions were similarly nicely curated. They were clearly steering you into the plot, but they allowed a good latitude of control over the mindset of the protagonist, which really swept you into the proceedings.

I will say, the ending was a mild letdown. (Spoiler - click to show) For one, the resolution suddenly demanded a sacrifice including a child option that somehow was not mentioned earlier at all. Also concerningly, there was no non-sacrifice option. I would say the endings I found were THEMATICALLY on point, but NARRATIVELY ill-justified. It’s possible other story branches covered that ground. But my narrative choices seemed to enable a branch that was unceremoniously cut from beneath me. I’m on record as appreciating (Spoiler - click to show)no-win horror. But I do need the work to do the work to convince me and not just TELL me.

It’s probably a clue how much text you’ve seen on this entry that it did stick with me. Yes, I had quibbles. I always do. Always. ALWAYS. ahem. But the combination of prose mood setting, really effective Gothic Horror, nice interactive character building (until the end), monster-as-metaphor, and even the maybe not earned but appropriate endings… that combo really came together. I’m only 2/3 the way through the Thing, but for me this one is in the ribbon conversation.

Also, it improbably but convincingly justified that “Jewel-eyed” teaser.

Spice Girl: Scary/Posh Spice
Vibe: Gothic Horror.
Polish: Textured.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would do another pass of editing, with an eye to trimming easy lines that are flourishy but don’t serve the narrative or mood. Also ones that are a little too on the nose.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 4.5hrs of contradictions, finished

NCBFFTT seemed like it had an attitude about it from the start. It simultaneously flies in the face of convention, and embraces what consensus seems to categorize as the worst aspects of early IF. Instant, not always clear why death. Magic nouns and verbs with incomplete synonyms. Extended puzzle sequences that can play as hurdles for the sake of hurdles. Incomplete descriptions that require just the right sub-component EXAMINE to shed important details. Repetition of lengthy, specific, random interaction scenes. A CONVENTION-DEFYING NAV SYSTEM THE AUTHOR THEMSELF STUMBLES ON.

It is reasonably fair play, in that most of these things are told to the player right up front. There isn’t any confusion of mismatched expectations. Just confusion of WHY. Any one of these things could just sink an IF work outright, vanishing without a trace in the pool of “too much work.” Most of these have established best practices to manage or mitigate. Punters, sez NCBFFTT. So how on earth did I manage to last 4.5 hrs?

NCBFFTT has a big thing going for it. Its setting is loosely based on an ancient sci-fi satire rpg, Paranoia. For the uninitiated, this was a deeply cynical, deeply funny sci-fi dystopia where the main feature was repeated, arbitrary death at the hands of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Where incompetence was if not a virtue, certainly a pervasive force to be reckoned with. Where the resistance was basically as disfunctional, just with less resources. So much good satire and slapstick to milk from that premise.

And NCBFFTT is pretty good at it! For a while. The protagonist’s back story, death scenes, the wry newspeak descriptions of locations and items, the random newscasts and interactions with NPCs, these are consistently funny and biting and kind of sad. It buoys things along for quite a while. It is fighting the good fight, but man the moving parts of the game do not make it easy. Opaque descriptions, usually unclear paths forward, inconsistent levels of detail, all challenge the player. In an environment where the learning curve is punctuated by constant death/restore/undo. In the first 3 hours, I found myself on the verge of rage quitting practically every 5 minutes, but something about the alchemy of the setting, the wry text, *just* enough unhinted progress kept me afloat. Even though there was no escaping the Hint System.

So yeah, the hint system was used early and often. It is complete, I’ll say that. There is a special kind of anger though when consulting a hint “How do I open door?” (Spoiler - click to show) “Turn the Wheel” When the room description mentions the door but no hint of (Spoiler - click to show)wheel. >X DOOR Oh yeah, did I not mention there’s a wheel on it? That’s my own paraphrase, btw. Doesn’t it seem like its trolling you on some level?

To make matters worse, here’s my analogy for the hint system. Take a complete set of progressive hints and navigation menus. Then shuffle them. Shuffle them, like you’re a Vegas blackjack table on the Card Counters World Tour. Shuffle them like the penalty for two spades in a row was death. Then tell the player to find the Queen! Every trip to the hint system felt like a minigame of its own, trying to guess where the relevant clue was. It was actually perversely engaging (because I am damaged), in that it felt less like cheating, more like you EARNED that daggum hint.

For the first 3 1/2 hrs, it felt like the game was crossing the room with a towering, inverse pyramid of jello desserts. Every step pitched dramatically one direction, its thundering crash a seeming certainty. Yet somehow a quick sidestep changed the angular momentum enough to forestall disaster, only to wobble precipitously in a different direction. FOR 3 1/2 HOURS! I mean that exhausting endeavor alone kind of has its own majesty.

At the 3 1/2 hour mark though, there is a narrative choice that ultimately torpedoed me. (Spoiler - click to show)To solve a puzzle, the protagonist commits mass murder. Including of innocents and children. And seems fundamentally unaffected by it. On the strength of the hint system, I assume this is an unavoidable outcome. I might complain that the text (and a death-fail) kind of led me to believe that would not be the outcome, but really, the clues were there, I just ignored them. (Spoiler - click to show)I mean it was called 'Cleansing Fire of God" or somesuch.

Now even that didn’t HAVE to be a destructive narrative choice, but in the version I played, somehow the wry comedic tone that had kept things from crashing until this point chose that moment to take a bathroom break. (It probably says a lot about me that I’m half convinced even a choice that dire could be salvaged with the right tone. I accept your judgement.) The text shifted to a near cold, journalistic description, and THEN tried to overlay a jarringly light comedy puzzle.

To be fair, I understand the current revision to have modified tone somewhat here, which will DRAMATICALLY improve the experience, at least for me.

There is some subsequent fun business in the final boss, but in my play the jello was already on the floor so to speak. Which is ABSOLUTELY going to be a catch phrase in my reviews going forward.

So in retrospect, I still grapple with this one. Far and away the biggest time investment of the Thing so far. So much of it in fighting the parser, the physical descriptions, and omigod dying. A lot of it skimming big blocks of repeated text. A lot more of it fighting the Hint system. But the breadth of the puzzles was cool, the amount satisfyingly large. Often, the hints left me with, “hey pretty cool, wish the text had given me more to go on.” The fact that the amusing text and puzzle mix kept the jello aloft that long, against those challenges, is noteworthy. Fixing the tone of that one plot turn probably gets the jello to the table.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Dystopian Satire
Polish: Distressed
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I mean if it’s mine, it’s gotta be rewriting that climactic scene/puzzle, no? At least for tone if not rethinking it completely. You could assemble a year’s long to do list of text/puzzle/hint cleanup, but without addressing that I think you’re still back to “Oh, no. No no no.” Author agreed?

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Rating omitted from total, as from previous version

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, bad ending

RDYD has a really nifty setup - school age girls playing what seems to be a party-hypnotism game. The writing is just perfectly on point. There is significant risk of potential confusion between competing reality layers (one mostly dialogue, another mixing dialogue and surreal scenery). But between font cues, authorial voice and crisp writing it is all conveyed seamlessly and compellingly. It was understated in the best way, accomplishing a lot with minimal verbosity, just precise and pitch perfect tone.

The surreal mindscape you navigate is pretty bare, deliberately so, but punctuated with one-off colorful details that reinforce the unreality of it all. At one point the game uses the word “uncanny” and I’m like, “Well yeah, that really sums it up, doesn’t it?”

I think what really won me over though was the upper layer dialogue between the un-hypnotised girls. You have a lot of interesting dialogue choices and all of them are crisply rendered with the character of the speaker. Really well executed, natural dialogue set the perfect backdrop to this tale, and really sold the plot when things got weird.

It’s a parser game, and the bareness of its environs nicely contain the description space to minimize the noun/verb implementation gaps. Even so, weirdly, the longer I played, the more I seemed to trip over stuff. Maybe its not so weird. Exploring/looking/collecting is more straight forward than anticipating every crazy player object manipulation, and the former dominates early game play.

An hour in, I felt like I had exhausted the map. Thanks to some clues, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do, and what I DIDN’T want to do. Suddenly, the game got combative with me. I could not figure out how to do what seemed easy enough: (Spoiler - click to show)pick up some rotten meat with a plastic bag. I spent a crapton of time trying and getting nothing but “nope,” and not even gently steering or cajoling “nope” just cold, stock “nope.” It felt like a noticeable departure to what had until this point been a pretty convivial, immersive conversation between me and the game. That’s where I went looking for HINTS to help me.

Yeah, there’s no HINTS. Or walkthrough. I wasn’t prepared for how much it vexed me, and I think I know why. I think of HINTS as weakness. Sometimes, on the part of the game where puzzles are unfair or inadequately clued. Sometimes my own because missing the obvious is my brand. HINTS are usually how I tell the difference. “Well, this is on you game, you expected me to guess MASTICATE when you didn’t even implement CHEW.” “Ooh, yeah that’s a clever puzzle. If I’d just remembered the speed limit sign and turned both dials to 5…” Due to reasons maybe only a therapist could explain, the NOT knowing is the worst. “Whaddya mean it could have been my fault BUT I’LL NEVER KNOW FOR SURE??” It was made worse, I think, because the tone of the thing, and the smooth progress I had to this point had kind of convinced me the game and I were on the same frequency. Like a skeevy parasocial relationship, I presumed the game thought more of me than it did. It stung a little!

So that whole spiral put me on tilt. What I SHOULD have done is internalized “ok, clearly this is not the path I thought it was, what am I missing or how do I approach this differently?” Where instead, I went with “WHY CAN’T I DO THIS?? FINE, I’M JUST GONNA DO THE THING I DON’T WANT TO DO INSTEAD.”

So I did it, and it was bad. Outcome wise I mean. Narratively, I was still in capable hands despite the maybe under-justified leap the plot took.

I can already feel the wheels turning in my psyche though. Like the memories of an immature first infatuation, I am losing the crappy way I ended it and dwelling instead on the early attraction and heady honeymoon period. Not sure how long it will take, but will undoubtedly take another run at this, when I’m mature enough to handle it. What? That day could come.

Spice Girl: Scary Spice
Vibe: Psychological Horror
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would let the reviewer know it wasn’t him at all, it was me. And as a peace offering to show what we have is REAL, I’d implement a hint system so robust, he’d come running back and we’d have a glorious future together of running hand in hand across sunny fields, feeding each other expensive food at sunset and relaxing in inexplicably matching outdoor bathtubs. Yup, that’s what I’d do.

If it were my project.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 30min, 6/10 tracked endings plus 1 untracked

I’ve been down this path before. When you play a lot of games in a short burst, inevitably similarities emerge. We’re humans, we’re wired for pattern recognition. EATQOTSK is a short option-select joint, oozing with comedic tone, whose main point is to collect all the endings. It’s not the only such experience this Thing, but has its own strengths and weaknesses in this emerging subgenre.

You are the titular Elf, called to solve a fantasy mystery, how to end a curse that forces everyone in the kingdom to yell at the top of their lungs. Excepting the protagonist and their manservant. This is only the thinnest of premise, used to connect a variety of unconnected subquests, each with a wry twist on expectations, tropes, or just an excuse for old fashioned slapstick. The tone is self-aware, with characters commenting on everything from screen layout, to fantasy and rpg tropes to the game itself.

The paths are of varying lengths, but none are long. The formatting is creative, and lent itself to quick digestion. I got a lot of dry chuckles at it and it was done! It could easily fit in what I have come to think of as the Adventure Snack product line - short, funny, does not overstay its premise. Is this the Showbiz Pizza to Adventure Snack’s Chuck E Cheese?

There did seem to be some technical issues. One of the setup’s conceits was a header and footer with inessential RPG-like stats. Those seemed to reappear and disappear during subsequent loops without obvious pattern. It was particularly unfortunate when the text was riffing on rpg tropes that were not on screen. There was also a tracker, showing you the endings you found, though it appears not all endings are tracked? I found one with no accounting.

Like a downhill mountain biker, none of that stopped things - it was moving fast enough to roll over those bumps, where a slower pace would have caused the bike to spill. Momentum compensates a lot! I feel like maybe I’ve said it three different ways by now, but it’s short, it’s funny, it’s pace makes it’s shortcomings non-impactful. Like potato chips, it’s a lot of satisfying if not good for you crunch, and once the bag’s empty, you can get on with your day.

Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d have to get the disappearing header/footer addressed. I might even tweak some meaningless values during game progress to underline the arbitrariness. Y’know, while I was in there.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, die twice, then win

At this point, I think we sometimes agree to pretend that parser IF will be enjoyed equally by novices and old hands alike. That as a form its evolved norms have made parser IF more friendly and less obtuse. There is some truth to this, of course. Certainly modern games are less cruel than their ancestors. Everyone who has a second is going to have a first IF experience and it COULD be any modern game in the archive. Even so, there are many informal norms that are deduced over time, like:
* If it’s listed, it will likely be important sooner or later.
* Walls and ground are rarely, but sometimes, interesting.
* Any location not connecting other locations has a purpose as a source of clues, objects or puzzles.

Despite having recently returned to the hobby (and enjoyed discovering the intervening years’ progress), my game play can never not be informed by the informal norms of the form. (“…informed by the informal norms of the form.” I wasn’t even trying and look what my brain came up with!)

It doesn’t feel calculated, so I’m going to say Marie Waits effortlessly leverages these informal norms to make a rarefied parser experience. The game opens with you, a plucky English detective, captured by villains and needing to escape before time runs out and their plan comes to fruition. There are objects to find, locked places to escape, and backstory and clues to discover. The text is constrained, with terse descriptions of environs and objects. The places are tight - each location with just a few things to interact with, maybe lugging around to be used later, maybe needed now. This has the nice side effect of constraining the noun/verb space within the bounds of normy actions. The ‘can’t do that’ messages seem fair and few. The spark of this game is the time limit. You are given three hours to secure your escape, and minutes tick by maddeningly fast.

Between the text, the location design, tight vocabulary space and the time limit, after two missteps I felt like this game put me in some Platonic Ideal IF Player zone. Leisurely trying random things to see how deep the implementation was was not going to be rewarded. There was a premium on leveraging meta norms to search, poke, prod at high payoff areas and shed distractions. And they were almost always rewarded! (Spoiler - click to show)There’s a bush here. Imma needa dig that soon as I can." “Can’t find exit, check the walls.” “Got a match, gonna need to light it when it gets dark.” It sounds like I’m running this game down, but I don’t mean it that way at all. It really felt like I was in the IF Zone, clicking along with the puzzles because of the tight adherence to metagame in a way that felt harder for newbies than me, but made me feel like a king.

Everyone who has a second whiskey has had a first. And it suuuuucks. The mouth experience runs contrary to millennia of species-preserving evolution. It’s kind of a miracle anyone ever has a second. But maybe you take it with coke for a few years in college, then someone introduces you to a perfect Old Fashioned, and before you know it, you’re having two fingers at night just to stay sane. I mean, you have grown to appreciate the nuances of the flavors. You even start differentiating whiskeys from each other as better or worse, but really as what is the best whiskeyness for your palate.

That’s what this felt like to me. Not a super sweet combination of spirits drowning in fruit juice. An unadorned experience that showcases the learned pleasures of a very specific flavor for someone who has trained themself to appreciate it. A perfect two fingers of cask strength IF to be savored and enjoyed, but quickly before those thugs come back.

A quick note on the narrative. The game makes an interesting choice to foreground the ‘escape from bad guys’ stakes (that is where the urgency lies after all), but background the underlying mystery that got you caught in the first place. As you navigate the spaces, bolting for freedom, you periodically find clues that trigger flashbacks. These flashbacks provide discrete snapshots of mystery pieces, puzzle pieces if you will. Some that snap into others to expand your knowledge, others that are in empty spaces of the puzzle tantalizingly hinting at a larger picture. The incompleteness of the mystery both underlines how inessential it is to the urgency of the escape, yet implies a compelling larger struggle outside the bounds of this 3 hours (game time. less than half that clock time.) It is just the right spice, the bitters to the cocktail if you will, that make this a crisp, satisfying experience.

So, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing this game to a perfect cocktail for the spirits enthusiast. The dirty secret is, when I really enjoy a perfect cocktail, I usually want another one behind it! Marie? You gonna keep me waiting?

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: In Media Mystery
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I see that this is an entry in a series of games, which is absolutely what I was about to recommend. If it were mine, I might entertain a deconstructed mystery approach: a series of short IF showcasing discrete sequences of an overarching mystery. Perhaps out of order. Standalone IF type puzzle games, (or even disparate IF forms: a Twine detective relationship game! A Texture code breaking excercise! An I dunno Ren’Py point and click!) whose full mystery only makes sense when fully assembled. If this was already the path… points for guessing it?

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/17/23
Playtime: 4.25hrs score 23/33

I, ah, wow.

Boy do I owe my randomizer an apology. Deferring this particular work to the end absolves whatever sins I attributed to it. The Thing would have been an altogether different experience if chance had front loaded RTE. This is an incredibly layered work, taking on a broad collection of themes and commentary with some central conceits that I found… deeply dispiriting in that it kind of shamed any similar artistic ambitions of my own.

But because I am a heroic reviewer of Epic Scale I must cast all that aside to describe what a wonder Repeat the Ending is. The game purports to be a “25th Anniversary, Critical Directors Cut Rerelease” of a technically crippled but thematically unique 1996 IFComp game. The remainder of this review takes that claim at face value.

There are at least 5 layers to this work: 1) the original troubled magical realist/mental health focused game (itself with several layers!); 2) the historical context of psychological narrative IF and its reception 3) the updated version of the game, most especially the significance of the modern changes; 4) tropes of IF, including “post-puzzle” tropes; and 5) the critical analysis of all that.

It is a collected work, a collage, the playable portion of which is the minority. There is companion text in separate pdf-eelies and integrated into the hint/GUIDE system. There are context-building historical blog posts, critical essays and reviews. Exhaustive explications of the limitations of the original game that act as stealth training. Deep annotations by a trio of critics that act as hints as well as context builders. I was over a half hour in before typing my first command. I was still reading for 45 minutes after typing my last command. It is deeply effective in portraying a body of discourse surrounding the work, compelling in its breadth and vision. Each component of the patchwork has a distinctive voice, especially the trio of critics that are our guides (with varying levels of esteem for the project), and the author themself whose wry commentary peppers everything with suspect honesty.

All of it tonally perfect, from the erudite critiques, the playful and perhaps disingenuous hints, to the raw sometimes immature game play at the heart of the work. As I do, I grabbed a few lines that tickled me early on, before the scope of the work overwhelmed me and I just clung to the dashboard for the rest of the ride.

"In a recent survey of parser IF fans, four out of five respondents were found to care far less about mimesis than they initially believed."

"author's hegemony" (which you are conseled to fight)

"Cook's use of 'score' is almost certainly ironic. Audiences who consider themselves too sophisticated for such outdated narrative features might better enjoy themselves by referring to it as a 'failure index,' 'success deficit,' 'flop quotient,' or, more portentously, a 'present assessment of counter-narrative guerrilla action.' "

It would be easy to just grab funny/well-written/cutting quotes, but man, out of context they are insufficient, and even somewhat deceptive, in conveying the scope of the work.

There is so much to latch onto here. The historical context stuff was a clever, yet melancholy series of observations about artistic endeavor. The way the author subverted his own game, by layering a counter-narrative motivation that started funny but got increasingly unpleasant. The critical commentary that was in some ways a gentle parody of facile criticism, of the insufficiency of both fawning and ‘takedown’ critiques. Girded with legitimate caveats and observations that acknowledge the simultaneous importance and unachievability of full perspective.

(Sidebar: I topped out my “flop quotient” at 23/33 by choice. While my completist nature initially pushed to get all the ‘soft’ endings reflected in the score, the tongue in cheek humor sublimated to something altogether uncomfortable as time went on and made completism less attractive. This seems a deliberate, and effective, artistic choice.)

Awash in all that, to me the most compelling thread was the contrast between the original work and the 25-year-later revision. The early work rings like the work of a young artist - in love with their narrative conceits, possessed by a powerful emotion demanding documentation, convinced of the importance of their artistic vision to the exclusion of mundane craftsmanship. And fraught with an epic helplessness, a not uncommon youthful preoccupation. The modern revisions (some small, some dramatic) showcase a more mature artist, actively rebutting his younger self with nuance, generosity and insight. "Yes, and"ing his earlier work, both acknowledging its power, and offering additional perspective. And, not for nothing, smoother game play. The picture is a compelling one, most especially in the progressive ‘new’ endings created for the later revision, suggesting a final gift of freedom from the raw suffering inherent in the original work. (Spoiler - click to show)It’s not just the devastatingly gentle rebuke of those alternate endings, but the fact that the way to achieve them is to actively resist the defeatist track of the main story. UNTIL THAT RESISTANCE ITSELF BECOMES DEFEATIST! How perfect is that?? Yeah, I don’t know why that observation deserves a spoiler and not the whole rest of it, but that’s just where my head’s at twisting over this thing.

The work is simultaneously super controlled and shaggy as life. As a reader/player, you can bounce around this vast creative space engaging any or all of these themes as your mood strikes. It is a rich environment, with many ecosystems, each with their own marvels - some standalone and no less compelling for it, others that shed new light on previously superficially understood areas.

It is a compelling achievement. Deeply immersive. Demanding a lot from the reader, but pretty consistently rewarding for it. I hate how much I love it.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Psychological Meta
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If this were my project I would burn it to the ground, and deny its existence forward. I’d probably take legal action to silence the beta testers and even the cast of Spring Thing 23. Just expunge this thing from the record and people’s memories. I wouldn’t want this impossible miracle to POISON THE GROUND FOR THOSE THAT MIGHT COME LATER.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/16/23
Playtime: 30min, 3 cycles

This one was an interesting experiment: implementing a parser interface into the historically link-select driven Twine. The presentation was very attractive, the clean font, blue on black graphics were unique and sharp. It was also quite well written. The story conveys a coming of age ceremony in some unspecific post apocalyptic future, maybe not even with humans. You are pretty limited to surveying the ceremony’s location, minimally attending (or not) the instructions given to you, remembering things, then making a choice about your future. The descriptive text is clean, conveying a lot without being showy or distracting. You have good latitude to engage or ignore details, depending on your mood.

As a proof of concept, I would call it a success, but as a polished for play feature, a few burrs to buff off. There was a hint mode, which I think turned interesting nouns bold but don’t think the feature actually toggled so I still don’t know if I was playing in HINT mode or not. Despite being told I could use N/S/E/W navigation, only one direction seemed to be implemented. This was consistent with the scenario setup, but an odd thing to advise when invariably I got “cannot go that way” responses.

Again, not sure if HINT mode is to blame, or a legit design choice, but I found if I typed bolded text, I almost always got something interesting. Begging the question, “This is different from link-select how? More work?” Now it wasn’t ONLY that. I found non-bolded nouns that had interesting descriptions too. And a lot that were “can’t do that.” Occasionally, I needed to enter a hidden noun or verb to make progress. It wasn’t awful, the text gave enough info to trial and error, but it seemed inconsistent. HELP also sometimes provided additional guidance, and sometimes didn’t.

All that summed up to a UI that never quite disappeared into the background, and perhaps colored my responses to the text. Which itself was crisp and clean and friction free (a bigger compliment than it sounds). You get a lot of background, character, setting, and then you are told to make your choice. I think I did 3 cycles, (Spoiler - click to show)and all of them were bad endings! I might have done more, but the game did not allow UNDO, and provided no FF feature to arrive at the decision point again.

As much as I belabored the UI above, I think my net takeaway was positive. Certainly, the text itself was seamless and propulsive. It was the ending, and interpolating the message behind it, that pushed at me the hardest here. At my most generous (and discounting a dramatically DIRE ending), it seems to resonate with the title in the sense that given a single impactful, no-return choice, we are doomed forever to an unanswerable “what else should I have done?” That is an interesting statement, but only works if you don’t take ALL paths. Which I didn’t. Good job me!

If I had though, then I would have to grapple with the author’s statement on the universe of outcomes. The alternatives are (Spoiler - click to show)either that all choices are in fact bad, or that there are good ones but you have no way of predicting which they are. These are unconvincing artistic statements to me in general, and the text did not try to convince me otherwise. I already rebel at the assertion that any one choice can be so life-defining. (Well, barring that dire ending. I do get that.) These assertions run aground against my fundamental belief that life is long and varied, and all but the worst decisions redeemable, mitigable or minimizable over time. Especially decisions whose consequences are so arbitrary, meaning agency and intent are effectively nullified. While acknowledging the world is not ours to control, I can’t help but feel our responses to that world ARE. At least to some extent. TRNT, I respectfully disagree!

So all that said, I do think the trail this game blazes, of adding parser capability to Twine, is a pretty cool one. I could see future efforts leveraging the expanded interface to good effect. It is this game authorship achievement that I find most compelling here, and that is where I land on Spice Girl.

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Social Sci-Fi
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d scrub the UI in general for friction. I think there is an interesting mix in here, of combined parser/click input, worth playing around to refine.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 45min, died same way 4 times, caught in same apparently unwinnable state 4 times

Here’s something I knew nothing about before Thing23: Mamertine. For weeks, when I read it in the list, I rhymed it with “Hammer Time,” and mentally included the distinctive musical sting. I am still enamored of that reading, tbh. According to the Internet WHICH NEVER LIES, Mamertine is variously ancient Roman mercenaries or an ancient Roman prison that housed the Apostles Peter and Paul. Seems this work is referencing the latter. One of the few descriptive blurbs on the work suggests escaping a cult which is a really subversive connection, if intentional.

The work itself has a tremendously attractive facade - the graphical interface design is slick, functional and appealing (standard taste disclaimers apply). The moody background music, effective. It implements a click-based parser of sorts, providing a stripped down menu of standard parser verbs, and highlights potentially relevant matching nouns when selected. You are effectively building parser commands with your mouse. It is a not unsuccessful choice! You deliberately trade command speed for guaranteed valid entries. My personal preferences may lean the other way, but this was as slick an implementation as I could hope for. “Why is this a back garden?” I asked myself. “Seems pretty polished.”

The narrative may have been a first clue: it was pretty bare bones. Hinted backstory of betraying a master landing you here, environs to navigate that presented more mystery than coherent story, an NPC much more concerned with their immediate surroundings than any background or table setting. Now this artifact is far from unique in IF, particularly in puzzle driven IF. Here though, the puzzles encountered were minimal and straightforward (at least partially an artifact of an interface that inevitably allows for exhaustive permutations if all else fails), so not the star. It kind of left the piece without compelling plot, story, character or puzzles. What is left?

And then I got to the game play. It opens with timed text, deliberately dragging the introduction. While I have seen timed text used effectively in support of artistic choices, without a compelling justification its use can easily become tedious. The game play itself harkens back to an earlier time, where death arbitrarily follows seeming benign choices. Where you can blunder into locations without crucial items and get locked into an (unacknowledged) unwinnable state. And I’m not sure you can achieve anything OTHER than that. I couldn’t. I made a good faith effort to restart and explore all location branches and that’s all I could find - death or purgatory. Maybe I wrote off the puzzle complexity too soon. Certainly there might be more business with the only NPC that could help me, but no clues guided me nor paths suggested themself. Not ruling out that I somehow missed a path (I didn’t actually map it out), but I did plumb my memory hard before throwing up my hands.

Which is where the lack of HINT/HELP systems became important. None exists here. I guess I am more forgiving of this omission in a Back Garden entry, but without that tool I kind of had to give up.

In the end, the star here was the pseudo-parser implementation, including the graphical flourishes. Those were pretty successful I thought! As a showcase of what the platform is capable of, it makes its case pretty well.

Apropo of nothing: CAIN’T TOUCH THIS! (doo-do-do-doot. yeeeah, yeah)

(Post Comp update: seems like what I interpreted as unwinnable state was an ordering problem. Game - 1, me - 0)

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Maze
Polish: Both Gleaming and Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If the engine were mine, I would focus on adding Hint/Help capabilities. That tool is crucial for a fully usable IF authoring system, as it is the surest tool to get players past brick walls, authorial or personal. If the GAME were mine, I would take a hard look at unwinnable state handling and engineer those out as best I could - or at least put the poor player out of their misery. And maybe also provide a walk through, pending the hint system release.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 30 min, all 4

An IF anthology! I LOVE that idea! (Notwithstanding from a certain remove Spring Thing itself is a functioning anthology.) This seems to be an umbrella release of 4 new-to-authoring student projects. Packaging together is a great move, as they are too slight to stand on their own, but that compactness is a strength in anthology format. Particularly since the common “use mirror somehow” prompt gives a unifying theme that still elicits maximum individual creativity.

In that spirit, I am changing my approach here, each substory will get a “Marketing Blurb” “Great” “Learning” and “Notable” reading.

Mirror by Mihi:
Blurb: “You’ve won the lottery, plan a trip! Wait…”
Great: Really liked the prioritized tasks/choices after the lottery - fun in specificity.
Learning: Choices that immediately reconverge are not choices! Easy to code, not too fun to play.
Notable: Leans more into the fiction than interactive, with legit narrative twist!

Mirror by Liliane:
Blurb: “If a mirror is a portal, it is a fragile, unforgiving one.”
Great: Smoothly surfing the ST23 zeitgeist of “find all the endings, and make them WILD”
Learning: A score of ‘endings found out of total’ is a tried and true way to keep player engagment.
Notable: Loved the embrace of arbitrary, bonkers end states

Mirror by Filter James:
Blurb: “If this is your house, why is everything…off?”
Great: Embraces classic IF find/unlock/explore tropes, but at breakneck speed.
Learning: Arbitrary puzzles and deaths work when pace is fast, would be contentious in longer works.
Notable: Mixes narrative and puzzle play! Always a winner!

Mirror by Dr. John:
Blurb: “Where are you? WHO are you? And why is IXI so interested?”
Great: This had the tenor of an abstract puzzle, compounded by intriguingly enigmatic players.
Learning: If it was an abstract puzzle, a ‘reset’ capability is key to giving the player deductive agency.
Notable: If it wasn’t an abstract puzzle (I didn’t solve it), the fact that it MIMICS one so well is actually kind of funny. The kind of gag well suited to short anthology.

Spice Girl: A whole band!
Vibe: Anthology
Polish: Distressed
Is this TADS? No. Get on that teach!
Gimme the Wheel! If this were mine, I’d take the extra step to wrap these 4 shorts into a single Twine interface. Maybe as simple as introduction/table of contents. Maybe a much cheesier Crypt Keeper type host and intro, replete with groan-inducing puns. Honestly? Definitely the latter.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 50min, finished

Man do I love how omnivorous this author is in subject matter, narrative interests, puzzle creation and platform engagement. If you’d told me ahead of time this was his next project my response would have been, “Are you kidding?? Where did THAT come from??” [pause, thinking] “Ok yeah, I see that.”

As is a my wont, a quick digression about ME. I have a long history with coding, starting from any number of BASICs, Pascal, Fortran, Intel and Motorola assembly, to C, C++, verilog, vhdl, Java, Javascript, BASH and Cshell, Tcl/Tk, TADS of course, and on… I am deeply unafraid of new languages which I condescendingly characterize as “where does the semicolon go?” Various programming languages come easier or harder, depending on how their syntax and operators align to my own thought patterns and algorithm organization. One language has long towered above all others as just GETTING ME. I speak of course of PERL, God’s Own scripting language.

As a Perl zealot, there is a special contempt for non-Perl scripting languages. Ruby, inessential. AWK, aimed at alien intellects.

Python. Sterile, pale, uncanny valley of scripting languages.

As a veteran of the Scripting Language Wars, arguably on the losing side (but the right side of history!), I have so many feels when I see Python. Boy do they surge when I need to fire it up, or worse, DOWNLOAD ADDONS TO A LANGUAGE I WOULD AS SOON PURGE FROM MY DISTRO.

Anyway, all that is inessential to this review, but was essential to my mental health.

WOR is a clever math puzzle, overlaid with a writer’s block simulator. You are given progressively more interesting rules about balancing writing and reflection, and asked to derive the variations (under the guise of ‘finishing a chapter’). Each correct variation you enter is accompanied by amusing mini-narratives about staying on task. Or not. I quickly got immersed, at first using fingers to brute force enumerate possibilities, then pencil and paper trying to math them out. This is my kinda fun! It did pull me down a rabbit hole of abstract thought, so much so that the choice to engage this right before bed was revealed to be a deep miscalculation. I found myself spinning on the same thoughts a little too frequently, blunt as my mental auger was. Reluctantly, I put it down. Next day, refreshed and caffeinated, I readily closed it out.

There were either a few bugs, or a joke that went over my head. I got “New ideas form. They should be more specific, but I forgot to fill them in! This is a bug that I should fill in, in wor1[or 2].txt.” quite a few times. I understand these bugs to have been subsequently fixed.

Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Fun Math
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No. It is THAT LANGUAGE THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine? Re-implement in Perl. Obviously.

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 45min, finished

Maybe I should have done some preview reading at the start of the Thing. In my review of The Kuolema I wrote:

"Of course, in five years, I’ll be typing 'Live IF via GMAI, what even is my life right now?' ”

5 Years? It was TWELVE DAYS!! Now I’m playing an AI-assist generated IF! Even the DARPA Grand Challenge took 2 years before self-driving cars completed the course.

The implementation is a hybrid click-select/parser set in Greek Myth. In practice I found that to be… pretty ok. It even seemed to handle my mischievous “click on link near top of page, after subsequent commands.” In practice the link acted as a ‘canned’ command for the parser, but did not preclude full parser input. My usual complaints with hopping input devices were kind of addressed here, at least addressed enough, and it was kind of… convenient.

The presentation was attractive, nicely evoking classical mythic art. That’s got me a little conflicted, tbh. Chokepoint Capitalism (ref. Cory Doctorow, 2023) has already transferred huge swaths of revenue from artists to rent takers/platform monopolists. Voice artists are under siege from AI audio, visual artists from AI artwork, now the extremely rarefied sector of IF?? We’re hardly a pot of gold waiting to be raided here! With that charged background I take no delight in saying: the art was pretty attractive and evocative. That’s how they getcha.

I take significantly more delight in saying the IF work shared a lot of shortfalls that beset pre-Beta human-created IF. I wish I could have transcripted it, but I understood the online interpreter to be required. There were lots of typos (a “fairly plan->plain corridor,” “later” instead of “latter” among others). There were many unimplemented nouns, including many samples of the evergreen “You are by the side of a river…” “>X RIVER” “You see nothing like that here.” There were issues with state awareness. (Spoiler - click to show)After freeing Narcissus, the room description still had him mesmerized, but trying to X him yielded “not here.” There was some overwrought prose: a cave mouth described with fangs instead of stalactites.

Wait.

Did we feed the corpus of IF art to a machine, and it decided THESE THINGS WERE FUNDAMENTALLY PART OF THE FORM?? WHAT DOES THAT GO@^#$%#MN MACHINE THINK OF US EXACTLY???

Before I get too paranoid, I am going to attribute human agency to some key elements of SD. For one, the overarching plot is very much aligned with modern, revisionist Myth interpretations. From Broadway to video games there has been an impulse to infuse these classic stories with modern sensibilities and twists and by and large I’m for it. Why not? Cultural currency. We got a Winnie the Pooh horror movie, can’t wait to see the same thing done with Micky !@#$%^ Mouse. SD is very much in the former vein. (Not so much the latter, but I would also watch the crap out of an Achilles Slasher movie. “Andromeda, he’s not dead! Get him in the heel Andromeda, the heel!”) Don’t know that I was clamoring for a redemption arc for (Spoiler - click to show)Narcissus but why not? On the other hand, its more generous take on (Spoiler - click to show)Phaedra was nice. Cause man could that have gone a different way.

I think my favorite dear-god-I-have-to-believe-this-was-a-human moment came in an error statement. Instead of “You can’t do X with Y,” or “I don’t understand that,” I got “That’s -not- Greek to me.” I guffawed aloud at that, not the least of which because the piece is pretty straight drama otherwise. I swear to god if you tell me a machine produced that line I’m going to go full Kaczynski. (Minus the postal terrorism of course, Jeezuz.)

In sum, I found this to be a promising work. It suffered a lot of the issues that plague pre-release hand crafted IF, but none fatal. Its premise was neat and well executed. The story was contained and linear, but I understand that also to be a work in progress. Look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.

Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Greek Mythology
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would institute a world wide pause on AI while we enlist our best thinkers to really plumb what it means for humanity to offload increasing amounts of cultural, technical and legal authority to inauditable, evolutionary systems. And for once, create guard rails and policies that keep technology in service of us, rather than letting clumsy, flawed systems run roughshod over the social order to keep enriching fewer and fewer. I mean, after I submitted this for a grade of course.


Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review

Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min

A lifetime ago, I began my fascination with the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, and to a lesser extent the dime novels and serials of the 00’s and 10’s (the last ones). Of course Sherlock Holmes played in that space, he practically loomed over it. There are a lot of qualified charms to those stories that still appeal to me. Not the least of which is the purple prose that was a hallmark of so much of it, at least until John D MacDonald and his peers entered the scene.

In a handful of reviews, I have complained about what I called ‘poetic verse.’ I have NOT called it Purple Prose. This is deliberate on my part. While the majority of the world may not see a difference between the two I very much do, no doubt due to my formative fascination with pre-war low culture. My personal distinction between Overwrought Poetry and Purple Prose is that I really like the latter in an only semi-ironic way, while the former pushes me away. What’s the difference? I couldn’t really articulate a grammatical definition, but in application it seems to be one of stakes. If you scale a mountain to leap for the heart of a universal truth… and then fall short it is heartbreaking and hubris-revealing. If you bend over with dramatic flourish to brush lint off your shoes and stumble, that’s kind of funny. The contrast of high language and low stakes is near irresistible.

Secret of the Black Walrus feeds that beast. It apes the tropes and the vibe of Victorian mystery stories in creating an Asian super sleuth, then aiming her squarely at a locked room murder. The language does a lot to settle us in with bangers like:

"the freshest in our bloodthirsty city’s contemptible compendium of heinous crime."
"Bixby had a mind like a lightless cellar."

among others. If anything, I wanted MORE of that! No, it’s not realistic dialogue. Yes it goes out of its way to make its point. That IS the point! That overwrought energy is as much a hallmark of the genre as the Deerstalker hat. I fist pumped in delight whenever it showed up, and was sad when too many screens went by without. Shout out to the pastiche language of the thing in general. Even when too restrained for my taste it ably carried the vibe of its inspiration.

The mystery itself is nicely fit to its conceit, plenty of a->b clue following and twists and peril. It’s not particularly revolutionary but is a nice representation. Mysteries are tough in IF, particularly when your protagonist is a superhuman detective and the player is very much not. Walrus takes the tack of letting you point the protag in an investigative direction, but then letting her do the heavy deductive lifting. Nothing wrong with that, but in providing limited options that can be exhaustively selected it can take on the feel of a wind up toy. Yes, I periodically give it a twist, but all the motive energy is its own doing. I’m not saying I know a better way to do it, I’m saying these kinds of characters are uniquely challenging in IF (see also Lady Thalia).

I wish that those were my only lingering impressions of the work, but there is another heavier impression I carry. Pre-war pulps were deeply racist. There is an entire sub-genre called “Yellow Peril.” When I first engaged these stories, fandom approached this artifact as “awful of course, and kind of quaint in its ignorant hate.” That take itself has not aged well, and my (and society’s) tolerance has shifted significantly. There is an impulse when doing pastiches of pulp stories to underline the racism, as a way to show you are not blind to the faults of the form. This comment comes not from a place of condescending judgement, but of lived experience. I wrote some pulp pastiches decades ago that have aged REALLY BADLY. (I took it even further than Walrus. In a pre-post-satire world I thought the perfect takedown was to exaggerate for satirical effect, to drive home how awful it was. When all I was doing was creating more of it in the world. What was I even doing wading into that anyway? Was my big insight “Hey guys. Hey guys. Racism is BAD ACTUALLY.”??)

Thankfully, Walrus didn’t follow me down that ruinous path, but it did belligerently embrace the ‘don’t forget the racism’ impulse. At this point in my life, I am pretty convinced that just starkly OBSERVING racism (or sexism or sexual abuse or any number of awful things), without having anything to say ABOUT them weighs a work down. Especially when looking back from a different (and hopefully better) cultural context. If the narrative is a light lark meant to thrill or amuse, it is particularly defeating. I think there are defter ways make the protagonist uncomfortable that don’t unintentionally make the reader uncomfortable. Some complain about “woke culture” ahistorical racial diversity and acceptance in fiction like say Bridgerton. Those snowflake whiners somehow don’t care that the practical effect of what they champion is that wish fulfillment fantasy becomes only pleasant to the historically privileged. What are they defending here, the ongoing right to exclude people from WISH FULFILLMENT FANTASY??? If you’re not making historical documentary or pointed polemic, let everyone play! I am swayed by the idea that realistic racism has no place in a light, high society romance.

I am kinda done with “historically accurate racism” in pulpy detective adventures is what I’m saying. Didn’t mean to take this all out on you Walrus, but you stirred up some Stuff for me. I guess its good to know I can get spirited over things other than cats, broccoli and python.

Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Victorian Whodunit
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would cut out most or all of the racial stuff, and replace it with MOAR PURPLE PROSE!!!1!!1!!

Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.