Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/22/26, 4/24/26, 4/28/26
Playtime: 1.75 hrs over four sessions, won

Am I capable of opening a review of a TADS work without proclaiming my unwavering fealty to that authoring system? My track record might suggest ‘not at all’ but I’m going to try it here. Except that first sentence kind of… D’OH!

Unseelie really goes out of its way to bias you under-appreciate it. The ABOUT screen lays out its genesis, not as a passion project, but as an undercooked assignment that got out of control. Then a half-hearted “might as well” ST submission, with self-confessed shortfall in aspirations. On the one hand, little risk of unachievable expectations. On the other, what a wild choice to SO prime the player with reservations. It’s already in the back garden, we KNOW there are caveats! Sure, points for transparency, but for me the invitation to dismiss it was so prominent it kind of colored my play of it.

That low-expectation level setting does immunize it from disappointment, but it also partially closes our mind to its charms. Every typo and gameplay glitch that follows can’t help but be seen through the lens of what it could have been. The narrative is very shallow - the protag is bumped into an otherwordly portal by dimensional travelers, then left to navigate a quasi-liminal set of tunnels. This is not a ding on the work, it harkens to very early parser traditions where the wandering and puzzle solving was the point. It does though, put a premium on the construction of those puzzles.

Here, I think, is where the undercooked nature of it works against the player. It has very clear “obstacle-circumvention” gameplay. A prisoner that must be freed. A faucet that must be turned on. A creature that must be distracted. The puzzles are a mix of classic “find key” and some more clever discoverable mushroom capabilities. I identified two things that ultimately prevented me from fully embracing the work.

The first was the absence of soft cues. This seems a deliberate design choice, putting a premium on player experimentation and exploration. There is nothing inherently wrong with this choice, in fact the biggest charges I got from the game came from connecting mushroom effects to puzzle solutions. The question this inevitably raises though is “What happens when player runs out of ideas?” Historically Hints or Walkthrough provide the goose necessary to keep going. Or progressive cuing text. Absent all that, players will sooner or later run into a wall. And here is where the expectation setting undermines things. By so thoroughly disarming us, we don’t really have a narrative hook to keep driving us past blockages, nor a confidence that the game itself is not blocking us. This was compounded by the inclusion of multiple locked doors, a (Spoiler - click to show)card reader, and an (Spoiler - click to show)unknown nest object that ended up being red herrings. Absent soft cues, they represented potential puzzles a player might spend an INORDINATE amount of time spinning on. For me, this added up to four separate game sessions of trial and error with fits and starts in progress, each time with decreasing enthusiasm. It is unclear, if this had not been a TADS work, if I would have bothered.

The second barrier to full embrasure is fear of puzzle design I am calling “steps for steps sake.” Some puzzles are rendered as multi-step. Freeing the prisoner requires finding an item to free them, only to be told “no you need more.” Same for the faucet with multiple valves. These are a tried and true tradition of parsers, no doubt, but the construction of multi-step puzzles is a delicate thing. The way they SHOULD work is a tiny shot of endorphins when a step is completed, egging the player further and providing some reward for the work to date. When the ‘reward’ is a repeated “NOPE, you have uncovered more blockage” that crucial shot of motivation is leached away, and you start to lose faith that further progress will not be met with MORE blockage. Yes, for sure there is an ultimate success waiting for you, but no real sense how far off that is, and how many blocks the game will throw in your path before you get there. These represent an increasing ‘enjoyment debt’ that threaten to overwhelm the stuck player, particularly if this is a common outcome of several concurrent, in-flight puzzles. I am glad to report that the chain of blockages is in fact quite shallow, and all of these puzzles DO reward tenacity! It turns out it was only a FEAR of steps-bloat, not actual bloat! It’s just, given the warnings we were given (particularly since I was solving things in parallel), not to mention distracting red herrings, a good deal of the playtime was under a shadow of dread. Then, because the puzzle solutions transition to game end so unexpectedly and abruptly (when red herrings were implying further gameplay), I never really had a chance to ENJOY the sense of accomplishment the puzzles DID provide!

Per the portentous ABOUT warnings, there are quite a few implementation issues as well - stray words and messages polluting object descriptions; a closed box reporting open; LOTS of missing nouns; iffy punctuation; some spelling typos; and most egregiously mushroom disambiguation and repetition issues. It seems overwhelming when put in a list like that, but honestly? Not as intrusive as a cold list would suggest.

So yes, despite ALL of that whinging, there is a lot more going on here than the ABOUT disclaimers suggest. The setting is solidly rendered with a consistent “Implementation Horizon,” effectively painted by tight, efficient writing. It leverages some more advanced TADS capabilities like Dispensers and AccompanyingState in its structure. The NPC is more deeply implemented than you would think, including acting as a soft HINTer if asked the right questions. I’m not sure I could engineer this tight an experience in only two-ish weeks. If the Back Garden is not custom made for this kind of work I don’t know what it IS for. It is a fully realized collection of TADS puzzles, ultimately a bit more mature than its disclaimers would have you believe, stocked with traditional game play and some nice mushroom-based curve balls.

That ABOUT disclaimer set a trap of underestimation I just barrelled into. Thanks to its clever construction, I did eventually claw my way out and enjoy it. I just wish I hadn’t spent so much time ensnared in misconception! Even partially-realized TADS works are still TADS!

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Part-time Parser
Polish: Rough (despite head faking Distressed)
Gimme the Wheel! : Were this my project it would OF COURSE be TADS. The most obvious things to address gameplay-wise would be either HINTS or WALKTHROUGH, missing nouns, or typo/grammar/stray message fixing. But I think my code wonkery would push my first priority in a different direction. There were awkward disambiguations throughout the work, most especially once you realize you can pick as many mushrooms as you want. I think I would plumb TADS’ isEquivalent and CollectiveGroup capabilities to tame that field as a first priority. Honestly though? Softening the ABOUT disclaimers would have the biggest impact on my enjoyment!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/24/26
Playtime: Just under an hour, all in

On the heels of confessing my besmirched admiration for the insect world, Senica Thing comes along and gives us an anthology of works with a (loose) bee common theme! Bees may be second only to spiders atop my Pyramid of Cool Bugs. Kind of the same way Senica Thing is atop my Pyramid of Most Anticipated Works of Spring Thing. I am an unabashed fan of this annual tradition, so to couple it to BEES, then have one work be called A SWARM OF SPIDERS??? If you are just shamelessly pandering to me YOU ARE DOING A GREAT JOB, PLEASE KEEP IT UP!

There also emerges an insect-adjacent common take to some of these works that I found intriguing, though maybe it is best to let it emerge through individual feedback. Let us delay no longer!

Yellow Swarm by HOT (10m 4 endings)
This was a great piece to start with, one that leaned into an action hero inspired tale of base infiltration against a little-a alien threat. It was very economical in its implementation: its protagonist and world were so thoroughly painted in a few ‘previous case’ details and periodic Schwarzenesque™ one-liners, quickly getting out of the way of its breakneck action pacing.

Beyond the really fun setting and frenetic pacing, there were two things that really elevated the piece. The most obvious is its graphical design. Given the Senica Thing authors - many students new to IF - it is quite notable when graphical flairs are added to the narratives. And so well done here, the font and layout choices really enhance and echo the setting of the work. The second aspect that delighted me was its ‘collect the ending’ architecture. Despite its deliberately tropey setting where it seems two-fisted Justice will be almost perfunctorily dispensed by an impervious hero, YS instead lets the player steer into a broad variety of endings, running the gamut from Action to Tragedy to Horror. All of them were interesting and fun to find!

Also this work leaned into an aspect of SWARM that many of the other works would ALSO lean into (and surprisingly so): a not-necessarily-unsympathetic depiction of hivemind.

WHAT A MESS by THK (5min, all endings)
Ok, I know I started by belligerently flouting my creepy entomophilia in your face, but one of the strengths of this format is the wild flights of inspiration of its various authors. Here, the swarm is a swarm of RABBITS. Dafug?? Also ROFL. This seems to be a collaborative work, where different branches might have been engineered by different primary authors. This is a very effective way to synthesize dissonant creative visions into absurdist fun. This is a work where your fictional partner may perish, marry you, or mistake your fart for an earthquake! What possible response to that is there but delighted giggling? This piece also leans into the multiple-ending paradigm which might well be a natural way for new authors to engage IF. For me, the success of that model is ALWAYS about how bonkers you can make those. Boy did MESS deliver.

Despite the seeming simplicity of branching narratives (at least conceptually), I am impressed by how many of these works go beyond pure combinatorial explosion, and implement reconverging branches. That is a crucial construct in the IF author’s toolbox, and seeing it explored in a maiden work (like here) is terrific.

The Underground Dungeon by ASM (5m all endings)
Another multi-author work, this one impressed me by how narratively tight it was. It was a collect-the-ending work, but rather than try to disarm with absurdity, it was more tightly linked to a story about palace intrigue. The possible endings were… ok not COMPLETELY shades of each other, but perfectly viable narrative paths. It did not read at all like the product of different authors, it easily could have been the product of a single mind. That is some next level collaboration! (and also somehow a reflection of the emerging hivemind theme?)

It also felt subversively cynical? The motives of the protagonist are unceremoniously selfish. Their king is shaded as problematic, but nowhere near the extent of say Game of Thrones, making our protag’s actions kind of hilariously worse-than-the-problem. Which narrative branches might reward, but more often deliver some over-the-top comeuppance. This work (like the first) showcased that collect-the-endings can succeed even if NOT an exercise in comedic breadth. Which is not to say I didn’t laugh.

Swarm of Thieves by SKIT (10min, endings 1,2,3,4,5,6)
This was a deceptive work of social-justice metaphor… Metaphor? That word kind of implies a level of indirection NOT present in the text: presenting a protagonist named TRUTH, along with companions JUSTICE and FREEDOM, struggling against an autocracy named KLEPTOCRACY. There are multiple paths this struggle might take, curiously many more optimistic results than cynical ones. It also subtly raises some questions, particularly about JUSTICE. While TRUTH and FREEDOM are philosophical constructs, JUSTICE expands to encompasses Social Systemics. Notionally we are playing as TRUTH (lending a bit of weight to our actions!), but functionally we are asked to perform JUSTICE. (I mean, we want those two to be close, right?) This is further complicated by aligning the protagonist with a SWARM - a word that typically does not imply nobility or fairness (let alone FREEDOM), but predatory massmind might-makes-right. All of these choices made the work much more complex than its surface choice-select construction. Just giving TRUTH choices AT ALL undermines the expected singularity of it. If we can choose multiple, incompatible paths, how can they all be products of TRUTH? It begs us to interrogate whether TRUTH is living up to its name, or are our decisions arbitrary and as their author we simply choose to CALL that TRUTH? And is JUSTICE really a universal concept at all, or just expedient control masquerading as something nobler?

Was any of this intended by the author? I have no way of knowing that, but SOT really spun my mental wheels in intriguing ways.

(One quick note to author, it appeared that TRUTH’s gender wavered throughout the work? If this was intended, I didn’t tumble to its desired effect.)

Join The Swarm by SAT (5min, 3 endings many times)
This presents as a horror work - the player is beset by sinister voices egging them on to some unsettlingly unspecific transgressions. This formless swarm seems to have verbal capabilities! The setting is an empty (except for protagonist) house, where the darkness outside is fraught with unseen threats. This all builds a terrific atmosphere of horror lurking below the everyday, emerging to torment us once the sun goes down - a wonderfully primal fear from our collective unconscious. The choice select work presents as a series of choices how to engage/avoid/combat these voices and the tension they are building. I appreciated the divergence from standard Twine formatting here, the red link choices really popped. The work funnels your choices into three possible endings, all hinging on a last minute twist worthy of The Twilight Zone. I found it interesting to replay. After experiencing the twist the first time, the story shifts to melancholy on replay, when you know what is coming.

The only glitch in my gameplay came from the audio track. At startup you are advised to crank up the volume, which I dutifully did. If there was a soundtrack associated with the work it did not seem to play for me. Which is too bad, because a just-shy-of-audible-muttering would have been an amazing mood-setter here!

Jouin Le Swarm by Neural (5min, endings 1, 2, 3, 4)
This is another story that elevates its default Twine formatting with playful font work. The fact that first time authors engage this arguably optional nuance gives me hope for the future of art. Or at least artists. This work explicitly grapples with the two sides of “SWARM” as a hive mind. On the one hand, a perceived loss of freedom. On the other, an end to loneliness and promise of community. I was pleasantly surprised at the nuanced treatment of this dynamic. Western Democracy has decided individualist FREEDOM is our highest aspiration (which to be fair, when presented with authoritarian alternatives does seem better). This simplistic prescription seemingly ignores our evolutionary grounding as a deeply SOCIAL species. I would not have guessed this doctrine to be questioned so explicitly in the entries of this year’s Senica! Does that speak to hivemind or a series of resonant free-thought exercises? Or to the possibility that the whole construct could be somehow a false dichotomy? Many of the works gestured at this tension, but this one foregrounded it. In particular, it had the maturity to acknowledge that while assimilation CAN BE violent to the individual, it does not HAVE to be! I liked the nuance there.

John The Swan by Vitali Blinov (5 min, 4 ends)
I am not a poetry guy, I trust that has become clear. If I am going to engage poetry though, it is best when it is playful. Join the Swarm → John the Swan is a subversively funny baseline for a sly wordplay poem. First runthrough, I thought the timed text worked pretty well, particularly, the ‘late link’ final step. It played out just slowly enough to force me to engage it, but not so slowly as to frustrate progress. It ended up pacing well enough to let its wordplay land with all the absurdist fury of Suess poem. From a default position of 'poetry - no thanks, ’ JtS was tight and fun enough to get past my barriers. If I had a quibble, it was on repeat plays. What at first was playful delay, compensating drag with surprise, once the surprise was eliminated the drag became uncompensated. I would recommend accelerating the pace of timed text during subsequent iterations, particularly for screens the player has already seen.

It’s Here by Chaos (5min)
Ok, if Jouin Le Swarm opened the door to reevaluating Western Orthodoxy’s fetishization of Freedom, It’s Here charges through that door and starts flipping tables. This Swarm is conceived of not as a threat to, but a negotiation between the collective and the individual. It posits that the individual need not be lost to the Swarm, just the opposite, that the swarm is enriched by the presence of each of its individual constituents. I don’ t mean for it to sound condescending when I say I was not expecting this from Senica Thing! I mean that as a compliment, but I understand SAYING it may not make it so. The amount of insightful and challenging thought packed into these small games is really a revelation and a credit to the authors. I really like the subtle reinforcement of that in the game’s construction, which I’m going to spoiler because I like it so much. (Spoiler - click to show)Every path of acceptance or rejection you might try to take ends with the same text! The architecture of the game is reinforcing its central message that there is no RIGHT or WRONG way to engage the collective. The Swarm is enriched by all of it! That meta-linkage is even more impressive to me than the always welcome formatting experimentation!

Dystopia by Creator (10m, multiple endings)
So Dystopia distinguishes itself in the field by having the most extended (and grounded) narrative in the collection. It is an amateur game maker’s baptism into the world of work. Sure, it’s a deeply CYNICAL narrative but that is a virtue, not a sin. It conceptualizes the Swarm as relinquishing individuality and creativity in the name of a collective. But not a nuanced collective of symbiotic benefits, a fully exploitative collective that its members just agree to because… social and financial inertia. When these ‘Rage Against the Machine’ narratives appear they are not served by nuance or ‘ok, but..’ In fact their complete LACK of measured fairness is the whole point. It is a polemic driven by anger, and since when does anger care to take time to hear the other side? It’s seen all it needs to, now is time for RAAAGE. Here, in cold black and white, it is possible my words might be misinterpreted as condemning this impulse. Far from it. This is the youthful Punk Rock ethos that refuses to excuse Exploitation with tepid ‘Trickle Down’ dissembling. It is a throat punch to a social order whose creative vampirism benefits only a very few. ALL my favorite music plays this song, and I LOVE IT. It doesn’t need to be an accurate portrait of all work, whatever that even is, it only need decry a model that EXISTS, and give it ABSOLUTELY NO QUARTER.

I might suggest three refinements here: first the illustration that appears 2/3 of the way in is HUUGE. Even on a full-screen window it bleeds over. I would resize (shrink) this to fit within the text. Also, while I as always appreciate the experimentation with presentation, some links are rendered in a maroon color that practically disappears on the black background. Lastly, there are early choices to reject the story before it starts. Sometimes it leads to an abrupt and unsatisfying end, long before its anger manifests. Another time it results in the game basically telling you ‘No, take the other option.’ Both of these are kind of counter to the narrative, and if taken before the game has been played through once, have no real power. Given the narrative really takes off only if the initial overture is accepted, it is perfectly ok to force the player to accept, and provide story reasons for it. “My family would have a fit if they found out I didn’t even consider the job. Maybe I’ll go ahead and check it out.” Particularly since meaningful accept/reject choices (arguably the point of the work!) occur later, early railroading would not be a terrible gameplay choice.

A Swarm Of Spiders by DiBa (5min, 5 endings)
And here, in our final entry, we get the eagerly anticipated SWARM OF SPIDERS!! The work presents a half-dream late night exploration of unusual spider activity. It can end with going back to bed, DYING, or… no not gonna spoil it, … or another ending that I laughed right out loud at. Vindication for Arachnophiles! This was a very short, very amusing way to close out this year’s theme and collection. The perfect amuse bouche to clear the palate of some of the heavier works ahead of it, and end on a playful, fun note. I do appreciate that one choice (perhaps the most meaningful in the game) was telegraphed as important. If I had a suggestion it would be to make the options of that choice more naturally suggestive of their outcomes, even if only in retrospect. Something like (Spoiler - click to show)Your adrenaline must have played with the spider venom in a catastrophic way… Otherwise, a great finale to this year’s premier IF anthology!

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Buggy (I mean, not COMPUTER buggy… you get it) Anthology
Polish: Various
Gimme the Wheel! : We have established that nothing in my makeup lends itself to this incredibly vital service to this hobby. This is a wheel I am content to leave in Ondrej’s firm, sure hands.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/21/26
Playtime: 10 min, 2 chars x2 personalities

“Welcome to the rest of your life, Mr. Menfer.”

That quote from Exchange presents as a mic drop moment, doesn’t it? In isolation like that, it can’t help but beg the question ‘is it earned in context?’ Don’t worry, it’s kind of my job to explore that, and if have my measure you know you’re going to get PARAGRAPHS of answer.

Exchange is a choice select work set in a near-future medical facility. I am loath to expose too much of its sci-fi conceit which anyway is kind of tangential to this first Act of a work. The piece is billed as Act I of III, and as you might expect is mostly used to establish characters and background. All of it in service of a narrative that promises to explore (Spoiler - click to show)billionaire privilege colliding with (Spoiler - click to show)underprivileged resentment. I mean, I am totally here for THAT.

It presents as a dual narrative, letting us play as both doctor and patient. It further lets us characterize each of those along the “well-meaning → @sshole” axis. This is a very interesting choice architecture. As far as I can tell, neither of those choice-chains influence the narrative directly (not in THIS Act anyway), but they very much shade the narrative with divergent characters and motivations. You can basically construct 4 separate narratives by permuting the two characters: 2 mirror image “good guy v bad guy” configurations, a cynical “dual-jerks” tale, or perhaps a tragic “dual-angels trapped in unfeeling system” one. It’s an interesting approach where the EVENTS are the same, but the characters the player creates are so different as to mold the story around them, thematically.

Learning that this is part I of III really sets some expectations here. For one, this act is pretty short, at least in a single runthrough. If the subsequent acts are to scale, this will end up being a blindingly fast narrative. My initial impulse is that it couldn’t possibly achieve its goals on this extrapolated time scale. That’s probably an unfair take though. The author is under no obligation to make the Acts symmetric, so perhaps this line of thinking is misguided. It also presumes things about the narrative I have no true insight into. Granted it wouldn’t be the FIRST time I wildly attribute a dire future on the thinnest of justification. Maybe I won’t do it here? Yet?

More interesting is the tension this structure sets up. In a (very) short Act I, practically a prologue, the degree of difficulty in enabling those four narratives is not SO high. It is still a noteworthy accomplishment, but it’s kind of like a free throw or an unchallenged layup. It’s one thing to ESTABLISH character and motive. It will be another challenge altogether honor those choices in a fuller narrative, where they might be expected to influence the plot directly.

Then too, there is the meta-narrative expectation. This is not four separate stories, this is a single work encapsulating the four. Yes, branching narratives CAN represent unrelated stories, customized stories if you will, where the intended experience is a single playthrough that honors player choices. This work though explicitly begs you to replay, presumably to at minimum see both principle actors. By opening that box though, you are also invited to plumb the permutations. Which then begs the question, “Will there be an over-arching meta-narrative that somehow unites these permutations into a larger statement?” How cool would THAT be???

Through those lenses, I found this to be a very effective opening. It set up stakes and conceits that are inherently in my wheelhouse of interest, compounds it with a challenging narrative structure that I see more pitfalls than reward. This is the perfect setup to surprise and delight me! It’s like having our hero dangling by a vine over a steep precipice. It was a fun romp to see them get there, and now HOLY COW HOW ARE THEY GOING TO GET OUT OF THIS???

So is the mic drop justified? All depends on whether the next two acts can turn a free throw into a buzzer-beating, game-winning three pointer. For sure the game is compelling enough not to stop watching at halftime.

Spaceship: Tardis (because.. DOCTOR…)
Vibe: Multiversal Medicare
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I would address one thing more explicitly. As a billionare-v-commoner narrative, I think the work needs to do a little more to establish that the DOCTOR is taking the commoner role. Today’s world places medical professionals closer to billionaires than the rest of us (in esteem, if not financially). The seeming goals of the piece might be better served to show why in the near future this is not so. I mean the corporatization of Hospitals and Health Care provides a ready-made path to this.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/11/26, 4/19/26
Playtime: 1.25hr stalled on first mystery; 45min w/ heavy walkthrough

Some tightly constructed mysteries seem to be written backwards. The author conceives of the crime, then plumbs characters, happenstance, clues and motives to drive towards its solving. Finally, they usher the protagonist through those items in a deliberate way, burying conclusions among red herrings that all make sense in the end. On the one hand, this is good - writing in the other direction could lead to meandering, contradictory and unsatisfying details that undermine the coherency of the puzzle.

It’s also a bit like navigating a trail network backwards. Imagine if you will a motivated hiker starting at a beautiful scenic overlook, the terminus of a particularly rewarding but signage-free trek. MOST hikers will start at the beginning: encountering junction after junction of intricate trail crossings, needing to suss out the ONE path that leads forward. Over and over again, perhaps with some false starts and retracing of steps. Our backwards outdoors enthusiast however, they do NOT experience this. For them, every junction has a SINGLE path backwards, with all the other trails clearly meandering in the wrong direction. For our reverse-pilgrim, the confounding network is anything but, and they speedily and confidently navigate back to the trailhead.

Ok, this metaphor has screaming gaps. Somehow our reverse hiker is also creating the trail system? AND the view at the end? What I am getting at is that, armed with foreknowledge of the mystery’s solution, a mystery author might lose sight of the bafflingly broad possibilities for explorers running it the OTHER WAY. I wouldn’t have spent so much time fumbling with this increasingly over-engineered metaphor if I wasn’t going to apply it to CCC.

For MY hike, I spent over an hour at the very first junction: arguably, the best signposted junction in the game. It wasn’t that the clues weren’t there, some of them anyway, it’s that the clues pointed to more paths than maybe the author acknowledged? After seeking other hikers’ input, I secured the trail map, blazed past that first crossroads, then hit the same artifact again and again. Logical conclusions that made sense BACKWARDS, but FORWARDS were not the only possible path. Ultimately, this repeated artifact meant EVERY STEP was ushered by the walkthrough, not under my own power. This much hand waiving at (if not outright IGNORING of) alternatives could not help but undermine the hike’s reward (and our faith in the deductive powers of the protagonist), regardless of the final vista.

BUT. The work had other charms. For one, despite having consumed a LOT of detective games over the years, the deduction minigame was a thrillingly new mechanic for me. You are presented with 2-4 questions to answer WHY a character might be lying to you. If you successfully navigate the dropdown options, BOOM! you catch the lie and the picture gets clearer. The dropdown was kind of ingenious - it presented facts you had uncovered as options (so many facts!) that both resisted lawnmowering in their breadth, but ALSO triggered you to think about specific aspects that might apply to this suspect/witness. Honestly, it was this mechanism, coupled with the construction of the mystery, that kept me at it, long after I had resigned myself to the walkthrough experience.

The construction of the mystery was ALSO intriguing. It turns out (Spoiler - click to show)EVERYONE is lying to you for all kinds of reasons! Penetrating those details gives you an increasingly clear picture of the sequence of events that notionally lead you closer and closer to the truth, culminating in the biggest lie by the perpetrator themselves. What a revelation of gameplay these two elements created! It felt like a new take on mystery solving that was both thrillingly novel and provided a narratively satisfying scaffolding.

THIS game didn’t quite realize the promise of this architecture for me though. Each junction was fraught with questions that did not parse against their dropdown options, options that encapsulated conclusions in opaque ways, and conclusions that made more sense backwards than forwards. I suppose if the narrative itself had been stronger, or tenser or funnier, that could have bubbled me along. I kept coming back to “Wait, our Thinking Machine organization is prioritizing THIS nearly stakes-free crime?? Are there so few Locked Room mysteries left in the world?” Don’t get me wrong, our protagonist was appealingly humble, the suspect pool diverse and distinct, and the setting confidently painted. But none of that could escape the shadow of the central mystery’s problems.

Ultimately, I am thinking of this as a training hike. I think there is a TERRIFIC game waiting to be trail blazed with this mechanic and construction. Those two choices are an innovative and enticing bedrock to build a game on. I think I just need a bit more attention paid to how it plays FORWARD to realize its promise.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Hallmark Mysteries
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : I think I have made it pretty clear what I would focus on, were it my work? I think the most important takeaway though is that I would DEFINITELY CREATE MORE MYSTERIES WITH THIS TEMPLATE. Given the fictional detective organization established as background, the serial potential is RIGHT THERE.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/18/26
Playtime: 45min, 2 endings, 1 achievement

There are honestly a LOT of things I like that just flat baffle my family. I don’t mean ‘oh that’s not for me, but it makes him happy’ like IF. I mean ‘HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU LIKE… WHAT DID GRAMMA AND POP POP DO TO YOU, DAD??’ Tinned sardines are one such item. Spiders and insects are another. In my life I have spent SO MUCH energy trying to explain to loved ones why these creatures are FASCINATING, ACTUALLY and it only ever made me more of a monster in their eyes. Somehow my hair trigger passionate defense of Bug’s Life has become a punch line when I AM TOTALLY RIGHT ABOUT IT. So I’m just going to accept my fate as a specist paraiah without explication. Bugs are cool. I accept your scorn.

Bugs that are also musicians? Are you just cherry picking from my brain pan now?

This work is a really tight parser, marrying anthropomorphised insects with ‘getting the band back together’. It is Bug’s Life meets Blues Brothers and SAY NO MORE, I AM YOUR UNCRITICAL CHAMPION. Your mission, young Flick, is to assemble a band to honor the moon. Each of your four bandmates are beset by predators or their own damaged psychology and you can free them with the power of music. And cleverness. The puzzles are nicely diverse - each requiring slightly different approaches, but culminating in a common (organically established) musical capstone. Each of your fellow musicians have unique stories and engaging personalities. The vibe of the whole thing is so generous, so empathic, even the (scary) external threats are clearly not EVIL, just doing their food chain-given work. Except maybe that demonic mole rat.

So what you have is a work that drove DIRECTLY into the most shunned, shameful corner of my interests, presented me with fun parser puzzles and a warm story, and you want me to nit-pick it? Maybe ask my family, I am ON BOARD. Everything about this work appealed to me: its hand drawn map, its bugs-eye-view environs, the heavy lean into folklore surrealism. Not least of which its prose. I am in the habit of grabbing quotes from text to support my claims, but here the only quote I grabbed was “pungent enthusiasm.” That wonderful phrase was deeply representative of the piece, conveying its sardonic warmth with every sentence. If you have no room in your life for the wry absurdity of that construct, I feel bad for you.

If I had a complaint, it would be that it was too short a work. Seems like good news on that score too: this appears to be set in a shared universe of (hopefully) more works to come. Have I ever penned a review that didn’t have at least ONE substantive quibble? It doesn’t feel like me, yet here we are. This is the best I can do. My quibble is I WANT MORE. Jake Blues, help me out, I have turned into a shallow, cheerleading shill. How can I close this fawning review?

“We’re on a Mission from MOON.”

(Hey is it a character flaw that my positive reviews are often MUCH shorter than my critical ones? I’ve got to figure out a wordier way to say “I really liked this!”)

Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise
Vibe: The BeEtles. Seriously, THE BEE…
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I would beef up the drummer-bug’s puzzle and role. Really center the narrative around him, dig into his background, his quirks, his musicianship. Maybe engineer some rhythm-game gameplay into his vignette. I would also… what’s that? I am a drummer, but I don’t see how that’s…

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/18/26
Playtime: 45min

I don’t have the unbroken runway with this hobby to know if “pull-forward” games (the opposite-yet-not of “throwback”, where ancient implementations are dragged kicking and screaming into today’s IF scene) are a recent phenomenon, or a low-key throughline throughout IF’s history. Aaron Reed, you have left me unprepared here! Certainly in my 4 years of engagement I have seen enough of them to recognize the category. This iteration is a reimplementation of the author’s unpublished Commodore 64 work, complete with online C64 emulator.

These implementations have a specific aura to them: they simultaneously harken to a day when computer capabilities were more tantalizing promise than reality, and invoke a youthful creative impulse, getting its hands around virgin technology and bending it, however imperfectly, to its will. You get both of those in spades here - a very small, very tight geography of locked doors to navigate around, littered with sometimes useful, sometimes red herring objects.

I found it to be reasonably smooth (with two exceptions), especially notable given its Italian-language authorship to this English reader. A key design choice, which I question whether was present in the original, was to highlight interactable nouns in the text. This compromise runs the risk of leeching away some of the promise of parser play, but in exchange bypasses the ‘flounder for implemented noun’ pockets that can occur. Especially for a work (at least initially) created by a new-to-form author, this tradeoff is WELL worth it and made the experience pretty robust.

The story this is in service of is hilariously of-its-(original)-authors-age: you must cheat your way to passing a test! No moral judgement, no exploration of transgression, just a very pragmatic this-must-be-done task. The completely un-self-conscious tone of the protagonist’s execution of this mission is a subversively funny baseline that sturdily supports the whole thing. The puzzles themselves are pretty uncomplicated affairs: finding keys, tools, or other artifacts to unblock obstacles until the test key is finally yours. For its age, I found it amazingly friction-free, much more so than games I played back in the day.

There were two aspects that did grate at me over time. The first was its emulator performance. Either through code complexity or as a deliberate design choice, the emulator seemed to recreate the key lag of 80’s hardware, so much so my 2026 fingers routinely outpaced the UI, skipping letters I for sure typed. This happened a lot. This is a piece of the experience that does not weather the intervening years well. Like watching 1970s cinema, the PACING is the ‘of its time’ artifact that holds up the least. Our contemporary expectations are just too far removed to see it as other than intrusive.

The second artifact seems pretty specific as well. You can >TAKE objects, but not >GET them. Now, this is petty for sure, but as a parser fan those neurons are burned pretty deep. My fingers stretch for the ‘G’ key before I know what I’m doing. By FAR the most repeated sequence of the game was:

>GET [something]
%@#$($#
>TAKE [something]

So, so many reps. There was a flash of red in my vision every time it happened, but honestly both those artifacts were also kind of endearing? They served as omnipresent reminders of WHAT I was engaging with, which, given the modest nature of the narrative, deserved its place at the table. It is telling to me that even its most dated gameplay paradigm - inventory management - did not spark my ire. It felt fully of a piece to the rest of the work and I (acharacteristically) just rolled with it.

This was a slight, sly, simultaneously smooth and chunky experience that evoked its provenance quite well, and unlike others of this pedigree never wore out its welcome.

(I should note the 'GET' shortcoming seems to be subsequently updated, so future players be comforted!)

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Too Cool for (Old) School
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would have to engage Vax/VMS instead. Is there an emulator for that? Y’know what, don’t bother looking it up. OF COURSE THERE IS.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/16/26
Playtime: 2.75hrs, used walkthrough for goosing, failed in tombs (repeatedly, due to remote open door), eventually undid to try an accusation but soft-locked out? Officially score 43/55

The closer you are to something, the more unique it becomes. This is a completely reasonable compromise between physics and evolution. In the unthreatening distance, we need know nothing more than ‘cow’ or ‘coyote.’ The fact that light attenuates over range makes it biologically convenient to deprioritize. (Not ignoring you, Sharp-Eyed Hawks, but until you start playing IF I don’t have much to say to you.) Up close though? Boy do I want to SEE small thorns before finding them other ways.

This works metaphorically too. To my wife, for whom all IF is “Colossal Cave” (technically, it’s all ‘that thing JJ does that is at least quiet’), OLOT’s charms might not feel so unique. To me, who is so close to parser development I may as well be wearing it, authorial voice is a strong distinguisher. OLOT’s voice is really polished, most obviously in its authoritative command of its setting. The monastery is so well conceived and complete, I might accuse it of being implemented from a real-world floorplan. The language used to describe it is consistently jargony, in a way that sets the scene AND slowly integrates us into monastic life. Obviously, I liked this, but I found the work’s more subtle writing even more impressive.

If you’ve consumed some amount of my reviews, you know I am fond of what I call the “Implementation Horizon.” The level of detail (and inherent cuing needed) that the game operates at. Parser players are well comfortable with the idea that we will never get thread count when examining sheets. We agree to operate at the level of the game. It is up to the game to 1) cue us where that level is and 2) then be consistent about it. OLOT takes a specific tack here: the level is deeper than it appears, and absent cuing that might suggest it. But it is, to my playthrough, completely consistent. This meant that I kind of had to discover the Implementation Horizon on my own? Learn the dialect of this game as it were. I needed a walkthrough goose to get there, but once I did, the consistency of it was reassuringly firm and nearly always rewarded. This had the effect of building a very coherent, very robust world to knock about in, whose unspoken limits became as much a part of the scenario as the prayer schedule. I don’t know if I’ve seen it done better.

On top of this is imposed a clock of sorts - the day resolutely dribbles by, alternating between daily duties (where the cast is conducting their daily chores, and available for interview) and Offices (where the cast is collected in the Chapel, leaving their locations unguarded and explorable). It is a nice gameplay feature: predictable, alternating NPC states that you can exploit to different ends. It also marks a game timer - if you do not solve the crime in time Cruel Tempus will halt your investigation.

Yes, you are solving a Monastery Murder - a classic of the ‘closed setting mystery’ genre. You must establish method of death, motive and suspect via decidedly lo-tech forensic work of tasting and smelling. As well as the usual interviews and poking your damn novice nose where it doesn’t belong. There is a large cast. Almost too large to be manageable, but wisely with at least a job-personality quirk combo to sort things. I found it (mostly) really well constructed: puzzles integrated naturally into the setting, deep curiosity both needed and rewarded, red herrings and dead ends sprinkled realistically throughout, but unambiguous clues once found.

I felt a few glitches where puzzle solutions might seem to run counter to the setting, most notably the completely casual ‘climbing on altars’ move which, as a testament to the writing, I felt REALLY bad doing. Glitches like that were very much the exception though. I liked that disturbing your Brothers’ rooms might trigger their suspicions. That points were awarded for monky behaviors unrelated to the mystery. That you spend so much time smelling plants.

As a way to convey how well-tuned the prose was, let me share my very frustrating endgame performance. Patience, dots will connect. I found my way into the Crypt during an afternoon Office, meaning all monks collected in the Quire. I had foolishly left a door open that I should have shut. This put me into a tight box: I needed to explore and escape a dark crypt while the game timer only had limited turns before my snooping was discovered and Game End.

This awkward situation meant 1) try a bunch of stuff until 2) timer expires and you lose, then 3) UNDO a WHOLE LOT to give yourself a tight block of additional moves. Repeat. A Lot. Eventually I find my way out, into the in-Progress Office where I am informed hey, I can SHOUT an accusation to solve the mystery! Only I couldn’t. Despite being told BY THE GAME that I could end things (and having assembled enough clues to have confidence I could do so), I ended on a failure. Jeebus was that frustrating! I think it was a bug?

Now this kind of endgame kludginess could reasonably be expected to poison the whole experience. Backing into a hard time limit because of something I neglected to do 10s of moves earlier, needing to recycle with UNDOs SO MANY TIMES, eventually getting to a legitimate solving position, only to be soft-locked OUT by a seeming bug. Here’s where I connect the dots back to the writing.

Thanks to the cumulative effect of the previous gameplay not only was I thoroughly invested in the solution, the constraints I backed into made me MORE motivated to find it! Even after the ultimate failure, I kind of ignored that, mentally readied my accusation, and read SOLUTION. I credited myself with a “Justice” ending that the game did not award me! I solved the mystery IN SPITE OF THE GAME, and with no hard feelings! In the face of all that mechanical awkwardness, I left the game satisfied and impressed.

DESPITE A BLOCKING BUG AT THE VERY VERY END, the writing had laid such a strong foundation, the mystery had clicked together so smoothly, my overriding takeaway was “hey, that was pretty good.” It was not diminished (much) by its glitches. How many times can writing in IF survive that? DOTS CONNECTED.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Echoes of Eco
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : The ‘cannot SHOUT’ bug at the end is most obviously in need of addressing.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/16/26
Playtime: 30min, 2 passes, mutual love, unspoken ending

Ok, I just need to start thinking of Ren’Py as a straight-up ‘visual novel’ engine, don’t I? It seems to have provisions for branching gameplay and dialogue trees (and I think I’ve seen pixel-hunt hooks before?), but I have encountered way more narratives than mechanics. Not a problem at all, just an observation.

BSM has some branching choices to make, scattered through its impending-life-change narrative. Ultimately, this does lead to alternate possible endings, but the central story is mostly static: you are spending your final week with a childhood friend (and sardonic third wheel) just as your feelings are becoming more adult.

Ren’Py as a platform centers its experience graphically, and BSM inadvertently tripped into a pet peeve of mine. Not pet peeve. Thorn in my paw? I don’t know, a creative choice that I probably read way too much into, but just can’t stop. Mismatched anime-character graphics against photographic or painted backgrounds have always suggested an artificiality to me. I understand the choice to some degree: humans famously embrace cartooning because iconic representations are easier to empathize with than uncanny valley ones. Thing is, Garfield outside his common-linework surroundings would be just horrific. Asymmetric art styles are visually jarring - characters feel removed from their surroundings. This can be used to effect. It is an economical way to convey alienation from one’s surroundings. Here, that does not seem to be the intended effect, and its dissonance is compounded for me by the nature of the narrative.

Melancholy is one of the most subtle narrative moods. It can be deeply affecting, but it is VERY nuanced. I found the narrative of BSM to be very well done: the protagonist’s emotional paralysis and looming decision point were deftly conveyed in the text and interactivity. This is no mean feat, and arguably the work’s strongest achievement! I found it undone a bit by limited character animations. I think there were 4-5 character emotion models? All textual content had to be reflected via those models, and they were cartoony shorthand that were NOT up to the subtlety of the narrative. The flatness of exaggerated ‘sad/neutral/shocked/pleased’ as an emotional palette was at odds with the far more subtle and affecting text. In some cases they seemed to be trying to indicate a narrative ‘path’ that did not map to text in a crisp way.

This central Melancholy (and the protagonist’s resolution of it) was the focus of the work, so anything that diminishes it is regrettable. But maybe it’s just me? Anime as an art form was embraced by the generation behind me - I’m certainly at a disadvantage parsing its visual dialects. I don’t THINK a Larson-esque character design would change my reservations, but maybe?

It is to the story’s credit that, three paragraphs later, dissonant art is not my overriding impression of the work. The story’s emotional content, most especially using its choice infrastructure to highlight the protagonist’s clay feet, are really well done. The language of the piece is natural and unadorned and carries the emotionality so much better for it. The scenario and characters are vivid, as are the choices to make (including ones not possible!). Even the multiple ending structure, presumably hinging on choices made throughout the game, allow the player to dial in a SPECIFIC melancholy in the protagonist, then honor the final choice against the carefully crafted backdrop. I did not exhaustively explore the space, but the two endings I achieved seemed completely justified and consistent with the choices I made throughout.

I also found the trio of main characters initially tropey, but blossoming over the narrative to fully realized characters in their own right, even the ones I was not driving directly! Overall, it was an accomplished work, conveying nuanced emotion. If I can (mostly) get past my artistic hangups, you probably can too.

Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise
Vibe: St. Elmo’s Fire
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : The easiest change I would make, were this my project, would be render the background setting images in the same style as the character models. A common visual scheme is the easiest way to NOT make the characters stick out. I think I would also create a LOT more character models to better mirror the emotional complexity of the work - some of the models maybe leaning into Mona Lisa-like ambiguity. I am trusting that, unlike myself, “Become a Competent Artist” is a pre-requisite task most Ren’Py authors have already accomplished.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/16/26, 4/22/26
Playtime: 40min (4 iterations, 3x0 plot fails, a week later 1 dastardly success)

Before I start my review, let me just finish this tea you thoughtfully provided me. ya-aw-awn Oh Spring Thing, I know it’s time to review another entry, but today was sooo long. I’m just going to close my eyes for bit, I’ll get to… it.. soooooooon.. SZRXNNN…

This work gets HUUUGE points from me for its unabashed commitment to its bit. Its inspiration is a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of Gothic pulp literature. Its central systems are based on a hilariously reductive analysis of the genre’s villain, protagonist and setting tropes. Even as a non-fan of the source, the IMPULSE to clown on its straight-faced conceits is so something I would do. To then gamify it? I am aligned with everything about this, author!

The parodic playfulness is doing a lot of lifting here. As a player, how do I choose between Withering Gaze and Overconfident Monologuing??? They are both so DELICIOUS!!! In the end though, I didn’t find the elements beyond its central conceit to be as weight-bearing.

For one, for a work so committed to the MOOD of its inspiration, portraying it in bland, default Twine formatting felt like a missed opportunity. A presentation more steeped in browns and greys (black was well covered), perhaps with evocative location backgrounds and Gothic fonts… back it with a portentous parlor music soundtrack… such flourishes would have really elevated the goals of the piece, I think.

Aesthetics aside, there was a bigger issue with my playthroughs - I question whether the game systems are ‘fair.’ This is a conclusion I jump to all too often, as the alternative is “well, reviewer, you are just BAD at this.” Certainly it is ONE of those two things, and in the end, does it even matter which? My experience was the same - baffling failure after baffling failure. The work provides some measure of ‘rules’ for you: that some (randomized) weather and locations will confound your randomized antagonists while others will buttress them. Intimidate them to ‘0’ and win; if failure leaches your ‘plot’ to 0 or your timer expires, lose. This suggests a pretty specific play style: confront your opponents where weakest, defer engagement where strong. This strategy was laughingly ineffective. I routinely failed (and lost Gaze capability!) where those thrice-damned heroes were weakest and occasionally succeeded where they were strong? In EVERY case, my plot points drained to zero much faster than any headway against my foes.

I do not know the mechanisms at play, but it FEELS like unconstrained randomness. Randomness in opponents whose FIBER scores combine to make your GAZE goal: on repeat plays I experienced some goal totals that were TWICE previous ones! If I can’t Wither “12” before my plot runs out, how will I EVER Wither “24”??? (This might be a bug? On repeat plays I ALSO got to see the previous randomized Heroes, making me wonder if I was getting harder goal scores due to non-reset, compounding game state. Or are some heroes just WAAAY more resilient?). To set scale, the path to success was 3-6 TIMES longer than the path to failure.

Further, there was cuing text that seemed to occur before and after an implicit “die roll.” Ie I might get a message "You are well prepared." That conveyed, 'ok, strategically on the right track! ’ To be immediately followed by (para) "The heroes laugh at your efforts. (Your Gaze score has decreased.)" How do I parse THAT combination? I tried the right thing, and failed anyway? The work strongly implied your GAZE score was the basis for randomization, but also seemed to modify your score based on results? This is a really punishing mechanic, if true. It reinforces results, making it MORE likely to succeed or fail next time based on the current roll of the die. Statistically, this means if you ever dip below 50%, you are increasingly likely to be on a resolute path to 0 plot. Which was my experience EVERY SINGLE TIME.

(SZNrr.. just a little more, donwannagetup…)

In addition to seemingly deceptive strategy guidance, some commands implied stat improvement by “practice.” Trying that (many times) did not seem to yield impactful improvements, and were just advancing my timer to the lose threshold. The gameplay was conveyed both too clearly (this is the strategy that SHOULD help) and inadequately (WHY DIDN’T IT???). Certainly, I did not tumble onto any cues that refined my understanding of dynamics under my control. Just one baffling failure after another.

Ultimately, it felt unbalanced? Randomization in games is a specific type of mitigation challenge - deduce how to optimize your chances of success against capricious fate, trusting probability and big numbers to not create unwinnable scenarios. This requires balancing the math in your randomization to not create a ‘failure drain’ and communicating action effects clearly enough for players to deduce mitigation strategies. My play experience was that neither of these things were accomplished? Since it is MY choice whether I call this “Game Design” or “Player Incompetence” you might guess which way I am leaning.

Despite those conclusions, I still carry a warm feeling about Perilous Plot. The scampish impulse to poke fun at something you love, then commit to it so HARD… I can’t stay mad.

SZZrxxXX, huhWhosat…? yawn Did I nod off? I just had the weirdest dream. Yeah, I was playing Perilous Plot, but it was different somehow. The hero-based faint targets were lower. Also my powers were more effective, in ways the game helped me anticipate? And I started with no items instead of two… Weird thing to dream about, yeah? It’s almost like I dreamed about a different game. Or am I dreaming now, and the randomization led to a circumstance where positive feedback launched me to success with the same inevitability as the prior failures? Has the game been altered, or has Dame Fortune trapped me in a dream within a dream? I DON’T KNOW!

CURSE YOU PERILOUS PLOT! DID YOU DRUG MY TEA??? BY MY HEAVING BOSOM YOU SHALL NOT GET AWAY WITH THIS GASLIGHTING SKULLDUGGERY!!!

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: “Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond…”
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d really have to dig into the math. DO I have a fun drain? If so, what is the math that mitigates it, and how do I cue players towards these mitigations? I’d prioritize that over the graphical presentation, at least initially. OR DID I ALREADY DO THAT???

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/14/26
Playtime: 30min, 5 playthroughs (4x2, 1x3 captured)

Cryptids are Horror adjacent. While the world is large, and there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in philosophies (Horatio knows what I’m talking about), cryptids occupy the twilight intersection of folklore, the thrill of the unknown, and monsters-among-us. Certainly Horror entertainment has embraced them as fodder, and this work’s outre creations lean hard into that. This work plays to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tradition of turning the human-victim/monster-marauder dynamic on its head. As the title plainly states, we are a HUNTER of cryptids. Suck it, stuff-of-nightmares!

The game is conceived as a contract for the titular protagonist: search out and capture 3 cryptids with specific characteristics for your employer. It is somewhere between an interesting challenge and a flaw that I found it so hard to do. The characteristics requested are clear enough, its just the cryptid descriptions only laterally map to many of them. It requires some logical leaps that are as often wrong as rewarded. Am I dumb or is the game obtuse? Both? It took me five repeats before I could assemble the requested bunch. The game is small enough, and the pantheon distinct enough, that iterations aren’t a chore.

As gameplay it was pretty trial-and-error. The showpiece of the work are the creature creations, and accompanying illustrations. I really liked them! 5/6 of them were unsettling, monstrous and wildly unique. (One was (Spoiler - click to show)a horse. Hey, at least it wasn’t redundant!) Their design is doing a lot of the Horror-adjacent work, as the actual captures were somewhat anti-climatic. Our resourceful protag has all the needed tools, and is never really in any danger. Thankfully, the creature designs stand on their own and carry the piece’s dramatic load. Even after a few iterations when their novelty is reduced.

This work is short, non-obvious and moody and successfully pulled my ‘replay’ levers until I managed to collect all 3. So the ending. The ending was not a surprise to me. It kind of telegraphed itself during the initial contract setup. There’s a line between subtle clue dropping and hamfisted foreshadowing, and this work was WAAY over it. So much so, I knew how I wanted to respond well before the work copped to its conceit. Sure enough, desired option available! I liked the IMPULSE of it, just found the implementation a bit too obvious to enthrall.

So what do I make of an unsatisfyingly difficult puzzle, in service of a telegraphed plot twist, with really cool monster designs? I’m sorry, all I heard was “hrma-grma-zrma REALLY COOL MONSTER DESIGNS.” Does my tunnel vision not surprise you? Moth Man may be an existential mystery of primal unknowability. Your humble reviewer, not so much.

Spaceship: Nostromo
Vibe: Vegan Curious
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I think I would more tightly bury the twist. Use more indirect adverbs to convey the suspect nature of the mission, but not its character. It’s a worn but not worn-out premise, and would breath better as a bigger surprise.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/14/26
Playtime: 30min, 4 endstates reached, 10/15 branches taken

Bait and Switch is a well-known pejorative at this point. Promises made, only to dissolve into nothing and be substituted with something far less attractive, commonly in service of a scam of some kind: monetary, emotional, whatever. Seems like a wild way to open a review of a work whose blurb is “A short story with hyperlink branching.” That’s like marketing Stephen King’s The Stand as “A thick book of pages, each with a lot of words.”

“Reviewer, how can this be bait and switch? That looks like a pretty naked hook to me!” Absent literally ANYTHING to hang on to, all we have left is every single IF game we have ever played. IF is a wonderfully broad canvas. Might we be in for a work of Gothic/Body/Cosmic Horror? Some hard-science or pulpy sci-fi? Light fantasy, puzzlefest, romance, slice of life, some REALLY MOTIVATED vampire erotica? Even in the face of that impossible expanse, you can be forgiven not finding room for “Multimedia Philosophy Lesson.”

This is not a lick on CFN1, in any way. The work arguably went out of its way NOT to set expectations, so much so our pattern recognition brains inevitably reach inside, attempting to frame what is to come. By avoiding any expectations of its own, the work puckishly lets our imagination flail around, knowing we will be flummoxed once it is fully revealed. It is a bold subversion of expectations on all fronts, so much so that it carves out for itself a truly novel IF experience, in some way echoing full on Augmented Reality Games.

The piece opens with some absurdist characters exploring a town, possibly investigating some ill-defined supernaturally-philosophical threat. The kind of thing Grant Morrison might conjure in his sleep. You are given choices on how to engage the town, but right away, things are a little off. As with any number of choice-select works, choices are embedded in the text, loosely associated with one of three characters. But there are also links beneath the transcript, meta-commands of some kind. They carry distinctive but contextually empty meanings. In most scenes this presents a bewildering number of options, some concrete, more just baffling. I want to say “all” in the next sentence, but since my data is anecdotal I must in good conscience downgrade myself to “most.” “Most” modern browsers (that I have used) highlight the http address of links you hover over. It took a moment’s exploration to determine that the inline links repeated the ‘meta’ links. This created a new mystery! How are these obtuse words aliasing to concrete actions in the text of the game? Why are THOSE two things driving to the same destination? That frisson alone, of trying to decode the game’s architecture, was a pretty uncommon experience in IF, and the novelty of it really hooked me.

Nothing in its very short runtime suggested any answers. Each screen presents MORE of these action/arbitrary word aliasing as a meandering story of no true climax plays out, inhabited by characters more avatar than alive. Except eventually, you find one link that does NOT alias to the labels at the bottom. Instead it takes you to an essay! Well, this is new! The essay makes it clear that what you have experienced is an implementation of a taxonomy of election-to-action. A State Machine model of human behavior in the finest tradition of Constructionalist Philosophers. You even get a bubble diagram!

Suddenly, the opaque decision making, the flat but elevated language of the work, the common links all make sense! You were not inhabiting a protagonist (or three) on a fictional mission, you were experiencing the model through example! Guided by rhetorical tools, personified. Example-before-theory is kind of a backward way to teach, but a powerful one! It gives us fresh, concrete experiences to crystallize around the abstract theory, immediately clarifying it. I found this to be simultaneously a very effective way to convey abstract theory, and somehow a completely new IF paradigm where multiple media converged to make my education a detective game! How did I get to an education Switch, from IMPLIED Bait???

It will not surprise any longtime readers to hear that now, I HAD to explore the game multiple times, armed with new understanding and using the state machine as a game ‘map.’ I explored its narrative structure as if it were a rudimentary colossal cave. Math checks out! Every branch of the construct was sure enough mapped to narrative action, a complete implementation of its thesis.

So. Your enjoyment of this will depend on how open you are to starting on Danny the Street, and finishing on Sesame Street. Given how liberally I sprinkle real-world grains of my life into these reviews, I must have previously mentioned my Philosophy Minor in college, years ago. For me, this work was a joyous surprise, engaging neurons I hadn’t fired in decades. From its intriguingly opaque narrative and befuddling construction, it encouraged my mind into an exploratory state, EXACTLY the mentality needed once its true purpose was revealed. This was an anti-narrative puzzle whose solution was every bit as satisfying as the most obtuse parser construct.

The focus of this review has left one observation adrift: the language of it. Once its purpose is understood, the language turns out to be much more engaging than necessary. The below is an example passage that just tickled me green. I’m sure that’s the expression?

“Whatever can exist, does exist”
“Then why haven’t we seen it before?”

A pretty pithy reference to this work!

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I doubt I would have focused on THIS construct. While rigorous and intellectually interesting, I’m not sure I was convinced of the UTILITY of the model. Understanding a conceptualization is inherently rewarding, but I’m not sure THIS conceptualization has enough predictive utility to live beyond this work for me. Had I authored it, I probably would have centered a model more immediate to my own interests. Which is kind of a ‘who cares’? The point of the work felt like a PROCESS more than a message. Certainly, that’s what I responded to!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/9/26
Playtime: 1hr, endings 1,2,5,6,7,12

What a delight this Twinesformer work is. It checks so many boxes for me: cruel capitalism (and AI!) satire, wry humor, creative, multi-use puzzle gameplay. You play as an alien mechanic, working on a space-factory whose management is pursuing labor-elimination measures in the most literal way possible. Your task is to assemble the robot that will replace you, in service of an organization that is so dehumanized it can’t conceive why that might be unappealing.

Follows a domino-tumbling sequence of tasks to not only assemble the damned thing, but then to try and mitigate its grim purpose. The puzzles are a veritable showcase of well-cued lateral-thinking, multi-use, object combination posers. They are also charged with humor and pathos, making things zip along practically friction free. The UI is a tremendous asset here. Objects can be Examined, Combined, sometimes Read, and Used. Combining or Using items causes the text to be populated with gear icons on nouns that might apply. It is a very efficient UI, simultaneously cuing things to try and executing commands. There is enough variety in the noun space to not make things trivial, and enough clarity in the scenarios that lawn mowering is unlikely to be necessary. Even when the things that are asked of you are objectively bananas. The UI really strikes the sweet spot of efficient command execution and soft-guiding progress without being intrusive.

But really, who plays IF for the UI? Robot people whose humanity has been consumed by social media algorithms, that’s who! For the rest of us, a clumsy UI might damage a work beyond salvation, but the BEST it can hope for is to fade to invisibility and let our brains eddy along with the flow of the narrative. The fact that choice-select parser-play so often tilts former makes this accomplishment worth noting, but it will rarely be a work’s defining feature.

No, the showpiece here is the amusing puzzle play, married to pervasively winning, wry humor. The temptation to dip into the details runs the risk of breaking the dam on a deluge of spoilers, which I am loath to do. As a beleaguered blue-collar alien, you are at the mercy of mercurial management, aggressive security personnel, the implacable momentum of automated manufacturing and supercilious bureaucrats. And one friend. Just the one. All of this building to 12 possible endings, most of which are very fun variations on a theme.

And here is where I might call into question my credentials as player AND reviewer. None of the above is what excited me most about this work. No that credit goes to the tiniest of implementation details that spoke to really next-level game engineering by the author. Late in the game, once the titular assembly was in its final stage, it was clear the narrative was entering a ‘no return’ moment. An accomplished player, trained by years of consuming such games, would absolutely have saved their game at this point. Your humble servant? Drunk on endgame momentum, I plowed ahead without, got an ending, then was confronted with the unhappy consequences of that choice. Should I actually restart? The game was short enough to make it a possibility, but complex enough to promise unsatisfying, repetitive clicking.

So I peeked at the save screen. THE WORK HAD AUTOSAVED FOR ME, AT THE CRUCIAL DECISION POINT!!! I’m not sure what prompted me to look, whether the game had subtly indicated this would be true, or whether I discovered this design gem through providence. Either way, it had the same effect. I powered through five more endings, restoring each time, and each time getting giddier and giddier that the work made even this, the most transactional of IF tropes (collect the endings) smooth and friction free! What a gift for the impulsive, slave-to-the-moment player! The fact the game was so generous to its most incompetent players where it might justifiably punish them spoke to a kindness of spirit that was practically moving. Contrasting with the cold satire of its narrative in a way that threw the setting’s lack of empathy into high relief and was essentially a meta-statement showing an alternate, better path.

Yeah, I just said we can save ourselves from Exploitive Capitalism with… AUTOSAVE. Am I overreading this? Absolutely not. I mean, I would give ANYTHING to have an autosave that could restore to 2023.

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Monkey Wrenching
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : This was such a complete package, I think the only thing I might tweak would be to cue the acid pool a little stronger. It really feels like crossing it is possible, but that was the one (thankfully optional) puzzle I didn’t tumble onto.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/9/26
Playtime: 30min, no progress without walkthrough

What is a form of a thing, without the heart of the thing? Kind of a homunculus of sorts - carrying its shape but missing the animating elements that give it true life. This feels like an unkind opening to a review, especially for a new author, but cannot instead this observation serve as a tribute to the learning process? The Mona Lisa could not exist, were not Da Vinci a master of his medium. The Craft is what enables the Art. For Frankenstein to rise, stitching the body was a crucial first step.

Parser IF, from its dawning, encapsulated the promise of author-player engagement through the vast medium of language. Constrained in syntax, perhaps, but as wide as the dictionary. Of course this audience knows this to be an illusion (for now! AI may one day deliver on that promise, the clearest possible example of ‘be careful what you wish for’). Illusion is not a pejorative here - all Art has illusory components. That brunette is not entrancing with an enigmatic smile - she’s only two dimensional! That marble shepherd is not poised between action and indecision, he’s a rock shaped like a naked dude! Parsers don’t actually understand all of your native language!

MCC (hey! that acronym seems familiar!) is a fully functional parser game, in the sense that it plays to completion with no blocking bugs. It decidedly is NOT an effective illusion of open world gameplay. The key to effective parser illusion is for the author to anticipate, as much as possible, how a player might engage the world being presented. An author need not provision every possible engagement, so long as they successfully steer the player to satisfactory engagement. Take the simple case of a closed door. If attempting to open it yields:

> open office door
It's locked.

> unlock office door with key
You can't unlock that.

The simple declarative response carries the weight of Reality: this door is an impenetrable barrier. The universe told me so. What should be soft cued here is an alternate entry method. If that method is:

> push office door
The door gives out a faint click.

the overarching question is, "How would the player know to try that after the universe’s unambiguous ‘YOU JUST CAN’T’. This is a soft cue in the text - it DISCOURAGES further attempts. Instead of ‘can’t’ if the message was You don't have a key that works on this door. that would cue a player ‘ok, I need to find a different key!’ If the message was along the lines of There isn't a keyhole on this door. that would cue the player ‘ah, I need to try non-key methods.’ Soft cuing is both the problem and the solution! This is not a new parser dynamic, it is in fact a hallmark of mature parser construction.

Such contradictory or opaque cuing is pervasive in this work. If I can’t LOOK UNDER a mat, how would I know to MOVE it? How would I think to HIT a solid clump of candy? If I can’t PUT CUP UNDER DRIP, how would I think that PUT CUP IN PUDDLE would accomplish this? Practically every step of the way, these artifacts blocked me. For me, the work was unplayable without the walkthrough. Good call providing one though!

“Ok, smug reviewer, how can an author possibly anticipate what all might need cuing?” The useless answer is “think about it.” Sure, as an author becomes more familiar with their craft, SOME opportunities will start to come naturally. But what a dick move it is to advise “Just think of those things you are not thinking of.” Parser tradition does provide a more useful answer though: Alpha/Beta play testing! What better way to suss out how players behave than watch player behavior? This is a work that SCREAMS for play test. It has the hallmarks of a prototype where the ‘success path’ was engineered and implemented, probably tested by author, but none of the gameplay grease needed by an actual player was added.

This textual inadequacy extends to scenario-setting and motivations as well. The piece introduces itself with "A perfectly normal mystery." Hey, I’m always on board for wry understated humor, but from there we are navigating and interacting with objects without motivation or sense of goals. If you did not read the blurb on the comp site, you would have no idea what you were expected to accomplish here! Now, parser expectations do some of this lifting: a locked door almost always means ‘find key’ in parser-ville. Guards almost always mean ‘circumvent.’ It’s not a functional gap per se, but it is a very big narrative one. Without an overarching goal though, it becomes an exercise of outlasting obstacles.

But! As a first effort, just assembling that working prototype is an accomplishment worth celebrating! Its core multi-step puzzle is an amusingly complicated one: (Spoiler - click to show)create tainted tea to send the guards rushing to the toilet. It is pretty funny with a satisfying variety of steps. Maybe my initial take is exactly backwards. Maybe the heart of the parser is in tact, infused with a budding love of the medium. Perhaps it is the body whose stitching needs a bit more work. If one were to recast its current state as Alpha, then solicit some testers…

…like those you might find in the audience of a comp…

…ready to play and provide feedb… Oh, Clever Girl

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: First Draft
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would undergo a round of Beta testing to see how players are engaging the world, and diligently provision everything they tried. Most especially including all the missing nouns!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 1hr, score 94/100, Confident, Playful, Upgraded, Right Suspect, Maestro in the Making

What is it with the desire to fuse genres and conceits? At its core, it’s kind of the most unsubtle echo of the creative impulse itself. All creativity is synthesizing myriad experiences, knowledge and entertainment into a specific-to-artist blend whose novelty springs from both the unique composition of its sources, and unique voice of the synthesizing artist. Narrative-setting fusion is just the most obvious realization of this phenomenon. To the reader it is often the first thing communicated about a work - the ‘hook’ to drive engagement, then ideally inform plot, character, and narrative voice. Entire fictional genres have sprung from this: looking at you, Steampunk.

Know what I haven’t seen before? Operapunk. Theatre of Memory centers on, to quote the work, “crimes targeting the performing arts.” It is a Theater Kid-High Fantasy-Detective Fiction fusion! What a delightfully bonkers mix! Also, what kind of world is it where this specific mix IS A FULLY LEGITIMATE CAREER PATH?? Where criminal investigation is sparked by BAD DREAMS??? I kinda love the unapologetic, completely straight-faced goofiness of it.

Too, the game has bespoke role-playing characteristics and achievements, with latitude to customize the character through game and narrative choices. This is not strictly necessary, in the sense that these choices do not increase or reduce your odds of ‘winning,’ even with attendant die rolls shading game responses. Instead, they present an opportunity for player identification with the protagonist. This is one of IF’s central promises, well executed here through role-playing mechanics. And isn’t role-playing catering to our internal theatrical impulses anyway? I mean, it’s right there in the name.

The mystery itself is very satisfyingly constructed: interrogations, suspects, red herrings, connecting anecdotes and evidence to draw unexpected conclusions Turns out these connections work in physical ‘Lead Pipe in the Conservatory’ space, as well as thematically and philosophically. The mystery itself has a theatricality to it, its clues and evidence as anchored in dramatic crescendos as any Renaissance Opera. It was all so tightly integrated, every moving part echoing one or more element of the overall tale, I couldn’t help but wonder: this was so SPECIFIC, so tightly coupled, HOW MANY MYSTERIES LIKE THIS COULD THERE EVEN BE? I mean, real PIs are 95%+ infidelity cases, what does that translate to here, understudy sabotage? Upstaging the principles? MURDERING A LINE READING??

SHOULD I HAVE MINORED IN WOODWORKING, JUST IN CASE, LIKE DAD SAID???

The presentation was endearing as well - generous character and setting illustrations in watercolor, providing a unifying visual palette that further emphasized the warm, bespoke vibe of the thing. This is where the High Fantasy of it all manifested most strongly. The relevant cast of witnesses and suspects is quite large, populated with an insanely diverse collection of Fantasy races. With a cast this large, images act as mnemonic devices to help keep things straight. It’s just easier to remember: “Hey that guy’s a bull!” than “This one has a deep voice.”

I guess I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge one of the core challenges of Detective IF. If the player is tasked to solve a mystery, that mystery is ultimately the Most Significant Digit of the experience. All the theater-kid, half-elf chrome you pile on will always be subordinate to it. There are two relevant dimensions here: 1) how challenging/intuitive are the mechanisms of the mystery and 2) how satisfying is the final solution? The first directly engages the player’s capabilities. If the clues are too baroque or subtle, the prospect of player failure must be integrated into the narrative. Here, that seemed to take the form of narrative compensation - ie even if the player missteps, the narrative will correct them. This kind of minimizes the player’s consequence a bit, but the very nature of mystery-solving-IF doesn’t have a universal solution to this problem. It is as valid as any other, though no more satisfying. TOM, at least for me, dodged this by (for the most part) clicking. I didn’t NEED the narrative correction often enough to feel cheated, the clues and text nudged me in the right direction, giving me those sweet “hey, I noticed that!” endorphins.

The second dimension is maybe the weakest here? Ultimately, you are trying to identify the (illegal) source of the bad dreams via corroborating witness testimony with suspect interviews. The suspect pool is pretty shallow, but with some ambiguity to not make it trivial. Earlier, I asserted the construction of the mystery was satisfying, and I stand by that. I am drawing a super, SUPER fine line between its CONSTRUCTION, and its SOLUTION. The clues were all interesting and interlocked in satisfying ways. It’s just, the core crime… it was BAD DREAMS. Not murder. Not an elaborate heist. NIGHTMARES. The narrative assured us this was quite transgressive but it never really felt so? It came across more as an extended inconvenience. Even the final unmasking fell prey to shaky foundations. The perpetrator’s motives (Spoiler - click to show)were grounded in a desire to be seen, be remembered. Yet the narrative also tried to excuse them by assuring us the dreams were unintentional and/or too embarrassing to actually try to correct once manifested. I mean was it the motive or wasn’t it? It felt shaky, and when compounded with the serious finale consequences to a seemingly benign crime, didn’t quite gel for me.

The good news is that the MECHANICS of solving the crime (not to mention the thematically strong linkages in clues themselves) were satisfying enough that any sketchiness in the SOLUTION were minimized. Its well-crafted infusion of fantasy and theater only further stacked into positive territory such that the overwhelming result was a very enjoyable, supremely goofy in all the right ways, romp. That maybe spoke to some needed criminal justice reform in this world.

Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise (the entertainment was literal Space Opera!)
Vibe: Glee presents Clue
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : I guess if it were my work, I would hammer on the perpetrator’s motives a bit harder. Try to tighten that to the level the detecting itself operated at.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 30min 7 iterations, two escapes

Why don’t we see more Ren’Py in Spring Thing and IFCOMP? As a platform, I haven’t seen enough of it to get my head around how I feel about it yet. It feels tailor-made to echo point-and-click adventures, somehow through a Powerpoint lens? To me, and for this game in particular, I feel echoes of Myst and The Longest Journey: background environments that are artistic showcases, crossfading travel in lieu of the latter’s side-scroll movement paradigm.

This implementation is more dialogue-tree than point-and-click, but its graphical prominence and limited animation still conjure those ancestors. Playing a wizard/prophet, you are condemned to an underworld for conspiracy against the king. The underworld itself is the showcase here, a fever-dream of body horror, fantasy-/techno- patois, and memorably alien characters. It is a heady, compelling mix, defying the player to keep up with its building strangeness, and rewarding the effort with compounding unease. It confidently seems to understand its most powerful asset quite clearly. You are treated to several encounters of compounding disquiet (or outright horror), populated by intriguingly unique characters. You either die or escape. The work does not devolve into repetition, nor diminishing returns on its weirdness. The whole experience will depend on how appealing, or maybe ‘fascinating’ is a better word, you find the setting.

For me, it really worked. It was the artwork that really sold it to me (not to say the characters, soundtrack and narrative voices were inconsequential!). The backgrounds are dark and evocative, but decidedly intended as background. Their palette and gloom contrast to characters that positively pop off the screen, both in color choice, design, and sheer ickiness. Notably, the protagonist themself does NOT - they practically seep into the background highlighting in a subtle way the player’s unconcern with their own image in the face of their shocking neighbors. I mean, that’s how we live most of our lives, right? Focused on the beings and events outside our mobile-camera bodies? “Influencer Culture” excepted. This has the effect of deemphasizing the protagonist’s narrative utility until the dramatically appropriate time.

The most confrontive choice is the narration/dialogue font. It is a harsh design, jagged and borderline illegible. Adjusting your mind to its shapes and patterns is a mini-game that echoes the protagonist’s floundering for purchase in their alien surroundings. That it is so quickly digested mirrors our protag’s almost superhuman resilience in accepting this new normal. Turns out, the protag (Spoiler - click to show)is ALSO composed of weird, alien stuff! This is a nifty choice that kind of shifts the narrative from one of vanilla player/protag adjusting to seeming unknowability, only to crest over time to alienation from the protag themself!

That schism is an interesting narrative choice. It provides a minor ‘shock twist’ of sorts that completely reinforces the mood of the piece. It also abruptly decouples the player from narrative immersion. Untethered from the protagonist, it becomes a more voyeuristic experience than an immersive one. This is perfectly fine! What you’re given to look at is pretty compelling! It does put a LOT of weight on the environment though. Here, the brevity of the work plays in its favor. Over a long narrative, having committed to essentially one dimension of engagement, the challenge would be to consistently deliver escalating weirdness that does not smack of repetitiveness or deescalation. The impulse to center the protagonist’s weirdness as a climactic twist of sort was strong - it carries precisely the novelty needed to end on a high note.

Now, I’ve used the base word ‘alien’ what, like 6 times now? This reflects a creative choice that is super specific, and plays to competing impulses in our brains. On the one hand, humans have a desire for novelty, even repellant novelty. On the other, we relish the comfort of things We Already Know. Deliberately defying the latter provides a charge of endorphins, but could as easily engage our ‘flight’ response. Certainly the longer we are subjected to novelty the more uncomfortable we might become, and the stronger our desire for comfort might crest. The comfort need not be in the environs, it could simply be in the human relatability of the characters around us, and the emotions they evoke. Despite consistently denying such anchoring, this work struck a tasty balance for me - escalating its weirdness, then climaxing before the latter impulse could overtake me.

Also, my choice to include the Nostromo in my ST26 categories now looks positively… PROPHETIC.

Spaceship: Nostromo
Vibe: Splatterpunk
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I’d be tempted to humanize the protag and not drive a wedge between them and the player. Which feels like it might actually damage the considered effect of the work? So maybe don’t give me the wheel here.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 5 min to play, 5 min to explore credits

I have, for a while now, called choice-select works that adhere to a parser gameplay paradigm as “Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise.” At one point, I grappled with the reverse: parsers that echoed choice-select gameplay. What did I call those? “DeceptaTwines” I think? If not, I like the sound of that, we’ll just pretend that was it. It does have the unfortunate side effect of positioning such works as villainous, which isn’t great, but puns will out.

This work is a short, very short, DECEPTA-TWINE that is completely playable as a link-select interface. The tortured Autobot conceit of my categorization is completely validated by a this work with two forms! It is a tight dual character study, where the protagonist/player and narrator are in dialogue with one another, revisiting artifacts from the protag’s life. Well, the Narrator is in dialogue, the player/protag is providing the impetus. The narration of these artifacts reveals a tortured family dynamic whose details are the crux of the work. Like, even discussing them, in a work this tight, can’t help but be spoilering. Yeah, no choice but to:

meminerimus captures this dynamic super concisely, conveying it through artifact exploration. Crucially, it recognizes that (Spoiler - click to show)the toxicity of this impulse is actually harmful to BOTH PARTIES. Perhaps not equally harmful, but devastating nevertheless. In this case, the tragedy of it underlined by one party seemingly not recognizing the cause-and-effect at all, and left to wonder. This is a pretty subtle and nuanced dynamic to convey in such a short runtime!

Overall, I found it very well done - so much emotional impact packed into such a small frame. Crucially, while the work clearly had a villain in mind and some artifacts generated repellently unnuanced feelings, others softened and humanized the proceedings: shifting it from raw despicability to flawed human tragedy. The alchemy worked. If I had to quibble (which… I might as well have said, “If I had to breath…”), I think the brevity of it slightly underserved it. In a longer (though not much longer!) work, I think the mixture would have blended a bit better. Limited to only four artifacts, there was a bit of whipsaw between narrative extremes. Like trying to drink a cocktail where the flavors had not quite merged yet.

Hey, I called it a quibble. Notwithstanding my documented love of well-blended cocktails, it was still a noteworthy achievement for its small package, capturing a very nuanced dynamic well out of scale to its word count.

Spaceship IF: Discovery
Vibe: Bad Parenting
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my product I would STOP GLORIFYING PYTHON and steer into the emotional healing power of PERL. Fun fact: I did coerce my kids to creating “Hello World” programs in Perl at an astonishingly young age. WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT???

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 21min, finished

It seemed like for a while, elaborate one-take shots were somehow a Holy Grail in cinema, discussed in reverent tones reserved for the nearly unattainable limits of human achievement. The most famous early one-take is the long opening shot of Orson Welles Touch of Evil (an astonishingly modern film if you can get past Charlton Heston’s dated acting stylings and brown face). These shots seem to achieve two things: a verisimilitude usually sacrificed to the visual and temporal language of film, and a real-time immediacy of experience. Since Welles’ revelatory accomplishment, the mere PRESENCE of such a technique in film was noteworthy on its own, kind of independent of the art it was in service of. (The Master, Hitch, actually got there first a decade earlier with Rope, but he was deliberately evoking a more stage-y experience and is not as lauded by history.)

Over time, this technical conceit has been revisited often enough, that while still noteworthy, it can now play against a body of such work rather than as a unicorn-like individual achievement. It is hard to imagine an implementation more accomplished than Timecode, a 2000 movie of FOUR realtime, unbroken takes, presented simultaneously in four quadrants of the screen, telling an interweaving story across all four. While I know I have seen the movie, I could tell you boo about its plot or characters at this point, only the thrilling execution of it. This exposes a pitfall: its employment is SO noteworthy, it can dominate the narrative itself.

Spiritually, the cinematic one-take feels of a piece with stream-of-consciousness literature, a famous example being Ulysses by James Joyce. That book (which I have started three times but never finished, so…) puts the reader in the protagonist’s mind as he goes about his mundane, mundane day. Notwithstanding the temporal difference between READING ABOUT something and DOING it, it attempts to present a ‘realtime’ experience to the reader.

Y’know what I’ve never seen? A realtime, stream-of-consciousness work of IF. Never seen UNTIL NOW. (Ok, that SOUNDS dramatic, but given my relatively short span of IF engagement, it amounts to “have not seen in the last three years.”)

Don’t let that lawyer-mandated parenthetical dilute that statement. This is a visual novel called “23 Minutes” that it took me 21 MINUTES TO PLAY. It presented an internal monologue of a troubled protagonist during his walk to work. Holy crap was it stunningly effective. The FORM of it was deeply accomplished. It married deliberate text positioning to less-than-full-sentence thoughts, to a wandering attention grappling with spiraling self-recrimination, all positioned over a blurry background of a constantly changing city stroll.

Its cumulative effect, most especially its pacing, was such a considered, precisely choreographed sum of its parts. The text formatting conveyed thoughts trampling over each other, one spurring another, often tangentially connected and circling back on itself. The poetry of the text, rather than pushing me away, optimized and abstracted the protagonist’s thoughts in a perfectly effective way that served both the conveyance of ideas, and the tight timeline of the piece. The blurry, ever shifting background conveyed a protagonist only incidentally concerned with his environment. A protagonist whose internal preoccupations left his environment indistinct and peripheral but not completely dismissable. The fact that this technical achievement does not completely eclipse the story it is telling is something one-take cinema doesn’t always succeed at.

The story here is manifest in the internal reflections of (Spoiler - click to show)an early-middle aged man whose new-parent and job dissatisfactions are gradually shown to be products of slow poisoning by his own character failures. The precise pacing of this reveal is emotionally crushing and dramatically devastating. The mechanism of this disappointment (Spoiler - click to show)(a family member descending into the conservative hate-sphere) is simultaneously depressingly relateable, while also piling OUR judgement on top of the protagonist’s self-recriminations. So many synchronicities stitched into this work, all of it so precisely engineered.

23M uses the graphical power of multimedia, textual formatting and presentation timing to shape how the words are consumed in an exercise that twists our brain to the pace and goals of the work. The interactivity is not so much our will modifying the work, as the work modifying our will to travel the story’s journey. It feels like a backwards interactivity? The alchemy is, whether the work is steering us, or we are steering the work, the outcome is the same. It is our mind taking the journey, more immediately and immersively than reading a book. What I just described is quite clearly (and more succinctly) a ‘visual novel.’ But that label technically applies to comic books and Ren’Py-esque quasi-power-point narratives as well. The amazing technical rendering of its real-time pacing seems to elevate this creation in the same way one-cuts have been determined to elevate cinema.

The trap of course is that a technical accomplishment this magnificent can outshine the work that it serves. Given what I’ve chosen to gush about in this review, I’m not sure 23M completely escapes this shadow. But neither does the narrative disappear. It manages to hold its own. This was an early highlight of the Thing for me. The pressure is really on the rest of the field to deliver a meta-moment as triumphant as the one that occurred when I checked my timer at the end of this story.

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Stream of Consciousness
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I dunno… I’d eke out another two minutes somehow? Who am I kidding, should I reshoot Welles’ Touch of Evil next? Instead, let me use this space for a recommendation. If you are enamored of, curious about, or annoyed with the cinephile’s reverence of this technique, I strongly recommend One Cut of the Dead, 2017. A wonderfully witty horror-comedy that almost by-the-way gives a nuts and bolts masterclass on why one-cuts are so remarkable.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 10m, 4 die, 2 survive

This is a small game, scaled to its protagonist. It is quite beautifully presented, with a wonderful pre-dawn background image that captures the melancholy wonder of its setting and narrative. The spare font and text pop against that backdrop setting a mood all its own. The game deploys you as a field mouse, scrabbling for food and water in a narrow window of opportunity before ever-threatening danger looms prohibitively large over this mission.

It is a choice-select work, where choices often end in modest success or quite immodest death. Sometimes, context helps inform those choices, many times it does not. Normally, I rebel a bit at instant death choices with little guidance. Here, that design choice is completely appropriate, and very effectively paints a picture of how ineffectual free will can be in a world so thoroughly hostile in scale and consequences. Where even the most modest of survival pressures are fraught with risk beyond control. Thematically this all aligns quite well, including the ‘go back and try again’ nature of replay. Here, replaying to success has the effect of highlighting that yes, there ARE paths to buy an additional day of life, satiating one’s needs for the moment but ONLY the moment. Inevitably requiring repeats every day thereafter. There are paths to success on any given day, but there are innumerable ways to fail, and successful choices today could easily lead to tragedy on subsequent days. Survival is a compulsory game of Press Your Luck that you cannot retire from.

I respect the artistic and thematic unity achieved here, reinforced by its beautiful yet unsentimental presentation. I struggle to explain why it did not enthrall me. I think the most obvious possibility is its unsentimentality. This journalistic approach to callous nature extended to the protagonist, the poor mouse we inhabit. There is no hint of inner life other than completely justified fear. No hooks for player sympathy. We technically inhabit the poor creature, but have no sense of it as a being, only a cog in the grand design of the food chain. Of course we WANT it to live under our watch, but if not, there isn’t a sense of loss, only of nature taking its course. This is an outcome consistent with its thematics, probably deliberate, but if so deliberately distancing.

Beyond its central theme, I think I found the language of the piece distancing as well. It felt like the text of the piece was straining to match the power of its background image, to my sensibilities not quite achieving its aims. The power of the background lies in its simplicity and unspoken depths hidden in shadow. The text of the piece was more baroque, explicit where the image was implicit. For example: “As your eyes blink open the familiar sight of the woven nest ball fills your vision.” “Filling your vision” is a passive, distancing phrase that felt quite beyond a mouse’s ability to abstract. This kind of language dominates the piece, and cumulatively creates a distancing barrier between lofty human poetry and grounded mouse reality. It inevitably elevates our focus to grander concepts - like the circle of life! - at the expense of the poor critter we are nominally piloting. To my way of thinking, empathy would be better served matching its text to the visceral vibe of its presentation and narrative. The work NEED not be striving for empathy, its elevated focus only intended to convey the grander food chain design. That it did quite admirably. It’s just, without empathy, it plays as cold as our poor mouse’s fate.

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Circle of Life
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would attempt to rework the language of it to match the protagonist, and perhaps to exploit opportunities for empathy as well. Also, wouldn’t it be cool if the background image slowly brightened over time, heralding sunrise? I think that would be cool.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/7/26
Playtime: 15min, joined Guild

I’m kind of 0-2 when invoking unfamiliar (to me) pop culture properties during reviews. You would think that kind of record would make me slow to employ that particular tool again. But no! I am an equus ferus, untameable and answering to no man! You cannot bridle me with your concepts of “humility” and “lessons learned”!

My usual employment of pop culture comparison comes spontaneously, unfairly, and colors my engagement with the work to some degree thereafter, at least until the work provides something ELSE to latch on to. To MYRTDPI’s credit, this time the comparison was achingly slow in manifesting, until it did so all at once, very late in the game. It is fair to say that this either points to me going 0-3 on these things, or to the BEST possible pop culture riffing - where the initial source is merely the springboard for deeply personal and creative works that ultimately owe little more than inspiration itself. And in some sense, given that there is nothing new under the sun, isn’t that really ALL art?

MYRTDPI plops us, very in media res, into a fantasy world we will struggle to keep up with. Cultures, Institutions, Geography, Biodiversity, all completely alien to the player with no real effort to provide purchase or explanation by the protag. If I’m going to get dunked into High Fantasy (which is not my chosen genre), this is the way I prefer it. Trust me to catch up, don’t spoon feed me. “WTF is going on here?” is a very effective way to batter aside any genre-resistance I might cling to. It helps, I think, that the world building is very aggressive. Almost nothing is taken for Medieval-Europe-granted, to its great credit. We seem to be in a matriarchal world (or at least city-state), where female power is the norm and males are tolerated intruders. Swirling around this, there is magic and swordplay and wondrous, dangerous beings.

It emerges that the protag is attempting to join a Guild, an only quasi-welcoming space of playful aggression and bruises. To do so, he must establish his credentials by satisfying a quest utilizing only his unique magical gifts. With the help of a new friend. From there, the quest is comically abrupt - go underground, fight monsters, win! The work’s brevity is well considered, as this seems intended as a prologue for one or more longer games in the same mythos. By game’s end we have effectively been introduced to the world, the protag, his specific abilities, and some NPCs.

Much like the work itself does, I have shaded the pop culture reference I am about to make. See, the protag owns a magic brazier, from which he can conjure (Spoiler - click to show)one of four fancifully-named spirits to aid him, most especially in fighting monsters. In service of his quest to join a (Spoiler - click to show)combative athletic club of sorts. Would it make it more clear if you envision the brazier as a sphere of red and white? The comparison is limited, in the sense that the brazier has no particular effect after foes are defeated. It is entirely possible that I am imposing a comparison unintended by the author. As counter-argument, I offer the mid-combat text, reporting on damage to your partner. It is a sly echo of “It’s super effective!” Once this pop culture resonance landed I giggled to myself uncontrollably. If in fact this parallel has any grounding, its employment was masterful - shaded until so late in the game it felt like a mini-revelation. Not so much cheapening the work (as such comparisons can sometimes do) but enriching it.

The difference is the dense, specific lore inundating the experience prior. After long beats of struggling to keep up with offhand strangeness while the plot steamed forward, this hit like a moment of clarity. Quite a feat in only 15 minutes of gameplay!

As a prologue, how did the complete work settle? I’m not sure? The fact that I’m not sure is probably a big win for this work. Given how far it is from my default interests, the fact that you are not hearing “great fun but not for me” is no small achievement. Its confident, thoroughly foreign setting, pervasive wry wit and what I perceive as a subversive, clowning reference, coupled with the controlled but frenetic pacing of it all are kind of winning. Certainly winning enough to engage its successor.

Spaceship: Tardis
Vibe: “Spooky Ghost Fighter, I choose you!”
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I think I would try to pack in just one more sly reference - maybe casually drop that the protag’s name is “Bash Ketchup” or somesuch. Just so overconfident reviewers are not left twisting over whether the reference was intended or not.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/7/26
Playtime: 1hr, 2 playthroughs (including 15 min background reading!)

The words in my head are so completely unfair, I am ashamed I thought them, ashamed I open this review acknowledging them, and ashamed I am incapable of balling this up and starting over. The words in my head rhyme with “Skiminishing Glitterns”

For context, know that I absolutely ADORE this game system, especially as encapsulated in the previous two games. The first involved pre-Nazi Germany, attempting to hold together a political coalition strong enough to stave off the greatest Evil in the last century. That feels pretty generally relevant, no? The second somehow spun directly into my fascination with pre-Communist Russia, where gameplay was attempting to hold together a fragile political alliance in the face of the Communist Revolution. The gameplay in both was balancing inter-faction politics with external events, and y’know running a country, and doing your damnedest to pull the populace back from the precipice of extremism. The mechanics are a card-driven paradigm, where each card presents options you might pursue either to mitigate events or try and further your goals. There are different decks for party v governing v events, and your task is to balance your hand to maneuver things about.

Both games are ALSO characterized by limited feedback on the efficacy of your efforts, until it is too late. There are paradoxically reams of data available to you, too much to digest really, but few clues on cause and effect. This is more feature than bug in those earlier games, where the uncertainty in your actions is very much part of the delicious tension. This is a rock solid game design, thematically tight to its historical inspiration.

This time around, you are attempting to hold together a fragile coalition in pre-war France, with the shadow of fascism creeping over the continent. Unlike the previous two, I had no prior exposure to France’s politics and pressures, and if I’m honest no seeds of interest either. That’s technically ok, at one point in my life I knew nothing about pre-Communist Russia, yet I’m all in on that now. But it does mean this game doesn’t automatically get me on its side like the other two did.

Like its immediate predecessor it tweaks the formula a bit: it opens a few months before an election in which your faction will be ushered to power. This is a really clever improvement on the previous games, essentially giving you a few game-months of ‘training’ on the game’s moving parts before the first election… and also showcasing the election mechanic that you will need to manage deeper into the game. This iteration further seemed to provide more ‘actions’ per turn than previous, while also tightening limits on your governing figures’ special powers, as well as allowing you to run a budget deficit (which I’m sure will not come back to bite later!). Even with these interesting tweaks this iteration did not quite capture my imagination the way the previous ones did.

I think there were two factors for this: 1) the stakes just felt lower. Yes, fascism was a looming threat everywhere, but especially early on it was relatively remote and gameplay centered around my (in)ability to maintain a governing coalition. It felt more like ‘clinging to power’ than the huge levers of history you were pulling in those other games. 2) This system has always felt a little opaque in cause and effect, this is actually one of its defining features. Even with that presupposition, this felt MORE so. Specifically, in a runthrough where I very deliberately prioritized ALL my socialist campaign promises, arguably to the exclusion of other events, I nevertheless was treated to “populace dissatisfied” outcomes, sometimes with identical text to when I focused on foreign affairs. Further, even though I played on ‘easy’ level I was booted from office in less than 6 months both times! It FELT less responsive to play.

Now in its third iteration, I think I feel about this system the way I do about GMT’s COIN series of games (Counter Insurgency). This is a series of board games with a very flexible asymmetric warfare focus. It is a core set of rules and mechanics that are applied to a series of different world scenarios: Castro’s Cuban insurgency, Afghanistan, Somali Piracy, Columbian drug trafficking, building the Cross Bronx Expressway(!), many many more. The foundational mechanics are interesting, fun and robust. But it is the scenarios to which they are applied (and the rules tweaks customized for each of them) that bring each specific one alive. Choosing which COIN game to play, then, becomes an exercise in “which conflict holds the most fascination for you?”

For me, for Autumn’s amazing system, I think I’ll go back to the other two? They just fire more endorphins for me.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: COIN III
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : For this iteration especially, I think I would focus on sharpening the feedback loop - why actions generated results. Unlike its predecessors where the scenarios themselves provided some soft nudging, this felt more impenetrable to me due to my unfamiliarity with the scenario.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/6/26
Playtime: 3.5hrs (26 puzzles solved, 5 hints, 1 bonus)

At some point in my life, capitalism became GRABBY. Ok sure, there is an argument to be made that not only is this take a pretty myopic view of economic history, it is a fundamental mistake to think grabbiness is not capitalism’s most salient feature. For large swaths of my early life though, it didn’t FEEL grabby. Yeah, Coke had snappy jingles, but it was up to you to remember to buy some, and if you didn’t, eh, life goes on.

Today? Today, you have ads that follow you across platforms, algorithms that bend social science and behavioral psychology in service of increased spending, subscription models for all the things you used to be able to buy outright, and a grey market of you-as-data sold for money to other capitalists. Capitalism did all this without asking us what we wanted, if this was a model we embraced. They just… took our privacy, our data, our peace of mind. Intrusively badgering us so they could more aggressively take our money.

So THIS game, centering a shopping loyalty app as a puzzle-delivery mechanism, feels amiably subversive from the jump. Here, the app’s true function is to deliver puzzles. So many puzzles of wonderful variety! If we ignore the narrative component for a moment, the app is simply a clever conceit, a framework to hang word games and logic puzzles on. And what a collection it is! None repeated, all concise and clever, most sized pretty precisely for the challenge they present. 26 puzzles in about 3.5 hrs, less than 10 min each. I didn’t NEED the framing device here, I thoroughly enjoyed the diversion of this collection. It reminded me nothing so much as the grocery store puzzle books of old, with every page a different brain-poser. I loved those! Notwithstanding how many words I am going to burn on the conceit of this thing, the puzzles are absolutely the centerpiece of this game, and absolutely worth the price of admission. Are we agreed on that? Ok, so back to the framing device…

The intrusivity of the loyalty-app infrastructure is initially acknowledged, but quickly steered away from. Solve the puzzles, score the savings! This was a narrative headfake though. The work was well aware that by ACKNOWLEDGING capitalism’s grabbiness it would cast a pall, however slight, over the proceedings. A lesser work would have been content to hand waive this away, probably successfully given the frothy lightness of its aims. It seemed like Enigmart was going to do so, embodied by a comedically frazzled, superficially-coded young mother. Her introduction cast her as an object of derision, so when she begins spouting pro-privacy observations, it feels like we are invited to dismiss those concerns along with the woman herself. Not me though. “Hadleigh is RIGHT dammit!” That’s not me making an assertion in this review, those were my actual, out-loud words after her introductory scene!

AND THE WORK AGREED! As the game progresses, this poor, underestimated woman develops into the full-on hero of the work. Between puzzles, we periodically get short bursts of in-store scenes that confirm and underline her thesis. The early seeming-dismissal evolves into a full bore condemnation of the game’s own conceit, even as that conceit was delivering wonderful puzzles to distract us!

Did the work NEED to do this? Absolutely not! It was completely tangential to the main focus of the piece: delivering a strong suite of standalone puzzles. Which it did with pseudo-marketing humor and verve, and reinforced by graphical playfulness. But the fact that it DID ANYWAY just completely won me over. The narrative component was not dense, it would have been intrusive if it had been. This was no polemic. It was a light and witty diversion, that was unwilling to give its premise even the slightest bit of slack.

Look, I love puzzles. I love my tinfoil hat. This work let me celebrate BOTH.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Brain Teaser
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d have to lean HARDER into the invasive privacy violations of Loyalty Apps. I mean like, so hard I probably would have completely destroyed the sly amiability of the thing. There are some wheels I should not be trusted with.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/6/26
Playtime: .75hr, 2 playthroughs (all characters)

There are WAY more past times and diversions in this world than any one lifetime could possibly consume. It’s cool, evolution and human nature got us covered. As individuals, our unique cranial chemical cocktails prune that jungle for us, categorizing pursuits on a spectrum from “THIS IS MY CALLING!” to “Seriously, no thank you.” Somewhere on that spectrum is a bucket for “I don’t think it’s for me, but.. that’s really kinda cool innit?” At some point in my life, Quilting got dumped into that bucket.

Hear me out.

There is a specific KIND of quilting that, despite nominally residing WELL outside the middle of my mental road, seizes my attention every time. These are the collaborative quilts, often commemorating some event, tragedy, accomplishment, or shared experience. Each square of these kinds of quilts are miniature artworks of their own, capturing its creator’s relationship to the common thematic inspiration. Whether crudely rendered or lavishly accomplished they all seem to tell a self-contained STORY - in evocative, suggestive shorthand. By unifying them, side by side in a grid, any overarching themes or narrative is purely accidental. The purpose is just to honor each of them, conveying the BREADTH of experience whether those experiences have anything to say to each other or not.

The House somehow summoned this from the deep recesses of my brain. Specifically its central conceit: four wildly divergent characters, trapped together through unspecified means, interacting to escape a house. You select one of the characters to inhabit, becoming privvy to their thoughts, then three more to share your trial. You get maybe two scenes of character exploration each (one an intro dialogue, another a thematic room) then shuttle to endgame. It’s kind of a wafer thin conceit whose whole purpose is to stitch these individual squares together. The narrative is not overarching, it is an excuse to get things stitched up.

I played twice, experiencing each square of fabric. First time I was a (presumably) collie, accompanied by a middle-age spinster, a (Spoiler - click to show)cyborg from the future with a mission in the past cabbie, and a ventriloquist. Next time, a vampire with a time/dimension lord, a totally normal (Spoiler - click to show)not-Alien Guy and a Creepy Doll.

In this short work, each had ABOUT the depth of a square of fabric, honestly in the best possible way. Their stories were tight, succinct, and suggestive of larger tales out of sight. Most were pretty funny. Some were surprisingly dark. Many played with their disparate communication paradigms in very fun ways - Lattie and Guy were particular standouts here. Each is shot through with its own playful, sly humor. I don’t think the phrase “like some kind of O+ pinata” will ever leave me. It is a pathology of my own that I envisioned them as fabric squares, ready for quilting.

I think this pathology was enabled by the self-acknowledged thinness of the scenario and gameplay, really just a substrate to knit these characters onto, then enable closer per-square inspection. The work acknowledges this by highlighting that replay is really about the central protag-selected character - diving deeper into an individual square. Which is really how I consume these quilts anyway?

Now, given how widely varied individual responses can be, I can certainly envision players who just DON’T GET QUILTING. It’s how I feel about Bird Watching. For those folks, the resolute lack of any overarching narrative thread or theme will be a dealbreaker. The fun, disparate nature of the cast might get lost, or if not lost just not feel complete. This is how chemical brains work, and they’re not wrong. Certainly the lack of deeper narrative glue is front and center, proudly announcing itself as NOT A PRIORITY HERE. For those not given to quilting this could prove unsatisfying.

For me? It reminded me there is this whole human endeavor I encounter infrequently, doesn’t really spur me get involved with, but tickles me just a little bit that it exists at all.

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Mosaic Narrative
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : Were this my project, I think I would give a little more energy to Sophie. She was really the only one that didn’t reward close inspection. Her story beats came across as both samey and less developed than Saargroff.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.