Reviews by JJ McC

Played: 7/27/24
Playtime: 2.25hrs, 3 deaths, ‘won’ with walkthru

This is a companion piece to A1RL0CK, and I do recommend playing the two together. I also recommend playing in order, as I think the denouement of this game would not work as well out of order. Initially, it felt to me like an improvement in every way on the prior work - which I had found narratively very strong, but burdened by overwrought language, implementation gaps and (a few) inadequately clued puzzles.

Early in the proceedings of RU1N, I found it much smoother and linguistically more disciplined. Here, the protagonist is a blue collar space/underwater worker, notably different than the previous protagonist and much more relatable in his down-to-earth, no-nonsense voice. He is immediately thrown into an alien environment and asked to navigate. I found the language employed here very obfuscative and scattered, in a very effective way. My inability to mentally create a navigable geography or even a clear view of my surroundings seemed a clever way to evoke the disorientation of sudden immersion in an alien environment. I also liked how descriptions changed dramatically, where the protagonist’s first impressions were nightmarishly horrific, only to be supplanted with a more mundane reality. It was an effective way to convey hair-trigger panic at the distressing surroundings.

This impression carried me quite far, and was enhanced by a challenging folding-in-on-itself map that was navigable but just offkilter enough. I wish that early experience was sustained. Implementation issues seemed to become increasingly intrusive as time went on. From clumsy disambiguations

>x glass tube
Do you mean the narrow glass tube or the small device?

to LOTS of synonyms and missing nouns

> x aliens
Sorry, I don’t understand what “aliens” means.
> x alien
They are not much different from the fish you are used to.

to narrative phrasing that has either typos or baffling word choice

GOING AGAINST ME WILL GET YOU ANYTHING, JAY TEE. DOWN YOURWEAPONS AND JOIN THE CAUSE.

x panel
The panel is open, and shows a series of beaks facing the opening, like a rake.

In the most frustrating example, combining two objects produces a third, but the narrative does not announce either the disappearance of the components or the creation of a new one. I assumed it was a bug for a distressingly long period, only eventually noticing an addition to my inventory. As frustrating as these were, they nevertheless still represented an improvement in the prior entry.

A larger disappointment, for me, was the gradual transformation of the prose from its early punchy, unadorned simplicity to more melodramatic and overwritten. Contrast this early piece:

“So we’re screwed: it’s as dark here as in Satan’s colon. And there’s nothing up, down, left or right. Give me some pointers, Cart. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed.”

to this:

“Cursed is the shadow of hell,” you voice loudly.

While there may be a fictional character that can plausibly say both those things, I did not find this protagonist to be that guy. Similarly, the narration took a similar turn, forfeiting its early punchy gains for less appealing baroqueness (baroquery?). By the end, it felt linguistically fully of a piece with its predecessor.

Its final puzzle ALSO felt like a let down. Overall, RU1N was a much cleaner puzzle experience for me. Some challenging leaps, but mostly rewarding diligent examination and satisfying once completed. That final puzzle though - specifically the final step of the final puzzle. After having a series of moving parts to decode, manipulate and sequence, all of them satisfying, the difference between success and failure was one final move I found to be completely opaque. There is a mild hint in death, though I interpreted that hint quite differently and never got there. Walkthrough showed me the answer which, eh ok.

Now that I have fully and completely whined about this stuff, let me turn again. All of those artifacts were there, detracted from my experience, but all of them were both less pronounced than previously AND more than compensated by RU1N’s strengths. In addition to the early characterizations and scene setting called out above, this one included lots of ‘fiddles’ (minor atmospheric messages that emphasize the dynamic nature of the environment) that were positively creepy and unsettling and terrific mood setters. Most importantly, I found the plot of this one to be super strong, and the timing of its beats even MORE capably dispensed than its predecessor (which was a strength of that work too!). Its horror was more horrific, its revelations more organic and interesting. They were timed to ‘unlocking’ areas of the map, but given the relative smoothness of its puzzles translated to a steadier, more engaging pace of revelation. Yes, the protagonist character lost the thread a few times (peevishly damaging his equipment in a way that beggared credulity for his situation, strong physiological reactions that rang untrue), but the antagonist and NPCs stepped in to carry things ably to a strong finale, even if spoilers were needed to fully experience it. The antagonist’s final revelation in particular was both foreshadowed and surprising in a satisfying way.

So to sum up, feels, like its predecessor, that it could use more polish and prose editing. Its bones though are even stronger, and it accomplishes more with language than its predecessor attempted. Barring a sour final step, its puzzles were also both fairer and more satisfying. I turned this into an outright comparison. Didn’t mean to do that. Both are worth your time. (But this one is better.)

Played: 7/27/24
Playtime: 5min, 3/3 endings

Back before the internet enabled pervasive access to, euphemistically, “externally authored texts”, students had to work much harder to find shortcuts for research papers and book reviews. (Well, maybe just ‘harder.’) Cliff’s Notes were the legendary black-and-yellow pamphlet size books of sweet, sweet relief from hundreds of pages of droning on about, I dunno, whaling practices. While indispensable for adolescents that wanted a social life, they could be… clinical. They described plot beats, explained literary flourishes, notable prose characteristics, historical context. Great for impressing English teachers (who, in retrospect, were probably not as fooled as we kids believed). Not so great for actually EXPERIENCING the celebrated prose, thrilling to plot beats, or watching the author’s mind unveiled in its idiosyncratic glory.

NYX is a repudiation of Cliff’s Notes cold distillation. “I’m not gonna EXPLAIN (Spoiler - click to show)Alien to you,” sez NYX. “Imma speed run it for you.” Framed as a last transmission from a doomed spaceship with a single player choice, it packs an entire dramatic arc into an insanely tight time frame, with an earned choice of diverse denouments. To me though, this was not the most interesting thing about it.

I am a fan of this genre, this story’s most obvious inspiration, this subculture, and this author. There was NO chance I wasn’t going to like this. What I found most noteworthy though was the prose. Here’s why. Early on, the protagonist makes the well-known observation ‘we should send poets, not engineers, to space.’ Leaving aside the driveby on engineers there, have you READ THIS AUTHOR BEFORE? I mean, there is no one else I would send into space!! They have got to be on the launch shortlist, once NASA validates the poetry priority. Which made it so impressive to me that the voice for this work was exactly as aliterary as the work claimed. Chameleon-like, the author delivers a protagonist’s voice that is consistently, believably workmanlike and technical, which sold the story that much more solidly. It’s almost unfair and, given how DISTINCTIVE their most flourishing prose is, astonishing it is done this well. So sure, delivers punch in tight package, interesting alternative arcs, bla bla bla. Still, the RANGE of authorial voice is the compelling part. That was my big takeaway.

That, and the importance of self-destruct subsystems.

Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 1hr, finished

This is billed as a beginner parser, and ok maybe. Certainly, veterans will find the puzzle play pretty straightforward. But a lot of what might uncharitably be called ‘training wheels’ by my strawman companion, I would characterize as ‘quality of life improvements.’ The work’s use of color to telegraph bespoke verbs and interesting nouns is particularly welcome. Room and object descriptions are so terse that they convey interesting details economically with no distracting prose chaff. Conversation trees were laughably shallow, having the effect of not distracting the player with misinterpretable color and ANY response being immediately flagged as useful. It’s not trying to give the illusion of alive NPCs, they are game pieces serving their purpose with clarity. Making the experience as friction free as possible is certainly a boon for new players, but honestly helps all of us!

The production strongly leverages its Adventuron platform: its thematic meandros borders crisply provide exit listings and major feature lists above its ‘work area,’ guiding proceedings without drama or heavy hand. The prose itself is crisp, yet delightfully empathic, developing a pleasantly generous, propulsive vibe that is just a delight to marinate in. The story itself is similarly warm, bending Greek mythology into a friendlier posture. The welcoming tone of the piece does as much as any gameplay innovations to signal ‘Parsers welcome everyone, not just crusty old fraternity members.’

If I may be so bold, there were a few burrs I detected that could be further buffed away: in the start room >GET SACK gave me both
you can’t take it
you pick up the sack of grains (which I clearly did not)

In another room, the sack description was SO terse I believed them a pile of empties and was surprised to (Spoiler - click to show)pull grain from them. One NPC knew about keys, but not the associated gates, making for a bit of conversation clumsiness and friction. I would also break up the verb inventory into categories - basics/system commands and spoilers. The opening screen characterized the verb inventory as spoilery, so I avoided it. In so doing, I missed its bespoke >TSCRIPT command (game rejecting the more standard >SCRIPT) and only at the end learned I could have provided one. Two categories of verbs, spoil and no-spoil might be a useful refinement.

Anyway, all that is further polish on an already terrific ambassador for parser games. The Adventuron platform itself should not be overlooked here, and was presumably chosen deliberately. With its overt old school aesthetic and vibe it conjures a time when IF was shiny-new and filled with promise. LnM’s warm story and welcoming play expands on that to open the hobby to those that might otherwise fear its legendary opacity and cruelty. By extension, LnM makes all of US look less inbred and niche. Thanks LnM!

Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 15min, 5 playthroughs

One word review: MeYOW.

Four-word review: I really dug this.

Multi-word review of uncertain length:
This is a fascinatingly structured choice-select scene. A charged social interaction between four bureaucrats of varying levels of self-importance. There are a few repartees, then things are broken up by the adult in the room. The story is really what each player brings to the exchange, and their interrelationships that drive the prickly encounter. Man is it well conceived and executed. It is short enough that with only a few replays you are assembling a full picture of the dynamics and personalities at play.

It is hard to say what the ‘best’ way to play this is, but I will say, my method just crushed it, and you are welcome to use it. After cycling one each in the first play, I decided to alternate between members of the same ‘faction’, then repeat starting with the opposite lead. This gave me full visibility into one faction’s drives. Then repeated the whole sequence for the other faction.

It helps that the piece gives convincingly varied motivations, personalities and vocal adeptness to each participant, then shows how ALL those pieces lead to the unchanging conversation flow. It is fascinating because it is so well done and organic. In particular, on my first pass of faction A (for ‘a$$hole’, as opposed B for ‘befuddled’) I came away thinking ‘uh, why are these two basically the same person?’ only to have the reversed order put that to the lie in a deeply satisfying and nuanced way.

Will a different order produce different ‘a-ha’ moments of equivalent quality? Did I even get the BEST revelation order? I dunno, maybe to both? But even if not EXACTLY equivalent, the charge of what is revealed about whom in what moment is still really cleverly done and it’s hard to believe some charge won’t be produced regardless of order.

Yeah, this struck me as pretty uncommon use of interactivity, deftly architected for satisfying mini-revelations stitched through a snide exchange of petty rivalries. This is like the whole driving impulse of reality TV. Which I don’t really like. But LOVE here!

Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 5min

This is a short, very short excerpt from a longer work. I am not convinced reviewing this in isolation does it, or the larger work, any favors. A priest is taken aback by a visit from a former romantic partner. That’s kind of it? There is tension in subtext for sure, largely interpersonal. The obvious tension though, that of love forbidden by the church, is mostly ignored? That complete non-engagement itself begs intriguing, but unaddressed questions. In such a short work, there is little time to develop either character beyond the allusions to their relationship. We get some vague sketches of their history, a glimpse into how each of them feels about it, and some one-dimensional character work. We don’t get much insight into them as fully human beyond this encounter. As a thin slice from a larger pie we needn’t expect that, but as a standalone scene the missing pie looms large.

Man, I really want some pie now.

The interactivity is minimal here, of the page turning variety. As an extended dialogue, the graphical presentation is appropriately and cleanly reminiscent of a script. It establishes an engaging rhythm, most pages starting with business and ending with dialogue. This rhythm is my favorite part of the work, making a virtue of its artificiality. The work carries itself as a script as well, to the stagey side of naturalistic. The priest in particular almost immediately expresses overt emotionality without much ramp. This is certainly economical and perhaps more justified in a larger stage production, but in a short vignette reads unnatural. The scene partner also comes across as… kind of smug? In a way that diminishes the reader’s empathy for both of them. Again, something a larger work could flesh out more compellingly.

I appreciate that the climax is pregnant with foreboding about what is to come next, given the bits we’ve seen, but I struggle to say I was invested in it. The work was simply too abbreviated to develop that. I really think the way to consume this work will be in its larger container. A quick peek at the author’s page shows that Vespertine is ALSO part of this larger work? I struggle to see how the two connect, and THAT is VERY interesting. It actually feels more of a piece with another work, Idle Hands, not only for its Biblical allusion title, but for its fascination with the collision between stifling religious doctrine and raw human need. The fact that it is NOT notionally linked begs all kinds of questions about the larger work, including its billing as gothic horror, where the horror part was noticeably absent from this intro!

A generous reviewer would do well to reevaluate this piece in its larger context - the entire pie as it were. Which, dear reader you will no doubt have cause to celebrate, as I DID secure a pie between initial composing of this review and posting. Bourbon Pecan. So good.

Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 45min

My introduction to this author was via their prose which typically lands squarely in my thirsty, thirsty brain. It is so singularly confident, eloquent and evocative it just pulls me along regardless of the tale it is telling! I have also come to revere their sly use of interactivity and links. Rarely as true alternatives, link choices are instead used build contradictions in the protagonist, often more effectively than simply explaining them. This work in particular, with its changing and unselectable options paints a clear picture of a protagonist struggling unsuccessfully against their own nature, and does so with uniquely effective interactive techniques.

This work also leverages the dreaded timed text in an ultimately successful way, representing a campfire conversation being lived, not laid out to consume at leisure. I will confess to some trepidation before its use was fully exposed. It is NOT a terrific way to consume story-based works, but it works here as both a graphical cue of its framing sequence and is evocative of its setting.

As a campfire tale, an Old West supernatural story, its setup is enthralling: a stolen identity to mask a deeper secret; a tempting offer that does not go optimally (I mean, do they EVER?); all cresting to some sort of resolution and twist. It’s a terrific formula, and the FORM of it is deeply appealing. Let me break it into four acts: ACT I - the setup and mini-climax; ACT II - a short transition; ACT III - a doomed, joyful interlude; ACT IV - turn and finale.

Despite a terrific plot frame, ACT I prose (acharacteristically for this author) pushed at me. It felt like an unedited first draft? I say this because the prose that so often effortlessly pulls me in, pushed at me here. In one dimension there was the disconnect between the language/imagery and its uneducated, hard scrabble protagonist. In another I found the sentences themselves over-claused? This author’s prose style is NOT Hemingway, not at all. But here, it felt like their typical discipline slipped and where extended sentences and modifying clauses usually flow and ebb but close with a punch, ACT I felt overridden with sentences that continued and continued and continued… and closed in confusion. It really felt of a different piece than the ACTs to follow. Because it was the FIRST ACT, it also pushed me away a bit, even as lots of plot (and notably inventive link architecture!) was happening. This was an uncomfortable, unwelcome conclusion for me. Judiciously turning some commas into periods would make a WORLD of difference here, to me anyway.*

For me, the most successful acts were the middle two. In particular, ACT II plays directly to the prose strengths of this author. I could remove this act from context and read it over and over again. Will resist spoiling what it is describing, but let’s just say it uses food chain specifics to paint passage of time (and obliquely evolution of protagonist) in a singularly magnetic way. This stands among the strongest sequences by this author. Because ACT I did not click in so crisply, this was a breath of relief as well.

ACT III delves into emotional interiority in a way that felt both earned and suitably shadowed for the tale. The prose employed to do so remained singular, unintrusive and propulsive. There were some logistical questions not quite clarified… a new character was able to pierce the veiled identity of a new body somehow… but the emotional content felt right. My specific question: (Spoiler - click to show)The host seemed to recognize the protagonist’s biological sex during a bath despite currently inhabiting a body the text leaned into as a male. Layered on top of this was deep sadness over the implications of the ACT I deal, agreed upon with no anticipation of ACT III’s fleeting joy. I found story beats, language and emotional content all clicking together smoothly and satisfyingly here.

ACT IV disappointed me in a different way. There was, throughout the work, some tension in the protagonist’s character. Early self-isolating choices pointed strongly one direction, only for later longing choices to contradict those earlier ones. In ACT IV, choices and mental anguish seemed further disconnected from plot beats and character motivations in a distracting way. In one sequence, the protagonist bemoans the impossibility of locating someone, despite having been told they are the local sheriff. Is it really that hard to find a sheriff when you need one? That seems like a pretty good lead to me! The anguish felt overwrought, given the circumstances. In general, the runup to the final scene felt more of a piece to ACT I than II and III, though the sentence structure definitely carried more discipline.

I am happy to report the final scene absolved a lot of that. A final plot twist is actually quite satisfying, leading to a final tragically impotent choice and open-ended climax. Then a campfire stinger appropriate for the narrative. While I initially rebelled at the open-ended climax, the narrative engaged it directly and turned me 180 on it in like two screens. That is some story-telling power!

So, overall impression: two frictiony acts, two banger acts, and a strong close. Sure, would prefer them all to stitch together cleanly, but if not, that’s good enough for me!

*It is not lost on me that the above criticism is fairly leveled at MY style as well. But this isn’t about me!

Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 10min, 3/3 endings

It is kind of gratifying to watch an artistic arc. So much art is consumed one-and-done in this day and age. Honestly, that does seem to be the model that makes the most sense anyway. Artists spend inordinate time and energy refining and honing a piece of art to stand on its own, encapsulating a complete artistic vision, and hopefully resonating with an audience in an engineered way. (Art IS engineering. Fight me.) While repeated engagement may be deeply gratifying to the artist, its impact on the consumer is usually dominated by that first encounter.

There is serialized art of course. Novels and comics have long engaged in serialization, most famously pulpy entertainment of recurring characters in genre adventures. I am not talking about a FICTION or STORY arc, however, I’m talking about an artistic one. When a single artist is behind serialization for an extended time their intellectual and artistic growth can become part of the story, a compelling subtext to another round of puncheminnaface. If you’ve never read Dave Sim’s complete Cerebus, it is a rollercoaster of artistic preoccupations and before-your-eyes evolution. Its latter half in particular is so dominated by the artist inventing Bad Takes (TM) before our eyes as to be equal parts mesmerizing and repellent. That arc ultimately overwhelmed the fiction it was nominally creating.

This is not what’s happening here, to be clear. I invoked it as one type of artistic arc. Another, more relevant arc is when an artist returns to some theme several times, exploring it in different ways and to different effect. This work seems to be connected to two others by this author, as a trilogy of sorts, all exploring the intersection of entitlement and romantic relationships. The author acknowledges this work’s debt to a crackerjack earlier work that I personally really enjoyed. It also shares overt similarities to a subsequent work I reviewed this 'Thon. The artist of course has naming privileges, but absent their input I will call this “The Entitled Heart Trilogy.”

This strikes me as a middle work both thematically and temporally. The first ‘entry’ engaged a troubled but redeemable relationship with a dangerously biased power dynamic. The third delivered a cold ‘masks off’ condemnation of full on toxicity. This one bridges the gap by using fantasy time loops to explore the surprisingly grey border between romantic manipulation and earnest will-to-change. In some ways it is the most subtly challenging of the three, particularly when exploring all possible endings. The author ultimately has some specific ideas about where things land, and in the construct of their fiction of course is the authority. I nevertheless appreciated that prior to the endings, the language remained open enough to challenge the player’s presumption of protagonist motives, conscious or otherwise. The fact that the ambiguity doesn’t extend to (one of) the endings is kind of a cutting rebuke of self-delusion lurking in the border tension. The fact that there are three endings further muddies the waters - toxicity is not fore-ordained!

I really enjoyed the first one. I appreciated the third one, which was much more straightforward, terse and confrontive. I may have liked the fleeting ambiguity of this one best of all, and the damning but open ending space it carved out. I really like all three of these together, and the artistic arc they collectively describe.

And unlike Cerebus, the artist is not reduced by their arc!

Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 5min, 5 playthroughs, 5 deaths

The 'Thon has exposed me to a higher density of (Spoiler - click to show)choices-don’t-matter works than I have previously encountered. Seems like tight time frame Jams draw these out for completely understandable reasons. Thing is, this type of game hinges so completely on its artistic theme that everything else pales, and it becomes the dominant lens to view the work by.

Unless… you are sending up that very type of game!

The player-protagonist is a crash test dummy. Famously without initiative or agency. You achieve consciousness and have precious little time to try and do something. This is a very attractively put together example of the sub-genre. Its color scheme, aggressive layout and interface are both attractive and functional, and satisfyingly evocative of the protagonist’s identity. The choices on offer are surprisingly numerous, given the character in question, and it takes a few playthroughs to feel like the space is satisfactorily explored. Though even after a single play, you get a sneaking suspicion what the work is on about, the message is dutifully reinforced through repeat plays. One choice in particular - use of dreaded timed text - ups the ante in a kind of hilarious way. (Spoiler - click to show)Not only can you not influence your fate, you can’t even control how you get information!

This reads so clearly like a playful spoof of these types of games, and goes above and beyond to really twist the knife. From the protag’s identity, to gameplay, to timed text presentation, it is cheekily poking at other games of its ilk and outright taunting players who play them! “Hey, that crash test dummy? That’s YOU player! Strap in and shut up!” As a one-joke jam game, for IF nerds like me, it is the exact correct mix of taunting insult and loving send up to elicit “yah-you-got-me” laughter. You can have your (Spoiler - click to show)tragic fate, your helpless victimization, your cynical statement no-choice games. I think this is my favorite game of this type.

Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 5min, ah, finished

This is a linear piece of short erotica. Interactivity is mainly used in mouseover phrases to dive deeper into a particular moment, usually to increase the explicitness of the proceedings. Otherwise you are turning pages, and not so many, until done. Oh yeah, your carnal partner is the Devil. Lucifer. Ol’ Scratch (in more ways than one, amirite??). Ok, I am going to endeavor to reign in my inner juvenile as I go forward. History suggests my success will likely be mixed at best, but know it is not from lack of trying.

Writing in general attempts to elicit emotions from the reader. Humor makes us laugh, tragedy makes us ache, horror unsettles us then gives us catharsis. Erotica speaks to a pretty specific and powerful human impulse. But here’s the thing, it ALSO has to contend with centuries of stigma, much of it socio-religiously sourced. Humans have a singular mechanism to deal with this level of discomfort: reductive humor. Especially transgressive humor which sublimates pretty quickly to profanity. Now, profanity is a lot of things, but for most of the world it is NOT a representation of the beauty of its subject. It is a challenging misdirection that derives its charge from its audacious defiance of convention, NOT the power of its purported subject.

So here we have this amazing physio-chemical trick our bodies can do, that in the best case interacts with our emotional wiring to build a transcendent experience of joyful linkage with another human being. But it finds itself wedged between socially indoctrinated shame and trivializing profanity. Finding the sweet spot in between is an insanely difficult needle to thread. It is a testament to the power of human sexuality that so many try.

But wait, effective erotica has still another enemy! While shared in the general among much of the population, carnal specifics are as varied as the people who pursue them. One person’s turnon is another’s kink, is another’s safe word deal-breaker. Specifics matter to those whom find it appealing and ALSO matter to those who don’t! An author really only has once choice here - relinquish hopes of universal appeal in favor of perfectly nailing it for the subculture that appreciates it. (See, look how heroically I resisted ‘nailing it’ riffing!)

To sum up. Thread a narrow needle for a specific segment of like-minded humans. When you write, the only tool you have to find this impossibly narrow path is words. This work has the right idea, I think, in that its prose leans poetic with occasional shots of enticing physical specificity. Poetry has the promise of capturing complicated human interiority, it’s kind of its north star. It’s almost unfair that this work, with all the above challenges, now must additionally contend with a reviewer whose patience for poetic prose is thin. While I did like the contrasting mouse-over unveilings of physicality, the rest of the text left me at arm’s length, just aiming a little TOO high to land.

I do admire that in its choice of partner, the work is explicitly, perhaps defiantly, running directly into the face of erotica’s socio-religious stigma. Couple that with some pleasantly jarring uses of profanity and you have a work that seems confidently determined to play with the boundaries of erotica. If anything, I do think more could have been done with the conceit. The text did not seem to acknowledge or leverage that super-interesting aspect of the pairing beyond some sly physical observations. Lastly, the work was a short description of a post-/pre- coital interlude without much dramatic arc. It actually ended kind of abruptly to my way of thinking, neither cresting nor teasing its forward path.

Note I did not use the word climax in that paragraph even once. I am a giant in my field.

It is a pretty short piece, a portrait of physicality that many of us humans are inherently interested in. It does admirably and effectively challenge the restrictive guardrails of profanity and stigma. Now, it comes down to personal sensibilities, both in prose and carnal preferences. For a work this well composed, I have no doubt there is an audience for THIS mix out there.

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 15min, 3/3 rescues, 2/4 fails, 3/5 awards

This is an entry for a Comp I do NOT judge! Weirdly, as EctoComp’s organizing principle (spooky Halloween fun) is slap in the middle of my road. Hey, I gotta pick and choose though, right? I intend to have a creative life of my own, and not just vicariously latch onto the heady works of my betters, then pepper them with whatever is happening in my brain chemistry at the time! I too have a dark passenger that needs servicing! Anyway, he’s in the backseat now so pepper away I shall.

The premise is exploring an old church and dealing with (Spoiler - click to show)the horror inside. It is basically a linear story, with a variety of details in the player’s hands (including the nature of your companion) that fan out into a series of replayable, collectible achievements. Achievements, more than any other mechanism, encourage ‘collect all the endings’ style of play, so that is how I engaged it.

I found the prose in this one more than it needed to be, in a very good way. In exploring the church, we learn our protagonist might have been raised religious but has since lapsed. The language was very good at conjuring a reverence of iconography and environment that, once seeded, still has a hold on us despite our subsequent spiritual journey. It was a nifty observation and mood to set, unnecessary for the horror that followed, but uniquely well-observed all the same.

After some short ((Spoiler - click to show)optional) exploring, you encounter the antagonist, make some choices and it ends. It is very disciplined, in that it understands replays will be less concerned with exploring and repeated text and thankfully provides for shorter paths to plumb its outcomes on subsequent plays. Of particular interest is the ability to choose the relationship of your companion. This choice opens different climax options and variations. I think my favorite was the (Spoiler - click to show)acquaintance whose fail ending made me laugh out loud.

So yeah, this was a MEIF (multi-ending IF), nicely tuned to its repeat play paradigm, offering a healthy variety of branches and written much better than it needed to be. Worth a play or 8-12!

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: Act I (2x) 5min; Act II (3x) 5min; Act III (4x) 8min

I made the call to review these three Acts together, given their relative brevity and presumed linkages in the author's RGB Cycle. After playing them, I stand by that decision. These are three very short games, linked in formatting and variations on horror themes. In each, you are playing a potential victim’s role in a horror story. The setups are economically conveyed, crisply establishing dramatis personae and blurry setting, not wasting a word on unnecessary details or background. The dramatic resolution of the current scene is the whole focus, and given their dire urgency, appropriately so. Background details are dribbled out organically based on your choices and responses. It is a powerful, very successful approach to horror this short.

In the first act, a wife is confronted by a monstrous (pirate) husband. The second showcases a man trying to find his way out of darkness. The last is a man responding to a panic-inducing revelation. The pieces are thematically linked, though they share no common characters or setups. The ‘cycle’ in question seems deliberately named, and I am going to show my whole ass trying to explain what I could be completely wrong about. The name "RGB Cycle" carries two meanings I think. The more playful of the two is the use of color implicitly and explicitly in the works. On one level it is purely a graphical/presentation choice, implicitly linking characters across these narratives. On another level (and here I risk creating theme in whole cloth), each act is a different shade (ah? ah?) of culpability and agency in monstrous circumstances.

I am running out of non-spoiler room here. Each Act presents a life-or-death scenario of (Spoiler - click to show)predatory murder. Each Act features subtly different gameplay, from dialogue trees to modest puzzle solving, to dark room exploration. Each Act also provides (Spoiler - click to show)a single ending while perhaps head faking multiple endings, as far as my limited playthroughs could determine. When individual games do this, there is clearly a point to it. If the point is not surprising and/or thematically laser focused, it can land with an ‘eh, ok, I get it.’ When a TRYPTYCH of games do this, their impacts expand and multiply. When the genre of those games is horror, that choice rings loud and impactful. In particular, the variance in scenarios and motivations underline that the situations kind of don’t matter. The different roles of the 'colors' underline that personalities don't matter. Motivations and innocence don’t matter. These are all tones of a horrible, horrible rainbow whose overriding arc is impervious to its specific shadings (and most distressingly, impervious to (Spoiler - click to show)attempts to alter it).

That is a really cool conceit, deftly implemented, and landed for me like so much more than the sum of its parts. So yeah, three Acts cresting into an overarching message of effective horror. One review. Would be weird to only review Broadway productions scene by scene, wouldn’t it?

I would be remiss if I didn’t observe that Act II’s title is maybe my favorite IF title of all time. Certainly of those I can remember at the moment.

Boy will my face be RED if the last installments of this cycle contradict what I'm saying here. I'm getting GREEN in the gills thinking about it. And kinda BLUE. At least you know I'm not too YELLOW to post my thoughts!

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 8min, 4 endings

Hitting quite a run of these Short Story IF works. I suspect (and only suspect, not having participated in Jams of my own) Jams encourage this style of IF. Broad puzzly works, with complicated moving parts, player initiative anticipation, and their attendant debug and tweaking are a lot harder to force into a tight development timeline than a controlled linear narrative. Not a dig, linear narratives after all are the PROTO narratives. Should not be a surprise that there is a Jam that acknowledges this directly, the One Choice Jam. Makes the subtext text!

This is a story about mourning and reconciling difficult parent-child relationships. Per the one-choice conceit, you must select one of four artifacts to honor your mother, with mini-sections giving context on each of the choices. Actually, ‘difficult’ isn’t quite the word I want, though it is technically accurate. The story is not more or less difficult than any portrait of two differing lives squashing together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frictions, and further burdened by unfair and/or tone deaf expectations on both sides. Y’know, standard interpersonal relationship stuff.

This is a pretty good representation of that dynamic, I found. The artifacts represent samples of different aspects of this relationship. The One Choice offers conflictory impulses. On the one hand, it asks the player to select only one aspect of the relationship to foreground. A relationship that is explicitly NOT one thing, but a synthesis of them all. The very act of selection betrays the reality of the relationship’s complexity and flattens the fullness of it.

On the other hand, the player is deciding which memories to prioritize, in some way acknowledging that the complexity need not be uniform. That some traits might loom larger and more accurately summarize the relationship than others. Or more importantly for the protagonist, maybe the complexity was noise that distracted from the aspects that loomed largest.

There is a subtle on the third hand here, begging the handiness of the metaphor. Because the player is making the choice, the choice becomes what the player/protag WANTS to be true, almost independent of the deceased. It becomes more about the survivor than the deceased, and more revealing of their needs and wants. This feels like a stunningly well-observed insight into how ALL human relationships work, especially ones relegated to memories and not new experiences.

The work then hinges entirely on this one choice. I find it telling that the denouement is (Spoiler - click to show)not materially affected by the choice - funerals are scripted ritual after all. But the choice itself is what makes all the difference, to the protag and the player’s experience.

Hrm. So while I seem to have successfully avoided narrative spoilers, I have nevertheless completely spoiled the emotional content of the work. Does that count? Is there a mask for that?

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs

At some point, I review enough work from a single artist that my impulse is to turn a current review into a body-of-work overview. I need to resist this impulse, not because Death of the Artist (why would I want that???), but in fairness to the current work. Or perhaps, in fairness to the remaining body of work. To this point, I have admired almost all of this author’s works that I presumed to review, sometimes with qualifiers. Those caveats have given me things to talk about, digest, and clown on a bit.

DOL-OS, for me, was an unqualified, un-caveated success. You’re tying my review hands, work! It presents as an ooooold computer terminal, some archaic dawn-of-windows-like OS. Monochrome (mostly) terminal, visible-pixel fonts, all of it. And the design is just terrifically evocative, down to the messy desktops, the stray game and (working!) internet apps, the trashcan of nearly-deleted files. No clues what to do, just log in (initially as guest) and poke around a bit.

There, you are treated to a wide array of files, images and programs (among a field of ‘corrupted’ ones) that build a mosaic picture of a future dystopia. I cannot stress too highly how well done this is - the graphical presentation is just perfect, from its squiggly ‘corrupted’ files, to its program start screens and tones, to its broken internet. Too, the documents at your disposal are varied, redacted and fragmentary, presenting a picture of life under state paranoia and its often dire consequences. And the puzzles this enables! A clever set of puzzles dialed in specifically to this conceit and environment, integrated in a satisfyingly organic way.

Eventually, you can piece together the password to a user account and… learn of the genesis of the dystopia and perhaps the seeds of its fall. Only then is it clear that you are interacting with (Spoiler - click to show)a distant past, though honestly, the graphical presentation couldn’t clue it more openly. And you engage a final artifact from those times: (Spoiler - click to show)an AI created to render passionless legal judgements, most often capital. At that point you enter a dialogue (on keyboard) until a final, impactful decision.

This was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. Its verisimilitude was top tier, and sucked me in immediately to its world building. I relished the desktop playground constructed for my spelunking. I devoured all the files I could find, for 2/3 of the runtime hopelessly lost in the loose, seemingly disconnected puzzle pieces it was presenting. Then the game masterfully closed the gaps, fit the pieces in a satisfying pop, and built to a final conversation of great import. These kinds of mosaic narratives are catnip for me, and finding one this well done makes my heart sing.

So here is the part of my review where I would back off and whine about some detail, some gameplay artifact, some prose flourishes that didn’t quite… whatever. NOPE. I got none of that here. This is a winner folks, a straight up winner.

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 5min

You guys are really throwing down the gauntlet here, aren’t you? Ever shorter lengths, ever tighter conceits, its almost like you’re daring me to spoil! A dual Jam entry this, it is structured as a letter from sibling to sibling. The interactivity is of the page-turning variety, adding more text to a long letter in small chunks until it is done.

The letter itself is just sad, full of regret for a lifetime of (Spoiler - click to show)neglect and emotional isolation of its addressee. There are depressing details, nicely observed, that sell the specificity of its setting. There are equally depressing omissions on the author’s part that paint a pretty complete picture. A sad, complete picture. I found it effective in its brevity, if a bit of a downer. Which, I expect, is the whole point of it. I mean, writing is exercise in empathy, no? Trying to evoke emotions in others (horror, swooning, catharsis, tragedy, horniness, laughter, whatever) is one of the written word’s most common uses. Until advent of motion pictures, it was the main mass market vehicle for it (not to sell stage productions short). RTWYT15 ably steps into that legacy with its brief, cold shot of empathy. Really nice last line too.

Yah, this is shorter than most of my stuff, but it is scaled to the work, I promise!

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 15min

My second played work from the Goncharov Jam, and hoo boy quite different. This is a tragic love story, where interactivity is used to provide different insights and flashbacks into the central relationship, between a (Spoiler - click to show)gangster and a killer seemingly hired to kill him. An early charge I got from this work was this super loaded phrase in the Content Warning: - Brief cannibalism. LolWUT???

The cover art was actually the FIRST charge I got from this work. It is evocative, compelling, and very much of a piece with the 70’s movie conceit of the jam. So much is packed into that illustration, its dramatic layout, its swirling brush strokes, the dynamic lettering, the details in those swirls, I could stare at it for minutes. I could mount it next to my Vertigo poster as a full partner.

Another aspect of the work that landed precisely for me was its use of inline links. There are three types of them: 1) third person flashbacks; 2) first person internal monologue/observations; 3) advance the story. Each of these has its own interactive paradigm and color cues, very effectively segregating three intertwined narrative threads. If I had a quibble, it is with the default color scheme, which seems at odds both with the purported inspiration and the narrative itself. If it was intended as ironic frisson, it didn’t quite land that way for me. Small quibble, but there it is.

The story itself is a relationship study of two flawed men. The prose used here is quite magnetic, employed in both first and third person to simultaneously flesh out the deep attraction (Spoiler - click to show)and the tragic destiny of their relationship. The language flows from character-focused descriptions of physical and emotional attraction to horrific acts of violence, and does so in a shockingly consistent voice - the juxtaposition enhanced by the language thread that unites them.

It was a compelling read, no doubt, but like another recently reviewed work it engaged the ‘romancing the villain’ trope. It’s a work of fiction, I get that, but real or not there is some level of atrocity where I just stop caring about perpetrator heartache. I don’t want to make too much of it. It’s my own hangup. If you find that trope compelling, it is hard to see how this work would disappoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 30min

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Played: 7/11/24
Playtime: 15min

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

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

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

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

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

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

Played: 7/11/24
Playtime: 12min, 6 playthroughs

This is a work submitted for an internet fad Jam - the BEST kind of Jam. An internet fad where lore is manufactured from a typo, a misunderstood offhand comment, a picture out of context, then that lore TAKES OFF into life of its own, composed completely of the whimsy of those whom it erupted around. Somehow stronger and more vital than the gossamer-thin threads of its animus and powered by sheer LOLs. The Best kind of fad.

As I was not part of the genesis of this particular memetic construct, I’m not the one to explain it, I am just expressing my admiration for constructs of its ilk. Someone took this phenomenon and said, “Let’s Game Jam it!” Ah humanity, when I fear all is dark, you endlessly remind me how great we can be, when we’re not being shitty to each other.

So this is a gangster game, notionally related to a fake meme gangster movie. You are tasked to find out some information about the other gangster gang for your gangster gang, by sweet talking a femme fatale. In the lore of the meme, the fake movie in question would be from the 70s, but this feels more pre-New Hollywood 50s-60s. It is a portentous conversation, with subtexts of danger and disaster swirling around a pretense of flirtation. It FEELS black and white, mannered, and swelling with unspoken anxieties. And no doubt fabulous clothing. Through a conversation tree you are asked to get as much information as possible, though how you prioritize that over flirtation is completely up to you.

Then, as these things mandate, the conversation ends with increased tension and without resolution. And that’s it. It is a very capable representation of a memorable scene between powerhouse actresses at the height of their powers, the scene that film scholars would endlessly revisit before TCM showings. Completely devoid of the context of the rest of the movie. Honestly, choosing THIS way to honor its inspiration is kind of … inspired.

It was pretty fun, certainly a quick play, and gave an admirable range of dialogue choices that narrowed to a few outcomes, none of which felt unnatural or lesser. Like the meme itself, it leaves great swaths of subsequent possibilities in the mind of the player, pointed towards but whose inclarity is its virtue. It kind of honors both the form and function of its memetic inspiration that way. It’s not clear to me it achieves much outside the context of its inspiration, but as a Jam entry was never required to do so. Viva fits of whimsy!

Played: 7/11/24
Playtime: 30min, read time really

This is a linear work, its aims cleverly clued by its graphical layout which conclusively evokes pages in a book. Its interactivity is precisely that, turning pages at each one’s end. It is exactly as interactive as a short story. As a short story, its effectiveness is entirely in the hands of the author.

Which is a wild thing to say. At some level, all art, interactive or no, springs from an author’s vision and implementation skill. At least in the ways I am interested in talking about. INTERACTIVE art explicitly aims to include the consumer in the art, (for want of a better word) PASSIVE art does not. This is a two edged sword for the author. The promise of interactivity is a deeper engagement, a unique frisson that is the difference between participation and consumption. The peril of interactivity is that the author has no control over the player, and must somehow accommodate or steer the experience to still deliver their artistic statement against an unpredictable range of interactions.

Am I saying fiction is “easier” than IF? That would be a hell of a hubristic thing, wouldn’t it? Let’s dodge that with mealy mouthed “they both have challenges.” The unique challenge of fiction is to get reader buyin, then keep it. The setup, scenario, human behaviors and plot twists all need to be convincingly communicated and sustained. There is no implicit buyin by player typing along at keyboard. In both kinds of art, the prose itself is doing the lion’s share of this convincing.

My Girl worked for me as a short story for most of its breadth, thanks to its prose. It is somewhat dreamy, somewhat poetic, but always cold and unsentimental, befitting its scenario and characters. It compellingly tells the story of an unhappy marriage, a woman abandoned by her husband for long stretches at sea, then expected to service marital and emotional duties during infrequent returns as if these gaps were immaterial. The wife a player in her husband’s story, as almost a glorified extra. Unsurprisingly, she is increasing dissatisfied with that role. For great stretches, the language and turns of phrase terrifically convey the feeling. Some standouts: “ever bending the crooked language of his devotion like a bludgeon” “There is nothing within your dominion that your husband would not claim as his own, in deserved access” “the hymns you sing segment it small, dividing the hours as neatly as in your book”

It is a slow, sad dance of spiraling despair, very effectively and magnetically conveyed… for 80-85% of its length?

Just often enough, there are narrative twists or observations that do not evolve naturally, that jarringly intrude into the narrative flow without prior warning or support. An observation about “frivolity of men” breaks the personal scope of the narrative, suddenly speaking (in isolation) to a larger indictment than the text was previously concerned with. Contradictory descriptions: “sniffing out for traces of betrayal that you could swear are dribbling in red rivulets down the inside of your wrist as he speaks.” vs “He has no reason to not believe you would be truthful, that you would be true.”

And two major plot twists, one of which carried some setup portent only to be so shadowed as to muddy its impact. Then a final twist from nowhere, the more unsatisfying for its terse, disconnected resolution.

There is a school of thought that for short stories, the ending is whole measure of success. I don’t think it has to be true. Certainly I have found any number of longer format works who have bungled the ending BADLY (looking at you The Stand) that nevertheless are fondly remembered for the many, many things that worked like gangbusters before that. My Girl doesn’t beef anywhere near that bad, but leaves me with analogous feelings. Sure, there were glitches at the end, but for great swaths of its length, I was captivated.

Played: 7/11/24
Playtime: 15min, two playthroughs

Y’know how some games are emerald-cut jewels of insight into some aspect of creation? That touch on universal themes and leverage interactivity to deliver that insight to the player like a thunderbolt? That instantly spark a spiraling sea of contemplations, revelations and powerful proximity to Larger Truths? That compel reviewers to hammer out page after page of analysis and exploration, as much desperately trying to grapple with the feelings the work elicited as informing potential audiences?

Wouldn’t it be EXHAUSTING if every IF work was like that??? Like, just fatiguing beyond all measure.

KoB is, thankfully, not that. It is another one-conceit Jam that slyly slips in a second conceit on replay. It feels graphically a little hastier than some. Textually, a little deeper than others. It is a pre-date screening by a helpful roommate that tests the player’s empathy a bit (I’m gonna say up to the line, but not hitting ‘manipulatively so’), then delivers some quick horror. In a game this small, that feels spoilery, but the game’s own descriptions basically confirm this, so I’m good.

I’m a horror guy, so my bar was not very high for this thing. I liked it for what it was. I really liked that it bucked a strong feline subculture in IF to SHOWCASE A DOG (who’s a good girl??). I liked it better on replay, when going for a different ending which really drove home the horror. Hard to imagine you won’t like those things too.

Except for, well you know who you are. :cat:

Played: 7/10/24
Playtime: 1/2 hr, 86 pts, fired; additional 1hr “won” with walkthrough goose
CW: AI art

CnL has a lot going for it, I wish so much of it was not qualified. This is a pretty classic parser experience, wrapped in an attractive package and oozing with wit.

The wit is the least qualified success in the work. It is suffused with pre-cancellation Scott Adams’ Dilbert vibes, which, death of the artist, when at its best was crushingly on point in its lampooning of empty business jargon. Most NPCs are endless fonts of vacuous business platitudes, and the game’s unbending commitment to the bit sells it terrifically. The game ups its ante by building these farcical lampoonings into its puzzles and plot beats. Occasionally laugh out loud, it is always wryly amusing and keeps things bubbling along. As a player you can decide whether this train of humor is still fresh, but for me, the work’s total investment just sold it.

The game’s presentation is crisp and clean - the vertical illustrations siding the clean font text panel establishes a graphic identity that is pleasing and engaging. The illustrations themselves flex between functional and part of the gag, and often work pretty well. There are some stylistic hints and non-uniformities that clue their AI authorship. For me, I concede that the artwork works with the vibe pretty well, introducing a 1950’s Man in Grey Suit overlay to 90s-00s corporate cult culture. It is not unsuccessful. The ambivalence you are detecting is that even when AI art is successful, and I have played other works where it was as successful as here, I inevitably struggle with its larger implications. “Death of the Artist” only makes sense to me when the artist was at least once alive. If this aspect of AI art does not bedevil you, you will doubtless find this less ambiguously successful.

The gameplay experience was more traditionally asterisk’d. There were many design and bug artifacts that I understand may now be addressed: weird state glitches, cross-room disambiguations, missing synonyms, moon logic puzzles and lack of reasonable alternate solutions.

These were not everywhere, by the way. There are plenty of lateral thinking, assemble the clues, and search for item puzzles that land squarely in parser tradition, often with humorous twists and satisfying clicks.

This review sounds kind of whiny and mopey doesn’t it? I actually enjoyed the experience a lot more than this review might be conveying. I think I got into that weird space where I enjoyed it enough to want to enjoy it even more, and felt those frictions more keenly. It is a worthwhile play - wryly amusing on several levels. Pretty fair, fun endstates even in failure. Its puzzles as often parser classics as glitchy-but-still-pretty-fun. I wouldn’t let my moping hold you back. Death of the Reviewer! (Especially as the updated version is probably even better)

Played: 7/9/24
Playtime: 45min, two restarts due to bugs

I was immediately won over by the sly, subversive wit that permeates the piece. It is nominally modern, but also medieval, and slides across its academia/occult knowledge/farce vibes with confidence and panache, dropping academic treatises and pop culture references with equal weight. It’s a quest for a portentious tome in the bowels of a library you are interning at. You need to make porridge, as is usually required in these things. There’s fights, snotty students, amusingly off-kilter puzzles. Two quick samples that I snorted in delight at: “[RE granola]The loudest, crumbiest of all the snacks.” “the medieval peasant you keep in your head for dialectical purposes cackles at you,”

It’s also, unfortunately, intrusively buggy in one of its central puzzles. In one early section, you are asked to concoct something. If you explore out of order, you can find yourself carrying the wrong ingredients for your puzzle solving mixture, with no way to replace incorrect items. In the course of decoding its mild complexity, I twice found myself in endless loops, unable to click free and needed to restart. This early in the game, not a huge problem but certainly jarring and unwelcome. If appearing in a longer work, would be game ending.

Even when not outright blocked, I was sometimes treated to buggy text as well, the following appearing after a paragraph of normal text:
"(set: the recipe card,jerky to it - jerky
what I can only presume to be internal code.

So yeah, a flawed experience, but honestly the rest of it is so witty and good-natured it was easy enough to forgive. The graphical presentation is pleasing, the use of sound amusing and deftly employed. A little more polish and it would be an unambiguous recommend. Will keep my eye out for promised subsequent chapters.

Played: 7/9/24
Playtime: 20min, 4 playthroughs

Sometimes my subconscious is an a$$hole. There is a phrase that came to mind during my third playthrough that was deeply uncharitable, kind of mean, and I could not shake once it hit. It also came kind of out of the blue, like a dreamstate free association. This is the second work by this author I have played, and I am just an outright fan of their prose. The dreamstate is a natural outcome of this mesmeric writing style, whose use of swirling imagery, conflicting clauses and poetic descriptions weave a spell like few others.

In IF I have encountered many, many attempts at this kind of word alchemy, vanishingly few this successful. The prose whisks you along, hinting at backstory through misty descriptions that leave an impression then maddeningly waft away, propelling you to the next thought or emotion. My first two playthroughs, I was driftwood caught in the eddies of this work, sliding to and fro, gently prodded to one direction or another and constantly, comfortably rocked while being so. I found it a joy to read. An example which, because I am a word nerd, stopped me in my tracks to admire it: “a place in her long shadow shaped exactly like you”

constellate tells the story of the reunion of two soldiers, one retired, who share an emotional history while hinting at the harsh backstory that led to their separation. The protagonist/player is processing deeply conflicted emotions at the reunion, and the gameplay centers around how you choose to engage that conflict. It employs one of my favorite (when done well) mechanics: links that change text inline to refine the sentence they inhabit. Here, this mechanism perfectly conveys the protagonists conflicted mindset, and gives the player some autonomy based on where it ‘resolves.’ I cannot tell if the narrative changes based on where the final click leaves things, but the thought that it might makes me happy. It certainly does yeoman’s work to sell the protagonist’s internal conflict.

So I went through twice in kind of a dream haze, savoring the warm, enveloping prose, the charge of conflict presented to player/protagonist. I think there was a weird schism there though, because while I definitely felt the conflict, the actual romantic feelings eluded me. If anything, an unhealthy lust, fueled by protagonist’s self-hatred, seemed a more convincing response… until some random firing neurons produced this:

(Spoiler - click to show)Space Nazis in Love

Once that cold, cruel phrase bubbled through the prose miasma to hit my forebrain, it became the only prism I could view through. My subconscious is an a$$hole, but, it’s not totally wrong? Without hint that the backstory is unreliably reported, which we have no reason to believe, we are instead left with two people who commit horrific acts, only one of whom seemingly has any regrets. Yet that pretty fundamental difference is still secondary to their strong chemical attraction. The author is not unaware of this contradiction, certainly the climax is fraught with conflict and compromise. As a player though, I kind of lost connection - sure, they’ve got pretty epic baggage, but even bittersweetness carries sweetness. Is that really what they deserve?

So my recommendation is play through this game for sure - admire its seemingly peerless prose; marvel at the effectiveness of the static links; get swept along by its rhythms and beats. Just stop after twice.

Played: 7/7/24
Playtime: 15min, 4 endings

I swear, fresh off their IFCOMP23 performance, @EJoyce has decided to just troll me exclusively. Veggie lasagna? With CATS??? About the only part of this game I related to was not wanting to let my partner down! This is a game where you try to make (occasionally dubiously hygenic) pasta while cats try to foil your every move. AS THEY ALWAYS, ALWAYS DO. You know where my dog was while I played this? Snoozing peacefully in the corner! Dogs respect your boundaries is what I’m saying, and I’m providing no glimpse into the wealth of counter-evidence at my disposal that might undermine that thesis.

As a choice select game, you are typically asked to choose between ‘do I indulge my whiskered tormentor?’ or ‘do I stay on task?’ while making lasagna. Which path is most successful? The answer may surprise you! Sure, the challenges presented by these feline monsters are varied, humorous and seemingly endless. The text is crisp and propulsive, never letting you get TOO mired in cat-minutiae. As other jams, it has one central conceit, lets you play with that for a while, then provides a subversive set of endings that justifies its runtime quite nicely. I went through four times, spanning the breadth from ‘get out of here whiskers, you’re my partner’s problem’ to ‘ooh pwetty kitty, what was I doing again?’ (that latter proving yet again, as if proof were still needed, just how heroic a reviewer your humble servant is!) The endings were suitably humorous, not the least of which… eh, I made it this far, no spoilers. I do recommend spanning the breadth of endings yourself. I do NOT recommend serving some of these to you partner!

Played: 7/6/24
Playtime: 35m, 4 endings - 3 short, one very long and very good

This work gave me cause to ruminate over the nature of multi-ending IF (MEIF for short). It’s got 14 of them. I have far from a categorical knowledge of this class of IF, but have seen enough to start to wonder about them. “Endings” is kind of a loaded term anyway, right? “Endings” implies a finality, a closure, in the context of fiction, a dramatic culmination. These are things you build towards, planting thematic resonances, scattering then gathering plot threads, evolving relationships and character traits to some final overarching statement of satisfying surprise or inevitability.

They are such fragile, complicated things, it’s a wonder authors can do ONE of those in a given work. What hubris stirs these IF artists to presume 5, 10, 14? There’s a few approaches to multi-ending that have enough merit to be enumerated.

The first is to eschew linear narrative constructs altogether - make the multiple endings the POINT of the work. There is little narrative flow beyond the simplest …and then… , it is the ENDINGS that carry all that weight and the more you see, the better you understand the narrative mosaic. Or, more often, the gag. Because this approach challenges our relationship with traditional narrative, it is particularly suited to humor.

The second is to use interactivity to change the player’s relationship to the narrative, but not the fundamental plot beats themselves. The varied ‘endings’ then reflect how successfully the player aligned to a linear plot - I do not mean this as a judgement. In classic IF this is the ‘You have Died’ ending. You failed to advance along the plotline beyond point X. One might conclude that this is the LEAST interesting MEIF, in that the “ending” is clearly not a NARRATIVE one, and the player is intended to try again and again until the true ending is achieved. A more interesting approach is to allow the player character choices responding to the plot - are they complicit in horrors, a victim of bad choices, or exonerated by thematic alignment? Great dramatic effect can be wrung from player ‘plot failure.’ The challenge is to craft the choice architecture to manage the different endstates in a way that feels organic and satisfying.

The most difficult by FAR is the branching narrative, where player decisions are meant to influence the plot. Cold mathematics quickly steps in to nP the space beyond human capacity, so the art here is to judiciously choose a manageable number of threads, then architect choices in a way that feels more open than it is. THEN ensure that everyone of them justifies itself against every possible permutation of player choice that terminates there! One approach to this problem gave us ‘hidden score threshold’ IF, where choices add up to a scorecheck at key branching crossroads. More manual solutions also exist, most successfully in smaller, tighter works.

There is some real existential hand wringing to do over MEIF for the prospective author. The first question to answer is ‘How do I want the player to engage this work?’ Will they be playing through only once, experiencing a narrative tailored to their specific choices, the majority of the work going unseen? Are they to Ash Ketchum that sh*t and greedily gobble up all of it? Somewhere between? How do you signal to a player which of those is the desired mode? And how does your game respond when players do whatever wild thing they want to do anyway?

Classic IF authors instinctively understood that if you characterize an ending as “FAILURE” players will want to reengage to get the win. That’s kind of a gimme. More elaborate constructs still feel pretty elusive to me - I have seen some very successful comedy pieces, one memorable mosaic ending dramatic piece. Telltale came as close to branching narrative success as I can think of right now. I have seen some dramatic failures in all those types though. The critical thing to understand about MEIF is that for subsequent runs, the player’s eyes are glazing over parts they’ve seen before. The more text you put before an interesting choice point, the more like drudgery it will feel to the player, and the more the endings need to justify or compensate that.

All of which brings us back to … Teatime. I played through four times. The first three endings were kind of unsatisfying. Variations on ‘life is hard and couch is comfortable, but should probably get up.’ But not really dramatically satisfying (though buoyed by energetic, fun text). Also, not for nothing, longer to re-click through than their resolution justified.

My FOURTH run though, I kind of took the game’s broad hints of ‘this is probably the path you should engage’ and did. I was treated to some Videodrome/Alan Wake II reminiscent stuff that was flat excellent, including a graphic presentation change, some talk show format clowning that had interesting choices, impactful character moments, and took a fun, funny, kind of endearing path to a dramatically satisfying close. It was also 4-5 times LONGER than the already kinda long other branches. Meaning, if there are multiple endings buried in that branch I will never see them.

But y’know what? I don’t need to see anymore. The remaining 10(!) paths could be long or short. If short, my experience says maybe not as satisfying as repeated clicking will warrant. If long SOOO much repeated text to get through, and hard to imagine it improves on the one I already got. That one long path was worth the price of admission, and I’m glad I stuck it out.

Which only made me ask… Given the narrative tightness of the longest path, what was the POINT of all those other endings? This work gave me cause to ruminate over the nature of multi-ending IF (MEIF for short). It’s got 14…

Played: 7/6/24
Playtime: 25min, 5 playthroughs, 3 endings

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: DR. WHO PLAYS NO PART IN THIS WORK

This is a short piece about an odd encounter one winter night. I guess it is a slice of life kind of thing. Certainly the simple majority of my playthroughs led to a denouement that was essentially a low stakes, “well that was a weird memory, wasn’t it?” That’s not a problem. I mean short stories trade in that all the time, the intriguing but trivial anecdote in an otherwise offscreen life. No connection to anything else, just a wild thing to reflect on from time to time. I would say, the first three playthroughs were unevenly implemented, in the sense that it was no more or less remarkable whether I engaged the strange phone booth or not. In fact, some ending text PRESUMED I had gone way farther than I actually did, referring to a girl that particular playthrough had not encountered. (There was another weird instance of me opening cans when I had bought bottles.)

The other two playthoughs more interestingly justified the time, one developing into an unsettling stalker scenario, the next into a ‘random hookup gone wrong’ vibe. In both cases though, the narrative pulled WAY short of any significant consequences or backstory, just ended up being different flavors of ‘hn, that was weird.’ Lots of intriguingly suggestive details but no solid answers. I think your enjoyment of the piece will hinge on how open to these kinds of mini-narratives you are. There was no character arc in my playthrough, no dramatic crescendos or reveals, just some weird details that defied explanation. Like a story you might tell at a cocktail party, whose whole point is ‘here’s a weird thing that happened to me…’

I think this might be a stronger piece with some narrative throughlines. There are hints that the PC might have somehow done something bad in the past, or that the visitor intended something bad, but nothing came of either in my playthroughs. It is possible my mix of choices derailed any of that, but just as possible that the hints were the whole point of the piece and nothing more was there. The latter FEELS more consistent with the work, so if it was the former, a stronger authorial hand would need to show the cards a little more prominently.

But that seemingly was not the work’s aim and that’s fine. It ably accomplishes a Wierd Cocktail Party Anecdote simulation, which, if those were uninteresting, we’d never bring them up at parties would we?

Played: 7/6/24
Playtime: 10min, 4 playthroughs

Hm. This is the latest work that confounds my reductive reviewing approach with another in a seemingly endless series of ‘howmygonnadothis?’ choices to make. When reviewing for Comps, judging is in the mix so I feel compelled to explore the factors that led to a specific rating. That pressure/justification is absent here. While my aim is more towards fellow players and the author, I try to be congizant of the Key Review Question.

The unspoken question is ‘is this worth a player’s time, and if so, what kind of player?’ Single-conceit Jam games are typically so brief that it would be near impossible to fail that test. BUT, they are also so brief that their single is conceit IS THE WHOLE THING. So if, in a review, I tell you the single conceit there is nothing left to experience unspoiled. In a large game, spoilers may not be ideal, but with some surgical precision you can limit the damage while making relevant points. In a small game, there may not be much left after the damage.

Sure, that’s kinda what spoiler tags are for, but also is our global energy system well served by delivering scads of 100% illegible reviews to browsers across the planet?

What I can say is that this work telegraphs a kind of distasteful style of gameplay, but whose central conceit thoroughly and completely redeems it. Even THAT feels spoilery. Is gameplay fun? I wouldn’t say that. Is it engaging? A little too prickly and bare bones for that. But its central message and (Spoiler - click to show)gameplay headfake are well rendered at exactly the right size, exactly the right conciseness to drive its message home. Its prickliness serves that conceit wonderfully. I found this game expertly calibrated and pretty darn cool.

Played: 7/6/24
Playtime: 13min, 8 playthroughs

GONNA DISCUSS WITH BIG SPOILERS, LIKE NOTHING BUT
it’s pretty short, go ahead and play first

Is there anything more dispiriting than social impotence? Is dispiriting the right word? It feels like it is, but it also feels like it isn’t… big enough? That your life exists only in the minds of those around you and no amount of cleverness, resistance, will or empathy, nothing actually of you makes the slightest difference in that. History is choked with marginalized peoples and genders that exist as outright property of others. Vast swaths of modern life still carry these impulses, usually applied to people whose lives and agendas are inconvenient to our own narratives. It is the worst kind of dehumanizing. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t try to rank those kinds of things. It’s pretty bad though.

This is a work that uses a heroic narrative from Greek mythology to drive that point home. The packaging is super attractive, opening with classic art, then a story-appropriate background painting of roiling seas under translucent text box. As a player, you are making a series of choices as Andromeda during her attempted sacrifice and subsequent rescue. An amusing variety of responses from ‘sweep me away broad shoulders’ to ‘back off entitled ass’ are available to you. The inability of any of those choices to alter your path are the crux of the work. You can be sassy, reasonable, unreasonable, compliant or enthusiastic, and none of it gives you initiative in your own life. Depending on a particular runthrough, this can vary the experience from spineless surrender to despairing defeat.

It is worth noting that “nothing you do will change anything” is one of the emergent staples of IF-as-narrative. Its theme-to-implementation-difficulty equation has an off the charts ratio, especially in shorter works. It is one of the easiest things to implement, no? No branching narrative, maybe a state variable or two, just the one path with some alternate text. The success or failure of a work like this depends pretty definitively on how convincing and/or entertaining that message is, relative the theme of the piece.

It is pretty perfect against a theme of social impotence.

Is it fun? I mean, does that SOUND fun to you? This is not a piece aimed at entertainment per se (though some branches to have a wry wit to them). It has a point of view, a message, and is super effective at delivering it. As a short work of interactive art, AC accomplishes a vivid, crushing evocation. This f@%#ing sucks. Remember that, sez the work.

Played: 6/7/24
Playtime: 15min, lost, 1.25hrs later, won

The Way Home is an ADRIFT game. For a Linux user, ADRIFT games are … suboptimal. As far as I can tell, the only way to play is to run Frankendrift after installing MS .NET (ptoo ptoo). Which, because I am a hero of BASHian proportions, I did. Frankendrift had some performance issues when I tested this, but I am given to understand those have been subsequently improved.

This is not the game’s fault in any case, and I hope I can tease out the negative coloring it imparted to the experience. I will say I did appreciate the crude but effective-enough mapping window. Thanks to sometimes spotty direction descriptions it was very useful.

The game itself is part 2 of a fantasy adventure, though as these things typically go, is more puzzle than swashbuckling. Also very much NOT required to play part 1. It stands on its own with two meaty puzzles composed of subordinate mini-puzzles. Very classic vibe in that way. I understand it to be an update of a Commodore 64 game? Wow, cool! I can very much see this being of that time and place. Descriptions are spare, from a time when storage was not cheaper than water. Just enough to set the stage and highlight important items, with bare minimum chrome to color things. Gameplay is very much classic parser, with a limited but set-complete vocabulary. Also very classic in that synonyms are in short supply.

I am happy to report that the hint system is fully functional, helpful, and context aware. I needed it twice, once because I was convinced I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)build a sled instead of … somehow… (Spoiler - click to show)ride a ladder, and a second time because (Spoiler - click to show)locksmith was not a synonym for keymaster. I wouldn’t say either of those were infuriating, but neither were they satisfying once spoiled. I will also say that while I did solve another puzzle it felt very much like an “if all you have is a rat, all problems look like cheese” situation. There are some death fails, but thankfully they occur early enough in the proceedings that a restart isn’t TOO onerous.

So yeah, very faithful old school recreation, of a time when IF technology was more fussy, puzzles more streamlined and idiosyncratic, and prose less adorned. I didn’t dislike the experience, but it is hard to justify the interpreter struggle to my fellow linux users. For non-linux it is a nice dose of old school Adventure, still cruel but less than most, good for a relatively tight nostalgia shot.

Played: 7/6/24
Playtime: 15min, chapter1

I did not expect this here! A preview chapter of a pay-to-play text adventure! I am delighted beyond words that this thing exists. The application was very attractive on my Motorola - a very professional, evocative presentation, graphically appealing, choices sliding in crisply from the sidelines to facilitate my agency.

There is a bit more text here than I was ready for - some pages required scrolling to get to choices, though I must say that friction quickly faded. The writing is warm and functional, but still concise enough to not waste your time so it rarely felt like description for description sake. It FELT very ChoiceScripty to me. There was a good bit of establishing character traits and physical appearance, some soft relationship building all on the way to a background mystery involving your brother and his shifty Dwarf friend.

As a preview, it had a few things going against it. For one, the non-character choices you were making had uncertain effect on the narrative. It wasn’t clear beyond some flavor text ANY choices actually did anything. Which is always an unfair statement, clearly building character is ‘doing something.’ But relative gameplay there were few hints your choices had consequences or effects. Meaning by the end of the chapter I didn’t really have a feel for what this fellow I was building would be DOING in subsequent chapters. What my gameplay was going to be.

For a second, as an intro chapter, it had a LOT of infodump work to do in establishing setting, NPCs, stakes, and of course your ChoiceScript Character Sheet. The setting is super Tolkien adjacent. Not a dig. Featuring Halflings, there is no universe where that is not true. It also includes a distant man-elf war against a dark power. A mysterious ‘protector’ that has really strong Ranger vibes. It’s close is what I’m saying. It also seemingly extends my least favorite Tolkien artifact, elvish racism against Dwarves, to Halflings. Why is THAT the JRR Touchstone?? All of it is pleasantly enough conveyed (barring that poor Dwarf - which, to be clear, I am exaggerating for effect), but for a High Fantasy Tourist like me, not so compellingly.

For my part, being a casual-at-best ChoiceScript engager, unmoved by fantasy as a genre, and unclear what kind of IF ride I would be signing on for, I probably pass on the rest of it. If I had any suggestions, and I recognize like most post-publication feedback is mostly academic, I would proffer that the free trail chapter might be better served showcasing gameplay to some extent: a training wheels combat, introductory throwaway find-use puzzles, a quick relationship based levelup, whatever the game itself centers on. Something to telegraph the gameplay to follow. To its credit, I will say the combination of presentation, crisp writing, and toned down CS-iness had its charms, even to me. I could see ChoiceScript fans having a more promising engagement, and fantasy fans finding a lot to be happy with here. If you consider yourself one or both of those, I do recommend it.