Ratings and Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re on a Mission from MOON.”

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/18/26
Playtime: 45min

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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