Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Played: 9/29/24
Playtime: 35m, 2 loops, seemingly stuck both times on ‘something new’
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/intrusive puzzle design? or player shortcomings?
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 2hr, nearly exiting mirror maze
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 45m, win, score 18/18
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 65min, finished with limited hints
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

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

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

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

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

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

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

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 15m, ~12 loops
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless, bonus for clever ui
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

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