Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 10m, all places and sidebars

Every now and then, my wife and I fall into a shallow rabbit hole of Real Estate Virtual Tours. Those things are compelling. Walking through a virtual tour of a home, via a UI that often feels like super-high-res Myst. It is a lot of things at once. Transgressive, like you are SNEAKING through someone else’s home. Wondrous in the technology that puts you so solidly in that sense of place. And an always-just-below-surface artificiality. You only have to navigate a close friend’s virtual home to appreciate the difference from the REAL experience. The staging, lighting, shot angles designed to make everything feel bigger, cleaner and more generic that the real counterpart. It’s an appealing unreality that always has a shadow of falseness to it.

This work is a Virtual Tour of a small hamlet. It resoundingly sheds Virtual Tour artificiality, making this a grittier, more rewarding experience. It feels like it is a combination of the unsentimental photography, the concise historical context, even the map geography that accomplishes this. Unlike trying to sell a house by showcasing (and distorting) its broad, sanitized appeal, Blossom revels in the awkward, specific messiness of this small enclave. It feels more authentically than performatively cool.

What Blossom DOES share with its corporate cousin is the impetus to put its reader/player in the driver’s seat. We recognize the appeal of self-directed discovery as a foundational pillar of IF. OF COURSE its power will be harnessed by Capital. While this harnessing might be an indictment of the West’s social system (barring some increasingly tone deaf defenders), Blossom puts this mechanism to a less-compromised purpose. To convey the thrill of discovery. The specifics of Blossom, NY are unique to it of course, but the breadth of it is not. EVERY place in America has that depth of lore. The Eastern Hemisphere has even DEEPER lore. If I’m honest, Blossom is interesting, but not particularly compelling in that. What IS compelling is marrying the exploration to an IF paradigm where the ACT of exploration is as or more enjoyable than the details unearthed.

If I have a regret with this work, I am sorry that its ties to human sacrifice cults, Cosmic Terrors, or pre-human otherness didn’t come to light in this short visit. How far could it be from Arkham?

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 15m, Trusting, reassured, guilted, deflected, heard

It seems the internet in general, and especially this IF series, are never going to let me break free of Vampire Subtext - a work’s conversation with traditional vampiric themes of predation and consent. This is the fourth(?) in a series of mortal-vampire romance vignettes, snapshotting moments from a long relationship. What I like about the series is its delving into deep cuts of romantic experience. It uses the particulars of its vampire lore to cast a dramatic spotlight on real relationship dynamics. Until this piece, it had quite nimbly (I thought) avoided Vampire Subtext pitfalls.

Here, our pair are tentatively addressing the discomforts of Vampire feeding - one of the most problematic of the subtexts. Traditional feeding tropes play directly into questions of consent and victimization. This work appeared to be trying its damnedest to answer and refute that subtext. Except I didn’t find the WAY it tried that convincing.

My read of the work was that it was capturing a very specific, very fraught relationship dynamic of mismatched sexual desire. Of one partner whose needs were out of scale to the other, leaving the relationship to negotiate the compromise. This is a dark, often glossed over dynamic that casts a long shadow. While the temptation might be to cast it as a minor issue to be worked through, any missteps can lead to unfulfilled resentment. It is totally worth questioning whether a long term relationship is deep enough to weather this, or whether both are better served finding a closer match. I found the rendering of this dynamic very economical and powerful. The characters come to an understanding in the moment, but that understanding is CLEARLY acknowledging the seeds of future discontent. Interestingly, this seemed to be true in all five of the endings I achieved. I LOVED this! By not providing (at least in my five) a ‘fairy tale’ resolution, it fully acknowledged the serious peril this dynamic presents! This read on the work has the effect of recasting the problematic Vampire subtext into something very human, and acutely observed.

Here’s the thing though. The work, in the most explicit way possible, REFUTED this read! Quoth the work: “It’s easy to think of it as analogous to someone having sex they’re not into – [but not]” Uhhh, yeah, it is easy. So easy! AND SO NARRATIVELY REWARDING TO DO SO!!! If I accept the narrator’s word here though, what am I left with? Maybe it is trying to paint a very specific human-vampire social interaction in the interests of emotional fantasy? Ok, but what do I do with all this LIVED HUMAN EXPERIENCE that is singing off the setup so perfectly? And even if I can escape that, DOESN’T THAT PUT ME RIGHT BACK TO VAMPIRE PREDATION, now with an EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL COMPONENT???

It doesn’t help that the human perspective continually highlights the seeds of the relationship’s destruction in other ways. “As if you could manage his feelings if only you had enough information to avoid ever doing or saying anything that might make him feel bad.” I mean, THAT doesn’t sound healthy does it? Regarding the feeding: “But six months has taken the shine off.” Feels like sunsetting an initial carnal infatuation to me. “It doesn’t make him a predator, or you a victim.” Well, now that you’ve brought it up, THAT question is going to linger and smell of denial… All of these dovetail so nicely with the asymmetric sexuality read of a white hot infatuation cooling to reveal the seeds of its destruction. WHY ARE YOU DENYING THAT, WORK???

As a final evidence of relationship foreshadowing, I offer the fourth ending I found (mild spoilers). Each of the endings is characterized by the dynamic used to power through the issue. The fourth one is called ‘Heard’ meaning the two have aired and acknowledged each other’s position. Except the choice I made to secure that ending was (Spoiler - click to show)“Try not to be like that?” Isn’t that the OPPOSITE of being heard? It’s being denied! As an acknowledgement that things are fraying that is a great development. But if not intended as such, what is it?

In the end, this work put me in an uncommon (but not unprecedented) headspace: one of deeply admiring the subtle dynamic I felt it captured, once I decided to IGNORE THE PLAIN TEXT OF IT.

(In the interests of covering my bases, I should note the possibility that the denial was in fact the human protag’s unreliable rejection of the true dynamic. That perhaps the dynamic WAS at play, but the participants were not able to identify it yet. Maybe. If so, I for one could have used some subtle narrative cuing that this was the case.)

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Single-Choice
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 20m, two playthroughs

University is an exciting, challenging time for a young person. Trial and error adulting. An array of new people all attempting to build a social order on a blank canvas. Complex realities colliding with simplistic expectations borne of sheltered upbringing. It is one of very few times when the world seems ours to write, bounded only by negotiations with others attempting the same feat. The thrill of discovery colors it all - discovering new rules to the world, encountering expectations and perspectives we could not dream of on our own.

In the face of that wonder, it might be easy to forget that not all motives are generous and personal safety is simply not a priority. This is a single-choice work that puts you in the role of a student, getting to know an off-putting classmate with a singular perspective. I am loathe to put it more clearly, as that will be well and truly spoiler territory. As a single-choice work there’s really two criteria to bring to bear: the effectiveness of the table setting and the impact of that choice.

As far as table setting goes, the specifics of the setting were a bit muddy to me. We see the protag cleaning up a common area, only to later be told they live alone. Now, this COULD be quad-room situation, but the text declines to clarify. Similarly, the physical description of the key NPC, specifically their eyes, are given a lot of attention, but the descriptions kind of seem at war with each other. All of this could be a deliberate attempt to put the player off, to generate discomfort and mystery aligned with the protag’s own. I don’t think it quite landed though. There is a gulf between struggling WITHIN the story, and struggling to GRASP the story. The nature of the NPC becomes clear enough, so baldly in fact that the earlier murkiness doesn’t seem to pay off?

I would say a more effective use of table setting was in the protagonist themselves. Starting as a blank slate we are seemingly invited to stamp ourselves onto, as the story progresses their questions and priorities nudge us away from that vanilla impulse with pleasantly surprising choices. The protagonist is revealed to be every bit as singular as the NPC.

The latter is what really makes the single choice land. The work toys with the subverting-expectations aspect of uni, and ends up including the player’s POV in that subversion. When given our single choice, its tradeoffs and consequences are ambiguous. What might seem obviously bad has been clouded - perhaps making it that much more dangerous for its reasonable doubt. Or perhaps it is refuting misconceptions in a way that only open engagement with the world can reward. Interestingly, the possible PRICE for the choice is never resolved. Maybe it is also subverted? Or maybe some expectations are COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED? The story ends before consequences are discussed leaving us in the newly-crafted space of the promise of our choices before it collides with a potentially cruel reality. It uses horror tropes to evoke the real world thrill of its setting, not forgetting the underlying terror and fragility of it. Ultimately, I think ending on that ambiguity makes the work stick better than playing out to a definite conclusion. The suspension of suspecting but not knowing is more interesting than either possible concrete outcome.