Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/3/25
Playtime: 30m, two playthroughs

This is a melancholy tale of a (queer? maybe? not explicit but possibly implicit?) person hearing a familiar name linked to an air disaster, then having dreamlike memories of their time with them. Its vocabulary and design are quite wide of my sweet spot, venturing in both form and text into poetic verse. This is a style choice that often leaves me cold. To the work’s credit, its graphical and sound design were very evocative and convinced me to at least try to shed my baggage. It really raised the level of difficulty for me in a few ways though, seeming to actively pit its interface against any attempt to meet it on its own terms.

For one, when its really beautiful dreamstate backgrounds kick in, the text nearly vanishes due to unfortunate font color choice. For many screens, I had to highlight nearly the whole thing just to read it. It also uses a pane paradigm, where the presentation is a small pane, mid window (depending on how big your window is). The pane is not always visible, sometimes it is the same color as the rest of the window. Meaning text that needs scrolling to read gives no indication that scrolling is even possible! Early on, I nearly quit thinking there was a bug that masked a missing progress link, only to finally realize I needed to scroll an invisible pane to find it.

This was exacerbated by ANOTHER choice on some screens to only provide exit links after some “dramatic” delay, again leading me to believe I had stumbled into a bug when instead the game was toying with me, watching me jitterbug the pane until it deigned to allow me to move on. These technical issues were so consistently present, so consistently interrupting my experience, that I never really developed opportunity to accommodate to the poetic style of the prose. Again, I grant you that I probably need more centering than most to get into the flow of this kind of thing, so for me it was particularly defeating.

Here is the metaphor that came to me: I’m some, I dunno, post-war steel worker ok? I come home from a long day… steeling… and my young wife has decided we should get into yoga! Now, I can think of nothing I want less than to NOT get a beer and a shower, but since I love my wife, I gamely put down my lunch pail, take off my hardhat and kneel on the mat she lovingly laid out for me. Yeah, it was tough day riveting or whatever, but I force myself to try relaxing. I’m breathing and ohm’ing.. its a whole thing but by cracky I’m really trying. Then before I even get a fighting chance, the damn dog starts barking and barking and barking and won’t stop. As much as I love my wife, at some point, can’t we agree the dog is telling us to try again later and I just get the beer?

What, doesn’t everyone jump to full-narrative metaphor?

The game’s narrative took a curious turn at one point. For most of its buildup, it seemed to leave its present-grounding behind and vacillate between ‘real’ and dream memories. It had a solid enough throughline until… maybe 3/4s in it took a turn in specificity that both rejected the inputs it let me make prior, and introduced specificity that was jarringly.. not unrelated, but read like a second anecdote that shared resonances with the first. Like two friends telling different stories that had enough similarities that made them worth sharing. This effect was cemented by a closing screen that seemed to reference an entirely DIFFERENT work called Echoes and Traces. Like I had started one work and at some point it transitioned to a resonant but entirely different work.

Like my steelworker finally got the dog to shut up, closed his eyes, and when he opened them, his wife had gently seated a dozen acupuncture needles in him. C’mon doll, am I ever getting that beer?

That was actually kind of a cool effect, honestly. I just wish the work hadn’t been fighting me the whole time and I could have appreciated the ride and sly closing subversion more.

Horror Icon: Babadook
Vibe: Meditation interrupted
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would toss a coin. Heads, I would rework the view pane paradigm: give clear indications when scrolling was needed and eliminate the timed text additions of links. Tails, I would think about fixing the font color to better contrast against the background, but then probably flip the coin again.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/3/25
Playtime: 3hr, finished

It seems every comp/thing/thon I wade into, there is a game or two that bears two distinct hallmarks: 1) Its conceits, prose, wit and composition seem engineered to trigger every pleasure center in my brain; but 2) for reasons I have yet to convincingly diagnose, familiar gameplay somehow suddenly baffles me. I have in the past inaugurated review sub-series to club works with common elements together. This particular combo has never merited one, as they are pretty rare within the confines of a single comp. Across multiple comps though, I could indeed create a meta-sub-series, probably titled “It’s not you, it’s me.”

RL is chockablock with hallmark number one. The central conceit (spycraft via a gun that transmogrifies things into their english-word reverse-order counterpart) plays into a rich IF wordplay subculture. We might call it a Schultzian-inspired game, though the conceit certainly predates our modern master. The writing here is strong in some areas. It has fun banter between the protagonist and principle NPC. The whole thing is oozing with wit, setting just the right tone to embrace its ridiculous premise and go along for the ride. There is a great detail where the companion NPC just reverses words when they talk for silly reasons. As an ongoing bit it is just fun.

It is further a competent parser implementation - spare enough in description to keep the weeds low, but with gratifyingly deep pockets of implementation. For example, despite only spare descriptions of beds that never mention subcomponents, you can nevertheless try to fiddle with pillows, mattresses and sheets. Another example: smells are frequently alluded to and never omitted if you subsequently interrogate them. Most importantly, scenery objects you might expect the magic reverser to work on almost always have wry comments on why that’s not a great idea. It’s attention to gameplay detail that both reassures the player they are in strong hands, and rewards player commitment. To a point.

Based on my intro, you know where this is going. To my ongoing shame, and in spite of its great achievements in hallmark #1, RL fell squarely into hallmark #2 during gameplay for me. It is inarguably my fault. I spent an hour spinning in the very first room because I interpreted a direction notation in a room description as color, not travel option. Later, I spun unnecessarily, convincing myself I had entered a silent no-win scenario because I simply neglected to examine an object before trying to use it. These are parser basics, something the author has every right to expect a player to be fully competent in, yet there I was, handful of thumbs, head bashing on screen. This dynamic repeated so often, it is my overriding memory of the game.

It didn’t help that the in-game hint system (conferring with your NPC-behind-the-screen) was only intermittently helpful. Like the author, that NPC likely assumed a base level of competence that I failed to supply, and so the hints and help were as often confirming directions I had already achieved as alluding to next steps without sufficient detail.

When I try to diagnose WHY some games reduce my normally suave, Bond-like mastery of my environment to Jerry Lewis level incompetence and fumbling, I generally focus on the combination of language and implementation. Spare descriptions tend to train the player that close examination is unnecessary. Clumsy disambiguation (at one point asking me “which spare part, the spare part or the spare part from freezer?” a phrase that can never resolve to the former) cast doubt on one’s ability to effectively interact with the world. Inability to consistently access information (for example, unable to >X OFFICE through an office window) implies that information is unnecessary when it very much is not. All of those phenomenon were in evidence here, but I think the central construction also impacted me. Ignoring some subtle parser conventions, like either lumping navigation directions together in text at top or bottom, having them explicitly listed in title bar or via >EXITS command, invites parser-savvy folks to miss things. The cumulative weight of these things represented a barrier between me and game.

“But reviewer, you finished the game - why are you bellyaching?” There was an additional peril in the exciting conceit of the game, perhaps more impactful than anything above. Wordplay games live and die by their cleverness and variation within their own arcane logic. The best such games provide a steady stream of laughing recognition of THIS wordplay solution. While there are some pretty great ones here ((Spoiler - click to show)drawer especially elicited a grin of delight, and the final puzzle was truly wonderful), there are many more that rely on words WAAY out of common use to the point of eliciting, “uh, ok” where the glee should have been. The work seems to acknowledge this, having our NPC guide us past those, but it has the effect of undermining the promise inherent in the conceit. Reversing words to create new objects is really only satisfying if WE ARE THE ONE DOING IT. This disconnect is further compounded by inobvious ways to USE reversed words, making deducing them that much harder. If (Spoiler - click to show)a tip is going to help me solve a puzzle, it should be obvious WHY that will help. Having to be walked through it by an NPC is not itself satisfying. I need more than hand-wavy explanations why core rules of the wordplay sometimes do and sometimes don’t apply. If not, I’m just reversing everything, hoping for a next step to materialize.

The unfortunate nature of the “It’s not You, It’s Me” hallmarks is that however accomplished and winning #1 is, #2 will nearly always trump it. It’s math. If the spinning drags a 45m game to three hours, it’s because over two hours of it is ineffectual self-recrimination. Why do I want that in IF, that is my all-day standard mode! (I should note, in fairness, that the final puzzle ALMOST rescued the whole thing for me, as a multistep variation that used normal words and was quite satisfying for it.)

Anyway game, I appreciate all the things you did right, I really do. I hope we can still be friends.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Cheeky
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d buff the HINT system for morons like me. I would be reluctant to damage the in-world hint conceit that makes such hinting next level enjoyable, so once I got to the limits of that, I think I would produce a walkthrough. Just in case.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/3/25
Playtime: 1hr, lost to Bolsheviks

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of my literary heroes. I find his prose magnetic EVEN IN TRANSLATION. I can only imagine how glorious it must be in the original Russian. I am one of maybe 4 people in the US who started (in good faith) his Red Wheel novel cycle as it started to be translated into English. Red Wheel is a sprawling, epic, fictional account of the events dramatized by this game. Its four volumes start massive and grow to thousands of pages, increasing as the work drives on. Its translation is also incomplete, the initial English language work halted by the publisher after only two volumes were released. The third volume has subsequently been split into 4 hardbacks by a different publisher which I have not yet read, waiting for paperback releases. The final volume has still not even been translated, nearly 35 years on. Solzhenitsyn! What the hell world, what are we waiting for??? This is how capitalism fails us.

I offer this to establish I have a passing, though (vis a vis the game) debilitatingly incomplete knowledge of this setting. I also have a hunger to know more! When I first saw this game, it did not click for me exactly how it would resonate. Instead, my initial reaction was “OMG I loved the original, it is still in an open tab on my desktop! The original features NAZIS, how could this POSSIBLY measure up?” Only when I dove into the required preamble reading and party- and character-names started ringing for me did I grasp the full grip this author has on my psyche.

Don’t get me wrong. Like its predecessor, 1917 is a COMMITMENT. SO much detailed background, more than you can possibly internalize before playing. (And bear in mind, I have a head start here!) I spent a full quarter of my first playthrough reading background! How can you possibly justify that investment? Who on earth would possibly commit to this?

Besides me, I mean. Kinda like the Red Wheel itself.

This game builds on its predecessor in daunting ways. Where the previous was juggling multiple competing faction alliances, social unrest, government management, and population service with woefully inadequate resources, this game increases scope in nearly every dimension. It substitutes two new dimensions “Government” and “Economy” as indirect windows into the former games’s “Polls.” I didn’t do a full comparison, but each tab FEELS like it has more variables to watch.

It shares the card-driven paradigm of the first, with multiple decks based on what your party has secured control over. As before, you have a limited hand of options, a limited (though configurable) slate of ‘advisor’ cards to bust out for special powers, and must-face ‘event cards’ that demand responses every turn. The amount of variables in play is untenably large. You cannot possibly keep them all in your head, and while you have a vague idea how to influence many variables, there is no truly predictable cause and effect. “The peasants are hungry” “Let me spend resources to feed them!” “Well, the numbers barely move and it is unclear how well that worked.” As a card game trying to minmax to victory, this is frustrating beyond justification. As a simulation of governing, where you have clumsy, uncertain levers to influence complex problems it is PERFECT. Ditto the concurrent game of adjusting policy and actions to keep an effective coalition that doesn’t usurp your priorities for their own.

Like its predecessor, while technically a work of interactive fiction, its gameplay is just outside what that label generally implies. Also like its predecessor, that caveat is immaterial. I adore these games. I am overwhelmed by these games in the best possible way. At some point, I am going to cede some fraction of my RAM to Autumn. This is the second game that will just be permanently open on my desktop. I guess I kinda already have ceded that space.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Big Box Boardgame
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : I recommended its predecessor be Kickstarted as a cardboard implementation. Even then, I underestimated the wooden-counter cost of reflecting its breadth of variables, nevermind the mechanical demands of keeping them updated with every action. 1917 has shown me how ill-advised that actually was. No, if it were mine, I would use the full weight of my subject matter authority and clout to see the final volume of Red Wheel translated and published. That kind of seems more in reach than the Kickstarter. UPDATE: I see that the fourth volume has a publication date of Nov 2025. Thanks Autumn!

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/2/25
Playtime: 15m, 3 playthroughs

Why make fiction interactive?

I ask this question sincerely, in full knowledge of the forum it appears in. What is the point of it? Oh, sorry, I should clarify. I’m not asking you, the reader of my winkingly labeled ‘reviews.’ I’m asking you, the would-be IF author. What is it about your work that makes interactivity intrinsic to its form or function? How do you expect interactivity to impact the consumption of your work - its plot, themes and characters and/or overall experience? It feels like a ‘gotcha’ question and it kind of is one. I see Interactivity as an attempt at a more personal engagement from the reader. By giving them some agency in a story’s progress, the reader develops investment, insight, and personal alignment with the proceedings. More intimate than even the best novel.

Maybe. The trick for the author is to nurture and develop that dynamic into an artistic statement. HOR (heh, loving the acronyms this year so far) takes several steps, deliberately or otherwise, to use interactivity to push the reader away. This feels misguided, if intentional. Really, I think it is the intersection of ambiguity and interactivity that misses the mark for me.

Let’s start with setup. This is kind of cleverly done by using mouseover to change dialogue options. We are presented with “coworkers” and “Boss” that become “Knights” and “Commanders” as our setting reveals itself to be an order of knighthood. That played pretty fun, though it did have one effect: it let we the players know that we are NOT aligned with the protagonist. Despite making conversation and thought(!) choices for the protagonist, we don’t really know their life. Now, this will always be true in IF - I have not lived my life as a hobbit or detective, I just haven’t. The trick is to maximize opportunities to align the reader and minimize overt disconnects. Unless tied to the theme of the work, choices that HIGHLIGHT that disconnect work against us.

A far more serious disconnect evolves through the creative choice to bounce the player back and forth between two sides of a conversation. The knight stuff is really just (interesting) background in a ‘you don’t appreciate me’ conversation between two… friends? Lovers? Something in between? Not knowing is another level of disconnect. We see and inform the STRENGTH of the protagonist’s angst, but develop no true feel for the SOURCE of it. Which is kind of important if we presume to carry half the conversation! Not understanding the source made the heat of it unsatisfying and ultimately baffling. Perhaps we are intended to supply it? That puts the cart before the horse a bit - asking us to watch an escalating emotional spiral, then retrofit motivations that make sense.

Further distancing player and protagonist, any attempts I made to defuse the angst (for example to focus on ‘are they maybe hurt?’ rather than ‘they hate me’) seemed to be basically ignored by the narrative. I was left with the strong perception that while I could try to shade things, I had no true ability to alter the conversation’s path. This is not automatically a problem if tied to the theme of the work (which it very much seems to be here), but it does have a distancing effect between player and protagonist. My input is roundly ignored, diluting my investment in the proceedings.

Worse, by occasionally being given the opportunity to drive the other half of the conversation, and by extension getting a glimpse of the partner’s inner life, we are underwhelmed. Nothing about the partner’s conversation choices suggest any level of worthiness, any level of justification for the protagonist’s angst. Rather, we are left in the position of confirming that yes, the partner is an obliviously smug and selfish person that the protagonist is well rid of. We saw their thoughts! We know this!

There is a read that maybe we are not seeing the partner’s thoughts at all, but the protagonist’s PRESUMPTION of their thoughts. Thing is, that may redeem the partner (though their objective actions are still an unanswered indictment), but it further exposes the protagonist as not ready for the relationship they want, and whose paranoid projections are decreasingly sympathetic.

All of which makes the bodice-rending, chest beating, wailing of the protagonist fall so, so flat. We don’t understand their investment, either internally or externally, and it comes off as needy drama they should just let go of. And it was interactivity that got us here!

All this plays into a theme (intended or not!) of alienation, of our interpersonal relationships being little more than projections we ourselves bring to the table. Both protagonist and player are caught in a spiral of having to assume thoughts, motivations and mindset of others instead of, y’know, having a real conversation about them. Yes, interactivity provides the tools to include the reader in this dynamic rather than simply presenting it. But to what end? The protagonist’s responses feel SO exaggerated they are off putting. Our need as player to fill in gaps feels less ‘universal truth’ than railroaded authorial hand. CAN this dynamic exist? Of course! MUST it exist? The work has not convinced me of that. The opposite, by using interactivity to alienate the player, the message feels unnaturally imposed. This is famously an ineffective way to work with people. Entire countries have been founded rejecting this!

Horror Icon: Carrie
Vibe: Doomed Relationship
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : While I’d be tempted to charge after the low hanging fruit of technical issues, I’d be better served to reassess the interactivity of the piece, sharpen its use against my narrative goals. Right. The highest possible fruit on the tree.

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/2/24
Playtime: 45m

This is an ambitious look back at and interrogation of an underserved character in the Monkey Island franchise. It bounces back and forth between old style point-and-click play (translated to Twine link-select), and some authorial side bars and digressions into the franchise history, the character, and their engagement with both. This kind of thing is very appealing to me.

From the outset though, it seemed plagued with technical burrs and frictions. For one, it makes use of the dreaded timed text. I find myself more forgiving than most in the community, but this implementation tested that sorely. For one, the opening scrolled intro both had no concept of window size, nor any concept of screen integrity. What I mean is, the text played out, below the bottom of the window requiring scrolling. If you found yourself fussing with slide bars and fell behind… the entire screen wiped before you finished it to start playing out the next one! Eventually, I full-screened the window (which you DEFINITELY HAVE TO DO), but still found myself unable to keep up. It was simultaneously too slow and too fast. For SURE there must be a pause for more at the end of every intro screen. (I am given to understand the current release tweaks these artifacts to some extent.)

This was not the end of the technical woes, however. There were link chains with no back or reverse, which, if you clicked on you needed to cycle through the entire thing again before returning to start. Different colors were used for character dialogue, at least one of which was chromatically close to the color used for links, resulting in link confusion. Graphic elements overlapped words or were completely missing. And oh that timed text, pervasive and stalling through it all. It seemed to be reaching for a conversational paradigm, the author/work talking to you in ‘real time.’ I can squint and see that. Honestly, waiting for text to present itself gave me time to do that.

You get it. Technically it is problematic. I will waste no more time belaboring the point. It is unfortunate that the technical issues intruded so deeply. There was real wit and verve in its homages to the Monkey Island era fonts and layouts.

The content of the game is more rewarding, assuming you can fight through to it. The light ‘point and click’ style puzzles were evocative of, though nowhere near as challenging as, its inspiration. Part of that is that while you can mimic the motions of mouse-to-hotpsot with mouse-to-link, pictures are famously worth orders of magnitudes of words, and you just get fewer hotspots with the latter. While unsatisfying as a puzzle, it surprisingly and pleasantly echoed that playstyle. It is the first time in a long time the Twine paradigm seemed more than an arbitrary UI choice.

Far more interesting was the interplay between that puzzly work, and the author’s inter-scene commentary on the game, the character and the history that informed both. It used the textual complexities of the inspiration to openly engage the boundaries between PC and NPC, and what ‘reality’ means in the context of fiction and gaming. Clearly the author had cause to pour a lot of thought into a character they found compelling but the narrative did not, and how that tension kind of exploded the whole thing for them. Leaving them to pick up and examine all the different pieces without the distraction of the functioning whole. Explosive deconstruction, baby!

There was a really encouraging amount of depth to engage here. Which made the ending kind of anti-climactic. Towards the end, after some time toggling between light puzzle/escape-the-boat play and digressions into lore both real and fictional, it unexpectedly and abruptly turned into (Spoiler - click to show)Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead territory. All the talk of ways to appreciate, deepen and reclaim the character, including actually PLAYING as her!, were (Spoiler - click to show)abruptly forsaken into..literal nothingness.

It is a jarring climax. After all the explorations of ways to interpret the character, to confer agency or broader depth, it nevertheless ends with a repudiation of that very effort. Is it a comment on fan culture’s propensity for putting emotional weight on elements not meant to carry them? (see the first 20 years of Boba Fett fandom) On the tyranny of narrative, whose choices are quite literally the final word? Or are we supposed to cling to the sweetness of that exploration in the face of its doomed fate against an unchanging lore?

Honestly? I don’t know. And that’s kind of cool, but also kind of unsatisfying. Which, why should I have it any better than Elaine?


Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Memoir-y
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure the first MUST DO is to add ‘pause for more’ inputs to every opening screen. While doing that, I would seriously revisit the timed text implementation, to make sure its use was intentional, strictly under control, and far less intrusive. Then, either fix or eliminate the Journal. Unless its inaccessibility was also part of the commentary…?

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

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/2/25
Playtime: 15m

I am on record as observing that the RPG Maker gameplay paradigm is not exactly my cup of tea. Successful games (for me) on this engine are brief, light on repetitive combat, and heavy on attitude - that ineffable quality of distinguishing itself from the sameness that can plague such a strong gameplay and graphical tool kit. So let’s check out WSASTRAS (wizastrous? WIZASTROUS??? I just like it more now).

Is it brief? Oh yeah it is. Hard to believe I’m saying this, but maybe too much so? You get to meet maybe six characters, all but two of which are pretty functional, solve a mini-mystery and make a final choice. The stakes are established both clearly but also incompletely so that choice is as much about the player’s proclivities as it is the objective scenario. This is actually the most interesting thing about the game! It’s a nice dynamic: forced to choose with incomplete information, informed by your own internal biases. Y’know like life.

Does it have combat? Nonexistant. The BEST choice for this engine! (for me)

Does it have attitude? WSASTRAS distinguishes itself from the field, at least a little bit, in two ways. Graphically it is reminiscent of the primitive pixellated standard for RPG Maker, but more line-driven and cruder. It is just different enough to be notable, but not different enough to undermine the gameplay engine. These things are always esthetically personal. For me I liked it well enough, though it did introduce some fiddly artifacts of aligning sprites just so to interact, as well as seeming to cue interactable elements that turned out not to be so. After some onscreen jittering to be sure. Not fatal, just the slightest of frictiony. The other way it distinguished itself was its light, playful vibe. Most NPCs are functional - giving quests, background or choices, but their dialogue is spiced just enough to allow that they might not be info robots. The egg custodian was a particular standout here. All of it added up to a pleasant enough, if undemanding time. Tweaking its toolkit-driven gameplay in the right direction, if only modestly so. Building to an interesting-for-its-ambiguity final choice. Those ‘ifs’ kind of loom large in the summary I suppose, but at least it is consistently on the right side of things!

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I might try to double down on the NPC personalities. Give everyone the attention that the custodian got.

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