Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 21min, finished

It seemed like for a while, elaborate one-take shots were somehow a Holy Grail in cinema, discussed in reverent tones reserved for the nearly unattainable limits of human achievement. The most famous early one-take is the long opening shot of Orson Welles Touch of Evil (an astonishingly modern film if you can get past Charlton Heston’s dated acting stylings and brown face). These shots seem to achieve two things: a verisimilitude usually sacrificed to the visual and temporal language of film, and a real-time immediacy of experience. Since Welles’ revelatory accomplishment, the mere PRESENCE of such a technique in film was noteworthy on its own, kind of independent of the art it was in service of. (The Master, Hitch, actually got there first a decade earlier with Rope, but he was deliberately evoking a more stage-y experience and is not as lauded by history.)

Over time, this technical conceit has been revisited often enough, that while still noteworthy, it can now play against a body of such work rather than as a unicorn-like individual achievement. It is hard to imagine an implementation more accomplished than Timecode, a 2000 movie of FOUR realtime, unbroken takes, presented simultaneously in four quadrants of the screen, telling an interweaving story across all four. While I know I have seen the movie, I could tell you boo about its plot or characters at this point, only the thrilling execution of it. This exposes a pitfall: its employment is SO noteworthy, it can dominate the narrative itself.

Spiritually, the cinematic one-take feels of a piece with stream-of-consciousness literature, a famous example being Ulysses by James Joyce. That book (which I have started three times but never finished, so…) puts the reader in the protagonist’s mind as he goes about his mundane, mundane day. Notwithstanding the temporal difference between READING ABOUT something and DOING it, it attempts to present a ‘realtime’ experience to the reader.

Y’know what I’ve never seen? A realtime, stream-of-consciousness work of IF. Never seen UNTIL NOW. (Ok, that SOUNDS dramatic, but given my relatively short span of IF engagement, it amounts to “have not seen in the last three years.”)

Don’t let that lawyer-mandated parenthetical dilute that statement. This is a visual novel called “23 Minutes” that it took me 21 MINUTES TO PLAY. It presented an internal monologue of a troubled protagonist during his walk to work. Holy crap was it stunningly effective. The FORM of it was deeply accomplished. It married deliberate text positioning to less-than-full-sentence thoughts, to a wandering attention grappling with spiraling self-recrimination, all positioned over a blurry background of a constantly changing city stroll.

Its cumulative effect, most especially its pacing, was such a considered, precisely choreographed sum of its parts. The text formatting conveyed thoughts trampling over each other, one spurring another, often tangentially connected and circling back on itself. The poetry of the text, rather than pushing me away, optimized and abstracted the protagonist’s thoughts in a perfectly effective way that served both the conveyance of ideas, and the tight timeline of the piece. The blurry, ever shifting background conveyed a protagonist only incidentally concerned with his environment. A protagonist whose internal preoccupations left his environment indistinct and peripheral but not completely dismissable. The fact that this technical achievement does not completely eclipse the story it is telling is something one-take cinema doesn’t always succeed at.

The story here is manifest in the internal reflections of (Spoiler - click to show)an early-middle aged man whose new-parent and job dissatisfactions are gradually shown to be products of slow poisoning by his own character failures. The precise pacing of this reveal is emotionally crushing and dramatically devastating. The mechanism of this disappointment (Spoiler - click to show)(a family member descending into the conservative hate-sphere) is simultaneously depressingly relateable, while also piling OUR judgement on top of the protagonist’s self-recriminations. So many synchronicities stitched into this work, all of it so precisely engineered.

23M uses the graphical power of multimedia, textual formatting and presentation timing to shape how the words are consumed in an exercise that twists our brain to the pace and goals of the work. The interactivity is not so much our will modifying the work, as the work modifying our will to travel the story’s journey. It feels like a backwards interactivity? The alchemy is, whether the work is steering us, or we are steering the work, the outcome is the same. It is our mind taking the journey, more immediately and immersively than reading a book. What I just described is quite clearly (and more succinctly) a ‘visual novel.’ But that label technically applies to comic books and Ren’Py-esque quasi-power-point narratives as well. The amazing technical rendering of its real-time pacing seems to elevate this creation in the same way one-cuts have been determined to elevate cinema.

The trap of course is that a technical accomplishment this magnificent can outshine the work that it serves. Given what I’ve chosen to gush about in this review, I’m not sure 23M completely escapes this shadow. But neither does the narrative disappear. It manages to hold its own. This was an early highlight of the Thing for me. The pressure is really on the rest of the field to deliver a meta-moment as triumphant as the one that occurred when I checked my timer at the end of this story.

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Stream of Consciousness
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I dunno… I’d eke out another two minutes somehow? Who am I kidding, should I reshoot Welles’ Touch of Evil next? Instead, let me use this space for a recommendation. If you are enamored of, curious about, or annoyed with the cinephile’s reverence of this technique, I strongly recommend One Cut of the Dead, 2017. A wonderfully witty horror-comedy that almost by-the-way gives a nuts and bolts masterclass on why one-cuts are so remarkable.

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: 4/8/26
Playtime: 10m, 4 die, 2 survive

This is a small game, scaled to its protagonist. It is quite beautifully presented, with a wonderful pre-dawn background image that captures the melancholy wonder of its setting and narrative. The spare font and text pop against that backdrop setting a mood all its own. The game deploys you as a field mouse, scrabbling for food and water in a narrow window of opportunity before ever-threatening danger looms prohibitively large over this mission.

It is a choice-select work, where choices often end in modest success or quite immodest death. Sometimes, context helps inform those choices, many times it does not. Normally, I rebel a bit at instant death choices with little guidance. Here, that design choice is completely appropriate, and very effectively paints a picture of how ineffectual free will can be in a world so thoroughly hostile in scale and consequences. Where even the most modest of survival pressures are fraught with risk beyond control. Thematically this all aligns quite well, including the ‘go back and try again’ nature of replay. Here, replaying to success has the effect of highlighting that yes, there ARE paths to buy an additional day of life, satiating one’s needs for the moment but ONLY the moment. Inevitably requiring repeats every day thereafter. There are paths to success on any given day, but there are innumerable ways to fail, and successful choices today could easily lead to tragedy on subsequent days. Survival is a compulsory game of Press Your Luck that you cannot retire from.

I respect the artistic and thematic unity achieved here, reinforced by its beautiful yet unsentimental presentation. I struggle to explain why it did not enthrall me. I think the most obvious possibility is its unsentimentality. This journalistic approach to callous nature extended to the protagonist, the poor mouse we inhabit. There is no hint of inner life other than completely justified fear. No hooks for player sympathy. We technically inhabit the poor creature, but have no sense of it as a being, only a cog in the grand design of the food chain. Of course we WANT it to live under our watch, but if not, there isn’t a sense of loss, only of nature taking its course. This is an outcome consistent with its thematics, probably deliberate, but if so deliberately distancing.

Beyond its central theme, I think I found the language of the piece distancing as well. It felt like the text of the piece was straining to match the power of its background image, to my sensibilities not quite achieving its aims. The power of the background lies in its simplicity and unspoken depths hidden in shadow. The text of the piece was more baroque, explicit where the image was implicit. For example: “As your eyes blink open the familiar sight of the woven nest ball fills your vision.” “Filling your vision” is a passive, distancing phrase that felt quite beyond a mouse’s ability to abstract. This kind of language dominates the piece, and cumulatively creates a distancing barrier between lofty human poetry and grounded mouse reality. It inevitably elevates our focus to grander concepts - like the circle of life! - at the expense of the poor critter we are nominally piloting. To my way of thinking, empathy would be better served matching its text to the visceral vibe of its presentation and narrative. The work NEED not be striving for empathy, its elevated focus only intended to convey the grander food chain design. That it did quite admirably. It’s just, without empathy, it plays as cold as our poor mouse’s fate.

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Circle of Life
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would attempt to rework the language of it to match the protagonist, and perhaps to exploit opportunities for empathy as well. Also, wouldn’t it be cool if the background image slowly brightened over time, heralding sunrise? I think that would be cool.

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: 4/7/26
Playtime: 15min, joined Guild

I’m kind of 0-2 when invoking unfamiliar (to me) pop culture properties during reviews. You would think that kind of record would make me slow to employ that particular tool again. But no! I am an equus ferus, untameable and answering to no man! You cannot bridle me with your concepts of “humility” and “lessons learned”!

My usual employment of pop culture comparison comes spontaneously, unfairly, and colors my engagement with the work to some degree thereafter, at least until the work provides something ELSE to latch on to. To MYRTDPI’s credit, this time the comparison was achingly slow in manifesting, until it did so all at once, very late in the game. It is fair to say that this either points to me going 0-3 on these things, or to the BEST possible pop culture riffing - where the initial source is merely the springboard for deeply personal and creative works that ultimately owe little more than inspiration itself. And in some sense, given that there is nothing new under the sun, isn’t that really ALL art?

MYRTDPI plops us, very in media res, into a fantasy world we will struggle to keep up with. Cultures, Institutions, Geography, Biodiversity, all completely alien to the player with no real effort to provide purchase or explanation by the protag. If I’m going to get dunked into High Fantasy (which is not my chosen genre), this is the way I prefer it. Trust me to catch up, don’t spoon feed me. “WTF is going on here?” is a very effective way to batter aside any genre-resistance I might cling to. It helps, I think, that the world building is very aggressive. Almost nothing is taken for Medieval-Europe-granted, to its great credit. We seem to be in a matriarchal world (or at least city-state), where female power is the norm and males are tolerated intruders. Swirling around this, there is magic and swordplay and wondrous, dangerous beings.

It emerges that the protag is attempting to join a Guild, an only quasi-welcoming space of playful aggression and bruises. To do so, he must establish his credentials by satisfying a quest utilizing only his unique magical gifts. With the help of a new friend. From there, the quest is comically abrupt - go underground, fight monsters, win! The work’s brevity is well considered, as this seems intended as a prologue for one or more longer games in the same mythos. By game’s end we have effectively been introduced to the world, the protag, his specific abilities, and some NPCs.

Much like the work itself does, I have shaded the pop culture reference I am about to make. See, the protag owns a magic brazier, from which he can conjure (Spoiler - click to show)one of four fancifully-named spirits to aid him, most especially in fighting monsters. In service of his quest to join a (Spoiler - click to show)combative athletic club of sorts. Would it make it more clear if you envision the brazier as a sphere of red and white? The comparison is limited, in the sense that the brazier has no particular effect after foes are defeated. It is entirely possible that I am imposing a comparison unintended by the author. As counter-argument, I offer the mid-combat text, reporting on damage to your partner. It is a sly echo of “It’s super effective!” Once this pop culture resonance landed I giggled to myself uncontrollably. If in fact this parallel has any grounding, its employment was masterful - shaded until so late in the game it felt like a mini-revelation. Not so much cheapening the work (as such comparisons can sometimes do) but enriching it.

The difference is the dense, specific lore inundating the experience prior. After long beats of struggling to keep up with offhand strangeness while the plot steamed forward, this hit like a moment of clarity. Quite a feat in only 15 minutes of gameplay!

As a prologue, how did the complete work settle? I’m not sure? The fact that I’m not sure is probably a big win for this work. Given how far it is from my default interests, the fact that you are not hearing “great fun but not for me” is no small achievement. Its confident, thoroughly foreign setting, pervasive wry wit and what I perceive as a subversive, clowning reference, coupled with the controlled but frenetic pacing of it all are kind of winning. Certainly winning enough to engage its successor.

Spaceship: Tardis
Vibe: “Spooky Ghost Fighter, I choose you!”
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I think I would try to pack in just one more sly reference - maybe casually drop that the protag’s name is “Bash Ketchup” or somesuch. Just so overconfident reviewers are not left twisting over whether the reference was intended or not.

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: 4/7/26
Playtime: 1hr, 2 playthroughs (including 15 min background reading!)

The words in my head are so completely unfair, I am ashamed I thought them, ashamed I open this review acknowledging them, and ashamed I am incapable of balling this up and starting over. The words in my head rhyme with “Skiminishing Glitterns”

For context, know that I absolutely ADORE this game system, especially as encapsulated in the previous two games. The first involved pre-Nazi Germany, attempting to hold together a political coalition strong enough to stave off the greatest Evil in the last century. That feels pretty generally relevant, no? The second somehow spun directly into my fascination with pre-Communist Russia, where gameplay was attempting to hold together a fragile political alliance in the face of the Communist Revolution. The gameplay in both was balancing inter-faction politics with external events, and y’know running a country, and doing your damnedest to pull the populace back from the precipice of extremism. The mechanics are a card-driven paradigm, where each card presents options you might pursue either to mitigate events or try and further your goals. There are different decks for party v governing v events, and your task is to balance your hand to maneuver things about.

Both games are ALSO characterized by limited feedback on the efficacy of your efforts, until it is too late. There are paradoxically reams of data available to you, too much to digest really, but few clues on cause and effect. This is more feature than bug in those earlier games, where the uncertainty in your actions is very much part of the delicious tension. This is a rock solid game design, thematically tight to its historical inspiration.

This time around, you are attempting to hold together a fragile coalition in pre-war France, with the shadow of fascism creeping over the continent. Unlike the previous two, I had no prior exposure to France’s politics and pressures, and if I’m honest no seeds of interest either. That’s technically ok, at one point in my life I knew nothing about pre-Communist Russia, yet I’m all in on that now. But it does mean this game doesn’t automatically get me on its side like the other two did.

Like its immediate predecessor it tweaks the formula a bit: it opens a few months before an election in which your faction will be ushered to power. This is a really clever improvement on the previous games, essentially giving you a few game-months of ‘training’ on the game’s moving parts before the first election… and also showcasing the election mechanic that you will need to manage deeper into the game. This iteration further seemed to provide more ‘actions’ per turn than previous, while also tightening limits on your governing figures’ special powers, as well as allowing you to run a budget deficit (which I’m sure will not come back to bite later!). Even with these interesting tweaks this iteration did not quite capture my imagination the way the previous ones did.

I think there were two factors for this: 1) the stakes just felt lower. Yes, fascism was a looming threat everywhere, but especially early on it was relatively remote and gameplay centered around my (in)ability to maintain a governing coalition. It felt more like ‘clinging to power’ than the huge levers of history you were pulling in those other games. 2) This system has always felt a little opaque in cause and effect, this is actually one of its defining features. Even with that presupposition, this felt MORE so. Specifically, in a runthrough where I very deliberately prioritized ALL my socialist campaign promises, arguably to the exclusion of other events, I nevertheless was treated to “populace dissatisfied” outcomes, sometimes with identical text to when I focused on foreign affairs. Further, even though I played on ‘easy’ level I was booted from office in less than 6 months both times! It FELT less responsive to play.

Now in its third iteration, I think I feel about this system the way I do about GMT’s COIN series of games (Counter Insurgency). This is a series of board games with a very flexible asymmetric warfare focus. It is a core set of rules and mechanics that are applied to a series of different world scenarios: Castro’s Cuban insurgency, Afghanistan, Somali Piracy, Columbian drug trafficking, building the Cross Bronx Expressway(!), many many more. The foundational mechanics are interesting, fun and robust. But it is the scenarios to which they are applied (and the rules tweaks customized for each of them) that bring each specific one alive. Choosing which COIN game to play, then, becomes an exercise in “which conflict holds the most fascination for you?”

For me, for Autumn’s amazing system, I think I’ll go back to the other two? They just fire more endorphins for me.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: COIN III
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : For this iteration especially, I think I would focus on sharpening the feedback loop - why actions generated results. Unlike its predecessors where the scenarios themselves provided some soft nudging, this felt more impenetrable to me due to my unfamiliarity with the scenario.

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: 4/6/26
Playtime: 3.5hrs (26 puzzles solved, 5 hints, 1 bonus)

At some point in my life, capitalism became GRABBY. Ok sure, there is an argument to be made that not only is this take a pretty myopic view of economic history, it is a fundamental mistake to think grabbiness is not capitalism’s most salient feature. For large swaths of my early life though, it didn’t FEEL grabby. Yeah, Coke had snappy jingles, but it was up to you to remember to buy some, and if you didn’t, eh, life goes on.

Today? Today, you have ads that follow you across platforms, algorithms that bend social science and behavioral psychology in service of increased spending, subscription models for all the things you used to be able to buy outright, and a grey market of you-as-data sold for money to other capitalists. Capitalism did all this without asking us what we wanted, if this was a model we embraced. They just… took our privacy, our data, our peace of mind. Intrusively badgering us so they could more aggressively take our money.

So THIS game, centering a shopping loyalty app as a puzzle-delivery mechanism, feels amiably subversive from the jump. Here, the app’s true function is to deliver puzzles. So many puzzles of wonderful variety! If we ignore the narrative component for a moment, the app is simply a clever conceit, a framework to hang word games and logic puzzles on. And what a collection it is! None repeated, all concise and clever, most sized pretty precisely for the challenge they present. 26 puzzles in about 3.5 hrs, less than 10 min each. I didn’t NEED the framing device here, I thoroughly enjoyed the diversion of this collection. It reminded me nothing so much as the grocery store puzzle books of old, with every page a different brain-poser. I loved those! Notwithstanding how many words I am going to burn on the conceit of this thing, the puzzles are absolutely the centerpiece of this game, and absolutely worth the price of admission. Are we agreed on that? Ok, so back to the framing device…

The intrusivity of the loyalty-app infrastructure is initially acknowledged, but quickly steered away from. Solve the puzzles, score the savings! This was a narrative headfake though. The work was well aware that by ACKNOWLEDGING capitalism’s grabbiness it would cast a pall, however slight, over the proceedings. A lesser work would have been content to hand waive this away, probably successfully given the frothy lightness of its aims. It seemed like Enigmart was going to do so, embodied by a comedically frazzled, superficially-coded young mother. Her introduction cast her as an object of derision, so when she begins spouting pro-privacy observations, it feels like we are invited to dismiss those concerns along with the woman herself. Not me though. “Hadleigh is RIGHT dammit!” That’s not me making an assertion in this review, those were my actual, out-loud words after her introductory scene!

AND THE WORK AGREED! As the game progresses, this poor, underestimated woman develops into the full-on hero of the work. Between puzzles, we periodically get short bursts of in-store scenes that confirm and underline her thesis. The early seeming-dismissal evolves into a full bore condemnation of the game’s own conceit, even as that conceit was delivering wonderful puzzles to distract us!

Did the work NEED to do this? Absolutely not! It was completely tangential to the main focus of the piece: delivering a strong suite of standalone puzzles. Which it did with pseudo-marketing humor and verve, and reinforced by graphical playfulness. But the fact that it DID ANYWAY just completely won me over. The narrative component was not dense, it would have been intrusive if it had been. This was no polemic. It was a light and witty diversion, that was unwilling to give its premise even the slightest bit of slack.

Look, I love puzzles. I love my tinfoil hat. This work let me celebrate BOTH.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Brain Teaser
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d have to lean HARDER into the invasive privacy violations of Loyalty Apps. I mean like, so hard I probably would have completely destroyed the sly amiability of the thing. There are some wheels I should not be trusted with.

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: 4/6/26
Playtime: .75hr, 2 playthroughs (all characters)

There are WAY more past times and diversions in this world than any one lifetime could possibly consume. It’s cool, evolution and human nature got us covered. As individuals, our unique cranial chemical cocktails prune that jungle for us, categorizing pursuits on a spectrum from “THIS IS MY CALLING!” to “Seriously, no thank you.” Somewhere on that spectrum is a bucket for “I don’t think it’s for me, but.. that’s really kinda cool innit?” At some point in my life, Quilting got dumped into that bucket.

Hear me out.

There is a specific KIND of quilting that, despite nominally residing WELL outside the middle of my mental road, seizes my attention every time. These are the collaborative quilts, often commemorating some event, tragedy, accomplishment, or shared experience. Each square of these kinds of quilts are miniature artworks of their own, capturing its creator’s relationship to the common thematic inspiration. Whether crudely rendered or lavishly accomplished they all seem to tell a self-contained STORY - in evocative, suggestive shorthand. By unifying them, side by side in a grid, any overarching themes or narrative is purely accidental. The purpose is just to honor each of them, conveying the BREADTH of experience whether those experiences have anything to say to each other or not.

The House somehow summoned this from the deep recesses of my brain. Specifically its central conceit: four wildly divergent characters, trapped together through unspecified means, interacting to escape a house. You select one of the characters to inhabit, becoming privvy to their thoughts, then three more to share your trial. You get maybe two scenes of character exploration each (one an intro dialogue, another a thematic room) then shuttle to endgame. It’s kind of a wafer thin conceit whose whole purpose is to stitch these individual squares together. The narrative is not overarching, it is an excuse to get things stitched up.

I played twice, experiencing each square of fabric. First time I was a (presumably) collie, accompanied by a middle-age spinster, a (Spoiler - click to show)cyborg from the future with a mission in the past cabbie, and a ventriloquist. Next time, a vampire with a time/dimension lord, a totally normal (Spoiler - click to show)not-Alien Guy and a Creepy Doll.

In this short work, each had ABOUT the depth of a square of fabric, honestly in the best possible way. Their stories were tight, succinct, and suggestive of larger tales out of sight. Most were pretty funny. Some were surprisingly dark. Many played with their disparate communication paradigms in very fun ways - Lattie and Guy were particular standouts here. Each is shot through with its own playful, sly humor. I don’t think the phrase “like some kind of O+ pinata” will ever leave me. It is a pathology of my own that I envisioned them as fabric squares, ready for quilting.

I think this pathology was enabled by the self-acknowledged thinness of the scenario and gameplay, really just a substrate to knit these characters onto, then enable closer per-square inspection. The work acknowledges this by highlighting that replay is really about the central protag-selected character - diving deeper into an individual square. Which is really how I consume these quilts anyway?

Now, given how widely varied individual responses can be, I can certainly envision players who just DON’T GET QUILTING. It’s how I feel about Bird Watching. For those folks, the resolute lack of any overarching narrative thread or theme will be a dealbreaker. The fun, disparate nature of the cast might get lost, or if not lost just not feel complete. This is how chemical brains work, and they’re not wrong. Certainly the lack of deeper narrative glue is front and center, proudly announcing itself as NOT A PRIORITY HERE. For those not given to quilting this could prove unsatisfying.

For me? It reminded me there is this whole human endeavor I encounter infrequently, doesn’t really spur me get involved with, but tickles me just a little bit that it exists at all.

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Mosaic Narrative
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : Were this my project, I think I would give a little more energy to Sophie. She was really the only one that didn’t reward close inspection. Her story beats came across as both samey and less developed than Saargroff.

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