Reviews by N. Cormier

What Is This?

Larvae is a choice-based game starring Isla and Cameron, two recently-graduated college sweethearts. Isla is a biology nerd who’s just received an invitation to a month-long biology camp where all the field’s greatest projects will be on display! Cam is a streamer, so while he’s not terribly interested in biology he’s happy to tag along and show his followers cool stuff. Especially those parasitic worms…

What I Liked

First of all, this game’s settings menu should be standard for everyone going forward and personally speaking, I’m taking notes. A music volume slider, spacing options, plus the ability to change font AND font size? I’m in heaven. If this had a light mode option it would be perfect. (For me. I can’t speak to anyone else’s accessibility needs, of course.)

Secondly, I just really like this game! It’s a nice little blend of romance and horror – it’s not a spoiler to say that the weird larvae in the title are going to do SOMETHING unpleasant, but the relationship between the title characters gets just as much focus. Both elements are well executed, with Cam and Isla feeling like well rounded characters with a very sweet and believable relationship despite the short length of the game. And the horror, well… I’ll leave that up to the reader, but I certainly found it terrifying!

This game also does some interesting playing around with genre and perspective, which I can't discuss without spoilers.

(Spoiler - click to show)
First of all: Genre. This is a romantic game, but whether or not the horror comes into play entirely depends on the choices of the player. The game pretty clearly signposts that drinking from the creepy water glass is a bad idea (at least if you’re playing Cam’s route first), and if you avoid doing so the game is just a cute little story about two people at a summer camp. I’ve always seen a lot of discussion about “genre savvy” in horror, i.e. that a lot of horror stories only work because the protagonists don’t know they’re in a horror story. And if they did, they’d make different choices, and it wouldn’t be horrifying at all! But since this is a horror game, the author has given us, the player, the choice to be genre savvy – at the expense of not getting the horror, which is undoubtedly what most people are here for! I think this is a great way to play around with interactivity and genre expectations. (Of course, this could all be unintentional and the goal was to make the horror hinge on a single innocuous choice, which is also horrifying! I may personally be too genre savvy for my own good, but I like that it works even if you can spot the hints beforehand.)

Secondly: perspective. As I mentioned earlier, you can play out the events of the game through the eyes of both Cam and Isla. This doesn’t change the actual events – the horror/not horror choice is present in both, and events will play out the same way if you make the same choice. The big difference here is that the change of perspective subtly changes the type of horror in play here, which I think is pretty neat!

If you’re Cam and you drink the creepy water, you’re treated to a nasty but straightforward body horror story. If you’re Isla, it’s still a body horror story but it’s much less straightforward. The horror choice is pretty well obfuscated in her route, so from her perspective she sees her partner gradually and then suddenly become strange and ill in a way she has no control over. I think the shift in perspective and the different framing of Cam’s issues that comes with it is very effective and helps keep things interesting, especially since large chunks of dialog don’t change between perspectives. Things got a little more repetitive on the not-horror routes from both perspectives, but given that this is clearly signposted as a horror game I didn’t mind all that much.

What Could Use Improvement?

Mostly, I think this needs a good round of polish. There’s a broken image link in the upper left corner, and there’s a few passages with no links out. I think they may be endings, but if so there’s no text indicating that’s the case.

I also believe the author is ESL so there’s some language issues that could be cleaned up if they got some editing help from a native speaker. This was honestly not a big deal and didn’t impact my enjoyment of the game, but I thought I’d mention it as I know there’s many people on this forum who are willing to help out. Not many people know about that, and editing help can be hard to find elsewhere, so I try to plug this whenever I can!

A Collegial Conversation is a game written for SeedComp 2024. The author is using the “1 link = 1 viewpoint” seed, which is exactly what’s written on the tin. You are given a selection of characters and their partners all involved in a spat at a workplace social event, and instead of choosing how the conversation flows you jump from POV to POV as it plays out along a pre-determined path. It’s a well-written and well-styled game, with a different gorgeous color palette for each POV character.

A Collegial Conversation is trying something very ambitious here in a relatively small space. This means in short succession we’re introduced to the setting (a party for government officials in Zelio, which is presumably a secondary world of the author’s creation), four characters, and the complicated history between them. Despite the helpful dramatis personae (linked on every page) I still found myself constantly lost in the shifting POVs. It also doesn’t help that characters are referred to by solely their first or last name depending on the POV, which makes in-character sense but doubles the number of names to keep track of. I had a much better time after reaching the end once I unlocked the ability to follow any given character through the full conversation. Overall I think this is executed as well as is possible given the inherent chaos of the seed, but a less involved setting may have been a better fit. Of note, I know the author has written other works in this setting so it may be easier to follow ACC if you play some of them first.

Also, a nitpick - the game doesn’t default to fullscreen and when smushed into the smaller box this text formatting will get wonky in some passages (in particular, Seira’s at the end). I believe there’s a setting on Itch somewhere to force it to display in fullscreen which should fix this.

What is this?

Collision is a game written for the Neo-Twiny Jam, with the attendant restriction of using 500 words or less. The conceit is that you wake up in an unfamiliar space, in a perilous situation, and the player must figure out what’s going on and then try to save our protagonist the crash test dummy from their inevitable fate. (Based on other reviews I figured this out more quickly than average, possibly due to my teenaged obsession with Mythbusters.)

What I Liked

The word limit is used to great effect here – all descriptions are given in two-word pairs, which contributes to an overall surreal feeling and heightens the protagonist’s lack of control. You have many actions available to you to try and get out of your predicament, most of which give you more information about your environment, but as far as I can tell every run will end in failure with the protagonist doomed (because they are a crash test dummy and can’t move). There may be a solution to the puzzle that I couldn’t find, but even without that I think this works well as a work of existential horror. It’s very atmospheric, and makes the absolute most of its word count.

What could use improvement?

If I had to make a suggestion, I’d add a toggle or slider for the timed text. It’s effective on the first few plays but after that it gets in the way of exploring all the options.

What is this?

Codex Crusade is a surreal Twine romp taking place at the University of Turin, Georgia (not the other one). Due to shenanigans involving the other Turin your library has recently come into possession of a large number of rare books, and of course not everyone’s happy about it. You, the librarian’s assistant intern, have been tasked to descend into the depths of the university and retrieve this tome – what could go wrong?

Codex Crusade is set up much like a traditional parser game; you can explore spaces (although without the usual cardinal directions), add items to your inventory, and use said items to solve puzzles. The whole thing is dressed up with comic academic theming, which I found entertaining despite the fact that I can tell a lot of it is going over my head. (If you have a background in philosophy or medieval studies I suspect this game is hysterical.)

Unfortunately, I ran into a showstopping bug fairly early on. I have the wrong item in my inventory for a puzzle and I can’t seem to get rid of it, but the game won’t let me pick up the right item until the Doritos are gone. I’ll come back to this later, maybe – per Mathbrush’s review it looks like it’s possible to finish the game, so if I get that puzzle right on the first try I should be able to advance. But for now I’m going to put it down and move on. But even with this bug it’s a fun and witty game, and proof that the comic-puzzler-parser model does not in fact have to be a parser game.

What is this?

In A Mouse Speaks to Death, you’re a mouse at the end of your life. Death has come for you, but before you go he asks you to reminisce about the life you led. From there you go through several rounds of choosing a memory to experience (from a group of three available, all randomly selected from a bigger pool) and then playing through it. Each memory is a self-contained storylet with branching choices, so you if the cards are in your favor you can play through any given one multiple times to “remember” it differently.

The overall result is a slice-of-life (or to be more accurate, several small slices of life) of what it’s like to be a mouse in the author’s rodent world. The mice farm, hunt, live, love, gather, experiment, and die all under the feet of the mysterious Eaters (i.e., us) and the player can focus on what interests them the most.

What did I like?

This work is part of a greater universe that the author has written and that I’m not familiar with. I’m always nervous when approaching games like this because making them independently accessible to a newbie is a real challenge – trust me, I would know! So I’m happy to report that AMST pulls this off flawlessly. The world of the mice is a fascinating echo of ours high above, but just different enough to feel new and exciting. The vignettes frequently focus on something new and exciting to our mouse, thus giving them a perfect excuse to explain them to our player. Sometimes these things are basic parts of mousedom that they encounter for the first time growing up, and sometimes they’re more unusual experiences like finding human artefacts, but no two are alike and there’s always joy in seeing something new. I didn’t find myself repeating storylets because I was much more curious about both this world and about the life of our hero.

Also, I couldn’t bring myself to click on any of the obviously signposted negative outcomes for our player mouse, so clearly 1) I was engaged from the word go and 2) I am a huge weenie.

What could use improvement?

There’s no counter telling you how many stories you get to go through, and by about 2/3 through I started to both get confused (should I be doing something to advance besides looking at storylets?) and also they started to wear out their welcome. A visible turn counter, an option to end your reminiscence early, or just a lower turn limit would have been a great help here. The storylet variety also wasn’t great enough to support the number of turns you get unless you’re interested in replaying them, which (as above) I wasn’t. There was also an issue where you could get duplicates of the same storylet in the same turn, thus cutting down your available options

Other thoughts

I see you, fellow Terry Pratchett fan! I love the Death of Rats so this was a real treat.

Conclusion

This was a real treat, and a great game to start off the Review-a-thon. I hope this is a good indicator of what’s to come!

The Spectators is a game set in 16th-century Italy, and stars a cast of characters (mostly servants) going about their duties while observing the decline of the relationship between the jealous Duke and his new naive bride the Duchess. Each character’s chapter follows roughly the same arc: they need to do a task as part of their job, but they have something else that they desperately want to do. The puzzles all revolve around trying to fit said task in without detection by other staff (and therefore avoiding the harsh punishment that would come with it). While going about these tasks, each character gets another look at the Duchess’s life and the Duke’s controlling relationship with her, all the way to its inevitable end. This description falls short as it makes things sound much more repetitive than they are - the characters are rich and varied, as are the puzzles they need to solve, and I never felt bored. Even though we spent only a little time with each character I felt invested in each of them and their desires (even, in the case of one particular character, that investment is shown by disliking her intensely).

The player character writing here, I have to point out, is good but not too good. What I mean by this, of course, is that while I was fascinated with all of the PCs, none of them overshadow the story of the Duke and the Duchess. The Duchess is the center of the game and is the axis about which the plot spins around - catering to her and interacting with her shapes most of the servants’ days, and form the tasks that conflict with their own desires. While we never get to see the world through her eyes, we get an idea of the kind of woman (or girl, really) she is, and the shape of the Duke’s conflict with her. He’s not seen as much but his presence looms large over the entire castle. Whenever he makes an appearance on screen the story tension goes up a notch. The pacing of the story is superb as well, with the rising tension lasting exactly as long as it needs to before coming to a horrifying climax.

There’s a number of other touches to this game that I loved as well, particularly the attention to detail. The author has clearly done her research about the setting, both about the poem the game is adapted from and the real history behind the poem itself. I love all the little details, especially all the ones that turn out to be true (I had no idea dial locks were invented that early!). This extra effort made the whole game a delight from start to finish.

Finally, some spoiler discussion: I was not previously aware of the poem My Last Duchess, which this game is an adaptation of. I am fascinated by the general idea of IF adaptations of works, and in particular by the way this work pulled it off. It’s almost entirely written from whole cloth, but it follows the beats of the poem faithfully and is, in my opinion, an excellent adaptation.

Through the Forest with the Beast is a fifteen minute branching Twine game by someone who, as far as I can tell, is a first-time IFComp entrant. The premise is simple - you’re a person who has been revealed as a dangerous Beast and cast out by their village, and must navigate the dangerous forest between you and a safe haven. There’s several different paths through the game in classic CYOA style, and you have to manage various stats (health/stamina/hunger/thirst) during your journey.

What I Liked

TTFWTB immediately makes a good impression - it has a gorgeous background (possibly drawn by the author?) and ambient forest sounds that really set the mood. (Bonus points for the text being easy to read!) The choices come thick and fast and have immediate consequences - each can take you a number of surprising places, and there’s no cheap instadeaths. Where this game really shines, though, is the experience it gives you of slowly discovering the forest, its inhabitants, and the truth about what makes you a Beast. I’m a huge sucker for sci-fi/fantasy blending and this game does it well.

What I Didn’t

The writing in TTFWTB could use some work. There were several grammar issues, and overall the writing felt too rushed - like it was trying to cram too much detail into too little space. There were a lot of good descriptions, but they come at you rapid-fire with no room to breathe. Some playtesting and/or editing would have been good here. On the gameplay side, stat management ended up being frustratingly out of my control. It’s hard to tell which of your choices will restore which (if any) stats, and at least once I died of dehydration due to no fault on my part.

Cannelé & Nomnom - Defective Agency is a game you can get a very accurate read on from just the title and summary. You’re an amnesiac who has hired the world’s most dysfunctional detectives to help you regain your memory. (They hate each other and are constantly wrestling for control of their single shared brain cell.) Your task is to keep them on track long enough to work on your case, and not get themselves into too much trouble – a tough task, given that neither of them have any morals and the fantasy world they’re in gives them far too many opportunities to wreak havoc.

This summary doesn’t even come close to doing C&N justice. First of all, this is the most polished Twine game I’ve ever seen! I am in fact COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY by how much effort and polish went into this. There’s (timed!) sound effects, music, art, extremely good use of text effects, and even multiple custom minigames! (One where you connect the post-its on your evidence board with red string and one fully implemented graphical card game, so far). If the authors added more images this could be a full-blown visual novel. The writing is equally good, and the mystery is as compelling as the characters are wacky. The farcical antics of our defective detectives are balanced extremely well with the increasing hints that there is something very rotten in the state of Falaisant.

What I Liked

I already spent a while gushing about this game but this is my review thread, so I can gush more if I want! I already vaguely mentioned that this is set in a fantasy-ish universe, so I want to throw a spotlight on the worldbuilding. The game takes a little time to explain how magic works at the beginning, but from then on does an extremely good job showing and not telling. I never felt confused, but I also enjoyed the bits and glimpses of what Falaisant is like and never felt like I was being beaten over the head with lore.

Also, for anyone who watched Pokemon just for Jessie and James’s antics – you’re going to like this game. Cannele and Nomnom are basically those two with the player character having to act as their Meowth.

What I Didn’t

The writing is fantastic but could have used one last editing pass by a native English speaker (I assume, given the large amounts of French, that the authors don’t speak it as a first language. My apologies if that’s incorrect). There’s a few spelling issues and weird turns of phrase that could have stood to be ironed out. Also, The Contre Morte section was a lot of fun to play, but the delay in seeing the options pop up made it frustrating to go through multiple times (which I had to because I’m dumb). Still, these are minor things that in my opinion don’t distract from a very well-done game.

God is in the Radio is a short visual novel made in Ren’Py, and with its heavy emphasis on the visual side stands out from the crowd. (This is no mean feat given the number of high-quality games in this year’s Ectocomp!) The story focuses on an unnamed cult centered around the Major Arcana of the Tarot, who have just been told by their High Priestess that they can hear a message from God of they complete a ritual involving a radio. The plot is mostly on rails, with the protagonist Death being given a few choices to decide how they feel or react to the whole ritual situation - these won’t change things immediately, but will affect what ending you get.

Despite the relative lack of interactivity, I had no trouble staying engaged with the plot. Part of this is because the story is well-written and well-paced, with tension slowly rising at every step. The other part is due to some kind of writing wizardry, because there are 22(!!!) characters including the protagonist - one for every Major Arcana in the Tarot. They all have unique portraits and uniquely defined characterization, and somehow despite being a short game with this many characters it doesn’t feel overstuffed. Mostly I think this is because the full cast only participates in the ritual, with a more limited number being part of the rising tension beforehand. Even with that it would be easy for the ritual portion to outstay its welcome so I am deeply impressed.

My only gripe with this game is how the endings are managed - the three choices are spread out throughout the game, and as far as I can tell different choices won’t change anything until you get a different ending. Because of this I wasn’t motivated to play through again in the hope of seeing the other endings (I got ending 2), but I don’t think this is necessarily a flaw in the game, per se. Most VNs I’ve played are like this (i.e. with long sections of non-interactive text between choices) but most of them make up for it by allowing you to skip text you’ve already seen, effectively fast-forwarding you to important choices and/or new content. God is in the Radio was written in four and a half hours and is a phenomenal game given that restriction, but I think it could be elevated further if the author implemented a similar feature.

This is a quick but surprisingly deep (heh) Twine game about trying to survive a hurricane in your attic. There’s only one puzzle (concerning what to do when the waters rise too far), but there’s plenty to see. While I’ve luckily never had any similar personal experiences, I didn’t mind too much because it makes sense. How many puzzles can you solve trapped in an attic? Instead, most of the game focuses on passing the time while you wait out the storm. Incidentally (and appropriately for Ectocomp) there is a whole lot of supernatural freaky stuff happening, but also a decent amount of regular weird stuff that comes along with your town flooding to the rafters. The regular-weird and supernatural-weird blend together nicely against the surreal natural disaster backdrop, helped out by the protagonist’s commentary.

This is an excellent little game full of mood and vibes, and it kept me playing until I ran out of endings. Great job!

I love weird concept games! And this one is pretty darned weird, being inspired by a dream the author had. Props to them for rolling with it, I am so here for Antarctic plant horror. The writing backs it up too, descriptive and suspenseful. Most of the game is spent introducing the player to the central concept (military fungal killing machines that require a human handler to prevent them from eating each other) and then slowly building up to the PC actually meeting one of these monsters in the flesh(?).

The game also features a lot of Bengali phrases as the PC primarily speaks the language, with the option to look at a translation and get a pronunciation guide. I thought this was pretty neat, and I think some of the vocabulary is going to stick with me. (Not much, unfortunately, but that’s a me problem again. I am not good with languages.)

There’s a lot of potential here, but unfortunately it’s not all realized. After the intro, the gameplay consists of a handful of tasks that you can choose to do or not do in order to affect how your meeting with your assigned Hyphaen goes, which then determines which of three endings you get. I got two (including the good end), but there’s quite a lot of text to get through before you get back to any choices so I didn’t go in for a third round. I’d really love to see a more expanded version of this game, since it currently just feels like the introduction to something really cool.

Oh man, this game got me right in the heart.

The Good Ghost has a simple presence - you’re a ghost bound to the house where you used to live, doing good deeds for your former family and trying to remember who you were. Simple is good here, because it allows the authors to really flesh (sorry) out the setting and the situation. While this game is choice-based, it has a very parser-like sensibility, with all interaction done via clicking on highlighted interactable objects or locations. (I liked this quite a lot, since it meant I wasn’t hung up on any guess-the-verb stuff and could just let myself melt into the game. I also suspect the walking-through-walls gimmick might have been difficult in Inform, but don’t quote me on that.) Meanwhile, the writing lightly but masterfully fleshes out the the cast of characters. Despite only getting snapshots, I really felt a strong connection to the mom, the boy, and even the cat! The story is handled with a similar light but deft touch, and I’m going to remember that ending for a long time.

I’m coming off a less-good-than-average week in my personal life, and playing this game felt like drinking a cup of warm chicken soup on a cold day. Thank you so much for this experience.

In Under the Bridge you’re a (small) eldritch abomination, one of the last of your kind, and you’ve taken shelter under a bridge in a forest. But bridges bring humans, and if sufficiently frightened humans will bring other humans with swords. (Humans are also delicious. Choices, choices.)

What I Liked

This is a very stylish Twine game! I normally get cranky about white-on-black color schemes (it’s not my fault it gives me eye strain!) but in this case it feels like a deliberate design choice instead of an author forgetting to change the default Sugarcube settings. This is backed up by a number of white-on-black illustrations of our monster and the situations it winds up in, which are simultaneously very creepy and absolutely adorable. The background sounds are also 1) togglable and 2) change per node depending on the mood the author wants to set, which is fantastic. Text colors and effects are also used well.

The writing is also a delight here – the plot is fairly thin (as expected for a game of this length) so it focuses more on showing events from our monster’s point of view. Writing inhuman protagonists that feel properly inhuman is always a challenge, and I think it’s done well here.

What I Didn’t

Replayability is hampered by the fact that the early game doesn’t change much regardless of your choices. You play through a series of events and your only choices are how to react. The first two events happen roughly the same way each playthrough and significant branching only happens after you’ve completed them, which starts to drag after going through the game 2-3 times. Having the undo button present helps, but I would have liked to see more cosmetic variation in the second event or at least a way to skip the intro on subsequent playthroughs.

Lost at the Market is the first game I’ve ever played in GrueScript, and from the author’s notes I think it’s the first one they’ve written in the language as well. Unfortunately, I spent most of my experience with it fairly confused – you’re playing through some kind of dream, but what the dream is actually about isn’t clear. (You also don’t appear to be lost in any kind of market, dream or otherwise). The game does a good job at making you feel as if you’re in a dream, but the dream-logic on display is frustrating and makes it hard to decipher what you’re supposed to do. This isn’t helped by the writing, which has an unfortunate number of spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes.

The author’s notes imply a more polished version with added multimedia is in the works, which I’d be interested to play. But for now, this game seems unfinished.

Witchfinders is a short twine game that is, as you may have guessed, about people who find witches. The twist is, you’re not a witchfinder – you’re a witch, and the absolute last thing you want to do is get caught. The game focuses on one day in your life, where you try to use your supernatural powers for good while avoiding the watchful eye of the Inquisition.

What I Liked

First of all, this game has great cover art (which is why I’m playing it so early)! The author is also credited with drawing the cover, so hats off to them for that – they’re clearly very talented in multiple areas.

Moving on to the game, I was impressed at the amount of puzzles and pizazz Witchfinders packs into its short runtime. The puzzles are all of the get-x-ingredient-to-solve-y-problem variety, but they each have a unique and engaging framework around them that keeps them fresh. There’s even a few tasks you can do seemingly just for the hell of it (why yes, I do like raspberry tea!) I felt the world of Witchfinders was well fleshed out, and nicely balanced hope and kindness against the inherent darkness of the premise.

What I Didn’t

Balancing difficulty in social puzzles is a tricky thing, and unfortunately the puzzles in this game fall on the side of “too easy”. In each case there’s obviously-right and obviously-wrong ways to tackle each problem, so you have to go out of your way to be obvious if you want to lose. I would have liked to see some more shades of grey in the puzzle design, with third options that would attract attention at the cost of doing good.

Other Thoughts

The game uses random descriptions well to keep things fresh. I liked checking the poster and reading the spellbook each run-through to see what ridiculousness would show up next.

I was excited to see a magical realist game show up in the Comp as it’s something I like but don’t see often, especially in video gaming. One of my favorite video games is in fact Kentucky Route Zero (which is also the only magical-realist game I know of, go figure). It’s clearly a favorite of this author as well, since I could clearly see the inspiration here. KRZ and The Counsel in the Cave are both games set in rural areas (at least at first), and are technically choice-based but don’t have much in the way of traditional puzzles. Instead, the player is given the option to shape how the story plays out – the choice picked is always correct and becomes the new truth of the world, as if it’s always been there. The overall framework of the plot stays the same, but no two playthroughs will ever be alike unless you do it on purpose.

Luckily for me, The Counsel in the Cave ends up being a worthy game on its own as well as distinguishing itself well from its progenitor. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s very well written and creates a world that is both stylistically and thematically distinct from KRZ and has no trouble standing on its own. It also tells a story that is nicely sized, and will feel familiar to anyone over a certain age - who will you become after high school?

The Counsel in the Cave ends up pulling off a neat trick integrating its gameplay with its story. The central conflict driving the two protagonists forward is the question of what to do after high school, how their choices will shape who they become, and how to deal with the responsibility of it all. At the end of their arcs they both conclude that it’s going to be scary, but no matter what they’ll solve the problem by moving forward and seeing where life takes them. The only wrong choice is not to choose and thereby end up stuck.

This is, incidentally, what the player is doing the entire way through The Counsel in the Cave. The only way to get stuck is by indecision alone, and while the player can’t be sure of the outcome of any choice they know it’ll move their story along. Yes, it’s a game and people are expected to click the links, but I really enjoyed this piece of thematic resonance.

What I Liked

For those of you who don’t want to read the spoiler (and I encourage you to play the game first before reading my thoughts!) I liked quite a lot of it. The side character Moondog was a standout, though.

What I Didn’t

I think a little too much happens offscreen between acts, in particular between 1 and 2. I can tell the author wanted most of the journey to happen off-screen, but that requires walking a tightrope between telling the player too little about what happened (and confusing them) and infodumping. This definitely erred more on the side of confusing, which wasn’t a huge problem but it did throw me out of the narrative for a hot second.

A Matter of Heist Urgency bills itself as “An Anastasia the Power Pony Story”, although as best I can tell this is the only “Anastasia the Power Pony” story in existence right now. The game certainly doesn’t seem to acknowledge this, as it throws you right into the action, but it’s not hard to piece together what’s going on – you’re Anastasia, a pony superhero fighting crime in a world of ungulates. In true Saturday morning cartoon style, you have to investigate a crime (without blowing your secret identity, of course), and then jet off and use your powers to fight the culprits with (or more accurately, despite) the help of the gallantly useless detective Sir Ponyheart.

What I Liked

The story and staging here have a lot of heart. The pony characters are memorable, and overall it really feels like a 90s superhero cartoon. I would have absolutely loved an Anastasia action figure as a kid.

What I Didn’t

This game is full of great ideas that aren’t translated well to a game. Yes, it’s a shorter parser game, but there’s really no puzzles to be found. You examine some things in the first scene, then it’s off to find the llamas and make your way through some fight scenes as Anastasia. At least one potential puzzle is solved by Anastasia doing a number of actions when commanded to SNEAK that could have been several separate commands. The fight scenes were similarly unchallenging and while there’s some depth to them, I also managed to win them all by spamming the same command over and over. Maybe the hint command will give more insight, but I’m not generally a fan of using it to convey required gameplay knowledge. This is a place where I really could have used a basic list of available commands, since otherwise I feel like the game expects the player to be familiar with Anastasia’s power set – but there’s still no other Power Pony games to be found, so guess the verb it is. Overall this felt like watching a cartoon, with watching being the key word.

This game is the latest in a series that includes Bell Park: Youth Detective and Birdland. Birdland in particular is a special game to me - I played it at the recommendation of my first girlfriend, and it was my first real introduction to interactive fiction. (Well, not including Counterfeit Monkey, which I enjoyed but came away with the conclusion that I was too dumb for parser IF). Appropriately given the summary of The Grown-Up Detective Agency, when I played Birdland I was also experiencing the ennui of my early 20s and all that entailed, with new and exciting challenges like “being out to my parents”, “I think my first real job sucks, actually”, and “baby’s first medical crisis”. The latter of these consisted of a really nasty sinus infection, and Birdland was suggested as a way to keep myself busy and cheer me up while I was stuck at home and struggling to be functional. So Birdland is one of those games that I played at the exact right moment in my life for it to really, really stick with me.

As such, I’ve been very excited and very nervous to play The Grown-Up Detective Agency, out of the hope that it’ll live up to my expectations and the fear that it won’t (possibly because things just hit different when you’re not taking enough antibiotics to kill a horse). But it turns out that I didn’t need to worry, because this game has everything that made Birdland great and then some.

What I Liked

One of the things I enjoyed most about Birdland was how it seamlessly balanced the silly and irreverent A-plot (psychic bird men are invading the world via summer camp!) with a touching, nuanced, and deeply relatable B-plot (how do I deal with being gay at 14?). The Grown-Up Detective Agency pulls off the same trick flawlessly and is equal parts more ridiculous and just as grounded.

The A-plot has you looking for a woman’s missing boyfriend, and is ripe with ridiculousness as you try to hunt down clues at a chicken wing joint, a cabaret club, and the world’s worst dive bar among other places. Many of these locations give you ample opportunity to hear about the ridiculous shenanigans that go on there, and I ran through every single one because hearing about the bar’s screaming contests is the kind of thing I find funny. (Yes, literal impromptu screaming contests over who can scream louder. It’s that kind of place.) Meanwhile, the B-plot has Bell attempting to solve why her 12-year-old self has suddenly time traveled into 2022 which turns into a subtle exploration of growing up, expectations vs reality, and the sinking feeling that maybe Kid You was more right about certain things than Adult You was. It’s very relatable to how I felt in my early 20s, and frankly still do to a lesser extent in my 30s. Bravo!

What I Didn’t

The mystery in this story can be summed up as “are the straights OK?”, which made for a lot of excellent humor throughout but didn’t give a satisfying conclusion to the A-plot (Spoiler - click to show)(since in the end Mark G was just off being bafflingly heterosexual). I think that was intentional, since its purpose was mostly to contrast Adult Bell’s boring detective work with Kid Bell’s wide-eyed enthusiasm, and most real life mysteries aren’t nicely wrapped up in a bow. Still, I don’t think it quite worked for me, possibly because after a certain point the mystery gets tied up in a way that felt rushed.

Other Thoughts

I’m also in a field that I’ve been interested in since I was a kid (engineering), and squaring my dreams of killer robots with the reality of endless Excel documents and heated arguments about flatness requirements for a while went only slightly better than Kid Bell’s journey did. Getting out of my awful first job helped though, and I think there’s a message here about keeping your youthful spark alive and not letting the reality of Adulthood (™) grind down your enthusiasm too far.

Star Tripper is a game that’s not trying to sell itself very hard. The summary consists of a single sentence, describing itself as inspired by a Palm Pilot game that I’m definitely not familiar with! So I didn’t really know what to expect going into this one.

It turns out that Star Tripper is massively underselling itself, because there is A TON to do. After the intro, which establishes you as the scion of a rich and powerful family looking to rescue their kidnapped sibling, it dumps you out in the great wide universe where you can do just about anything. And I do mean anything! The number of quadrants and planets you can visit must number in the hundreds, with activities on each ranging from religious prayer, drinking, visiting bookstores, ferrying passengers, and of course karaoke and gambling (not available yet in my playthrough, but I’m excited about them anyway). Oh, and the resource trading. How could I forget that?

What I Liked

The goods trading is the meat of the game, and it feels very satisfying. It didn’t take me long to get a feel for how it worked - buy goods cheaply on planets that produce them, and sell them high on planets that don’t. I quickly spun up a burgeoning empire in electrical cables and for a while I was rolling in money. I felt very smug about my early success, and was pushing into deeper and deeper quadrants in the hope of finding a space station to spend my cash on a better ship and start the process all over again.

What I Didn’t

Unfortunately, a game like this is hard to balance, especially with one programmer and one tester (based on the credits). So while I thought the trading was fun, fuel management ended up being a pain. In particular, refueling on a planet is a real drag! Instead of the spaceport having a fuel station (why???), you have to go to a bar, buy a patron a drink (at a price that scales with planet difficulty), buy them ANOTHER drink (with a similar price that isn’t revealed until you’ve bought the first), and then finally unlock the option to pay them even more money to buy fuel. Not only is this tedious, it means that if you land on an expensive planet you can wind up with not enough cash to actually buy fuel, leaving you to do odd jobs until you scrape together the cash to leave. An easy fix for this would be at least to let the player buy as much fuel as they can afford, but when you’re buying it from a shady person outside a bar it’s all ten units or nothing.

There’s a few options of jobs you can do to earn cash - I’ve run into mining ore and making coffee so far, although I suspect there will be more once I get further in. Unfortunately, the mining minigame seems to be designed for players to trade credits for carpal tunnel - you descend a mineshaft for up to 50 meters (requiring one click for each meter), mine until your bag is full (20-30 clicks) and then go back up to the surface (again, one click per meter). Then you do it again. I did this once and then stopped because it gave me wrist strain. The other money-making minigame I’ve encountered (working at a coffee shop) is much more fun, since it’s based around remembering customer’s orders instead of blind clicking. Still, the payout wasn’t enough to justify the 20 or so rounds I’d need to complete in order to get back off the planet, so with that as my only option I decided my run was over. (The minigame rewards don’t seem to scale properly with the planet level either?)

Finally, I had absolutely no idea how to progress the story, and after the first quadrant I didn’t encounter a single space station where I could upgrade my ship. In hindsight I really should have written down the number of that first quadrant! (I really should have written down a lot of things. Definitely bringing a notebook for round 2.)

The Haunted Help Desk has the scariest real-world premise yet: dealing with your company’s IT department. (I kid, I kid!) The conceit is that the IT department is haunted, but you really, really, REALLY need to get your tablet to connect to the wifi, so you’re willing to brave the horrible IT maze to find someone who can help you. (Which, minus the haunting, sounds like every IT experience I’ve ever had).

The game squeezes as much out of the concept as inhumanly possible, with the ghoulies and ghosties of the maze all still happy to help you find the one guy who can fix your tablet. Of course, Haunted IT is a lot more dangerous than regular IT, so there’s pitfalls waiting for you at every corner. Luckily, the author has mercifully enabled the back button here, changing your numerous deaths from something frustrating to a comedy punchline.

Overall, this game feels like playing through a Halloween SNL sketch, and I mean that in the best way. Great job!

So, just to establish where I personally am coming from in this review - I’m a gay cis woman. I don’t consider myself trans or nonbinary, so by necessity this is going to be an “outside looking in” type perspective, but I’m also not entirely a stranger to grappling with gender identity/presentation/etc. issues. Some of this is because the idea of gender and sexuality being different things is fairly recent and there’s still a lot of cultural baggage hanging around the concept that any queer person is going to have to deal with, but also because I have a complicated relationship with femininity. I could spend a while talking about it but I’ll leave it as I prefer to present masc of center but still feminine, and have spent a lot of my life figuring out exactly what that means. (I also work in a male-dominated field, which means I have “how do I present at work” as an additional confusing gender-related issue). So instead of having a fully outside perspective, I guess I have one arm hanging through an open window or something?

Now that I’m done talking about myself and torturing metaphors to death, let’s talk about the game. Euphoria Brighter Than a Comet follows Bekcj, an alien attending the uncomfortably-heteronormative St. Andrew’s College to get an Earthian college degree. Everyone already treats bem like an outsider because of beir alien experience, and also because as a Plutonian bey don’t conceive of gender the same way that we do. The only thing making beir time at St. Andrew’s bearable is their best and only friend Aaron. So when bey receive an invite to the biggest, hottest frat Halloween party (as the guest of honor, no less!) bey’re torn between wanting to fit in and navigate Halloween, “the most gendered of holidays”…

This is the first moment I came up short, since this assertion doesn’t like up with my experience for two reasons. One is mostly down to my personal experience, since most of the college parties I attended were populated mostly with theater kids. (In addition to being a very queer group of people, even the straightest cis theater kids are pretty comfortable with crossdressing). So I’m willing to chalk that one up to luck that I was able to have a college experience very much the opposite of St. Andrew’s, but my second gripe is a little less of a personal opinion. Isn’t the most gendered holiday Valentine’s Day? I think one certainly could make an argument for Halloween being the more-gendered holiday at least in certain contexts, so I was curious to see how the author would spin it, but the spin never came. Apart from some background comments from the party goers about Beckj’s gender presentation (ranging from ignorant to rude to cruel), there’s hardly any exploration of gender and Halloween to be found. Some of the meathead frat bros are described as wearing very masculine costumes, and Aaron’s more gender-ambiguous choice of party wear is good foreshadowing for the rest of their character arc, but that’s about it. (Surely there’s something to be said about female Halloween costumes, even? The game only gives us a look at the masculine side, which seems like a missed opportunity for a game about the gender binary). The frat boys also predictably have not invited Beckj to be their guest of honor for wholesome reasons and subject bem to public humiliation because bey’re a “freak”, but I didn’t get the sense that they found Beckj to be freakish because of beir gender or lack thereof, only because of their alien status. I think the author needed the “alien as metaphor for the nonbinary experience” to be more developed by this stage than it actually was, since this didn’t ring thematically sound for me even though I can see what the story is going for.

The rest of the game follows Beckj and Aaron dealing with the aftermath of the awful thing Beckj has just gone through, and opening up more to each other personally in the process. I found this part sweet but also kind of flat. Part of this is I don’t think the character writing is quite up to snuff - everyone in this story has a very similar narrative voice (minus the cartoonish frat bros) and Aaron’s characterization doesn’t stretch much beyond sweet, supportive of Beckj, and (Spoiler - click to show)nonbinary. The other part is that the ensuing gender discussion frankly doesn’t go much deeper than it has elsewhere in the story. Beckj does give an interesting account of how gender works on Pluto, which I would have loved to hear more about, but then explains how Plutonian pronouns work in a way that doesn’t quite line up. (Spoiler - click to show)(Plutonian gender is constantly reinterpreted throughout their life and depending on context, but Beckj then says the Plutonian pronouns are best translated as versions of English pronouns with the first letter changed to a B - his to bis, hers to bers, theirs to beirs. However, there’s no explanation of how or when a human would know which pronoun to use, which made Aaron’s vow to use Beckj’s correct pronouns in private seem like a Sisyphean task.) That said, the euphoria of thinking you’re alone in the world and finding out there’s someone else exactly like you is deeply relatable, which for me was the best part of this segment. (Full disclosure, I skipped the sex scene, an option for which I am grateful to have but I think needed a bit of extra writing to do a proper fade to back.)

As an addendum, I also found the white text on a light blue background hard to read, and the background image didn’t resize properly to my screen. The author did mention they intend to release a choice-based version of this game later, so I’m putting these out there in the hopes they’ll get tweaked for the next version.

There’s a lot of good ideas here, and quite a few things that rang authentic to my experience (the number of friends I made while closeted that turned out to also be closeted is way higher than it should be by random chance, so I deeply appreciated Aaron and Beckj’s pre-party relationship), but I think it needs stronger thematic cohesion and more attentive character writing to really work for me