Reviews by N. Cormier
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All The World's A Stage, November 5, 2022I 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.
Saturday Morning Superhero Action, November 5, 2022A 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.
What's past is prologue , November 5, 2022This 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.
A Space Trading Sim, November 5, 2022Star 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 IT ticket from hell, November 5, 2022The 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!
Gender and Halloween, November 5, 2022So, 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
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