Ratings and Reviews by kaemi

Like any good poet, I’m on my way to fail an imperial exam. Since there’s so many ways to fail, in essence it acts as a personality test: which failure will you become? To determine, you select an opening image, align perhaps with one of four pitched philosophies, then align perhaps with one of two pitched politicies. Probably there’s some condensing method, the 23 offered endings don’t totally itemize the factorials.

Wandering the imperial gardens to formulate a poem grants more domain for inspiration than for Cao Zhi, as any ambition ought to be tested to an elusive qualia. To the game’s credit, the poems you can craft from the compilations genuinely resound in the mood: “Loose on stormy waves, dancers tread on air, / Mountain peaks standing tall, above human desires, / As pure as the constant moon, / Grief for the past drowned by joy of the future” has an infinity within it, should you grant it some fraction of that consideration. Why not let’s indulge another, surely the treasury affords its like: “Caged by circumstance, twisted shapes flourish, / Swimming fishes surge to meet the sporting waves, / Sudden winds scattering clouds, parting for truth, / Fresh kinds of grief may yet bring the same sadness.”

In the combinatoric condensery of poetry can we calibrate the multitude to meter, alas as always the incitidents prove more prosaic. The philosophies presented are sometimes silly. When this merely means we’re not arguing points of Confucian but some binary more imaginative, the silliness almost seems intentional. Shall we pluck the plum? “You would simply lie there underneath the plum, and hope that it dropped into your mouth. You should want and desire nothing, only receiving what nature has given you. In society, that means a strict order of things, listening to your elders, following the laws of the community as decided together, rejecting freedom in order to live.” We must imagine Tantalus happy. Sadly, sometimes we drop the pretense of elegance, and so the consequence clatters: ““Exactly!” the man in blue claps. “Our focus on the human body, the body parts we each find beautiful, to the point where we immortalize them in transcendent words of poetry.” / “Why not just write about that without having to concoct such elaborate schemes and performances?” / “The scene is what makes the poem. The excitement of spying from afar, the pain of unrequited love, all simulated in a form that hurts nobody!” / You raise an eyebrow. This seems perfectly fine on the surface, but… / “Is this some kind of fetish?” you ask.” It’s hard to imagine that last sentence punctuated by other than a literal clunk. At least within the silliness we sometimes source a joke, as per the plum previously: “a few people actually begin to grind ink to write down a poem in honour of the plum, using their tears to wet their inkstones.”

One assumes some fatemaker might martial forth the jade seal pleasing the Emperor with whatever our heavens may mandate, but in the absence of his satisfaction our various endings also languish. The general wins, and this is sort of bad, or the princess wins, and this is sort of bad, or nothing really happens, but someday this will be sort of bad. Stuck in this loop, we yet pleasure in the riches votive to our vocation: “Each day passes much like the other, as you read and idly write poetry to fill the hours that yawn before you.”

What’s the point of being alive? I’m not being flippant, genuinely, it’s hard to squint through a coffeesip at Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter, and not in your grimace wonder. Because, you see, the game opens with an insult: “# ERPS Dial-Driven Narrative Engine (Player-Facing Version)”. Not only the hubris to call 700 words of low effort garble a narrative engine, not only the sneer at calling the only text that exists in the context of play the player facing version, but most vexingly the realization that we’re not even meant to read what little has been offered to us, since one of the sections of this player facing version is a list of twists to shock us towards conclusions.

That the prompt immediately spoils the game it hopes ChatGPT will magically make is one of the many ways in which Penny Nichols is damned by GIGO. The rest of the prompt consists of nonsensical infinitesimalhearted gestures at RPG mechanics which are more likely to trip up the LLM than produce even the faintest verisimilitude of simulation. Even then, the few details meant to supply our adventure are ridiculous on their face: the color associated with the cost for “sneaky” magic is cyan, the color of a clear sky. I’d be willing to be gaslit into perceiving this irony as a constitutive opposition were any coherent commentary to emerge from the mechanics, not even within the magic colors themselves, I just mean like in general, at all, if there was even the slightest sense of a reflective consciousness.

Similarly confused is the setting, which the prompt insists is “retro-futurist, occult-nuclear” despite initiating play as an insurance agent, muddling us through a magic system with divination and conjuration, culminating the story in smaughoard dragons, and whose narrative style is described as “Scooby-Doo”. None of these vagueries will do anything to ground the hallucinatory expanse of a player cajoling the LLM to generate more interesting elsewheres.

Penny Nichols, as a narrative experience that an LLM could enable, breaks upon contact. Copypasting this prompt into Claude will generate a worse experience than simply typing “Let’s roleplay. I am an insurance agent investigating a claim on Mars.” Everything Penny Nichols adds, the clunkiest skeleton of mechanics, a series of twists it telegraphs, and an inconsistent setting, detracts from the basic back and forth you could have with Claude, whose training set has already stolen everything Penny Nichols hopes to take credit for, including Penny Nichols, a punning name already made in Phoenix Wright.

We’re worried about low effort AI slop avalanching over everything we adore, but actually here is a worse abyss screaming beneath us, the annihilation of the spiritual. Mockery of creative communication has been mechanized. This game was not really written nor really meant to be read nor really capable of being played. IFComp has been, for over three decades, a celebration of a computerized interface between writer and reader animating newly possible interpersonal interplay, but now some bugeyed demon ridicules this tiny community festival by weaponizing hundreds of billions of dollars of hyperscaling dishumanification to erase both sides of the interface. Other entrants have poured their hearts into years of hope in anguish, and someone thought so little of that filigree desire to exist they lampooned it here to disrupt the beautiful electricity as we congregate to care about how we care.

At least in troll entries there’s some interpersonal experience whose bathos puddlesplashes as you nod blankly at Uninteractive Fiction 2, and even in low effort AI slop at least there’s a desire for something to have been made that’s been outsourced though precisely is it the resin of human contact which makes the thing alive, but in this nullity is there nothing, nothing comes from nothing and keeps on coming til the nothingness reigns. Why be anyone? It’s an extremely humiliating process, and, in the end, whatever you you make will be dissimulated into the machine.

Humanity’s inescapable tragedy is falling asleep to an eight hour train engine POV. Squinting through room’s dark at a screen, stem of your Cahors malbec so far sideslunk in your sadly not drunk your ok cradles the cup, realizing below all you’ve built is the basic ask unfulfilled to be Mediterraneanly baskably still save cradling side to side by bends up some mountain pass, you don’t even care which, just five hours up and five hours down day after day after day, gently reassured by the motion that you’re moving, that the colors on the screen will take you with them, screensavers where “everything you touch is polymer, glossy and smothering.” In the interim, “Some of your time is taken up by organizing supplies, some by being warned”, never at home in whichever city you try, and you do try, “Crisp bread, soft colorless melon. Some sort of warm savory beverage. Your new city seemed temperate, expansive, for a time”, don’t specify, you’ll know when, compelled past “All known and catalogued … in search of deeper secrets.”

Saltwrack’s journey pleasures in snowflake filigrees of “the wrack’s austere beauty, its complete sovereign self” which shine phantasmagorically beyond the “layers of coalsilk and oilfoam fluff” that shiver against. Our daunted north mesmires marine castform divergences, mercurial unfathoms forming “Silicaceous networks and lattices” and “Cnidarian clumps of tendrils.” These psycheflourishes are pinned to the page to ground you in scientific exteriority, this exists for a reason the worldbreaking asserts assiduate to punctuate the campmaking and freezefording. Thankfully for the vibesplorers among us these pages turn quickly, days counting down ration by ration forcing us to forgo the tepidries of rationalizing backstories from blurmarks. Whizzing by the window, Saltwrack’s swiftness of imagism excels: “A sphere of depth, crested with sky.” Sure, the prose overrelies on sky, but only to toneset timekeep the dreamy towards and terrified recoil, piercing through variorum desolations the purpose as pace: “As the ash-white land darkens in the dusk, the sky stays a clear pale blue for an hour or so. You work beneath it.” Such work occupies the play of space to stage fantasy dangers; where “meltwater has carved a channel down into it and refrozen in slick glassy knives below”, impalement lies in a wrongclick.

But yes, sure, fine, we ought to be going somewhere with all this, rationalize a backstory from the blurmarks. Seek out the worldwound: “Something flips. Wrong. At first only a placeless terror. Your lamp is bright and yet there is no light, no emanation. And then as in a dream, where awareness flows to you, you know that experiments in physics were conducted here, that the city at large was renowned for technological advancement. That this point is where it all went terribly wrong. But you know it from the other side, from a patchwork recollection of long-dead minds. This is not what they saw. This is only a trace of it, only a tethered and slumbering remnant. It is all around you. Already you are losing yourself.” Digital twins scar processors in a whois for who is sequenced in helixed dissociations disowning anthropocene apexeclipse anthraxing the technotraumic allwrack to nadir codas of shivery postregrets, if only so that we don’t have to have them, disimminent dissolver of the posed fraxis might we Mani man from I to mythmake the guilt, “split off the real from itself … A grown nightmare, an organic gnarl, physics’ nameless teratoma. It ate from the atmosphere and spewed out its own waste over it, all the toxins that would damage its ecology. An excess, in particular, of salt. There is a thing beyond the vanishing point, and it is living still—while your earth silently decays.” Haunted? You’ll always be, so you should be.

Any complexity to recast twain tautologies of fate to a doom of one’s sown? Gestures of being hunted hound you home, so suddenly, you’re home, credits roll, characters epilogue that life goes on. Turns out scrying the curse from core contagion can be good for your career, you’ll moue into your downed Cahors, time to go to sleep.

Dead Sea sells itself immediately with aethereal wispiness echoing last night’s etude: “Rows upon rows of tombstones stretch endlessly. / White orbs float above them.” In softchill breezes such as these Dead Seas’ feathery couplets lift flittery with the wind, “You walk a sandy path dotted with soft grains. / Palm-like plants grow sparsely.” To keep this stimmung from dissipating upon any errant arpeggio, a surprising humor stays our focus in puzzles where you freeze JRPG slimes in mixing up a Fanta® to sate a thirsty gravedigger. Such competing uplifts and downdrafts catch us liminally in an otherworld with all the lightness of a dream. When the gravedigger says, “How do I leave? Walking. I live in that town”, the joke’s spark stagelights carefully the scene its halfdark implies.

What a shame that this sylph succinctness starts to smudge with the offwhite writing, watercolors you didn’t realize would run and mud, and sadly the sensuousness of the symbolist sparseness slabs mudbricked when we linger long enough allowing it to dry: “Before you lies an endless sea. / Lead-gray water flows sluggishly. / All seems melancholy under thick fog.” In the first sentence, place, but also perfectly a lack of place; in the second sentence, a resonant specific to paint the scene; then a third sentence to impasto out the pleasure. Even when we keep quick to the path, sometimes still the sparse offwhite doesn’t blur into mist, the simplicity simply stays simple: “A white lighthouse stands on the cliff, / signal light rotating with mechanical clanks. / Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.” This has described a lighthouse to the benefit of those not in the know.

We do get imaginative imagist dabs of “Midway to the castle, / a hill rises from the calm sea” to Turneristically mark a whale that carry us through, but the weight that sags that finely first struck chord piles up, alas, as it always seems must, exposition. Somehow, in these lambent milds, we’re supposed to sustain all this: “That was before the God fell. / Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here. / This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt. / Even angels fell because of it. / Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’ / To remake the world, God first had to remove the ‘Stake,’ sparking a long war. / That era was called the ‘Dirt Epoch.’ / This lighthouse was built after the Dirt Epoch ended.” If that’s not enough, then I kid you not, the Mayflower.

This is intended to ballast the plot as the story’s symbolist purposing, but the plot already bobs on the surface: a Duke marries a medievally young bride, an illness nearly blesses her with death’s escape, but her soul’s then vesseled in a whale, so the Duke kills the whale to recapture her soul, which doesn’t work, we’re not sure why. Certainly, this works wonderfully as a watercolor expression, “He spreads his arms as if to embrace it, / but it floats skyward, unstoppable. / The Duke kneels silently on the whale’s back, watching it vanish”, but its effect doesn’t enjoin any of the machinery made to effectuate it.

More charming is the game’s ability to take the basic, plinth it, fog machine it, then gloom in the mood music, such that a saltshaker sings out “The whole land is brimstone and salt, a burning waste; nothing sown, nothing growing.” In its humor and its echoes, Dead Sea spirits our seeking more than the crumblings we collect from its scrolls.

In Haatti, furthest corner from the grace of Aratta, wanderers of the wastes without the light of Ashur, those Gutians driven back from Purattu by Shulmanu Ashared, a dog walks into a tavern and says, I can’t see a thing, let me fetch the visibility blessing from the stele. This turns out to be quite fun, with the game’s central mechanic allowing you to wander a teeming map sniffing out opportunities to precisely infuse spells to solve a tapestry of problems. In a wise design choice, you don’t need to solve all of them, and many of them can be solved variously, which rewards exploration by rendering it personal rather than rote.

What really makes these puzzles excel though is the lavishly textured historicity of the Hittite setting, which layers the spellplay inside an enchanting world. Almost every detail is drawn rigorously to evoke the Bronze Age in high fidelity. Rather than NPCs standing around a field doing farmerisms, we’re watching people busy on the last day of harvest reckoning with the payment of taxes as a complex logistical problem requiring significant labor, starting with how are we going to ship this: “Makeshift docks have been cobbled together at the edge of the river, planks and boards all lashed together to load the village’s taxes onto the barge.” This type of close inhabitance, with all the specificities of attention with which our ancestors would’ve solved the same problems, brings an ancient setting to life. We get an argument lyrically redolent with the timbres of these tensions uniquely, like two men arguing in a field about a missing sickle: “…you know what you’ve done, Zuwa? You’ve stolen the very moon out from my sky! Oh, my moon, my crescent moon, my beautiful harvest moon! How I used to wax and wane her through the fields—a whirlwind of bronze, a tempest! Barley, emmer, flax, wheat—no seed-head could withstand the golden glimmer of moonlight singing out from my hand.” Not only does this splash so much color on the canvas you can’t help but ricochet from detail to lovingly crafted detail in Boschian delight, but also it humanizes the puzzling to make it genuinely transportive: the taxman, easiest to lampoon, is instead “Gray-haired and sour-faced, Piseni has the final say on any village matters, which means he’s the first one the soldiers come for when taxes aren’t paid”, anxieties that lead to a rich internal train of thought about what his life could be like, what it was like for the hundreds of actual lives he condenses. We’re ripped from our frame of reference to grapple with taxes that were, yes the burden it is for us, but more than that, the key point of connection to the empire that enveloped your life, perhaps the one time a year you travelled to the capital to savor its sights and sounds, awed by connections with worlds unfathomed, the moment your work is experienced as integrated with emergent machineries of being far beyond the barley that builds it, like did you realize the Bronze Age had highly complex economies rich with the considerations we haughtily reserve for our own age, we wave away their societies like okay over thousands of years people learned to lend money to farmers and this created money, voila civilization, and it’s like I don’t think you understand, there was active finance brokered in similar sophistications, I mean like credit spreads in the Old Assyrian period could actually decrease during periods of political stress because terms would shorten to reduce risk exposure to debt amnesties associated with the start of a new reign but the agricultural season is fixed, right, so premiums would rise but because the competition for creditworthy borrowers and the lack of alternatives meant you had to transact anyway at the going rate, this meant lower risk adjusted returns for your silver since you’re forced to eat a lot of the additional risk, which is an effective reduction in silver’s purchasing power since you’re essentially buying a physical delivery commodity futures contract even if it’s structured as a loan, which means that, hey, where are you going, come back, I was about to circle this around into tax arbitrage, don’t you want to hear about tax arbitrage.

There you are, sit, now speaking of the historicity of tax arbitrage, the setting’s rich imaginings are augmented by ample historical footnotes studded into the text contextualizing this world as vivid as lived, full of the intricacies inset by our animating complexities: “Some scholars have argued that all taxes were paid in labor during this time period, but archaeological evidence from those silos shows that some farmers left large amounts of weeds in their tax grain to increase the weight.” Stop talking about taxes you’re crying into your screen, okay fine, the historicity excels beyond scholarly copypastes into a speculative tinkering that drives embedded meanings. The story takes place during a capitol shift to Tarhuntassa, which is imagined as upriver from a seaport in Ura, and lately up this route has come a Cypriot princess showing off her huge tracts of copper mines, and who, in an inspired bit of dot connection, is potentially the niece of Ramesses II, who is in fact at that moment on the verge of a great war with the Hittites, suddenly you have an entire geopolitical intrigue on the verge of a megahistorical shift that could very well exchange St. George for Tarhunt, all this seethes constantly just below the surface. There’s also, even more importantly, an Ea Nasir meme.

With such grounding, the puzzles breeze by, helped by painstaking polish that no doubt burned many a midnight candle. Indeed this game is at pains not to break, using the blessing of the wind on an object that gets whisked out of state resets the blessing to the stele for instance. It’s amazing how seamlessly so much of this works, given the enormous range of possible states and solutions. Quality of life features, like a “stash it” command that lets you put a spell into a stele then immediately return to where you are, or a clickable map with symbols that mark points of interest, lubricate any friction in the joins. Certainly, through all the backtracking and fetching, every nicety you’re given invites you to imagine more, you’re tapping your foot like why can’t there be some contrivance to connect spells stored in the separate steles so you don’t have to haul them back and forth, but the level of these complaints merely demonstrates how effortlessly we’ve risen from the base.

That said, as you whittle down the sequence of puzzles and are forced to fight with some of the wonkier ones, alas, humanity is glimpsed. The copper chimes sequence was so finicky that I couldn’t get it to work, which resulted in the chimes constantly going off to annoy both Kassu and me as I wandered the map. I looked up the walkthrough; this didn’t help; so I checked the walkthrough for another puzzle that was confusing me, the aqueduct, where apparently I need to get so heavy the aqueduct breaks, or something, it wasn’t entirely clear, so I took the curse of the earth and grabbed the chimes, well whoops the chimes got stolen in the process of exchanging curses, so grab the chimes again, well whoops the chimes still have amplification, so switch out amplification for earth, invert it to wind, used the wind to get into the aqueduct, invert it to earth, infuse it into the chimes, hold it on the right square, nothing, so fine, I went down to grab something else, the first object that came to mind was the lamp, so down to the caves, or I need visibility, so take earth out of the chimes, stash the chimes, switch earth out for invisibility, invert it to visibility, down to the caves, get lamp, back up to the stele, switch out to earth, invert it to wind, squiggle into the aqueducts, invert it to earth, imbue earth into the lamp, nothing, drop and hold just to see, nothing, you can see this gets frustrating. There’s a kind of postgame that invites further playful exploration which I wish I could be here praising, but it’s the tedium that clunks from these lesser puzzles that wanes the curiosity of even the historically minded.

All of which is to blame the limitations of time, as we all must. Obviously, The Wise-Woman’s Dog ought to be twenty times larger and taught in schools, but we must suffer waylaid by our inevitabilities, chief amongst them the need to pay taxes.

Kenji Eno is a person you can wiki if you want, but The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer’s not that interested either. Like many a rock biopic, the band and biographies are beside the point, we’re here to rock: “Okay, here’s what I’m leading up to. We don’t understand you. We never will. Just give us the code for Spy Lunch.” Swap in whichever songs you like, the four on the floor blow by blow of Eno’s career handwaves the artistry to center the frontman, an anticensorship rockstar ready to headline any publicity stunt: “Anyway, everyone knows this story by now. Kenji Eno does whatever the ★★★★ he wants. You swapped the publisher’s discs to avoid censorship like it was a walk in the park.” The label absolutely can’t handle him, but how could they ever let him go? “When the company board freaked out over what you did on stage … one of their executives just said … Musicians are like that. Kenji Eno is just what we need in the video game industry.” But Eno will never sell out, even if his albums do, like any good rockstar he’s equal parts authentic and selfdestructive: “So if some company ★★★★★★ you off, just renege on every aspect of the relationship that you’ve built up. Burn the bridges. Swap the logos. You see, this is why my company is so ★★★★★★ afraid of you.” Party up this blaze of glory, then, til when the sweat is seventy proof and you’re staggering sweatsoaked into fevercold sheets for the worst hangover of your life we can spiral out to the expected ending of nothing else left: “No. By D2, I had given up. If the publisher was going to censor it, they were going to censor it. When I look back at it, I can still feel the thick atmosphere of it all. Not just the game, but my own state of mind. I had such a difficult time coming up with anything but the opening chapter. I wasn’t fully there. It’s like when a band makes their last album before breaking up.” You had to be there nostalgia with all its absences implied.

To the extent anticensorial cool could coalesce some crystallizable thesis, the chaos throws us back to the clash. The two most summatory lines largely contradict: on one hand, Eno’s need to contravene imposed limits generates his creativity’s laterality, “You weren’t just avoiding censorship. I think you needed those limitations as an opposing force to evoke your creativity. Like a game of cat and mouse.” but on the other hand, censorship is incapable of moderating true transmission, “But you know what? I know censorship. It makes no ★★★★★★★ difference. Because even when everything’s ★★★★★★★ missing, even when everything is ★★★★ on by the censors and ★★★★★★ over by control-freak publishers — sometimes people will know exactly what the ★★★★ you mean.” The need to slip censorship through improvised release valves ventures the auteur’s inexpressible appeal, yet simultaneously this chase leads nowhere to leave us speaking as clearly as hidden. Is there some synthesis to achieve, perhaps censorship only supercharges the subervision jouissance? Maybe, but The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer conceives of censorship primarily as an interloping inconvenience: “There were a ton of annoying rules around blood and violence at the time. So I tried to avoid them. I thought of myself as a spaceman. I was on Planet A and my audience was on Planet C … There were annoying laws on Planet B … but if I was a spaceman, I could just warp through it.” So we don’t get any further than commercialist rules are annoying, we just want a copy when the directors cut out.

Rebel to say what for what reason? The game shrugs; Spy Lunch, the MacGuffin lost masterwork, is a blank slate that, in a climactic twist, stays blank. Turns out that nobody cares what the lyrics say so long as they can singalong, so it’s worth mentioning that The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer zanies up a few archbrow zingers: “Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions.” The central censorship complaint is generously sidetracked by escapades into the wacky, with the primary game element being failing to keep an eye on an elusive turtle, introduced as a joke and culminating in an impactful punchline. Occasionally your wandering eeries into the psychedelically silly: “Your supple, Italian middle-aged body fat is coated with years of grease from maintenance work, allowing you to slide down the toilet drain with ease. / You told Marco you could do this. You could have entered and exited the building via the pipes all along. There was no reason to brave the horrors of the glass elevator, the gaping maw of the urban skyline, the terrible heights.” Rather than feel at odds, the oddness gives a goodnatured wiliness to the proceedings that, in its inventive interplay, supplies us with a feelgood chorus better than getting anywhere: “And despite all the heady thematic interpretations that have been circulated during the forced discussion, Marco thinks that’s all that Kenji Eno wanted. To surprise people and be surprised himself.”

What’s gone isn’t gone but radiates your negative space. The last little enclosure you’ve fortressed, the “scream” where “the silence and darkness vanish”, haunts the stranded your uninhabitable.

Our metaphor, then, a space station held at arms’ length from unreachable life, transcribes complex emotions with the swift immediacy of shorthand. The writing’s percussive simplicity carries the pulse to steady rhythm. “In this voyage through horizonless landscapes, / I reach out toward memories” imposes the central conundrum, you cannot escape what you cannot leave behind, in an efficiency which elicits the engineer’s expression of elegance. Tight designs demand minimum torque at each joint, a soft touch that trusts each piano echoes the awaiting of the room. The game achieves this simplicity at several points, softfocusing stars to snowflakes to scintillate the composing metaphor, spacestation to the hollows in the home, with a few fleet delights like a child’s wonder of astroneering clashing against the father’s architectural supersedence furnishing just enough justification to satisfy the sole puzzle.

Unfortunately, acceleration towards a climax tempts our author towards explanations. Initially, this merely flattens the affect, with the old man explaining everything we’ve intuited since scene one in prose that struggles to add anything by adding anything. Sadly, this frustration accelerates alike to the climax, with the grand revelation annihilating the accumulated artistry: “It’s a photo of a child — not me — with my father and a woman I don’t recognize. The child, whose features resemble those of the old man from the ship, is wearing a birthday hat. On the photo, there’s a date: February 12th, the second part of my father’s password. If the child is the old man, he ate this corpse and hid it in his secret room.” The first sentence hits the gas, and for a moment everything holds together, but the swerving of the second and third sentence, haphazardly hazarding what we could very well guess, crashes in the ridiculous fourth sentence to a fireball from which we may only hope to Romain Grosjean.

Like its spacestation, the purpose of The journey is to be suspended gracefully in negative space. We should resolve its central conundrum through affirmation of the tensions: “I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function.” The empty spaces have a function, Dad, not least that they must contain you.

The nuclear deterrent is frequently misunderstood as mutually assured destruction through glistening missile arrays just a trigger finger away from apocalypse. In reality, the nuclear deterrent disincentivizes proliferation primarily through the heartstarching inevitability of some undertrained overexcited gutreactor yaketysaxing cascading radioreactive incompetencies to chainreacted gigachernobyl grayouts. Did you know there are currently dozens of unexploded nuclear bombs lying on the seafloor? It just was kind of a routine thing during the Cold War, whoops, there goes another one.

Lockout’s nuclear submarine bears this rich legacy proudly. A desk in the engine controls has railings that “are useful to keep people from accidentally knocking things off the desk … one has to walk past the railing carefully because a piece came loose when Butterfingers wanted to show he could jump over it.” Perhaps we could have foreseen an issue when we entrusted our nuclear deterrent to Butterfingers, but then again, it seems we’ve not foreseen much of anything. The game’s setpiece puzzle is that the automated disaster response automatically seals off the engine room, stranding you, which raises several questions like, why would you do that, why do we even want to abandon our station in the engine room during an electrical incident, how is this the second time this has happened on this voyage, maybe we should just spend our tax dollars on roads or something. Moreover, an emergency red light strobes you blinded, so literally the first step in disaster response is shutting off the disaster response so you can respond to the disaster. More questions emerge as we do respond to the disaster, like why is the wheel that opens the tool cabinet impossible to open, why is there no battery in the door controls, how come almost everything we need to do was already covered in training and we’ve clearly learned none of it.

The answer is, as you’ve guessed, it’s an escape room, fiddly dependencies pushing you to seek out square one forms the throughline. Once you’ve opened the door, the rest is shrugged: “You make your way out of the door, and find your crewmates in tight concentration on the command deck. You work out a plan and manage to preserve the vessel and your lives.” The room itself, then, fine. There’s some reasonable text adventury finicking, and I generally enjoy the genre of patiently simulate a diegetic skill. The issue that shortfuses this fun is blurriness, a vague sense of uncontact with each system you manipulate. Interactions can struggle with the daunting of their implementation, as when you need to search through training logs, but the desk with the training logs awkwardly rebuffs you: “The papers from the desk seem to be notes from various training exercises. You arrange them neatly on the desk so you can read them if you want to, but they seem meaty, so you’d prefer knowing whether any of them are relevant before you read them.” You already have to know which ones you want to read, which you find out by reading all of them one by one in the logbook to find out which ones you want to read, which causes them somehow to show up in the desk, which you can’t search, but you can just read? Similarly, at several points you pull up a help screen on the smaller screen you need to disambiguate from the monitor, which awkwardly mutters that you can’t read the help screen on the help screen, “the best way to read this help file is as a printed book, not on screen”, so instead you need to bring it up on the screen after which you can read the help, except when you get the right help screen, which isn’t the help screen page mentioned in the training notes but is a page that is mentioned in the training notes you type into the help screen, which is read straight off the help screen text.

As you’ve probably guessed, the answer to these issues is “Lockout is the first parser game released by the author, and as such may contain all kinds of quirks and odd bits.” Let’s instead then celebrate the author’s promise! Underthrumming Lockout is genuine interest in intertwining die Mensch-Maschine in procedure, the way in which our exertions to torque mechanisms exert us into the mechanizing logic, as ever more exacting you learn your response role are you extended through this ingineering resonates the beauty of the emerging capability you radioperate, which emerges as a playerfriendliness in the metalayer as the parser extends conditionalities to symphony the elegant consistencies you input output mediate, infusing the interaction not with mystic extravagance but a grounded realism of trial and error, confusion and learning, which, after some trial and error, we can hope our beloved parser catalyzes.

Why is it that you, weak of will, consider a sudoku a puzzle, it requires no concentrated response of alignment, you cell by cell sculpt til the form is freed, voila, are you satisfied? No, in my arrogance, wise of ways, I demanded more than Eye offered, always the path to exhaustion. Initially Eye asks you, or not even really asks you, nudges you to color by numbers: “The old man says, “Another very useful word is known as the Sphinx, which tours the pyramids. The Sphinx has the head of a lion, the body of a rat, and the tail of a wolf.” / “But that’s not a real word,” says one student. / "You are correct. Not all words are real words.”” The solution here is LAF: the first letter is the first letter of lion, the second letter is the middle letter of rat, the third letter is the last letter of wolf. An arbitrary set of instructions formulating its answer for you to fill in, for what? If the initial lateral form of reading pleases you, then it quickly saps your soul in sudokus like: ““I have learned how to get in,” says one servant. / “Tell me!” / The servant looks around cautiously. “One, twelve, and three.”” The answer being, counting up letters, alc, voila, are you satisfied?

Quite quickly you’re tapping your foot in anticipation of the revelation. The suffusion of Egyptian imagery suggests hieroglyphics, which can encode multiple syllables into phonogrammatic signs, but actually the travel codes follow a simple 5-4-1 pattern of location name to code, e.g. library → arl, which is a rule instantiated, as far as I can tell, entirely for the satisfaction of pyramid → map. The words of power you unlock are all equally as arbitrary: the signposted goal, attaining the rose, requires you to solve three minigames, each of which provides a letter, which jumble together meaninglessly: “oxd - that word’s body for a head / cab - head of a viper for a tail / bed - tail of a skink for a body”, XVK xyzzys you the END.

So you attain the rose, much to the envy of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, so we attain the revelation: you have collected x out of y points, go back and pzl! Here then is when the puzzling truly begins, transliterating the number of days in a year to letters, transliterating prime numbers into letters, mirroring the count of letters from one code to another, implying letters missing in phrases, counting up animals into ciphers, all dizzied through a map to make you long for the precisions of pyramids.

Perhaps you vibe with the puzzling, in which case, let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. If you don’t, then there’s nothing else; here’s a room description spartan to its purpose: “This room is quite warm. Pots and utensils are scattered around the counters, and more hang from hooks. A fire is roaring underneath a wide stove.” What little details appear here are hints jammed in for your careering condensery. QED.

Suitable for a digital artifact, many layers of mediation await our excavation, but true historians, we leave all this clutter to the earth to claim the story which best fits the page. Why bother parsing who wrote what? Written by someone in the 80s based on tropes written endlessly since the 1880s to be written by someone else in the 80s to be translated by, depending upon which recension of the credits you credence, one person or another person or probably Google, what’s one to make of intent? Here, the best source is the bandits: you hunt down this murderous roving gang, so they politely tie you up next to your blanket and a fire and your horse, inviting you graciously to the puzzle, these “outlaws with no past and no future.”

Though rather than fog our way round warehouses, the salient quiddity to survive the muddling of intermediacies is an awe for Arizona’s austere beauty: we ride the vastness of deserts and grasslands, descend into crevasses and mines, and, most memorably, traipse along a rickety rope bridge over “the high rocky walls of the gorge” in which “a raging torrent rushes away”. The game’s insistence that we lead our horse to water, mount and dismount it, climb ropes, seek out summits, and blast our way through rock blazes a lively path through the scorching landscape.

This outdoorsy romping traverses the 80s terseness to reach us through the translation as a timeless appeal, a star to guide us through mostly perfunctory puzzling. Sometimes a hatchet lies a room over from a wooden door in need of hatcheting, other times there’s a blanket you should’ve picked up at the beginning or you’ll be going back to the beginning to get it. If the connection ever gets too complicated, the examine will helpfully explain, hey, this object is the solution to a puzzle, make sure to use this to solve this puzzle: “Some very high trees grow close to the edge of the chasm. Maybe cutting one down could help you to cross it.” When Tin Star does hazard up a more complex sequence, like a shootout with bandits or having to revive a dying man, the solution cuts straight through the complexity, go ahead and “>shoot”, what are you waiting for, hurry up and “>revive him”.

The premier exception to this is the centrepiece puzzle, requiring you to seek out a high point and make a smoke signal, which demands that you piece together everything you’ve picked up along the way and contemplate that way you’ve wandered in a satisfying grounding. Since the landscape is the strength, we ought to play to it.

Nothing I’ve said matters, of course, you’ve already agreed. At one time they recorded this game to magnetic tape as a series of square waves to be interpreted bit by bit into a ZX Spectrum. You had to encode magnetically an exact sequence of short, medium, or long vibrations to pulse binary into this inscrutable space obelisk engineered by Babelist hubris so it could summon unto you Sedona and its mesas. What a precious, innocent time that was, a world still yet unblemished by me.