Ratings and Reviews by kaemi

So on one hand, this game gestures wildly at everything: our dramatis personae draws from history a la carte with random appearances from whomever seems like they could plausibly fill the role – there’s a French ambassador, may as well be Napoleon – so you get a strange eclecticism where Cleopatra chats with Rasputin about Audrey Hepburn; the plot sizzles with international intrigue, as multiple nations potentially engage in espionage over a Raytheon-led military project shrouded in secrecy, all the while snarled up with tawdry DC gossip a la the Petraeus scandal; there’s a multitude of meta levels that enjamb each other, like Antony and Cleopatra solve cases but then there’s also a TV show with the exact same premise as the real life duo, or how every historical character is both themselves and not quite themselves; and bizarre little details constantly unsettle the flow, like an offhand reference to a character wearing a Noh mask or the deliberately loose way that a foreign head of state seems interwoven with a classified state investigation.

On the other hand, however, rather than slosh chaotically between competing stylistic pressures, the game’s flat affect smooths over these discontinuities to make a mild matter-of-factness that equalizes every left turn into a neutral paste. Madcap juxtapositions merely provide the pretense for straight-as-you-go transcripts laying out a series of facts, not really building up to anything you could call a testimony, which you judge against the others. Characterization consists largely of wikiskim vibe approxies, though many interactions do not attempt at all to summon the historical person, using their name rather as a de facto placeholder, including our protagonist duo, who make little impression. The metonymy of the tone occurs when we visit a suspect in Alexandria, and there isn’t some grand attempt to capitalize on presumably-a-golden-reason-this-bizarre-combination-would-even-exist pun between the Virginian and Egyptian cities. The resulting flatness, beyond making you thirst a little pizzazz, also undercuts the two-player conceit, because neither perspective really accomplishes much that the other doesn’t, and the only real variable, a few moments where you can change the tone of a question based on who asks it, could easily have been achieved in a single player design.

Mostly the game persists with the weightless superficiality of a madlibs murder mystery, listing resinous references without their manifesting narrative consequences, although a few witticisms are peppered in to make some use of the setting, like this great line: “While you don’t necessarily have any issues with buying diamonds or gems with blood, as blood is an essential part of statecraft and a Queen cannot avoid it, Antony kindly explained the implications to an American audience.” Additionally, a few strong characterization lines help you parse the lineup, like this bit which purposefully ignites your suspicions: “His handshake is laser built to convey trustworthiness, vital energy, and a good-natured affect.” So electricity does carry down the line, even if it never sparks the story to life.

As the game ought, being so well engineered. The experience runs seamlessly, with live updates between clients, and a few interaction-rich collaboration points. The one bug we did encounter, a momentary disconnection from the server, ended up providing a positive moment of appreciation for the underlying systems, as we just clicked a button and were instantly right back in the thick of things. Presumably a lot of hard craft went into making the play experience so effortlessly smooth, and it’s hard not to be impressed with Twine as a platform in the wake of innovations like this.

There’s so much potential here, and the technical accomplishments of this game go a great deal towards establishing a solid foundation. As it is, though, the narrative on top doesn’t quite justify its expensive chassis.

The last several days have been upsetting, so I was attracted to this game’s “cosy” tag. The vibes were, as advertised, lovely. It manages to make a high stakes situation (I personally would be very anxious getting thrown into running my grandparents’ small business) feel, well, manageable. Felicity Banks deftly mixes in enough uncertainty and spice to keep the sunny pleasantries from glazing over into saccharine kitsch without overflowing into frustrations that might upset the mood, and the purling stream of minicrises keeps you flitting about ever so slightly frenetically to disappear the time as swiftly as a week in paradise. Add in a cute but not overpowering backdrop of romance, and you’ve got enough here that, when I reached the finishline, I wished I was only at the halfway point.

Given how swiftly the time escapes you, the game is well served by its fleetness in characterization. A small choice, like how you make your way through a crowd, leads naturally into a bit of insight into a character whose importance exceeds their screentime: “Granny nods in approval as you make your own path through the scrum. Going against the flow is certainly a family trait.” An easy economy that evinces the tightness of the design without drawing attention to itself. Our player character also comes across as having a distinct personality, even though they are largely a composite of our choices, because your choices always feel conveyed through the character, such that they can undertake your impulse but fail to embody the choice in a grounding way: “You spin around, almost falling over in the process, and half-scream, “What a beautiful morning!” / Sharon Dazzler rears back as if you’ve thrown Machupa at her. She gathers herself with a visible effort. “Hello?” / “Sorry,” you say. “It’s my first full day.”” The chagrin feels earned, because the choice makes us confront the fact that we’re trying to act in a way that doesn’t come naturally to the narrator, which is a fascinating path towards resolving characterization dissonance in a Choicescript style game. Sometimes, though, the game gets a little too glib in its quickness of character, leading to stereotypes that seep in some unnecessary bitterness. Surely it is possible to typify a teenage girl more thoughtfully than this: “A teenage girl who wants to catch the best photos and videos, and will cheerfully put her body on the line to get more views.” I get the mild eyerolling natural to the staff that have to cater to richer people at a resort, but this just felt a little unfair.

Still, the characterization does work its magic to forge connections between you and the characters in a vanishingly short amount of time. Like, I felt genuinely happy when I helped the Chinese family who were nervous about the language barrier to relax and have a great time. And the whirlwind of activities are designed with similar swiftness, able to capture specific moods and then immediately move on, like the nervous dauntedness that arises when you try to recall how to videos on tasks that feel way harder now that they’re real and in front of you and this has to work out: “If you’re going to convince a team of Health Inspectors that four cats in a B&B kitchen is a good thing, then you probably need to make sure that they’re not inclined to attack humans. You vaguely recollect seeing an adorable video of a foster carer changing a visibly diseased and furious stray into a loveable house kitty in a neatly-packaged seven-second video. It mostly seemed to involve lots of towels and perfect makeup.” Why do your memories about a thing seem so much more distant when you’re suddenly right in front of it?

Thus, even though the moments rush past, they still seem to linger, like this lovely line which gives us a sleepless night even though we click immediately to the next day: “He pulls back far too soon and looks at you as if he’s seeing a starry sky for the first time.” The sadness I felt having to slip away from this world coheres very nicely with our narrator, returning to Australia after their week abroad. As tempting as it would be to demand more, perhaps it is magical precisely because it is fleeting; stay any longer, and you might start to recognize you’re working a job. Better then to “quietly fade into the background, leaving Granny to deal with them all. It’s not your responsibility. / Not yet.”

So easy to hate. Orients your entire world. Gives you something to hold onto as you slowly lose everything. Because it’s deserved. Because you know what it is to suffer undeserved, so you have to believe in, if not justice, simply gravity, inescapable crushing weight sucking us all down. So easy to hate, because you no longer trust love, that there is even such a thing, colorless gaze of simply decay, nothing behind it but parasites.

They found your brother, “A bloated, rotting corpse. A parasite-ridden body. A centerpiece for nightmares. I’m sure you have enough of those already, her eyes say. When was the last time you felt safe in your own skin?” How you’ve, not always, you can’t stop thinking about then, known him. How you’ve snapped pencils in your hand wishing he would see in the mirror. How you’ve shocked awake at midnight. What you’ve wanted to drown, that there may emerge some part of your soul not sunken. “I don’t have to do this. I can go home right now, call the station and tell them to cremate the body. It’s not my fault he’s gone. / And I don’t need closure. I need him scrubbed from my memory with bleach and steel wool.” Don’t need closure, don’t need closure, need to believe there is a me that can still open up…

Looking at him, no, the text corrects you, the body, “There should be nothing left but venom.” But you want to be more than venom! You were never like this, you have never liked this. What if it is true that in the revulsion there is pity, in the hate there is, there is, what it overwrote, what you want to cherish like honesty, “Because I do miss you, but not you, I miss the part of you that taught me how to tie my shoes or drive a car. I miss when you were sweet to me. When you pretended to be. / And it’s not a question of mourning. Because you’re my brother. I’ll always mourn you, there will always be a piece of me that’s missing now that you’re dead. Maybe that means you aren’t dead at all. / And it’s not a question of love. I love you more than anything and anyone in this world. It’s unconditional. It’s maddening. I wish I could rip out the love I have for you.” Because at the end of the cycle of crying, your body loosens, your breath deepens, you remember the, you’ve forgotten it felt like this, desire to embrace, to love through the.

Because everything else is buried, why must you this inclination? Why is there never a gone that hurts you less than everyone else? Just because we desperately want to go doesn’t mean we want everything to go, just like that. “Age 18. I’d gotten accepted into a big name university, scholarship and all. My chance at freedom. (Three months earlier, Mom got diagnosed with lung cancer. You argued we both needed to be there to support her. And maybe if things were normal and nice, I would’ve agreed. But they weren’t, so I didn’t.) / She died before I could visit, so I never did. If I never come back, she’s not really dead. / (Well, I’m here now. I took too long and now everyone but me is gone, but I’m here.)” You are here, and everybody else just leaves, how is it fair they keep taking part of you to the grave, yet you still remain haunted by all you cannot, will not bury.

Not closure, but a shoulder, that tears might bloodlet in the warmth, keep your blood from freezing over. Because it keeps freezing over. Because it is so easy to hate, gives you someone to hold onto as you slowly lose everything. “He is dead. I am no less alone.”

The play within the play’s the thing to cache the context of the sting, so The Library of Knowledge nests its narrative inside a haunted echoarium. A library, with its trove of closed stories, offers an uncanny mediation in which the narrative’s desperate incantations can curl into a place outside of time, the breath between the storm: “The candlelight wavers, and then recedes, like an ocean flattening before a tsunami, twisting and turning through ribbons of bright emerald and heavy black smoke. Suddenly, it disappears, and you are cast into inky tenebrosity. You feel your breath exhale in the bitter, uncomfortable air.”

In this narrative layer that retains the immediacy of our engagement, we encounter the ancient spirit of Shaanxi, a primordial knowledge god, and beseech its library for answers to our questions, which, for a moment, are suspended unknown in the mist. If this sounds eldritch, as liable as Hermaeus Mora to opt into tentacles and terror, then The Library of Knowledge adeptly presses through the tropes to cast the scene to stronger, more compelling emotions: ““Sad?” Shaanxi gazes hazily away. “It did… for a long while I felt… lonely. I’d read every love story ever written, every ballad, every sonnet, but… I knew I’d never truly understand the ecstasy of being seen, the warmth of being loved. It was all just letters on a page, a vibrant world observed behind greying glass.” / “What changed?” You inquire. / “Well I suppose I realised something… Just like a mother loves her fresh-faced babe, I too love these small, funny, vibrant little worlds… And just as that newborn child will stare back at its mother, not being able to comprehend the vivid colours of her face or the workings of her brain, or how, when its older, it might call her cruel for not bowing to its every whim and whimsy, that child still loves its mother, its creator… in its own curious way. I do not need to be recorded in paper, for paper too will one day fade, but I am content if even tiny fractures of my existence remain in the memories of those who are worthy.” This touching combination of fear and heart pervades the library scenes to give it a lustrous sheen supernating the substance beyond tepid renditions of shadows upon shadows.

The strength of that combination supercharges when rilling through extravagant passages, like this one that builds nearly baroque in its transliteration of one sense into another: “Their piercing, visceral choir is constantly shifting… one moment it’s a harmony of wordless whispers slipping across oily scales or burning snakes writhing in agony, and the next it’s hundreds of mice scurrying across wet stone, and then it’s… is that laughing? Is it screaming? Is it weeping? The cacophony crescendos into a violent shrill that penetrates the deep of your skull, threatening to split your skin from bone.” Given how physical sound is, how you can feel music reverberating within you, this passage plays upon a twilight synesthesia primed to resonate within us. As with any combination, though, you have to remain careful, because it can easily trip too far in one direction and clatter the delicate mood, like this offnote joke from Shaanxi: “Hmm… ancient civilisation… world creation…doomsday…cheesecake recipes… Ah! The world of Elandris. Now, what specifically do you want to know?” But when it works, The Library of Knowledge enrichens its shadows with subtle shades of black in an oilslick rainbow gradient.

Which queues up the primary disappointment in The Library of Shadows, that this layer is just the uncanny mediation of nested narrative layers which prove not nearly as striking. In Shaanxi’s library, we read from two books: one about the world and one about the narrator’s life. The world book is just a loredump about a lightly fictionalized China and a heavily fictionalized Europe, a wiki summary made more egregious by the fact that most of this exposition ultimately holds zero bearing on the rest of the story. Like the provinces of the ersatz China are literally just Xinjiang, Jiangnan, Guangdong, and can stand in for themselves, while most of the original bits, like the Roselith empire, prove little more than backdrops. The entire world book could have been excised and you’d still more or less intuit the details.

As for the book of the narrator’s life, the strengths of the mediation layer’s prose rust, blunting into backstory blandness: “Over the next two months, Doi and Setsunai travelled by foot to reach the western border of Yanxia; the pair hiked over the winding waterways of Zhejiang, past the abundant rice fields of Jiangnan, through the blistering sands of Zinjiang, and into the rich coastal region of Shandong. / After some investigation, Doi concluded that the area most likely to facilitate her voyage would be the small town of Kowloon, which sat nestled in the Shandong caves. Due to the town being hidden away from nearby cities, and the convenience of being situated close by to the Spectral Ocean, which separated Yanxia from the west, the town had become a safe haven for criminal activities - specifically pirating and smuggling. / First, Doi visited the docks, and asked around for any spare work, citing their previous experience as a deckhand, but the townsfolk were suspicious of foreigners; they took once glance at Doi’s bright white hair and ignored her. So instead, Doi went to the tavern to play mahjong with the locals. She played precisely and shrewdly - winning enough to break even and then, as the locals began to complain, would fumble their next few games. Doi laughed alongside the locals as they all counted their winnings.” It feels more like someone’s relaying to me a story than telling me a story.

Given that these nested layers make up the majority of the story, ultimately The Library of Knowledge sags. Nevertheless, when it revels in its immediacy, The Library of Knowledge can spark out highlights that make the journey memorable. Even within the nested layers, pearls gleam that remind that, if the muddled whole remains inchoate, care and skill still enchant its turbid trundling.

A murdered god wanders Ancient Egypt to inquire of gods and royals the mystery of his death. Sound intense? Detective Osiris does gesture towards its stentorian drama, like when sky goddess Nut muses on the strained symbiosis between humanity’s voraciousness and the gods’ creativities: “When we first created the world, it was tiny. It was so small, but it had everything we thought that people needed. / And, try as we might to provide everything, the mortals just kept expanding their efforts. They wanted more. More land for farming, more troves of natural resources, more things to discover, more knowledge of the world around them, and its limits. / So we kept making it bigger. We added more forests, then deserts, mountains, the ocean. Before long the people began to divide into countries. Sumer first, then Elam, and here in Egypt. / Shai tells me that one day, many summers and winters from now, humankind will set their sights on the sky itself. By then, they’ll scarcely even believe in us, only in themselves. So they’ll seek to conquer the sky with elaborate machinery, forged of metal. When that day comes, we’ll have to move even further away, and build more, for them to explore.” As an apotheosized mortal yet to develop an aspect, this polytheistic cosubstantiation through ideal and iteration offers a dizzy array of thematic jewels to inlay in Osiris’ reckoning with the divide between earth and sky.

An array that quickly proves too dizzying, as Detective Osiris retreats from its scope, modulating down into chatty ditziness that builds color through silliness rather than through a sustained tone. So we’re assured that Anubis is “a very good boy” and that Geb, an earth god, is “laying on the surface of the sky, face down, ensconced in a cloud of smoke. I recognise the scent: Cannabis.” Any heightened urgency posed by the setting melts in conversations like when we ask Maat, goddess of law and justice, about our murder: "Osiris, you too are now a god. There’s no need to bow, silly … I cant do anything about it other than be annoyed and wait for the guilty party to die. Or I have to go begging one of the more powerful gods to intervene and, y’know, do a plague or something. In normal circumstances. But, your wife did some magic, bingo bango, you’re back as a god.” Despite this weightless levity, the game also never really settles into comedy either, unable to transmute cheeriness into humor. The few times it does go for a joke, the results aren’t exactly electric: “Geb rolls his eyes. “At night, I could be watching sex. So that’s what I was doing. When you were killed, I wasn’t looking in the right direction.” / I’m beginning to see some of the attraction in watching the mortals. For the first time in the afterlife, I truly grin.”

Despite its many tonal jumps, Detective Osiris never truly surrenders its ambition, particularly in a few passages of lyrical descriptions that flourish a lovely dazzle: “The crystalline surface of the sky is hard underfoot, and the air is thin. The sprawling country of Egypt is visible through the floor below. Ra gently guides his solar barque, carrying the sun, on an adjacent pellucid river. The celestial light douses the world below in light and warmth, but the temperature here is fresh, and the baked glass mezzanine sky smells like hot stone roads cooling in the night air.” Rather, the game is just kind of jittery and unsettled. Take its historicity as an example: there are some solid hits, like a shoutout to the much underrated Elamites or how Egyptians counted on their hands, and then there are some glaring errors, like mixing in Ptolemaic Alexandria with the clear Old Kingdom stylings. Sometimes these errors are so obvious that they likely are an intentional part of the silliness, such as the Sphinx’s joke about H always being in the middle of “akhet”, which is the transliteration of a hieroglyph. The result is an unevenness that never seems to settle into itself.

Whatever plays upon the surface, however, the underlying gearbox has no hesitations. The gameplay structure manages a clever magic trick of gently guiding you through an ever expanding playspace, keeping a firm control on the pacing of your journey without making you feel railroaded. No moment drags on too long, and the twist ending starkly reinterprets several of the characters you’ve met along the way. In this consummate craftsmanship, Detective Osiris manages a grounding that its narrative never quite achieves.

The Trolley Problem Problem satirizes, you'll be surprised to hear, The Trolley Problem. Just as airily as the thought experiment is always invoked, the first screen sketches the setup that offers us the ethical choice: "There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two (and only two) options". Which ethical imperative do you follow and why? Is there a justified utilitarian value in minimizing suffering, or is actively choosing the death of a person an act of instantiating harm that condemns you as a conduit of mortal misery? What makes a choice ethical? In a world of double binds, is morality applicable to the grays we must sift?

Our author mocks this pompous grandioisty of the thought experiment to ridicule the assumption of the double bind which forces us into a binary action. Because, ultimately, the trolley problem is a fantasy of control, in which you can analytically evaluate the suffering you, in the fullness of your Weltanschauung engagement, elect to perpetuate. Instead, we are reminded that you don't have perfect information from which to philosophize an answer, that actions perpetuate consequences in complex interactions that don't conform to your agentic intentions, that aleatory indeterminacies compound any choice beyond the scope of your miniscule, irrelevant existence.

Thus, the idea that you might, in the blessed infinities of your wisdom, refuse to act, styling yourself up in inviolable principles more beautiful than the people they destroy, is eyerollingly dismissed: "You do nothing. The runaway trolley careens into the five people tied up on the tracks, killing them in an incredibly gruesome fashion. It hurtles on into a trolley station, which - though you hadn't noticed during your initial assessment of this terrible situation - also happens to be the end of this particular line. The trolley slams into the stopblock at the end of the tracks, throwing passengers violently through the glass windows. / Seeing this, the one person on the side-track immediately suffers a heart attack and dies." Your noble decision not to cause the death of the person on the sidetrack causes their death anyway, and oh by the way more people died than you bothered to perceive would.

If you elect the different moral path, choosing to spare as many lives as possible, accepting the inevitable ethical compromises of a broken world while still adhering to the underlying purpose of a moral code, then the result is a cartoonishly escalating Rube Goldberg machine of violence, in which the trolley careens into more people, which causes a car crash, which yadda yadda yadda enrages the mole people from the depths... the unintended consequences of your act erases any utilitarian value you thought you could wrest from the circumstance.

Barraged by this sneering uncertainty, the idea of a Moral Agent Making a Choice, the core conceit of the trolley problem, seems puerile, wilting the weightiness of its central choice. The Trolley Problem Problem punctures the epistemological bubble of the thought experiment, dissipating its imaginary power into the chaos of the real world.

Faced with this dissipation, how are we to choose? Never fear, I can rescue you from the vicissitudes of uncertainty with an ironclad Objective Answer! Here's the Of Course Correct Obvious solution to the trolley problem. First, you pull the lever to divert the trolley towards the single victim. Watch as their eyes grow wide in horror, recognizing their condemnation confirmed, that the salvation they had been imagining, a life of pious survivor's guilt, has suddenly been ripped from them, they are now the victims they would have so many times at funerals and gatherings and late at night wished was them, and suddenly all their principles surge through them useless, the entirety of their existence sealed prematurely into a vacuum more total than any feeling that drove them, all possibilities annihilated to blank their humanity to mere object, a set of tissues and muscles and bone without claim upon cosmic continuity, and in that instant aware of the immaculately unique preciousness of life, of the beauty of the contingencies that have characterized their lives into such profusions of color, of the fragile wonder that the inuring of cycling days had suppressed beneath their shock and loving awe, they begin to cry at the most mortal levels of their being, weeping for days lost and for days lost. At the last possible moment, as they sink into transcendent nihil grasping melancholy at the earth, flip the switch back. Watch their lungspunch bellowgasps as they witness their life rematerialize, as they watch, as if in slow motion, as if one by one, the quelling of five lives opposite, each one having undergone the reverse spiritual journey, having achieved at last lifewish when they're whiplashed back to destruction without the time to process the loss, snuffed still starryeyed with beautiful lives reunfurling, a snowglobe moment of sincerity into which the void simply, painlessly, overwrites. The absolute agony of the survivor as they bloodsoaked recoil from your monstrousness, as they realize that you chose for them to live and for the others to not, that you specifically intervened such that your sparing of them would not be a contingency you allowed to happen but an irreversibly chosen act, that their suffering survival is your specific violence, that they know, just know, that you will await in their thousands of nightmares coming, bleakstaring straight into them, yes, I am the author of your anguish, of your living, all that you undergo is my blessing unto you, and in that sweating sleepless terror they will finally know God. Which means, of course, that it is the morally correct choice.

my heart, bared. by Sophia de Augustine

Tense, bejeweled prose muzzleloads the heartbeat: "Blooms too heavy to hold their own heads aloft nod gently, swaying on shorn stems, angled to sit just so. They sprawl languidly across every available surface, petals fluttering down to carpet with any movement in the house. Every sighing tumble sets your teeth on edge, eyes skittering to the doorway. He stands silent sentinel, one hand resting against the threshold, not yet bidden entry." So my eyes beamglew and I logged online. Some sentences threaten to flutter a little too gossamer, but they're anchored down with sudden raw bashes, as this pinkish wave of overexposure crashing over a craggy clause: "His hands are just as bitten into, bearing the marks of experiments gone wrong, faces broken against the crush of knucklebone, and gun powder burns from where he's held rifles with the same surety as a long cherished lover."

This batting eyelashes alternation between phantomy fleetness and fear spikes superimposes into a holographic cutesy queasy lacy danger: "The paintbrush's handle is burnished smooth from your cradling fingers, fitting into a phantom's touch. It's difficult, to focus on sketching, even with the luxury of the smooth, buttery glide of pencil over paper. His gaze holds a physical heft, like butterfly pins skewering you into place. He remains quiet, holding his tongue, hands folded politely in his lap. / He fiddles around with his cufflink, pearls cradled close by gold. Eventually, it grows intolerable." While sustaining this mode into a mounting anxiety, the story sparkles with purpose and poise.

The swerve, because surely we were all awaiting the swerve, that this is your husband, separated from you by a supernatural somewhat, life and death and laboratories and profaned rosaries and all that, springs the trap prematurely, trying to pump in a bunch more exposition whilst still pacing the bravado of a grand reveal. The result is confusing, hinting at twenty flavors of katabasis: wait, I'm dead, or he's dead, or we're both dead, or maybe I'm an iteration of a dead archetype that he keeps incarnating? I gather that the story is based on a Fallen London quest, so perhaps it is relying on a preexisting knowledge base, but then it would have the luxury of dispensing with all the exposition it profuses, so that doesn't quite cohere either. Our final choice isn't so much a choice as a tagline, so it doesn't supply us an answer.

Thus, my heart, bared. teases with wondrous aplumb, but when it invites us to dance, it trips, flails forward, seesaws over our legs, smashes through the glass table, fumblerolls into a waste of shattered teacups, then looks up bloodied and cravat crumpled, grins still seductively, as if maybe that was mysterious or dramatically masculine or threateningly romantic or?

The concept, a soldier reading as many of his comrades’ letters home as possible in order to perfect the style of his own aestheticized letter, is extraordinarily literarily generative, a perfect seed for a psychological novella in the Russian tradition, somewhere between Gogol and Platonov. You could go cosmological, a dizzying sense of unimportance in the face of the mass replication of one’s predicament in the unfathomable scale of slaughter of war; you could go postmodern, with a selfconscious reflexivity on the text only as a set of tropes which generate the letter in reverse, with the soldier trying to get the battle to compose the conditions for his letter’s authentic sentimentality; you could go Borges mystical, posing the idea of the perfected soldier’s letter as a literary koan; you could go Celine sardonic, a brittle lambast of the way war reveals us wretched; sadly, it seems, Between the lines of fire elects no path, perfunctorily printing the sequencing.

The game being simplistic in its execution, with telegraphed sequences of go north or talk to x and y, troubled only at the end by a single puzzle, isn’t what I mean by perfunctory. The prose’s limited valences are only partially what I mean by perfunctory, forgiving as I am always of a language barrier. Rather, the perfunctory smothering of the work occurs in its most critical scenes, when, pressed to the psychological richness of its conceit, it elides it entirely abashed, ushering the action offstage like a Greek: “I wake up just before dawn. I get up and I can’t believe my eyes. Pavel and Nikolai are on the ground in pools of blood. The bayonet next to me, soaked in red. It was me who did this. / The pen is in my hand and there are sheets everywhere, crumpled or torn by anger. I realize that in my delirium I had tried to write my letter with the letters I had already, plus those of Pavel and Nikolai. / A leaf next to me is the only one left intact. I take it carefully and begin to read. The letter is beautiful! The alchemy of all these sensitivities had taken place. I am in tears, but at the same time I understand that the letter is not perfect. Something is missing that I cannot identify.” What’s the point in writing the setup and denouement of a story but leaving its heart hollow? The soldier’s desperation for the letters, the way it obsesses him into delirium, seems interesting, certainly, but we only hear about it secondhand, quelling the I interiority that sieves colors through the predicament.

Yet even at this level of the photograph rather than the painting, there could still be a certain verve to the performance, a playful stitching together of the letters’ tropes as personified in the soldiers whose letters we steal. From one soldier the melancholy reflection on having marched hundreds of miles from home to die, when his forefathers all had the luxury of a single cemetery; from another soldier the romanticist yearning to see his beloved one last time before the end; yet another recalls their childhood, realizes now the true pleasures of innocence; you could go collecting reflections on death to inflect your death. Alas, even this is stolen from us, with the various letters receiving at most indifferent descriptions, and our final synthesis being handwaved away: “This is the end of Sidorof’s story. He joined another nearby battalion and a few days later was killed in action. His family received the most exciting and moving letter ever written from the front lines.” Your sigh echoes in the hollowness.

Between the lines of fire is a sketched outline of a captivating story. One hopes the writer one day writes it.

Athletic success requires sacrifices: time, friends, the manifold diversity of life, choosing instead to hone your body to a razorsharp blade, shaving off everything that doesn’t attenuate you to some point, the medal must be the point, a delineated absolute efficiency of existential framing in which all this is validated, an excellence you pursue and pursue until you one day wake up as, victoriously sculpted into an ideal several seconds more ideal than any other body screaming and panting up the steps. Years sweating into the dark dreaming of the podium, and it comes, and for the first time realized you stand there and realize you’re alone, suddenly being the only one at the end literalizes: “You always dreamt of this - standing on the little wooden step, the applause, being awarded a trophy to take home with you - but it’s bittersweet, as Susan isn’t here to see your achievement, and you still don’t know where she is or how she’s doing. / You sit for hours by the finish arch, your limbs stiffening up in the cold, as the dawn breaks and the sun comes up over the final peak of the Merrithorne route. You wait. / And wait.” And you remember what your old mentor said, the one who first paired you with your running partner, “‘It’s not the result, but rather the adventure along the way.’”

Which is fine to believe when you still await the result, while the journey still leads somewhere, but then you end up either way alone: “Sitting together in the sunshine, Susan finally explains why she’s been so tired during the race. She’s not well, she says, and she’s not going to get better. She didn’t - couldn’t - tell you before, but this was her last mountain race. She just wanted to finish one last time. With you.” You can choose whether or not to leave Susan behind, but you can’t bring Susan with you.

In this final refusal to finality, we’re left “trying your absolute hardest not to appear unhappy or worried or (god forbid) impatient” as you slow through a series of choices interrupting the “relentless forward motion” of marathoners, dallying in specific spaces just long enough to convince Susan forward, trying to remain useful in the gaps by gathering water, opening a pack of supplies, reading instructions. Because of this emphasis on the moments when you’re not running, The Last Mountain lacks the intensive rush of a race. Besides creating a bit of emotive dissonance, this nonintensity prevents the central dynamic of a running partner who can’t keep up from pressuring the player into confrontation. The writing reminds you that Susan is slowing you down, yet she’s right there with you as you U and D, with the only major moment of reprioritization being during a precarious descent when the game specifically instructs you to take time to watch Susan, but you could choose not to: “Suddenly, Susan loses her footing and falls. You should have been watching! / For a sickening moment, you are sure Susan is gone… but thankfully, she manages to cling to a ledge on the side of the cliff. She is badly injured and appears dazed, and it takes you a long time to climb down and pull her back onto the path, with help from other runners. It’s now clear you need to call the emergency services; it takes a while to get signal, but once you get through, an air ambulance quickly arrives and you are both whisked off to hospital. / Susan’s recovery process is long and only ever partial.” A disastrous ending, but not one earned by imbalancing priorities, rather merely out of curiosity for what happens if you deliberately defy the hint.

Replacing the emphasis on competitive speed is the bittersweet tenderness of caring for a running partner who is now more the noun than the adjective. The Last Mountain offers over ten endings, each one based upon the cumulative effect of small choices you make in each room, which filter into three basic categories: finishing with Susan, finishing without Susan, or failing along the way. The first category allows you to get the best possible marathon result but is typified pretty unambiguously as negative, while the third category is obviously not good. Instead, the game nudges you towards the second category, guiding Susan through steps along the path, so that you can finish this one last mountain as you always have, together. If you do the best job possible escorting her, putting as little strain on her as possible while guiding her carefully and refusing to let her fall behind, you receive what I believe is the best ending: “But somehow, in the end, Susan picks up the pace - to your great surprise. She puts everything she has into it, and you become so invested in getting her to the finish line that you stop caring about your own result. Susan beats you by two seconds - and incredibly, you finish bang on the cutoff time for the race. If you’d been one second slower, you’d have been disqualified, as rules are rules. You stare at your medal, feeling like you’ve witnessed a miracle. The unexpected medal is a sweet reward, but Susan’s sheer delight is sweeter.” This tenderness, in which your nurturing of her ability to excel exceeds your own desire to perform, delivers the true tonal intention, loving sweetness suffused with loss and loneliness.

Because you can care for someone through the gauntlet, overcome all the obstacles with them, struggle their excellence for both of you to awe, but the journey doesn’t last forever, some day you arrive where we’re all headed. Left alone on the path, how do you keep going, The Last Mountain muses: “For many years afterwards, you believe that Merrithorne was your last mountain, too. That the mountains were something you shared with Susan, and now that part of your life is over. / But eventually, you find yourself returning. New friends accompany you on your adventures now - but old friends’ voices forever linger in your ears, spurring you on along the mountain trail.” The how, the why, it doesn’t have an answer, but you do keep going, and in that, at least, you’re not alone. Maybe one day you will medal; standing on that podium, you’ll have so many memories to share it with.

A journey into the far reaches of the galactic hinterlands teases you with the mysterious exoticism of interstellar adventure, but Hinterlands: Delivered! chugs instead into parallel mundanity. You’re operating a Parcel Express cargo craft into an “inconveniently located” planetary system, turning into the culdesac to drop off your last delivery before the weekend. The diffident fiction of the craft molds easily into the delivery van vibes, with an air conditioner that doesn’t work, an adjustable visor for the sun(s), and, we’re annoyed to notice, a fuel gauge running low.

So we swoop by the nearest rest stop and find ourselves either on a strange desert planet or in Utah: “The south side of the trail is blocked by an impassable overgrowth of brush, cacti, and weird spindly trees. Towering buttes are barely visible in the far distance.” This demonstrates the tension that low lore scifi exhibits, which is the need for compressing the expressive range to remain within a communicable shorthand. Otherwise, you end up with the dense flights of fancy that Hinterlands: Delivered! does make one go at: “To the other side of the farm is a closed pen containing a blurghon, a g'laar, an ooloo, a wyrgnacht, and a yiggim.” Gosh, guess we’ll need to destim the doshes! Because of that jabberwocky rattle, I rather enjoyed this sequence, which sizzled flair beyond western with rayguns. It’s exciting to explore when your examinations can yield “The g'laar is a large amphibious beast that resembles a bright yellow flea with pink fins where its legs should be. It has large compound eyes on either side of what must be the creature's head, which is otherwise featureless.”

This, being the highlighted exception, can lead you to intuit the rusted backroads detritus which instead makes up most of the world: “Slunk's room is not so much messy as impossibly over-crowded. Every inch of every surface is cluttered with something or other: shelves bowing under the weight of hundreds of old magazines, several rows of household cleaners on the dining table, the television perched atop an massive stack of old stereo equipment, accompanying remote controls lined up on the coffee table, multiple laundry baskets full of clothes on the bed, ashtrays and coasters scattered about everywhere, and so on and so on from floor to ceiling. There's barely space to stand.” These televisions, magazines, and stereos assure us that our spacefaring hasn’t dragged the text adventure out of the 80s. Classic puzzles like climbing a cliff with a rope and grapnel or using a cane to hook a key adhere to the orthodoxy. Our PC even has a classically heavy dose of the Adventurer’s Sociopathy, getting NPCs to look the other way by wreaking havoc with waspish disregard, stealing the sacred orb after which the planet is named by desecrating their only other sacred object as a diversion.

This all works, of course, to the extent that you’re here to play along. Weird details that don’t add up like a recreational drug that “any basic fusion reactor based engine can run on just a tiny pinch of the stuff” become humorous specifically because of their wild grasping. Dissonance becomes silliness, as when I had a tense chase with an assassin which led to a dramatic gunslinging confrontation, only to discover they’d had time to write up the entire sequence in their diary in meticulous detail. Look, I know I’m not the fastest gun in the west, but you don’t have to livetweet it!

In that vein, there is enough stuff around to make your jaunt feel complete by the time you’ve scrabbled together a liftoff. Plenty of twists keep up the momentum, and every noticed detail proves useful in a satisfying way. On display is a clear intentionality and ambition, even if it usually boils down to locks and keys. Which will surely prove a crowdpleaser in a ParserComp!