Reviews by kaemi

In Verb Noun Adjective, the admirably confusing Rybread has set Yet Another Meta Parody Adventure adrift in a set of sprawling optimization puzzles so haphazardly juxtantipodal that the many individually winning qualities haven’t coherently set. Perhaps this is inevitable when Counterfeit Monkey, a game that has seen numerous community bugfix patches in the decade since its release, serves as the chief inspiration for a game that does not list a single beta tester.

The trap that befalls many meta parodies is it’s a chore for the reader to take seriously what the author has not, and this game trips into this trap basically immediately with basic contradictions like “You are on a short, dusty road … The road itself extends the way the sun rises and sets.” Sometimes the slipups are deliberately jokey: “The uh…occidental road… there’s an easier word for this…ugh, I just had it. I’ve been saying it… Anyway, you are on the road, let’s cut to the chase. Exits are east and… on the latitudes.” West, you say, and the game thanks you. Lucky for you, I’ve enormous experience with people rambling incoherently about the west until they do us all a favor and forget what it is they’re trying to say.

That uncertainty of prose, amplified by typos and a tendency to vacuity of a certain “weight, mass, volume”, is rather an unfortunate accompaniment to a game that would like you to collect a coin from “SCORE”, see, as in an O, leaving the “SC RE” behind, then later give a counterfeit coin to a “Monkey” to get a “Moonkey”, as in another O, since, of course, Counterfeit Monkey. Enjoined to the closest of reading to wit upon any whit of wordplay, you end up trying to ply the r from “This is the last indulgence in the land and costs only a single coin three trimes” to fix the typo in “Seems familia, with an equally familiar and tinier mailbox next to it”. I don’t mind red herrings, but I do mind a moat “with an intense current”.

Such frustrations prove doubly frustrating when the layers that do exist can be so compelling! Who doesn’t want to give Can’t Cant to a thief to steal STEAL? In one offhand description: “A torn manuscript depicting a thief sent to Naraka, a realm of torment and suffering. His only act of charity in life was sparing a spider. One day a single silky tread of web shoots down to Naraka and he grasps it and starts climbing out.” This seemed strange to me, because like most people I was familiar with this story through Akutagawa, but the word for hell here should be jikogu, not the Sanskrit naraka. As it turns out, though, Akutagawa took the story from an anthology of early Buddhist parables, and in a Pali Canon context maybe this makes sense? Or what’s happening here. Believe it or not, this is actually a set up to a genuine dishonest-to-Satan punchline: when you, having stolen steal, steal and get sent to hell, it’s explained that hell is, with the help of its deep pool of private equity talent, performing a bit of a rollup: “We are really leaning into the whole syncretism trend this quarter. Keeping this space traditional, but trying to setup Naraka to the east of the pentagram, Tartarus, Druz Demana, Ọ̀run Àpáàdì and even Jahannam if we get the budget approved.” And you escape by having spared a spider earlier to use its silkthread to climb out. Close reading rewarded, I’d say! The best part is there’s a whole separate sequence that happens here if you purchase an indulgence. Silliness ricochet is where parody genuinely starts to create large logic jumps that recontextualize the space through humor. If that recontextualization doesn’t apply in the million more cases where it doesn’t apply, then at least it’s funny when it does: “Hell is where the heart is! Especially if it’s heavier than a feather!” For a game that spends much of its screen time on zanies that groan both where they wilt obvious as well as where they jitter unexpected, as in this one two punch, “The OSHA equivalent has hit Big Adventure, and while bureaucracy has oiled the machine, there’s still some rusty spots. So consider: you’ve had a tetanus shot… but how many years ago?” there lurks ever capable the ability to tell a genuine joke: A banker declares, “We have our own coin, and it’s done us very well for many generations!”

Ultimately, as hostilely obtuse as this game is, I think you can parse it in a single combination: “Funemployment has let me tackle Inform 7 or at least try. This adventure is really a puzzle-fest inspired by decades of ideas and a recent reread of the Renga in Blue blog. Some of those early games were brutal, but those eureka moments must have felt so sweet” meets “By the way, and unrelated, ever hear that an hour of research can yield one sentence in creative writing?” Perhaps IFComp isn’t the best venue for the resulting ramble, but then again would IFComp really represent us without grandiose mistakes?

Several times, and I must say I’m batting a thousand on this (baseball (good (what have you never left the house and encountered terrified another person that exists (I’ve scored a double century, get out of my epost)))), I’ve held off from reviewing a game, because I had an inkling that it was a trap, that any type of response was the type of response they vituperatively awaited, and I don’t need to dial up my dialup to be reminded I’m not enough, that comes without any effort at all. This is the essential dejection that faces our vampire assassin, eager to be unreachable by this predicament: “Whatever I belong to it’s been long erased from the sapphire landscape. I make my own space. I make this city my bitch. I’m important like that. I make my own importance.” The fantasy of a magic invisible, not that it’s magic, only some sort of system functioning where they have not yet defined, if you struggle enough you can squirm through their strictures unfathomable: “Just cut the connection cable connecting to the wider world. Then I’m in. / Of course it’s not that simple. I understand that. I’m ready for it.” But what if you can’t reach it? What if you’re paranticipated in some system simply loops back to this expectation of? Is there a self worthwhile if not elsewhere? “I’m a liar. I take the subway back home, ducking into the ground, worming my way through the veins of the city, a virus without a ticket, undead and self-replicating. That sounds stupid. I’m not stupid. I’m smarter than that, smarter than a smart card, I need to stop thinking.” How do you get out?

Because there’s no way to reach the man in the panic room without being one of “thousands of stories, you see, I must have done all the possible combinations. Any object you can think of, any backstory, any personality type, they’ve all been used for murder. It’s all I can see now. Swimming in my mind, drowning my thoughts…” And there’s nothing that makes you want to see if your skull has other states of matter brainreachable more than to be expected by the kinds of people who are expecting, these answerably gazing ghouls who “could be your father, the one who slaps you on the back and tells you to watch out for women. You never know what we’re thinking.” Suddenly we’re not arcane but rather an awkward phrasing, “Keep mansplaining my predicament and I’ll kill you faster” which is what they’ve always thought we were, their sentence misspoken. These experts on the correct form, they assure you from a world which you slither perpetually after afterobserver, it’s a shame the publishing industry but at least “literary launch” lies out of unabstract compression, the more you consider it the more you’re willing to accept their terms and acidify nonervator: “They don’t retrain you for the world that comes, they just wait for you to stop being part of it.” There’s no approach that doesn’t make us connected, and if we so become, then it’s justified, this vituperative “CONSTANTASSURE”. Who wants that? Who is the wanting here? This alarm that has ceased to alarm you. How do you get out?

Take this sentence, and you will, I’m sending it by certified mail so that they will tell me about you, register forever how you interacted so I don’t even have to be there to know, which is all we really want, to be somewhere else without poisoning the thereness with our presence, the United States Postal Service knows where you live and are contractually required to report back to me, I’m not sure if that’s really economical at five bucks but that’s what they asked and I paid it and it’s not really up to me if this is subsidized so that one day I Will Be Found And Recorded: “I’m just like any other. I could be on the cover of a book or magazine, but I couldn’t, because I can’t appear in photographs. That’s good; it makes me less precious. Less precious people do more important work. I’m doing real work; I’m not worried about my image. I haven’t got an image. These are my gifts.” Now yes you’re thinking that’s more than one sentence, just stop, will you, for once. Just, please, for me. So take this sentence. It’s glib, it uses a rhythmic return in lieu of posing the thought precisely as it’s poignant so that it skims through the cheap ha ha, and you could read it and get nowhere you’ve not gone before, which is you’re probably right, someone slick with it can say the phrase class consciousness while the rest of us bury ourselves in concrete until whichever blessed whenever rescues us the revolution, the next paragraph has been written before: “The job is: he’s a successful crime writer, successful enough to retire on a fortune. I’m planning to take his gifts. It’s work, mind you, more work than he’s been doing. I don’t leave people to starve. I balance out the system.” But I’m still here, holding this sentence, I am trying to hand it to you. You haven’t had the moments when you were most important make you less precious? You don’t realize what it’s like the first time you come home and look in the mirror and just see what’s been observed? Losing the frame by which imaginative. They’re taking pictures of you all the time and you’re in none of the captions which will outlive this captivity precisely. I just want to be less, if this is what it means to be less, get me there faster, more totally oblivacated. “I suffer from shiny surfaces but I don’t need them. My kitchen is a freezer and an empty space for appearances.” Mere appearance as a mastery, yes fine okay I’ll admit I’m envious of “Once he stopped looking like the image enough that people started commenting, he stopped appearing in public.” But then he wins again. That’s not right, is it, somehow we end up liquefying his soul and letting the tap drip it down the drain, or. And this proves that we’re, you know, in some way, you know that’s probably not one of the combinations he’s written, they could put us on the next cover, looking like death, that’s what they keep wanting, why. “He is smiling … but not smiling so warmly that anyone would think he is not a tough man, tough on crime, tough on his characters, toughen up by reading him. It’s a smile I’ve tried to imitate, but I can’t tell how it looks, I just have to trust. He is in repose.” Well I’m supposed to be the vampire here, why does he get all the undeath, that’s not fair, I’m supposed to be the vampire, to be undeath, to be some kind of… and he’s just reciting lore at me like I’m a thing that can be known, so, why even be, right, less precious, find something important into which, some how to get out, an event which fulminates fumeroles to new blue impossibles, codas without concordance. “I’ll break out. They won’t be able to process me. They saw how it started but they can’t judge me on what happens next.”

So how do I get there? That’s all I, less precious by the second, want. Don’t even need to take anyone with me, “I don’t have time for love. I don’t have time for any of that. Well I have time but I don’t have” and that lacking is all that needs to propel me, how should I even introduce myself lol, hiya I just have a bit of a strange question but can you tell me how to get there.

Demon Game for Sophie fuzzpedals heavy metal: “Manifest nightmare. A lake of fire, a brimstone pyre, the smoke thrown out by acts of eternal, never-resting torments reaching up and out into eternity. Rivers of blood, non-euclidean corridors, bodily fluids leaking from walls of mashed genital-shaped flesh.” This is a place where symbolic scenes in staining glass imbue you with devilish powers of the four menhorses of the apocalypse, “where darkness masquerades as light, where suffering is painted as a virtue,” where your climactic duel liturgies its impieties: “The smells are rose, frankincense, myrrh, and human piss.” Such high gothic has some successes, like “an icicle headache”, and plenty of grandiose gestures at nothing: “For something born deep beneath the earth, the light builds slowly.”

What you quickly notice though is a flippancy of tone, which sometimes errs on the side of voice, “They say ‘curiosity killed the cat’. But why? What do they not want the cat to learn?”, and which othertimes crumples up the paper pouting, “The knife is simple, a kitchen knife. A / It’s covered in blood. You’ve got claws and stuff so there’s no point taking it.” The sharp “A” into a fragment is not unique, passages wear their typos as sneers perhaps to the exacting concept of proper forms: “The room around you is blood. / bodies lie broken and scattered around you, flesh and stained black robes torn, bone slpintered, fractured, organs ruptured bloodvessles burst, brain lumps spattered onwooden walls.” Written in an urgency that can’t be made more correctly so, could this be the problem…

Flippancies ooze out of the prose down into the mechanics, which attempts a kind of D&D it can’t be bothered to texture: “Your disguise – desperate young maiden, harassed holy man, a simple voice in the mist – hardly matters. Neither do your words: be they a plea, a promise, or a threat. Neither does your tone, your bearing, your movements. What matters is what they all come together to make this man - a tired, bleary-eyed trader in sight of home – feel.” Hardly the dungeonmaster, more the dungeontemp. While you can die and lose, actually you can’t, why bother, what’s the point, ensu(r)e the selfbarrage: “You see, this could be my fuck up. I want to think that it’s yours, not that I think anything at all because I’ve no idea who ‘you’ are or if there ever even will be a ‘you’ listening to this. But I also worry that there’s a chance I’ve balanced this wrong, or explained it wrong, or just put in a bug somewhere that just kills you. I don’t know. So here’s an out. You’re already on the bad ending, it can’t get worse. So in the spirit of agreeing that Souls games probably should have difficulty settings, you can keep playing, same as before. But you can also know that you failed. Or I failed. I don’t know. It’s up to you. And if you die again you’ll get this again. Just play till you win if you want. I’d turn off achievements at this point but I don’t fucking have any. / Fuck it. Ship it.”

This contempt, the need to punch through the canvas to reach where the picture lies, ostensibly follows from a despair of reception, trying to channel Weltschmerz into “something worth saying. Something now forgotten.” which makes the attempt to try again feel hopeless: “It means nothing to me. Almost nothing. There’s just this little fizz of resentment. You might have picked up on that earlier. I’m pre-emptively angry that people might like it. That there might be people out there who play through that whole story and kill the archpatriarch, and then come and listen to all of this, or vice-versa, and think that story was the better use of their time than this one. / How dare they. It’s an insult to art that Call of Duty sells better than Disco Elysium. And it’s an insult to reality that people will watch all the Marvel movies but not watch the news. The real news, not the ‘entertainment’ bullshit they have in the states. / I thought this time I’ll write something easy, something fun. Because for once my life had meaning, so maybe my art didn’t have to? Well here I am. / I’m not proud of myself.” And this goes on into threads I shall gently leave in situ, contortive memories of sacrifice desperate to summon a sacrifice more noble, guilts which should be shared but aren’t, and are here, and aren’t, until finally dizzied misanthropic repulsion harangues the very humanity of memory: “Burial takes up land, cremation wastes energy.”

Drowning in these moonbound tides of bloodshed, can we learn to hurt some estranging way? “Most fundamentally and most ephemerally you are that which binds you to this place. You are your manifest, your connection to this plane which will never be your home. Each time this world strikes at you, your connection to it will waver and your manifest will reduce.” Recession, from those you must address, from the causes which must matter to you because they matter more than you, unbecomes defeat before the systems claromancing how the dies roll, your role in the masquerades of our “non-paradoxical mix of hope and despondency.” And what’s wrong with a little erasure? Perhaps it will blot out the fact that we’re within it. “You teach the child to close his eyes to the darkness, that if he sees horror, then all he can do is look away. It is a lie he would learn anyway, eventually.”

Toitu lyricates you into the stream sensorial primally grasping at a before buried in “tangled in barbed rosewire” which overwhelms the ordinated course of things til you find your “feet succumbing / to the crag and slip / in the canopies / the empire of birds / musical”, a freedom in “courseways of leaf”. And it works, of course, as “you crackle over the forest floor” to watch “a brush of sun explodes on a tall bough, brightening and magnifying the hillside”. Who so scullery serious doesn’t enjoy such things? Even just “a huge kowhai tree nearby drips yellowy petals onto the grass” is lovely in the sense that I know now such a thing as a kowhai, this has improved my attachment to this earth, which is all we must ask of a sentence.

Of course, too much color without shape induces vertigo, so we find “you are standing in what looks to be a men’s urinal”. Alas that having something to say. Well very well. We’re now teetertumbling through Dunedin to pit the poets against the bankers, their whole accursed line stretching back to “the first sailor stranded himself on the shores of Murderer’s Beach” who have enslaved the native landscape into “all these things we have he says, opening his arms in a widening circle around himself”, metonymized by the act of diverting the stream to harness “All that power going nowhere, out to sea, wasted… all that water, that precious water…” Through this act of appropriation the magisterial architecture of downtown Dunedin, its banks, its gardens of the queen, full of statues to names immortalized to History by right of being the superintendent who “despatched the first shipment of wool to London”. It is written, what you will remember.

But other stories have tried to be written, to overcome “the teeth like mountains to climb / the tongue like a moving hillock of grit / and everywhere the breath, the breath”. We wander the whorls of half place to seek the “forgotten stream, forgotten poet / the world cannot keep up with the barreling wheels of time” through loose drafts of Janet Frame, a Dunedinite writer rescued from lobotomy by a well timed literary award who, in this telling, has not been so rescued: “they silenced the poet / they will try to silence you, too, if you are not careful / the only way to remember your name is to be heard / the only way to be heard is to remember your name”. The invocation of the name hearkens back before we were tamed to flow through waterwheels, when different forces flowed the river forth on journeys which cannot be mapped by streets. That Dunedin has forgotten that the city is built upon the Toitu is the imperial act of selfgrounding which recognizes that “We had to master the story, to remove the stream not just from the hillside but from people’s minds” in forging a place whose story starts in 1770. In defiance of “these people, the ones who own and control the narratives / they understand the power of a name”, find yourself “fortified against it / because you know the name of the stream / the source of the power” through intuitive construing of alternation progressing beyond where “the lines are joined. Everything is named / how can you possibly live with it? / well, I shall write it upon a piece of paper”.

As the ambition ramps more definitive, the poetry strains to retain semblances of its original charm. Sometimes it’s just hard to lyrically elevate the mundane: “you find a box of coffee grounds with some italian name across the front / add the water / you set the lid of the plunger on top of the glass and watch the water turn a murky black / wait / the coffee and water mixture is strong, the plunger gives slowly, with some satisfaction / you pour the coffee out into a plain white mug / you sip tentaively, blow”. Othertimes the obvious is more pleasant when pleasant: “the skinhead sees you coming, stares you down / there is something malevolent in his way”. Then there’s just the occasional absence of an editor’s pen: “it is so cold and smooth it feels alien, as if made by aliens”. There’s no rule that we can’t enjoy excesses beyond the power of editors, though, so I rather enjoy “a doziness comes over you”.

Shall we find ourselves struggling for purpose the further we stray from which edens introduced us, then we’ll find a companion here, where “the bricks seems to breathe and squeeze you with their breath” as we strive tirelessly “to find a place beside the graves, in the soft grass”. We yearn together for the voice of one whose name was writ in water within these walls where “they are for the cars, the crosses / and the rain is for the people”.