Ratings and Reviews by Lance Cirone

I had been working at this game for four months. I cannot believe how it turned out. It is one of the longest games I have ever played. This is one of the most insane experiences I have had playing a game. I feel like a totally different person now that I've finished it. It's a rollercoaster of emotions, and I never knew what would be coming next. It is unpredictable, it is difficult, it is different.

Cragne Manor is what happens when you take over 80 authors' contributions and intricately weave them together into a whole game. Every room is written independently, so just one step away is something totally different. Despite this, Cragne Manor has a method to its madness, and can feel amazingly coherent at points (props to the Carol arc). I kept going because I wanted to see everything and hopefully run into another engaging set piece, bizarre cultural reference, or well-developed puzzle. I wanted to know how the game could possibly end, and how everything would come together. You are given a basic goal -- find your husband Peter by uncovering bits of information in and around the manor -- but to list everything you have to do would be crazy.

I'd like to give shout-outs to some of my favorite, or most memorable, parts of the game. These are rooms that just blew me away. Please don't read these until you've been to the actual rooms!

Estate Agent's Office: (Spoiler - click to show)By far one of the best and most comprehensive rooms in the game. Everything Bethany says, everything she does, your inexplicable obsession with getting a lion sex book, the writing style, it had me laughing so hard. I actually came back here midway through just to make sure I asked her about everything. Some suggestions: Read the lion sex book and ask her about it. Ask Bethany about yourself, Peter, Jedediah Beaverhat, and Maple Kate.

Meatpacking Plant: (Spoiler - click to show)Cut up the corpses of dead animals! It's described in the most disgusting way possible. My stomach was churning by the end of this, and I actually had to put the game down before and after doing it because I was so uncomfortable.

Meatpacking Plant Bathroom: (Spoiler - click to show)How do we not talk about this one? It's iconic. Banish a boneless horse by using demonic rituals and a time-traveling toilet. It's worth trying everything you can here, because it accounts for most of your interactions; I spent a while trying to pee on every surface imaginable and I got a funny response for everything. Reading the diary is also a highlight, and the various "unfortunate baby names" gave me a good laugh.

Nursery: (Spoiler - click to show)Carol and Christabell offer up one of the most surprising moments in the game. There is an interconnected narrative between these two rooms. You get to watch Carol grow up from a kind yet lonely child to a politically-obsessed mastermind who wants to summon Cthulhu. Also, the part about Naomi apparently being pregnant really shocked me and made me want to know how the arc could possibly end. Christabell even comes in to wrap everything up! Carol apologizing, and the memento she leaves behind, made me genuinely sad.

Music Room: (Spoiler - click to show)A room that contains a bunch of small sub-rooms to tell an incredibly gruesome and disturbing story! Francine is messed up. Seeing her child self vomit, and then opening up a bag of body parts, actually made me feel sick and I had to put the game down for a bit. Not a pleasant story, but a memorable one for sure.

Workroom: (Spoiler - click to show)Cast magic spells and learn about the Cragnes' family history. The mechanics are fleshed out, there's a lot of optional deaths, and it's a nice break from some of the other more horrific parts of the game. It's a satisfying puzzle.

Curiosity Shop: (Spoiler - click to show)I like Jessenia. She's fun to talk to and she has all kinds of interesting items to trade. This is really late in the game, but I enjoyed it.

Narthex: (Spoiler - click to show)This kind of bizarre Catholic high school drama, complete with demon possession and tragic tales of love that was never meant to be, had me engaged. Brandon's eventual suicide attempt had me horrified and emotionally shattered, and even Naomi's shaken up by the whole thing afterwards.

Inside the Shack: (Spoiler - click to show)One of the last rooms in the game, this thing is surreal. The descriptions are disturbing and paint very horrifying images, there's a lot to do while you're in there, and messing with Naomi and Peter's history is a harrowing yet beautiful experience.

That's not to discredit the smaller rooms, though. They deserve appreciation for how they just tie everything together and they all draw inspiration from various sources. It's fun to have a few minor puzzles or transition rooms in between the game starts going off the rails and destroying you emotionally (yet again). I had visceral reactions to this thing; I almost threw up twice. I screamed so many times. It was great.

The main complaint I had with this game was an unavoidable, inevitable problem; sorting through your items gets hard. Attempting to use a noun like "dial" or "key" in a command will result in everything showing up and you needing to use disambiguations. Sometimes I'd just throw out my backpack before I went into a room so I wouldn't have to deal with it. The mildew was also a massive misstep that I wish was toned down, and if I were to give one piece of advice to anyone before playing the game, get rid of it as soon as you can. It made me begin dreading opening my inventory and filtering through items, because it inflated it with useless text and ended up taking the entire screen.

My review has only scratched the surface. Play this game, don't let the content warning scare you, just go with it. Play it to the end. There's always something new waiting. Jenni Polodna and Ryan Veeder, both absolutely amazing authors and people in general, thank you so much for this. I'll never forget Cragne Manor.

Opening Night is so much more than it appears. It's a short game, taking me around 40 minutes, so please give it a try.

You are attending an opening night show for Miranda Lily, your favorite Broadway star. You've saved up for weeks with your pay from the factory, and you've got a rose ready to give to Miranda when you finally meet her in person.

Getting into the theater and intercepting the doorman who won't let you in because of the dress code requires some good ol' cartoony hijinks. I was expecting a similar silly tone from the rest of the game, but the performance sets the stage for something much deeper. Spoilers abound.

So many moments after (Spoiler - click to show)the intermission just had me ask "wait, what?" and "did I read that right?" It drove me to figure out the mystery and understand what was truly happening. The game weaves in flashback text with the current happenings, and time skips at key moments.

The game's biggest surprise would have to be that (Spoiler - click to show)Miranda is DEAD. She started acting in movies, which "stripped her of her immediacy, her presence, reduced her to the sum of her parts" and sent her into a downward spiral. She became an alcoholic and died. The fact that we came back to the theater just to remember the biggest day of our lives, before the place gets torn down. We spent weeks trying to build up the courage to give her the rose, because one in-person performance made us feel unworthy of her presence; and you get to put the wilted stem in a vase in Miranda's abandoned dressing room. It's a perfect bittersweet moment.

I couldn't believe it by the end. I was shocked. The way everything develops is outstanding. The puzzles are simple enough that you can solve them without hints, putting full focus on the story. I'd definitely recommend this one.

After I had fun with Nord and Bert,
I thought, more word games couldn't hurt!
I had high expectations,
and with little hesitation,
went in receptive and alert.

The comedy rhyming is consistently a joy,
and depending on who you employ,
the story will take different a turn.
You can always undo, so no cause for concern.
(A good move, as the inverse would annoy.)

To the heist's challenge, my squad arose,
all written in the game's unique style of prose.
Not once did it feel bland or uninspired,
it stays quite fresh, so you won't get tired.
Lots of work was put in, and it shows!

The premise enticed,
review scores sufficed,
so allow me to conclude this review
with a statement that's honest and true:
I'm glad I played Limerick Heist!

Nord and Bert was the first piece of interactive fiction I ever played. I read about it and it sounded right up my alley. Looking back, it's definitely got its great moments, but also some not-so-fun parts. You can play the levels in any order you want, and they don't have any interconnected story elements, so I'll recap them all:

Shopping Bizarre: One of the highlights. You run around a supermarket and make all kinds of crazy things (turn a sale into a sail, or a moose into mousse). The homophone theming is fun and never feels too obscure. Prime segment here.

Playing Jacks: Use a bunch of tools with "jack" in the name. I actually broke this one on accident. (Spoiler - click to show)The mermaid simply wasn't showing up after I did the jacuzzi scene. It's a cool concept, but needing to remember how to activate my tools slowed me down a bit. The jacked-up coding makes it a pass.

Buy the Farm: Might be my favorite level. You try to restore an empty farm through taking idioms literally, like teaching the old dog new tricks, or putting the cart before the horse. One very tricky puzzle here, though. Still, horse around with this one for a bit.

Eat Your Words: Harass and inconvenience a waitress and a cook, also by taking idioms literally. A lot of the terms you have to use here are pretty obscure, so it's easy to get stuck. It and Buy the Farm are like two peas in a pod, but this one's a harder nut to crack.

Act the Part: Act in a 50s sitcom and get your annoying brother in-law to leave. This segment doesn't really have any relevance to the rest of the game, contains some really esoteric puzzles, and it's easy to make it unwinnable. Hook it off the stage.

Manor of Speaking: Confusing and pointless. Find a way to scare a portrait of Karl Marx. Also, there's a room in this one with a frustrating mechanic (can't use the same verb twice) that just slowed it down. Quiet it up and move on. (Or play Hulk Handsome's similarly-named game, because that one's awesome!)

Shake a Tower: A fun return to the earlier segments! Come up with silly spoonerisms (a head louse becomes a lead house, a shoving leopard becomes a loving shepherd) to save the day. I do have to warn against a game-breaking bug here, since my (Spoiler - click to show)well-oiled bicycle just disappeared between rooms for no reason. Going into this one was a pretty rough take considering how the quality was slipping, but it actually felt relevant.

Meet the Mayor: You can only play this part once you've finished all the others. Is it worth it? Not really, it just feels anticlimactic and doesn't really work as a review of what you've learned. Tell the mayor I'm out.

Half of Nord and Bert is witty and comical. The other half is baffling and just not that fun. Whenever I return to the game, I go through Shopping Bizarre, Buy the Farm, and Shake a Tower, maybe Eat Your Words, and leave the rest. It's a good game with some bad segments, rather than the other way around, so that even out into a 3/5 star rating.

Savoir-Faire is, first and foremost, a difficult game. What kept me going was the mystery, the atmosphere, the incredibly versatile and unique magic system, and the desire to finally get something good to eat.

In this game, you get to "link" two similar objects together depending on their properties. Then, what you do to one item will affect the other. Sometimes, you'll have to modify or change items so they can be linked up to another. Reverse-linking has the opposite effect, applying one item's properties to another. This also leads to a bunch of fun Easter eggs. When I first played, I underestimated the system, so a bit of advice for new players: Don't be afraid to try everything. Sometimes a solution will work when you don't think you can do it.

The game's atmosphere is notable, too. You're alone in a fancy mansion, exploring every nook and cranny to piece together what happened to you and Marie. It genuinely made me gasp at some of the plot developments or more unexpected things I came across: I had no idea (Spoiler - click to show)Marie was alive! The bits of backstory you come across are meaningful and communicate just how intense it can be to live in a world with this kind of magic.

The cooking puzzle deserves special mention. This thing drives the game: I loved finding new ingredients in order to finally cook these recipes that had been taunting me for hours. It's rewarding to use, and allows you to segment your goals a bit more: what do you have, what do you need, and where do you think you can get it?

This game is an absolute classic. Give it a try.

Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's pleasantly surprised me. The premise is that you're a psychic advertiser for Schtupmeister beer; you're visiting an Applebee's late one night to subliminally convince people to drink the brand. There are four people, and all of them have some sort of interesting twist. It's hard to absorb all their stories and interactions on the first playthrough, since they run concurrently. Part of the puzzle is figuring out when's the best time to slip in and whisper your ads into their brain, and the other is figuring out how to optimize this all for one run. There's a small amount of other choices that will affect your ending, such as whether or not you tell on a stealing waitress. I found that some of the endgame stuff was light on choices at first, but the dialogue does adjust depending on what you did in the restaurant.

The game also deserves mention for its really modern theming and dialogue. It name-drops stuff like TikTok trends, has a debate on whether Garfield or the Kool-Aid Man would win in a fight (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading), and there's jokes about about California Pizza Kitchen and crypto related to forgotten memes. Remember this one in a few years -- it's a total time capsule of late 2022, and I love that. There's also some flat-out surreal jokes, such as a PSA warning against Driving While Yogurt-Eating, and a few cracks are made at Applebee's (such as noting that this time, people aren't running and screaming out of the restaurant for "the usual reasons").

Applebees is a light, silly game that can be beaten quickly (maybe 15-20 minutes to see everything?) and isn't that hard to figure out. Still, it's a nice comp entry in its own right. Give it a few plays.

Speculative Fiction's voice and narration are full of personality. Everything is written from the perspective of wizard-turned-bird W.D., whether he's reflecting upon his past failed inventions or trying to cheat his way into wealth. The NPCs and characters around the world are interesting, and I had so much fun on my initial run through the world just to see what there was.

Eventually, it came down to the part where I had to start puzzle-solving, and this is where the game started to grate on me. There's very few clues, and while I was able to solve two or three on my own, I spent a lot of time struggling with ones that I didn't have the necessary materials for. I think I had a bug with the (Spoiler - click to show)cabinet puzzle, and the blind man's puzzle wouldn't accept some of the other solutions I thought were sensible. Other stuff, like the (Spoiler - click to show)stock market and fishing chalk circle, are practically begging for you to look at the walkthrough.

I'd recommend giving this game a quick look to appreciate the unique style, but don't be afraid to look for hints if you're intent on solving it.

"Life is meaningless, we are but players of a game, and that game is MARIO CARDS".

MARIO CARDS has you being blindfolded and kidnapped by no other than Mario, who's going to play a card game with you whether you want to or not. The game consists of matching pairs of cards with Mario's face on them. Turns out this is just the start: you have more games to play, and MARIO CARDS was only the beginning. Early into the game, the author interrupts to say that he was a sleep-deprived wreck when he wrote it and he isn't even sure if it makes sense.

The game is full of awkward middle-schooler humor: the subtitle is "MARIO CARDS : The Text Adventure about a Card Game about Mario who's from a Video Game - I don't Play Them myself but my Brother plays Call of Duty and says it's Pretty Good so There You Go", and you're given the option to "kicK OVER THE TAble godadMN this is taking forever". There's regular jokes about life being meaningless or the general laziness of the game, such as railroading your choices or even saying "I'm a goddamn saint and you are going to play this through and appreciate it for the Art that it is." There's obligatory swearing and forced sex jokes ("At first you thought it was some kind of deprived sexual ritual of MARIO's, but he is literally a video game character and video game characters don't do that, unless they are a video character that does, then they do").

The game's ending declares that "NOBODY WINS AT MARIO CARDS," and that's right on the money. The game itself admits that it's aimless and nonsensical, and while I did find the writing and plot direction slightly amusing at points, it's not worth your time.

One horrific night in the 1950s, teenager Bonnie Noodleman finds her almost-boyfriend attacked by horrific brain-guzzling monsters from beyond! However will she and her friends stop them? Such begins Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!

This isn't a hard game, but it's of a nice length. The puzzles are pretty basic, but some have multiple solutions, and areas you don't need to go to anymore tend to be closed off. The game is a parody of 1950s sci-fi, in a way that reminded me of Max Blaster, featuring comics with absurdly preachy messages and an absolute lack of severe language (such as "Oh my gosh!" and "We’re in such a deep pickle right now!"). These jokes are where the game is at its best, and I particularly loved your conversation with the robotic Wife of Tomorrow. The sci-fi aspect is handled well and plays a good part in the story. The latter half was full of great jokes with all the psuedo-futuristic technology; it felt like I was playing through an episode of Futurama.

There's a cast of characters in this game, all of whom get unique portrait art, which I didn't expect. The conversations are interesting and full of different options, and a lot of characters will stick around and even get a bit of surprising development. My favorite in this regard was Mary Jane, the hysterical prom queen who (Spoiler - click to show)turns out to be a brilliant inventor. Following these characters throughout the games, learning their likes and dislikes and getting their help to solve puzzles, was definitely one of its strengths.

Overall, the game's appealing writing style, approachable puzzles, and fun characters make it an easy recommendation. Definitely play The Mary Jane of Tomorrow after you beat it, too; that one's great.

You are a disgraced high school Rock Paper Scissors champion. It's been a long year, but you are ready to regain your position, with the help of the three RPS Gods.

Rooms are bare, descriptions are blunt, and the setting isn't that interesting. The two core puzzles here are finding your offerings (a rock, a paper, and scissors), and tricking your sacrifices into making RPS signs. That latter puzzle is repeated nine times and makes up the bulk of the gameplay. Talk to someone until they make a sign (such as holding up their hand as a stop motion, or posing for a picture with a V sign), then do the right symbol against it. Then (Spoiler - click to show)they get sucked into a vortex. It was surprising at first, but this is most of the game. The mechanic doesn't get expanded upon and the difficulty stays low throughout, eventually feeling kind of boring.

With all that said, this isn't a bad game, just pretty middle-of-the-road. It'd be worth a try if you want a more low-key game.