Ratings and Reviews by Lance Cirone

Mayor Mystery is one of those games that puts on a front, and turns out to be more than it appears. You receive an anonymous letter saying that the town mayor has joined a group offering him "great power," and you're suspicious. The game is a town simulation where completing your first main story run is pretty easy. But there's a lot of side content and unlockable endings, including some more bizarre ones like (Spoiler - click to show)marrying a restaurant mascot cutout, (Spoiler - click to show)going to the barber until all your hair gets shaved off and then joining a cult for bald men, and (Spoiler - click to show)dying from eating unhealthy cereal.

The game has a lot of meta content. For example, the opening scenario is actually a test to see if you act according to the good guy the intro says you're supposed to be. You can keep messing it up to get different scenarios and make the narration angry. This comes into play later in the game.

There's also a full soundtrack, which consists of synthesized piano music. It's pretty comprehensive: the apartment music has different instruments depending on whose room you're in, and there are a few jingles for victories or defeats. The music fit the mood well and I enjoyed having it.

I also have to compliment how tight the game's programming is. I didn't come across any unintentional bugs, and there were a lot of moments where the game would respond to something I did that was out of the way. There are even a few different minigames to play in the arcade, while is cool to see implemented in Twine. For what appears to be the author's first game, there's some advanced programming on display and I have to give the game props for being so comprehensive.

Here's the spoiler content. You'll run into it about ten minutes into the game, but it's a big moment. (Spoiler - click to show)On a repeat playthrough, you unlock a new location: Bloomhurst Lake. It's intentionally broken and does not work. When you leave, it explains it was going to be DLC, but was cut midway through development because it did not add anything meaningful. This leads to another section where you and the game designer exit into Twine itself to find the narrator and ask why the alternate endings exist?

When you restart the game, it takes the form of beta testing for a sequel, where adjustments have been made to the story and gameplay. I was interested in where this would go: the game only has one linear path and you can see remnants of what was removed. Unfortunately, the writing doesn't hold up here. It's constantly bogged down with old memes, re-using the same jokes, and kinda lazy meta humor. I noticed some of this in the initial playthroughs, but this entire section confused me. It had a perfect horror setup, and could have played with the concept of everything you know being different, but they went for this modern humor that didn't work. I appreciate the commitment with making an actual Google Form to submit feedback to.

After this, you get a minigame where you answer quiz questions about the game for money. Then I got stuck -- there's a wall of 16 buttons, and it says the results show up "tomorrow". I was never able to figure out how to progress after this point. I noticed one button changed things in the computer lab, and another gave me a bonus weapon for the fight with the mayor, but I couldn't figure out what any of the other ones did. At this point, I kept using the hints on the end screen to find more endings. I got 17 endings and all 8 of the unique mayor fights, then the hints stopped appearing.

I was kind of confused as to what the game is going for. (Spoiler - click to show)The writing sticks to a comedic tone in a sort of flat way, and when I was suspecting it would be a disguised horror story, it cranked the jokes up even more. The fourth wall aspect with the game's narrators talking to each other is interesting, as is one inserting themselves into the game as an in-universe character. The satire on game sequels and DLC also felt out of nowhere, since once I hit the button wall, I got the rest of the endings without being reminded of this aspect. Again, I couldn't finish it, so I might be missing something overall. But I think the game could have used more focus. Maybe the goal was just to come up with a bunch of crazy alternate endings?

Mix Tape is an introspective look at a relationship. You play as Valentine, whose boyfriend Peter has taken her to a cliff overlooking the ocean. You brought the scrapbook of your relationship. He wants to burn it -- he feels he's betrayed you and desires to restart his history anew. You play through a series of three small vignettes representing different points of your relationship.

The writing in this game is so good. It's poetic and it understands itself. I was very impressed by its prose throughout: one highlight, "You look down at the scrapbook. Smiling faces and tokens of your relationship stare back at you. Each posed photo, each impromptu poem scribbled down, each journal entry is a slap in the face."

The game is short but sweet, and it hits a lot of emotional highs and lows. Just the framing device alone is worth playing for. This is a beautiful game, and one I'd definitely recommend. I wish I could put into words how much it affected me, but this'll have to do.

Death By Monkey is the only fully original game made in the IAGE engine. The others are Alice Through the Looking Glass, Cloak of Darkness, and Ruins ported over from the Inform sample book, an incomplete port of Mini Zork, and an MST version of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die. Curiously, this game also has multiplayer compatibility, apparently. IAGE lets you host a server that other people can join to play games with you, and there's even functionality to kick players who are disruptive.

It was a pain to figure out how to play this game in the first place, given the obscurity of the platform. I wound up using the IF Archive to download the launchers, hosted my own server, and then joined it in another client (there didn't seem to be a way to just play this on its own). I was surprised the program worked perfectly on my PC, given that it was discontinued in 2002.

For the story, you are driving down a dark road at night when your car crashes. With nowhere else to take shelter, you go to a creepy mansion and look through the window to see a mad scientist zapping a caged, implanted monkey, causing it to briefly gain super strength. Now, you head down to the basement and see the monkey for yourself. You can knock it out by throwing a rock at it, and there's a few items and pieces of scenery around that serve as red herrings, because the rest of the game is unimplemented. You can't get killed by the monkey, either. There's no formal ending point.

This is one of the 12 games made for ToasterComp, explaining the noticeable spike in toaster-related games of 2000 you may notice when browsing the IF archives. It is extremely short. You are hired to fix a toaster and must do so by following the manual. The game's setting and atmosphere is what lifts it up: it's happening in the middle of a cook-off where stagehands are rushing by and pressure is put on you. Also, the guy you have to fix the toaster for is named Biff Backowicz. It's worth checking what your score is throughout the game, because the ranks are pretty funny.

Noticeably, Leon Lin has returned to regular IF developing over twenty years after this game, making some pretty well-received games for EctoComp and Spring Thing.

I was hoping to like Earl Grey more than I actually did. The game's upper-class English writing style befitting a tea party is very well-done, and the characters are memorable. The game also gives you some of the protagonist's internal monologue after each move, which can clue you in to what to do next or (more often) give you a joke. I found the jokes to be a bit excessive later in the game, but there were some clever ones too ("You know, Eaves, it's not like I didn't have other options today. One of my friends offered to teach me to fish! I could have eaten for a lifetime!")

The game is a bit like a reverse Counterfeit Monkey. Here, you get to take letters out of things and transform them, then re-insert the letters. Confusingly, a few puzzles involve removing a letter, doing something, then putting the letter back where you found it. The opening has you do this twice in a row and I had no idea what happened differently between the two times -- the dialogue made me think I screwed up the puzzle and it was giving me another attempt. And the biggest problem I had with the game is how confusing some of the puzzles can be. They get really abstract or make use of things you don't think too much about.

There's a lot of potential with this game, but I found it a bit messy. David Welbourn's walkthrough is very helpful if you just want to read through the story without struggling with the more esoteric puzzles.

SpeedIFs are always a bit hard to review, because they have so little to discuss by nature. Still, A Wizard Goes Shopping is a fun five-minute adventure. You have to collect lobster, mango, and fettucine by exploring four aisles of the grocery store and casting spells to help you reach what you need. I think this concept could easily be expanded into a longer game.

In this game, you're an 8 year-old inventor who gets bullied on the playground, and has to set up traps to use on the bullies the next day. You find all the materials you need by exploring your house, featuring a few small puzzles. Assembling the traps is fun and the game gives you a good amount of clues, there aren't any super complicated or interconnected puzzles.

Also, you don't need to solve everything: you only need three traps, and I ended up making four. My favorite was the dart gun that launches a superglued sticky note on the bully's back, and you get to write whatever you want on the note. Seeing all the traps in action is satisfying and you can easily picture how they play out.

I like that you get a sense of what the protagonist's family is like just based on the narration and what they have around the house, and the ending climax plays out well. I think the writing in this game could be pushed a bit more -- it's good but not great. There's also a few issues with synonyms not being recognized. Still, this is a simple, lighthearted story that I enjoyed.

The Mean Story bases itself on offensive humor and warns you multiple times about it. I'm not really a fan of this, but I can't blame the game for it when it's the entire point. As a game, it doesn't have much to offer -- there's a few ableist slurs, some racism, and a puzzle that consists of tricking various disabled people. It's not very fun to play through.

When you type "AMUSING" at the ending, it asks if you've tried "...not being amused by a story like this in the first place?" The help menu also admits it might say something bad about the author if he found this funny enough to make. It feels like there was some apprehension about publishing this.

AI Dungeon isn't a game many people would want to play today. The ethics of generative AI have been discussed countless times, the environmental impact is horrible, and it's been shoved down everyone's throats for a while now -- it's become the next tech buzzword that every company thinks they need to use.

But back in early 2021, when generative AI was in its infancy, not as readily available to the public, and restricted to just text with images being a pipe dream, AI Dungeon was something to see. I loved playing this back then. My stories rarely ever made sense and I'd try to follow them the best I could, but if I got bored, I'd prompt it with some crazy plot twist and see where it tried to take everything. The writing could also range from funny, to profound, to just bizarre. Sometimes people wouldn't even just use it for stories: they'd prompt it to write song lyrics, jokes, or lists of fun facts, which came out as incredibly mangled and hilarious in a surreal way.

Granted, even then it had its problems. The game had an insistence on making you go to school, wake up in the forest, or have your mother appear in the story, no matter how much sense it made. It was also really bad at following physical character descriptions or permanent bits of worldbuilding you wanted to add.

If you want to see what a traditional text AI output looked like around this time, try B.J. Best's You Will Thank Me As Fast As You Thank a Werewolf, it was made around a similar time and had a very similar energy when I read through it.

The game's decline was rapid. If you asked me to review it in March 2021, I'd probably say four or five stars. But around April, the game was hit with an infamous censorship system. This wouldn't be a problem if the censor wasn't so trigger-happy. Having a character or animal that was under 18, in the cleanest contexts, would upset the censor. Even saying that a person had short hair would trigger it. It would flag your story, halt it, and Latitude would read your private stories for content violations.

Fans complained, and the response of Latitude was horrible as well. If the censor got triggered, you'd get the patronizing message of "this took a weird turn, help us figure it out?" And if you clicked that, they'd double down with the text "It's possible that our systems messed up; that can happen when you're on the bleeding edge of technology" and imply it's uncommon that the player would "actually like reading." This did nothing to appease the already angry community, who were backing up their stories into Google Docs, canceling their subscriptions, and deleting their accounts. Latitude also changed their official Discord server into an unofficial one and removed their social media links from the game's homepage.

By May that month, the true source of the training data was found, with it being heavily illegal and NSFW material. Latitude's next update was releasing an in-app purchase that let you have the AI speak text out loud in a Russian accent. They also started to let random people sign up to read the flagged private stories for 7 cents each.

I dipped from the game and checked back in 2022, where it turned out to have an energy system: one ad gave you 10 turns. A Steam release that didn't even have the premium AI was made with a price point of 30 dollars. The AI itself also got even dumber -- while it had a bit of inconsistency, it was flat-out unable to write a story by this point.

MathBrush's recent review inspired me to check in on the current state of the game, and it seems like it hasn't improved too much since then. There are also competitors like NovelAI, but in a world where AI is now starting to become more of a genuine threat than just a tool to use for fun, I don't think the appeal is there to most IF authors.