Reviews by JoshGrams

This was an interesting exploration of a place and a history and a local writer, but it frequently used language and hyperlinks in ways that felt unmoored and haphazard rather than the more grounded and integrated ways that I'd prefer. For a story about reconnecting with nature, it uncomfortably often used phrasings that I associate with a lack of connection to the physical world. And while I think the hyperlink usage is internally consistent, it was opaque in ways that felt more generically mysterious than crafted to evoke particular feelings and responses.

There are also some annoying bits of timed text where a poem plays out veeeery slowly. And the dialogue of the characters you meet is mostly in colored text with inadequate contrast so it's hard to read.

Anyway, language: take the second passage in the game:

when you look up, you can see the sun setting gracefully, devouring the expanse of ocean before it

the sky is {cycling: pink / orange} and the trees are like rusted warriors looking out over the horizon

it has been a few hours since you {cycling: drank / ate} and your body is starting to fail

The various mythologies that I grew up exploring have the ocean or horizon devouring the sun: I think of this flipped phrasing as a recent eggcorn or folk etymology that's a little out of touch with sunsets.

There are more than a few hours between meals, for most of us! Your body is not starting to fail already. And a short while later, we get the character walking up a hill, "you begin to trudge mechanically up the road, tugging your torso..." which yay, alliteration! But it makes no physical sense to me (you're leaning slightly forward when you walk; your torso goes first, you're not tugging it), so it fights with the game (trying to?) describe things in a very visceral, embodied way.

Also this work almost entirely uses the spelling "thru" but there are a half-dozen uses of "through." I thought that should be significant but couldn't see the pattern to it so it just ended up feeling sloppy.

Shortly after this, we go thru several body parts (hands, feet, torso) and cycle thru descriptions of each. Hands cycle between physical descriptions which are drastically different in a way that I liked, but then ends with "smooth and scarred" which feels like a contradiction. Feet's first description is physical but then it goes far more abstract, feeling like a sequenced poem told through the cycling link but not making much sense as individual descriptions, while the torso feels similar but a little more concrete and each line does make a little more sense as a description. And overall they didn't cohere for me into a bigger picture, and the RPG-ish "choose your character's attributes" meshed awkwardly with the attempted poetry.

Then in Part One we get a bunch of exploring and freeing the stream, and a couple of these felt very adventure-game-ish — e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)most plastic doesn't sink very fast and you're certainly not going to be able to dredge up a bunch of sunken beer bottles with a random strip of plastic tarp so that one made no sense.

As for the hyperlinks: in the Prologue we start with cycling links within the passage, with the last word or words being a link to move forward. Then it starts mixing in short side-trips, again with only the last link moving on. Then it turns into a bit of a maze — can you find your way out of the Prologue? And when we get into Part One it turns into more of an exploration in the form of place descriptions where you can click to to go to the adjacent places mentioned within the description. Then in Part Two it gets more menu-ish with links at the bottom that do stuff and links in the body that give short nested descriptions and then return — except that for the lock-and-key puzzles the link to use the item you've found is never the last one, it's always in the body, so I kept clicking them by accident and then having to exit and re-enter and click thru to that point again.

Part Two also gets more lawnmower-ish, introducing a fast-travel method so now the game is a set of disconnected places instead of a single space to explore. And the game doesn't really give you reasons to visit one before another so it felt less compelling: it looks like we're giving you a new freedom but actually we're just giving you a checklist; can you collect all the places?

In hindsight I can see how this works, but while playing it felt pretty arbitrary and confusing and tumbling from one form into another, and I didn't get a sense of intentional confusion toward a particular end, so...

It was an interesting experience and I'm glad I played it, but I more often felt "hmm... ok, I can see what you're going for" than "oh, that's a beautiful way to express that."

This rabbit fairy-tale worked really well for me the first time, but on playing again I realized that (Spoiler - click to show)each tunnel goes to a random destination every time, meaning the only outcome you control is how many tunnels you visit, which fits the themes of the game, I think, but undermined my interest in choosing which tunnel to visit. On the other hand, the ending is fairly responsive to what you encountered, but it's subtle enough that (depending on which one you get) you may not notice unless you play several times.

But the way things fell out on my first playthrough, I had NO idea that (Spoiler - click to show)it was a dream: my first three vignettes fit pretty well with the interpretation that the rabbit had started sneaking out every time its mother wasn't looking. Then on the last (fourth) tunnel I died... and the game continued with "You look around. It feels like there are even more tunnels than before." So I was wondering if this was some sort of afterlife. I tried one more tunnel and then went back to my burrow... only to wake up and (Spoiler - click to show)find it was all a dream.

So that was a fun roller-coaster. But the illusion fell apart a little even on a second playthrough, and more on subsequent ones. So was that first experience an intentional part of the possibility space? Or did I just get lucky? I eventually walked away feeling like the game was an experiment with form and responsiveness where each individual piece was thoughtfully done, but where some of the design was less effective once you saw the trick, and some of the effort was easily overlooked; it didn't engage with the subtleties of the gestalt of the design as skillfully as I might have liked.

Recommended, but maybe let your first playthrough stand as canonical and don't look back.

This is a 90K+ word novel exploring religion and philosophy (?) in 1596, near the end of the reign of Elizabeth I when the Protestant repression of Catholics was fairly intense. It's a kaleidoscopic view of the intertwined lives of six or seven characters in these turbulent times, presented as the starting character Anna Claewart dissociating from her imminent burning at the stake and trying to understand the situation that brought her here and "reduce the entropy" enough to crystallize the situation enough to escape being burnt alive (although in fact (Spoiler - click to show)it ends with her friends inciting a riot: not very orderly).

It's big on showing gruesome punishments and death. In particular we get detailed descriptions of the martyrdom being gleefully anticipated by the Jesuit priest, who gets tortured on the rack and is going to be drawn and quartered after several other delightful procedures. But he's only one of many examples.

I liked a bunch of stuff about the writing: Anna's reasoning about the weather, and about why her mind's eye sees things reversed, for instance. And Ajita's grumbling about these Frankish sects squabbling over "different opinions about a type of cracker they eat in their temples on Sundays. They do not quarrel about the best recipe for baking this item, nor about the proper etiquette for chewing it, but rather about its metaphysical status."

Ajita's Epic, on the other hand, is awful. It is diegetically supposed to be a religious mythology constructed by a cocky contemptuous atheist and rendered in free verse and it's just bad. You will think you want to read it, because the whole structure of this game is a long linear story with frequent (usually single-passage) digressions and elaborations, and these digressions are usually the best parts. But in this case, just... just spare yourself.

It also has a few unfortunate phrases like "The subsequent scenes are riveted to her literal memory" but mostly I enjoyed the writing other than Ajita's poetry. And I liked that Anna buys very strongly into all the Protestant theology and attitudes but also is like, I don't want to get married and have kids, so I'm going to dress as a man and study theology and philosophy at the university for as long as I can justify evading my "duties."

The game is punctuated by occasional options to "Return to the Stake," as a reminder of the fate that is looming over Anna. This is complemented by a strange mechanic where you try to identify anachronistic quotes or turns of phrase in the prose (which are unmarked, but you can just use Tab to cycle through interactables on the page to find them) in order to gain Knowledge or reduce Entropy. There are also certain diversions which contain trick questions which bump your entropy back up no matter what you answer (and some which contain real questions which help you out).

The idea is supposedly that if you're erudite enough, you can affect these mysterious and partially-hidden stats to the point that you can return to the stake and save Anna, but it all feels very mysterious and opaque and player-hostile. Which... is quite possibly intentional? But despite anachronism featuring in the title of the game, I never figured out what it had to do with the story the game was telling? It feels like there must be a connection but I still have no idea what it is.

And it ends with the reveal that this whole thing is (Spoiler - click to show)Ajita and Anna having written up their story to "comfort and divert" Giordano Bruno as he is in jail condemned for heresy just a few years later. "Look, we got out, maybe you could too"? I guess?

So I don't know. I found this intriguing; I liked a lot of the writing; I liked a bunch of the twists and turns; but it's also very long and the writing style is dry; in many ways it's not very interactive (maybe more like some long VNs? But fuzzier and more opaque mechanics than those tend to have, I think). I can sort of see how some of the interactivity fits with the text, and I'm glad I played it, but I'm not sure how many people I'd recommend it to.

As survival horror, this game was a complete failure for me. Initially that annoyed me so much I didn't even want to finish it. But I think there's another reading where labelling the game "survival horror" is an elaborate joke playing on the triangle of identities (player, narrator, player character), and under that reading I like it a lot.

That is, (Spoiler - click to show)the game is a survival horror story for our narrator, Princess Cathabel X, who is finding out that her careless investments have put her girlfriend at risk of death. But she's narrating to herself, no one can hear her. An after an initial outburst our player character, Cath's girlfriend Dor, doesn't seem too fazed. As an ex-street rat who met Cath by trying to mug her, she's surely aware of the danger but she's also well equipped to deal with it; perhaps more resigned and fed-up than truly frightened. Then we, the player, complete the triangle, listening to Cath's fearful narration and fashionable bravado and condescending (?) instructions and telling Dor what to do.

Beyond that... the text is sparse (occasionally too sparse) but evocative, the combat is more tedious than terrifying but Dor is squishy enough that it serves to keep you paying attention, and you uncover just enough little details and mechanics to keep you (the player) busy and entertained while the story unfolds. And then there are optional outfits which change various mechanics, giving you a reason to go back and optimize your playthrough, if you're into that.

This is a series of short snapshots (about 400 words each) of a Polish woman's life from age 19-ish in 1965 to her death in 2019, with most chapters encompassing about a decade. So it's necessarily sparse, but it paints an effectively personal portrait of Poland's history. Despite the viewpoint, the long time spans and short length of each chapter (and possibly the no-nonsense reporting of the writing style?) kept me at a little distance from the character. We're not living these years with her: we're dropping into her life occasionally to make a choice. The once a decade Christmas lettter, if you will. But I found it an interesting series of snapshots.

I wasn't entirely sold on the daily delivery by e-mail: it does force you to take a little time with it rather than clicking through the whole thing in 15-20 minutes, but I'm not sure how much difference that made to me. And it's implemented so that you get the next e-mail 24 hours after you respond to the last one. So it'll be later each day (possibly much later, if you don't get to the e-mail right away) and that was a nuisance: I ended up skipping days twice on my first playthrough. It would have been nicer to have it at the same time every day.

It's very branchy; I'd guess that it's nearly a full time cave. All the chapters seem to be binary choices about how you respond to some critical event. The first choice felt wildly unbalanced, which is unfortunate because most of the others feel much more natural and less forced, not so "well, I guess we need a choice here."

I enjoyed my time with it: I played it once in April and then again this month, and I might well go back and do it again sometime. It's a nice viewpoint on the history and it's not a big time commitment: it's just spread out over a week.

A linear story where your choices build stats to a big ending branch can be very effective in the right hands. But this one is poorly handled in a number of ways that make it hard to recommend, especially at this length.

I played this three times and then looked at the source code to see if that changed my opinion of the piece (it only reinforced it). It's sort of a morality test wrapped in a 170K-word tome of a novel that's rebelling against Hollywood presentations of the Arthur legend. Are you willing to agree with the true meaning of life and death as propounded by author self-insert character Merlin?

The misogyny and misanthropy is constant - the first time (Spoiler - click to show)rape comes up, after the enemies let the women go, their own king still doesn't give them a break; he has to immediately drag them to Camelot so they can personally tell Arthur (Spoiler - click to show)(no, don't hesitate, "TELL HIM!") how many times they were raped and how awful it was.

Even Arthur mainly exists as someone for Merlin to browbeat (er, "instruct by the Socratic method"?). At one point a 7-year-old girl dies, you can't take it so you flee the cottage, only for Merlin to show up to yell at you for your feelings and tell you that "[Death] does not contribute to the significance of a person's life. It is the conclusion of that person's life story, and is significant only as that conclusion."

And in turn Arthur is constantly looking down on the people around him. He does often have the choice to be outwardly supportive, but he still usually has a condescending inner monologue going on.

It's written "in normal American English, not Hollywood medieval English" but laced with a heavy dose of the author's preferred medievalisms. The writing is repetitive and very much on the surface, not leaving much to the subtext. For me these things added up to an affected quality that I found hard to ignore. And the characterization is somewhat inconsistent: for instance Arthur reverts from competent hands-on boss to wide-eyed naïf who's never seen a roof thatched whenever a lecture on Medieval Life 101 comes up.

The author's choice to try and force players to stick with it by obscuring the point of the work ("if you bail out before the end, you'll miss the whole point of the work. That's because good stories pull the pieces together at the end") means your choices get very little narrative feedback. Someone brings you a dilemma, you grumble and handle it, get a sentence saying who's mad at you (you already knew they would be), then it jumps days or months or years to the next scene. So it's hard to care about your choices as part of the story: they're clearly just stacking up points toward/against "did you make the choices you were supposed to?"

Later on it does pull together into a dramatically tragic ending as you'd expect for an Arthur story, but by the time you're 100K words in you've probably lost most players. And all three of the endings somewhat spoil the drama by putting too much emphasis on Merlin's heavy-handed agenda.

This is a big sprawling puzzly game built with a web interface that stitches together nine separately-written games to share inventory between them. It's an interesting idea, but as with many first takes on a new idea, it's more notable for the technical gimmick than being a stellar-quality game.

The biggest issue for me is the pacing: you know how in a metroidvania there's that early/mid-game rush of finding new abilities that unlock new areas and secrets ...and then they always peter out with that tedious end-game hunting around for those last lousy points and do you even care enough to scour the map for every last thing that you missed, and did you take good enough notes the first time around?

This game starts with that. There is a big multi-part map, there are a lot of items, and it feels like the progression gating is relatively stingy so you have to find the right one (or right few ones) first. So it took several hours of wandering around mapping before I felt like I was getting anywhere, and even then... I don't know if I care. A lot of the ideas are creative ((Spoiler - click to show)there's a metal detector; a pair of waders; I haven't found it yet, but it's strongly suggested that there's a viewing device for autostereogram posters) but a lot of the time it feels like they were invented as an excuse to link the various parts of the game or limit progression rather than because they were necessary for any story purposes or were a cool mechanic in themselves?

I don't know. The overall design feels very slapdash and "(slaps roof) look how many wacky ideas we can fit in this bad boy" rather than a thoughtful design process of "how will this feel to the player? Does adding this really improve the feel?"

And there's not a lot of story. Again, it's wacky bits and pieces and the narrative is super-spotty here. I'm four or five hours in and I still have no idea who I am or why I'm here or what I'm trying to do, other than wander around looking at silly stuff and solving puzzles because they're here. What's so important that I was reckless enough to take a kayak across the ocean at night to explore this island? Why am I such a feckless idiot that I didn't bring any supplies or even a light source? (that's one that really REALLY feels like "nobody thought about this AT ALL; they just needed a way to gate off some areas until you found an item. And it's super inconsistent and nonsensical; sometimes you can read things by the light of (Spoiler - click to show)the jellyfish in an inlet and sometimes you can apparently see fine in some (Spoiler - click to show)underground tunnels with no explanation. I don't get it. Don't ask questions, just play along).

So if you're looking for a sprawling world with lots of puzzles connecting the bits, if you like making maps and taking notes so you can find that one weird spot again later, if you like realizing that "oh, now I can make progress over here," this is probably right up your alley.

If you need a reason for solving puzzles other than "they exist: of course you want to solve them" or a story motivating the thing (that's not just shallow facile "what wacky random things can we shove in here?") or something where you always have a puzzle to make progress on instead of mostly wandering the map looking for one of the few places where you can make progress... don't waste your time. I've poked around 7 of 9 of the regions and I wouldn't say this is any of those authors' best work.

It's kind of cute, but it has a bunch of typos and such, and it seems to be nothing but irritating guess-the-verb puzzles from beginning to...well, as far as I got (part way through the pet shop).