The Belinsky Conundrum

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

Oof, I can’t help but feel bad for the timing of launching a Facebook Messenger game the same week that it crashed. I didn’t run into any downtime, but I did find FB Messenger an awkward platform for this game, from really-annoying timed text, the need to manually scroll down the chat log after each prompt to see the options, and accidentally restarting the game several times when I tried typing instead of just clicking. It definitely seems like there could be advantages to the format that make it worth these downsides, but I don’t think The Belinsky Conundrum does anything that can’t be capably handled by more traditional platforms like Twine, and using one of those likely would have made the implementation a fair bit smoother.

The substance of the Belinsky Conundrum is also a little awkward. The blurb made me expect intense moral dilemmas, and then the opening seems to be framing a high-stakes espionage mission, important enough to be launched from the White House Situation Room, but your character’s dialogue options radically undermine any sense of gravity – like, upon being told that the mission will involve assassinating an American citizen and his minor children, my choices were “sweet!”, “that’s messed up”, and “oh my god”. Which, I mean sure, it is messed up, but I was expecting something a bit more articulate? This irreverent tone continues throughout the mission, and while I guess it’s meant to keep things grounded and conversational, it really took my head out of the game.

It doesn’t help that most of what you wind up doing is fairly dull. The primary gameplay is about managing the logistics of getting to the mission and gathering the needed weapons and transportation. Preparation can be a fun part of a heist story, but here there’s not much interesting going on in any of the sequences – even a (Spoiler - click to show)a surprise betrayal from a key contact played out in a low-stakes, low-consequence way – and I ran into what was I think a bug that made the resource-management part of these decisions moot, since I started out with several thousand negative credits (but could keep spending anyway).

I can see how things might pick up at the climax, but just as I got to the mission’s target the first time, I learned that they were about to be raided by the cops, and I decided to scrub rather than get caught in the middle. Turns out this ends the game, which is fair enough, but since there was no save functionality, rectifying that mistake meant starting over, and I didn’t have the endurance to face all that timed text again immediately (I eventually won -- see below). It’s a shame, since a good moral dilemma can be satisfying to work through, but I fear TBC might have gone too far in back-loading the good stuff.

Highlight: I did enjoy the drama of kicking off the story in the Situation Room – it’s a fun touch.

Lowlight: Getting a gun was a really tedious process, not least because you need to call through five different people with very-similar names to figure out which one is actually your contact. It’s pointless busywork since there’s no way to guess which one’s right, and no penalty other than sitting through identical wrong-number dialogue, if you fail.

How I failed the author: I haven’t logged onto Facebook in like 3 or 4 years (look, I’m not a big social media person) so I was distracted the whole time I was playing by a sidebar full of people I’ve flaked on writing back to for an extraordinarily long time. Sorry!

MUCH LATER UPDATE: I went back and replayed this one to a real ending. There’s definitely a climax that brings some excitement and ties together the plot threads laid down earlier, and presents the promised moral dilemma. This didn’t change my mind on the game too much, though, since the story felt very much on rails after the point where my first playthrough prematurely concluded. There’s a lot of action and some wrenching decisions, but they all appeared to happen automatically, with only one significant choice coming in at the very end. There do appear to be major consequences for the decisions made in the mid-game – there’s a score listed at the end, and there was definitely room for improvement – but I think front-loading the interactivity like this wasn’t a great idea, since it means there’s a lot of fiddly decision-making before the story kicks into high gear, then not much to do except click “next” once the ending arrives. If this had more of a heist vibe, where you could know a bit more about what the climax was likely to look like and make your preparations accordingly, I might have liked it better, but as-is the decisions felt too much like shots in the dark.