Studio

This is the kind of horror that gives me nightmares. There are no supernatural beings in this story, just a diminishing sense of security in a world that is getting increasingly dangerous to sleep in.

For the avid (and paranoid) parser player, it pays to get to know your player character and what she's like. In the first half of the game, she has to do her chores like emptying the dishwasher and (Spoiler - click to show)remembering her new identity. As the game progresses, the web browser turns orange and gradually dims, imitating the sun going down. If the player snoops around with the right commands, they'll learn about her backstory, why she has moved to a new part of town, and why she's constantly exhausted but still aware of everything around her.

As the second half begins, the web browser goes dark and everything onward is written in the future tense. The inciting event hasn't happened yet. All the parser input the player enters is the sequence of actions she will take to overcome (Spoiler - click to show)the armed intruder.

Studio is a very tense game, especially when the player is starting out. The game reacts to your every command without hesitation and you can feel how precious every move becomes in this (Spoiler - click to show)life-or-death situation. Every step feels like a step into the unknown and I have to remember the right numbers, where things are and where (Spoiler - click to show)he is.

I've lived in studio apartments this small before, so it's impressive how spacious this environment becomes when we add this obstacle to the mix. Navigating around the apartment, grabbing important items, and possibly creating distractions makes this living space feel a bit larger -- but it's still overwhelming because I have to remember that her smartphone is by the bed, her laptop is in the office area, etc. This game could have been set in a house, but the compactness of the studio apartment makes it more intense. In the parser game model, the player character and the obstacle are in different rooms. In the actual writing of the game, they're just a few feet away from each other. This proximity overrides the way I usually map parser games in my head, and I find it thrilling, if not nerve-wrecking.

There are multiple endings to this game, which may not seem like much at first. However, the game only counts endings not by how we got there, but what the outcome is. (Spoiler - click to show)Multiple ways to kill the intruder exist as a quick example. This made me replay the game a lot to explore what other outcomes are possible and which one would be satisfying for the player character. Normally, I would find replaying a horror game less unnerving. However, the constant search for new things to do keeps me on edge, and I really like how the game encourages that experimentation.

If I hadn't, I wouldn't have noticed that (Spoiler - click to show)fleeing the apartment with everything you have is the same as fleeing the apartment without your valuables. After all, the armed intruder can still find you and kill you. Or how the armed intruder reacts to sounds and things that look off (he noticed the keychain was missing). Or how you can just turn on the radio and listen to some great hip-hop. This makes the setting very believable and grounded while creating a kind of sandbox environment for the player to play around in.

It took me a while to get the last two main endings, that is (Spoiler - click to show)subduing and murdering the intruder while alerting the police. And I had to ask Cochran for help for that since they weren't really smart ideas for the player character to have. But I do appreciate that these endings exist as they remind the player that every variable is in fact in check.

While I enjoyed the game very much, I have to admit that the game doesn't go beyond its atmospheric horror roots. The way the game handles its themes doesn't make me want to write an essay about it. I think this can be a downer for people who want more than just a sandbox horror game.

That said, I think its brevity works in its favor. Studio knows what it wants to do, and it delivers. I am extremely impressed with the title and how many secrets it has -- I'm sure there are more to be found, even though I've spent hours on the game. It's simply an effective horror parser game because it preys on something most people feel vulnerable to: our safety.

I remember wondering what the player character meant in the second half when she said that (Spoiler - click to show)she was missing the weapon that kept her safe, and I restarted the game and searched the apartment as if I were burglaring her place. After a day of searching, I found (Spoiler - click to show)her taser and time stopped for me. I thought about all the associations with the object, her backstory, and why she needs it.

The object, in my view, challenges how we balance safety with other needs while reminding us that one wrong step could be the end of everything. It is a symbol of how (Spoiler - click to show)gender-based violence is everywhere and the police are useless. All she can do is fend for herself, and I think that's the real horror of the story: she's alone in a violent, violent world.

The studio apartment just happens to be a microcosm of that world.

The premise of Studio is simple: for lore reasons only hinted at, your safe house studio apartment has been broken into by an armed intruder looking to kill you. (It's technically not all one room since there's a bathroom, but it's close enough.) You spend your run(s) in a tense thought game of cat-and-mouse as you and the intruder creep around each other in the tiny studio apartment.

Your playthrough begins with you having just moved into your new studio apartment. Here you have as much time as you like to explore, and Charm Cochran takes care to incorporate a surprising level of character depth, should you choose to look for it. Some of it is given to you with the REMEMBER command, but others are easily missed (Spoiler - click to show)like the text messages to her handler. Her quirky nighttime routine is a fantastic way of infusing character into a tutorial, and attention to detail is rewarded.

Then once night falls, you understand how justified her paranoia is. The intruder NPC is smart and reactive to your own choices, making him feel like a real threat. The game itself (Spoiler - click to show)takes place in mere moments as the main character plans her escape (another lovely character detail!) and this framing device allows for many interesting playthroughs. Playing the game once through is short - it doesn't take that long to get just one of the endings - but I found myself playing for hours, resetting the scenario over and over again to try everything the apartment has to offer. After a few runs, I suggest (Spoiler - click to show)restarting the game altogether so you can prepare your studio apartment for the night to come.

This game is very polished. The CSS enhances the nerve-racking mood without being distracting, and Cochran has taken care to reward unusual decisions -(Spoiler - click to show)I was surprised when standing outside the door when the police arrive gave unique lines!. The puzzles aren't punishingly difficult, but aren't immediately obvious. There is lots that can be missed even with several playthroughs (Spoiler - click to show)like many of the radio stations. If you like atmospheric games with vivid writing that you can come back to again and again, this is for you!

(This is one of those games that can’t meaningfully be reviewed without spoiling a particular narrative and gameplay twist, so it might be best to go in blind – though if you’ve read the content warnings you probably have some sense of where things are headed…)

I am really eager to read the postmortem on this one. Studio takes the my-dumb-apartment setting of many authors’ first parser game and uses it as the canvas for a violent, nervy thriller, and I’m very curious whether this was meant from the beginning as an intentional subversion of the subgenre, or if the deeply-implemented setting came first and the plot was added as a way to leverage it. Either way, its confident storytelling and sandbox approach make Studio a standout; it’s a bravura performance in an under-explored gameplay paradigm.

The key insight here is that a stealth-focused immersive sim – think Thief, or playing a sneaky build in Deus Ex – can work really well in parser form. There’s logic here; parser games are generally good at modelling detailed environments that reward exploration, and their turn-based nature can heighten the drama of an alert enemy slowly drawing near to your hiding place. There’s also precedent, as last Spring Thing’s I Am Prey was a solid proof of concept that stealth can work in IF (I promise I will get around to reviewing that soon…)

A narrative certainly exists, and it’s deftly rolled out via the introductory tutorial section: as you finish unpacking in your new apartment, which takes you to its various corners and establishes the key features and actions that will be important in the game’s second half, the hints that things aren’t quite as innocent as they seem escalate. A mention of a mysterious contact, a casually-stored taser, a safe whose combination is keyed to the made-up birthday of an assumed identity – the details aren’t fully spelled out, even when you’re prompted with a REMEMBER command that fills in some specific backstory, but they don’t need to be. You’re on the lam, running from dangerous people, and you’re something of a dangerous person yourself, which is all the setup that’s required to make the home invasion that kicks off after the prologue concludes feel motivated and intense.

What makes Studio so fun is the wide field of possibility open before you when you wake panicked in the middle of the night and hear suspicious scratching at your door. There’s obvious stuff to do to prepare (hide under the bed, grab the paring knife from the knife block). There are obvious points of vulnerability (do you really want to let the intruder grab your wallet, or break into your laptop?) There are obvious courses of action that are probably a bad idea (is it smart to get the cops to alerted to whatever your deal is?) There are obvious repercussions to your choices (just booking it and running away poses some risks; so does trying to subdue or kill him). And with only few exceptions, this all works seamlessly, turning this tiny apartment something of a playground.

I found seven different endings, most with variations depending on exactly how I reached them, and found it fun to collect them not because they implied drastically different narrative outcomes – in fact many of them are pretty similar, and the denouement is generally left to the imagination in each case, with just a few ambiguous sentences providing a hint of where things might go before asking the player if they’d like to try again. No, it’s just that seeing the simulation respond and react is delightful. If anything, despite the horror-movie premise I found Studio something of a power fantasy; the protagonist knows how to handle herself and UNDO and SAVE will correct for any misstep, so it was enjoyable rather than stressful to set myself challenges like ghosting my way around the apartment until the intruder got bored and left empty-handed.

The implementation supporting all of this is truly a gold standard for my-dumb-apartment games. Usually such things founder at the kitchen or the bathroom, as implementing all the fixtures is an annoying pain, but here they’re all present and accounted for and work exactly as you’d think. Beyond that, there’s a dishwasher, a laptop, a phone (with charger), a radio, and everything is fully interactive without being excessively fiddly. This attention to detail continues when the stealth section kicks off; in particular, it feels like the intruder has a coherent plan in mind and improvises based on what he finds or doesn’t find, rather than behaving like a robot.

There are a few places where small bugs or moments of friction creep in – the unlocking action retains an implicit take, which leads to odd response messages when you refuse to take a key off its keyring, and sometimes I experienced momentary confusion about how to properly interact with the phone’s various submenus. But these are niggles on what’s otherwise a very polished experience. If I have an actual complaint, it’s that the game is maybe a hair too straightforward – one decisive action is usually enough to trigger an ending, and I get the sense that there are a bunch of esoteric interactions that I didn’t get a chance to uncover because it was so easy to just hide behind some boxes and either stab or smash a vase over the head of the baddie. Pacing and escalation in stealth games can be tricky in general, though – they lend themselves to binary success and failure states – so it’s hard to hold that against Studio. Still, I can’t help but be curious to see what an expanded version of this concept might look like, with a bigger environment and additional affordances like, say, being able to throw stuff around to distract the intruder’s attention.

All of which is to say that despite being rooted in one of the hoariest of IF tropes, Studio breaks new ground for future exploration while being perfectly enjoyable in itself. The purity of the concept and the depth of the programming that support it are equally praiseworthy, so like I said, I’m anxious to read the postmortem to get a better sense of where exactly the ideas came from, and maybe a clue to where they could be further elaborated, too.

This game was entered in Spring Thing 2024. It's a parser game that uses the Bisquixe interpreter, which I worked on, to do some color changes, so this review is biased. It is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see when I made it so I'm very happy.

The story is one of suspense. You arrive at a studio apartment, ready to sleep, but you have to prepare for the night first. While doing so, you, the reader, will discover that there is more to your life than first appeared.

Later on, the game enters a new phase. (Spoiler - click to show)A stranger starts opening the door, and you start planning on what you'll do, using the future tense, one of the few times I've seen someone use this Inform option.

The world is dense and richly implemented, with tons of items, electronics with menus and submenus and programs, etc. It can be overwhelming at times, but the gameplay isn't as complex as I was worried it would be. You can reach several different endings fairly easily, although there are a lot, some harder than others, if you're going for completionism.

The suspense was there for me, and there were several big moments, emotionally, including the fun color changes.

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/10/24
Playtime: 1.5hr, 4 endings of at least 5

I really like what this game is doing, and I’m working out if the frictions I felt ended up being completely necessary and justified.

The piece opens on an adult woman adjusting to her first night in a new apartment. At one point I cynically wrote down “Moving In Simulator” in my notes. I stand by the accuracy, if not dickish tone, of that note. For the first forty minutes I explored a small studio-ish apartment of fairly deep implementation, doing some last few chores before going to bed. In the course of that, I learned some background about my situation - it was not a desired relocation - and most especially the geography and layout of the place. It took me forty minutes to get to the title screen! I’d be lying if I said I was enraptured by the proceedings to that point.

Turns out I needed that intro, as I was awakened by a potential intruder and… from there it was off to the races where that intro knowledge was CRUCIAL. The work also shifted at that point to future conditional tense (WHAT???) and mental gears clashed for a moment but I quickly adjusted. Now we’re playing cat and mouse with a hostile intruder in a small, dark apartment, in an awkward syntax. This section of the game is just as deeply implemented as the first half, with many different possibilities and outcomes in this tight feint and counter-feint. The genius thing is, by using future conditional tense, after one finish (which you are allowed to accept or reject), (Spoiler - click to show)the whole thing is recast and revealed to be a lightning fast mental excercise by the protagonist, deciding how to react by playing things out in her mind! What an elegant, satisfying and unique replay/‘RESTART’ conceit! The final words of the game on finding an acceptable run (which you, not the game, gets to decide on) are just PERFECT.

The other thing gameplay did quite well is align player and protagonist. We’ve only had a single evenings’ introduction to the surroundings, but SO HAS SHE. Any fumbling we do with the environment is very much in-game and resonates with her perfectly. Couple that with its reasonably deep implementation and it has a lot going for it.

I don’t even think I want to talk about ‘flaws,’ maybe ‘compromises?’ For one, as a percentage of time, fully half my playtime was spent on setup. On reflection, I concluded this was appropriate, but in the moment it was not compelling. I also found the intruder to be less terrifying than the game wanted me to think. I am not sure whether it was the language, the discernible pattern of movements, the restart conceit, or the sometimes unfairness of his actions ((Spoiler - click to show)I would have expected more reprieve from a locked bathroom door) that put me into ‘game’ mode rather than ‘hunted’ mode. Again, I think it might have been NECESSARY to do that, so the game didn’t become a long fight against a randomizer, but it did undermine the tension a bit. In one notable case, I could not bend the parser to my will (Spoiler - click to show)trying to push the chair to wedge the front door to buy some time. Ok, that last I won’t forgive, but the rest ultimately is necessary to let those final words ring so nicely.

So yeah, in game I had reservations and frictions, but it all felt completely and satisfyingly justified by the ending. I especially liked the 4 different endings I found - all very varied but earned dramatic closures to the scenario, deeply respecting but also not coddling player choice. Yr in a tough spot, girl, you make the call on what success looks like! I will take a moment-by-moment confounding work that sticks the landing this well over an absorbing work that fumbles on the goal line 7 out of 10 times. Y’know, in my Gymnastic Football metaphor.

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: The Strangers
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : Ok, it’s not my project and good thing. I’d be afraid anything I did to try and ‘fix’ it would disturb the ending and I can’t justify that.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.