Reviews by Mike Russo
IF Comp 2023
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Middle march, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game. Also, this review contains spoilers).
I am very much a city kind of person – so much so that when I went to stay with my uncle in semi-rural New Hampshire for a couple of weeks immediately after moving out of Manhattan, the combination of deep silence and unfamiliar wildlife sounds that characterized the local soundscape gave me insomnia for the first time in my life. And actually I just recalled that when I was still living in the city, even just taking the subway to Brooklyn could make me agoraphobic. Despite all that (or maybe because of it), though, I totally get the fantasy Tricks of light in the forest offers: going into the woods, exploring slightly off the beaten trail, looking closely at every rock and flower and tree and bug, syncing into tune with the world… it’s alluring because it’s such a change of pace, sure, but also because it feels like returning to nature is an antidote to the poisonous distractions and superficial conflicts of civilized life.
My experience is actually not that far off from that of Lara, this Gruescript game’s 12-year-old protagonist; while she embarks on her unsupervised trip into the woods with the insouciance of a born ranger, actually she’d also lived in a city until just the previous year. And for her, getting in touch with nature is even more important than it is for us, as hints in the game’s narration indicate that it takes place after climate-change disasters have wrecked much of the earth, displacing people and animals alike. Not that she’s very concerned with any of that; monitor lizards have always roamed Europe in her lifetime, so she’s just focused on having a fun time exploring, taking some pictures of interesting plants or bugs, and finding something to collect for a classroom exercise.
While eventually a few brushes with danger intrude on this innocent agenda, this is a decidedly low-key game by IF standards, and it sings when it leans into its smallness. There are only a few objects needed to surmount the game’s small set of puzzles, but each of its locations typically boasts at least a few pieces of scenery: a half-dead tree, a heap of trash, a swarm of bees, a cleft in the earth. In addition to examining them, you’re typically also able to take a photo, or touch or smell, or, for portable items, harvest a piece for your sample box. The game tracks all of this, but it isn’t vulgar enough to change the plot based on your actions, much less include anything like an achievement to “reward” you for mechanically clicking on everything. Instead, exploration is worth pursuing for its own sake, or rather for the sake of tiny jewel-like bits of prose:
"There are two kinds of moss on the rock here: both are like carpets made up of green strings, but one has longer, thinner and lighter strings, while the others are shorter, thicker, and a less cheerful tone."
"I kneel under the highest part of the fallen tree. The underside is different from the top. Cold, a bit damp, softened. Eaten by bugs? Small circles of white and yellow fungus thrive in the shade. Some day, not too far, they will weaken the wood so much that the trunk will finally break."
There’s a neat connection drawn between this external poking about and more internally-focused reflection. Often, engaging with an object will prompt an association whose thread Lara will follow over a few subsequent turns, sometimes sparking a memory of her previous life or prompting her to think about her family members or the bigger world. Similarly, most of the big-picture setting details are established glancingly, through these fine-grained observations: noticing some dead trees will reveal that they were probably killed by climate-induced flooding, or seeing the traces of poachers will make Lara recall a conversation where her dad alluded to the political upheaval that predated the current, more stable time. Notably, while it’s clear that the world has changed in generally bad ways, Tricks of light in the forest posits a future where nature has begun to heal, generally assisted by humans. Both of Lara’s parents work in recovery efforts, and while the woods are wilder and different than they are today, they’re still vibrant and a place of wonder.
This quietly hopeful vibe extends to the moments of genuine threat, where Lara encounters untamed wildlife. These sequences are definitely tense, but I don’t think it’s possible for the player to die, and the way you deal with the animals just involves shooing them off, rather than inflicting lasting harm. And while these are puzzles that involve multiple steps to solve, I didn’t find that they detracted from the meditative mood of the piece; you typically only have one or two usable inventory items at a time, and Lara is a resourceful enough character to take initiative and set up the next action in the chain without requiring too much handholding, so the steps are typically clear. The Gruescript implementation does mean that there’s often a fair bit of clicking to manage – getting an inventory item queued up to use sometimes felt to me like it took one step too many – but it’s not awful, and again, this isn’t the kind of game where you feel lots of urgency.
No, things stay contemplative throughout, never more so than at the end. After finding your way back home, you’re given the chance to look over the mementos you acquired during your trip, and pick which one you want to bring to school. It’s a small, satisfying note to finish on – or it would be if it were the finish, but it’s not. Instead, these enigmatic paragraphs are the last writing in the game:
"I’ve been thinking about all I’ve seen: the living things that thrive in the light and the dark, but also the traces of disaster, the secrets of Terror Country, the invading species, the heat.
"I have the feeling that I’m missing something. That there is something to be understood in the middle of all this, which I can’t understand, I can’t even guess."
This isn’t, I’m fairly sure, anything so crass as an indication that there’s a secret ending I failed to unlock; rather, it’s an invitation to the player to reflect on what the game’s presented and see if there’s something visible to them that Lara – who, remember, is twelve – missed. Here, the game’s repeated theme of depth, and its miniaturist mode, loom large: Lara is continually pushing herself to go deeper into the wild (indeed, the navigation system is nearly linear; most locations offer only “home” and “forest” as travel options), while hyperfocusing on each leaf, twig, and bug. And on the internal side of things, she gives us big-picture statements about the world and very specific recollections of particular incidents in her life.
So what’s in the middle of these two spectrums, at the interface of the personal and the global? There are many concepts one could throw out, and find support for in the game: history, say, society, or politics, and the way they create larger-scale shifts to systems. Appropriately, Lara seems innocent of all this, but the player is given more than enough hints to see what’s elided: that reference to the wilderness being “Terror Country” aligns with Lara’s father mentioning “the time when [bad people] were in power. When they threw your grandad and grandma in jail. The Terror,” for example, and forms a still more menacing constellation when you throw in the tucked-away cabin, with its chair with leather straps and generous supply of bleach. Lara’s relatively-safe, relatively-hopeful existence, that is to say, is one that’s contingent; it took coordinated action to achieve it, and it was opposed by the coordinated action of others who had a different vision. The sum of our decisions, as mediated through our civilization, is the single overriding fact: alone, deep in nature, it may be hard to see the city, but it’s not so easy to escape.
(Okay, having written those last two paragraphs, boy will there be egg on my face if actually it’s just that there’s a secret ending I failed to unlock).
This man knows nothing, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game).
In the English class I took as a high-school sophomore, in lieu of formal essays the teacher would have us write little weekly papers in response to a quote he’d pull from whatever book we were reading. Usually the quote would clearly invite a specific kind of analysis, like it’d spotlight a key theme or a bit of character development or what have you, but every once in a while he’d mess with us, like when we were reading Updike’s The Centaur: out of that novel’s heady mix of mythological allegory, lyrical landscape-painting, and squalid small-town depression, he extracted for our waiting pens the bare clause “…a sluggish digestive rumbling.”
This was, so far as I remember, a totally insignificant quartet of words, brought on by one character drinking coffee on an empty stomach or something like that – a mere incidental detail signifying nothing. The upside was that I felt free to write whatever I felt like, and for whatever reason, I decided what I felt like writing was a three-page narration of Socrates’s last hours. I had him run through a monologue about his devotion to philosophy and the ideal, drink the hemlock in perfect equanimity, and say goodbye to his disciples with no great show of emotion. Yet even as his spirit faced its end with calm, I had his body rebel, guts heaving and roiling against the hemlock, lungs desperate to keep gasping down air. The ending line (I was very proud of the ending line) was “what is Truth? Truth is a sluggish digestive rumbling.”
All of which is to say that even to a teenager whose knowledge of Socrates came mostly from The Cartoon History of the Universe, the idea of using him to dramatize the physical nature of man is irresistible: to levy a critique of pure reason (wait, that’s Kant) by bringing the body into the equation, to juxtapose the phenomenology of spirit (oops, that’s Hegel) with the reality of flesh. This is something Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates does, and does well – we meet an embodied, earthy Socrates, with a big nose and a bigger belly, and with a taste for wine and food and sex – but it’s also, let’s face it, a sophomoric trick that isn’t actually that interesting: ideas come from people, and people exist in the world, film at 11.
No, what’s interesting in this game isn’t so much what’s done with Socrates qua Socrates, as what’s done with his wife Xanthippe, and therefore with him in relation to her. Xanthippe has come down through history only as a silent archetype, demonized by centuries of male writers as a shrew so vituperative that Socrates turned to harassing passers-by in the agora just to escape her clutches. It would be tempting to flip the tables on this legacy of misogyny by positing a Xanthippe who’s a perfect mate for her husband, someone who’s supportive of his endeavors, an intellectual match for him, and able to create a harmonious home for him as a refuge from the small-minded politics that ultimately killed him. Fortunately, Victor resists this temptation: his Xanthippe is certainly Socrates’s equal, but she’s recognizably someone who gossips would turn into a legendary termagant. She holds a grudge, she knows what buttons to push, she calls him on his BS. It would have been easy to write this game to be about reacting to the great philosopher; instead, he has to react to her.
There’s a lot of skill needed to make this work, though; it’s easier to describe the dynamic between two long-married people than it is to show it, especially when they’re interacting in circumstances as extreme as these (the premise, memorably laid out by the blurb, is that as Xanthippe you’ve bribed your way into his prison cell on the eve of his execution, bent on one last roll in the hay). The game rises to the challenge by slaughtering sacred cows left and right. Almost the first thing out of Xanthippe’s mouth is ”come here, humpty grumpy Socratumpy,” which is a hilarious line but also a statement of intent: these characters aren’t going to be mere figures mouthing stentorian dialogue, but human beings who demand to be understood as such. This does mean that there’s more than a bit of anachronism in the dialogue (there’s a reference to a cuckold’s horns, for example, though I’m pretty sure that figure didn’t exist in antiquity) but the game is more than worth the candle: freed of the need to hew to some imagined Merchant-Ivory portrait, the game has full rein to be funny and sincere.
Indeed, while the circumstances of the characters are quite dire, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates made me laugh as much as any game in the Comp. There are of course philosophy jokes sufficiently accessible that I got them (despite the passage of 25 years, I’m still mostly relying on that Cartoon History for my knowledge of Socrates), little Classical in-jokes (“That’s not what Alcibiades told me”/”You shouldn’t believe everything Alcibiades says”), and parodies of Homer, but the humor really proves its worth in the fights between the two spouses – for of course, whatever you choose, the evening quickly goes off the rails and a lifetime of resentment, regret, and suspicions get dredged up for one final look.
Arguing with your spouse is usually not considered fun IF gameplay, but here, it’s both integral to the story and entertaining in its own right. The marital dynamics here are very keenly observed – I swear that I’ve had some of these exact fights with my wife, especially the one about what counts as an apology, and Socrates’s inability to let an opportunity for a little joke slide or refrain from raising tiny, completely insignificant objections had more than a bit of a personal resonance – but among the heart-truths they sling at each other are enough gags and funny moments to make the conflict go down easily. The game’s also careful to manage the power disparities: neither one is wholly right or wholly wrong, the emotions aren’t allowed to go too far out of bounds, and since the game is necessarily framed by the question of when to sacrifice truth for social expedience (with Socrates’s example implicitly suggesting the answer is “very rarely”), it would feel perverse to try to avoid conflict when there are things left unsaid. As a result, despite being the kind of player who’s almost invariably polite when given the option, here I was gleefully picking the choices that maximized the amount of time Socrates was raked over the coals for slipping and calling Xanthippe a cow.
So yeah, this is quite a fun and funny game – I think this is the only time in IF Comp history when a player character has (Spoiler - click to show)shagged Plato. But as with many of Victor’s games, the comedy is in service of a non-frivolous examination of what we owe each other, what partnership can look like, and how we can imagine saying goodbye to the most important people in our lives. The closing scene is lovely and wraps many of these threads together, positing a domestic origin for the famous Allegory of the Cave that’s sweet and sexy and segues beautifully into the final bout of lovemaking (I know a mid-Comp update added the option to wrap up with cuddling, but that choice feels decidedly non-canonical to me).
For all that it’s set almost 2,500 years ago, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates feels vital and contemporary; just as the questions Socrates grappled with are still ones that haunt us today, there’s nothing in this story that feels like it’s since been solved. Shorn of their dramatic circumstances, these dialogues are ones many of us have, or will have, with our partners – and just as in the game, those conversations proceed a lot of yelling and ill-advised joking that we hope history will fail to record.
Heartfelt clowning, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I alpha tested this game).
One of the things I worry about, as a critic, is turning into one of those people who says everything under the sun is a liminal space. It’s a cool-sounding phrase, sure, but it’s one of those concepts that can easily become a crutch, allowing one to say something that seems impressive but doesn’t communicate much beyond “this is a place that’s between other places”, which for sufficiently loose values of “place”, “between”, and “other” can be made to fit whatever you like.
Having written the above paragraph I am now seized with concern that actually I’m already one of those people and just haven’t noticed. …but OK, I just searched my IFDB-posted reviews and only 3 out of 387 use the phrase, referring to trains, bus stops, and public transit, which seems fairly restrained. So I think that means I can burn some of that banked capital and say you know, when you think about it, traveling circuses sure are liminal spaces. At a basic level, they move from place to place, but there’s also a temporal component, because when they’re pitched up somewhere and you visit, you’re sandwiched between its past nonexistence before they came into town and its future nonexistence once they leave. It’s unsurprising, then, that the circus is often positioned as a site of transformation: shuffling through my mental inventory of circus stories at random, you’ve got Big, where Tom Hanks literally enters one a boy and leaves a man; sticking to IF, Ballyhoo sees the player character lunge at the chance to stop being an anonymous punter and take on a new life of adventure.
For the people who work at a circus, though, it certainly can’t function as a one-off engine for change. In reality I’m sure for many it’s just a job like any other, but from a literary point of view, the approach taken by Honk! seems exactly right: the winning cast of this top-notch comedy puzzler are predominantly queer in one way or other, but comfortably so, at peace with an existence that the narrow might say is perennially in-between more conventional alternatives. The main character, a clown named Lola, takes hormone pills; her lover Freda is the circus strongwoman, gigantic and mighty and tender. The magician Adagio changes gender as part of her act, and the goose-trainer, Ken Lawn, clocks as neurodivergent (beyond his questionable decision to spend lots of time with an animal as ill-tempered as a goose as part of his profession, I mean). Against this, the Ringmaster seems a plain-vanilla kind of guy, but hey, he’s nice so we can let him skate by.
Actually pretty much everybody is nice, even initially-prickly Ken – except for the Phantom who’s haunting the circus and sabotaging everyone’s acts. The main business of the game involves assisting the three other main characters in their performances, seeing how the Phantom tries to wreck them, and foiling his plans to keep the shows moving (they’re endlessly repeatable until you succeed, this being a merciful game). This is a lovely structure, since it gives you multiple avenues to work on at once without any interdependences, so if you’re momentarily stymied you’ve almost always got another avenue to switch to. It also makes the player feel more proactive than in many parser games, since in practice you wind up scoping out the carnival grounds, then trying the acts to see what the Phantom’s going to do, then going back to the free-roaming section to hatch your plan and prepare.
Honk! is also among the funniest games in the Comp. The author’s a dab hand with farce – pretty much every scene involving the assholish goose left me giggling, for example:
“Completely asleep!” marvels Lawn. “I don’t believe it! How did yaargh fnaaargh,” he continues as the goose wakes up and bites his nose.
But there are also really good laconic, tossed-off jokes:
“It was your day off, you got back late, maybe you didn’t hear from anyone yet,” says the Ringmaster. “The circus is haunted now."
And the best gags to my mind are the ones that play their hand slow, telegraphing the punch line to the player and then drawing out the windup longer and longer and longer until an initially-good joke becomes sublime; it’s an impressive bit of comedic legerdemain that’s totally appropriate to the setting.
The puzzles themselves are a strong bunch, too. Most aren’t too hard, requiring just enough forethought to feel clever; there’s maybe one puzzle that’s a little too hard because it tips into overly-cartoonish territory (Spoiler - click to show)(the bit where a helium balloon makes the rabbit float upwards) but even that is mostly delightful and funny. In fact for all that it’s all mostly standard medium-dry-goods manipulation, the puzzles have a very strong thematic focus – the tools of your trade involve pie-throwing, making balloon animals, and playing around with magic tricks – that make Honk! truly feel like a circus game, not just a game taking place at a circus.
That strong theme comes into play in the ending, too; after a deliriously-escalating climactic sequence, the game’s final text ties a surprisingly-affecting bow around everything the game’s played with – queerness, found family, laughter, killjoys using the law to stop people doing stuff they don’t like. While it never lets its message get in the way of the fun, Honk! is the rare silly parser puzzler that actually has something to say, positing that people who live in liminal spaces deserve a place to call home, too.
Post-post-modern and emotionally raw, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game. Also, this review contains spoilers since it deserves to be discussed in its full context).
I regret not having a stronger grounding in literary theory pretty much any day ending in y, but that lack feels especially excruciating as I turn to LAKE Adventure, because it’s operating within a movement that I’d love to be able to name definitively. Instead, I’m going to have to wildcat this thing and call the game part of the New Sincerity. Like, we all know that modernism happened, right, and dramatized the way that conventional narrative forms and naïve realism were no longer tenable in an increasingly polycentric and polyvalent world, right? And then came post-modernism, which responded to the anxiety that forms might be empty by turning a microscope onto said forms, exalting self-conscious exploration of structure above superficial considerations of plot and character.
But after post-modernism exhausted itself (er, to the extent it has – again, I am mostly groping blindly here) something had to come next, and for many, that something had to respond to the ongoing felt need for old-fashioned emotional engagement and catharsis. But how to manage that in a world where a genre-savvy audience goes into a work knowing all the tricks? Paradoxically, the author needs to meet them where they’re at, and move outwards into ironic distance to create the preconditions necessary to eventually move inwards to identification. Thus the New Sincerity; think of House of Leaves, which for all its metafictional flourishes has as its engine the failing marriage between the two leads. Or of the Sandman comics, which move into an epic register to chronicle the exploits of the Prince of Stories, but ultimately are largely concerned with how he’s a shitty boyfriend. Or – to tip my hand – think of And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, B.J. Best’s Comp-winning game from 2021; a coming-of-age story about the pre-teenaged angst of moving away from your best friend, it could have been saccharine-sweet but for the way its narrative was ramified through text adventures within text adventures (with bonus parallel text adventures as an Easter Egg).
LAKE Adventure is doing something similar, I think, but there’s no risk that anyone will find this game cloying. It’s also part of what I’ve called a confessional turn in recent parser IF (think of this year’s Repeat the Ending and Hand Me Down; also, I really need to stop trying to name things, I’m bad at it), positioning the game the player experiences as a diegetically-created work whose origins are themselves elements of the game’s story. The premise is that the game’s central character, Eddie Hughes, has dug up an old text adventure he wrote when he was 13 (and later revised when he was an older teenager) and, facing the doldrums of the first months of 2020’s lockdowns, is watching on Zoom and commenting along as a friend plays it for the first time.
This is an excruciatingly painful framing device. Like, I am one of the few (maybe only?) people in the world who’s experienced something like this: I presented Sting, my memoir game, to a meeting of the Seattle IF Meetup in 2021, and while they were completely lovely about it, sharing scenes from my actual life as rendered into parser form – in real time – was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever done. And that was just a game that emulated how I was when I was a young teenager, rather than one actually reflecting my 13-year-old sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, Eddie is diffident in the extreme, repeatedly asking the player whether they want to stop playing, apologizing for the overly-faithful implementation of his childhood home, and audibly squirming when his younger self-insults the player for turning on the TV by calling them a “vidiot.” No wonder that self-deprecating phrase “I guess” is by far Eddie’s most common verbal tic as he attempts to narrate his lost youth.
For all that LAKE Adventure boasts a note-perfect recreation of a late-80s childhood – there’s a birthday party invitation recognizably created via Print Shop, and the in-game narration focuses with hyperspecificity on the material and brand of young Eddie’s swimsuit – it’s not nostalgic, and in fact is anti-nostalgic. While the few glimpses we get of adult Eddie’s life indicate that it’s unremarkable but stable, his youth was anything but. The plot of the game-within-a-game is notionally just about visiting a birthday party for his best friend’s sister, but it’s haunted by numerous specters, from his parents’ shattered marriage to his own sister’s illness to a history of bullying to the sad fate of his friend. Snatches of this dark reality come in extradiegetic Shards of Memory, which take the player out of the idyllic lake-house setting to experience snatches of Eddie’s contemporary reality, or in adult Eddie’s understated acknowledgement of the ways that the game functioned as an escape from an untenable situation, or from the incursion of graphic violence into a heretofore-innocent story. The game mines pathos out of the implications of the smallest detail or slip of the tongue:
"Your mother’s clothes are on the floor in piles. Some are dresses. Some are jeans. It’s a good thing you know how to do your own laundry!
"Anyway, the bathroom is to the east and my paren—my mom’s—room is west."
And I’m not going to quote it, but there’s nothing in this year’s Comp that hit me as hard as the description of the doll.
The player has work to do along the way; there are puzzles that keep you busy, but mostly what I found myself doing was reflecting on memory. The game is a palimpsest, with some of the darker elements presumably added in by the late-teenage Eddie who knows how some things end up, changes that retroactively reconfigure what’s come before in a way that makes the original forever inaccessible. Of course, that isn’t even a metaphor – to invoke one of my many strange points of bleed-through with this game, my memories of my sister’s last months are already confounded by all the times I’ve remembered them. Later, in the climax, the player’s explicitly confronted with a series of young Eddie’s most traumatic experiences, and has the option to either embrace or reject these memories – but for those seeking comfort in coming full circle will be disappointed to learn that these choices make no difference to the outcome. Then the tragedy of young Eddie’s disillusionment is driven home by a sequence that runs through all his hopes for the future, from romantic conquests to worldly success.
After all this, LAKE Adventure ends with a coda that could be seen as a final, superfluous twist of the knife. The Zoom session is cut short as Eddie’s daughter comes into the room and kicks him off the computer for an early-COVID remote study session for her ancient history class. She’s uninterested in her father’s half-hearted attempts to tell her what he’s been doing, and the game draws the curtain to leave his final, plaintive question unanswered: “I’d like to know if ancient history matters.”
It’s hard to get to this point and not feel beaten down. Again, this is the genius of the New Sincerity: narrate Eddie’s life from front to back, and we’d roll our eyes at the naked emotional manipulation, but let his pain peek out through the multiple overlapping layers of narrative, and it’s heartrending. This final suggestion that all of this was for nothing is almost too much to take. Yet it’s worth being pedantic about what Eddie’s asking: not whether the past matters, but whether history does. We routinely conflate the two, but in fact these are radically different, for the past is what happens, and history is what we write about it, how we try to wrest brute facts into narrative. While we don’t have details, it’s nonetheless pellucidly clear that Eddie’s experiences have shaped his life for good or ill – hell, just about the only thing we know about his daughter is that she’s named after his sister.
The judgment on history, though, is more equivocal; Eddie spends the whole game running away from or apologizing for the story he’s made of his traumatic past. And yet, even in this reticent, half-unspoken way, he does share his embarrassing juvenilia, and if it is possible for history to matter, surely the necessary first step is for someone to read it.
I am definitely shook, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game).
I always find it hard to review games I’ve tested, because even when I replay the final, finished version, my first impression is inescapably of a no-longer-extant game still in the process of reaching its ultimate form; I sometimes attempt some mental gymnastics to try to figure out how my sense of a game might differ from that of someone coming to it fresh, but that’s especially challenging here, because Prince Quisborne is a massive game that I haven’t had the opportunity to revisit in any depth, and I first started testing it in February. So my memories are more distant than I’d like, I haven’t refreshed them recently, and I suspect the addition of some new features, like the NUDGE command that points you to areas where you’re able to make progress, or the DESTINATIONS-based fast travel system to minimize the challenge of navigating the large, diagonal-direction-happy map, radically smooth out the gameplay. Nevertheless I feel obliged to write something by way of comment on the most Brobdingnagian game of this, or, perhaps, any Comp, but you might want to take it with even more salt than usual.
Right, with that distressingly on-point intro out of the way, let’s talk about tarof, which is the Persian practice of hospitality. So far as I’ve experienced it (I have an Iranian-American wife and in-laws), the thing that’s distinctive about tarof is its extravagant generosity. The quintessential example is that you’ll be invited over for lunch, and on your way in you’ll maybe mutter some compliment about the nice rug they have in their living room, at which point your host will beam at you and say “oh, it’s a terrible old thing, I hate it, but I’m so glad you like it, let me give it to you!” At which point you might protest a) you weren’t dropping a hint or anything like that; and b) actually you’re no expert on rugs but now that you look at it it sure seems very nice and actually probably quite expensive. But they’ll say it’s kind of you but no need to be polite, actually you’d be doing me a favor if you take it. And as you try to think of what to say, your host will gently shove you out of the way, get down on their hands and knees, and start rolling the thing up for you. The thing is, this is obviously incredibly nice. But it’s also super overbearing – it’s too much, and even leaving that aside, how the hell are you supposed to get that giant rug home?
And so we come again to Prince Quisborne, which combines the vast scope of a mainframe game with the intricate depth of implementation of a short one-room one, and presents its epic story in a prose style that’s prolix to a fault. In some ways this is the dream that animated the early amateur IF scene: a whole world rendered in jewel-like detail, where you could equally well traipse from one side of a kingdom to the other, and pause anywhere along the way to take in a pagelong random event tied to your exact progression through the plot, or stop off at a blacksmith’s shop to futz around with a fully functional forge, or visit a mini area with fiendishly complex logic and word puzzles that could be a whole game in its own right.
I’m not sure I’ve come across anything else that incarnates this vision nearly as well – Cragne Manor is the only plausible contender, and as a game with 84 authors and all the incoherence that implies, it’s not really a close comparison – and the thing is, having experienced it, it’s not obvious that this was such a good idea. Prince Quisborne is a lot; the prologue is manageable, though already shows off the author’s facility with jokey high-fantasy-ish language and love of multiple puzzle solutions, but once past that lagniappe, the full game unfolds and I can only imagine that most players will issue a gulp, much like I did, once they realize exactly what they’re in for: sure, an incredible voyage of discovery where your eponymous protégé will learn to be a grown-up under your tutelage as you unlock ancient secrets, but also puzzles that rely on having searched an unobtrusive bit of scenery halfway around the world, or remembering an incidental detail from a lore dump ten hours ago; or finding the thingabob you suddenly realize you need means remembering whether you first saw it in Chelkwibble or Chedderwicket; and when you hit the big plot-progressing cutscenes to hand, I sure hope you have a drink and snack handy.
As with tarof, it’s easy to look at all of this and just think “it’s too much”, especially in the press of the Comp. But unlike with tarof, which is embedded in complex systems of power, class, and reciprocity that need to be navigated to maintain politeness, there’s really no downside or ulterior motive here: Prince Quisborne is precisely as generous as it appears to be. If a player tries to rush through it in one go, I suspect they’ll resent it, but if instead it’s played over weeks or months, I suspect it’d deservedly be one of the greatest IF experiences you’ve ever had. It’s extraordinarily rich, and the more I played it, the more I appreciated touches like Prince Quisborne’s facility for having a limerick for every situation, or the way his character subtly changes over the course of the journey as experience leads him from callow youth to surprisingly-touching heroism. In fact, I’m not ashamed to admit that the ending sequence made me tear up – while PQ starts out as a comedy character, he achieves real depth by the finish, and the way the game acknowledges his growth is at once a total blindsiding and completely, necessarily obvious. It’s one of the most impressive climaxes to a piece of IF I’ve ever experienced, so if you’re wondering whether pressing through to the end is worth it, I can say that it emphatically is.
PQ also goes out of its way to be friendly to the player, without watering itself down in the slightest: there are all those convenient commands I mentioned at the beginning, as well as an always-on inventory window, exhaustive hints, and a lovely, inviting presentation (for the love of god, play this in QTADS to get the full experience). One doesn’t need to meet PQ halfway, only a quarter of the way at most.
This is still a commitment, let me reiterate! I’d guess this is at least a 20 hour game. But each of those hours will show you something worthwhile, and the accumulation of them accomplishes things very few other games have done. Now that the Comp is over, it’s the perfect time to approach PQ as it deserves to be approached: dedicate some time. Let go of the idea that you need to race through it (or that you should have any shame about consulting hints or the walkthrough!) And get ready to experience something extraordinary.
Mind = blown, but maybe not blown enough, December 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I think anybody who has a job or area of expertise that’s routinely depicted in popular media has a pet-peeve list of things that are continually and hilariously flubbed in said media. As someone with a law degree, I’d put the talismanically-powerful contract waiver near the top of my list: you know, someone’s about to do something ridiculously dangerous and/or ill-advised, but since they agreed to a generic waiver, all is good. So it goes for Ziyan, the protagonist of this stylish choice-based game, who signs his name to a vague waiver saying “We are not responsible for any liabilities and damages that may occur during the games” before entering a reality-TV videogame competition that immediately goes way off the rails. As the battle royale gets way too real and axes, grenades, and body-parts start flying, the question isn’t who’s going to be left standing to claim the million-dollar prize – it’s how fast the survivors and the family members of those who don’t make it out will sue everyone involved back to the stone age, waiver or no waiver.
Okay, okay, that’s clearly not the point – and to a certain extent, the ultraviolence isn’t really the point either, as GameCeption’s thankfully more focused on the relationship between its two leads and the game-theoretical implications of its twist than it is on rendering a Battlegrounds-style game in IF form. Ziyan’s best friend, and partner in the competition, is Airen, an affable, supportive guy who provides a nice counterweight to Ziyan’s occasionally moody nature. There isn’t much time for the two of them to hang out before they decide to sign up for the TV show in hopes of making enough money to pay the rent, but the introductory scenes are enough to establish an easy rapport between them that raises the stakes once things go pear-shaped.
The signs that that something’s off about the production company come early, as the initial interview delves into some oddly invasive questions about how much the duo trust each other – this is effectively lampshaded, though, in a bit that showcases the early, laidback vibe:
“Dude, same,” Airen agrees, scratching his head. “Like are they gonna make us do a trust fall off the side of a building?” Ziyan punches him. “If that really happens, I’m blaming you.”
This introductory sequence does feel fairly long, and doesn’t have too many decision-points, but once the competition starts, things pick up. As you play the game, you’re presented with a series of mostly binary choices; I’m not sure how on-rails this sequence is, but it feels authentically tense. The writing does go a bit over the top, and having the gameplay narrow to determining whether you die or get to continue the story, but this section moves quickly enough that it doesn’t wear out its welcome. And then comes in the twist, which I found fairly predictable but which I’ll spoiler-block nonetheless.
(Spoiler - click to show)It turns out that you’re not piloting a polygonal avatar around, but rather (through some unexplained technology) your buddy Airen; likewise, the other players you’re fighting are real people who are being killed and/or maimed by the ultraviolence everyone is deploying in pursuit of the prize. This ironically brings the video-game battle royale genre back to its cinematic roots, but shorn of its original thematic heft; GameCeption doesn’t seem interested in interrogating the economic, political, or cultural systems that created such a horrifying competition, but instead uses its premise to put pressure on the traditional understanding of player identity in IF: if you’re making decisions for Ziyan, and Ziyan is making decisions for Airen, who’s actually the player?
It’s a superficially clever turn, but this twist didn’t do much for me. Again, it’s pretty heavily telegraphed, and questions of players’ complicity or agency in a narrative are old hat for IF by now; I don’t feel like adding the second-order complexity of one character piloting another did much to unsettle the well-understood IF triangle of identities (narrator, protagonist, player). Even a somewhat-stale theme can still support a good game, of course, but I felt that GameCeption put too many eggs in the metafictional basket: the rapport between Airen and Ziyan largely drops out as the action picks up, and the simple gameplay isn’t enough to hold the player’s interest. And then the ending doubles down by having Ziyan reup with the competition, and using his interest in game-design to implement an even bigger twist for the next season that makes even less sense, and has even less emotional impact.
Bringing things back as we return for spoiler-town, I’d summarize by saying that the game becomes over-reliant on a meta idea that isn’t quite as clever as it seems to think, and becomes a slender reed upon which to rest the second half of the game. There’s some excitement to be had, but I think GameCeption would have been stronger if it had either gone smaller, by staying grounded in the best-friend relationship between the two characters, or even bigger by leaning into the implications of its twist and dialing up the questions it raises about agency and control to 11. As is, I found the game a little too lukewarm to make much of an impact, like boilerplate contract language your eye just skips right past.
A lost sequel, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
One thing I’ve noticed when thinking back to my tween years, three decades on, is that things are either seared into my memory or complete blanks. I can still hear what it sounded like, for example, when we got back from a summer vacation to find that a brood of cicadas had hatched while we were gone and had decided to fill the night with a beautiful and threatening cacophony of chirping. And I can instantly recall the squirming, excited embarrassment I felt when the girl I had a crush on me called me one evening because I’d messed with her little brother the day before, telling him I’d found a long out-of-print Dragonlance gamebook that she coveted. On the other hand, I know I must have played months of basketball in eighth grade – I went to a tiny school, everybody was on every team – but I can’t summon up one reminiscence of anything that happened at a single game or practice.
So too it is with Douglas Adams: I was obsessed with him the summer I was 11, blazing through the then-four-part Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy just as school ended and then chasing down the Dirk Gently books before embarking on a campaign of rereading those six books over and over until I got thoroughly sick of them, which took a while. The first book I remember pretty well, because it’s got most of the iconic moments; the third was my favorite so I reread it like once a week, and as a result I can still run down most of its cricket-based MacGuffin quest. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, though, didn’t make much of an impression all these years on – the ending sticks, not so much the rest. And the second book, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe mentioned so prominently in this game’s subtitle? Um. I remember the gag about it being stuck in a manufactured time bubble so patrons can swig their martinis as they watch the heat death of all things, but I’m pretty sure that’s actually introduced in the first book. Like I said above: complete blank.
My other relevant Douglas Adams lacuna I can’t blame on advancing age: I’ve also never played Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with any degree of assiduity (I think I poked at the BBC illustrated remake long enough to give up halfway into the babel fish puzzle). I suppose I should get around it one of these days, but its reputation as an unforgiving puzzle-gauntlet doesn’t do much to recommend it to my sensibilities. Sure, I remember liking Adams’ writing, but if I wanted to revisit it I’d much prefer to go back to the books than struggle through a style of IF that doesn’t do much for me.
All of this is to say that I am entirely the wrong audience for an impressively-robust fan-made sequel that appears to pick up immediately after the first game left off, and doesn’t provide anything by way of context or motivation. I wouldn’t say Milliways is explicitly nostalgia-bait; from my very vague understanding, it primarily visits situations and characters not covered in the first game (though I think some pieces may be part of the book plots that I’ve forgotten?), and while the troupe of familiar characters are present, they’re off getting hammered so are almost completely noninteractive. But it’s clearly the product of deep affection for the original – so much so that it’s written in the modern incarnation of the language the Infocom Imps used to make their games – and shorn of the pleasant sheen of remembrance, the game often just left me baffled.
The earliest example is maybe the most telling: the game doesn’t tell you who you are. I feel it’s safe to assume that you’re once again inhabiting British everyman Arthur Dent – the clearest clue is that you can find your dressing gown, which the game tells you you must have dropped in the previous game. But I don’t think ABOUT spells it out, there isn’t actually any intro text, and X ME just tells you “you see nothing special about you” (ouch). It also doesn’t tell you what you’re doing. You start out having just exited your spaceship and reached the surface of a planet called Magrathea (the name’s dimly familiar, no recall of the details); presumably you’re meant to explore, but there’s no narrative telling you that you’re there to look for anything in particular, and the cryptic stuff you find doesn’t retroactively explain why you might have come here in the first place, or what you think you’re doing. By the time I stopped my playthrough, about three hours in, I’d finally encountered the first indications of something like a plot, but it took a lot of unmotivated bumbling to get to that point.
Of course, not every game needs to be Photopia and unmotivated bumbling can make for solidly entertaining gameplay, so long as solid writing and enjoyable puzzles are pulling the player along. Milliways gets mixed marks from me on this front. There are solidly Adams-aping gags sprinkled through the text, like this bit where you look up the eponymous eatery in the Hitchhiker’s Guide:
"It goes on to explain, in extremely vague then suddenly extremely detailed (and obviously copyrighted) paragraphs how Milliways, better known as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is the best restaurant you can ever visit."
There are also some good jokes embedded in the parser, like this exchange prompted by examining a painting:
"You look at the painting, which could have been done by yours truly (and I’m not even AI yet). It is of an old mouse wearing a monocle. At the bottom of the painting is a plaque, which reads:
"Reginald Markenplatt
Founder of Magrathea Corps.
86 standard yrs.
“Oh, you like it?” says Percy.
"> no
“Well that’s not very nice.”
While for much of my time with the game, I was basically keying in the walkthrough (more on that later, of course), I had a reasonable time doing so based on the charm of the prose and the efficiently-drawn situations. It’s certainly not laugh-a-minute funny the way that I recall Adams being (…probably best not to revisit and find out whether that impression holds up), but this all makes for an entertaining way to pass several hours.
I found the gameplay often made things much less entertaining, unfortunately. There are some quite good puzzles here, like camouflaging a drink to knock out someone whose keycard you need to steal and figuring out how to deal with a shape-changing alien, but many of them rely on frustrating mechanics – there’s a strict inventory limit, many instant-death timers that end the game if you don’t solve things fast enough, the mechanics for travelling between different areas appears to be largely random, and at least one place that will lock you out of victory if you don’t somehow know which objects will be plot-critical and which are red herrings. Compounding the challenge, I came across some notable bugs in the game; twice, an event was supposed to trigger after waiting for a reasonable number of turns, but both times 150-200 turns of waiting didn’t do the trick (the walkthrough offered a workaround for one, and I had a save that allowed me to replay and eventually get past the other, at least). And there’s a recurring puzzle that appears to quite literally involve guessing a verb at random (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking of the different ways you can escape the Dark; trying to use the “missing” sense is nicely clued, but having learned that my sense of touch is going to be important, I’m was at a loss for how I was meant to go from TOUCH LUMP, learning only that it’s “warmish”, to PUSH LUMP other than just running through all the possible interactions). From inadequate clueing to disambiguation issues, it really feels like the game just needed a little more time in the oven.
With that said, as I hit what seems to be the halfway mark I was starting to get into more of a groove, though this could have been as much my increased readiness to consult the hints as anything else. And I did appreciate the moment when an NPC finally started explaining a bit of what was going on and why it was important. Sadly, almost immediately after that sequence a combination of those frustrating mechanics I mentioned above seem to have killed me – I needed to pick up an object, but I didn’t have the spare carrying capacity to do so, and as I futzed around with inventory a timer ended the game – and, facing the quickly-impending Comp deadline and realizing that a post-Comp, less buggy version, is likely to come out soon, I decided to bring my playthrough to an end.
I’ll repeat that Milliways doesn’t seem to me to be purely banking on nostalgia; there are novel ideas here, and the classic ethos seems to be a matter of intention rather than ignorance. And I can’t help but feel affection for something that’s so clearly the product of unbridled enthusiasm. But without much enthusiasm of my own for its antecedents, the game lives and dies by what it’s able to bring to the table on its own – which is currently a bit wonky and sometimes willfully obtuse. With that said, the experience was anything but forgettable; hopefully I’ll eventually get to finish Milliways, but in the meantime I definitely have a few fun new memories to rattle around in my increasingly-empty head.
An eminently logical room-escape, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The thing about escape-room inspired games is that you can’t think about them too hard, or they suffer narrative collapse. Like, okay, you’re stuck in a cell of some kind, sure – sometimes there’s a more-or-less-contrived reason the baddie would do that instead of just kill you, sometimes there isn’t, but that’s a sufficiently common genre situation that it’s not too hard to swallow. But instead of one normal lock that keeps you in (and that presumably would have had to be opened to put you there in the first place), there’s a system of like half a dozen different interlocking mechanisms that all need to align? And there just happen to be clues scattered around that make the puzzles solvable, but not too trivially so? There’s no way to rationalize this kind of setup, so instead of being a killjoy clearly you’re supposed to just turn off that part of your brain and enjoy the puzzles.
Major, major points to LUNIUM, then, that I think it basically works? It’s got all the trappings of the genre: you wake up with amnesia, chained to the wall in a room chock-a-block with paintings with mystical symbolism, scraps of paper with numbers and letters scrawled on them, turgidly-written pages of your diary that you can recover piecemeal, and a ticking-clock conceit that requires you to escape before the dawn so that you can stop the killer who trapped you from claiming their next victim. It even adds a layer of complexity by requiring you to deduce the identity of the baddie from a list of suspects to get the best ending, in addition to unlocking the final door so you can escape (I mentioned liking this structure in my Mayor McFreeze and Death on the Stormrider reviews, and I think it works well here too). And yet, when I got to the end and figured out what was going on – it actually all kind of made sense and held together! True, I haven’t gone back and rigorously tested the diegetic plausibility of every single bit of the design, but that’s an unfair standard to inflict on a piece of IF; at least as to the broad strokes, each of these bits of contrived escape-room logic hold up, and in fact things couldn’t have gone any other way!
The elegance here goes beyond the narrative, though. This is one attractive Twine game, with moody illustrations conveying a vibe as well as critical clues if you zoom in to enjoy the artwork, and the interface makes it simple to fiddle with the various safes, locks, and other paraphernalia on display. There are also well-integrated hints (plus straight-up solutions, if you need them), though many players might not need them given the well-judged clueing. There’s a nice range of puzzles here, and if they’re not especially thematic, they’re solidly designed and offer some good variety, so no particular approach overstays its welcome: there are of course a number of code-deciphering puzzles, but some are exercises in pure logic, others rely on deductive reasoning that lend a mystery-solving vibe to proceedings, and a few require a bit of lateral thinking, which lead to some satisfying aha moments while still being eminently fair. I’m not the best escape-room puzzler-solver in the world, but I only needed to go to the hints twice: once when the small screen of my phone meant I couldn’t make out an important clue (though I should say that unlike many graphically-rich Twine games, LUNIUM generally works a treat on mobile), and a second time when I’d mixed up two character’s names and therefore didn’t realize I’d already gotten the solution to the puzzle, I was just implementing the solution wrong.
As for the plot, I don’t want to say too much lest I spoil the fun reveal I alluded to above. As is typical for escape rooms, there isn’t much in ongoing narrative, but there is some backstory to discover, and this is parceled out judiciously in between bouts of puzzle-solving. As a Victorian detective, you’re on the trail of a serial killer, and while the outline is quite generic, there’s enough detail given about your previous investigations of the key suspects to give them at least a whiff of personality. There are also some specific themes that keep recurring, like an omnipresent moon motif to go along with the game’s title. As a result it’s enjoyable to read the various document-facsimiles provided, even when you’re largely skimming them looking for clues to the puzzles. This is helpful because it’s this non-puzzle-relevant information that provides the prompts needed to guess the identity of the killer, and while I got to the end with only a tentative guess at whodunnit, the ending prompts pushing me to make my accusation provided another subtle hint or two that let me feel very clever for ultimately fingering the right suspect.
LUNIUM isn’t perfect – I noticed one small bug, where I got some text mentioning the contents of my pockets after I freed myself from the wall despite not having had a chance to look in them yet. But that’s an incredibly minor issue, and I honestly am having trouble dredging up any additional constructive criticism (the writing could be a little more authentically Victorian, I guess? Really though it’s just fine for the purpose it serves). This is an assured game, playable and narratively satisfying in a way I didn’t think I was even allowed to hope an escape room game could be. So I guess that’s my other criticism: it may have spoiled me for other games in the subgenre by making it harder for me to look past it when they don’t make any sense!
Stupid universe, I hate it so much, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Before we talk about For Eternity, Again and Again, we need to talk about lore.
Wait, come back! Look, I often give lore a hard time – by which I mean the generous slatherings of worldbuilding minutiae that get troweled all over many a fantasy or sci-fi setting. You know the stuff: codex entries going into absurd detail about the botany of a made-up tree that’s just there to pad out the skybox, mythologies that are long on incident but thematically inert, absurdly over-worked discussions of political or economic background with no conceivable relevance to the plot… There are better and worse versions of it, but it’s largely waffle, interesting maybe to think up but deeply enervating for most players to have to wade through (I admit I don’t always fall within the most, since I have a soft-spot for the fantasy economics stuff).
Lore makes for a convenient punching bag, because it’s often the sign of an author who’s more interested in sharing their setting notes than telling a story. But I do fear that the pendulum can sometimes swing too far in the other direction, with authors holding back on important information about how their world works for fear of boring the player. The thing is, worldbuilding for its own sake is dull, but in genre fiction it’s absolutely the case that the player needs to have some sense of the rules governing the pieces of the setting that depart from the familiar real-world milieu. Like, the answer to any question of the form “why did X happen in this story?” is “because the author wanted it to happen.” But emotional engagement requires that dynamic to be disguised as much as possible, so that actions feel like they have understandable consequences and the plot doesn’t come off as bare authorial fiat. The context needed for this alchemy to happen isn’t lore, though it might look like it – it’s stakes.
For Eternity, sadly, is one of those games that throws the baby out with the bathwater. This short Twine game riffs on the Moorcockian Eternal Champion premise, with a protagonist who’s endlessly reincarnated in new situations to carry out quests, and who’s joined by their likewise eternally-recurring lover. But in this latest rebirth, there are worrying signs that this rather cozy cycle is coming to an end. Structurally, the game consists of one conversation with the lover establishing the set up, then a quick transition to a second dialogue as things, predictably, go pear-shaped. This could be a tight, efficient way to get to some drama as these star-crossed lovers are cruelly torn asunder. But it lacks much impact because it’s never clear why anything is happening. Per the opening, “the Universe” has something to do with this whole cycle, with mention of dark tendrils holding different timelines together. That’s an interesting – though not I think especially appealing – image, but it’s pretty hand-wavey. That’d be fine if the focus were on what happened within each cycle, but it’s not; as mentioned, the questy bit is entirely bottom-lined:
It is almost the same as every other hero you have lived as before. You fought monsters, almost died several times, and met companions. All the while your lover floats around you, whispering jokes and loving words in your ear. Well, they were supposed to be.
That stuff actually sounds interesting, but those couple sentences are all the player gets. Instead, you’re shunted into one of I think two distinct endgames; in one, the universe is decaying into an entropic end-state, taking you with it, while in the other, it somehow decides it doesn’t like you and brings an end to your reincarnation dealie. The first thing that makes this feel arbitrary is that your choice of dialogue as you groundlessly speculate on what’s going appears to determine which path you wind up on. But since neither scenario is motivated by facts or observations, just tossed-off brainstorming, it feels decidedly coincidental that your stab-in-the-dark just happens to be right. Beyond that, there’s no previously-established reason why the universe would be decaying, or how, mechanically, it can have opinions and act on them. These ideas aren’t terrible in of themselves, but they’re given no context or buildup: when you get to Act III, you can’t have the narrator run onto the stage, blurt out “oh sorry, there was a gun on the mantel this whole time, forgot to mention it”, then speed off just as a character aims and fires. Rather than situations leading to consequences, this is consequences dictating situations. If the universe decides it dislikes me, what’s stopping me from deciding I don’t like it and I’m not going to play it’s stupid game anymore? Who can say.
The overall weak prose means that these narrative problems loom all the larger. There are myriad typos, starting at the beginning of the game’s second passage, and there are often-bizarre images, like this description of your lover:
Soft skin, plush lips, tender touches, and a voice like a music box.
Or this bit of establishing dialogue, which achieves a sort of low-energy camp poetry:
A huff echoes through your mind. “It took a while to look for you. It will take a short time for me to materialize. The Universe is just playing tricks.”
“That you don’t appreicate.” You say, knowing how much they hate the Universe.
Stupid universe, I hate it so much!
On the plus side, sometimes this kind of thing teetered into hilarity, perhaps intentionally, like the bit where the hero, a mighty immortal warrior, gets punked by a lowly goblin because they’re hanging out flapping their gums while backlit by a cave entrance. But this comedy makes the low-stakes melodrama even more bathetic. I repeat, the concept for For Eternity’s narrative could work, but I needed more of a reason to care about these people and their world to make the story hit home.
I just got why "The Undiscovered Country" is a punny title, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
You can’t drop your dick on the first turn 0/10.
(Later).
I played for five more minutes and turns out you can drop your dick, so okay, we’ll do a real review.
Despite having never previously played a Stiffy Makane game other than the short, semi-high-brow Nemesis Macana, I still knew enough to make that joke because somehow, Stiffy has become a part of IF’s communal lore. From humble beginnings in a poorly-made late 90’s work of AIF, he was thrust to stardom via interactive MST3K mockery, much of which from my understanding centered on the fact that Stiffy’s stiffy was implemented as an ordinary inventory item. Thence his career got odd as different authors took the helm, running from sci-fi parody to filthy-minded philosophical rumination, with a few meta meditations on choice-based mechanics and the uglier side of player empowerment along the way (hopefully this potted summary is more or less correct; checking out the Stiffy oeuvre is on my list, but as I said I haven’t really gotten around to it).
Stiffy has a history, in other words, and for a maybe-new author (one never knows with pseudonyms) to make a Stiffy game out of the gate strikes me as audacious – almost as audacious as naming it after Citizen Kane, for all that that is a simply irresistible pun. And in fact this is an ambitious game. After a brief introduction in which you have a nightmare of being stuck in an eternally-resetting loop of the original Stiffy game, you wake up and learn the premise: you’ve just been defrosted from cryogenic suspension into a future where men are extinct (we lost a literalized battle of the sexes) and a new generation of hopefully enlightened scientists are hoping to study you, learn more about heterosexuality, and find out whether peaceful coexistence as a once-again gender-integrated society might be possible. That means you’ll need to wander around having a lot of random sex, which is accomplished through a deckbuilding minigame, all while solving the problems of the good citizens of Urville, from improving production in the local milk farm to teaching a college course on sexuality to helping the priestess recover a stolen relic.
This is of course only a slightly-better worked out version of guess-you-need-to-schtup-everybody AIF worldbuilding (“what if Y: The Last Man, but with a lot more boobs?”), with RPG-light gameplay to match. But the degree of care that’s been taken in implementing the game is impressively far from the notorious shoddiness of the first Stiffy. The minigame hits a just-right level of complexity, being relatively straightforward to understand but taking a few tries to get the nuances, while also striking a good balance between grind and progression. There’s a time-of-day system that gives the city an air of vibrancy without imposing too many annoying delays on the player. And the overall polish is very solid, with lots of synonyms, implemented scenery, and small little Easter eggs, like this one from the time-looping opening:
“Hello, Stiffy. I’ve been expecting you.”
She is naked.
You can imagine where it goes from here.
> imagine
The thing is, you don’t have to. You’ve been through this a million times.
The writing is also well judged; this is AIF, yes, but in normal gameplay it’s content to stay in gentle nudge-nudge wink-wink territory. It’s puerile, but I laughed when I visited Fountain Square and saw a note in the location description about the titular fountain, and laughed again upon examining it:
“Titular” is right. The centerpiece of the fountain is a statue of a beautiful naked nymph, water spurting from at least every orifice.
The first part is obvious, sure, but that “at least” is a good gag.
In the sex scenes the game does get quite explicit, but the randomly-generated text here is far more calculated to raise a laugh than the libido:
"As you slide your hammering hampton in and out of Aubrey with a smooth, steady rhythm, the sound of your loving echoes through the air like a whole volume of books being slammed shut in sequence."
"You burst like a violently vomiting giraffe. The two of you get dressed again."
"The feeling of your protruding pencil stuck deep in her gutted hedgehog is a sensation you won’t forget soon."
(The game’s ABOUT text mentions that ChatGPT was used in some portions of the writing, and I can’t help but wonder if some of these deranged combinations are the fruit of an LLM not knowing how inserting tab A into slot B actually works).
And beyond the tamer-than-it-looks writing, Citizen Makane is actually kind of… wholesome? All the other characters are quite earnest (and generally down to get down with Stiffy – there’s no iffy consent stuff here, thankfully), and you’re written as a laid-back, polite sort of horn-dog. All the game’s quests involve being helpful, and while the recovering-stolen-property one does foil the plans of the thief, she doesn’t wind up holding a grudge and everybody’s cool with everybody else by the end. The best ending even winds up arguing that non-stop sex only gets one so far, and it’s nice to just cuddle or see a movie sometimes too to build a strong relationship. Truly, this is the Stiffy Makane game you can take home to meet your mom.
Qua game, the only other thing I’d note about Citizen Makane is the caveat that the sex minigame does have one obviously-best strategy that’s a little too easy to hit upon and implement, and makes things fell quite mechanical by the end-point: all you need to do is find one rare dominant card and one rare submissive card (cards represent sex acts, and in an effort to keep you from just spamming the same one over and over again, you get a penalty for playing two of the same type in a row), upgrade them each, and then alternate them over and over until you win. Sure, the increasingly-mechanical nature of nonstop coitus is part of the game’s theme, but I think that could have been accomplished narratively while making the gameplay a little more engaging (for example by dealing out a subset of your equipped cards each round rather than having all of them always available).
Those themes are worth digging into, though. Sure, this is a silly sex comedy, but at this point the Stiffy Makane brand, oddly, is at least as much about making philosophical or sociological statements as it is about parodying AIF, so I think it’s worth taking at least a little seriously. We’re not meant to think too hard about the war that killed all the men, which is fair enough, but Citizen Makane does seem to want us to think about the all-female society it depicts. In many ways it’s a utopia – while one character does indicate that Urville’s self-presentation as a post-scarcity, egalitarian, and peaceful society is slightly untrue, the worst we see is that money does still exist in other parts of the world, and some people seem to think that having slightly kinkier sex than others is somehow subversive.
There is one element of the society that is problematized, though. Midway through a history lecture you can wander into and listen to, you get this bit of background:
“Over time, the new all-female society developed a myriad of alternative forms of intimacy. Emotional connections, intellectual stimulation, and artistic collaboration became increasingly significant aspects of women’s relationships with one another. This expansion of intimacy beyond the purely physical realm contributed to significant decline in female sexual activity over time.”
Yes, part of the reason they thawed you out is because Urville, without men, has reached a crisis point of too much cuddling and not enough boning.
Again, this is a standard heal-the-world-through-the-power-of-dick AIF trope, but the game really does dwell on this aspect of the world more than it needs to in order to establish that yeah, random people will want to screw you. And it’s of a piece with a decidedly reticent treatment of people with non-heterosexual orientations; lesbianism is only indirectly acknowledged in the various lectures and documents you find (and when it is, as in this excerpt, it’s implicitly positioned as lacking as compared to straight relationships), and while there are a couple of sapphic orgies you come across (er, not literally, thankfully), there’s only a single, very missable line towards the end to indicate that two characters are in a relationship with each other. For all intents and purposes, it feels like the only real sexuality is straight sexuality, so you’re the only game in town (there’s also no indication that there are any people not on the gender binary, which seems decidedly odd given the setup).
This is an oversight, but I think it’s intentional; to the extent the game has something to say, it’s saying it about male sexuality. The name of the holographic AI who piggybacks on your brain to vicariously experience sex (…I don’t think I’ve mentioned her yet, there’s a lot going on in this game) is called Shamhat, for example, which is the name of the temple prostitute who civilizes the wild man Enkidu through lovemaking in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Shamhat is also a critical part of that climactic scene where Stiffy renounces impersonal fucking in favor of engaging with the humanity of one’s sexual partners. And throughout the game, the player’s interactions with the town’s inhabitants do help bring out restraint in Stiffy; he learns to act professionally even when there are opportunities to push things in a sexy direction in the classes he teaches, for example, and there’s a semen-milking minigame that’s all about teetering at the edge of orgasm without losing control. Without spoiling things too much, the game’s ending also circles back to the beginning, and finishes with an explicit renunciation of the logic of early AIF. To the extent there’s a message, it’s that sex is an important and positive part of many relationships, but it’s just one part of fostering a human connection with one’s partner.
That’s a nice lesson that hardly anyone could object to (if they do – run) but at the same time, it sure doesn’t seem like the artistically-collaborating cuddle-happy lesbians of Urville need to learn it; this is all about Stiffy within the fiction, and out-of-game it sure feels directed at a presumably-male player audience. And I dunno, in space-year 2023, where there continue to be lots of issues around sex and intimacy in heterosexual relationships, but where there’s hopefully pretty broad understanding that similar issues arise in other kinds of relationships too – and, not to be a bummer, where setting up straight relationships as the norm can marginalize people with other orientations and gender identities – that approach does strike me as a little parochial. I’ll repeat, this is an ambitious, well-designed and implemented game that’s about as heartwarming as an AIF parody can get, but I can’t help but wish it pushed the envelope a little further and thought through what, if anything, Stiffy Makane has to say to people who aren’t straight men (I mean, his dick comes off! Someone’s gotta be able to do something with that!)
In-jokes and Easter eggs, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Interactive fiction, we’re told, can be conceptualized as a crossword at war with a narrative (this obviously isn’t true for much, if not most, contemporary IF, but please just go with it). All Hands Abandon Ship is what happens when they’re enmeshed in a three-front war with an all-encompassing pile of Easter eggs and pop-culture references, and actually neither of them are putting up much of a fight.
This sounds like I’m saying the game is bad. It isn’t bad! Mind, it’s not great, either: the escape-the-doomed-spaceship premise isn’t just old enough to drink, it’s got a Facebook account it uses to post photos of the grandkids and share awkward grumbling about foreigners; the implementation is pretty thin, with lots of generic descriptions and unimplemented synonyms; and there are no characters or much in the way of environmental storytelling to liven things up. But there are attractive feelies with a cool map of the ship, there’s a pretty solid amount of geography to explore, and I didn’t notice any bugs. So it’s got solid enough bones for a low-narrative sci-fi puzzlefest.
The trouble is, there aren’t really any puzzles. Okay, I guess there’s an overall time limit that counts, but since that just makes escape impossible (after 100 turns, you drift beyond a black hole’s event horizon so life pods can’t get out) and you can continue running around the ship exploring, all that means in practice is that you’ll run out of your time on your first go-through, figure out how to win, then type RESTART to do so. Outside of the countdown, though, all you need to do is (Spoiler - click to show)wriggle down a dumbwaiter, which doesn’t require any commands more exotic than ENTER DUMBWAITER and D, then get an electrical system working again by the simple expedient of (Spoiler - click to show)OPENING a panel and then TURNING ON a circuit breaker. I spoiler-blocked the details to be polite, but trust me, this is stuff that anyone with even minimal experience with parser games would do in their sleep. In fairness, there is one alternate path to victory that involves a tiny bit of problem solving, but this is marred by some guess the verb issues (Spoiler - click to show)(you need to put a yoga mat on some live wires to provide insulation, but various iterations of PUT MAT ON CABLES fail; only DROP MAT works) so I think best not to count it.
This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to do, though, since the game actually has a reasonable amount of things to mess around with and places to explore. Some of these include some reasonable jokes – when you’re told, of an unremarkable head, that “[y]ou wouldn’t be at all surprised to see its design aesthetic featured on the front cover of Brutalist Architecture Monthly” it’s inevitable but still entertaining that you’ll eventually come across an issue of just such a magazine. And there are lots of little optional interactions, like microwaving various inappropriate foodstuffs or getting a physical from the holographic doctor.
But mainly what you do is notice references. Past a certain point, my notes just became a litany of all the in-jokes I’d seen – there’s a strong 80s/90s pop-culture angle here, since I came across a Soundgarden CD, a Presidents of the United States lyric, a Scarface reference, and of course a couple from Aliens. But lest you think there’s a consistent retro pre-millennium revival across the futuristic society, there are also prominent mentions of the Doors and the Great Gatsby.
Look, I know I sound like a scold. And I can’t lie, it is a fun idea to have a holodoc that goes by T.J. Eckleburg. But, like, what am I, as a player, to do with that idea? The doctor doesn’t have any dialogue, I don’t think, beyond “open up and say ahh” (I thought he was an optician, not an ENT); he doesn’t have a fascination with the book, or provide a thematically similar role by witnessing and judging the player’s activities. Like all the other references, it’s an empty signifier, there to provide a frisson of recognition and that’s it. This sort of thing can be entertaining in moderation, as a break from more engaging business, but again, the game doesn’t have a story to speak of and lacks much in the way of challenge. To risk a culinary metaphor, the author phoned in the entrees and spent all their time on the side dishes instead – but actually, the side dishes are junk food, conveying an instant pop of flavor but containing no nutrition – so go figure, I didn’t leave especially satisfied.
Choose your own psychotic break, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
In my Dysfluent review, I mentioned that there’s a robust subgenre of IF that centers on the experience of living with a particular disability, and at first blush Escape your Psychosis – which is quite literally about trying to escape a repeated series of psychotic episodes – seems to fit squarely among their number. It’s late in the Comp, so forgive me for quoting from myself about the common threads that tend to show up in these games:
they’re most often short, choice-based, and allow the player to engage with the disability via a central game or interface mechanic. I’d also say that much of the time, their focus on the subjective experience of a particular challenge understandably gets prioritized over traditional IF elements like narrative, character development, or gameplay.
All of these get a solid check save the one about having a unique game or interface mechanic that’s thematically tied to the disability at issue – though it does stand out from the rest of the games in the Comp by being presented as a pdf file with internal hyperlinks, I couldn’t find any linkages between this approach and the experience of psychosis. For all these points of similarity, though, there’s something about Escape your Psychosis that felt slightly off to me compared to other games in the subgenre, and once I finished and read the post-script, I realized what it was: whereas all those other games were written by folks who actually live with the conditions they describe, this one was written from the outside. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that there’s some distinct distancing from the protagonist, and a slightly dodgy quality to some of the depictions; the game’s got an educational purpose, and I think it mostly fulfills that remit, but I’m unsure about how well it communicates the subjectivity of psychosis.
One aspect of this is the game’s cartoony presentation. Each page features attractive doodly art that helps make what could be a heavy topic go down more easily. But when it’s juxtaposed against events that are legitimately concerning, I experienced dissonance that sometimes undercut the impact of what the narrative was depicting. And it was uncomfortable to see the somewhat-dehumanized depiction of two homeless characters – they’re treated straightforwardly by the prose, but are drawn with stink-lines emanating from them and other exaggerated characteristics. On its own terms, I actually like the art; it’s cute and well done. But it seems calculated to make the game more approachable rather than to convey how a person experiencing a psychotic episode views the world.
Similarly, the plot takes some rather wacky turns. Structurally, the game is built as a series of interlocking circles, with different choices at the onset of an episode taking you down various semi-overlapping paths as you alarm your friends and neighbors, then possibly attract official attention and get into treatment, before inevitably having another episode recur. The various incidents seem to map with what little I know of psychosis – a few are built around megalomania, many around paranoia – but the focus is very much on what the protagonist is doing, with their emotional state described primarily to explain the behavior, and the consequences of the protagonist’s disturbance are sometimes played for laughs, like when you strip naked and splash around in a fountain in the park.
None of this is ill-intentioned, I don’t think, and the information the game conveys about how to support people undergoing psychotic episodes seems valuable to me (there are one or two things that struck me as odd, especially the way the game suggests that treatment, medication, and regular habits are helpful but can’t prevent backsliding, whereas if you just have three episodes you’ll eventually learn enough about how they go to get to a happy ending where the condition becomes manageable. But I think that’s primarily just a limitation of this very unsophisticated game format). So I guess it’s unfair to criticize Escape your Psychosis for not doing very much to show me what it’s like to live with an awful, highly-stigmatized mental illness. But I was hoping it would do just that, especially since people with the condition are so heavily marginalized; there’d be real value in helping more people better understand, only slightly, what the experience is like. And the success of many other works of IF in a similar vein indicate that such a thing would be possible; maybe someday somewhat will write that game, since I don’t think Escape your Psychosis is the last word on the subject.
Weapon of choice, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Without context, One King to Loot Them All would be a weird game. Not so much in its premise – it’s a limited-parser sword and sorcery pastiche set in a funhouse-dungeon that wouldn’t be out of place in an early-80s D&D module, with dracoliches, logic puzzles, and pit traps set cheek-by-jowl without excessive regard for rhyme or reason – but weird in its gameplay, especially the way it provides information and responds to player commands. For one thing, location descriptions are typically quite long and detailed and print out the player’s inventory at the bottom, while examining most objects just unedifyingly reprints the details already included in the location description. For another, it’s extremely solicitous of the player – maybe even sometimes veering to the pushy – in how it prompts you towards the next action. More so than most parser IF, the experience is of being on a ride (uncharitably, one might say a railroad) where doing the one right action gets you a mini-cutscene and moves you on to the next sequence, and anything else is quite unrewarding.
There’s nothing wrong with linear IF in my view, but this is an approach at odds with the traditional strengths of the parser game, where tootling around a map and examining every detail that catches your fancy is typically a big part of the draw. So coming to the game without any context, the player might be scratching their head about why the author took this particular tack. Fortunately, the ABOUT text reveals the secret origin of One King to Loot Them All, which explains quite a lot: the game was originally intended for this year’s Single Choice Jam, where games had to have only one moment where the player could do more than one thing, but missed the deadline.
Viewed in that light, many of its odder features make sense: the descriptions works the way they do, for example, because originally, looking or examining random scenery or even checking inventory would have been disallowed, so all that information needed to be conveyed automatically when entering a new area. Similarly, the limited-parser approach would cut down on the frustration of most commands not doing anything, and since the player could similarly easily get fed up without being able to uncover clues by investigating a scene, these likewise need to be extremely obvious.
One King to Loot Them All, in the form we’ve gotten it, has lifted the most extreme constraints of the jam – commands other than the intended ones are allowed and sometimes marginally useful – but the gimmick is still imprinted deep in the game’s DNA. It has some fun with the concept, too, with a consistent meta joke being the way the protagonist (an off-brand Conan the Barbarian) never met a complex problem he couldn’t solve with immediate violence – when all you’ve got is a hammer… (I kid, but really, the solution to the hoary old “one guard always lies, the other always tells the truth” problem made me snicker).
On the down side, I found the game sort of… lulled me? I’ve played easy games before, of course, but even in an easy parser game there’s typically at least some decision-making incumbent on the player, and again, there’s always the temptation of noodling around (I am an inveterate noodler). Knowing that actually, I should just do the thing I was supposed to do and then move on to the next thing meant that I was acting in as direct a fashion as the protagonist, but also made me feel like my job was just to figure out what the author wanted me to do and then do it – this got me into a flow state of a sort, but it was a sort of inattentive flow state, if that makes sense (it doesn’t).
Of course, you typically don’t just say something “lulled me”, you say it “lulled me into a false sense of security.” And that’s my excuse for why when One King to Loot Them All got to the point where I could make my one choice, I was incredibly slow on the uptake. I’m spoiler-blocking this bit, since it’s the cleverest part of the game:
(Spoiler - click to show)so knowing that there was only one point in the game where more than one action would be productive, I naively assumed it would either come at the beginning or at the end. When the opening half hour was completely linear, I relaxed and, as mentioned in the paragraph above, just played on autopilot, figuring I could turn my brain off until I got to the final scene of the straightforward kill-Foozle story. Even when I went through an odd timey-wimey bit, I still contented myself with doing the most obvious thing at every juncture – and was surprised when it turned out that wasn’t working.
It took me astonishingly long to realize the game’s twist – the choice isn’t so much a choice as a puzzle, and it’s embedded in the middle of the game, not the end. It’s an impressive bit of misdirection that left me clapping my hands, but it also left me a bit frustrated. There’s a fair bit of drudgery involved in experimenting, since I wound up replaying the whole game to that point to confirm that what I’d tried didn’t work, and the logic of the puzzle still doesn’t fully make sense to me: you meet a mysterious sage who blesses your axe, then tells you you need to rewind time to change something that happened before the game starts. So after a bunch of UNDOs you can actually slingshot your way beyond the opening scene and try to change history – but crucially, the axe remains blessed even though you’ve turned back the clock to hours before you met the sage. It’s fair enough, I suppose, since who knows how a diegetic UNDO should work, but in my fugue state, I wasn’t quick enough to figure out the trick, and I didn’t notice any clues (like a telltale new sparkle about the axe, say) that would have helped me out, and I had to use the walkthrough.
To briefly summarize all that blurry text: there’s a really cool twist, but I was too dull to appreciate it, which is mostly my fault though I think some elements of the design could have mitigated the risk of the player being a big old dum-dum like me. I also think the game could have cut itself freer of its single-choice origins while retaining its impact. In particular, making the descriptions more conventional would have made the gameplay a bit more engaging by rewarding player investigation, and kept certain sequences, like the multi-part puzzle to get across the river, from feeling overly constrained.
While I’m picking nits, I also felt like the writing could have been a little zestier. It’s technically solid and hits the genre tropes in a satisfying fashion, but I like my sword-and-sorcery prose to be more over the top, with extravagant superlatives and overly-baroque locutions, as in Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest; One King to Loot Them All is more workmanlike. Similarly, sometimes the barbarian-y synonyms chosen for the limited-parser actions were strained; OPEN being remapped to LOOT made good sense when I was pillaging a chest, but less so when I had to LOOT a wineskin already in my possession to drink it. But these really are nits, and my complaint above might just reflect that I was a bit tired when I played the game and not sufficiently with it to appreciate its uniqueness and smarts.
Abstract angst-em-up, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My first year of college, I had a roommate who was super into Dar Williams. He was so into her, in fact, that he would fall asleep every night listening to his playlist of her songs on repeat. This being 1998, though, we were well before the era of Spotify and infinite music availability; that playlist was about fifteen songs he’d managed to snag on Napster. Oh, and our room was pretty small – our beds were about four feet from each other – so when I said he would listen to that playlist every night, I meant we would listen to that playlist every night. And while when I first heard Williams’ stuff, I found her a pleasant enough singer-songwriter who’s recognizably of a piece with a bunch of similar mid-90s folks that I really enjoy, being subjected to the same hourlong loop of music, running over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, did uh not leave that positive first impression intact, through no fault of her own. You might justifiably ask “wait, why didn’t you just ask your roommate to play something else or turn down the volume or wear headphones or something?”, but I was a 17 year old boy, dealing with another 17 year old boy – I did not have nearly the emotional intelligence needed to initiate and negotiate that dialogue, so now something I once kind of liked leaves me twitching with shellshock.
…for once, I am starting a review off with a rambling, overly-specific personal anecdote, and it is precisely on point. The Gift of What You Notice More takes its title from a Dar Williams song, and takes as its subject a failed relationship whose fractures stem in large part from its protagonist’s reluctance to speak up and have direct conversations about their needs and feelings. Rather than an interactive drama, though, this parser-like Twine game explores its emotional terrain through allegory and flashback. After an opening that sees the protagonist ready to leave their apartment, and husband, for good, you visit a strange café where you encounter a trio of poets and an ambiguous angel who arm you with the tools you need to delve into your memories, which you do by entering three photos of pivotal moments in your conjugal lives: the night when your husband proposed, the day you moved away from your hometown to support his career, and your last birthday, when the façade of happiness you showed to him and your friends became too much to bear. By solving inventory-based puzzles in each vignette, you achieve some tentative revelation about one of three key questions that are gnawing at you (where did it all start to go wrong, what do I really need, etc.), and then you can choose which one is most compelling to you when you revisit the poets and unlock the next phase of the game.
I actually really like this structure; it combines things that parser-like IF is really good at (environmental storytelling, light puzzle-solving) with a strong thematic framework that links the gameplay to the overall narrative, while giving the player space to provide specific input about how they’re interpreting the story as they uncover it. And divorce has supported a million novels and movies, hard to go wrong there. The puzzles are solid too, all quite intuitive so they never slow you down, with an inventory system providing the tiniest bit of friction so lawnmowering isn’t that appealing.
And yet, as if it were a Dar Williams song, I found I didn’t quite get on with the game (I repeat, my current antipathy for her music is entirely irrational and undeserved!), I think for two primary reasons. The first is that the allegory is often way too literal for my tastes. This is maybe a Scylla and Charybdis thing, since I also tend to dislike games where the allegory gets too personal and abstruse to be resonant to anyone else, but I still think there’s a generous margin between that sort of thing and the puzzles we get here, where you need to confront the elephant in the room and recover what’s been swept under the rug. As one-off groaners these’d be bad enough, but they’re often the prompts for multi-step puzzles that make you really dwell on how clangingly obvious the imagery is, like the bit where you see that you’re wearing armor in the birthday-party scene, but when you try to take the armor off so you can be vulnerable, a jester comes jumping out from behind the couch to replace your protection. I admit, I’m not sure I can immediately come up with an instantly-readable metaphor for using humor as a defense mechanism that’s any less ridiculous, but perhaps that’s an indication that this whole approach is flawed.
I think I get why the allegory is as on-the-nose as it is, though, which goes to the other reason I didn’t click with the game. There’s very little here that says anything specific about the relationship, or about the character of the husband, or for that matter about the character of the protagonist. We get a very few hints – there’s a short text-message exchange where your husband’s trying to cheer you up ahead of the birthday party, and we see he’s fond of emojis – but when you go to the flashbacks, everything is static; all the characters, your past self included, are frozen, and you can’t engage or interact with any of them. While there would have been ways to keep this element of the design while still getting more concrete details into the picture – the narration could have incorporated more specific bits of dialogue, for example, or spent more time reflecting on what drew the narrator to her husband in the first place – for the most part the authors seemed content to leave both characters largely as ciphers.
As a result, picking apart the reasons why the relationship failed felt too abstract to truly land for me. Like, many of the potential problems listed – saying yes to a commitment when you weren’t 100% sure, moving someplace far away from your home for a partner’s career opportunity – could either be deal-breakers or complete non-issues depending on the specific people and specific circumstances involved. And the others are largely just truisms – yes, addressing challenges as they come up rather than burying them and building up resentment is important! – that, shorn of any particulars, lack the heft to elicit more than a shrug.
The frustrating thing is, in the ending sequence the game is more concrete and specific, and it’s by far the most affecting part of the piece. Calling a friend to come pick you up, washing the dishes one last time before you leave the apartment forever, deciding what to pack in the one suitcase you’re taking with you: the writing here conveys real emotion, and I think would resonate with anyone who’s ever been in a similar situation. After all, as great songwriters know, all the platitudes about love and overwrought metaphors in the world can’t stand up to a single well-chosen detail (again, Dar Williams could certainly be counted among these great songwriters for all I know!)
Wordy and muddled, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The major part of Meritocracy depicts a philosophy class where you’re the only student, framing this as an opportunity for free-ranging discussion that sparks creativity and learning – but let me tell you, I’ve lived something close to this experience and the reality is very different. One trimester when I was in college, I took a Philosophy of Mind class on a lark, only to discover that at my small, science-focused school, not many other folks shared that lark – there was only one other student enrolled in the course, and he was pretty flaky in his attendance. Making matters worse, the professor had the most droning voice I’ve ever heard, the class was held immediately after lunch, and the rest of my course load that trimester included some very hard classes so I was regularly pulling two or three all-nighters a week to keep up with the problem sets. As a result, I’ve retained only three things from the class: 1) I can use the word “qualia” correctly a solid 30% of the time; 2) I’ve got an anecdote I can dine out on about the time I walked into the classroom only to see a dozen Secret Service agents staring unblinkingly at me (then-President Clinton was giving a speech and they’d commandeered the room as a command post); and 3) I determined that philosophy is 95% defining reasonably-intuitive terms in excruciating detail, 4% saying completely obvious things with those terms, and 1% thought-provoking new ideas.
When I was 20, I meant this as a burn – take that, Western canon! – but with a bit more perspective, I think there’s actually a lot to respect about this approach. For one thing, having gone to law school helped me recognize that it’s often incredibly hard to come up with air-tight definitions for things that seem to be simple common sense, so while the labor of pinning language down to the mat might not be especially glamorous, it’s useful work, allowing seemingly-obvious propositions to be tested and setting the needed conditions for clear, productive disagreement and discussion. This is where Meritocracy founders: while it takes on a debate that’s recently generated a reasonable amount of energy, I found the writing throughout to be muddled and confusing, such that I’m not sure I ever got a clear sense of what the various ideas, arguments, and counterarguments here on offer actually add up to.
Structurally, the game is relatively simple – using a choice-based interface, you navigate your first day going back to school, visiting first a mechanical engineering lecture (turns out you were in the wrong classroom), then go to the aforementioned solo philosophy class where you discuss the ad hominem fallacy, before you wander into an open-air debate between students about the titular philosophy; the game then wraps up with a final visit back to the philosophy prof, where you can reflect back your take on what you heard and then hear some counterarguments. You have a few incidental choices in each vignette, but save for the one at the end where you give meritocracy a yea or nay, I didn’t get the sense that there was significant branching – which is OK, this is a game that’s trying to walk the player through an argument.
Again, though, the problem is that this argument doesn’t quite land. The general prose style is a major culprit in the lack of clarity I experienced; it’s quite wordy, and often repeats the same idea multiple times after only slight reformulation. This is rather stultifying to read, as in a mid-game sequence where you walk through the campus that feels like it loops back on itself over and over without saying anything of note. Forgive me for quoting at length:
"You are observing everything, the buildings, the gardens, the fountains. Observing them with curiosity and admiration. Observing them with reverence and gratitude. Observing them with wonder and awe. You are walking around the campus, thinking about everything. Thinking about what you are doing here. Thinking about why you are here. Thinking about how you came here. Thinking about what you will do here.
"You are here, because you want to be here. Because you chose to be here. Because you have a purpose. A purpose that is noble and lofty, that is worthy of your efforts and sacrifices, that is dear to your heart and soul. A purpose that is to study. To study not only for yourself, but for others. To study not only for today, but for tomorrow. To study not only for knowledge, but for wisdom. To study not only for pleasure, but for duty.
"But you are also here, because you have to be here. Because you were compelled to be here. Because you have a destiny. A destiny that is mysterious and inevitable, that is beyond your control and understanding, that is shaped by forces greater than yourself. A destiny that is to learn. To learn not only from books and teachers, but from life and experience. To learn not only from success and happiness, but from failure and sorrow. To learn not only from joy and love, but from pain and loss.
"You are here, on this campus, where you will study and learn, where you will grow and change, where you will meet and part, where you will love and suffer. You are here, on this campus, where you will face challenges and opportunities, where you will make choices and consequences, where you will find friends and enemies, where you will discover yourself and others."
When it comes to the philosophical aspects of the story, the stylistic issues become even more challenging. Here’s an excerpt from the exchange about meritocracy that kicks off the second half of the game:
"[First character:] You are wrong about the effects of meritocracy, my friend. The effects are not positive and beneficial, but negative and harmful. The effects are not empowering and liberating, but oppressive and alienating. The effects are not inclusive and democratic, but exclusive and elitist.
"[Second character]: You are wrong about the alternatives to meritocracy, my friend. The alternatives are not better and fairer, but worse and unjust. The alternatives are not more humane and compassionate, but more cruel and indifferent. The alternatives are not more progressive and innovative, but more regressive and stagnant."
This isn’t a debate, it’s a staged reading of the thesaurus.
What’s worse, when the writing isn’t being repetitive, it’s often being confusing. Like, the major choice about how you feel about meritocracy prompts you for your feelings on “this idea”, but there’s no immediate antecedent in the rest of the sentence or paragraph to clue you in on the fact that “this idea” here means the arguments against meritocracy that you just heard, rather than meritocracy itself, which was how I initially interpreted the clause.
The muddle extends beyond the writing into the ideas themselves, too. For one thing, the extended treatment of the ad hominem fallacy – itself somewhat confused, in that it invokes the execution of Marie Antoinette as an example of the fallacy – doesn’t have anything to do with the conversation about meritocracy as far as I could tell; the debaters are barely characterized, so they don’t go after each other on that basis. And then in the final sequence, at least in the branch I chose the professor went off on a bizarre tangent about the trolley problem, arguing that it can be “seen as a metaphor for the competition for limited resources in society” to justify its relevance. But this is pretty unconvincing – the trolley problem is obviously about ethics, not distributional justice (also, can IF please just stop it with the trolley problem? Thanks).
Perhaps as a result of the fact that comparatively little of the game is spent on the idea that’s centered in the title, I likewise found the treatment of meritocracy underbaked. There are lots of arguments and ideas thrown around, but there isn’t any kind of analytic framework provided to make sense of what positions different characters might advance, or which you might want to agree or disagree with. Like, in the farrago of verbiage, nowhere is it acknowledged that arguing that meritocracy has been tried and found wanting – because it devalues the innate dignity of human beings, for example – should take you to a completely different place than arguing that it has been found difficult and not tried – by pointing out that rich people get unfair advantages that have nothing to do with merit; all these critiques are simply lumped together. Similarly, I found the game persistently conflated meritocracy as an ideology and meritocracy as a system of concrete policies and practices. There’s just a lot of words being thrown around, and then the game ends.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the game needed to situate the conversation about meritocracy in the broader context of political philosophy, or give a potted summary of Rawls or anything like that, in order to be successful (though honestly, some of this kind of thing might not have been a bad idea…) But I do think it needed a lot more discipline, in both its conception and its writing, to convey any idea beyond “meritocracy: people sure have feelings about it, seems complicated!” I suppose that requiring the player to sharpen up their linguistic tools so they can make more refined assessments could well turn out deadly dull, but that, alas, is often the price of philosophy.
A buggy, over-ambitious homebrew, December 20, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I had my issues with Hawkstone, but full points for honesty. The game’s introductory text straight-up tells you that “you will travel to far off imaginary lands with your avatar and attempt to command yourself with basic English sentences; All the while while upping your stats by fighting gratuitous monsters and looting pretend valuables so you can stuggle to the end and earn the magical McGuffin for defeating the game.” The unpretentious humility of that disclaimer made me root for the game even as the typos and expectation-management sent out warning signs – not that it takes an especially sensitive antenna to pick up on such signals when that opening blurb also says “I’m sorry the game isn’t as good or polished as I wanted, but I was down to the wire and needed another week to implement everything I intened. I worked really hard and hope it’s good enough for you.”
Points too for content. I feel like often games written in homebrewed systems are often on the shorter side, since so much of the author’s time has to go into developing the engine, but this adventure-RPG hybrid has complex mechanics (there’s a full character-development system that gradually increases a bevy of stats as you adventure, as well as separate adventure-game and RPG-game inventories) and, from a quick glance at the long walkthrough file, a giant map bursting with puzzles.
There’s obviously been a “but” hanging over those first two paragraphs, so I’m just going to rip off the band-aid: but the game is still a bit of a mess, with technical issues up the wazoo and a mystifying lack of clarity about what’s going on. Without any real plot to speak of to pull me through the rough patches – you’re just an adventurer who washes up on a strange shore and starts solving puzzles and picking stuff up for the heck of it – I bounced off this one fairly quickly.
By far the biggest usability challenge I ran into was the game’s issues displaying text. The interface keeps the location description constantly available at the top of the window while commands and responses fill in below. This isn’t my favorite approach, since it can involve a lot of looking up and down the screen, but it’s made far worse here by the game’s tendency to resize its window, making them narrow or wider in response to what I typed, and sometimes triggering scroll bars that I had to click through in order to get back to the action prompt (there are some suggestions in the readme that helped make this issue somewhat less pronounced, but it was never fully resolved). Making matters worse, sometimes new output would overwrite previously displayed text, leading to stuff like this:
—What now?–>look gate
—What now?–> ocked gate closely.ck up the plant pot above gate.
You rattle the gate hoping it’s only slightly locked. Turns out it’s very locked.
Even when the display is working properly, I still found it hard to understand what was happening around my character and what, if anything, I’d done to trigger these particular results. The RPG statistics are the worst example of this; while I like the idea that you increase your attributes by doing things (shades of Quest for Glory!) it didn’t seem like there was any link between the actions I was taking and which stats were going up, and the specifics of what different attributes did didn’t appear to be explained anywhere. Sure, strength is probably self-explanatory, but making sense of stuff like this is much harder:
—What now?–>look fishing line Search[TM] without perception and a shovel.
You examine the fishing line closely.
It goes down into the ravine. You can use it to check if the tinker has caught any supper yet.
Moved smelly kipper to location.
You check what’s on the line.
experience+
You have discovered ONLINE SHOPPING
The parser is often fairly obtuse; despite a solid five minutes of struggle, I couldn’t figure out how to light a candle with some matches, which is what eventually tipped me over into putting down the game. Occasionally I have enough patience to just key in a walkthrough to see what a game has to offer, but as mentioned, this is a really big game, and I think I’d just get more frustrated if I tried to power through it. That’s a shame given the amount of work the author clearly put into Hawkstone, but hopefully my response exemplifies some good advice for folks entering the Comp: if you think you need another week to make the game you want to submit, you probably should wait for next year (or another festival) because you likely need way more than that week. If you’re homebrewing or creating an intentionally retro experience, think hard about why you’re doing that and what the upside will be for the player’s experience. And if you need to choose between expanding your game and polishing what you’ve got – which eventually you will have to do – polish is almost always the right answer. Entering any game into the Comp is an achievement, and I hope to see more games from the author after taking onboard some lessons learned!
(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
So this game leaves me in something of a quandary (and I don’t just mean that I tried and failed to do this as a theme review rewriting the Who’s Pinball Wizard): I have long been of the opinion that IF can, and should, take on politically and personally important themes, and I also really enjoy comedy puzzlefests too. You could say that’s inconsistent, and sure, I maybe lean a little more on the games with Something To Say when constructing my list of all-time favorite pieces of IF, but the variation between these kinds of ways a text game can be is actually one of the things I love about the scene: in this very Comp, I played To Sea in a Sieve back to back with Gestures Towards Divinity, which ironically was a perfect pairing.
Usually these contrasts are a matter of different games taking dramatically different approaches, though. Thus the flummoxing: Paintball Wizard is a parserlike choice-based puzzle game where your frat-bro protagonist uses a robust magic system to win the eponymous faux-battle. It’s also a narrative intensely focused on the experience of marginalization and abuse, steering into bleak real-world events so directly that they barely count as allegories. It’s a bold mélange whose audacity I admire, but while there are very strong elements in each of the game’s two halves, for me at least I felt too much whiplash to ever get past the incongruity and feel like the game worked as a unified whole.
I guess I’ll start with the nuts and bolts of the system that supports the paintball game. This is a parser-like choice game with metroidvania elements; you navigate around the outdoor arena searching out your opponents in order to zap them into submission, via an interface that allows you to move around, examine particular objects, take a context-specific action, talk to any NPCs present, access your inventory (though this is typically for informational purposes only, there aren’t any USE X ON Y puzzles), or cast a spell. The magic system is syllable-based; working out exactly how it behaves is a fun meta-puzzle that you can start to solve before you’re “meant” to, which is a nice touch, so I won’t spoil it except to say that it reminded me of one of my favorite tabletop RPG systems (for the curious: (Spoiler - click to show)Ars Magica). It’s quite complex – and there are some puzzles that I thought were slightly underclued or wonkily implemented, like the paella-pan necromancy or outdrawing your pledge-master, but you’re eased into things because you start out knowing only one spell, and unlock more as you go.
Thus, while the name led me to expect that the gameplay might be open and dynamic, in actuality it’s fairly linear; the other players don’t move around, just staying in their respective hideout areas waiting for you to get the tools you need to find them and zap them. Those other players – your frat brothers – are also the way that you gain access to new magic, because after you beat them, you can enter their minds to get a flashback that reveals some backstory while teaching you a new spell or two.
This is what brings us to the other side of the equation: in this world, wizards are known to the world at large but are subject to widespread bullying, hatred, and distrust. As a result, these flashbacks are uniformly bleak, sometimes operatically so:
"St Mungo’s is a detention center reserved for children who cannot be adopted, who cannot be fostered, and who will not be accepted at the work farms for normal children. The mission of this grim institution is to hunt down and reform unwanted children who are known or suspected wizards. The other orphans have left for the day, most of them leased laborers at a local glue factory or working in even more horrible places. Some of them actually like the glue factory because they glean extra calories licking spilled horse gelatin off the floor."
You read that and think, “OK, couldn’t get any grimmer”, but turns out the orphanage was an old radium watch-dial factory, and they haven’t bothered to clean up the residue. Other vignettes deal with the immigration system separating children from their parents, redlining and ghetto-formation, and even a lynching. Gameplay-wise, these sequences all use a restricted set of the same mechanics that animate the paintball bits, but instead of creeping around in dark alleys trying to get the drop on your buddy, you’re trying to escape extrajudicial detention or recover a beloved pet before your home is seized. They work well enough on their own terms, with some unique gameplay twists that are actually more interesting than the paintball game. And there’s a narrative link to the frame story, as learning more about his brothers makes the protagonist reciprocate by opening up to them about his own history of trauma, helping reinforce the game’s overall theme of found family.
It all makes sense in the abstract, and I can see the coherent vision that the author is going for. Still, making all these different emotional registers work, and invoking these very real horrors without trivializing them, is a tall order, and I’m not sure the writing is always up to the challenge. There are some odd details or minor errors throughout; nothing too major, but enough to elicit a “huh?”, like the note that you might know more about ants if you’d taken an introduction to ornithology class (should that have been entomology?), or a character bringing their younger sibling into the room for their high-stakes college interview. The game’s focus on bringing dignity to subaltern characters also stands in tension with some mildly culturally-insensitive banter the wizards engage in when they go out for dim sum – so much for solidarity!
The worldbuilding is a little strange too, especially the repeated reference to terms like quidditch or Muggles; it wasn’t clear to me whether this was the result of the wizard community ironically reappropriating these words, or if the setting is supposed to be a more literal alternate take on Harry Potter. And sometimes the needs of gameplay seemed to trump narrative logic, as in the flashback sequence where the mother of one of your frat brothers starts trying to teach him magic in the middle of a crowded immigrant processing center, while trying to pretend they’re not wizards. Paintball Wizard is only rarely clumsy, but I never found it showed the deftness of touch you’d probably need in a game where one minute you’re contemplating the fact that wizards with cancer are denied life-saving medical care because of their identities, and the next you’re trying to figure out what the XYZZY spell does.
So the game’s high-wire act was wobbly throughout, but the moment where I feel like it definitively stopped being able to keep its components from flying apart came close to the end – it’s a sufficiently big twist that it’s worth spoiler-blurring:
(Spoiler - click to show)Turns out the protagonist has a deep dark secret he’s keeping from his brothers, which is that he’s not really a wizard; he manages it all with stage magic and sleight of hand. This is nonsensical on its face – for example, one of the things that led to him being on the outs with his family was a vanishing trick he pulled in the middle of his sister’s interview with a Princeton admissions officer. He says this was “accomplished with a half silvered mirror and a trap door in the floor behind the admin officer’s desk”, but what, he snuck into the office to saw out the trap door the night before the interview? And of course he spends the whole game actually doing magic; the game tries to get around this by having the protagonist protest that “I’ve stolen all my real spell casting knowledge from inside your minds using SPLACK. I’m still a fraud.” But SPLACK is a spell! More tellingly, this makes a mess of the game’s themes; while the wizard community mostly seems to operate as a racial metaphor, it could have also worked if wizarding were a behavior, making it more of a queer metaphor. But saying that you can opt into being a wizard, but doing so is a shameful thing you keep secret means that the protagonist is basically positioned as Rachel Dolezal. And again, the player has to think this stuff through while trying to out-paintball your bros and complete various side-tasks like learning the chapter pledge song and trying to work an off-brand TARDIS.
If Paintball Wizard doesn’t work in its current form, though, it still deserves flowers for making the attempt. It’s cleanly programmed, and has strong puzzle design and a myriad of engaging gameplay systems; it’s also unafraid to take on some really important issues and boasts moments of appealing humanism and openness. Sure, in retrospect it’s got an ill-conceived premise that probably would never have fully worked regardless of whether the specific complaints I levy above had been addressed, but it’s a memorable fiasco that’s a standout game in the Comp, which as far as I’m concerned is its own kind of success.
Well-textured sea adventure, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There’ve been a goodly number of short Texture games this Comp and last, and call me jaded but by now I’ve got a pretty solid sense of what to expect when I see one coming up next: a personal narrative with a reasonable albeit clunky metaphor, confusing use of the drag-and-drop interface, interestingly flawed writing, and minimal branching. Leave it for the last such game in my queue to leave me spluttering and unsure of what I’ve just seen: All Hands is, I swear to y’all, a limited-parser game in Texture form. I didn’t know you could do such a thing, but now that I have, I think the system might be almost perfect for it?
In retrospect, this maybe should have been obvious to me. The drag-verbs-onto-nouns interface is quite similar to how classic graphic adventures were set up, but since most games tend to change the verbs on offer with each passage, the resemblance is typically obscured. Here, the player gets a consistent trio that map cleanly to traditional IF actions – reflect/examine, take, and approach/go – and the author’s also set things up so that after an introductory section, you’re able to wander around different areas of a ship and even revisit places you’ve been before. And while I wasn’t even aware Texture could do much in the way of state-tracking, there are obstacles that are clearly puzzles, and which respond in different ways if you’ve acquired the right tool or piece of information. I wouldn’t say any of them are challenging – this is very much an exploration-focused game – but this is a sturdy formula to drive player engagement, and it’s well-realized here.
Uncharacteristically, I’m three paragraphs in and I haven’t said anything about the game’s plot or themes; it’s time to remedy that, but take the omission as an indication of just how much the structure bowled me over. So you’re a young person living in a fantasy version of the real world who’s always been fascinated by the sea, and as part of your backstory, your sister killed by sea monsters, so this fascination has a dark, obsessive element to it too. One night while wandering the coast, you come across an unearthly vessel that plays host to a strange, ocean-going carnival. The ringmistress invites you aboard and gives you a chance to explore before the show begins, and as you poke around belowdecks, you can uncover the ship’s secrets, some of which are uncannily personal…
The premise is over the top, in other words, and the writing sometimes doesn’t sell it as effectively as it could – as you climb the ladder onto the ship, for example, you’re told that there’s a bunch of dust on each rung, indicating that it’s been a long time since there’ve been any visitors coming aboard. It’s presumably meant to be a spooky touch, but it’s rendered ridiculous by the fact that you’re scaling the ladder in the middle of a storm, a detail that this very passage takes pains to remind you of. But there are some authentically eerie notes too, like the observation that the ship’s larder seems to stock only root vegetables, which is bizarre and oddly specific. Overall, despite its moments of weakness, I liked the prose; unfortunately, you’ll need to trust me on that because I played the game on mobile which meant that whenever I tried to copy and paste any excerpts into my notes, it crashed (Texture gonna Texture).
The game’s climax is a nice capstone too, snapping into focus some thematic elements whose presence earlier in the narrative seemed slightly off. It seems like there were several different endings the player can choose between, based on how deeply they plumbed the ship’s mysteries, which was a pleasant way to make the parserlike gameplay relevant to the story, though once again one of Texture’s foibles reduced my enjoyment; I wanted to go back and try out some of the other options, but without an undo or save/load option, that would have meant replaying the whole game from the beginning.
I guess I can’t help banging on about Texture even when reviewing a game I enjoyed; it’s a frustrating piece of technology. But for a change, I can actually see how it supports what a game is trying to accomplish, and the tweaks I’d want to see to make the system work better are just tweaks, not fundamental reimaginings. That’s an exciting place to leave my journey with Texture for the year, so nice work, All Hands; your weirdo creepy circus and this weirdo creepy engine are a surprisingly good fit.
Memory boxes, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve found myself increasingly interested in non-fictional IF over the past few years, and not just because of a love for lexical paradoxes; the gotcha of pointing out that “interactive fiction” is underbroad as well as overbroad has long since grown stale, after all. No, what’s unique about these games is that they’re the logical end point of quite visible, longstanding trends – I’m thinking here of the decades-long shift towards more personal IF, which was of course turbo-charged by the rise of choice-based games but does have roots that predate it, as well as the significant increase in the prominence and respectability of the memoir in the broader culture – but by this sensible extrapolation, they wind up putting revelatory pressure on the “interactive” part of IF.
If a game is telling a true story, after all inviting a player to interact with it, allowing interactivity to directly change the narrative would be self-undermining (…though it occurs to me that could be a viable strategy; we’re still waiting for the IF equivalent of Adaption). But there are other approaches available; You Couldn’t Have Done That, an almost-memoir with an autistic protagonist from a couple years ago, offers multiple choices at key decision points but redirects the narrative onto the critical path if the player strays from what’s possible for the player, providing a concrete but frustrating look at unrealized alternatives. And my own game Sting from a couple of years ago lets the player act in the gaps in my memories, where I don’t fully recall the order that things happened or the exact details of conversations I had. One could argue these are bits of sleight of hand, and I suppose that’s true. But at the same time, it’s also the case that regular fictional IF very rarely allows for anything like true player agency. The illusions provided by nonfictional IF may put these tactics on more obvious display, but to my mind that’s a virtue, not a vice – part of what I enjoy about games in this subgenre is that they require authors to think more creatively about interaction, and help me better understand what’s going on when I engage with an author’s mind via a piece of IF.
I’m writing this overlong, probably over-theorized, introduction because I think it would be easy to write a review of My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition that focuses just on the content, because it is searing and intense: the game chronicles the author’s year in several treatment facilities as they worked to survive a severe mental health crisis that, among other impacts, dramatically reduced their cognitive function. That crisis by itself would be more than enough to carry the game’s weight, but the author also experienced – and writes about – parental abuse, transphobia and misgendering, suicidal thoughts, and the bureaucratic nightmares of America’s heath care, insurance, and housing systems. But the narrative isn’t misery tourism by any stretch of the imagination, as the author throughout highlights the things that helped them hold on and survive, the art they continued to create despite the incredible limitations they faced, and the authentic moments of connection and joy they found along the way.
The writing tells this story in direct and affecting prose that’s confident in its power; it knows that a specific, well-chosen detail evokes far more emotion than purplishly exaggerated language. I have a lot of these in my notes, but here are a few examples from the early parts of the game:
"[The pseudo-dementia] even affected how I could eat food: because of the high executive dysfunction that was now in my brain, I could only eat food that was simple in texture, simple to prepare, and easy to eat. I ate a lot of cups of Kraft Mac and cheese at that time.
"When I was in the ER, they couldn’t give me access to a pen due to my suicidal ideations—they were scared I would hurt myself. But I was desperate for a writing utensil, and they were able to give me a little crayon pack: one that you would give to children, with the colors yellow, red, blue, and green. I was very grateful to receive it."
There are also some wry bits that made me laugh – a quartet of paintings depicting the author, their twin, and their parents is titled “Leo Tolstoy Was Right About Families.”
So yes, the narrative here deals with very weighty subject matter, and is very well-told. But I was just as impressed by the structure the game uses for the story. The “exhibition” referred to in the title is entirely literal, as you’re positioned as a visitor to a museum that houses a collection of concrete artifacts from the author’s odyssey. A lovely dual-window view displays text in the right window, and images in the left – the interface elegantly recreates the quintessential museum-going experience of moving your eyes back and forth between an object and its informational label. The game goes even further by embodying the player; rather than flicking through a catalogue of items, you’re given a map of each wing of the show, and use directional navigation controls to decide where you want to go. This means the player can decide to go back to look at a previously-visited object if a later one recontextualizes it, or choose when they feel ready to move on to the next collection. And critically, there’s a small bit of friction at every step – walking around is quick but not instantaneous, and the sound of footsteps imposes a short but noticeable delay when moving from wing to wing.
The effect of all these choices is to create distance, but it’s not the kind of distance that keeps the player at arm’s length; rather, it’s a reflective distance that invites the player to engage with what they’re seeing and reading, and then think about it. There are certainly moments when the exhibition is overwhelming, like long screeds of journal entries written in the throes of crisis, or when a piece of art that depicts a source of chaos in the author’s life fills the screen. But these are balanced by moments of peace and isolation, which I found made the moments of intensity even more impactful since they had time to land. It also helps draw attention to some of the subtler aspects of the game’s design, like the clearly-intentional way that a positive COVID test kit is tucked away in its own isolated niche.
The way the presentation focuses on a selected set of the impedimenta of the author’s journey is also a smart way of acknowledging that the full experience can never be communicated to someone who hasn’t gone through something like this: this approach provides concrete, tangible examples and then leaves space for the player’s mind to fill in the gaps. Sure, some examples had more personal resonance for me than others – the author’s practice of writing themself a letter on an important anniversary date is one I’ve used myself, for example, whereas I’m pretty sure I would dislike all the anime series that get mentioned – but that’s not the point, because the game’s methods of fostering engagement don’t rest on anything so flimsy as relatability.
I find it can often be challenging to write good criticism of works like this that engage – often uncomfortably – with intense, personal trauma. Beyond the obvious tendency to softpedal critiques (“your suffering was insufficiently entertaining” is not a sentence anyone ever wants to write), I think it’s also often the case that reviewers overemphasize the bravery of the author for sharing their story, without acknowledging that bravery all by itself doesn’t make for a good work of art. So while I do think the author is brave and have intense empathy for what they’ve gone through, I also wanted to spell out very clearly that I was very impressed too by the craft that went into this game, both as to writing and as to design; I’ve written down a 9 for it in my rating spreadsheet, which is as high as anything else I’ve rated this year, and I might adjust it upwards when I do my final scoring. This one’s not to be missed.
Post-mortem exam, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Would it be braggy to say that I don’t think I’ve ever had the showing-up-for-a-test-and-you-haven’t-studied dream? When I was in school, I had the Lisa-Simpsonish trait common to many people-pleasing nerds of kind of enjoying tests for the opportunities they offered for external validation, and I guess as a result tests, even when they were hard, never generated the same intense apprehension that makes them the stuff of literal nightmares for many (to this day I do still have anxiety dreams about the time in college that I failed to drop a PE class that I couldn’t attend since it clashed with my course schedule – make of that what you will). So it was something of a revelation to me when I entered the endgame of Last Vestiges and suddenly realized I was wildly unprepared for what this locked-room mystery required of me if I wanted to solve it.
After Mayor McFreeze and Death on the Stormrider, this is the third mystery in the comp that decouples the puzzles required to trigger the end of the game and the steps needed to actually solve the mystery – I continue to like this structure, though its recurrence is making me wonder if this is a well-settled design approach that I’m only belatedly catching on to? – but here, instead of Mayor McFreeze’s medium-dry-goods puzzles and Death on the Stormrider’s NPC-manipulation challenges, progress involves solving a series of escape-room style puzzles. It took me a minute to get into the swing of this, since it felt somewhat at odds with fairly-grounded vibe established by the game’s narration, and I felt another moment of dissonance once I reached the end of the chain, since it turned out that the reward for solving all the puzzles was finding the victim’s hidden will – protip from someone who knows a bit of inheritance law, you generally want to make it super easy for the authorities to find your will, not conceal it behind a set of arbitrary barriers. But judged on their own terms the puzzles are solid enough, offering a bit of variety without too much challenge (though one picross puzzle was a bit annoying solve since it displayed oddly on my interpreter – fortunately it was pretty easy to intuit the answer).
The implementation has some nice touches, with the various characters having a robust set of conversational topics, and an integrated tutorial helps get new players up to speed. And while I wouldn’t formally count it as a limited-parser game, it’s aggressive about pruning out unused commands to avoid potentially confusing or unexpected interactions. There are some odd choices (the game’s single location doesn’t appear to have a description, just a list of its contents) and an awkward moment here or there (when I wanted to check whether there was anything behind the clothes in the wardrobe, MOVE CLOTHES and TAKE CLOTHES didn’t work, with the less-intuitive X RACK being the right answer), but I found the game generally quite solid.
So everything was going well, until I found the will and the game told me I could trigger the endgame at any time, and I realized I only had a very vague idea of what had happened and no obvious outstanding leads still to investigate. There were a few small clues I’d picked up along the way by asking my superior officer about various bits of forensic analysis that had already been done, and noting a few suggestive details about the objects I’d turned up, but certainly nothing conclusive. And then when I figured I’d just see if I could bluff my way through the game’s concluding quiz – which works similarly to Antony and Cleopatra, where you need to select your theory via a multiple-choice menu – I was reasonably confident about my guess of suspects, maybe fifty-fifty on my guess about the general cause of death… and then was confronted with this set of choices for the final question on what specifically killed the victim:
1 - drug overdose
2 - self-inflicted cut injury
3 - adverse side effect of propranolol
4 - adverse side effect of antidepressants
5 - drug interaction
6 - gunshot wound
7 - stroke
8 - heart attack
9 - ruptured esophageal varices
10 - stomach ulcers
11 - intractable vomiting
12 - diverticular bleeding
13 – tuberculosis
Thus the anxiety – as far as I can tell, there’s nothing you can do in the game to get a primer on what diverticular bleeding is, or an NPC you can consult to fill you in on the specific side effects or interactions of drugs. So for me the game ended in a decidedly un-Sherlockian fit of panicked trial-and-error guessing; after four or five tries I eventually got there by process of elimination, but rarely have I felt a less sleuthy sleuth.
The game’s postscript explains what I was missing: apparently the author wrote it as a proof of concept for potentially using IF as a teaching tool for people studying forensics or medical examination. Used as part of a course of study where players would have outside resources to consult and a sense of what questions to ask, this final challenge could actually work really well. This focus on pedagogy also makes sense of some aspects of the game that feel underbaked (I haven’t mentioned the plot or characters that much in this review since there isn’t much to talk about on either head), as well as the rationale for the easy escape-room style puzzles, which I suspect are meant to be there as a pleasant bit of sugar to make the lesson more fun.
But with all that said – yes, this is exactly showing up at the test without having studied, and without even knowing you should have studied and there was going to be this kind of a test at all. So as a Comp entry offered up without more warning or context for the player, I can’t judge Last Vestiges as that successful; nonetheless, I’m intrigued by this approach, and could easily see myself enjoying a future game along the same lines that offers lay people an opportunity to access the information they’d need to be successful, and maybe learn something along the way (I told you I’m a nerd, turns out I want IF Comp to be more like school).
In-artful throwback, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I keep turning the title over in my head. “Artful Deceit” works on a literal level, sure, for a mystery centering on the death of an art magnate that at first appears to be an accident but ultimately proves to be murder most foul. But zoom out a step and it’s still got some apt resonance, since the game’s a retro artifact, packaged as a Commodore 64 disk image that requires an emulator to access. The two-tone blue startup screen, the noticeable delay when typing commands, the feelies that offload long text-dumps to pdfs to reduce the game’s memory footprint – all of these are integral parts of the experience that wouldn’t be replicable if the game were just another .blorb file. But where once these elements were the inevitable consequences of then-cutting-edge hardware, now they’re limitations affirmatively chosen to evoke a specific response: an artful deceit, you might say.
I don’t mean that to be a slam on retro gaming as a category, or this game in particular; heck, you could safely argue that “artful deceit” is redundant inasmuch as all art involves an artist creating an illusion that may make gestures towards realism but is nothing of the sort. But if the medium is the message, I always wonder why an author chooses to introduce the level of friction that comes with a game that’s an intentional throwback to a 40-year-old experience of playing a game: is it just nostalgia, or is it something more that explains why the player’s expected to wait over a minute for the game to load, or put up with typing LOOK INTERIOR GARAGE DOOR instead of X INTERIOR?
Artful Deceit isn’t an exercise in throwback annoyance for its own sake, I should admit. There are some notable player-friendly touches, like a means/motive/opportunity system that signposts to the player when they’ve gathered enough evidence to solve (and prove) an aspect of the case, and unlike many self-consciously old-school puzzlers, there are robust hints and a complete walkthrough. Meanwhile, if the lack of implemented scenery grates on someone used to more modern IF, and the NPCs aren’t especially interactive, that’s both authentic to the 80s experience and also helps keep the player focused on the core gameplay needed to solve the puzzles and reach the ending.
At the same time, elements of the design did start to grate, over and above the lack of the conveniences offered by a modern parser. Progress requires knowing that at some point you’ll need to leave the scene of the crime to drive to the victim’s workplace, despite the absence of any specific clueing that this is possible, for example; and a bug meant that I wasn’t able to complete the game despite having all the necessary evidence in hand (Spoiler - click to show)(I happened to search the corner of the sculpture that had the magenta button first, and when I pushed it, the hidden compartment popped open even though I hadn’t realized there were other buttons – much less that the correct combination was hidden in several paintings in an overly-literal interpretation of art having a message – which meant the game didn’t recognize that I’d fully solved this puzzle chain). Modern games have issues like this, too, but what feels like a forgivable oversight there can sometimes come off as deliberate obtuseness in a retro context, through no fault of the author.
The details of the plot also sometimes made me happy to have left the 80s far back in the past. The resolution of the mystery hinges on some fairly retrograde thriller tropes that struck me as insufficiently motivated, and left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth – it’s the kind of plot that could be palatable if viewed through a revisionist lens, but in my opinion isn’t much fun anymore when played straight.
All these pros and cons might just add up to the same thing, which is that Artful Deceit is successful at its aesthetic endeavor of recreating a long-gone moment in time. When writing these reviews, I generally try to be sympathetic to authorial aims and judge a game according to how well it meets its brief, so I suppose I should end things there. But – cards on the table – I was one in 1982, and didn’t really get into IF until I was almost 20, so in this instance the nostalgia of imagined time travel is lost on me, and I’m left going back to the question with which I opened the review: what’s the point of all this effort, really? If Artful Deceit is content to be a view back to the early 80s, but as far as I could tell it doesn’t use the perspective granted by age to say anything distinctive about the era, either in terms of the culture depicted, the experience created by then-current gameplay aesthetics, or the ludonarrative implications of contemporary hardware. Let me repeat: that’s not necessarily a failing, but in this case I was left wanting something more.
Cowboy lawnmower, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Is there a name for the genre of games that are structured around collecting all the endings? Insomnia, in this year’s Spring Thing, comes to mind (still need to review that one) but I feel like I’ve played a bunch of others; they tend to be choice-based, with strong Time-Cave-style branching leading to a variety of equally-ridiculous endings, each playthrough is typically pretty short, they have absurdist premises and/or senses of humor, and the only gameplay challenge is typically how much lawnmowering the player wants to do before calling it a day? If not, there really should be, if only because the most interesting thing about All the Troubles Come My Way is the way that it is but also isn’t an Insomnia-like (look, we’ll workshop the name later, let me just get through this review).
On the “way it is” side, we can firmly tick the absurdist premise and/or sense of humor box: you play Johnny Montana, a cowboy from Texas who’s somehow (if you think this “somehow” is ever explained, or at all important, you are in the wrong genre) been transported to modern-day New York City, but instead of the game being about that strange, fish-out-of-water experience, it picks up an indeterminate amount of time later where your biggest challenge is finding your misplaced hat after a bender. The writing also wrests some humor from the clash between your old-fashioned personality and your new, incongruous surroundings:
“No, ma’am, that just wouldn’t be just,” you say. You try to finish the sentence dramatically by looking wistfully in the distance, but being in a bathroom, the distance is limited. You end up just squinting somewhat suspiciously at a toothbrush resting on the sink.
Playthroughs are also pretty short; I counted three major ways to win the game (by getting a, not necessarily your, hat), and not counting the prologue section, which is skippable on replays, the shortest probably takes about two minutes and the longest maybe ten. And as the blurb says, the game is clearly meant to be replayable, with engagement coming from how deeply you explore the possibility space.
Turning to the “way it isn’t” side of the ledger, though, the possibility space isn’t strictly branching; instead, it’s hub-and-spoke-y, with three major locations you can eventually move between, each of which offers at least a few sub-areas you can investigate or different ways you can engage. Relatedly, there’s also a mechanical system that impacts your ability to move between different branches: you have a quartet of RPG-style stats, with evocative yet vague names like Southern Charm and Rodeo, that sometimes increase when you make decisions and which gate certain actions. It’s an interesting idea but I found it an awkward fit: for one thing the player generally doesn’t have enough information to consciously decide how to build their character (at one point, questioning whether dirt is still brown in the future gets you a point of Cowboy Justice) or weigh whether a less-optimal-sounding choice that checks a strong stat is better than a more-appealing one that relies on a dump stat. Making things harder, unless you take notes you can’t even see how your build has evolved in a particular playthrough – I think this might be a limitation of the default implementation of Ink, since I couldn’t help thinking that a Twine sidebar or ChoiceScript stats page would have come in handy.
The system also seems overengineered for such a short game, like it needed more space to feel worthwhile. This is especially the case due to the game’s last major departure from the Insomnia-like template: all the endings are emphatically not created equal, since in only one of them do you find your own hat. And inverting my narrative intuition, that ending is the easiest, quickest one to get – in fact, I got it first time out, just as I was starting to feel like I understood the game’s vibe and systems. I replayed a few times and saw that it’s got a fair bit more to offer, and there are some fun vignettes in this portion of the game – I liked the verbal duel with the Indiana Jones impersonator and chatting with the costume shop clerk about 12 Angry Men – but since those other endings seemed manifestly worse (you mostly wind up with various hats that don’t belong to you and might only be cowboy-hat-adjacent rather than the genuine article), all this felt too much pointless padding; after all, I’d already gotten the “real” ending.
I should note that I’m no exponent of slavish adherence to a formula, and in theory, the attempt to expand out the Insomnia-like approach to include more robust gameplay systems is one I could see working. And the writing does a good job of being funny without becoming too annoyingly zany. But some of the specific choices made by All the Troubles Come My Way undercut the benefits of the new tack it’s taken; either make the RPG system lighter and more of a joke, or more important and legible to the player, and put the good ending at the far side of the content rather than right at the start, and I think you’d be on to something.
Zorklang unbound, December 19, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Joey Acrimonious has written some of the best recent IF that includes graphically-depicted sex – the blurb here refers to its genre as “erotica” rather than “AIF”, and I think that’s an appropriate distinction as to the author’s previous work too. Turbo Chest Hair Massacre is a farce that culminates in the world’s most debauched description of a robot changing her cooling fan, while Digit is a sweet romance that takes its time getting to the moment when its well-drawn characters take their flirtation to the next level. Both mostly progressed as standard parser games with maybe a few lewd touches before climaxing with set-piece sex scenes; Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest breaks the mold, though, because this one starts out with a bang. Specifically, the eponymous heroine is enjoying a bout of vigorous, lovingly-described lovemaking with her barbarian lover – the sex is so good that when he casually mentions that his birthday is coming up, she rejects his suggestion for a casual hang in favor of knocking over a small country and giving it to him as a gift. This sweet gesture is somewhat complicated when her main contact turns up dead and a mysterious assassin starts chasing her down. Hijinks – and lots of interstitial sexy bits – ensue.
The game wrings a lot of comedy out of playing its absurd premise so straight it ends up way over the top, which is to say, it’s very very camp. The prose is written in an exaggerated sword-and-sorcery style that left me chortling. Even the tiny bit of narration when you open your journal (which handily tracks your progress and your to-do list) is an opportunity for a gag:
Zorklang checked her scriven notes, for all great despoilers keep a journal of their deeds and intentions.
Oh, did I not mention that the bat lady is named “Zorklang the Despoiler”? And that she has a catchphrase she intones whenever she meets anyone, warning them that she is “bound by the laws of neither gods nor men”? She also has wings and a cool cape, making her a sexy distaff Batman, plus she has mind control powers she can invoke via the eponymous DESPOIL command? She has more authentically chiropteran powers too, like echolocatory hearing and an impressive sense of smell (OK, it’s less impressive than the whole DESPOILing thing, but still pretty good).
This suite of abilities is used to largely good effect in the game’s puzzles. There are a few that involve inventory items, fiddling with mechanical contraptions, or solving a navigation challenge, but for the most part the player winds up searching out hidden ways, recruiting weak-minded confederates, and leaning into her unique abilities. There are some implementation hiccups that meant some puzzles weren’t as smooth as they could have been – one stymied for a while because I hadn’t noticed that GIVE OBJECT defaulted to making an offering to my pet cat, rather than the NPC who needed an object, making me thing I’d tried the solution and it hadn’t worked. And there’s a late-game sequence that’s only kicked off once you notice that one detail in a single previously-visited locale in the largeish map has changed; the player’s given a light hint pointing them in the right direction, in fairness, but the detail in question is just tacked onto the end of the location’s description without being broken out into a new line or anything, so I found it very easy to overlook.
As long as I’m segueing into complaints – don’t worry, I’ll get back to praise soon enough – I also wasn’t entirely sold on the lewd bits that came (yes, yes, I know) in the middle parts of the game. The opening sex scene is necessary to motivate the game’s plot, and is silly and sweet in equal measure, while the closing one (of course there’s a closing one) is likewise a nice capstone reinforcing what a great time the sexy main couple have with each other; they’re the kind of sex scenes you could take home to meet your parents. But the sex in the rest of the game doesn’t feel nearly as organic; often you’ll just be running around doing your regular parser-game stuff and then run across people making out, or the game will pause and drop not-at-all-subtle hints that you should relax, nudge nudge wink wink. It largely avoids the creepiness of the typical exploitation-film approach – you do use your mind control powers to kick off a small orgy at one point, but it’s pretty clear the characters were just looking for an excuse – but these sequences do feel somewhat shoe-horned in, and without of the emotional connection that animates the lovemaking between Zorklang and her boy toy, the florid language risks just seeming silly:
Gasps and sighs of fleshly pleasure answered the salacious squelch and gurgle of her hotly slathered loins. Arching her back and rocking her hips in an ancient, primal rhythm, she painted the bedsheets with sweat and slick passion.
And speaking of potentially unnecessary elements, there’s a treasure-collection mechanic that gives you a score post-endgame based on how much loot you’ve been able to plunder along the way. It’s right there in the title, I suppose, and the system is entirely optional, but its inclusion still struck me as bizarre – anyone who can try to steal a whole country as a token of affection probably doesn’t need to steal minor valuables along the way.
There, now my critical duties are fulfilled and I can close by giving some more examples of how Bat Lady Plunder Quest’s genre self-awareness made me laugh. There’s an absolutely savage skewering here of the kind of DnD player who won’t shut up about their tortured and completely plot-irrelevant backstory, as well as a blurb laying out the in-game lore for the setting’s dog-furry race that gets increasingly shamefaced as it goes:
The two were of dog-person lineage, a race of beast-people: half-human, and half-dog. Well, more like 90% human and 10% dog. Well, more like humans, but just with cute dog ears and silly dog tails.
The ways other characters respond to your introductory catchphrase also never fail to charm:
“I am Severskidim the Crime Lord,” replied the rather bemused man lounging on a plush chaise longue. “My brothels, gambling-dens, tobacconists, and other illicit enterprises payeth no tax, and I do pass the savings on to me.
A few dodgy puzzles and some unnecessary sex didn’t do much to reduce my enjoyment of the game, in other words. I do wish there’d been a full walkthrough uploaded, rather than the helpful but incomplete hints we’ve got now, since there is more friction than I’d like, but Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest is funny and charming, and lives up to its predecessors as a strangely wholesome and wholly entertaining romp.
Ill communication, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
2023's had a lot of boatiness, but it was also murderier than usual, with a solid number of mysteries represented in the entries. Death on the Stormrider crosses the streams, being a murder-mystery on a boat – on a steampunk airship, no less, which makes the protagonist’s isolation and vulnerability even more intense. As a foreigner trying to work their way home on a ship where only one crewmember spoke their language, things were already parlous enough, but when that one crewmember is found murdered – with your brother fingered as the only suspect and thrown in the brig – you’ve got to do everything you can to find the true culprit. Of course, you can’t interview suspects or read any incriminating documents, and you start out locked out in your cabin, though it seems like that wasn’t intentional. At least the rest of the crew is busy getting ready for landing, and will mostly ignore you.
The setup here is compelling in narrative terms, but is also cannily contrived to avoid the typical weaknesses of parser-IF mysteries. The language barrier means there’s no fussing about with a clearly-inadequate conversation system, and also explains why everyone else mostly leaves you to your own devices as you wander around and taking everything that isn’t nailed down: they’re busy, and it’s too much trouble to tell you to stop unless you seem to be messing with something important. In fact, though their vibes are wildly different, I was reminded of Mayor McFreeze’s analogous approach – in both games, you’re mostly solving navigation puzzles to thoroughly explore the map, with the investigation part of the gameplay largely reducing to simply examining the stuff you find along the way.
A difference is that in place of the medium-dry-goods puzzles of Mayor McFreeze, in Death on the Stormrider almost all the puzzles involves engaging with the various NPCs – who are in fact quite active, wandering about the ship bent on their own tasks. And just because you can’t talk to them doesn’t mean you can’t interact with them, or they with you. As expected, if you poke your head into some especially important areas, they’ll quickly eject you, and there are also many locked doors that can only be opened by a crewmember who has reason to pass through them. As a result, the primary gameplay involves observing the NPCs’ movement patterns, scoping out hiding places, and creating distractions to get them to go where you want them to. It’s nonstandard, but the optional tutorial that takes the player through the first major puzzle does an admirable job of demonstrating the game’s systems; likewise, the included map makes navigation significantly easier.
The prose isn’t called upon to do anything fancy – it has enough to do to situate the player, alert them to exits, highlight the activity of crewmembers in the immediate or nearby locations, while noting any interactable objects. Still, I found it nonetheless communicated a strong sense of place in just a few words, like this early segment that has you forced to the perimeter of the ship:
"The maintenance passage (forward) ends, sharply, terrifyingly, with a narrow metal platform—and then nothing but the great expanse of the air behind you, the ground so far below that you can barely make it out. A hatch to port leads back to the safety of your cabin."
Less positively, I did feel like the writing sometimes wasn’t up to the task of communicating the key clues needed to solve the puzzles. For example, I was able to figure out that I needed to get through a currently-inaccessible exit, but the description of the situation seemed to point somewhere entirely different from the actual solution (Spoiler - click to show)(trying to move the shelf in the miscellany does say you’re unlikely to succeed with your bare hands, but the rest of the response seems to indicate there’s too much stuff, rather than just one object that’s too heavy to shift unaided). And in one of the final puzzles, the game seemed to go out of its way to provide an anti-clue: (Spoiler - click to show) once you get the wrench, most location descriptions print out an additional line drawing attention to the presence of pipes you can sabotage, but that line is notably omitted in the captain’s cabin so I assumed there weren’t any present. Still, the final puzzle is intuitive and satisfying, requiring the player to synthesize several different strands of information to determine the actual reasons for the death of the murdered crewman.
That synthesis also points to my other criticism, though, which is that when it comes to the mystery side of things, the game leaves an awful lot up to the player. For one thing, while the stakes – your brother’s life and freedom – are effectively conveyed in the opening, they’re left in the background for most of the game’s running time. The player character doesn’t have much subjectivity, and while I kept expecting that there’d be a sequence where I’d come across my brother, or at least the locked door to the brig where he’s held, nothing like that ever happens (oddly, while the brig is noted on the map, its presence isn’t ever mentioned in game, making it seem like it’s sealed off in a parallel dimension or something). And then the ending doesn’t give the player very much: I found what I think is the optimal resolution, and have a pretty solidly worked-out theory of the various intersecting crimes and deceptions that played out aboard the Stormrider, which is reasonably satisfying from a gameplay perspective, but the final text felt strangely perfunctory, declining to dwell on the protagonist’s joyful reunion with their brother or even to explicate the mystery’s solution. The ending of a whodunnit doesn’t need to provide emotional catharsis or spell out the answer to the puzzlebox, I suppose, but it’d be nice if it did something.
All of which is to say that Death on the Stormrider leans more on the crossword than narrative side of the parser-IF dilemma. But it’s generally a good crossword that cleverly matches its novel gameplay to its premise; if a post-Comp release cleans up some of the clueing issues, and a player goes into it wanting to uncover all the game’s secrets for their own sake rather than to earn a story-based payoff, I think there’s a whole lot of fun to be had here.
Start shouting, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve read a fair bit of Russian literature, and I tend to like political fiction. The Whisperers, then, is up my alley: it’s an interactive play that is set, and notionally performed, in the USSR in 1938, chronicling the lives of five inhabitants of a communal apartment in Moscow as they make an escalating series of poor decisions that eventually end in catastrophe (but I repeat myself: I already said it’s about the USSR in 1938, when the Great Purge reached its climax).
Before delving into the plot of the play, it’s worth sticking with the framing for a beat. The conceit is that the player is attending a performance of a novel entertainment – at scene breaks, one of the characters in the play will break the fourth wall and ask for the audience to indicate their choice of several narrative options via cheering; whichever one seems to have the greatest enthusiasm behind it will be chosen.
As a way to diegetically explain the mechanics of choice-based fiction, this is smartly done, and I actually wished the game had done more to explore it. At the beginning, you’re given the choice of how literally to take these mechanics; the author recommends a mode where the player’s decisions are given priority, making the game play like any other work of choice-based IF, but there’s also a mode where you just play one audience-member among many, with your voice not necessarily being determinative. I took a risk and picked the latter option, but I was disappointed that there wasn’t more explication of how the audience was responding to the play, and whether my hooting and cheering was making a difference. This is especially the case because some decisions involve resistance to Stalinist orthodoxy; the actor framing the choices swears that they’ve been given special dispensation not to report anyone who evidences signs of deviation, but that struck me as a hollow promise. The audience is already lightly characterized – the player’s given a choice of whether to sit among the proletariat, the party bosses, or those in need of reeducation – so making more explicit the implied social context in which the play is being performed could have enriched proceedings further, I think.
Another interesting aspect of the presentation is the use of stage directions. These are generally a bit more heavy-handed than I’d expect to see in a real theatrical script, but given that a player doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the actors’ interpretations, I think that’s a good choice. But among their idiosyncrasies is the approach to indicating the volume at which dialogue is delivered; the game notes that unless otherwise indicated, all lines are spoken at a whisper. On the one hand, this is both narratively and thematically apt: with five characters crammed into three thin-walled rooms, keeping one’s voice down is both polite and, given the police-state context, prudent. And keeping even extremes of emotion and distress sotto vocce suggests the ways that life in authoritarian states is lived; concealment is the default, rather than an exception. But I found the actual implementation challenging, because of course as I read the game’s text I’d often forget that injunction and assume that un-annotated dialogue was spoken full-volume; again, if the scenes were actually being performed, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the experience of reading the text on the page was different.
The play itself is quite well-written. There’s a certain quality of slightly-awkward effusion that I expect when reading something by a Russian author, and the dialogue captures something of that tone. Here’s a line from one of the two leads, Agnessa, a Trotskeyite idealist, on her feelings about one of her new neighbors:
"No, no it’s nice to see you. I do like you Dariya Yuriivna. I’m not embarrassed that you know it."
Or here’s a bit from the other lead, Nikolai, waxing rhapsodic about his romantic connection with Agnessa:
"Now. I have things now, I love my work, I love my books, I love … things, life! But sometimes, no, all the time; sometime, sometime, a long time ago, when I was a child, something changed. Dreams became safer than life. Yes, there were reasons to wake up. But there were reasons to stay asleep too. As well. I was scared, I guess. And I became bad. But now I wake up, straight up, childishly up, because I know that I might get to be with her."
Sometimes the characters come across as callow, or talk past each other, but that all generally rings true. I do think Whisperers does sometimes presuppose more familiarity with the politics of pre-WWII Russia than the abbreviated pre-game glossary can provide – there’s an extended riff that depends on knowing the context of what “socialism in one country” means, for example – but I think it still works well enough even if you don’t get the nuances. And the themes it engages with are strong: the central couple’s relationship dynamics drive the plot’s main clash, the tension between the political idealism to change an unjust world and the desire to nonetheless live a private, mostly-happy life within it. That conflict is echoed in a lower key by the marriage of the two older characters, as Dariya’s continued attachment to Orthodoxy is part of longstanding worry on the part of her husband Georgy. And then the fifth character, Agnessa’s brother, Sergei, serves primarily to up the stakes, since he’s an NKVD officer.
(Er, I just realized I’m doing the thing I dinged the game for at the beginning of the last paragraph: the NKVD was one incarnation of the Soviet secret police, part of the alphabet-soup sandwich between the Cheka and the KBG).
(Yes, that’s a terrible mixed metaphor).
It’s all solid and resonant – especially now, given the war of aggression the USSR’s succession state is currently waging – but I have to confess that I didn’t find The Whisperers quite as compelling as I expected. All the themes make sense, they’re played in a smart, historically-grounded way, the writing is strong, and the use of interactivity is well-considered. But I suspect the character work isn’t quite up to the same standard. The core due of Agnessa and Nikolai especially sometimes veer into caricature – she’s a true believer who at one point directly says that she doesn’t see a difference between fiction and real life, and he’s so feckless he seems to make decisions purely on impulse. I liked them, but they felt more like types than people. Sergei, meanwhile, is likewise mostly just a plot device, and while Georgy and Dariya have a world-weary charm, they get by far the least spotlight time (I also came across what I think is a bug that undercut the impact of their strand of the story; in my playthrough, I didn’t have Georgy burn Dariya’s idols, but the NKVD still couldn’t turn up anything untoward when they searched the apartment. From looking over the full text of the game via the included script mode, though, it seems like the bad consequences you’d expect to happen should, in fact, happen).
The related issue is that I suspect I didn’t invest myself too heavily in Agnessa and Nikolai’s relationship because it was clear from the jump that they were doomed. The fact that a story telegraphs that it’s a tragedy doesn’t mean it can’t work, of course. But I did feel like the latter stages of the plot hinged too much on, well, plot-y stuff like whether they would get away with their acts of defiance and if they’d have any broader impact – but of course they don’t, and of course they don’t. This is very old history at this point, and besides, I’ve read all three volumes of Gulag Archipelago, there aren’t really any portrayals of Stalinist brutality that can surprise me at this point. Focusing in on the emotions, conveying what it might be like to live in this horrible situation, could have worked, but here’s where I think the archetypal nature of the characters wound up being a flaw. Admittedly, there’s a plot branch that didn’t show up in my playthrough that I suspect might recast the emphasis of the final scenes (Spoiler - click to show) (my audience opted not to have Agenssa tell Nikolai that she was pregnant, which would presumably up the soap-opera quotient) so maybe one point of feedback would be to prioritize that choice in the mode where the player doesn’t get to make all the decisions.
The thing is, when I consider all the issues I’ve raised, it occurs to me that they all boil down to the same actually-kind-of-vapid critique: this is a play that I’m reading rather than seeing performed. With actors bringing life to the characters, and the immersive engagement that theater provides, I think these downsides would melt away, and the work’s very real strengths would be even more apparent. Of course, this is also a piece of IF that’s been entered into an IF competition; it’s entirely appropriate to judge it on the form in which I encountered it. But heck, I enjoy reading Shakespeare, even knowing that that’s far from the ideal way to experience his plays – if anyone ever puts on a production of The Whisperers, I’d be eager to see it, but in the meantime I’m glad it was entered into the Comp.
Charge sheet, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
ARREST/CHARGE INFORMATION
SEPTEMBER 20, 2006
NAME: 20 EXCHANGE PLACE AKA “SOL FC” AKA “HAYES”
PLACE OF ARREST: 20 EXCHANGE PLACE
ARRESTING AGENCY: NYCPD PCT001
ARREST CHARGES:
CRIMINAL IMPERSONATION (PL 190.26): suspect entered the scene of a hostage situation outside a Financial District bank at 20 Exchange Place. He put himself out as an NYPD officer and engaged in various law enforcement activities, but his level of professionalism and effectiveness was so indescribably low that suspect obviously was nothing of the sort.
AGGRAVATED ASSAULT UPON A POLICE OFFICER (PL 120.11): suspect claims that upon arriving at the scene and asking his notional colleague, Officer CORTEZ, for a briefing, CORTEZ responded with unreasoning hostility and initiated a physical altercation (Office CORTEZ has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into his actions).
ASSAULT IN THE FIRST DEGREE (PL 120.05): suspect, noting that a crowd had gathered around the crime scene, attempted to clear the surroundings. Subsequently, a reporter for the New York Post identified him as a police officer and approached suspect to ask for an update; suspect, apparently incapable of delivering a simple “no comment”, responded with hostility and escalated the situation and eventually initiated a brawl with the journalist (NOTE: eyewitness indicated the Post reporter carried a live mic and was accompanied by a video camera crew; potential credibility issues if we put them on the stand?)
CRIMINAL USE OF A FIREARM (PL 265.09): after the aforementioned physical altercation appeared not to be going his way, suspect fired three “warning shots” in an attempt to stop the brawl, and then aimed his loaded firearm at one of the journalists. Suspect argues that this was a conservative choice, as his only other option was to “go off book”, though he did not elaborate on what that would have entailed.
AGGRAVATED ASSAULT UPON A POLICE OFFICER (PL 120.11) (yes, again): subsequent to the above altercation, Deputy Inspector PASH arrived and attempted to deescalate. Suspect once again initiated a fistfight (NOTE: several eyewitnesses swear that the fight lead to HAYES being shot dead, which is clearly impossible. Did the bank robbers release a hallucinogen or something?)
OBSCENITY (PL 235.05): despite claiming to be a police officer, suspect appears to have an aversion to even as mild an oath as “pissed off”, somehow managing to pronounce it as “p***** off”.
SMOKING (NYCAC 17.503): before initiating planning on how to breach the bank and rescue the 17 hostages, suspect paused to smoke a cigarette within 50 feet of the bank’s entrance. Suspect claims that he had no choice, as he is sufficiently addicted to nicotine that without said cigarette, he would have been so nervous that he would have been forced to blurt out confidential information when engaged in negotiations with the robbers.
EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION – HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT (NYCR A.2.7): suspect seems to harbor a bizarre grudge against Irish-Americans, including claiming not to understand the accent of a decorated member of the NYPD bomb squad (NOTE: see charge under PL 190.26. Who the hell does this guy think makes up the force, anyway?)
AIDING AND ABETTING ROBBERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE (PL 160.15): while suspect purported to be trying to rescue the hostages and apprehend the robbers, his advice and actions were so error-prone as to indicate that he was likely in collusion with the criminals. At every stage, even the most anodyne of his suggestions would lead to disorder within the ranks (see charges under PL 120.05, PL 12.11 x2), assistance to the criminals (see charge under NYCAC 17.503), or catastrophic failure and loss of life (three separate suggestions about how to infiltrate the building, plausible on their face, led to unexpected explosions and death of hostages). One initially-promising sortie via a side door was even brought to a halt when suspect appeared to have some form of seizure, requiring resetting planning from the beginning.
CRIMES AGAINST MIMESIS (IFTR 1-25): please just make them stop.
An occasionally-wonky thin-mint-stery (am I doing this right?), December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I feel like there are a larger-than-usual number of sequels in this year’s Comp, and this is probably the most unexpected of them. Last year’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear? was an fun but slight whodunnit that mashed up hard-boiled narration with hard-candy characters; it wrung some solid laughs out of its off-the-wall premise, but gave every sign of being a one-off joke. So when I saw that Bubble Gumshoe had another case, part of me wondered whether the gag would have gone stale. Fortunately the answer is no; Mayor McFreeze still entertains by leaning into its Candyland-gone-bad setting, and changes up the gameplay formula by swapping more traditional IF puzzles for Gum E. Bear’s focus on interviewing suspects.
The plot this time out is a mystery cliché, but a different one from the straightforward who-killed-the-dead-guy hook of the previous installment: the mayor’s femme-fatale wife walks through the door of your office and asks you to check in on him, as she learned he was lured to a meeting with a notorious crime-boss at an abandoned factory on the wrong side of town. But when you go to investigate, you get locked in, and turns out the factory is due for demolition in the morning – you’ve got to escape, and hopefully solve the crime along the way.
My memory of the previous game is that the comedy came largely from one-liners and delicious puns, and those are still in evidence this time out, but I got the most enjoyment from the places where the author really leaned into the absurdity of the game’s world, piling joke upon joke without once cracking a smile:
"The docks once saw fleets of ships coming in full of raw sugar, and leaving full of premium saltwater taffy. But the pollution from Sugar City’s industrial district has given the cola here an extra kick: the extra maintenance costs involved in shoring up the ships’ dissolving hulls put the factory into the red, and when the Good Ship Lollipop foundered right in the middle of the channel - blocking access to all other vessels - that was the final marshmallow in the s’more."
This kind of scene-setting calms down a bit once you reach the main part of the gameplay, but there are still plenty of good lines slipped in even once things get serious, and the endling features a delightful escalation of noir cliches and dessert-based investigative techniques, again all played entirely straight.
I also thought the gameplay structure here was cleverly done. There are basically two tracks the player needs to work through: to escape the factory, you need to solve a series of fairly conventional medium-dry-goods puzzles that are primarily about traversal. But along the way, you’ll also have the opportunity to find and investigate some clues about the titular crime; these aren’t puzzles per se, but the game tracks which ones you’ve found, and then changes the ending based on the information you’ve gathered. This is an elegant way of representing a mystery in IF form – conversing with NPCs is obviously challenging to do in a satisfying way, and requiring the player to demonstrate they’ve figured out the solution can often be tricky, since it’s easy to make things either too easy (most genre-aware players will guess the identity of the bad guy pretty quickly) or too hard (since spelling out the exact way all the clues fit together represents an interface challenge, and may require information the protagonist has but the player doesn’t). And allowing the player to get to the end without solving the mystery helps provide a hint about what they missed, so they can go back and try to do better.
The implementation sadly lets the comedic tone and elegant structure down, though. There aren’t a lot of alternate syntaxes provided, and Inform’s default responses largely haven’t been changed, so I spent a lot of time fighting with the parser and hearing Graham Nelson’s drily amused voice chastising me, which took me out of the world (tip to authors: it only takes fifteen minutes or so to customize the most commonly-used responses, and this goes a very long way to making your game feel polished and unique). There’s a point where I needed to untie a piece of cord from a door, and TAKE CORD, UNTIE CORD, and DETACH CORD were all unsuccessful, with only TAKE DOOR working – which was odd, since I needed the cord, not the door! There are also several things that look like containers that you can’t put anything in, a fair number of disambiguation issues, and long location descriptions that are presented as single unbroken blocks of text.
Beyond the technical aspects of implementation, I also found a fair number of the puzzles required a higher amount of authorial-ESP than I’d like, and solutions sometimes relied on what felt to me like dodgy logic. Like speaking of that guess-the-verb issue I mentioned above, one puzzle requires you to rip a metal door off its hinges using detonator cord, which from my understanding is made of plastic and quite thin, so I wouldn’t have thought it would be up to the challenge. Conversely, I had to go to the hints because I wasn’t sure how to get through this door:
"A cheap, stained wooden door, badly warped by damp. There’s a small keyhole just beneath the brass handle."
Turns out it’s sufficiently fragile that throwing a heavy object into it will break it, but I don’t think that description adequately signposted that brute force would be a solution here (the fact that the keyhole is a separately-implemented object also seems designed to mislead the player).
The investigative track I think is a bit more intuitive than the puzzle track, though again there were places where a bit more hand-holding would have been appreciated, especially where world-building details that might be lost on the player are at issue ([spoiler]I’m thinking here mostly of the need to TASTE various objects, most importantly the dead body, which feels like an egregious violation of crime scene protocol as well as slightly cannibalistic).
As is my wont, I’m harping on details, but it really just is the details that are the issue here; the writing, story, and general design are quite strong, unlike the funny but sometimes-dodgy Gum E. Bear (I solved that one by accusing suspects at random, which I think was a common experience for players). Despite its sometimes-thin implementation and inadequate clueing, Mayor McFreeze represents a real progression; dare I wonder whether we’ll see a completed trilogy next year?
It's all over (and over), December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The thing about Groundhog Day is that it’s a horror premise dressed up as a rom-com. Like of course there’s the sheer existential terror of the way the time loop cuts you off from the rest of the world, shipwrecked on an isolated outcrop of temporality. But beyond that, God or fate or kismet or whatever taking a direct hand and saying you are meant to be with this one specific person, and will keep you stuck in a timey-wimey rut until you perform just the right steps to unlock the prison? That’s the part that kicks things over into nightmare territory. Even if there’s a spark and connection, life is long and relationships are hard; once time’s arrow is flying forward again, who’s to say what’ll happen next Groundhog Day, or the one after that? If you get in a fight, or decide you want a divorce, will the world stop again until you take it back? Every minute of every day would be torture as your subjectivity is annihilated.
As per usual I am perhaps overthinking things. But Last Valentine’s Day remix of the classic formula comes up with what I think is a better alignment of themes and narrative: if the story is trapping the protagonist in a loop, shouldn’t the resolution also hinge on an internal emancipation? Certainly the main character doesn’t start out the story in any obvious need of a personality adjustment: walking through an unseasonably-warm February afternoon with a spring in their step, they seem to have it all figured out, with their biggest dilemma deciding whether to get orchids or roses for their partner. Given the framing of the game, it’s not much of a surprise when they get home only to be blindsided by a Dear John letter, nor that you quickly get sent back to the beginning of a day that’s suddenly a little colder, reflecting on a relationship that suddenly seems to have some cracks in its façade.
The challenge of a time-loop game is that it can get boring for the player to run down the same track time and again, and in its second iteration, I was worried Last Valentine’s Day was going to fall into that trap; the situations, and even the specific sentences you read, are quite similar to the initial sequence. The modifications are well-chosen to clearly but subtly shift the mood, but I still felt my eyes starting to skim over seemingly-familiar bits of prose. Fortunately, subsequent trips through the loop see even clearer variations, focusing on new characters or situations, or zooming in to focus more on things that were bottom-lined the previous time out. As a result, while the palette of narrative elements stays limited throughout, I found the game remained fresh through its running time.
These narrative elements are decidedly low-key, but effectively play with the central theme of a curdling relationship. You have encounters that foreground the potentially transactional nature of love, highlight the possibility of heartbreak due to betrayal or tragedy, or just provide a light thematic throughline based on the legend of Orpheus (I was disappointed that telling a character that yes, I was familiar with the story, wound up terminating that branch of the conversation rather than leading to a dialogue about what it means). There are plenty of choices available throughout, and while I never got the sense that any particular decision I made was going to have much of an impact – the protagonist’s escape from the loop isn’t a puzzle the player needs to solve by doing everything exactly right, thankfully – these frequent interjections of interactivity succeeded in keeping me engaged as I decided how sympathetic to be to each of the views of love being offered up.
For all that there’s a lot of external incident, though, the game is quite solipsistic, with the reality of the protagonist’s partner never coming through in any concrete way. Instead the focus is all on the protagonist’s feelings and reflections about love. I think this is a reasonable choice for a game that’s so internal, but it does contribute to an impression that the work is intended to speak for and to younger people entering into some of their first relationships (also adding to this impression: the fact that the florist, who I think is described as being in her very early thirties, is referred to as middle-aged, and who, after suffering a romantic setback of her own, bemoans the difficulty of starting all over and worries that she’s far too old to find love again. For the record, I am 42 and only like halfway crumbled into dust). The writing, while generally strong, also occasionally hits a clunky or callow note, like this bit of one of the breakup notes:
"Life with you has been an adventure. There is no other word to describe it. The clouds parted and I started anew. There was so much excitement. And so much angst. I ceased to live in a pit, I ceased to walk on a plateau. I was on a roller coaster, and you were there right beside me, laughing and screaming and crying, all at once."
While I would have enjoyed the game more if its take on love had been a little more grounded and, dare I say, mature, I’ll admit that this is a game with a naïve protagonist who is a little too much in their own head. As I read the game, it gradually makes clear that what’s trapped you in the loop isn’t so much any external force, it’s your own desire to cling to the past and escape heartbreak, and your tendency to catastrophize what’s after all an ordinary and expected part of life, however painful. The prose in the ending is slightly overdone for my tastes, but it hits a properly resonant thematic note: it’s not that you finally move on by jumping through the proper set of hoops, but rather that you move on by moving on. And having gotten the knack, one hopes, there’s no sword of Damocles hanging overhead waiting to strike if you ever again stray from the straight and narrow.
A riddle wrapped in an enigma, December 15, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I really like riddles. What’s more fun than wordplay, engaging with some cryptic poetry and turning it over and over until it lines up at precisely the right angle and you see the obvious solution that’s been staring you in the face the whole time? I’ve got good memories of a car trip I took with some friends twenty years ago where we killed four or five hours just swapping riddles – somehow I almost stumped everybody with the hoariest of old chestnuts, you know, the whole “a rich man needs it, the poor have more of it than they know what to do with” one, except after fifteen minutes one of my friends looked out the window at a storm-cloud and said “that looks like the Nothing” (you know, from Neverending Story – I told you this was a long time ago) and that shook the answer loose.
That’s the rub, though. Riddles are a good way to pass the time with friends, so you’ve got someone to bounce ideas off of and nothing better to be doing – plus it’s also no big deal if you can’t guess one right, since that just gives someone bragging rights and you can move on to the next one (assuming you’re not going to be a sore loser, skulk after them in an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim their prize, then ultimately bite off the finger of their second cousin once removed). In a piece of IF, they’re a high-stakes design element because these forgiving bits of scaffolding disappear: sure, they can go gangbusters, but a distressingly large percentage of the time, if the player doesn’t immediately figure it out, they’re going to grimly stare at it, fail to get any good ideas, try a couple more options, then dispiritedly have recourse to the walkthrough and feel bad about the whole process.
So yeah, if you’re going to have your game hinge on riddles, it’s good to be mindful of the dangers. And also, for the love of God, don’t make the text entry boxes case-sensitive.
Right, now that that’s off my chest we can talk about Paper Magician. This is a short choice-based game where you play a test subject bent on escaping from the lab where they’re confined so they can finally see the things they’ve only read about in books, like the sky. It’s a premise that could be played many different ways, and the game opts for a fairy-tale take. It opens with an extended sequence where you meet a disembodied spirit in a dream who promises to help you escape if you can make them a body – for you have the power to conjure the things you draw or write about into reality. This is a neat idea, and when the writing stays grounded in the protagonist’s perspective, it can be compelling, like this bit where you fantasize about what escape could mean:
"The sensation of placing my hand against a river’s current, running across a field, petting a griffin’s fur. I’ve only truly experienced breathing, the touch of a cold wall, the brush of paper, and the thin solid form of a pencil in my hand."
I like that it’s unclear whether griffins are real in this world, or if, since you only know about what you’ve read in your few books, you just don’t know that they’re mythological. On the other hand, the prose can also feel muddled and vague. Like, it took me a longer time to come to grips with the actually-fairly-simple map of the compound because of stuff like this:
"I see two doors, each one on opposite walls, marked West and South."
Wait, west and south are opposite?
This became a bigger issue as I started to dig into the meat of the game, which involves investigating a few rooms in the lab for clues about the experiments being conducted on you. Like, I’m pretty familiar with video game tropes, but I struggled to make sense of stuff like this:
"As the source of all magic in this world, the Dragon of Origins is omnipresent in different forms. However, it has a core form, within the depths of this world. If we can draw out the core and then implant it into Subject 0013, then it can become our personal reserve of magic."
If it was just a matter of digging into optional ~lore~, I’d have shrugged and moved on, but actually the player needs to understand this stuff to reach the endgame. The final area of the lab is sealed with four locks, each of which poses a particular question about what the scientists are up to and requires an answer to be typed into the waiting text box. So yeah, they’re riddles. While two of the questions were straightforward to figure out, the other two felt substantially more open-ended, and susceptible to several different legitimate answers. For example, one asks what the subject is going to become, which seems to refer to this extract from one of the documents I found (spoiler-blocked since this reveals one of the twists):
(Spoiler - click to show)"Raise and control the subject as our new god. Harness its power as it becomes our own new reserve of magic. A living reservoir."
Another document also uses the phrase (Spoiler - click to show)"figurehead god” to refer to this idea. So I tried that, as well as (Spoiler - click to show)”new god”, “living reservoir”, “reserve of magic” and permutations of all of these. Turns out the answer was just (Spoiler - click to show)"god", but either the hint needed to be much clearer, or alternate solutions should have been accepted. And here’s where the case-sensitivity comes in, because actually that doesn’t work either; it needs to be capitalized. This is the point where I went scurrying for the walkthrough with a frown on my face. It didn’t need to be this way – I’d actually gotten all of the riddles mostly right – but this overly-strict design turned what could have been an engaging, albeit diegetically unjustified, opportunity for the player to demonstrate their understanding of the backstory before entering the endgame into a frustrating exercise in reading the author’s mind.
Said endgame does pick up a bit; the scenario as a whole is fairly underdeveloped (I would have liked to see more uses for the protagonist’s cool magic abilities, and better integration of the backstory elements into the narrative once they figure out what’s going on), and the story just goes exactly where you think it’s going to go given the setup, but it still finishes on a nice note of catharsis. Still, my opinion on riddles remains unchanged: a lovely game to play among friends, but outside of that, they’re a dangerous business.
Untamed, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
An awesome thing about well-crafted video games is that they can conjure up seamless new worlds for the player to explore. An awesome thing about poorly-crafted video games is that by inadvertently breaking the illusion of mimesis, they can conjure up hallucinatory terrain that dislocates and disorients the player in a way that wind up perversely enjoyable. So it goes with Into the Lion’s Mouth, which combines a strange loop born (I assume!) of a weird bug with some odd writing choices to convey a discordant, postmodern experience where the player’s more Theseus adrift in a maze than Heracles bearding a lion.
The opening is deceptively simple: this choice-based game starts in medias res, as the protagonist suffers a vehicle break-down in the middle of the Serengeti and is immediately menaced by lions. The player is primed for a tale of survival as you need to make the right choices to escape hostile animals and unforgiving wilderness to make it back alive, but the reality is more discombobulating. For one thing, if you try to deal with the lion, your only options are to yell at it and draw attention to yourself (bad idea, duh) or to… try to hypnotize it, which the game illustrates with an inline YouTube video of a young girl “hypnotizing” various small animals like a frog and an iguana. Shockingly, this also doesn’t work, sending you back to the opening menu where you can select the remaining, incongruous option: “Lucky I prepped with the lion taming simulator.”
Clicking on that takes you to what seems to be an unrelated vignette, where you (is this the same you? In this story you apparently work as a park ranger, whereas the main-timeline you seems to be unfamiliar with the Serengeti) encounter an abandoned lion cub and nurse it back to health. There’s another odd fourth-wall breaking bit here, where you get sent to an unrelated website that lays out a DIY recipe for approximating lion’s milk that you then need to pick out of a set of choices in order to successfully feed the cub. But other than that things progress as you’d imagine: you bond with him, you help him learn to hunt, you reach the moment when you realize he belongs in the wild, and you tearfully leave him there and drive away…
At which point you’re sent back to the game’s opening yet again, I guess to hope that hypnosis will work better this time out (it doesn’t).
I have questions. For one thing, in what sense was this vignette a “simulator”? It’s framed as something that actually happened. But are we to assume it was just a Twine game that the protagonist of this other, less-successful Twine game played prior to going on safari (the lion-cub bit is far and away the best part of the game, seeming to indicate that some bit of research went into it, plus as mentioned it has a narrative arc rather than allowing time to become a flat endless circle)? If that’s the case, and you’re the kind of person who is so psychotically prone to overpreparation that before a trip to a wildlife preserve you research exactly what you should do if you happen to come across a lost lion cub and need to raise it into adulthood, shouldn’t you also know how to jump-start or a car? Or at least know not to engage with potentially dangerous animals instead of shouting “yoo-hoo, over here!” or trying, I repeat, to hypnotize them?
I had plenty of time to contemplate the answers to these queries as I confirmed that yes, everything remains the same in this second iteration, including the possibility of jumping back into the simulator again and rebooting things yet a third time. Into the Lion’s Mouth is a misnomer of a title: play this one, and you’re crawling into an endless matryoshka doll with infinite narratives nested inside each other, never resolving; I’m half tempted to play it until I’ve set free so many rehabilitated lions that they’re no longer endangered. Surely this can’t have been what the author intended, but from a quick nose at the Twine code, I can’t see a more definitive ending. And honestly I’m glad for that, since absent this bug or whatever it is the game would be a forgettable snack that doesn’t do much with a unique premise. Instead, I get this picture of the future: a man, hypnotizing a lion – forever.
A dark revenant, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I think most people who’ve lost someone close to them have played some version of the bargaining game: imagining what you’d be willing to give up to get one more day, one more conversation, one more hug, with your loved one. It’s a ghoulish pastime, beyond being quite futile – perhaps for the best, there’s no interlocutor out there ready to take up the opposite side of the bet – but it’s nonetheless a positive fantasy; knowing that it’s impossible to obtain something so devoutly to be wished, or at least not for free, our lex-talionis-addled brains heap up sacrifices to make the vision plausible.
Careful what you wish for: in the grim world of My Brother; the Parasite (dig that semicolon), they’ve discovered a microorganism that delivers the unthinkable: once it colonizes a person’s brain, it will spring into action after they die, sending electricity into the brain and reanimating a corpse for four or five days. The person’s still dead, but their corpse lingers on, a talking thing that’s kept around out a vain hope that it can offer closure.
That hope is especially vain for Inez, the protagonist of the game. Her brother has died – choked on his own vomit after one bender too many – but as he luckily was afflicted by the parasite, she’s offered the chance for a series of one-on-one interviews to unpack the many, many layers of trauma he’s inflicted on her over the years. There are some details given, and others withheld, but it’s dark, dark stuff (Spoiler - click to show)(while it doesn’t spell things out, I read the game to imply that he sexually assaulted her at least once), and Inez can’t help but pick her scabs, verbally jousting with the body that used to be her brother in search of something she knows he can’t give.
The writing here is queasy and authentically muddled, and often describes abuse that was inflicted so frequently that it seems to have become almost commonplace:
"You knocked the wind out of me. I collapsed onto the floor, gasping, in tears, trying my hardest to force air back into my lungs. You brought me half a mango as an apology and begged me not to tell Mom."
"My mind, though… There are a hundred, million reminders that set it aflame. There are sounds that make me jump. Phrases that make me sick. Parts I can no longer touch."
The visual presentation matches this dour tone. The graphics – a mixture of portraits and heavily-modified photographs, with some limited, disorienting animation – occupy a range from moody to actively unsettling. There are occasional choices that prioritize vibe over readability, like the use of dark-gray text over a black background, and a few instances of timed text, but I think these are legitimate decisions that work to make the player uncomfortable, giving them the smallest taste of what it’s like to live as Inez does.
The game’s perspective in fact is locked very close into her subjectivity; this is a hothouse-flower of a game, focused overwhelmingly and obsessively on the trauma her brother has inflicted on her. If anything, I found that when the game tries to broaden out from this theme, it hits its few false notes: there’s a repeated suggestion that part of the ill will between the siblings came from competing for their mother’s love, and Inez several times repeats that she loves him and will mourn him. But these claims ring hollow in light of the intensity of the brother’s transgressive hatefulness and Inez’s complementary rage; I just didn’t buy these conventional, psychologized elements, and frankly the game doesn’t need them.
I’m hopefully communicating that this is a deeply unpleasant, but also deeply compelling, work to experience. Inez’s experiences are intense, but suggested with enough subtlety that the player can’t push them safely into the realm of melodrama or schlock horror. For all that it’s a very internal work, the author sets up the plot with care; it progresses from one distinct scene to the next with a clear logic of escalation connecting them. Despite the lack of anything resembling a branching choice, there’s some skillfully-deployed interactivity that means clicking through the various bits of text remains engaging throughout. And the conceit of the parasite is brilliant, because instead of a duel between two people, it’s simply a matter of a single person and a thing, meaning Inez is always in the spotlight and on the hook for the decisions she makes, while her brother is a dead but still-animate sparring partner whose incapacity for moral action is no longer blameworthy.
My Brother; the Parasite didn’t resonate very strongly with my personal experiences; my sibling relationship was complicated as all are, but nothing at all like this. And the emotions it evokes most frequently are ones that are generally alien to my personality. If there were too many games like it in the Comp, I think I’d have a hard time playing my way through it – I certainly needed a break after finishing this one. But it’s a haunting and well-crafted work, and for those who enjoy engaging with darker situations and feelings, it’ll be something very special. For my part, I’m glad to have played it, and glad too to be putting it aside.
A haunting non-allegory, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
While I’ve generally read far fewer books by non-Anglophone writers than I would like, to the extent that there’s an exception it’s Russian novelists: while I don’t speak the language and I’ve thus relied on translations, I’ve made my way through a pretty high percentage of the 19th-Century canon as well as a smattering of more recent authors. Probably this is partially down to subject matter: I like political and philosophical novels, so given the preoccupations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, et. al. this is a rewarding furrow to plow. But more than that, even in translation there’s something about the quality of the language that’s unique and engaging to me, some blunt poetry and non-Western meter to the writing that forms something of a common thread even for authors with very different styles.
I got something of the same vibe from Kaboom, which is similarly translated from Russian, and which has a premise that’s seemingly as off-kilter as its prose: in this parser-like Twine game, you play a stuffed hare who has to try to help its person (a five-year-old girl) after a bad dream that seems to turn the whole world topsy-turvy. Like, here’s the description of the anthropomorphized sun that floats above the strange dreamscape that opens the game:
The sun gazes directly at you, jokingly wagging his scalding rays. He has a clean-shaven, balding elderly face with somewhat lumpy cheeks and small eyes slightly turned towards the nasal bridge. In spite of his countenance being noble and a little weary, it also gives away an immense inner tension - looks like it takes him quite an effort not to blow up altogether, taking this whole world into oblivion with him.
That’s not a paragraph most native speakers of English would write, I don’t think – that use of “altogether” is a little archaic, the image of wagging rays of sunlight probably wouldn’t occur to me but might make more sense in the original Russian, and the repetition of “somewhat” and “slightly” and “a little” I think reflects diminutives that English lacks. But for all that the writing is grammatically correct, and I found this an arresting image, rendered in a distinctive, engaging way.
I definitely experienced some disorientation from a combination of the odd premise and the unintuitive prose, though. This sometimes made solving the game’s puzzles more challenging: I often had a hard time visualizing the space I was moving through, and while there are usually good hints or cues pushing the player towards what they should be doing, I was often unclear on what broader goal I was serving by pushing a pillow around or getting glue on my paws, even though I could tell that the game wanted me to do these things.
The interface also could be cleaner: there’s an inventory menu in the upper right corner that is mostly limited to your cute little hare-y arms and jumpy hare-y legs, with options for grabbing or kicking showing up when you click to open the menu. But most of the time the choices presented in the main window include things like pushing or picking up objects, so the logic of when and why I’d need to go to the inventory remained opaque throughout my playthrough. There’s also some unneeded friction that comes of the game’s decision to return back to a location’s top menu after you take most actions. There were sequences that require multiple connected steps, like pushing a toy crane truck, turning its crank, connecting its hook to something, then turning the crank again to lift the object into the air, and it was a little annoying to have to manually click “look around” then on the crane truck each time I wanted to perform the next step; the annoyance was increased by the realization that the game appears to have a time limit, though I got to the end before time ran out.
The consequence of all this, though, is that it took me way longer than it should to figure out what Kaboom is actually doing. Full spoilers after one last evocative but confusingly vague passage:
"Full of thoughts, you slowly turn towards the house and suddenly hold still, thunderstruck: only a small part of the wall at the corner you came from is visible, the rest of the building is covered by a huge messy heap of unidentifiable something! What’s happening? What crazy giant gambolled here? And how can you, an ordinary toy hare, withstand this giant?"
(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, what’s going on is that you’re in Ukraine, and your house has just been hit by a bomb; it’s pretty clearly implied that your owner’s parents were both killed, and you have to draw attention to her predicament so that she can be rescued before she bleeds to death. It’s possible to fail at this task, though mercifully the game doesn’t go into details, but even success comes at a cost: your poor hare winds up doused in ash, covered in glue, and finally half burned away by the end of the game, and since your owner is unconscious when she’s pulled from the ruin of your house, it’s pretty clear that you’re going to be abandoned and lost forever.
This twist hit me like a ton of bricks. Some of that is of course just seeing the horrors I’ve been reading about in the newspapers for a year and a half unexpectedly brought home; some of that is the sentimental fact that I tuck my two-year-old son into bed every night with his favorite toy cat beside him; and some it’s the simple and heartfelt closing message from the game’s anonymous Russian author. This is a game with some infelicities, as I pointed out above, but it got more of an emotional response from me than anything else in the Comp so far, and I think partially it’s those very points of friction that make it so effective. I wish to God we didn’t need to have games like this – much less that there’d be another recently-ignited conflict to which Kaboom could equally apply – but I found this game a very effective use of interactive fiction to create some much-needed empathy and connection; it’s trite to say that art is what will eventually end war, but however small it is, in my heart of heart I believe games like Kaboom are making some difference.
Sub orb-ital, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’m not generally one for “old-school” IF. The text adventures of the 80s don’t tickle my nostalgia receptors – I played a few at the time, and many more since then, but I got into IF via the late 90s/early aughts indie scene so when I think of The Games of My Youth, it’s Photopia and Slouching Towards Bedlam that come to mind. Many of them also tend to take the two-word parser approach, which fundamentally doesn’t jibe with how my brain approaches IF interfaces. And while I enjoy a good puzzle as much as the next person, I tend to place a high value on literary prose, thematic depth, and engaging characters; it’s not so much that most old-school IF is bad at those things as that it politely declines to even attempt such things in favor challenging gameplay in the medium-dry-goods model. I can enjoy this style of gameplay but I’m very aware that when I bounce off an old-school piece, the fault’s more likely to be on my side than the game’s.
At the same time, though, I sometimes wonder whether this attitude has become something of a crutch for my critical faculties. Like, it’s easy to say “I guess this thing I didn’t like is just a matter of taste”, and it makes one feel like a broad-minded, ecumenical sort of person who can look beyond their own prejudices. It’s much harder to try to be more rigorous and nail down questions like a) what exactly do we mean by “old school”, anyway, given that there were plenty of early 80s games that aimed to integrate gameplay, plot, and theme and had literary pretensions; b) what particular design elements are necessary or at least helpful to creating an “old school” vibe; and c) are those elements implemented well or poorly in a particular work?
That sounds like a lot of work that I’m not going to attempt now – maybe post-Comp fodder for the Rosebush – but having had these thoughts, I’ve decided to try to provide a slightly more critical look at Have Orb, Will Travel than I was first inclined to do. Because despite having enjoyed the author’s previous two games, this is another old-school puzzlethon that I didn’t quite get on with, but upon reflection I think that’s due to some particular design choices that deserve to be engaged with rather than just chalked up to de gustibus non est disputandum.
Start with the curious decision to play coy with the plot. It’s a hallmark of this style of game that the story isn’t a primary draw, but even by those standards what we’ve got here is curiously thin. The game’s blurb, its opening text, and the letter you start out with in your inventory all gesture towards your character having been given some sort of charge by a Council of Elders, which can be inferred to be to obtain the titular orb, but despite several hundred words being dedicated to this setup, it never comes out and says what the orb is, what it does, how it got lost, why you’re looking for it where you are, and why finding it will matter. Sure, it’s a MacGuffin, but this is uninspiring and even a little confusing, so much so that when I found a magical “sphere” I thought I’d just about hit the end of the game, even though I was only halfway through.
Speaking of magic, HOWT features a Vancian spellcasting system where you can learn spells from a spellbook and then cast them. I’ve liked this kind of system in games like Enchanter, but it’s again oddly vestigial here. There are only three spells in the book and you never accumulate more through play, there are only two places in the course of several dozen obstacles where spellcasting comes into play (meaning that yes, one of the spells appears to be useless), and the system is needlessly baroque, requiring the player to intuit that they need to manually LEARN each spell, which can only be done when you flip through the book page by page until you get to the appropriate one.
The puzzles are generally solid, though after a couple gimmes (there’s an early maze with a fun but straightforward gimmick that’s satisfying to solve) they quickly ramp up in difficulty. This is genre-appropriate – and kudos to the author for providing a full hint system as well as a walkthrough – but some design decisions around traversal made experimenting with them much more tortuous than it needed to be. The map is riddled with one-way passages whose existence isn’t disclosed in advance, and it’s easy to blunder into one before you’ve completed exploring a new area. It’s always possible to retrace your steps, but for much of the game, doing so typically requires either solving the maze again – which quickly grows tedious – or enduring a medium-length section with timed text, which similarly wears out its welcome almost instantly. Further, many puzzles involve interacting with some kind of mechanism that has an impact somewhere else in the map, often without a direct cue about what sort of changes you should be looking for. As a result, the puzzle design presupposes that the player will be making frequent laps around the map, while the navigation design contrives to make that approach pretty annoying.
I hasten to point out (er, 900 words into the review) that there are definitely strong elements here. The author’s homebrewed parser continues to be a highlight, feeling almost as seamless as the tried-and-true Inform or TADS ones (the only foible is that taking items from containers requires a little extra typing, but this is well signposted in the documentation, and a shortcut is provided). There are also a lot of little riddles and clues that help lead you through many of the puzzles, which is a style that I like and which is generally well-executed. And while the setting could be a bit more exciting – when you wend your way through a magically-confusing wood and discover a secret cottage hidden away at its center, it’s deflating to be told that it’s “totally uninteresting” in its features and décor – the prose is efficient at communicating what you need to solve the puzzles, and even manages to be fairly evocative. I think I found one bug (the game crashed when I tried to walk W into the lake rather than type SWIM) but otherwise it was completely smooth.
It’s these very positive pieces that make me want to beg off from any sharper critical judgment: this is a well-made game with a cheerful vibe, and its design choices feel intentional rather than being oversights, so if those design decisions frustrated me, again, maybe I should just blame myself. But thinking about them some more, I’m increasingly of the mind that actually some of those decisions were bad ones, and that HOWT could have been just as old-school but decidedly more engaging if it had paid a little more attention to its plot, or made the magic system a more integral part of its challenges, or reduced the friction of navigating its map. A game like this was never going to be my favorite in the Comp – again, this isn’t my subgenre of choice – but there’s no reason I couldn’t have liked it a lot more than I did.
A feisty heist, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There are a lot of things I enjoyed about Finders Commission, a parser-like choice game where you carry out a museum heist — like, for example, everything in that clause I just wrote – but my favorite was the breezy way it lays out its premise:
"Bastet is a beautiful cat.
She believes she is an ancient deity who should be worshipped by all.
Her Aegis, or breastplate armor, has been missing for centuries.
She read online that it was sold at auction to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities."
Each line of is wackier than then next, but it’s delivered with such supreme nonchalance that you almost don’t notice how off the wall it is – to say nothing of the way the brilliantly impossible-to-argue-with first line just slips by. The game largely delivers on this promise, offering an entertaining set of puzzles and a straightforwardly pleasant story; it’s a bit rough in places, and I think it had room to lean more into the silliness of its setup, but I found it an engaging way to while away half an hour.
The planning is an integral part of any heist, and here Finder’s Commission offers just enough to whet the appetite. You get to choose your protagonist from a menu of gender-ambiguous options, each of whom boasts a special talent or two (I opted for Nat, “strong and compassionate”), and then negotiate your fee with Bastet (to no real end, as far as I could tell, but it’s still a fun touch) before heading to the museum to reclaim the unjustly-stolen antiquity. This phase did seem to have a peculiarly large number of empty, useless locations, and that feeling persisted once I got to the main gameplay space; fortunately, it doesn’t take long to find a map to make the compass navigation more intuitive, but there’s still way more real estate in the museum than seems necessary to support the handful of puzzles on offer. I’m guessing that this is partially in service to the character-selection portion of the game – there was at least one interaction I found that I’m pretty sure was available because of Nat’s strength, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the useless places I encountered play host to bespoke options for other protagonists – but there might have been a more elegant way to accomplish this.
The writing also feels a bit perfunctory once the heist proper kicks off. There are a few vignettes that have some charm – I liked the sequence where you can do some light flirting with a cute docent – but for the most part the descriptions are quite functional. This isn’t the kind of game that should provide reams of historical context for each inessential artifact displayed in the museum, nor should there be long dialogue trees with NPCs when you’re trying to keep a low profile, but I couldn’t help think of the way the Lady Thalia games get a lot of mileage out of a few well-chosen period details and a couple lines of witty banter.
The actual process of making off with the aegis doesn’t have too many steps, but some do require some timing and forethought, which pushed me to scout out the scene, and try to come up with a plan before making my move, all of which felt in-genre. Each puzzle is relatively simple on its own, but the game does have time limits in a few sequences, and the inventory system requires manually selecting an item when you want to use it in a location, which discourages lawnmowering, so accomplishing the goal felt satisfying even though it was ultimately fairly straightforward.
I wound up with 87 points out of 100, though I characteristically want to try to argue my way to a better score – for example, I got dinged for leaving a security camera pointing at the aegis, but while I had figured out how to move it, the game didn’t do a good job of explaining which direction it needed to be pointed so it couldn’t see the case I was breaking into. I also got dinged for not charging my phone, when the last time I checked it it had 162% battery power, and for not tipping a barista when I’d never actually ordered a coffee. So I think we can all agree I deserved to get 100%.
Beyond these small oddities, I think I ran into a couple of other bugs – in particular, an important box-shaped gizmo seemed to go missing most of the way through the game, though I was able to undo back until it popped up again. These weren’t a very big deal, but hopefully they can be cleaned up for a post-Comp release.
Still, even when I was thinking of ways the game could be improved, I was still smiling as I played Finder’s Commission. I believe it’s the author’s first piece of IF, and it appears they’ve taken the oft-given advice that new authors start out with a short, manageable first game; if that’s the case, perhaps there’ll be a future, more robust Finders Commission game to come (this one is labelled as Episode One), which I’d certainly look forward to!
Introduction to camp, December 8, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The girl whose two moms were a mermaid and a pirate did most of the job, but it was the Prana Yurt that broke me.
I know it sounds like I’m saying that to make fun of Lake Starlight’s world’s-wokest-wiccans premise, but I think – or at least hope – I have some substantive critiques beyond just being a hopeless geriatric reactionary. This choice-based game is the first part of what promises to be a much longer YA-style story, following the tween protagonist as she leaves her home in a polluted, dystopian city and attends a sleepaway camp where she’ll make friends, learn about her magical heritage and, from the cues in the game’s ending, eventually take on the greedy companies that have ruined the land. The game is resolutely BIPOC-centered; the protagonist is a Latina (though oddly, the game has you choose a name before letting you know that), and a major part of her journey is connecting with her family roots and encountering other characters who are likewise empowered by their respective traditions. And it’s also staking out a clearly environmental-justice-oriented stance in laying out who’s made the world as bad as it is, and who needs to be stopped to begin to heal it.
This is all fine, I think – it’s as subtle as a brick to the face, but it seems to be pitched to younger players so that’s forgivable. Similarly, the worldbuilding is fairly thin, since there are lots of details making clear this is basically our world (the man character speaks Spanish, another one is named “Marie Bayou” and is from “Orlenze”) while the major departures, like the swarms of blood flies and the mind-control cults, are never explained, but I’m not sure heavy helpings of lore would have improved the experience. The writing had a number of typos, but generally struck me as in-genre for a YA work; it’s fairly simple and frequently made me feel like I was crumbling into dust:
Together, all of you yell out, “Yessss!” Then Stella shouts for everybody to jump up and she teaches you a super-fun cheer routine that involves lots of booty shaking and kicking and jumping and spinning around while shouting: “Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up! Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up!”
There are some 13 year olds who would find this cringe, but others for whom it would work, I suspect.
So all of that is to just say this is very much not for me, but that’s completely OK! Not everything has to be, and in fact I think the IF scene is stronger when there are more games not pitched at nerdy middle-aged white guys as the key audience.
I do think there are some issues here that go beyond mere preference, though. For one thing, the player isn’t given very much to do – there are sections of the game where ten minutes will pass in between choices – which I generally don’t mind too much, but I confess I did get annoyed when Lake Starlight felt like it was actively undermining my choices. Like, there’s a segment where you get to choose which of your cabin-mates to pair up with for task, except when I clicked on the one I opted for, I got told she’d already teamed up with someone else and I got automatically assigned to another girl. Previous to that, there’s a bit where you need to choose your strategy for introducing yourself to the other campers, and I decided to focus on my self-assurance – only for that to completely fail as I turned into a bundle of nerves. Making matters worse, I made that decision because I’d previously chosen for the protagonist to be born under the Fire Moon, which was supposed to make me brash and strong-spirited, so it felt like the author was doubly-negating my input. If a game has a specific story it really wants to tell without the player getting in the way, great, but in that case I think it’s much better not to present false choices.
The deeper critiques I had about the game go back to where I started this review. First, there’s the girl with the pirate mom (the mermaid one is blameless in all this so I’m leaving her aside). She tells the rest of the cabin about her mom’s occupation with a clear sense of pride, and they all nod along like this is a cool, normal job for someone to have. Sure, she does say something about “colonizers” being the target of her mom’s piracy, but given the absence of any active colonial activity being foregrounded in the story and the setting’s resemblance to the real world, this feels like it’s justifying violence against people based on their group identity. It’d be one thing if this was an isolated incident, but the game several times gives a pass to “good”-coded characters recklessly threatening violence against the protagonist. The camp head has a trio of pony-sized attack dogs charge the main character in what’s played as a small welcome-to-camp practical joke but looks way more like hazing to me, and later in that same scene, one of your cabin-mates draws a bow and points a nocked arrow directly at you, seemingly to show what a cool rule-breaking badass she is, but which is entirely equivalent to the decidedly un-cool activity of pointing a loaded gun at somebody.
Maybe I’m being overly-precious about this – and in an empowerment fantasy like this, I totally get that part of the draw is the cathartic idea of unleashing redemptive violence against bad people who share traits with the real-world politicians and oligarchs who’ve inflicted harm against communities of color and the environment. But Lake Starlight seems to me to have a too-cavalier attitude towards violence, and having played it not two weeks after the self-appointed representatives of an oppressed people unleashed horrifying violence against civilians and sparked a confrontation with a vicious government that’s killed thousands more innocents, its juvenile take on these issues grated.
Then there’s the Prana Yurt, which struck me as taking two vaguely non-Western words bespeaking alternative wisdom or lifestyles and mashing them up without any rhyme or reason. There are parts of the game that seem well-observed to me, like the protagonist’s home life and relationship with her family. But there are other parts, like the Prana Yurt, that feel like the result of antiracist mad-libs – I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the pirate-mermaid daughter is named “Lilo Keanu”, which I’m pretty sure is the Hawaiian Kemal Pamuk*. The BIPOC Avengers is a cool concept, but given the hard work that goes into building nonracial solidarity, it again feels like it can trivialize important real-world history to treat things so superficially.
I’m aware as I say all this that I could just be a big old hypocrite (emphasis on the old) – back in the day, I enjoyed the heck out of the tabletop roleplaying game Mage: the Ascension, where various stereotypes, including kung-fu monks, violent neo-pagans, and indigenous spirit-summoners team up to fight an authoritarian technocracy, and it’s definitely guilty of all the sins I’m laying at Lake Starlight’s door. Still, Mage came out in 1993; 30 years on, I think it’s reasonable to expect more.
* I don’t think I’ve recently explained the Kemal Pamuk thing anywhere. See, in the first couple of episodes of Downton Abbey, there’s a sexy Turkish guy who shows up as a guest star, and Julian Fellowes, when deciding what to call him, very clearly just stole the first name of the first political leader who popped into his head (Kemal Ataturk) and the last name of the first writer who popped into his head (Orhan Pamuk). This is extremely racist, but IMO also quite hilarious when you play the parlor game of applying the same logic to Western countries – Abraham Twain, Winston Shakespeare, Louis Hugo, etc. etc. etc.
Stuck at a low boil, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I have played a lot of IF over the years, and as a result – not to brag or anything – I’m kind of a big deal. I’ve rescued crashing spaceships, defeated maniacal supervillains, slain more evil wizards than you can count, and saved humanity, earth, the multiverse more times than I can count; I’ve bearded Lovecraftian horrors in their dens, and performed great acts of perspicacity in ferreting out whodunnit (albeit typically with a lot of restarts). So to play a game where the inciting incident is that you’re missing a couple of ingredients for the dinner party you’re going to throw for your friends, and you rise to the occasion by popping out and grabbing them with little more fuss than it takes to make a Trader Joe’s run… is actually a nice change of pace.
Creative Cooking is a cozy, exploration-focused game that, pace the title, doesn’t require you to do any cooking at all. Instead, it’s got two phases: first, you wander your house and learn a little more about the protagonist and their world – this is a fantasy world and you’re a sort of elf, and there are a lot of proper nouns being thrown around – then you get to the pantry, realize that you’re out of some stuff, and the second, puzzlier portion kicks off. You automatically jot down the three ingredients you’ll need, as well as some notes on how to obtain them, and head out to the elf village proper to find them. Between the three, there’s maybe a puzzle and a half; one is just lying on the ground, you get another just by talking to two NPCs (who have maybe two or three possible topics of conversation apiece), and then the last requires you to take one additional action after you pick it up, which is explicitly cued but I still managed to mess up due to my blind spots when dealing with two-word parsers (Spoiler - click to show) (I tried putting the vine in the pond, and throwing it in the pond, and dropping it, but had to get a hint to land on just THROW VINE). Then you go home, cook the meal, and have a nice time with your friends – actually, an especially nice time with one in particular.
I’m all for this kind of thing; not every game needs to have world-shaking stakes or brow-furrowing challenges, especially this deep in the Comp randomizer list. A simple premise with easy puzzles that just provides an excuse to hang out and explore a setting is a great concept for a game, especially one that, per the blurb, is meant to ease players into a forthcoming longer piece set in the same world. Unfortunately, I don’t think the implementation of the concept worked especially well for me. In large measure this is due to the shallowness of said implementation. Creative Cooking is written in a successor to the very early AGT language, and since I’m not familiar with that, I can’t say how much of this is due to the choice of language, but regardless, the game feels significantly more primitive even than other intentionally old-school games entered into this Comp. Very very few nouns are implemented – room descriptions will routinely mention objects that seem worth investigating, like a table with a drawer, or tools on a workbench, but rarely is any of this stuff even minimally implemented. Seemingly-obvious actions, like COOK, are also disallowed, and see the spoiler above for the parser issues I ran into trying to solve the one real puzzle.
The other factor distancing me from the game was the prose style. English isn’t the author’s first language, and several native-speaking testers/proofreaders are listed in the credits, so I don’t want to harp on this element too much, but there are still quite a lot of typos and confusing syntax, compounded by dense worldbuilding that lacks an immediate hook, a chatty approach that bombards the player with gossip without much context, and a reluctance to present text as anything but a single overlong paragraph (this might be a limitation of the engine). Like, when you examine yourself, the game notes that you’re an elf with a “kirune” body, so when I found a book in my library about kirune physiology I was hoping to learn more about what that meant. But here’s what you get when reading the book:
"This book on kirune physiology is the gift from Senpai Miryarai; when I unwrapped it, I was perplexed of the choice, Miryarai is a very accomplished healer, and for me is a really trusted friend and senpai. And she knows it. Noticing my perplexity, she says, with all her proverbial phlegm and calmness, a strange phrase: “a page a day keeps the healer away”. I never heard something like. Seeing my increasing perplexity, she coquettishly looks toward Etuye Alasne, hugging her with her right white wing. “it’s a saying from another world, far in the past and space”. Her matter-of-fact, objective explanation makes sense, Etuye is an exceptionally well-versed Soulmancer, and her soulmancy led to the first Soulmating till the end of Time in more than 10,000 years, the one between Miryarai, Etuye Alasne and Atuzejiki, but I still felt something off in her manifestation of love towards Etuye. Sometime later, I asked Miyai about this, and she explained, but it’s another and long story, to be narrated elsewhere, later…"
It’s interesting to see a game implemented in an older IF language that does something other than bog-standard collect-the-treasures gameplay, and I admit that I’m probably more down on fantasy worldbuilding bollocks than I should be, so I don’t want to judge Creative Cooking too harshly – and again, I really did like the setup. But with gameplay that’s so simplified, and the fruits of exploration so baroque and unrewarding, I didn’t find much here that clicked with me.
Floyd I'm ready to be heartbroken, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There’s a longstanding tradition in parser IF that authors should eschew the generic USE verb. The conventional wisdom, which I ascribe to, is that there are two major reasons for this: on the player’s side, it removes much of the fun of playing a parser game if you can just mindlessly spam USE X or USE X ON Y without actually thinking through a potential solution, and on the author’s side, you wind up with one mega-verb that can function radically differently in different contexts, which can make debugging really tricky, and can paradoxically make implementation even more work, as the player might expect USE to work as well as whatever more bespoke actions might be needed to resolve a challenge. After playing CODENAME OBSCURA, a spy-themed Adventuron game that’s an intentional 80s throwback, I can adduce a third rationale for avoiding USE: I, specifically, am very bad at figuring out when to try it, such that I had to go to the walkthrough three separate times to figure out what I was missing, and each time it was because I’d attempted everything but USE.
Admittedly, I expect the Adventuron parser to be a bit picky in the best of circumstances, and in each case, it was immediately obvious what to do once I got unstuck, so I shouldn’t pretend my repeated oversights about USE were that much of a barrier to enjoying the game. It makes a winning first impression, efficiently setting up a silly James Bond plot (you’re a secret agent working for an organization called TURTLE, visiting a town in Northern Italy to foil the plans of a German Count who’s stolen a diamond from England and is in league with the Sicilian mafia) and charming with lovely, colorful pixel art. The picturesque opening quickly segues into an action set-piece and then a simple escape puzzle, before setting the player loose to tackle the meat of the game.
There’s a lot to do, from visiting a witch to infiltrating a costume party to breaking into the compound where the Count is building a doomsday weapon. The map is reasonably open, but there’s typically only one or two puzzles where you can make progress at any point in time, which could be frustrating if the game world was much bigger, but CODENAME OBSCURA just about gets away with it. Speaking of the puzzles, they’re typical medium-dry-goods affairs; there’s perhaps a bit too much repetition, with three different blocked-off areas requiring you to WEAR something and/or SHOW something to gain entry, and one sequence where you solve a puzzle to find a password which allows you to find a combination which allows you to find a code, but they’re generally straightforward enough – save for a computer puzzle that combines unclear instructions with a bit of timed text to make for a fairly irritating barrier.
Speaking of annoyance, that USE issue is a real one, however, and bespeaks a game that has a very particular idea of how it wants you to interact with it. There are relatively few actions implemented – despite sound being important at several points, the player can’t ever LISTEN – American spellings for common commands aren’t accepted (PET vs. PAT, PUSH vs. PRESS), there are lots of items that you can’t examine until you pick them up, and it wasn’t just the USE case where I had to play guess-the-verb (the worst offender was a bit where you have to manipulate a part of a statue, and only one very precise syntax will work). CODENAME OBSCURA also does the default-Adventuron thing of bluffing when you try to interact with or examine an object that’s not actually implemented – it just says “you notice nothing special” rather than admit it doesn’t know what you’re talking about – and then makes the problem worse by retaining that same “you notice nothing special” default description for several game-critical items. I suppose that thinness of implementation is part of the game’s intentionally retro vibe, but a bit more testing could have helped the author strike a better balance between that lo-fi feel and player convenience. Likewise, I twice ran into a bug that led to the game hanging and not accepting input; fortunately, I was able to simply reload the webpage and seamlessly pick up from where things went off-track, but it was nevertheless kind of a pain (that’s why I’m attaching three transcripts).
For all these complaints, I did enjoy my time with CODENAME OBSCURA; it’s a far friendlier old-school puzzler than The Witch, and it’s got more meat on its bones than Magor Investigates…, so it did scratch an itch – and I say that as someone who doesn’t have any nostalgic attachment to the old two-word parser games that it mimics. I’d say it needed a bit more time in the oven, but from the blurb it sounds like the author’s been working on the game off and on since 1987, which is quite the gestation period; still, a little more testing and refinement to sand off some of the unintentionally rough edges – and provide alternatives for the USE-allergic among us – would be quite worthwhile.
There's no Spoonerism for "Spoonerism", December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I've played a lot of Andrew Schultz games, and while there are definite themes and sub-series, he’s a wide-ranging author and about the only thing that applies across the board to his work is that he’s always doing something other than regular parser stuff, be it anthropomorphized chess puzzles, an inverted tic-tac-toe game where losing is winning (and vice versa), or the extended wordplay riffs of Bright Brave Knight Knave, which I already played in this Comp. To my knowledge, though, outside of a few short jam entries, he’s typically stuck to parser engines for his more robust games, so I was curious to see what he’d gotten up to with Twine.
Trail Stash is actually not that far off from Schultz's other entry in the '23 Comp, Bright Brave Knight Knave, in that it hinges on Spoonerisms, a kind of wordplay the initial sounds of two words swap – like, you’ll win twaddle if you make a twin waddle (I don’t even know what the term is, if there is one, for the more complex stuff in BBKK and its ilk). The game’s replete with them – every location is a Spoonerism, and so are all the items you pick up along the way, because yes, this is a parser-like choice game with a persistent inventory and a navigation system that enables you to revisit places you’ve already been. And in fact you’ll have to, because each location contains one, and only one, item, and requires you to use one, and only one, other item to solve it (and thereby obtain one of a dozen pieces of a treasure map).
There is a story here, but it’s pretty vestigial even compared to the sometimes-sketchier frames for Schultz’s other wordplay games; it basically reduces to “you’re a guy who likes treasure, go find the map.” Likewise, if there’s any theme that unites the various situations and problems you face, it felt pretty light to me. Nothing wrong with that since it lets the player concentrate on the gameplay, and that suited me just fine. I often find the wordplay games a bit tricky, but shifting to a choice-based engine makes proceedings much simpler, since you just need to click the item you want to use; no need to sound things out and decide whether you want to write a word with an f vs. a ph, for example. Of course, that risks making things too simple and turning the game into a lawnmowering exercise, but I thought the game mostly managed to hit the sweet spot in between; with 16 total locations, comprising a training-wheel set of four and the meat of the game in four additional sets of three, the set of possibilities is manageable while still making trial-and-error unrewarding unless you’re really feeling stuck.
I also thought the hit rate for the jokes was pretty good. Plaid base is a good gag, as is funk pail. And I had to stop and think for a second when I found the one-word item to figure out how that one could work. And Trail Stash trusts the player enough not to belabor its point – it usually avoids spelling out the Spoonerism so that you can get the pleasure of feeling the click in your brain. I liked this description that came after figuring out how to solve the “weedy nerds” area:
"The weedy nerds are quickly very interested in the wee freights, be they ships or trains. The process of moving and organizing said freights gets longer. They analyze the structure of the freights and build bigger ones. All this is a good workout—something the weedy nerds once avoided."
Sure, not all of the puzzles are so clean, and I was definitely reduced to mechanically clicking through my options a few times, or left scratching my head after somehow landing on the right answer. But for the most part, I felt like I got the logic of which object I should use when. I’m sure this is partially because of the shorter running time of Trail Stash, so despite its name, it’s able to stick to the cream of possible Spoonerisms rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel. Likewise, this fresh twist on the Schultz wordplay formula would probably feel restrictive if it went on too long. But as an experiment in taking a tried and tested parser approach into new, choice-based territory, I’d rate the game a solid success.
Perhaps too low-key, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I have by now played a reasonable number of Larry Horsfield games – three just in this year’s ParserComp – so when I see his name on IFComp entry, I approach it with a certain amount of respect leavened by an also-certain amount of fear. He writes big, old-school games that fall into the traditional genres, but has an eye for appealing worldbuilding and an engaging, almost homey level of detail. But the puzzles he writes are almost always way harder than I’m able to solve, most often due to my own lack of brain-power, but occasionally also due to the idiosyncrasies of the ADRIFT system and parser; he’s also parsimonious with hints and typically doesn’t post a walkthrough. My quintessential experience with one of his games is to bumble my way to about a quarter of the points before giving up in despair, feeling like I’d missed out on something that could be really good if I was just more in tune with the intended gameplay.
This feeling, as it turns out, is right on, because Magor Investigates… is a sidequel to one of those aforementioned ParserComp entries, Xanix-Xixon Recurrence (yes, I looked that up), and the introductory text allows you to get a summary of what happened in that game to its two heroes (Duke Alaric Blackmoon, who’s the protagonist of many of the previous games in this series, and his buddy the king, whose name I’ve forgotten, and look, I’ve already looked one thing up in this paragraph so I don’t know what you expect). I left them flailing about in an abandoned city after a sandstorm, but apparently they had some cool adventures after that as they fought the titular lizardmen (they’re the Xanix, I think?) including a giant scary hybrid. It definitely sounds pretty neat, and there’s even a closing plot twist: Duke Blackmoon is able to use a special ability of the king’s magic axe, except only someone with royal blood should be able to activate that magic!
That’s where you – Magor, the court wizard – come in. Once the duo are back and rested from their journey, they charge you with doing some genealogical research to investigate Blackmoon’s connection to the royal family. I loved this premise – you will never go wrong pitching me a game about reading old documents – and the author’s worldbuilding strengths are very much on display. While the absent-minded wizard is a hoary old archetype, Magor is a great incarnation of the concept, and has his own idiosyncrasies: I laughed at his industrial-sized home distillery he’s got tucked right off his sitting room, because the guy loves his whiskey. So I embarked on this adventure hoping I’d get a little farther than usual.
And, er, I did; I managed to win, in fact. Magor Investigates…, it turns out, is an appetizer of a game; you have a ten-element task list laying out what you need to do to win, but some of them are optional (I forgot to water the plant, oops!), many of them are well-nigh automatic, like meeting with the king, and the few puzzles, which largely revolve around curing the royal archivist’s tummy-ache, are quite straightforward, though not without their pleasures (fussing about with the kettle and herbs to make an herbal infusion was just the right amount of busywork).
I was a bit disappointed the game was this slight. Partially this is just because it’s fairly easy, but also because of the way the difficulty is managed: there aren’t any conversational commands in the game, for example, with dialogue just happening automatically in cutscenes. Some puzzles also take care of themselves, in ways that actually sometimes wrong-footed me: I couldn’t figure out how to give the infusion to the archivist, because you’re not supposed to do that yourself – it’s all taken care of once you walk into the bedroom carrying the mug, but since I poured the kettle into the mug once I was already in the room, this “convenience” wound up being frustrating. And I was likewise momentarily stymied when I failed to notice that putting one herb in the kettle automatically put the other one in, too.
This is the second of Horsfield’s games that I’ve finished; I made my way through another of his ParserComp entries, Bug Hunt on Menelaus, this summer. It likewise was fairly short and consisted mostly of simple puzzles, though it was subject to a very tight time-limit that required frequent reloads; there’s nothing like that this time out, and if anything the challenges were even simpler. In both cases, I enjoyed myself, but definitely wanted something a little meatier than what I got. I know, I know, I am being a jerk, like Goldilocks saying “this one’s too long and hard,” “this one’s too short and easy,” when I am just freeloading on the hard work of others. Still, I do hope that sometime, I’ll get to play a Larry Horsfield game that’s just right – and for all my bellyaching, Magor Investigates… is certainly a fun way to pass the time until then.
Cult decor, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There are several ways to interpret Assembly – a short parser game about using your IKEA-honed furniture-construction skills to foil an incursion of Lovecraftian gribblies – but the most natural, I think, is to read it as a riposte to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. That seminal essay, of course, argued that the rise of technologies that allowed for the unlimited copying and display of objets d’art – photography, printing, the moving image, to say nothing of developments Benjamin couldn’t have dreamed of in 1935 – would sap them of their aura, the unique quiddity that gives it its authority by placing it in space and in time. Benjamin traces the concept of aura back to an imagined origin where the primary purpose of art was to create images of deities for religious purposes; thus, mechanical reproduction reduces or even eliminates the so-called cult value of the work of art.
Against this, Kirwin posits a thought-experiment by which a singular monument like Stonehenge can be crammed into an infinitely-replicable flat-pack:
Then, finally, a new age: an age of infinite repetition, of unbounded mechanical reproduction, of forms iterated out beyond imagination. These gods, and the few who remember them, have found their chance — for a ritual copied blindly from an instruction booklet, or a sacred ratio embodied in fibreboard instead of stone, still holds the same power.
This is a bold claim, and demands us to expand our understanding of what can constitute “cult value”. For Benjamin, it is axiomatic that while ordinary worshippers may not have access to the work of art and be fundamentally ignorant about it – think of the divine statues sequestered in the rear of Greek temples, or, less representationally, the placement of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies – the priest does engage directly, physically, and intentionally with the image, and through their role as intercessor connects the veneration of the non-present worshipper with the aura of the artwork. Kirwin elegantly reverses this exclusive formulation – the worshipper remains ignorant of the higher mysteries, but is granted access to a mass-produced replica of the objet that nonetheless retains its cultic nous. What complicates this picture is the role played by the protagonist –
OK OK I’m dropping the bit. I’m reduced to comedy-art-history because for a change I don’t have a ton to say about Assembly; it’s got a killer premise that it executes with elegance, and my only complaint is that it left me wanting more; despite the blurb promising an hour and a half, it only took me half an hour to get through (my experience with estimated construction times for furniture is very much the opposite).
Really, it’s all very well done. The loopiness of taking something so workaday and familiar as IKEA and mashing it up with cosmic horror is inspired, but actually makes an odd amount of sense. And the jokes are spot-on – sure, making up punny IKEA-style names for different pieces of furniture is a common pastime (…we all do this, right?) but I got a good chuckle out of several of these, especially the way that the name of the table you start out building presages what’s to come.
Turning to the gameplay, the various puzzles are all logical, and build on each other in a way that makes the player feel clever; maybe they’re a little too easy, but better that than too hard. The implementation is top-notch, too – with all these flat-packs, instruction manuals, screws, pins, pegs, nuts, screwdrivers, hex keys, &c &c I thought this would be disambiguation hell, but instead everything feels very smooth, with the parser keeping up with even shorthand commands for each step of assembly or deconstruction. If anything, I thought the game could have stood to add more friction here, and make the process of building things more of a challenge (Spoiler - click to show)(I kept waiting for there to be a gag where one of the pieces of furniture had incorrect instructions or holes too small for its screws or something – c’mon, I love IKEA too, but we all know that it happens – and then that triggering a blood sacrifice or something when you inadvertently cut yourself, but that shoe never dropped).
So yeah, I guess I’m hoping for a sequel that just gives us more of all the good stuff here on offer; maybe Walter Benjamin wouldn’t have been so down on mass-production if he knew it’d get us awesome things like Assembly.
Navel-gazing voyages, December 7, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
So here’s a deeply thought-out model for adventure stories that I’ve just thought up this second: imagine a line that says “external conflict” on one end and “internal conflict” on the other, then plot out various stories along the continuum. There’s a range of what works, certainly, but probably most of the really successful stuff lies somewhere around the middle: your Lords of the Ringses, say, where the business of orc-slaying is balanced by Frodo and Gollum undergoing their mirrored crises of self-doubt; or your original-flavor Star Wars, a bit further towards the external side what with all the laser-swords and pew-pew-pew stuff but still slowing down to deal with Luke’s journey towards white-guy Zen enlightenment and Han emerging from his solipsism. If you get really fancy, of course, you set things up so that the external conflicts rhyme with the internal stuff, but that’s not strictly necessary for a satisfying adventure, just gravy that moves you upwards on the orthogonal literary/unpretentious axis.
But shifting too far on the conflict continuum does risk pushing the formula to the point of breakdown: not enough internal conflict and you’ve got bubble-gum pulp that evanesces as soon as it’s consumed; not enough external conflict and you’ve taken the “adventure” part out of the adventure – which is my second-biggest critique of The Ship. This big choice-based game is pitched as a journey into mystery, with two captains charting their respective courses into uncertainty and danger, with only a cryptic poem to guide them, in search of a transcendent experience beyond mere treasure. And that’s a great pitch! But the game doesn’t really sell the high-stakes nature of the voyage; most of the challenges you experience aren’t about testing your wits against a hostile nature or devious foes, but rather getting a recalcitrant ship and querulous crew to keep moving in pursuit of the goal.
These are technically external obstacles, I know – maybe my model is not as ironclad as I thought – but they feel decidedly low-key. The game’s first puzzle involves winning a game of liar’s dice against a crewmember to win back the astrolabe he borrowed from the ship’s navigator, which is fun enough in itself but of course feels like busywork since you’re the captain and could just order him to give it back; others require you to fix damage to your ship (largely inflicted offscreen), investigate a spate of thefts, and fetch some soup for a prisoner. There is a minigame that sees you navigating through a series of treacherous passages, but it plays as a highly mechanical programming puzzle where you input your moves ahead of time and see if they bring you through; it’s reasonably engaging, but fairly bloodless. It’s all stuff that could work well if the game was attempting to provide a low-key simulation of shipboard life in the early 18th Century, but both from the blurb and the structure of the game, it’s clear that it’s aiming at, but failing to reach, a more dynamic, epic feel.
The game’s biggest issue, though, is its inappropriate prose style. Skillful writing could have perhaps bridged the gap between The Ship’s ambitious premise and its quotidian reality, and period-appropriate prose could have livened up the historical tourism aspect of the game. But instead, what’s on offer is informal and contemporary. Here’s a bit of the main character’s journal:
"All my life, I never truly belonged. Never had a family, a job, or something else that would make me a normal person. Hell, fuck normal persons, could not even be a half-decent pirate to earn my living! The sea was too much of a hassle for me."
Modulo the pirate-orphan stuff, this sounds more like a middle-class emo teenager from 1997 than a dashing ship’s captain from 1719. As that awkwardly-inserted f-bomb indicates, there’s also a fair bit of profanity, but it doesn’t sound anything like what I’d imagine someone of the captain’s background would actually say; I couldn’t help but compare the game’s use of language to that of To Sea in a Sieve, and the Ship sadly comes up wanting. And while I’m probably more of a stickler for period detail than most, for a contemporary style to work in this story, it would have to be more engaging, and again, epic – while it does reach for big-picture imagery in a few sequences, the writing is largely content to stick in this low-key dear-diary sort of mode.
So these are the reasons why the game didn’t fully work for me, but I have to admit there’s a lot to like here. The cast of supporting characters are quite one-note, but they’re generally pretty appealing, and the various minigames are skillfully programmed and change up the gameplay, even if they do get a bit repetitive and the navigation one dearly needs a function allowing you to edit your movement queue rather than just delete everything back to where you made a mistake (the biggest of these puzzles is almost fifty moves long! I confess I consulted the walkthrough for a couple of these). It also ends strong, with a climax that unites the two strands of the plot and posits a resolution that would externalize the internal conflicts that came before in a way that could have worked, if the earlier segments had been stronger. And speaking of the second strand of the plot, I haven’t said much about it because it actually functions as a pretty cool reveal. But there isn’t enough ballast to keep The Ship fully afloat.
PC LOAD LETTER, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
For its first ten minutes, I was pretty convinced that Fix Your Mother’s Printer just wasn’t going to work for me. The title and blurb instantly convey a compelling comedic premise – troubleshooting printers is annoying enough, much less with someone who’s probably a little out of step with modern technology, much much less via Zoom – but the initial exchanges with my mom seemed to indicate that it was also going to wring some jokes out of not-so-friendly banter and maybe even some passive-aggression; she reproached me for never calling, while most of my dialogue options contained some barb or other to throw in return.
That’s fine so far as it goes, but look, unless I’m prompted to play a specific character, I usually play IF as if I were myself – I mean, I am myself, but you know what I mean. And my mom is pretty great! She likes wine, NPR, and the New York Times games app, and though she lives on the opposite coast she comes out to visit for a couple of weeks every few months to offer free babysitting and cook delicious dinners. So I was already pretty disinclined to be mean to my game-mom, all the more so since she’s drawn to look not too different from my real one.
I was resigning myself to not enjoying this one as much as I hoped I would as I embarked on the tech-support odyssey, trying to at least pick the least-prickly options – when I realized the game was actually following my lead and the dialogue on both sides appeared to soften. I actually wrote in my notes file “seems like she’s getting less acerbic”, and then alt-tabbed back to see that the next line of dialogue involved the mom saying she was glad I was being nice, since “sometimes you can be a little bit acerbic.” Turns out I was on the same wavelength as this game after all! And from there I settled in to have a positive, lovely time.
That is, a positive, lovely time with my mom; the printer was an obstreperous beast throughout. You have to work through checking the power, the print que, the drivers, the toner, the firmware… I’m no longer an expert at this kind of thing, I should admit – I’ve long since experienced the transition that prompts soul-searching for so many middle-aged geeks, going from “I know how to write my own autoexec.bat and himem.sys files” to “can someone please tell me how to turn off the Apple TV?” (that isn’t a randomly chosen example; if any of y’all know, please do drop me a line) – but I thought the troubleshooting bits worked well, hitting the right balance between frustration and at least narrowing down the possible problems. And with me and my mom firmly on the same side, the increasingly-ridiculous lengths we had to go to to try to fix things provided grist for our double act; it was more good-natured than laugh-out-loud funny, but it was still really enjoyably written, and I did giggle when some joint of hers let out a loud crack when she bent down to move the printer, and she told me “you have no idea what’s coming to you, physically.”
The rat-a-tat comedic timing meant that I often was clicking through so fast that I missed changes in the game’s graphics, but that’s my own fault. The interface is nicely set up to mimic a video call while keeping ample screen real estate for the all-important text, and the charming, hand-drawn image of your mom updates as her expression changes, she ducks out of frame to mess with the printer, or Very Good Boy Pawford pops in for a cameo (even though it’s accomplished vicariously, petting Pawford was the best bit of doggie tummy-rubbing I’ve seen in a piece of IF in quite some time). They’re never overbearing, and as my experience indicates, you can pretty much ignore the visual elements if you want, but they do add a really pleasant vibe to the proceedings.
So all was well that ended well; we did manage to fix the printer, and despite what seemed at the beginning of the call like a threat to discuss your dating life once the tech support was done, actually that part was really sweet too – as was another sequence involving talking to her about her in-progress divorce or separation from your dad. I was not expecting Fix Your Mother’s Printer to be gently emotional, but turns out that was my major takeaway vibe. What’s even more impressive is that there seems to be significant branching – from reading other folks’ experiences with the game, it’s possible to fail to fix the printer, to have a way more conflict-oriented conversation with your mom, and generally have a completely different experience. Still, I’m quite satisfied with the ending I got; how can you expect a printer to play nice if you aren’t going to?
Communications breakdown, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Dysfluent is part of a subgenre of IF that foregrounds the experience of living with a disability. I’ve played a number of such games, focusing on autism, OCD, social anxiety, and I’m sure there are many others I’ve forgotten, and beyond the subject matter they tend to have common threads: they’re most often short, choice-based, and allow the player to engage with the disability via a central game or interface mechanic. I’d also say that much of the time, their focus on the subjective experience of a particular challenge understandably gets prioritized over traditional IF elements like narrative, character development, or gameplay; they tend to be immersive and dramatize short, intensive events that don’t leave much room for such things. There’s nothing wrong with making those choices, in my view – I’ve found many of these games effective and memorable – but I think I’d internalized the necessity of this tradeoff to such a degree that it felt deeply surprising to me when Dysfluent demonstrated that it’s eminently possible to depict a disability in an informed, sensitive way, while still including a plot arc, impactful choices, and a well-characterized protagonist, without any significant compromises required.
As the title suggests, Dysfluent’s main character lives with a stutter, which makes the quotidian tasks that make up game’s plot – picking up a gift for a friend, attending a celebratory lunch, and interviewing for a new job – a bit of a minefield, and one with a lot of minute-to-minute uncertainty. While sometimes your speech impediment manifests in very intense ways, other times it’s relatively minor, and you’ve developed a host of workarounds and other strategies to help manage it. This means that the player’s actually given a fair degree of agency, since the interface allows you to see the likely difficulty level of the various dialogue options you’re given; you can decide that in a particular situation it’s more important to be understood quickly than to take the time needed to get out exactly what you intended to say, or just wave at someone rather than say hi to avoid the dilemma entirely.
I never felt like there was a single right approach, as the different contexts the game offered for these interactions shifted my sense of the tradeoffs. Dysfluent also does a good job of making these decisions important both internally and externally. The protagonist appear to have had their stutter since childhood – and per some flashbacks, are carrying around some trauma from some callous and clueless behavior from parents, friends, and teachers – and feels a lot of pressure to avoid discussion of, or calling attention to, it. As a result, the choices aren’t simply cold-blooded exercises in optimization; they also impact how authentic the protagonist is able to be, both with themself and with their friends.
It’s nice that the game doesn’t make this too one-dimensional on the other side, either; I didn’t feel judged when I decided to give a fake but easier-to-say name when picking up coffee because I just wanted to push the easy button. Dysfluent also isn’t a total misery-fest – I certainly respect games that lean into that approach, but it’s also nice to see protagonists in these sorts of games get a win. Despite a little bit of difficulty communicating, I was able to get exactly the right present for my friend’s birthday, which helped get the game off on the right foot and reassured me that my choices could have an impact. And while some of the other interactions didn’t go so well, I was OK with that; when bad things happened, it generally seemed like a logical consequence rather than the game trying too hard to make a point.
The elephant in the room is the omnipresent use of timed text. This is unavoidable given Dysfluent’s subject matter; it’s the obvious mechanic to represent the stutter, and it definitely helps the player experience the frustration of not being able to get out what they want to say. Still, there’s no two ways around the fact that this design choice does mean intentionally frustrating the player, and I do think the annoyance factor could have been tuned slightly down without harming the marriage of gameplay with theme – in particular, timed text is sometimes used when it doesn’t seem necessary, like delaying your internal thought processes or dialogue from other characters.
On the positive side, the game does allow you to turn off the delay after finishing it, if you want to go back and try to make different choices or gather some of the achievements you missed your first time through – again, it appears that there’s a lot of branching, and that achievement section is quite robust. So those “new game plus” options are a nice convenience, but also an indication that the author’s thought about who Dysfluent works as a game, not just as an experience, and it’s all the better for it.
Divine investigation, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Adapting a piece of static fiction into IF is a vexed challenge that could bedevil even the wily Odysseus. On one side, there’s the risk of hewing so closely to the original story that a player who’s familiar with it gets bored, knowing all the plot twists in advance – call that Scylla. On the other side lurks the danger of changing things so much that the coherence of the story falls apart, and it deviates so much from its inspiration that it no longer functions as an adaptation – call that Charybdis. Of course, this dilemma doesn’t cut so deeply if a player hasn’t read the original, though this creates its own problems: “come play my adaptation of the Odyssey, except if you like the Odyssey, this isn’t for you” is a rough marketing line. Detective Osiris proposes another way out of the bind, though, by adapting a myth – myths, after all, having a certain margin of error, being endlessly retold and reinterpreted in ways that occasionally differ from each other in quite radical ways. It nonetheless sails a wobbly course – at first I thought it tacked too close to Scylla, then at the end I was worried Charybdis was going to get it – but ultimately it does make it through.
This Ink retelling of the story of Osiris starts out with many of the traditional plot points: you wake up in Duat, the Egyptian underworld, having been hewn apart and then painstakingly reassembled and resurrected as a god through the good offices of your wife Isis. Rather than immediately taking up your new divine duties, however, the other gods of the pantheon encourage you to investigate your murder so you can bring justice to the unknown perpetrator. This plays out largely through interviewing suspects, both divine and mortal, as you wander through a small but pleasing recreation of Ancient Egypt and its imagined afterlife, with a few puzzles tacked on towards the end of the case.
These conversations aren’t anything special in gameplay terms; there are typically only a few dialogue options in each, and you don’t need to work too hard to figure out who’s lying or choose an approach, as simple lawnmowering will work just fine. I did enjoy getting to know the various characters, though, especially the gods, who are given a recognizably modern slant: Geb is imagined as a TV addict who views the lives of mortals as “content”, while Anubis and Ammit are pets of Ma’at and Thoth (they’re both pettable: Anubis is a good doggy and clearly enjoys it, while Ammit doesn’t acknowledge the gesture in the slightest, which Ma’at says is a sign that she likes you). Sometimes this perhaps goes a bit too far – Ma’at’s dialogue skews a bit too informal for my taste, and Ra saying “wow. I love that” does undercut the majesty of the sun god – the game’s casual attitude towards anachronism occasionally leads to an inadvertent howler, like the mention of Alexandria at a time thousands of years before its founding, but on balance I found this more interesting than a more traditional, wooden approach would have been.
The puzzles, on the other hand, feel somewhat vestigial. There are only two, and the multiple-choice format combined with the lack of any penalty for failure means they’re trivial to brute-force. Even if you try to solve them honestly, one is far too easy, and the second (a math puzzle) is maybe a bit too tough. I appreciated the attempt to change up the gameplay, but I think the author would have been better off either leaning in by having more, more robust puzzles, or simply dropping them and focusing on the character interactions exclusively.
As for the prose with which all of this is rendered, I found it rather inconsistent. It starts out quite nicely, with this description of your experience of revival:
"When I wake up, I can taste the river in my throat. I’m laying in a glade, which seems unkissed by the sun and yet somehow still lit. The trees have cobalt leaves and the thicket is so dense that it obscures any kind of sky."
That’s quite nice! There’s also a sex scene which, impressively, isn’t terrible or cringe-inducing (though it does seem to indicate a major departure from the original myth, given that Isis famously couldn’t find one specific bit when she was stitching Osiris back together…) But there are some bits where the attempt to bring in a slight noir tone leads to comedy:
"I can scarcely believe it. Dead? And chopped into pieces? It didn’t exactly sound like an accident."
The text also boasts a fair number of typos and spelling errors, most of which are forgivable (it’s for its, that sort of thing), but there were still enough of them to occasionally take me out of the story.
So it’s all solid enough and engaging on its own terms, but I still found myself slightly checked out for the first three-quarters or so of the game. The trouble is that per the myth, I knew perfectly well who the perpetrator was, and the game doesn’t work very hard to hide the ball. So while running around and ticking the boxes on my investigative checklist was all well and good, none of the conversations really told me anything I didn’t already know, and again, Detective Osiris doesn’t make you jump through any hoops to obtain these somewhat-underwhelming clues. On the one hand, it was nice that the game didn’t require me to play dumb; on the other hand, that means this murder-mystery isn’t very mysterious.
But then the game did something unexpected, throwing in a twist I didn’t see coming at all. I’m not convinced it fully holds together – and it’s certainly not very well seeded in the previous section of the game, further undermining any claim Osiris has to being a detective – but it is reasonably clever and reinterprets the myth in a new way. It’s not going to replace the original, of course, and I do think the game maybe skews too faithful in the early going before getting too radical in the end, where a more consistent approach would have worked better. Even so, Detective Osiris still averages out to a novel-but-not-too-novel take that makes it through adaptation’s peril-filled strait only a bit worse for wear.
Lights, camera..., December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My wife and I visited Venice a few years ago, on a trip that had a lot of conventional highlights – the Arsenale! The Bridge of Sighs! That quadriga they stole from Constantinople! – and one that was quite unconventional. We went in late October, as the tourist season was starting to ebb, and though the city was still flooded with people during the day, many of them were cruise people who went back to their ships in the evenings, so once the sun was down it was surprisingly thinly populated. In fact one night as we walked back after dinner, the campo in front of our hotel was completely deserted, and as we marveled at the romantic ambiance, we suddenly spied a flickering light off at the other side of the square, in a heretofore-unnoticed breezeway leading around the side of a decaying building. We crept closer and saw that, oddly, small candles had been placed at intervals at the sides of the passage, leading us down and down the arcade into a night that suddenly felt quite black and cold, though still just as absent of human life. As we considered whether to keep going, I felt near-certain that either a ghost was going to appear, or we were going to be murdered, but either way it was going to be stylish.
From its movie-aping cover image to its multilingual-pun title (“yellow” is “giallo” in Italian, of course), Barcarolle in Yellow is similarly enticing, promising lurid thrills in a memorable setting. As an actress specializing in Italian B-movies, you’re summoned to Venice with the promise of work, but soon find yourself teetering at the edge of madness as plot points from the film – like a mask-clad stalker and a depraved cult – become all too real. Have you just been popping too many pills, or are the brutish director and sinister psychoanalyst in on the plot? And are you just the victim, or something else entirely?
This is a lovely lovely premise, but sadly for me the game didn’t quite live up to it, for two main reasons. First, the setting is surprisingly underutilized, and in fact Barcarolle in Yellow overall doesn’t provide much in the way of striking imagery. There’s something charming about entire districts of Venice being rendered as single locations, but the effect is to make an already-small city even more cramped. The general absence of implemented scenery – or even mentioned scenery – also drains the setting of some charm. Like, here’s the description for Piazza San Marco, omitting only the listing of exits:
"The best-known square of Venice, perhaps of Italy, featuring the church of San Marco, the iconic Campanile and the Doge’s Palace, as well as a grand view of the lagoon to the south and the island-monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore on the other side of the water."
This is a singularly underwhelming rendering of one of the most beautiful places on earth, and what’s worse, trying to examine any of the landmarks gets a terse reminder that you’re here “to work, not to see the sights.” Where a screenwriter might be able to get away with simply writing “EXT – LIDO – NIGHT” on faith that the director will add the details and ambiance, this works less well in IF form; again, I could fill in the blanks a bit from my own experience, but I still found myself wishing that the prose provided a more evocative jumping-off point for my imagination – all the more so since this is nominally a giallo, which thrive on atmosphere. Sure, things do get more evocative and intense in the interstitial cut-scene sequences, and there is the occasional exception, like a psychiatrist’s office that’s described with well-chosen details, but this can’t really substitute for the relative thinness of the interactive sections.
And speaking of interaction, that’s the other place where I thought the game fell a bit short. You’ve definitely got some interesting things to do, from escaping a violent mob to trying to catch the killer on film, but I never felt like an equal partner in proceedings; instead, like an actor working for a domineering director, I felt henpecked, pushed to do whatever specific thing the game had in mind with no tolerance, much less reward, for trying to explore off the beaten path. As mentioned above, the authorial voice even hurries the player past examining things it doesn’t want you to look at, but beyond that, the puzzle design is actively discouraging of experimentation – your introduction to Venice is a chase sequence with not even a single turn to spare, the movie-filming sequences adhere to a rigid set of requirements (you’re not even allowed to scream when someone gets gunned down in the Western you’re filming in the prologue), and in general I just felt like I was somewhat surplus to requirements. This reached a nadir in the ending, where the final text seemed to assume I’d accomplished something I’d spent many turns unsuccessfully wrestling with the parser to attempt (Spoiler - click to show)(shooting either my double or myself – the game kept insisting the gun was unloaded, even though I’d opened it and seen the bullet in the chamber). There are some decision points that seem to determine which of several endings you receive, but these are similarly curated, coming as yes/no decisions that break into the normal flow of parser gameplay, so I found they didn’t add much in the way of engagement.
Admittedly, the game’s thin implementation and occasional bugginess also meant that in the back half of the game I hewed closer to the critical path. When I took an action necessary to solve the first puzzle, for example, the opening sequence where the director of the Western yelled cut and a boy ran up with a telegram inviting me to Venice suddenly replayed, despite already being in the Venice train station. And an action sequence involving falling off the Ponte Rialto was somewhat undermined by the ability to enter a souvenir shop mid-descent, and pick up a passing motorboat along the way.
For all that, once I just gave up and went with the game’s direction, I did have a reasonably fun time. While this isn’t a story for the ages, it hits some fun beats, and gets many points for novelty (is there a second parser giallo?) And it’s occasionally quite skillful in how it mixes artifice with reality, with the protagonist’s real life sometimes seeming to be a movie, and vice versa. Still, I wish I hadn’t had to work so hard to meet the game halfway; this one needed a little more time in pre-production and a director who’s a little less of a control freak, though I could still see it gaining a cult following.
Old-school to a fault, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Points to The Witch for delivering when it comes to terror – guessing that in an old-school game like this the SCORE command might be useful, I was chilled to read the phrase “the game is winnable from this point” after it duly recited that I’d garnered 0 of 150 points. That positive statement, reassuring on its face, gives rise to what we fancy JDs call a negative inference: it wouldn’t be there unless at some point the game becomes unwinnable.
I don’t necessarily have a philosophical objection to games that are cruel in the Zarfian sense, I don’t think; in some cases, requiring restarts to optimize a puzzle solution or having certain especially significant or bone-headed choices lock a player out of victory might be defensible. No, my issue is a practical one, which is that cruel games, especially those of the old-school persuasion, are often tedious – there’s often a lot of retracing of one’s steps, resolving of puzzles one has tried before, and just generally faffing about in an uninteresting way. Sadly, The Witch already has a tedium problem, with a mostly-generic setting, a yawn-worthy premise, and fiddly features like an inventory limit. Add to this a generally high level of difficulty that seems to require authorial ESP to progress, and hair-trigger failure states that punish the player for the slightest deviation from the walkthrough, and I have to confess I couldn’t motivate myself to finish, even though I only put slightly more than an hour into it.
Let me start out by saying there were some elements I like. The player character is an elf with a mead hangover who missed the titular witch’s abduction of his village-mates because he was off on the aforementioned bender. I like this premise both because it’s implied that these aren’t like Noldor-type elves but rather Keebler ones, and also because I find the mead hangover thing very relatable; I’ve only had mead twice in my life, and each time I woke up the next morning praying for death. So me and this elf were sympatico. And while the prose is generally quite terse as per the usual style for this sort of throwback puzzlefest, there were some neat set-pieces, like an encounter with a giant owl, and some places where the writing went to some extra effort:
“This cottage belongs to Widow Elf, the matriarch of the village. The air is thick and still, smelling vaguely of lavender. Sunlit dust motes dance in the faint light. The cottage is warm, the air oppressive.”
That’s one more clause about the air than is needed, and Gloria Steinem could have a field day on how this lady’s identity is literally subsumed by that of her dead husband, but the passage is still way more lyrical than I expected.
Now that we’ve reached the inevitable pivot, though, I have to rattle off the stuff that wasn’t so nice. For one thing, the implementation is quite thin, with a lot of objects mentioned in location descriptions either not available to interact with, or brushed off with a “you don’t need to refer to the X”. Said locations are also pretty repetitive, with a lot of empty paths and elf cottages with only one or two salient features; combined, these two issues mean that exploration of the reasonably-sized map is a drag. Speaking of, there are at least two mazes; I made my way through one with a bit of trial and error, which wasn’t too bad, but come on, gimmick-less mazes in 2023 – in a game with a time limit – are a hard pill to swallow.
And oh, speaking of hard, the puzzles. Some of them aren’t bad in concept, but seem quite fiddly in implementation (Spoiler - click to show)(I’d come up with the idea of using the birdseed to get the key from the owl, but he attacked me every time I brought the seed out of the contained I’d hidden it in; from the walkthrough, it seems like you have to make use of Inform’s implicit take function to solve this puzzle, which is a really high bar); others just don’t seem to make any sense (Spoiler - click to show)(is there a clue anywhere that indicates that you should show the teddy bear to the catatonic elf?). And then, as mentioned above, there are the fail states; there are a couple of traditional puzzles that I would have enjoyed muddling through, one involving finding the correct combination for a series of levers, the other involving using a cart to explore a mine, but for the fact that they actively discourage experimentation. If you try a single incorrect combination for the levers, the machinery permanently stops working (this is especially egregious because the most logical way to read the one clue you get points to the inverse of the correct combination, not the one the game actually accepts), and the mine cart zooms off without you if you neglect a single step in what becomes a rather involved trial-by-error process, plus you need to do the whole sequence before your lamp burns down, which is on a ridiculously short timer.
I know there are folks who like this sort of thing, either out of nostalgia or sheer bloody-mindedness (hey, Francis Bacon, over here! Have I got a game for you!) But I got into IF through Photopia, not Zork or Adventure, and such as they are, my kinks top out at quite liking brunettes. God bless you people who will like The Witch, but I am not one of you (hell, you folks probably like mead, too).
Systems of oppression, December 5, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Thing of Wretchedness bills itself as sandbox horror, which is a phrase I read in the blurb then promptly forgot about; now, though, as I turn over which parts of the game worked and which didn’t work for me, I’m realizing that label is key to the whole experience. The horror elements are clear enough: you play an older woman, living in an isolated, snow-bound cottage, who’s desperately writing away for help dealing with a big, awful thing too terrible to describe that’s taken up residence with her – while they coexist uneasily at first, the threat of future violence is omnipresent. The sandbox elements are well-defined, too – there are several different paths you can pursue, each flagged with greater or lesser obviousness, from attempting to deal with the thing yourself to looking for external aid to trying to plumb the mystery of its existence. And the major gameplay challenge isn’t so much the simple puzzles as it is solving said puzzles while managing the thing’s semi-random behavior; ToW feels more open-ended than the typical parser game as a result since no static walkthrough will guide you to the end.
While each of these elements is well-done, I’m not sure they fit together all that well, though. In particular, while I enjoyed the game’s presentation of Lovecraftian tropes, I didn’t find it the least bit creepy. Partially this is down to the decision not to describe the thing’s appearance or behavior in any detail, but I think that’s partially motivated by a desire not to have the thing’s repetitive, system-driven actions clash with a more literary prose style. And of course the tension in horror depends almost entirely on pacing, which is hard for an author to manage when so much of what happens and what order it happens in is out of their control. Sure, there are other horror video games that use semi-emergent behavior to get scares, like your Amnesias and what all, but I’m not sure these techniques translate well to the text-based context, without audio and visuals. Lastly, I didn’t get much sense of the protagonist’s subjectivity; I think this was intentionally done to try to conceal a twist that she presumably knows about but the player doesn’t, but the downside is that because she rarely felt all that concerned about the thing, neither did I (it also doesn’t help that I guessed the twist about thirty seconds into the game).
Meanwhile, the sandbox-y gameplay is pretty engaging – while I was several steps ahead of the plot, it was a fun reveal when I started to understand the rules for how the thing worked and figured out how that would help me achieve some of my goals. But in practice, the player’s tools for manipulating these systems are limited, so I wound up spending a bunch of time banging the Z key to wait for the thing to do exactly what I wanted; that’s no big deal in of itself, but again, slight boredom is antithetical to any mood of real horror.
The game’s endings are fortunately among its best elements, so while the middle section did sometimes drag a bit, it finished strong. The actions you need to take in several of them are bleak and intense, making up for the slacker pieces that came before. I also enjoyed the crossover with the author’s previous (and excellent) Ascension of Limbs – it’s not anything that a new player will miss, just a slight bit of added context to a small frame-story, but it puts a cute button on the game while hinting at the events that happen after the formal action of the game is done. So while A Thing of Wretchedness definitely feels like a minor game, it very much has its pleasures, even as it demonstrates that marrying a horror story with sandbox gameplay is a hard nut to crack in IF.
Snipe hunting, December 4, 2023Out of Scope tells a story of twin siblings brought into deadly conflict. Reared by a prominent military family, their parents try to push them apart for fear of an obsessive love between them that might border on the romantic; the son is trained to be a soldier, despite his disinclination to violence, while the far-more-vicious daughter is shunted into peaceable work. Their domestic psychodrama is soon caught up in great-power politicking, in a world that may differ from ours in the details – all of the country names are imagined – but is otherwise quite similar – there’s colonialism, a military propaganda machine, and Shakespeare has somehow persisted – and the story is all too likely to end in tragedy.
The only literary precedent this mélange brings to mind is Ada, or Ardor, with its too-close sibling bond, aristocratic milieu, and alternate-history setting of Anti-Terra, and if you are aping Nabokov, you are flying close to the sun. It’s a high-wire act, in other words, but sadly, one that I don’t think succeeds, as the ambition of the premise is let down by a terrible UI, inconsistent writing, weak pacing, and at least one game-stopping bug. For a game that set its sights lower, maybe none of these issues would be fatal, but given that the themes Out of Scope puts on the table are extraordinarily freighted – again, the player is asked to invest in a quasi-incestuous relationship between young twins – these are deadly flaws.
(As a point of disclosure, I should probably acknowledge that since I’m a twin – or rather, was a twin, since my sister passed away a few years ago – the whole twincest angle would at best be facing a steep uphill climb with me. For all that, I did like Ada, or Ardor, but I’m struggling to think of a second story about sibling incest that doesn’t want to make me throw up. Still, I think the problems I experienced with Out of Scope aren’t purely down to personal idiosyncrasy).
I’ll start with the UI, because it’s impossible to ignore. Out of Scope is a Unity game (available in downloadable form as well as a browser option), and it offers a bespoke text-based interface; in each sequence, you’ll see a gray background onto which are scattered several small text boxes. Those with gray outlines just provide a bit of flavor text; those with black borders can be clicked on, which will often lead to further text, or possibly a yes-or-no choice that pops up as a thought balloon below the window. Choosing no might then lead to a different question popping up, allowing you to cycle through different options, though it’s never clear how many you might have, and in some cases considering all of your choices means you forfeit the chance to do anything at all. Oh, and these different boxes are often not visible from the start, requiring you to repeatedly drag around to search them out – sometimes moving to a new scene will lead you to an entirely blank screen, in fact, with the actual interactive bits of the passage scattered to the four winds. At least there are arrows that occasionally show up at the edges of the screen to point you towards boxes you can’t currently see, though I found they sometimes didn’t work. Plus the various buttons aren’t especially responsive, at least on my track pad, requiring double-clicking that sometimes speeds through text before you’re ready.
Oh oh oh, and it’s all animated so there are delays before text loads and the option-bubbles pop up.
Let me be very clear: playing this game was torture. Maybe it’s more manageable on a mouse, but the interface still adds a huge amount of friction to every interaction. In a tight, linear game where this was thematically appropriate, perhaps that would be forgivable, but Out of Scope goes for at least two hours, has long stretches where it wants you to explore a large map, and doesn’t try to create any resonance between the extra-diegetic abuse inflicted by the UI and the diegetic events of the game. There are moments when it is aesthetically pleasing, like a dinner party where each guest’s bit of dialogue shows up on overlapping text boxes that denote their places at the table – but even then, there would have been a million other ways to get a similar effect without inflicting such needless annoyance.
Contrarily, the writing does provide some high points, but doesn’t manage to sustain them throughout the wide-ranging plot. Some of the interactions between the twins have a sort of poetry to them:
"When two people are silent together, it’s like a song."
(This reminds me of one more interface complaint – highlighting text isn’t allowed, so I had to manually copy down any passage I wanted to quote).
The house that forms the main backdrop for the game is also often evocatively drawn, alternately imposing and pathetic depending on where you are in the timeline (the game’s chronology jumps around a fair bit). Here’s a bit noting an aftereffect of the fire that ruined the estate:
"The fire was intense here, warping and twisting metal cans of fruit and soup into little bombs."
On the other hand, there’s stuff like this:
"A south-easterly tor watches and chills and wets you from its prominence, irrespective of yours."
Huh? There are lots of head-scratchers like this, like saying of some fallen leaves “crisp winds divide them. Crisp thoughts too.” The game is full of malapropisms, from a moon likened to a “scrambled egg, white-yolked and runny in the pan” (….have you cooked an egg?) to a reference to “the twisted logic of a rubber sock.” And there are frequent dangling participles, confused pronouns, and verb-noun agreement issues. I feel like a bit of a jerk harping on this stuff, but again, Out of Scope is attempting some seriously challenging things – the stakes are very high for many of its set pieces, especially the highly-charged encounters between the twins, and when the prose gets weak or unclear, everything lurches towards comedy.
As to that relationship, though, the game’s structure does it no favors. The whole logic of the plot depends on there being a preternatural connection between the two siblings, but the game starts with a flash-forward where they’re already trying to kill each other – though the drama of this setup is blunted by requiring the player to explore a large area mostly devoid of points of interest before they can interact – and then flashes back to a sequence where they only have one short interaction before they get separated. By the time the game lets them meet again, as late teenagers, a lot of time has passed both in the plot and for the player – there’s an extended military-training sequence for the brother, then an even longer one where the sister wanders around the house before the aforementioned party – and by that point things are already weird and strained between them. It’s just not enough to establish the bond in any resonant way, all the more so because what the author is trying to set up isn’t just ordinary love between siblings, but something weirder and more intense that might not be incest but isn’t exactly not incest.
Then there’s the bug I mentioned. After I finished chapter 7 (of 10), I had to step away from my computer for an hour or so. When I came back to the game, the text boxes had all vanished and I was facing a blank yellow screen; scrolling around, or restarting the game and resuming my save, did nothing. I was about at the two hour mark, and the prospect of braving the interface to redo everything I’d done defeated me. Fortunately, the author provides a walkthrough that includes a basic plot summary, so I was able to learn how the game ends. Unfortunately, here’s where I learned that there was a whole additional layer of political intrigue that had been completely lost on me. Admittedly, some of this is stuff that appears to only come into play in the final few chapters, but the political maneuvering that I’d seen felt to me like it was meant to provide a backdrop for the family drama, rather than being robust enough to support major chunks of the narrative on its own. But there’s apparently a major twist that makes the twins’ relationship decidedly secondary to a wide-ranging espionage plot aimed at reconfiguring domestic politics in the family’s home country, which are only lightly sketched in the portions I saw; I suspect this swerve would be pretty unsatisfying to those who experience it. Also, this plot point hinges on understanding that this family, where the patriarch is part of a naval dynasty and keeps trophies of a country he helped conquer in his study and the mother runs a propaganda outlet selling a Thatcherite brew of social conservatism and militarism, are moderates, which is uh not how I experienced them.
Again, I can’t fault Out of Scope’s lofty goals – despite my hesitance about some of its themes, I really wanted it to succeed. But in every way, its reach exceeds its grasp. Reading the plot summary and thematic discussion contained in the walkthrough file, I can see how the game is meant to work in the author’s eyes, but it’s not there yet. With that said, God knows I’d be excited to see more smart, political IF that deals with complex sibling relationships, so I’m really hoping for a robustly-improved post-Comp release for this one.
Consulting vice-president, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
A game with a title like this isn’t exactly crying out for another reference to throw into the mix, but nonetheless, I have to do it: the figure out what the game is doing, we shouldn’t look to Shakespeare or The Godfather, but to Sherlock Holmes. That’s because this multiplayer whodunnit, where the titular couple team up to solve the murder of Raytheon CEO Marlon Brando in an alternate-reality Washington DC, is largely reimplementing the classic board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. This is no bad thing, let me hasten to add! I’ve been obsessed with the game ever since we had a copy of the video-enhanced original from back in the 80s (a part of the VHS-board game boom that is wholly regrettable save for the fact that it brought us Dragonstrike), since it’s such a unique concept in the boardgame arena: unlike other games in the subgenre like Clue, which abstract mystery-solving into abstract logic puzzles or deduction games, the cases in Consulting Detective are actual cases.
A few pages of read-aloud text introduce a crime, and then the players, working together, decide which leads to follow up on, picking suspects to interview, crime scenes to investigate, or contacts to visit. At each, another few paragraphs of text may reveal further clues, or indicate a dead end or red herring. And then, after time’s elapsed, the players are confronted with a quiz laying out the key questions for the mystery, and once they agree on their answers, there’s a final bit of story that tells them the actual solution and allows them to see how they did.
From that description it’s pretty clear that this is a species of analog IF, so it makes all the sense in the world to adapt the model to a digital incarnation. And implementing it as a multiplayer title is similarly a no-brainer: while other recent works of multiplayer IF have set up the players as directly or implicitly antagonistic, or given them asymmetric information to encourage cooperation, the player interaction here is purely about talking through the clues, developing theories of the case, and working together to solve the mystery. As a single player game, the relative mechanical simplicity would risk things getting dull; as a multiplayer game, it sings.
Antony & Cleopatra implements the model faithfully. The main investigative tool you’re given is a calendar that allows you to schedule suspect interviews or visits to key locations, with two slots available for each of the seven days you’ve got to solve the crime (the set of possible leads expands as you go, of course, and there are tools in the sidebar to remind you of who or what each is). Once a scene begins, you may just be given the relevant information or be told there’s nothing much to learn, but more frequently, there’ll be a list of questions or investigative avenues to pursue; these can typically be lawnmowered, but it does break up the wall-of-text issue that the board game sometimes runs into. There doesn’t appear to be state tracking – at one point, we noticed that a character had just told us something that contracted what someone else had said, but there was no option to call them on it – which is a little odd, but does mean that the players, rather than just the characters, need to be alert about the clues they’re gathering.
The game also departs from its inspiration by offering a few minor multiplayer-specific mechanics. The two players need to agree on which leads to follow, and that they’re finished with an investigative visit, before the game will move on; similarly, you of course need to reach unanimity on the end-of-game questionnaire laying out your ultimate theory of the case. The most game-like mechanic is the dialogue options specific to each character; while it doesn’t matter who clicks on most topics, a few are marked with an A or a C to indicate that it’s available only to Antony or Cleopatra respectively. It appears that these always are offered in analogous pairs, and the choice of which character should take lead seems to roughly correspond to a good cop/bad cop split, with Antony generally taking a more direct approach than Cleo. It also appears this is largely a cosmetic difference rather than one leading to dramatically different clues being revealed, but even if it’s largely superficial, it’s still a pleasant reminder that there are two distinct characters here, not a single blob being jointly piloted by the two players (although since they are always accompanied by an FBI agent sidekick as well as a half-dozen royal bodyguards, actually there is more than a little blobbiness). Impressively, as far as I could tell there’s actually quite a lot of variation between the text the two players see; while key clues seem to show up in both, Cleo tends to be more perceptive about interpersonal dynamics, while Antony (who’s the Vice President of the US, by the way – don’t think I mentioned that!) has a deeper understanding of everyone’s social and political positioning. As a result, comparing notes on impressions and theories is richer than it would otherwise be.
So much for the systems – what about the setting and story? As to the former, it’s a fun mash-up of 50s Hollywood with Ancient Rome, and serves as an enjoyable romp through the sights and sounds of DC, but I couldn’t help but wish it went a little deeper. If there’s some underlying logic connecting these various inspirations, it’s not foregrounded, and while this odd juxtaposition could make for some wackiness, the game generally plays things straight; there are a few good jokes here and there, but when Cleo doesn’t even make a comment about visiting Alexandria, VA, it feels like a missed opportunity. Similarly, it sure seems like a game that puts President-for-Life Julius Caeser in charge of the US and then has a plot hinging on the murder of a defense contractor should have something to say about the military-industrial complex. It also doesn’t really go into the alternate-history aspects; if Napoleon is the French Ambassador to the US in 2021, I’m guessing that the early parts of the Long 19th Century must have been very different in this world, but we don’t get even a whiff of that. I got the sense that the pop-culture stuff was mainly just used to make the names of the characters more memorable – it’s way easier to recall that Audrey Hepburn is the new Raytheon CEO than if it were some rando, to be fair – but the game’s refusal to play out the implications of its choices sometimes frustrated me. The depiction of DC, meanwhile, is generally quite good, though there are a couple details that suggest it wasn’t written by a native (despite being the home of a university, Georgetown sadly doesn’t really have the boho vibe it’s given in the game, and rich neighborhoods not having sidewalks is far more of a California phenomenon than an East Coast one).
As for the mystery itself (he says, a thousand words in), it’s pretty good, neither too simple nor too complex. Industrial espionage, national security, and sordid personal affairs are all in the mix, and while the time limit is relatively forgiving and it’s not too challenging to suss out the basics of what’s going on, the story’s sufficiently twisty to make for fun conversations between the partners. The case is faithful to most of the ones I’ve played from Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective by having at least one element of the solution feel like it requires a big leap of intuition to get right, but that’s probably the right balance to strike; getting ¾ of the details right is in some ways more satisfying than either being completely ahead of the game, or floundering.
I’ve been a little down on the game here, as is my wont, but that’s largely because I think this approach has a lot of potential that’s only been partially realized in this particular case. If there is a Case V, I hope it marries the setting more deeply into the mystery, and perhaps takes a bit more advantage of the digital medium to offer some more involved mechanics – I actually missed the vintage newspapers, London map, and telephone directory that in the board game offer some additional avenues of finding leads beyond just picking who to interview next. All that’s forgivable in a first instalment, though; Antony and Cleopatra’s unique and enjoyable, and well deserves a follow-up.
Might make light ... lake? (I am bad at this), December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Graham Nelson’s adage about a work of IF being a crossword puzzle at war with a narrative has been rattling around for decades at this point, so it’s perhaps surprising that so few authors have steered into the crossword side of things. By this I don’t mean puzzles at the expense of narrative – there are still plenty of puzzlefests out there, of course – or even literal crosswords – shout-out to 2000’s Letters From Home! – but adopting the crossword puzzle model. Like, most authors (myself included) tend to conceptualize their games as distinct, requiring bespoke narratives and mechanics , or if they’re part of a series, adopting a traditional narrative throughline connecting installments. And yet, for all that, I have cheerfully played the New York Time crossword every day for – [checks statistics on phone] – actually, let’s not get into details, but suffice to say, a whole long time, and the fact that the framework is almost entirely static isn’t at all a barrier to my enjoyment, because the variety in clues and theming is enough to make each one feel unique.
Andrew Schultz is one of the few authors who’s exploring this territory, notably with his series of rhyming wordplay games, of which the present instalment is the sixth. As with a crossword, the basics are the same each time – the player navigates a somewhat-absurdist space, and when prompted with the two-word name of a location or significant object, needs to come up with a rhyming phrase that substitutes a different letter or sound at the beginning, as in the game’s title (we’re miles away from the traditional medium-dry-goods model). The games don’t tend to have very involved narratives, as often-idiosyncratic circumstances required to support the baroque wordplay aren’t really consistent with the Aristotelian unities, but they do have cross-cutting themes that animate some of the more memorable set-pieces and serve to distinguish them from each other. They also all boast incredibly robust quality of life features, from a hint function that tells you whether a guess is partially right and how far off you might be, to a THINK command that memorializes guesses that match the wordplay constraints but require some change in the world model to be effective, to a handy list of the most common English phonemes if you’re reduced to lawnmowering (reader, while I enjoy them, I am not very good at these games and am always reduced to lawnmowering).
It’s a unique puzzle system, and it’s still engaging even this far into the series; you’d think the list of rhyming phrases would eventually run dry, but Schultz is able to keep filling his quiver with clever prompts that make for memorable visuals and fun gameplay. Sure, there’s an occasional clunker (Spoiler - click to show)– HID HUM felt like a reach – but look, you don’t have to do many crosswords before you realize that sometimes some junk in the fill is the price to be paid for a construction that’s elegant overall. The theming on this one is also interesting; it’s more social than the others, with the protagonist suffering a crisis of faith that requires them to find and help other people to reclaim their prior (metaphorical) status as a knight. This idea is present in the introductory text, but also through the gameplay, as several puzzles involve finding different companion characters who can help solve certain puzzles when the right pair are present. I also felt like Bright Brave Knight Knave had a bit more focus on the world model – you’re still not INSERTING X INTO Y, or anything, but there are more puzzles about finding objects which in turn unlock new possibilities elsewhere this time out (BBKK isn’t quite a Metroidvania, but it is a sequel and there’s a boat, so yes, it’s a 2023 Comp entry all right).
I liked these new features, but they did lead to some hiccups, too. In particular, having to decide which pair of followers to bring along when solving specific problems felt like one more axis of complexity than my brain could handle, and exacerbating the challenge, I couldn’t quite get the syntax for swapping them to work (characteristically, there’s a difficulty setting that should automate this process if you don’t want to bother with it, but I likewise had trouble activating it). At about the two hour mark, I hit a point where this meant I got stuck, but I definitely felt satisfied with the portion I was able to play; I’m sure there’s a cool set-piece ending, but I’ll probably wait for the post-Comp release to check it out. In the meantime, it’s almost midnight, so tomorrow’s crossword will be up soon…
A brazen head, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. Some spoilers in this one, though the concept of spoilers is a little odd as applied to this game!)
If you are the kind of nerd who likes Greek words, poetry, and/or Greek words about poetry, you’ve probably come across the rhetorical device “ekphrasis”, which is piece of writing about a work of (usually visual, I think?) art. It’s a hoary enough trope in poetry and prose, the most famous example probably being Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, though there are more modern practitioners too – A.S. Byatt’s novel Still Life talks about Van Gogh’s art in smart, richly-descriptive prose that made me appreciate his work far more than I had before I read the book. I can’t offhand say that I’d applied the label to a piece of IF before coming across the rich, enigmatic Gestures Towards Divinity.
The blurb says that the game isn’t about Francis Bacon but his work – violent and frankly unpleasant – and biography – likewise violent and frankly unpleasant – are certainly the main elements of the piece. As an anonymous museum-goer, you have the opportunity to explore a small exhibition of his paintings, looking at three triptychs exemplifying different eras of his career. You can also enter each of them and carry out deep conversations with their central subjects: an imagined, misshapen Fury; Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer; and Dyer’s corpse, after he’s committed suicide. Or you can go to the café, which is much more pleasant (there’s no gift shop).
There is a fair amount of gameplay here – seventeen achievements are available to mark various accomplishments, surprisingly including some medium-dry-goods stuff that makes for a nice change of pace. There’s also basic information about Bacon and his art available in the museum’s placards, while the written descriptions of the paintings are quite good, conveying more than a flat narration of the objects in view by communicating something of the effects of the piece, without imposing too much of a prejudged interpretation that would crowd out the player’s imaginative faculties. But these are just enough to prime you with questions and a basic orientation towards the Bacon’s themes; the heart of the game is the three set-piece dialogues where you learn about Bacon’s upbringing and evolution as an artist, as well as Dyer’s life and relationship with Bacon.
These conversations are richly-textured, engaging directly with challenging material without sanitizing or dumbing it down in the slightest. Bacon had a domineering, abusive father, and as a gay man, his earliest sexual experiences were inextricably linked with violence and shame. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps just because he was the way he was, he grew into a man with deep obsessions around religion, death, and suffering, which were reflected in his art – and with a deep masochistic kink that saw him push others, Dyer included, into becoming sadists, regardless of whether they were comfortable with the role.
Each of your interlocutors provides a distinct perspective on these dynamics, and there’s plenty of straight biography and art criticism, but the game isn’t afraid to take on larger questions. There’s an additional swirl of other themes around luck, karma, divinity, and the afterlife – in addition to these being common conversation options that appear for all of the key characters, (Spoiler - click to show) there are indications that the player is dead, though whether they’re meant to be the ghost of any particular person or character in the story is left open-ended so far as I can tell. And Dyer pinches Jesus’s last words.
These elements didn’t really cohere all that strongly for me, though. The bits of dialogue are interesting enough on their own, but unlike the themes related to relationship dynamics, I felt like they had only a loose connection to the main narrative, and as a result didn’t seem as connected to the main thrust of the game, even if I can see how they’re clearly important elements of Bacon’s art (I mentioned these are all triptychs, right, which is the standard format for altarpieces?). It’s intellectually rich, but it just feels a bit abstract compared to stuff like this:
He grimaces. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, after all. I don’t know. My stomach hurts.” He falls silent for a moment, then says “why do we fall in love with bad men? Why do we stay in love with them? Why do we deny and make excuses and protect them? Who protects us?”
While I very much admire (I can’t really say “enjoy”, given the subject matter) the content and prose style of these conversations, the mechanics can occasionally be slightly awkward. GTD is a parser game, and uses the ASK ABOUT/TELL ABOUT system with an ever-updating topics list to help keep the dialogue on track. It’s quite well paced too, with new topics being added to the list as they come up in conversation, and whole tranches of new ones being unlocked when you start to exhaust an earlier set. The game also rewards exploration; I found quite a lot of subjects that weren’t listed in the topic catalogue but which led to robust, interesting responses. Unfortunately, the topic names are often quite complex – you can ask the Fury about “its relationship with Bacon” – or seem to overlap – Dyer has different responses when asked about “his life” and “life in general” – and the parser sometimes struggles to keep up unless you type things in exactly as they’re written in the topic list, which detracts from the otherwise-organic give and take of the dialogues.
In these conversations and in the museum sequences, GTD is a game of nearly pure exploration. The player doesn’t have any external goals to accomplish – the names of the achievements are hidden until you get them, and there’s nothing stopping you from walking out the museum’s door without looking at any of the art – and the “puzzles”, such as they are, aren’t especially meaningful in and of themselves. Instead, most of my engagement with the game came from trying to decide what I thought about Bacon, and the vexed question of whether his artistic accomplishments in some sense justify his actions (often quite horrifying, I haven’t come close to mentioning the worst parts).
It’d be understandable for a game so fully engaged with an artist’s work to ultimately take his side, but just as GTD doesn’t impose its interpretation of Bacon’s art on the player, so too it maintains a studied reticence. If anything, in the places where it offers a glimpse of its hand, its sympathies seem to come down against Bacon. There’s an oblique resonance to Dyer’s choice of reading material in the second triptych, for example – it’s a newspaper story about the kidnapping and murder of an ordinary woman who the criminals have mistaken for Rupert Murdoch’s wife. She’s an ordinary person who’s come to great harm by getting mixed up with a rich, famous person, in other words. So if she’s the analogue for Dyer, that means Bacon plays the Murdoch role…
The barista working the museum’s café offers another hint; she’s trans and has a girlfriend, but except for one note about some uncomfortable relationship dynamics before she transitioned, she’s notably trauma free, thinks Bacon’s art is unpleasant and his personal history is worse, and mostly seems to care about cleaning up litter and playing D&D – a regular, functional person with what sounds like a functional relationship, serving as a notable counterpoint to Bacon and Dyer’s tragic queerness. True, the barista is also there to balance out the museum guard, an amateur painter who’s enthusiastic about Bacon’s paintings – but even she is clear-eyed about his human failings, and uses Bacon as fuel for her own work.
And then there’s the climax that greets the ordinarily-diligent player. If you work through the conversation with the guard, she lets you into her locked office, which contains one final Bacon painting, this one a self-portrait (it also contains a computer with some draft placard text which enables the player to learn exactly which self-portrait this is – thanks to playing Hand Me Down earlier in the Comp, I thought to try MOVE MOUSE to wake up the screen). You can’t enter this one, nor engage it in dialogue, since this representation of Bacon ignores whatever you say, simply spewing out bon mot after bon mot, witty observation after witty observation, a never-ending and exhausting charm offensive from someone convinced (not undeservedly) of his own cleverness.
If you check your topics list, though, you will see that you do have one additional option: you can tell him that you know who he is – and once you do, the urbane litany ends, and Bacon begins to howl, keen, and gibber, giving voice to sheer terror and self-loathing. It’s hard not to interpret this as a judgment; having plumbed his dark secrets by studying his art and talking to the man he victimized and ruined, you have the power to cast aside his self-protecting delusions and expose him. This is a rhetorically neat solution, too; if you go back to the Greek, ekphrasis means to speak out, or more poetically, to call something by its name. So by understanding Bacon, by naming him, you cast him down in act of karmic, retributive justice.
There are only two troubles with this reading. The first is that the player’s action of revealing Bacon to himself is entirely unnecessary. Even if you never decide to use that conversational topic and let him continue his babblelogue uninterrupted, he’ll also eventually begin his unending scream. You aren’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know, in other words. The second is, well, did we forget that he’s a masochist?
No, the blurb didn’t lie; this game isn’t about Francis Bacon and whether he gets his just or unjust deserts – even in this imagined space, that’s far beyond our power to accomplish. And it’s only incidentally about his art as such, or about the people he loved and hurt along the way, or about whether he’s a monster or an inspiration or just (“just”) a flawed, talented man. No, GTD is a simple game, or at least only as complex as the player wants to make it: all it does is ask how all this makes us feel or think, and, like the best museum pieces, makes us consider whether we’ll take anything away with us when the time inevitably comes to leave the exhibition.
A reckless disregard for gravity, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve never had a dream of falling, or at least not that I can remember, and I’m kind of bummed that I’ve missed out. The feeling of flying through the air seems like it must be exhilarating to me, and without the real-life risk of splatting against the ground, wouldn’t that be an amazing sensation to experience? We All Fall Together takes a different view, however, imagining a Limbo of ever-plummeting bodies caught between a terrifying cyclone that claims those who dive too low and shadowy predators who snatch those who try to slow their fall and drift too far up. It’s a situation that can be read to have a number of different real-life analogues, but it’s not so one-note as to be too simple of an allegory, so it’s interesting enough to support the game’s ten-minute runtime – and while my streak of being annoyed by the Texture engine continues with this game, at least it has a better showing than most.
As in medias res openings go, “you’re falling endlessly” is a great one, so the game makes a solid first impression, and throws in enough incident to keep the story moving – after starting to get oriented towards the situation, you get a chance to engage with several other inhabitants of this strange netherworld, most notably a black-clad figure you call “the Rock Star.” They’re a great source of exposition, and the dialogue efficiently sets up the metaphysical stakes, establishing that there’s a risky but rewarding path that may allow you to escape your fate and return to your loved ones.
Granted, it’s not an especially sharp dilemma, but it’s reasonably engaging and the opportunity to give the Rock Star a pep talk is nice; similarly, while the writing occasionally overreaches and has some errors, for the most part it hits a solid balance between action, dialogue, and jokes. What works less well is the attempt to impose a backstory on you and your interlocutor. You each talk about partners who are devoid of names, genders, personalities, or histories, landing at precisely the least-effective position between specific enough to be affecting, and general enough to be archetypal. The ending still feels rewarding, though, and again, this is a very short game so the offending bits only amounted to a minute or so of reading.
As for the Texture-ness of it all, I thought the author did a good job of picking verbs that were clearly distinguished from each other, and signposting what actions would do. Oh, and I played this one on my phone, and good news, the tiny-text-on-buttons bug I’ve experienced in other Texture games went away! …bad news, I experienced a new bug where switching to my Notes app to paste in excepts or jot down thoughts caused the buttons to stop work. Texture, you take delight in vexing me and have no compassion for my poor nerves – but despite that, I’d still say this is among my favorite games using this engine.
Short, talky golden-age sci-fi, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I grew up reading Golden Age sci-fi, and for all that even at the time I recognized its corniness, I still have a big soft spot for that kind of thing. As a result, while I can’t tell whether or not the opening of The Enigma of Solaris is intentionally camp, I loved it all the same:
”Agent Grey,” the colonel announced, his voice carrying the weight of gravitas that only a military man of his rank could muster, “we have a situation on Solaris.”
Grey leaned in, her senses alert to every word. “The Solaris, sir?”
(The use of “muster” so close to “colonel” is an argument for intentional silliness, it occurs to me).
If you guessed that this is immediately followed by some exposition where the characters explain to each other things they already know perfectly well, points to you. It’s a formula, but it’s one that’s not presently overused in IF, and like I said I’ve got some affection for it, so after the briefing established the situation (research station mysteriously losing power, go investigate and save the day), I was ready for adventure.
Things get a bit more serious when you arrive at the station, and the early sequence of poking around to gather clues is pretty engaging. But this turns out to be quite a short game, and what initially seemed like it was going to be a high-tech investigation quickly turned into an extended NPC interaction sequence with few if any choices for the player to make. Said NPC is another sci-fi caricature – he’s a scientist who’s lost perspective on the risks of his research – but trying to reason with someone like that isn’t particularly fun, and the eventual reveal of what’s going on on the station struck me as a bit underwhelming.
While the prose never loses its over-the-top charm, I couldn’t help but wish that the plot matched that tone rather than staying relatively grounded, and I wished too that there was a little more for the player to do. This partially could be due to the extreme concision of the game – it’s really maybe 10 minutes at most – so I could understand it if the author didn’t feel like it was worth fleshing out too much. A game that took this same basic approach but which had more robust gameplay and leaned further into the far-out elements of its inspirations could be a lot of fun, but as it stands, there’s just not that much to the Enigma of Solaris.
De-plunder , December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I don’t know where a two-year-old picks up these things, but my son has learned that pirates say “yarr!” The other night we were reading a book about animals dressing up for Halloween, and when he saw the chicken with a peg-leg, he swung his arm in a little Pirates-of-the-Caribbean move and said “yarr!” I can’t think of any other book or show he’s seen that involves pirates, so like I said, I’m somewhat at a loss – is there some kid at day care who pontificates about this stuff during outdoor play period, confidently explaining in a toddler’s burble how you pretend to be a pirate? – but I guess the cultural knowledge that this is how pirates talk is just that strong.
The kicker, of course, is that so far as I understand pirates didn’t talk like that; your stereotypical Golden Age of Piracy buccaneers probably spoke like the 18th Century Englishmen they were, albeit with more lexical flights of fancy than would be typical given their outré experiences and dearth of formal education. They likely sounded, in other words, like Captain Booby, the deuteragonist and comic centerpiece of To Sea in a Sieve:
“That’s it, boy — bail, an’ lively ho!” says the Captain. “’Twill all ha’ been worthwhile when we’m rescued, ye’ll see!”
“Not me snuffbox too,” wails the Captain. “Well, here’s lubberly manners! That snuffbox was o’ great sentimental value to me, I’ll have ’ee know. The man I killed fer it were a dear an’ loyal friend!”
“Arr, not me pineapple!” says the Captain, woefully. “I had me a fancy to make a lovely canapé — pineapple and hunks o’ cheese, served up on the spines of a porpentine. Ye’ve set haute cuisine back centuries, damn ye!”
(Okay, maybe that last one undermines my point, but technically it’s an arr, not a yarr).
There have been some very funny games so far in the Comp, and I know there are more ahead, but I have rarely laughed so hard at anything as I did at Captain Booby. This is fortunate because for the game to work, he has to work, since he’s the only thing standing in the way of this being the shortest parser puzzler ever: you play the cabin-boy he’s dragooned into helping him flee with his ill-gotten plunder when the authorities put an end to his piratical career. But since an errant cannonball has holed the lifeboat, you need to dump the loot before you sink. If the good Captain were capable of balancing risk and reward, he’d obviously stand aside and let you do it – but if he were capable of that, presumably he wouldn’t have gone into piracy, and so he opposes you at every turn, so that you need to outwit, outmaneuver, and outsnuff him in order to commit his treasures to the briny deep.
As a result, in less skillful hands Booby could have become a deeply annoying character, continually frustrating the player and providing handy, punchable characterization for the frustration of failing to solve puzzles in a parser game. But this hardly ever happens, as Booby is as pathetic as he is bombastic: I mean, if you can read the line “’Od’s blood, fire and thunder, my sinuses!” without a) feeling a little bad for the fellow, and b) giggling so hard you almost go into a fit, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Even when I was stymied on a particular challenge, sharing a lifeboat with Booby was never anything less than delightful.
Not that I was stymied that often or that long, since this is a well-designed set of puzzles. A few of the Captain’s treasures can simply be heaved over the side, but most require some work to obtain and drown, and all the while water is seeping into the boat, lending an air of farce to proceedings as you pause in your efforts to desperately bail. To make progress you’ll need to relieve the Captain of some of his effects, match wits with a carnivorous plant, and prevent an overzealous beaver from sending you to Davy Jones’s Locker. Even as the boat’s load lessens, the comedic frenzy heightens, with new complications lending increased energy to the situation and preventing it from getting dull over the game’s one-hour running time.
While many of the puzzles do require relatively specific syntax, I found for the most part that To Sea in a Sieve did an excellent job cueing the appropriate action, which made me feel very clever indeed but is actually just good game design. There were a few challenges towards the end of the game where it felt like this broke down somewhat and some additional clues might not have gone amiss (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking of looking at the tea caddy through the quizzing-glass, and the precise language required to use the brocade), but it’s got a well-implemented hint system so I can’t complain too much (and I have to admit that I was having so much fun that I stayed up way past my bedtime playing this one, so my brain probably wasn’t working so well by the end).
The only thing better than finishing To Sea in a Sieve was seeing in the ending text that it’s part of a planned trilogy – the middle part, To Hell in a Hamper, was released 20 years ago so this technically checks both the “boaty” and “sequel/prequel” boxes for Comp ’23 bingo – so there’ll be another iteration of the concept to look forward to. And even if it takes another 20 years to get the final instalment, based on the success of To Sea in a Sieve it’ll be worth the wait.
Single White Barista, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Please Sign Here is a deceptively complex game. Superficially, it’s a slice of life mystery; as the framing story establishes, the main character, Jackie, has just been in a car crash that’s claimed the life of her best friend Casey. But the police have other things in mind as they interrogate her, since she’s also potentially linked to the murder of a number of delivery drivers whose last stop before their deaths was the coffeeshop where Jackie works. The meat of the story involves flashing back to the events of the last week, when torrential rains and a vacationing boss left her isolated during a series of night shifts, and she repeatedly encountered three customers who each seemed like they could be hiding something…
This moody mystery is more than it appears, however, and that’s not just down to the attractive art. I don’t think it’s fully successful at the tricky moves it pulls – heck, I’m not 100% sure it’s aware of exactly how tricky they are – but I’ve been turning it over and over in my brain ever since I finished it, which I’d certainly count as an accomplishment. Talking about why involves digging into the plot, though, and since this is a mystery it’s poor form to just spoil said plot without warning. So you might want to give the game a play-through before joining me in the spoiler-text below – and if you have and aren’t sure what tricky things I’m talking about, let me just say that you might want to replay and remember your Miranda rights.
(Spoiler - click to show)
Hi there! I’ve got to do a little bit more plot summarizing before we can get to the good stuff. So as mentioned after the in-medias-res police-interrogation opening, you flash back to your shifts at the coffeehouse, with the game progressing day-by-day through the week leading up to the opening car crash. Jackie’s the daughter of a cop, but she’s quite jumpy, starting out suspicious of the three recurring customers: Quan, an elderly recent-immigrant from Vietnam; Aaron, a young Black man who’s juggling a job and his studies; and Marta, a Latina mother with a demanding and thankless job. In fairness, this might be because something odd seems to be happening in the shop; even thought Jackie’s supposed to be alone, the back door keeps getting mysteriously unlocked and opened…
Despite the sense of dread the game’s trying to establish, I actually found the meat of the game surprisingly cozy. In part this is down to the art, which has a warm webcomic-y vibe; there are a few illustrations that are creepy, like the one depicting the fateful pre-crash car ride, but the coffeeshop sections seem to depict a warm, dry haven on a stormy day, with the visiting customers looking friendly and appealing. Intentionally or not, the writing also signally fails to establish any of the three “suspects” as remotely threatening; as far as I can tell, the major details that are supposed to make them potentially dangerous are the fact that Quan drives a black car that might be the same as one Jackie’s seen loitering around, Aaron brings in a big package one day, and Marta’s job occasionally requires her to pick up documents from city hall. You can practically hear the duh-duh-DUH when these details are revealed, since the game frames them as significant, but they’re such obvious red herrings that Jackie’s reactions just mark her out as a paranoid fussbudget – she’s also a real stickler for the rules, not even letting a wet and bedraggled Marta wait for her bus inside the near-empty coffeeshop unless she buys something.
The writing is also, bluntly, not that great, which undercuts the game’s attempts to set a mood. Like, here’s Jackie’s reflections on why she’s friends with Casey, who’s kind of the worst:
>[I]f her dad wants to keep his high chances for donations to become Police Chief next year, Jackie has to keep up playing friendly with one of the richest families in town. The Wintons might only be a truck service company, but they’re the reasons semi-trucks even exist in the first place."
That took me a while to parse, and it’s par for course with much of the game’s prose. The choice-based elements of the narrative also aren’t especially engaging, as there aren’t many decision points and not enough effort is put into making them seem meaningful; there’s one moment where you hear something in the back and go to investigation, and you’re given the choice of grabbing either a broom or a “group handle” (?) as a weapon, but after selecting one the next passage begins “It doesn’t matter.” For the love of god, game, I know this is mostly on rails, but you don’t need to draw attention to it!
Things get much more interesting when the timeline catches up to the framing story, though. After recounting your memories, the cops ask you to pick which of the three “suspects” you think they should prioritize in their investigation. I clammed up and refused to finger any of them, both on general principles – public service announcement, if cops are ever asking you anything, shut up until you’ve got a lawyer present – and because I was quite sure none of them murdered the delivery drivers or was responsible for the car crash. And in that ending, which the epilogue text deemed the “main” ending, the third-person narration shifted from referring to the main character as Jackie to Casey, instead – she’s Jackie’s notional best friend, remember – and mentioned her recent hair-dye job.
The clear implication is that Casey has gone all Single White Female (or Talented Mr. Ripley, if you prefer) and killed Jackie in service of trying to switch identities with her. There are some seeds of foreshadowing throughout the earlier section that point in this direction; Casey seems envious of Jackie’s life in their earlier interactions, and right before the car crash, the flashback sequence ends with Casey asking whether Jackie thinks people deserve second chances – a macabre question when you realize that Jackie is herself the second chance in question. So it could be an inspired twist.
There are two flies in the ointment, though, one more interesting than the other. To get the boring one out of the way: of course this makes no ^%$^ sense. There’s no indication that Casey’s done anything more than the dye-job to make herself look like Jackie, nor that she had much time or expertise post-accident to make Jackie look like her. The twist has nothing to do with the much-belabored deaths of the delivery-men, and in fact Casey killing all of them – as the ending implies – would do nothing but invite further scrutiny of the switcheroo. And did we forget that Jackie’s dad is a cop, and presumably knows what his daughter looks like? So take as read that this is all completely ridiculous.
The more interesting inconsistency in the twist, though, is the fact that you only see it by refusing to try to set the cops on some innocent person to throw them off the scent (this is where the racism/police corruption themes mentioned in the blurb come into play, by the by – the implication is that they’re happy to go after one of the POC “suspects” and ignore the possibility that the white girl is a baddie). You can conceptualize this as a reward for the player – by successfully realizing that none of them is the killer, the player gets a hint of what’s really going on – or as an in-character decision by Jackie, who’s gotten to know these people. But for Casey to make this choice is counterproductive; again, she’s inviting more scrutiny for no reason!
This isn’t a just a plot hole like the ones I mention above, though; it calls into question who exactly is making choices and how those choices are being resolved. Instead of the conventional IF triangle of identities – player, protagonist, and narrator – here we have the traditional player and narrator joined by a competing dyad of protagonists, whose methods and motivations are diametrically opposed, and who, unless you happen to pick just the right options, seamlessly substitute for each other with the player and narrator none the wiser. And now that we think about it some more, the flashback depicts events in Jackie’s life, but it’s being recounted by Casey to the cops as though it’s about her, so this doubling is even more complex than we thought (oh, and this also means the narrator is completely unreliable too and we presumably can’t trust anything we’ve read)! Please Sign Here thus becomes narrative collapse: the game – nothing that comes after the twist makes sense, and it throws into question everything that comes before the twist, too.
I wish I could say the game does something compelling with this move, but per my long-ago, pre-spoiler-text note, I’m unconvinced that it knows how radical it’s being – possibly this is me just being judgmental and overgeneralizing from the weak prose to assuming that the game has weak writing overall, I suppose, but it’s inarguable that the game doesn’t explore the implications of its scenario, seeming satisfied with using it as a noirish capstone to a conventional whodunnit, not one of postmodern dislocation. Still, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even what may seem an often-clumsy mystery can dislocate its player into acute postmodern vertigo.
No fluke, December 1, 2023I used to work with some environmental advocates, from whom I learned a mouthful of a Greco-Roman phrase: charismatic marine megafauna, or, in normal-personal language, cool big ocean creatures. All the organisms that live in the sea, as well as general environmental features like pollution, oxygenation, and (gulp) temperature, are critical to keeping oceanic ecosystems stable. But “save the krill!” is a rallying cry for precisely nobody, so in order to persuade people to adopt the kind of laws and regulations that are needed to mitigate the impact we’re having on the marine environment, you’d better trot out a dolphin or sea turtle or something big and sympathetic like that. And of course marine fauna don’t come any more charismatic, or any more mega, than the whale: warm-blooded and communicative like us, but massive and as comfortable at the depths as on the surface, it’s no wonder they’re an object of fascination, back to the story of Jonah and the whale. So it’s perhaps just understandable that the cetologist protagonist of The Whale’s Keeper appears to have purposely arranged to get himself swallowed by one.
This choice-based game’s obviously set out a magic-realist scenario, but it does credit to both sides of that equation. As to the latter, the pressure increases as the whale dives down give rise to a memorable set piece, for example, and there’s some lovely prose describing what it’s like to be inside it as it sings:
"You are at ground zero and for a moment you wonder if this vibratory wonder might thrum you into oblivion. It overwhelms you with its grandness. It is the most perfect, all-encompassing thing you’ve ever experienced, every molecule of you sings in response."
The mechanics also reflect the precarity of your situation; you’re given a 10-click “sanity” clock, which decreases as especially frightening things happen; presumably once it hits zero, you get a bad ending, though I never had that happen since the system is fairly forgiving. This is especially the case because there are opportunities for your sanity to go up, primarily as you encounter the elements that fall more on the “magic” side of things. In particular, the game quickly establishes that you’ve got company in this particular gullet; figuring out how to engage with the hermit you quickly nickname “Jonah”, interacting with him and learning how he’s managed to eke out his existence, is a highlight of the first part of the game, even if some of these details strain credulity past the snapping point.
While the game starts out with you (er) in the middle of things, it does eventually sketch out a few elements of your character’s backstory and try to explain why you’d do something as crazy as this, I wasn’t as sold on this piece of the game, both for the specifics (there’s a particular detail about the death of your child that probably could have merited a content warning) and just the general concept of the attempt (look, I don’t care how terrible things have been going for you, there’s no way to logically justify jumping down a whale’s throat). The game really only works when it keeps its focus on the present, and the player of necessity has to run with the off-kilter reality being presented.
The elephant in the room is the format. For all that the game I’ve just described would work just fine in a conventional engine like Twine, The Whale’s Keeper runs on its author’s bespoke chat-based IF platform; you have an option of playing it via Telegram or just, as I did, via the web. So while each passage ends with a series of choices, instead of clicking on the appropriate one, you need to type in the indicated work or two to select your preferred option. While I can see some games taking advantage of the chat-based interface, this one doesn’t gain anything by it – and since I played on my phone, tapping out the required words felt like it added unnecessary friction to the experience. And despite a fair bit of fiddling, I couldn’t adjust the text speed to a comfortable pace; many of the passages are long, but each is delivered in short speech-bubble chunks, so I wound up either tapping my foot waiting for the next one to load, or having the view window prematurely yanked down as one arrived while I was still finishing the previous one.
These quibbles didn’t do much to take me out of the game, though, and the game’s strengths are unique enough that it’s worth putting up with these idiosyncrasies. It communicates a real sense of wonder by immersing the player in a compellingly-imagined environment, and while it dances on an absurd tightrope between reality and fantasy, it’s over quickly enough that it never topples to one side or the other. One of its most impactful sequences, in fact, marries the two: Jonah guides you down to the acid pools that he scavenges for sustenance, and in amidst the potential food you fish up clumps of garbage and plastic bottles, too. For all the power that this leviathan has over you, it’s subject to the same human-made pollution that’s destroying the rest of the oceans; save the whales, save yourself.
For the real CoG heads, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
One Knight Stand reminds me of a peacock. This hefty ChoiceScript game is impressive but also absurd, hyperspecialized after taking evolutionary logic way past its logical endpoint. I know, for example, that the Choice of Games audience tends to really like player-customization options, but when it took me four separate choices to establish the length, texture, and color of my character’s hair, I thought something had gone awry; when, five minutes later, I picked out the color of my favorite mug and laid out my habits when shopping for a cell phone, I half suspected this thing was actually a parody or maybe a marketing survey in disguise. Similarly, CoG games tend to use length as a selling point, but having slogged through what I’m pretty sure was a short novel’s worth of prose to get through just four simple scenes and introduce only two significant characters, I can only imagine the fortitude needed to persist through the Middle of the End and the End of the End. There are some promising modern fantasy flourishes here, and I can’t fault the author’s work ethic, but sadly this is one of those games that I suspect will elate its intended audience while leaving those outside that group bewildered.
In its outlines, the story here is pretty solid. The main character lives in an alternate future where COVID gave way to a series of other plagues and pandemics, though as the game opens they’re more focused on practice with their surprisingly-intense polo club. But the city’s been threatened by a series of gruesome murders, and after seeing some strange things around your apartment, you get swept up in a supernatural world that involves demons, reformed incubi, the reincarnations of the Arthurian Knights, and a best friend who’s harboring some kind of secret…
It’s all fun enough – I could see the setting being a lost World of Darkness RPG from the late 90s – and the bits involving the polo team have some zip to them (I wouldn’t be surprised if the author has a bunch of real-life experience with horses), but the game’s glacial pacing does it no favors. I had to get through half a dozen see-something-weird-out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye-but-there’s-nothing-there-when-you-check “scares” before the first sequence was over, so that the creepiness had long since worn off, and the game’s written in an incredibly granular style that completely undermines any sense of pacing; I was similarly bored of most the action scenes by the time I was two-thirds done with them because they just took too long. And the transitional sequences are just as bad, as you’re forced to play through the dull bits between the set pieces at a similarly high level of detail; it’s like reading the first draft of someone’s first novel, before they’ve figured out how to move characters around in time and space.
The other element undermining what could be a fun pop-fantasy romp is the tonal whiplash. While the world is generally fairly grounded, and the game’s blurb says its genre is “dark urban fantasy”, a large portion of the game’s choices have some ZaNy options. Like, here are the player’s choices in one of the action scenes:
-Here goes nothing.
-Easier said than done.
-I don’t get paid enough for this.
-Da da da da da… Batmaaaaaaan!
The monster you’re trying to run away from here is actually kind of creepy, but this kind of thing drastically undercuts any sense of realism or fear the game is trying to convey. And I’ve picked a mild example; there are lots of pop culture quotes and bewilderingly over-the-top choices that seem to show up more and more as time goes on (though even the first sequence suffers from a news broadcast where April O’Neil and Peter Parker are highlighted as featured reporters).
One Knight Stand also gets way too dark sometimes given its omnipresent refusal to take itself seriously. You (of course) have a tragic backstory, and without thinking too much about it I went for the one where my family died in a car-crash (the others are comparably bleak). I was not prepared for how this was narrated (putting the details behind a spoiler-block; CW for violence and just general terrible things):
(Spoiler - click to show)Your father had turned the car at the last moment so that the driver’s seat took the full brunt of the crash. He’d been killed instantly. At the trial that followed, lawyers had argued that the people in the backseats — your brother, your sister, your mother — could have survived if the car’s side airbags had deployed as they were supposed to.
In the end, both your siblings had died before rescuers could prise them out of the wreckage of the car. You know your little sister, at least, had been alive directly after the crash. She had cried, gurgled, and half-screamed for several minutes afterwards. Your mother in the seat directly behind you had lingered the longest. She never regained consciousness in those last few days and finally passed on after a bloody miscarriage.
What the fuck, game.
I’ve said before that to my mind, the one thing that most amateur IF needs to feel professional is an editor, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glaring proof of that. If someone had helped the author smooth out the drastic tonal shifts, cut down 2/3 of the word count to focus on the engaging parts, and highlight places where going deeper really would be helpful (the main romance interest is so bland that even after three and a half hours of gameplay, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about his personality), this could be really promising. As it is, while I suspect the hardcore CoG-heads will lap this up, I didn’t get much enjoyment out of One Knight Stand. Which is a shame: peacock feathers may only turn on peahens, but at least they’re still pretty to the rest of us.
DICK MCBUTTS GETS REVIEWED IN THE NUTS, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
There are some stories that, when you encounter them, worm their way into your brain and take up permanent occupancy. Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is on that list for me; the piece concerns an eccentric Frenchman who so fashions his life so that he can write, from scratch and without reference to the original, simply from his own mind and direct experiences, a brand-new version of Don Quixote that is exactly the same, textually speaking, as what Cervantes wrote. But even though every character precisely matches, the story’s narrator tells us that the two books are not the same: there are some passages where Menard writes so movingly, and with such fiery, personal inspiration that the corresponding bits of Cervantes pale in comparison.
We have something slightly different here: instead of two identical works with the same title but different authors, DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS has one title and one author but two entirely separate texts. I was spoiled on this feature by some of the forum discussion surrounding what’s clearly an entry that wants to be noticed, learning that there’s a random die roll at the beginning that determines which of the two versions a given player will get. I also knew going in that one is linear, full of typos and egregiously offensive, while the other has some actual gameplay and is legit funny.
On the one hand, this is clearly just a play for the Golden Banana of Discord. On the other, that’s a good meta joke, and the combination of title, authorial pseudonym (my money was that this was Graham Nelson’s triumphant return to IF; it was only slightly disappointing to learn it was actually the very funny Damon L. Wakes), and blurb was sufficiently funny that I decided I’d play along: I resolved to take whichever version the RNG offered up, and not game things to replay the other one, in order to obtain the intended experience.
Reader, you probably know me well enough by now to know that I was secretly hoping to be stuck with the terrible one, and my hopes were not disappointed. The five-minute vignette I played was entirely linear, moving sentence-by-sentence through a zero-context extravaganza of genital trauma and bodily excreta with cameos by Adolf Hitler (as promised), various 80s movie villains, and a troupe of cancan dancers. There’s only one dramatic element – it’s the one in the title – that plays out in a variety of scenarios, the content set off by a nauseously-oscillating green-and-pink background, rakishly-angled text, and typos that couldn’t be more aggressively awful if they tried.
But there’s the rub, of course they tried; the whole thing is entirely calculated to be bad, rather than naively bad. And I found that knowledge colored my entire experience, and meant that I actually kind of enjoyed something that’s objectively terrible. We’re back in Borges territory here, but legitimately so: like, when I read that Darth Vader shrunk himself down into two mini clones, and one of them kicked DICK MCBUTTS’ right ballsack and the other kicked his right ballsack, I didn’t roll my eyes at the slapdash mistake, but chortled at the skillful trolling. Similarly, the rising-and-falling action – no, not of the kicking, but of the game’s pacing, which hits several fake-out climaxes in its short running time – seemed balletic to me, cruelly playing on the naïve player’s hope that this thing is finally ending. There’ve been troll games in the Comp before, so it’s really not hard to imagine the Cervantes DICK MCBUTTS, which would make me angry about how it wasted my time and how cavalierly it deployed Hitler for cheap laughs; but this is the Menard DICK MCBUTTS, and it is sublime.
I’m still rating it a 1, of course. Anything more would be disrespectful to Mr. Janus.
Matchless, December 1, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
As discussed in my Eat the Eldritch review, boats are clearly the central theme of this year’s Comp. Little Match Girl 4 does OK on this score – there are some shipwrecked pirates, plus an extended sequence on a spaceship – but my experience with the game was largely defined by its membership in two other incipient trends of the Comp, being a sequel (I’ve already reviewed Shanidar, Safe Return, and looking ahead on my list there are a bunch more) and a Metroidvania (joining Vambrance of Destiny and Put Your Hand Into the Puppet’s Head).
Let’s take the sequel part first. I haven’t played any of the three prior Little Match Girl Games, and while I’m dimly familiar with the original Hans Christian Andersen story, any connection to that moralizing fable has long since fallen by the wayside; per a handy recap function, the eponymous protagonist has developed the power to travel through time and space by looking into fires, been adopted by a post-reform Ebenezer Scrooge, and currently works as a freelance sniper-cum-troubleshooter for Queen Victoria (England’s gain is Denmark’s loss; I guess she wasn’t very patriotic?).
The game seemingly isn’t especially fussed about any of this backstory, though, and in fact opens in medias res, with the introductory text not explaining anything about your immediate mission or situation. This kind of beginning can work well, but here I feel like it was misdeployed. It’s not used to skip boring exposition and get the player into the action from the get go, since the opening sequence just involves quiet exploration of a deserted beach. Nor does it do much to heighten player interest in what’s going on, since the actual plot is straightforward – you need to find half a dozen magic pearls as a combined peace offering/christening present to a baby fairy; i.e., it’s a fetch quest – and it’s effectively dropped in your lap ten minutes in without any deeper engagement or piecing together of clues required; you wander into Faerie and come across the infant prince and his caretakers, and everybody acts as though you already know the deal. As a result, the decision to forego a conventional introduction struck me as an odd one: I don’t think the game gains anything by it, but it loses the opportunity to establish stakes and engage the player in the world and the characters.
The Metroidvania aspects of the game also start slow. This is a genre convention, of course – the accretion of powers allowing you to overcome previously-encountered obstacles is a major part of the appeal – but I also found that the absence of minimap like that provided in Vambrance of Destiny, combined with the additional navigation challenge posed by the fire-portals leading to other settings meant it took me a while to wrap my head around the available space for exploration. It doesn’t help that the first few areas are rather straightforward – a ghost town, the age of the dinosaurs, a coast – with the few other people not especially engaging to interact with (LMG4 uses a TALK TO system without any dialogue options, which is probably my least-favorite way to implement character interaction in a parser game).
Fortunately, I found the game picked up by about the halfway point. Gaining a few additional abilities and a clearer sense of the map made the puzzle-solving feel more rewarding, and the environments became more interesting – the dinosaur era actually involves a modern, oddly-bougie civilization; the English coast is home to the actual Pirates of Penzance; and there’s a vampire-haunted Alpine chateau that’s the best of the bunch. The number of sly jokes and clever Easter Eggs also ramps up quickly from the comparatively-straight beginning: it took me a minute to realize that your first two upgrades mirror the ones Samus gets at the beginning of each Metroid game (Spoiler - click to show)(the fire-bullet is like a missile, and the mouse-transformation is like the morph ball); there’s an extended conference among the vampires that gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes – and it goes a long time; and there’s a disguise bit that I’m pretty sure is directly tweaking the Gabriel Knight 3 puzzle that’s long been decried as having killed graphic adventures all by itself.
Even in this running-downhill part of my experience with the game, though, I still found there were underexplained elements that I think must have been part of earlier games in the series – you seem to have some history with a couple of the specific vampires, you’ve encountered that prehistoric civilization before, and I’d guess that the climax is calling back to the very first game. So while I did eventually very much enjoy my time with LMG4, I can’t help but think that I would have liked it even more if I’d played the earlier games in the series, or even better, if it had done a bit more work to get new players up to speed. I can see how entering a late-series game in the Comp can help draw attention to earlier works, which is all to the good, but it’d be nice for us newbies to be met halfway.
It's beginning to look a lot like fish men, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Well, it’s finally happened. Even a casual perusal of this year’s Comp roster reveals that games with boats are way, way overrepresented, and I for one couldn’t be happier – big boats, little boats, sail boats, paddle-wheelers, motorboats, house boats, inflatable boats; yawls, yachts, ketches, clippers, men o’ war, brigantines, sloops, catamarans, schooners, container ships, dinghies, triremes, hovercraft, barges, scows; even airships, zeppelins, sauce boats – I love ‘em all, and I’m excited to finally be able to embark (eh? Eh?) on the nautical portion of my Comp explorations.
Eat the Eldritch is a great way to inaugurate the trend, too, because it’s both very boat-y (the whole thing takes place on board a giant fishing boat) and very good, leavening an effective Lovecraftian vibe with good-natured gross-out humor and some satisfying parser puzzling – call it The Terrible Old Man and the Sea. You play the captain, who’s had a bad run of luck that means he hasn’t managed to catch any fish to feed into the floating fish-stick-making plant belowdecks; you’ll get right on that, as soon as you get the suspicious “Rudolf Carter” fellow you just hired on as cook to fix you some lunch… As that potted summary as well as the title suggest, Eat the Eldritch presents a horror of consumption, where everything exists to eat and be eaten, with the latter stages of the game containing revolting, stomach-churning images by the score.
This would be a little much for my poor vegetarian self, but fortunately, the game’s also wickedly funny, and the occasional chortle really helps the offal go down. Here’s a bit of the description of the aforementioned cook, focusing on his fingers:
They are thick and swollen and their skin looks like brittle scabs. The comparison may be disgusting, but they actually look like fried fish sticks and when he uses them, you’re afraid they’ll crumble.
It’s a ridiculous image, but very gross, and works very well. The game does swerve into more straightforward horror territory from time to time – the description of the inevitable Cthulhoid monstrosity is a uniquely messed-up phantasmagoria, and there’s a lovely disorienting bit where you see some ceiling-lamps swaying with the waves, and you imagine yourself upside-down and underwater, looking down at colossal sea-grasses. But there are also some extended jaunts of wackiness, maintaining the overall balance and keeping proceedings from getting too grim.
Eat the Eldritch is also impressively balanced when it comes to gameplay. It uses shipboard directions for verisimilitude, for example, but smartly keeps the size of each individual deck small, and provides handy ASCII-art maps for each, so these aren’t as disorienting as they can sometimes be. There are also regular prods towards your immediate goal to keep you on track, and a handy THINK verb in case you need a reminder (though attempting to THINK in a particular extra-dimensional space threw off a run-time error). And the downloadable version of the game comes with a nicely put-together Infocom-style manual that should make this easy for folks newer to parser games to get into. Oh, and while there is definitely peril of both the physical and existential varieties, Eat the Eldritch will politely rewind if you reach a bad end, taking the sting out of failure (you’ll also often get an optional achievement for your trouble – I though I was pretty thorough, but I only got about a dozen of the 27 on offer!)
The puzzles are similarly player friendly; there’s nothing too head-scratching here, but they’re satisfying to solve, especially the climactic set piece, which had me giggling and gaggling in equal measure. But beyond its visceral appeal, it’s a clever bit of design – it’s got multiple steps and requires some clever leaps of logic, but it’s all quite well clued and I was able to put all the pieces together without any hints. There is one potentially misleading reference that could lead folks less-familiar with maritime matters astray – protip, if you’re ever in a major storm, you emphatically do not want to go perpendicular to the waves, you want to steer your bow directly into them – but other than that, they’re uniformly well-clued.
It’s a real pleasure to come upon something as horribly lovely as Eat the Eldritch; as I said, I may be slightly partial to maritime tales, but this one floats on its own ballast, and sets a high-water mark for the other games in the Comp.
Idle hands, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I swear, the Comp randomizer has a sense of humor: immediately after having me play a possibly-unfinished game about not being able to see, it serves up a Texture game that features the engine’s signature miniscule-text-on-action-buttons bug and which explicitly presents itself as a teaser. In the Details has a solid premise, updating Robert Johnson’s legendary deal for the social-media age, but the implementation’s a little wonky and it ends just as things are getting interesting. I’d certainly play more of this story, but what’s been entered into the Comp isn’t especially satisfying on its own.
The opening sequence sees your rock-star-on-the-rise rolling into your upcoming gig in style, then blowing off your manager; it helps establish the main character as a conceited, thoughtless brat, but then, I already said they’re a rock star so I’m repeating myself. The elements of a strong beginning are here, but the scene could use another layer of polish: the manager says you’re too drunk to perform, but that level of inebriation hadn’t been conveyed through the earlier text, for example, and the prose throughout conveys some bold, if not garish, imagery, but has more than a few awkward moments. Here’s the description of entering the venue:
"A gold-speckled red carpet yawns at your feet, all the way down the procession and into a set of double doors whose windows glow with a heavenly facade."
Or a sequence where you wow some backstage listeners with your virtuosity:
"To their gaped jaw and compulsory applause, you close your eyes and take a deep bow. You live for this, and maybe [your idiot manager] will appreciate what you do just like the others."
I found the Texture drag-verbs-to-nouns interface worked okay, but not great, throughout this sequence. In particular, sometimes the distinctions between the available actions felt too fine to easily parse: in one of the first passages, you get to choose between “inspecting” and “considering” various nouns, with no clear indication of which might move the narrative ahead. Later on the options do become more straightforward choices, which were simpler to navigate – but here the stakes are quite high, with one wrong move leading to a premature, and quite violent bad end.
(Complete plot spoilers follow; it’s nothing you can’t guess by reading the blurb and looking at the cover art, but still figure it’s good manners not to completely ruin the twist).
(Spoiler - click to show)Because yeah, 3/4 of the way through, the devil shows up; you sold your skill for guitar skills, and now the bill has come due. The writing gets much more engaging at this point, as the author clearly starts having more fun – we’re told that in a bit to intimidate you, the devil “rolls his neck slowly. Purposefully. Vaingloriously.” And you do have that high-stakes choice. But if you guess wrong, he simply murders you (albeit in lovingly metal prose); if you guess right, you get shunted into a series of noninteractive passages that work as an ending cutscene setting up the final “To Be Continued.”
Based on this finale, the game rallies sufficiently to make me interested to see what comes next; there’s promise here, but also some rough bits, so hopefully the author refines the existing prelude even as they work on the next chapters.
A bit out of focus, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My freshman year of high school, somebody stole my glasses. I wasn’t as nearsighted then as I am now (and I wasn’t farsighted at all – ah, to be young again!), so I was able to struggle through the day, but it was still a disorienting experience; I remember squinting at blackboards, at faces, at the TV, hesitant and having to constantly guess at what I was seeing, who I was talking to. It was an object lesson in how fragile one’s sense of stability in the world can be – and also an object lesson about the cluelessness of teenaged boys, because turns out the culprit was a dormmate who’d drawn my name for Secret Santa and decided it’d be funny to give me back a bunch of my own stuff.
So I think the inciting incident in Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses has legs; waking up after a nap at your school’s Literature Club room to find them missing, of course you’d drop everything, and even grill your close friends, to get them back. Unusually for a ChoiceScript game, there aren’t any stats governing your travails (or at least if there are, they’re hidden), though you do get to customize your gender and romantic preferences (relevant because you can get flirty with at least one of the two prime suspects) – success is all down to the perspicacity of your investigation.
Or is it, though? After two playthroughs, my sense is that the game isn’t really structured as a mystery. Sure, you can go interrogate your two friends – one the anarchic class clown, the other a mysterious and cool new kid who’s a multiclassed jock/nerd – and take a variety of conversational tacks, but these choices mostly seem to have an impact on you relationships rather than your ability to solve the mystery. And as is perhaps evident in the lopsided detail with which I characterized the pair of friends, while questioning one of them is an involved process with the potential for myriad different outcomes, the other friend is dispensed with in a conclusory two or three choices. I explored pretty thoroughly in my first playthrough, but I didn’t find my glasses, and though I did in my second, success didn’t feel especially satisfying (Spoiler - click to show)(I decided to take a nap and the glasses had come back while I slept)). I consulted the walkthrough, and it seems like the results of your investigation might depend primarily not on what you say when you encounter your friends, but your skill at finding them: the initial sequence of the game involves you trying to track them down via a variety of means, which feels a bit like an exercise in forcing the player to find the plot.
The writing is charming enough to somewhat carry this disappointing gameplay, though – it’s got a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and though the prose has more than its share of grammar errors and typos, it’s still occasionally charming. I got a laugh out of this description of one of your friends:
"She’s the typical class clown, always with her antics, never taking anything seriously. One time she ordered milk tea for the whole class, even when your school specifically bans outside food."
What a mischievous imp! I do wish the writing had done more to foreground how challenging it is to exist in the world without being able to see well, though; while it gets mentioned from time to time, I’d often forget my predicament since many descriptions don’t seem to be impacted by the main character’s presumably-intense myopia.
Actually, there’s an indication that H!ICFMG may be unfinished; the Comp blurb starts off with “(To be updated)”, and the author’s already uploaded two new versions as of this writing. If that’s the case, a more robust final release may help the game more fully live into its fun premise, but for now it’s more of a teaser.
Lost in prehistory, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Shanidar, Safe Return, has a compelling setting that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a work of IF before – Clan of the Cave Bear style prehistory. Jumping back 40,000 years ago, this choice-based game tasks you with guiding a small band of Neanderthals who’ve suffered an attack from some aggressive Cro-Magnons first to immediate safety, and then to a far-off sanctuary where they can hopefully flourish. It’s enriched with compelling details that appear to be the fruit of quite a lot of research – I really felt the texture of these people’s way of life. While the author made a few choices that I found worked somewhat at cross purposes and lessened the impact of the work overall, I was still glad to experience this story.
The game admittedly doesn’t make the best first impression – instead of a play online link or a game file available for download, instead you need to open up a pdf that contains a link to the actual website where Shanidar, Safe Return is hosted. For something that appears to be a conventional Twine game in format, this feels needlessly convoluted. The landing page includes a quick summary of the setup, but then lists links without providing any context – I wasn’t sure at first whether these were ways of jumping to different sections of the story, but as it turned out the game gives you an option of which of three story vignettes to start out with.
There’s a cast of characters page there too, but I found it hard to digest. The names aren’t drawn from any language I’m familiar with, a lot of characters have names that begin with the same letter, and you can’t refer back to the cast list once the game starts, which really wished I could do once I’d clicked through: immediately, there are a lot of different people to keep track of, and their basic information and relationships with each other aren’t always communicated. I was deep into the game’s second act before I realized that Uda, one of the major recurring characters, was actually the father of the main character’s son, but I think I was supposed to know that from the beginning.
Admittedly, some of this confusion may be due to the fact that the game is a sequel to an earlier instalment – those who’ve played that one might find this introduction smoother. Still, since I don’t believe the prequel was an IF Comp game, I think the author could have probably been more mindful of the likelihood that there’d be a lot of new players who were coming to the series fresh.
It didn’t take me too long to get into the groove of things, though, since the initial setup of fleeing from danger was clear and compelling. The game’s written in a very simple prose style that feels like a good fit for the subject matter, too; the characters are never dehumanized by forcing them to adopt stereotypical “cave man” speech, but it does make sense to keep the language from getting too flowery. Here’s an early passage:
"Oihana carries Eneko in a soft leather sling on his back. Eneko is never a burden. Eneko falls asleep in the safety of Oihana’s sling. He drops the doll, Pala, along the way. The forest canopy protects the band of refugees from the rain. They leave a trail of wet prints in the mud, most of which are washed away by morning. Dawn approaches. The rain stops."
There’s a kind of mythic, elemental resonance to this kind of writing, and when it combined with those well-observed details about how the characters found and prepared food, or gathered supplies for travel, or engaged in group decision-making, Shanidar, Safe Return works very well in a unique, anthropological vein.
Unfortunately, pretty soon after the initial act came to a close, I once again started feeling disoriented. The game started introducing more and more characters, and I realized that its idiosyncratic approach to choices – each passage ends with two or three links summarizing something different people are doing, and clicking on one will skip you over to that part of the plot, without any interstitial narration to make the transition less jarring – was actually skipping me over important information or plot developments; for example, in the first act, I found it most compelling to follow the thread involving an orphaned toddler and watchdog finding their way back to the larger group, but as a result I didn’t wind up clicking on any of Uda’s links, and as mentioned above, didn’t understand who he was or why he was playing such an important role in Act 2.
This sense of the game skipping around was exacerbated in the final act, where, their preparations complete, the group embarks on an epic journey of thousands of kilometers. I was deeply curious about how they were going to cross mountains, pass over the Bosporous, and explore unfamiliar lands – but since Act 3 also introduced a whole new set of characters, who appeared to be ancestors of Aboriginal Australians, I was curious about them, and by the time I’d gotten a handle on who they were and switched back to the original group, they were already just about at their destination! This isn’t a modernist story, where fractured timelines and incomplete information are thematically important – again, I feel like the game is most effective when it’s working in National Geographic mode – so I feel like a more linear approach to the material would have worked better.
The other authorial choice that didn’t resonate especially strongly for me is the use of some narrative elements that felt YA-inspired; there are some tropey romances, and the Neanderthal-Cro Magnon conflict is characterized in a fairly Manichean, diversity vs. intolerance sort of way. I’ve got no objections to any of that, but I felt like they didn’t mesh well with the dry prose style, and injected some notes of anachronism into what was otherwise an engaging window into a long-forgotten past.
For all that not all the strands here come together seamlessly, though, many of them do. I liked getting to follow Eneko’s coming of age, and learning about how the people’s foraging practices changed as they came to the Middle East from their original home in Europe. I’d gladly play a third game in this series – but would hope that it would be a bit more accessible to newcomers, and not lose sight of the primary threads of its story.
Pauldron of peril, gorget of glory, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
It’s probably the dream of most IF authors to be a prolific writer of high-quality games, but contemplating the oeuvre of Arthur DiBianca, who’s perhaps comes as close to that ideal as anybody currently working, I wonder whether there’s a downside to such consistency. Does there ever come a point where the audience starts to take you for granted, and greet each new work with a simple “ho hum, here’s yet another really fun Arthur DiBianca game”? I hope that’s not the case, but I have to say, I was not the slightest bit surprised to find that Vambrance of Destiny is pretty great.
Like pretty much all of his work, this is a limited parser game, one that specifically feels like an iteration on last year’s IFComp entry, Trouble in Sector 471. Like in that game, here we’ve got a nicely-realized minimap, a metroidvania explore-to-upgrade-to-explore-more structure, and a main objective that’s largely advanced by using your abilities to beat baddies. Here, though, the robot-topia of Section 471 is swapped for the aesthetics of dungeon-crawling fantasy; plotwise, you’ve got to delve into an ancient ruin to beat up a rogue wizard and reclaim his stolen staff of power, and ability-wise, you’ve got the eponymous arm-armor, which evinces various spell-like abilities as you fill its various receptacles with magical gems. There’s also a cool tech upgrade this time out, which is that the game is played with single keypresses – no need to type out full commands or even hit enter – which is a nice convenience (the tilde key allows access to SAVE, LOAD, and other systems commands, though).
The story and writing are relatively minimal – the Foozle shows up a couple times to taunt you, but otherwise this is a simple get-to-the-end-to-beat-the-boss affair, while the absence of an EXAMINE action helps keep the location descriptions tight and focused. They work well for what they are, don’t get me wrong, but like most of DiBianca’s games, VoD lives and dies by its puzzles. And unsurprisingly, they’re really quite well done.
The process of getting new capabilities via gem upgrades is always fun, of course, and you get to master a fun set of spells over the course of the game, from elemental attacks to teleports to summoning spells. Having spent a bunch of time recently assessing the design of limited-parser games, I’m increasingly of the mind that the key challenge is to avoid the lawnmowering problem – that is, making it too tempting for the player to make progress simply by running through all the different options at their disposal whenever they hit an obstacle, rather than engaging with the puzzle and trying to solve it. Vambrance avoids this pitfall handily; the challenges progress nicely as you go, with straightforward one-spell-required obstacles soon giving way to more complex ones that require an extended sequence of different spells, or have timing elements that require you to wait or otherwise pay attention before spamming different actions. This variety of strategies keeps things fresh, and means that spamming all the spells in turn eventually becomes tedious and unproductive.
Of course, there’s also a risk of making challenges too complex – which is just that a game becomes too hard. VoD generally stays on the right side of this line, too. I struggled a bit with some of the multi-step solutions in Sector 471, but generally had an easier time here, I think because the game does a great job providing feedback for when you’re on the right track or have come up with a partial solution. As with most of DiBianca’s games, the most esoteric puzzles are mostly saved for optional side-objectives (here, there are a dozen bonus treasures to collect along the way to the big boss, in keeping with the dungeon crawl theme). That said, while I did complete all the puzzles, both the critical path and the optional ones, I did wind up going to the hints more than a few times towards the end – ultimately, you wind up accumulating over a dozen different ability-gems, some of which are fairly involved to use (like the one that enables you to temporarily teleport in one of a half-dozen different objects), which feels like it starts to strain at the borders of how limited a limited-parser game can be.
Still, even the puzzles I got hints on were well-clued in retrospect, and fun to solve. The climactic fight with the rogue wizard is also a really good time. It maybe doesn’t play completely fair, I have to admit -- (Spoiler - click to show)you need to beat him in a spell duel, and after a warm-up round where he throws things with obvious counters at you, and then starts mixing in ones that require extrapolation from puzzles you’ve previously solved, to a final set that actively mislead you, telegraphing one vulnerability only to reveal a different, hidden one after you fail to stop it. This means that victory will almost certainly require an initial loss or two so you can memorize how to respond to these tricky ones, albeit trying again just takes half a dozen turns -- but since the whole sequence winds up being an enjoyable set piece, this notional violation of good game design principles winding up eminently forgivable.
All of which is to say: ho hum, here’s another really fun Arthur DiBianca game. Yawn. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next year!
Art vs commerce in a rigged fight, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The randomizer, ever playful, gave me two short Texture games in a row. Like Lonehouse, this one’s also a deeply interior portrait of a person in the throes of powerful feelings, and also boasts a fair bit of awkward writing. It does have a clarity of purpose, though, and some arresting images, as it tells a story of one old man’s obsession with completing his sculptural masterpiece, while it manages to use the sometimes-awkward drag-verbs-onto-nouns Texture interface fairly intuitively; for all that it does have real merits, though, it seems to endorse a rather narrow understanding of the role of art, which limited the effectiveness of its climax.
While The Sculptor doesn’t offer a lot of biographical details about the main character, it does give you enough to understand his situation. His aspirations towards artistry have been frustrated for decades, first by an unsupportive father and then his lack of money. After a lifetime of menial labor, though, he’s finally been able to save up enough money to purchase a block of marble, so that he can have one last chance to create a magnum opus. Complicating matters, he’s also deep in medical debt due to a hernia surgery – the collections agency representative, though, seems intrigued by your work, and might accept your masterpiece to discharge the debt, and their display of such a remarkable piece might even help make your name famous…
This is a straightforward plot, but it’s enough to support the game’s short runtime. And there are a few places where the game offers some optional social engagement with your old boss, or lets you contemplate what you’re trying to achieve, which enriches the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Mechanically, you’re usually given one or two more passive or reflective verbs, and one that’s more active, so it was typically clear which options would deepen the current scene and which would move on to the next bit of the story. On the flip side, the prose is often wonky, but does mix in some moments of real power. Here’s a bit where you consider the sacrifices you made for art that shows off both these aspects of the writing:
"The days you scavenged your intact pockets, counting what to spend so you could put the rest away. The nights you slept in hunger’s bed, the winters of wet socks and tattered shoes you wore with pride, and the dear family you loved — children and wife you chose not to have lest they too would choose to put the rest away."
There are also a few images that just land, with no caveats needed, like this description of the marble block you’ve paid for with your life’s wages:
"That is your whole life, you explain. Where every little coin you saved went. You struggle to admit that every chip you break from it is a year thrown away."
I did find the game tottered a bit at the finish line, though. After you complete the masterpiece, the collections agency people return, and you’re confronted with a climactic choice, which are literally labeled as either “Sullied and Impure” – you let them have the sculpture, clearing your debt and bringing you worldly fame – or “Refined and Preserved”, where you take a hammer and smash the sculpture to bits before their disbelieving eyes. This is not an especially nuanced look at how artists are cross-pressured between commerce and integrity!
This could work, I suppose, as an allegory of various artistic dilemmas, but the rest of the game has too many specific details – like the whole hernia surgery/medical debt plotline that sets up the choice – for it to easily function as a pure philosophical statement. At the same time, it isn’t sufficiently grounded to really engage with the questions of artistic production under capitalism; like, if he has the medical debt because he was uninsured pre-Obamacare, that lands differently than if he lives in a state that’s stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid for obscure reasons of political fealty. Similarly, the game seems to posit collections agencies as well-funded, classy operations akin to Fortune 500 corporations or law firms, able to shell out big bucks for art and promote it in such a way as to ensure your reputation.
This matters because throughout human history, artistic production has been embedded in webs of economic exchange and patronage – especially capital-intensive forms like marble sculpture – so the simple art-for-art’s-sake philosophy the game endorses seems about as substantive as someone yelling “no sellouts” at a Jawbreaker show. Like, creating a great work of art is rewarding in and of itself, sure, but quarrying rock is not an especially fun job, and the people who cut it into regular blocks often die of silicosis. The myth of the lone, tortured artist creating at the margins of society is largely an invention of the Romantic era, but it’s telling that the people actually doing the creating back then were primarily white male aristocrats or members of the haute-bourgeoisie. The Sculptor seems to interrogate that myth by seeing how it applies to someone with dramatically less economic privilege – but it can’t quite bring itself to reject this inherited narrative.
An over-generic take on loss, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
My wife has a sweatshirt that used to belong to my sister. We live in California, and she lived in Maryland, so one September when we were visiting and it got cold, she noticed that my wife was shivering in her SoCal-appropriate outfit, and lent her a hoody. I forgot to give it back before we left, and a month later we found out Liz’s cancer had come back, so returning a sweatshirt wasn’t ever a priority in the time we had left. And now that sweatshirt isn’t just a sweatshirt.
There can be an unbearable poignancy to the artifacts our loved ones leave behind when they die; the books they read and wrote in, the glasses that let them see, the tchotchkes they’d look at and smile. Trivial, everyday objects that were barely worth a second of thought are transmuted to relics, bearing the last impress of someone’s now-finished time in the world.
Lonehouse engages with that poignancy, in ways that were occasionally quite arresting for me to encounter – the protagonist is visiting the apartment of her recently-deceased sister, named Liv, to help clean it out and take away some keepsakes. As you explore using Texture’s drag-verbs-to-nouns interface, you get snatches of the history between them – it’s not fully explained, but it seems like the sisters hadn’t been in touch, and perhaps there’d been a falling out – and identify the things that seem to have the most Liv-ness to them: a jacket, a favored plushie, a photo.
Despite the strong personal resonance of the premise, though, I didn’t wind up feeling like Lonehouse was truly compelling. Partially this is because the writing is often awkward. The style is generally unadorned and matter-of-fact, which I think is appropriate to communicating grief, but some of the author’s word choices undermine the simple power of this approach. Partially though it’s because the writing never gets especially specific. The general experience of death is one we’ve all had or will have, of course, but it’s unique details that turn this from a vague sense of loss to heart-rending tragedy, and Lonehouse doesn’t usually try to work in this register. Upon seeing that Liv saved an old Christmas gift that the protagonist made her, for example, we’re told that “[a] complicated feeling stirs in you” – but what feeling is that? Again, we aren’t given much detail of the prior relationship between the two, so it’s hard to place this in context.
The Texture engine also makes experiencing the story less engaging than I would have liked. I ran into what appears to be a bug with the system, since I came across it in another game too, where the buttons holding each scene’s verbs displayed their text in a tiny font – that’s not the author’s fault, but it did mean that I was often taken out of the story as I tried to decode my options. The interface also made it challenging to figure out which actions would allow me to explore or get more detail, and which would progress to the next sequence; several times in this short game, I wound up accidentally speeding through rooms I’m not sure I was finished with.
This is a short game that takes on some compelling issues; I’m not sure whether it’s the author’s debut, but if so I think it’s a more than respectable start. My key feedback for next time (and hopefully there’ll be a next time!) is to lean into the concrete, grounded style displayed here, but not to sacrifice the particular in the vain hope of making a piece of writing universal: otherwise, a sweatshirt will remain just a sweatshirt.
Indonesian innkeepery, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
For all that Bali B&B lives up to its billing as a cozy domestic simulator, this ChoiceScript game inspired more stomach-churning dread than any other game in this year's Comp – just as I was settling into my week-long stint of temporarily managing my grandparents’ eponymous business, I was terrified to learn that the proprietor of a B&B is expected to play host over breakfast, talking to all the different guests at once, making sure the conversation doesn’t lag, and generally engaging in an extended personal interaction with people who are involved in a purely economic transaction with you. I can see how people with less social anxiety than me would enjoy this as an opportunity to get to know new people and learn more about the world, but ye gods – this is one career I can definitely cross off the list when I need to figure out what to do post-retirement.
Other than that one shocking moment, though, this really is a warm duvet of a game. As a quarter-Indonesian Australian, you’ve grown used to coming back to Bali for vacations and spending time with your grandparents, so when they surprise you on your latest trip by telling you that they’re off to Paris and you’re in charge, at least you know many of the locals and most of what needs to be done. The week progresses in an agreeable series of vignettes; you’re always jumping from one crisis to another, but buoyed by a charming supporting cast, nothing ever feels insurmountable. A litter of cats in the oven when the health inspector comes calling? Guests who don’t speak any language you know? Another who insists on eating bacon over the religious objections of the cook? I dealt with some of these better than others (I charmed the health inspector and tamed the cats; I gave the Chinese guests some mild food poisoning but they overall seemed to have an OK time; and I’m a vegetarian so I told bacon-guy to fuck right off) but the game was happy to keep things moving without excoriating me for my mistakes.
The problems and confusions that arise as you attempt to keep the B&B running are the main focus of gameplay, but the true star is the setting. I’ve never been to Bali – though since there was an Indonesian restaurant a couple blocks from my college dorm, I can confirm the food is absolutely delicious – but this game is a great advertisement for a stay there. The scenery is described in lush detail, there’s an attention to the cultural and religious diversity that feels authentic and respectful, and overall there’s a lovely, laid-back vibe to the proceedings. A game with this premise could easily fall into the trap of demonizing the guests or stereotyping the staff, but even when someone’s being a jerk, the author manages to convey their humanity (and even the ones who behave badly have an opportunity to at least partially redeem themselves). There’s also an adorable yet mischievous monkey, what’s not to like.
If anything, my only complaint is that I felt like the game went too easy on me. It has the usual overwhelming flurry of ChoiceScript stats, which I promptly ignored, but regardless, almost everything I tried seemed to succeed. Late in the game, there was a moment where it said that because I took good care of my health, I was able to accomplish a challenging task, but I had no memory of ever prioritizing health or even having the option of doing so. And the health inspector felt like a Chekhov’s gun that didn’t go off – after an initial encounter where she finds some violations, she says she’s going to come back, but since she returns after your grandparents do, you don’t get to see whether the consequences of your decisions have saved the B&B from a shutdown. Given the general gentle vibe of the game, this isn’t a real threat, of course – and again, this is comfort gaming, I didn’t need it to be overly punishing – but at the end of the week, I did feel like there were some times that I’d made mistakes, and it maybe felt a little patronizing that the game didn’t call me on them.
That’s mostly me finding something to criticize, though. I had a lot of fun with this one, from the well-drawn characters to the intelligent approach to choice-based gameplay (there are times when you’re asked big-picture questions, for example, but if you feel like you don’t have enough information you can sensibly just punt on them with no penalty). And I didn’t even talk much about the kittens! It almost was enough to make me think that B&B life could be worth the awkward breakfast table chit-chat. Almost.
The world's first Muppetvania, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Everyone remembers the first time they truly understood death, I suspect – the moment when it toggled from a frightening but abstract notion, one of a million things about being grown-up that kids have to accept but don’t really get, to the viscera; and frankly terrifying revelation that anyone, anytime can be taken, with no exceptions or escapes or ways back. I was a sheltered kid, so for me that didn’t happen until just after I turned nine, when one morning on the way to school the radio said that Jim Henson had died. Of course I knew who he was: the Muppets and Sesame Street loomed large in my childhood. I tried to hold myself together, but then they played Kermit the Frog singing Rainbow Connection, and I lost it, blubbering as my harried mom dropped me off.
As a result, while it took me a while to figure out what Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head was doing, once I twigged to it I immediately was on board. It’s a Twine game built around a recently-deceased puppeteer who’s clearly modeled on Henson, albeit with significant differences in biography (Malcolm Newsome is a Black millennial from Lancaster, CA); there’s a Disney-style megacorporation threatening to buy out and bulldoze his studio and a tabloid narrative saying that Newsome died of a drug overdose threatening to undermine his reputation. The player character is a former member of Newsome’s troupe who’s snuck back into the studio to try to figure out what really happened, fight back against his enemies, and reclaim his legacy.
It’s a great premise, and like I said, one that resonates with me. But the reason it took me a while to realize that was what was going on is that the game initially presents itself as a heist – actually, you’ve been hired to try to steal back as many of Nesome’s puppets as you can before the compound is demolished. And once you enter the first of four buildings on the lot, the set-up is quickly complicated by a pair of twists that come in quick succession: 1) once you grab the first puppet you find, you’re compelled to put it on your hand and it starts talking to you, and 2) there are monsters, bastardized puppets who now patrol the compound on behalf of the company that’s coming to bulldoze everything. Despite the game’s blurb claiming that its genre is horror (well, “mascot horror”, whatever that is) this isn’t played for as many scares as it could be – in particular, while it’s weird that the puppets appear to be sapient, they’re friendly, and actually quite helpful, as the most important ones each have a special power that can help you navigate through the maze-like interiors of the studio’s buildings, find your way around the various locks and obstacles, and evade or defeat the monsters.
Gameplay-wise, then, we’ve got a sort of Muppetvania, as you gather keys and new puppet powers enabling you to traverse more of the game’s world and in turn obtain yet more keys and puppets. It’s a pretty big game, and while you don’t need to recover all 14 puppets to get the best ending, I found the gameplay loop compelling enough to find all but one (and my failure to go the distance might have been due to a bug rather than a lack of commitment: (Spoiler - click to show) the puppet-detecting puppet kept telling me there was another to be found in the sink of the dishwashing area, but when I searched there I couldn’t find anything). Each dive into a building makes for a tense game of push-your-luck, as you attempt to explore and search every room, identify obstacles and hidden exits, try to work out the pattern of the monsters’ movements (there’s a different one in each building, and they all have bespoke movement strategies), and then flee so you can come back with the puppet or puppets you need to make progress. It’s fun stuff, even if I defaulted to undo-scumming more often than I like to admit.
I’m not sure it fits well with the broader ambitions of the game, though. For one thing, you’re limited to carrying at most two puppets at a time (and if you’re full up on puppets, you won’t have a hand free to pick up keys), so to speed up the process of recovering puppets from the buildings, I tended to eschew the ones with utility powers in favor of the ones that were strictly necessary to solve puzzles. Because the author’s coded in a bunch of neat interactions where puppets give commentary on the workshops and soundstages you encounter, as well as putting in unique dialogue between each pair of puppets if you wear two at the same time – but I know I missed out on a lot of that. This is a shame because I really did like the cast; all the characters seem like plausible members of a Muppet-like ensemble, and had winning personalities in their own right. And missing out on their commentary in the studio areas meant that they felt more like monster mazes than opportunities for environmental storytelling that enriched the game’s overall themes.
The other disconnect is that it turns out that the real villain of the piece isn’t Disney-branded monsters, it’s systemic racism. I’m going to spoiler-block the rest of this discussion because this is a big late-game revelation, but I can’t help discussing it in some depth. (Spoiler - click to show)Turns out there’s one particular puppet who has a camera built into her, and she recorded Newsome’s death, which is different from the vague “maybe it was a drug overdose” story you hear hinted at in the early game. Actually, he was pulled over by some LAPD cops who got angry that he wasn’t sufficiently deferential, so they murdered him and planted drugs on his body to cover up their crime. I’m deeply conflicted about this plot point; on the one hand, I liked the way the game foregrounds Newsome’s experience as a Black man in the entertainment industry, and God knows we’ve all seen enough examples of police violence and even killings of Black folks in recent years. But at the same time, this is an exaggerated, if not cartoonish, take on how these incidents play out. I’m maybe especially sensitive to this because I work for an LA-based civil rights organization and know some of the groups and people who helped reform the LAPD post-Rodney King; they still do a bunch of racially-biased stuff and much of my day job involves working to shift funding from policing to community-based alternatives, but for all that the story as conveyed by the game didn’t feel plausible. And again, the struggle against the monsters and the company that made them turns out not to be all that on point with what actually killed Newsome.
Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head does end strong, with a lovely epilogue where you explore a museum exhibit that’s been built around the puppets you recovered, encountering Newsome’s family and colleagues to explore the impact he had, and, at least in my ending, seeing his legacy vindicated. It’s really well done, and gives the player a strong sense of accomplishment as they end their time with the game. But again, its elegiac tone and more grounded themes (race is again a major factor) are at odds with the maze-y horror bits that make up the innards of the game. Again, I think those innards are good, but I’m left with the feeling that this is a game whose components are all quite strong, but which don’t necessarily reinforce each other all that well – it’d take a master puppeteer like Mal Newsome to stitch these disparate parts together into a unified whole.
Effects pedal to the metal, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Beat Witch is something I haven’t seen before: a parser game imagined as a series of high-octane action set pieces. It makes for a propulsive, pacey experience that’s easy to imagine seeing as a blockbuster movie, with sudden reversals, twists, and explosive climaxes coming one after the other. This approach isn’t without its downsides – the traditional parser pleasures of exploring an environment at one’s leisure and carefully thinking through the solutions to a smorgasbord of puzzles are completely absent, as the game pushes you from one adrenaline-fueled sequence to the next – but it makes for a unique change of pace.
Unsurprisingly given the game’s design ethos, Beat Witch starts in medias res, as you jostle your way into a safehouse alongside a bunch of hazmat-suit clad rescue workers dealing with a deadly plague. And just as you start to sort out what’s going on, you’re in for further rug-pulls; as it turns out, you’re not actually part of the team, and there isn’t actually a plague. The ABOUT menu fills you in on the situation through a neat bit of worldbuilding – it offers you the table of contents of a book about the eponymous “beat witches”, dangerous women who have the supernatural ability to siphon off and invest life energy, as well as a fatal vulnerability to music. Just giving the title of each chapter establishes the setting with admirable concision; I was way engaged contemplating “The Choral Uprising and why it failed” or “The phonograph, the radio, and the Great Extermination” than I would have been by a traditional lore-dump.
It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re one of the eponymous witches – but you’re a good witch, not a bad witch, with an angsty backstory from having accidentally hurt members of your family and striving for redemption by taking out the especially evil beat witch who’s made the city her hunting grounds. Of course, once the rest of the hazmat team realizes what you are, they aren’t going to take any chances or ask any questions before trying to kill you – in only a few turns, you’re faced with deadly danger, and once you solve that puzzle, there’s only a fleeting moment to catch your breath before you make it to the bad witch’s skyscraper lair and find the next desperate situation from which you need to extricate yourself.
The game never really stops, shunting you from one well-implemented sequence to the next – sometimes literally, as if you dawdle too long other characters might force you to move on. In pretty much all of Beat Witch’s scenes, you’re at the brink of death and struggling just to survive; there’s little extraneous scenery to explore, and in a convenient bit of worldbuilding, beat witches like you are mute, so there’s no real conversation system to slow things down. And while you’re powerful, your abilities are relatively straightforward, so you only have a few options in any given situation. As a result, things move quick; the puzzles aren’t especially hard, but it feels good to solve them because they have such high stakes.
Beat Witch does run on action-movie logic; if it explains how you knew about the bad witch you’re trying to stop, I didn’t notice that being established. You zip up, down, and around the skyscraper without being especially bound by the laws of physics (there’s an internal monologue and flashback as you fall from the roof that goes so long it almost becomes funny). And your nemesis is a classic motormouthed villain, cartoonishly evil and incapable of shutting up: when, late in the game, she taunted me by saying “think how much you goofed while I squeeze you like a juicy fart”, I imagined the protagonist was as tired of her BS as I was.
But these are all in keeping with the genre the game is trying to emulate, and may be the price to be paid for some really compelling moments like – I’m going to spoiler-block this one so as not to ruin the surprise – (Spoiler - click to show) sky-bridge of semi-animated bodies connecting the roofs of neighboring skyscrapers, or the LIVE command overwriting the after-death menu and heralding your resurrection. The game does have some unforced missteps, though: having an antagonist named “Dr Steve” is a little too goofy for the mood, and while I understand the intended thematic resonance of the final encounter, I think it comes off a bit anticlimactic. But these are easy to look past.
Reading between the lines of this review, it’s probably not a surprise for me to reveal that I admired Beat Witch more than I enjoyed it. I am an increasingly-old fuddy-duddy who likes to potter around when I play a parser game, and I tend to prioritize things like literary prose, thematic depth, and well-realized characters – none of which Beat Witch has much interest in. But I’m pretty sure that for some folks out there, this will be their favorite game of the Comp, and I can completely understand why; it delivers an experience most parser games don’t even attempt, and does so with elan.
(Insert LotR pun here), November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
The 2023 Com doesn't have an entry more high-concept than One Does Not Simply Fry: I’m sure I’ve seen mash-ups weirder than the Great British Bake Off meets Lord of the Rings, but I can’t think of them offhand. But for all that I’m deeply curious about precisely where the idea came from, it’s a match made in, if not heaven, at least one of the higher tiers of purgatory: the bake-off formula provides a sturdy framework for a ChoiceScript style game, with cooking skill, sucking up to the judges, and engaging with the other contestants providing distinct areas of endeavor, while the Tolkien stuff allows for a wide cast of familiar characters and works as a font for a million bad jokes and worse puns. It makes for engaging gameplay – and it’s quite replayable, with three distinct characters (plus a bonus unlockable one), multiple endings, and a host of potentially-viable strategies – even if the humor sometimes feels a bit forced.
Starting up the game, my first impression was that it was overstuffed with content. There are the aforementioned multiple characters, each of which is a knock-off of a member of the Fellowship: ersatz Legolas, faux Frodo, and a version of Éowyn who’s mysteriously called “Avis Barb” (is that like “has a beard” in schoolboy Latin? Anyway, I played as her my first time out). As per usual in ChoiceScript, they each have a distinct array of strengths and weakness, encompassing cooking ability, martial skill, speechcraft, and magical powers denoted as “breadomancy”. You’ve got the trio of judges: lead judge Tira Masu, grumpypants Gorgon Ramsayer, and the Doldrums/Seagull double act. There are optional vegetarian and vegan modes if you’d prefer not to be confronted with certain ingredients (a touch I appreciated!) Then there are the competitors you’re up against, including the certainly-not-going-to-turn-out-to-be-the-baddy “Sour Ron”, and a loaf of bread. And once the competition kicks off, you find out that your goal is not just to make the best onion ring, but to fry up the On(e)ion Ring which may or many not reawaken the Dark Lord resting uneasily under Mount Boom.
It’s a lot, but fortunately once the game kicks off, it’s reasonably manageable. Play proceeds in phases, from buying ingredients to preparing your frying setup to jostling with the competition and completing the challenge, before transitioning into a high-stakes endgame. Since each of the characters have distinct skills, it was usually straightforward to figure out which actions would make the most sense to attempt. I wound up winning the competition and making the On(e)ion Ring my first time out, but it felt excitingly touch-and-go throughout, and I was eager to start over to try out to the hidden character. At a gameplay level, then, I’d judge One Does Not Fry a success.
The humor, though, wound up being a slight net negative for me. There are some good jokes in here, don’t get me wrong – not-Éowyn makes brutal fun of the Witch King for being overconfident about that “no man can slay me” prophecy in a world that’s 50% women and also has hobbits, elves, dwarves, ents… And there’s an extended bit where you can decide to get potatoes rather than onions from the store, which rather scotches your chances of wining the onion ring challenge, but does set up a lovely line where you attempt to explain potatoes to the ancient Elven ghost who lives in your copy of the rulebook – don’t ask, I told you it’s a lot – and get the following nonplussed response:
"Back in the Worst Age, we didn’t have any weird eldritch ground tubes with self-replicating eyes that would try to convince you to plant them so they could poison you."
But as that “Worst Age” (First Age, geddit?) and all the punny names I mention above indicate, there are a lot of clunkers here too. The game subscribes to the view that everything has to be a pun, and go figure, many of them seem forced. It’s not Edoras, it’s Fedoras; it’s not the Witch King, it’s the Which King?; and I already mentioned Doldrums, who besides boasting a really forced name also for some reason has a Cockney accent. I regret to have to report that there’s a “Riders of Lohan” joke. Look, I don’t want to come off like a humorless scold, and I think my appetite for silly Tolkien stuff is pretty high, up to and including having a favorite LotR-themed rap band. But still, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if it’d had more restraint; the authors clearly came up with a bunch of really good Tolkien jokes, but unfortunately felt like they had to crank out like double or triple that amount to meet their quota.
After a first playthrough it’s easy enough to skim over that stuff, and the bones here are solid; I’m tempted to give the game another spin to check out how the classic Frodo and Sam team would fare. And there are a couple of achievements I failed to get in my two playthroughs (oh yeah, forgot to mention, there are achievements too). One Does Not Simply Fry really is an embarrassment of riches, even if you do need to take the bitter along with the sweet.
Infernal laws, November 29, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I really enjoyed SV Linwood’s entry in last year’s Comp, A Long Way to the Nearest Star, but dinged it for having a generic title and forgettable blurb. Fortunately, there are no worries on that front this year – I already had a smile on my face when I booted this parser game up, looking forward to the promised mad science, demonological deal-making, and (most exciting of all) legal research. And that smile stayed there for the hour and a half it took me to work through all its puzzles – this is a delight, funny and satisfying in the way of the best comedy puzzlefests.
The setup here is a good one – brainy-yet-hubristic mortal treats with the devil for forbidden knowledge, desperately hoping to keep his soul – and could be played straight for a seasonally-appropriate note of gothic horror. That’s not what we’ve got here, though; Dr Ludwig goes for the laugh every time, and every time nails it – like, it took me five minutes to realize that it wasn’t the case that literally every description in the game started with a sentence with an exclamation point, just most of them. It’s the kind of thing that could wear out its welcome, but the game never comes close to that line, deftly slinging joke after joke. Like, here’s what you get when you examine your trusty mad-scientist’s coat:
"My favorite lab coat! After that accident while experimenting with pocket dimensions, I could carry so much stuff in it. And the bloodstains were very fashionable, too!"
(See, I told you about the exclamation points).
Crucially, the humor is almost all character-driven rather than embracing wackiness for its own sake; between Dr Ludwig’s crazed ambitions, the Devil’s sly insinuations, and the leader of the pitchfork-bearing mob’s punctilious adherence to the legal niceties, everyone’s got a slightly different schtick, and an in-world justification for being funny.
And actually, as with A Long Way to the Nearest Star, character interaction is a highlight. Beyond their comedy potential, the whole cast is winning, making you solicitous of their love lives and unfair work conditions even as you’re digging up their ancestors and plotting to violate all God’s laws. And the process of engaging with them is very smooth: Dr Ludwig is an Inform game, but it uses a TADS-style conversation interface where after greeting a character, you can ask them about a constantly-updating list of topics. This hits a nice sweet spot between the freeform ASK/TELL system and more-prescriptive choice-based menus, and you’re able to ask everyone about a wide variety of subjects. The devil is especially impressive; as the game starts, you’ve just summoned and bound him, meaning you can give him commands via the traditional DEVIL, DO ACTION syntax. I confess that I often struggle with these kinds of puzzles, but here the process was well-cued and impressively well implemented: I tried to catch the game out by attempting DEVIL, ABOUT, but was told “As powerful as the Devil is, even he cannot access meta commands” (I was able to get him to take inventory and maybe learned some stuff I shouldn’t have that way, but I can’t help but think the author left that in on purpose).
In fact implementation is a major strength throughout. I did find a single Inform-standard response that had been left in; everything’s rewritten in Dr Ludwig’s bombastic voice. TOUCH attempts fail, for example, because “I am a man of science! I am above such physical labor as touching things without purpose!” (again, see what I mean about the exclamation points?) And you’d better believe that you can LAUGH or CACKLE whenever you want.
The puzzles are similarly of a high standard. They’re mostly traditional object-manipulation challenges, save for the aforementioned get-the-Devil-to-do-your-bidding bits, but they’re well signposted via a dynamic (and funny) to-do list, and they almost all involve engaging with that entertaining supporting cast. Most of the game is fairly open, too, with multiple puzzles available at any one time, so it’s hard to get too stuck. There are two that gave me some trouble, one that could have used better clueing (Spoiler - click to show)(I hadn’t realized that I’d basically solved the shopkeeper’s puzzle by dropping the flyer, because I didn’t understand that the “someone” she was worried would see her reading it was me), and one that was harder than it should have been due to the single bit of awkward implementation I found (Spoiler - click to show)(you need to examine the unsuccessfully-made monster to find your scalpel, but the game refers to it as a “disappointment”, but it doesn’t accept that – or either BODY or MONSTER – to refer to it, requiring you to guess that it’s implemented as EXPERIMENT).
Those are quite minor complaints, though, and just the sort of thing that would be easy to clean up for a post-Comp release. And even in its current form this is an early highlight of the Comp – if you’re adamantly against comedy parser puzzle games, Dr Ludwig won’t change your mind, I suppose, but just about everyone else will have a great time with this one.
The war comes home, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
(Spoilers in this one)
What I like most about The Long Kill is its harshness. Oh, as always, I brought it on myself – there’s a trio of difficulty options at the beginning of this nicely-presented Twine game about a British sniper deployed in the Afghan War (the just-concluded one, that is), including story mode and a conventional “pick whatever choice you want” one. But no, I opted for “Sniper Mode”, where you have to do math and dice are rolled behind the scenes, so you can miss your shots even if you do everything right. And it’s not just the violence: the game has flashbacks and flashforwards to civilian life, and I fucked up my one chance to have a girlfriend because after winning her an elephant at a carnival shooting game, I thought she wanted me to show off and go double or nothing, but actually she was cold and wanted me to go home. Some of this may feel unfair, but who says a game about sudden, explosive death coming before you even have a chance to blink should embrace fairness as an ethos?
(OK, there’s an undo button, and I did use it once or twice, but I felt bad about it).
What I like second-best about The Long Kill is its obsessive focus on shooting. Again, this goes beyond the scenes set during the war. The protagonist – he’s given the uninspiring nom de guerre “Mister” – bonds with his father only through shooting targets and rabbits; as mentioned above, he tries to impress his not-girlfriend by shooting; when he interviews for a job, he talks about how shooting gave him great math skills; even when he takes on a home improvement project, the scene ends with him leveling a power saw and pulling the trigger. Mister is very, very good at shooting; it’s not so much that he’s bad at everything else as that there isn’t anything else.
What I like third-best about The Long Kill is the prose. There are some typos, but it manages to be evocative while sticking to a terse, militaristic style. This sentence is about 2/3 of what the game shares about Mister’s relationship with his father, but it communicates just about everything the player needs to know:
"Even without looking though you can picture the little non-smile, that happy frown he does when you do or say something he likes."
What I like least about The Long Kill is its fantasy of victimization. After an opening sequence where you support a house-raid that bags an important Taliban leader, Mister’s convoy gets hit by an IED and he’s captured alongside his unit. They’re subject to torture, and he’s given an ultimatum of teaching the enemy soldiers to be better shots, or his companions will be executed. It’s a queasily compelling sequence, even if it ends rather abruptly, and by making Mister weak and frightened, it finally renders him something close to human. But this was still a bad authorial choice. We know that in the flashforward, Mister has PTSD and a discharge, but there’s no need for a period of abjection to connect the precise, effective wartime operator with the haunted shell of a man; that’s just what war does. More damningly, this sequence creates an underdog narrative that inverts the far more common reality of the war – the number of Western POWs and casualties was miniscule compared to the Afghans captured, maimed, and slain (many, of course, were innocent, and many, of course, were not). To elide this reality, and instead opt for a shell game that seems to swap the positions of the players: that’s kid glove stuff. Not at all harsh.
A girl and her goat, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Oof. Despite being a sucker for libraries, knowledge, and (presumably) libraries of knowledge, I did not get on well with this one. The pitch is compelling: you’ve found a magical shrine that plays host to an all-knowing spirit, a collection of all the world’s wisdom, and a masked library attendant with a secret, and now you can ask to read any book you want. Wow! That is a lovely idea, and if the realities of implementation mean that of course the promise of “any book” can’t come close to being delivered, at least it’s a compelling illusion.
Sadly, after establishing the setup, the game quickly began to lose me. Partially this is because there are only three books on offer – specifically, two short-ish ones that establish the background lore of this fantasy world’s two major nations, delivered in DnD-manual style, and one long one that’s just the story of how your character came to the library, which of course you already would know and wouldn’t bother wasting time on. Partially this is because the prose doesn’t really live up to the fantastical premise:
"Your breath catches sharply in your chest as the last of the incantations die on the biting wind that whips around you. Streams of pale moonlight flicker in past the broken beams overhead, sending a cascade of sprawling patterns through the old, fractured glass. Ancient words scrawled onto a faded scroll bleed off the edges of their crumbling paper, spilling a black mist onto the cold stone floors which slips and slides into the dark corners of this dilapidated temple."
Adjectivitis, unvarying sentence structure, small grammar errors; it’s not awful but it’s not a high point either, and since the game is almost entirely walls of text – there are some engaging choices towards the endgame, but for the most part you’re either picking “turn to next page” or “turn to next section” – I really found myself wishing for better prose.
As for the content, I found the DnD manuals competent but rather uninspired. One nation is fantasy China, with the serial numbers not even filed off – the provinces are literally just real-world Chinese provinces. It’s got a whiff of Orientalism to it (did you know the lands of the East are ruled by “an ancient and magical dynasty”, that the people are “deeply spiritual and honor their ancestors above all else”, that they “practice martial arts as a way of harnessing [chi] energy”, and are ruled from a capital that is “a place of intrigue”?) but I think this is innocent; the country’s multiculturalism and openness to immigration are held up as a strength, and contrasted with the xenophobia of the western nation (which is Europe-flavored but not a direct insert of anyplace in particular; it’s just general fantasy bollocks).
It’s all serviceable enough, but unexciting to slog through, all the more so when the author occasionally loses track of the lore (there’s a bad-guy cult alternately called the “Band of the Dark Sun” and “Band of the Black Sun”) or draws too-direct inspiration from pop culture (there were a bunch of killings at a recent marriage, which has become known as the “Crimson Union”). And none of it actually winds up being all that relevant to the main part of the game, which is your character’s autobiography – the setting details are sufficiently straightforward that they could have easily been explained in the course of the story.
This bit does have some zip to it; it’s maybe paced a little slowly, and sometimes drops to bottom-line narration when writing out a scene would have been more effective. It also isn’t self-aware of how funny the premise sounds (you go on a world-shaking quest to find a cure for the ailing goat that’s your last link to your family); it’s offbeat enough to work well, but I think needed more time establishing the stakes and emotional connection between the main character and the goat. But once it gets moving, it executes YA-style fantasy novel tropes solidly enough; this isn’t my genre of choice, but even I got a kick out of the various double-crosses in the pirate section. Then things kicked up again after the story wraps, as the protagonist does face an actually-challenging set of decisions without a clear moral compass to make their choices easy.
As a result, my view of the game improved as it went on, but it’s still hard to recommend this one. The author’s got enthusiasm and some talent, but the game we’ve got feels too much like a first draft – there’s a lot of unnecessary cruft and an awkward frame that doesn’t cleanly mesh with the main substance of the story, along with prose that needs some polishing. Of course, every great game started out as a terrible first draft, so this is no bad thing by itself – but hopefully for their next game, the author will be able to spend more time figuring out what they need to say and what they don’t need to say, and revising their work to foreground the most compelling parts.
Legacy game, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
I’ve noted elsewhere that the Manichean parser/choice split has been breaking down in recent years, and Hand Me Down is a leading example of the trend: what we have here is a big old Twine-TADS-Twine sandwich, and despite the slight wonkiness that description might suggest, the narrative handles the transitions with aplomb. In the framing choice-based bits, you play a young woman who’s visiting her ailing father in a hospital oncology ward, while in the middle you play the text adventure he (and your partner) has written up as a gift for you, so the shift in platforms makes diegetic sense.
To its credit, the novelty of the game’s design never felt like a distraction. It helps that the various pieces are playing to their platform’s strengths, and even their stereotypes: the parser game is a lightly comic puzzle-‘em-up in the mansion of a whimsical relation, while the Twine bits deal with emotional family drama. On the technical level, I found the process a tiny bit convoluted, but largely because the author provided a lot of choices about how to play each bit; while I could have simply gone from one bit to the next via the game’s webpage, in my experience TADS games tend to be way better when played via the QTADS interpreter, so I the slight fussiness that came from deciding to download the game file instead is on me. And while there’s no state carried between the different pieces, given the setup, that’s not a feature I missed.
This isn’t exactly a game of halves, though – the two Twine pieces are much shorter than the meaty middle. That’s not to slight them by any means: I thought the opener efficiently sketched out the loves, annoyances, and fears between the various character, while providing scope for a few low-stakes decisions that nonetheless helped characterize the protagonist. And the finale sequence is an impressively open-ended conversation where you can choose to chat about what you liked (or disliked) about the text adventure, press your dad on his health and prognosis, or a combination of the two; while the game cues you towards positivity and escapism, at least it does acknowledge that your dad’s constant wisecracking and avoidance of hard topics is at least a bit problematic, so there’s some tension in how to navigate the discussion. But still, combined these two parts made up perhaps half an hour of my two with the game.
(I also can’t help but note that the Twine sections feature AI-generated character portraits; adding insult to injury, I didn’t think they were very good).
As for the text adventure, it’s an impressively realized artifact that does a great job communicating the fictional details of its construction: it’s a wacky puzzlefest set in the house where your dad grew up (very in line with the first parser game many folks write), and since it was originally intended as a gift for your 16th birthday, the main goal is for you to get an invitation, costume, and shareable gift to bring to your party. So if there are sometimes dumb jokes, overcomplicated puzzles, or implementation niggles, well, those are all to be expected!
Irony can only take you so far, but at least as to the first two potential issues, I think Hand Me Down succeeds. On the writing front, the joke-a-minute style lands more often than not, helped along by appealing, entertaining prose; there’s the inevitable puzzle where you need to search an unpleasant pile of compost, and of course you know there’s something in there, but the game’s going to drag things out:
"The only way to make this dark curiosity go away is meet it at the end. You thought you were used to the smell, a cross between vegetable corpses and bug barf, but nope, urk! there it is again, with a fresh layer of horribleness now that you’re getting closer."
There’s also an extended sequence where you have to follow a snail as he races to show you something that left me giggling.
As for puzzles, thought has clearly gone into how to balance the old-school feel with player accessibility. In particular, while there are five different invitations, costumes, and gifts in the game, you only need to get one of each to get to the ending, which takes a substantial edge off the difficulty. There are definitely some design approaches that are too hardcore for me – if you want to get a full score, this is the kind of game where you’d better LOOK UNDER the kitchen table without any prompting. I also signally failed to figure out how to interact with any of the computers I found, with USE COMPUTER or TURN ON COMPUTER being no help at all; turns out MOVE MOUSE is the way to go, which is a pretty granular requirement for something that shouldn’t be at all hard for the protagonist to accomplish. But since those puzzles were largely optional, I can’t complain too much about a design that allows more hardcore puzzle-solvers than I to have extra fun.
That third category, implementation niggles, did sometimes get more than niggle-y, though. There’s some minor stuff, like unimplemented objects (the narration calls great attention to a clock on a mantelpiece in one room, so I was surprised no such thing actually existed) and a takeable beam of sunlight. But the major issues I ran into were about disambiguation. I had to go to incredible lengths to manage such mundane tasks as unlocking a drawer with the key that clearly unlocked it, or reading the most recent of the dozen notes I’d picked up. Judicious inventory juggling got me through most of these challenges, but there were a few I simply had to write off because I couldn’t figure out how to communicate exactly which object I was referring to. I haven’t experienced anything this rough since playing Cragne Manor – and that had 84 different authors, none of whom coordinated with each other!
Those nearly-interchangeable notes bring me to what I think is Hand Me Down’s other missed opportunity. See, over the course of years, your dad has added what amount to diary entries into the game, musing on his relationship with you, his divorce from your mom, how he felt about his own dad… these are well written, and form the clearest connection point between the text adventure and the frame story, rewarding the diligent player with backstory and deeper emotional engagement to inform the eventual climax. But it’s pretty hard to find them – I only discovered about half – and because they’re embedded in a big, riotous puzzlefest, I found they didn’t have as much heft as they merited, because as soon as I read one it was on to the next complex challenge. I would have enjoyed the game more, I think, if the author had leaned harder into creating resonance between the frame story and the text adventure, so that it felt like progress through the parser game was more directly shedding light on the central character relationships.
That would have been a different game, though; and to be honest I have a hard time believing that the protagonist’s dad would have made a more modern, post-Photopia game instead of going back to the 80s text adventures of his youth. Similarly, if Hand Me Down doesn’t fully integrate and unify its disparate pieces, it’s still quite successful at the ambitious task its set itself. The game has heart, comedy, and clever puzzles out the wazoo; if the pieces don’t fully cohere, at least each of them is enjoyable on its own.
Birth of a Tory, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Per a Who song from 50 years ago, no one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, but a cavalcade of anti-hero based movies, TV shows, and podcasts sure are hopeful of filling the gap. Virtue, a UK-set Ink game by a debut author (and/or pseudonym), is the latest to step up to the plate, and it has novelty on its side: here our bad man is a bad woman, and per the blurb, one destined to be a Tory MP. Gloria, our protagonist, is a real piece of work – a status-conscious, property-value obsessed avatar of the bourgeoisie with opinions about Poles, Roma, you name it – and as she confronts, or rather fails to confront, a peeping-Tom incident in the tony neighborhood to which she just moved, her odiousness moves from the personal to the political.
She’s an unpleasant, anxious person, in other words and the game’s great strength is that it keeps just the right distance from her. The player is privy to all Gloria’s fears and hopes (there’s rather a lot more of the former than the latter), which are all sketched with psychological plausibility, but her subjectivity is kept at a remove; the narration weaves in snatches of thoughts and bits of dialogue, but there’s more telling than showing, which might not be the most literary choice but in this case provides the player with some much-needed psychic defenses. Like, here’s a bit where she’s contemplating the horribleness of anything threatening her cozy suburban dream:
"So much seems perfect—the proximity to the kids’ school, the quality of the location, the size of the house, the decoration, the conservatory, the new extension you’re planning, the new carpets, all the many book shelves, the TV that when you stop watching it dims and looks like a painting—the new kitchen fittings, the cooker, the plans to fell the tree in the back garden to give the garden more light—how can you face tainting and undermining any of that?"
The details are all well-observed, but the language is vapid enough to let the player off the hook (similarly, the author’s careful not to have anyone say anything too awful about the various minorities being demonized, though of course they’re thinking it). This isn’t due to a lack of writerly skill, I don’t think, but reflects a deliberate choice, because when the stakes are lower, the prose is more engaging. Here’s a bit of landscape description that I liked:
"Beyond two multi-million pound houses—and beyond the strip of garden belonging to the first house, which was lined prettily with pink bougainvilleas—the estuary turns and opens up in one large, swerving gleam."
At any rate, intentional or not I was glad of the distance because Gloria is a truly odious creature. After learning that a mysterious person has been lurking in the hedgerows and abusing himself while peeping on local women (which fact she discovers through an incredibly awkward conversation with her Polish neighbor), she launches a crusade to push the filth to finger a perpetrator, ideally by trawling the local Roma caravan for some suspects to fit up for the crime.
When that doesn’t work, she forms a busybody committee and catches the attention of the local MP. Her interactions with her family form a counterpoint to this more political strand of the plot, and these are likewise quite dour: she fights with her henpecked husband, infantilizes her much more self-aware daughter, and ignores her furtively absent son. This stuff by no means engenders sympathy, but does provide some context for the aggression she displaces onto those she finds insufficiently British (there’s an intimation that she was a victim of clergy sexual abuse while younger, which serves a similar purpose by giving her what seems to be an anxiety disorder and a persistent fear of impurity and inadequacy).
It’s an unpleasant but neatly-told story with its politics in the right place, I think. It doesn’t lean especially hard into interactivity; most passages end with a single choice leading to the next bit of plot, and those choices that do exist largely seem illusory. But the format does help establish the modicum of complicity that’s needed for the piece to work, so I think it justifies the author’s decision to write IF. I’d rate Virtue a well-done game that’s worth playing – but as always, I do have two caveats.
The first is that the game seemed to end quite abruptly, perhaps due to a bug? I reached the final section of the game, which is the meeting with the local MP, but after greeting him in the pub and deciding to have some white wine, the game simply stopped before getting to the substance of the meeting. This might have been a consequence for some poor decision-making, since the game seemed to be implying that I was insufficiently sloshed (I mean fair, I’d have to be three sheets to the wind to survive a conversation with a Tory backbencher) – there’d been an earlier option to have either a cuppa or some wine before heading out to the meeting, and I’d opted for the tea, and the horrible Tory was having a G+T because of course he was and I could have joined him in that rather than sticking to wine. But since the rest of the game’s choices felt fairly low-stakes, and the ending didn’t indicate he sent me packing for being too much of a lightweight or anything, it felt less like an anticlimax and more like a technical issue. Still, by that point it was clear where the story was headed so I don’t think this negatively impacted my enjoyment too much.
As for the other issue, it’s a broader one but also more nebulous, and it involves a spoiler – though one that the game’s own blurb comes pretty close to revealing, so I’ll omit the blurry-text this time. Turns out in addition to Gloria’s crusade being motivated by her self-esteem issues and general xenophobia, the game is pretty clear that the roving Onanist who’s kicked this whole thing off is her son Andrew, which a part of Gloria recognizes but refuses to confront, leading to her sublimating her denial into political action. I suppose it’s reasonable to consider that many reactionaries are the way they are because of deep-seated insecurities and a guilty conscience – and in some ways it’s even attractive to think that they’re just broken people dealing with trauma in deeply antisocial ways. So it’s all plausible enough.
But I can’t help but wonder whether this is a bit too pat. The blurb also says that this is an “origin story of a shameful MP” – it’s unsurprising that the complete ending appears to involve Gloria running for office as a knock-off Liz Truss – but really, do these kinds of people typically have origin stories? I think they don’t, or if they do, they’re less psychological and more tawdry: people born with unjust privilege realize they can maintain it by scapegoating others; people born without it realize they can curry favor by comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. We’re primarily dealing with material conditions, in other words, and in the post-Trump, post-Boris Johnson age, the idea that the enemies of democracy could work through their issues if they just got some therapy feels, I have to say, a bit naïve. And here, Virtue’s otherwise-praiseworthy decision to hold Gloria at a remove winds up being a negative, because a more literary take going deep into her subjectivity perhaps could have avoided this objection; since the didactic writing style invites us to view the game not as a character study, but as an object lesson, though, I think it’s harder to argue that Gloria isn’t meant as a type.
Let me emphasize once again this is a pretty rarefied complaint: “Virtue is insufficiently Marxist” isn’t a criticism that should prevent one from playing a smart, well-implemented game that made me think. Recommended!
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