baezil's IF comp '26 reviews (latest: Black Thumb)

[baezil]

This is my first IF comp as an active IF player/creator. I’m not a participant in this comp, though (we made that call three days before deadline), so I can really cut loose with my reviews, get REAL and RAW and really tell it like it is. Just kidding, this’ll be a lot like my other review threads: subjective responses to the works I engage with during the comp.

I wanted to say “games I play during the comp” just then, but reviewing Spring Thing entries earlier this year got me thinking about the degree to which some works were games and some really weren’t. I like that a single If event can have 23 Minutes (not a game) alongside Missing City Council (almost purely game, to its detriment). I started thinking about how IF works are all different mixtures of interactivity, fiction, and gamification. Just for fun, with my reviews I’m going to include a chart that roughly measures the degree to which those three qualities are present in a work. The chart doesn’t measure the success or the quality of each attribute, just the degree to which it’s present in/central to the work. It’s a rough, gut-check measurement, not a judgment.

Below are my definitions of the three elements (the three humors?) of IF, and some example charts using Spring Thing '26 games.

Interactive

I understand interactivity as the degree to which the player can change the game state. This can include the classic picking up/using objects, earning and spending currency, making choices that lead to one of several possible endings, or changing the text of a work in a way that affects the meaning (link cycling, e.g.).

Fiction

I understand fiction as the degree to which a narrative requires, justifies, or contextualizes gameplay. How central is the fiction to the experience? Could the gameplay happen without the story? Does the narrative inform or require the actions taken to solve any puzzles?

Game

I understand game to be the degree to which the experience has a set goal, the friction put in the way of progress, and the ability to succeed or fail.

For Example...

23 Minutes was a game (sorry, work, see, it’s hard to break that habit) in which you clicked the screen to view the next paragraph or verse of text. It was described by the author as an interactive poem. I quite liked it; other reviews were mixed. I think 23 Minutes’s chart would look like this:

Here the narrative is central to the experience. It’s all there is, really. There was no game (no goal, no ability to fail or succeed to varying degrees), and the only interactivity was clicking to progress the text, which doesn’t really count.

Enigmart was a series of puzzles presented in a light story, made in Twine, and a lot of people liked it. I don’t love puzzles, but I admire what the game was doing and the medium it used to do it. I think Enigmart’s chart would look like this:

The narrative in Enigmart was not central to the gameplay experience. Those puzzles could exist in isolation. Similarly, the interactivity was low; you didn’t directly alter the game state to a great extent. The puzzles, though, were very “high game.” There was a clear goal, and it was possible that a player was unable to solve them (at least without some hints).

Missing City Council was a very rough parser that gave the player absolutely no hints or narrative justification for its strange, highly specific puzzles. It was, understandably, not well reviewed. (I’ve come to think of it as accidentally incisive art that says a lot about parser game design, but this isn’t the place for my ‘MCC should’ve won Spring Thing’ rant.)

MCC would have very high game, fairly high interactivity, and very low fiction. Things happen, but there’s no no coherent narrative and no clear connection between the actions you take to solve the puzzles and the world or story in which those actions take place. It has high game, but that game was objectively bad because the goal wasn’t clearly stated, and that lack of connection between story and solution made the solutions feel arbitrary.

I hope this clarifies that this charts aren’t measuring quality and aren’t a rating, just a way to think about and visualize certain characteristics. Like a humoral chart, it’s not scientific.

Games reviewed:

Thirst for Blood, by Zeno Pillan

Quackpond, by Quackpond Admins

Necromanceers, by C.E.J. Pacian

Skeletrom Crew on the Loose!, by Kai Stewart

Black Thumb, by Bridget Hoang

[baezil]

Thirst for Blood, by Zeno Pillan

I’m obviously obligated to start with the bug game! In Thirst For Blood, you’re a mosquito looking to drink some egg-nourishing blood. The premise presents interesting challenges for the author: how to describe and navigate the vertical aspects of a mosquito’s world, how to present the PoV, what challenges to give the player.

The mechanics of the game were pretty simple: navigate, examine. The implementation is variable— smell indicates the direction of CO2 concentration, a description of a poster changes after examination, but a necklace is mentioned that doesn’t seem to exist, and the taste of the skin is referenced but “taste skin” gets you a default response. You can’t actively bite; it’s just something that happens after you enter a specific room. I liked the vertical aspect of the environment, and I liked that it didn’t always clearly map. (You have to go up, s, and then down to get to the neck, and can’t get there by just going S from the mid-height room.) It felt like the way a flying insect might map out safe flight paths. The directions weren’t consistently signaled, sometimes included in the room description and sometimes not mentioned at all, but overall it was fairly hard to get lost.

The ostensible goal here is to get blood, but there’s a sort of hidden goal that carries most of the game’s content. A points system encourages the player to explore entirely bloodless items, and while I like the concept of revealing what’s really happening through examining objects, but I’m not sold on how to game handles mosquito PoV. We aren’t really inhabiting a naturalistic version of a mosquito’s sensory or cognitive world, but we don’t get much characterization of the mosquito as an insectoid person, either. For example, gas concentration and heat are part of descriptions, but descriptions are still primarily visual. Mosquitos aren’t blind, but their visuals are attuned to IR/heat sources and are affected by smell; when you mistake a poster for a hole in the wall, through which you can see distant nude humans, it’s an unlikely mistake for a real squeeter to make. At one point you can read and interpret bloodwork results. Mosquitos being born as expert phlebotomists is funny, but later when you try to pick up a jewel you’re told it’s too heavy and "that’s not something an insect usually does.” Mosquitos don’t usually see a dolphin plush and reminisce about their own aquatic larval days, don’t recognize diamond cutters and lament that no one will listen to their true crime theories because they’re just a bug, either, though. And while you recognize these things, and have some thoughts about them, there’s no characterization. Forget the how of it all, why does this mosquito care? Does she have opinions about it?

IMO, the game would’ve worked for me a little more if it had either committed to the classic “critter that recognizes and has thoughts about human stuff” bit OR leaned into the dramatic irony of a mosquito who doesn’t understand much of what she encounters but which we, the players, are able to recognize.

Overall, the concept is fun, it’s a mosquito-bite-sized little experience, and I always love to see an invertebrate protagonist. This feels like a game that deserves a little more polish and attention to its tone, style, and implementation. It’s the sort of project that I hope the author revises and updates after the comp.

Now, on to the chart. As a reminder, the chart does not measure success or quality, just the degree to which each element is present in or central to the experience of this work.

Interaction — there’s not a lot to manipulate here, since you’re too small to take or use anything, and you can’t actively bite. You can examine things, and the vertical element of navigation is interesting, but interaction is fairly low overall (especially for a parser).

Fiction —Without the fiction, the real goal that incentivizes most of what you do doesn’t exist. The fiction is central to the experience. You don’t need the story for the initial “get blood” goal, so some of this game exists without the Louvre narrative.

Game - There’s a goal, sort of, but no serious friction in achieving it, and no ability to fail from what I can see. This work is about learning more about your surroundings, putting together the pieces, and imo the points system is there more to tell you when you’ve found everything that it is to really measure your success. You can leave without getting the points, but it also isn’t hard to do; while there are gamey elements here, they’re fairly light.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

I like this metric and look forward to seeing it applied!

[baezil]

Quackpond, by Quackpond Admins

Travel back with me to the relatively early internet. I’m 14. I spend my daily allotted hour of dial-up internet time split between Runescape and a Lord of the Rings-themed geocities message board built by a friend. There are maybe seven members (it’s invite-only); we use it to write nerdy roleplays, none of which we finish, and discuss the books/movies on which those nerdy Rps are based. At the time I’m horribly in love with the friend who made the site (I’ll be in love with them for another couple years; I’ll never do a thing about it). Meanwhile, one of the other members apparently has a crush on me, starts causing drama with the site creator in some kind of misguided rivalry. Parents get involved, it’s all weird and embarrassing, friendships end, and our little geocities site, like Middle Earth in the third age, enters its sad decline. This happened a thousand times, in a thousand different ways.

I really enjoyed Quackpond. It’s such an effective speedrun of this quintessential early 'net experience. The fact that you play as someone peripheral to the core relationships is so smart; most of the time, you were a bystander to this sort of thing, only realizing way too late how serious and messy and totally out of your hands the whole thing was. This is an experience that even younger folks will recognize; how many Discord servers have died this death? The difference is that back in my early teens, that there was no discord; these small communities had to be built, and a lot of us didn’t know how to do that. You relied on people who could code, or who knew html, and though friendships sometimes survived on larger forums or various IM services, most of the time these sites were like deep sea vents. When they went dark, the communities that had clustered around them just died out. We talk a lot these days about the internet being so corpo, and it’s true, but any ownership of the early web required skills that not everyone had. Enshittification still happened, in a way, but instead of ads it was immaturity, jealousy, resentment, poorly handled feelings or neurodivergence that made a site unusable. As soon as I saw the post about the site shuttered I had just enough time to go look at my duck (Doodle, a grey muscovy) one last time; I tried to play with him, got that final error. Ouch.

I love the way this game works. The gameplay is slight, but it works well, never overstays its welcome. I overuse “well calibrated” as a descriptor of small games, but this one is well calibrated, the perfect length to say what it’s saying, just enough variation in what your clicking on to hide the fact that you are just clicking on links. Writing and design are great, it was funny (there was always a duck song guy; the geocities creator’s brother was a duck song guy, actually, by which I mean he incessantly referenced that specific duck song), it made me genuinely sad. Great stuff!

The Chart

Interaction — You can play with or feed your duck, though I don’t think those numbers can actually hit 0, and you can add persistent text posts to the forum threads and determine the tone of the responses. What you write doesn’t matter, so you can break the illusion if you want, and there’s only one ending that you can’t change. Interaction is fairly low overall, though it feels more substantial if you lean into the role.

Fiction — The story is the experience here. This work doesn’t exist without the narrative, so I’m cranking that fiction dial all the way up.

Game - Your duck’s meters can’t hit zero (EDIT:I tried a “no playing with the duck” run and didnt hit 0, but I think you CAN hit 0 by visiting the duck page, neither feeding nor playing w duck, and then going back to the forum. Will investigate more tomorrow.), and the ending isn’t affected by your choices. You don’t really have a goal beyond “experience the story,” so game is cranked down to 0.

*mandatory disclaimer: chart doesn’t measure quality, just the degree to which each element is present

[lightsidegames (Polaris Storm (Games from the Lightside))]

Hey! I got curious, and I actually tested Quackpond to see if it was possible to hit zero. It actually is! I think you just somehow managed to get the most joyous duck of all time despite not playing with them which is really funny and I made an account just to say that.

I can’t include the image nor a link to the test duck due to the newness of my account(?) so I sound a little “trust me bro” but I swear I did actually test it.

[baezil]

Oh, shoot, no way! Okay, I’ll have to go back and play around some more, try and suss out what the decay rate is tied to, uncover the secret hardcore duck mood meta, lol.

[lightsidegames (Polaris Storm (Games from the Lightside))]

Good luck with the neglect experiments (insane sentence out of context), def let us know what you think’s going on there!

[baezil]

Okay, non-mystery solved, I thought you had to interact with the duck to progress the story, but just visiting the duck page ticks the progression forward, and you can run down the duck stats faster than I was doing. Hitting 0 doesn’t seem to have an effect on the rest of the game that I can see, but I like that you don’t have to actually read any threads; you can focus on your duck, then get a site shutdown page without ever knowing why.

Another side note, I downloaded the file to look at it in Twine, and the build is very neatly organized. The links are dense, naturally, but it’s all arranged in a very neat and readable way. Something to aspire to if/when I get back to Twine, lol.

[baezil]

Necromanceers, by C.E.J. Pacian

There was a moment when I realized how many custom responses this game was promising and was overwhelmed at the thought of how much work that would’ve been. Going through, it’s actually quite tightly controlled, with the branching limited to story content and the opportunity to find some names. It’s very well done; I didn’t notice seams stitching the variations to the “main” passages, and there’s more subtlety and depth to those variations than I first expected. The work is fairly short, and a chapter system makes it very easy to reply all or specific parts of the game, which I appreciate. The characters were engaging, and some of the subtle variations in the playthroughs was about learning how they reacted to things, the degree to which they could end up in different places. Characterization through multiversal iteration. I really liked this one overall.

I had two strong associations. First, I thought of Spring Thing’s Maybe You’ll Respect This Dead Person Instead. Necromanceers’ take on summoning dead guys is more complex, fleshed out, and variable than that game; it’s a fuller realization of the concept, which is neat! I liked in in MYRTDPI, and I wanted more, and Necromanceers did that for me.

Second, we’ve got to talk about the Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb of it all. There was a game in Spring Thing that so strongly reminded me of a series that, it turned out, the author hadn’t read; if that’s the case here, I’ll eat my twin in utero. This felt, in a lot of ways, like a Locked Tomb fan game, and Necromanceers invites this comparison, loudly, with its fantasy-space-religious-imperialist conflict, the cannibalistic “rules” of becoming a necromancer, the way the protag addresses a consumed soul in the narration, the relationship between the soldiers and the necromancer. The thing about Muir is that she goes pretty deep into the characters and (at least parts of) their world, and Necromanceers, probably due to the 2 hour time limit and the need to tightly control its scope, felt a little shallow. This game isn’t trying to delve deep into the psychology of its characters, but because you loop through at least sections several times on your playthroughs, I wanted them to feel a little more three dimensional, wanted more of an arc for them. Tabitha, for what it’s worth, didn’t fully agree with this critique, so I may be looking for something this work wasn’t trying to give.

I’ll also note that a pet peeve of mine is when people write anxious characters by prefacing their dialog with "um"s. In my experience the interruptions in speech are more varied (stutters, mispronunciations, hesitations) and often show up mid-sentence. Hitting a single speech quirk over and over feels unpolished (I associate the “Um, [rest of sentence]” bit with stereotypical fanfic style), and as the writing was otherwise solid it stuck out. I replayed several times, trying different summons, and what would’ve been a quibble on one pass become an irritation after the third or fourth time through; maybe this contributed to my perception of shallowness.

The Chart

Interaction - There’s at least one point in each chapter where you choose a summon, or make a choice that determines whether someone is alive or dead (and therefore summonable). The game does always end at the same point in the story, and choice and entering a name are the only forms of interaction (e.g., there are no items, no clear friendship levels or currency), and because the branching is tightly controlled there’s a clear limit to how much you can affect the game. Medium levels of interaction.

Fiction - This is a story, and everything else serves that end.

Game - There are goals here: collect names, see how many endings you can get. They’re optional, though; you can use the default summon and reach the end of the game, never trying out another name; though you can die, avoiding death isn’t really a big factor here. The summon mechanic is about unlocking story content that is basically optional. That means that this measures fairly low for gamey elements. (As a reminder: this isn’t a bad thing! I think that any more gamification would’ve undercut the pleasure of this game, which lies mostly in finding various little branches the author wrote. The chart “measures” the centrality of an element, not quality.)

[baezil]

Skeletrom Crew on the Loose, by Kai Stewart

Sometimes you find a work that’s doing something specific in exactly the way you like, and it connects with you so uncritically and immediately, that’s it’s hard to talk about why you like it. You’re too close to it, and explaining why you like it would require a self-dissection, mapping out the skeleton of your personality. I’m going to try, but maybe the best version of this review is simply, Idk, folks, this just really did it for me.

Skeletrom Crew on the Loose a spooky-fun bedtime story for adults, the essence of halloween specials and novelty songs presented with a unique and consistent authorial voice making a lot of wild choices. It’s silly, creepy, funny, cozy, occasionally earnest. I never knew what to expect next, but I was immediately delighted by everything that happened. At one point I said “oh, we’re doing Beowfulf now” out loud, and later I actually clapped when Kyle’s sunglasses dropped from the top of the page, clapped alone in my home like a fancy little lad at the theatre. Every route was totally different and just as enjoyable as the one before.

My instinct here is to temper my enthusiasm, say something like, Of course this is subjective, I know it’s not the most complex or ambitious game in the comp, etc etc. I feel self-conscious about my taste, sometimes; I’m both picky and impatient, and I struggle to focus my attention on more literary choice games or the crunchy and high-effort puzzles that often get a lot of (deserved) attention. But dang it, I think silliness and humor are really hard to do well and often underappreciated. So sure, maybe this one doesn’t seem as overtly ambitious as some of these behemoth parsers or more literary works sharing the comp stage, but it’s doing five different things, doing them all really well, and tying them together in a single aesthetically coherent experience, and it’s funny and clever! The little callbacks between the routes, the animations, the ASCII art animations/dance minigame… It’s really well done, it’s very much itself, and I loved my time with the skelethings. It’s early days yet, but I’m really, thoroughly charmed; it’ll be hard to unseat this as my personal fav of the comp.

My only real critique: I think this game would’ve really crushed in Ectocomp. I’m worried that here it’ll be underappreciated. It’s a little out of season, and it’s a pretty crowded field. I’d actually be really curious to read a post-mortem that talked about the choice to enter if here and not wait for Ectocomp.

Just kidding, one more critique: one of the passages (Dogs13) is bugged, and the link is broken because of some attempted bolding of the text. I had to DL the file and edit the passage to finish the dogs’ story. Hoping the author updates this at some point soon, I’d hate for it to be dinged for a fairly minor/easily fixed bug!

The Chart

Interactivity - there are a few branching choices that lead you to a different ending for certain characters, and a click to dance mini-game, but these are mostly flair.

Fiction - we’re here for the story; stories, really.

Game - I don’t think there’s a “game” here, not according to the definition used for these charts (a specific goal, with friction that must be overcome and the possibility of failure).

[JoshGrams]

Yeah, I finally e-mailed the comp organizers about the bug since there’s no other contact info for the author and they don’t seem to be on here, and Jacqueline said they’re passing it on.

[Pacian]

@baezil

Second, we’ve got to talk about the Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb of it all. There was a game in Spring Thing that so strongly reminded me of a series that, it turned out, the author hadn’t read; if that’s the case here, I’ll eat my twin in utero.

You’ve given me food for thought here, because, yes, you can put your twin down, I have read and loved The Locked Tomb.

I wasn’t consciously thinking of it when I made Necromanceers, but I guess it’s interesting to wonder how ideas form and end up the way they do. To pick an example you didn’t mention, when I asked myself the question, “Where is an interesting place for the dead to go?” I answered, “How about something like that river full of ghosts in Metal Gear Solid 3?”, and so I gave my world a River of the Dead. And why not abbreviate that sometimes to just “the River”? Which I now remember is the afterlife in the Locked Tomb series… I had felt like I had a broad spread of influences on this story, but perhaps it is more directly inspired by something than I realised…

[baezil]

@Pacian

so I gave my world a River of the Dead. And why not abbreviate that sometimes to just “the River”?

This is really funny, and also very relateable!

I should say that I do not think the similarities are a bad thing, and there’s a vibe and purpose in Necromanceers that’s very much its own thing! Muir is open about having a lot of influences, so it could be more of a case of convergent evolution. Idk if you’ll do a post-mortem, but I’d be really interested in other things that inspired Necromanceers!

(Also, Gnar is my favorite!)

[baezil]

Black Thumb, by Bridget Hoang

Interesting! This sort of vaguely metaphoric reverie is more the domain of choice-based games, and it’s neat to see it done in a parser. I think there’s a reason for that, though; parsers are finicky beasts that only want to make puzzles. Parsers are horrible little gnomes that are always whining that if they don’t make one puzzle every five minutes they’ll die, and then you let them make a puzzle and try to compile it and they grovel and perish dramatically, muttering about errors “bubbling down off the tree.” Parsers are finicky perverts to a one, and the sort of fiddly business that those icky little goblins just loooove really harshes the airy and poetical vibe. (Is it obvious I’m still a little bitter about how strangely, inconsistently buggy our would-be IF Comp entry was?)

This game is not buggy, and for what seems like a first effort there’s a really nice attention paid to the implementation. Still, even in a two room, fairly sparse setting there’s a little implementation and synonym jank: a few “nothing special abouts” and the “didn’t understand that verbs,” the plant pot being a container that has a description mentioning the succulents and which also reports its contents (succulents). Some of this game’s funk comes from concessions to the parser’s inherent depravity; your room’s window is locked and requires a key, which I’ve never seen irl, and trying to unlock the window for the first time (sans key) told me I’d attempted to do so with the succulent care card. (If keyhole window locks are one of these “everyone does this outside of the US and CA” things, sorry! EDIT: Apparently this is the case. Never assume!)

Elsewhere, it was a matter of the author deciding on a chain of logic that seemed counter intuitive. Generally, things are insulated from the outside, for example. My various attempts at insulating the jar (wrap yarn/glove around pot, put glove on jar, etc) were met with various non-responses until I tried “take all” for the second time and automatically stuffed papers into the pot. This did the trick, though why I’m not sure.I’d have loaded this baby down with synonyms, synonyms for DAYS; I’d want to make this initial stages as easily accomplished as possible, because the pleasure of this game isn’t really in the finding the exact right verb/phrase/slightly irrational action, is it? That can be pleasurable, but here it seems to clash with the intended tone. The puzzles aren’t the draw here, surely, more a means to an end?

With one exception. The payoff here is-- well. First: if you plan to play this game but haven’t yet, please do not, as I did, click to unblur this spoiler. Because I spoiled the payoff, which is that you’re supposed to take the sun right outta the sky. Which is neat!I think it would’ve been more effective without so much fiddly parser business up front. Everything is building to it, and struggling to untangle the blankets in an attempt to insulate the jar stalled that conceptual flowering.

That’s a lot of critique, sorry! It’s easier to talk about the little frictions than the story, which is vibey and intriguingly opaque. I have an interpretation, but it doesn’t account for the PC being a teen. Similarly, succulents thrive on carefully measured neglect, in my experience, so succulents as a beings of excessive and destructive desire is a Choice that hints at a specific intention or idea the author was working with. I’ll chew on this one for a bit, and probably never come up with a satisfying interpretation. I critiqued this game for its clashing procedure and tone, but I think the parser elements actually make the opacity of the story less… frustrating, maybe? I don’t mind a story that makes you say “well, huh,” but I think if this were a straightforward Twine click-to-proceed it just wouldn’t land with the same weight. Despite the paragraphs above, I think this might work best as a parser, actually? Hm, I’ve written myself into a 180 change of mind, which I think means this work is working. There’s Something Going on Here, and I appreciate it.

The Chart

Interactivity - As a parser, everything you do interacts with the world model: examining objects, taking and combining, unlocking. There’s no novel verbs or innovative systems here, but you do need to manipulate things around you in a few different ways.

Fiction - the vibey narrative is at the center, but it sometimes feels detached from the actions you take to actually progress. Fiction, for the purposes of the chart, contextualize, justifies, or requires the actions taken to progress through the work. The climactic action feels most resonant; opening the window could be left out without affecting the story.

Game - It’s definitely a game. You need to figure out specific things to achieve a specific goal (get your succulents more light). The slight vagueness of that goal, and the relative ease with which you can achieve it, keeps it from being very high game.

[DamonWakes (Damon L. Wakes)]

@baezil

(If keyhole window locks are one of these “everyone does this outside of the US and CA” things, sorry!)

These are really quite common in the UK. It’s more likely to be a Yale lock than a big old-fashioned keyhole, though, if that makes any difference.

[baezil]

Well there you go, who knew? (Statistically, probably most people.) I’m sure it happens here, too, somewhere, but I’ve only ever seen windows secured with a simple latch. Interesting!

[DamonWakes (Damon L. Wakes)]

Often the lock is set into a button that has to be pressed to open the latch, and realistically I think that’s probably the more effective element: it’s trivial to press and turn from the inside but would probably be a real pain if stretching an arm in to open a large window through a small one or something. You certainly couldn’t do it with a bent coathanger or whatever.