JJMcC's 2026 R-A-T-A-T-O-O-T-Y

[jjmcc]

GET MANIFE$TO by Matt Bee
Style: Parser
Played: 7/8/26
Playtime: 2hrs, score 450/1000, blunzed, stuck and quit

Here is a smattering of things you will do in this game: mix a cocktail, murder with radioactive piss, unsuccessfully engage a punk rock lizard man. That sounds fun, doesn’t it?? It is! For a while. The work is an absurdist romp of trying to escape a lab after some apocalyptic accident. Its tone is probably its strongest asset. The whole thing is light, breezy and unserious, and never wavers in this (though some mileage may vary in the gruesome death scene? My mileage is just fine here.) The text is disciplined - area descriptions are concise, exposing their noteworthy details without obfuscation. The jokes are disciplined - short, poppy punchlines like, “He died the way he lived: full of radioactive piss.” All in all a very joyous text world to inhabit.

For a while.

The gameplay itself is a little less disciplined. There are many missing nouns and synonyms. The ASK ABOUT… command is provisioned, leading to expectations of NPC interaction which are RESOUNDINGLY unfruitful. And game play cues are deeply uneven. The work asks you to do many bonkers, unobvious things. This is very much of a piece with its bonkers tone, and usually quite fun. However, coaxing the player to TRY bonkers things is a but of a hurdle. Sometimes stray notes or object descriptions will cue things. Sometimes those cues are buried in hidden objects. Many times you just need to try stuff and see what happens. The effect of this is to leach away the light tone into slog territory. It took me an hour and a half to accomplish two (linked) multi-step puzzles. It took me another half hour to revisit exhausted territory, coming up empty on what I presumed to be the final puzzle. Absent HINTS or helpful NPCs it is a shotgun approach to gameplay. Quite often failure is rewarded with humorous rejections, softening the blow a bit, but on excessive repetition the charm leaks away. This is the kind of game CRYING for a walkthrough. Because its tasks are absurdist nonsense (in the best possible sense!), the prospect that players will not tumble to the unique brand of required lunacy looms large. A walkthrough (or robust hint system) is the best way to nudge players past that barrier, to keep the lively, fun vibe steaming along.

All in all, I really liked the light, fun vibe of this piece but felt its often opaque gameplay undermined it a bit. In turn stretching its playtime beyond what its humor could sustain. A churning, methodical plod through the locations is kind of the opposite of the breezy lark its text advertises. As a mental exercise, I do kind of wonder if I HAD finished the game, would its charms have prevailed? They just might. I don’t actually have a way to measure it, but it FEELS like the enjoyment gap is just less than an ‘I WON’ quanta. So more talented players, you are likely to have a better time than I did!

I will stay tuned to other reviews, and if I spot clues to finding the keypad code after getting blunzed might test my I-WON-quanta theory. If not, there are enough charms here that I do look forward to the author’s next effort.

POST SCRIPT: There is an amusing meta answer to the 'What is the title referencing, actually?" question as the author provides their own manife$to of sorts of successful IF creation. I feel like maybe there could be one more part to it?

EDIT: forgot transcript
gm_jjmcc.txt (57.3 KB)

[jjmcc]

The Uncle Sam Atrium by alyshkalia
Style: Visual Nonfiction
Played: 7/15/26
Playtime: 5m

There is some art (if not MOST art) that only flowers into fullness when you understand its context. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a harsh fable of power corrupting until you have a deeper understanding of the Communist Revolution in Russia. The Last Waltz was the 1978 film of The Band’s final* live performance, a marathon concert with a stunning array of high wattage guest musicians showcasing an act whose connections to that era of music ran deep and wide. The concert was a powerful musical statement on its own, but it is made that much more powerful when the film dives into the career and personalities of the artists.

Of all the arts, perhaps architecture is the most bound by this dynamic. This makes some kind of sense. Of all the arts, architecture is the BIGGEST. It is an endeavor of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people creating something so outsized to human scale that its artistic statement can’t help but strive in proportion. It is bound by physics in a way few other arts are, its defiance of such a culmination of contemporary material science and static engineering. Simply CREATING something that large requires resources only possible on a grand scale, often limited to collective government. (And where not, that too becomes a remarkable aspect of its statement.) Beyond funding, land allocation and zoning must be navigated, deeply integrating politics and so the mores of the times into its bones. And the active creative span can stretch across decades if not centuries. With such a span, history inevitably leeches into the artistic statement as well.

“Wow, reviewer, you got all that from a 5-minute Ren’Py piece?” I mean, yeah. I don’t NORMALLY just sit around thinking up stuff like this. USA (wait, THAT’s the acronym for this???) is a contemplative piece experienced as a Visual Novel except Real. It starts by introducing us to the most time-bound of projects, a 1980’s vintage shopping mall now in deep decline. Then it jumps us backwards to expose the historical, political and social context of it, ultimately introducing the idea that at conception the COST of such endeavors are are no better understood than the ultimate VALUE of the completed piece. Both must be negotiated by history and society.

Translating art from one media to another is a fraught prospect. See also 2019’s Cats movie. USA is focused on the CONTEXT of its subject rather than trying to somehow recreate architecture in words and pictures. And yet, the words and (super evocative) pictures can’t help but tickle our brains and flesh out our appreciation. The building is not an UNinteresting piece, and its photographic presence alludes to that. USA is a piece as much about local government’s best if all-too-narrow intentions, what they are willing to pay for them, and the ultimate large scale crapshoot these things become. It becomes simultaneously a cautionary tale of ill-considered consequences and an almost nostalgic look at civic hubris.

I think its really cool that a work this short and focused generated all this noodling. Just don’t read those last two lines of the previous paragraph without context. That just makes me sad.

* ok in the music industry there is no such thing as ‘final,’ not even death. Final in its classic composition.

[jjmcc]

Saintsridge Angels by Atreyu Celestine
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/15/26
Playtime: 2.5 hours, 5 (of 9 I think?) chapters complete, bailed

Horror’s most glaring Achilles Heel is often its slavish fealty to PLOT. Makes sense. Plot ends up doing a lot of work in Horror - it needs to set the stage so that all the extremes of its mechanics become viable in an otherwise recognizable world. Thanks to the Hollywood Formula, it often feels compelled to deliver shocking setpieces. twists and escalations to push us from horror to terror. Then there is the mood of the piece. The plot is responsible for perhaps half of the mood (alongside textual texture or scene staging and framing) too. If allowed to drive a work unrestrained, this is where "Ooh, I think I’m going to explore the strange noises in the dark basement in my negligee’ " comes from. Yup, in some horror tales, the first victim is CHARACTER.

For a while SA made me think this is where we were. The work opens with a seeming fourth wall-breaking sequence that telegraphs its scary intent. While the text of it seemed to be striving to set a mood, it ALSO seemed to want to keep the actual mechanics of the story in shadow, presumably to reveal at the plot-appropriate time. This is not an unheard of tactic, but it is a balancing act. Too little concrete details and it becomes too obtuse to impact. Too much and your later surprise is neutered. I found SA to lean to the former, though it did do one turns-out-crucial thing. It let us know we were in a horror story in the first place.

That became kind of easy to lose track of through the first two hours of gameplay. In that extended window, the work’s focus is on character and setup. An anemic (medically, not narratively) male protagonist is reacquainted with a childhood friend and college classmate with whom he had lost touch, who presents the opportunity to move into a woman’s “sorority” of sorts. The work spends a lot of time attempting to reassure us and the cast (and the protag!) that this is not creepy. I can’t decide if it ultimately succeeded at that, or if it only seemed to work in relation to other troublesome elements.

Before I get too far, let me sidebar into gameplay. As a choice-select work, there are really three main mechanisms in its employ: shading of protagonist responses to situations and dialogue; echoes-of-dating-sim NPC interaction prioritization; and optional thought/memory asides to add context to the situation. And of course page turning. PLOT looms large over all of this, ultimately deprioritizing ALL of those mechanics such that when they show up it feels like seasoning on an otherwise pre-planned meal. While not necessarily a bad choice, the implementation of those mechanisms kind of undermine the work’s impact.

The dating sim gameplay is the most glaring in this regard. Let me be clear I do not think the game WANTS to be a dating simulator. That impression seems roundly rejected by chapter 5. Here’s the thing. The setup plays baldly to anime ‘harem’ story beats. Guy-in-midst-of-all-girl-cast, an array of female personalities that start as tropey cutouts, varying levels of initial acceptance that turn into attraction, fanservicey/winking wardrobe and flirting. This is further underlined by the anime-styled NPC illustrations. It is further FURTHER underlined by chapter breaks where you can see the current “Bond” level you share with each of them. Suggesting how you prioritize your facetime and responses you will ‘progress’ with each female roommate. I honestly don’t know if this gameplay is intentional or not. Ok, OBVIOUSLY the mechanics were coded in by the author, that’s not an ACCIDENT. What is unclear to me is if they want all the player EXPECTATIONS this builds or not. The work doesn’t really reward this kind of gameplay, not through 5 chapters, nor does it subvert it in any narratively interesting way. It’s allowed to run unfettered, coloring our engagement with the world in a way that often runs pretty at odds with the underlying horror beats.

The protag-response choices are a more subtle complication to the work. Many of the responses seem to fall into the ‘be a dick or not’ dichotomy. I don’t play a lot of dating sims, but the ones I have played seem to lean pretty heavily on DON’T BE A DICK == WIN. The choices presented here undermine the dating-simminess, as often they result in no change in ‘BOND’ which casts doubt on that aspect. Just as often, many interactions end being between SHADES of dickishness. You-the-protag are not allowed NOT to be a dick. Most of these kinds of choices appear during conversations, where choice-select most often lets me down generally. It provisions unattractive choices and fails to provide options I would ACTUALLY want to select, ultimately PRETENDING I can tailor the protag when not really. Constrained, unattractive choices can absolutely be used effectively in IF. Understood! Our protag is a DICK! Except just as often less extreme options ARE available, making for a discordant character. The choice architecture has the effect of scrambling the protag’s demeanor and motivations so wildly as to make his character an inconsistent enigma. As a typical example, here is an interaction where one NPC is helping the protag move, and suffering under the box weight.

[protag] “Yeah? Cuz I’m dying over here. You sure this is no big deal?”
[NPC]"Not at all! I- gh-... -I wanted a workout anyway."

Here are your possible protag responses:

• This bitch.
• What a showoff.
• I wonder if I can make this worse for her.

This is a character with whom a lowkey flirtation has been the primary dynamic until now. If any of those are intended to be playful, neither cuing nor subsequent choice text supports that.

Plot does this too, by the way. The NPCs present wild, inconsistent swings in characterization throughout the piece. For a while all this dissonance has the effect of reminding us we are in a horror tale – its uncanny-valley weirdness providing an unsettling mood that reminds us of the intro. It just doesn’t seem very intentional in its contradictions. A big example is when some (mild) physical violence erupts between the girls. Every NPC’s response is so specific, and in some cases extreme, that not only is it unconvincing as a human interaction, it ALSO establishes character relationships to violence that are later blithely contradicted without comment or dramatic effect. I mean, just soap opera levels of slapping here.

I think given how many paragraphs I am already in, I’m just going to cut to the chase. I found there to be a lot of unconvincing moments, mostly in character but definitely in plotting as well. Partially in baffling scene setting (at one point the college setting is qualified with "It’s unheard of for a campus to be idyllic enough to find students sunbathing on the front yards, " Is it? That is one of my core memories and I didn’t even attend a CALIFORNIA SCHOOL). Partially in drastic consequences to banal choices (try NOT moving into the sorority).

But mostly in the pacing of the thing. Successful horror, most specifically horror that is content to shortchange human characterization, needs to HAUL ASS. It’s got to MOVE, keep your knuckles white and your eyes unblinking. This is… not that. There is timed text I initially enabled, but became too intrusive even for my receptive sensibilities, only to discover it was still maddeningly draggy after ‘disabling.’

There are extended scenes of a dance performance and soap opera watching that provide little plot or character utility, executed in belabored detail. There is an entire CHAPTER of playing a boardgame whose elaborate descriptions waver between board- and computer-game paradigms so wildly as to render it unconvincing, and ALSO provide little in the way of character beats we had not already seen. Nor do they seem to serve the harem-bond mechanism (though that could be an artifact of my choices.) These really extended scenes go on and on for pages of marginal interaction and have the effect of diffusing the cloud of horror while either serving no narrative purpose or piling more contradictions into the characters.

During Chapter 5, this confoundingly slow and contradictory pace suddenly explodes into bloody chaos. Yes! Comes from left field but now we’re in it! Only the massive fight scene both beggars credulity in the protag’s violent response to strangeness and also itself goes on and on. The blocking of the fight slowly loses tension in screen after screen of more and more fight, to little advantage and painfully slow knowledge increase.

This is kind of a drag to write about, I can only imagine how tiresome it is for you, the reader. “No one is MAKING you be an ass about this, reviewer..” That is true. I think I feel compelled to highlight my dissatisfactions because despite all that whining up there, there is something here. When not being contradicted there are some really nice character beats across the board, including some really sweet flirting. The central mystery of the protag and his childhood friend is intriguingly crafted. The use of color and mouse-over was very effective in managing the early NPC explosion. The post-dance setpiece is anchored by a really unsettling supernatural element, and a terrific plot twist that was effective in SPITE of weirdly paced back story. I hope we can get past the negativity and see I am trying to be exhaustive and specific in the hopes my feedback might lead to an editing cycle to sharpen the whole thing to its full potential. To my eyes if some more intentionality were applied to gameplay, consistency in character, and narrative pacing, there could be a lot to enjoy here.

Either taking us away from “Let’s hide behind these chainsaws” towards grounded atmospheric work or embracing it in service of a thrillride, this is a work primed for an Eldritch Editor to defeat the darkness!

I grabbed a few typos and awkward grammar, but was not very consistent about it. For author:

gleamed
“Remind me (to) look at that when I’m done eating.”
tanish-brown
consecutive dialogue: “Uh… couldn’t tell you.”
“So, you liking ADA so far?”

[jjmcc]

Lewd Mod: No Butts (demo) by HH Richards
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 10m, one mis-classified image

By all accounts, human moderation of social media is DIRE. In some ways it suggests to me an SVU-like policeman. Your entire job is to expose yourself, day after day, to the worst humanity has to offer. Then go home and pretend you HAVEN’T been marinating in depravity all day. How could it NOT impact one’s world view and mental health? Having to navigate the moving line between merely-reprehensible and actively-evil, a line whose very framing is some combination of corporate double-speak and Lynchian corruption? Adult/pron sites have a particular flavor of that where exploitation and human trafficking loom large over the submission pool. As anti-AI as I am (and BOY AM I), if I thought human depravity were a solvable algorithm this is one application I’d acknowledge as vital. Of course its not solvable though. So what is the point of you, AI, if you can’t even help with this?

This demo is very evocative of another game by this author, perhaps the entire series - in gameplay, tone and graphical presentation. As in the other, you are asked (via a cell phone/remote work paradigm) to screen and flag images that adhere to some guideline. Previously, it was identifying a marker that indicated ‘spy.’ Here it is enforcing increasingly permissive decency guidelines. In both cases, the image submissions are mostly of women enjoying some exhibitionism. What made the previous game work was its tone: it seemed beamed over from another universe, the ‘gleeful sexuality only’ universe where a pervasive joy and unapologetic horniness infuse every aspect of life. That tone is very much in evidence here, from the increasingly explicit selfie submissions demanding your evaluation, to a giggly ‘send N00dz!!’ flirtation with your boss.

This is about the best possible tone for these kinds of things, and remains a strength of the proceedings. The images are.. representational? Cartoony, but smacking of digital filtering of real photos. Or rotoscoping-esque. One of their more subtle aspects is to typically only present eyebrows and mouth to convey expressions. No eyes. This choice is interesting - it kind of mutes the humanity of its subjects and abstracts them to purient objects of Gaze. That impulse is certainly… a choice, one that could be actively offputting if not for the winking humor (and uncomplicated lipstick grins) surrounding it. All in all, I felt this shared the strengths of its companion work, as well as its limitations. If you are looking for a titillating diversion, these works attempt to skirt the most problematic aspects of online erotic images and underline the humor and fun. They mostly succeed at that. Female body focused? Yes. Statistically, that’s where the money is. So all that remains is to decide if YOUR sexuality is compatible with this.

For me though, by centering image moderation as its driving conceit, this work remained a bit more haunted by its darker real-world counterpart than the spy-fantasy of the previous work. Just enough of a pall to compromise its specific charms.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Oh, you were really close to winning this, though I think you missed a fair number of optional points! You just need to FLIP the whiteboard and READ it while blunzed to get the code (it’s a word, not numbers, which stymied me for a second before I went back over the description and saw it’s specifically referred to as an alphanumeric keypad.

[jjmcc]

recombinatorial by 30x30
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 5m

One of IF’s venerable capabilities is the use of interactive presentation to meter the pace of the work, in the most successful cases using that pacing to make a statement. Sequential art (just say it, comic books) truck in this too, using visual cues, frame design, lines and shadow to usher the eye across the page to specific pacing effect. Every now and then, someone comes along and creates a new visual vernacular that is so effective its novelty never seems to expire, and it becomes just part of the visual language. Will Eisner famously innovated continually through his career, expanding the vocabulary for everyone.

In IF, this vernacular is in page size, link usage, graphical layout of words, fonts and colors. And yes, timed text. (Perhaps heretically, I maintain effective examples of such exist! Just because a knife is dangerously sharp doesn’t mean it can’t be wielded to effect!) These tools are so familiar and pervasive, it is easy to think perhaps all of them have been discovered. Easy as it might have been for illustrators to think Little Nemo and Krazy Kat had exhausted the visual palette.

This work kind of did the unthinkable for me. It invented a new pacing convention that worked like gangbusters. This work is peppered with links, rendered in dark brown on a black background. The effect is to have them register to the eye, but be all-but- illegible. Clicking the link has the effect of turning them white, integrating them into the surrounding text. The effect is to slow the eyes down, demand an excavation of the reader, and subsequently put some weight on the discovered text beyond their plain meaning. It is an analogous effect to underlining passages or ALL CAPS-ing them, but with the added element of active reader participation and discovery.

How cool is that??? SO COOL. An interactive paradigm I have never seen before? It feels innovative and I kind of hope there isn’t any prior art. Yes, to put it on the scale of Will Eisner’s accomplishments is clearly hyperbole. But I wasn’t alive then, was i? As exciting as this was for readers of his day, I inevitably want to consider the impact on contemporary ARTISTS. That kind of watershed revelation, of unsuspected new frontiers in expression? Can you fault me for wanting to be in the vanguard of a taste of that? What a letdown if it exists elsewhere. Never tell me.

I say this because the thrill of this unfamiliar technique is my most dominant impression of this work. The narrative is loosely of a young mariner observing a cruel massacre on a beach as they are morbidly compelled to a singular path. Befitting its experimental UI elements, the work is abstract, poetic and impressionistic. This particular author has a history of battering aside my deeply ingrained resistance to poetry. For some reason, here this effort was less successful. I can’t quite suss out if I was so enamored of the innovative UI that I couldn’t spare the effort to push out of my comfort zone, or if the nature of the narrative and protagonist’s mindset just didn’t land for me. There are still banger phrases to enjoy like “flashlight under covers, red capillary net, light behind your eyes” but the impact of the narrative ultimately eluded me.

Which brings us back to the UI where the impact did NOT elude me. On the ‘final’ page of the work, after rounds of joyous experimentation, suddenly some links DID have function. Narrative function! The surprise of this somehow pushed the bounds just that much further! Clearly, I found recombinatorial worth my time as a showcase for an unfamiliar interactive paradigm. Narratively, I reserve gushing for subsequent implementations. Hey, Eisner had his critically lauded successors too.

[jjmcc]

Sleepless in the Sapphire City by Coral Nulla
Style: Visual Novel without pictures
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 30m, finished

“isn’t it freeing
to be unwanted?”

I need a word for stream-of-consciousness that doesn’t actually try to capture the reality of thoughts and impressions but generate the IDEA of it. Ok, we have the word POETRY that general aspires to this general effect - of capturing emotion through idea indirection. Long time readers will note with trepidation that this word is loaded if not pejorative for this particular reviewer. I was hoping there was a word SPECIFICALLY for stream of consciousness musings, to let me run at this review without having to endlessly apologize for my unaccountable blind spot.

This is a tale of a vampire’s night, rendered in stylized text and grammar. Its seeming goal, which it honestly succeeds admirably at, is to convey an OFF kind of mindset for these predators, to put the reader in their perspective and through their eyes paint a skewed picture of familiar reality. I actually found it quite good at this. It felt less like a narrative than a slice-of-unlife, its ultimate goal being a hallucinogenic experience of life adjacent to our own.

The formatting of the piece helped this. Organized into three columns, each with their own font and color palette, we are given narration, environmental/sensory grounding, and internal dialogue. We continually bounce among the three, their inputs playing off each other to convey the whole of the experience. The internal dialogue in particular stands out, as the font is just slightly blurry, its lack of clarity contrasting to the sharper inputs to the left to really sell the murky consciousness of the protagonist. There are links to follow, though to my experience they inevitably loop around so the intended narrative is a consume-all-the-words one. But, by allowing the player some small latitude to pursue one thread over another it reinforces and aligns the player with the protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness POV. Our thoughts go where they pull us, unless forced by external stimuli or task focus. I found this to be an extremely effective use of interactivity to underscore and reinforce the narrative aims.

Because I invoked the word POETRY above, I put a big ol’ Damoclean Sword above this review, didn’t I? Sike! Here’s some sample quotes that landed square for me:

“and the stronger people believe
that washing liquid means forgiveness”

“I wonder now: is Female a brand?”

Poetry in the idea abstraction sense, not the rhyming sense, and more often than not really working for me. So you don’t suddenly picture me with beret and bongo drums, let me equivocate that it wasn’t 100% successful.

“A paradox:
the space for which no-one longs
is a space in which nobody looks.”

Is it a paradox? IS IT? (It is not.) Still kinda evocative though. Notwithstanding that face-saving example, the spell this work cast, as the sum of its presentation, interactivity and evocative phrasing, really worked for me. Not a vampire-stan. Dislike poetry. Yet this poetic, impressionistic Nosfera-tale totally landed the plane. I CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

[jjmcc]

A Train to Piccadilly by Marco Innocenti
Style: Parser
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 5hr, finished with MANY hints

It has been a while since I have had my russophiliasis tweaked. Turns out it is not an affliction that time can cure. In Piccadilly we are thrown into an alternate history where Germany won WWII. But wait! This is no modern-Nazi tale, perhaps the most traveled of alternate histories. No, the Third Reich ignobly collapsed after Hitler’s death, though not before dealing America a fatal blow, ushering in a global SOVIET hegemony! Better, it is nominally set in 1986, conjuring late Cold War atmosphere and paranoia. Our protag is a member of the resistance (hell yeah!), sent on a mission to somehow undo this historical anomaly.

I should start out by saying the setup is simultaneously confused and concise. Confused in that technologies are wildly anachronistic, including some ridiculous time warp/teleportation fantasy tech. Concise in that cut scenes, discovered histories and environmental details are CONSTANTLY reinforcing the oppressive soviet atmosphere and bona fides, to my sensibilities via well chosen and economical details. What it does oh so right is straight-face its bizarre and discordant elements, and improbably weaves them into the dystopian political elements super effectively. If the strongest reaction wild dissonances prompt in me is ‘Why not?’ I consider that evidence that the author is fully succeeding in crafting the desired atmosphere. An atmosphere with a particular hold over this reviewer.

This confused/concise dichotomy most definitely extends to game play as well. You see all this wonderful setting work is in service of, as you must have guessed, a puzzle fest. It is probably exactly what you picture: mostly (though satisfyingly-when-not) logic-puzzle-setpieces that could be grafted onto ANY setup. Except they TOO are simultaneously confused and concise. On the one hand, the piece role models implementation horizon discipline. You almost NEVER get the information you need without digging, but that digging is almost always rewarded, crafting a consistent play space of exploration. Where it requires put-thing-in-other-thing, the mechanics and text cuing lead you pretty seamlessly. Ditto its pick-up-whatever-moves-you’ll-know-why-later ethos. All that makes for smooth gameplay until BOOM, puzzle designs take wild turns into metagame (or completely outside game!) knowledge, incredible logical leaps and confusing cuing. Take the example of manipulating something out of reach, where you possess several long items. The sequence plays out:

> get card
The panel is out of range.

> get panel with broom
Impossible, it doesn't have a hook.

> get panel with poker
Impossible, it doesn't have a hook.

Now, how I read that cuing was "find a way to fashion a hook onto your broom, and pretend fire pokers DON’T HAVE HOOKS. It was actually attempting to cue something entirely different: push panel with broom instead. So, so many puzzles played out like this. Smooth sailing of interesting puzzles, with satisfying gameplay, punctuated by long stretches of grappling with puzzles just beyond my reach. Thankfully, there are brighter IF lights out there. Do not attempt to play this without @rkowalski 's invisiclues. And be prepared to forgive when the solution makes no sense to you even after revealed, nevermind the diegetic justification for the construction of the puzzle in the first place.

Also, hey, are you a stickler for protagonist backstory? Because if your soviet-revolutionary protag needed to fend on the strength of his own knowledge to solve these puzzles (let alone even manipulate some of the objects!) there is NO WAY it could happen. It is only you the player, bringing your out-of-world skills and knowledge to bear that make the plot even feasible.

AND YET, in the full acknowledgement of ALL THAT, and adding my own legendary incompetence to the mix, this was an absolute HOOT to play. It magically steamed past all its contradictions, frustrations and confusions to STILL deliver a satisfying story and puzzle experience. It earned forgiveness for its excesses via all the times it did things right, and by steadfastly maintaining its straight, brutalist face through it all despite the wild stuff it was throwing at you.

Could it be better? Yeah, probably a lot better. Was it already AWESOME, though? PEKLO DA, COMRADE!!! (By the way, where did you go @MiloM ? I miss you!)

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[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

Concur and agree with your review (I have betatested it, so no review from me); In particular, I appreciate the constant use of “soviet” in your review, and important thing in Italy, where many people are very adamant in pointing that sovietism isn’t Communism.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[jjmcc]

The Antediluvian Weapon by Daniel M. Stelzer
Style: Parser Hybrid
Played: 7/17/26
Playtime: 45m, won after dying a few times

Ok, two scenarios. Scenario 1: Earth is far older than we give it credit for. Sometime before dinosaurs a race with opposable thumbs advanced to near-magical scientific capabilities before being erased from the fossil record. Then, Renaissance Italy somehow discovered some artifacts from that time. Scenario 2: In the far future, the human race develops near-magical scientific capabilities before suffering an apocalypse. An impossible number of years after that, humanity recreates Renaissance Italy who discover artifacts from this prior civilization. In either case, intrigue ensues!

What a delightfully weird and ambiguous setup to a spacial puzzle of infiltrate/steal/escape! Throw in some elemental spirits and we are COOKING. This is a pretty tight navigation/chase puzzle of securing a mysterious weapon, then using it to evade capture and escape. If you can effect a rescue in the process so much the better. I would say the UI is indispensable and effective here. You get a map, and a parser gameplay paradigm, augmented with hyperlink help. This kind of UI, when done well, smooths some of the potential gotchas with parser gameplay like verb guessing and sussing important nouns from background chaff, and soft steers the goals of the piece. I found AW to be done VERY well on this count. A compact but effective dashboard adjacent to the > prompt, married to a compact but effective map, including foes. Your goal is never in doubt, the enemy and object parameters reliably communicated, leaving a playground of experimentation and timing to work through.

The work is brief, requires some restart/undo trial and error, and delivers legit feelings of accomplishment when successful. The text is spare, injected with just enough wry playfulness to keep things bubbling along crisply and succinctly. While the HOW of accomplishment is very much the crux of the game, the WHAT of it is conveyed naturally and subtly without contradicting or muddying itself. Doing so this effortlessly is much harder than it looks. I found it to be very well conceived, implemented and communicated, leading to a very immersive puzzle solving flow. With just enough weird chrome to keep it from becoming some kind of intellectual-only exercise.

Just one buggy artifact to report: the UI dashboard disappears on RESTART, requiring a full QUIT to reappear. Invisiclues also provided, which is always a welcome touch. In this case not consulted, but having them available is appreciated. I never know when my IF competence will abandon me. All in all, a nifty, short, rewarding game.

The-Antediluvian-Weapon-260717-1232.txt (31.4 KB)
The-Antediluvian-Weapon-260717-1300.txt (52.9 KB)

[rkowalski (RJ Kowalski)]

Hah, I couldn’t ask for a better recommendation, I’m just glad they helped you.

[jjmcc]

The Krampus Case by Kirk Damato and Sarah Willson
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/17/26
Playtime: 30 min, solved in 16 days

If there is one thing I fail at pretty consistently, it is resisting the urge to invoke comparisons in reviews: either between works in an author’s ouvre’ or among games with similar concerns and conceits. If there are TWO things I fail at consistently it is the above AND metering my clumsy attempts at empathy with humility. If there are THREE things… you know what? This feels like a bottomless pit yawning before me, let’s get back to number one.

I have declared myself thoroughly IN THE BAG for @DamonWakes 's Bubble Gumshoe games - a noir-detective series set in a world of sentient candy. Almost immediately with KC I felt those same endorphins coursing. Here, you are a noir-detective solving a Christmas Crime at the North Pole. This one makes use of its choice-select UI by styling the choices as an Advent Calendar: a holiday tradition of daily surprises, opened throughout December until the Big Day. There are 25 days to check, but oh no, its already the 5th, so you must deliberately find the six clues in twenty days to solve it in time! The conceit doesn’t QUITE work, as it would be unthinkable to consult a real advent calendar out of order - civilizations have fallen for such transgressions. It’s fine, the conceit’s narrative load bearing responsibilities are dispensed with pretty quickly.

I will confess to some reservations initially. A mystery to solve with 25 different possible interactions and few signposts. Was this just a random walk problem? I need not have worried. Divorced from the calendar conceit, the game responds to thoughtful investigative approaches: interview likely witnesses/suspects, develop background, investigate important scenes, test hypotheses. Leads develop, informing subsequent calendar choices in satisfying and humorous ways. All of it undergirded with completely committed-to-the-bit Christmas mythos clowning. It is not Bubble Gumshoe, but it tweaks all the same pleasure centers of investigation and deeply-committed, over-the-top absurdity.

It ALSO mines the inherent contradictions of ridiculous pastel fairy tale and hard-boiled, cynical misanthropy to great effect. The 90s were kind of famous for “grim and gritty” takes on childish fantasy. A self-serious take on this contrast (only with tongue firmly OUT of cheek), whose main aim was to strip-mine dramatic impact by sullying, polluting and dismissing the charms of their settings. Like strip mining, exhausting its frisson pretty quickly, leaving only ugly destruction in its wake. Both Bubble Gumshoe and this work tack to the Roger Rabbit tradition of moving that tongue 90 degrees to the right - of using their settings’ bright optimism to expose the hollow center of edge-lord nihilism. And also have a few good laughs at its expense.

I mean, a few really good laughs. I’m only giving you two, though I could easily quadruple this essay with more examples.

"And a child’s belief is a powerful thing… which is why they must never play with satanic toys like Dungeons & Dragons or the Ouija board.”

(To the tune of Jingle Bells)
"Pooping log, pooping log, time for you to go

Let out Santa from your bowels, right here in the snow — oh!
Pooping log, pooping log, gee, I hope this works
Oh what fun it is to deny Krampus — he’s a jerk!"

Beyond tone, the work really ups the ante with its omnivorous engagement with diverse cultural Holiday oddities, all of them surprising and delightful. Then stitching them into a patchwork mystery that ultimately works, albeit according to its own logic. Actually, the word ‘albeit’ seems to suggest some necessary forgiveness and compromise. No, it works BECAUSE OF its internal logic.

My biggest regret… well, is not investing in NVIDIA a few years ago. My biggest regret HERE is playing this in the middle of a national heatwave, nearly as far from Christmas as the calendar gets. This game is CRYING for a holiday playthrough, and that is my recommendation. If you are reading this review to determine if you want to play The Krampus Case, December only please. But December DEFINITELY.

[jjmcc]

oxblood by Naarel
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/20/26
Playtime: 30m

Some things I can endlessly revisit, not experiencing anew exactly but not exhausting their novelty either. I have a decades-long relationship with Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii where familiarity has not eroded the experience even a little bit. I have a similar relationship with Reanimator, The Blues Brothers, and Fury Road. This is not limited to music and movies. There are boardgames on my shelf that hit the table decades on, and despite years-long gaps I relish revisiting my beleaguered copy of Catch 22. This is not the RULE of course. Far more entertainment is disposable or.. timeful? Is that the opposite of timeless? As a young person, I discovered Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards and adored it. It is a chore to endure now. (It came out within months of Star Wars, isn’t that wild? Artistically, they seem separated by DECADES.)

So, Vampire IF. Despite my self-avowed bona fides as a Horror Fan, vampires have never been my thing. It’s cool, some of my things would probably repel many of you. Despite vampires being low on my revisit list, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say my review corpus is dominated by them. I’ll have to run the numbers one day. Seems likely the Queer Vampire Jam is the root of that. I mean, if there were a, I dunno, Ribald Mathematics Jam it could have broken a totally different way but here we are.

It is true that the community has made it easy on me in one regard: the overwhelming majority of them spin unique takes on the lore, the metaphoric linkages, the imaginative execution. There is probably an essay somewhere about the LGBTQIA+ community’s dialogue with vampire mythology. Demonstrating I AM capable of bare-minimum introspection, I AM NOT THE ONE TO WRITE IT. No, instead I’ll just accumulate an ever-growing critical engagement with works in the vein. (I know you saw it, I won’t lampshade it. THIS TIME.)

These twists on lore are so pervasive, something like oxblood carves out its novelty by reengaging more traditional vampire beats and making THAT feel transgressive! “Wait reviewer, surely that is dependent on the ORDER you encounter works in! Without the large body of prior art as context, its seeming uniqueness couldn’t possibly land!” Ah, knee-jerk strawman reader, you are lucky I am here. oxblood has anticipated this possible refutation. You see, the text of the work presumes a romantic human-vamp relationship as its setup, then proceeds to unwind the peril that has ALWAYS been in the subtext. And does it while making a statement about toxic romantic attachment! It seems in conversation both with romantic-vampire genre AND selfish romantic expectations! For me, it was a startling breath of fresh air… wait, that’s not what I want to say. That implies I have been breathing stale air for some time which is decidedly NOT my experience. For me, it was a startling subversion of expectations executed with PRIOR EXPECTATIONS. And it caught me in exactly the right critical context to feel novel and insightful.

Crucial to all this is the prose of the piece. We spend most of the piece inhabiting a vampire at the dissolution of a romantic relationship, privvy to the hurts and pettiness of the protagonist. Which then sings off their affliction (is it ok to call it that? my foot-in-mouth sense is tingling…) to spiral into something dangerous and self-destructive. This is an all-too-common aspect of human relationships, and vampire lore is used to shine a bright light on it. The repeated euphemism of INK, which pretty quickly is understood to be blood highlights the self-deception that attempts to fend off the darkness prior to an eventual surrender. The prose paints all of this against a kind of matter-of-fact portrayal of vampire life that feels lived in and well observed. The PURPOSE of this backdrop is to center the protagonist’s experience and bring it into sharp focus without distracting dissonances. I found it really well done, decidedly dark, and doing a lot to inject the HORROR back into its genre. As much emotional horror as supernatural, that simultaneously echoes and counterpoints the larger body of engaging vampire IF.

When I am praising prose, as I mean to do here, I often try to grab samples to prove I am not just making it up. That manifests as a quick pause in my playthrough to cut’n’paste, spurred by an out-of-flow recognition of ‘hey that’s a nifty phrase.’ I do not have that for you this time. I think it’s because in the moment there were no showy textual flourishes. It was just a slow build of atmosphere and character decline that accumulated over the course of the piece to a very affecting (and tragic) climax.

It is not lost on me that SO many of my reviews of this genre start with ‘Ehh, I’m not about vampires really.’ Is that actually helpful to you, the reader? I THINK it gives you some context to process my words with, but at some point the repetition might feel like dismissal. Maybe I can redeem that a bit by revealing that I AM about THIS vampire story. It emphasized the STAKES of these tales in a tense and insightful way. (Don’t cry to me. You had to know it was coming.)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

@jjmcc

It has been a while since I have had my russophiliasis tweaked

(Ask me how I feel whenever I read about the Russo-Japanese War).

[jjmcc]

@DeusIrae

(Ask me how I feel whenever I read about the Russo-Japanese War).

WHAT DID YOU DO TO THE JAPANESE?!?!?!?

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Actually they won quite handily, which somehow surprised most observers.

[MiloM (Milo van Mesdag)]

@jjmcc

(By the way, where did you go @MiloM ? I miss you!)

I’m coming back! Just wait till September. Although I will burst your bubble now and say that this one is both very very different and, out of character for me, not at all about Russia. Sorry