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

[andrewj]

Thanks for the review, I’m glad you enjoyed my game.

This may not be the right place to prattle about myself, it’s your thread after all, but I’d to give a little insight about my own journey writing IF.

Last year I was helping the IFwiki determine which games were parser based, or choice based (etc), so I ended up playing the beginning of a lot of games. Two things happened: (1) I noticed many of them were quite unsatisfactory, they didn’t explain what was going on very well, or there was an interesting NPC but talking to them didn’t work, just a lack of “depth” I guess. (2) My ego kicked in and I thought “I can do better than this”.

So I started making my first serious game: All That Shimmers… for last year’s Ectocomp, however I caught a bad case of “the doubts”, thinking the premise was too thin, the puzzles too basic, so I put it aside for a while. But I guess I liked the little world I had starting making, and decided to continue the game and enter the PunyComp competition, trying to make up for those deficiencies by making the world as rich as possible. I’ve been a programmer all my life, so the coding part was not too hard, but I discovered that writing is really difficult, but can be really satisfying too.

[jjmcc]

Something in our Heart by Naara and Coral Nulla
Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 25m

Visual novels are clubbed in with IF pretty routinely, but my experience of them is usually quite different. Ok, I COULD at this point develop an elaborate multi-axis schema whereby works are placed on a continuum of interactivity/graphical flare/narrative pacing. I could further build to the stunning revelation that NO! Everything is in fact a spectrum! To this crowd, I could as easily spend my time diving into light physics and confirming that YES! Our human eyes perceive the sky as BLUE!!!

What that spectrum analysis asserts is definitely true, but it kind of white washes that different points on the spectrum ARE IN FACT DIFFERENT. Purple is not red! SIOH does something new here, to my experience. It manages a quantum superposition at TWO discrete points on this continuum. In gameplay this is a visual novel. Clicking pretty universally means ‘advance story.’ UI-wise though, it is an interactive epistolary work. The reader is navigating a variety of computer interactions, the input simulating encountering the story at your keyboard. It is a neat trick. Without offering choice or agency to the player, the work nevertheless envelopes the reader in interactivity, and by such transforms them from consumer to participant. It is a very specific kind of keyboard trick, but uniqueness is not an INDICTMENT of art, is it?

Man did that specific trick work like gangbusters on me. From its opening screen, a wry 8-bit-era click-thru license agreement, we are ushered into a… hmm. Ok, I’m going to need to create some vocabulary, bear with me. Steampunk as a genre takes the tech-wonder sensibilities of cyberpunk (usually jettisoning its deep cynicism), and re-imagines its technologies in anachronistic gears and hydraulics. Retro-future does the same thing (kind of) with a 1950’s Middle American sensibility. How about the 80s/90s? What is a term for anachronistic sci-fi tech grafted to the last millennium’s computer interfaces? Leg-Warmer Punk? 8-bit Futurism? CyberGrunge? I kinda like that last one, let’s go with that.

Ok, this is a CyberGrunge story of body mods, aggressive AI and emergent terror. All with a Win3.1 feel to it. As a reader/player you are shadowing a member of an online body-mod community whose hacker ethos takes the protagonist DEEP into a rabbit hole. Let me just say outright I loved everything about this work. Its graphical language is an inspired take on the past’s design sensibilities, especially when things get really WEIRD for the protagonist. Its interactivity is immersive and engaging, propelling the story via an amazing variety of computer (and not-so-digital) interactions. The story itself has a LOT of concerns and twists, any one of which could support a full narrative of its own. This is not to say any of its elements are SHORT-CHANGED. Not at all! Its twists steam forward, loop on themselves and are increasingly outre’ and dramatic and it all just WORKS SO WELL.

I am loathe to dive too deeply into the plot, as its surprises are bonkers and really well executed and deserve to be encountered fresh. How those surprises are communicated in its 8-bit vernacular are, if anything, MORE inventive and delightful. There is one flourish where the overwhelmed protagonist’s thoughts are rendered in barely readable background that was just amazing in its narrative inventiveness. I am unabashedly gushing over my appreciation for this thing. Were I rating these works to my IFCOMP scale (which, per my R-A-T tradition I DO NOT) it would earn a ‘Transcendent’ rating from me, a rating which as of summer 2026 I have conferred fewer than 5 times.

The more I go on, the more likely I am to spoil things for all of us. Instead let me close by highlighting a minor detail whose pithy perfection I will assert is a microcosm of the entire work. I have, in the past, revealed that Ren & Stimpy’s Big Red Button spoke directly to young me’s psyche in a way I was previously unaware that art could. (This is totally relevant, I swear.) There is a line in this work that captures that same perilous fascination at least as well: “I’m on the edge of something irreversible I’d rather have someone push me off of it” Despite its DEEP sci-fi conceits, the work grounds itself in recognizable human impulses and dissatisfactions and does not skimp on consequences or danger. Or, improbably, hope too.

This one is great. Play it with a soundtrack of telephone-modem squeals. Or not, just damn well PLAY IT.

[jjmcc]

Garden of Impossible Objects by Skyshard
Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/29/26
Playtime: 10m, finished

Safety tip: this work requires webGL2. If you are a brain-damaged privacy paranoid who has bewilderingly locked their browsers up TIGHT, you will need to play on your poor suffering wife’s wide-open courting-disaster machine. Know the risks, people.

GOIO a visual novel that uses music and images to enhance its spare story of indirect grief. Indirect grief is a sturdy dramatic conceit. It deftly resonates our OWN experiences of grief into the proceedings while 1) not having to evoke those feelings directly via artificial constructs and 2) adding a layer of sadness by emphasizing how SOLITARY grief can be. How even those around you might EMPATHIZE with you, but might not actually experience the same emotional depths. The vehicle for this in GOIO is a child protagonist who barely knew their aunt supporting their mother as they explore the deceased’s property. Like the protagonist, we the reader only experience the loss through observing the mother and her clumsy, human reactions. Because it is framed as a later-in-life recollection, we are free to integrate OUR mature experiences of grief alongside the now-grown protagonist.

The implementation is gorgeous: evocative backgrounds, moody music, and an impressionistic character illustration for the mother that suggests imperfect memory yet still delivers some pathos. It’s text is timed, but quite rapid, which delivers a conversational, off-the-cuff informal vibe without slowing the reading experience down. This lends a welcome naturalism to the proceedings, as well as reminding me that timed text need not be the Boogie Man of IF.

This is very much a visual novel, a recollection of grief. It’s interactivity is of the page turning variety, so the experience is more about pacing and word/picture interplay. I don’t know that the illustrations achieve the “worth 1000 words” standard, but they are quite impactful anyway, reinforcing the mood of the piece (along with the somber soundtrack). In sum, it is a very attractive, well realized package that delivers its melancholy intent precisely and effectively.

[jjmcc]

recquiescat by rh9
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/29/26
Playtime: 10m, playthrough, bonus “Progress” exploration

recqiescat is a dark tale of toxic love. Its title and initial framing are that of looking back on a once-in-a-lifetime emotional relationship, overflowing with milestone memories of meet-cute, great dates and romantic confessions. It hits all the beats of early relationships by presenting a layered recollection where the initial text is warmly reminiscent, and where clickable links expand to even greater detail. The player’s interaction is mostly just exploring these links in an otherwise linear narrative. It presents a world where memories are not cloudy, representational things, but so vital as to have layers of detailed, still-accessible depth. Oh, there are dark clouds too, as the narrator/protagonist recalls (and seemingly brushes aside) warning signs and misgivings of friends and family. Those dismissals actually enhance the totally-smitten character beats in a resonant way, except… we’ll get there.

The early part of the work capably builds its atmosphere of in-denial foreboding. When the turn comes, it is shocking, but maybe not quite the way its textual construction would have you expect. Yes, I am now discussing EXPECTATIONS of THE UNEXPECTED. This one is going to be impossible to talk about without spoilers, so be advised. Whatever blurring I end up doing is almost certainly NOT going to get the job done.

Here’s the thing. This is a past tense narration by one of two principles in a horrific event. The narrator experienced the events of the story, and is relating them to us. We the audience experience the narrative as a shocking twist, but the narrator decidedly does not. They already know how it ends! And yet, the story almost never acknowledges this. Certainly, what the narrator chooses to convey for the first two thirds of the work focuses on the dreamy, rewarding parts of the relationship. This… does not ring true to me. How on earth can these early impressions NOT be colored by subsequent events? How could hints and clues NOT become apparent in retrospect, given where things led? There is an explanation, but give me a few more minutes to rant first.

This is a story of memories, of what and how the narrator chooses to focus their reminiscing on. A lot of time is devoted to the heady flowering of romantic emotion. Almost NO time is devoted to the inciting event, a narrative whirlwind of sexual entitlement exploding into violence. What time IS devoted to it is weirdly oblique and rushed, lacking the immediacy of the more positive memories. The effect is to present a relationship, a reasonably long one, where NO HINT of storm clouds is evident to the protagonist, barring some offhand acknowledgement of others’ concerns. Where the protagonist’s response to the shocking development is not only matter-of-fact but also kind of self-satisfied. You can almost feel their hand waving dismissively! There is no sense of loss, of betrayal in the recollection. Just a matter-of-fact “this is what I did instead.” A loss and betrayal one might easily expect to color ALL PREVIOUS MEMORIES if not PERMANENTLY SCAR. But the prior narrative suggested neither of those things, quite the opposite actually, and that omission becomes the most notable thing about the whole work.

Taken together, the early rose-colored focus and the all but dismissed culminating drama, it kind of paints a picture of the protagonist as a sociopath! To them the dramatic climax is every bit as meaningless (in the long run) as the antagonist’s own victims. They are focused on their OWN emotional pleasure to the complete exclusion of others’ concerns and even their lives. It morphs from a story of surmounted victimization to one of two monsters meeting and only one surviving. That is honestly kind of cool, though the wording and tone of the work does not suggest this is its intent. I am choosing to embrace the ambiguity here, as this is a much more subtle, affecting read than its face value presentation. I wish I were more confident that read was the work’s intent.

[jjmcc]

Bael’s Rock: A Text Adventure by Alex Halver
Style: Parser
Played: 7/30/26
Playtime: 4.75hr, finished

I did not know you could sell these things for money! Good work author! There were codes available to get review copies, but because your humble reviewer is composed of UNIMPEACHABLE integrity (and untenable amounts of coffee), I purchased it anyway (it was on sale at the time). MY REVIEW WILL NOT BE BOUGHT WITH INDUSTRY FAVORS!!! Also I could not make the codes work.

This is an old-school cave-bound puzzle fest with really handsome production values. The whole package is clean and slick and integrates really evocative background illustrations and music. A personal favorite was the toad-Sphynx, but all of it is appealing. Even my wife, when walking by the screen, commented “That’s a cool picture!” There is an “old school” mode, that as far as I can tell removes the illustrations and changes the font to something slightly less rounded. Don’t bother with that, enjoy the sensory feast.

Gameplay hews to classic parser conventions, for the most part, and does a good job of cuing the player when more elaborate commands are called for. There are some windows superimposed on the screen: an optional inventory pane, a command pane, a response pane and a location description pane. Splitting the last two into separate spaces was a two edged sword. On the one hand, it really cleaned up wall-of-text responses, while keeping the high level interesting nouns readily at hand. On the other, for an old hand like me whose fingers hit >L[return] by reflex between commands, it took a while to get situated, especially because the game’s response to this redundant command was try something else. It ALSO had the effect of wiping details you had just read before the next command, adding some friction to exploring lower level items. If you needed to reference those lower level nouns there was nothing for it but to repeat prior commands to refresh the text. A nice touch might have been to add those details to the master pane once initially found… assuming that could be done without crowding things.

As far as its parser capabilities it was pretty good but had some frictions. Occasionally I was in the space of knowing what I wanted to do, but it took multiple formulations to get it accepted. It was never TOO onerous, just frictiony enough to be noticed. To be fair, the game was just as often quite generous in accepting wildly different commands to accomplish the same things, so kudos for that! Too, while most nouns were dutifully implemented, there were examples of missing synonyms (especially singulars or plurals) and a few you see no [noun mentioned in room text description] peppering the proceedings. Notwithstanding those quibbles, the interface was on balance responsive, pleasing on the eye, and a nice twist on convention.

The story is pretty classic IF stuff: nameless protagonist deposited in mysterious under-mountain complex, solving puzzles to progress. The architecture of the game compliments its stripped-down gameplay really well. It is broken into 8-9 chapters (depending how you score them), each a MOSTLY standalone puzzle space where unlocking doors or circumventing barriers ushers you to the next chapter. The spaces are pretty Spartan, each requiring close examination of minimal details to reveal its secrets, and by its Spartanness imposing helpful guardrails on the player. In the second chapter, there is a poem hinting at what to accomplish, but the WAY it must be accomplished is a real logical leap. The fact that there are so few moving parts in the space kind of soft-prompts you to try things a denser setting would obfuscate.

So how are the puzzles themselves? I would say 3/4 of them were both clever in their own right, and were satisfyingly staged in terms of escalating complexity. They also span quite a variety of gameplay which was nice: mechanisms to manipulate, riddle solving conversations, put things in things, word games, lateral thinking, spell casting. It made for an intriguing variety and a real challenge to solve (with commensurate feeling of accomplishment). There were some really clever subversions of expectation too - the aforementioned toad-Sphynx solution was really funny, and integrated the soundtrack into its puzzle play in a satisfying way. The multi-step word puzzle was devious and just obtuse ENOUGH.

Look, there’s always going to be a spread to these things: some puzzles hit harder, some will near miss. One ancient convention I don’t PERSONALLY miss are IF mazes. They always seem a lot more work than worth, which was my experience here. This one was compounded by initially hiding behind a “Do Not Enter” barrier, which sang off a nice “Unimportant Item” gag on the level, giving me hope it was not necessary. No, it was most definitely necessary. The maze was made more difficult by assuming sense-of-direction defeating passages between two classes of identical rooms, meaning reverse paths were broken. Not impenetrable by any means, just a lot of trial and error and mapping.

This particular level ALSO had one of the few cross-chapter dependencies. You had to remember a detail from the previous level (the location name of a magic sphere) which I did NOT. After some ineffectual noun spamming, “Ok,” sez I, “There is a pile of maps on this level. Surely that was the author’s way of maintaining chapter atomicity.” It was not. The maps were narrative chrome that had nothing to offer. “Hmm..,” sez I. “The game has a text log, how about I just go back and look it up?” Oh, but no. The log only tracks the CURRENT LEVEL, I was not able to find a log of the previous level. “I see,” sez I. “Well, there is also a chapter-save system, I can just go back and quickly play the previous level to get the detail I need…” Only when I did, I was told it would erase all my subsequent progress! Ack. Instead of hewing to the established independent chapter paradigm, I had to REPEAT the previous level to find the magic noun that would work, then retrace my steps in the subsequent level as well. After all that, the reward being… a maze. This likely colored my dissatisfaction even more than it might have otherwise.

Then the final level was a time loop combat puzzle. Suss out the moves to defeat the monster, dying many many times while doing so. This was a lot of trial and error, requiring little of the brain power needed in previous levels. It wasn’t BAD per se, but it was both significantly less challenging (and rewarding) AND draggier than previous levels and so kind of disappointed as a capstone. These deflating and grindy puzzle levels were unfortunately back loaded in the game, tainting the earlier levels’ accumulated good will.

So let’s pull it all together: really appealing package; 6/8 puzzle levels clever and varied; 2/8 not terrible, but likely better received by players more open to combat/maze gameplay, and positioned to disappoint players not so inclined; all powered by a very tight design and nifty variant parser paradigm. Even a cold math summary puts the experience at 75% + bonus for graphical slickness. Evaluates as a B/B-? Hey, that is totally worth the $2 I spent. In this economy? Probably worth more.

POSTSCRIPT: Worth noting that there is a walkthrough available for those truly stuck, though I found the game tight and responsive enough that my OWN incompetence did not demand it. In retrospect, it might have saved me some replay though.

[jjmcc]

…aaand that’ll be a season wrap on JJMcC’s RATATOOTY! Of the remaining 3: I am a beta tester on 1, I authored another, and the last required an adult site login I was unwilling to navigate. Thanks @alyshkalia and the slate of brave authors for another great year of relieving the summer doldrums! See you all in September. Or in about 3 weeks if you are fans of Iron ChIF!

[AlexHalver]

Thank you for the review, and congratulations on completing the review-a-thon! I’m glad that you found Bael’s Rock entertaining, and I’m especially happy with the B/B- rating.

I’ll take everything you wrote into account when working on the next adventure, particularly your feedback about the parser and your ideas for improving the interface.

If anyone would like to give the game a try, I’ve included some Steam keys in the event spreadsheet. Feel free to redeem one and claim the game for free. I hope you enjoy it!

(If you run into any issues with the codes, please feel free to DM me and I’ll be happy to help.)