Ecellent review, as expected from JJMcC.
Its criticism isn’t only constructive, but thoughtful and thought-provoking. Very thought-provoking, for example JJ is right, in hindsight the confines of the 'Comp are too small for this level of narrative, I must admit.
Thanks !
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Rod McSchlong Gets Punched in the Dong by Hubert Janus
Mc23a: “How are you back here again, time traveling future me? Wait, before you say another word, GIVE ME STOCK TIPS!”
Mc23b: “Wait, look at our names, past me. They’ve changed, we’re no longer pre- and post- McB.”
Mc23a: “Duh doi, I’ve played Dick McButts by now. So those STOCK TIPS…?”
Mc23b: (waving hands impatiently) “But why numbers? What could that…?”
<flash of light>
Mc24: “Hail and well met good me’s!”
Mc23a: “Oh god, we buy fedoras???”
Mc24: “What? No, you can see I’m not…”
Mc23b: “You’re us from further in the future aren’t you?”
Mc24: “Oh I see, no. Time travel is so 2023. No, we’re MULTIVERSAL now. These numbers…”
Mc23b: “Universe identifiers, got it. So your universe?”
Mc24: “One where my IFCOMP24 randomizer put the McButts sequel first, yes. So I’ve played it and you haven’t.”
Mc23a: “We got turned into a douche by a randomizer?”
Mc24: “What? No, I was always, wait, wh… aaaah.”
Mc23b: “The sequel you say? Ok, I admit I was intrigued seeing it in the entries. Is it going to hold up?”
Mc23a: “It’s literally the next game on our list, couldn’t we maybe talk stocks instead?”
Mc24: “What happens when you go to a one joke conceit a second time?”
Mc23a: “Great. Fedora AND Socratic method. You live alone, don’t you?”
Mc23b: (ignoring Mc23a) “Oooh, That’s tough. You kind of have to escalate things or twist things pretty dramatically, don’t you?”
Mc23a: “Why are you humoring him??”
Mc24: (ignoring Mc23a) “Yes, but, what if you don’t?”
Mc23b: “Diminishing returns? I’m starting to see your point, Mc23a.”
Mc23a: “Is there someone else we can talk to?”
<flash of light>
Mc420: (slowly massaging side of face) “Wooah. Dudes. This is too, too trippy.”
Mc24: (peevishly) “I kind of had this.”
Mc23a: “I’m not getting any stock tips, am I?”
Mc23b: “New guy, have you played Rod McShlong?”
Mc420: “Oh fr sure my dude. It was a lark, but didn’t really take off until it technicolor’d in the middle. Like, into a dimension of shlong punching.” (eyes go vacant, considering implications)
Mc24: (miffed) “Yeah, I was getting to that. That was the most fun part of it.”
Mc240: “I mean the gags were solid, right in line with McButts.”
Mc23a: “I can’t help but think stock tips are a better use of…”
Mc23b: “Solid but not escalating?”
Mc420: (thinking way too hard before…) “Yeah I guess so. But that trippy center part was the tits.”
Mc24: “I can see where that might land harder in… his universe.”
Mc23b: “Hm, yeah. Anyone else we can talk to?”
Mc24: “I’m still here!”
<flash of light>
Mc69: “Hey guys, we talking Rod McSchlong?” (waggles eyebrows)
Mc23a, 23b, 24: (in unison) “NOPE!”
<exit in flash of light>
Mc420: “Hold it! Everyone STOP! STOP! Rod? ROD MCSHLONG?!?!?” (giggles uncontrollably)
Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 20min, 1 win, 9 ‘losses’
Score: 5 (Mechanical/mostly Seamless, bonus for midpoint graphical experimentation)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience is complete
This had me laughing out loud, well done 
The Lost Artist: Prologue by Alejandro Ruiz del Sol and Martina Oyhenard
It seems every year there is an entry or two that just catch me so offguard, that are so unabashedly playful and bonkers, that I can’t help but play right along. This is nominally a detective/mystery solving game, but in its blindingly fast playtime displays neither. It cycles through one bananas setup after another, with little regard (until the end) for how they connect. You meet bank robbers, a corp-slave artist and a marginally engaged detective. On the way you get meaningless choices to make, each with snicker-inducing specificity and daffy breadth, where the whole time you are basically white knuckling along a ride that doesn’t seem to care how bad it whipsaws you and is unclear it even knows where it’s going.
But the ride is so zippy and good-natured it kind of doesn’t matter. I feel like I want to give an example, but the work is so short I’m cheating you just a little. I can’t resist, here it is:
This case is a dead end. All the contacts are hippies. They’re all probably ‘fishing for trout’ in their private trout-fishing lake.
The criminal Balding wanted to capture had stolen all the angst left in an aging punk drummer. Right before the trial the drummer moved back to Ohio to start a new life. The criminal was freed.
Those are not two separate quotes, just one continuous flow. Don’t even get me started on the wonderfully incoherent sentences that form the UI links! The whole thing makes very little sense, but in the most appealing way possible. By the end, the detective has been engaged by the corpdrone for reasons, and ‘ravens’ have been established as somehow being a connective thread. All of this, as the title suggests, will be worked in a future episode. Yeah, it doesn’t end at all, it just stops. McFly-y-y? It’s a Prologue McFly!
Ordinarily this lack of meaningful choice, lack of clear characterization, lack of narrative throughline or plot and certainly lack of closure would infuriate me. Or disappoint me. Or repel me. But here, the language, the flights of fancy are just SO enjoyable I kinda don’t care about any of that. It was a terrific ride for its short duration. I have only the vaguest of ideas what I just experienced, but am damn sure I will engage the next episode. Yeah, this scattered focus probably can’t sustain an extended multi-chapter mystery. There are signs the threads COULD come together though, and that’s good enough for me. Viva la bizarre!
Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 10min, 2 playthroughs, likely 100% of text
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, but followon has my attention
Return to Claymorgue’s Castle by Claudio Daffra
Is there such thing as pedigree in IF? Actually, is pedigree itself ANYTHING??? Other than a socially imposed privileging system? Wow, got off track there. What I mean to ask is “Scott Adams approved this homage of his work. HOW COOL IS THAT??” Is there anything more rewarding than getting the imprimatur of an artistic inspiration? I feel like Claymorgue has already won … something… and anything we say about it from here is just gravy. Kudos author, and kudos Scott for top-tier menschhood. Just positivity on positivity.
I think it says a alot about the chill, supportive vibe of that whole background that it did not unfairly raise my expectations in any way. The whole thing was so generous and earnest it encouraged me to engage the work in a similar positive spirit. This is a team-investigates-mysterious castle jam. It leverages an underused gameplay design of NPC specialists, who can be employed in their specific areas to solve puzzles. I know I’ve seen it before, but infrequently, and it is a welcome change of pace when I do. It also is fully committed to its pixel-art esthetic and I am here for that. It puts the piece squarely of a time with its inspiration.
Its gameplay is Twinesformer - parser gameplay via link-select UI. This choice necessarily restricts command space in a way that kind of echoes restricted-verb parsers of bygone days, but with more modern link-select chrome. Its presence is, in the context of this IFCOMP, a clear case of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Just 8 reviews ago I was clamoring, clamoring!, for a paned UI paradigm. Along comes Claymorgue and here we go! Was it all I hoped for??
Ehhh, no.The paning did unclutter the transcript portion of the game, that’s a plus. But it broke it into 3 separate panes, on extreme quadrants of the screen, ensuring maximum inconvenience in swiping cursor around. It further compounded inconvenience by requiring a MINIMUM of 4 clicks to get anything done. Character-Verb-Noun-Enter. A default actor and enter-on-noun could have cut that in half in most cases. I’m not in the business of comparisons, but this is NOT what I had in mind. Interacting with the game was, and I take no joy in saying this, a chore.
It was further compromised by making a crucial pane scrolling, with no visual clue that this was true. In at least three cases, information (portable items!) necessary to progress were hidden below the pane bottom, with no indication I should scroll to find them. It was further, further compromised by changing its entry norms for character interaction where selecting a second character works differently than initiating action. All in all, I never stopped fighting the intrusive interface start to finish.
How about underlying (parser adjacent) gameplay? Again, I wanted more. One artifact of Twinesformers is that you have a limited verb roster to select among. This means, often, you need to play a ‘which not-quite-right verb can I contort to get things done?’ game. There are bigger issues though. For one, despite having the ability to highlight interesting nouns (a way to quietly steer the player to areas of interest), the highlighted nouns here were overrun with red herrings. Not just red herrings that you couldn’t interact with, red herrings that gave generic ‘you cannot’ messages, even when just trying to examine them! WHY WERE THEY HIGHLIGHTED IN THE FIRST PLACE??? There are ‘fiddle’ messages, random comments or business from your companions to remind you they are there. These messages are sometimes trivial, sometimes nonsensical, but sometimes read like hints or events that need addressing ASAP! They never are though, which I can attest after many fruitless attempts to engage them.
Puzzle play is similarly challenged. There were puzzles that required you to examine something twice, when the first examine gave NO clue you had not exhausted its value. Other puzzles required you to dawdle in locations for random amounts of time, despite NOTHING interesting to hold your attention there! In a key final puzzle, you needed to have told one character to read things turns ago, THEN read something later, and only if those two unconnected and unhinted things were done, was a final location unlocked.
What I’m saying is, it was unplayable without the walkthrough. I appreciate walkthroughs and/or HINTS in IFCOMP (and generally) as I have a propensity to get off a game’s vibe and struggle. With IFCOMP’s punishing time limit it can be instrumental to get unblocked to see a fuller picture of a work. If my reaction on reading HINT/walkthrough spoiler is “JJ you IDIOT, that puzzle is GENIUS!!” I know I’m in good hands. If my response is “Uh, wot?” … that’s trouble. In a particularly eggregious example, the climactic ‘you have won’ text was ONLY present in the walkthrough, it was not presented to me in-game! Without walkthrough, I would not have known the game was over!
So yeah, this was a full two hours of unnecessarily difficult struggle. But. That easy-going, positive vibe? It was EVERYWHERE. In the color text. In character interactions. In room descriptions. In object descriptions (when provided). In discoverable lore documents. As much as I struggled with the gameplay and UI, the prose and the underlying pixel art were just… welcoming. Despite all those good reasons above, I couldn’t stay mad at the game, it continually sparked with earnest good will. Despite it all, I nevertheless felt Sparks of Joy. I’m not a monster.
Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished (everyone satisfied) via walkthru
Score: 4 (Sparks of Joy/intrusive ui/gameplay)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience is complete
finding detailed instructions to transmute lead into gold. The step-by-step featured a complicated setup, complicated finishing, but whose middle step was “Do the Transmutation.” I laughed long and loud at this. Classic Step 1/Step2//PROFIT!! gag.
Thank you very much for your detailed and honest review. I really appreciate the time you took to play Claymorgue and share your thoughts. I agree that the user interface could have been more intuitive and that some puzzles could have been presented more clearly. I will take your feedback into consideration for any future updates. I’m glad you enjoyed the positive atmosphere and humor of the game. It was a pleasure to create it and knowing that someone appreciated it makes me very happy.
Focal Shift by Fred Snyder
A Javascript-coded HTML text-entry parser game. What won’t they think of next! The infinite flexibility of the motivated creator never ceases to impress me. This is a work with a clean HTML presentation with just enough graphical flourish to sell its cyberpunk theme, yet still stay out of the player’s way. It engages cyberpunk staples of body mods, hacking, future noir in a pretty straight forward way. It establishes the facts of the setup with minimal embellishment, leveraging our expectations to quickly get to the core puzzle execution. I would say the whole esthetic, from graphics to plot to character to puzzle play is pretty stripped down.
On the one hand this definitely minimizes friction, playing comfortably within our expectations at every turn. It was never really unclear (barring a notable exception or two) what needed doing next, or how to get it done. Like classic parsers, explore everything, take what you can, use it when needed. Its gameplay showpiece, the hacking mechanisms, were introduced and integrated very smoothly, quickly becoming reflexive commands nevermind their novelty. All this is to the game’s credit.
On the other hand ‘never breached expectations’ isn’t exactly a sought-after compliment in art. There is for sure room in all endeavors, IF included, for successful journeyman work. If anything their value is underrated. But it is hard to escape that they are inherently less impactful than transgressive, boundary-shattering works. Or even emotionally swelling melodrama that pulls our internal empathy levers. I was committed to the story, but emotionally detached due to the fairly vanilla characters and clean but unchallenging fetch-then-use plot beats. Sparks of Joy in its cleanliness and well-executed story beats, but lacking that emotional hook for true engagement.
Except, lets talk puzzle play. Part of the hacking conceit is that you solve encryption keys and AR token slotting (sometimes with AR security programs). These puzzles were pretty ok! The work did not tell you how to solve them, which provided some early trial and error head scratching before clicking into place. A word game in particular seemed to delight in subverting any Wordle-based preconceptions you might have before unlocking its gameplay, then proved legitimately as interesting as Wordle itself. Similarly, the AR based hacking let you discover the rules, then added a security element once you thought you had it mastered. I find it telling that the mini-games, simple and elegant as they were, stayed with me more than the story itself! Too often, I find mini-games the least enjoyable part of a work - drudge work I need to complete to get back to story. Here, they were thematically as clean as these things can be, while still respecting the ‘play’ in gameplay. Not only that, provided a legitimate charge of fun in the proceedings! My recommendation to future players would be to bypass the extra-turn body mod to keep mini-game play sharp. That, or limit yourself to ONLY real words as guesses.
As an overall rating, we have a legitimately Sparky, well executed story that both makes a strength of its reliance on tropes but also doesn’t really escape them. Integrates hacking gameplay and commands as smoothly as one could hope for. And is married to legitimately engaging mini-game play. All of it mostly seamless+.
Public Svcs location missing exit directions in description
Played: 9/7/24
Playtime: 1.25hr
Score: 7 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless+, bonus point for engaging puzzle play)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There by Mandy Benanav
This is the latest of the hoary old ‘mysterious invite to spooky house’ setup. If you are asking, ‘how many of these can we be expected to encounter across the run of IF history?’ my answer is ‘as many as it takes to encounter THIS one.’ With point-select works, the fun is a very precarious balance between ‘lawn mowering’ link combinations to make progress your brain can’t find, and a mechanical exercise of following a trail of links with no uncertainty or frisson in their construction. If my own sampling can be considered statistically valid, far more fail in one direction or another than succeed.
I am tempted to take you on a faux-discovery journey as I pretend to explore how this one succeeds when others do not. Both as a click-select adventure AND as the latest trotting out of this staid old warhorse setup. I could propose disingenuous theory after disingenuous theory, engage them with pie-eyed dishonesty before sadly concluding, ‘no that doesn’t quite explain it.’ All before revealing with performative wonder the BIG SECRET of the work. I could do all that, but the truth is, it’s pretty obvious EXACTLY why this one succeeds.
Its writing and NPCs are delightful.
That’s really it, the BIG SECRET. Yes, it is pretty good at balancing clear-but-not-crystal clear progress paths and clues. Yes, you might need to do some conversational lawn mowering, but the work rewards you with fun anecdotes and business so you don’t feel the time is wasted. Yes, the overarching setup and final plot beats are pretty bog-standard. But everything in between is just a joy to marinate in. Goofy, funny, inventive, wacky and fun. Even the language of the thing is endlessly playful. This is a work that uses ‘perspicacity’ correctly, but also delves into slime humor. I captured so many lovely images and bizarre turns of phrase and decided this one best summed up how on-my-vibe this piece is: “the mundane atticly ephemera of a lifetime” A work that gleefully makes up nonsense words side-by-side with multi-syllable jawbreakers is my art-work from another mother.
Everything about midgame was a joy to work with, from the moon logic puzzles that flow naturally from setup, to the zany cast, to the environment descriptions of its tight geography. Not only are the NPCs well conceived, sharply characterized, gifted with their own senses of humor (and pettiness), they also track state VERY well for this sort of thing, and engage (or don’t) you exactly as events would have you expect. Just not necessarily the WAY you would expect. Equal parts gleefully surprising and rigorously internally consistent.
It doesn’t quite achieve technical seamlessness, there are a few state issues. In one case, a teddy bear you moved continues to be present in its initial location. But these issues are vanishingly small in number, and further reduced by all the good will the rest of the package generates. The prose is almost immediately and pervasively Engaging. (Quick shout out to the sound design, which provides a great baseline atmosphere for the thing. Cuts out an aural space for you to play in, away from the cold logic of the world around you. That has no place here.)
So all you IF authors laboring painstakingly in a finely tuned code base to wring nuanced puzzle play out of cold algorithms: forget all that stuff! Just write really well and delight your player/readers! What could be simpler?
Played: 9/7/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished
Score: 8 (Engaged/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
Best advice, 10/10 course review, no notes. 
Bad Beer by Vivienne Dunstan
Talk about a masterclass in establishing stakes. The beer has GONE BAD. FIX IT, STAT!!! My GOD game, say less, I’m on it! Ethan Hunt, I CHOOSE TO ACCEPT THIS MISSION!!!
This is a parser game, set in an Old World pub and your mission could not be more vital. It could be more… responsive? or challenging? though. There is some rudimentary early exploration, talking to NPCs, comfortably deep scenery implementation, all of which smooth enough but not so long on clues and leads to pursue. Until you encounter an NPC that can help. If I did anything to spur this development, I am at a loss to describe what it was. It rather felt like HE found ME.
Thanks to this helpful NPC you learn some more, then are ushered to the source of the contamination and presented with one puzzle to try and resolve the issue. Ok, step back everyone. Impossible Mission Force is on the job, cue some disguises and stunts (and that PEERLESS theme song) and let’s wrangle this into shape! Long prelude, but NOW the Beer Hero can kick into gear and… wait, its done? And I failed to solve the puzzle? But the beer is saved ANYWAY??? Let me go back and try again. Hah! This time I did solve it! And yeah, side mission victory, but beer’s fate is unchanged?!? Maybe IMF was a bit overkill on this one? Feels like the mystery was very capably solving itself?
It really felt like the story was playing out, just steaming right along, and not only did it not need me to advance it, it kind of didn’t care what I did between beats. It was odd to feel this outside-looking-in in INTERACTIVE fiction. Which is a wild takeaway, on reflection. There are plenty of choice-select IF that are really short stories whose main interaction is turning pages. (I’ve got to figure out a better way to say that because it always sounds like I’m talking down and I don’t mean to be.) BB was not objectively less interactive or player-focused than those works. Might I be holding Parser IF to a different standard? Might Parser IF, by explicitly making the player the protag and ceding control on every single move, might that imply an unspoken promise of a deeper interactivity, even if that is only “suss out how to use weird thing A in location B?” What if this was more of a short story-like IF, where my one job was to hit return to keep going? Maybe it was toying with my expectations to deliver something else entirely? Maybe it was SHAMING me that I was so into a trivial puzzle problem, when making a small but real difference was a possibility for me. All that is conceivable I suppose, but even the difference I could make was pretty muted, in terms of dramatic impact. Maybe it was a comment on the shallowness of NEEDING high levels of difficulty and dramatic resolution when true, meaningful accomplishment should be enough?
That I can be shallow cannot be a shock to you at this point. I’m not sure I need a game to thematically highlight that. Look, it was a very well-crafted, modest parser where story-wise I just didn’t matter much. Yeah, I’m disappointed I couldn’t really be the Beer Hero of my fantasies but it did enough right to keep the sparks going. Granted, the biggest spark was the unfulfilled promise of BEING a Beer Hero, but there were still plenty of sparks to be had.
Turns out it was my self-importance that was destined to self-destruct in five seconds.
Played: 9/8/24
Playtime: 30m, 1 fail, 1 succeed
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
bb_jjmcc.txt (35.6 KB)
Thank you for the review and transcript!
Final Call by Emily Stewart & Zoe Danieli
A click-select exploration adventure, I’m going to say with echoes of parser DNA, but well short of a true Twinesformer.You are a petty crook doing ‘one last job’ when it goes horribly awry. As you explore the makeshift prison you find yourself in, you must assemble clues to escape. Along the way, flashbacks fill in the gaps in your relationship and heist setup that inform both the situation, and your finale options. Feels pretty familiar, summarized like that, no?
The mood of the piece is its greatest strength. The graphical layout conspires with photographic prompts to create a legitimately creepy, if not altogether novel, prison to explore. There is a soundtrack that further enhances the proceedings nicely, including the wonderful touch of obscured dialogue that feels just OFF in a very evocative way. There are graphical flourishes cuing different flashbacks and plot developments that are simple enough, but super effective and underutilized as a authoring tool across similar IF. I found the marriage of form and function really well done here. The piece has the chutzpah to engage the dreaded timed text, but between its terseness and delivery speed is far less onerous than these things can be. I am likely in the minority on this, but do think its employment here enhanced more than detracted (at least on first play).
The fetch quest gameplay is pretty straightforward. The game cues its puzzles strongly, both in text, and in the relative terseness of its prose which brings details to fore in high relief, practically neon-lit. Even with its mostly puzzle-driven geography, the work still makes time for creepy and offputting details, which was a nice, welcome touch. But the geography was pretty spare and the chrome could not conceal what was at core pretty mechanical circling until closure.
The story, similarly, was pretty stripped down and functional. The beats are there, but none escape the timeworn tropes they are inspired from. Sure, there is some frisson to the setup of Coen Brothers present SAW but other than the fact of it, doesn’t achieve escape velocity. It’s worth remembering that petty criminals are not fire fighters. They don’t AUTOMATICALLY get audience sympathy, it has to be earned. (Wild how twenty-five years ago I might have said ‘cops’ but boy has their stock fallen. I think they are the Intel of professions.) Sense of humor, weirdness, comical venality, tragic backstory, there are lots of effective tools out there at the prospective author’s disposal to finesse sympathy. I mean the Coen Bros ouvre’ is practically an encyclopedia of such tools. None were really employed here, and in IF where you ARE the protag, it is especially critical to drive player engagement.
Short all those things, I’m afraid I found the character and plot beats as mechanical as the puzzles. I do think this effort has a lot going for it, and look forward to seeing more from these authors, especially if they continue to integrate these effective graphical and aural flourishes in their work.
Played: 9/9/24
Playtime: 20min, 4 endings
Score: 4 (Mechanical/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
Traffic by D. S. Yu
A parser-driven, time loop scenario of interconnected cause and effect to untangle? Yes, please! One whose puzzles are both intuitive, yet lateral-thinking heavy? YES, PLEASE. One that minimizes hand holding and segues from pure puzzle play to underplayed but engaging dramatic beats? YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU, GIMME GIMME GIMME.
This game may represent the quickest ramp from my neutral, “Well, what have we here, entry N+1?” that I start every game with, to “HELLZ yah, this is my jam!” You are quickly introduced to the looping gameplay core, with almost no guideposts to follow. I found this game, for a while, to be just about perfect at leveraging tight scenario descriptions and implicit parser assumptions to strike the wonderful balance between ‘what the hell do I do next?’ and ‘wait, this wild thing I tried actually has a response!’ It is a deep implementation that centers player initiative and for while continues rewarding and rewarding and rewarding it. The mechanism of looping itself is a wonderful ‘wot the hell?’ → ‘oh, I see what you’re doing!’ discovery.
It does feel though, like either that initial impression is not as precisely engineered as it feels, or that time ran out on implementation. At some point we segue from a gleaming clockwork of balanced expectations and rewards to what feels very placeholder-implementation-y. I have no insight to this author’s development process, but it feels like things were attacked in this order:
It further feels like this work only got halfway through step 4. Specifically, whereas early puzzles were masterpieces of player information balance, leaving us tantalizingly on the razor’s edge of deduction and head scratching, later puzzles were missing key pieces of info and expectations that made it unplayable without walkthrough.
There is one puzzle that requires NPC mood management, with no feedback on their mood making it impossible to detect, never mind gauge. Another requires you to examine something that is never remarked upon in text (at least text presented in my run through). a cab, that unless you read the walkthrough are hearing about for the first time from me. Yet another requires clear spatial information to solve that is woefully under conveyed. Still another requires a bespoke verb that nowhere in the text is it hinted might be needed and/or interesting. The only way past ALL these is via the walkthrough. Which itself was sometimes deceptive, as if referring to an N-1 implementation and not the final release. (Still close enough to close the deal, but certainly leeching a lot of good will in the process.) All of these stand in stark contrast to early puzzles that hummed by comparison. Not helping matters, after some resignation and trying to follow the walkthrough, it appears I entered an unwinnable, endless loop and needed to restart. Though given I didn’t follow the walkthrough from the start, possible there was some state issue the walkthrough did not anticipate.
If I had to grade each of those above development steps, which, I’m not your teacher but why not? I would grade 1-B+; 2-A+++; 3-B; 4-D. The puzzle and scenario design just felt top notch to me, flush with promise of a truly engaging game. It just felt let down by final polish where later puzzles were noticeably clunkier to work than the early ones, and purely for reasons of player communication, not inherent design. You know what solves that though? More Polish!
Unfortunately, that late downgrade in polish really undid a lot of the early work’s promise. If I may borrow a conceit from my Spring Thing reviews…
Gimme the Wheel - what I would do next if it were my project: I would attack the last half and double and triple revise the text to produce the same level of finesse as the first half of the game. The bones here are as good as I’ve seen, and the first half SHOWS how capably things could be balanced. Traffic 2.0 could be something special.
Played: 9/10/24
Playtime: 1.25hr; incarcerated, looped, restarted following walkthrough
Score: 5 (Sparks of Joy->Mechanical/notably intrusive puzzle cluing)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
traffic_jjmcc.txt (292.4 KB)
Hildy by J. Michael
As sometimes happens when I review things, my brain decides on a reductive label that becomes the lens I view the work through. I actually try NOT to do this, but my ass of a brain often as not has its own ideas. Hildy elicited this: “Magicly Blonde.” Now because it is MY brain, I didn’t need explaining that this was an objectively weak reference to Legally Blonde, the Reese Witherspoon comedy vehicle. I fully recognize anyone outside my brain pan would need hand holding. It’s just not my brain’s best effort.
But that reference, reductive though it was, was reflective of the bubbly, reclaiming-stereotypes, confident optimism that was so infectious in the 2001 movie. An IF work could do FAR worse than echoing that inspiration in a Hogwarts-like setting. Like Reese’ Elle Woods character, the titular protagonist is her own thing, seemingly underestimated and dismissed as trivial and out of place in magic study. While Hildy is a little less assured of her path forward, she nevertheless attacks it from her own plucky perspective with no apologies. She is delightful and we are on her side immediately. Early on she is reprimanded with:
“We can’t go around granting the gift of speech to people’s sandwiches, giving every storm cloud a smiley face or exploding monsters from the inside out. It upsets people!”
I mean, those first two are not the same as the last and WHY NOT??? Stop harshing her mellow. From there, a sympathetic professor sets her on a find-yourself quest that sets her into the not-quite-extinct ruins of a fantasy mall. Not sure what else you expected. Follows an intricate series of Zorkian parser puzzles to manipulate objects, learn and use spells, trick NPCs and generally explore the space. This is as competent a puzzly parser as I’ve seen, though it is MUCH bigger than the 2hrs I devoted to it. I was truly engaged throughout its runtime, encountering minimal technical frictions, unique and difficult but tractable puzzles, discoverable lore that seems equal parts color and foreshadowing, and a setting geography ably painted in the players mind to make mapping minimally necessary. The puzzles themselves sparked with odd setups and clever payoffs that are steps above ‘give item X to NPC Y’ shuttling. That is a really long-winded way of saying ‘Engaging.’ It hooked me with its adorable premise, then segued confidently to an old school parser that was, 2hrs in, free of any asterisks, qualifiers and caveats.
So here’s one. If I had a wish it would be that we got to hear/see Hildy’s personality and voice MORE. Once the preamble is over, we leave an NPC-stocked setting of humorous interactions to a relatively barren, lonely one where Hildy goes quiet. When that happens, we lose a bit of the animating personality that was such an effective hook for the first few scenes of the game. The protaongist settles into the more generic ‘faceless player avatar’ of old school parsers. It’s of a piece with its classic vibe and doesn’t jar because of that. But it does downplay its strongest asset. DON’T PUT HILDY IN A BOX! Let her speak!
Anyway, you know me, I always want more. This was still a truly Engaging, Mostly Seamless work of IF, notably polished despite its size. The highest praise I can bestow is that assuming there is no 2hr quality cliff, I will absolutely play to completion after COMP. (Why would I even say that ‘cliff’ thing? I have no reason to doubt it’s gonna be great.)
Hildy quote, at least in spirit: “This is gonna be just like senior year, except for funner!”
Played: 9/10/24
Playtime: 2hr, unfinished, 35/75 points
Score: 8 (Engaging/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: Yes, will def finish
hildy.txt (154.5 KB)
King of Xanadu by MACHINES UNDERNEATH
Choice-making in IF is the secret sauce that differentiates it from just-plain-F. Whether choice-select, parser, or some yet-to-be-invented interactive paradigm, the capability is ‘player, you participate here.’ This is going to have an effect on the player/reader. Whether it is weighing between presented choices, deciding what to try at a cold prompt character, or just navigating the UI to proceed in the story, the player is digesting information and determining action forward. I am belaboring what every IF fan knows because every now and then, an IF work seems to not understand that. No, that’s too harsh. An IF work seems to underESTIMATE that effect.
By requiring player involvement, players become complicit in the story, required by the work to steer it in some fashion. Differentiating IF from straight-F is most effective when the work understands that impulse and integrates it into the narrative. This is not the same as ceding control to the player. The most successful of the thriving ‘choices are illusory’ themed works explicitly reward or punish player involvement in service of an artistic statement. The key is that the successful works directly engage player expectations and confound them in surprising and ultimately satisfying ways. Asking a player to engage a story, then repelling or rejecting their input at every turn is bad. Asking a player to choose from a wealth of unattractive options that are clearly bad is worse. Both push the player away from the story, but the latter requires their active complicity just to move forward. Unless there are other artistic avenues to keep them engaged, the work will simply be rejected.
I am afraid KoX wanders deliberately or errantly into this space. As the titular King, the player is a preening, egotistical, divine-right product of oblivious privilege. Early on, the story asks the player to select among comically bad choices. The humor in these early scenarios is helpful - no one wants to be awful on PURPOSE, but as a joke? Sure, I’ll play along! This does not sustain very long, before dire consequences start presenting themselves and the jokes leave the room. Then it becomes simply escalating insularity and incompetence required by the PLAYER, until the completely foreseeable and unsatisfying conclusion. So, a work asking a player to inhabit a repulsive character, make obviously awful choices, then blames the player for the story’s tragic conclusion. In a no-longer-humorous tone. This underestimates the power of player initiative, betrays it in a way, then delivers an unsurprising, unsatisfying conclusion, seemingly punishing the player for getting involved in the first place.
Maybe I’m too emotional over this, let’s back up. There is a reading that this work is a character study of insular, egotistical political leadership, dangerous in its disconnectedness and their outsized impact on humanity around them. Sure. Thing is, there are no shortage of those in the world. The REAL world. In the US, you can find them in TikTok, the daily news, and on the campaign trail without even trying. More ink has been spilled on these folks than, I dunno, the ink spillage problem. We understand them pretty well everywhere they appear at this point. To engage this character in IF, in this way, the unique opportunity is to give us insights - maybe we are compelled to better understand a character, having been ‘in their shoes.’ Being the choice-maker in this archetype maybe gives us a greater understanding of… no. That’s not happening here. We are just compelled to make bad choices, and only bad choices, with no insights or commentary beyond ‘bad, right?’ I mean, yeah, right. So why am I doing it? This work cannot answer that question.
I didn’t really find any deep insights here. I recognized the archetype at play, and resented being forced to play it. And was rewarded with unsurprising and predictable results. The work did not seem to figure out a way to leverage interactivity (and the inherent player engagement) to make an artistic statement that leveraged that engagement into something larger. Quite the opposite, it told me things I already knew and despised, then made me do them. This is a very functional definition of Bouncy.
It is almost of secondary notice that the language in the piece was reaching just beyond its grasp. Phrases like “throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities.” don’t really land with me. “The finest legion of the capital garrison postulates itself before you” almost certainly means ‘prostrates’ there. And this just seems like a straight up typo: “ach one a great drumbeat; the drum is made from human skin, and the skin is cracked and chipped from years of impacts” Honestly though, the language is the least of the work’s issues for this reviewer.
Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 20m, two playthroughs
Score: 2 (Bouncy/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
I’m so, SO happy you enjoyed Redjackets, and particularly the romantic confession scene. As an asexual person, I’ve never really seen how we “work” really shown in relationships and that was my goal with Declan and Lynette. I’m so glad it absolutely landed for you. <3
This piece may get the Banana … I gave it an 8! I thought it really enhanced the feeling of this madness rampaging through the kingdom.
Lol, wouldn’t be the first time I landed WAY outside the consensus on a work! Viva le difference! Glad it worked so well for you though.
Forbidden Lore by Alex Crossley
Standard TADS Disclaimer: I am a TADS-stan. Reader, calibrate your assessment of my impartiality as you see fit.
This is a TADS jam about uncovering a deceased relative’s knowledge of a world’s secret history. It is AMBITIOUS in its aims. It is creating a pseudo-history of magic and prophecy in a library of reference materials, that you, the player, will read. It does so many hard things really, really well. It presents the player with multiple shelves of books, each with multiple tomes of interest, many with multiple relevant facts that build on each other in a patchwork narrative of history. And it improbably does it with minimal confusion. What could be a bottomless pit of disambiguation between shelves, books, titles and facts, for me, was instead a deeply responsive hierarchy of unique naming conventions, sly context assumptions and effective mnemonic shorthands. Despite continually referencing and re-referencing these things I almost never got tripped up in the wrong objects or dissonant responses. It honestly is kind of a technical tour de force just managing all those similar but different things.
Ok, I just said I was never tripped up. Crucially, I said by object reference. Tripped up on LORE, well, that is a whole different thing. This is a work whose lore includes country names, religious organization names, Important People names, NPC names, magic spell names - every last one of them made up. They are thankfully not similar to each other, much, but they ARE Fantasy Letter Salad. They are ALSO unforgiving in spelling, meaning when you need reference them (and manage not to confuse a place name for a character name or somesuch), you might type it in three or four times before getting it right. You will find yourself typing endless variations of >ask eyveru about kardevat
The lore itself is interesting enough, as these things go, but remember was dispensed piecemeal through exhaustive combing of maybe two dozen pretend books. Much like real academic study, the charge is in making connections between disconnected facts to drive new conclusions. Did you commit all those vowel-consonants to memory? Do you even remember which book provided which detail when future refresher is needed? No you did not and no you do not. This leaves you in an unenviable position: knowing there are details you need for the next puzzle, but having no idea where to find them again. So now… do you do ANOTHER FULL PASS of the library, hunting out the details you need?
Yes. Yes you do.
At this point, it inescapably starts to resemble homework. So much (re)reading, probably some note-taking to keep things straight, heaven forbid any misspellings on the way. All to tease out byzantine details and connections that you can turn into actionable conclusions! If you are clamoring for an ancient text academia simulator, Lore has you covered. It isn’t opaque, it’s reasonably clear what needs scratching. It’s just a chore to churn through the reference materials to find it. For me, it quickly became apparent that if I wanted anything to write about beyond library science after my two hour playthrough, I better consult the hint system.
This carried me for a while, past the virtual paper cuts of virtual page turning, but then other artifacts started rearing. The early ones were pretty inconsequential - an important NPC in a room described as unoccupied; weird posture changes. Then actual gameplay artifacts came up: being told you don’t know where something is, but being required to point another object at it and succeeding just by >point X at Y Then, there were HINT artifacts, where the game seemingly accepted a puzzle solution, but the hint system seemed ignorant of it and required a DIFFERENT solution.
Until finally, catastrophically, the hint system broke entirely. Going to the well once too often yielded
[Runtime error: string is too long
]
and repeat engagement responded with a cold “Nothing obvious happens.” The safety net had shredded. I was near the end of my timer at that point anyway, but hoo boy that seemed pretty final.
For all that, it would be inaccurate to say the game was a slog. In spite of all the mechanical slogging, there IS a charge in connecting unconnected facts. The puzzle play and emergent lore was entertaining, to a point anyway. The NPCs were kind of fun, and the physical descriptions and magic were cool. There were legitimate Sparks of Joy throughout. I think it may come down to are you a Tolkien reader that immerses in faux history, or are you a noob D&D player that just wants to throw fireballs? The former will find a lot to dig into here, in way more than 2 hrs, and if they successfully bypass the hint system maybe be ok? There are technical accommodations to make with it though, and you probably know yourself enough to decide if the lore is worth it. If not, it may be more… FORBIDDING LORE. Eh? Eh?
Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 2hrs, looks like 1/2 threats defeated but hints disagreed
Score: 4 (Sparks of Joy/intrusive lookups, bug and lore)
Would Play After Comp?: Unlikely, Imma go lob some Magic Missiles
flore_jjmcc.txt (122.3 KB)
Thank you for playing Hildy! I’m delighted that you have enjoyed the game so much and are planning to get back to it after the comp to finish the adventure. I also want to thank you for taking the time to write your review and for providing your transcript.
And I’m very pleased that you are as fond of Hildy the character as I am. I’ve actually never seen Legally Blonde, but my wife has and she has recommended that we watch it together. I’m curious to see how much Elle Woods matches up with the image of Hildy in my head, so I’m sure we’ll watch it soon.
Thanks again!
J. Michael aka Frotzing