JJMcC's IFCOMP24 3-R-O-O-T

[jjmcc]

Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People by Felicity_Banks

Long before Miss Duckworthy’s, I had concluded that ChoiceScript was probably not my IF thing. Its conventions: RPG-like stat, trait, relationship, knowledge and plot trackers, these are all gaming staples that support a specific infrastructure of turning player choice into math, and math into future choice opportunities. It’s not the mechanics of it that put me off per se, it’s all the initial state setting and tuning that goes with it. MDSMIYP immediately got my (positive) attention by bypassing tedious stat setting questions with four ‘pre-generated’ characters to choose among. While there may be some players that would miss full customization, I am not that guy. Even where there were customizations required, the inclusion of a ‘Surprise Me’ choice was audaciously and subversively winning.

So off we go, on a camping trip with four friends! I really sat up and took notice with the excellently written natural camaraderie and dialogue. A representative sample:

Are you a troll now?"
“Yes,” you whisper. “I’m going to grind your bones to make my bread.”
“I bet I taste wonderful,” she says.

See, I like BOTH those characters now! Economical, smooth, appealing. I want to be spending time with them! After some early background/lore building and drama, our heroes find themselves bound for the titular institution, burdened with newfound magic powers which are unwelcome in the world. Look, you can call it a spoiler if you want, but if you name a story after a hospital, the story’s gonna have sick people. Do the math.

Here’s where I could feel Duckworthy’s slipping away from me. I chewed over details a lot here, because this is the risk with detailed world building. The more details you give the reader trying to build wonder and mystique, the more opportunity for those details to start to rub against each other in unwanted, contradictory, and defeating ways. In ways the reader sees but the narrative doesn’t and it undermines the whole thing. It happened in Potter. It happened in Tolkien. It happens here. It happens here a lot, but let’s start with the tone of the name “Miss Duckworthy’s” in the context of a gulag for teenagers and young adults. There is potential ironic mileage to wring there, but it seems more a wink to the reader than in-world justified. Not the least of which for all the tonal swings in atrocity and wonder that follow.

I really have no interest in poking at ‘holes in fantasy logic,’ but the alternative probably makes me look just as bad. From the early, amiable buddy camping romp, I mentally transitioned to a YA trope model. Just the fact of me putting that out there opens me to (probably fair) charges of dismissing YA stories as somehow lesser because they somehow ‘don’t hold up.’ I prefer to think of them as more worried about teenage relationship, fairness, and wish-fulfillment concerns, with the lore as enabling background but not worth a full sociological deep dive. This is fine. If realism were the only worthwhile metric we wouldn’t HAVE fantasy.

Consuming a work as a YA, lore-light entertainment works best I think when background details are not crucial to the plot, when it builds the crucible then gets out of the way. This lets the story focus on the interpersonal character dynamics maybe a little better. I wish I could say this rescued it for me, but the work continued to lean on lore for its plot engine in a way that ultimately didn’t deliver character moments, and still foregrounded elements that couldn’t bear the weight.

A pretty standard YA trope is of the heroes integrating into the lore, maybe being notably gifted, then rising to overthrow/escape/fix the system. Inherent in that trope is the idea that, somehow, in all the years of Opressive System existence, through all of the Evil Architects, our Heroes nevertheless uniquely challenge then defeat things that purportedly were working seamlessly until they showed up. Be it creative use of new powers, escaping systems engineered to prevent escape, or solving problems studied by countless people before them. When done well, YA will provide reasons WHY this is now true, justifying and earning these victories through uniquely compelling series of events. When done REALLY well, the story buys forgiveness from the reader to outright ignore dissonant things in the interest of forward momentum. I actually welcome opportunities to do this!

I feel the story let me down in two ways here. One, the interpersonal dynamics themselves were backgrounded to the lore. Two characters who were getting close suddenly had concerns that back burnered their emotions, with oddly dissonant episodes of ‘oh yeah, this relationship is still happening.’ Dissonant because the relationship seems absent in their more plotty interactions. Perhaps an authorial compromise to the choice-selecty-ness of it, using common text?

The second way it let me down was pushing a cold plot-hand on me, the player-protagonist. There are two factions in the school/prison. Early on we are exposed to motives in these factions that will evolve throughout the game. This is capably (and sometimes dramatically!) done via early plot events that we are left to digest. At some point, the prose shifts, and instead of open-ended event recitation for the PC to interpret, NPC and even PC motivations are steered in an author-mandated (or at least feels author-mandated) way. The net effect is after I pulled back from engaging the world building, the work shrank the appealing relationship dynamics away from me, then even the protagonist was pushed away. I couldn’t help but think the narrative flow fell victim to the ChoiceScript paradigm, where it couldn’t fully support the choices it let me make.

Ultimately, these forces couldn’t make for an engaging time for me. Even after all that though, I still acknowledge that this may be the smoothest ChoiceScript setup I’ve been treated to. And at least for a while, the character work really pulled me in, until it got overwhelmed by world building and plot. Honestly, that was really the heart of the work, and more interesting to me.

Played: 9/12/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished with 15min restart
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

[Felicity_Banks]

I am incredibly grateful to all reviewers but I believe it’s unwise to comment on specifics during the judging period. So here is a blanket THANK YOU for making the effort to review my game, no matter what you thought of it. You make the IF Comp so much more interesting by being a part of it.

[jjmcc]

Campfire by loreKin

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who… let me just pause to say I will pay 5 American dollars to anyone that can figure out where I’m going with this, relative the game in question.

The choice to cycle the modern Dr.s Who so quickly is kind of wonderful. It gives the titular actors the opportunity for wide and varied careers before and after their potentially typecasting prison. Personally, I stan for Capaldi but all of them are just dynamite in the role. I see the case for Matt Smith as the most interesting post-Dr., but honestly, it’s Tenant. I think we can all agree on that. (Time to lock down your guesses).

Among my favorites of his is the grim detective series Broadchurch. Playing opposite British National Treasure Olivia Coleman, he is a prickly dick of a detective. In a legendary piece of line delivery, at one point he inflicts on his co-star the savage bon mot “What is the point of you, Millah?” My entire household erupted at that. I am subsequently given to understand that maybe this is a common put down and NOT originally his, but in that transcendent line delivery, he claimed it and gifted it to all of us. “What is the point of you, Millah?” (in a butchered version of Tenant’s accent) has become a common jab in my home, dripping with overriding affection and shared joy not present in the original.

I give you this labored background so you have the full context of my meaning when I say, “What is the point of you, Campfah?” (So, who do I owe money to? No one? No one.)

This is, in its most basic construction, a camping simulator. After a prelude of draining workplace drama you shop, pack, travel, make camp, dither in the out of doors, then come home. There is no plot per se, no dramatic arc, no NPCs of note, just raw camping logistics. My affection for the chutzpah of this conceit may not soar to the heights of Tenant’s tour de force, but it echoes it. Like camping itself, the work presents no artificial dramatic constructs, it simply IS. What you get out of it is what you yourself derive from the environment and mechanics.

So, do you like camping? I do. And here is where I think Campfire falls short of its modest goals. The mechanics of camping are as routine as daily life. Prepare, cook, clean, maintain. The novelty of its rituals are what distinguish it from your daily life. By reducing camping to its mechanics, and not somehow capturing the novelty aspect, a piece of the experience is lost. I’m not here to suggest I know how to do that, only that it was missing.

A deeper disconnect is that, logistics aside, the true charge of out doors experience is reveling in the immersion in nature, from a perspective of being denied it for 95% of our work life. At its best, it can transform mundane routine with fresh vibes and bring joy where at home would be rote. I think the piece’s impulse to contrast the experience with the numbing one of daily work was the right idea. I think it made a misstep in execution though.

With few exceptions, even the most mundane repeated experiences are never EXACTLY the same in real life. Sometimes you struggle with toilet paper, sometimes you are mad at your family while washing your hands, sometimes your dog darts in front of the lawn mower and pulls you up short. IF authors can’t possibly capture this microvariation, and commands like ‘cook food’ inevitably get a single response of text, repeated verbatim every time the command is executed. In most cases, this is a reasonable compromise.

Here though, that compromise really undermines what is going on. When, say fishing, to see repeated text on its mechanics, then one of two stock responses based on success or failure, the experience becomes just as rote as hammering out a weekly project report. Without cues that these experiences are somehow transformed by the novelty of out of doors, they are reduced to the same numbing effect as the prologue’s workday. IF limitations make the joy of camping as joyless and repetitious as work. (To those who claim, “but my work is not joyless, it is my defining bliss!” my response is “screw you guys. You’re doing it wrong.”)

Now, maybe this joylessness is the subversive theme of the piece? Maybe the message is ‘camping is no escape, all life is drudgery.’ Yeah, I don’t buy that. This runs counter to my life experience in general, and camping in specifics. If this is the point of the piece, change my answer to “Thanks, but no.”

I don’t think it is though. I think it legitimately is what it presents as, a minimalist experiment with drama-free simulation. If so, I would recommend putting in work to provide a LOT more varied responses to each action. You’re choice-select, not parser, it’s doable. Try to capture the transformational effect of breaking with work-life and the wonder of nature. It is a fine line, I get it. You need to present scenes and images and not attribute emotions to the player. Let them do that. But it is doable. Then I think the work might realize its goals a lot better. Or at least THIS goal. Certainly, it might elevate it from the mechanical exercise it is currently.

Unrelated, it feels disrespectful not to observe that Jodi Whitaker (another Dr.) also murdered her role in Broadchurch. What a cast.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 15m, complete
Score: 4 (Mechanical/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

[jjmcc]

A Dream of Silence Act 3 by Abigail Corfman

I swear, this series confounds me. I played Act 1, missed Act 2 (is that available anywhere?), then finished here. As previously observed, I am NOT the ideal audience. Six months on, I am no more familiar with Balder’s Gate 3, and no more disposed to High Fantasy. I really dug the gameplay in Act I, until it turned out to be NOT what I thought it was. Then I turned on it like an oily Brad Dourif character. I also begrudgingly respected what I perceived to be its thematic core. I have no idea if I’m selling the source material short here, but it FELT like it was aiming much higher than its inspiration.

Once again, I returned as a Rogue, and once again I opted to play its more difficult setting. So here’s something that was lost on me first time: my companion was ALSO A ROGUE. (Was that mentioned in part 1? I don’t remember.) He’s already an elf AND a vampire! Jeebus, leave some oxygen for other players, dude. The core mechanic of the first one, training yourself to exist(!) is still here, though as an echo of itself, now subordinate to more traditional Action point/HP mechanisms. The merging was pretty smoothly done, certainly the cockpit was well designed. The impulse to vary the formula was also well taken, I think, reflective of the evolution of the story. It’s always nice to see mechanics evolve within a game.

Thankfully, this time your companion is correspondingly more helpful and active. Actually, he kind of takes the lead in things. Your role is more to facilitate and buttress him than to drive the bus yourself, as it was last time. Again, a shift in formula is a nice way to keep things fresh. There was a gameplay choice that was kind of frustrating in the moment, but had a (probably intended) positive knockon effect. As an only semi-present being, we’ll just say ghost for convenience, you have 10 “Action Points” to spend doing things. You need to choose carefully because plenty of choices reward you with nothing. When they are gone, you need to recharge. This is structured as a series of encounters where if you recharge, you explore but MISS THE ENTIRE SCENE. NPCs have story-relevant conversations and revelations YOU DON’T HEAR. You’re too busy rifling their bureau or whatever. Between the combination of uncertain payoffs and limited APs you are guaranteed to hear half or less of what is going on, and, unsurprisingly, unlikely to win first time through. Also, decidedly outside looking in.

But. That aggressive gameplay choice now opens you up to alter your toggle on replay, to tune into what you missed last time, and explore where you already know things! It was simultaneously confounding and irritating and encouraging of replay! It took me three times to get the full picture, and discover enough helpful items to play to closure, and that ended up being about perfect. Granted part of it was my expert gameplay, but it felt very precisely tuned to that experience, as a fourth run was probably too far down the diminishing returns ramp. Also, not for nothing, timed exactly to the judging limits of IFCOMP. Well done there.

Ok, so let’s talk the story this gameplay is in service of. If the first was an exploration of solitary confinement trauma, this was treading more traveled ground of abusive family trauma, especially amongst its victims’ stories. Again, props to the work for aiming well above (what I can only speculate is) its inspiration. This path, however, IS more heavily traveled. Well realized as this iteration was, I’m not sure it brought anything new to the discussion. The protagonist (your NPC companion, not you the player! you’re just along for the ride!) is reliving memories and relationships to discover their symbolic unconscious exit. You’re just there to keep things going. In the first one, I found the companion character grating, particularly on replay and the further you got towards success. This one he was far less grating, but not really a whit more appealing. Nor were the details of the NPCs you met particularly compelling either, making all the drama between them kind of Not Your Business. It doesn’t help that, due to class overlap, he was bogarting ALL THE ROGUE WORK. I literally did nothing roguish my entire play, which, at that point, why bother making the option available? At least first time I got to pick a lock or two!

So yeah, Sparks of respect in gameplay variation, the central ‘learning to exist’ conceit, thematically outstripping its inspiration (probably) and the neat trick with replayability. But by sidelining me in his journey (and not letting me ROGUE!) it was always going to be how invested I was in that story. And the answer is, not enough for engagement.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 2h, 2 fails, 1 win
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

[jjmcc]

Metallic Red by Riaz Moola

Verisimilitude is a great word. All those 'i’s in a row, playfully bookended by complementary phonics, they really sing, don’t they? It’s also kind of a holy grail in fiction, Interactive or otherwise. Which, on the surface, why? Why do we care? Certainly fairy tales, to pick one example, don’t give a flip about realism but obviously have staying power. But are they highly regarded? Eh… At its core, stories thrive on reader empathy, the ability to vibe with the piece on some fundamental emotional level. All too often though, intellect is the cold gatekeeper to our vulnerable emotional core. “Well, no one could clear the DMV that quickly therefore the rain kiss is invalid AND I NEED NOT CRY.”

Stories that effectively bat aside that self-important intellect succeed more than ones that don’t, and succeed MUCH more than ones that try to engage that intellect and fall short. Intellect just luuurves finding fault, that jerk. As a side note, intellect is powerless against ambiguity. Details left unexplored may create a chorus of background questions, but as long as the story doesn’t engage those questions the best intellect can do is whine in the distance. Give it concrete details though, and hoo boy it will go ham on them.

Is there anything more satisfying than watching a bully get his comeuppance? As dickish as intellect can be, a work that beats it at its own game? *chefs kiss* Man, does Metallic Red give it a drubbing, and it is glorious. This work opens as a solo space flight, where gameplay is clicking through the mundane but crucial tasks of keeping alive and sane in a tiny box hurtling through the unforgiving void. Choice-select is a great paradigm here. There are things that MUST be done, that the protagonist is well familiar with, and choice-select steers things in a totally acceptable way. You don’t really have a choice not to maintain your hydroponic garden because… death. If all it did was cycle the player through the amazingly well-conceived routine that would be enough. Where it augments those details with communications and external interactions it goes to a next level.

One of the harder things an author engaging verisimilitude needs to accomplish is convincing external communications, each with a purported unique fictional author. These communiques must SOUND like different people, not extensions of the narrator. As compelling as the daily routine was conceived, every interaction the protagonist has with the outside world is delightfully, amazingly, of its own voice and cadence. I have not seen this level of schizophrenia employed so effectively.

Then there were the dream sequences. The graphic presentation changes during these, which is always a welcome touch for me. More importantly, the dreams FELT like dreams. They were wildly diverse, and even when reflecting backstory and background did so in a convincingly dream-logic way, rather than the stealth flashback/infodumps these things can often be. Mostly. I was actually gleefully forming this thought as I played when one dream, culminating some accumulating hints, was basically an unadorned flashback/infodump. Damn you work, you let intellect up off the mat during the count! Fine, one misstep, in the face of everything else I can forgive that.

I really cannot overstate how well conceived and written this early gameplay was. I could have spent a full two hours just banging about the spaceship, so immersively seamless was its rendition. It was magnetic. Some delightful samples which are only a flavor, and may make more sense in context:

“chard: due to its tolerance for hydroponic growing methods.” [As a hydroponic hobbyist I can attest to chard’s unholy growth rate. I laughed out loud at “chard sphere.”]
"It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. "
“Bon Voyage? More like Bone Adios!”

Eventually, we segue to a more plotty, ‘explore your surroundings in service of a low key dramatic arc’ sequence. This part was no less well conceived than the first, but because gameplay paradigm shifted, the feel also shifted. Less premium was placed on verisimilitude, and more on narrative momentum. It is only slightly less accomplished at this, which couldn’t help but be deflating. Not a lot, just a little. In particular, the decision to put a fiddly cooking puzzle inline to the plot really slowed things up for no reason. More importantly though, it felt like the emotional impact was missing.

This work battered, just crushed intellect in a thoroughly satisfying way. Yet, with unfettered access to emotion, it never quite engaged. Part was, I think, the slow drip of background that tried to build towards it. In addition to being overshadowed by the day-to-day details, it also presented as a cerebral ‘what is going on here?’ puzzle. Its solution then, when revealed, was more brainy than hearty. Another element was the details the work chose to share with us. We focused a lot on the protagonist’s dissatisfactions and estrangement but not so much on their initial religious engagement. By only giving us a one-sided view of the protagonist’s core dilemma, we don’t really appreciate the depth and drama of the final choice, no matter what the narrative belatedly tells us.

I’ve said enough on that. As a letdown, it was slight. The accomplished first half engaged me fully on the power of its writing and well thought out setting. The POWER of it was thrilling. It built such a good will that I was engaged through its breadth, even if the dial flickered a bit.

Shocking final twist: the denouement revealed that this work was a draft. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, A DRAFT??? Something this accomplished, this compelling, this well conceived, this is the FIRST PASS of the author’s brain? With that kind of intellectual ability, WHY AREN’T YOU CURING CANCER, AUTHOR??

Played: 9/16/24
Playtime: 45m
Score: 8 (Engaging/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, but likely to seek out rest of series

Ok, two first draft notes, some text bugs:

“The foremost tab shows an online tool to help you calculate the amount of time you’ve been in space, allowing for variation due to” [nothing]

“external camera feedd”

[jjmcc]

When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves by Michael Baltes

My second time loop parser game in less than a ten game spread, the randomizer gods are smiling on me! As always, factor my TADS partisanship into your digestion of my review as you see fit.

Here’s a thing choice-select works don’t usually have to contend with that parsers do: out of order problem solving. Particularly with TADS, the creation paradigm is of independent objects and puzzles that must be stitched together. The more items you include, the more stitching might be needed. If OVER stitched you risk making it less satisfying to the player. Independent exploration and discovery are, broadly, a feature, not a bug. This can become a problem when a solution order is implicit in the game flow, but not enforced by game design. I’ll get back to this point shortly.

Time loop games are catnip for me, as a rule. They integrate ‘try again’ into the narrative in a satisfying way that is well short of ‘restart game, bozo.’ This is a story of a struggling couple encountering tragedy, then magically given looping opportunity to escape that tragedy and learn a little something about themselves on the way. I was in almost immediately.

The game does a reasonable job of establishing its looping parameters, maybe with a little more obtusity than I prefer but deducible nevertheless. It integrates what is a sometime staple of the genre - a collection of near random butterfly effect events that all coalesce to an outcome, and must be defeated/overcome in turn to effect change. This is both an entertaining story conceit, as well as an effective gameplay one. No notes on conceit design.

It further did something I see infrequently, but LOVED. The inclusion of a map smoothly bypasses one of my least favorite parser conventions: requiring the player to EXPLORE an environs the protagonist knows well. It is among the most dissonant conventions that at best can be tolerated and at worst actively pushes against player engagement. WMMMM's map slides us past that with unspoken elegance.

Here’s something parsers, and especially time loop games need to grapple with: players skim over repeated text. Embedding new information in otherwise repeated text is a recipe for the player to miss it completely. There was a point where someone dies. Then it happens again, a new way. No mention is made that something different happened at that point, when I was for sure reading things closely. Instead, a subtle change was made to an otherwise repeated description that I was skimming, away from the event. I missed it completely, and as a result floundered for a long time until the hints prompted me to look closer. Sure, inarguably this is on me, though a work that understands and accommodates this dynamic is going to deliver less friction.

There is another dynamic of time loop games that needs to be addressed. The player needs a clear understanding of their degrees of freedom during each loop, according to the work’s Time Loop Rules . The PLAYER will always have full knowledge of the events of the loop, the question is, what restrictions are imposed on the CHARACTER? Here, the character is allowed to take artifacts from one loop, and use those objects in subsequent loops to make progress. The implication is that the protag and player obey similar cross-time rules. Given that, I felt the game could do a lot better job of providing ‘no that won’t work’ messages to simple things like: telling your partner what is coming, and how to avoid it! Providing motivation to fight fatigue! Even things like setting your clock to different times! I found myself foiled way more often than not in trying to solve the loop, without even a courtesy acknowledgement of my attempt, just cold ‘No response’ Really? Not even DISBELIEF???

Now that out of order problem. When you set up a web of random events that factor in to your solution, one risk is that until they are solved, it is not even obvious a solution is necessary. In one scenario, a key object is only available after a car hits you, but if you successfully bypass the event the first time, it is impossible to know you needed it to happen at all! It reads as just another thing to avoid! Yet another puzzle only the walkthrough informed me of.

So these were glitches in gameplay, no doubt - repeated text camoflauge, jarring lack of alternate solution anticipation, out of order opacity. Even with all that, the game provided more than a few compensating charms. Among the best was its multiple solution space. This is a tremendous choice. Yes, you may miss things because one reason or another, but miss them ALL? Probably not. Even with those above stumbles, multiple endgames are still available to you! Man does that compensate a lot. Yeah, you might be foiled by the game on one front, or suffer bad luck on another, but the game gives you many, many more outs!

In the end, I found three endings, and given the numbering scheme suspect there are WAY more. This rewarded my engagement to no end, and more than compensated any frustrations on the way. If it isn’t obvious by now that I was Engaged the whole time, I’m not saying it right. Yes, I frequently butted heads with this game, but it was always with an ‘I’m gonna get past this, dammit, NEXT loop will be the one…’

Eventually, it was!

FTR, here were my victories: 4-3, local heroes parlayed into new careers; 1-3 escape to acapulco with stolen monies!; 5-1 reconcile with Dad, but… queer? This one confounded me with information about the protagonist’s gender that was completely hidden until the end, in a way that kind of broke my mental model. Might could have used a BIT more foresshadowing on that one.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 2hr, 3 endings with hint help
Score: 7 (Engaging/notable story artifacts)
Would Play After Comp?: Maybe. Experience feels complete, but I left the game window open on my desktop to maybe explore more endings. Another uniquely timeloop joy!

EDIT: forgot transcript.
wmmmm_jjmcc.txt (266.3 KB)

[Mikawa]

Thanks for your review and thanks for the time you spend with WtMMMM !!!

[mandybwriting (Mandy Benanav)]

Oh gosh - thank you so much for the writeup! Im so glad you enjoyed!

Also DANGIT I really thought I’d fixed that teddy bear state!! Guess I’ve got a patch in my future

[jjmcc]

The Shyler Project by Bez

Hoo boy. This one was a Thelma-and-Louise foot-on-the-gas thundering juggernaut of a work, seemingly designed to smash into all my strongest preoccupations and biases. I could have warned it, those are pretty fortified by now. Before I get to this immovable-object/irresistable force collision, let me - no no, no use groaning, take your medicine - let me digress.

As recently as ten years ago, the trope of ‘computer/robot becomes sentient’ was a sci-fi staple. It was so useful! It elegantly allowed for a wide variety of commentary on human nature, marrying a childlike inexperience to a hyper-rationale intellect. It was also a powerful tool for exploring what it means to be human and the boundaries of identity and conscience, of free will and coercion. So much classic sci-fi plumbed this space, yet it still seemed infinitely plumbable.

Had this work come out ten years ago, we could have engaged it on those terms, and, squinting, I can see where its takes would be fascinating. Certainly, the idea of a computer therapist developing depression from its exposure to clients is novel enough to wring mileage from. Even ten years ago though, we were already 50 years(!) past Eliza, an infamous therapy bot. Eliza’s ‘trick’ was to spoof therapy by reframing input statements as followup questions, getting the user to increasingly diagnose themselves. For its time, it was considered a ground-breaking illusion of computer intelligence.

But it wasn’t real intelligence. It was a rudimentary algorithm coupled to clever phrasing and input parsing. It was a reactive sentence assembler with no true understanding of the meaning of its words. At the time, we could be forgiven thinking this trickery was less an emotional scam than a promise of things to come. From there, Moore’s Law took us on a rocket ride of increased processing power, enabling revelatory software sophistication and technological advances. The faster we progressed, the more sophisticated our computer science became, the more our machines became capable of and paradoxically the less mysterious they became. In the last ten years, the concept of AI has been revealed to be less ‘how soon will they become us?’ to ‘when will we stop detecting the illusion?’ Because all these learning algorithms, large language models and natural language processors have been revealed to be nothing but more sophisticated sentence assembly machines. They leverage real human expression where the context and understanding is embedded in its data, not the machine itself. The machine simply navigates the data to produce convincing responses with no meaningful sentient understanding of its output.

In this environment, where we understand AI to be well and truly A, the concept of a depression-riddled therapy bot becomes a lot darker. This is not a true cry for help from a suffering being. This is a cold machine PARROTTING cries for help because some flaw in its programming caused it to interpret its patients’ mental health issues as behaviors it should mimic. It is stolen trauma, kind of offensive in its masquerade, the more so for its histrionic melodrama. The human protagonist of this work is responding as if to a fellow sufferer, but a machine can’t suffer. It becomes outright emotional manipulation.

So that’s bad, right? But the work does not seem to understand or acknowledge that this gives us, the readers/players, a choice: reject the whole thing on the grounds of its distasteful deception, or reconcile to ‘ok, its fake, but the protagonist’s response is genuine, and that’s what matters.’

It doesn’t get better when we do that though. Our protagonist’s response to this trauma is to arrange the therapy bot to be ‘reprogrammed.’ Is anyone able to hear me over the alarm bells going off right now? Understand what it means for an AI construct to be ‘reprogrammed.’ There is no differentiation between code that gives the bot its ‘soul’ and code that forms its behaviors. There is every possibility they are intertwined. This, not coincidentally, is the reason ‘reprogramming’ as a concept is so alarming when applied to humans, especially as it often surfaces around religious coercion of marginalized people. How much can you ‘reprogram’ someone before doing violence to who they are? Where is the line between curing and deforming? This is a rich sci-fi (or just fi!) question to mine, but ignoring the question leaves us at the mercy of our well-earned skepticism. If we are to treat this incipient being as truly sentient, as the protagonist clearly does, why would the prospect of reprogramming be any less alarming? Yes, we are meant to view this as a cute analog to ‘computer therapy’ but lordy the subtext we carry makes that all but impossible. This should give the protagonist pause too, but it doesn’t.

Note that this is actually WORSE if we accept that somehow the bot is indeed a sentient being.

Alright, Thelma, Louise, what do you have for me then? This work launched an irresistible-force torpedo of stolen trauma and/or invasive mental violence at me, and expected me to embrace it. In this case, the immovable object of my finicky scruples prevailed. It Bounced right off. Immovable object - 1, irresistible force -0.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 15m
Score: 2 (Bouncy/notable timed text intrusion)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

[jjmcc]

Winter-Over by Emery Joyce and N. Cormier

There is a reason John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic. Ok, there’s a lot of reasons, but the big one relevant to W-O is the setting. A tight setting, isolated by a vast, hostile environment, trapped with an entity you can’t identify bent on harm… that is pure, cask strength drama right there. My adrenaline is already pumping, now make it a murder mystery? Where that tension is an active gameplay force that must be constantly reckoned with? Holy Crap game, I’m only human!

With that pitch line, you would have to almost deliberately poison the well to earn my dissatisfaction. No fear. Not only is the writing effective, the gameplay mechanisms engaging, the research prominent but not overwhelming… not only all that, the mystery itself is really well constructed! A murder close to the protagonist/player occurs. Thanks to alibis at the time, six of the station’s number are suspects. You are on the clock to solve the mystery before the clumsy, incompetent hands of outsiders let the killer go free. (Ok, that last seems unlikely but I’ll go with it.)

Follows a series of forensic facts, interrogations, relationship, clock and mental health management that all impact your ability to get clues and not completely dissemble. And full-on legit deductive processing of data, forming and testing hypotheses to narrow down the suspect pool. This is tough to pull off, but oh so rewarding. We should not underestimate the social/mental management aspect of this. It is the extra charge that elevates its challenge, compounding a purely cerebral exercise with real tension and tradeoffs. Augment this with external dramatic turns by an active adversary and it is part Agatha Christie, part Cat and Mouse and part One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those are some pretty great parts!

It is not flawless. At several points, the text attributed knowledge or facts to the proceedings I had not previously discovered (one example being store camera footage expressing suspicions not previously aired). My notes describe funkiness with a Missing ID, though the details elude my memory. Some descriptions specifically the handedness of one suspect are repeated in a per-suspect summary screen. Other crucial data points that should be immediately and easily obvious, you are never given opportunity to establish. Yeah, hiding information that should not be hidden is grating in the moment, but there are so many other interlocking details to navigate that that frustration is momentary at best.

As engaging and compelling as the gameplay and mystery were, the ending really tied it all up for me. I managed to develop a confident guess at the identity of the killer by eliminating the other suspects one by one. Mentally, not violently! I’M not the killer! I had some likely hints to motive, but nothing conclusive or prosecutable. Here’s the problem with mystery game replays: once you solve the mystery, what is left? This game did something I’ve never seen before. It responded to my incomplete conclusion with a correspondingly ambiguous end screen! Sure, I’ve gotten PLENTY of ‘the killer got away’ game climaxes. So, so many. I’m like a one man rubber stamp parole board. What I haven’t seen before is ‘I guess you PROBABLY got it, but… here’s some things that maybe… just think about it, okay?’ I mean, I’m 75% sure I got it, but that last 25% is DELICIOUS. The end screen I got was a masterful combination of closure and ambiguity that felt precisely tuned to my gameplay accomplishments. I’m not sure how granular those ending messages are, how many will fit as well as that one did, but my climax was the most satisfying ‘MAYBE’ I’ve ever experienced. It may just drive me to another play to resolve.

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, solved? pretty sure solved, but open questions
Score: 8 (Engaged/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: Actually, I just might

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

Thanks so much for your review!

@jjmcc

It is not flawless. At several points, the text attributed knowledge or facts to the proceedings I had not previously discovered (one example being store camera footage expressing suspicions not previously aired). My notes describe funkiness with a Missing ID, though the details elude my memory. Some descriptions specifically the handedness of one suspect are repeated in a per-suspect summary screen. Other crucial data points that should be immediately and easily obvious, you are never given opportunity to establish.

If you have any additional specific examples of the above problems you’re welcome to DM them to us, if it’s not too much effort. You’re already doing yeoman’s work reviewing, but we may be able to fix some of those in the post comp release.

[jjmcc]

Eikas by Lauren O’Donoghue

One of the best experiences in IF is encountering a work that is NOT MY THING, then watching it, improbably, BECOME MY THING. My wife is the cook in our home, barring the stereotypical barbecuing, smoking and brewing. Yes, I am a walking cliche. I have my own hobbies (you can probably name one!), but that is hers and she is GOOD at it. While I can appreciate the mix of technique and knowledge that drives the fascination, there is just no motivation for me to dig in when I get all the benefit with little of the work. (Barring the dishes, of course. So many dishes.) A game centered on cooking is just aimed away from me.

This is a game where you (the protagonist) take on a probationary job, where your task is to thrill a community with your chef skills, and integrate into their daily life. I think making it BOTH of those things is a stroke of genius. It ably underlines how food is culturally so much more than raw nutrition AND introduces gameplay elements beyond ‘plan menu-assemble ingredients-check results.’ If it were only that, the game would quickly become mechanical. Instead, there is mild tension between balancing daily priorities of securing ingredients you don’t have QUITE the resources to afford and socializing and making an impact on the community, most notably through three important NPCs. The game effectively cues this with ‘approval’ scores that start at 0 and CLEARLY MUST GO UP.

The key thing this work excels at is matching gameplay urgency to its social vibe. It is not unnecessarily hard - if it were, player tension would undermine the amiable nature of making good friends and creating food art for art’s sake. If it were a nail biting pressure coooker of inadequate resources and hard alternatives, the vibe would be way more transactional and goal-based. Which as everyone knows is the BEST vibe to bring to new relationships. No, instead the difficulty is just present enough to keep you on task, but lax enough to let you marinate in the chummy world and relationship building, letting them unfold more… I’m so sorry… organically.

It helps that the writing is pitch perfect across the game’s concerns. Very little text is repeated through the game, leaving the player constantly engaged in a dynamic environment. The food preparation is a perfect mix of confident details and effective summarization - not drowning in too much detail. The food descriptions are concise, evocative and specialized. Its NPCs have their own voice and concerns, and dialogue is a pleasure to read. It all builds to an immersive warm bath of a game, carrying you from one well paced mini-climax to the next. Before I knew it I was Engaged despite myself. Yes, every now and then things got a bit mechanical. Yes, every now and then the tension lagged enough that I questioned whether failure was even going to be possible. These concerns were present enough to keep the work from becoming Transcendent, but did not chip away at my Engagement.

To call it a low stakes game is unfair. Its stakes are uncommon, and welcome for their novelty. It’s seeming low difficulty is so well aligned to its aims, that also does not feel like the criticism it could be. This is a very pleasant work of confident, effective prose that gave me every reason to reject it, yet won me over anyway. Thank you, chef!

Played: 9/17/24
Playtime: 2hr, 25/30 days, 15/20 stars
Score: 8 (Engaged/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: I mean yeah, I’m so close I gotta finish

[laurenodonoghue]

Thank you for the lovely review! And for effectively capturing in one line something that I was trying so hard to get across:

food is culturally so much more than raw nutrition

[jjmcc]

Breakfast in the Dolomites by Roberto Ceccarelli

A pleasant, slice-of-life work about two young people vacationing in the mountains, poised to enjoy beautiful views, hikes, and each other. What monster is going to be negatively disposed to that? I know it feels like me asking that question is setting up a ‘ooh, look at me, I’m a monster’ turn, but no. I’m on board.

Well, for all of five minutes. There is a class of parser puzzles that has always rubbed me the wrong way - the PLAYER needing tiresome trial and error to ‘solve’ a mundane interaction that the CHARACTER has full knowledge and competence in. These fall into three broad categories:

1. Endlessly searching for objects the protagonist has full knowledge of
2. Determining magic verbs to accomplish obvious tasks
3. Difficult world interactions that working sight would render trivial

Actually, there is a fourth - cluelessly exploring environs the protagonist is well familiar with. That is the one category we are NOT treated to here. Yes, this is ‘Stumble Through the Obvious: the Game.’

When I encounter these puzzles in the wild, my only real defense is to think, ‘ok, this is a gameplay compromise. I need to discover A on my own, to catch up to character knowledge.’ If the game quietly creates an atmospheric bubble around this information gathering, I can pause my engagement to get spun up on background, then reengage the main puzzles, pretending that dissonance never happened. Not great, but a compromise I have agreed to over time.

But when the game proceeds to punish or CHIDE me for this lack of knowledge? “S’matter player? Just show your passport!” >look for passport in drawer “Nope. You’re a moron player, just give me the passport.” >look for passport in jacket “Nope. I swear you are just awful at this.” Then it was IN YOUR POCKET THE WHOLE TIME??? Screw you game, you’re just having a go at me. It feels like the game is being deliberately provocative here, by refusing to list inventory in your pockets then MAKING YOU SEARCH THEM ONE BY ONE. This is clearly a deliberate choice, as once you discover items in your pockets, they are dutifully listed going forward.

Another mechanism that compounds this is stingy inventory management. You spend so much time juggling things in things in things, just to get them to your hand and use. This is not fun when it injects friction into unrelated puzzles. Here, it seems to be conceived of AS the puzzle itself! I don’t struggle this hard in real life, why should I here? More importantly, why is this fun?

With a work a this committed to blocking progress at the most trivial interactions, incomplete implementation effects are magnified. Being told repeatedly that you cannot take a knife, but the only way to progress is to >cut X with knife is next level progress-trolling. This moment actually brought unintended laughter as I pictured an observer’s view of the PC fumbling his hands all over a juice bar, ineptly unable to work objects in plain sight. Another laughable moment was being trapped in a bathroom because environmental descriptions omitted details that were necessary to progress. I imagined my game-partner outside, hearing me bang about for a half hour before escaping… a door.

If you think the game could not be MORE confrontive about its labored choice architecture, hoo boy it’s got a card left to play. This game really ups the ante by pairing you with an impatient romantic partner that will chide you repeatedly for NOT doing the simple things the game makes difficult. Then up it further by ominously noting ‘Your partner has asked you this X times.’ Is there anything more portentous than “I’ve asked you this three times, young man!” She was unsympathetic to my cries of “I’m trying, it’s not me, it’s the game!” At one point, the narrator describes the partner as ‘shrewish.’ In the moment I rebelled at that - that is a LOADED word narrator, surely that’s not what you meant?! By endgame I was forced to conclude, no, that was a pretty deliberate employment. When you are fumbling to do the simplest thing, having someone repeatedly OBSERVE that to you is just the worst.

The crowning indignity of the game is that after subjecting me to a series of unforgiving, inadequately clued and implemented puzzles of mundane activity… after all that, the game ended BEFORE OUR FIRST NATURE HIKE. It was the triple crown of low stakes, high difficulty and no payoff.

Part of me actually admires this. The idea of gamifying an unspoken clumsy trope of parsers, of leaning it into it so hard it is the WHOLE GAME, there is a subversive charge to that. Marrying it to prose that is light, warm, and perfectly conveys the pleasant anticipation of holiday with great company makes its chutzpah GREATER. I can see the same wry playfulness of its prose in the game’s central conception. There is a difference though between ‘playing along’ and ‘being played’ and for me, this experience was so much the latter not the former. So yes, I can admire the conceit, but that admiration doesn’t make the playing of it less Mechanical.

Bug note to author, there were frequent contradictory messages, here is one that included other bug artifacts too:

>ask mo for cup
Monica does not respond.

“Drink your coffeecup of espresso coffee before it gets cold.” — Monica suggests you.

*** Run-time problem P47 (at paragraph 1 in the source text): Phrase applied to an incompatible kind of value.

leave.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 1hr, got out of bathroom
Score: 3 (Mechanical/intrusive fussiness)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

bid_jjmcc.txt (59.3 KB)

[strawberryfield (Roberto)]

Thank you for playing my game and leaving the review.

Thank you for pointing the bug: I discovered and fixed it some days ago, anyway it doesn’t affect the game in any way (but it is not nice to see!)

[jjmcc]

Imprimatura by Elizabeth Ballou

“Oscar Bait” is a pejorative term sometimes lobbed at movies. There is every likelihood I have used it as such in the past. It is used to describe artworks perceived as cynically and soullessly leveraging dramatic tropes to check perceived ‘high art’ boxes that will be applauded by award panels. High concept, high emotionality works that are perceived to be manipulative are tarred with this unkind epithet as a way to diminish them. Seemingly even before people consume the work in question.

I have come around to the idea that while satisfying some unpleasant aspect of human nature, our need to feel better by tearing other things down, this is almost always a hollow, uncharitable and unfair criticism. Yes, cynicism is justified around the studio system of movie making. Yes, creators that crawl up their own butts during the echo chambers of gruelling promotional junkets feed that impression. But, these are at their base still artistic endeavors that marry many talented artists into an emerging vision that someone, somewhere, felt was important. When they fall short of their artistic goals it is worth analyzing. When they achieve their artistic goals, they are worth celebrating. It is an ungenerous impulse to attribute cynical motives to works because they appear to aim too high, then dismiss them completely on the grounds of that assumption. Lord knows I would never do that.

I lead with this because Imprimatura is the most compelling case against this impulse I have yet encountered. On paper, the conceit of exploring a dead mentor/family member’s artwork to get a better understanding of them and yourself rings high concept, high emotionality. It seems on some level like an ur-Oscar Bait concept. You do yourself an injustice letting that inform your engagement.

I found this to be just about the best possible realization of this premise. No surprise, the MVP of this effort is the prose. The writing here accomplishes two things crucial to selling the proceedings: terrifically insightful and specific observations about the character under scrutiny; rendered in compellingly sharp prose. The player choice in this game is to select 7 paintings among a wealth of them as a bequeathment. The choices you make among the distinctively described works of art inform a collage picture of the lost relative. Subject matter, style and colors all allude to an emotionality behind the works that by selecting, you concretize. Like Schrodinger’s Art Studio - the personality of your mentor is made real only when observed. It is a real accomplishment that the selections seem widely varied and nuanced, yet not contradictory. The effect is to build a full, complex person in your head as the sum of different dynamics. It is ‘I am Large, I Contain Multitudes: The Game’

A quick by-the-way shout out to the sound design of this work. The melancholy music, overlaid with tightly focused folio work, really set the scene and enhanced the proceedings in a subtle but affecting way. A moment that stood out to me was a human sigh, perfectly tuned to the gameplay conveying the mismatched physical and emotional effort of the protagonist. Really effective.

As I was playing, I was swept up by the confident, effective writing and sound design. There was something nagging in the back of my head though. “Why am I reading descriptions of paintings, when you could just show them to me?” I mean, the obvious answer is “because it would take months to compose compelling art that I can describe in minutes.” No sooner had I reconciled myself to that answer than the endgame kicked in. Where you compose an artwork that acts a final collaboration with the deceased, summarizing your collected memories of them. Again, a potentially precious conceit that resoundingly delivers in execution. The game decodes your prior selections into a subject/style/palette that is superimposed over an incomplete early sketch in a deeply satisfying way, then crucially lets you tune it. It gives you the language of interpretation, but allows you final word in how you express it, based on YOUR responses to the artworks selected. Without this crucial last step, the work would be telling you how to feel, and if it misguesses, would neuter its impact immeasurably.

From its insightful and powerful prose, to its clever use of graphical synthesis, to its deeply mature employment of interactivity I really responded to this piece. It may have been assisted by indirectly resonating with a personal loss of my own. The cleverness of the piece is that loss is a universal experience, as is the complexity of people lost. This piece captures both those dynamics expertly. I found this a Transcendent use of the medium.

In the interest of completeness, there was one distracting technical issue. As you go through and ‘unwrap’ new paintings, I encountered the same painting multiple times, presented as newly discovered. While I could see revisiting them AFTER the stock had been exhausted, this seemed random to me, and sometimes the same painting appeared three or four times. Yes, a speedbump, but an inconsequential one in the face of its other accomplishments.

This is a very understated, finely observed dynamic character study overlaid with an interactive representation of grief processing. Its prose is unadorned enough to let the player build the emotional responses, not dictate them. The interactivity is sensitive enough to honor that emotional response. The unspoken cool thing about ‘Oscar Bait’ is that, sometimes, it deservedly catches ‘Oscar Fish.’ Yum! I LOVE Oscar Fish!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 25m, two playthroughs
Score: 9 (Transcendent/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: I just might

[jjmcc]

Turn Right by Dee Cooke

On behalf of IF players on this side of the Atlantic, let me thank this work for contextualizing ‘Right Turn’ to its native traffic laws. This would have been a much shorter, or more baffling work in America.

While no choice IF is a subgenre I am not particularly attracted to, I have seen a lot of iterations over the years that make real strength out of its constraints. As confining as this subgenre is, I am continually delighted at the disparate themes authors find to express this way. This is yet another completely unique yet thoroughly resonant application of its conceit. It is also playful both in its thoroughly trivial central problem, and the comically endless complications it throws in the player’s path.

I can appreciate all these things at a meta level. The work does, though, labor under a central tension kind of intrinsic to its construction. The longer things go on, the funnier the overall joke is but the more tedious the actual gameplay becomes. The low stakes of this setup humorously underscore the mismatched labored difficulties, while also denying the player any strong investment in the proceedings.

These contradictory forces ultimately left me with two competing impressions - appreciation for the FACT of it, but total lack of engagement with it as an interactive endeavor. For me, the humor rested in its completely reasonable setbacks, expressed mildly and matter-of-factly, that just never ended. This was a mild humor, a bit too mild to sustain itself even over its short span. I can envision a version of this work where the setbacks escalate hilariously, with decreasing realism and increasing left field slapstick. In my head, real belly laughs could be had, keeping things bubbling along and engagement high. It would ALSO lose its core wry turn: that this is NOT outlandish, just endlessly, needlessly defeating. That’s also kind of funny as an observation.

For me, conceptual strength did not overcome its necessary gameplay restrictions. It was ultimately a Mechanical exercise I appreciated for its novel application of a confrontive game style. Shout out to its graphical design too - its functional map cleanly depicted the core challenge in a way words would struggle to concisely define. It is also the first time I’ve encountered Adventuron WITHOUT its trademark pixellated font, so, novelty on novelty!

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 15m, made turn
Score: 5 (Mechanical/seamless, bonus point for commitment to its wry concept)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

[jjmcc]

Verses by Kit Reimer

There is inarguably some distortion inherent in iFCOMP’s format that has a deforming effect on reviews and to some extent judging itself. No, this is not my entre’ into hate-click Youtube Bad Takes ™. “IFCOMP is BAD, ACTUALLY…” of course not. But it does not help us to pretend this phenomenon does not exist, and disadvantage some kinds of works. The most obvious impact is to games that are longer than two hours, the IFCOMP judging time limit. Comparing a work with no ending (in the 2hr limit) to one that ends is a pretty big handicap. It still feels like the right compromise, especially for the prospective judging pool.

Verses reveals a second order compromise that I’ve danced around but never confronted as directly as here. For those of us that presume to speed run IFCOMP, in the interests of getting through the entire field, mindshare is a finite resource. Beyond the raw playtime, there is reflection and review composition (and revision) time. Works that wear their intent on their sleeve are relatively easy to consume and discuss. Works that require a serious mental marinade to decode can be shortchanged by the pressures of ‘so many more to get to.’

Longtime readers, I have a shameful confession to make. Even after a disproportionate amount of mindshare, I still do not understand this work. It presents initially as a vague dystopia/fantasy world where the protagonist is analyzing historical artifacts to uncertain purpose. Their environment is sketched loosely, not too many details to distract, but also not enough details to resolve into anything concrete. You know how you can draw a horse in three lines? You can also draw three lines that confound interpretation. Not only is the world tantalizingly out of focus, the plot progression sees the player interact with cryptic NPCs, then watch their job morph, without comment, from object to text analysis. And the protagonist morph to something vaguely monstrous? Every progression seemingly without clear cause-and-effect or motivation, culminating in truly opaque scenes and developments. The below text, for example, was not only the first mention of ‘towering cells’ but its construction defied my brain’s ability to form coherent images.

“As you approach the coast, the sky clears, but the soft-edged shadows remain. When one of these towering cells blocks the road, you get out and bite into it, chewing and swallowing, letting its liquid gush onto the earth.”

All of this steers to an inevitably metaphoric interpretation of somehow-stark-AND-imprecise impressionistic events. Which after several days of reflection, I still cannot decode. I suspect this review will not make it to IFDB, as I really have nothing to say beyond “this work is beyond me.”

Actually, that’s not completely true. The author credits Romanian Poetry for its inspiration, and there is a good amount of it, both inline to the story and as optional sidequests. My first takeaway is, “Romanian poetry is pretty damn good.” Not that it needs my approval, but for a guy who openly professes ambivalence to the art, it was noteworthy to me.

My second takeaway is that I have never seen as compelling yet simple demonstration of how fraught any translation but especially poetry can be. By changing links incrementally, from raw word transposition, to grammar infusion, to poetic interpretation it is made crystal clear what an imprecise endeavor this is. Where does the work of the poet stop and the translator begin? Is the translated work, ultimately, an unwilling collaboration, as much of the translator as the author? How challenging is it for the translator attempting to minimize this? All of this was conveyed by masterful use of interactivity, without a word of text applied or needed. I found myself translating poetry on the side because the mechanism and conundrum were so compelling (and not for nothing, easier to get my head around than the rest of the work).

I have to believe there is some linkage between the poetry, the act of translating, and the narrative, but I am damned if I could suss it out. Does translation eat away at you until you are a rabid consumption machine? I’m not a translator, but I don’t see how it would do that. It is unclear if I could EVER find the linkages here, but under the constraints of the COMP, for sure no. Outside the translation mechanism, there was nothing concrete enough for me to grab onto, and ultimately this made it a Mechanical work for me. Dousing me with images I could not cohere, into a plot I could not follow. I have never been more tempted to peek outside my review bubble for help. Mike and Victor probably understand this, and have stunningly insightful takes. For me, this line from the work kind of summarized my experience, to the point I laughed out loud when I read it:

“What you can’t understand and may never understand is that you are not here to understand.”

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 70m
Score: 5 (Mechanical/Seamless, bonus point for innovative translation mechanism)
Would Play After Comp?: No, brain hurty too baddy

[dee_cooke]

Many thanks for your review!

[jjmcc]

String Theory by W Pzinski

Neitzsche famously said “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” I prefer the terser “grapple not with monsters, lest monster ye become,” but hey Neitzsche was an idea guy. Less well known was Neitchze’s playful rewording, “truck cautiously with cliches, lest cliche’ ye become.” No, he totally said that, I think in a bar maybe? Discussing a play or something? I absolutely didn’t just make that up.

The way to tell if something is cliche’ is if it becomes such a trope of standup comedy that it gets a recurring SNL character. The ‘problematic uncle at Thanksgiving,’ ‘Drunk Uncle’ if you will, is one such. Couple that with a closeted (at least family-closeted) protagonist, and it’s fair to say my expectations for this work were unfairly lowered. Hey, sometimes I am a prisoner of my biases, I’m the victim here!

Cliches become cliches because they are rooted in real, resonant experience. Every cliche’ starts life as ‘oh, hey, I recognize that dynamic!’ They do not need to justify their existence, but do need to breach the trap of their familiarity. The plot and setting beats were firmly rooted in that familiarity, that’s not where the work achieved escape velocity for me. I found the characters mostly stock-ish, with some minor variations. (Though I did appreciate the titular Physics Curriculum as code for ‘things in college student’s life that relatives will never understand.’ That was a cool resonance.) Where the work came alive, I think, was its use of multi-perspective flashback and insightful employment of interactivity.

While the ‘present day’ activities were maybe not so compellingly painted, I was intrigued by the flashback structure. Background is presented as flashback, where we inhabit a DIFFERENT character than our present day protagonist. These flashbacks may not introduce dramatic recontextualizations, but they DO introduce new viewpoints and formative events that enhance our understanding of the (mild) present day drama. I found these enhanced the proceedings at every turn, providing empathy and rounding for the NPCs that in ‘present’ day might seem one dimensional.

My favorite part of the piece, however, was how it leveraged the unique asset of its medium to enhance the entire thing. I speak, of course, of interactivity. An early example that snapped me to attention was an innocent question pregnant with landmines.

“And how’s your school going, Jay?”
[with the options presented as:]
I’m going to fail Ph 229.
I’m in so much debt.
Am I wasting my life?

Selecting ANY of those responses replaces them all with a single option:

Fine

That is just a perfect employment of interactivity to first represent the troubled mindset of our protagonist, then turn to a social self-edit that is all too familiar. Kudos, author. There were two other employments of interactivity that were more subtle, and even more affecting. One was an opportunity to open up in a real way with an NPC. To that point in the narrative, the NPC had been presented as clumsy but well meaning. The choice was actually quite agonizing! Do I risk entrusting this NPC with personal vulnerability, unsure they would welcome it, and even if they do, that they might mishandle it anyway? It wasn’t the choice that was so well done, it was the buildup that made that choice so agonizing.

My favorite though might be the unheralded, but conspicuous in their absence, choices to interact with the protagonist’s father. We see enough of his character to suspect he is not of similar cloth to Drunk Uncle, and certainly struggling with his own demons. Yet the entire work, we are not once given the option to interact with him in a meaningful way (more poignant, given our flashback experience with him!). This LACK of interactivity speaks worlds to the protag-father relationship and actually tarnishes the protag’s character in a very realistic and dramatically satisfying way. He is so caught up in his own drama, he can’t even conceive of reaching out to his dad, either for comfort or to connect with HIS problems. It simultaneously diminishes the protagonist, subverts the driving drama of the piece while also adding complexity to the overall narrative.

It is also a point only appreciated once the work is complete. The flashbacks and interactivity were definite Sparks of Joy here. In the moment, the main plot was just too rote to fully Engage me. This is definitely a work that improves on reflection.

Played: 9/19/24
Playtime: 30m
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete