JJMcC's IFCOMP26 F-E-R-R-O-O-T

[jjmcc]

On Repeat by Sarah Wilson

On Repeat picks a wonderfully niche human experience as its central focus: discovering new-to-you music that speaks to you on such a fundamental level, your life immediately expands with possibility. I can remember this happening exactly four times (or five? I’m going to count it as 4, as one might not have occurred without the first). 1) Listening to a “Columbia Record Club” recording my parents had received, no doubt through laziness, of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s Greatest Hits. 2) Listening to, on recommendation of a friend, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. (And then feeling those feels STRONGER with Wish You Were Here) 3) Purchasing Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, because of some offhand comment on Slashdot or some similar forum. 4) Listening to the entire Toxicity album by System of a Down because I had heard “Chop Suey” in the Rock Band video game.

In the first case, it kick started a lifetime engagement with the Blues. In the other three, a still-running love affair with the bands in question including a near maniacal collectors impulse to acquire their back catalogs and bootlegs. (If you’ve ever had cause to explore Pink Floyd’s ROIO* body, it may be second only to the Grateful Dead. Its a DEEEP hole is what I’m saying.)

These epiphanies are so personal, OR makes the wise decision to shade the music in question. Nothing would be more defeating than to claim revelatory music, then play tunes the player might not synch with. It would undermine the whole premise of the work. It is inviting we the players to bring OUR experiences to the table and boy did I. Given the rarity of artistic explorations of this phenomenon (off the top of my head, most frequently alluded to in the filmography of Jack Black), I was pretty psyched going into this thing.

After seemingly exhausting its various endings, it is with great sadness that I conclude the work’s evocation of this transcendent phenomenon was tangential to its aims, and in a way that kind of minimized it?

In OR, the protagonist encounters a to-them watershed musical work. As a player, we are invited to navigate the protag’s subsequent days, selecting between social activities like work, dating, shopping(?), connecting with family or immersing yourself in the newly-discovered disk. By making these things mutually exclusive, it immediately positions the musical engagement as anti-social. You EITHER live your life in the world OR indulge your new obsession. It leaves no room for, closer to my experience, inflicting your new obsession on everyone around you! Further, there is an emoji-based player status that is influenced by your decisions. On first play through, I just played through as ME, not willing to retreat from the world but indulging the obsession a “reasonable” amount. I still got one pole of the emoji-verdict and a not-so-satisfying result. So I replayed, deliberately attempting to finish on the other two results. They provided different narrative results, but none were emotionally satisfying. I figured out pretty quickly why. The promised ecstasy of discovering newness in the world was NOT the point of the piece at all. It seemed to deliver a more prosaic “balance is good in your life” message, which, sure. BUT SO IS/ARE (DOSES OF) THRILLING IMBALANCE!!! That latter is far more interesting to me, given the breadth of “balance” messages the world is eager to foist on us.

So, my strongest reaction was really one of missed opportunity - opportunity to celebrate this rare, wonderful aspect of human existence. I think there was a more subtle potential here which I could have embraced, but also did not quite land. When we encounter transformational music, it FEELS like the arbitrary touch of the divine in our lives, of providence delivering a glimpse of something greater. But of course this is not really the case. These moments of revelation are deeply dependent on the chain of experiences prior to the engagement, to our mindset at the moment of experience, and to the staying power of the art in question. All these are deeply SUBJECTIVE artifacts of the normal progress of our lives. On perhaps my favorite path, it seemed like the work was going to foreground this. The protagonist experiences a traumatic life event in the course of the work. It would be a pretty stunning twist to showcase how your life influences your epiphanies, how tragedy might poison an experience that otherwise could have been a treasured memory. I don’t feel the work actually connected these thoughts though, and instead reverted to its more safe conclusions.

It is unfair to the work to burden it with my own expectations, but by evoking such a SPECIFIC feeling that has been an unalloyed positive in my life it couldn’t help but do so. Casting musical epiphany as unhealthy obsession felt like a false equivalence. Could it be that? Sure. But if that were the point of the piece, couldn’t we have used, I dunno, Meth addiction instead? Imma say it out loud here: “Music is BETTER FOR YOU THAN METH.” Bold stand, I know. This deliberate, to me VASTLY reductive, equivalence quelled whatever Sparks I might have felt. It DID cause me to play some music though, and that was worth it!

*Record Of Indeterminate Origin

Played: 9/14/26
Playtime: 10m, 1st pass; 20m 5 more play throughs all 3 emojis
Score: 4 (Mechanical/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

[jjmcc]

Necromanceers by C.E.J. Pacian

Fourth in our “Yr Better Than That!” review sub-series, for works that don’t quite breach into Engaging, but have a certain je ne sais quoi that distinguishes them. FOURTH??? Holy crap, what a bumper crop of awesome this COMP has been so far. I’m barely a third of the way in!

Far and away the most prominent aspect of this choice-select work is its setting. It is a singular magical-militarist work, technologically WWI-ish where military units are lobbed around inside oversize artillery shells, units have attached Necromanceers, all set in a world suffused with arcane politics, cohabiting aliens, strange geographies and nearly impenetrable nuances. Works that dabble in this kind of world building can usually break one of two ways: into an impenetrable mess of hopeless contradictions or a magnetic partially-complete puzzle where the glimpses are staggeringly strange yet allude to a coherent, stranger-still big picture just out of focus. Showing my hand early – boy howdy is this work WAAAY the latter. Every detail of the world would seem to support a rich narrative of its own, but the details keep COMING and COMING and COMING, leaving us to white-knuckle along for the ride, barely glimpsing one wonder before we are whisked off to the next. It is the propulsive backbone of the work and does SO MUCH LIFTING. The phrase that hit me early, and then continually repeated with increasing urgency, was “How METAL is this!!!”

Which is good, because the gameplay could feel a little opaque. Not the character-molding choice-selects you are given, which are mostly how you react to and prioritize against plot developments. Those are obvious enough. No, the opacity manifested in the opportunities you, as magical protag, have to do some DEATH MAGIC. To conjure (seemingly as kind of an act of violence!) long-dead mythic figures to your cause. I say opaque for two reasons. In the first, the namespace is wonderfully fantastical - really great fantasy letter-salad that the work assures us was drawn from a real census and seems richer for it. Because of its alienness though, the namespace kind of defies our ability to hold them in our head. As we learn of potential ancient heroes, we are expected to draw from MORE letter salad to effect combat. In my case it was all I could do to remember the most recent discovery, nevermind draw from a quiver of possibilities to apply the right hero to the right task. And this is AFTER a kind-of-clumsy learning curve where only CERTAIN dead folks are available, something the protag SURELY knew better than me.

I did get a bit better at it eventually, when I resigned to scratch paper because I could not easily reference the game’s compendium of names during gameplay. Not good enough that I felt in CONTROL at any point, but at least able to hold my strokes against the fast-moving current of the plot.

I also felt the characterizations suffered a bit. Most NPCs, even the ones with the most fascinating back stories, never felt multi-dimensional. They all seemed to have a plot-driven function that comprised their entire personality. Rereading that sentence it sounds kind of bad, but in practice both the back stories and plot functions were BANANAS, completely of a piece with the hardcore background that constantly swirled around us. I’m saying characterization felt one-dimensional but not FLAT if that makes sense.

Well, barring the protagonist. That guy did feel flat, and he was textually composed of multiple pieces! His verbal tics were omnipresent, and leaned towards ‘nebbish,’ in the most egregious cases undermining other more flamboyant characters’ attraction to and regard for him. So you can see where I couldn’t quite get to Engaged with this work.

But let’s get back to how @$^%#*& METAL this thing is. We are talking a FLEET of airbrushed panel vans. Every plot twist, most character escalations, and even casual observations of environment lead to AMAZING world revelations of aliens, wondrous geology and society, intricate politics and magic systems. So far NONE of it feeling repetitive, derivative or cliche. Which is mind-boggling given how MUCH of it there is. Do you know hard it is to make octopoid aliens not feel cliche’?? I was able to play to three endings and all three somehow EXCEEDED THE BAR OF WONDER THE WORK HAD SET! ALL THREE!!! How is that much creativity contained in a single work, especially one this short? I am still BLOWN AWAY by this.

Here is the measure of my regard. Yes, I fist pumped and devil-signed my way through this. At the end, I sat back with a huge grin, convinced I had exhausted my engagement. I peeked back at the name Compendium, noting only 3 of 16 achieved (one of which was your ‘starter’). Dude. DUDE. DUDE. There are 13 MORE of these kick-ass things to find and employ!? In a lot of works I might have qualms that the uniqueness will peter out, that repetition will chill the white hot creativity I experienced. This could still happen of course, but given the trippy experience so far I’m confident there’s more to wring out before that happens.

HOW METAL IS THIS?!?!?! No seriously, HOW METAL!?!?!? I NEED TO KNOW!

Played: 9/14/26
Playtime: 30m three endings
Score: 7 (Sparks of Joy/seamless) +1 YBTT! Bonus
Would Play After Comp?: PARTY ON, WAYNE!!

[jjmcc]

El Ruido by Jen Lee

We all do this: at the start of the comp, I browsed my shuffle, just skimming the field to get a read on what I’m in for for the next 6-7 weeks. TADS games get clocked. Eye popping art gets clocked. Returning franchises get clocked. Most genre lists get perused at best perfunctorily. This one pulled me up short. “telenovela, noir” WHAT NOW? I am so glad this was relatively front-loaded in my shuffle because ‘telenovela noir’ is a phrase I didn’t know could exist and it would have driven me MAD with anticipation if it had been relegated to end of line. Could a work POSSIBLY live up to the evocative promise of that genre pair?

IN TEXTURE??

In this year’s COMP, I had a reunion of sorts with Texture as a platform. I repeat myself a lot on this topic, on the off chance someone has not heard this particular drumbeat of mine: lot of UI promise rarely realized, intrusive dynamic text artifacts rarely mitigated. It is a two edged-sword with a HIGH body count on the author’s side of the blade. I am happy to report, this is the most accomplished application I have experienced in a while. While it did not attempt to leverage the drag-balloons, it decidedly leveraged its ‘thought connection’ mechanics to great effect - often allowing multiple verb-noun cross connections on any given screen. All too often, Texture works are limited to single noun-verb pairings, kind of undermining the player’s need to connect them at all.

It also, perhaps more critically, ALMOST completely managed its dynamic text issues. I think fonts only changed sizes twice during gameplay? And in-line text MOSTLY inserted at easy-to-spot paragraph or narrative breaks? When it broke down it was inevitably jarring, but compared to other works, this was far more the exception than the rule. There may be a slight grading-on-a-curve happening here, but based on its ultimate impact to the gameplay I call it Mostly Seamless.

For a work this short, it is crazy to me how many thematic threads are provisioned, and how effectively they are layered on top of each other. At one level, this is a dialed-to-11 stagey melodrama, where the protagonist is an actress portraying a villainess. A persistent ‘buzzing’ goading her to extremes are the constraints of the teleplay. At another level, it is a woman living in this dialed-to-11 melodramatic world, the ‘buzzing’ of this world goading her to genre-specific acts that would not otherwise be thinkable. At yet another level, it is a woman dealing with some heartbreak, and the ‘buzzing’ a psychotic tendency to react to those around her in the inappropriate telenovela style. At THREE OTHER LEVELS, it is a woman at EVERY ONE OF THESE LEVELS, resisting the coercive buzzing of her particular milieu.

AND EVERY LEVEL WORKS LIKE GANGBUSTERS. I was immediately attracted, as I’m sure we all were, to the prospect of SLAPPING THE CRAP out of our co-stars, accompanied by a cutting line of dialogue. All in fabulous hair, wardrobe and makeup. Promises made, promises resoundingly kept! Then I ran at it as an actress, then as a mental breakdown, and it all held together insanely well. Then I tried resisting these imperatives at each level AND THOSE ENDINGS REWARDED ME FOR DOING SO TOO. Honestly, in 15m time, I felt like I had experienced 5-6 different stories, each of them impossibly tight and dramatically taut! And regardless of storyline, I felt FABULOUS while doing so!

The prose of the piece did wondrous work through all of this. It effortlessly conjured the feel of telenovela melodrama (ok, to be clear, I am enamored of the CONCEPT of telenovela, but not a true consumer of the media. My regard is completely through its reputation and parodies, not a first hand expertise.)… where was I? Oh yes, it effortlessly conjured the feel of MY CONCEPTION of telenovela and through the magic of IF invited me to live it. Cutting dialogue, swelling music, intense stares, impossibly fraught emotions, I experienced all of it through the power of words. Words that ALSO let me experience all those other levels! Amazing writing. Given the impossibly high expectations set by its pregnant genre description, how fantastic is it that not only did it MEET those expectations, it still found ways to EXCEED THEM?

I was tempted, on the strength of this multi-level achievement to rate this work Transcendent. After a few days of rumination, I don’t think I quite get there, but the conversation is still raging inside me. Who knows where I’ll end up by COMP’s close? There is a high likelihood, in the course of my internal debate, someone is gonna get slapped.

Played: 9/17/26
Playtime: 15m, 5 endings all pretty great
Score: 8 (Engaging/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: Experience seems complete, but might need to refresh myself come vote-logging time. Or if someone is in need of a SLAPPING.

[jjmcc]

Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa by Daniel Stelzer, Daniel Gaskell, and Tim Leonard

Longtime readers are familiar with one of several openings I give to reviews: citing some left field tangential connection to my life and riffing from there. Given the really shallow depth of my Bag of Tricks, you wouldn’t even need to be THAT longtime of a reader to note it. For this work, an embarrassment of riches presented themselves to me. Do I riff on my wife’s engagement with Duolingo and my often hilarious perspective overhearing her talk to the app? Do I riff on the extremely dire “educational games” of the 80s and 90s, whose learning value was inversely proportional to their gameplay (Carmen Sandiego, this wouldn’t concern you, you are free to go.) Do I introduce you to my sister, who speaks 4? 6? languages, and regale with one of many stories that all start with “Be as mean as you like, this white girl has no idea what we’re saying.”

Or do I, somewhat acharacteristically, just dive right in to the game itself? From the very first screen, HL announces itself as an extremely accomplished production. Were this a Spring Thing game, I would probably have created a NEW category beyond “gleaming” into “blinding” in its polish. It opens with a note-perfect view of an academic’s desk, an open textbook being the game interface. Special kudos to the book boilerplate acting as credits to the game - its inclusion perfectly encapsulates how every detail of gameplay is simultaneously as low friction as possible as well as presenting unbreakable kayfabe in its conceit. Committing to the bit is an understatement – it acknowledges no reality BUT its bit.

After the intro, you go to one of three chapters, presented as a translation of original Hittite tablets. Each “tablet fragment” is conveyed as an academic figure, each alien word clickable both to provide translation and grammar tips or straight game input. Yes, you could also type it, but for me given the unfamiliar letter combinations, clicking was the way to go. This well-lubricated interface zips you forward, where it reveals its true aims: to teach you the ancient Hittite language.

Its quality of play features go beyond this. “Sticky notes” in the text present navigation compass, map, definitions, suggested verbs in each location. Gameplay missteps recast “You can’t do that” messages as footnotes of “erroneous translation.” Further footnotes acclimate you to grammar construction and character rendering. Presented every bit as straight-faced as the rest of the work.

It is kind of an ingenious conceit. Parser games are already pretty terse noun-verb things. This curt grammar naturally focuses the translation problem. If you are conversant with its traditions, familiar IF gameplay will also push things forward where strange syllables might conspire to stall. The first part (“tablet”) is a pretty straightforward navigate-pickup-use puzzle. You could almost say “trivial”, though if you did you would need to put enough mustard on it to show this is far from an insult, it is quite considered and effective. It’s triviality draws focus away from problem solving to translation, “How do I accomplish what clearly needs accomplishing?” “What words get me where I want to go?” “Hey, I’m speaking Hittite!”

So, when I first went skiing.. (I should’ve added that to my first paragraph list!) When I first went skiing, I pretty quickly mastered “stay upright while gravity and low friction accelerate me to dangerous speeds.” What came MUCH slower was “Wait, I have to turn now? Or absorb moguls? Or avoid other skiers???” The conceit, presentation and UI of HL WAS that hill. Even part 1, on the Bunny Hill if you will, my speed outstripped my capabilities.

I don’t think there is any way around the fact that, unlike my sister, if you have little linguistic ability this is going to be a LOT of mouse back and forth and clicking. If the words “Nominative, Dative and Accusative” not only mean nothing to you, but refuse to stick in your head in a useful way there will be a lot of trial and error. All of it amusingly rendered as translation correction “footnotes.” I do not blame the game that my copy of the text ended up being the most footnoted in the history of academia, often overwriting itself thanks to my sheer linguistic ineptitude. If that text told me ONE MORE TIME that my noun form was incorrect I’m not sure a court of law could hold me accountable for my crimes.

Even so, the Bunny Hill’s construction worked in my favor and I powered through the scenario in about 50 minutes. 50 minutes, for a geography and puzzle that probably warranted 15, but was obviously only a means to an end. I did it in HITTITE! An accomplishment there is no way I could have predicted a month ago! The charge came, not from the parser puzzle of it, but by becoming minimally capable in a new language (with LOTS of hand-holding). Like a newborn!

Look, academic learning IS a chore. The mechanics of it are unnatural. As a species we seem better suited to apprenticeship-like learn by example and practice. Which is ALSO a chore, as any kung fu training montage will drive home. We endure these things because our questing brain thirsts for new knowledge and skills. This is the charge that drives us, that made us apex predators. Artists! Engineers! Philosophers! Craftsmen and women! LINGUISTS! All of them are funneled through this rigorous regime to deliver accomplished professionals on the far side!

The joy is definitely in the GETTING THERE, and less on the work involved. (Ok, clearly I am relating my OWN relationship with academia here. In my family there are people for whom the slog is the joy. I mean I woulda been satisfied with 1 additional language and I never really got there. I will, as per usual, be presenting my own experience and assessment of this game. Hopefully with enough context that you other weirdos can extrapolate from.)

So. A lot of work landed me into Tablet 2, where the command construction was more complicated and the IF puzzle a bit more complex. Trying ever so gently to move me past Kindergarten. It proved too much for me. More noun forms to navigate between, with multi-syllabic names. Adjectives and descriptive nouns. Multiple-noun actions. Grammatic constructs I simply failed to penetrate. To this moment, I remain unsure what a “Dog-knife” is. Another hour-ten was insufficient to get me much past a non-fatal NPC encounter, despite epic amounts of clicking.

What I am left with are copious Sparks of Joy in UI presentation, deep respect for its employment of IF as a motivating element, some feeling of accomplishment at the 50m mark, offset by a gameplay experience that nevertheless felt more work than fun. This may be the BEST POSSIBLE educational game experience I could envision (no, still not time for you Ms. Sandiego), particularly given its very niche subject matter. Judged on that criteria I don’t think this work has a peer. As a voluntary experience that I might get invested in, the experience capped at those Sparks. Decidedly worth my time, flawlessly implemented, but more work than play.

Hnh. I never thought of myself as an anti-intellectual.

Played: 9/17/26
Playtime: 2hr, marginal pt2 progress
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/Seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: Maybe? Language am hard.

[jjmcc]

Pegasus Crew by Dildemma

So here’s the problem with strawmen. Sure they’re flexible, but they’re so itchy in bed! Wacka wacka wacka! Not sure why I opened with a Catskills joke, but here we are. Less cigar-wavingly, aNOTHER problem with strawmen is they can’t lift very much with their dangly arms. Pegasus Crew raises a lot of questions, but kind of neuters their impact with the series of straw-filled supports that not only can’t quite hold the load needed, they can be bent in unintended, contradictory ways.

The setup is a small crew touching down on the titular Pleasure Planet for plot reasons. When I say “small crew” I mean three. What is the minimum crew needed to HAVE a Captain? I guess there is no minimum in boating, but it feels like there oughtta be. The word ‘Captain’ has both a functional and a hierarchical implication. Thanks to media the former is often lost behind the latter which really requires a deeper org chart to make it tenable. In this case, the crew size feels pretty deliberate. The player guides an amnesiac Captain as they shepherd a crew of two on a personal memory recovery mission. (That alone begs the question, why is the crew so invested, actually? Why should they care?)

The work is rife with strawman dichotomies to plumb. Your crew personifies credulity extremes and sadly, little else. Your prior job was servicing a 1/0 model of the universe, explicitly eliminating 0’s. The pleasure planet is either “treat yrself” or “mind virus.” Every choice elicits one of two emotions from your crew. The work doesn’t really invest in any of those poles in a challenging way, not enough to make anything BUT its centrist message feel appealing. Ironically championing “free will over false categories” by providing a single attractive path that amounts to its own bridled choice. Worse, more often than not, it narratively rewards one of the poles anyway!

Lets start with your crew: a cynical former-noble and an optimistic alien waif. Eventually they do get some flashback fleshing out, but for most of the runtime they are reduced to their one-dimensional philosophies. We are given precious little of them besides this. Because the narrative is so clearly attempting to reject binaries, having two binary characters has the effect of us rejecting them as well. It doesn’t help that the narrative does not present them as equally valuable either. Optimism is positioned as blindly accepting the best motives, pessimism the opposite. In a world of even the most basic complexity optimism will be disappointed. Pessimism, besides being kind of disappointment proof, by virtue of its ‘rejection’ bias gets to soft-align with rejecting the whole binary! Which the narrative ends up reinforcing by showcasing that pessimists are, for all intents and purposes, right. So, binaries DO have value?

The world building suffers a bit from this too. I’m not saying there is no human impulse to divide into 1/0s - accepted insiders and rejected/persecuted outsiders. It’s just… extremists have long known that to make it stick it can’t be ambiguous. Cloak it in moral imperatives, in social norms, fictional transgressions or universal truths. The more readily you can identify transgressors, the better. Here, that identification is ceded to some unnamed judgement body? The world’s complexity comes from everyone’s different, nuanced definitions of WHAT a 1/0 is and navigating their conflicts. It’s how binary computers work: each bit is a dichotomy, sure, but in a 64-bit machine the combinatorial explosion allows us to present all colors of the rainbow! PC posits a world where power dictates that two colors are one too many, they’ll TELL you who is what color, and people just agree to power’s assessment of that. It is unconvincing and because of that undermines its thematic intent.

The most interesting parallel in the work, and some thematic spoilers ahead, is the Pleasure Planet’s “Entice and indulge” method of dichotomy enforcement vs the Galactic Gvt’s “just murder 'em.” Carrot v stick (another dichotomy!), both leading to the same outcome. Even this though is further complicated by its assertion that the carrot approach springs from alien physiology that demands mass-mind. This is a species that biologically DEMANDS conformity, but its central conflict is positioned as a not-so-attractive choice to the player. So what works for them doesn’t work for us? Sci-fi has a long history of holding up human behavior as alien, to examine it through exaggeration. It is a tricky thing to do though, because by positioning it as ALIEN, your starting point is “this is NOT us.” Words can do it for sure but I didn’t find this iteration crossed that gap. Yes, people are susceptible to trading autonomy for comfort. We are equally if not MORE susceptible to rejecting it, so reducing a society to only the former makes them alien. Which raises the prospect, are our dichotomies even relevant here?

I think the least satisfying of these dichotomies is the endgame: you have opportunity to secure your memory goal, and must decide to pay the cost or not. It is PRESENTED as a multi-dimensional choice, but only one choice actually honors the characterization and plotlines. The others present as jarring contradictions of everything prior, delivering a dichotomy of “narratively justified” v “not justified” as a result. Maybe there is some possible resonance to these alternate paths if you force yourself into unattractive options earlier in the game? Though it would require some endgame text changes to make it stick. As it was, the final choice seeming closed its ‘reject binary’ message with ‘take this third path.’ I just don’t think ‘reject the binary, lionize the trinary’ is a compelling upgrade in freedom?

This is a work that wants to declare “I am not a one nor a zero. I am a FREE MAN!” but provides a choice architecture that doesn’t feel convincing or any more free. For me, these contradictions ultimately kept me from engaging this beyond a Mechanical level.

Played: 9/18/26
Playtime: 45m, 4 endings
Score: 4 (Mechanical/Mostly seamles)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

[VictorGijsbers]

@jjmcc

For me, these contradictions ultimately kept me from engaging this beyond a Mechanical level.

Come on JJ McC…

Give yourself over to absolute pleasure
Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh
Erotic nightmares beyond any measure
And sensual daydreams to treasure forever
Can’t you just see it?
Whoa, whoa, whoa

Don’t dream it, be it!
Don’t dream it, be it!
Don’t dream it, be it!
Don’t dream it, be it!

(Sorry )

[jjmcc]

@VictorGijsbers

Don’t dream it, be it!
Don’t dream it, be it!

I’m totally the Brad here, aren’t I?

[jjmcc]

Meet the Timesheet by Garrulus (aka Jay)

This is a short, surreal parser puzzle whose central challenge is to get enough computer time to finish your timesheet. It advertises itself as a “corporate liminal horror,” which feels very of-the-moment. Liminal horror kind of exploded into the mainstream, between Backrooms and Severance on the dual strengths of its collective subconscious power and its usefulness as an analogy for opaque, bureaucratic alienation. I haven’t decided yet if “of its time” is a compliment or criticism.

The piece opens with some table setting of an office get together, successfully establishing our faceless protagonist as disinvested and presenting the titular challenge. It does NOT try to establish the dreamy dissociated atmosphere that builds the liminal space. This is kind of ok - the abrupt transition from 'uncomfortable but normal" to “deeply strange”, most especially including the protagonist’s unconcern with that transition, puts us off balance which is where liminal spaces want us to be. It is a short Spark of discomfort, very much aligned to the work’s aims.

There follows an escalating exploration of a looping collection of cubicles (the loop itself another off-kilter detail), trying to secure enough compute time to service your paperwork. The setting is shadowy and minimally detailed, effectively painting an environment that slides off your eyes in a disconcerting way. Another Spark! You are pursued through your quest by some shambolic zombie middle managers that need to be avoided… just like real life! Here is where I felt the considered lack of specificity undermined the work a bit. Your pursuers are in shadow until they catch you - when suddenly their parody value is foregrounded. It doesn’t quite coalesce with the liminal space you are navigating, rather it swings between TOO immaterial to register and TOO funny to be strange. It also introduced, to me, the FAIL-UNDO loop that became my primary gameplay mode. That repetitive loop combined with the threat dissonance to nerf the liminal dread and atmosphere, making the gameplay much more transactional.

As your timesheet progresses, the environment throws complications at you, and also some tools to deal with them. These are entertaining, if alternately too obvious or too obscure to truly engage. The latter though led directly to the brightest Spark of the whole work. The walkthrough.

This pdf-eelie is a wonder all its own. Styled as a collection of office detritus and strange doodlings it is WONDERFUL in accomplishing the environmental mood the work itself doesn’t quite deliver. It is simultaneously fun to read AND provides sidelong hints in a thoroughly winning package. Honestly, if you play this game WITHOUT consulting the walkthrough, you are getting a noticeably lesser experience. At MINIMUM, consume it after you play.

With some goosing from the walkthrough, I tumbled to the most clever puzzle of the game - resolving the seemingly-stuck screen savers. The nature of the puzzles are expectation-defying, even in the strange liminal space you inhabit. They are also quite amusing and fun. All this amounted to SO many Sparks of Joy, but with some key could-have-beens (CHBs). The gameplay loop CHB more enjoyable and balanced. The environment CHB stranger. The game CHB as great as the walkthrough. Even without though, sparky for sure.

Technically there was one big glitch, so prominent that it rose to Notable all its own. When you attempt to take the second batch of pins, I don’t think it matters in which order you reliably get this:

> get pins

[ Programming error: tried to write to —>10 in the array “which_object”, which has entries 0 up to 9 ]

[ Programming error: tried to write to —>10 in the array “which_level”, which has entries 0 up to 9 ]

[ Programming error: tried to read from —>10 in the array “which_level”, which has entries 0 up to 9 ]

[ Programming error: tried to write to —>10 in the array “which_object”, which has entries 0 up to 9 ]

[ Programming error: tried to write to —>10 in the array “which_level”, which has entries 0 up to 9 ]

[ Programming error: tried to read from —>10 in the array “which_level”, which has entries 0 up to 9 ]
red pin: Taken.
green pin: Taken.
yellow pin: Taken.
blue pin: Taken.

So a Sparky/Notable dish it is. With a STRONG side of “read-the-daggum-Walkthrough!”

Played: 9/18/26
Playtime: 1hr (including unrelated reboot/retracing steps), 128/128
Score: 5 (Sparks of Joy/Notable Technical intrusion)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

mtt2_jjmcc.txt (87.1 KB)

[VictorGijsbers]

@jjmcc

I’m totally the Brad here, aren’t I?

I’ve given this question due consideration, and I’m leaning towards the opinion that you’re more the Dr. Everett V. Scott here.

[jjmcc]

Dreamteller by Fatih Mert

Our cultural fascination with serial killers is an in-my-lifetime phenomenon. Part of it, I’m sure, is how ALIEN even a single thrill-murder is to most of us, let alone a central life choice. That alienness has a magnetism about it, defying us to make sense of it yet demanding us to try. Psycho offered psychology as a possible decoder. Subsequent fictions like Red Dragon and From Hell took it further, couching murderers as philosophical monsters, prey to dark insights at the heart of the universe most of us can’t perceive. At some level, this is as good an explanation as any given how inscrutable these motivations are.

On another, it abstracts the true human horrors enough to make them more palatable as entertainment. It gives permission to couch serial murder as some sort of elevated endeavor, a response to forces so primal that mere glimpses of it are enough to forever color how you perceive the world. A horror precisely because we are incapable of understanding its true meaning. This approach brings a sort of Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror right down to the human level. And also lets the villains monologue about it ENDLESSLY.

Dreamteller positions itself very much in this story-telling tradition, adopting the elevated language that many of these stories do to sell their mythic scope. The language in these stories does a lot to try and establish the sense of larger meaning, of forces beyond us, by rendering it in poetic terms outside our daily lives. A lot of the frisson of these kinds of tales lay in the awakening of its central detective to this hidden part of creation - of contrasting their workman-like, grounded competence to mysteries beyond their skillset.

As a culture, we’ve seen an ungodly amount of these stories by now, at varying levels of convincing. The American crime drama Criminal Minds alone delivered 320+ over a 15 year run. We’ve seen enough of them at this point, that I need either a really unique spin on the omnipresent evil, or I need a super-well executed detective turn to spark for me. HBO’s True Detective season 1 is a recent celebrated entry in the genre (which, interestingly enough, both sells its conceit tremendously well, then also undercuts it masterfully). I did not find Dreamteller convincing on either score, I’m sorry to say.

On the detective side of the house, I think the work suffered a bit from its interactive model. The work is more story than game, interactions often token story advancement rather than true choice or puzzle solving. Because of that, the protagonist’s detecting skills were referred to often enough, but only really demonstrated in action in a single puzzle which the player had vanishingly small opportunity to participate in. (And whose prosaic nature, I should observe, clashed with its elevated premise quite notably.) The story moves fast enough, with pretty minimal clue decoding, that that single puzzle did not do much to establish character or create player affinity. The rest was the cold hand of plot, culminating in a Deus Ex Machina climax essentially bypassing where lots of gritty detective work SHOULD have gone and that kind of rendered the prior detective work immaterial?

I don’t feel I clicked with the elevated prose any better, which honestly is the higher bar for this reviewer anyway. I was constantly conscious of the prose REACHING for meaning, rather than CREATING meaning, if that makes sense. I respond best when poetic prose conveys the SENSE of a coherent world even as it is conveying how my dumb human brain is ill-prepared to understand it. Here, it felt more like obfuscation for obfuscation’s sake.

"How are you going to explain the void in your mind? For in your mind, swirling,
intertwined mists are drifting, shifting through a thousand shades of darkness.
They avoid taking a certain form, becoming a meaning. Like a dream forgotten
as you try to put it into words."

"The way to find him passes through the clues. "

If I notice what the words are attempting, it probably means they haven’t actually accomplished it. Contrast those above to a more effective passage that was describing something insightful, but more grounded:

"The deaths, the murders would turn into a game where you fed each other's narcissism. "

Now, THAT sounds like an observation I can get behind! Let’s see more of THAT! This was part of the most interesting aspect of the story, where the protagonist acknowledges that the chase might just be more compelling that any larger Justice. In the end, that observation doesn’t really go anywhere, as it becomes swamped with Supernatural Developments. The endings do provide meaningful choices for the player, but their effectiveness hinges on how clearly the protagonist and the cosmic forces resolved. For me, neither gelled into anything concrete enough to justify any of the endings, leading to more of a ‘…and then this happened..’ than ‘…THEREFORE this happened…’

I felt the work ably if a bit reach-escape-graspy recreated a genre that I just need MORE from at this point, never becoming more than a Mechanical experience for me.

Played: 9/18/26
Playtime: 30m, 3 endings
Score: 4 (Mechanical/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

[jjmcc]

The Acquisition by Jess Watsky

There is a class of IF conceit I have come to call “Surprise Protagonist.” Unlike some, I’m not going to painfully beg to make “Super Intelligence” happen - fetch will either happen or it won’t. I am going to use “Surprise Protagonist” for the duration of this review though, as a convenient shorthand. SP is a fiction conceit that bases a plot twist (if not a work’s MAIN twist) on the late reveal of the protagonist’s TRUE nature, hidden from the reader until the appropriate dramatic moment. The effectiveness of the surprise hinges on how fair it feels in retrospect, how it does not contradict previous narrative beats, and of course how ambitious the turn is.

In non-interactive media there are some terrific examples, though even to NAME them becomes a spoiler-fraught exercise. I think the best ones work because stories with surprise twists are among our favorites, and PROTAGONIST twists are among the most subversive. IF, though, has something these other media do not: interactivity, obvi. Among the oldest of IF’s tricks is to cast the player AS the protagonist. We are not consuming traditional media that are, for all intents and purposes, 3rd person experiences. We are PARTICIPATING, DRIVING the work. SP is a WHOLE new dynamic here - it is not “everything you knew about this character is wrong” it is “everything you knew about YOURSELF is wrong.” To experience, it feels less like a joyful surprise than an unfair trap. I can think of exactly ONE IF work that successfully executed this twist, and it used some storytelling alchemy to make it work.

Acquisition opens with the protagonist seeing a piece of artwork come available, and endeavoring to acquire it. Our early choices are about how to pursue that, and we are asked to make these choices with passing little knowledge of our protagonist’s financial and family condition. Good news, since WE are the protagonist, we can just fill that in ourselves, make choices that align with some assumptions we choose to make. BAD NEWS, we are resoundingly WRONG in those assumptions, rendering those choices wildly inappropriate, and kind of unjustified.

I think the work is not blind to this artifact, though there is enough ambiguity of effect and cause-effects that this may be a generous assessment. If I am wrong about the work’s intent, it is merely off putting and unconvincing. That’s not a very interesting criticism though. Let’s assume I am right, that these surprise twists are part of the work’s thematic aims. If so, by the nature of SP, the implication is that we, the player/protagonist, either do not know our own history of mental illness, or whose affliction renders that knowledge moot.

See, the work’s choice-select architecture implements my two least favorite kinds of choices: choices that do NOT deliver what they imply when you make them; and limited choice space that does not provide non-escalating options that we the player WANT to choose. Now, thematically, I can squint and see how these confrontive designs could serve this particular work. If the protagonist understands the world incorrectly, of course the choices will not deliver their promise! The protagonist’s nature only ALLOWS for a narrow band of responses, that’s why more reasonable ones are unavailable!

In theory, ok there’s something to work with here. I could cherry-pick evidence that maybe this is what the work is driving at. In practice, ehhh, it didn’t work for me. For one, almost immediately the narration conveys that the protagonist IS aware of their history and its complications. Meaning, our false choices don’t read as self-delusional, just tricks played on the player that drives a wedge between them and the protagonist. For another, the consequences of these choices can be so wildly bizarre as to render the “real” world outside the protagonist even MORE nonsensical than their inner delusions. The work suffers from a time dilation problem, where consequences play out narratively over time, but our protagonist has no ability to influence that timeline once the inciting decision is made. It would be like saying, “What did you have for lunch last week?” “Tuna salad.” “Ah, well THAT’S why your kids failed algebra and grew up to be Meth addicts!” “Wait, I had no opportunity to course correct THEIR ENTIRE ADOLESCENCE???”

That latter dynamic is particularly insidious, as it casts the real world as much MORE capricious and bizarre than any player-protag disconnect. We end up navigating an unknowable protagonist through an inscrutable reality, none of which behaves according to our experiences. Bold choice, Cotton! Even that didn’t have to be a kiss of death though. If the entire work is couched as the unreliable narration of the protagonist, this could STILL be attributed to a single cause. If this was the work’s aim, it did not achieve it. The narrative voice is BELLIGERENTLY omniscient, conveying events and motives the protagonist could not experience. Sure, you could hand wave those as ‘unreliable interpretations,’ which, ok but then you are left with no discernable NON-delusion narrative. How invested can we be in a story that only conveys “well, this isn’t real, so…” But if NOT an all-encompassing delusion, there is no other thematic link established between the protag’s “twist” and the warped behavior of the world around them. If some effort was made to present consequences as of a piece with the SP, a subtle narrative might link those manias in interesting or compelling ways. I didn’t get that here. It just feels like two separate phenomenon that end up beggaring credulity to the breaking point, AFTER the work has carefully separated us from the protag.

The breadth of endings underlines this unjustified capriciousness. Every one I found led to the wildest, most extreme consequences, even the “best” one, painting a picture of a world just as fractured and disconnected from itself as we are from the protagonist. A single, coherent delusion might be refined by precise prose into some sort of common theme. Divergent endings that have nothing more in common with each other than the protagonist just presents a patchwork of unjustified cause-effect. In the end I felt as alienated from the plot as I was from the protagonist. A Mechanical if Seamless experience.

It doesn’t really flow with the main thesis of this review, but I do want to acknowledge that positioning the choices as “Turn to Page…” complete with fictional page numbers was wryly amusing. It concisely evoked a CYOA vibe that bought some small forgiveness for its choice architecture. CYOA famously courted these wild, ill-justified and unrecoverable narrative twists. They were part of the charm. This work COULD be read as a sendup of that kind of gameplay. Here, put in the service of non-comedic mental illness, the joke didn’t really land as well as it might have with a still-united player/protag.

Played: 9/19/26
Playtime: 15m, 4 endings (“good”, suicide, death, humiliation)
Score: 4 (Mechanical/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

[jjmcc]

Tales of Nivea, GRIP by Arlo Inthaphone

Fun piece of trivia. (Irony quotes around ‘fun’ implied.) Despite a rubric designed to “use all the numbers” in my IFCOMP scoring, it has become subject to the tyranny of the Normal Curve. Earlier this COMP I awarded my first ‘1’ ever. To this point, I have never awarded a ‘10.’ I wonder what that will take? What? Why I have NO IDEA why this review would open with this observation.

Tales of Nivea is a work that uses a constrained choice architecture to great effect. As player/protag, you are a member of an alternate-history, magical realist underclass. You take a bureaucratic job with the government whose processes are structured as aggressively anti-humanist as imaginable. It very much echoes the gameplay of a seminal “art” game from the '10’s Papers, Please.

It is a harrowing work of no-good-choices, where options are bound explicitly by paperwork and Processes, or more subtly by lack of opportunity for the underclass, begetting complicity. I recently decried ‘railroading, unattractive option architectures.’ Here, that artifact is in fact the entire point of the piece. See you are some kind of nightmare Sorting Hat, processing cold paperwork that defines the fates of CHILDREN whose transgression is to be born with magical abilities. Like any good bureaucracy, there are categorizations and measurements that incompletely quantify phenomenon, and processes that flow from those arbitrary labels that actively refute the humanity of their subjects. Your only options to process MAGIC CHILDREN are kill them, mark them for ostracization, or send them to the military for indoctrination. Which of those are most attractive? Least unattractive?

Look, we’re all empathic individuals here, yes? Steven Miller doesn’t hang out here. Of COURSE we are going to try to bend the processes to our sense of justice. The work pretty blatantly demands this, presenting us with case after case of CLEAR moral consequences that nevertheless run afoul of the inadequate framework of the State. Your role is positioned as “for safety” “for security” “for the greater good”, tellingly ignoring the State’s role in CASTING these scenarios as unsafe. It is easy to come up with a solution to a problem you made up! The work could not be more clearly drawing a parallel to Jews in Nazi Germany if it clothed every one in Brown Shirts.

If I were to document each of the cases the game required you to process, it would probably read out of context as emotionally manipulative. That would be due to my own inadequacies as a writer. The prose in this game just sung for me, selling its (sometimes melo-) dramatically constructed scenarios with convincing dialogue, beleaguered pessimism, gritty texture, and its masterful portrayal of the gears of State oppression. I grabbed a lot of examples, which I will (mostly) decline to publish as there are so MANY of them it will derail whatever gushing momentum I have. Ok, I can’t resist. Here’s two:

"Everyone says that," she mutters. "Like it's a rule instead of a choice."

[the bureaucracy is] A machine for making fates look decided-correctly after the fact. The stamp was always this.

Crucially, the game does not shy from complexity, it revels in it. You are allowed the MOST minor of humanist victories, giving you something to cling to as things get increasingly dire. A few cases represent real challenges to leniency, yet are STILL bound by inadequate options. The game sells its trapped-in-spider’s-web fatalism by foreshortening the passage of time, showcasing presumed highlights, while implying grand expanses of less dire, mind-numbing and corrosive complicity. Games like this often make me decry lack of “I QUIT!” options, but here that is turned into a powerful statement about how State-manufactured desperation drives complicity.

In perhaps the work’s most subtle and affecting twist, you are afforded only glimpses of how your community responds to you as your role in the bureaucracy becomes known. At first, you are welcomed as ‘our man on the inside,’ lauded for what justice you are able to effect. As the weight of your forced decisions accumulate, you become someone the community can ‘manage,’ whose empathy is a lever they can pull, and decidedly NOT something that redeems you to them. Wow, is that an amazingly REAL observation, indirectly conveyed to the player most deftly.

I found this oppressive, angsty game PERFECT in every aspect: its confining choice architecture, its wonderful prose, its thematic unification, its overall depressing vibe. And especially its portrayal of the State whose slide to horrific excess is a series of slow dehumanizing steps, designed to boil its population into compliance. The graphical presentation is just as accomplished. A helpful user glossary of terms, a notebook to remind yourself of the humanity your job denies, blocky, evocative background pictures that mirroring the reductive obfuscation of the bureaucracy itself to hint at horrors underneath.

Most satisfyingly, the ending I achieved was also PERFECT. The work masterfully ushered me into its fatalistic bosom, ensuring I was as trapped as the protagonist, and my rebellious impulses revealed as inadequate if not meaningless. So much so, the fate I was awarded felt exactly correct - both in its natural extension of the State’s power, in its acknowledgement of my choices, and, at some level, a fate I embraced as kind of just. I’d have to spoil WHAT that ending was to convey what a higher degree of difficulty this represented compared to say, “You marry the Princess.”

I adored this work. I think it married its themes, prose, gameplay and presentation into a laser-focused exploration of State Inhumanity, experienced by its victims and its agents alike. It evoked FEELS in me, actual real world FEELS, on the strength of its rock-solid construction and wonderful prose. 10/10, no notes (beyond the above 9 paragraphs).

Congrats, ToN my first 10 ever!!

Played: 9/21/26
Playtime: 1.75hr, ending #7
Score: 10 (Transcendent/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: Wow, I dunno. Am I strong enough for that?

[jjmcc]

Demonstration by Marion Zhuravlev

If a work bills itself, as this one does, as ‘Experimental,’ I think it’s fair to ask “What is the hypothesis being tested here?” “What are the variables, what are the controls?” I think Demonstration is making me question its commitment to the Scientific Method. This feels a lot less scientific and more to me like play my brother and I engaged in as kids we called “Invention Day.”

“Invention Day” was a few hours where we took a generous handful of objects from the Junk Drawer, some random tools from Dad’s workbench, and went ham trying to make something of them. (I think of this as self-directed play we just dreamed up, but in retrospect can’t help but wonder if my parents were GENIUSES.) It may shock you to hear we did NOT come up with cold fusion. We were just throwing objects together, twisting them out of shape, and hoping against hope we’d discover something through the process. If we did, that knowledge is lost to time.

If I approach this work as Experimental, I am at a loss to identify what is being experimented upon here. Certainly the narrative is non-conventional, but in a way that feels familiar - it is an Absurdist work. Yes, Demonstration defies story-telling tradition, but absurdism itself is not exactly undiscovered technology. As player, you are put into a series of barely-conveyed scenarios, trying to advance in some impenetrable fashion. Nouns more often than not do not exist when probed. Reasonable actions are rejected pro forma. You end up trying wilder and wilder things, just because you have no other options, and then the scenario abruptly ends (maybe because of your initiative? maybe not?) and you appear in another. No connective tissue or thematics between them, perhaps not even a consistent protagonist. Repeat until game over.

I don’t mean to suggest I’ve seen THIS before. That’s not how absurdism works. These works’ attraction is in how bonkers it gets in its commitment to non sequitur and Demonstration is not SHY about this. Even so, despite its unique construction I’ve certainly seen absurdist works whose vibe reminds me of Demonstration. If I’m honest, many more successful at it, largely on the strength of their gameplay.

The slipperiest part of these kinds of works is differentiating between technical implementation shortcomings and intended experience. The very absurdist nature of such works opens the door to “opaque game play is PART OF IT.” I’m not so convinced. Certainly if it IS intended, it is actively confounding and off putting. I find absurdism most appealing not when it is opaque, but when it is somewhere on the ‘hilarious’ or ‘thematically coherent’ spectrums. When it conveys its ridiculousness clearly enough to let the player play along. This work didn’t ring either of those bells for me, making its technical challenges more prosaically distracting. This is a game whose brevity is its strongest asset, but whose beats are confoundingly difficult to maneuver and unsatisfyingly enigmatic. Making it something you endure rather than engage. Saying you ‘endure’ something implies it is a slog. This is too fleet and short for that, but the point stands.

Kind of like my parents having to sit through my brother and my “Invention Presentations.” I imagine their experience was also pretty Mechanical (“that’s very creative, dears”) as they encountered Intrusively Buggy and impenetrable usage model constructs.

Played: 9/21/26
Playtime: 15m, kiss ending
Score: 3 (Mechanical/Intrusive)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

demo_jjmcc.txt (9.0 KB)

[jjmcc]

IF Derby by Hedda Deadline

This is a wry, uncomplicated little race game whose goals are modest, but is amiable enough in its construction to make a virtue of it. It is structured as a gambling game, where IF-game-named horses can fill or drain your betting stake. The names are a mix of real IF works and (as far as I can tell) parody names where the joke is not an individual horse name, but the breadth of fake-but-convincing titles.

Gameplay is, with one major exception, random. Random horse names (with amusing IF “stats” in the racing sheet), racing to a random winner and no detectable throughline. A speedy horse in one race could run unaccountably slow if it shows up again, for example. If there is more than one trick to this, I never found it. The one trick is kind of subversive and fun, though it renders the gambling gameplay kind of mechanical. I won’t share it as it is a spoiler, but it is self-referentially amusing.

So gameplay swings from uncontrollable randomness to raw determinism, which isn’t really an Engaging mechanic. Its low aims and cheeky IF-community tweaking do marry to the low-tech MacIntosh graphics to deliver some undeniable Sparky charm. This charm extends to the “big” twist. All in all, it was a pretty slight but pleasant work that knew enough to get out before wearing out its welcome.

I call its technical construction “Notably Intrusive” on the weight of what I perceive to be uncontrolled randomness. At the end of one of my runs, I tumbled to the twist too late to save me from bankruptcy. My next run, I knew exactly what to look for but thanks to randomness (I assume) it took an INTERMINABLE amount of time to actually show up. Knowing you need boxcars to advance makes die rolling until you get them a MUCH more frustrating experience than if you didn’t know. Probability doesn’t care about your gaming experience.

I feel like I owe you all and “Hedda” like 12 more paragraphs somehow. I’m just not sure what else there is to say here. A charming, low-ambition work that doesn’t overstay its welcome (unless the cold hand of Big Numbers intervenes). Should my review be anything else? Sparks of Joy/Notable artifacts, a predominantly pleasant 20 minutes.

Played: 9/21/26
Playtime: 20m, 3 restarts, one you are wealthy
Score: 5 (Sparks of Joy/Notable)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

[jjmcc]

Skeletrom Crew on the Loose! by Kai Stewart

Our lives are filled with shrill voices - some righteous, many despicable - all trying to make THEIR preoccupations the MOST dire, the MOST worthy of our attention. This is done for money, for power, for attention. Into that cacophony, how lovely is it to encounter a work that just wants to deliver warm vibes? SCotL! is the Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski of the Comp this year. The din swirls around, but unflapped and unperturbed, SCotL! obliviously just does its own thing.

This is a choice-select work that has no higher aim than to make you smile. You will navigate up to 5 (6?) reanimated skeletons, each on a HIGHLY specific nighttime sojourn not exactly AMONG the living, but adjacent to them? And each other? There isn’t really a goal to service, other than to meander around 5 times and see what you can get up to. The work wrings a lot of mileage out of the mechanics of ambulatory bones, allowing some glimpses into the living preoccupations of these shades. Along the way, you also get some glimpses of how they see each other. All of these glimpses? Just the pettiest, most niche, completely left field glimpses you could hope for. They operate as fundamentally disconnected short comedic vignettes, almost an anthology only united in their universal disdain for KYLE, the 5th skelelelegrimon.

So, if I have a recommendation it is this: if you can BEAR to spend time with that wastrel, Kyle, do it last. I did not try to verify if order mattered, if you get different text for each sklmonigronk as Final Bones. Based on my playthrough, I don’t think any of the others will close as well as that bone blister KYLE. Given the feather-light aims and disconnected plotlines I kind of assumed there would not even be a climax. Leave it to KYLE to provide one, that try hard. His uniform dismissal by his peers is really the only throughline of the piece, and that bottom-feeder’s adventures both couldn’t care less AND riposte’ anyway. And honestly, in a pretty great way. I have been haunted by this text snippet every day since I played it: “you ambulatory stripper pole.” Now imagine that phrase TRIUMPHANT. That’s what you can expect from that bag of bleah, KYLE.

Special note should be made of the skull-based ASCII “animations,” graphical flair meeting the bare minimum to qualify as such. When it started spinning I nearly lost my $#!&. They are honestly wonderful, and encapsulate the playful, completely unconcerned-by-expectations attitude of the piece. Did it make for Engaging play? Not how I think of that word, it was a little slight to engender that much investment. But it was so UNAPOLOGETICALLY slight that it was completely winning.

Sometimes you just need a palate cleanser. Sometimes that palate cleanser is a total waste of calcium. (KYLE!) But just sometimes, the Skeledudeskis ABIDE.

Played: 9/21/26
Playtime: 35m, all skelegromphix
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete

[meri_something (Meri)]

I played as Kyle last and I had no regrets

:]

[jjmcc]

9 Days in a Van with your 3 Best Friends by Nathan Leigh and Nicole Orabona

The next (5th I think?) work in our review sub-series “Yr Better Than That!” for works that don’t quite breach into Engaging, but have enough extra punch to exceed mere Sparks of Joy. 9 Days is an interactive memoir/narrative work about a young punk band pursuing their dreams in a world larger than their experience. The player is nominally the fill-in drummer of the band (woot woot!), though no less a fully fleshed character than the other NPCs.

There are a few things I think the work did really well. For one, the prose did a wonderful job of capturing the thrill (and also disappointment) of live performance. The feeling, nearly religious in nature, of a rhythm section GROOVING, providing a platform for the other instruments to launch from and return to is (in my limited experience) rarer than we want, but transcendent when we achieve it. Especially when the crowd is open enough to feel it and feed it - it is the crack cocaine of live performance and I found it wonderfully executed here. No less powerful because the OPPOSITE dynamic, of an entire evening of searching for the other performers but not quite synching is as or more common, and ALSO quite deflatingly real. With the perfectly correct amount of ‘why is this different tonight?’ It feels like a lived experience, observed amazingly well, down to the welcoming class of venue-adjacent laborers opening their homes to the ‘talent.’ Like the best memoirs, it conveyed the experience naturally and seamlessly.

Also like the best memoirs, I thought it did a terrific job of conveying (and evoking in the reader) youthful aimlessness and preoccupations. Details like lionizing Anarchy without understanding it at all, like Time being something mostly out of your control, like grappling with mechanical failures without a parental safety net, these all transported me to a more confident, less capable time when winging it was a constant discovery of new situations and capabilities you didn’t know you had.

The OTHER dynamic it captured amazingly well was the boredom and edge-of-disaster vibe of youthful road trips. Sophomore year, a buddy of mine and I drove cross country and back in a summer adventure. We had a very tight budget to stretch 40 days, and every day was a mental math of ‘where are we going, what can we afford after gas?’ Not to mention filling all that road time with conversation and music. The fragile stability of our vehicle was constantly challenged with weird noises, power losses and crates of motor oil that we ended up using in a near 1:1 ratio with gasoline. There was a sense that we were screamingly unprepared, but were trusting in our untried coping skills and the universe’s tolerance for youthful hubris to carry us through. The travel sequences in 9 Days, most especially how it used interactivity, brought all that back to me in a wonderfully evocative way. Mostly.

Most of the time, this interactivity played out as a series of time-passing options, a variable amount needed before next gig arrival. On the one hand, I think it did an excellent job of conveying the struggle to fill the hours. On the other, I think it also distorted things a bit. The music playing portions were my favorite, a mixtape of sorts with music evocative of youthful genre discovery. The reading portions were my least favorite. There, sections of “book” were reprinted in their entirety. These jarred me, not the least of which because the text was not anything I would pursue in my real life, but also because it corrupted the game’s flow of time. Most of these road sequences were representational: conversations/musings we could read in a few minutes standing in for hours of travel. This is one of the powers of written language, used to good effect here. Except, when “reading a book” your are ACTUALLY READING TEXT IN REALTIME. Instead of representational passage of time, you are marking REAL passage of time, and having it collide with the representational segments on either side of it. To me, it kind of eroded the distance-numbing vibe of travel with more aggressively experienced boredom. This was so jarring to me, I resolved NEVER to select ‘read book’ again, only to find on longer legs of travel it was unavoidable.

The interactivity kind of warred against itself elsewhere as well. The first time you ‘take the wheel’ you are hyper aware of gas tank status, upcoming exits, price of gas. It becomes your entire choice architecture for your entire time at the wheel. (With a light sprinkling of roadside attraction side trips.) This was AMAZING, such a perfect evocation of the first-time pressures of long haul travel, of knowing running out of gas is catastrophic and 100% YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO AVOID. The focus the game demanded of you on those tight variables so expertly evoked that summer road trip in my head, of being disproportionately nervous about a clearly half full tank. A more in-touch-with-feelings person might have teared up. *chefs kiss* just perfect use of interactivity.

Except, the work then went BACK to that well during a shift-driving sequence. This muddled the experience for me. Where before, it was putting me IN the character, and evoking that panicky ‘not on my watch’ feeling, now I was some kind of master scheduler? Managing the same problem, only for all four characters? The effect was to transition to something of a logistics game, and not a particularly difficult or engaging one, where your visceral connection to your character was lost. It became a Gas Gauge Sim, not a protagonist-based memoir, with all the emotional disconnect that implies. Same interactive choices. COMPLETELY different impact on the player.

There were other choices that undermined what I perceived to be its most effective aspects. There were long dream sequences that I did not feel added to the narrative in a meaningful way, some going on long enough to disrupt the hazy momentum of road travel. There were mini-games, and journal entries and a weird choice-select video game sequence that required disproportionate interactivity. These had an opposing effect to the Read Book sequences: by requiring so much player involvement, they distorted the hazy passage of time in noticeable ways. As measured by miles-per-click, those sequences felt like additional DAYS of narrative time.

Two more quibbles: there is a conceit the work employs infrequently where it shifts to a script format. Where instead of a loosely-protagonist-aligned POV, we shift to a more omniscient director’s-eye-view. As far as I could tell, this seemed mainly a convenience for scenes with lots of characters talking? The effect on the reader is different though, it pulls us out of the otherwise immersive first-person presentation and I’m darned if I could figure out why we want that. The scenes that employed it did not resonate as an “omniscient revelation” of any kind.

My most shallow quibble is nevertheless the hill I claim to die on. I could not stop observing that the non-mixtape background music (though thoroughly pleasant) was NOT PUNK. Not even a little bit. The work infrequently engaged the punk/diy ethos. When it did so narratively, particularly during gigs, I felt it did so wonderfully. Certainly given the nature of the trip, I would have expected this cocky, youthful belligerence to be front row center. It is not lost on me that license-free music is a cornerstone of amateur IF. I do not begrudge its use. EXCEPT HERE I TOTALLY DO BECAUSE AN ACTUAL PUNK ROCK SOUNDTRACK COULD HAVE UNIFIED AND ELEVATED THIS WORK EFFORTLESSLY!! Surely, given the anti-establishment ethos of punk rock, license-free music exists SOMEWHERE?? Shout out to the pixellated backgrounds that graphically backstopped the work. They did the work the music maybe should have, of portraying a raw, DIY music 'zine esthetic, completely evocative of the premise.

The sum of the work’s glitches – the narrative digressions, counter-productive stretches of interactivity and perspective changes (and the pervasive feeling that I wasn’t but should be MOSHING) – ultimately kept me from fully Engaging the work. But when the work was clicking - its graphical language, describing the gigs, evoking the pressures of tight-budget road life, using interactivity to put me on those endless midwest roads with a slowly titling gas gauge - it HUMMED. Sparks of Joy, yes, where each Spark is a mini SUPERNOVA. Hey, 9 Days? YR BETTER THAN THAT!

Played: 9/23/26
Playtime: 2hr, Wyoming gig
Score: 7 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless) +1 YBTTT! bonus
Would Play After Comp?: I WANTED to finish it, but an ill-timed reboot flushed my state, so I’d need to start over. Just don’t know.

[jjmcc]

Demon Game for Sophie (Arisen) by Milo van Mesdag

The first seven minutes of this game dare you to underestimate it. After being ADAMANT about its audio component, the game proceeds to read to you for seven minutes. This is a daring choice in multi-media IF. People read at different speeds, and there is no (non-eyeball tracking) way to know what that speed is. My most frequent experience with these kinds of works is that the voice-over lags my consumption of the text in a way that deemphasizes the audio and makes the whole thing seem draggy. This audio was paced better than average for my speed (though of course yours will vary), but I did chafe at long passages. I appreciated the narrator using character voices for NPCs. It reminded me of family road trips where we would listen to the Hobbit on CD, and whose narrator was unambiguously COMMITTED to character voices. My experience with the first seven minutes is summed by the first note I wrote for this game: “Is it just going to read to me?”

At the seven minute mark (approx), the narrator just stops mid-sentence, takes a deep breath, lets the pause get FULLY pregnant, then resumes, reluctance dripping in his voice. It so CLEARLY conveys “I am not into this.” It marks the first real exposure of the deliberate fractures of the work. It also feels painfully real, which is either a TREMENDOUS acting achievement or a superhuman display of courageous vulnerability. I’m not going to try and parse that for this review, because it functions in the work as the latter so powerfully that trying to resolve the question feels disrespectful.

The next crack takes a long time to manifest, and is subject to being overlooked. A word combo is highlighted differently than than the default choice-link we have been navigating to this point: tarot reading or something like that. On the one hand, using a different link cue makes perfect sense, but I wonder if it is obvious enough? Were someone to miss it, I think the work would be significantly crippled. Not me though! Your eagle-eyed reviewer clicked right in! Following that link, we are taken to a full Rider deck Celtic Cross spread. There is no text here at all, just the spread, and clicking on each card prompts our narrator to essentially deep dive into the reading.

This reading is one the narrator received, by someone suspiciously named Sophie (who may or may not be the TITULAR Sophie? Probably is). It acts as a dambreak on the conflicted, self-critical emotions the narrator has been exhibiting infrequently throughout the game to this point, mostly in sighs and tone. Our narrator, the presumptive author of this game, is baring their crisis of confidence in almost painful-to-hear candor. The impression wavers between “Is this for Sophie?” and “Am I intruding?” The narrator seems to acknowledge your nosy presence, effectively telling the player, “if you want more of this, fail the game later.” Noted. I definitely do want more. Not least of which, as it presented more questions than answers after establishing Sophie’s haunting presence over the narrative.

There is a small technical issue here. In the spread, a Tower card occupies one slot (the most Portentous card in the deck! More so even than Death and the Devil!). The narrator speaks as though the card in question were the Devil though. Prior and subsequently, the narrator sometimes paraphrases or omits sentences in the audio. This comes across as the narrator’s carefully masked disinterest in the material peeking out. Here, that read doesn’t make much sense. Is it a bug?

Regardless, after this quite lengthy (and impactful) diversion, we are back to the main story. The main story is a parser-adjacent choice-select work, where we are manifest as a demon from Hell, and get sent on an earthly quest to eliminate a clergy figure who is growing capabilities quite apart from saving souls that also presents a threat to the underworld. The mysterious antagonist is only alluded to indirectly, but the distinct impression is that he is quite BAD, and therefore our demonic quest not entirely evil. This is a great setup! The introduction also translates some birthing-pain encounters to three RPG stats that will influence how the demon proceeds, with die roll+attribute mechanisms. Not a fan of that mechanism in narrative IF myself, but it presents as lightweight enough that it didn’t outright grate on me.

Most of the game, at least until the two hour mark, is gathering resources to steel yourself against this presumed final Boss Fight. I appreciated the novelty of setup, the subversive nature of the quests and the work’s low key religious pessimism. Had I encountered this without audio, I undoubtedly would have embraced it as an adventure entertainment. (Including maybe my favorite fetch-quest, to STEAL A CROSS for an NPC’s redemption. I mean, Supreme Being don’t care how you got it??? Could my DEMON PROTAG just keep it?!?!?!?!?)

Buuut this is not just that, right? The audio has conveyed that the narrator/author is unhappy with this work, unhappy with his situation, and must just be powering through primarily because of sunk cost. This can’t help but impact OUR investment as well. We hear all the careless mistakes, the heavy sighs, the pregnant pauses. Cumulatively they undermine the immediacy of the work, in what must be a very calculated effect. Except, I wanted MORE of it. Even after the tarot reading where the cards were, if you’ll pardon my snickering, laid on the table, the narrator’s discontents were few and far between. Just present enough to remind you, but not really building in a narratively satisfying way. I saw the curtain clearly enough, but that one meaty glimpse behind made me want SO MUCH MORE OF IT.

And here is where the two hour limit slammed me. I had been advised to fail the maze to get more meta-text voice over. I had failed to write down any instructions more specific than that, confident I could fail like NOBODY’S BUSINESS when the time came. It’s one of my superpowers. Except the maze was not designed to fail OR succeed easily. I spent the last of my precious judging time wandering aimlessly through the maze, neither succeeding nor failing, just in limbo. I would not have enjoyed that in a SINGLE layered work, here it felt like TWO THUMBS in my eyes to be relegated to this middle nothing. I ONLY HAVE THE TWO EYES!!!

My randomizer has served up a lot of 2+ hour games so far this COMP. These are always at a disadvantage in this format. This may be the MOST disadvantaged work I have yet come across. Part of the blame must lie in the pacing of it, particularly as after that big event it was very parsimonious with its meta-narrative. But without being able to glimpse past the maze, my scoring can’t account for any downstream redemption of this choice, on either narrative level. All I can account for is a Sparky Demon die-roll adventure, with tantalizing, incomplete meta narrative subversions. And I am still wondering WHO THE HECK IS SOPHIE???

Of COURSE Sparks. Every time the meta-narrative peeked out I sat straighter in my chair. The narrative gameplay itself had a few sparks of its own. But time running out in a wheel spinning maze put the ANTI in ANTI-climax, never letting it get beyond Sparks. This is where I’m stuck, for purposes of COMP.

Played: 9/23/26
Playtime: 2hr, in labyrinth
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: I don’t think I can resist, even though the back pressure of repeat play is pretty big.

[severedhand]

re: Dolcett,

@jjmcc

Too stupid to live” is a phrase I can’t see myself using against a real person,

Ha!

I tried Dolcett first of all the entries this year. I decided within a few minutes it wasn’t for me and I didn’t feel what I had to say would constitute a review.

It did make me review in my brain various definitions of pornography of erotica, all of which are loose. There’s the joke that porn is books you read with one hand. (Now more often the computer materials you mouse with one hand.) Another idea I remember, comparing porn stories to non-porn, is that porn stories start with the assumption that sex is the only thing of interest in the world.

Dolcett seems to have a fairly big and specific catalogue of shared assumptions about what might excite you as a fantasy, if it’s going to work for you as erotica or pornography. That’s still on paper, though. I found the writing too overcooked and the instant orgasms too unattached to anything to continue past the first scene. I was, heaven forbid, bored.

-Wade

[meri_something (Meri)]

@jjmcc

either a TREMENDOUS acting achievement or a superhuman display of courageous vulnerability

I felt the same way, this a good way of putting it. And I’m not sure which I find more impressive.

I also had a hard time purposefully failing the maze. If you do fail long enough the narrator will eventually discuss how stupid the maze puzzle is, which made me feel stupid in turn because I did not figure it out.