It is cracking me up that you happened not to get to see an opinion by noted reviewer JJMcC.
6 Likes
Funnily enough I actually only saw mine come up after like ten times through - I just got the other two possibilities over and over!
5 Likes
IT KNOWS WHO YOU ARE - secret new Z-machine tech
7 Likes
Like I need MORE REASON to be Tech paranoid! (Though my family will be relieved to hear, I suppose!)
3 Likes
Wild Ride to Earth by Cavaris
A lot of fiction, ESPECIALLY sci-fi, springs from a “What If?” premise. “What if radioactive spiders DIDN’T give you cancer?” “What if Time Travel, but terrible record keeping?” A lot of fiction springs from a “What If? this OTHER work…” This makes sense, all art is in some way in conversation with its ancestors. “What if the Shadow lived near a Batcave?” “What if Twilight, but BDSM?”
“What if Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but the Earth didn’t blow up?” Uh, spoilers for a decades-old property, I suppose. I’m not implying this was the author’s deliberate riff, I have no telepathy and can’t see another’s soul. But this was definitely what I thought of while playing it. Assuming you are not a cold monster of a human being, this ancestry is equal parts daunting and delightful. Engaging a galactic population of venal, bureaucratic aliens to whom you are little more than a punchline, whose indifference to your plight is hilariously confounding, is just the most Arthur Dent stuff imaginable. The game opens, much like its What-If, with you being abducted, possibly probed?, and discarded. Or, in the textual words of your first unhelpful NPC: "We’ve got to do something about Abduct-and-Dump.”
What follows is a quest to earn enough galactic credits and/or respect to return to Earth (possibly via Space-Uber!), before your window to claim a winning lottery ticket closes. Yes, it is a numbers-go-up v timer logistical problem - where you are taking the right alien part-time jobs to earn your passage. That’s a pretty sturdy central mechanic to hang a game off of, but it is NOT going to be what you remember. The available jobs are hilariously diverse: from acting as Space Judge John Hodgeman, to being an artist’s model, to providing military secrets. Sometimes you need to advance your numbers to meet prerequisites. You always need to keep an eye on advancing time and Hyperspace hop costs and distances to succeed. But your job-scenarios are battering you about with cynical-but-good-natured humor, daring you to enjoy yourself and take your eye off the ball.
Which I totally, totally did my first playthrough. A game typically wants you to measure it by its “success” scenario. It is what you are striving for, where your endorphins will trigger, and what the puzzle architecture is designed to deliver. “Failure” outcomes are often little more than goading you to get right back up in that saddle and try again. Games that REWARD failure are more rare, but I do so love them when I find them. WRtE ABSOLUTELY delivered that for me. This is a game I replayed, not JUST because I still had more timer, not JUST because I was pushing for “Success” but because even in failure I had a WONDERFUL time with it, and was not ready to be done!
Between the insult-comic humor that totally landed for me, the breadth of goofy work scenarios, and the sturdy core logistical puzzle, this work just clicked. So much so, I totally forgot it was built on a ChoiceScript framework! CS is not my favorite platform, not so much for its inherent capabilities and focus, but because it often encourages an RPG-stats management kind of gameplay where so much early oxygen is spent establishing those stats. WRtE slides you through that effortlessly, and provides a helpful dashboard to keep those mechanics both tractable and de-emphasized. Yes, you’ll glance at it from time to time, but there is little sense (as I often encounter with CS) of those stats driving YOU.
So BOY did I explore, during my two plays. Each job is a tiny vignette of gameplay, each (for me) wonderfully witty and anti-human. I’m not sure how much it would hold up on repeat play, certainly the bounce to it was in its off-kilter surprises, but there is enough that at least through two plays, I was not feeling the drag of repetition. Part of that was probably my gameplay decisions to EXPLICITLY court new work (with a minor nod to logistic optimization), but the piece encouraged that! Experiencing the vignettes was ALMOST more fun than managing your rep and bank account! The interplay between them is what made this a thoroughly Engaging work for me.
I should acknowledge that its kind-of-crude layout and art were a decided asset here. A satisfyingly large number of weird aliens, conveyed with almost childlike enthusiasm, against abstract backgrounds that could be reflecting disinterest as easily as alien perception. They combined to provide a low-key reinforcement of its core thesis: that the universe is unconcerned with your esthetics and priorities, you live HERE NOW, so suck it up buttercup! The fact that it had a charm all its own was just gravy. Also, what WOULD computer graphics look like if it sprang from tentacle-based stylus manipulation anyway?
The only reason I am rating this “mostly seamless” instead of “Seamless” is its not-quite-masked CS artifacts. In particular, the quite long “jobs postings” required sometimes two or three screens of scrolling to digest, even though they never changed (other than to eliminate satisfied employers). Yeah, its a tiny, very ignorable friction, and doesn’t change the final score in any way.
“What if thoroughly Engaging, but also Mostly Seamless?” What if, indeed.
Played: 9/30/26
Playtime: 1hr, 2 plays, Destroyed Earth!, landed Rich; JAG’s DECENT EXPLORER, EMERGING SPECIES, CANSU FUTURE CUSTOMER, ARTIST APPROVAL, STARVING SCIENTIST, CARIDDOR LOVES YOU
Score: 8 (Engaging/mostly Seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
5 Likes
Bob the Barbarian by Charles Moore
REALLY early IF was so concerned with inventing itself, it had no time for self-reflection. It relied on surprise for a lot of its charge, of practically random-walk problem solving to deliver non sequitur puzzle solutions where just getting ANY response other than failure was energizing. It wasn’t long at all before those early tropes struck the industry as kind of funny, and the jokes started rolling in - simultaneously lampshading and embracing that confoundingly random puzzle play. Given a LOT of time having passed, the art form has expanded - works with decidedly more grounded and deducible puzzles, humor not so reliant on META, rethinking puzzle play and NPCs ENTIRELY.
As a relatively young art form though, IF still has an eye on its past. I mean, take painting. When was the last time you looked at a painting and thought “Hey, they are REALLY recreating that CAVE MURAL esthetic, and the meta-textual inquiry into OOG-UGGs technique is…” Here in IF we do that ALL THE TIME. BtB firmly embraces this tradition, filling a sparsely-populated, tightly-bound geography of a world with really opaque puzzles. These are not uncommon in this generation of authorship. Heck, in this COMP. For me they land best when leavened with humor and quietly incorporating friction reducing advances in the craft. Ideally both, but at LEAST one of those!
With a title like “Bob the Barbarian” you might hope the humor is not in question. It was present, periodically, in belligerent NPCs, area descriptions, sometimes in the puzzle construction itself. (This IS a work where farting is a puzzle solution.) It was dry though. So dry, in places it had flaked away and I could see where humor WANTED to be, but was only in shadow. During my engagement with it, my overriding impression was not of comedy, but of old-OLD-school gameplay.
The least satisfying gameplay, for this reviewer. It implemented my full Rogues’ Gallery of IF villainy: instant death from innocent choices; instant death from UNMITIGATABLE RANDOMIZATION; quietly unwinnable states. It also had technical issues like unhelpful soft cuing or broken disambiguation: Did you want to ask the mob about the castle or the castle? Often it was hard to tell if a gameplay artifact was intentional or not. Certainly the baroque puzzle architecture felt deliberately opaque. This is a work where you have to get drunk, then wander into a SPECIFIC location you have no reason to revisit to unlock progress. Where eating beans at the wrong time can put you in an unwinnable state only the walkthrough (or frustration) can extricate you from.
I bashed about in this play space, restarting MANY times, to eventually throw up hands and consult the walkthrough. At first just to goose myself past obstacles, the solutions I spoiled were so unsatisfying and obscure I ended up consulting it more frequently until eventually I just read it.
This is not my preferred gameplay. (Whaaat? Reading walkthroughs isn’t yr jam?) I shouldn’t try to speak for others, but it strikes me that even old-school fans might find this unfair and opaque. This gameplay CAN be justified with humor, self-deprecating or otherwise. I didn’t get nearly enough of that here. This made it a Mechanical, Intrusively glitchy experience for me.
(I try to avoid actively comparing works to each other during COMP, y’know beyond clubbing them into review sub-series. But I am somewhat bothered by the scoring artifacts of my rubric here, when compared to Verb, Noun, Adjective. That other work was more technically accomplished, a little funnier, and every bit as opaque in gameplay. Because BtB was less accomplished, its sins are not as clearly BY DESIGN, meaning I am more inclined to attribute technical than artistic artifacts to my disappointment. That feels unfair. I do have a mechanism to correct that, though!)
Played: 9/30/26
Playtime: 1.5hr, gave up and read walkthrough
Score: 2 (Mechanical/Intrusive implementation gaps) -1 opaque gameplay penalty. for JUSTICE.
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
7 Likes
Deceit in the Guildhall of Virture by Doug Egan
[sotto narrator] “Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice…” (BrrrrTANG!)
Isn’t it wild, in this post-MCU cultural moment we live in, that there are so few Superhero IF works? Off the top of my head, the only other I can think of is a Superhero HORSE work. I’m sure they’re out there. Heck, there’s a case to be made for last year’s Dispatch commercial game. Part of it, I’m sure, is the open-ended nature of the genre. To generate an IF Superman adventure, you’d have to accommodate super-breath, laser eyes, catastrophic physical damage into EVERY GAME OBJECT AND NPC. That’s a lot of provisioning, for what will probably be tangential to the narrative you want to convey. This is a genre with potentially waaay more variables than needed to tell a story.
DGV seemingly takes its cues from deconstructionist superhero stories: most prominently presenting a noir detective murder mystery in which the suspect pool is revealed as maybe having darker motivations than their four-color milieu traditionally engaged. This is a riff on Superfriends, by way of Powers and Watchmen. The kid-friendliest of super-hero franchises, retrofit with the prospect of infidelity and alcoholism. And, of course, MURDER. It is a dissonance that has been mined for drama since the 80’s (arguably even earlier with 1977’s Superfolks). Here, we are tasked to solve a Superman-analogue’s murder, on the floor of the Hall of Justice, with the Wonder Twins and Aquaman amongst the suspects.
DGV makes the crucial decision to nerf its protagonist - recent adventures have rendered him an ambulatory brain with little ability to manipulate the world around him, let alone bring different super-powers to bear. This conceit neatly skirts the pitfalls of superpowers, and squarely enables its detective-driven gameplay. No pesky deus-ex-superpower plot twists undermining the works. The mechanics of the mystery are quite good - interview and analyze clues (with some increasing capabilities as the narrative steams on), which gives you facts (and secrets!) that can be combined to dissemble the cast into further revelations.
For much of its runtime, I appreciated the mechanics, admired the EXPLODING deductive space of everyone-with-a-secret, enjoyed some humorous flourishes, but was held a bit at bay by the kind of toothless transgressions we were encountering. Not to say infidelity and MURDER are boring, but that this far into some EXCESSIVE post-modern takes, they feel… not as ambitious? I mean, no one is DETONATING A SPACE SQUID or SEX TRAFFICKING ADOLESCENT SIDEKICKS here. Lots of Sparks of Joy navigating the mystery though, connecting sometimes-obvious facts, and sometimes legitimately deductive leaps. All of it raising MORE questions and possibilities.
So there I was, sparking like mad, many answers leading to many more questions, when we entered the ACT III/Endgame. Or, as I’m going to assert, when the game hit the NOS* button. (For those not enamored of Mad Max or Fast and Furious, the HYPERSPACE button.) I’m going to go deep into spoilers in a moment, and I kinda have to to explain just WHY this work vaulted into a whole new tier for its endgame. Let me start with a not-exactly spoiler digression. Mystery endgame, the gathering of suspects into the parlor to j’accuse, is a practically mandatory convention of these things. DGV does something I hadn’t seen before. It turned this into a narrative/gameplay opportunity instead of a “FINAL TEST.” It’s not a “ok player, reveal the solution OR FAIL” moment here. It is an escalation of domino-tipping revelations that as player, you are allowed to digest and toy with WITHOUT BREAKING THE SCENE. This was a wonderful subversion of its noir conceit that let the player just keep playing. Yes, it may have neutered some of the charge of solving by not allowing mistakes, but it also underscored its most masterful subversion. If you haven’t played it yet, do yourself a favor and do so before reading spoilers. Engage blur.
DGV so thoroughly sells its ‘post-modern gritty’ atmosphere that we kind of lose track that it is all SUPERFRIENDS based. It presents reminders throughout - the characters acknowledging that they are animated, live their lives in cartoon episodes, have adventures in the pages of comic books. In the moment these are mined for winking comedy but are also low-key establishing groundwork for its Kaiser Soze worthy reveal. THAT THE WHOLE THING WAS AN ILL-CONSIDERED COVER STORY FOR A BIRTHDAY SURPRISE PARTY!!! That happened to run afoul of less-dire-than-seem secrets.
I howled out loud at that. Yeah, I’m one outburst away from my wife initiating competency hearings. What an incredible SUBVERSION OF SUBVERSIONS that was. And not just out of the blue, it carefully set up a series of seemingly dire, adult complication dominoes, that proceeded to tumble when each was revealed to have innocent, almost childish explanations. The work refuted its post-modern, “Supers are SERIOUS!” setup by recommitting to its kids-lit roots. Oh, it was a wonderful tumbling domino-chain of REconstruction, rebuilding its innocence and whimsy brick by brick. We FINALLY made it folks! We achieved POST-post-modernism!!! 
So yeah, ACT III VAULTED into an Engaging time on the strength of its endgame play and amazing plotting choices. I truly hope you get to experience it without me dutching the experience for you. I blur these things for a reason!
[sotto narrator] “Once again, the Hall of Justice is Secure. The Super Friends have proven that brainpower and caring can be more effective than edge-lord nihilism.”
Played: 9/30/26
Playtime: 2hr, solved
Score: 8 (Engaging/Mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
* Nitrous Oxide. Ask Vin Diesel.
8 Likes
To be fair, there are two of those.
4 Likes
And it’s not the only superhero work in last year’s IFComp – this is what happens when you have to miss an event, I guess. 
4 Likes
Ok, that just feels like rubbing it in… 
The Very Last Night I Spent at Ethelred Estate by Kai DeJesus
I think I have spent more words grappling with Texture than any other IF platform. Its UI is so specific, with such specific promise and pitfall, that it kind of colors works implemented in it, in a way that parsers, say, do not. Hope you’re not tired of my belaborings, because you’re about to get more!
The most noteworthy thing about this work, for me, was how WELL it tamed my most frequent Texture complaints. Its screen discipline was excellent. Additional text was deposited on the screen with (quickly) timed animation that called out the new text clearly and cleanly. Its page size resisted the shrinking font problem completely, bar one minor late game occurrence. (I should note, in sidebar, that because of Texture’s font-resizing default, I ALWAYS consume these works at full screen. I recommend you do too.) This discipline, the craftsmanship of recognizing the presentation problem and steering around it without fanfare, mesmerized me precisely because it is so uncommon.
I wish I could say the rest of the work similarly showed tight control and considered affect. It was deeply sad for me, that for a work that so ably managed its common technical perils, it fell prey to seemingly even simpler ones? In several places, drag-and-drop links were cued in the text, but actually rejected by the engine. You cannot, for example, link to books (“Curating a collection”), despite the UI cues indicating you should be able to. The plot requires something pretty DIRE of you, but actually selecting it is rejected in at least one case. Another connection, “Listen Close,” just hangs the game outright, requiring restart. You were SO CLOSE, TVLNISaEE!! Why?!
So above, I identified its layout competence as the most noteworthy thing about the work. Is that really what an artwork wants to hear though? “Yup, sure is competent, this one! Not visually jarring at all!” Probably not. The narrative itself a gothic horror jam, of a woman learning of her horrible legacy on the night of a party. I’m not sure the interactive paradigm was put to good use in this story. Before we even get to Texture specifics, the player is given a choice at the start of the game: is the party a WAKE or a WEDDING? Those are two VERY DIFFERENT THINGS!!! But because the text is reconverging, the same descriptions and events play out, regardless of the choice. The text would need to be EXTREMELY flexible to accommodate both of those and I did not find it to be so. Meaning the subsequent party had elements of both, regardless of the initial choice, rendering either selection kind of nonsensical.
More subtly, I think the choice of Texture was just not a great match for this particular narrative. The kind of narrative I find most suitable to Texture is one of dawning revelation. Which this kind of is, just the wrong KIND of dawining? The mechanic of dragging thoughts onto other thoughts clearly evokes the dynamic of connecting seemingly unrelated ideas in flashes of insight. For sure the protagonist is discovering some horrific things over the course of the story, but more often than not, it is not a result of protagonist insight, it is just being told things (often things it’s kind of hard to believe only come out NOW). This puts the player in a more omniscient role, the revelations happening around you, because you connected PLOT cues, not as much TO you because of protagonist insights.
It has a distancing effect on the player-protag connection. To its credit, the proceedings are sufficiently horrific and supernatural, of the kind I like best: out of the realm of human understanding, happening TO us regardless of motives or justice. Here though, in addition to stiff-arming us with the UI, the narrative also MOVES. Events and revelations pile on super quickly, and characterization has no room to breathe. Heck, the revelation that we are pregnant is treated as a surprise reveal halfway through the party! Because of its speed, we are not given time to settle into a family dynamic, to understand the people around us AS people. At one point, the mass of humanity in attendance are compared to buzzing insects, and its pretty accurate. None of the NPCs read to me as more than plot-function, including the protagonist herself. This is a narrative that CRIES for empathy, to really drive home the horror of the situation. The protagonist is caught by forces beyond her, asked to commit a dire act not because she deserves it but because spooky legacy. The terror of inconceivable actions required through no fault of our own is a staple! But it kind of requires we empathize with the cast it is inflicted on, and here the work is just moving too fast to establish this. Because I found the characters unconvincing, the climax’ impact was muted for me. Yes, bad, but more in a “well that’s a shame” way than “OMG, NOOO!”
I’ve spent a lot of time backing up the train, and I think that’s a reflection of how much I WANTED this work to sing. Gothic Horror is an appealing genre for me, and I really was thrilled by its early mastery of Texture. “Could this be it? FINALLY, the work I can point to as GETTING TEXTURE RIGHT??” It was not to be, but holy cow did I WANT it to be. I think that letdown informed my reaction as much as any. Which is a really backhanded way of saying that in spite of all the subsequent technical Intrusions and narrative shorthand, my early engagement was Sparking like mad! No use denying it, it just was. I hope the author refines their craft in future offerings, becomes attentive to late-game bugs and thoughtfully marries the UI to the narrative. They are on stronger footing than most with this platform and I can see the potential clear as day.
Played: 9/30/26
Playtime: 25m, one ending, two hangs
Score: 4 (Sparks/Intrusively buggy)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
7 Likes
Toitu by Adam
This work made a (probably unknowingly, it would be WILD if I was targeted like this) confrontive choice, right on its second page, that back footed me so hard I don’t think I ever recovered. The Prologue to this work opens with a timed text poem. I am not allergic to timed text in IF, but I AM kind of allergic to poetry. Eh, allergic is too strong. How about ‘resistant’? It’s not that the work was hiding this, as it proclaimed itself to be an ‘Interactive long-form detective poem.’ It wasn’t DECEIVING me. But the reality of it, slowly unfurling before me in all its elevated prose and challenging imagery.. unfurling slowly enough that I had time to analyze it in flight and then some… without even the space bar advance to save me. I know the work has nothing to do with me, but it felt like an overt, direct provocation DARING me to not appreciate it.
Then when, on the very next page, I am told “the trees are like rusted warriors looking out over the horizon” it was clear to me that this was going to be a challenge to consume. You spend the prologue grappling with your nakedness, then your place in this dreamy, poetic forest. The presentation floats back and forth between italic poems and stylized prose, all of it attempting to wrap you in an emotional but alienating engagement with nature. All through feelings. Ok, that terse pronouncement can sound dismissive, especially if you envision it coming from a manosphere commentator. I don’t mean it that way… exactly? That is what poetry attempts to do after all - whether it makes narrative sense or not, poetry wants to convey a FEELING or IDEA, and tries to find hidden truths in provocative word combinations to do so. Whose fault is it when those words jangle more than sing? When, despite their best efforts, they do not actually deliver a coherent idea or even a compelling image? MY FAULT, obviously, but is it ONLY my fault?
This prologue went on for a full fifteen minutes, at the end of it to be revealed as a dream. A dream that did NOTHING to establish character or setting. What it did do, to be fair, is establish its link-select vernacular, and a MOOD for the piece. I suspect if I were to parse it closely there would also be some thematic resonances (nature itself is a pretty consistent character in the rest of the work), but notably the work never calls back to this opening sequence in any way, leaving it to kind of dangle in obfuscated glory. So its interactive expectation setting was this sequence’s major contribution to my playthrough, and there it delivered. There are a few ways it utilizes its links, and all of them were creative.
One of my favorite link-select tricks is when links replace themselves with alternate text, essentially conveying a protagonist weighing possible descriptions or mindsets or interpretations by cycling among alternatives. This is a pretty cool use of links, which Toitu took to the next step of ACKNOWLEDGING which choice you ultimately let stand. Honestly, I have been CRYING for a work to do exactly this for so long! As often as not, the alternate descriptions attempt to represent complexity and paradox without recognizing the implicit choice the player makes by settling on one. This work very much did, in turn honoring its protagonist’s knowledge quest.
Another trick it performed, still often successful but less universally so, was to use link manipulation to convey delay or echoing beats, effectively pacing the game by requiring the player to push the narrative forward. This can sometimes feel like needless delay, which it occasionally did here, but when done well it can convey a protagonist struggling to escape forces conspiring to mire them. I experienced this latter effect often enough to respect its use in Toitu.
It also established other conventions: looping text that created almost a call-and-response rhythm to some passages; confusing link architecture where it is never quite clear what is ADVANCE and what is SIDEBAR. Both of those would recur throughout the piece, the latter surprisingly effective at keeping the work from becoming predictable, and of keeping the protagonist on edge.
Ok, so some vernacular established amidst a flurry of imagery, then what? Then the protagonist, a curious but aimless young adult, ambles about his hometown until a neighbor sets him on a drain-clearing quest that evolves into an exploration of the city’s history. The aimlessness of this low-urgency task seems to be part of the point of this. Like the minor discoveries we make are better experienced practically by accident, as part of a tapestry of FEELINGS, rather than an informational goal of any kind. Yes, there is an early framing goal of clearing pipes, but it is so unconvincing in its mechanics, not to mention some talking animal helpers! that it feels less like accomplishing and more just vibing. The surreal world of the opening dream encroaching on the gloomy-but-otherwise-normal New Zealand day.
I wish I could say the work eventually got me on its wavelength, wrapped me in its poetic fuzz. It did not. There were too many jarring moments of incredulity, too many flowery images that did not land, too many moments that sacrificed coherency for turn of phrase. This inclarity extended to the protagonist themself. Because of the link architecture, the overriding impression of the protagonist is “kind of passive and anxious.” Such that later when “you dance in the petals for a while” it stands out as totally contrary to established character. By the time the narrative takes you into an underground mole car, the link architecture ALSO becomes a barrier. Once you enter the car, you are kind of trapped there until you experience everything the game wants you to. Unfortunately, there are NO signposts as to WHAT are important observations and what are not. Meaning I had to lawnmower sometimes deep location implementations REPEATEDLY before being allowed to progress. Under that repetition even passages that did NOT rub me the wrong way initially frayed over time. Any possibility of the work getting me on its side vanished in that endless underground tunnel.
I am actually kind of ashamed of the review to this point. I have belabored the many ways the work tried but failed to win me over. What I have NOT conveyed was the POINT of the piece which could redeem a lot. This is a love letter to Dunedin, a New Zealand small town, as well as to a Dunedin literary daughter, Janet Frame. As you meander about, you are treated to evocative black and white photos of the places you encounter, as well as book excerpts from Ms Frame’s work. It so clearly comes from a place of affection and wanting to share its charms that you can’t be MAD at it. But if I’m honest, I found the dramatic photos more evocative than, and kind of at war with, the poetic language of the work. I would also say, from the snippets we are given, that the prose of the piece is very much of a type with Ms. Frame’s. If the goal was to convey a high regard through the most earnest of flattery, imitation, well done! It’s just, I don’t think Ms. Frame’s stylings are any more to my taste than the rest of the piece.
I greatly respect the impetus of this piece, of rendering love of place and artist into an interactive whole. Of pushing it into the language of a beloved artist, and sustaining that while also delivering moments of real interactive charge. I love that this piece exists, and while it never became more than a Mechanical exercise for me, that is clearly an artifact of my OWN tastes, not a failing of the work itself. I hope it finds an audience less calloused (and callous!) than me to truly appreciate its dreamy tribute.
Played: 10/2/26
Playtime: 2hr, finished
Score: 4 (Mechanical/Notable churning gameplay)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
7 Likes
Bloodrust by Orx
Does anyone actually keep a digital diary? I am sure folks must - digital storage is just so much more convenient to consign to posterity than a series of hand-written books. Which begs the question, who are diaries for, exactly? I mean, the author, OBVIOUSLY, but anyone else? Does anyone write a diary with an eye to how others will consume it? Isn’t radical honesty a late-in-life affectation or luxury, after a life span’s diaristic heyday? Does anyone WANT their shallow, emotional adolescent yearnings exposed to the world? And if it DOES mostly exist for the author, shouldn’t that influence the content and level of detail?
So, Bloodrust is a futuristic narrative, where we seem to be excavating the digital accounts of the work’s protagonist. It is a mix of diary entries, emails, job reports. The conceit is pretty thin - once we log in, we have no control of the media. Disparate documents play out before us in a narratively coherent, roughly chronological order. This is how stories work, for sure, but so much prominence is given to the digital conceit, the shallowness is kind of jarring.
As is the language of the piece. Diary entries have snippets like, “I could feel the edge of the table beneath my gloved fingertips, the seam of the cold metal biting into the cloth.” and “The hazmat-ed man closed the door behind me, locking me into the claustrophobic space. It was bathed in dying, artificial light from a half-broken bulb hanging from above.” Are diaries really that focused on micro-detail? Or more on capturing the emotional IMPACT of the day’s events? Diary passages seemed so CLEARLY aimed at a third party audience, their kayfabe dissolved in front of me. At one point the protagonist even lampshades this, though without justifying explanation.
This textual lack of focus extended to our protagonist himself. Despite having access to thoughts our protagonist took the trouble to document, he remains an enigma in the center of the narrative. We are given many, many examples of HOW he is, but nothing about WHY he is. Effect without cause, especially when the effect is SO EXTREME, is inherently unconvincing. Many texts make hay on delivering us to warped sensibilities slowly and naturally, crucially starting from relatable humanity and progressing from there. We can accept monstrous transitions if we can UNDERSTAND them. Stephen King is particularly good at taking us on these kinds of journeys.
Our distance from the protagonist, and what motivates him, is magnified by a seemingly random encounter some ways into the narrative. We end up gambling our finger away, with no clear motivation to participate at all, nevermind enduring a revelation that this is not the first time! For all the detail we are given on waiting room lighting, we can only indirectly infer how THIS gambling den became something the protagonist got involved with.
As we continue consuming diary entries some technical issues presented themselves. For one, the graphical “computer” that frames the text is periodically overrun by text. For another, there are some words you can mouse-over to get expanded description. It is unclear what mechanism of diary-writing this represents (maybe stray thoughts triggered by words? but accessed through computer manipulation?), and it ALSO sometimes gets cropped by edge-of-frame so we can’t read it anyway. The most egregious “bug” though is an apparent full-on hang at about the ten-fifteen minute mark. At one point a very disconcerting eyeball fills the frame. It’s a great moment, if somewhat out of the blue. Almost immediately defused as the game hung for me right there. No input of any kind could goose it to proceed, nor was there a backpage available to get out some other way. No amount of paging and spamming showed a path forward, so I tried again with different settings, then a whole different device and browser. Only when I tried it a FOURTH time, did I notice the small red link waaay underneath it. How did I miss that three times in a row? I have no idea. Certainly, the dark red text on dark background did it no favors, but I should have been used to it by then.
Ok, a short, not-entirely-game’s-fault digression but back in business. From there, the protagonist continues to dissemble. He returns to the gambling den a few times, gets to know the nature of Dealer MUCH more intimately. He makes a mind-bogglingly unmotivated series of decisions (we may click them, but there are no options NOT TO so they aren’t really our choices) and gets a denouement appropriate to his completely self-absorbed spiral. After all this, we don’t really understand our protagonist any better at all. The WHAT, the DESPAIR is pretty clear, the WHY ANY OF THIS is very much not. He seems enthralled by the gambling, alienated by his life, and drawing some vague connections between this post-apocalyptic world and larger supernatural forces, but it is all so shadowed and impersonal there’s not much for the player to hold onto.
The blurb promised, “BLOODRUST is a game about hunger, need, and entrapment within the confines of one’s world and mind alike.” I guess I kind of got that? At least, I got that those things were PRESENTED to me. What was missing was any sense that these things were grounded in humanity. WHY these things were relevant to THIS protagonist. Between the tattered kayfabe of the digital artifacts and the inscrutable motives of the protagonist there just wasn’t anything beyond baffling MOOD to latch onto here. For me, not enough to escape a Mechanical experience.
Played: 10/2/26
Playtime: 45m, three “hangs” (firefox linux and Android Chrome), 4th run finish
Score: 4 (Mechanical/notable bugs)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
6 Likes
Quackpond by Quackpond Admins
The game presents as a crude DIY online game/community, something that is evocative of early 90s internet but not STYLED that way. Its layout, color palette and sensibilities are kind of timeless actually, which adds to its charm. It headfakes digital pet gameplay, where you are encouraged to name YOUR duck, then click links to keep their numbers happy. As gameplay it is not very engaging or immersive but that’s kinda the point? By virtue of not-much-else-to-do, the player is encouraged to engage a fake user forum of other duck owners. The game plays a few clever tricks during this portion: it has a realtime aspect where the REAL story unfolds in the comments whether you engage it or not. But it is also minimally reactive to your participation, acknowledging THAT you responded even if it isn’t some kind of AI-driven chatbot engaging your content. For this setting, this feels about right, emphasizing the parasocial connections that tickle but don’t satisfy as real relationships.
Then, when things blow up in the comments, you are invited to involve yourself in INTERNET DRAMA ™. The conceit of this is kind of funny, honestly. There is no corner of internet so trivial that it can’t explode into angst, riding the edge of (or just plunging into) flames and self-mythologizing. But. Do people find this fun? People certainly seem to find this engaging in real life, hoo boy are they eager to fan the flames for lols or virtue signalling. But is it fun?
Despite my best efforts at algorithmic impenetrability, I’m really swimming against the tide of ebbing privacy. I have no YOUTUBE account, instead GUESTing in on different machines, yet it has figured out that I must be GenX and served me the most obnoxiously GenX-glorifying content imaginable. Hey, I can DEF be pandered to, I just wish MACHINES didn’t figure that out. These super-shallow fluffer pieces lionize my generation as “self-reliant,” “intolerant of self-glorification,” and “no nonsense.” AN ENTIRE GENERATION??? “Latch-key youth” is pretty universally the major factor given for our uber-competence and affect, but I HAD A STABLE, LOVING CHILDHOOD! Also, AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF SELF-RELIANT PEOPLE??? Unconvincing to my experience, nevermind the number of my peers that are just chock-a-block with NONSENSE and self-glazing LinkedIn profiles. And yet, in my most naked (and unverifiable) humble-brag: THAT GENX CHARACTERIZATION TOTALLY DESCRIBES ME, YA’LL!
There was an early saying on the Internet “The internet treats Censorship as blockage and routes around it.” Oh how naive we GenXers were back then. If I may posit a generational response that echoes off that, “GenX treats internet drama as noise, and routes around it.” I could appreciate the venality, the desire to pile into things we know nothing about, the artificial heat of bystanders presented by this game. I appreciated them as “realistic” but not as “something I need to get involved with.” It is obvious to anyone that thinks about it that we cannot know the true facts of a matter through the self-righteous postings of emotional people. It is just as obvious that BOY DOES THAT NOT SLOW US DOWN FROM PILING ON ANYWAY. Yup, Quackpond understands that dynamic really well. What it may not have counted on is my generational-avatar impulse to just give it all a pass.
Now, I can definitely envision a version of this game where the self-serving drama posts are constructed to give us a dawning insight of the underlying reality. Other media play this trick well, where the story is hidden in the subtext and the prose carefully reveals this to us through its conceits and indirections. That is a pretty satisfying dynamic, when it appears. This is not that though. Its engagement with this phenomenon was pitch-perfect as a pastiche, but like the Quackpond gameplay, not much interested in MORE than surface pastiche. It was so well-executed, it generated my real-life response to these things: thanks but no.
The brevity of the work, and the shallowness of its most innocent gameplay never really rose to Sparks for me. The comment-chain story seemed engineered to refute its early charms. As a meta-commentary on Internet Foibles, it knew what it wanted to say and objectively said it pretty well. Just, kinda not my generation’s business. I eagerly await my generation’s “ok, Boomer.”
All that said, the shallow whimsy of the duck gameplay had its appeal. My duck was “Muscavity.” He was a good boy.
“Muscavity, Muscavity there’s no duck like Muscavity…”
Played: 10/2/26
Playtime: 25m, 2 playthroughs, website closed
Score: 5 (Mechanical/mostly seamless) +1 for delightful duckage
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
7 Likes
The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen by Charles M Ball
Just when I think I’m on the downslope of IFCOMP reviews, when there can’t possibly be enough space left for wild coincidences, I find myself inaugurating a new review sub-series. Sometimes, randomizer, I think you are amusing yourself at my expense. This is the SECOND (the first being retroactive) work in the “Do Your Own Research” sub-series, collecting works that give historians access to Primary Research. I know. I’m as surprised as you that somehow this VERY SPECIFIC inspiration is in this year’s zeitgeist.
Remember the weird boat zeitgeist of IFCOMP24? Where seemingly every third entry involved water- (or space-) craft? Good times. Warsaw Queen channels THAT synchronicity as well, earning honorary inclusion in the 2024 “Here There Be Poopdecks” review sub-series. It’s fine, LVotWQ is about time travel. IF, especially parser IF with its promise of ANY COMMAND, needs to solve its not-infinite-space problem. How to constrain the play area (both to focus the player AND to optimize the author’s valuable time) while maintaining the illusion of a larger world? Boats are SUCH an elegant solution to this. So elegant in fact, there is a WEALTH of prior art.
For me, the most relevant prior art was a 2018 game Return of the Obra Dinn. This was a critically lauded time-travel insurance adjuster investigation, with all that implies(!). So, y’know, Eldritch Horror. Warsaw Queen is a time-travel academic investigation with all THAT implies. So, y’know…
After some “modern day” business you are transported to the past to interact with an ancestor aboard a paddle boat… for your midterm paper or something? It’s fine, it’s not the grades you get, its the unverifiable Primary Research you cite along the way. The vibe of this is KIND OF Obra Dinny, of being a witness to history without being able to impact it, though I think I like Warsaw Queen’s “ALMOST material” conceit even better. You are not wandering through static tableaus, you are wandering past schemers and crew who can only sometimes detect your presence. It is an elegant way to limit interactions while still presenting NPC-based problems to solve, and reinforcing the strangeness of your journey. You quickly discover the occupants of the boat, at least the ones still awake, are mostly grifters with inconveniently complicating plans. You are pretty free to wander about listening to stray conversations to piece together motives and movements, all of them acting to obscure the object of your research.
The premise and gameplay were super Sparky for me, but there were a few things that rubbed at me. Most trivially, the game foregoes naval ‘port-starboard’ navigation for painfully explained ‘east-west’ substitution. Sure, compass is more familiar to most of us, but give us some credit! I think it was maybe done to enable diagonal navigation? I dunno, feels like that could have been solved by other means. Naval directions are among the BEST way to underscore your boat setting, forfeited here. More intrusively, there are bugs - most often in missing nouns or synonyms, or broken disambiguation. Not enough to really block you, just prevalent enough to jar from time to time.
I think the part that rubbed at me the most was its scene-based design. The piece is broken into several chunks of time, each of which has a specific chokepoint to defeat in order to progress. This is not a terrible decision in and of itself, it’s just the implementation of it was non-intuitive. In each chunk of time you discover plans and objects that will help later, and eventually those get exhausted. At that point, there is a chokepoint to navigate in order to progress. I found these DEEPLY unintuitive. In one case you need to wander through an otherwise uninteresting node of the ship. In another you need to intuit that an NPC will be writing things in their journal and you need to contrive space to let that happen. Three times. Choke point designs work best for me when the gate in question unfolds as a natural progression from current discoveries. These felt much more random - making sense in retrospect but pretty opaque when living FORWARD.
This is another way of saying I needed walkthrough/hint goosing periodically when I ran out of other stuff to do. Almost always after I had exhausted a scene. The most egregious friction, and also kind of the funniest, was not at a chokepoint exactly. Among a ship’s worth of quasi-ghosts you are free to roam around, periodically being detected by apparitions that are sensitive to light. The piece’s greatest puzzle (which I really admired) has you trying to get past a ghost sentry in shadow. It is a terrific piece of lateral thinking, only brought up short by a, no way around it - creepy, linear dependency. Mutli-step puzzles are not a problem in themselves. Here’s a problem though. In order to take step 3 of, say, 6 in this puzzle you needed to rifle a woman’s lingeree drawer. Look, I’m an AFGNCAAP, I’m perfectly comfortable looting someone’s place behind their back. But, without the game giving me cues to try focus on undergarments, isn’t TOO MUCH FOCUS… kind of creepy? I had already opened the drawer, wasn’t that transgression enough? Did the game really need me to tease the soft fabrics… to caress the lacy trim… to slowly run my fingers through the silky…
Ahem. No. I’m better than that. At least while my transcript is watching.
So that (pretty great!) puzzle was kind of a microcosm of this work for me. Really clever, varied puzzles in that sweet spot between ridiculous and baroque. A spooky, almost dreamlike atmosphere that worked more than it didn’t. A REALLY well conceived setting (loved the downloadable map!). With just enough technical and architectural glitches, sprinkled throughout its runtime to keep it from Engaging. And apparently also rewarding DEEPLY CREEPY behavior.
Even if the protag’s paper dodges its ethical concerns, seems like it’s going to have some citation problems.
Played: 10/2/26
Playtime: 2hr, barely finished! Died and Righteous endings, SURPRISE and QUALIFIED SNOOP achievements
Score: 5 (Sparks of Joy/notable technical glitches)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
lvwq_jjmcc.txt (231.5 KB)
7 Likes
Thanks for the review! I got Obra Dinn from GOG some time ago but I’ve actually never played it. I’ll have to take the journey soon.
1 Like
Forensic Necromancy by Daniel M Stelzer
Hot on the heels of its inauguration, here is the THIRD entry in the “Do Your Own Research” review sub-series, collecting works that send our protagonists across time, not to make a fortune in betting markets, but in service of academic pursuits. Y’know, the KILLER APP for time travel technology.
This one uses its setting to excuse this wild premise, positing a world of magic-based cross-time scrying in service of a Doctoral Thesis of sorts. Like if someone from Hogworts was angling for a Nobel Prize. I don’t know. A stick-up-the-butt straight-faced engagement could push on ALL KINDS of incongruities with this premise (not least of which is “how to prove you didn’t just make it up”). For me though, the premise is SO bonkers and fun, so OBVIOUSLY wonky, I am inclined to roll with it. Especially because the mechanism introduces some pretty elegant gameplay.
This version of Time Travel is also a Mind Palace - the bones of the past can conjure scenes conveniently relevant to the protagonist’s thesis, and not just “secured another totem for my clay figure collection!” This is a pretty effective way to both ground the player in familiar parser-hybrid gameplay, and to put some diegetic guardrails on the implementation. It provides a narrative reason for keeping things focused, in turn minimizing time wasting player cul-de-sacs. Here, the Mind Palace becomes a navigable space, with objects you can apply to parser-like-puzzles.
Brief sidebar here to acknowledge this author’s particular.. peccadillos? Propensities? Some other P-word? This is like the third or fourth game I’ve seen this year, FROM THIS AUTHOR, that leverages an extremely compact, extremely effective mini-map. Its stripped down ASCII graphics esthetic is super efficient and pleasant to encounter, while ALSO not overtaking the play space. From credits, I assume this is a standard library of some sort? If so, WHY IS ONLY THIS AUTHOR USING IT??? It is starting to feel like their signature move, and a welcome one it is.
If that’s a thumbprint, then this author is also leaving pointer-finger prints on this year’s COMP. On the heels of Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa, this is the second work fascinated with bronze age/iron age Middle East culture and history. This is a niche of history I, like many Westerners, am belligerently ignorant of so it presents as novel and intriguing to me in a way, say, Medieval England can’t anymore.
The technical presentation is pretty dynamite also. Besides the compact map, the link-parser hybrid paradigm is integrated really well. Hybrid gameplay is kind of a white whale in recent years. I’ve seen many versions of it, to varying degrees of success. The best ones, to my experience, are the ones that handle open ended parser inputs, while also providing cockpits of (ideally few click) parser-command links. These implementations allow the player their low-friction keyboard shortcuts, while also soft-hinting via links what command space to focus on. FN implements this paradigm pretty excellently.
The Palace Intrigue story this is in service of is ALSO pretty great. According to text, it is a speculative fiction take on a real Royal Heir conspiracy. The plot beats are pretty good! So with all these blinding Sparks going for it, why did I feel at a remove from this work? This was a poser for me. After a few days’ reflection, the best answer I can come up with is “unclear motivation.”
The stated goal of the game is to assemble (para) “enough ancient facts to make my Thesis killer.” If the game communicated what “ENOUGH” meant in that phrase, I never caught it. Meaning I was kind of steaming along - exploring the present to give access to more bones of the past, then exploring the past to determine where more bones might be – solving puzzles that led naturally to the next puzzle – all without ANY sense of “how much is enough”? I felt kind of like a horse. I was being led by a kind, gentle master to a destination I had only the vaguest concept of. I’m a horse, why would they bother trying to explain that? Shut up and eat your apple!
At two very close points in my gameplay, I had two contradictory thoughts almost on the heels of each other. “Is that it, am I done?” quickly followed by “Wait, I’m done already?” This lack of clear goal focus kind of shadowed my entire gameplay. My immediate tasks were always clear and tractable, but I had little to no sense of how far along I was towards my overarching goal. How MUCH history would satisfy my persnickity protagonist. This uncertainty cast a pall over things, keeping me from feeling truly Engaged with the proceedings, and made the ending feel pretty abrupt.
So for this work, it’s not about the ENGAGEMENT of the destination, its about the SPARKS OF JOY you felt on the way. There were a lot.
Played: 10/3/26
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished incl. background reading
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
6 Likes
Hi, thank you for playing BLOODRUST.
I did not believe the content of the journals would break suspension of disbelief, as it is common to include such detail in epistolary stories, but I understand where you are coming from in saying it is not necessarily realistic. As for lack of motivation, the main character’s listlessness is a key aspect of his persona.
BLOODRUST is meant to be more of an emotional experience than one of coherent story, so I acknowledge your grievances.
I am deeply sorry, however, for your technical difficulties. I am only a beginner at coding, and prior playtests showed no such issues.
Thank you still for taking the time to play. 
1 Like
Thirst for Blood by Zeno Pillan
So, back in the 90’s there was a video game called Bad Mojo, where you play as a cockroach. This felt transgressive back in the day, in no little part due to its repellent protagonist and grimy, pixellated presentation. Honestly, I don’t remember a lot about the gameplay, but I can still KIND of see some grotesque screenshots in my head. For sure it seems to have established a beachhead in my memory banks, now some 30 years on. I also have a vaguely positive impression lingering from the experience, so it must have had SOMETHING going for it?
It was these dusty, atrophied neurons that got tugged when TFB rolled up in my shuffle. Here, you play an even MORE benighted member of the insect kingdom, the despicable Mosquito. There is no point arguing things, from worst to less-worst the order is: Scorpion, Mosquito, Wasp, Cockroach. The OTHER end of the spectrum is less firm: for sure spiders and bees are at the top, but they are constantly jostling for #1. Don’t even bother coming at me with “ooh, but Arachnids are not…” I’m not hearing that. Tell me what you think in the comments, and don’t forget to LIKE 
and SUBSCRIBE 
!!
The KEY difference between cockroaches and mosquitos is… probably the Malaria. Or the radiation resistance? Ok, the key difference in GAMEPLAY is flight - adding that third dimension to the proceedings. Your motivation is pretty buggy (wait, that’s a confusing word, I mean INSECT-Y) - you need that sweet, red vein juice and don’t wanna get squashed on the way. Feeding your grubs may have factored in there somehow, but the less we dwell on that the better. No, our work is to zip around a small room, harassing an unsuspecting blood bag until satiated. I found the three dimensional movement pretty clearly conveyed. There are obstacles to avoid, fun secrets to uncover, and some maneuvering to angle in. I appreciated the frictionless directioning, I never felt unclear about how to execute desired maneuvers. This was all pretty Sparky for me, and I say that while picturing the face my wife would make if I ever tried to explain this to her.
I do have some lingering questions though. As I was buzzing around, I was HYPER alert for danger: from bug zapper, to carnivorous pets, to meaty swatting hands. I executed some Golden Age of Aviation aerobatics in that small room. One of two things is true. EITHER, my alertness was rewarded by adroitly navigating fearlessly past all potential hazards. OR there were no hazards provisioned and it vibed more challenging than it actually was. The uncertainty is a rhetorical device. I went back SEEKING OUT hazards and the game resolutely refused to provide any. No zappers, no pets, not even any spiders in the room’s corners that I could engage. To the contrary, the game steers you away from any possible danger, no matter how diligently you try to court it. So I was never really in any danger at all. Makes sense. If history is my guide, first-time flawless gameplay is very much NOT a trait of mine.
For Time immemorial, as far back as the Incredible Shrinking Man, a key feature of these micro-scale narratives is how DANGEROUS our mundane world is for the tiny. Even without explicitly seeking out confrontation, I never really felt that here. Instead of navigating a world of outsize threat, I zipped around, kind of unmolestable. LIKE AN IMPERVIOUS INSECT GOD. Real SCORPION stuff. That feeling, of putting MUCH more into the maneuvering than was strictly necessary, coupled with the deflating lack of peril-induced panic, kept it from being Engaging for me. It is always possible that I am just THE BEST MOSQUITO EVER, but… then I can see my wife’s face again at that proclamation and I will shut up now. Even if not an Engaging experience, I still am now 2 for 2 on bottom-of-scale bug games, and in a few more decades look forward to reflecting on TWO Sparky bug games I remember fondly, if imperfectly. By then, I MAY even be ready to take on Scorpion gameplay!
In another few decades. Let me steel myself for that.
Played: 10/3/26
Playtime: 15m, score 4/4, bad blood/better blood endings, plus some death-wish roaming
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
tfb_jjmcc.txt (14.0 KB)
8 Likes
Live and Get Pie by Tame Spond/ee
What are Kalshi’s odds on a positive JJMcC Review of a poetic IF work? How about the odds against one appearing in the “Yr Better Than That!” review sub-series? Asking for an unrelated friend. Be right back, have some financial business to conduct…
Ok, back. If you are so dead inside that the VERY TITLE of this work does not spin you into giddy schoolgirl giggling, you and I will never be friends. If our two hour IFCOMP judging limit were to be reduced to ONE SECOND, enough time to only read a work’s title, THIS work would be the uncontested GOAT, its #1 status outlasting the empire of Man.
“But wait, reviewer! The limit is longer than that! And this is a poetry-forward work. You have been QUITE OBNOXIOUS about your animosity for poetic endeavors!” Uh, obnoxious? Is that the word? Ok, sure, aggressively worded point taken. Here’s the thing. Poetry is, at its most reductive, wordplay. Playing with words for impact beyond their dictionary meaning and grammar-restricted forms. Y’know what I DO like? WordPLAY. And boy is this one playful.
You might imagine any positive feelings toward a poem would involve the eroding of my ossified, prim distaste by a steady flow of accomplished phrasing and imagery. 98 times out of a 100, spot on, you have measured my jib. For LaGP, under the spell of its ECSTATICALLY PERFECT title, that unscalable mountain was reduced to a gentle hill. A specific early line dynamited that hill, and put an Olympic Luge track in its place.
Because instead of listening[/] you eyed your boss's glistening
Abs.
You say I’m obnoxious about my poetic antipathy, but I don’t even remember what my negative drum beating was all about. I don’t remember because this is TOO AWESOME. You, my strawman nemesis, didn’t think that was possible, did you? “Obnoxious animosity” indeed. You seemed quite judgemental about my, ah, judgemental takes. I am more than my Hot Takes ™ on poetry, cats and broccoli! If you know me so well, I’m sure there are hot buttons you can name that elicit my joy and fealty. Anything? No? How about COMMITING to the BIT? Know how I feel about that? I. LOVE. IT. And boy, does this work do so. Even in error messages, as evinced by (not just) verb-not-supported retorts:
>bounce
Alas! Alack! Aday! That verb has gone away.
This is a very short, very slight, and completely unfair parser puzzle. But its AABB commitment is ABSOLUTE, from start to finish. There is majesty, nay, NOBILITY to this that just swept this reviewer along start to finish. It packs a lot of wordy joy into its short runtime. Too short to be Engaging, but so gleefully committed to its couplet conceit that every other friction fell away in my estimation.
Sparks of Joy/ for this boy.
But just Sparks? Don’t diss larks!
“Obnoxious animosity”? YOU DON’T KNOW ME! For Svengali-like turning me around on rhyming through sheer force of its commitment… Hey LaGP? “YR BETTER THAN THAT!” Oh yes, I will definitely take this call from Kalshi. Wait, the SEC? Ah, no. I’m busy.
Played: 10/4/26
Playtime: 15m, 5-ish deaths, one survive with pie!
Score: 7 (Sparks of Joy/mostly seamless) +1 YBTT! bonus
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
8 Likes