Yay! I am 98% excited you’re closer to get up and running again, 2% sad I didn’t close more of the gap while you were offline 
Hope the rest of the recovery process isn’t too annoying.
6 Likes
RGB Cycle by Charm Cochran
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: Act I (2x) 5min; Act II (3x) 5min; Act III (4x) 8min
I made the call to review these three Acts together, given their relative brevity and presumed linkages. After playing them, I stand by that decision. These are three very short games, linked in formatting and variations on horror themes. In each, you are playing a potential victim’s role in a horror story. The setups are economically conveyed, crisply establishing dramatis personae and blurry setting, not wasting a word on unnecessary details or background. The dramatic resolution of the current scene is the whole focus, and given their dire urgency, appropriately so. Background details are dribbled out organically based on your choices and responses. It is a powerful, very successful approach to horror this short.
In the first act, a wife is confronted by a monstrous (pirate) husband. The second showcases a man trying to find his way out of darkness. The last is a man responding to a panic-inducing revelation. The pieces are thematically linked, though they share no common characters or setups. The ‘cycle’ in question seems deliberately named, and I am going to show my whole ass trying to explain what I could be completely wrong about. The name RGB Cycle carries two meanings I think. The more playful of the two is the use of color implicitly and explicitly in the works. On one level it is purely a graphical/presentation choice - fully as artistically valid as anything else. On another level (and here I risk creating theme in whole cloth), each act is a different shade (ah? ah?) of culpability and agency in monstrous circumstances.
I am running out of non-spoiler room here. Each Act presents a life-or-death scenario of predatory murder. Each Act features subtly different gameplay, from dialogue trees to modest puzzle solving, to dark room exploration. Each Act also provides a single ending while perhaps head faking multiple endings, as far as my limited playthroughs could determine. When individual games do this, there is clearly a point to it. If the point is not surprising and/or thematically laser focused, it can land with an ‘eh, ok, I get it.’ When a TRYPTYCH of games do this, their impacts expand and multiply. When the genre of those games is horror, that choice rings loud and impactful. In particular, the variance in scenarios and motivations underline that the situations kind of don’t matter. Motivations and innocence don’t matter. These are all tones of a horrible, horrible rainbow whose overriding arc is impervious to its specific shadings (and most distressingly, impervious to initiative ).
That is a really cool conceit, deftly implemented, and landed for me like so much more than the sum of its parts. So yeah, three Acts cresting into an overarching message of effective horror. One review. Would be weird to only review Broadway productions scene by scene, wouldn’t it?
I would be remiss if I didn’t observe that Act II’s title is maybe my favorite IF title of all time. Certainly of those I can remember at the moment.
6 Likes
Dark Communion by alyshkalia
Style: Choice-select
Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 15min, 3/3 rescues, 2/4 fails, 3/5 awards
This is an entry for a Comp I do NOT judge! Weirdly, as EctoComp’s organizing principle (spooky Halloween fun) is slap in the middle of my road. Hey, I gotta pick and choose though, right? I intend to have a creative life of my own, and not just vicariously latch onto the heady works of my betters, then pepper them with whatever is happening in my brain chemistry at the time! I too have a dark passenger that needs servicing! Anyway, he’s in the backseat now so pepper away I shall.
The premise is exploring an old church and dealing with the horror inside. It is basically a linear story, with a variety of details in the player’s hands (including the nature of your companion) that fan out into a series of replayable, collectible achievements. Achievements, more than any other mechanism, encourage ‘collect all the endings’ style of play, so that is how I engaged it.
I found the prose in this one more than it needed to be, in a very good way. In exploring the church, we learn our protagonist might have been raised religious but has since lapsed. The language was very good at conjuring a reverence of iconography and environment that, once seeded, still has a hold on us despite our subsequent spiritual journey. It was a nifty observation and mood to set, unnecessary for the horror that followed, but uniquely well-observed all the same.
After some short (optional) exploring, you encounter the antagonist, make some choices and it ends. It is very disciplined, in that it understands replays will be less concerned with exploring and repeated text and thankfully provides for shorter paths to explore its outcomes on subsequent plays. Of particular interest is the ability to choose the relationship of your companion. This choice opens different climax options and variations. I think my favorite was the acquaintance whose fail ending made me laugh out loud.
So yeah, this was a MEIF (multi-ending IF), nicely tuned to its repeat play paradigm, offering a healthy variety of branches and written much better than it needed to be. Worth a play or 8-12!
5 Likes
Idle Hands by Sophia de Augustine
Style: Short Story
Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 5min, ah, finished
This is a linear piece of short erotica. Interactivity is mainly used in mouseover phrases to dive deeper into a particular moment, usually to increase the explicitness of the proceedings. Otherwise you are turning pages, and not so many, until done. Oh yeah, your carnal partner is the Devil. Lucifer. Ol’ Scratch (in more ways than one, amirite??). Ok, I am going to endeavor to reign in my inner juvenile as I go forward. History suggests my success will likely be mixed at best, but know it is not from lack of trying.
Writing in general attempts to elicit emotions from the reader. Humor makes us laugh, tragedy makes us ache, horror unsettles us then gives us catharsis. Erotica speaks to a pretty specific and powerful human impulse. But here’s the thing, it ALSO has to contend with centuries of stigma, much of it socio-religiously sourced. Humans have a singular mechanism to deal with this level of discomfort: reductive humor. Especially transgressive humor which sublimates pretty quickly to profanity. Now, profanity is a lot of things, but for most of the world it is NOT a representation of the beauty of its subject. It is a challenging misdirection that derives its charge from its audacious defiance of convention, NOT the power of its purported subject.
So here we have this amazing physio-chemical trick our bodies can do, that in the best case interacts with our emotional wiring to build a transcendent experience of joyful linkage with another human being. But it finds itself wedged between socially indoctrinated shame and trivializing profanity. Finding the sweet spot in between is an insanely difficult needle to thread. It is a testament to the power of human sexuality that so many try.
But wait, effective erotica has still another enemy! While shared in the general among much of the population, carnal specifics are as varied as the people who pursue them. One person’s turnon is another’s kink, is another’s safe word deal-breaker. Specifics matter to those whom find it appealing and ALSO matter to those who don’t! An author really only has once choice here - relinquish hopes of universal appeal in favor of perfectly nailing it for the subculture that appreciates it. (See, look how heroically I resisted ‘nailing it’ riffing!)
To sum up. Thread a narrow needle for a specific segment of like-minded humans. When you write, the only tool you have to find this impossibly narrow path is words. This work has the right idea, I think, in that its prose leans poetic with occasional shots of enticing physical specificity. Poetry has the promise of capturing complicated human interiority, it’s kind of its north star. It’s almost unfair that this work, with all the above challenges, now must additionally contend with a reviewer whose patience for poetic prose is thin. While I did like the contrasting mouse-over unveilings of physicality, the rest of the text left me at arm’s length, just aiming a little TOO high to land.
I do admire that in its choice of partner, the work is explicitly, perhaps defiantly, running directly into the face of erotica’s socio-religious stigma. Couple that with some pleasantly jarring uses of profanity and you have a work that seems confidently determined to play with the boundaries of erotica. If anything, I do think more could have been done with the conceit. The text did not seem to acknowledge or leverage that super-interesting aspect of the pairing beyond some sly physical observations. Lastly, the work was a short description of a post-/pre- coital interlude without much dramatic arc. It actually ended kind of abruptly to my way of thinking, neither cresting nor teasing its forward path.
Note I did not use the word climax in that paragraph even once. I am a giant in my field.
It is a pretty short piece, a portrait of physicality that many of us humans are inherently interested in. It does admirably and effectively challenge the restrictive guardrails of profanity and stigma. Now, it comes down to personal sensibilities, both in prose and carnal preferences. For a work this well composed, I have no doubt there is an audience for THIS mix out there.
8 Likes
JJ, you have reviewed here many interesting IF, but sadly the increased nosyness of that site itching for money and personal data has blocked me from the HTML-based IF there:
(note that I have used the last IF rewieved as mere example)
disgusted regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
1 Like
Collision by manonamora
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 5min, 5 playthroughs, 5 deaths
The 'Thon has exposed me to a higher density of choices-don’t-matter works than I have previously encountered. Seems like tight time frame Jams draw these out for completely understandable reasons. Thing is, this type of game hinges so completely on its artistic theme that everything else pales, and it becomes the dominant lens to view the work by.
Unless… you are sending up that very type of game!
The player-protagonist is a crash test dummy. Famously without initiative or agency. You achieve consciousness and have precious little time to try and do something. This is a very attractively put together example of the sub-genre. Its color scheme, aggressive layout and interface are both attractive and functional, and satisfyingly evocative of the protagonist’s identity. The choices on offer are surprisingly numerous, given the character in question, and it takes a few playthroughs to feel like the space is satisfactorily explored. Though even after a single play, you get a sneaking suspicion what the work is on about, the message is dutifully reinforced through repeat plays. One choice in particular - use of dreaded timed text - ups the ante in a kind of hilarious way. Not only can you not influence your fate, you can’t even control how you get information!
This reads so clearly like a playful spoof of these types of games, and goes above and beyond to really twist the knife. From the protag’s identity, to gameplay, to timed text presentation, it is cheekily poking at other games of its ilk and outright taunting players who play them! “Hey, that crash test dummy? That’s YOU player! Strap in and shut up!” As a one-joke jam game, for IF nerds like me, it is the exact correct mix of taunting insult and loving send up to elicit “yah-you-got-me” laughter. You can have your tragic fate, your helpless victimization, your cynical statement no-choice games. I think this is my favorite game of this type.
3 Likes
Cycle by alyshkalia
Style: Choice-select
Played: 7/25/24
Playtime: 10min, 3/3 endings
It is kind of gratifying to watch an artistic arc. So much art is consumed one-and-done in this day and age. Honestly, that does seem to be the model that makes the most sense anyway. Artists spend inordinate time and energy refining and honing a piece of art to stand on its own, encapsulating a complete artistic vision, and hopefully resonating with an audience in an engineered way. (Art IS engineering. Fight me.) While repeated engagement may be deeply gratifying to the artist, its impact on the consumer is usually dominated by that first encounter.
There is serialized art of course. Novels and comics have long engaged in serialization, most famously pulpy entertainment of recurring characters in genre adventures. I am not talking about a FICTION or STORY arc, however, I’m talking about an artistic one. When a single artist is behind serialization for an extended time their intellectual and artistic growth can become part of the story, a compelling subtext to another round of puncheminnaface. If you’ve never read Dave Sim’s complete Cerebus, it is a rollercoaster of artistic preoccupations and before-your-eyes evolution. Its latter half in particular is so dominated by the artist as to be equal parts mesmerizing and repellent. That arc ultimately overwhelmed the fiction it was nominally creating.
This is not what’s happening here, to be clear. I invoked it as one type of artistic arc. Another, more relevant arc is when an artist returns to some theme several times, exploring it in different ways and to different effect. This work seems to be connected to two others by this author, as a trilogy of sorts, all exploring the intersection of entitlement and romantic relationships. The author acknowledges this work’s debt to a crackerjack earlier work that I personally really enjoyed. It also shares overt similarities to a subsequent work I reviewed this 'Thon. The artist of course has naming privileges, but absent their input I will call this “The Entitled Heart Trilogy.”
This strikes me as a middle work both thematically and temporally. The first ‘entry’ engaged a troubled but redeemable relationship with a dangerously biased power dynamic. The third delivered a cold ‘masks off’ condemnation of full on toxicity. This one bridges the gap by using fantasy time loops to explore the surprisingly grey border between romantic manipulation and earnest will-to-change. In some ways it is the most subtly challenging of the three, particularly when exploring all possible endings. The author ultimately has some specific ideas about where things land, and in the construct of their fiction of course is the authority. I nevertheless appreciated that prior to the endings, the language remained open enough to challenge the player’s presumption of protagonist motives, conscious or otherwise. The fact that the ambiguity doesn’t extend to (one of) the endings is kind of a cutting rebuke of self-delusion lurking in the border tension. The fact that there are three endings further muddies the waters - toxicity is not fore-ordained!
I really enjoyed the first one. I appreciated the third one, which was much more straightforward, terse and confrontive. I may have liked the fleeting ambiguity of this one best of all, and the damning but open ending space it carved out. I really like all three of these together, and the artistic arc they collectively describe.
And unlike Cerebus, the artist is not reduced by their arc!
4 Likes
(I have more of a bone to pick on the lack of moderating tools for Jam runners than anything else, but yeah, it’s not always ideal. We use what we got, though.)
2 Likes
Revenant’s Lament by 30x30
Style: Short Story
Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 45min
My introduction to this author was via their prose which typically lands squarely in my thirsty, thirsty brain. It is so singularly confident, eloquent and evocative it just pulls me along regardless of the tale it is telling! I have also come to revere their sly use of interactivity and links. Rarely as true alternatives, link choices are instead used build contradictions in the protagonist, often more effectively than simply explaining them. This work in particular, with its changing and unselectable options paints a clear picture of a protagonist struggling unsuccessfully against their own nature, and does so with uniquely effective interactive techniques.
This work also leverages the dreaded timed text in an ultimately successful way, representing a campfire conversation being lived, not laid out to consume at leisure. I will confess to some trepidation before its use was fully exposed. It is NOT a terrific way to consume story-based works, but it works here as both a graphical cue of its framing sequence and is evocative of its setting.
As a campfire tale, an Old West supernatural story, its setup is enthralling: a stolen identity to mask a deeper secret; a tempting offer that does not go optimally (I mean, do they EVER?); all cresting to some sort of resolution and twist. It’s a terrific formula, and the FORM of it is deeply appealing. Let me break it into four acts: ACT I - the setup and mini-climax; ACT II - a short transition; ACT III - a doomed, joyful interlude; ACT IV - turn and finale.
Despite a terrific plot frame, ACT I prose (acharacteristically for this author) pushed at me. It felt like an unedited first draft? I say this because the prose that so often effortlessly pulls me in, pushed at me here. In one dimension there was the disconnect between the language/imagery and its uneducated, hard scrabble protagonist. In another I found the sentences themselves over-claused? This author’s prose style is NOT Hemingway, not at all. But here, it felt like their typical discipline slipped and where extended sentences and modifying clauses usually flow and ebb but close with a punch, ACT I felt overridden with sentences that continued and continued and continued… and closed in confusion. It really felt of a different piece than the ACTs to follow. Because it was the FIRST ACT, it also pushed me away a bit, even as lots of plot (and notably inventive link architecture!) was happening. This was an uncomfortable, unwelcome conclusion for me. Judiciously turning some commas into periods would make a WORLD of difference here, to me anyway.*
For me, the most successful acts were the middle two. In particular, ACT II plays directly to the prose strengths of this author. I could remove this act from context and read it over and over again. Will resist spoiling what it is describing, but let’s just say it uses food chain specifics to paint passage of time (and obliquely evolution of protagonist) in a singularly magnetic way. This stands among the strongest sequences by this author. Because ACT I did not click in so crisply, this was a breath of relief as well.
ACT III delves into emotional interiority in a way that felt both earned and suitably shadowed for the tale. The prose employed to do so remained singular, unintrusive and propulsive. There were some logistical questions not quite clarified… a new character was able to pierce the veiled identity of a new body somehow… but the emotional content felt right. My specific question: The host seemed to recognize the protagonist’s biological sex during a bath despite currently inhabiting a body the text leaned into as a male. Layered on top of this was deep sadness over the implications of the ACT I deal, agreed upon with no anticipation of ACT III’s fleeting joy. I found story beats, language and emotional content all clicking together smoothly and satisfyingly here.
ACT IV disappointed me in a different way. There was, throughout the work, some tension in the protagonist’s character. Early self-isolating choices pointed strongly one direction, only for later longing choices to contradict those earlier ones. In ACT IV, choices and mental anguish seemed further disconnected from plot beats and character motivations in a distracting way. In one sequence, the protagonist bemoans the impossibility of locating someone, despite having been told they are the local sheriff. Is it really that hard to find a sheriff when you need one? That seems like a pretty good lead to me! The anguish felt overwrought, given the circumstances. In general, the runup to the final scene felt more of a piece to ACT I than II and III, though the sentence structure definitely carried more discipline.
I am happy to report the final scene absolved a lot of that. A final plot twist is actually quite satisfying, leading to a final tragically impotent choice and open-ended climax. Then a campfire stinger appropriate for the narrative. While I initially rebelled at the open-ended climax, the narrative engaged it directly and turned me 180 on it in like two screens. That is some story-telling power!
So, overall impression: two frictiony acts, two banger acts, and a strong close. Sure, would prefer them all to stitch together cleanly, but if not, that’s good enough for me!
*It is not lost on me that the above criticism is fairly leveled at MY style as well. But this isn’t about me!
Some typos spotted that further fed the 'pre-editing' impression:
The stars seem to, leaving burning trails across the sky.
Is is wrong to want more than this emptiness
The first town that was not already a belly-up, sun-rotted corpse was halfway there already.
he dead cowboy cackles, […] as warm as a lovers tempered arms.
5 Likes
You cannot understand how confused I was when I got to “ACT IV” and realised, “Wait, this isn’t the RGB Cycle.” All of the points could probably be applied to both! Not really, but my confusion agrees.
3 Likes
I love this. Thanks for the review!!
4 Likes
WHOM I SHOULD LOVE ABOVE ALL THINGS by Sophia de Augustine
Style: Short Story
Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 5min
This is a short, very short excerpt from a longer work. I am not convinced reviewing this in isolation does it, or the larger work, any favors. A priest is taken aback by a visit from a former romantic partner. That’s kind of it? There is tension in subtext for sure, largely interpersonal. The obvious tension though, that of love forbidden by the church, is mostly ignored? That complete non-engagement itself begs intriguing, but unaddressed questions. In such a short work, there is little time to develop either character beyond the allusions to their relationship. We get some vague sketches of their history, a glimpse into how each of them feels about it, and some one-dimensional character work. We don’t get much insight into them as fully human beyond this encounter. As a thin slice from a larger pie we needn’t expect that, but as a standalone scene the missing pie looms large.
Man, I really want some pie now.
The interactivity is minimal here, of the page turning variety. As an extended dialogue, the graphical presentation is appropriately and cleanly reminiscent of a script. It establishes an engaging rhythm, most pages starting with business and ending with dialogue. This rhythm is my favorite part of the work, making a virtue of its artificiality. The work carries itself as a script as well, to the stagey side of naturalistic. The priest in particular almost immediately expresses overt emotionality without much ramp. This is certainly economical and perhaps more justified in a larger stage production, but in a short vignette reads unnatural. The scene partner also comes across as… kind of smug? In a way that diminishes the reader’s empathy for both of them. Again, something a larger work could flesh out more compellingly.
I appreciate that the climax is pregnant with foreboding about what is to come next, given the bits we’ve seen, but I struggle to say I was invested in it. The work was simply too abbreviated to develop that. I really think the way to consume this work will be in its larger container. A quick peek at the author’s page shows that Vespertine is ALSO part of this larger work? I struggle to see how the two connect, and THAT is VERY interesting. It actually feels more of a piece with another work, Idle Hands, not only for its Biblical allusion title, but for its fascination with the collision between stifling religious doctrine and raw human need. The fact that it is NOT notionally linked begs all kinds of questions about the larger work, including its billing as gothic horror, where the horror part was noticeably absent from this intro!
A generous reviewer would do well to reevaluate this piece in its larger context - the entire pie as it were. Which, dear reader you will no doubt have cause to celebrate, as I DID secure a pie between initial composing of this review and posting. Bourbon Pecan. So good.
3 Likes
A Collegial Conversation by alyshkalia
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 15min, 5 playthroughs
One word review: MeYOW.
Four-word review: I really dug this.
Multi-word review of uncertain length:
This is a fascinatingly structured choice-select scene. A charged social interaction between four bureaucrats of varying levels of self-importance. There are a few repartees, then things are broken up by the adult in the room. The story is really what each player brings to the exchange, and their interrelationships that drive the prickly encounter. Man is it well conceived and executed. It is short enough that with only a few replays you are assembling a full picture of the dynamics and personalities at play.
It is hard to say what the ‘best’ way to play this is, but I will say, my method just crushed it, and you are welcome to use it. After cycling one each in the first play, I decided to alternate between members of the same ‘faction’, then repeat starting with the opposite lead. This gave me full visibility into one faction’s drives. Then repeated the whole sequence for the other faction.
It helps that the piece gives convincingly varied motivations, personalities and vocal adeptness to each participant, then shows how ALL those pieces lead to the unchanging conversation flow. It is fascinating because it is so well done and organic. In particular, on my first pass of faction A (for ‘a$$hole’, as opposed B for ‘befuddled’) I came away thinking ‘uh, why are these two basically the same person?’ only to have the reversed order put that to the lie in a deeply satisfying and nuanced way.
Will a different order produce different ‘a-ha’ moments of equivalent quality? Did I even get the BEST revelation order? I dunno, maybe to both? But even if not EXACTLY equivalent, the charge of what is revealed about whom in what moment is still really cleverly done and it’s hard to believe some charge won’t be produced regardless of order.
Yeah, this struck me as pretty uncommon use of interactivity, deftly architected for satisfying mini-revelations stitched through a snide exchange of petty rivalries. This is like the whole driving impulse of reality TV. Which I don’t really like. But LOVE here!
3 Likes
Lysidice and the Minotaur by manonamora
Style: Parser
Played: 7/26/24
Playtime: 1hr, finished
This is billed as a beginner parser, and ok maybe. Certainly, veterans will find the puzzle play pretty straightforward. But a lot of what might uncharitably be called ‘training wheels’ by my strawman companion, I would characterize as ‘quality of life improvements.’ The work’s use of color to telegraph bespoke verbs and interesting nouns is particularly welcome. Room and object descriptions are so terse that they convey interesting details economically with no distracting prose chaff. Conversation trees were laughably shallow, having the effect of not distracting the player with misinterpretable color and ANY response being immediately flagged as useful. It’s not trying to give the illusion of alive NPCs, they are game pieces serving their purpose with clarity. Making the experience as friction free as possible is certainly a boon for new players, but honestly helps all of us!
The production strongly leverages its Adventuron platform: its thematic meandros borders crisply provide exit listings and major feature lists above its ‘work area,’ guiding proceedings without drama or heavy hand. The prose itself is crisp, yet delightfully empathic, developing a pleasantly generous, propulsive vibe that is just a delight to marinate in. The story itself is similarly warm, bending Greek mythology into a friendlier posture. The welcoming tone of the piece does as much as any gameplay innovations to signal ‘Parsers welcome everyone, not just crusty old fraternity members.’
If I may be so bold, there were a few burrs I detected that could be further buffed away: in the start room >GET SACK gave me both
you can’t take it
you pick up the sack of grains (which I clearly did not)
In another room, the sack description was SO terse I believed them a pile of empties and was surprised to pull grain from them. One NPC knew about keys, but not the associated gates, making for a bit of conversation clumsiness and friction. I would also break up the verb inventory into categories - basics/system commands and spoilers. The opening screen characterized the verb inventory as spoilery, so I avoided it. In so doing, I missed its bespoke >TSCRIPT command (game rejecting the more standard >SCRIPT) and only at the end learned I could have provided one. Two categories of verbs, spoil and no-spoil might be a useful refinement.
Anyway, all that is further polish on an already terrific ambassador for parser games. The Adventuron platform itself should not be overlooked here, and was presumably chosen deliberately . With its overt old school aesthetic and vibe it conjures a time when IF was shiny-new and filled with promise. LnM’s warm story and welcoming play expands on that to open the hobby to those that might otherwise fear its legendary opacity and cruelty. By extension, LnM makes all of US look less inbred and niche. Thanks LnM!
4 Likes
Hello, a very belated thanks for this - I’ve been awol with work/life etc and just catching up.
You are right there is not really any more than a weird anecdote here (although I confess i was going more for campfire-ghost-story than cocktail-party-anecdote). It’s reaching for lingeringly unsettling rather than shrugged-off weird, intentionally no solid answers. Obviously the buggy bits and uneven-ness derail this and should be fixed… it’s a 3-minute creepy pop song or a (very) short story. All atmosphere. I guess I’m just saying you read it right, even if that wasn’t what you wanted! Thanks again.
4 Likes
Nyx by 30x30
Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/27/24
Playtime: 5min, 3/3 endings
Back before the internet enabled pervasive access to, euphemistically, “externally authored texts”, students had to work much harder to find shortcuts for research papers and book reviews. (Well, maybe just ‘harder.’) Cliff’s Notes were the legendary black-and-yellow pamphlet size books of sweet, sweet relief from hundreds of pages of droning on about, I dunno, whaling practices. While indispensable for adolescents that wanted a social life, they could be… clinical. They described plot beats, explained literary flourishes, notable prose characteristics, historical context. Great for impressing English teachers (who, in retrospect, were probably not as fooled as we kids believed). Not so great for actually EXPERIENCING the celebrated prose, thrilling to plot beats, or watching the author’s mind unveiled in its idiosyncratic glory.
NYX is a repudiation of Cliff’s Notes cold distillation. “I’m not gonna EXPLAIN Alien to you,” sez NYX. “Imma speed run it for you.” Framed as a last transmission from a doomed spaceship with a single player choice, it packs an entire dramatic arc into an insanely tight time frame, with an earned choice of diverse denouments. To me though, this was not the most interesting thing about it.
I am a fan of this genre, this story’s most obvious inspiration, this subculture, and this author. There was NO chance I wasn’t going to like this. What I found most noteworthy though was the prose. Here’s why. Early on, the protagonist makes the well-known observation ‘we should send poets, not engineers, to space.’ Leaving aside the driveby on engineers there, have you READ THIS AUTHOR BEFORE? I mean, there is no one else I would send into space!! They have got to be on the launch shortlist, once NASA validates the poetry priority. Which made it so impressive to me that the voice for this work was exactly as aliterary as the work claimed. Chameleon-like, the author delivers a protagonist’s voice that is consistently, believably workmanlike and technical, which sold the story that much more solidly. It’s almost unfair and, given how DISTINCTIVE their most flourishing prose is, astonishing it is done this well. So sure, delivers punch in tight package, interesting alternative arcs, bla bla bla. Still, the RANGE of authorial voice is the compelling part. That was my big takeaway. That, and the importance of self-destruct subsystems.
6 Likes
THE RUIN OF 0CEANUS PR1ME by Marco Innocenti
Style: Parser
Played: 7/27/24
Playtime: 2.25hrs, 3 deaths, ‘won’ with walkthru
This is a companion piece to A1RL0CK, and I do recommend playing the two together. I also recommend playing in order, as I think the denouement of this game would not work as well out of order. Initially, it felt to me like an improvement in every way on the prior work - which I had found narratively very strong, but burdened by overwrought language, implementation gaps and (a few) inadequately clued puzzles.
Early in the proceedings of RUIN, I found it much smoother and linguistically more disciplined. Here, the protagonist is a blue collar space/underwater worker, notably different than the previous protagonist and much more relatable in his down-to-earth, no-nonsense voice. He is immediately thrown into an alien environment and asked to navigate. I found the language employed here very obfuscative and scattered, in a very effective way. My inability to mentally create a navigable geography or even a clear view of my surroundings seemed a clever way to evoke the disorientation of sudden immersion in an alien environment. I also liked how descriptions changed dramatically, where the protagonist’s first impressions were nightmarishly horrific, only to be supplanted with a more mundane reality. It was an effective way to convey hair-trigger panic at the distressing surroundings.
This impression carried me quite far, and was enhanced by a challenging folding-in-on-itself map that was navigable but just offkilter enough. I wish that early experience was sustained. Implementation issues seemed to become increasingly intrusive as time went on. From clumsy disambiguations
>x glass tube
Do you mean the narrow glass tube or the small device?
to LOTS of synonyms and missing nouns
> x aliens
Sorry, I don’t understand what “aliens” means.
> x alien
They are not much different from the fish you are used to.
to narrative phrasing that has either typos or baffling word choice
GOING AGAINST ME WILL GET YOU ANYTHING, JAY TEE. DOWN YOURWEAPONS AND JOIN THE CAUSE.
x panel
The panel is open, and shows a series of beaks facing the opening, like a rake.
In the most frustrating example, combining two objects produces a third, but the narrative does not announce either the disappearance of the components or the creation of a new one. I assumed it was a bug for a distressingly long period, only eventually noticing an addition to my inventory. As frustrating as these were, they nevertheless still represented an improvement in the prior entry.
A larger disappointment, for me, was the gradual transformation of the prose from its early punchy, unadorned simplicity to more melodramatic and overwritten. Contrast this early piece:
“So we’re screwed: it’s as dark here as in Satan’s colon. And there’s nothing up, down, left or right. Give me some pointers, Cart. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed.”
to this:
“Cursed is the shadow of hell,” you voice loudly.
While there may be a fictional character that can plausibly say both those things, I did not find this protagonist to be that guy. Similarly, the narration took a similar turn, forfeiting its early punchy gains for less appealing baroqueness (baroquery?). By the end, it felt linguistically fully of a piece with its predecessor.
Its final puzzle ALSO felt like a let down. Overall, RUIN was a much cleaner puzzle experience for me. Some challenging leaps, but mostly rewarding diligent examination and satisfying once completed. That final puzzle though - specifically the final step of the final puzzle. After having a series of moving parts to decode, manipulate and sequence, all of them satisfying, the difference between success and failure was one final move I found to be completely opaque. There is a mild hint in death, though I interpreted that hint quite differently and never got there. Walkthrough showed me the answer which, eh ok.
Now that I have fully and completely whined about this stuff, let me turn again. All of those artifacts were there, detracted from my experience, but all of them were both less pronounced than previously AND compensated by RUIN’s strengths. In addition to the early characterizations and scene setting called out above, this one included lots of ‘fiddles’ (minor atmospheric messages that emphasize the dynamic nature of the environment) that were positively creepy and unsettling and terrific mood setters. Most importantly, I found the plot of this one to be super strong, and the timing of its beats even MORE capably dispensed than its predecessor (which was a strength of that work too!). Its horror was more horrific, its revelations more organic and interesting. They were timed to ‘unlocking’ areas of the map, but given the relative smoothness of its puzzles translated to a steadier, more engaging pace of revelation. Yes, the protagonist character lost the thread a few times (peevishly damaging his equipment in a way that beggared credulity for his situation, strong physiological reactions that rang untrue), but the antagonist and NPCs stepped in to carry things ably to a strong finale, even if spoilers were needed to fully experience it. The antagonist’s final revelation in particular was both foreshadowed and surprising in a satisfying way.
So to sum up, feels, like its predecessor, that it could use more polish and prose editing. Its bones though are even stronger, and it accomplishes more with language than its predecessor attempted. Barring a sour final step, its puzzles were also both fairer and more satisfying. I turned this into an outright comparison. Didn’t mean to do that. Both are worth your time. (But this one is better.)
3 Likes
At this point in the Thon I have a Good News/[reader decide tenor of] News situation.
The Good News is I have finally resurrected my laptop, and am fully reconnected with my online worlds… and just in time as I have finally flushed my backlog of reviews. Sidebar: Framework is just an excellent computing choice for anyone not afraid to turn a screw. Not only are repairs well in hand for the casual home handyperson, their Tech Support is above and beyond in helping root cause issues.
The [tbd] News is I think I am tapping out of further reviews. This acharacteristic and self-disappointing decision comes from a few places including: the loss of momentum due to hardware ill fortune; the knowledge that because of gaps in playability I have no chance of full completion; and most importantly the looming spectre of IFCOMP, which has accelerated its schedule to a scant 3 weeks away. I have to break SOME time free for my poor, neglected WIP!
I apologize to the authors whose works I did not get to. Again please vent your ire at the cruel hand of my randomizer algorithm, not spite on my part! I will post a wrapup closer to end of 'Thon, and of course kibbitz reviews by others mercilessly. Thanks to @alyshkalia for organizing and finding me in my off-season TADS isolation. Thanks to the authors who continue to surprise and delight me with the breadth of their creative visions. Thanks to all the reviewers that make this effort so communally gratifying and less like me just blarging word soup on an undeserving artistic community. Especially thanks to sponsors who maybe forgot what they were in for financially with me. I missed this boat at the front end, but will match donations in a gesture to share the burden I created.
If I have a request for next year, it would be to maybe center this event between Spring Thing and IFCOMP? Just a thought, had a blast, not like I’m gonna skip if we don’t. See ya’ll for wrapup and IFCOMP!
13 Likes
Glad to hear you got the laptop situation sorted out, and you’ve definitely got nothing to feel bad about - this was a comprehensive run of great reviews (unsurprisingly), and honestly I sometimes I wish I could strike a better balance between reviewing and making progress on my own stuff.
8 Likes
Yay for having a working laptop again, and kudos to you for reviewing 41 out of 49 games!! (Even more impressive given that several of the non-reviewed ones were later additions to the list, meaning you reviewed nearly all of the original entries.) Thanks so much for your enthusiastic and multitudinous participation. Looking forward to your wrapup!
I’ve been planning to ask for feedback on the timing as I prepare for next year, so thank you for noting this! (I also have a feeling that the list will be a lot shorter next year—maybe it’s worth considering making this a biennial event… 
)
8 Likes