JJMcC's ST25 A-S-T-O-O-T

[jjmcc]

Y’know that impulse not to repeat yourself, to continually vary and reinvent what you do to keep it fresh for yourself and the folks who watch you? Yeah, I don’t have that impulse. Another Spring Thing, another batch of reviews where I hang arbitrary labels on works according to my increasingly ossified sensibilities! As usual, here are this year’s labels in question:

Horror Icon: This one is close to my heart. So close in fact, that I run a serious risk of diluting the field by introducing waaay too many granular characters/categories to apply. The goal is to graph this stuff, so will try to be disciplined! The icons I think I’m settled on: Leatherface (horror works. already I’m on thin ice, they’re ALL horror works! Texas Chainsaw, especially at its introduction, was among the most truly unsettling horror movies in pop culture, so that’s where I land. Will try not to write an entire parenthetical thesis on every one.); Jigsaw (detective/technical works); Babadook (non-CWM); Pinhead (puzzle solving); Freddie Krueger (comedy); Regan/Pazuzu (literary - from Excorcist if you don’t carry these characters in your head every waking moment like I do). Must… resist… urge to… keep adding…

Vibe: Playful, Dramatic, Hilarious, Dour, Pulpy, etc, will invent ratings as needed
Polish: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel! : Wherein I describe how my particular manias as developer would apply, should in some alternate timeline I have authored this work.

Beware entrants. We’ll tear your work apaart

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Yay, excited to see your reviews! Though at risk of outing myself as genre-unaware, what does “non-CWM” mean in this context? I’m aware a cwm is a sort of Welsh valley, but as an acronym I’m blanking. Chainsaw-wielding man? Crossword maniac? Christian women of Malta?

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

From JJ’s previous threads I believe it stands for “cis white male”. Everyone knows the Babadook is a classic gay icon so this tracks!

[jjmcc]

@Encorm

I believe it stands for “cis white male”

Absolutely correct, though going forward I will evermore think of it as ‘Chainsaw Wielding Maniac.’ Depending on the specimen, can be pretty strong parallels…

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

“Chainsaw-Wielding Man” (or Maniac) reminds me of the Great Mimesis Debate !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[Hidnook]

alt text

The first cover of the manga “Chainsaw Man” by Tatsuki Fujimoto. A brutal man with a bird-shaped mask and office wear leaps out of the colorful frame, crushing the head of one of many people screaming in agony. Three chainsaws are attached to the man’s body: one on each elbow, parallel to the forearm, and one emerging from the mask.

[jjmcc]

We Stole a Ship to Run a Scam by Peter M.J. Gross and Donald Conrad
Played: 4/2/25
Playtime: 15m

I am on record as observing that the RPG Maker gameplay paradigm is not exactly my cup of tea. Successful games (for me) on this engine are brief, light on repetitive combat, and heavy on attitude - that ineffable quality of distinguishing itself from the sameness that can plague such a strong gameplay and graphical tool kit. So let’s check out WSASTRAS (wizastrous? WIZASTROUS??? I just like it more now).

Is it brief? Oh yeah it is. Hard to believe I’m saying this, but maybe too much so? You get to meet maybe six characters, all but two of which are pretty functional, solve a mini-mystery and make a final choice. The stakes are established both clearly but also incompletely so that choice is as much about the player’s proclivities as it is the objective scenario. This is actually the most interesting thing about the game! It’s a nice dynamic: forced to choose with incomplete information, informed by your own internal biases. Y’know like life.

Does it have combat? Nonexistant. The BEST choice for this engine! (for me)

Does it have attitude? WSASTRAS distinguishes itself from the field, at least a little bit, in two ways. Graphically it is reminiscent of the primitive pixellated standard for RPG Maker, but more line-driven and cruder. It is just different enough to be notable, but not different enough to undermine the gameplay engine. These things are always esthetically personal. For me I liked it well enough, though it did introduce some fiddly artifacts of aligning sprites just so to interact, as well as seeming to cue interactable elements that turned out not to be so. After some onscreen jittering to be sure. Not fatal, just the slightest of frictiony. The other way it distinguished itself was its light, playful vibe. Most NPCs are functional - giving quests, background or choices, but their dialogue is spiced just enough to allow that they might not be info robots. The egg custodian was a particular standout here. All of it added up to a pleasant enough, if undemanding time. Tweaking its toolkit-driven gameplay in the right direction, if only modestly so. Building to an interesting-for-its-ambiguity final choice. Those ‘ifs’ kind of loom large in the summary I suppose, but at least it is consistently on the right side of things!

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I might try to double down on the NPC personalities. Give everyone the attention that the custodian got.

[DConrad (Donald Conrad)]

Thanks for playing and coming up with an abbreviation for the title! This was a fun review to read, and it gives us quite a few things to ponder on our next outing with RPG Maker.

[jjmcc]

Elaine Marley and the Ghost Ship by Logan Delaney
Played: 4/2/24
Playtime: 45m

Hoookay. Another season of reviews, and another merry prankster of a randomizer. On the heels of a light RPG-maker joint, we get a heavier, memoir-y Twine effort. Thankfully mental whiplash is not a thing! This was an amibitious look back at and interrogation of an underserved character in the Monkey Island franchise. It bounces back and forth between old style point-and-click play (translated to Twine link-select), and some authorial side bars and digressions into the franchise history, the character, and their engagement with both. This kind of thing is very appealing to me.

From the outset though, it seemed plagued with technical burrs and frictions. For one, it makes use of the dreaded timed text. I find myself more forgiving than most in the community, but this implementation tested that sorely. For one, the opening scrolled intro both had no concept of window size, nor any concept of screen integrity. What I mean is, the text played out, below the bottom of the window requiring scrolling. If you found yourself fussing with slide bars and fell behind… the entire screen wiped before you finished it to start playing out the next one! Eventually, I full-screened the window (which you DEFINITELY HAVE TO DO), but still found myself unable to keep up. It was simultaneously too slow and too fast. For SURE there must be a pause for more at the end of every intro screen.

This was not the end of the technical woes, however. There were link chains with no back or reverse, which, if you clicked on you needed to cycle through the entire thing again before returning to start. A “Journal” was identified as unlocked, though the link never worked for me throughout the game. Different colors were used for character dialogue, at least one of which was chromatically close to the color used for links, resulting in link confusion. Graphic elements overlapped words or were completely missing. And oh that timed text, pervasive and stalling through it all. It seemed to be reaching for a conversational paradigm, the author/work talking to you in ‘real time.’ I can squint and see that. Honestly, waiting for text to present itself gave me time to do that.

Example of missing graphical elements:

You get it. Technically it is problematic. I will waste no more time belaboring the point. It is unfortunate that the technical issues intruded so deeply. There was real wit and verve in its homages to the Monkey Island era fonts and layouts.

The content of the game is more rewarding, assuming you can fight through to it. The light ‘point and click’ style puzzles were evocative of, though nowhere near as challenging as, its inspiration. Part of that is that while you can mimic the motions of mouse-to-hotpsot with mouse-to-link, pictures are famously worth orders of magnitudes of words, and you just get fewer hotspots with the latter. While unsatisfying as a puzzle, it surprisingly and pleasantly echoed that playstyle. It is the first time in a long time the Twine paradigm seemed more than an arbitrary UI choice.

Far more interesting was the interplay between that puzzly work, and the author’s inter-scene commentary on the game, the character and the history that informed both. It used the textual complexities of the inspriration to openly engage the boundaries between PC and NPC, and what ‘reality’ means in the context of fiction and gaming. Clearly the author had cause to pour a lot of thought into a character they found compelling but the narrative did not, and how that tension kind of exploded the whole thing for them. Leaving them to pick up and examine all the different pieces without the distraction of the functioning whole. Explosive deconstruction, baby!

There was a really encouraging amount of depth to engage here. Which made the ending kind of anti-climactic. Towards the end, after some time toggling between light puzzle/escape-the-boat play and digressions into lore both real and fictional, it unexpectedly and abruptly turned into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead territory. All the talk of ways to appreciate, deepen and reclaim the character, including actually PLAYING as her!, were abruptly forsaken into..literal nothingness.

It is a jarring climax. After all the explorations of ways to interperet the character, to confer agency or broader depth, it nevertheless ends with a repudiation of that very effort. Is it a comment on fan culture’s propensity for putting emotional weight on elements not meant to carry them? (see the first 20 years of Boba Fett fandom) On the tyranny of narrative, whose choices are quite literally the final word? Or are we supposed to cling to the sweetness of that exploration in the face of its doomed fate against an unchanging lore?

Honestly? I don’t know. And that’s kind of cool, but also kind of unsatisfying. Which, why should I have it any better than Elaine?

Aaaand now, despite my promises not to belabor the technical woes, I can’t help but wonder if my inability to access Elaine’s Journal left a key piece of the puzzle out of my reach. A technically flawed but very tantalizing package.

Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: Memoir-y
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure the first MUST DO is to add ‘pause for more’ inputs to every opening screen. While doing that, I would seriously revisit the timed text implementation, to make sure its use was intentional, strictly under control, and far less intrusive. Then, either fix or eliminate the Journal. Unless its inaccessibility was also part of the commentary…?

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

I think the “journal” is the game bits, as opposed to the author’s notes - like, that’s a heading for each of the entries (hour one, hour two, etc.) rather than a missing link to something different.

But agreed with your overall take here - there’s a lot to like but ye gods the timed text.

[jjmcc]

Aahh, yeah, I see. Makes sense, though puts another possible lifeline out of reach!

[LoganDelaney]

Hi JJ! Thank you so much for the super thoughtful and in-depth review. (And thank you to Mike Russo for answering a few questions that have come up about my game in the forum!)

I’ve received a few comments about the timed text, so I’ve sent Brian an updated version of the game with the more egregious timed areas removed. This version should now be up on the Spring Thing website. I can definitely see where that can get frustrating.

I’m super glad you enjoyed the game and the commentary, and am looking forward to reading the rest of your reviews!!

[jjmcc]

The Hound of Ricsige by The Bentomologist
Played: 4/2/24
Playtime: 15m, 3 playthroughs

Why make fiction interactive?

I ask this question sincerely, in full knowledge of the forum it appears in. What is the point of it? Oh, sorry, I should clarify. I’m not asking you, the reader of my winkingly labeled ‘reviews.’ I’m asking you, the would-be IF author. What is it about your work that makes interactivity intrinsic to its form or function? How do you expect interactivity to impact the consumption of your work - its plot, themes and characters and/or overall experience? It feels like a ‘gotcha’ question and it kind of is one. I mean its not like you OWE me an answer. I see Interactivity as an attempt at a more personal engagement from the reader. By giving them some agency in a story’s progress, the reader develops investment, insight, and personal alignment with the proceedings. More intimate than even the best novel.

Maybe. The trick for the author is to nurture and develop that dynamic into an artistic statement. HOR (heh, loving the acronyms this year so far) takes several steps, deliberately or otherwise, to use interactivity to push the reader away. This feels misguided, if intentional. Really, I think it is the intersection of ambiguity and interactivity that misses the mark for me.

Let’s start with setup. This is kind of cleverly done by using mouseover to change dialogue options. We are presented with “coworkers” and “Boss” that become “Knights” and “Commanders” as our setting reveals itself to be an order of knighthood. That played pretty fun, though it did have one effect: it let we the players know that we are NOT aligned with the protagonist. Despite making conversation and thought(!) choices for the protagonist, we don’t really know their life. Now, this will always be true in IF - I have not lived my life as a hobbit or detective, I just haven’t. The trick is to maximize opportunities to align the reader and minimize overt disconnects. Unless tied to the theme of the work, choices that HIGHLIGHT that disconnect work against us.

A far more serious disconnect evolves through the creative choice to bounce the player back and forth between two sides of a conversation. The knight stuff is really just (interesting) background in a ‘you don’t appreciate me’ conversation between two… friends? Lovers? Something in between? Not knowing is another level of disconnect. We see and inform the STRENGTH of the protagonist’s angst, but develop no true feel for the SOURCE of it. Which is kind of important if we presume to carry half the conversation! Not understanding the source made the heat of it unsatisfying and ultimately baffling. Perhaps we are intended to supply it? That puts the cart before the horse a bit - asking us to watch an escalating emotional spiral, then retrofit motivations that make sense.

Further distancing player and protagonist, any attempts I made to defuse the angst (for example to focus on ‘are they maybe hurt?’ rather than ‘they hate me’) seemed to be basically ignored by the narrative. I was left with the strong perception that while I could try to shade things, I had no true ability to alter the conversation’s path. This is not automatically a problem if tied to the theme of the work (which it very much seems to be here), but it does have a distancing effect between player and protagonist. My input is roundly ignored, diluting my investment in the proceedings.

Worse, by occasionally being given the opportunity to drive the other half of the conversation, and by extension getting a glimpse of the partner’s inner life, we are underwhelmed. Nothing about the partner’s conversation choices suggest any level of worthiness, any level of justification for the protagonist’s angst. Rather, we are left in the position of confirming that yes, the partner is an obliviously smug and selfish person that the protagonist is well rid of. We saw their thoughts! We know this!

There is a read that maybe we are not seeing the partner’s thoughts at all, but the protagonist’s PRESUMPTION of their thoughts. Thing is, that may redeem the partner (though their objective actions are still an unanswered indictment), but it further exposes the protagonist as not ready for the relationship they want, and whose paranoid projections are decreasingly sympathetic.

All of which makes the bodice-rending, chest beating, wailing of the protagonist fall so, so flat. We don’t understand their investment, either internally or externally, and it comes off as needy drama they should just let go of. And it was interactivity that got us here!

All this plays into a theme (intended or not!) of alienation, of our interpersonal relationships being little more than projections we ourselves bring to the table. Both protagonist and player are caught in a spiral of having to assume thoughts, motivations and mindset of others instead of, y’know, having a real conversation about them. Yes, interactivity provides the tools to include the reader in this dynamic rather than simply presenting it. But to what end? The protagonist’s responses feel SO exaggerated they are off putting. Our need as player to fill in gaps feels less ‘universal truth’ than railroaded authorial hand. CAN this dynamic exist? Of course! MUST it exist? The work has not convinced me of that. The opposite, by using interactivity to alienate the player, the message feels unnaturally imposed. This is famously an ineffective way to work with people. Entire countries have been founded rejecting this!

Theme aside, how do I map this experience to my horror icons? Three games in, and I’m already adding one! So much for discipline. Please welcome Carrie to our pantheon, who will represent games focusing on emotional drama and melodrama. Yeah, its in all our interests that you be nice to her.

Horror Icon: Carrie
Vibe: Doomed Relationship
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : While I’d be tempted to charge after the low hanging fruit of technical issues, I’d be better served to reassess the interactivity of the piece, sharpen its use against my narrative goals. Right. The highest possible fruit on the tree.

[jjmcc]

Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917 by Autumn Chen
Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 1hr, lost to Bolsheviks

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of my literary heroes. I find his prose magnetic EVEN IN TRANSLATION. I can only imagine how glorious it must be in the original Russian. I am one of maybe 4 people in the US who started (in good faith) his Red Wheel novel cycle as it started to be translated into English. Red Wheel is a sprawling, epic, fictional account of the events dramatized by this game. Its four volumes start massive and grow to thousands of pages, increasing as the work drives on. Its translation is also incomplete, the initial English language work halted by the publisher after only two volumes were released. The third volume has subsequently been split into 4 hardbacks by a different publisher which I have not yet read, waiting for paperback releases. The fourth has still not even been translated, nearly 35 years on. Solzhenitsyn! What the hell world, what are we waiting for??? This is how capitalism fails us.

I offer this to establish I have a passing, though (vis a vis the game) debilitatingly incomplete knowledge of this setting. I also have a hunger to know more! When I first saw this game, it did not click for me exactly how it would resonate. Instead, my initial reaction was “OMG I loved the original, it is still in an open tab on my desktop! The original features NAZIS, how could this POSSIBLY measure up?” Only when I dove into the required preamble reading and party- and character-names started ringing for me did I grasp the full grip this author has on my psyche.

Don’t get me wrong. Like its predecessor, 1917 is a COMMITMENT. SO much detailed background, more than you can possibly internalize before playing. (And bear in mind, I have a head start here!) I spent a full quarter of my first playthrough reading background! How can you possibly justify that investment? Who on earth would possibly commit to this?

Besides me, I mean. Kinda like the Red Wheel itself.

This game builds on its predecessor in daunting ways. Where the previous was juggling multiple competing faction alliances, social unrest, government management, and population service with woefully inadequate resources, this game increases scope in nearly every dimension. It substitutes two new dimensions “Government” and “Economy” as indirect windows into the former games’s “Polls.” I didn’t do a full comparison, but each tab FEELS like it has more variables to watch.

It shares the card-driven paradigm of the first, with multiple decks based on what your party has secured control over. As before, you have a limited hand of options, a limited (though configurable) slate of ‘advisor’ cards to bust out for special powers, and must-face ‘event cards’ that demand responses every turn. The amount of variables in play is untenably large. You cannot possibly keep them all in your head, and while you have a vague idea how to influence many variables, there is no truly predictable cause and effect. “The peasants are hungry” “Let me spend resources to feed them!” “Well, the numbers barely move and it is unclear how well that worked.” As a card game trying to minmax to victory, this is frustrating beyond justification. As a simulation of governing, where you have clumsy, uncertain levers to influence complex problems it is PERFECT. Ditto the concurrent game of adjusting policy and actions to keep an effective coalition that doesn’t usurp your priorities for their own.

Like its precedecessor, while technically a work of interactive fiction, its gameplay is just outside what that label generally implies. Also like its predecessor, that caveat is immaterial.

I adore these games. I am overwhelmed by these games in the best possible way. I did detect some implementation and two gameplay issues. On the gameplay side, it seemed that there was a ‘point of no return’ where while I was trying to figure out what powers my advisors had to offer, if I dug too deep the ‘return to hand’ and ‘cancel action’ options actually expended my turn, while doing nothing. Losing actions, where the game is so stingy to start with, is punishingly cruel, and feels like a gameplay bug to me. I’m trying to engage you game, don’t punish me! (I don’t remember if this was a feature in the first game or not.)

The second gameplay bug is more an aesthetic suggestion. Of the decks at your disposal, you have “Party actions” “Soviet Actions” and perhaps “Provisional Gvt Actions” The first of those are appealingly rendered in propoganda/street poster graphics to clearly distinguish them from the others. The latter two show period photos, but do not seem to distinguish themselves from each other. It would be nice to include a graphical cue for all categories of cards-in-hand.

Two other artifacts:

1. some actions required resources, though it was not clear if they meant State or Party resources, and when selected did not seem to deduct resources from ANY bank! Were there other resources I couldn’t keep in my head?
2. The “Food Policy” card was both missing its photo AND delivered truncated text when the “cooperatives to accelerate” option was chosen.

These are obviously just minor quibbles at the fringes of my experience. At some point, I am going to cede some fraction of my RAM to Autumn. This is the second game that will just be permanently open on my desktop. I guess I kinda already have.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Big Box Boardgame
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : I recommended its predecessor be Kickstarted as a cardboard implementation. Even then, I underestimated the wooden-counter cost of reflecting its breadth of variables, nevermind the mechanical demands of keeping them updated with every action. 1917 has shown me how ill-advised that actually was. No, if it were mine, I would use the full weight of my subject matter authority and clout to see the final volume of Red Wheel translated and published. That kind of seems more in reach than the Kickstarter.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Awesome review! Man, I had no idea the situation on Red Wheel was so disappointing – my Solzhenitsyn nerdery caps out at finishing Gulag Archipelago (which is surprisingly readable and not depressing!) but I keep meaning to dig deeper into his fiction.

Anyway I very much agree re 1917 – I think it’s wider than the original Social Democracy, but also tighter since I think the number of turns is overall smaller, so replays feel a little more approachable. I was also confused about the different costs of actions, though I eventually realized that “resources” means costs to the party, while “budget” means costs to the state/provisional government – it’s a little confusing though not sure there would have been an easier way to convey the difference, and I think it’s consistent.

I did make it to elections without a Bolshevik coup a couple times, but they never unlocked for me as a playable faction – not sure whether that’s something to come in a later update, or I just wasn’t sufficiently successful in the elections for it to count as a “win.”

I feel like playing these games always makes me appreciate stuff I knew about on an intellectual level much more viscerally, and this time my main takeaway is how much politicians – even quite left-wing politicians! – loved fighting World War I. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy enough to say “my guys, this is trashing your economy and killing hundreds of thousands of your people, and driving the large number of soldiers doing the dying into the arms of the one party saying they’ll stop it,” but good lord they’re pretty much all like “well, but what if we just fought it slightly differently? Wouldn’t that work instead?” I know, I know, there’s national prestige and the perceived need to shore up foreign aid, and from a gameplay perspective things would probably be too easy if you could just have the Mensheviks sign a separate peace on day one, but it definitely felt similar to the German SPD’s resolute resistance to just doing Keynes.

[jjmcc]

Retool Looter by Charm Cochran
Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 3hr, finished

It seems every comp/thing/thon I wade into, there is a game or two that bears two distinct hallmarks: 1) Its conceits, prose, wit and composition seem engineered to trigger every pleasure center in my brain; but 2) for reasons I have yet to convincingly diagnose, familiar gameplay somehow suddenly baffles me. I have in the past inaugurated review sub-series to club works with common elements together. This particular combo has never merited one, as they are pretty rare within the confines of a single comp. Across multiple comps though, I could indeed create a meta-sub-series, probably titled “It’s not you, it’s me.”

RL is chockablock with hallmark number one. The central conceit (spycraft via a gun that transmogrifies things into their english-word reverse-order counterpart) plays into a rich IF wordplay subculture. We might call it a Schultzian-inspired game, though the conceit certainly predates our modern master. The writing here is strong in some areas. It has fun banter between the protagonist and principle NPC. The whole thing is oozing with wit, setting just the right tone to embrace its ridiculous premise and go along for the ride. There is a great detail where the companion NPC just reverses words when they talk for silly reasons. As an ongoing bit it is just fun.

It is further a competent parser implementation - spare enough in description to keep the weeds low, but with gratifyingly deep pockets of implementation. For example, despite only spare descriptions of beds that never mention subcomponents, you can nevertheless try to fiddle with pillows, mattresses and sheets. Another example: smells are frequently alluded to and never omitted if you subsequently interrogate them. Most importantly, scenery objects you might expect the magic reverser to work on almost always have wry comments on why that’s not a great idea. It’s attention to gameplay detail that both reassures the player they are in strong hands, and rewards player commitment. To a point.

Based on my intro, you know where this is going. To my ongoing shame, and in spite of its great achievements in hallmark #1, RL fell squarely into hallmark #2 during gameplay for me. It is inarguably my fault. I spent an hour spinning in the very first room because I interpreted a direction notation in a room description as color, not travel option. Later, I spun unnecessarily, convincing myself I had entered a silent no-win scenario because I simply neglected to examine an object before trying to use it. These are parser basics, something the author has every right to expect a player to be fully competent in, yet there I was, handful of thumbs, head bashing on screen. This dynamic repeated so often, it is my overriding memory of the game.

It didn’t help that the in-game hint system (conferring with your NPC-behind-the-screen) was only intermittently helpful. Like the author, that NPC likely assumed a base level of competence that I failed to supply, and so the hints and help were as often confirming directions I had already achieved as alluding to next steps without sufficient detail.

When I try to diagnose WHY some games reduce my normally suave, Bond-like mastery of my environment to Jerry Lewis level incompetence and fumbling, I generally focus on the combination of language and implementation. Spare descriptions tend to train the player that close examination is unnecessary. Clumsy disambiguation (at one point asking me “which spare part, the spare part or the spare part from freezer?” a phrase that can never resolve to the former) cast doubt on one’s ability to effectively interact with the world. Inability to consistently access information (for example, unable to >X OFFICE through an office window) implies that information is unnecessary when it very much is not. All of those phenomenon were in evidence here, but I think the central construction also impacted me. Ignoring some subtle parser conventions, like either lumping navigation directions together in text at top or bottom, having them explicitly listed in title bar or via >EXITS command, invites parser-savvy folks to miss things. The cumulative weight of these things represented a barrier between me and game.

“But reviewer, you finished the game - why are you bellyaching?” There was an additional peril in the exciting conceit of the game, perhaps more impactful than anything above. Wordplay games live and die by their cleverness and variation within their own arcane logic. The best such games provide a steady stream of laughing recognition of THIS wordplay solution. While there are some pretty great ones here (drawer especially elicited a grin of delight, and the final puzzle was truly wonderful), there are many more that rely on words WAAY out of common use to the point of eliciting, “uh, ok” where the glee should have been. The work seems to acknowledge this, having our NPC guide us past those, but it has the effect of undermining the promise inherent in the conceit. Reversing words to create new objects is really only satisfying if WE ARE THE ONE DOING IT. This disconnect is further compounded by inobvious ways to USE reversed words, making deducing them that much harder. If a tip is going to help me solve a puzzle, it should be obvious WHY that will help. Having to be walked through it by an NPC is not itself satisfying. I need more than hand-wavy explanations why core rules of the wordplay sometimes do and sometimes don’t apply. If not, I’m just reversing everything, hoping for a next step to materialize.

The unfortunate nature of the “It’s not You, It’s Me” hallmarks is that however accomplished and winning #1 is, #2 will nearly always trump it. It’s math. If the spinning drags a 45m game to three hours, it’s because over two hours of it is ineffectual self-recrimination. Why do I want that in IF, that is my all-day standard mode! (I should note, in fairness, that the final puzzle ALMOST rescued the whole thing for me, as a multistep variation that used normal words and was quite satisfying for it.)

Anyway game, I appreciate all the things you did right, I really do. I hope we can still be friends.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Cheeky
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d buff the HINT system for morons like me. I would be reluctant to damage the in-world hint conceit that makes such hinting next level enjoyable, so once I got to the limits of that, I think I would produce a walkthrough. Just in case.

Note: transcript ends about 5 min before solving, as my cumulative frustration was pushing me to quit prematurely.
looter_jjmcc.txt (235.6 KB)

[jjmcc]

@DeusIrae

I feel like playing these games always makes me appreciate stuff I knew about on an intellectual level much more viscerally,

Right? I find the difference between boardgames and computer games interesting in this context. In board games, there is no algorithmic machine hiding the mechanics from the player. This makes the experience of the computer game much more focused on the Human Experience of history, where the mechanisms are shaded and unknown, whereas manipulating the markers and counters in board games provides a tactile feel for the mechanisms at play (or more accurately, the MODEL of the mechanisms). In some ways, this makes Autumn’s computer work MORE emotionally impactful than the cerebral focus of cardboard.

The fact that we have access to both of those just makes my heart happy.

Also, apropo of Solzhenitsyn, I find it fascinating that I periodically encounter folks online (intellectual titans of epic charisma!) that have read him. I have never once met a live person who has. (At least to my knowledge. I don’t bring it up with EVERYONE.)

[OverThinking (Charm Cochran)]

Thank you for this thoughtful review! I’m adding your recommendations to my list of things for the next update!

[jjmcc]

Starfish & Crystallisation by Colin Justin Wan
Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 30m, two playthroughs

This is a melancholy tale of a (queer? maybe? not explicit but possibly implicit?) person hearing a familiar name linked to an air disaster, then having dreamlike memories of their time with them. Its vocabulary and design are quite wide of my sweet spot, venturing in both form and text into poetic verse. This is a style choice that often leaves me cold. To the work’s credit, its graphical and sound design were very evocative and convinced me to at least try to shed my baggage. It really raised the level of difficulty for me in a few ways though, seeming to actively pit its interface against any attempt to meet it on its own terms.

For one, when its really beautiful dreamstate backgrounds kick in, the text nearly vanishes due to unfortunate font color choice. For many screens, I had to highlight nearly the whole thing just to read it. It also uses a pane paradigm, where the presentation is a small pane, mid window (depending on how big your window is). The pane is not always visible, sometimes it is the same color as the rest of the window. Meaning text that needs scrolling to read gives no indication that scrolling is even possible! Early on, I nearly quit thinking there was a bug that masked a missing progress link, only to finally realize I needed to scroll an invisible pane to find it.

This was exacerbated by ANOTHER choice on some screens to only provide exit links after some “dramatic” delay, again leading me to believe I had stumbled into a bug when instead the game was toying with me, watching me jitterbug the pane until it deigned to allow me to move on. These technical issues were so consistently present, so consistently interrupting my experience, that I never really developed opportunity to accommodate to the poetic style of the prose. Again, I grant you that I probably need more centering than most to get into the flow of this kind of thing, so for me it was particularly defeating.

Here is the metaphor that came to me: I’m some, I dunno, post-war steel worker ok? I come home from a long day… steeling… and my young wife has decided we should get into yoga! Now, I can think of nothing I want less than to NOT get a beer and a shower, but since I love my wife, I gamely put down my lunch pail, take off my hardhat and kneel on the mat she lovingly laid out for me. Yeah, it was tough day riveting or whatever, but I force myself to try relaxing. I’m breathing and ohm’ing.. its a whole thing but by cracky I’m really trying. Then before I even get a fighting chance, the damn dog starts barking and barking and barking and won’t stop. As much as I love my wife, at some point, can’t we agree the dog is telling us to try again later and I just get the beer?

What, doesn’t everyone jump to full-narrative metaphor?

The game’s narrative took a curious turn at one point. For most of its buildup, it seemed to leave its present-grounding behind and vacillate between ‘real’ and dream memories. It had a solid enough throughline until… maybe 3/4s in it took a turn in specificity that both rejected the inputs it let me make prior, and introduced specificity that was jarringly.. not unrelated, but read like a second anecdote that shared resonances with the first. Like two friends telling different stories that had enough similarities that made them worth sharing. This effect was cemented by a closing screen that seemed to reference an entirely DIFFERENT work called Echoes and Traces Like I had started one work and at some point it slowly and subtly transitioned to a resonant but entirely different work.

Like my steelworker finally got the dog to shut up, closed his eyes, and when he opened them, his wife had gently seated a dozen acupuncture needles in him. C’mon doll, am I ever getting that beer?

That was actually kind of a cool effect, honestly. I just wish the work hadn’t been fighting me the whole time and I could have appreciated the ride and sly closing subversion more.

Horror Icon: Babadook
Vibe: Meditation interrupted
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would toss a coin. Heads, I would rework the view pane paradigm: give clear indications when scrolling was needed and eliminate the timed text additions of links. Tails, I would think about fixing the font color to better contrast against the background, but then probably flip the coin again.

[jjmcc]

Hauntless by Abby Blenk
Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hr, died in disgrace

Among the most uncommon experiences I have, here in my modern engagement with IF, is the tremendously enjoyable failure. I don’t mean failure of the game, I mean failure of me, the player. Games I beef so hard they leave welts, yet still look back on fondly. There are two flavors of those, both utterly remarkable for their accomplishments. The first, arguably more subtle, are a cold dose of water, exposing the REASONS for my failure as of a piece with the work’s themes. These games finesse my failure into the artwork itself. The more brute force way is “simply” to present such overwhelmingly enjoyable gameplay, such delightful prose and plotting that even the stink of failure doesn’t diminish my esteem for it. In some ways these are the spiritual Yin to the “It’s Not You, It’s Me” Yang.

I kind of showed you my cards with that intro didn’t I? The game presents a supernatural investigation into a mass killing scenario nearly a hundred years old, to free a ghost from purgatory. Why not? You then spend the game exploring beautifully described and illustrated carnival remnants looking for clues to solve things. Why didn’t police find these clues back then? Eh, who cares? You proceed to wade through old artifacts, notes and journals piecing together the events and characters from that fateful day. It is all so vividly rendered, which is a tribute to the prose. Both the decay around you, and the inner lives of long dead characters are painted so clearly that despite a reasonably large cast all of them feel alive and unique. Honestly, as a novel I would eat it with a spoon.

As a game, the link-select gameplay lets you navigate around the tattered tents, kicking up new clues with each revisit (to a point), all to the purpose of using a Clue-like scorecard to eliminate suspects, weapons and locations to solve a specific murder. Clue seems to have fallen out of favor as a deduction game this century, with so many stronger modern innovations stepping up, but its process-of-elimination bones are solid, especially when grafted to a well written series of vignettes that require player intuition to translate into “elim this one.” Other gameplay nods include tracking your return visits (as a soft pointer to potentially more information), reviewable lists, testimony and artifacts all supporting your ‘can I eliminate anyone/anything/anywhere?’ gameplay. As is my nature I tried to EXHAUST the information available before cycling to endgame. I took copious notes, even creating a spreadsheet to track character interrelations. I was one roll of yarn away from a full on Mind Map.

Along my investigation, there were more technical glitches than could be overlooked. The wonderful illustrations only actually loaded about half the time. More seriously, periodically I would get red bars of doom saying things like: “(mock-visits:) cannot be used outside of debug mode.”,
“A custom macro (with no params) didn’t output any data or hooks using (output:) or (output-data:).” Or other such. I don’t THINK they affected my ability to gather clues, though one appeared when I tried to retrieve a needed key that might have locked me out of something. There was still enough meat to power past those until I exhausted the environs and it was time to put up or shut up.

I did, like a good pro-player, save at this point. Foreshadow.

Here is where I must now discuss and dissect my epic fail. While technically not spoilers as, again, FAILURE, know what you are in for if you continue to read these, let’s call them ANTI-SPOILERS. Here’s the thing. This was a mass murder event, right? Despite what I am going to call too-soft steering that the goal was to solve ONE murder, I assumed, and played as if, solving them all would solve the one. Through that lens, there is no better alibi than ALSO BEING MURDERED. The game made this fun by sometimes identifying bodies, but sometimes requiring you deduce bodies’ identities to eliminate them. At the end I was able to narrow to two potential survivors/suspects. Only one of them had a plausible motive for mass murder (though that was admittedly a HUGE logical jump), so, boom! Suspect identified. Similar logic was applied to weapon: if I found it, it couldn’t be the weapon because the murderer clearly must have run off with it. Shut up, my logic is unassailable!

Yeah, the game didn’t think so either. Two strikes right off the bat with my two possibilities. Dafug? Ok, maybe the mass murder theory was blindering me - who remaining had reason to kill the victim even if they were somehow later murdered, unrelated? Strike three. Y’know how in baseball, after strike three you are out? In Hauntless, after strike three you are DEAD.

Wow mystery, you have my attention, let me just restore that savegame I foreshadowed earlier and…
“The (dropdown:) macro was given a bind to $saveLoader and the string “guess 1”, but needs 1 more value.”

No restore possible. Well, crap. This left me at a crossroads. Do I really comb through ANOTHER at least hour and a half, retracing every one of my steps to revisit this scenario absent my initial assumptions?

I think I do, but maybe like in a few months when the technical problems have been fixed. I really was engaged deeply in this thing, loving the environment, gameplay and prose. The fact that I got it SO wrong hurt a bit, but hey, I’m resilient. I just don’t think I can give it that much time NOW, and not in its current state. ESPECIALLY without a functioning save-restore.

Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Supernatural Cluedo
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : I mean, if it were my project, fix all those bugs, natch. Starting with that patently cruel RESTORE one.