For what it’s worth, restoring the game works on the title screen. The ending screen didn’t let me restart the game after failing to restore, but I was able to return to the title screen by closing and reopening the tab.
5 Likes
I had much the same experience haha, my thought process was also that there’s one inciting incident that ended with everyone dead, so if someone has been murdered themselves they couldn’t be the culprit, right? Less sure of that now though. Then I died, but unluckily I hadn’t saved in a while.
2 Likes
Interview Interview by Ronynn
Played: 4/4/25
Playtime: 30m, 3 playthroughs
Welcome game! So glad you could make it today, the panel and I liked what we saw in the CV. If you don’t have any questions for us, shall we get started? Wonderful! It says here you name is.. oh, that.. oh. That’s unfortunate. I see here we are conducting an Interview Interview Interview. Hrm. Well nothing for it but to power on, yes?
Let’s establish the basics. You are a Twine-based Dialogue tree game, yes? Oh no, it’s fine. The recent regime has insisted we ARE allowed to ask these kinds of questions. It may be mandatory. So, Dialogue Tree? Yes, good.
And playable in 30 minutes or less? No, we don’t have a specific requirement, just like to know where we stand. 30 minutes, then, good.
I see here you feature statistics and achievements, yes? Presumably to encourage replay? Don’t be embarrassed, no one is judging you. On THAT I mean.
Excellent, you’re doing great, now let’s get a bit deeper. Are you satisfied that you achieved your mission statemement of *checks notes* I’m going to paraphrase, ‘exploring the artificial characters we create of ourselves in interviews?’ Well yes, it is an open ended question, that’s kind of how these things go. Ok, I’ll focus the question for you a bit. You present a few different scenarios: a fawning, celebrity interview, a traditional job interview, an interpersonal service interview, and a romantic ‘interview.’ For most of those, you present four, and only four lanes of response each with its own layer of artificiality. What’s that? Oh no, you definitely CAST one as ‘truth’ but that’s not really accurate, is it? I mean, unless the player happens to share EXACTLY the same neuroses as the protagonist, it’s just another role being played, this one to perhaps satisfy the game rather than the interviewer. You don’t see it? Hm, let’s drill into the personal trainer then.
The trainer scenario distinguishes itself as breaking the mold of the others by presenting binary yes/no questions rather than a range. Should the player not meet the trainer’s expectations, they are rejected. The binary questions are cast as even more tightly exploring the ‘truth/not truth’ boundary. Except, sometimes a PLAYER’S actual ‘truth’ response is interpreted as falsehood, and the way to progress (or at least lock in a game-motivating achievement) is to falsely align to the interviewer’s perception of truth… why are you smiling? Oh I see. You are exposing how goal motivation can pervert even a nominally ‘true to yourself’ path into another flavor of ‘navigating what the interviewer wants to hear.’
*laughs* Well, that makes this whole interview a bit awkward, doesn’t it? Heh, let’s power on anyway. I’m going to show you two pictures, of actual playthroughs. Give me your reactions.
I mean, yes, steering into a specific stripe of artificiality grants you achievements confirming your actions. The unpublished third run confirmed this as well. Could you expand on the function of those achievements, confirming what the player probably was well aware of during their playthrough? In particular I am interested in where the game recognizes NO achievements. No, obviously the Cringe option was a sly joke path, I’m not questioning its absence, rather I am plumbing the difference between the Truther and No Man achievements. One of degrees, I suppose? Why differentiate those? In particular, I am fascinated by the high scores in ‘Honesty’ and ‘Professionalism’ not actually conferring a commensurate achievement. Is this a tacit acknowledgement of the paradoxical falsity of these paths, most especially the Truther one?
Oh, ‘just not high enough.’ No that’s fine, you are entitled to your own design, the other just seems more… nevermind. I better digest that a bit. Two final questions. Are you aware of the dissonance in the romantic interview? By casting it as fully artificial as the other scenarios, the work rejects the intrinsic value of true romantic partnership, making the ‘prize’ less desirable but nevertheless casting the player as seeking it anyway. (For a bit at least) Yes, certainly I see the resonances it is trying to strike for a protagonist struggling with insecurity. By ignoring other, more obvious motivations in that encounter though, the very scenario impeaches itself as perhaps not as universal or resonant as portrayed. What is my question? Hm, right, I don’t seem to have one there after all.
The final question is spoilery, so members of the panel that have not finished the game should recuse themselves now. Given the final denouement, which draws a pretty clear line between ‘satisfying interview goals’ and ‘mechanical responses of a lizard brain,’ not to mention the cheeky author-insert who refuses to clarify things, how do we come away with a higher understanding of goal-seeking artificiality, other than just recognizing ‘yup, that’s a dynamic?’ What I mean is, both in text and meta, the message is ‘when presented with artificial choices, we respond artificially.’ Sure. Agreed. What is the game telling us about that, other than the dynamic’s existence, and perhaps its inherent ludicrousness? The stated goals of the work were about ‘deforming reality by responding to artificiality’ but we didn’t see that. We saw responses in kind, insulated from reality but too obviously transactional to actually impact that reality. Was there something we missed?
Hmmm. Yes, ok, thank you, we’ll make a note of that. And thank you for coming by today, we appreciate your interest. What? Oh, we’ll take a few days, discuss your case and let you know. Yes, we’ll call… what’s that? You have some questions for me? Wait, are you really attempting to conduct an…
Interview Interview Interview INTERVIEW???
Bold move, Cotton.
Horror Icon: Freddie, though a case for Carrie
Vibe: Absurdist
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : No, we haven’t made a decision yet, but the panel would like to provide some constructive feedback. We think perhaps stating the goals of the work so baldly, and in such elevated terms, in the “About” section actually undermine the impact of the work. It sets a very high bar the work cannot quite clear. The work still has clever things to say, and true panache in its construction, there is no need to set lofty expectations that unfairly burden it. We would recommend trimming it to just the first three paragraphs.
9 Likes
Thanks for playing the game. And yes your observations on gym trainer is correct, on one hand he insists you to be real more than anything else, yet he wont accept you to the gym unless you give exact answers he wants, and to do that most of your answers have to be no (hence the No man Achievement, perhaps my nod to the Yes Man term).
The player’s character then tells their dad that the trainer’s expected answers felt weird to them, who then guides them that people are going to say all kinds of things but you accept what seems best to you, only to then suggest the player character to become a security guard when they are clearly working hard for some other kind of job. This I believe shows a honesty perspective on the dad’s part, not saying what the mc might like but what is on their mind, much like how the game expects one set of answers to be more honest or more professional. You calculate your answers only when you need the person in front to like or accept you, but the dad or the game itself doesn’t hence they present their cards as they are.
As for the prize seeming less desirable, the social norm of relationships as prizes is something the game questions itself, if the player was trying to get to know her and spend quality time instead of living in their own dream realm, waiting for some bright future someday, they would have figured the artificialness of this particular situation, and the fact that there was no real romantic partnership here at all.
That is atleast the way I was designing it in my head, thanks for playing and the review once again.
3 Likes
blackberry bloodbath by Melany Socorro
Played: 4/4/25
Playtime: 30m two playthroughs
One point must be made clear from the very start. I am not now, nor ever have been, an adolescent girl. I raised one. I married one (well obviously not AS an adolescent, Jeebus). That feels a little like I’m saying “I watched Roots so I am an expert on racial issues,” which, be assured I very much am NOT saying. I am highlighting that I approach this work from a place of empathy, not sympathy.
With that framework established, know I immediately liked this work. The graphical design was very compelling and attractive: a low-resolution representation of early 90’s styling cuing both its recent-past setting and the concerns of the protagonist. Gameplay is basically navigating the protagonist’s online journal and IMs as she ages from 13 to 21. Almost always driven by her adolescent/young adult poetry.
“But reviewer, you famously despise poetry!” I hear you say, intimately familiar as you are with my inescapable cultural impact. Ok, ‘despise’ is strong, but yes, poetry’s appeal is more often lost on me than not. Here it serves a few purposes beyond its intrinsic wordplay, and does so magnificently. Firstly, it is used as shorthand for ‘adolescent yearning’ which strikes me as perfect. A hallmark of adolescence is struggling for relevance and truth while mimicking tools used to explore those goals absent mature understanding of them. Poetry is a pitch perfect and smashingly economical shorthand for that. Second, the rendition of that poetry is (almost) as revelatory as its presence. Now, these things are inevitably informed by personal biases, and as established boy do I have those. To me, as the protagonist’s journey progressed, I found the poetry progressively more effective, and less.. reach-escaping-grasp-y. I could feel the protagonist maturing, as reflected in maturing and more impactful poetry. Up until the final entry, which… I’ll get to in a few.
Established that I found the presentation and poetry conceits compelling and successful, lets talk plot a bit. This poor girl. Presented as a series of annual impactful collisions between newly-found puberty-spurred yearnings (often but not exclusively romantic) and real world complications, our protagonist struggles to reconcile the two. Yeah, that is a bland wash over what actually happens. With few (though critical) exceptions, her hopes and desires are pretty uniformly crushed in the most dispiriting ways possible. We watch a ball of hope and expectation gradually and dramatically reduced to a self-destructive shell of unfulfilled and presumably now unfulfillable aspirations. My first playthrough, I found this heart-rendingly successful as a tragedy, and a deeply sad indictment of the pressures on girlhood. The only off note of that first playthrough was that I felt the final, most mature round of poetry was not up to the standards of its evolving predecessors. I think it would have been a more impactful resonance if these final poems were the most accomplished, underlining the tragedy in the full bloom of maturity as a final repudiation of adolescent dreams. (And with something as difficult and personal as poetry, I totally get an author-note to ‘write better poetry’ is essentially useless.) But I think there is a generous read that allows for this as well: her journey has undermined even her most private aspirations to the point she just phones that in too.
In any case, warm in the glow of a dynamite, deeply affecting story I did something I NEVER SHOULD HAVE DONE. I played it again. DO NOT DO THIS, DEAR READER, WHATEVER YOU DO. I AM DEAD SERIOUS, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU LOVED IT DO NOT REVISIT IT. Spoilers follow.
Here’s the thing. At several points you are given plot-redirecting choices. Entire swaths of narrative are bypassed and entirely new ones available to you. I mean, this is IF, that’s not really a surprising phenomenon. It is in fact an ENTICEMENT to replay. (RESIST!!!) Thing is, the first time you played through, events sometimes blossom into horrific violence, emotional trauma and just plain misery. This leads inevitably and tragically to the very affecting endgame. This is clearly the dramatic aim of the piece, so the trick the author has to play is, without guiding the player’s direction, how do they ensure that arc lands via every branching path? The answer is they ensure EVERY choice has unique but equally (negatively) impactful consequences, all reconverging to the same absolutely justified ending. Here’s the thing. What played in the first run as an extreme but not IMplausible scenario, on repetition becomes decreasingly effective. EVERY choice and aspiration explodes into the MOST extreme, dire outcome. It starts to take on the tenor of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the increasingly implausible outcomes become almost comedic in their unremitting extremity. This is clearly not the aim of the piece, and the effect damages the first playthrough in retrospect. By enabling exploration of ‘alternate-universe’ sequences, and resulting in the same over-the-top outcomes, the meta-message is “this is girlhood. It will always break you.” It changes from a singularly tragic character study to (intended or not) a comment on ALL girlhood. No, no, no! I don’t want that for my wife and daughter! I have reason to believe that was not their sum experience. It would break my heart if they were hiding this from me!
Without benenfit of sympathy, it is an unconvincing, dark and repellant thesis. Again, I do not presume to take on the ‘truth’ of this artistic statement, that is not mine to weigh in on. I am relating the impact on my empathic engagement, and how it corroded on replay. My very specific, very adjacent perspective is this: do yourself a favor. Savor a compelling narrative, expertly rendered and written. Savor it once and move on.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MOVE ON.
Horror Icon: Carrie
Vibe: Dark Coming of Age
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would be rightly excoriated for presuming to tell a story I am horrifically unqualified to tell. And undoubtedly would handle it really badly.
6 Likes
Thank you so much for the feedback! I really appreciate the mind map degree of investment 
Sorry about the bugs! As far as I can determine, I’ve fixed all of the ones you mentioned— including the save data bug (which should be compatible with previous saves).
Also, regarding the illustrations: I did only do location illustrations for the “suspect” locations. Do you mind me asking, did you have issues with those loading, or was it the absence of them in the other locations that was an issue?
2 Likes
Hm. I’m not sure? I did not tumble that that was the methodology, so I only really noticed absences, but did not detect method behind them. Also, I found it a little weird that I only saw the character portraits at the very end, when I was making accusations? They had not appeared prior (which, ok, I had no way to know what they looked like, but why now then?)
Will try again after the Thing!
The Sandman by Bellamy Briks
Played: 4/6/25
Playtime: 30m, 4 playthroughs
The Sandman is a horror-tragedy of helplessness. The setup is a small group of people, huddling in isolation, trying to escape a devastating plague that infects when you sleep. (“1,2, Freddie’s Comin’ for you…”) A desperate family finds a purported shelter with only a single remaining occupant, and they weather the days together waiting for rescue that never comes.
It is structured as a series of days, during which you get 3 actions, and goads you into engaging conversations that provide opportunity to frame the protagonist (and player’s) thoughts on life, afterlife, truth; y’know the kind of things our human brains fascinate with when not overwhelmed by daily routine. The plague is kind of a lens bringing these philosophical problems into focus, and foregrounding our human desire to grapple with them. It is a legitimately interesting setup, reinforced quite capably by both the graphical presentation and its sound design. Collectively it really creates a dire, compelling mood.
I wish the gameplay, and even the conversations it sparked, rose to the same level. Here’s the thing. As a player, you inhabit the mother-of-two protagonist. You are told that falling asleep will kill you. Of the three actions allowed you must choose between: 1) keep yourself awake; 2) keep child #1 awake; 3) keep child #2 awake; 4) have deep convo. You see the problem? How on earth does #4 EVER rise to the top of the priority list??? What does it say about you and the protagonist if it does??? The game CLEARLY incentivizes you via end score and achievements to embrace those conversations, but remains quite mum on the implicit costs.
An initial playthrough reveals how futile trying to save your family is. Ok, maybe this is the game’s way of saying “Might as well prioritize inner life, its the only agency you will have.” Sure, so… then what? Then of the available choice selections, WHICH option do I forsake to choose option #4? It is not a passive acceptance, it is an ACTIVE CHOICE to sacrifice loved ones to… have a midnight dorm-room conversation?
Assuming you can get on board at all (which, yikes), that puts a LOT of weight on those conversations, and for me, they were not up to the task. The back and forth seemed pretty shallow, usually culminating in “enter your thoughts into text box.” The driving force of the game is not bad, providing opportunity for player to reflect on deeper thoughts. We could probably all use more of that. But the scenario provided is really a challenge as a launch pad. It doesn’t help that game world developments continually remind us that maybe chatting is not our best pursuit at the moment. Specifically, as loved ones start passing not only is this glossed over, it is not even prioritized as a conversation worth having! Meaning a community is choosing to philosophize on everything BUT grief and interpersonal loss, while nominally suffering that in spades. I mean, in what world?
So yeah, I appreciated the impulse of the game’s aims, but could not embrace its setup even a little bit. It doesn’t help that the prose was to the ‘trying too hard’ side of my sweet spot. I think an editing pass would sharpen that up dramatically. Here are a few samples of prose that feel overdone, but could be sharpened into something better:
“she moves to the beat of forgotten water dripping from a loose pipe”
“scraping stridently across the cement floor”
“her exhausted body sits up with fervor”
There are examples of prose that did land for me, so it does feel in reach:
“light returns to them [eyes] like an old, abandoned, phone powering on”
While the overall presentation was very well done, there were some game artifacts too. Conversations didn’t seem to track game state, so if I delayed talking until day 6, dialogue informed me I “got here yesterday.” A major character disappears at some point, a disappearance unremarked upon by narrative or characters. Daily task selections were sometimes repeated in the menu to no obvious purpose.
There is a nice bit where seemingly obsolete options are revealed as very much in story, but their presence only undermines the artificiality of the philosophy discussions MORE. After four playthroughs, I was left with admiration for the presentation and impulse of the game, but a rejection of its dramatic construction. It was time to sleep.
Horror Icon: Leatherface
Vibe: Resignation
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, wow, what do I do? I guess maybe I would try to foreground the deep conversations in a way that DIDN’T require actively horrible player choices. And I think we would be well served to engage the scenario directly, steer the deeper conversations to the very vital events surrounding us, at least initially, and build to the less tethered concerns.
6 Likes
Echoes (an anthology) by Ben Jackson
Played: 4/6/25
Playtime: 3h (2 endings)
Echoes was a seminal composition in the discography of the band Pink Floyd. From their album Meddle, it was a watershed, melding their established trippy and entrancing musical compositions with a dramatic leap forward in lyrics and artistic preoccupation. Taking half the album, the work was notice that, as popular as they were, they were on the precipice of a quantum leap forward. A leap that would deliver seminal works: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals (fight me, it belongs in this list!), and The Wall.
Is this to be the legacy of Ben’s Echoes as well? Well first off reviewer, that is a DEEPLY unfair comparison to even posit. Though there are, as any time a full-of-their-conceit reviewer turns their mind to something, ways to wring out some parallels. Maybe I can buy some good will by revealing that Pink Floyd was the first band I resonated with in a non-superficial way, and consumed large chunks of my personality through high school. Meaning for me, even drawing the comparison displays the esteem I have for this author’s works. An ECHO of it, if you will. Uh, you won’t? Oh reader, I have bad news about the conceit of this review…
This author leapt onto my radar with their overwhelming graphical prowess, their composition skills if you will. Professional, evocative, superbly integrated with gameplay and narrative, I can’t think of anyone doing it better currently. On top of that, Ben is creatively voracious. Different platforms, UI experimentation, Google Forms fer crissake. Deeply creative and engaging premises, across multiple genres, crafting finely tuned, friction-free gameplay experiences that are so unfair to the rest of us that maybe he DESERVES to be compared to a towering super group just to take him down a peg.
This work feels like a fractal view of the entire ludography - an anthology of different playstyles, different genres, different narrative aims all bouncing off and resonating with each other in a uniting narrative. Multiple movements all building to a unified whole, as the movements of Pink Floyd’s Echoes does. A quick survey:
Sticks and Stones: the longest play of the three, itself a fractal composition of three movements. A fantasy dungeon crawl leveraging parser tradition, but with a streamlined and zippy arrow-button interface. It is peppered with wit and leverages familiar tropes both as shorthand player guidance and to twist them to humourous or gameplay effect. It is so effective and confident it looks much easier than it is.
Treasure of the Deep: a short, linear horror narrative, employing language not exactly in a pastiche of HP Lovecraft, but HP adjacent, evoking the feel of it without slavishly recreating it. Like the gameplay above, the pitfalls here are numerous and deep, but so deftly avoided it seems deceptively simple. If only there was a word for something that rang and reminded of an original…
Labyrinth: a quasi-ancient-Greek multiplayer escape room, leveraging mythology for soft guidance and mood, but leaning hard into escape room style puzzle play. The puzzles were clever, and put a premium on multiplayer communication (even if schizophrenically driven by a single player).
All three established gameplay conventions, thematic preoccupations and lore unique to their episode but reinforcing and resonating with each other. It would already be an impressive submission if left there. But no! The Master Conductor then unites all three, interweaving those disparate gameplay, themes and lores into a cohesive, finely tuned whole! A series of puzzles follow that stitch them all together in a wonderfully satisfying clockwork that once again appears natural and inevitable when in fact is out of reach to all but the most accomplished watch makers. Kind of like the recurring single note in (musical) Echoes that launches multiple musical divergences, only to reassert at the end.
Y’know what I haven’t remarked on? The graphics. They are, as usual, uniformly wonderful when employed, but just not the focus of the work here. They precisely fit the concerns of the work, enhancing both gameplay and dramatic beats, but still subordinate to the experience. In some ways they are the Careful With That Axe, Eugene of the work, their accomplished quality setting prior expectations, and informing but ultimately only one facet of a larger whole.
So, is this the notice of Ben’s coming quantum leap into superstardom? Is his Dark Side right around the corner? I dunno man, I can’t see the future. Even if not, even if I posit a timeline where Meddle was the last Pink Floyd album of consequence, that album itself was an accomplishment few bands achieve. I still listen to it ALL THE TIME. This feels like the creative space this Echoes occupies.
And here is where the Floyd parallels end. I do not recommend gummies with THIS Echoes.
Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Kaleidescope
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work I would be so astonished that I could produce something this well honed that I would fall into a creative paralysis over the prospects of further work. I am confident, like Floyd, the actual author will not be so stricken.
6 Likes
Re blackberry bloodbath
Summary
I agree that I would have liked some variance in ending based on choices. That being said, the inevitably of being broken by life - and, in particular, sexuality - does seem to be a common thread to the narrative of what it means to be a teenage girl. To me, as a woman, I actually found strength in that universal ending because it reminded me that no matter how I got there, the result really is something we all share - I felt thematic and personal echoes of the ritualistic fire in the ending. We aren’t alone in what we’ve gone through: even if the story is wildly different, the beats are the same and maybe that’s womanhood.
I actually found your statement
to be a bit offensive. This to me was an incredibly beautiful piece about the small traumas which make us women and there’s something incredibly ironic about a man missing the point and commenting saying to “just move on.” I’m not trying to start a fight, but I think there are places it’s worthwhile toning down the brash snark in commenting, and pieces about sexual assault might be that place.
2 Likes
Wow, thanks so much for your review! I had not intentionally referenced Floyd (although there are intentional references to lots of other things!) – but oh boy, to imply my next one has to be up there with Dark Side of the Moon… No pressure then? 
4 Likes
I’m sure it won’t surprise you, but this is not the first time I have waded into unfamiliar waters and it ended in self-inflicted disaster. The LAST thing I want to do is sour this event celebrating IF and IF artists with my tone deafness.
I am deeply ashamed of those words, and their callous, monstrous implications. I am further shamed that, despite rereading it many times before publication, I failed to intuit its grotesque tonal dismissiveness.
Please accept my abject apology for.. well for my all-too-obvious empathic shortcomings. I hope, if we pretend my mental trolley went down a less offensive track, the rest of my words conveyed the esteem I had for your the work in SPITE of my shortcomings.
Please wash me from your brain and enjoy this event as if I were not here, if that is possible. I will try to do better, forward.
4 Likes
Again, I wasn’t trying to start a fight and I didn’t see any intentional negating. I would suggest a replay, however, because I think this game really captured an aspect (a horrific but all too common aspect) of growing into womanhood that I think you have missed.
Again, no shame and I love that you’re adjusting your mindset with the new context.
5 Likes
Hell Ride by Dana Montgomery
Played: 4/7/25
Playtime: 3hr, finished with walkthrough goosing
In the past I have observed a few “Golden Oldie” creative choices that are poison to my enjoyment of IF. Unavoidable instant death. Silently unwinnable states. Inventory management. Opaque solutions to invisible problems - ie required moves not narratively clued, that are unlikely to register as tasks, but even if understood, the WHAT of the task is equally opaque. Hell Ride exhibits all of those, not pervasively but notably.
Review Spoiler: not only did those things not kill my experience, they didn’t even destroy the flavor of it. Before I get to the triumphant plot twist, lets explore the makeup of the poison here.
Inventory management is the softest poison in HR. Your inventory space here is actually quite large, including a fanny pack that you can shunt stuff into. The world is similarly chockablock with stuff to grab, much of it red herrings. It is a somewhat baffling equation though. The game lets you carry WAAAY more stuff than physically plausible. This is fine, probably preferred actually! It is a gameplay concession that reduces friction and a bit of ‘realism’ we are fine without. However, there IS an arbitrary line drawn where EVENTUALLY you have to start juggling things between ‘hand’ and ‘pack.’ There is no ‘realism’ this is in service of, the line manifests when your inventory is laughably large, so it begs the question, why bother with that limit at all? It is unnecessary friction.
Instant death is also an issue, though arguably the one instance of it is completely narratively justified, so much so that even an incompetent like myself knew enough to savegame before committing to the path. Poison neutralized.
The silently unwinnable states are more insidious. I detected two during gameplay (which I savvily avoided), and fell into a third that seemed bug driven? When I tried to use string and gum to better my odds at a dime toss, I entered a state where the string thought it was attached to a dime that no longer existed, AND the magic dime I ACTUALLY needed was rendered unavailable. I identified it as unwinnable almost immediately, but only through meta-experience. The game itself was going to let me play forEVER in that state. These I do not forgive so easily.
The last was the worst. There is a chokepoint puzzle maybe 2/3 the way in that there is no way I could determine was even a ‘puzzle’ let alone what to do about it. There are locked doors. Getting the key required giving objects to a character they have expressed no interest in, and no text in game suggested they might. Giving similar objects might or might not have resulted in soft cluing, but even thinking to do that was prompted nowhere in the game. It was the mind-readiest of mind-reading puzzles.
These were all compounded by infrequent but numerous technical issues. Besides the string bug above, game state was stubbornly static. Descriptions continued to hint at objects you had long taken and moved. Vital objects are not mentioned AT ALL in the text of the game, and were only secured because they were noted on the pdf-eelie map. Some conversation topics were necessary for progress, but near-neighbor topics ignored, suggesting no value in probing for more. There is a no-image mode of play (which, as an anti-ChatGPT zealot was the only way I was going to play), which the text inadequately compensated color information for, making some puzzles much clumsier.
Ok, the litany is long. You saw the spoiler though. I actually really enjoyed this game a lot. The most obvious way this game minimized the poisons is simple, well understood, yet still less frequently employed than I would like. There was a Walkthrough. Any time things started to drag, I could goose forward by (maybe restarting or reloading and) cheating past the offending blockage. This game, more than any in immediate memory, demonstrates the value of this ONE SIMPLE TRICK BIG I-F DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT. Walkthroughs are not a panacea however. Simple presence may change a rage-quit to a joyless, mechanical transcription but it will not on its own rescue the experience.
No, the game did that with all the things it did SO SO RIGHT.
For one, I LOVED LOVED LOVED the evidence gathering mechanic. Oh, yeah, the plot: you are a reporter gathering evidence against a shady carnival. The evidence gathering mechanic was wonderful - integrating question asking, lore reading, clue finding into an intuitive and cohesive whole only SLIGHTLY showing its gameplay underpinnings in a way that soft-clued the player how to use it. It is essentially a parallel puzzle you are working while doing standard explore-grab-fiddle parser puzzles. Its inclusion was a standout for me, complicating and enriching the game in all the right ways.
The setting was also engaging. Carnivals are just classic parser settings, and this one was rendered with real verve and detail. Everything you think should be there, is, and most of it is interact..able(?) even when not strictly necessary for the plot. It was a really complete, largely bug-free, certainly engaging experience.
Then there is the ineffable vibe of the thing. The author notes that Hell Ride was created in the 80s and updated today, and does it ever capture the feel of an 80s parser. You might not think that is a compliment, but boy howdy it is. It is more verbose than what I would think of as 80s-provenance, but its level of detail and soft word choice are that alchemical mix of full-but-indirect that cues the player which elements of detail are worth probing and which are not. And more often than not it does so effortlessly. The language, finely tuned level of detail, employment of repetition all steer into the traditions of 80s games, not yet infused with expectations and conventions of the next century. Couple that with puzzle design that was SO much in line with 80s conventions you might as well have been playing this IN THE DAY. Puzzle solving was as much a logical exercise as a muscle memory one, dredging up 80s neurons that were patiently waiting for exactly this to re-fire. These resonances had the effect of buying forgiveness for its faults in ways we forgave 80s games because we didn’t know any better yet.
So yeah, I found this game unplayable without the walkthrough. It tried its best to poison me on multiple fronts. Rasputin-like, this reviewer survived all those malicious attempts to.. drown in a river? Wait, no, to revel in a wonderful throwback experience, enhanced by a truly unique and enjoyable detective mechanism.
For those that doubt the power of the WALKTHROUGH, you are on notice.
Horror Icon: Jigsaw
Vibe: Classic parser
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : Clearly I would go on a bug-squashing spree, starting with that string/dime thing. I would follow that up by reworking that chokepoint non-puzzle into something a player might recognize. Then fix states, room descriptions, cue unwinnable states… but whatever I did I would PRESERVE THAT WALKTHROUGH.
hr_jjmcc.txt (367.0 KB)
6 Likes
Wayfarers by Gina Isabel Rodriguez
Played: 4/7/25
Playtime: 1.5hr, 3 endngs
Wayfarers is a work firmly on the FICTION side of Interactive fiction, which isn’t to say it is not interactive. It is the story of a soldier recovering from horrific losses that cause her to interrogate her world, her family, and her place in both. It is set in an ill-defined future of endless warfare, advanced technology and all-too-familiar psychological and social pressures.
It is also stunningly, staggeringly, well written. Every scene, whether it be military battles, virtual reality game-world, interpersonal conversations, background lore, all of it drips with verisimilitude, confidence and authority. We are in super firm hands here, gang. The prose is unadorned and insightful, propelling us from one scene to the next like a series of small explosions. I captured so, so many lines, here are a few for flavor:
“I had prayed for my hatred to keep me from being killed, but here I was.”
“We were pretty and white like the main characters of yesteryear.”
“They’ll run out of people before they run out of money.”
“I wanted to tell her that if I had designed this world, it would have been kind.”
“How small a scrap of human would I have needed to be, to be allowed to die?”
Holy crap ya’ll even out of context that stuff ROCKS. In context it is devastating. In story, we jump back and forth between wartime (and to a lesser extent, family) flashbacks, therapy gameplay, and post-combat recovery. Interactivity is used to get the player invested and aligned with the protag - clicks are rarely choices but they ARE shepherding us along the protagonist’s journey and each mandated link another step forward that we take with them. The graphical presentation is tight and effective - the use of color and fonts differentiate and suggest the reality (or gamey unreality) of the current interactions. By the end we are both along for the ride and driving forward for some measure of closure for our protagonist.
The narrative is super controlled - despite the disorienting unreality the protagonist experiences, we the reader are never unclear what aspect of their challenging existence we are experiencing, how important it is, and how it interacts with every other aspect of their recovery. It all builds naturally and dramatically to one of several totally justified and enthralling twists, leading to a final choice we DO get to make on her behalf. Having plumbed all the endings, let me just say I find it impossible to think any one of them would disappoint the buildup. We’re all going to have a favorite and boy do I. To the end, the story retains its stubborn difficulty. There is no ‘story book’ tightly knotted resolution, just a measure of closure in a still-messy life with frustrating gaps eluding protagonist control. But definitive closure nonetheless.
I was blown away by this entry. You can probably tell I am dancing around the core of this thing, relying on my superlatives to carry how smitten I was with it. I do this deliberately. With some works I might be tempted to pull apart the themes of the piece, dissect characterization or compositions, all in an effort to convince myself I have a full handle on the author’s intent and/or the work’s impact. Here, I feel the writing is SO precise, none of it is uncertain or ambiguous. It is a tale so well told, creating complexity then navigating us through it so sure-handedly, it really doesn’t need anything from me but the most minimal endorsement I can provide.
“Wow.”
I think that’s as concise as I will ever get.
Horror Icon: Regan/Pazuzu
Vibe: PTSD
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would marvel that I were capable of such an affecting story. Which of course, I am not. So in spite, I would tweak two small technical issues: I would add a back link in the Credits, and cut the timed delay at game’s start in half. That’s it, man.
9 Likes
JJ, thank you SO much for playing Hell Ride. And your feedback was amazing. Thank you for your thoughtful and encouraging comments. I am most grateful!
And my apologies for the poison. And the dime/string thing. It never occurred to me that someone might want to use that mechanic elsewhere in the game.
3 Likes
idle phone simulator by summsalt
Played: 4/7/25
Playtime: 10m
Oh this randomizer, it is the Coyote-trickster of algorithms! On the heels of a stunningly well written drama, we get… a slyly well written comedy! This is a Ren’Py game, kind of an under-represented platform in my IF journey. A visual novel, with IF choice-making as an engagement engine.
The visual part of this visual novel(ette) is attractively realized. A very distinctive artistic style rendering protagonist and their home for us to loosely navigate on the way to work. The protagonist is an endearing mess, with her daily routine juuuust barely, and amusing, beyond her grasp in the full view of her creepily-intrusive electronics. The art provides the perfect informal, warm vibe, kind of mirroring the protagonist’s attitude. It makes some choices that raise eyebrows, not in a deleterious way, but in a ‘carving its own place’ way. For example, you play as a cat-girl with rabbit-person friend… who also has an actual cat. Is it just me? It’s not just a hat on a cat – that’s wild, right? People don’t keep people as pets, do cats keep..? I don’t know, I can’t stop wondering how that works. Also, our cat person uses skin cream but not fur cream…? Where does the rabbit hole stop???
Look, I get that I could light a pipe, put on a sweater with elbow patches and digress into artistic representation vs underlying reality but… why? That sounds pretentious and joy sucking and dull and SO out of step with the fun of the piece.
Complementing the art style, is a sassy writing voice that is snortingly fun. Here’s some examples:
“its ass oclock”
(para)“did you know you can lose 87% of your joy eating zuchini?”
“absorbing the power of 350 incels”
The whole thing is rendered in this matter-of-fact, cynical, put-upon voice and it is just thoroughly winning, the more so contrasted against the cartoony hello-kitty characters. The premise – flailing to get through a morning of trivial challenges – could end up hopelessly twee if this last element were missing. Conversely, the presence of the wry voice transforms both art and premise into something worth riding along with just to get more one liners! The frisson is as much the joy as the sly language itself.
So there I am, bubbling along happily in this cozy, witty flow. And then it ended.
Wait, what? Yeah, if I have a quibble with the piece its that in its vanishingly short runtime it gave us a lot of fakeout (low) stakes, humorously trivial setbacks and then… ended. There was no arc, dramatic or otherwise to the piece. No escalating tensions, needs unfulfilled, setups and payoffs, just a really fun hang with a charismatic character that abruptly stopped. I mean, that’s cool, it WAS undeniably fun. Without those other things though, I’m not sure how much sticking power it has.
Other than questions that will never leave me like “…DO THEY FIGHT OVER THE CATNIP???..”
Horror Icon: Freddie
Vibe: Beleagured
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project you would know it because there would be more dogs. If I were to finesse this project, I’d have to try to provide some semblance of a dramatic arc. Something, anything to stop me wondering how MARKING works in that house.
5 Likes
Three-Card Reading by Norbez Jones
Played: 4/7/25
Playtime: 15m
Over the last few Comp cycles, Bez has treated us to a few works marrying art, voice and narrative IF. Each of them has had its own personality, its own quirks and fascinations. In terms of raw presentation, it feels like things are creatively cresting into a very next-level appealing package. The artwork here, combinations of handdrawn characters and scene setting background is immediately compelling, and laid out terrifically against the text space to make for an inviting interface. There was one glitch on my window, though I have seen this enough over the comps that I suspect my Linux/Firefox setup has some non-standard challenges that authors periodically drive into.
Even more noteworthy than the graphical package was the voice acting. Bez has employed this in the past, to mixed success to my ears. There are a couple things here that really work though. First and foremost, the script really aids this iteration. When voice acting is less successful, it represents a drag on things. We read the text, then wait for the voice actor to catch up, repeat. Here, with really only one or two notable exceptions, the dialog is natural, but bounded. Relatively short observations, answers, then next prompt. This flows very naturally, and not for nothing doesn’t give us opportunity to get ahead and have to wait for the game. In particular, the Mack character chose a delivery that was rapid but natural and really kept things bubbling along. The other characters were not quite so economical, and Yancy had an extended monologue at one point that DID drag, but I find it noteworthy that that was the exception in this work. Otherwise it was quite tight, and made for an enjoyable time.
Now the function all this form was in service of. The work is a lazy afternoon with friends doing Tarot readings, as catalyst to have some friendly conversations about their friendship, including some mild tension around one of them harboring a secret. These characters have a history here, in a work I consider a unique combination of compelling thematic genius and biting family tragedy, swimming in a crowded sea of less successful dramatic elements. The friendship at the center of this work is one of the latter. If, however, I divorce the characters’ history from their presents, it is kind of sweet and amiable.
Up to the point of the plot twist. It’s…BIG, this twist. So big, it challenges the natural, friendly vibe.. no that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, it’s so big it SHOULD challenge that vibe and doesn’t. The LACK of incredulity, followon questions, other explanations in the face of unquestioning acceptance, PARTICULARLY when the foundation was already some suspicion of deception, did not ring true, not for this quiet afternoon.
So now I’m off balance, trying to figure out how we got here and where its going to tumble, and then it ended. Hm. Ok. Maybe I was a bit hasty. The revelation was huge, kind of bonkers huge, but we are talking about a world of animal-people. Oh, did I not say that? Yeah, these friends are all ani-people. In THIS world, which the narrative tells us nothing about, maybe this wild revelation is not as strange as it reads to boring people-people? Certainly the overriding takeaway of this work was as an interlude, some connective narrative bridging the previous work and leaning into a followon. I assume. It certainly plays like that. If so, on the strength of the artistic growth and next level voice work, count me in! I mean, how do I NOT hear how this bonkers development gets resolved???
Horror Icon: Carrie
Vibe: Afternoon Hang
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I might take a look at the revelation’s reception, make sure it is playing out precisely the way the next work needs it to. Ensuring the jarring effect on the reader is deliberate. (There is a good chance it already is!)
3 Likes
Looks like you don’t have a font that contains those characters: ➤ and ⯮. Noto’s a good one for just having practically every symbol you might need.
1 Like
Canvas Keepsakes by C.T. O’Mahony
Played: 4/8/25
Playtime: 45m
The conceit of this work, like a lot of genre works, is doing a lot of lifting. Genre fiction (interactive or otherwise) gets a lot of bang for the buck in wild conceits. Arcane magic or hand-wavy super science can create bespoke scenarios that range from full on metaphysical metaphor to nuts’n’bolts lore-wonkery where exploring the setting (and clever twists by the author) is every bit as engaging as any symbology or themes. It is not a lick on this work to say it skews to the latter, because it does it so WELL.
As a player, we are co-piloting (let’s not pretend the author isn’t ALWAYS also at the stick in these things) an artist. A painter, trying to live off commission work while hiding a secret that they can enter the reality of their paintings and bring back artifacts from them. (Ok, yes, you and I would drop everything to labor on our civic-mural-scaled STACKS OF CASH TRYPTYCH. This protag doesn’t. Just roll with it.) He also has a partner/pet of a talking cat. Yeah, even I am beyond blinking at that at this point.
Follows some nice intrigue, evolving lore and ever-more-clever twists on the conceit that are both completely reasonable and completely satisfying. Do not underestimate the finesse this requires. “Going deep in the lore” and “Crawling up your own butt” share a LOT of common imagery and perils. For me, CK consistently fell on the right side of that dichotomy.
It is enhanced by a lot of tangible, unadorned writing. In particular, the details of the painter’s craft were just as present and tactile as you would expect for this kind of protagonist. The writing went a long way to casually and matter-of-factly establish his bona fides as a working artist, and that in turn helped sell the really outre’ developments to follow. If there was a facet that was shortchanged, it was the characterization of the protagonist. Other than a REAALLY strong reluctance to bathe (seriously, what is THAT about? SO many grooming actions available, uniformly rejected by the narrative), and the physical details of their craft, they were more or less a blank slate. Now in IF, this is not generally an issue. The protagonist is often explicitly intended to be a player surrogate. Thing is, specificity in detail works against that identification, so we fall into a weird middle ground where the protag is not US, but isn’t really an identifiable OTHER either. This stands in contrast to NPCs that are quirky, motivated and interesting. Even the rather moustache-twirling antagonists are narratively justified and fun in their one-dimensional-ness.
What? You want me to say it? In print, attached to my name in perpetuity? Fine. Yes, the cat companion was quite fun. Happy? I feel dirty.
As the narrative progresses you work with the protagonist to untangle the implications and nuances of the wild lore, satisfying stakes that range from ‘losing an apartment’ to ‘slavery and death.’ I mean, what, you didn’t want it to escalate? I found the whole thing a really enjoyable lark, not the least of which because it enabled me to reclaim some dignity for those most-unfairly-maligned of creatures: no, not cats. Their malignment is totally fair. I speak of giant spiders. Yes, I was not satisfied with my status as feline pariah, I must bolt headlong into FURTHER social marginalization! I regret nothing!
All in all, this was a nicely calibrated plot engine, just about the perfect size for its preoccupations. It also gifted us with a new legendary beast for the Monster Manual: the Artistivore. So good.
Horror Icon: Leatherface
Vibe: Reality bending
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I think I would endeavor to flesh out the protag, just a little bit more. The nature of IF is such that players usually do not begrudge inhabiting a complete character who is NOT them. Would be worth pulling this protag in that direction.
5 Likes