JJMcC's ST26 A-S-T-O-O-T

Competitions Spring Thing
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Hey folks, don’t mean to alarm/excite you, but Spring Thing 26 is almost here! YEAH Imma review again, we can’t have another IFComp25 debacle. Well, I’m certainly CAPABLE of it, but not this time! As has become de riguer, will be attaching arbitrary labels to these works, in lieu of actionable feedback. Or maybe, through an accident of the big numbers wordcount I firehose, in addition to? No promises, but it could happen!

In honor of the Artemis II mission, this year’s discretionary category will be FICTIONAL SPACECRAFT. You thought last year’s Horror Icons were too obscure? Oh reader, this year will make those labels seem like common cultural currency.

Fictional Spaceship: So I trust I am drawing from reasonably well known sci-fi properties. Inevitably, you are likely to be more familiar with the works they populate than the fake starships themselves. Pay attention! This is the only place I will be connecting those dots for you! Nostromo (horror, ship from Alien), Heart of Gold (comedy, ship from Hitchihiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Discovery (artistic aspirations, ship from 2001 A Space Odyssey), Fhloston Paradise (romance, luxury ship from The 5th Element, because, y’know the 5th element is LOVE), Tardis (non-CWM. ok I am commited to this category, but pickings are SLIM here), Hermes (puzzle solving, ship from The Martian).

And my usual additional padding:

Vibe: Playful, Dramatic, Hilarious, Dour, Pulpy, etc, will invent ratings as needed
Polish: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel! : If the work were mine, what I’d do next

Relegating myself off-season to the TADS board, I see I missed the community’s discussion of increasingly un-ignorable AI. Don’t need to relitigate any of that, just reiterating my own support for Spring Thing’s AI policy, and a renewal of my disinterest in EVER reviewing AI works. A few paragraphs of my thoughts in this review, no need to restate.

Deep breath. Seal my spacesuit. Houston? Start the countdown. 10…9…8…

18 Likes
2

…2 …1 …BLASTOFF!

The House by Miles Poehler
Played: 4/6/26
Playtime: .75hr, 2 playthroughs (all characters)

There are WAY more pasttimes and diversions in this world than any one lifetime could possibly consume. It’s cool, evolution and human nature got us covered. As individuals, our unique cranial chemical cocktails prune that jungle for us, categorizing pursuits on a spectrum from “THIS IS MY CALLING!” to “Seriously, no thank you.” Somewhere on that spectrum is a bucket for “I don’t think it’s for me, but.. that’s really kinda cool innit?” At some point in my life, Quilting got dumped into that bucket.

Hear me out.

There is a specific KIND of quilting that, despite nominally residing WELL outside the middle of my mental road, seizes my attention every time. These are the collaborative quilts, often commemorating some event, tragedy, accomplishment, or shared experience. Each square of these kinds of quilts are miniature artworks of their own, capturing its creator’s relationship to the common thematic inspiration. Whether crudely rendered or lavishly accomplished they all seem to tell a self-contained STORY - in evocative, suggestive shorthand. By unifying them, side by side in a grid, any overarching themes or narrative is purely accidental. The purpose is just to honor each of them, conveying the BREADTH of experience whether those experiences have anything to say to each other or not.

The House somehow summoned this from the deep recesses of my brain. Specifically its central conceit: four wildly divergent characters, trapped together through unspecified means, interacting to escape a house. You select one of the characters to inhabit, becoming privvy to their thoughts, then three more to share your trial. You get maybe two scenes of character exploration each (one an intro dialogue, another a thematic room) then shuttle to endgame. It’s kind of a wafer thin conceit whose whole purpose is to stitch these individual squares together. The narrative is not overarching, it is an excuse to get things stitched up.

I played twice, experiencing each square of fabric. First time I was a (presumably) collie, accompanied by a middle-age spinster, a cyborg from the future with a mission in the past cabbie, and a ventriloquist. Next time, a vampire with a time/dimension lord, a totally normal not-Alien Guy and a Creepy Doll.

In this short work, each had ABOUT the depth of a square of fabric, honestly in the best possible way. Their stories were tight, succinct, and suggestive of larger tales out of sight. Most were pretty funny. Some were surprisingly dark. Many played with their disparate communication paradigms in very fun ways - Lattie and Guy were particular standouts here. Each is shot through with its own playful, sly humor. I don’t think the phrase “like some kind of O+ pinata” will ever leave me. It is a pathology of my own that I envisioned them as fabric squares, ready for quilting.

I think this pathology was enabled by the self-acknowledged thinness of the scenario and gameplay, really just a substrate to knit these characters onto, then enable closer per-square inspection. The work acknowledges this by highlighting that replay is really about the central protag-selected character - diving deeper into an individual square. Which is really how I consume these quilts anyway?

Now, given how widely varied individual responses can be, I can certainly envision players who just DON’T GET QUILTING. It’s how I feel about Bird Watching. For those folks, the resolute lack of any overarching narrative thread or theme will be a dealbreaker. The fun, disparate nature of the cast might get lost, or if not lost just not feel complete. This is how chemical brains work, and they’re not wrong. Certainly the lack of deeper narrative glue is front and center, proudly announcing itself as NOT A PRIORITY HERE. For those not given to quilting this could prove unsatisfying.

For me? It reminded me there is this whole human endeavor I encounter infrequently, doesn’t really spur me get involved with, but tickles me just a little bit that it exists at all.

Typos for Author:

accross, Trolphy
Also several instances of crufty grammar like this
You watch as through the mirrors everyone and thing in the room except for The Reflectionless age

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Mosaic Narrative
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : Were this my project, I think I would give a little more energy to Sophie. She was really the only one that didn’t reward close inspection. Her story beats came across as both samey and less developed than Saargroff.

11 Likes
3

Enigmart by Sarah Willson
Played: 4/6/26
Playtime: 3.5hrs (26 puzzles solved, 5 hints, 1 bonus)

At some point in my life, capitalism became GRABBY. Ok sure, there is an argument to be made that not only is this take a pretty myopic view of economic history, it is a fundamental mistake to think grabbiness is not capitalism’s most salient feature. For large swaths of my early life though, it didn’t FEEL grabby. Yeah, Coke had snappy jingles, but it was up to you to remember to buy some, and if you didn’t, eh, life goes on.

Today? Today, you have ads that follow you across platforms, algorithms that bend social science and behavioral psychology in service of increased spending, subscription models for all the things you used to be able to buy outright, and a grey market of you-as-data sold for money to other capitalists. Capitalism did all this without asking us what we wanted, if this was a model we embraced. They just… took our privacy, our data, our peace of mind. Intrusively badgering us so they could more aggressively take our money.

So THIS game, centering a shopping loyalty app as a puzzle-delivery mechanism, feels amiably subversive from the jump. Here, the app’s true function is to deliver puzzles. So many puzzles of wonderful variety! If we ignore the narrative component for a moment, the app is simply a clever conceit, a framework to hang word games and logic puzzles on. And what a collection it is! None repeated, all concise and clever, most sized pretty precisely for the challenge they present. 26 puzzles in about 3.5 hrs, less than 10 min each. I didn’t NEED the framing device here, I thoroughly enjoyed the diversion of this collection. It reminded me nothing so much as the grocery store puzzle books of old, with every page a different brain-poser. I loved those! Notwithstanding how many words I am going to burn on the conceit of this thing, the puzzles are absolutely the centerpiece of this game, and absolutely worth the price of admission. Are we agreed on that? Ok, so back to the framing device…

The intrusivity of the loyalty-app infrastructure is initially acknowledged, but quickly steered away from. Solve the puzzles, score the savings! This was a narrative headfake though. The work was well aware that by ACKNOWLEDGING capitalism’s grabbiness it would cast a pall, however slight, over the proceedings. A lesser work would have been content to hand waive this away, probably successfully given the frothy lightness of its aims. It seemed like Enigmart was going to do so, embodied by a comedically frazzled, superficially-coded young mother. Her introduction cast her as an object of derision, so when she begins spouting pro-privacy observations, it feels like we are invited to dismiss those concerns along with the woman herself. Not me though. “Hadleigh is RIGHT dammit!” That’s not me making an assertion in this review, those were my actual, out-loud words after her introductory scene!

AND THE WORK AGREED! As the game progresses, this poor, underestimated woman develops into the full-on hero of the work. Between puzzles, we periodically get short bursts of in-store scenes that confirm and underline her thesis. The early seeming-dismissal evolves into a full bore condemnation of the game’s own conceit, even as that conceit was delivering wonderful puzzles to distract us!

Did the work NEED to do this? Absolutely not! It was completely tangential to the main focus of the piece: delivering a strong suite of standalone puzzles. Which it did with pseudo-marketing humor and verve, and reinforced by graphical playfulness. But the fact that it DID ANYWAY just completely won me over. The narrative component was not dense, it would have been intrusive if it had been. This was no polemic. It was a light and witty diversion, that was unwilling to give its premise even the slightest bit of slack.

Look, I love puzzles. I love my tinfoil hat. This work let me celebrate BOTH.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Brain Teaser
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I’d have to lean HARDER into the invasive privacy violations of Loyalty Apps. I mean like, so hard I probably would have completely destroyed the sly amiability of the thing. There are some wheels I should not be trusted with.

14 Likes
4

Social Democracy: Popular Front by Autumn Chen
Played: 4/7/26
Playtime: 1hr, 2 playthroughs (including 15 min background reading!)

The words in my head are so completely unfair, I am ashamed I thought them, ashamed I open this review acknowledging them, and ashamed I am incapable of balling this up and starting over. The words in my head rhyme with “Skiminishing Glitterns”

For context, know that I absolutely ADORE this game system, especially as encapsulated in the previous two games. The first involved pre-Nazi Germany, attempting to hold together a political coalition strong enough to stave off the greatest Evil in the last century. That feels pretty generally relevant, no? The second somehow spun directly into my fascination with pre-Communist Russia, where gameplay was attempting to hold together a fragile political alliance in the face of the Communist Revolution. The gameplay in both was balancing inter-faction politics with external events, and y’know running a country, and doing your damnedest to pull the populace back from the precipice of extremism. The mechanics are a card-driven paradigm, where each card presents options you might pursue either to mitigate events or try and further your goals. There are different decks for party v governing v events, and your task is to balance your hand to maneuver things about.

Both games are ALSO characterized by limited feedback on the efficacy of your efforts, until it is too late. There are paradoxically reams of data available to you, too much to digest really, but few clues on cause and effect. This is more feature than bug in those earlier games, where the uncertainty in your actions is very much part of the delicious tension. This is a rock solid game design, thematically tight to its historical inspiration.

This time around, you are attempting to hold together a fragile coalition in pre-war France, with the shadow of fascism creeping over the continent. Unlike the previous two, I had no prior exposure to France’s politics and pressures, and if I’m honest no seeds of interest either. That’s technically ok, at one point in my life I knew nothing about pre-Communist Russia, yet I’m all in on that now. But it does mean this game doesn’t automatically get me on its side like the other two did.

Like its immediate predecessor it tweaks the formula a bit: it opens a few months before an election in which your faction will be ushered to power. This is a really clever improvement on the previous games, essentially giving you a few game-months of ‘training’ on the game’s moving parts before the first election… and also showcasing the election mechanic that you will need to manage deeper into the game. This iteration further seemed to provide more ‘actions’ per turn than previous, while also tightening limits on your governing figures’ special powers, as well as allowing you to run a budget deficit (which I’m sure will not come back to bite later!). Even with these interesting tweaks this iteration did not quite capture my imagination the way the previous ones did.

I think there were two factors for this: 1) the stakes just felt lower. Yes, fascism was a looming threat everywhere, but especially early on it was relatively remote and gameplay centered around my (in)ability to maintain a governing coalition. It felt more like ‘clinging to power’ than the huge levers of history you were pulling in those other games. 2) This system has always felt a little opaque in cause and effect, this is actually one of its defining features. Even with that presupposition, this felt MORE so. Specifically, in a runthrough where I very deliberately prioritized ALL my socialist campaign promises, arguably to the exclusion of other events, I nevertheless was treated to “populace dissatisfied” outcomes, sometimes with identical text to when I focused on foreign affairs. Further, even though I played on ‘easy’ level I was booted from office in less than 6 months both times! It FELT less responsive to play.

Now in its third iteration, I think I feel about this system the way I do about GMT’s COIN series of games (Counter Insurgency). This is a series of board games with a very flexible asymmetric warfare focus. It is a core set of rules and mechanics that are applied to a series of different world scenarios: Castro’s Cuban insurgency, Afghanistan, Somali Piracy, Columbian drug trafficking, building the Cross Bronx Expressway(!), many many more. The foundational mechanics are interesting, fun and robust. But it is the scenarios to which they are applied (and the rules tweaks customized for each of them) that bring each specific one alive. Choosing which COIN game to play, then, becomes an excercise in “which conflict holds the most fascination for you?”

For me, for Autumn’s amazing system, I think I’ll go back to the other two? They just fire more endorphins for me.

Note to author, last entry of Timeline is truncated:

1934: The riots of February 6, 1934 occur, where far-right paramilitaries attempt to. In the wake of the riots, the Popular Front is formed as an antifascist

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: COIN III
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : For this iteration especially, I think I would focus on sharpening the feedback loop - why actions generated results. Unlike its predecessors where the scenarios themselves provided some soft nudging, this felt more impenetrable to me due to my infamiliarity with the scenario.

9 Likes
5

Maybe You’ll Respect This Dead Person Instead by Ellric Smith
Played: 4/7/26
Playtime: 15min, joined Guild

I’m kind of 0-2 when invoking unfamiliar (to me) pop culture properties during reviews. You would think that kind of record would make me slow to employ that particular tool again. But no! I am an equus ferus, untameable and answering to no man! You cannot bridle me with your concepts of “humility” and “lessons learned”!

My usual employment of pop culture comparison comes spontaneously, unfairly, and colors my engagement with the work to some degree thereafter, at least until the work provides something ELSE to latch on to. To MYRTDPI’s credit, this time the comparison was achingly slow in manifesting, until it did so all at once, very late in the game. It is fair to say that this either points to me going 0-3 on these things, or to the BEST possible pop culture riffing - where the initial source is merely the springboard for deeply personal and creative works that ultimately owe little more than inspiration itself. And in some sense, given that there is nothing new under the sun, isn’t that really ALL art?

MYRTDPI plops us, very in media res, into a fantasy world we will struggle to keep up with. Cultures, Institutions, Geography, Biodiversity, all completely alien to the player with no real effort to provide purchase or explanation by the protag. If I’m going to get dunked into High Fantasy (which is not my chosen genre), this is the way I prefer it. Trust me to catch up, don’t spoon feed me. “WTF is going on here?” is a very effective way to batter aside any genre-resistance I might cling to. It helps, I think, that the world building is very aggressive. Almost nothing is taken for Medieval-Europe-granted, to its great credit. We seem to be in a matriarchal world (or at least city-state), where female power is the norm and males are tolerated intruders. Swirling around this, there is magic and swordplay and wondrous, dangerous beings.

It emerges that the protag is attempting to join a Guild, an only quasi-welcoming space of playful aggression and bruises. To do so, he must establish his credentials by satisfying a quest utilizing only his unique magical gifts. With the help of a new friend. From there, the quest is comically abrupt - go underground, fight monsters, win! The work’s brevity is well considered, as this seems intended as a prologue for one or more longer games in the same mythos. By game’s end we have effectively been introduced to the world, the protag, his specific abilities, and some NPCs.

Much like the work itself does, I have shaded the pop culture reference I am about to make. See, the protag owns a magic brazier, from which he can conjure one of four fancifully-named spirits to aid him, most especially in fighting monsters. In service of his quest to join a combative athletic club of sorts. Would it make it more clear if you envision the brazier as a sphere of red and white? The comparison is limited, in the sense that the brazier has no particular effect after foes are defeated. It is entirely possible that I am imposing a comparison unintended by the author. As counter-argument, I offer the mid-combat text, reporting on damage to your partner. It is a sly echo of “It’s super effective!” Once this pop culture resonance landed I giggled to myself uncontrollably. If in fact this parallel has any grounding, its employment was masterful - shaded until so late in the game it felt like a mini-revelation. Not so much cheapening the work (as such comparisons can sometimes do) but enriching it.

The difference is the dense, specific lore inundating the experience prior. After long beats of struggling to keep up with offhand strangeness while the plot steamed forward, this hit like a
moment of clarity. Quite a feat in only 15 minutes of gameplay!

As a prologue, how did the complete work settle? I’m not sure? The fact that I’m not sure is probably a big win for this work. Given how far it is from my default interests, the fact that you are not hearing “great fun but not for me” is no small achievement. Its confident, thoroughly foreign setting, pervasive wry wit and what I perceive as a subversive, clowning reference, coupled with the controlled but frenetic pacing of it all are kind of winning. Certainly winning enough to engage its successor.

Spaceship: Tardis
Vibe: “Spooky Ghost Fighter, I choose you!”
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I think I wouldy try to pack in just one more sly reference - maybe casually drop that the protag’s name is “Bash Ketchup” or somesuch. Just so overconfident reviewers are not left twisting over whether the reference was intended or not.

11 Likes
6

A Quiet Scurry by By Moss & Quill Studios
Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 10m, 4 die, 2 survive

This is a small game, scaled to its protagonist. It is quite beautifully presented, with a wonderful pre-dawn background image that captures the melancholy wonder of its setting and narrative. The spare font and text pop against that backdrop setting a mood all its own. The game deploys you as a field mouse, scrabbling for food and water in a narrow window of opportunity before ever-threatening danger looms prohibitively large over this mission.

It is a choice-select work, where choices often end in modest success or quite immodest death. Sometimes, context helps inform those choices, many times it does not. Normally, I rebel a bit at instant death choices with little guidance. Here, that design choice is completely appropriate, and very effectively paints a picture of how ineffectual free will can be in a world so thoroughly hostile in scale and consequences. Where even the most modest of survival pressures are fraught with risk beyond control. Thematically this all aligns quite well, including the ‘go back and try again’ nature of replay. Here, replaying to success has the effect of highlighting that yes, there ARE paths to buy an additional day of life, satiating one’s needs for the moment but ONLY the moment. Inevitably requiring repeats every day thereafter. There are paths to success on any given day, but there are innumerable ways to fail, and successful choices today could easily lead to tragedy on subsequent days. Survival is a compulsory game of Press Your Luck that you cannot retire from.

I respect the artistic and thematic unity achieved here, reinforced by its beautiful yet unsentimental presentation. I struggle to explain why it did not enthrall me. I think the most obvious possibility is its unsentimentality. This journalistic approach to callous nature extended to the protagonist, the poor mouse we inhabit. There is no hint of inner life other than completely justified fear. No hooks for player sympathy. We technically inhabit the poor creature, but have no sense of it as a being, only a cog in the grand design of the food chain. Of course we WANT it to live under our watch, but if not, there isn’t a sense of loss, only of nature taking its course. This is an outcome consistent with its thematics, probably deliberate, but if so deliberately distancing.

Beyond its central theme, I think I found the language of the piece distancing as well. It felt like the text of the piece was straining to match the power of its background image, to my sensibilities not quite achieving its aims. The power of the background lies in its simplicity and unspoken depths hidden in shadow. The text of the piece was more baroque, explicit where the image was implicit. For example: “As your eyes blink open the familiar sight of the woven nest ball fills your vision.” “Filling your vision” is a passive, distancing phrase that felt quite beyond a mouse’s ability to abstract. This kind of language dominates the piece, and cumulatively creates a distancing barrier between lofty human poetry and grounded mouse reality. It inevitably elevates our focus to grander concepts - like the circle of life! - at the expense of the poor critter we are nominally piloting. To my way of thinking, empathy would be better served matching its text to the visceral vibe of its presentation and narrative. The work NEED not be striving for empathy, its elevated focus only intended to convey the grander food chain design. That it did quite admirably. It’s just, without empathy, it plays as cold as our poor mouse’s fate.

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Circle of Life
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would attempt to rework the language of it to match the protagonist, and perhaps to exploit opportunities for empathy as well. Also, wouldn’t it be cool if the background image slowly brightened over time, heralding sunrise? I think that would be cool.

9 Likes
7

23 Minutes by George Larkwright
Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 21min, finished

It seemed like for a while, elaborate one-take shots were somehow a Holy Grail in cinema, discussed in reverent tones reserved for the nearly unattainable limits of human achievement. The most famous early one-take is the long opening shot of Orson Welles “Touch of Evil” (an astonishingly modern film if you can get past Charlton Heston’s dated acting stylings and brown face). These shots seem to achieve two things: a verisimilitude usually sacrificed to the visual and temporal language of film, and a real-time immediacy of experience. Since Welles’ revelatory accomplishment, the mere PRESENCE of such a technique in film was noteworthy on its own, kind of independent of the art it was in service of. (The Master, Hitch, actually got there first a decade earlier with Rope, but he was deliberately evoking a more stage-y experience and is not as lauded by history.)

Over time, this technical conceit has been revisited often enough, that while still noteworthy, it can now play against a body of such work rather than as a unicorn-like individual achievement. It is hard to imagine an implementation more accomplished than Timecode, a 2000 movie of FOUR realtime, unbroken takes, presented simultaneously in four quadrants of the screen, telling an interweaving story across all four. While I know I have seen the movie, I could tell you boo about its plot or characters at this point, only the thrilling execution of it. This exposes a pitfall: its employment is SO noteworthy, it can dominate the narrative itself.

Spiritually, the cinematic one-take feels of a piece with stream-of-consciousness literature, a famous example being Ulysses by James Joyce. That book (which I have started three times but never finished, so…) puts the reader in the protagonist’s mind as he goes about his mundane, mundane day. Notwithstanding the temporal difference between READING ABOUT something and DOING it, it attempts to present a ‘realtime’ experience to the reader.

Y’know what I’ve never seen? A realtime, stream-of-consciousness work of IF. Never seen UNTIL NOW. (Ok, that SOUNDS dramatic, but given my relatively short span of IF engagement, it amounts to “have not seen in the last three years.”)

Don’t let that lawyer-mandated parenthetical dilute that statement. This is a visual novel called “23 Minutes” that it took me 21 MINUTES TO PLAY. It presented an internal monologue of a troubled protagonist during his walk to work. Holy crap was it stunningly effective. The FORM of it was deeply accomplished. It married deliberate text positioning to less-than-full-sentence thoughts, to a wandering attention grappling with spiraling self-recrimination, all positioned over a blurry background of a constantly changing city stroll.

Its cumulative effect, most especially its pacing, was such a considered, precisely choreographed sum of its parts. The text formatting conveyed thoughts trampling over each other, one spurring another, often tangentially connected and circling back on itself. The poetry of the text, rather than pushing me away, optimized and abstracted the protagonist’s thoughts in a perfectly effective way that served both the conveyance of ideas, and the tight timeline of the piece. The blurry, ever shifting background conveyed a protagonist only incidentally concerned with his environment. A protagonist whose internal preoccupations left his environment indistinct and of peripheral but not completely dismissable. The fact that this technical achievement does not completely eclipse the story it is telling is something one-take cinema doesn’t always succeed at.

The story here is manifest in the internal reflections of an early-middle aged man whose new-parent and job dissatisfactions are gradually shown to be products of slow poisoning by his own character failures. The precise pacing of this reveal is emotionally crushing and dramatically devastating. The mechanism of this disappointment (a family member descending into the conservative hate-sphere) is simultaneously depressingly relateable, while also piling OUR judgement on top of the protagonist’s self-recriminations. So many synchronicities stitched into this work, all of it so precisely engineered.

23M uses the graphical power of multimedia, textual formatting and presentation timing to shape how the words are consumed in an exercise that twists our brain to the pace and goals of the work. The interactivity is not so much our will modifying the work, as the work modifying our will to travel the story’s journey. It feels like a backwards interactivity? The alchemy is, whether the work is steering us, or we are steering the work, the outcome is the same. It is our mind taking the journey, more immediately and immersively than reading a book. What I just described is quite clearly (and more succinctly) a ‘visual novel.’ But that label technically applies to comic books and Ren’Py-esque quasi-power-point narratives as well. The amazing technical rendering of its real-time pacing seems to elevate this creation in the same way one-cuts have been determined to elevate cinema.

The trap of course is that a technical accomplishment this magnificent can outshine the work that it serves. Given what I’ve chosen to gush about in this review, I’m not sure 23M completely escapes this shadow. But neither does the narrative disappear. It manages to hold its own. This was an early highlight of the Thing for me. The pressure is really on the rest of the field to deliver a meta-moment as triumphant as the one that occurred when I checked my timer at the end of this story.

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Stream of Consciousness
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I dunno… I’d eke out another two minutes somehow? Who am I kidding, should I reshoot Welles’ Touch of Evil next? Instead, let me use this space for a recommendation. If you are enamored of, curious about, or annoyed with the cinephile’s reverence of this technique, I strongly recommend One Cut of the Dead, 2017. A wonderfully witty horror-comedy that almost by-the-way gives a nuts and bolts masterclass on why one-cuts are so remarkable.

8 Likes
8

meminerimus by diluculum
Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 5 min to play, 5 min to explore credits

I have, for a while now, called choice-select works that adhere to a parser gameplay paradigm as “Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise.” At one point, I grappled with the reverse: parsers that echoed choice-select gameplay. What did I call those? “DeceptaTwines” I think? If not, I like the sound of that, we’ll just pretend that was it. It does have the unfortunate side effect of positioning such works as villainous, which isn’t great, but puns will out.

This work is short, very short DECEPTA-TWINE that is completely playable as a link-select interface. The tortured Autobot conceit of my categorization is completely validated by a this work with two forms! It is a tight dual character study, where the protagonist/player and narrator are in dialogue with one another, revisiting artifacts from the protag’s life. Well, the Narrator is in dialogue, the player/protag is providing the impetus. The narration of these artifacts reveals a tortured family dynamic whose details are the crux of the work. Like, even discussing them, in a work this tight, can’t help but be spoilering. Yeah, no choice but to:

Parenting, amirite? You have this whole new being that starts as a blank slate. How do you avoid infusing that empty vessel with your own loftiest hopes and dreams, powered by a chemical reaction of Love among the strongest we are capable of? How do you avoid seeing this bundle of endless possibility as a vehicle to correct or redeem failures in you own life? Thing is, these are not empty vessels at all, but EMERGING ones. Parents that cannot give space to that emergence, prioritize it over their own vicarious desires, those parents curdle this relateable impulse to something toxic. And tell themselves it is ‘parenting.’

meminerimus captures this dynamic super concisely, conveying it through artifact exploration. Crucially, it recognizes that the toxicity of this impulse is actually harmful to BOTH PARTIES. Perhaps not equally harmful, but devastating nevertheless. In this case, the tragedy of it underlined by one party seemingly not recognizing the dynamic at all, and left to wonder. This is a pretty subtle and nuanced dynamic to convey in such a short runtime!

Overall, I found it very well done - so much emotional impact packed into such a small frame. Crucially, while the work clearly had a villain in mind and some artifacts generated repellently unnuanced feelings, others softened and humanized the proceedings: shifting it from raw despicability to flawed human tragedy. The alchemy worked. If I had to quibble (which… I might as well have said, “If I had to breath…”), I think the brevity of it slightly underserved it. In a longer (though not much longer!) work, I think the mixture would have blended a bit better. Limited to only four artifacts, there was a bit of whipsaw between narrative extremes. Like trying to drink a cocktail where the flavors had not quite merged yet.

Hey, I called it a quibble. Notwithstanding my documented love of well-blended cocktails, it was still a noteworthy achievement for its small package, capturing a very nuanced dynamic well out of scale to its word count.

Note to author

I wouldn’t characterize this as a Bug so much as a jarring note. I pinged the credits early, recognized some potential spoilers, and opted out before reading them all. Yet later the game still prompted me with:
“Now that you’ve read the full credits already, would you still like to give them another read?”
I think just excising the word “full” there would have not provided that jarring note, while still honoring the impulse.

Spaceship IF: Discovery
Vibe: Bad Parenting
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my product I would STOP GLORIFYING PYTHON and steer into the emotional healing power of PERL. Fun fact: I did coerce my kids to creating “Hello World” programs in Perl at an astonishingly young age. WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT???

mem_jjmcc.txt (14.5 KB)

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Crier by Antemaion
Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 30min 7 iterations, two escapes

Why don’t we see more Ren’Py here and in IFCOMP? As a platform, I haven’t seen enough of it to get my head around how I feel about it yet. It feels tailor-made to echo point-and-click adventures, somehow through a Powerpoint lens? To me, and for this game in particular, I feel echoes of Myst and The Longest Journey: background environments that are artistic showcases, crossfading travel in lieu of the latter’s side-scroll movement paradigm.

This implementation is more dialogue-tree than point-and-click, but its graphical prominence and limited animation still conjure those ancestors. Playing a wizard/prophet, you are condemned to an underworld for conspiracy against the king. The underworld itself is the showcase here, a fever-dream of body horror, fantasy-/techno- patois, and memorably alien characters. It is a heady, compelling mix, defying the player to keep up with its building strangeness, and rewarding the effort with compounding unease. Crucially, it seems to understand its most powerful asset quite clearly. You are treated to several encounters of compounding disquiet (or outright horror), populated by intriguingly unique characters. You either die or escape. The work does not devolve into repetition, nor diminishing returns on its weirdness. The whole experience will depend on how appealing, or maybe ‘fascinating’ is a better word, you find the setting.

For me, it really worked. It was the artwork that really sold it to me (not to say the characters, soundtrack and narrative voices were inconsequential!). The backgrounds are dark and evocative, but decidedly intended as background. Their palette and gloom contrast to characters that positively pop off the screen, both in color choice, design, and sheer ickiness. Notably, the protagonist themself does NOT - they practically seep into the background highlighting in a subtle way the player’s unconcern with their own image in the face of their shocking neighbors. I mean, that’s how we live most of our lives, right? Focused on the beings and events outside our mobile-camera bodies? “Influencer Culture” excepted. This has the effect of deemphasizing the protagonist’s narrative utility until the dramatically appropriate time.

The most confrontive choice is the narration/dialogue font. It is a harsh design, jagged and borderline illegible. Adjusting your mind to its shapes and patterns is a mini-game that echoes the protagonist’s floundering for purchase in their alien surroundings. That it is so quickly digested mirrors our protag’s almost superhuman resilience in accepting this new normal. Turns out, the protag is ALSO composed of weird, alien stuff! This is a nifty choice that kind of shifts the narrative from one of vanilla player/protag adjusting to seeming unknowability, only to crest over time to alienation from the protag themself!

That schism is an interesting narrative choice. It provides a minor ‘shock twist’ of sorts that completely reinforces the mood of the piece. It also abruptly decouples the player from narrative immersion. Untethered from the protagonist, it becomes a more voyeuristic experience than an immersive one. This is perfectly fine! What you’re given to look at is pretty compelling! It does put a LOT of weight on the environment though. Here, the brevity of the work plays in its favor. Over a long narrative, having committed to essentially one dimension of engagement, the challenge would be to consistently deliver escalating weirdness that does not smack of repetitiveness or deescalation. The impulse to center the protagonist’s weirdness as a climactic twist of sort was strong - it carries precisely the novelty needed to end on a high note.

Now, I’ve used the base word ‘alien’ what, like 6 times now? This reflects a creative choice that is super specific, and plays to competing impulses in our brains. On the one hand, humans have a desire for novelty, even repellant novelty. On the other, we relish the comfort of things We Already Know. Deliberately defying the latter provides a charge of endorphins, but could as easily engage our ‘flight’ response. Certainly the longer we are subjected to novelty the more uncomfortable we might become, and the stronger our desire for comfort might crest. The comfort need not be in the environs, it could simply be in the human relatability of the characters around us, and the emotions they evoke. Despite consistently denying such anchoring, this work struck a tasty balance for me - escalating its weirdness, then climaxing before the latter impulse could overtake me.

Also, my choice to include the Nostromo in my categories now looks positively… PROPHETIC.

Spaceship: Nostromo
Vibe: Splatterpunk
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I’d be tempted to humanize the protag and not drive a wedge between them and the player. Which feels like it might actually damage the considered effect of the work? So maybe don’t give me the wheel here.

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Fantasy Opera: The Theatre of Memory by Lamp Post Projects
Played: 4/8/26
Playtime: 1hr, score 94/100, Confident, Playful, Upgraded, Right Suspect, Maestro in the Making

What is it with the desire to fuse genres and conceits? At its core, it’s kind of the most unsubtle echo of the creative impulse itself. All creativity is synthesizing myriad experiences, knowledge and entertainment into a specific-to-artist blend whose novelty springs from both the unique composition of its sources, and unique voice of the synthesizing artist. Narrative-setting fusion is just the most obvious realization of this phenomenon. To the reader it is often the first thing communicated about a work - the ‘hook’ to drive engagement, then ideally inform plot, character, and narrative voice. Entire fictional genres have sprung from this: looking at you, Steampunk.

Know what I haven’t seen before? Operapunk. Theatre of Memory centers on, to quote the work, “crimes targeting the performing arts.” It is a Theater Kid-High Fantasy-Detective Fiction fusion! What a delightfully bonkers mix! Also, what kind of world is it where this specific mix IS A FULLY LEGITIMATE CAREER PATH?? Where criminal investigation is sparked by BAD DREAMS??? I kinda love the unapologetic, completely straight-faced goofiness of it.

Too, the game has bespoke role-playing characteristics and achievements, with latitude to customize the character through game and narrative choices. This is not strictly necessary, in the sense that these choices do not increase or reduce your odds of ‘winning,’ even with attendant die rolls shading game responses. Instead, they present an opportunity for player identification with the protagonist. This is one of IF’s central promises, well executed here through role-playing mechanics. And isn’t role-playing catering to our internal theatrical impulses anyway? I mean, it’s right there in the name.

The mystery itself is very satisfyingly constructed: interrogations, suspects, red herrings, connecting anecdotes and evidence to draw unexpected conclusions Turns out these connections work in physical ‘Lead Pipe in the Conservatory’ space, as well as thematically and philosophically. The mystery itself has a theatricality to it, its clues and evidence as anchored in dramatic crescendos as any Renaissance Opera. It was all so tightly integrated, every moving part echoing one or more element of the overall tale, I couldn’t help but wonder: this was so SPECIFIC, so tightly coupled, HOW MANY MYSTERIES LIKE THIS COULD THERE EVEN BE? I mean, real PIs are 95%+ infidelity cases, what does that translate to here, understudy sabotage? Upstaging the principles? MURDERING A LINE READING??

SHOULD I HAVE MINORED IN WOODWORKING, JUST IN CASE, LIKE DAD SAID???

The presentation was endearing as well - generous character and setting illustrations in watercolor, providing a unifying visual palette that further emphasized the warm, bespoke vibe of the thing. This is where the High Fantasy of it all manifested most strongly. The relevant cast of witnesses and suspects is quite large, populated with an insanely diverse collection of Fantasy races. With a cast this large, images act as mnemonic devices to help keep things straight. It’s just easier to remember: “Hey that guy’s a bull!” than “This one has a deep voice.”

I guess I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge one of the core challenges of Detective IF. If the player is tasked to solve a mystery, that mystery is ultimately the Most Significant Digit of the experience. All the theater-kid, half-elf chrome you pile on will always be subordinate to it. There are two relevant dimensions here: 1) how challenging/intuitive are the mechanisms of the mystery and 2) how satisfying is the final solution? The first directly engages the player’s capabilities. If the clues are too baroque or subtle, the prospect of player failure must be integrated into the narrative. Here, that seemed to take the form of narrative compensation - ie even if the player missteps, the narrative will correct them. This kind of minimizes the player’s consequence a bit, but the very nature of mystery-solving-IF doesn’t have a universal solution to this problem. It is as valid as any other, though no more satisfying. TOM, at least for me, dodged this by (for the most part) clicking. I didn’t NEED the narrative correction often enough to feel cheated, the clues and text nudged me in the right direction, giving me those sweet “hey, I noticed that!” endorphins.

The second dimension is maybe the weakest here? Ultimately, you are trying to identify the (illegal) source of the bad dreams via corroborating witness testimony with suspect interviews. The suspect pool is pretty shallow, but with some ambiguity to not make it trivial. Earlier, I asserted the construction of the mystery was satisfying, and I stand by that. I am drawing a super, SUPER fine line between its CONSTRUCTION, and its SOLUTION. The clues were all interesting and interlocked in satisfying ways. It’s just, the core crime… it was BAD DREAMS. Not murder. Not an elaborate heist. NIGHTMARES. The narrative assured us this was quite transgressive but it never really felt so? It came across more as an extended inconvenience. Even the final unmasking fell prey to shaky foundations. The perpetrator’s motives were grounded in a desire to be seen, be remembered. Yet the narrative also tried to excuse them by assuring us the dreams were unintentional and/or too embarrassing to actually try to correct once manifested. I mean was it the motive or wasn’t it? It felt shaky, and when compounded with the serious finale consequences to a seemingly benign crime, didn’t quite gel for me.

The good news is that the MECHANICS of solving the crime (not to mention the thematically strong linkages in clues themselves) were satisfying enough that any sketchiness in the SOLUTION were minimized. Its well-crafted infusion of fantasy and theater only further stacked into positive territory such that the overwhelming result was a very enjoyable, supremely goofy in all the right ways, romp. That maybe spoke to some needed criminal justice reform in this world.

Spaceship: Fhloston Paradise (the entertainment was literal Space Opera!)
Vibe: Glee presents Clue
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : I guess if it were my work, I would hammer on the perpetrator’s motives a bit harder. Try to tighten that to the level the detecting itself operated at.

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So funny you say that, because there’s a series of short fantasy books, Katherine Addison’s Cemeteries of Amalo, that heavily involve an opera house and various mysteries connected to it, and there’s a very similar “gather the troupe and ask them all questions” scene in the first novella of the series. In those books the detective is a half-elf priest whose holy duties involve finding justice for the dead, so it’s a little darker, but I’m extremely interested to know whether this series was an inspiration or not, because I could not stop thinking about the parallels when playing ToM.

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Ah, thanks, I definitely needed to make my to-read list even longer today…

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Can I jump in here to ask what ‘ASTOOT’ means? ST is presumably Spring Thing, but I can’t figure out the rest, and was not on the forums when this delightful tradition seems to have taken rOOT.

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Oh, phew, @lpsmith , thanks you. I was too embarrassed to ask, thinking it was something everyone knew but me :slight_smile:

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One of the serious benefits of being entirely too overconfident is that I’m always happy to ask the dumb questions!

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Lol, that’s my bad. I neglected to provide the expansion this year. Waay back in 2022, I decided my IFCOMP reviews would be “Reviews Out Of Time”: ROOT. Because I am a living time capsule, apparently. I since adopted Out-Of-Time as a throughline of sorts, including ST’s “Assessing Spring Thing, Out Of Time.”

When you’re ready, ask me about Review-A-Thon’s “RATATOOTY”

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The Missing City Council by Solarius
Played: 4/9/26
Playtime: 30min, no progress without walkthrough

What is a form of a thing, without the heart of the thing? Kind of a homunculus of sorts - carrying its shape but missing the animating elements that give it true life. This feels like an unkind opening to a review, especially for a new author, but cannot instead this observation serve as a tribute to the learning process? The Mona Lisa could not exist, were not Da Vinci a master of his medium. The Craft is what enables the Art. For Frankenstein to rise, stitching the body was a crucial first step.

Parser IF, from its dawning, encapsulated the promise of author-player engagement through the vast medium of language. Constrained in syntax, perhaps, but as wide as the dictionary. Of course this audience knows this to be an illusion (for now! AI may one day deliver on that promise, the clearest possible example of ‘be careful what you wish for’). Illusion is not a pejorative here - all Art has illusory components. That brunette is not entrancing with an enigmatic smile - she’s only two dimensional! That marble shepherd is not poised between action and indecision, he’s a rock shaped like a naked dude! Parsers don’t actually understand all of your native language!

MCC (hey! that acronym seems familiar!) is a fully functional parser game, in the sense that it plays to completion with no blocking bugs. It decidedly is NOT an effective illusion of open world gameplay. The key to effective parser illusion is for the author to anticipate, as much as possible, how a player might engage the world being presented. An author need not provision every possible engagement, so long as they successfully steer the player to satisfactory engagement. Take the simple case of a closed door. If attempting to open it yields:

> open office door
It's locked.

> unlock office door with key
You can't unlock that.

The simple declarative response carries the weight of Reality: this door is an impenetrable barrier. The universe told me so. What should be soft cued here is an alternate entry method. If that method is:

> push office door
The door gives out a faint click.

the overarching question is, "How would the player know to try that after the universe’s unambiguous ‘YOU JUST CAN’T’. This is a soft cue in the text - it DISCOURAGES further attempts. Instead of ‘can’t’ if the message was You don't have a key that works on this door. that would cue a player ‘ok, I need to find a different key!’ If the message was along the lines of There isn't a keyhole on this door. that would cue the player ‘ah, I need to try non-key methods.’ Soft cuing is both the problem and the solution! This is not a new parser dynamic, it is in fact a hallmark of mature parser construction.

Such contradictory or opaque cuing is pervasive in this work. If I can’t LOOK UNDER a mat, how would I know to MOVE it? How would I think to HIT a solid clump of candy? If I can’t PUT CUP UNDER DRIP, how would I think that PUT CUP IN PUDDLE would accomplish this? Practically every step of the way, these artifacts blocked me. For me, the work was unplayable without the walkthrough. Good call providing one though!

“Ok, smug reviewer, how can an author possibly anticipate what all might need cuing?” The useless answer is “think about it.” Sure, as an author becomes more familiar with their craft, SOME opportunities will start to come naturally. But what a dick move it is to advise “Just think of those things you are not thinking of.” Parser tradition does provide a more useful answer though: Alpha/Beta play testing! What better way to suss out how players behave than watch player behavior? This is a work that SCREAMS for play test. It has the hallmarks of a prototype where the ‘success path’ was engineered and implemented, probably tested by author, but none of the gameplay grease needed by an actual player was added.

This textual inadequacy extends to scenario-setting and motivations as well. The piece introduces itself with A perfectly normal mystery. Hey, I’m always on board for wry understated humor, but from there we are navigating and interacting with objects without motivation or sense of goals. If you did not read the blurb on the comp site, you would have no idea what you were expected to accomplish here! Now, parser expectations do some of this lifting: a locked door almost always means ‘find key’ in parser-ville. Guards almost always mean ‘circumvent.’ It’s not a functional gap per se, but it is a very big narrative one. Without an overarching goal though, it becomes an exercise of outlasting obstacles.

But! As a first effort, just assembling that working prototype is an accomplishment worth celebrating! Its core multi-step puzzle is an amusingly complicated one: create tainted tea to send the guards rushing to the toilet. It is pretty funny with a satisfying variety of steps. Maybe my initial take is exactly backwards. Maybe the heart of the parser is in tact, infused with a budding love of the medium. Perhaps it is the body whose stitching needs a bit more work. If one were to recast its current state as Alpha, then solicit some testers…

…like those you might find in the audience of a comp…

…ready to play and provide feedb… Oh, Clever Girl

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: First Draft
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would undergo a round of Beta testing to see how players are engaging the world, and diligently provision everything they tried. Most especially including all the missing nouns! Attached below, I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE.

mcc_jjmcc.txt (26.6 KB)

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No, this comment is the first I’ve heard of that series! How interesting. I’ll have to check it out.

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Thank you so much for playing and reviewing!

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The Universal Robot (Assembled by Hex) by Agnieszka Trzaska
Played: 4/9/26
Playtime: 1hr, endings 1,2,5,6,7,12

What a delight this Twinesformer work is. It checks so many boxes for me: cruel capitalism (and AI!) satire, wry humor, creative, multi-use puzzle gameplay. You play as an alien mechanic, working on a space-factory whose management is pursuing labor-elimination measures in the most literal way possible. Your task is to assemble the robot that will replace you, in service of an organization that is so dehumanized it can’t conceive why that might be unappealing.

Follows a domino-tumbling sequence of tasks to not only assemble the damned thing, but then to try and mitigate its grim purpose. The puzzles are a veritable showcase of well-cued lateral-thinking, multi-use, object combination posers. They are also charged with humor and pathos, making things zip along practically friction free. The UI is a tremendous asset here. Objects can be Examined, Combined, sometimes Read, and Used. Combining or Using items causes the text to be populated with gear icons on nouns that might apply. It is a very efficient UI, simultaneously cuing things to try and executing commands. There is enough variety in the noun space to not make things trivial, and enough clarity in the scenarios that lawn mowering is unlikely to be necessary. Even when the things that are asked of you are objectively bananas. The UI really strikes the sweet spot of efficient command execution and soft-guiding progress without being intrusive.

But really, who plays IF for the UI? Robot people whose humanity has been consumed by social media algorithms, that’s who! For the rest of us, a clumsy UI might damage a work beyond salvation, but the BEST it can hope for is to fade to invisibility and let our brains eddy along with the flow of the narrative. The fact that choice-select parser-play so often tilts former makes this accomplishment worth noting, but it will rarely be a work’s defining feature.

No, the showpiece here is the amusing puzzle play, married to pervasively winning, wry humor. The temptation to dip into the details runs the risk of breaking the dam on a deluge of spoilers, which I am loath to do. As a beleaguered blue-collar alien, you are at the mercy of mercurial management, aggressive security personnel, the implacable momentum of automated manufacturing and supercilious bureaucrats. And one friend. Just the one. All of this building to 12 possible endings, most of which are very fun variations on a theme.

And here is where I might call into question my credentials as player AND reviewer. None of the above is what excited me most about this work. No that credit goes to the tiniest of implementation details that spoke to really next-level game engineering by the author. Late in the game, once the titular assembly was in its final stage, it was clear the narrative was entering a ‘no return’ moment. An accomplished player, trained by years of consuming such games, would absolutely have saved their game at this point. Your humble servant? Drunk on endgame momentum, I plowed ahead without, got an ending, then was confronted with the unhappy consequences of that choice. Should I actually restart? The game was short enough to make it a possibility, but complex enough to promise unsatisfying, repetitive clicking.

So I peeked at the save screen. THE WORK HAD AUTOSAVED FOR ME, AT THE CRUCIAL DECISION POINT!!! I’m not sure what prompted me to look, whether the game had subtly indicated this would be true, or whether I discovered this design gem through providence. Either way, it had the same effect. I powered through five more endings, restoring each time, and each time getting giddier and giddier that the work made even this, the most transactional of IF tropes (collect the endings) smooth and friction free! What a gift for the impulsive, slave-to-the-moment player! The fact the game was so generous to its most incompetent players where it might justifiably punish them spoke to a kindness of spirit that was practically moving. Contrasting with the cold satire of its narrative in a way that threw the setting’s lack of empathy into high relief and was essentially a meta-statement showing an alternate, better path.

Yeah, I just said we can save ourselves from Exploitive Capitalism with… AUTOSAVE. Am I overreading this? Absolutely not. I mean, I would give ANYTHING to have an autosave that could restore to 2023.

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Monkey Wrenching
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : This was such a complete package, I think the only thing I might tweak would be to cue the acid pool a little stronger. It really feels like crossing it is possible, but that was the one (thankfully optional) puzzle I didn’t tumble onto.

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