Thank you for being you today. I appreciate the opportunity to experience your creativity. I will be reviewing as a part of Spring Thing, the Great Play Marathon, and ParserComp.
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Crier by Antemaion
So this 4AM I was flailing out of bed to you know as it happens vomit blood, don’t look at me like that, you some kind of aristocrat who sleeps through hyperefficient daynight cycles in your Gulfstream G666 Fluidless Sheen, I bet you’ve never even seen yourself in the mirror on account of a complete lack of pours, you’re sandpaper in a tan suit, you’re a Miami highway migraine, you’re some atavist Atacama where the heavens shine so clarified no life strains beneath them tormented, and while on the whole I don’t recommend the experience, there was yet this pleasantly delirious moment where you’re dripping over a sink lightheaded maundering like “Splinters of throbbing light. Blood trickles from your nose. You’re promising too much. Causality grates against your nervous system. Put yourself in the path of entropy any longer, and you will be destroyed. This world is but a shell. Pressure shivers it from within.” Nodding to yourself gently holding the hair back by the curled wrist, yeah but everything’s a shell, it’s all a shell game, shell corporals holding shell corporals holding shell corporals holding back your hair so you know it doesn’t the blood.
Wildeyed mycologies exquisitate our subterranean jumblescape to alluring lithographs of “Toxins that erode the lungs, destroy the nerves, rot the flesh in an instant. A battlefield covered in skeletons covered in pink foam.” Worldbuilding iridises its inscrutable stains, “These aren’t all my lichen. Most are feral, or wildtype. Semiotic mimics”, which could mutate to gutterpunk jabberwocky which darksparkles the sludge too smooth, selfsame, sludge sprawling, but the prose does hazard its splatters to graffiti, it is I assure you always nice to have something to say, “They evolved to maximize attention. They emulate written speech: warnings, prayers, infographics. There are thriving colonies in the upperworld now, cultivated at shrines,” here you’re going oh god oh no is this lore but luckily we’re saved by the swerve to luminosity for the sake of it “plastered apotropaic over airship hulls. People like them.” That final plunk of throwaway candour keeps the theatrics easy, which is good until it goes all glib in teenspeak dissipations of its own moments: “sounds really peak for suffering and subjugation honestly”. Rather the purpose of making it look effortless is to emphasize all the effort. When the “grossbeautifulvile” overlap glitches too hard towards any one axis, the “fungal, ozonic, wetly metallic” glistens decay harshly to “A shit graveyard.” And in such climes the game wanders always on the edge of shitpost, which is sometimes charming, “ever at Your service! cya” and manytimes not so much, “A grub cat masturbates on a pile of scrap integument. Half-formed larvae squirm on its back, a few scattering off into the discarded chitin and sinew.”
When it does maintain composition, this magic of having something to say while expending most of our energy revelling largely in the raw pleasure of saying still must be balanced against the other tendency, for it all of course to mean if you squint. We get the hatchmarked sidesketch of the spiritual thrum: “The subworld is a repository for disavowed projects. The toys that some upper power threw down in disgust. Or the things that crawled from the corpses of those toys. If you seek influence, learn their ecologies.” This, counterposed against an overworld ordered by Commerce Torture, we make all the requisite rounds, “Most of them work the soil to produce food. Or in mines to produce matter for manufacture. Their bodies are destroyed by the toil, captives of obligation. Above them, a handful reaping the produce. A chain stretching absolute up to the sovran” assembles us right and ready for the Porpentine revolutionary lashout, final slimergences wheresoever “A different evolution obtains” in the overlooked margins, since “Scientiffs know not our screwing-algorithms”, demiurge unchained here we go, but then some random uh oh cuts you out to a cutaway ending, congrats you’re leftover limbs to be surgered, congrats uh well it turns out there were too many limbs actually, congrats you can’t feel your limbs on account of lichen, congrats you uh just kind of chose a boring option so let’s end the game anyway, go back to the beginning if you want the true ending, but then the fulcrum I found isn’t so much a climax as a thesis statement: “Sovran Absolack: But of course you do. It was the face of history as an unbreakable fortress.” The pleasure of this austere surprise is dampened a bit by “Absolack”, but you know maybe the real vengeance was all the friends we made along the way, “haven’t done much killing lately though… don’t really miss it or anything. just chilling in the catacombs here”.
And that’s fine! Vibing’s how you get the vibes, what are you a JRPG protag here to Masamune God, relax, the whole point of being exiled is to leave your troubles behind. “You wait. Small sounds take place in the dark. Is that a real glint of light? Or the prisoner’s cinema, a visual trick of your pareidoliac mind?” Stop fretting that you can’t get a grasp on anything and give yourself over to the paresthesia’s pleasures.
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Our Lady of Thorns by Joel Burton
The Name of the Rose is a strange inspiration for a murder mystery, because it isn’t. Like most Eco, it’s lavish, loosely interwoven tapestries of intertextuality as a mode of lifetexturing intellection hung in such a sequence as to imply progression for those in need of instruction. It’s more a mystery in the sense of medieval mystery plays, biblical stories breathing life into everyday scenes. William of Baskerville is precisely the joke, the Doylean deduction inspires the crimes towards a shared spiritual frenzy, whereas the real motive is and always will be a book.
This somewhat awkward inheritance is where I think the central tension of Our Lady of Thorns lies. On one hand, a murder mystery in a medieval monastery offers an excellent tinkerbox for the intrepid adventurer: the eight offices provide a carefully orchestrated timeline for you to explore, understand, then optimize; the setting is a redolent admixture of ambient physicality so readily repuposable to puzzling, with a Latin motto indicating how to open a secret passage and stained glass scenes indicating how to open a secret passage; and the extensive gardens and botanical knowledge thereby trained offers a grounded intuitional network for several satisfying guessworks. On the other hand, the weight of simulating so specifically stimulating a space stresses out the story’s modest ambitions: in lieu of the glossaries, the place is painted in vague accumulations of time, from “The stone floor is worn smooth by centuries of feet” to “The steps dip in the centre from generations of sandaled feet” to “worn floorboards where chests were dragged back and forth over the years”, repetitions dulling the atmosphere fogged; and the central motive for the mystery, that a brother is stealing psalters produced as the “primary source of priory income” to support his struggling family, isn’t really accurate, English monasteries didn’t make books as commercial objects on spec, as it were, but rather as gifts to patrons or to fulfill a specific commission from an important figure, and by the fourteenth century this gift would probably have been a book of hours rather than a psalter, so while the scenario isn’t implausible still it relies on a vague high monasticism rather than a genuine engagement with the monastery as a living social institution.
Of course, an interactive fiction game playing at a medievalism that vagues the prior to prioritize the puzzles is a story worn smooth by centuries of feet. If anything, it’s the delicate sense of craftsmanship that pervades Our Lady of Thorns which sufficiently stirs you from your default stupor to summon such complaints. Lucky we, treated to so laudsable a labor of love constructed from months of “ritual, timing, prayer, silence. It feels both comforting and confining. You’re not sure which feeling prevails.”
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Cyclic Fruition Number One by D E Haynes
The selfposession required of selfreference is to avoid seeming so selfevidently selfinterested, which is gauche, when we’re all quite vogue, thank you, perfectly selfaware. The characters are stuck in a loop, but never you worry, they’re tying themselves in knots to prove their agency: “Chalgrove: Human action is repetitious. We establish a routine and it propagates to others. / Broadstairs: Yes, and the vocabulary evolves accordingly. New words are created, or older ones get repurposed. / Appleby: But here we’ve encountered a semantic token with no apparent reference. Which implies an entire process of action which hitherto we’ve been unaware of. / Chalgrove: So I’m classifying this as a Phantasm. For the moment, at least. / Appleby: OK, and whatever else we encounter will simply accrete. Until we glimpse its nature. / Broadstairs: Then our own vocabulary will adjust to explain it. / Chalgrove: A new case then? / Broadstairs: A new case. Top priority. Happy now, Appleby?” A reciprocus structure cycling over and over, and “With every repetition we precipitate new meaning.”
Do we? New meaning requires a first meaning, some germinating core which roots whatever proves straining this point to structure fruitful. So very well, who are our interlocutors to localize all this interlocution? Some characters are sketched promisingly: “To consult with Broadstairs is to discover a beneficent uncle. To engage him awakens a mighty foe. His letterhead crowns only solemn undertakings. His monogram makes most weighty the deed. / He is sincere in every syllable. So he will spare you the details. You will be unable to recall exactly what was promised. And when he gives his Word, his Word comes not with a word. The Word of Broadstairs is a nod. An affirming smile. An intoxicating handshake.” A dutiful but ambiguous operator, certain of his authority, affable uncertainly along the banks of a ruse, excellent, but where is that in the actual dialogue? “Broadstairs: Pie and chips? Or Welsh Rarebit? / Some place where we can smoke and sit. / A pint nearby, my pipe well lit. / And these two sitting opposite.” Whatever ambitions you might have had for this man to fulfill all go up in smoke, alas. Each turn you take through the looping draws up more and more of the blanks, which is great for Russian Roulette, but in a story the mirror of the soul is made a meta vanity. The structure of the text is structuring the text, every reincursion blunts the borders dully unporous, suffocation in the selfsame: “Broadstairs: Do we have a stable representation of our situation? I’d like us to agree on some sort of interpretation. / Chalgrove: OK, here’s what we know. A new word has appeared. And it is propagating everywhere. / Appleby: No, we need to think in terms of processes. Language is action. / Chalgrove: Action by whom? / Appleby: I don’t know. But forget where you think you are. If I’m right we’re experiencing some sort of poietic fruition. / Broadstairs: This is becoming a three pipe problem. I need to reflect for a few minutes.” So’s the issue with dialogue ultragained to white noise, we think only in the terms of processes.
A mention is made here, I cannot imagine idly, of a Winograd matrix, and like a lot of Eastgate era hypertext, the text is the hypertext, so it’s an inconvenience to be dragged back to the text. I blame all of this, of course, on Samuel Beckett, whom I’ve never forgiven. Beckett in the past tense is perfect, you see, so many negative constructions all minimus arrayed, any presumption pops to plummet you voidnausea, voila. The problem is that, at some definite point in time, you’re engaged in reading it to have eventually have read it, and precisely then the gap between you and the nothing drones nonzero, which I insist it is, still, it’s spring outside, there’s got to be a world out there, somewhere…
Anyway, this is a satisfying sentence: “A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals.” Sorry for complaining! I’m always complaining. Oh well. Thanks!
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The Saltcast Adventure by Beth Carpenter
Below the mode of being, not so below you cannot still feel it, a longing hollow from “Years of deprivation” having “pared your body to bone and wire,” lies the recognition of some valiance lovingly imagined of yourself “extended in an eternal gesture of longing … showing only as a hole where interior hollow meets exterior plane.” The central metaphor here, embedded in a magicomechanics hoardedly lored, is a phantasmagoric kaleidoscopia where “whatever phantoms lurk in the half-created space between fantasy and the real world may escape through the mirror”. Desire as a tenuous malleation of reality as “simply an image” which could substantiate, could we only seek ourselves some deeper fundament buried beneath salts of our tossed wayward upon strands, shatters us into a thousand sins, “for we fall short of the Gods and their desires for us”, the tendrills specificity of this sundermust buried heartcore within our howling thisafter lodes the cursed mirror “hidden somewhere within the Host’s body” our communions cannot consecrate.
Do we, deep beneath the surface, discover from the distortions faces? Partially. As we might expect of an uncanny liminality between dangerous presence and exoticating internus, The Saltcast Adventure sustains its fantastic charge in the alternating current of intensity and mundanity. We encounter, in cavernous depths, the cursed spirits haunting the land, and it’s simply a society much like ours, markets and wars and stories refractions of our own. This ambiguity creates a spiritsickness in the heaves of uncertainty, where apparitions undergo apatheia to mere appearance, or so it appears, apperceive in their inreflections a vastness beyond our contained: “The first leap of flame eats a hole in the world, sears through your eyes. A moment afterwards, once you’ve finished blinking, the modest candlelight reveals that the smallish room you’re in is almost entirely bordered in mirrored glass, re-creating the minor crowd of beings around you as a vast throng of duplicates.” In every visagestation of the weird looms the blooms of buriedness, briefly, as we’re harried through, lambents of the spiritual to, suffer it through the blinking need, “stare out into the interior space of the Seeming.”
Until, that is, the current alternates, and we’re onto the next thing. The Saltcast Adventure establishes its rhythm by skipping the first hour of the Fellowship of the Ring, page one at “This is the furthest you’ve ever been from home.” Always we’re hurried onto the next thing, almost by Act III to the point of parody, when Patricia skips in her mother’s footsteps, intuiting immediately “She must have found a Blessing Stone, or something of the kind”, a secret knowledge we’ll graciously attribute to being “a bard, build for aftermaths”, then swiftly encountering Saltcast who swiftly recognize her as Madelaine’s daughter, so that we might expeditiously fastforward her mother’s expedition into the Hydra King’s lair. And then the next thing storytelling sallows out the assortiment of sentiments, suggestions accumulating sedimentation: “You stare blankly ahead of you for a few moments. That was certainly an encounter … You move on as quickly as you can.”
I’ll take it over in the year thirty second of the reign of so and so, but this tendency, when combined with the story’s penchant for sheer incident, leaves us “floating in the dark, and around you swim darting shoals of light and colour and sound. There’s no way to reach out to them, but sometimes their course through the void brings them close enough to perceive clearly. Laughter, soft but cruel. A pale hand pressing on glass until it breaks.” The Saltcast Adventure correctly intuits that a pervasion of mystery is the route by which its proper nouns can parade to the theme, but we must of the mysteries manifest more than the might be or the sublimity it implies softens simply to sensations, a séance of “the nothing in your head—your whole self, your entire sense of reality flattened into a stage for that voice to occupy. You don’t understand the words, but it doesn’t matter. They fill you anyway, swelling inside your skin, beautiful, terrible, indifferent.” I’m not without feeling, though, I can cherish sensations for their sake. Isn’t it lovely, such a turn of phrase: “The circle of wavering light in which you move makes the darkness beyond look like a receding tide of ink, pooling in the depths as you make your way along”. A bit of humor also helps: “You’ve got such a human sort of look on your face. Gormless.” Anyways, in all these mirrors and mystications, sometimes it’s nice just to feel seen: “His fiancé’s spider collection is getting pride of place in their new home when they move in together.”
If the central ambition melts away into world historical strings of fantasy pseudoconsquence, then precisely in its hollows we hallow the unmade, which ever lingers our losstouch to literature: “They believe that we come from the souls of the unmade peoples of the world the Gods discarded … And they believe that the Dead God exists still on the other side of the mirror, and might grant them their memories of what they consider the true world back if they call on her enough.” Who doesn’t yearn a bit of gnostic needing? “Someone should have saved you, but you don’t have a face for the someone.”
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