Your Very Last Words
Interactive Dreams
Running this on my Windows machine was impossibly slow. It would take 30 seconds to a full minute just to display the next screen of text. For a while I’d alt-tab to something else while the next screen was loading, but eventually gave up on that; it clearly wasn’t the intended experience. So! For now, I’m writing it off as ‘impossibly buggy’.
Saltwrack
Henry Kay Cecchini
Ohhhh, I liked this one.
At the beginning, you’re given the goal of ‘go on a dangerous expedition to discover why the apocalypse happened’, and then immediately given some choices that felt sim-like (who to take with you; what supplies to bring), then set off across the wastes. Weirdly, in a way it felt vaguely similar to ‘The Olive Tree’: you’re given a sim to navigate, and while that’s happening, the story happens around you. This one had a much closer connection between ‘what you are doing’ and ‘where the story is going’ than that, but I at least was somewhat in that mode when playing: trying to maximize my survival odds while simultaneously trying to figure out what happened. I suppose a lot of modern cRPGs are similar: you’re given fights to beat to keep you occupied while you encounter the story.
At any rate, regardless of the genre this game inhabits, it worked for me. I felt like I was making meaningful choices as I went, trying to safely make it to my destination and back, and appropriately, the journey there was much less harrowing than the journey back: the stakes kept increasing, and the twists started coming more frequently. Eventually I made a wrong choice and died, and of course the game has no save or undo, so I had to click through the whole game again to get back where I was. (Why? Why make me do this? Whyyyyyyyyyyy?) Then I made a different wrong choice, died again, clicked furiously again, and then finally made it to a satisfying (and weird!) ending.
Other than the fact that save/undo would have made for a VASTLY improved experience, the game itself was great. It had interesting worldbuilding, intriguing characters, a sympathetic and relatable PC, and realistic challenges that felt satisfying to overcome.
I kind of feel like the game was probably a ‘gauntlet’ style choice game (at least on the way home), with wrong choices sending you to an early grave/exit. But I don’t know! I also don’t know if making different choices of companions at the beginning would have changed the outcome, and I kind of don’t want to know, either. Somehow it’s more satisfying to me to have made it through with my original choices.
Did the author have anything to say? Present a harrowing and intriguing world.
Did I have anything to do? Make difficult but satisfying choices to navigate that world.
High On Grief
Norbez Jones
Hmm.
It’s weird being asked (in a sense) to comment on a highly personal piece like this (I assume?), especially when my own highly personal experience is just different enough to be… well.
So: the premise is that you are Yancy, an agender child of a terrible woman who just died. The mother in question is given exactly two characteristics: a) abuser and b) Christian. The two kind of blend together for Yancy, especially given that the mother’s reason to reject their agender status was their Christianity.
You go to the mom’s funeral at the mom’s church, where you are further berated for being agender, and when it’s your turn to stand up in front of everyone and say something, if you say your mom was abusive, you then run outside, upset, you are then confronted by the pastor, who seems more concerned about the fact that you made a scene than he is about the fact that you just accused your mom of abuse.
And, like, OK? I don’t want to dump on anyone’s lived experience, but these are cartoon villains. And they may well be cartoon villains because they are based on people who act like cartoon villains in real life. I certainly have heard enough stories that I’d believe there are actual people who act that way. But the game presents itself as a meditation on being sad that someone who was terrible to you has died, and the complicated feelings this engenders. But the solution seems to be to assure themselves that, yes, their mother was indeed a cartoon villain. Assuming this game is some form of therapy, is that… actually helpful? That’s a genuine question. Does it actually help to reduce the memory of someone to merely the (true!) terrible role they filled in your life? The mom is said to be a wonderful person by everyone else in her church, but all Yancy sees this as, is as a facade: a fake face worn to fool people. Is that likely? What if it wasn’t true? What if she genuinely cared about people, as long as they weren’t her own child? That kind of makes her an even more terrible person (which the game kind of hinted at for a second, but never really embraced), but at least she’d have a bit of nuance. Again, I don’t know who these people are based on. Maybe they were just ‘simple evil’. But maybe there was some complication, and maybe (only maybe! I’m not an actual therapist!) acknowledging that complication could help Yancy work through the equally real abuse they suffered? But in the end, my sense was that Yancy still has a lot of work in front of them with respect to their relationship with their mom. This is probably fine; there’s no need to tackle everything all at once. But I could sense the unresolved threads, and it left me a bit unsettled.
I feel like I can say this only because it’s presented as a work of fiction, but I’m trying to tread lightly in case there are more autobiographical aspects to this piece. (And, like, how could there not be?)
The only other thing I want to say here is that while I’ve certainly seen this brand of Christianity in fiction and in news reports, it doesn’t track with the Christianity I’ve seen nor try to exemplify in my own life. I worry that, just like Yancy’s mom was reduced to cartoon villainy, Christianity itself was also reduced to cartoon villainy. Again, maybe that’s the only thing the author has seen! Christianity as an institution is certainly large enough to contain this sort of anti-Christian nonsense, and at pretty large scales, to boot. But this particular brand of nonsense seems to be the only version you ever see in art and media. Probably because it’s the only version that some people see in their lives. So, I dunno. It’s sad, is all. It’s sad all around.
Did the author have anything to say? Yup! It was an interesting and important snapshot into a kid dealing with unexpected grief.
Did I have anything to do? I could choose whether the protagonist stands up for themselves or not, and then semi-randomly choose which friend to talk to afterwards. It was kind of limited, but reasonable.
Possibly you missed the fact – which is a bit hidden – that you can actually have ten conversations with friends as you work through all the brownies? (I’m not sure you missed it, but I’m mentioning it just in case.)
Thank you for the kind review, Lucian!
I did intend to include a Save feature—but it just wasn’t working out and I unfortunately didn’t have enough time to implement it before the deadline, so I scrapped it. For a post-comp release, I think I’ll prioritize adding it 
Your feedback is appreciated!
I feel as though another factor is that there’s less reason for Christianity to feature prominently in a story unless it’s a toxic version of it. There are plenty of dramatic stories you could come up with involving the KKK, but far fewer about church bake sales.
Oh, hmm. I thought they were alternate endings, not that the protagonist actually talked to everyone in sequence ‘in the fiction’. Thanks for the information! Thinking they were alternate endings made me think I had reached the end of the game, and I could explore the alternates if I wanted, or not. If the game doesn’t ‘actually’ end until you’ve talked to everyone, that’s… not what I was led to believe.
I mean, I’d play a game that pitted the KKK against a bake sale! But yeah, I’m sure this is indeed also a factor.
I always forget that some systems don’t have save/undo built in; it seems so basic that my instinct is to assume that the author must have turned it off somehow, or at least forgotten to enable it. I’m sorry you didn’t have time to make it work, but am happy it’s slated for inclusion later!
Thanks for the review Lucian! Did you go through the replays like Yancy asked? I’m assuming from your conclusion that Yancy only sees their mother as a cartoon villain that you did not. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the true ending.
Also, regarding Christianity: your experience with it may be positive, but for many, it is not. There is nuance to the topic, but there is no nuance in being around people who misgender you and say the abuse you experienced can’t be true (as it is in Yancy’s case). What you call “this particular brand of nonsense” is more real to me and many people than you will ever know, and not experiencing such things is certainly a privilege I, and many others, will never have. I’m glad you try to live by a different example, but the way you talked about this topic was/is extremely disappointing to me.
I hadn’t, and now I have. But no, it didn’t really change the way I saw the mom’s portrayal: I don’t think Yancy ever saw their mother as anything other than a straightforward villain. Again, the trauma is still fresh, and moving from ‘my mom was normal’ to ‘my mom was terrible’ is clearly the next step they need. I am just guessing that it’s not going to be the last step they need. And, as I said before, that’s just a guess; I’m not a therapist. And there also certainly could have been intent behind bits that I simply missed. Yancy worked through a lot of stuff about themselves in the discussions, which was good!
Also! I appreciated the fact that the game was able to spur me to think about these things more, as opposed to spurring me to think about things like ‘there was a typo on page 2’. It was a thoughtful, honest game, and that came across 100%.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘the way you talked about the topic’, unfortunately, but if you would like to explain, I’ll be here. (Or we could move to DMs or your ‘feeling misunderstood’ post? I’m happy either way.)
I definitely didn’t mean to criticize the fact that you portrayed Christians negatively in your game. Re-reading my post, I can see that too much of my own frustration crept in there, so I apologize. I was trying more to lament the fact that enough Christians have this nonsensical heresy baked into their theology so thoroughly that this is all people see (And of course that’s all they see! It 100% overwhelms anything else, good or bad.) It makes me sad that this is the situation in the world, or at least the US. It makes me sad that my own church’s little pronoun stickers for our nametags aren’t enough to counterbalance the evil nonsense others put out there in the world. (This is, of course, not all we do. And it also makes me sad that everything else we do also is not enough.)
Gotcha, thank you! I’m also very curious what you thought of the meta elements. Maybe I need to make the notes a required page instead of an optional one. . . Will consider for the next update.
& I can appreciate that, yes.
For the 2nd part: what I mean in the way you talked about the topic, your frustrations came though, and it felt like you were personally offended by the depiction. Which is something you yourself notice here and apologize for, so I appreciate that a lot. There’s a lot I can appreciate about Christianity, mainly in helping the homeless and those between housing, but I’m not a part of it anymore because of the way folks of faith treated me & many others. And because I feel theologically disconnected from it as a whole (I studied high-level theology in college).
I think this is a big part of it, yeah. It’s great that my passionately Christian relatives are onboard with trans rights and supportive of the trans people in the family, and I’m very lucky to have that kind of experience rather than the sort Yancy went through—but my experience is also not the sort of thing that usually drives someone to make art about it. And even if I did write the IF of “here’s how the protagonist’s family has been loving and supportive”, the fact that some of these people are devoutly Christian probably wouldn’t take center stage.
We can use that as our tagline: “We’ll treat you in a way you don’t have to make art about.”
The inspiration for my new low-stakes religious drama, “The Life of Christ”, focusing on a normal day in the life of the Messiah where nothing out of the ordinary happens. He finishes building a cabinet and starts working on some nice chairs. Buys some new lumber from Shmuel on the next street over. Mary makes dinner.
Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan
N. Cormier, co-written by: Emery Joyce
I had not played any Lady Thalia games before, and this was a delightful introduction to the franchise! The character was fun, the premise was fun, the situations she got herself into were fun. The puzzles were reasonable, fun to solve, and had some flexibility to them, which I appreciated at some times, and some times I worried that the flexibility made it a little too easy? When there are three options, and you get three chances, it’s highly likely that you’ll be able to figure out the correct option by the third try. But interestingly, the fiction kind of filled things in for me, here: if you pick correctly the first time, everything goes well and I felt clever, and if I only got it right the third time, I felt like my protagonist was actively floundering and only made it in the end by the skin of her teeth.
Some of the game was progressing the overall narrative of Lady Thalia’s story, and I was impressed that I was able to slot right in and figure things out without any ‘wait, what?’ moments. Hopefully those familiar with the series didn’t feel overly-exposited-upon, but it was the right amount of exposition for me. It felt natural, too, with few if any “As you know, Bob” moments.
One thing I greatly enjoyed: seeing a single scene from two viewpoints. Absolutely lovely. It was great for me as a player understanding more of what was going on in the scene, and it was great for characterization, too: I got to know Thalia and Mel almost more from how each of them described the same scene as I did from anything else in the entire game.
I don’t know what the other games focused on, but it felt to me like the additional character goal of ‘romance’ was probably added on to this game, in a way that hadn’t existed in the previous games? I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I can at least say that I felt a set of game expectations, as it were, from, I dunno, my gestalt reading of the text and the options, and it felt like the romance bits were an extra reach this time; something additional the author (and, for that matter, Thalia) were adding to the list of things they wanted to accomplish. I’ve noted before that I really like games that know exactly what they are and then exactly accomplish that thing. For me, it felt like the game knew exactly what it was and then added romance to the mix. And it worked! It was cute! And it felt real! So my overall sense of it was as an added bonus over and above a solid foundation. I guess another way to put it is that had the game not included any romance at all, or put it entirely into cut scenes, that would have felt fine, but as it was, it felt well-integrated into everything else, and really helped brighten the game around the edges to make it something special.
Finally: the game had save but not undo, which was fine. But playing so many choice games without one or the other this comp has finally crystalized for me what it is that I like about undo: it’s the fastest way for me to get back to the story. If I have to replay from the beginning, or even replay from the last time I remembered to save, I always spend the first minute or so clicking furiously, without reading any text at all. And that experience pushes me away from the game; I am disengaging and treating it more as an object; a piece of code to manipulate. It’s time spent not thinking of myself as an actual character in the world of the story. If all I have to do is click ‘undo’, I’m immediately back ‘in character’ at exactly the moment that I wanted to be. The path-now-not-taken feels more like a premonition on the part of the character, instead of a bad piece of code I-the-player am now trying to avoid.
Did the author have anything to say? They had a fun story to tell and fun characters to tell it with.
Did I have anything to do? I got to feel clever a lot, and it was great. And overcome some mild obstacles to fall in love!
Thank you for the thoughtful review, and we’re both very glad you enjoyed the game! (I’m especially delighted that you liked the dual POV sections; I enjoyed writing them but they were, well, approximately double the effort of a regular conversation.)
Sorry about the lack of undo—we don’t have it in these games because it would completely trivialize the conversation puzzles, although as you note they’re pretty trivial to begin with. In one of our previous games (not in this series) we had undo disabled by default but allowed players to choose to enable it, so maybe that’s something we could consider here.
So, here’s another way to look at it. Puzzles have been a staple of IF since forever, but their role is to involve the player and make them invested enough to keep reading. If Undo had been available, I might have started exploring your game and read even more of it: namely, the failure paths. I could have treated conversations like a puzzle the first time through, see if I was correct or not, then hit ‘undo’ to see the perfect path and also the imperfect ones! And then probably choose to move on with a winning path, but if the game let me, maybe not! Maybe I’d try making it harder on myself, or on my stalwart companion?
I guess one way to make someone play through (and read) your sub-optimal paths is to make ‘backing up and trying again’ too onerous for them to do it. And if they have fun on that sub-optimal path, you’ve successfully encouraged them to have fun in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise. But if you allow undo and let other people experience more of the game, maybe it’s worth it? I don’t know; I don’t know how many people are like me vs. how many people are other types. I just know that one way I have enjoyed games is to know all the paths through it before settling on one ‘canonical’ playthrough for myself. And, you know, everyone likes funny death scenes.
Errand Run
Sophia Zhao
You have $20, and you have to do the grocery shopping. It’s a short game, but I found the way you had to balance what you needed against what you wanted to be surprisingly compelling, and the different endings were interesting the way they took the very small input of ‘what you end up spending money on’ and extrapolated wildly, but not completely unbelievably. There’s one ending in particular I’d like to talk about, so spoiler blurs up…
Ha, right, OK, the first paragraph is of course total BS, but my first version of this review started off “I really liked the twist!” and then I realized that even knowing that there is a twist would spoil the game too much. I don’t suppose anyone else wants to organize people to make fake one-paragraph reviews for this game, followed by a spoiler-blurred real review? Job’s open if you want it. And if you clicked on this paragraph but haven’t played the game, don’t click on the next paragraph! Just go play it; it really is 15 minutes max, and the twist really is good.
At any rate, this is basically a one-joke game where the joke is the twist, but I felt it was exactly the right size and scope to pull it off. The first time I got weird text I figured (obviously) something was off, but I thought it was going to be something personal/psychological. Then you get enough more information to realize, no, it’s just another post-apocalypse game; surprise! And then you get more information and it’s not another nuclear or climate apocalypse! Instead it’s… the Christian Rapture apocalypse? And then, wait, not even that, but something else? Aliens, maybe? Who knows, the game is done! You’re just a scared kid who’s gone a little crazy and everyone you know is dead, and you’ll never know any more! Which itself is basically yet another joke, and instead of laughing you’re now creeped out. Well done, game.
Here’s my real two-question section: Did the author have anything to say? Lead you down the primrose path a few times, dribbling bread crumbs of backstory to keep you following them before finally cackling and disappearing around a corner. Did I have anything to do? Make wrong assumptions and have them subverted. And now, back to the fake review!
Did the author have anything to say? An interesting think-piece on the future implications of current scarcity.
Did I have anything to do? Make a few choices, and watch them play out in interesting and believable ways.
Yeah, to some extent I think it’s a personal preference thing; for my own part, I find if an undo button is available I will not resist the temptation to use it, but at the same time it can keep me from fully engaging with/getting into the flow of the story. (I touched on this a bit in my review of Civil Service from last year’s comp.) But since it’s possible to let people choose to enable or disable it, I think this is one of those rare situations where you actually can please everybody! (Unless there’s some secret third category of players that wants undo enabled but only when the game is touched by the light of the full moon or something.)
Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata?
Damon L. Wakes
Hey, I’ve played the other two games in this series! I enjoyed the very first game (“Who Shot Gum E. Bear”) to a point, but felt disconnected at the end, where the mystery turned out to be a joke instead of an actual ‘mystery solution’:
The next year, this was my reaction to “Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?”:
Reader, I was wrong: this is the game I had thought I was playing lo these ages past. Game #2 took itself seriously, but the game was largely ‘find clues in a warehouse’. This game basically went down my muder-mystery check-list, item for item (only missing one, which I will not reveal): ‘interviewing people, collecting clues, analyzing them, checking for alibi discrepancies, getting attacked by a goon and managing to escape’. I almost feel like Mr. Wakes literally had my list up in one window when designing his game in another.
That makes this a much more ambitious game than either of its predecessors, and the sheer weight of it all was almost too much. Personally, I often felt adrift in the game, not sure what I was supposed to be doing next. I often then found something helpful to do anyway, but I definitely more often felt like a lost puppy than a hardboiled detective. In the end, I had to rely on hints a little more heavily than I would have liked. But! I still figured some things out on my own, and the process of discovery (and the backstory of the murder you eventually solve) was satisfying. My only wish was for some sort of to-do list for myself that often appears in these types of games; I feel like I would have been on track more, and felt more in-character even if I was floundering a bit in reality. I also felt like the two-hour limit chafed a bit; it seemed like the sort of game that would play better if you gave it a little more room to breathe, going away and coming back with an idea.
But complaining seems churlish for a game that seems like it was written literally for me, personally. And I liked it a lot! I liked the atmosphere, I liked the cut-scene (he said vaguely), I liked the expanded Sugar City Lore, and I liked the final solution to the mystery, as well as its conclusion. The game was also well fleshed-out, with a lot of content almost everywhere.
But I did want the verb ‘chew’ to be a synonym for ‘lick’ instead of ‘eat’.
Did the author have anything to say? Yes! A solid murder mystery within an utterly ludicrous world that never batted an eye to let on that it knew it was ludicrous.
Did I have anything to do? Yes, quite a lot! So much so that I felt a bit adrift at times, but that did mean that it felt all the more satisfying when I figured something out (like stopping the motorcycle, which deserves a special call-out as ‘a thing that could happen only in Sugar City’) on my own.