Ha, cheers, I’m glad you liked the review – hopefully it’s clear that despite the comedy negative framing, I really dug your game! And if it’s any consolation the typos were quite minor – I caught a who’s/whose error, and a principle/principal one. Only a confirmed nitpicker would even mention them, so mea maxima culpa.
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Your review of Filthy Aunt Mildred got me to play it, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me or what can be done about it at this late stage in my life, but it’s my favorite game of the comp so far. I laughed until I wept.
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Mine too! I’d like to say, comfortingly, that that means there is nothing wrong with you - but I’m afraid all it really means is that there’s something wrong with both of us.
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Digit, by Joey Acrimonious
In other posts on this board I’ve advanced the theory that one of the distinctive things about this era of IF is that the parser vs. choice dichotomy that loomed so large – and, er, acrimoniously – through the 2010s is starting to dissolve as authors who play, and sometimes make, both kinds of games experiment with ways to get the best of both worlds. Typically the way I’ve seen this play out is through choice-based games that implement parser-like navigation and a world model while filtering interaction through a set of always-available actions rather than bespoke choices. Digit represents the opposite approach – it’s a parser game with no puzzles and large chunks of text between actions, where almost all of the interactivity is embedded in the menu-based dialogue system.
This is a rather bloodless way to describe a sweet albeit graphically sexual (or maybe it’s the other way around?) story of two best friends visiting a street festival and learning more about each other than they’d bargained for. But I’m foregrounding structure because – well, it gives me a chance to expound a pet theory, but also because it’s helpful to let potential players know what to expect – choice-based mavens who typically shy from parser games I think would find Digit a gentle way to dip a toe (groan) into the pool, while parser boffins looking to juggle inventories and unlock every door they see should adjust their expectations. It’s also relevant to how I evaluated the game, though: viewed narrowly through the criteria I usually use for a parser game, it has some real negatives, but making a broader assessment these don’t matter so much compared to its strengths in what it’s actually trying to do.
To get those negatives out of the way quickly so I can focus on why I enjoyed Digit so much: yes, it’s largely on rails, with much of your keyboard input simply just hitting a button to get the next line onto the screen, up to and including the game typing in an action for you on occasion. In terms of interactivity, you can choose different dialogue options but the order doesn’t seem to matter so you can just lawnmower your way through. And it’s a bit underimplemented, without much scenery to explore, few synonyms for the objects, the world model not always matching the story (like a character still being present in a room after dialogue indicates she’s gone to the bathroom), actions that could have been implemented separately swept up into the general TALK TO command (e.g., there’s a point where you need to give a series of foods to your friend, but attempts to GIVE are unsuccessful), and a few small bugs like a cute sequence at a water fountain that you can repeat even after it’s fired.
If you want to get hung up on that stuff, I can’t stop you. Still, I think that would be missing the forest for the trees, because even if all you’re doing is typing TALK TO EVIE, picking an number, and bouncing the space bar a dozen or so times before going back to step one, nonetheless I think this is still a really good game, because it’s really well-written. The central element here is that the prose, while not at all showy, is really really good. Often in my IF reviews I note that a game has solid writing, which is to say, it’s fine, it gets the job done, nothing to worry about here. But for me personally, the quality of the prose is probably the single biggest factor in how much I enjoy something. Outside of IF, 99% of what I read is literary fiction, and that’s due to how much attention those authors typically put into every word they use, not because I have an obsessive interest in reading about New Yorkers getting divorced (–though you know, I’ve just this moment connected the dot that my parents were New Yorkers who got divorced. This seems a dangerous idea to keep unpacking, though, so let’s move on). Digit does great on this score, boasting clever yet naturalistic dialogue, landscape descriptions that are low-key while still having the occasional moment of lyricism, and a global grounding in the concrete and physical that meant I was always right there with Sirin and Evie. Like, here’s a passage chosen at random:
I led us down a footpath, which ran down a hill to the waterfront promenade. As it approached the horizon from behind a fluffy cloud, the evening sun bathed the sky in peachy hues - but damn, it was still a hot one.
Not far from where we were standing, gentle waves were breaking on the shore, caressing the rocks with a quiet murmur. A light seabreeze ruffled my hair. It felt cool against my sweat. It was nice. The promenade was a place I often came to jog, but it felt totally different being here now with Evie.
Again, it’s nothing that’s jumping up and down screaming “look at me!” But this sets a mood, and you read it with satisfaction without consciously noticing the way the author adeptly slips from landscape description to character responses to embedded flashbacks, alternating longer, fancier sentences with shorter, more direct ones. This same care is present in the dialogue sequences too, like an effective scene where the protagonist is sharing some tough personal stuff with her friend while skipping stones, and the conversation is regularly interrupted with a count of how many skips she’s getting, illustrating how emotion is getting the better of her in a neatly understated way.
The strong writing extends to the character work, too, which is really what takes center stage. Given the tags and the content warning, it’s hopefully not a spoiler to say that the whole game is a dance of seduction – though who’s seducing who is definitely placed into question!. It’s appropriate, then, that Digit is in no rush to get to the sex. We get a sense of who these characters are, what’s going on in their lives outside of their relationship, and what they mean to each other, so that by the time the low-level flirtation bubbles over, it’s not sexy just because people are having sex, but because these characters are having this sex. The strong writing is also a godsend here, because of course sex writing is so frequently ridiculous; it’s good here, as befits a game from the author of Turbo Chest Hair massacre, which has the steamiest robot sex ever featured in an IF Comp entry (with all apologies to @hanon for robotsexpartymurder’s competitive second-place showing).
Would Digit be a better game if it had all the usual parser game bells and whistles? I guess in a formal sense, but beyond the small bit of bug-squashing alluded to above, the only change I’d really want the author to make is to alter some of the default Inform responses – hearing Graham Nelson intone “that was hardly portable” took me out of the story a little bit. As it is, I had a lovely time with Digit, and if there are more parser/choice mashups like this to come, bring on the revolution.
digit mr.txt (109.8 KB)
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Wow. This is more praise than I deserve. Thanks - and especially thanks for the criticism and transcript! One of these days I’ll learn how to set aside an appropriate amount of time for testing, I swear.
It bears mentioning that the structure of Digit began as a reaction to my experience with Turbo Chest Hair Massacre. My thought process went something like this: “Huh. My first attempt at a parser game was a PITA to play, but a lot of people liked it anyway because of the writing. I wonder what would happen if I made a parser game that was mostly just writing, and streamlined everything else so that people wouldn’t get confused or stuck?”
One could argue that it might as well be choice-based at that point, and admittedly that would have created a lot less potential for bugs, but I still think there’s something to the idea of letting a player uncover a narrative at their own pace through parser. Haven’t nailed the technique yet, but I do feel that I learned a lot from this attempt.
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Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi, by E. Joyce and N. Cormier
Reader, let me level with you: I was in the bag for this game before I even clicked the word Start. The first Lady Thalia installment was a highlight of last year’s Spring Thing for me, with its zippy heists and even zippier repartee fine-tuned to delight. So how could more of the same be anything but lovely? True, sometimes a sequel brings diminishing returns, but given how much I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything by this pair of authors, the thought that 2 Lady 2 Thalia could be a disappointment never crossed my mind – as well it shouldn’t have done, because as I suspected, in this case even more of a good thing is even more of a good thing.
For those lucky souls who’ve yet to try one of these games – oh, how I envy you! – the protagonist is a former demimondaine who’s clawed her way into respectability by day, while slaking her thirst for objets d’art at night through her alter ego as Lady Thalia, gentlewoman thief. The first game, set in Jazz-Age London, saw her carry out a series of escalating thefts, thumbing her nose in the face of her arch-rival, Melpomene Williams of Scotland Yard.
While the setting and characters have immediate appeal, a big part of what made it so successful is the heist mechanics, which carry over to the sequel. There’s an initial phase where you case the joint, digging up information about security measures and alternate routes, via some hopefully-subtle poking around as well as a social engineering minigame that requires sussing out whether a particular mark is best approached in a friendly fashion, bowled over by the direct approach, or drawn out so they can vent their natural loquaciousness. Then it’s time for the operation itself, where you need to put you planning into practice and respond to the many curve-balls life, and the Yard/gendarmerie, throw your way. Finally, there’s a wrap-up where you receive a score rating the panache with which you pulled off the job. Sticking to this framework means there are some similarities between heists, sure, but it also means that each has its own narrative structure, with the methodical exploration-heavy investigation giving way to a puzzley heist and an improvisational exfiltration, and then the score helps motivate you to do as well (or better) next time.
Rose of Rocroi puts a few spins on this high-quality formula. You’re vacationing in Paris so the scenery is even better this time out (the authors wisely exercised restraint and kept the dialogue free of mais oui and zut alors! interjections, though there are fun references to Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis). You have a new candidate for nemesis, as you’re actually working with Mel to foil a chauvinistic French thief with a penchant for fancy-dress and a disrespect for fine art. And then – well, let me spoiler block this next bit: in the most exciting alternate-protagonist twist since Halo 2, you actually play Mel in the investigative sections this time out!
These aren’t radical changes, but they’re enough to keep an already-great formula fresh. The writing draws you along on a paragraph by paragraph level – picking two examples from an endless candy box of bon mots:
You are once again at a garden party (being wealthy seems to involve an almost intolerable amount of garden parties) and are just about to claim a headache and beg off when you overhear something that catches your attention.
And:
You are Lady Thalia, and it is time to commit a crime. Well, a crime sanctioned by the police. Well, sanctioned by one policewoman who doesn’t have jurisdiction in this country. Not that any of that makes this any more or less illegal than what you typically get up to, anyway, but it is a change of pace.
Then the meaty crunch of each heist gives you something to sink your teeth into. None of the challenges are that hard, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the possibility of getting a perfect score is always there, urging you to pay attention and ensure Lady Thalia lives up to her reputation. And sitting above the episodic bouts of thievery, the overall plot, and more importantly, your relationship with Mel, provide a sense of progression through the game as a whole. It’s really smartly-designed stuff, and it makes the time playing this medium-length game feel like it just melts away.
Lest I be accused of a total lack of impartiality, I do have one and a half points of criticism to leaven all this praise. The half-point is that while the narrative nicely escalates into the finale, mechanically speaking the climactic heist didn’t feel more complex or challenging than the earlier ones, which was a small missed opportunity – but only a small one, given how much this last job gains in coolness from being set in Versailles. The full point, though, has to do with how the most important relationship in the game is handled: I’m speaking, of course, of the Mel/Thalia frenemy romance (alert a leather worker, I need to cram a third word into my portmanteau).
Look, obviously these two crazy kids are meant to be together. And obviously given the differences in where they’re each coming from, that shouldn’t be a cakewalk. The game does a good job of signaling that you need to need to walk a fine line to get the best ending with Mel – lean too much into the archnemesis side of things, and there’s no opportunity to make nice, while Mel justifiably views too-enthusiastic expressions of affection with suspicion. So in my playthrough, I aimed for varying moments of sharp-elbowed banter with heartfelt moments of vulnerability, hoping this changeup would melt Mel in her boots. Sadly, though, when the game listed my final scores, I did near-perfectly on the heists and investigation but only got a 4 out of 9 in my relationship with Mel. That’s all well and good, but when I went back and replayed, trying even harder to focus on getting this path right, I still got that same mediocre score.
It could be that I’m just not any good at this and I should stick with crime rather than romance (and in the game!) But from looking at the comprehensive walkthrough provided with the game, I feel like the requirements here might not be as elegantly signposted as most other mechanics in the game are. It seems as though rather than allowing you to succeed by balancing meaner and nicer options, instead at each decision point there’s a single correct answer you need to pick to optimize your score. From the way the narrative presented things, it wasn’t clear to me that this is how things were going to work, and sometimes the differences between choices were subtle enough (like the one offering three slightly-different ways of suggesting Mel work undercover) that I’m still not sure why one was correct and the others weren’t.
It feels unfair to harp on this, since – I can’t emphasize this enough – the game is deliriously fun to work through and even replay. But shipping Thalia and Mel is a hugely appealing element of the story, so it was a shame that it felt frustrating. Fortunately, I had no shame about stooping to the walkthrough to make sure that third time around was the charm for our mismatched leads. And here’s hoping that next year, there’s a third entry in the series waiting for us. Maybe a visit to the casinos of Monte Carlo is in order, or perhaps she’ll return home and try to swipe the Crown Jewels? Wherever she goes, I’ll be there, since I’m nowhere near done with Lady Thalia!
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Cheers, glad the review was helpful, and that note about the origin of the idea makes a lot of sense. I have to say, this resonates with me:
This is also what I was trying to do, to a certain degree, with Sting, my game from last IFComp (and similarly resisted the entirely-reasonable suggestion some folks made that I might as well have made the thing choice-based) – I likewise think I didn’t fully crack it there (partially because I was, as is typical for me, also trying to do like five other things) but it’s an intriguing concept to worry away at!
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How did you know our working title???
Super glad to get this feedback! The idea was that we wanted part of Thalia’s character arc this game to involve learning to be less selfish and work together with Mel, so the options that are too snarky (and wind her up) or too nice (and make her suspicious) don’t do anything to change the status quo. Originally this was going to be backed up by additional gameplay (by giving Thalia choices that would affect Mel’s investigation the next day) but we ended up having to cut that for time. Without that I can see how the relationship choice signposting needed to be stronger to compensate, plus could have benefitted a little from being more similar to the slow/messy mechanic and having the player learn it by similarity. But hey, hindsight is 20/20 and I think this would be something that’s easy to fix for a post-comp release (let alone for any theoretical sequels that may be in the works). 
Thanks so much for the wonderful review!
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To add on to my coauthor’s comment, in retrospect I realize that it doesn’t quite make sense for the characters’ relationship as presented to always penalize the player for being snarky, because the banter is a cornerstone of their relationship and something they enjoy, although if they just keep doing that all the time they will, as mentioned, be stuck with the status quo.
As the writer primarily responsible for the Mel & Thalia interludes, I worried a lot about the writing aspect, since this game relies much more heavily on investment in their relationship than did the previous one, but it sounds like I should perhaps have worried less about that and more about the mechanics. (Apart from the undercover suggestion bit that you point out, which I never really felt good about; if we do a post-comp release to improve the relationship mechanics I’ll replace that with a different set of dialogue options entirely and have the suggestion as non-optional dialogue.)
But I’m glad that you enjoyed the game otherwise, and flattered that you were invested enough to replay three times!
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Yeah, that was exactly my thought - when I saw the messy/slow thing explained, I realized that’s how I wanted the Mel dynamic to work, because the way you’ve done that is so elegant and intuitive. Like it just made sense to me that if I paused for a minute to get my bearings, that means I should now rush a little for the next bit. And that just works without the player having to consciously understand how the mechanic works - it’s great!
Oh man, I was super invested in them after the first game, and I suspect I’m not alone! They’re both individually such cool characters, and I’m a total sucker for the trope where nemeses team up in the second game/movie/book. You’ve done a great job writing them.
Anyway as usual I’ve done the thing where I bang on at length on the one thing I can find an excuse to be overanalytical on, but hopefully it’s clear I’m a total Lady Thalia fanboy. Thanks to you both for making these games!
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Totally the same boat. I used to be die-hard parser until I realized how much more narrative control the author has in choice, not to mention drastically reduced troubleshooting and testing.
But I also understand how comfortable it is in your design-system of choice. Part of the reason I’ve laid out of IFComp and completing anything is AXMA is no longer viable, and I’ve been balking at committing to and thoroughly learning a flavor of Twine. Sugarcube is finally winning me over until some other flashy new thing comes along (stop casually removing your shirt around me all the time, ElmStoryEngine!!!)
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Half-Alive, by Bellamy Briks
A couple of years ago I read this incredibly long analysis of the Mass Effect trilogy (ah, the things I had time for before I was a parent!) which sketched out a distinction between fiction that’s detail-first and fiction that’s drama-first. The idea is that detail-first fiction, especially in the genre space, is all about worldbuilding, consistency, and verisimilitude, even at the expense of a good story; drama-first works can have a complex setting, but the rules are much less important than serving the emotional beats of the story and making sure that there’s always something exciting happening and the stakes just keep going up and up. This isn’t a framework I find myself thinking about all that much – most things are somewhere in the middle, of course – but I think it’s really helpful for conceptualizing my response to Half-Alive, which I enjoyed even though the twists and turns of its plot had the detail-first part of my brain blowing a gasket.
What we’ve got here is a teenaged riff on the Underworld narrative, with Inferno-y bits – there are layers! There’s a guide! – and an Orpheus-y motivation – reclaim the missing part of your brother’s soul from the demon-thing that snatched it. The protagonist is Kendall, a 17-year-old girl with awful, broken-up parents who shoulders more responsibility than she should have to, and her interplay with her brother and Wyatt, the guide character, is enjoyable to read because she comes off as a classic hero. Indeed, Half-Alive does a good job of deploying the iconic elements of the journey, down to her weapon of choice – an ax – becoming a heroic attribute.
There’s enough that’s distinctive to keep it from feeling like a retread, though. This particular layer of the underworld is mostly populated by children, for one thing – some are ambivalent characters, but many are so-called “ringleaders”, who direct the weaker-willed kids and are bent on stealing the name and vitality from these living visitors to win the chance to return to the world above, but play fair if bested in a game of riddles.
The stories of many of these kids, including Wyatt, are counterposed with Kenny’s journey, and it’s here that I most struggled with the game. The characters you encounter are drawn from different times and places – though I believe they’re all American – and even allowing for their modern locution as a forgivable concession for both reader and author, the vignettes are full of anachronisms and wild plot twists. There’s a pair of twins who were born in the 18th century; their backstory is that they were abandoned in a dumpster, then fell in with a traveling circus that toured the country complete with an elephant. Another character’s story is a riff on the child-gang bits of Oliver Twist, except he always wears a burlap sack for a mask – after he tries to betray the gang’s Fagin figure, the crime boss travels all the way to the west coast to make him sleep with the fishes, but is still nice enough to put up a gravestone with the kid’s name on it back home in New Jersey. The plan also hinges on a pocket recording device, despite the character having been born in the Great Depression.
This all makes for emotionally-charged, dramatic reading, but at the same time there’s a cost to playing so fast and loose with plausibility. The trend isn’t restricted just to the flashbacks, either, with details changing or going unmentioned until just before they can land with the most impact: Kenny’s ax doesn’t work against the demon until suddenly it does; the demon has a staff that allows it to travel between worlds, but as soon as Kenny gets her hands on it we’re told it’s almost drained of its limited number of charges.
The prose is similarly highly emotional, but often a bit slippery on details. The town where the game starts is alternately called Millflower and Mayflower, and it changes its mind on whether Kenny’s brother was attacked by the demon minutes or hours after school ended. There’s a regular drifting of tenses from present to past and back. Sometimes these infelicities undermine the impact of the story:
In a fit, Dad flips our living room couch to which my mom slaps him. Yelling vulgar insults at each other, he stuffs his hands in his jeans and then storms out.
More often, though, the exuberance of the writing was enough to carry me along. Here’s a bit that’s definitely overheated, but works much better:
The chill would make you feel as if you landed in Antarctica and the dirty fog that invaded your lungs was so thick and heavy that you could barely breathe or see.
On the wind, miscellaneous whispers and wails were being carried, filling their confused bodies with fear. Not to mention the overbearing smell of the area which stank of decaying flesh.
And like I said, despite noticing these weaknesses, I wasn’t too bothered by them once I tried to enter into the spirit of how Half-Alive was telling its story. It also really helps that the game side of things is well-designed and player-friendly. The opening About text nicely explains the length and overall structure of the piece, which is a helpful convenience in a longer game like this. While the focus is very much on the narrative, there are some significant choices to be made in navigating the afterlife, including the aforementioned riddles and also some timed challenges. Nothing’s especially hard, and you can easily rewind even if you do make a mistake, but the gameplay is all engaging enough, and works well as a pacing element to break up the talkier bits.
Playing Half-Alive can feel like being on a roller coaster curated for maximum thrills – if you’re worried about the plausibility of each swerve and scare, or annoyed because you could see the final twist coming a mile away, you’re missing the point. I wouldn’t want every game to be this way, of course, since pure emotion can get exhausting and I typically prefer a story with careful intellectual scaffolding supporting the drama. But for this game and this author, it works, and despite my caviling Half-Alive pulled me through with its energetic, iconic storytelling.
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Thin Walls, by Wynter
I usually don’t like to look at other reviews of a game before I’ve written mine, but I’m going to bend that rule this time so I can check how many others managed to refrain from mentioning House of Leaves… OK, looks like there’s only one public review at this point (Mathbrush’s), and yes, despite him not having read it, HoL still manages to get a namecheck. I’m a big fan of that book, and it deservedly is the first reference point when you see a house behaving the way the one in Thin Walls does – sprouting up new rooms as it starts to get full, lengthening hallways to stymie exploration, and responding to the worst instincts and desires of its inhabitants. But while the house in House of Leaves stands in relation to the individual – it’s the unconscious, a spur to knowledge and its negation – Thin Walls uses this malicious bit of architecture to take aim at society.
What we’ve got here is a multi-chapter Twine game where vignettes from the perspectives of the different inhabitants of a rooming-house alternate with a recurring, exploration-focused sequence where you can see the house changing and pick which resident to follow next. After a disorienting opening, it quickly becomes clear what unites all these stories: the anomie of modern life, and how communal living can paradoxically become isolating. The writing isn’t subtle, but it communicates its ideas well. Here’s a bit of description from the frame sequence:
You are in a small bathroom. There is a toilet and washbasin, beside which four little soaps sit in separate containers, and four little hand towels hang on a rack and a radiator.
And a bit of reflection from one of the later stories:
But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it.
The way the house-metaphor expresses itself varies from chapter to chapter: in the most effective, it works to split up a couple who are having problems, creating space to isolate them and eventually putting up a wall between the two single beds they’d pushed together (again, the allegory is not exactly deeply obfuscated). In another, it ensures an Instagram-obsessed woman has a perfect, clean, white, sterile backdrop for all her photos. Another favorite sees a woman daydream about getting a boyfriend and moving in with him – but obsesses over the new space and the amazing furniture she’ll fill it with, until she loses track of the imaginary boyfriend and he abandons her.
By the end, I did find diminishing returns were starting to set in – the late chapter about the two housemates squabbling over who was eating the other’s cereal and making loud noises late at night reduces the house to an annoying prankster. I ran into a small bug where after I finished Chapter 4, a bit of Chapter 3 popped back up until it ended again (EDIT: I am unobservant, this is intended per the author’s reply below). And the writing does occasionally get too on the nose – at one point the Instagram lady says:
My photos were my defence against the world, my pretence that all was well in this house.
But overall Thin Walls did a good job of keeping me engaged, and at the close of each vignette I was always eager to return to the free exploration sequence and see what had changed, who had moved in, and check whether the cupboard under the stairs had become unlocked, or the mysterious landlord who lives at the top of the house had come home yet. And the ending sequence is a return to form, with the house’s transformations becoming more and more kinetic and the social world of the house becoming unmoored and kaleidoscopic (though as involved as I was trying to solve the mystery of the house, I was also puzzled by why all the music at the climactic party was from the mid-aughts – I don’t think it’s meant to be a flashback!) It’s definitely worth the playthrough, and not just to get another menacing metaphysical house in the mental toolbox to sit alongside the house on Ash Tree Lane.
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Thank you very much!
Btw, ‘#perfecthome’ (chapter 2 or 3, depending on what order you read it in) is actually meant to be read in two halves - one before ‘Candyfloss Hair’ and the other afterwards - it’s totally deliberate.
The music was based on my postgrad parties at university - maybe I need to get a more up-to-date taste in music!
EDIT: oh, and I was really pleased to read this -
at the close of each vignette I was always eager to return to the free exploration sequence and see what had changed, who had moved in, and check whether the cupboard under the stairs had become unlocked, or the mysterious landlord who lives at the top of the house had come home yet
because that’s exactly how I was hoping it would be read
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D’oh! I updated my review accordingly, sorry for the negative assumption.
I should say, the reason I noticed it is that I kept seeing a new song come up and going “oh yeah, I know this song, it song rules! This one too!” Which is not my typical response these days when the DJ is more au courant.
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Another Cabin in the Woods, by Quain Holtey
Based on the title, I went into Another Cabin in the Woods expecting a horror story – but while, per the author’s note, that was the initial conception of the game, what’s on offer here is an emotionally-charged reflection on long-buried family trauma. There are no monsters here, only poor communication skills, though man, the damage they can do is sometimes almost as bad.
(That last sentence is a paraphrased bit of Mountain Goats stage banter, special for @pbparjeter).
Speaking of musicians, this is an audio-rich game, with sound effects, a musical score, and even voice acting. This is fitting given the plot setup, which sees the protagonist visit her childhood home after the death of her mother in order to clean it out before it’s sold – the mother was a musician, and much of the first part of the game involves finding different sheets of music and playing them on the family piano to trigger flashbacks. I can’t speak to the substantial work that went into the audio side of things, as I played the game muted – my life circumstances right now don’t make it easy to play IF with sound on – but I suspect it will enrich the story.
That isn’t to say it doesn’t work well as a text-only work, though, since I enjoyed my time with the game. The cleaning conceit is a smart one, creating a rationale for the protagonist to poke around exploring the cabin and triggering different memories as they visit each space in turn. And the writing is good enough that even without the sound on, I got a sense of what emotion each musical work is meant to evoke:
Throughout there’s a good eye for detail – the prose isn’t doing anything fancy, but again, it effectively communicates the mood of abandonment and decay:
As for the story itself, it’s unsurprisingly downbeat, but it mostly earns its pathos honestly, I think, and keeps the melodrama under control for the most part. The family dynamics are depicted sensitively, with no one coming off perfectly well but nobody an irredeemable monster, either. I also enjoyed the distance provided between the protagonist’s point of view and those of the memories, which are from the perspective of the mother – the protagonist is regularly surprised to have remembered things differently or that her mother’s memories are often substantially more positive, which helps energize a story where almost all the important events happened well in the past.
While the writing for them was overall strong, there were a few design decisions about how the memories worked that I found created a little bit of friction. First, I think they would have been more effective if the flashbacks were parceled out one at a time, but for me and I suspect many other players, the most natural approach was to explore the cabin, find all the different pieces of music, and then play them at the piano all at once. Again, each piece of this is good but the pacing wound up feeling a bit back-loaded. There’s also a small puzzle that needs to be solved to reach the endgame that involves putting the different memories in chronological order, but while after reading each, I had a sense of how each fit with the others, but in the reassembly process they’re labeled not as “memory about the piano lesson” but as the less-descriptive “piece found in bedroom” which made the process harder.
These are small niggles, though, and besides the lack of spacing meaning I sometimes worried about mis-tapping, they’re pretty much the only negatives I found in the game. I was engaged with the story Another Cabin in the Woods was telling, despite its dark moments; the author mentioned this is only their second game and they’re already thinking of repurposing the initial horror hook for a subsequent game, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of their future work!
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I have to admit I don’t know that one…
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It’s from an intro to Going to Jamaica. Dunno if you listen to bootlegs but that whole show is on the Internet Archive and is really good!
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Aha, I knew that the wiki had the show transcripts but a Google search did not turn it up! Thank you.
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Abate: Hide Behind the Curtains, by Rohan
Dear reader, you don’t know me from Adam so you’re going to have to take my word for it, but: I am not especially easy to flummox. That sounds like a boast, and I suppose it is and there’s more boasting to come, but still, I’ve read Joyce and Woolf and Foster Wallace and had some struggles, sure, but modulo Finnegans Wake I feel like I understood and appreciated them. In undergrad I was able to keep straight the astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and advanced classical mechanics I was studying all at the same time, and did fine in law school even when having to unknot the trickiest problems of jurisdiction in my Fed Courts class. My favorite game in last year’s Spring Thing was Queenlash, which is like 80,000 words of superdense metaphor about Cleopatra.
So when I tell you that I spent my playthrough of Abate not having the first clue what on God’s green earth was going on, I hope you will give me the benefit of the doubt that it’s not because I’m just a big dummy easily confused by nonlinear storytelling. Like, I’m going to summarize the plot, and if you haven’t played it you’ll read the summary and think “oh, that’s not so bad, I kind of get it,” but trust me, no, you don’t.
There’s definitely something liberating about playing a game so free of the bounds of traditional narrative causality that it could serve as an interactive rebuttal to the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, and I have to confess that like 25% of the bemused chuckles I emitted during my playthrough were prompted by the anarchic glee here on display. But it gets exhausting not being able to understand whether anything that’s happening is connected to any of the story’s previous events, or will lead to any coherent resolution in the future – especially where, as here, the prose doesn’t provide sufficient pop to serve as a throughline and the choice the center-align all the text makes reading a bit of a headache.
OK, here comes the summary so you can see what I mean: in this bespoke choice-based game, you play a student stuck in a Groundhog Day style time loop on the day of a big school celebration. There’s a lot of incident: your best friend is bent on confessing his love to the student council president, who in turn wants to buttonhole you to rope you into helping with the school activities. Meanwhile, you’re trying to avoid a frenemy who doesn’t realize that you’re the one who wrote the now-defunct cooking blog that’s inspired their own culinary efforts. Every once in a while, for reasons that remained obscure to me, everything blacks out and you confront the void – and a beyond-sketchy tempter figure whose proposed “you’ll just owe me one, it’ll be no biggie” deal seemed like an incredibly bad idea – and things reset, until they don’t.
Again, that sounds wacky but not too far outside the realm of comprehension, so I’ll provide a taste of what Abate is like. This is part of an embedded flashback where you reflect on how you met your best friend:
There has been no groundwork previously laid for the main characters obsession with potatoes, and if you’d expect there to be some like acknowledgment that “onions” are not a spice, your expectations will go unfulfilled. It’s entertainingly zany to read a little bit of stuff like this, sure, but the whole game is this way, with characters running in and exclaiming about stuff that doesn’t seem to connect with anything else before moving on to the next thing. Eventually it ended, after I rejected the deal with the devil and then managed to unite my friend with his crush through the expedient of wandering randomly around the school unsure of what I was doing – so I think I won?
I unfortunately can’t say it was very satisfying, though; the lack of coherence meant that I felt little sense of agency, and the sheer randomness of everything that was happening meant I couldn’t find a consistent set of themes or ideas with which to engage. Maybe that’s the point, and it’s all meant to mirror the atomized, discombobulated nature of postmodern life – but even if that’s the case, more unified aesthetics and a few concessions to causality would probably have helped the argument land a bit better.
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