I lol’d at this; one of the least pleasant reviews Universal Hologram received was in part because of its rude opinion of astral projection, so it seems I kneecapped myself from both angles with the new age thing.
I have to admit I didn’t get far enough into Universal Hologram to see the sarcastic and rude bits, that should have tipped me off in hindsight. 
I do like the core concept of using AI images though.
I bounced hard off of UH, but I adored CF (I think it’s one of the best games in the Thing), so this is probably true.
I’m very happy to hear this, thanks! 
Yeah, I definitely enjoyed it, and laying out the axes there I definitely can see how my choices put me in the cooperative/hopeful bucket so that seems reasonable enough. I think it’s more a matter of degree than kind, if that makes sense; like I felt like the protagonist had perhaps pulled out of the nose-dive but wasn’t ready for as transformative an act as what was in the ending. But people can surprise you!
Hah, after fluffing it on the Thomas Pynchon thing in my Hole Man review I’m glad I spotted this one right Again, definitely a positive in my mind. And funny you mention Dr. Sbaitso, I’d totally forgotten about that but seeing the name again, I suddenly got a very strong sense-memory of playing it with a friend in like 6th grade, and yes, it’s very Computerfriendy!
Re the UH discussion, yeah, it’s quite distinct from CF so neat to see the range of your writing.
Definitely understand how folks might react well to one but not the other, though of course I liked both.
Thanks for sharing this! I was thinking it’d be good to get more background on why this was rubbing me wrong, but trying to include any more detail felt like it’d derail the review.
For what it’s worth, my review of Computerfriend also namechecked DFW. It’s hard to escape with literary 90s-style retrofuturism about disjunctions between eager, socialable screen surfaces and hyperinexpressible isolating despair. Plus wasn’t there a line in there about a Quebec civil war, or did I hallucinate that?
Chrissy Tiegen Caught In Brian Williams-esque Lie Over Quebecois War Fabrication
(you’re right!)
Oh wow, I missed that one – nice catch @kaemi!
(I enjoyed these headlines, though the fact they’re clearly about reality in the 2020’s – like who knew who Chris Pratt was in 1999 – made me briefly wonder whether the computer was a time traveler or something!)
No problem! In my free time, I am a (rather poor) Assyriologist who can’t get enough of this amazing website.
Well isn’t that great. You just decided to tear open an entirely new rabbit hole, did you. For me to get lost in for an unknown quantity of minutes and hours and days of my life.
Thanks a lot. I’m off to learn about cuneiform writing now.
Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony, by Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw
Ooof. This is a tough one to get to grips with. Partially that’s down to the content of HTWAS: it’s a cut-up series of autobiographical vignettes mapped in achronological fashion upon a “hypercube”, which concern set theory, bipolar mania, creative partnerships, and a math-and-divination based project to facilitate universal love and cross-cultural understanding via ethereal communication with a Chinese pop star, all of which chaos is accessed via a parser interface with a minimal verb set whose only affordances are navigating the hypercube and combining objects that represent abstruse math concepts to form other, yet more abstruse ones (feel free to scatter parenthetical “?”s anywhere the previous sentence seems to be crying out for one).
The bigger barrier for me, though, is the opening text, where one of the co-authors says his relationship with the other co-author (which was also a romantic one, from the game’s context), has fallen apart after confessing to having sexual feelings for her teenaged son, who he’d apparently been a caregiver for over most of the previous decade. This is walked back almost immediately, but in a very vague way that indicates something significantly bad did occur:
No, actually none of that was happening or going to happen, except the part where I, BenJen, am delusional and say horrible things to a teenager believing it will restructure the proton and give perpetual free energy via large cardinal embeddings, but actually I am just hurting the people I love, failing to manage my mental illness properly, and destroying my life and everything I have tried to do and be in the world.
This is of course something said in-game, and versions of both co-authors do exist in the story (which is similarly from the perspective of Ben), so it’s certainly possible that this declaration should be understood within the fiction of the game and doesn’t reflect actual events – as someone whose previous game was a memoir, I’m acutely aware that even in an explicitly autobiographical work there can be a significant difference between real events and what shows up in the game. But from playing through the game it certainly does not seem to boast much fictionalization; most events are low-key, quotidian ones depicting the co-author riding his bike around San Francisco, talking with his co-author about subjects including writing this game, and digging into his obsessive-seeming theories about what advanced math means about the nature of reality. Much of it’s also told in a writing style that I find really reminiscent of similar emails I’ve gotten from a bipolar friend of mine when he’s in a manic phase:
The ball returns to your flippers and you shoot for an appealing target. The ball ricochets off the Communication Carousel and hits the Free Will Fork for a bonus. She continues, ‘Why is a Measurable cardinal special? If a measurable cardinal exists, it is the critical point of an embedding of the universe of sets to a transitive class, and the full universe of sets is larger and richer than L, the constructible universe. The existence of elementary embeddings depends on the self-reflectivity of the universe of sets, whether or not initial segments of the universe reflect properties of the whole. This is analogous to recursive self-containment of deities and universes and souls within the universes that contain the deity, as well as to the infinite mirroring of two minds communicating and modeling the other mind modeling the other modeling itself.
I don’t mean to be dismissive of what’s clearly a significant work, in terms of the effort it’s required and its significance to the co-author. And while it is very hard to make sense of much of the game – partially because I can’t follow the math, which might of course be perfectly comprehensible if you have the right background – there are some powerful moments in amongst the muddle. There’s a fantasy of playing the piano with great facility that’s counterposed with the lived reality of arthritis making such virtuosity out of reach, and conversations where the co-author shares his arguments with his partner but displays appealing self-awareness about the positive things he’s able to communicate but also the ways his enthusiasm or mania makes things more challenging for her. There’s interesting things to discuss about how the narrative – and the hypercube mapping – are constructed, as well as the binding mechanic and what it means in terms of the themes that emerge from exploration and the eventual option to “win” the game.
When I think about engaging with those things, though, I feel a coldness in the pit of my stomach, because it’s hard to treat HTWAS primarily as an aesthetic object when I can’t shake the idea that it’s the record of a person in the throes of a mental health crises who’s harmed themselves and others. It’s also unclear to me whether both co-authors agreed to put the game out in its current form, or if Ben has done so unilaterally after their relationship fractured. I’m not completely sure whether this is the right course of action for me, much less others, but I’ve decided to leave these notes on my reaction incomplete rather than doing a full review, and won’t be nominating it for ribbons. And I’ll also hope everyone involved with the game’s creation (especially the other co-author’s son) gets the help and support they need.
A Single Ouroboros Scale, by Naomi Norbez
Immediately after playing Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony, I came across another game with challenging bleed-through between art and artist: A Single Ouroboros Scale is primarily an archive of the Jots (lightly-fictionalized tweets) of IF author Algie Freyir, who has many overt similarities to IF author Naomi Norbez (who goes by Bez), who wrote SOS. Fittingly for a protagonist named after the eponymous mouse in Flowers for Algernon, Algie’s latest Jots show him struggling with rapidly-decaying mental faculties, including a failing memory; per the author’s notes, this affliction is also affecting Bez, meaning that Algie’s desperate attempts to assess and even safeguard his legacy take on a terrifying, poignant power, since none of this is theoretical.
The frame here is reminiscent of that used in one of Bez’s previous games, the Dead Account – the protagonist is a nameless volunteer trying out for a place with an archiving project that’s maintaining a backup of the IF community’s Jots since the main site has closed down. Rather than preserving information, though, the project director – your potential boss – seems more intent on destroying it by imposing a significance test on posters, and deleting the Jots of those who fail it. The business of the game, then, has you reviewing 8 years of Algie’s Jots and then facing the binary choice of whether or not his account, which is framed as being low-rated, should be deleted.
This of course doesn’t make much logical sense – how does someone who believes in restrictive curation wind up in charge of an archiving project, especially when the deletion can save at most a few thousand words of text (he also misgenders Algie in the final sequence, cementing his status as a villain)? The stakes of this decision for the notional protagonist are also quite low – there’s a suggestion that joining the project will somewhat enhance their standing in the IF community, but that’s pretty thin gruel. But this setup is very effective as to Algie, as this record of his participation in the community is threatened with oblivion – and while in theory his games would survive on whatever the fictional IFDB analogue is, of course all we see of him are his Jots meaning the stakes feel total. And while it’s hard to imagine any good-faith player sincerely picking the “delete” option at the end, putting the player in a position to make such a decision works very well to implicate them in the processes by which the IF community determines who is and isn’t worthy of remembrance.
Overall though this layer is relatively thin, and the main action of the game involves reading, and reacting to, Algie’s Jots. And on these terms the game definitely needs to be judged a success, because I think most players will have many, strong reactions to the Jots. Many of them are very personal, charting Algie’s journey towards understanding and embracing his trans identity and falling away from his Christian faith. Descriptions of the games he’s working on, his influences, and artistic aspirations are also really compelling, enlivened by repeated allusions to two poems – an Emily Dickinson one about the miraculous and weighty responsibilities of being a flower, and one by Rebecca Elson about dark matter but also touching on death and the possibility of resurrection. And of course there are the heart-rending final ones charting Algie’s despair as his mind disintegrates. There are some good funny bits along the way, too, despite the darkness of the game’s progression – Algie’s response to folks telling him to stop talking about personal stuff so much is that he’s “gonna complain about parsers SO much and SO many of you are gonna be pissed,” which made me laugh.
The main subject, though, is the IF community, and the trajectory of Algie’s attitude towards it shifting from one of bright-eyed excitement at finding a set of fellow-artists and a potential audience for his writing, through gradual disillusionment as his games are ignored or met with patronizing uninterest from most of the community, through desperate, vituperative anger at the prospect that his work will be forgotten and these years of engagement will produce no legacy. From the specificity here, as well as the out-of-game author’s notes, it’s clear we’re meant to engage with these critiques not just according to the fictional frame where they chart out a tragic character arc, but also reflect on what they say about the real-world, Jot-free IF community.
This is an important goal, and I do think many of the criticisms land – and probably would land with even more force if I’d been around during the bad old days of the Twine Wars. Still, I think embedding them in the fictional construct of SOS undercuts the power of many of these arguments, and can make them sometimes frustrating. We’re only able to see one side of the conversations, and Algie’s complaints are sometimes vague and hard to connect with real-world people, incidents, and behaviors – this is understandable given the fictionalized, in-character nature of the Jots, as well as by a laudable desire not to call out specific people, but I found it put the arguments in something of an uncanny valley, too real to appreciate solely within the game’s made-up world but too far afield from reality to be conducive to concrete, specific action. For example, the project director’s dismissal of Algie, and folks working in hypertext in general, is really slippery:
You know, keeping creators whose work are more relevant to the growth of the IF scene. Offshoots are ok, too experimental not as much. We’re also leaning more towards parsers, considering how important they are to the community, compared to the hypertext stuff going on outside of the main IF circles. Nothing against hypertext obviously, but I just haven’t seen much development there compared to parsers, and neither has the community
“Growth”, “offshoots”, “too experimental”, “important”, “development” – these important words aren’t elaborated on or defined, nor am I finding it easy to map them to critical conversations I’ve personally seen. There’s also a Manichean view of the community as either “parser” or “hypertext/Twine”, which doesn’t take account of a contemporary scene where many players, and even authors, move between them – though much of this seems to me as about importing parser sensibilities into choice-based frameworks, which per SOS’s values might be seen as a colonizing or at least tokenizing development. And similarly, it’s hard not to see Algie’s blunt dismissal of parser games (“I don’t get it but you do you I guess? Like I said, never liked them very much… But you do you and I’ll do me”) as symmetric with the disinterest with which others greet his work – of course there’s nothing unfair about saying responsibilities look different for less marginalized vs. more marginalized members of a community, but this subtlety isn’t pulled out in the game.
Again, for a fictionalized polemic, this is completely understandable, even notwithstanding the constraining circumstances Bez’s medical condition has had on the game’s composition. And he’s also clear that these arguments can be taken in different ways, and is primarily focused on generating, rather than resolving, discussion – in the final notes, he says:
The JAVP and Robert Evans’s vision/execution could be an “IF dystopia” as one beta tester put it, or an alternate future closer to our reality—up to you, but I do want to raise the question of how IF history is remembered/recorded.
I have to say, even after all these caveats, sometimes I did feel annoyed and thought SOS was taking some cheap shots. It’s hard to ignore the fact that I’m one of the cisgendered, straight, white, middle-aged, male parser authors who are the clearly-signposted bad guys here, so it is not entirely outside the realm of possibility that rather than being a completely disinterested and fair reader, my feeling that these critiques aren’t fully relevant and persuasive are biased by some defensiveness. I haven’t seen too many reviews of SOS out in the wild and the ones I have are generally from folks with backgrounds apparently similar to my own; I’m very eager to see what others coming at it from a different perspective might think of the game.
Wrapping up by going back to Algie, though, there’s definitely self-awareness and clarity on some of the tensions inherent to his desires, especially in the really well-written final sequence of Jots. Here he reflects on the contradiction that gives SOS its title:
Does anybody ever die satisfied? I’m pretty sure no matter how successful you are or big you get, you got loose ends SOMEWHERE. And that’s kinda reassuring? But I also feel like I gotta die “right”/“well”, y’know? Which means seeking satisfaction there. But I won’t be satisfied. But I keep trying. Endless ouroboros.
And I’lll be replaced. I know that. Once I stop making stuff or die somebody’s gonna pick up where I left off and take over. The internet’s full of people clamoring for attention on their work, including me. And I’m replaceable by any of them.
Both pieces of this are true; we all want to be remembered, and we’ll all be forgotten (though given society’s biases, some of us will have an easier time lasting longer in the memory than others). Finishing SOS, I thought about my twin sister, who died two years ago. Afterwards, the Department of Defense named a reasonably significant award after her (she helped run the military’s sexual assault prevention and response programs), and I felt pride that her memory will live on this way. But of course, in another ten years odds are nobody involved will have any idea who she is, and her name on the award won’t have any real meaning. And in another twenty, odds are that they’ll rename it again.
I also thought about a poll conducted in the UK 1929, about which authors would still be read a century hence, in 2029. Number one went to John Galsworthy, who’s now a footnote to history[1]; Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, and James Joyce were absent or near the bottom of the list.
What counts as enough of a legacy to be satisfied? And if the worm can eventually turn, who are the ones who are turning it? SOS doesn’t provide answers to any of this, but I’ll certainly remember it asking the questions.
1: He wrote the Forstye Saga, which as a person who’s read a lot of dead white males I only know because of a middling Masterpiece Theater adaptation from the early aughts.
Hello Mike, (I figured Mr. Russo might be a touch too formal!) I didn’t want to impose- but as you highlighted wanting to specifically hear from people with a different perspective- I did a little review of SOS here. No obligation to read of course, just wanted to share since I saw this while reading your reviews.
For some context: I’m a young woman who is a member of the LGBT community (bisexual), southeast asian, not all that familiar with the parser and Twine divide on account of not being present during its heyday, and am physically disabled (I have a hemorrhagic genetic disorder), the last of which especially colours my review as I approached the game from the perspective of a creative who has felt similar distress over how illness intersects with the ability to create. While my experiences haven’t been similar to those outlined in terms of community atmosphere in the work- (I’ve found the IF community quite warm and welcoming), I can still empathize in some regards when it comes to personal illness in a creative.
So, a bit different in terms of background variables to inform my perspective, I’d imagine, haha.
Your review is not so little, I found. It shows thoughtful engagement with the piece and some courage to write so explicitly about how and why the work affected you.
While I have not played A Single Orobouros Scale, I certainly admire your review of it.
Putting in yeoman’s work on these reviews, brother. For real. 
@DeusIrae I’d like to thank you for your detailed review of my game “Roger’s Day Off”. Yours has been the most helpful, since your points of criticism were all constructive and the examples given are most appreciated.
I’m pleased that you didn’t think the game was all about seducing the female characters. Other reviewers seemed to think it was, then complained this wasn’t actually possible. I’m assuming they got this idea from the images, since there are no suggestive dialog options nor any in which you can make advances. Typing such things too, won’t get the player anywhere. This tells me a lot about what’s really going on in players’ minds and how they perceive things.
Here’s something I’ve discovered:
When a game offers choices, people complain for the occasions when they have to type. This point is not aimed at your review, as one of the few people that tried to “poke the world” a bit more. This is also interesting - how far do you flesh out the world, when people aren’t going to type anyway (much), even when they’re given a parser to do so? This reads as a sad indictment of parser input, when choices are (also) available. So this is why you found parts “underdeveloped”, as i mostly didn’t expect people to bother looking.
On the puzzles, i accept many points here. Originally i planned “dialog puzzles”, but decided to put in some more tricky ones in the later missions (the milk jug and the drinking puzzle). On reflection, those do look way too much old school. For the next game, I’m going to scrap these sort and concentrate on deeper and more meaningful dialogues. Point taken.
For some of the inaccurate history, i admit it. But it’s not like movies have never done this sort of thing for the purposes of entertainment. And who knows what it was really like 2000BC.
Now, I’m just going to talk about “ladies with pneumatic boobs”;
Currently I’m working on a new game featuring a witch. Originally, i thought this character would be easy to design. But it isn’t. For ideas, i image google “witch” and get exactly two kinds: green faced warty old hags with hook noses or sexy witch costumes!
But i don’t want either of those! I want something original and creative, and not the stereotype “wicked witch of the west”. On the other hand, i also don’t want “ladies with pneumatic boobs” either. So perhaps i make her a bit attractive, but perhaps also with a disfigurement, like a scar or a withered hand maybe.
This isn’t a problem non-graphical IF has to deal with.
In the game, the witch character is not an enemy, so it’s quite tricky to get the balance. And unless i do go for a warty old hag, there will always be the risk that the character artwork is judged as oversexulised. At least in many players’ minds. Movies do this all the time, and it’s a very difficult call for games to get this right, as they are most definitely judged harsher than movies in this regard.
Thanks for your review.
Thanks very much for flagging your review! I missed it since I haven’t done a great job of staying current with the review spreadsheet, but I’m glad I got to read your response to SOS – your perspective on the impact of a disability on creative work gave me a better appreciation of that piece of the game.
(Also thanks for calling me Mike, not Mr. Russo – oi, I was grimacing when writing that bit in the review conceding that I’m now technically middle-aged so that would not have helped my self-image!)
Great, I’m glad it was useful, and glad the criticism landed as constructive, which was definitely my intent. It’s interesting to hear about the challenges of figuring out player expectations in a game with both choices and a parser; I think a lot of games are moving in this direction but there’s not yet a well-settled grammar for how players engage with that. I suspect we’ll eventually get there, but there’ll be some trial-and-error in the interim, sort of how it took a while to land on a consensus control scheme for mouse-and-keyboard first person games.
For the images, it sounds like you largely grabbed and modified existing 3d assets? That makes total sense in terms of workload/skillset, and an understandably depressing commentary on what stuff is out there.
Super Mega Tournament Arc!, by groggydog
Folks remember Indigo Prophecy, right? It was Quantic Dream’s breakthrough game, a studio which later gained even more attention for Heavy Rain, Detroit: Become Human, and Being a Complete Garbage Fire of a Workplace. But going back to the beginning, Indigo Prophecy was cool because it immersed the player in an immediately-gripping mystery, with your protagonist waking up from a dissociative event to realize they’d just murdered someone; starting from your desperate attempts to cover your tracks, the story allowed you to slowly peel back the layers of a sinister conspiracy, with clues to the true nature of what was going on always remaining elusively out of reach.
Then you got to the midpoint of the game, the developers ran out of money and/or ideas, and the back half of the narrative saw your everyman protagonist develop superpowers and win a three-way kung-fu struggle against a Mayan human-sacrifice cult and the physical personification of the internet.
Even leaving aside the let’s-just-say-problematic elements here, a fundamental problem is that nobody who enjoyed the low-key, street-level mystery the opening promised wanted what the second half of the game was offering. Frustrating player’s expectations can lead to exciting twists if it’s done right, but yank the rug too much, and folks will check out even if the individual elements are sound, is the lesson.
The connection here is that while Super Mega Tournament Arc! seems to promise one kind of story, from its blurb, NES-style graphics, and enthusiastic title, it winds up delivering something quite different – actually, two or three things. And while there’s some good writing and individually engaging pieces, I felt like the whole was less than the sum of its parts; as the ending kept escalating and throwing more and more narrative shocks, I found myself wishing to rewind time and go back to when this was just the story of a simple gladiator-cyborg fighting their way to the top.
That opening part of the game is I think the most effective. It’s a little slow-paced, as the first-act training sequence stretches on for a while, but the storytelling is effective, as the backstory for your plucky fighter is gradually revealed, you pick practice options to determine your style in the ring (choosing between lawful, entrepreneurial, and individualistic – more or less relying on discipline, scrappiness, and defiance, respectively), and your lovable-stereotype trainer helps you figure out what’s what. True, there’s a jarring moment where a white-cloaked patron shows up and drops some mystery on you, as well as gifting you a weird death mask, but on the whole the sports-movie cliches hit their beats well. The prose here, and throughout the game, is solid, though never quite as over the top as the exclamation-marked title made me expect – I think it’s down to personal taste whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, though I thought it fit the unexpectedly low-key vibe.
The second act sees you thrust into the arena, running through a series of fights against colorfully-costumed competitors. I don’t think it’s possible to lose, but each bout is dramatic, and escalates the challenge and the stakes; the exact approach you take to win also depends heavily on the choices you make during training, which gives the first act a pleasing retrospective weight. Again, it’s maybe a little long – six fights is a lot – but I was jazzed to see where the climax was headed.
The third act is where things went off the rails for me, though. I’m going to spoiler-block the specifics, but suffice to say the story makes a hard left into a very different genre. Rather than a cyberpunk sports movie, it turns out you’re in a Norse-themed superhero one, as the patron uses magical artifacts of the Aesir to defeat the mob boss who organized the tournament, take their ring which is literally Draupnir from Norse myth, and then threatens to use it to bring about Ragnarok. The issues here aren’t confined to genre coherence, though: the mysterious patron also takes over the narrative, in the way that an annoying GMPC can sideline the player characters in a tabletop RPG session. There are also some fourth-wall-breaking shenanigans that similarly feel like they come out of nowhere in a game that hadn’t been especially meta to that point.
Eventually the good guys win, and the story gets around to circling back to the personal stakes that motivated your character to enter the arena at the first place, but by that point I had a hard time feeling engaged; I felt like the protagonist’s struggles, their relationship with their family, and the close dynamic they’d built with their trainer had been too thoroughly revealed as unimportant to what the story was actually about, so this was too little, too late. I’d definitely play enough game by this author because the fundamentals of each act are strong – to say nothing of the cool pixel art – I just hope they tone down their imagination next time and recognize when less is more!
Hey thanks. I’ll try it.
Thank you for your review.