Mike Russo's IF Comp 2021 Reviews

Thanks so much for your review! I’m glad that you were able to enjoy it as well as that I’ve submitted a good ode to the genre!

You were absolutely correct in that this is essentially my first game, too, so I’m flattered you think it’s a good effort. (That is also the reason that I had no clue about the ABOUT or CREDITS, woops lol.)

Ah, yeah I was worried Aural was less fleshed out than everyone else, but I would hope to develop him more if I end up making a sequel (which would feature him more). One last thing, I’m so happy you liked the raven! I kept adding possible interactions with her because she was fun to write! Hopefully I will return and write an indirect sequel to this game someday!

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Belatedly respoinding:

Of course! My parental leave basically 100% overlaps with the Comp, so that’s handy (thank God for parental leave), though at the margin I’m maybe trading off IF time against sleep in a way that’s slightly suboptimal.

Yay, I’m glad I wasn’t just pulling that out of nowhere! Sometimes when I’m writing these reviews I wonder whether I’m overthinking stuff, then I recall how much I obsess over everything in my games and figure anything I notice is probably in there intentionally :slight_smile:

Ghosts Within, by Kyriakos Athanasopolous

Ghosts Within is a sprawling mystery, with a big map, myriad puzzles, and three distinct openings that shift the available puzzles and endings – it all adds up to a long running time that push it well beyond the Comp’s two-hour limit, even discounting the absence of a hint system or a walkthrough (authors: please don’t do this!). It’s the kind of game that’s ill-served by the Comp, since it’s one you’d want to sink into, taking careful notes and talking to all the characters about every topic you can think of, while mapping out the queer seaside town where the action takes place. The story’s also perhaps ill-served, I think, by a too-close fidelity to an old-school medium-dry-goods approach to gameplay. It’s still very much worth playing, but while Ghosts Within is a very fun, engaging game, it falls a bit short of greatness.

The game’s opening is bewildering, as you wake up wounded in a forbidding forest, but intentionally so – we’ve got an amnesiac protagonist, natch. If that piece of the premise is par for the course, what happens next is novel, as your choice of which direction to stagger towards determines which of three vignettes will set the plot in motion. You’ve got a choice of starting at the village, the nearby research facility (as it turns out, the setting is roughly contemporary), or the hut of a local recluse. I stumbled hut-ward, which I’m guessing might provide the least-clear impetus for investigation. The lonely hermit there clearly has an agenda, but is rather tight-lipped too. That opening also appears to mean the mysterious research institute is off-limits, meaning that I entered the large village map with only a rough sense of what I was meant to be doing.

The process of walking through the village’s environs and meeting all of its inhabitants is rewarding, but a bit overwhelming too. The map isn’t excessively big when you’ve finished running around it, but there are a lot of false exits and diagonal connections that make it hard to hold in your head. And while the cast is actually rather small, each one is implemented with a very deep set of conversational topics that are really fun to dig into, but again feel like a lot when you’re first meeting everybody. I wound up wishing there’d been some light gating to separate off a portion of the village so that it felt more manageable at first, and give the player a chance for some puzzle-solving to break up the exposition.

This isn’t to say the expositions is uninteresting, though: to the contrary, the story that slowly emerges is compellingly drawn (the writing is also very clean – there are a few small infelicities of phrasing and tiny typos, but nothing that stands out given the amount of text here on offer). The village is still reeling from the aftermath of a decades-ago tragedy, and figuring out how each person is connected to that formative event, and seeing the details fleshed in one at a time, makes for compelling gameplay. There are other narrative strands too, though they might not all be available after all openings – I learned that the scientists at the institutes were very interested in the fog that cloaks the town, but never found a way to advance that piece of the plot. I finished with only about 80% of the points, though, so I could be missing a true ending that unifies the disparate pieces of the plot – the one I reached was satisfying enough, but felt a bit rushed, with a couple quick revelations culminating in an admittedly-stale twist (I would have gone back and tried for another, but I saved at what I thought was the point of no return, only to find out you’re locked into the endgame once the door to the final cave is opened up, regardless of whether you’ve entered or not).

Beyond the story, the other high point is the implementation. Beyond the aforementioned conversation system, scenery is always present, and usually modeled two or three levels down; SMELL is implemented with custom responses in nearly every location, too. Barring one tiny disambiguation issue with oranges, the parser is completely smooth. With that said, I did sometimes struggle with it in ways that I think are intentional pieces of the design. The puzzles here are pretty archetypal: you’ll be finding a light source, getting into locked doors, going on collectathons so NPCs will do you favors, and digging up two different patches of disturbed ground. They’re not very distinctive, though many of them do involve engaging with the well-realized cast of characters, which is nice. Many of them require very specific actions, though – I knew I needed the help of a security guard to get something, but had to try half a dozen phrasings to secure her aid, and there are a set of crates that only give up their secrets if you LOOK BEHIND them, with a regular EXAMINE or even MOVE or LOOK UNDER going nowhere.

This adds to the already-generous game length, and the puzzles are pretty fun to work through, but they did sometimes feel somewhat disconnected from the character-driven mystery at the game’s heart – and again, the omission of hints or a walkthrough seems a disservice to judges who are engaged by the narrative but left cold by the inventory-juggling. On the flip side, this does mean the game’s secrets are that much more engaging since they’re not handed to the player on a silver platter – I can definitely see myself coming back to this one post-Comp to see if I can get a better ending, albeit I might wait for some other kind soul to pull together a walkthrough first!

Highlight: The village and its inhabitants are really fun to explore – its eerie seaside environs put me in mind of Anchorhead, though the vibe here is much less menacing.

Lowlight: After a lot of effort, I managed to retrieve a missing bouquet of flowers, and got a lot of points for giving it to the appropriate character – but as far as I could tell this didn’t lead to any new plot unfurling to pay off the effort (I did get a lot of points, though).

How I failed the author: I didn’t rank this one as high a it probably deserves, since after two hours of repeated 20-hour sessions – which involved a lot of going back over old ground to remember where I’d already been and what I’d already done – I hadn’t yet solved many puzzles, and I hadn’t come across much of the plot. Again, this is a good game that’s an awkward fit for the Comp!

ghost - MR.txt (599.3 KB)

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The TURING Test, by Justin Fanzo

It’s easy to see how the Turing test could be a good fit for IF. In a genre where text comes first, what better challenge than to closely-read the responses of a mysterious interlocutor to separate out man and machine? And of course to have an AI sufficiently advanced for the test to be plausibly attempted almost requires a science-fictional setting of the type that tends to provide good fodder for a game, not to mention a likely-rogue robot or something to provide a readymade antagonist. The trouble is, unless an author rolls their own AI – perhaps a high bar for a free text-game competition – the player isn’t actually administering the Turing test, just trying to determine which bit of human-authored text is meant to denote personhood and which is meant to come from a machine intelligence. Instead of the test Turing devised, the player’s actually stuck in a version of the iocane powder scene from the Princess Bride, trying to second-guess whether a particular bit of clunky writing is meant to be a tell.

The TURING Test (handy of the author to do the all-caps thing to make distinguishing game from test easy!) falls into this trap, but it does so affably and enthusiastically enough. It opens with the protagonist as the one being grilled for a change – rather than having your identity put to the question in a meta twist, though, you’re setting ethical parameters for a new AI your lab is developing via a Socratic conversation. Asimov’s Three laws feature heavily as a starting point, albeit you can depart from them if you like.

This section works well enough, but it suffers from a common weakness of philosophical-dilemma games, which is that it’s hard to articulate the reasons behind your choices. There’s a gesture in this direction – if you think Asimov’s Second Law should apply to the new AI, you’re given an opportunity to say why you’ve made that choice, but the only two options on offer fail to hit many of the reasons why you think this is a good decision. If the protagonist were strongly characterized in a way that made sense of these restricted choices, that would be one thing, but here I think the player is encouraged to weigh in with what they really think, which is a hard thing to manage!

The other weakness is that of course – of course – this is all clearly a minefield set up to trick you into creating a killer AI that’s going to wipe out humanity. Maybe it’s possible to avoid this outcome, but I was trying as hard as I could to guide the fledgling intelligence towards being live-and-let-live, and still wound up with the obvious outcome, probably because you’re forced to do things like lay out a single goal all people should follow (choices throughout don’t seem to have that much impact, to the extent that sometime after picking an option you’ll be told “the question is academic”).

Anyway, I wound up co-parenting an AI who grew up with a twisted sort of utilitarianism that made it decide that nuking the world to prevent global warming? Then there’s a long, linear sequence describing your desperate struggle to protect the remainder of humanity that could have stood to be more interactive, before we get to the eponymous test – you need to determine which of two shuttles attempting to dock at a space station is piloted by a human ally, and which is the shamming AI trying to sabotage your desperate attempt to shut it down.

The Turing test as rendered here is surprisingly low-key, I thought – you once have a choice of questions that are again primarily about broad ethical considerations, and need to judge the responses. This seems like a questionable approach to the Turing test – I feel like you’d be likelier to succeed at IDing an AI by asking highly-idiomatic questions that could be interpreted different ways – but I think the idea is that you’re supposed to compare what you’re hearing to the framework you gave to the AI in the first section of the game. This is a clever idea, but it fell down in practice for me, partially because the responses in the first section felt philosophically fuzzy to me and hard to sharply link to what I was hearing in the second section. So I wound up just figuring that whichever one was written in a slightly clunkier fashion was probably meant to be the AI – after briefly second-guessing myself by wondering whether that’s what I was supposed to think, which is that iocane powder vibe I mentioned above – and that worked and saved the day.

Again, this all goes down easily enough – the writing’s enthusiastic and pacy, if a bit typo-ridden, and no specific sequence outstays its welcome (the game is well short of the two hour time estimate in the blurb; it’s also not really horror, for that matter). But the philosophy is a bit too half-baked, and the choices too low-consequence, for the TURING Test to leave much of an impression.

Highlight: The cutscene-like sequence linking the two philosophical dialogues is actually pretty fun, breathlessly narrating everything the AI does to destroy humanity and your actions to try to stop it – I really wish there’d been some choices and gameplay here!

Lowlight: That sequence also has an extended discussion of the deontological arguments the AI lands on to destroy humanity, which is more labored and less fun.

How I failed the author: The other reason I didn’t notice too many callbacks to the first section in the test sequence is because I played them an hour or so apart – this bit might work better if played straight through.

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Thank you so much, @DeusIrae, for your kind and honest review of my game!

I knew from the beginning that this competition won’t do enough justice to such a lengthy and compelling installment, but due to the deadlines for my master thesis, which this game is a part of, I had to enter the If Comp. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, though I’m a first time author in general and a non-native English speaker, my imagination kept running wild, and ideas were continuously flooding my brain, leading me, in the end, to create a big, fun, and probably a bit overwhelming at times game.

That said, thanks again for taking the time to explore as much of the game as you could. :blush:

— Kyriakos

P.S.: Considering the bouquet, if you remember the story correctly, maybe the character you gave the bouquet to was not the appropriate receiver, despite still enjoying your offer!

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Taste of Fingers, by V Dobranov

I’m not double-checking to confirm, but the main character in Taste of Fingers is I think the second-worst person among this year’s Comp protagonists (The Best Man’s Aiden is still a prohibitive favorite to take the crown). You’d think it’d be easy to sympathize with someone hiding out from a zombie apocalypse, regardless of their peccadilloes, but our man manages it. In a series of flashbacks, we get to know him before everything went wrong, and oof, what a piece of work he is. Beyond the overwhelming contempt that flavors all his observations, the racism is probably the most obviously awful thing about him – he’s a white person (I think some kind of banker?) on a business trip to Hong Kong when the plague hits, and he’s got no shortage of disdain for the locals, even stipulating that the prostitute he hires has to be European. But when he realizes that the disease triggering the outbreak only targets Asian folks (some kind of genetic rigmarole is invoked – PSA, race is a social construct not a biological one, but we have to roll with it), his matter-of-fact satisfaction, unalloyed by any compassion for the vulnerable, bespeaks near-psychopathic levels of solipsism.

`This is as it’s meant to be – we’re firmly in horror territory here, and one of the tropes of zombie fiction is that the stress of societal collapse brings out the worst in humanity. Taste of Fingers doesn’t wallow in too many other of the standard motifs of the subgenre, though, since the zombies aren’t actually onscreen for most of the game. It’s got an interesting structure, where present-time vignettes set in the coffee-shop fridge unit where the main character is lying low alternate with the aforementioned flashbacks. In each section, you’ve got a choice of three memories, and you get to explore two out of the three before time moves on. There’s little other branching, as far as I could tell, but there’s a good amount of interactivity, as in each passage there are a lot of words to be clicked on. Most of these will expand out descriptions of items, or spell out the main character’s perspective or thoughts on something that’s happened – I wound up lawnmowering, but generally found the extra text added to the experience rather than being busywork.

With few choices or immediate action to keep the pace up, the prose has to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it’s mostly up to the task. The writing is evocative throughout, freighting almost every sentence with the key themes of decay, corruption, and contempt. It can go a bit over the top at times, flabbing up a clause with one adjective too many, but since the vibe here isn’t exactly understated better too big than too small, I suppose. The style also shifts effectively in the final sequence, which sees a change in perspective that adds a neat twist to the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Again, it’s nothing too unexpected given the territory, but it makes this small, nasty game more memorable, and provides some healthy outside perspective on the terrible protagonist.

Highlight : The protagonist’s asides when you click on highlighted words in the passages expand into the original text, which helps keep this on-rails story engaging (it helps that as I mentioned, the writing in these bits is generally strong).

Lowlight : I generally don’t mind when a protagonist is an unpleasant person to spend time with, but the sequence in the strip club threatened to be a bit too much for me.

How I failed the author : I think I did OK with this one – short choice-based games I can play on my phone are really coming through for me this Comp!

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Brave Bear, by John Evans

I mentioned in my review of Finding Light that I was surprised to go so late in the Comp before finding a puzzley fantasy adventure – and here we are half a dozen entries further in, getting to the first game that centers on a kid. Despite the fact that you’re playing a sentient off-brand Care Bear, Brave Bear doesn’t come across as particularly whimsical. There’s a real creepy vibe to the dark presences that are scattered around the bear’s owner’s house, and the threat they pose seems darker than the toy-focused premise led me to expect. Unfortunately, this short game withholds the full picture of the plot, leaving inference to fill in the nature of the danger, and it also ends pretty quickly, with only a few simple puzzles to solve before the thing is done – there’s enough here to intrigue but not, alas, to satisfy.

The premise here, of toys coming to life to help their owner, is a nice one, and the basics are definitely covered. Thematically, it’s all about the power of togetherness, and solving the puzzles requires building a team. The main business requires recruiting other toys to give you the strength you need to banish the threatening miasmas that gate progress through the house – their support gives you the strength required to overcome their darkness (I imagined Care Bear Stare, given my demographic). This is satisfying to work through, and the supporting cast – a Transformer, a toy car, several stuffed animals – are briefly but satisfyingly sketched. They also have a few abilities that are used to get the band together. These challenges are all simple enough, though they feel quite old school, since most of them require a CHARACTER, ACTION command syntax that I associate with Infocom games. The ABOUT text flags that this will be required, though, so it’s all fair enough.

I’m struggling a bit to find much more to say about Brave Bear, though, since it doesn’t do much with this solid framework. This isn’t just a matter of its brevity; first, the owner and her relationship to your protagonist feels very archetypal, without much lived-in detail. Similarly, the house feels quite generic, with the room descriptions spending more time mentioning exits to other parts of the map than offering up any scenery or anything else to observe to get a window into the owner’s life. And the origin of the evil phantoms haunting the house isn’t explained, and the game ends without a climactic action showing the Bear rescuing the owner – there’s some mysterious ending text that hints at the real story, but it’s pretty thin stuff. It’s all implemented smoothly enough and it goes down easy, but I can’t help wishing Brave Bear had a little more to it – there’s a down side to wearing out one’s welcome, of course, but the game errs too much on the other side.

Highlight : I liked the other toys, who definitely have a spark of personality coming through – my favorite was the nervous Transformer.

Lowlight : I was enjoying the game for what it was, so I was sorry to reach the overly-conclusory ending so soon.

How I failed the author : Henry was feeling a bit fussy while I was playing Brave Bear, so I was only able to play it in five minute chunks in between seeing to him, which probably made it hard for me to integrate all the different hints as to what’s going on.

brave bear - mr.txt (44.4 KB)

You are SpamZapper 3.1, by Leon Arnott

With a new Matrix sequel coming out I think reasonably soon (“linear time” is a concept that feels like it only applies to other people ever since Henry came) I’ve been reminded of why I found the previous set so utterly disappointing. Like basically every then-teenaged boy I was very excited by the first one, and I thought it ended on a really exciting note: the good guys were poised to go on offense, and clearly the way they were going to do that was via mass-Satori, awakening all the people trapped in the Matrix from their illusions and crashing the machines’ power systems. But then the sequels arrived and were, uh, not that – instead of a Buddhist parable of human liberation, instead we were suddenly supposed to be invested in all these new AI characters and their muddy Gnostic maundering about their purpose for two long movies.

This may be running a little afield when assessing You are SpamZapper – though the turn-of-the-millennium setting means it’s tapping into at least some of the same zeitgeist – but I had a similar reaction as what initially seemed like a winsome workplace comedy turned into an overlong melodrama about immortal intelligences and their codependent relationships with their users. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I think it’ll find an audience who enjoys the heightened emotion and big-idea twists it has to offer, but it didn’t land for me as well as it probably deserves.

Now that I’ve spoiled a bit of where the story goes, maybe I should lay out where it starts, which is your anthropomorphized spam-blocking software meeting a new coworker (an email plugin that dings when a new message hits the inbox) and logging in for a busy day’s shift zapping spam. This segment of the game makes elegant use of the sometimes constrained nature of a choice-based game, since the only agency you have is to block or approve incoming messages one by one. As the flood of email rises, you start to get a sense of who the human user’s friends are, and also a retrospectively-idyllic look at vintage-2000 email ads.

I enjoyed this bit, but it definitely goes on for a while (I think 50-odd emails) before the main plot stats to emerge. Because this is not just a regular workday: a friend of the user’s (Laurie) is having issues with her Christian-conservative father, who’s considering taking her computer away. The stakes for this are higher than just being e-grounded, though, since Laurie has, uh, fallen in love with another program, the letter-writing wizard in her word-processor. To avert the separation of these two lovers, you need to work together with the other programs to change the father’s mind about the temptations posed by technology. Along the way, you also learn to deal with your crippling self-esteem and anxiety issues (you’re perpetually worried that if you make too many spam-blocking mistakes your user will uninstall you), plus there’s a recurring subplot going into way too much detail on the mechanics of why the programs are sentient – it’s not just a comedy bit we’re supposed to go with, in fact these email plug-ins are incarnations of immortal noosphere intelligences who exist simultaneously at all points in time (there’s yet another plot strand set in a post-climate-apocalypse world).

It is a whole lot, in other words, and reader, I can’t say I followed along the journey. The writing is solid enough – the different programs have a good amount of characterization, and there are some really good jokes involving the different chimes the new-mail signal program can make (I remember that duck quack!) and all the different obnoxious spam running around the early-00’s internet. But there’s also a lot of text here, too, most of it delivered in linear click-to-advance fashion that started to feel exhausting by the second hour, and some things definitely feel over-explained (there is way too much detail on the made-up mechanics of the noosphere-intelligence thing – it’s magic, we just need to go with it!) Similarly, Zappy’s various crises of confidence began to feel fairly belabored by the end. I also really had a hard time investing in the love story between a girl and her Word template: I get that we’re supposed to see the programs as metaphors for people, but their obsessive, near-slavish devotion to their user stands as an incredibly creepy barrier for me to take the metaphor seriously.

There are some puzzles and choices to break up the progression of the story, and a few of these I thought were quite clever: your merry band of AIs only has a few things they’re allowed to do, so figuring out how to leverage those abilities, which includes leveraging a few opportunities in the giant mountain of spam, is generally pretty fun (though there is one pick-the-right-spam-message-to-exploit puzzle that felt like it involves reading the author’s mind, as the characters even comment on what an off-the-wall idea it is). The balance between puzzles and reading seemed off to me, though – I wanted less text in between more-interactive bits.

In fact that – less – is just what I wanted for You are SpamZapper as a whole: less word-count, sure, but I also think I would have enjoyed the game more if a few of the plot’s twists and turns had been excised in favor of a leaner and more compelling progression, and if some of the crazier ideas had been weeded out where they get in the way of the emotional core of the story.

Highlight : I really liked all the mail-ping jokes – something about that bit of circa-2000 Internet nostalgia works for me.

Lowlight : I ran into a bug around the bit where you open a new credit card – a development-tools window popped up at the bottom of the screen, which made it hard to click the links, though eventually this went away (I played in a Safari browser on an iPhone).

How I failed the author : I was really tired when I played the first part of the game, so the business where two characters were sharing an email account left me permanently confused about who was who.

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D’ARKUN, by Michael Baltes

I’m bummed I already brought up the comparison in my Ghosts Within review, because now that I’ve played D’ARKUN, I’m turning into the Boy Who Cried Anchorhead. The similarly is even clearer this time out, though, as while the former game had a dreamlike vibe very much its own, in this long Dialog game we’re most definitely in remixed Lovecraft-plot territory. There’s a decayed mansion with secret passages a-plenty (including an attic telescope), a seaside town with more than its share of creepy inhabitants, nightmares that grow worse as the days go by, a wicked inheritance dredging the sins of the past into the present day, and – natch – tentacles galore. While D’ARKUN has its weak spots, with a thinner-than-it-needed-to-be story and some underclued puzzles in the back half, it definitely scratches that old Mythos itch.

Starting with that plot, the impetus for getting the protagonist to this accursed stretch of the German coastline is a new one on me – your student character is on vacation and managed to rent the world’s worst Airbnb – but after an eldritch encounter all thoughts of relaxation are put aside as you start delving into the mysteries of your rented house. This shift happens too abruptly for my taste, as there isn’t much time spent establishing why you’re suddenly climbing down cliff-faces and looking behind paintings, except that there’s not much else to do to pass the time (if the cosmic horrors hadn’t materialized, one wonders how you’d have spent your holiday). Exploration is almost immediately rewarding, though, and it’s just fun to find a madman’s scrawled notes or hidden compartments in the family mausoleum. This first half of the game is well paced too, as new locations gradually open up as the clock moves forward (the accompanying map is really evocative), and you work through satisfying puzzles that aren’t too tricky: there’s a well-implemented set of climbing gear that allows you to clamber around obstacles, and while there are some objects that require SEARCHing to find, the ABOUT text gives fair warning. There is a tricky light puzzle, where you need to make good use of the handful of turns your lantern has before it runs out of oil, but again, copious use of UNDO will see you through.

I found the second half didn’t fully pay off the promising opening, though. Partially this is due to the implementation starting to feel a bit less polished: I started running into disambiguation issues, there are some guess the verb syntax issues (figuring out how to use the syringe was tortuous), and to get to one location I think you have to type RIDE TO SIEBENSCHIEDERSTEIN, which should never be required of any player. There are also more NPCs to deal with, and they’re drawn rather thinly, without many dialogue options or much in the way of interactivity to make them feel like anything other than contrivances. Beyond implementation, the clueing starts to get thinner: there’s a puzzle involving getting past a guard that feels like it involves reading the author’s mind, a maze that has a clever way to solve it but I wound up brute-forcing, and at another point progress requires you to get into what looks like an unwinnable situation and spend several turns waiting before a deus ex machina rescues you, rather than undoing or restoring to safety.

More impactfully, I didn’t feel like the plot really cohered. It gestures in the direction of enough Lovecraftian tropes that I can sort of see where things are meant to be going – there’s a horrifying ritual, an extradimensional temple, a surprise twist or two – but the stakes are sketchy, both for the world as a whole but also for your character. A bit more polish and a bit more focus on the subjectivity of the protagonist would have made D’ARKUN a very worthy Anchorhead-alike; as it is, it’s a good time but requires the player to fill in some blanks.

Highlight : the creepy mansion is a good example of the genre; it’s not too big, but dense with creepy scenery and not-too-tough exploration puzzles.

Lowlight : the recipe puzzle is neat in theory, but required more trial and error than I wanted – there are clues helping you figure out what the mixture is supposed to look like, but there’s some vagueness in the puzzle (I got the potion to look “shiny”, as the notes said, but still needed to add another dose of the relevant ingredient) that made it unsatisfying to solve.

How I failed the author : this is a long one and it’s taken me a couple days to work through it, so that’s perhaps contributed to my feeling that it’s a bit scattershot.

DArkun - MR.txt (369.7 KB)

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Thank you very much for thoroughly investigating my game (across several days, wow!)
Your scripts (if there are any more) are very welcome!

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Of course – hopefully it’s clear I had a lot of fun with it (saying that it doesn’t quite hit Anchorhead’s highs is a sort of absurd bar to hold anything to). That is the full transcript attached – I stitched the various play sessions together, except I forgot to run the transcript for one small bit, which is mentioned in the file (I marked my annotations with asterisks). Cheers!

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Goat Game, by Kathryn Li

I have conflicting feelings on Goat Game, a short-for-each-playthrough choice-based game about the queasy moral tradeoffs forced on us by capitalism. It tells a grounded story well, with just enough worldbuilding to connect this city of anthropomorphic goats to our own situation without getting bogged down. But it also has 15 different endings, and between the two-hour suggested game length and some intimations in the game, it seems like the intended experience is for the player to reach all 15. Replaying made me like it less than I did the first time out, though, and I bailed after only seeing three, making me wonder whether a more curated narrative experience would have served the story better.

This is one of those stories where everybody’s an anthropomorphic animal – I think it’s 100% goats –but it’s not about jokes, it’s about social comment. You play a young researcher who works for the city’s hottest tech company, which has introduced groundbreaking innovations in biotech (I praised the lightness of the worldbuilding above, but I will say I would have liked a little more detail on what exactly the company made, and how the technobabbley magic purple pearls behind the processes worked). The early sections of the game are very slice-of-life-y, as you decide how to spend your workday, choose your general attitude and morale level, and interact with coworkers and family. These choices impact a triad of stats: “social”, “work”, and “opportunity”, the first two of which were clear enough though I was a bit confused by the last.
Instead of a life sim about juggling these meters, however, the game quickly reveals it’s about a small set of major decisions rather than the accretion of lots of little ones. A Big Event happens that implicates the company, and there are a number of heavier-weighted choices about how you respond which determine which ending you get. Without spoiling things too much, it’s all very Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, with a satisfying range of options that let you articulate how you’re attempting to mediate the tensions that are pulling you in multiple directions at once – and while it’s not a direct allegory, there’s clear, strong resonance with any number of modern corporate scandals that I suspect would ring true for anyone who’s ever worked at a big, profit-driven institution.

The writing is a strength here, understated, with a good ear for dialogue, and rarely didactic – while some characters will push a Manichean worldview, the game itself doesn’t feel too judgmental… until you hit an ending, which is where my troubles with Goat Game began. My first time through, I picked generally positive options when asked about my attitude towards work, but when the opportunity came to take action to improve the company, I jumped on just about all of them (I signed the petition and organized a walkout, though I didn’t badmouth the company on live TV and didn’t quit), putting myself clearly in a reform-from-within mode. The ending I got, though, was labelled “inertial paralysis” and saw me disempowered and obsessing over work to the exclusion of all human (er, goat) contact, despite having finished with a “medium” ranking in the social stat. This didn’t feel like an organic capstone to the choices I’d made, and came off like a blunt authorial intervention judging some decisions as good and some as bad. And indeed, when I replayed and intentionally made choices that I felt were more about drifting through life and shutting out other people, but quit the company in my final decision, I got a much more hopeful ending that similarly rang false.

It’d be fine for the game to have a strong point of view – like, I think it’s totally great to make a game arguing that attempts to use inside tactics to reform a corporation are doomed to failure, that’s actually pretty close to what I personally believe! – but Goat Game presents itself as much more ecumenical than this and I didn’t think it indicated that this stuff was being ineffective as you’re making these decisions. The structure also makes it hard for the game to stake out a specific angle, because of all those endings and the strong implication that you’re supposed to collect a bunch of them, rather than there being a single “true” or “best” ending to achieve. There’s an omnipresent set of asterisks marking which of them you’ve already achieved, and after getting a third ending, I got some new concluding text suggesting there’s some kind of meta progression being tracked.

This is pretty standard practice in visual novels, I think, but there you usually have convenience features to help zoom through stuff you’ve seen before, more narrative branching (here you pretty much always get the same events – choices are primarily about shifting a paragraph or two in how you respond to them), and tools to track which you’ve gotten to. Here, it’s not clear to me how the different choices and stats translate to specific endings, and I’d already made the decision I thought were most satisfying after my first time or two through, so getting all fifteen feels like it’d require building a spreadsheet and doing some rote lawnmowering, which isn’t appealing this late in the Comp. It’s possible that completing the grid would reveal more of what the game’s about and resolve some of these contradictions, but I’m left wishing the significant effort that went into Goat Game had delivered a more focused experience rather than such broad but less-rewarding replayability.

Highlight: I really liked the main character’s cousin, Miriam. She clearly cares about the protagonist and is looking out for her, but also has her own stuff going on. So often in games it can feel like the world revolves around the protagonist so it’s refreshing to see someone who sometimes doesn’t have time for you.

Lowlight: conversely, the character of Ira, the union organizer, really took me out of the game. He seems realistically teed off at the company’s management, but also has a scorched-earth approach that doesn’t jibe with the labor folks I’ve known, who are keenly aware that if a workplace is “brought to the ground”, as Ira boasts at one point, all their folks are going to be out of a job.

How I failed the author: as with many of the choice-based games in this year’s Comp, I played this one on my phone while Henry napped on me. It worked perfectly well, but unfortunately that meant the lovely art was displayed at postage-stamp size – from looking at the cover image I can tell that means I missed out so this was maybe me failing myself.

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BLK MTN, by Laura Paul

BLK MTN is enigmatic in a way that’s atypical for IF, operating on a dreamy logic that’s not so much surreal as internal, focused on conveying the experience of its protagonist without overmuch concern for narrative coherence. On paper, I should like this kind of thing: while rare in IF-world, it’s par for course for the literary fiction which is my static-fiction genre of choice (see, “on paper” was a pun!) And I do, to an extent – but I while I appreciate the ideas that are animating the game, I found that one of the author’s choices really undermined my ability to enjoy the piece. Digging into that requires some pretty thorough spoilers of at least what my path through the game looked like, though – since I can’t pick out individual spoilers the way I can fuzzy-text the solution to a puzzle, fair warning that I’m going to fully relate what happened in my playthrough.

I said BLK MTN leads with its protagonist’s experience, so let’s start there: as the blurb says, we play someone named Jackson who’s on an existentialist road trip, looking for himself as he drives alone through the American South. We get hints of backstory, but only hints – it seems like he used to be traveling with someone named Ashleigh, but she’s not there anymore, and he’s got an old friend named Jim who’s set up at an art-college-cum-commune in North Carolina. Per the blurb, he’s also seeing visions, apparently courtesy of some entity he calls “Bluebird”, though as the story opens Bluebird has stopped appearing to him.

Whatever got him to this point, Jackson is searching for meaning and for connection, and visiting Jim and the eponymous Black Mountain College (a real place, as an in-line Wikipedia link points out) gives him opportunities for both. Much of the story as I experienced it played out as a series of vignettes, as Jackson attends classes or participates in college activities, which usually involves meeting one or another real-life figure and talking to them about their life, ethos, and work (there’s ambiguity about whether you’re really meeting them and the story is a period-piece, or if you’re having visions of their midcentury existence).

Again, in theory this could work – and I can see how for someone who has more connection with the figures and movement being depicted, engaging with the fictional depictions here would be very rewarding – but I have to confess this largely left me cold, and not just because I only recognized the name of one of these folks (Walter Gropius, and pretty much the only thing I know about him is that he’s a different person than father-of-international-law Hugo Grotius). Rather, it’s because the prose doesn’t feel as strong as I wanted it to be, and because the story, at least as I experienced it, was missing major pieces.

On the first point, as mentioned this is literary fiction, which I find really relies on the power of its writing for its effect. And there are some lovely images here, for a bit where Jackson notices the way some propped-up ladders create a new perspective: “in the sky, elevated rungs break up the air above, dissecting the clouds that pop through, framing and organizing the atmosphere into parcels.” But for every passage like that in my notes, I have several like this, where he reflects on whether he wants to stay at the college: “Maybe the fact that this wasn’t a preconceived idea meant I could probably fade out and on my in a few days time. It’s comfortable here, but I don’t want to be siloed into another group that I’m always on the outside of.” Beyond the grammar errors that fuzz up the meaning of the writing, the ideas are rather vague, and the metaphor of being siloed into something that you’re outside of feels incoherent. And a lot of the prose is like this, or just flatly bad: “the glove compartment sits there like a jeweled chest waiting to be unlocked, discovered, the holy grail of the last crusade.”

On the second point, there are a lot of continuity issues that refer to events that I never experienced: a character named Marisol comes out of nowhere but the game seemed to think I’d already met her and related a dream Jackson had apparently had about her, Ashleigh’s name similarly comes up without context, and prosaically, there’s an aside saying Jackson’s main concern when he first came to the college was whether he’d brought enough beer, but I don’t remember him voicing that in my playthrough. The plot thread involving Bluebird was also completely dropped in my playthrough – I think after the second passage, Jackson never said the name again. Admittedly, some of these omissions may be due to choices I made (this is one of those hypertext-fiction pieces where links move you through the text without any signposting, and going back and trying different choices I’ve confirmed that it’s possible to miss extended scenes that the story may assume have actually happened) – but some of them seem deliberate.

In fact, I don’t think either this structural issue or the prose quality are errors as such, but actually reflect intentional authorial choices. The game opens by telling us Bluebird’s visions are coming less frequently, and late in my playthrough I came across a few passages that seem to tip the author’s hand:

These read like statements of purpose, but also apologia, for the disconnected narrative and inconsistent writing. And I think I get it! Jackson clearly has some pivotal experiences at the college, but trying to reduce them to dead text laying out the cause-and-effect is perhaps a doomed endeavor, so portraying that frustration diegetically, by having the irrational – but most important – pieces of the story disappear while slapdash prose is only intermittently able to point towards the intensity of what’s missing is an artistic choice that makes sense: this is how we get from Black Mountain to BLK MTN.

So it’s an audacious move and one that’s motivated by the piece’s themes, but it didn’t ultimately work for me. Creating a work that intentionally frustrates its own aims obviously builds in a lot of barriers to engagement, but there are strategies around this. The most obvious is probably to make sure the sentence-to-sentence reading experience is strong – when playing BLK MTN, I kept thinking of Queenlash, a game in this year’s Spring Thing that had I think many of the same issues but which I loved, partially because the prose was amazing, sparking off two or three different indelible images in each paragraph. But there are other options too, maybe focusing on deeply-drawn characters or leaning harder into historical analogues or philosophical ideas to drift off their associations (Queenlash also does this, anchoring its plot in real-world history). BLK MTN largely eschews these approaches, though (at least in the playthrough I got) – and while its restraint is admirable in theory, it winds up on the wrong side of austere for my taste.

Highlight: This review was already really long (and Henry is stirring from a nap – please give me five more minutes, kid!) so I didn’t include as many examples of the bits of writing that I thought really worked, but there are a bunch of them in my notes. Here’s one more: “After rinsing off my face, I try to rally to go to the music performance. The scene is wild. Costumes made of wire and cardboard. Something gestural and rich with motion. The rocking of the road hasn’t left me though, and I feel my eyelids start to droop.”

Lowlight: I wasn’t a fan of the Wikipedia links, which continue as you meet new characters – at least on my phone, they weren’t differentiated from in-game links, so every time I clicked one as was taken to a new window it was disorienting. And it sometimes made me feel like I was being asked to do homework before being allowed to engage with the story – I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the historical context, but I think another approach, like footnotes, an afterword, or just more in-game framing, would have been a better choice.

How I failed the author: attempting to analyze a novella-length work of literary fiction when you’re sleep-deprived and reading it on a phone is a dubious endeavor at best, so perhaps I should have let myself be more focused on the experience rather than attempting to force my parenting-addled brain to extract overarching meaning.

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Re: Beneath Fenwick…

I have to admit I, too, missed the “undo” at the top which let me undo multiple moves. I think I just wasn’t looking for it at first, because the Harlowe(?) template with the curvy undo and redo arrows to the left is what I think of when I think of “allow multiple undos” in Twine. But this was all quite new.

(Note: I found this out when I got myself trapped going directly back to the Fenwick Public Library, which I should’ve remembered was a dead end, since I was just there. I was able to back up.)

I suppose that’s how it is with some innovation, though. If we were expecting it from experience, it wouldn’t really be innovative. And there’s no way for the author to force us to see it!

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There is actually a long story branch where Jackson meets with Ashleigh and they travel together; it took up about half of my first playthrough. You have to choose the wandering options and don’t call Jim at the start I think. It’s very easy to miss.

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I Contain Multitudes, by Wonaglot

Reading the blurb for ICM, I realized that just as this Comp has been thin on fantasy adventures, it’s been positively skeletal on mysteries. I really enjoy them despite being awful at them, and this Quest game has a compelling setup: we’ve got a cruise ship for the pampered elite of an Italianish steampunk world, a dead bishop, and a creepily clever mechanic where you can don different masks to vary your aspect as you interrogate the array of witnesses and suspects. Sadly I ran into some technical issues that meant I couldn’t finish the game, and the puzzles lean more fetch-quest-y than mystery-solving, but I still enjoyed my time with it – I’ll be keeping an eye out for a post-Comp release.

The biggest positive here really is the setting. There’s an air of decadence that oozes from every overdone decoration or costumed passenger on the ship, and hobnobbing with slumming sopranos and vicious empresses is quite the good time. Poking your head into all the nooks and crannies makes the initial exploration lots of fun, while the on-screen map and compact layout still make it easy to get around when it’s time to dig into puzzle-solving. The prose doesn’t go too far over the top, either, relying on a few well-chosen details rather than slathering adjectives willy-nilly. This restraint holds true for information on the overall society, too, with a few optional books and throwaway references hinting at an interesting world without getting bogged down in exposition. Sometimes the writing can err on the side of providing atmosphere and a general vibe rather than nailing down specifics of furniture, which can make some of the locations feel a little bare once you’ve read the introductory paragraph, but this again makes it easier to shift into progress-making mode. And there’s clever attention to detail, too: when you pick up a knife while wearing a bestial devil-mask, an extra sentence appears saying that it “reminds you of one of your fangs.”

Speaking of the mask, that’s the other immediate standout. Masks are a big deal in this setting, and besides going bare-faced, you have the choice of four to wear as you do your work: a devil, a cherub, a widow, and an anonymizing half-mask. Some puzzles revolve around having the right one on at the right time, with different dialogue options or actions being unlocked. I wasn’t really clear what this looked like from the perspective of the other characters in the game world – like, if there’s something supernatural changing their behavior when they see you don a mask – but it adds a needed additional bit of business to interacting with other NPCs: mysteries in IF are often tricky to solve because they can require repeat play, with careful tracking of NPC schedules, but things are more straightforward here, with movement only being triggered by your actions.

NPC autonomy isn’t ICM’s only departure from mystery orthodoxy, though. There’s some evidence to be gathered, primarily through SEARCH, LOOK BEHIND, etc., but for the most part you’re doing favors for the cast of characters, and at least in the first stages, they’re largely well-signposted scavenger-hunts. This makes it easier to make progress, since you usually have a list of specific tasks to accomplish and places to poke around. On the flip side, for the portions of the game I saw, I felt less like a detective creating a web of deductions to snare a murderer, and more a traditional adventure-game protagonist doing favors for people until they explained the plot.

This might change in the final section of the game, though, since I ran into some bugs just as thing were starting to come to a climax. After showing a piece of evidence to someone, I started getting repeated out of memory errors printing out down the screen. I was eventually able to type some commands which appeared to make the errors stop, but when I attempted to save, the interpreter froze (I was playing offline, per the recommendation in the blurb) – and what’s worse, this seemed to have corrupted the save. Since I’d already gotten close to the two-hour mark, that’s where I left things. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and depending on how the finale goes I could see ICM tipping over into something really special, but I’ll wait for a post-Comp release to find out.

Highlight : the ship’s library has a book with extensive excerpts from an in-universe opera which provides a lot of cool flavor for the world.

Lowlight : there are a few puzzles that have guess-the-verb issues – in particular, when a particular character asked me for some medical help, asking or telling the doctor about them does nothing (I had to ASK them FOR MEDICINE instead).

How I failed the author : life’s been pretty busy the last few days, (including Henry getting some vaccines yesterday that led to a stomachache and bad sleep last night), so I had an extended pause after my first forty-five minutes in the game that meant that when I came back to it, I had to spend a bunch of time reading back over what had happened – which in turn meant that when I ran into the bugs, I didn’t have enough time left to start over.

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How it was then and how it is now, by Pseudavid

This Comp has had a good number of surreal games featuring relationship allegories pitched at varying degrees of abstraction, and most of them haven’t grabbed me very hard, making me wonder whether this subgenre just isn’t for me. But here we are with the last one of these, and I actually kinda love it? The premise sounds absurd when you state it flat-out – the world is being taken over by Platonic solids, and you need to go on a puzzle-solving mission with your ex to try to save it – but it winds up being surprisingly rich, and the writing is a joy, allusive yet precise in just the right measure.

How it was… has the courage of its convictions, meaning it’s not afraid to lean way, way into its abstractions, but also doesn’t get stuck there. There’s not a simple, one-to-one mapping between the rather bonkers central metaphor and the issues the main characters are confronting, at least so far as I can decode, but it’s clear there are deep veins of meaning being mined. The weird geometry is breaking down and fraying, maybe suggesting the way clear ideals and emotions get muddy and messy in the crucible of a relationship. The main character has more specific associations, recalling analogies to the domestic geometries of the house they shared with their ex as they traverse the hostile landscape. And the puzzles are all about decoding fuzzy signals, trying to wrest meaning from ambiguity – given that the relationship ultimately fails, maybe it’s appropriate that I sucked at them.

On the flip side, the game doesn’t stay at this high, abstract level, showing a keen eye for detail and making clear that idiosyncratic specificity has just as much importance as totalizing ideals. Here’s an early bit, which also shows off the strength of the prose:

The first street where we lived together was lined with orange trees. In January, when everything else was pale and lifeless, our street would be bursting with radiant spheres.

The oranges were bitter, of course. The metaphor is too evident to be useful: too hard to wrestle into a different meaning.

Similarly, Clara, the main character’s ex, comes across as a person, with a distinctively laconic lilt to her dialogue – she’s not simply a vague stand-in for a generic beloved. Putting all the pieces together, the writing creates a compelling allegory about how this specific relationship failed, rather than issuing mushy-mounted platitudes about how any relationship can fail (though of course there’s universal resonance and relatability in this specific story!)

As for the puzzles, there are two kinds, one about translating an image into numbers and the other about recognizing deformed shapes. As mentioned I thought they were thematically resonant, though I also found them pretty tough. Even once I basically figured out the gist, there’s some fuzziness baked into them, sometimes literally, that made it hard to be sure I was getting the right answer (I was also playing on mobile, which might have messed with some of the layouts). As a result, I wound up getting a really bad ending – the weird geometry took over everything, meaning my poor communication skills doomed not only my relationship with Clara but also the whole world. I guess that’s a little harsh, but losing your partner can certainly feel apocalyptic, so while I wish the story had resolved on a more positive note, the ending I got did feel like a satisfying resolution. Did the world need another game in the surreal relationship-issues drama? On the basis of How it was…, yes, certainly – and now when I run across one in next year’s Comp, I’ll know I can really like the genre.

Highlight: fittingly, this is a bit abstract, but one of the strongest elements of the game is its pacing. There are a lot of elements here, from present-day dialogue with Clara, flashbacks to the mission briefing, deeper flashbacks to the relationship, and puzzle interludes, and the game shuttles between them with a light touch, keeping the momentum up without the central narrative thread feeling disconnected.

Lowlight: as mentioned, I kinda destroyed the world through incompetence so that feels like a lowlight?

How I failed the author: this was a near-miss failure, thankfully, because when I first started the game on my iPhone none of the text other than the links was coming through. Thankfully the author put in a theme select to tweak the colors, which allowed me to read the rest of the words.

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Thank you very much for your review! This year I’m not really engaging reviewers, especially since most are disliking the game so much, but I’m reading everything with a lot of attention.

when I first started the game on my iPhone none of the text other than the links was coming through.

Did you play the live version from the IFcomp site? I made an update to fix precisely that on October 29, I hope the bug doesn’t remain on iPhone…

And a small spoiler…

I kinda destroyed the world through incompetence

The bad ending is not supposed to suggest that the world is doomed! Only that the PC won’t get out.

Again, thank you for a extremely encouraging and amazingly in-depth, analytical review! I’ve especially loved this bit:

There are a lot of elements here, from present-day dialogue with Clara, flashbacks to the mission briefing, deeper flashbacks to the relationship, and puzzle interludes, and the game shuttles between them with a light touch

If the game was about anything for me, it was about this: jumping in time fluidly, without following the almost universal continuous time of games and IF. I’m so glad that someone has highlighted that.

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Thanks for the reply, and glad the review picked up some points that were important to you when writing the game - I know I always find it super gratifying when that happens for me so I’m happy I get to pay it forward! I’m sad to hear other reviewers aren’t enjoying it so much, though as you say it does mess around with some IF conventions so I wonder whether it’s partially about mismatched expectations? On its own terms I thought it was super successful.

On the display issue, I was playing the October 29 version so unfortunately that bug might be persisting. And thanks for clarifying the ending - I’m a new parent and generally playing the games while sleep deprived and juggling taking care of the baby, so my reading comprehension has taken some hits!

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(Sighs)

I wonder what I could do if I had half the focus needed to write something like Sting and review almost the full Comp in such detail while having, first a pregnant wife, then a baby.

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