Mike Russo's IF Comp 2021 Reviews

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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RetroCON 2021, by Sir Slice

Okay, real talk: I found RetroCON 2021 – a low-key, low-plot collection of minigames – kind of boring. But as the last game to come up in my Comp queue (I still need to play more than the first sequence of Cygnet Committee, but I beta tested all the remaining ones), actually it was kind of pleasant to have something so inoffensive to close things out. It was nice to dip into the seven different activities on offer, dig into the one or two that interested me, and quit without feeling like I needed to exhaust everything the game has to offer. It’s an inoffensive time-waster – and an impressive demonstration of programming skill – that’s not especially memorable but sometimes there’s a place for that.

There is a thin frame story tying this all together: you’re in Vegas for a retro gaming convention, providing justification for the three different games on offer as well as four opportunities for gambling. But there are no characters to interact with in this layer, or any consequences so far as I could tell for winning games or money, so it’s really just there as a semi-elaborate menu for the minigames. I’d roughly divide these into the fun ones, the duds, and the ones that are fine but left me cold. In the third bucket I’d put all the gambling ones – I’ve never found straight games of chance at all compelling, so the horse-betting, keno, and slot machine didn’t hold my attention for more than a minute. The fourth gambling game – video poker – I’d technically classify as fun, though there’s nothing novel about this implementation so I didn’t feel inclined to spend much time on it either.

That least the three games, which are presented as retro throwbacks to old, late 70s-early 80s vide games. Two of them fall into my dud category, sad to say: there’s a zombie-themed card game you play against the computer that relies heavily on take-that gameplay, meaning that in my first go-round it took me 22 turns before I could do anything at all useful, at which point the computer was a turn away from winning. There’s also a text-based football game that’s got a complex and interesting set of choices, though I found it was tuned too hard to be fun (my passes failed just about every time, even when the defense was focusing on the running game).

Thankfully, the final game is a full, albeit small text adventure, with a text parser integrated into Twine. This isn’t anything to write home about, as the parser is pretty bare bones, the adventure has a generic plot (you’re searching for a hidden inheritance from your uncle), and there’s only one and a half puzzles to solve, though there are multiple solutions. But again, for me at least at the end of the Comp, I enjoyed going through the generic house and yard searching the furniture for hidden keys and working out the simple challenges that don’t overstay their welcome. With a more robust frame story, some incentives to reward success in the minigames, and a smoother difficulty curve for some of the rougher ones, RetroCON 2021 could have been more than the sum of its parts – but eh, as is there are still worse ways to kill twenty minutes.

Highlight : I took two runs through the horse-racing game, and in the second one I won big putting my money on the dark-horse contender, so that was fun (and a nice justification for stopping gambling now that I was ahead).

Lowlight : I only dimly remembered what Keno was, and then once I clicked on it I remembered that it’s the world’s most boring “game” (you pick a bunch of numbers, then they get called or not).

How I failed the author : I played this one with only half my brain at best, but I think that’s more or less the expectation here so hopefully it’s not too big a failure to wrap up on!

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Thanks for the kind words – though it’s amazing how far 8 weeks of parental leave and a questionable set of priorities will get you!

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Congrats on finishing everything! Hopefully I can follow your example.

And yes, I remember a Keno computer game when I won. I saw a big board of 80 numbers and thought there must be some grand brilliant strategy at play here. When I found out there wasn’t, I was disillusioned.

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Thanks for the review! I can’t believe you got so far only to encounter a glitch like that. I have no idea what happened, as I’ve never replicated anything like that! I guess something can’t be playtested enough no matter how much we try. Thanks for playing!

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Yeah, it seemed weird – I tried searching for the error phrase and didn’t find any other mentions of the specific one I ran into on the Quest forums. I think it had something to do with memory, and maybe it had the word “transcript” or “transcription” in there too? I was keeping a transcript, but it looks like it got cut off around the point it hit 1 MB, so dunno if that’s part of what was going on or just a coincidence. Sorry not to be more helpful, and thanks for the game!

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Just bumping the thread to note that I’ve added a longer, real review of Cygnet Committee, as well as short updates to my Kidney Kwest and Belinsky Conundrum reviews – so that’s all the games I didn’t beta test! I’ll probably wrap up this thread with some quick highlights of those, since I don’t have time to fully replay those and it’s unfair to write a review based on my months-old memories of beta code.

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Thanks for following up!

Lowlight winning the game gives you the option of unlocking a new “hard mode”, which I’m guessing fleshes out the plot a bit further…

I think I oversold hard mode. There is no special ending at the end of hard mode. Nobody should feel the need to play hard mode, as it doesn’t change the plot.

But depending on how much you enjoyed the mechanics, it will probably be interesting to see how quickly you can get a high score.

Note that, as you open up movement by spending the chips, you will also encounter more drones (and get more chips) because you’re moving more.

requiring two full playthroughs to open up the option to play a third time feels like inaccessible design.

You probably won’t want to play hard mode unless you’ve mastered it after two playthroughs or more—the death and capture system is much less forgiving. Drones also have more HP as the game progresses, which can really set you back if you lose a fight. It really is hard!

I turned up two, and am pretty sure I missed a bunch more – finding these was really rewarding.

Curious as to which two you found—one of them has a list of all the secrets, and some of them help you farm for chips more quickly.

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Ah, that sounds interesting! I got the dark alcove, and the crate of chips after the helicopter blew away some of the undergrowth at the mountain heliopad. Though I did feel like the drones were dropping more chips in the last half of the game so maybe I’d figured something else out without realizing it?

Though I did feel like the drones were dropping more chips in the last half of the game

Drones seem to show up in the forest more often; I think it is just because there is more outdoor space and backtracking to trigger their appearance.

There is also an issue with the way I triggered random numbers that I couldn’t entirely figure out, so sometimes you will get 2-3 drones in a row. This problem can happen anywhere, but happens a lot more in the forest because of the open space.

Re: increasing payouts, there is a special control panel at the “Airfield” room that increases payouts; it is a big, timed runaround challenge so you would know if you got it.

I got [spoilers]

Congrats. Did you figure out the alcove without hints? I can’t remember when the hint comes up exactly now that I think about it…

I just opened up the twine game to count the secrets and there are four others, only one of which is an actual room on the map…the rest are just chip payouts.

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As mentioned above, I beta tested the remaining games and I don’t feel able to do full reviews since I don’t have the bandwidth to replay them, much less the mental energy to try to compartmentalize away my experience of playing the initial beta versions, in some cases several months ago. But these are all great games so I don’t want to wrap up the Comp without saying at least something about them, so I’m just going to lift up a quick highlight for each.

AardVarK Versus the Hype, by Truthcraze

Highlight : I adore the period details in this high-school-set comedy – the bonkers school assembly, the house party – but it’s the attitude of the various bandmates towards their music, and the mainstream represented by the eponymous zombification-inducing soft drink. In our current later-capitalistic hellscape of paid influencers and multimedia content-leveraging strategies that operate mostly independently of the artists they’re notionally built around, the GenX energy of these kids, who believe, correctly, that their music can save the day (and maybe get one or two of them a date), brings some heartfelt sincerity that makes the game more than just a hilarious romp – though of course it’s that too.

And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, by B.J. Best

Highlight : There’s loads of cleverness on display here, including a game-characters-as-gigging-actors conceit that’s honestly maybe a little too clever for me but leads to a lot of really fun conversation options that flesh out the game’s cast as well as providing a bit of a lens on the main character’s feelings as he navigates recent grief and puberty (not necessarily in that order). That’s of a piece with many aspects of the game, which has gameplay resembling many an IFComp puzzlefest of years past, but stands out by making sure all the puzzle-solving, location-navigation, and NPC-interaction help drive the character’s arc.

At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast, by Travis Moy

Highlight : Adaptations are famously difficult to manage in IF, because there’s an unavoidable tension between fidelity to the static source text, and offering the kinds of interactivity that tend to provide strong engagement. AKACF is one of the best at managing this tension, I think for two reasons: the first, straightforward one, is that the source text does revolve around an extended dilemma, and it’s one where the protagonist does kind of fudge his way through – meaning that I felt freedom to fudge things in a slightly different way. Second, even just inhabiting the tension of the dilemma, regardless of how it’s resolved, felt rewarding to me, because it offers an opportunity for some historical tourism. The past, as they say, is a foreign country – they do things differently there – and while it’s possible to intellectually understand the way Sir Gawain is torn between the duties of chivalry and the duties of hospitality, these duties can feel pretty abstract to modern sensibilities. So the way AKACF expertly communicates his internal conflict wound up working really well for me, since it made me appreciate the alien values of a past era in a way a straightforward history, or static fiction, couldn’t do.

The House on Highfield Lane, by Andy Joel

Highlight : As befits its top billing in the title, I found the eponymous house one of the best pieces of this old-school puzzlefest. This isn’t to slight the puzzles, which are pitched just right in terms of difficulty (OK, except for the final one, which I floundered on at least as it was presented in the beta) – but in a mansion-crawl like this, it’s easy for the setting to feel incoherent, with a mish-mash of different environments and thinly-justified puzzle elements pushing the player out of the game. The house in HHL does have its obscure touches, from a steampunk elevator to a creepy arboretum (not to mention the mad-scientist’s laboratory in the basement), but a few canny touches create a real sense of place: you can catch glimpses of your own house through the window, you can see blocked-off locations before you get to them, and the map of the house changes over time, keeping the player on their toes but also forcing you to think about how to navigate the space. Even though it’s been a couple of months since I’ve played it, I can still close my eyes and remember how the map fits together, which isn’t something I can do for half the games I just played in the Comp over the last month.

The Libonotus Cup, by Nils Fagerburg

Highlight : I feel churlish picking this given the embarrassment of riches this game offers, from the Monkey-Island-ish humor to the surprisingly open-ended race that caps things off, but Libonotus Cup has the best Easter Egg of the Comp. Spoilers, obv: it’s tied to what’s also I’d say the best feelie of the Comp, the included crossword puzzle that at first looks like a neat little add-on. But once it’s solved, the solution cleverly provides a key to some mysterious text on a couple items in the game, which in turn opens up a cool hidden interaction that also provides a boost to your winnings in the race. Like the game as a whole, it’s fun, smart, and tightly-designed!

Walking Into It, by Andrew Schultz

Highlight : Given that it’s an Andrew Schultz game, it’s unsurprising that the implementation here is smooth and robust (not to mention a story and characters that are way more emotionally impactful than they needed to be for such a puzzle-focused design), but it’s the premise that’s a stroke of genius. Flipping the goal of Tic-Tac-Toe from winning to losing in a plausible-enough fashion transforms the world’s most boring game into a surprisingly-engaging intellectual challenge that had me smiling as I worked through all the cases. I gained a new appreciation for this humble pastime – and now I’m wondering if there’s hidden fun if you somehow manage to reverse Monopoly!

What Heart Heard of, Ghost Guessed, by Amanda Walker

Highlight : WHHGG (look, I’d give the author a hard time for the title, but my entry last year was called “The Eleusinian Miseries” so I have no leg to stand on) has probably the most sheer pathos of any Comp game I can easily recall. It’s a bold choice for a first-time author to go downbeat, but one that pays off: the puzzle-solving mechanic, which revolves around manipulating the player-character’s emotions, could easily have come off gimmicky if it was embedded in the Comp-traditional light-comedy vibe, but here it lends surprising thematic weight to the lonely house-exploration that makes up the gameplay.

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