Thanks for the detailed review! That December 3rd thing is a little spooky, I agree. . . Definitely unintentional. Wow.
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Codex Sadistica, by grave snail games
Codex Sadistica gives off big music-zine vibes: it’s got a self-consciously over-the-top aesthetic of total commitment to and love of heavy metal, with stripped-down gameplay where you solve puzzles almost exclusively through power-chords. On the other hand, while the game’s perfectly functional, all its edges are rough, with implementation issues everywhere you look. Would it have violated Codex Sadistica’s artistic ethos to have butter-smooth programming and elegantly-implemented parser responses? Yes, 100%, but I still missed them.
The premise for this parser adventure is a classic get-the-band-back-together quest, as you must go collect your bandmates from their individual predicaments so you can storm the stage and kick off a performer whose overstaying his timeslot (admittedly, the game kinda lost me here, since Faramir Spidermoon’s eleven-act song-cycle of himself sounded awesome). The venue is a tight four-and-a-half locations, and the writing really lets you feel the grime and sweat coming off the walls. The puzzles you need to solve are pretty grounded (sneaking bandmates past an overzealous fan, helping another win an argument with well-actually-ing dudebros), but the method for doing so is anything but: once you’ve got your first bandmate liberated, you can jam with them, creating powerful effects, from a fuzzy doom-metal riff that conjures up fog to pirate-metal that summons a crowd of larcenous seagulls. Further complicating matters, you can genre-mix by playing with more than one of your bandmates at a time, increasing the face-rocking quotient while adding complexity.
This is a lot of fun, but as those examples indicate, it’s hard to deduce the consequence of the different musical effects just from their descriptions – we’re firmly in trial and error territory here. There aren’t so many combinations to make this annoying, and the writing is sufficiently fun to enliven even unsuccessful attempts, but this did mean that I didn’t get much satisfaction from solving the puzzles.
Now that I’ve segued over to critiques, it’s time to turn to those implementation issues. I didn’t run into any bugs that impacted progression, but there are a lot of implementation niggles in Codex Sadistica. Locations list their contents using the default Inform rules, often redundantly when objects are already mentioned in the room description. Multiple plot-critical items don’t have descriptions (“you see nothing special about Mae’s Lighter.” Really?). Items and people mentioned in room descriptions aren’t actually present. Character interaction is handled with a TALK TO command, but this is never mentioned to the player. And damningly for a music-focused game, LISTEN, DANCE, and SING didn’t have any effect.
Again, given the context, I suppose this is all fair enough, and leveling these critiques just marks me out as the lame dad who brought his kid to the show and can’t shut up about how talented this band is so it’s a shame they don’t apply themselves a little more. But hey, now that I’m a dad, I come by this lameness honestly – so I do hope there’s a post-comp release to iron some of this stuff out.
Highlight and lowlight: I have a tricky combination *light for this one. An early puzzle requires you to help your guitarist get through a dungeon in their DnD game – awesome! But it’s a one-move sequence that’s over as soon as it begins – lame!
How I failed the author: my streak of luck with baby-napping (like, the amount of napping the baby was doing, not good fortune stealing somebody else’s baby) came to an end near the close of Codex Sadistica – Henry was waking up with a dirty diaper just as the climactic showdown kicked off, so I went straight to the walkthrough there when I couldn’t immediately solve the puzzle.
codex MR.txt (119.5 KB)
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Universal Hologram, by Kit Riemer
Universal Hologram takes the player on a joyride through altered realities both inner (via lucid dreaming) and outer (via stacked simulated realities), with enough big ideas to make Philip K. Dick blush and off-kilter prose that sells the premise with brio.
Admittedly, it starts a little slow – the opening is well considered in name-checking some of the major concepts that will be explored in what’s to come, and giving the player the opportunity to dig into what they’re most interested in, be that the history of the far-future world, the mechanics of lucid dreaming, or just interacting with other people. But it isn’t until maybe a third of the way in that a real conflict and sense of urgency start to come into the story; before that, it’s pretty much all exploration. Since, though, the writing is good and the world is interesting (it’s a sort of Martian post-scarcity techno-utopia where the Internet is a person and the Earth is gone, but much less annoying than I’ve made that sound), I was sufficiently engaged to stick around until the game got more grabby. I’m once again in the position of having played on my phone, so I was too lazy to copy and paste bits of writing that I liked and I’m therefore in the unenviable position of having to broadly characterize it and say “trust me, it’s good.” But I really liked the way it takes a off-kilter conversational, even occasionally lightly confrontational, tone while digging into the heady concepts underlying the game.
The plot, once it comes, ties together the game’s different themes with some elegance, and the choices at that point shift from being primarily about which parts of the setting you want to dig into, and more about how or whether you want to cooperate with the ontological heist your character gets press-ganged into, with some surprising action-y bits even coming into play to change things up in the late game. I’m not sure the ending I got completely stuck the landing (though see “how I failed the author,” below), but the journey was well worth the price of admission.
Highlight : I’m a sucker for a good heist sequence, and this one delivers, with high stakes and curve-balls coming left and right.
Lowlight : A tradeoff of this fleet, too-clever-by-half voice is the occasional clanger – there’s one out-of-context Lawnmower Man reference that really should have been left on the cutting room floor.
How I failed the author : after I finished the game, I was turning over its heady themes and intentionally-disjointed plot in my brain to see how I thought it all coheres. But almost immediately Henry needed a diaper change, and it was a rough one with two mid-change pees, and after the chaos died down I’d lost the thread and as a result my final take on what the game’s saying and doing is a bit fuzzier than I’d like!
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Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts! This was both fun and enlightening to read. And I’m glad to hear someone finally refused to read the notes. 
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Glad you liked the review, and congrats again on the game – it’s a really fun and clever piece, and so well realized!
I am super fun at parties, let me tell you 
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4x4 Archipelago, by Agnieszka Trzaska
Going into this year’s Comp, I knew that my time for IF would be limited, so I resolved not to get too sucked into any of the “longer than two hours” games on offer, to make sure I was able to play as many games as possible. Well, here I am, my resolve in tatters: I’ve probably put five or six hours into 4x4 Archipelago over the last few days, and immediately upon winning was tempted to start again to try a different one of the I think three possible main plots driving this slick, addictive Twine CRPG.
I call 4x4A a CRPG advisedly, not to imply it’s not IF – ugh to genre gatekeeping – but to highlight how far it goes to deliver the features you’d expect in a mainstream CRPG. As your randomly-generated adventurer embarks on a voyage across the 16 islands making up the titular archipelago, you’ll encounter a clever skill system that starts you with two skills out of a choice of fighting and noncombat options; a robust inventory tied to an economy that stays relevant throughout the playtime; a main hub boasting shops, services, a library, and more; a multi-step primary quest and numerous fleshed-out side quests; a host of dungeons and mines, many with a boss at the end; and random encounters out the wazoo. Oh, and am automatically-updating journal that puts all the key information you’ll need at your fingertips – seriously, this thing is better than the journal in any AAA CRPG I can recall playing. Plus it’s all randomly generated so replay value is high.
Of course, just as the game delivers so well on the CRPG genre’s positives, it also inherits some of the weak points too. It can feel a bit grindy, with a few too many dungeons that are a few too long. My main character was a magician, and I definitely wound up with a bad 15-minute-workday habit. And the early stages can feel a little tough, as you go from island to island building out a list of fun stuff to do but the ability to do only like 10% given how much of a greenhorn you are. But I can’t lie, there’s some comfort-food pleasure even in these hoary irritants. 4x4A is the kind of game that isn’t always well-served by the Comp, since it’s long and a bit outside the genres that traditionally do well, but it’s super fun and I’m definitely looking forward to coming back to it post-Comp.
Highlight : The game sets out some clear patterns and expectations around how side-quests work and the geography of the archipelago, but it also doesn’t hesitate to break those patterns to create some cool moments of surprise.
Lowlight : The writing here is actually better than it needs to be – here’s the description of one island: “The forests of Old Oak Island remember ancient times. They are dark and foreboding, and hide numerous secluded gorges and valleys. Many islanders are woodcutters, hunters, or pig farmers; local long-haired, black pigs are grazed in the oak woods, where they gorge themselves on acorns.” But it’s too bad that the well-crafted text really fades into the background as the gamier aspects take over and you visit the same places and encounter the same monsters over and over.
How I failed the author : Henry having some rougher days sleep-wise, so after starting out game and getting about an hour in, I didn’t get back to it until today, only to find my saves were wiped (I think there was an update in the interim). Too bad, Titus the Swashbuckler, but Letho the Tinkerer found the Heavenly Spire in your place!
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Thank you so much for your review, Mike!
I’m so sorry you lost your saves! I think this is the case of the author failing you, not the other way round. I’ve always assumed updates cannot wipe Twine saves, only clearing your browser local storage can. When I launch the game on itch, I can see my saves from even before the Comp opened for judging, and I’ve made a good couple of updates since then. But I’m using Windows/Firefox, so maybe it’s different with other systems? (I also remember reading on the Twine Reddit that Safari on iOS automatically wipes your local storage after 7 days of not visiting a site, so in this case coming back to a game after a longer period of time will definitely result in lost saves).
I’m really glad you’ve enjoyed my game for what it is, even if it isn’t a great fit for IfComp, with its length and procedural generation. I’m also happy you liked the island descriptions! I’ve had a lot of fun writing them, and I wanted to add a bit of character to each of the islands (and there are 56 in the pool), even if the descriptions are purely decorative – I think you’re right that most players will read them once (at most) and then focus on gameplay. (With several islands, one for each terrain type, the descriptions are a little more meaningful, since you get a special activity that’s connected to them).
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Huh, that’s interesting re the saves - I was playing that character using Safari on my iPhone, but it was definitely less than 7 days - maybe 36 hours? Sorry, I haven’t preciously played many Twine games on my phone. Anyway it wasn’t too bad to start over - it helped me see which things change from play through to play through.
Congrats again on the game!
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Re: saving, you probably need to enable cookies in Safari. I’ve had some trouble with this testing my games as well.
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My Gender is a Fish, by Carter Gwertzman
My Gender is a Fish is a short, surrealist Twine game that’s hard to characterize. It’s not quite an allegory, nor a fable, but neither is it tied to the concrete in any meaningful sense (the inciting incident is a magpie swooping down and yoinking your gender identity). A sui generis work like this is usually, I find, either really good or really bad; happily, this time it’s the former. Since this is a short game with only a few choices and I don’t think any state changes, its success is pretty much 100% down to the writing, which is playful and thoughtful in equal measure.
The notional action involves the protagonist embarks into a dangerous forest in search of what they’ve lost, and considering whether various objects and creatures they run across are their lost gender, but what’s rewarding is the ruminations triggered by considering each possibility. While the subject matter is clearly serious, the tone here holds possible meanings or conclusions lightly, raising questions rather than driving towards any plodding conclusions. I found this approach really effective – as the world’s most boring cis straight guy, I think I sometimes come to art that’s about issues of gender from a more intellectual angle, but while the game probably most directly speaks to trans or genderqueer folks, I found its way of opening up these topics was sufficiently broad to resonate with me on a more personal level too.
Highlight : It’s hard to pick this one apart into component pieces, but I will say the way the opening smoothly slips from grounded description to the protagonist’s new metaphysical predicament was deftly done.
Lowlight : I maybe wish there’d been a little more state-tracking, so that earlier choices had more of an impact on later ones? The fact that I can’t immediately tell what that would look like, though, means this might be a knee-jerk idea more driven by the conventions of choice-based games than something that would actually improve the game.
How I failed the author : Since this is a 10-minute game that’s making thoughtful points, but not in a needlessly obscure way, even I was incapable of messing this one up.
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The Song of the Mockingbird, by Mike Carletta
A tightly-designed and well-researched period-piece puzzler about a singing cowboy rescuing his sweetheart from a band of outlaws, The Song of the Mockingbird has a lot going for it: it nails a consistent voice that fits the setting, it boasts complex but fair puzzles that can be tackled in nonlinear order, and there are really robust post-game notes laying out the historical context. I can see this doing really well in the Comp, and deservedly so – but for a few mostly-idiosyncratic reasons it didn’t fully resonate with me, so I can’t say I enjoyed Mockingbird as much as I admired it.
First, I found I struggled with the puzzles. Some of this is due to my new-father brain, I’m sure (I played the game over a couple of late-night sessions), and all of them make sense once they’re solved. But I wound up using the hint system more than I was expecting to, largely because I had a hard time getting my bearings. Many of the puzzles hinge on using historically-appropriate equipment (like making the lighter work and fixing the wagon-wheel), but the way they were described often made it hard for me to picture what was going on so I could get to grips with what problem I was trying to solve or what the thing could do. Location descriptions were also often really verbose, with a lot of detail on the environment and relevant objects, as well as usually having a couple of additional paragraphs laying out what a nearby bad guy was up to. Again, this is overall probably a strength, since it helps get the player grounded in a complicated, unfamiliar environment – but something about the writing sometimes left me feeling a bit at sea.
Another reason I found the puzzles hard was that the vibe of Mockingbird is much more serious than I was expecting. While the blurb and cover art aren’t zany by any means, the presentation of the disarmed singing-cowboy protagonist whose wits and guitar are going to save the day led me to expect something reasonably lighthearted. Deviating from parser-comedy conventions is no bad thing, but in this case, one way the difference played out is that the puzzles kept being more ruthless than I was expecting. The puzzles are all about getting rid of various outlaws who are keeping you from reaching the ranch house where your sweetheart is being held, but while I kept trying to do things like disarm them, the actual solutions were way more bloodthirsty. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed how the game takes its premise seriously – but seriously doesn’t have to mean violent, and personally this choice didn’t work well for me.
Finally, while the game is technically solid and I didn’t run into any bugs, I found it was missing a number of conveniences that I’ve come to expect from modern IF. The biggest offender is a door locked with three different keys – once I’d solved all the puzzles needed to collect them, I tried just typing S or OPEN DOOR, but nope, I had to manually unlock each different lock, with lots of disambiguation issues along the way because UNLOCK BRONZE WITH BRONZE wasn’t understood (nor does UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRONZE KEY work – you need to match each key to each lock). This is a minor annoyance in the grand scheme, but it still look me like two dozen turns to get this stupid door opened, and there were a few other similar places, like futzing with the gold casket or finding the block and tackle, where the parser wasn’t as helpful as I wanted it to be.
So yeah, this is a review full of niggles of what’s a really well-done game, and I know a good amount of my caviling above is really down to personal preference – there’s a lot of good work and solid craft that went into Mockingbird, and I love seeing more historical games in the Comp. Sadly it didn’t quite gel for me, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the author does next.
Highlight : I loved the lavish historical notes available after winning the game – I’m kind of a history nerd so I love this stuff (though see next point…)
Lowlight : OK, so the game is set in 1867, but in the epilogue the main character reflects on how “President Johnson will snuff out the embers” of the Confederate dead-ender movement the outlaws are supporting. Come on, this is post Swing Around the Circle! Sure, the local military head, General Sheridan, was a staunch Reconstructionist, but from the timing implied by the notes, he was at best only weeks away from being transferred away by the soft-on-Confederates Johnson! (OK, I suppose maybe the singing cowboy isn’t so up on politics, but come on, this feels like an oversight).
How I failed the author : er, per the above, I may have been overly-fixated on historical minutiae.
Mockingbird - MR.txt (342.3 KB)
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Thanks for playing Mockingbird, and thanks for your review! I confess to my historical error on President Johnson, and I’ll change this line for the post-Comp release.
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Congrats on the game – it’s a really impressive piece, even if I couldn’t stop nit-picking I just read a couple books about Reconstruction and the Johnson and Grant Administrations last year or I don’t think I’d have noticed the line.
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Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg, by Arthur DiBianca
I’ve played a number of Arthur DiBianca’s signature limited-parser games – including just getting to the first Grandma Bethlinda instalment just a couple months ago – and have generally really enjoyed them, with last year’s Sage Sanctum Scramble being my favority. GBRE has a different vibe than that unabashed word-based puzzlefest, and I took a little while longer to get into it, but by the time I was digging into the as-always generous post-game content I was definitely enjoying myself.
As always there’s not much plot – you’ve managed to handcuff yourself, and you need to give one-word commands to the Rube-Goldberg-meets-Alexa egg to get yourself free – so it’s all about the gameplay as you explore its functionality and unlock new commands by running through its autorepair sequence. Despite this setup, GBRE is actually much thinner on puzzles than I was expecting at first – there are maybe three or four that gate progress on the repairs, and they’re good ones, but mostly the gameplay is focused on exploration, as you try out the commands you unlock at each stage, figure out the potential interactions between them, and guess at other commands the egg might accept.
Until I got to the ending, I found this pleasant enough but not that engaging – it felt more like a toy than a game, and while it’s delightful to see what the egg will do next, by the end of a half-hour the novelty had started to wear off. Getting to the end unlocks a full Extra Credit list, though, which basically serves as an Achievement system, with 21 different entries clued only by their titles. This endgame content starts to require more focused problem-solving, while retaining the whimsy and discovery of the main section of the game.
Some are really easy (”Greetings” just requires saying HELLO to the egg), some yield after a modicum of thought (”Grrrr” clearly has to do with the dog and the bone…), and some require a good dose of lateral thinking (racecar ones, I’m looking at you). A lot of this is trial-and-error, but it’s the fun kind of trial and error where you smash toys together to see what will happen – it reminded me of the old Doodle God Flash games.
Amid a Comp that often has games dealing with really serious themes and ideas, it’s nice to get a playful palette-cleaners like GBRE – definitely treat it like a Marvel movie and stick around after the ending to get the most out of it, though!
Highlight : Figuring out Exterminator made me feel very clever.
Lowlight : I ran through every permutation of answer to the SURVEY command and was disappointed not to get any validation for my completionist instincts (I have a problem).
How I failed the author : After getting about a third of the Extra Credit points, I was figuring this was going to be it for me given that I have less time for IF Comp this year, but after putting GBRE aside I thought to start a hint thread, and using that was able to get all the points. So I lost out on some of the joy of discovery, but gained the hollow validation of checking every item off a long list – yay me?
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The Belinsky Conundrum, by Sam Ursu
Oof, I can’t help but feel bad for the timing of launching a Facebook Messenger game the same week that it crashed. I didn’t run into any downtime, but I did find FB Messenger an awkward platform for this game, from really-annoying timed text, the need to manually scroll down the chat log after each prompt to see the options, and accidentally restarting the game several times when I tried typing instead of just clicking. It definitely seems like there could be advantages to using the format that make it worth these downsides, but I don’t think The Belinsky Conundrum does anything that can’t be capably handled by more traditional platforms like Twine, and using one of those might have made the implementation a fair bit smoother.
The substance of the Belinsky Conundrum is also a little awkward, I thought. The blurb made me expect intense moral dilemmas, and then the opening seems to be framing a high-stakes espionage mission, important enough to be launched from the White House Situation Room, but your character’s dialogue options radically undermine any sense of gravity – like, upon being told that the mission will involve assassinating an American citizen and his minor children, my choices were “sweet!”, “that’s messed up”, and “oh my god”. Which, I mean sure, it is messed up, but I was expecting something a bit more articulate? This irreverent tone continues throughout the mission, and while I guess it’s meant to keep things grounded and conversational, it really took my head out of the game.
It doesn’t help that most of what you wind up doing is fairly dull. The primary gameplay, at least as far as I got, is about managing the logistics of getting to the mission and gathering the needed weapons and transportation. Preparation can be a fun part of a heist story, but here there’s not much interesting going on in any of the sequences – even a surprise betrayal from a key contact played out in a low-stakes, low-consequence way – and I ran into what was I think a bug that made the resource-management part of these decisions moot, since I started out with several thousand negative credits (but could keep spending anyway).
I can see how things might pick up at the climax, but just as I got to the mission’s target, I learned that they were about to be raided by the cops, and I decided to scrub rather than get caught in the middle. Turns out this ends the game, which is fair enough, but since there was no save functionality, rectifying that mistake would have meant starting over, and I didn’t have the endurance to face all that timed text again. It’s a shame, since a good moral dilemma can be satisfying to work through, but I fear TBC might have gone too far in back-loading the good stuff.
Highlight : I did enjoy the drama of kicking off the story in the Situation Room – it’s a fun touch.
Lowlight : Getting a gun was a really tedious process, not least because you need to call through five different people with very-similar names to figure out which one is actually your contact. It’s pointless busywork since there’s no way to guess which one’s right, and no penalty other than sitting through identical wrong-number dialogue, if you fail.
How I failed the author : I haven’t logged onto Facebook in like 3 or 4 years (look, I’m not a big social media person) so I was distracted the whole time I was playing by a sidebar full of people I’ve flaked on writing back to for an extraordinarily long time. Sorry!
MUCH LATER UPDATE: I went back and replayed this one to a real ending. There’s definitely a climax that brings some excitement and ties together the plot threads laid down earlier, and presents the promised moral dilemma. This didn’t change my mind on the game too much, though, since the story felt very much on rails after the point where my first playthrough prematurely concluded. There’s a lot of action and some wrenching decisions, but they all appeared to happen automatically, with only one significant choice coming in at the very end. There do appear to be significant consequences for the decisions made in the mid-game – there’s a score listed at the end, and there was definitely room for improvement – but I think front-loading the interactivity like this wasn’t a great idea, since it means there’s a lot of fiddly decision-making before the story kicks into high gear, then not much to do except click “next” once the ending arrives. If this had more of a heist vibe, where you could know a bit more about what the climax was likely to look like and make your preparations accordingly, I might have liked it better, but as-is the decisions felt too much like shots in the dark.
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extraordinary_fandoms.exe, by Storysinger Presents
This is the second game I’ve played in the comp that explores issues of identity and trauma via online fandom, after A Paradox Between Worlds. The two pieces make for an interesting study in contrasts, because while I thought Paradox was overstuffed with characters and plotlines, to the detriment of its strongest narrative throughline, I found extraordinary_fandoms.exe erred on the side of minimalism. Everything outside its core story only briefly sketched in, with the titular fandom and characters other than the protagonist feeling rather thin, and no obvious places where choices lead to much variation, even at a cosmetic level.
There are advantages to focus – and since, per the author’s postscript, a lot of the (awful) details of domestic abuse here are autobiographical, it’s completely understandable that everything else would fade in importance. But for me, the absence of context supporting the story meant it didn’t land as strongly as it could, though it is compellingly drawn. The central conflict is about the main character – who goes by the handle Pinecone – finding what seems like their first real friends via a Discord-style chat server and wiki dedicated to an anime franchise. Pinecone’s halting steps towards self-confidence and self-awareness are affecting, and the link between their struggles and those of the fandom character they gravitate to – who suffers from hidden low self-esteem – makes thematic sense. And it’s heartwarming to see the affirmation and support Pinecone gets from the other people on the server. But the other characters feel pretty thin; there are maybe half a dozen folks who hang out to chat and do (short, very deep) roleplay, but outside of their favorite anime characters they don’t have much in the way of personality. And there’s a very stark divide between Pinecone’s home life, which is portrayed as unremittingly horrible, and things on the server, where everyone is uniformly and immediately positive, with never even the slightest disagreement about how best support them. Ultimately I thought the game works, but this flatness robs it of some of its power.
Highlight: The choices aren’t a major focus of extraordinary_fandom.exe, with many passages connected by a single “continue” link or its equivalent, and most others just having two choices that amount to very slightly different ways of saying the same thing – which is all fine. But this low-key approach to choices helps set up an effective moment that I’m going to spoiler-block: at one point as the other folks on the server are asking Pinecone whether they can help, you’re offered two choices: “No” or “No”. The moment conveys the paralysis that often comes with being in an abusive environment in a show-don’t-tell way that the rest of the game sometimes struggles to achieve.
Lowlight: The “.exe” in the title really bugs me. I don’t really know how Discord works, but I think it’s like an IRC channel, right? And the wiki is a wiki. So what’s the executable program?
How I failed the author: I didn’t have any issues playing through the game, but Henry’s been struggling with gas today, so I’ve started and stopped writing this review like eight times as I’ve jumped up to soothe him after he woke up crying from what seemed like a perfectly nice nap. Apologies if it’s disjointed as a result!
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This Won’t Make You Happy, by Mike Gillis
This Won’t Make You Happy gives a first impression that makes it appear like it’s going to more than live up to its title: the design is close enough to default Twine to look a bit rough, and the confrontational narrative voice seems like it’s way too in love with the cleverness of a meta premise that’s actually pretty played out (like, have you ever thought about whether hoovering up shiny objects might have some metaphorical resonance with the pursuit of happiness and mental health under late capitalism? If so, approximately six billion indie platformers would like to have a word). Happily, though, the game pulls the good kind of bait and switch, and while its short length limits the scale of the impact it can have, This Won’t Make You Happy actually did bring a smile to my face. If you haven’t played it yet, definitely don’t be put off by its prickly presentation – it’s worth the additional five minutes to see where it’s going.
If you have, here are some final spoilery thoughts: the crux of the game is clearly the moment where, after provoking a fight through its blatant unfairness, the narrator admits that it’s been a rough year all around, and shifts gears to provide opportunities for some reflection and self-care – enforced through timed text that’s actually a good idea, for once! I was confused by the blurb’s characterization of this as a sort of funny, sort of sentimental game, but after finishing it, that totally makes sense.
Highlight : Despite the initially-blah design, there are actually a bunch of neat visual effects as the text transitions from one passage to the next.
Lowlight : In the first chunk of the game, I wound up seeing the narrator make the same dumb “the object seems to say X, but of course because it’s just an object and I am pretending to not understand how metaphors work despite just having deployed one, that doesn’t make sense!” joke like three distinct times in five minutes.
How I failed the author : I played this one-handed on my phone while Henry napped on my shoulder, and again, this wound up being a secret success: if there is a jewel of happiness more efficacious than a sleeping baby, I’ve yet to find it.
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Wabewalker, by Ben Sisk
Wabewalker is a first for me – it’s an abstract allegory where the puzzles you run around solving unlock progress towards inner spiritual growth, which isn’t too novel, but the framework here is an explicitly Buddhist one (that it’s a .jar file that I needed to install Javascript for might also be a new one, though a slightly less interesting one). I don’t know that much about Shingon Buddhism, which is the particular set of beliefs that underlie the game, but am aware it’s a form of Vajrayana – the tantric version whose most prominent exemplar is Tibetan Buddhism. One of the distinctive things about Vajrayana is the use of powerful symbols to structure meditative introspection of consciousness, which means it should be perfectly suited for the use it’s put to here: like, the religion explicitly deploys allegories in exactly the way the game is striving to. It’s a neat match of form to subject matter, and definitely creates some high points – but at the same time, I feel like there were places where there wasn’t as much of a connection between the stuff of the game and the themes it was evoking.
It’s the puzzles that provide both the peaks and the troughs, but the setting and story are interesting too. There’s no introductory text laying out the situation, so figuring out what’s happening is the initial puzzle and I don’t want to say too much to spoil that – I’ll just note that I found this pretty effective, even if it’s not especially surprising. Bottom-line, you move between three linked dream-like environments (one a sort of museum, another a sort of mansion, a third a mountainous landscape, though there are plenty of incongruous touches to merit the “sort ofs” in this aside, and while nothing is described especially fulsomely, that fits the abstract nature of the game), solving different aspects of single overarching puzzle to unlock different pieces you’ll need to perform the actions required for the endgame. Most of the landscape and décor are Japanese, and you’ll run across reading material – and a few NPCs – that explicate some key principles of Buddhist views of the self and identity along the way. It’s all in service of the main revelation that the puzzle-sequence brings you to, though, which is quite internally-focused – there aren’t really conventional story beats to be paid off.
OK, so let’s get to the puzzles. Again I don’t want to spoil things since the game does set up a real aha moment, and once you get to that click, it really does shift your understanding of everything else in the game and what you’re meant to be doing – which is very in keeping with how Vajrayana sees enlightenment happening, with the sudden impact of a diamond thunderbolt. So far so good, but what you do after that aha moment felt more arbitrary to me, and not linked to the game’s Buddhist themes. To talk about why, I’m finally going to need to get spoilery:
The big reveal is that the color-coded combinations you notice on various safes and locked doors are tied to which of your three incarnations are alive at any given moment. Since you can move between the three areas, and reverse each of their deaths, fairly easily, progress becomes a matter of jumping around and getting yourself either killed or resurrected in the specific combinations needed to get through each barrier, at which point you’re rewarded with pieces of the mantras you’ll chant at the three shrines located in each area. On top of that, you need to solve some additional puzzles to figure out how the pieces relate – which mantra to chant at each shrine, which symbol is associated with which bodhisattva, and which body part is associated with each mantra syllable. It’s a fun enough process to work through, but it feels very much like solving a logic puzzle, which is not the vibe Buddhist revelation, which emphasizes the inaccessibility of enlightenment to reason, typically takes! I felt like this puzzle sequence could have been about a trio of robots trying to hack a security system, and there’d be a better fit between form and substance. Worse, the final bit of the puzzle requires you to find the answer to a historical trivia question, which is what unlocks the final sequence – a koan this is not!
This didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the game, since again, the puzzles are fun to solve. And overall Wabewalker is a satisfying experience, with generally solid implementation and a well-considered minimalist aesthetic. I just can’t help wishing it went a little further towards marrying its gameplay and its themes.
Highlight : Without a doubt, it’s that aha moment.
Lowlight : this is not a merciful game – it’s possible to reach a game over by dying, with no advance warning, and in fact I did by typing a single innocuous command. Once you die once, it’s not too hard to figure out how to prevent it from happening again, but definitely save often!
How I failed the author : I played this in a bunch of short sessions, but mostly was able to keep up with it – where I let the author down is probably being hyper nitpicky in this review. Also I’m fairly tired right now so I’m not sure I’m thinking and writing with the clarity required when talking about an actual religion, especially as a white guy who’s read a lot but doesn’t actually practice Buddhism!
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Thank you Mike for your thoughtful review. I very much enjoyed reading it.
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Cyborg Arena, by John Ayliff
The credits for Cyborg Arena include thank-yous to a large number of Patreon donors, and I can see how a game like this would be perfect for building a dedicated following on that platform: it’s got a compelling and accessible hook, clean storytelling, lots of opportunities to customize the player character’s identity and key relationships, a complex but manageable set of mechanics, and a half-hour length that’s perfect for showcasing the impact of choices without things becoming unmanageable (and also makes it possible to finish projects at a reasonable clip). Turns out this makes for a solid IF Comp entry too!
The premise here is sturdy, and well-communicated by the blurb – you guide a cyborg gladiator through a climactic fight – but everything is realized with more craft than it needs to be, from the grabby in medias res opening that starts things off with adrenaline to the embedded character-defining flashbacks that go beyond the literal nuts and bolts of your stats and armaments to get at how you navigate the dog-eat-dog social milieu of the gladiator stables. While the worldbuilding doesn’t go too far beyond what’s needed to support the big fight, there’s some plausible social satire that I thought was well handled.
All this attention to bells and whistles (oh, and on that subject, the visual design is good without being overly fussy) doesn’t come at the expense of the game’s core appeal, either. The fight involves juggling two distinct tracks – there’s a set of rock-paper-scissors combat options that depend on the stats you’ve chosen for you and your opponent, but you also need to keep the audience’s interest high, which requires not repeating the same moves too many times, requiring you to mix things up and trade off fighting effectiveness against crowd appeal. It’s not especially hard, but it’s engaging to decide on your round-by-round approach, and victory feels satisfying.
If I have a critique, it’s that the game ends rather abruptly, and while there are lots of different ways the fight can conclude based on your decision, there’s not much of a denouement laying out your character’s fate beyond the immediate events of the night. But since one of the key tenets of showmanship is to always leave the audience wanting more, it’s hard to lay too much fault here – Cyborg Arena is already much more generous than it needs to be.
Highlight : The game takes a page from modern deckbuilders by disclosing what move your opponent is going to make each turn, meaning combat isn’t a meaningless roll of the dice but requires strategic consideration of your options as you consider both short-term success and your longer-term positioning in the fight overall.
Lowlight : I mentioned the abbreviated ending above, but I especially wanted a little more closure on the legal and social changes the game briefly sketches in – again, this is efficient worldbuilding.
How I failed the author : Cyborg Arena is sufficiently short and player-friendly that I don’t think I could have messed it up if I tried.
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