Mike Russo's IF Comp 2021 Reviews

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 :slight_smile: 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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The daughter, by Giovanni Rubino

In just about any work of art there’s a gap between ambition and implementation. Occasionally this I because a modest premise is realized with far more care and attention to detail than it needs (see my just-previous review of Cyborg Arena for an example) but more often it’s because an author’s reach exceeds their grasp. There’s certainly nothing wrong with being overambitious and stretching one’s limits, but there’s also little more frustrating than seeing an exciting idea weighed down by failures of execution.

Starting out this way obviously focuses on the critique side of things – and from the numerous typos, confusing scene- and character-shifts, occasionally odd worldbuilding, and abrupt ending, there’s definitely lots there – but I don’t want to underemphasize how good the premise is. The structure of a murder-mystery provides a great framework for exploring an alien society, as a variety of suspects can show off the different kinds of people who live in the world, and a detective’s probing questions can elucidate its hidden depths and tradeoffs, so that’s a great starting point. And the particular crime and alien society we’re talking about here – the death of the one young person in a far-future earth whose immortal residents have removed themselves from the cycle of reproduction – seem like they’d be really interesting to dig into.

The game gives occasional hints of paying off this setup, but due to the issues mentioned above, my time with it was really unsatisfying – especially the sudden-ending thing, since the game cut off just as I was starting to get my bearings. I’ve seen other reviewers speculate that some of the wonkiness here might be intentional – the typos and grammar errors could potentially bespeak a Riddley Walker-style attempt to present a far-future evolution of English, for example, and ending the investigation before it gets going could indicate a pomo refusal to endorse detective-fiction tropes. But if that’s what it’s doing, the game doesn’t even wink at the player to help bring them into the gag, so I’m left just hoping that this is an IntroComp style teaser, and we’ll eventually see a version of The daughter that gets closer, if not all the way, towards its ambitious promise.

Highlight : After finishing the game, I reread the blurb, and some of the info stated there helped me better understand and appreciate what was going on.

Lowlight : Part of the setup is that the post-scarcity residents of the new earth have mostly decided to reshape their bodies so they’re perennially “hot 30 year olds.” Being told about a “middle aged man looking a good 10 years older than anybody else” – i.e. 40 – and his unkempt appearance and “short and messy graying hairs” made me feel even older and more decrepit than usual.

How I failed the author : I was playing on my phone and kept getting interrupted, and maybe because my cookie settings were messed up, every time that wound up resetting the game, so I wound up playing the opening like three or four times.

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Dr Horror’s House of Terror, by Ade

Is there a harder genre at this point to parody than Hammer horror flicks? By this point, not too many people have actually watched the movies, but we’ve all seen a million I-vant-to-suck-your-blood-bleh-bleh sendups that make it seem like the originals were just as silly. Dr Horror’s House of Terror manages the task, though, keeping the traditional comedy monster-mash angle while adding a meta twist (you’re not running around actual Transylvanian villages and Alpine laboratories, just movie sets) and playing some moments of horror just straight enough to land. To be sure, the main draw of this big puzzlefest is working through its just-hard-enough challenges, but the tone is also just-novel-enough to make the fourish hour runtime go quickly.

The other strong element here is the pacing. I find long games can often feel awkward on this score, with an intimidatingly-big environment at the beginning and too many puzzles making it hard to feel like you’re making progress, and a saggy late-middle as you run out of things to solve. Dr Horror does well out the gate with a focused, linear opening that establishes the premise and stakes – the head of the horror-movie company moonlights as a cult leader and wants to give you a starring role in the sacrificial rite to summon their demonic patron to earth. Then the map leads you to a hub where you find five different themed soundstages where the bulk of the game plays out, but you need to solve the first one, and get a feel for how the puzzles will work, before all the doors unlock.

Indeed, the game actually winds up being a bit formulaic. To fight the cult and their demons, you need to build an army of undead, since turns out Dr Horror has been cutting costs by enslaving real-life (er) zombies, vampires, and mummies. On each soundstage, you’ll need to deal with a roving security guard (in gruesome ways that raise the question of who exactly is the monster here), then figure out how to find, summon, resurrect, or control the various flavors of monster before doing it again at the next stage over. There’s enough variety of theme – you’ve got your werewolf-stalked hamlet, your sun-blasted Egyptian ruins, your voodoo-y New Orleans – as well as puzzle style – there’s some traditional object manipulation, some messing around with NPC behavior, some light futzing with machinery– that this formula winds up being a strength, since it gives the player a framework to grab onto without making things stale. Then there’s an endgame that introduces a fun new puzzle-style that’s not too out of left field, nor too hard – often the bane of late-game mechanics twists.

Speaking of difficulty (what a segue!) I found it tuned well throughout. Most of the soundstages are self-contained, with only a few requiring bringing items over from other areas, which helps limit the possibilities, and several puzzles have alternate solutions implemented. The puzzles aren’t easy enough that I solved them immediately, but at the same time I only needed one hint (I didn’t realize the animal cages were portable) which is impressive in a game as long as this. The implementation was also generally quite smooth, and once I had an idea it usually didn’t take any wrestling with the parser to make it happen. I did run into a couple of bugs, though – I ran into a thematically-appropriate resurrecting security guard in the sands of Egypt, and one time when I got thrown out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, the crematorium wound up accompanying me to the parking lot. But some quick UNDOing was enough to set things back to right.

The writing is another strong point, with jokes that generally land (I liked the main character’s perhaps-forced naivete about where their co-stars kept disappearing to) and some real moments of gross-out horror preventing things from getting too weightlessly silly (those poor security guards!) There are some typos, though, and I did find things got a bit overly wordy in places, leaving me scrolling through more than one page of text just to see what was happening in a location. These are small niggles that hopefully can be ironed-out for a post-Comp release – given its long run-time, I’m guessing some folks won’t completely finish Dr. Horror’s House of Terror during the judging period, but this would be a perfect one to revisit once the time-pressure is off.

Highlight: There’s one puzzle that was a standout for me, a Delightful-Wallpaper-style combinatorial riff that requires you to reenact a Cajun-spiced melodrama of family secrets and voodoo curses. The writing and puzzling are both really fun, and there are enough clues to prevent things from devolving into the trial-and-error slog these kinds of puzzles often devolve into.

Lowlight: When you solve that puzzle, instead of recruiting the cast of messy antebellum ghosts, you just got a crowd of zombies to swell the ranks of your undead army. Boring!

How I failed the author: I played the first half of the game while keeping my wife company during one of Henry’s late-night feedings, when I was feeling pretty loopy – things get rather wacky in the transcript below as a result.

Dr Horrors.txt (925.1 KB)

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Infinite Adventure, by A. Scotts

I think the cat is sufficiently out of the bag that folks realize that this game isn’t a standalone, but rather a companion piece or interactive feelie for And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One (which I’m familiar with, despite the lack of a review so far – I tested it a couple of months ago). In the course of that 1980s-set story, the protagonist winds up playing a game that randomly generates short Scott Adams style adventures; this is that game.

And it does exactly what it says it does! The adventures are simple to the point of minimalism: there’s always an object or character (an altar or a vampire or a idol) that requires exactly one object to be delivered to them (a flower or a kite or another flower – seriously, I ran into a bunch of those even in the half-dozen games I played). You can guess wrong, and get a losing result for that game, but you have to work to do so, since the clues are not at all subtle, and plus the neat in-game map seems to clearly highlight the location of the important object, as well as the place where it must be deposited. The prose, meanwhile, is an accurate mimic of what writing was like in the games being riffed on, which is to say, it’s also stripped down to the minimum level of descriptiveness.

Is this fun? Eh, I could see it being a reasonable way to keep your fingers occupied while binge-watching TV. But I tend to find procedural-generation in story-focused genres pretty underwhelming – I’m aware other folks feel differently, but I like to read to get in touch with the intelligence behind the words, and don’t feel like I’ve got tools for getting in touch with the intelligence behind an intelligence behind the words. Anyway once I grasped the mechanism at work, I didn’t find the game very engaging. There are indications that Infinite Adventure might have some easter eggs or connections to the main game if you delve deeply enough, but since it’s been a while since I played And Then You Come to a House… and I’m not sure I’d recognize the clues. So I think I’ll keep my eyes out for others to surface anything like that rather than doing the digging myself.

Highlight : I got DOSBox to work with no trouble! That felt very satisfying.

Lowlight : Once I figured out that the map marks the locations of everything important, I stopped exploring.

How I failed the author : I left the game running overnight and when I checked it in the morning, the screen was just blinking YOU WIN and didn’t respond to keypresses, and despite my highlight above, I didn’t feel sufficiently motivated to re-mount the game directory in DOSBox to play again.

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The Library, by Leonardo Boselli

The Library posits the player as a force of chaos, using the possibilities of Borges’ Library of Babel to haunt a dozen-odd works of classic literature. In pursuit of a conventional goal set out by an ersatz Morpheus (er, from the Matrix, not the god) – help Ulysses escape Polyphemus, or make sure Edmond Dantès makes it out of the Château d’If – but accomplishing that mission requires bumbling through a dozen-odd other books, sometimes simply reenacting the plot points but as often upending their plots or cross-pollinating their characters and stories.

This is a fun time! I enjoyed wandering the labyrinth, excited to see which book I would come across next – they’re well-chosen, with familiar characters and situations, ranging from The Divine Comedy to Moby-Dick. Each book sucks you into a brief vignette, requiring you to solve a single simple puzzle to progress. Despite none of the puzzles being real brainteasers, I still struggled with many of them, though. Partially this is because the game is quite linear – while you can access any of the books from the off, I think at any point in time, there are at most two where you can actually accomplish anything. Making this worse, the navigation system is pretty confusing, with right/left/back directions that change depending on where you enter each room from, so even when I wanted to check whether something had changed in a particular book, it was a real struggle to find it again. Finally, I didn’t initially twig to the fact that I needed to manually click through the provided excerpt for each book to make sure my character could act on the knowledge provided there, even if I was personally familiar with a passage.

These niggles did unfortunately undermine my enjoyment for the first part of the game – then I decided to make use of the walkthrough to at least figure out how to get from book to book, and had a much better time of it, since when you can focus on the literary playground offered by the game, it’s quite a good time indeed.

Highlight : The twist ending of the Odyssey section made me laugh with surprise – and had a satisfying denouement in one of the other sections.

Lowlight : Without getting too spoilery, the action required in the Treasure Island section seemed a little rough, all things considered.

How I failed the author : As mentioned above, despite having figured out how the relative-direction navigation system worked in theory, I could not use that knowledge to get from Point A to Point B if my life depended on it – thus going to the walkthrough sooner than I probably should have.

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The Last Doctor, by Quirky Bones

The Last Doctor is one of the slightest games in the Comp – my first playthrough took less than ten minutes, and there are only two or three substantive choices on offer. There’s basically zero context provided for anything, with the central-casting post-apocalyptic milieu only barely sketched and the doctor protagonist getting only a word or two of backstory, and certainly doesn’t have anything as specific as a name. And yet!

Since IF Comp is primarily concerned with text, writing that’s good enough can turn even the most prosaic game into a killer app – and the prose in the Last Doctor is quite good indeed. In the author’s capable hands, even a few details or a single line of dialogue is enough to conjure up an image, or reveal character. As with most of the choice games, I played this one one-handed on my phone while Henry was napping, but atypically, I actually went to the trouble of typing out some of the bits of writing I liked so I could include them in this review. Your clinic is host to “two medical beds [and] a chessboard of pill bottles”, for example, and the choice to ask a patient a bunch of questions about their condition is labeled “introduce her to Socrates.” And the writing is good enough to enliven the central moral dilemma, which could feel hackneyed and contrived if told by a weaker pen, but here feels satisfying and just right, regardless of how you resolve it. Again, this is a small thing – but it’s a small, beautiful thing, which is no bad thing to be.

Highlight : I’ve singled out some of the favorite bits of writing, but I also admired the laconic scene-setting of “Your days are long. Your hair is short.”

Lowlight : I may have found a slight bug having to do with how the game tracked my choices: I opted to treat the scavenger with all the supplies I had, and then tried to save the syndicate boss but failed due to not having what I needed. But in the final conversation with Baba, he said a line that implied the boss had died because I’d refused to provide him treatment.

How I failed the author : I don’t think I did, happily enough – the effort to type out that Socrates gag one-handed was definitely worth it.

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Thank you very much for the review! After the first one by Mathbrush, I had no other feedback until now and I was a little “worried” thinking that no one was going to play it.
I’m happy that you’ve enjoyed wandering the labyrinth (I mean enjoyed the discovery of the available books) as I had fun in finding strange connections among the books. Unluckily I made that bad design choice of the “left, right, back” that you also pointed out. It was inspired by the dodecahedron of the Wumpus (and it’s a puzzle per se) but I realize now that it’s very frustrating when the player wants simply to find a particular book following an intuition to progress in the story.
I agree with the other weak point too: if the player is familiar with the passage, why should I force to read it to unlock items? There is space for future improvements.
Finally, the roughness of the Billy Bones’ episode: Lestrade’s pills were too intruguing not to use them, but I had no better idea than that. Do you think I had to put a warning in the blurb?
Thank you again for the review!

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Thank you so much for this review! You’re right that the ending is abrupt…if I come back to the game after the comp, it’ll be to add some kind of epilogues.

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Thanks for making the game! I hear you on the wait for reviews – it’s so tough! – so glad I could help on that front, though I’m sure there’ll be more coming in in the next few weeks, as folks get deeper into the Comp.

For reading the passages, I think the thing that really got me was the arrows to continue – a couple of times I read the book, recognized the passage, then didn’t click through. So maybe if all the excerpts were on one page, or if the trigger was flipped when first reading the book rather than finishing it, that could work? (It’s possible that is how things already work and I’m just misremembering – if so, sorry!)

On Billy Bones, I don’t think you need a warning (you can’t very well play adventure games without being OK with randomly poisoning people just because you can!), and Treasure Island was the one book that I haven’t actually read and know only from a vague sense of the plot, so it could be for folks more familiar with things the action makes more sense.

It works that way. In a first version the items were already available without reading the passage. then I had the “nice” idea to unlock the items only after reading. I think to follow your suggestion in a future release, at least unlocking after the first passage.

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Kidney Kwest, by Eric Zinda, Luka Marceta, Art by Kirstina Ness

Kidney Kwest is an educational game, aimed at helping kids with kidney failure learn more about how to manage their condition (in a heartbreaking detail, the blurb mentions that it’s meant to be played during three-hour dialysis sessions). It’s also unintentionally educational in showing why natural-language parsers aren’t dominant in IF.

Taking the first part first: the game’s gets off to a sweet start, with the player character worried about finding a costume for a school play and unable to find anything until the Kidney Fairy takes a hand. She sweeps you away to the fairy world, where you need to solve some small puzzles to get the pieces of a costume. The educational angle also kicks in once you move to the other world, as a hunger timer starts up, but with a twist – in addition to regularly finding (ideally healthy) food to eat, you need to take your medication (a phosphate binder) before or after each meal. Taking a pill also shifts you into a Fantastic Voyage style minigame, where you roam your body looking for rogue phosphate molecules to hoover up before they accumulate.

This is all charmingly realized – I liked the little drawings that pop up in the sidebar – and the couple of puzzles I solved were reasonably satisfying. I didn’t find the full costume and make it to the end of the game, though, because the hunger timer is tuned really aggressively, and requires a restart once you get too hungry. This makes some sense given that that timer, more so than the costume-gathering puzzle, is the main point of the game, but I still found it frustrating, all the more so because of the second notable thing about the game, which is the custom natural-language parser, which is meant to make the game more accessible to younger players who aren’t versed in IF conventions. The details are well above my head, but I read a linked blog post which provides an overview, and the parser does appear to live up to its billing: it understands complete English sentences, including asking questions about the state of the world.

The cost of this success is high, though. First of all, the parser is finicky, requiring you to speak in formal English (you can’t even drop a “the” without making it do extra work) in a way that feels fairly awkward at least to me as a seasoned player of IF (and I suspect would also not be a good fit for how digital-native young people expect to type things into a computer). Second, some of the standard conveniences of mature IF languages are missing – pronouns aren’t recognized, UNDO does nothing, disambiguation is painful, and there’s no command buffer. And most critically, the engine ran very slowly for me, with each command taking at least a few seconds to process, and some even requiring ten or so to complete. This added so much friction that every interaction became really frustrating – and since running around trying to deal with a hunger timer is already kind of annoying, this makes for a bad combination!

If the natural language engine brought something new to the gameplay, maybe this tradeoff would be worth it. But Kidney Kwest, at least the portions I saw, just requires very simple object-management commands that any traditional IF language could handle quite easily. Sure, there’s added functionality if a player wants to request the detailed description of an object using more convoluted syntax (like “what’s in the safe?”) – but teaching a player how this works seems harder than just teaching them to type X SAFE, and the frustration of waiting so long for a response seems greater than the frustration of struggling with a quickly-responsive parser, at least if a game’s implemented well. Eventually, these kinds of parsers could replace the ones we’ve got, which are based on decades-old models at this point – but we’re not there yet, and that shift will probably be ushered in by games that make good use of the new affordances provided by natural language, rather than doing the same old stuff in a slower, more convoluted way.

Highlight : I liked the miniaturized segments where you explore your own body – there’s some good detail, and it makes for some novel gameplay.

Lowlight : much of the feedback the game gives feels very close to the world-model, without being translated into more accessible text. For example, “examine myself” gave this response: “you is a person, a physical object, a place, and a thing. It also has a hand, a hand, a body.”

How I failed the author : Henry hadn’t been sleeping super well when I played this one, so I was nodding off while waiting for the game to respond to my commands, which is why I didn’t feel up to a third try.

MUCH LATER UPDATE: I went back for a final replay after the author mentioned that the server’s responsiveness had gotten better. It still wasn’t lightning fast, but was much less frustrating to play nonetheless. I also didn’t worry about eating “bad” food this time out, so the hunger timer was less of an issue, and I was able to get an ending. There’s a neat mechanic where your choice of items to pick up along the way give you a different costume (I got scientist, appropriately enough), and a metal rating depending on your dietary choices (I wound up with bronze, given my damn-the-torpedoes approach to food this time). I can see a couple of places where I could have done things differently, so there’s definitely replayability, and I can see kids swapping stories of how they did. I still think the game’s intended purposes would have been better served by just using one of the existing languages, but now that the optimization is a little better, and I’ve got more familiarity with the parser’s idiosyncracies, it definitely worked a bit better.

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A Papal Summons, or The Church Cat, by Bitter Karella

One thing is clear straightaway about A Papal Summons, or The Church Cat: if the Comp were judged based solely on content warnings, it would be far ahead of the rest of pack. Just reading the list of stuff that’s included is enough to raise the hackles, even before starting in on this Twine game’s theatre of horrors. These aren’t idle warnings, either – while I’m not sure I ran into everything on this list in my playthrough, based on what I did see, I’m more than willing to believe that the missing enormities were lurking close behind some of the doors I left unexplored.

The parade of horribles isn’t just here for shock value, either. The game’s plot sees the priest protagonist summoned to the 15th-century Vatican to present a prodigy of nature to the pope, but the structure is a descent through greater and greater depravity, with some of the contemporary Church’s well-documented crimes presented alongside supernatural violations that are polemical exaggeration, not mere fantasy. I’m running out of euphemistic synonyms for “really bad thing”, but suffice to say that I ran into Torquemada and one of the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum and purchased a plenary indulgence (albeit from a shrine dedicated to Mammon), but also found a brothel being run by an Abbess right next to the construction site for St. Peters, and far more besides.

The writing effectively conveys the awfulness of what you’re seeing, with some more modern touches to the dialogue preventing the distancing effect of history from undercutting the impact of what’s happening. Indeed, given the way harm to children becomes a more and more salient motif as the game progresses makes it clear that it’s not just the 15th-Century incarnation of the church that’s being critiqued here. Again, this is all fair enough – there’s a reason the Reformation kicked off shortly after the time being depicted here – but at the same time, it’s not exactly unplowed ground, and while the critiques maybe land with a bit more force than usual given the luridness on display, I wound up wishing there was a bit more flesh on the bones here, a bit more complexity in the portrait of how a horrible institution perpetuates itself that doesn’t rely on painting everyone concerned as a villain or a dupe. If the game was content with deploying its imagery just in the service of scares, that would be one thing, but since it’s clearly more than just a haunted hayride I wound up wanting more.

Commenting on the game-y aspects of The Church Cat feels a bit besides the point, but it’s generally well-structured, with choices allowing you to select which terrible thing you’ll confront next on your trip into the bowels of the Church (mercifully, you also sometimes are allowed to run away from some of the more disturbing scenes). There were a few aspects of the implementation that aped some parser conventions, like a persistent inventory link and occasional directional navigation – typically I like this sort of thing, but they’re best suited for a puzzle-based experience, which this definitely isn’t, so they felt redundant and like they were setting expectations the game didn’t deliver on. Streamlining them away wouldn’t make it more fun , but would probably make it more focused on its core, horrible themes.

Highlight : Slight spoiler here: the cat that speaks to quote from scripture is neat, and I appreciated that it lifted up some of the wilder bits of the Bible – the passage where a bunch of kids make fun of Elisha for being bald, so the prophet curses them and two bears maul them to death, is a personal favorite.

Lowlight/How I failed the author : Hopefully the author will not be offended if I say that the game was pretty much all lowlight for me – it’s gross and scary and horrible, and as a new father I was especially not excited to read about bad stuff happening to small kids. I still think it’s good at accomplishing what it sets out to, but man I did not enjoy it one bit.

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