Mike Russo's IF Comp 2021 Reviews

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.

3 Likes

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.

3 Likes

Enveloping Darkness, by John Muhlhauser, Helen Pluta, and Othniel Aryee

Enveloping Darkness is a straightforward fantasy story, requiring a ten-minute series of binary choices to navigate. There’s nothing here anybody hasn’t seen before – there are raiding orcs, a desperate quest to find a kidnapped brother, picking up weapons and armor at the main city, and negotiating with potential allies. And the narrative feels like it’s on rails, with few choices mattering very much except to avoid an instant death midway through – in fact I just went back to check on this, and yeah, this is pretty much the case. In particular, while you’ve got a number of opportunities to talk to a particular beggar or walk by, or how much to engage with him while you’re talking, no matter what I picked he still wound up tagging along on my journey.

There’s nothing wrong with a straightforward premise and disguised linearity in my book, but if a game is forgoing those opportunities for engagement, ideally there’d be some other aspect of the game that’s grabby – an interesting prose style, well-drawn characters, good jokes. Enveloping Darkness does okay but not great on this score. There’s not much that really jumps out as distinctive, but there’s solid execution. The writing is generally clean and typo-free, with an understated voice that can lead to a bit of humor. There’s only one other character worth noting – the aforementioned beggar, who turns out to be a half-orc who acts as your sidekick – but I enjoyed him, especially once I realized he actually winds up doing most of the work. I can’t say the game will stick with me, but it’s a fun enough way to while away a few minutes, which I think is most of what it’s trying to do.

Highlight : I liked the sequence where your character, who works as a miner before deciding to go on their quest of rescue, just walks up to the king and asks for stuff to help on their mission. And it works!

Lowlight : Once again, this is a game that ends pretty abruptly once you complete your mission. Authors, once you’ve done so much work to set up a story, it takes so little additional work to make the ending a satisfying victory lap or opportunity to reflect on what’s happened – don’t neglect the denouement.

How I failed the author : about midway through the game, I faced a moral dilemma as I came across a golem about to harm a baby, and I had the choice of saving the kid or trying to fight the monster directly. Given my current day-to-day I of course opted for the former choice – which was 100% the wrong answer as it led to death and a restart (I guess this is more me failing myself than failing the author, now that I think about it).

2 Likes

The Best Man, by Stephen Bond

The Best Man sits firmly in a genre that’s typically less well served in IF than in static fiction: it’s a piece of literary fiction, with nary a spaceship, broadsword, dead body, or tentacle in sight. For all the mundanity of the setting – we’re at a wedding in a small, well-realized Irish town twenty-odd years ago – though, I found the protagonist the most bone-chilling character I’ve seen in the Comp so far. By dint of his predicament, Aiden could be sympathetic – after a stag night mishap, he’s called up to be the stand-in best man, with the twist being that he’s been nursing a years-long crush on the bride. Being relegated to the friendzone is, I think, a broadly-shared experience, so heightening the drama around this common situation makes for compelling drama. The Best Man isn’t trying to create a universally-resonant story, though – it has a very specific narrative, with very specific characters, and what really drives the story is Aiden’s toxic self-involvement.

This is all extremely well-motivated: long-term romantic disappointment can be tough to weather for anyone, but Aiden has a combination of vain self-regard, social awkwardness, and inability to self-regulate this emotions that means his infatuation with Laura immediately curdles, and by the time of the wedding, he’s developed a whole alternate universe in which his sense of his own intellectual and emotional development means that he is now a fitting romantic partner for her (or at least will be after the inevitable divorce). The twist of fate that’s led to his brevet promotion is reinterpreted as meaning he’s now playing a leading role in the wedding, and I felt a queasy sense of anxiety as he ran pre-ceremony errands for fear of what awful gesture he had planned for the big moment.

Fortunately for my enjoyment of the game, we’re not locked into Aiden’s claustrophobic viewpoint the whole way through. In addition to chapters alternating wedding business with flashbacks to Aiden and Laura’s college days, there are also several that follow residents of the town incidentally swept up in the nuptials: the widower Aiden bumps into mid dog-walk, the partner of the Civil-War-obsessed florist (Roundheads vs. Cavaliers, not Blue vs. Gray), the church organist who could have been so much more (maybe?) Besides providing some relief for the reader, these vignettes also highlight Aiden’s self-absorption, laying out the rich seams of life he’s oblivious to in his inability to see anything but Laura. There’s also a sequence from the viewpoint of another wedding guest, Nick: a pleasant fellow who tries to make friends with Aiden but is instead ruthlessly judged, partially on the basis of his lower-class food preferences (though being a vegetarian from California, I share some queasiness at Nick’s love of white and black puddings).

Literary fiction lives and dies by the quality of its prose, and The Best Man for the most part gives a good account of itself, with lots of well-observed details and generally naturalistic dialogue. I’m adding caveats because I found the Aiden sections to have noticeably weaker writing than the rest of them. Given the contrast, this is clearly the result of authorial choice: his voice is generally intense to the point of histrionics, and the thing about histrionics is they do sound clangy when written out. Still, I found the dialogue of some other characters also felt clumsy during these sections – the opening dialogue with Laura I think has some of the weakest prose of the game, unfortunately – so feel like another editing pass wouldn’t have gone amiss.

I’m quite deep into this review and haven’t mentioned anything about interactivity yet, which isn’t necessarily a kick against how the game deploys its choices but just an indication that that isn’t what’s of most interest here. There are opportunities to decide on different high-stakes courses of action for Aiden – most notably how he behaves when it’s time to hand over the rings mid-ceremony, and what he says in an impromptu post-wedding speech – but in most passages, there are options to expand different sections of the text through inline links. While this is definitely a game with a specific story to tell, and you can’t change the viewpoint characters into people that they aren’t, the process of playing The Best Man definitely feels engaging enough.

I can see this game bouncing off of some people, given the comparatively low-key setting and the off-putting central character (the closing narration from Aiden made me think that in the years since the wedding, he’d become an incel or something – he’s that awful). But anyone who likes literary fiction, or a good antihero drama on TV, will find some real enjoyment here.

Highlight : I really, really loved the sequence with Bill, who can turn even the most innocuous of questions into a disquisition on the New Model Army – it made my sympathize with what my loved ones put up with.

Lowlight : The whole sequence with the bride’s 15-year-old sister. Ugh. Just ugh.

How I failed the author : As mentioned in my squib on Cygnet Committee, I don’t generally listen to sound when playing IF, and that’s true a fortiori now with the baby since I’m typically playing while Henry’s napping and I don’t want to wake him up (or not hear if he makes noises). From the listing in the credits, though, it seems like there’s a great soundtrack for The Best Man that I’m a bit bummed to have missed – though if there was going to be a Pulp song, I question going with This is Hardcore when Disco 2000 seems to have by far the clearer thematic resonance.

4 Likes

Thank you for the How the monsters… review!
Judging by the feedback, I see that most players have problems with the interface, such is the fate of trying to reflect the parser-like world-model through hyperlinks.
Glad you liked the views of the Wasteland)

1 Like

Fourbyfourian Quarryin’, by Andrew Schultz

I primarily come to IF for the story, but I have to say, I really appreciate it when a pure puzzler comes up in the middle of the Comp: there are usually lots more narrative-focused entries, so it’s really nice to have a change of pace that exercises completely different parts of my brain. This isn’t to say that FQ doesn’t have words – there’s actually a robust introductory story that follows on from where the prequel game (Fivebyfivia Delenda Est, entered in this year’s ParserComp) left off, and there are some good jokes as rewards for solving each challenge, hinging on a series of diplomatic “gaffes” being interpreted in bad faith as casus belli – but the main engagement here is working through a series of well-curated chess puzzles, as you place a limited set of pieces in a stripped-down five-by-five chess board to defeat a series of opposing kings.

Doing chess via parser-IF commands could be a fiddly nightmare, but the mechanics here are smooth as silk. There’s a really well-done ASCII-art depiction of the chess board, plus an accessible description mode, so it’s always clear where things stand, and it’s simple to move the player around and call in new pieces to your position (this sequel switches up the gameplay from FDE by dropping the requirement that your character navigate the board via the knight’s move). And the number of pieces at play in each puzzle isn’t too large, which keeps the gameplay focused on thinking of solutions, rather than having to type a bunch of commands implementing them. Similarly, the game’s overall length and pacing are great, providing just enough time to lay out the mechanics, develop them a bit, and end before it wears out its welcome.

As with many of Andrew Schultz’s games, the core gameplay is supported with lots of documentation, a tutorial mode, help commands, and options. And in addition to some gentle hints, there’s a robustly-annotated walkthrough fully explaining the solutions (actually there are three, one each for the hard and normal versions of the game, as well as a brief version with just the key commands). It’s all very helpful, but I do wonder whether it might be a little much for a new player who didn’t play the prequel. Relatedly, I really enjoyed the introductory text, but it is fairly dense and could take some effort to decode in order to understand what the goal of the puzzles actually is – I know we’re in the press of the Comp so it’s hard to recommend playing another game right now, but I think FQ would be more satisfying if you play the first game first.

While I’m mentioning small cavils, I did find the game text introducing the idea of the “traitor” pieces pretty confusing – the game told me that “[y]our trips to Southwest Fourbyfouria and West Fourbyfouria will include the yellow knight who is not as loyal to their King as they should be,” but it seemed like the yellow knight was actually on my side, and the traitor was actually grey, so this threw me for a bit of a loop. Rearranging my pieces could also sometimes be a little more awkward than I wanted – in particular, when I wanted to reposition my own king, rather than summon the opposing one, requires typing “twelvebytwelvian” for disambiguation, which is a mouthful (maybe “your king” vs. “their king” could be an option, or something like that?) But these are very minor niggles that did nothing to reduce the fun I had solving the puzzles and adding to the Twelvebytwelvian empire.

Highlight : I mentioned the hint system above – after being a bit stymied by one mid-game puzzle, I had recourse to one, and it did a marvelous job of getting me unstuck without ruining the fun of solving the puzzle!

Lowlight : This isn’t much of a lowlight, but it took me a while to twig to the fact that winning each section required forcing a stalemate before getting the mate – I’m spoiler-blocking that because it’s possible that figuring that out is an intended part of the challenge, but I had more fun once that light-bulb had gone off for me.

How I failed the author : this is another one where I don’t think I did! Even though I was sleep-deprived and I’m not that good at chess, the game’s difficulty curve is well judged and I was able to work through the hard version pretty quickly during one of Henry’s naps.

2 Likes

The Spirit Within Us, by Alessandro Ielo

I can’t say I fully understand the impulse behind making a custom parser – I mean, beyond the desire to test one’s programming chops – but one thing I’ve noticed about custom-parser games in recent IF Comps is that they tend to share an old-school sensibility that’s hard to recapture with the modern languages. The Spirit Within Us seems at first blush to be a case in point, from its white-on-black text, its amnesiac protagonist, the stripped-down prose, and the my-first-apartment setting of the first half of the game. There’s also a hunger timer of sorts: you wake up wounded, in the aftermath of a fight, and you bleed over time, reducing your “energy” stat, which only increases after eating (there’s a combat system you get into later on, which is also based on energy). Rather than being a lighthearted puzzle-fest, though, the game’s fairly story-focused and hits on some heavy themes, and I think the mismatch here doesn’t serve to add a frisson of novelty but rather make it feel incoherent.

Let’s start with the gameplay. For the first section, largely consists of exploring the strange house where you find yourself, trying to piece together the backstory from a few scattered clues. And per the above, since you’re bleeding and aren’t able to bandage yourself (I wasted a lot of turns trying to rip up the sheets in the opening location to staunch the bleeding), instead you keep death at bay by eating the various foodstuffs you find, so as you’re learning details about the horrid events that got you here, you’re also hoovering up raw eggs and vitamin pills. The second section, meanwhile, opens up as you leave the house and start blundering around the woods exploring both the physical geography and trying to figure out what you’re meant to be doing next.

The good news is that it doesn’t take long to basically figure out what’s going on; the bad news is that it’s also quickly clear that the game is going to be dealing with the fallout of the sexual abuse of children. There are no details depicted, thank God – you’re only told that you’re finding photos depicting awful events, and come across vague excerpts from the self-justifying writings of the predator whose actions have set this story in motion. Still, this is a heavy, heavy topic, and it sits awkwardly with the Hungry Hungry Hippos vibe of the first part of the game.

It’s also one that I don’t think is handled especially sensitively. Some spoilers here: there’s an indication that the protagonist, who’s one of the victims of the villain’s abuse, has wound up with violent tendencies that almost rise to the level of a split personality as a result of their trauma. And speaking of the antagonist, turns out he’s the school janitor, which fits in a not-great tradition of inaccurately portraying the most common perpetrators of sexual violence as low-class strangers. Beyond these specifics, another challenge is that the writing is pretty minimal, as befits its presentation – most locations get only a sentence or two, and even the throes of combat aren’t described especially fulsomely. Doing justice to the emotional heft of the subject matter, though, would require something a little more robust than what the game delivers, especially after it reaches a violent catharsis.

The parser is generally solid enough, though I did spend some time wrestling with it. Disambiguation was often very tricky, and examining objects often requires you to be holding them, which is made harder by the low inventory-limit. Still, overall the custom-parser experiment is a success – I think it’s just married to a game that it doesn’t fit.

Highlight : I usually detest hunger timers, but here it’s implemented pretty generously, so I found it added a prod to move efficiently through the world but didn’t add too much stress.

Lowlight : Trying to get a bunch of pills out of a vitamin packet required something like two dozen trial-and-error commands before I understood how to refer to them.

How I failed the author : I played this late at night, while pretty bleary-eyed, which meant that I really couldn’t read the blue on black text the game uses to update you on your energy levels, so I was flying blind most of the game.

2 Likes

Thanks for the review! Your note about the yellow/purple knight–well, that’s a bug, and it was text I slipped in in the last few days, ostensibly to help the player. Oops. So I appreciate you finding this, especially since it (along with the nice words) gave me motivation to push a trivial update to the IFComp site.

I wanted to mention that pairs of stalemate quests were identical for W/SW and E/NE, so I didn’t want the player to repeat themselves, and somehow, when I wrote everything out, I wrote in your other ally when I meant to write in the traitor.

And yeah, it’s tough to shake that 5x5 is a good intro to 4x4, and people have enough games to play right now. I didn’t realize how difficult it might be until I put it aside for 2 weeks, came back, and got frustrated a solution wasn’t working. Before that break, I’d forced the player to find a new stalemate in the north/northeast on hard mode, which I promptly forgot I’d added.

2 Likes

Smart Theory, by AKheon

Smart Theory is part of a sub-genre of games that, by my lights, has yet to produce a single successful entry: the much-dreaded polemic about current events. Don’t get me wrong, I like politics in my stories, but using narrative to convince, rather than to explore, sets authors up for failure, and often the temptation is to use thin plots and thinner character to prop up an ideological point, rather than using beliefs to enrich the people and stories we follow.

Smart Theory does not break this streak, and doesn’t beat the already dismal batting average of the sub-genre. I suppose it’s possible I think that because I’m on the opposite side of the particular culture-war fight being picked – the game appears to be an attempt to take down Critical Race Theory, and inasmuch as I work for a civil rights organization and took a class in law school from one of the founders of CRT, I’m on team wrongthink as far as it’s concerned – but at the same time, Stand Up / Stay Silent from last year’s Comp was basically Defund the Police: The Game and I thought that one profoundly didn’t work too. No, the problem isn’t that Smart Theory is trying to gore my oxen: it’s that it’s rather a bore about it.

Things start to go wrong from the very premise. Where other polemical games dress up their ideological agendas in at least some narrative fancy-dress, here the story is tacked-on as can be: you’re a student who attends a college lecture by a proponent of the new “Smart Theory” craze, which again is a very thinly-veiled CRT stand-in (like, a book called “Dumb Fragility” gets name-checked). There’s barely any plot to be had other than talking-heads yelling at each other, and the lecturer doesn’t get any characterization beyond “over the top charlatan.” So things that stories are traditionally good at are off the table, and the game lives and dies by the quality of its arguments.

Reader, these are not good, on either end! The lecturer’s explication of the theory is glib and parodic, which I guess makes the polemic go down easy but there’s not much here that a CRT proponent would recognize, as Smart Theory seems way more focused on French structuralism and postmodernism than on the actual stuff CRT deals with. On the flip side, partially due to the nature of the choice format, where you can’t easily have the player’s choices go on for paragraphs, the counterarguments the player character raises are also so superficial and unconvincing that a tiny part of me wonders whether the game is sort of double-agent, secretly parodying the anti-CRT position.

This ain’t changing anyone’s mind – it’s comforting pabulum for those who already agree that CRT is poisoning our children, trivially dismissible by those who don’t, and I’d wager completely incomprehensible to those who don’t already have their minds made up. Maybe someday someone will write the game that changes peoples’ politics by main force, rather than by grounding their ideas in compelling characters, rich settings, and satisfying plots, but today is not that day.

Highlight : Again, these barbs are largely mis-aimed (protip: critical theory and critical legal studies are not the same thing!), but there are some good jokes about postmodernism – the best being a mid-lecture celebratory announcement that “our crack team of social scientists has successfully added one more [post] prefix” to the modernism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, etc. that Smart Theory is based on.

Lowlight : I think I’ve said enough on this score.

How I failed the author : er, fairly comprehensively, I should think. I really liked the author’s Ascension of Limbs from last year, for what it’s worth!

7 Likes

Starbreakers, by E. Joyce and N. Cormier

As I mentioned in my Fourbyfourian review above, I quite enjoy a mid-Comp lagniappe of pure puzzling, and while I wasn’t expecting one to come from the team that produced the excellent heist comedy Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires – a standout entry in this year’s Spring Thing – it was a welcome surprise nonetheless. At its heart, Starbreakers is a collection of brainteasers, with only a bit of story connecting its different challenges. But the story and puzzles are generally strong enough to make this an enjoyable entry in a genre that’s usually about pure fun.

I won’t say too much about the narrative here, since unpacking exactly what’s going on is part of the draw, except to point out a clever touch, which is that when you fail a puzzle – and you will, since the default difficulty there are time and move limits that even the cleverest will run afoul of at least once – you get another chance, but along with the puzzle-reset, the genre of the story can change, from medieval fantasy to space opera to tomb-raiding to pirate adventure. This is an intriguing hook, and also just a lot of fun – plus it plays a clever mechanical role in some puzzles, since some details change with the genre shifts which make the associated puzzles harder to brute-force.

The puzzles on offer here are for the most part old chestnuts – there’s a small crossword, a word-search, a couple of decoding puzzles, and a nicely-done classic logic puzzle. You’ll have seen almost all of them before, but they’re implemented well, incorporate some good jokes and clever design, and are satisfying to solve – and if any are giving you too much trouble, there are integrated hints and explicit solutions close at hand in the sidebar.

It’s hard to say too much more without diving into the details of all the puzzles, but hopefully from this description it’s clear that if you like this sort of thing, you’ll like Starbreakers – and even if puzzle-fests aren’t your usual cup of tea, the relatively short length and good-natured mystery threaded through make this a good one with which to get your feet wet.

Highlight : when approaching a collection of classic puzzles, I always have a sliver of dread in my heart because of the possibility that it will include the dreaded towers of Hanoi. I don’t want to spoil its appearance here, but the fact this is a highlight rather than a lowlight should convey how delightfully Starbreakers manages things.

Lowlight : I had an excessively tough time with the first puzzle – one of those lever-balancing jobbies where you have containers that all hold varying amounts of liquid and you need to pour things around to get the right amounts in the right places. It’s simple enough, but I think I ran into a bug that meant that the game said left-hand side was always lower than the right no matter how much liquid was in either container – so that put me off on a wild goose chase trying to figure out if there was a trick, and then once I realized that the puzzle was playing straight, I still managed to flail around and fat-finger my choices so I failed maybe a dozen more times – I failed way more on this first puzzle than on all the others combined!

How I failed the author : Despite there being an easy mode that would have removed the time and move limits, and despite the fact that I was as usual playing left-handed on my phone and couldn’t type quickly or take notes due to holding Henry while he napped, I stubbornly refused to activate it.

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Hey, thanks for the review! I don’t know if the following revelation will improve or further degrade your impression of the game, but for what it’s worth Smart Theory is not CRT. Canonically, I think of it as a type of a successor ideology to all the strands of critical constructivist thought. Being the most streamlined, brash, marketable and disingenuously oppressive thought system on the block, it has essentially devoured all of its competition, and the references to things like intersectionality and fragility could be seen as ham-handed appropriation from its part.

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Thanks for the great review! And thanks for the heads up about the balancing puzzle bug - I’ll see if I can replicate it.

I’m also glad everyone seems to like our “version” of Towers of Hanoi. Multiple reviews have mentioned it so far which means we did it right!

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Thanks for all the feedback on the game, Mike! FWIW, I have been able to add some caching on the server that has greatly improved performance since you played. It isn’t at Inform 7 level speeds, but it is much better than what you (unfortunately) experienced.

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After reading Mike’s review (I hadn’t considered the angle, and it made so much sense that I had some “what was I thinking” moments) and comparing it to my own, I walked away realizing that I, like the Smart Theorists, saw what I wanted to see, even though I tried to avoid that.

I focused more on huckster motivationalism/MLM/prosperity gospel (e.g. Joel Osteen/“don’t let THEM crush your dreams”) moguls or, more personally, a former coworker who was very, very enthusiastic about PERL. For a while, I couldn’t figure why I learned more PERL when talking to other coworkers who seemed to love PERL less than he did.

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I mean, I’m happy that almost all of the reviewers so far have found something different in Smart Theory. The game has a contemporary political edge, for sure, but (at least personally) that’s not all it’s about.

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Thanks for the bug report! Honestly, the description of which way the pole is tipping is an artifact of a version of the puzzle that didn’t show you how much stuff was in each bucket, and it’s pretty redundant now, so rather than fixing it I think I’m just going to remove it.

Glad you enjoyed the game!

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Oh, that’s interesting! Thanks for sharing, and for responding with such grace. If I didn’t pick up on all the subtext, the fault is probably mine - dunno if you saw the first post, but I’ve got a one-month-old at home and am pretty sleep deprived, so my ability to recognize nuance is not great right now. I think part of what happened is that there were some very specific references, like to White Fragility and the repeated mentions that this is an academic discipline being discussed. This is maybe part of the challenge of this kind of game - the line between making references that are too on-the-nose and having things be going vague for folks to get the satire can be pretty narrow. But sounds like folks are getting different things out of it, which is the key thing.

Oh, that’s great news - I’ll try to go back and give the game another go!