Mike Russo's IF Comp 2021 Reviews

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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

After-Words, by fireisnormal

There’s lots of high-concept IF, but those concepts usually focus on a specific gameplay gimmick or unique setting – After-Words, meanwhile takes the road less traveled by adopting a constraint on the writing. Every sentence, description, and response in the game is at most two words long. There are two different ways you could go with this: one would be to keep things as stripped-down and literal as possible, to make sure the player always understands exactly what’s going on despite the limited number of words available to communicate; the other would be to use evocative language, neologisms, and metaphor to paint a picture and engage the emotions, even at the risk of leaving the player a bit at sea. After-Words opts for the latter approach, which makes for a more fun game overall though I did spend some time floundering.

The game elements are pretty unique, too. After-Words uses a custom web-based interface that’s narrowly-tailored to what it does. The main screen shows an icon-based grid map that you can directly navigate with arrows, gives you an interface element to toggle between your two available actions (looking and interacting), and features a small window for the text describing what you see in each location. You’re exploring a surreal city, most of which is initially gated off – unlocking the various barriers so you can open up the full grid takes up most of the game’s running time, and this is largely done via a series of simple item-based interactions. Sometimes this is as simple as using a coin to pay a bridge’s toll, but usually there’s some leap of logic required, based on interpreting the fantastical world sketched out by the game’s dreamlike language: figuring out how to repair the city’s screaming gunflowers, or how to impress the backflipping flickerking.

There’s only a minimal amount of story or context here – you’re solving puzzles because you’re a player and supposed to solve puzzles – but the writing does a good job of presenting a consistent world, and key themes do emerge: there’s a strong elemental vibe to the different districts of the city, religious practice seems to be a central concern of its residents, and what technology exists is bespoke, near-organic.

Getting to see new parts of the map, then, also means learning more about this strange, intriguing place, and solving the puzzles similarly provides a sense of the rules that govern it. I found this gameplay loop effective for about the first two-thirds of the running time. In the last ten minutes or so, the large number of open locations and slightly bigger inventory (previously there’d only been one or two items carried at a time) made it harder to intuit what steps would lead to progress, and reduced me to lawnmowering my way through the map. But overall I’d judge After-Words an experiment that succeeds – I just wouldn’t be shy about using the built-in hints to prevent it from wearing thin in the late-game.

Highlight : One location, described as the city’s “stochastic court”, just intrigued me no measure, and I spend a few minutes spinning out possible interpretations for what the legal system here could look like.

Lowlight : There’s one interaction – receiving a benediction from “in-sects” who inhabit the city’s “seahives” – that seems to break the two-word-sentence rule: ”our – buzz – blessing – buzz” only skates by on a technicality.

How I failed the author : As with many of the choice-based games, I played After-Words on my phone in between taking care of the baby, which wasn’t the best way to experience the game – using Safari to play it online, the top-of-window options (including save and load functionality, as well as hints and a walkthrough) weren’t visible, and using inventory items required a lot of awkward scrolling up and down. Dipping back in on my desktop makes the game a much smoother experience.

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Recon, by Carlos Pamies

Back in the early 90s, every once in a while I would come across a game that was full of style but didn’t make much sense (typically it would be some kind of French adventure game or RPG, with an 80-page novella in the manual that somehow just made things even harder to understand), and I’d be dragged through a confusing plot and obscure gameplay by sheer force of aesthetics. Recon keeps this tradition alive: I wasn’t really clear on the characters, stakes, and setting until the final few sequences, and my understanding of what was going on changed radically a couple of times, and not in ways that I think were intended. And the puzzles are a mix of clever and off-the-wall. But there was enough verve on display to largely carry me through my time with the game.

Recon’s first impression is a pretty accurate slice of what you’re in for. The cover image is a gorgeous slab of sci-fi, and the title and chapter screens continue the high production values. Then you’re dumped into a bar with a kitten, and asked to participate in the world’s most awkward character-customization process (you’re required to specify your skin color, which can be “Nordic”, “Caucasian”, “Ethiopic”, “America”, or “Oriental”) As this opening sequence proceeds, it becomes clear that you’re there to check on two of your allies, “X” and “Equis” (it turns out these are actually the same person), and you’re up against the jackbooted thugs of “Faro”, which is not a gang boss as I first thought (nor a card game or grain, for that matter) but an evil corporation that calls the shots in this dystopia.

Things clear up a bit from there, but only a bit, and beyond this Faro mix-up, I also had at least two other moments where a glancing reference or new development made me realize I had deeply misunderstood the main character’s situation and motivation (the others turned on the “Recon” group that the main character leads, and the ending’s indication that a functioning court system exists and can actually bring down the mighty Faro). The writing is also often a bit off-kilter, contributing to this discombobulated mood – there aren’t too many typos or out-and-out errors, but the syntax and word choice are often strange in a way I associate with translated works or writing from folks whose native language isn’t English – it’s not necessarily bad, but it’s often hard to scan and understand.

Fortunately, the game is well-paced and doesn’t require you to understand the big picture to work through. Each of its chapters is structured similarly, with a bunch of story progression and narrative choices building up to a major puzzle that gates progress. These are all one-of-a-kind, running from an adventure-game style search of X’s house to pattern-recognition tests. Many feature some fun fourth-wall breaking, and you’ll see substantially different puzzles depending on which of the major midgame branches you go down. Some are a little too out there, I thought – even looking at the walkthrough, I don’t understand the Morse code puzzle. But luckily, that walkthrough is comprehensive, and also boasts impressive layout and design. Once I used it to reach the end, I was able to appreciate the aesthetic experience Recon provides – but I do with there’d been some more careful worldbuilding, clearer writing, and better-clued puzzles to go alongside.

Highlight: There’s a surprising amount of interactivity in the mid-game – there’s a major branch that meant I ran into completely different plot and challenges than the ones the walkthrough described, and there seems to be a good scope for different choices in how you treat a potential ally to lead to different results.

Lowlight: The game doesn’t have content warnings, but I would have appreciated one since a late-game sequence features an interrogation that does spill over into what I’d consider torture – most of your options involve verbal coercion, but there is a “hit” option. Making this sequence even less enjoyable, I ran into a bug after failing it the first time, as once the interrogation restarted I was missing some of the options needed to progress (I could no longer try to blackmail, or press for a confession), and after I gave up and checked the walkthrough, it turned out that the intended solution is actually pretty counterintuitive since you need to get the target’s stress level outside of the range marked “optimum” to succeed.

How I failed the author: I just did not get what was happening for like 90% of the game, and I can’t imagine that my generally fuzzy-brained state (Henry’s been having some congestion and not sleeping as well as usual, poor thing) helped matters.

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Hi Mike!

Thanks for the time and your deep review of my IF.

Most of the reviews I’m receiving are focused on the problem with the language. (Noted for next tryouts) Apart from that, I don’t get what you find messy or unclear throughout the story, if you could be more specific it would help me a lot for this and following stories.

Did not see the interrogation part as you did, but I think you are right and I should have thought better of it. (I’m sorry you had problems with that part, I’ll try to fix them. The optimum spot will be misaligned depending on the size of the screen.)

Once again, thanks for all the tips and I’m glad that you at least enjoyed it even if only a little.

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Hi Carlos – I did indeed enjoy your game! Sometimes it’s fun to play something that has some dream-logic, and it’s well-paced which counts for a lot.

A little more on the plot points I found hard to understand behind a spoiler-block – though I should say I have a newborn and am pretty sleep-deprived lately, so these misunderstandings could well be just me being braindead!

Let’s see, I found two pieces of the setup unclear, and then the ending made me think there was a third major thing I’d missed. First, the main character seems at first like a loner – we meet him on his own, in a bar, and he doesn’t seem to have close allies other than X/Equis. But the stuff later on where he recruits the racoon into the Recon group made him seem like he’s more of a gang leader, and has a crew of followers. So that was surprising, since I don’t think that had been previously established. Second, Faro seemed like it meant a dictator or gang leader (I think I associate post-apocalyptic stories with gangs!) – I hadn’t realized we were in a corporate-dominated dystopia until breaking into their offices, and again, that made me feel like I’d misunderstood the world. Finally, I remember the ending text saying something about how I was able to give evidence of Faro’s bad actions to the courts, which shut it down. This made it seem like there was a strong government with authority above Faro’s, which again I hadn’t gotten an inkling of previously – it seemed like there weren’t any independent institutions like that, which is why the main character had resorted to guerilla activity.

On the interrogation puzzle, I was playing on my iPhone, using Safari, so that might have been responsible for the misalignment. It’s great you provided a walkthrough!

The Last Night of Alexisgrad, by Milo van Mesdag

Alexisgrad has a grabby premise and a killer gimmick I don’t think I’ve seen before in the Comp. Start with the premise: we’re in a fantasy world, albeit a grounded one whose politics and social organization seem quite resonant with our own circa the late 18th/early 19th century. The title city wrested its independence from an authoritarian monarchy some time ago, but has recently been weakened by a bout of Paris Commune-style internecine violence, and now the monarchy’s armies are coming to reclaim what they lost so long ago. And as the blurb makes clear, they will succeed: the game is about how the fall of Alexisgrad plays out, not whether it will.

I love this setup – the time period and politics being invoked are ones that personally appeal to me, and knowing the outcome makes it a bit fatalistic, sure, but that gives the player more freedom to try to create an interesting story, rather than focusing on optimizing their outcomes. Or I should say “players”, since that’s the gimmick: this is a two-player game, with one person making choices for the city’s dictator and the other taking on the role of the kingdom’s general. Here again the foreordained result is a good design decision, setting up this multiplayer experience as one of collaborative storytelling rather than an opportunity for cutthroat PvP.

Unfortunately, I found the actual implementation of the story didn’t live up to my (perhaps too-high) expectations. I played through twice, once on each side, and while the dictator’s side of the story was a bit more engaging, both times the experience fell a little flat, and petered out rather than reaching a satisfying climax. Partly this is down to the writing feeling like it could use an editing pass to tighten up – there’s a lot of description of the city’s architecture and history in the early going, as well as ruminations on the current situation, and while the substance is good it sometimes feels a bit repetitive, with the same idea or fact being restated two or three times without offering any new information. Relatedly, the game features long passages between choices, which is a solid decision that minimizes the amount of back-and-forth required between the players, but sometimes exacerbate the sometimes tension-deflating flabbiness of the prose.

The bigger issue, though, is that the choices generally didn’t feel especially interesting or consequential on either side, with no real surprises or aces up their sleeve on either side. The early ones primarily focus on the defense of the city, but the kingdom’s forces are so overwhelming that the stakes never feel especially high – not only is the outcome never in doubt, I never felt like the dictator had much ability to exact any real pain along the way or play for extra time. Then in the second half, there’s an extended negotiation between the two characters over the terms of surrender, but again the dictator doesn’t have any real leverage and it’s not clear whether the general has much autonomy to create significantly different post-war settlements. The most interesting options in this section involve digging into the recent history of the city, and the attitudes of the two characters towards the revolution are satisfying to explore, but this really feels like idle conversation, with no substantial impact on future events.

It’s a shame because I can imagine some fun dilemmas spinning out of this setup, where the two-player gameplay would add a note of uncertainty. If the dictator had some card to play in negotiations, they could be forced to decide which of the city’s freedoms to protect, for example, or the general could decide whether they want to prop up one of the city’s factions against the other in the occupation. So while I don’t think this incarnation of Last Night of Alexisgrad quite succeeds, it’s definitely a promising proof-of-concept for an IF two-hander and I hope there’s more to come from this author in the future!

Highlight : The dictator’s opening text is very compelling, dramatizing the impact of the invasion by describing the dictator’s recent political work, and how it suddenly no matters in the slightest.

Lowlight : In my second play-through, where I was making decisions for the dictator, I tried to make the conquest as painful as possible, and be more confrontational in the conversation with the general. None of my efforts seem to slow them down in the slightest, and then the general had me summarily shot.

How I failed the author : I couldn’t schedule a time to sit down and play through the game in a single sitting with a partner, so I had to play asynchronously, with gaps between DMs with my partner (thanks @jade!)

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Congratulations on the baby!

I can see where you aiming at.

Maybe is not clear enough how big is the group that the main character leads.
On the other hand, cyberpunk recreation bases its stories on large corporations that have gained so much power that they almost compete with the government, but that doesn’t mean it does not exist! But I will see if I can change anything to make it clearer.

If you’ve made some notes during the reading or transcripts I’ll be glad if you send them to me.
Thanks for all again!!

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