Mike Russo's IF Comp 2021 Reviews

Competitions IFComp
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Fine Felines, by Felicity Banks

I’ve heard various theories for how to do well in IF Comp posited over the years, but Fine Felines cuts the Gordian knot with an outside-the-box strategy that’s obvious in retrospect: jam a game chockablock with kitty pictures and wait for the 10-out-of-10s to roll in. That’s not all this ChoiceScript entry has going for it, since I found the economic side of the cat-breeding system engaging, the potentially-twee premise is leavened by some more serious themes, and the writing is assured too, sketching in four different romanceable NPCs and juggling the different subplots with aplomb. But despite trying to maintain critical distance, I still spent a disproportionate amount of my time with Fine Felines cooing over photos of kittens – I’m not made of stone!

The main thrust of the game is as advertised: in the wake of the death of your disabled mother, for whom you’d been the primary caregiver, you’ve decided to use your inheritance to set up as a cat breeder. I know nothing about the specifics of the business, but Fine Felines goes into just enough detail to be fun, making sure you need to consider things like license requirements and the characteristics of different breeds of cat but providing enough info and context that I never felt like I was in over my head. The game’s roughly divided into two phases: in the startup portion, you meet different cat-breeder NPCs and decide which two (of six) cats you want to use to seed your stable, while spending your nest egg to keep the kitties healthy and happy, with options for food, exercise equipment, and more, as well as the advertising and overhead every business needs. Based on your decisions here, you’ll eventually wind up with a number of kittens, and the second phase is about caring for them and hopefully selling them to their lucky new owners.

These systems aren’t tuned particularly harshly – without agonizing over my decisions, I wound up with a successful business that was swimming in cash by the end. But the choices still feel meaningful, and it’s satisfying to see the main character’s life get better. It helps that this isn’t a dry management minigame – all the decisions you need to make on how to run your business are embedded in the narrative, and many of your choices aren’t made in the abstract, but also let you engage with the cast of NPCs. When you pick the breed of cats you want to purchase, for example, you’re also picking which of the breeders you want to spend more time with, and potentially check in with when crises hit.

Beyond this main thread, there’s an additional subplot involving your character being diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and having to use some of their financial and emotional resources to protect their health while running a successful business adds an additional, more serious tone – though again, I found that the game’s difficulty was easy enough that this became an upbeat story of adjusting to life with a disability, while not sugar-coating the challenges that the disease poses.

All in all, Fine Felines succeeds at what it sets out to do. If I have a critique, it’s that the various NPCs, while endearingly drawn and refreshingly diverse, didn’t for me take on a life of their own beyond their somewhat-tropey initial presentation. Given the game’s relatively short running time and the broad range of potential interactions, though, this is a minor fault. And did I mention that it’s lavishly illustrated with cat pictures? 10/10, wins the internet.

Highlight : look, I hate to be superficial, but again, these are adorable kitties, and despite the fact that I’m primarily a dog person, I still found the choice of which cats to pick super hard because they were all so adorable!

Lowlight : I wound up choosing a matched pair of cats from the same breed, since the game seemed to present that as the default option – going with two different breeds requires clicking through to a second set of choices, and also seemed like it required rolling the dice on whether these cats who didn’t know each other would get along. But this choice made me feel like I missed out on interacting with two of the main NPCs, since it was hard to come up with reasons to talk to them rather than the one who was an expert on the breed I selected. True, this design means replays will be more rewarding, and Fine Felines seems like it’s meant to be run through more than once, but I still think it’d be more fun if I’d been pushed more aggressively towards the mix-and-match option.

How I failed the author : again I’m going to mark this down as a secret success, since in the last few weeks I’ve gained a new appreciation for the joys of caring for a helpless but cute little creature.

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The Golden Heist, by George Lockett and Rob Thorman

I’m a firm believer in playing games in the random order that the Comp page spits out. Sure, it’d be easy and immediately-rewarding to just jump around, looking for games from authors I know I like and picking the ones with blurbs that immediately appeal. But that would mean I wouldn’t give as much attention to games by new or lesser-known authors, and would probably make me burn out on getting through the full Comp, since I’d be front-loading the stuff I’m probably going to dig and backloading stuff that might take more of an intentional effort to play. With that said, I am only human, and every Comp, there’s a game or two that strikes my fancy right off the bat, leaving me to furtively scroll down, drool over the blurb, and anticipate the moment when I finally get to play.

Reader, since October first I’ve been jonesing to dig into The Golden Heist, since it seems laser-targeted to appeal to my interests. I’m a sucker for a good heist, and the record will show I’m quite a fan of lightly-comic Classical settings (ahem – LINK). And I’ve long wanted to visit the ruins of the Domus Aurea – while I haven’t managed it yet, I have walked past the entrance while pestering my wife with fun facts about it, though (she really appreciated that, I’m sure). So while I think this is a fun, well-designed game that anyone will enjoy, you might want to take the following with a grain of salt given how many of my buttons it manages to hit.

To be successful, The Golden Heist needs to walk a tightrope between breezy accessibility and historical grounding – anyone drawn in by the specificity of the premise is going to want to see the game reflect what we actually know about this time and place in early-Imperial Rome, but at the same time, a heist needs zippy dialogue, narrow escapes, and surprise reversals that can’t be too indebted to plodding realism. It’s a tough balance to strike, but the game manages it really well, with lots of incidental detail about things like the fire hazards endemic to ordinary life in Rome lightly scattered throughout the story. The take on Nero, too, is pretty pulpy, but I think is pretty closely modeled on the portrayal in Suetonius (whether or not the dishier bits of the Twelve Caesars were anything other than scurrilous gossip is whole separate question).

Of course, the player needs something to do in this well-realized setting, which brings us to the heist. It’s all well-motivated – your father was an architect who helped build Nero’s new golden palace, but was cruelly cast aside after an injury, so now you’re out to rob the place blind as an act of revenge that will incidentally make you rich – and while there’s not much of a separate planning phase, which is something I tend to enjoy in these kinds of stories, you do get to choose one of three mutually-exclusive partners for the caper and bring their particular specialty (fists, wits, or brains) to bear. I went with charming rogue Felix – he seemed lucky – which had a major impact on how things played out, both lending his talents to overcome some of the obstacles we encountered and adding some complications of his own as some of his past swindles caught up with him at the wrong time.

The heist itself plays out as a series of obstacles that need to be overcome in sequence, from making your way in (I had the choice to blag in the front or sneak in the back) to connecting with a contact to setting up your distraction to the light puzzle-solving required to get into the vault, and climaxing with the desperate rush to escape once things go inevitably pear-shaped. While the tone stays breezy (and bringing Felix along set up some pretty good jokes, including his threatening bluff that the main character’s a Macedonian known as Alexander the Great With His Fists), there’s definitely a ratcheting up of tension.

I’m not sure whether it’s possible to have to abort the heist early if things go too wrong, but it certainly feels like there are degrees of success or failure that have consequences later, especially in the push-your-luck escape bit. I have to confess that my run was more Benny Hill than Danny Ocean, with a few small missteps in the opening cascading into big problems on the way out. Still, I managed to get away with a reasonable chunk of loot (though the game seemed to think I’d lifted Nero’s golden lyre when I’d actually left it behind), and I’m eager to replay post-Comp to see if I can do any better. And given how big a role Felix played, I’d imagine that picking one of the other sidekicks would feel like a substantially new experience.

There are certainly some parts of the game that don’t work as well as the rest – in particular, the puzzle to unlock the vault feels too adventure-gamey to me to fit easily with the other obstacles – plus there are a couple typos, and it’s a little disappointing not to have the larger cast and cross-cutting of scenes that you sometimes get in heist stories. Still, even discounting the way the setting and vibe play to my preferences, Golden Heist is a fun, fleet piece of work that lived up to my high expectations.

Highlight : Picking just one is really hard, but I did especially enjoy how bonkers the running-away portion of the heist played out, with priceless treasures of the Julio-Claudians bouncing across the marble floors.

Lowlight : I’ve refrained from mentioning it so far, but much of the game’s text is timed, fading in sentence by sentence. It comes in pretty quickly, but still, why must authors do this?

How I failed the author : While I was 2/3 of the way through the game’s major puzzle, Henry woke up hard from a long nap, with a dirty diaper, a gas back-up, an empty stomach, and a nose stuffed with boogers. Seeing to all that took quite a bit of time, but it’s a testament to how much I dug this game that I felt like I’d barely missed a beat when I came back to it.

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Thanks for the wonderfully detailed review! I appreciate your observations and thoughtful consideration of my fledgling entry into the comp.

Regarding the abrupt ending: that is due to the fact that this was meant to be part one of a three-part story, but time got away from me. I had already spent a little over a year creating the story and code infrastructure and needed to get this out the door for my own sanity. After some more refinement of the interface, I hope to create parts two and three, probably as separate games.

And congratulations on Henry! Apart from the sleepless nights, parenthood is awesome! :smiley:

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Ah, that makes sense! Well I definitely think the code infrastructure is in a good place, so I’ll definitely check out parts two and three when they’re released. And thanks for the congrats – parenthood is indeed great!

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Second Wind, by Matthew Warner

Typically for an Adventuron game, Second Wind makes a great first impression, with an awesome comic-book cover image and slick maps helping immerse you in the postapocalyptic setting. The premise is also refreshingly grown-up and grounded: the main character’s wife has gone into labor, some complications have arisen, and now she needs a c-section or she and the baby will die. Making matters worse, the only doctor around is the main character’s ex-wife, who lives in a neighboring settlement – and between the bad breakup and the trek though the postnuclear wastes, enlisting her aid isn’t going to be easy. I unfortunately left Second Wind less impressed than I was when I began playing it, largely down to some incongruous, mimesis-breaking puzzle design and a punishing time limit that almost requires a restart and retry, but it’s still worth playing through.

I probably found the story the most engaging part of Second Wind. It doesn’t get drawn too deeply beyond what’s in the blurb, but the simple dialogue and intense dilemma faced by the main character pulled me in. And in a sea of protagonists with no family ties, a game with a divorced protagonist is a novelty – especially since it positions your character has having been in the wrong, since he cheated on his ex-wife, Wendy, with his current one. This lends the sequences where you’re groveling for Wendy’s help a queasy vulnerability that I haven’t seen in much IF before. The postapocalyptic backdrop works well enough to create stakes, but it’s the domestic drama that really drives the plot.

The gameplay is where things worked less well for me. Some of the challenges on offer do match the tone of the plot, like figuring out how to wrangle transportation for Wendy. But most of the obstacles gating progress feel very gamey. There are several different keycodes you need to find, one of which is drawn from Les Miserables in a way that’s just this side of reasonably, the other – a reference to Tommy Tutone’s 1981 hit “867-5309 (Jenny)” – a completely implausible choice for characters who we’re told were born around 2000. There’s also a word-scramble, and a series of puzzles that require out-of-game googling of some fairly obscure facts in order to figure out a safe combination. And then there’s the trial-and-error maze.

These aren’t awful puzzles in themselves, and I’d have enjoyed coming across them in a puzzlefest, but they felt really at odds with the downbeat vibe created by the story and setting. And while none of them are too hard, some are fairly time-consuming to work through, which meant I ran afoul of the game’s strict time limit. A ticking clock definitely makes sense given the premise, but I wished it applied only to longer actions, like travel through the wilderness or building or fixing machinery – having every action advance the timer disincentivizes exploration, I find – or at least was pitched a little more generously, since it made the maze at the end feel like a bit of authorial sadism.

The writing is serviceable throughout, with a few evocative notes here and there – we’re told that in the shelter, “filtered air hisses gently from behind recessed lights”, which is a nicely-considered detail. And I didn’t have problems with the parser, partially because the author does a good job of prompting the right syntax. This is usually done through out-of-world notes, and I suppose it would have been smoother to integrate these prompts into in-world descriptions, but again given the time pressure, erring on the side of avoiding flailing is a nice convenience and gets the parser out of the way of the story. I just wish the puzzles had done the same, either by being more organically connected to the plot or just being dialed back.

Highlight : there’s an effective late-game twist that ramps up the tension even further – and actually adds its own further time limit, which now that I think about it could have substituted for the overall one.

Lowlight : that safe puzzle, which had me going to Wikipedia to look up things like the Japanese term for an a-bomb survivor. As far as I could tell, there’s no way to access this information in the game – I wasted time looking in the various computer systems to see if there was a library function – and the puzzle isn’t clever enough to justify this crime against mimesis.

How I failed the author : it’s unfair to hold this against the author, but the risk of harm to a pregnant woman and baby – and actually the reality, because they do both die if the time runs out – landed pretty heavily on me give my circumstances, and I kind of resented failure at these silly puzzles leading to such a dire outcome.

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Weird Grief, by Naomi Norbez

This one lived up to its name for me, for a couple reasons that are more idiosyncratic and one about the way it’s written. I’m definitely glad I played it, but didn’t find it as emotionally resonant as I wanted it to be, despite how well-observed and grounded it is.

Starting on the idiosyncratic side: it was a bit uncanny to realize this was a companion game to The Dead Account, which I’d played much earlier in the Comp – the main cast of Weird Grief are the friend and family group of the holder of the eponymous dead account in the previous game. I suspect this is the reverse of the ideal order, since Weird Grief is first in time, and it also fleshes out the characters who show up only as screen-names in The Dead Account, which would have enriched my experience there. Oddly, Weird Grief doesn’t go into as much detail on what exactly happened to Mike, the dead person, withholding information in a way that didn’t seem to have much payoff. I suspect linking the games more explicitly, either by suggesting an intended order, integrating them into the same file, or shifting the way information is presented to provide analogous exposition no matter which is done first (though of course that would be hard!), might have been a good choice.

The other idiosyncracy in my response is that I’m unfamiliar with the subculture that takes center-stage here – the protagonist is a furry who’s in a polyamorous relationship with the dead man and his widower – which is fine, but I sometimes felt at sea when trying to understand the norms around the relationship. Juniper, the main character, lives in a different city from Mike and Roger (the widower), and an invitation to move in is treated as a big deal, making it seem like the connection was relatively new or less formal. But she’s also specifically called out as their “third” at the funeral, putting her on a different level from another character who’s also present and had been a sexual partner for the couple.

My confusion about Juniper’s role and expectations tied in with the way she’s written. I didn’t find that she had a lot of interiority, or had a lot of direct feelings about Mike’s death (beyond a single admittedly-heartwarming anecdote that’s told a couple different times and reminiscences about sex). Partially this is the nature of protagonists in choice-based games, where room is generally made for the player to put their own stamp on the character. But here, this meant Juniper felt more like a lens for Roger’s grief, with his taking the priority over hers.

This focus extends to the sex scenes – as the blurb warns, they’re here and they’re quite explicit. This sort of thing isn’t exactly my cup of tea, and I have to say that when I’ve experienced deep, soul-crushing grief, sex has been pretty far from my mind so there wasn’t much personal resonance for me in these bits. But I can see how for these folks, sex would be a source of comfort and bonding in a hard time, and definitely understand the artistic imperative not to draw a curtain over what goes on between the three character. Anyway putting all that aside, I felt like Juniper was sidelined in favor of Roger in these sequences: in the first one, I don’t think she has an orgasm, and in the second, she’s more viewer than participant as the other two characters have sex. I assume this is intentional, and meant to reflect something about Juniper’s relationship with Roger, but it once again my takeaway was that Juniper’s subjective experience was secondary to the piece, which feels like a real missed opportunity given that she’s our viewpoint character.

The writing is pretty strong throughout – the dialogue rings true, and I liked the focus on the logistics of the grieving period, albeit these folks ate too much fast food – though there are signs of sloppiness. There are lots of typos though, including one “double click passage to edit” error, and an awkwardly double-nested parenthetical. And while there are few choices, they feel reasonably impactful. So the supporting pieces are all strong enough – I just wanted Juniper, structurally the center of the piece, to loom a little larger in the story.

Highlight : The characters are all winning, with Tammy, Mike’s sister, especially came through as a positive presence.

Lowlight : once again I played this choice-based game with Henry napping on me, but due to text size and other formatting issues it required a lot of scrolling when reading in portrait mode (I was going to say it’s hard to play one-handed, but that could be misinterpreted!)

How I failed the author : As I said above, this milieu is pretty foreign to my experience so I worry I’m missing, or misinterpreted, many of the social cues or other indications of relationship dynamics.

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Unfortunate, by Jess Elizabeth Reed

Ugh, the title here is apt in more ways that one. It’s a clever bit of wordplay for this parser-based fortuneteller-me-do – we’re not talking turbans and crystal balls, you’re just looking to show off your palmistry to some friends at a party – but it also conveys how frustrating it is that the significant promise here is let down by some real implementation issues. This isn’t just a matter of smacking down a few bugs here and there: there’s a need for additional design work, from fleshing out the conversations, deepening the characterization of the party-goers, and providing clearer feedback on how you’re making progress, as well as a good amount of polish. But even the rough version on offer goes a good way towards showing the (I think first-time?) author has some great ideas for how to realize this wonderful premise.

Digging into that setup, which is delightfully more specific than the blurb initially made me thing. Ss mentioned we’re in the real world, not a fantasy one, and the protagonist is a hobbyist, not a carnival charlatan or anything like that (in fact, since you do get vague flashes at least some of the time when you do a reading, you might have some real talent). And the party here is one of those awkward post-college hangouts featuring a mix of old friends, exes, and coworkers, some of whom can’t stand each other. There’s a complex web of actual and potential connections, which creates a lot of potential for how things can shift once you start telling fortunes and intervening.

That’s the other part of the premise, you see – the game proceeds in two phases, with an initial round of conversation and palm-reading giving way to a long, interactive second phase as the characters start bouncing off of each other and having accidents both happy and not. Success isn’t about guessing a correct fortune and then lying back and waiting for fate to catch up to your intuition, though: you do have a choice of three different prognostications to offer to each of the other guests, but except for the first, generally negative, option, they won’t come true if you take a laissez-faire approach. You might arrange some mood music, or make sure someone has what they need to ensure a romantic gesture goes off.

These puzzles are pretty tricky, though. For one thing, it seems like there’s tight timing in the section – the other characters move around, and while some of the setup can be done ahead of time, there are also some right-place right-time pieces. You also can’t work on most of the fortunes on their own – the majority of them are about romantic matters, so how the fortune you pick for one character plays out can depend on what you picked for one or more complementary characters. After an initial, spectacularly unsuccessful playthrough, I realized Unfortunate is meant to be played multiple times as an optimization challenge – there’s a clever meta touch here, since the player’s accumulating knowledge over multiple passes stands in for the protagonist’s flashes of intuition.

On paper this should appeal to me, since I usually like optimization puzzles and real-world settings. Unfortunately (there’s that word), implementation issues bedeviled my enjoyment, so I didn’t get very far. Again, this isn’t just implementation in the sense of programming, though there’s some of that – X ME has the default description, lots of scenery is unimplemented, rules for picking up objects give responses that only make sense the first time you take something, whether or not a device is technically switched on doesn’t make a difference to whether it works or not, there are misdescribed or even missing exit listings, and room descriptions sometimes don’t update even after you’ve removed objects. And there are lots of typos.

The bigger issue is that there are significant chunks in need of a lot of polish, and sometimes even feeling unfinished. The characters are probably the major example here. There are seven of them, and their backstories and roles are intriguing enough to set up a bunch of potential business as they bounce off of each other. But they’re thinly drawn, with physical descriptions focusing on superficial details like clothing. While there’s a multiple-choice conversation system, all the characters have the same three options (one of which initiates fortune-telling), which feels quite artificial. And there’s something odd about the implementation of the second phase, since the different characters don’t actually seem to be present and available for interaction, even as event text describes them talking and moving around.

I also wanted there to be better feedback on how I was doing on the puzzles. There are some ideas that seemed obvious but the game wouldn’t let me try (Moses is allergic to flowers so giving him the bouquet for his big demonstration of affection doesn’t work – but while the herb bouquet seems a likely substitute, I couldn’t get him to accept it) and some of the fortunes are probably a little too vague, since there were a couple of times when I thought I’d satisfied one only for the post-game scoring to say I hadn’t. Combined with the combinatorial explosion of trying different mutually-dependent fortunes and the choreography required in the second act, this lack of clueing makes it feel like making real progress would require a lot of trial and error.

It’s not hard to guess at the source of these rough patches: much like Plane Walker, Unfortunate doesn’t list any testers in its credits, and however much playtesting it got wasn’t enough. I’m really really hoping for a post-comp release of this that makes upgrades and bug-fixes based on folks’ transcripts, since Unfortunate could easily be a five-star game given the quality of what’s already here – I haven’t mentioned the prose yet but there’s some really good writing too – but it really needs more time in the oven. Here’s hoping it gets it, and that the author keeps writing games but gets more testers next time (I’ll volunteer, just DM me!)

Highlight: Figuring out how to get one of the good fortunes to work felt really rewarding – this is a great puzzle-solving framework.

Lowlight: The game lists exits in all-caps, which is a nice convenience – except one’s mislabeled (it says it’s east but it’s actually in) and then there’s one that isn’t even mentioned at all (tip: going IN from the kitchen will get you to the laundry room).

How I failed the author: As mentioned Henry was having a fussier couple of days, so I only put like half an hour into the game before I had to put it aside for a little over a day, and while I intended to play more, the challenging difficulty and thin characters meant I wasn’t able to get back into it.

Unfortunate - MR.txt (184.2 KB)

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Funicular Simulator 2021, by Mary Godden and Tom Leather

Much like The Golden Heist, I’d been looking forward to Funicular Simulator 2021 just on the strength of its title. Oddly, I’m a sucker for a good transit-themed game – I’m thinking of the waking-dream fugue of What the Bus in last year’s Comp, or the meditative hangout-game Misty Hills in this year’s Spring Thing. I’m guessing this is partially because I kind of miss my public-transit commute, 18 months into COVID (I used to get a lot of reading done!) Beyond this personal bias, though, I think public transportation is actually a great match with IF: transit is a liminal space, where you can encounter different people whose lives are very different – and while the destination is your own, someone else is driving, so you can sit back and enjoy the journey. Funicular Simulator 2021 is not really a transit-game in the sense I was expecting – there’s nothing quotidian about this trip, as the protagonist is climbing a very special mountain on the night of a once-in-a-lifetime aurora. But it wound up scratching the itch nonetheless, because it provides some of the same pleasures.

Belying its title, Funicular Simulator isn’t about the vehicle but about its passengers. The main gameplay consists of extended conversations with four different people, all of whom are ascending the mountain for the same basic reason – to check out the mountain’s mysterious phenomena – but who ascribe very different meaning to what they’re about to experience. You get to learn more about their backstories and what they’re hoping to find, and while the protagonist is a blank slate, by responding to the various characters and validating or denying their motivations, you can define why you’re at the mountain. Without spoiling too much, my takeaway was that this is about allowing the player to explore some of the common human responses to the numinous: to look to it for escape, for study, for comfort, or for distraction.

The game doesn’t posit these as exclusive choices, I don’t think, and doesn’t put its thumb on the scales for any in particular, allowing you to see the value in, as well as the counterarguments to, each worldview (though with that said, I found the artist to be a bit too callow to take seriously – perhaps that’s more about where I’m at in life than about anything in the game, though). You get multiple opportunities to engage with the four characters, and you spread your focus equally among them, or focus on just one or two to explore their conversations more deeply. Replay shows that there isn’t a huge amount of branching in terms of the content of what they say, but the different choices do feel like they portray the protagonist in a significantly different light, so I still found them satisfying.

The writing is strong throughout, taking sentiments that could be cliched, and events that could be far too abstract to be resonant, and making them sing. The understated visual design – which portrays the night progressing from the initial golden hour through midnight – aids the immersion. It all leads to a final, ultimate choice that’s lightly shaped by how you’ve spent your time on the journey. The stakes for this choice weren’t completely clear to me, nor am I sure how much changes based on your decision. But the ending I got was poetical, and felt like it organically built on what came before, so much so that I don’t feel tempted to take the journey again and make different choices just for the sake of it.

Highlight: I found the conversation with the pilgrim character really well-done and personally resonant – her situation could be played for melodrama, but the grounded dialogue and unique worldview she offered made her stand out.

Lowlight: Some of the sequences when you reach the mountain struck me as a little too much on the far side of oblique, but if so it’s a close-run thing.

How I failed the author: I played this one late at night, after a day of Henry not sleeping well at all. But again I think this wound up being good, since even though this meant I don’t think I appreciated the prose as much as I should have done, my zonked-out brain found a lot emotional heft in the game that I might not have been able to appreciate as clearly if I’d been feeling sharper (you ever notice how pregnant with meaning the world can seem at 5 AM when you’ve been up all night?)

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I haven’t even looked at Funicular Simulator yet, so I only checked the first paragraph. And it really resonated because 1) public transport is/was a great opportunity for me to read, and 2) I’m glad to see public transport themed games mentioned, even if they’re ones I maybe should have seen when they came out! I think I need those suggestions beyond IFDB’s somewhat-looping “you may like…”

And if anyone out there feels like mentioning other games is name-dropping/“look how much I know,” it’s not. I was hoping reviewing in IFComp would turn up other games for me to look at, and it has.

As for other public transport games? Alex Warren wrote Moquette in 2013 to show off Quest’s latest version’s technical chops. It contained the whole London Underground, and it was a bit light on story, but it was neat to just poke around at. So, yes, hooray for public transport games.

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Finding Light, by Abigail Jazwiec

Puzzley fantasy adventures don’t tend to be my favorite IF subgenre, but they’ve got deep roots and an undeniable cozy sort of appeal. I’m a bit surprised it took me this long in the Comp to get to one – I feel like they’re typically thick on the ground, so maybe they’re falling out of favor? Fortunately, Finding Light does a good job flying the flag, with enough of a twist on the hoary standards of the genre to stay fresh and puzzles that go down easy. It’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s a worthwhile way to scratch its particular itch.

Let’s start with the twist, since it’s tied up with the premise: you play a familiar spirit, bound to a boy with magical abilities and able to swap between human and fox shapes at will (the human shape kind of threw me for a loop since it gives the whole nonconsensual soul-binding thing a creepier vibe). The game starts with him being kidnapped by raiders, so it’s up to you to sneak into their fortress and set him free. Your different forms have different abilities – as a fox, you can track scents and talk to other animals, whereas as a human you have hands and er, color vision? Really, the fox gets the better end of the stick here – which come in useful as you work through a series of simple obstacles, from a maze with a trick to a couple of fetch quests.

None of these puzzles are anything too tricky, but they’re not trying to be too brain-melting and they don’t overstay their welcome. Similarly, the setting is a bit sketched-in, and the boy you’re bound to doesn’t register as much of a character, but they work well enough to justify what you’re doing. There’s a topic system that makes conversation with the various animals you encounter go down easily, too – these are actually a highlight, since while your master is a bit of a bowl of oatmeal, the raven, rat, and horses you meet have personality.

Implementation-wise, there are definitely a few small niggles. I ran into a bug where trying to go non-cardinal directions either didn’t produce any output, or gave a response that only made sense in the maze, and there were some missing synonyms or fiddly action phrasing required in a few places. Similarly, the puzzles are well-clued and smoothly implemented. I think this is the author’s first game, and it’s an impressive debut both in terms of programming and design – definitely looking forward to seeing what they do next!

Highlight : The raven was my favorite character, and it was fun to take reading material back to her to decode.

Lowlight : The game doesn’t have any ABOUT or CREDITS text as far as I can tell, so I’m not sure whether there were testers – if not, this is impressively smooth, but regardless, always have testers!

How I failed the author : once again, I was reasonably tired when playing this one, so I appreciated the overall gentle difficult, but I was thrown for a loop by what was supposed to be a hint: the rat says he has exactly three things to trade, so after I got three things from him I thought I was done, without realizing that one of them was a freebie he’d thrown into a single swap, and I had one more left. Fortunately this didn’t hold me up for too long.

finding light - mr.txt (102.5 KB)

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Thank you so much for taking the time to play, and to write such a detailed and thoughtful review. It’s especially heroic considering that you are a new parent!

…my takeaway was that this is about allowing the player to explore some of the common human responses to the numinous: to look to it for escape, for study, for comfort, or for distraction.

I think this was one of the first things we talked about when we were starting to design the game, so we’re really happy that came across.

Thank you again (and the best of luck to you and the family),

Mary and Tom

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we, the remainder, by Charm Cochram

My favorite band is indie-rockers the Mountain Goats, on the strength not just of the songs but also the witty, humane stage banter. There’s one bit I came across in a bootleg and has stuck with me ever since: the frontman talks about how when he first started writing songs, all the romantic ones involved protagonists stalking the objects of their quote-unquote affections, because what’s more emotionally intense than stalking? But of course beyond the super problematic nature of this approach, this means all your songs are kind of the same, and have nowhere to build.

One glance at the content warnings for we, the remainder should indicate why I bring this up – I thought A Papal Summons was going to run away with the Most CWs sweepstakes, but it’s actually a close-run thing. The game is about a disabled girl who’s been left behind when the cult she and her mother are a part of transcend their earthly fetters, which is a compelling premise. But I found myself exhausted by the author’s decision to twist every dial to 11. There are piles of dead bodies, gross-out scenes with spoiled food, and a bingo-card’s worth of abuse, heaped upon the young protagonist but also comprehensively meted out from the prophet to all his followers. It’s certainly effective at setting a mood of well-nigh-postapocalyptic horror – and there are indications that some of the terrible things on display are hallucinations brought on by trauma and starvation – but I found it hard to immerse myself in such a grand guignol world, as the comprehensive awfulness put me at a distance and also made the cult-members seem less like real people who’d made understandably-bad choices to trade off their autonomy for a sense of belonging, and more like cardboard cutouts in a cabinet of horrors.

Gameplay-wise, we, the remainder is curiously parser-like, with compass navigation links off to the sides of the screen and each location in the large map offering three or so different objects to interact with. Some are just there for atmosphere, but a few of can be picked up (there are inventory puzzles, but they’re handled automatically so long as you’ve been to the right place to get the right item). And others trigger flashbacks, as the protagonist recalls one or another instance of abuse (there’s a suppressed-memories trope here that feels a bit icky). The writing here is effective, as these vignettes do convey a sense of what life was like in the cult – and in fairness, there are a few moments that leaven the near-unremitting darkness of the story with at least potential rays of light. The ending too is reasonably positive, at least the one I got (apparently if you’re less efficient at exploring, you can different ones). I think it would have rang truer if the path to get there had been less choked with muck, though.

Highlight : There’s an effective bit of characterization early on, where you can decide what one talismanic object you’ve kept hidden from your controlling mother – and once you’ve picked it, there are numerous callbacks to you touching it for comfort as you encounter the compound’s terrors.

Lowlight : Since I was playing on mobile, I accidentally clicked through the aforementioned passage really quickly, and didn’t see a way to undo to see the other choices. I wound up with an Orioles baseball cap, which I guess was OK?

How I failed the author : since I played on my phone, the cool ascii-art map didn’t display properly, which made navigation difficult. Though east and west seemed to be flipped on my screen in a confusing way, and having the map available maybe would have made me feel I was playing Angband, so perhaps it’s for the best!

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I always preferred the Mountain Goats albums/song series that stuck with a concept actually.

IMO the mid-career albums (Tallahassee-We Shall All Be Healed-The Sunset Tree) were the best. There is no clear progression in terms of character or concept except in very broad strokes, but the tonal shift from track to track works for me.

It is mostly a matter of track arrangement and there is always some “down time” between the more intense parts (which is what you’re getting at in your game review I think).

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I take your point and agree — that’s my favorite period too though I’d maybe group in All Hail West Texas as a pivot-point — though I think the specific comment was more about really early individual songs (like Going to Georgia, which really feels creepier and creepier the more you consider the lyrics). But yeah, the point applies to within-album paving perhaps even more strongly!

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Right, but if we’re talking strictly about repetition rather than the moral quality of the content…I also find the newer stuff repetitive in a way that I kind of dislike.

I know that Darnielle worked in a psychiatric role and worked with youth for a while and that he draws on that for material. The ‘troubled youth’ themes that pop up now and then just don’t make for good material IMO, and definitely not in large quantities.

Not for moral reasons but just because it seems like it never changes…I think that Darnielle is too sympathetic towards the topic so a lot of it lacks the way that Tallahassee and the Sunset Tree sublimated really heavy subjects in different directions tonally.

Then again every album has at least a few really good tracks.

Sorry for hijacking the review thread for TMG purposes (or not sorry, depending on board etiquette).

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I think the rules on threadjacking are that it’s up to the OP to object, and I am always fine with an extended digression on TMG! I haven’t kept up with recent albums, though. I think the last one I spent much time with was Transcendental Youth, which hit, er, nine years ago now? The troubled-youth theme is responsible for a lot of his best stuff, I think – Best Ever Death Metal Band, etc., plus the first two books (the 33 1/3 Master of Reality novella and Wolf in White Van) – but I can see it being a well that runs dry if gone to too often. Oh well, there’s still 20-odd years of other stuff to keep busy with!

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Oh yeah, I always thought Wolf In White Van would appeal to IF people because it has the plot around the RPG game-by-mail. I always knew that chess by mail existed, but RPG by mail was before my time and I didn’t know about it until I read that book.

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Yeah, I remember seeing some ads in magazines for those sorts of things, but had never actually played one, so seeing the mechanics in WiWV was super fun (on the off chance other folks are reading this back-and-forth, here’s a link to the book, which is about the disfigured designer behind an incredibly involved play-by-mail RPG. It’s great!) Relatedly, a couple months ago Aaron Reed wrote about one of these games in his 50 Years of Text Games project – dunno if you came across it, but it’s also a good read.

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The Corsham Witch Trial, by JC Blair

You don’t hear much about the uncanny valley these days, it occurs to me – we all remember the term for the creepy middle-ground between CGI characters that are too real to scan as cartoonish, and too plastic to scan as real? Despite being everywhere around the turn of the millennium, I haven’t heard anyone sling the phrase in quite a while, whether because CGI’s gotten sufficiently good, or – more sinister – we’ve all just become inured to hyperreal hyperpolygonated faces.

I bring this up not to critique the graphics in Corsham Witch Trial – it doesn’t have any, natch – but to explain the trap my brain stuck me into when I played it, due to an awkward mismatch between me and the game. Starting with the latter: the premise here involves a young paralegal tasked by their boss with reviewing documents from an unsuccessful case from a couple of years previous. Despite the title, there’s nothing supernatural going on: the eponymous witch hunt is a question-begging label for the suit, which involved bringing an English child protective services staffer to court on charges of criminal negligence after they failed to act to prevent the death of a child. It’s presented largely through primary sources, with IM messages between the paralegal and a colleague (this is where the game’s few choices are made) framing a collection of documents like trial transcripts, incident reports, email threads, and so on. There’s a lot of verisimilitude here, with links in the main narrative often going to Google Drive files that are impressively mocked up, and convincingly-deployed acronyms and invocation of procedural rules.

This is where things went awry with my expectations, though. I’ve got a law degree (albeit from the U.S., and the only times I’ve been in a courtroom were for jury duty - I know just enough to get myself in trouble), so I ate all this up. But very quickly, my outside knowledge started taking me out of the story – it’s sufficiently grounded that I couldn’t put on Phoenix-Wright goggles and ignore departures from plausibility, but it also has some plot points I found ridiculous. This happens all the time when I try to watch like Law and Order – readers of these reviews will be unsurprised to learn I can get nitpicky – but I was able to put many of the niggles I noticed aside and chalk them up to differences with the U.K. legal system. But unfortunately one of the issues I couldn’t get over had to do with the conflict driving the game’s plot.

We know pretty much from the off that the case fails, but its publicity contributes to the government launching some child-protective reforms that are framed as positive things. This seems like a fine outcome, but the case had collateral damage: one of the main witnesses is the child’s school teacher, who brought repeated complaints raising her suspicions that she’s being abused at home. In the course of representing the civil servant in the dock, though, the defense attorney wages a vicious campaign to undermine the teacher’s credibility, in ways that dredge up her own history of abuse. Much of the framing conversation in the last part of the game consists of a dialogue over whether this damage was worth the middling-positive outcome.

The mechanics of this had me jotting down incredulous exclamation points in my notes – again, I know the UK legal system is different from what we have in the US, but I sure hope the idea that you can subpoena the confidential notes of a witness’s therapist on a fishing expedition, and then introduce them into evidence with no notice to opposing counsel, is as bonkers on that side of the Atlantic as it is here. But beyond these details, it’s not at all clear why the defense counsel is allowed to pursue this line of argument at all. There’s no suggestion that any of the reports the teacher filed included false information, so whether or not the conclusions she drew from the evidence she saw were credible seems completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the civil servant satisfied a reasonable duty of care towards the child when the evidence came to is attention. In other words, it’s his subjective decision-making process that matters; the teacher’s views have nothing to do with anything.

I can totally see the argument that this is law-nerd stuff and most readers wouldn’t notice or care. But at the same time, it felt like a failure to clearly establish the stakes and terms of the conflict that I feel like a lay reader would at least intuit. While I admire the work that’s gone into creating the story and presenting it in a fresh, engaging way, this blankness at the center really undermined its effectiveness for me. The other downside is the lack of a denouement – throughout the framing instant-message conversation, it’s made clear that the boss wants to discuss the case with the paralegal main character after you finish your review. But the game peters out before that happens. On the one hand, I can see why, since you’ve already had the chance to make your views of the case clear through the choices you make in the IM conversations, so the talk with the boss would likely feel like a retread. But pointing towards a climax, then not putting that climax on-screen, seems like an oversight.

Speaking of choices, I’ve seen other reviews ding the game for not being especially interactive, but I have to say that didn’t bother me much. Digging through the various documents felt engaging to me, and the couple times I could weigh in with my take on the trial felt satisfying. I think this is a perfectly valid way to present IF, and in fact kind of exciting – I’d definitely play something else by this author, even if I’d still be gnashing my teeth over perceived legal weirdness.

Highlight: The incident reports the teacher fills out are spot-on, capturing the bureaucratic language these things have to be couched in while still conveying the desperation and impotence behind the teacher’s repeated complaints.

Lowlight: I was disappointed that the game seemed to unproblematically endorse the idea that more activist child protective services are an unmitigated good, and the only reason not to have them is budget cuts. Maybe things are different in the UK context, but in the US this is a vexed question that runs into snarled issues of racism and the criminalization of poverty and mental health and substance abuse disorders. You can squint at the title’s implications, I suppose – maybe this trial is like a witch hunt because society is looking to the civil servant as a scapegoat for broader ills? – but that reading feels strained to me.

How I failed the author: This entire review probably counts as the “how I failed the author” blurb.

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Wow, it’s awesome to get a review and that level of detail from someone of your experience. My first hand experience of cases such as this is as a school teacher/complainant/witness over the years so I have a reasonably solid understanding of said cases but only from one side of the curtain as it were and its illuminating to get the words of someone who knows the other a bit better.
And your very valid points on interventionalist CS, I of course have zero knowledge of the system in the US bar a couple of “Last week tonight” episodes, but even from that I can totally understand any skepticism of ‘the boss’ potential stance (which of course doesn’t change depending on player choices, Cerys simply takes the opposite tack to the player to interrogate the readers POV but the outcome and the position of the ‘boss’ don’t alter) given the cross section of law, economics and conflicting interests hinted at there.
Again, thank you kindly for your time, it was intriguing and and really engaging to read through your comments/tips and thought process. Lots for me to reflect on and think about when I start drafting my next project!

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