Mike Russo's IF Comp 2021 Reviews

Competitions IFComp
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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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First off, ugh, I had a feeling you had some personal experience of this stuff somehow – I know they’re hard, hard situations but of course incredibly important, and I think it’s great you’re using the Comp to raise awareness of these issues. And now that I’ve read some other folks’ reviews, I can see that folks from the UK zeroed in on post-recession austerity cuts as the key context, which makes sense. I think part of my reaction is that when I was in law school in New York, there was actually a similar tragedy, but the response there dredged up a lot of issues both around CPS inaction, but also overzealous taking of kids away from Black and brown parents in ways that damaged both children and parents, where other approaches and services were warranted. Different contexts are different!

I also see that literally zero of the other nine reviewers sensed anything even slightly off about the defense lawyer going after Sarah the way they did, so that guess about the lay reader might also be off base. Anyway, glad the review was an interesting perspective, and apologies again for being a bit anal-retentive – like I said, it’s the fact that the game is so well put-together that put me into such a nitpicky mood. Cheers!

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No don’t you worry about that at all; as with all the games in the comp I’ve submitted it for feedback (mostly with a view to develop my writing and produce better work in future) and these things all point to immersion and whether I’m able to create something that can suspend disbelief. Your comparison with the uncanny valley was really apt, and I know that for every person mentioning it (yourself) there will be two or three more at least thinking it and not speaking up. I really liked getting that other perspective and it will inform my future work.

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Thanks so much for your review! I’m glad that you were able to enjoy it as well as that I’ve submitted a good ode to the genre!

You were absolutely correct in that this is essentially my first game, too, so I’m flattered you think it’s a good effort. (That is also the reason that I had no clue about the ABOUT or CREDITS, woops lol.)

Ah, yeah I was worried Aural was less fleshed out than everyone else, but I would hope to develop him more if I end up making a sequel (which would feature him more). One last thing, I’m so happy you liked the raven! I kept adding possible interactions with her because she was fun to write! Hopefully I will return and write an indirect sequel to this game someday!

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Belatedly respoinding:

Of course! My parental leave basically 100% overlaps with the Comp, so that’s handy (thank God for parental leave), though at the margin I’m maybe trading off IF time against sleep in a way that’s slightly suboptimal.

Yay, I’m glad I wasn’t just pulling that out of nowhere! Sometimes when I’m writing these reviews I wonder whether I’m overthinking stuff, then I recall how much I obsess over everything in my games and figure anything I notice is probably in there intentionally :slight_smile:

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Ghosts Within, by Kyriakos Athanasopolous

Ghosts Within is a sprawling mystery, with a big map, myriad puzzles, and three distinct openings that shift the available puzzles and endings – it all adds up to a long running time that push it well beyond the Comp’s two-hour limit, even discounting the absence of a hint system or a walkthrough (authors: please don’t do this!). It’s the kind of game that’s ill-served by the Comp, since it’s one you’d want to sink into, taking careful notes and talking to all the characters about every topic you can think of, while mapping out the queer seaside town where the action takes place. The story’s also perhaps ill-served, I think, by a too-close fidelity to an old-school medium-dry-goods approach to gameplay. It’s still very much worth playing, but while Ghosts Within is a very fun, engaging game, it falls a bit short of greatness.

The game’s opening is bewildering, as you wake up wounded in a forbidding forest, but intentionally so – we’ve got an amnesiac protagonist, natch. If that piece of the premise is par for the course, what happens next is novel, as your choice of which direction to stagger towards determines which of three vignettes will set the plot in motion. You’ve got a choice of starting at the village, the nearby research facility (as it turns out, the setting is roughly contemporary), or the hut of a local recluse. I stumbled hut-ward, which I’m guessing might provide the least-clear impetus for investigation. The lonely hermit there clearly has an agenda, but is rather tight-lipped too. That opening also appears to mean the mysterious research institute is off-limits, meaning that I entered the large village map with only a rough sense of what I was meant to be doing.

The process of walking through the village’s environs and meeting all of its inhabitants is rewarding, but a bit overwhelming too. The map isn’t excessively big when you’ve finished running around it, but there are a lot of false exits and diagonal connections that make it hard to hold in your head. And while the cast is actually rather small, each one is implemented with a very deep set of conversational topics that are really fun to dig into, but again feel like a lot when you’re first meeting everybody. I wound up wishing there’d been some light gating to separate off a portion of the village so that it felt more manageable at first, and give the player a chance for some puzzle-solving to break up the exposition.

This isn’t to say the expositions is uninteresting, though: to the contrary, the story that slowly emerges is compellingly drawn (the writing is also very clean – there are a few small infelicities of phrasing and tiny typos, but nothing that stands out given the amount of text here on offer). The village is still reeling from the aftermath of a decades-ago tragedy, and figuring out how each person is connected to that formative event, and seeing the details fleshed in one at a time, makes for compelling gameplay. There are other narrative strands too, though they might not all be available after all openings – I learned that the scientists at the institutes were very interested in the fog that cloaks the town, but never found a way to advance that piece of the plot. I finished with only about 80% of the points, though, so I could be missing a true ending that unifies the disparate pieces of the plot – the one I reached was satisfying enough, but felt a bit rushed, with a couple quick revelations culminating in an admittedly-stale twist (I would have gone back and tried for another, but I saved at what I thought was the point of no return, only to find out you’re locked into the endgame once the door to the final cave is opened up, regardless of whether you’ve entered or not).

Beyond the story, the other high point is the implementation. Beyond the aforementioned conversation system, scenery is always present, and usually modeled two or three levels down; SMELL is implemented with custom responses in nearly every location, too. Barring one tiny disambiguation issue with oranges, the parser is completely smooth. With that said, I did sometimes struggle with it in ways that I think are intentional pieces of the design. The puzzles here are pretty archetypal: you’ll be finding a light source, getting into locked doors, going on collectathons so NPCs will do you favors, and digging up two different patches of disturbed ground. They’re not very distinctive, though many of them do involve engaging with the well-realized cast of characters, which is nice. Many of them require very specific actions, though – I knew I needed the help of a security guard to get something, but had to try half a dozen phrasings to secure her aid, and there are a set of crates that only give up their secrets if you LOOK BEHIND them, with a regular EXAMINE or even MOVE or LOOK UNDER going nowhere.

This adds to the already-generous game length, and the puzzles are pretty fun to work through, but they did sometimes feel somewhat disconnected from the character-driven mystery at the game’s heart – and again, the omission of hints or a walkthrough seems a disservice to judges who are engaged by the narrative but left cold by the inventory-juggling. On the flip side, this does mean the game’s secrets are that much more engaging since they’re not handed to the player on a silver platter – I can definitely see myself coming back to this one post-Comp to see if I can get a better ending, albeit I might wait for some other kind soul to pull together a walkthrough first!

Highlight: The village and its inhabitants are really fun to explore – its eerie seaside environs put me in mind of Anchorhead, though the vibe here is much less menacing.

Lowlight: After a lot of effort, I managed to retrieve a missing bouquet of flowers, and got a lot of points for giving it to the appropriate character – but as far as I could tell this didn’t lead to any new plot unfurling to pay off the effort (I did get a lot of points, though).

How I failed the author: I didn’t rank this one as high a it probably deserves, since after two hours of repeated 20-hour sessions – which involved a lot of going back over old ground to remember where I’d already been and what I’d already done – I hadn’t yet solved many puzzles, and I hadn’t come across much of the plot. Again, this is a good game that’s an awkward fit for the Comp!

ghost - MR.txt (599.3 KB)

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The TURING Test, by Justin Fanzo

It’s easy to see how the Turing test could be a good fit for IF. In a genre where text comes first, what better challenge than to closely-read the responses of a mysterious interlocutor to separate out man and machine? And of course to have an AI sufficiently advanced for the test to be plausibly attempted almost requires a science-fictional setting of the type that tends to provide good fodder for a game, not to mention a likely-rogue robot or something to provide a readymade antagonist. The trouble is, unless an author rolls their own AI – perhaps a high bar for a free text-game competition – the player isn’t actually administering the Turing test, just trying to determine which bit of human-authored text is meant to denote personhood and which is meant to come from a machine intelligence. Instead of the test Turing devised, the player’s actually stuck in a version of the iocane powder scene from the Princess Bride, trying to second-guess whether a particular bit of clunky writing is meant to be a tell.

The TURING Test (handy of the author to do the all-caps thing to make distinguishing game from test easy!) falls into this trap, but it does so affably and enthusiastically enough. It opens with the protagonist as the one being grilled for a change – rather than having your identity put to the question in a meta twist, though, you’re setting ethical parameters for a new AI your lab is developing via a Socratic conversation. Asimov’s Three laws feature heavily as a starting point, albeit you can depart from them if you like.

This section works well enough, but it suffers from a common weakness of philosophical-dilemma games, which is that it’s hard to articulate the reasons behind your choices. There’s a gesture in this direction – if you think Asimov’s Second Law should apply to the new AI, you’re given an opportunity to say why you’ve made that choice, but the only two options on offer fail to hit many of the reasons why you think this is a good decision. If the protagonist were strongly characterized in a way that made sense of these restricted choices, that would be one thing, but here I think the player is encouraged to weigh in with what they really think, which is a hard thing to manage!

The other weakness is that of course – of course – this is all clearly a minefield set up to trick you into creating a killer AI that’s going to wipe out humanity. Maybe it’s possible to avoid this outcome, but I was trying as hard as I could to guide the fledgling intelligence towards being live-and-let-live, and still wound up with the obvious outcome, probably because you’re forced to do things like lay out a single goal all people should follow (choices throughout don’t seem to have that much impact, to the extent that sometime after picking an option you’ll be told “the question is academic”).

Anyway, I wound up co-parenting an AI who grew up with a twisted sort of utilitarianism that made it decide that nuking the world to prevent global warming? Then there’s a long, linear sequence describing your desperate struggle to protect the remainder of humanity that could have stood to be more interactive, before we get to the eponymous test – you need to determine which of two shuttles attempting to dock at a space station is piloted by a human ally, and which is the shamming AI trying to sabotage your desperate attempt to shut it down.

The Turing test as rendered here is surprisingly low-key, I thought – you once have a choice of questions that are again primarily about broad ethical considerations, and need to judge the responses. This seems like a questionable approach to the Turing test – I feel like you’d be likelier to succeed at IDing an AI by asking highly-idiomatic questions that could be interpreted different ways – but I think the idea is that you’re supposed to compare what you’re hearing to the framework you gave to the AI in the first section of the game. This is a clever idea, but it fell down in practice for me, partially because the responses in the first section felt philosophically fuzzy to me and hard to sharply link to what I was hearing in the second section. So I wound up just figuring that whichever one was written in a slightly clunkier fashion was probably meant to be the AI – after briefly second-guessing myself by wondering whether that’s what I was supposed to think, which is that iocane powder vibe I mentioned above – and that worked and saved the day.

Again, this all goes down easily enough – the writing’s enthusiastic and pacy, if a bit typo-ridden, and no specific sequence outstays its welcome (the game is well short of the two hour time estimate in the blurb; it’s also not really horror, for that matter). But the philosophy is a bit too half-baked, and the choices too low-consequence, for the TURING Test to leave much of an impression.

Highlight: The cutscene-like sequence linking the two philosophical dialogues is actually pretty fun, breathlessly narrating everything the AI does to destroy humanity and your actions to try to stop it – I really wish there’d been some choices and gameplay here!

Lowlight: That sequence also has an extended discussion of the deontological arguments the AI lands on to destroy humanity, which is more labored and less fun.

How I failed the author: The other reason I didn’t notice too many callbacks to the first section in the test sequence is because I played them an hour or so apart – this bit might work better if played straight through.

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