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!
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 
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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Thank you so much, @DeusIrae, for your kind and honest review of my game!
I knew from the beginning that this competition won’t do enough justice to such a lengthy and compelling installment, but due to the deadlines for my master thesis, which this game is a part of, I had to enter the If Comp. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, though I’m a first time author in general and a non-native English speaker, my imagination kept running wild, and ideas were continuously flooding my brain, leading me, in the end, to create a big, fun, and probably a bit overwhelming at times game.
That said, thanks again for taking the time to explore as much of the game as you could. 
— Kyriakos
P.S.: Considering the bouquet, if you remember the story correctly, maybe the character you gave the bouquet to was not the appropriate receiver, despite still enjoying your offer!
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Taste of Fingers, by V Dobranov
I’m not double-checking to confirm, but the main character in Taste of Fingers is I think the second-worst person among this year’s Comp protagonists (The Best Man’s Aiden is still a prohibitive favorite to take the crown). You’d think it’d be easy to sympathize with someone hiding out from a zombie apocalypse, regardless of their peccadilloes, but our man manages it. In a series of flashbacks, we get to know him before everything went wrong, and oof, what a piece of work he is. Beyond the overwhelming contempt that flavors all his observations, the racism is probably the most obviously awful thing about him – he’s a white person (I think some kind of banker?) on a business trip to Hong Kong when the plague hits, and he’s got no shortage of disdain for the locals, even stipulating that the prostitute he hires has to be European. But when he realizes that the disease triggering the outbreak only targets Asian folks (some kind of genetic rigmarole is invoked – PSA, race is a social construct not a biological one, but we have to roll with it), his matter-of-fact satisfaction, unalloyed by any compassion for the vulnerable, bespeaks near-psychopathic levels of solipsism.
`This is as it’s meant to be – we’re firmly in horror territory here, and one of the tropes of zombie fiction is that the stress of societal collapse brings out the worst in humanity. Taste of Fingers doesn’t wallow in too many other of the standard motifs of the subgenre, though, since the zombies aren’t actually onscreen for most of the game. It’s got an interesting structure, where present-time vignettes set in the coffee-shop fridge unit where the main character is lying low alternate with the aforementioned flashbacks. In each section, you’ve got a choice of three memories, and you get to explore two out of the three before time moves on. There’s little other branching, as far as I could tell, but there’s a good amount of interactivity, as in each passage there are a lot of words to be clicked on. Most of these will expand out descriptions of items, or spell out the main character’s perspective or thoughts on something that’s happened – I wound up lawnmowering, but generally found the extra text added to the experience rather than being busywork.
With few choices or immediate action to keep the pace up, the prose has to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it’s mostly up to the task. The writing is evocative throughout, freighting almost every sentence with the key themes of decay, corruption, and contempt. It can go a bit over the top at times, flabbing up a clause with one adjective too many, but since the vibe here isn’t exactly understated better too big than too small, I suppose. The style also shifts effectively in the final sequence, which sees a change in perspective that adds a neat twist to the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Again, it’s nothing too unexpected given the territory, but it makes this small, nasty game more memorable, and provides some healthy outside perspective on the terrible protagonist.
Highlight : The protagonist’s asides when you click on highlighted words in the passages expand into the original text, which helps keep this on-rails story engaging (it helps that as I mentioned, the writing in these bits is generally strong).
Lowlight : I generally don’t mind when a protagonist is an unpleasant person to spend time with, but the sequence in the strip club threatened to be a bit too much for me.
How I failed the author : I think I did OK with this one – short choice-based games I can play on my phone are really coming through for me this Comp!
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Brave Bear, by John Evans
I mentioned in my review of Finding Light that I was surprised to go so late in the Comp before finding a puzzley fantasy adventure – and here we are half a dozen entries further in, getting to the first game that centers on a kid. Despite the fact that you’re playing a sentient off-brand Care Bear, Brave Bear doesn’t come across as particularly whimsical. There’s a real creepy vibe to the dark presences that are scattered around the bear’s owner’s house, and the threat they pose seems darker than the toy-focused premise led me to expect. Unfortunately, this short game withholds the full picture of the plot, leaving inference to fill in the nature of the danger, and it also ends pretty quickly, with only a few simple puzzles to solve before the thing is done – there’s enough here to intrigue but not, alas, to satisfy.
The premise here, of toys coming to life to help their owner, is a nice one, and the basics are definitely covered. Thematically, it’s all about the power of togetherness, and solving the puzzles requires building a team. The main business requires recruiting other toys to give you the strength you need to banish the threatening miasmas that gate progress through the house – their support gives you the strength required to overcome their darkness (I imagined Care Bear Stare, given my demographic). This is satisfying to work through, and the supporting cast – a Transformer, a toy car, several stuffed animals – are briefly but satisfyingly sketched. They also have a few abilities that are used to get the band together. These challenges are all simple enough, though they feel quite old school, since most of them require a CHARACTER, ACTION command syntax that I associate with Infocom games. The ABOUT text flags that this will be required, though, so it’s all fair enough.
I’m struggling a bit to find much more to say about Brave Bear, though, since it doesn’t do much with this solid framework. This isn’t just a matter of its brevity; first, the owner and her relationship to your protagonist feels very archetypal, without much lived-in detail. Similarly, the house feels quite generic, with the room descriptions spending more time mentioning exits to other parts of the map than offering up any scenery or anything else to observe to get a window into the owner’s life. And the origin of the evil phantoms haunting the house isn’t explained, and the game ends without a climactic action showing the Bear rescuing the owner – there’s some mysterious ending text that hints at the real story, but it’s pretty thin stuff. It’s all implemented smoothly enough and it goes down easy, but I can’t help wishing Brave Bear had a little more to it – there’s a down side to wearing out one’s welcome, of course, but the game errs too much on the other side.
Highlight : I liked the other toys, who definitely have a spark of personality coming through – my favorite was the nervous Transformer.
Lowlight : I was enjoying the game for what it was, so I was sorry to reach the overly-conclusory ending so soon.
How I failed the author : Henry was feeling a bit fussy while I was playing Brave Bear, so I was only able to play it in five minute chunks in between seeing to him, which probably made it hard for me to integrate all the different hints as to what’s going on.
brave bear - mr.txt (44.4 KB)
You are SpamZapper 3.1, by Leon Arnott
With a new Matrix sequel coming out I think reasonably soon (“linear time” is a concept that feels like it only applies to other people ever since Henry came) I’ve been reminded of why I found the previous set so utterly disappointing. Like basically every then-teenaged boy I was very excited by the first one, and I thought it ended on a really exciting note: the good guys were poised to go on offense, and clearly the way they were going to do that was via mass-Satori, awakening all the people trapped in the Matrix from their illusions and crashing the machines’ power systems. But then the sequels arrived and were, uh, not that – instead of a Buddhist parable of human liberation, instead we were suddenly supposed to be invested in all these new AI characters and their muddy Gnostic maundering about their purpose for two long movies.
This may be running a little afield when assessing You are SpamZapper – though the turn-of-the-millennium setting means it’s tapping into at least some of the same zeitgeist – but I had a similar reaction as what initially seemed like a winsome workplace comedy turned into an overlong melodrama about immortal intelligences and their codependent relationships with their users. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I think it’ll find an audience who enjoys the heightened emotion and big-idea twists it has to offer, but it didn’t land for me as well as it probably deserves.
Now that I’ve spoiled a bit of where the story goes, maybe I should lay out where it starts, which is your anthropomorphized spam-blocking software meeting a new coworker (an email plugin that dings when a new message hits the inbox) and logging in for a busy day’s shift zapping spam. This segment of the game makes elegant use of the sometimes constrained nature of a choice-based game, since the only agency you have is to block or approve incoming messages one by one. As the flood of email rises, you start to get a sense of who the human user’s friends are, and also a retrospectively-idyllic look at vintage-2000 email ads.
I enjoyed this bit, but it definitely goes on for a while (I think 50-odd emails) before the main plot stats to emerge. Because this is not just a regular workday: a friend of the user’s (Laurie) is having issues with her Christian-conservative father, who’s considering taking her computer away. The stakes for this are higher than just being e-grounded, though, since Laurie has, uh, fallen in love with another program, the letter-writing wizard in her word-processor. To avert the separation of these two lovers, you need to work together with the other programs to change the father’s mind about the temptations posed by technology. Along the way, you also learn to deal with your crippling self-esteem and anxiety issues (you’re perpetually worried that if you make too many spam-blocking mistakes your user will uninstall you), plus there’s a recurring subplot going into way too much detail on the mechanics of why the programs are sentient – it’s not just a comedy bit we’re supposed to go with, in fact these email plug-ins are incarnations of immortal noosphere intelligences who exist simultaneously at all points in time (there’s yet another plot strand set in a post-climate-apocalypse world).
It is a whole lot, in other words, and reader, I can’t say I followed along the journey. The writing is solid enough – the different programs have a good amount of characterization, and there are some really good jokes involving the different chimes the new-mail signal program can make (I remember that duck quack!) and all the different obnoxious spam running around the early-00’s internet. But there’s also a lot of text here, too, most of it delivered in linear click-to-advance fashion that started to feel exhausting by the second hour, and some things definitely feel over-explained (there is way too much detail on the made-up mechanics of the noosphere-intelligence thing – it’s magic, we just need to go with it!) Similarly, Zappy’s various crises of confidence began to feel fairly belabored by the end. I also really had a hard time investing in the love story between a girl and her Word template: I get that we’re supposed to see the programs as metaphors for people, but their obsessive, near-slavish devotion to their user stands as an incredibly creepy barrier for me to take the metaphor seriously.
There are some puzzles and choices to break up the progression of the story, and a few of these I thought were quite clever: your merry band of AIs only has a few things they’re allowed to do, so figuring out how to leverage those abilities, which includes leveraging a few opportunities in the giant mountain of spam, is generally pretty fun (though there is one pick-the-right-spam-message-to-exploit puzzle that felt like it involves reading the author’s mind, as the characters even comment on what an off-the-wall idea it is). The balance between puzzles and reading seemed off to me, though – I wanted less text in between more-interactive bits.
In fact that – less – is just what I wanted for You are SpamZapper as a whole: less word-count, sure, but I also think I would have enjoyed the game more if a few of the plot’s twists and turns had been excised in favor of a leaner and more compelling progression, and if some of the crazier ideas had been weeded out where they get in the way of the emotional core of the story.
Highlight : I really liked all the mail-ping jokes – something about that bit of circa-2000 Internet nostalgia works for me.
Lowlight : I ran into a bug around the bit where you open a new credit card – a development-tools window popped up at the bottom of the screen, which made it hard to click the links, though eventually this went away (I played in a Safari browser on an iPhone).
How I failed the author : I was really tired when I played the first part of the game, so the business where two characters were sharing an email account left me permanently confused about who was who.
3 Likes
D’ARKUN, by Michael Baltes
I’m bummed I already brought up the comparison in my Ghosts Within review, because now that I’ve played D’ARKUN, I’m turning into the Boy Who Cried Anchorhead. The similarly is even clearer this time out, though, as while the former game had a dreamlike vibe very much its own, in this long Dialog game we’re most definitely in remixed Lovecraft-plot territory. There’s a decayed mansion with secret passages a-plenty (including an attic telescope), a seaside town with more than its share of creepy inhabitants, nightmares that grow worse as the days go by, a wicked inheritance dredging the sins of the past into the present day, and – natch – tentacles galore. While D’ARKUN has its weak spots, with a thinner-than-it-needed-to-be story and some underclued puzzles in the back half, it definitely scratches that old Mythos itch.
Starting with that plot, the impetus for getting the protagonist to this accursed stretch of the German coastline is a new one on me – your student character is on vacation and managed to rent the world’s worst Airbnb – but after an eldritch encounter all thoughts of relaxation are put aside as you start delving into the mysteries of your rented house. This shift happens too abruptly for my taste, as there isn’t much time spent establishing why you’re suddenly climbing down cliff-faces and looking behind paintings, except that there’s not much else to do to pass the time (if the cosmic horrors hadn’t materialized, one wonders how you’d have spent your holiday). Exploration is almost immediately rewarding, though, and it’s just fun to find a madman’s scrawled notes or hidden compartments in the family mausoleum. This first half of the game is well paced too, as new locations gradually open up as the clock moves forward (the accompanying map is really evocative), and you work through satisfying puzzles that aren’t too tricky: there’s a well-implemented set of climbing gear that allows you to clamber around obstacles, and while there are some objects that require SEARCHing to find, the ABOUT text gives fair warning. There is a tricky light puzzle, where you need to make good use of the handful of turns your lantern has before it runs out of oil, but again, copious use of UNDO will see you through.
I found the second half didn’t fully pay off the promising opening, though. Partially this is due to the implementation starting to feel a bit less polished: I started running into disambiguation issues, there are some guess the verb syntax issues (figuring out how to use the syringe was tortuous), and to get to one location I think you have to type RIDE TO SIEBENSCHIEDERSTEIN, which should never be required of any player. There are also more NPCs to deal with, and they’re drawn rather thinly, without many dialogue options or much in the way of interactivity to make them feel like anything other than contrivances. Beyond implementation, the clueing starts to get thinner: there’s a puzzle involving getting past a guard that feels like it involves reading the author’s mind, a maze that has a clever way to solve it but I wound up brute-forcing, and at another point progress requires you to get into what looks like an unwinnable situation and spend several turns waiting before a deus ex machina rescues you, rather than undoing or restoring to safety.
More impactfully, I didn’t feel like the plot really cohered. It gestures in the direction of enough Lovecraftian tropes that I can sort of see where things are meant to be going – there’s a horrifying ritual, an extradimensional temple, a surprise twist or two – but the stakes are sketchy, both for the world as a whole but also for your character. A bit more polish and a bit more focus on the subjectivity of the protagonist would have made D’ARKUN a very worthy Anchorhead-alike; as it is, it’s a good time but requires the player to fill in some blanks.
Highlight : the creepy mansion is a good example of the genre; it’s not too big, but dense with creepy scenery and not-too-tough exploration puzzles.
Lowlight : the recipe puzzle is neat in theory, but required more trial and error than I wanted – there are clues helping you figure out what the mixture is supposed to look like, but there’s some vagueness in the puzzle (I got the potion to look “shiny”, as the notes said, but still needed to add another dose of the relevant ingredient) that made it unsatisfying to solve.
How I failed the author : this is a long one and it’s taken me a couple days to work through it, so that’s perhaps contributed to my feeling that it’s a bit scattershot.
DArkun - MR.txt (369.7 KB)
3 Likes
Thank you very much for thoroughly investigating my game (across several days, wow!)
Your scripts (if there are any more) are very welcome!
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Of course – hopefully it’s clear I had a lot of fun with it (saying that it doesn’t quite hit Anchorhead’s highs is a sort of absurd bar to hold anything to). That is the full transcript attached – I stitched the various play sessions together, except I forgot to run the transcript for one small bit, which is mentioned in the file (I marked my annotations with asterisks). Cheers!
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