Mike Russo's IF Comp 2023 Reviews

Besides self-inserting, I also think it lets players feel like they can add details to the story and thus making it feel more realized.

Much of the strangeness of One Knight Stand for some of us comes from the ability to cooperate with the writer in figuring out what the story should look like or even be. The color of the mug and the hair shade aren’t simply self-insert tools; they are collaborative attempts to ground the story. The author may have designed the set-pieces, but you can also color them purple and pink. They might not be your favorite colors; it’s still engaging with the story no matter how much you spin it. You are being brought further into the setting through these cosmetic choices. This co-authorship goes beyond the usual tabletop games since the player-GM feels blurred here.

I think there’s some interesting possibilities in the approach since this level of customization means the story feels like it’s being designed by the player. There’s something engaging about the illusion of co-authorship here. It’s just that the game suffers from having too many choices at once and the pacing/formula is just terrible.

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Thanks for the thoughtful review, @DeusIrae!

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(visualising Obama swinging a sword and leading an Inqusition)
ROTFL^ROTFL*LOL^LOL

thanks for these 20 minutes of wild laughing, enough for forgetting for a bit the Israeli mess…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Please Sign Here, by Road

Please Sign Here is a deceptively complex game. Superficially, it’s a slice of life mystery; as the framing story establishes, the main character, Jackie, has just been in a car crash that’s claimed the life of her best friend Casey. But the police have other things in mind as they interrogate her, since she’s also potentially linked to the murder of a number of delivery drivers whose last stop before their deaths was the coffeeshop where Jackie works. The meat of the story involves flashing back to the events of the last week, when torrential rains and a vacationing boss left her isolated during a series of night shifts, and she repeatedly encountered three customers who each seemed like they could be hiding something…

This moody mystery is more than it appears, however, and that’s not just down to the attractive art. I don’t think it’s fully successful at the tricky moves it pulls – heck, I’m not 100% sure it’s aware of exactly how tricky they are – but I’ve been turning it over and over in my brain ever since I finished it, which I’d certainly count as an accomplishment. Talking about why involves digging into the plot, though, and since this is a mystery it’s poor form to just spoil said plot without warning. So you might want to give the game a play-through before joining me in the blurry-text below – and if you have and aren’t sure what tricky things I’m talking about, let me just say that you might want to replay and remember your Miranda rights.

Hi there! I’ve got to do a little bit more plot summarizing before we can get to the good stuff. So as mentioned after the in-medias-res police-interrogation opening, you flash back to your shifts at the coffeehouse, with the game progressing day-by-day through the week leading up to the opening car crash. Jackie’s the daughter of a cop, but she’s quite jumpy, starting out suspicious of the three recurring customers: Quan, an elderly recent-immigrant from Vietnam; Aaron, a young Black man who’s juggling a job and his studies; and Marta, a Latina mother with a demanding and thankless job. In fairness, this might be because something odd seems to be happening in the shop; even thought Jackie’s supposed to be alone, the back door keeps getting mysteriously unlocked and opened…

Despite the sense of dread the game’s trying to establish, I actually found the meat of the game surprisingly cozy. In part this is down to the art, which has a warm webcomic-y vibe; there are a few illustrations that are creepy, like the one depicting the fateful pre-crash car ride, but the coffeeshop sections seem to depict a warm, dry haven on a stormy day, with the visiting customers looking friendly and appealing. Intentionally or not, the writing also signally fails to establish any of the three “suspects” as remotely threatening; as far as I can tell, the major details that are supposed to make them potentially dangerous are the fact that Quan drives a black car that might be the same as one Jackie’s seen loitering around, Aaron brings in a big package one day, and Marta’s job occasionally requires her to pick up documents from city hall. You can practically hear the duh-duh-DUH when these details are revealed, since the game frames them as significant, but they’re such obvious red herrings that Jackie’s reactions just mark her out as a paranoid fussbudget – she’s also a real stickler for the rules, not even letting a wet and bedraggled Marta wait for her bus inside the near-empty coffeeshop unless she buys something.

The writing is also, bluntly, not that great, which undercuts the game’s attempts to set a mood. Like, here’s Jackie’s reflections on why she’s friends with Casey, who’s kind of the worst:

>[I]f her dad wants to keep his high chances for donations to become Police Chief next year, Jackie has to keep up playing friendly with one of the richest families in town. The Wintons might only be a truck service company, but they’re the reasons semi-trucks even exist in the first place."

That took me a while to parse, and it’s par for course with much of the game’s prose. The choice-based elements of the narrative also aren’t especially engaging, as there aren’t many decision points and not enough effort is put into making them seem meaningful; there’s one moment where you hear something in the back and go to investigation, and you’re given the choice of grabbing either a broom or a “group handle” (?) as a weapon, but after selecting one the next passage begins “It doesn’t matter.” For the love of god, game, I know this is mostly on rails, but you don’t need to draw attention to it!

Things get much more interesting when the timeline catches up to the framing story, though. After recounting your memories, the cops ask you to pick which of the three “suspects” you think they should prioritize in their investigation. I clammed up and refused to finger any of them, both on general principles – public service announcement, if cops are ever asking you anything, shut up until you’ve got a lawyer present – and because I was quite sure none of them murdered the delivery drivers or was responsible for the car crash. And in that ending, which the epilogue text deemed the “main” ending, the third-person narration shifted from referring to the main character as Jackie to Casey, instead – she’s Jackie’s notional best friend, remember – and mentioned her recent hair-dye job.

The clear implication is that Casey has gone all Single White Female (or Talented Mr. Ripley, if you prefer) and killed Jackie in service of trying to switch identities with her. There are some seeds of foreshadowing throughout the earlier section that point in this direction; Casey seems envious of Jackie’s life in their earlier interactions, and right before the car crash, the flashback sequence ends with Casey asking whether Jackie thinks people deserve second chances – a macabre question when you realize that Jackie is herself the second chance in question. So it could be an inspired twist.

There are two flies in the ointment, though, one more interesting than the other. To get the boring one out of the way: of course this makes no ^%$^ sense. There’s no indication that Casey’s done anything more than the dye-job to make herself look like Jackie, nor that she had much time or expertise post-accident to make Jackie look like her. The twist has nothing to do with the much-belabored deaths of the delivery-men, and in fact Casey killing all of them – as the ending implies – would do nothing but invite further scrutiny of the switcheroo. And did we forget that Jackie’s dad is a cop, and presumably knows what his daughter looks like? So take as read that this is all completely ridiculous.

The more interesting inconsistency in the twist, though, is the fact that you only see it by refusing to try to set the cops on some innocent person to throw them off the scent (this is where the racism/police corruption themes mentioned in the blurb come into play, by the by – the implication is that they’re happy to go after one of the POC “suspects” and ignore the possibility that the white girl is a baddie). You can conceptualize this as a reward for the player – by successfully realizing that none of them is the killer, the player gets a hint of what’s really going on – or as an in-character decision by Jackie, who’s gotten to know these people. But for Casey to make this choice is counterproductive; again, she’s inviting more scrutiny for no reason!

This isn’t a just a plot hole like the ones I mention above, though; it calls into question who exactly is making choices and how those choices are being resolved. Instead of the conventional IF triangle of identities – player, protagonist, and narrator – here we have the traditional player and narrator joined by a competing dyad of protagonists, whose methods and motivations are diametrically opposed, and who, unless you happen to pick just the right options, seamlessly substitute for each other with the player and narrator none the wiser. And now that we think about it some more, the flashback depicts events in Jackie’s life, but it’s being recounted by Casey to the cops as though it’s about her, so this doubling is even more complex than we thought (oh, and this also means the narrator is completely unreliable too and we presumably can’t trust anything we’ve read)! Please Sign Here thus becomes narrative collapse: the game – nothing that comes after the twist makes sense, and it throws into question everything that comes before the twist, too.

I wish I could say the game does something compelling with this move, but per my long-ago, pre-spoiler-text note, I’m unconvinced that it knows how radical it’s being – possibly this is me just being judgmental and overgeneralizing from the weak prose to assuming that the game has weak writing overall, I suppose, but it’s inarguable that the game doesn’t explore the implications of its scenario, seeming satisfied with using it as a noirish capstone to a conventional whodunnit, not one of postmodern dislocation. Still, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even what may seem an often-clumsy mystery can dislocate its player into acute postmodern vertigo.

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To Sea in a Sieve, by J. J. Guest

I don’t know where a two-year-old picks up these things, but my son has learned that pirates say “yarr!” The other night we were reading a book about animals dressing up for Halloween, and when he saw the chicken with a peg-leg, he swung his arm in a little Pirates-of-the-Caribbean move and said “yarr!” I can’t think of any other book or show he’s seen that involves pirates, so like I said, I’m somewhat at a loss – is there some kid at day care who pontificates about this stuff during outdoor play period, confidently explaining in a toddler’s burble how you pretend to be a pirate? – but I guess the cultural knowledge that this is how pirates talk is just that strong.

The kicker, of course, is that so far as I understand pirates didn’t talk like that; your stereotypical Golden Age of Piracy buccaneers probably spoke like the 18th Century Englishmen they were, albeit with more lexical flights of fancy than would be typical given their outré experiences and dearth of formal education. They likely sounded, in other words, like Captain Booby, the deuteragonist and comic centerpiece of To Sea in a Sieve:

“That’s it, boy — bail, an’ lively ho!” says the Captain. “’Twill all ha’ been worthwhile when we’m rescued, ye’ll see!”

“Not me snuffbox too,” wails the Captain. “Well, here’s lubberly manners! That snuffbox was o’ great sentimental value to me, I’ll have ’ee know. The man I killed fer it were a dear an’ loyal friend!”

“Arr, not me pineapple!” says the Captain, woefully. “I had me a fancy to make a lovely canapé — pineapple and hunks o’ cheese, served up on the spines of a porpentine. Ye’ve set haute cuisine back centuries, damn ye!”

(Okay, maybe that last one undermines my point, but technically it’s an arr, not a yarr).

There have been some very funny games so far in the Comp, and I know there are more ahead, but I have rarely laughed so hard at anything as I did at Captain Booby. This is fortunate because for the game to work, he has to work, since he’s the only thing standing in the way of this being the shortest parser puzzler ever: you play the cabin-boy he’s dragooned into helping him flee with his ill-gotten plunder when the authorities put an end to his piratical career. But since an errant cannonball has holed the lifeboat, you need to dump the loot before you sink. If the good Captain were capable of balancing risk and reward, he’d obviously stand aside and let you do it – but if he were capable of that, presumably he wouldn’t have gone into piracy, and so he opposes you at every turn, so that you need to outwit, outmaneuver, and outsnuff him in order to commit his treasures to the briny deep.

As a result, in less skillful hands Booby could have become a deeply annoying character, continually frustrating the player and providing handy, punchable characterization for the frustration of failing to solve puzzles in a parser game. But this hardly ever happens, as Booby is as pathetic as he is bombastic: I mean, if you can read the line “’Od’s blood, fire and thunder, my sinuses!” without a) feeling a little bad for the fellow, and b) giggling so hard you almost go into a fit, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Even when I was stymied on a particular challenge, sharing a lifeboat with Booby was never anything less than delightful.

Not that I was stymied that often or that long, since this is a well-designed set of puzzles. A few of the Captain’s treasures can simply be heaved over the side, but most require some work to obtain and drown, and all the while water is seeping into the boat, lending an air of farce to proceedings as you pause in your efforts to desperately bail. To make progress you’ll need to relieve the Captain of some of his effects, match wits with a carnivorous plant, and prevent an overzealous beaver from sending you to Davy Jones’s Locker. Even as the boat’s load lessens, the comedic frenzy heightens, with new complications lending increased energy to the situation and preventing it from getting dull over the game’s one-hour running time.

While many of the puzzles do require relatively specific syntax, I found for the most part that To Sea in a Sieve did an excellent job cueing the appropriate action, which made me feel very clever indeed but is actually just good game design. There were a few challenges towards the end of the game where it felt like this broke down somewhat and some additional clues might not have gone amiss (I’m thinking of looking at the tea caddy through the quizzing-glass, and the precise language required to use the brocade), but it’s got a well-implemented hint system so I can’t complain too much (and I have to admit that I was having so much fun that I stayed up way past my bedtime playing this one, so my brain probably wasn’t working so well by the end).

The only thing better than finishing To Sea in a Sieve was seeing in the ending text that it’s part of a planned trilogy – the middle part, To Hell in a Hamper, was released 20 years ago so this technically checks both the “boaty” and “sequel/prequel” boxes for Comp ’23 bingo – so there’ll be another iteration of the concept to look forward to. And even if it takes another 20 years to get the final instalment, based on the success of To Sea in a Sieve it’ll be worth the wait.

sea in a sieve mr.txt (166.3 KB)

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The Enigma of Solaris, by Jkj Yuio

I grew up reading Golden Age sci-fi, and for all that even at the time I recognized its corniness, I still have a big soft spot for that kind of thing. As a result, while I can’t tell whether or not the opening of The Enigma of Solaris is intentionally camp, I loved it all the same:

”Agent Grey,” the colonel announced, his voice carrying the weight of gravitas that only a military man of his rank could muster, “we have a situation on Solaris.”

Grey leaned in, her senses alert to every word. “The Solaris, sir?”

(The use of “muster” so close to “colonel” is an argument for intentional silliness, it occurs to me).

If you guessed that this is immediately followed by some exposition where the characters explain to each other things they already know perfectly well, points to you. It’s a formula, but it’s one that’s not presently overused in IF, and like I said I’ve got some affection for it, so after the briefing established the situation (research station mysteriously losing power, go investigate and save the day), I was ready for adventure.

Things get a bit more serious when you arrive at the station, and the early sequence of poking around to gather clues is pretty engaging. But this turns out to be quite a short game, and what initially seemed like it was going to be a high-tech investigation quickly turned into an extended NPC interaction sequence with few if any choices for the player to make. Said NPC is another sci-fi caricature – he’s a scientist who’s lost perspective on the risks of his research – but trying to reason with someone like that isn’t particularly fun, and the eventual reveal of what’s going on on the station struck me as a bit underwhelming.

While the prose never loses its over-the-top charm, I couldn’t help but wish that the plot matched that tone rather than staying relatively grounded, and I wished too that there was a little more for the player to do. This partially could be due to the extreme concision of the game – it’s really maybe 10 minutes at most – so I could understand it if the author didn’t feel like it was worth fleshing out too much. A game that took this same basic approach but which had more robust gameplay and leaned further into the far-out elements of its inspirations could be a lot of fun, but as it stands, there’s just not that much to the Enigma of Solaris.

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Hi Mike! Thank you so much for your review, it was a lovely thing to wake up to on this overcast Wednesday morning, really made my day! I’m so glad you enjoyed the game.

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Whoops, I’m pretty sure I didn’t read this, but I called it a monstrosity too!

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I think that’s just part of Standard Lovecraft English: you know, cyclopean, eldritch, non-Euclidean, squamous…

Yay, glad to have repaid a tiny bit of the sheer delight I felt playing your game!

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Hi Mike, thanks a lot for your review and, as always, detailed analysis.

Also “camp” really?

The first English definition of the term, which appeared in a 1909 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, conformed to popular, contemporary notions of camp: “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to, characteristic of, homosexuals…”

ref;

That aside, i like your “mustard” reference. Damn! I wish i’d thought of it. In which case i’d have made more of it.

You know, i think you’d like my game “the bore war”;

The Bore War

A battle of nerves, wits and stamina. Stiff upper-lip essential!

Synopsis:

It’s April 1900, at the height of the “Bore war in Afika”. Charlie Bodfish, that’s you! are posted to Mafeking, South Africa, as part of the big push to break the siege deadlock.

Your assignment is to sneak across the frontier and steal all the interesting things, and to leave in their place dull stuff like; Bee-gees phonographs, family photos, tax forms, powerpoint presentations and Alan Titchmarsh’ gardening tips.

The hope is to break the spirit of the bores so badly they go home!

Importantly you must steal the secret plans for the “boring machine” by inventor John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson containing his advancements in drilling and boring practices.

It has Gorilla warfare and everything!

Ideal for people like me that can’t even spell the title of their own game :slight_smile:

Thanks again. spot on as ever!

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I can’t imagine you’ll be well served by a 1909 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps we can go to a much more authoritative source, Susan Sontag:

The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste … Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

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So wait. Susan Sontag is now some maker up of word meanings?

OED:

Cambridge dictionary:

A writer, I think you mean, yes.

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Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on “Camp” published in 1964, is credited with bringing the term camp into the mainstream. Her essay also inspired the Met Gala theme for 2019.

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Don’t you mean the Boer war?

Also called the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, or Second Freedom War in Afrikaans?

Eventually, British scorched earth policies, and the terrible conditions suffered in concentration camps by Boer women and children who had been displaced by these policies, brought the remaining Boer guerrillas to the negotiating table, ending the war.

Yeah, the Sontag view of camp is I think pretty much the mainstream understanding of it now, though even the 1909 OED gets at the gist of how I intended the term with its first cluster of synonyms (“ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical” – though Colonel Flagstaff’s performance of masculine authority maybe is a little drag-y, now that I think about it, to say nothing of his name). To be clear I meant this in a positive way, I am definitely pro-camp!

(Pretty sure that’s the pun!)

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They made that pun in the 40s apparently

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(As an aside, the “sitzkrieg” was definitely the superior name. You know, instead of blitzkrieg because they were all sitting around?)

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We All Fall Together, by Camron Gonzalez

I’ve never had a dream of falling, or at least not that I can remember, and I’m kind of bummed that I’ve missed out. The feeling of flying through the air seems like it must be exhilarating to me, and without the real-life risk of splatting against the ground, wouldn’t that be an amazing sensation to experience? We All Fall Together takes a different view, however, imagining a Limbo of ever-plummeting bodies caught between a terrifying cyclone that claims those who dive too low and shadowy predators who snatch those who try to slow their fall and drift too far up. It’s a situation that can be read to have a number of different real-life analogues, but it’s not so one-note as to be too simple of an allegory, so it’s interesting enough to support the game’s ten-minute runtime – and while my streak of being annoyed by the Texture engine continues with this game, at least it has a better showing than most.

As in medias res openings go, “you’re falling endlessly” is a great one, so the game makes a solid first impression, and throws in enough incident to keep the story moving – after starting to get oriented towards the situation, you get a chance to engage with several other inhabitants of this strange netherworld, most notably a black-clad figure you call “the Rock Star.” They’re a great source of exposition, and the dialogue efficiently sets up the metaphysical stakes, establishing that there’s a risky but rewarding path that may allow you to escape your fate and return to your loved ones.

Granted, it’s not an especially sharp dilemma, but it’s reasonably engaging and the opportunity to give the Rock Star a pep talk is nice; similarly, while the writing occasionally overreaches and has some errors, for the most part it hits a solid balance between action, dialogue, and jokes. What works less well is the attempt to impose a backstory on you and your interlocutor. You each talk about partners who are devoid of names, genders, personalities, or histories, landing at precisely the least-effective position between specific enough to be affecting, and general enough to be archetypal. The ending still feels rewarding, though, and again, this is a very short game so the offending bits only amounted to a minute or so of reading.

As for the Texture-ness of it all, I thought the author did a good job of picking verbs that were clearly distinguished from each other, and signposting what actions would do. Oh, and I played this one on my phone, and good news, the tiny-text-on-buttons bug I’ve experienced in other Texture games went away! …bad news, I experienced a new bug where switching to my Notes app to paste in excepts or jot down thoughts caused the buttons to stop work. Texture, you take delight in vexing me and have no compassion for my poor nerves – but despite that, I’d still say this is my favorite of the games using this engine so far.

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Punwise, the point of the game is to bore the boers to surrender.

(Edit: Oh. Sorry. Posted too quick. Already pointed out by Mike.)

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