Mike Russo's IF Comp 2023 Reviews

Competitions IFComp
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Creative Cooking, by dott. Piergiorgio

I have played a lot of IF over the years, and as a result – not to brag or anything – I’m kind of a big deal. I’ve rescued crashing spaceships, defeated maniacal supervillains, slain more evil wizards than you can count, and saved humanity, earth, the multiverse more times than I can count; I’ve bearded Lovecraftian horrors in their dens, and performed great acts of perspicacity in ferreting out whodunnit (albeit typically with a lot of restarts). So to play a game where the inciting incident is that you’re missing a couple of ingredients for the dinner party you’re going to throw for your friends, and you rise to the occasion by popping out and grabbing them with little more fuss than it takes to make a Trader Joe’s run… is actually a nice change of pace.

Creative Cooking is a cozy, exploration-focused game that, pace the title, doesn’t require you to do any cooking at all. Instead, it’s got two phases: first, you wander your house and learn a little more about the protagonist and their world – this is a fantasy world and you’re a sort of elf, and there are a lot of proper nouns being thrown around – then you get to the pantry, realize that you’re out of some stuff, and the second, puzzlier portion kicks off. You automatically jot down the three ingredients you’ll need, as well as some notes on how to obtain them, and head out to the elf village proper to find them. Between the three, there’s maybe a puzzle and a half; one is just lying on the ground, you get another just by talking to two NPCs (who have maybe two or three possible topics of conversation apiece), and then the last requires you to take one additional action after you pick it up, which is explicitly cued but I still managed to mess up due to my blind spots when dealing with two-word parsers (I tried putting the vine in the pond, and throwing it in the pond, and dropping it, but had to get a hint to land on just THROW VINE). Then you go home, cook the meal, and have a nice time with your friends – actually, an especially nice time with one in particular.

I’m all for this kind of thing; not every game needs to have world-shaking stakes or brow-furrowing challenges, especially this deep in the Comp randomizer list. A simple premise with easy puzzles that just provides an excuse to hang out and explore a setting is a great concept for a game, especially one that, per the blurb, is meant to ease players into a forthcoming longer piece set in the same world. Unfortunately, I don’t think the implementation of the concept worked especially well for me. In large measure this is due to the shallowness of said implementation. Creative Cooking is written in a successor to the very early AGT language, and since I’m not familiar with that, I can’t say how much of this is due to the choice of language, but regardless, the game feels significantly more primitive even than other intentionally old-school games entered into this Comp. Very very few nouns are implemented – room descriptions will routinely mention objects that seem worth investigating, like a table with a drawer, or tools on a workbench, but rarely is any of this stuff even minimally implemented. Seemingly-obvious actions, like COOK, are also disallowed, and see the spoiler above for the parser issues I ran into trying to solve the one real puzzle.

The other factor distancing me from the game was the prose style. English isn’t the author’s first language, and several native-speaking testers/proofreaders are listed in the credits, so I don’t want to harp on this element too much, but there are still quite a lot of typos and confusing syntax, compounded by dense worldbuilding that lacks an immediate hook, a chatty approach that bombards the player with gossip without much context, and a reluctance to present text as anything but a single overlong paragraph (this might be a limitation of the engine). Like, when you examine yourself, the game notes that you’re an elf with a “kirune” body, so when I found a book in my library about kirune physiology I was hoping to learn more about what that meant. But here’s what you get when reading the book:

This book on kirune physiology is the gift from Senpai Miryarai; when I unwrapped it, I was perplexed of the choice, Miryarai is a very accomplished healer, and for me is a really trusted friend and senpai. And she knows it. Noticing my perplexity, she says, with all her proverbial phlegm and calmness, a strange phrase: “a page a day keeps the healer away”. I never heard something like. Seeing my increasing perplexity, she coquettishly looks toward Etuye Alasne, hugging her with her right white wing. “it’s a saying from another world, far in the past and space”. Her matter-of-fact, objective explanation makes sense, Etuye is an exceptionally well-versed Soulmancer, and her soulmancy led to the first Soulmating till the end of Time in more than 10,000 years, the one between Miryarai, Etuye Alasne and Atuzejiki, but I still felt something off in her manifestation of love towards Etuye. Sometime later, I asked Miyai about this, and she explained, but it’s another and long story, to be narrated elsewhere, later…

It’s interesting to see a game implemented in an older IF language that does something other than bog-standard collect-the-treasures gameplay, and I admit that I’m probably more down on fantasy worldbuilding bollocks than I should be, so I don’t want to judge Creative Cooking too harshly – and again, I really did like the setup. But with gameplay that’s so simplified, and the fruits of exploration so baroque and unrewarding, I didn’t find much here that clicked with me.

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psst… you forgot to close your spoiler tag…

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Lol you beat me to it, I just spotted the missing ‘]’

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Hello Mike Russo (@DeusIrae),

Thank you very much for playing Codename Obscura and writing this excellent review!

I understand this point completely, and looking at the implementation now, I find that there are truly many cases where you can use the USE command. On the other hand, most of these do have the “more proper” synonym or option available also, so the primary idea of using USE was to make it easier for the player, which I agree might not have been a very good idea; to just enable the player to throw USE everywhere and then magic happens. Especially hard scenarios to understand for a non native English person like me, are such doors with key readers, where the scenario would in strict terms require the player to place the electronic key close enough to the reading mechanism. So, the correct command most probably could not be INSERT, because you are not inserting anything inside anything. Perhaps SHOW could be better. This is one of the two cases where USE has been set to be the only correct command in the implementation, for lack of understanding better. The other case is USE COMPUTER.

I’m very glad you regard this opening to give a good first impression :wink:

This came as a surprise for me, because I had the impression it should be implemented. But you are correct, of course, there is only one location where you can LISTEN to anything, the one location where it is actually crucial to do so. Sorry about this, it’s something that somehow has slipped through…

Yes, some other reviewers have pointed this out also, point taken. My idea was that what would first seem like a straight forward puzzle to solve, would then in the next step cause some serious head scratching. The idea was perhaps a valid one, but the implementation should be better…

This seems very strange, I’ll take a look at the transcripts. This game has been implemented with a quite limited set of features of the Adventuron framework 8-bit mode (as compared to the full Adventuron features) so, there might be something perhaps related to that, I could talk to Chris A about it also (the inventor of Adventuron).

This is very nice to hear indeed, as this is my first entry into this competition (or any IF competition) and also has those 8-bit retro limitations.

I wrote the first version back in 1987, then forgot about it totally for decades. It was, a few years ago, really like finding an old gem to be able to retrieve it from a dusty C-casette! And then it took me quite a while to find a modern tool to get it to this reborn status :wink:

Thank you again for playing Codename Obscura! All this feedback is very valuable, and I think I already understand much more about fluent game design than I did before this competition.

Cheers,
Mika

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thanks Mike !

It’s a bit sad that you can’t access the thread “celebrate the reviews that you really like” in the IFComp author forum, because I feel is the proper one for answering, but what matter is that your review is a model. First the good, then the bad in a very constructive manner.

I’m actually undecided if doing first a post-mortem or the inevitable post-comp release, but the quote from the game is exceptionally well chosen, because I think is one whose shown best the real major issue: the lack of balance between two showcasings (the world of my WIP and that Magx can still be viable for simple, unpretentious work) coupled with an excessive care into not spoilering much about the WIP.

I reckon the failure in resorting to a cruft bypass and a warning in the help and walkthru (the correct english words escapes me now…) for a serious (=put the story into unwinnable state) bug after three days of fighting it, a thing alone who deserve a lowering score :frowning: whose is one of two causes of the lack of implemented decoration, the other being a 10-day spate of bad mood with zero actual coding.

this is all I can say for now, I think.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Lake Starlight, by SummersViaEarth

The girl whose two moms were a mermaid and a pirate did most of the job, but it was the Prana Yurt that broke me.

I know it sounds like I’m saying that to make fun of Lake Starlight’s world’s-wokest-wiccans premise, but I think – or at least hope – I have some substantive critiques beyond just being a hopeless geriatric reactionary. This choice-based game is the first part of what promises to be a much longer YA-style story, following the tween protagonist as she leaves her home in a polluted, dystopian city and attends a sleepaway camp where she’ll make friends, learn about her magical heritage and, from the cues in the game’s ending, eventually take on the greedy companies that have ruined the land. The game is resolutely BIPOC-centered; the protagonist is a Latina (though oddly, the game has you choose a name before letting you know that), and a major part of her journey is connecting with her family roots and encountering other characters who are likewise empowered by their respective traditions. And it’s also staking out a clearly environmental-justice-oriented stance in laying out who’s made the world as bad as it is, and who needs to be stopped to begin to heal it.

This is all fine, I think – it’s as subtle as a brick to the face, but it seems to be pitched to younger players so that’s forgivable. Similarly, the worldbuilding is fairly thin, since there are lots of details making clear this is basically our world (the man character speaks Spanish, another one is named “Marie Bayou” and is from “Orlenze”) while the major departures, like the swarms of blood flies and the mind-control cults, are never explained, but I’m not sure heavy helpings of lore would have improved the experience. The writing had a number of typos, but generally struck me as in-genre for a YA work; it’s fairly simple and frequently made me feel like I was crumbling into dust:

Together, all of you yell out, “Yessss!” Then Stella shouts for everybody to jump up and she teaches you a super-fun cheer routine that involves lots of booty shaking and kicking and jumping and spinning around while shouting: “Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up! Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up!”

There are some 13 year olds who would find this cringe, but others for whom it would work, I suspect.

So all of that is to just say this is very much not for me, but that’s completely OK! Not everything has to be, and in fact I think the IF scene is stronger when there are more games not pitched at nerdy middle-aged white guys as the key audience.

I do think there are some issues here that go beyond mere preference, though. For one thing, the player isn’t given very much to do – there are sections of the game where ten minutes will pass in between choices – which I generally don’t mind too much, but I confess I did get annoyed when Lake Starlight felt like it was actively undermining my choices. Like, there’s a segment where you get to choose which of your cabin-mates to pair up with for task, except when I clicked on the one I opted for, I got told she’d already teamed up with someone else and I got automatically assigned to another girl. Previous to that, there’s a bit where you need to choose your strategy for introducing yourself to the other campers, and I decided to focus on my self-assurance – only for that to completely fail as I turned into a bundle of nerves. Making matters worse, I made that decision because I’d previously chosen for the protagonist to be born under the Fire Moon, which was supposed to make me brash and strong-spirited, so it felt like the author was doubly-negating my input. If a game has a specific story it really wants to tell without the player getting in the way, great, but in that case I think it’s much better not to present false choices.

The deeper critiques I had about the game go back to where I started this review. First, there’s the girl with the pirate mom (the mermaid one is blameless in all this so I’m leaving her aside). She tells the rest of the cabin about her mom’s occupation with a clear sense of pride, and they all nod along like this is a cool, normal job for someone to have. Sure, she does say something about “colonizers” being the target of her mom’s piracy, but given the absence of any active colonial activity being foregrounded in the story and the setting’s resemblance to the real world, this feels like it’s justifying violence against people based on their group identity. It’d be one thing if this was an isolated incident, but the game several times gives a pass to “good”-coded characters recklessly threatening violence against the protagonist. The camp head has a trio of pony-sized attack dogs charge the main character in what’s played as a small welcome-to-camp practical joke but looks way more like hazing to me, and later in that same scene, one of your cabin-mates draws a bow and points a nocked arrow directly at you, seemingly to show what a cool rule-breaking badass she is, but which is entirely equivalent to the decidedly un-cool activity of pointing a loaded gun at somebody.

Maybe I’m being overly-precious about this – and in an empowerment fantasy like this, I totally get that part of the draw is the cathartic idea of unleashing redemptive violence against bad people who share traits with the real-world politicians and oligarchs who’ve inflicted harm against communities of color and the environment. But Lake Starlight seems to me to have a too-cavalier attitude towards violence, and having played it not two weeks after the self-appointed representatives of an oppressed people unleashed horrifying violence against civilians and sparked a confrontation with a vicious government that’s killed thousands more innocents, its juvenile take on these issues grated.

Then there’s the Prana Yurt, which struck me as taking two vaguely non-Western words bespeaking alternative wisdom or lifestyles and mashing them up without any rhyme or reason. There are parts of the game that seem well-observed to me, like the protagonist’s home life and relationship with her family. But there are other parts, like the Prana Yurt, that feel like the result of antiracist mad-libs – I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the pirate-mermaid daughter is named “Lilo Keanu”, which I’m pretty sure is the Hawaiian Kemal Pamuk*. The BIPOC Avengers is a cool concept, but given the hard work that goes into building nonracial solidarity, it again feels like it can trivialize important real-world history to treat things so superficially.

I’m aware as I say all this that I could just be a big old hypocrite (emphasis on the old) – back in the day, I enjoyed the heck out of the tabletop roleplaying game Mage: the Ascension, where various stereotypes, including kung-fu monks, violent neo-pagans, and indigenous spirit-summoners team up to fight an authoritarian technocracy, and it’s definitely guilty of all the sins I’m laying at Lake Starlight’s door. Still, Mage came out in 1993; 30 years on, I think it’s reasonable to expect more.

* I don’t think I’ve recently explained the Kemal Pamuk thing anywhere. See, in the first couple of episodes of Downton Abbey, there’s a sexy Turkish guy who shows up as a guest star, and Julian Fellowes, when deciding what to call him, very clearly just stole the first name of the first political leader who popped into his head (Kemal Ataturk) and the last name of the first writer who popped into his head (Orhan Pamuk). This is extremely racist, but IMO also quite hilarious when you play the parlor game of applying the same logic to Western countries – Abraham Twain, Winston Shakespeare, Louis Hugo, etc. etc. etc.

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Finders Commission, by Deborah Sherwood

There are a lot of things I enjoyed about Finders Commission, a parser-like choice game where you carry out a museum heist — like, for example, everything in that clause I just wrote – but my favorite was the breezy way it lays out its premise:

Bastet is a beautiful cat.
She believes she is an ancient deity who should be worshipped by all.
Her Aegis, or breastplate armor, has been missing for centuries.
She read online that it was sold at auction to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.

Each line of is wackier than then next, but it’s delivered with such supreme nonchalance that you almost don’t notice how off the wall it is – to say nothing of the way the brilliantly impossible-to-argue-with first line just slips by. The game largely delivers on this promise, offering an entertaining set of puzzles and a straightforwardly pleasant story; it’s a bit rough in places, and I think it had room to lean more into the silliness of its setup, but I found it an engaging way to while away half an hour.

The planning is an integral part of any heist, and here Finder’s Commission offers just enough to whet the appetite. You get to choose your protagonist from a menu of gender-ambiguous options, each of whom boasts a special talent or two (I opted for Nat, “strong and compassionate”), and then negotiate your fee with Bastet (to no real end, as far as I could tell, but it’s still a fun touch) before heading to the museum to reclaim the unjustly-stolen antiquity. This phase did seem to have a peculiarly large number of empty, useless locations, and that feeling persisted once I got to the main gameplay space; fortunately, it doesn’t take long to find a map to make the compass navigation more intuitive, but there’s still way more real estate in the museum than seems necessary to support the handful of puzzles on offer. I’m guessing that this is partially in service to the character-selection portion of the game – there was at least one interaction I found that I’m pretty sure was available because of Nat’s strength, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the useless places I encountered play host to bespoke options for other protagonists – but there might have been a more elegant way to accomplish this.

The writing also feels a bit perfunctory once the heist proper kicks off. There are a few vignettes that have some charm – I liked the sequence where you can do some light flirting with a cute docent – but for the most part the descriptions are quite functional. This isn’t the kind of game that should provide reams of historical context for each inessential artifact displayed in the museum, nor should there be long dialogue trees with NPCs when you’re trying to keep a low profile, but I couldn’t help think of the way the Lady Thalia games get a lot of mileage out of a few well-chosen period details and a couple lines of witty banter.

The actual process of making off with the aegis doesn’t have too many steps, but some do require some timing and forethought, which pushed me to scout out the scene, and try to come up with a plan before making my move, all of which felt in-genre. Each puzzle is relatively simple on its own, but the game does have time limits in a few sequences, and the inventory system requires manually selecting an item when you want to use it in a location, which discourages lawnmowering, so accomplishing the goal felt satisfying even though it was ultimately fairly straightforward.

I wound up with 87 points out of 100, though I characteristically want to try to argue my way to a better score – for example, I got dinged for leaving a security camera pointing at the aegis, but while I had figured out how to move it, the game didn’t do a good job of explaining which direction it needed to be pointed so it couldn’t see the case I was breaking into. I also got dinged for not charging my phone, when the last time I checked it it had 162% battery power, and for not tipping a barista when I’d never actually ordered a coffee. So I think we can all agree I deserved to get 100%.

Beyond these small oddities, I think I ran into a couple of other bugs – in particular, an important box-shaped gizmo seemed to go missing most of the way through the game, though I was able to undo back until it popped up again. These weren’t a very big deal, but hopefully they can be cleaned up for a post-Comp release.

Still, even when I was thinking of ways the game could be improved, I was still smiling as I played Finder’s Commission. I believe it’s the author’s first piece of IF, and it appears they’ve taken the oft-given advice that new authors start out with a short, manageable first game; if that’s the case, perhaps there’ll be a future, more robust Finders Commission game to come (this one is labelled as Episode One), which I’d certainly look forward to!

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I don’t want to slam your attempt to argue for a better score, but I thought this was obvious: one camera on the east wall, one on the west wall. Just point them at their respective walls.

The phone charging thing was a bit silly though (I’ve seen my sister go bonkers when her phone is down to 40% and she can’t find a socket right away…), so you can have 75 points for that. Bringing you up to a neat 162%.

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Thank you for the lovely review. I really like your approach to the game. It has been a very challenging yet inspiring experience and a lot of fun.

Cheers,
Deborah

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Ah, now that you lay it out like that it makes sense! I assumed the case was up against the wall so since the specific location of the camera wasn’t noted, my guess was that it was somewhere in the middle of the room, and I thought pointing it west would make the most sense since I planned to enter the room from the south and exit to the north.

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FWIW I had the same problem with the security camera puzzle. Sure, the layout Rovarsson has deduced is a logical one, but it’s not the only possible way the room could be set up based on the minimal information that we’re given. And it feels odd in this sort of game to make the player deduce something that the PC would just be able to see, which makes me wonder if it’s more that the writer had a very clear image of the room in their mind and didn’t realize they weren’t communicating that image to the player.

(I’m also still bothered by the lack of an in-universe reason for the PC to be unable to look at the monitors to see where the cameras are pointing.)

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I’m looking at my notes and map:

Camera locations

-Camera LMZ-C799 is in the location with the stone owl and the female statuettes. This is the middle (of five) location on the far west side of the exhibit. Turning it west would mean it sees the west wall and not the interior of the room.
-Camera LMZ-P291 is in the location of the Aegis itself. This is the fourth (counting from south/bottom of map) location on the far east side of the exhibit. Turning this one east would mean, again, that it sees the east wall instead of the interior of the exhibit hall.

I found no other cameras, and the exhibit is a straight 5x5 map, so I’m really wondering how else the room and the cameras could be set up other than in my mental image of them.

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It’s specifically the one in the same square as the aegis that threw me. It’s never stated to be attached to a wall (I just double-checked to confirm this), so it could be attached to the ceiling, as Mike suggested, and if you assume that that’s possible, it and the case could be pretty much anywhere in that square relative to each other.

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Yeah, exactly – I also considered whether the camera could have been in one of the corners (since that’s where I tend to think they most frequently are located in real life?), but given the layout, I figured if they were in the SE or NE corners, they’d have a good view of the western entrance but a less-good view of any art on the east wall, which seems worse from security perspective than the NW or SW corners where you’d have slightly worse visibility of the entrance area, but would have full coverage of the art. So either way I pictured it, aiming the camera west seemed to be the best choice.

Anyway it’s not a big deal at all, just kind of interesting to dig into the different ways we all imagined it! Now we need a Finders Commission spin-off that’s all about surveillance camera vision cones :slight_smile:

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Oh… Yes, I see. For all the text says, the Aegis could be against the east wall with the camera on the ceiling staring right at it from a meter west and up. Or any other setup that hangs the camera somewhere else than close to the wall.

You’re right. My mental image defaulted to the camera hanging on the wall (but not flat stuck against it). It doesn’t have to be that way.

Thanks.

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Hello all,

My brain sees the cameras mounted to the wall pointing inwards. I should have made that much clearer. So if you point the camera near the Aegis either North, South or East, you would have effectively concealed the theft. Thank you for your continued feedback!

Cheers,
Deborah

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Some things just strike minds in different ways. I feel obtuse often enough when solving puzzles, but the decision of which direction to turn the camera only took a split second for me…

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Word of God!

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Have Orb, Will Travel, by Older Timer

I’m not generally one for “old-school” IF. The text adventures of the 80s don’t tickle my nostalgia receptors – I played a few at the time, and many more since then, but I got into IF via the late 90s/early aughts indie scene so when I think of The Games of My Youth, it’s Photopia and Slouching Towards Bedlam that come to mind. Many of them also tend to take the two-word parser approach, which fundamentally doesn’t jibe with how my brain approaches IF interfaces. And while I enjoy a good puzzle as much as the next person, I tend to place a high value on literary prose, thematic depth, and engaging characters; it’s not so much that most old-school IF is bad at those things as that it politely declines to even attempt such things in favor challenging gameplay in the medium-dry-goods model. I can enjoy this style of gameplay but I’m very aware that when I bounce off an old-school piece, the fault’s more likely to be on my side than the game’s.

At the same time, though, I sometimes wonder whether this attitude has become something of a crutch for my critical faculties. Like, it’s easy to say “I guess this thing I didn’t like is just a matter of taste”, and it makes one feel like a broad-minded, ecumenical sort of person who can look beyond their own prejudices. It’s much harder to try to be more rigorous and nail down questions like a) what exactly do we mean by “old school”, anyway, given that there were plenty of early 80s games that aimed to integrate gameplay, plot, and theme and had literary pretensions; b) what particular design elements are necessary or at least helpful to creating an “old school” vibe; and c) are those elements implemented well or poorly in a particular work?

That sounds like a lot of work that I’m not going to attempt now – maybe post-Comp fodder for the Rosebush – but having had these thoughts, I’ve decided to try to provide a slightly more critical look at Have Orb, Will Travel than I was first inclined to do. Because despite having enjoyed the author’s previous two games, this is another old-school puzzlethon that I didn’t quite get on with, but upon reflection I think that’s due to some particular design choices that deserve to be engaged with rather than just chalked up to de gustibus non est disputandum.

Start with the curious decision to play coy with the plot. It’s a hallmark of this style of game that the story isn’t a primary draw, but even by those standards what we’ve got here is curiously thin. The game’s blurb, its opening text, and the letter you start out with in your inventory all gesture towards your character having been given some sort of charge by a Council of Elders, which can be inferred to be to obtain the titular orb, but despite several hundred words being dedicated to this setup, it never comes out and says what the orb is, what it does, how it got lost, why you’re looking for it where you are, and why finding it will matter. Sure, it’s a MacGuffin, but this is uninspiring and even a little confusing, so much so that when I found a magical “sphere” I thought I’d just about hit the end of the game, even though I was only halfway through.

Speaking of magic, HOWT features a Vancian spellcasting system where you can learn spells from a spellbook and then cast them. I’ve liked this kind of system in games like Enchanter, but it’s again oddly vestigial here. There are only three spells in the book and you never accumulate more through play, there are only two places in the course of several dozen obstacles where spellcasting comes into play (meaning that yes, one of the spells appears to be useless), and the system is needlessly baroque, requiring the player to intuit that they need to manually LEARN each spell, which can only be done when you flip through the book page by page until you get to the appropriate one.

The puzzles are generally solid, though after a couple gimmes (there’s an early maze with a fun but straightforward gimmick that’s satisfying to solve) they quickly ramp up in difficulty. This is genre-appropriate – and kudos to the author for providing a full hint system as well as a walkthrough – but some design decisions around traversal made experimenting with them much more tortuous than it needed to be. The map is riddled with one-way passages whose existence isn’t disclosed in advance, and it’s easy to blunder into one before you’ve completed exploring a new area. It’s always possible to retrace your steps, but for much of the game, doing so typically requires either solving the maze again – which quickly grows tedious – or enduring a medium-length section with timed text, which similarly wears out its welcome almost instantly. Further, many puzzles involve interacting with some kind of mechanism that has an impact somewhere else in the map, often without a direct cue about what sort of changes you should be looking for. As a result, the puzzle design presupposes that the player will be making frequent laps around the map, while the navigation design contrives to make that approach pretty annoying.

I hasten to point out (er, 900 words into the review) that there are definitely strong elements here. The author’s homebrewed parser continues to be a highlight, feeling almost as seamless as the tried-and-true Inform or TADS ones (the only foible is that taking items from containers requires a little extra typing, but this is well signposted in the documentation, and a shortcut is provided). There are also a lot of little riddles and clues that help lead you through many of the puzzles, which is a style that I like and which is generally well-executed. And while the setting could be a bit more exciting – when you wend your way through a magically-confusing wood and discover a secret cottage hidden away at its center, it’s deflating to be told that it’s “totally uninteresting” in its features and décor – the prose is efficient at communicating what you need to solve the puzzles, and even manages to be fairly evocative. I think I found one bug (the game crashed when I tried to walk W into the lake rather than type SWIM) but otherwise it was completely smooth.

It’s these very positive pieces that make me want to beg off from any sharper critical judgment: this is a well-made game with a cheerful vibe, and its design choices feel intentional rather than being oversights, so if those design decisions frustrated me, again, maybe I should just blame myself. But thinking about them some more, I’m increasingly of the mind that actually some of those decisions were bad ones, and that HOWT could have been just as old-school but decidedly more engaging if it had paid a little more attention to its plot, or made the magic system a more integral part of its challenges, or reduced the friction of navigating its map. A game like this was never going to be my favorite in the Comp – again, this isn’t my subgenre of choice – but there’s no reason I couldn’t have liked it a lot more than I did.

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Kaboom, by Anonymous

While I’ve generally read far fewer books by non-Anglophone writers than I would like, to the extent that there’s an exception it’s Russian novelists: while I don’t speak the language and I’ve thus relied on translations, I’ve made my way through a pretty high percentage of the 19th-Century canon as well as a smattering of more recent authors. Probably this is partially down to subject matter: I like political and philosophical novels, so given the preoccupations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, et. al. this is a rewarding furrow to plow. But more than that, even in translation there’s something about the quality of the language that’s unique and engaging to me, some blunt poetry and non-Western meter to the writing that forms something of a common thread even for authors with very different styles.

I got something of the same vibe from Kaboom, which is similarly translated from Russian, and which has a premise that’s seemingly as off-kilter as its prose: in this parser-like Twine game, you play a stuffed hare who has to try to help its person (a five-year-old girl) after a bad dream that seems to turn the whole world topsy-turvy. Like, here’s the description of the anthropomorphized sun that floats above the strange dreamscape that opens the game:

The sun gazes directly at you, jokingly wagging his scalding rays. He has a clean-shaven, balding elderly face with somewhat lumpy cheeks and small eyes slightly turned towards the nasal bridge. In spite of his countenance being noble and a little weary, it also gives away an immense inner tension - looks like it takes him quite an effort not to blow up altogether, taking this whole world into oblivion with him.

That’s not a paragraph most native speakers of English would write, I don’t think – that use of “altogether” is a little archaic, the image of wagging rays of sunlight probably wouldn’t occur to me but might make more sense in the original Russian, and the repetition of “somewhat” and “slightly” and “a little” I think reflects diminutives that English lacks. But for all that the writing is grammatically correct, and I found this an arresting image, rendered in a distinctive, engaging way.

I definitely experienced some disorientation from a combination of the odd premise and the unintuitive prose, though. This sometimes made solving the game’s puzzles more challenging: I often had a hard time visualizing the space I was moving through, and while there are usually good hints or cues pushing the player towards what they should be doing, I was often unclear on what broader goal I was serving by pushing a pillow around or getting glue on my paws, even though I could tell that the game wanted me to do these things.

The interface also could be cleaner: there’s an inventory menu in the upper right corner that is mostly limited to your cute little hare-y arms and jumpy hare-y legs, with options for grabbing or kicking showing up when you click to open the menu. But most of the time the choices presented in the main window include things like pushing or picking up objects, so the logic of when and why I’d need to go to the inventory remained opaque throughout my playthrough. There’s also some unneeded friction that comes of the game’s decision to return back to a location’s top menu after you take most actions. There were sequences that require multiple connected steps, like pushing a toy crane truck, turning its crank, connecting its hook to something, then turning the crank again to lift the object into the air, and it was a little annoying to have to manually click “look around” then on the crane truck each time I wanted to perform the next step; the annoyance was increased by the realization that the game appears to have a time limit, though I got to the end before time ran out.

The consequence of all this, though, is that it took me way longer than it should to figure out what Kaboom is actually doing. Full spoilers after one last evocative but confusingly vague passage:

Full of thoughts, you slowly turn towards the house and suddenly hold still, thunderstruck: only a small part of the wall at the corner you came from is visible, the rest of the building is covered by a huge messy heap of unidentifiable something! What’s happening? What crazy giant gambolled here? And how can you, an ordinary toy hare, withstand this giant?

So yeah, what’s going on is that you’re in Ukraine, and your house has just been hit by a bomb; it’s pretty clearly implied that your owner’s parents were both killed, and you have to draw attention to her predicament so that she can be rescued before she bleeds to death. It’s possible to fail at this task, though mercifully the game doesn’t go into details, but even success comes at a cost: your poor hare winds up doused in ash, covered in glue, and finally half burned away by the end of the game, and since your owner is unconscious when she’s pulled from the ruin of your house, it’s pretty clear that you’re going to be abandoned and lost forever.

This twist hit me like a ton of bricks. Some of that is of course just seeing the horrors I’ve been reading about in the newspapers for a year and a half unexpectedly brought home; some of that is the sentimental fact that I tuck my two-year-old son into bed every night with his favorite toy cat beside him; and some it’s the simple and heartfelt closing message from the game’s anonymous Russian author. This is a game with some infelicities, as I pointed out above, but it got more of an emotional response from me than anything else in the Comp so far, and I think partially it’s those very points of friction that make it so effective. I wish to God we didn’t need to have games like this – much less that there’d be another recently-ignited conflict to which Kaboom could equally apply – but I found this game a very effective use of interactive fiction to create some much-needed empathy and connection; it’s trite to say that art is what will eventually end war, but however small it is, in my heart of heart I believe games like Kaboom are making some difference.

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