Mike Russo's IF Comp 2024 Reviews

KING OF XANADU, by MACHINES UNDERNEATH

(Another review with unmarked spoilers here, due to the brevity of the piece and the centrality of the way the plot develops to assessing the game).

Kubla Khan is a deceptive poem; for one thing, even though I should know better, I always need to catch myself to remember that the title isn’t Xanadu. But more importantly, the mythology Coleridge built up around it – that the idea came to him in a dream, and he had a flash all at once of hundreds of lines that he raced to scrawl down, until that famous person from Porlock knocked on his door, deranging his train of thought and dooming the poem to be a fragment forevermore – is self-evidently bollocks. I don’t have any special insight here, or done any deep examination of Coleridge scholarship, but come on, just read the poem: we get like a dozen lines on Xanadu and Kubla Khan, as advertised, then an overlong digression about a fountain, then a little more about Kubla, before a swerve to first-person section where suddenly we’re talking about an “Abyssinian maid” (Abyssinia being Ethiopia, quite far from China as a polymath like Coleridge would well know), and our narrator starts talking about how if he could conjure up the image of Xanadu in a song, everybody would think he was divinely inspired, if not mad. So yeah: there’s padding, a false swerve, and then a meta turn – this isn’t interrupted genius, it’s a guy desperately trying to spin out those first awesome ten or twelve lines and not quite succeeding.

So it’s appropriate that KING OF XANADU is likewise a deceptive little thing. The title is at least a bit more on point here: you do play the eponymous monarch of the eponymous utopia (though here an empire rather than a city-palace), making judicious choices of how to order your royal gardens, arrange the imperial armies, and perform your religious responsibilities so as to best please your refined sensibilities. The language too is worthy of its inspiration – it’s very easy for attempts at this poetic kind of prose to wind up as claggy high-fantasy treacle, but the writing remains fleet as it picks out one lovely detail after another to highlight:

The people perform the usual celebrations. Red cloth is hung from balconies. Young children paint bouys the colours of daydreams and set them out to sea. Elders with lit candles parade through the capital, singing the old songs, winding through the streets like ancient snakes. And, lastly, arithmaticians take out tablets and chalk, ready to count and divy the grain of the harvest.

The author’s not afraid to take big swings for pretty much every at-bat – here’s another early bit:

The fields surge with life. Rivers twirl through the tumbling hills like veins in a grand muscle, unwinding into your harbours, which throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities.

“Holy lichen” is perhaps a bit too much of a reach for my taste, but the missteps are rare, and better by far to reach for something surprising than let caution keep things boring, in this kind of story.

But this is not a fantastic story about an enlightened, Orientalist despot. No, twist the first is that no matter how you try to play him, my man is an awful ruler, like “80% as bad as Donald Trump” awful. After being presented with a new elm grove for the palace grounds, I ventured the opinion that a water feature might improve things; His Eminence took this to mean the trees should be razed and replaced with an artificially-created salt-water (!) stream. Later on, when confronted with a famine, I attempted to heed the wise counsel of one of our scholars who suggested we “watch closely the simple animals of the world and preserve the ecological balance" before making any rash moves, and of course Kubla Mao issued edicts to kill all the wildlife that might be eating the crops.

Speaking of that famine, another feint is that the game takes as much inspiration from another poem in the Romantic canon, Shelley’s Ozymandias, as it does Kubla Khan. Despite how Xanadu is built up as a perfect, powerful state, it only takes a few years of failing crops – and the king’s increasingly unhinged ukases – to bring it to its knees. The exterior catastrophe mirrors the protagonist’s mental degradation; even as food riots are flaring up outside the palace, you wind up enacting purges, engaging in the kind of mad caprices that enliven the biographies of some of your more outré Roman emperors, and coming up with big ideas that would put the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns to shame ( “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun” I scrawled down in my notes halfway through, and giggled) – look on my works ye mighty, indeed.

I don’t want to accuse the game of striking false notes, let me be clear – it’s very obvious that these subverted expectations are part of the design, and in fact each of these strands intersect cannily to deliver the desired effect. Having a protagonist who willfully misinterprets the player’s choices can be played for comedy once or twice, but quickly becomes frustrating, for example, but since the game telegraphs that doom is the only possible outcome, it’s possible to sit back and enjoy the ride. And if either the internal spiral of the king’s faculties or the external collapse of the state’s institutions were at all realistic, it’d risk the other half of the game feeling unrealistic; instead, they slide into extreme satire in tandem.

No, for all its deceptiveness, beyond the unfortunate accumulation of typos as the game wears on the only true bit of fakery I picked up on was the ending; after seeing everything come to ruin, you’re given a chance to tack a moral onto the proceedings, choosing to reflect either on the inevitability with which hubris is punished, or the fragility of social cohesion, or the importance of staying true to one’s dreams. But come on: there are no lessons to be learnt here (besides, maybe, “don’t put assholes in charge” – good advice to anyone who can vote in the US this November), and attempts to gesture at one feel unnecessary, like Coleridge grasping for his Abyssinian maid: just stick with Xanadu, no need to go any further.

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The Curse, by Rob

(Spoilers ahoy; this is one to play blind, I think, and it may be worth trying even if the old-school presentation might initially put you off since the game is shorter, easier, and stranger than you think).

So here’s a Rorschach test for you: get a friend – or actually just an acquaintance is fine – get a TV, get a Battlestar Galactica boxed set, then plop the one down in front of the other while you put on the last and make them watch all the way through the first three seasons (these aren’t your sleek modern 8-episode seasons, mind, we’re talking 50-odd 42 minute episodes so hopefully you’ve built in some bathroom breaks). At the close of the third-season finale, I guarantee that they will turn to you and say “what the hell did I just watch?” – but some of them will say that with incomprehension and disgust, and others with giddy wonder (the specific moment I’m thinking of here is of course the part where five characters who obviously can’t be Cylons turn out to be Cylons and start singing All Along the Watchtower, despite none of that making any fucking sense).

I am team giddy wonder so I think I love the Curse, despite being fully aware that this opinion is probably indefensible. The first three quarters of my notes for the game consist of multiple variations of the question “what the hell am I playing here”: this is an 80s-throwback parser game that disorients the player with multiple pop-up windows that are meant to be read in a specific order, a parser that asks a bunch of rhetorical questions except for the ones that aren’t rhetorical, awkwardly timed text, and a backstory that sounds like your stoned friend fell asleep during an Indiana Jones movie, half-awoke during a James Bond marathon, and then attempted to reconstruct the dream they had for you: seriously, you’re a superspy who’s been made redundant by the end of the Cold War, so now you do freelance work and you’ve been called in to rescue a kidnapped woman, who’s been taken to a pyramid by a sorcerer named Shamir, except he died during the abduction attempt, but not before putting a curse on a village, though there’s no village around…

One plane crash later, you’re dumped into a trackless desert and turned loose to explore. This part of the game presents itself as a reasonably straightforward throwback text adventure – there aren’t many objects implemented, nor are there a ton of locations, so moving from place to place trying to few available actions feels natural enough. There are some neat touches, like attractive graphics and Easter Eggs referencing classic rock, and some frustrations, notably a parser that frequently seems to just break. Witness this exchange:

> unlock panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

> open panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

Oh, and I got a parser error the first time I tried to push the button on the panel, but was able to try to activate it the second time I made the attempt.

Frustration mounted as I realized I couldn’t figure out how to get into the door-free pyramid, or get through a fog-clouded maze section, or what to do at a mysterious altar in the middle of the dunes. Fortunately, there’s a HINT function that prodded me in the right direction: I needed to PRAY by the altar, which has a certain sense to it now that I type it out but sure felt like a reach at the time. That led to a new sequence with a couple once-again-buggy objects that I couldn’t quite figure out how to interact with, but as I was flailing around with the parser again I noticed some confounding new text showing up whenever I tried anything:

Will and Pat have never met.

What now Nobody?

Events progress linearly from there, I think regardless of what you do (I certainly didn’t feel like I accomplished much from that point on), and when I realized what was happening my jaw dropped just like it did when I watched that episode of Galactica more years ago than I care to count: as best I can tell, the ghost of Shamir escapes you by going back in time and preventing Will Crowther from ever meeting his wife, so that he never spelunks, gets depressed during his divorce, and writes Adventure to try to connect with his kids – meaning that there’s never any such thing as a text adventure, and you, as a text adventure protagonist, go poof.

I’ve been reduced to giving the play by play here because I’m not sure how else to communicate the sheer bonkers-ness of the scenario; there are no shortage of metafictional joke games in IF, of course – heck, I’ve already hit at least one in this year’s Comp – but the ambition of this gag, and the way it’s slow-played by hiding under a reasonable-sized chunk of an authentically kinda-broken custom parser game, really make it stand out as something special. I’m not sure it really stands up to scrutiny; the logic behind the twist is paper-thin and requires some reconstruction even to minimally make sense, and surely the process of getting to the good part could have been made slightly less painful. But look, a thing can be too ridiculous to work and then somehow at least kinda work regardless, and in this case my only possible response is to applaud the audacity (and think about a Galactica rewatch…)

EDIT: this review originally had a caveat where I said something like “maybe this is just a bad end and I missed the whole game”, but I deleted that before finalizing because how could an author include a twist like this without it being the point of the game? Now that I have read other reviews, I am delighted to learn that I am wrong and this isn’t actually meant as an Infidel-style deconstruction of IF, but actually just the retro puzzle adventure it appears to be with a throwaway gag midway through. This makes the whole thing even funnier to me; everyone else is welcome to their flute and their mirror and their Anubis and whatever other stuff they got hung up on; I am content with my memories of the time I retroactively destroyed IF.

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Reading your review in a vacuum, my first impression was that it was a dig at the player — ie. the real person behind the keyboard — because it used your name in the first instance. In other words, not an attempt to remove the protagonist from play (or at least not just that).

Can you actually keep doing stuff after it comes up?

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I also picked “Photosynthesis”! The description of its shapes and colours was almost overwhelming, I could see the painting coming together in my mind through the words of the description. My other favourite was “Blackbyrd”.


We seem to react along the same lines to this IF piece: great appreciation for the writing and a sense of disappointment in the graphic rendering of the last painting. I do think that the ending impacted my overall impression more negatively than it did you, from what you write in your concluding paragraph.

But you are totally right when you say, with a wonderful expression I did not know, that when Imprimatura “sticks to its knitting”, words over visuals, it is very strong indeed.


Oh, small typo in your review:

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Thank you for your precious time.
(Yes, (passing) time is an obsession of mine.)
I would have printed your review and, after framing it, i would hung it on the wall of my bedroom.
“You reached for the secret too soon!”

You opened the cage too soon.
I tried to warn of the danger by writing a message on the label of the cage.

However…
The game needs to be improved in many aspects.
I hope to be able to do it in future versions of the game.

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Turn Right, by Dee Cooke

It’s been well said that America and the U.K. are two countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but interestingly, you could make the same observation about our supposedly-common language. Take, for example, “left turn”, a simple phrase we Yanks commonly use to indicate a sudden, veering shift in the way things are going. It’s one I deploy without thinking, but now I’ve realized that it must make no sense at all to our fancier-accented cousins, for whom the left turn is a trivially-executed move while it’s the right turn that’s the stuff of nightmares.

This revelation comes courtesy, of course, of Turn Right, an Adventuron game that is to vehicular paralysis as Dubliners is to the emotional and existential varieties. After a long day, you’ve stopped off to pick up some groceries, and just need to pull out of the parking lot for the short drive home. But as the attractively-illustrated overhead map reveals, that means crossing like four different lanes of traffic (there’s something confusing happening with an off-screen roundabout that means you need to get to the farthest lane), and getting a hole in the rush-hour traffic that wide is akin to winning the jackpot on a slot machine.

The gameplay of course isn’t what carries a piece like this – typing TURN RIGHT over and over isn’t intrinsically engaging – but fortunately the author’s got comedy chops to spare. The jokes come in two distinct registers: there’s dry understatement, like the opening screen’s declaration that “this game is about a driving manoeuvre made in the UK,” which left me howling, or the surely-intentional way that the helpful here’s-everything-you-Americans-need-to-know-about-driving-in-Britain glossary casually drops the phrase “multi-carriageway” into the one of the definition as though that’s a meaningful sequence of words. Or, perhaps best of all, take this description of one of the traffic lanes:

The far lane on the opposite side of the road is the one you take if you want to take either the first or second exit from the first roundabout, or the third exit from the first roundabout onto the second roundabout and then the first exit from the second roundabout. The last of these options is your route home, and so you want to turn into that lane.

If your brains aren’t melting out your ears at the end of that, you’re made of sterner stuff than me.

Then there’s the more slapstick flavor of humor, as exasperating event after exasperating event prevent you from getting into gear, achieving “Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake fifteen times” levels of sublimity. I won’t spoil the best gags here, since there are some great ones (I particularly liked the sequence with the grocery store manager), but suffice to say they substantially enliven what could have been a dully repetitive scenario.

Also helping relieve potential tedium is the game’s deep implementation; I thought of a bunch of logical and not-so-logical commands, from turning on the radio to waving at oncoming cars, and the game handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. The author even anticipated my attempts to nope right out of Turn Right’s Kobayashi Maru scenario by abandoning my car and walking home, or just stopping off at the neighboring pub for a couple of hours until traffic lightened up. Sure, this isn’t a game that will change your life or make you see things differently than before you played it – unless for some reason you’re unaware that driving is awful – and there are one or two small dud notes (the disappearing clown was a bit too silly for me, especially the second time he showed up) but I am always happy to see a solid gag executed at such an impressive level.

(Speaking of, the joke with which I opened this review was lifted wholesale from Eddie Izzard.)

Turn_Right MR.txt (27.3 KB)

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Final Call, by Emily Stewart and Zoe Danieli

Mike, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a very common name in the U.S., so much so that in my elementary school class of 25, I was one of four Mikes – even my sister would call me “Russo.” So I suppose I should have been quicker on the uptake when Final Call, a choice-based escape-room-inspired scenario jumping off from a casino heist gone wrong, seemed to be getting confused about who was saying what to whom. The protagonist – whom I’d naturally enough dubbed Mike since one of the first screens in the game asks you to input your name – is a down-on-his-luck con artist getting ready to scam the penny slots via a smuggled-in magnet; he spends the introduction on the phone, going over the details of the plan with his partner in crime to make sure they’re ready to do what needs to be done. Except sometimes instead of my partner telling me “Mike, you need to do XYZ”, it seemed like my internal monologue was referring to myself in the third person, saying stuff like “Mike said it would be easy.” Shamefully, I was well past the game’s first-act twist, which sees the protagonist kidnapped and abandoned in a creepy lock-and-trap-filled asylum, before I realized oh wait, these aren’t bugs, I just inadvertently Fight Clubbed myself.

Er, spoilers.

Unlike with the Curse, though, where something vaguely similar happened to make my experience idiosyncratic, I think I can reconstruct what a more typical playthrough would look like. Such a player would probably enjoy the clean interface, which adds a helpful sidebar keeping track of the inventory items and clues you’ve found to the typical options-presented-in-blue-text of the main window, as well as nicely-chosen photos with a creepy filter illustrating the abandoned facility you’re trying to escape. They’d probably wince slightly at the prose, which gets the job done but is weighed down by omnipresent typos and odd leaps:

The door creaks open. It’s just dusty and messy room. Looks like it could have belonged to a pair of twins, or maybe close friends.

They’d likely find the puzzles straightforward – there’s only one or two of them, made relatively simple to solve by the aforementioned helpful interface; even if the steps the protagonist takes occasionally seem unmotivated and hard to predict, well, you’re just clicking through all the options available to you. I suspect they’d be rather conflicted about the copious flashbacks – unlike the thin context escape-room games typically provide, Final Call offers a bunch of scenes fleshing out the protagonist’s relationship with his girlfriend Roxy as well as with other-Mike, and also digs into the pathologies underlying his failures as a partner to both and the pathologies that drive him. But the consistently lackluster writing, lack of direct connection between this material and the main action, and inexplicable plot twists (seriously, who could have possibly paid other-Mike a boatload of money to set us up?) might make our idealized player think the game would be more focused without all this.

So yeah I noticed all of that stuff, but I was more excited about building out my own version of the story where other-Mike was a facet of the protagonist’s personality, an angel or demon on my shoulder given increased reality by the omnipresent “hangovers” and “headaches” that plague the primary identity. As I got to the end, I figured out how to reconcile the various narrative strands that seemed to pull in different directions: other-Mike, you see, had enough separation to recognize that the compulsive way we keep returning to high-risk, low-reward behavior and chronic substance abuse was pushing Roxy away; to salvage matters, he used our meager savings to hire some people to scare us straight, make us think our criminal ways were going to get us killed, and allow us to escape a reformed man ready to walk the straight and narrow. God bless, other-Mike: you’re the very best part of me.

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The game asks you who you are at the beginning, but it doesn’t really communicate whether you’re naming yourself as the player, or yourself as the protagonist, so I don’t think anything intentional is being done to create a difference there? The game does end completely a bit after the weird timey-wimey stuff starts happening, but you can keep moving around (and I guess making progress?) for a few turns after that – now I’m curious how that potentially interacts with the game if you play it straight…

I liked that one a lot too – and yeah, I think our broader reactions were similar, though it might have helped that I played Imprimatura on mobile; after I got to the endgame and realized that there were going to be graphics now, I zoomed in once or twice to get a closer look but stopped doing that upon realizing the art style didn’t do much for me, so the postage-stamp-sized swatch of color didn’t undermine my experience too directly.

Hey, I’d be proud of that!

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Many thanks for your great review and for the transcript!

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Hi Mike! Thanks for playing!

You’re right on the money with me seeming more interested in telling the story: this was originally a personal project that I wrote for myself, and only decided to enter it into IFComp last minute. I was mostly just experimenting with things, writing documents and a playlist to keep myself on task. :slight_smile:

Going to 100% investigate that Declan bug too - I’m pushing bug updates as I fix them.

Thanks again for your time!

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I like your review of The Deserter!

I encountered the same situation, and I was delighted to find that I could appeal to my comrade’s sympathy for my situation so that he not only let me escape, he actively misled his superiors by blasting some RPGs (the kind that go *!BOOM!*, not the kind where you grind away at killing lobsters to gain XP) behind my back and called it in as a confirmed kill.

An example of the degrees of loyalty I mentioned in my review.

I really like the way you anthromophically depict the game as shrugging in the face of the existing “IF doesn’t do action well”-trend.
The Deserter does. Its shrug is justified.

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A Death in Hyperspace, by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Nacarat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

I often like IF collaborations quite a lot – Cragne Manor ranks quite high on my all-time favorites list – but they often present a tradeoff: when you’ve got a bunch of authors bringing just their one or two best ideas to the party, the novelty and energy can be infectious, but at the same time, that diversity can fray at the unity of a piece, reducing the impact that any particular element might have on the work as a whole and cramming in too many diverse themes to fully cohere. That’s why reading the blurb for A Death in Hyperspace made me a bit apprehensive: having ten authors work on a game that only lasts about an hour seems like it could be a recipe for chaos. Once I started playing, I was surprised to find that wasn’t at all the case – this tale of a spaceship’s AI investigating the death of its captain maintains a very consistent tone and approach while putting a novel spin on the sci-fi whodunnit genre. If anything, I actually found myself wishing for a bit more of the aforementioned chaos.

After an introduction establishes the murder and lays out the interface, you’re given a roster of about a dozen crew and passengers and access to the various rooms within you where they may be found, and told how investigation proceeds: encountering each character allows to engage in dialogue with them, including asking standardized questions getting to motive, alibi, and anything suspicious they might have seen; the initial conversation also unlocks a piece of evidence that can be found elsewhere on the ship and which, when found, will enable you to further corroborate or undermine the testimony you get in future conversations. Meanwhile, a somewhat-unintuitive “murder board” interface lets you lay out your assessments of how credible each person’s story is, ultimately allowing you to end the game once you’ve made a critical mass of decisions.

It’s easy to see how the structure of the game was created to support collaboration: it appears that the other authors all came up with a character and were responsible for writing the conversations with them, while the organizer or organizers were responsible for the connective tissue. This organizational scheme does allow the various pieces to be stitched together cleanly, but it does mean that there isn’t as much interaction between them as you might expect: often, I’d be having a potentially-incriminating conversation with one suspect while three others were standing right there, with no acknowledgment of the awkward circumstances. It also slowed down an opening that I already found quite slowly-paced: I felt like I had to read the crew roster before jumping into interrogations in order to understand who I was talking to and what they might say about their fellows, but it appears that the roster entries were written to a common format, which made me feel like I was listening to a dozen people tell me about their DnD characters one after another.

Because the thing is, I mostly found the characters dull. They all have one or two interesting sci-fi-y characteristics – there are a couple different kinds of aliens, there’s a cyborg, someone who’s hallucinating while in the throes of hyperspace madness – but given that the only experience of them the game offers is interrogation by a ship’s computer that’s read too many murder-mysteries, there isn’t much room for details of personality to come through in anything but a schematic way. Several of them are also explicitly designated as minimally-interactive red herrings, too, and given that I had a hard time keeping track of a large cast boasting generally-forgettable names (look, I’m not 12 any longer, I’m not going to be able to remember which one is “Until Tomorrow” vs. “Lament Tynes” vs. “Keen Oculus”; at least there are a couple, like “VX2s-K3r BÆSDF”, that are memorably awful) that meant I spent a lot of time clicking on people, finding they didn’t have anything new or interesting to say, and clicking out.

This sense of lassitude is exacerbated by the way the game encourages lawnmowering. You need to loop through every location at least two or three times, since the pieces of “evidence” aren’t findable until you’ve met the appropriate character, at which point you need to loop back for a follow-up conversation, but it’s worse than that because characters can move around. You can track down specific people through the roster feature, but since that means you might miss evidence, it felt like the game was encouraging me to play it by mechanically running through each location and talking to each character over and over until I’d exhausted the content. The conversational structure is also fairly rigid from one character to the next, with few interesting choices to engage the player: many reduce to either behaving normally and asking direct questions, or indulging your murderino streak and wildly leaping to accuse suspects just to see how they’ll react.

Indeed, investigation isn’t that satisfying either; I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is one of those quantum mysteries where every suspect potentially did it or maybe no one did. There are few hard clues to go on (there’s no sign of foul play on the body, and you automatically decline the doctor’s offer to do an autopsy), with your interrogations mostly turning up shifty backstory elements rather than actual evidence; meanwhile, the connection between the “clues” you find and their impacts often felt abstract to me (one of them was a teddy bear that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything?) Beyond that, the game’s promise of 11 different endings makes it seem likely that they’re all like the one I saw, which constructed a plausible-seeming case for why the suspect I picked might have done it – unfortunately, because the game’s save feature isn’t included in the sidebar but rather nested underneath a game menu link that I didn’t think to return to after toggling some initial settings, I didn’t make a save allowing me to test this theory, though regardless it does seem like at least one ending requires you to do a full replay of the game.

For all this griping, there were a few specific elements I definitely thought worked; the one character who had a sense of humor was actually quite funny to me (though I’m not sure it was a great idea to have the single Black person in the cast speak with an accent called out with nonstandard spelling and punctuation). Pearl, the ship’s AI, is also appealingly keen to find the captain’s killer. If the game had provided characters whose voices similarly took up more space, and loosened up its structure to allow for deeper subplots or more involved investigative tracks, it would probably have made A Death in Hyperspace a woolier, more awkward beast – but one that I think I would have liked far more than the overly-sterile version that we got.

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Traffic, by D.S. Yu

Fittingly for a game that’s structured as a series of repeating time loops, I am getting déjà vu writing this review, because I’m sadly going to have to start and end with a point I’ve made many many times before: if you are planning on putting a game in the Comp, especially if it’s a parser game, especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game, and especially especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game relying on a bunch of nonstandard commands and mechanics, you need beta testers to put the thing through its paces. Traffic has some clever ideas and an engaging premise, but as it currently exists I think the only options for experiencing it are “type in the walkthrough” and “tear out a tuft of your own hair every five minutes for two hours, at which point you’ll probably be irrevocably stuck maybe halfway through.” I’d definitely recommend the first experience over the latter – even for those of my readers who are fortunate enough not to be dealing with the incipience of male-pattern baldness – but even better would be playing a hoped-for post-Comp release that improves the clueing and implementation so that its clear potential can be realized.

Part of that potential is the comedy of the setup. Much like Turn Right, this is a game about getting across an intersection; unlike Turn Right, this time you’re a pedestrian (yay), and the risk of being run over is very high (eek – the blurb should probably have a content warning for this), but you’re carrying a weird science gizmo that allows you to rewind the clock and hop into other people’s bodies (er?). With a little experimentation, you learn that by looking at particular people in the short time available to you before you get pasted, you can queue up targets for your Quantum-Leap-y ability, at which point you’ve got a short window to try to change things so as to avoid the accident – prevent the phone-addicted parent from pushing her baby stroller into the road, reset the wonky traffic-light controller system, deescalate a passenger’s mental health crisis that will lead to the bus getting stranded in the middle of the intersection. If you fail, no big deal, you can always try again, albeit at the cost of another bone-crunching death to reset the timeline.

I love this premise; it’s a clever way of making a puzzle of, and lightly skewering, the absurdities of everyday life, while getting around the artificiality of letting the player have infinite time to prevent a traffic accident that clearly has to happen within a few seconds. And making the protagonist be a sad-sack postdoc just adds to the comedy, while the drily understated prose gives the slapstick room to breathe. Unfortunately, to switch transportation metaphors, things quickly go off the rails.

There are two main issues I experienced that undermined the puzzles – and this is an entirely puzzle-focused work. First, you’ve got your implementation challenges. There were many times when I knew what I had to do, but struggled to communicate this knowledge to the parser. Take the bus scenario: to prevent the old lady from melting down, obviously you’d want to let her take your seat rather than being forced to stand. But STAND doesn’t work (someone else takes the seat out from under you), and ASK/TELL WOMAN ABOUT SEAT just gets a generic response indicating the conversational topic isn’t recognized. I had to go to the walkthrough to learn that I had to GIVE SEAT TO WOMAN, which I suppose is idiomatically reasonable but wouldn’t be intuitive to anyone familiar with parser IF conventions; really, if the player types any of these things it’s clear they’ve solved the puzzle and they should be accepted.

Then there are the puzzles that aren’t sufficiently clued. Some of these might just be places where I was being thick: there’s a math puzzle that I feel like might be underdetermined, such that answers other than the one the game is looking for should also be valid, but I admit I could be wrong about that since it’s a long time since I’ve solved this kind of problem. But in the late game, there’s a puzzle that can only be solved by intuiting the presence of an undescribed item (the bed, in the sequence with Sarah – adding insult to injury, the stuffed animals, which are mentioned, aren’t implemented), and after you resolve the initial trio of challenges you’re thrown into a second that requires you to maneuver two different cars to block the progress of a police cruiser, which is described so confusingly that even the walkthrough couldn’t get me unstuck, requiring a restart.

And finally there’s the puzzle that gates off the real ending from the premature one, which requires both reading the author’s mind AND wrestling with atypical syntax (the game very clearly indicates that looking at people is what triggers the body-hopping, so THINK ABOUT SARAH is completely unmotivated and not a command most parser-players would think to try; and after that we’ve got BREAK PACKAGE rather than OPENing it, which gives a discouraging result, and BARK TWICE being mandatory when BARKing on subsequent turns would be more natural). Admittedly, said “real ending” is still a shaggy dog story, but the game is much more satisfying with it than without it so gating it with the aggressiveness with which you’d conceal an Easter Egg is a bad design choice, to my mind.

But again, I don’t think this was a design choice: like everything else I’ve complained about, I think it’s just a lack of testing – there aren’t any credited that I could see, at least, while the blurb describes these extra-spicy puzzles as “mild”, and many of these issues are ones that I think would be easily corrected if the author had the advantage of seeing how people try to grapple with the game. Again, this is an awful shame because Traffic deserves to be its best self; with its many rough edges thoroughly sanded down, I could easily see myself recommending this game to folks in the mood for a clever yet grounded comedy game, so I very much hope to see a post-Comp release.

traffic mr.txt (186.7 KB)

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I object. Bald is beautiful. There are those of us out there who thrill to a shiny head:


I rest my case.

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The Garbage of the Future, by AM Ruf

There are certain kinds of criticism that, while well-intentioned, nevertheless always bug me, and high on that list is I-wish-this-parser-game-had-been-a-choice-based-one. It can certainly be a legitimate reaction to a game that doesn’t leverage the unique affordances of the text parser, or has a clumsy interface that would be much smoother if the player could just click their way through it, but it sometimes can also just reflect essentialized views of what the two houses of contemporary IF, both alike in dignity, are all about: if a game is about feelings and relationships and people other than straight white men, well, wouldn’t it be more comfortable with the choice-based crowd, not stuck over here with all the medium-dry-goods puzzles? Well, perhaps, but perhaps shifting our expectations of what goes where is worth a bit of discomfort.

With all that as context, it hopefully conveys the power of my reaction to The Garbage of the Future to say that I really wished this choice game had been a parser one.

The minimalist, creepy premise isn’t the issue: the protagonist is a working stiff who’s driven a tanker trunk jammed full of supernaturally potent waste out to the woods to empty the tank where nobody else is around. This is a simple task that’s obviously replete with danger and vague, ominous implications, and the game’s prose does a good job playing up the nerve-wracking details of your errand, from the flickering of your temperamental flashlight to the sound of a threatening figure skittering through the mist. The exact nature of the toxin you’re dumping is never explained, nor are the motivations of whoever’s paying you, but my brain had no trouble filling in the blanks with horrifying possibilities.

No, the trouble is in the implementation. Performing the job requires reading a manual in the darkened truck-cab, picking up and repairing the hose from one compartment and tools from another compartment, as well as exploring your environs for useful equipment and a place to put the waste. The choice-based interface for doing all this is straightforward enough: objects you can interact with are highlighted, and clicking on one of them will usually pop up a sub-menu allowing you to use some standard commands (take, drop, open) or use an inventory item on them or navigate to an exit or some other, bespoke option. But in practice this can be rather overwhelming, like in this early location description (many later ones are even more complex):

Jake opens the glove box. Inside, a faint glow illuminates a flashlight and a manual.

The truck is unnervingly dark.

Bill says, “If you forget what to do, it’s explained in the manual.”

A distant groaning fills the air.

(Exits: Field, Path)

Jake, glove box, flashlight, manual, truck, Bill, field, and path are all highlighted, and in practice I found I was having a hard time keeping up with all my options. Navigation was similarly tricky; not all locations are reachable from all others, and figuring out which areas were connected to which other ones took a long time.

The core puzzle at the center of the game also feels like it leans into the system’s weaknesses. Futzing with the hose feels like it does in a parser game, for example – I definitely got confused trying to remember which end was which – except with more interface friction from all the clicking required, and a half-second screen-refresh delay that began feeling interminable. There’s also a ton of waiting – after I got the tanker draining, I had nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs while the gauge slowly ticked down, and reaching 0% required five solid minutes of clicking wait, with nothing much of interest happening in the meantime.

As a parser game, I think Garbage of the Future could work quite well – default actions and affordances would suffice for most of the machinery-manipulation portions of the puzzle, and moving round the small map would be much easier (it’s also quicker to repeat-slam the Z key and enter than keep clicking in different places on the screen). The fractal nature of attention in the prototypical parser system, where looking at one object may reveal several more to consider, would also help tier out the level of detail provided. As it is, I found my engagement in this creepy vignette was often undercut by interface woes, which is an awful shame given the creativity on offer; exploring the generous spread of achievements tracked by the game, and checking off the variety of different approaches and endings, would have made for a pleasant second hour with the game, but the thought of once again having to juggle a turn timer and click dozens of times to get through sequences I’d already explored was too daunting to surmount.

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Dr. Who and the Dalek Super-Brain, by jkj yuio

As my reviews of Dream of Silence review, I’m maybe not especially good at evaluating fan-fiction riffing on stuff I lack much direct experience with. Unlike with Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve at least seen a bit of Dr. Who – I watched the Christopher Eccleston season of the rebooted show, and like three or four stories an ex showed me from the classic show – but it’s still a trivial percentage of a media franchise that’s been around for more than half a century at this point; if I’d seen only one season of Voyager and like three episodes of the original series, I’d feel on uncertain ground assessing how well a fan-game captured the Star Trek experience, and I’m in worse shape here since classic Dr. Who is also a quintessentially British phenomenon.

With that said, Dr. Who and the Dalek Super-Brain certainly seems like an authentic tribute to the show. The Daleks are presented lovingly, for one thing, with attractive 3D models and an endearing combination of ruthlessness and Self-Defeating Evil Overlord behavior. And the scenario, with its series of cliffhanger death-traps and fuzzily-explained time travel techno-babble, seems of a piece with what I know of the old series: after finding your time-ship blown off course, you’re kidnapped by the Daleks and your companion Bex is threatened with extermination if you don’t cough up the secrets of time travel to these tinpot Hitlers, after which you’ve got a chance to turn the tables through judicious application of the sonic screwdriver, logical paradoxes, and jury-rigged explosives.

This is all good clean fun, and if neither the narrative nor the prose ever rise above being workmanlike, well, I’m sure there were lots of weeks when Dr. Who was just phoning it in too. I did like the paradox bit – it’s set up as one of those classic 50s/60s scenarios where the protagonist tries to overload an android’s brain by spouting something nonsensical or self-contradictory, but here, after making the Dalek supercomputer consider one of the many paradoxes of time travel, the result isn’t to make it explode but rather to second-guess whether it truly understands time travel enough to build a working time machine from the info you’ve provided. But other than that, the companion is here to be rescued, the jaded leader of oppressed slaves is here to be inspired, and the Daleks are here to go down like punks – it all plays out exactly as you’d expect, which is the sign of a successful pastiche just as much as of a less-ambitious game.

The interface also contributes to the sense that there’s not much to do gere. Things are purely choice-based, but with an opportunity to do a bit of navigation between different locations. While a nice bit of freedom in theory, in practice only one of the three or so rooms available at any given time will have anything you can usefully interact with, which makes the game feel emptier than it would if the choices were more restricted. Meanwhile, the visuals are nice but also led to a challenge or two, like the way a passage with various clickable links explaining potential upgrades for my screwdriver kept scrolling up and until I couldn’t actually reach the links anymore (this is the one real puzzle in the game, but fortunately it’s trivially solvable if you read at all carefully).

Speaking of the visuals, we need to address the elephant in the room, or rather the cantaloupes. From my admittedly small sample size, my sense is that Dr. Who is a relatively sexless show. So I experienced a bit of ludonarrative dissonance from the fact that almost the first graphic the game presented to me was a slightly-zoomed in shot of Bex’s chest, with most of her head cropped out of the frame and her zipper pulled down to reveal quite a lot of cleavage. The text itself doesn’t sexualize Bex, beyond the patriarchy-mandated trope of restricting her role to being menaced by aliens and having the plot explained to her, so I don’t think this is an intentional decision to try to make horny Dr. Who. The cleavage could just be because the author was looking for free or low-cost 3D models of sci-fi looking women, and maybe the cast from an off-brand Fallout sex game was all that was on offer; meanwhile, I think the cropping-out of her face was just due to how I had my browser window set up. Still, it made for an off-putting and in-your-face combination; if the first thing a game thrusts at me is boobs, I kinda expect it to be about boobs, and it’s a nice bonus if the person the boobs are attached to has a personality.

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I think there has been exactly one specific boob shot in all of classic Who (everything predating the 8th doctor). It can be seen at 1 minute into the 40th anniversary trailer, where it is included in a knowing fashion.

This is actually a segue to encourage you to watch the 40th anniversary trailer (1963-2003) just because I think it is an exceptional piece of wordless editing, assembled by the BBC at the time, with Orbital’s version of the Dr Who theme in the background. As a classic Who fan, I always find it to be a mixture of funny and moving, and with the odd scare / grossout,.

Peri, wearing the bikini at one minute, was a companion of the the fifth and sixth doctors. I met the actor Nicola Bryant at a Dr Who convention in Sydney in the early 2000s. She was there with Sylvester McCoy (doctor 7).

-Wade

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Hi. Thanks for your detailed review. If the game doesn’t zoom in to the character’s faces, it’s a bug that i need to fix. What version are you playing and in what browser. If you could DM me a screenshot, that would be a lot of help. thanks.

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Note there’s a puzzle connected to that, which makes it substantially faster. I think the tedium of waiting is meant to make you go looking for solutions.

I ran into that as well, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s intentional—this is a game designed to be played in portrait orientation (on a phone), and I was playing it in landscape (on a laptop), meaning when the character art scales to the width of my device I can only see the middle of their chest.

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Thanks for your insights, Mike!

The game was a lot of fun to put together, but it sounds like it isn’t working too well for most folks. C’est la vie, right?

The only thing I’ll note is that the Black character was written by a Black author (James Beamon), and that’s very much his style–in terms of humour and voice–in other projects I’ve collaborated with him on, as well. :slight_smile:

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