We can have a detailed discussion after the competition is over about whether the game would be better with a parser interface if you’d like. I will point out that there are settings in the menu for turning off animations and for enabling manual saving.
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LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST, by THE BODY & THE BLOOD
Early on in LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (hereinafter “Sextuple L”, per the subtitle – yes, I know that’s only five, I have some theories but we’ll get to those later), L, the game’s early-20s British transmasc protagonist, watches an ASMR video. It depicts a lemon being poked at in a way that’s meant to evoke a lobotomy – this is one of many sequences in the game that are sufficiently far outside my experience that they seem bizarre but also facially plausible given the way people are on the internet – and at one point, the YouTuber pokes a hypodermic under the fruit’s rind and injects some water to ape anesthetization, except the lemon already being quite full of liquid, the pressure of the plunger just makes the needle shoot back out of the rind. This strikes L as funny, since he did almost the same thing when he practiced on an orange before starting injecting himself with testosterone:
Who would have thought my [transgender] experiences would connect with this one random guy, who absolutely is cis, even though I have no real way of knowing that, over something so stupid…
This is a process that absolutely works in reverse: despite this being a game that’s heavily immersed in the subjectivity of L as a trans man, with a supporting cast that’s also entirely trans folks, and almost everybody is a 20-something Brit to boot, I found it incredibly relatable and emotionally engaging despite being a cishet American in my 40s. This isn’t because it’s especially meant for people like me, I don’t think – at least I hope it’s not, God knows there’s more than enough stuff out there catering to my demographic – but precisely because it does such a good job communicating the specificity of what L is seeing, thinking, and feeling. I’m very aware that my own experiences feeling awkward in a nightclub or adrift after graduation, to pluck two examples among many, don’t directly translate to L’s situation – beyond dealing with systemic transphobia and near-crippling confidence issues, he’s also got to grapple with a crush on someone way out of his league, moving back in with parents he’s not yet out to, and how to integrate a powerful rubber fetish into his romantic life, and more besides – but nonetheless I found the game a master-class in empathy: L feels like a flesh and blood person whose happiness I was deeply invested in.
I worry I just made Sextuple L sound kind of weepy and Very Serious, but it’s nothing of the sort – or, well, it sometimes is, but part of what makes the game so special is the authors’ bravura ability to shift tones and pivot on a dime while carrying you with them. L is an amazing narrator and very funny, incapable of letting a moment to wryly note the absurdity of a situation go by no matter what awful thing might be happening, and he’s sharply observant to boot. Despite the game disabling copy-and-poste (boo) my notes file is littered with lines I loved so much I was willing to type them in manually, like this early reflection L makes on his, er, reflection as he hides in the aforementioned club’s bathroom:
He doesn’t look like a he. He looks like what a 13 year old girl would draw as her fictional boyfriend before she has an understanding of boys or friends… ugly in a way that he’s not ugly enough. There’s beauty in the beautiful and beauty in the grotesque. He’s neither… not woman enough to be an object; not man enough to be a threat.
The first bit elicits sympathy, the last an “oof” at what a reductive, yet sadly accurate, understanding of gender norms it conveys. And then smash cut from that self-loathing introspection to suddenly “someone with a full gasmask, catsuit sans-arms, and a harness of ropes knotted into a pentagram walks in” (it’s rubber night).
A bit later, when L rabbits out of the club and is waiting at the bus stop, he’s surprised to feel his latex-gloved hands immediately getting cold, due to the way rubber passes on heat – “I need gloves for my gloves”, he laments – and then he meets-cute with another trans guy, Val, who’s also waiting for the bus: “there is a quiet, but unmistakable, squelch of lube sliding under latex as we shake.” And I’ve got a million more examples; the narrative voice is brilliant at bringing out the texture of everything that’s happening and making it come alive, while being very very funny to boot.
…I should get on to actually reviewing the game, rather than just listing off the best bits, but I have to share a couple more. Eventually L hooks up with Val and his friend Artemis, a trans woman (let me just interject here to say that the sex scenes are really well done – there’s always a risk that sex will seem ridiculous when you write about it, and I think that risk is heightened when you’re dealing with fetish material that will be unfamiliar to many readers, but man, these work), and as they’re smoking during the comedown this exchange left me howling:
“Maybe I’ll get into piss,” she narrows her eyes, and taps the end of the cigarette, ash falling to the floor. “I haven’t done anything with piss.”
“Ugh, don’t. Everyone’s getting into piss.”
[banter about not-hot stuff people getting into piss say, culminating with] “Give me swimmer’s ear with your dick!”
Oh god, this is reminding me that just before that, as the sex scene was really getting going, you’re given a choice of having L remain silent or “vocalize”, and choosing that option has him blurt out “I t-think I have covid” – he doesn’t, he’s just overwhelmed and his brain is malfunctioning at the idea of losing his virginity, but good lord that made me laugh.
…I need to stop, but really, last one, here’s a bit where L considers whether to accept his hairdresser’s offer of some product for his hair:
If I say no I could incur the wrath of someone who in one move could turn me from teenage boy into depressed lesbian.
It is definitely not all fun and games here, though – there are threeish major strands to the plot, and L’s relationship with Val is only one of them. Another has to do with L navigating his still-fairly-recent transition, from dealing with acquaintances who knew him before he was out to enduring the vagaries of interacting with the NHS while trans (it’s not great, though not as bad as you might expect). And then the last has to do with the Internet: like most of us, L is terminally online, and going to uni during COVID has probably exacerbated matters. He’s often checking tumblr or Discord chat while the other events of the game are progressing (these are rendered in Ink with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude), and there are extended sequences as he falls down rabbit-holes, watching interminable arguments about whether only TERFs talk about “bi lesbians” or seeing the control-freak mod of the Discord server, Gerstin, throw their weight around.
I have to admit that I found this last element the least compelling; by its nature, the online stuff largely lacks the grounding in detail that’s so engaging through the rest of the game, and it also goes on fairly long – admittedly, part of the point is that internet stuff in general, and Gerstin in particular, is a whole lot, but that point could have been made in a pacier way, I think. Gerstin’s version of friendship with L also lacks ambiguity; they’re clearly earmarked as toxic from the start, and things only escalate from there (seriously, they wind up endorsing eugenics!), so when you’re finally given the choice to de-friend them it’s cathartic but a very long time coming.
I wasn’t ever frustrated with L for not having kicked them to the kerb long ago, though, because the spine uniting all the disparate elements of this three-or-four-hour game is L’s crisis of confidence. The one bit of mechanics in the game, so far as I can tell, is that your assertiveness is tracked, and eventually slots you into one of two different endings. Early on, L understandably enough is a wallflower’s wallflower, barely able to nod hello or ask people to use his preferred pronouns. But through making real friends, getting laid, and getting a bit of perspective on his life, he (well, you) is given the opportunity to stand up for himself a little more. The choice-density in Sextuple L is fairly low, but almost always when you get one, you’ll see a more-passive and a less-passive option (and just those two). There are times when keeping your head down makes the most sense, but I suspect there’s a reason that the two main branches are labelled in the game files as “conf” and “bad”: almost always, picking the confident approach will make L’s life better, allowing you to cut loose from toxic relationships, assert your right to dignity, and make out with hot people. Perhaps this is a bit of wish-fulfillment – and speaking of, Val, who’s hot and nice and experienced, maybe comes off a bit overly-perfect – but I can’t say this bothered me at all: the way society works, especially for marginalized folks, standing up for yourself usually is going to get better results than just drifting by, and I found the arc of the “confident” ending heartwarming: L undergoes some bad stuff and comes out of it with scars, but also hard-won wisdom and hope. Not every trans story needs to, or should, end like this – but it’s kind of lovely to see one that does.
It’s long past time to bring this in for a landing, and by tradition this is the paragraph where I get to nitpicking. Besides the Discord stuff going on a bit (and Gerstin being the fucking worst), I suppose I have to gripe about the interface, which has you clicking after every couple of paragraphs to get the next bit of text (and if you click too many times, that can trigger a screen-wipe as you transition to the next passage). I loved the prose so much this bothered me much less than it should have, and there are a few places where it helps the punchline of a joke land with that much more force, but really this should probably have been reined in. There’s one sequence – the one that earns the “fatphobia” content warning – that unlike other times where L acts kind of shitty, goes textually unremarked-upon, which doesn’t feel great and could probably be sharpened. Oh, and there’s one typo I found: “right of passage” for “rite of passage”.
Of course, for a game of this length, having only one typo is amazingly clean, and that’s how I feel about Sextuple L’s flaws: sure, they’re there, and I suppose worth pointing out, but they sure didn’t reduce my enjoyment. This is my favorite game of the Comp so far; it’s fleet, human, and funny.
…oh, before I sign off, I said I’d come back to my theory on the sixth L, right? The easy answer is, er, L – as in the protagonist. But I’ve got another idea. Each of the game’s five acts is titled with one of the Ls: the fetish-focused opening is Latex, for example, running through the confrontational scenes in Leather, the consequences of the bloody, ill-advised hookup in Lipstick, engaging with L’s romantic feelings for Val (and the suffocating nature of your relationship with Gerstin) in Love, and in Lust, finally facing the world with open arms. What comes after all that? Life.
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Not to detract from the review, but I’m now deeply curious whether L actually thinks he has covid or if he’s the sort of person to bring the “i think i hauve covid” meme into the real-life bedroom.
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Oh, he doesn’t at all – I completely didn’t realize this was a meme, but I think you’re right that that’s what’s going on, since L is definitely up on such things. Thanks for pointing that out, even though I think it’s slightly funnier as a complete non-sequitur!
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I was flabbergasted by that scene. It was the first and only time I felt my agency as a player was not taken seriously, since the protagonist did something absurd that had nothing to do with the choice I made. Perhaps it would have made more sense with some background knowledge about this meme, whatever it may be?
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So apparently there’s a joke where you say that you have COVID in order to indicate that you’re sexually aroused. And it was caused by this tweet which, even though I must admit to knowing what the acronym means, still doesn’t strike me as much of a joke, but okay:
Sweet summer child is apparently a phrase from George R. R. Martin, but I think I’ll refrain from falling deeper into this rabbit hole.
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Yeah I don’t really get the meme-joke (COVID doesn’t typically make you nauseous?) I think with that context the scene in the game does make sense – L is vocalizing their horniness, but it’s filtered through their terminal-onlineness in a way that’s incomprehensible to the normies (actually, this reminds me that one thing I didn’t get a chance to touch on in the review is the interesting way that L uses the word “normal” – this is the almost-talismanic, repeated critique he makes of Gerstin, that they’re “not normal”, when of course per mainstream society neither of them could have any claim to the term. So it’s notable that L – justifiably, I think – claims the mantle of normality nonetheless!)
EDIT: I also didn’t get a chance to mention the soda bottle, but I thought that was a lovely running metaphor, too.
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House of Wolves, by Shruti Deo
The thing about metaphors is, they can’t be too metaphorical. Similes are anchored by that “like”, they can do anything they want: there’s a Mountain Goats song, International Small Arms Traffic Blues, with the line “my love is like the border between Greece and Albania”, and it completely works, you understand exactly what it means. But metaphors lack any automatic grounding in reality, and so they’re liable to float away if you let them. Case in point: I am pretty sure that when the parents in House of Wolves make the protagonist eat meat for dinner, the game doesn’t (or at doesn’t just) have vegetarianism on its mind, but I couldn’t tell you what it does. Reactionary politics? Sexual orientation or gender identity? Academic success/meritocracy as a cloak for the Hobbesian war of all against all? The fact that this is about “wolves” and “meat” indicates there’s violence at the heart of whatever’s going on, but whatever’s going on is too gestured-at to be visceral.
This isn’t to say there’s nothing powerful in the writing here. Part of the protagonist’s three-part daily ritual is studying (bracketed by ablutions and the aforementioned meal sequences): they appear to be taking a computer-science course under remote-learning conditions, possibly due to COVID, and at one point there’s a description of the technical concepts of encapsulation and abstraction in the context of programming languages, but it’s clear the description could equally apply to avoidance strategies. I also liked that the protagonist’s dream of escape isn’t that their parents will stop trying to make them eat meat, no, it’s that they’ll just enjoy eating it: their imagination doesn’t extend to freedom, just to no longer experiencing the pain of conformity.
But again, we don’t really get a sense of what the protagonist is trying to avoid, or what costs conformity actually would impose. Nor are we given any climax or catharsis. We just get these same concepts repeated in various forms:
You’ve almost forgotten what it’s like not to have that pressure bearing down on you. Separated from your friends, separated from any form of escape, you’ve buckled under its weight. Let them stamp you down into the cracks till there’s nothing left to break. You pretend it makes it easier. That it makes it hurt any less.
This seems unpleasant, and abstractly, I want things to go better for the protagonist. But I didn’t feel like my choices as a player had anything to do with that – you can acquiesce to eating eat, or be force-fed it, but external and internal end results felt the same – nor was there any poignancy to these scenes, any sense that an actual human being had anything concrete at stake. I’m not saying House of Wolves needed to make its allegories clanglingly explicit; heck, I’m a vegetarian, even if the game is just about eating meat I think that still could work. But right now all there is is the metaphor, and it’s not bloody enough to connect.
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Can you explain to me what ‘terminally online’ actually means? I’ve seen adjacent terms bandied around in other reviews of the piece, but I feel unsure about the connotations. Is it depreciative? Does it imply that someone has an addiction? Has it specifically to do with social media, or is someone who plays a lot of DOTA also terminally online?
Anyway, it’s a bold bold move to make a scene hinge on a meme in such a way that you can’t really understand the scene if you don’t know the meme! I’m very prone to using all kinds of cultural allusions myself, but I try – perhaps not successfully, this is fairly hard to judge for oneself – to keep the experience accessible without some of the more specialist knowledge. E.g., you enjoyed my little joke about Alkibiades in Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates, but someone who has never heard of the guy can understand perfectly what’s going on the scene.
I’m not saying that the blood & the body are wrong in using this meme the way they do. They’ve generated a disconnect of exactly the kind that the piece is often about, indeed, it is the exact disconnect that the scene is about. L is making a joke that comes naturally to them; their sex partner doesn’t understand it at al; and every reader is going to be in either of those two positions, with a fairly wide chasm between them. It’s interesting, and I’m glad to have found out about it by talking on the forum. But it’s bold as a design choice!
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I think of “terminally online” as indicating someone’s lost the ability to communicate to people who don’t have a shared context around particular memes and topics that don’t circulate outside specific online communities and thus can’t easily talk to “normal” people - honestly these days I mostly think about Trump and other right-wing figures these days when I hear the phrase, since they’re the highest-profile example of needing to know about specific conspiracy theories and bits of nomenclature to understand what they’re saying: even just at a linguistic level, all the weird sex slang (“cuck” etc.), the “antifa” stuff, heck, all the “Marxist” accusations don’t really use the words the same way regular people do. But yeah, for me it’s specifically about alienation rather than just the raw time and kinds of online activities people pursue.
Anyway I agree that it’s a bold choice, but also think you’re right that different players will either be identifying with L or Artemis in that scene - I brought up it up since I found it hilariously out of left field, and L just burbling out something completely unhinged (and maybe calculated to bring the sex to a halt due to their sublimated sense that they don’t deserve something like this) seemed completely in-character. I think a lot of my reaction would be different if this weren’t a harmless choice though, since of course Val knows what’s up and we quickly get back to things; if clicking an innocent choice like that led to my intentions for the sequence being stymied I definitely would have been annoyed!
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Your review is appreciated. The typo has been caught for the next update, which is set to come out after IFComp finishes.
The discussion here is correct about “i think i hauve covid” . It’s a phrase that’s become popular on Tumblr because of the original tweet it’s from, and now it’s very common to find photos and videos people find attractive with swarms of tags and comments with “i think i hauve covid” (the misspelling is critical!) as shorthand for “this person is incredibly hot”. L, having no experience in real relationships and so flustered he can’t think straight, defaults to this without thinking what it actually means, prompting that reaction from Artemis. Valentine diffuses, being just online enough he knows what it means.
Our approach for this game was to showcase an experience that’s entirely ours, without compromise or cuts on any part of the experience. Almost every hit and reveal was tailor-made for the people who have experienced this story and its toxic relationships, and anyone else moved or annoyed by the experience was collateral. It’s been a pleasant surprise to find multiple people outside that demographic enjoying it just as much.
Cheers,
– THE BLOOD
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Ok I think I should be the last person to discuss about jargon/in-world terms, but what is a “cishet” (among other unknown terms in your review…) ?
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I think it means when a person is both cisgender (same gender as was put when you were born would be a way to put it?) and heterosexual (straight).
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The core of it is “I’m suddenly aroused from something not particularly sexual and I don’t know how to handle that, so I’m making a really lame excuse to cover for it”. It’s the same vein of joke as someone rummaging through their pocket, accidentally dropping something embarrassing, and going “I have no idea how that got in there”—it’s not an excuse that anyone’s actually going to buy, so it’s used in a kind of self-deprecating way.
That part of the meme is fairly easy to explain, thankfully. Game of Thrones used to be a huge cultural force (at least in America) and then it ended with a whimper and pretty much disappeared from public consciousness. So it’s about using outdated references.
My take is pretty much the same as Mike’s: “terminally online” means you spend so much of your time in online echo chambers that you have difficulty relating to people in real life. Usually I hear it used in the context of “discourse”: extensive, extremely-impassioned arguments about things that don’t actually matter at all outside a particular bubble (on Tumblr, usually things like “is it homophobic for a bi woman to call herself butch” and “is the children’s show Steven Universe fascist propaganda”). From the sound of it, L spends a lot of time in these sorts of echo chambers, to the point that when he’s interacting with people in real life he struggles to communicate with them.
Max hit the nail on the head. Or to put it differently: not trans and not gay. Since there’s a lot of shared ground between cis gay people and straight trans people, it’s become useful recently to have a term meaning “not either of those things”.
Okay, wall of text over. Don’t mind me; as a linguist and also a Tumblr user I love exploring the specific ways these things are used.
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Deliquesence, by Not-Only But-Also-Riley
Deliquescence is an emotionally charged game presenting one of the most painful experiences possible – being with someone you love in the minutes before they die – so of course instead of engaging with any of that I’m going to start off by talking about the interface.
This is of course a choice-based game, but the presentation of those choices is almost unique in IF – rather than a typical set of inline links or radio buttons, the options available are offered via nested menus. Talk, Touch, and Do are the initial three, each with a little + next to them indicating that they can expand to offer a further set of choices, which of course can expand in turn to offer additional refinements another layer down, ultimately reaching three or four levels deep in some cases; you might select Talk, then About her, then Tell me a story, then finally About your grandmother to trigger a short reminiscence. Even something as comparatively simple as touching her hand is actually Touch, Her, Hand – and the way the nesting works, you don’t know what options are available until you click to fan them out.
I suspect that this choice of interface was partially a practical accommodation to allow for quite a lot of choices – there are something like thirty different courses you can pursue – to be displayed at once, without requiring the player to fumble with the back button or locking in any path-dependence (the game does shunt you into one of several different endings based on what you do, but each interaction works the same way every time). But it’s also a perfect fit for the game’s subject matter: in such a high-stress situation, with seconds ticking down to the inevitable (yes, the game does have a real-time limit hurrying things along if you dither), I think your brain really does work like this: I should say something, what should I say, maybe a question, what was a story she told me, oh the one about her Grandmother. And there’s so much you might want to do, but the likelihood that it will be the right thing is so low given the stakes, that you do find yourself considering action after action, jumping around in the list, all the time knowing you can’t get through even a fraction of what you’d like to do or say before the end, and actually by searching for something perfect you’re frittering away the little time that’s left.
The setup is so neat that the specifics and the writing are almost besides the point; happily, they’re quite good, though I inevitably have a quibble or two. The main one of these is that Deliquescence is not nearly as emotionally devastating as it could be. For one thing, as the title indicates your friend is dying because their body is turning into water; this can be read as a metaphor for all sorts of things, and could be rendered as a terrifying bit of body horror, but in the event the author succeeds in giving the friend’s physical decay an odd, terribly beauty; her death will make you sad, but it’s a wistful kind of sad, and a sadness leavened by the invitation to restart and experience it again. For another, neither the friend nor the protagonist are especially characterized, nor does their relationship have much flavor to it; there are a couple of nice anecdotes, and from the fact that they’re in this situation together the player understands that the ties that bind them together must be tight ones, but I felt an intellectual rather than a visceral understanding.
The endings also pull some punches. There aren’t any good ones where you say exactly the right thing to make you and her feel OK about what’s happening – because of course there aren’t – but nor are there ones where you say the wrong thing, or one or the other of you breaks down irretrievably (er, emotionally, that is). If you futz around with the interface so much that you never actually do anything, she says the important thing was for you just to be there; if ask her to tell you stories, she tells you she was happy with her life. One ending that threatened to become a bummer ended with her saying “My death is not for anyone but me. It’s just another thing that is happening. Don’t make it a burden.” I’m not saying that’s unrealistic – in fact my sister told me something not unlike this a few weeks before she died – but it is a pretty direct instruction to the player not to feel too bad about things.
This all seems to be a matter of choice rather than mistake on the part of the author, though – based on the quality of the writing, I have little doubt they could have gone all-in for melodrama had that been their goal. Instead Deliquescence allows the player to get their toes wet exploring an awful moment, experiencing all the ways it can feel overwhelming and go wrong while still having a safety net that blunts the worst excesses of emotion and reassures them that it’s going to be OK no matter what. That’s an admirable thing to offer, with impressive artistry going into the design, even if the situations it’s emulating are nowhere near as domesticated in practice.
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Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe, by Jim Nelson
Last night my wife and I had one of our all-too-infrequent dates (we’re parents of a toddler, the struggle is real), and I made the questionable decision to use some of that precious time telling her about the drama surrounding NaNoWriMo endorsing LLM tools. She was gobsmacked: the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel, so what possible point could there be to having an “AI” write part of it for you? I didn’t have any great answers; the best I could come up with is that there are people who really want to have written a book, but either can’t or don’t want to do the work to actually write it.
Comes now Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe to assert that yes, there definitely are people like that, and to imagine what they might do if they had to make a deal with an entity darker still than ChatGPT to get their way. Oh, there’s plenty going on in this impressively-put-together TADS game – beyond the main thread involving investigations in an evocatively-presented 19th-Century Baltimore, there’s also a terrorist thriller, and even a brief Renaissance interlude – but the heart of it is a meditation on artistic ambition; trying to uncover exactly what caused Poe’s death provides impetus to the plot, and he enigmatically haunts proceedings as inspiration, cautionary tale, or victim, but the story is ultimately concerned with others who lack his talent and perseverance while feeling no less entitled to success.
Speaking of ambitions, this is a lot for a parser game to bite off, but UCEAP manages it all with aplomb. There’s a modern-day framing story for the main action in Poe’s Baltimore, as well as one or two other nested flashbacks, but everything except the 19th Century stuff is presented in a compact, guided fashion that ensures the player doesn’t flounder even as they’re put in situations without enough context to understand them, or asked to make thematically-charged decisions via a parser interface that doesn’t allow for much nuance. The tools used here include a fair amount of prompting, via a (optional, but enabled by default) system that provides hints about possible conversational topics, or the reduction of complex dilemmas to binary choices represented by physical actions easily fitting the medium-dry-goods paradigm. It’d be churlish to complain about this kind of thing, though, since these sequences are clearly ancillary to the main event, where the player is afforded far more freedom; keeping the necessarily-less-engaging side-stories moving is the right decision.
And oh, what fun there is to be had in Charm City! As an admirer of Poe’s who has heard news of his troubles, you rush to his hospital bed and vow to discover who or what brought him to such dire straits. The whole sequence is rendered in enjoyably melodramatic prose that brings the milieu to life, like this description of the harbor:
Eagerly I pass through the doors of the ferry building, columned on both sides by the sails and smoke rising from the ferries gliding over the glassy Patapsco River.
Or this later one of a damaged mechanism:
A great iron pot-bellied engine sits mounted into one wall, with a webwork of contraption and gears sprouting from its head. Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate.
It’s impressively-wrought apery, conjuring ambiance while avoiding mentioning too many nouns that would need to be implemented, and if there are anachronisms or infelicities, I didn’t notice them. A lot of research has clearly gone into this, but the game avoids the pitfall of ploddingly reciting Wikipedia summaries; historical tidbits like how voting frauds were perpetrated or what medical care looked like at the time are given life and made plot-relevant instead.
The puzzles are also woven into the narrative with care and skill. There are barriers to your investigations – you’ll need to retrace his steps before the attack that felled him, wheedle key information out of a wino, er, toper, and even decode some cryptograms that could have come straight out of a Poe story. But they all arise, and are surmounted, in organic fashion; there’s nothing that comes off as a gamey contrivance to pad out the running time, and the puzzles all reward logical thinking and period knowledge (in fact I managed to sequence-break by guessing a cipher keyword well before I was supposed to based on knowing some things about 19th-Century medicine). And even for folks less well-positioned to grapple with its challenges, the game offers hints and a walkthrough.
For all that they’re well done, though, the puzzles aren’t what UCEAP is most interested in. Nor, in the end, is Poe – the game does engage with the historical circumstances of his death with impressive depth and fidelity, and it’s generously larded both with specific references to his work, as well as with tropes that invoke the mysterious, haunted atmosphere of his writings, from uncanny doubles to ominous codes to insoluble murders. But we don’t get much of a sense of his subjectivity: the active characters are people who look up to him, or are jealous of him, or find themselves enmeshed in situations that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his tales. Indeed, there’s even a clever feint that led me to expect that Poe would be revealed as his own worst enemy, only to find that something else entirely was going on.
No, it’s the protagonist and villain, and their echoes in the modern-day story, who are most thematically central to the game. It posits a series of dualities within literary identity: the desire for broad success as well as critical acclaim, for bourgeois respectability as well as demimondaine extravagance, and above all for the trappings of fame without the effort required to master a craft. Much like the puzzles, this theme is well-put together and cleverly integrated into the game as a whole, but here’s my major complaint about UCEAP: I’m not convinced it winds up with as much to say about literary production in general, or Poe in specific, as I’d have hoped.
Most authors, I think, really are trying as hard as they can to produce good work; if they’re taking shortcuts, they’re shortcuts imposed by the exigencies of artistic production under late capitalism rather than moral failings. ChatGPT and its ilk pretend they offer the equivalent of a deal with the devil – have your masterworks handed to you on a platter rather than forging them with the sweat of your brow – but it’s nonetheless clear that this Mephistopheles has not a golden fiddle but an out-of-tune ukulele. And as for Poe, UCEAP convincingly demolishes the character-assassination portrait of him as a depraved alcoholic brought low by his inability to control his vices, but it doesn’t dwell much on the positive vision we should have of him instead. I don’t disagree with anything the game is saying, by any means, but I do wish it had found a way to penetrate a little more deeply, engage more directly with the questions it raises about how we sinful mortals can create undying art.
Let me be clear that I’m just talking about the difference between a great game and an incredible one, though – I found UCEAP a joy to play, with best-of-class prose, design, worldbuilding, and narrative structure (I haven’t gotten a chance to mention how scene transitions are often accomplished via seamless match-cuts, like jumping from a 2024 hospital to an 1849 one). It also boasts the most hilarious way to get out of a bad contract I’ve read in quite some time. And if it doesn’t completely transcend its origins as a sensational tale of depraved and desperate ambition, well, Poe wrote a bunch like that himself and many of them have survived the test of time nonetheless.
poe mr.txt (300.4 KB)
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Thanks for the great review! I’ll follow-up on a couple of your points after the comp has concluded.
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The Lost Artist: Prologue, by Alejandro Ruiz del Sol and Martina Oyhenard
The Comp welcomes all kinds of IF, but it’s also an awkward place to enter a teaser. As the most, well, competitive of the community’s various events, it tends to be where long, polished games by seasoned authors tend to wind up, so an incomplete effort will look even slighter by way of comparison. But beyond that, the audience simply expects complete experiences: while the Comp’s been home to multi-part series, like the Earth and Sky superhero trilogy that dominated the winner’s circle in the early aughts, or the game I’m going to be reviewing next for that matter, those games had full beginnings, middles, and ends, with linkages to future installments being akin to Marvel-movie postcredit sequences. Well, I say “the audience” but I mean “me” – for all that the blurb clearly discloses that we’ve got here is “simply the prologue” to The Lost Artist, I was still disgruntled to reach the end well before I expected to, all the more so since there’s no indication of when and where the continuation might show up.
But admitting that putting a teaser in IFComp is probably not a good idea, is this prologue nonetheless an effective one? I’d have to say no. For a preview to make me excited to check out the full experience, I think it has to establish the premise and end on a moment of drama, when things are opening up and you’re left on the edge of your seat, half-imagining what might happen next but sure that there’ll be plenty of surprises beyond what you can think up. Think about the Lord of the Rings: you could cut things off after the hobbits take the Buckleberry Ferry just ahead of the Ringwraiths, say, and have a solid teaser. If that’s too much movie to give away for free, you could push back to the moment where Frodo tells Sam that he’s about to go farther from home than he’s ever been before: we don’t get the excitement of the Black Riders or the other hobbits yet, but we know what’s at stake, and that the journey’s about to begin in earnest.
The Lost Artist: Prologue, by way of contrast, basically decides to cut off just as Bilbo slips the ring on at his party, and excises the opening historical flashback besides: we have a disconnected set of characters who’ve barely interacted with each other, some kind of inciting incident that seems like it’s going somewhere, but no real idea of the shape of the story, what the themes or conflicts to come will be, and little reason to care about anything we’ve just seen. Here, instead of hobbits we’ve got a pair of bird-sanctuary-keepers turned bank robbers, an artist trapped against her will and losing her creativity, and the world’s most generic detective; instead of the dark lord Sauron we’ve got an ominous megacorporation with decidedly odd ideas about profitability (we’re told that at least one part of their business is making corporate logos, and they “[save] money by making up a new logo every time”, which seems like the opposite of how it should work?), and instead of magic rings we’ve got low-context invocations of time travel and a mystical raven. Possibly there are rules and thematic linkages that unify all of this, but the vibe is that anything could happen, and not necessarily in a good way:
Balding picks up the envelope but notices that his name is misspelled.
“Damn.” The Detective whimpers to himself, looking off to somewhere else.
The letters of his name are floating in the center of his view. The letters continuously disassemble and reassemble into hallucinated shapes.
He gets all weird about that.
Better to find something else to focus on.
Hey! What’s over there?
Let’s just say that the word “huh?” recurs a lot in my notes.
There are one or two possibly-intriguing images here – I liked the bit where the captive artist, who’s stuck working on the aforementioned logos, has a moment of clarity after she clumsily spills maté tea powder on one of her doodles and is arrested by the “depth and texture” it lends to her work – and just at the end, it indicates that the detective is being brought in to investigate something to do with the artist’s predicament. But there’s just not enough here to make me care about what happens next, even without the wacky tone, barely-there characters, and underexplained worldbuilding. It could be that after another act or two, the Lost Artist brings its disparate parts together, establishes compelling themes, and creates an engaging narrative – or it could be that it doesn’t. But either way, this prologue doesn’t allow the player to give it a fair shake.
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ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, by Hubert Janus
When the Republican Party inevitably moves on from having Trump as its standard-bearer (soon may the day come), there’s a chance they’ll land on Hubert Janus next. Sure, he’s fictional, and probably British, to boot, but he’s clearly devoted to inverting Marx: for in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, Europe is haunting a spectre.
No, wait, I mean: in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, history repeats itself, first as farce, second as tragedy. ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG is of course the sequel to last year’s DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, which was precision-engineered to win the Golden Banana of discord (seriously. There was math). It offered two separate paths to potential players, determined randomly and irrevocably upon startup; while I believe both elaborated upon the scenario teased in its title one, apparently, was surprisingly robust and engaging, designed to elicit a middling score, while the second was an intentionally-awful congeries of timed text, GeoCities-era flashing text and overbusy design, completely linear gameplay, and a conga line of cameos from Darth Vader to Adolf Hitler. I got the second version, and finding its goofily over-the-top effort to be the worst game in the Comp sublimely ridiculous, gave it the 1/10 it was angling for.
To say DICK MCBUTTS is a tough act to follow is an understatement (and possibly a butt joke in itself). But ROD MCSCHLONG makes a manful go at providing more of the same, but different. In particular, whereas the comedy in the former came from the dizzying variety of ways that the titular act was perpetrated, here DONG-PUNCHING is a fail state; the groin of our hero is ever-threatened, but the player has the agency to guide ROD through the gauntlet and escape the ever-thrusting fists of, in turn, a swole leprechaun, a passel of mutated Sciuridae, alien overlords with more limbs than a Hindu god, and more besides. You’re only offered at most two options at any time, and the Twine game allows you to freely undo, so a bad end just means enduring a gif depicting shocking stick-figure violence and then a replay, but for a joke game, ROD MCSCHLONG does a good job of playing fair; more often than not, logical deduction, careful attention to detail, and a cautious regard for the importance of safeguarding your “baloney pony” will see you through. There’s an engaging sense of escalation throughout, too – it’s hopefully no spoiler to reveal that ultimately the very multiverse is put into the balance, meaning that you’re not just protecting one dong, but innumerable dongs across countless realities.
The tragedy is – well, there are two tragedies (see how elegantly Hubert rebuts Karl: everything repeats, not just history!) For one thing, while the game is structured around a dream of escape, the title exerts a remorseless pull: no matter how you try, no matter what you do, ROD MCSCHLONG will GET PUNCHED IN THE DOG, with each near-miss serving to raise the tension before the inevitable. Heck, you need to get out your classical-tragedy bingo card, because here we’ve got both character-is-destiny (the piece opens with ROD’s hubristic boast that no one will ever PUNCH him in the DONG) and trying-to-escape-fate-makes-it-happen (ROD’s efforts to evade PUNCHES are themselves what eventually put his DONG right in the line of fire).
The second tragedy is, well, of course it’s not quite as funny as DICK MCBUTTS. There are some great one-off gags, don’t get me wrong – I don’t exactly know what it means to say performing the eponymous assault would be “[l]ike going to the Cumberland Pencil Museum and trying to beat up the world’s largest coloured pencil,” but it makes me laugh anyway – but inevitably the second time around, the jokes don’t have quite the anarchic zing they once did. There’s an extended sequence involving an athletic supporter and cup that’s played a little too straight, and the easy way failure can be undoing means that ROD MCSCHLONG actually GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG quite a lot, with no lasting consequences. Despite a glee-inducing late-game cameo and quite a lot of craftsmanship, sadly the game ultimately can’t help but disappoint.
That’s OK though, since as stated it’s all in service of inverting Marx’s dialectics and endearing Hubert Janus to the GOP’s movers and shakers – at least until next Comp’s inevitable DONNIE MCTRUMP GETS THRASHED ON THE RUMP.
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