Mike Russo's IF Comp 2025 Reviews

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

This year’s Comp is an unusual one in all sorts of ways – it’s the second-biggest in history, there are UK geoblocks, AI-art covers are all over the voting page, and somehow a Lady Thalia game somehow wandered over from Spring Thing. But even in times of tumult, some things stay the same: I’m going to try to review all the games, in random order, without much fear of spoilers and with much too much pretentious vocabulary and overlong personal anecdotes.

As is my tradition, I’m also copying and pasting Brian’s list of games for my index.

Let’s get started!

*OVER* , by Audrey Larson
3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS, by Kastel (beta-tested)
Anne of Green Cables, by Brett Witty
Backpackward, by Zach Dodson for Interactive Tragedy, Limited
The Breakup Game, by Trying Truly
The Burger Meme Personality Test, by Carlos Hernandez
By All Reasonable Knowledge, by BMB Johnson
Cart, by Brett Witty
Clickbait, by Reilly Olson
A Conversation in a Dark Room, by Leigh
Crescent Sea Story, by Stewart C Baker
A Day in a Hell Corp, by Hex
Dead Sea, by Binggang Zhuo
Detritus, by Ben Jackson
Eight Last Signs in the Desert, by Lichene (Laughingpineapple & McKid)
Errand Run, by Sophia Zhao
Escape the Pale, by Novy Pnin
Fable, by Sophia Zhao
Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade, by Lamp Post Projects
Fascism - Off Topic, by eavesdropper
Fired, by Olaf Nowacki (beta-tested)
Frankenfingers, by Charles Moore
Grove of Bones, by Jacic
HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT, by Larissa Janus
High On Grief, by Norbez Jones (call me Bez, e/em/eir)
Hobbiton Recall, by MR JD BARDI
Horse Whisperer, by nucky
Imperial Throne, by Alex Crossley
INPUT PROCESS, by HY
The Island Of Rhynin, by Ilias Seferiadis
Just Two Wishes, by Kozelek
The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer, by P.B. Parjeter
Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan, by Emery Joyce and N. Cormier
Let Me Play!, by Interactive Dreams
The Litchfield Mystery, by thesleuthacademy
The Little Four, by Captain Arthur Hastings, O.B.E.
Monkeys and Car Keys, by Jim Fisher (OnyxRing)
Moon Logic, by Onno Brouwer
Mooncrash!, by Laura
Mr. Beaver, by Stefan Hoffmann
A murder of Crows, by Design Youkai
Murderworld, by Austin Auclair
My creation, by dino
Not so Happy Easter 2025, by Petr Kain
The Olive Tree, by Francesco Giovannangelo
One Step Ahead, by ZＵＯ ＬＩＦＡＮ
Operative Nine, by Arthur DiBianca
The Path of Totality, by Lamp Post Projects
Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter, by Sean Woods
Penthesileia, by Sophia Zhao
Pharaohs’ Heir, by smwhr
Pharos Fidelis, by DemonApologist
Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story, by Phil Riley (beta-tested)
The Promises of Mars, by George Larkwright
PURE, by PLAYPURPUR
Rain Check-in, by Zeno Pillan
The Reliquary of Epiphanius, by Francesco Giovannangelo
Retrograding, by Happy Cat Games
A Rock’s Tale, by Shane R.
Saltwrack, by Henry Kay Cecchini
The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens, by Lamp Post Projects
The Semantagician’s Assistant, by Lance Nathan
Slated For Demolition, by Meri Something
A Smörgåsbord of Pain, by FLACRabbit
Space Mission: 2045, by Benjamin Knob
The Tempest of Baraqiel, by Nathan Leigh
Temptation in the Village, by Anssi Räisänen
The Transformations of Dr. Watson, by Konstantin Taro
Under the Sea Winds, by dmarymac
Uninteractive Fiction 2, by Leah Thargic
Us Too, by Andrew Schultz
valley of glass, by Devan Wardrop-Saxton
Violent Delight, by Coral Nulla
A Visit to the Human Resources Administration, by Jesse
Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus, by Charles M Ball
WATT, by Joan, Ces and humikun
Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata?, by Damon L. Wakes
whoami, by n-n
Willy’s Manor, by Joshua Hetzel
A winter morning on the beach, by E. Cuchel
The Wise-Woman’s Dog, by Daniel M. Stelzer (beta-tested)
The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens
you are an ancient chinese poet at the neo-orchid pavilion, by KA Tan (beta-tested)
You Cannot Speak, by Ted Tarnovski
Your Very Last Words, by Interactive Dreams

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Slated for Demolition, by Meri Burgess

The surrealist IF game about trauma is a sufficiently well-represented subgenre that by this point I have a standard bit of patter I trot out for my reviews: these pieces often have spikily compelling writing and can be engaging on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but they also run the risk of being too idiosyncratic to resonate with the audience, as it’s very easy for an author to present snatches of imagery, language, and events that are incredibly personally meaningful, but which lack enough context to ground them in lived experience. No matter how great your prose or vivid your imagination, if the player can’t connect to what they’re reading, there’s a limit to how much impact your game can have.

Slated for Demolition is a very good Twine game in this vein, and as if to prove how little I know, one of the two things holding it back from being really great is that at a climactic moment, it reaches for universality rather than staying rooted in the subjective. At least the other thing is the more conventional challenge of underexplaining a key metaphor.

Before circling back to those issues, though, it’s worth dwelling on the ways that Slated for Demolition really works. While the subject-matter here is pretty familiar – early-20s anomie interrupted by sexual assault – the authorial voice is immediately confident, equally at ease describing the bleakness of a late-night suburb, the degrading consequences of alcohol dependence, and magical-realist irruptions of beauty and terror. The sentences have rhythm, the anecdotes have enlivening details, and the tone never stays stuck too long in one place, preventing the player from being desensitized through repetition. An example, more or less at random:

Once when you were 18, you went to a party and drank your entire personality away all night long. You managed a few passed-out hours of sleep, and then you had to wake up and go to work for the early shift.

It was your turn to stock the freezers. You knelt on the hard concrete floor, gingerly placing TGI Fridays-brand meals and trying your hardest not to vomit absolutely everywhere.

The gameplay also knows how to change things up. The overall structure is that of a quest, or a shaggy dog story – you leave your house in search of a Slurpee, but compulsions keep dragging you into more errands, and memory drags you back into reveries, leading to distinct set-pieces as you pass a long dark night of the soul. Some of these involve straightforward choice-based branching, but others require the player to move through or explore a persistent space; a stand-out vignette is more or less an extended puzzle, as you try to figure out which apartment an acquaintance lives in when all you know is the building’s address.

This kind of variety could risk undermining the game’s sense of progression, but one of its conceits is that in each scene, you’re collecting items to satisfy an obscure shopping list you find in your pocket. While the significance of each is typically unclear, wanting to complete the collection kept me engaged in the details of what was happening even in the strangest of the sequences, and provided a sense of pacing across the game’s almost-two-hour running time (the list is also rather forgiving – even if you miss something, just before the endgame you’re given a chance to zoom back to pick up the items you lost).

That endgame is where Slated for Demolition attempts something surprising and audacious, which I can’t help admire even though it didn’t quite work for me (I admire it enough to spoiler-block it, in fact, but the short version is that it makes a move for the universal rather than the particular, when the particular had previously served it very well indeed). After doing a lot of work to situate the player in the protagonist’s subjectivity and revealing the details of the traumatic event exerting its gravitational pull throughout the rest of the game, the protagonist begins a ritual to attain closure – except before performing it, the player is invited to think about some pain they’ve experienced and use the ritual structure to fill in details for their own exorcism. It’s a lovely idea for bridging the gap between author and player, and I made a good-faith effort to engage with it, but I found the exercise deeply uncomfortable, because it felt like I was overwriting the protagonist’s, and perhaps the author’s, experiences with my own. Trauma is trauma, to a certain degree, but as the rest of the game demonstrates, the specific details of what was done by whom, to whom, and how, make an enormous difference – and that’s especially the case when dealing with sexual assault, given the role gender and power dynamics play. For some players, I’m sure, the details of the ritual would resonate deeply and the memories it evokes would be congruent with the game’s themes. But for me, even making the attempt felt like overstepping.

My other complaint is that the strongest image in the game didn’t cohere in a satisfying way. I also don’t want to spoil this too much, but the blurb and cover art give away that every once in a while, the protagonist feels like she’s dissolving into pasta and red sauce, and while that sounds silly, in fact it’s written to be the most upsetting piece of body horror I’ve come across in years. I was delighted by how much these sequences made me squirm, but while there are a few hints for how they connect to the game’s broader concerns, the hints are rather thin and ultimately the metaphor doesn’t connect very neatly with the title and framing idea about a house fated for destruction. It’s a textbook example of surrealism that needs a bit more connective tissue, so while Slated for Demolition definitely challenges my theory for what makes these kinds of games succeed, at least I don’t need to throw it out entirely.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

*OVER*, by Audrey Larson

Readers, a confession: I fear I was not a very fun child. Case in point, even when I was little I never much liked cotton candy. Sure, it looks pretty and it’s good enough on first bite. But there’s just so much of it, and every bite is exactly the same – the same unidimensional sweetness, the same airy-yet-claggy texture, with nothing to liven up the monotony of the march to the soggy cardboard at the end.

*OVER* is much more enjoyable than a stick of cotton candy, so this is an unfair simile with which to open this review. It’s got some characters who eventually grew on me, a nicely-granular look at the enervating logistics of a big family vacation, and entertaining period details. But I also found it way too long for what’s ultimately a simple story whose themes, characterizations, and gameplay don’t have much depth; at half the length, they wouldn’t wear out their welcome, but at over two hours, the candyfloss has time to turn to a gummy paste in the mouth.

(Here is the *OVER* drinking game, by the way – take a shot every time I screw up the title formatting so the asterisks become invisible italics tags).

Here’s the short version: a 19-person family goes on vacation to an unnamed theme park that is 100% Disneyworld, and over the course of five days, the two main characters – both queer woman, one a 20-year old whose name the player supplies, the other a maybe-late-thirties aunt named Lou – come to grips with the ways they’ve allowed the demands of their big, homophobic family to push aside their need for autonomy and love, against a backdrop of low-key child-mediated mayhem and ubiquitous walkie-talkie use serving as a metaphor for garbled communication and the possibility of surprising connections. Everybody gets on each others’ nerves, everyone’s trying to convince themselves they’re having fun when there’s little authentic pleasure on offer, and just as Disneyland is a pleasant but generic façade over a grim capitalist reality, so too do the rituals of a loving family cloak disapproval, sharp elbows, and bigotry. Fortunately, both the 20-year-old and Lou happen across idealized love interests who offer an escape (though you can’t see how both of their stories resolve, since you have to choose just one to follow into the climactic sequence, which retroactively renders much of the slow buildup of the path not taken superfluous).

That’s not a bad story, but it’s not an especially complex or novel one to support a game that ran me well over two hours to get through. Characters are almost all slotted into a one-dimensional good vs. bad continuum, except for the children who are such non-entities they’re not even allowed names (this is a game with a lot to say about parenting and nothing to say about parenthood). There are a few small choices the player can make to affect the story, but they come infrequently and late – I mostly just remember them being of the form KISS LOVE INTEREST/DON’T KISS LOVE INTEREST. Instead, most of the gameplay consists of deciding which of the characters to follow for the next piece of narration, which always left me feeling like I was missing out on the full story (a feeling exacerbated by the game occasionally calling back to events that I hadn’t seen happen, or even been mentioned). And as for the plot, there’s not much that happens for the first three or so days of the five-day running time, besides the slow establishment of the character dynamics, low-key introductions to the love interests, and (in fairness) a kid puking on the awful grandma’s shoes – and things only pick up slightly in days four and five.

All that means that playing *OVER* can feel enervating, something the prose definitely contributes to – it’s wordy, and intentionally evades detail:

The lines were long and dark, most line games were rendered inoperable, and tiredness made them all skirt around conversation. The kids talked about their plans for the coming days, which rides were high priority repeaters and which they barely felt the need to do once. The mom’s, Marian, and Lou talked about the weather, how poorly they had all packed, how nice it was to get away from home for a little while. Charlotte asked her mom about work, and they discussed some previously relayed story’s newest developments. Lou hadn’t heard that story, and didn’t feel like listening to a saga start to finish at the moment, so she asked Margot if she’d read any good books lately. It was a thing they had bonded over in the past, though their tastes weren’t similar, by any means, they both appreciated texts that were unusual, that you wouldn’t necessarily find on any of Oprah’s lists.

There’s a reason the author adopted this style, I suspect – with its busy-ness, its focus on logistics, and its monomaniacal fixation on form and allergy to substance, it clearly has some resonance with the Disneyworld experience it depicts. That same logic applies to *OVER*’s length, too – the brutality of long exposure to this place, and this family, is precisely what’s ground down Lou, and what the 20-year-old eventually comes to see as an existential threat. So subjecting the player to this very much furthers the work’s artistic aims. And it’s clear the author is writing from experience, and can include some wry or winsome detail when desired:

A dramatic sobriety falls over her, so dramatic that it almost feels like she’s actually drunk, and she clenches her fists together tight enough to make crescent-moons in her palms with her fingernails, matching the sliver of moon in the sky.

It’s also the case that quantity can have a quality all its own, and by the end I did have some fondness for the sympathetic members of the cast. While Lou is a straightforward character not drawn with as much specificity as I’d have liked (I don’t need a ton of backstory, but there are a couple sentences towards the end that imply that she’s never actually been in a relationship, and if that’s true that should probably have been mentioned earlier), I still wish I’d been able to see how her story turned out, since after long exposure to her travails I couldn’t help but root for her. A fling with a hot, understanding bartender, which seemed to be where she was heading, won’t cure all ills but it certainly wouldn’t hurt, and it would have been a fun note to end on.

So there’s definitely enjoyment to be had in *OVER*, but it can’t overcome the fundamental mismatch of scope and richness: as the game itself argues, a week is way too long to spend in someplace as simple and cloying as Disneyworld, so better to make it a day trip or go to Rome instead.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

The Tempest of Baraqiel, by Nathan Leigh

Lately I’ve been getting back into Star Trek. There’s an element of nostalgia to it, certainly, that gets increasingly appealing as my age keeps ticking ever-upwards, and its optimistic vision of humanity makes for a nice change of pace from the evil currently consuming America. But actually the thing that I find most soothing about it is what’s been dubbed the “competence porn” angle: The Next Generation especially is a show where a bunch of high-functioning professionals confront challenging problems, hold meetings to brainstorm ideas and develop a plan of action, then despite whatever twists and turns the galaxy throws at them, save the day in 43, or at worst, 86 minutes (until DS9 came along and ruined things with its three-parters and seasons-long arcs). In this time of chaos, seeing people be good at their jobs is basically my ASMR.

The Tempest of Baraqiel cites golden-age sci-fi as its immediate inspirations, and its setting is far more militarized than the Federation: here, humanity is locked in a losing war against an implacable and cryptic race of crab aliens. But it definitely occupies adjacent territory. As a young exolinguist, you’re assigned to a warship and given a secret mission to decode enough of the aliens’ language to operate one of their weapons. Through a well-paced adventure that’s only a bit longer than a Star Trek episode’s running time, you’ll motivate your team, look for inspiration to get through blocks in your research, and yes, have a bunch of meetings with your superiors (in fairness, you can also get into a fistfight in a knock-off of the Enterprise’s Ten Forward bar, if you want). Kal Shem, the protagonist, is young and has some anxiety to living up to the example of his war-hero mom, but at least as I played him, he’s really good at sweating the details and playing the bureaucratic game – at least until things went off the rails in the endgame.

The game definitely puts its best foot forward, though. The custom choice-based interface is clunkily sleek in that 80s-sci-fi way, with low-poly 3D renders in the corner illustrating the ship and its locations (admittedly, I mostly stopped noticing it after the first scene – likewise, there’s a custom music system that I can’t offer an opinion on since I didn’t listen to it). There’s a fair bit of world-building to get through, but it’s managed with a deft hand, and if there are few sequences where characters explain things they both already now to each other, that’s part of the charm of old-school sci-fi – mostly the infodumping comes with some character backstory or a reasonable explanation for why someone needs seemingly-basic context. Some of these circumstances can feel a bit contrived, most notably the fact that Shem isn’t a specialist in this particular alien language, so he seems an odd choice for team leader. But his family’s military background means he’s seen as more reliable for an assignment that requires discretion, so I was willing to go with it.

Baraqiel’s approach to interactivity is also nothing fancy, but well done. There’s a high density of choice – there are very few passages where you just click “next”, and there are both a reasonable number of what seem like significant branch points where you can take a different strategy on your research assignment, and more low-key choices that are either cosmetic, or might have a mild impact on your team’s opinion of you. Interestingly, you’re not restricted to making choices for Shem alone; from time to time you can pick actions for another character, sometimes even an antagonistic one. I was typically too gun-shy to lean into creating conflict in these situations – like I said, that’s not what I go to Star Trek for – but it’s a nice option for players more interested in orchestrating an engaging story than getting by with a minimum of fuss.

As for the prose – well, would you be surprised to learn that it’s largely straight-ahead, but well-crafted? The one distinctive note is that many of the characters use Yiddish slang, like dybbuk or macher; I’m not sure whether a passage I missed laid out the in-universe reasons for it, but it’s a touch I enjoyed (I also know enough Hebrew to understand that “Shem” means something like “name”, which is apropos enough for a game centered on linguistics).

There were a few small flies in the ointment as I played – most notably, the save/load system bugged out, recording only the first time I pushed the save button and not any of the others, meaning that when I tried to rewind a late-game choice to explore other options, I got sent nearly back to the beginning. Meanwhile, only one of Shem’s teammates gets much in the way of characterization. Still, I was having quite a good time as I headed into the game’s third act, which serves as the endgame – but unfortunately that’s when things started to fall apart. The methodically-paced research process suddenly leaped ahead with one flash of insight after another, not all of which made much sense, including a final revelation that seemed hard to swallow (surely if the alien language was crafted to be comprehensible over the static of interstellar communications, the humans would have already had to understand and craft a similar solution to this problem when they encountered it over their centuries among the stars?). The climax also forces a conflict with one of Shem’s superior officers who I’d managed to cultivate a solid relationship with; I was deeply confused by why Shem suddenly seemed to be edging right up against mutiny for what appeared to be no good reason, regardless of trying to pick the more conciliatory options. And the ending passage I got was exceedingly compressed and anticlimactic – while the game seemed to be building up to a moment when you’d actually communicate with the aliens, or at least operate their weapon, neither of those came to pass, and the scant few paragraphs that tie off the game were also sufficiently ambiguous that I wasn’t sure what was meant to have happened, or why.

My guess is that the author ran out of time as they got to the end of what’s by any measure a big, responsive, and high-production-value game – it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to a first-time Comp entrant, and it certainly won’t be the last. So even if Tempest of Baraqiel’s final act lets it down somewhat, there’s still more than enough competence on display in the majority of its runtime to scratch that meetings-and-science-and-space-adventure itch.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

The Transformations of Dr. Watson, by Konstantin Taro

So I know there’s a plethora of successful Sherlock Holmes games, from Infocom’s run at the great detective to those more recent 3D ones where he goes up against like Lupin or Cthulhu, but I’m not going to let that fact get in the way of my sweeping opinion: there’s no way to make a truly satisfying Holmes game, because you need to either make him too smart or too dumb. That is, either you limit the player’s agency and have him solve the case for you, because of course he’s a genius, or you subject Holmes to every one of the player’s idiotic flailings, making it a wonder he manages to tie his shoes let alone reveal the secret of the speckled band.

The way to dodge this conundrum is to have the protagonist be someone other than Holmes – typically Watson, sometimes, I am informed, a dog – and feed him information, so that once he has the data he needs he can make the great deductive leaps his fictional reputation requires. The Transformations of Dr. Watson takes this approach, putting the player in the shoes of Watson, at least initially, but forgets that this means Holmes doesn’t have to swap his deerstalker for a dunce-cap; sadly, this is the dimmest Sherlock has been since those Robert Downey Jr. movies where he mostly just got in fist-fights.

Making matters worse, the mystery here at issue would barely keep a single Hardy Boy busy for an hour. As the game opens, you as Watson are called to the house of a recently-deceased toff to pronounce him dead, though the game doesn’t exactly play things close to the chest when introducing the setup:

His nervous smile and damp palm upon shaking hands betrayed his tension. “My father… passed away. Heart, I suppose,” he said hastily.

“Sir Silas never complained of his heart,” the butler, Cavendish, retorted dryly, casting a quick glance at Alister. My medical intuition screamed an alarm.

The only thing that could make things more suspicious would be – well, Alister’s name oscillating to “Alistair” with no explanation, but I assume that’s just simple typos rather than further evidence of fraud. But the teacup with an oddly-bitter odor right next to the body sure does gild the lily.

In fairness, Watson doesn’t get the odor clue right away; first, his soul needs to transmigrate into the body of a cat so he can take advantage of its enhanced senses. Yes, there’s a gimmick here, and not one that was at all explained in my playthrough: after the treacherous Alister/Alistair bashes his head in with a cane, Watson’s consciousness shifts to inhabit a variety of other creatures, and he uses his newfound lease on life to draw Holmes’ attention to the clues once he arrives to check up on his missing friend.

It’s a bizarre if not unpromising gimmick, but there’s less here than meets the eye. Even once the prologue ends, the game is largely linear, with the few choices almost all having clear right and wrong answers – and again, since the mystery is so obvious, the fact that Holmes needs help at all just makes him look exceptionally slow on the uptake. At least there’s a bit of bathos to be wrung from the way the heir is able to intuit that he’s somehow managed to anger a menagerie that’s now bent on his undoing, leading him to seemingly-unmotivated reprisals that surely only incriminate him further. But unexceptional prose that’s a bit too adjective-happy combined with overly-slick AI art mean that there are few flowers to stop and sniff along the way to Holmes’ preordained triumph. It’s all laid on a bit too thick, we’re denied the conventional pleasures of a Holmes tale, and sadly neither gameplay or presentation are up to much. It’s enough to drive a man to cocaine.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Willy’s Manor, by Joshua Hetzel

Last year, I was disappointed when the premise of this author’s previous game, Warm Reception, didn’t turn out to much survive the prologue: the idea of a medieval gossip columnist covering a royal wedding is all sorts of fun, so I couldn’t help pine for what might have been when the game quickly revealed itself as a puzzlefest where you romped across a wacky, uninhabited castle. But that means this year I was happy to see that the protagonist’s notional job as a reality-TV producer fell just as quickly by the wayside, as Willy’s Manor is similarly a puzzlefest where you romp across a wacky, uninhabited mansion.

Warm Reception wasn’t especially sophisticated but it had enthusiasm and charm, and that’s another thing it has in common with Willy’s Manor. Structurally, you need to solve a series of clues (notionally, this is a test a novelty-company magnate has set for you before he’ll agree to being featured on your show, which is at least a new one) by depositing the answer to a riddle into a box in order to get the next clue, and occasionally a key opening up a new area of the house. Most of the riddles are pretty straightforward, both because the game isn’t especially large, and because they tend to the hoary – the old “what do the poor have but the rich lack” one gets trotted out. And that final coat of polish is conspicuously absent: beyond a fair number of typos, items are sometimes still mentioned in descriptions after you take them, there are a lot of default responses that don’t fit the tone of the game, and some obvious synonyms remain unimplemented.

Still, I didn’t come across any flat-out bugs, and there is that charm I mentioned. The eponymous Willy is a devotee of slapstick and awful puns, and while none of them are laugh-out-loud funny, the corniness of the “full moon” you see above a skylight is easy to enjoy. It also turns out that there is an actual connection between the answers to all the riddles, one that’s surprisingly sweet – though of course that sweetness has only a few moments to linger before hitting a final silly joke. The game also gets a little less simple towards the end; the last major location you unlock has a reasonably sophisticated gimmick to it, and plays host to some more satisfying puzzles that take a little bit of thinking to solve (though admittedly one of these, involving entering a pond with no indication that that’s possible or desirable, is under-clued). And the late-game “liebrary” is legitimately clever without being overly complicated.

Am I over-estimating the game’s virtues out of relief that I didn’t actually have to think about reality TV during its running time? Possibly, but while Willy’s Manor is doing things a million small comedy-parser games have done before, it does them with a sincere smile, and that’s worth something – and so too is the fact that it’s a clear improvement over its predecessor. Let’s see, maybe next time out the protagonist can be an investment banker, and we might be entering modern-classic territory.

Willy’s Manor MR.txt (67.0 KB)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Imperial Throne, by Alex Crossley

Everyone knows that the worst part of parser-based IF is guess-the-verb puzzles. What Imperial Throne presupposes is – maybe it’s the best?

Admittedly, the setup here is fairly unique, and far afield from wrestling with medium dry-goods in an eccentric relative’s mansion. The game plops you down on the eponymous seat, placing you in command of a fantasy empire boasting rich provinces, inconsistently-competent generals, restive peasants, impious priests, and more rival powers than you can shake a stick at. From your exalted perch, you can examine all of the above and more, and ask your advisor to provide a bit of color commentary on them, but that’s about it in terms of traditional IF commands; trying to move about or take stuff just tells you that these things are unbecoming to and unnecessary for an emperor. There’s no ABOUT text to provide any direction, so what can you do? Just type stuff in and see if it’ll work.

And, thrillingly, there’s a lot of stuff that works. I cooed with happiness half a dozen times at seeing my ideas for governance accepted by the parser – I’m having to restrain myself from listing off half a dozen examples, but since this is a case where spoilers really do undercut the enjoyment the game offers, I’ll just note that one of my early priorities was establishing sumptuary taxes to support a shipbuilding program that I think made my foreign trade more lucrative. Yes, you can just type TAX SILK, and Imperial Throne will make that happen. At its best, the game manages to recapture the I-can-do-anything feeling experienced by the earliest players of parser games – I’m too young to have experienced that first-hand, but now I have a far greater appreciation for how impactful that must have been. Like, you can intervene in the capital’s culture, respond to crimes with punishments lenient and severe, balance class interests, and of course shuffle around troops to engage in great-power adventurism! And OK, I can’t help adding one more, though I’ll spoiler-block it: BUILD BRIDGE ON LOCANUS will give a military advantage to your soldiers when they need to cross that river to retaliate against a neighboring kingdom’s raids!

The impact of all these decisions isn’t always clear – you’ll note that I only had a guess about what all those ships were accomplishing for me. While your emperor-o-vision lets you see the troops, leaders, and resources at your command, it provides only vague information about foreign policy or domestic unrest. Where a Civilization or Paradox strategy game would give you dials, charts, and numbers galore, Imperial Throne just gives you a sentence or two. This feels restrictive, but in a way that more authentically captures the experience of pre-modern rulership: this is a fantasy kingdom, but one without magic or other shortcuts that would allow a state to see or know things that historically required a significant bureaucracy and educational infrastructure. You get told that opening up the granaries to starving peasants softened a famine’s impacts and reduced unrest, but not that you lost 3 farmer populations and unrest notched own by 2, which helps keep the game’s mechanical underpinnings from showing through too baldly.

There are some rough edges and limitations, of course. The game’s opacity is a critical part of what makes it work, but it did lead to frustration when I couldn’t figure out the syntax to incorporate potatoes into my subsistence agriculture, and I was surprised that I couldn’t imprison a particular troublemaker, only execute him (all the more so when I saw that the walkthrough seemed to think that should have been possible, too). Keeping track of all the different made-up names of people, provinces, and kingdoms, is really difficult, since they’re all so much fantasy gobbledygook, and there are no built-in help features tracking this stuff, so you’d better have been taking good notes if you want to move a specific general to a specific place. And there are some minor bugs and a lack of polish; besides the aforementioned issues with imprisonment, X LABORERS got me a “runtime error: invalid comparison”, and a fair number of things just give the default “you see nothing unusual about them” response (even the potatoes, which had been brought back by an explorer returning from a far-off land!)

The biggest issue, though, is just that once the thrill of discovery wears off, there’s not much to keep the player engaged. After about 150 turns, I’d pretty much figured out what I could do, and while different events kept happening, they were mostly variations on what had come before, and the thing is playing a simple strategy game with a parser interface isn’t that intrinsically enjoyable. So when an ally I’d carefully cultivated suddenly turned on me after some domestic upheaval, I checked the walkthrough, saw that I’d uncovered like 90% of the possibility space, and decided I couldn’t be bothered laboriously shuffling troops around to fight off the invasion; I just hammered Z until the end game (joke’s on the betrayers, though, actually one of my generals took advantage of the chaos to get declared Emperor and toppled me after a brief civil war). But there’s no way to avoid that kind of come-down in a game built around experimentation – inevitably, you eventually run out of new stuff. But until that point arrives, Imperial Throne is a lovely little toy to mess around with, and I’m looking forward to reading other reviews to see what I might have missed.

Imperial Throne MR.txt (51.9 KB)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Cart, by Brett Witty

Cart is a choice-based game where you play a night-soil man (baldly: someone who collects human excreta and sells it for fertilizer) trying to eke out an existence at the margins of a brutal society rife with classism, racism, and brutality. The most impactful choices hinge on how far you’re willing to stick your neck out for a Roma boy who, at least in my playthrough never exchanged a single word with me. And it’s all rendered in ornate prose that takes a bunch of big swings that hit much more often than they miss. Yes, everything about Cart appeals to me, except for one tiny word in the blurb: the genre is listed as “allegory.”

It’s not that I’m completely allergic to them. Sure, when done lazily they can be witless exercises in matching a thin fictionalization to its real-world counterpart, with nothing to offer but a mildly-enjoyable recognition. But there are plenty of richer examples, too, where translating an aspect of everyday experience, heightening and recontextualizing it, helps us see more clearly: think of Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares, or the cannibalistic Stalinism of Animal Farm. No, the trouble is that right now, allegory feels besides the point, since whatever you can say about the current omnicrises roiling the globe – of governance, of the environment, of simple human decency – lack of clarity isn’t a complaint you can levy; we all know exactly what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what horrifying consequences it will have, it’s all spelled out for us every day in pellucid detail. What could allegory possibly add to this picture?

Fortunately, while per the above summary Cart clearly has plenty of present-day resonance, there’s more to it than simple this-for-that transposition of current events. First off, there’s something appealingly mythical about the protagonist. A victim of circumstance, he actually takes on the night-soil man’s trappings and identity when his predecessor is killed by a crackdown on some “undesirables”; that this degraded job is his by choice underscores his previous desperation, and takes him more to the realm of folklore than allegory. Then there’s the prose, which is written in a complex, convoluted style that serves to conceal what it’s doing until just before the whip cracks:

They cannot in their own conscience pay you enough to forget that you aren’t servicing the arse end of society. Perhaps this is why your predecessor was a gambler rather than a drunk —- this amount of coin can merely buy hope, not ignorance.

Or:

Around the corner you hear the confederated slap of guard boots against the road. Probably two guards, judging from the banter. You do not open your eyes. You do not move. While you lack many things, chief among them is the need to invite attention.

It’s not all aphorism, though – the dialogue of your chief tormentor’s henchmen is positive Deadwood-y (says the guy who’s never seen Deadwood, but I know it by reputation). Here’s one reminiscing about a particularly enthusiastic session of keeping the hoi polloi in their place:

It was a bountiful feast for a hungry truncheon!

Inevitably, there are some stumbles – at one point, the game informed me that “a dark rumination descends upon you” – but they’re easy to overlook when the average is as good as it is.

The game doesn’t immerse you too much in the abject routine of your profession – though the occasional reference to “the warm, variegated latrine slurry” is enough to evoke a shudder – which is perhaps part of the allegory we’re warned about; it’s enough to establish that the protagonist is a pariah, but that’s not what Cart is about. The set pieces where you must navigate a series of choices are where its interest truly lies, and these are presented as moral dilemmas without pat answers: do you defile the dead to help the living, how far will you go to deflect attention from that Romany boy without drawing too much to yourself? It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the very first choice is about whether to eat an apple…

Cart is at its rawest in the climax. Partially that’s because the pacing feels a bit abrupt; I was settling into the game’s rhythms and enjoying seeing its world slowly expand, so while I understood this story would have a violent end, I didn’t want or expect it to come so soon. Partially that’s because when the antagonist is a nativist orator ranting about racialized others eating pets, we’re straying into the ponderous sort of allegory. But the ending sticks the landing: you’re confronted with another tense choice with unclear but high stakes and then get crushed down by despair, before the epilogue offers a tiny sliver of light by presenting a flat-eyed view of what the end of fascism actually usually looks like.

This, I think, is where the allegory is successful: it’s not about showing us anything new or unique about the villains, because we know all about them already and they’re banal, empty figures. Instead, Cart explores the way that our actions in a time of oppression at the same time matter very little, but also matter enormously; the dream of escaping degradation and overturning an unjust order with the power of words or the revelation of elite corruption in a single redemptive moment is just a dream, after all, and it’s important to recognize that, just as it’s important to know that not everyone will survive persecution. But it’s just as important to know that evil does come to an end, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad, and the decisions we make can determine who’s there to greet that new day, and what they’re carrying forward to meet it – and that’s an allegory that helps us look beyond to the horrors of the news cycle to bigger, true things.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Horse Whisperer, by nucky

After more than 30 years, the Comp has accumulated a body of folk wisdom, tips and tricks, and helpful pointers about how authors can best position their work for a successful reception. Sadly, this store of knowledge is built atop the broken debris of promising games that demonstrated what not to do, and sadder still, Horse Whisperer, which boasts an engagingly oddball premise (you’re a horse psychologist trying to fix a race for the mob) and more than its share of solid gags, must join this host of fallen exemplars, offering an illustration of the lesson that if the phrase “untested alpha build” appears anywhere in your game or blurb in a non-diegetic context, you should withdraw and resubmit next year (or to Spring Thing! There’s always Spring Thing!)

It would feel mean to catalogue all the errors I ran into trying to play Horse Whisperer, but there are a lot and they’re obvious – none more so than the dialogue options currently marked with asterisks, which when you click them take you to a “sorry, coming soon” passage. The logic linking the results of your actions to an ending appears either broken or absent, since the outcome of the race ignored that I’d psyched up one horse, demoralized another, and disqualified a third (the disqualified horse came in second place). Oh, and the race happened a day after it was supposed to.

Again, this is a shame, since this dark, absurdist take on Mr. Ed has some comedic potential that’s occasionally well-realized, and the author clearly has a lot of fun ideas for how to elaborate on the premise. But it’s not spitting-distance to done, even for a horse. Hopefully in addition to being a warning sign to others on the dangers of submitting an incomplete game to the Comp, Horse Whisperer will also be fodder for the author to come back next year (or again, this coming spring!) with something that lives up to the promise that’s on display here. Until then, the game isn’t stable enough to… be able to make much hay? These horse puns are harder than they look!

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

The Burger Meme Personality Test, by Carlos Hernandez

Have you ever taken a personality test for work?

A: No.

B: Yes, once.

C: Yes, more than once.

D: My work is administering personality tests.

If B or C, did the exercise seem worthwhile?

A: No, because it didn’t tell me or my managers anything we didn’t already know.

B: No, because I lied on all the answers.

C: Yes, because the insights I gleaned helped me increase my performance and

D: Yes, because if I hadn’t taken it they would have fired me.

Are work-administered personality tests a good topic for comedy?

A: …I admit it’s not one I would have ever thought of on my own.

B: I suppose it’s an experience that a reasonable number of folks have shared?

C: This game is funny, so I guess my answer has to be yes.

D: All of the above.

What about a multiple-choice test, is that a good format for comedy?

A: No.

B: No.

C: Yes?

D: Well, I’m writing this review, what do you think.

What line in the game made you laugh the hardest?

A: “Ready to learn a little more about yourself and not hold Burger Meme™ responsible for any trauma this required voluntary test may cause?”

B: “Social Skills: BRACE FOR IMPACT, HR.”

C: “Liberal Arts majors don’t historically become productive members of the Burger Meme™ family. They become ‘whistleblowers’ who ‘believe in the dignity of workers’ and ‘try to start unions’ so that employees can ‘take profits from parasitic shareholders and redistribute them to employees.’”

D: “It would be like trying to work at Disney and being afraid of lawsuits.”

From that answer, I’m wondering whether this comedy game is actually more of a satire of bad corporate behavior?

A: Yes, though Burger Meme is so cartoonishly evil and short-sighted that the critique doesn’t seem like it could possibly apply to any actual corporation.

B: Yes, and now that I think about it, it’s almost certainly the case that corporations really are using AI chatbots to interrogate prospective hires and using the results to make decisions, and good lord that’s bleak.

C: No, because the test gets so zany, so quickly, that the occasional bits of trenchant social commentary don’t have time to breathe.

D: No, of course not (please don’t fire me).

Why do you think the Burger Meme test-administrator-bot tracks answers that it doesn’t like as “Sins”?

A: It’s a statement about the ways that corporations try to moralize simple questions of efficiency, in to exploit human beings’ natural pro-social instincts.

B: It’s a mechanic that unlocks a unique ending if you finish the game with exactly seven sins.

C: It’s an acronym for “Situationally INapposite Solution.”

D: None of the above.

What was the first ending you got, and why was it a failure?

A: I got too belligerent with the AI.

B: I got too friendly with the AI.

C: I admitted I was also an AI.

D: I admitted I was a vegetarian.

Final assessment:

Analytic acumen: 63%

Comedic chops: 24%

Overall employability: 17%

Potential role in the Burger Meme™ family:

A: High-concept corporate-retreat designer.

B: Customer experience technician.

C: Ingredients.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Fascism – Off-Topic, by eavesdropper

One of the vanishingly few advantages of the current political environment in the US is that it’s largely put to bed the tedious “is MAGA really fascism, or just sparkling authoritarianism?” debates. Scan the headlines – or hell, go outside, I live in LA and used to live in DC – and it’s clear that fascism is the air that we breathe, the water in which we swim. It’s everywhere around us, it’s totalizing in its ambition to reduce all of society to the coddled in-group, licensed to glut on violence and graft to try in vain to satisfy their sociopathy and daddy issues, and the abject out-group, stripped of rights and property and dignity. Fascism, sad to say, is pretty much always on-topic these days.

Except, famously, for that recent forum topic spun off a thread on the itch.io de-indexing of NSFW content, after some sea-lioning led to one more of those “but are they really fascists?” conversations I thought we were well quit of. Yes, pity the poor player coming to this one fresh, Fascism – Off-Topic is a forum in-joke come to life. But come back! It’s actually pretty fun!

Well, fun is maybe not le mot juste for a game that sticks you in a moving subway car opposite a couple having a yeah-they’re-definitely-breaking-up-after-this argument. Around this central conflict is arranged a well-realized suite of furniture, both plastic and human – there are some tourists, a guy playing chess on his phone, a lady listening to loud music on her headphones, but they’re all minding their own business, or at least pretending to do so while eavesdropping on the fight, just like you are. This is a parser game, so you’re free to check out the surroundings as things between the couple escalate, but since you’re in a subway car there’s no place you can go, and nothing you can do.

Well, actually, there’s one thing you can do. You see, you’ve just read an article about fascism (note the singular there), and you’re raring to share your opinions about it (well, again, it’s more like an opinion). As a result, my heart sank when I saw the response to X ME: “Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic.” In fairness, I also more or less meet that description, and the protagonist’s thoughts about fascism are a bit in the weeds but not that bad, thankfully, but waiting to see what he’ll say adds an additional layer of anticipatory squirming as you watch the blowout escalate.

Once you intuit the command to talk about fascism, you can do so at any time – but the game’s central, nay only, mechanic is that most of the time, this comes off as a non-sequitur. So your challenge, if you are a bad enough dude to accept it, is to pick your moment so that you can make fascism on-topic. It’s a cleverer conceit than an in-joke game needs, as it forces the player to think about the ways that this couple are berating each other might mirror the larger patterns of abuse fascists inflict on subject populations. That’s of course a big, depressing topic, and this is a small, mostly-funny game, so I wouldn’t say the insight is life-changingly trenchant or anything. But it does get at some intersections of politics, gender, and control that are worth slowing down and examining.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Fascism – Off Topic is super serious, though. While the argument is downer, the rest of the cast are engaging in funny little bits of ambient business to lighten the mood, none more so than the unobtrusive old guy who surreptitiously eats a raw onion – I completely lost it when, upon finishing, he pulled out a second. And it’s not just this patter that indicates a solid level of polish; the implementation is generally quite strong, with thoughtful synonyms helping avoid the multiple men and women in the car sending the player to disambiguation hell, and good cueing helping signal the verb you’ll use to trigger your fascistic monologue.

There are a few places where things are a bit rough – it might have been nice to have some alternatives to that custom verb for folks more familiar with Inform’s traditional ASK/TELL conversation system, and I think the timing on the ending banners is off by one, since I saw the “winning” version fire the turn before the one where the fascism-talk provokes a response from the couple. But these are minor niggles, and this isn’t exactly the kind of game where a months-long beta testing process is a reasonable expectation. And at the end of the day, I don’t think we actually need to worry about players who come to the game knowing nothing about forum spats and thread splits: Fascism – Off Topic stands well enough on its own, pushing us to consider the ways totalitarianism has its roots in everyday interpersonal relationships, and also to consider knowing more than one thing about it because again, fascism is unfortunately kind of a big deal right now.

* I should probably disclose that I believe a joke I made when discussing the forum contretemps is incorporated into the game. But as I barely remember the joke, and anyway ideas matter far less than implementation, I think I can rate and review in good faith!

fascism mr.txt (28.4 KB)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

A Smörgåsbord of Pain, by FLAC Rabbit

There have been a lot of lessons to be drawn from the explosive growth of superhero movies over the last decade and a half, one of the more positive of which is the way they can escalate. You introduce a hero, maybe a half-sketched-in sidekick, they mostly fight mooks before the last set-piece kicks things up a notch – nothing wrong with that! But then soon enough you’ve got a team of dozens, with factions, betrayals, time travel, multiverses, romances, deaths, MacGuffins upon MacGuffins…

A Smörgåsbord of Pain is a sequel to 2022’s A Matter of Heist Urgency, and if it doesn’t quite speedrun the entire Iron-Man-to-Endgame progression, it’s dramatically more ambitious. The first game was largely an exercise in trying out some ideas for designing fight scene in a parser game, with a memorably off-kilter premise (anthropomorphic super-hero pony fights pirate llamas) and a final scene where you could leaven the simple punching and kicking with some environmental swashbuckling. But Anastasia the Power Pony’s second adventure is no mere proof-of-concept – we get to see her in her secret identity, there’s a chase, a much more assured combat sequence, some investigation and infiltration, revelations, and a gonzo climax featuring half a dozen combatants, an optional sidekick, and more buffet-based mayhem than you can shake a hoof at. I haven’t gotten to Murderworld yet, so I suppose it’s got competition in the best-superhero-adventure category, but it’s definitely an impressive showing.

The humor is a big part of what makes the game so enjoyable. Smörgåsbord makes the genius choice to play its bonkers setup completely straight, never acknowledging that there’s anything inherently funny about a pony with an office job and super-strength. Instead, jokes are made at the expense of overly-pretentious martial arts (“Many martial arts emphasize ‘philosophy,’ ‘understanding,’ or even ‘learning how to fight so one does not have to fight.’ Such ideas betray a true lack of enlightenment and deserve no attention…. Remember, we are here to learn how to beat people up.”), default Inform responses (“When you conclude that violence is the answer, simply >ATTACK, >PUNCH, >KICK, >WHAP, or even >CLONK the source of your problems”), Scandinavian cuisine (there is a lot of lutefisk at the titular buffet), and banal chit-chat with coworkers you despise (the opening dialogue about whether there are usually waiters and menus at buffets could work as a scene from The Office). I laughed very hard when Anastasia’s sensei noted that “wordplay is almost 89% of swordplay” (yes, there’s a pun-based fighting style), and harder at the dialogue options when I stormed into the eponymous restaurant bent on justice:

“D-Do you have reservations?” [the host] inquires, trying to maintain his composure.

1. “Not about using violence.”

The production values are also absurdly high. There are great feelies, two maps and a martial-arts how-to that contains some of the best jokes in the game. The implementation also feels deluxe, with social interaction feeling especially rich – there’s a menu-based conversation system, but you can also interrupt that to ASK/TELL about an impressive array of topics; I don’t recall getting a single generic response, though admittedly this is more a game about action than talking. And there’s a newscast sequence midway through that’s one of the most impressive visuals I’ve ever seen in an Inform game; I think I can kind of guess at how it’s put together, but I can only applaud the audacity to even attempt such a thing, much less the chops to pull it off so well.

It’s not entirely rainbows and unicorns, though. Another lesson of superhero cinema – and one it shares with buffets – is that that’s possible to have too much of a good thing. While I was initially delighted at the prospect of a throwdown in the restaurant, since I was looking forward to a food fight from the first scene where the location appeared, in practice I found this sequence way too involved and fiddly to be as fun as I wanted it to be. It’s set in a big, 5x5 region, with half a dozen enemies across multiple waves of reinforcements moving around to pursue you, so I found it very difficult to keep track of where everyone was, even when referencing the included map. There’s also a high degree of randomness that governs when your attacks, and those of your enemies, land, which meant that some of my attempts petered out much quicker than others. Meanwhile, success largely depends on coming up with pun-based uses for the buffet’s food, which is a great idea, but in practice slowed things down as I tried to come up with the appropriate joke, which was often frustrating: it’s great fun to WAYLAY an enemy WITH HAY, but I couldn’t TICKLE with PICKLES, or ROUT with SPROUTS, HARRASS with GLASS, or NAIL WITH SNAILS… given the significant number of food items in the buffet, and the large number of dumb jokes you can make with the English language, it’d be unreasonable to ask that all of this stuff work, I suppose, but the difficulty of this sequence is tuned hard enough that I felt like I’d have needed to figure out a lot of the trickier puns, not just the obvious ones, in order to win, not to mention getting lucky with the RNG.

Fortunately, the game lets you proceed even if a sequence proves too hard, and the actual final bit is much more forgiving, and wound up playing to my strengths (let me just say that as the parent to a science-oriented almost-four-year-old, my practice making baking-soda volcanos stood me in good stead). And everything up too that point had a well-judged curve of escalation, especially the stealthy bit at the end of act 2, which has some really good puzzles. If Smörgåsbord gets a little top-heavy towards the end, well, at least it’s never anywhere near as ponderous as the MCU’s worst excesses. For all that I’m definitely suffering from superhero fatigue at the movie theater, I’m definitely down for more Anastasia – maybe just don’t demand such rigor from a silly food fight next time?

pain mr.txt (147.4 KB)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Your Very Last Words, by Interactive Dreams

Is there anything more talismanic than last words? There are fictional characters – and real people too! – defined completely by the all-time great way they went out: who knows anything about Nathan Hale, or that guy from Tale of Two Cities, other than their eminently quotable exits? And “badass” is only one viable strategy, like, imagine how much time humanity has collectively spent trying to figure out what the heck Socrates meant about that chicken. In fact you can get a lot of mileage out of enigma – “Rosebud” is the engine that powers Citizen Kane, after all. They even have a special power in the law: dying declarations are exempted from the rules against hearsay evidence because of their gravitas. So kudos to Your Very Last Words for zeroing in on a perfect scenario for interactive fiction; we’re all head-over-heels for words already, so how can we resist the chance to author a sentence written in lightning whose thunder will reverberate down the ages?

Of course, in reality last words usually don’t live up to their billing. People who are close to death are often confused by pain and medication, and there can sometimes be disagreement about what a person’s last words actually were. Plus, most of us aren’t Socrates, or being written by Charles Dickens – for all that it can be morbidly fun to fantasize about the words of wisdom we’ll bequeath to our loved ones as we leave them for the last time, don’t we also nurse a secret fear that they’ll lean forward, pens at the ready to note down our valedictory phrase, only to shoot each other guilty looks once we’ve departed, disappointed at how banal our dying thoughts proved to be? And if that’s the case, kudos I suppose too to Your Very Last Words for being a bit muddled in its implementation and less than piercing in its prose.

Judged just on its mechanics, this is a very odd duck, and an underexplained one, if a duck can be underexplained. The way it works is that you’re facing a firing squad, and the sergeant derisively gives you a few minutes to think of something to say before he orders the bullets to fly. Your character says a sentence or two, reminiscing about the revolution that brought them to this awful end, their grieving family, or the fate of their country, and then the player gets to choose one of three phrases with which to complete the thought – though you’re given the unexplained option to choose and remember, or choose without remembering, for whichever one you pick. It turns out that phrases you remember are recorded in a running list tucked under a dialogue bubble in the upper left corner, but these aren’t your actual last words – instead, at the moment before you’re killed, you can choose three of the phrases in your list and slot them together, Mad Libs style, to complete your self-written epitaph. Oh, and at any time you can press E to open your eyes, at which point the game’s black backdrop irises out to reveal a black-and-white 3D rendering of the firing squad and the fellow prisoners being executed alongside you, which you can explore via mouselook.

It’s confusing and awkward, all the more so because some controls are mapped to the keyboard (opening the eyes, advancing to the next bit of dialogue) and some to the mouse (looking around, picking a dialogue option, opening up the list of phrases you’ve recorded). Beyond the interface, I also found the particulars of the protagonist’s predicament hard to come to grips with. This isn’t an abstracted, Platonic ideal of an execution – instead you’ve been caught up in the violence of Mexico’s Ten Tragic Days, when rival generals who’d launched a coup against the incumbent president unleashed terror against supporters of the regime. This is a historical period that I must admit I know vanishingly little about, and while the game provides some proper nouns, it doesn’t give much more so unless you’ve got a solid grounding in Mexican history you’d better hit Wikipedia if you want some context. And this isn’t just a matter of idle curiosity – it was hard for me to have a handle on which dialogue options I wanted to pick when the protagonist was lamenting the loss of freedom and the fate of his country, without knowing whether he was likely a right-wing or left-wing paramilitary! Meanwhile, the personal side of the monologue often felt melodramatic, which I suppose is as much due to the structure as anything else – when the screen only displays a dozen words at a time, the main way to make brevity have an impact is to get histrionic. And likewise, there’s not really enough detail for a personality to emerge; in a longer work, there could be poignancy in the way the protagonist mourns for the loss of his lover and unborn child, only to reflect on the many, many other lovers and many, many other illegitimate children he’s sired, but as it is I found it injected a presumably-unwanted comic note.

The nail in the coffin is that I found it really hard to string my list of isolated phrases together into a coherent, much less powerful, set of last words. Because they’re not drawn from consecutive sentences, it was challenging to create syntactical connections between the three phrases, much less substantive or thematic ones. Plus, trying to bridge the personal and the political felt too challenging since there’s so little real estate to work with – but choosing one over the other felt like giving short shrift to the game’s full set of themes.

I admire what Your Very Last Words is trying to do – I like idiosyncratic games, personal games, and historical games very much, and it certainly checks all three boxes. But as with the fetishization of last words, it tries to pack too much into too few phrases, and as a result it buckles under its own weight. After all, last words carry the most weight when we can see how they’re a capstone for a full life: without that broader background, they might as well be written in water.

[FLACRabbit]

Thank you for the review. It looks like you hit a really obscure bug that none of my beta-testers caught which prevented several implemented pun attacks from working. I’ve updated the game to fix that issue, and some other minor errors that you came across. I added some of the extra puns you came up with, too!

In particular, I really appreciate that you provided a transcript. I’m not getting very many online transcripts this time, so it’s helpful to be able to see what exactly you tried.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Great, I’m glad the transcript was helpful and you managed to squash that bug! My struggles in that scene really were the only fly in an otherwise-amazing ointment; heck, you can see from the transcript I still played through it I think four times before giving up

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Errand Run, by Sophia Zhao

Despite its short play-time, Errand Run engages with a number of different themes, but there’s one I keep coming back to, possibly because it’s increasingly salient of late: how do you tolerate the intolerable? It’s no spoiler, I think, to reveal that what initially appears to be a simple trip to the grocery store with twenty bucks in your pocket is concealing something darker than just dealing with the impacts of inflation; the first passage glancingly averts to wrongness by mentioning in passing that all the shopping baskets are scattered around upside-down, but the second passage leaves subtlety behind:

THEYRE JUST ONIONS FOR GODSSAKE but your mind is a bullet a knife slicing splitting s u n d e r i n g each precious layer ghostprickleof tears in your eyes

(The last four words are blurred).

The text effects calm down after that, save for an ominous red-shift as you near the ending, but the intimations of exactly how much has gone wrong keep escalating; often you’ll see a potentially disturbing phrase that, when clicked, turns anodyne: “the fly died” becomes “the fly flew all the way back to home to make little fly babies,” for example (though depending on how you feel about flies, it occurs to me, maybe the latter is worse than the former). The gameplay loop remains consistent throughout, with each new aisle peeling back a layer of the protagonist’s denial, and providing more clues about the enormity of what’s happened – there aren’t any real choices to make, but fortunately, at ten minutes, this simple structure doesn’t wear out its welcome, and when the last band-aid is ripped off, what we’re presented with is memorable in its details, and appropriately grand guignol, even if it’s not especially novel (I seem to recall a Comp game from four or five years ago with a largely similar take on the Rapture).

So Errand Run is an effective little horror story, sounding in delusion and religious mania and post-apocalyptic nihilism, but as I said up top, the reading I’m finding most resonant right now focuses on the protagonist’s actions as a form of coping. While there’s an implication that their perceptions may sometimes be confused by trauma, I think it’s more frequently the case that they’re trying to recontextualize and ignore the evidence of their senses, rather than suffering full-bore hallucination. That is, the protagonist knows that things have gone to hell, but just continues to engage in quotidian rituals like grocery-shopping to propitiate the devils of despair. At a time when the aspirations that gave our lives meaning seem increasingly questionable, and our own devils of despair seem not just real, but in charge of major government agencies (this store’s take on food safety has nothing on RFK Jr’s), Errand Run feels as much of a political story as a supernatural one. Just going through the motions can keep the hounds at bay, but for how long? We’re down to a rotting back of onions and two packs of cinnamon gum; eventually something will have to give.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

A Conversation in a Dark Room, by Leigh Ferrier

What do vampires have in common with the X-Men? The glib answer is “Vampire: the Masquerade” – yes, we all played it as superheroes with fangs, no, there’s nothing wrong with that – but the one I had in mind is the racism-analogy problem. See, in any genre fiction where you’ve got a distinct and insular minority who are set apart from the ordinary mass of humanity, like because they’re mutants or they drink blood, it’s tempting to lean into the subtext and start telling stories about how the ways they’re set apart resemble real-world discrimination. There can be some rich vines of pathos and thematic weight to mine here, and it can be a solid on-ramp into political awareness (I can’t definitively claim that various 80s comic books where religious reactionaries whip up vicious mobs had no impact on my current views), so I don’t mean to knock the practice by any means. But it runs into difficulties when you try to take the metaphor too literally, because at the end of the day the people who hate and fear vampires or mutants? They, uh, kind of have a point, given the extreme danger they pose to ordinary people, outside the techniques of control we accept as part of a liberal democracy. It’s not crazy to not want to live next door to a bloodthirsty creature of the night or someone who can turn your curtain rod into a deadly weapon, after all, but this gets awkward when curtain-rod guy is a stand-in for Black people or trans folks or what have you.

There are various strategies for dealing with this, of course, from steering into the skid (I haven’t read it, but I understand there’s a recent X-Men run where mutants basically set up their own nation-state, with an implicit threat of global annihilation keeping the jealous superpowers at bay) to the one Conversation in a Dark Room employs, which is to neuter the threat. Again, I understand the impulse, since the vampires in this game are clearly meant to evoke real-world marginalized groups (the bit of dialogue saying “[y]ou may even have vampire coworkers, you know. It’s not as easy as you think to spot us these days” is a bit on the nose, as is the bit about how the label “vampire” is applied as a blanket term despite the fact that most of them are “mixed”, with varying degrees of human-ness), and part of the point of the game appears to be to put the protagonist’s unexamined group-hatred of vampires under the microscope, so this wouldn’t work the same way if vampires were draining people dry willy-nilly. But there’s part of me that rebels at seeing horror’s ur-predators defanged as comprehensively as they are here: we’re told that rather than drinking human blood, they’ve created a network of humane farms that sustainably harvest non-life-threatening amounts of animal blood, as well as invented synthetic blood alternatives; oh, and they mostly don’t even reproduce, having decided that subjecting other people to their immortal curse would be mean. And as far as we’re told, vampires are a monolithic block who agree with these Jain-style precepts – given that they also don’t burst into flames in the sunlight, they come off as especially long-lived, super nice goths.

This is a shame, because with real menace on the table, Conversation in a Dark Room could be have been a nail-biter. A two-hander where a vampire and the human he’s hired to kill him chit-chat before getting down to the deed is a great premise, and there’s some queasily compelling writing in the dialogue, especially the bits that make it look like what’s happening here is a seduction:

He asks you, “Have you ever done something like this before?”

“No…No, I haven’t. Not like this. But…”

It’s also played for comedic effect – like, this is a very different kind of date:

So what do you do, anyway?" His voice broke your trance.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What do you do? You know, for work?”

And while the vampire’s motives for choosing annihilation aren’t spelled out, and don’t seem to go too far beyond the traditional tropes of the modern vampire mythos, the author knows how to play the hits:

He sighs. “When you live a long time, you…experience a great array of things. You’d think the world would be full of endless opportunities and feelings and experiences, but the truth is, much of it is the same. And at the same time, some of it is impossible to replicate, and you’ll spend your whole life chasing it.”

So the ingredients are here for a tense yet melancholy battle of wits, but some of the narrative and design choices sap the setup of its power. Again, the major issue is that the vampire just doesn’t seem scary; it’s certainly possible that he’s just gaslighting the protagonist about how woke the modern vamp is, but there’s no indication that’s the case, which makes it feel like the protagonist’s vendetta against the undead is just a thoughtless prejudice rather than anything to take seriously (at least in the two run-throughs I played, these feelings don’t stem from a specific grievance or incident that would make them feel more reasonable or psychologically grounded). Further undercutting my identification with the protagonist, they appear to be the worst journalist ever: despite their job being all about asking questions, and an apparently longstanding distaste for vampires, they seem to have never pondered, much less done research to resolve, various important matters about how vampires live and feed. For a blank-slate whose ignorance is meant to provide an excuse for world-building exposition, this would be easier to overlook, but instead, as mentioned their animus towards vampires is positioned as a major reason why they’ve taken on this assignment in the first place.

Below the narrative layer, the mechanics also make proceedings more ho-hum than they could have been. There are multiple different endings you can achieve, with your path through the story largely determined by your scores along three axes: wallow in your aggression, and you can get Hatred points, while asking lots of questions gains Intrigue and commiserating with the vampire earns Empathy. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to gain these points, meaning I found it hard to proactively think about trying to shape the character along different extremes; instead I clicked around and hoped for the best, which led to a balanced score along the three gauges, but also an ending that paid off the setup without adding much in the way of surprises – it’s possible to overstate the value of novelty, of course, but again, this game feels to me like it wants to be structured as a thriller, which requires at least one good twist or gear-shift.
Still, all this puts Conversation in a Dark Room at “well-written vampire game with solid politics and themes,” which isn’t a bad place to be, and I haven’t even mentioned the neat visual presentation and interface bells and whistles, like a customized note-taking tool. It’s a testament to its promise that I can’t help but imagine a game that leans into, rather than away from, its darker moments, and mines richer emotions than just world-weary pathos from a premise that, again, seems very well-chosen – and it’s not like I think anyone’s actually ever solved the racism-analogy problem, it’s just that it can be more fun to read the more spectacular failures. Conversation in a Dark Room isn’t a failure by any means, but it could have stood to take a few more risks.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Hobbiton Recall, by MR JD BARDI

Mashing up J.R.R. Tolkien with Philip K. Dick isn’t an idea that feels obvious, even in retrospect. Sure, they both gained their greatest popularity in the 60s and each had at least one prominent middle initial, other than that? Tolkien’s reputation rests on a few long books, Dick’s on a flurry of short ones; Dick was the bard of a quintessentially American brand of paranoia, Tolkien of a quintessentially English brand of heroism. One searches in vain in Tolkien for Dick’s signature themes of identity, surveillance, and the contingent nature of reality, while Dick deals with Tolkienian motifs like the quest, the redemption of the powerful by the weak, and the tragedy of corruption infrequently and ironically.

Hobbiton Recall’s synthesis of these two authors at first, then, seems to work only at the level of plot – per the blurb, the game runs through the narrative of We Can Remember it for you Wholesale/Total Recall, except with the Martian espionage angle swapped for adventure in Middle-Earth – rather than any substantive connection. But sadly it swiftly becomes clear that it’s working in one tradition common to both of them: being fucking terrible at writing women. Dick’s women are either ball-cutting shrews or naïve sexpots, while Tolkien’s of course are mostly just nonexistent, but Hobbiton Recall opts for its own particular blend of misogyny by having the protagonist constantly condescend to and belittle his wife, when he isn’t behaving like a helpless baby reliant on her for his basic needs. It’s a blatantly obvious element of the game’s writing, and I suppose it’s possible that it’s part of a game-long arc that eventually sees the main character eat some crow. But if so, the game plays it very straight for at least its first hour, meaning that when I hit a progress-breaking bug, I couldn’t be bothered to try to find a workaround.

I suppose I should say that that’s a shame. It is nice to see a GrueScript game in the Comp, and part of me admires the fact that the game appears to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, since in that first hour I solved a bunch of my dumb apartment puzzles to get out of the house, and then wound up stuck in some unrelated busywork having to do with a urine sample, before finally getting a chance to try out the memory-implanting technology – but instead of landing me in Hobbiton, it just sent me to the hospital where I ran into the fatal bug. Again, I can’t say for sure whether keeping the player so far away from the actual premise of the game for so long is an accidental design weakness or an intentional provocation, but I admit I was a bit disappointed when I checked the source code and saw that there does appear to be a substantial Middle Earth segment eventually. There are one or two funny jokes (when perusing the memory packages, you respond negatively to the option of remembering a life as an assembly-line worker, because you already are one, only for the sales rep to ask “Yes, but have you ever been an assembly line worker in Kettering?”) and one or two reasonably-satisfying puzzles, like the one where you chase away some hooligans with a stick.

But my god, the whole thing is just so sour. Here’s the introduction of the protagonist’s wife:

Her tongue was hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and a warm patch of drool was forming on her chin. Dave smiled; she looked just like she did when they had met in a crowded bar all those years ago.

What the fuck, game. Right after that, you wake her up in the middle of the night – by pinching her nose closed while she’s sleeping! – to send her to the kitchen to get you a warm glass of milk and a cookie, at which point you’re treated to this I-see-your-what-the-fuck-game-and-raise-you-one-more bit of prose:

Just the one biscuit, mind, too much sugar at this time of night was liable to turn Dave a bit frisky—and she didn’t want that!

Dave lay back on his pillow, his hands fumbling down the front of his pyjama pants.

Some other bits from the game’s opening section:

Mavis has been decorating the landing for the last 3 weeks. You should get on at her to speed things up!

It’s the first room guests see when they enter the house, so you are very strict with Mavis about always keeping it nicely hoovered.

“Would you mind not yawning?” you ask politely. “Not only is it unbecoming of a lady to yawn at the breakfast table, but I also find it extremely sexually unappealing. And what’s more, you’re putting me off my Coco Pops.”

This is where Mavis comes to have a little cry when she’s having one of her ‘episodes’.

It’s not just Mavis – there’s a “joke” later where the death of another worker’s wife is played entirely for laughs, and at the factory there’s a woman who’s hunchbacked and deformed and hideous, and the “joke” here is that nobody talks to her. I suppose it’s not just women who have a bad time of it, as the ill-natured puzzles also include things like playing a screeching tune on the bagpipes to wake up a sleeping cat for no earthly reason. But yeah, it’s definitely mostly about women. At least there is one attractive female character – a sexy nurse who’s having an affair with a married doctor (this is where I hit the bug; I was clearly supposed to use my knowledge of the affair to blackmail the doctor into letting me leave the hospital, but the option never appeared).

If I were trying to be balanced, at this point I’d try to scrape together a few more positive points about the game to offset additional critiques I haven’t yet gotten to (there are more bugs, like a teleporting pen and a urine sample whose description doesn’t update even after you accidentally spill it; several puzzles, like replacing the aforementioned urine with pond water, are underclued or nonsensical, and the “walkthrough” that comes with the game just provides hints and stops about a third of the way in; and the genAI pixel art throughout added one more source of omnipresent irritation to the proceedings). But I can’t find it in me to muster up the energy. I’ll say one thing for Hobbiton Recall – at least next time I read some Tolkien or Dick and roll my eyes at their bad treatment of women, I can think to myself “well, could be worse.”

* I suppose I should note for those interested that @otistdog found a workaround to the hospital bug that should allow progression past that point.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT, by Larissa Janus

DICK MCBUTTS GETS PUNCHED IN THE NUTS famously is two games in one. As part of author Damon Wakes’s successful plot to win the Golden Banana of Discord, it cunningly rolled an invisible set of dice upon boot-up, and depending on the result slotted the player into either a short, obnoxiously-linear vignette focusing on genital trauma with co-starring roles by Hitler, Darth Vader, and copious vomiting, or a longer, still-obnoxious but not linear scenario featuring better jokes and much less flashing text (I got the first, and hate/loved it). I’m not sure whether the sequel, ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, took the same approach, but this third game goes it one better: I’ve heard people confirm that there’s a similar random sorting of players into either a short, linear version or a longer, more robust one, but even having gotten the latter this time out, I’m confronted with a duality: is this a lackluster DICK MCBUTTS sequel, or an elegant DICK MCBUTTS subversion?

Some grounding in what the thing actually is may (but only may) help answer that question. This time out our protagonist is HEN AP PRAT, a Welsh (I think?) trans woman who’s aware of the title of her game and despite acknowledging the ridiculousness of the prediction (since she does not, at least as the game opens, possess the requisite piece of anatomy), locks herself in her apartment and turns to arts cartomantica to fend off her destiny. The game is in DendryNexus rather than Twine, which allows the card-reading conceit to be rendered quite nicely: you deal yourself a hand of three tarot cards, and clicking on one fires you into a zany vignette that typically involves some form of transformation and/or threat to your groin. Some are branching storylets, others are linear, some appear to lead inevitably to a bad end while others are entirely safe, and some get away from the series’ core conceit that getting kicked in the crotch is funny by redefining what being SMACKED IN THE TWAT even means, like maybe it’s just “twat” like the British slang for someone being kinda clueless, you know? (these are the least funny ones) But make no mistake: play for long enough, and one way or another, the title fulfills itself eventually.

There are a number of things one can say about all this. One is that it’s not as funny as its predecessors. Oh, many of the same ingredients are there, like a rotating cast of supporting characters with similarly-constructed names, and wild leaps across genre and plausibility. And there certainly are some jokes that landed for me, like this bit:

At the reception to the clinic - which is typically small, drab and mean-spirited, the seats composed of the severed left halves of benches collected from a gallery of brutalists’ responses to the prompt “imagine a tramp says out loud ‘at least it can’t get any worse’ and then sees your work” and the walls decorated with posters of that homophobic dog meme saying shit like “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE” and “THIS IS THE PART WHERE HE SMACKS YOU” - Hen gives her name to the receptionist, clarifies that it’s her real name even though the receptionist didn’t think it wasn’t, then decides she’s better off just standing in the corner of the waiting room to wait.

But the humor typically earned a smile rather than the impossible-to-control chortles of the first games. For all the ridiculousness, the effective comic bits tend to be like this one, more observational, which is new ground for the series – when HEN AP PRAT tries to go big, it just feels like a shadow of its predecessors, going over old gags to diminishing returns. The presentation also makes a big difference; I missed the Geocities-aping blinking lights and colored text, whose garishness made a better accompaniment for the DICK MCBUTTS humor than the understated class of DendryNexus’s basic black. Speaking of DendryNexus, the storylet structure means there’s not much of a sense of progression, as you could potentially play any card at any time – a big departure from the delightful escalations that marked prior installments, with near-misses piling up one after another and plot twists turning things this way and that, before the whole Jenga tower collapses; some of the vignettes attempt similar moves here, but they just don’t have the runway they need to be as effective.

The biggest issues, though, are that 1) unlike the feel-good comedy of a dude wincing in pain as someone thwacks him in the junk, a woman being kicked in the genitals is unpleasant to contemplate, given the prevalence of gender-based and sexual violence in the real world; and 2) that gets dialed up to a thousand when the woman is a trans woman, given that they’re targeted for violence at even higher rates, not to mention that there’s an entire right-wing movement that’s attempting to institute global fascism largely on the basis of a fetishistic obsession with trans peoples’ genitals. When we’re told that Hen huddles in her apartment, afraid of other people because of the risk of sexual violence, that isn’t a fun premise for a comedy game, that’s real life.

So yeah, as a DICK MCBUTTS game, HEN is a bummer. But, is that what it is? Beyond the already-mentioned DendryNexus of it all, HEN is also attributed to Larissa Janus, rather than the first two game’s Hugh. There’s a family resemblance, of course (I’m guessing she goes by Lar), but might we entertain the hypothesis that a different author, or at least a different authorial persona, is making a different point, and in fact using some of the underpinnings of the series to raise some pointed questions – like, asking the player to engage with how they feel when the threat of groin-assault is leveled against people of different genders and with different genitals, and maybe take that to other experiences of gender identity. Or just noting how, for Hen, acquiring a vagina is a dreadful thing that carries with it a promise of violence, which can come at any moment, from any direction, in fact is guaranteed to come. On that reading, some of the queasiness I mentioned above is the point.

I don’t mean to say that HEN is overly dour – this is still a game where one flip of a card can turn you into She-Ra, after all. But “it’s less funny” might not be the damning judgment it would be if the game was just trying to be a gag-filled sequel; if HEN is DICK MCBUTTS 3, it’s only so-so, but if it’s NEMESIS MCBUTTA instead, well, that’s something else entirely.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and that whole ORIGIN OF THE WORLD subtitle is pretty interesting too, huh? No subtitles for the other two DICK MCBUTTS games, much less one that recalls Courbet’s pornographic provocation, a painting that pointedly exchanges the politely-hairless nudes of the artistic establishment with a vagina drawn from, and to, life.

[Sobol]

If HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT turns out to be written by Damon L. Wakes, I’ll be very surprised.

I suspect it’s another author from IFComp 2024 trying to win the Golden Banana of Discord for the second time in a row.