…you know that feeling where you realize you’re unwittingly inhabiting the stereotype of an old codger pestering the youngsters about the great blizzard of aught-six, or was it aught-seven?
(Thanks for flagging, you’re exactly right!)
5 Likes
Thanks, Mike!
This is a distant prequel to Spire, Surge, and Sea, a Big Old Choicescript Game which does involve boats at times, and which explores a lot of similar themes. The player character in Crescent Sea Story is the king–the bigger game’s main antagonist. He definitely is not intended as an unbiased, objective observer… 
1 Like
The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens, by Lamp Post Productions
I’ve since moved away, but for a long time I lived just a few minutes away from the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, CA. They’re a series of botanical gardens with various theme – there’s a rose garden, one with native plants, some woodier areas, a Japanese garden – plus a library, art museum, and conservatory, all based on the collection and estate of a railroad magnate who was a great philanthropist (but definitely did some shady stuff to make his money). It’s a lovely peaceful place, and I visited it a whole bunch when I leaved nearby, taking friends or family members when they were in town or just going to hang out on a lazy Sunday, in those pre-kid days when lazy Sundays were a thing.
So when I tell you that The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens is a game about spending a bunch of time at a magic version of the Huntington and solving some riddles and mysteries while building friendships and/or romance with a quartet of appealing characters, let there be no doubt that this is extremely my jam. Like, check this:
A handful of visitors mill around, chatting and strolling. A half-elven couple and their toddler feed breadcrumbs to a flock of birds. A boy sits on a bench, absorbed in a book. The connected structures of the central villa, the library building to the East, and the glass conservatory to the West bound this area on three sides. An engraved bronze plaque identifies your location as “NAIADS POOL.”
There are things to do here: the reason you wind up at the Sylvan Gardens is that you’re afflicted by a strange sleepwalking malady that seems to keep drawing you to its grounds, so you’ve decided to investigate in your waking hours. And after you meet the aforementioned characters, they turn out to have their own problems that relate to your own, and running down these interconnected mysteries involves deciphering mythological references, brewing potions, and solving some similar gentle puzzles. These are all engaging enough, but for me the draw is just that this is a very nice place to spend time. There are follies! Two separate characters want to have tea with you upon first meeting them! There are bucolic graphics and a nice little map! The lady who founded this place was named Ploutossina Pecunia, which is a funny Dickensian name and also proof that this is one of those fantasy worlds that definitely had a Rome!
The characters are very nice too. As with the other game of the author’s that I’ve played in this Comp (Path of Totality), they’re all wholesome and down to earth; some of the early sequences hinge on whether you want to tell them all about your predicament or be more cagey, but they’re all so ingenuous I’d be surprised if many players took the latter route. There’s a child-prodigy librarian, a dedicated botanist, an easygoing gardener, a hermit who knows more than he’s letting on… you can choose to romance one of them, but that doesn’t stand in the way of just strengthening your friendships with the others, which are rewarding in themselves: you can go hiking or stargazing or eat a homecooked meal while getting to know them and helping them with their problems. Those problems aren’t exactly subtle – they’re each suffering from a different malady that mirrors your own, and which have thematic resonance with emotional challenges they’re experiencing as well; these are perhaps a bit on the nose, but allow the gameplay bits where you’re trying to lift the curses mirror the relationship dynamics sketched out via dialogue, which I think is a worthwhile trade.
There’s a lot of game here – I think it took me about three hours to get to the end – and I was engaged the whole time, as the game is paced well to make sure you’re always making progress; once I got through the initial setup I was worried that matters with all four characters would progress at the same rate, but actually you’re able to resolve some of their problems reasonably quickly while others linger into the endgame. And there’s one thread that initially seems to be just a bit of backstory on the same level as many others, but which takes on unexpected weight as you head into the endgame: I’m talking, of course, of what to do about the mass killing of the dryads, which isn’t just part of the setup for one of the characters’ arcs, but winds up being the major question posed in the endgame: do you try to reverse the impacts of the genocide if it means potentially destroying this lovely place and the town that depends on it for its prosperity?
This dilemma is more pointed than I was expecting from the otherwise cozy vibe, and the game doesn’t make it too easy on the player (taking the morally correct option of maximally repopulating the dryads does lead to some downer consequences as everyone moves away and the town dies). And that’s all to the good: I’ve used “nice” a whole bunch in this review and in my notes, but this element shows Secrets of Sylvan Gardens has more than just pleasant vibes to offer. So it’s maybe apt that the game’s postscript doesn’t list the Huntington as one of its real-world inspirations, but it does mention the Boboli Gardens in Florence, which I’ve also been to. They’re likewise a beautiful, manicured collection of landscapes, with cypress trees and Italianate sculpture and all the rest. But unlike the SoCal facsimile of European elegance, there’s weirder stuff too – my wife and I still talk about the strange grotto we stumbled across there, where after peering through an arch decorated by overgrow, cancerous stucco we glimpsed a bizarre altar resting under sculptures depicting putti, a goat’s head, and a pregnant she-goat with swollen teats. There’s nothing quite so disturbing in the Sylvan Gardens, thankfully, but neither is it an entirely manicured experience.
7 Likes
Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter, by Sean Woods
Every once in a while the question of “what is IF?” comes up, and I have a couple of stock answers: one is that “IF” is a community-based discourse rather than a genre, and another is that “IF” is whatever we IF people are playing and talking about (these are equivalent formulations, just with more or less pretension according to taste). The other one I tend to trot out draws more from how academic disciplines are functionally defined, and holds that anything one can usefully analyze via the approaches IF critics have developed counts as IF.
These are broad definitions by intention, but by that last one, it’s very hard to consider that Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter is IF. See, this isn’t a complete game; rather, it’s a prompt you can paste into an LLM in order for it to create a game-like experience for you. As such, it’s pointless to talk about the stuff I usually do when writing a review: there’s no pre-baked prose whose quality I can assess, no ending I can weigh for thematic resonance, no puzzles that might be more or less fair. It’s all just down to whatever the plagiarism-bot feels like spitting up in the moment – so given that, as well as what I think is a well-founded reluctance to use an LLM unnecessarily, I didn’t actually bother to “play” this game.
There are other approaches to game criticism than the ones prevalent in our little community, though, and given the format Penny Nichols uses, I couldn’t help considering how it would look through the lenses tabletop RPG reviewers use when looking at scenarios. Those folks tend to look at questions like “how well are the scenario’s theme and flavor communicated to the GM so they can run it as intended?”, “are there raw materials here to allow the GM to construct a well-paced adventure”, “are the mechanics well thought-out?”, and “how railroaded is this adventure likely to be in practice?” And these are questions one can ask of the Penny Nichols prompt.
Unfortunately I don’t think it comes out very well on any of them. The prompt is quite short and devoid of any consistent vibe; there’s an underbaked science-fantasy theme that provides some proper nouns but no coherent guidance to a human intelligence as to how to play it. Like, here’s what we/the LLM are told of Penny:
The player character is Agent Penny Nichols, an Insurance Investigator from the Solar Insurance Company on Mercury.
- Hue 150 (Divination & Illusion specialist).
- Prefers indirect investigation, including cover identities.
- Member of the Circle Trigonist faction.
Does that “hue” thing indicate Penny can do magic? What’s a “Trigonist”? Is locating an insurance company on a planet that’s consistently so hot it radiates mostly as a black body an indication that there’s some fraud going on, or are people just dumb? Your guess is as good as mine (and much better than ChatGPT’s); this is slightly better than “make up some bullshit,” but not by much.
As for the “plot” of the scenario itself, there’s more concrete reason to think that tabletop RPG design is the best way to think about this since it explicitly says the story should proceed according to the four-act kishokentetsu structure that was all the rage in RPG circles like five years ago. But the implementation of the structure is incredibly sketchy, not even running to 200 words: basically, there’s a space station studying an artifact, but the artifact has vanished, so you’re sent in to investigate. There’s meant to be a mid-story twist where you can find out that the artifact was a hoax by the lead investigator, because he wanted to get more funding; but then the final twist reveals that the artifact (or the station itself, the prompt isn’t clear) is actually a dragon’s hoard (or maybe the dragon itself?) that created the lead investigator as a psychic projection, in order to get the attention on which dragons (and hoards?) subsist. The resolution requires the player to “contain, banish, or escape before [the dragon] consumes more” (there’s no mention anywhere of the dragon having previously consumed anything).
Look, I’ve run a bunch of tabletop RPG adventures, and not to put too fine a point on it, but this one sucks. Hell, the notes I scribble to myself for scenarios I’ve come up with and already live in my brain contain way more detail about the psychology of the characters, how to construct challenges that are engaging to deal with, ideas about how to manage pacing, and particular bits of dialogue or turns of phrase to incorporate in my narration. Speaking as a reasonably experienced GM, I’d find this prompt worse than useless: it doesn’t give me any of the stuff I’d look to a scenario to provide, and in the time it’d take me to read, understand, and attempt to spackle over the holes of this prompt, I could come up with something far better using only my own creativity.
So that’s my assessment of what the author submitted to the Comp as a “game”, but I was morbidly curious about what could be included in the “walkthrough” file, since of course there’s nothing to walk through. Turns out it’s some commands that (might?) work to complete the scenario under Claude.ai, as well as a sample transcript of the author “playing” the game with ChatGPT. And oh lord, as bad a mood as reading the prompt put me in the transcript was worse.
For one thing, ChatGPT seems to insist on presenting everything as bullet-pointed lists of information and options, with embedded emojis, meaning reading it feels like being trapped in an Axios article (What they’re saying: “this is literally hell,” according to Mike Russo), and also makes me wonder how the author reconciled the “you can type anything and the game will understand it!” promise of LLMs with the reality that it was providing an interface indistinguishable from that of an especially low-effort choice-based game. For another, while the blurb promises that Penny Nichols is a “Star-trek style away mission”, ChatGPT sure seemed to think it’s a high fantasy setting where all your actions involve casting magic spells. And actually the prompt in the transcript isn’t the same as the prompt in the Comp submission!
The transcript at least explains the last of these discrepancies; halfway down, the author realizes that things aren’t going well, and asks ChatGPT to change the rules, then regurgitate a new prompt capturing the alterations. It’s of glancing interest that even after the changes, the transcript remains awful: despite being told to stop prompting with an explicit list of options, ChatGPT keeps doing that; the stilted, buzzword-laden prose make it feel like you’re playing DnD with the worst, most corporate manager you’ve ever had; and there’s nothing resembling an actual conflict or revelation, just flaccid set-pieces and irrelevant revelations following each other in succession until the author declares that he’s won. To be fair, I guess I should note that I didn’t notice any glaring inconsistencies or logical contradictions in what the LLM spat out, which either indicates our forthcoming robot overlords are getting better with the hallucination problem or just that the “writing” was so soporific and arbitrary that there was no central narrative for individual developments to contradict.
But like I said, all those criticisms are only of glancing interest. I repeat: this prompt, which was submitted to the Comp as a thing you could use to get an LLM to play a game with you, is itself the product of an LLM – Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter is a coprophagous ouroboros, creating the very slop it feeds on, of no possible use or value to a human being. In that sense I suppose there’s something potentially meta to the prompt’s “final twist”: “Dragons feed on human attention, and this hoard has been feasting.”
They do, and it is.
Are we inclined to do something about that?
This is not IF.
15 Likes
I guess this is as good a place as any to share that I poked around the author’s linked website and there’s some context which may illuminate the backstory of Penny Nichols. Of course, none of this is in the entry submitted to IFComp so you can’t review it, but if like me you were wondering how we got here and/or are fascinated by how people categorise the world then you may find it interesting.
Filling in some gaps myself, Penny Nichols seems to be the first release from a project to create a “low effort LLM RPG” which has used AI to generate simplified (?) worldbuilding and systems, which “players and GMs can load into the LLM of their choice, and get comically bad answers from.” The claim is that “the LLM is only summarizing the lore. Everything that is fed into the SRD and the Lore manual starts with a human description. I’m only using the LLM to condense it, translate it, etc.”
This started out as an addition to the author’s non-AI worldbuilding/RPG project, but negative feedback led to the decision not to want “the SublightRPG trademark to be stained by being associated, at all, with this AI generated system.” The project was instead rebranded as “The Expense. A parody of the Expanse and Star Trek, with wizards. The joke is that the mightiest heros in all the Solar system are the accountants. And maybe the cold open is like Johnny Dollar. Your party is called in to investigate insurance fraud, or an invoice that makes no sense, or track down a fugitive who failed to fill out the 777-022 form before they left Ceres.” At the risk of making a value judgment, my impression is that the AI doesn’t get the joke.
The hue system corresponds to regular RPG attributes and various forms of magic. It seems to be a drastically simplified version of the author’s own system of emotional archetypes from the non-AI project. If Penny’s value of 150 is meant to correspond to this then her archetype is “The Lover”, whose goal is “being in a relationship with the people, work and surroundings they love”.
There’s three factions, and the Circle Trigonists are “Earth-based merchants, intellectuals, and exiles. Governed by arbitrary courts with AI-assisted rulings; the head judge holds informal power. Economy relies on agriculture, banking, and manufacturing.” (emphasis not mine) and possibly a “Collection of feuding states in inner system”. More intriguing are the OPFOR faction, a “chaotic refugee agency in charge of Earth’s post-scarcity socialism” run by Home-Owners Associations who have a massive navy. The names of the factions apparently originate in actual US military wargames; apparently the Trigonists were meant to be the Nazis, but I don’t know if this is supposed to carry through to Woods’ setting.
I’m not sure where the dragon fits in to it all, but there’s some mention of supernatural Lovecraftian entities.
As far as I can tell, how this ended up in IFComp is yet to be revealed. But much like with Uninteractive Fiction 2, I feel it’s worth a passing mention that there is a little more out there. Yes, I am having a very boring weekend, why do you ask?
12 Likes
Thanks so much for playing and reviewing! Atmosphere (and specifically garden design!) was a primary focus for me while writing this game, so I’m really glad to hear that resonated with you.
(I love the Huntington Gardens, too, by the way. Visited once a number of years ago; phenomenal place.)
3 Likes
The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer, by P.B. Parjeter
Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer has comfortably the most bizarre setup of any game I’ve played so far in this year’s Comp – and that includes the explicitly surreal ones like the game where your body occasionally disintegrates into spaghetti. As it says on the tin, it opens with you and your brother raiding a Tokyo office building to perform the eponymous deed, resorting to violence in order to get human-being-who-actually-existed Kenji Eno to surrender his in-development game to your employers. But the gameplay, thankfully, doesn’t involve directly participating in the interrogation: rather, your brother’s browbeating of Eno, which involves running through a potted history of his bad-boy career making PS1- and 2-era survival horror games, is repeatedly interrupted by his (Eno’s) turtle going missing, which triggers him (your brother) to freak out and scream at you to find the animal, so you do that by solving an escalating series of puzzles as he (the turtle) climbs his way into more and more unlikely places.
So yeah, I was pretty lost here, though I was having fun with the anecdotes about the 90s Japanese development scene and the enjoyably over-the-top dialogue – until finally, well after I should have caught on, the game clicked and I realized why every bit of that premise is completely perfect. I won’t spoil what’s going on except to say I laughed quite a lot once I twigged to the twist, and found it added an additional fun layer through which to interpret the main action. But that main action works pretty well on its own, too. The narrative voice is lots of fun, with your brother’s frequent profanity obscured by stars, and entertainingly out-of-context gags. I liked this early bit, right after you restrain Eno:
Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions.
The game also makes a convincing case for Eno as an under-appreciated (at least in the West) artist. The best story is the one where he outfoxes the console approval process to get an uncensored version of one of his games onto store shelves without anyone the wiser, but even in the quieter bits of the history, as well as his interactions with you and your brother (which per the credits are drawn from actual interviews) he comes across as a thoughtful humanist trying to do something different from the mainstream, not just to shock but because he had something idiosyncratic to communicate – I can easily see how he’s become a cult figure.
As for the puzzles, they’re good examples of how to make such things work in Twine without going whole-hog into designing a parser-like interface. Most of the action plays out in a single combined kitchen/office (though there are occasional forays into other locations once you hit the midgame, including a maze that I think you’re guaranteed to solve just in the nick of time) with a bunch of different interactive features: a fridge, a stove, a cabinet. You can click on each one to interact with it, and for objects you can manipulate, like a stool you can shove around to different locations to help you climb when needed, the appropriate link cycles through to show where you’ve currently pushed it to. There’s perhaps a bit of fiddliness in the way you need to back out of examining stuff to try to climb around (most of the turtle-finding puzzles involve clambering around atop the furniture), and the final challenge maybe involves a slight bit too much busywork, but overall it’s a solid package that kept me engaged while I waited for the next bit of Eno’s career retrospective.
And that’s really where the heart of the game lies, I think. The twist I’m talking around gestures towards some contemporary questions about censorship and what counts as “age-appropriate” material, as does a slightly-didactic epilogue. The points raised are important ones, I think, and the way the game gets at them is unique. And possibly if I were one of the people unable to access a number of the Comp games due to the UK geoblock, that part of the story would be the one that resonated the most strongly. But since I’m American, it feels to me like the reason we don’t get as many video games with the artistry and sensitivity Eno appears to have brought to his stuff isn’t censorship (whether governmental or corporate), but because the mainstream industry has largely decided not to pursue those ends. That being the case, I’m walking away from Kidnapping thinking mostly about the ways he was able to get his games made in the face of a corporate culture no more welcoming to that kind of thing than the one we have now; I’m glad to have learned about his example.
6 Likes
Detritus, by Ben Jackson
When I’m playing video games as a civilian – i.e., when I’m not blasting through IF so I can meet the review quota before a deadline – I actually tend to prefer games robust systemic elements on top of engaging stories, rather than just pure narrative games. As a result, immersive sims are among my favorite genres, and Prey, a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, is one of the best of recent years, directly bringing in many elements from its inspiration while adding some new ones. And like the best immersive sims, much of the fun is in the way these systems interact in unexpected ways: for example, in both Prey and Shock, the skill points you use to gain character abilities aren’t an abstracted currency, but physical items you acquire in the game world. Something Shock doesn’t have but Prey does is a 3D-printing system that allows you to break down random junk in the world into its constituent parts, and then use the raw materials to build anything you’ve got the specs for. And – you see where this is going, if you hack the right systems or explore in the right areas, you can find a blueprint for the XP items, enabling you to cross the streams of the game’s different sub-economies. It doesn’t quite break the progression wide open, but discovering this obviously-intended exploit made me cackle with glee.
Detritus is a traditional adventure rather than an immersive sim, but the whole thing is built around a similar recycle/fabricate gameplay loop – and, impressively, it manages to come up with a twist on the system’s capabilities even more impactful than the one in Prey. Admittedly, this isn’t obvious for most of the game’s running time. It starts out as a minor riff on the very traditional spaceship-disaster subgenre of IF: a meteor’s hit your courier ship, causing an explosive decompression and the deaths of everyone on board, but since part of the emergency protocol involves having a backup of one of the crew loaded into the fabricator just in case, you get a second lease on life as a 3D-printed clone with your predecessor’s memories, and a mandate to save the ship. This involves traditional fare like reading datapads to find passwords, fooling biometric locks, and hacking electronic systems via a math-based minigame.
You’ll have done all of this before, and to its credit Detritus doesn’t pretend otherwise; each of these puzzles are implemented smoothly, with a clean choice-based interface and high production values, but they’re not harped on. What is harped on is the fabricator. Almost all of the conventional challenges require some piece of kit that you can manufacture on the spot, or unlock upgrades or raw materials allowing you to make more, different stuff to solve more, different puzzles… It makes for a compelling gameplay loop, as you start out bobbling a few pieces of space-junk back to the fabricator at a time in order to fuel your first, tentative explorations, before increasing upgrades, confidence, and knowledge see you hauling much bigger loads into the recycler and creating ever-more-useful tools. There’s also a gentle survival element to the gameplay – your need for food, water, and oxygen is always ticking up with everything you do, and you have to scavenge, or use your limited stock of fabricator resources, to meet those needs.
This does mean things are a bit more fiddly than in similarly kinds of stories, but again, there’s a robust interface that makes the inventory-juggling quite manageable and at least on the default difficulty, the various timers serve to ground the player in the protagonist’s predicament without ever becoming too much of a nuisance (in a nice touch, if, like me, you neglect to eat or drink while pushing to get to the endgame, Detritus ensures you can get a final meal and gulp of water to allow you to reach the finish line). The logistics-focused gameplay is also often interrupted, sometimes for exposition that fills in the backstory and raises questions about just what you were up to when the accident happened, and action-focused set-pieces like an EVA sequence that sees you explore the breach in the hull. The writing here isn’t flashy, but it sells the space adventure theme with more than adequate panache:
I look up… through. The distant stars shine with the utter clarity you only get when looking at them directly, and distant nebulae glow with an almost iridescent colour. The hole is large enough for me to fit through. If I were crazy, I’d actually consider it. Am I crazy?
In true immersive-sim style, there are also lots of flashbacks, unlocked either as your memories come back over time, or when you gain access to various computer logs and terminals. On the plus side, even though the other members of the crew are all dead, they get some solid characterization through these scenes, which makes exploring the ship that became their tomb all the heavier. On the other hand, the backstory you uncover is relatively straightforward, and boasts a reveal that did significant damage to my suspension of disbelief (I assume it’s just part of the genre rules that we’re ignoring how cost-prohibitive it would be to blast a colony’s trash into space – but even with that hand-wave, what sense could it possibly make to ship it to another planet rather than just dumping it and letting it drift into the star or an asteroid field?)
While I’m complaining, I might as well dole out the last of my criticisms now: the twists of Detritus’s plot do somewhat outlast the interest its systems provide. Despite the last couple of upgrades I unlocked in the fabricator seeming useful in theory (one notably expands your inventory limit, another obviates the hunger/thirst timers, and a third allows you to combine a bunch of tools you otherwise need to juggle into a single item), the number of resources they required was sufficiently high that I preferred the annoying grind of forgoing them to the annoying grind of obtaining them. The last major puzzle also feels like it relies on a cartoon logic at odds with the otherwise grounded, often-dark vibe of the game (I also wonder if there’s a fallback should you decide to recycle every coffee mug and can of soda in the game before realizing you need them, since I don’t think you can fabricate them once they’re gone)).
But I’ll close on a justified positive note, which is to return to that final reveal about the fabricator I mentioned up top. Without spelling it out, I’ll just say that it was the one development in the plot I didn’t see coming from a mile away, while it also made sense of some inconsistencies that I’d written off as just part of the game’s modeling of how immersive sims work. Beyond all this, it takes the creepiness inherent in Star Trek’s transporters and dials it way up, then uses that as the jumping off point for a closing moral dilemma that I legitimately don’t think has an easy answer. It’s a great way to wrap up the game, and some of the questions about consciousness it raises pair nicely, albeit in an understated way, with some of the more standard plot elements having to do with AI possibly replacing ships’ crews. It’s these kinds of juxtapositions that make immersive sims so much fun, so Detritus deserves some kudos for crossing the streams with such gusto.
9 Likes
Thanks for playing and for your review! You’re right to make the ‘Prey’ connection; the recycle/fabricate mechanic was heavily inspired by it. And of course, any comparison to that game is quite the compliment!
Those last-tier items are all meant to be ‘luxury’ items, designed for the player who recycled everything they could lay their hands on. While it’s possible to fabricate all four (and you get an achievement for doing so), you can, as you discovered, complete the game without them.
Also, if the player recycles any essential item they can’t remake for themselves, a replacement item will spawn somewhere else on the ship (with no resources gained, so it can’t be abused). Although the game is designed to seem challenging, in reality, it’s actually quite an achievement to die or find yourself in a genuinely unwinnable state!
4 Likes
My creation, by dino
Reviewing a chunk of games all at once through the course of the Comp can be a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, there can be synchronicities that help you look at a game through an unexpected angle. On the down side, though, sometimes it’s hard to avoid feeling like past-you is stepping on your toes. Case in point: the best jumping-off point for My creation is Frankenstein, since the game excerpts it at length and is clearly in dialogue with Shelley’s classic. But having already reviewed Frankenfingers, and done a little tap-dance about the not-so-good doctor in my INPUT PROCESS review, it feels awkward to go back for a threepeat.
So let’s go with what’s arguably the second-best jumping-off point: parenthood, specifically those first few days when you’re back from the hospital with your first kid and you are sleep-deprived and your life has changed and you don’t know how anything works. It’s a terrifying, disorienting experience, and so in some respects it’s a perfect fit for a somewhat wonkily-implemented parser game: the sense that moving around is harder than it should be, you’re either seeing double or things that should be there are nowhere to be found…
My creation does communicate the claustrophobic vertigo of those moments quite well via its writing, too. The game starts with your days-old baby screaming and crying while your headache gets worse; you don’t know what to do to quiet the kid down, and as the blurb indicates, you don’t have another parent or any other family member providing any help. Small wonder that even moving from one side of the bed to the other involves “dragg[ing] yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers,” and that there’s a clumsy tactility to your physical interactions with the baby:
The unevenness of the floor and the speed of your movements shake the basket, and the child within it, more than either of you expected. The moan has become a cry. You shift your hand on the floor and grab the baby’s wrapper with the other. In one swift movement, the child is on the bed. With wide, tearful eyes, the child watches you groan and sigh, your face scrunched up in pain.
Thankfully, this isn’t an extended experience – My creation is a short game – but it’s an authentically horrifying experience, knowing you’re responsible for another life but not sure how to do that while also needing to take care of yourself, too. There’s only a single challenge to overcome, but it’s a doozy: get the kid to stop crying, with nary a formula bottle or white-noise machine in sight. As mentioned, the game really could have used more testing, because there are rough patches everywhere: moving from one corner of the bed to another absurdly uses compass directions (and UP and OUT and EXIT won’t let you stand up), you can get told that there’s a basket and a baby where you are but trying to interact with them reveals that they’re actually somewhere else, and Inform’s default responses are jarring when they intrude, both because of their voice – Graham Nelson’s studied disinterest has rarely felt less apposite – and their content, with SLEEP throwing up a totally-not-true “you aren’t feeling especially drowsy” and FEED BABY horrifyingly generating a “(to yourself)” implicit action (thankfully, it fails). The gameplay wouldn’t work in a choice-based interface, since the desperation of typing anything you can think of into the parser, with most of it not working, is 100% the way to marry form and substance when depicting the existential despair at not being able to quiet a crying infant. But the same effect could have been achieved without quite so much clunkiness – heck, the game doesn’t actually end, it just throws a “(the end)” after the wall of text following the correct move.
All right, I think we can circle back to Frankenstein now. The protagonist has a copy of the book right by their bed, and examining it displays an extended passage near the middle of the novel, as the reanimated-and-abandoned monster reflects on his miserable condition by comparing himself, and what he’s been able to intuit about his nature, to the lives lived by a seemingly-happy peasant family. This also prompts him to ponder his origins: “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to answer them.”
Dr. Frankenstein is undoubtedly one of the worst parents in all of literature, so it’s understandable that an anxious, frightened father worried about how bad a job they might wind up doing would think of Frankenstein, though there’s a more direct reason why the protagonist would find the monster’s situation resonant too (despite copious clues about where the game is headed with this, it treats this as a reveal, so I’m not going to spoil it). Babies can feel so fragile, and the psychology of child-rearing is presented as requiring such specialized knowledge and attention, is it any wonder that a parent who doesn’t have their whole life already figured out would be terrified that they’ll make a child as broken as they are? Even for those of us who faced parenthood with plenty of supports My creation’s protagonist lacks can find these fears relatable, I think, which is why I appreciate where the game ends: you can stop the kid crying, and hopefully start to get a handle on your anxieties by articulating them, but they don’t go away, and the baby doesn’t stay quiet forever. Taking care of someone else is something you do hour after hour, day after day, never knowing where you’ll both wind up at the end of it – hopefully not locked in an Arctic death-hunt, at least! – but dragging yourself out of bed, searching for creativity even at your wits’ end, nonetheless.
creation mr.txt (29.0 KB)
4 Likes
Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan, by N. Cormier and Emery Joyce
I’ve been in the tank for the Lady Thalia games pretty much from the minute I first encountered them: I love a heist and a period piece, so add on a flirty enemies-to-lovers dynamic between the lady thief and her policewoman antagonist and I’m more than sold, but the nimble pacing and tightly-designed puzzles take things to the next level. But I’m in an odd situation with this fourth installment: you see, I still haven’t played the third one, since it was released in Spring Thing 2023, and some life events interrupted by reviews of the festival that year. I still want to get back and finish those, and Lady Thalia and the Masterpiece of Moldavia is a reward I’ve set myself for doing so. But that means that I’m coming to this one having missed an episode.
This used to happen all the time, of course – when I went off to high school, I remember being frustrated that I wasn’t able to keep up with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, doubly so because on the odd occasions I could catch an episode suddenly Worf was there – but in this age of on-demand streaming everything, it’s an unfamiliar sensation, and actually not necessarily a bad one? If anything, I’m now even more excited to go back and learn how Thalia and Mel struck a truce that saw the latter leaving the Yard and then the pair going into business together as consulting private detectives. I’m also curious whether Thalia’s heretofore-offscreen husband made his first appearance in that installment, or if the supporting role he places here is his actual introduction (he’s a gay bank robber married to a lesbian cat burglar, you’re each others’ beards, it’s cute). There’s also a distaff Sherlock Holmes analogue who I don’t remember from the first or second game but definitely makes an impression.
But though there’s a lot to catch up on, the game gives you the context you need, and the characters are as always drawn with such bright colors that you feel you know all about them from the moment they come on screen – actually, now that I think about it, Lady Thali4’s handling of Mel on this front is especially deft, since she hasn’t had that much screen time to date, even including her role as deuteragonist in the second game; nonetheless, her dogged approach to investigation and clumsy approach to romance were exactly what I expected based on her prior experiences.
The puzzles are likewise unsurprisingly satisfying. By now the series structure, of alternating case-the-joint sequences where you learn about a target through some light social-engineering mechanics with the actual heists, where you might need to pick some locks, crack a code, or engage in a chase is well established, and even though you’ve gone straight, the rhythm hasn’t changed: it’s just that this time out you’re trying to catch a copycat thief who’s appropriated your name in the act, and investigating their potential targets before they strike. This doppleganger plot is a great way of continuing to play to Thalia’s strengths even as she’s shifted to the side of the angels, and the set-pieces continue to be great fun, with a break-in at the headquarters of an off-brand Golden Dawn a particular highlight. None of the individual challenges are that challenging – you’ll get to the end regardless – but you are graded on the verve and brio you bring to your role, with top marks reserved for those who manage to balance the need to hide your tracks with the urgency of keeping up with your rival. The other fun addition to the series’ systems is interrogation sequences where you play as both Thalia and Mel simultaneously; in the stratified world of Edwardian (I think?) England, what you say might not matter as much as who says it, after all.
“Much as it was, but with some fun new twists” is also my take on the writing. The prose has always been alternately zippy and wry, which kept a smile on my face throughout:
He chuckles. “Scandalous of me, I know! To come to an art gallery—making an appointment, no less—with no interest in the current exhibition and no intention of buying anything!”
You probably do six things more scandalous than that before breakfast each day, but you want to know where he’s going with this, so you laugh along.
I also enjoyed the running joke where Thalia keeps workshopping different nicknames for Mel, which is all the funnier for not drawing undue attention to itself. But the focus on these two characters’ relationship also creates space for things to get more serious at times, including a nicely understated scene where Thalia and her ex talk around their breakup. The central romance is of course the main event, and through the inevitable ups and downs, there’s no getting away from the sweetness of the two falling in love:
She looks like she hasn’t slept properly in several days, and some of her hair has escaped its bun and is falling in her face, and there’s still a yellowing bruise around her left eye, and of course she’s also currently angry with you. Nevertheless, some part of you is still convinced that she’s the most attractive woman you’ve ever seen, simply because she’s Mel.
I’m not sure whether this fourth installment is my absolute favorite, as there were some minor blemishes to my enjoyment on the mechanical side – I found navigating through the gallery backrooms was a bit more confusing than I wanted it to be (since on my first visit, I had to choose between which door to try, whereas during the subsequent one you need to pick which room to go to), and while an Arts and Crafts exhibit is a cool backdrop, I think the final heist felt like it was over a bit quicker than the prior ones; the titular artifact also feels like it’s underdeveloped. But the story here could well be the best it’s been – all the more reason for me to circle back to the third installment to find out for sure!
8 Likes
Thanks so much for your review!
3 Likes
I probably shouldn’t comment too extensively on your feedback, but for the post-comp release I can definitely make the updated door links say “Go through the [description] door to the [room name].”
Glad you enjoyed the game!
5 Likes
Thank you very much for your review of The Little Four and your kind words—I’m glad it could at least be a pleasant experience despite the unfamiliarity!
I had fun reading through the transcript you provided (and would love to credit you for the helpful gesture). I also enjoyed the interesting comparisons you drew. I’m looking forward to discussing some of these points further in the post-mortem. :–)
3 Likes
Thanks for the review!
a maze that I think you’re guaranteed to solve just in the nick of time
You do end up in the destination passage (the balcony) with IIRC a turn or two to spare — but if you leave the balcony without taking the item, you have to go down the the sewers and trigger the process over again.
1 Like
Mooncrash!, by Laura
In the very first IF review I wrote after coming back from a 15-year hiatus, I talked about the alienating associations anime tends to have for me – I know, this is a me thing, it’s obviously an incredibly successful medium with aesthetic resonance for untold millions of people! But nonetheless, while I can recognize the reasons why over-busy narratives involving sexy people with nonstandard eye and hair colors and histrionic science-fantasy apocalpyses can be lots of fun, I confess the appeal is somewhat lost on me; less “anime BS (laudatory)” than “anime BS (derogatory)”, to adopt a kids-these-days idiom I do enjoy.
Mooncrash!,if you couldn’t tell from that intro, is very much working in this tradition. In a world due to end any minute, you’re a second-tier hero who gets to team up with the A-listers due to the fact that the world is ending any minute now. The mechanics of this are initially obfuscated, but by exploring the four paths the game offers (each corresponding to one of the four superheroes you can work alongside) it’s clear it involves armies of demons and dragons, and the plans to forestall it involve constructing magitech devices to allow some people to survive the end of the world, stealing a biological WMD from an infernal vault, or possibly just creating a magical simulation into which to escape. And after you run through each of them (there’s a death-and-rebirth thing going on that enables you to toggle between branches, as well as retain your combat skills and achievements across lives) there’s a culminating vignette where you can choose which strategy to save the day you want to throw your weight behind.
It’s a relatively simple setup, but Mooncrash! is maximalist in its storytelling – most actions you take produce long passages of text, dense with proper nouns and action and exposition. When the conflicts it describes are straightforward, this lends a pleasant over-the-topness to proceedings:
The wind whips around you as you soar through the air, and you grip the red scales of the dragon below you for dear life. Below you, a battle rages on a bridge made of solid hard-light. Your allies, The Dawn Legion of Leont, do battle against the forces of Izalith, The Dread Horde. Twisted forms, demonic and devilish alike, clash against the shining armor of your brethren.
You can practically hear the death metal!
The prose can get bogged down when the action quiets down, though. One of the four branches is an extended conversation with the wizard who’s created the magical simulation I mentioned above – this involves them going into their overcomplicated backstory (they’re a refugee from another reality that collapsed in a crisis similar to the one yours is currently undergoing), their romantic entanglements, the reasons why they created their tower headquarters where and how they did, the nature of the alternate world they’ve built, how it could be used as a cheat code to escape the apocalypse… Again, I can see how those with a taste for this stuff would lap it up, but I found it dragged.
Other sections have more involved gameplay, though. The combat one is straightforward and does require some repetition to grind your skills to the necessary level, but it’s hard to go wrong skewering monsters. There’s a medium-dry-goods one where you solve some very simple object-based puzzles to prepare the ingredients for a sorcerous construction project. And the last involves either a conversation puzzle or a maze, before the endgame puts all the pieces together. They’re mostly pretty basic in terms of challenge, but they all have some time pressure to keep the player on their toes, and can be repeated as many times as needed (plus even failed attempts will typically give you an achievement, which is a motivating touch).
I’m unconvinced that a parser-based interface was the best fit for this game, though. Many sections play out in a primarily or exclusively choice-based mode, with the game prompting you to type CHOOSE (keyword) at some important points; I’d have rather just been able to click on an appropriate link, and a choice-based interface would have made some of the longer chunks of text go down smoother, too. Mooncrash! also doesn’t do much to take advantage of the affordances the parser offers – the object manipulation section spells out exactly what you need to do, for example, and the game is generally underimplemented, leading to unintentional comedy like this:
DANGEROUS PATHOGEN - DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT ALPHA-PLAN AUTHORIZATION
CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE - DO NOT REMOVE FROM CONTAINMENT FIELD BEFORE DEPLOYMENT
REPENT, YE WHO WOULD SEEK THE POWER OF THE BAD BLOOD
Staring at the pitch black vial sends a shiver down your spine. You look away on instinct. You get the sense that a single drop of this vile liquid could kill you instantly. Thankfully, the vial is sealed shut, and not a single smudge of the stuff has reached the outside.
> x blood
You see nothing special about Bad Blood.
For all these complaints, though, there are definitely clever touches to Mooncrash! – I particularly liked the way a particular endgame challenge manipulated the choices available to you to mirror a mental assault, and the game is chock full of nonstandard, ambitious elements like this (I haven’t even mentioned the extended personality test that opens the game – it’s kind of pointless since the protagonist is a cipher, and while it shunts you to one of the four branches, you eventually need to play all of them. But I kind of love the ridiculous juxtaposition of a melodramatic Götterdämmerung with an OKCupid quiz, as well as the fact that the answers to “what kind of a person are you?” are basically three flavors of “I’m kind of a jerk” plus “I’m a jerk but I hide it”). Mooncrash! is identifiably a first parser game, with some of the lack of polish that implies, but it’s clearly been well-tested to smooth out bugs, and includes a bunch of customized systems that go way beyond what most rookie authors dare to bite off. And while as I said the specific subgenre it inhabits isn’t one I have much native affinity for, I think its emulation of said subgenre’s aesthetics is spot on, reflecting careful, intentional writing and design. So this is definitely an author to watch; even if Mooncrash! isn’t especially my speed, it’s still an impressive debut.
mooncrash mr.txt (160.4 KB)
7 Likes
Dead Sea, by Binggang Zhou
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, they say, before blushing in shame from having wasted their first impression on such a cliché. Dead Sea could stood to listen though, as it had two strikes against it five minutes after I started it up: one, the silly genAI cover art, which just looks insipid upon first glance but seems sillier and sillier the more you try to work out what the waves, clouds, and light are doing, and two, the initial puzzle, which has you make a Fanta for a gravedigger by zapping a sapient monster-orange with a freeze ray and then dismembering it until it fits in a bottle. After those first five minutes, it’s clear that some actual care did go into making the game and it settles down to tell a dark-fantasy story with an occasional hint of whimsy rather than the wearying zaniness that opening challenge seemed to presage – so that’s all good news, but it’s still frustrating to see an author start off in a ditch due to such avoidable missteps.
What we’ve got here is a parser-like choice game that tasks you with uncovering the secrets of the ruler of the island called Necropolis – there’s Bluebeard-y backstory, Moby Dick references, souls being harvested and used to animate golems… The vibes are dour, though the compressed prose style largely gestures at mood rather than wallowing in it, in service of keeping things moving. That isn’t to say there aren’t any good images – I liked the use of color here, for example:
Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.
No way up found.
An injured White Whale is beached, reddening nearby water.
But as you can see, it’s nothing too fancy, it makes its points and then shuts up. This relative terseness puts the focus on the puzzles, and I’d say they’re serviceable. Most are inventory-based and fairly well signposted, with a few boasting multiple solutions. It’s clear that some of the systems are a bit hacked together – in particular, the inventory system doesn’t allow you to drop things, picking up something new will often just mean replacing what you previously carried, which silently goes back to where you first found it in case you need it again – but this winds up being intuitive enough, and I can’t complain too much since it does reduce the amount of inventory-juggling you might need to engage in. The other mechanic I wasn’t sure how to engage with were the small statues you run into every few minutes – you’re told that praying at one will “reset chapter parameters”, which seemed like it could potentially mean losing progress, so I steered clear. At any rate, what you’re called upon to do is typically straightforward, and you typically just have a small segment of the gameworld unlocked at any point in time, which means I found it hard to get too stuck; again, the pacing is enjoyably quick.
As for the plot, once you uncover enough secrets to understand the main conflict that’s playing out on the island, it’s reasonably engaging; there are a few nicely-observed elements, like how the girl betrothed to the dark, melancholy Duke dreads the arranged marriage but is still looking forward to the wedding. And while it’s clear how this will all be resolved, the option to make suboptimal choices to get premature game-overs makes the player’s input feel more impactful. On the flip side, there’s some bonus content you can access just as you win the game which slathers the functional story with a thick coating of proper-noun fantasy bollocks:
That was before the God fell.
Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here.
This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt.
Even angels fell because of it.
Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’
I suppose that means that Dead Sea’s last impression is just as dodgy as its first, but at least the stuff in the middle goes down easy!
4 Likes
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful review! I really appreciate that someone who isn’t that into anime tropes took the time to look at my entry in such detail. Unfortunately, the anime-smell will probably show up in most of the things that I write, so be aware of that if I pop up again and you decide to give another game of mine a try. Some of the dragging, I think, can’t be avoided if I’m playing to those tropes, but I’m glad that you found things to enjoy in my entry regardless.
You (and many other reviewers) are correct in identifying this as a first serious attempt at IF! I have been keeping track of things to work on for next time (like those missing item/scenery descriptions - the one you pointed out is pretty funny, though!). I’m glad that the experience is relatively bug-free in spite of the rough edges, though I have noticed a few annoying formatting errors that I just never had the time to patch during the comp. My background in QA and my computer science job/training is very helpful here!
I think you’re right that a choice-based system would have worked better here overall. Sure, I’d lose a few things, but 95% of everything in Mooncrash! could have been at least reasonably approximated in Twine/ChoiceScript. That last 5% could be swapped out and replaced without too much hassle, too. It just started as a school project that I had to make in the parser style, and porting it over would have been more trouble than it would have been worth, I think.
Thanks again for the review!
6 Likes
Oh but they are! It’s really interesting to try kissing Boar or Eagle multiple times during the descent. Their lack of eagerness switches somewhat drastically…
Completely agree.
1 Like
FYI, I believe the Fateweaver uses they/them pronouns!
2 Likes