Thank you so much for the review! 
1 Like
High School Reunion, by Sanj
There are a ton of stories about high school reunions, and basically none about college reunions, because of course there aren’t. The core premise of a movie or book built around a high school reunion is that it’s a crucible in which characters’ understanding of themselves is tested: returning to the place from which they set out, they measure themselves by the distance between who their peers remember them as, and who they seem to be now – and if they pass the test, they earn the right to be with that crush they never made a move on. There are obvious dials to twirl – an underestimated character who’s since achieved success but is insecure about it is perhaps the most classic archetype, but you can flip the script and center Homecoming royalty anxious about the way they’ve come down in the world, their glory days well behind them. And of course the plot almost always turns on deception, as no one ever shows up at a high school reunion being exactly who they are: in stories at least, they’re always fronting, pretending to be at least a bit more successful, a bit more charming, a bit smarter and hotter and all the rest.
The problem with trying to do this for a college reunion is that it’s silly. Sure, you still have a fair bit of growing up to do in your twenties, but seeing older characters go through similar contortions of anxiety about stuff that happened well after they had the right to vote can be more pathetic than relatable; by that point, more of your character is presumably set, you should have more of your life figured out, and trying to deceive the people who knew you then should be even less likely to succeed.
The trouble is, these critiques apply to the high school reunion story too, just in attenuated form. The best of them recognize that still being hung up on this stuff is dumb, that if there’s a chance to reconnect with people who once meant something to you, great, but remaining obsessed about the judgment of people you haven’t seen in years is a worse flaw than whatever peccadillo you’re ineptly covering up. The worst of them, though, are little better than revenge fantasies, functioning just as excuses to vindicate the underdog and give the cool kids their comeuppance.
We’ve taken a long time to get to the actual game here, both because at this point, a month into the Comp, the Mike Russo review process has gotten a little raggedy, but also because the above constitutes like 80% of my critique of the aptly-named High School Reunion: the generic title of this Texture game is a harbinger of how closely it hews to the classic tropes. You’re a loser desperately worried that your old classmates will recognize that you’re a loser, consumed by long-simmering resentment about the rich, popular kids, and nursing a decade-long crush you never made a – you know how this goes, I typed it all out in paragraph one.
The two notable things about the game are first, its unlovely edgelord streak. The narration loves to wallow in how pathetic the main character is. Like, here’s what happens if you try to meditate to calm yourself before walking into the reunion:
You start to internalize being no one and belonging to nothing. You decide to meditate, but meditating is stupid and you’re stupid. But being stupid is something and you’re supposed to be nothing which is also very stupid. This whole thing is stupid. You look around to make sure no one saw you being stupid, and thankfully no one was around.
If you keep meditating, you do it so hard that you die, which is typical of the hyperactive nastiness that characterizes the humor. To actually pluck up the nerve to meet your former peers, you need to violently ambush a finance-bro classmate (“you think you might remember a quiet asshole in high school that every girl liked simply because his name sounded rich, but you don’t remember much else”, which, hoo boy, there’s some stuff going on there), and pretend to be him; of course, this goes gangbusters but your old crush instantly recognizes the real you, and if you finally pluck up the courage to ask her to dance, suddenly all your problems are solved and the future looks bright, which at least swaps the nihilism for a saccharine woman-as-talisman-of-success ending.
Getting to that ending is tricky, however, due to the second notable thing, which is the game’s gauntlet structure. There are many possible endings besides the one mentioned above, but they’re all recognizably failed states – beyond meditating yourself to death, you can chicken out and never go to the party, you can run afoul of the finance-bro’s revenge, and you can turn into a vampire and eat everybody (see previous comment about the sense of humor). There’s some creativity on display here, even if I wasn’t a fan of the vibes, but since Texture makes it hard to know what you’re actually choosing to do when you make a verb/noun pair, and the outcomes on display here are often even more disconnected from what the player thinks they might be doing than usual, I found it very easy to stray from the one true path, especially since my goal upon starting out was “go to the reunion and talk to people like a normal human being,” which is not really supported. Without the easy undos of Inform or Twine, having to restart over and over to figure out what the author wanted me to do got annoying pretty quick.
For all that I’ve bagged on the high school reunion story-structure in this review, I think it can be done well – I’m as big a fan of Grosse Pointe Blank as anyone. But doing it well requires doing character work that humanizes the abstract tropes, and ideally putting some unique, engaging twist on proceedings. High School Reunion sadly doesn’t make the cut: it’s a bitter wallflower at prom making snide comments while the band plays uninspired oldies.
8 Likes
Invasive Species, by Rachel Helps and Steven L. Peck
I haven’t gone back and checked, but it feels like there are more explicitly-incomplete games in this year’s Comp than usual. For the most part, I was fine writing reviews of Postgrad and Gambler’s Quest because even if I didn’t know exactly how all the twists of turns of their final plots would play out, the excerpt on offer was able to establish a clear sense of how the game works and what it was about. Invasive Species is another creature entirely, though. It’s only about 60% of the full game – we get Act I, an interlude, and Act II, with a promised second interlude and Act III still to come – but that 60% manages to cram in at least two and a half distinct games, and damned if I can guess whether the final two fifths manages to wrangle that number back down to one, or if things are going to get more unruly.
This is going to be a heavily spoiler-filled review, because I can’t talk about my response to the places the game winds up going without talking about said places, and since the biggest of those twists happens at the end of Act I, I’m not going to use blurry-text as the shift is big enough, and early enough, that dealing with blurry-text feels unnecessary and awkward. So if you’re spoiler-averse this might be a good time to bail – I’ll say that while I don’t think Invasive Species is generally successful, at least in its current form, I did find it engaging.
OK, we’ll pad out this next paragraph with a description of the opening before getting to the twist. Invasive Species initially presents itself as domestic sci-fi: you’re a grandmother helping her daughter take care of her autistic son during a big event her company is putting on to tout the benefits of a new body- and brain-modification technology. The event is targeted to social-media influencers, which makes sense given their focus on novelty and appearances, and their ability to set a trend, but the game’s broader concern with bioethics takes precedence: obviously given the context of your grandson’s condition, questions about the possibility of this modification to mitigate some of his most challenging symptoms come up, and in between making choices to try to keep him happy and out of trouble, you’re given a lot of background information, encounter examples of the kinds of results the company is getting, and are prompted for your opinions about disability and body- and behavior-modification generally.
This works … fine, I’d say. The subject matter definitely feels compelling and timely, and in theory making the player the caregiver for a vulnerable tyke gives them a stake in these debates. I found the implementation slightly less effective than I wanted it to be, however. In part this is because the game progresses from the abstract to the concrete, rather than vice versa. You’re prompted to fill out a checkbox questionnaire on disability treatment before you even meet Weston, your grandkid, and you also need to decide on whether to opt for body-modification for yourself as almost one of the first choices you’re offered (albeit you can revisit it later). As a result, rather than experiencing a story with living, breathing characters working through some thorny problems about autonomy and dignity, and then being given an opportunity to reflect on how that’s impacted the player’s beliefs, instead you get what’s in effect a series of policy quizzes before the narrative has a chance to get off the starting blocks. And this pattern happens several other times, where the game puts the story on hold to engage in high-level (often stilted) conversation about high-level issues before they have a chance to play out on screen. Midway through the second act, there’s a throwaway line about how you used to work in hospital administration, which is maybe meant to justify why you’re engaging with these questions as if you had a Masters in these topics, but regardless it still feels clumsy and out of character.
The core interpersonal dynamics of the game, those between the main character and her daughter and grandson, are also sometimes given short shrift. I was anticipating the opening section would have many scenes involving helping Weston through what’s clearly going to be a tough day, but in the event there’s really only short scene squarely about this; Invasive Species is too busy providing color on the influencers, going into lots of detail on the sales pitch for the “Uplift” procedure, showing how it’s been used to give animals advanced intelligence (and shoehorning in an awkward “dilemma” that echoes argument about reparations), plus all the aforementioned social-science-paper stuff. So that’s at least one and a half games by my count.
Then you hit the interlude and shit blows up even bigger. See, throughout Act I you’re getting more and more hints that the modification technology has some squirrely aspects to it – it’s a gift being provided by the benevolent Zydon space empire, and you don’t need to have seen a lot of Twilight Zone episodes to find that ominous. Every detail is more suspicious than the last, and since one of the early ones is the revelation that part of the process involves an egg being implanted in your body, it didn’t take long for my Luddite instincts to take over. Still, Act I ends with Weston’s parents deciding to send him off to get de-autism-ized by the bug aliens, and I figured I’d play along by signing up for a small modification myself so I could go with him (I think you wind up accompanying him regardless, for what it’s worth).
And then in the interlude your daughter forwards you a bunch of emails so you can help her with the paperwork, and mixed in with the official contract email (which is a nicely-mocked-up seven page pdf that feels cribbed from real-world medical forms) is one from a whistleblower who describes what the aliens are actually up to. Sure, there’s another email where the reporter is smeared in an attempt to discredit her, but 1) this is a transparent hack job, and 2) even if you think there’s only a 1% chance that you and your grandchild were going to be devoured by one of the pustule-maws of Zxxy’asdfs the All-Engendering, there to be reborn in the fecund matrix of His million wombs and recreated from the cells up as a wetnurse to His insectile progeny, you’re clicking on PASS.
So yeah, there’s an abrupt pivot into Lovecraftian conspiracy horror, and maddeningly, the only dialogue options you’ve got with your daughter are “good news, it looks like they don’t need a copy of Weston’s immunization records.” The game’s bizarre refusal to engage with this shift in premise made Act II the stuff of black comedy, as you and Weston are secluded in a camp with a cohort of other saps, recovering from the procedure as you’re press-ganged into parenting vile alien pupae that you’ve been re-engineered to think of as cute. There are opportunities to voice displeasure with the company and the procedure, and a few places where the dangerous nature of your charges breaks through, but there’s also a sequence where you talk to a disgruntled peer and decide whether to sign on to their open letter calling for independent review of the company’s informed consent policies. AN ALIEN CULT HAS FED OUR BODIES TO THE SLUG-GOD SLUMBERING BENEATH THE ICE AND IS USING THE TWISTED MOCKERIES THAT HAVE REPLACED US TO REAR A GENERATION OF HORRORS, VICTORIA, EYES ON THE FUCKING PRIZE!
The thing is, there are still glimmers of the game Invasive Species first seemed to be in here, and they continue to mostly work fine. While you can’t react with nearly the vehemence that the situation requires, there are some interesting choices where you have to balance your distrust of the company and the aliens with the fact that you’re under their control and protection, such as it is. The policy debates also come back in, and sure, they continue to be poorly integrated, but they are kind of interesting to think about. There’s a lot more of Weston here, as he becomes verbal and much more social, and witnessing his development alongside the growth of his preternatural bond with the larval monstrosity born from his flesh is an exercise in ambivalence. But – to put it gently – the bioethics-focused domestic drama sits uneasily with the conspiracy thriller about the cyclopean uterus-monster hidden under an Antarctic lake
There are some other places where the game could be tightened up a bit: there’s an assistance mode, on by default, that tells you exactly what impact your choices will have, and while it’s nice to know when you’re picking which options you want to do first, but you’ll have a chance to do all of them eventually, vs. where a choice might have short- or long-term consequences, it’s currently tuned to provide way too much information (it states that some choices don’t have a mechanical impact, for example, and at least once spoiled information that hadn’t yet come out in the narrative), so this should probably be dialed back and maybe default to being inactive. And beyond the big twist, the game is way too blasé about providing some context, like the fact that the “Conrad” who you blandly mention as your daughter’s boss is also Weston’s father (Conrad gives big Elon Musk vibes, there’s one person I wouldn’t mind being fed to a slug-monster).
Overall, though, this is an ambiguous game that has so many irons in the fire that I really have no idea how the Act II cliffhanger will be resolved, or what the conclusion will reveal the game to have notionally been about all along. There’s something exciting about that, I suppose, but it’s also a sign of a game that would really benefit from more focus: whether from an overabundance of ambition or having two authors working somewhat at cross-purposes, Invasive Species is at war with itself. Personally I’m most interested in the human-level drama, so a version of the game that gave Weston’s arc room to breathe and presented the technology more neutrally has the most appeal. But it could also be fun to let Victoria inhabit her inner badass and commit to bringing the whole operation down from the inside, and in a pinch the version where interactive policy quizzes provide an introduction to the work of Martha Nussbaum could be an interesting diversion too, I suppose. It’s just that they can’t all share the same body.
9 Likes
SCAVS, by David Hunter
There aren’t a lot of One Simple Tricks in IF. There are so many different kinds of experiences text games can provide, so many differences in goals and design and interface, and so many different audiences, too, who all like different things – it all means that a gameplay element that earns near-universal approbation in one context could be a real drag if moved into a different kind of game or just if different kinds of players encounter. But with that said, I sometimes wonder whether there is a universal make-IF-game-better button, and if there is, it’s certainly playing around with the triangle of identities.
This is a fancy (well, where “fancy” equals “hearkening back to cutting-edge game-design discussion of the late 90s”) way of saying that in most pieces of IF, there’s a narrator that’s the source of the words, a protagonist who’s doing the things, and a player who’s reading the words and telling the protagonist to do the things. The basic Zork-y approach where the protagonist is more or less an avatar for the player, and the narrator is a disembodied voice wryly relating proceedings, certainly works well enough, but trying to introduce some tension in the legs of the triangle to squeeze a little bit of extra narrative or thematic or gameplay juice is almost always a winning bet. SCAVS is a case in point: its dystopic sci-fi tale of interplanetary scavengers stripping an abandoned mining facility of its resources won’t win many points for originality, while its puzzles and prose are solid but unspectacular. Beyond some high-production value sound and graphics, though, what helps it stand out is a simple tweak that separates the player from the protagonist (who’s also the narrator), which helps enliven a standard planetary-excavation scenario and open up space for some second-half narrative twists that make it one of the most purely enjoyable games I’ve played in the Comp so far.
See, the first big thing you do in the game is go through a character-selection process, picking between a grizzled vet and a young engineer (you know which one of these is a man and which a woman – SCAVS doesn’t try to subvert the classic tropes). But this isn’t who you play as: it’s who you’re sending down to the surface to try to complete the mission. You’re actually playing an Operator, in the employ of the surely-benign System, issuing orders to the scavenger who’s taking all the risks. There are some cool interface gubbins, like an upgradeable sector map and a data-file log collecting the inevitable audio logs, but otherwise just about all the text in the game comes to you via the scavenger’s narration of their surroundings. Meanwhile you direct their explorations via dialogue, telling them which way to go or whether to mess around with any of the various ruins or other points of interest on the surface, and can make choices in longer conversation sequences that are usually triggered when your scavenger is forced to hunker down for a while to wait out one of the periodic dust storms (mostly these choices reveal more backstory and strengthen or weaken your rapport with your scavenger – while the human instinct is to make conversation, System warns you that they’re doing this job for a reason, usually because they did something messy in their past, and given the risks it’s best not to get attached).
The prose gets across the disparate voices of the two characters – there are a few areas only accessible to one or the other, but even though they’re mostly describing the same map, there’s very little repeated language that I could pick up on. It’s not especially literary, though. Their respective personalities are established in very broad strokes, and the engineer in particular is prone to stepping on any moment of potential poignancy to spell out the metaphors:
The ground here… it’s crunchy. Every step I make cracks through a hard, compacted layer and releases the fine sand beneath to join the dust surrounding me. When I look back, there’s no trace of my footsteps; they’ve already blown away. My history, so recent, already erased.
(The jarhead, by way of contrast, is prone to screaming stuff like “THE WIND… IT’S LIKE A THOUSAND FISTS. FULL OF FURY AND RAGE!”)
Still, both are appealing characters in their own way, if a bit jejune, and they’re good company as you jump through hoops you’ve probably jumped through dozens of times before. There are hidden caches of Helium-3 to track down, broken mining equipment to get back in working order, and hostile wildlife to avoid or fend off. The map is a good size, not too gigantic but with a bunch of interconnectivity and several identifiable regions with different stuff going on; it’s satisfying to work your way through it, figuring out which puzzles can be solved with which resources, sussing out shortcuts, and seeing your Helium-3 reserves tick up. The occasional puzzles are very straightforward, but the game’s understandably focused on traversal and resource management rather than brainteasers, and they do serve to break up the pacing.
And speaking of pacing, inevitably there’s a twist mid-way through. I won’t spoil the details, but I found it well handled, giving the player an easy off-ramp if they were satisfied with the experience so far while also offering inducements to dig deeper. This post-twist chapter also sees some of the game’s less-utilized elements come into their own, most notably that rapport system, which initially seems underdeveloped. It all leads up to a climax that’s legitimately exciting, culminating in a big action set piece that perhaps strains credulity but nonetheless brought a grin to my face and ensured SCAVS went out on a very high note.
Now, those of y’all who know me might have pricked up your ears when you saw me say SCAVS is “purely enjoyable” back in the intro, because yes, that was something of a back-handed compliment. The game’s main flaw is that it goes down far too easily, as though it were afraid of imposing any friction on the player. Despite the setup and systems priming me for a survival experience, the gameplay is tuned to be very forgiving: except for a few times when I intentionally took a course of action the game was clearly warning me away from just to see what happened, I only took negligible damage from any of the ambient hazards. Meanwhile, the challenge of navigating based only on a topographical map is quickly negated by alternate map modes that highlight the connections between different areas, place circles on the shelter areas where you can hide from storms, and even list off the places you should investigate. This plays out on the narrative side, too. While the whole final sequence is an enjoyable rush, it’s kicked off by an unbelievably melodramatic coincidence, and while the game talks a big game about the incredible dangers of the planet, and the all-seeing eye of System, in the event all those obstacles crumple like a wet paper bag, leading up to an ending whose overwhelming positivity felt unearned.
This is a fine line to walk, of course – it’s very easy for an author to respond to every bit of negative feedback from testers to add more clues and more streamlining, and usually that’s good! There are way more pieces of IF that are too rough than ones that are too smooth. But remember what I said up top about there being few universal constants in IF? SCAVS is the rare case where a bit less polish, a bit more unfairness, and a bit muddier of a narrative arc would have made for a more rewarding, memorable experience. It’s still a very fine game that’s easy to recommend, but less perfection could have made it great.
9 Likes
Demonstration, by Marion Zhuravlev
Belying its title, Demonstration isn’t a game overly concerned about selling you on anything. This short parser game is made up of four even smaller vignettes, set up with just a few sentences focused more on vibe than context. Two of them appear to be on short timers, playing themselves off the stage almost before the player’s had a chance to catch their breath, while the others require you take a single thematically-weighty action to progress. The former of these is heavily prompted, while the latter isn’t; it took me like three minutes to figure out, after I’d exhausted all the obvious stuff to try and started in on some more random options, which isn’t that long but was a high percentage of the 7 or so minutes the game takes to play.
The subject matter of the vignettes is intentionally opaque. You’re a spy, on or failing a mission: X ME returns “that’s classified”. You’re on an airplane, you’re in an elevator, you’re drowning (?), you’re in an office. You have a female coworker and a male partner, or maybe they’re the same, or maybe in some vignettes you’re the coworker and in others you’re the partner. You think about travel, you consider what space there is for human relationships in these circumstances:
Under safer circumstances, interpersonal interactions are pointless. if no one is injured there is no reason for first aid, and without first aid or other productive efforts there is no need for contact.
Demonstration’s themes are straightforward even if the storytelling is cryptic; I felt like it was more espionage-as-metaphor-for-romance than romance-as-metaphor-for-espionage, but honestly it could easily be intended to go the other way, and that ambiguity is fine, even a positive. And I like the presentation, a sort of atomic-gastronomy of the parser form; my instincts are to want the vignettes, especially those on a timer, to be more built out, but I’m pretty sure those instincts are wrong.
So I have some admiration for the game, but I feel it at somewhat of a remove. It’s less that it’s intentionally alienating and obscure as that it strikes me as a bit too clinical. The characters barely exist, the idea of another human being shorn of almost all human traits. The spy stuff is so dreamlike that it doesn’t provide much beyond the abstract idea of concealment; per the above excerpt, the prose is clean and abstract, devoid of emotion or even subjective detail. I would have preferred something slightly less hermetic – give me a proper noun or two to help my imagination breath life into this scenario, tell me we’re in East Berlin or our spy agency is defending capitalism, take advantage of the whole rich world that exists outside the four corners of this tiny game to make me feel something! The vibes, as I said, are good, but man does not live on vibes alone.
demonstration mr.txt (8.9 KB)
9 Likes
The Copper Tavern, by Alexander
All good game reviewing is subjective, in my view, but sometimes that gets tricky because the subjective experience of playing a game can wind up having very little to do with the game itself. Case in point: The Copper Tavern. An actual review of this game would contextualize it as a small PunyInform fantasy game, with thin but largely-competent execution, one and a half simple puzzles (plus another simple optional one), and a not-unappealing but juvenile sense of humor, and then maybe provide some personal color on how much the reviewer enjoyed, or didn’t, all that stuff, perhaps wrapping up with some craft pointers for what’s probably a first-time author and maybe making a wry-joke about the see-through safe (“You can see a heavy duty safe (which is closed and contains an eviction notice) here.”)
Yeah, that’s not what playing Copper Tavern was like for me.
I mean on a certain level it was, I experienced all those things and had all those thoughts. But the whole time I was distracted. See, only a day or two ago I played Gambler’s Quest, which is a small PunyInform fantasy game, with largely-competent etc. etc. etc., and I couldn’t help notice that there are an overwhelming number of similarities between these games, even beyond the obvious. They’re both attributed to authors going by just their first (fairly generic) names, with no email or other contact info listed. Per their serial numbers, they were finalized on consecutive days, and their Comp intent IDs are also apparently consecutive. They both involve taverns and gambling, and they each have slippery titles: the story file for Gambler’s Quest is actually called tavernkeepers-tale.z5, whereas that for Copper Tavern is just story.z5, but the in-game banner text refers to it as THE TAVERN HEIST. They even both have the same weird feature disabling transcripting!
Given all these highly suspicious circumstances, I was convinced the two games were linked, that there was some metapuzzle connecting them, some hidden detail that when plugged from one into the other would unlock an elaborate reward (or at least funny in-jokes). So the whole time I was playing Copper Tavern, I was alt-tabbing over to Gambler’s Quest to cross-reference descriptions, try similar actions, and otherwise try to catch the author – surely it’s just a single author! – out.
None of that worked, though, up to and including decompiling both games via glulx-strings. Could be there’s a secret here, but if so, I don’t have brain enough to crack it. Unfortunately though that means I have no idea what it’s like to play Copper Tavern straight. I think it would be a pretty fun time, for what it is? There are a couple of funny meta-jokes, like the way the game initially seems very focused on the incongruity of toting an AK-47 around a generic fantasy world, but it turns out it’s completely useless. The writing is pretty generic, but not bad for all that, and some optional actions and scenery are implemented, which helps the player feel like they have something to do. The puzzles solve themselves in rather silly ways, which will frustrate anyone looking for a challenge, I suppose, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to come to a game like this with that expectation. I didn’t find the anachronistic joke about Amazon funny, but again, I wasn’t seriously thinking that this game would share my sense of humor.
These are all just guesses, though – I can’t actually write that review because I didn’t play that game. Instead I played Copper Tavern, a frustratingly opaque mystery-object that was nonetheless pretty compelling for a while; I’d recommend that you give it a whirl, but unfortunately now that you’ve read this, you can’t.
10 Likes
One day, Mike, you will get to write this review:
Unexpected Twist Game
What is the nature of twists? I remember asking this question after [four paragraphs of autobiographical reflections].
[Seven paragraphs of detailed analysis of the twist in Unexpected Twist Game.]
I highly recommend that you play this game without any preconceptions, otherwise it will utterly ruin the experience. But unfortunately now that you’ve read this, you can’t.
12 Likes
Woah, second review I’ve read today about a game being “too slick”.
4 Likes
Dreamteller, by Fatih
For the better part of two decades, I’ve enjoyed making fun of Downton Abbey for naming its sole Turkish character “Kemal Pamuk” – what is there to say about the blithe, unselfconscious Orientalism of smashing together the name of the one Turkish novelist you can think of with the one Turkish politician you can think of? But joke’s on me, maybe, because it’s not like I’ve actually read any Turkish novelists other than Orhan Pamuk, now that I think of it (I know a fair number of their politicians, at least). So I’m very much doing the Boss Baby meme when I say that Dreamteller, which per the language options appears to have been translated from Turkish, has an unreal, abstract vibe to its prose that I also associate with the Pamuk books I’ve read. Maybe both are picking up real features of how Turkish literature tends to work, much as there are distinctive stylistic tics that I’ve noticed in Russian writing translated into English, or maybe my mind is being overeager about making associations, but either way, it very much livens up this short and cryptic detective-vs.-serial-killer game.
Indeed, the bare outlines of the plot are nothing special. You’re a Holmesian high-functioning compulsive the cops call in to catch the bad guys when they’re stumped, with a knack for finding the key clue that everyone else would miss. And now that a killer who suffocates his victims before mutilating them in a very specific way has struck for a third time, the Lestrade-analogue has summoned you to the scene of the crime to do your thing. The killer, it turns out, has been waiting for this to happen, as he’s set up an elaborate game of cat and mouse targeting you, creating puzzles and enigmas that can’t help seize your obsessions and remind you of a deeply-hidden secret you’ve kept from everyone else, drawing you deeper and deeper into the tangled web he weaves, until you lose all mooring to reason and morality. So yeah, you’ve heard this story before, with the inevitable twist at the end likewise not being anything all that novel.
The choice-based interface is likewise straightforward – mostly it’s on rails, with a couple places where you can click for more background or context, and few options through the middle of the game, though his opens up as you reach the endgame where your choices guide you to one of three or four distinct endings. There’s one puzzle that largely solves itself, though I thought the bespoke interface you use to work through it was pretty nice (it should really be a bit more forgiving about capitalization and/or spacing, though – it took me two or three false starts to enter in the answer, even though I’d already figured it out).
So this would be a solid genre piece, but for the prose. Like, here’s a bit of the protagonist’s inner monologue:
How are you going to explain the void in your mind? For in your mind, swirling, intertwined mists are drifting, shifting through a thousand shades of darkness. They avoid taking a certain form, becoming a meaning. Like a dream forgotten as you try to put it into words.
I don’t know what precisely this is trying to convey – there’s a vagueness just at the tip of my tongue as I try to nail it down – but as that last sentence indicates, that’s entirely apt for the subject matter (oh, did I forget to mention that the bad guy in Dreamteller has weird powers over dreams? Yeah, of course he does) and even leaving that aside, I find it a compelling little linguistic puzzle-box to worry away at. Here’s another bit:
You also knew that searching for evidence at the crime scene would be no different than searching for the other sock of a pair. Even if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you would eventually come across a clue that would catch your attention.
That isn’t at all what it’s like for me to look for a missing sock, actually! But I can’t stop thinking about what it would feel like if it was. This hazy language maybe undercuts the game’s effectiveness as a taut psychological thriller, but that’s more than made up for by the dividends paid when considering it as a prose-poem. I may not know exactly where these vibes are coming from, but I like them.
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Maximilien, by Yohan
Maximilien is a maximally stylish Lovecraft-baiting work of occult horror that immediately grabbed me with compelling ideas and enticing questions. Why is Maximilien, a psychology student in the 1920s with a crush on his landlady’s daughter and a grudge against his alcoholic stepfather, a youth so frail he gets bullied by children barely into their teens, sleepwalking to the nether regions of the city? Can he follow the clues laid down by a horrific piece of automatic writing and decades-old cemetery property records to find answers? What connects the Dybbuk of Jewish folklore with the dream-image of a brothel that’s traveled from Pittsburgh to Massachusetts with the preternaturally savage killer the yellow press calls the Ogre of South Boston, and who seems to have a special animus against those who wrong you?
No, I’m seriously asking, what connects the Dybbuk of Jewish folklore with the dream-image of a brothel that’s traveled from Pittsburgh to Massachusetts with the preternaturally savage killer the yellow press calls the Ogre of South Boston, and who seems to have a special animus against those who wrong you? Despite having finished the game, I’ve got nothing.
See, despite the game feeling relatively on rails as I was playing it, apparently it actually gives you a lot of rope, and I guess I wound up hanging myself with it. There’s a fixed rhythm to its two-hour runtime, with segments where you’re sleepwalking and inhabiting a dreadful dream-realm alternated with more prosaic ones, where you can pursue your investigations in the real world. The dream sequences feature terrible, repeated imagery – they all start out with being buried alive, and as you explore more and more of your surroundings, you come across disturbing intimations of long-buried secrets and confusing confrontations with entities whose goals are obscure, all playing out through traditional choice-based gameplay, as you decide where to go, how to navigate through conversations, and whether to delve deeper into the mysteries or try to escape.
The waking sections are much more rational: most days start in your boarding house, where you can check the newspapers for recent events, some relevant, some merely there for color, and perhaps talk with Telma, the aforementioned object of your affections, or rest or call the doctor if you’re feeling ill. You can also head into the city, perhaps visiting your university’s library to do some research, or chasing rumors into the Boston demimonde. There are a few in-vignette choices to navigate, but the most impactful decisions you make on this side of the wall of sleep are just about how to allocate your time: some actions are free, but most take up one or two of the five “slots” you have available each day. When you run out, it’s time for sleep, and what dreams may come…
It’s a solid structure, and there’s plenty of extra bits built on top of it. Beyond all the different plot threads I mentioned at the top of the review, there are a host of sidebars with an inventory system, a notepad, a sanity tracker, an “intuition” page that I don’t fully understand, achievements… I should also mention the video trailer that runs on the opening page, and the interstitial animations that transition from one phase to another with images of clock’s hands and blood.
This all makes for a nicely put-together package, but given how comprehensively I failed to reach a satisfying conclusion, I can’t help feel that there’s something player-unfriendly about the interface, the design, or both, because I still don’t know where I went wrong. Despite the day mechanics seeming set up to provoke FOMO, I actually was able to fully complete every avenue of investigation open to me: I read every book I could find in the library, tracked down the brothel’s phone number after a night of ill-advised revelry, went to as many college lectures as I could attend, and exhausted the avenues of inquiry at city hall. Heck, on day four (out of four) my only options were to read the paper and just wait for sleep, since there wasn’t anything left to do. Heck, I even got to make out with Telma! I’m guessing that means that I must have missed something in the night sequences, but it’s even harder to figure out what that would be, since I was pretty assiduous about trying to poke my nose into sanity-risking situations instead of fleeing like a coward. Maybe I was meant to do more running away? Or maybe it was something even more seemingly-innocuous: I tended to take a skeptical attitude with the gravediggers who show up at the beginning of each night, maybe I should have been spreading out my choices a little more?
Still, having so recently complained about SCAVS being too low-friction, surely I’m not bold enough to take the opposite position here? Why not reload a save and try again? Well, for two reasons. First, there aren’t actually saves; the game backs up your position so you can resume your session, but you can’t go back and undo a choice to pick something different. There are shortcut links allowing you to replay an entire day, but that’s a large chunk of gameplay to have to repeat, all the more so when I’m very unclear on what I should have been doing differently. And then there’s the second reason, which is that the prospect of re-reading that much of the game’s writing is profoundly enervating.
It’s not that the prose is bad, exactly. It often manages to be a very good Lovecraft pastiche, in fact!
I reel… a frail skiff making its way through streets swollen by a thunderous tide, borne along on the swell of the clamor of laboring workmen, the pitiless hammering of hooves striking the paving stones of the boulevard, the hawkers bawling their wares to draw in customers… To the acrid fish smell are joined the exhalations of leather flooding my nostrils. My temples throb, and I must lean for a moment against one of the barrels cluttering a narrow alley. There, in the shadow cast by the austere wall of the Petty-Fitzmaurice fish warehouses, I am able to catch my breath.
Okay, the idea of a fish-warehouse being “austere” is silly (there are a couple of other malapropisms in other places, like a reference to “coveted vegetation”, which may be typos or artefacts of translation from French). But the details are generally good, the adjectivitis feels authentic to the inspirations, it’s overall grabby. It’s just, it never stops:
Trying to reason with myself as to the nature of these disturbances, I loosen the vise formed by the bitter grimace of my jaws.
…
The choice of script, the interlacing of Kabbalistic signs, the nature of the symbols, such as the Seal of Solomon formed by a six-pointed star or the nine- and seven-branched candelabra, and the remarkable characters of the Hebrew language all indicate that this cemetery belongs to the Jewish faith.
…
At last, the chapel bells, blessed deliverance, announce the mass migration of students toward the refectories, where I am able to fortify myself after a particularly emphatic blessing. Though I seek isolation at all costs, I am forced to endure the social exchanges that bring me face to face with my classmates, to which I respond with terse politeness.
What works in small doses starts to get monotonous as the game goes on, as there aren’t really any action sequences to break things up, and even straightforward dialogue scenes are few and far between (all the night-time conversations are just as portentous). And on top of the words themselves, the way they’re presented also makes them increasingly hard to enjoy reading – as your grip on sanity slackens, the text on the screen often gets blurry, shifting in and out of focus, which can mean waiting through five or six blurry-clear-blurry cycles in a single medium-length passage. Combined with the sheer length of the game, it all makes me loath to start all over again in hopes that blind chance will let me do better than I did before.
I am looking forward to reading other reviews, for all that, in hopes of seeing what those who got to a better ending wound up thinking about the game – and I would definitely read the plot-summary section of a Wikipedia page, if one ever gets written, because Maximilien rearranges its familiar tropes in novel ways, so I’m really not sure where things were actually headed. But for all that, and all the effort that clearly went into making it, I’m content to be finished with the actually-playing-it part.
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Thank you for the review! I’m just making some notes for a post-comp release: 21% less polish, 16% more unfairness and 12% muddier arc – got it!
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The 9:00 AM Train, by tzbits
The 9:00 AM Train is either a thriller or a meditation on grace; I’m tempted to say that I’d like it more if it made up its mind, but then again, I might not.
This is a parser game that flirts with minimalism. You’re an unnamed character waiting in a station for the eponymous train, starting to sweat because you’re not quite sure where to pick up your ticket. There’s not much scenery or much to do – the counter isn’t staffed, there are hundreds of people milling around which is to say there’s nobody in particular around – and the details of who you are and what you’re up to are left vague: you’re dressed as a tourist, but where you are, and whether you’re coming or going, are left entirely unsettled. As you start to poke around for lack of anything better to do, you can run afoul of some creepy ROT-13 spouting guards, or you can help out a stranger, at which point you get a text message indicating that outside events have rendered your quest for a seat on the train rather more urgent. As the danger ramps up, answers remain unforthcoming, nor does the ending shine any more light.
This vagueness, I think, undercuts the thriller plot – we don’t know the stakes in general, and we have no reason to care about the protagonist in particular (for all we know, maybe the ending would be a happier one if some member of the anonymous crowd had gotten that last train seat in our stead!) But it does create space for a more metaphysical engagement with the game. Events proceed in a liminal place where nothing is fixed, except when a moment of empathy creates a connection with another character, likewise creating a spark of specificity. An early good deed becomes, unlooked-for, the only reason you have a chance of salvation, and another key event hinges on a bond you create with another character over your ability to speak German, a language taught to you by your mother, whose death you’re still grieving. And this isn’t just me imposing my Catholic upbringing on the game, it’s very aware of its key theme:
“Sometimes we are given grace and others are not. Whether you call it lucky breaks or grace is a matter of personal taste. But regardless, what you have to accept is that sometimes you have no control over who receives it.”
But back to the thriller side of the equation – it’s still there, and is responsible for the plot and most of the business of gameplay. The brisk prose and penchant for talismanic repetition are a reasonable fit for both parts of the game, but in other respects 9:00 AM Train’s attempts to serve two masters are awkward. In particular, the puzzles struck me as a bit underclued both in the abstract and in context. One relies on a particular verb that most modern IF doesn’t rely on (though admittedly the action list in the HELP text does indicate it’s a possibility) and there’s another where you’re only told a key fact about your surroundings when you perform an unrelated action. In a puzzle-focused game, these would be mildly annoying bits of friction, quickly surmounted, but in a meditation on how the Lord sendeth it to rain on the just and unjust alike, it rather took me out of the mood to be wandering around the map, Xing everything in sight and trial-and-erroring my way through the verb list. Similarly, it’s hard to take the ROT13 stuff seriously.
I don’t want to be too much of a grump here, though – part of the fun of the game is seeing what it’s up to, and the fact that it spends a reasonable chunk of its time behaving for all the world like a simple action story plays a big part in that fun. Contrariwise, the moral insights here are not, I think, especially deep – though they have a lot of personal appeal to me – so ensuring the player has something to do other than nit-pick them is the right choice. So the 9:00 AM Train is very much worth catching, even if the grade could have been a bit smoother in places.
9 am train mr.txt (41.6 KB)
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Shadow and Ink, by Stewart C Baker and Aidan Doyle
There’s nothing more annoying than someone who’s constantly citing themselves (well, OK, I guess it’s worse if they’re a professor, and as part of this bad habit they’re also making you buy the textbook they wrote). But as I played Shadow and Ink, an enjoyably bibliophilic romp through a fantastical version of early 20th-Century Japan, I couldn’t help thinking of M. Russo’s seminal 2023 Rosebush essay Guybrush’s Heirs.
See, in that piece I worked through some of the the ways limited parser games and “parserlike” choice-based games resembled each other, and identified a couple of the design considerations most implicated by those choices of interface. And one of the, if not in fact just the, central dangers I talked about was lawnmowering: the player realizing they don’t actually need to think about things, they can just spam the one or two verbs the parser accepts or click on every link they see, and get to the end. Ironically, this can lead to a more mechanical experience than a puzzleless story that just lets you get on with it, because the player knows they’re interacting with a system, they’re just not engaging with it the way the author wanted, and they risk being taken out of the experience altogether.
Nothing quite as bad as all that happened to me in Shadow and Ink, thankfully. There’s plenty to enjoy here, from the setting-appropriate visuals to the gently bucolic vibes of the cursed village you explore to – especially – the insistence that everyone’s problems would be solved if they just read the right book. The story is mostly just an excuse to wander around, meeting a bunch of people suffering from more or less dramatically unfortunate magical transformations, but some of the vignettes are quite well done, like using your shadow to feed shadow-rice to a shadow-fish in a shadow-pond, or, on the more prosaic side, the traveling salesman who’s missed the birth of a child. Sure, there are some corny jokes (“Shogun and Sensibility” is trying *way* too hard to make a Jane Austen pun when Lady Susanoo was right there (yes I know he’s a male deity, if you have a better joke please share it!)) and the occasional odd image – what’s a “disheveled mansion”? – but this is a nice place to spend time with a breezy prose style making exploration rewarding.
For all that, though, there is an evil enchantment, and to put things right, you have a store of magical book-making materials that you can use to turn specific objects into books; then offering the right book to the right person will break their curse, usually allowing you to collect more materials and/or another object. Some of this prompting can be *rather* direct, like this guard dropping a not-so-subtle hint about what could persuade her to let you past her post:
She nudges the drawstring bag Old Willow gave you with the butt of her spear. “Course, it’s been a while since I had something new to read. And anyone who offered me a book—say, one about long-ago battles—would never break the peace. Why, they’d no longer be a stranger, for that matter.
“You get what I’m saying?”
Gee, let me think! But for younger readers or those new to IF, this kind of direction isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and admittedly, this is one of the very first characters you meet). What is a questionable design decision is that even without the prompting, these puzzles would largely solve themselves. You only generally have access to a few book-making objects at any time, and after you’ve made one, the choice to offer it to the correct person pops up right on the main exploration screen, with no incorrect choices even listed as options. As a result, the gameplay just involves running around the map, hoovering up everything you see, periodically turning it all into as many books as you can, then looping around again to see if there’s a new option that’s popped up. Notionally, there’s a resource-management aspect to the system, because you only have so many sheets of paper and bottles of ink, but in my game this limit was bugged – I could keep making books even though I was out of paper – but even if it was working, it wouldn’t have done much to address the lawnmowering issue since extra materials typically aren’t gated around puzzles, so without the bug I would have just had to make one additional tour through the map before I had everything I needed to make all the books.
Thinking critically about the lawnmower problem might have also suggested that the game’s endearing “bonus challenge” – finding an octet of hidden ninjas to unlock a bonus ending – actually makes this issue worse. The way you find them is clicking on all the scenery links you can find, as some of them have a chance to reveal a hidden ninja. From what I could tell, this sometimes requires revisiting previously-explored areas, and as a result, just pushes you even further towards a playstyle of automatically running laps around the village and clicking everything without thinking about it.
I suppose this is the point where I should admit that in my article, I didn’t *solve* the lawnmower problem or anything, it’s actually quite a tricky one to grapple with. But there are some tools in the toolbelt, and I very much do think a bit of friction could have really enhanced the puzzles. Requiring the player to go into the inventory tab and think about which object could be turned into a book responsive to a character’s dilemma would have helped bring the mechanics and the narrative together more closely, and create a stronger sense of satisfaction at having solved a puzzle. Or getting the resource-constraint working properly, and using it to drive decision-making, could have been a viable option as well. Or, heck, just not having puzzles – there could be a version of the game where you can always make a book for a character as soon as you meet them, but you have to weigh the choice of handing them a Dostoevsky or a Marx. Like I said, I by no means have this all figured out. But I think Shadow and Ink would have been stronger if it did more to grapple with the problem.
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Thanks for the thoughtful review, and I look forward to buying your $165 textbook on the subject of lawnmowers soon.
I will definitely look into this! There are two books which don’t require the paper, which might be what is going on, but that could be clearer–a couple of people have mentioned this now and I haven’t (yet!) been able to reproduce it.
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Epistemophilia, by Mehmetcan Serinkaya
Epistemophilia isn’t quite a neologism, but the title is unfamiliar enough to prompt some attention: it means love of knowledge, if I have my Greek right, but at least in English the -philia suffix denotes a love that’s gone a bit wrong, that’s misdirected or obsessive (contrast with what happens when we move it to the first part of the word, e.g. the austerely positive philosophy, love of wisdom). Although I wasn’t able to finish the game, I assume it’s meant to refer to the story’s bad guys – while it took me a while to get my feet given an oblique, highly-branching opening where the vulnerable, amnesiac protagonist explores a strange, hostile world, eventually it becomes clear that you’re poking about in the aftermath of several failed experiments where scientists and bureaucrats played god with their unwitting subjects, and reaped the whirlwind. Yet for all that the word’s associations are negative, I can certainly recognize tendencies in that direction in myself, as anyone who’s ever talked to me about the origins of the nation state or the balance between efficiency, equity, and incentives in tax policy will know. So why didn’t I find the process of uncovering Epistemophilia’s secrets especially compelling, even before running into a pair of game-ending bugs?
I think that opening is a big part of the issue. While, zoomed out, this is a reasonable, even archetypal, idea for a game, “waking up with amnesia in a strange and hostile world” is an approach that requires some delicacy. Even a blank-slate protagonist needs some degree of characterization to be appealing, and ideally some kind of drive beyond mere survival and recovering their memories. There’s some work done on the former front, as some early interactions make clear that the protagonist is older, has a rather no-nonsense attitude, and previously earned the gulp-inducing moniker of “Beast of the Dunes”. On the latter, though, things are thinner. Even after spending the better part of an hour flailing around, I didn’t have a clear sense of objectives beyond going to new places, learning new things about the world, and trying not to die.
Again, that’s a process that often works at least OK in games, but again, I found a couple of stumbling blocks in my way. First is the sheer arbitrariness of the setting – the fact that it’s all a bunch of failed experimental setups I suppose creates plausibility for even the wackier elements, but still, my early poking about uncovered an incongruous parrot, killer robots, writing in the sky, a Victorian mansion packed with surveillance equipment… things started to settle down later in the session, as the truth about what’s going on starts to be revealed, but that first fifteen minutes isn’t a great introduction because rather than prompting me to look for clues about what was going on, they trained me to just accept whatever was thrown at me because I sure couldn’t guess where this was going. Second, the prose is rather dense and often dissociated from the action. Like, here’s an attempt to go through a door:
You touch the cold metal surface of the door. You still don’t remember a thing about your past life. You realize that you don’t really care, as long as you’re human. So far, your new life was full of adventure. You don’t really know who “yourself” is but something tells you that you were nothing but yourself in this strange world. There’s no need for any regrets.
I appreciate the attempt to weave together the present action with the amnesiac state of the protagonist, but this specific reverie doesn’t tell us anything, breaks up the momentum of discovery, and is fairly wordy to boot. And that’s representative of the whole: I often felt like I was reading a whole lot of words for a disproportionately-small payoff in terms of ideas, images, and plot development.
The last weakness here is the choice structure. Most nodes give you a lot of choices, often half a dozen or so. And these usually aren’t the kind where you work through possibilities one by one, or where there’s a puzzle and you need to figure out the right approach, because often they can lead you to wildly different, mutually-incompatible branches with no real warning. Like, the first choice in the game includes options for “try to remember your name” and “woolgather”, which seem like they’d be similar “sit around and introspect” choices that wouldn’t necessarily change how you move through the main plot, but in fact they send you careening into entirely different settings. Making this structure even more challenging, a lot of these choices seem to be dead ends: I couldn’t get very far in the “remember your name” branch, but “woolgather” seemed to be the golden path to the endgame, while other options in that initial node appear to lead to quick, un-sign-posted deaths. There’s even a midgame sequence where you need to work through a set of left-or-right staircases, with no indication of the proper path that I could find, and instant death waiting if you make the wrong choice.
This is of course a litany of some of the weaker elements of Choose Your Own Adventure books – we’re pretty much in a Time Cave – which make the process of exploration feel more mechanical. Once my brain adjusted to the necessary save-scumming, I was able to make some progress, but unfortunately after hitting on a lode of computer logs that explained much of the backstory – and suggested there was still a fair bit of game left – I wound up hitting a dead-end link, and the reload function likewise stopped working. A more enticingly mysterious setting, a more compelling character, or gameplay that was less of a punishing gauntlet might have lured me back, but alas, my love of knowledge was not sufficient to push past these barriers.
I’ll repeat: by no means do I think this is an ill-conceived game. Heck, just a robust edit trimming the wordcount and number of branches by a third or so would make it much, much stronger, and adding a few clearer hooks for the world and the protagonist wouldn’t require much of a change to the structure. Given the effort that’s clearly gone into Epistemophilia, I think a post-Comp release that makes some of these improvements (and tracks down that save-game bug) could be a marked improvement, so here’s hoping for that.
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Hi Mike,
Thank you so much for this review, as attentive as it is kind. I’m glad the world, the structure and the ideas of the game appealed to you.
Your feedback on the ending is very valuable to me. The fact that you explored every lead without understanding where you went astray shows me that the conditions for progression aren’t readable enough, and that’s what I’m going to work on first. The intuition system is precisely meant to guide the player in that direction, and I’m going to make it clearer. Your remarks about not being able to go back and about the blurred text also point the right way, and I’ll take them into account.
I can now see recurring stumbling blocks across the reviews I’m receiving. I wrote Maximilien more like a tabletop RPG session, through my eyes as a Game Master, than like a gamebook, and where this can bring enjoyment, it can also make the experience frustrating as it stands. There’s no way to know how the narrative will react to a behavioral choice that may not match what you anticipated. Around a table, you clarify, you adjust. Here, you can only try to live with consequences whose scope you sometimes can’t measure, and it becomes a matter of luck. Everything can always be recovered, but only through choices of the same nature. Few major narrative nodes rely on this principle, but they’re enough to have negative consequences on the success of one intuition path or another. I need to show when these paths lock, clarify how the intuitions work, add a way to go back (which now seems essential to me, and which I hadn’t questioned since the start of the project), and remove the text distortions caused by the influence of sanity to make reading easier, replacing them with a more pleasant way of conveying it without disrupting the reading.
I’m very happy and pleasantly surprised to benefit from such sharp reviews, which I would have needed so much during my testing phases, in French as well as in English.
If you’d like to know how the dybbuk, the brothel and the Ogre of South Boston are connected, I’ll gladly explain it in a private message. Everything is built around the legacy of Maximilien’s bloodline and the burden of its consequences.
A clarification about the blur in the dreams, which I only understood while rereading your review. This effect doesn’t come from sanity. It appears from the third dream cycle onward, when the haunting grows stronger and takes control. The text, which the reader already knows, blurs, and only a few words stay sharp. Together, they form the words of the haunting, speaking through them. The idea was also to spare the reader, by signaling that there’s no need to read the passage again. Clearly it failed, since you did exactly the opposite!
Thank you again for the time you devoted to it.
Yohan
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Hi Mike,
Thank you for taking time to play and review Epistemophilia. I appreciate it.
Epistemophilia favours a certain approach. While I don’t think it’s a good example for introducing IF to someone, I suspect that an outsider may enjoy Epistemophilia much more than an Intfiction member.
I’d also like to think that there’s a payoff in Epistemophilia. Though it may only appear once you forfeit the investment or do not think about it at all.
About your interpretation of the story itself, all I can write is that there’s more to the story, in more than one sense.
I’m sorry that your game was cut short. I’m also a bit baffled. With Ink, the saving-loading system is pretty much baked in. I’d like to try replicating the issue and find out what went wrong. I’d also like to learn more about that “dead link”. The details would most likely contain spoilers about the story, so please feel free to send me a message when you can. It would be a great help.
Take care,
M.
Bob the Barbarian, by Charles Moore
It is easy, in space-year 2026, to view all old-school parser puzzlers as essentially alike. We’re far enough away from the design sensibilities of the 80s that certain once-common but now passé elements loom so large that it’s hard to see past them. And therefore it’s similarly easy to write a review that simply rehearses the case against those elements, recapitulating in miniature the historical developments that largely consigned them to the dustbin of history, while sparing only the slightest of attention to the idiosyncratic quiddity of the particular game being examined.
OK, I’ll stop being coy: the main element I’m talking about is of course Zarfian cruelty (and I’m not being coy about anything else, to be clear, I haven’t read anyone else’s reviews of this game yet, I’m mostly critiquing other reviews I’ve written here). Bob the Barbarian’s traditionalism is clear from the bog-standard rescue-the-princess premise, and that extends to its approach to difficulty, which occasioned many restarts and a bit of swearing before I won through to the end. As I said, it would be easy to make this review *just* about that, and I am going to talk it through, but per the above let’s try to dwell on some of the other stuff it’s got going on first.
Right off the bat, the writing is generally a highlight. Being told that the eponymous Bob “come[s] from a long line of proud barbarians, a crude and vulgar pedigree”, evoked a laugh-snort, and the prose manages to keep things feeling zippy and fun even when the gameplay is being a bit of a buzzkill. There are some digs at the protagonist for being dim, which is a bit of the modern barbarian stereotype I find annoying (y’all know that Conan was smart, right?) but here at least it serves partially to set up a cool leveling-up mechanic where you start out illiterate but eventually are able to read, revealing new information about areas you’ve previously visited.
Similarly, the cook’s tour of fantasy locations – you’ve got your foreboding forest, your gritty town, your bucolic farm, a punishing desert, pirate adventure island, and the inevitable Castle ‘o Foozle – boasts not the slightest shred of novelty (and speaking of the desert, I could have done without the game’s one real-world element be clarifying that the fat, untrustworthy camel-dealer is in fact an Arab), but the distinct areas contribute to a solid sense of progression and make coming back to the ends of some of the longer puzzle changes feel satisfying indeed.
The puzzles are also mostly fair; just about everything was logical in retrospect, even if I spent a lot of time in the first half of the game struggling because I’d failed to solve one puzzle that unlocked a major area with the solutions to most of the conundrums I’d been banging my head against (more on that in a bit). There’s one that requires setting fire to an object to prevent people in hot pursuit from using it that I think is wildly overoptimistic about the time it takes things to fully burn, but other than that even some of the more creative ones hold together quite well, with reasonable clueing. I will ding the game a bit for not living into its premise as much as it could have, though – given that it’s called Bob the Barbarian, I was expecting to solve more problems through the power of my thews, but there are surprisingly few places where hitting things or ripping them apart is a viable course of action. The exception is the regular combat sections, I suppose, but these unfortunately aren’t a highlight – they’re rendered as DnD style turn-based wrangling, but your only option is to ATTACK, I don’t think your stats approve over time, and there appears to be an RNG running so it’s quite possible to get killed after a couple of rounds if you’re unlucky or wasting time. As I result I just undo-scummed through these sequences and questioned why they were there.
That’s hopefully an adequate amount of time on the impedimenta, so now it’s on to the difficulty. Bob the Barbarian is very much a cruel game, and it quickly put me in the habit of making frequent, differently-named save files after a few initial setbacks led to a lot of backtracking. This is surely an intended part of the design, so it’s not especially productive to complain about the mere fact that it’s possible, nay, easy to get yourself into an unwinnable position. Still, there are some aspects of the implementation that feel like the game is frustrating even by the unmerciful standards it’s holding itself out to be judged on. For example, while there are a couple of places where it’s reasonably signposted, either before or immediately after the fact, that aimless experimentation can put you in an unwinnable state, there are other places where this kind of aimless experimentation is required. Most egregiously, that one puzzle I mentioned above hinged on using a clearly one-time-only object without any external prompting, and then spending several turns wandering around afterwards before seeing that it had any positive effect – which is tricky in the best of circumstances, but by that point I felt like the game had trained me to think that this kind of behavior was dangerous! There’s similar instance where I felt the game didn’t provide enough information about the likely consequences of my actions, because I thought that a cauldron of beans contained more than one serving so I could go back for more if I needed to – this turned out not to be the case, which contrasted with another area where the game made a big deal out of Bob being kicked out of a location after visiting a couple of times, but actually *that* puzzle remains solvable no matter what. This kind of inconsistency made it hard for me to engage with the game, and sent me to the walkthrough more than I would have it had been consistent about punishing motiveless action and telegraphing which resources were limited.
Am I saying Bob the Barbarian would be more fun if it was more cruel? …yeah, I think I am; as it is, the game doesn’t feel as much like a challenge to be surmounted as it does, well, a game. And to an extent it does seem like it wants to be solved, at least more so than the original games from which it takes inspiration – there’s a hint system, for one thing, though the way that it requires the player to type the name of an object accessible in the current location dramatically limits its usefulness. So maybe an easier version would have been fine, too – as it is, I enjoyed playing Bob the Barbarian, at least when I wasn’t swearing at it, but feel like I would have dug it more had it moved farther in one direction or the other.
bob mr.txt (237.5 KB)
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Archive 13, by Anastasiia
There is, I would posit, no better setting for a piece of IF than a library. In IF everything is text, and the interactive element means that the player is necessarily manipulating text, moving from one passage to the next, trying them on for size, imagining how they could be different. That’s why there’s always been something post-modern about IF even from the very beginning, and why there’s nothing more perfectly apt than placing the protagonist within an enclosed environment bounded by words, and letting them free.
Of course, take this logic too far and we wind up arguing that Naughty in the Library is a better piece of IF than Zork, and while there may be certain incredibly narrow circumstances where that’s true, that’s probably an indication we should step back from the sweeping declaratory statements and motte-and-bailey our argument into just being that libraries in IF are cool.
Archive 13 is a short Twine game entirely set within such a place, though with a pair of meta twists, one authored, one circumstantial. The former is that the eponymous archive is no public institution – it’s an idiosyncratic congeries of newspapers, yearbooks, diaries, and official documents, arranged not by publication type or subject area or even author, but purely by date. It seems to serve as a machine not for general reference, but for remembering the traumatic disappearances of several children, a decade apart. And you, a night watchman new to the task, turn out to have a key role to play in that mechanism of remembering.
The second meta twist is that the game is written entirely in Russian. Through the magic of Google Translate, I was able to play it despite my one semester of college Russian being way in the rearview mirror at this point, but as with so many tech company offerings, this is something of a poisoned chalice: relying on a machine to render the game’s prose makes me unsure which of my impressions are based on a close-enough encounter with what the author wrote, and which are biased by the idiosyncratic or over-literal workings of a stack of silicon. Don’t get me wrong, there are some howlers here that I’m sure are machine errors – the choice, upon noticing a file, to “honor the article”, is almost certainly mangling an idiom for pulling it out and paying special attention to it – but there are only so many such outliers. So while I can make a tentative critical approach to the premise – I’m in favor, see above – everything about my judgment of the implementation is subject to the world’s biggest asterisks.
As such, examination of (what I think of as) the game’s prose is rather besides the point. Overall though my subjective experience was fine; the writing seems effective at its aims, conveying clarity when it wants too, becoming appropriately muddled when the story in the papers starts to get tangled up with the story of the watchman, and boasting some engagingly clunky images and locutions that might be translation bugs, or might be stylistic tics authentically in the Russian original, but which I kinda liked all the same even as I acknowledge that yeah, it does feel pretty awkward at times.
I’m hopefully on firmer ground with the pacing. Again, there’s nothing especially novel here but I think it works well enough. The game is structured around multiple shifts, as you perform more of your work and learn more about the disappearances in each of your visits. There are only a few layers to this onion, but they’re peeled back engagingly, from the early intimations about a chapel that no one remembers, to more directly spooky revelations from the documents and the fellow who has the shift right before yours. The choice structure also helps keep things moving along briskly, as there are usually a couple of dialogue options with the other watchman, or decisions about what order to tackle your research, to liven up even the more linear sections.
The blurb does promise three endings, so at least some of those choices do branch the story, but the exact mechanics for that weren’t ever clear to me – and again, that could be intentional on the part of the author, or it could be that the algorithm stripped out carefully-placed signposting. Regardless of the cause, the unfortunate result is that when I hit a game-ending bug – there’s a non-climactic passage with a single link, and when you click it there’s nothing on the other side – I wasn’t sure what I should have done differently to get to a better result. The game does have a default-Twine undo arrow that in retrospect I could have used to backpack and find a path forward through trial and error, I suppose, but at the time, the fractured, premature ending seemed curiously of a piece with the disjointed way I’d experienced the rest of the game – and besides, it’s not like you get finished with a library by reading everything in it, just by deciding that you’re done.
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Actually, speaking as someone who interned in an archive over the summer, bowing to a file is standard procedure.
Glad to see your review of this one; I was interested in it because of the setting/concept, but didn’t want to subject the game or myself to the Google Translate mangle method. (I much prefer the “wait for Mike Russo to thoughtfully present his impressions” method!)
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