Mike Russo's ParserTHON 2025

Competitions
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The journey, by paravaariar (ParserComp)

For good or ill, we as a society appear to have move past the era of the mash-up – instead of “it’s X meets Y!” we now have “it’s X, but rebooted!” – but it’s still enough of my cultural DNA that I thought I had The journey (sic?) pegged within the first couple of moves. The game starts with you waking up from cryogenic suspension on a colony ship that’s been orbiting the earth, waiting for enough time to pass from an environmental catastrophe for the planet to become habitable again. Except the earth isn’t quite habitable yet, because you’ve been woken up early, apparently by a strange old man who ducks out of the room as soon as you come to. So yeah, that’s WALL-E meets that Passengers movie from a couple good lord, almost ten years ago, minus the romantic tension (I mean from the latter, though the WALL-E / EVE relationship is pretty cute). But little did I know how far off I was, because even though the game as a whole is only ten minutes, man does it go some places.

I’m going to pause for a minute to talk about the custom parser system that powers the game, before things go completely barmy. It’s fine! This is a web-native game that looks slicker than the average parser interpreter; there’s a starry background that helps set the stage, and functional windows that don’t draw too much attention to themselves but neatly separate output from input. The parser makes for a smooth experience, though the game is simple enough that there’s not really room for it to get itself in any trouble – the design is so minimal that there are no takeable objects, containers, items with duplicate names giving rise to disambiguation problems, characters with whom you can have a conversation… But I’d rather have something stripped-down that works than something fussily over-engineered and fragile.

The gameplay likewise accords with KISS principles. There’s one and a half puzzle – the half involves examining an obvious bit of scenery to find a password that you can type into a computer through the simple expedient of TYPE PASSWORD rather than having to actually memorize the digits. Then the main puzzle just involves following the instructions you find on the unlocked computer. It’s likewise fine! There’s also an interactive flashback, and it took me maybe thirty seconds to figure out how to move into this scene and then back into the main timeline, but that’s about it in terms of stuff for the player to do.

That just leaves the writing – the plot and the prose. The second of these, you will be shocked to learn, is also workmanlike. All the descriptions are very matter-of-fact, even those in the flashback where some emotionally intense stuff is happening. With that said, there few times when the laconic style is effective, like this bit from the flashback:

It’s my drawing of a spaceship with different parts. Mom likes it, but Dad doesn’t. He really yelled at me. I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function.

The story is what bucks the trend. See, the flashback leads to two rapid-fire revelations about the present-day situation: not only did the old man wake you up for reasons more sinister than simple loneliness, he also has an unsuspected connection with the player character. And then something happens with the ship to bring the entire narrative to a climax. Each of these three things are entirely unrelated to the others, as far as I can tell, which feels like at least one coincidence too far, even leaving aside the lurid details behind that overview, which are really tipped me over into being completely nonplussed by the ending (I feel like you could say “it’s WALL-E meets Passengers!” at a pitch meeting and get at least a few heads nodding; “it’s WALL-E meets Passengers meets survival cannibalism!” is going to get you escorted out by security). Sometimes, more is more – bouillabaisse, say, or family reunions – but journey is way too short to comfortably support all the ideas it’s bringing to the table. Not everything need to be straight reboot of something we’ve all seen a hundred times before, but there’s still something to be said for restraint and allowing the ingredients you’ve got time to blend.

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The system is fi-js. There are not many games in English that use it, but it’s been around since 2013.

It’s kind of stripped down, written in old-school JavaScript without external tools, but it’s pretty solid and flexible (supports parser and choice).

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Method in My Madness, by Max Fog (THON)

There’s a distinct and robust subgenre of IF that’s devoted to the subjective portrayal of mental illness, braiding description and mechanics together to try to communicate the lived reality of conditions like OCD, social anxiety, autism, depression, and many more (like I said – it’s a robust subgenre, and one I think is a great example of what IF can do well). But Method in My Madness, despite appearances, isn’t actually part of this subgenre – while it effectively uses chaotic typography and text effects to make its scant word-count disorient and oppress the player (this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry), the mode here feels more literary than confessional, more a lurid thriller with a twist than an attempt at verisimilitude.

Oh, what a twist, though! The game’s bag of tricks aren’t that novel, I suppose, or too hard to tease apart if you analyze them piece by piece, but they add up to an overwhelming assault on the senses. Words are splayed across the screen at odd angles, splashing in or fading out, their upsetting content secondary to the still-more-upsetting presentation. At first, appropriately, things don’t quite cohere – the name Cauchy (or is it a word? “Cauchemar” is French for nightmare…) is repeated like a mantra, “Fix me” is the only clickable link (though of course clicking it won’t) – but something resembling a plot does emerge: the protagonist is obsessed with a neighbor, contriving excuses to bump into him early in the morning when taking out the trash for pickup.

The narrator, with the player’s complicity, eventually engineers a meet-cute that leads to something further, a potentially sweet moment made terrifying by the disjunction between the reasonable-seeming dialogue, representing the protagonist desperately trying to hold things together, and the explosion of intrusive thoughts and mania leaking out at the margin. And then things take another turn…

Stripped of its House-of-Leaves aesthetics, Method in My Madness admittedly wouldn’t land quite as hard, but the prose works hand in hand with the formatting. I copied and pasted a bunch of sentence-fragments into my notes to jot down memorable phrases, and if the game’s styling hijinks meant that sometimes what got CTRL-V’d was a bit jumbled up, well, that’s all the more on point:

Cauchyburn us all, our bodies fed to the spirits in the same way we were born: by the fairies
nothings mumbled in a restless, cold ear

And while there are only a few choices, the use of interactivity is well-judged, making the player feel like they’ve got a say in where things go and pushing you to engage with the riot of text and appreciate the details, rather than just letting it wash over you. Again, I don’t think this game has much to say about real mental illness, rather than the Hollywood kind, since spectacle and plot are the first priorities here. Admittedly, sometimes that can trivialize important issues – Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitivity! But Method to my Madness doesn’t pretend to be something different than it is, and on its own terms, I think it delivers (and if you’re in the mood for something more substantive, there is that whole robust subgenre filled with great games to explore).

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Thousand Lives, by Wotjek Borowicz

For all that we are changeable creatures, most of the poignancy of our temporary lives comes from their implacable, irrevocable permanence. As the poet says:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

One of the pleasures of games is the escape-hatch they offer from the tyranny of causality: feel free to move that Moving Finger back a ways, thanks to omnipresent save/load functionality, no tears – much less piety or wit! – required. The ability to explore what might have been is incredibly potent, but the tradeoff is that it’s also inhuman; there’s nothing in anyone’s lived experience remotely like thinking “nah, I didn’t like how that played out” and pushing rewind. So it’s perhaps no surprise that some designers perversely constrain the play of contingency in their games, in search of immediacy or meaning. Permadeath is one key strategy these folks pursue, forcing a player to slow down and consider the consequences of their actions – but this approach isn’t as powerful in narrative-focused games, as most stories don’t hinge on the extended moment-by-moment drama of “is the main character going to die now? How about now? How about now?” No, for narrative games the mechanic of choice is the Game You Can Only Play Once: by forcing you to live with your choices, removing easy options like reload and undo, and sometimes even preventing the player from restarting from a blank slate, you create a game that’s like, well, life: no do-overs.

Thousand Lives takes things one step further: this biographical game about a woman navigating the ebbs and flows of life in postwar Poland plays out in real time, forcing you to wait a day to see the consequences of your actions. Structurally, it hearkens back play-by-post games of the 80s and 90s (heck, the game’s main visual motif is a series of historical postage stamps); after you sign up to play, you get an email each day, laying out a bit of story and then prompting you for a choice that determines which bit of narrative you’ll get on the morrow. If you get buyer’s remorse half a second after clicking submit – which happened to me more than once in the week it took me to play – well, that’s just how it is, presumably you can relate!

There are dangers to this approach – most notably, each of the vignettes is relatively short, perhaps a thousand words or so, and a day in 2025 can feel very, very long. Fortunately, Thousand Lives does a good job of recapping the previous day’s action at the top of each email, re-grounding the player in the story before pushing it ahead.

And it’s a story I was very interested in. I’m by no means deeply versed in this era, but as a child in the 80s, I knew about the Polish pope, heard dockworkers chanting “Lech Walesa!” on the TV – I learned the word “solidarity” from the name of the union. I’m a sucker for a historical game, and the history Thousand Lives has to relate, of Poland’s suffering under and then emergence from the Iron Curtain, is dramatic – plus, it’s got a unique viewpoint character. The protagonist is a woman based on the author’s grandmother, and while her biography will vary depending on your decisions, she’s got a compelling personality: smart, caring, and willing to make tough choices to protect her dreams and her family (though of course she might not be able to do both).

Those choices are a high point of the game, as well they should be. They all feel impactful, and I agonized over most of them. Reflecting societal constraints under Communism (and capitalism, once it arrives!), only a few are about expressing a preference for what the protagonist wants their life to look like – most are about trade-offs, asking you what you’re willing to give up for one thing you want. I think you can play the game to create a version of the protagonist who’s completely uncompromising, but while I can see the temptations of that path, I wasn’t confident enough to take it, instead tacking back and forth with circumstances, sometimes pushing for my ambitions, sometimes settling for less when the cost to me or my loved ones felt like it would be too dear.

So this is a successful game, I think, but I admit my admiration is a bit chillier than I’d prefer. Partially this is because of how zoomed-out it is – Thousand Lives covers 75 years in the course of six chapters, none of which are especially long. Trying to cover a decade in a thousand words inevitably means that there’s not much texture; situations are described, but not events, trends, but not moments. While the writing successfully conveys some of the personality of the various people in the protagonist’s family, they never truly came alive for me. As a result, while the dilemmas the game regularly threw up were intellectually engaging – I didn’t want any of my loved ones to be imprisoned by the army! – they lacked the emotional heft that comes with specificity.

Paradoxically, the time lag and no-backsies mechanics might have also drained some of my choices of their impact. Given that it took some time and effort to get myself back in the cultural space of Communist Poland each time I got one of the game’s emails, I can’t help wondering whether longer, more intense engagement would have made it more memorable. But more significantly, in a game like this, there are no right answers, no wizard at the bottom of the dungeon who throws up a “you won!” sign upon his death. Navigating this kind of story isn’t a puzzle, it’s a journey, and I think I would have better appreciated my decisions if I’d had the opportunity to see the alternatives, and commit to my story. Life is one damned thing after another, as they say; if art lets us see all the different places that Moving Finger could move, before finally coming to rest in the place it does, well, there’s a poignancy in that, too.

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I know it wasn’t meant this way, but this reads as a bit dismissive toward real people with mental illness—the idea that narratives that position us as scary and dangerous are “more fun” than narratives that depict us with compassion and empathy. Just wanted to put that out there!

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I’m a bipolar-American, but I feel differently. Making light of things is how I deal. But we all deal in our own ways and that’s fine.

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I think that everybody likes problematic media–I have a complicated relationship with HP Lovecraft–but it’s a worthwhile exercise to imagine the phrase “I don’t think this media has much to say about real [some other social disadvantage], but…”. I think people get a “sanism” pass–speaking broadly and not just about this review–it’s complicated. My preference is that the messiness be acknowledged before moving on.

I also think it’s different when I’m talking about my own experience–it’s mine. I make a lot of jokes, as anyone who’s played my games can attest. Like, I can call myself crazy but some of y’all better not haha. My response to autobiographical work is therefore different.

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I appreciate folks’ critiques here, which I think are right on! I think IF is good at providing insight into mental illness that’s grounded in lived experience – which is valuable on its own terms and also often very artistically effective, there are a bunch of games that take this approach that are among my favorites – so was trying to convey that MtmM is doing something different. But the words I picked to communicate that were dismissive and flip, so mea culpa for that! I’ll do some rewriting later today when I get a chance, and sincerely, Tabitha and Drew, I appreciate y’all bringing it up (and Phil, for adding your perspective too!)

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The Sword of Voldiir, by Bottlecap Rocket Games (THON)

It’s a truism that RPG sessions are often way more fun to experience than they sound when you describe them to people who weren’t at the table. And it’s a truism because it’s true – even I, gentle reader, have seen an interlocutor’s eyes glaze over while telling them some totally awesome story about the Satyr I played in this Changeling game back in undergrad. Descriptions that sound great when improvised come off flat when it’s part of a presumably-rehearsed narration. Out-of-character friendships liven up the banter that can feel lame shorn of that context. The drama of uncertainty, of not knowing which way the dice are going to fall or what lurks behind that nondescript door, is way more intense to experience first-hand than hear about second-hand.

(Seriously, though, Harry Dedalus was the coolest fae in the San Jose Court, the stories are great).

The Sword of Voldiir is a choice-based game that touts its origin in a tabletop DnD campaign, and it’s a case in point. It’s definitely got some shaggy charm, with a cast of NPCs who seem to enjoy hanging out and razzing each other, and solid pacing that keeps the narrative ticking along. But the fantasy world and quest plot are mostly generic, the RPG-inflected mechanics aren’t that engaging, and the whole thing, especially the prose, is in need of some polish – I only played the free demo rather than shell out for the full version, so perhaps there’s a significant uptick past the parts that I was able to play, of course. But while I definitely would believe all the original participants of the tabletop game had a great time, on this evidence you kind of had to be there.

I’ll take my first and third critiques together, since they wind up reinforcing each other. While there are some flashes of originality in the character creation section – the races on offer are human, half-elf, and siren – the setup is one you’ve definitely seen before, with your character hired on to accompany three NPCs on a mission to recover the titular artifacts: the reasons, and its powers, are underexplained, as are the personalities of your crew (there’s a sidebar with some biographical info: the first one’s “quick-witted, smart, and conniving,” while the second is “intelligent, rather quiet, and alert”. The poor fighter, meanwhile, just gets some middling backstory, with no actual characterization listed. The story does go through some twists and turns, but there’s little narrative groundwork laid, so it can came off feeling like just one thing happening after another, and each incident is a trope you’ve definitely seen before (the one exception is the bit where you’re able to track down a bandit because she gave her real name, and declared the magic items she was carrying to customs, upon entering a city).

The classics are classics for a reason, of course, but making them sing is down to execution, and here’s where the omnipresent typos, eyestrain-inducing dark-red-on-black color scheme for links, and leaden prose prevent Sword of Voldiir from going down as indulgent IF junk-food. There’s just a little too much friction, a few too many details that jar – like the party members setting up a fire in the middle of an enclosed cave without worrying about smoke inhalation – and a few too many scenes that seem to be included out of a sense of obligation rather than because there’s anything compelling about them. Here’s a sequence where you check in on a companion after arriving at an inn:

“What have you been up to?”

“People watching.” She nods to the people sitting all across the dining room. “Interest folk who come here. I always enjoy watching them.”

“That’s fair enough. Have you seen anything interesting?”

“Plently.” She lets the conversation die there.

(There’s a pick-which-NPC-to-spend-time-with mechanic that appears that it eventually leads to a romance – I played the field to try to get to know all of them a bit, so in fairness it’s possible that if I’d stuck with one they’d start opening up a bit more).

As for the second item on the bill of particulars – I like RPG-style mechanics in IF, but Sword of Voldiir’s implementation doesn’t leave much room for the player. You do get randomly-rolled stats for your character, which I dig, and they do influence how some of your decisions play out, as well as coming to the fore in a couple of combat sequences. But their impact is obfuscated, as dice are only rolled behind the scenes, and your role in fighting is just to pick whether to use magic or weapons at the outset, with no information given about the options, and then click through turn by turn to see whether you die. There are various ways to make these kinds of mechanics legible to the player, from the simple expedient of showing the results of die-rolls, to graying-out options that aren’t available to you due to your build, or signposting where you’re getting more information because of a skill or background – and the RPG elements of the game would be stronger if some of these strategies were pursued. Heck, even the non-RPG bits suffer from a lack of player agency, with many choices literally coming down to picking which of three doors or passageways to go down, sans any context to make this anything but a stab in the dark.

Like I’ve said, all of this is stuff that would be eminently forgivable if it came up around the gaming table on a Thursday night – all the players would know what was going on at the system level, the low-key world building and action-oriented plot could make for a fun beer-and-pretzels experience, and the fact that the characters all talk about being “stoked” and curse a lot would just be an indication that the group is unwinding after a long day at work. Even the choose-a-door-any-door bits would indicate someone is about to have fun doing some graph-paper mapping! But it’s hard to make a tabletop campaign work as IF without deeper-seated changes than what Sword of Voldiir has to offer; adaptation, rather than direct translation, is what can breathe life into old grognard stories, and there’s not quite enough of that on offer here.

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Return to Home, by dott. Piergiorgio (THON)

It’s not often that I’m stymied by a piece of IF – especially not one as slight and apparently straightforward as Return to Home. This short parser game starts with your car blocked by an unexpected detour on your way back from work; rather than drive around to find another route, you decide to cut through the countryside and walk home. This isn’t a perilous adventure where you need to cross raging rivers or make your way through a forbidding forest – there’s a hill, sure, but the weather is fine and the danger is non-existent. Nor is it a set of brain-teaser, with no puzzles to speak of beyond a couple of Easter eggs to be found if you stray slightly off the short path home (the whole game is about a dozen rooms). Structurally, it resembles a so-called “walking simulator”, but where games in that genre balance their mechanical simplicity with detailed backstory and lush environments, Return to Home is matter-of-fact; most descriptions have a sentence or two of simple prose, without much in the way of scenery, and there’s no lore or hidden trauma to pick up on (or if there is, wow did I miss it!)

So it’s hard for me to evaluate the game’s success according to its design goals, since I have a hard time articulating what I think those are – it seems content to just be a low-key experience, not in a hurry to impress anything in particular on the player. There are some small grammar and spelling issues in the prose, but English isn’t the author’s first language, and since the writing isn’t reaching for the stars I didn’t find these minor slips had much impact on my enjoyment. The one thing I can say about Return to Home is that I think it’s a game that enjoys that it’s IF. Most of the Easter eggs point to classic-era games (I picked up references to Curses and Once and Future/Avalon, though there were a couple I know I missed), and beyond that, by stripping the parser game down to its bare essentials, it made me slow down and be more mindful of what I was experiencing: moving through a map, reading a few sentences of narration, enjoying the way that a minimum of effort would frequently turn up a new bauble, without needing to worry about what I was supposed to do with it. Playing Return to Home was a gentle way to spend five minutes connecting with as unpretentious a piece of IF as you can imagine, and I guess that might just be the entire point of the thing.

return mr.txt (14.7 KB)

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A House of Endless Windows, by SkyShard (THON)

I am not a J-horror fan, or even a horror fan in general, but there is one clip from a mid-aughts entry in the genre (I think it was called Pulse, but I am 100% not looking it up to check) that lives rent-free in my head: a guy goes into a sub-basement, hears something weird, and at the end of this dark hallway, sees a strange figure standing there in the shadows. Slowly, slowly, it starts to walk towards him, with this hideously unnatural gait, almost falling once before it gets its limbs back under control. He’s rooted to the spot, just watching as it gets closer, and closer, and closer, mesmerizing in the inevitability of its languid approach.

I don’t know how the sequence ends – I honestly hope it’s just a jump-scare, because that would be the least-scary of the alternatives? – but I find it terrifying; being forced to inhabit the same world with something uncanny for so long, with no choice but to linger on the details of how wrong it is, makes my blood run cold. It’s horrible! But in a really compelling way.

A House of Endless Windows pulls off a similar trick: while this kinetic novel plays coy at first, dancing around details of backstory and context, it’s clear from the get-go that there’s something deeply wrong in this family – the alienated child (that’s our narrator), the pushy mother, the absent father – even before a new arrival shatters the prevailing chilly détente. But then the player understands more about what’s happened to create this situation, and engages with the mysteries surrounding the newly-arrived housekeeper, and the effect is slow-motion torture: the situation feels untenable, even as nothing overtly threatening is happening, the danger and trauma masked behind stilted dialogue and a refusal to acknowledge the reality that everybody knows lies beneath the surface.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a plot, stuff does happen, but the vibes are really what make A House of Endless Windows so arresting. You get a sense of the contortions the main character has made of his life in order to hedge defenses around himself almost immediately:

The sooner I complete the chores, the sooner I can start on homework. The sooner I start on homework, the more time I have to study.

Or:

I yell as loud as I can. It’s a pitiful, quiet yell.

The writing is finely calibrated, getting us in the head of Pierce, our damaged, precocious protagonist, while writing dialogue that isn’t quite naturalistic but still manages to feel plausible. Here’s an exchange between him and his friend Avery:

Pierce: Do you believe me?
Avery: Well, I can’t imagine you’re lying about it.
Pierce: That’s not the same as you believing me.
Avery: No. It isn’t.

It’s clear this awkwardness is intentional – there are a few flashbacks that take Pierce back to a time before things in his family were quite so broken, and his mother’s dialogue is notably warmer than it is in the present. There are also a few well-earned moments where the possibility of emotional engagement at least flickers into possibility, even if it’s never quite achieved. But they gain their power from the contrast they draw with the rest of the game, where Pierce is typically passive or frozen, observing that things aren’t right but unable to take action to correct them. Indeed, his lack of conviction is a major character point: he takes refuge in the rigidity of mathematical proofs, but finds he can’t even conjure enough faith to assume the axioms to be true – indeed, while contemplating the possibility of a higher power, he says he “prefer[s] this to the other options. And yet, it’s unsatisfying. I don’t like it. The proof, when I write it out, looks weak and flimsy.”

This is very internal horror, in other words, which is a good fit for the deliberate pace at which the plot doles out its revelations. For all that I think there was probably room for the climax to go a bit bigger and provide a sharper contrast with the slow-burn of the rest of the story, I found those middle bits, where Pierce knows more than you but not enough to be able to make sense of what’s happening, very effective. I’m no more eager to revisit A House of Endless Windows than I am that clip of a ghost walking down the hallway, but I think it’s going to stick with me just as long.

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Quotient: the Game, by Gregory R. Simpson (THON)

When learning something new, the most important factor – I’d argue bigger than native ability or quality of instruction or anything else – is often enthusiasm. No matter how quickly things click, you’ll invariably run into road-blocks, and no matter how fun developing one aspect of a skill might be, there’s always going to be something else that’s a slog. Sure, all those other things, skill and good teachers and so on, can reduce the friction so it’s easier to power through, but you still need that motive force to keep you moving even as things get tough. And beyond overcoming obstacles, enthusiasm can have active virtues too: even the most jaded critic can be charmed by a roughly-hewn work if the palpable excitement of creation comes through.

The thing is, though, enthusiasm can only take you so far. A short game with all the flaws of inexperience can still leave a positive impression if it’s fleet enough to end before those flaws weigh down its exuberance. But if things drag on too long, the nitpicks start to pile up, the bubbly energy starts to feel exhausting, and the jaded critic (hi, it’s me!) loses track of what perked them up about this thing in the first place.

Quotient: the Game could have been engineered in a lab to illustrate the principle. The ingenuousness of its spy-thriller-meets Zork premise wins it a smile, which is only deepened by the cornball appeal of its love of junk food and Ohio pride (seriously, your jet-setting spy can go to Oxford, DC, “Africa”, outer space – or Cleveland and Cincinnati). And there are some solid puzzles that help keep the momentum going. But over the course of this two to three hour game, the constant in-jokey references to Dr. Who and Star Wars start to grate, the lack of adequate player direction or clueing lead to floundering, and the weight of minor bugs and small implementation threatens to overwhelm the fun stuff. Most of Quotient’s issues are ones first-time authors have to deal with (especially those who don’t benefit from a lot of pre-release testing); it’s just a shame that so much time and energy appears to have gone into this debut when it’s likely that the lessons learned from completing a game would help the author write something a lot tighter the second time out.

On to specifics: Quotient self-consciously invokes Zork with its setup: you’re outside a house, with a leaflet promising adventure to come, and a scoring system that rewards the accumulation of treasure as much as progression of plot. But this is no fantasy pastiche: instead we’re in the realm of a technothriller, as you play a new recruit to the eponymous spy agency, tasked with … well, it’s not really clear from the outset. One of the first challenges I faced with Quotient is that the game seems to assume you already know about the important characters, the world, and the basic outline of the plot – there’s some exposition, but almost always it left me with more questions than answers. Not getting bogged down in details until the player’s invested in the game can be a powerful technique, but here the other shoe doesn’t really drop. Like, once I solved enough puzzles to be admitted to the spy agency as a probationary agent, I finally got a mission briefing, which read as follows:

Welcome to the team. Your mission involves two things. One is simply treasure hunting. This will earn points toward your rank. While we were setting up this training mission, a real mission came in. This is the second and most important part of your mission. The Lion has escaped and interfered with Cassie’s time experiment. We need your help on this mission. It’s critical we help Cassie complete her experiment. All of our agents are already working it. There is no time to explain more, you’ll have to figure out the rest as you go.

I eventually groped my way towards a fuller understanding of the premise: the aforementioned Cassie is a scientist working on a future-prediction machine that uses quantum computing, but a villain stole the magic crystal that powers the device, so you have to track him down and take it back. The game doesn’t end at that point, though – to my surprise – as you then need to help Cassie complete her experiment. Each of these steps is either underexplained (exactly what the experiment is, or what it requires, isn’t really spelled out) or overexplained (I got a few updates from Florian about how to find Robert well before I had the slightest idea of who either of those people were).

As a result, it’s most natural to treat Quotient as a treasure hunt – just wander around, solve puzzles because they’re there, grab whatever’s nailed down. And on that score it works OK! Here’s where the enthusiasm really tells; the game is palpably excited to show you around such tourist attractions as the National Mall, Oxford University, and downtown Cincinnati. In the farther-flung locations, the narration is very much lifting up the Wikipedia highlights and flubs a few minor details (I’ve lived in DC, and the geography there is slightly off in a way that kept wrong-footing me). But the local Ohio stuff elevates what sure seems like it must be the author’s favorite diner, and the allegedly-famous Cleveland sign. The gonzo would-a-teenager-thing-this-is-cool sensibility is also in best display in this section, like when you get this readout on the current British PM:

Prime Minister Jason Stevenson is an experienced leader with a deep understanding of European state affairs as well as genetics. He is a skilled martial artist and has been known to relax in front of a videogame at times.

The puzzles are also pleasantly moreish, for the most part. There are two mazes and some unmarked exits, and some of them rely on completely arbitrary clues, like a deck of cards that for some reason spells out the steps required to complete a high-tech feat of engineering, but on their own terms, that’s fine. There are some password challenges, a couple straightforward inventory puzzles, dark areas that require a flashlight – it’s all basic but goes down easy.

Well, it goes down easy until it doesn’t. At what I think is about the 2/3 mark of the game, my progress slowed substantially – I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to be doing, and I’d run out of puzzles that I could easily figure out how to solve. There are some in-game hints, but they tend towards the cryptic, and don’t account for stuff you’ve already done, but I was able to use them to grind through a few more puzzles, albeit these ones felt more arbitrary than the earlier ones (I’m pretty sure praying in the National Cathedral made a laser pop out of the floor; if that’s explained anywhere, I missed it), and threw the unhelpful nature of the thinly-implemented NPCs into sharp relief (after I’d recovered the crystal she was looking for, why didn’t Cassie unlock the door to her lab instead of making me fly halfway across the world to try to dig up a keycard?). And then I hit a wall when I realized I’d soft-locked myself by fiddling with a much-earlier puzzle (protip: don’t put anything into the lighting tube you want to get back).

So yeah. At the one hour mark, I’d have said that I was enjoying the silly, giddy ride that Quotient has to offer, but at the three hour mark, I was mostly just frustrated. None of my complaints are mortal ones, I don’t think, and again, they’re incredibly common among first-time authors – assuming the player will know what they’re doing because it’s obvious to the author, missing that some puzzles don’t have nearly enough clueing or motivation to allow the player to solve them, going for a larger cast of shallow characters rather than just a few more deeply-implemented ones, and not quite enough time polishing and fixing bugs that arise when the player doesn’t do quite what’s expected. Unfortunately Quotient goes on long enough that its early promise does have time to curdle into annoyance. The good news is that usually second-time authors quickly learn how to avoid these mistakes – it’s just that for both author and player, there can be an advantage to getting to that second game sooner rather than later.

quotient MR.txt (414.6 KB)

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good and balanced review, with an interesting question I’ll answer: there was no design goals, as explained in the post announcing it: a tiny coding exercise sitting for years in my HD, lacking only a pair of details toward being completed, then completed in a pair or so hour; In theory, I could have kept it for the '26 amnesty day, but being basically complete, why not let it out ?

[below are spoilerish references to Mike’s transcript]

a “missed”, even by me, reference to the classic era is that you’re the 2nd reviewer which don’t notice that the car is enterable turning the point for the map in an unintended reference to the ancient “last lousy point”.

but indeed there was a subtle reference to another classic-era feature, the red herring, if you think about your fruitless search in a location suspiciously empty, which is actually empty, IS an twist on the red herring theme…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Mystery Academy, by thoughtaction (ParserComp)

I am on the record as being grumpy about generative AI – including in this very thread! – so when I saw that Mystery Academy is an LLM-centric game, with its itch page talking up features that mainstream IF has generally discarded as pointless or actively bad design (stacking multiple actions in a single input line, adverbs/tone), I admit that it was hard to put that grumpiness aside and keep my mind as open as it gets at my advancing age. So I’m as shocked as anyone to report that I actually kind of liked this? It helps that Mystery Academy, per the about text, is a custom-built and trained system rather than one of the off-the-shelf programs, and most of the important prose (like the case files setting up each segment of the game) seems human-written. There are the inevitable issues with lag, and I have a suspicion that some of my failure to solve a single one of these cases was due to the chatbot yes-anding my questions, so I’m not a convert yet, but this might finally be the first LLM game that I think is basically OK.

A lot of that has to do with the constraints the design imposes on the game: you’re a junior detective tasked with solving minor-league cases – the game cites Encyclopedia Brown as an inspiration, and that’s definitely the territory we’re in, as each of the three mysteries on offer has to do with the theft of a valuable object with a minimum of bloodshed or skullduggery. Neatly, each crime has three and only three suspects, and your boss is an efficiency-minded chap who requires you to ask at most three questions of each of them. You get an introduction and the aforementioned case file at the top of a case, then it’s just a matter of choosing which suspect to interview first, asking your three questions, doing the same with the other two, and making a final accusation. The advantage of this focused setup is that it leans into what chatbots are good at – mimicking human conversation – and away from the areas where they struggle – consistent world-modeling, while the three-question limit pushes the player away from asking silly or absurd questions that could break the simulation, or letting things go long enough that hallucinations or inconsistencies start to sneak in.

The writing is also frequently charming, which helps build goodwill and reassurance that you’re not in for typical AI slop. It’s nothing fancy, but it fits the gentle middle-school vibe, lending some character to proceedings. I liked this description of an avant-garde piece of music:

They say the first performance was held in total darkness, lasted 7 hours, and included instructions like “play what the cello might have said if it had lied.” Forty-seven people fainted. Two went temporarily catatonic.

Dialogue from the different suspects is also pretty solid, with the wordy teacher bringing an appropriately Brobdingnagian vocabulary to every response, and the system does seem more sophisticated than just keyword-matching, with some ability to detect and respond to the nuance in your questions, which makes the interrogations feel responsive. With that said, I did run into some hiccups with the writing – “you understand why Theseus needed a spool of thread to navigate his own maze” prompted a double-take – and while the game hypes up the interrogation sections as core to the game, after playing through three cases I feel like they might actually be a sideshow?

See, in each of them, I think the information you need to crack the mystery is right in the introduction and casefile, and in two of them I actually managed to second-guess myself out of the right solution after talking with the suspects (spoilery details: in the first case, I immediately noticed that doing a “midyear assessment” on the first day of school seemed odd, but Croft had a superficially plausible explanation, and without the ability to check with any of the students who would have been taking the test, I wasn’t sure whether he was lying; meanwhile, in the second one, the footprint-size clue seemed way too honkingly obvious, and I wound up noticing the detail of a control panel that had been left clumsily open at the crime scene, which seemed to align with what the game was telling me about one librarian being fussy and the other being slovenly). Meanwhile, in the third case, I couldn’t get a suspect to provide any explanation for a potentially-incriminating clue (the engineer told me that of course there was a lot of oil around the ship when she was doing maintenance, but didn’t have an on-point response when asking how it got on the captain’s ladder, which presumably isn’t near the engine room) even though she turned out to be innocent. LLMs are BS machines, and I guess most guilty suspects likewise want to BS their way out of getting caught while jittery innocent ones sometimes accidentally fumble a question, so I suppose this is plausible enough. But after realizing that in every case I would have been better off if I just hadn’t questioned anybody, I felt like I’d figured out the magic trick and what seems like the meat of the game is just misdirection.

So I don’t think this kind of LLM-based approach is going to replace actual detective IF anytime soon, since stapling a static Encyclopedia Brown story to a chatbot is a novelty, but not much more. And I did run into some technical issues – every command I typed took 5-10 seconds to process, and in the third case the question limit didn’t seem to be enforced. Still, Encyclopedia Brown stories are fun (I still remember the gag in the first one I read as a kid, about a commemorative cavalry saber from the first Battle of Bull Run), and Mystery Academy’s good-natured vibe meant I had some moments of enjoyment with the game even as I was critiquing it. I continue to be deeply skeptical that generative AI is the future of IF, but if these are the kind of experiments we’ll get along the way to establishing that, things could be worse!

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Thanks for the review of Quotient, The game, Mike. I appreciate you putting so much time into playing the game. Your feedback will make it better (and my second game!)! (it’s especially helpful to have your transcript! Thanks!) Clearly, I can layout the goals more clearly through what one reviewer called “sign-posting”… I’ve also learned a lot about NPC communications from your review, and from following along on the Let’s Play of Ryan Veeder’s Fly Fishing. I see all sorts of things to do differently the next time around, and I’m especially pleased that the puzzles were pleasantly moreish. Anyway, thanks again for playing… I’m learning a great deal by having some pros like you play this game! Things have come a long way in IF since my Zork days!

All the best!

Greg

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(oh, and I should definitely make that light saber a light source! Lots of great ideas from that transcript!) (and I had to look up the word erm, hahaha)

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A Taste of Terror, by Garry Francis (ParserComp)

In the first couple turns of A Taste of Terror – an Inform 6 reimplementation of a lost ‘80s game by an unknown author – the ten-year-old protagonist, whose defining backstory element is that he’s a middle-school chess champion, gets his hands on a matchbox and also a dagger. “We’re going to get into the fun kind of trouble,” I thought to myself, and reader, I didn’t know how right I was: by the end of the game, I’d added a pitchfork, bolt-cutters, and a length of chain to my melee-weapons arsenal – to say nothing of the two severed heads I was toting around – and used accelerant to make a big bonfire, and blown a witch away with my trusty double-barreled shotgun. The grindhouse air perhaps makes little Sean an inapt protagonist (most fifth-graders can’t do quite such a convincing impression of Ash from Evil Dead) and while the game has a modern polish, there are some archaisms like a bigger-than-it-needs-to-be map and a lack of clear direction for much of the middle section. But beyond the mayhem, this is a tightly-constructed adventure with some cute flourishes and a satisfying execution of its theme.

The plot ultimately goes to predictable places – there’s a cult, evil magic, a ritual to perform – but I enjoyed the grounded way Taste of Terror starts: as it opens, you’re visiting your aunt and uncle’s farm on a school break, but your uncle just died under mysterious circumstances, your aunt is acting weird, and you’ve woken up in the middle of the night with odd back pains that make it hard to sleep (bad news, kid: in a couple of decades, you won’t need to cast about for a supernatural explanation for those). It doesn’t take too much effort to effect a cure, at least as long as you remember this is an old-school adventure and you should be SEARCHing and LOOKing UNDER and BEHIND everything you see, but the game prevents you from just going back to sleep. In the event this turns out to be a good thing, but it does mean that you’re then left to explore the rest of the house, and a large outdoor area, with no real in-character goal other than to poke around. Fans of detailed character motivation might find themselves a bit nonplussed by the amount of unprompted breaking and entering you need to perform – as I crawled my way through a broken window in the middle of the night, while juggling the aforementioned pitchfork and most of the contents of a workbench, I found myself wondering whether this was going to be worth the tetanus I was most assuredly about to catch – but there is a lot of fun stuff to uncover, with some satisfying puzzles to work through, even if I wasn’t always sure why I was doing what I was doing. I was relieved that eventually there are some revelations about what’s going on, and what you need to do to stop it, so my priorities for the last third of the game were a lot clearer – again, this is the kind of the game that’s much more about the puzzles and the gameplay than a deep, never-before-heard story, but the various revelations hit their marks, and I’m always a sucker for a collect-the-ingredients-for-the-spell quest.

As that summary indicates, we’re also in pretty familiar territory when it comes to the puzzles, but there’s a pleasant variety, with a bevy of locked doors to be opened, a few action sequences and navigation puzzles, and the aforementioned ritual-components bit. There’s nothing here that will make you sit up and take notice of its daring innovation, I don’t think, but many puzzles have alternate solutions and most of them are reasonable enough – it was smooth sailing throughout, except for one time when the requirements for getting raven’s blood seemed oddly specific (I was out of shotgun shells at that point, but STAB RAVEN WITH PITCHFORK and THROW DAGGER AT RAVEN both failed to get the desired result; THROW PITCHFORK AT RAVEN feels much less likely than those other two theories, though), and then I spun my wheels for an extra fifteen minutes at the end since I’d neglected to notice a clearly-marked exit in one late-game area (the instructions suggest making a map; I didn’t, and don’t think it’s exactly necessary, but it would have helped!) Meanwhile, the handful of characters are implemented to a fairly deep level, responding to just about every conversational topic I could think up (though referring to the Roma characters with the g-word is one thing that could have stayed in the 80s).

As for the writing, it’s not going for anything overly fancy, but it conveys a spooky vibe and gets across the information you need to solve the puzzles with a bit of flair – it’s not Proust, but the prose is more robust than what you would have gotten in the '80s. While I do think the lurid nature of events would have made a slightly more intense impression on the protagonist than what we see, Taste of Terror isn’t the sort of game that would be improved by a realistic treatment of PTSD – and I suspect actual ten year olds would be tickled pink by the Grand Guignol horrors here on display.

terror mr.txt (106.8 KB)
terror mr 2.txt (82.8 KB)

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Last Audit of the Damned, by thoughtaction (ParserComp)

Well, that didn’t take long.

Just a couple days ago I played the author’s other ParserComp entry, Mystery Academy, which took advantage of its LLM-based system’s affordances to present some light interrogation-based mysteries. Sure, I had some questions about the extent to which those conversations were actually necessary to cracking the cases, genAI’s tendency to run with your prompts occasionally muddied the waters, and the post-command processing wait could feel interminable, but between the gentle humor and the way the design played to the system’s strengths (keep things focused on conversations) and mitigated its weaknesses (putting strict limits on the numbers of questions you could ask any suspect and keeping the mysteries simple), despite my justly-earned suspicion of LLM-focused IF I found myself having a reasonably good time.

Does that streak continue in Last Audit of the Damned? It does not, largely because the system’s flaws are on glaring display when applied to a scenario resembling a typical parser game, rather than sticking to the kinds of scenarios to which it’s better suited. The text-based lightly-comedic medium-dry-goods puzzler isn’t a fully solved problem by any means – heck, I wrote one a couple years ago – but this is an area where the traditional authoring systems and design approaches are very, very robust, and as a result the game’s failures to measure up to the state of the art feel glaring.

The most fun I had with the game was reading the opening, which isn’t damning with faint praise: the idea of a pirate accountant is, to my mind, the good kind of silly – I’m a sucker for any game involving taxes – and a shipwreck is a classic IF setup for a reason. The jokey prose largely hits that Monkey Island vibe, even if there aren’t any laugh-out-loud jokes and the mention in adjacent lines that both the ocean and the waves were “indifferent” felt like awkward redundancy. But then I started to play and my cautious optimism quickly curdled.

It’s going to be hard to avoid the rest of this review turning into a litany of annoyances and LLM-bashing, so I’ll at least start with a design issue that can’t be blamed on generative AI. The game’s divided into self-contained sections corresponding to your trek across the desert isle you’ve washed up on (you can see them all on the included map, and jump to any you’ve unlocked), and each – or at least the two I was able to play – includes a quite limited time limit. This has some minimal plausibility in the first chapter, which is a race to get water before you die of thirst, but there’s no diegetic explanation given for a timer in the second chapter, where you’re exploring an abandoned hut. The limits are fairly short, too – only 20 turns in the first section, which feels quite limited given that there are around a dozen different pieces of flotsam you can mess around with. Sure, the game’s engine allows you to enter multiple commands per line, much like all the traditional IF systems, which only counts as a single turn, unlike in all the traditional IF systems, but typing out a run-on sentence and then paging through reams of output is a decidedly unpleasant mode of play. And once you’re out of time, you need to restart the full section, which is not much fun – these limits were a bad idea.

Okay, with that instance of a purely-human design flaw, now we’re in the realm of generative AI issues. The first section seems calculated to focus on the strengths of an LLM system by presenting what’s basically a complex engineering problem – to avoid fatal dehydration, you need to jury-rig some kind of mechanism to help you get water. In theory, the open-ended nature of the problem lend itself to the freeform back-and-forth an LLM enables. In practice, though, I wound up spending only a few turns looking around before the narrator started getting pretty heavy-handed with its hints: I examined some rocks only to be told that they would do a good job holding down the sailcloth if I wanted to make a solar still. So MAKE SOLAR STILL, I typed, and my larcenous CPA did as I asked, which didn’t do much to make me feel like I’d solved a puzzle (in fairness, I hadn’t – the solar still is a dead end that doesn’t buy you as much time as it takes to construct; instead, you need to build the other contraption the narrative voice starts telling you to make). In a traditional parser game, I’d expect that examining each of the potential components in turn would hint at its potential use in the machine I was trying to build, allowing me to assemble the pieces without me, as a player, knowing exactly how a solar still works – here, though, I’m guessing it was too hard for the LLM to provide the right level of cueing, so it speed-runs from presenting a challenging situation to serving up the answer on a silver platter lightning-fast.

As for the second section, as I mentioned it’s about checking out a hut, and solving what appears to be some kind of riddle, but I admit this is as far as I got, because even ten minutes into the game its ability to hold a consistent world state was feeling rickety. For one thing, the hut is mentioned in the game’s intro, so before slaking my thirst I’d tried to break into it and eventually succeeded – so I was confused when, after the section transition, it was locked again, the method I’d used the first time didn’t work, and once I did get in the contents were completely different (I’m guessing that the hut is only specified as scenery in the first section, so this whole line of exploration was just LLM BSing that wound up completely inconsistent with the “real” hut). For another, I replayed this section a few times – the turn limit here is reduced to only 10 – and the same action led to inconsistent results for no reason I could understand, like when throwing a rock at a precariously-balanced key sometimes did and sometimes didn’t knock it free. My frustration peaked – and my playthrough ended – when I saw that the riddle had something to do with arranging a stack of books. I told the game to try alphabetizing them, which it duly did, albeit the 15 books I’d started with had been whittled down to a lucky 13.

As a cherry on top, there are of course significant pauses whenever you take an action; I’m not sure whether it was because of the time of day or the vagaries of server load, but I felt like they were longer than the stops in Mystery Academy, and got one time-out error where after waiting for a minute or so, I got a message saying the previous command failed and the window was replaced with a non-interactive ellipsis.

If all of this comes off bitter – well, I am bitter. Playing Last Audit of the Damned is an exercise in frustration, made all the worse by the fact that it’s easy to imagine how this game could have been pretty fun if it was just written in Inform or TADS. The stuff the game asks you to do are all things those systems can handle with aplomb, with no hallucination, lag, or inconsistent clueing besides what an author intends to put in. I suppose a counterargument might be that there are boundary-pushing gameplay elements in the 2/3 of the game I didn’t play – but I thought half the case for using LLMs in IF is that they can make the genre more accessible and prevent parser errors from provoking players into rage-quitting. My experience with Mystery Academy suggests that there might be some novel kinds of gameplay scenarios where an LLM-based system provides some advantages, but on the evidence of Last Audit of the Damned, trying to use them for bread-and-butter parser IF sure seems like a fool’s errand.

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The Deluge, by Lionstooth (THON)

I have an odd relationship to floods, which is to say, I don’t actually have one. I’ve experienced earthquakes and hurricanes, seen a tornado, had to evacuate my home because of a wildfire, missed my wedding rehearsal due to mudslides, and hunkered down through more blizzards than I can remember before I decamped to Southern California (they’re way better than the fires). There are more exotic natural disasters beyond these, of course, but I’ve seen movies depicting avalanches and tsunamis and volcanos so there I at least have some second-hand associations of terror. But floods? I’ve never actually been in one, and they don’t present an especially cinematic prospect, unless a dam breaks or something. As a result, while I intellectually know they’re awful – witness all the recent deaths in Texas – I don’t have much of a visceral response to them. If anything I think the images of flooded towns can seem oddly peaceful, the ordinary landscape of roads and buildings transfigured.

So I vibed with The Deluge’s take on the theme: the nameless protagonist is forced by a flood to leave their home, but leaving everything and everyone behind doesn’t seem entirely unwelcome. This is a meditative game, the danger universally acknowledged but never actually approaching, allowing plenty of space to contemplate mistakes and paths not taken and consider what might come next. This choice-based game isn’t exactly parser-like – there are no compass directions, no inventory you can check, and no puzzles besides some order-of-operations stuff and one unique challenge I’ll circle back to later in this review – but you do have freedom to explore, ranging from your apartment to your old haunts to the outskirts to which you’ll eventually have to escape. There aren’t many direct conversations or anything you’d think of as an action sequence, but there is a lot of environmental storytelling, effectively narrated in a voice that focuses more on conveying sharp, concrete detail than providing a complete backstory for your character:

The bed is unmade. You imagine yourself half-asleep, safe, warm, and as perfectly content as a stretching cat. You imagine the body beside you, reaching out instinctively for you without fully waking up.

This extends to the effects of the flood, too:

You’re only halfway down the least-used of three stairwells when you realize the extent of the damage. Puddles slosh at your feet; a vaguely riparian odor drifts up from the basement below you.

There were times when this studied fuzziness of plot did present a slight obstacle; it seems like the protagonist has complex history with a lot of former lovers, friends, and family members, and since none of them are given names I sometimes had a hard time keeping them straight. But obfuscating the details helps reinforce the central vibe, of a mountain of regrets and guilty relief at being forced to leave them behind. It also means that when something does snap into focus, it gains additional power: there’s a charged conversation with an ex that really stands out, for example.

The gameplay, meanwhile, also meshes nicely with the theme. You can’t get everywhere from everywhere, and there are interactions that are only available on repeat visits or after you’ve gone someplace else first, which means that you spend a lot of time circling around the same ground, slowly building up to making your escape. There’s a list of things you need to accumulate before you’re able to finally go, some physical, some more nebulous, though I didn’t find a way to check these other than trying to leave, which made the transition to the endgame feel bit more abrupt than I would have liked (on the plus side, it was exactly as enigmatic as I liked). There’s also that odd gameplay mechanic I mentioned above – let’s spoiler this: when I tried to find the key to my uncle’s boat, at first I thought I was stuck due to a bug that only let me toggle between two passages, rather than allowing me to retreat back to town when it didn’t turn up. I actually alt-tabbed for a minute to jot down some notes in frustration – but then when I alt-tabbed back, suddenly I’d found the key! I think this is a real-time mechanic that reveals the key after you’ve let the page stay up for a certain amount of time, which is formally interesting, but felt like an odd choice to me – the game doesn’t otherwise use timed text, I don’t think, and without that telegraphing I almost got annoyed and restarted the game! It’s something that I think is neat in isolation, but I’m not sure is a great fit for this game in particular.

That’s really the only discordant note I found in The Deluge, though – it’s otherwise a very coherent work, embedding some universally-relatable emotions in a distinct, and distinctly-presented package. It didn’t make me afraid of floods, but it did help me inhabit their aftermath with more clarity than I had before, making a case for rising waters as a pregnant metaphor worth dwelling on, regardless of their real-world dangers.

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The Butterfly Dream, by Avenue Q Productions (THON)

There’s an old Taoist story that goes like this: once, a man dreamed he was a butterfly, and the dream was so vivid, so real, that he forgot that he was a man and truly believed he was a butterfly. Then he woke up, in his human body – but for a moment wasn’t sure whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or was a butterfly that now was dreaming it was a man. It’s an elegant but also existentially horrifying parable about how we don’t have the slightest understanding the nature of our consciousness, our actual knowledge on this score having advanced not one iota in the 2500ish years since it was written.

It’s also a reaaaaaly on the nose title for a visual novel about a video game designer who’s invented a VR system that blurs the line between simulation and reality. And so it goes in The Butterfly Dream, at least so far as this demo is concerned: what we’ve got here is a serviceable enough premise, but delivered in a by-the-numbers and slightly awkward way that doesn’t manage to generate much in the way of strong feelings.

That demo bit is an important caveat, though (I should note that the full version is available, but it’s not free; the author does offer a limited number of community copies gratis, but I didn’t want to claim one and prevent anyone else from being able to take advantage of this thoughtful gesture). There’s only about fifteen minutes of gameplay, which suffices only to establish the setup – you’re one of a handful of luminaries in different fields who the designer has gathered so you can test the new game system by creating playable worlds for it to run – offer a series of short introductory vignettes to establish the cast, and then provide a quick preview of the VR system in action. There’s not really scope for things to get that interesting given this limited amount of plot, so it’s certainly possible that the full game gets grabbier. And I’ll say that while the characters get implausible where they deviate from stereotypes (“anxious and self-effacing” does not describe any high-powered investment banker I’ve ever met or read about), it’s hard not to enjoy the doddering old children’s-book author or the tiny, constantly-eating chef.

Fifteen minutes is enough time to gauge the game’s prose, though, and unfortunately it’s not very compelling. The different characters do have their own voices and tics (going back to the stereotypes thing, you will be shocked to learn that the Spanish guy’s first line of dialogue is “Dios mio!”), but they share with the narrator a tendency towards platitude and maladroit syntax. For example, the designer welcomes you by saying:

Though the exhaustless research by our immensely talented and dedicated team, I can proudly say: ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future!

Or there’s this description of a house in one of the aforementioned children’s books:

It was a little hut most charming, tucked in a corner most idyllic.

The occasional malapropism is no big deal, and in isolation some of them can be fun in an idiosyncratic way – I actually enjoyed the line saying the chef “was holding about a dozen plates in one hand, a feat indicative of her well-tuned fine motor control and determination”, despite its physical impossibility – but they’re so omnipresent, and the prose so frequently generic, that it undermines the writing: for all that I was repeatedly told how amazing this VR system is, it never felt amazing.

I know I value tight prose more than many players, and I admit what-is-real VR stories aren’t a genre that has much special appeal to me, so it’s worth acknowledging that what didn’t work for me here might not be as much of an issue for others – and again, this demo appears to be a small slice of a much larger work. So I’d be interested in reading a review from someone who’s finished the full game, even as I’m unlikely to take the plunge myself.

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