The demo is 87k words, while the final game will probably be somewhere over 200k words. Just in case anyone was wondering about the size of that slice.
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Yeah, we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree on that point. 
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Thank you very much for your kind and thoughtful review!! I’m so happy to hear that you enjoyed Nonverbal Communication. 
The tale of your horticultural misadventures was a delight to read, haha. Good job making all that progress! 
As for my own gardening woes: I was thrilled about the “exhibition” aspect of Spring Thing, but the “competition” part didn’t appeal to me, so I was happy to be able to opt out of that. Certainly the game’s limited scope and experimental nature (as well as the lack of time to polish it as much as I wanted to) were also factors!
I would love to revisit this world and concept later on, and plan on discussing that in the postmortem next month.
I really appreciate your feedback and it was great looking at your transcript. I enjoyed the comments you left in there!
I struggled to find a good way to telegraph that ME can be used, but it’s definitely something I’ll keep mulling over! I have plans for an improved THINK/HELP/ABOUT system in the future; hopefully that might help nudge the player in the right direction without spoiling other parts of the game.
Thanks again, and if you ever feel like trying more of the game, I always love to hear your thoughts!
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Thank you for the review, Mike! I’m glad that the story interests you and I’m also looking forward to switching to Gruescript. I’m working on a small prototype in it for an unrelated game and it’s a much better fit for me than Inform.
That said, Gruescript’s also meant for a much more compact style of writing, so figuring out how to preserve the plot I have going on is going to be an interesting challenge
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Yay for using a parser-choice hybrid system! Gruescript is really underutilized and appeals to both sides.
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Provizora Parko, by Dawn Sueoka
I am not usually one to police genre boundaries – these are useful shorthands for discussion, analysis, and (mostly) marketing, nothing more – but I have to admit my ears pricked up when I saw a slight inconsistency in the tags the author provided for Provizora Parko (which as far as I can tell is Esperanto for “provisional park”, reinforcing my conviction that Esperanto is just a monoglot American putting on a fake accent and pretending to speak Russian). The primary genre is tagged as surreal, you see, while there’s also a content warning cautioning about implied violence “in a magical realist context.” And while the border between these two things is admittedly vague, there are real differences, beyond just that I tend to like magical realism and am more frequently left cold by surrealism. The former is more likely to accord with the traditional plot dynamics of a literary novel, with occasional fantasy elements introducing moments of illogic into a familiar structure, whereas in my experience the latter eschews linear narrative and tends to put conventional elements and outré ones at the same level. My complaint about surrealism is that it can often feel lightweight: a bunch of stuff happens, but there’s no throughline of dramatic progression ensuring that actions beget consequences in a comprehensible way. For a poem, that’s completely fine, but for a story – and most IF is structured as a story, of course – it’s a riskier proposition.
Provizora Parko definitely falls much more on the surrealism side of the line. But! Like a good poem, it’s also admirably disciplined about the language, imagery, and themes it deploys, which mitigates that feeling of weightless contingency: this is definitely not a world where anything could happen. As you (it’s unclear who “you” are) explore the titular mostly-abandoned zoo, there are certain elements that recur: crowd scenes, birds, travel, disaster. While you’ve got freedom of movement (this is a Twine game that allows you to navigate, though there’s no compass directions or inventory or any other parser-like touches) the map imposes or at least suggests a particular progression through the space that leads to something resembling an arc, with individual, memorable set-pieces gaining significance by the way they’re juxtaposed.
I want to zoom in on the language, since to my mind that’s the primary draw here. It’s evocative and clear while still remaining elusive, like this bit of landscape description:
Rainbow shower trees with sherbet-colored blossoms border the plaza and cast crisp shadows in the midmorning sun.
This approach extends even to the unfamiliar or fantastical elements – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which, in fact. Take this bit:
Sunlight dances on the path, which is carpeted with layers upon layers of exploded figs. In the heat and humidity, the sugar sculptures are beginning to sweat, the beads of moisture hardening into tiny pimples.
I don’t really know if that’s how a sculpture of sugar really starts to melt, and that tentative sense of alienation, that tension between the alien and mundane, helped keep me engaged. It also helps that there’s a real sense of variety to the half-dozen different areas: one uses timed text to create a delightful emulation of luggage coming down an airport’s baggage claim carousel, while another takes the shape of an extended, absurd dialogue with a man and his perhaps-imaginary bird.
For all that I enjoyed much of the experience of playing Provizora Parko, I ultimately did find that its surreal aspects were too distinctive for my tastes. In particular, while I can identify some of the game’s key concerns, and squint at the endings to see how the theme of substitution or transformation that runs through them finds echoes in earlier parts of the game, it didn’t feel to me that this was an organic climax that brought everything that came before into coherence. This might just be a reflection of wanting the game to be more prosaic than poetic, but even very abstruse poems usually strive to leave the reader with a pop of insight at the end that refigures what’s gone before. Someone else more on the game’s wavelength might feel differently, though, and just based on the quality of the writing I’m certainly satisfied by my visit to this park.
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Yay, thanks, Mike, for this thoughtful and generous review–and great points on genre and the endings! I really appreciate your perspective, so thank you again 
!
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Deep Dark Wood, by Senica Thing
Theme and variation is a solid approach for an anthology, and Deep Dark Wood – a collation of seven small Twine games written by Slovakian students ranging from six to thirteen years old – picks a classic for its hook: as the title says, each of the heptad sees the player lost in a spooky forest and facing a variety of dangers. There are structural similarities too, as they all implement Time Cave or gauntlet structures with plenty of deaths and bad endings lurking to claim the unwary; generally there’s not much by way of cluing to differentiate the safe from the dangerous paths, but fortunately the always-available undo button and the games’ short lengths make exploration painless (in fact some of the bad endings are as much if not more fun than the successful ones).
The fact that there are so many similarities here, though, helps throw into sharper relief the differences in approach taken by the various authors – which largely turn on writing style and implementation of the choice framework. So I’ll provide some quick thoughts on each of the seven in turn, focusing on those elements:
Back to the City, by David (8)
The most immediately engaging thing about Back to the City is its enthusiasm: almost every choice ends with an exclamation point. This upbeat vibe extends to the narrative as well, as this is the rare Deep Dark Wood that doesn’t threaten the player with peril. Per the title, all roads eventually lead back home, but the player’s able to explore as they desire, perhaps having fun at a Christmas Eve party or helping a lost horse get back to the farm. None of these incidents are sketched in too much detail, but they effectively move the story along and are introduced and resolved in a satisfying fashion, lending the longest playthrough a bit of a picaresque vibe (the shortest playthrough traverses only three links and isn’t nearly as satisfying). It’s a gentle, slight game, and I can’t help but suspect that it was put first in the collection to ease the player into the more dangerous woods to come… (OK, it’s also first alphabetically).
Dark Dream, by Baily’s Sisters (11)
Dark Dream shares the exclamation-point-at-the-end-of-the-choices trick with Back to the City, but is a much more challenging story to navigate. Per the dream theme, the forest-and-cabin setting this time boasts surreal touches – you can find your headlong flight through the wood interrupted by running straight into a fox’s mouth, and there’s one branch that leans into the way absurd details can pile up in dreams:
Finally, you find a doctor that is also a dog. He gives you pills and you take them.
You feel great but you are lost. The dog asks you if you have money. You have some.
Structurally, Dark Dream is more of a Time Cave, with different decisions in the opening leading to distinct, nonoverlapping episodes that all quickly lead to an ending. Again the game leans into its themes, because in each ending you’ll eventually wake up – but per the conventions of the horror genre, there’s always a twist where whatever happened to you in the dream will recur when you’re awake. Sometimes this can be as subtle as a bad taste in your mouth if you finished the dream gorging yourself on bear meat, but it can also go in hilariously metaphysical directions too, as in the various endings where you wake up only to find yourself dead. Another nice bit of craft is that the final passage is always introduced with an ellipsis, creating drama about what exactly is going to happen when you find yourself in your bed, which adds to the punch-line nature of the endings and makes the bad ones just as much fun as the good ones.
Halloween, by Hailey and Milka (11)
Halloween also leans into the surreal, though doesn’t adopt anything as straightforward as the “it was all a dream” explanation from the previous game. Instead, you might enter a creepy cabin, get bitten by an evil doll, and then find yourself whisked to the bottom of a lake. As a result, it plays like a roller-coaster ride – you don’t know where you’re going to go, but you can trust that it will be entertaining. My favorite vignette is the one where you wake up from a dream (okay, some of the bizarre branches do use this cliché, but not all of them) only to find that your fingers have vanished, and your only choices are to pray to Jesus or try to go back to sleep. There’s also one where you find a duck and then get abducted by aliens – it’s zany, in other words, though there’s another branch that mixes in a note of social realism by telling you that your parents have recently gotten divorced, which is “a usual thing in Halloween stories”.
Once again the approach to endings is a highlight – the authors are aware that much of the draw of a game like this is collecting the different endings, so they judge each as good or bad, let you know whether you’ve been awarded any trophies (these are numbered, but no explanation of the numbering is provided, which paradoxically made me more excited to try to collect them all), and then let you click one final link for good measure – though that just confirms that the story is over and you can stop clicking.
IXI in the Forest, by Leontine (6)
IXI in the Forest distinguishes itself less by its plot – once again there’s a child lost in the woods, who can try to befriend and/or flee from a variety of animals, with a gauntlet structure funneling the player to the best ending, where IXI, a bird, and a rabbit enjoy a picnic together – than its approach to choices. Rather than playing as IXI, you function as a co-narrator, deciding what outcome for each particular small vignette to pursue: for example, when IXI meets a doe who turns out to be dangerous, your choices are either “let IXI escape” or “let IXI not escape.” This adds a bit of distance to the player’s engagement with IXI – who isn’t characterized in any notable way – but also pushes the player to think about the choices differently, looking not for the most advantageous strategy but for which option might lead to the most interesting narrative.
Little Frogie, by Natalie (12)
Little Frogie is the game in the anthology that departs the most from the walk-through-the-spooky-forest vibe – there’s one branch where the eponymous frog gets restless and decides to leave their cabin, with a trip to the woods being one of the options, but other than that they’re just going about their froggy business: making a meal, drawing a picture, taking a bath. Despite this, Little Frogie has a strict gauntlet structure, with only one correct path allowing you to make it through each episode in turn and get to the best ending. As with other the other games, though, it takes the sting out of the bad endings with a bit of humor: starving to death will elicit a wry “a sad moment”, while more successful ones might be judged “most adventurous moments”. It also provides some judicious hints to help the player navigate some of the trickier choices, like reminding you that it’s a hot day outside when you’re picking the temperature for your bath. The final set of choices – those ones allowing you to leave the cabin – feel like a bit of a shift from the rest of the game; beyond leaving the cozy setting of the frog’s hidey-hole, they also amp up the danger, which makes for some heightened drama in a story that could have otherwise petered out in a low-key fashion.
Survive or Die, by Unicorn Sisters (13)
Survive or Die takes us back to the core of the Deep Dark Wood theme by modeling itself on a horror movie: you’re lost in the forest in the middle of a storm, in need of shelter, when you stumble across an old house… There’s of course a monster, and danger lurking everywhere, but what’s clever about Survive or Die is that succeeding requires you to embrace genre tropes. You can pick whether you’re by yourself or with friends, for example, and of course the movie is more fun with other people around. Similarly, when there’s a loud noise you’re prodded to ask whether they heard the scary sound too. It all leads up to an entertaining twist ending, a perfect capstone for this self-aware genre exercise.
The Dark One, by Mushroom (13)
The anthology closes as it began, with a relatively friendlier entry. There’s still quite a lot of danger, don’t get me wrong – structurally, this is a combination gauntlet and Time Cave so there are quite a lot of ways to reach a bad end, including monsters and poison. But in addition to the welcome return of choices mostly punctuated with exclamation points, the narrative voice is also companionable, providing positive reassurance like “I like your way of thinking” when you make a wise decision and commiserating with you when things don’t quite go your way. After the often-solitary escapades of the prior six games, it’s nice to have a friend along on the adventure, and the game recognizes that this is one of its key draws: one of the ways to fail is to refuse to trust the narrator. And being told “I’m so happy for you, my dear friend!” brings an extra warmth to the best ending.
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Thank you, Mike, for your time spent on playing the games and even more time invested in writing all the reviews which provide a great amount of valuable know-how. I keep wonedring whether there’s anything like IF Academy, or whether the reviewers and authors here have sharpened their skill just by years of writing and attending events like this one. Thanks again and hope to meet next year.
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A Dream of Silence, by Abigail Corfman
I’ve got a conundrum: what’s the opposite of a chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation? I’m a big fan of Abigail Corfman’s mechanically-engaging Twine games, and while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m sufficiently into Bioware-style RPGs with relationship drama to make the prospect of melding these two things into a fangame where you need to help a BG3 companion explore and escape a traumatic dream-prison via judicious stat-juggling and trust-enhancing conversation immediately appealing. But instead of a delicious Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I feel like I’ve just bitten into – I dunno, a Swedish Fish Oreo? Onion-ring mints? I’m just goggling weird candies now, somebody help me out.
I should say up front that this is an incomplete chunk of what will eventually be a larger game – it consists just of a prologue that sets up the main action, and then a first act that ends just as there’s a glimmer of hope of rescue. Per some notes from the author, it sounds like there’ll also be some beefed-up options for specific kinds of characters to flesh out the interactions. And I think I am at a disadvantage from not having much pre-existing familiarity with Astarion, the game’s central character – I’m dimly aware from the BG3 discourse that he’s a popular character, and Dream of Silence provides an efficient summary both of the larger game’s plot, and Astarion’s basic deal as an elven vampire, that I understood the plot, but I didn’t have any feelings about him one way or the other going into things. So it’s possible my current reactions won’t make as much sense once the full game is out, or for a player who’s already Team Astarion.
With that said, I think there are some interrelated design and narrative decisions here that wind up yucking what should be a yum. On the story side, after an intense, confusing opening that again probably works much better if you’ve played BG3 and know who the various name-checked characters are, things slow way down. See, your party is under attack from a dream-eating monster, which has lead to Astarion being trapped in what appears to be a nightmare based on memories of when he was enslaved by the vampire who turned him. Said nightmare is one of isolated captivity: he’s stuck in a small, near-featureless crypt, slowly starving to death while his mind frays. You’re able to project yourself into the dream to try to rescue him, but only appear as a sort of wraith, with limited ability to interact with Astarion or the environment. While there are a few events that liven things up to a certain degree, for the most part all that happens for the game’s half-hour-ish playtime is fiddling around, unable to accomplish much or have much by way of conversation, while hopefully finding some way to put off his seemingly-inevitable demise.
This is all accomplished via a parser-like interface where you can zoom in on different sub-areas of the crypt and engage with the objects and characters there to the extent of your abilities, which are quite restricted. While you can pick a Dungeons and Dragons class at the outset, as far as I can tell this only provides a very few rare one-off options. For the most part, your capabilities are restricted according to an energy gauge (you get ten points at a time; resting replenishes them, but also reduces Astarion’s HP and sometimes his mental health) and how much you’ve levelled the three core skills of sight, touch, and speech. Speech 1 only lets you produce a vague susurrus of whispers, while higher levels allow you to say single words or even a few at a time; similarly, higher levels of sight give you more insight into your surroundings (and Astarion) while touch helps you interact with your surroundings.
That’s a reasonable enough framework, but the I found the implementation really drags. Partially this is because you need to level up the skills a fair bit to be able to do much, and at the default “balanced” difficulty level, it can take multiple rests to get some skills even up to level two or three (you choose how to prioritize the skills so that there’s one that’s relatively cheap to level, one that’s fairly punishing, and one in the middle). The game does provide you with specific targets to aim for by graying-out options you can’t yet access, but telling you what skill level you’ll need to unlock it. The nature of the tiny playing area, though, is that each level-up only opens up one or two new things, and as far as I can tell it’s not really possible to specialize just in one or two – you’ll eventually need all three to a certain extent. So that leads to a lot of thumb-twiddling gameplay just to move the ball forward a small amount, mechanically speaking.
What’s worse, the narrative impact of your abilities is often quite disappointing. For example, I was excited to get Touch 2, since that would let me pass through walls. But exiting the crypt just revealed that I was tied to Astarion and couldn’t go far, and unlatching the door to make it easier for him to escape required Touch 3. The only other thing I could do was enter a particular, prominent sarcophagus – but popping in just revealed that there were two items there that required Touch 5 to retrieve. This wasn’t a one-off anticlimax, either – once I got Touch 3 and opened up those latches, a skeleton immediately came and re-locked them, with no positive impact. It’s possible that if I’d had my speech skill leveled up further I would have been able to tell Astarion to try something with the door (though I didn’t see even a grayed-out option for that when I checked), but again, levelling up multiple skills is a time-consuming slog.
The nadir probably hit when I tried to use my special paladin power. There was a monster who showed up to menace Astarion, and I was excited to see that I could try to SMITE it – except I needed at least Touch 3 to unlock that option, and in my first playthrough I’d made that my lowest-priority skill and therefore was nowhere near being able to use it. On a subsequent playthrough, I made the appropriate investment so that I could try out the shiny, exciting choice – only to find that smiting the monster didn’t hurt it in the slightest, but drew its attention to me so I lost all my energy for the day and faced ongoing penalties even after resting, which is a far worse result than what you can get by just mumbling “hide” with no class powers and Speech 2.
It could be that these mechanical choices are the game trying to push you to worry less about the environment and more about the NPC, but sadly I didn’t find Astarion himself that engaging, even when I did a playthrough investing heavily in speech. He’s not a very garrulous conversationalist, which is fair enough given that he’s talking to a disembodied ghost, but still, the perfunctory way most exchanges play out is both a bit dull and mechanically punishing since you need to pay energy to keep each back-and-forth going. He also comes off as lightly characterized, despite a few hints of an enjoyably-spiky personality in some of his lines; likewise, nods to his backstory occasionally come to light but since that’s all spelled out in the pre-game infodump there’s not much intriguing about them. And outside of dialogue, he also isn’t especially proactive in taking any actions on his own to try to get himself free. Again, this is narratively reasonable: by the time the game opens he thinks he’s been held captive for fiveish months, so presumably he’s already explored around and tried everything he can think of, but the result is that without the benefit of how he’s established in BG3, I found him a passive, somewhat-generic character who couldn’t bear the weight the game’s structure puts on him.
All of which is to say that on both the mechanical and plot levels, the game creates a lot of tedium and frustration which is thematically relevant but doesn’t provide much for the player to glom onto – and the slow pacing and unrewarding narrative progression are exacerbated by the difficulty level, which at the default “balanced” level required me to start over several times to make progress. The easy “story” mode was slightly faster on the mechanical level, at least (I shudder to contemplate the unlockable hard difficulty), but that didn’t provide much of a patch on the game’s other issues; heck, I got to the end successfully in that playthrough, but it still wasn’t clear what I did to trigger the deus ex machina event that caps off the demo, adding lack of agency to my complaints.
I realize this is a lengthy review that’s more negative and less balanced than I usually try to be, so it’s worth repeating that this is probably due to my frustrated expectations – I went in expecting to really like A Dream of Silence, so I’m still working through the whiplash of bouncing off of it instead. I’m interested enough to still check out the full game, I suppose, but I’ll be sticking to the easiest difficulty and hoping for substantial changes behind the scenes.
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@lavieenmeow I don’t plan to write a full review but @DeusIrae’s review inspired me to play through “Provizora Parko” once.
I wanted to say I was impressed by the way that you made most pages work in their own way.
I guess that you’re not the first to do that (everything is a default feature of Sugarcube afaict, unless I’m wrong) but it made the game pretty engaging. I particularly enjoyed being yanked out of the airport lineup in real time.
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Thank you @pbparjeter! I’m so happy you enjoyed the game ! And yep, everything is either default Sugarcube or Chapel’s fading macro set. I’m also glad to hear you experienced that little detail in the airport. I was a little worried that 35 seconds was too long, and most players wouldn’t encounter it.
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One King to Loot Them (Twine Edition), by Onno Brouwer
This is a remake in Twine of an Inform game entered into last year’s Comp; it was originally intended for the One Choice Jam, whose requirements called for games that only had one moment where the player had any options. One King, in its original incarnation, had a clever interpretation of the theme, and its essential linearity was disguised by its nature as a parser game – having a whole bunch of potential options, only one of which is productive at any particular point in time, can be de rigueur for such things, after all. The plot, characters, puzzles, and text all seemed unchanged to me, so on all those points I’ll just refer back to my review of the original game; the short version is that this is an entertaining Conan pastiche with straightforward but satisfying challenges and solid prose. So how has it been changed by its new choice-based interface?
Some things that I found frustrating in the game’s first iteration have definitely been streamlined; the sometimes-cryptic limited-parser verbs are no longer a barrier, for one thing, since you just need to click on stuff to interact with it. The use of an inventory sidebar also helps make one of the harder puzzles fairer by making obvious an option that previously required a bit of a leap of intuition. While navigation links aren’t highlighted, leading to some potential confusion – the opening scene has two separate “broad dark stain” links, one of which provides additional detail text, the other of which advances the plot – the game’s linear nature (and the always-available undo button) means this is no big deal.
There are some places where the interface does get a little awkward – trying to open a chest can require clicking two or three times, which is a few too many in the abstract and also creates challenges if the player’s also trying to use an inventory item to break it open and isn’t sure when they’re supposed to do that. And while it’s nice that there’s a new achievements feature, it’d be nice if the game told you when you’d unlocked one, or told you the names of ones you haven’t found yet, since as is I just looked at them at the end of the game, went “huh”, and closed it down.
All of which is to say that this is a clean and faithful translation of the parser game: that trick with the one meaningful choice is still really smart, the puzzles and story seem to work just as well as they did in the original, and that one puzzle at the end about heading off a “circling” enemy still makes my head hurt. If you’ve played the game already, there’s probably not much need to revisit it unless you’re interested in doing comparative analysis on the different interface schemes (which is totally legit, I actually enjoyed doing that!) But if you’ve hesitated to take the plunge, this is version hits all the same high points and is more accessible to the parser-averse to boot.
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Hi Mike,
The achievements is indeed a new feature of the game. When a player reaches the end, they will have achieved everything, so there does not seem to be much use for it. It is rather an elaborate “progress bar”. Except for the one thing people might have missed:
I originally intended to use different link colors to indicate the type of verb associated with it (yellow for marching, blue for regarding, red for all other verbs), then the text would be shown like this:
Another option would have been to mark ‘Alcaz’ as the action link (since the original parser action is actually ‘talk to Alcaz’ at this point), would that have been a better approach?
Thank you very much for your thoughful review!
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The Kuolema (Twine Edition), by Ben Jackson
A year and three weeks ago, I said:
even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking “[the Kuolema] would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine”.
It works just as well, and is smoother, in Twine!
…okay, the work the author has put into updating the game deserves a little more than that, but unlike my takeaway from One King to Loot Them All, where choosing between the Inform or Twine versions came down to a matter of taste, this is a clear upgrade all around. The Google Forms original pulled out some clever tricks to deal with the fact that that system was never designed for games – including not having any state tracking – but the Twine version is unencumbered by those awkward contrivances: the full game is all in one file, rather than being split between three password-gated ones, inventory and notes are easily available in a sidebar, along with a save-and-load feature, and the presentation has gotten an across-the-board upgrade including some attractive typography and graphic design. Puzzles do still require you to type the name of the object you’re using, the password you’re trying, or what you’re looking for into a text box, but I enjoyed this hold-over: the sidebar allows you to easily refer back to items and info you’ve collected to date, and the type-in requirement means you have to think a bit about what you’re trying to do, rather than just lawnmower through links.
There’ve also been some improvements to the meat of the story. The general shape of the narrative remains the same, but while I didn’t go back to compare things line by line, I remembered seeing some typos and clumsy phrases in the original prose that I didn’t pick up on this time out (I just saw one misspelling: “metalic” for “metallic”). There’ve been a couple of alternate solutions added to puzzles that perhaps felt a bit out-of-context in the initial iteration, and the endgame has seen some expansion – my sense was that the climactic conversation has been substantially fleshed out, and takes advantage of the game’s newfound ability to remember actions you took earlier in the story, while the set of factions you can potentially ally with has been expanded, with accompanying options seeded earlier in the game to set up those possibilities. It’s still recognizably the same pulp sci-fi thriller, but it’s got a bit more heft to it and the central character of Dr. Vrieman has some more psychological plausibility.
The game does include “AI” generated art, alongside hand-made graphics for the puzzle-relevant visuals and documents. As I’ve mentioned before, I am generally down on such things, but kudos to to the author for handling this well: using such tools wasn’t such a hot-button in 2022, when the game began its gestation, and their use is fully disclosed, with a post-victory survey even enabling players to weigh in on how they felt about their presence in the game. I still don’t like seeing them – and I personally don’t think they add much to the game, it would work just as well with the gameplay-relevant graphics being the only ones – but this helped take the sting out.
I suppose the Google Forms version does still retain some novelty value, and future players might enjoy checking it out just to see how far one can torture the system, but the Twine version is very much the definitive edition of what, per my 2023 review, was already a heck of a good time. Nice job, year-ago-Mike, you were spot on!
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Ah, cool, I did get that – wasn’t sure if there was anything else I’d missed but glad to know I got my completionist’s gold star!
As for the dark stain link question, I think the color-coding is a cool idea, but even if you’d adopted that I’d agree that having “Alcaz” be the forward-progress link would probably make the most sense, since as you say, interacting with him is what actually advances the plot.
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Pass a Bill, by Leo Weinreb
(I beta-tested this game)
In my first review of this year’s Thing, I lifted up Potato Peace as an example of a game that has the trappings of a game about politics but isn’t actually a game about politics. Part of the reason that concept struck me the way it did is that I’d only recently tested Pass a Bill, which despite its Schoolhouse Rock-baiting name likewise resolutely avoids having anything to say about the actual exercise of legislative powers in this or any country. For all that the protagonist – a newly-elected representative who’s either well- or terribly-positioned for success by virtue of being the only independent in a two-party legislature – has their heart set on getting a bill enacted into law, much like the game they’re profoundly indifferent to the actual substance of said bill, and the process of doing so requires not a single iota of politicking or parliamentary maneuvering.
And despite the fact that it took me a little while to readjust my expectations, that’s OK! Pass a Bill is slapstick, not satire. Yes, it makes no sense at all that the majority whip won’t talk to you about moving your bill until you check in with the minority leader and let her lard up your draft with poison pills, but it does make for a silly bit of shuttle diplomacy. No, I don’t know why said whip is a violent weirdo bent on getting your personal oath of loyalty (nor how he’s managed to get elected to two separate seats for two different parties). And the game’s eventual climax is impossible to take seriously but good-natured nonetheless.
In terms of presentation, Pass a Bill is an appealing mix of primitive and sophisticated. The black background, white text, and blue links put us firmly in Default Twine territory, but there’s an inventory and hints sidebar that provides helpful information throughout, and the MS-Paint-style illustrations similarly have more than their share of rough charm. And for all that there’s a clear spine through the game, there are a fair number of branch points, easily-rewindable deaths, and Easter Eggs to reward poking around a bit.
Pass a Bill is still a sillier game than I tend to enjoy – nothing wrong with comedy, but I tend to prefer stuff that either has more bite, or goes even farther to dress up dumb jokes with a veneer of sophistication. But it’s got some appeal nonetheless: I ultimately wound up thinking of it as a kind of extreme version of a yes-and improv session where an initial, politics-heavy setup gets quickly and entertainingly pushed into absurdity, leaving only a rough framework and handful of NPC descriptions in its wake. If it’s more Mr. Bean Goes to Washington than Mr. Smith, there’s nothing wrong with that.
8 Likes
Loose Ends, by Daniel Stelzer and Anais Sommerfeld
(I beta tested this game)
So far in this festival we’ve seen games that seem to be about politics but aren’t (Potato Peace, Pass a Bill) and games that seem to be about politics and are (Social Democracy, Dragon of Steelthorne sorta); Loose Ends completes the set, being a game that doesn’t seem to be about politics but actually 100% is (I suppose there are also a bunch of games that neither seem to be nor are about politics, but that’s a singularly unedifying line of inquiry). It’s about vampires, you see, but not just any vampires: these are the Kindred of the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: the Masquerade, which can be played in a variety of styles ranging from angsty personal horror (…or so I’ve heard) to superheroes with fangs (definitely played in a few campaigns like this), but always foregrounds the complex web of relationships, feuds, and factions that dominates the endless unlives of the titular immortals.
The game does a good job of letting you slowly wade into the deep end of the pool, though. You’re a newcomer to town who gets hired for a classic Vampire task, a Masquerade cleanup: some chump of a vampire’s revealed their supernatural powers to mortals, leaving witnesses and evidence, and it’s up to you to preserve the secrecy of undead society by seeing to the requisite disappearances and threats. The early stages of the game therefore unfurl as an investigation, as you follow the schmendrick’s tracks and try to figure out exactly how big of a mess has been made. But it doesn’t take long to realize that, again in classic V:tM style, the job isn’t on the level and by nosing around, you’ve inadvertently put yourself into grave (groan) danger. As the game progresses, gameplay shifts from finding evidence or persuading witnesses to strategizing about trading favors: there are a wealth of characters representing a wide number of factions, most of whom hate each others’ guts, and sharing resources, information, or promises with some of them will help unlock secrets, or lend you mundane or supernatural aid. It all comes to a crescendo in a final conflict that turns less on whether you’ve sussed out the mystery than if you’ve made any allies who’ll care enough to keep you from getting squashed by a bug.
The interface does a good job of helping you master the array of options and information at your disposal; each night, you’re given a choice of locations to visit, and also the chance to review your resources and what you’ve learned. Gameplay largely proceeds via standard choice-based gameplay, but with clearly-marked places where your choice of focus attributes and vampire powers unlock new options. When it comes time to offer a favor, you always have a chance to back down and change your mind; likewise, while the game does have an overall time limit, it’s fairly forgiving and runs partially according to the rules of drama rather than a strict clock. As a result the game feels quite fair, even as the social-engineering puzzle it presents can be quite challenging to navigate.
The characters are a highlight, brought to life by evocative prose and well-chosen dialogue. They tend a bit to the stereotypical, if you’ve played the tabletop game, since most stand in as single representatives for their faction, but they’re all well done, and there are some who stand out as individuals, like the freethinking university professor or the alchemy-dabbling painter and her making-a-series-of-bad-decisions lover. And I’d imagine they make the cavalcade of political groups a little easier to navigate for newcomers to the World of Darkness, by personalizing the factions – in fact overall I think the game does a good job of explaining itself and not presupposing prior knowledge of the setting (if anything, I might have wrong-footed myself through my familiarity with older versions of Vampire: in my first playthrough, I caught wind of the hideout of a Sabbat cabal. Seeing as they’re a sect of vampires whose cruelty and fanaticism are so extreme that I’m struggling to come up with a plausible real-world analogy, I steered well clear. But when I visited them in a subsequent save-file there was just a tense conversation waiting for me, reflecting I think that the Sabbat have been toned down in recent editions).
I can still see Loose Ends not being for everyone: the web of information and relationships is tricky to navigate successfully, and if you’re interested in the personal-horror aspect of vampirism, your thirsts will largely go unslaked – there’s no existential angst here, and heck, feeding on the blood of the living is mostly something that gets taken care of in a perfunctory paragraph between chapters. But if the idea of trying to use your wits to survive jaded immortals’ games of feint and counter-feint, look no further.
11 Likes
Thank you so much for your review, and we’re so glad you enjoyed it! The full details will come in a post-mortem, but suffice to say, that’s exactly the experience we were hoping for.
3 Likes
You mean, a post-post-mortem?
(I cut like five additional undead jokes from this short review beyond the “grave” one).
5 Likes