ParserTHON 2026

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Isekai (preview), by dott. Piergiorgio

Exactly at the midpoint of my combined ParserComp/Review-a-Thon list, Isekai loomed, both enticing and dreadful. I’ve already played and reviewed several games related to the author’s magnum opus, most notably The Portrait, which is the very opening sequence of this deep and broad fantasy parser game, and First Contact, which is a choice-based prequel providing some background on the game’s world and the married trio of elf, demon, and angel who appear to take center stage in Isekai. I think it’s fair to say that while there are elements of both games that I enjoyed, like the depth of implementation and the author’s enthusiasm for the world and the characters, there are also many that game me pause – the prose in both was often prolix, with some infelicities that are attributable to English not being the author’s first language, and some that are not, for one thing. For another, those earlier games often treated fairly ho-hum fantasy tropes, like devils and angels being people rather than supernatural incarnations of pure evil or pure good, as revelations, and fairly ho-hum plot developments like a man being mystically transported into a woman’s body, or the existence of queer throuples, as meriting repeated all-caps exclamations of incredulity. And the elephant in the room is their treatment of sexuality, which simultaneously attacls prudery, insisting that residents of this plane are too enlightened to find nudity or, er, breast-feeding inherently sexual, while spending a lot of word count drawing attention to the bounteous, barely-concealed bosoms of the super-hot main characters.

But both The Portrait and First Contact clearly presented themselves as subsidiary works. This slice of Isekai isn’t the complete package – per the author’s note, it’s only about the first fifth of the game – but it is nonetheless the main event, the prime reason for all the worldbuilding and character work foregrounded in the other games. So I was curious to see how this would all work in that intended complex, as well as to see what the gameplay undergirding all this looks like.

Well, Isekai both is and isn’t what I was expecting. Having played the Portrait, I wasn’t surprised to see the level of detail in the game’s implementation of an elvish wizard’s house; while there are some notes saying particular areas or items are works in progress or placeholders, every conceivable item of scenery can be examined or, where appropriate, interacted with, and there’s practically a fractal zoom available, as looking at any particular item often leads to two or three more sub-parts that can likewise be studied. There are plenty of books providing lore infodumps, about two dozen rooms and hallways that make up the mansion, and a solid view of the outside provides plenty of opportunity to learn about your environs in detail.

The flip side of this is that Isekai is also a game with a large number of words, and relatively slow pacing – I suppose I didn’t have to check out as many incidental details as I did, but since the gameplay in this section is purely explorative, it would have felt odd to cut it short. While the prose is still often a bit iffy, with plenty of typos and missing spaces, and does run on a bit, I did find this aspect worked better than in the Portrait or First Contact. Beyond the writing just being overall more polished, in the former, all you had to do was examine every single piece of an obsessively-detailed painting, and the latter had a lot of relatively clumsy infodumps of deep background. Here, you’re getting snippets of detail in response to moving around the house and trying to resolve discrete questions or handle minor inconveniences, and the additional agency – and the dialing-back of implementation depth after that initial, scarily-involved painting – makes it go down easier.

I felt similarly about the sexy bits. Isekai still risibly tries to have its cake and it eat too, emphasizing that the elf babe whose body you’re inhabiting is totally uninhibited and doesn’t find nudity sexual, but having practically the first bit of business that happens to you be a bit of burlesque farce that sees your bodice cut open and your skirts falling down (and for all that you’re not meant to be squeamish about your body, you’re awfully embarrassed by the sheets showing evidence of menstruation). Boobs are less of a focus than they were in the lactation-rama of First Contact or in the Portrait, where the gameplay entirely consists of ogling a picture of three well-endowed ladies, but the game still elicited more than a few eye rolls (like, one of the few books fully implemented in the library is a gynecology textbook).

All of the above is pretty much just a rehash of those earlier reviews, though, even if the particular valence of specific critiques shifts in this different context. I had two new reactions to Isekai proper, though. The first of these is that there is actual stuff for the player to do here, and I thought it was actually fairly mechanically engaging. I haven’t directly stated the premise, but the idea here, per the title, is that you’re a modern male human who has a bad dream and suddenly wakes up inside the body of the afore-discussed elf lady. And so this slice of the game is about trying to understand your new circumstances and surroundings, with regular prompts of italicized text pointing you towards the next revelation. Having played the author’s other games, I can’t say that the new information itself was all that interesting, since I’d already come across it before – though even then, it feels like the game makes a way bigger deal of elves having six fingers than that deserves – but the process of uncovering it feels pleasingly deliberate. You learn this new world’s numeric system by finding a ruler, noting the symbols marked on it, and counting its markings, and you similarly develop your literacy by working your way up from simple comic books to YA novels (the game acknowledges this is unrealistic, pitching it as your brain just catching up with a language your body already knows). My favorite moment in this vein was when the main character – who was a sailor in his previous life – was able to identify that this world was in another part of the Milky Way by finding the Magellenic Clouds. None of this is especially difficult, so I wouldn’t call them puzzles per se, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the emphasis on the way learning new things is helping develop your capabilities and understanding lends some purpose to the infodumping.

The second thing has to do with the isekai-ness of Isekai. I’m not super familiar with this genre, but it’s a version of portal-fantasy centering on the possession of the body of a native of the fantasy world. There’s a lot of dramatic potential in the mismatch between a character’s previous understanding of their identity and circumstances, and how those things have changed in their new reality, and the game is constantly drawing foregrounding the protagonist’s awareness of these mismatches, especially as it pertains to gender and sexuality. There are easily a dozen times – probably more – when the game harps on the protagonist recognizing their situation:

I realise that my thinking is more than mine, the thinking of Etuye of now. and I realise my being Etuye: Inside me, Inside my soul, I’m myself, I’M ETUYE.

The tone is almost invariably overwrought and incredulous:

After this realisation, you fight really hard to banish from your mind the surreal mental picture of three females, a demon, an angel and an elf sharing together the same bed… albeit that mental picture gives you an unexpected warmth inside your chest and tender feelings of… love ??

It can feel comedic, because again, has this guy never heard about trans people, or lesbians, or poly folks? It’d be one thing if what was going on was a conflict between the protagonist’s pre-existing personality and sense of himself, and the way they’re attempting to assimilate these changes. But the protagonist is almost completely uncharacterized; his previous gender is established, and we know his profession, but other than that he’s pretty much an AFGNCAAP.

Because there’s no real interiority to the characterization, no substantial engagement with the subjectivity that shapes the experiences and revelations the game depicts, some moments that are clearly meant to be profound land as comedy. “Can you imagine a man suddenly having a woman’s body??? Or an elf lady being married to a demon lady and an angel lady???” Well, yeah, of course I can imagine those things, repeating this stuff over and over just feels silly – I get it already. But imagining a particular character, who had a particular relationship to their previous, male, body, trying to figure out what that shift means for his understanding of himself – that’d be something different, and more interesting. The same is true on the relationship side: was he married? Happily or unhappily? Was he straight, or gay, or something else? How do those experiences shape his feelings about Etuye’s menage, as he realizes that he might soon be called about to inhabit it? In the absence of a characterized protagonist, there’s nothing for these questions to stick to, no central figure whose form is reshaped by these changes. And so they just float, abstract and insubstantial, with the game reliant on repetition and emphasis to try to sell their impact.

Maybe I’m wanting something from Isekai that the game isn’t interested in providing. But I don’t think so! In fact the whole structure seems to demand an actual character at its center. And that absence is a shame, because having played this substantial chunk of the full game, I do see its appeal – there’s definitely an idea here that could work, and a dedication to craft that could make for something truly unique (plus yes, the sexy stuff, which I repeat is kinda out there but I gotta admit is distinctive). But far more than tightening up the prose or speeding up the pacing, to be a success I think the final game really needs to figure out who the story is about. It could be that actually, it’s just about the elf lady and her adventures, which would be fine, if a bit conventional. If the game is going to emphasize the alienness of its premise, though, I think it needs to go a different direction, and create a protagonist who’s just as compelling as the natives of the fantasy world.

isekai mr.txt (234.8 KB)

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@jjmcc

Lol, here I thought us natives were the only ones that might clock this. I like to remind folks that a ‘dry heat’ is what ovens use ALL THE TIME.

I have a friend in Arizona who’s always saying the heat isn’t that bad, it’s dry, you get used to it, nothing to worry about. I’m glad to hear that’s not a consensus there!

[jjmcc]

@Draconis

the heat isn’t that bad, it’s dry, you get used to it, nothing to worry about.

I think its a relative thing? Certainly 90 degrees SOUNDS daunting, but in AZ, not so bad, really. I was more uncomfortable at 80 in Michigan. But 110+ is miserable at ANY moisture content.

[alyshkalia (Tabitha (ey/em or they/them))]

Thanks much for the review; I’m glad you enjoyed it!

@DeusIrae

I dimly remembered other buildings and other anecdotes from the Google Maps version I actually tested

The one you tested was actually about a different (albeit nearby and similar in scale) place!

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

The Uncle Sam Atrium, by alyshkalia (Tabitha)

Hot on the heels of Blossom, NY comes the author’s other local-history game focusing on upstate New York. But while the gently-pedagogic intention and conversational yet informative style are the same, actually Uncle Sam Atrium is notably different from the former both in approach and in subject matter.

Taking the first thing first, here we’ve got a visual novel in RenPy rather than a Twine game. Sure, in both cases the presentation is words plus pictures, but I found Uncle Sam Atrium to be more, well, visually-oriented than Blossom. I think this is just the nature of a VN engine: the pictures are bigger, spread out to the edges of the game window, while the text shrinks down to a small box that only holds a sentence or two at a time. There are advantages to this, because USA (oh hey, now I see what they were doing with that acronym!) combines contemporary photos with archival pictures showing how the eponymous building has changed over time, so being able to see more detail made these comparisons more arresting. At the same time, I sometimes wished there was a little more text – we don’t need Caro’s The Power Broker, here, but I missed Blossom’s footnotes providing additional depth and context. The narration is clear and coherent, don’t get me wrong, but I think the format wound up make the story the game presents simpler, or at least feel simpler, than it would have in the Blossom, NY format.

As for subject matter, I made that Power Broker reference advisedly because rather than a travelogue through a small town, the topic this time out is a forensic investigation of the death one particular building in the city of Troy. The game shows us the current, near-deserted state of this block-sized mall, then takes us back through consecutive strata of history to unpack the decisions that led to this point – and as with so many contemporary design issues in American cities, finds that a thoughtless, suburb-centric approach to postwar “urban renewal” set the project up for failure many decades on. What’s worse, the game closes by noting that current debates about what to do with the moribund building are in some cases retreading some of that same old ground, which will likely have similar results if followed through on, an eloquent testimony to the importance of paying attention to history.

It makes for a compelling story, but even acknowledging the upsides of the photos-first, limited-text presentation, I did find myself wishing for a bit more meat on the bones. We don’t get a sense of any of the personalities involved, or how the policies and economics around redevelopment have shifted over the decades, for example, which would help USA feel less like a cautionary fable and more like, well, history. I very much don’t want to begrudge what’s here, because I enjoyed it and it’s well done, and I have to admit that the average member of the audience is much less nerdy about this kind of thing than I am. But I think these two games, taken together (plus Swormville Sweep, the Google Maps one that I forgot having tested, thanks for the reminder Tabitha!) stand as a very strong proof of concept, and indicate there’s room to go both broader and deeper on these ideas.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Edge Valley Bigfoot Society, by NegSec

There is a host of well-meaning, and actually quite wise, advice for first-time authors of parser games. This ranges from emphasizing the importance of beta-testing to coaching newcomers through the inevitably anxious process of releasing a game and getting public feedback, to far more granular pointers about implementation and technical challenges. But probably the biggest, most important single tip is to manage scope: you learn an enormous amount writing your first parser game, so there’s a major upside to keeping things relatively small and simple, minimizing the number of complex mechanics or branch-points in favor of getting a shipped game under your belt.

For all that this is rock-solid advice, though, many if not most parser newbies ignore it completely – they think they’re built different, they’ve got an idea, and by gum they’re going to reach for the stars. And you know, God bless those hubris-drunk rookies, among whose ranks I proudly count my younger self as well as the author of Edge Valley Bigfoot Society.

Sure, at first blush the game doesn’t seem crazily ambitious. The premise is classic parser-comedy stuff – you’re a sasquatch who’s been captured by a group of underachieving cryptid hunters, and you need to make your escape from their modestly-sized headquarters before so much time passes that the rest of your clan realizes that you were clumsy (and curious) enough to get caught and draw attention to them. The map has only maybe a dozen rooms, with a solid third of them being minimally-implemented transitional spaces. And the quickest route to an ending requires solving just three and a half relatively-simple puzzles.

Ah, but I said “an ending”, didn’t I? Yup, this sucker has six of them, with alternate solutions up the wazoo! And while many of the mechanics are standard medium-dry-goods affairs, at least one set of solutions I explored centered on the recondite ordering-NPCs-around mechanic, which is for real Inform heads only at this point. There aren’t any hints included so I didn’t manage to fully investigate everything on offer, but the game is deeper, with more simulationist elements, than it first appears.

Did it need to bite off as much as it does? …well, actually I’d say no, the straightforward puzzles are totally fine in themselves, with the quirky setting and enjoyably wry prose more than enough to carry the player through to the simplest ending. And at times I think the author was struggling to chew everything they had in their mouth: there are standard first-time Inform rough patches like line spacing errors, some confusion over scope, and a hesitance to extend build-in grammar (like, there’s a puzzle that should be solved via TAKE X WITH Y, but instead of allowing the parser to take an indirect object for that action, you just type TAKE X and the game checks whether you’ve got Y in your inventory and does the more complex action automatically if you do).

So yeah, there’s a hypothetical version of Edge Valley Bigfoot Society that trims its sails to eliminate all but one way through its puzzles, simplifies the implementation, and spends that time on polish instead. And that version would be a solid, fun game! But I much prefer the version we got; it’s only a little messier, but much more fun to mess around with – and, hopefully, more representative of what more the author might accomplish with a second parser game building on the lessons of making this first one, because it’s always a lot easier the next time out (see, that part of the advice is 100% correct).

bigfoot mr.txt (70.3 KB)

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

Thanks for the excellent review !!

I have taken the liberty of copying your review and pasted it into my dev notes. and this alone shows how highly constructive is your criticism.

the (dreaded ?) answer to your questions & criticism must wait my reading of your transcript, I’m curious about your commentary in it…

Thanks and best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

Now my reaction to the rather interesting and stimulating constructive criticism.

I’ll proceed from top to bottom, so I suggest opening another browser tab on Mike’s review (as I’m actually doing in writing this) for following the proceedings:

the combined rampage of prolixity and bad english is a well-known problem, and I’m actively working around it, and this is slowing down the coding.

Isekai is first and foremost an tackling of human condition, following the ancient narrative device of the utopia, hence the tackling of the issue known as “sexual repression” which, at least in Italy and EU, is perceived as “foisting anglo-saxon mores on our societies”, but I agree that the text need a serious revision toward less accent on æsthetics and more on the social issues, but in the mean time I don’t want to give the impression of appeasing, uh, sensible souls. It’s a complex and delicate chisel work-in-progress.

On the level of detail, obviously I have taken duly note of the missing scenery/synonyms in your transcript, but the “fractal zoom” critique is an important one.
I’m proud of the “most detailed item in IF history”, but I realise that having this unusually detailed item can too easily put off-track the player, and this very early in the story so I’m actually planning a layering of the details (thanks to the .reveal feature) with an “all the rest is an AMUSING optional” after seeing what actually matters (let’s call it the “first layer”, but where I have trouble is in conveying to the player the “you have seen what really matters, the rest is optional” message in a diegetic mean.

On the books, I find that is the perfect place to confine infodumps, but the issue is how to point to the books which aren’t mere lore. (spoiler: in act. II Azuj will be the “librarian”); the notebook happens to have its “natural place” outside the shelves. (incidentally, your transcript shows the need of putting in the about (and in the readme file in due time) how to handle the book browsing interface: thanks !)
The missing spaces are actually caused by the late usage of
#pragma newline_spacing(delete)
as solution of a major source readability problem (basically I have abused the <<...>> feature for adaptive prose, turning it into a scripting language) but I have not fully inserted the now-needed space after a newline in the adaptive text

(slight spoilery snippet of actual code:

lookThroughMsg = "you see that outside it is night, 
<<if !gRevealed ('svision')>>
but amazingly you easily see in the penumbra, as a cat, 
<<if mirror.examined>>
or to be more exact, as an elf, 
<<end>>
<<end>>
that there's....

)

on the sexy bits, I think I have already explained above, and agree on the overboard, but the burlesque approach seems to me the right handling, but is still a WIP inside the WIP.
(incidentally, what are on the sheets isn’t related to fertility but to sexuality; thanks for noticing the ambiguity of the euphemism: thankfully I have another around…)
the textbook is, I 'fess up, a sort of, uh, reprisal toward certain non-constructive criticisms; but in the actual, finished, story will be a totally optional loredump.

on the new reactions & critiques, trust me, six fingers will matter later I leave to your imagination (hopefully without science ) how and why. (hint: you have noticed that there’s many tools, instruments and even complex machinery…)

now, the PC/Etuye’s relationship: as noted above, the story also convey a social message in form of an utopia, that is, IMVHO the IF as narrative medium is reaching its maturity, to the point to be used also for conveying serious arguments (cfr. all the recent IFs tackling, for example, the rise of evil in 1930s germany); in this context, the symbolism of the AFGNCAAP Sailor gradually transmogrifying into the well-fleshed and characterised Etuye represent the transition between the old and new in the coming-of-age of IF.

I fully concur and agree on the silliness of many repetitions (often related to unfinalised placement in the general narrative)

on the actual character, you surely have get that Sailor is in effect a “chrysalis” from where the “butterfly” Etuye came out. so, your constructive criticism is, uh, no, stems from the “still offstage” main character. Main because, and is where the hard work for me still looms: there’s a protagonist and two deuteragonists, not mere NPC, and I’m hoping that the dynamics between the PC and the NPC will be at least compelling.
and yes, not only alienness, but also “aliens”. Hope to have answered the last of these excellent, highly-constructive criticism.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory, by Outgrabe

Criticism, I firmly believe, is most valuable when it’s sympathetic to the specific goals of a work. “This apple is no sort of orange” is about as helpful as complaining that you can’t talk to the monsters in Doom, or that there aren’t enough puzzles in a kinetic novel. Articulating what a game is trying to accomplish, then analyzing what pieces of the design and implementation either support or undermine those aims, is what I try to take as my guiding ethos for reviewing – if I allow myself some leeway to nerd out about themes or influences or personal resonance, I like to think that’s OK so long as that foundational work of criticism is there.

By those lights, I can only judge Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory a resounding success. The game’s itch page explains that the goal was to make the smallest piece of IF ever, with size measured not by word count or file size but the physical dimensions of the screen displaying the game. And by implementing a miniature text adventure in Thumby, a platform that emulates what’s basically an even smaller-than-real-life version of the Nintendo Gameboy with a screen about the size of a stamp, I think the author must have done it. Mission accomplished!

…and if I were consistent in my critical methods, that’s where the case would rest, I suspect, but I can’t help assessing the game’s quality qua text adventure, and also what kind of experience the unique interface provides. So let’s proceed with those inquiries, with the disclaimer that these are just bonus sections because the game clearly did what it set out to do.

On the former question, I’d say it’s completely fine. I’ll give it points for the overall structure, which is basically an extended shaggy-dog story: you’ve messed up your shift schedule and gotten stuck in the eponymous factory right when it’s scheduled for demolition, so you need to scramble around trying to get out. There are five different potential avenues of escape you need to attempt before the final course of action unlocks, which leads to a groan-worthy and entirely predictable punch-line (I mean this in the most complimentary way possible). None of the five are especially challenging to figure out – the parser is pretty stripped-down, so most of them involve just typing USE [OBVIOUS OBJECT] in the relevant room, with the few exceptions just requiring straightforward, logical item usage. The writing is serviceable, light-hearted without ever being funny as such, and the only real quibble I had with the scenario is that at one point you try to wriggle out a vent, and the game notes that your head and shoulders fit just fine, but your rib cage can’t make it through, and I can’t help pointing out that that’s not how bodies work.

As to the second question:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!! FHHFGGGGFHNNNNNGGGGGGGHHHH!!! YUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGGKLKLKLKLKLK!!!

[pant,pant]

I am having a hard time coming up with comparisons for what the experience of actually playing HILFCF is like that do not involve trivializing actual real-world atrocities. So I won’t make the attempt, and simply describe how the game works.

Let’s start with that tiny display. It fits about 12 characters at a time, so anything longer than that slowly scrolls across, with each sentence repeating until you push a button and it moves on to the next one. I guess that’s pretty much the only way to manage things, but when I tell you that the description of an object is often around 100 characters, and the results of one of the five futile escape attempts can be more like 250, you can start to see the problem. Imagine every complaint you’ve ever heard about timed text in IF, then raise it to the power of please god make it stop.

So much for output – there’s also the input side of things. Thumby takes inspiration from the Gameboy here too, so by default you have a directional pad and two buttons. The default, recommended interface option is to use the directions (mapped to the arrows) to scroll through the letters of the alphabet one by one, with the buttons allowing you to select a letter or delete one. This mode also boasts an autocomplete feature, but it still took me like fifteen seconds to enter TAKE BAR. That was the last command I attempted with the default control scheme; fortunately, there’s also a QWERTY option where you can just use your keyboard as normal, except, whimsically, the m key doesn’t work. Oh, and while the two-word parser is generally pretty straightforward, many map connections aren’t two-way, requiring you to type BACK rather than the relevant direction to retrace your steps, which makes the game’s geometry far more confusing than it needs to be.

Put all this together, and the fifteen minutes I spent playing the game are among the most physically unpleasant of my IF career, leaving me squirming, impatient, and frustrated. Admittedly some of these issues were unavoidable given the aim of cramming a full text game into such a small container, but more could have been done to match the content to the game’s affordances, like writing highly-condensed descriptions that wouldn’t require so much waiting (I’m reminded of After-Words in the 2021 Comp, which made every single bit of text in the game exactly two words). And the weird map connections, and the inability to type m, just feel like bizarrely gratuitous obstacles to engagement.

I don’t want to be too negative here – I do find the ridiculousness of the game’s goal delightful, and the actual words and design are more than good enough given the remit (I am very partial to a shaggy-dog story). It’s just that HILFCF is way, way easier to enjoy by someone telling you all about it than by girding your loins and playing it. And whatever a game’s stated objectives, that sure seems like a shame.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Maddie Teases, by HHRichards

Folks, we’ve had a good run. Across five Lewd Mod reviews, I like to think I’ve provided some insight and entertainment, from the early days when I was incredulous at how everybody lacked eyes and acted like horny robots, all the way through to the belated realization, in my No Butts review, of what the premise of this series actually is. But with installment number six, I fear the well has run dry. Maddie Teases is extruded Lewd Mod product, and after two years of familiarity with how these things work, I’ve grown too jaded to have any real reaction.

Like, our coworker texts us out of the blue to say she’s going to send us increasingly-risque selfies to workshop the hottest ones to send to her boyfriend, and won’t take no for an answer? Been there, done that. Our all-caps dialogue options read like they were written by someone high on paint thinner? Of course, how else do people talk. The naked drawings omit all facial features except mouths and eyebrows? Wake me when something interesting is happening.

Reader, I tried to come up with something interesting to say here. I even played twice, role-playing a total horn-dog the first time and a complete cold fish the second. Typically in this series the latter is a surefire recipe for hilarity, as the half-naked lady steamrolls your diffidence and non-sequiturs, but this time that too was a damp squib, just terminating proceedings at the PG-13 level without any bonkers miscommunications along the way.

So yeah, after playing Maddie Teases, I was bored, but also, I confess, disappointed – and hopeful that when next year’s Review-a-Thon rolls around and the author inevitably enters another brace of demos and excerpts from the extended Lewd Mod cinematic universe, they’ll boast enough novelty or demented titillation to perk up my interest again. I recognize this is a very bad sign, inasmuch as I’m now in the position of someone whose tolerance to their intoxicant of choice has gotten sufficiently robust that they need harder and harder stuff to feel anything. But here we are: I’m too benumbed for an experience like this to register anymore, but maybe if I keep chasing the green fairy, I can recapture what it felt like in those first days…

[Candy64]

@DeusIrae

I am having a hard time coming up with comparisons for what the experience of actually playing HILFCF is like

It’s a great game but probably not the right kind of game for ParserComp. I think it would be a top contender for an Avant-Garde style IF game jam. The ParserComp page sets a different expectation for what to expect in games for its competition. That page even suggests that arcade games or games with an arcade style input are not what they are looking for.

I’ve tried playing it 4 times now using the rules of the road for the competition which are free form parser commands. I have had little success typing commands and using the ‘b’ key ends up filling up the prompt with b characters. Here is what happens in the opening break room when I try to look at the vending machine typing ‘look machine’. It won’t take the ‘m’ and perhaps ‘m’ is a special key or button press. I don’t have to press enter but it goes into this loop. I have no idea at all what the [a], ^v, or * mean and if that is something that the emulated device shows or it is part of the game. Like said before, I want to want to like it and have tried to play it. To me the puzzle is just figuring out how to play it.

I gave it a good rating but I have to give the traditional games that play without any extra cognitive load better marks.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

The Priest and the Rennes Alignment, by catventure

The conspiracy theories around the secret treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau are incredibly well-trodden ground in pop culture in general due to the eye-popping (and occasionally head-scratching) success of the Da Vinci Code, but this potboiling tale of Templar riches and esoteric secrets also got a definitive workout in gaming, via the third Gabriel Knight game, though it’s largely remembered these days for the dumb cat-hair mustache puzzle rather than its take on the whole lost-bloodline-of-Jesus (plus there are vampires) thing. Heck, the topic is even relatively top of mind for me at the moment since Jimmy Maher recently wrapped up his five-part look at the conspiracy theories and the tawdry men behind the hoax.

So a threshold question for a new game offering yet another run at good ol’ Fr. Sauniere, his mysteriously-acquired riches, and the various cults and heresies of the region, is whether there’s sufficient juice to be worth the squeeze after all this time. I think The Priest and the Rennes Alignment manages to clear this bar, albeit it’s a close-run thing. Wisely I think, the game doesn’t harp on the traditional trappings of the conspiracy: we get the church and the villa that the eponymous priest built, with their creepiest elements intact, and the geographic alignments that are a significant strand of the more bonkers side of the hoax are an important part of gameplay, but besides some brief gestures towards the end, we don’t get into any of the Church history stuff, there are no secrets encoded in paintings, and the only coded message is entirely optional, and it uses the world’s simplest Caesar cipher.

In place of all that hoary rigmarole, we get a bit a bit more of an Indiana Jones plot – the protagonist is an older treasure hunter whose academic colleague goes missing, while another, more mercenary tomb robber flits menacingly around the background. Meanwhile, most of the puzzles are largely agnostic about their broader context, medium-dry-goods stuff involving locked doors, magnetism, digging in the dirt, and so on. The exception is the sequence of puzzles alluded to by the title – unlocking the endgame requires using surveying tools to take sightings from a series of important landmarks around the village in order to identify a major geomantic axis.

It’s a cool idea – speaking of Indiana Jones, I’ve loved these kinds of puzzles since I encountered them in Fate of Atlantis – but I found it a bit anticlimactic because, while all the individual steps were fun to work through, at the end I think all it does is point the way to a locked door I’d identified near the beginning of the game by examining a suspicious bit of scenery. It’s a symptom of the way the game sometimes suffers from brushing past the more esoteric edges of the Rennes conspiracy and as a result stretches a relatively small quantity of esoteric hoo-ha across too broad a swathe of gameplay. There are tons of documents to recover from nooks and crannies across the village, and I enjoyed uncovering them, but after the first one or two they pretty much just all restate the same hints about geographic alignments, crystals, and light – it gets repetitive, and none of it actually provides any hints or knowledge you need to progress through the endgame (at least said endgame does ramp things up into an appropriately-silly Grand Guignol finale).

The implementation is similarly a mixed bag. The game is coded in the ThinBASIC Adventure Builder, which has a solid-enough parser but suffers from the inability to recall previous commands with the up key. Character interaction is also mostly solid but occasionally finicky, with attempts to TELL them about important subjects often not working – sometimes I realized that’s because SHOWing a relevant object was the intended path, but sometimes reasonable-seeming interactions didn’t seem to be implemented.

The prose is well-judged, keeping things moving at a thriller’s cadence while throwing in some lurid details at appropriate moments:

You examine the famous carved devil. The figure is grotesque yet strangely compelling - a hunched, demonic Asmodeus. His expression is one of grim resignation, as though he has been forced to serve a higher purpose against his will.

The puzzle design sometimes did bring me up short, though. While most of them are reasonably clued and fun to work through, there are a couple that are a bit obtuse: there’s one that can only be solved by examining a particular object twice, without any specific prompting that I noticed, and I was stuck for a long time on the penultimate puzzle because I kept trying to remove an obstacle to progress when all I was supposed to do was to keep trying to move past it, which leads to it being automatically removed. The biggest issue I ran into, though, was that after solving all the puzzles I could find the game prevented me from entering the endgame area, based on a general vibe that there was more to be done. I went back over the full map and found one or two optional locations I hadn’t previously explored, but they contained no additional items or relevant information, at which point I was allowed it, but it was still an annoying roadblock.

I don’t want to overly harp on these complaints – the game is pretty well put together, and I generally enjoyed my time working through it, even if there are some places where some more polishing or rethinking of the approach could have made things smoother and more engaging. As a matter of personal preference, I do like my supernatural archaeology mysteries to be deep and abstruse, so the streamlined approach the game takes isn’t as much to my taste, but it’s a perfectly reasonable one that will probably resonate better with other players, and given how much of a punch-line Rennes-le-Chateau is these days, in objective terms it probably was the right call. Still, I find myself with a hankering to replay Gabriel Knight 3 – the deep-down-the-rabbit-hole puzzles charting landmarks and doodling lines over oil paintings really do hit the spot for me…

rennes mr.txt (202.4 KB)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

the lamp of your body, by Naarel

(Spoilers for this short game, which is very much worth a play).

About a third of the way through the lamp of your body, I squinted at the screen and alt-tabbed into my notes file. The game had been grabby enough from the beginning, with a narrator realizing that there’s a strange woman with unearthly eyes in one of his classes who keeps staring at him, leading to an early, memorable hallucination:

And then, her pupil ruptures. It spills out like an undercooked yolk, all over the whites of her eyes. I need to look away but I can’t. It’s hypnotic, the way the darkness takes over, slowly, slowly, and pools on her waterline. I’m holding my breath, waiting for it to overflow and splash on the table.

I remained intrigued as the narrator’s investigation into her identity kept coming up short, stymied by one uncanny barrier about another, before actually engaging in some direct but enigmatic conversations, but wasn’t quite sure where the game was going with all this. Then, after a snafu with the protagonist’s financial aid means they’re having to skip meals until the next check arrives, the woman says she can get them something to eat; the protagonist demurs, but nevertheless, the next time they open their fridge, rather than just having a few sad eggs it’s stuffed to the gills. This is the point at which I switched to my notes and wrote “hmm with the food in the fridge, are these riffs on the temptations in the desert?”

Then I clicked to the next passage, and laughed out loud when I saw that it started “we’re standing on the roof of our uni library…”

The lesson I suppose is that you can take the boy out of the Catholic church, I guess, but you can’t take the Catholic church out of the boy, even three decades on. In fairness, the itch page literally says “run temptation” when you start the game, which is a detail I’d forgotten until just now but probably subconsciously primed me to recognize what was going on. The fact that the protagonist attends the kind of school where there are electives about the apocrypha is also a reasonably direct prompt.

Still, for all that the parallels are rather clear, and the protagonist’s increasingly apocalyptic visions leave little doubt about the demonic nature of their interlocutor, the lamp of your body isn’t a clangingly obvious allegory by any means. While the basic arc of the story matches what’s in the gospels, the major difference here is that the protagonist doesn’t appear to be supernaturally chosen or even all that special. While the devil’s rationale for trying to corrupt Jesus are obvious, the motivation behind all the special attention the woman showers on the protagonist remains obscure, and it’s a testament to the quality of the game’s writing, grounded yet philosophically rich, that I couldn’t help turning that question over and over in my mind.

Is it just a matter of trying to collect one more soul, as Satan clocks through yet another workday in an eternity of trying to make quota? I don’t think so; the woman appears genuinely obsessed with the protagonist, and her offer of temptation after temptation seems less the calculating stratagem of a great deceiver, and more the only recourse of someone who knows no other way of engaging with another mind. In fact, the climactic moment of the game, the one choice that’s offered to the player, hinges on the woman asking whether the protagonist thinks the devil is inherently evil, or if they have the freedom to try to repent – and the woman seems sincerely invested in what they say.

Of course, maybe it’s all an act, with the question serving as the last temptation: while the protagonist demurs at all the woman’s other offers of aid or power, this is the one you, the player, can say yes to, and if you do, your eyes start to turn black just like hers. But even if you say no, while the woman disappears, the protagonist is still haunted by her absence, a black shadow always lurking at the corner of their eye: “I don’t know if it’s because I’m blessed or cursed,” they muse, “maybe there never was a difference.” The game’s title is an allusion to a verse in Matthew: “if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” If our perceptions are clear, and we see things the way they truly are, in other words, we will be illuminated, but if our perceptions are clouded, we will be dragged into darkness. But isn’t it tempting to think that just maybe, it’s the other way around?

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Untitled (Underground), by Coral Nulla

These days, the phrase “significant other” is probably most familiar from a period around the 90s when straight people were flailing around trying to find a less age-inappropriate alternative to “boy/girlfriend”, before giving up and just stealing “partner” from queer folks. But it’s got another, older history: in early 20th-century anthropological theory, a “most significant other” is a person who helps define your identity in your community, through the act of perceiving you and thereby granting you a particular level of status. Early 20th-century anthropology being what it was, the examples I read about in my textbook were preeeety racially coded – chieftains and shamans recognizing people who’ve gone through particular rituals or accomplished impressive deeds – but the basic idea is of course generalizable: identity is status is performance, and performance depends on an audience to view it and respond to it. The place where technological modernity offers a clean break from other modes of social existence, though, is in our severing of these acts of perception from social relationships. What happens when this is all commodified and fed through an anonymized network that offers eyeballs in exchange for content, where instead of status being mediated through a specific set of figures held in high regard (note “regard”, by the way, these dynamics are embedded in our language) by everyone in your shared social universe, it’s the result of easily-manipulated algorithms, parasocial feeding frenzies, and dopamine-feeding likes counters?

Untitled (Underground) is a short creepypasta visual novel, but the above would have been an even more hilariously inapposite opening paragraph if all it had in mind were cheap scares. Oh, the signifiers are certainly here in force, with the protagonist, an urban-exploration streamer named Aisling, tracking down an old video that purports to show the way to a lost Underground (as in, the London subway system) station and ignoring common sense to try to find it for themself. Their hubris is most visibly rewarded by running into some uncanny apparitions, but more unsettling is the monologuing of an unseen narrator, whose words are counterposed with Aisling’s deeper and deeper explorations, recounting an obsession with building more and more elaborate mazes and traps just to see what will become of those sucked into them.

These horror elements, though, didn’t feel especially horrific to me. There’s definitely an aura of menace, and at least one ending strongly suggests something quite bad happening to Aisling, but prose holds things at a remove rather than opting for visceral detail. There’s also not much in the way of a climax, with the mood just building and building until it’s abruptly resolved. Even the creepypasta elements are just, well, creepy, rather than actively threatening: there’s a businessman who keeps walking past Aisling, saying the exact same thing each time, and a rather pathetic ghost, but things don’t really escalate from there.

So I think all this is just the infrastructure that allows the game to play with what it’s actually interested in, which is exactly the aforementioned questions of identity and perception. Aisling is trying to livestream everything that they’re seeing, even well after that point past which it’s clear that there’s real danger here, and that there’s nobody watching on the other end of the camera. The narrator, meanwhile, is a sadist and a voyeur, compelled by a traumatic backstory to reenact terrible situations to see what happens to their victims, observing but never coming into contact with them. The player, meanwhile, doesn’t get to stay innocent of all this: the only gameplay element here is that periodically, a choice will pop up enabling you to decide what happens to Aisling as they keep walking down that endless Tube corridor: either “there is nothing”, or “there is something [presumably bad]”. So the question becomes whether you, comfy in your chair, will tolerate boredom or whether, much like the narrator, you’re jaded enough to inflict harm on Aisling just to relieve the tedium. Everyone is either pathologically watching, or wanting to be watched, but there’s no reciprocity, no engagement: it’s atomized, disconnected, faintly pathetic.

That’s all a reasonable approach for a horror game to think, appropriately intellectual, but I think there are some elements of the design that softened the impact Untitled (Underground) had on me. For one thing, I played twice, the first time going for all “nothing” choices, the second time all “something” ones. In the former case, there’s a happy ending that feels slightly insincere, with an out-of-context character sweeping in for a rescue. The latter course was, as advertised, more interesting, but still suffered from the static pacing mentioned above. In neither case did I come across any plot beats that provided any resolution for the narrator character, and in neither case was the something/nothing choice ever framed diegetically, which undercuts the degree of player complicity. And maybe this reflects a personal bias against streamers, but I didn’t find Aisling at all likeable, which is a totally fine choice for a game to make, but it did mean that I was largely indifferent to their peril. So while I think Untitled (Underground) works nicely enough as an examination of what happens when our Most Significant Others are replaced with A Billion Anonymous Others, there’s not enough blood in its veins to do more than that.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

GET MANIFE$TO, by Matt Bee

I’ve said before that one of the nice things about the ‘thon is that it enables you to engage with games without necessarily having to be confined to the context of their original release: the focus is reviewing, so if the most interesting way to look at something is as an entry in Thematic Game Jam X, knock yourself out, but if another interpretive lens better strikes your fancy, that’s totally fine too. GET MANIFE$TO, though, is pretty hard to divorce from its intended target context: in the event, it missed the deadline for this year’s Manifesto Jam, but given its title and its content, the only real way to assess the game is as a vector for delivering, yes, a manifesto.

Interestingly, this isn’t just a screed masquerading as a game; there’s a reasonably-sized parser game with plenty of puzzles here, it just happens to be the case that you regularly run across items that, when examined, give you some points and feed you a sentence or two of the full manifesto. The kindest thing I can say about its virtues as a game is that it leans into the DIY punk ethos that manifesto-penning seems to invite: the puzzle design is unremarkable, and the under-explained premise (you need to an escape a lab where… something has gone wrong, which you’ve found yourself trapped in for… some reason or other) is at least enough to motivate exploration and set up some fun set-pieces like water-gunning a fed with radioactive fluid and drinking a strange concoction so you can see Cthulhu. Unfortunately, the connection between what the protagonist is up to and the game-design manifesto that’s the point of the proceedings is obscure. Worse, this is definitely the kind of game that when you check the credits and see that there are no testers listed, you nod and say “yeah, I could have told you that.”

My transcript flags a long list of implementation infelicities, from missing synonyms to guess-the-verb challenges to misleading responses. There are some neat bits, don’t get me wrong, including an elegant use of text colors to highlight information, and a broad range of items and systems to play with, but I’m glad the game came with source code included because I needed to check it once to get through a puzzle that was either underclued or oddly implemented (I also checked it to see why I didn’t get all the points when I won – turned out that’s because when I saw there were lizards on a tree, I typed X LIZARD and when I got a default you-don’t-see-that error I assumed it was another piece of unimplemented scenery, rather than an indication I should try X LIZARDS instead). It’s not unplayable by any means, but GET MANIFE$TO is definitely a game best played by someone familiar enough with parser mechanics to suss out when a puzzle is hard because it’s hard, and when it’s hard because of first-time-author implementation challenges.

As for the content of the manifesto – well, it’s also fine. You uncover a list of numbered precepts laying out the author’s views on making games, and while I nodded along with each of them, I couldn’t help feeling that they were mostly anodyne. Like, here’s number seven:

If you like playing your game, someone else probably will too; if you don’t like playing your game, try making it more fun or using fewer words.

“Make it more fun” is not super helpful; “use fewer words” is good advice; but either way, this is hardly a slogan you can scrawl on the rag you’re going to use to wick a Molotov cocktail. The best manifestos are full of fire, j’accuse’s leveled not at a faceless monolith but at the writer’s peers, urging them to do better – like 40% of the Communist Manifesto is pure score-settling with other German leftist factions, Marx was a hater (complimentary). Sure, some of the manifesto’s points sling barbs at AAA game development, but I doubt many of those folks are playing indie art-games, and even if they are, they’re mostly too busy getting fired to pay much attention. Like, what are we meant to do with precept five?

Big studios need to fill their games with moviewatch because they perceive film as the most prestigious medium. You are fortunate to be unburdened by this convention: it means your games will be better.

I’m unconvinced that “prestige” is really the motivation for this phenomenon, but even leaving that aside, is the IF developer just supposed to congratulate themselves and move on?

Possibly I’m being overly hard here because I’m skeptical that the IF community is in much need of manifestos right now. We’re just over a decade out from our last revolution, and the insurgency and reaction have both subsided, after all the conflict, into a mature scene that IMO hasn’t yet tipped over into the decadence that would make us ripe for another upheaval. Still, if I’m going to be convinced otherwise, I think it’ll take a manifesto that pisses me off, that says stuff I don’t want to hear, that paints a vivid picture of a future I can’t get out of my head. Feel-good tips aren’t going to do it, much as I might agree with them on their own, and embedding them in a largely-unrelated puzzle game doesn’t add much to their persuasiveness either.

manifesto mr.txt (88.1 KB)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Trenchline, by JJ McC

I promised we’d be circling back around to this series, and so the time has come for another thrilling installment of:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

This time I’m pretty sure the answer is yes! My son was one and a bit during the 2022 holiday season, which was about when he started sleeping most of the way through the night, so while I don’t have perfect recall of those almost-four-years-ago days by any means, I went into this one pretty sure I remembered some of the high points from putting it through its paces – artillery fire, a satisfyingly complex implementation of a radio, a bunch of rigmarole with some wire. But sadly it turns out I’m 0 for 2 in this series, as per the in-game CREDITS it was actually some guy named Mark Russo who tested it.

Well, whoever that Mark dude is, he must have given some solid feedback because I had a lot of fun with whatever number run through the game this was! In my Edge Valley Bigfoot Society review I mused on the well-intentioned advice to newbie authors to focus on finishing a small game before getting too ambitious, and how despite agreeing with that advice I admire the hubris of those who choose to disregard it. Trenchline does a really good job of walking the balance-beam, because on the one hand it’s got a very manageable scope – the map has half a dozen or so locations, most with only one or two interactive objects, and there’s only one real puzzle. On the other hand, that puzzle has a lot of different steps, all logical and satisfying to solve without requiring excessive hand-holding (though the hints are a lot of fun, if you do have recourse to them). Meanwhile, the radio is a very ambitious bit of design – there are a bunch of different parts, all of which behave the way you’d think, and once you get it working there are multiple NPCs you can interact with. The implementation is tight, with lots of scenery implemented and logical courses of action anticipated, and good use is made of some of TADS’ bells and whistles, like hyperlinks for navigation and topic-suggestion in the ASK/TELL conversation system. About the only hiccup I noticed was that there’s a bit of disambiguation required when you’re juggling multiple parts of a long wire, but it only held me up for a few seconds.

Beyond the design, the writing is also nice and tight. The setup here is that you’re a mercenary (don’t worry, you were hired to fight fascists) whose company has been slaughtered, left to take shelter in the eponymous underground bunker to avoid a withering artillery barrage and hopefully find some way of escaping. I’m not aware of too many pieces of IF that center on modern-ish infantry warfare, and still fewer that present military matters with any sort of verisimilitude, so I was impressed by the game’s ability to present what felt like a well-observed, grounded setting without forcing the player to wade through boring gun porn. There’s even a bit of environmental storytelling in the laconic descriptions, like this bit that provides some hints about how and why the bunker became abandoned:

A clearly professional job of smashing these crates was recently conducted. Few splinters are larger than a forearm and all of the ammunition the crates previously contained, now gone. Whether issued to PWM forces or expended in anger there is no way of knowing. The wooden debris is loosely scattered about.

Similarly, conversations with the soldiers on the other end of the radio are appropriately bureaucratic, but I always felt like I had enough context to understand what they were saying and how to respond.

It all adds up to a satisfying package – confidently written, cleanly implemented, with a single puzzle that’s satisfying to solve and doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s about as assured a debut as you could hope for, so plaudits are definitely due to the author and the mysterious tester who backed him up.

(Sorry for doing you like this, @JJMcC, I wasn’t aware of the typo when I launched this silly I-can’t-remember-what-I-beta-tested bit but once I saw it I couldn’t really back down from the gag).

trenchline mr.txt (55.2 KB)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Quirky Test, by Andrew Schultz

Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games have always been distinguished by a copious amount of documentation and player support, even as their gimmicks can often be brain-meltingly challenging, so the idea of him writing a game aimed at players brand-new to parser IF for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam is at once entirely natural and counter-intuitive. Also, while I’ve played quite a lot of his games, they’ve almost all been written in Inform – this is an Adventuron game, so would there be any strange parser, er, quirks, or slightly-different approaches to implementation that would trip me up?

Turns out I needn’t have worried in the slightest; Quirky Test is a smooth, well-judged ride that’s a great introduction to Schultz’s unique approach to IF, as well as providing some pointers towards what other, more traditional games are like. The setup here is much as it always is: the player moves through a large map, solving puzzles not based on object- or NPC-manipulation but by typing out the answers to a series of riddles that work according to a specific wordplay scheme. This time out it’s reverse-engineering Spoonerisms – like taking “fighting liar” and flipping the leading syllables to get “lighting fire”. This is a relatively simple bit of linguistic legerdemain, as such things go, especially since by default the game highlights the key phrases you need to invert to progress (though attentive players who note other Spooneristic bits of text sprinkled throughout the game can rack up some bonus points). There’s also a hint system – integrated into the parser, rather than being embodied in a complex, standalone object as in some of Schultz’s other games – that tells you if you’ve got half a riddle solved, as well as copious tutorial messages to help walk you through both the main puzzle mechanic, and other potentially-tricky bits of IF design, like diagonal directions.

The tone throughout is appealing, conversational and positive. Descriptions of IF conventions are clear and direct, and while as is often the case for Schultz, the overall plot that connects the various puzzles is very thin – you’re trying to get the better of some bullies and explore for its own sake, I think – the focus is very much on the journey, rather than the destination. The charming, low-fi illustrations that accompany each location also reinforce the sunny vibe.

So Quirky Test nails the basics, but there’s plenty more here to enjoy. Beyond the bonus points mentioned above – almost as many as there are mandatory puzzles – there are a whole host of additional features, from a large number of achievements to unlock, developer commentary accessible via a new game plus mode, and even an extended exegesis on Graham Nelson’s Player’s Bill of Rights, accompanied by notes from Schultz on how he tried to incorporate its tenets into the game. I wound up with half the bonus points, a few achievements, and just dipped my toe into the commentary mode, and felt more than satisfied – there is a Review-a-Thon on, after all – but this is definitely a game you can enjoy by ripping through the critical path in fifteen minutes, or spending an hour or two plumbing the depths, which also means it’s a good fit for IF (and Schultz) newbies while still having something to offer the veterans too. I’m glad that there are harder iterations of this design out there, too – I’m sure there’ll be an example or two or three to look forward to in the Comp or EctoComp or next year’s Spring Thing – but as an easygoing change of pace, it’s hard to beat Quirky Test.

(Oh hey, I just got that joke! Yup, now I’ve got ten bonus points).

Quirky_Test mr.txt (92.7 KB)

[Nulla (Coral)]

Thank you for your lovely reviews, it means a lot!

IIRC the third act of Sleepless was originally even longer, there was like a whole bit where she went back to the den for some reason… I remain grateful to my friend/de facto editor Kate for advising me to cut it down. The reason it’s a bit disconnected is because Evelin killing the body was actually a late addition to the story. (Which is a bit wild given that the whole story hinges on that moment, but then in the earliest versions Evelin wasn’t even a vampire, so I guess that’s just how writing works sometimes.) I wanted it to feel like we’d returned to the start but it’s not quite the same (much like how the song it’s named after is structured) so I think there’s probably more tweaks I could make.

That’s the tricky thing, do you go back and make changes or just use the knowledge in future works? I’ve gotten some very useful feedback on Untitled (Underground) from the RAT, and I did want to try rewriting it, but then again I think I’ve already done what I wanted to do better on the new project…

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

The Most Valuable Card in the World, by DC and Mathbrush

Exciting news, folks – it’s time for our third and final (at least for now) installment of:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

Yes! Just a month or two ago, so I actually remember doing so fairly well! God is in his Heaven and all is right in the world, nice work chaps, we’re all done here.

…

Oh right, the review. Knew I was forgetting something!

The Most Valuable Card in the World is a big comedy parser-puzzle adventure that’s at once highly traditional – like, read that description again and tell me if it reminds you of one or two other games you’ve played – and novel, incorporating some unique mechanics and centering on series of swaps that sees you upgrade, step by step, from what’s basically the worst Pokemon card imaginable to the eponymous treasure. It’s cavalier about killing off the player, especially in the opening, which can occasionally threatens to feel annoying – except those death messages are written with such good humor, the ways to avoid them are eminently logical, and a quick UNDO will get you back on the right track in a jiffy. There are some tricky puzzles – you’re going to need to push items from one location to another, and a simple X OBJECT won’t always tell you everything you need to know – but the clueing is very well tuned (and the hints are clear and always available), making them satisfying to solve.

For all the above seeming-contradictions, I was able to get a handle on Most Valuable Card in the World rather quickly. The chain of trades provides a clear, compelling structure to proceedings, and actually helps orient you towards what puzzles in the medium-sized map you should be solving next by providing a rough dollar value for each card you find – typically you need to be moving up step by step rather than leapfrogging. The authorial voice is also consistent and confident, managing to cram something funny into basically every sentence without seeming like it’s giving off flopsweat. Like, here’s a quotidian description of pushing a shopping cart around:

Screeeee! Screeee! One of the wheels on this cart is so non-functional that it might as well be a cube of rock. You power through at the expense of the already damaged floor.

That made me smile, and it’s just the baseline of enjoyment that the big-swing jokes and set pieces push still further. Some of the more traditional puzzles are lampshaded, the supporting cast are an endearing set of weirdos, and the descriptions of what happens once you actually start throwing down in the ersatz Pokemon game are lots of fun. Most Valuable Card in the World isn’t my favorite story about a wildly-improbable sequence of escalating barter – the laurel goes to Gamma World RPG session I played in where I was able to parley an irradiated can of baked beans into part-ownership of the bombed-out remains of Powell’s bookstore – but it’s a heck of a close second, a real gem from this partnership between an enthusiastic neophyte author and one of the most seasoned implementers in the business.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Blood and Silver, by alyshkalia (Tabitha)

Blood and Silver is a short vignette in the relationship between a vampire and his human partner, deepened by being one installment in a larger series featuring the couple. I’d played its immediate predecessor, Blood and Sunlight, in last year’s Review-a-Thon, so I was able to get my bearings quickly, though the flip of viewpoint character to the human, Lyle, made for an interesting change of pace. And “pace” is the right word because the game does a good job jumping into an interesting situation – you decide to get your boyfriend, Zach, a piece of jewelry as an anniversary present, not knowing that silver is painful for vampires, and the awkwardness of the misfired gift leads to a state-of-the-relationship chat.

The choice structure here is highly granular, with the ability to pick just about every bit of dialogue Lyle utters, which means there’s a lot of branching – there are nine endings, and while the broad contours don’t change too much (presumably to allow for better continuity with future games in the series), there’s a broad variation in the emotional impact, with this moment seeming like can be either a high point or a low point in the relationship, depending on what choices you make. Understandably, deciding to deflect Zach’s attempts to have a heart to heart or emotionally withdrawing after he’s said his piece lead to the most diffident endings, while being more open and steering into the fraught waters of potential conflict is riskier but potentially more rewarding.

The prose style is a good fit for the story; it’s dialogue focused, and unafraid of talking clearly about emotions:

He sighs, hands gripping the cold metal railing. “I sometimes feel like being with me is a waste of your time. You could be with someone who could stay over at your place, and go to concerts with you and your sister, and wear the ring you bought them. I feel like I’m always restricting you and letting you down, and I know—” he continues over the objection you’ve begun “—that you’d never say that, but it’s how I feel.”

There are some nicely-observed details and a few gentle jokes, but those never distract from what’s basically an intense two-handed one-act play.

My one early disappointment with the game is that, per that excerpt, at first the game seemed to be replaying the same key conflict that featured in Blood and Sunlight – Zach’s feeling that because he’s a vampire, he doesn’t deserve love – but while Blood and Silver reestablishes that dynamic to allow players who haven’t experienced the earlier game to get up to speed, it soon breaks new ground. See, one of the things Zach feels bad about is his need to feed on Lyle, which provides him necessary sustenance but also brings him a lot of pleasure. All your choices in response to this prove some degree of reassurance, but Lyle’s internal monologue indicates that actually, there is a potential fly in the ointment here – once the endorphins of new infatuation had faded, the feeding has grown physically inconvenient and, what’s worse, emotionally distancing, as Lyle lies back and thinks of England while Zach enjoys an activity that’s unsurprisingly heavily orgasm-coded.

A mismatch between how much the members of a couple are enjoying sex isn’t an especially novel topic, of course, but what’s interesting here is that both Lyle and Zach identify as “gray ace” – I am old and boring so I had to google this to learn it means largely asexual but experiencing fitful moments of sexual attraction. This seems to play out in what we’re told of the physical side of their relationship, with regular makeout sessions that don’t appear to escalate beyond (er) necking. But with Zach frequently achieving a level of physical satisfaction via blood-drinking that doesn’t appear to be shared with Lyle, I was curious how this might destabilize Zach’s identity, or at least Lyle’s understanding it, and the impact those shifts might have on their relationship – and their shared ace identity is a big deal, we’re told that’s how they first met each other!

The downside of this being one installment in a larger series is that just as I was getting invested in how the protagonists were going to navigate this new challenge, the game stopped, with Lyle noting that they’re not ready to be honest with Zach about these feelings yet. I read that as a suggestion that there’ll be more to come on this front in a future sequel, so while I’ll admit to being disappointed that the game ends where it did, it definitely leaves me eager for what’s coming next.