Rabbit's IFComp 2024 reviews

[rabbit]

I like how every time I start one of these topics, Discourse warns me my topic is similar to “Rabbit’s IFComp 2020 reviews”, “Rabbit’s IFComp 2021 reviews…” Gee, I hope I’m not stepping on that guy’s toes.

Anyway! Here are a few reviews. Sorry I’m so late to the party this time - I did make a start on 1st September, but had to drop everything for a few weeks due to Brain Problems.

I usually put my faith in the personal shuffle, but I’m being a bit looser this year and skipping around more. I like to note when I played each game, how I played (downloaded? online, in what browser?), and how long it took me to beat each game. That’s especially important ths time because I played some of these games weeks ago, so my first few reviews won’t reflect any mid-comp updates. Sorry!

First Contact (dott. Piergiorgio)
A Warm Reception (Joshua Hetzel)
Uninteractive Fiction (Leah Thargic)
The Killings in Wasacona (Steve Kollmansberger)
The Apothecary’s Assistant (Allyson Gray)
The Curse (Rob)
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (THE BODY & THE BLOOD)
Big Fish (Binggang Zhuo)

[rabbit]

First Contact (dott. Piergiorgio)

Played on: 1st Sept (first version played before updates)
How I played it: online via IFComp website
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins for one playthrough

This was a real curveball to start IFComp 2024 with. Be warned, I’m not going to avoid spoilers for this review.

First Contact is part of a larger fantasy worldbuilding project by the author – I believe Creative Cooking from last year’s comp was another part. In this game, a young-ish elf attends her inauguration at a magical academy, and quickly befriends two fellow students, an angel and a demon. It’s a romance story with a dash of monster girl erotica and a heavy dusting of lore. It’s very linear, as the game admits in the introductory matter. I had assumed that there would be a choice between the angel and the demon, but the three settle on forming a polycule pretty quickly. That’s kind of refreshing, honestly.

There are two elephants in the room here. The first is that I found First Contact very difficult to read. I have to be honest about that, but I don’t like saying it, as I believe English is not the author’s first language and I’m not going to hold linguistic errors against them. (If any authors ever feel I’m being unfair to them because of translation issues, feel free to kick my ass until I try writing a game in a second language.) But there are a lot of long run-on sentences and obscure word choices, which cause issues with the pacing of the writing. Those issues are compounded by heavy use of in-universe terms and concepts, long character names and ancient titles, all of which add an extra step of interpretation. It becomes difficult to intuitively parse the literal meaning of each sentence, and I found myself getting bogged down in the prose.

I think First Contact doesn’t do itself any favours by front-loading a lot of the worldbuilding. In the opening scene, the player character has a choice of things about herself and her world to reflect on, and I think you need to read through all of them before you’re allowed to progress (either that or there’s only a few critical choices but I clicked on them last). By structuring the story that way, the reader is bombarded with unfamiliar names and terms very quickly. I don’t mind spending time on worldbuilding and exposition, but it feels like not all of the setting information provided here is directly relevant to the story, and I think some of it could be cut from this game. Luckily you don’t have to memorise what you’re told here; the critical information (there was a time of war, but now the different races of the world live in peace; some people are magically attuned and some kinds of magic are rarer than others) can be picked up contextually from the events of the story, which is the best way to incorporate worldbuilding in my opinion.

For all that I’m harping on the worldbuilding, I do like the setting a lot. I especially love that it’s playing with different types of fantasy races and monsters, which is something that not enough fantasy works take advantage of. One of the most appealing things about First Contact is how it plays with bodies – the characters aren’t just humans in different skins, they have physical forms with wings and tails, and those physical attributes are explored both within the culture of the world and within the story’s erotic moments as non-human bodies wrap around each other. It’s very cute, and it helps to sell both the world and the sex.

Okay, I think we’re ready for the second elephant. The content warning of First Contact (at time of writing) includes “depiction of breastfeeding”. That… doesn’t quite cover it. A substantial percentage of First Contact is dedicated to two scenes of mutual breastfeeding. In the first, the rector of the academy describes a historical event in which the breastmilk of all the races of the world was mixed and drank (for perfectly sound reasons), and then recreates the act with herself and her students. This is a pivotal moment in the story, as the consumption of each other’s milk strengthens the mystical bond between the three protagonists. The second is an erotically-charged act of mutual breastfeeding as the three further strengthen their bond. The act of breastfeeding is depicted as naturalised rather than as fetishised within the game’s setting. This has been established by prior worldbuilding, which intertwines maternity and mysticism closely.

All the breastfeeding took me by surprise! I don’t really have a problem with this, I don’t think. Maybe I have a history of being sex-negative in my IFComp reviews, and I’m trying to unlearn that (my hang-ups are not the author’s problem), and breastfeeding is a totally harmless fetish. George R. R. Martin was allowed to get away with it. (I hope Dott. Piergiorgio doesn’t mind me saying this is a fetish. I get the impression he sees the funny side of fetishes and sex in fantasy. I laughed at the joke where the main character reflects that “scientific research on Sanctuaries [i.e. the wombs of magically-attuned people] ranges between amusing diversion to cringing rambling in proportion with the age of the work’s author.”) On the other hand, I did get uncomfortable when it became apparent how much of this game was focused on breastfeeding, and I would have liked more of a heads-up. If on my first day of university my head of department had lactated into a jug and then passed it around instructing the class to fill it up and then drink from it, I think I would have dropped out and tried to pick up a trade instead.

There’s a lot about First Contact and its setting that I found engaging. This is a teaser for a larger 2026 project, and it has certainly caught my interest. A full-length project will give the worldbuilding and setting much more room to breathe, so I have good feelings about where this work is going.

[rabbit]

A Warm Reception (Joshua Hetzel)

Played on: 1st Sept
How I played it: Downloaded the zip file and used Windows Git
How long I spent: 30min for a perfect score

In concept, A Warm Reception is a mild mystery. You’re a journalist who’s arrived at a royal wedding, but the castle is abandoned apart from a monster; defeat the monster while searching for clues to explain what happened.

In practice, this is fairly classical interactive fiction: a parser puzzler set in a screwball fantasy-ish world with treasures to hunt (if you’ve played Zork, you’ve already got the idea). The ultimate goal is to slay a dragon, which is decided by a die roll, which is weighted by how many treasures you have; that’s a nice way of letting you decide how completionist to be. It also means there’s a theoretical universe where your adventurer strolls in, beelines for the dragon, kills it and leaves unprompted. That’s fun to think about.

The author has billed this as having a “limited list of verbs” to work with. This sounds like a limited parser game, maybe like The Wizard Sniffer. But there’s been a bit of a shortcut with the implementation – rather than pruning unnecessary verbs or redirecting them to new responses, the author has just not touched them. This leads to the usual implementation woes:

> x olives
There is nothing interesting about the edible toppings on the pizza.

> eat toppings
That's plainly inedible.

Oh well, who amongst us hasn’t written a parser game and done something like this? And A Warm Reception is pretty clear about the verbs that do work. When you get into the habit of sticking to those commands, it all goes smoothly enough.

I’d also like more scenery implemented. That is a bit more of an issue, because early rooms have minimal scenery implementation, training you not to bother looking at everything in the descriptions. This means later rooms where you do have to investigate the scenery might catch you out; the unspoken rules have suddenly changed. To be fair, the room descriptions strongly suggest you should look at the scenery at those points, but there’s a missed opportunity here to integrate the investigation/journalism strand of the game into the earlier scenes. It might be fun if a player who thinks to look at the furniture early on is rewarded with an extra clue or a bit of flavour text.

I did enjoy this game, though – it works well as a puzzle adventure on the easy end of the scale. Hints are peppered throughout the game, which will be great for newer players who aren’t yet attuned to the ways of the text parser. Stock puzzles show up, but with enough cleverness to make them feel fresh. The darkness puzzle and the maze puzzle are the two best ones, in my opinion; the darkness puzzle is a cute trick which was just unexpected enough to catch me out, and the maze puzzle has a gimmick I’ve not seen before. An honourable mention goes to the casino puzzle, whose solution feels very classical, like something Infocom might pull.

This is one of those reviews where I struggle a bit with the tone, because I really did like the game but I feel I’ve spent most of the review harping on complaints. Yes, there is room for improvement in the implementation, but the fundamentals are really sound, and I really enjoyed the puzzling at the core of A Warm Reception. I hope Hetzel grows more confident with Inform and continues making parser adventures.

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

more than the usual thank you:

***[You have substantially increased the size of First Contact’s postmortem]***

Thanks again for your review,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[rabbit]

Uninteractive Fiction (Leah Thargic)

Played on: 2nd Sept
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 10 seconds, one losing ending

There’s usually one game that captures the attention of the IFComp judges right out of the gate, for better or worse, and this time it’s Uninteractive Fiction. I always miss out on these, so this time I ignored the personal shuffle and went for it. The blurb says “the only winning move is not to play.” There’s a PLAY link; you click it and it says “You lose” and plays a sad trombone effect. I downloaded Twine to check the source code, and yeah, that’s it – no hidden links or timed text.

I don’t get the impression that the game is very impressed with itself or thinks it’s doing something artful. It’s (probably) just a goofy joke based on that one line from Dr Strangelove. But the punny pseudonym and the confidence with Twine (evidenced by the non-default styling and the embedded audio) suggest that this is an author who knows what they’re doing. Games have been resigned to last place for more interactivity than this (see poor old Lucerne from the 2019 comp), so this must be a troll game, right?

As with most troll games, the fun is in people’s bemused reactions and little shitpost reviews. This was a good year to do it too. An anonymous author has let the community know that there’s a meta-puzzle hidden in this year’s entries, and a couple of people marked this entry as clearly suspicious. I certainly did. I opened the cover art in Paint to see if there was any hidden almost-black lettering, and I tried to compile the audio from the text dump in the Twine source code to see if there was any spectrogram stuff going on but I couldn’t figure out how to do it so I gave up.

I did have a paragraph here musing on what it, like, means to be interactive fiction, but if that’s the point, then both Uninteractive Fiction and I are about 25 years behind the curve. I realised I’m absolutely not interested in reheating the discussion. I’ve had a lot going on, man.

Anyway, I enjoyed the sad trombone sound effect, but I believe Uninteractive Fiction is throwing itself in front of the last-place bullet for the benefit of the other authors, and who am I to deny it?

[rabbit]

The Killings in Wasacona (Steve Kollmansberger)

Played on: 3rd Sept
How I played it: Online via IFComp webpage
How long I spent: 40 minutes to get the “Case Closed” ending

This review is a little spoilery – it won’t give away the solution but it will discuss what the solution isn’t. Also, there’s a paragraph about police brutality in this review. (It’s not as negative and serious a review as that makes it sound, but content warning anyway.)

This year is a comp of murder mysteries, so I’m told, and this is the first one that came up for me. There’s been a spate of killings in the little American town of Wasacona; they look unrelated on the surface, but so many deaths so quicky? You’re the fresh-faced new FBI recruit who’s been sent to investigate.

This was a pleasant surprise. I will be completely honest and say I had low, low expectations for this one. (It’s the AI art cover. Sorry, but it is. What’s up with how that white car’s parked?) But The Killings in Wasacona is a solid piece of work!

The game uses random chance in a way that’s pretty interesting. We’re on tabletop gaming rules: you have a set of skills with a stat value, and the outcome of your actions and investigations are decided by die rolls which are weighted by those stats. For example, if there’s a set of footprints near the crime scene, you’ll be prompted to investigate further, and depending on how observant your character is, either you’ll notice that one set of footprints is more distinctive than the others, or you won’t notice anything. So yes, you can miss clues if your luck is bad, but there are enough opportunities to gather clues throughout the game that this probably won’t hurt you.

At the start, you’re prompted to choose a character archetype as a basis for your stats, or build your own. Like many other reviewers, I went for the Analyst prebuild. This turns out to be a good choice, as there seem to be many more skill checks based on mental acuity than on physical attributes. Even the walkthrough recommends Analyst as one of the more viable choices for reaching the best ending. I had a good time, but I think players who go for an athletic or intimidating character might feel hard done by.

Once you’re set up, you’re dropped in Wasacona and left to your own devices. You have generally free reign over what locations you visit in what order, and who you talk to when. The smart part of this is that Wasacona is not a static town. Time advances in-game, and you only have so long to investigate, but the locations change and people move – if you leave it too late to question a shopkeeper, you might miss closing time, for example. What’s more, people do notice how you investigate and what you’re focusing on. If you treat characters gently, they might come to the police station later with new evidence; if you play hardball and accuse them of having something to do with the murders, they won’t open up to you. There’s some really lovely and responsive scenario design here which encourages you not just to solve the mystery, but to roleplay, to treat Wasacona as a living and sensitive community rather than as a puzzle box. It’s very well done. (For board game nerds, this put me in mind of T.I.M.E Stories, Chronicles of Crime, and similar puzzly tabletop games with an emphasis on time management.)

The mystery itself is serviceable. It’s constructed around the mechanics of the game, so that bits of evidence and leads are available constantly – this gives you a fighting chance even when you’ve had a run of unlucky die rolls. I managed to solve all the killings correctly; I couldn’t prove everything, but enough die rolls had gone right that I had a pretty good idea whodunnit for some of it at least, and was able to guess the rest. I will say that as a mystery in its own right, it’s not the most satisfying, but maybe I just had the wrong expectations going in. This is more like a police procedural than a closed-circle Agatha Christie mystery, and there aren’t any especially devious twists or dramatic reveals.

One strand I’m curious about, and I’m trying to choose my words carefully here but do let me know if I’m messing up: There’s a recurring motif of racial tension, which is woven throughout The Killings in Wasacona and provides potential motives for one or two suspects. Notably, one of the police officers is virulently racist against the Wasacona immigrant population, but the sheriff is a black man who is trying to tolerate it as best he can. It’s never really a critical plot thread, which feels a bit odd to me. Surely you can’t feature police officers as major characters in a mystery which implies that its murders are racially-motivated without invoking a Western history of police brutality against racial minorities? I think the game flirts with this fully intentionally; one of the victims is even described as having been beaten with something “like a police baton,” so I believe you’re meant to consider police brutality as a potential solution. But in the back half of the game when more concrete leads emerge, this thread appears to be dropped altogether. I don’t know, I feel like a theme as strong as police brutality is something you either commit to exploring or leave out altogether; I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it being used purely as a red herring? But I may have missed a scene that explores this more – I stopped visiting the police station after a point when the clock was ticking and haven’t seen everything there, so I’m happy to admit I may have been unfair on the game here.

I achieved the second-best ending. You need to be in the right places at the right times (and maybe have a little luck) to achieve the best ending. This is neat, as it rewards players who replay the game with knowledge of what’s going to happen who might wonder if they can stop things from happening. It’s a cool way to reward the dedicated player who pushes back on the game systems. (I didn’t replay the game, but the walkthrough has details of what you need to do to get there.) I also enjoy the stats for how players did – they’re a lot of fun to read though now that plenty of judges have run through the game. I’m pleased to report that no FBI agent has put in an “Abysmal” performance yet.

This was nice! I’m always happy when my low expectations are defied, but this is a pretty good game in its own right.

[rabbit]

Right, I started a new medication on Saturday and the side effects are making me tired and loopy, so bear with me if these reviews aren’t very good.

The Apothecary’s Assistant (Allyson Gray)

Played on: 2nd Sept – 6th Sept, and then one more on 25th Sept
How I played it: Downloaded and played through Firefox
How long I spent: About 45mins total

I went out of my way to play this one when I spotted that it was supposed to be played over multiple sessions. The idea behind The Apothecary’s Assistant is that you stumble into a job running errands at a magical shop. Once a day, you log in and spend a few minutes solving a mild puzzle and a handful of cryptic crossword clues. There is a real-time aspect which determines whether you’re tending to a customer or doing some stocktaking, according to the business hours listed in the IFComp blurb. The currency you’re paid can be used to purchase beads which will correspond to donations to charities once everything is tallied up.

I’m struggling to write a substantial review, but that’s for positive reasons – I think this is pretty solid! It feels like it’s following in the tradition of “wholesome games,” by which I mean life-sim-ish games focused on peaceful tasks and interactions, like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley – I don’t know how well-explored that territory is in interactive fiction, outside of Ryan Veeder’s Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing. In that respect, it hits the mark. I was having a bad week when I was judging this game, and it was nice to play something calm and gentle with a low time-commitment. It slotted in alongside keeping up with the daily Puzzmo puzzles.

(I’m hesitating a bit with “wholesome” because I’ve seen a growing wave of cynicism directed at the “wholesome games” movement, generally along the lines of “how come all these games have you running a small business?” Don’t think you can level that kind of criticism at The Apothecary’s Assistant in good faith, though. Also, the charity beads aspect is a really cool initiative. )

There is a storyline running in the background – unfortunately I’ve done The Apothecary’s Assistant a disservice by writing this review three weeks after I played most of it and not writing down any notes about the plot. Whoops! Sorry. The real-time aspect of the game comes into play here – the apothecary’s proprietor Aïssatou is trying to get affairs in order before the Hunter’s Moon which is set to occur about 17th October, right around the end of the IFComp judging period. Better get a move on, judges.

I enjoyed the setting. Little drips of setting detail suggest we’re in a magical realist pocket of Earth. In an optional conversation, Aïssatou says she’s Senegalese, but from “beneath the hills there” so maybe not the parts of Senegal that we know. Mostly, I just liked all the animals and the stocktaking rat.

There’s also a sub-plot about Aïssatou’s past, and this is where those cryptic clues come in. You’ll get three a day, up to 15 clues, and if you solve enough of them, you’ll trigger an extra scene. Now, me, I love cryptic crosswords. I’m no expert, but I’ve devoted a lot of time over the past few years to learning them and setting my own. So this little sub-game was right up my alley, and I really enjoyed solving a few clues a day. The grammar on some of these clues is a little loose in a way that I can’t really explain without spending a lot of time taking a clue apart and looking like a nitpicky asshole while doing it, but they’re good enough that you know when you’ve got the right answer before you enter it, which is the important bit. (Favourite clue was “Mental confusion leads to loud sorrow (6)” – that’s an excellent surface reading.)

Sorry, not a really substantial or insightful review, but I just wanted to let people know I had a good time with this. Sometimes games are nice!

[rabbit]

edit to this one - sorry, forgot to blur a puzzle spoiler!

The Curse (Rob)

Played on: 9th Sept (downloaded on 3rd Sept)
How I played it: Download version on Windows
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins to reach a winning ending with 18 points

I remember Rob’s Radicofani from a previous comp quite fondly, warts and all, so I was pleased to get a new game by him in the personal shuffle. The Curse is a text adventure adapted from a project from the 80s, and it very much feels of a piece with the kinds of adventures Jason Dyer’s been showcasing. A cartoonish Ancient Egyptian pyramid is a classic adventure setting, filled with two of the things 80s designers loved the most, puzzles and deathtraps.

Actually, let me back up. The premise of The Curse is that you’re Cronoboy(?), a secret agent whose work has dried up after the Cold War (although that doesn’t really factor into events), sent to rescue the ambassador’s daughter from a sorcerer. Your plane crashes near a pyramid, and you start the game wandering the desert. Also, you get a phone call in the first two minutes to tell you the sorcerer is dead? It’s a cheerfully bonkers premise which feels like it’s been cobbled together out of different parts.

That’s a bit of a theme, actually. The Curse often feels like a grab-bag of disparate ideas, enthusiastically presented, as if it’s been stitched together from scraps of other projects. It’s charming but also kind of bewildering. There’s a mid-game section where the action moves to a cave and abandoned house, which doesn’t feel like it belongs with the rest of the setting. Neither does the fog set-piece in the early game, although I enjoyed that section’s atmosphere. Odd easter eggs abound – I liked the one which changes your name to “nobody”, I think that’s a funny prank to pull on the player. The game bounces between eerie horror-ish trappings and goofy jokes and references like this, and it’s fun but it’s not quite cohesive.

As with a lot of 80s adventures, the puzzle solutions are more associative than logical. It may not be clued what you need to do, and it may not be in-character for your in-game avatar to do it, but theoretically you can find the solution by experimenting with verbs that make sense in context. For example, I got stuck for a long time figuring out what to do with the altar, and eventually resorted to hints. You need to kneel at it and pray in order to receive an item. I don’t think there’s anything in the game which nudges you to do this or tells you that that particular item is hidden at the altar. But then again, what else are altars for? There’s a scoring system where you gain points for solving puzzles and lose them for resorting to hints. There’s a target score of 30 which I think is doable for a first-time player with enough experience and patience, but I ended with 18. Part of that point loss is an unfortunate bug in the Sphinx room, where the Help command doesn’t print a hint but decreases your score anyway.

Mentioning that bug makes me realise I’ve skipped over the game engine here. The Curse is written in a custom engine which I believe is the same as Radicofani. The text parser itself is spotty but not unmanageable – it misses a lot of verbs and nouns you’d like to use, but there’s an in-game set of instructions which lets you know what The Curse is expecting, so I wasn’t significantly hung up by guess-the-verb issues. There was one error message in Italian (I didn’t write down where I found it, sorry – it said “RUOTA% RIMANE A ZERO”), but the rest of the translation is serviceable, and I probably wasn’t supposed to see that message anyway.

The presentation is what makes the engine interesting. As with Radicofani, the game pops up all sorts of different windows which can be a pain to close manually, but which also lets it display art and styled text in interesting ways, and allows a few pop-up surprises. I enjoy this, but I have to say, I’m puzzled by some of the art choices. Some of it is Egyptian-themed stock photography, which is all well and good, but much of the rest is… weirdly nightmarish. Spidery legs erupting out of children, that kind of thing. Again, it feels like it belongs to a different game than The Curse, as if it’s been repurposed from some other scrapped project.

I feel like this will occupy the same spot in my heart as Radicofani. The Curse has a lot of rough edges, but it feels like it was a lot of fun to put together, and it’s unashamedly old-school, and it’s a lot of fun to take on its own terms like that.

[Ally (Allyson Gray)]

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on The Apothecary’s Assistant — reading your kind words really made my day! I’m grateful for the beads you bought and very happy that the game could bring you a bit of joy.
Wishing you the best of outcomes with your new medication!!

[rabbit]

thank you so much to @Ally for the wonderful gift art which I’m using as an avatar!

LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (THE BODY & THE BLOOD)

Played on: 29th Sept
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 2 hours to get a little way into Act 2

Some unmarked spoilers for Act 1 (the first third(?) of the game) here.

Bear with me, I’m not used to talking about this and I’m trying to say it right. I mentioned in my First Contact review that I have a couple of hang-ups which my have come out in previous IFComp reviews. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before but I think I’m somewhere in the asexual/grey-asexual range – I’m not motivated by sex, and sometimes find the idea repulsive. I accept this about myself, and I am what I am (whatever that is), but there’s a danger in imposing that on other queer people. Sex and kink are fundamentals part of the queer experience. To hide them, or to insist that they be hidden, is to sanitise that experience. This can have real socio-political consequences; for example, a lack of access to information about sex for queer people can be a real danger, one that can be swept under the rug by cis-heterosexual people who find it distasteful, as demonstrated by the AIDS crisis.

For this reason, I have been trying to be more open to discussions and depictions of sex and fetish content. This makes LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (hereafter LLLLL) something of an exam for me. I’ll do my best:

This is a story about L, a young trans man who wants to enter the world of kink and BDSM, but finds himself too socially anxious to take the initiative. After giving up on a kink club and bailing out, they’re taken under the wing of the more experienced Valentine, who introduces L to his first sexual experiences. Throughout the game, L’s experiences with kink are contrasted with the mundane everyday transphobia they face, as well as the conflicting information and arguments held by an entirely-online friend group. Well, I assume this happens throughout. I should note that I did not finish this game due to the time limit expiring. When I realised I wasn’t going to see the end I slowed down and took my time, so I’ve seen rather less of the game than other reviewers – I only made it a tiny way into Act 2.

I’m glad I took my time, though, because the writing here is excellent. I wish LLLLL’s Inkrunner implementation let you copy and paste text, as it means I had to skip over a lot of lines I liked so can’t paste them into the review. If I transcribed every good turn of phrase, I wouldn’t have made it through Act 1. But lines such as “I know I’m supposed to assume ‘they’ [pronouns] because I know that makes me a good person” and “if the opinion shifts, I get to be in the silent company of those who are always correct about everything” were little body blows which I had to flag up, demonstrating as they do uncomfortably-relatable facets of L’s character (more on that later). An extended metaphor about a Lucozade bottle manages not to feel strained, and an early diatribe about what’s expected of a trans person sets the tone for the game’s explorations of discourse versus reality.

It should be noted that what I saw of the game was very linear, with a handful of binary choices throughout offering L the chance to vocalise certain thoughts before the game gets back on track. I can’t speak to how much these choices change the outcome of events. I’m given to understand from other reviews that the choices are being tracked and totalled, but I don’t think I reached the point where they start to matter. Inkrunner is used effectively in other ways: the overall styling is beautiful, committed to bold red and blue colour palettes, and textual styling is largely restrained to an occasional right-aligned paragraph in grey text signifying L’s innermost thoughts.

As a person who largely writes comedy, I think LLLLL’s writing’s greatest strength is that it understands and embraces the truth that kink is funny. Fetishes are inherently absurd and surreal in their pageantry and performance. All the latex, all the effort of wriggling in and out of latex, and L’s bewilderment and inexperience contrasted with Valentine’s matter-of-fact approach, is funny. Act I’s sex scene, in addition to being extremely steamy and probably one of the best-written sex scenes I’ve ever read, is full of ace little one-liners as L’s internal monologue short-circuits, and then the post-coitus scene of L’s dominatrix smoking a cigarette and musing “Maybe I’ll get into piss” is a knockout punch. Without any mockery of sex or fetishes or the kink community, LLLLL has some of the best gags (haha) I’ve seen in the comp.

(Admittedly, my primary point of reference for well-written sex is terribly-written sex in fantasy novels. I’m not done ripping on George R. R. Martin yet. You simply cannot be using phrases like “man’s staff” and “Myrish swamp.” I guess the point for some of those is that the sexual situations are deeply uncomfortable for the characters, but those are still some skin-crawling euphemisms.)

(Actually, the sex in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth is pretty good, but I’ve only read the first one. Anyway I’m getting sidetracked.)

If there’s any scorn in LLLLL, it’s saved for that most dreadful class of people: posters. I laughed at the “PERVERSIONS” list (i.e. the content warnings) including “online drama/discourse” but that is a major strand here, at least in Act 1 – an exploration of how young online queer communities can get tied up in taxonomy and litigating Tumblr posts, and how useless it is without an understanding of queer history and experience. This is practically shouted at the reader through a megaphone in a scene where L, experiencing sexual fulfilment for the first time in his life, opens Discord to see his friends arguing about whether “bi lesbian” is TERF rhetoric. (I’m disconnected enough from online discourse these days to not know whether this is an actual debate, but if you told me that was a real Tumblr post I’d believe you.)

This kind of discourse has deeply affected L, who is a quietly excellent player-character, full of contradictions yet to be resolved. L and friends appear to be of a certain online mindset that the job of leftism is to sort people into having Good politics and Bad politics, and to make sure you’re on the Good side, and to prove it by making an example out of the Bad side. (You see this all the time if you don’t curate your social media feeds aggressively enough: teenagers and 30-year-olds who should know better slap-fighting each other with snide one-liners and quote-tweets. See A Paradox Between Worlds for another excellent game which examines the same trend as manifested through online posting.) Those earlier lines I quoted demonstrate L’s self-vigilance here, the set of rules which dictate Good queer politics.

However, the ever-so-slightly-sarcastic tone of those lines betrays L’s burgeoning discomfort with this mindset, and a growing understanding that the world doesn’t sort as neatly as we would like. There’s an early scene where they have to convince themself to laugh along with Val’s anti-Dutch bigotry by remembering “They did colonialism at some point, right?” The later conversation with Artemis, where L realises he’s met a bi lesbian in the wild and struggles to reconcile the real person with the bitter, derogatory ~friendly reminder~ Tumblr post about bi lesbians they read that morning, is, I’m sorry to say, relatable. Posts delivered with an angry enough tone and a suggestion that not agreeing with them is a moral failing really do get into your head. The different directions L is pulled in by the demands of regular cisnormative life, the online panopticon, the practical realities of kink, and his own self-doubt and growing skepticism add up to a superb character and some compelling, wry and believable narration.

If you can’t tell, I really liked LLLLL, and it’s given me a lot of food for thought. I wasn’t expecting this game to be for me, and I’m still not sure it is, but I still adore it. I can’t vouch for the whole thing, but I want to make time to finish it after the comp.

[rabbit]

Big Fish (Binggang Zhuo)

Played on: 14th Sept? I think? Sorry, I forgot to write it down.
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 35 minutes (30mins for the good ending, a quick 5min reply for the true ending)

Content warning: This game features implied sexual abuse of children. I don’t think the current content warning on Big Fish does a good enough job, so I’m saying it up top. The review will touch on this theme.

I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy Big Fish at all. There are some really fun and bizarre ideas in this murder mystery which make me want to like Big Fish a lot more than I do, but they’ve been quashed by technical errors and (in my opinion) some badly misjudged character and scenario writing.

It’s difficult to know how seriously to take Big Fish. The premise, at first, is straightforward. Your uncle has been executed for the sexual assault and murder of a girl. His last communication with you pleads his innocence and implores you to visit the town of Big Fish to discover the truth. That’s all fair enough, but buried in this is the bewildering reveal that your uncle was executed by being fed to crocodiles. The game continues to shift between tones like this, acting like a po-faced small-town murder mystery, then bamboozling you with a bizarre crocodile-themed detail or misadventure. I think Big Fish is being intentionally surreal and off-kilter with this clash of tones; there is an endgame payoff for these odd details. For me, though, I think it’s made its core scenario too dark for this to work. A sexually-motivated killing of a child (or accusation of such) is a very unfunny concept which needs to be handled carefully, and in that light the death-by-crocodile thing reads as a tonal misstep rather than as a level-breaker.

Similarly, the player character is too off-putting. I enjoy a quirky troubled detective as much as anyone, but our character’s first glimmer of personality is when he imagines brushing his teeth as oral sex. This sets a tone that is difficult to overcome, and makes you mistrust the player character – it makes what might be innocent lines come off as a bit weird. There’s a line mid-game, when the player character looks under the murder victim’s bed and discovers “a few things that shouldn’t be here […] This led you to some despicable thoughts.” I flagged this as a good line suggesting the character has discovered something horrible and doesn’t want to dwell on it, but I’ve peeked at other reviews and some have read this line less charitably, as if the character is having sexual thoughts about the victim. I’m going to stay positive about that line, but this is the risk you run when the first thing you establish about your main guy is “he’s horny” and then you have him investigate a sexual assault of a minor.

Once you get to Big Fish, you’re prompted through an investigation. I will give the game its flowers here: the mystery itself at the core of the game is pretty good! It plays fair, and it’s quite tricky – I missed the key clues and had to brute-force at the point where I was asked to choose the real killer, but the explanation makes me satisfied that I could have figured out their identity if only I had paid more attention. You’re helped out by new text appearing in a different colour – for example, once you meet the conditions to progress to the next scene, some green text will appear to draw your attention to the new hyperlink. This is a great quality-of-life feature. And for all that I think those crocodile bits are misplaced and don’t mix well with the central premise, there are one or two related scenes which add intrigue. There is a good murder mystery game in here!

But there’s a more fundamental issue that cannot be left unsaid. The technical quality of the text is poor throughout, in ways that any kind of proofreading would surely have caught, and in ways that can’t just be attributed to translation issues (at least not as far as I understand). The point of view goes haywire, switching abruptly from second-person to first-person and back again. There are basic oversights with the Twine game logic, where you can visit the same room and pick up the same item over and over again. One character’s name changes mid-scene. It feels like this game has been written in a rush to the IFComp deadline and no time has been left for editing or testing.

I don’t know if that’s what happened, but if it is, it’s a cautionary tale. There is stuff to like about Big Fish, but it feels hurried and underbaked, so as it stands it’s less enjoyable than it should have been.

(Also, look, I know I’m going to annoy people if I harp on about AI cover art every time, but I gotta call it out here. If you’re going to do it, and I don’t think you should and I’m not interested in arguing that point but if you’re going to, you’ve got to have some curation, or some sense of what would accurately represent the literal or metaphorical events of the game. This one looks like the author has just typed “Big Fish” into the AI and downloaded whatever came out. Maybe they haven’t but it looks like they have. There is no big fish in Big Fish.)