Rabbit's IFComp 2026 Reviews

[kayakafa]

Hi rabbit,

I’m sorry for the difficulties you’ve gone through. I hope everything is all right now.

Thank you for taking the time to play and review Epistemophilia. It means a lot to me. I’m going to deal with the bugs you’ve faced as soon as I can.

I wouldn’t dare to speak for players, but I suspect that Epistemophilia may be an acquired taste. For me, it’s fascinating to read different interpretations of the story. I think your review contains very helpful tips for potential players and a solid grasp of the essence of Epistemophilia. I really liked reading it. I don’t think anyone would mind seeing it on IFDB if, at one point in the future, you decide to share it there.

I’m very new to the IF scene, and I don’t really want to write something that may be considered bad etiquette. Maybe I’ll write a post about Epistemophilia once the competition concludes. (Just know that there’s a reason why Epistemophilia feels improvisational.)

Take care,

Mehmet

[rabbit]

The Rat (Daniel M. Stelzer)

Played on: 20^th September (using the 18^th Sept update)
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins to reach an ending with a score of $3000

Speaking as someone who once placed 13th in IFComp with a lightly puzzly parser comedy about vampires in mundane settings, I humbly consider myself one of the world’s foremost experts on IFComp entrants, etc etc. Well, actually it might not be a vampire this time. Count Vespertilion is a bloodsucker of some sort but it’s left open to interpretation whether he’s the supernatural kind or just the capitalist kind. Anyway, The Rat is good.

This is an authorised sequel to IFComp 2024 winner The Bat by Chandler Groover. In that game you play a butler who is the only staff member attending to a billionaire’s party, juggling distractions, maintenance work, and hosting. In The Rat, you’re on the opposite side, orchestrating a daring heist on a house party where security and hospitality are both managed by one solitary perhaps-familiar butler. In my review of The Two Seasons, I said it was merciful that the game doesn’t actually make you juggle two characters at once; in The Rat, you direct four. The titular Rat is your critter on the ground, hiding in the house and breaking things to create maintenance jobs for the hapless butler, and assisted by the Chameleon in the latter half of the game; the Jackdaw (well, “the Magpie” was taken) is in the storage cellars grabbing everything she can while the butler is away from the security feeds; the Spider is your eyes and ears, letting you monitor separate rooms while the butler roams and party guests chat to each other.

It’s a bit of a tall order to have four player characters at once here, but The Rat’s Dialog web interface is excellent. All necessary verbs are clickable per character, avoiding the need to specify who you’re talking to (“rat, north”); in fact, the Rat and the Chameleon get their own directional arrow buttons to help you visualise where you’re sending them. You’re also given a map which updates every turn, showing you the location of your guys, the butler, and the party guests. Despite the concept, it’s very playable and smooth.

Good thing we have all these bells and whistles too, because we need them once we work out what’s going on. Our gameplay loop is having Rat break things to distract the butler, then telling Jackdaw to grab what she can. We see the route the butler takes on the map, then we realise that Rat can break more than one thing, then we realise: oh, this is a path-finding optimisation puzzle! We’re setting up the longest route we can for the butler to buy Jackdaw as much time as possible. This sets up a few tricky scenarios - there aren’t many individual puzzles in The Rat (there are five chapters overall, each with a different arrangement of rooms, NPCs and distractions), but they can get complex. I very much like the puzzle which introduces Chameleon, as finding an optimal solution here was fun and displayed some impressive implementation: I managed to find a way to stalemate the butler by moving the guests back and forth, and after a few moves the game acknowledged what I was doing and gave me a LOOP verb to repeat the process until Jackdaw was done. Being able to detect a loop without false positives and let you perpetuate it is some very good work - I don’t know anything about working with Dialog but I can’t imagine it’s easy in any programming language!

The only thing I wasn’t clear on was the progression. We have a scoring system where Jackdaw will collect any valuables she finds, but I don’t understand what causes her to find valuables and what causes her to find the thing that allows you to progress the plot to the next chapter. It looks like she only finds one thing at a time, so I think you’d have to distract the butler multiple separate times to get her to clean out the basement, and I also guess there’s a degree of optimisation where the longer the butler’s path, the better the loot… but I wasn’t sure and I couldn’t work it out in actual play. I just moved the plot on instead, but I suspect my haul of $3000 is quite paltry next to a more diligent player.

I think I’ve got into the habit of putting Jokes I Liked in the last couple of paragraphs of each review because it’s an easy way to compliment-sandwich things and avoid ending on a sour note. No problem doing that this time, because The Rat is hilarious. Our heist compatriots natter and bicker throughout the job, which narratively helps to fill in the backstory and define their characters, but which is also so much fun to read. I was especially taken with Jackdaw, who’s clearly an accomplished shitposter in her personal life; she takes a swipe at the compass direction system at one point, a gag which I’m pretty sure was written for Chandler Groover specifically. The party guests are great too, each one a different breed of cartoonish Mr Burns-like billionaire. The standout is obviously Luna L Meresankh, founder of an AI startup which seems to be rubbing off on her:

Quinn: So this new product of yours. Are you aiming at consumers, or do you think it has a place in the corporate world too?

Luna: You’re absolutely right. Your comment was not just insightful—it cuts right to the heart of the issue. Any modern technology needs to cater to the business market if it wants to succeed. And PyramidAI has the potential to reduce expenses by as much as 200%.

Quinn: Reduce by 200%? How do you figure that?

Luna: You’re absolutely right—that’s my mistake. Of course, it’s not possible to reduce a quantity by more than 100%. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Even chief antagonist Count Vespertilion has his moments. “It is wrong of me to question an invited guest who has crossed my threshold,” he says at one point, very unsuspiciously.

And with that little bit of bookending, let’s wrap up. The Rat is very different to The Bat, setting and one or two returning characters aside, but it’s a clever sequel. Seeing The Bat’s harried player-character (probably) from an external perspective is a great twist. Even if nothing else about the game had worked, it’s at least satisfying to be the one causing problems for a change.

[rabbit]

The Copper Tavern (Alexander)

Played on: 21^st September
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 27mins (15mins to win, 12mins to noodle around afterwards)

Puzzle and endgame spoilers here, but it’s only a 10-15 minute game - if I avoided all spoilers, there wouldn’t be much to talk about.

I’ve been trying not to just copy-paste passages from games to mark them up for errors, because if I’m not careful I can stray into being mean rather than constructive. However, this time I’m going to indulge, as there are a few issues with The Copper Tavern which are both glaring and, forgive me for saying so, quite funny. Sorry if I stray too far into mockery, as I think this may be a first project from a new author and I don’t want to discourage them, but this is one of those cases that really demonstrates the importance of asking someone else to proofread or test.

For example, here’s the first impression The Copper Tavern makes:

THE TAVERN HEIST
An Interactive Adventure based on handwritten notes.
Release 1 / Serial number 260828 / Inform v6.45 PunyInform v6.7 R

Old Dirt Road
An old dirt road stretches out before you with a dense set of trees on either side, only allowing a few rays of light from the setting sun to escape the thick canopy of cottonwood and maple. Just off the path sits a cozy little tavern with warm light glowing from its windows.

> x tavern
You can’t see any such thing.

So we have the title changing between the ballot and the gamefile (I’ll stick with The Copper Tavern), and then a failure to implement the object which the game is named after, whichever title you use. From here on, The Copper Tavern is fighting an uphill battle to keep you engaged on its own merits; it’s beefed it obviously and immediately and now part of you is waiting for the next mistake rather than engaging with the world.

To give it its due properly, this is a tiny parser game that drops you next to a tavern holding an AK-47 (you, not the tavern). It’s not clear what your goal is initially, but after poking around you’ll learn that the tavern needs to raise 1000 gold pieces or face eviction. So we end up on a little six-room quest to save this cosy little drinking hole. This feels like a snippet of a Zork game, which I mean as a compliment – it has that screwball-fantasy vibe, where it could be a Dungeons and Dragons scenario if it wasn’t for the vending machines, or in this case, the assault rifle.

The blurb implies a choice of stealth gameplay or guns blazing. That’s technically true, but it’s not as detailed as you might expect. There’s a locked door which you can shoot the lock off, or you can use the lockpick you were given at the start of the game instead. As far as I can tell, that’s it. I’m open to the idea that I’m missing some deeper secret (I usually do), but I don’t think the lockpick is necessary anywhere, and the AK-47 hardly has any other uses; the player character will refuse to shoot most things, apart from the hapless tavernkeep, who you can cheerfully blast in the leg over and over again.

Speaking of which, that’s really where things start to go wrong for The Copper Tavern. Having worked out that you can go >in to enter the unimplemented tavern (fair enough, makes sense, but I’d still like exits to be listed somehow), you have a go at talking to the tavernkeep:

> talk to tavernkeep
“Cheers mate! Feel free to ask me about the tavern, the beer, the king, the debt, the eviction notice, or that casino in the back.”

> ask tavernkeep about tavern
“Sorry mate, can’t help you with that. But ask me about the king, the debt, the casino, the eviction, or beer!”

> ask tavernkeep about eviction
“So you heard of the eviction? Well, the king says if I don’t pay a thousand gold by the next moon, he’ll tell his men to tear this place down! I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t have nearly enough to pay them what I owe!”

The issue is not the fact that the tavernkeep volunteers the tavern as a topic and then immediately denies all knowledge. It’s not that he offers the eviction as a topic and then wonders how you know he’s being evicted. (Although those are both a little funny.) It’s that he offers the eviction as a topic at all, because this completely cuts out half of the puzzles in the game, where you find a way to sneak upstairs and then crack his safe to find the eviction notice. It’s clearly expected that you should have done this by the end, as there’s a little gag that assumes you’re holding the notice, but the tavernkeep here gives away the knowledge that you’re supposed to acquire by investigation. It’s a shame, too, because that safecracking puzzle is funny in an intentional way - it’s a shitpost of a puzzle which lasts just long enough to finish just before it gets annoying.

There are other issues too, but I’m concerned the above is already too harsh, so I’ll end it here. I think I’ve illustrated the fundamental issue that The Copper Tavern needed a lot more testing. I assume it didn’t have any testers as I can’t find any credits. Making a text adventure is very difficult, and goodness knows I’ve made some blunders in my text adventures, but I think a little game like this needs more care and attention to detail than you might realise, otherwise the bugs and the errors completely subsume the actual good work you’ve done.

[rabbit]

Postgrad. Chapter one (beta) (Smith Geursen)

Played on: 22^nd September
How I played it: Online via the game’s website
How long I spent: 2 hours, didn’t reach a chapter ending

This is one of those tricky reviews, where a lot of individual things Postgrad. Chapter one (beta) does range from fine to good, but it’s not quite the sum of its parts for me. Maybe I’m just cranky, or maybe I was put off to begin with because three out of the four words in the title indicate that the game isn’t finished. I had a bit of trouble engaging with a work which I knew wouldn’t have a pay-off even if I rushed. I’m going to spend a lot of time picking at things which bugged me and trying to diagnose them, so I want to say up top that I don’t think this is bad at all – what’s there is looking promising for the complete game.

Okay, the summary, as best as I can manage it. Postgrad is a game built in a custom engine, I think, where you play as Bel. Bel is a postgraduate student trying to pin down a research topic, but she’s also pretty confident that her research – medicinal fungus growth to combat the effects of the “metademic” (like a pandemic but worse) – will help people. So she wants to write about the illegal trade of “biotics” while also running a start-up with her friend Junior to secure funding to distribute fungal biotics legally. But she’s also running a nootropic drink start-up with Junior. Both start-ups are run out of the same building which is a crumbling cinema in Wellington, so she’s also trying to stop earthquake safety officers from condemning the place and evicting them. But she’s also getting dragged into an unofficial investigation into a bunch of dead cats by her grandfather(?) Pop, a former officer. But she’s also getting embroiled in a friend’s attempt to take revenge on a business who overcharged her and then handed her details to debt collectors. And she’s also taking an interest in another friend’s attempt to find an arcade game which causes psychotic breaks. And she’s ALSO feeling the strain in her relationship with Junior, who disagrees with her approach to investors and who may or may not be planning a hostile corporate takeover.

Partway through, Bel complains that there’s “never enough fucking time.” I think I see the problem.

Now, this is where Postgrad’s gameplay gimmick comes into play, or where it would come into play if it was appropriate for IFComp. The game boasts a “Timescale” mode, where events advance in real time. I take this to mean that you can only advance one of these plot threads every evening and maybe follow up on them the next morning or afternoon, and then you wait until the next evening for your next choice point. The blurb says that Timescale mode lasts weeks, which, obviously, is a little beyond the two-hour judging limit, so instead I used Freeplay mode as recommended by the author, in which we can advance time in between plot events. There’s also a lovely bit of visual flair where your choices between plot threads are presented on a map of Wellington, as if Bel is having to run across the city to make her appointments. It doesn’t work perfectly – sometimes locations are placed too close to each other so that one choice obscures the other, and also the OpenStreetMap that the game loads in is the entire world map, meaning you can zoom all the way out just in case you’re needed in Portugal – but it’s a nice idea all the same. The map and the pacing make Postgrad resemble a New Zealand noir take on Fallen London.

I’m curious how well the Timescale mode works in practice, because Bel really does have an awful lot of irons in the fire. Even within Freeplay mode, it was a struggle to keep all these plotlines straight in my head; Postgrad drops you in media res, leaving you to pick things up as you go, but some important details can be lost depending on what order you follow plot threads. Unless you follow the Daisy thread early on, it takes an awfully long time to learn what the metademic even is, let alone what Bel is doing with those mushrooms in the cinema. There’s a concession to this in the breaks between active play phases, which summarise where you are in plotlines by printing their current driving question, but that doesn’t seem sufficient. I think it would be easy to forget a lot if it’s been a couple of weeks since the last time you checked in on Pop or Daisy. Maybe a journaling feature is called for, to help the player keep more detailed notes.

Another issue with the plotlines is – and this might just be me – I think I don’t like Bel or many of the other characters very much. Now, I’ve been thinking carefully about this. Bel is a young black woman, many of the lead characters are women, and there’s a strong feminist streak signalled throughout the game in Bel’s choice of music (which I will say nice things about later) and in one or two scenes which demonstrate the misogyny Bel has to put up with (e.g. a courier who assumes Junior is the manager rather than Bel). I don’t think I’m bigoted, but I want to remain vigilant to the possibility of internalised misogynoir, and I’ve tried to step outside myself and consider whether I would still find Bel frustrating if she was depicted as male and/or white.

And my tentative conclusion is: yes, I would. I find the signifiers of Bel’s youthful attitude a little lazy, for one – she skateboards around the cinema and wears Star Trek merchandise, which feels like a perception of youth that hasn’t been updated since the 90s. I don’t really like the stand-up bits Bel and Junior occasionally practice on each other, finding them generally unfunny. (Although I did like reading out the Attenborough Bit in my best impression.) And there’s also an expectation that we’re siding with Bel throughout. It’s not that Bel is supposed to be read as a flawless character, as she’s depicted as tempestuous and willing to indulge in a little light fraud to keep her businesses going (“should we tell the investors that our building is being condemned?” is a point of contention between her and Junior). But I think we are expected to sympathise with her, as even when the camera is off her the language the game uses reflects her viewpoint, like retaining her insulting names for side characters.

There’s a scene where a building inspector, who is named “A Giles” after Bel’s ribbing of his stuttering attempt to introduce himself, is shown as being obstructionist and single-minded as he roams about the cinema and clearly doesn’t like what he sees. Thing is, though, A Giles is right! It sucks for Bel that she doesn’t have the money to find better premises, but yeah, if the building is at risk of collapse, that’s probably a bad thing! (For one, it probably contravenes food hygiene standards for the nootropics botting station.) The moment we step away from Bel and assess the situation for ourselves, we see all sorts of ways in which she’s her own worst enemy. To be completely fair, this may be where Postgrad is heading – maybe there are going to be hard lessons that Bel learns, which contribute to her greater character arc. This isn’t the full game so I can’t be sure. All that’s present in IFComp is Chapter 1, though, and I’ve only seen most of Chapter 1, and I don’t feel that the game was obviously setting this up.

The way that Postgrad is formatted might be contributing to these issues. Postgrad is presented as a screenplay for a film or TV show. That’s not a bad idea at all. It’s a useful way of disambiguating speakers in dialogue-heavy scenes, and the author directs an imaginary camera at points to peek over a character’s shoulder or cut between locations in a montage. It offers ways to play with scene and setting and pacing that prose doesn’t. I think this format is good, and it’s used quite well here! The trade-off, though, is that the game is narrated from the camera’s perspective, not from Bel’s, so we’re lacking the interiority and reflection that would help us understand why Bel does what she does. The closest we get is the occasional stage direction “Bel opens her mouth to speak, then closes it” (which occurs frequently enough to be noticeable). She’s not a complete cipher, and we can infer a few details about what’s going on in Bel’s mind – we can reasonably guess that she’s scared of failure and the huge debt she would be in if her investors came knocking, as hinted at by the opening scenes where Pop reminds Bel of her debt to him to ever-so-slightly turn the screws on her and get her to help him with all these dead cats. But it would be nice if the game could get across some more of that motivation more obviously with Bel.

Okay, okay, okay, that’s a lot of criticising a game which I ultimately think is fine, so let’s cap off by running through what Postgrad does well. For a start, it’s a beautiful game! I already said I liked the visual effect of the map, but the appearance of the whole game has been considered, including opening scenes with gorgeous storyboard panels. (It looks like the artists have left a lot of construction lines in, perhaps to contribute to the film-in-production aesthetic, or perhaps to demonstrate to more cynical players that they’re not using AI – either way, they look pretty good, scratchy and unclean like the setting.) The soundtrack is also pretty great, such as it is – Postgrad doesn’t have any music, but it does specify what Bel is listening to when she wears headphones, so I treated those as needledrops and went to YouTube to play the song in the background. It’s given me a few bands I’d like to listen to more of – my algorithm is now queueing up a few Um, Jennifer? Songs, and I’m liking them!

And you know, for all that I complained about the pacing of the plot and Bel’s role in them, I do find myself invested in some of them. The tension between Bel and Junior is intriguing, but I’m especially curious about all those dead cats, given what we eventually learn about the metademic and the connections that we might draw. There are the seeds of an interesting mystery here, even if they’re not germinating just yet. And, well, I said that Bel and Junior’s bits weren’t funny and I stand by it, but the black-comedy slapstick in one or two of the dead cat scenes lands, and Bel’s half-apology “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings- sorry for fuck’s sake” is a pretty good line (and a nice bit of characterisation too).

I don’t know, I don’t really like picking apart what, in the end, is a perfectly decent game. That’s the problem with judging, sometimes you have to analyse and it turns out that’s difficult! A decent game can bother you and a less well put together game can compel you and it can be impossible to pin down why. I think Postgrad doesn’t work for me as it stands, but I have a lot of respect for it and I’m willing to concede that I may just be discussing bugbears rather than flaws.

Bel should absolutely drop out of the postgrad course, though. Bel, the universities in New Zealand charge like $10,000 for a year of master’s tuition! You’re not going to have time to do your social research while running two start-ups and you need that money to keep ahead of your debts! Don’t do it, Bel! Aaaahhh

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Thank you so much for the review!

[rabbit]

MAD WARRIOR (SnackSoft)

Played on: 23^rd September
How I played it: Downloaded and ran the Windows executable
How long I spent: 2 hours to make it partway through Floor 5 out of 24

Quick update - you can disregard my complaints about the garbled numbers - it seems like an issue with my operating system after all. See prevtenet’s post below. I won’t rewrite the review right now as I’m supposed to be working, but I’ll keep it in mind when I submit my scores to IFComp.

In my review of The Copper Tavern I talked about first impressions, and MAD WARRIOR is another interesting case study. The lore dump in the IFComp ballot blurb is charmingly bonkers, but then we run the Windows executable and get this:

============================================================
                        MAD WARRIOR
============================================================
THE PARSER DUNGEON CRAWLER

TYPE "LOAD" TO BEGIN YOUR PREVIOUS GAME.

TYPE "START" TO BEGIN A NEW GAME.


> START
←[38;2;240;154;82mDUNGEON SURFACE←[0m

←[38;2;232;189;88m←[38;2;232;189;88mTHE JAWS OF THE ←[38;2;237;142;173mDUNGEON←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m CLENCH BENEATH YOU.
WOLF-LIKE WINDS SLICE YOUR SENSES.
A TEMPEST OF GOD'S TEARS WHIP VIOLENTLY,
DRENCHING YOU AS THUNDER RUMBLES IN THE DISTANCE.←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m←[0m←[0m

YOU CAN SEE:

* TRAVEL VENDOR ERMOS

* STAIRS DOWN


>

Okay. So what happened here? What are the numbers and arrows doing there? I’d blame my computer mangling something, but I’m running vanilla Windows 10, and other reviews I peeked at have had the same problem. When I look at the files for MAD WARRIOR (all the JSON databases of rooms and monsters are stored in your Windows AppData folder, along with the Python codebase), I see that description is supposed to have “[GOLD]” at the start, implying that the description is supposed to be printed in golden text but that the code to do this has gotten corrupted while building the Windows executable. But how did this make it to the published game? Did the author get really unlucky with the testing environment and send in a game that works for them and their testers but nobody else? Or did they not have any testers? Or did they even look at the executable themselves?

So we’re distrustful of MAD WARRIOR (which, by the way, will print those garbled numbers in every subsequent room description) from the first screen, and we may start to worry when we try to > look at Ermos, only to be told “YOU CAN’T SEE THAT.” Now, to be fair, the game does have a help menu, accessed with the reasonable “help” command, which gives the correct syntax “look x” as well as other commands. What it does not tell you is how to light a torch, so you might, like me, spend an hour of the game carrying around an unlit torch and a bottle of oil with no idea of how to combine the two, until you eventually notice that the “help” menu gives the command “help help”, which is not an accidental duplication of “help” but rather the command for a second help menu which finally gives the command “oil torch” as opposed to commands like “use oil” which work with most other items. I’m happy for the author and the reader to put this down as the reviewer’s incompetence, but I don’t think I’ve played a game which hid a help command inside another help command like this before. (Oh, also, the command for perusing the vendor’s wares is not “look wares”. It’s just “wares”.)

Having finally got going, we can start to appreciate MAD WARRIOR for what it is, a good old-fashioned dungeon crawler. The plot is all in the blurb, but you don’t need to worry about any of that. You’re a mad warrior; there’s a hole next to you; go in the hole and beat up everything down there. There’s no level-up system or stat building; instead, we get more powerful by scrounging up more powerful weapons and armour. Combat is simplified too – enemies like bats and skeletons have different behaviours and can inflict status effects like poisoning, but actually dealing with them usually amounts to typing “attack” until they fall down or you do. This is broken up with some light puzzling, in the form of “here’s a locked iron gate, and there’s an iron key three rooms away”.

The difficulty curve is steep at first, especially since it takes a while to locate your first altar room, the only rooms in the dungeon that allow you to save your progress. Once you’ve got an altar, things get a lot less tense, especially when you realise that altars heal you to full health, making healing items much less important. It looks like MAD WARRIOR tries to balance this with its level design, as the trip from Floor 4 to Floor 5 is a one-way trip, depriving you of resources unless you use an escape rope to teleport back to the Dungeon Surface. Crawling the dungeon, then, is about thoughtfully choosing what weapons and other consumables you bring down with you to maximise your survivability.

Here is where we encounter the greatest enemy in MAD WARRIOR: your bag. So every item you find in MAD WARRIOR gets put in your bag, apart from whatever weapon you’re using (including torches for dark rooms), which are equipped to your hands. The bag enforces a very tight inventory limit, based on the total weight of items you’re carrying around. This can be a little annoying, but I accept it as a method of increasing the difficulty and forcing the player to make more strategic choices – are you going to drop the antidote to make room for an extra weapon, increasing your flexibility but making poisonous enemies much more dangerous? That kind of thing. (If it bothers you, I think you can edit the save file to increase the inventory capacity easily. I didn’t try it, but it’s only a JSON file.)

What I do object to is the fussiness of the bag. You can’t pick up an item at all until the bag is open, so you have to > open bag before you do any inventory management, and then > close bag when you’re done, because the game won’t let you move until the bag is closed. That’s already irritating, as it costs valuable turns – if you’re poisoned or bleeding, if you have to mess with the bag to get your antidote or bandage, it can cost you more health than you’d expect. (I’m not sure, but I believe that you suffer status effects on failed turns too, so a wrong command can be costly!) Worse yet, MAD WARRIOR insists that everything goes through the bag. So if you find a new weapon, you can’t just equip it – you have to open the bag, then put the weapon in your bag, then take it out of the bag by equipping it. Or if your bag is full, you have to drop items until your bag is empty enough for the weapon, then put the weapon in the bag, then take it out again to equip it, then put your dropped items back in your bag. And then close the bag. Why is it like that? My best guess is that there’s some state machine in the code where you’re either moving around the dungeon or looking at your inventory, and the bag toggles that, but surely there are smoother ways to do this? I have a lot of tolerance for time-wasting in text adventure games (I love to map a maze), but this was a pervasive issue which annoyed me every time.

And yet… MAD WARRIOR compels me. There’s just something that will always be satisfying to me about clearing out a dungeon. The fundamentals here are fine. The quirks are tough to get a handle on and I think there is a lot more that could be done for quality-of-life features (not to mention fixing those garbled room descriptions), but once you get on MAD WARRIOR’s wavelength, you can zone out and go hacking and slashing. I’ve had much longer two-hour play sessions before. I suspect this won’t do that well in the final IFComp rankings, as it’s obviously flawed and doesn’t appear to have been tested properly… but I kinda want to keep playing it. Not a chance anyone’s beating it in two hours like the ballot implies, though.

[prevtenet]

@rabbit

What are the numbers and arrows doing there?

These are ANSI escape sequences; they’re used to display colored text. They should work in vanilla Windows 11 but (for historical reasons I don’t entirely understand) not all builds of Windows 10 enable them by default.

[rabbit]

Ah, thank you! Sounds like it’s my computer after all, then. I’ll stick a note on the review.

[JTN]

Buried in Mike Russo’s review thread are some things you could try to make it work on Windows 10.

[rabbit]

New Captain (Joshua Kaden)

Played on: 25^th September
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins for one successful playthrough (scoring 250/300)

New Captain is a game about being forced to hit the ground running. You know, like when you start a new job, and the guy who was previously in the role didn’t leave any instructions and everything needs doing at once, and you just have to fake it until you make it? Also your second-in-command hates you, and you’re in space? You know how it is.

We’re the New Captain of a spaceship, see, and we’ve been given a diplomatic mission: we’ll be brokering a peace treaty between two alien civilisations, the cat-like Therans and the fern-like Polypodiopsids. The game is one big puzzle where we need to plan our journey to the planet where the treaty will be signed and make appropriate preparations with reference to what the diplomats have asked for – what kind of room they want to meet in, what the room’s climate should be like, etc. We can also explore the ship and talk to our crew, and maybe notice one or two hidden things that may affect the outcome of the negotiations.

This is an interesting structure, as it means much of the gameplay and interaction in New Captain is frontloaded. You can spend a lot of time scouring the ship, and a lot more time in the mission briefing sequence where you hash out the details and timeline and which crew member will be doing what, but then the execution of the mission is over in 5-10 minutes. The climactic treaty signing takes care of itself! I’m not sure I would call this structure bad, but it maybe feels a little anti-climactic if everything goes smoothly as it did in my playthrough.

Rather, I think New Captain is interested in the build-up, the stress of responsibility and of waiting for the hammer to fall. There are a few ways it puts just a little psychological pressure on you (not much – I wouldn’t call this a high-stress game - but it has one or two tricks). First is the quite long wait between planning the mission and actually executing the mission, as you need to advance time hour by hour for your ship to reach the planet - not a huge bother, but long enough to give you second thoughts. The game also shows you your popularity among the crew, person by person. You can’t please everyone, and there’s a little bit of anxiety in watching a crew member side-eye a command you’ve given. (Amusingly, your biggest hater, who loves the Old Captain and hates change, is placed in the First Officer role, threatening you with the possibility of being undercut by your own second-in-command. You can reshuffle crew member roles, though – I didn’t touch these but it looks like you can demote him if you want!)

I mentioned that this game is one big puzzle. It looks like it might be a strategic diplomacy game at first glance, but there are definitely right and wrong answers here. Perusing the computer you’re given at the start of the game flags up some obvious pitfalls - for example, you get a choice of Room A and Room B to host the treaty signing in, but the choice is obvious when you find the factoid in one of the aliens’ files that says “we hate Room B”. But there are also a lot of secrets hidden aboard the ship and exposed in conversations with crew members which give you advantages in the ensuing negotiations. I believe some of them are necessary to ensure the treaty signing goes well. So there seems to be broadly one correct solution to New Captain (or at least one solution that keeps everyone happy). There might be variance in that, but I’m not sure. There’s also a stats system for your player character that might influence things, but it seemed insignificant in my playthrough – I only increased three out of six stats by one point each. I expect that different stats increase with more ruthless choices than I made, but I can’t imagine there are that many opportunities to increase all the stats.

The story and tone are generally light throughout. That’s impressive once you realise how ugly the scenario is. The background information we’re given indicates that the Therans are a hyper-expansionist culture who have colonised most of their planet, choking out the Polypodiopsids; the treaty is intended to keep the Therans happy while preserving land for the Polypodiopsids (yes, I am looking up that name every time I type it). I didn’t remember to save the passage that made me think this, but I got the impression that the Polypodiopsids have to cede some land as a concession in the treaty. I don’t like this! Feels bad! (To be fair I didn’t get a perfect score so maybe the secret I missed addresses this.) However, the writing is disarming and just funny enough that I found myself forgetting this. Framing the conflict as an alien version of cats chewing on ferns is pleasingly silly.

That leads us into the Jokes I Liked Lightning Round to cap off the review:

• There are some excellent NPC names in here. Here’s one: “Ste7en Stephen.”
• The security protocol ominously specifies that “all personnel and visitors will be profoundly scanned”.
• I really love the NPC who goes behind their diplomat’s back and calls you on a secret communication channel just to tell you that they agree with their diplomat.

New Captain was a very charming game! Complex enough without being stressful, and puzzly enough without being overwhelming. This could have been a much worse first day on the job.

[rabbit]

Ass in the Woods (Alice Vartevanian)

Played on: 25^th September
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 20mins for two quick playthroughs

I don’t know my classics. Most of what I know about A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been scraped together from references in other media, mostly the book Lords and Ladies and this year’s Titanium Court. So I knew there’s a queen and a king and there’s a theatre troupe, but the bit that Ass in the Woods riffs on, the transformation of Bottom’s head into that of a donkey, was a new one on me. I’ve got a collection of Shakespeare plays that I asked for last Christmas just in case of situations like this, and I’ve had a quick skim so I can verify: yep, there’s a guy called Bottom and he becomes a donkeyman for a minute.

So I can now speak with absolute expertise on Ass in the Woods. Our nameless player character has woken up in the forest just after Bottom’s head has been transformed, and while everything else is kicking off too. There are a few slight changes to Shakespeare’s original; for one, Titania avoids falling in love with Bottom (we can find her near the beginning of the game, but she quickly excuses herself from proceedings). We also have a lot of tension between Bottom and the rest of his troupe, who worry for him but also find him deeply frustrating to work with, whereas Bottom is convinced he’s too good for them. Our role is to play peacemaker between Bottom and the troupe, or to stir the pot even more if we like.

I do enjoy when a Twine game plays around with the CSS and the scripting a little, so I quite liked how Ass in the Woods approached the source material. The background and styling are nice, for a start, and visual effects are used on the text throughout (such as rapidly-shaking text), which translates a little bit of the sense of theatrical performance to the screen. Different-coloured text represents different characters’ dialogue, which is appreciated when the whole theatre troupe is bickering at once.

This does fall into the little trap that a lot of similar IFComp games have fallen into before, which is the use of text on a time delay. Timed text often annoys IFComp reviewers, as fast readers may find the text too slow and feel that their time is being wasted – there are a lot of IFComp games to get through! – whereas slow readers may get left behind if the text changes before they finish reading. For my part, I don’t think the timed text is so bad here. It’s mostly used in scenes where the troupe have a row amongst themselves, so the argument rolls on line by line while you have the option to interrupt them at any time with a link labelled some random variation of “shut up!” That’s pretty cute. There is a bit of unskippable timed text later which might make some players impatient, but this is only a 10-minute game.

As for the story, I don’t really have much to say! It’s a theme park ride version of that one bit of the play with a little extra depth to Bottom’s character thrown in, but it’s fairly light and insubstantial - a lot of Bottom’s motivation here is only really hinted at in the closing moments of the game. It didn’t leave too much of an impression on me. There is, at least, some nice structuring in terms of the story branching. Two substantial scenes can be visited in either order, and the author has managed to keep track of what the player has and hasn’t seen so that accurate text is displayed whichever scene comes first. I also found two different resolutions to the story - I’m not sure what triggers either ending, but your dialogue options involve speaking to characters with different levels of rudeness, so I imagine your own helpfulness is a factor.

Pretty quick review (by my standards), but Ass in the Woods is a pretty quick game! I don’t know my Shakespeare well enough to really get into what the game does right with the original play. As a quick taster, though, it’s not bad at all, and the attention to detail throughout in the scripting and styling indicates a great level of care for the source.

[OreganoJones (Joshua Kaden)]

I just wanted to thank you for this review of New Captain. You complimented me on things I worked hard for, and put your finger on some of weak spots I’d point to myself. It was very insightful, and gratifying! So thanks again.

[rabbit]

Bob the Barbarian (Charles Moore)

Played on: 26^th September (using the 9^th September update)
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 1hr 55mins to reach an ending with 220/220 points

Following my enjoyment of MAD WARRIOR, I think maybe I just have a soft spot for unpretentious swords-and-sorcery fantasy, for here’s Bob the Barbarian, which is about as broad as it gets with the genre. I spent a very pleasant and peaceful two hours with this game, despite (or maybe because of!) its old-fashioned sensibilities.

The story is almost non-existent. You’re Bob the Barbarian; a sorcerer whose name I forget has kidnapped a princess whose name I also forget; there’s a castle and a town and some deserts and things; now hop to it. It’s extremely tropey. I trust the author won’t mind that description, as Bob the Barbarian is a clear pastiche of the classic fantasy text adventures of old, not least in its ultra-simple combat system which consists of typing “hit x with y” until the x falls over. It’s not for nothing that the first two combat encounters are against a troll and a thief, two of the more notorious nasties in Zork I.

The puzzles, too, are very old-school. There are variations on the classics throughout - there’s a maze (with a solution that doesn’t require mapping), there’s a timed puzzle, there are some NPCs to barter with. There’s a large haystack, and you already know what you need to find in there even before you find the puzzle that requires it. Quite a few puzzles like that haystack are associative rather than logical; as another example, one obstacle you have early on is that Bob is too stupid to read, and the item that helps with this obviously would not help in real-life, but it can be culturally associated with literacy so it miraculously works within this little puzzle-world. (We’ll set aside the equivalence made here between intelligence and illiteracy, and pretend we don’t see it. Maybe Bob just went to a school which didn’t have adequate funding.)

The thing to note about the puzzle design, though, is that it’s cruel, in the IF sense of the word. You can get yourself into an unwinnable situation, and Bob the Barbarian isn’t going to stop you. That said, if you’re cautious, it’s still accessible enough. Most pitfalls are obvious; the attentive player who clocks the barber-surgeon saying “You have far too much blood, sir, I can tell from here” is probably not going to sit in the barber’s suspiciously strap-covered chair without saving their game first. Other pitfalls will be found through experimentation and can usually be reversed with undo. (Some of these are even quite funny – I enjoy the glee with which NPCs will pocket any valuable item you give them before you can reconsider.) There are a few tougher sequences which are more easily made unwinnable, the island sequence probably being the peak of the difficulty curve, but if you save frequently you can get by without any headaches.

And once you get going, Bob the Barbarian all goes pretty smoothly. There’s nothing that scratches an itch quite like knocking out a puzzle, getting an item out of it, and immediately knowing what puzzle to take it to next. There are occasional missing objects when you examine everything mentioned in the description (e.g. you can’t examine the tunnel mentioned in Behind the Castle), but not to the point where it’s an issue – everything that needs to be there is there. I will say I had some difficulty with verbs sometimes, knowing what the solution was but failing to express it how the game wanted. The correct verbs are never too offbeat, but there are some correct-looking ones that aren’t recognised (such as (puzzle spoiler) getting out of the chair’s straps while wearing the bracelet – “untie strap” works, which is fine, but I had several failed attempts with things like “take off bracelet” and “loosen strap” before I found it). The in-game hint system needs a bit of work too – I won’t harp on that point as the updates show it’s a work in progress, but I would suggest that (different puzzle spoiler) if you’ve worked out that the plank is significant while you escape the pirates, you should be able to get a hint with the plank – it’s in scope, after all, and there are a lot of plausible verbs (e.g. pushing it) that don’t get a response.

And now, to counter that burst of criticism, let’s head into the Jokes I Liked Lightning Round:

• The barber’s comments are excellent – in addition to the comment about blood above, I also liked the ominous reference to “my gum denuder”.
• The ogres having to throw you out of the house, and locking the door behind you after the second time you barge in. It’s an unwinnable situation, I think, but it’s funny.
• I believe Bob the Barbarian is the first game I’ve played where “belch” is a critical verb.

As I wrap up this review, I keep thinking of summaries that damn Bob the Barbarian with faint praise - “it doesn’t do anything new, but…” Well, maybe it doesn’t, but I think the game knows what it is, and it’s quite happy to play the hits. I do really like this kind of thing. It’s old-school, for better or for worse, but unlike Bob’s, it’s a good school!

[rabbit]

Live and Get Pie (Tame Spond/ee)

Played on: 27^th September
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Git
How long I spent: 7 minutes (4 minutes to beat, 3 minutes to noodle around)

Can I be honest? I was expecting to hate Live and Get Pie. I was planning on it, even. Just looking at the blurb, I was workshopping polite ways to say “please god no” – the humour doesn’t work (do not start your blurb with a Portal reference in 2026), and I do not trust people who write comic verse online to pay attention to meter or scansion.

But alas, I’m powerless in the face of a silly joke, and when I read the opening location description:

Clouds
Above you in the clouds: a plane that is quite loud.
Also you’re a spy who’s falling from the sky.
Your mission is unknown before here you were flown
Because instead of listening you eyed your boss’s glistening
Abs.

… I guffawed at that apologetic little “Abs.” before I could stop myself, and from then on, I had to look much more kindly upon Live and Get Pie.

This is an ultra-slim parser game, and in fact I’ve probably just posted 10% of the total word count. It’s a little snippet of surrealist spy fiction told entirely in rhyming verse. That includes all descriptions and all responses, which is a pretty impressive feat even when considering that the author has cannily reduced the workload by disabling most actions.

And you know what, the verse is generally fine! Not nearly as bad as I feared. When read out loud to yourself, there’s a bouncy rhythm to it, twelve syllables to a line (iambic hexameter?) with a rhyme every six syllables. The rhymes are fine, usually – a thumbs-up for rhyming “self-reflection” with “ejection”, and a slap on the wrist for trying to rhyme “men” with the first syllable of “dangerous”. As the ballot’s genre field threatens, “I COULD have made it worse”. I think the short length really helps. Live and Get Pie probably couldn’t last any longer than its <5 minutes runtime without getting grating. (The author also has the good taste to take the content warning field seriously and not try to work a rhyme into it. I don’t take that for granted!)

Not much else to say – it might have been quicker to play the game than to read this review! There are some good jokes, including a rather nice meta-joke that only becomes clear once the game is beaten. There’s a simple hint system which is worth playing with just for a few extra jokes. The puzzles, both of them, are not great and both rely on the same trick, but who cares, this isn’t really about puzzling the player. Play it on a car journey (unless you’re driving) and read it aloud to your fellow passengers.

[rabbit]

Meet the timesheet (Garrulus (aka Jay))

Played on: 29^th September
How I played it: Downloaded and run on Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 50 minutes for one easy playthrough and one hard playthrough

Meet the timesheet reframes office drudgery as surreal monster horror. You’ve had to abandon your workplace Christmas party upon realising that you haven’t completed your timesheets and that your manager is probably going to chase you for them. You explore the identical-looking desks of the empty office upstairs trying to find a working computer to complete your timesheet. But something else has followed you which is not (or no longer?) entirely human, so the gameplay loop is a push-pull between staying at computers to complete your work and moving on to evade your pursuer. Spice this up with a power cut plunging everything into darkness halfway through and a few puzzles to slow you down, and you have a pretty sound foundation for a horror game. You’re given a choice of an Easy or Hard mode, but I didn’t notice a major difference between this other than the monster being more persistent in Hard mode.

(There’s also a framing device in the blurb that claims this game was found on a floppy disk and is now being presented to the IFComp audience, but I’m not sure that this framing device is necessary or helpful? It adds a layer of abstraction for no clear purpose, and it implies that the events of this game don’t exist within the game’s world either. But we’ll come back to it at the end of the review.)

The open-plan office is a clever setting for this kind of horror game. Designed as a site of surveillance where you’re constantly in sight of managers, this space now weaponizes that quality to expose the player – you can be seen from anywhere else in the office, especially when you’re lit up by a computer monitor, so you’re never quite safe. Meet the timesheet exaggerates the environment by having it loop infinitely, giving you no walls to hide behind at all. I wouldn’t follow the IFComp ballot in calling it a liminal space (I’m pedantic enough to save the word “liminal” for spaces which exist as transitional spaces in relation to other spaces, rather than, as it’s used now, any space which is just kinda quiet), but it’s definitely nightmarish in the way that it corrupts an everyday space to create and emphasise danger.

Your objective and the puzzles also play to the theme. The timesheet is probably the ultimate signifier of meaningless bureaucracy, the maddening experience of having to waste time doing things you know are nonsensical just because someone up the chain you’ll never meet got a bee in their bonnet once. It’s heightened in Meet the timesheet when the player character has to fill in timesheets for future days as well, so that the manager doesn’t have to sign anything while on holiday. I think anyone who’s worked in an office has an anecdote like this. (The word “Kafkaesque” is tapping at the window and begging to be let in, but I haven’t read any Kafka, so I’ll draw the curtains and pretend I’m asleep until it finds its way to someone who’s better-read.) The monster you’re dodging indulges in the madness, behaving like a possessed demonic entity, crawling with twisted limbs, yet muttering inanely about the timesheet whenever it catches up to you. Meanwhile, the screensavers which must be unlocked to use the computers add a sort of forced corporate-friendly joviality to proceedings, ostensibly being silly and humorous (especially the smiley face and the screaming goat) while actually just being more depressing. (These screensavers comprise the puzzles – they’re generally okay, but I want to shout out the goat puzzle, which has an amusingly nasty trap built into it.)

So we’ve got some pretty good foundations here, twisting a recognisable situation to expose the ways in which it can sap the life out of you, personifying them as a manager who literally saps the life out of you. However, a lot of games like this falter once you realise how the enemy behaves, and unfortunately Meet the timesheet falls quickly to a little experimentation. The entity is reduced from a threat to an annoyance once you realise that you can hide under any desk. It can’t get you! Any time you get a warning that something is approaching, you can just hide, maybe hide for a couple more turns to let it wander away, and then carry on. You can also find a bag of chips, which I think you’re supposed to use as a warning system – like, if you hear something stepping on some crunchy chips to your east, you know it’s time to scarper west – but in practice I never needed to try them.

This is my only major complaint with Meet the timesheet, but it’s kind of a huge one – either you’re constantly wandering away from computers to evade the entity, in which case you can’t progress as you need to hang out at a computer for a little to log in before you can fill your timesheet, or you’re just hiding every few turns and completely defanging the horror. I know the following suggestion is not helpful as it amounts to basically asking for a different game, but I think this kind of horror benefits from more bespoke scenarios and more changes to gameplay where whatever’s chasing you has more chances to outwit you – when it’s all in the same environment with the same objective, it’s too easy to learn and become comfortable with your options. Alternatively, there could be something more to discourage hiding and encourage interaction. Into the Sun, the Alien fangame from IFComp 2022, comes to mind – that game features a timer to keep you on the move, and an environment which can be altered by the xenomorph, destroying objects in rooms but also, say, melting a locked door open for you if you can get it in the right place (but of course, doing that intentionally means letting the xenomorph detect you…)

There’s one more feature of Meet the timesheet to mention. That framing device mentions that a handful of handwritten pages were sent along with the floppy disk. These pages comprise the walkthrough, and they are beautiful. Even if you know what you’re doing, you must look at the walkthrough – it provides hints and instructions playfully, and the art is very creepy.

I think Meet the timesheet is flawed, but I really like what it’s accomplishing with its setting and I think there are some great flourishes here. This game pairs very nicely with the emails I’ve had to send to colleagues in different teams in my workplace earlier this week trying to explain things that they would know if they read any of the other emails I sent them. Thank god my office isn’t infinitely large.

[rabbit]

Galilee Bones and the Juggernaut of Jordan (Phil Riley)

Played on: 30^th September (playing the 5^th Sept update)
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 40mins to complete the game with a few hints

I had fun last year calling Indiana Jones a hack when reviewing The Reliquary of Epiphanius. Galilee Bones isn’t doing a whole lot of sound archaeology either. He’s certainly not excavating here with delicate brushwork and lab analysis. But despite his failure to adhere to rigorous preservation protocols, Galilee Bones and the Juggernaut of Jordan is pretty good!

This game is set in 1943, and we are Bones, adventurer-archaeologist-academic who parachutes to Lejjun, a Petra-like city carved out of a cliff face, to intercept whatever the Nazis have found there recently. So, yes, Galilee Bones is a text adventure pastiche of the Indiana Jones franchise, and in fact it plays the tropes surprisingly straight. Galilee is perhaps a little more petulant than Indy (his reaction to spotting an SS Guard being “Ugh. Nazis. They’re the worst.” – not untrue, but not all that eloquent either), but everything else from the Nazis to the ancient civilization to the probably-supernatural to the spunky female love interest is present and correct. I think maybe it takes the assumptions of Indiana Jones a little too uncritically, in how we treat ancient civilisations and who has the right to plunder them; on the other hand, killing Nazis never goes out of style.

We have a story running throughout which is largely background flavour. Primarily told in flashbacks, we see moments of vulnerability from Galilee as he reflects on his relationship with his Spunky Female Love Interest. These revolve around Galilee’s chauvinism and mild ineptness with women, so we have a gentle deconstruction of the masculine action hero archetype. It’s painted very broadly and it’s mostly confined to flashbacks so it’s hard to say that this game is About Chauvinism – you could largely remove it without needing to do much rewriting. (That said, keep an eye out for an extra option when you beat the game that will lead you to a playable epilogue.)

Galilee Bones the man may be a little awkward, but Galilee Bones the game is smooth as heck. The implementation is excellent throughout, with great attention to detail (for example, your description of yourself updates with bespoke text based on what you’re wearing). I never had any issues with bugs, which is impressive considering that there are some very complex objects here, such as a dictionary which can be used to translate quite long phrases. NPCs are responsive within reason, though things are arranged such that you rarely interact with them deeply (for example, half of them are Nazis who shoot you dead on sight). Few of them speak English but a footnotes extension is used to automatically translate for them, as if they’re being subtitled in the film adaptation. I think there’s a little room for more play with NPCs – for example (and this spoils a major puzzle mechanism that I’m otherwise trying to avoid mentioning because it’s too cool to give away), I think you could have fun messing with time paradoxes by releasing Fremd, etc – even if it just leads to an immediate game over, it felt like a shame to shut that avenue down out of hand. What’s there still works very nicely though.

I also very much enjoyed the puzzles. There aren’t many individual puzzles, but each one takes a bit of work. The opening puzzle, slipping past the SS soldier guarding the camp outside Lejjun, is a good example, requiring careful observation of the surrounding locations and an aha moment when you spot the implications of one description. I think Puzzle of the Comp so far is (minor spoiler) bringing the emerald home, a multi-step process with another great aha moment at the start and an amusingly morbid final trick. Galilee Bones is tough but it generally keeps you on track – it usually won’t let you get yourself into an unwinnable situation. (I think it might be possible if you let a certain enemy chase you into a dead end but I didn’t investigate thoroughly and I think it’s early enough that a restart would be relatively painless.)

I had a lot of fun with this. It’s tough enough to make you sweat, but fun and snappy enough to keep you going. This is by-the-by, but do you ever think about how stressful carving Petra must have been? Imagine being the guy who chisels too hard and accidentally demolishes one of the pillars on the façade of the Treasury. They’d have to carve two feet back into the rock and start all over again. You’d feel like such an idiot. I was trying to make this work as a cold open and couldn’t manage it, but I keep stressing myself out thinking about being the guy who accidentally shatters the Royal Tombs like that statue bit in Day of the Tentacle. Now you can too.

[rabbit]

Under Loch (Mertie MacLeod)

Played on: 1^st October (using the 26^th September version)
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 17 minutes, kinda

There’s room for all sorts of games in IFComp, but it is kind of funny how the IFComp personal shuffle can mix them up and give you whiplash. After the survival horror of Meet the timesheet and the action-adventure of Galilee Bones, I find myself launched straight into… a quiet game about eating a chip butty by the lake. Very lovely! A moment of peace before we soldier on.

In the template I’ve accidentally made for reviewing, this is where I summarise Under Loch, but I’ve already done that. We have a few paragraphs of descriptive prose where our protagonist muses that the Scottish loch they’re visiting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – no spirits like the guidebooks say, not even a Loch Ness Monster – and enjoys a sandwich instead. You can click a link to eat a bit more of the sandwich, but our player character is determined not to rush things, and in fact if you click enough you’ll get a little message saying that this will take a while, so come back later.

I think there’s room for this kind of thing in IFComp. It’s very pleasant and tranquil. There’s just not much interaction in what we get here, and not much to go on. The player character seems nicely defined, anyway. I like their slightly bitter muttering about listicles trumping up this little pond as a full-scale loch.

Anyway, not much to say, not much to criticise. A perfectly innocent and quiet slice-of-life scene.

Although…

Spoilers for a secret

See, the personal shuffle really is a funny old beast, and by sheer dumb luck, mine has placed a game called Enkii next. And I couldn’t help but notice that the authors of each game share the initials MM, and that their names are anagrams of each other and of the email address which they both share, and that both games happen to have most recently updated at exactly the same time, down to the minute. So while our luckless tourist finishes her sandwich, maybe we just have a little peek at what’s going on in the next game…

Enkii (Mélodie Marcet)

Played on: 1^st October (using the 26^th September version)
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: The rest of the 17 minutes

This one’s a little more mysterious. We have a protagonist making dark allusions to malpractice in an experiment involving fish, then attempting to leave their underwater observation room to walk away from the project – only to find that the door handle is broken and they’re dropped the key outside. They find a walkie-talkie and use it to call for help.

At which point, the game seems to get stuck. We can repeat a call for help, but we get nothing back – only an empty box with a suspiciously familiar creamy-yellow background. But if we tab back to Under Loch to see how the sandwich is going, suddenly our tourist hears a call for help coming from the bushes behind her…

Back in IFComp 2020, I was delighted by The Knot, a game which had been split into three separate entries strewn through the ballot, requiring judges to notice that the three entries all had suspiciously similar cover art and title abbreviations. Under Loch / Enkii (“under lock and key”, very good) is the same trick with some technical advancement – whereas The Knot provided codes in one game that needed to be manually entered into the next, Under Loch and Enkii are in direct communication with each other, where using the walkie-talkie in one will automatically progress the conversation in the other. I don’t know how this is implemented, so I assume it’s magic. It’s also a bit fairer on the player, at least in the IFComp environment – the judge who doesn’t spot the trick at first but follows Under Loch’s suggestion to come back later might have tried Enkii since then and might now have a foothold. (The walkthroughs for each also give a strong nudge.)

Past the trick, the story is very cute. It’s largely linear with a few dialogue choices, the two girls fumbling through an awkward conversation while one searches for the other’s dropped key. Having both characters narrating in their respective games is a lot of fun, as they speculate about the other. It also helps to contribute Under Loch / Enkii’s second trick – a few funny miscommunications between the two might lead the player to a sneaking suspicion, before the ending twist drops. It’s nicely done and I enjoyed the conclusion.

A little word on the CSS used in both games: I like how tastefully pared back it is. It’s pretty close to a default Twine styling but with a different colour palette for each (airy light yellow background for Under Loch, murky purple for Enkii). They’re complementary colours too, I think - I like how the dialogue boxes for characters use their home game’s backgrounds, so that we get splashes of the purple Enkii background set in a box against the yellow Under Loch background. It’s a small thing but it’s thoughtful and pleasing.

Neither game is huge, and the two together take 15 minutes total, which is wise – you probably can’t keep a player happily tabbing between two tabs once a minute for much longer than this. Under Loch / Enkii are worth playing, and I hope more judges catch on to the trick. I was lucky to have it served on a plate to me, but heartbreakingly I’ve seen at least one judge who’s played both games and thought both were broken. That’s the risk with this gimmick, I suppose.

[rileypb (Phil Riley)]

Thanks for mentioning the flashbacks. They were the part that was most fun to write, which is why I’m taking a break from IF to write some static fiction.

[rabbit]

El Ruido (Jen Lee)

Played on: 2^nd October
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 17 minutes to find a whole bunch of endings

Are there really only two games in the whole of IFDb tagged “telenovela”? Yes there are, and I know that because I just added the telenovela tag to El Ruido a couple of days ago. (The other game is Masq.) What are we doing? Why haven’t we been making more? A playable telenovela is such a winning idea for a game. Look, the first line in El Ruido is “Selena Morales is bedridden and you wish she was dead.” That immediate melodrama and cattiness is so good.

In this short Texture-based game, we are Yesenia Montenegro, the villain of the piece, jilted lover of Alejandro, determined to ruin his chance of happiness with Selena. We also happen to be plagued by a noise on the edge of our hearing which gets louder or quieter depending on how we act. The story is quick but branches widely to some very different endings, depending on if we throw ourselves into our villainess role, act more diplomatically, or investigate what’s going on with this noise.

This is one of the better uses of Texture I’ve seen, and I’m attributing that to one verb: “glower”. Present as an action in most scenes and usually serving the same purpose as the “examine” verb in a parser game, “glower” is the perfect word to use here. It’s unusual and characterful - you can imagine the camera swooping around dramatically whenever you glower at someone. I simply had to click and drag “glower” over everything and everyone.

Oh, and the actual implementation is good too. I didn’t find any substantial bugs while playing, and although Texture games rarely give you quite enough information to predict what exactly will happen when you drag a word onto another word, El Ruido does a decent job of telegraphing what Yesenia is thinking of doing. The only issue I had was a late scene where “glower” progresses a scene unsuccessfully, breaking the apparent rule that you could glower freely. Still, though, a playthrough only takes 5 minutes even if you’re reading everything, so it’s not a big deal to run back through and try again. (There’s no undo button, which is a shame, but I think that’s usual for Texture games?)

The story is kind of an interesting beast - it’s familiar, verging on derivative, and I think some dialogue is a bit too nasty in places, but I think I understand why these writing decisions were made and I see how they support the game’s central allegory. Discussing this in any detail requires giving away the twist, which I will do under this spoiler heading:

The Twist

As it happens, neither we nor Selena are quite human. The way Alejandro and other male extras react to us indicate that we’re expected to be performers, in a way that doesn’t quite fit the internal logic of the telenovela. But once we hit an ending where we’ve gone too far off script and men in black suits come to bundle us away and reprogram us, we may realise: ah, this is Westworld. To be fair, I haven’t watched much Westworld (the film or the TV show), but as I understand it, El Ruido shares the same premise: a theme park staffed with androids who indulge any desire of their human guests (such as Alejandro), where the androids begin to understand what they are and what’s being done to them and start plotting against the humans. (The noise, by the way, seems to be an in-universe way of keeping the androids on track. We find it grows more discordant as we venture further off script.)

On the one hand, when I realised this, El Ruido felt a little more disappointing and unoriginal. On the other hand, I understand why you might take this premise and run with it. El Ruido draws a parallel between the performance of the feminine androids in this telenovela-world and the expected performance of femininity in the real world, particularly the expectation that women should be competing for subservience to men. Or, put more simply, we’re fighting the patriarchy in this one. This is underscored by the way the human men treat the android women and speak about them. Sexist and ableist language is used throughout in a hugely unpleasant way that I struggled with a little, but this is in service of emphasising the power imbalance and building sympathy for Yesenia and her plight. (And it reduces the odds that a reader with any kind of moral compass will be rooting for Alejandro by the end, even when the player understands that Alejandro is just some schlub who’s visiting, a symptom but not a cause.)

El Ruido uses its setting to advocate for organised resistance: the most successful ending that I found comes when you plan carefully with the other female characters to rebel, and during this ending path Yesenia frames her goal as “Justice. Reparations. Sisterhood.” “Reparations” is repeated several times, reframing a word most often associated with racial justice and the effects of global slavery as a signifier of a general fight for justice and equality. Borrowing Westworld’s premise and the aesthetic of the telenovela lets El Ruido express this in a heightened and playful way, one where the risk of violent suppression can be downplayed and we can reach a more cathartic ending.

Perhaps fittingly, El Ruido is a theme-park version of its central allegory, using the telenovela to load it up with melodrama. It is, I think, a touch clumsy, but it’s a lot of fun in its concept and execution.