Russo-a-thon

Playing
41

He Knows That You Know And There Is No Stopping Him, by Charm Cochran

The randomizer must know that I’ve been saying nice things about it, because I just realized that it’s managed another cool trick: it put the three entries in Charm Cochran’s “RGB Trilogy” relatively close together in my to-play list, and in the proper order to boot! I contemplated waiting to review them all at once, since from context, they seem to be designed to be played that way – they were all entered together in the Neo-Twiny Jam (meaning they’re also short, given the 500 word limit for that event), and there are links to the other Acts within each game. But I ultimately decided it might be more interesting to review them piecemeal, to better track how the themes and structure emerge with each installment (so no, this has nothing to do with padding my review count on IFDB and for the sponsorships, perish the thought).

The last review will probably be a bit weightier than the first two, I suspect, since I’ll hold off on digging into what I think the trilogy is doing until I see everything it has to offer, but fortunately, even just in this first Act there’s a fair bit to talk about. From the color-coding of the game’s itch.io page, it’s clear that this is the “blue” entry, with later entries taking the “green” and “red” slots; further reinforcing the color motif, the dramatis personae page that opens the game identifies the two characters not by name, but by description – the game is constructed as a dialogue (which is an efficient way to use the scant words the jam rules allow) between “a rich and imposing, if ugly and impulsive, man” (whose words are all in blue) and “a quick-thinking and witty, if selfish and manipulative, woman” (whose words are all in green). The psychological priming here isn’t especially subtle, and the first line of the game proper – a stage direction noting that the blue man is “brandishing a bloody key” – pretty well confirms what story we’re in: this is Bluebeard, that most Freudian of folktales.

Except, well, that’s not exactly right. The language is off, for one thing: the game is written in a Shakespearean English that feels a bit archaic for a story that was famously collected by Perrault. This is a dangerous choice, since there’s a risk of ending up sounding like a bad 80s RPG, all thee-ing and thou-ing, but I found the style here worked – the grammar and syntax are credibly done, while the vocabulary is kept relatively modern for ease of reading. It winds up giving a hint of old-fashionedness without slowing down the dialogue too much.

That’s important because – understandably given the space constraints – the game is concerned just with the climax of the tale: blue has caught green (his wife) in the act of defying him, and bad news, the player is responsible for what green says as she attempts to escape punishment. The back and forth her is really punchy; each line of dialogue is fairly short, and the back-and-forth volley between the partners in this two-hander feels rapid, and intense, as a result. Your possible responses tend to include calling blue out for his crimes, pleading for forgiveness, and playing for time, but not in a mechanical way – sometimes you only have two options, and the confrontation does escalate fluidly, so I think it would be hard to stick to just one approach without intentionally disengaging from the story; I did find my approach varied satisfyingly in replays, but the game did a good job of shaping an arc from my choices regardless of what I did, sometimes starting out defiant and then growing chastened, other times desperate for mercy and then trying just to delay the inevitable once it became clear that wasn’t working.

There’s one other interesting aspect of the game’s storytelling that’s worth discussing under spoiler tags: the main way the game departs from the story it’s riffing on is the ending – because blue does not kill green the way he’s killed all his previous wives, instead she ganks him with the dagger she’s had concealed behind her back this whole time. For all that the presence of the weapon is flagged from the very beginning, it’s still an effective twist, not least because the player’s given no direct hint that all of green’s conversational gambits are just setup for a stabbing. Indeed, one of the options you’re given late in the game is simply to “acquiesce” to your own imminent murder, but even that is a feint and leads to blue’s bloody end just the same. I really enjoyed this move; it’s an effective way of demonstrating exactly how manipulative green can be, and exploits the tensions within IF’s triangle of identities (player, narrator, protagonist) to good ends.

There’s more to say about the game, or at least more to speculate on – I’m curious what direction the Hamlet quote that closes things off is meant to be pointing to, and when we’ll be introduced to the “red” character who must surely come onstage at some point to complete the design. But I’ll hold all that in reserve until I get further into the trilogy; for now, I’ll just note that I’m wrapping up Act One very interested in seeing more.

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42

Collision, by manonamora

Friends, I am acutely aware that I just wrote a 900 word review about a 500 word game; with another Neo-Twiny Jam entry up next (and one that actually uses only half of the already-scant budget) I’ve got a chance to do better.

Collision is a practical joke of a game that proceeds largely in deadpan two-word couplets: you get a spray of three or four super-short phrases each “turn” (“stuck neck”, “roaring engine”, “no voice”), and an expanding number of similarly-terse choices to move things ahead (“look around”, “move hands”, “scream”). This hyper-compressed writing style obfuscates the setup slightly, but only slightly – even if you haven’t paid attention to the cover art, an early bit of narration’s declaration that you have “no pants” and “yellow and black dots on arms” mostly gives the game away.

So it’s clear something terrible is going to happen – though your choices allow you to waste time confirming the obvious – and it’s also clear that you’ll ultimately be powerless to avert it. The comedy of the game arises from the absurdity of making the effort nonetheless, and the bathos of panicking at the realization that there are others stuck in the same predicament as you. It’s a solid gag, and the blinking “failure” you see at the end of each run is a canny lure to get you to try again, at which point the futility of your efforts gets even funnier. Collision is nothing but a one-note gag – it won’t make you look at the world differently, or expand your understanding of what IF can accomplish – but it’s a gag that works, and one I haven’t seen before.

(Under 300 words, that’s gotta be a record for me!)

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43

The Way Home, by Kenneth Pedersen

I didn’t find the context for The Way Home quite as dubious as that for Quest for the Serpent’s Eye, but I have to admit I also went into this one with my shoulders preemptively squared up: what we’ve got here is an ADRIFT adapting just the second half of a game the author had previously written for the C64. Perhaps I’m an inveterate stereotyper, but regardless I was expecting unwinnable states, low-context puzzles, minimal implementation, and objects requiring pixel-perfect searching to find.

There’s definitely some of that stuff here. The backstory is conveyed with minimal texture – you’re a Conan-style barbarian who’s just recovered a massive gemstone on behalf of some queen, for some reasons, that aren’t especially fleshed out. Leaving the forest where you found it, and facing the return trek across a trackless desert, you decide to stop off in a glacial valley to up your stocks of water (…can I venture a guess that the author isn’t a geologist?) And the first puzzle very much suffers from some fiddliness of implementation: you get captured by ice trolls in the prologue (I am not at all clear why they left me alive, but one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth I suppose) and need to do the classic cut-the-ropes-with-a-sharp-stone bit, but I found it very hard to tell whether the stone was too far away from me to get, or just hadn’t come up with the right phrasing, and even once I figured out the necessary intermediate step, there were still some misleading responses that delayed the solution yet further (in particular, the game strongly prompts you to WEAR BLANKET, but if you try to THROW BLANKET AT STONE while you’re wearing it, you get an unhelpful generic error message, rather than being told that you need to manually remove it from your shoulders first).

Thankfully, things started to look up from there. The map of the valley is small and tersely-described, but it’s got an interesting mix of places to visit, and the subsequent puzzles are generally well-clued and offer some nice shortcuts – there’s one location that holds a bunch of different building materials, and I was a little worried about all the hoops I’d need to jump through to assemble the object I knew I needed, but fortunately MAKE worked a treat. There’s even a cool bit of global interactivity that winds up changing the descriptions and behavior of most of the map, which is implemented way more robustly than it needed to be since it only really impacts one puzzle. There is a slightly-unfair puzzle that forced me to restart – at one point you get an object that unlocks two new areas, and if you go first to the area that’s closest and which you have an in-game reason to be interested in, rather than going to the other side of the map to explore just for the sake of it, you’ll lock yourself into a dead-person-walking scenario – but this isn’t the kind of game where replays take very long once you know what you’re doing, and honestly I was expecting to hit something like that sooner.

And then after solving that area, you’re whisked away to a separate vignette in an entirely new area! This once again suffered from a lack of connective tissue – the problem you need to solve there does directly grow out of what you do in the first part, but it still feels like it comes out of nowhere. But this area has a lot of other characters, who have a reasonably broad set of conversation topics, and the puzzles shift from the predominantly medium-dry-goods affairs of the ice valley to ones having to do with helping, interrogating, investigating, or otherwise interacting with people, which I found more engaging. In fact I’d say I really enjoyed this second half; there’s still not much in the way of scenery or anything to do except solve the next puzzle in the chain, but the difficulty is pitched just right and it’s a perfectly serviceable bit of fantasy adventuring.

Sadly, the low-context thing returns in force: once you get to the end of the puzzle chain you’re basically handed an “I win” button to resolve the overall problem (in the game’s defense, “here’s an apple, eat it and you’ll automatically beat the dragon” is not a plot twist I’ve seen before), and characteristically the game’s ending text is beyond anticlimactic, consisting of a single sentence saying you brought back the gem and the queen rewarded you. All of which is to say that The Way Home never transcends its origins, but it winds up a reasonably welcoming example of its form just the same.

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44

Museum Heist, by Kenneth Pedersen

The randomizer continues tracing its whimsical path through my to-play list, putting the two remaining Kenneth Pedersen games back to back. They make for quite a contrast, though, because while Museum Heist has some things in common with The Way Home – the ADRIFT format, terse but effective prose, bug-free implementation – this is no old-school treasure hunt; while you are an art thief looking to lift as much loot as possible from the eponymous institution, the game operates in the thoroughly modern optimization-game framework. Just as in Ryan Veeder’s Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder, which is largely credited with kicking off the sub-genre, you need to search a small map stuffed with riches, solving individual puzzles to obtain each, while using trial-and-error over repeated runs to figure out the metapuzzle of how to get the richest possible haul before time runs out.

The theming is obviously a great fit with the gameplay – the time before the police arrive provides an obvious ticking clock, it makes total sense that a museum would be stuffed with more art and antiquities than one thief could reasonably make off with, and that some would be easy to simply smash and grab while others would be protected with more robust security measures or present logistical challenges to obtain. And while this isn’t the kind of game where you can linger over descriptions, the various galleries and objets d’art are effectively chosen to communicate the idea that you’re grabbing exciting, valuable stuff (look, I’m going to like any game where I get to lift Etruscan artifacts and something made of porphyry).

The game’s relatively compact scope also makes it more approachable than a sprawling example of the subgenre like Sugarlawn. The greater part of the museum is just a three by three grid, and unlike the slowly-flooding ship of CVP, you just have to worry about one timer. You’re also only required to solve maybe two and a half puzzles in order to liberate individual artworks; one of these, which requires some lateral thinking on how to get a massive Rosetta-Stone style inscription, takes some enjoyable outside the box thinking.

The flip side of this, though, is that I quickly found myself grappling with the optimization puzzle rather than trying to figure out its component parts, and the metapuzzle here is largely focused on inventory juggling. If you had infinite carrying capacity, the 40 turns you’re given would provide a comfortable margin for hoovering up everything on offer; the issue is that you can only carry so many items in your hands before you start automatically dropping things. You do have a backpack – and a tube for carrying rolled-up paintings – which makes life easier, but the order things go in matters, with higher-up objects needing to come out to get to the stuff you first stored away, and there are a few puzzles that require swapping things into and out of your carryall.

In the abstract it’s a reasonable enough set of constraints to layer onto the more traditional optimization-game challenges, but I suspect like most people, I don’t really enjoy faffing about with carrying limits, so I found I didn’t have much appetite to really push for the high score, all the more so because I was a bit demoralized when I thought I’d found an optimal solution, only to discover waiting out the time limit rather than manually triggering your escape means you drop everything you’re carrying, so I’d actually need to eke out two more turns somewhere. For all that, Museum Heist is still a solid introduction to this fun, contemporary IF subgenre, providing a manageable sample of why it can be so enjoyable; beyond that, seeing it paired with a more throwback game definitely demonstrates the author’s versatility.

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45

Thanks for the two reviews! The blanket issue you reported is definitely a bug which should be fixed.

I guess both games suffer from a lack of testers. “The Way Home” because I had just returned to IF in 2016 and underestimated the need for more testers and “Museum Heist” which was a jam entry with a tight deadline (14 days IIRC)

But I’m glad you enjoyed the last part of “The Way Home”. :slight_smile:

Its ‘prequel’ (The Dragon Diamond) I ported to Inform at some point, slightly improved though, but in the same vein.

Regarding Museum Heist, when you do not manually leave, you are interrupted by the police and you are told: “You drop everything you are carrying and run towards the rope dangling from the skylight.”

In other words, in that situation, objects you are carrying are dropped, so only the objects in the backpack and the tube are kept. At least that is the way it is intended to work :smiley:

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46

Hello, and thanks for this.

Absolutely point taken on the “do you want the plot to keep happening Y/N” choices - there are a couple of B-routes through the story that should have some satisfactory resolution, but they are uneven for sure. And on the pacing (I realise these are not unconnected issues).

Interestingly I did initially consider your version of the ending twist but I thought it was too neat, and potentially collapsed the primary uncanny thing about how real and/or menacing the girl was - it’s not just amnesia in either case in my mind. But worth thinking about. I will come back and tidy up the obvious bugs and infelicities (although we may have to disagree about “desultorily”) at some stage and it would be a straightforward change. Thanks again!

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47

Kiss of Beth, by Charm Cochran

I can’t decide whether Kiss of Beth works better the first time or on the replay. Oh, even from the get-go of this dialogue-based two-hander, you’ve got more than enough indication that what your interlocutor, Cordero, thinks is happening (nosy roommate grilling the new boyfriend before a date) isn’t what’s actually happening. But you’re not sure exactly what direction the game is going to go, so even as you’re feeling him out by asking leading questions about his family or job, you get the sense that this is building to an important choice, but the stakes for whether to send him on in to see the eponymous Beth after she finishes showering, or fake a family emergency, are deliciously unclear. On a replay, though, despite knowing exactly how the horror is going to play out, I found I was scrutinizing Cordero’s responses to try to get a level of certainty about that final decision that just isn’t possible to achieve – as well as paying even closer attention to what the protagonist’s questions were revealing about them.

The presentation here is effectively off-putting. The text splays over an aubergine background, with a slightly-pixelated photo of Cordero off to the side. Then as you get over the preliminary greetings and the not-so-subtle interrogation begins – you want to make sure you have a clearer sense of who he is before you make a final call – the photo snaps to black and white, before slowly filling in with color as you learn more. The dialogue is well-done too, naturalistically shifting from topic to topic with a sheen of awkwardness that’s entirely fitting for the circumstance. Most of the questions you can ask have at least a hint of passive-aggressiveness about them, but that also makes sense – for reasons that eventually become clear, the main character is looking for reasons to dislike Cordero, which makes for some entertaining friction between the seemingly-cordial dialogue and your inner monologue.

You don’t get a full biographical readout on him through your questioning, of course, but the game does do a good job of sketching out a sense of who he is, both in terms of class, background, and personality, with solid attention to detail (when he mentioned that he wanted to get an MSW, I was able to correctly guess that Columbia was his dream school since I know that they have one of the best social work programs). There are ways to get him open up a little more, or to push him to be more defensive, which makes the conversation still engaging the second time through (again, this is a game you’ll definitely want to replay), but you’ll never be completely satisfied that you’re getting the real Cordero, and not just a scrubbed-up version he’s trotting out to make a good impression.

The eventual reveal isn’t one that’s unguessable by any means, but the details are memorably horrific, and left me feeling queasy regardless of the choices I made – the final screen puckishly tells you “this game has two endings. You got a bad one” in text that doesn’t vary regardless of your decisions. And it effectively throws the spotlight from Cordero back to you; as I mentioned, the second time through the game, I found it interesting to consider whether the questions I was asking, and the asides I was making to myself, meant that I was a better fit for Beth than him.

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48

Ah, I totally missed that, but that makes complete sense – my eyes must have just glazed over from seeing the other, familiar text so that I noticed that tweaked detail. Guess that means I was actually two moves away from the optimal solution, not just one…

I can see your point about the ending – I think I tend to prefer neater, Twilight-Zone style resolutions to stories like this, but other approaches can be more effective for other players, I’m sure. And you do you re desultorily – there are definitely words I love even though I know it’s intellectually indefensible to use them as much as I do (“preterite” is probably my number one on this score).

Thanks both of you for the notes!

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49

How Dare You, by alyshkalia/Tabitha O’Connell

After a long stretch of the randomizer doing a shockingly good job of ensuring I play games in the proper order (beyond correctly sequencing the RGB trilogy, I’ve noticed that it also put A1RL0CK before its sequel, and ensured an adequate distance between the two porn games), it’s now thrown a curve-ball by having me play an Inform remake before its Twine original. I’ll be interested to assess comparisons once I hit Cycles in about eight more games, but I can’t imagine I’m missing out by playing How Dare You first, because this is a game that is unashamed about rejecting context, focusing on the dramatic action of a lover desperately trying to avoid a breakup without overly concerning itself with backstory or plot. Sure, you get the bare bones of the setup, but the opening text starts with “we have to talk” and only provides four or five short paragraphs of elaboration before opening up the interactivity.

Such a character-focused premise isn’t the most natural fit for a parser game, but the design cannily takes advantage of what players are likely to do. The scenery is densely-implemented, for example, and the descriptions provide a bit of nuance as to what’s going on. You’re having the breakup fight just outside your partner’s room, and here’s what X HOUSE gets you, for example:

It’s smaller than the one you share with your parents; only Heron and eir mother live here. She’s out somewhere right now.

(Heron is your soon-to-be ex, and uses ey/em pronouns; I think this line is the clearest suggestion that both of you may be teenagers or young adults).

A lot of your and Heron’s body parts are also implemented, which gives some additional color to the scene and also helps clue potential actions. You see, while the concept might make you think that this is a dialogue-focused game, there are no conversation menus in sight; TALK TO HERON (ask/tell aren’t implemented) just gives you one brief exchange, while subsequent attempts just have you begging “please, Heron…” before drifting into silence. Since you can’t try to convince Heron to change eir mind with words, you’re just left with approaches, which of course is right in the parser wheelhouse. Many of the standard Inform verbs will lead to a customized response (my favorite was sitting on the floor, which sees Heron heave a sigh at your I’m-not-leaving-here-until-you-un-break-up-with-me dramatics), but there are a whole lot of additional possible actions available too, from taking eir hand to weeping. While you’re not limited to just one verb – though there are some that shunt the story to a conclusion – playing How Dare You reminded me a little bit of playing Aisle, since it has a similar dynamic of trying to suss out a large possibility space by testing prompted but not explicitly spelled-out verbs.

So playing this scene while dramatically de-emphasizing the talking is an interesting choice, and I’m curious whether things will be different in the game’s Twine incarnation. I liked the way it lent a heightened, almost theatrical air to proceedings, with one lover searching for the grand gesture that will win back the other. It makes for a novel portrayal of a familiar kind of scene, but at the same time it did mean that I wasn’t especially invested in the outcome since I didn’t get much sense of who either the protagonist or Heron were, or why (or whether) their relationship was worth fighting for. As a result the game didn’t land with much emotional impact for me, though I should add the caveat that beyond attempting one last kiss, I studiously avoided any actions that involved physical violence. I confirmed from reading the spoilery commands list you can read after completing the game that a number of these are implemented, and depending on how those play out I could see them having a significant impact on my sense of what the game is doing. But while domestic violence is an entirely valid thing for a game to take on, it’s not something I feel comfortable opting into if I have any other choice; perhaps that means that my view of How Dare You as an interesting and successful writing exercise is incomplete, but if so I suspect the probably-more-guided experience of playing Cycles may let me in on what I’ve missed.

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50

Suspended in the air so that all of your weight is concentrated on a single point halfway down your spine, by Charm Cochran

Geez, ^ spoiler alert.

We have here the second part in the RGB trilogy – and while it’s recognizably of a piece with He Knows That You Know and Now There’s No Stopping Him, it also throws some curves into the emerging formula. For one thing, the cast list gives us three characters this time: green makes a repeat performance, and we’re introduced to red, “a handsome and charming, if quick-tempered and immature, man” but also purple (purple?), “a kind and gentle, if naive and sheltered, woman.” But rather than a three-way conversation, this green-themed instalment is rather a solitary affair: you play as red, waking up in a dark, solitary room suspended in the air so that… well, see above.

The mechanics of choice are different this time too – you’re given an array of possible actions across the bottom of the screen. Given your predicament there isn’t a lot you’re able to accomplish besides try to look around as best you can, cry out for assistance, or start swinging… eventually you’ll overhear a discussion between the other characters that sheds some light on what’s going on and how you got here, and your attempts to escape bring the short story (this is another Neo Twiny entry, so it’s also 500 words) to another violent close – that’s directly in keeping with part one, at least.

While I found this part a bit slighter than the blue one – as I noted in that review, dialogue lets you do more with less; the need to describe action chews up a chunk of the word count – there’s still plenty of thematic weight to proceedings. Though speaking of spoilers, I should probably blur the rest…

So turns out we, the callow and potentially overbearing husband of the ingenue purple, have been strung up and left to die by green, our mother-in-law. While the milieu has apparently changed somewhat between entries in the series – blue had a historical feel, while the language here is more modern and reference is made to a laptop – the opening page stresses that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”, and I’m inclined to take it at its word. If this green is the same as the one who killed her husband to escape him, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she’s over-protective of her daughter given her own experience of marriage (though given that said daughter is purple, not teal, we perhaps are being prompted to assume that the family history here isn’t as simple as all that?) and level of comfort with murder. Making the parallels starker yet, as she kills red, green murmurs “she will heal… she always does,” suggesting that much as blue did away with more than half-a-dozen brides, she’s killed several of purple’s grooms by this point.

There’s probably more going on here than just “mothers-in-law, amirite?”, though. The other thing of note that green says is “I know your plans for my daughter… I won’t stand for them.” Given the framing of the series so far, the mind naturally goes to sex and/or death, but it’s interesting that in addition to secreting you away, green has also stashed all your possessions in this abattoir: “your books, your gramophone, your laptop – everything’s here.” Knowledge, art, and creativity are also being shut away and taken from purple, which perhaps is part of what keeping her innocent entails – and part of what prevents her from understanding the lies that green spins.

As I said in my review of the first game, though, these are all tentative thoughts; I’d be surprised if the major themes I’ve noticed so far don’t get carried over into the final act, but I also can’t say I have a clear sense of how the series will culminate. But suffice to say that I’m continuing to be intrigued, and am looking forward to seeing how, or whether, everything connects.

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51

I have played through all 3 games, but didn’t really understand what was going on, and couldn’t make all the links between parts properly (“wait, is purple the sister?” And so on :laughing:) and this really helped me clear this out…

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Well, we’ll see if I’m on target with any of this when I get to the last game. But glad to do a bit of service journalism :slight_smile:

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Oh, I def have thoughts, but will wait for final review to weigh in. Been mulling this one for a while…

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Nyx, by 30x30

I count at least two layers of metatextual irony in Nyx’s second sentence:

Scientists, soldiers, pilots, people of few words — why didn’t we send painters, writers, musicians, why didn’t we send anyone capable of humanity?

The first layer, of course, is that this is a work of IF, an art form pioneered by programmers, mathematicians, physicists, and many other scientists who proved themselves more than capable of humanity (and, as to at least some of them, less-than-capable at shutting up). The second layer is that this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, so a person of few words is actually the ideal narrator.

Given the brevity of the format, it makes sense that the game unabashedly tips its hand to what it’s riffing off; the opening is a clear response to the “they should have sent a poet” bit from Contact, and the situation – the narrator is the last one left after a space monster has killed all the other crew on their ship – is structurally the same as Alien, though there are some important differences in the details. It’s a neat juxtaposition, since the former is all about the wonder of exploration while the latter turns space into a site of terror. The prose, as always with this author’s work, edges on the sublime, and is more than capable of holding these opposites simultaneously:

Why me? Why me, when the only prayer I know is the astronaut’s — dear God, please don’t let me fuck this up — why me when there’s something spiritual about how oxygen reacts upon ignition, stomach lurching backwards, pressed against spine, dreadful exhilaration robbing air from lungs and rattling teeth as higher into the heavens you spiral — why me?

The story is also well-chosen for the length limit, since relaying how the other crew-members died in a sentence or two apiece is effectively chilling, and conveys all that’s really needed; there are fuzzy indications that the alien does more than just eviscerate people and perhaps exerts some degree of psychic influence, but of course the narrator wouldn’t have a clear sense of how that works, as this is apparently humanity’s first contact with any sort of extraterrestrial life. And this simple setup is more than enough to provide context to the game’s one, climactic choice – whether to send the ship into deep space and hope it stays lost, set coordinates back to earth so that others will encounter the alien, or open the bulkhead door and embrace what’s coming.

Narratively speaking all of these are reasonable endings to the first 2/3 of the game, but my one critique of Nyx is that I didn’t feel like there was as much thematic connection between the opening – which, per the bits I’ve quoted, is heavily devoted to the inadequacies the narrator feels about trying to use words to capture their experiences in space – and two of the endings; each of these individual pieces are quite well written, don’t get me wrong, but for a game this short I wanted the experience to feel tighter. It took until the last ending that I tried to see the build-up actually pay off – which it did, quite well. But as a result I think this is a work of IF that suffers somewhat from its interactivity; I was sufficiently engaged by the presentation, in stark black and reds with clicking required to get the next bit of tense, evocative text, that I didn’t feel like I really needed any narrative agency. And as a work of dynamic fiction that ensured the player sees the parts of the story in the order that would have the most impact, I think Nyx could be even more successful – though I think it certainly works well enough as it is.

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WHOM I SHOULD LOVE ABOVE ALL THINGS, by Sophia de Augustine

The first thing I wrote in my notes for this game was that the presentation is really nice; it looks like a book or (better) screenplay, with a clean white background, text in a lovely, readable font, and a horizontal line across the bottom with the title beneath. So I goggled when I scrolled down a bit on the itch page and saw this was an entry in the Bare Bones Jam, which prevents authors from doing any UI customization at all. I assume this must be some obscure Twine format – it’s definitely not the familiar, endearingly ugly Harlowe or Sugarcube – but good lord, why isn’t everybody using this?

Speaking of Jesus (…yes, I’m going to hell for that segue), this piece of dynamic fiction – a single short scene excerpted from a longer work-in-progress, entitled Anchorite which per the author’s note at the end is sadly a place and not a job description – centers on a Catholic priest whose ex-lover has just slid into his confessional. Most pages consist of a short paragraph of physical business describing what’s happening, before shifting into screenplay mode to display the dialogue, in which the pair run through their recriminations and hopes. Andrey, the ex, is the wittier, invoking bits of Catholic ritual to fondly needle the priest, Joel, who seems earnestly and perpetually flummoxed. It’s a fun dynamic – you can see how they would have worked when they were an item – and they’ve each got distinct voices that come through clearly in the writing; I keep saying “screenplay” because you could see this working if shot as a film.

Those initial paragraphs go well beyond the relatively terse stage directions you typically see in a script, though. There’s some good stuff here too, but I found that I experienced a bit of a disconnect between what the characters were saying and what they were doing. Take, for example, the moment where Joel “places his cross between his teeth, biting into the soft gold.” This is an incredible image, obviously a weighty, symbolic act that communicates torment and desire in equal measure. But it comes not at the climax of the scene, but in the middle, and didn’t seem to me to be clearly precipitated by anything that had just been said, nor is it acknowledged by either character in the dialogue. A talented director and well-trained actors could sell the moment nonetheless, but on the page it felt like the different pieces of writing added up to less than the sum of their parts.

Ironically after just saying that I might have liked NYX better if it hadn’t had any choices, I also found myself wishing there was a choice or two embedded in this. I don’t think anything as vulgar as branching would fit the story, but I did feel like I wanted a little more interiority for the characters: why was Andrey coming back now, what would rekindling the relationship mean to Joel? Choices would have slowed down the momentum of the story so that I had to think about these questions more deeply, and displaying different options could have helped convey internal conflict.

Of course, it may be the case that in the full game, there’s context and backstory to this scene that addresses these dynamics – and for all that there are aspects of the game that didn’t fully land for me, it still worked as an effective teaser for that larger project. Operatic relationship-drama in a Catholic milieu is a delicious premise (to me, at least – why yes I was raised Catholic), and I definitely found myself curious about how Joel and Andrey had first gotten together, and where the story was going from here, since it very much ends on an emotional cliff-hanger. And similarly, even though it didn’t fully land, that cross-biting image will stick with me.

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Romance the Backrooms (demo), by Naomi Norbez

There are a lot of ways the contemporary video game scene is different from what it was when I was growing up, many of which are good and many of which are bad, since the transition from playground-for-insular-but-sincere-weirdos to gigabuck-suffused-juggernaut-targeting-every-imaginable-demographic doesn’t lend itself to a simple good vs. evil dichotomy (though I will note in passing that the clear balance point of awesome between these questionable extremes was 1998, a year that was clearly Peak Videogames; yes, I was 17 that year but leave that aside, I am 100% right). Despite the profound ambivalence I typically feel when comparing then with now, though, one thing that still evokes uncomplicated nostalgia for me is the demo. Demos were the 1990s version of Early Access – developers trying to build buzz for their games by releasing a limited slice ahead of the full release – except you didn’t need to pay for the privilege and the games would eventually come out. Some were good, and admittedly some were quite bad – a particularly dire Hellboy demo that involved spinning around endlessly in a deep-brown graveyard looking for a way out was a lowlight – but regardless playing a demo was an exercise in abiding in hope: this was just a little bit of game, it’s still being worked on, and besides, it’s free, how great is that?

There are a lot of reasons the demo has gone by the wayside in the larger video game culture, and understandably they’ve never been big in IF, province of short, free games that typically don’t use teasers to sell themselves. Romance the Backroom isn’t a typical piece of IF, though – though using Twine, it’s styled as a visual novel, with copious character and background art, music, and (eventually – it’s not in this release) voice acting. It’s also got a long playtime, judging from the fact that the piece that’s currently available is billed as only the first act. So a demo to give players a low-commitment way of trying things out actually makes sense.

The balancing act a demo must undertake is to provide a satisfying, self-contained experience that lets the player experience what’s good about a game, while making clear that there’s a lot more to come in the full game. On this front I think the present demo is a success. The setup here is that the main character, Carla, falls through the cracks in the world into the “backrooms” that undergird the multiverse, literally tripping on her way out of the day-care where she works and finding herself far from home. It’s an abrupt, unexplained shift, but the details ground it:

…instead of my hands hitting the cold hard gravel of the parking lot, they hit a wet, carpeted surface, splashing on top of it with a loud smoosh.

That is just viscerally unpleasant! The backrooms themselves are an interestingly empty setting; at first they’re just a maze of yellow-wallpapered hallways (the protagonist made a Charlotte Perkins Gilman reference just after I did), but you soon run across a bizarre fellow named Kilcal – he’s got a clock for an eye and is clear that he’s not a human – and his compadres, four other warm-hearted grotesques (my favorite is a guy with eyeballs in his hair named Glarence, I mean come on) who promise to keep an eye on you and help you get home. But it doesn’t take long for you to be separated from them and kidnapped by a creepy group of “mimics”, who take you back to their king, who menaces you for a bit before Kilcal and company show up to rescue you, starting your world-hopping adventure in earnest just in time for the “coming soon…” banner to pop up.

It’s a lot of backstory, worldbuilding, and characters to establish, but the game lays out its premise effectively; there isn’t enough time to feel like I really got a handle on the main supporting cast, who I assume will carry the “romance” part of the title (this part of the gameplay isn’t really evident yet in the demo), and Carla is a bit of a generic protagonist, but things are archetypal enough that I never felt overwhelmed, and the writing is specific enough that I never felt like I was just experiencing a naked trope-fest; this is especially the case with the villains, who are legit creepy. The prose is straightforward, but each of the characters does have an individual voice, which is no mean feat. And the setup seems sturdy enough that I can imagine a lot of adventures, and interpersonal drama, to come.

On the more questionable side, the visuals lean a little far to the grotesque for my taste, and I ran into an odd bug where the top 20% of the images started getting cut off after a bit. But I tend to find it pretty easy to ignore pictures in my IF. Similarly, the frequency and impact of choices seems relatively light so far, with the few on offer primarily giving you the opportunity to resist or give in to the obviously-bad king’s blandishments. But I was certainly feeling engaged regardless, and I assume that as the game progresses, the gameplay will open up a bit too. For that matter, future development might shift the art style into something I enjoy more – again, that’s the beauty of the magical thinking prompted by a demo! But in this case I feel confident expecting that the solid parts of what I’ve played so far would translate over into the full game, and even if the weaker pieces remain as they are, they’re still not sufficient to drag down what’s shaping up to be the weirdest Saturday morning cartoon that never was.

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Read This When You Turn 15, by Kastel

I have now played a number of Neo-Twiny Jam entries (yes, saying “a number” rather than going back to check is lazy, but look, I’ve capped out on my sponsorships and you get what you pay for) and I feel like I’m starting to get a sense for how you can make a memorable game under brutal space constraints. Minimizing branching is definitely a key strategy to wring the most out of the word-budget, as is focusing on dialogue, or at least prose with a voice, so that fewer words can have more impact. Managing the scope of the story also makes a lot of sense (though now I’m curious whether you can stitch together one or two word mini-phrases, Collision style, to weave together an epic). But less obviously, I wonder whether a respectful relationship with storytelling archetypes – okay, we can just call them tropes – should also be on the list. Not to say that there’s no place for surprises, but being able to sketch a narrative in just a few lines, and then devote the rest to the ways this story is different or unique, probably puts an author in a better position than having to burn most of their fuel just getting the reader to understand what’s going on.

So yeah, given that intro, despite some arresting themes and well-turned phrases, Read This When You Turn 15 didn’t fully work for me because I think its narrative ambitions outstrip the space it’s been allotted. Pitched as a letter written from a brother to his adopted sister, for her to open when she’s old enough to understand it, its 500 words of dynamic fiction paint a picture of an abusive family so idiosyncratically awful I was too busy asking questions to feel very much.

As I understand it, the core trauma here is that the sibling’s mother adopted the sister to be a remote-viewing fashion plate: while galivanting around the world on trips to fashion capital after fashion capital, she has various nannies and caregivers dress up the infant in precious baby-outfits and parade her in front of the webcam (the brother might be complicit in this). But then she apparently tires of this amusement by the time the kid’s Pre-K aged and abandons her to neglect, perhaps assuaging the occasional tiny shred of guilt by sending some of the largesse from her latest shopping trips home. Speaking of guilt, the brother has a lot of his own since the occasion for him to write the letter is his departure to America to get a remunerative job; he took care of her when she was little, but knows he won’t be there during the very hard years to come:

You are going to be a stranger to me by the time you read this. The isolation and traumas you’ll face, I cannot imagine. I can only hope that this letter is not the way you found out you were adopted.

(Jesus Christ, buddy, if you write a sentence like that maybe take a step back and ask yourself “wait, how would I write this letter differently if it was going to be the way she found out she was adopted?")

On the bright side, the brother’s goal in writing the letter isn’t to try to wring possibly-unearned forgiveness from his sister; less cheerily, that’s because he’s monotonously focused on making sure his sister blames their mother for her misdeeds:

But your mother, she’ll say she loves you and remind you that she put money into your education.

I have only one request: please have the courage to hate her.

It’s searing stuff, and I have no doubt that there are abusive families where this particular configuration of pathologies and hatreds could play out. But it’s not a familiar configuration, to me at least – I wanted to know more about what precisely the mom was thinking (adoption is not a quick or easy process in most countries, so it’s a hell of a lot to commit to for some photo ops, especially if you already have a kid), what the brother’s relationship with her was like (was he treated the same, or different?), whether there was another parent in the picture and what they thought of all this, whether the brother was specifically focused on money (he name-checks “getting a job in Silicon Valley”) or just looking for the easiest possible escape….

In a longer work, there’d be room to modulate tones, contrast the Grand Guignol awfulness of the world’s worst mother with a grounded, psychologically-driven portrait of what could have motivated her, and what the consequences could be for her kids, and give a sense of the personalities behind the abuse. And what’s here is a good teaser for that longer piece – it’s shocking, well-written, and again, I want to know more. But I felt like it was trying to do too much in its limited space; to work at 500 words, it might have been wise to make at least some aspect of the family’s unhappiness more familiar, to take some pressure off the player’s imagination and enable the truly aberrant pieces to stand out.

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Cubes and Ladders, by P. Rail

Satire is a tricky beast. Oh, I get the allure – it’s a writer’s dream to cut the Emperor down to size with razor-sharp, Swiftian wit and reveal his naked form to all and sundry. But there are many ways the implementation can go awry. Pitch it too dry, and people might not notice you’re taking the piss (well, I say “people” but I’m mostly thinking of sixteen-year-old-me watching Starship Troopers). Go too over the top, and you’ve got a toothless parody – nobody ever had second thoughts about the carceral state after watching Naked Gun. But worse yet, if you don’t quite grasp why the system is actually bad, you can wind up making superficial jokes while reifying the too-comfortable worldview you thought you were tearing down; what starts as satire ends as propaganda.

Cubes and Ladders is a parser-based lampoon set in the target-rich environment of corporate America; as a fledging employee at photocopier-turned-financial-services-firm Minimax, you’re told that the report you’ve written for your boss is too short, simple, and buzzword-free to cut the mustard, and you’ve got to zhuzh it up before the noon board meeting where layoffs are the agenda item of the day (for some reason, the photocopier-turned-financial-services firm is struggling). For what appears to be the author’s debut game, there’s a lot of ambition on display – there are several characters with relatively deep conversation trees, a turning-point midway through that adds a whole additional layer to the story, a fun running gag about your character’s ability to detect the hyper-specific scents that mark out everybody else at the office, and a Vorple-based presentation that shows off a robust suite of AI-generated art (more on this last bit later).

The puzzle design is quite solid, with the game often hitting that sweet spot where it feels harder than it is. There’s a maze that mostly serves to just waste a bit of time and lightly poke fun at cube farms, a confrontation with an elderly security guard that unexpectedly solves itself, a multi-step puzzle to retrieve a branded baseball cap that’s just out of reach, and a mess-around-with-the-complicated-machine puzzle that again winds up being fairly intuitive in practice. Admittedly, they’re not all winners – there’s a guess-the-combination puzzle that I solved only by noticing that there was only one number written down anywhere rather than through any real sense of logic, and which requires some finicky syntax to input besides – and the fact that there’s a time limit made exploring more stressful than I’d have liked, but the batting average is solid, with reasonable clueing and satisfying aha moments.

Circling back to the implementation, though, there are some more flies in the ointment here. I wound up taking an expansion port right off a large machine that I’m pretty sure was meant to stay there, a fair number of non-scenery items aren’t given descriptions, and I experienced noticeable lag when inputting some commands (the game can’t be run locally, so could be I was just having a slow internet day, though). Provoking more hair-pulling is the fact that save, load, and undo appear to be disabled; beyond the time limit, it’s also possible to die in this game, via a pratfall that would have been funny if I could have just typed UNDO and not done the stupid thing, but which instead required a full replay and occasioned plenty of grumbling.

The AI art that’s a centerpiece of the presentation is also not up to much. It’s exhausting to have to recapitulate the broader conversation about LLMs and AI-generated art every time it comes up in a review, so I’ll just say that while I’m very much on the skeptical side of these debates, even folks far more comfortable with generative AI than me would have to admit that the pictures are a bit of a mess, showcasing impossible spaces and uncanny figures in a way that took me out of the game; the author mentions that the pictures were generated based on their own sketches, and I’m pretty sure I would have preferred just seeing those.

And not to bang on about the AI thing, but that brings me back to where I started, which is the question of what exactly Cubes and Ladders is saying. Look, I get that this is just a silly parser puzzle game and not worth getting too worked up about, but I’d be lying if I said the ending didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth. After spending the first half of the game trying to avoid being laid off while enduring lectures by all the other characters about how everyone was looking at me to innovate (there’s no dialogue option to say “I’m pretty sure I’m getting paid minimum wage, how about you do the ‘innovating?’”, sadly), I wasn’t too surprised when the back half moved from trying to save my job to trying to save the company. And this is presented as an act of regeneration, turning back to using engineering to actually create things again after the company founder’s failson decided to move into investment banking. Except the punchline is that the game-winning invention is a socially-useless arbitrage machine (it predicts stock fluctuations based on yesterday’s newspaper) – never mind that all you’ve done is figured out a way to move money around in such a way as to make rich people ever richer, at the expense of people who aren’t lucky enough to be able to pay for your prophecy engine, the ending straightforwardly fetes you for your accomplishment, rewarding you with a corner office overlooking a golf course and your former boss as your new assistant.

It’s an ending that could work to make fun of the empty cult of “innovation” that animates corporate America, but if this is satire, I admit I didn’t get it. Cubes and Ladders gets some hits in along the way against over-the-hill salesmen who get too excited for company merch and bosses who talk only in corporate platitudes, but these are glancing blows at best against capitalist ideology. I’m not saying I can only enjoy text adventures with an orthodox Marxist pedigree by any means, but if a game seems like it’s trying to say something, it’s hard to ignore when that “something” appears to be unquestioningly reinforcing an empty worldview – all the more so when it’s festooned with ugly and questionably-ethical corporate art.

I’ll close by emphasizing again that there’s a lot of promise here; the puzzles are good, the writing quality is solid, and modulo the ill-advised decision to eliminate saving and undoing the implementation mostly impresses. And once again, not every piece of IF needs to have a political axe to grind (god, that sounds like it would be tedious). But if you choose to write satire, you either go for the jugular or you risk looking like a lapdog.

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Renegade Brainwave, by J.J. Guest

Having just written a long review taking a game to task for its toothless satire, I come now to Renegade Brainwave, which finally has the gumption to set its lance at a real sacred cow: terrible B-movies of the 1950s, especially those made by Ed Wood. This is working in “loving parody” mode, though – from the overwrought narration to the main character’s penchant for cross-dressing, the game’s animated by a clear affection for its source material, warts and all, and wants nothing more than to share its enthusiasm with the player. The introductory narration, for example, comes from an undead circus-ringmaster whose words practically beg you to imagine the hammed-up delivery:

“Beware! Take care! For you are about take part in an interactive story that will reveal the terrifying truth behind the ill-fated Soviet space program! Revelations of incredible horrors that will terrify you with their brutal reality!”

“For this is the story of a mysterious force — a force that has crossed the billion-mile vastness of infinite space! Boneless, fleshless, almost invisible and yet imbued with incredible power — I speak to you of cosmic radiation!”

(Almost invisible?)

This histrionic voice is maintained in the game proper, where you step into the white vinyl go-go boots of a beat cop who’s been charged with investigating a mysterious meteor that’s cratered into the burial ground for local carnies, alongside your partner, an off-brand Ronald McDonald (I am not trying to be funny, this is just a straightforward description of the setup). The swamp-choked graveyard is home to all sorts of hazards and haunts, all described with a purplishness of prose that would put the ripest eggplant to shame, but there’s room for snappy jokes, too:

Pallid-faced with a shock of orange hair and a red nose, Donald is one of the more bizarre-looking officers in your precinct, topped only by Officer McGillicuddy who is a chimpanzee, and Officer McKenzie, a spoon.

The map is laid out in a compact three-by-three grid, and it doesn’t take much poking around to learn what’s actually going on: that meteor was actually a crashing Russian spaceship, and the cosmonaut, a Soviet cur – I mean she is literally a dog – has been given psychic powers by space radiation and now is working on a machine to create an army of the dead (again, this is just the plot, I’m not adding any additional wackiness or anything). Foiling her plans requires testing your wits against the living and unliving denizens of the swamp, from a giant alligator to a fetid bubble of swamp gas, and marshaling the talents of your often-uncooperating partner to boot.

The game’s wordy narrative voice does mean that I struggled at first to get into the rhythm of the puzzles; nine locations isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things, but some of them boast entrances to buildings, and all have long, dense descriptions that take some repeated reading to fully parse. Fortunately, they don’t actually have all that many implemented nouns, and the game’s pretty good about highlighting the one or two actually-interactive objects per area. While some of the challenges can feel a bit obscure, the fact that at any given time there’s only one or two puzzles you can make progress on paradoxically helped me focus my efforts, since it meant I could put all my brain-power to the question of what good the angora sweater I just recovered could possibly do me (beyond going nicely with my Mary Quant dress, of course). There were a few challenges that stymied me for a bit – including one that appears to have been added in an update to the game, and therefore isn’t addressed by the hint system or provided walkthrough – but close observation and a bit of trial and error were generally enough to come up with a reasonable solution.

Some of those solutions might be more challenging for beginning and intermediate parser players, though, as they center on ordering around your partner, Donald – I get the sense that the NPC, ACTION syntax isn’t especially commonly used, these days. Once I got the idea to try to leverage his skills, though, I found these puzzles were generally intuitive, though I think as a sidekick Donald unfortunately does leave something to be desired. For one thing, every turn you direct a bit of banter at him, and even though there’s a long list of random lines here, over the course of the game the well definitely ran dry, and the duplicative dialogue contributed to the feeling that location descriptions were exhaustingly long. For another, Donald often works at cross purposes to you, stealing your things, playing practical jokes on you, and generally being a nudge. It’s easy to recover from most of his hijinks, and I suppose the incompetent sidekick is a B-movie staple, but I still found it pretty irritating to be locked into a coffin over and over.

This is a somewhat churlish objection to a single element of an incredibly good-natured package. Renegade Brainwave wants you to have a good time, and if counterproductive slapstick is part of that package alongside over-the-top writing and cartoon-logic puzzles, well, I won’t presume to mess with the recipe. If you don’t enjoy the vibe of the source material, or don’t get on with fairly challenging puzzles, Renegade Brainwave probably won’t change you’re mind, but if you’re an MST3K fan who wants to go back to where it all started, this game’s got your frequency.

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Cycle, by alyshkalia/Tabitha O’Connell

I don’t know if I’m especially atypical in this, but every once in a while I notice how there are certain allegedly-universal elements of the human experience that I’ve actually never personally experienced. I went to a boarding high school, for example, so the prototypical John Hughes version of one’s teenaged years is unrecognizably exotic to me. Or there’s the fact, which is not unrelated to the prior point and is related, finally, to the game I’m reviewing, that I’ve never been broken up with. That’s mostly just a factor of having had fewer, longer relationships rather than because I’m some amazing catch or anything, and of course I’ve read and watched plenty of breakups from both perspectives, but the result is still that my primary personal reaction to breakup conversations is just wanting them to be over and done with, rather than replaying them over and over in my mind to try to find just the right thing I could have said to get a different result.

Boy howdy is Tiel, the protagonist of Cycle, not in that boat. This is the choice-based original upon which How Dare You is based, and among the myriad differences between the two is that in this iteration, you are nearly compelled to replay the breakup sequence, trying myriad different strategies and exploring the tides of cause and effect; Tiel is frankly like a dog with a bone, unable to let go and accept Heron’s word that their relationship has run its course.

Another difference is that where the parser-based version of this story presents it almost as avant-garde theater, a nearly wordless tableau where the scenery reveals the merest hints of the context of the fight and gesture and action carry the plot, Cycle is not nearly so minimalist. The opening narration here is three or four paragraphs that provide more information on Tiel’s living situation, what he enjoys about his relationship with Heron, and creates a spirit of optimism that’s suddenly ground to a halt by his soon-to-be-ex’s “we need to talk”, whereas in How Dare You there’s only a bare sentence or two before hitting that moment. And in addition to the backstory and detail, there’s a lot more dialogue – I got a much clearer sense of both Tiel and Heron this time, and why their relationship is probably doomed.

Cycle also does some interesting things with its gameplay and potential branching that I don’t think are mirrored in its remake, but they’re sufficiently spoilery that I’ll invoke the blurry-text for the rest of this paragraph: so the “cycle” of the title, and the esprit d’escalier that I understand often accompanies being broken up with, are made quite literal here through the device of the watch Tiel can use to rewind time and try again. I was really taken by surprise by this pot twist, delightedly so – I’d gotten a sense of why Tiel was a bad partner, but seeing him manipulate Heron via undetectable means, and reading the implication that he’s been doing this from the very beginning of their relationship, makes this story something far more memorable than a quotidian breakup. I also really liked that the game doesn’t just make every option available to you from the get-go; each loop adds only one or two new options, based on what didn’t work or almost worked the previous time. This means that there’s a sense of progression even as events are repeating: structurally, we’ve got a spiral, not a circle. And the possibility of reaching one of the endings is withheld long enough for the player to have no illusions about the stakes for their choice.

All told I have to say I enjoyed Cycle significantly more than How Dare You, though I respect its radically different approach. I’m also now very curious how I would have felt about it had I come to it assuming its characters are the same as the ones in this game; the subtle push towards making Tiel physically violent in the latter game makes a lot more sense to me now. Regardless, Cycle certainly stands on its own as well as being part of an interesting pairing – though it’s definitely cemented me in my belief that the best breakup is the one everyone walks away from as quickly as possible.

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