Fascism - Off-Topic
Was not expecting this to be a joke game from the title! I only learned from Mike Russo’s review that it’s an in-joke, and a pretty obscure one to base a game on. It does a great job of evoking the feeling of sitting on a subway while forcibly-eavesdropping on an argument. While you can’t do anything (save for the single command INTERJECT or INTERRUPT, the environment is saturated with character detail and a few IF references. At the risk of over-analyzing, it seems like the characters already live in a fascist society. The “white, male, patriotic” PC might not even have the level of political consciousness to think of himself as a fascist–it doesn’t affect him, so why would he need to think? His facile analysis that fascism is “uncertainty and fear” (contrasting with the definition in the game description) is on-topic for the conversation, but completely fails to engage with the society he’s actually living in.
Your Very Last Words
And speaking of fascism… this is a very dark piece in which you play as a young man about to be executed in a coup for supporting the democratically-elected president Madero (or not, it doesn’t matter to the soldiers). As Juan ruminates on his life, family, love, and political activities, you can save snippets of his thoughts as “last words” you can choose to say right before he dies. In my playthrough, they were “God has abandoned us, but I am not afraid.” Continuing on the theme of waiting-as-gameplay, regardless of how long this takes, you have to wait ten real-life minutes for the officer to come back and give the order, eyes open or closed, listening to the sound of the rain and your own whimpering. Switching between keyboard and mouse felt a bit clunky, but overall very evocative.
A Murder of Crows
Cute concept, you follow an entire murder of crows throughout their day. You only have enough time to pursue one plot thread, as far as I can tell. On one playthrough I figured out what happened to Penny, a girl favoured by the crows, and on another I got a dog loose before hitting time. I will confess to struggling with the crow argot–it wasn’t always clear whether I had solved my objective or not, and I based it off of what tasks were described by the ending. I think the crow “dialogue” being offset in some way would be useful.
Let Me Play!
Let Me Play! is about the player watching a play called Let Me Play, whose characters are played by the Let Me Play players. There are what seem to be dialogue options on the screen, but attempting to select them gets you in trouble for interrupting the play, in the course of play. The proceedings gradually unravel in their fictionality, and you can make more choices. Of course, the choices are determined by the game, so in a way you still don’t have a choice, especially if you wouldn’t pick these ones. Maybe that was the point? Nice design and music.
The Little Four
A slice-of-life tale from the later years of Poirot and Hastings. Set in their apartments on a rainy day, the background details are lush with character notes and novel references to pick up on. Their warm relationship came through more than in some of the books. The title is riffing on The Big Four (complete with allusions to the generally-recognized worst entry in the Poirot canon), but I felt like The Little Four was directly in conversation with Curtain, the final Poirot novel. Spoilers for both that book and the ending of this game: The false suspicion cast on Hastings’ children, the culprit, and the growing awareness of Poirot’s advancing age all foreshadow these characters’ final outcomes. It almost felt like a trial run, so to speak.
I had slightly mixed feelings about how the mystery was implemented: To find the item you’re looking for, you have to examine most of the bolded objects in the apartment, leave, come back, and examine it again. There is a good in-universe reason for this–in fact, it’s the only way for it to be solvable–but I think a dogged player who took the objectives prompt seriously could get really stuck here. (Which, by the way, I thought having an objective in the header was incredibly useful.) A fun outing that may make you very emotional if you read a lot of mystery novels.