This will be where I put my reviews for The Inaugural IF Review-a-thon! With the first one hopefully coming tomorrow. And I’ll throw in a reminder that you can sign up to sponsor me or any of the other reviewers here.
Edit: Thank you @sophia for the lovely banner!!
Someone Else’s Story by Emery Joyce
This game was written for the 2022 Goncharov Game Jam. While I am 100% out of the loop on the Goncharov meme, beyond knowing it exists, that fortunately didn’t stop me from comprehending or enjoying this short game. You play as Sofia, whose backstory remains largely a mystery beyond her being under the thumb of a mob boss. Tasked with getting information out of Katya, the wife of Goncharov (said boss’s rival mobster), at a party, Sofia studies and chats with her but is ultimately left with more questions than answers.
Throughout the game, optional links provide more information on people or situations mentioned with brief, evocative descriptions. The choices that exist are which dialogue options you say to Katya, ranging from flirtatious to apologetic, direct to subtle. Which you choose will determine in part the content and tenor of your conversation, especially its ending. I enjoyed replaying to see the different possibilities and gain a little more insight into Katya each time, seeing her and Sofia connect, however briefly, in different ways. In one variation, a line from Katya directly alludes to the title: “This isn’t our story, Sofia.” But while these women may be on the periphery of men’s rivalry and violence, the game itself centers their experience, with Goncharov never making an appearance. Well-written and compelling, this is an excellent little bite of a game—like Sofia, I’m left wanting more.
Museum Heist by Kenneth Pedersen
I enjoy this sort of item-gathering optimization game (someone on IFDB has dubbed the genre “Verdeterrelike”), and I had fun with this one! A brief introduction explains that you’re at this museum to steal the famous “Mon Alicia” and then grab as many additional items as you can in the next 10 minutes before you leave. Like other Verdeterrelikes, it’s meant to be replayed multiple times, so on my initial playthrough I took my time examining everything I encountered, exploring the museum to see how big it was and understand the layout (ADRIFT’s automapper was helpful for this, although not strictly necessary as the map is quite simple).
Every action you perform takes 15 seconds, and you’ll need to be efficient if you want to maximize your score. Acquiring all the items requires solving small puzzles revolving around access and transportation. If time runs out before you’ve manually escaped, the game has you escape automatically—at the cost of dropping everything you’re carrying. So you have to make sure you leave enough time to go through the departure steps after grabbing your items. A single playthrough is quite quick, and I was sufficiently motivated to replay many times in order to keep increasing my take (ultimately hitting $681 million, which I was happy enough with despite knowing a higher score is possible).
The game was made over a brief time period, which shows a bit as there are some rough edges that could be smoothed out. Every turn takes 15 seconds, whether you successfully perform an action or not—so typos and commands that don’t work will cost you as much time as anything else. I also encountered a bug in one playthrough where I was able to do an action I don’t think was supposed to work (pushing the Corvette Stone into an adjacent room without the wheelbarrow), because when I tried the same thing in subsequent playthroughs I was told it wasn’t possible. Still, for anyone looking for a quick little optimization puzzler, I recommend checking this one out!
WHOM I SHOULD LOVE ABOVE ALL THINGS by Sophia de Augustine
This is a brief excerpt from a longer work-in-progress that packs a lot into its short space. We, the readers, watch the scene unfold in third person as two long-separated men reunite in a confessional booth. Their dialogue has script-like formatting, most of the work a conversation with brief pauses for description. Said description paints a vivid picture of the two, deftly characterizing them through both their appearances and actions. We’re told none of either one’s backstory or their shared history, but are left to infer it based on their conversation, which is sufficient to provide a strong sense of who each is—Andrey, charming and flippant; Joel, earnest and emotional—and why this reunion matters to them.
The religious aspect is well-employed, both to hint at what drove them apart—Joel is a priest, while Andrey has lost his faith—and to serve as an analogy. The work’s title is taken from a Catholic prayer, which when excerpted at the end is cast in a new light by what we’ve just seen play out. A hint of sacrilege, delightful in the deep meaning it gives their relationship.
There are no choices in the piece; the reader simply clicks a link on each page to continue, with the short length of the pages encouraging you to linger on each, taking in the richness of the writing, processing each beat of this emotionally fraught moment as it unfolds.
Thanks for the review - glad you liked the game 
Yes, it could probably do with a more thorough polish!
Not Just Once by TaciturnFriend
I played Not Just Once back when it was first released and enjoyed it then, but encountered a few bugs. Having just played the updated version, I’m happy to report that my experience this time around was bug-free! Both on my original playthrough and again today, I found it quite compelling from the get-go; there’s a very moody vibe to it as the PC walks home in the snow on a January evening, preparing to eat a sad corner-store meal, and soon it takes a mysterious and somewhat spooky turn. (I found myself reading parts of it in the voice of Jonathan Sims from The Magnus Archives, which was delightful.)
Early in the game, the choices are about characterizing the PC—do you find Christmas lights still up in January charming, or irritating? What type of ostentatious shoes are your favorite? (Later, there’s also an appearance customization section, but it subverts expectations in several ways; clicking “skin color” does not actually allow you to choose a skin color, and the things you do get to choose have an immediate, very effective payoff.) We’re never told much about the PC outright; there are hints at your past, and apparently you knew going into it that today would be difficult, but the reason why, whatever happened prior to the game’s start, is never revealed.
Players also get to help shape the PC’s reality in an interesting way, going beyond looks or fashion choices. When a stranger tells the PC the two of you have met before, you get to choose if she seems familiar or not, and whether or not it’s possible that you had the encounter she describes. For these reasons, I felt somewhat distanced from the PC the whole time, like I was co-crafting them more than playing them, but that wasn’t a bad thing; having all these different options made it feel like the game was full of possibilities, and I was eager to explore them.
After playing several times, I definitely have a favorite ending, one that felt most fitting with the game as a whole. Multiple times throughout you’re given the choice to pursue/continue your odd encounter or give up and just head home, and continuing was the most rewarding to me; heading home (alone) at any point feels like it cuts the game off early, and leads to an ending I found less satisfying than what I consider the “main” one.
Two minor mechanical things—this is a stretch-text Twine game without an auto-scroll function, so constantly having to scroll down after clicking a choice was a bit annoying. The other is that the game doesn’t properly restart if you click the “end” link, which returns you to the beginning screen, and then click “start” again; if you do this, the game still remembers the appearance choices from your prior playthrough, and you don’t get to pick new ones. To fully clear the slate and start fresh, you have to click the “restart” icon. But these are small complaints about an overall rich, intriguing game!
Suspended in the air so that all of your weight is concentrated on a single point halfway down your spine by Charm Cochran
This is the second of three games (so far) in Charm’s RGB Cycle, all of which were made for this year’s Neo-Twiny Jam, which had a length restriction of 500 words (not counting code). I definitely recommend starting with the first entry, not because this one can’t stand alone, but because playing it within the context of the first adds a layer to the experience. In this trilogy, each game builds on the previous one to recontextualize what came before it and what you think you know about the characters.
But on to the actual game! It’s very stylish, with a nicely presented introduction screen (containing instructions for playing and a cast list) and making good use of color throughout, presenting each character’s dialogue in a different color in order to distinguish them. The opening lines set a sinister mood that ramps up as you realize what exactly the PC’s current situation is—I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say that you spend the game trapped in a dark room. Reminiscent of Abigail Corfman’s A Dream of Silence, you have a range of available actions—looking, speaking, and moving—which result in more information and/or different outcomes as you repeat them.
The pacing is excellent, with conversations overheard from outside your prison conveying the passage of time and adding to the suspense. The game uses its small word count very effectively, and because of the several options always available to you and the different ways they build on each other, you likely won’t see all the text on a single playthrough—and while the game always ends the same way, there are at least two variations on the ending. After my first playthrough I replayed it immediately to see what I’d missed.
I won’t say much more due to the risk of spoilers, but it’s a great little horror game. The two moments of peak horror for me: There is a point where your choices are “Crawl”, “Scream”, or “Bleed”, and damn, that reveal at the end.
Small bug: after I’d already found that the door was locked, “Look around” gave me the text “Maybe if you swing to the door, you can get it open.”
It can’t be true it mustn’t be true by Charm Cochran
Following on my last review, I’m now reviewing the conclusion (for now) of the RGB Cycle!
First, while I didn’t call this out in my review of the prior entry, it’s true of all three games: the cast list is a great introduction to the characters, introducing the two or three people who appear in each game with two positive and two negative adjectives, giving you a sense of who they are without giving away any of the games’ secrets. Like the others, this one also has a nice UI, again with a great use of color and starting out with a well-done emulation of a messaging app.
In contrast to the slow build of the prior installment, in this one you’re given the details of the situation—and the possible danger you’re in—right away, immediately establishing tension. Other notable contrasts are that you have much more agency (or at least, there’s the illusion that you do), but instead of choosing actions to do/try, you’re picking nouns to engage with. The game has a mini world model and is focused on exploring your environment, and there’s even a small puzzle (although you can finish the game without solving it). This entry clearly belongs with the two previous games while still having its own distinct type of gameplay. As I said about #2, the range of options the player has in such a short game is impressive—while, as in the prior installment, it always ends the same way, there are variations to the ending (I found three) depending on what you do or don’t do during your playthrough.
While technically this is a review of the third game, the rest of this is thoughts on the cycle (as it stands now) as a whole. As such, it has major spoilers!
You may have noted that I didn’t review the first game; it wasn’t as striking to me as these two, mainly because it feels like necessary setup before things really get going in #2. As I said in my review of that one, each game builds on the previous one to recontextualize what came before it and what you think you know about the characters. Each has a different PC; the one in the first game is the current wife in a Bluebeard scenario who kills her murderous husband and escapes. However, in the second game this same woman is the villain—she murders that game’s PC, and has been doing the same to any man who gets too close to her daughter. “Men are horrors, every one,” she says in seeming justification.
When playing this entry for the first time, this statement reads as a misguided belief based on her traumatic experience with her husband, with the PC an innocent victim who we have no reason to believe deserved this. But in the third game, we’re taken back in time and shown that he’s actually a serial killer—he’s the villain now, with a new PC as his hapless victim. Just as this man is reframed, so is the woman from #1 and #2 yet again—maybe she was entirely justified in taking out her daughter’s fiance! Of course it’s much less black-and-white than that, but I loved how I was made to rethink her character twice over the course of the cycle.
It’s an excellent linked series of games. All three feature a PC trying to get out of a dangerous situation alive, and all have only a single possible outcome—someone always dies. In the first one—the only one with a woman PC—you succeed, but in the second two, you don’t. Two of the games have a serial killer meeting his end, both killed by the same woman. In the first one, a man threatens a woman’s life, but ultimately she kills him. The third one has a presumably queer man killing another queer man. The trilogy is playing with the idea of victim and perpetrator—anyone can be either, or both—and showing how context-dependent our judgments of who deserves to live or die are.
I know there are a few more games to come in the cycle, and I’m curious what they’ll do to change my view of these three and their characters. Will we see more of the PC from #3, or the daughter from #2? She feels like a foil to the Bluebeard character from the first game; him clearly evil, a perpetrator only, her clearly innocent, solely a victim. But will we learn things that call her innocence or that of #3’s PC into question? I certainly look forward to finding out.
DOL-OS by manonamora
DOL-OS is less a choice-based game and more a hypertext exploration game—or more specifically, a “found document” game, with the documents consisting of computer programs, web browser history, images, music, text files, log entries, etc. Being given this trove to explore was compelling, even as at first I was very confused about what all the things I was reading/seeing had to do with each other.
The lovely UI does a lot to create immersion—it’s a great faux computer interface, complete with a green CRT emulation, a variety of icons, and different looks for different programs. The pacing is handled well, with puzzles gating the content you’re meant to see later, meaning the tension slowly escalates as you learn more specifics about who this computer belonged to and what they were working on. There’s one point at which it’s clear you’re getting to the meat of the game, and pieces of what you’ve seen earlier start connecting, until finally you have the full story—and the full horror of it. And there’s still one more twist after that…
`The moment where you realize that the AI is still present, and you can interact with it, was a great one—perfectly chilling after all you now know. The conversation with it was a little bit of a let down to me, though. Here you get a list of questions you can ask, which you can lawnmower through—picking one doesn’t lock you out of any others. However, some of those options lead to sub-menus of questions, and typically you can only ask one of those before you’re shunted back to the main menu. I didn’t see any in-game reason for this, and would have liked to be able to ask all the sub-questions. There’s also, as wolfbiter’s review mentioned, the fact that you don’t get to pick every piece of dialogue from the PC—some back-and-forth happens without your input, which was a little jarring because up until that point, there hadn’t really been a PC, just me, the player. Also, when given the choice at the end, I didn’t see any reason why I’d want to save the program—the game certainly gave me no evidence it was at all a good thing!
I liked that most of the links are keybound—i.e., there’s a little number next to each, showing that you can press that number on the keyboard to open that link. But there were a few hiccups with this system; not every clickable option on each screen is keybound, on one screen there’s a “10” option instead of a 0, and some parts of the game simply can’t be played via the keyboard. I also discovered only after completing the game that there are in-game hints accessible only from the keybinding menu—not sure if I missed something at the beginning indicating they were there? Finally, I don’t want to be a dick about translated games, but the text could use a final proofreading pass to clean up typos and errant phrasing.
Despite my quibbles, I definitely enjoyed my time with the game; it was fun to progress, solving the small puzzles to unlock more text and finally learn the answer to the mystery. And a game about the perils of trusting in AI too much feels very timely… (ETA: Of course, LLMs like Chat GPT aren’t actual artificial intelligences, while the one in the game is, but it was still impossible for me to not draw the parallel while playing.
Captain Piedaterre’s Blunders by Wade Clarke
I love rats, and I enjoyed Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder (both when I first played it and after replaying it today in preparation to play CPB)—so I was primed to enjoy this short spoof game, and enjoy it I did! You play as the titular Captain Piedaterre, a rat captain with a distinctly different approach to life than your brother Verdeterre’s. Discovering exactly how this game inverts the conceit of Verdeterre is part of its charm, so I’ll include the details under spoiler tags below.
First, a note about the interface: this is a choice-based game implemented in Inform 7; there’s no typing (unless you choose to hit number keys to choose from the list of options), just hyperlinks. Overall it works well, with the two caveats that the blue link text on the black background doesn’t have great contrast (an issue that’s worsened if you replay, as all the links then turn to dark purple), and that the autoscroll is very jerky. There’s probably a better way to describe it, but the result is that each link click results in a rather jarring movement of the text.
Now on to the actual game! With the PC’s latest ship sunk, he washes ashore near the house of a pirate who happens not to be home. The gameplay has you searching the house for loot, of which there is plenty—but it’s not the actually-valuable items, like a diamond or a Fabergé egg, that you want; rather, the things that are treasures in the PC’s eyes are items like a broken chair leg, a black banana, a dust bunny. While taking each of the actual valuables is presented as an option, clicking those links will simply tell you why Captain P. doesn’t want them. The gimmick of “ignore the jewels, the garbage is the real treasure!” was amusing, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome; once you’ve collected all seven items (with no time pressure or optimization-replays needed), you’re whisked out of the house to “the one and only end”, where you show off your haul to your baffled brother.
Without the context of CVP, this game might not make much sense or be particularly engaging, but the contrast between the two made it a humorous experience. And while there are indications that Captain P. is meant to not be very bright, my interpretation—as a former pet-rat owner—is that, unlike his brother, he’s a much more typical rat, drawn to hoarding bits of junk. My rats wouldn’t have cared about a diamond, but they would have loved an overripe banana! Other things they liked to steal and hide included pens and dog toys. So the rattiness of this game brought an extra layer of enjoyment to it for me. (I also have to shout out the Bop-it joke—for whatever reason, it hit me just right.)
Thanks very much Tabitha, and I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I agree about the unsatisfactory scrolling of the text. The game was made as a prototype for an Inform choice system, and one of the big design challenges turned out to be how to present this kind of material in the Inform display. Often you’d make a choice and not even be able to tell, with your eyes, that the screen had moved. So in this game, I threw in some forced scrolling (by microscopic delays) to try to help.
I didn’t advance much on these interrelated tech problems, but because I never delivered this system for public consumption, I ended up not having to 
-Wade
Ok, I need to go back and replay these three, because I so thoroughly missed the explicit, non-thematic connections. I’m still not sure about them, tbh, despite the compelling case you made in the dropdown! In particular, Act I seemed completely of a historic time, whereas Act III had cell phones. But this interpretation has definitely piqued my interest to replay.
When technology allows.
This gave me pause as well, but this statement from the intro screen of each act sold me in the end!:
Characters are color-coded, and will retain their colors throughout all acts.
Hanna, We’re Going to School by Kastel
There’s a lot going on in this game, as you’ll see from the length of this review! I’ve played multiple other IF works by Kastel, and this one was quite different from the rest—it’s longer, less tightly focused, and has more characters and dialogue. I wrote a lot of notes while playing, and screenshotted multiple passages to look back at later, which was great as I love when a game gives me a lot to think about.
The premise here is: you’re Jing, a high school student and closeted lesbian who is accompanied everywhere by the ghost of one of her former fellow students, Hanna—a trans girl who committed suicide after being bullied. (We learn her full story slowly over the course of the game, through asides where Jing remembers different pieces of it.) Besides Hanna, Jing doesn’t have any friends at school, and is pretty miserable there. The gameplay is guiding her through this particular school day as she sits through classes, witnesses another student being bullied, and gets singled out by a popular girl—Clara, one of Hanna’s bullies—chatting with Hanna on and off the whole time.
Jing is never directly bullied in the conventional way—no name-calling, no mean-spirited pranks. But players can still quickly see why she hates school so much. The bullying she sees is toward fellow student Harold, who’s mocked for a love poem he wrote to Clara and is later tricked/coerced into reading it on stage in front of everyone. Having to see someone else be treated like this while those in power do nothing to stop it, all the while feeling complicit for being a bystander, spurs thoughts for Jing about the bleakness of the future—the same people who rule the world of high school are going to grow up and rule the world outside it, too, and there will still be no place for people like her.
Jing has much less of a reaction to Clara throughout the game. Clara makes many creepy, fetishizing comments about Jing being Chinese and how desirable that will make her to men. She even goes so far as to try to set Jing up with her counterpart, the school’s lead male bully. But despite these conversations/monologues clearly making Jing uncomfortable, she has a crush on Clara. She listens to Clara without comment, disassociating through the worst of it and never reflecting on the racism in Clara’s remarks. The lack of acknowledgment by Jing upped the awfulness; dealing with things like this is normal for her, just one of the many miserable aspects of high school.
The game’s four endings vary a lot, and they depend on one choice you make early in the game and one at the end. In the first ending I got, after telling off Clara Jing feels emboldened to tell Hanna how she feels about her—that she loves her. This gave their relationship throughout the game a solid arc, with their bickering and disagreements and support of each other culminating in this affirmation of what they mean to each other. After all Clara’s invalidation of both Hanna and Jing, they validate each other as queer people. It’s a lovely moment, and ends the game on this hopeful note of “the world sucks, but we can support each other.” The same vibe is present in the ending where Jing encounters Harold in the rain after school and shares her umbrella with him. She goes on to talk to him about how she wants to make a space for people like him, her, and Hanna, those sidelined by society.
The other two endings are quite different. In one, after Clara goes on a transphobic rant where she misgenders Hanna and uses her deadname (represented by a series of dashes), she kisses Jing. Jing’s immediate response is to be “intoxicated” by the kiss. After this, Clara has a complete about-face; apparently she was only nasty to pre-ghost Hanna because she was jealous of Hanna’s friendship with Jing, wanting Jing for herself. Now, suddenly, she feels bad about how she treated Hanna, and her transphobia is forgotten: “ ‘Hanna is a really nice name,’ Clara says, ‘I wish I could call her that.’ ” Upon realizing Hanna is actually present, Clara says she’s sorry, and Hanna tells Jing to tell Clara she forgives her.
This is a lot all at once, and it’s hard to believe from any of the characters—that Clara would have this sudden change of heart, and that Jing and Hanna would forgive her so easily. Well, Jing does specifically say that she doesn’t forgive Clara, but she also says, “you’re hurt. You’re just hurt in a different way from Hanna and me. I don’t want to ignore that. You may have harmed me and other people, but you are also a victim trying to survive.” In a way, it’s the extreme version of the other two endings—the solidarity of suffering people coming together, including the one who was the cause of the suffering, because guess what, they’re suffering too.
Now, contrast all that with the final ending (well, it’s labeled ending 1, but it was the last one I got). In this one, Jing beats Clara to death with an umbrella. Yup. (Aside—I love how the umbrella can be either a tool of connection OR a tool of violence.) It’s so different from the other three endings, with a catharsis not present there but at the cost of any sense of peace or future okay-ness. Was it worth it for? “You feel alive for the first time,” the game tells you, and “Freedom is a privilege immersed in guilt and violence[,] and you don’t want to squander the precious little you have.” (This line feels more broadly applicable, too, for example with Hanna having to kill herself to be free.)
I wrote in my notes while playing that these two endings in particular felt like fantasies—the bully is actually gay and in love with you; you get to murder the bully. In the author’s afterward, which you can read if you see all the endings, they say that that’s exactly what they were aiming for: “The routes all involve the fantasies I had: the violent escape, the free romantic, the camaraderie of the oppressed, and forgiveness. They’re all fantasies Jing and I wished for.” Placing these four endings on equal footing didn’t entirely work for me, though; while the first two felt plausible for these characters within the world of the game, the second two didn’t. Fantasizing about killing a bully is one thing, but actually acting on it is another; I could see Jing giving Clara a couple good punches, but brutally beating her to death seemed a bit extreme. I think the other ending is even more implausible, with both Jing and Clara acting very counter to what we previously saw of them.
These two endings, and some other moments throughout the games, felt so exaggerated/unrealistic that they jarred with the emotional beats that did ring true. But these choices make more sense in the context of the game’s creation, as it was made for a horror game jam; the murder ending, for example, feels very fitting for that genre. But I think perhaps the jam origin was a detriment to the game; it could still effectively—perhaps more effectively—showcase the everyday horror of high school without the more extreme elements. (Another downside of its having been made quickly for a jam is that it could use another round of edits to clean up typos and some rough patches in the writing—some of the dialogue especially felt a bit clunky.)
Finally, some more technical notes: the width of the text area is inconsistent from page to page (wider or narrower depending on the line length), and the position of the sidebar moves along with it, which was a bit visually annoying. I also hit a rough spot when I reached a passage containing about 70 single-word links—this is fully on me, but I struggled with figuring out how to proceed here for a lot longer than I should have, as each link seemed to go to the same single-sentence passage, which then routed me back to the many-links passage. Turns out there is one correct word to click, which seemed obvious once I knew I had to look for it (I ended up asking the author what I had to do to proceed 
), but my struggle there realllly killed my momentum on that playthrough (to the point that I initially gave up and started over, only returning to the choice that yielded that passage after I’d gotten all the other endings). But one gameplay design choice I really liked was the option you get after finishing a playthrough to jump to the pivotal choice points, so that you can see the alternatives without having to fully replay.
So yeah, this was an interesting game—clearly it gave me a lot to talk about! In the Afterward, the author mentions possibly returning to this cast/setting, and I would certainly love to see what results.
Hello, and thanks for effectively reviewing this one for a second time (!) and for instigating the whole review-a-thon. And apologies for this very belated reply as I’ve been somewhat awol with life/work things.
I can’t help but be pleased that you read this one so much as it was intended, but I’m also grateful for those remaining bugs to find… I really like the stretch-text effect but will consider options… feel like it’s necessary for ease of reading that the new text appears where the eye is on the choices but maybe there’s something that could make it work better after that.
Thanks again!
A Mouse Speaks to Death by solipsistgames
In this game, you play as a recently-deceased mouse who’s been given the opportunity to recall your life before Death takes you away. Each round (a single playthrough is comprised of eight), you have a choice between three possible memories, presented as cards with titles and brief descriptions. The game’s paratext says that there are a whopping 46 of these total! I’ve played through five or six times now and have still only seen 26 (I didn’t always get new-to-me cards, and sometimes purposely chose repeat memories so I could make different choices within them).
As I often do, I’ll start by talking about the UI, which is lovely; it includes a non-standard font that I still found perfectly readable, as well as lightly drawn background art depicting the space where the mice live, complete with cute isopods. There’s also a menu with a glossary and a handy setting to change the font size (although it took me a bit to realize that it existed, because the isopod drawing that opens it blends into the background a bit—and I’m pretty sure the font resets to the default every time you replay, which is a bit annoying). And in the interstitial sequences there’s an illustration of Death themself, a fittingly skeletal, hooded mouse. I wrote recently that I don’t care a lot about art in IF games, but this is a nice touch, elegant in its simplicity, and allows Death’s dialogue to be presented in speech bubbles. It helps set the “conversation with Death” mood better than text-only would, I think. Certain memories also trigger the addition of significant items to the background art, which was both fun and useful as my subsequent playthroughs began to blend together; these unique illustrations were good reminders of what important memories I had experienced that go-round.
I quite enjoyed the storylets themselves, too. The worldbuilding is great—details like the mice having a fungus farm and Floki the Tinker helping make mobility aids for your daughter particularly stood out to me—and you learn more and more on repeated playthroughs; it’s also fun to see NPCs recur in different memories. There’s a good variety to the memories, too, with spectrums from adventurous to domestic, solitary to social, nature-focused to human-focused. As mentioned, within each memory you have several choices, too, which help characterize the PC. I found the game emotionally engaging, in both the general poignancy of looking back on your life, and in specific moments in the memories—such as my friend Mip dying because of a choice I made, and the storylines about having pups. I enjoyed the experience enough to play multiple times, and intend to play more to uncover the hinted-at larger plot!
There were some things that made it less smooth than it could have been, though. There are typos throughout (never anything major, but fairly pervasive); several terms I went to look up in the glossary weren’t there (“nest rot” being one); and on my first playthrough, I thought I was getting accidental repeated cards when “Nestmouse” kept coming up after I’d already picked it (I did later discover that it’s just that this same title is used for several different memories, though). Another thing is that in the middle portion of the game, the interstitial dialogue with Death gets repetitive; I would have liked if it varied more. And then I’m torn about the adjectives that appear at the end based on what choices you made in each storylet—in a way it’s a nice summary, and I enjoyed the contrast or even contradiction between them—even mice contain multitudes!—and the way that illustrates your growth/change over time. On the other hand, each memory being summed up by one or two adjectives seems a bit reductive, and the animation of the words dropping away was much too slow.
My other main critique is that I wanted more of a sense of continuity. The author explained here that you’re getting one memory for each year of your life, but I hadn’t realized that while playing (although I’ve since noticed that it’s kind of indicated by one line of Death’s dialogue), as there wasn’t a sense of the arc of a life; the memories didn’t necessarily seem to build on each other, save for a few that were clearly unlocked by having seen a certain prior one. While on the one hand I liked the isolated snapshots, how you’re picking out these few individual incidents to reflect on, the lack of continuity was jarring sometimes, with the endings of some memories feeling like cliffhangers that never resolved. I might prefer a structure where each set of memories you get to pick from is related in some way to the prior chosen memory, as I think the playthroughs I enjoyed most were the ones that had more of a throughline.
Finally, this is the tiniest thing, but as a rat lover I must protest the portrayal of rats as speaking in broken English! Rats are very smart, and having had both pet rats and mice, rats are definitely the smarter of the two. But all my quibbles aside, it’s an impressive and well done game, and I’m certainly going to return to visit some more mousey memories.
Thank you for the review! I am sorry for the typos … I tried so hard to find them, but I guess I failed.
I have also had both rats and mice, and mice are as dumb as bricks. Even dumber than gerbils! But these mice have a higher opinion of themselves. 
Chinese Family Dinner Moment by Kastel
I played this game last year when it was first released. Replaying it today, I found it even shorter than I remembered, which I think speaks to the punch it packed on that first playthrough. I remember starting it up and trying the usual initial parser commands—“x me”, “inventory”, “x [mentioned noun]”—and trying to reply to the woman who’s speaking to the PC, only to find that most commands have been rendered ineffective. The descriptions of you and your inventory are brief and atmospheric, but the responses you get when you try to speak, examine anything, or travel in any direction are all explanations of why the PC can’t or won’t do those things.
It’s of a piece with Rameses and other games with an agency denial mechanic, a game where the point is what you can’t do rather than what you can. Figuring out how to advance CFDM’s story as the parser rebuffs you at seemingly every turn (both through custom error messages and the Inform defaults—rewriting the latter or remapping those commands to the game’s custom catch-all message would take the polish to gleaming, to borrow from JJMcC) could be considered a mini puzzle, one that’s satisfying to solve even as discovering the solution brings on a sinking sense of despair.
This constrained parser format is an excellent choice for conveying the protagonist’s circumstances and frame of mind—they aren’t going to push back against their situation at all, no matter what the player might attempt to have them do. The title is apt, as this really is just a brief moment, a snapshot in this person’s life, but one that’s rendered effectively enough to be visceral and memorable. I felt for this nameless protagonist and understood their choices, even as I wished they would stop sitting back and accepting the harassment, racism, and transphobia happening around and to them.
Taking the one alternate choice you can make, simply leaving the restaurant where this is all going down (by typing “quit”), is just as unsatisfying as playing through to the end, which I think is the point. There aren’t any good choices here; maybe, under the looming specter of familial obligations, disassociation and passivity are the best you can do.
Lysidice and the Minotaur by manonamora
Disclaimer: I playtested this game back before it was released. But today was my first time playing the published version! I love that it includes so many non-essential-but-very-nice-to-have features, like the introduction about how to play, including the command for starting a transcript—it drives me up a wall that every parser engine has a different transcript command, but the pain is much lessened when I’m told upfront what it is! Also immediately notable are the lovely stylistic flourishes, includes the meandros border (thanks to JJMcC for the new vocab word!) and the use of color to differentiate commands, clickable links (another handy feature), the PC’s thoughts, etc. Items and directions are also always listed in a status bar at the top of the screen and are clickable from there, so all in all it’s very user-friendly.
I also found the parser especially user-friendly. I often struggle with Adventuron’s parser, but this game understood everything I wanted to do on my first attempt (okay, it probably helps that I tested it, meaning poor Manon received documentation of all my struggles lol). The one time I ran into an issue was when talking to Daedalus; I was writing commands like “tell him about [thing]”, but he kept replying with a custom “I didn’t understand you” message. I thus thought I was phrasing my commands wrong, or hadn’t yet done something that was necessary to unlock the next conversation, but it turns out I needed to type “ask Daedalus about [thing]” (which I finally discovered by turning to the walkthrough). I also think I ran into a bug with Eriboea; I thought I’d done what I needed for her to talk to me, but she still wouldn’t, so I couldn’t complete her part of the story.
A nice thing about the game, though, is that multiple aspects are extra—Eriboea and Icarus are both present as NPCs and each have their own little storylines (I remember doing Eriboea’s when testing the game), but they aren’t necessary to win. So I was able to complete Icarus’s like the completionist I am, but wasn’t stuck due to being unable to finish Eriboea’s. While walking back and forth in the maze did get a bit tedious (although I did more wandering than I needed to while trying to get un-stuck on Eriboea and Daedalus), fortunately there’s a downloadable map which I made good use of.
But now let’s talk about the story. In short: I love it. I love that it makes the monstrous minotaur into a loving friend to Lysidice, and I love that her motivation throughout the game is her love for him; she wants to escape the maze with him so that he’ll stop getting hurt protecting her. The first sequence in the game has her tending his wounds, complete with a kiss on the forehead at the end. Throughout the rest she makes valiant but fruitless efforts to push/move/lift heavy things, and the minotaur always steps in to help. It was very sweet, and a nice subversion of the myth. I also enjoyed Daedalus and Icarus’s brief roles, and the dramatic irony of their ending. While, stripped down to the basics, this is a medium-dry-goods parser puzzler, the framework around it makes it so much more.
(Transcript attached with some typos/minor bugs noted!)
transcription_Lysidice_and_the_Minotaur_08-2024.txt (117.9 KB)
