Tabitha's RaT 2026

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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Better late then never, finally starting my Review-a-thon reviews! First up…

Trenchline by JJMcC

This is a tight, focused game set in the trenches during a war—the first game with that setting I’ve encountered! I will confess that I tend to dislike war fiction (war is horrible; I don’t need stories to remind me), but this piece isn’t actually focused on the horrors; rather, it uses that backdrop to create some neat little puzzles and a compelling reason to solve them.

It’s hard to establish a crisis mood in a parser game, and in this one, while ambient messages every few turns mention the explosions ringing out overhead, their repetitiveness and lack of impact on the gameplay made them fade into the background quickly. But the descriptions of the immediate setting really captured the place, with succinct and evocative images such as:

An unknown liquid has turned the bottom dirt to muck, requiring a haphazard layer of pallets to provide flooring.

>x pallets
The pallets have half-sunk into the mystery muck at the bottom of the trench. It would take heavy pry bars to move them.

These kinds of details really made it feel like this game could be set nowhere else, and while it feels weird to say I enjoyed inhabiting this space, I did like experiencing this unusual IF setting.

I said above the game is tight; I didn’t count the number of rooms, but it was quite low (five or six?), with typically one significant object to find and collect in each. Because the possibility space was so small, some of the time I felt like I was stumbling upon the puzzle solutions (“I need to extend the reach of this wire—I guess the tripod must be for that since it’s the only item I have left?”) rather than actually figuring them out. On the other hand, I also turned to the hints twice (for tuning the radio and for looking at the back of the code page); having them built-in and context-dependent was much appreciated! And on the third hand, making the series of radio calls required to secure my escape was very satisfying.

In all, it’s a well made little game that’s much better than it had to be given its origin as a programming exercise to learn TADS. In my own learning-Inform game, I just made a simulation of a few streets in my neighborhood. This is much more imaginative and fun to play!

12 Likes
2

A Garden of Impossible Objects by SkyShard

This piece hit me hard emotionally both when I first played it last year and when I replayed recently in preparation for reviewing. Having had a death in my family a few years ago that reminded me in several ways of the death at the core of this work, I felt a strong resonance with its depiction of how it feels to be left with unanswered questions in the wake of an unexpected death. And more particularly, how visiting the deceased’s house—getting an intimate glimpse into the life of someone no longer living—can create more mysteries than it solves.

The story is told by an unnamed teen; the deceased was their aunt, Carmen, and they visit her house with their mother, Carmen’s sister. The two lived far apart and don’t seem to have kept in touch regularly: the teen narrator barely remembers Carmen, and the mother doesn’t initially display, outwardly at least, a strong reaction to her sister’s passing. There’s not even any mention of a funeral. The narrator and their mother make the journey to Carmen’s house solely (purportedly, at least) so that the mother can pick up some things Carmen was storing for her. This means the narrator sees the house and all its quirks, from the garage Carmen turned into a combination wood shop and greenhouse to the funky art pieces Carmen created and scattered around her yard, only after Carmen is gone.

As this is a horror work, the mother’s apparent stoicism doesn’t hold as the two explore deeper and deeper into Carmen’s space, encountering unexplained things like a basement full of party streamers and mail addressed to someone the mother has never heard of. The mother is seeking those old belongings that Carmen held onto for her, but no matter where she searches, basement to bedroom to the maze Carmen created on her property, she can’t find them. She remains convinced, though, that Carmen wouldn’t have thrown the stuff away, telling herself and her child that she knows Carmen would respect her possessions because she knows Carmen, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Seeing the mother’s grief bubble up and spill out through the eyes of someone who doesn’t understand it and can’t relate made it hit all the harder. The story is told over a backdrop of colorful edited photos and digital paintings, not trying to realistically capture Carmen’s house and yard but very effectively creating a mood. The mother sprite, and the changes it undergoes, was a visual highlight as well. (I just wish there was a “history” feature, like Ren’Py has, so that I could have referred back to earlier text.)

6 Likes
3

Bael’s Rock by Alex Halver

Unmarked spoilers within!

I want to start with the caveat that this isn’t the kind of IF I’d normally play; I’m interested in the early days of the medium, but not so much in modern games that hearken back to them, and I generally like a strong story to go with my exploration and puzzle solving. So I am not the target audience for this one, but I still wanted to give it a try!

First, the presentation is very nice—it’s a clean layout with text encapsulated by boxes over background images that set the mood of each chapter perfectly. An inventory pane on the left side is a nice touch, and during one puzzle, a handy reference pops up in that sidebar too.

One aspect of the UI that didn’t work as well for me was the separate box for command responses. The room description always remains static in one box, but then all the other text cycles through the other—so you type a command, get a response, and then the response disappears (relegated to the text history, which you can view with a click) after you enter the next command. I found this a bit inconvenient when there was a description of something that I wanted to refer back to frequently, and this setup also requires a LOT of pressing enter—the response text was often broken up into two or more pieces, with an enter press required between each pair.

I also found myself fighting the parser at times. One example:

You can see a glowing blue object.

>x blue

You can’t examine that.

>x glowing

You can’t examine that.

>x glowing blue object

You can’t quite make out what the glowing blue object is.

>get it

You can’t get that

>get glowing blue object

You can’t get that

The first part of this sequence primed me to think that I had to type the full name of a thing to interact with it, but then the full name didn’t work when I tried to take, rather than examine, the object (the correct command turned out to be “get object”).

There were other points where I struggled due to a lack of cuing. For instance, in the first room you’re collecting pieces of a cube, guided by a four-line poem. I thus assumed I needed four pieces, and kept looking after finding three, but actually three was it; I learned this by re-examining the fragments, but I would have expected to be told I had them all upon collecting the third.

I did enjoy that area (Chapter 2), though, especially the moment when I tried, certain it wouldn’t work, putting my amulet in a lion statue’s mouth as a way to get rid of it—and that was actually the puzzle solution! The mirror area in chapter 6 was another highlight, with the portal being a fun mechanic (although I used the walkthrough for the exact wording—I didn’t remember what the game had called the place where I dropped the sword, and it didn’t accept “chasm” or other synonyms that I tried. And I had no idea at all how to refer to the room where the sphere was).

In other areas, I leaned pretty heavily on the walkthough. In Chapter 4, for example, the game had cued me to be afraid of the toad, so I would never have guessed that purposely making him angry was the solution. I was also a bit disappointed by the final puzzle because it was so repetitive and, I felt, unintuitive (I’d noticed the beast always lost focus after I dodged, but because it then immediately prepares an attack as usual, I hadn’t interpreted that as a cue to attack it); it didn’t feel like the strongest note to end on.

On the other hand, I liked the ending twist about our mysterious guide and the player character’s fate. And the environments were fun to imagine and inhabit; the steampunk flying bridge, the firefly torch, the rotating room, were all memorable and cool. Some of the issues I brought up are definitely a matter of taste, and some good playtesting would smooth out the others.

3 Likes