Let’s play some games. Let’s write some reviews. Let’s use this first post as a place to link the actual reviews. Let’s hope somebody has already made a spreadsheet.
My review philosophy is this: I want to give honest criticism that turns writers into better writers, and readers into better readers. Criticism is our shared project of improving the art form. That includes me – I often learn from other reviews, and it turns out I’ve missed important things and misjudged others. If I review your game and you feel I didn’t do it justice, DM me. If you think I did do it justice, also DM me! And everyone should feel free to react below and/or mention my review in their own reviews.
Reviews with an asterisk are longer and more substantial.
There’s a long tradition of interactive fiction games that live somewhere in the only vaguely delineated lands between magical realism, symbolism, and whimsy. These are games where things are not as they usually are, and they clearly have some Meaning attached to them, some role to play in a Story with a capital S… but where the canons of interpretation are too weak to actually bring us from the idea of Meaning to Meaning itself.
It seems to me that Dead Sea falls squarely into this tradition. We have extremely strong Moby Dick references, but they are tied to a love story, and to something about soul migration, and to an allegory of death, and there’s a freeze ray and water melons and a light house with a sphinx who wants us to say that this is a very satisfactory story, and we get a moral choice about killing a whale… and this whole motley crew of signifiers is sitting there, begging us to make sense of them. But what sense is there to make? Why is the code to the elevator 666 in a game that seems to have nothing to do with the satanic? Why does a game that is so brief not spend its time on deepening a few of its ideas, rather than throwing more and more at us, giving none of them the time to congeal into something more solid?
The puzzle structure was fine. Forgiving, easy, but fine. Each level is structured in a different way, which keeps the experience fresh. The puzzles get us through the story and makes sure we see everything. The world is full of hints, ideas, poetic elements. But we need to get to Meaning. And as far as I can see, we don’t. A competent start, but I’d love to see more coherence – possibly, though not necessarily, starting by giving us a protagonist with more individuality and more at stake.
Today I learned that in the USA, people below a certain income can get ‘money’ that they can only spend on food. They don’t get actual real money. They get some kind of currency and then the state, this supposedly land-of-the-free state, decides what they can spend it on. It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the contradictions here. Politicians in the USA are always inveighing against bad European socialism, because it doesn’t respect freedom. But let me tell you that in the Netherlands, there’s no such thing as ‘food stamps’. You just get money. And you can spend it how you see fit, as befits your status as an adult human being.
In the USA, the poor are not adult human beings. Their poverty shows that they are morally weak and cannot be trusted to make their own decisions in life. Outside, somebody is preaching the prosperity gospel. Above it all hovers the gold-plated spirit of Donald Trump.
Nathanael West, in 1934, mercilessly lampooned all this American Dream shit in A Cool Million, but somehow it still survives.
A Visit to the Human Resources Administration is more focused on the implementation problems of the social programme; on the hoops it makes people jump through, the problems it creates, the ways it doesn’t actually help the vulnerable. It uses the device of an alien to bring out the absurdity of the situation. This is a well-known recipe familiar from works such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. (There it’s not extraterrestrial aliens, but the idea is the same.) It is familiar because it works, and it works here.
The game is not groundbreaking; it doesn’t reach the humorous absurdity of the bureaucracy in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, nor the existential dread of a Kafka story. But it’s written by someone who knows the actual situation, and that makes it useful and interesting as a kind of documentary evidence. Plus: we can never complain when we are called to pay attention to those whose life is made difficult. A competent piece with a good message.
Yay, excited to see you’re reviewing again this year! Looking forward to digging into these once I’ve written my own, to see which of my views are obviously correct since we agree, and slap my forehead when you see stuff I missed
You need some inside knowledge to get this joke. I at first didn’t have the inside knowledge, but then I searched the forum for other reviews of this game… and that gave me the inside knowledge that I lacked! Because there is no way that it is a coincidence that on this forum, there is a thread called Fascism - Off Topic. Our author must have been tickled by that title. When, exactly, is fascism off-topic? When is it on-topic? What about some guy who is tormented by this question? Who is sitting there, just dying to talk about fascism, but unfortunately the conversation around him is about something else, and so his interjections about far-right politics are always off-topic?
Friend: “This Indian restaurant serves some pretty good vegetarian food!”
Guy: “You know who also was vegetarian?”
Friend: “Oh no, here we go again…”
This, but then as a Glulx game! Irresistible, of course. I fully understand the desire, nay, the necessity to make a game about a dude who is sitting in the metro listening in to an unknown couple having a fairly disastrous fight about infidelity, and wondering at which moment it could be just, just conceivably on-topic to inform them about the nature of fascism! Turns out that there’s no right moment. There are moments when it is on-topic, but, you know, it’s still not the right moment. There is no right moment for lecturing unknown people in the middle of a life crisis about the nature of fascism.
It’s a funny joke. The game is sloppy, with many obvious commands not understood (including ‘sit’ and ‘stand’). But look, it’s a throwaway joke. It’s one of those old games that you could only understand if you had been spending most of your free time on IFMud and the newsgroups, and which otherwise meant nothing. I’m glad it got made.
“It’s difficult to grow tired of artificial chicken.” If there’s one true sentence in this IFComp, then this is probably not it. But I found it hilarious, and 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS is full of small well-crafted details like that. At one point you go to a class that teaches the ability to talk in a normal way about sex, rather than being totally repressed about it as is normal in this society. The teacher says: “Let us start with oral practice. Repeat after me: Penis.” Hilarious.
But let’s take a step back and talk about sex, society, and intimacy. In Brave New World, the novel by Aldous Huxley, free love is the norm; more than the norm, it is seen as a serious social defect to either not engage in sex at all, or to have sex with the same partners too often. Sex has been turned into nothing but a fun activity. It has been drained of all the guilt and shame, but also of all its deeper meaning. This, of course, fits perfectly into a society that requires everyone to be a happy cog in the machine, all smiles, all surface, no hidden depths. There is no such thing as intimacy, because there is no distance between the inner and the outer. If the whole you is already reflected in a physical mirror, you don’t need to see yourself reflected in the eyes of significant others.
The world of 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS is at the other end of the spectrum, but as is so often the case, the spectrum bends around and its ends are in some weird sense identical. Here we have a world where sex has been excised – completely. It’s not just that there is no porn, or that there is only sex within marriage, or that revealing clothing is forbidden. There is literally no sex at all. Through a slow progress of censorship and repression and Bathroom Laws, the ruling Sensible Party has abolished sex. Perhaps children are born as they are in Brave New World, in factories. This is not explained. But certainly sex has lost its connection to intimacy and meaning, as it has in Huxley’s novel. It has, in fact, become extremely dangerous. Everyone in this society has so much repressed sexual energy that getting Turned On leads to spontaneous combustion. Fatal combustion. This is why people are not allowed to see anyone else before the age of 43, and even then they have to cover all of their skin area except the face when they go out in public.
This is not a subtle allegory, but NHB (as I will call the game henceforth) has no interest in subtlety. It revels in the absurdity of its premise and pushes it far and fast. Our protagonist is an investigative cop whose job it is to handle cases of sexual combustion. Clearly he (the cop is still thinking of themselves as male at this point of the story) is a highly sensual individual himself, avoiding death by arousal only by taking extremely high doses of an arousal repressing drug. There’s a little investigating in the beginning, just a little, and then – bam! – the game shifts gears. It turns out that the drug has turned the cop into a woman; what’s more, she now realises that that’s what she always wanted to be. And not just any woman, but a gorgeous sexy woman. What’s more, the cop is an exhibitionist and wants nothing more than to show off this gorgeous sexy female body to people, and she unconsciously exhibits herself to the first person who comes along, a food courier… who gets turned on and dies in spontaneous combustion. Of course, this will lead to a police investigation! But do we get into trouble? No! We get a chance to buy female clothes, and experience first-hand the thrill of wearing clothes in which we not only feel wholly ourselves, but in which we also feel really sexy. I felt sexy myself when playing this scene, so I though it was effective. (While I am perfectly comfortable with my male body, I would love it if we had a way of switching gender at will. Being just one gender is so restrictive.)
Then, the game shifts gears again. We become part of the revolution! And the leader of the revolution is our boyfriend! And we cum while he watches, perfectly fitting our exhibitionist desires! There’s also some stuff about classes, and organising the revolution… but then the game shifts gears again again. The leader of the Sensible Party contacts us and claims that he wants to adopt out entire programme! But we know that he will betray our principles, because he is not acting from real LUST, and so we kill him by doing our exhibitionist thing and fulfilling his sexual kink, which turns out to be getting a golden shower. And thus sex conquers all! Everyone lives happily ever after!
Its breathless, it’s fun, it’s well-written, there’s some good barbed satire about current events, and of course it is 100% a wish fulfilment fantasy. Waking up one day as the gender you’ve always wanted to be, looking far more sexy than you ever did, changing society into a sexual paradise, getting the man of your dreams, and all that without paying a serious price or even having to confront much difficulty – it’s wonderful. And if that was all that NHB was, it would have been a very fun game with good pacing, a highly original premise, and a happy ending that you can’t begrudge anyone.
But it’s not all that the game is. Just before the end, the ‘author’ breaks in and tells us about their worries and real-life problems. Drew’s recent topic about my game The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode has no doubt raised my sensitivity to the distinction between the real author and the author that appears in the game, but even without that it’s easy to see that the ‘author’ who interrupts the game cannot be the real author, Kastel. The ‘author’ tells us that they’re worried about making the game a happy wish-fulfilment fantasy, but okay, they’ll make it anyway, because some people will like it. Well, but that’s not the game that Kastel has made. Because the game Kastel has made is the one which also contains, in addition to the happy fantasy, these remarks by the ‘author’, which make the fantasy go *pop* faster than a balloon that is consummating his marriage to a cactus.
Here’s what the ‘author’ character writes about the game, after telling us about their own feelings of isolation as a trans person visiting Japan and not really getting near to anyone:
Now let me give my interpretation of what is going on here. The game itself, as a whole, is an allegory for a particular way of thinking about sex. The game is a story of wish-fulfilment, and the picture it paints of sex is also that of wish-fulfilment. You have an exhibitionist fetish? Alright, then good sex means masturbating while somebody is watching. You have a golden shower fetish? Alright, then finally fulfilling that wish by being pissed on is an explosive event perhaps worth dying for!
There’s an infamous interview with Bioware marketing guy David Silverman where he explains that in this game they’re making, if you press a button, something awesome happens. “So button, awesome, connected!” That’s what the picture of sex we just discussed is like. All I need is somehow who will press my buttons (whatever they may be), and then, bam!, awesome happens. My kink is the button, you press it, awesome! Button, awesome, button, awesome.
But when we treat sex as wish-fulfilment, it has little to do with intimacy. This can be fine; sometimes, perhaps, one just wants sex. But the desire for intimacy is both stronger and deeper, and it ties in with sexuality in ways that are messy, complicated, sometimes glorious, and sometimes full of all the difficulties of human relationships. Crucially, intimacy is never mere wish-fulfilment. It essentially requires a vulnerability that is more than physical; a working through of problems, both our own and those of the other person; and the terrifying work of self-knowledge. You can’t get it for free. Most people, and I certainly don’t mean to exclude myself, often settle for less than intimacy because we are too tired, too distracted, too afraid, or too hurt to do this hard work. On the other hand, even small moments of fleeting intimacy can be worth much; and we can slowly get better at being intimate, over time, with courage and hope and determination. This is the work of love.
The messy story of sex and intimacy within a relationship was the topic of my own 2023 game, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates. It used sex to get to talk about intimacy. In a very different way, NHM comes to the same messy story of sex and intimacy along the same path. Sex is used to get to talk about intimacy.
If there’s a message to take from this game, I think it is this: clearing the ground for guilt-free sexuality is important, perhaps even crucial. But it’s not by itself the royal road to intimacy. For that, we need to get beyond the wish-fulfilment fantasy, difficult though that may be.
I won’t try to barge into any discussions of my game as much as possible, but I’ll just say that Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates was one of the sources of inspiration for this game.
At first sight, The Breakup Game is somebody’s misguided attempt to console the heart-broken by letting them talk to a Twine piece. This Twine piece first makes sympathetic noises, then makes encouraging noises, and it ends up by forcing The Power of Positive Thinking down the throat of the reader. I’m fairly certain that it will be of no help to anyone who is going through an actual breakup. There is too transparently nobody who is actually listening to you – a website cannot take the place of a friend. Nor does it harness the power of experience sharing or fiction; there are no other people here whose lives and thoughts can illuminate your own. There are only abstract consolations, many of them as obviously false as this one:
If you believe that you are the sole writer, director and actor of your life, then I’ve got some theories about why you ended up with a breakup; but you clearly have no business being sad about it, given that you wrote, directed and authored it! The doctrine of ‘manifestation’ is a hard taskmistress; you pay for the illusion of total control with the terror of total responsibility and the pain of total isolation.
But look, The Breakup Game is not somebody’s misguided attempt to console the heart-broken by letting them talk to a Twine piece. This should be obvious from the title, which proclaims the piece to be a game. It should be obvious from the fact that it was entered into a fiction competition. And if you have any doubts, what about this message from the blurb:
This is deliciously absurd. Why would the heart-broken need achievements? How could achievements be relevant if you are experiencing something that is personal to you? (Only you.) As you play through the game, supposedly sharing your grief and trauma, achievements will continue to pop up. You state that your partner fell out of love, and the game does, bling:
Spoiler alert from somebody who wrote their MSc thesis on entropy: love and entropy do not, in fact, have an obvious conceptual connection. But more importantly, can you imagine talking to somebody about your breakup and while they give you sympathetic responses and tell you that your situation is totally unique and personal, they also hold up little signs with humorous messages classifying your experiences in pre-made categories? The entire game is an insane performance, an absurd parody of sympathy. Good thing it offered me infinity infinities of tears. But then it forced me to click
and man, I felt dirty expressing such a boastful lie.
Still, the game doesn’t forget to dispense the best general advice one can give to other human beings given that one knows absolutely nothing about them and has not been able to make the slightest amount of personal contact:
When a competition game labels itself the ‘prologue to a science-fiction story’ one fears that perhaps it will only be the fragment of a game, rather than a full game. On the other hand, You Cannot Speak also claims to have a play time of half an hour, which is substantial enough. So this could go two ways.
Unfortunately, it goes the first way. This is just a small fragment of a larger game, and the fragment by itself has nothing to tell us. We are given a situation (new colony on Mars), a plot kicker (waking up with no voice), and the beginning of development (when we meet two people). And then it stops. The whole thing takes maybe five minutes.
I’m afraid the author has misjudged the nature of the competition, which is meant for full games. This would have been better as an entrant of IntroComp, although even there I feel that we haven’t seen enough to give much useful feedback. One thing the author should think about carefully is whether the Nazi-themed shower scene is a good idea; this will depend on the rest of the game. It might be a brilliant idea, or it might be wildly inappropriate. This is the main thing I would be looking out for.
Technically, the implementation is competent, although the author should remember to make more of the chosen actions disappear from the generated game text.
In theory, Space Mission: 2045 does something interesting. The author explains that he was very disappointed by AI Dungeon, because you are just wandering around aimlessly in a world that has no persistent reality. I agree completely! And so the author wanted to make a game that uses LLMs, but not as the core driver of the story, but more as a sort of helpful GM running the scenario prepared by the human author. The LLM can parse commands, fill in details of interaction, and so on; but underneath we have the story written by the author and a persistent world model.
There are serious questions to be asked about how useful this approach could be. One of the nice things about parser games is that it is usually quite clear whether your command was understood and whether it changed anything in the world. Putting in an AI assistant to deal with commands that have not been understood might increase the believability and depth of the play experience; but it might, instead, just make gameplay less transparent and give the player a feeling of groping in the dark. It is to Benjamin Knob’s credit that he thought about this issue. One of the things we learn from the readme file is that the AI has access to information about the game world that has not been revealed to the player, so that text generated by the AI can reveal this information and be useful to the player. This could work well. I don’t know; but it’s something that is worth trying out, and Knob is here to try it out. That is to be applauded.
Unfortunately, playing Space Mission: 2045 is not a joyous experience. First, the AI is very slow. If I understand it correctly, the AI queries are sent to a remote server, which can be more or less busy. I don’t know whether I was playing at a particularly busy time – it was Friday evening in Europe – but I do know that responses often took 10 to 20 seconds, and sometimes more. Playing a game at this speed is, if not torture, at least an exercise in frustration. Even if the gameplay had been brilliant it would still have marred the experience.
Exacerbating the feeling of frustration are serious problems of game design. On my first attempt to play the game, I quickly landed my pod on Mars, then typed ‘exit pod’. The game gleefully told me that I had forgotten to put on my space suit and helmet, and therefore I had died in the vacuum of Mars. Game over! No way to undo.
This is the kind of cheap trick that we grew out of sometime in the 80s. Either you automatically have me put on my space suit, or you give me a warning before I exit the pod, but you do not punish my failure to read the author’s mind with an insta-death… that cannot be undone! This totally breaks the expected social contract of parser IF gameplay; and the fact that the game runs at a glacial speed makes things much worse, because now I have to sit through minutes of remote server queries just to get back to where I was.
I did decide to give the game a second chance. This time I went to Earth instead of landing on Mars. There, I was quickly captured by some fascist goons. After a fairly interminable scene in a prison cell – I could not for the life of me understand what the guard wanted from me, and the AI generated responses were not helping at all – I ended up before an evil emperor who somehow is using the New World Computing logo as the symbol of his evil empire. These scenes were cringe-worthy. Everyone was a cartoon villain, shrieking, laughing evil laughs, gleefully telling me about my execution;tiring stuff with the cliché dial turned up to eleven. And it turned out that it was all part of the worst GM trick in the book: railroading me back to the pre-made adventure. The ability to go to Earth was an illusion. I was condemned to execution, but instead of being executed, I got sent back to Mars, with my onboard computer once again suggesting that I land there and nothing changed from the initial state of the game!
Since not all my readers may have experience with pen-and-paper roleplaying games, I want to explain this a little bit more. Pen-and-paper games have always had this promise that you can do anything. You’re a character in a world, and you can do whatever that character wants! And that might be true in certain systems. But it cannot be true in systems that have a Game Master and require this GM to prepare, often with a lot of labour, an adventure for your characters to have. If the GM prepares an adventure in the lair of the necromancer, and tells you that your character meets a desperate woman whose child has been kidnapped by the necromancer… then you’d better go after that necromancer, or the entire gaming evening collapses.
Now it is very possible for roleplaying groups to get into dysfunctional states where the players don’t feel like they have real agency, and where they instinctively react against the implicit wishes of the GM, perhaps by making up plausible in-character reasons for not going after the necromancer. And now the GM might feel forced to, I don’t know, have the characters kidnapped at night and then wake up in the lair of the necromancer, because that’s the only way he can get them into the adventure he has prepared! This ‘technique’ is called railroading. It is BAD.
There are many ways that roleplaying games can avoid this horrible pitfall, and I’d be happy to discuss them if someone is interested. But railroading is a phenomenon that I had never yet seen in interactive fiction. Authors don’t need it, because as an author you are not giving the player options that will take him out of your prepared story. You can’t turn back and go home in Zork and spend your afternoon gardening; and so the Zork authors don’t need to think of a way to get you back from your home to the white house above the Underground Empire. But what if you use AI to expand the realm of the possible? Now suddenly it might seem as if the player is going to have so much freedom that he can start doing things that have nothing to do with your story. He can go gardening. And so, perhaps, we need to railroad him back in…
So, there I am, back on Mars. Having learned from previous experiences, I wear my suit and helmet, and go out of the pod. I’m on a big plain. I type “go south”.
And that, dear reader, was another insta-death. Apparently I wandered around for a long time until my oxygen supplies ran out and I died. I have no idea how this intention to just keep walking forever was implicit in my command to go south, but that’s what the game did to me. Even in the 80s, only particularly evil games worked like this; nowadays, that’s just a fundamental betrayal of the social contract between parser authors and their players. Having once again been kicked in the teeth by Space Mission: 2045, I gave up on it.
Continuing reviewing games that have not yet been reviewed, here is
Your Very Last Words
I did not know about the Ten Tragic Days, a sad episode in Mexican history when a democratically elected president was forced out of power and then killed by power hungry generals with the help of – you’ll never guess this – the United States ambassador. In Your Very Last Words you are one of the soldiers who fought for the president, and now your enemies are about to execute you. You get ten minutes to think about your last words. Now open your eyes.
When you open your eyes, you see the firing squad, and you can’t think. Best close them again.
With you eyes closed, you can think. Think about the failed attempt to rescue democracy. Think about yourself. Think about your wife and child. Think about your parents. Think about what your life has meant. Think about your fellow soldiers. Think about the enemy. And especially, perhaps, think about what your very last words will be. It’s all a matter of choosing one of three options in a choice menu, where you can in addition choose to remember some of those options as potential last words.
After ten minutes – ten real time minutes, I believe – the sergeant comes back, and you get to say your last words. They change nothing. You are shot and your body is fed to the dogs.
This was an interesting experience. The idea of death looming gives much more significance to your thoughts. The idea that some of these thoughts might be your very last words, and that you have to choose wisely, gives gravitas to every phrase – you are ‘tasting’ them all, trying them out, seeing how they work in isolation. I believe that some of the seriousness you feel comes from knowledge that the historical situation is real. You’re sort of trying to do justice to those who actually fell. That’s weird, but I think it’s true. If the scenario had been more fictional, it could not have had the same impact.
On the other hand, this only brings us so far. Our protagonist remains fairly unknown to us, and his thoughts remain abstract. The interface is clunky: for some actions you need to use the keyboard, for others the mouse, and this kept distracting me. But look, I got to think and to feel and I got to learn about Mexican history. These were twice ten minutes well spent.
I do not have much fondness for Zork. It’s historically important, and some of its puzzles hold up. But the setting and atmosphere do nothing for me. It is random stuff taped together by geography; whimsy without humour and humanity; prose written by people who have nothing to say.
And so it’s very hard for me to understand why people would want to write games set in the world of Zork. See, I’m already not a huge fan of fan fiction set in, say, Middle Earth – but I can understand the appeal of inhabiting Tolkien’s deeply conceived and deeply realised world. But fan fiction set in The Great Underground Empire? It is the least inspiring of fictional worlds! And even less appealing are parodies of Zork. There’s nothing to parody! The original authors were already just doing random stuff with an ironic grin on their faces, so what can you do except repeat that very pose?
All of which is just to say that I was pleasantly surprised at Moon Logic. It starts off as a Mystery Science Theatre version of Zork, which sounds, for the reasons set out above, as a terrible idea. Of course you can make sarcastic comments about Zork, but they’re hardly going to improve the experience – especially because we already know everything that is wrong about the game. This is old, old news. And making sarcastic comments about a ‘parodic’ version of Zork is even easier and even less rewarding.
But it quickly becomes apparent that Moon Logic is something else. Yes, it is a recreation of a small part of Zork. But the ways that it differs from the original are crucial to the gameplay. Instead of a parser game, this is a game where you have only a few options to choose from. Crucially, you can never choose from more than four options, corresponding to standard parser commands. But the command you need might not be among them! And so a totally new kind of puzzle is created, where you have to exhaust certain commands in order to make other commands available. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. An additional layer of puzzles is created by the fact that you also cannot choose a noun. And so you have to exhaust the nouns as well, with all the complications this engenders. I thought it was a really fun idea. The MST-like comments quickly turn into helpful hints about how to use this system. All in all it just doesn’t outstay its welcome. The game should not have been longer, but for the length that it had, it managed to entertain me.
Navigation is worth a special mention. In his One King to Loot Them All, Onno wrote a purely linear game where you can only go forward… most of the time. In Moon Logic, we once again have a purely linear game, and a ‘Go’ command that doesn’t take a noun. And so you always only go forward, until you can no longer do so, and then you only go backward, until you cannot do that any more, and so on. There are a few openable and closable barriers in the game, and you’ll want to use them to your advantage! Fun, original stuff.
I enjoyed this game quite a bit more than I had expected. I could have done without the bizarre text effects. As a parody of AI, they are not really on point; and they made the experience of playing Moon Logic unnecessarily difficult. Of course I could have turned them off, but I was hoping they would turn out to be an integral and cool part of the experience. They were certainly memorable, but in the end I just wanted them to stop. I should also mention that the interface of the game is slick. A well-made, light, but original game.
Not very vast, mind you. It’s, like, about five minutes of play time, and either one or two days of game time. Those days are spent gathering some resources and taking some rather obvious decisions until
They’re tribal people! And they’re wandering about! Because that, I suppose, is what tribal people do? What else could they be doing? They’re definitely not governing themselves, because they got some non-tribal dude to do that for them. And your non-tribalness is enough to make you the perfect heir of the king, the perfect next king, at least if you’re willing to kill you crew mate for the privilege. It is not very clear why you would want to become King of these tribal people, rather than returning to your own country and your loved ones; nor is it clear why the game is telling me that I will become the next king even though I entered my name as ‘Elizabeth’. But that’s what it is.
I’ve been adopting a joking tone throughout this review, but I think that’s better than taking the game seriously. Taken seriously, one would perhaps have to be outraged at its portrayal of non-Western people, and its facile, even unthinking use of the colonialist white-guy-is-adopted-as-king-of-the-natives-because-they-recognise-him-as-obviously-superior plot. Better to just shake one’s head and walk away.
(When I was reading Pippi Longstocking to my children, I definitely changed the passages where her father is described as ‘King of Negroes’; an obvious title to attain for a white guy who washes up on the shores of an island inhabited by black people, apparently. But Astrid Lindgren wrote in 1945, not in 2025. Still dubious, but not quite as tone deaf.)
The programming is competent, and there’s a fine use of stats throughout. The game would have been more interesting if one’s choices had been less about finding the optimal path, and more about influencing the way that the story unfolds.
