Victor's IF Comp 2025 reviews

Competitions IFComp
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Escape the Pale

For about 120 years, the Pale of Settlement was the part of Russia were Jews were allowed to settle; outside the Pale, Jewish residence was mostly forbidden. The protagonist of Escape the Pale is a Jewish merchant operating in this extremely antisemitic environment, trying to make a living by buying cheap goods in one place and selling them for more in another place. This is a well-known genre of game; and there is even a precedent for using it to do something different in IF Comp: 2018’s Let’s Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise which was… weird.

As a commodities trading game, Escape the Pale would leave a lot to be desired. The interface is both ugly and clunky. You can’t buy multiple goods with one command; your trading information disappears from view when you choose a destination, which is the very moment at which you need it; your trading information is extremely unreliable; and most bizarre of all, you cannot see at which price you’ll sell a good when making the decision to sell it. You’re always in the dark about the deals you are making, a strange fact which not even fictional antisemitism can explain. And while there are serious consequences to leaving the Pale, the game doesn’t so much as mention which cities are within it and which cities are outside. And of course you cannot save and restore. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone will play until they can buy a ticket to New York!

But Escape the Pale is not really a commodities trading game; it is merely using the trappings of a commodities trading game to instil a sense of dread, of unfairness, and of having the deck stacked very heavily against you. Trading is hit-or-miss. There is no feeling that you can shape your own destiny. Tickets to freedom are absurdly expensive. Antisemitic border guards can shoot you or your friends at any point. There’s a scene where you are given charge of your niece, Leah, and now you have a real goal: get her to safety. Having her around increases your expenses, and also makes it even more impossibly expensive to buy a ticket to freedom. And then, at random, she can be taken away from you by border guards to a fate that is probably worse than death.

When that last thing happened to me, I looked at the screen for about a minute and decided that, no, I did not want to play on. Who wants to buy ‘cases’ and ‘vodka’ and keep their fingers crossed that these might turn a profit in Kiev when their niece has just been abducted in a non-interactive scene that strongly suggests that no course of action will bring her back? So I quit. This is not a failure of the game. I’m quite sure that it is a success. This is the experience that Escape the Pale wants me to have; the experience of being a persecuted minority that the law will not help.

In many ways the game isn’t very deep or detailed. You don’t get a sense of Jewish life in the Pale; with only minor changes it could have been a game about an illegal immigrant trying to get by in the US, or a Palestinian merchant travelling the West Bank and trying to get through Israeli checkpoints. Perhaps that is also part of the point – in its abstraction, the game has something of the universal about it.

At the end, ‘Novy Pnin’ speaks to us directly. He tells us a story about being a professor who never dared to speak out about political and personal topics, and whose friends all warned him against publishing this particular game because it would draw unwanted attention to himself. Now he has emigrated from an unnamed country to another unnamed country, and he finally feels free enough to publish Escape the Pale, though still anonymously. (Novy Pnin, ‘new Pnin’, is no doubt a reference to the Nabokov novel Pnin about a Russian emigré professor.) This story rings fairly hollow. It lacks all the details that would make it believable, especially because I find it hard to imagine that anyone would expect Escape the Pale to be controversial.

I also don’t think that this fiction author’s autobiographical unburdening strengthens the game. Escape the Pale works well enough on its own, without a coda that tries to impress us with its seriousness.

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If you’re a participant, your IF Comp doesn’t really feel started until your game has been reviewed at least once – or at least, that’s how it felt to me. We’re almost to the point where all games have been reviewed, and to hasten it further along, here is a review of

Let Me Play!

I’m an extremely mediocre piano player, and even that might be praising myself too highly. Let’s just say that although I’d love to play Mozart piano sonatas, I can’t. Except for one – the Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major K. 545, which Mozart wrote for beginners. Lovely of him to do that. It lets me play. It also happens to be the opening music of Let Me Play!, which I found appropriate in a personal and idiosyncratic way.

Let Me Play! is a game made by a team that included writers, programmers and illustrators, and it shows. The production values are very high. The game takes place in a virtual theatre where actors get on and off the stage. There’s not a lot of action or movement, but the visual choices certainly set a mood; and there are nice touches, such as the bodies of the actors visually disintegrating as we move deeper into the game.

When it comes to content, this is a strange duck. The entire game is about a fight between the player and the game; or, perhaps we should say, between the player and the characters, the player and the game, the player and the writers – the player and whoever it is that seems to be in charge of the experience of playing the game. Because it is our player (our fictional player, of course) who wants to be in charge. The player wants to play, and repeatedly whines: Let Me Play! They’re not here for non-interactive experiences, nor for choices that turn out to be ignored. What they want is control.

Let Me Play! does everything it can to push the problems inherent in this stance. The player gets into a fight with the characters because they want to control their own lives; the player gets into a fight with the game because it can’t give them the freedom the player desires; and then, brought to the authors to complain, it turns out that the authors within the game are also unable to give real freedom and control to the player, because their dialogue has already been written two years ago and can no longer be changed. We’re all trapped in the work of someone else! Oh no!

Sure. But who exactly is the target of this argument? I’m sure there are some people out there who believe that great games put them ‘in control of the story’, without recognising that the real experience of control over a story would be that of sitting in front of a blank sheet with the freedom to write any word that you want. (And that’s not the freedom that these people crave!) But this is a fairly naive stance towards games and interactive narrative, and I don’t think it is at all prevalent in the interactive fiction community. Most of us are more than willing to abandon ourselves to the authors – the real authors – and see where that will lead. Interactivity does not equal control. Choice does not equal authorship. And the protagonist is certainly not ourselves.

So I agree with the argument of Let Me Play!, but it is a bit too easy to agree with it. The delivery is on the slow side, with timed text and, especially near the end, much repetition. I had a memorable playing experience, especially because of the great production values (graphics, music, interface), but the message of the game did little to challenge me.

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It was the second game I played in this IFComp. The first one was Uninteractive Fiction 2. Not a great start. But with the first one, I’ve been prepared what to expect.

Among many disappointing things in The Island of Rhynin the one which struck me most was this. I don’t mind playing an evil character. If the PC had to kill their companion for something like immortality or love or bags of money – I’d accept it and see what the game is trying to make of it. But when the choice is either to die or to become a (probably life-long) king of this extremely uninspiring island with extremely uninspiring «tribal people» – it’s practically Uninteractive Fiction 1.

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Rain Check-In

This is a great premise for a puzzle game: self check-in in some Airbnb type apartment. When I went to Lisbon for a conference this summer, the instructions told me to first open the main door with a code (and you’re always praying that it will work!), then get the key from the electricity cupboard, then pull hard on the door while trying to open it. I had to pull really hard; without that part of the instructions, I’m not sure I would ever have been able to enter! Now it’s easy to imagine a situation where the way to get into the apartment is a bit harder and the instructions are bit worse, and suddenly you are in core IF puzzle territory.

That’s what Rain Check-In is. A thunderstorm might start any minute, the check-in instructions have been mangled by horrible translation software, it is dark, and your phone is almost dead. Can you get into the house?

The game is small but mostly well-made. I had little trouble getting into the house, and in fact the mangled instructions were fairly easy to follow. On my first attempt I got a mediocre ending, because I had used the spade to open the lockbox, even though I had already found the dial. On the second attempt I used the dial and got the best ending.

My only real criticism is the dial puzzle. It doesn’t make much sense to me; as I understand this kind of combination lock, if you take out the entire part which allows you to set a combination, the lock will no longer keep the box shut. But perhaps it’s a type of lock I’m not familiar with. More importantly, the interface was rather obnoxious, especially when the game is played on a phone, with just too many commands required after you already know the solution to the puzzle. On the positive side, I’m happy that you could find the spade based on the photo alone, without having to turn on your lamp. That allowed me to feel smart.

The game achieved what it set out to do: a nice little puzzle game with a relatable premise.

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I agree that the temptation was mostly not there! :smiley:

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That passage and the title of Pippi’s father have been changed in later swedish editions by the Astrid Lindgren estate.

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High on Grief

(This is an expanded and changed version of the original review.)

Herodotus wrote, in The Histories 3.38, about how funerary customs differ from place to place:

The point that Herodotus is making is that everyone has their own customs, everyone believes their own customs to be the best, and that the wise man understands that there is no universal goodness of customs. Anyway, I was reminded of this passage by High on Grief, which starts from the amusing premise that Yancy the protagonist has baked brownies containing (a) weed, and (b) the ashes of their dead mother. Whom they hated with a passion. Eating the mother is an attempt at healing, an act of absurd vengeance, and the keeping of a promise made in youth to a friend while high on drugs. (Proving Bill Hicks right: “I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do.”)

It’s good that the game has a funny premise, since without it, it would have been rather grim. From what we hear, Yancy’s mother was an absolutely horrible parent, subjecting her child to years of psychological abuse. She seems to have had no redeeming features when it comes to the parent-child relationship. She had great relationships with other people, but the how and why of this is not explored in the game – the protagonist notices it, comments on it, and briefly discusses it with a friend, but the role it plays is to put the negative role of the mother as mother into even starker relief. High on Grief is not in the business of humanising the mother, or showing her as a complex and rounded character. It is in the business of eating her ashes.

While being high! That’s an aspect of the game that I did not mention in the original version of my review, but it is worth commenting on. Drugs turn out to have been an important escape route for Yancy in their youth; to get away from the abusive situation at home and all the stress that it put on them, they went to their friend Nekoni and smoked weed. Its almost as if the weed is in the brownies to counterbalance the ashes of the mother; to make sure that in eating, we incorporate her and escape from her at the same time. Perhaps that is exactly what grief is. We give that for which we grieve a place in our self, and by incorporating it, win back our freedom.

That the mother is not a complex and rounded character is perhaps to be expected, given the premise. Somewhat surprisingly, the same is true of Yancy. We never get much of a sense of who they are beyond the struggle with their mother. We do learn something. They’re agender, they are autistic, they went to college and found some amount of freedom there, they don’t want kids, they have a bunny, and most of their friends are on some kind of server but also available for phone chats. That’s something, but it’s not much for a game where we spend almost 100% of the time inside Yancy’s head while they are struggling with big emotions. The struggle remains somewhat abstract. It never, for instance, gets into specific memories of the mother. Perhaps this is part of the point that the game is making; that under circumstances like these, grief is abstract; that there is no room to bring in the specific. And perhaps it is for this very reason that we don’t have much of a sense of Yancy arriving at real self-understanding. There is not much healing going on here. Or maybe there is, and the game is just making the point that such healing takes a very long time, so that the short time period of the game’s fiction cannot show a measurable amount change. That would be fair. In fact, Yancy themselves is pretty explicit about it:

Getting closer to going to where you want to be is a minimal goal, falling short of getting closer to where you want to be. This is how tough the task is. Merely getting yourself turned into the right direction is already a victory.

The main gameplay loop is this: eat a brownie, think a negative thought, call a friend, be talked out of the negative thought to some extent. We repeat this until all pieces of the brownie have been eaten. There is something positive about the fact that the protagonist has a wide circle of friends they can call, and who are all willing to talk to them and give them advice. On the other hand, the protagonist doesn’t truly unburden themselves to their friends, and we often only learn from diary-like notes that the conversations have not been as helpful as they originally hoped. Yancy emphasises that they don’t dare tell anyone about the fact that they are eating the ashes of their mother, assuming that their friends, like the Greeks in the story of Herodotus, would be outraged.

These notes are curious. Some of them mention the fact that Yancy is in a game. A friend who is usually not very wise now give helpful advice, ‘like someone else was speaking in his place.’ Yancy wonders whether the game’s creator would reset them and erase their grief, and even comments on something that they said in an earlier version of the game but which has now been changed. Yancy and the Creator even seem to have had a conversation, perhaps many conversations. What to make of this? What is the relation between Yancy and the Creator? If the Creator is free to create, then Yancy has every right to be extremely angry with them*, for why did the Creator decide to give them such a traumatic childhood? But that’s not the vibe. Perhaps Yancy understands that they somehow stand in for the Creator; that the Creator had no choice but to use Yancy to express the burdens of their own heart. If so, they bear it without anger – an act of love at the heart of a strange fiction.

* I’m using ‘them’ as a neutral pronoun here because the Creator is not to be identified with the real author. I’m sure that Bez has had no conversations with Yancy.

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Fable

There’s a lot to unpack here. Fable is the story of a young man whose best friend was prophesied to kill a dragon, set at the moment when the best friend returns and is lauded as a hero. This is an interesting premise. Usually, we are the hero. It is far less often that we are made to dwell on the life of the hero after returning from the heroism – the most obvious example being, I suppose, the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings. And even less prevalent are the stories where we are the old friends of the hero, now forever relegated to non-hero status.

Okay, but Fable is also the story of a love triangle, for the hero is supposed to marry the sister of the protagonist, but the protagonist himself is also in love with the hero. Is the hero really in love with the sister, as his past behaviour seems to indicate, or is there some chance for a queer relation with the protagonist? And if the latter, how will the sister react?

But that’s not all, because Fable is also a story about a body snatcher. It turns out that the hero, Ronan, has not in fact defeated the dragon, and also that the Ronan who appears in the game is in some sense not Ronan. See, Ronan’s body has been snatched by a wandering soul, some guy called Jamie, who is using it for his own purposes. Prime among those purposes is… well, Jamie has been experiencing Ronan’s memories, and has fallen in love with you, with the protagonist, Kel. So Jamie directs Ronan’s body back home to strike up a romance with you. You can’t believe your luck, until you find out that Ronan is not the real Ronan; and also, that the real Ronan is still inside the body too, waiting to take back control. Meanwhile, your sister also understands what’s going on, and obviously she wants Ronan to get his body back.

That’s… a lot, as I said. It’s all original and inventive, and that’s a big positive in my book. But I also feel that all these different layers of the fiction are a bit too much for what the game then proceeds to do with them. See, after all this complicated set-up, it turns out that there is a solution to the central problem that makes everyone happy: Jamie occupies another body, of somebody who was dying anyway; Ronan and your sister get married; and you get into what seems to be a secret relationship with Jamie-in-his-new-body. That’s a bit too neat. And it leaves me wondering what the point of the whole body snatcher scenario was if we don’t end up exploring questions like: Do you fall in love with the body, or the soul, or the interplay of the soul and the body? What happens when you find out that the person you’re in love with is in fact a ruthless abuser? Could a polyamorous relationship in which two people share a body work out? Is it possible to fall in love with someone that person X is in love with when you literally look through the eyes of X? And so on and so forth; there’s a lot of stuff you could do with a body snatcher scenario, but Fable rushes to a happy ending without really asking any of those questions.

To my taste, the game also lacked interactivity, relying heavily on big texts with ‘continue’-style links underneath. There were some points with multiple links, but few and far between. This is no doubt very subjective, but I prefer a rhythm where my interactions have less text between them.

To add some important points to the positive side of the balance, the game is well-written and well-paced.

(I noticed two place where the author used an unfortunate turn of phrase, which can perhaps be edited. The first: “Stone erodes slowly. Sometimes, it takes centuries.” This is unintentionally comical in its underestimation of how long it takes for stone to erode. The second is where a character says that until now they saw life in black and white, and now they suddenly see it in colour. This simile is based on the history of photography, and does not belong in a pre-industrial fantasy world.)

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Hi Victor, I’m happy you liked it, and also that you find it relatable! :sun_with_face:
Your review reflects the kind of experience I tried to design!

For the lock, yes, it is exaggerated, but it is inspired by a true half-broken lock I had to deal with. It had number wheels but, it was like missing a part of the structure next to one number, so the last wheel was not properly fixed in place and could slide on the axis that kept them. To spin the wheels I had to keep pushing the last wheel next to others, otherwise none of them would move.

Hope the dial interaction didn’t ruined your experience, I liked a bit of hardness in commands (like recreating the feeling of setting the code on a stiff dial with scarce lightning), but I get the point, and I’ll keep it in mind for the future!

Did you have the same issue I have on mobile that requires to re-open the keyboard after every prompt?
This bothers me every time I try to play a parser online instead of using Frotz.

Last but not least, if you still have time, and you haven’t already tried, there is an alternative ending that begins going north to the bar! :wink:

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:rofl:

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I just played this one, and wanted to note that there are multiple possible endings—so the interactivity that is there does matter; while you can get a happy ending, several of the other endings I encountered were decidedly not happy.

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Thanks for the review Victor! Did you read the meta elements of the notes? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that aspect.

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That’s interesting, because not only did I have no idea of this, I felt that the game’s writing went out of its way to make it clear to me that the choices did not have an effect. For instance, there’s a moment where you can decide to tell your sister the truth or not. I decided to tell her the truth; but the text that resulted strongly implied that she already knew what was going on, even without me telling her. So I concluded that telling her or not telling her did not matter as far as story progress was concerned. I wonder whether this was intentional on the part of the author, or quite the opposite!

My review, then, comes with the caveat that if you take the path I took, the ending feels like a fairly facile resolution of an intriguingly complicated scenario. I’m happy to hear that there was more than met my eye!

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Thanks for pointing out that I neglected that aspect of the game, Bez. I’ve done some rather big edits to the review, and one of the things I did is that I brought in the meta-fictional element of the notes!

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Monkeys and Car Keys

Monkeys and Car Keys is a new school parser puzzle game: it’s unabashedly a puzzle game, not much interested in having character or story beyond providing a setting for the puzzle, but it is also very mindful about fairness and convenience and making sure that the player doesn’t get stuck much. It’s also, and importantly, both charming and well-made.

The set-up is this. You’re in the jungle, and after hours of searching you finally found your car again. That’s great, except that the local alpha primate has grabbed your car keys and is hiding with them inside a secret rock chamber. You need to get those keys!

In the first segment, which is the most original, you uncover three statues fitting the traditional monkeys of not seeing, not hearing and not speaking. Using your smarts you find a way to have one of these monkey statues translate the language of the actual monkeys for you, thus gaining the information you need to discover a further path. I liked how the jungle setting and these well-known icons, now so familiar as emojis on our phones, combined into a neat puzzle. In the second segment, you need to solve a few puzzles involving ropes and bridges; these were less original but worked well enough, and I enjoyed the fact that you need to collaborate with the monkeys to make it happen – this is a game where the NPCs are more frequently helpful than antagonistic. In the final segment, there is an antagonist, and violence turns out to be the answer. But you can only win by enlisting the help of others.

The puzzles seemed to have the right difficulty. I consulted the hints twice, but in both cases I’m sure I would have found the solution with more perseverance; it’s just that during the competition, I’m in a bit of a rush since I want to complete a lot of games. (For the curious, I had somehow failed to examine the monkey droppings, and failed to realise that the glasses might be useful to the monkey.) And the game has a nice tone. Even when you are using the monkeys for your own purposes, it’s always clear that they are enjoying themselves. There are even a few Easter eggs hidden in the game, such as when you ask the statue to translate a piece of language you cannot logically have heard at that point in the game.

Enjoyable fare.

(I ran into one bug where ‘say hua’ while on the column with the baby monkey led to a series of programming error messages. But the game simply continued, so it wasn’t a big bother.)

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Thanks for the review! And also reporting that bug. I’ll get it fixed and re-released shortly.

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Hi Victor,

Thank you for your thoughtful review! The reason I chose Zork for my choice/parser idea was precisely because it already embodied a lot of “Moon Logic,” making it the perfect vehicle for me to experiment with. It would likely be familiar to some older players like me, and hopefully put a smile on their faces when they see what I subverted it into; a coming together of parser and choice worlds.

The bizarre text effects were another matter. I wasn’t sure whether I should leave them enabled by default for IFComp or disable them instead. My intent was to drive home the point that “trying to please everyone means you end up pleasing nobody.” (Each time I come across generative AI in the line of duty, its cheerful tone sets my teeth on edge.) But it was a very heavy-handed way of doing so, and I can only hope it doesn’t count against me.

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Not so Happy Easter 2025

I’m not, personally, thrilled about returning to old-school parser experiences. I miss conveniences like being able to use ‘it’, and I don’t really like the ultra terse prose of games that had to fit in very limited memory. But I can roll with it when necessary. What’s more, I already had a ZX Spectrum emulator (Fuse) installed on my Ubuntu computer… so why not try Not so Happy Easter 2025?

And while this game is in many ways a very old school parser experience, it turns out to have been strongly influenced by more modern trends as well. The puzzles are fair. The game cannot be put in an unwinnable state! I struggled with the parser to some extent, and I definitely typed ‘L’ a few times when I did not want to load a save, but the experience of playing the game was mostly quite painless.

(The loading thing was very confusing, though. It seemed to load states that I had never saved, from way farther in the game than I had at that point reached. And it also did not load the same save every time, but neither did it give me a choice of which game to load. Nor could I determine where the save files were kept on my disk. Mysteries wrapped in enigmas.)

The premise of the game is this: you created an Easter egg hunt in the park for some local kids. But they disappeared! And now you have to find out where they are. Turns out that they have been kidnapped by an evil serial killer and you have to solve devious puzzles in order to save their lives. Very cliché, but it works. At first I thought the game was also going to lean into heavy cynicism – that’s the vibe of the first few paragraphs of text, and the first interaction I had with another person had the protagonist think some fairly fatphobic thoughts. But this vibe gradually disappears. By the time I was in the forest, I was quite enjoying the game’s funny touches, like the Kinder egg and the rubber ducky, and the mini conversation about stereotypical associations with the homeless man.

The puzzles were quite good too. I used hints a few times, mostly because of problems with either the parser or feedback. (You need to unscrew the light with a knife. That’s fine, but I think I should have gotten some useful feedback when I tried to do the exact same action with my credit card. And I was stumped when I had put the notice on the car, only to learn from the walkthrough that one should use ‘use on’ rather than ‘put on’.) But with a little perseverance, I think this game is solvable without hints.

And the ending was quite funny! An unexpected touch.

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I mentioned it in another post, but just to close the response-post loop, I’ve addressed the RTE you found and updated the site. Thanks again!

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Re: Not So Happy Easter 2025,

Summary

I don’t think I’ve saved children from a serial killer before by solving devious puzzles. I haven’t even done it without solving devious puzzles! I haven’t saved children from a serial killer before, period. I have perhaps saved myself from one by solving IF puzzles. I don’t feel the ground is thick with such premises or games, though.

It’s also true that, this being an 8-bit game, the premise doesn’t affect mechanics much. It sets mood and atmosphere and things in the player’s head.

-Wade

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