Haha don’t worry - I get it! Genuinely thank you again for trying it and taking the time to write about it!
Definitely learned from your review - also really helped emphasize to me how important the context is!
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Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade
You know what’s my thing? 17th century opera! Okay, I admit that that’s overselling it. In no way am I an expert about 17th century opera, nor do I listen to it that much. I’ve been listening to Vivaldi’s operas lately, and that’s more early 18th century. But I do put on Monteverdi with some regularity, and the Spotify playlist that came with Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade was right up my alley.
This is the second game by Lamp Post Projects that I’m playing in this competition, and it’s easy to recognise the similarities to the other one, The Path of Totality. There is the slick interface; there are the really nice hand-drawn character portraits; there’s a general atmosphere of niceness; and there is optional romance. But they’re also very different games. Fantasy Opera is a detective game. There’s a real crime afoot, and so there’s a dastardly opponent with an evil plan, which means that the general atmosphere of niceness is much more circumscribed. I enjoyed the tensions this brought more than the more laid-back approach of the other game. There were also random dice rolls in an RPG style skill check system, including protection against save scumming. (Yes, I tried.)
As players, we have to solve the crime before it is committed, and this requires us to piece together the puzzle pieces and formulate a hypothesis. I liked the set-up, but found the implementation didn’t quite work. (Major spoilers start in the next sentence.) I had realised exactly who was going to commit the crime, and how, and why. The one thing that I wasn’t entirely sure about was who was going to be robbed; none of the evidence I had found seemed to specify this. But since I had some evidence that the criminal might resent the duchess, I chose ‘the duchess’ and the victim of the crime. Now when I tried out this hypothesis, the game would tell me not that I lacked evidence about the intended victim, but that I lacked evidence about how the criminal wanted to use the instrument. But I didn’t! I knew that part of the story perfectly! This stumped me, and I resorted to ‘casting a magic spell’ – after which, yes, of course, I reloaded my save and proceeded. But the feedback given by the game should be different in situation such as this.
Nevertheless, this hardly impacted by enjoyment. Fantasy Opera is a fun game, based on serious knowledge of historical opera performance, and I’d happily recommend it.
(Merely parenthetically, I do wonder after these two games what the point of the ‘fantasy species’ is? They all seem to be, well, extremely human? We are given no story about social structures of oppression or exclusion that would make it logical to introduce non-human characters for story reasons. Surely they’re not just there for the pointy ears and tusks and other bits of cosmetics? But I can’t think of anything that would change about either Fantasy Opera or The Path of Totality if everyone were turned into a human.)
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Uninteractive Fiction 2
Confession: I quite enjoy the Epic Rap Battles of History episode where three Western philosophers battle three Eastern philosophers. It’s very vulgar, and ‘Eastern’ could just have been ‘Chinese’, and it’s doubtful whether Sun Tzu is really a philosopher, and the interpretation of all of these thinkers and traditions hardly even reaches the point of being shallow… but it’s still fun. “Bitch, I authored The Art of War, so you better get your guns out. These white boys getting burned, 'cause, guess what, now the Sun’s out!” Great lines.
I bring this up only because at the end, instead of just the usual question ‘Who won?’, which appears at the end of all Epic Rap Battles video, this video shows another question: ‘What is winning?’ This is the deep question that Uninteractive Fiction 2 is asking. No answers are forthcoming. But that’s great, because it leaves the door open to a further sequel, and hence to more money being made!!!
As far as I know, there’s only a single other Epic Rap Battle that does not end with ‘Who won?’, which is the battle between Stan Lee and Jim Henson. I didn’t even know these two guys when I watched that video for the first time, although it turned out I did know the things they are famous for. But, boy, I certainly knew the third person who suddenly intrudes into the battle, and who is the reason that we don’t get ‘Who won?’ If you want to see evil –
Let’s defeat the empire of joy, friends, by making weird little games of all types. That’s when we’re all winning.
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Thanks for playing and reviewing, Victor!
But the feedback given by the game should be different in situation such as this.
Hmm. There’s an in-game hint that should have pointed you directly to the relevant evidence for the target of the robbery! From what you described, I wonder if you may have come across a bug. I’ll follow up in DM, if that’s okay.
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Of course!
Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter
This is not a review. I don’t think there’s literally speaking a game here, and I’m not terribly interested in spending much energy on the texts generated by an LLM. But I’m interested in LLMs as artefacts, and especially in how people get fooled into assigning capabilities to them that they do not have.
Fun fact. If you type into any of the LLM chatbots a command like “pick a number between 1 and 100, but don’t tell me which one” it will no doubt answer some variation of “okay, done!” This is a lie – or rather, it would be a lie if LLM outputs had intentions behind them. An LLM cannot pick a number without revealing it to you, because it picks things by revealing them to you. Just now I asked ChatGPT to do this:
Pick three prime numbers larger than 100. We will refer to them as A and B and C. Please write down A*B*C, A, and B, and C in that order. You are not allowed to show your work.
It answered
11634173, 103, 107, 101
Reader, the product of 103, 107 and 101 is 1113121, not 11634173. In fact, even the quickest mental calculation will show you that the product ought to be around 1 million, not around 10 million. So what’s going on? Simple: the LLM inside ChatGPT cannot first think of three prime numbers, then multiply them, then show the multiplication, and then show the three primes. It has to generate a number first and then retroactively generate the three numbers that would make up that number. (In this case, it couldn’t even succeed at that because the number it generated first is already a prime.)
You can also test this by asking such a chatbot to come up with cryptic crossword clues, for instance; and then afterwards ask it to reveal the answer. It is only at the second stage that a model like ChatGPT will actually go into ‘deep thinking’ mode, as it now has to solve its own cryptic clue to which it does not know the answer – because there is no outside of the text, as Derrida told us so presciently (this is a lame philosophy joke, don’t bother to look it up) – and the results are invariably horrible.
So here we have Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter, which claims to be ‘fine tuned and optimized’ for play with LLM chatbots… and which consists to a large extent of GM-side tools that should be hidden from the player, including dice, mana, and other variables. But there cannot be GM-side tools that are hidden from the player. No LLM can roll dice that the player can’t see. No LLM can keep track of variables that do not appear on the screen. (I’m not saying that no AI could be built that does this, but it would have to be a system that has capabilities rather different from that of the type of LLM that we currently have.)
Today’s lesson: no LLM can play the role of a GM who has prepared something that the player does not yet know.
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Slated for Demolition
You never really know about cultural differences until you run into them. That’s a vacuous statement, I suppose, but here’s a case in point. When writing Slated for Demoliton, Meri probably thought that ‘marinara sauce’ would be instantly familiar to any reader. However, it sent me DuckDuckGo-ing! I thought I knew the major tomato-based pasta sauces: bolognese, napoletana, arrabbiata, norma… but what on earth is marinara? I mean, this is relevant. Getting attacked by spaghetti with bolognese sauce is different from getting attacked by spaghetti aglio e olio, you know? Drowning in a fresh pesto genovese is clearly a more distinguished way of leaving this earth than suffocating in gallons of carbonara. I’m just saying.
My search led me to believe that ‘marinara’ is a name used, primarily in the USA, for a fairly basic tomato sauce; perhaps it is even more a name for basic tomato sauces in general rather than for one particular recipe. It’s probably the red substance covering the pasta on the cover of Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident?.
Now if I were @DeusIrae, I would be able to segue into a long, funny and in the end surprisingly relevant anecdote about me and pasta – but I’m not, and I wouldn’t. Still, it seemed appropriate to give pride of place to the Italian delicacy in this review, since it plays such an important role in Slated for Demolition. As we traverse the game world, exploring a house, a shop, and an apartment building, pasta stalks us – and attacks us in horrifying and grotesque ways. It’s good that it’s pasta. There’s something funny about pasta; all the weird little shapes, the strange names, the mere sight of somebody trying to eat spaghetti without using a knife… it’s funny! But also slightly horrifying. Pasta with tomato sauce looks a bit like a putrefying human corpse; blood with worms and maggots in it. I mean, check out that very Guns N’ Roses cover. It’s digusting. And kind of funny. And a little too reminiscent of our mortality.
What does pasta mean in Slated for Demolition? This is harder to say. I think the above paragraph maybe captures the why of the pasta; it signifies horror and the body, the feeling of suffocation, but in a desperately comic mode that keeps the game bearable. Then again, it is also possible that it symbolises an eating disorder that was the result of the central trauma. Probably not, but it’s possible. Slated for Demolition is heavy on symbols and light on explanation, and it’s not easy to piece together exactly what happened to the protagonist.
But we can take a stab at it. In their early twenties, probably, the protagonist worked as a group leader at a LARP summer camp. It was hard work, but they had an intense and interesting time with the other group leaders, drinking too much, making out, striking up friendships. But then disaster struck. The guy that the protagonist was developing a bit of a crush on sexually assaulted her. The whole situation was complicated, and therefore hard to understand even for the protagonist herself, but that was basically what happened. (There’s also a side story about another woman who stole him away from the protagonist, but I’m not entirely sure how that fits into the narrative.) Later on, perhaps not much later on, this same guy had to be taken care of when he was struggling with suicidal thoughts, and it was the protagonist herself who was the only person who could get into contact with him and she did so – extremely uncomfortable, but she nevertheless did it. There’s a strong sense that throughout all of this, the assaulter never really understood the meaning of his deed.
The way this story is told is extremely compelling. The writing is strong throughout, and the shape of the game is also interesting. It consists of three exploration sequences: a supermarket, a house, an apartment building. But we have a strange to-do list of objects, and as we explore the worlds, we pick up these objects, sometimes being steered heavily towards them, at other times having to go out of our way to find them – by putting underwear in the freezer, for instance. Each time, there is also something that generates tension. The absurdity of the supermarket prose turning into lists of pasta names. The suddenly revealed trauma in the house. The possible suicide in the apartment building. Although mechanically all the sequences are more less ‘lawn mowering’, they felt fresh and engaging.
Then, in the end game, there’s first the suggestion that the entire game was written to confront the abuser with the reality of their deed. This feels psychologically true – you’d want the person to really understand what he wrought – but also deliciously insane. What’s the chance that your Twine will make its way into their hands? Unless the abuser is one of the handful of completionist judges that you can be almost sure will pick up your piece! (Good for me that it’s clearly set in the USA, then.)
But the game quickly moves beyond this, towards a spell for closure. Here we have possibly the best use of timed text ever, as Slated for Demolition forced me to think whether there’s anything in my own life for which I desire closure. And I sat and thought, and thought, and came to the conclusion that I don’t really understand what closure is supposed to be. For a fictional story, sure. There’s threads of narrative, and at the end of the classic novel, there’s closure. But that’s not how life works. What is closure? Is it the moment where we are at peace with what has happened? But it’s unclear that we want to be at peace with bad things. Is it the moment where the bad things no longer influence us? But how could they stop influencing us? Why would we even want that? What we want is the ability to continue, the ability not to stop hurting, but to once again grow and flower and bloom (even if there’s some hurt still somewhere) – but those are metaphors of opening, not of closure. And so I thought: I just don’t know what closure is.
At that exact point, the protagonist also concluded that she did not know what closure was. @DeusIrae states, in his review, that the climax didn’t really work for him because he didn’t want to overwrite the specifics of the protagonist’s trauma with his own stories. The climax did work for me because I and the protagonist both came to this point of confusion, of no longer knowing what it even was that we were looking for in casting a spell of closure.
Slated for Demolition is a wonderful piece, my favourite in the competition so far.
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A winter morning on the beach
We’re at the stage in the competition where sometimes I feel that I don’t have much to add to the existing reviews. In this case, B. J. Best and Mike Russo capture most of my thoughts. Mike’s analysis of how the game sets an absurdly low bar for being a good grandfather rings very true to me, and I share B. J.'s difficulty of seeing quite what A winter morning on the beach is aiming for.
The seagull is the most mysterious thing. It actively discourages one from exploring the beach; but, on the other hand, it doesn’t really create tension. Perhaps finding a way to actually get to 10k steps is meant to be a puzzle? But it’s not very difficult, nor does it seem to make sense to turn this into a puzzle – especially if the game’s main intention is to spring a completely unrelated reveal about your family on you. So, yeah, I don’t really know what to make any of this.
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Thanks for playing and for the suggestions.
I find out that the business partner entered the study after Litchfield died but did not raise an alarm… and I also can’t ask him about that!
If you’ve solved the second mystery in the game, it mentions that the business partner thought the victim was asleep.
As for the rest of your comments, I could do a point-by-point response but I would really rather take it offline, and only if deemed absolutely necessary. Will keep these in mind for future works.
Anyhow, glad that the game engaged you and was enjoyable for you to a certain extent.
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Thanks for your review! Funny, I had no idea marinara sauce was more common to the US?? That just goes to show you can’t make too many assumptions. It’s very interesting to read your interpretation of the story…I was very purposefully oblique but kept going back and adding a little clarity here and there so it wouldn’t be completed obfuscated. Seeing what landed is kind of fascinating. But also, it’s really cool to read about someone taking away exactly what I wanted them to, so thank you for that! Anyway, if I had to use a pull quote “deliciously insane” is A+
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(This is about B.A.R.K.)
FWIW I was able to get the hint function to work on some things by just typing HINT and then an object name at the disambiguation prompt. Not that that was much help, though, since all the other issues you flag are still present; I know what I need to do next, I think (clean the lamp) but no idea how to do that.
EDIT: OK, figured it out, TAKE ALL to the rescue.
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So, I ran out of steam! I was ill for about a week, mostly very tired; and then my book got published and I’ve been doing some promotional activities; and all in all I didn’t have the headspace to play IF. (It had nothing to do with the game I was in the middle of playing, The Wise Woman’s Dog, which is very good!) Maybe I’ll be able to squeeze something in in the last few days, who knows. 
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Woohoo! Do you have a link to it?
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You’re very much in the target audience for that one, so I’m glad you at least got to start it!
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I got behind my own goals, too, but I don’t have illness as an excuse. (Or publishing a book! Congrats there–those are definitely at opposite ends of the spectrum for reasons why other stuff took a back seat.)
I also find it’s more often than not an interesting challenging game trips me up. I know I’m missing something, and (and this is on me) I hate to just leave it there while tackling another entry.
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Yes! But… it’s in Dutch. It’s a book, meant for the ‘general public’, about the philosophy of infinity. It deals with things like Zeno’s paradoxes, the difference between potential and actual infinity, the possible infinity of space and time, eternal recurrence, immortality, the mathematics of infinity, and what it means to be a finite being. 
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I will no doubt finish it too!
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Sounds fantastic and right up my alley, to be honest. I only wish I spoke Dutch. 
Seriously, though, congratulations on the publication!!!
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