Thank you for the extensive review!
I’ll keep your comments in mind when I work on the post-comp update 
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Thank you! This is a remarkable review, and well above any response I could have asked from a player. I very much want to respond, not in a negative or a refuting manner, but to continue the conversation. I’ll wait until after the comp, though, and make it part of my postmortem / author’s notes.
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Looking forward to it! (You can also send me a private message, of course, but perhaps it’s more fun to have the conversation in public at the end of the competition.)
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Witchfinders by Tania Dreams
Witchfinders is a short Twine game about a witch in a 19th century Edinburgh where detecting and prosecuting witches is still a pastime for some. The game begins rather bizarrely:
Even if we ignore that both ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Renaissance’ are misspelled, and that there are no fewer than three article errors in the sentence, there is still the problem that this makes no sense. How can it be the case that the Age of Enlightenment giving way to Romanticism makes us leave behind the ‘brutality’ of the Middle Ages, which ended some four centuries earlier? This doesn’t inspire confidence, which is very important to inspire at the start of a game. The game then goes on to tell me that I’ll be surprised that I won’t be able to play a witchfinder, because instead I am… the witch! Actually, there are so many IF games in which you are a witch (or wizard) that it would have been a lot more surprising to be the witchfinder!
Thankfully, the rest of the game is significantly better. It is also very much more down to earth. You visit a handful of locations in Edinburgh, learn about a few problems, collect some ingredients, and solve the problems. At all points the prose is very sparse; NPCs are just quest-giving machines, locations are never detailed in more than two sentences, and the PC doesn’t have much of an inner life. There is a system in place where by earning ‘witch points’ you can get yourself persecuted. But there’s no real tension, in part because it is easy to avoid the witch points, and in part because everything is so sparse and functional that you’re never caught up in the fiction.
Actually the experience is somewhat reminiscent of playing a mediocre graphical RPG like Oblivion. There’s a sick child to be saved, but the only possible interaction with him is to click and hear ‘ugh’. You can talk to his father, who has two endlessly repeated sentences of text to give you the quest. You walk into the woods and harvest the necessary ingredient. You return to the father, click, press the ‘give medicine’ button, get the XP and gold coins, and walk away towards the next quest. Without the visuals to distract us, the equivalent experience is Witchfinder shows more clearly how bare bones this approach is. Why don’t we have a more detailed conversation with the father? Why isn’t there a story in which the suspense slowly mounts as even the people we care about start getting suspicious? Why aren’t we forced to choose between helping the needy and our own safety? Why isn’t our character more fleshed out? In general, why isn’t there more fiction in this interactive fiction? I’m just left wishing for a lot more.
3 Likes
I also beta tested According to Cain, and while I won’t read your review until after I replay it and try to write up my own thoughts, I’m looking forward to doing that, and hopefully some post-comp conversation too.
FWIW, I also spent way too long turning this over in my head and trying to figure out what it’s supposed to mean:
Age of Enlightment gave a way to Romanticism, leaving behind medieval brutality and aspiring beauty of Reneissance.
My best guess is that this is just an awkwardly-written sentence and it’s meant to communicate an overall progression – now that Romanticism has come, the earlier periods (Medieval and Renaissance) are even further in the rear-view mirror. But beyond getting the chronology slightly neater, this is still a but of a confusing opening because a) Romanticism actually hearkened back to Renaissance and especially Medieval models in some respects, arguably bringing those eras closer to contemporary society, and b) I have not a single clue what the quotidian action of the game, which you accurately describe, has to do with Romanticism anyway.
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You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book by Austin Lim
There are two sides to You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book. On the one hand, it’s a hypertext adventure of a familiar kind. You are a faceless adventure person, you receive a strange quest, and by walking around town you manage to collect some objects and pieces of information that just happen to allow you to solve the problem. It’s more a matter of thorough exploration than of real puzzle solving, and because everything is so disconnected and distant, it is hard to care about what’s going on. As an adventure game, You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is competently implemented but ultimately forgettable.
On the other hand, You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is a collage made out of locations from other works of literature. So while you are playing the adventure game, you’re also playing a ‘guess the original’ game. This is certainly a more original conceit than the quest itself. However, the lack of interactivity with the surroundings makes it less interesting than it could have been. You get one paragraph of text, and then you either know it or don’t know it; there’s no way to explore further and interact with the environment to get more clues. In some cases, clues are not needed. The violin playing inhabitants of the apartment next to apartment 221 who seem very interested in murders? Check. The farm that is run by the animals themselves? Check. Waking up as a giant insect? Check. It might still have been fun to explore that farm more, say, and find that we’re in the middle of the scene where the horse is being sold off; but at least we don’t need to in order to guess the source. In other cases, the source material seemed a lot harder to guess. And the problem is, if you don’t know it immediately, there’s no way to investigate further. Does this three sentence description of a forest not ring a bell? Tough luck.
What I found very interesting indeed is that in several cases, I immediately recognised what the source material was… and then found out, at the end, that Austin Lim and I had different things in mind. You enter a church and are almost driven to madness by a bell that won’t stop tolling? Obviously this is a reference to Emily Dickinson’s stunning I felt a Funeral, in my Brain; but actually the scene was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells. In another scene, you are walking across a beach and warned against staying out in the sunshine for too long. No clearer reference to Albert Camus’s L’étranger is possible, right? Except that the reference was to Dune. Which just goes to show, one, that our literary heritage is highly overdetermined (as the literary critics like to say; we philosophers would say that the works of literature are underdetermined by the clues, but it means more or less the same thing); and, two, that you really need more space for exploration if you want to implement a puzzle like this! Maybe let me check my inventory to see whether there’s a gun, and then have me discover some… spice? (I’ve never read Dune, so this is stab in the dark.)
5 Likes
I’ve read Dune, and although the scene that part of You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is riffing wouldn’t have a gun in it (the characters at that point didn’t have one), spice could definitely have helped clue people in and would be plausible. That, or worms on the beach that needed to be avoided (the other thing that is in regular cultural osmosis from Dune) - particularly if it was by walking in a non-rhythmic or otherwise unusal way. (Travelling by day being a bad idea is definitely a thing in Dune… …and at least two-thirds of the other books set in deserts I’ve read).
1 Like
Esther’s by Brad and Alleson Buchanan
Esther’s is a short piece of interactive children’s literature about two mice eating at a child’s (both real and make-believe) cafe. No age range is indicated, but the simple premise and the straightforward plot (the mice want a particular meal and are happy once they get it) make me think that the authors are aiming at children of about 3 to 5 years old. The piece is implemented well and accompanied by a small selection of cute, professionally executed pictures.
I played through the game myself, but then decided to also play it with one of my children. My eldest is now 6 years old and I usually read books to him that are far more demanding – from a narrative and language perspective – than Esther’s; so I decided to play it with the 4-year-old. Her native language is Dutch, so I had to do off-the-cuff translation, but I don’t think this posed a problem. Did she enjoy it? Yes, and she wanted to read it again afterwards. (But couldn’t because it was bed time.) So one can certainly count that as a success.
Still, I’m not convinced that Esther’s was as successful as it could have been. While reading it to my daughter, I noticed more clearly than when I read it myself that the game makes some heavy and perhaps unnecessary demands on the young listener. The basic idea of mice wanting specific food and not being able to communicate with the cafe owner is easily grasped. But the foods in question were highly unfamiliar. Even I myself had to look up mimosas. In addition, my 4-year-old has only a vague knowledge of avocados and guacamole, and none at all of tapioca pudding. Possibly this is a cultural issue. But I think my daughter would have been more invested in the game if she had had a better grasp of the kinds of food that were required, and therefore of the steps needed to make them.
This problem is exacerbated by the rather complex cognitive task of keeping in mind the current inventory of the mice. Children are really good at grasping and remembering narratives. I read long books over many nights with my daughter, and she’ll still know what happened to the horse ten chapters ago, no problem. Story is easy. But I noticed that it was really hard for her to mentally keep track of the foodstuff that was on the table in Esther’s. The mice now have… an empty cup, a slice of orange, toast with the cinnamon & sugar still on it, a quesadilla with cheese and some guacamole. I mean, that is hard. But if you’re not keeping track of this, you don’t really understand how far you are along in the story; what you have done; what still needs to be done. It makes me wonder why the authors chose this particular form for the game, rather than a more traditional narrative that requires less complex non-story state tracking.
So, yes, it was fun and visually attractive, and I’m happy to see more interactive fiction for young children. But I also have some doubts about the design choices that went into Esther’s.
8 Likes
It’s very cool that you took the game out for a test-drive with your daughter to see how it works in practice! I’m curious, from what you say, it sounds like a status display of the food on the table might have been helpful – is that right, or was it just the overall cognitive load rather than the interface that was the challenge?
I suspect this is cultural, yeah – from the authors’ IFDB profile it looks like they’re in Seattle, where I’m guessing those foods are pretty common (I’m in California, and my one-year-old has already eaten all those things, albeit a Persian version of rice pudding rather than tapioca specifically). It’s interesting to consider how to translate a game like this in a way that uses more culturally-relevant foods while maintaining the puzzle structure!
3 Likes
A status display might have helped, I think. But it also seems to be something you might not want to go for with this type of story and presentation. It kind of distracts from the text and the pictures (even more so given that you are quite likely to play this on a phone when you’re reading it with a kid).
Surely your one-year-old did not have samosas? 
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Ha, true, my eyes skipped over that part of the paragraph! I have eaten a samosa in front of him and told him he’ll get Indian food when he’s a little older, though
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Wait, I’m confused! It’s not samosas but mimosas. I knew vaguely what samosas were, but had to look up mimosas (which is probably why I’m confusing them now). Mimosas sound kind of horrible, to be honest; a waste of good cava.
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Thank you for the review!
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Oh geez you’re right, haha! I’d forgotten the mimosas (in fairness, I believe they’re nonalcoholic in the game, right?)
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They settle for orange juice, yes. 
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I was thinking a small round drawing of the table with pictures of the available foods on it, updated for food that is added or eaten. Easy overview of the items while still keeping with the drawing style.
Somewhere to the right in the bottom corner.
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I agree completely. Now, pomosas are a different story. The bubbly goes so well with a little sour pomegranate juice.
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An Alien’s Mistaken Impressions of Humanity’s Pockets by Andrew Howe
The credits tell us this was a class project, and since the aim was no doubt to get some experience with Twine, it can be counted as a success. There are several locations, there’s a simple but clear puzzle structure, and everything seems to work as intended, including a colour mixing puzzle that must have required some programming skill to implement. (I did run into one game-breaking bug when I entered a name for the key-chain and pressed enter. This is so early in the game that it hardly matters, but it will still be nice to fix.) On the other hand, the game is absolutely rife with misspellings, omitted capitals, strange amounts of white space, and other problems with the basic presentation of the text. This made it feel very sloppily executed even where the underlying programming was solid.
The game’s basic premise is that two alien investigators misinterpret the human artefacts found at archaeological dig sites. This is a nice idea that could have been worked out better; as it is, it disappears from view very early on in the game. All in all, a good step in the learning process, but not really ready for the limelight yet.
5 Likes
One Final Pitbull Song (at the End of the World) by Paige Morgan
Here is Harold Bloom on Nathanael West’s wonderful 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts :
Bloom distinguishes between satire, which hopes to improve us, and parody, which does not. This seems to me a rather idiosyncratic use of these terms, which in addition risks concealing from view the fact that satire is best thought of as a spectrum. What is crucial, I would say, is the relation of the author to those whom they satirise. On one end of the spectrum is the kind of satire where the author satirises a We, a community that the author takes themselves to be part of. Such satire can be gentle or sharp, but in identifying with those who are satirised, the author is inviting us all to laugh at ourselves and thereby improve ourselves. On the other end of the spectrum is the kind of satire where the author satirises a They, a community that they see themselves as completely cut off from. Such satire can be bitter or more good-humoured, but its essential nature is that it sees those who are satirised as beyond redemption. It does not and cannot understand itself as a medium of self-improvement. Rather, its business is coping with the existence of the Others by laughing at them.
Most satire sits somewhere between these two extremes. The author of satire usually feels some distance from the exact groups or tendencies that they satirise, but also appeals to values that those whom they satirise are expected to share. For instance, Mark Twain’s The War Prayer is a satire of religious jingoism. Twain certainly doesn’t consider himself under the spell of religious jingoism, so in that sense he is satirising a Them; but he hopes that the reader, who may be under this spell to a certain extent, can be made to see how ludicrous such a position is, so in that sense he is satirising an Us. It is possible to laugh at someone in a way that invites them to join in.
What does this mean for satire in the current United States of America? I am not making a statement either controversial or new when I observe that American society is being torn apart into opposing camps that can no longer even contemplate working together. We are at the point where one can build a political career out of being nasty towards those on the other side: for people like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, saying nasty things about trans men and women – to take an example that is, in the context of this review, not entirely random – is a way of generating political popularity. One doesn’t vote for such politicians because one wants certain beneficial policies enacted; one votes to ‘own the libs’. Causing pain is the point. In such an environment, being grotesque is a benefit, not a disadvantage. When politicians are willing to say and do anything, no matter how extreme, it is impossible for satire to hold up a mirror to them, as Bloom correctly observes.
In such a society, satire is effectively reduced to its two extremes, with the entire middle of the spectrum falling away. There is, on the one hand, the satire of the strict We, where we are urging our own group to see in what respects we are being ridiculous and where we can therefore improve. There is, on the other hand, the satire of the strict Them, where we have no hope of reaching or influencing those whom we satirise, but where the satire is a way for our group to let off steam and at least get a laugh out of the foolishness and evil that confronts us. We can of course have both types of satire in a single work, but if we do this will be a major source of tonal tension; and only in the hands of a deft artist can such a juxtaposition work. Bringing these two types of satire together is exactly what One Final Pitbull Song is doing.
We can say at the outset (if this still counts as the outset) that One Final Pitbull Song is a complicated game, made more complicated by the fact that it consists of three wildly different – though connected – lines of plot development. The longest and most detailed of these, and the one that the game itself suggests is the first, is the line that takes us to prison and then drops us into the underground caves. Here we have, on the one hand, a harsh satire of what the game itself calls the prison-industrial complex. This is the satire of an enemy, an enemy that is known to be beyond reason and morality, since anyone, anyone, can see the wrongness of these social institutions simply by looking. On the other hand, there is the much more gentle satire of the anxieties that plague the protagonist and her cell mates. All of them are well-meaning people; all of them know the others to be well-meaning people; and yet they are constantly afraid of hurting or embarrassing each other, far beyond what is useful in structuring their social interactions. One Final Pitbull Song rather masterfully mixes these two types of satire together. An absolutely cold-blooded murderer in service to a cruel and inhumane system may, a few seconds after shooting someone through the head, get flustered and apologetic when they find out they have perhaps misgendered that person. Characters that are running away from devouring monsters through dark caves may spend minutes apologising over an insensitive comment they made about someone’s body. Now I suppose one could write these scenes in such a way that they suggest that sensitivity is unimportant compared to the real macho value of survival. But that’s not at all what is going on here. That is only what someone on the other side might take away from it. If anything, we are shown in a grotesque and absurd way the difficult realities of being decent and sensitive in a society that promotes egotism and cruelty.
The two types of satire reach an apotheosis in the person of the Cracked Visor Enforcer, an apparently sensitive soul who is absurdly easy to embarrass even when they have done nothing wrong, but who nevertheless wholeheartedly embraces a cruel societal system even after it has been revealed as completely indifferent to their well-being. Of all the character story arcs in the game, Kyle’s arc in the first narrative line is the one that seemed most thematically consistent and consequential. O, Cracked Visor Enforcey! O, Kyle! You’re a horrible piece of shit, but you’re also the authentic (anti)hero of this post-satirical satire.
As I said, One Final Pitbull Song is a complicated game. It is impossible to get through even one of the longer narrative lines in the two hours set aside for the Interactive Fiction Competition, and you haven’t really experienced the game until you’ve seen all three of them. Clearly, one satirical target of the author is the notion of choice. Large parts of the game are entirely non-interactive, in the sense that we just read a page of prose (often a very long page of prose) and then click the single link that is available to us. In fact, there are only two choices in the game that make a real difference. First, there is a the choice in the beginning about whether or not to leave the car; a choice that you, the protagonist, make only because you feel you have to show you can make a choice. Second, there is the choice of whether to eat beans or potatoes in the prison canteen. Both choices completely change how the rest of the game plays out; and change it in ways that not only could not have been foreseen by either player or character, but that also make no causal sense. This suggests that, yes, we can influence the stories of our lives, but no, not in a way that gives us agency. Furthermore, the game at many points tells us that the best choices are those you make without thinking about the fact that you are making a choice; the best choices are not experienced as choices. But – and here we see an example of how the ironies of One Final Pitbull Song keep destabilising any easy lesson we might want to draw from it – the structure of the game as a whole suggests that our true self is only achieved when we identify with all the choices we had, both those we made and those we did not make. And it suggests that real happiness can only be achieved when divine powers set up a ‘perfect divergence’ for us, where we just happen to make all the right choices. And it suggests that this happiness consists in us taking responsibility for ourselves and our own lives. One Final Pitbull Song revels in the tensions all of this generates.
Let us look at another example of the game’s irony. As we go through the three narrative lines of the game – in order or out of order – we are subjected to approximately every gross and horrible event one can think of. At various points the protagonist is covered in piss, in vomit, in blood, in cum, and probably in other substances I’ve forgotten about. People die in an astonishing variety of terrible and extremely graphic ways. And yet we finally arrive at what we are tempted to understand as a happy ending: the reunion of Bal, his wife Pae, and their child PeeBee. It’s almost a Hollywood movie! Until we start thinking about it, and realise the terrible irony of ending a game that is centrally concerned with gay and trans people and with the many ways that relatives can be harmful to you, of ending a game like that with a literal reconstitution of the traditional family. A traditional family that moreover literally consists of murderous monsters. It’s not that we are supposed to understand that this is not a happy ending; the monsters are no less humane than some of the humans. It’s that the game’s ironies cut so deep that they make all simple evaluations impossible. This definitely extends to the various interjections made by the supposed author of the piece, interjections that claim, among other things, to apologise (or not) for certain difficulties in understanding the game (even to the point of referring to one potential reviewer by name and suggesting that they probably won’t understand or like it). It would be absolutely impossible to take any of these statements at face value, which means that they only serve to further undermine our attempts to boil the game down to a simple message.
This already extremely long review has only scratched the surface of the game’s contents. I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre premise of an entire culture built around the music of Pitbull. This is a game that at every point seems to burst at the seams. There are always more characters, more gory scenes, more ideas, more ironies, more mindless cruelty, more romance, more dialogue going over more of the same things – and so on. I can’t do justice to all of that. But perhaps I can do justice to there being all of that, to there being so much and to there being the kinds of things there are. To do so, I want to put forward an interpretative hypothesis.
What One Final Pitbull Song is fundamentally about is the deeply exhausting experience of living in a hostile world. It is a world where your hesitant attempts to be yourself – hesitant because they are made after a long history of animosity – are constantly interrupted by outside threats. It is a world where your attempts to find a modus vivendi with your friends can always be aborted by the stressful attack of a monster; although in real life, the monster could be, say, Ron DeSantis, and thus a metaphorical rather than a literal spawn of Baäl. It is a world where you don’t feel in control, because things can always suddenly change for the worse. It is far too often the world of the trans person, of the gay or the lesbian, of the member of a racial minority.
Some other reviewers who are astute and discerning readers of interactive fiction have complained about the long, sometimes tedious prose passages, the length of the game, the seemingly never-ending sequence of events. Well, yes. Absolutely. But how could this have been a neatly trimmed story, nicely designed to be just right for the human reader, when it wants to acquaint us with the exhaustion of living in a world that was designed to be against you rather than for you? This game wants to acquaint us with that, but it also wants to show us how one deals with it – through inexhaustible energy, creativity, perseverance; through a will to life that is stronger than the forces of darkness; but, since such energy and such a will are rather too much to ask of us at almost every moment of our lives, at least through this: the ability to laugh; to still, after all the horror and cruelty, be able to muster a sardonic smile at the absurdity of it all.
And so I salute Paige Morgan, the demonic parodist, as she provides an endless string of Pitbull covers to celebrate our march down into hell. Read her for her prophecy, and for the unsettling laughter she will bring you, as you too approach the monster-filled pit prepared for the American soul by the American religion.
12 Likes
Wow! Thank you for this review and for the time you took to understand my work. It really seems like you got what I was going for, and I appreciate that so much!
2 Likes