IF Comp 2023 “Mini” Reviews

~ ejtranslations

I’ve always been prone to getting more longwinded than I meant to in mini reviews, but I was especially bad this year, so apologies for that.

As usual, all reviews are under the cut; links will jump to a specific review.

Assembly

The concept of Assembly is immensely fun: you roam an Ikea trying to stop some cultists from summoning the elder gods using sigils made of flat-pack furniture. The writing swings back and forth between heightened fantasy narration and mundane descriptions of furniture assembly with panache, and the blue-and-yellow color scheme with its clean, friendly sans-serif font helps sell the Ikea atmosphere. The implementation is very smooth.

Despite the many excellent qualities it has going for it, though, the game also has a major flaw: it’s not particularly well signposted, and I often wasn’t sure what I was trying to accomplish or in which order I should be trying to solve the puzzles. The in-game hints weren’t always as helpful as I would have liked, and in a couple places I had to turn to the walkthrough.

Part of the fault was mine, I admit, for not getting to grips with the game’s internal logic; my tendency in an adventure game if I run across a locked door or cabinet is to assume that there’s a key somewhere, for example, but Assembly is looking for more creative solutions. I do think that if the game had been a little longer, I would have been able to settle into this groove and do better problem-solving on my own, so I wish there had been a little more meat to it. (Despite the hour and a half play time estimate, my playthrough was forty-five minutes with a fair amount of going in circles included.)

All in all, though, I enjoyed what the game was doing and would love to see more from this author.

Edit (10/8/23)

Through some conversation with the author, I’ve learned that the hints that I needed actually were/should have been in the game, I just wasn’t seeing them for some reason, so it seems to have been a technical issue rather than an issue with the hint writing per se.

The Paper Magician

The Paper Magician features a PC with the ability to manifest anything they write on paper into reality. This could have been an interesting gameplay conceit, but ultimately it only features in non-interactive scenes; the gameplay consists of exploring the facility in which the PC is held in order to find the passwords for the exit doors.

This is neatly integrated with the plot; each of the four passwords is the answer to a question about the PC’s true nature and how they came to be here, so progress comes from exploration of the world and backstory, which both introduce some intriguing concepts that I would be interested to see expanded on further. But it’s a little prosaic compared to the kind of interactions the PC’s powers could theoretically enable, so I was a bit let down. The choice to end with an opportunity for the PC to name themself, though, felt fitting and satisfying. And I am admittedly a sucker for a feline companion.

A couple minor frustrations:

I had some trouble understanding the layout of the facility; this was probably because of my poor ability to visualize, but it was a little unintuitive to me that the door marked “NW” wasn’t “the northwestern door”, but “the door to the room in the northwestern quadrant, whatever direction that is relative to where you are right now.” But people who aren’t used to relying on the cardinal directions of exits in IF to substitute for the ability to make a mental map of how rooms are connected may be less thrown by this.

I was also thrown by the fact that the passwords were case-sensitive – I suppose, since you are typing them into a computer in-universe, this makes sense, but the question-and-answer format somehow led me to expect they wouldn’t be, and it took me a while to understand why my answers kept being rejected as incorrect.

Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses!

Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses! is a cute, very short game in which the teen protagonist attempts to discover which of the other three members of their school’s Literature Club stole their glasses. I was intrigued by Jaime, the golden child with a secret wild side, and enjoyed their potentially-flirty interactions with the PC, but the other two suspects felt a bit thin by comparison.

I suspected after talking to the club president that no one had stolen my glasses, they had just been knocked somewhere weird when the other club members were horsing around and were probably still in the classroom. By the end of my first playthrough (which took about five minutes) I was certain this was the case, but how to get the PC to figure that out was a different question, and one whose answer was not obvious to me.

I stumbled on the answer by accident after a couple more playthroughs, when I realized that the characters are always in the same locations and I could just go straight there. The in-universe logical connection between PC action and consequence seems a little weak here, though, since it’s actually another character’s actions that lead to the retrieval of the glasses in the end. Apparently if you don’t happen to walk in on the club president just after he finds them, he walks off with them without any effort to tell you he has them, which seems like odd behavior for a friend, especially since the game has established that all these kids have phones.

Nevertheless, the game has charm, and I would give an expanded version a shot if one is in the works. (I’m not sure whether this is meant as a sort of proof-of-concept or whether it’s meant to be complete as-is; the glasses incident seems very self-contained, but then there are all the questions it raises and doesn’t answer about Jaime, or the fact that the intro implies that Minh is a possible love interest but the game doesn’t actually seem to offer any flirty dialogue options with them.)

The Sculptor

This game follows a sculptor in his eighties who has toiled away for years to get the money to afford a block of marble to create his final masterpiece. Then he is confronted with forgotten medical debt that forces him to decide whether to sell the sculpture, or refuse to sully his art with crass commercialism and instead lose everything he owns.

I feel that if you are going to make your game revolve around a single moral dilemma, you ideally want to make each choice a complicated one that leaves the player with mixed feelings, rather than making it black and white as The Sculptor does. Selling the sculpture is the morally bad choice that you will feel horrible about and regret forever, even if it does let you pay your medical bills; refusing to sell it and destroying it so they can’t just repo it anyway is the good choice, the only way to preserve your all-important artistic integrity and thus the only right thing to do.

Maybe it’s not meant to be a dilemma; maybe it’s just meant to surprise the player that the PC is miserable about the option your average person might think was “good” and happy about the option they’d think was “bad”. I can see how that might be eye-opening to someone who has never really given much thought to the way art and money interact before. But like a lot of people in the hobbyist IF space, I’ve grappled with this at some length, so to me all the game does is present a character with an unusual-but-not-unheard-of hardline take on this thorny matter.

Death on the Stormrider

There is always a tension in mystery fiction between the genre as puzzle box and the genre as exploration of human psychology and relationships. (This is a bit of an oversimplification—there are other elements to the genre—but for the purposes of this review, it’s good enough.) Some authors are primarily interested in why the crime occurred (i.e., what combination of personality and circumstance would lead to this?) and in what impact it has on the people who are affected by it; others are primarily interested in how the crime was committed, how it was concealed, and how the detective will find out the truth. Either can be narratively interesting, but I feel that the best mystery narratives manage to incorporate both to a significant degree, even if one is clearly more prominent.

Death on the Stormrider features a PC investigating a murder among a ship’s crew that speaks a language that the PC does not speak. It’s a choice that in some ways plays to the strengths of the medium—conversation can be done well in parser games, but it’s hard to pull off, and I think games where it’s a major aspect of the gameplay but not the main focus of the game are perhaps the hardest. Stormrider chooses not to wrestle with that, leaving the player to focus on skulking around unseen amid NPCs who patrol (mostly) fixed routes, getting into places they aren’t supposed to go, and manipulating a variety of tools and devices.

All of this works pretty smoothly (minus a couple of minor quibbles I’ll mention at the end). Once you get a sense of how Stormrider operates and what it generally expects you to do, the logic of most puzzles makes sense, and the a-ha moments are plentiful and satisfying. The automatically-updating list of tasks and clues was a great help in keeping track of everything. By and large, I enjoyed the process of playing the game.

But Stormrider is pretty much all puzzle box and no psychology, and that left me feeling a bit unsatisfied by it as a story. Some of this is down to the language barrier, which leaves the crew members functioning in the game more as automata than as characters. Their thoughts and feelings are inaccessible to the player, and we never learn much about how they relate to each other; this is a deliberate choice to increase the PC’s sense of alienation, but it does mean that there’s not much emotional weight to figuring out who the murderer is, and the “why” is something the player can only guess at. A bit more characterization for the PC and their brother could have balanced this out a bit without the need for any changes to the language-barrier conceit, but I didn’t get a strong sense of who they were either.

It was a solidly constructed puzzle box, in the end, but I wanted a bit more emotional investment.

(The minor quibbles:

  1. When a large setpiece can be moved by the PC, I would like a little more indication of it. Maybe it’s me, but I tend not to try to pick up or move large objects unless the game gives me a fairly overt nudge in that direction.
  2. I’m sure it was mentioned somewhere that there are exposed pipes in every room, but I played in a few shorter sessions, and by the time I actually needed to interact with the pipes I had forgotten that they were there. Fortunately the invisiclues got me unstuck, but I would love for this to be more explicitly mentioned in room descriptions.)

Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Bubble Gumshoe’s first outing, Who Killed Gum E. Bear; it hinges entirely on noticing a single aspect of the central gag and most of the investigating you do is utterly pointless. It’s an approach to detective IF that’s bound to be hit or miss, and for me it was a miss, even if the candy-coated noir setting was delightful. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Who Iced Mayor McFreeze. I didn’t doubt that it would be funny, but would it be enjoyable as a game?

Fortunately, the answer was yes. Rather than having you guess the identity of the culprit like its predecessor, Mayor McFreeze traps Bubble Gumshoe in an abandoned factory that is also a crime scene. She must both search for clues and find a way out, giving the player quite a bit more to sink their teeth into than Gum E. Bear provided.

The puzzle design worked well and made clever use of a smallish inventory of objects. The implementation was a little rough, though, and after figuring out what I needed to do I occasionally experienced some friction trying to communicate that to the game. (You’ve heard of “guess the verb,” now get ready for “guess the preposition”!) But I was having a good time in general, so I didn’t mind too much.

All of the clues are technically missable—that is, you can escape the factory without finding any of them—but most of them are wildly unlikely to be missed by a player with enough adventure game experience to instinctively poke into every nook and cranny. The clue that incontrovertibly proves the killer’s identity may elude some players, though; it relies on a mechanic that I remember being emphasized in the previous game, but that isn’t highlighted here. It is covered in the handy list of verbs the game provides, though, so those who didn’t play Gum E. Bear should still be able to figure it out; it just requires a little extra thought/insight compared to the other clues.

The summation at the end is handled by Bubble Gumshoe without input from the player, but varies depending on how many of the clues were found, which I thought worked well. Some players might prefer to have a quiz here, but to me it felt like the real challenge was in solving the puzzles, and once the clues were in hand, interpreting them was fairly straightforward, so I didn’t mind letting the PC do it for me.

Dr. Ludwig and the Devil

This game follows Dr. Ludwig, a Dr. Faust/Victor Frankenstein mashup, as he tries to make a deal with the Devil for godlike powers of creation without actually giving up his soul. Meanwhile, there’s an angry mob at his doorstep—though its leader is quite handsome….

Dr. Ludwig (the game) is entirely narrated in the Mad Scientist Classic™ voice of Dr. Ludwig (the character). Whenever you take an item, for example, the response is “The [noun] was mine! All mine!” You can practically hear the evil laughter that must surely follow. The tone this sets is a large part of the game’s charm. It may be a little too much for some—Ludwig is a rather excitable fellow with a great love for exclamation points—but I enjoyed it.

The game delights in its cheesy genre tropes, and in juxtaposing them with the boring minutiae of real life. The torch-and-pitchfork mob just wants Ludwig to sign a neighborhood charter to agree to avoid experimentation on weekends and holidays (“with the exception of Hallowe’en for historical reasons”) and stop making loud noises after 8 PM. The woman who works at the mysteriously appearing and disappearing magic shop is thinking of forming a union because she doesn’t get enough vacation days. There’s a Terry Pratchett-esque sensibility to it, also evidenced in its approach to deities—the magic shopkeeper, for example, knows that God and the Devil exist, but she doesn’t believe in them, because “there’s really no reason to go about encouraging them, is there?”

The puzzles are well done, but mostly pretty typical medium-dry-goods fare (though the ones that incorporate ordering the Devil to do your bidding have some unique flair). Where the game really shines is in the character interactions—with the shopkeeper, with the Devil, and with the aforementioned handsome pitchfork-waver Hans. These interactions take place via an ask/tell conversation system with topic listing, which is my favorite kind of ask/tell conversation system. (Although it might have been nice to have some indication, in the list, of whether I’d asked about the topic yet or not—I did, at least once, miss out on asking about something puzzle-critical because I lost track.)

It’s easy, in comedy, to make characters that are one-note, or who behave in whatever way they need to in order to serve the joke of the moment. Here, the characters are humorous, but the humor is grounded in characterization that is consistent and recognizably human (if somewhat heightened), which also drives how each character interacts with the puzzles and the plot. (For example, Hans’s mention that he doesn’t really mind if you dig up the remains of his ancestors—they’re dead, what do they care?—presages his admission that he doesn’t believe in God, both of which are key bits of information needed to solve puzzles. And the former, at least, is also pretty funny.) Ultimately, I found them all quite endearing (and was pleased that Ludwig had the opportunity to ask Hans out on a date).

Dr. Ludwig has humor, heart, and a high level of polish, and I had a great time playing it. I would happily follow the good(?) doctor’s further adventures if that was something the author was interested in pursuing.

Beat Witch

Beat Witch is a parser game that takes place in a world where some girls, at puberty, suddenly turn into Beat Witches, a sort of energy vampire for whom music takes the place of garlic or holy water. The PC is one of these witches—the well-meaning “reluctant monster” type, who tries not to kill when she feeds—and her goal in the game is to take down another witch, one who has no such compunctions.

The game is fairly linear, not just in the sense that it lacks plot branching, but in the sense that it doesn’t often let you wander and poke around. There’s generally one specific command the game wants you to type at any given time and it won’t recognize much else, other than examining things. And examining things can be risky; sometimes if you don’t do the thing the game wants you to do immediately, you die.

When you type the right thing, the next bit of the story will be delivered to you in a large multi-paragraph chunk of text. Even on my gaming laptop, which has a large screen by laptop standards, this was almost always more than one screen’s worth of text, and sometimes more than two screens, so I was constantly scrolling back, trying to find where the new text started. This was a bit of a hassle, and to be honest, if I’d been playing on a smaller screen I don’t know if I would have had the patience to make it to the end.

I have to admit that as the game went on, I wondered more and more why the author had chosen to make it a parser game. It isn’t really taking advantage of the strengths of the medium (the sense of space, the object manipulation) or doing anything that hypertext couldn’t do, and I think I would have had a much smoother reading experience had it been a choice-based/hypertext game. The constant back-scrolling was frustrating and undermined the sense of propulsive forward motion that Beat Witch seems to be going for. Besides, if I’m going to be discouraged from interacting with the environment, I’d prefer to just get rid of the illusion that I can do so. It’s distracting to be constantly wondering if maybe this time there might be something interesting off the beaten path. I’d rather be put on some visible rails and know for a fact I can’t deviate from them. (Plus, the game’s recurring problems with unlisted exits couldn’t have existed in a choice-based game, but that at least is relatively easily fixed.)

In a work without much gameplay, the writing then has to do most of the work; Beat Witch has mixed success on this front. It has an atmospheric depiction of a mostly-abandoned city and some effectively gross horror imagery, and the loosely-sketched worldbuilding was intriguing. The emotional beats, however, didn’t quite land for me; you get too much of the PC’s backstory and motivation in a single infodump, and it feels a little inorganic. I would have loved to get that information parceled out over the first half of the game via the PC’s own memory so that her brother’s recording didn’t have to cover so much ground. I also feel it would have worked better for me if I had actually seen some of her idyllic childhood before everything went wrong. I think that would have made finding out what happened to her more immediately, viscerally painful, which then would have made the ending more satisfying.

There’s some interesting stuff in Beat Witch, but in the end it felt to me like a story that was constantly fighting against its format, and between that and the uneven handling of the main emotional arc, I was never as fully immersed as I wanted to be.

The Whisperers

The central conceit of The Whisperers is that the player is an audience member watching a play in Stalin’s USSR. At various points in the show, the audience gets to vote on what the characters should do; the idea is that this is a teaching tool, meant to show, essentially, what happens to people who cross the Party.

The story revolves primarily around the doomed romance of two Trotskyist would-be revolutionaries, Nikolai and Agnessa. Agnessa’s brother Sergei is an NKVD officer, and their neighbors, the older couple Georgy and Dariya, show up occasionally to chat and offer advice. All five characters have things to hide from one another; this is presumably the reason for the game’s other conceit, the idea that the actors are whispering at all times unless otherwise noted. This is an arty touch that sits oddly with the play’s in-universe status as a piece of Soviet agitprop, a genre not really known for metaphor or anything that would open the intended meaning up to interpretation. (Though it may be that while The Whisperers the game intends the whispering to be symbolic, The Whisperers the play intends this entirely literally and the agitprop writer just thought that that was a normal thing for people in an apartment building with thin walls to do?)

Of course, no matter what choices you make, Agnessa and Nikolai’s fates are sealed from the outset. The only question is how much collateral damage will be incurred—making the characters do things the Party wouldn’t approve of naturally leads to worse outcomes for Sergei, Georgy, and Dariya.

The game is well-written in many respects. The setting is clearly well-researched, and the necessary information is communicated deftly to the player without any awkward “as you know” info-dumps (though there is a glossary to help anyone who’s lost). The characters also feel very real; Agnessa’s mindset of being unable to relax or do anything fun because the world is in a horrible state and she could be doing something about it, particularly, struck a chord. If you move in leftist circles at all you probably know a few Agnessas (although perhaps none who are quite so desperate as to take the measures she does). And while some of the choices don’t mean much, at their best they provide a window into the struggles of flawed people trying to live under intolerable circumstances and striving, however vainly, to keep their loved ones safe.

But I’m not sure how to feel about the theatrical framing. It has a distancing effect, especially given that you’re playing as either a faceless audience member or the collective will of the audience. You’re not inhabiting a particular character who can experience any consequences for the choices the player makes, and you’re constantly reminded that the characters who are experiencing consequences are fictional. This encourages the player to hold the whole thing at arm’s length, and I can’t quite figure out what it’s meant to add in return, or, alternatively, why it’s to this story’s advantage to be viewed at a few layers of remove.

(The secret ending in which the audience rebels and demands a happier ending for Agnessa and Nikolai does have interesting thematic implications—the audience as proletariat, perhaps?—so maybe the whole framing is just to build up to that point, but I don’t know if that’s enough payoff, especially as it’s missable.)

The author also provides a link to the script and encourages people to actually perform the show, and as an actor, I couldn’t resist taking a look with performability in mind. The first two-thirds or so seem quite doable, but toward the end, the combinations of variables to be taken into account become complicated and the text diverges quite significantly, going from changes to a few lines to, in some cases, entirely different scenes. I’ve seen a few pieces of somewhat-interactive theater in my time; usually there’s only a single point of divergence and it comes fairly late in the show, so that the actors don’t have to keep track of so many things and memorize so many different versions of their scenes. This is considerably more ambitious than anything I’ve seen performed. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but certainly I think you’d need a cast of highly skilled professionals to pull it off. I would be interested to see it done, though!

Lunium

In Lunium, you are a detective who awakes to find yourself chained up by the killer you have been pursuing. You must both discover the killer’s identity and escape the room you are locked in before they strike again.

The game has been widely compared to an escape room, and with its plethora of combination-lock puzzles, it’s easy to see why. But Lunium does take advantage of its medium to have a player character with a distinct identity, allowing it to do things that an actual escape room would be unable to do. This gives the game a bit of individuality that I enjoyed, and makes it feel like it has a reason to be a Twine game beyond the fact that most people don’t have the opportunity to make their own actual escape room.

As is typical for this style of game, most of the puzzles that you will have to solve are immediately in front of you once you’ve gotten out of being handcuffed to the wall. A common issue with this structure is that if you have too many puzzles requiring number combinations (or any other single format of answer, but it’s usually number combinations), it can become hard to tell whether you have what you need to solve a given puzzle yet. Lunium does fall into this a little, but luckily it has a “hint mode” that you can enable that will give you this information when you look at a puzzle, which I appreciated. There are also more granular hints available, but I didn’t end up using those.

The puzzles largely walked the line of being challenging enough to be satisfying without being too terribly difficult. The only place I really got hung up was the point early on when I didn’t realize that I needed to search my right pocket again after getting uncuffed, and I eventually got past that just by trying every action that was available to me. I did find it a little annoying to have to repeatedly light matches and I’m not sure the light source management added much in the way of legitimate, interesting challenge, but otherwise the gameplay experience was smooth and I moved through the game at a good clip.

The game has a slick visual design that makes good use of images to create atmosphere; the images also have clear and concise alt text for those that need it. The prose largely stays out of its own way, and the plot does what it needs to do to provide an excuse for the puzzles. (It’s all a little improbable when you get right down to it, but puzzle games tend to be.) One aspect of the final twist became apparent to me fairly quickly, but the other did require a little thought and a careful reading of the in-game documents.

I enjoyed the hour I spent playing Lunium, and if I wanted to introduce my escape room friends to IF, I think this would be an excellent place to start.

20 Exchange Place

In 20 Exchange Place, you play as an NYPD officer trying to deal with a hostage situation at a bank. The PC is world-weary and sarcastic; the people around him are mostly incompetent; the stakes are high; the pace is fast.

This has the makings of a solid interactive action movie, if only it had some polish. But as it is, 20 Exchange Place feels like a game made in a great hurry. The dialogue is punctuated correctly only about half the time. The second-person POV keeps slipping into first-person. (Some of this seems to be unmarked reporting of thoughts, but there are places where it’s unambiguously narration.) There are a lot of words that are capitalized for no apparent reason. I try not to get too snotty about writing mechanics, because I know that it’s hard for many people, but the types of mistakes found in 20 Exchange Place seem to speak more of a lack of self-editing than a lack of understanding.

The game is also unforgivingly difficult, and the fact that you can only keep one save at a time makes it harder. I didn’t have it in me to keep replaying from the start to figure out how to successfully rescue the hostages, especially as the game seems to expect you to do this by trial and error.

As a final note, the grey-on-white text of the game’s light mode combined with the very light font weight was pretty hard to read (although dark mode would still have been worse for me).

The Gift of What You Notice More

I love Dar Williams, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a game whose title references her music. I assumed at first that the connection ended there, but no; in fact, The Gift of What You Notice More is substantially based on Williams’s song “The Blessings”—it would have fit right into ShuffleComp back when that was a thing. (Of course, this is largely inconsequential to a review, unless you also happen to be a Dar Williams fan who wanted to know exactly how Dar Williams this game is, but I wanted the writers to know that the whole concept of it made me smile.)

The PC of The Gift of What You Notice More is in the process of separating from their husband, and is going back through dreamlike, surreal versions of key moments in their relationship to figure out where it all went wrong. You go through three rounds of this, at intervals getting items that unlock new areas within each memory (the game calls itself an escape room, but structurally it’s more of a Metroidvania—as funny as either of those descriptors sounds when applied to an introspective game about relationship failures). This is all in the service of digging progressively deeper in the hopes of unearthing the most fundamental problems with the relationship and figuring out what you need to take away from this experience. The problems are all very plausible, and the game struck a nice balance between being relatable and making the characters specific people with a specific relationship that isn’t meant to be a vague stand-in for every soured relationship ever.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the author’s first major foray into choice-based IF after releasing a number of well-received parser games. The Gift brings a parser sensibility to Twine in a way that I thought worked very smoothly. You have an inventory of items always displayed on the right side of the screen; if you think you can use a particular item in a particular location, you click on it, and if you’re right, the relevant link appears. This provides a taste of the parser-style puzzle-solving satisfaction that you don’t get in games where the link appears automatically once you’ve got the right thing in your inventory, but only having to worry about the noun makes it less clunky than the attempts I’ve seen to incorporate verb selection into choice-based gameplay. (It’s a little too late to take inspiration from this for the inventory-heavy choice-based game I’m currently working on, but I’m taking notes for the future.)

But although I liked the mechanics of the puzzle-solving, the design of the puzzles themselves didn’t always work quite as well, largely owing to the dream logic that the game operates on. When the internal logic of it works, it works (of course I have to drop a banana peel so that the jester who keeps popping out to put my armor back on whenever I take it off will slip and fall!). But there were puzzles where I could figure out each individual step based on the tools I had available but had no idea what my end goal was (e.g. all the elephant business—yes, I get the “elephant in the room” metaphor, but it wasn’t really clear to me what I was trying to do with the elephant), and others where I had no idea where to start (e.g. the moving van scene with the sticks). This is fairly subjective and I suspect that if you polled players you wouldn’t get very strong consensus on what clicked and what didn’t, but there must be some way to give the player a bit more of a nudge in the right direction now and then.

Another minor complaint is that each round involves coming up with three possible sources for the relationship’s issues and then picking one as the issue; this is clearly a reflective choice meant to encourage the player to engage with the story, with no gameplay implications. The thing is, the options didn’t seem mutually exclusive, and there was at least one round in which two of the options felt like facets of the same underlying problem. So it didn’t feel like there was strong in-universe motivation to be choosing just one thing to focus on, and I didn’t feel like I was guiding the character down a significantly different path into their future based on which thing I chose. It felt like the PC realizing where the problems were and what they could do differently in the future was what was really important for their growth, and picking one was a formality that ultimately fell a little flat.

But these complaints aside, I did enjoy The Gift. I like when introspective, issue-focused games have a little bit of whimsy and/or a fantastical edge to them, and this was a lovely example of that, with some smart ideas about gameplay design on top.

Last Valentine’s Day

(Yes, my personal shuffle gave me the two surreal choice-based games about getting over a breakup back-to-back—there wasn’t even a game I was planning to skip between them or anything. It’s also funny that both of them feature a PC who used to play the violin but doesn’t anymore.)

Last Valentine’s Day represents the experience and aftermath of a breakup as a time loop in which the PC relives the last day of the relationship over and over, passing from shock and disbelief through despair before finally reaching the point where he’s able to move on with his life. The world around him reflects his mental state—the weather, the condition of the park he passes through, and the lives of the people around him go from pleasant to miserable, then gradually improve again.

This externalization of the PC’s feelings serves as somewhat of a substitute for actual interiority—the specificity that I appreciated in The Gift of What You Notice More is missing here, and I don’t have a strong grasp of who the PC is, who his partner was, or why their relationship fell apart. But the evocative descriptions of the environment and the predicaments of the somewhat more distinctively drawn side characters help to ensure that the game sounds the emotional notes that it means to.

The game effectively captures the post-breakup emotional arc of a person who has been dumped unexpectedly; choosing to represent this as a Groundhog Day experience emphasizes the difficulty of moving past something like this, and the fact that choices don’t matter much makes sense inasmuch as this kind of post-relationship grief is, to a degree, something you have to just wait out. But I think the writing would have been just that much stronger if there had been a bit more distinctive characterization for the central (ex-)couple.

The Finders Commission

In The Finders Commission, you play as one of the members of the eponymous group, a euphemistically named band of thieves-for-hire. You’ve been hired by the goddess Bastet (or maybe just a regular talking cat) to steal an artifact belonging to her out of a museum. You navigate the museum exhibits, in the process avoiding police officers, creating distractions, entering various codes, flirting with a guard for information, and so on, all in preparation for the moment when you finally take Bastet’s aegis from its case. There seems to be no way to fail at this, but you receive a score at the end grading how well you pulled it off.

As this description might suggest, in a case of convergent evolution, the gameplay here is rather similar to the heist sections of Lady Thalia, which makes it a bit awkward to comment on due to the bias involved. That is to say, I think it’s a very solid foundation for a heist game, but of course I would think so. In any case, barring a few bugs and one puzzle that seemed somewhat opaque, I think the structure was largely implemented well here. Nothing is really that difficult to figure out, but there’s some challenge involved in fully exploring the museum and finding all the things that you can do.

That said, the writing was a little spare for my tastes. The prose consists of terse sentences with minimal variation in structure; many rooms lack sensory detail, and not much characterization comes through either. It’s very much a straightforward recitation of a list of facts. If the gameplay were more complex, that might have been enough to carry the game, but as it is I think it could stand to be punched up a little.

Also—I don’t want to be told that the detective “could be a friend or maybe even a lover” if the two of you were on the same side of the law. I want to see that tension between them; I want to feel the star-crossed chemistry for myself. (I mean, again, of course I would, but.) Even though they don’t interact, this could still be demonstrated through how the PC thinks about the detective and what they notice about him. Obviously this is a trope I enjoy, but I’d like to think this isn’t just about me wanting to see more of it in general; if you’re not going to make the player feel the gulf between the two characters and genuinely regret that it’s impassable, why even bring it up?

You can choose to play any one of a number of different Finders, who apparently have different strengths and interests, but as far as I can tell, the only difference this made in the game was to the three-sentence description of what you do with your morning before heading to the museum. This seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for greater variation in both narration and gameplay actions available.

I could see an expanded version of this game, or a sequel, becoming something I would very much enjoy, but as it is there’s not quite enough there for me to become fully invested.

Citizen Makane

When you think about it, text adventure games are a triumph of phallogocentrism (as originally defined by Jacques Derrida and expanded on by feminist theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray). The world of the parser leaves no room for indeterminacy, for ambiguity, for self-contradictory ideas. What matters is concrete objects, represented by words, able to be manipulated in predictable ways and be used in puzzles with a single solution that can be reached (ideally) through logical reasoning. As this worldview is associated with a Western, patriarchal system of values that tends to set up hierarchical oppositions that define men by what they have and women by what they lack, games like the original Stiffy Makane—which is quite literally phallocentric—can be argued to be the ultimate expression of this tendency, having the player engage in this system with the explicit goal of the subjugation of women. Meanwhile, Citizen Makane demonstrates its commitment to complicating the phallogocentric worldview in its first scene, which requires the player character to unequip his penis in order to proceed, thus blurring the boundaries between the body and the environment as well as the traditional definitions of “man” and “woman”…

Okay, okay, that’s enough—Citizen Makane is a porn parody deck-building game, and although it has moments of sincerity and some actual commentary to make about masculinity, most of the game is very, very silly.

It is the story of a man who wakes up after centuries of cryosleep to find himself in a world where men have otherwise died out. He has been revived as an experiment in reintroducing men to society, and is also playing host to an AI, Shamhat, whom he is tasked with providing with training data by having sex with as many women as possible.

The sex is represented by a very simple deck-building card game; once you’ve figured out the basics of how it works, it becomes rote, with little variation between encounters. The acts you perform are described with semi-randomized ridiculous similes clearly parodying bad erotica, which keeps things entertaining for a while, but the fun of that wears thin eventually too. This is unfortunate, as the player does have to grind (no pun intended) to advance the plot. But then, maybe the tedium is intentional; as the game goes on, the PC himself obviously begins to tire of the whole thing and long for some real connection.

This is one of a number of ways that Citizen Makane sets up gender-essentialist and heterosexist elements for the purpose of knocking them down. The player must afford the game a certain amount of goodwill for this to work, as much of the knocking-down comes fairly late in a long (by IFComp standards) game, but—all semi-joking attempts at feminist litcrit aside—the opening sequence did serve its purpose of giving me some confidence that these elements weren’t being replicated uncritically.

There is, however, one area in which the game doesn’t try to question the assumptions that undergird the genre that it’s parodying, which is the treatment of sex and gender as strict binaries. Granted, I’m not sure quite what I would have liked to see the game do here, given the “all men have died out” premise; it’s inherently difficult to handle the idea of sex and gender as spectra in that context. I don’t think any recent take on the premise has handled this in a way that I was entirely satisfied with, or that didn’t cause a certain amount of controversy; even the best-regarded example that I’m aware of, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, came in for a decent amount of criticism within the trans community (of which the author is also a part). So I can’t entirely fault Citizen Makane for simply avoiding the issue, but I was still a bit uncomfortable with the lack of acknowledgement that trans, nonbinary, and intersex people exist. Though I did appreciate that the game made a point of showing that some of the women still prefer relationships with each other, even with a man available.

Ultimately, despite these flaws, I did find Citizen Makane a largely effective deconstruction of the toxic machismo of the genre that Stiffy Makane, in its particularly egregious awfulness, has become emblematic of. The opening and ending scenes are particularly strong, and there are plenty of humorous moments to be found along the way. But I’m always a bit on the fence about whether intentionally boring the player is worth it, and while I recognize its thematic import here, it still made the long middle section of the game a bit of a slog.

Antony and Cleopatra Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando

The Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective gamebooks have spawned a whole genre of multiplayer games where the players take the role of detectives provided with a number of leads; limited to a certain number of actions per day, they must decide what to follow up on and hope they manage to get enough information to solve the case. These games generally end with a quiz asking not just about who the culprit is, but about a number of other particulars surrounding the case, to see how much the players have discovered or deduced. Antony and Cleopatra is an attempt to bring this genre into the realm of multiplayer IF; it’s an ambitious and interesting attempt, but not, I think, an entirely successful one.

Rather than emulating Sherlock Holmes, Antony and Cleopatra take their cues from Nick and Nora Charles, but the chemistry and charm that have made the Thin Man movies enduring classics are largely absent; the influence is obvious mainly in the staggering amount of drinking on the job that the characters can do. Characterizations for the protagonists are fairly thin and their interactions with each other are minimal. This seems like a missed opportunity—Antony and Cleopatra are colorful figures with well-established pop-cultural personas that seem ripe for some engaging repartee in the interstitial scenes between investigative activities. But the only moment in the game where this comes through is the bit in which Antony has to explain to Cleopatra why a jewelry store being named “Blood Diamonds” might be off-putting, as Cleopatra thinks it’s only natural that diamonds should be paid for in blood. I would have liked to see more moments like this one—more character interaction, more dry humor wrung from the absurdity of these two larger-than-life figures investigating a murder.

Antony and Cleopatra’s innovation with regards to the genre’s traditional gameplay is to add investigation sequences where both players are offered dialogue options to question people connected to the case, but the lack of distinction between the two characters here is disappointing—sometimes you can get the same question worded slightly differently, but only slightly. In combination with the lack of focus on developing the characters and their relationship, the lack of any game-mechanical difference makes the two-protagonist conceit feel somewhat pointless. In fact, since you always have time to ask all possible questions and it makes no difference who asks them, the interactivity isn’t doing much for the investigation scenes in general.

There are a number of different approaches one could take here, any of which I think could have been effective:

  1. Dispense with the two-PC conceit entirely and make the whole experience more like playing Consulting Detective with your friends, where you’re not really controlling multiple distinct characters, just trying to hash out among yourselves where you should focus your investigative energies. As in SHCD, make the investigation scenes static passages; have the planning sessions be the bulk of the actual gameplay and rely on discussion between players to keep them engaged otherwise.
  2. Conversely, take inspiration from some of Consulting Detective’s successors that were actually designed as multiplayer games (unlike the original) and make the characters mechanically distinct. Give them unique investigative abilities (with limitations on when and how often they can use them); give them actually distinct conversation options; have them notice different things. In IF, this is an opportunity to work in characterization in a way a board game can’t, but honestly, in my experience, if you give players the mechanical distinctions, their imaginations will often fill in the rest.
  3. Go the IF sleight-of-hand route and keep the two characters mechanically identical, but give them very distinct personalities. The player may always get the exact same information in the end, but the initial formulation of the questions is so different that it seems like it matters which PC is asking what. The illusion would fall apart on replay, of course, but SHCD-likes (if you will) usually aren’t replayable anyway.

The mystery itself also didn’t work quite as well for me; maybe there was something I didn’t find, but as far as I can tell, you’re meant to solve it by noticing a single discrepancy that you can’t in any way follow up on and extrapolating the whole situation from there, and that didn’t quite come together for me. I understand SHCD cases usually did require some leaps of logic (which I presume is part of the reason that it turned into a multiplayer event when it wasn’t designed as one—more likely that someone in your group will make the right connection), and my preferences here are probably shaped by having spent much more time with recent games like Detective: Modern Crime than with the original. But I would argue that what’s fitting for a game based on the controversial deductive style of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t feel so natural elsewhere, and in an interactive mystery I do prefer having firmer grounds for my conclusions.

I will admit that part of the problem here may be that I played this game with my partner and we tend to be pretty much on the same page, so we didn’t spend a lot of time debating what to do, which is clearly meant to be a significant aspect of the gameplay experience. But she and I have enjoyed working through games like Detective together, and I think it could be fun to have that kind of experience in IF form, especially if, again, it managed to lean into some of the things IF can do that board games can’t. Antony and Cleopatra, meanwhile, feels to me like it makes just enough changes to the formula to introduce new problems without fully committing to the strengths of the new medium.

One Does Not Simply Fry

One Does Not Simply Fry is a short ChoiceScript game laden with Lord of the Rings puns and jokes about cooking competitions. Possibly also jokes about ChoiceScript games—I’m not sure whether the bit where the PC is exasperated at having to fill out endless forms about their identity, preferences, and motivation before they can start the cooking competition is a friendly dig at the usual Choice of Games style, but if it is, it amused me.

Rather than actually filling out those forms, you select a premade character—essentially either Legolas, Eowyn, or Frodo—and then get frying. In effect, you’re skipping the part of the CoG game where you decide how to build your various skills and going straight to the part where you figure out how to apply them to your best advantage. I’m a bit impatient, at least when it comes to this style of gameplay, so I appreciated this.

I was easily able to win the fry-off with every character except poor Leggy Ass (his high stat of “breadcraft magic” simply doesn’t seem to have as many potential applications within the competition as some of the other skills). The game encourages you to play multiple times for the full experience, but I was a bit disappointed at how little changed between playthroughs—the differences are mostly at the beginning and end. This was especially glaring with Froyo, who is accompanied by an assistant (Samfool, in a slightly lazy joke) when none of the other characters are; this seemed like it should at least have an impact on flavor text, but Sam apparently didn’t have much to say during the competition. Even the special unlockable character of the Which King (he can’t remember which king he’s supposed to be, you see) mostly gets the same text as the other possible PCs during the competition, although the divergence at the end is more significant.

This is a little unfortunate mostly because the game trades primarily on its humor, and seeing the same jokes over and over again tends to take the shine off them. (Although I was unreasonably amused by “mistainless mithril” every time.) If the style of humor seems like a good time to you, it’s worth a play, but I think the optimal way to go about it might be to do one normal playthrough (probably not as Leggy Ass), then play as the Which King, then call it quits.

Published by ejtranslations

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