IFComp 2025 review: my creation by dino

my creation by dino is a short (10 minutes) parser game (the IFComp website incorrectly said it was Twine but I have emailed them about this) in which the PC is a dad stuck in bed in a rickety house with his crying baby. You would never guess this from the cover art, a design which will only resonate if you complete the game.

Endlessly crying babies raise human hackles at a primordial level, so the game's temporal depiction of that common experience of shuffling around a room one can't leave while the crying can't be stopped is likely to knife (or knife anew) anyone who tries it, in spite of major implementation gaps. It's clear my creation hasn't had a testing round or received any technical advice, but I commend the author for bringing a story like this to the parser format on their own. Other gains can come in future.

It's important to say there's ultimately more to the game than the screaming baby. If that had been the whole thing, it would be an uninviting ask of players to say the least. It's tough as is. But there is more. I will discuss the more with complete spoilering in the remainder of the review.

The PC's in the bed and the baby's in a nearby basket, crying. Where the geography of the parser model really works for this game is making the bed into the PC's world. For reasons not made clear until the end, the prose indicates the PC is in physical pain and inhibited in movement, so each NORTH, SOUTH etc. drags them, with effort, to another section of the bed. The efforts are described. On the one hand, the idea of thinking about compass directions while moving around a bed is absurd. Obviously we're not meant to be thinking about them, they're just the stock method of movement in a parser game. For a new author to program up some replacement terminology would be a big ask, so in this case, it shows dino working with the strengths of the format, but also the need to bend the format's stock trappings to the game. In prose, it's also effective for the bed world that the game's opening paragraph is written in the third person (the rest of the game is in typical parser second person) offering a bird's eye view of the situation:

"He is lying in his bed, in his bedroom, in his own crooked little house with small windows, single glass, overlooking other crooked houses;"

The cut from this intro text into the "middle of the bed" location, the change of scale and pronoun and person, all act together like a magnifying glass zooming in on the PC's situation, where suddenly one bed seems giant.

The geography of the bed isn't respected in the programming, though. There's a constant mismatch between what's described, what can be acted on, where things are. This doesn't block progress – the game is too small for that – but it does interrupt the spell of the fiction and so reduce its power. One inadvertent side-effect was that I was chuckling at my gauche handling of such props as the baby or the basket, but at the same time I experienced a kind of remote terror in handling them. Like, god, I hope the game won't let me DROP the baby in any bad way.

I was surprised when, having found a copy of the novel Frankenstein near the bed, I typed READ BOOK and was suddenly hit with an almost 700-word excerpt. This moment broke the dirge of the baby situation and made me re-engage afresh. I also admit that my kneejerk reaction to the idea of reading Frankenstein to a baby was laughter, but I remembered a second later, of course you can read anything to a baby with a chance of soothing the baby. Reading Frankenstein to this baby is the "winning move". It leads to another text block, this one almost 800 words, in which the dad monologues to the restful baby.

The monologue drops the details of the story into place. It's not a twist, but narratively it has some of the functions of a twist of a short story. The dad's in pain in bed because he's had gender-changing surgery, but before that he gave birth to the child. The monologue muses on their possible future and their future relationship. It's certainly a breather after the oppression of game-long crying, and the dewy-eyed intimacy of the moment feels real. In the context of what's come before, which gave away little, and only a little bit at a time, 800 words straight up  inevitably feels expositional. That's how I/we typically respond to story structures and lengths after we've encountered enough of them. But the monologue doesn't feel expositional in a "nobody would say all this" kind of way, and I think that's more important. It reads authentic and illuminates the sketched character of the dad. The value of Frankenstein is now also apparent, its tale of human creation and unusual birth and an outsider human in an unusual body resonant with the PC's experiences.

I valued my creation more after playing it and after thinking about it than during the playing, at which time the implementation was kicking the atmosphere every few moves. Even implementation can't stop a baby crying baby, though.

IFComp 2025 review: Temptation In The Village by Anssi Räisänen

Temptation in the Village by Anssi Räisänen is a parser game adaptation of an unfinished short story by Franz Kafka. That story is dated 1914. Temptation took me 30-40 minutes to complete and my review discusses it in full.

Räisänen explains in the ABOUT that the game begins as a faithful adaptation of the story followed by his own expansions on it in the spirit of Kafka. The result is the experience of a Kafka tale manoeuvred to suit the parser format. Psychologically focused within the PC, it is atmospheric and works very well. The methods for the adaptation are interesting but uncomplicated, and they drew my attention back to some fundamental qualities of the parser format and their effects. The story is certainly as existential as one expects from Kafka, but it doesn't have the unrelenting heaviness of something like The Trial. Its feet are in naturalism and it's set on a village farm.

The opening paragraph of the game acts as a kind of benchmark. It depicts the PC experiencing what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed "the peak experience", the feeling that life is infinitely interesting and exciting, and potential-filled:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you."

This experience will soon be defused by the PC's dealings with a roster of unhelpful and sometimes unintentionally sinister village characters. In my reading of the game, the elaboration of the move to or away from this psychological high point is the frame for what happens in the story.

I need to preface the rest of this review by saying that at the time I'm writing this, I haven't read any Kafka. Being a literary type, I know a lot about Kafka from secondhand reading, the zeitgeist, and the overused and under-understood adjective "Kafka-esque". The experience of Temptation meshed with specific qualities I expected from Kafka. It features absurdity and an uncertain prosecutorial atmosphere, and though there are no real bureaucracies in it to confound the PC, the minor hierarchy of the farm's running amounts to a version of one.

The story begins with the PC wandering in the countryside when they come across a farm. Looking for shelter and work, they start to enquire about both, and are soon running afoul of ambiguously helpful/unhelpful locals. A villager suggests the inn might suit, but also points out it's been turned over to a cripple the local community was obliged to provide for. The cripple and his wife can hardly manage the inn, so the inn stinks and ends up providing for nobody. The villager man and his wife hang about the dithering PC, following him at a distance for no good reason and seeming both menacing and foolish in doing so.

The main way such events are managed in the game is just by allowing or blocking directional movements at different times. The player is forced to twitch and dawdle about the first location, being invited in one direction, finding that way blocked by NPCs or their ideas, invited in another, finding it now blocked too for new narrative reasons. For the most part, these methods get around the need for any conversation mechanic. When I first tried to speak to the villager, I was briefly led astray by the ALAN engine's default help message regarding ASK PERSON ABOUT THING, which prompted me to think (with great relief) that I wouldn't have to use such a command at all, since all the characters thus far had been speaking spontaneously. It turned out later that I did have to come up with ASK MAN ABOUT ... so my least favourite IF mechanic struck again, forcing me to the walkthrough for one command.

The divisions of parser game turns and locations suits Kafka's and Räisänen's unhelpful NPCs. The prose of Temptation conveys an inner psychological process, not just a series of standalone vignettes about place. The PC enters a room, is often prohibited from performing actions by implied social customs or just the silence of others (how strange it would be to go to ask an old couple for a room for the night, find them at dinner, but also that they're prepared to sit there ignoring you in the half-dark while eating porridge) and must work out what to do to unstick the situation. The prose indicates a normalcy, or at least non-rudeness, in the PC, that is tested by others who seem to be unthinkingly rude or just not thinking.

Even children have an air of menace in this story. They awaken and encircle the PC in unison when they hear the sound of a dog barking at night:

"It is too late; suddenly, all around you, you see the children rising up in their white nightshirts as though by agreement, as though on command, and eye you closely."

There is the sense of conspiracy amongst others, never verified or verifiable. It just emphasises that the PC is the PC and cannot know others' thoughts, yet he keeps trying to balance what he guesses those thoughts might be against his own standards.

Where Kafka's story ended in the night, Räisänen continues to the morning with the PC's enquiries regarding work. A young man seen earlier on a wall, where he was inviting the PC onto the farm in what modern folk would describe as a passive-aggressive manner, now submits the PC to a pre-work test:

"It would make a great impression on the master if you mowed the tall grass south of the house. There is a scythe in the old barn... Another thing you could do is move the big trunk from the old barn to the new barn."

The PC thinks this man seems like a foreman, and speculates he might even be the son of the old farmer, but chooses not to ask about either of these things. The player's more traditional adventuring skills are now drawn on to bring the farming tasks to a close, at which point the man asks one more thing:

"... remember seeing those fallen cherry blossoms in the garden? You could go and glue them back onto the tree branches. I am sure the master would appreciate that very much."

The PC's realisation that the man has been pranking him and wasting his time is accompanied by another; that the PC himself has been behaving in a blindly obedient manner while on this farm.

Similar incidents sprinkled throughout the game have led to this point. As a player, I recalled my own following of all the suggestions made by the first villagers outside the farm in spite of them not actually being helpful. However, I didn't realise that the old couple I'd found eating porridge on the first evening had never even offered me a room until I reviewed my transcript. I had just felt they had, then I'd gone off and lain down on a pile of straw to sleep. The so-called foreman never indicated who he actually was, or why he might have had any real authority over me, yet the PC had behaved in a manner as if he had.

Given that this is the conclusion to the fully original portion of the game, and that it weaves together the prior contents of Kafka's short story so well, I think the integration is excellent, and the story has a thematically and psychologically powerful conclusion.

The man's prank isn't the final word, though. Recalling the peak experience of the protagonist in the first scene, that hard-to-share delight he experienced at everything, I'm aware of the distance travelled from that moment to his humiliation at the hands of the foreman. The game has shown that the PC got here by careless small steps in the face of uncertainties, and certainly lost his way after that first moment. Peak experiences can feel like accidents. Abraham Maslow ended up assuming they were. Writer-philosopher Colin Wilson later explored the phenomenon in literature and in reality. He wrote about the true value of these experiences, their nature, what we can do to try to bring them about, what we can do to try to recall them, or avoid losing them or moving too far away from them. Temptation ends with a turn back towards the potential of the opening high point:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

For the evolution of the PC, this is the right move. The game casts most of its situations in Kafka's socially adversarial light, so there are practical implications we can take from the story, or be reminded of, about how more assertiveness may be needed in dealing with such situations, and with self-proclaimed authorities, if we aren't to be given the runaround like the PC is in Temptation.

Given my lack of Kafka-reading, I don't know if Kafka ever ended stories with what you might call a positive vector. By reputation, my guess is that he wouldn't have. On the other hand, if he'd trafficked down in Samuel-Beckett-like levels of wilfully stupid pessimism, I'm sure I'd have heard about that.

Temptation in the Village is interactive, but not in the sense that the player could have warded off all those unhelpful people. There's a journey to go on here and the interactions highlight opportunities to think about it. The player is subjected to the old "You can't go that way" message a lot – in situation-specific prose, of course – but that message is existential, not just physical. The PC chooses not to go that way, now. Why? Probably because they're being too careful to try not to offend any of the uncaring NPCs.

What is the Temptation of the title? I have no idea. Some googling suggests there aren't solid ideas out there regarding Kafka's original piece. It was an unfinished fragment, after all. I think some mystery is always a good thing.

IFComp 2025 review: Willy's Manor by Joshua Hetzel

Willy's Manor by Joshua Hetzel is a good-natured puzzling-in-a-house parser adventure, no more and no less. The blurb's concept of the PC being a producer for a TV show called Celebrity Houses is the game-unimportant excuse to subject them to a test organised by novelty-manufacturing eccentric Willy in Willy's extravagant manor. In other words, you enter the manor and solve all the adventure game puzzles inside. Willy has a box which dispenses lightly riddly questions whose answers are objects. Put your object-answer in the box, pull the lever and see if you're right to get the next puzzle. It took me about 45 minutes to complete the game using the in-game HINT command seven times. There are some typos, it lacks proofreading polish, and sports the odd non-critical bug, but it works.

The character of Willy is built up during play in his absence. There are lots of photos in his house showing moments from his life that either amused him or were important to him. These include shaking hands with the president of the USA and laying out whoopee cushions. Other notes and books and bits and pieces pay out anecdotes about the man. He comes across as a thoroughly nice and quite nostalgic chap, a Willy Wonka (I assume the main inspiration) without the dark bits. So while it's his house that's supposed to be the subject of the PC's interest, it's really Willy's life that the player seems to be analysing during the course of the puzzling. I don't recall the game specifying Willy's age, but it does all feel like an exercise in looking back in fondness. Ultimately it felt good in its emotion to me, if in danger of being a little cloying on the way.

The game is not technically a limited-parser one but it is one of those that lists all the commands you might need in its HELP section. It doesn't exploit a wide range of actions, sticking to the basics and adding a few custom ones. The in-game graded hints can be called on generally or in relation to specific items, and worked well for me. A couple of times, one of them in the case of a word riddle, I continued to enter HINT until I got the explicit answer.

I'm not sure the manor is as bizarre as the blurb suggests. There's definitely one fantastic section you'd not find in a house, but otherwise it's mostly traditional rooms and halls. It pays to EXAMINE everything. A lot of items don't appear until the PC first notices them. Most puzzles involve you observing the quality of some item and matching it to the riddle answer Willy's box is asking for at the time. A few puzzles in the fantastic section involve more elaborate work, and actually I kicked myself in this area for not being more observant of the environment. I felt I spoiled a good puzzle mechanism with the hints; I blame IFComp haste.

The very last puzzle exasperated me a little as it relies on the player having either a good memory of details of their game, long scrollback that they can review, or a transcript. After wracking my brain I was able to extract from it the needed data. There is a satisfaction in the last room in reviewing Willy's various nostalgic memories, this scene amplifying the overall theme of the game.

Willy's Manor is a little rough-edged and the prose isn't remarkable, but there are lots of puzzles and some good puzzles. The indirect focus on the character of Willy adds an angle to distinguish this arbitrary-puzzling-in-a-house game from the many similar ones out there.

IFComp 2025 review: Not so Happy Easter by Petr Kain

Not so Happy Easter 2025 (NSHE) is a humourous, light horror adventure originally written by Petr Kain in the Czech language. The author's translation of it to English debuts in IFComp 2025. The platform is the ZX Spectrum, one of the most popular 8-bit microcomputers in Europe and the UK in the 1980s, so you need to use an emulator to play it. I used and can recommend Retro Virtual Machine (RVM) which I've used for ZX text adventures before.

I found NSHE to be compelling, well designed and a lot of fun, so I would say to players, yes, it is worth the effort to get the emulator and play it if you're prepared to take that little bit of time to get into (or re-tap) its 8-bit mindset. It has some contemporary design sensibilities like an absence of random deaths and "walking dead" situations, and I also particularly enjoy retro-platformed IF that is set in the present day (unsurprising, as I made one of my own). NSHE offers the anachronistic delights of cell phones, Teslas and QR codes rendered via technology which predates their existence. As an Australian, the game was also culturally interesting for me. It has some local slang, the Czech currency and other European touches which might be inconsequential if you live there but are nice transporting details if you don't.

Note: I don't think the game's playtime estimate of half an hour is accurate. Bringing my retro-adventuring skills to bear, it took me 83 minutes to complete without hints. I don't know if it would be physically possible to get through it in half an hour at the accurately emulated game's sub-5Mhz speed. Commands have processing time, text doesn't appear instantaneously and you can't type too fast or characters are missed by the buffer. It's possible that on a different emulator, you may be able to overcrank a little, but RVM offered me real speed or an impossible-to-manage warp speed. On the plus side, I discovered you only have to type the first two characters of any word to be understood. The great danger for modern players is that L is not short for LOOK here but for LOAD, which will fastload a fastsaved game! To LOOK, either type LOOK or R (Refresh?)

Having recently commended the blurb for valley of glass, at least for its ability to draw me, I think NSHE has a good one too, and which is an accurate tonal harbinger of the game's content:

"You invented a simple adventure game for the kids in the town, where they had to solve simple puzzles and look for chocolate eggs. They solved nothing, they found nothing, and three of them got lost somewhere."

I especially like that second line conveying the mildly exasperated cynicism of the PC voice. The good thing is that that voice doesn't become overly cynical during play. 8-bit games of the day could be snarky at the expense of the game's narrative or atmosphere, and still can be if they emulate that tone, but I found NSHE to be sitting in a good spot. My own feeling of achievement in solving its 75 points worth of puzzles was not undermined by cheap one-liners. Those puzzles involve the PC's search for the missing kids with the goal of avoiding being drubbed by angry parents. There are a handful of F-bombs dropped and some described violence, but contextually there's not much of it and no gratuitousness.

The game starts in a town, and with this section being more open than what comes later, it's potentially a little more difficult, or at least less aimed. I found the key to success is to continue to make your rounds. The environment is mildly dynamic (e.g. there's a bus stop, and a bus that doesn't come immediately, and NPCs who come or go in response to events) but this is a game where repeat visits to locations and retrying actions over time can pay off. Once you've observed this, the fact that the roster of locations isn't too big works for you, as does the limited verb set. The game gives a complete list of verbs if you ask for VOCAB. Anything that can't be expressed with a more specific verb can be effected with USE A, or USE A ON B. There's lots of technical help, too, in the form of colour-coded feedback and the marking of interactive props with inverse text. Such features help prevent the wasting commands on things that aren't implemented.

The post-town adventure which takes place in spookier wilderness is where the game gets denser. This is well-performed classic adventure gaming with lots to do in a small number of locations, some back-and-forthing and the potential for new ideas and uses for such diverse items as an electric bike or a rubber duck to pop into the player's head. I finished with a score of 71/75, interpreting a few actions I performed as gaining bonus points, so there must have been some more that I missed. You can check your SCORE at any time en route.

Overall, Not so Happy Easter 2025 is a solid and solidly 8-bit adventure touching with humour on the tropes of modern life, still managing to exercise a bit of a PC voice and attitude through terse-leaning writing, and which does what it can technically to smooth play.

IFComp 2025 review: valley of glass by Devan Wardrop-Saxton

valley of glass, a lyrical-leaning and extremely short parser game by Devan Wardrop-Saxton, was the first IF I chose to play from the IFComp 2025 crop because I liked the blurb. However, when I say it is extremely short, I mean that it seems incomplete, a stub of an experience. The author may view it as complete – I don't know – but I expect that most players will not experience it that way. My review describes potentially everything in the game.

The blurb for valley of glass starts like this:

Here you are again, walking the North Road in a rare moment alone before another day of your seven years promised to the village blacksmith.

This called to my mind the English folk song The Blacksmith, the first track on both of Steeleye Span's first two studio albums, which I like very much, and I expected to find a broadly similar vibe here.

I assumed the PC was a woman, both because of the song and because of the line in the blurb "promised to the village blacksmith" which I read as being about marriage. When first examining my inventory, I found I was wearing "A heavy woolen coat made for a man twice your size." Then I wasn't sure. Perhaps the seven years I promised were of hard blacksmithing toil? If I was a woman, the coat description sentence was ambiguously written, though admittedly the blurb pointed out it was a borrowed coat; but that's the blurb. That info should be in the game if confusion is to be avoided.

My speculations continued. The blurb continued, "seven years until you may reunite with your love, the Black Bull of Norroway." Now I was thinking woman again, because the Black Bull of Norroway sounded like the kind of entity a woman betrothed to a blacksmith might instead pine for. What cinched the deal for womanhood were my boots: "Plain leather-soled boots that first belonged to your eldest sister, then your second-eldest sister, and now you." To play devil's advocate and suggest the boots might have been passed from sister to brother felt like a stretch atop all the other bits of info.

I thus find myself walking on the road in the game's first location. It's clear the author is unaware of Inform typicalities. X ME replies "as good-looking as ever" and no exits are listed. Testing the directions, I discover that a geographical and/or memory-based blockage exists in three of the four main directions, and that they imply puzzles I expect to solve. e.g.

But until you’ve won your iron shoes from the blacksmith, you’ll never make it past the first few switchbacks.

The southern location was a village. Here, no compass directions worked, so I tried IN. That provoked the end of the game. I had to run the ending a number of times before I got the feeling that yes, it can be considered a legitimate ending, as vague as it is about all things other than that a workday is beginning.

I couldn't locate a blacksmith, forge, shoes, or anyone or anything else, except some jewelled fruits in my inventory, polishable with the cloth I had. My instinct, when stuck in certain kinds of parser game, learned back in the day from Infocom's Wishbringer, is to try squeezing or breaking things I'm holding. BREAK worked here, reducing my jewelled fruits to detritus, but also indicating that this was probably a mistake.

Those are the far extents of the game that I've found. They comprise the start of a character who has memories, possessions that add to that character (the clothes), others that are unexplained (the fruit), and a few locations recalling memories. The lyrical bent of these things is something, but there's not a game here and not enough resolution of what is to convey much else.

Given that I harped on the blurb, I should also point out that valley of glass's synopsis did describe it as "a reimagined moment alone from the folktale Black Bull of Norroway." Moments aren't long, unless you're in Inception. I personally anticipated a certain vibe here because of my acquaintance with Steeleye Span's take on a folk tale, but I expect most other IFCompers won't have that. Perhaps my review describes my process of acclimatising myself to the scale of valley of glass, which I had misapprehended. It never promised me puzzles or greater length, though it presented four geographical nodes that I could have sworn were going to lead to puzzles. I still don't think there's enough detail here to convey the import of the promised moment.

IFComp 2024 review: The Triskelion Affair by Clyde Falsoon

In spite of being the buggiest game I've played this IFComp – though admittedly I have not played many – The Triskelion Affair still held my interest and/or pulled me through. This parser adventure posits the player as a "medieval detective" (quoth the blurb) tasked with finding a magical item hidden in a church. Perhaps, in retrospect, the key piece of information to take from the blurb is this description: "Inspired by the classic dungeon-crawl adventures of yore." And not this other one that says, "Sword & sorcery", which feels wrong. And also not the paradoxical thrust of the whole blurb, which is that you will only get into deeper trouble if you don't explore diligently. I think it's actually the opposite, that by exploring diligently, you will advance in the game and thus unavoidably get into deeper trouble, the nature of adventures in general. That first note about the dungeon-crawl adventures of yore reins in a range of the game's content and approaches, which could otherwise be described as being all over the place. They still coalesce into a setting of some atmosphere and focus in the last third of the game, which takes place in an eerie abandoned chapel.

(cover art by Ian Yarham, Geograph (2024-08-18))

The parser voice is a mixture of straight reverent description, replete with details of the different architectural features of churches such as the apse and narthex, and personalised snark of the kind parser games have refined over the years but which is going out of style unless you label your game Old School. A rewrite of core parser cues, like asking the player 'What do you do?' every turn, and the inclusion of numerous gags, like wacky doggerel for tombstone epitaphs, or erecting mausoleums to Crowther and Woods of Adventure fame, give the sense of the author's presence. I don't know that the two voices are at war with each other, but they certainly comprise a tonal switch that is thrown rapidly and repeatedly between settings A and B during the course of the game. There's also the odd personal exhortation; typing GET ALL produces: "That’s too much burden for one person, and there’s stuff you don’t want to deal with. Try examining the thing first. Explore! Otherwise, what’s the fun?"

This particular message was a handy cue for me to poke at things for poking's enjoyment and sake, which was the correct attitude to take in retrospect. Much of the game's contents and geographical presentation remind me of a MUD's, which aren't usually designed for single players or for puzzle-solving. The room description of each of a large graveyard's sections consists of a brief note about which sector the player is in, followed by the same general graveyard description. A game warden's hut is chock-full of takeable described stuff that is ultimately of no use on the player's quest. Having taken it all, I ended up leaving it strewn all over the donjon because there's also an inventory limit, albeit a generous one.

I found the chapel part of the game particularly involving. I've found it hard to put my finger on exactly why. I certainly find abandoned church settings inherently creepy and fascinating. There's a sense in this game that there's no overt threat, and that the environment shouldn't be hostile, but it is, anyway. Everyone's left or died. Broken furniture barricades hint at scary troubles. The church is full of ritualistic paraphernalia, the volume of it suggesting numerous stressful prop-based puzzles are ahead (What am I going to do with an explodable canister? With the northern lantern? The southern lantern? The third lantern whose direction I forget? The stack of parchment? The highly suspicious blank parchment? The multiple candleholders? etc.) yet that's not the case. Somehow all of these elements apply an overhead weight, an idea of a past and of a world and kingdom outside, all the better to make you feel stuck in this weird holy place picking at some minor mystery like it's a cog in something bigger. 

There's also a lone RPG fight with a zombie, easily won, but just make sure you pick up and wear again anything the zombie tore off you during the melee!

As my opening declared, I found the game to be really buggy. Increasingly so towards its conclusion, where even room names degenerate into exposed Inform code. All the way through, there's almost always just one way to do a thing that's frictionless. Every other way is troubled, missing, leads in disambiguation circles, or suffers from spelling errors or no synonyms. Most alternate obvious uses for objects are not catered to. I've experienced hundreds of games in this state by now in my gaming and reviewing career. These games just needed testing. How this one's state will sit with each player is unknown to me. It's easy to imagine players tossing in the towel due to a lack of trust. Once I'd established the level of bugginess, I didn't hesitate to turn to the walkthrough when needed, or just break out saved games to repeat actions that I had no faith the game would let me repeat without cutting off future success.

Triskelion also opens with a tutorial. It feels funny and friendly, but already shows many of the implementation omissions. The second command demanded in the whole game seems to be SALUTE. This immediately returns, "What do you want to salute?" Come on, game. The guy who just saluted me. It's also off-target in emphasising a lot of eating, which is unimportant for this game, and a decent amount of communication by the dreaded ASK/TELL system, which is also, mercifully, completely unimportant for this game beyond the tutorial.

The Triskelion Affair feels like a lot of buggy, parser-loving parser games I've played before, but it comes on friendly, even if the tutorial's off piste, and the church section ultimately pulls together to menace with atmosphere. Whether you will get that far in spite of all the bugginess is not a prediction I can make in general.

IFComp 2023 review: Barcarolle in Yellow by Victor Ojuel

I've currently time to play only a few IFComp entries each year. I try to start with a horror game that speaks to me. This year, the game that's plainly shouting at me is Barcarolle in Yellow by Victor Ojuel.

Cover art by Ara Carrasco

This parser adventure is an IF take on the cinematic subgenre known as giallo, in which I have some expertise. So even if this turns out to be my only review, I hope it's one that can help other players to appreciate the qualities of this game in the context of its source material. I'm sure Barcarolle will entertain anyone who enjoys a hectic, lurid murder-mystery thriller with violence and some sex/nudity, for that's what it is, but I can still imagine a lot of "What was that about?" questions regarding some of its content in the minds of players who've never encountered a giallo or giallo-like before.

* If you don't want to read a review of the game before playing it, but would like to know a little about the giallo genre before you do, you can safely read the About giallo in general section.

* Anyone can also read the Spoiler-free play advice section before playing. In fact, I recommend you do read that before playing!

* Otherwise: The review following those sections is not a spoilery review in terms of what the game would consider to be its surprises. It describes the initial scenes of the game, the nature of the game and story overall and the kinds of tasks the PC will be involved in during the game. It lists some specific ways the PC can die and describes the nudity that's in the game. It says nothing about the content of the ending but something about the nature of the ending.

About giallo in general

Giallo is Italian for yellow. In Italian publishing, there's a history of classic mystery novels being released in cheap editions with distinctive yellow covers and sensational cover art. Their success led to newer pulp mysteries being published in the same style. When these stories began to take cinematic form, directors quickly turned to producing original murder-mysteries inspired by them, but with a modern outlook. These films were more psychologically-focused, erotic and horrific than the books that originally inspired them (though sometimes not more so than the covers that inspired them) and often featured innovative audiovisual styling, gore, nudity, and a high body count. This kind of film became known as the giallo and was at its international peak of popularity in the 1970s.

The majority of giallo came from Italy, followed by Spain. Some were coproductions that shared Italian and Spanish actors and production crew. The film's casts were often studded with internationals. In Barcarolle in Yellow the heroine PC, Eva Chantry, is English (according to her passport) and is off to shoot a giallo in Venice when the game begins.

The name and cover art for Ojuel's game are on the mark in their pastiche quality. Compare the Barcarolle cover shown earlier in this post to this real poster for The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963)

The international success of one particular giallo, Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970) set off a copycat trend in the naming of these films. Numbers, animals and colours featured heavily. As did salaciousness. Consider these titles:

• Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)
• Cat'O'Nine Tails (1971)
• The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)
• Strip Nude for your Killer (1975)
• Watch Me When I Kill (1977)
• Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)
• The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971)

It turns out that a barcarolle is a kind of Venetian gondolier's song. And for a giallo IF initially presenting to a giallo-unfamiliar audience, the colour yellow is an obvious choice.

Giallo, as they were unto themselves in the 1970s, aren't really made any more. Some thrillers have giallo-like elements, but never enough to fully qualify them or give them the giallo feel. What we do see produced today is the occasional hyper-loyal giallo pastiche, like the 1970s-set Abrakadabra (NSFW trailer) or 1980s-set Crystal Eyes (NSFW trailer). Abrakadabra and its trailer are so amazingly accurate, I genuinely thought the film was a giallo from the 1970s when I first saw the trailer; the film was released in 2018.

Finally, one of the giallo masters from the day, Dario Argento, is still alive, and brought out a brand new giallo in 2022, Dark Glasses (NSFW trailer). For all its flaws, I still think it's his best film for a long time.

Spoiler-free play advice

The game uses few verbs, and mercifully, all talking is achieved just with a TALK (PERSON) command. All commands needed to play are listed in the HELP. The key advice I can give is to WAIT whenever in doubt, as many scenes progress on their own, TALK TO (PERSON) whenever still in doubt, save frequently (though UNDO is also your friend) and finally, pay attention to your wardrobe. It's both fun in an IF sense to change your clothes, but it also turns out to be policed in a practical sense by this game. Wear whatever your commonsense tells you is appropriate for whatever task you're about to undertake.

About Barcarolle in Yellow

In this giallo adventure set in 1975, the player takes the role of Eva Chandry, an actor whom the credits describe as starring "as herself". The credits are interwoven with the game's opening turns set in a police station, where an interview with Eva is beginning. Eva often finds that life is like a performance, or that life reminds her of her art more often than the other way around. Thus the game is presented to the player within the frame of it being a film, and is also about a film actor appearing in a giallo film to be shot in Venice.

Giallo films often blur the lines between reality, dreams, imagination, and false memories of the seen and heard, but they rarely enter the postmodern. Barcarolle in Yellow throws in a foregrounded fourth wall element that adds to the pleasurably discomforting pressure the game is always applying through its prose. Is the game reality the true reality? Or does that lie in some layer above or below what Eva experiences? What she does experience is all the mayhem of filmmaking, typically chaotic giallo plotting, and being the target of a mask-wearing killler in Venice, the same way her character is stalked in the script.

Killers in giallo films are often motivated by Freudian traumas from their past. As often, the traumas are revealed to the audience in piecemeal flashbacks cued by the developing investigations of the murders. While I'm used to giallos going back, I laughed when Barcarelle went way back (to 1862) and to another country (USA) in what appeared to be its first flashback. In its typical rug-pulling style, this was revealed to be a scene from a Western Eva was acting in.

Overall, Barcarolle in Yellow turns out to be a dangerous and tricky game, with frequent physical threats to the PC, death on the cards and numerous abrupt changes of place and reality. However, it also has a strong, often linear trajectory that keeps it from being too hard. I found most difficulty stemmed from under-implementation. It doesn't cater to enough synonyms and possibilities for the amount of prose there is. This combined with a few timing-critical scenes makes for some frustrating passages. On the plus side, the THINK command will almost always point the player in exactly the direction they need to go. I didn't use THINK on my first playthrough, but used it a lot on the second to shore up identify-the-noun moments that had repeatedly held me up.

As the attractive Eva, the player must get around an excitingly compressed version of Venice, occasionally act in the film she's in (by following its script!) investigate the stalker who appears in both Eva's life and the film, and manually handle her wardrobe. Cue giallo-typical nudity, both appropriate (having a shower) and justifiable but glamourised (being nude in a prolonged dream, except for a mask). This being a giallo, the game comments, via Eva's thoughts, on the way the camera observes the female body through an exploitation film lense.

There are a lot of entertaining scenes and tricks that toy with agency as an IF player, as a woman PC and as an actor in a film. The world of the game is as aggressively sexist and sexual as many giallo films were, and those films already experimented a lot with people's roles. The agreed-upon prototype giallo is Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) which foregrounded, in one stream of the genre, a kind of outsider female experience. The American heroine in that film takes a holiday in Rome, witnesses a murder there and eventually solves it. Eva is Barcarolle's outsider protagonist. She visits a city in another country to shoot a film and also has to play a tourist in that film. The player even has to shoot photographs during Eva's acting scenes.

Some giallo could be very gory, with particularly outré deaths that are now regarded as proto-splatter-film. Barcarolle hits these genre notes, too. It features a knife murder committed through the eye, a speedboat attack and a hanging by designer scarf. The fresh and well-informed performance of so many giallo notes in the game is really impressive.

Giallo films were ultimately open to exploiting any dimension of cinema sensation they could in their commitment to producing involving, shocking, thrilling and twisty murder-mysteries. Bigger twists and shocks were better, even if they didn't make a lot of sense. Some giallo were tightly plotted, others lurching shock machines, but most had their eye on overall audience satisfaction. This hectic quality can be perceived in Barcarolle in Yellow, too. Some of the game's shocks involve unexpectedly sudden endings or upendings, or the placement of moments of fourth wall breakage. There are in fact multiple endings to the game that riff on the bizarre nature of solutions to giallo murder mysteries; I found four endings so far and can tell there's at least one more.

I've played a couple of Victor Ojuel's other games over the years. They both featured vivid or innovatively-realised geography, and that's true again of Barcarolle's handy version of Venice. The games also needed more implementation work to my eyes, and that's also true of Barcarolle. Because I like this game very much, I would also like to see a solider version of it, without all the excess line breaks, with the typos cleaned up and all those synonyms added and programming beefed up to remove the bumping-against-the-walls moments. However, with its strong hint system, Barcarolle won't leave a player stranded if they do hit the walls, and that's more important for today and for players' IFComp experience with the game. I also appreciate what programming an IF game as event-driven as this one is like.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Barcarolle in Yellow. It shows great and affectionate knowledge of the films and related cultural milieu that inspired it.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Bigfoot Bluff by P.B. Parjeter

Bigfoot Bluff, by P.B. Parjeter, is a busy parser adventure game of bizarre comedy. You play a paparazzi (?!) Bigfoot trying to snap a picture of your dad, a Bigfoot, in a national park he controls. You're doing this for reasons that are hard to understand at first and hard to articulate later. Plus the park has cryptids (? again) in it. And you're photographing them. Why to both? Well, it works out eventually, but this doesn't feel like the kind of game in which one should be fumbling for understanding as often as one is.

BB taps the vein of fun eight-bit adventures with its tons of amusing objects to collect, little puzzles all over the place and a sarcastic parser voice. It's quite compulsively enjoyable already, but simultaneously frustrating to play. Part of the trouble is in the realm of combinatorial explosion. With so many crazy objects in the game (you can sling a goat over your shoulder, dig chocolate out of a pie, wear a falconry glove, take photographs of things, build disguises out of bits of park detritus, etc.) interactions amongst them are underimplemented. This much stuff calls for that much more development work. Many great ideas I typed in received default rejection messages, making my perception of puzzle difficulty go up. There are also minor bugs and almost no synonyms, which leads to time spent retyping and rephrasing good commands.

And, for a good while, I genuinely thought the game was trolling me. Part of the HELP says:

"... Try to do various things that will help you stay hidden in the park. As you do, your score will increase and you will be able to track down Bigfoot Senior and catch him on camera...

Bigfoot Bluff is a forgiving game even though undoing is disabled. If you lose points, don't worry! Just keep playing and you will more than make up for the lost points."

So the score is related to stealthiness. If you act stealthily or increase stealth, your score goes up. But if you bumblingly draw attention to yourself, you lose points. I grew to find the numerous ways you can lose points increasingly hilarious, and suspected that the game's help message about its forgiving nature might be part of the joke.

Here are examples.

What if I...

– Put on some aviator glasses I found on a crash dummy in a downed plane?

>wear glasses

The glare from the reflective coating gives your position away

Score minus two

– Examine the drone I saw hovering near the plane?

>x drone

The drone focuses its lens and you hear a click as it photographs you.

Score minus one

– Try setting a weather-altering machine to SNOW in hopes of making me harder to see?

>set weather to snow

You set the weather machine to snow.

It begins snowing. Your tracks will only make you easier to follow.

Score minus one

Try setting the same machine to WINDY instead?

>set weather to windy

You set the weather machine to wind.

The wind picks up; this will only blow your scent around.

Score minus one

After twelve score-altering events had occurred in the game, I had made a net gain of only three points.

It took me a long time to get on the wavelength of BB. To really understand the premise, and what I was trying to do, and why, and how I should be going about it. I think part of this may be that the intro is too sparse. The premise is deliberately silly, but it's also sophisticated. The opening line is:

"Ten years ago you renounced Bigfootdom to become a paparazzi. Now it is your job to do an exposé on your reclusive sasquatch father. Welcome to... Bigfoot Bluff."

This bit of prose requires unpacking and raises a lot of questions. But the game just starts with you standing in a Parking Lot of short description. Probably the HELP text would be better placed as part of the introduction, and it could all stand to be more focused. I don't think having to make sense of everything slowly by playing the game is the best fit for BB, but that's how it is now.

The game builds up an effective aesthetic that is simultaneously funny and a little menacing. The emphasis on surveillance inevitably makes you feel like you're being watched. The descriptions of the park don't need to be extensive to create a strong sense of place, a naturally beautiful wilderness with your father's menacing cabin sitting in the middle of it, and the PDF map helps, too. There are wacky cryptids about the place, such as the Garbogriff, for you to photograph, and the taunting announcements / nature talks your father is strangely obliged to give by loudspeaker at such times are amusing as well as truly weird. His later revelations are even weirder and wilder.

BB describes itself as a sandbox game. I don't think I've ever really understood the term, but here it seems to refer to both the nature of the map, and perhaps the mechanic whereby there are many puzzles to be solved, but that you don't have to solve them all. I found this to be a relief because I had a good amount of unused stuff left in my inventory at game's end. And that end is quite spectacular.

BB is a detailed and very funny game, but its implementation isn't a match for its content, and I believe it's unnecessarily hard to get into. I'd like to see these issues addressed in a future update.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony by Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw

Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony (HC from here on) is the semi-autobiographical parser sequel to 2016's also semi-autobiographical Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony by the same authors, Ben Kidwell and Maevele Straw, and which was also introduced via Spring Thing.

I found the first game to be extraordinary. It's a hippiedom-infused, life-living sim seen through the window of manic depression, and transfused with plenty of bike-riding, fictional computer tech, new age alternate realities, loving, drug-taking and blasts of mathematics. In spite of its chaos, it displays an almost perfect marriage of form and function in relation to its subject matter, and is wildly written, and fun as well. (You can read my 2016 review of Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony in this blog.)

The follow-up, HC, has deep connections to the first, albeit in a fractalised, non-continuous way. Memories and events recur, or are revisited, or are re-analysed, or are fit into a continuing narrative of what has been happening with the authors since the first game. While all of the same subject matter returns in this second episode, the result is superficially less satisfying than the first because this time around, the framework is not conspicuously gamey. The player may still be the PC, now known as Mycroftiv (the narrator Ben from the first game) but they aren't a doer in a game world. They're invited to read what amounts to Mycroftiv's hypercubic journal of their memories and experiences. Each location in the game functions as one of 64 journal entries, and they're divided up in a virtual filing cabinet navigated by a bit-based nav system worthy of an Andrew Schultz game. The player's goal is open-ended: they can read entries as they see fit, and try combining some of the objects they find along the way. Objects like a Boolean Prime Ideal or a Measurable cardinal axiom. Examining these objects gives points, which is a measure of progress, but not a particularly important or logistically useful one in this game.

As I found the first game very moving, I found reading the entries in HC just as moving and stimulating, and somehow enveloping. They deal, through the authors' anecdotes, with family relationships, the nature of friendships, peak experiences via people and nature, and theories of "the mathematics of loving communication". Thus encapsulated, that last one may sound flakey, but the journal entries devoted purely to mathematical theories are not light reading. While two authors of the work are credited, the narrator voice is Ben Kidwell's / BenJen's / Mycroftiv's.

In both games, what I feel as I play them is the accuracy of the reality espoused (or theorised) by their authors, because in its bizarre way, it is perfectly articulated through wonderful writing that is never didactic. The narrator can be frank and proselytic when in their manic phases, but they're also tempered by acknowledgment of their mistakes, by moments of standing outside themselves, and by a lot of extended musing on the nature of empathy. The major declared mistake that forms a cut-off point in their life for the genesis of this game sounds especially disastrous (giving voice to sexual interest in a teenaged ward during a ritual invented during a manic phase) and this declaration is made in the first lines of the game. All the player's reading is declared to be about to happen "backwards in time... before everything shattered." So there is a sad frame placed around the game. However, its core narration is clearly an espousal of optimism. The sum of its multi-dimensional journal of positive memories, breakthroughs, mathematical progresses and wonderful human connections is an Eternal Yes.

Like the first episode, I see HC as demonstrating a perfect melding of form and ideas. The author's favourite idea, articulated in a thousand different ways, is about the interconnectedness of all things. The hypercubic nature of the game's journal connects its 64 locations in a fashion that allows you to get between any of them in fewer moves than it would take on, say, an eight by eight grid. This is a mechanical demonstration of what it may be like to have access to another dimension. In turn, the player's path through these locations may be entirely random (people who don't get binary numbers) or may follow a certain logic (people who know binary and can use the game's binary coordinates to lawnmower the journal). Somewhere on their journey, the player will likely find the journal entry that muses on the nature of free will and randomness:

"... I'd like to propose instead that free will is better understood as what randomness feels like from the inside. The intuitive sense that free will is different from randomness is a dichotomy between the external view of dice rolls as meaningless and arbitrary versus the meaningfulness we feel motivates our own choices. A more careful examination of the definition of 'random' shows that the identification of 'random equals meaningless' is not objective. The real definition of random is simply anything that cannot be externally predicted on the basis of available information..."

For all its wildness, the game has this seer-like, synchronous way about it, and contains journal entries addressing almost any mechanic or idea demonstrated by the performance of the game itself. Some of these entries are indirect, others explicit. One that made me laugh was the authors discussing whether the entries describing mathematics would prove too thick for readers. I'd already found my concentration wavering when trying to follow some of those entries down at my lay level. Another entry stepped out of the game to posit that the player is actually a character in another game played by 17-dimensional chipmunks.

It's with tricks like these that the game seems to be what it proclaims reality is: a demonstration of complete interconnectedness in ways we can't anticipate or understand. That it's also an emotional diary of creative experiences, introspective moments growing out of bike rides, jokes, and mathematical ponderings, demonstrates the authors' great instincts for mapping the personal onto the cosmic and the existential. And that it has no end as such, instead just failing to provide new material at some point – petering out, even – seems to be saying something about the imperfect movement between different episodes in our lives or creative outputs.

I think the game is also superbly written from word to word. The voice is persuasive, lyrical, able to build ideas clearly when necessary, and also able to explode them with illegal syntaxes when necessary. While HC drops its gaminess relative to its predecessor, its lack of a need for world model implementation has allowed the authors to take even more flight with their prose, at greater length and as often as they like.

I find it hard to imagine just how HC will fall on players who never tried the first game. It's bound up with that game's contents like the posited hypercube. A cube placed in the first game, and which then expanded simultaneously in all directions, might produce the vertices of the second game as a diffracted take on the old mixed with the new. Given that the parts of the old that reappear are reconstituted in detail, I suspect they might work and stand alone for new players. And if you like HC, you should certainly return to the first game to experience its more purposive take on an earlier stream of the story. Both games come with optional outside-the-game music, and HC's extras folder contains css files with theory and speculation about Enlightenment Escalators and Harmonic Ultrafilters. Together, the two Harmonic pieces comprise one of the most singular visions in IF.

Autumnal Jumble 2022 review: The Prairie House by Chris Hay and Kelsen Hadder

* When I first posted this review, I mistakenly claimed the soundtrack was partly original. It's actually entirely original, all by Kelsen Hadder. This mistake came from me misreading part of info on the itch.io page. The mistake has now been corrected in the following review.

In Adventuron parser game The Prairie House by Chris Hay and Kelsen Hadder (I'll call it PH for short) the PC is a student involved in soil-collecting field work on the Canadian prairies. Running out of light at the end of an enthusiastically spent day, they drive to an empty but storied communal field house to stay the night. The game's mystery-based trajectory of spookiness is a steadily upwards one.

I played PH on a Mac Pro (mid-2010) and itch.io's online player for it wouldn't run in either my Safari or Brave web browsers, so I just downloaded the game. I had no trouble playing in the Brave browser once I was running a local copy.

PH took me about half an hour to complete on my first play, and I was thoroughly enveloped by its atmosphere and story details all the way. The experience builds to solid folkloric ghost tale chills, and even gets in a quality and non-cheap jump scare en route. The game's prose of geography and props is minimal in general, but expands at the right moments. It cues fear right from the first screen:

"As you look around the open grassland, and nervously at the nearby aspen groves, you feel utterly exhausted and alone, and you realize how vulnerable you are."

Part of playing any IF game is divining its general outlook on how to make progress through it. Is it going to be a game where you're meant to grab everything that isn't nailed down? A game where you'll advance if you just pay attention to the PC's thoughts? Or something else? PH starts off looking pretty open. There are good number of objects on the first few screens, but the game shows quickly enough, by policing what you can and can't take with you, that it's not going to be a kleptomania piece. It's important that it gets this out of the way early, because the later scariness might have been easily derailed had the player been allowed to muck around too much during it. That's to say, had they expected that they should try lots of prop and inventory busywork during the spookiness, simply because they could. The spooky sequences need to cast a kind of unbroken spell to hold their effect.

There is one parser shortcoming in the game, and I don't know if it's due to Adventuron itself or author programming, but objects with two-word names only respond to one of the words. And sometimes it's not the first word. (e.g. a rare orchid is only recognised if you type "orchid", not "rare"). I'd hope most players would clock this during those item-heavy first few locations, but I'd also hope this could be addressed in an updated version of the game.

The feeling the game creates is a specific one with many notes. On the one hand, there's the environmental sparseness of the prairies, the power of nature out there and the fear that comes from being alone in it. But PH also evokes the comfort of finding civilised shelter at a time when you're scared, and also the great indirect civility of the community-minded folk who look after and use the field house. The third note is the history of the house itself, manifest in the mementos and books found inside. Their contents, and the immigration backstory, set up a mystery and some ghost lore. The note wrapping all of the others together in PH is the supernatural reality that encroaches during the night.

PH has an original atmospheric soundtrack by Kelsen Hadder and wields some evocative eight-bit / minimal-palette-style graphics at times. It's also glazed with incidental chiptuney sound effects that simultaneously make the whole thing feel like a lost horror game for the Nintendo Entertainment System – had that console ever hosted parser games or a keyboard with which to play them. PH further offers seven font and colour-controlling themes a player can choose from, both before and during play. My main theoretical interest in these was to see what the scene graphics would look like in different colours, but these graphics usually occur during cut scenes, a time when you can't change themes.

While the game is simple and accessible in its delivery (I scored ten out of ten on my first game, but I'm not saying you suck if you don't) it builds a rich and particular world in a short space of time, and succeeds in developing eerie tension, further enhanced at a visceral level by the soundtrack. This kind of spell can be hard to sustain in IF, and I was completely under the spell during this game. The aesthetic is entirely coherent and the overall effect is charming as well as eerie. Yes, horror can charm.

* The author cites the films Picnic at Hanging Rock and Deathdream as recent influences. I know both films well, and while the influences don't appear in an overt way, I can detect them.

* If you have a decent amount of money to spend on a collection of international folkloric horror films, have a look at All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium Of Folk Horror, for sale at Diabolik DVD. No, I am not affiliated with Diabolik. Yes, I spend a lot of money there. No, I do not own this particular item yet.

IFComp 2021 review: Closure by Sarah Willson

In Sarah Willson's parser game Closure, teenaged Kira has snuck into the dorm room of her newly ex-boyfriend TJ (using her spare key) intent on nabbing a particular photo of the couple for future reminiscence purposes. As she commits this rummaging crime of the century, she texts her best friend, YOU, THE PLAYER, detailing her every move and asking what she should do next at each juncture. The result is a charming game of rummagey revelations, presented in one's browser with an excellent marriage of content and aesthetic framing, and which took me twenty-three minutes to complete.

I think it would be easy to oversell the game's presentation as the answer to the question of why it works. When Closure is played in a web browser, it certainly puts the player in the right frame of mind to see the speech-bubbled messages appear onscreen as messages do, but what's considerably more important is the dynamic flow of the prose and its accuracy as (pretty articulate, considering the situation!) text message writing. The divisions between successive messages indirectly convey the flow of thoughts in Kira's mind, and also lead the player to visualise the physical actions Kira might be taking between texts. The game can't mention all of her lurching about, lifting and dropping things, her gaze alighting frantically on this and that, her occasional standing back to consider the situation, these things that she must be doing, but I experienced them in a peculiarly vivid way for their absence.

I was actually playing Closure offline initially (I play almost any game offline if given the chance) and even in that situation where the messages didn't appear in bubbles, I already appreciated how well the game was presenting as a text messaging simulation. Prior to IFComp, I had read and responded to some of the author's presentation queries on intfiction.org. It was only via the ABOUT command, which mentioned something like "CSS magic", that I realised perhaps the author had found a solution that was browser-based, and which caused me to check out what she had done with the game online. So I can confirm that Closure works just as well without any CSS assistance.

The game is well-implemented in terms of cleverly fobbing off many typical parser actions in context, or translating them into the game's context in cute ways. For instance:

>x me

i'm using that picture from new year's as your contact photo!! hahaha

Mechanically, it is a one-room game in which you need to search everything in the room to reconstruct the backstory as to why TJ broke up with Kira. This isn't a particularly difficult task, but the revelations are laid out well, with Kira realising things about both TJ and herself in the process and the player being compelled to keep digging.

The next paragraph is 100% spoiler:

From what's learned, it's clear neither character is a titan of complexity (au contraire), nor was their situation. This all suits a still-in-high-school relationship. From being on the outside of Kira's experience, I moved into it a bit, and could think things like, "Yeah, you should have tried to understand TJ's extensive sneaker collection a bit more if you really wanted this relationship, not just made fun of his extensive sneaker collection." Outwardly, this sounds superficial, but I can buy it. People have broken up over infinitely dumber things. I also don't know the nature/extent of the sneaker-teasing; maybe it wasn't actually so dumb an interaction in reality. Also, it wasn't only the sneaker-teasing; there's the liking-metal-music teasing. The conceit is that Kira is texting in harried fashion as she snoops a dorm room, so I can also accept the lack of details regarding these events within the context of the game. Can the game stand up without such details? I've argued here that it can, except that the final revelation of TJ's having run off to marry someone else felt weird and extreme. It's clearly not an impossibility, but it didn't feel like the right end for this game to me.

I think Closure presents its situation as a game about as well as anyone has ever presented this kind of thing in IF. The texting conceit, the thoughts of the responding character as modified by this mode, the prose used to convey it, the dynamics of the text itself and the thoughtfulness of how Kira responds to conventional parser instructions are all handled wonderfully. The only misstep for me was the final revelation.

IFComp 2021 review: AardVarK Versus the Hype by Truthcraze

(Update: On November 5 2021, author Truthcraze reworked and extended the ending of the game. You can read about that in his intfiction.org post at this link)

Disclosure 1: I was supposed to help beta test this game. Due to a bunch of bad timing of availability and communication, I didn't. Therefore, when and if I see any bugs in it that I could have staved off, I feel I can only flagellate myself.

Disclosure 2: The author, Truthcraze, had sneakily let it slip in advance (i.e. he told me directly) that this game was likely to appeal to fans of the film The Faculty (1998) amongst other things, and I am a fan of that film.

This game did appeal to me, and continues to do so. It took me 63 minutes and 29.4 seconds to complete.

AardVarK Versus the Hype (AVH) is an extremely funny parser adventure about a bunch of teens whose rock band, AardVarK, suddenly becomes very important for the project of life's continuance when a corporate/alien entity known as Hype starts flogging its soft drinks ("sodas" for the handful of Americans out there) to innocent high-schoolers. The brew's side-effects include mindless shillism and bleeding from the orifices.

The game is set in 1997, a time when popular culture was still dominated by the recent explosion of alternative music into it but before the internet had made any excursion onto the same turf; the game is blissfully free of the internet. If I was going to hazard a cultural thought of the kind I don't know that Truthcraze would approve of in the case of AVH, I'd suggest the simplicity of The Kids versus The Hype conflict is already a bit nostalgic for the eighties, a time when individuals-sticking-it-to-commercial-behemoths plots were easier to articulate. The film Reality Bites (1994) captured the zeitgeist of young Americans of the 1990s trying to retain their cred in a culture that was beginning to facilitate the commodification of everything.

Such drama is not what AVH is about. It's about the eternal comedic struggles of being a teenager (well, eternal since the 1940s or so, so not very eternal at all, actually) and about the nineties version of them in particular. The player gets to control all four members of the band AardVarK at different times with a SWITCH TO (PERSON) command. The switching isn't bound up with complex puzzles. It's essentially for narrative purposes. These teens are boys and girls, punks, goths, would-be frontpeople, singers and guitarists. The nineties wack is clearest in their dialogue stylings. There is a ton of multi-option dialogue in AVH wracked with a mixture of self-consciousness and excitement as the teens try to blurt out their explanations of weird shenanigans and corporate shills.

It's not so much what the characters want to say to each other that changes across options, only how they're going to say it. Bravado, hostility, coolness, honest dorkiness and cluelessness are some of the modes the player can choose amongst. Just reading all the different options, including the 75% not chosen, makes for a good chunk of the comedy. There's rarely any revisiting of unpicked dialogue paths because the story and conversations are too busy screaming forward for that.

The seat of the game is a wonderful repeating set piece joke involving the Gas'n'Stop convenience store, a location that has been thoroughly plundered and destroyed by the time all the main PCs have abused it. There are also jock-guarded parties, night-time trees to be climbed, cars that are rocking, and condom-purchasing jokes executed in good taste. Furthermore, AVH has some cool tricks of delivery up its sleeve. One is the way it will suddenly override the player's typed commands with replacement evil ones if the current PC gets possessed by The Hype. Another occurs in a situation where the PC's car turns over, at which point some of the printed text does the same thing. I don't remember seeing that joke in a parser game before.

AVH is a game that wants to help you finish it. It has graded HINTs you can ask for, but it's constantly prompting for free anyway in an amusingly harried voice. I think part of this stems from the fact that it's trying (successfully) to create a sense of lively action, and having players stand around examining everything is anti-action. The game would rather remind you of the next thing you're meant to be doing than let you gawp. There's also a decent amount of fourth-wall-breaking, and its version of the parser voice versus character voice dance is a cute one. I hit some bugginess across the game (remember paragraph one: I am now hitting myself with a stick) but the only thing that actually tripped me up was a guess-the-verb moment which was cleared up by the HINTs.

I admit I'd have liked some more reinforcement of differentiation amongst the teens identities across the game, what with all the SWITCHing amongst them that goes on, and the victory scene felt rushed (Update: On November 5 2021, author Truthcraze reworked and extended the ending of the game. You can read about that in his intfiction.org post at this link) but these aren't major complaints for a story this funny and engaging. I laughed aloud a lot, admired the many forms of comedy wielded by the writing and loved the Gas'n'Stop situation.

IFComp 2021 review - The House on Highfield Lane by Andy Joel

The House on Highfield Lane or The House... on Highfield Lane if you believe the punctuation on the cover image – and which in any case I shall now on refer to as House – bills itself as 'horror without the horror'. I would probably bill it as a mystery, fantasy and sci-fi parser adventure, which ironically covers all the major genres minus horror and romance. The PC is sassy teenaged Mandy who, fresh from school one afternoon and still done up in its accoutrements, finds herself compelled to enter this house in her neighbourhood after finding a letter addressed to its occupant. Wide-ranging, puzzly adventure game shenanigans ensue in a steampunk-leaning environment. There are big-small spatial gags, some quirky NPCs, a Frankenstein-styled laboratory and creepy silver-faced background folk who always manage to run away.

Summary

House took me a bit over two-and-a-half hours to complete. I spent more than an hour just exploring and fiddling with things without managing to solve any puzzles, though thoroughly in the mood all that time and not with any sense that I wasn't getting anywhere. I then turned to the provided invisiclues webpage for help, and used it a fair bit from them on because of time pressure, thinking (in vain as it turns out) that I might be able to get through the game in less than two IFComp hours.

House induces curiosity and enchantment, demonstrates interesting and sometimes challenging design, and is a great first outing for the latest iteration of the Quest authoring system. Indeed, it's the best-implemented Quest game I've ever played, though still not perfect in this regard (though what game is?) House is kind of hard, though, in a complex way. I don't mean that the puzzles are all complex. I mean that what's hard about it is complex to tease out, and has a nature I suspect will fall quite differently across different players, as might its third person narration. Ultimately, I loved the atmosphere of House, and quite liked the puzzles in spite of my troubles with some of them and the invisiclues.

P.S. The heroine swears A Lot! Mostly with the two most common rude words. I'm not going to say them because this blog is not a home to filth.

WEIGHTY CRITICAL DISCUSSION SECTION

I found the key joy of this game to be its development of a prolonged atmosphere of unyielding mystery. There's a derangement of reality at work that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, as do Mandy's flip reactions to this reality. And like in Alice, there's a sense that there is some overriding meaning behind the weirdness. That's mandatory in this kind of game to prevent the feeling you're just solving a bunch of arbitrary puzzles.

The prose is narrated in third person present tense –

"Conscious that dust is about ninety percent dead skin, Mandy decides not to study it too closely."

– which is one of the less common viewpoint choices adopted for IF. I think the first way this choice helps House is that it gets the player through the unreality barrier faster. The game starts with what is arguably a lot of unexplained weirdness. My initial sense of separation from Mandy (she's not 'You' or 'I') helped me accept the lack of explanation. Once inside the house, Mandy quickly runs into some major discrepancies of physical scale and geography. Perceiving Mandy in the third person helped me appreciate the scale of theses scenes visually, as if I really was standing back and seeing a film frame of a relatively tiny girl in a room hundreds of metres high. Over time, Mandy's flip comments on the situation brought out her personality, and made me feel closer to her.

Returning to the topic of the game's puzzle challenge: That the first relevant puzzle entry I looked up in the invisiclues after playing for close to 70 minutes was named for an object I hadn't yet seen or heard of speaks to the difficulty of writing comprehensive invisiclues. This event did worry me, though. Was I really so out of touch with this game? Or had I missed some fundamental mechanic?

Fortunately, neither case applied, but I would say House's puzzles lean hard for a variety of reasons. First, some of them are old-school-styled, involving a lot of mechanical experimentation and repetition (rotate the object, look outside, see if anything happened. If it didn't, rotate the object again, check again etc. And have the idea to do all this experimentation in the first place). Second, this game is rich with interesting objects that seem like they'd help solve multiple puzzles, but usually only one solution is acceptable. I could think of several objects I possessed that could very feasibly be used to catch another falling object, amongst them a giant floppy hat and a magically embiggened chamber pot, but the game didn't have any programming in place for these attempts. The solution to this particular problem involved roping in an NPC I didn't even know I could communicate with, since he didn't speak when spoken to. Teaching players all the ways they can interact with NPCs in your game is vital for any game. Since the base level of game content here is solid, I don't see it as a great omission that House didn't have heaps of alternate solutions in place already, but I do see it as a necessary site for improvement when a game is at this level.

Finally, there may be a stylistic issue that obscured some of the game's numerous props, all those paintings and windows and pipes and levers and bureaus and drawers spread out all through the text. Most IF games cater to this angle of interpretive difficulty by using presentation systems or logic to set elements off; the exits, or prominent objects or geographical features, etc. House wasn't so great at this, presenting most of its prose in solid blocks, so I forgave myself for missing some stuff.

The lead character of Mandy isn't built out of personal details, but out of a lot of behaviours and attitudes players might recognise from girls in this age group. I especially like the way her cynicism for schoolwork is tempered by the occasional excitement she experiences whenever she realises she can apply something she learned at school to real life. Her frequent sarcasm makes her a good fit for the classic strain of sarcastic parser voice that also gets a workout in House.

This game is the maiden voyage for QuestJS aka Quest 6. QuestJS was developed by Andy Joel, author of House and current head of the Quest project, and is a JavaScript incarnation of the Quest engine. House is a great ambassador for the new Quest, which is what you want in a maiden voyage. In the first place, it's engrossing and well-implemented by any standards. Second, it's the best-implemented Quest game I've played to date. I've been playing Quest games for about a decade and they've always been a bit querulous. You could only play on PCs, playing online was too buggy, and the parser was flakey. House seems to have eliminated all these problems, and the standard of its parser is way up. Unfortunately my transcript was missing all my own typed commands, but this feels like an easy tech fix.

I feel I have to address the game's final riddle (no spoilers to the actual answer here, though if you want to know even less about the question than a measure of spoiler-safe info, stop reading now. Then again, wouldn't you have already stopped reading much earlier?)... it is, as a joke, pretty good. As a puzzle, it's probably terrible because it relies entirely on the player's own knowledge if they want to be able to solve it themselves, with the out that they will soon be given the answer if they can't. But they don't know there's an out coming when the riddle happens. And the game had previously enforced a PC/player knowledge divide in the opposite direction, with a riddle to which most players would know the answer but which they weren't allowed to solve until they had first made the PC research that answer in-game.

The kindest spin on all this is that the game adopts two opposite positions as a joke. Even then, I'd ask is it worth doing this when there's a high risk of annoying players on one or both occasions? Reviewer Bitterly Indifferent wasn't as indifferent as he generally claims to be in the case of the knowledge enforcement of the first riddle, as evinced by his linked-to review here. This type of enforcement was, coincidentally, recently discussed on intfiction.org in this topic. The upshot is that I don't think ending any game with this kind of riddle is a strong way to go out, and even in the case of this game, which at least gives you the answer if you can't get it, it will be received as an unrewarding ending by a subset of players.

IFComp 2021 review: The Spirit Within Us by Alessandro Ielo

The Spirit Within Us is a parser-driven thriller with crime and mystery elements that opens with the injured and bleeding PC waking up in a bedroom. Amnesia-game-fearers need not fear per se; the amnesia is well justified and quickly overcome. The whole game plays out around this house setting in what feels like real time, and ultimately with an emphasis on realistic action.

The author describes Spirit as psychological, but I found the prose too sparse and some of the content too vague for it to succeed at that level. It is evident English isn't the author's primary language and its use here is functional. The section of the game based in the house presents as an almost default set of IF content: a bunch of rooms, doors, fiddly doors, openable things and plain objects from daily life — sinks, toilets, boxes, etc. If it weren't for the timed interjections of the PC's returning memories and the few interesting book props, this phase could be a boredom challenge for the player.

The author wrote the game and its parser from the ground up using C. While that parser effects the basics, the game's needs have definitely outgrown it. My transcript shows I once entered seventeen commands trying to eat a pill from a packet of vitamins before I succeeded, and twenty-three trying to execute the last action required by the game. What to do was obvious, but I had to consult the walkthrough to get the right phrasing.

The story that is revealed and the violent situation that grows out of it in light of the player's explorations and recollections are more compelling on paper than in the game. They're particularly filmic, as well. I've seen a lot of thriller and horror films make good use of the "waking up in a messy and potentially violent situation" scenario when they're also withholding some information from the viewer. Spirit is in this terrain, but unfortunately doesn't have the prose detail to sell it.

There's also a health timer element for the PC that induced a bit of unintentional amusement for me. The PC starts losing hit points from his injuries as soon as the game starts, and the player has to keep finding enough food and supplies to keep them up until the end. This mechanic does seem to be well balanced in terms of raising player stress levels while not being too savage under the hood. I finished the game without dying on my first play, and with plenty of health left, and this only took me about twenty-five minutes. (I acknowledge that geographically, I had good luck during my playthrough. After I'd made the whole map in my head, I could tell I'd fluked the ideal direction to explore in on a couple of occasions.) But the amount of time I'd spent rummaging around for food – fruits from gardens, leftovers from kitchens et al. – seemed to be too great a portion of the game experience. It's the major mechanical feature atop the find-and-use puzzles and some semi-randomised combat.

From the epilogue, I learned that the author's stated intention was to create a game with some moral challenge/choice. But again, the psychological content wasn't evident enough during play to make it clear I was making any moral path choices, at least in terms of my choosing them against apparent alternatives. If an action seems the obvious one needed in a game, I will take it. I don't come to these games to test my own morality, and I know this a difference between me as a player type and some other player types out there. Certainly the ending text I received was of the kind to indicate what the other endings might be compared to the one I got, but I'm not interested in replaying to see them.

I like the kind of story and situation this game presents, but its sparseness of writing and implementation mean the story doesn't really land, or with the right impact. The game's title is also too vague, in retrospect. I'd still say Spirit may be of interest to players who like a game with a bit of contemporary grit. And its mystery remains a little abstract, which is to say, I have questions about the backstory and I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to. This situation could just be due to the limitations of the prose. Even if it is, the particular degree of vagueness where the details have ended up is not a bad one.