See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

The headline for Closure by Sarah Willson is “An ill-advised sad teen heist.” That truly is an appropriate summation for this quick and tidy parser game.

Closure opens with a Mad Libs series of questions (“What’s an activity you like doing around the house on a day off?” and so forth) before launching straight into the situation at hand. You receive a text message from your friend Kira:

i did something totally cool and normal that you will definitely not disapprove of

i'm in TJ's dorm room right now

TJ being Kira’s ex-boyfriend, naturally, who is away for the afternoon. Kira is Watergating his room to reclaim an old photo from when they were a couple. Kira texted you because she needs your help searching for said memento.

The innovation here is to use an interactive fiction parser as an SMS interface, where your commands are not actually instructions for the story’s “you,” but rather for Kira as she frantically ransacks TJ’s dorm room. All of my commands received character-appropriate responses from Kira rather than the flat, characterless responses typical for text adventures (although I didn’t try anything too wacky). Even when I got a touch stuck, the hint system remained in character:

>hint
you're asking me? that's why i texted you in the first place!

ok, let's see

if it were me, i'd probably…

Another nice interface touch: When Kira sends multiple messages to you in succession, you have to press a key to receive each one. It’s a clever way of emulating the natural pauses when texting.

There’s a Rorschach test within Closure: My first command to Kira was LEAVE, which she promptly refused. I betrayed my principles and began assisting her in her search. The game’s setup makes you complicit. I felt a bit guilty throughout my session.

Most everyone has been in this situation, or at least knows someone who was—well, maybe not texting while breaking-and-entering, but madly jealous and forlorn, along with the concomitant regrettable decision-making. There’s not a lot of time for character development or nuance in Closure; it’s Kira’s hyper-focused mindset and the frisson of her situation which sustains interest.

Is there room for improvement? I suppose so, but I admire the minimalism of the project: You’re dropped into the situation, you navigate Kira through it, and you witness a transformation. It’s not deep, nuanced stuff, but it doesn’t purport to be. Closure is more like a breezy short story, a slice-of-life, than a full-bodied, novella-like game. It can be finished over a short lunch.

I confess: Within twenty seconds of opening Closure, I thought, “This isn’t my kinda game.” The pleasant surprise was its constrained scope and smart design choices drawing me into Kira’s little adventure.

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

Amanda Walker’s What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed opens with a scene that could have been cut-and-pasted out of any number of text adventures from the days of yore: A bare room, a closed door, and a locked wooden chest. However, before this comes an introduction suggesting all is not as it seems:

…as you try to bring your hand to your eyes, you have no sense of your hand. No sense of your eyes. It is a strange sort of seeing. Looking down at where you– your body– should be, you see nothing. You try to open your mouth, to call out, but you have no sense of your mouth. No sound comes from you.

This disembodied sensation is not fleeting. This is your state of being throughout the game. Ghost Guessed takes one of the core assumptions of interactive fiction—the player’s ability to interact with the game world—and turns it on its head. You can LOOK and EXAMINE and glide from room to room, but otherwise, you appear unable to interact with the world around you.

Soon, some shattered glass and an opened piece of jewelry reveal you are capable of manipulating the world by your emotions. And your emotions are strongly felt: Doors don’t open, they slam open. Boxes fly across rooms to you, but rather than being caught, they soar through your incorporeal form and crash to the floor. This linkage between strong emotions and violent results is the game’s strongest element. I’m not encyclopedic when it comes to the taxonomy of the spirit world, but I believe this is known as a poltergeist, a “noisy ghost.”

While this concept of emotions-instead-of-actions may sound like a device, it’s handled rather well. Not only is the technique discovered organically, each emotion is tied to the character’s past. Learning how to manipulate the world reveals and defines your character and her history. The other story elements are gleaned through a steady accretion of detail within the house.

The title comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” (“to a young child”):

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

Ghost Guessed is as doleful as its nineteenth-century namesake. It reminds me of other Gothic literature from that time period. As you float through the house, a picture develops of a quiet country estate occupied by a moneyed family, where the secrets are locked away upstairs whilst whispers downstairs are exchanged over tea and cakes. The bulk of the dramatic arc has already occurred when the game begins, but there’s plenty of empty space within this hushed, reserved home for the main character to realize the totality of what’s happened, and to grow from it.

Side note: The content warning indicates the game contains violence and child abuse. This turned me off at first, but I came to see it’s all handled tactfully and without sensationalism. Kudos.

None of the puzzles were difficult, but I would recommend anyone starting the game to examine everything. I don’t think of this as a “puzzle” game, however.

What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is an elegiac game, a story of tones and grays within an interactive fiction, solemn without becoming moody—good for a rainy day.

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

Unfortunate by Jess Elizabeth Reed opens with a straightforward yet unusual premise: You and your frenemy Lux, both amateur fortune tellers, agree to a bet:

If you could give accurate readings to everyone at the party, then they would teach you what they know. But it [sic] you couldn’t, then you’d be banned from doing readings at their house ever again. Somewhat stupidly perhaps, you accepted the challenge.

This isn’t fortune-telling in the sense of crystal balls and satin-shrouded parlors reeking of patchouli. You merely take a person’s hands and react to the images passing through your mind. The game permits you to decide what fortune you’d like to give, based on a menu system. As you offer readings, you record them in your notebook.

The party is attended by a clutch of hip baristas and bookstore clerks in a house of thrift-store furniture and long-playing record players. From the brief conversations, you gather there’s a backstory between some of these people—just like one would at a real house party of twentysomethings. I wish this exploration could have gone deeper; the conversation system offers a limited number of questions you may ask, and the responses range from perfunctory to minimal. Still, they are in character:

[Your reading:] Your love life is volatile and has the potential to wreak havoc.
Irene: Bite me.

Once the readings have been offered, there’s a shift in the game. Events begin occurring, and those fuzzy readings you gave begin to seem relevant. “Sometimes the only way to be successful is to make your own luck…” reads the game’s introduction.

Alas, the title Unfortunate has a double (or even triple) meaning. The game’s minimal approach is marred by typos and a lack of detail work. You can CHECK NOTEBOOK to review your fortunes, but no notebook is to be found in your inventory. A number of mentioned objects cannot be examined or are unusable, such as a shower curtain that can’t be opened, or a closed door that fails to hinder your path between rooms. Opening a box reveals an important item, but the description concludes “You open the cardboard box, revealing nothing.” None of this is fatal, but it all adds up to an end product that feels decidedly unpolished.

More seriously, at a key point the game settles into a state where I can’t leave the kitchen. I can consistently reproduce the problem. It occurs right when the game is winding up, which takes some of the air out of the tires. I suspect the bug is triggered by one of the readings I’m giving, and that I’m selecting the same reading each time I play. I’m not motivated enough to figure out which reading for which character causes the failure, however.

I sense the author’s intention was for the various combinations of readings to trigger new situations at the party you had to deal with. But as I couldn’t move forward once the readings had been made, my speculations about Unfortunate remain just that.