I have been learning about ebooks.  If, while I was doing that, you were busily harboring a secret desire to give me money for my bullshit, your chance has come.  (It’s pay-what-you-want, because probably your secret desire is to give me and my bullshit the smallest amount of money possible, and I fully support you in that.)

My practice ebook took six hours to write.  It’s quite short, and wildly uneven in quality.  Mostly about poop, and Peach & Mario’s sex life.  There are nonsensical instructions on how to make a dragon out of fish, and really skinny eyebrows for the moon.  There’s a guy called Harpsichordus Repairmagnet and the almost-adventures of Waffles the gentleman thief for whom I was too tired to actually write any adventures.  It might be worth a dollar, if you are the kind of person who runs around the zoo throwing dollars at ostriches.  It is probably definitely worth at least less than that.

Anyway, it’s a thing.

We shall never speak of it again.

(Update:  Well, damn, someone bought the thing at the ostrich price.  I’m up 56 cents!)

me:  Mouth Audio Interests has got to be a front for something
Ryan:  that Pauly “Big” Mouth has his fingers in a lot of pies
me:  and a lot of pies in his mouth
Ryan:  one of his many piefingers is his literal pie business
he needs literal pie money to feed a figurative monkey
me:  ahahahaha
Piefingers is also the name of his literal pie business
Ryan:  it’s a front for literal monkey trafficking
me:  most of the overhead involves keeping the literal monkeys from eating the literal pies
Ryan:  figurative overhead
the literal monkeys are kept in the basement
me:  right, where it’s cooler
Ryan:  the pies are in a cooler!!!
me:  IT ALL MAKES SENSE
Ryan:  Pauly Mouth is a guy for whom
things just kinda
mesh

[spoilers begin here]

I did not play the game to which A Roiling Original is a sequel, because I am a terrible person.  Hopefully this doesn’t slow me down too much.

I have a pedanto-notepad.  I love this game already.

> answer door
(to yourself)
You can’t think of anything to say on that topic.
The knock on the door continues.

I am getting… is there a thing that’s like motion sickness but instead of motion it’s anagrams?  Sonic tokenisms?  Moon stickiness?

There is a lot going on and I don’t understaaaaaand.  The game is helpfully suggesting I change some stores around like I did on my first quest.  I wasn’t on my first quest!  Oh, oh, oh, wait, I get it.

Huh, I am typing in anagrams pretty indiscriminately, which generally makes things happen and increases my score, but there doesn’t seem to be very much rhyme or reason behind how this world works.  Or, possibly, I am just dumb.  That sounds more likely.

Wait, I lost the game because I dug up a ghost without knowing why?  Everything I’ve done in this game has been without knowing why!

Yeah, I didn’t play this game for very long, because it gave me a headache similar to the one I got trying to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  (The part where the dead sister cuts the girl’s head off every night and carries it downstairs to style her hair, is that allegory?  I am not good with allegory.)  That’s not the game’s fault, and I’m very sorry.

[more words if you click a thing]

I just preordered Monaco, a single-player/co-op heist game that I am SUPER excited about.   Then I checked out the development vlog, hoping to find more info on the various classes and how they played.  What I found was this very motion-sicknessy video in which Andy Schatz attempts to defend the redhead class from accusations of misogyny and does kind of a terrible job.

I’ll back up and provide context.  There are eight classes in the game, all based on classic heist tropes.  You have your locksmith, your pickpocket, your computer hacker, your guy who comes in and basically mows everybody down with a shotgun and they turn into skellingtons (can you tell which class I am most excited about?)  Then you have the redhead, whose power is seducing men as a distraction, a la Cinnamon from Mission: Impossible, etc.

There is an argument to be made in defense of the redhead, and it goes something like this:  “Look, these characters are not supposed to be three-dimensional, they are supposed to be classic heist tropes.  The pickpocket is a frigging hobo with a monkey!  A hobo with a monkey!  I also have a dumb guy who is good with locks and a dumb guy who is good with a shovel.  What more do you want from me?”

(The counter-argument you could make to this is “Yes, but you had an opportunity here to come up with creative takes on these classic stereotypes instead of perpetuating them whole cloth,” the counter-counter-argument to that is “Sure, but I didn’t.  Oh well!  Game’s still gonna be fun,” and the response to that is “Yes, and I am still very excited about it!  I will shut up now!”)

Schatz touches on the classic tropes defense briefly, but spends most of the video arguing various other things rather unconvincingly, as though he’s hoping something will stick and Anita Sarkeesian will call off her squad of death muppets and he will be able to go outside again and see his family.  And get a Smashburger, he really misses Smashburger.  (Okay, I will stop making shit up about Andy Schatz for no reason.)

His arguments as I understood them:

1)  The redhead is actually progressive, because she uses her sexuality as a tool and um Leigh Alexander wrote an article about Bayonetta and it probably also applies here.  God, I hope so.  (Maybe tonight I will try to sneak past the feminists and see if my dog is okay.)

I didn’t read Leigh Alexander on Bayonetta, or play Bayonetta, so I can’t speak to that bit, but whenever someone makes the argument that wielding your sexuality as a weapon necessarily empowers you as a female, I am like “oh dear God I was with you before you said that please stop talking.”

The kind of power that women want — I’m'a just speak for all women quick — involves shit like being treated as a fully equivalent human and being taken seriously and just maybe, sometimes, being the one who gets to do all the cool shit.  Being able to distract guys with our tits so other people can do cool shit is down there with being Aquaman, on the big cosmic list of superpowers.

(We are also, especially since the redhead is defined as a manipulative character, getting a little too close to the idea that women are all evil bitches who use their cunts to get what they want.  This is in my personal opinion the absolute most offensive thing you can say about us as a gender, and I have heard plenty of dudes on the internet saying it as though it were a proven fact.  I don’t think that’s at all where Schatz was going with this, I don’t think he’s a bad dude, I also love Smashburger, I’m just saying.)

2)  It is okay if the redhead is problematic, because there is another female character, the lookout!  Did you know she was female?  Is that made clear in the marketing materials, that the lookout is female?  Let me quick make that really weirdly explicit in all the marketing materials, that the lookout is female.  (Please, will you just tell my mom I’m still alive?)

So, okay, two out of eight characters are female.  One is real good at distracting guys so the others can do cool shit elsewhere, but the other one is much more of a badass, in that she is real good at, um, looking out for guys so the others can do cool shit elsewhere.

Awesome?

I’m a little bit reminded of a boy playing a heist game with his friends.  The only girls there are his crush and his little sister, whom he relegates to support positions so they don’t get in the way of the Big Important Fun Stuff, which everyone knows only boys are physically and psychologically equipped to deal with.  Maybe his crush enjoys being a seductress (I know I was super sold on the idea of having boobs before I got them), but I’ll bet you a Smashburger his little sister would rather be the hobo with the monkey.

(Side note:  The description of the lookout in the video is “Trained from youth to see danger around every corner.”  This is actually really relevant to the female experience!)

3)  It’s hard to do a female character, because either they are a damsel in distress, or they are a fake damsel in distress who turns out to be a badass, and that second one is actually pretty sexist because it shouldn’t be funny or punchy that a woman is a badass, she should just be a badass.  (Oh God OH GOD put the hammer down I swear I won’t touch your penguin ever again)

The fake-damsel-in-distress reversal gets more of its punch from people being sick of damsel-in-distress tropes, I think, but I absolutely agree that a woman who is a badass should just be a badass.  (See:  that chick from that dumb Priest movie, basically anyone from Kill Bill, Samus, FemShep, etc.)

You know what else is badass?  Remember that sociopath I was talking about earlier who just kills the shit out of people with a shotgun?  Make him a lady.  Or the computer hacker, “a modern-day wizard!”  That’s pretty badass!  He could be a lady!  Angelina Jolie did it!  Come on, Andy Schatz, you like lady badasses, right?

I bet a female Cleaner would be just the thing to convince Anita to sew your legs back on, or at least tell you where she put them!

—–

This gender stuff isn’t a dealbreaker; I am still really excited for Monaco.  You learn pretty early on as a chick who plays video games that if you insist on being a lady badass or a lady not-sex-object, or even just a lady, you do not get to play nearly as many video games, so you suck it up and deal.

I look forward to a future in which our granddaughters get to stop friggin’ having to do that, though, and I’m a little sad that Monaco missed an opportunity to do something cool and subversive along lady badass lines.

(I’m also sad to have gotten absolutely zero free Smashburgers for having written this.  I gotta stop writing feminist diatribes hungry, they go to some weird places.)

ikea horse puppet
i don’t know, son, we’re lions
rollerskating waitress jobs phoenix
ridiculous lion noise
echidna penis
ersatz homosexual relationship
larp not about vampires
a picture of a vagina
novels printed on toilet paper
don’t shoot the puppy
david bowie’s area
daisy dukes with the pockets left in

(If anyone you know needs a rollerskating waitress, hit me up!  I would be a great rollerskating waitress, or any other job I can do on roller skates!)

[spoilers begin here]

Hmm, is my aspect fire, light, or force?  Probably not force.  I like light, I like how it makes things visible, but I gotta go with fire, which contains light.  Also, you can use it to set shit on fire, which is a thing I like in a game.  I wonder if I get to unlock hats.

Huh, LOOK is not a thing?  I don’t know what to do without LOOK!  Sure, I’ve got this list of places and objects on the sidebar, but it’s just not the saaaaaame!

I get the feeling there are going to be light puzzles.  I have some glow powder and the game is making a big deal out of torches.  I can’t remember if I like light puzzles or not; I think it depends how fiddly they are.  That sure was a lot of I statements in a row.  I statements are important for deflecting perceived hostility.  It’s not you, light puzzles, it’s me.

Is there any reason for this hallway to exist other than “it’s a hallway, you gotta walk through hallways?”  Do I have to go lie down in front of a bulldozer?

Where am I, even?  I think I am some kind of wizard st-FUCK I forgot to name myself Calamity Boomfist! some kind of wizard student.  Am I a privately owned wizard student, or is this some kind of school, or what?

Why am I exploring it, anyway?  Because the game told me I couldn’t get back to sleep, so now I have to go look for secrets in the mysterious wing (which I think might be called the mysterious wing?)  I guess this is what people do when they don’t have the internet.  You know what I would actually be doing in this situation?  Watching an adorably bawdy Swedish couple play Terraria until I passed out.  As soon as I graduate from wizard school, I am going to invent the internet out of magic.

Oh, I can’t LOOK, but I can LOOK AROUND.  Good to know!

How do I know this is the forbidden library other than its being called the forbidden library?  Are there signs all over it saying “CETTE BIBLIOTECA EST VERBOTEN?”

[...]books of various topics both secret and taboo.
My dog is larger than life, both literally and physically.  (Also, “taboo” is a fun word.  You should say it out loud right now.  Taboooo!  I put a spooky ghost inflection on mine!  My neighbors think I am insane!)

Oh man oh man is this book the titular Encyclopedia of Elementals?  It is!  And it’s mine, bitches!

Well, shit, wait, this was a real-time timed puzzle?  Not a turn-based timed puzzle?  Do you know what I think about that?
I think that is
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLSHIT

Sorry I let you die, random guy.  : (
may you fly up so high to the sky
while we try not to cry
is there pie?
– a poem I wrote for the random guy I let die, 2013
I am good at poem

It’s the kind of heat that makes one side of you really hot, but the other side of you is cold.
Not only is this an awesome sentence (oh, that kind of heat!) but I am well familiar with this phenomenon from living in the Phoenix area.  See, every public space here is designed with the assumption that it is always nice outside, even though there are months, plural, where it is A BILLION ZILLION DEGREES FAHRVERGNUGEN, and sometimes in the winter it gets down to the forties or even thirties.  This is clearly too damn cold to be outside in whatever passes for your winter coat (generally, a t-shirt with a pair of mittens stapled over the nipples), and reasonable people would go inside at this point.  But there isn’t enough inside for everybody, so what they do is bring out a metal cylinder full of fire and we all huddle around it acting personally insulted that it dares be this cold.  Don’t get me started on what happens when it rains.

Man, I’m really bothered that I didn’t save random guy, but I don’t want to pull out a walkthrough and replay it.  I don’t even know if he’s saveable.  He’s got to be, right?  The game doesn’t even mention your failure to rescue him, which is a little weird.  Maybe it’s trying to focus on the positive?

The scope of this game just expanded and I don’t care anymore.  The only goal I have been given is to find a place to sleep.  (Now it wants me to sleep!)  I mean, shit, I can do that in my real life, both now and when I’m dead.

Okay, okay, game, I’ll give you 39 more minutes.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my house!?”
That is an eminently reasonable question, blacksmith dude.  You see, I am an adventurer, and I was obligated to enter it, because it was implemented.  Are you going to put the pointy thing down?  …you’re not putting the pointy thing down.

Ah, here we go with the backstory.  I am a spoil of conquest, apparently.  I must be special as fuck.

Hephaestus the blacksmith?  I’ve heard this one before.
“I’m madly in love with a woman named Sheila.”
Okay, maybe I haven’t heard this one before.  He wants me to, let’s see, go to town, find out what her favorite gemstone is, then go into the mines and convince a dude named Steve to just give me one of those.  You know, standard adventurer stuff he can’t do himself because he’s come down with a bad case of being an NPC.  In return, he is going to make me some armor and a weapon, which I think are plot coupons?  You got it, blacksmith buddy!

Oh shit yeah I want to make some money.

“If you can get the iron from him and get back here before noon, I’ll give you 50 gold because I like you.”
Because you like me, not because I went and got the iron?  Will you still like me if I get back at 12:05?  I am so confused.

Huh, here is a puzzle where I have to prove to a guy I have heard a joke before so he will let me leave!  I like this.

Hm, I wonder which one of these stores Sheila works at?  Hephaestus didn’t tell me.  I’m not sure he knows.

There are many different kinds of shoes sitting on shelves around the shop. It’s very impressive in a time when there are really only a couple different ways to make a shoe.
This game has some amazing sentences in it.

It’s wooden washtub big enough for a child to fit in it. It looks like it’s mostly used for catching blood.
o.O

…you know, if I don’t guess the punchline correctly, Steve doesn’t tell it to me.  Steve is terrible at telling jokes.  Steve is basically a terrible person.  I hate you, Steve.  I hate you, Steve!

Also, I should mention that Sheila is a bitch and a half.  Hephaestus is cool, but his name takes a long time to type.  I don’t see them working out, really.

Hmm, how do I find a sewing needle in this mess?  Hey, Hephaestus?  You don’t mind if I just take all your shit from your house, now that we’re buds, do you?

UGGGGH trying to guess the verb to crank this winch to lower a bucket into the well is driving me maaaaad

Okay, calling time on this one.  It wasn’t bad, but not only did it bring nothing new to the table, I’m not positive it didn’t antique the table.

This is just to say that the name of this blog is one of those phrases you can sing to the tune of Camptown Ladies, and it took me over four years to notice that.

Carry on with your bad selves.  I am going to sleep now.

doo-dah, doo-dah

…I’m a big boy.

[spoilers begin here]

Okay, I just opened this game, and it is basically already adorable.

hee hee Lydia Dragonbottom

You reach the end of the corridor, where you are surprised to find a gigantic spider wearing a tatty burnished crown and sitting on a frayed satin pillow. Could this be the fabled spider king?
SPIDER KING IS TOO CUTE
CAN’T EVEN HANDLE IT
PLEASE SEND OXYGEN BY EVENING POST

Oblivia Firespoon is a good wizard name.  Almost as good as Calamity Boomfist, which is the best wizard name, which I assembled out of wizard name bits in the character creation screen of a fairly dumb wizard-based MMO.  Then I spent some time coming up with my own wizard name bits, which are even dumber.  (Dictaphone is pronounced “dic-taff-o-nee.”  Wandlicker is pronounced “wand licker.”)

I am going to curtsey to the spider king and introduce myself politely, because I was not raised by wolves.  Well, okay, I was raised by wolves, but they had a lot of Regency-period etiquette books for some reason.

Item Gained – Black Rose!
Hells of yes!

Witch’s Girl gives me options to be good, bad, or neutral, but I can tell it wants me to be naughty.  Normally I roleplay paragons of virtue that you can’t even look at without your eyes exploding, but this game is pretty charming, so I’ll indulge it here and there, when I can.

A fork in the road is little more than a contrived choice-forcing mechanic.
This is funny, but I’m surprised at the fourth-wall breaking.  Let’s take the (slightly longer) route past the crumbling old windmill, in hopes it’ll yield another item!

‘Eep!’ cries Esme. ‘Put it down! Books with faces on can only have bad things inside!’
That is the most intelligent thing anyone has said to me all day.  Maybe I’ll mess with dark forces I do not understand when I replay this.  (I can already tell I’m going to want to replay this.)

When Esme doesn’t respond, you turn around, sensing that something is wrong. It is. Esme is reading the face-book!
Well, crap, she’s gonna be on there for hours liking pictures of people’s kids dressed as TARDISes and dodging requests to play Candy Crush Saga.  I better go get the witch.

‘Stop right there,’ says Ethel. ‘Most people would tell you to slow down or just start at the beginning, but as it happens I am a witch and therefore I can use my magic powers to understand whatever you’re babbling about.’ She waggles her hands in a magical fashion, then pales. ‘Well, that’s not good,’ she says, shoving you out of the way and barging up the stairs.
I laughed out loud.

OH SWEET TIME TRAVEL

I’m a little disappointed I can’t go fishing at the fish pond after picking up a fishing rod.

Yay!  I saved the world, and there’s an epilogue!

That guy you gave the croissant to loved it so much he went and became a bat guy, and his used his mellowed-out forest attitude to help them curb their aggression.
I don’t remember giving anybody a croissant.  I don’t remember having a croissant.  I can’t imagine being in possession of a croissant and not instantly shoving the whole thing into my face.  Then again, I don’t always read all the words, so maybe that happened and I missed it?

I really, really enjoyed that.  The story was fun, the writing was clever, the pictures were delightful, and on the whole, the CYOA medium was used well.  If I had a complaint, it’d be that the game opens up a little too much after you gain access to the time-travel cauldron, and I found myself in steamrollering mode (I even squashed that cute vampire bug!  I feel terrible!)  Also, it’s narratively weird that most of the text remains the same whether or not your character has been in a situation before; you would think that she and her friend would have stopped being afraid of their buddy the witch by now.

Still, frickin’ loved it.

Yes, dammit, I’m hungry.  I am going to quick make some onigiri or this review will be even more about food than it’s already going to be.

[spoilers begin om nom nom]

As with all horror games, I reserve the right to stop playing once they freak me out.

You’re master of your own destiny, Larry Wyndham. Another day, another dollar, Larry Wyndham. And above all remember: Time and tide wait for no man. You aren’t just a drunk beachcomber - you are Larry Wyndham the drunk beachcomber.
I like this opening.  “Drunk beachcomber” sounds like something you’d get from a fictional profession generator, doesn’t it?  Like “piston cowgirl,” or “quick-draw heretic.”

Wow, this shack is shittier than most of the shitty apartments my PCs have lived in.  If I weren’t waiting for my stock options to vest, I would quit my drunk beachcomber job and find something more lucrative, like teaching or bitcoin mining.

Pieces of glass glint in the sand. Some of the larger pieces come from broken bottles. You look affectionately at some of the more familiar pieces.
Larry Wyndham’s life is very sad and he is very lonely.  That is what I am picking up here.  (I am not picking up the glass, because it won’t let me.)

Blue-grey glimmering filaments of sticky rot crisscross its matted black fur like a lattice.
This is the most beautiful description of a dead cat I have ever read.  No, scratch that; it isn’t strong enough.  I have seen people describe their lovers less attractively than that dead cat.  (Most egregiously, as “that whore Lois.”)*

This reminds you of playing in the sandbox when you lived in …
… said that he no longer belonged aboard ship, and threw himself over the side, quickly disappearing beneath the black water. God have mercy on him.
You have always lived here.
Whatever you say, Larry Wyndham, you most reliable of narrators, you.  I’m going to start referring to you as Admiral Nutbag.

>bury cat
You shovel some dark sand over the body of the cat. Its tail and a stiff paw emerge from the ground like roots.
Also, you suck at burying cats.

Time and tide wait for no man, Larry Wyndham.
But they wait for me.
Oh!  Oh!  I know this one!  The doctor is a woman!
…no?

Hm, the book I lost in the ocean showed back up on the dresser, and I suddenly have an answering machine.  With a message.  Still no phone or electricity.  Getting kinda creepy.  How do people write horror games without skeeving themselves the hell out?

The tape begins to play. There is a muted crackling noise, and then the message starts:
       ”… You have no new messages. They have gone into the sea.”
That… is creepier than it has any right to be.  I’m lining up coconut milk shots.  OH GOD THIS COCONUT MILK HAS A BEACH ON THE CARTON

IT’S ONLY EIGHTY CALORIES A SERVING

The twist ending to this game is going to be that I’m not really Jenni Polodna, teetotaling IF reviewer, and these coconut milk shots are actually human blood.  Which we all know does not go with onigiri at all.

Huh, this game was doing a really good job of leading me along, and now I’m not sure what creepy-ass thing I’m supposed to be doing next.

It is not wrong to carry around a fish bowl. You would be breaking no laws.
I like this.

Um.  There are not a lot of things in this game.  What am I missing here?  Damn, no hints.  Oh, I need to fill the fish bowl with water?  That makes a certain amount of sense, I guess!

>sleep
You are getting more exhausted.
You aren’t feeling especially drowsy.
This is problematic.

This five-dollar bill says the dead fish and cat are my fellow crew members.  This five-dollar bill tells me lots of things.  Abraham Lincoln’s eyes glow purple and his mouth opens up real wide and he makes the secrets vibrate through my skull.  Boy, am I ever crazy.

Oh, I guess I, Larry Wyndham, am turning into a monster.  It is weird that knowing that makes things less creepy.

It’s almost time to go to the sea. But there’s something to be done first …
You’re going to make me guess what that is, aren’t you, game.

>take fish
(the dead fish)
      You grab the fish bowl, noticing as you do that your hands look different than usual …
       Before you have time to think about this, though, the fish bowl shatters in a clean shriek of glass.
       The fish bowl is gone, replaced with the body of Janice. The body is still fairly fresh, and the wound in her throat glistens where someone bit out her esophagus.
       You can still taste the memory of blood in your mouth.
You don’t want to do that.
Another little implementation blip.  Was this game tested?

Well, that was… I have got to stop saying “Well, that was a thing.”  Not only is it ridiculously lazy, it makes me worry that I’m losing the ability to react properly to stimuli.  Like, when my daughter and daughter-in-law* proudly place my first grandchild in my arms, I’ll say “Yup, that’s a thing.”  Like, when I am the only one to survive the apocalypse and I am dragging myself on my elbows past wrecked buildings and piles of ash that once were people, I’ll say “Huh, yeah, that certainly was a thing, all right.”  On the plus side, it is getting easier for a robot to do my job for me.

PROCEDURALLY GENERATED SUMMARY::FISH BOWL::ETHAN RUPP
attention_in_beginning = grabbed
implementation_issues = light_to_moderate
ultimately_anticlimactic = yes
clueing_present < clueing_needed
creepy = sure
END SUMMARY::GENERATE DICK JOKE

*  Kidding.  “That whore Lois” is a thing my friend Rachel likes to say.  I think someone in her family ran off with that whore Lois, who was from then on referred to as “that whore Lois.”  Have I told you about my friend Rachel?  She is real.  She introduced me to South African smoke spice on cucumber sandwiches.  I think she is great.

**  If I’m having an imaginary child here, I’m making her a lesbian.  If I have a real one, it can choose its own sex, gender and sexuality, because I am a motherfucking liberal. ***

*** I include “sex” in that list because the joke is that of course the child will not actually get to choose these things, and the idea of it sitting there in utero with an options list and an Ikea pencil is funny to me.  Please do not leave me comments about how gender and sexuality are not choices.  Or, wait, is the point of gender that it is a choice?  Porpentine, come explain this to me.  Preferably with cartoons.

I’m not going to lie, it’s like this blurb was written specifically to make me not want to play this game.  I say this more as an acknowledgement of my own failure of depth than an indictment of the game and its blurb.  Know what kind of blurb would make me want to play a game?

You are on the moon and it is awesome and there are robots and then you get to eat cake.

Huh.  In other news, Dinner Bell now takes place on the moon.  Anyway, I’m going to play howling dogs, because I hear the author’s last game had sex in it, and I like sex.  And cake.  Sometimes I like to have sex while eating cake and you can’t stop me because I am a grownup.  I sure do wish I had a robot.

[spoilers begin here]

Once he was awake he could hear that not only was the patient next door but the two hundred dogs kept in the hospital courtyard for use in the laboratory had also been threatened by his sobbing and clearly were howling
Man, I bet he sure did feel like an asshole for disturbing other life forms with his misery.  Should I make the official call that this game is depressing now, or give it a couple screens to see where it goes?

Every day you think of ways this photo could have been improved: better lighting, better surroundings, closer to see the subtleties in her expression, further back to see her form and better imagine embracing her…
I have never felt this way about a photograph that is being used as a surrogate for someone I care about, but this sentence does convince me that the PC loves this person.  Not every game with a love interest gets to this point.  Some of them, you wonder if they’re even trying.

A certain person was tasked with describing a garden for the records of an empire. To assure objectivity, they were shown this garden through a slit in a piece of opaque black paper.
Okay, what?  I was just in a strange institution.  Is this a scientific study, or am I being used in some way, or what?  I guess I am supposed to be wondering that and the game has done its job.  You go get ‘em, game.

You feel certain that the garden permits a feeling of privacy and enclosure at regular intervals despite the relatively small size of the garden, due to the height and closeness of the trees, as well as the gentle canopy of long green leaves proliferating from the tip of each tree.
Is it just me, or is that a weird thing to feel certain about?  I mean, it sounds like a thing that is just true.

I am going to describe this garden aesthetically, because that seems like the entire reason to even have a garden.  (I just angered all of my friends who are botanists and/or oxygen enthusiasts.)

Shouts and sudden downswing of some sharp or heavy or sharp and heavy, wearisomely edged, grippable, heftable, you can hold it in two arms, or one, it can, at any rate, be lifted from the earth, thing
As a person who derives genuine joy from badly written sentences, I sometimes have problems gauging the quality of really arty writing.  Is this good?  It doesn’t make me feel anything, which is generally what I like in my arty writing.  It is, however, moving very confidently towards whatever the hell it is going for.  Have you ever noticed that you can say anything with the inflection of a joke, and people will laugh?  It really works.  You can even judge how smart your friends are by seeing how long it takes that little flicker of confusion to cross their faces when they realize what you just said wasn’t funny.

Okay, so the weird activity room stuff is connected to the images in the sanity room.  That is a thing, I guess.

The shower is a peaceful time for you, a way of demarcating space within extremely limited space, moisture and temperature standing in for spatiality.
What, you mean the place where I soap my balls? *

The phone is vibrating under the blanket, muffled enough to ignore if you will keep holding me.
Okay, this sentence I like.

You are something I digest and shit out.
This girl really needs to work on her pillow talk.  Yikes.

I say light, but a better phrase would be “capacity to behold irrespective of light”.
That confused me for a second, but it actually makes a lot of sense when applied to a text game.

Outside the bedroom I can think freely about the events of last year. More than three hundred days have elapsed, so how strange that only now would I be driven to kill you.
Huh!  Okay, now I am interested.  Hm, the game wants to know if I want to be complicit in killing him.  I haven’t even heard what happened last year, so I’m afraid I’ll have to decline.  Sorry!

Oh, you want me to watch?  That’s cool, I guess.

“Testosteronated” is a good word.

Damn, the description of her photograph changed.  I probably should have looked at it before that last activity room session.

The drop-coffins are falling.
Drop-coffins?  Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?

High above the martial vapors you know the Death Ship is rattling gantries and frames to release more invadorial cargo.
I like this sentence also.  It was Invadoriel, wasn’t it, who got kicked out of Lothlorien for arms dealing?

Your sisters and brothers in death crunch to the surface of this doomed planet.
“Don’t you think this is a bit morbid?”
Took the words right out of my mouth there.

A hurtling mortar opines that it saves processing power to merge the death element.
That is a weird thing to opine!  Do you?  Or don’t you?  You can’t have an opinion about a fact, right?  I swear I learned that in school somewhere.

I am enjoying the experience of playing this game.  I don’t know if it’s anywhere near the experience the author intended me to have (well, a generic me), but it is weird and mysterious enough that I am digging it.

The mud is analyzing alternatives.
Whatever you say, game.  Whatever you say.
You’re sitting at a fine table sipping tea.
If you like.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, there’s a bit where the text is blurry and unreadable like those allegedly humorous t-shirts about being very drunk.  I’m going to try to read it and get a headache and maybe go insane and split my cranium open and slimy things with legs will crawl out.  I hope you’re happy, game.  Oh, it wants to know if I believe myself a prophet.  No.  No, I don’t.

“Women are half of humankind. Does God waste?”
Fuck yeah!  You tell ‘em, hungry nun!

You are the empress of the starry diadem, lordess of the sun-cursed towers, visionatrix of the inner sea, controller of foundries, trade routes, war zones, of anything laws may touch and everything susceptible to grace.
See, I keep telling people this, and all they ever do is stare at me.  “Visionatrix” is another good word.  I am learning so many good words.

They prepare you for the day you shall be assassinated by draping your body in red streamers and arranging you aesthetically across carpets and divans.
You are instructed in
the art of dying in the proper lighting
I AM HOPEFUL FOR MY FUTURE

The empress has always saved herself for death, because death will only accept a maiden. If the empress is not pure in death, how can she birth the next empress?
For all know each empress is born of the union between woman and death, and they are known by the fleshless foot that tears their mother.
We are getting into some Khazar Lexicon business up in here and I am not complaining at all.

Hm, another thing I am taught is the art of emulating the appropriate saint with my death pose.
Fortunately the saints died in an absurd number of ways.
Laughed out loud; frightened the neighbors.

We bring back choice specimens, chained to elephants—a church, several fine houses, and a cafe. We have questioned them all closely but they will not reveal their origins.
Why did this game fuck around for so long before getting to this vignette?

Your zoo now has one of each kind of bird in the world.
Fuck yeah it does.  My zoo is bad-ass.  Also my hiking boots are awesome and this mountain is being dominated by me.

Hmm.  You know, I quite liked that, once I embraced that it was never, ever, going to make sense.

*  I said “balls” there because the joke needed a monosyllable with the correct amount of vernacular crudeness to counteract whatever the hell is going on in that other sentence.  Also, balls are inherently funny.  I still don’t actually have testicles.  Maybe someday.

I am on fucking fire tonight.  If I were a chicken, I would be fully cooked and delicious by now.  Wait.  I just made myself hungry by imagining that I was a delicious chicken.  That’s kind of messed up.

[spoilers begin here]

He fingers two of these charms, a unicorn and a dragon, as he starts speaking in a low voice:
” Let this man know my arcane chambers. [...]“
This is generally the point at which I call the cops.

> ask dragon about dragons
 ”Dragons are good people.”
I suspect bias.

The wizard who cast it has great power, that’s for sure.
> ask unicorn about wizard
The word ‘wizard’ is not used in this game.
Lies!  Bold faced lies!

Okay, this cracked me up:
> ask unicorn about myself
“I don’t know you very well, but based on what I’ve seen so far, you appear to be a intelligent, sensitive person who is a bit confused by all that’s happened.”
> ask dragon about myself
“You seem like you don’t know your butt from a loaf of bread.”

> eat butt
The word ‘butt’ is not used in this game.

Uh.  I asked the unicorn about help, and he offered me a small purse or beef jerky, but I had no idea what the correct command to take them was, so I think I missed out?  Oh, no, you can still ask him for them.  Confusing!

A mouth materializes in the middle of the dark patch. “I must have payment!” the mouth says. “Put the right two gold items into my slot and I will be open.”
Things keep getting sexy tonight.  I guess it’s just one of those nights.

Well, that was a thing.  A short thing.  It wasn’t particularly broken that I noticed.  Got confused once, had a nice laugh, made it to the end, moving on with my life.

I mean, if that’s all right with everybody.  I could stay here and make more chicken jokes.

naked manpissy
put this sentence “you have to figure it out yourself” into one word
kitten in a party hat
drivefs ed pacin car to play
conine alkaloid
peanuts grammar
stool eating & pissying
handkerchief on park bench
banjo hell
naked unicyclist
something interesting

That was fun; now what should we play?  Let’s read blurbs.

A train hurtles towards your son – or five strangers.
Five strangers are hurtling towards my son?  I guess that is what they mean by “stranger danger.”  Hey, are you sure you don’t mean the sun?  That’s usually what things hurtle towards, in my experience.

Later in the same blurb:
You’re kidnapped and forced to save an innocent life.
OH POOR ME

Okay, I guess I have to play this game, if I’m going to make fun of its blurb.  I’m scared, though.  There are zombies and potentially dead kids in it.  I am not a super fan of zombies and potentially dead kids.

[scary spoilers begin here]

“Run, Harry!  Run, you magnificent bastard!” Frank shouts, looking behind you in alarm.
I like Frank.  I like people who say things like “Run, you magnificent bastard!”

Yup.  Zombie tropes being totes evoked on up in here.  This is what we’re doing.  I wish I had corn muffins left.  That is not a related thought.

Between the cold and the thawing bricks of soup and chili and nacho cheez
No, it is my cheez now.  Law of the jungle.

Convenient for exiting the freezer while carrying an armload of food, inconvenient for trying to keep the door closed against the zombie horde.
Yeah, whoever designed this freezer door had their priorities all wrong.  Fortunately, they later redeemed themselves by designing the Zune.*

What should I be doing?  I know we can’t stay in this freezer forever, but that’s all I know.  Let’s have a look around.

Well, shit, Frank and I both got bitten by zombies, and there’s only one dose of antidote.  We are both inevitably fucked no matter what, because hey, zombie apocalypse, so I might as well do the self-sacrifice… hey, wait, can I gnaw off my arm?  No.  Well, poop sex.

Frank says, “Whatever happens, I’m sorry about Julie.  Did I ever tell you about my wife, Angie?… Ask me about her sometime.”
>ask frank about angie
Frank smiles in recollection, for just a moment.  Then his face falls.  ”Let’s talk about something else.”
Dude, you brought it up!

Well, I shot myself, and moved on to Chapter 2.  Hooray, I guess?

You hear a small crackle in your ear, then a voice, low and deep, says, “We have reason to believe this man knows of an impending terrorist attack that may kill thousands.  You need to get the date, method and collaborator’s name from the prisoner.”
Oh, I’ve seen this improv game before!  I bet it was Bill Cosby with a butter churn during the French revolution.

They really want me to hit this prisoner.  Something about thousands of people dying.  Because this is a game, I am approaching this not as a moral choice but a puzzle.  Also, I don’t particularly want to hit the prisoner.  So I’m leaving.

Oh, fuck, this is the part with the train and my son.  Not really looking forward to it.

Your son says, “Mom, stay here.  I’m going to go help them.”
crap crap crap crap crap

>throw switch
Do you really want to throw the switch?  The train is close, and you will not be able to change it back before the train hits Jeremy.
Of course not!  But I’m fucking going to!  While feeling very fortunate that this is a game and not my actual life.

“That’s Li Nguyen.  Probably the best violinist in the western hemisphere.  The only unlucky thing about her is that she has a very rare blood type.  Only one other person in the world has it.”  The nurse pauses to let this sink in.
“Well, the blood thing, and the fact that she was in a serious accident this morning.  So, she needs to be attached to you for the next couple of months.”
“It would be great if you could WAIT here for about eight, nine months.  Because if you leave, she dies.”  The nurse pauses again.  ”Of course, it’s your choice.”
And with that, she walks out.
Oh, what the crap?  Well, of course I’m not going to be the asshole who tells the best violinist in the western hemisphere she can’t be alive anymore because I can’t handle eight or nine months of hanging around a hospital watching bad TV and eating Jell-O.  I could write a book.  That sounds like an instant best-seller, doesn’t it?  I’d probably get to be on Oprah.  I don’t know what I’d say on Oprah.  “Yeah, Li’s great, she snores kind of loud, but we really bonded.”  Sure, no problem.  I just fucking murdered my son.  This is gravy.

Oh, man, it really wants me to wait one day at a time.  That’s awesome.  I never feel that I, the player, am at all put out by these really difficult moral choices, so it is sort of great being asked to type Z, what, two hundred and seventy times?

All your waiting has not been for naught.  One day the doctors and nurses come in, and cut the violinist free from you.
But… that wasn’t even twenty!  I was gonna go the distance!

Hmm.  I’m not sure what the red button on this capital-M Machine does, but if it wants me to push it so badly, I’m not going to.

Now that I’m hammering on the environment trying to find an alternative to pushing the shiny seductive red button, the cracks in the implementation are really showing.

Your mind is consumed with thoughts of pushing the button.
Look, I’m not going to push the button, all right?  I’m just not going to push it!

>pull button
Nothing obvious happens.
Your mind is consumed with thoughts of pushing the button.
Damn.

The white table is aggressively plain.  You think that it might not even exist, except that it is holding up nothing.
This would be one of those cracks in the implementation, yes.

Dammit, even the walkthrough wants me to push the button.  I’m not pushing it.  I will quit this game, never play it again, and someday I will die without ever having pushed that button.  Tab closed.  We are done here.

(It’s funny, because in real life I probably would have pushed it within seconds.)

I am not entirely sure how to feel about this game, but it did really impress me when I thought it was going to make me type Z 270 times in order to stand by my decision.  I wish more moral choices in games were presented with some approximation of actual cost.  Even when I’m, say, paying off a random NPC’s gambling debt with money I could have spent on equipment, I can generally rationalize this from a cost-benefit perspective if I think of it as spending money to gain alignment points.  I’d like to see a game with no alignment tracking at all, just realistic narrative consequences (as in, all you get from saving that NPC is the joy of seeing him out fishing).  Did Dragon Age do this?  I feel like Dragon Age might have done this.

* I am not sure what this joke even means or how you are supposed to parse it, I just thought, hey, time for a Zune joke, right?