Played through in December 2023.

A puzzle game where you're given a story title, and must create the corresponding story by assembling a comic strip. You drag-and-drop sets which are effectively plot beats (e.g. “affair” is pretty self-explanatory, but “gun” can be an assassin taking or returning the gun, or a detective finding fingerprints on the gun; some scenes like “ballroom” or “forest” tend to be a more open-ended encounter between characters), and then drag-and-drop characters into them.

It's a premise that's full of promise, and then in practice mostly ended up feeling more rote than I expected. It turns out archetypal stories are fairly predictable, and so the interactions in this puzzle space tended to be less surprising than one might wish. As a result, the interest curve was a little too flat. There were a couple of late-game puzzles that genuinely made me laugh out loud when I understood them, like the “Friedrich Takes Revenge” puzzle where Nietzsche falls in love with Eve in the garden of Eden, then seeing her punished for eating the forbidden fruit is motivated to kill God.

There are some advanced puzzles unlocked after finishing the game, which I need to go back and play.