On Delicious Emily’s Holiday Season, a time-management game with a romantic subplot in which you can actually make choices for the character. I can see this may have set them up for some problems about sequels down the road, but I was pleased with it, and it made a good occasion to talk some more about the interplay of gameplay and romance.

Speaking of casual games with developed plots, I am seriously disappointed by Jojo’s Fashion Show: World Tour. I’m guessing someone else took over the franchise after the tragic dissolution of Gamelab. But the dialogue doesn’t snap, the characters are dull, the fashions are less attractively drawn, and the gameplay is neither as challenging nor as interesting. There’s a portion where you can create your own items of clothing to go into the show, which sounded like it might be another attempt at the product-mixing concepts in Chocolatier: Decadence by Design and Passport to Perfume. But once again, this isn’t actually as interesting a mechanic as it could be. You’re always creating clothing to match a specific style, applying colors and patterns to a very limited selection of silhouettes: the result is that it’s hard to make an outfit that is a resounding failure, and fairly easy to come up with something worth a large number of points; and the process of doing this is all about experimenting with the colors and patterns until you’ve hit as many of the style features as you can. Perhaps this is an attempt to keep the game from being too difficult, but the results are (in my opinion) kind of limp. I’m still waiting for a tycoon or time management game where you design your own products but the gameplay on both sides really crackles. (This is — or could be — basically a deck-building problem.)

Dear people-that-send-me-email,

Sorry I’ve been uncommunicative the last couple of days, and here’s fair warning that I will probably continue to be so through the first of the year or so. It’s down to a combination of computer problems, academic year wind-up, and other features of Real Life. I wish everyone the best, and will catch up in January.

Here. (I know, I said it was best if you didn’t know too much about it. Don’t worry: the review steers more than usually clear of plot and setting issues.)