Ratings and Reviews by jakomo

The current eruption of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii has led to lots of speculation that the goddess Pele is back and she's angry. But this game has taught me there is another form of Pele's Curse: if you take any local rocks away with you as souvenirs, bad luck will befall you. This scares the thieving tourists enough that many send the rocks back in the post: as a Hawaii tourist board employee, you need to drive around putting them back in their rightful places.

This is very much a postcard from Hawaii, both in size and style: an excuse to implement a "what I did on my summer vacation" as a text adventure. Not that there's anything wrong with that. "Bolivia By Night" is another really good example of that kind of thing. There is not much to do, puzzles aren't really difficult, and it's short, but well-written throughout.

A return to the weird world of Castle Balderstone. Specifically, the "weird west" world, in this cowboy horror where the protagonist packs heat to take on a demonic invasion of a frontier town. It's a shoot-em-up with trivial levels of puzzle difficulty: the only real challenge is equipping the right gun for the right enemy (and maybe preserving ammo, but it almost grows on trees in this game). But this is story-focused IF, and the most important element, the writing, easily carries this to greatness: you can almost taste the sawdust and spittoons. And there are multiple, impressively lengthy bits done entirely in rhyming verse. Yee-haw!

The Little Match Girl gets scary, with this Clark Ashton Smith inspired weird tale. Ebenezabeth takes on a time-travelling werewolf, teaming up with three other monster-hunters, in the closest thing to a "slasher film" this series has ever been. Builds a genuinely foreboding atmosphere very successfully (the descriptions of the creature's victims are especially creepy), while retaining the straightforward inventory-puzzle focused gameplay these games are known for. A nice new feature for this series is the in-built adaptive hint system: I only needed it once but love that it exists. There is also a "post-game" involving collecting a set of cards, which I have yet to fully explore...

The little match girl's mission is to retrieve a missing statue on orders from the pope himself. She is accompanied by a new character, Melix, who can jump through worlds by using mirrors. The quest takes the pair through plenty of unusual locations, in a highly linear fashion: there are very few diversions here, most rooms only have one entrance and one exit. It's like following a walking trail. Given the large, complex maps of the recent Little Match Girl 5, this linearity works fine as a palate-cleanser. The challenge involves looking out for fire or mirrors to warp to the next world, while negotiating the occasional puzzle: these feel like a step up in difficulty from recent LMG games, despite the minimal inventory and interactable objects. Actually, most of the puzzles occur on the way back, after finding your target, which is a very funny inversion of the usual "Hero's Journey" tropes.

Little Match Girls, assemble! This episode immediately subverts the LMG formula by putting you in the shoes of Linus, an NPC from previous games, who can jump between worlds by locking/unlocking doors. He's hunting five different versions of Ebenezabeth, to bring them together for a daring rescue mission foreshadowed in LMG4. The second part of the game gives you control over all five match girls, jumping between them at will, as they infiltrate a vampire's lair and use their unique skills in conjunction to save the day.

Big maps, lots of NPCs, action sequences, character switching, cut scenes, all contribute to the cinematic feeling of of Little Match Girl 5, but it's the story where this episode really excels: giving glimpses of vast world-building, then pulling back and making it all about Ebenezabeth and her immediate circle of friends and enemies, a story about people instead of just places or ideas. This trick is repeated multiple times, and culminates in possibly the biggest thing to happen to Ebenezabeth in the series so far.

Ebenezabeth decides battle strategy in a war between dino-riders, pteranodons and wellness instructors. Essentially, a single big logic puzzle as you place the most suitable units to repel/attack the enemy's units, then watch the fights play out. Didn't work out? Restart and try again. Ebenezabeth can explore the military encampment and its environs, chatting to NPCs etc to get a feel of the backstory to this conflict and the characters engulfed by it: this also provides useful strategic info. The puzzle itself is multi-dimensional, complex and interesting to solve. And once you've figured out how to not lose, you'll realize you then need to figure out how to (Spoiler - click to show) rout the opponent, and then how to draw a perfect stalemate to get the best ending, and a bonus puzzle. A deftly written and smartly implemented addition to the Little Match Girl canon.

Well-written prelude to a new official Lone Wolf trilogy, the first ever written by someone other than Joe Dever. You have to keep track of the gamebook elements by yourself (it tells you when to add/remove inventory items, notes, and endurance points on your action chart, and provides a dice rolling button), which initially feels strange for a digital game, but makes sense given the physical gamebook series this Twine is promoting.

Set well before the events of the classic series, you play a female initiate of a holy order sent on a dangerous investigation into the vanishing of a family of merchants. It's filled with branching choices, providing plenty of replayability, and packs in a lot of intriguing worldbuilding in its relatively short play-time. My character limped to the finish with a barely any endurance points left: a sign of a well-balanced gamebook, generating drama and tension through both narrative and mechanics. Some nice background music and simple but evocative images round out an enjoyable package.

Scientists have proven that by the year 2033, all interactive fiction will be Little Match Girl games. The eighth episode to date has Match Girl taking on a whole gang of bad guys, the "naughty girls" - some of whom are real historical figures. Takes place after LMG4, but mainly refers to events from LMG3. Gameplay revolves around finding and collecting "special verbs", then using them in the appropriate places to solve puzzles. Simple, straightforward, perfectly effective and highly entertaining as ever.

Almost like a "deleted scene" from LMG4, further expanding on the unexplained history between The Little Match Girl and the character "Linus", who was apologetic about a mystery event in the past. This episode fills in part of that continuity gap as LMG leaps between her attic and four locations (a cabin in the woods, a witch's cave, a future crypt-temple, and a metropolis in the grip of panic) in search of a leaf that can be used to create a curative elixir. She's accompanied by her crow, who becomes the playable character at one point. A welcome twist to the now tried & tested formula of this series. Ends with a straight-up general knowledge test question (easily cheatable).

The fourth numbered entry, and the sixth overall entry, in the distinguished series about the eponymous time-and-space-hopping assassin, formerly a tragic Hans Christian Andersen heroine. LMG4 drops the turn-based combat of its predecessor and returns to traditional puzzle-solving roots, while keeping the large, sprawling maps that need to be explored with pen-and-paper in hand (including prehistoric Montana, a far-future colony ship, an alpen castle and a frontier mining town).

No opening "mission briefing" this time round: you're dropped on a beach in Penzance with a picture of a lighthouse and told to get on with it. The game meanders at first before coalescing into a collect-the-pieces plot (pearls for the fairy prince's crown) but it's easy enough to grok that you need to explore every location you can: unlock doors, find light sources, shoot bad guys etc. There's plenty of optional content: I mistakenly thought a side quest about gathering signatures for a petition was actually the main objective, so was surprised when the quest-giver just gave a curt "ok thanks" type response and nothing else happened.

As expected of this series: great writing and well-balanced old-school gameplay (I only used the built-in hints once). But it's also the first entry that doesn't quite feel complete (there's a lot of setup for LMG5 that doesn't pay off in this entry) and the first entry where I felt it was content to rest on its laurels: there's no really innovative new stuff here that hasn't been seen previously. But the series already sets a very high quality bar, so it remains must-play stuff even while coasting.

Experimental text adventure in the mould of Heavy Metal magazine's hard-edged sci-fi stories. Crashed spaceships, alien planets, biomechanoids and plasma rifles all figure. You play using just single verbs, but many of those verbs are not available until you have the necessary object to activate them. Compass directions are replaced with WALK and JUMP and further commands as you progress. Makes it pretty difficult to map! But the game is small enough that it doesn't matter. Finding new locations often entails returning to previous locations to try out new verbs you've acquired since your last visit, Metroidvania-style. Although small, there is a ton of optional content to discover. I barely scratched the surface, finishing with a meager 'C' rating. HINT commands are included, which you'll most likely need when replaying to find all that content.

The Little Match Girl: Wordle Edition. No fetch quests this time, just variations on the en vogue Hangman-meets-Mastermind word games. The most linear game in the series by far, but with all the elegant writing and succinct, effortless worldbuilding you come to expect from this author.

Each Little Match Girl game has been getting more and more elaborate, so inevitably The Little Match Girl 3 is a giant, open-world non-linear RPG. Yes, RPG: your character has stats, can recruit party members and battles enemies in turn-based combat. Pretty daunting at first: you'll need to map, keep notes, it's tricky to win battles and potential companions seem very scarce. Luckily there are no negative results to losing a battle, it's easy to restore your HP and ammo, and once you get into the groove of picking the right fight, using a winning strategy, then levelling up to do it all over again, it settles into a nice flow. Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom vibes. There are a few traditional fetch-quest type puzzles too to break things up, but the main focus is on the combat, which has a lot of depth: my strategy involved using (Spoiler - click to show)the crow's "vex" and "shriek" to disable enemies, the match girl's "rapidfire" to do massive damage, and the mermaid's "heal" and "vortex" situationally. But there were lots of special abilties, stat-enhancing items and magic potions I never touched. There was even a whole other companion I never recruited. Every player will have their own unique way to win.

Light and fluffy when it wants to be, dark and moody when it needs to be, Veeder has an affinity for the JRPG Earthbound and, of all his work, this is the game that shows that influence the clearest.

A traditional sequel in the Hollywood style: everything people liked about the original but more and bigger. Locations are more expansive, puzzles are more complex (there's even a full-blown escape room in here), NPCs generally have more to say. As a result it does lose some of the elegance and simplicity that gave the original its charm. But it gains some great gags: the sea-captain's diary is an entertainingly absurd piece of Spike Milligan-esque nonsense-humour. The sudden appearance (and subsequent complete disappearance) of RPG combat is also worth a chuckle (but will turn out to be a major gameplay element of the next game). A nice wrinkle is that a lot of the puzzles are about creating the fire-source that you need to proceed. Straight-up (Spoiler - click to show)killing a guy may seem a bit out-of-character for the protagonist, but actually fits with the (Spoiler - click to show)implied violence of the first game's ending. As well as being a neat metaphor for letting go of the past and looking forward instead of clinging on to a mythical "golden age".

Structurally very similar to the first game: more fetch quests, more fun NPCs, more wildly imaginative locales to explore. This familiarity is likely a deliberate choice, designed to subvert the ending of LMG1. Where you previously (Spoiler - click to show)threatened violence to get what you want, this time round everything points to a similar resolution, but that doesn't fly and you need to find a more peaceful way, more in keeping with the protagonist's personality.

The "classic fairytale re-imagined" is one of the most heavily over-represented genres in IF, but when Ryan Veeder does it, you pay attention. You play the titular match girl, freezing to death on a street corner but able to teleport to different times/places/worlds by striking matches. Gamplay is super-straightforward fetch quests: find an object / find the right NPC to give it to, or find an NPC / figure out what object they would like. Superluminal Vagrant Twin-esque. It's elegant, clean and simple. Locations are varied and surprising. NPCs are deftly characterized and full of life, despite how little they actually say and do.

Another one-puzzle, one-room parser game about battling a terrifying body part, like Zombie Eye. This time it's the horror of a face spot discovered in your bathroom mirror as you prepare for a job interview. Use the contents of your bathroom cabinet, and your phone, to save the day. Lots of fun details about the player-characters life, household, family and personal relationships. Multiple amusing endings.

Tiny Adventuron parser adventure in which you try to rid the world of the titular monstrosity. A one-puzzle, one-room game, nicely illustrated with blocky graphics and some basic sound-effects. Uses the Adventuron "house style" - the look & feel of a 1980s BBC microcomputer. I managed to get stuck right at the start (the convenient VERBS command was enough to unblock me) but was smooth sailing from that point on.

A neat 500-word short story from 1916 about a skinflint who suddenly becomes generous, now in the public domain so available for reproduction. The modern co-author adds an impressive cover art image and a short bonus section in the middle of the story, where the interactivity lies. A text-box lets you type an appropriate noun to end a sentence. Contextually, this should presumably be a synonym for "miser" but it also allows many other words (and will tell you if it doesn't recognize what you type). The result is a short chunk of text with one line of dialogue altered depending on what you wrote. It then proceeds with the rest of the story, unaltered and unaffected by this little interactive detour.

Why the extra section is presented in a different form to the rest of the story (a play script instead of prose) is difficult to fathom. Why this interactive section is supposed to elevate the original short story is equally difficult to fathom. As an overall concept, there is potential in a twine-like choice-based system that hides the explicit choices behind a type-what-you-want text-box, but it definitely requires a longer work, with multiple choices that matter, to do it justice.

Choicescript tale of the nautical and the supernatural. You're a Byzantine-era ship captain at a party (where everyone talks in rhyme), recounting a weird event where your ship inexplicably stopped moving and a female passenger seemed to be the sole cause. The story is compelling, the moral choices you're given are interesting, and it wisely leaves the biggest mysteries unexplained. It's only disappointing that the rhyming gimmick set up in the framing device isn't carried over into the main story: would have loved to read this tale entirely in verse.

You're a shrink talking to a murderer in a Russian prison: initially about himself, then moving on to his murders, and then his own family. The killer has a really strong voice: sweary, belligerent, self-consciously confrontational. Heavy-duty dialogue like (Spoiler - click to show)"Push your dick into a million whores, you will never know what it feels like to push yourself into another man's brain, past his broken skull." He seems to revel in his violence, but, as the player-character points out early on, it's likely just a mask. You can let him talk freely or interject with your own questions. Written in Ink, a basic no-frills implementation. Works literally, as a frightening character study, but can also be read symbolically, as a metaphor for the historical traumas suffered by the Russian empire that brought it to its current precarious state.

Does exactly what it says on the tin. You're a surprisingly high-functioning zombie, who speaks like Grunk in Lost Pig, munching on human brain and posting an online review. Simple choice-based silliness. Here's a sample: "ME VERY SMART. ME ONCE EAT BRAINS OF MAN WHO ME BELIEVE WAS BESTSELL AUTHOR MALCOLM GLADWELL!!!” Like the zombie's victim, completely disposable, but tasty while it lasts.

Hypertext poetry. A portrait of obsessive, excessive, limitless love. Or is it? The vivid, lascivious imagery offers an interesting thematic counterpart to the other Ectocomp 2022 entry, MARTYR ME, that also displays a similar co-mingling of sex and unexpected violence amid a sense of unreality. Is there something in the air? Ectocomp is horny this year. The story is strictly linear, with hyperlinks popping up annotation windows that offer further expansion on the link text. In fact, the whole work could be reproduced as a regular static poem, using the standard superscript numbering scheme to denote in-line footnotes and listing the annotations, sequentially, as a numbered list beneath the main body. Would be fun to see something like that in a trad printed poetry anthology one day.

Text message interactive fiction: chat with your mum, and with your pal Ash with whom you've been reading Ancient Tomes, while a relentlessly oppressive musical drone churns in the background. The text interface simulacrum effectively induces dread through extremely slow reveals of each... new... message... and the few choices you get to make, although inconsequential, help characterise the protagonist and elaborate her thoughts beyond the conversations themselves. A highly linear creepypasta-ish experience which appears to be the final part of a trilogy: having not played the previous two I can confirm this works perfectly well as a nightmarish standalone experience.

I'm now officially HSL Certified! Just passed an online health & safety exam for Haunted Scissor-Lift operation with a score of 28/35, and feel ready and raring to go... This is a Choicescript-based sequence of 35 questions that perfectly imitate the patronising, jargon-filled language of these kinds of online H&S quizzes but throws in a supernatural twist, a la SCP Foundation, where the humour comes from the the disjunction between the wildly magickal fantasy/horror stuff and the ultra-mundane health&safety regulation stuff. This made me laugh out loud: "Before you are two goblins. One always lies, the other always tells the truth. Both claim to be your supervisor and suggest that you follow them to your haunted worksite." 35 questions is probably too much, the first 10 questions gently ease you into this world, the last 10 are where all the really funny, silly, creative stuff lies, but the middle 15 could probably be trimmed for pacing reasons. On the other hand, I understand the need for it to be as tedious as the real thing for the whole effect to work. The "Haunted Scissor Lift Manual" is a separate download, I'd also like to see that somehow incorporated into the main body of the game itself as it's filled with good bonus material.

Stop me if you've heard this one: a young lady, newly married, goes to live at her new husband's estate. Creepy goings-on in her new home ensue, and she comes to doubt the integrity of the man she has married. Something Blue puts a neat spin on this hoary old tale by presenting it as a series of letters from the new bride to her sister, in a classical 1800s literary style. You get to "edit" each letter before sending, by changing a sentence here and there. It's interesting how such a relatively small amount of change can really affect the character of the heroine, and therefore the tone of the whole story. She can be fearful and suspicious from the start, making a grim, E.A. Poe-like psychological study, or naive and optimistic to (almost) the end, making a sedate M.R. James-esque ghost story. I encountered two endings, there may be more.

Ingenious time-loop puzzle box in which you whizz through a sequence of cyclical inter-linked nightmare scenarios trying to escape to wakefulness. A dense thicket of choices await you at each turn, as you seek the critical clues from one dream to help free yourself from another. Impressively captures that bewildering yet hyper-real feeling of free-association during a vivid dream to a tee.

Gather your allies and venture forth to fight monsters... but you're also a regular teen at a Halloween party, and your allies are your family and friends. Recruitment consists of negotiating choice-based conversations with each of your friends taking into account their specific personality traits. Battle consists of turn-based RPG style combat. Well-written and intriguing lore, lots of mysteries to explore: what are these protoplasmic entities? Who exactly are you, why are you able to read minds, why can only your crew fight these creatures? And how does it relate to the "pre-war" Harry Potter-esque book series that your friends chatter about? None of these mysteries are answered though, as the game simply ends after your first fight. Appears to be a teaser for a future project and not a complete game in its current form, so would be better placed in Introcomp.

The technological Singularity has arrived, and has decided the human race needs to be deleted. But has very kindly given us a week's notice to get our affairs in order first. You're a writer in a new town, deciding each day whether to knuckle down and write your final masterpiece, or go out and experience the sights, sounds and people of your neighbourhood as they come to terms with the approaching apocalypse. Essentially, this is two separate narratives that require you to go "all in" on one route to experience the stories to their conclusions. Trying to alternate between writing days and going out days simply yields two half-completed stories instead of one full one when your time runs out. Which mechanically fits with the central theme of Blackout: you can't do everything, there just isn't enough time. This is either intended as a broad life lesson: "life is more satisfactory when you can focus on what you know you can achieve rather than what society says you should achieve", or a darkly comic metaphor about writer's block and missing deadlines.

The latest from Damon L Wakes, whose personal brand of flippant, off-the-wall humour is fully on display in this Twine optimization puzzle. You're a ghost with the most, and you're here to say, humans in your home, you don't dig it - no way! You've got six hours to make your abode as uninviting as possible before the new resident shows up. Each possible action has a differing spookiness quotient, but also has a differing amount of time to prepare it. Will you spend hours creating poltergeist activity in the kitchen, only to run out of time to make the lights flicker in the porch? Lots of different endings depending on your final score out of ten, all very sharp and amusing, as you'd expect from the author of such loopy delights as Good Grub! and GUNBABY.

Bind, Torture, Klll Simulator 2022. You play the serial killer, with your victim narrating their own torture and murder to you as it happens: but it's clearly a voice in your head, as they describe the long drawn out torture as almost a consensual sexual coupling between the two of you, something they want and actively seek, and their eventual murder as a "martyrdom". Unless you screw up the "ritual" of course, then prepare to be berated and verbally abused. Strong meat, especially as the game never breaks out of the killer's gaze, there is no framing device, no switches to other perspectives. Just a single changing word in a hyperlink seems to betray the unreliability of these words. Very well presented, utilising colour, speed and positioning of text as further markers of utter derangement.

Balderstone #2 introduces a fresh batch of terrifying tales:
- Look after your grand-child as an elderly invalid. Weird and nonsensical, with little interactivity but a lot of strangeness.
- Examine a monster in forensic detail. Simple and amusing.
- Live the spaghetti-western lifestyle: deserts, horses, guns and a love triangle (think Claudia Cardinale as Jill Mcbain). Exudes Mexican flavour. Like oregano and cumin.
- Survive an incident in a space laboratory. The regulation "meaty" chapter (each game seems to have one). The way this introduces who you are, where you are, and what you're doing with no infodumps at all is really neatly done. Has some tricky puzzles for the first time in this series (it will become more of a feature in later games). Managed to get stuck here for the first (and only) time too, unfortunately. Had to consult the "ClubFloyd transcript" to proceed.

Also includes some entertaining hidden content: try using the (Spoiler - click to show)safeword, or (Spoiler - click to show)quitting and restarting. If you enjoyed the first Balderstone, this is more of the same quality writing and expert pacing. But it's definitely the next game in the series where things really start to fly, as Veeder gets more ambitious with bigger and more complex scenarios, while also varying the storytelling voice more between the fictional authors.

Where it all began for the now-venerable series of Tales from the Crypt-esque anthology-horror games. Four spooky micro-IF stories are told by horror authors gathered at the titular castle. A tale of ghostly revenge, a surreal dive into psychosis (and blood), an abandoned hospital explore-em-up, and a trolling exercise (unless I missed something?). Much shorter and less thoroughly implemented than later episodes, but Veeder's comic turn-of-phrase and subversive wit shines through as usual. There's some hilarious mockery of self-indulgent literary "post mortems" in the framing device. In particular, the send-up of the heavy-handed metaphors of the abandoned hospital story, by it's own author, is expertly handled.

Inkle's two subsequent games after their smash-hit 80 DAYS have been deliberate attempts to try something new: a sci-fi graphical adventure game and an Arthurian turn-based strategy respectively. Their latest, Overboard!, is the closest thing to a proper 80 DAYS sequel: a choice-based narrative filled with storylets and side-plots to uncover and explore, with a ticking time limit and zero chance to see it all in one go, a Groundhog Day-like "time loop" game. But of course on a much smaller scale, and focused much more on people (the staff and passengers onboard your transatlantic ship) and their secrets than places and modes of transport. Our deliciously evil player-character, Veronica Villensy, is absolutely brilliantly written, as are all the small cast of NPCs, and both music and graphics perfectly complement the whole 1930s jazz/brass/art deco era mood and tone. Flawless.

Credit to Karmic Shift Studios: they've clearly learnt from the flaws of the previous entries in the Horror in the Darkness series and it all comes together in this fourth entry, which is easily the best so far. The intro is intriguing (a different character's point-of-view), the premise is appealing (escape the lunatic asylum you've been committed to after the events of the previous games), the puzzles comes thick and fast, there is a wild and wacky cast of NPCs, and a delicious undercurrent of black humour throughout. Unlike previous games, there is plenty of flavour-text and guidance when you attempt incorrect actions. Thoroughly enjoyable. Ends inconclusively, clearly not intended as the final entry in this series, so it's a shame there hasn't been another in five years.

This second sequel to Horror in the Darkness works better than the lacklustre Horror at Innsport: mainly due to the locale. An exotic tropical resort island is definitely more fun to wander around than a drab, dying industrial town. The biggest game of the series by far, so it's important to map and take notes diligently (it's very easy to miss exits). Takes its time to get going, with an initial off-brand Monkey Island flavour, but once the horror starts it soon ratchets up to Cannibal Holocaust levels before turning into a rip-roaring old-school adventure. Multiple endings too, depending on the choice of character background you make at the beginning.

The sequel to Horror in the Darkness is bigger and more ambitious: this time, there are actual NPCs scattered around the isolated island town you are exploring to find a missing girl, and significant plot events actually happen to you, rather than being related to you via scattered letters you find lying around. But bigger is not necessarily better: the implementation feels sparser, like the effort given to more locations, more objects and more puzzles has reduced the effort given to implementing unique responses for non-critical-path actions. Pacing, mood and atmosphere are also a slight step down. The first game wasn't particularly scary, but this one almost veers into comedy at times. Still worth playing if you enjoyed the original (and the (Spoiler - click to show)genocidal ending is... an interesting choice).

A very familiar slice of Lovecraftiana, exploring a secluded mansion to uncover the mystery of the residents who seemingly vanished. Anybody who has played The Lurking Horror or Theatre or Anchorhead knows the drill by now. But this is reaching out to an audience of smartphone users who maybe don't have that history, and it does very well in that regard. An intuitive button-based interface, a map and hint system, even background music complement a traditional (world-model based) parser-style text adventure (with no typing). Nicely paced: plot reveals come at regular intervals with each major puzzle solved, and there is a good forward momentum - I counted zero unfair puzzles. Android version is free but offers an IAP to "remove ads" - but I didn't see any ads so don't know what that's about? Pretty short but is followed by three sequels.

A simple Enchanter-like magic casting adventure on an empty desert island (or dessert island, as this is a place of gingerbread cottages, cream lakes and battenburg mountains). Uses a custom parser system that works well, and presents a nice map on the right on the screen (that fills as you explore) with rich text on the left. Provides a little world-building through letters and newspaper articles scattered around. If you're not Dutch/Flemish you'll need to look up what a "smoutebol" is. A lot of fun, unfortunately it lacks any online hints, and it's pretty damn hard to boot so I didn't get very far by myself (7/16 points). On the itch.io page you can find "Slacker Sam's guide to an easy B" - but it still only gets you up to 9/16 points.

I loved this. Like a Saturday morning kid's cartoon scored to the sound of lo-fi space-pop, CC's Road to Stardom is adorable, delightful, silly and disposable. Wander around a little spaceship vibing with your quirky buddies (including a youtuber pigeon), playing through little logic puzzles and word games. Nothing too taxing, just enough to keep you buzzing off the game's brilliant style and mood. Fab comic-book style pixel art graphics and a superb musical score accompany the fun: even a full song with vocals. It's part of "Cosmoose", a multi-media multi-format Gorillaz-like pop music project fronted by cartoon characters (I'm listening to Cosmoose's album Into the Cosmooverse as I write this, in fact - it rules!). CC's Road to Stardom is the 21st century answer to Tass Times in Tonetown.

Absolutely nails the objective of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam: to make an enjoyable easy game for text adventure first-timers. This would be the Day One exercise in Text Adventures 101 if such a thing existed. You're a troll in a world of fairy-tale mythological creatures, trying to raise a dragon (literally) by the book. The set-up could have been cloying and twee, but the author has lots of sly fun inverting expectations: the cyclops is friendly, the fairy is angry, the unicorn is unruly. The ASCII art images are pleasant (the troll's house looks like cross-stitched embroidery). It's a kids game at heart but still requires some thought and lateral thinking to get through, even for adults. Everything just works!

Straightforward vampire-hunting adventure: doesn't intend to surprise or subvert the traditional gothic horror formula, beyond some nods to the term "strigoi" and an attempt to ground it in traditional Romanian mythology. It's thoroughly implemented and the puzzles are well-designed. The only baffling choice is the arbitrary inventory limit, requiring lots of dropping and picking up stuff which gets annoying real fast. It could also have done with implementing "hand" and "finger" as nouns. It's an enhanced translation of an older Spanish game and it uses the PunyInform library, so some of its limitations are understandable. Worth a play.

Winner of the 2022 Text Adventure Literacy Jam, and it's easy to see why. Solid implementation, generally intuitive puzzles on a nice difficulty curve, a charming NPC (the fairy), and a surprisingly elaborate story about three gamedevs going inside their game. I preferred Barry Basic's previous adventure (Barry Basic and the Quick Escape) as unlike that one, Speed Daemon is extremely linear: solve a room's puzzle and the exit to the next room will open, repeat ad nauseum. A large chunk of screen estate is given to a map which is frankly unnecessary given the lack of free movement, I would have liked some contextual pictures in addition to the character portrait: especially as some of the descriptions were hard to visualize (the (Spoiler - click to show)tunnel/vent/bulb puzzle in particular). As a tutorial game it works great, lots of help available from NPCs and the in-built hint system (integrated into the story). Overall, it's a good time despite these annoyances, and despite a few bugs ((Spoiler - click to show)I broke the slider puzzle: somehow ended up with the same word on two rows).

Classic farce: a series of escalating mishaps caused by the protagonist, a dodgy insurance salesman (is there any other kind?), trying to fix his previous mishaps at the home of his prospective client, a a famous young baroness. Reminiscent of a Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers comedy, the game has a well-drawn player-character, fabulous environmental descriptions, and an excellent sense of comic timing. It's a shame I didn't get to see half of it, as annoyingly I was never able to progress beyond the (Spoiler - click to show)burning curtains. There are no in-built hints, nor any external ones. I look forward to revisiting when a walkthrough becomes available.

From the author of The Long Nap, written in Dialog, and The Lookout, written in Inform 7, comes The Box, written in Kreate. Mr. Polylingual! It's a demo game for the new language and does a good job at showing off that it has all the fundamentals for a solid parser and world model in place. There's nothing particularly taxing here: no conversations (the only NPC is a mouse), no ropes, no noun disambiguations, no complex sentences required. There is some burning, though it's only used once. It's a very straightforward, short escape-the-room game with entertaining puzzles and a tidy (but sluggish) web-GUI: click on a hyperlinked noun to "examine" it, which brings up some clickable relevant actions you can do with it, or just type at the prompt at usual. if you liked Fireproof Games' The Room, you'll certainly enjoy this.

Two minor bugs:
(Spoiler - click to show)
Sitting on top of it is an intricately carved wooden box. On the stone pedestal is a wooden box.
You set the panel on the window sill. It covers the window almost entirely, blocking out most of the moonlight. The panel is already on the sill.

A time-travel romp through multiple eras, modelled on Magnetic Scrolls games. And, like those games, the puzzles suffer from a degree of broken logic and inconsistency. It does have a useful hint system: be aware you can type "help" multiple times for more detailed hints. The (overly busy) UI presents a a multiple-choice interface, but also a text prompt, as well also clickable in-line hyperlinks and (overly big) images. Often, the command you need is not presented as a choice, so you will need to type at the text prompt at times. Story-wise, this is some wacky, absurd stuff, but well aware of it's own utter ridiculousness, and pretty fun as a result. There are more exclamation marks in this game than in every other Spring Thing entry put together! Contains plenty of hot chicks promising to "reward" the PC, like a porn game, but without any follow-through so it ends up closer to a very tame Leisure Suit Larry. A sequel is teased at the end: I think I'm on board.

This Pratchett-esque comic fantasy adventure has a narrative that I found kinda bland: it doesn't challenge or provoke in any way. The same could be said about the author's previous excellent 4x4 Galaxy and 4x4 Archipelagos, but those games being mechanics-driven RPGs meant the writing was far less important. This is a traditional text adventure, so the emphasises story and puzzles. I found myself skim-reading a lot of the long text-dump sequences to get to the game parts, which is where the cool stuff lies. Attach and detach your body parts (which then become playable characters), swap between them at will, use them as inventory items, there is a hell of a lot going on, but it successfully avoids overwhelming the player. There was only one puzzle (the candle holder) that could have done with a bit more in-game prompting (though external hints are supplied). UI feels a bit clumsy but the game is constrained enough that it doesn't become annoying.

Pay off your mob debt by training for, then competing in, an underground cyborg fight tournament. The training part lets you customise your stats, which then unlock different choices during the actual fights. Does a great job at making the fights feel player-driven, despite actually being carefully authored. I was gripped during those encounters as if they were the Rocky films' climactic battles. Your trainer is a brilliant character too. Yes, I pictured Burgess Meredith. The synth-wave neon cyberpunk look-and-feel is beginning to get tired in 2022 but story-wise this takes a hard left-turn away from typical genre tropes in the third act which certainly keeps things fresh.

A micro-twine about establishing a restaurant that serves insect-based food. Really funny, well-written and entertaining, and very educational! The kind of twine game you'll want to replay multiple times to read the results of the obviously silly choices.

A conversation in a cafe with an old flame. Made with Bitsy, so it has a neat Gameboy-ish aesthetic, pretty similar to Sakura Wars GB. There are only two meaningful decisions to make to steer the conversation, a choice from three options and a subsequent choice from two, so a single playthrough is very short, but it's well worth playing through to see all (3*2) combinations which together give a rounded picture of the two personalities and their relationship.

The World of Lone Wolf by Ian Page was a 4-book spin-off from Joe Dever's Lone Wolf gamebook series, featuring a new magic-focused character in a distant part of Magnamund. This mini-series shook up the formula quite a bit: Grey Star the Wizard is often accompanied by chatty and memorable sidekicks unlike the lonesome Lone Wolf, he was raised on an isolated island so is naive in the ways of the world, and not being a warrior means combat can be extremely difficult (even impossible at times) and to be avoided at all costs. You do have multiple cool magic tricks up your sleeve but they eat up willpower points which are hard to recover.

This Android adaptation is from the developer of the excellent Lone Wolf Saga: it naturally has the same high-quality UI and QoL features, and is again free.

Solve a missing person case with a ghost partner, like Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), who only you can see. Three scenes (an apartment, an abandoned mall and a construction site), each with a few rooms to explore and a couple of puzzles to solve (mainly lock & key, with some variation). Feels like a first-time effort, as the game is filled with pedantic parser issues. The lack of synonyms for nouns, and the lack of automatic implicit actions are the biggest problems. Pretty flat writing throughout: the scary bits need to be scarier, the funny bit need to be funnier, characters need to have a bit more personality - I only found the homeless biker memorable. It's solidly designed though, with no moon-logic puzzles, no time-wasting travel (complete the objective in one scene and you're instantly whisked to the next), and even a basic hint system.

A 1-bit styled super-low-res graphical adventure buit with Môsi and set in "Oniria World - the world of dreams", a popular shared setting used by many Spanish language indie gamedevs. Move your sprite, a newly born "nightmare", around 2D tile-based graphic screens, bumping into interesting objects/NPCs to get some descriptive text that may or may not progress the (somewhat opaque) story. Appropriately for a "world of dreams", logic is not a priority: events often feel arbitrary and the pseudo-philosophical musings are difficult to untangle (especially when they occasionally remain untranslated from Spanish). I saw two of the three endings, neither of them the optimum one, which would presumably require not becoming a killer - something surprisingly difficult to avoid! Perhaps that's the point - the sheer difficulty of living a life that does not harm others, both in the world of dreams and our own.

Starts off very promisingly, with a tense deer hunt, even if the game is literally telling you what to type at each prompt. Things get spooky as you track the deer's trail to an eerily abandoned farmhouse, where you learn the story of it's occupants. At this point it loses focus: suddenly, it's a collect-em-up where, without motivation, you're catching rabbits, trawling a pond - and that's as far as I could go, as I hit a game-breaking bug trying to use the meat scale. As compelling as much of this content was (shades of Edgar Allan Poe), the sluggish online Quest interpreter nevertheless made it a chore to play: use the offline interpreter if you're able.

Interactive adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, in which the titular three rogues find treasure then trouble. The 14th Century language has been modernised a fair bit to be understandable to 21st Century folk, but the central moral parable remains. Choices are mainly between sticking with the original text or diverging from it, with divergence usually leading to a swift bad ending. Except, there is a way to subvert the original ending and "win" (as Chaucer turns in his grave). Excellent monochrome woodcut illustrations decorate a well-presented and easy-to-play game, although a more ambitious effort could have included further interesting choices and more branching storylines. The game also tracks five stats at the top of the screen, but they don't seem to be used at all?

As in Firewatch, you've volunteered for Fire Tower duty, deep in the forest, far from civilization, and far from the personal tragedy that feeds your nightmares. Unlike Firewatch, you won't be doing much hiking, exploration and mystery-solving: in The Lookout the horror comes to you. Although very linear, this is an effectively told creepy tale, with a strong emphasis on atmospheric descriptions that provide a slow-burning escalation of visceral terror.

Struggling to see the Halloween connection with this EctoComp entry, beyond the real-life horror of post-Brexit Britain. The third in a series of Twine games that I have not yet played, Crumbs 3 explicitly talks about the care crisis, the petrol crisis, the supply crisis and the rampant inflation that has gripped the UK since Brexit (while the government desperately tries to blame it all on covid). As the owner of a food bank struggling to fill its shelves, you navigate three phone calls with your partner, an old friend, and your aging mother, before making an important choice about the future. Dialogue feels natural, the protagonist is a well-drawn character, and her troubles are relatable. Ends with a hint of hope.

Tiny sci-fi horror, with some of the tone of the films Sunshine and Event Horizon. Arriving close to your destination planet after a long-haul space journey, you notice that things may not have gone exactly as planned. Start cheerily, then things get grimmer and grimmer. I saw three of the four endings, all perfectly bleak.

The fourth in the Castle Balderstone horror anthology series is the first to mix Twine (for the framing story) with Inform 7 (for the stories being told). You can choose which order to play the stories, and the game even auto-saves! This time round, stories are being told in different rooms around the castle, so the Twine sections provide some back-story and characterisation via conversations with your host as you travel between them. The castle map serves as the main menu, from where you can select your chosen story.

- Explore a shipwreck with basic Metroidvania-style gameplay, revisiting previous areas with new-found abilities. Well-judged difficulty, lots of surprises.
- Be a space bounty-hunter, tracking down your target over multiple worlds. Really stylish, really atmospheric, really cool.
- Imagine if those pastoral/rural life sims (like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley etc) were actually folk-horror? Plays almost like a turn-based business-sim (and keeps a score, if you want to replay).
- Look for your missing boss in a lake town. The highlight, a "HUUUUGE" game, that has got everything: a big map, lots of fun characters, a complex (and really thoroughly implemented) magic system, lots of puzzles (some with multiple solutions?). This one alone could probably win the XYZZY Best Game of the Year Award by itself.

And that's still not all! There's more, as Veeder begins playing with the medium (both mediums?) with one further spooky story to wrap things up. Must-play stuff from top to bottom. A sensational effort.

Pay-what-you-want text adventure that runs in a browser and includes images, video and music. An amazing opening puzzle: build a world that can sustain life and evolve it into an intelligent space-faring civilization. Requires understanding and controlling dozens of variables to get it right. Daunting at first: you're basically given a reference book and told to have at it. But do the research, plan carefully, take notes, and it's all very rewarding when everything falls into place. Things get more traditional after that: explore a massive multi-level space station, get involved in political intrigue, rescue prisoners, build robots, a little sabotage...

It's easy to bounce off the crazy amounts of alien-sounding people, places and concepts, the high difficulty (no in-built hints and no walkthrough), the complex map (2/3 of rooms are purely decorative), but it's worth persisting for the thoroughly implemented world, the challenging but fair plot-integrated puzzles, and the twisting, turning story in the grand tradition of "golden age" sci-fi.

A beautiful audio-visual experience, with a haunting piano tune accompanying fantastic monochrome woodcut-style illustrations (some even animated). I played the "emotional" story (there are three to choose from), in which you cook a recipe in anticipation of your sibling's visit to your log cabin, dealing with the loss of a loved one in fragments through the process. Snowhaven builds a superb wilderness atmosphere while providing a thoughtful study of the player-character. It's let down by at least one bug that blocks progress: it's impossible to get the carrots from the storage locker, and typing HELP tells you that you can use the HINT command, but doing so gives you "This game doesn't use 'hints'". Presumably there is a way to catch the meat for the stew but I couldn't find any bait, or any clues about how to acquire the bait? I look forward to returning to this after the promised "major updates".

A standard old-school text-based RPG where you run through a dungeon, fighting or evading monsters, until your HP falls perilously low, then you go home to heal and use the gold you looted to upgrade your equipment, then back into the dungeon to do it all again. But, like all Arthur DiBianca games, there is a devious spin on proceedings: in this case, a set of overlapping, escalating textual "puzzles" that requires careful reading of the location and monster descriptions to optimise each run. The game is thoroughly addictive: I had two full pages scrawled with notes, even without the extended post-game challenges. There is some heavy randomisation that makes things unnecessarily grindy at times, but the humour (especially the easy-to-miss bestiary entries) will keep you going.

A short "magical-realist" text adventure using the Adventuron engine: navigate the simple puzzles in the woods to get to the train on time. A very smooth, frictionless experience to play through, aided by soothing background music and the game's unique selling point: real photographs instead of drawn illustrations. A lot of the lore remains a mystery: who you are, what you're running from, and where you intend to go, are left to the player's imagination. I scored 23, but the game neglects to tell you what that's out of, so it's unclear if I saw everything.

The least ambitious game I've encountered so far in PunyJam (the competition for Inform games using the slimmed-down PunyInform library)... but also the funniest. Closet of Mystery tickled my funnybone successfully at least twice. Which is good going for a game I completed in 16 turns (scoring a perfect 0 out 0 in the process). Play it.

You're a genie in a bottle, but thankfully nobody needs to "rub you the right way". You have the power to SWAP any object in the game world with any other (providing it has similar properties). A door is locked? SWAP it with a different, open door you've seen somewhere else and just walk through. A really clever mechanic used in multiple crafty and surprising ways. Three new custom verbs, a karma system, puzzles with multiple solutions, and multiple endings, NPCs you can converse with, all crammed into a mere seven rooms. The game is an entry in "PunyJam", a competition for games using the alternate, cut-down Inform library suitable for 8-bit computers. I honestly didn't notice anything missing from the regular Inform libraries while playing, so that's a big success for both the library and the game's shrewd use of it.

Like another PunyJam entry Arthur's Day Out, Pub Adventure is very bare-bones. Lots of nouns that are described but cannot be interacted with and the occasional guess-the-verb difficulty. Nothing game-blocking though, and the story, about the ghost of a pub that wants you to make its favourite cocktail, has a good sense of its own absurdity while rarely becoming frustrating.

An intriguing demo that ends just as it's getting started. The player-character is a fascinating enigma: you "crackle into existence" in a pub closet, covered in bandages: NPCs are familiar with you, as if you've worked with them before, but who you are and what you do are only partially revealed. In contrast to the player-character's mysterious supernatural nature, puzzles are mundane: fix a leaking pipe, retrieve something stuck in a tree, unlock a gate. Just as you're about to flex your powers, the game ends. Successfully does the job of an intro scene: I want to see more!

A puzzle-filled pirate-themed adventure: the local publican's daughter has been kidnapped by nasty pirates. To rescue her, you'll need to uncover the mystery of their stolen treasure. Lots of intricate details implemented here: chatty NPCs who respond to lots of conversation topics, a pirate ship that requires nautical directions to navigate, a very cool imprisonment-and-escape sequence. Everything exudes an appropriate 1700s-era flavour. Puzzles aren't easy: I couldn't get past the crate puzzle in the warehouse, which sadly brought an abrupt end to the fun.

The titular Arthur is none other than Arthur Dent, complete with gown and analgesic pills, in what seems to be a pastiche of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Does a good job of emulating the light, breezy writing style of the Adams/Meretzky game, despite the implementation being very bare-bones. I struggled to solve many of the puzzles presented here, as there too few clues to help you. I gave up at 90/200 points, stymied by an impossible light source puzzle, an impassable doctor's office door, and an uncrackable safe.

You're a hungry groundhog looking for things to eat in a garden. This is Inform, not Adventuron, so the visual presentation is a bit different than other games in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam: (nicely drawn) pictures show up in-line rather than having their own window, for instance. It plays a little like a junior Eat Me: score a point for each thing you take a bite of (although it never acknowledges when your score goes up?): there are eight things to eat, but you can finish the game just by bee-lining straight to the blue lettuce if you want. The game seems to be targeting the youngest age-range of all the games in the competition, with all the anthropomorphic flora and fauna, hence the lack of any tricky challenges. Not sure how horticulturally accurate all these plants are, but perfectly cromulent entertainment all the same.

The most ambitious game I've encountered so far in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, Barry Basic and the Quick Escape features 3 playable characters that you can switch between at will: co-ordinating their actions and making use of their individual skills is crucial to success. The titular Barry Basic has got himself stuck in a guarded building, and he needs his two friends to help get him out so they don't miss their tea-time. While Dungeon of Antur had fun RPG combat, and Sentient Beings had its cool day/night cycle, Barry Basic goes furthest in integrating it's central mechanic with almost every aspect of the game, teaching the value of teamwork while delivering a really fun and highly-polished experience. There are even achievements: I finished the game with just over half of them.

A very traditional entry in the well-trodden "explore your eccentric relative's mansion" genre. The Manor on top of the Hill (I feel like the "t" of "top" should have been capitalized there) has no graphics unfortunately, but makes up for it with a lot of characterful locations, evoked succinctly in their short descriptions. Some lock-and-key puzzles, a dark room that needs to be lit up, a code to be cracked, and an inventory puzzle or two give text adventure beginners a nice, quick, friction-less tour of the standard puzzle types. The choice of font and colour scheme feels very Commodore 64. Good stuff.

An entry in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, a competition for entry-level parser games for kids. Reflections goes out of its way to hold a first-timers hand: simple, bold and colourful images for each location, short MIDI-musical ditties at appropriate moments, a helpful tutorial mode, and a map on-screen at all times (alongside the competition-mandated two word parser).

You're a kid wandering around the house and the back-garden looking for the titular reflections of yourself. A light sprinkling of magical realism adds talking cats and magic mirrors to the mix. Puzzles are suitably basic: mix a recipe, find out a dog's name, distract a rat, play with coloured crystals. All well-clued in the environment if you explore thoroughly.

Would feel perfectly at home on a 1983 primary school's BBC microcomputer, alongside Granny's Garden and Devil's Causeway.

A really pleasant, relaxing experience. Soothing background music, a calming yellow and blue colour palette, a seaside ambience that is just what the doctor ordered coming out of this season's "long cold lonely winter". You're a kid having a day out on the beach, looking for five treasures to complete your sandcastle. The map is a 9x9 grid, impossible to get lost, and the puzzles are really easy and frustration-free. I would say the target age is two years below that of the equally excellent Reflections from this Text Adventure Literacy Jam competition. But whatever age you are, fire this up for a meditative ten minute break in the sand and sea.