Reviews by bkirwi
Spring Thing 2022
View this member's profile1-2 of 2
Very funny and not too erotic, April 16, 2022First off: while the game description does contain the word "erotic", it's not actually particularly explicit or anything; while the protagonist certainly has a vivid and prurient imagination, nothing is spelled out in uncomfortable detail, and the humour is more in the bashfulness of the character than the raunchiness of the jokes.
This is a short and quite funny game. One gets points for poking around the room and unlocking amusing little bits of text, or making progress through a rube-goldbergian comedy of errors. Aside from some lingering default messages, the protagonist's voice suffuses the game, keeping things appropriately humorous and light throughout; there was some occasional awkwardness in the language, but this didn't feel out of place given the general awkwardness of the protagonist.
Like other reviewers, I found the final ending a little abrupt. It comes by surprise; doesn't clearly connect to anything the protagonist was up to, and feels more like a puzzle to be solved than a satisfying conclusion to the story. (And since there's no walkthrough from the author, I'm still not certain of this!) In any case, playing around and trying to ramp up your score seems to be enough to get you the three distinct endings mentioned in the blurb, and is certainly a nice way to spend the 15-30 minutes you're likely to need to get there.
A clever and charming puzzler in Twine, April 14, 2022Narratively, this is a lighthearted and comic fantasy story; mechanically, it's an interesting mix choice-based game with RPG-style elements and a world that wouldn't feel out of place in old-school Infocom.
The main characters are quite likeable, and the imagery is often strong. (Having one character riding around in another's empty eye socket is an unusual and visceral mental picture.) It's written in the third-person past tense, which I found a little hard to get used to, though in the end I do think it works for a game with this sort of storybook feel to it.
The world model is unusually well developed for a Twine game, as richly modeled as many parser fictions. The puzzles are also pretty old school - finding, using, and combining objects, exploring underground passages - and well put together. The implementation is (characteristically for the author) very solid and thorough.
One of the more unusual features of the game allows switching between multiple characters or detaching body parts and letting them move around independently. This is narratively interesting - you get multiple perspectives on parts of your environment, for example - and it sets up some unusual puzzles.
The interface is also well implemented, but sometimes a bit tedious. For example, what might in a parser game be `put arm on table` would involve several clicks: list parts, detach arm, pick up arm, open inventory, select arm, use arm, select table. Streamlining these sorts of manipulations might have kept the momentum up at that critical moment when the player's figured out a puzzle and is putting the solution into action. The game also preserves some rather unloved aspects of classic parser games, like an inventory limit and a maze, though I found to be only minor trouble.
1-2 of 2