Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I feel like I should have a clever and witty when reviewing a game like this, where you're a talking rock who just sits there and talks to people in a forest as they go by. Alas, I don't. Alas, I do not, so I will go with the mechanics. They are straightforward enough, and the game's engaging that you never really worry about how a rock can talk in the first place, or whether you, if given a choice, would be able to walk or talk, but not both. Based on this effort, though, I'd play a game by this author that featured a mute rock-monster running about a forest.

You first have to wait for random people to come by. The main hub choice has this, as well as seven dark "you cannot call this character" links. These links become clickable once you hit it off with people who stop by. You can even be a bit of a jerk, too, saying "Sounds pretty boring, not gonna lie." As someone who loathes "not gonna lie," because it implies the speaker lies a lot, I found this well-used. (You get a chance to apologize afterwards. The game lives up to its "heartwarming" promise on the blurb.)

Whom you see is all pretty random, though you start off with a miner who doesn't have much to say. Interacting (in)correctly with them offers up the possibility of two of twenty endings, with basic actions. The ending list is cute. You can ask for hints, and I went to them early, even though I was enjoying the story. The people's lives intertwine if you make certain choices, though there are also some fun interludes. There's a king who asks you to kneel, but you're a rock. There's a sentient stump, too, and a running gag about cats and dogs that worked for me.

At least half of the endings are pretty straightforward or can be stumbled onto by accident or by clicking through sensibly. There's a bard who forgot a song they composed, but someone else remembers the words even though they didn't want to. Two characters have a crush on one character, who has a crush back on one of them. A circus ringleader, and the circus freak she fired, stop by, too. There's a sad kid who calls you "Rockinator" once you befriend him, and a lazy cobbler, too. Bringing them together correctly or incorrectly gets you different endings.

As does failing and disappointing them. Some of these endings are very funny, but I spun out on the hints after fifteen or so. You see, some conversations block certain endings, so you have to restart the game. This allows for interesting strategy, although it would be nice to have something in the hints saying a certain ending was not achievable. or the option to list it as such.They all make sense on their own. For instance, in the love triangle, if A and B are together, the game rejects you trying to tell C "tell A about your crush," unless you click RESTART, which means you need to find everyone again. So it sort of forces you to know and not know that A and B would be happy together. Schrodinger's Rock. And it's emotionally hard to do this after helping other people figure things out.

(This criticism may not apply to future versions. The author mentioned in the subforum they wanted to fix this.) Having to restart to wipe all the links to call people is more than an inconvenience. You have to wait for them to come by again. You'll face the miner, whom you can't do much with, dropping by a lot. There will always be one person straggling, due to coupon problem-like randomness. Hopefully you won't need them if you replay through, though from my own experience, ignoring certain people walking by didn't stop them from dropping by soon after (If it does, author, let me know! But it might help soften any bad RNG.) It would be nice for the reader to have the option to zone people out if you were totally done with them, but that's nontrivial coding.

So there is a small damper for completionists on the quick fun you can just enjoy, since the characters you meet are likeable. Especially since there is no direct indication you (likely) need to restart to get all endings. But that's my biggest complaint. Also the endings sprawl a bit, so non-spoiler guidance might be nice. But it's tricky. Still, it's something you'll want to do, because the fuzzy text at the bottom made me REALLY want to see who the last guest was. And when I look back on my time as a rock, it's much easier to focus on that. I wound up poking through longer than I expected after getting the Big Good Great Ending. And I sort of missed the people I'd encountered, even the miner who showed up too much.

I miss Taleslinger's old New Year's Day SpeedIF comps, so it's glad to see something filling the void after a few years absence, and I sort of am sad I didn't make it to ClubFloyd, since Snowkemon more than fills that void. And I think this game does more than that. Now I'm not a big Pokemon fan, and in fact I even got a lot lost with the references in Pogoman Go, but here we have a nice tiny little game where it's pretty clear what you're supposed to do, and it uses a parser nicely, with a few standard verbs to break up too much of a "dry goods" feel. The items and NPCs are delightfully nonsensical, yet with a bit of thought, it's pretty clear who gets what item.

The NPCs are all non-canonical Pokemons that haven't grown yet. You can find an item which helps. They are scattered around the map, though some only appear once you've solved other puzzles. There's also scenery to SEARCH or do other things with, which lets you find a present. Then you can pretty much brute force your way around the game map, which is a symmetrical snowflake with passages 1 and 2 squares out of each of the 8 main directions from the center, where you start. (The inner ring is also connected, so there's a lot less backtracking.) If my words muddle you, just look at the handy cover art, which will not. It's seful and attractiive!

The author mentions in the CREDITS that they really aren't well equated with pokémon, and neither am I, but they still give what's important, and maybe if they were more acquainted, they might not have gone with the NPC puns. There are references to a lot of other myths or stories, some Christmas and some not (a schneezer becomes an Ebenschneezer, for instance.) So it's one of those fun holiday game experiences where you can't lose. Well, you can, but you have to try and invoke a Christmas movie, and I won't say more other than the joke's been done before and I don't care and neither will you. It's well placed.

Snowkemon is well laid out and I can see myself replaying it to get through faster--the organized map makes it easier to bounce around wondering whom to give what. It's a really nice bit of creativity. I got spun around twice trying to go too fast: once when I didn't interact with some scenery, and again at the end where I tried too hard to focus on the chair in the final room. I guess that's one problem with dry goods games, where if the author goes for a little variety to break up monotony, people like me who charge through will hit a wall a bit. We completely ignore the nice scenery the author put into it. And we deserve the slight inconvenience.

Given that it's a SpeedIF, it doesn't have a lot of idiot-proofing amenities, but I think if the author chose, there'd be a lot of cool things they could try to make the whole affair even slicker. The big one would be blocking off places you were done with, or maybe using green and red colored text for places that were done, or for snowkemon games. But this is the usual "make it even better" quibble I have when something works nicely, the sort I want to do with my own SpeedIFs but it gets lost in the shuffle.

I admit I cringe at hearing a work is (yet another) retelling of a beloved or important classic in Twine or Inform. There've been a few adaptations of poems into hypertextual form, and some work quite well, my favorite being one written in Squiffy that the author had taken down. They do feel workmanlike or more like "hey, I like this too." Which is hardly a crime, but, well, I found myself saying, what about an author's other works that might fit the medium better? Here I like that the author has taken a Kafka story other than the Metamorphosis and made it fit well.

Text adventures aren't the only medium where this can be done--on Twitter (I'll always call it that) there's an account called SportsButMakeItArt, which features art we may not know and compares it to a screenshot from a sporting event. It's wonderful and cool and I learn a lot from it. They avoid popular works. It teaches us without any "OK, time to learn, kids." It's one of the few reasons I go back to Twitter. (Another big one is Rep. Jack Kimble. IYKYK.) So I like that TitV shows us something new beyond just a new form of presentation.

And Kafka seems like a good author to write a text adventure about, or at least a simple one, and the story is chosen well. The main characters wind up feeling like that had no agency in the end. They're pushed along by people smarter or at least more cunning than them. And they're rejected without satisfactory explanation. There seems to be so much possibility in the parser, but often there isn't really.

This is the case here, too, and I missed the foreshadowing in "just get things done" mode. TiTV is a relatively sparse twelve rooms with the promise of more, but you're rejected from certain passages. That's too private right now, etc. At the start, you are walking east, to a town, but you're a bit tired and there's that village to the north you've never seen before. You stay for the night. It's free, a village resident says. You return a dog to a woman, feeling as though it's your fault it got lost, or at the very least that you made so much noise returning it. In the process you find a guest room you weren't offered. You wonder why, and the man you met explains: the innkeeper must trust you to give you that room. You want that room. You just need to do a few simple chores. People seemed friendly. It reminded me of a picture at the end of Amerika, where Karl Rossman meets up with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, all smiling line-drawn people that would be out of place in pretty much any other Kafka story. I was optimistic!

The first chore is straightforward, but the second is a bit odd. This is where we get into spoiler territory: you have a realization. The realization reminded me of times people had left me fit in if I did something for them. I'd fit in just fine, sure. But maybe I never got a call back. Or maybe they had private conversations among themselves where I wasn't allowed. We all have had those episodes. But this is something more: something with a little arm-twist, where if you don't know how to push back and call things out for what they are, you'll get stuck. Throughout the game there's a sense you feel you're imposing. The innkeepers say you talk too much. The kids you sleep with in the attic are upset you woke them. And so on. You get things for free, well, monetarily.

And yet, it's nice how one task helps you with another, right? There's also a suspicion that the foreman made it so you had to do the tasks in an awkward order, and this wasn't adventure game logic. Then the reveal at the end. I felt it was unfair at first, well, to the reader. But I had another look. The next time, things clicked more, that it was fair, and it reminded me of stupid hazing rituals or people who just want to keep you busy on something other than your own thoughts. I was reminded of the Saved by the Bell episode where Zack was still in junior high, and he went through an initiation, only to find the real initiation was getting kids to pretend to an eighth-grader that he'd be accepted. This isn't quite so personal, and it has no crowd going "aww" in the background. But it reminded me of people who acted like they had more authority than they did, and how I believed them, because surely someone else wold've set them straight? (In some cases, these people were new and I was not.)

On replaying, I wrote down memories of some people who felt that way, who made me jump through hoops. Not any farmwork or anything. But I remember people telling me a lie and saying I had to believe it, and I felt uneasy, and maybe sometimes I saw most of the proof they were lying but I couldn't go along with it. And I went along with it here, a few times, but with a different purpose each time, feeling wiser each time through.

The ending is less fatalistic than The Metamorphosis or The Trial, so there's that. I found it easy enough to work through. I do remember people in high school saying The Metamorphosis was some fearsome thing (they were in Advanced Placement English, I was not,) then being shocked at how short it was, on reading it in an introductory college writing course. I remember hearing people use and over-use "Kafkaesque." And the huge section of literary criticism of Kafka in the library. Kafka was a Big Name. Then I buckled down and read him and felt I still missed the point. Perhaps I still do, and this is a minor work of his for a very good reason. But it made me feel like I could pull my bootstraps up, and I'll remember it, after playing Let Me Play! earlier today. It was a different look at free will and what the player could do. The characters sort of float about as you try to find your way. I guess I fell prey to the blind obedience the main character had, just wanting to get through things and not paying attention. Sometimes we have to be that way. And it's better to be caught like this in a text adventure than real life.

One of the dangers of waiting until the last day of a comp to judge and create everything is, there may be one entry that sticks with you and you want to think over, before you move on to the next one. Which is usually a good thing, but if you've procrastinated, well, you'll have to put that off. That's the story of me and I Got You at EctoComp 2025.

I looked at the cover art a few times and wondered what "I Got You" meant. It's a flexible phrase. I figured it might be a play on the Sonny and Cher song, or even a man showing off a woman and his trophy wife. The second of these of course is very bad, and it's been covered in other ways, but the initial implication of "I got you" is "I will have advice for everything, and if you slip up I will help you." That's your wingman, Tom. But as the story goes on, it's revealed to be more about "Ha, I GOT you," as in Tom catches you making a dumb mistake and goes all "what were you thinking." Also, in some branches, Tom has you to listen to him, and you can't push him away ("I got you cornered.")

It starts as a relatively straightforward advice for a date. I got you, says Tom. In this case, it clearly means, I have your back. I'll pick you up if you slip and fall. It may mean other things later. He hints what to say, and you don't need a lot of reading comprehension to figure it out. His advice is very general -- one funny bit, you pick the right ice breaker but he is quiet on the follow up, where the wrong answer makes you look very foolish indeed. And yet the wrong choice could potentially be spun at least as well as the right one.

He tells you how to say the right things to get a woman to be interested in you. Most of this is pretty basic advice, like don't be a jerk, or don't talk about boring stuff, or don't be too melodramatic or unenthusiastic. These aren't the deal breakers, though. There's only one question that matters, and because it is unusual and potentially unexpected, I won't spoil it here. But you have a choice on with or not to sympathize.

Tom wasn't prepared for this, or at least, he wasn't prepared to give positive advice. Because boy oh boy, if you do the wrong thing, he gives you quite the gish gallop full of whataboutism and other conversational tricks. Usually I'm opposed to huge walls of text and having to sift through them, but here, it's appropriate, sort of how someone gives you quick useless advice to start, and you can pass it off as keeping it simple early on, until you realize there's not too much depth. But once you slip up taking their advice, even if their advice was self-contradictory or bad, boy howdy do you hear it. We've all had that sort of person, whether it be for romantic advice or otherwise.

And that's why this piece worked for me, because it was ostensibly about going on a date and impressing a girl you like, but on the other hand, it brought back much more low-key and platonic memories for me, of someone being a slightly unwanted guru that I listened to at first out of politeness. I had my share of other males in high school who would tell me about how to talk to chicks (yes, not girls or women,) and their advice wasn't particularly helpful. I didn't have the guts to ask them why they didn't follow it, or if they did, why it didn't work for them.

In essence, they saw me as a captive audience. At least they weren't advocating anything illegal! There were varying degrees of intent. For instance, when I was thirteen, some friends told me I could do better than a certain girl that I sometimes walked home with. They had advice on how to talk to girls. It was wrong, because they were thirteen, but as we get older, there's less excuse for this sort of thing.

So how Tom turns against you is really the main thrust of this piece to me, which made it not just about romance, or whatever. It's about having someone captive, willing to listen to you, sort of like a Walter Mitty fantasy but trying to impress someone who might be beneath you, as opposed to Walter Mitty testifying against himself in the courtroom. Tom has a captive audience, and it's not just that they want to listen, but he wants them to be sure he is giving them information they couldn't get anywhere else.

And it's not just about Talking To Girls. I've certainly had my share of people told me I should be more social, but the problem is, a lot of them told me that I needed to put myself in social situations they would enjoy and I wouldn't. This was hard to articulate, and I didn't really have any proof it was the case, but fortunately I built that up over the years. I've found where I worked best. It's rewarding. Some of my "helpers" would find it weird. Tough luck for them. I'm glad I forgot some of their names. So Tom helped me take a look back at the sort of person whose advice ostensibly opens you up to new things, but all the same, it bends you away from new things you might want to and not Tom. It reminded me of people who talked me out of connecting with, well, other people I'd be a better friendship fit for. Whether or not they meant to.

Twine games are rich ground for discussing guilt trips, but I think I Got You covers new ground, because Tom genuinely is giving you a lot of advice. It's just very shallow or trivially true, or the opposite is quite silly. There's the feeling that even if you connect on a deeper level with your date, you'd owe it to Tom anyway, even though he's completely useless on that front. So "I got you" can mean a few other things: I got you all this help and this is what you do with it. Or "We're having an argument here, even if you didn't know it, and I got you." The textwall has a lot of rhetorical tricks I recognize from studying them, and in one case Tom pulls the "some people have it worse than you" card. When I sincerely got that Tom actually cares about these other people one bit. But that's how whataboutism or fast-paced argument works. In this case, as I thought through my past and the "advisors" I wasn't able to shake, I could hear Tom telling me, oh, so what if you got gaybaited in high school, why let it drag you down? You were never punched for it. Or nobody said a slur when punching you. Or they laughed and said "just joking." Or nobody waited at your house. People wind up in the hospital or dead. So don't feel too upset about a little gay baiting. (This may seem like a tangent, and it's a potential spoiler if you really want to dig into it, but ... just play. It's quicker.)

With Naked Bombs in IFComp, that makes two efforts in a row by this author that I really was able to relate to, even on the mundane level, one that looks into very G-rated needs we all have and should fulfill. Yet the setting is the sort that younger me would've been told "you're too young for that." Of course we are never too young or too (favorite adjective here) to want to belong or to share and explore ourselves and find the best people to do so with.

A title like this is meant to be catchy and a bit gonzo, and, well, it may be the best GrueScript game I've played that isn't by Robin Johnson, who created it. Not that I'm big on rating stuff, but t's pretty clear the author knew what they were doing as the writing is relatively clear and funny, with the usual ways to die that should make you laugh, and it's pretty clear what roughly to do without being duh-obvious.

The main mystery is that you have a television who doesn't like you. It just simply wants you to plug the cable in, so you can get cable channels, but that kills you. Big problem. Guess it's not just the cable fees that are brutal! To make matters worse, your girlfriend has disappeared. You want to rescue her, but you've hit some hard times lately.

The big hitch is, you have to negotiate with other machines, like a vacuum cleaner and a microwave and other things, first just to get out of your apartment and then to navigate Amanda's. The machines have their own personalities and aren't completely cooperative at first. Your vacuum needs a vacuum bag before it steps aside and takes an item of yours. Amanda's microwave needs to be cleaned. (Both of yours complain about the icky things you put in them.) Amanda's appliances are generally suspicious of you, and the telephone which misses her talking to her friends because she is calling you a lot is particularly demanding. You need to make up for what you've taken, so to speak.

What with your television able to kill you on the first move of the game when you plug the cable in, and the game title, well, it's no surprise that Amanda's disappearance/avoidance has to do with a hostile television of her own. Your apartment and hers are really quite different, but neither is terribly big, and while they have a lot of amusing squalor, there isn't a lot of already-done My Lousy Apartment stuff. The puzzles are also lampshaded, like the utility pole outside her apartment you can't climb, and having to fiddle with your TV in your apartment nicely foreshadows what you need to do with Amanda's. And since GrueScript directs you to the verbs you need, there isn't a whole lot of unnecessary fiddling, and the clicking through isn't particularly tedious. So it's well paced, and I found the climax dramatic and still pretty funny.

This was a really good entry, worthy of its long name, not one of those where it just posted on a long crazy name that makes you laugh for a few seconds and hoped it would coast on jokes you heard before. it also effectively uses the device of, well, people think you're crazy because you talk to machines, but actually you're not, without going overboard or making you yourself look or feel like an idiot. On finishing, I sort of missed the machines I had conversation with, as well as the ways the author asked, hey, how would machines they feel about their roules in a human's life? About being used too much or little? It's wise and clever and gives good laughs.

I missed the author's entries in IFComp because they felt like the sort of thing I wouldn't want to judge at the moment. On the strength of BWW, I'm quite motivated to go back and give them a look. (I planned to look at everything in the top twenty.) In BWW, you are a ghost who haunts a boarding house until someone finds your secret. This year, the guests are Lou and Amelia, and perhaps they'll be the ones to uncover your secret.

So why do you need a human to help? Because you're a ghost and can't really grab anything. You can only blow the wind, and then only on Halloween. It's 8:30 PM, so you have three and a half hours, or you would, if Lou and Amelia didn't go to bed before ten. There's a small keepsake hidden in a secret room, and it holds a secret, but you can't open it. So you're reduced to making stuff fall over or making a clock chime. Each thing gets different reactions from the humans. You need to lead them to certain rooms, too, before critical actions.

It's not a very huge house, but it doesn't need to be, and while I'd play a bigger version, I enjoyed not having to do a whole ton of things. Manipulating The Lodgers is not too hard, and it's pretty clear what works and doesn't. There's no time, but rather, them seeing they're a bit tired and then going to bed, and then you miss your chance on Halloween. To finally break the loop. There are a few things to do in order, which I don't want to spoil, and since it's not a very big game, you won't lose much if you run out of time. In fact, the ending where you lose makes the winning ending feel more satisfying once you get it right. But the story makes a lot of sense either way. I missed the best ending the first time through, got it the second, and then revisited a location outside the house with my third. (I was more confident where to go, in what order. The right ending fully validates the title, but seeing everywhere clinches things.)

So it's a really good use of choice script, which may seem a bit hard with the 4-hour time limits, but it doesn't worry about stuff like player stats, which would muddy up the story here.

This isn't the first story of investigating your death or manipulating people who are still alive, but it reminded me of Caelyn Sandel's Light My Way Home. They are similar length, but LMWH is a parser game. In that, you're incorporeal being that acts on machines, not people. So it's really cool to see how these two take a basic premise in very different directions and do so very well.

Oz the Great and Terrible (OGT) is a nice cute bitsy game if you don't read the text, and it's a funny subversive one if you do. The plot loosely follows The Wizard of Oz. You drop from the sky and find the Wicked Witch of the West buried under a house. As in the book and movie. The munchkins are oppressed, too, by the Wizard of Oz. Your goal is to find your dog Toto whom you lost.

I counted ten rooms on the main path, with ten off to the side. This didn't include the informational start and end rooms. So it's a pretty good size, with no risk of losing your way. Your friend the Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Man make an appearance, too, but it's in different circumstances, and it's not quite the companion story of the book. You need to do something for each of them before you can pass by. Once you do, the wizard beyond the emerald gates will give you your dog back.

Along the way are munchkins. A lot of munchkins. They relate to you what the wizard is doing, or what sort of animals are attacking them. There's almost a weird truce and balance between the wizards damage and the animals. And there are funny terrible scenes where you see a munchkin lying on its side in a field, and you find out why, or there is a small camping area where they are scared to make a fire. There's a cemetery, too, near the start. I almost missed it, but I'm glad I didn't when I tracked back to make sure I wasn't misssing something. Some of the scary bits are laid out clearly, but some imply certain things, and coming to that realization hits effectively. There's a bit of humor, too, especially when you try to take more brains than you need to in one place.

The graphics are a bit different than the usual bitsy game, which usually have wide open areas for when you can move to the next screen. Here, you're following the yellow brick road, as in the book, so you learn to follow paths and not open areas. The start is purplish, and the ending is green. (The empty spaces are black, naturally. Desolation and all that.) The color shifts help compartmentalize things into beginning, middle, and end. OGT also uses flashing rainbow text for dialogue, which was probably intended to be small neat cute harmless fun, but it adds a bit of spookiness here.

I'm generally a bit leery of remakes of classic literature, as I'm worried the author may just be relying too much on the original thing. Here, it's a really clever and fun take. I got a bit confused as to what to do in the end, as I think I needed to take the brains twice at the beginning and maybe visit all the rooms, so that was a bit confusing. But I would gladly play it again to figure out the details. It's funny and attractively presented.

Well, hey, how about this! A twine game that plays and feels like one of the very old Scott Adams text adventures. It has very terse prose, generic room names and items, and really a bit of charm from trying not to do too much. You know what to do, and you know there will be item swapping, but somehow an actual story gloms on to the fetch quest along the way, much to the dismay of purists who might demand heaps of treasure collection or killing an obvious big baddie.

It's hardly perfect. In fact, there are some clear bugs. I found a ladder near the end and knew where to use it, but on the way I actually got the "real end." (The bad ends consist of attacking NPCs who might help you, or attacking bad ones unarmed.) Inventory is rickety, too. You have a left hand, right hand, and a pocket, and it's pretty clear how items are sorted. Right hand for weapons, left hand for accessories like a salt shaker, and your pocket for valuables like invitations and keys. Your pockets are bottomless, which is a relief given how if you take item A in room B then item C in room D, item A seems to disappear. It actually goes back to room B, so it's not a fatal bug, but it gives a mysticism I don't think the game wanted. However, since the world map isn't very big, and it's pretty clear to see where and how to use, say, the fishing pole, this is forgivable. There are also statues to pray to to reset an area, but it doesn't seem like you can make the game unwinnable.

It has a sense of humor, too, as you wind up attacking a frozen slime to start, but later on there's some poetry and a love story. There's a white whale, too, not really a ripoff of Melville. You even have a doll you need to bring to life, which foreshadows other things. This contrasts with more pedestrian events like "guards tell you you can't cross the river without an invitation," then "you can't enter the castle without a gift," and then there is an elevator that needs a three-digit code.

But even when I got things right, the narrative provided clues to say, oh, hey, you kind of missed this. This sort of thing put Dead Sea a few notches above your standard fetch quest without any obvious bugs.

"It didn't try to do too much" sometimes feels like faint praise, but here, it felt about the right length, and it was ambitious enough. It felt like maybe the author had to downscope a bigger story they wanted to tell due to time constraints, but if they did so, they did it well. And I'd be interested in the bigger one later.

Costumes and Candy is about what you'd expect, given the title and the competition it's in. And it really hits the mark for me, with a balance of adult wisdom and nostalgia. It's got several different mini games beneath the strategy of getting to all the houses in the neighborhood and maximizing your candy to defeat Shawn, the rich bully with a much more expensive costume than yours. Which you like, of course. But bullies are bullies, and this sort of thing is maddening when you're young.

There's a lot of flavor text as you go walking around. You have a choice between saying TRICK OR TREAT or, well, being a bit rude -- or in some cases, asking adults what's up. This reminded me of how I was told to behave, and in this case, there's obvious incentive to (adults don't like jerk kids,) so it's not even close to a perfect moral lesson. But I certainly remember thinking "I'll get what I want if polite, Halloween or no." It was good not to have to worry about ethical nuance. Simpler times!

There are also fun little dialogues as you walk between houses, and some link up or describe what you get from other houses. And there's a mini maze that's fun and wouldn't be fun if you were an adult. There's another game besides the maze that I don't want to spoil, because it's the sort of thing I'd have loved to do. Some adults let you in their house, and don't worry, they're safe! Others have, well, problems, or they even forgot to put out treats, and you can help them, maybe not perfectly ethically, but hey, it's just a fun game. And they wind up glad they "remembered."

C&C has replay value because you can figure where you didn't quite do what you could have. Or you can see what happens when you're a jerk. I got 96 out of 100 points. But I still had that "aw shucks I missed some candy feeling" from the kid inside me, when I didn't have time to visit all the houses or whatever. I remember strategizing too as well in the neighborhood, and how I would vow to get more next year once I was stronger and faster and had more endurance.

There are a lot of neat jokes in the writing but one caught my eye as a sports fan. The author, more often than not, has one of these very random ones that fit perfectly in each game he writes. A former athlete named (Spoiler - click to show)Jim Elbow, whose name is a mashup of (Spoiler - click to show)John Elway and Tim Tebow, lives in your neighborhood. The name feels like something even non-sports fans can enjoy.

The only weakness may be the lack of a map (or one apparent -- I couldn't find one.) It's your neighborhood, so you roughly know the way around.

I will be playing through as a jerk to see what happens. I didn't want to at first, because I was caught up in the fun. But then I will be sure to try a 100% run, so I can beat Shawn in a best two of three. He deserves it.

The title and subtitle here are very cryptic. Lucky day? You're sixty years old! It all feels a bit sarcastic, really. What can you find on the beach? Wouldn't more moderate weather be luckier? You're not searching for treasure, or anything.

Plus, for the most part you seem to have bad luck, or a tendency towards it. You are simply walking along the beach, for your health, but not too fast, or you will get a cramp. But if you stay too long, a seagull "hits" you. Quite frequently. I was unable to figure out any pattern.

The mechanical object of the game is to make 3000 steps–you start around 7000, and you need to get to 10000. So, thirty moves, since the average is 100 steps. I reverted to save-scumming to avoid those pesky seagulls, because UNDO was disabled. This perhaps reinforced how getting around is that much slower than you get older, though I don't know if the author wanted quite THAT level of reinforcement. There were signs along the way I read, too, about the importance of not messing with nature. Fair enough. Were you watching for a rare seasonal animal? If so, where were your binoculars?

The game has five distinct endings, which is not bad for being fifteen minutes long. They're not too hard to figure out. I don't think the author wanted the best one to be hard, because they were just going for a general vibe, but you can poke around too to find them all. The toughest one (I think) is being a jerk.

While the lack of UNDO and random seagulls may be a dubious design choice, it is attractively laid out – you can click on hyperlinks to use your senses, though sometimes it has you TASTE the sand. The writer uses graphics well. The fixed-width green font gives a retro feel that fits in with being old, and it contrasts well with the graphics, too.

So while it's not a grand production, it's all very tidy, and I enjoyed the twist at the end. It made sense of the subtitle without feeling sentimental or too random and gave a new dimension to the walk, too.