Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Please Do Not the Cat doesn't inspire confidence with his title, but fortunately, the vanishing word is deliberate, and the game's header throws in a verb between Not and The, describing -- well, what you need to do with the cat in the game, or the complete opposite. It's usually pretty clear which. The cat has jumped into your life, or more precisely, onto you while you were sleeping on your couch, through an open window. Please do not wake the cat.

You can't move, but actually, you can, to go look a few places around the couch. This gives the impression that things aren't going to be very realistic, but there's some quick humor here, and once you're able to move around, you realize you need to feed the cat and play with it a bit, so it's relaxed enough for, well ... I won't spoil it, but you can guess.

So there's some basic apartment game + needless surreality in the your basic apartment game, which meands PDNtC won't be high art, but it's fun enough to figure how to read the cat's collar or make friends or play with it. It's not a mean or dark game.

When looking through TALP games I hadn't reviewed, I immediately said "oh no" to this, but it's pretty well-contained, and despite some minor verb-guessing, it's not going to frustrate you, and certainly after a minute or two I was pretty convinced it wasn't. So I got through quickly. There are some alternate routes, and how to talk to the cat and capture it are rather cute. When it's over it's even a bit sad. So while PDNtC is a bit plain, it's also relatively rewarding, and it focuses on the right parts of a Your Apartment/slice of life game.

So it's the sort of game you may say hack no to, and there is some verb guessing, but it's nothing terribly painful account because the world is pretty well contained. You wind up doing things that cats like kind of like bringing them food or toys, and then it's over it's a bit sad, too, but it's the right ending. And it reminded me of various cats I'd made friends with, and the ways I'd made friends. So it may not have intended to have great range, but it was nice and homey and (I think) did for me what the author hoped.

Adventurous Extraordinare starts with an intriguing premise: you're a detective who is trying to solve fairy tales gone wrong. The graphics are really very nice. It gets a little too absurd, and the custom parser doesn't accept simple things that should work, and I think that's part of the problem with writing something in the different than your first language. Those two things combined to make what should have been a simple and relatively tidy game with fun quirks become something rather tricky to play, where you know what do to but the parser just isn't quite cooperating. Perhaps I would've given up if I didn't want to review all ten games for the TALP jam. And yes, this was one I passed on, when I initially wrote reviews. It made more sense the second time through. But the writer gave themselves a lot of hurdles to jump over, and despite some clear diligence fixing bugs in their change log, it didn't always work.

Your first order of business is to get out of your office, which is locked, and of course you've misplaced your keys. This implies you actually sleep there and also makes for a handy lead-in to the tutorial. You can also read the writing on your office door, which is your name backwards (a nice touch: it's chosen from five random first and last names that fans of crime fiction will recognize, and of course it reads correctly once you're in the hallway) but you just don't recognize it. While AE is meant to be absurd, there's a lot of reaching that can strain belief, especially when you go to meet a huntsman who, the game says, you should really help people, and then he traps you and captures you. So you're bounced around a bit with a rather wonky plot.

Snow White and the evil queen get involved, too, and I think probably the strongest bit is the main puzzle in the forest, where you need to find a map in order to make it to the castle, and you bump around randomly until then, but fortunately, there really aren't very many rooms. The ending bit is kind of cute, too, because it's pretty clear what to do once you're in the castle with not many ways to get out but at the end, you actually have five different ways to answer the question the queen asks of you, which is one that's pretty standard for fairy tales. There are two standard answers, but the three non-standard ones make the payoff worthwhile.

Worthwile enough to forgive the annoyance of having to type WAIT TIME instead of JUST wait, or LOOK AROUND instead of LOOK. L is also used, but my brain had a brief blip where I saw them both and LOOK AROUND captured my attention, because it was a lot longer. Unintended consequences. And the inventory limit is a bit frustrating, and there's a way to lock yourself out of the ending, which I guess makes sense physically (all your items are taken, and you need to get them back,) and the player should know better. But it's kind of mean for such a relatively cheery game in a tutorial jam.

The author promised a sequel, or Day 2, and it arrived, replete with bears and gruel and even a troll. But it was unsolvable because I could not type a hyphen in. Looking at their itch.io page, they'd moved on to other whimsical but intriguing small projects. I was glad to see they were still creating and trying new stuff. But I sort of wish they'd have found more time to nail down AE's flaws--oh, and get Day 2 tested. I was able to read the source to see their plans, and it was similar to Day 1, and I was sort of sad I didn't have the chance to play through their intended experience.

The Rotten Wooden Room is a relatively linear game where, fortunately, there are much more exciting places to visit than the room where you start. It's got nice graphics, and it's pretty clear what to do. The fantasy and text adventuring troops are pretty standard here. You find a pickaxe to dig at gems, you give magic items to magic beings and eventually, you have a happily-ever-after ending. It's quite pleasant, and although there is one bug that had me baffled, it's well organized enough and you don't have to guess the verb. The place with the bug, the author simply misplaced a door in another room, so you go to unlock the door where it should be, and it says it isn't there. It's a puzzle of its own, which isn't terribly unwelcome, since nothing else overtaxes your mind.

It was written for TALP, and the tutorial bit is adequate, explaining what to do and how to get started, and it helps you in bits and pieces all the way through. While it's not necessary, it's still refreshing to see this sort of follow-up. The author cares. Though it does come off feeling like a first work, because the author has the basics of what a text adventure is down, and they don't make any big mistakes, but besides the bit at the end which I found very nice, it doesn't really start to achieve personality. It's still a pleasant journey.

And it's a relatively linear one. There are only two rooms that branch, and as you'd expect, you find items in each dead end that help you move on other places. You're not going to get lost here. You can even dispense with examining and such a lot of the time, once you know what to do, and it's not hard to find your way through again. You wind up making one guardian flea and making another happy with a gift. There's rudimentary dialogue.

I'm glad the author stopped by to write this, even if it isn't a world beater. It's interesting to see the sort of things people with a more artistic background come up with (they have a nice portfolio of other stuff on itch,) as I sure couldn't brave going into an art jam for drawing stuff. I think this is much better than what I'd be able to do. When I replayed this, I remembered some of the images very quickly, such as the castle with the clouds. So while it may not blow you away, it's more enjoyable and has more substance than most games that place low. It's a bit of a shame the title made it seem potentially dreary, because it really isn't.

I recently replayed MToH when it came up as CASA's "random game" because it seemed familiar--I clicked through, recognized it and forgot enough of it that I enjoyed revisiting and rediscovering while writing a walkthrough and drawing a map. I hadn't written a review back in 2021, because I felt I didn't have a whole ton constructive to say.

MToH isn't a huge game, clocking in at fifteen rooms in your eccentric departed (but maye not dead) aunt's house. Well, three to start, until you find a light source in the tutorial. That opens up five more rooms, and there are a few secret doors and passages to open, too. So it felt like more than fifteen rooms, but not in the bloaty way, especially with the door that's locked from the inside. There's mystery there.

The tutorial portion makes an odd first impression, as you TAKE and DROP an item you need to use very soon later. But that first impression was reversed by how the tutorial cued other things later. Some very good TALP entries wound up ditching the tutorial after the introduction, and I think that's a missed chance. Here there's nothing profound, but the author generally knows when the player might need help.

The first secret passage you'll open up will probably be to the ending room, where it's pretty clear you have to find stuff and bring it back. There's a safe among the locked doors. Its combination is found in two parts, though on replay, you don't need to read them in-game. There is also one barrier where it was obvious what items to use, but I had a bit of trouble guessing the right verb, as the usual violent ones fell short. (Spoiler - click to show)DESTROY was it.

MToH does a bit of everything -- it uses a bit of colored text for important items, gives tutorial nudges where needed, has secret passages and gives a good variety of verbs to use without making you guess too much. It's not especially heavyweight, but I was glad to visit it, and I was amused to remember how, now and then, I ignored further passage west of the main branch room, because I assumed there was a locked door there just like to the east. It was a weird blind spot to have. For whatever reason, I remembered the safe combination, or that it was one of four values. This gave an eerie feel I think the author intended. I enjoyed coming back to it.

The mechanics of Swap Wand User are pretty simple. You're given a jumbled sentence, and you SWAP (WORD1) (WORD2). These words must be of the same length, which eliminates a lot of guesswork.

There are seven main puzzles before the denouement, which is a narrative of easier puzzles where you switch two words that almost create a story. The main puzzles evolve into four sentences by the end, which may sound taxing, but of course there are clues beyond what the sentence/paragraph's general purpose is. If you have a capitalized word, it probably begins at the start of a sentence. Proper names belong together. And so forth. These were small realizations, but they made me feel smart. I'm not sure if there are many more such strategies to be uncovered from this mechanic, but I wouldn't mind a sequel that showed off a few more or was even a bit of a retread.

The sentences and eventually strings of sentences lay out a story, one in tune with Getting Things Mixed Up. It has a healthy dose of instruction manual tone crossed with "okay, something clearly went wrong here in the game world." It's interesting to feel both relegated to the sidelines like this and like I'm changing things--we never physically meet the characters, but it's our word swapping that helps unravel their fates and learn about them. I caught myself wondering "should I SWAP X Y or SWAP Y X" even if it didn't make a difference, which showed some immersion.

The pace and scope seem about right. Certainly I had the feeling of "this can't go on/be too big" but on the other hand it didn't try to tie things up too quickly. The longest puzzle has a lot of tension in it, because you do want to unwrap the tragedy, which itself involves people getting things jumbled up in the game world, but you don't want to do so too fast. And I've found it made me focus--a lot of times I can play or read a text adventure/interactive fiction for speed, and this slowed me down about right to have time to think.

On the abstract side, SWR reminded me of how I enjoyed doing the word jumbles in the daily newspaper as a kid (e.g. "WHELIA" to "AWHILE,") until they got too easy and I really didn't, because they were just abstract and repetitive. (I moved on to crosswords and enjoyed being baffled there.) Word jumbles only had so much scope. I'd hoped for more, and with SWR I definitely found some more.

So I liked it a lot but my technical side couldn't ignore one option SWR had: I'd have liked to see a different sort of help toggle than the hard/easy given. Easy, indeed, made it too easy and left me open to the temptation of brute-forcing things (it puts correctly placed letters in BOLD,) and in hard mode, my energy was directed toward the pedantry of finding and remembering which words had the same length, which started to get in the way of the fun of solving the longer puzzles.

Given that you can only swap words of the same length, it'd be interesting to keep track of which can be swapped somehow. Perhaps

(4)best (1)I (3)the (2)am

Or

4444 1 333 22 (with 10+ using a, b, c, etc.)
best I the am

Perhaps this would put the game over the 500 word limit need for (I think) contributing to the Short Games Jam as well. In this case having the constraint helped the author produce something original that didn't muck about. So maybe Twine would ultimately be better for the very smoothest experience -- different word lengths could give different colors, and we could reuse them eventually as, say, nobody's going to confuse a 10-letter word with a 1-letter word. The JavaScript in the clicking interface there would likely be even trickier than Inform, where the swapping still seems nontrivial.

However, if SWR hadn't been in ParserComp, I'd likely have missed it! So I was glad it was there. So maybe this is better reserved as technical feedback for the author, and I think something released in Twine or even Python could give the puzzle a new dimension. And that I played and came back a few hours later to check off details (e.g. the puzzles always appear in the same jumbled order) before writing this review shows how involved I was.

Witch Hedwig is another of the author's games in AdvSys, and it seems to have the most features. You as Witch Hedwig have to go and find three things in order to heal your son. They're not too bad to find, as it's not a huge world. You learn to find light, and you also need to trade with a pirate to open up a secret passage. So the puzzles all work well and they're pretty coherent. If you just want to put your head down and solve the game, you can do that with little problem. The parser works pretty well, though I had some fights with the singular/plural form of a noun not being recognized.

It all works, and it's satisfying to open up a new passage or make a light source or realize, aha, this is what I need to cut a tree down. Or even the game's final command, which I tried to guess from the recipe, but I realized I was thinking too literally. It was a very appropriate guess the verb. But I would like to see more on the creative side -- it feels like they can do that, based on their willingness to share source, and they shouldn't need to worry if English is their first language.

Because here it feels like there should have been a story, and a weak one would have added to some relatively interesting simple puzzles and given emotional depth. How sick is your son? Did someone make him sick? Was he being careless? As-is, it just feels like doing a job or cooking dinner instead of, well, helping cure your son. Not that there has to be a ton, but the author did a lot of testing to get technical stuff right, and I'd like to see what they can do creatively. It doesn't have to be deep literature, maybe just brief flashbacks.

I also wish something had been done with the notes where the game says it's night or it's morning. There could be a puzzle for that, and I think it would be a good way to stretch ASL's boundaries a bit further. Maybe next game. I'd like to see the author escape their comfort zone a bit more -- they've done a lot of work with the core stuff of building and compiling AdvSys for different platforms, and I'd like to see what they can do on the creative side.

Small disclaimer note: I was given a beta version of this game, but I was unable to test it or I did not make time for it because I had my own effort. I played the comp version.

Time Crystals of Cythii features you, as an elf, who dozed off and let some powerful crystals get stolen from right under your nose. You had one simple job, and now you have a bigger, tougher one: to descend from your comfy magic tower and retrieve them. Below are mists leading to five different places in time. Not just any places! Each one is a famous historical disaster waiting to happen: the Hindenburg, San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake, Krakatoa, the Titanic, and London just before the Great Fire in 1666. The game also gives you a watch, with an idea of how much time you have. It's way more than enough for all but the trickiest puzzles, if you do things one at a time. While there's some suspension of disbelief here, such as "why did the bad guys hide the crystals and not use them for evil purposes," TCoC is well put together, both the individual scenarios and the overall puzzles. Apparently this was written to augment a game that was much crueler, but even without that contrast, it's a really good effort.

TCoC is wide open at first, though you will pretty quickly sort out the smallest areas. At first I worried this gave imbalance: London in 1660 had only two locations, but San Francisco had a whole ton of them despite having the same population. Not to be a stickler, but when you have these roads you can go down in San Francisco but not London, it feels restrictive in a way the Hindenburg, which can only be so big, doesn't. But I think it works overall as a way to help you get started, as even in the largest areas, there's stuff to chip away at, at first. You get one item to trade and one to use to discover a new passage of sorts, in the small areas. It's pretty clear which is which.

The scenarios, as you'd expect from the listing, give lots of variety to TCoC without needing weird randomness, so it's never dull. I think the Krakatoa scene is best, where you get to befriend a monkey and also have to find a way to visit a ship off the shore. One of the crystals is there, and while it's never explained how it got there, going through the puzzles is really satisfying.

Which I believe well outpaces the small stuff I'm noting below. The good stuff works great, and you can only say so much without spoiling. For instance, in Krakatoa, there's pretty clearly something off the island, and finding it and making it there is a sequence of neat puzzles. While the stuff I'm not sure about, it's sort of complex to explain why, e.g. "this was for a jam with a tutorial required, and some puzzles seem a bit advanced, so once the jam is over, people will forget about that." So those not interested in technical stuff can stop here and take away the TLDR that this is definitely one of Garry Francis's better games, and it kept me occupied and was well-paced, and for whatever reason time travel games just Make Me Think more than most, so these ideas spilled out.

And I can't say any of the points dented my enjoyment. The time travel feels convenient and not forced or trivial. It felt like I was making raids and doing a bit more each time. In Krakatoa, this went beyond mapping, as there was a lot of why and how to figure out beyond the mapping in San Francisco. What's on the water, and how do you get to it? I'm the sort of person who likes to think "gee, how can we do this even better." So this is what I came up with, because I have a hard time unseeing certain questions. All this is fiddly and really only the difference between "smooth game" and "very smooth game."

First, the Titanic has a small snag with one of the solutions (apparently there are alternate ones, and the one most apparent to me was trickier.) You have to jump over a gap, and it's tough to know how much time is there. I think it was mostly the case that I was really involved, and I didn't notice the time, but I do wish there had been some sort of warning, especially since valid parser verbs that throw a parser error count as one move, or one minute. I ran into some situations where I had to figure the right verb, which was logical, but it still cost time. This feels contrary to the tutorial spirit.

Also, recognizing TCoC is in PunyInform, and features are hard to squeeze in, it would still be neat to know when scenarios are complete, or have an option for that, especially since this is a tutorial jam--maybe have a gem or something that tells you, okay, you're done here and don't need to go back. Most of the time, it's relatively obvious, but it's one of those things where if a person forgets something, and they scramble, they see possibilities that aren't there. A little surety would help. Also, having a way to know when an item is useless would help. This above and beyond "keys you find in area X open a door in area X" -- which I'm grateful for. It kept things logical. But of course having some items cross time boundaries gave challenge and made sense. For instance, NPCs from a different time period would be impressed by anything from the Titanic.

The NPCs that are there, well, it's a bit odd to walk on to Hindenburg past Nazis, especially since you are an elf, which is not very aryan, and you're probably not wearing the proper uniform, either. But the Nazis just sort of sit there and twiddle their thumbs while you hand a document to someone important. I mean, the small girl or hobo in San Francisco won't have much to say. The baker closing up shop in London is brusque too. The Titanic passengers are not going to bother with people or humanoids they find beneath them.

I also had a problem with finding how to carry stuff there is one part of the game where you need your hands completely empty to operate a vehicle, which makes sense, although it's pretty weird just to be holding a key. You know what to do, and you know probably also that you need to wear something, but part of me thought "No fair! I'm only carrying a key! That doesn't inhibit me that much! I can palm it!" So it feels like a specific excuse to reject the player would be in order.

So, yeah, my complaints here really are just that you have timed puzzles that are a bit too stringent, and there is some imbalance with the areas, and I'd have liked to see more, but there are enough good puzzles as is. You'll have a fun time not being a pedantic worry wart like me.

Disclaimer: I tested this game in its near-final state. This review reflects my replaying the released version. I had access to a map which may've made things easier.

TF leaves you in the dark to start. You know who you are and how you got there. You just don't know when. A newspaper reveals you have traveled back in time from 2225 to 2170. The wormhole you've exited indicates much worse things may have happened and may be happening. What's worse, your main mavigation machine, the Time Mother, is off-line.

Your first task is obviously to fix it, and it comes after the tutorial. I like the tutorial here as it doesn't just give you stuff to do and shuffle you off on your way. It pops up again a bit later, saying, hey, here's a nuance that would've been too much at the outset. I'd like to see more TALP games do this in the future--here it ranges from cluing you to the G/AGAIN command with a stuck door to mentioning how to deal with a hostile NPC.

And to fix it, you first need to input a quantum backup unit in your ship controls. Once you do that, you can leave and visit four different scenarios that open one at a time. No single one is overwhelming. You may have to knock out an enemy sentry, trade up for an "ancient" piece of computer equipment (committing a funny misdemeanor on the way,) or find a way to jump a wall and tackle an enemy. The enemies do look familiar, and there's a reason for that...

In the meantime, when you go back to your ship, your crew mates have a bit more to say. So does the Time Mother, the AI controlling your flight. But who is the enemy you are chasing? And why? The answer, revealed in the final time shift, is satisfying and a bit disturbing.

Overall TF works well. It has some parser wrangling, and I overlooked that a certain sort of lock was a chain lock and not a keyhole or padlock. But that didn't stop my progress through the game. The time zones were discrete and simple enough, I never felt lost, and it made up for not having a THINK style command that reminded me what I needed to do. I was able to guess, without feeling "oh, game logic says this is the only thing to do." I like how the time paradox is hinted at without some long melodramatic explanation at the end, and I like the funny bits where you need to find "ancient" computer equipment.

Contrasting TF with the other two time travel entries in TALP 2025 reveals some good variety. It has four different eras and is largely linear, but it features no famous people or events. Time Crystals of Cythii features four famous events, and Fixing Time features three famous inventors from different time periods. So that's an additional plus.

I may have bumped HP's rating up because of the author's notes as they told what they were trying to do -- the vision and so forth. Because I think there will be a divide between people giving up on it and people who are willing to poke around. There's a bit of heckling involved in all of this, which may not fit the tutorial/helpful tone the jam wants you to take, as well. This may bug people, but having finished, I find it amusing. I liked the ASCII art, too.

The first time through HP, I was happy simply to find an ending. I figured it might be the worst ending, but it was something. Writing anything in what is not your first language is tricky, and some of the writing bears that out. But getting to an end is fun, if a bit chaotic. I was surprised how rewarding the best one (being the life of the party named in the title--though it's someone else's home) was, after finding the two "bad" endings and the okay one. But I did have to use the author's notes to get through in a timely fashion. However, said notes and source gave me insights into their thought process.

The tutorial feeds you what to do, perhaps a bit too on-the-nose. People are playing Cards Against Humanity, and the game ends after you follow some simple instructions. Then you go wandering about Bert's apartment. You run into other partygoers, who do feel like somewhat papery NPCs, but their alliterative names are charming, e.g. Winner Wendy or Shy Sinty or Anonymous Andrew (ha!) They're even randomized each playthrough, so there can be Winner Wendy or Anonymous Anton. I had the feeling of being slightly out of place, which I think is what the author wanted. You jump from a card game to assembling a lamp, which feels like a reference to A Christmas Story based on the pieces. Maybe a gummy worm doubling as a wooden rod should have prepared me for the surreality. It's a bit of a jump from a card game, though once you see what needs to be done, things may click. And it's just after the tutorial ends, and some of the parser responses misdirected me.

Talking to the NPCs at the party is important, but sometimes I felt like I didn't really notice how or why until I read the source. They give obscure references to assembling items or finding popular party items. For instance, there's a knife blade and hilt to assemble, and the final puzzle is a disco ball which -- well, it's not intuitive, but it makes sense. I think the switch between doing surreal stuff with items and the everyday partying/people just hanging around is a bit much. And I felt like I needed more to go on than "find all four endings" to keep looking, and I might not have anyway in a larger jam. But I kept going, determined to have the game label me as more than a bad boyfriend or person, once I found ending three or four. The "bad person" ending is kind of clever, as you may forget the whole thing is a flashback, but once you remember it, you know why a certain action is awful, and the game does warn you. I got the neutral ending where everyone eats cake and goes home where I wasn't a bad person but my girlfriend found me kind of bore. Eventually, I achieved the "lousy neighbor" ending for catalyzing such a successful party! But at least I was not a lousy text adventurer, and that's what's really important.

Home Party reminds me of Simon Christiansen's PataNoir from 2011, or Kateri's Krypteia from 2014, due to the objects that are weirdly literal -- I can't imagine it's the first game to do such things. But having it in the setting of a party is obviously quite different from these other two. And it brings a certain charm to it, as it turns out the YouTube video people are watching is important. You also need to figure a way to create two players to play Mortal Kombat (the actual mini-game was curious, as I just spammed FIGHT and beat some braggart easily,) find a secret passage, and protect bronze statues from the sun in an odd side trip.

A lot of people will probably miss this, and some of the surreal uses of certain items are really stretching things, but they make sense. For instance, you have to wear a sweatshirt to take a certain item. But I think Home Party would be far less of a work and might miss the mark completely if the author tried to be conventional.

Still there are some pretty staggering jumps made just because, and while it's impressive that someone can write something like this and what isn't their first language, the small nuisances do pile up, making it tough to figure what the surreal possibilities are. And one of the endings for the party occurs only after you try to leave. Then people call you back. This isn't well hinted, but on the other hand, the game does say "explore everything."

I'd have been a bit lost without the source code. It's well annotated, and it shows what the writer is getting at. With it, I was able to make sense that a lot more headway. A lot of care was put into it, and that helped me be patient until I figured what was going on. But in a tutorial jam, "look in the source code for help" may not be the option you want. And while I could talk to a lot of NPCs, they did seem to blend together.

For the time travel element suggested by the jam? Well, it is a flashback, driving home from the party. The actual puzzles have a bit of nostalgia about them but not too much. There is an old Playstation, and the thing is, you don't just put CDs into it, you put other weird stuff there's a bookshelf with one book that seems out of place, and you also have friends watching YouTube videos of classic movies. One of the main puzzles at the end is to find a disco ball, which is very 70s indeed. All this stretches belief a bit, but if you operate under the "okay, things must have uses somehow" principle, you can knock things down. You also may have to appreciate the author's nonconventional sense of humor. I took a bit of time to. So I think that while this starts out with a pretty solid tutorial, it eventually has you do stuff which is a bit beyond what you'd expect for an introductory text adventure.

The author has an active and capricious imagination, and this all led me to come back after I found the first ending, just happy to have made some sense of things, and then once again once I found the second ending which was also a bit abrupt. There's a bit of a gulf between them and the successful endings, or relatively, but I was surprised how pleased I was to actually get the party going, even though I don't especially enjoy big parties like this. I enjoyed seeing the names of the NPCs, with no last names but just adjectives, and if it all felt a bit too surreal, well, it was better than a "my lousy apartment" game. It has its own unique style, and that makes it worth playing and, yes, even searching through the source code for the puzzle where you're stuck.

This review is for the comp version of the game. The thorny bits I saw feel like something that was just missed while implementing an ambitious project, and with the feedback of a comp/jam, the author can probably make some quick fixes that render my complaints obsolete.

Fixing Time works hard to gain your trust and approval, and overall, it gained mine. Though it's tough sledding at some points, and if you miss one detail you're in danger of getting stuck and unsure what to do next, not due to a technical glitch, but due to some inconsistency in the verbs accepted. This is borne out by the introductory tutorial, which is overall well-done: you have four rooms, called Navigation, Objects and Interactions. You learn how to move around, how to take items, and how to use them. The main puzzle is getting to the end room, and in the process, you learn a few basic verbs that will serve you well. Once there, you're a bit stuck, unless you RESTART. which is only cued once--and it hits the Adventuron default "Would you like to forfeit the game?" Given the gadget-based fun in the game proper, it'd be interesting to have, say, a trapdoor leading to the main makespace.

And what happens there? Well, there's no direct drama, but you find evidence a friend has gotten lost. As you explore the hackers' makespace, evidence accumulates that he likely used a time machine and got lost in time. But the time machine itself is broken!

So your object is to repair it, finding items around the makespace and using them properly on the various machines stationed around. Sometimes it's hard to figure what to do next, unless you apply reductionist logic: namely, what items haven't I used yet, and what items aren't useful because they're not really technological? This is a bit hard to do, because the game has a lot of florid passages about how everything is well-loved, and that gets in the way of learning what to put together, and there are a lot of non-technical items that give a small smile but ultimately are distracting, as red herrings. Perhaps an option to flag game quest-critical items could help here, as could one to give brief descriptions. I found it tough to focus, even the second time through before writing this review. But I did play through it, and it did go smoother the second time, once I was aware of what I Was doing and how things were organized. It just isn't brought to light clearly enough. And there is a struggle with the parser. It could be something as simple as making corkboard/board or newspaper/paper synonyms. Or it could force you to TAKE something to READ it, which is slightly annoying with inventory limits.

That said, FT does a whole lot right, and so my major caveat is with playing the original version, if the author chooses to update post-comp. And I hope they do. The issues above feel very fixable without too much effort, but they also feel nontrivial to uncover even with dedicated testers.

FT has, at its best moments, the feel of reading an interesting instruction manual and actually Getting It and wondering "why can't they all be like this?" There is a puzzle to get the time machine's circuit board working. Finding the spare parts requires you to examine a lot. Once you do, the REPAIR verb is highlighted in color, and you need to find the relevant machine in the hackspace. With fourteen rooms, this isn't bad at all.

You visit three time periods before finding your friend Andy, meeting three very different inventors who are famous throughout history. It's a neat contrast to the other time-journey games in the comp: Tempus Fugit had general globetrotting, and Time Crystals of Cythii brought you to just before big disasters. Each inventor needs the help of a much better machine than they have access to in their time period, maybe just to repair what they have or build something better. This really brought to life some machines that to me were just technology other people would use: a soldering iron, a 3-d printer, a laser cutter, an oscilloscope and even a classic sewing area with scissors. And the special verbs, like REPAIR, are highlighted, giving you a relatively clear set of things to do, along with things you need. In some cases you even get an ordered list.

There's some mixing of the time zones: a puzzle for area two builds on an item you find in area one, which seems valuable. (This is a bit odd, as it involves searching in someone's house -- but again the "search everywhere" principle may get you started.) And everything has one use, pretty much, except for (Spoiler - click to show)the slot on the time machine, which adds a new era to go to with each important item you find. The writing on the time machine suggests there will be ten eras in a future release, but you need only visit three before you are led to your friend Andy.

FT is very satisfying for all its rough edges and over-description that overcompensates for the game's technical nature (everything is lovingly made, etc., "as if/suggesting an air of...") and fights with the parser. I'd be interested in the future release with better cluing. Though right now, I'm glad I had a bit of walkthrough help so I could find the right verb to do what the game indicated. I felt very competent and technologically sophisticated indeed when I figured what to put together, and if there was some retro "fun" of fighting with the parser, I overall enjoyed the experience, which (though time travel is fictional) felt derived from what was likely the author's own time well spent creating odd gadgets with friends and dreaming of making even cooler ones.