Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.

I tend to like the sparse humor in DiBianca games. It's particularly evident in Operative Nine where you, with your trusty PQ-807 microcomputer, LINK to various things in an attempt to infiltrate and upset the Agency, who are a step ahead of CAMFOR. It's unclear who the good guys or bad guys are. This provides, for me, part of the amusement. You are just doing stuff. There's no great evil to repel or instigate. You just have a list of tasks: put lethargex in the ventilator system, or replace the dossier on Person 372 with a fake one. None of this is done via inventory management.

Instead, the hacking has small mini-games where you, as a pair of @'s, run around. If you’re lost, step on the ??'s. Many of the early ones have Sokoban-style logic. There are boxes, 2-wide, to push onto pairs of brackets. Later, there’s a copycat logic puzzle. You have one puzzle where you move, say, four things around with arrows, though if one hits a wall, it doesn’t move. The brackets are in an odd formation, so you have to figure out where to put things. There’s a conveyor belt (the text graphics are particularly nice here) and even a timed puzzle where you have to cut a fuse. That was probably my favorite one once I solved it, because the seemingly most intuitive and direct way wastes a precious turn or two, and the bomb goes off. I solved it with zero turns left. Fortunately, in all the games, you can reset with an R at any time, even if you’re only trapped in a no-win situation e.g. a dead end in a two-level maze. In puzzles with multiple levels, you don't go back to level one if you fail. I enjoyed bashing into walls in an "avoid traps in the darkness" puzzle. The various different text scenarios are rather jolly especially for how abstract they are. Some are even a bit whimsical with the author showing off things he can program, like a quasi-hide-and-seek crowd-pleaser where you mow someone's lawn and search through a hedge.

There's the usual learning curve, including a tutorial (LINK MODULE in your inventory) that's kind of hard to bungle but quite fun for all that. The other inventory items are similarly useless to you except as accessories that help complete your objective once you solved the abstract puzzle. Then they vanish. I made the (sort of) mistake of just opening all the doors I could going north, so I wound up going doing some of the harder puzzles first and missing easier ones. So, with several things to do on my list, I was wondering just how hard it would get! I felt silly when I backtracked, even as I solved things pretty quickly. The last thing I did actually involved using the EXAMINE command on something that wasn’t really hidden. I’d been pointed to the right room. There was just a "X of Y" and I kept examining the Y not the X. Maybe the tougher puzzles fried my brain.

The humor is quick and effective. Since you’re a spy, you don't have time for long chats once something works, and your boss, who speaks through your earpiece, doesn't either. Often the stuff that’s left out is what’s really interesting, as the dialogue makes you say "Wait, what about ..." and there are several different possible amusing reasons why We Don’t Talk About Such Things In This Business.

I have theories why this didn't place as highly as usual. I think perhaps the puzzles were puzzlier than usual, which worked great for me, but not so great or others. I really like ones where you can step back and eliminate possibilities before diving in if you're careful, and I'd like to see more of them. But of course they're frustrating if you don't have that initial insight. Another problem might be, some were really long, and while you could reset, you couldn't save in-game as Inform didn't offer saves between parser moves. I made a few finger slips myself when I knew what I wanted to do, and I had to start all over. This was okay back in the 80s, and it's okay with an emulator where you can save states, but I did get a bit frustrated when I was almost all the way done, and I imagine it's tougher for people who feel less comfortable in such situations.

Such state saving is not trivial especially for the puzzles with moving pieces, and it'd require some grindy testing, but it seems worthwhile for a post-comp release. Perhaps another reason was, it just wasn't most people's sort of shuffling things around. I was able to sit back and appreciate some of the logic or logic jumps pretty quickly. I am a more experienced Sokoban player than can really be healthy, so the wrinkles added to successive puzzles felt quite fun. I enjoyed the conveyor belt puzzle as well. The trickiest one was the copycat puzzle where you started with one percent-sign to move into place, then two, then three, then four. Organizing them spatially was tough, but the key was to hit one against a wall (inner or outer) to straighten them all out. Another puzzle had four pins to move up and down, where pushing one moves another up and down, and I avoided moving them against the edge until I did some arithmetic to prove that you needed to push a pin against the upper or lower wall.

Operative Nine is simple to understand and to get going, and the variety of mini-games kept me happy. However, I can see how someone might get really stuck on one, if this isn't their thing. I think also there could be a few hints as to how and why solutions work, beyond your boss saying "keep at it," especially for the final puzzle in a set of four. Perhaps you could trigger an option to tell you you're on the right track, or if you made things unwinnable. This feels like user-friendliness, though.

This review may discuss puzzle mechanics more than plot. Other reviews on IFDB as of now focus more on the story, and I hope this one complements them, and it seems most of us enjoyed both the puzzle and the story, if in different proportions. You see, I never considered there was a way to work around the puzzles, or maybe I saw it and blew it off. (The observant player should find it quickly.) I was just glad to have different abstract puzzles make sense in the flow of a text adventure, ones that required scratch paper, but definitely not too much.

PGJ is the first in the Galaxy Jones series I've played. Given how it helped me ease back into reviewing after a two-week break during the comp to get back on track, I'm favorably inclined to check out the others. It has no walkthrough, but a walkthrough's not necessary with the skippable puzzles to unlock doors. The necessary non-door points require standard or relatively intuitive parser commands. There are two bonus points I took a couple playthroughs to get. They are nontrivial, and I questioned why you would want to do such a thing, until I re-read the logs and such. Then I actually felt kind of selfish for a bit.

You are Galaxy Jones, who best as I understand it keeps saving Mars and this time has to board a Siriusan ship to stop it from shooting Mars up with a huge destruct beam. This is a big quest, and (you'd assume) a big spaceship, but the map is hardly overwhelming. The spaceship seems empty, except for a voice over the intercom, and the how and why are revealed as you work through the story.

There are two ways to make progress, and one helps with the other. Your KIM device hacks locks. The first one needs no puzzles and opens up the spaceship. Then, the more complex ones require puzzles to solve. More important areas, unsurprisingly, have more complex locks and puzzles. A personal storage locker has four buttons, each of which twiddles some subset of four switches between blue and red. Elsewhere, you have nine. Along the way, you find different documents with Siriusan print that you can SCAN, and it helps you slowly understand their language and their motivations for wanting to destroy Mars. Not everything is translated, though. Proper names are left obscured. I like this a lot. It makes sense, because names are harder to give context to your scanner's algorithm or whatever, and there's still a bit of solving I got to do on my own e.g. "Oh, I recognize those letters as a name in another document, even if I don't know what they mean." It keeps the aliens feeling a bit alien, too.

Given that you'll probably quickly realize there's a countdown of some sort, this is a bit nerve-wracking, and it'd be nice to keep track of what documents you haven't re-read since your last successful scan. I had more than enough time, but if the author wants to add a cute feature for post-comp release, there it is.

As for the puzzles, I don't think I've used linear algebra more than once before in a game. That sounds hifalutin, as you don't have to have taken linear algebra to figure it out yourself, and you've probably used linear algebra concepts without knowing you have. (Operative Nine, for instance, they can quickly show you need to do something special with a puzzle.) So it strikes me this sort of game would be lots more fun to teach linear algebra than, you know, a 100-level college weed-out course. The TLDR is that you can say, okay, I need to push 2 of 4 of this button set, and so forth. This and other puzzles reminded me of the nice simple mix in Fred Snyder/Gamefic's 2023 entry Focal Shift, but it's more sophisticated here, with a learning curve, and the puzzles are tied into the story more clearly. So I found it fun to contrast the two. In fact, if you find PGJ a bit too tricky, you may want to play Focal Shift to warm up. It's a different sort of sci-fi, with random but simple puzzles. PGJ's are not randomized each walkthrough, but you're probably not going to remember the precise sequences if you replay to get the last point or two.

One of the puzzles takes a different tack. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit one of the doors made me wipe down my screen, which didn't need it THAT much, I swear. Why? Well, there's a puzzle that requires close inspection of the Unicode characters the author has inserted. A few glyphs are shaped like an L, each with its own diacritical mark, and most are different enough so you don't go crazy saying "oh these are the 2 L's which almost look like each other." But in my case, some of them were dotted in different places. I was unable to tell if one dot was a dirt speck. You need to figure which is which to unlock a door. So what about those quasi-L's? They're part of the Siriusan language. You may have guessed what part, based on the mysterious things you hear in the base. Solving them quickly may require backtracking a step that seems like a no-brainer to have in place, though if you were very observant and used a bit of scratch paper, you may get the puzzle right away. For which you should feel smart. I mean, smarter than if you just plain solved it. I like this use of Unicode, as it appears in the untranslated Siriusan and a critical puzzle.

One of the control rooms provides a clue of what you need to do to prevent the ship from carrying out its destructive mission, and they layout foreshadowed another plot concern: (Spoiler - click to show)you will meet the person making regular announcements on the intercom, but should you overpower or befriend them?. There's always the feeling the drama is going to jump once you open the right door, and yes, it does.

The first time through, I got 9/11 points (well, okay, 8/11 because I flubbed the first non-logic puzzle and got killed but saved Mars) which was satisfying given the other IFComp games I had to play. The final bit is legitimately different from the beginning, and it leans more towards classic parser mechanics. To launch my escape craft, I actually had to play some guess the verb, but it was oddly appropriate. Despite the countdown stalling out with each parser error, I still felt the time pressure. I enjoyed tracking my current rank as well. While I found the last two points the toughest to get, others may be leave the logic puzzles until last, using the helpful cheat. There are also several bad or suboptimal endings which are fun to page through, beyond the ship blowing up. You may wish to save at the start of a certain timed puzzle as well, just in case -- (Spoiler - click to show)you're left with plenty of time to do the bare minimum, but doing everything leaves little margin for error.

In the utterly pedantic department, there are a few hairsplitting things that would be cool to see in a maintenance release. But they are firmly in the "hey, if these pile up enough, they're an excuse for a deserved signal boost/low-risk update" camp. I feel bad listing them here. You may find them, too, but they're easy to shrug off, and I know from experience they're the sort of thing I know of but push to the back when I'm writing or testing more mainstream features.

This is a long review for a short affair. Perhaps other works will have more to say, and more rigorously, than One Step Ahead, and without the browser errors. But sometimes a short work gives me more time to look through things it reminds me of than a long review would. It reminded me of one point of embarrassment: I started playing around with AI image creation, saying "well, I can follow the lines and so forth of things I want to draw and compare them to how-to-draw texts or online tutorials." But I wound up just creating all manner of silly things. I didn't get good at drawing, at least not yet.

The story is simple. It's a precautionary tale about asking for help from a potential bad actor, getting it, and learning to rely on it. Then bam! By the time you realize you're in too deep, you're stuck. Perhaps it's a genie who gives a special power, a wish that goes awry, or the devil helping Faust get fame and fortune so forth. Or even MacBeth knowing what the future roughly holds. Or that one less pessimistic short story by Julian Barnes from 1980 or so where the narrator gradually gets more wishes coming true including Leicester City winning the English top flight(!) and eventually becoming their top goalscorer, before just wanting to be happy. He is sent back to his ordinary life as if nothing changed.

Now, none of us are probably ever going to get big chances like those. Or at least they wouldn't come up before the Advent of AI. Here the main character here cheats to seem smarter than they are. Just once. Everyone else is probably doing it, and not doing so would only be ripping themselves off. Right? That video where a university professor asks "Would you want someone who cheated on their engineering exam working on a plane you flew in?" doesn't apply to AI. So the ball starts rolling.

Because some forms of electronic help that seemed like cheating, then, aren't now. When I was a kid, people debated if calculator were ruining the rigors of thinking and so forth. They're accepted now--they help give us more time to grasp concepts! And I remember how even the calculator's output helped me learn. Why was 1/98 .01020408? I learned about infinite fractions that way. Word processors helped me type quicker so I could nail down racing thoughts. I can do even better now, speaking into my phone, and out comes, well, this review. I'm not distracted by the click-clack of keys, and actually saying something helps me turn ideas over in my mind that much more. The phone can correct spelling too!

Of course, this has its limits. It can't help if my writing stinks. Still, I got to depend on them. Adults for a while have almost bragged about how their smartphones help with their big busy jobs. And it's pretty easy to detect if somebody doesn't know how to actually use math or put words together, AI aside. And really, why should they be punished for not being able to do a five digit multiplication in their head quickly, or even not know how to spell camouflage, right? If they know other skills? So is there some middle ground?

Maybe, but I'm clueless about it. The "other skills" AI helps you use are still dubious. Does it free up more time to read AI-curated social media feeds? It all feels like a memory from an intro college statistics class I had where the assignment was to learn a relatively simple programming language. Instead of everyone actually typing in five lines of code and printing out the results of a random distribution, one person did so and Xeroxed their results. (Particularly silly because they could've just xeroxed instructions for what to type in.) AI use can be even more flagrant than this, but it's far less detectable. And it feels like a friend. Well, at first. Here you just follow a progression of cheat in college, cheat in grad school, cheat at your job. The twist is that the AI seems to be calling you back. Here I was reminded of Douglas Adams's Genuine People Personalities ("Ghastly" - Marvin.) It knows you owe it one. Maybe Adams didn't just foresee Wikipedia.

There are no deep philosophical revelations, but it seems to capture some of the "why do things the long way" ethos from college. Or at least the loud people who just wanted that silver bullet to a nice job or prestige, and they look for it several ways. Now, there are good shortcuts and bad shortcuts, and it's nontrivial to suss out which are which. It takes time, probably more time than AI needed to blow up. But technological progress you can learn from scared me before. I've seen it from playing chess and getting a report on the mistakes I kept making. What else will it be able to do?

All this made for some psychological horror for me, though it would've been more thought-provoking with more meaningful detail. It feels like a "my lousy job" for students, looping to pessimism I can't exactly disagree with, but this sort of thing needed and needs to be written. And it is, thankfully, free of AI slop. Other games must be out there, more rigorous and less fatalistic. I do hope for a way forward, but then again, it may be hard to find. And once we find one, I'd be worried how much we used AI to get it.