Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Looking at the relative popularity of items in the jam, this one slid way behind the other's work, *Eviscerate This Girl*. DCYOA seems a lot more my speed, and I'd like to encourage others to give it some love or thought, too, if you haven't. You could simplify it down to just choosing 3 tarot cards from a pack. Instead of double-edged, murky, stuff like Death or The Wheel, though, it's odd gifts like a Celestial Pillow, which helps with Lucid Dreaming. Or you can visit a paradise resort, but you have to pay for a room. Nothing practical or earth-shattering, but always fun. You choose three, then at the bottom, you click at the end, and said three cards are together.

It's interesting to re-read through and see which is the best fit, but I was amused by how I quickly said some at the top were the best, or if I was offered them take-it-or-leave-it, I wouldn't wait for the next ones. They were too good.

But at the bottom is a choice that might expose my reflexive gratitude as selfish. It's a choice that allows gifts for others. You are less powerful. It's double the height and width of the other cards--whether the author just wanted to leave relatively little white (well, dark here) space or kind of unsubtly point out what they feel is the best gift here, I certainly had a moment of reflection. I'd been slightly enchanted by the possibilities and then felt like a bit of a bum, nothing to ruin my day, but I realized that even with gifts that seemed benign (as opposed to the ones from a Djinni that cause bad things to happen elsewhere) I hadn't thought much of ramifications, or What Was Really Important, or I assumed my gifts could cover WWRI later.

So whether or not it was intended to be a psychological experiment, I found it to be an effective one.

Neo Twiny Jam had a surprisingly large (to me) ratio of fantasy-quest games by authors, all of whom really seemed to know what they were doing. There've been a lot of works with emotional impact, too.

But this one combines both, while sneaking in under the maximum word count. I wasn't expecting what the curse was, and you probably won't, either.

Of course, given that it has some narrative, the tomb is not VERY big, or the quest VERY long. There's really only one puzzle and a few things to observe. It's a puzzle you can maybe guess, but said puzzle also has under a hundred states, so figuring an efficient brute-force method is a neat puzzle on its own.

It's a very clean effort, without extra fanfare, and I'm left with a clear feeling the author could (and should!) create something much bigger if they wanted. I'd also like to praise the cover art, which drew me in without grabbing me.

Finally, thanks to the author for including the source, and for telling us to experience their game before looking at it. It's in chapbook, and I used sugarcube in the jam, but several things still made immediate sense to me.

Piele is a work that probably isn't intended to make sense the first time through, but it was rewarding to make sense out of and figure what was going on. Even if I didn't already trust a work by Kit Reimer to Go Somewhere Interesting, it was pretty clear the confusion was 1) intentional and 2) added to the experience.

To overgeneralize, there's a small page text in a language you probably won't guess. I had fun doing so. It's not from a huge country, but not an obscure one either. The point is that you go through the process of deciphering stuff, not just translating, but understanding what the words mean. The writing is poetic in nature, with two poems of four lines each, and sometimes, when you click on it, the literal interpretations appear first before the translated ones do. So the meaning slowly pops up.

This feels like a work you should experience for yourself, as explanations or critiques on my part would either fall short or be just plain wrong. So I’m just going to mention that clicking on the ending twice kicks you to the end of the work, so avoid that if you want to see it all right away!

Hint for the language: (Spoiler - click to show)look at the accents. They are unique (AFAIK) to a reasonably-sized country. If you're stumped, (Spoiler - click to show)cut and paste and use Google Translate. I think it’s a good choice for what the author was (I think) trying to accomplish. And I think it was successful, and that’s why I’m only semi-revealing the spoilers.

One other thing that makes more sense after the first time through: (Spoiler - click to show)the cover art.

It's always good to see IFComp authors pop up somewhere else. Whether these people are publishing books or just clocking thousands of rep points on stack overflow, it's a reminder to me that while I enjoy having a corner of the internet, but I don't need to stay in a bubble. In fact, I should not.

The author wrote Flattened London for IFComp 2020 which was a combination of Flatland and Fallen London, and it was a pretty big and amusing parser game. Then for IFComp 2021, they wrote My Gender is a Fish in Twine. I thought it was an effective and succinct counter-measure to those who used gender pronouns as a joke, and it never got close to over-earnest crusading.

This is about a slightly supernatural cycle of life where someone's body is repurposed following death. It branches to three stories, then a conclusion. It has the odd effect of making, for a moment, (Spoiler - click to show)cannibalism seem almost natural, each small story in a way reminiscent of how I read Native Americans performed rituals after hunting certain animals for food and made sure not to waste as little as possible out of respect for the animal's life.

But in our brief glimpse into Jacob's world, even what is not used, is used. And what is not used to clear constructive purpose has its own use in a way. It makes a clear case for content warnings, but paradoxically, the stuff that causes them is potentially the most uplifting or hopeful.

I hope Carter Gwertzman is writing other stuff, too, outside of comps and jams. I'm pretty sure that is the case.

(Note: Manonamora's review mentions the first sentence, which left an impression on me, too. Maybe you as well.)

This is a short story that takes an idiom and turns it on its head effectively. That idiom is "may I have your name," except, well, it’s literal in this case. It’s hard not to feel a bit defensive about all this. You get some interesting deflecting responses. You shouldn’t have to say them.

I don’t think there's any way to do as the fairy asks. But it’s a really neat look at invasive, unwelcome questions and having one’s personal space breached in a way that doesn’t make me need to go wash my hands after.

They way it ended for me, I wondered if the fairy ever had any intentions of taking your name, or it just wanted to be annoying, like a low-key catcall. Maybe it had no power to do anything.

It’s an interesting clever twist on chance encounters where someone was rude to you for no reason at all and you are left wondering "what did I do" and wondering why you feel just a bit icky even if you can't put your finger on what the random passer-by did to annoy you.

"Please don't take this the wrong way" can be said at least two ways: from a position of power, or not. It can act as a pre-emptive apology all polite listeners had better accept and, thus, let the speaker rattle on for longer than they really should. This sort of conversation is often laced with "no offense, but you know what your problem is?" or "I know I can be harsh sometimes, but people need to wake up and hear the TRUTH!" and other such gems. Or it can be legitimately confused, realizing you see something a certain way and don't want to look down on those who don't, and they don't even have to come over to your view.

The speaker in this interactive essay/poem is decidedly in the "not" category. They've probably heard the phrase a lot from more powerful and confident people, both those who want to help them, and those who don't. They have a pretty clear idea of what they want to say, but all the same, people do seem to take it the wrong way, or they offer pity or other things that don't help. Or they put more stock in certain actions than they should.

One of the key phrases revealed on clicking is "I just want people to listen sometimes." And this struck me: everyone wants someone to listen sometimes. For many non-autistic people, they know how to increase that sometimes until acquaintances find it hard to pull away, whether at the start of a conversation or after thirty minutes of yacking. Whil I can't speak for anyone autistic, they know they probably aren't good at it, and they see the facts, and that's all that needs to be said. But that makes people more squeamish than some narcissistic fool's endless blather about how they had to wait in line too long at the DMV, or something.

The essay itself has words or phrases you click, which let the user expound. If you're paying attention, you'll see roughly where it's going, that here is a person who just wants to be understood and really, clearly, does not deserve to have some "wise" adult pass off some rubbish like "to be understood, first you must seek to understand others" before, perhaps, saying they understand the speaker perfectly, and it ain't pretty.

I've met people who are able to laugh off self-destructive or self-impairing behaviors (a "happy drunk" is a relatively benign case here) and people who feel bad they can't fix things they want to. But there's also some unwritten rule many of us live by, in that if we see something wrong with ourselves or others, we should try and fix it. The narrator here has experienced do-gooders who followed that rule, in various degrees of good faith, and they don't help. Perhaps this can apply to those of us who are not very social but would like to be and fail, or even those who keep making the same programming mistakes over and over again. So I appreciate this work very much.

So I'm the sort of person predisposed to like this author's sense of humor, kicking well-worn tropes when they're down in a sophisticated playing-dumb sort of way, but I think this will have mass appeal. It has pretty much everything needed to make you happy you (sort of) wasted time. Each passage and choice is, you see, one letter long. The actual quest (as I see it) mirrors a well-known fantasy book, but you get there your own way. There are lots of ways to fail. Of course, there is the "sleep in bed and do nothing" possibility. One of them has you marrying a dragon and having a kid. This might not work with long drawn-out passages, but it does here.

There are also audio clues of the “best” choice. Sometimes it's pretty obvious. The right choice is contained in what the voice (the author's, which is a nice touch) says. Other times you have to remember some tropes. But it's non-intrusive, and I very much enjoyed the reactions, especially to one that promoted inclusivity nicely without being preachy.

I'm one of those people who always felt bad that I didn't enjoy 500-page fantasy novels as much s I should have, what with everything to track and the descriptions of scenery which quite frankly got repetitive and tedious after a bit. That's not a problem here, with just 500 words. On the one hand, it's an exercise in efficiency, but on the other hand, it was oh so wonderful for the author to have packed in as many jokes as they did. I was just happy I got things under 500 words, and I was relieved to get rid of some of the more flabby sentences. The author did me one better.

I'll likely enjoy said novels even less now, maybe because OWW (which may be an inappropriate acronym, yet it could fit into a passage or a choice!) puts things to a much higher standard. I hope more people see and enjoy this. The author's work is always good and funny and enjoyable to me but this, to me, is a spike up from his usual high standards.

This one, I thought I'd written a review for during the jam! It was one I connected with, but it felt almost silly to write, or to remember fears from high school. And it suggests some fears are still very real, if not especially crippling. I knew what I wanted to say. But I did not. At least, for a while. I wasn't sure how much to share. But on replay, I had even more. So here goes.

You see, I went to a horrible four(?)-week driver's ed school the summer before my senior year. For many kids, learning to drive was exciting. But I had quite a lot of my mother saying how expensive insurance was, and how teen drivers had better shape up because they are careless, and so forth. It was a bit of a shock to me that some people enjoyed taking Drivers' Ed. That includes kids who would lower their grade-point, even with the easy A, because of the boost from honors and advanced placement classes! One other thing about Drivers' Ed: it was at the fourth floor in my high school. I never went up there as a student. So it held some mystery when I finally went back on an open house night, after having sold my own car because public transport was good enough. It wasn't that exciting when I got there, of course. But it was a reminder of other things I'd built up and not looked into.

My first instructor apparently spent a lot of time in nightclubs, and he'd yack on endlessly about it, so as not to put people on edge, apparently. The (very faulty) reasoning being that if we were being deluged by the subject of how interesting and outgoing he was, we couldn't feel fear!

This confused me, since drinking occurred a lot at nightclubs. And drinking and driving was bad. Suffice it to say that I did not need the negative reinforcements from certain driver's ed movies, the newspaper clippings on the wall of very sweet and lovable kids who screwed up, assuring me that I had better not drink and drive. All blissfully unaware I'd never even been to a party with alcohol at that point!

How does it relate to the work? Well, TRH's background music--well, it reminded me of those horrible driver's ed movies that tell you not to screw up or you'll endanger your lives and others. It establishes fear, but a totally different one than perhaps the drivers' ed movies want you to feel. It's a fear of understanding too well how you might screw up and not having the confidence to avoid that. It's a fear based in how you maybe aren't acclimated to how cars have safety feature, and the rules of the road--well, how to be a safe driver has a lot of precautions, and if you're paying enough attention, you'll catch things. Or you'll wind up getting close to a mistake, but not really, and if you're conscientious, you'll realize why people do certain things.

At some point, though, being over-cautious is too much. And I never had anyone address that until my nightclub-visiting instructor said "YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY TOO SCARED TO GO ANYWHERE WITH A HIGHER SPEED LIMIT." Between them and my parents--ouch.

And the parents in this reminded me of, well, my own. They know how to nitpick. They never suggest the simple truth, which is that you learn things fairly quickly if thrown into the melting pot. And ... well, having a kid drive at night for their second lesson is a really, really bad choice. There's more to remember, with turning on lights. It's harder to look for a stop sign, or for people not wearing reflective clothing or whatever. There is so much to process, but the parents failed to keep it simple.

So I see, intended by the author or not, two parents that threw the kid in the deep end and, conscious or not, had something prepared for the kid's inevitable failure, or almost-failure. And the kid certainly beats themselves up. There is more fear than there needs to be and a shocking lack of empathy from the parents, who don't outright tell the kid they're a flake but jump on small mistakes.

Oh, that combined with [spoiler]the kid realizing they could have hit two pedestrians not paying attention[/spoiler]. I empathize with the narrator, for being pushed into fear that drains them, trusting adults to plan and do things correctly, but the adults did not.

This is all very negative. My story had a happy ending--I had a second driving instructor later who said "just go ahead. I trust you." And it worked. The second instructor actually smoked in the car, and it did not bother me. I reacted favorably to his lack of "exciting" nightclub stories tinged with belief he should be an even bigger man when out on the town than he was. (Note: the first instructor did shut up, but I felt guilty that I was so distractable, he couldn't share the stories he wanted. Also, he is on Twitter now, and one of his most recent pictures features an odometer going up to 100 MPH, which is well over all speed limits.) I don't drive much now, but I feel confident I recall the basics quickly. It's the opposite of fear--competence without excitement.

This is a bit long-winded, but it's my own driver's ed story, so different from the average "I AM GETTING MY CAR!" But I hope it shows more growth and overcoming fear and how TRH brought that home but also reminded me I had progressed past certain fears. In a nutshell, what is a joyful rite of passage for most teens is extremely stressful, for the narrator. And they, unlike most "normal" kids, are unable to put small mistakes behind them, likely due to adults who needed to flex how with-it they were and others weren't. That's sad and terrible, even before the story's climax.

On its own, this is just a choice between whom to call, without a lot of data You have a conversation, then hang up. But paired together with a predecessor, a penny drops. It becomes more than a small vignette but a true story.

The predecessor is a cookie-clicker sort of game called Literally WatchPaint Dry. It's not the first boredom simulator and won't be the last. But it's a relatively quick one. And it uses the cookie clicker engine to relate a story with all the paint you watch dry. A friend turns away from you based on who you are, but another takes place. The implication is that there are some people you can watch paint dry with, and some people who were maybe exciting at first, or you did more exciting things with, but they were unfulfilling.

Perhaps this back-reference bends the rules of NTJ slightly. But I think this entry in Neo Twiny Jam can stand on its own. Pair it with LWPD, and you have something very nice indeed. It requires a certain confidence to call a game LWPD or, indeed, to refer back to it. That confidence is not arrogance, here.

I confess I used a keystroke-sender to get through LWPD. There is nothing beyond the first day and a half (129600 seconds to be precise) and it subverts the whole pointles clicking genre with something neat and emotionally rewarding. You see the backstory behind the friend who wants to be with you and the one who doesn't. You realize perhaps you were calling the old friend out of habit or misplaced loyalty.

It reminded me of a friend who I thought was okay watching paint dry with me. Then I figured I got too boring for him. But then I thought of what his ideas of excitement were, and I was glad I was boring that way.

LttPR lives up to its credo--it allows you to take it or leave it, even if it is different from the other entries in the jam (it is very plain, itself, but refers to previous non-text-based games, in this case one made from a graphic engine for a game originally meant to be mindless) or not being very interactive. It may, in fact, not be exciting. This is not because the author has a lack of creativity. But there are many efforts about far more oppressive circumstances that get the point across and may seem shinier and more praiseworthy. Many are. But LttPR focuses more on personal rejection and coping with it without drama and, in doing so, it is saying it's okay with what it is. This isn't a backhanded compliment, but I always enjoy works that don't have to be exciting to be creative or thought-provoking, especially if they help me recall certain negative things in a more constructive light. LttPR did that.

If you worry Buck Rockford is too on-the-nose as a Western character name, fear not. This work is not fully in earnest. And Buck’s name works doubly for me. Why? Well, having lived in Chicago for a while, I know of a good-sized town about 90 miles west called ... Rockford! It is not a terribly romantic place to live, alas.

Buck Rockford Heads West (BRHW) is itself an effort written in Ink, where you, as Buck Rockford, have a choice of four professions to follow. Each is stereotypically Western, except for weird twists that happen once you start. In each profession, you may have a drastic life-or-death choice, except ... well, it only affects the story.

Each part of the story at first relies on standard Western tropes, and while Western tropes have been done and mocked enough to make me scream, this is different. There is no "howdy pardner" or long description of scenery. There is simply doing stuff wrong on purpose, which turns out to be way more interesting than doing it right. Here the enforced word count works well. Twists and turns are packed in nicely.

Eventually, Buck finds his destiny, which is sort of unexpected, but it makes sense given the surreal logic of the story. Strangely enough, I found it related to (Spoiler - click to show)Mr. Seguin's Goat, which I'd played a few weeks ago in ParserComp 2023, because of (Spoiler - click to show)the themes of having too much freedom not being so great. In fact, because of the nature of the story where one adventure does not help Buck on any of the others, we can either note that he is going around in circles with his four choices, or he does in fact find worse luck somewhere along the way. (It's possible there is a hidden ending for doing things the "right way." But BRHW doesn't feel like it wants to force to you. I played through several times to check.)

I was surprised how much I thought of it afterwards as more than just a bunch of clever jokes and misdirections. It reminded me of back when the World Wide Web was more volatile, and I thought I'd find a webpage where I'd stay longer than I did, or a community that should've worked, didn't. Some webpages seemed terribly avant-garde or clever, but they were just flashy, and once I heard the same old snark a few times, I moved on. Then on stumbling over a website from over a decade ago, it seemed old-hat, the "insightful" humor too cruel.

Similar things happen with art, of course--people loved Sasha Baron Cohen's Borat for different reasons. The parts that got the loudest laughs didn't seem to age well, and the odder parts, to me, showed profound insights. And Cohen himself keeps needing to try new characters or environs. Once his current alter-ego gets too popular, he needs to move on.

Neo Twiny Jam has its share of downright depressing works where someone is stuck. BRHW is about being stuck in its own way, but it has more a sense of melancholy, of searching for more. Perhaps not of discontent but of knowing you will kind of shrivel up and growing if you stay certain places too long. But it's told to you not by a self-help guru worth tens of millions of dollars, or even a teacher in high school who said you should be more interested in their subject than you were, because that's the way to a good job. But it's about looking into things you always meant to, a reminder of longing without saying, gee, pal, you wasted your life.

Well, that's what it was for me. You may find your own interpretation, and it would not be wrong. I have already yammered on so that this review eclipses the Neo Twiny Jam word limit. I think that says a lot.