Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Near the end of Neo Twiny Jam, a lot of people submitted games, and my goal of reviewing half the games before the end went kaput. On balance, this is a good thing. More to review later. But given my goals, it felt like I had something taken away from me, even though I really hoped to see as many entries as possible.

Clarence Street, 14 was one of those. In fact, it seems to be bit hard by coming in before the final wave, so if you look at games submitted by reverse date, it's not easy to see. But the title intrigued me.

You see, the title gives more mystery for an American reader, since we don't have very many addresses here under 100. The most notable exception I remember is in the Chicago Loop, at State and Madison, which is officially the zero north and west point. As you go further north, Lake Michigan moves west. Until then, posh stores give way to mansions, which give way to a park. And of course 10 Downing Street is a famous foreign address.

So the story had a good bit of mystery from me just reading the title. And it kept up through, for 500 words. What is it? What is the character doing there? And why? This is revealed at the end.

I liked how the tension built, and I liked how things seemed legitimately different after the reveal, which felt more than fair and logical. I saw the character in a different light, definitely. In fact I liked this better than Collision, which got a lot of deserved nice comments, because the surprise twist here felt a bit more real. They are both worth it. (The author had a third entry, too!) It certainly makes me want to work through other late entries to make sure I didn't miss anything else really good.

Semi-spoiler with meta-thoughts: (Spoiler - click to show)the character has gotten lost in the shuffle, like the game with all the other Neo Twiny entries. I won't say much more.

For me if something is going to be linear and use effects, it either needs a buildup or payoff. And in vanitas it has both.

You can see where it's going pretty quickly. Two friends more or less stay in touch as the dominant social platform changes. They discuss how nice things were, well sort of, while also realizing how bad it was. (False nostalgia is touched on quickly and effectively.) You may or may not recognize each individual site as you hit space and go through various conversations.

The ending, which is very much worth it, seems meant to be open for interpretation. It's creative and lampshaded a bit. It certainly made me think of how exciting it must have been for my parents or grandparents to be using the telephone more regularly, maybe complaining about how people can listen in, or how the phone monopolies are ruining everything. It reminded me of a whole bunch of nuisances, such as busy signals with no answering machines available. And that is the unemotional side.

vanitas is not a very tangly game. You can just hit space a bunch, then tab your way to open the next social media site. But it's effectively done, and the aesthetics are not there to show off, and the final two scenes are definitely worth your time. I recommend just poking around to bulldoze through rather than noting this spoiler, but since we only have so much time, (Spoiler - click to show)the final two scenes look into communication into the past and are deliberately obscure, as people's complaints about Zuckerberg or Musk may seem 100 years from now.

This was a relatively quick Neo Twiny Jam entry without too many choices, but what were there were quite funny. A lot of details aren't filled in--you've warped to some odd reality to track down someone who's, well, been warping through realities too much. How strong their essence is, you don't know. They only give cursory excuses. It's unclear whether they're evil or ignorant.

That said, you have a job to do, and there's some mystery as to if anyone is at the typewriter.

The ends are abrupt, and that works for NTJ, because they needed to restrict the word count and also provide a few passages through, and because it's about the apocalypse. I also enjoyed the detail of a portal folding into your pocket--it's good surreal stuff presented quickly.

Despite giving relatively few branches, DGtT got me thinking of what its universe was, how it was built, and so forth. I enjoyed it on its own, and making up my own backstory, which seems to me proof the author used their words well. But I would still enjoy reading how the author themselves would've expounded on it.

Bitsy has been a very valuable defense against having too much angst at once from a game. For me it reinforces that the game is not trying to crush you with detail. It says, I'm trying to paint with relatively broad strokes with these pixels, and you may fill the details in, if you wish. And so I do, much more than with much slicker productions. Perhaps it also says, to someone who remembers GameBoys and GameBoy Colors, that there was more than just basic shoot-em-ups available there, and we can still find them.

That's not to say it invokes nostalgia, but it reminds me that progress needn't be just about higher graphical detail or more color or whatever. It reminds me of stuff I always wanted to do, of my own basic programming efforts to move someone around with a cursor and arrows on the Apple. And yet at the still at the same time it can still give a complete and small world.

Even if the world is, technically, only two rooms large, as in Letters To a Friend. That's more than okay. And the whole "my apartment and I'm lonely and maybe it's COVID" thing. But the apartment itself is kind of cheery, with a wardrobe and such. As you bounce into scenery, you note things like you haven't really needed to buy any clothes, but you really should take the recycling out, because this sort of stuff does pile up.

And that's the main thrust of the game. You haven't checked your mail from a while, and there are letters from a friend. The catch is, it's someone you don't know. And you figure they must be regular. It reminded me of emails I forgot to send back and emails I didn't receive back, and I promptly went out and wrote them. It ends on a positive note. (Though I'd have liked an ending screen instead of scrolling back to the top.)

Elitists may claim this sort of thing doesn't wash in the long run, but seeing a regular drip of efforts like this certainly make me want to try something in Bitsy. It's versatile and lets you say what you mean to say, without feeling you have to oversell it, and that hits me as an author and reader/player. The one-bit graphics give a certain charm that say "You know, I'd like this character to live in more than two rooms, nice as it is," even as another part of your brain might be horrified at the thought of living in two rooms for so long.

Bitsy seems to have a certain baseline and shell against really rough stuff--it's hard to do anything to gross anyone out--and LtaF goes well above that. Maybe the novelty of Bitsy will wear off for me, but then, when I first saw it, I thought it would wear off quite fast. It hasn't, because of efforts like this.

500 Word Hotel Escape is about what you'd expect. It's not a huge hotel. But you overslept on the final day of vacation, and now it's locked, and your room is isolated. No easy way out.

It's not hard to lawnmower through, just searching everywhere, as you discover a key or two, as thankfully it's not all about finding keys. There is variety!

5WHE flipped the fears from the times in hotels I hoped I hadn't misplaced my key on their head--the point being you are busting out instead of in, and I found the ending to be lampshaded more than well enough. So there were nice little subversions.

I'm slightly bummed the author didn't slip in the other stuff they meant to. It feels like the writing could have been tightened up slightly, but then again, I found it tough to cut down my word count below 500. Perhaps some simple graphics would've helped, as a lot of the writing specifies directions e.g. "the window is behind." But this is technical quibbling. I think I'd enjoy seeing 1000 Word Hotel Escape to see what the author couldn't quite slip in.

Well, you got three 500-word entries in the Neo Twiny Jam, and the moderators gave the author their blessing to write entries as sequels of each other and I think the author made a good choice here. Perhaps if too many authors tried this, I'd say "hey, come on, write very different stories," but it acted as a relatively strong baseline, not trying to be to fancy or evoke too many emotions, and the 500-word limits provided balance. It was a good introduction to NTJ for me. But it definitely had its mystery!

You see, I managed to bungle things and read the second part first. As a result, I certainly was left wondering whether there was a breakup or whether someone was dying. I actually leaned towards the breakup and wondered if the third part had reconciliation! And of course I wondered how they met, and the first part probably hit harder than if I'd read them in order.

However, it is about death impending. It's very smooth, and while the interactivity isn’t huge beyond putting in names and choosing a few locations, that doesn’t affect much for me. It is about, well, people finding each other and living a life together, and their hopes for the beyond.

Re-reading it I was amused to note how it seemed to incorporate fantasy tropes (going out on adventures) as feeling like, maybe, a high-paying job in the real world that required a lot of travel. This was unexpected. I also enjoyed the brief discussion of their one kid much different than them. One generally doesn't think of such things, or you suspect character classes stay in the family, even if you need one of each class to go on a quest.

A longer word count might've caused it all to get too maudlin. I’m glad the author used these entries the way they did. I think the results were different than they would have been for, say, a 1500-word limit jam. It all felt well-paced and balanced. While the maximum interactivity may be picking the passages up after a week away and trying a different one first, I indeed did so. I enjoyed sketching the lives of the letter writer and receiver together in my mind, filling in the holes.

Ah, fitting in. All sorts of works can be written on it. How to do so. How fitting in may actually be bad. How it was nice, but you need time to yourself. JaNH looks at this--I read the author's blurb, but on replaying, I forgot it came about after research on autism. Of course it's awful to laugh at others' attempts to blend in if they just, well, want to blend in. But when they're trying to infiltrate a social order to disrupt it later, we should feel free to go ahead.

This is a brief humorous explanation of humanoids trying to fit in to human culture. But there are so many ways they fail, despite having done extensive research. The names don’t sound right. And ... well, no matter how much research they do on blinking, it fails.

Blinking is so natural to us, yet we can’t explain it. We don’t even know we do it, and it’s painful to keep our eyes open.

There’s a neat trick where you click on an eye and it opens up more text. It provided some much-needed color, though having a whole box of eyes blinking seemed like overkill. (Don’t click the big eye at the bottom.)

However, everything else was pretty effective. It’s easy for me to say “yeah yeah another game about fitting in,” but this offered genuine humor. There’s a chance to fail as well.

One thing about writing about fitting in, though, is it can be danged if you do or don't. If it fits in too much with the existing literature, it doesn’t push the envelope. And if it tries too hard to be its own thing, well, it isn't even TRYING to fit in, amirite? This is where individuality comes in, and while I think JaNH's text effects were a bit overdone, I found it fits well in the jam without surrendering what makes it itself, despite being about, well, not fitting in.

A side thought on playing through: some groups I felt obliged to fit in, not because I wanted to, I never realized that some people were, in fact, acting at “being themselves” but imitating their favorite comedians or celebrities or actors from a movie or even book characters. They seemed natural at the time. But they had done a research of sorts, too, like the aliens in this story, and of course they couldn’t tell me how to fit in, because it would blow their cover and show them as not original!

Over the years I've moved from "I guess I have to fit in here or somewhere" or "if I can't fit in here, where do I fit in?" to worrying less about this sort of thing. JaNH captured my former fears without, well, making me captive to them.

The Single Choice Jam allowed for one actual choice of branches, with the rest being just pushing through with the equivalent of "next." That's not to say you had to put a choice of two or more paths in, though of course it'd be a risk to.

CFDM takes this risk and is, I think, successful. Perhaps you have little in common with the narrator. You're not a member of any group that's discriminated against. But it's still easy to understand their helplessness, as well as the final climax, which wasn't dramatic but I can see how it's something you might be dreading all evening.

The setting is a family dinner where banal things seem to be discussed. Except in context they are not banal and you have a right to feel very ugly listening to them. Family members are either negligent towards this or actively trying to make things more uncomfortable. It's not a very long dinner, thankfully for the reader, and it doesn't need to be to get the point across. The final bit hit home for me, as it forced the narrator to go along with the whole charade of normality one last time. I found it effective. I suspect most readers have been in the narrator's position before. The alternative seems to be that they have not, because they have created that sort of position for others, which is obviously worse.

This entry was written by someone looking to try Inform for the first time after showing they were handy with Twine and narrative things. It's neat to see this crossover on general principles, being someone who used these jams to look into Twine after learning Inform. And I think it adds a new perspective--based on other potential entrants' notes, I don't think the way through the game would've been something someone experienced with Inform would've gravitated to. It's relatively simple, but it hits a good spot between standard Inform verbs and what to do in this sort of situation.

Also, given the restrictions of the comp, it seemed like a great time to learn something new--"don't do too much," a general good idea for learning something new, is really baked into the comp rules. Plus you have a buffer or ready-made excuse if things don't work out. CFDM did not need one.

I've had a few painful family dinners of my own, with the whole "just sit through it" ethos. Sometimes it would be rehashed afterwards once guests left, with "perhaps you could have participated more, maybe next time, they'll think something is wrong." The author mentions they hadn't had such a dinner for three years due to COVID, which is a small mercy for all the bad things that happened, and I was grateful to be able to add their perspective at this sort of thing to my own. I can say "yikes" now without going into a tailspin, and I appreciated this from CFDM, and I hope the main character gets there sooner than I did.

What They Don't Know, as part of the Single Choice Jam, gives the player three options at the start: that of Lady Highchester, who controls the Highchester family fortune, or Chelle, her daughter, or Ara, daughter of the late vineyard keeper, recently brought in as an alternate heir. This bit is as ominous as it sounds: it all but says "I'm not saying you're not fully adequate, I'm just saying." The reader can see each of their stories and piece together what happens.

WTDK is a short, tidy piece, but it's rather discomfiting for all that, which given the content warnings seems like the intent. It's not overdone, though. You might say, who cares about rich people's struggles anyway? Usually not me. But we see nuances in the characters behavior. Shelly and Ara have grown to like each other, and they both wonder why Lady Highchester is doing this. Each would feel discomfort in leaving the other with less than she deserves.

I chose Lady Highchester's path last, and I think this would be the best way to get the most out of the story. She's the one with the power, after all, and I think it's most tense to see the reveal of what she is doing and why. There are unintended consequences.

On reading the three characters stories, it's pretty clear to me that Lady Highchester really had no chance of getting what she wanted, or seeing what she wanted, and her meddling was the sort of thing that messes up basic happiness for other people. Though she doesn't lash out, no response would really have been good enough for her. It reminded me of times I've been in friendships or in groups, where they might say, hey, this really is better than those old bums, right? Or even in an honors class where we don't associate with them there regular-class rabble. And I felt there was no good answer, or I would get nailed for being too enthusiastic or not enthusiastic enough. But of course nothing was ever enough.

That's a danger of having power and using it casually, of course. You use it, and any positive response you get, you don't know if people are really doing out of the goodness of the heart, even if you try to construct things that way is an experiment. Lady Highchester's power play is far more subtle than, say, the classic scene from Goodfellas where Joe Pesci's character says, "What, do you think I'm haha funny?" Or when Henry is applauded for not snitching, but of course there's still distrust throughout the crime syndicate. But it's tough to tell which hurts worse, if you're the target. Under-the-hood stuff leaves no immediate intense burn but lasts longer.

From the character sketches I suspected that Lady Highchester never really considered that her experiment might cause unwanted effects. And I think the author clearly showed this is not okay without moralizing. Or maybe I'm just glad to see the sort of thing that reminds me of unscrupulous people from my past who expected loyalty-just-because and had ways people could show it. I felt bad, being kind of a pushover and all, that I couldn't show said loyalty.

It's easy to reject or laugh at or be disgusted by loyalty oaths or hazing or whatever. The subtler things are, the trickier it is, because we all have moments where we want to test friends' loyalty, generally when we aren't at our best, and we can't isolate that variable, so to speak.

Of course, we similarly can't prove that this paradox is a thing, so when stories like this come by, it's as close as we can get, and it feels good enough. We see how and why Lady Highchester is wrong, and that helps us be okay with not liking our own Lady Highchesters as much as we should on paper.

I have fond memories of grinding away in RPGs when I was much younger, but all the same, I don't want to do too much for that again. There are other goals. I'm no longer just grateful computer RPGs exist. Zenith is not a grinding RPG, or even close to one, but it brought back those memories. It helped remind me what I liked about them.

In Zenith, you simply climb up a mountain. The rooms you go through are designated at random, and sometimes in these rooms, you find special items. Then, at the top of the mountain, you have a chance to chase your real quest, to fly to the "real" tower. You can just take a cheap glider back down the mountain if you think you're not prepared enough, and the game gives you some idea of how far along you are. The penalty for failure is losing all your items. The more items you have, the better chances of success.

This usually takes several times, and at first, you're not sure how many items could be in the backpack. You only know how you feel based on the place where you're given a choice (fall or jump,) this being an entry in the Single Choice Jam. Eventually you'll get to where you're not getting new items. That's a clue jumping may be a good idea. It's not hard to go back up the tower, as you just mouse-wheel down and click the link at the bottom. I sped up, so things seemed to blend together for me, while I noticed the room descriptions themselves were generous, with the exits different. There's a paradox here, of course--you want to get back up the tower quickly, but go too quickly, and you have less hope of finding new items to help you make your jump!

So mechanically Zenith can be expressed as "just keep clicking until you have enough items," but that's really unfair. First, the writing is too good, and second, I became conscious of several things while playing, both related to play and not. One was that even during a short grind, my mind wandered a bit as I quickly said "hmm, give. Items. Now." But there were others, and you may think back to lyour own long-term can-I-or-can't-I because-it-is-there accomplishments you had.

My other goals were getting a certain rating on a chess website (did I study enough? Jumping might mean pulling an all-nighter and possibly failing and giving up on chess for two weeks.) There's more random stuff than you'd think there, based on opponents' relative strengths and openings and so forth.

There was also my city's bike-share program, where you can ride for free for 30 minutes between any two docking locations, but after that, you get a charge. So I had a goal of making it between two seemingly distant locations without having to dock and start another ride. I would get closer, and finally I could do it. There was that faith in the final leap, when I didn't need that alarm saying I'd been riding for 25 minutes, so I'd better dock soon..

I wound up playing Zenith a few times more than I anticipated, because first of all, there's a high score listed at the end, and I managed to mess things up and not put my name on. (I thought I had to hit enter, instead of ... as happened through the game ... clicking on "enter your name." The author kindly obliged me by adding a feature.) But even if they hadn't, I wouldn't have felt my time was wasted. Obviously you can overdo the description but it wasn't, here, and if the descriptions were dry, perhaps my mind would not have wandered so productively. Even if I didn't know the strategies and number-crunching, it still reminded me of other times I was pretty sure I got things right, and other times when I really should have been sure I got things right, but I didn't jump, because I was a bit scared of other things that didn't work out.

Zenith reminded me, too, oddly, of Dragon's Lair, where you had those three parallel trips through the castle before meeting the dragon. That was more deterministic, but the randomized bits still scrambled things well enough that replays were fun and surprising, and I felt like I was navigating the randomness, which I don't feel in real life sometimes. Or it could just be like building levels and items needed to win a boss fight, or even memorizing a poem ("Do I remember how all this links together?")

It's a tricky thing, writing something that efficiently condenses longer works without getting too brief, and everyone's sweet spot will vary. But it worked for me, and rather quickly. It's one of the few Single Choice games that used randomness, and I think it did so very effectively. It could be done in other contexts. For instance, you could have a "prepare for a marathon" game where all sorts of factors on the day of the race could affect things. But the choices would be hamstrung and maybe artificial. (Eat nutritious or not? Train too much, enough or too little? And so forth. How much are you willing to put work and social life aside? The choices feel artificial, stated so. You know what the game wants, so it feels like a loaded quiz.) Perhaps even having Zenith with "you can go left/right" would be artificial. The first time, after failing, it was neat to succeed. On replaying Zenith I had that faith the RNG would work out in my favor even after not getting items on an early trip through. And it reminded me of times I thought or hoped I'd tweaked life's RNG in my favor to get things done. But I also saw how, once I succeeded, I thought "I'd better not fail--I need X items!" (I encourage you to find what X is.) It was empowering and revealing in unexpected ways. I think this was probably the author's intent, since they avoided moralizing and such. It seems like it could help push you away from some mindless RPG-based game (say, on Facebook) to realize, no, THIS is what I really want, if I go look for it.