Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.

Priceless Vase Adventure (TALP), by Robert Szacki

This is a small ten-room game where the object is, well, to find a priceless vase inside a hotel. There's no huge storyline here, beyond that you are named Anthony Smith and are in need of money. You have a coin to start.

The puzzles to get through are, for the most part, trading. The trading doesn't make ultra-rigorous sense if you put your critic hat on (I still maintain that most people would rather eat a sandwich before playing sports than soup,) but if something is listed separate from the room description, it's important. There is even one dark room and one dark item. You can quickly figure they're related and you can use a light source–and that doesn't involve taking the lamps that are scenery.

You wind up having to guess two verbs along the way, which are not hard, though in one case, I tried to play it safe by adding a noun, e.g. EAT FROG instead of EAT, and the parser rejected it. Which was inconsistent with before when USE X didn't work, but USE X ON Y did. That said, the puzzles were fair.

ADL is a bit ancient, and as such, it doesn't naturally understand stuff like implicit nouns, like Inform dies. The confusion wasn't game-breaking, but this was frustrating in particular at the end, where I was in a slight "did I do this/try all possible combos of the command?" fog. In fact, at the end, I needed to spell something out, and I got pinged at first for not doing so, but then I remembered how to use the parser–because I'd seen it before. I don't know if ADL has this implicit-noun capability. We take it for granted.

This feels like a step up from the author's previous ADL efforts. The dark room provides some mystery, and the NPC interactions give the hotel some life, and the verb guess puzzles provide a good and very fair introduction to going beyond the basic commands. Stuff like double-dipping on important commands (e.g. taking something twice) is rejected, too. I guess my problem is that I was able to solve the puzzles because there was nothing else to do, and since the game had a solution, doing X had to be it. So I wasn't left as fulfilled as I could've been. And I wish more scenery could have been implemented.

This all feels fixable, though. The author mentioned he planned to tighten up certain things, and he ran into the deadline. And I've been there too.

With an author name like Rex Mundane, and a well-worn situation such as making a sandwich, there are always a few worries. Has it been done before? Is it trying to be too wild and silly? Is it trying to be too "ha ha I wrote this in under 2 days so go easy on me there, pal?" There are all sorts of pitfalls, and so I walked into PJTA thinking, okay, maybe this will be straightforward. Or maybe it will go off on a tangent.

Or worse, it could be the sort of game that picks you apart for performing Every! Single! Step! to make a sandwich. I had this in sixth grade. There was stuff like taking off the lid and so forth and putting the knife in the peanut butter, and the teachers did all they could to show you it wasn't quite like that, or you missed a step. It was painful. Even though I enjoy proofreading and (on a good day) finding bugs in my own tricky code, this annoyed me terribly.

Thankfully it avoids the long list of instructions approach (yay!) and manages to combine straightforwardness and odd tangents well. It's a good fit for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, because it combines the two well enough to make me laugh. It's not a huge game, and it's not super-ambitious, but I had forgotten I'd set my phone's alarm an hour before looking at it. It was for a cool-down timer for another Internet game I wanted to chip away at. When the alarm went off, I was most of the way through, and my reaction was "silly phone, I don't need to do that right now."

So I was engaged. PJTA hits the usual riffs on adventure games, but they're varied enough, and deep puzzles or plot aren't the main focus. It is a text adventure tutorial, and not just the one that tells you in detail how we wrangle parsers around here, then forces you to wrangle with said parser to gain street cred. It tells you more or less what you need to know, and when, except for a couple verbs you need to guess. Then, it gives more than adequate hints, including one with an NPC who yells at you irascibly until you get it. That was an unexpected humorous twist.

So you may guess making a sandwich isn't all there is to the game. I don't want to spoil it, not because it has a profound moment you'll be mad was spoiled, but because the author organized it with enough care that we could be surprised and laugh as we follow the shaggy-dog story. It's bigger than it seems, as you get out of your kitchen, and you visit your living quarters and beyond. Well beyond. There are many other elements you wouldn't expect, and maybe they are generic elements for fantasy adventures, but they're thrown together for comedic effect.

This is not the first text adventure to get all meta with relatively pleasant and silly jokes, and it won't be the last. In IFComp, people might be tired of this straightforward approach, or it might need a more detailed payoffs. But one pops up every few years. The last one that comes to mind is Mike Gillis's This Won't Make You Happy from IFComp 2020. The same level of meta-humor and story length but definitely very different stories! Also, I like how PJTA gives you a different item to find depending on which part of the sandwich you look for first. The puzzles seem the same, but it's a nice touch nonetheless.

It's pretty clear PJTA is winking at you to join in the joke and see where it goes. There's nothing profound, but TALJ 2023 would be lesser without it, and given that it was the first game I played, it was very welcoming indeed. And while on the one hand a story with emotional depth will almost certainly beat it for first place, it feels very much at home in TALJ.

I've played a lot of Garry Francis's games and enjoyed them. They always seem to have a general crowd appeal to them, relying more on the interesting puzzles than the characters. For instance, Kenny Koala is a fun game worth checking out if you haven't, and all the animals you talk with are fun and add to the environment, but you don't do much with them besides give them items to make them happy. MoWH seems to pay a lot more attention to the characters. They go places or restrict you. Maybe he's done this and I forgot, because he's written a lot. But I think the whole conceit of MoWH is very appealing: you are Ian McKenzie, and you get kicked out of class, as 13-year-old boys do, and lo and behold! You have the school to yourself. A perfect time to find missing treasure that will make it financially stable. Especially since this time, your stunt might get you expelled, unless you have evidence of good behavior elsewhere.

I was a bit worried when I read MoWH's summary, because if there is a lot of treasure, then perhaps the school is necessarily very, very big. Which means the game might be exhausting. Maybe you are worried, too. But thankfully, in the spirit of TALP, it's under control. I lost track between 15 and 20 rooms, because I was able to hold it in my head, and it was pretty clear some rooms weren't useful. (That, and I checked with HINT, which is handy for making sure you're done somewhere. Perhaps for future authors, another command that tells only if you're done here would be even nicer. Cragne Manor had its coffee cup. But for a z5 game, this is great.) It still feels big enough to be a school, though. Just stuff like having one hundred lockers in a locker room and needing to find the right one (twice) and some general hallways and a service elevator makes enough to hack through for a satisfying adventure, but you're not going to get stuck anywhere.

And I really like that you spend more time with an NPC than usual in one of Garry's games–here a janitor moves around impressively for a PunyInform-sized game and gets a lot of attention without seeming too wise-old-father-figure. There's a small part where you have to go back to ask him for more help, and he gives it, and it was surprisingly hard for me, not because one shouldn't repeat things in adventure games or be expected to, but because Ian generally has caused trouble and doesn't need to bug the janitor, and there's another adult besides his teacher who impedes you slightly. The 13-year-old awkwardness comes through!

The puzzles? Well, they seem more straightforward than usual in Garry's games, and that's appropriate given this is a TALP entry. There are a lot of tropes. There are locked doors and drawers and an apparent dead end in a basement, with a secret passage behind a secret passage. In a way, it's been done. There's a safe, too, and finding the combination is strongly hinted. Amusingly, it's one piece of information you do remember from class, so it all makes sense. You won't have to break your brain.

I think MoWH did a good job of establishing tension despite a generous helping of tutorials and hints if you want them. And one thing it reminds me of, too: a lot of Garry's games rely on puzzles that experienced adventures may be acquainted with, and yet at the same time I haven't noticed a lot of repetition or overlap between games, which is impressive in a general sense.

I remember the author's Sentient Beings as one of the highlights of the first TALP jam. It's quite good, and if you're having withdrawal after finsihing this year's entries, you might want to go back and look at it. It's a scavenger hunt, like Midsummer's Eve, but there are fewer things to collect and more abstract puzzles. With SB, there's no doubt you'll get things done. You have 24 total specimens to find and can only carry 6 jars, so you can go back and forth a bit. There are a few verbs to guess, but they're hinted directly elsewhere. It's fun and cute and well done.

Midsummer's Eve is a lot less solitary, and you are a kid who vows to win your town's treasure hunt this year in a town full of magic. The treasure hunt features 12 clues, nicely laid out so that kids hunting for clues can find them and put them back or, in the case of one gift item, everyone gets one, because it's the sort of item kids like. The clues aren't strictly ordered, but you need tone to get another, sometimes. Clues 1-7 build to finding clues 8-12, each of which gives a piece of a passcode you tell to win. There are even other kids walking around, but you're way faster than they are. Still, you can ask them for clues! In fact they're cute in a clueless sort of way saying "I think you have to (X)." One was still struggling on solving zero clues when I had ten. I kind of felt mean pumping them repeatedly for clues, or maybe I was chuckling a bit inside at them, once again in touch with my inner ten-year-old. (For silly features, I think it would be cute to have a no-badgering difficulty level where you can't ask for too many hints at once!)

ME uses the Adventuron parser in interesting ways. You have to order specific food in some cases e.g. ORDER HAMBURGER WITH MUSTARD. The garnishes matter to find a few clues. There's not a lot you have to intuit, which is not surprising, because really abstract puzzles would be mean to thirteen year olds who just wanted a fun treasure hunt. And while some of this is, for the reductionist, just following instructions, it's all tied up in things like climbing mushrooms or interacting with a mythical beast. But there are also commoner pleasures such as riding a Ferris wheel or playing carnival games. These don't interest me-the-adult, but I really enjoyed being able to play along as a kid who thought they were wonderful or mysterious or whatever. Also, in a thoughtful fun twist, the specific food you order? Well, you can only carry one at a time, but you can just eat it and order something else. Everything is free. Yay! You literally have an excuse to eat until you're sick, or until you can't avoid being sick tomorrow. That's what festivals are for.

The graphics are all very good and add to the mystic feel. I read on the Adventuron server they were AI generated but given my attempts to create cover art with AI, it's a lot trickier than saying "Okay, draw a big picture with this that and the other." In fact I had a weird bit of discovery where one location appeared to be plain, but lo and behold, on revisiting it, the graphic actually loaded this time. It added to the whole magic feel. I usually knew to wait for Adventuron graphics to load, but my eagerness to explore and beat the other kids out betrayed me for a bit.

There's also a mystery intertwined into all this. I wound up restarting in order to actually get a transcript, and I solved the side quest (or a chunk of it) before finding the final clue I hadn't. But I had fun rolling through things and forgot to check off on the secret items. This speaks to replayability. And the layout is very nice beyond the graphics. You can either click on CLUES (to see the clues–as an adult, 12 clues is a lot to juggle) or MAP or just type those commands. You forget this sort of thing once you get used to it. I was also surprised you could mouse-click on the help menu. This isn't cutting-edge GUI for AAA game studios, but it's so welcome for independent games.

I really enjoyed my experience with ME and I suspect you will too. There are a lot of things that just felt right, such as a grouchy man distracting me from taking an item I needed, and I missed the obvious way to get around that for a bit. It has a good economy and balance for its rooms, too. By that, I mean that there's usually only one thing to do per room, so even if that last clue evades you, you can focus on rooms where you've done nothing yet and potentially even cross off ones where you have, and with the rooms mostly in a figure-eight, you never have to backtrack too far. The descriptions are robust enough that this process of elimination works and you shouldn't get bogged down, wherever you might get stuck. Also, the clues are ranked by ease of discovery, which is a nice gesture for both 13 year old kids and whoever is playing this game.

So it's a well-balanced game, and you need/get to do a lot of neat things to find all twelve clues. Oh, and you can't cheat and tell the answer right away, even if you know four of the pass-phrase's words and can guess the fifth.

Like Rex Mundane's PJTA, I was worried this might get too meta, or meta in the wrong way, and just like PJTA, I was glad to be proven wrong. The meta-fiction bits here have, to my knowledge, not been done before, but now I saw them, it feels like someone should have. And it also feels well-paced. What the author does could easily come off as forced. I think it might have the most effective tutorial segment I've seen in a TALP competition, as of 2023. The tutorial is integral to the first part of the game, and it flows well.

The object, for the first part, is simply to visit all the rooms, which is refreshing, as it takes a lot of the pressure off the player to do stuff right away. But of course it's not just a matter of mapping things out. The rooms are named after parser concepts. The first one is, appropriately, You Are Here, and other rooms include examining yourself, other objects, and locks. There's a side room. You have to navigate darkness to get to the real adventure. There's even an insta-death, which is pretty well clued and reversible. You don't quite get eaten by a grue.

I think the author deserves credit for (likely) resisting the temptation to hat-tip classic Infocom games. It would be fun for those of us experienced with parser play, but that sort of inside joke would ruin the welcoming atmosphere ParserComp seems to want to give. And also, it seems that the lack of really wild or catchy items or room names at the start is a design choice and one I agree with. While it might be interesting to see a more advanced tutorial discussing longer commands, or even one that goes through the history of Infocom games, that also might be outside of the scope of TALP. But IATA has opened the door.

The second part is a more classic adventure. Mystery builds and fits together at the end. There are keys and a safe and all sorts of things to examine. You can also type CLUE if you get stuck, which worked well for saying "don't bother with this location." The trickiest part for me was heeding the note that you can EXAMINE twice, but for the wrong item. In the end, there is a treasure to find, sort of.

It's impressive that the author took a bunch of standard adventuring items and put them into a game that feels like a really good introduction for people who might have trouble with parsers. I've played too many parser games to be sure of this, but certainly I had many "I wish I'd known that" moments when starting out. And while stuff like Zarf's reference card is certainly handy and well thought out, you can't really experience reference cards.

TALP is a great niche for this sort of thing, and while it would have been a good IFComp or Spring Thing entry, I can't imagine either of them inspiring it. Its focus and experimentation revolve around teaching. While IFCom and Spring Thing of course encourage experimentation, the experimentation there is more literary or with visual effects. And, of course, the specter of past not-so-robust homebrew parsers may make people think "oh no."

In TAIA's case, though, everything is pretty clearly spelled out. And it seems to anticipate mistakes the player may make. For instance, near the end, you have to guess a number, and one might be wrong, and it has a useful response to this. That doesn't make or break the game, but it was one of those "aha, the author really understands how not to frustrate the player" moments.

That's not to say TAIA neglects aesthetics. Colored text makes it easy to focus on what's important, and the text is consistently grouped nicely above the parser prompt, though I would needle the author for a change post-release. They talk about the EXAMINE command that can examine scenery – but it would be neat to have a different text style for scenery that could be examined, or an option to toggle it, much like the game had the HELP NUMBER option to toggle noting how many rooms you'd explored.

TAIA is done well. It teaches without being pedantic, and I like the ramping up into the main adventure, which was fun, too. You could even, if you want, say it doubles as a tutorial to make an adventure.

This looks like a first-time complete game from an author who had, as of 2023, some basic game elements and a partial one. So they knew what an initiate to text adventures might have had trouble with. Not only that, they've executed something that would work well on its own or as a fit for TALJ. First Encounter is a brief horror tale where a ghost of a woman appears to you, and you follow her. It's not quite clear why she appears, so there's some mystery.

However, you learn soon enough, because FE is relatively on rails. The experience was effective for me. There aren't many puzzles beyond finding a light source and leaving the house the right way. Locking yourself outside to follow ghosts with uncertain motives willy-nilly is just a bad idea and, in this case, taking precautions heightened the tension for me. There are also a few directed-verb-guessing puzzles. Here I'd suggest the tutorial might go on a bit longer. I really don't know if Adventuron has something to look at the input and say, for instance, if someone has a kazoo and people type BLOW KAZOO, "this is a relatively simple verb." But if it does, that feels like a tap-in for a post-comp release.

Saying the author didn't try to do too much always feels like a backhanded compliment because it kind of implies they shouldn't have considered reaching higher, or maybe they should not do so the next time. But here I hope it is sincere, because of the increasing scope I saw in their itch.io submissions, and it feels like they're ready to make another jump soon, if they want. Too many people, some with considerable skill and knowledge, shoot too high and wind up with nothing. I think TALP really helps with that--you'd better have an excuse to do too much! And one problem with a too-elaborate game is that it can exhaust reviewers and judges for the next one, though of course too many that lack details make us look for more exciting stuff elsewhere. And of course there's a balance between self-interest and not hogging the oxygen. It feels like EF made sure it did not hog the oxygen, and the author can and should be bolder with their next game.

FE works particularly well with TALP, as it took on a good subject and good atmosphere that forced it, or gave it an excuse, not to do too much. In this case, adults were sleeping and you didn't want to disturb them, which meant you couldn't go walking through the house. It may be the shortest one you play through in TALP, but that's more due to very sensible, logical cluing and an economy of use. There are few red herrings, if any.