Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Feathery Christmas replaces Santa's sleigh and reindeer with, well, pigeons. It's a cute, small story, and the puzzles are mostly abstract. Larry, the pigeon leader, needs you to feed his flock, and then you need to find a secret code in a church to release them to deliver a package. It's a bit tenuous, as are many logic puzzles (truthteller/liar and a general logic grid to decide which pigeons haven't been fed,) but it also has easy and hard mode, where the puzzles vary. The replayability was welcome, especially when you needed to find the shortest way through a wind tunnel with houses on easy mode, then the longest on hard mode. It's not super-robust, but it's more than competent, and the pictures are, well, legitimately artistic.

Having played on both easy and hard mode, I noted that besides the abstract puzzles, the item-trading you needed to do to get a ticket to the church was identical, as was acquiring bread. You also had a book that translated to and from Korean, and again this was cheery, but given that I don't know the Korean alphabet, I didn't get the full effect. There's also a puzzle of how many times to ring the church bell--again, reading the books you trade back and forth will show you this.

That said I really enjoyed the final puzzle where you guided a bird east through the screen. There are wind gusts that push you east to speed you up, until you bump into a house. The quickest solution isn't immediately apparent, and the slowest one seems almost counterintuitive. It's a fun, original bit of calculation that never feels like busy work, and there's no pressure either. You just keep trying again. It's one of those moments that shows potential for a great deal more, and I wound up thinking more about this puzzle than the rest of the game. And, well, it fit perfectly in with the theme of pigeons flying, while the logic puzzles for feeding bread didn't quite mesh. It was a neat conclusion. If the author worried this might challenge the player too much, well, I for one would disagree and would hope to see more of this from them, as opposed to the vanilla book-swapping and logic-chopping.

I'd have seen FC favorably even without it, though. In the end I hoped for considerably more, always a good sign, and so I was glad I could replay quickly on hard mode.

SANTAPUNK 2076 is a short, cute cyber-dystopian game with a few interesting puzzles. This seems like a contradiction, but it's handled well enough to make a nice short story. You are a deliveryperson for. There seem to be all sorts of references to things going wrong and persecution being a part of life, from "You are Number Five" (-The Prisoner) down to Amasoon Logistics, the Claus-Mishima Corporation and, of course, a gaudy job title: Executive Lead Fulfillment. It's a lofty way to say "you need to deliver a package," but they do keep getting loftier and loftier as the pay gets worse and worse. There are other dystopian touches, such as the McKingdy's fast food restaurant (Burger King and Wendy have been assimilated! However, I reserve hope that Arby's has held out.) I can't speak to the similarities to Cyberpunk 2077, but SANTAPUNK stood well on its own for me.

The graphics certainly reminded me of an upgrade over when I played Neuromancer, another dystopian game (it had message boards and email! Back around 1990!) on my old Apple II. And those felt so revolutionary, because they included yellow, and--well, these are better, and they're pretty much done by one person in not much time. So, very impressive! Hooray technology! Well, aside from the whole "accelerating dystopia" thing. And the puzzles are neat--hacking an interface and, in one case, discovering a really awful password. While this always feels slightly artificial, it's quite believable that people are still exasperated enough with password security that they write dumb ones, and the joke can work in many guises. It does here. You have to forge your identiy to enter an apartment. This opens up an even more worrying mystery beyond "oh no the computers have taken over, and worse, the people who crave power have taken over the computers, or vice versa."

Perhaps the whole message is a bit heavy, but I laughed for all that. The graphics helped soften the message. I wound up with a grade of A for my performance. I felt very proud of myself, despite the information I read that, in fact, the world was going further down the tubes. Well, until I considered the possibility that Amasoon Logistics may have given me the best grade for just shutting up and mindlessly what I was told and not considering the moral ramifications of my actions. (I was just plowing through.) This worried me. But the graphics and puzzles were cute! The game notes noted multiple paths through, and I'd found a quick one, and I wonder what others there might be, and what happens in the big picture if I somehow get a D.

Writing two entries for IFComp is hard, especially when they're different in scope or tone or setting. There's so much bouncing back and forth. And writing your first program in Inform is hard, too. Playing through HKT, there seemed to be potential well beyond "this author lucked onto a good subject and didn't make the most of it." So I may be poking at its weaknesses more than I might for entries that placed in its general area.

You see, the author had written two entries. And it sort of made sense. There's a lot to look at and enjoy in Counsel in the Cave (CitC,) which I think it's clearly the superior of the two, as did the judges--it deserved to finish in the upper half. In HKT the story is a bit sparser: a friend has pushed you into a pit which, serendipitously, is right by a mummified king's tomb. As you walk around, there's a Queen, too, and a sarcophagus. There are no supernatural NPCs chasing you, so you're a bit stuck. There's a nonstandard verb to guess. I was able to, though first I did so in the wrong place.

The tricky thing was, there was so much to take, I thought it'd be a puzzle where you performed a ritual, and it wasn't quite. I can see the author intending it then scaling things back and leaving a few red herrings. Because after I guessed the verb, I found the way up and out of the tomb, through secret passages and other methods. The story clicked, though I wish I'd learned more about how or why your friend double-crossed you. Unfortunately there are a lot of unimplemented and sparsely described items, and when I was allowed to take fourteen candles, I thought there'd be puzzles, maybe a scale puzzle or something. But they just stayed in my inventory, along with other things. There seemed to be many chances to make cursed artifacts affect you negatively, or to note you needed others, but I missed that.

However, the changing map when you figure out what to do adds nice atmosphere. It would probably have made quite a good entry on its own, honed, making everything else scenery. As it was, I stumbled successfully through HKT without a real feeling of accomplishment. I think writing HKT was a good risk to take, even if it didn't pan out, and I'd like to see the tomb and story fleshed out a bit more.

I really do recommend playing CitC to see what the author is fully capable of. I suspect if they go the parser route in 2023, they'll have something more substantial than HKT. Because as-is, the experiment didn't quite work. I'd have encouraged a post-comp release even before working through CitC and, in fact, with some blind-spots fixed, HKT would be well worth a replay to me. Unfortunately, HKT as submitted falls into some traps we all must, as growing Inform programmers, and it may have caused people to shy away from CitC once people noticed both were by the same author. So if I am being critical of HKT, I'd also like to boost CitC.

Northpole's graphics helped carry me through the rough bits for a really enjoyable experience. It's not the only game in the Adventuron Christmas Jam to do that, but it's particularly smooth and homey with a lot of variety in backdrops and elves to see. all very smooth and homey, and as you play through more, the variety of locations and people (well, mostly elves) drawn is impressive. Both realistic and magical landmarks are drawn with love and care and attention. The plot is strong, too, as you're a disgraced elf accused of causing delays in the delivery process. You need evidence it wasn't you. It's interesting how Northpole claims its own middle ground between Save Bigfoot's Christmas and Santa's Trainee Elf. The high production values helped me blow off a few potentially frustrating verb-guessing roadblocks. I wound up playing in two sittings: first, I got five presents so I could enter the Elves' village I'd been banned from. Then, I got the final two. Each half of the adventure is a distinct experience.

The snowy wasteland you've been exiled to is not too huge--fifteen rooms or so. The room names are generic and even duplicate, but given the images, you'll have enough of a map in my head to be able to wander around. (Besides, I'd rather have the images, if I had to choose.) There are two places that indicate an area behind, both via text and graphics, each with the appropriate mystery. The Elven Pole in particular is neat. There's a snowman tucked away in off to the side as well. You can ASK it for hints, but since it's out of the way, you need to organize things first, which is a neater bumper than "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT HINTS?" And while HINT gives some help, too, you get tripped up if there's nothing to do in a room. Northpole shows the verb-help menu, which scrolls. And it doesn't necessarily help with the verbs you need to guess. And all this has another thing drawing you on: the outside wasteland locations are well-drawn, but the village Bori the Border Elf guards you from, well, you can see how colorful it is at the entry to the village. The wasteland part is beautiful, but the village promises even more, so there's motivation to get there beyond "I want to solve this."

It delivers visually, and the plot picks up, too. Villagers you find new clues about who has disrupted things. The puzzling part is less smooth, but it has more story, with other elves to ask questions of and a neat reversion of the "kid standing on other kid under a coat to get into the movie" trope.

There are two more presents you must find in the elf village area, and I found some fiddling with verbs was necessary to break through. Eventually I found a command I thought I'd tried. There are a lot of cutting implements. AndI was able to see roughly the order I needed to do things in, and what I needed to do, but I had to scour through the village again.

That said, the mystery of a weird fireplace that teleports you if you use the right powders is a neat one--you won't even have to use the parser to mix the right ones when the time comes! And the final puzzle to snatch the final present away is suitably clever and closes a loop on a few plot points.

I thought highly enough of Northpole, despite some minor technical flaws, that I considered writing a map and guide of it for CASA quickly after winning it. I didn't want anyone who played it in the future to get stuck. But one was already there! I wasn't disappointed in the time I spent stuck, and I was glad someone else had played it two years after its release. It's a case where there are about ten verbs to guess, and you should do so 80% of the time. So the math dictates there'll be a hitch, but now you'll be able to enjoy nice story with many magical places to go and even a bit of helper-elf culture to explore without getting stuck. (I almost found myself craving sprouts.) I'd guess a lot of people would be glad to call it a day after getting into the village and seeing their way around, but I was very glad to see that last bit of magic when I came back to Northpole and figured a way to brute-force things.

This one's really short by IFComp standards. I mean, it's shorter than The Lift, which I like to point out as something someone slapped together because IFComp seemed neat to enter at the time, and also to win the game you have to do something kind of hilariously skeevy. The author had other creative pursuits which, on Googling, seemed to go well, and they probably thought, what the heck. It happens. And with 4E, the concept had so much you could do with it, but there's no other way to say it: you bounce around and check out a few coworkers named Edit(h) and Niki and choose one to go on a date with. None work. Thankfully, it's got more than the most minimal on IFDB. I remember the author's name, but it'd be mean to share them. The game simply asked "Do you want to win this game?" Well, it kept the IFDB front page busy for a bit. Even when the author made points I agreed with, it made points so clunkily that I just groaned.

With 4E there's more, and the premise of sorting out similarly-named people is ripe for comedy. I was ready with a sheet of paper to evaluate pluses and minuses. I was about to start writing. Then I chose someone, just to see what happened. 4E ended. I undid and tried again. Same thing. I learned who Niklos Fenyo was, which is something.

The final observations are sparse, with a sentence or two describing your remaining life together, which may be a long relationship or not. It's arbitrarily chosen and can't be changed. So there is not a ton to see here, and given the game mentions it was for Twiny Jam, with some details added, I could have done with more. Well, better a bad date than a bad drawn-out relationship! It felt a bit more like getting free samples of the only thing left at the store, and it's nice, but you're not going to buy it as-is and you know why it was left last. My guess is that the author misjudged the scope of IFComp, and if they'd known it was for potentially longer works, they could and would have done more.

Day of the Sleigh hits several holiday notes for nostalgia and hits them well: it's the 80s, and you are a teen with a babysitting job. Today, you're taking Deirdre, who is more excited about Christmas than you, shopping. (I'm not sure where her parents are. All the same, this potential plot hole wasn't worth scrapping the game over. I actually played in to sessions and assumed you, Elidih, were her older sister.) Deirdre's so excited, she runs off in a department store when the lights go out and gets lost and trapped.

Thus begins the fun. Deirdre's not hard to find, but you can't get to her right away. While it's not a huge emotional moment, I still don't want to spoil it. You can't blame a young kid for getting lost the way she did, and you can't blame Elidih for being exasperated, even when you get Deirdre to cooperate for something important. Elidih understands certain things aren't fun for teens but were for seven-year-olds, and that's good enough.

DotS is not a very big game at four rooms, and there isn't a ton to do, but it's more fulfilling than many bigger games. Your first task is to find a key that opens a door to the south. Tutorial mode works very well here. It establishes you'll need to look under or behind or in a few items, which would get exhausting in too many rooms, but they set the mood well for the treasure hunt. It also establishes its size early. There are stairs up, but you can't go without Dierdre.

This was comforting when I had trouble finding what Santa wanted. What he wants is randomized across games, and a few quick replays suggest there are four treasures, one in each room. So you may get lucky and find what you want right away. Then, once the sleigh is full, you need to get it running and open an exit. This requires a few steps that include contacting the shop workers without, you know, letting them know Santa is nearby. They also have an item you need, but they're not going to give it to some teen.

Despite having only four locations, DotS's room graphics are very colorful, and when you need to move scenery around, the graphics change, though Deirdre keeps her teddy bear and Fischer-Price radio even after escaping. So it feels very full. The variations on LOOK worked for me. They aren't the only puzzle, as there are some guess-the-verbs that also feel eminently fair. A couple need prepositions. And there's funny stuff to try, like giving Deirdre sweets. (She also seems to blame you for the whole situation, and seven-year-olds can get away with that! Given her name's similarity to the author, I wonder if this is a slight mea culpa to a babysitter they liked but they knew they got on their nerves a bit, because being that young, you can't help it. I've been there.)

In the end, Deirdre gets rescued, and I don't want to spoil precisely what happens, though I was glad I saved near the end. It's not earth-shattering, as high drama would ruin the humorous tone, though I do recommend restarting, as there are a few callbacks to the beginning text. I may have missed a few achievements, and that would make DotS well worth replaying to check on, but right now I, in the Deirdre school of thought, am running and grabbing all the Adventuron games in this jam that I can, because I can.

SSoN's title does sound a bit ponderous, but fortunately, that doesn't carry over to the game, which has a great premise. The Summer Solstice Sovereign has refused to wake up the Winter Solstice Sovereign of the North, and until he wakes, the days will be very short and, I assume, cold. This comes to you in a dream. There's a ritual to perform. There's even a romantic interest. It all fits together quite nicely at the end.

SSoN isn't a huge game, with seven locations, and one is locked at the beginning. That's where an archaeologist lives, and you sort of have a crush on her. She helps you later on. But in the meantime, you need to find a way to cross the lake to get to the ritual site, and you're worried people may not believe you. Once you do, and you solve another puzzle, a neat cipher is revealed. Some suspension of disbelief is maybe required, here. You have about ten items in the cipher, which makes for a puzzle translating the ancient text that tells you what to do. And yet the puzzle was satisfying once I put this aside. The ritual isn't complicated or disturbing at all--you just need to find two items and use one semi-standard verb.

So SSoN feels like standard puzzle fare in some ways. And the puzzles do feel a bit puzzle-ish. One item I thought I had rendered useless turned out to be useful, but the in-game hints (I used them a few times--they work well) showed adventure game logic applied, sort of. The TLDR is, every location has a use. And there's one irregular verb that's semi-obvious for another item. There are two items that fuse together, as well, and while the actual combination was a slight stretch, it fit in well with the story. The location pictures similarly don't have a ton of detail--they remind me of Apple low-resolution graphics--but they adjust nicely when you move stuff around or even find or take an item. I don't know how difficult it is to adjust graphics across game states in Adventuron once, but having it work across the game is a nice progress gauge.

In the end, you get the girl and help the Winter Sovereign. I noted that English was the writer's second language, and this showed in obscure ways. It's a case where the translation is logically correct but, well, safe. It doesn't try any tricks, so sometimes the writing seems a bit pedestrian. I'm left feeling this would probably be a sharper, more colored-out story in the writer's native language. Parts feel on-the-nose. But the big idea is original and well-executed and very satisfying. So SSoN shines as not being like the usual "find and give gifts" which I've also enjoyed very much in the Adventuron 2020 Jam. Instead, it reverses something that we probably all wondered about as kids. What if the days don't get longer this year? We understand the physics, as adults, but SSoN reminded me of those fears and more. It also leaves open another angle, where maybe people try to summon bad magic to keep days extra-long, and you need to prevent that. I wound up thinking about that a lot after SSoN. I'd definitely play a game like that from the author.

Wodehouse is one of those authors it seems easy to make a tribute to. The main problem seems to be avoiding too-well-trodden paths or, perhaps, a plot of his you just haven't read yet. And stories with Bertie Wooster and Jeeves seem particularly easy, because we know the formula. Bertie gets in trouble, sees a silly way out, and seems to make things work, until things turn out okay, because Jeeves planned things that way.

I knew this formula well, but the end was a nice surprise. I was distracted by the things I needed to do. And if part of the distraction was fighting the parser, well, I guess being slightly muddled helps put us in Bertie's shoes. Okay, your name's actually Bartie Worster (your middle name isn't Wilberforce, either,) and your butler is Gieves, probably for intellectual property reasons.

But DtHG does so much more than just say "Hey! You like Wodehouse? Here's something Wodehouse-y." Anything could be a bit too verbose, enough to bring back memories of Bertie, and we'd give it a cheerful wave and thumbs-up. Fortunately, the strong introduction made it clear the author knew their stuff, or knew it well enough I didn't mind being fooled.

The airy verbosity extends to useful error commands. Not that you have to have it. You can get rid of some '20s slang with an option, which helps limit one potential source of overkill (people's tastes will differ.) I admit at first the error messages threw me for a loop. But they really couldn't be the generic ones and keep the tone of the story! I think this is the first Adventuron game I've played with really custom error messages.

And there's a risk they may be too cute--I've had games I really liked where parser error messages backfired due to context. But here, Bertie has several random ones that loop. And my favorite staple, "you can't go that way" replacements are delightfully chatty. With each push-back I thought, hey, this is sort of neat, but then I realized there was a huge impressive body of work. Also, the help felt in tune with the 1920s and what Bertie would say. Outside of, well, the direct HELP that just states the main verbs. Bertie would probably be flummoxed by concepts such as a parser, after all!

The plot? DtHG begins in a town square, where you, Bertie, need to make change for a bell-ringer collecting for charity. You are not dropping a whole crown into their bucket! You actually have to make change twice. The game then twists to an estate where you, as a guest, are locked in your room and need to MacGyver your way out--the item descriptions make it pretty clear some of what must be used, and there's not too much.

For the third part, you need to rig things in the house so that Julia, the object of your affections, will step under the mistletoe and let you kiss her. You need to distract an overbearing aunt (a Wodehouse staple) and disable a door. Once it works, but doesn't, your final task seems trivial indeed.

The game is not very big (four rooms, one room, ten room in the three parts of the game,) but all the same there are enough places to visit, and the descriptions are funny. I got hung up trying to bring something messy in the house by tinkering with scenery I hadn't used yet and avoiding a room that had helped me solve a puzzle.

Jeeves is conspicuously absent from all this. But he plays a part.

DtHG, though, has some frustrating moments. The hints are well-done. You can HINT NEXT or HINT RECAP as needed, and Bertie vaguely discusses what he did in the big picture without spoiling things. There are also some guess-the-verb problems. HELP mentions this, and I agree that explicitly mentioning the verbs you need would spoil things, but the alternative is awkward, too! So maybe if there is a way for Adventuron to detect "Okay, you tried for the 10th time to do something with <ITEM>, I'll help you out" that would be useful. Or maybe things could be spoiled if you keep failing a certain way X times. That sort of balancing act's tricky.

I'm quite glad I played DtHG, all things considered. I imagine there's been a Wodehouse game tried elsewhere, and of course the Monkey Island games feel Wodehousian in their own way. And there are games that like to feel Wodehousian, with the 1920s setting and meandering stories I find more fun to read than actually sit and listen to. But based on what I've read, this feels the most closely connected to "Plum"'s works, and it pulls things off well.

The enjoyment I got from Save Bigfoot's Christmas was well worth the struggles I had with the parser. This seems to be more a case of the author still learning Adventuron. It's a tidy, balanced game, in the big picture. You're an elf assigned with verifying who has been naughty and nice. Bigfoot is your subject. He believes he has been nice, but Santa has received information otherwise. That information is out of context, and your job is to find out why.

The crimes are not especially terrible: Bigfoot's hair is near a littered soda can in a national park, BIGFOOT has been sprayed on the side of a house in Hoboken, New Jersey, and Mrs. Maple's children have fingered Bigfoot as the thief of one of her pies. The graphics? Well, it's probably old hat to compare an Adventuron game to Sierra AGI graphics, but this feels particularly close to the good bits without rehashing any old Sierra puzzles, with graphics changing as you make progress, so that is very neat.

These locations are, unsurprisingly, spread out, and you need to go through a teleporter to get to them. In each one, your main goal is to (Spoiler - click to show)get rid of an NPC so you can rummage around the environs to find the needed evidence. The puzzles have a good balance of absurdism. In one case, there's a garage making a lot of noise, and you find a garage door opener. But of course the battery comes from another of the areas! So the puzzles have balance this way. You have to go in and out of the teleporter a few times.

Accomplishing each main task is pretty varied. Sometimes you must do something off-stage, and one (the campground) is pretty complex. There are a couple spare items I didn't figure the purpose of (the toy robot,) but the descriptions and basic verbs managed to clue me into what to do or try.

Brian Rushton's review mentions some of the exact verbs you need. This game pointed to a high-level weakness of Adventuron and maybe parsers in general: for Mrs. Maple's pie, I had an item to use and saw what to use it on, but the verb was tricky. Perhaps having a hint-cue if I typed both items would help, so the player doesn't flail too much. It was more notable than usual, since for an AAA battery, you couldn't type AAA or battery but had to type both. So hopefully this warning lets you know where not to get stuck.

Having that aha moment to get rid of the campers was the high point for me--after that, I had a bunch of wobbles, but the game clued me nicely to make progress inevitable but still challenging. Combined with a small puzzle-maze the game only made you go through once (I'm glad this user-friendliness seems to be more common!) it was clear the author was committed to the player having fun and was willing to offer ways to streamline the pedantic bits. There are still a few that could be sanded. For instance, you need to enter the transporter out and the portal back a lot, so ENTER TRANSPORTER and ENTER PORTAL could, after a try or two, be replaced by IN. Disambiguation for similar items could be honed. But there's nothing to really make you bash your head. SBC, despite being slightly raw, is genuinely uplifting and clever, so the bumps when the parser fights you a bit are quickly forgotten.

Does anyone really like Applebee's? It's a pretty easy target. Maybe it deserves to be. Nobody likes working there. The food isn't great. But it seems convenient enough and not as unhealthy as McDonald's. You could do better. But you could do worse. You could say Applebee's is as easy a target as airline food was. It seems like a good target for someone like the author, who's so consistent about putting out an adventure gaming newsletter, and for light-hearted humor, it does well. It also goes beyond "Applebee's, amirite?" The main thing it hits is advertising. I mean, nobody really likes advertising. Many advertisers probably don't enjoy their jobs or the ethical implications. But over the years I've found ways to be able to zone it out, and I feel that's an achievement. Probably the trickiest was blocking the ads for stuff I didn't need between songs I didn't like at the athletic club. It's the sort of thing they don't teach you in school. But of course, advertisers are always looking for another way to horn in on your life, preferably without you feeling violated enough to push back.

One they haven't gotten around to in the real world is the protagonist's main power, which is being able to see in people's minds and also plant a thought there occasionally. So, yeah, you're getting quickly into "creepily overstepping boundaries" territory. And here I originally assumed the game would be about parlor tricks where the crowd paid money if you were particularly clever! (Of course, if some people just wanted to sit and eat and didn't know you'd be there, that's invasive in its own way.) There's a certain violation of childhood dreams for me, too--mind reading seemed like something really cool, but of course powermongers will ruin it. It's treated as an asset by corporate management, and not just an asset. One you'd better use to their advantage and maximize, or the lack of initiative goes on your performance review. But -- but! The ad agency you work for has ethics. Well, sort of. You'd better not mind-read more than once, or they'd be in legal trouble, and you can't do that to a place with such an innovative business model that helps you make the most of your abilities!

This is of course bad on many levels: one, that your psychic ability is for more ambitious and "big-thinking" people than you to enjoy, and two, that the legal branch of the whole corporate empire has considered all the angles here to provide loopholes if things go wrong, and they've probably cross-communicated with the number-crunchers, and even the lawyers who would sue you for violating other people's space are probably plenty sleazy. And so forth.

This is the scary bit. Fortunately there are funny bits. First, you work for Schtupmeister beer. The world can never have too many parody beer brands--these certainly do more for me than actual alcohol. The four people whose minds you want to invade are, well, imperfect in their own way. There is a cryptocurrency trader. This was written three months before Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX went belly-up, and now that happened, I'm actually sort of disappointed more wasn't written earlier about Cryptocurrency, and, well, it's a bit too easy of a target now. Cryptocurrency, like advertising, drains resources in ways most people aren't aware, and of course, there are some smug, slick types pushing it. But dang if the story doesn't roll out another side quickly!

There's also a somewhat lonely old man, and a waitress upset with her lot in life (I couldn't help but think Schtupmeister would both fire someone for drinking on the job and for, well, not getting enough people like her to start drinking on the job, or right after their job) and a kid who turns out to be exactly the wrong sort of special. Let's just say selling alcohol to minors isn't the worst thing going on here.

You have a small number of turns to try to get each to try your special brand of syrupy beer before Applebee's closes. Do so at the wrong time, and they ignore the instincts you planted in their brain. And this right time isn't obvious for all targets until you've played through UYPPA several times and read everyone's mind. Since it's not too long of a game, this is no burden, and I'm disturbed how nosy I got and how fast.

Once Applebee's is closed for business (my not just saying "closes" may be a minor spoiler) you can catch up with your targets to see if, indeed, your psychic invasions got them to buy Schtupmeister. The indications of whether they drank your specific brand of beer are amusing. For instance, one person has Schtupmeister beer spilled on their shirt instead of what they were drinking, and this pleases you greatly. In all cases, the fallout from people drinking Schtupmeister far outweighs any profits you redirect towards Schtupmeister.

Though you the player already have a pretty good idea, the performance review at the end hammers things home, both how well you did and how awful the Schtupmeister corporate culture must be. You get a combination of rah-rah and condescension from your sales manager no matter how many people you got hooked on Schtupmeister. UYPPA combines a lot of this sort of small horror into a big one.

Criticisms would be that UYPPA hits some low-hanging fruit, though it knows not to beat said fruit into a pulp. It's low-key terrifying, too, and I'm not surprised that an author who has a newsletter of short games understands balance. UYPPA reminded me of all the times I'd been accosted by salesmen, and how hard it was to turn them down, and the effort it took to be polite, because I knew it was their job, even though I knew part of their job was leveraging guilt and hesitation. These four decidedly imperfect souls of targets? Well, for the most part, I sympathize with them. The kid, no. His mother, yes. So this was definitely a successful entry, to me.