Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I can't help but link Into the Sun with two other IFComp entries that take place in space: Crash and A Long Way To the Nearest Star. Obviously, they're all three different games, but this intersected the other two nicely. And I'm aware it's a homage to Aliens, where I still haven't gotten through the series, and I forget what I saw. It's very much its own game. It has a lack of order the other two have, not in the "the author didn't bother to nail down their vision," but in a "you need to strategize here" way. I think when it comes to maximization games, I may've hit my, uh, maximum a while back. There's so much of my own stuff I want to fiddle with. I'd rather maximize my own writing, if not for others' pleasure, then for myself. But I still think it's a worthwhile and entertaining experience, even if I may have a certain amount of second-hand "oh, I can see how someone would do this" joy.

After just playing LWNS, I was ready to start using access cards and so forth to figure how to discover places, and, well, I needed a more violent solution right off the bat. As a scavenger, I'd been looking for a derelict ship to raid, and I needed enough money to be able to refuel and repair my own ship. Here there is no intrigue or politics. It's still a matter of life and death, and a more acute one, because you'd also like to avoid the bloodthirsty, massive, quick alien running around the ship. This is different from politics or sabotage or a cagey AI! Oh, and as the title says, this derelict ship is hurtling into the sun, so there's urgency outside the prospect of a violent end near the monster.

The alien's hard to avoid, too. It stumbles around randomly and persistently, and you have some clue where it is. You need to nearn how to navigate the ship's three levels, with maintenance elevators you can run around. Most importantly, you have a stun-prod with three uses. It will repel the alien temporarily. The alien's fast and powerful. You can't run once it sees you, so you'd better
be armed, though you can UNDO. This isn't a cure-all, as you can only guess if the alien has destroyed a room with a particularly valuable treasure, if it's far away. So you're left with the prospect of pessimism if too many rooms of little value are pristine. This brings a lot of tension as you replay, on top of, of course, the whole life and death thing if the alien is nearby.

I wasn't really expecting this, since the only other timed game with anything resembling violence is Approaching Horde! And that had a lot of humor. Here I had a hard time adjusting to all sorts of things, even getting port and starboard confused! This is my fault, but it also reminded me of how non-parser players might feel when faced with standard parser directions everyone knows. At the same time, I realize it's not a gimmick–there aren't really directions in space! It was easier in Crash for me to adjust because of the lack of ambushes, and also Crash had a smaller ship. Into the Sun's seems just about the right size. There's enough space to get around to start, and then you realize you'd better take the initiative to tear the ship apart before the beast does.

I quite bluntly had no clue what to do, as I don't think in "destroy this" mode. Then I read some other reviews and, aha, I managed to open some panels that were closed. No, I wasn't going to perform some electrician-style miracles here. There was no puzzle with colored wires. It took a while to get used to. And of course there was the random alien. It had destroyed almost everything the first time I managed to avoid it or explore most of the ship, and it was a while before I even got enough money to repair my ship. I still lost, technically, since I had no money for fuel.

This in itself felt like a victory for me, if not for my character. The game's rather intense, and I wasn't necessarily up for that, but I caught myself jotting down strategy. Touches like the service elevator were nice, as were finding spoiled rooms the alien had been to. A-ha, that might be good next playthrough when I know what I'm doing. I also like that I didn't seem to have to maximize everything and there seems to be a lot of latitude to find a strategy for the best odds of escaping. So while I thought I wasn't up to ItS's challenge on the day I reviewed it, in the stretch run before the comp closed, it pulled me through and got me to try some things I wouldn't have otherwise. I really enjoyed having the different stories based on money found, as opposed to just ranks.

An entry that helps pick me up and postpone or cancel severl "I quit" moments is very well done indeed. And that's where ItS fits. Perhaps I'll pull off a few more reviews and read them and see if I can maybe even retire with my haul from the ship. That's a sign of good game design. The author mentioned being inspired by Captain Verdeterre's Treasure, and I actually found the puzzles and story more compelling here.

I used to have a ton of Dover Thrift edition books. They were $1 at a mom-and-pop-ish bookstore. I bought up whatever I could. There were ones I knew, like A Shropshire Lad, and ones I didn't, like The Thirty Nine Steps. The physical book is gone, but an e-copy is on gutenberg.org, which sort of has everything–well, before a certain date. I didn't remember it very well, and I think that's the best choice for a project like this (or Dorian Passer's refiguring of The Lottery Ticket by Chekhov!) Too well-known, and it feels like a rehash no matter what you do. Yes, there's a movie by the same title, so it's known, but it's not overdone.

And I think the project works well. You wake up to notice Scudder, an acquaintance, has been murdered. How to escape and maybe figure out the who and why? This sort of thing lends itself to immediate choices. Whenever I read a book like TNS, I'd think "boy, I'd be too dumb or unobervant to make this choice, or I'd cop out." And though I gave the book a brief re-glance at Gutenberg, I couldn't really track how much was the original source and how much was needed to put parts of the original book into believable branches. Whatever the ratio is, it works. I noted some obvious changes: the cipher key is different in this work than the original book, which makes for a nice small puzzle without having to bang your head.

TNS is pretty up-front about the choices you can make. They're mostly classified into Open, Bold or Clever. There are no wrong ones, and you get the bad guys no matter what. But there's still a lot of tension. The music is effective and not distracting. And I wound up trying to play through while going heavy on each option, and I enjoyed the flavor.

Since you get vindicated in any case, you might then ask, what's the point of going through? Well, the more you observe correctly, the more of a story you get. You get out what you put in. With a bunch of bad or careless choices, I wound up saying "okay, yes, action, good." But when I made an effort to look around, things popped up. This might not work in a standard Twine story, but given that it's a spy story where there's supposed to be pacing, and the start is "someone is dead in your house and you don't know why," this makes a lot of sense–you can stumble through and be glad you're safe and have no clue what's going on, and the action in the meantime is breathless and branched enough that you can have completely different stories despite the core text being there.

So I thought this was a neat trick, though really it's more than a trick. There's enough to piece together that you have a story, but not so much you're confused. It's never self-indulgent, and I don't mean this as a pat on the head and a cookie for people or works that "can't be exciting" or "are efficient, at least." Flashy effects or embellishing critical passages would ruin the mood of the original book, since only the text is modernized and not the in-story environs. I enjoyed both the immersion and the realization that helpful technology would make a lot of the protagonist's concerns moot today (for instance, the cryptogram could be googled, as the hints point out.) True, more technology would make it easier for your pursuers, but it's really good to have a reminder that that's not needed for a good thriller. I retained a lot more images from this than from gaudier works. Perhaps that's because I read the original so many years ago, but I also think, beyond being a good story, TNS is a very neat and successful experiment in seeing how the writer or reader leaving certain things out can expand a work.

STF intimidated me a lot the first time I played through it. The map is not small. But fortunately, when I sat down to take another shot at it with David Welbourn's maps, things went a lot easier. I noticed it placed 8th in the Adventuron 2020 Christmas jam, which left me thinking, "Man, how good are the seven ahead of it?" While part of the low placing may be that some people probably found it tough to get going, that can't be all--there must've been quality stuff ahead. And I'm glad I got to unpack this, over two years later. The advent (heh) of Adventuron had passed me by, so I missed this sort of thing, and I'm glad it's still fresh.

STF is very much a directed treasure hunt. You, as Eldrid the trainee elf, get a list of basic tasks to perform. They're pretty pedestrian kids' toys, the sort kids might not even really like these days. They're certainly not cutting-edge technology. But what can you expect, being at the bottom of the rung? Nevertheless, I was quickly left feeling that these toys would be fun to give and make in a way that, say, potion-mixing games to be strong enough to beat up monsters could never be.

You should quickly find a manual that tells how to make the toys, as well as a list of kids who are getting gifts. And since there are several supply rooms, you can get most stuff done by brute force. You can't run out, either.

But ... but ... the neat part is that you can and must leave Santa's house to find everything. That includes a lump of coal for the one bad kid on the list, which is probably the very easiest task. There are other items that are lying around, which are useful but replaceable, so you might as well take them. There are a few puzzles to get to special rooms. And there's one puzzle I find well-clued: Mrs. Claus asks you to get a box of gingerbread cookies from the top shelf of a pantry. You have a box, and it's not quite tall enough, and neither are you. It weaves in nicely with another puzzle, so that STF is about more than reading recipes and dumping stuff in Santa's sleigh.

Most of us poking around in text adventures have, of course, long since stopped believing in Santa. Perhaps we are cynical about the gift-giving of Christmas, with good reason. But here there are no ads or comparisons of expensive gifts or even stress over sending out holiday cards. (Note: gifts and holiday cards with people we care about are good things. But, well, they shouldn't feel obligatory.) And we may even be cynical about ways to bring the magic back. Somebody's profiting off it, right?

Only for STF, that wasn't quite it. I mean, just finding Adventuron existed was a neat gift at any time of the year, even though I didn't discover it for a few months. It was another nice way to connect that we sort of needed with COVID. And it was also something I dared wish for when younger: something more sophisticated than Sierra games, with lower load time and more colors. And a lot of the special effects, too, mirror something I'd have loved as a kid, and still enjoy now. The presents you find or build have alternating green and red text, which flies in the face of our cynicism about too-gaudy HTML. The pictures of each room are fun. The list of tasks changes them from red to yellow to green. It's cheery and practical, without any of the "Oh, it's holiday time, if you can't be cheery now when can you be cheery?" that it feels more commercialistic holiday routines, or holiday office parties or whatever, inflict on me.

Santa's place is pretty well drawn out, too. Some rooms are clearly blocked off, such as Santa's Bedroom, and there are NPCs willing to help you but also reminding you of your job as a trainee elf. Instead of making you feel small, period, this actually funnels you to your tasks and leaves some wonder of the sort of things you could do or see if you did your job right. And while the interaction isn't intense, there's the feeling you're working together with the other elves. In a neat touch, there's also a metals room for advanced toys where you don't need anything just yet. (You can verify this with your toy making manual.) It hints at perhaps a sequel which, even if it doesn't arrive, is easy to imagine. STF has a bunch of neat responses to custom verbs as well. So it's well-produced, and while I think even a middling game would've left me with unexpected gratitude, having something nice that someone made for free, in their own time, feels good.

Part of me is a bit upset I didn't discover Adventuron right away, but it and the Christmas jam and this entry were waiting for me to play, and I did. I wasn't expecting too much of a gift, but perhaps I was more in a frame of mind to enjoy it than I was two years ago. Also, I was suffering through Adventuron withdrawal--this year's IFComp game had no Adventuron games! So STF filled that void and also pointed me to where I could keep filling it. I've been fortunate enough to take advantage of a few neat no-obligation trial offers this holiday season. I appreciated them, even as I felt slight guilt about canceling them even though all that is baked into the business model. But I appreciate a nice experience like STF, with even fewer strings attached, even more.

I love a good sneaky reference to a popular work I liked, and I love getting the reference–or even forgetting the reference and saying "gee, of course." The title indicated something more idyllic to me than what I got. Because, indeed, one of the endings is very dark indeed and makes a play on the original title. There are several, and since YFL is a tidy little game, you can explore it to see them all without too much trouble. I wound up almost missing one because of my eternal nemesis, timed text. (Note: it's used effectively somewhere else, and I also appreciated the use of colored text.) But I got them all, with help from the walkthrough, and enjoyed it. I'm not ashamed to admit I push ahead a bit, and if I have to look a couple times, I chalk that up to my own haste and obtuseness.

The plot is this: you wake up with a case of amnesia, only knowing there's a neurotoxin in your brain due to explode in 24 hours unless you find a $50000 ransom. That one day's enough, in game time (fixed number of clicks, plus there's that handy undo arrow) to look around quite a bit, but it also indicates bumpers so that the world is not too big. And what do you find? Well, you find your own apartment, and you find you're rich, though you never learn why. A lot of details are left unfilled, which I found a bit favorably creepy. You can also find or steal stuff to sell to the local pawn shop. You can get away with two straight-out profitable activities (your bank account gets you close to the magic number) but there are several things well worth finding and selling. Morality doesn't matter, here, and perhaps the item you get the least money selling would be priceless in any hypothetical black market of famous items found in books. Not only that, I don't believe buying it could ever push you over the $50000 mark. If indeed the author worked the numbers so this happened, congratulations to them!

There are a few ways to end. You can die, you can perform a ritual to get cured, or you can even visit a hospital as long as you get injured other ways. The hospital only takes the neediest patients, so you need to find a way to get injured more than once. The second way was a bit tricky since it required a bit of a walk around the map, which only had ten rooms, but with the repetition involved it wouldn't be surprising if some people had the right idea but then backed off.

This all gives a much more different impression than you'd expect from the title. I expected high fantasy or absurdism. I got a bit of a thriller-mystery. And that doesn't quite match up with the book allusions for me, even with how I saw they were supposed to work against your amnesia. Some do feel a bit shoehorned in, and the game is left feeling mechanical and generic for that part, though--of course you want to see all the references, once you've read a few! I can also see some people not quite getting that different things can happen at different times, even though the world should be small enough you can traverse it more than once before dying. I didn't recognize one or two of the books, too. My lazy side would also have preferred the undo/redo arrows be closer to the bottom where I did most of the clicking, though of course there's always tabs. None of this is fatal, but it certainly let me feeling needlessly slowed. But I liked what I saw, and based on YFL, I have a couple more books to add to my list.

Recon, the author's entry last year, had a lot of moving parts and a backstory that took a few playthroughs to put together. HbT is similar–it's a lot smaller, but it feels more organized, and it's still fantastical, though the fantasy veers toward general abstract stuff more than sci-fi. I think it's a technical step up, but there were a few design choices that made it hard for me to say what I wanted, as quickly as I wanted. I'm not surprised a few reviews rolled in late. There's an unexpected hard break just when it seems things are starting, and people may wonder what's up. Sure, we see the "end" in small print below a separator, but it's not clear how or why until we've played through several times. I thought I'd just walked into a death trap, and I didn't see what I did wrong.

Once I realized that there was a sort of timer where you make so many moves and then just die, things picked up. I was able to plan out relatively modest goals, deciding what part of the city to explore, and how. This is hampered slightly by being unable to reload, at least on Firefox, even with a complete refresh. Fortunately HbT isn't huge.

It starts with a cute puzzle, the sort I felt was the strength of Recon. You are told to choose the shortest stick, and you get a sneak peak, with several different spellings of "stick." These sorts of HTML tricks seem very easy until you have to think of one yourself, and if and when you guess right, you get one of three items. Each is specifically useful at some point in the city, and it's fun to find that point and then do things with or without that item and compare and contrast. I'd consider finding all six such states to complete HbT, such as it is.

There's definitely weirdness about, and for the most part, it works, but I was frustrated that the turn-limit cap along with options such as "turn right/turn left" that didn't give me enough information to work with. So it was a matter of more weird detail, please! You want to feel helpless, but not too helpless. I think some sort of timer can and should be integrated in a post-comp release, and I'd also have liked the cut-outs not to interrupt a choice I made beyond traveling somewhere new. Surely there's a way to incorporate a game flag and also to say, okay, the story won't end just before you get to talk to someone. As-is, it was a bit jarring. It seems like a forgivable oversight, but it's also a high priority when it comes to revision.

I think these issues impacted the replayability the author wanted to give the player and which, with the game text, seemed even more rewarding with a smoother gameplay experience. I might even suggest a small bonus to people who keep replaying, as payback for their faith. Note the timer, not with just a number but with narrative cues, and also maybe fill in details of paths they have already seen. It's tricky, but I think that would combine the whole "you can't explore everything at once" aesthetic with "you don't want to repeat yourself too much." Perhaps I'm greedy, too, but the ability to constantly restart as with Let Them Eat Cake might open the way for a grander vision once you've hit all the six states I mentioned above. UNDO might be a bridge too far, but I'd also like to get greedy and maybe track which branches have been fully explored and which haven't. This is nontrivial coding, but it seems worthwhile.

I was glad to see reviews pour in late for HbT, because it deserved them, but I'd also have liked it to be less forbidding, and the forced game-over probably intimidated people. So I'd be very glad indeed if my main questions became obsolete! How much you should push the player back is tough to judge, but it's not clear to me right away why things should stop completely, and I think people legitimately had trouble figuring things out. Here's where my great enemy timed text would be quite welcome, before a "restart?" link popped up. It would be an appropriate penalty for a player's inattention. There are other solutions, too. Unrolling everything too quickly here wuld probably ruin the author's vision, but I think a compromise would be welcome.

It's hard not to enjoy a game where you play as an animal. And in AMHU, my biggest groan was realizing I'd missed the pun in the title. (If you missed it: highest/heist.) It's a bit less serious than last year's Finding Light, to say the least. You're Anastasia, the Power Pony, and through this brief game you collect evidence after the crown jewels have been stolen, then you go fight the baddies to retrieve said crown. The only other entry I can think of offhand that does this is Peter Nepstad's Slap That Fish, and there, you're fighting with animals as weapons (Anastasia's weapons are her hooves,) and there's more strategy and less to do outside of that. MoHU allows for a good deal of showmanship and style points that weren't my thing, but I was glad they were in there. They fit the comedic tone of the heist.

The evidence collection is not hard. You do it considerably better than Sir Ponyheart or Commissioner Mumblebumble, who is true to his name. Sir Ponyheart understands the Commish, but you can't. The evidence quickly points to some evil llamas, and once you track them down, the fighting starts. This is one case where excessive disambiguation works. It captures that you're beating up a bunch of llamas at once, like a true action heroine.

And the author makes it hard to lose, with the focus on humor and creating a detailed fighting scene rather than intricate puzzles. The main thrust seems to be cluing you how to perform fighting tricks. The fight's on a pirate boat, and anyone who's enjoyed a pirate movie will be able to figure a couple of them and will probably want to. This factors into your rank at the end of the game. I'm not sure you can really lose, as there seems no ending besides the default, where you-the-character leave slightly disappointed, but I-the-player did not. I was amused by it, as well as the in-game good-bad puns. And the title. It's genuinely good-hearted, and my fears it might get too twee never materialized. It seems like a really good type of entry to expose interested people to the parser, too, because it's got a clear vision of what it wants and achieves it without feeling light-weight, and in a fight sequence, well, custom verbs seem almost necessary. I even appreciated the music, which feels like a really neat chiptune tribute and is appropriate for such a bouncy game.

AMHU already has a post-comp release, and I'm glad it did. I can't be the target audience, but that doesn't matter. I really don't care much about pirates, and the bonus content for choreographing pirate or dance moves or similar things isn't something I'd prioritize. That doesn't matter--I wound up enjoying the craft, and it's the sort of entry that makes me glad I at least tried to hit all the IFComp entries. I probably won't play the post-comp release due to general time concerns, but it's cool to imagine the possibilities opened up by the author's change logs, and given the good work they did in-comp, it's good to see they're dedicated to their craft and this won't be the last thing they write.

When I was going off to college, or even just after college, I wish I'd have felt free enough to write something like this. It hits on themes I wondered about, and it cut through many "wiser" adults' assumptions about college quickly. It might not soar for your average reader. But it was in the right place at the right time for me, and I think it discusses the sort of universal themes we need to read more about. Looking back, I'm shocked I can't remember someone else trying for this in IFComp, at least for the years I reviewed. CIC has the interesting, wild choices of Elvish for Goodbye and the coming-of-age of Doug Egan's Roads Not Taken from a few years ago. And it also parallels, in part, Mike Russo's Sting. This was the life of someone who'd been given a lot of opportunity but still had questions about things. It didn't enforce its criticality on you. And tht worked great for me. In this case, Sting's main character is rather more privileged than CIC's, having gone to a prestigious East Coast private school, then to Cal-Tech, so the author labeled that character as privileged. The characters in CIC are doing well, but not quite so well.

The two main characters, May and Jason, have both graduated high school and are going to college: May to Temple, Jason to Lehigh. They're both from Bucks County, which is north of Philadelphia, where Temple is located, and east of Bethlehem, where Lehigh is located. (You may not recognize Bethlehem, but it's next to Allentown, which was the subject of a Billy Joel song. Both were hit hard in the eighties when the steel industry lost jobs. They've made a comeback, and they seem likely bigger than May and Jason's home town.) So there is a literal fork in the road and going in different directions for them both, and it's one that can't be avoided.

As for myself? Well, I haven't been in college for a while, but I must be close to the target audience, since I am sort of between Sting and CIC. I moved from one relatively acclaimed public school near an acclaimed public university to one near a private one (Purdue, up to middle school, to Northwestern,) but I went to classes with a group who figured Temple and Lehigh were nice and all, but you really should do better. I never really felt comfortable there, and I in fact worried that I wasn't really trying hard or didn't want to learn, or whatever, or if I couldn't succeed here, I certainly couldn't really succeed or thrive in college.

As it was, I went to a university that itself probably look down on Lehigh and Temple, even though the Ivy Leagues look down on it in turn. (Side note: it claimed it was tougher than some Ivies. The perils of comparison, which is the sort of thing people told me I needed to do more of!) However, it did have a good creative writing program, which I discovered a bit too late. I wound up trying to take advantage of it, but also feeling like I was an outsider who never quite fit in. I had my chances, and I had my moments, but somehow, I felt like I was wasting the college experience. I see that now I wasn't, and if I'd started earlier, I've gotten a lot out of it. Perhaps saying that I know I missed something and I want to recover it without going full midlife crisis is useful for me. People said college was about asking questions, and of course ideally, it is about opening up those questions which last a lifetime and are worth asking no matter what your career is, or how big your office is or whatever. And CIC's are.

That's my story. It's not quite May's or Jason's, but theirs would have helped me bring things into some perspective even if CIC quickly laid an egg. But it didn't. They asked questions I'd had before I convinced myself weren't really relevant or suited to my skill set or to all the opportunities high school gave me. They were the sort of person I'd have liked to meet in college, regardless of university entrance exam score. I didn't realize not only did other people share similar than me and they're worth having, but you could do so and still do well in classes or whatever. It just required more effort and sacrifice. To be frank, I am a bit jealous that somebody was able to express these thoughts at an earlier age than I was, but hopefully I have the maturity to be glad if I got something out of it. And I got a lot.

CIC presents itself in three parts: Shiloh Hills, Lost on Layers' Edge, and Counsel in the Cave. You can play through any of the three chapters repeatedly, making the interface very smooth. As May and Jason talk, you're presented with choices of how to take the conversation, from fear to hope, and so forth. And I think this is done well, as you often have a choice between two plausible but different emotions, and in the flashback or fantasy scene, the choices are always exciting. I'd like to compare it to a choice-based game that did much better in IFComp, Creatures Such as We, and it took a while to express why CSaW didn't do much for me. There, you had choices, but it felt like the author was constantly saying "C'mon, one of these is good, right? Right?" or mayve they were giving you a personality survey to "surprise" you at the end with a gift you couldn't decline and had to like. Sometimes I related to none of the four choices given. I don't sense a lot of this sort of people-pleasing in CIC, and it was refreshing, because CIC is wanting to be about more than people-pleasing and yet at the same time, you want to fit in somewhere.There was a certain amount of "I'd like to let my mind wander, and not around you, if you please."

CIC let me push back if I needed, or let me blow off the rare choices I didn't care about, so I quickly stopped caring How Good It was or What Its Place in Posterity Might Be. i enjoyed having to go forward with what I picked but also being able to look at the other choice or choices too after too long. I'm the sort of player who can lapse into "okay, I'll just choose the first choice and see what happens." That didn't happen here.

The first part felt the strongest for me, because it quickly brought up good and bad memories as well as fears or dreams, and it let you decide what to dwell on, both as May and Jason. Moondog, an old fisher you meet in act two, feels a bit too old-and-wise at times, with some mystic advice, but once I accepted this was a bit of a trope, things worked better. The third part includes a lot more surrealism, and the thing about surrealism for me is, I can't judge it unless there are clever jokes. I think at some point I was saturated with my own thoughts and just clicking around a bit to see if anything hit me directly. Overall, though, I got the feeling that May and Jason were both waiting for a sign to move on, and at the end, they sort of got one, but they realized they couldn't and shouldn't expect it in the future.

I suspect with CIC there were chunks where I sat back and just heard what I wanted to hear or read what I wanted to read, but I got a lot from it anyway, and it very much beats the alternative. There are works that hope youdo t that, and there are those that let you, and CIC is in the second, which is preferable. I've played through a few times now, and I feel sure I missed something, and I'm okay with that. It means I'm actually searching and interested and don't want to close the door on those questions. There's a surprising amount of wisdom in there for someone who is as old as the author seems to be from their Twitter bio. And I wish I'd let myself try to write something this good when I was their age, even if it hadn't nearly been as successful. CIC quickly reminded me of some former concerns and put other long-term ones in new perspective. I hope this is higher praise than the adults who told me "Oh, hm, yes, you ask important questions. I asked them too at your age!"

Final meta stuff: the author had two entries in IFComp. The Hidden King's Tomb was the less successful of the two. I imagine writing HKT was itself the sort of experience Jason and May both fear and anticipate. They're worried they won't succeed. They wonder what they're there for. They wonder if things are worth sharing. They're worried they won't hit their potential, or their potential has a ceiling. And HKT missing the mark adds to CIC in a way a more successful entry maybe could not have.

We understand that this person is good, and they've shown it, and they just missed the mark, not due to laziness but becaue they took a chance worth taking. They deserved, and deserve, to show up and say what they had to say, and maybe they didn't use their time the best way. That doesn't matter. They've looked for something beyond what was necessary to get by, and they found something or they said, you know, I didn't get all of that, I would like to do more.

We saw last year how Infinite Adventure cleverly added to BJ Best's comp-winning And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, but that was intentional. HKT feels less intentional and more real for all that. Because it's an old saw to say that you should try new things, because so what if they don't work out? It's hard to express, though, just by writing something that doesn't work out. With the author's two entries, we get to see both, and my general feeling is: the author will get their next Inform game right, if they choose to write one, and they did the right thing sticking their neck out or maybe even taking on too much this time. Next time, it won't be too much. But they may have found bigger and better things to do.

It's been a while, but the author requested that people not spoil things, if they figured out what was going on in TOMBs. I still won't, explicitly, but I'm caught between not writing a review at all and explaining why I liked what was going on. And years later, I sort of forgot, and I sort of remembered. Did I only like TOMBs for the novelty value at the time? Most text-adventure RPGs I'd read were a bit too earnest, which helped it stand out. But when I poked through, I was able to enjoy it again and notice the snarky bits that gave me pleasure.

It's sort of a relief, in IFComp, to have something where you can just kill a bunch of monsters for a bit. Sadly, a lot of these entries have little more to offer. But I knew the author knew what he was doing, so I had a Trizbort map ready to go for a nice big dungeon. I would kill everything. I would go in for level-grinding. I didn't particularly want to empathize with anybody, or anything. I'd get to those entries later. In TOMBS, I would do some hack-and-slashing.

But of course I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any secrets! I got the feeling I would need a few, to beat the big bad beast. Reading the book in the library was the first inkling that there was more to adventure than the usual. I remembered the monsters I'd disposed of. I became curious what the ?'s were for. And I enjoyed having "limerence" as a stat, because it's a great word people don't know too much about. You may, but if you don't, it's the concept of being in love with love instead of, well, with people. And it's not an especially good stat for surviving in an RPG. So it sort of clues us into how things aren't quite right. Here we’re in love with the idea of nobility, etc., or improving ourselves through fights, but if we are just sitting grinding at some game, are we really improving?

So the second time through I managed to do more than just kill everything, and I used the previously ???'ed options. Some irony here: I didn't go face the beast for so long because I figured "that would just kill you, right? I'm not strong enough, and besides, I've been doing nice things, so I don't want my fate." So in a way I was paying for my bloodthirsty mentality even when I intellectually knew what to do.

The game made me feel trapped in level grinding, too, not hopelessly trapped but enough to get me the feeling there should be more. It was small enough, though, I was able to reload and see if there really was something else and say, okay, I’m not doing this. So many games are built to get players to keep playing even when it’s not fun, and ToR turns that notion on its head. We need more of this.

As for the final message? Well, it’s one we’ve heard before, but it's been too mushy or melodramatic other places. And it puts your earlier defeats of the beast, and the text from that, in perspective. Looking back, stuff like the chest guarded by bats also clued me, if I’d been paying attention.

So there are a lot of fun lessons in this game we don't realize are lessons til they’re done. And I think that’s very, very good. It's a case of having a bunch of independent jokes that have a 5-10% chance of working or making the light go off, but because there are twenty of them, it will happen eventually.

ToR is not the first subversion of RPGs, but it's one that doesn't shove the observational humor or retread fourth-wall observations in your face. As you explore, evidence piles up that something's wrong, and you can have a good laugh at what you've missed. You may even miss stuff even knowing it's a subversion, as I did on replay. I suspect many people may have missed this and downgraded ToR as just a collection of jokey shticks and feel superior to it and say, ok, maybe the next game will be a REAL game. But it looks like enough people, indeed, got it.

I'm not big on alcohol, in general. I was fortunate to learn quickly that it doesn't work for me, and there were other ways to loosen inhibitions that did more harm than good. Yet as a kid I remember looking at all the drinks in bars and how people might mix them and it seemed like magic or artistry, perhaps even more fun than mixing a root beer float. The reality of bars was drearier, though. I still loved Cheers growing up, but that was much more for the characters. They all had their flaws, especially Sam, the bartender. But it was must-see TV, and my later (slight) experience in bars never came close to that. There were other TV bars, too, such as Phil's in Murphy Brown or McLaren's Pub in How I Met Your Mother or even (if for all the wrong reasons) Paddy's Pub. Again, they seemed more fun than the real thing. Also, there was the occasional illicit game of Tapper, or even Root Beer Tapper, at the arcade, with an amusingly violent end when you failed to schlep brews in time. Then later there were bars in RPG where you found information or new recruits or, perhaps, found experience-gaining fights. That seemed to cover it all. But T3 provides a new perspective: you're an employee who likes where they are, but you want to do better.

The production values for T3 are established early: the "wait, loading" graphic is a neat green snowflakey tesselation on a tan background. There's been a lot of thought put into the design, and it's not just about looking pretty. The whole experience is very smooth, and at the core, it is about mixing drinks, though there's a neat subplot as to why you want the money at your tavern job. And of course the title is very cool. It suggests some rough clientele who dig their knives into the table, just because.

So where does your bartending pay go? What are you saving for? Well, you've got a leaflet about joining an adventure academy, with a 300 coin fee for a course that starts in one week. This all feels a bit fourth-wall. In fact, the scenes at the beginning and end drive this home a bit too much for me, but on the other hand, that's probably my major complaint, and I'm not sure what I'd had the heart to cut out. Overall, T3 fell into the "I was just having fun and really paying attention, so I feel half bad for noticing this missing detail" camp. I recommend you do the same. I enjoyed many moments throughout the game, even ones the author probably did not angle for–for instance, I had a slow internet connection, and so the graphics of the various drink ingredients that appeared behind the bar popped up in amusing fashion. It almost gave the feeling the drinks were about to fall off the shelf, and I think it fit in well with the general lack of organization the author established was endemic to the tavern itself.

The mechanics are simple enough. You're the barmaid, and you mix drinks. Get them right, and you get tipped well. Miss, and you don't. You can decide whether to knock the tavern sign for luck (Roscoe, the owner, gives you a trivial fine) or to leave your tip box out, too. It might get stolen. I made sure to save before making the decision for the first few days, but I got absorbed enough that I forgot later, which is a good sign. (This almost bit me later, but the details are a spoiler.) You have a frenemy relationship with Brom, the cook, and Ez, who serves the food. Roscoe isn't very reliable, but it'd be boring if he was. People play stupid pranks on each other during slow times. Coffee isn't just for the customers.

I played on easy mode, so I was under no time pressure, and I assume the recipes were there for me to take my time with, so I did not miss out. It wasn't just easy mode that made T3 feel welcoming. I particularly enjoyed how certain syrups or fruits would be lumped together. Perhaps this is done behind the bar regularly, but in this case, I think the author nicely avoided clutter. You want it to be busy, but not too busy. The pull-outs for applying garnish were very charming, too, and I liked that I had to use some minimal reasoning to get some drinks working. For instance, there's only a specific section for citrus fruits, but if you're asked for oranges or lemons or limes, you just have to click there. So there's no need for additional futzing! You don't want everything done for you, but it's nice when a game trusts that you do, indeed, get it.

With all this, the first two days, with generic customers, were more than enough to help me adjust to the curve. I was ready for more challenge, and this came (one of those neat moments I don't want to spoil,) and it was pretty clear how this would fit very well into the timed/arcade version of the story. Then there were two special customers. Contrasting their goals with yours worked very well, I thought.

This special encounter helped me scrape by after just five days of the seven allotted. I tallied up my tips, and yes! I had just hit the mark! There were good-byes, and they felt appropriate, as I felt enough of a kinship with my coworkers. But once I'd moved on, I wanted to go back and mess up a bit to see how long things would last and whom else I could meet in those remaining two days, or even how my coworkers would react if I did not meet my goals.

It wasn't until the end of the story that I realized I hadn't used the cognac to mix anything, and I was never called on to use the paper umbrella! As a fan of The Jerk, this made me sad, but now I wonder if adding them willy-nilly might have gotten me bonus coins. The cognac felt like a sort of Chekhov's gun, along with the rattling tip box, and it's moments like this, where something you looked forward to didn't materialize and you still had fun, that make you realize what a smooth, enjoyable ride you had.

T3 established high standards quickly and gave my mind time to wander free. I've often thought of the good-citizen concept of IFComp entry, and sometimes it feels like "you didn't have anything profound to say, and you didn't pretend to! Yay, you!" In a way, yes, but in another way, this is something to enjoy and see things from a different perspective, and you don't need anything profound, and the game never taps its foot and expects you to find profound stuff. You know you don't need tense life-or-death situations to have revelations, or to remember something cool, or to say your own experiences are worth sharing. Plus it reminded me of those baffling bartender books I remembered seeing, and I never actually wanted to mix drinks, but I wondered what was in there. I did find trivia I might like to correct for a post-comp release, but in this case it would be an excuse to generate more deserved publicity. I think it's definitely one of the cheeriest and best-produced IFComp games, and it clearly doesn't rely on its production values only. It's a game about friendship and goals that doesn't get mushy. Part of me wants to try the arcade mode to challenge myself on replay, but the other part is worried I might miss a part of the story I meant to revisit.

Good Grub embraces its limitations as a no-frills Twine game enthusiastically, and I think it does so without going overboard. Teaching facts without coming off as pompous is tough. And with GG, the idea is that bugs are good to eat. We've heard it, but unfortunately, the people loudest about this are the least likely to listen. GG takes a fake on-the-nose tone through it all, though there's not a ton. It reminds me of that clip in Wayne's World where Alice Cooper and Pete Friesen, his guitarist, educate Wayne in semi-stilted voices about the history of Milwaukee. I still remember these facts, and the presentation to this day! And I enjoy it when I find it elsewhere.

GG can't master Alice and Pete's voice inflections, being text and all, but the script is decidedly snarkier, and it works well for the time it takes. It's about starting a restaurant. It pokes you if you try to guess something wrong, but often in random ways. For instance, choosing the worst possible name for your restaurant gets a "Stop that. Try again." But other things that seem less fatal do, in fact, ruin your budding business. This sort of randomness has been done before in Twine games, but it's not purely zany here. The choices are always fresh. With easy UNDO, it's fun to see which actually matter, too, because GG is short enough you can do that without getting exhausted.

It's hard not to sound a bit moralistic or preachy when talking about subjects such as sustainability, and GG's tone works throughout. You take transport to your interview, where the reporter tries your fare. Your restaurant's success is at stake! It's a surprisingly dramatic moment.

GG is a good blend of entertainment and teaching--nothing too deep, but there can be a thin line between preaching and giving people a boost and encouragement for open-mindedness. Lots of people still don't like the thought of eating bugs--they prefer to eat smarter, more sentient animals. So it's a good tongue-in-cheek advertisement for that sort of thing, as well as the author's other games.