Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.

I'll start by discussing a comment I saw on a forum about Matthews and Linehan and how I don't want to be that sort of person. M&L were the folks who created Father Ted, a universal character we probably wouldn't like in person but who showed our faults so well and let us laugh at them. The commenter said "Well, M&L never got close to that afterwards." Someone pointed out that The IT Crowd was very, very, good indeed, and the commenter said "Well, fair enough, but it's still not quite Father Ted."

Whether or not FT is better than IT Crowd, or however BPH's (I hope that's not too familiar. I know I hate, for instance, being abbreviated to Schultz. But I find Hennessy as misspellable as most people find Schultz, as my brain WILL insert that third E) works stack up to M&L, I want to relate this story: Small Child in Woods felt dang-near perfect to me. It had universal appeal and weird humor and made many people laugh. Someone had to do it, and I'm glad they did it well. Cow Farming Activities on the Former West, the second part of You Will Select a Decision, was almost as good. And the rest of the author's stuff? Well, it doesn't hit the sweet spot of SCiW for me, and he shouldn't try to, and when I make time for his stuff, it's always worth it. But I wouldn't want him to deliberately try for another flashy thunderbolt like SCiW. He owes me nothing.

Also, I'm hacked off he didn't publish the "promised" sequel It Is Good To Be Skateboarding Champion of the World. I had an idea that was just a bit of verbal gymnastics to make the reader laugh, and it still does, but each work of his reminds me I would love to read that apocryphal book some day. Curse the author for following their own vision, said the guy who knows his own stuff is probably more niche-y!

All this was no excuse for whiffing on Birdland, Known Unknowns, and BOAT PROM. And GUDA is one of many IFComp entries already that make me say, hey, I need to check stuff from this author's past, too. It may be the only one with a link in the introduction giving a brief overview, which I appreciated. But it was also sort of shocking to think, wait, did he really write Bell Park: Youth Detective that long ago? Wow.

Yes, it was nine years ago, and Bell is nine years older. She's a private detective now. I didn't recognize Cassidy, who's come to Bell with a missing persons report. More specifically, her fiance has gone missing. Checking back at BPYD, she doesn't get a ton of billing there. Drifting away from best friends is like that, I suppose, and with GUDA, it's pretty inevitable they would've broken up, as they show themselves to be very different people. Eventually you grow, and you realize how you were sorted into social groups at 12 was just a good guess, or it was the least awful of the available options, and you get to see what (hopefully) works even better.

All this navel-gazing aside, what sticks out about the start is: there is banging from inside of a locker in Bell's office. Is it an animal? How does Cassidy pretend it's not there? Is Bell some sort of criminal? You make allowances for friends' eccentricities of course, especially if you spent time being weird or outcast together, but, um, well, if it gets too obvious...

No, it's just that Bell is hiding her nine-years-ago self in that locker and doesn't want to have to explain things. And she doesn't, immediately, but it's tough to cover things up forever, and this is one of the many humorous threads that recur throughout the story. There are some leads in finding Cassidy's fiance, and you follow them all across a neat map of Toronto. Below the map are names, and a red arrow appears where they are on the map. This apparently was a big hit for people with an attachment to Toronto, and while it stirred up no memories in me, it's really well done and gives me some idea of how big the city is, and I was able to compare it to, say, a similar map of Chicago. I also like how the current characters in the scene have head shots–Bell-21 and Bell-12 on the left, and the person or people they're talking to on the right. The transitions worked technically, and the pictures are well imagined and drawn.

The Bells go to various places, visiting and revisiting them, and they meet casts of weird characters, even Bridget, whom Bell has broken up with. As someone not acquainted with Birdland, I didn't know Bridget in any way, but I still found her effective as a character. It's pretty obvious something is up, and I enjoyed Bell-12's reactions to a grownup she knew (Cassidy) and one she didn't (Bridget). Naturally Bell-12 starts bugging Bell-21 as to why they broke up. Through this all I had an occasional worry: is the time paradox going to blow up in our faces and make this whole story unbelievable?

Well, I don't know if it's ever resolved fully satisfactorily, but up until then there's a lot of fun to keep things going. Bell-12 has a lot of questions, which Bell-21 avoids, until Bell-12 keeps on asking. You have some agency in how much you tell Bell-12. But this certainly brought back how I would discuss things with Andrew-12 or Andrew-22. There's a lot to unpack, and I forgot how much there is to unpack even in the last ten years! It can blur together a bit. Bell-12 is decidedly more caustic than Andrew-12, asking the sort of questions I wished I'd asked, and having a mentor in Bell-21 who gave more good-faith answers than many people older than me.

The interesting characters about Toronto didn't land so well. I'm the sort of person who's not particularly interested in interesting characters, or if I think they are getting too obtrusive, I'm inclined to think "Stop showing off, already!" I can only take so much per day. Nevertheless, there's some good stuff in there with Bell-21 and a woman dressed like a cat, who seems like a potential villain, and having to return to the place that serves wings (Bell-12 and Bell-21 both hate to be caught dead there, for different reasons) provides character development. Bell-12 bugging Bell-21 about why Bell-21 broke up with Bridget is well done, even if the "aha, you're remembering what you liked about them" angle seemed a bit forced. A lot of good jokes and observations come out of this, well beyond narrative threads funneled into "Look! Bell realised that adults are weird and insecure and annoying but they have a good reason to be and are worth putting up with, even the obnoxious ones! And, um, yeah, humor, too!"

So it's a good sign that what to me were the less interesting parts turned out to be worthwhile, and I think the author had a strong idea of pacing–there's a shaggy dog story here, but it doesn't get too shaggy, although the reason for the fiance's disappearance didn't resonate with me. You have to deal with people you don't like, and it's tricky to pay attention to them the right amount without being fully transactional, which Bell-12 doesn't understand. Then you have to be annoying sometimes to get what you want, too, and Bell-12 encourages that (with Bell-21 ceding a few points) without getting too in-your-face. There's a lot to work with, telling one's younger self everything's not black and white, but also hearing your younger self remind you that intuition matters--presumably, you have more data to check your intuition at 21 than 12. There's knowing we can veer from certain big questions as we get older because focusing on some side issues is very interesting indeed, and if we can't do everything, we don't have to. And there's also poking oneself to realize, yes, there are definite dark and light greys where it's best to put nuances aside temporarily so, ahem, You Will Select a Decision to push ahead expediently and meaningfully.

I can't say I've run into an Andrew-12, but I did finally join my high school's graduating class's Facebook group, and it was like I was speaking to my old self, with things I remembered and people I remembered and may or may not have wanted to deal with. It was awkward, but I settled some things. GUDA brought back that, and new ways to look at things, and people and ideas and fears I'd forgotten, and I'm glad I was at least somewhat prepared for that.

Perhaps I'll be more prepared to replay GUDA once I've read the BPH works I've missed, especially Birdland. But I definitely found Birdland et. al aren't critical to appreciating GUDA, though, and even if GUDA didn't hit all the notes for me, it feels like it should hit a lot of really good ones for others who may or may not be familiar with BPH's works.

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.

Some self-indulgence, first: last year, while I was playing A Paradox Between Worlds (the author's 2021 entry,) it just so happened that it tied in very nicely with what I was doing at the moment. I was paying attention to an Internet community that was much more stable than what was described in PBW. It was run by adults, 4 adults, and in a way, about adults, but it was about adults younger than all of us. There was no focal point of the whole community. There were American college football teams, and golly there were a lot of them. Under the SBNation umbrella, people pretty much stay in line with basic decency, and if the founder wound up being a jerk, we could move on. Yet still I found a ton of parallels and a ton to be grateful for. Purdue was playing at Nebraska in American football and won a game fans from both sides, at http://offtackleempire.com, verified was very dumb. So, being a fan with superstitions, I decided to look through AatR while Purdue played Nebraska. The game was even more exciting than last year's, but of course we all thought it was very dumb. Both teams forgot to play defense, but fortunately, Nebraska forgot a bit more. And I forgot to, well, tune into this. I was still wrestling with AatR. Whether it's better than PBW, I can't say. It brought up entirely different issues, and I felt a lot less immediate personal involvement. So I'd definitely welcome a third entry that swerves in yet another direction, because I now have an established silly superstition.

This all may be a long and tedious joke, but the TLDR is that though I'm clearly not the intended audience for the author's works, I get a lot out of them. And seriously, it's this sort of thing that distracts me from watching football games I don't want to waste time with. I may not be Mr. Busy, but I value stuff that makes me look for better ways to use my time, or think big ideas, or whatever. And the author's IFComp entries are two-for-two in that department. I wound up falling asleep soon after playing, and when I woke up, I didn't check the late-night football scores. I poked at the alternate paths through.

So what makes AatR good? For starters, combines a few things that could be (and have been) beaten into the ground if done wrong: a job that pays and uses your skills a lot less than it should, money problems, relationship problems, and oh yes, being ostracized for being different. It'd be painful if an author focused too much on any one of these and of course it could get unwieldy if they're not mixed together right. The money angle seems intended to be frustrating. You're too tired to do your job (within the first five minutes, a polite email assures you you've just been reallocated, not demoted,) due to chronic fatigue syndrome and, well, other stuff. So you can never make as much money as you want, and a bit of quick mental math after my day's first pay showed me the pay was inadequate. But this is more than an argument for living wage. You find out you're an undesirable person (AatR discusses being trans and what it means or can mean–even going out for food is a bit dramatic) and perhaps your company is trying to push you out. The rent jumps exponentially, along with the late fees and so forth. And through it all, the archives you search through (your job) have a bunch of things you want to read and a bunch you're paid to file. I've read a lot of treatments of mean employers all "YOU COULD DO THE WORK IF YOU'D JUST BE NORMAL," and I've had times I was unable to work after "normal" conversations that excited everyone else and drained me, but this provided a new angle without the "hey, others have it worse than you, feel for them before moving on."

Because your job is not hard, at least technically. Emotionally? Perhaps--knowing you can and should do better, and sometimes you can't even do your job, must take a toll. To prevent the plot going too slowly, AatR may make it trivial on purpose, perhaps, once you get what to do. The file names tip off how to sort them, if you're paying attention, though it's not obvious at first glance. But given who you are, well, it feels almost like a lie to settle into something normal, or if you do settle into such a routine, you might let something else slip, and then society's out for you. This is captured in CityNet's messages about horrible "righteous" punishments for "men who impersonate women." Forgive the quotes. The news is obviously slanted and meant to attract the "what the hell is wrong with the victims?" responses found on in-game message boards. You admit it's exhausting to read CityNet, but you also can't avoid it. (Plus ca change, eh?) There's that plague going on, too, and wearing a mask, normally a common-sense pro-health thing, is seen as maybe disguising yourself further.

And of course the additional fees that crop up just for existing make it pretty clear you're not going to make it. Fortunately, you have old friends, exes in fact, you can lean on. Though it's hard. These choices are frequently blocked out, to show you're not up for it yet, or the fear of asking an ex is still stronger than the fear of eviction. Certainly I've faced this in much less dire circumstances–maybe it's just having the fear of an IFComp bug slip through versus the fear of "geez, how didn't you see how to code this?" on the message board, and if these fears are neither fully rational nor critical to my well-being, they're there.

I missed a lot the first time through, and I know it. In some ways there seems no path for me to really sympathize with the main character. Works where exes still care about each other are tough for me, given the sort of marriages in my family. (People stayed together and sniped.) But I appreciate a believable scenario where, yes, this is the case, and no matter how horrible the government is, people are willing to take risks for people they still care about, if not as intensely as usual. And that's uplifting, as is ending one, which I don't want to spoil because I may not fully have a handle on it. It's just that there's a weird feeling certain sorted messages are for you, and it's even weirder when you realize how justified that feeling is and reach that certain ending.

I spent a lot of time trying to poke through the different messages after downloading the source. I felt too mentally exhausted to play through again, but I wanted to find out more about the archivist's world, just as they wanted to find out about, well, mine. I remembered the times I wanted to go out and didn't, and the times I felt forced to go out but didn't want to, and the times I went out late just to avoid people to talk to. I think I'm missing the main point, and I'll need to read other reviews. But I got a lot out of it. Looking at the endings, I realized how tough it would be to actually play through the ones where you accept the friendship and help of someone you broke up with. It's something that would be effective in a dystopia or a normal world.

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.

IFComp has a bunch of works that subvert expectations, some in-your-face, some trying it under the hood. January is one of the latest ones, more under the hood, more highbrow, and the mechanics work, though they may be a bit exhausting. There've been plenty of discussions of linearity, friendly or not, and my main takeaway is that I'd prefer not to have too many passages where you just click ahead for its own sake, and it feels like the work is tugging on your sleeve not to leave just now, because it has so much to say, honest it does, and you'll miss some of the deeper meaning if you do leave. So if someone wants to write something linear and give the player a fixed ending, while still giving them a chance to say "hey, what about that" or 'hey, what about this," how do they go about it?

January provides some good pointers. It's innovative, to me at least, and it forces the player to re-read without being too intrusive. It's illustrated, too. The illustrations provide a practical focal point, as it turns out, the way the story is organized.

It's a zombie survival story but a bit more than that. You can safely assume the narrator doesn't die right away, because after the first passage, you're presented a calendar. Something is ahead, likely dread. There's a moderate but not overkill amount of content warnings. A date early in January is circled. You can click on any circled date, and once you're through, there's an X. This was an interesting and relatively simple wrinkle to me, and it worked very well. I've been shocked by jumps before in a book, and even seeing "Three months later, X was still thinking about the incident" feels a bit clunky. It provides a bit of shock protection, I guess. Chapters end with a picture, which re-appears if a date goes from X'd out to red-circled, and then the picture reappears again. I liked the pictures, and I sort of needed them, after the rather bleak content.

I don't know much about visual novels, so I have no clue how much is the author's own innovation and how much they are pulling from general knowledge, but either way it's effective. The text changes dramatically, fading from old words to new ones to provide a different perspective, and my only complaint is that I can't (or I missed the way to) go back, because a lot of times I realized a detail was important, and I wanted to see more.

The work itself is more about loneliness than outright horror. Your family is infected with the zombie virus, and one infects someone else accidentally, or cluelessly. You find a cat to take care of, which I thought was one of the strongest focal points (I can only take so many details about survivalism,) and you realize there is a lot you don't know about, well, survival and life and how other people are getting along, but they must be out there. There's one passage where the warning for suicide kicks in, and it's not some stale old "woe is me, I have no friends." It's something I don't quite want to spoil. But I was certainly engaged in the story of the main character protecting the cat, even against the bodies of zombies they formerly knew.

I'm a bit disappointed I couldn't go back and revisit stuff I realized I skimmed over a bit. Perhaps that's a user error, but I still hope for something relatively linear and long to allow you to do so, because things get missed, especially when it drags you to re-read, then bam! No, you can't re-re-read to make sure of things. My usual refrain of "but I can look at the source" was mentally countered by "No, it's not the same thing, it's missing something." The ending bit where you can mouse over images to show different ones felt like end credits in a TV show, and they brought up a lot of memories. Maybe on point it hoped to bring up was there is a lot of stuff you forget when just in survival mode, whether that be with zombies, or people around you at a job you can't stand, or a horrible high school. There's also a twist there that other people found effective but didn't work for me. This is sort of harping on the weaknesses. I thought the strongest bits were the part that went beyond ZOMBIE PLAGUE and dealt with the "what if I get infected" and "maybe it's better if I do." Sometimes it felt like it didn't get out of its own way, but that's how legitimately experimental works feel. Overall, I'm glad it staked out new territory in the potentially tooth-grinding genre of zombie survival.

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.

Prism was the last of the IFComp entries I played. There was a mix of anticipation and fear. I believe it was the last of the IFComp entries to get any review, and playing it, that was more people having a lot to digest than "hey, let's keep away from this weird mess." Looking at the review list near the end of IFComp, it had caught up, and I can see how the people who liked it would want to explore several branches before pronouncing a final opinion. We know we're going to miss something.

And we don't want to typing a mere "I liked this bit/this bit surprised me/this bit confused me." Maybe this review does that, in disguise. But Prism is a real wild card, one that half makes you feel guilty for giving something more conventional a high score. It's sophisticated and complex enough that blanket "gee this is cool you should try it" statements make me feel like a bit of a goober. It's like that tough class other people tell you to fear, but you wind up enjoying it, and you worry people might pound you for admitting that--until you find other people who like it.

Or, maybe, another way to put it is: you may be worried Prism isn't your thing. And maybe it isn't. But I think you will get a lot out of it, anyway, which is impressive, because it's not super-long. This sort of thing is more likely to happen with fifteen-minute games where you say, okay, they knew when to end the quirky joke and left me time and energy to enjoy the next one. But even in my sped-up mode, pressing to get through the final IFComp game, I realized I'd have a day to write a review for Prism, and my instinctive reaction was, I wished it'd be longer. Fortunately, there was an entirely different branch worth replaying!

So with the usual "I probably missed branches and themes" caveat I'm satisfied I got enough. If it's hokey to say "be glad the glass is half full and you like what's there," it's a lesson I still have to learn after trying to get through all the IFComp games. I've put off potentially rewarding experiences before, and the clues were there. But I'll be thinking of Prism when I balk at my next challenge or reading goal or whatever.

Prism is part of a whole phalanx of Ink entries which acquitted themselves very well in IFComp, in my opinion. In particular, it's a splendid complement to Elvish for Goodbye. Both are about an imaginary city and secrets you can't quite express, maybe even ones that would be ruined if you described them fully. In EfG, they're related second-hand, and that somehow makes them bigger. In Prism, you're in the middle of it, yet with your courier's job, you sense there must be even more than you're able to see, or you'd like to be able to see stuff even quicker.

Your friend, Karae, is partially to blame for this. You're pretty close, but she has holes in her life story, ones that should have been filled by now, the more time you spend together. She's missing an arm, but that's part of why she has power. You've seen a lot as a courier, but you know she's seen even more. You know the city you live in, Conduin, has grown from what was once pure desert, and it is growing, and you want to grow with it. There's a question of what new suburbs reveal the most.

I played through twice. Each time I had contraband to deliver, but it was radically different. My journey both times led me to people who talked unusually but logically, then out of the city, where I had to outsmart guards. I'd have felt rather helpless doing so if I were a newcomer instead of a courier--there was some knowledge assumed about which way to flee, so the choices didn't seem too zany. Each way it was pretty clear there was no way back, but the first time, it was about rebellion, and the second was more about finding my own way. Both entities I found outside the city suffered their own persecution. I saw my friend Karae in two entirely different lights.

It feels like there must be so much more than what I saw. The branching to two very different but believable escape scenarios is really impressive. Conduin feels even more sprawling after the second time than the first, and I want to explore even more. This feels like something that must have taken a good time to get straight, and the author also took some big risks that people might go "Huh? What?" And maybe I did sometimes, but I was fairly sure early on that this question would be answered. There's a whole assortment of mystics and criminals, and Prism feels like that food you can maybe order once a year, that you do and don't want to eat too quickly, and you're quite glad if you forgot about it for a couple months (I mean, assuming it keeps,) because you'll find the right other thing to enjoy it with. I suspect I'll find another game that will remind me I want to replay Prism with a new perspective, and enough will be forgotten that I won't sleepwalk through any choices.

I've talked a good deal about my impressions of Prism, because after two play-throughs, I'm left pondering a lot of possibilities for who might be the good guys and who might be the bad guys. This isn't due to vagueness on the author's part but rather that there's so much intrigue and nuance it'd be a pity if anything was too straightforward.

Oh, one final note: shout out to the author for noting where to save so you could see a bunch of options. This didn't apply in the second work-through, but by then, I had a pretty good idea where the bottlenecks were. On the one hand, this can seem like authors nudging players to the good part, but on the other hand, it can be more effective than a blurb for helping us know what to expect. There are that fewer save states to juggle.

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.

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.