Reviews by Andrew Schultz

The name Camelot Jack brings up, perhaps, President John F Kennedy for those of us who live in america. It's a good solid title without that, because we have an idea of what fairy tales get mashed up, namely Jack and the Beanstalk and Camelot with King Arthur. But unfortunately, the homebrew parser gets in the way of the author's ideas, and we're left with some minor laughs about how the author had trouble getting stuff done, and they try their best, really, but things never take off, even if the puzzles presented are a nice short jaunt to try and leave a prison. The author seems to have gotten the scope right, but CJ isn't really a good fit for the competition, as it feels more like "my first parser game as an author" than "let me help you play your first parser game."

The layout is impressive, with buttons to push for common parser commands. And having Swordy, your sword, help you along in the all-too-brief tutorial helps to not take things too seriously and forgive some rough bits. But it's also hard to do simple things like take inventory or even go north. While clear GUI is nice, though, CJ doesn't understand abbreviations like I for Inventory. NORTH gives "I know not this north of which you speak." So the humor does try a bit too hard.

Nevertheless, sitting down with a walkthrough and going through (going off course may make the game unwinnable,) provides a smile or two, and by the end, you see what the author was getting at, but it could probably have used more testing. You probably know what to do with cheese if you've been an adventure before, so that's good for beginners, and there's a neat little main puzzle where you have to choose between three trapped containers, and one item that didn't seem handy comes in handy, and it makes sense, and you feel clever outsmarting an NPC. This is something to build on. Once you win, you don't really win, but you get a message that the author had hoped to do more. They definitely can one day, as the GUI is impressive here and shows the author knows what he's doing, but the competition really isn't focused on that sort of convenience.

While many of the entries in the TALP 2024 took the more classic Western fairy tale approach, Bakemono no Sekai went in a different direction, with Japanese fairy tales, and it served as a sort of double tutorial for Japanese folk tales, culture and terminology, as well as text adventures. I don't particularly need the second, but I was glad to have the first. I'd heard a lot of the terms off and on, but here I had sort of a chance to ask about them and interact with them, via an NPC and a book in the library. People interested in Japan on the Internet get a bad rap, rightfully or not, but this was straightforward and did not drown me in information. Just small additional descriptions where needed. It kept the focus on what I might want to know, not what it id.

Although you have mythical beasts to kill, it's a relaxed affair, as they're not the super powerful type. They're more the sword born out of people's fears, who just annoy them and distract them from doing what they really want. But there's something odd going on here, because they don't just vanish, but they leave behind a sort of black powder. I was able to guess what that black powder was, and I feel smart about this, though I may not have seen the full ending. The game revolves around you solving this mystery, and there isn't a whole lot of abstract stuff to do, but there's enough. You have a notepad with tracks down things you need to ask about, and later you find a book at a library that tells you about it.

About the only real puzzle is finding money to buy stuff at a shop, and you only need to find one coin to buy three or four things. There's also a puzzle about finding light, but it's relatively trivial. it does involve blowing past the game's warning saying, "Oh, sure, you can search something if you want, why not?" So maybe that's a bit artificial, but there aren't a whole lot of false trails, so you probably will say, okay, I might as well look.

PunyInform seems like a good tool for this. I don't want too much too fast at me, and this felt about right, giving twelve or so things to ask about at the start and pushing you forward once you've asked eight. You can't leave your house until you do, and then you go to town and discover a library which offers more information. Along the way you pick up some items which seem like they'll be useful, and you're not sure how, but removing the curse has a small ritual which I also found effective.

Games about Japanese culture have a bad rap, based on the sort of stereotypical person who like them, but this and others that I've played via comps has turned out very well. I'm not surprised this did well in the TALP contest. There aren't any big tricks or bends in the map, but it is big enough that you do feel you're walking through a town and its outskirts, and the few puzzles you need to figure are satisfying while not crushingly difficult. One final thing: I didn't know enough to be fully moved by the twist at the end, only recognizing some of the terms, but I was still able to stand back a bit and say it was nicely done.

Sometimes you just look for an author you're pretty sure you'll like, to make a good start in reviewing a comp. Leo Weinreb in was my choice for TALP 2024. He wrote A Walk Around the Neighborhood, which had the really clever device of talking to your significant other, who calls out progressive hints exasperatedly from the next room over. And your friend Tonya helps you with the verbs you'll need to complete the game, even with a tweak for if you toggle the tutorial after it's over. It's the sort of humor that jibes with me. So this all jibes well with TALP/TALJ's purpose.

And about the only problem I had was, The Wolf felt generic as a title. The main character, however, is quickly revealed as definitely not a bore, for better or worse! The Wolf spins together several fairy tales everyone knows and probably doesn't want or need to hear again, at least as a stand-alone, and the result is a pretty snappy game that makes those old stories new.

You're a wolf, see, and you just aren't the violent type. Honest! But still, you're in the police station, undergoing questioning for several murders. If you-the-reader know your fairy tales, you can guess most of them.

But you're not a murderer. So you say. You're a building inspector (how freelance your role is, is not revealed,) and boy do you like to capitalize on any pretext whatsoever to go inspecting buildings. It's not that easy, though. People don't let you in.

It's a slightly absurd assumption, but then, these are fairy tales, and it pulls them together well. There's a shepherd boy who will call you out, a girl with a red hood, and three pigs. There's a fisherman, too, and I confess I blanked on the reference. But it added nicely to the story.

I think the pigs puzzle was particularly clever and fun. The first house is easy to blow down, but the second needs a little work, and you need trickery to enter the third.

*The Wolf* does a great job of following the constraints of the comp and using them to sharpen its focus into something funny, the sort of simple but effective twist on a premise I as an author am a bit jealous when other people find. No "Oh, I'm reimagining fairy tales and passing it off as my own stuff" here. The wolf is a delightfully shifty character, and I found myself almost wanting to believe it, not just because I played through as the wolf, who's ostensibly made a lot of trouble, but because the natural human inclination is to believe an exciting lie over a boring truth. And I've been in my own situations where I felt weird explaining myself, and I was innocent, honest I was. The end result is an almost plausible story, one certainly more believable than the fairy tales that feel run-down when referred to the Xth time.

So there's that humor there but the reminder, too, that we do love to be suckered in by a good story. While some of the text described disturbing things, the humor meant that it wasn't until I looked back on things that I thought of that angle, how we can believe people we dislike if they just have a good exciting story. It's both disturbing and funny, thoughtful and full of action.

(Originally written during TALP 2024, touched up during TALP 2025.)

I sometimes wondered as a kid if my life would be radically different if I, say, chose one flavor of ice cream over another one day. The Butterfly effect and all that.

Well, that sort of happens here.

You are driving to work, and you stop at a gas station to refuel. You have a choice of four snacks to buy. Each one opens a different mini-story, and each mini-story gives you part of a message you need to decipher. Once I solved two of the stories, I had enough of the message to decipher it. I don't know if it's the author's intent, but it's a neat idea. And the snack images are neat low-res things that give me nostalgia for Apple and TRS-80, in a good way.

There are some puzzles, too, mostly of the logic type. There's "three people, one may be lying" and numerical patterns and so forth. I got talking animals in a forest and then an elevator where the desired floor was the answer to a puzzle. I missed on the animals in the forest several times, but it was forgiving and looped back until I examined stuff and figured things out.

This means Day Out isn't big on story, but technically, it works. However, it seems as though it would work a lot better in Twine, and the author may have confused "tutorial for others" with "tutorial for myself." The verbs are sensible but they are force-fed to you. So it's not great on teaching the player what to try first, and what to expect from their tries.

Part of this may be because English isn't the author's first language. I googled their name, since it was relatively unique, and their artistic side is rather interesting, at least on Instagram. It jibes with what I saw, where you had interesting whimsical drawings, and it's good to see someone with a large Instagram following move over here. The interlinking stories and secret messages are creative, if a bit random. For instance, with the elevator buttons, PUSH RED/GREEN/BLUE could just have three buttons to click, saving keystrokes. So it doesn't really play to the strengths of the parser, especially when I typed BLUE. Thankfully the HINT command bailed me out. So the author made serious effort to make things robust, though Adventuron may not have been the best tool for the job, especially since Twine allows graphics at least as easily too.

There was enough of that that my usual "I couldn't write something in another language" caveats and praise for courage aren't just fluff. There are spelling and grammar errors, but it's not the sort a native speaker would make, and when you see those it's easy/easier to be forgiving. I was definitely left thinking, okay, this person did what they could, and with more time to proofread and translate, this gets ironed out, no problem. I mean, you get a password just before the puzzles start, which is thoughtful of the author, and the passwords are rather amusing on their own. The author has a legit sense of humor, as I found by playing theie 2025 TALJ entry.

Though between checking off to say, yes, this is what the author meant, and fighting the parser a bit to get to the "good" ending, I was glad to cut things short initially. Guessing the "real" path through is hinted at several times in the story and leads you to a fun small sub-game of its own, which has almost certainly been done before, but it's satisfying.

This points to good and bad: I needed a break after the two times through, but I was interested in eating the other two snacks before judging ended, for more than just completionist purposes.

Day Out does provide fun but also has weaknesses: it does feel like puzzles with story slapped on a bit (I've definitely been in that boat, too, as a writer,) but I did like the blocky way-retro graphics, and I don't think that sort of aesthetic appeal happens by accident. But the game also has limitations, because the parser inhibits the experience instead of adding to it. However, if it weren't written in Adventuron, we might not have the cool graphics Adventuron seems to inspire. So Day Out may not be a great fit for the jam, possibly due to some misunderstandings, but it's still fun if you have guardrails. The author for his part seems to have made a parser game that would be trickier to do in Twine for TALP/TALJ 2025. The tutorial feels more fleshed out. But looking back on Day Out, it does have a rough "shows potential" charm, and the author built on this potential.

BaB is certainly a catchy title: two words beginning with the same two letters, not obviously related, but you get to wonder how or why they might be. It also foreshadows that some of the puzzles will be surreal and silly, and they are, but they don't feel forced.

And it works quite well, as a father-and-son collaboration. We've seen them before, and I think that sort of cooperation works well for instructional games. The child doesn't understand coding yet but has an idea of what they want to create, and the adult maybe understands coding but is frustrated they don't have any cool ideas, or maybe they've forgotten one from the past. So the adult in essence gives a tutorial to the child, and then they collaborate on what to give to the player. So there's always a checkpoint of "why are you doing this" that the developers have to pass, and doing so makes things clearer to the reader. And these games are generally quite fun, as even if there is a hole in them, we think, well, I'd have been proud to write something almost this good when I was younger. Or have someone help me. Or, well, help my kids if I had them.

And it is a really good fit for the competition, too. You are Hermes, and your first task is to find two sandals that will help you fly around to deliver a letter to Zeus. Of course, it's for him, so you'd better not read it. I like this sort of riff on mythology. This groundedness reminds me of that passage in Amadeus where Mozart says "Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus ..." The next bit, while amusing, is not kid-friendly.

Delivering the letter runs into problems, of course. A flash storm lands you on an island where you solve some puzzles that feel standard for text adventures. They're mostly GIVE X TO Y type puzzles. There are hints, and you can evebn CALL ZEUS if you get stuck. A minotaur blocks your way, and of course, you need to figure what to do with the basilisk. If you know your mythology, you'll have a good idea, but I thought the fight was well-done as it used Adventuron's graphic features effectively. It just felt like the sort of coding project that's perfect for a kid but satisfying to solve at the end, especially in a comp where instadeaths should only happen if the player really, really tries.

The hand-drawn pictures are pleasant, too, and that's always a nice feature of Adventuron. They're whimsical without feeling lazy, and for me, seeing the room change when you take an item never gets old. Perhaps there's a part of Young Andrew who's still wowed at how Sierra did it and how it's easy to do now. That part of me is also wowed that you can change the font from Sans Serif to an ancient Greek style with FONT in BaB. Yes, even though I've known about fonts for 25 years now. There's still magic in there. Maybe it's the Inform programmer in me, who is generally just happy to use bold and italics. But I like these small aesthetic touches that maybe can be done just as easily in CSS, but it's cool a text adventure language lets you do something with a wave of your hand.

Overall, the silliness works without overwhelming. You always know what you need to find, both the enemy and an item. But that also got me in a bit of a problem. The game encourages you to look everywhere, and I had a tough time at first finding the banana because (Spoiler - click to show)bananas grow in tropical climates, and you find one in some snow. Perhaps I’m at fault for overthinking or not lawnmowering as diligently as I should.

Any absurdity you may have worried about is explained at the end as you wind up meeting a few more mythical beasts. Adults may guess the misdirection here. I've seen it in other games. But I think it worked very nicely, despite my knowing, like a surprise party you know is going to happen, but the recipient deserves it.

BaB felt like a near perfect fit for the competition and one of the most replayable. There were some cases where I hit on solutions and got whisked to the next room before I poked at everything I wanted to, which is one of Adventuron's foibles, but hey, TALP games should push you forward quickly to encourage you when you do things right.

(This review was originally written in May 2024 during the jam. I edited it post-comp.)

I meant to make my IFComp 2023 reviews public, but I never did. So I had a think, which entry affected me the most? Which gave me the most memories? Bez's MPDE hit the mark for me. I wasn't surprised to see many high-star reviews when I went to submit mine.

MPDE is a virtual museum, autobiographical, about the author's experiences in an abusive home. Going back, I didn't remember all the details, but I wound up remembering the technical and aesthetic choices more than the story despite not being an aesthetics person. The writing is good, but the way the author goes about sharing episodes helped me think about how I share my disappointments, big or small, with others, and how I hope they share with me. It was also unexpected, even though I know Bez is a quality writer. (The strongest line for me, which I want to share, popped up early on. "But that's when it hit me: if I wanted to kill myself, why did dying in a dream disturb me so much?") This veers off into how I would write something, so be warned.

Because the museum is a good choice for what the author wants to present and allow the player to empathize. It's largely choice, with custom programming, but it takes in the parser elements of a map, which I found effective. Each museum allows you to back up in-game, away from the main exhibits on the walls (think: 4x4 map where you need to touch the edges to see stuff,) which was a surprisingly nice way to violate the "no unnecessary rooms" principle. In fact it works a bit better as rooms on a 4x4 grid in a parser can't really "see" each other.

There've been times I needed to back up physically when addressing a serious problem, and with these actions the game itself said "you can back up physically if you need to and come back later." And I did. Often writing about my own parallel problems. "Here's what I'd do if I had a museum." I think we'd all like to build one for ourselves, recognizing how impractical it would be if everyone built one (no-one'd have time to visit!) But I enjoyed the thought experiment. I enjoyed being able to go at my own pace, not just by getting up instead of clicking "next" but by being able to wander around in-game or revisit a part of a room exhibit, now I'd seen the others. (Yes, Twine has undo, but that arrow is off to the side. I'm grateful for the convenience.)

There's a price of sorts to enter the museum. Not dollars and cents, but waiting to download a 200 MB file. And it is worth that price. It brought back memories of "No way, I'd never download something like this" in the old days of IFComp, even the message of "if your multimedia extravaganza is over 20 MB, please cut it down." And weirdly, taking 5 minutes to download it is proof of how far we've come, and what we expect, with download speeds, maybe something we never really expected to have consistently. It's a big ask from the author, in a way. But it's also an acknowledgement that we don't have to worry as much about technological restrictions. Also, the author realized that they could take advantage of resources such as faster download speeds to give us their full vision, with what we want to keep or get rid of. In my case, I turned down the sound. For focusing on the issues in MPDE, even relatively soft music is a distraction. I wondered briefly how many seconds would've been shaved off the download, but I didn't bother to calculate. The TLDR here is that I had a moment of realization: we deserve to take advantage of resources to get the help we need and maybe pass it on. We deserve to risk bogging down other people who may be all "say what you want and get on with it." And I think MPDE did that.

My memories of museums are mostly "don't go wander and get lost" or "do you really want to stay here that long?" I did both with abandon, though the big museum rooms are pretty much one-way, since a sequential story is being told. I enjoyed having the third way of just doing whatever I pleased and not having to worry about museum guards. And I also enjoyed the shift from the early days of Twine, where good writers might bludgeon the reader with lots of details at once, making a conclusive case they've suffered more than you. This catharsis is a necessary and good outlet for the writer, but it's hard work for the reader, and it's not the way to connect. MPDE was still hard work for me, but it was work I wanted to do. And noting one detail then another left me to think on and off about my own museums. Highlighting where I knew I reacted badly, and I was able to forgive myself for that without blowing it over. Where I saw I'd improved, or I realized the people chiding my for my bad reaction to nastiness ignored the, uh, nastiness.

On the actual exhibits: one thing I found interesting was Bez's discussion of a support network. I realized I did not have one for certain things, and the Internet provides that now. In fact, I realized some people that I should have been friends with on paper, or with whom I got put together in classes, actively discouraged that, or me finding that sort of thing, or suggesting that I really didn't need that. I might even have had a network of people who just saw me as a target to feel smarter than. High school was like that, not with the classic bullies, because it was a well-regarded high school, but with people who told me that I was kind of weird and not reaching my potential, and the only reason that got the grades or achievements I did was because I had no social life. This is a bit of whining on my part, but seeing the simple things that Bez brings up makes me realize that the things I was asking for, the things people said was too much with that I had to work for, I didn't really have to work for. Well, I would have to work to keep relationships up once I found them, but I didn't have to work to justify that I wanted these sorts of things, the small things that helped Bez get out of what was way more than a rut. I imagine a lot of people feel they don't deserve a support network, at least not until they get more social!

This wasn't the only contradiction MPDE reminded me of in my thoughts past and present. But it also reminded me life is tricky, and contradictions happen, and we can fight and push forward. And when Bez talks about a support network, it's important at least for me to realize, the support network is someone who helps you work through these things, and it's much different from the self-proclaimed life experts who say, well, that's stupid to have that contradiction. And whether or not we have had this bad experience with people, or we can sort things out, or we do have a strong logical background, we are people, so we see these inconsistencies that turn out to be nuance, and it's rewarding to work them out for ourselves, all while not blasting other people for legitimate, honest inconsistencies, or not understanding how things work but wanting to, or realizing sweeping rules that seemed to work as a kid aren't always right.

And I remember someone who gave me a notebook years ago, as Bez received early on. I never really used it. I equated it with the notebooks my parents would buy me at the start of the school year, because We Buy Kids The Supplies They Need. I think about that notebook a lot, and how I missed the point of it at first, and how I bought my own notebook in college and slowly started building a file of notes and daily writing that got to 10MB and then I managed to organize it or at least be able to siphon off lines with certain keywords.

There was other stuff, too, that I didn't need to share. But I remember wanting to Show People that I had a right to behave the way I did, that it was rational. The people who say "Oh it's your life" but then "remember this, not that." But I had a lot of "I forgot that, that really happened, and I missed the meaning, and I wasn't overreacting feeling awful about it."

There are a lot of exhibits, and MPDE gives a really homey feel. I enjoyed the feeling of not being pressured to look at any of them and the hand-drawn maps of each exhibit area, where it was clear where the exhibits and exits were. The graphics were well done too, with an option just to read the text where appropriate. There's also space in the middle of the exhibit you can wander around.In a parser game, this would be flagged as a waste of rooms, but here, it's kind of neat. You don't have to be looking at the exhibits, and there will be no security guards telling you to move along or even just glaring at you, a potential suspect who might deface an exhibit with the pen or pencil you're (allegedly) using to write ideas that are pouring in. (Yes, the guards are just doing their job.)

One other thing that struck me about MPDE: my IFComp entries are very much the opposite of Bez's entries, on the surface, but in other ways, the protagonists have similar goals. They start with something missing in their lives, and they deal with people who've betrayed them and, possibly, overcome them by the end. I just put more jokes and puzzles and silly existential despair in, and it's helped me work through some things. If the comp were full of only Bez-like entries or only me-like entries, it would be the lesser for that. And if Bez's entries evaporated, the comp would clearly be less, too. Yes, yes, I'm implying and hoping the same thing can be said for mine. But it hit home for me in a way that well-intended pro-diversity messages can never quite, because you're aware they ARE trying to convince you of something.

There's a lot of miscellaneous stuff right, too. The title is particularly strong, as many of Bez's are. You know what you're going to get, but at the same time, it's a phrase you haven't heard before, and it's not a cliche. It got me thinking right away of what to expect, and what I hoped to see, and what I hoped not to see, and it largely hits the mark for the first. With the caveat that Bez did not, in fact, write this work specifically for me. Not even close. But it got me thinking of my own museum, as well as places I am glad to have visited, and if I can't physically visit them again, I am glad there is the Internet as a, well, pseudo-museum dementia can't corrupt. Or a place to visit locations that actively hurt me.

MPDE is not, strictly speaking, fun. But it is rewarding, and it will assure you that you deserve to have fun in real life, and it helped me have fun sorting out bad stuff from my past. I looked up a few other people, too. I worried it might cause something bad to flare up. But I also said, yeah, okay, I'm okay with not liking this person or that person, or when they reached out, it was to push me over. So I felt like I'd come some way over the years, maybe not as far as the author did in two years, but good enough. Much quicker than hoped, without the "Look! I was faster than you!"

It inspired me to find ways I'd bounced back, or ways I still need to. I felt comfortable with the uncomfortable scenarios it related. Some, I'd been thre. Some were more intense than what I had. It was work to get through, rewarding work, but I never once felt like skipping ahead. It felt like someone saying hey, here's a note, can you look at this later, and having the person requesting it have faith in me that I will, and wanted to do that, even though I know it might be tough. This game has that, and I value that trust highly, and it's not easy to say. I've had my share of exasperated "Look, dude. I trust you/you need to trust me." With this review, I hope I've repaid the game's trust I would pay attention.

If you'll indulge me, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I made my own museum. My own MPDE. Nothing ever written about in a text adventure. I hope you have one too, but only if you need one.

(Spoiler - click to show)With my reading notes, the weekly stuff, where I point out incongruities I remember, or where I realized I just had trouble remembering basic stuff around certain people. I couldn't explain it. What goes wrong with me? Didn't I have this motivation? This went as far back as high school, where people assured me that I really was smart in all that, but I wasn't reaching my potential because I was kind of flaky, you know. It bothered me that I should be flaky around certain people, and it never really occurred to me that this was a feature and not a bug of how they treated me. Apparently I hadn't given them a fair chance, but they documented, publicly and privately, they'd done so for me. (This had holes.) It's legitimately rewarding to fix these holes and move on. But I feel okay and not selfish placing the blame for my flakiness around certain people around, well, them. Especially those who claim to have leadership qualities.

I can only assume that they would be equally "lovely" and "tough but fair" to Bez as well. Likely even more so. If they could be bothered. They slate some people as nobodies, for abuse or neglect, and during abuse you should be glad you're not neglected and vice versa. It's tough to realize they have nothing new to offer, even if they throw out a factoid to trip you up momentarily.

One such person was a physics teacher. I thought of the exhibits I would show. They're in my own museum, but I think above several I would have his quote, words no teacher should be caught saying: "They can't get rid of me." It was not my fault he tried to intimidate me into science extra-curricular activities and I wound up intimidated by him. I only wish I'd saved the email I'd received about how alleged bad actors were trying to push him out. They succeeded, and I met his successor, who was much kinder and saner.


Oh yes! About the soundtrack. On finishing, I realized I had a song of my own I thought about. I remembered some people had songs to go with their reviews--I figured it just wasn't for me. And it usually won't be. But it will be now.

(Spoiler - click to show)I never felt a reason to until now. Mine is Public Enemy's "Brothers Gonna Work It Out." I remember in high school people saying, "what, you don't know Public Enemy?" Then a friend at math camp played Public Enemy for me and I was hooked. Then people said "Come on, dude, you can't like it that much." After all, as last names go, Schultz is about as white as you can get. Was I minimizing racial struggles? Was I trying to be Black? Appropriating Black questions?

These were troll questions. I didn't see how to deal with them. I learned, over the years, forgetting what that song meant to me, and how I had belief in myself in some areas, that I would work it out. And even though I forgot that song, I still did. I guess that's a small pseudo-dementia exhibition of my own. I thought I'd just forgotten it, but I'd actually found a bunch of other motivators, one of the originals faded. I'd forgotten some demons I'd buried, and I forgot why they were so powerful, and yes, there were unexpected good things I forgot I'm glad MPDE brought back up.

This isn't the first time that a work of Bez's has helped me say, yes, the things I have are worth saying, at least in a certain context. I want to measure them out and say them carefully, but I don't have to feel guilty my struggles are less intense or acute than Bez's. And it's been the best one so far for that.
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I feel Escape from Summerland may be underrated because it didn't get the IFComp reception it could have -- the authors were in a time crunch, and some bugs slipped through. Which is sad for those who maybe played it and got frustrated. It still may be frustrating with the bug fixes--but it's also a lot of fun, with very clever viewpoint switching and a lot of quirky humor.

You start off as a ghost who sees someone trapped in a tent. Seeing who they are gives a realization--you may be able to figure it out. Once his initial duties are performed, you switch to his pet monkey, which has a ... rather less nuanced version of things. Then once the monkey leaves her cage, you're the ghost, making sure she's safe. That done, you switch viewpoint to a robot. Its descriptions are technical and tough to decipher. But here's the twist: the more you observe and look around as the other players, the more you figure what they mean. And different items are described differently by Amadan (the ghost,) Jacquotte the monkey and Shinobi the robot. Shinobi appears to be some sort of drone from an outer-space invasion, not really malevolent but just obeying orders.

And with the three players' combined abilities, you switch perspectives until Jacquotte gets out of the park. It's fun but very tough. I've come back to EfS several times, and without the clues, I get stuck somewhere else. The puzzles make sense, but they're very sticky. There's a part-broken lift to operate, and pushing a box out of the way takes a while. Shinobi has lost both arms and is badly malfunctioning (the temperature gauge goes from -80 to 80 Celsius). And it is low on power, which is probably why the invaders desert it. And for big events, the power drops 2%. You may see where this is going. Will Shinobi have enough power?

EfS rapidly becomes a buddy-comedy but without the backslapping. Amadon, the least powerful, most knows what's going on. Shinobi, for its technical knowledge, has no clue what things are for. Jacquotte can reach places. Amadon actually needs to provoke Shinobi into an action, where Shinobi senses his presence without being aware he's, well, dead. And Jacquotte has fun with the buttons on the lift, as one always wanted to when one was much younger. Contrasting her with Shinobi is amusing, as she often reverts to emote-speak with no qualitative description, and Shinobi's technical descriptions include "Organic Pest Must Be Jettisoned Before Further Ambulation." In actual English, that means Shinobi must DROP PEST if Jacquotte has climbed, before moving on.

EfS also has neat touches beyond just the three entities seeing the same item in drastically different ways. Trying to change them to themselves gets clever responses. We realize that the amusement park is a sad place, poorly kept up even if there was no alien invasion. And ... well, there are still bugs hidden in there, so you may want to save after each small victory. Which sort of adds to the slog as the three entities push through, leading Jacquotte from her cage to freedom. And, yes, there is some guess-the-verb, due to the nature of how the three entities see the world, but I actually rather like the included hints. They help me stumble through, along with the three heroes.

EfS is a rare combination of charming and clever, where it's fun to take a step back and see what everyone sees even if there are pitfalls in he puzzles and parser. Once you get in the flow, it's clear the authors really knew what they were doing and had a great plan. I know after EfS I hoped and expected something even bigger and more polished. Sub Rosa, for IFComp 2015, was that. And it brings up a tough dilemma: would I rather have, say, EfS and Calm, or one Sub Rosa? I'll cop out here on my own question and say I'm glad we have both, since they're each unique in the IFComp landscape. And to say: EfS is worth taking another shot at, if you trip up at first. Even completing it with its hints/feelies by your side is extremely rewarding.

Changes may have the most creative story from IFComp 2012: you wake up in the body of a rabbit, but with the mind of a human. This isn't some "intelligent rabbit" or Watership Down thing, here. You're on a person-free planet called Elysia. And you observe how you became a rabbit: animals are putting other animals into the same sort of pod you came out of, and they are switching bodies. They know this instinctively. So your main task is: how do I find what happened to my body?

I remember almost giving up on Changes because the start was unclear and hostile and even random. You had a very diligent fox chasing you around, and being able to sense animal emotions around you only did so much--if the fox wanted to play prevent defense randomly, gosh darn it, it would, until you got impatient, and only trial and error showed where you were safe (Oddly, you could also run past the fox if, say, you were south of it, it chased, and you went north. Hooray for mimesis and feeling fear?) It wasn't really clear what animal you'd want to become, as everyone else was bigger than you. The solution wasn't that clear to me, though it seems hinted in retrospect. Along the way I found a ton of insta-deaths. There was one place where I fell into a lake and drowned, because rabbits couldn't swim.

This is the big clue here, because you need to become something that can swim, and there's only one real animal that can. I didn't find it at all obvious how to kill them, though in retrospect, it makes sense. I guess the solution felt like something you'd see in a cartoon, and not a serious sci-fi work. But once I took the new animal's body, I saw more of what to do.

I did not drown in the lake, but my predator did. Then I managed to annoy another animal and kill them. There were deer to manipulate and avoid. I noticed an abandoned shuttle which, well, looked familiar. I needed to become an animal that had something resembling fingers--all through the game, I spent time dragging the bodies of animals I'd killed by their teeth, into the cocoon and then out.

Opening the space shuttle is the big thing, and while actually moving a human body back to near the pod (there's no animal big enough to carry the body) again feels a bit cartoonish to envision, it's pretty much "do what you can to cause a disturbance."

Nevertheless it's all very clever to watch and see unfold, and each time you change animal skins, you get a flashback detailing more of the story. Perhaps you'll be able to guess it sooner than I did. But even escaping in human form doesn't change anything. There's a mythical feel to Changes, including the ending, which is far from "you board the shuttle and race home, vowing never to get near Elysia again." There's a tale of human tragedy and conflict to unravel, and the feeling I had that I was disturbing something perfect and special was, in fact, validated by the end.

Some parts of Changes do feel a bit loose, and they stop it from soaring. There seem to be more locations than necessary, and chasing certain enemy animals gets exhausting. But the payoff is legitimately rewarding, and with Andromeda Apocalypse won the IFComp that year, I can't help but thing Changes would've had a shot with a good deal more polish.

As-is, I remember the author had a bug tracker with a lot fixed, and there were obviously a lot of different moving parts with several animal NPCs. They all act pretty simply, with beavers hissing or deer fleeing, but they build a world remarkably quickly with little need for detailed scenery. As someone who is indulgent about using walkthroughs and giving the author a mulligan for a puzzle or two that may be a logical jump too far, I really enjoyed Changes, even though the random events and NPCs bouncing around made it hard to execute. Perhaps it added to the feel that I, as (initially) a human, had trespassed somewhere I should not have been, in the name of progress. It combines eerie naturalism with sci-fi horror in a way I don't recall any other IFComp games doing.

Milo van Mesdag opened the Pandora's Box of two-player interactive fiction. It explored themes of oppression and war, pitting two characters against each other, leaving the players to suss things out later. The Purple Pearl feels more in the text adventure tradition. Yes, a purple pearl has been stolen, but the other player in this case is someone you cooperate with. You're both cordoned off into small cells. There's a way to shuttle items between rooms, and useless items are rejected. The game has separate binaries for the player in each cell. You can pass items between cells, and once you do so successfully, a code to give to your cooperator drops it into their game.

The Purple Pearl is a good, successful experiment, but if you think too hard, it does feel a lot more like an experiment more than the author's other works. You know you have stuff to solve, and you know it's not the real puzzle, and your main goal is just to get out and start your main adventure. So it doesn't have the usual emotional depth of one of the author's games. But it's still unique and fun and well-executed, and the puzzles, while not profound (they feel as though they've been done before and some, you can use brute force) require some lateral thinking. Receiving the player code once your partner did something, though was a nice surprise gift, as usually you have to keep hacking away or examining everything until you find a clue. Now you hope your partner has, or that they missed something. There was a good deal of encouragement between me and my partner no matter who went first. We wanted to get out of our cells, but it was nice not to have death hanging over us.

And the gifts? Well, they felt like a white elephant party, except they were useful. In one-player games, discovering such things might've seemed too random. I found, first playing one side than the other, it was still a fun surprise to receive an item I'd given, and vice versa. And I was glad the person I played with didn't reveal too much when they were briefly stuck. Purple Pearl has hints--or, more precisely, you can ask for hints to send to your teammate, so you can't spoil anything on your own--but neither of us needed them. (I did poke through them later. They're cheery and fun and do well to steer you only into what you need, with some rhymes that don't spoil things until you know what item they're talking about!) Generally, the items that you didn't need any more conveniently crumbled, which didn't leave much room for confusion.

The Purple Pearl is definitely replayable to see the other side. It took us about forty minutes the first time, then less than twenty for the other. Of course you can play both sides on your own, but I found it a bit difficult to keep track of, even though many puzzles were similar (three switches with three settings, a dial with three digits.) The main moments were the mystery of what might be coming my way, as if waiting for a holiday gift, or asking my partner what we should be looking for--we were walking a fine line between getting through our half of the game and not spoiling the other half, and it was pretty clear we each wanted to see how the other half worked, especially for the bit when we'd escaped our cells and were in a corridor with just one more thing to do. I think that is the main, lasting draw of The Purple Pearl. And it will be unique, unless a MUD version of Inform 7 becomes active again, with its own puzzles.

I confess I've never really gotten into Larry Horsfield's work. Based on this, perhaps I should, or at least try to chip away at one of his works for a few minutes each day. It's odd. I'd have been bummed about a work as short as this as a kid, even if I could solve it, but now, given all the games there are out there to play, I want more like this. (I can't complain, of course, having my own series of decidedly old-school parser games that do their own thing.) It feels like a good introduction, even if it is the fifth in the Mike Erlin series, so it may've been a wake-up call to say, yes, scaling back the difficulty would be worth it. I'm glad it snuck into ParserComp under the deadline.

You, as Captain Mike Erlin, have a group of five subordinates whom you have delegated to help track down Meneltra, which -- well, they need to be shot, because they're big long ugly bugs that shoot acid and terrorize the town. You are to shoot them down with minimal property damage, then BECOME the next person in Erlin's troop. You can play with timed turns or not. The timed turns are a very close shave indeed, at eighty moves total.

Your team splits up at the nexus of a road, going every which way. One Meneltra is easily findable, and another is disguising itself among zampfs, aquatic creatures which need air, while Meneltra don't. You as the captain have one of the toughest ones. There's also one Meneltra you can't shoot, and you need to use other weapons. Blow up six Meneltra, and, mission accomplished!

This is standard parser stuff, but it gives a good look-in to the universe. It's worth playing without the timer, then with it, to feel like you really understand what's going in.

The timed test is a bit confusing from a plot perspective: if you've split up, shouldn't the maximum time taken be what matters, not the total moves? Mike Erlin seems like a man of action and not one to stand around, but when you switch perspectives, the turn count goes up, and that's that. Still, it's a pretty tidy timing puzzle all told.

Still, I wound up coming back to this after ParserComp to play it again, because I appreciated it, and I hoped it would bring me closer to really appreciating the author's other works. So often I've spun out on them earlier, wondering if I should have tried harder to fight with the ADRIFT runner, and such. I've had such fun with short ADRIFT games in the past, and I feel sad I can't tackle bigger ones. Bug Hunt on Menelaus is a good place to start, though, it seems. It leaves me wanting to understand more about how the characters interact (they're all sent separate ways from the center.) It leaves me feeling I can tackle such a game, and all the non-obvious verbs can be quickly found. I'd like more of that!