Reviews by Andrew Schultz

This is the author's third effort with a custom parser, and if you've played the previous two, you probably have a feel for what it is. The parser is very old-school and attempts to recapture the good bits and cut out the most useless bits. It pretty clearly succeeds. And with each game, Older Timer's work has made technical and creative strides.

But I also saw the potential to hit a wall. It's one I fear I have, too, for what I write, but in a different way. We write about different things. But it's OUR different thing, and we care about it, and we're willing to take a risk that people say "yeah, yeah, I get it" and move on. And we don't try for a huge emotional effect. And I see those sorts of similarities which could be comfortable for those in the know, and a formula that works for enjoyment for the people who like this sort of thing, but then that comfort formula will eventually run out. That time may be a long way away, but it's still there, and it certainly lurks in the back of my mind. However, being able to enjoy efforts like this consistently reminds me that, yes, there are ideas ahead, ones I should work on, even if they pull from previous works, or you realize you've seen that general twist before.

You start off getting a letter from one Ezekiel Throgmeister, who has left you to do your own thing–and if you do it well enough, you'll gain his approval and see many neat things. The ultimate goal is to find a bunch of reagents to make an alchemical spell that, well, completes his experiment. So you know you're getting an adventure game with this all, and if this is not your thing, that's okay. It is mine.

The most entertaining part of the game is a device that renews items. There aren't very many to renew, because even though The Alchemist is long, it doesn't flood you with items. But it's useful in some fun and unusual ways. Alchemy almost feels second to restoring a document or being able to refill a weightlessness or strength elixir endlessly, but then again, if alchemists exists, this is the sort of thing they would ultimately develop. And it's handy in-game, as if you make a mistake with where to use one of your elixirs, you get a small but not insurmountable penalty.

Another focal point of The Alchemist is a mirror that you walk through to visit new weird areas–fantasy staples such as a chapel. You find something new to do there, then move on. It's hard to hate on mirrors that transport you somewhere else, but having this magic contrast with seven-digit codes found on documents laying about didn't fully sit well with me. I wound up more with the feeling of accomplishment I got when I got a microwave or VCR working instead of "hey, I'm exploring a cool fantasy world." Especially since the game has you PRESS 1111111 and then PRESS ENTER–making the magic mirror feel more mechanical and less magical. There are some adherences to old- school parser that don't quite work for me. It's big and involving enough that this sort of busy work drains me a bit. Another nuisance was TAKE ALL/EVERYTHING FROM X, when a one-word verb like, say, CULL would be more convenient. But these are the sorts of things the author sanded down over time.

Sometimes The Alchemist feels a bit color-by-numbers, if you're an experienced player. And if you're not, it won't be for you. But it's fun for all that, and the author has craft. There are no great social insights to be had. It has a relatively low ceiling but also a high floor. It seems that, for non-parser players, just sitting down and going through the walkthrough could help someone familiarize themselves with how parsers work, both strengths and weaknesses. It seems universal but at other times a bit generic, with the various mirror codes. It clearly fell more on the "fun to play" side for me, though. And efforts like this probably will for a while.

AMIHP is a short and purposeful game about, well, aliens discovering things in humans' pockets and guessing what they're for. It's labeled as a class project in the "about" text, and it does feel like a first work of sorts. But though it's very rough, I liked the humor a lot. Often these are not very successful in IFComp, and this wasn't. I'm not sure they need to be, for students' goals. They are often jumping off the deep end and trying something new. Teams of students have run into headwinds, too, submitting stuff to IFComp. In AMIHP the proofreading is certainly uneven (this may be a case of the author just not knowing where to look for help.) So it had a few strikes against it.

Plus people have probably seen the general conceit before. I was exposed to Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" back in my freshman year of high school, and it left an impression on me. I know it's been done before, but it's a good template for someone who wants to write something creative without getting too crazy. It's a theme you can riff on without getting burned or seeming too dull. And AMIHP largely does that. There are some minor puzzles, too, such as getting someone to fetch a box or getting by a maintenance person or mixing fizzy drinks in the cafeteria to make an appropriate substrate. The last one felt speculative, but I suppose constant "humans are backwards and odd" riffs might've grated.

There's enough humor and insight in here that I had no problem seeing things to the end. And I'm glad the author didn't beat the joke into the ground. I hope this doesn't come off as "they don't have the talent to go on for an hour," because the story felt wrapped up well, and often I'd like to see more shorter entries that don't feel like they have to transcend everything. You can tick it off and move on and recoup from the bigger ones. I had no problems sticking with AMIHP until the end, despite the distractions with grammar and style. There are about seven locations to visit, so there's not much to hold in your head. I think I'd have been quite happy to write something like on this level in college and to have the opportunity to share it with the world. I wish I'd tried more back then.

Every year I have one author I didn't know with whom I trade a flurry of testing emails. It's exciting. I learn a lot. I wish I'd have started sooner, but on the other hand, I'm glad I had a chance to focus. Thanatophobia (TTP) was such an experience. An innovative interface and seeing my suggestions fixed quickly made me quite happy. As a reviewer, I try to dissociate the enjoyment I had changing works and seeing an IFComp entry under the hood before the big reveal on October 1st from, well, is the work any good? On replaying to actually review it, I think it's still quite good, and I'm glad people reviewed and discussed it despite minor technical hurdles (note: best played on an Opera browser with VPN.)

Now my ideal IFComp entry would be comedy. I do wish IFComp would have more of such entries, where people overcome frustration with coping. Nothing cheesy or prosperity gospel-ish, nor any too-hackneyed "Ha ha ha just deal with it" or outright absurdism for its own sake. But I've always been interested in new and different ways to Deal With It, and a lot of what I write revolves around that, albeit abstractly or weirdly or related to parts of my life I can't share, and if I did, it might not make sense.

Thanatophobia pretty clearly establishes itself quickly as Dealing With Something. But the cheap fun jokes are missing. It's not oppressively dark, or dark for darkness's sake, though. You can guess what's going on pretty quickly. Someone is describing a dream they have. You need to ask them questions. The right ones may push them forward, but it's not necessarily a matter of "hey, look, I can speed-run through with the exact ones." Madeline, the subject of your interrogations, so to speak, gets less vague as you ask more pertinent questions.

As for what you're asking her about? Well, that's something you may guess at with an elementary knowledge of Greek, given the title, but it's not revealed right away. There's a dark figure in the corridor she is dreaming of, but she can't look at her face, only giving small details.

Thanatophobia's natural language parser seems very good and also knows quite a bit of trivia. I just asked about Ren and Stimpy for the heck of it during testing, and she had a non-generic response. TTP's playing a tricky game here, because in order for it to feel real, Madeleine will have to have a response to everything, and a lot of times it is watered down. That can lead to saying oh, why bother, but on the other hand, given that she is vague about other things she needs to be specific about, it works pretty well. You learn when she is being meaningfully vague, and when you should push forward with what you have to say, and when you are just going down a dead end. So it sort of felt like an emotional intelligence test back at me.

How does one pass that test, then? Thanatophobia has three main points, which are revealed in the hints, unobtrusively placed in a pop-out box below the game's main image, which changes when you hit a critical moment. But you and probably figure out pretty clearly when meaningful progress is made. Madeline talks to you about her family, about her friend Kim, and about her friend Kim's family. She reminds you of how you met, and that plays some into what you need to ask about. She wonders why you knew she might have needed you, and you can probably figure out some of the reasons as you go through things. All this doesn't happen right away. I don't know what goes on under the hood, but you slowly start asking about things, and she slowly starts revealing more or saying "But I can't X, can I?" If you get too far off-base, there are nudges back. She notes there's something she's worried about and would like to be asked of. It's much more natural than a quit button or even "Don't leave me now!"

The end was not a huge surprise for me, but that didn't matter. I pretty much knew what had to be done, and I saw through it, and I sort of didn't want it to be true, and I still think I had empathy for Madeline and what she went through. It's certainly an issue we need to address, and in many different ways, especially since, well, I recently saw one of John Oliver's This Week Tonight that addressed the issue: (Spoiler - click to show)it was about how drug gangs in Brazil took more precautions against COVID than the government did, because people being alone is a huge risk factor in drug addiction. You get bored and need something to do, and surely with COVID done, you wouldn't keep at it? So it hit home a bit extra based on what I'd recently experienced, as well as (nothing too dramatic) realizing I was eating more than I should when my athletic club closed for 3+ months back in 2020. I guess I got away with not too much damage, but I did spend too much time playing computer games.

It's tough to provide a new spin on the issues that Thanatophobia raises, but I realized that it may not have been so much about the issues as about getting someone to open up and tell you their secrets, even if you're not the sort of person who looks into secrets. Maybe they had to hide them for a bit, but they need to reveal them to you now. So I felt there was a very good back and forth there, and I think it worked especially well because maybe just you couldn't see the usual parser prompt or whatever, and the use of graphics gave a realistic world that couldn't be too in-depth because of what Madeline needed, in the short term, to hide.

I wound up testing TTP in more iterations than I thought, and not just because I said, hey, maybe this would break things, or the author would get more feedback, or out of a sense of obligation. It provides a useful line of inquiry into certain things that are stigmatized, or into people where we say, how could you be dumb enough to do that? It makes you realize what the real important questions are, without bathos or melodrama or without cloying with too much sympathy. I found it a boost for my IFComp stretch run, both technically (hey! I'm finding stuff!) and also as a reminder of things I'd fought through that I could feel good about, even if they were not as critical as what Madeline saw and experienced.

There's a lot to explore in Star Tripper, a homage to a sophisticated old phone game, and I don't think two hours was enough to explore it fully. The author knew this, too, but all the same, I was immediately intimidated by starting at sector 99. With a two-hour judging time, my immediate reaction was "oh no, 20 minutes to get acclimated, then maybe one minute to explore each sector?"

That said, it's a well-constructed trading game with a lot of neat bells and whistles, and the procedural generation works. You start with a small ship and look to boost it by learning which planets are where, etc. I found it neat how you could visit a bar and buy drinks and the prices of goods would change, which leads to a lot of game theory based on tracking prices. But the problem from an IFComp setting is that it takes a long time, way more than two hours, to nail things down, and you've already guessed at the strategy, and I was faced with the prospect of, okay, how many sectors do I need to explore before continuing, and how many bars do I need to buy people drinks at? The thing is: you want the game to have surprises, so it doesn't get boring, but with a time limit on playing and an inability to save, you realize you're going to get blindsided. It's fun to get blindsided a bit, of course, but with only two hours, it's impractical.

So I'd like the opportunity to cut out the bit at the start, as the choices don't seem to matter. That might not sit well with the author. The player can just keep rolling for favorable scenarios, e.g. ones with places near the starbase where you start where you can run quick trading routes that don't waste fuel–but on the other hand, you need several tries to really look into things, and it's possible to get bad luck early on, and restarting is frustrating. That and other keyboard shortcuts (beyond being able to hit tab end enter) might go a long way to help people who need to get their feet wet. Also, saving would be nice, especially for a long game. Again, closing a tab inadvertently and not being able to recover was frustrating for me, which on the whole seems more important than preventing save-scumming. I also have some worries, after several replays, that there's a lot of luck involved in finding a good trade route. Getting hit with the same RNG on replay loses a lot of excitement.

So I see there's a lot there, and I'd like to see more, but some of the less important and absorbing features were pushed to the forefront. I'd like to be able to enjoy even more of the cool coding and world-building the author did, but more in the overview sense. Stuff like just being able to buy information quickly after you did so the first time would be a big help (note–sometimes you waste money on beer, because you get thrown out after ordering one drink. I'm okay with that. It's just that sometimes the repetition caused my eyes to glaze over, and I missed vital information.) And then there was the mining sub-game, which was pretty painful on a desktop, even being able to hit TAB a lot.

These are some harsh technical quibbles but I think the author showed they've grown a lot as a game designer and programmer since last IFComp, and shoehorning the game into ChoiceScript is impressive, but ChoiceScript's limitations come through a bit, so it's not as streamlined as it should be. But – in the big picture, I think I see it, and I get it, but I'm too exhausted to look into details. I do, however, wish I'd enjoyed ST's predecessor many years ago, and I feel a sense of loss over that as well as the author requesting ST to be removed from IFComp. ST definitely felt like a bad fit if it wanted to place well, but I'm glad it was there. It does a lot for me technically if not emotionally, though I really would find it most ideal if someone else hacked through to find a win.

The Staycation listed itself as taking two hours, but for me it wasn't close to that long. However, the time suggestion and content warnings (which seem almost apoligetic) pushed it back in my IFComp backlog. It's more a sprinkling of discomfort than anything intense–a brief Texture effort about spending a few nights at home, or trying to. Claudia and Xavier, your two flatmates, are on vacation for a bit. It's not clear if they're actually dating, or if you are upset about this, but they mention you are welcome to come along. You don't. You're sort of glad they're gone, you say. But then night comes, and you either poke at a book you don't process or a phone, where you see Claudia and Xavier on social media.

There aren't many choices here, but that's part of the intended creepiness. You realize you may not want to be around your flatmates, but you don't want to be away from them, either. The main choice is whether to face your demons inside or not. You have two or three nights of this. My first ending was, apparently, seeing my own blood on my arm and not realizing why or how it happened. Another? Well, it seemed the story got frozen, which was creepy in its own way. You have two options to drag-and-drop, but you have no words to drop them on. The text say "you choose (X)" and the implication is, you can't choose.

I looked at the source, as I wondered if this was intentional.I don't think so, because there's a final ending, where you have a nervous breakdown. Whether or not it is, it's effective enough. I've had times I thought I made a decision and didn't really, because I would flip back and forth. Or I'd choose to face a horrible truth but only after this next go through social media I didn't care about. Perhaps if and when texture becomes more mature, people will know this trick and say it's been done and can we find something new? But I found the jolt effective.

The Staycation mirrored a high-placed game several years ago in IFComp written in Inform that forgot to include an "instead" at the end, and the result was that excessive text bled into the game, but it was surprisingly effective. Here, if the hang was unintentional, it was effective–it gave the prospect of an endless loop of nights, or a fear of an endless loop.

Sadly there isn't enough here. It's a bit light on character sketching, and I think too much is left to the imagination, so it falls short of the well-done cover art. Obviously filling in all the whys would be unsubtle. But there were missed possibilities to play to Texture's strengths by, say, looking at items around your flat.

Side note: this is the first Texture entry I played on my phone, because I looked for ways around the apparent bug and thought it might be the browser. The interface made me wonder if I should revisit my earlier reviews–it makes a big difference!

The fears of some about parser games, especially custom parsers, are fully warranted for Jungle Adventure. It has all the usual faults. But it manages to be fun. I like the ASCII graphics, the whimsicality, the not-too-big maze. And, I admit, I enjoyed peeking in the source code. I'm still not good with classes in Python. Paul Barter is much better than me with them. If JA is whimsical (describing your game as "rip roaring" certainly is bold,) his organization is not, and I learned a lot from it. Hats off to him for that!

The game part is chaotic, though. The parser, first. There're simple verbs that outright clash. You don't want to type just "exit." That exits the game without warning. But "exit plane" leaves your plane, which you need to do. Similarly, LOAD GAME and SAVE GAME are necessary, not just LOAD and SAVE. Some items are implicit in the charming ASCII art or the item description, which is clever until something is forgotten, and you're looking for something that's not there. More seriously, you know your radio must have batteries, because it works, but this is not explicitly described in-game. Then the batteries form part of a neat puzzle. And seeing "oh, hey, this is the part of the ASCII drawing that's not in the text" is neat, but it comes at too high of a price.

The game itself isn't too arduous--well, if you cheat a bit. While there's some guess-the-verb or guess the item, once you get a puzzle, items are swapped and you move on. If something is broken, it's pretty clear you must fix it and how. The maze near the end is not too painful, and the main map is not huge. You'll know what to do. A lot of times you may need to get killed to know what to do, but you'll know. There's humor to keep your spirits up as well. Maybe not Mitch Hedberg or George Carlin, but it's there, and it helped me through some parser-wrangling.

So even if the puzzles take on some additional weight due to you missing the right verbs or nouns (pro-tip: read main.py and scenes/*.py in a text editor) and you have to save-and-restore the fights in the maze (if you get killed while button-bashing, you may be kicked out from the "restore or quit" dialogue, too) it's not too bad. As BJ Best said, there's a certain joy of discovery in Jungle Adventure which more advanced games won't have, and we can lose that if we're not careful. That doesn't make up for serious technical flaws, but for those of us who like writing or playing parser games, it heartens us to try neat new stuff and take on a bit more than we might have felt comfortable with before.

Too many JA style games in IFComp and we might have less patience with the parser. But for me a small handful is always nice, as they never seem to deal with heavy issues, and too often I do not want to deal with heavy issues, even if such efforts are well-written. With JA, there's that genuine joy that, gosh, you can DO something like this, and it succeeds at its goal. And to me it's clear these games are better than they were five or ten years ago, where we have to dig deep to find what the writer was saying, and it's a bit unsatisfactory. JA has a walkthrough now, so IFComp completionists, if you're out there, will hopefully be able to enjoy things more easily. There are frustrations, and a lot of them, but they're (relatively) forgivable. So if you are an IFComp completionist late to the show, you can notice and understand the holes in JA and not feel impeded by them, and the fun I suspect the author had putting JA together will be far less filtered.

Perhaps for a sequel, in addition to a more robust parser, the author will use the colorama package which allows a programmer to specify text color. Then, maybe, the important items could have color in them, while the background is just background. Colorama's something neat I use for my own Python programs to tell when stuff goes wrong, or when a test passes. I think JA shows a lot of potential. With the author's knowledge of Python (I imagine this could expand to learning a testing module as well,) a game design book or two could make something really special, whether for IFComp or elsewhere.

Python? Well, it feels like Python has possibilities for a simple-stupid parser that people can figure easily. With its "split" function (divides a string into an array with spaces) and so forth, it avoids the pitfalls of a lot of homebrew parsers in C or whatever. You see the verb, and you see the object, and you know what to do with each. You don't have to worry about Inform's custom verbs. (And hey, I wrote one last year because it fit what I was trying to do. Someone pointed out JavaScript would've worked better. They were right. But I don't know JavaScript.) With my own Inform games, Python might work better, because I really abuse the regex matching, which slows Inform. The potential is there. Unfortunately, Traveller's Log (TL) doesn't do much with parsing or plot.

It's a relatively small Python game. It's a bit confusing at first in that it asks if you want to read a file, and either way, it then asks for a 3-digit code, which affects what you start as. Looking at the source, there are several options, and I only wish we'd had some nudges as to how to start. I don't mind the randomization per se, but I was flying a bit blind. Perhaps on ending, if I were given some clues how to proceed and replay, I could and would.

You're given commands to type (e.g. walk, trade, exit or warp) with the goals of either gain money to live comfortably or find a king to ally with to live happily. There are some fights, but nothing too stressful, as dying resurrects you quickly. You also get random gold for staying at inns which pop up randomly, which is counterintuitive. The main goal is just to TRADE enough for the best weapons, then kill enemies as needed.

The writing and mechanics are don't have much to distinguish them. The game's title feels a bit generic. It's technically sound in terms of gameplay, though I'd have liked "y" and "yes" to be synonyms along with "n" and "no." Nevertheless, there's a good deal of effort put into the entry, as I can see from all the possible characters you could play as, and I enjoyed looking at the source because I tend to skimp on programming classes, and after some play time, I had a much better feel for them. They're something I've used more and more as I try to to script-testing of my Inform games, and I had a few aha moments.

It's good to see people are trying to use Python. There was one game in particular I meant to look at from 2016 that also placed last, though Chandler Groover said "Hey, there's a lot here." And there are advantages to Python--less worry about failing to implement default verbs and so forth. Everything is laid out well enough in Traveller's Log, but there's not much to do and not much reward for the grind, so it misses the mark. I'd like to see more Python efforts. TL doesn't do anything to change my views on this, from a functional perspective, even if the story and imagination are lacking.

A woman has vanished, well, sort of. Her husband's a bit confused. There's no foul play, really. You're a researcher, maybe an investigator, maybe a combination. That's an early choice, but your title doesn't matter. Your task is to find out what has happened, where did she go, and why.

Everything seems in order in not just the house by also the story and the technical layout. The layout feels appropriate–black and white sketched pictures, unintrusive but effective music, and a small local map in the bottom left where you click on where to go. So big-picture navigation is easy. The calculated sparseness gives us a good feeling that something is wrong. We're seeing enough details, right? But we aren't.

Asking her husband gives you additional questions to ask in general. Some things seem out of place. The light is wrong. You can have up to five questions to ask, and the right one in the right place offers clues, leaving Miriam Lane closer to visible. Ones you don't need any more are discarded. While brute force works, things are generally well-clued, and you should be able to find some clear places to ask the right questions before the last observation or two needs guesswork.

Once you become adjusted to the light, you have an idea of how or why she is gone. Here there's the only thing that really broke immersion for me, but the rest of the game is so well-done, I may be missing something: you-the- character need to find her name, which her husband never tells you, but you-the-player know it's Miriam, and based on the puzzles in the rest of the game, "M. Lane" would seem suitable. It's minor, but the rest of the game is so strong, I want to leave the possibility open I was missing something.

Once she's visible, you can start collecting items. Some of them have special meaning to her, for better or for worse. An average reader should discern pretty easily what makes her happy and what doesn't. Also, the stuff that makes her happy is hidden, and most hidden items are similar to something unhappy in clear view, and yes, this Means Something. The more positive items you collect and show her, the more optimistic the ending is, though once you know her name, describing what you've found of her also helps her return to her normal self. This threw me off slightly, too. There was a status bar at the bottom, and it increased when you gave her something nice, but I was under the impression you had to make it go all the way. You don't. But perhaps I should have known.

You see, there's a moment in AoML where it clicks that the author knows what they're doing. This is the only other time AoML slightly broke immersion for me, and that was more due to me appreciating the technical and design work, because I was looking for it when writing a review. There's a book of flowers and a flower bed. The book describes several flowers. Each flower has about five descriptions. When you pick a flower, you're asked to choose from about twenty descriptions. But you don't need all five! I can't recall this convenience before and, well, it just makes sense.

This was an immense relief but also in line with the game: you don't need to know every detail about why things happened to Miriam, or how she got to be the way she is. Although in some cases, items you find may make her upset. Several that seem happy aren't, which you can deduce if you have been paying attention, thus putting AoML that much further above your average fetch-quest. That's how empathy works in general, beyond an "oh, you like this, right? Well, you seemed to enjoy it. Whatever." Miriam doesn't need that complete understanding, yet you feel she needs it, and her husband seems to want a complete explanation. None is necessary from her, and none is necessary in-game. So when we ask for people to understand us completely, perhaps we would really just be happy with people who understood enough to block out others who tell us, with bad intentions or not, "Gosh, I just can't understand this about you." For Miriam, it's her husband not really caring about her impractical or "childish" desires and ignoring her sacrifices. While that may be a truism, AoML pushes it forward nicely.

There's one more criticism that's quite high-level. I'd like it to be easier to tab through the options. There's a lot of mouse movement, and certainly AoML is more ambitious and intricate than your average Twine effort, so there needs to be, with pop-up screens when you want to think or take an item. This is detailed GUI stuff, and it's the sort of request I only make when it's clear the author knows what they're doing and then some and, well, I wanted to see everything in-game before rifling through the source. I think with something as high-level as AoML is, it leaves you asking for more--especially because the main NPC, Miriam, never did, and look what happened to her! That's what being sympathetic gets you, game.

This is minor, though. AoML offers a wide variety of emotions and choices. You can play very badly or well. The second time through, when I knew there were things to be remembered (the more you remember and find, the more you recover of Miriam) I felt bad forgetting stuff I should have known. It occurred to me that there were people I found forgettable whom I cared about more than noisier people who grabbed my attention, and perhaps I was on the other side of that.

One more thing: AoML made more than enough sense the first time through, but it made a lot more sense when I replayed the introduction and poked around and also re-read the content warning. So much is well-hinted. It leaves you feeling you missed something, and that is your fault and not its, and that's an eerie feeling. I wound up remembering times I'd been ignored in my past, as well as people I ignored. There was no rage. But I remembered certain items people felt should give me joy and didn't, and I had an explanation. So that was a boost.

AoML and Elvish for Good-Bye were my top two rated entries in IFComp and may be more similar than you think. Both talk of unspoken desires. In AoML, they're more realistic, stuff you can't say you want, or stuff that can be easily crushed. EfG is more fantastic, more optimistic, a knowing there's something out there you can't imagine one day. Each feels necessary to give life color in its own way.

With the author's games, you have stuff you know you should expect and a whole bunch you don't, and both are pleasing. You know you're going to have a lot of whimsy, and some puzzles that should be basic but aren't, but they are fair. And you have limited verbs that say, okay, this is the puzzle. You'll have to combine them in some ways, and there aren't many commands, but there are enough that brute force just isn't going to happen. So come use process of elimination and a bit of intuition and solve it.

The subject matter is something else entirely. There will be something new, nothing you have to think too much about. That's saved for the puzzles. Here you're a robot in some high-tech area that's out of power. I assumed it was a spaceship, maybe because of "Sector (HIGH NUMBER,)" but the author noted that nothing made this the case in the text. He is correct.

Your official name is Exter-17, and you'd better do a good job here, or you'll be relegated to the boring stuff. You only have a few commands (COM to communicate and ZAP to zap) to start. The main spaceship doors are all shut, and without power, they're not going up. And all the other robots are out of power, so ZAP it is. This one's hard to bungle, and that's how introductory puzzles should be.

As power comes back on, you gain another abillity/command. You can interact with crystals, which (among other things) open doors. You'll gain a few more commands, so you can even be able to pick up items you find lying around, eventually! This is of course an amusing inversion of how TAKE is one of the first commands a player learns or uses, and TAKE ALL is an accepted early way to get your bearings. I won't spoil the actual command names, because they're nice small amusing surprises, as are the robot name abbreviations of the NPCs. These presented small puzzles to figure out (what do the first three or four letters expand to?) when I got stuck with the main puzzles. This is totally optional, of course, but it helps prevent you from feeling dumb or frustrated.

This all feels very simple, like learning very basic machine language commands (as with many DiBianca games) but there are production effects, as well. The first is what happens with text art that happens with power back on. I won't spoil it, but if you play for five minutes, you can't miss it. You also have an option of which background to choose, so that's very cool. I ran through all the options more than once.

Restoring power is the easy part. Destroying bugs is next, and it's tougher. Well, the first bug is out in the open. Then the next two are in rooms you need to solve relatively trivial puzzles to gain access to. Then, if you try to ZAP a bug, it evades you! There are thirteen total, and while no puzzle is too complex, you have to pay attention to your surroundings, or to rooms that seem like dead ends. Pretty much everything is useful, and you have to figure how.

You can win without exploring all the rooms in S471. This is a DiBianca staple: enough challenges to make you happy you got through it, then a hint you're missing something. In this case, there are a few rooms in the center that are unexplored. It seems two squares are pretty obviously needed to preserve symmetry. You get a small bonus on killing the last bug, and it's up to you how to use it that to poke around even more. Given the square map, you can figure where you need to look. There are also locked doors, or ones that won't stay open. There's even a robot that imitates you around a locked door, so toggling the door is out.

I enjoyed Sector 471 a lot. While I don't like rating it as opposed to other games by the author, I just would like to compare it to books of brain teasers as a kid, mathematical or otherwise. DiBianca's stuff seems to last a bit better. With the books, at first it was fun to say "Hey! I know how to do that!" but they got less fun when I knew all the tricks and realized I was only getting answers from what I already knew. I felt ripped off. I hoped for more out there. And I wanted more than problems. For instance, it's fun to solve "Two mathematicians were talking. One said the product of his kids' ages was 36. Then he told the other mathematician the sum of his kids' ages. It wasn't enough for the other one to decide their ages. Then he mentioned his oldest just had a birthday." It's fun to work through again after you've forgotten it for a while. But it is such a bummer when reading a puzzle book and getting a bunch of these not-new puzzles but you're aware these are rehashes. And I still remember the day I realized logic puzzles didn't have the satisfaction they used to, and I was probably avoiding mistakes more than trying or enjoying anything new. With the author's complete works, I don't feel that way.

S471 definitely has its own personality, and the general brevity works well -- the robot dialogue is odd and whimsical the right way, because robots shouldn't talk much like humans, and you can and should have a good laugh about it. It continues a nice string of works I'd have enjoyed as a kid, ones that would've boosted my confidence when the Zorks, no matter how much I loved them, left me baffled. As much as I enjoyed abstract problems, I wanted more, and I didn't know what. (I preferred this stuff to dirty jokes at 13, which did not make me at all popular.) These tastes feel less weird now I've played many such games and know others like to, too. While I don't need them any more, and the Internet provides other ways to explore my mind, I'm glad there's a repository for neat puzzles consistently blended with a fun story.

Big picture stuff first: PPD (I'll neglect the O, as otherwise I'm reminded of Naughty by Nature's hit which seems, um, incongruous with the title) makes me want to play Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. It's maybe on the long side, slightly, to fit into my plans, and I'd have missed it outside of IFComp. I admit I appreciated the walkthrough greatly. I don't know how much I can kvetch about tricky puzzles, or even if I have an ethos of one, but it's the sort of thing I wish I have bandwidth for, even if I don't. Still, it's a lot of fun, with a lot of variety, and it's old-school in many ways. I mean, malls are dying, and it's extremely expansive, and you need a big map. There's a big word puzzle, too. I'd have absolutely loved it back in the Infocom days, before there were so many other games to grab my attention. I've had paid for the InvisiClues. Thankfully, during IFComp, I needed to buy neither PPD or its cluebook. Technology!

PPD is the story of a woman who wants to get her daughter the perfect prom dress. It tackles no great social issues (okay, there's a bad rich person who gets comeuppance, and we can never have too many of that.) But it's not just pure entertainment, as there's some nice family stuff in there. Your daughter sends slightly pleading texts that double as shallow hints, and one of the main puzzles includes a love story on its own. There are absurdist laughs along the way and a bit of criminal mischief. You lock someone in a closet, but it's revenge, because what they did violated a memory of something nice from Ballerina. You may have started them smoking again, too, though they likely didn't have the discipline to stay away) and I do enjoy the cringey puns in the store names.

I hope my review gives you a big-picture idea of what was a fun experience for me, even though I abridged it. This is a game where even looking at the walkthrough will make you laugh. But sometimes we don't have the time. Compared to other long efforts, I got a lot more. This has obviously been planned and tested well. And the author admits they don't expect anyone to solve it within the IFComp time limits. They hope it will last. Perhaps it's a great game for when it's cold outside and your Internet is flaky.

A word on malls. Even a closed mall brings back memories for me. Malls were bigger when I was a kid--part of it was, I was smaller, so they seemed bigger. There was a mix of awe and fear, and I figured the future held even wider and taller shopping malls, because everything would be bigger and better in the future! They amazed me–all the stores I wanted to look in but parents wouldn't let me, because we wouldn't buy anything. Then, of course, malls started closing, and I realized I never had a look in store X. Sometimes I still see a store name today where I wonder "what did they sell?" (Thanks for answering, Google!) And I feel like I'm doing the next best thing to sneaking away from my parents looking in. PPD captures that sense of being lost in a way a swashbuckler can't, but not really, because if a mall were an actual maze, it would be very, very bad for business. It has to be practically laid out, and there are no dungeon rooms or whatever (government regulations!) but there's still a chance for hijinx. And though I've been in few malls with elevators (Schaumburg, Water Tower Place--they're there for aesthetic value,) just having that elevator in PPD helped me imagine an impossible mall, or one I expected would be build by now and wasn't. It turns out, there's some reason why the mall and its elevator are laid out the way they are, too. Nice planning by the architect.

As for the puzzles? I thought the item-based ones were the strongest, and the more abstract ones felt forced. In one, you push a bunch of buttons in a certain order to cause security screens to go blank. This is neat on its own, but picturing the security guards you suckered away from it actually figuring out how to operate this seemed far-fetched. If they could, they'd have a much better job than security guard. Perhaps I'm a stickler for this, given the puzzles I like to write. I can't express my full theories, but sometimes an abstract puzzle at the wrong time feels like it's just there, and here it can break up the relative fun of doing odd things with everyday items.

These puzzles make for a very pleasant escapism, and when you do punk an NPC, there's that brief moment of worry PPD's going to get mean, then it doesn't. It could really have gone wrong with the homeless man (he seems to have delusions, but he doesn't,) but you actually enjoy some significant cooperation. And there's general retro mischief like smoking indoors, which we wouldn't tolerate today! It's not full retro, though, as a cell phone you have provides you with occasional love-bombs from a well-meaning daughter and also the ability to take photographs. I remember reading how so many horror plots from years past could've been subverted if even one person in a party had had a working phone, but here it's not possible. OPPD has the phone, but you never need to use it, and in fact you probably want less technology.

PPD also does well enough keeping the relevant focus areas small. You eventually need to distract the security guards, but until you do, they have movie cameras centered on most stores. You have a catch-all for unnecessary items, and the various stores with their crazy names (bad pun alert! Of course, I was sad when the bad puns were over) are emptied quickly enough. So OPPD is comfortable despite its intimidating size. It doesn't make any great philosophical statements, but I'm often glad when a work doesn't state that up front, and I don't think they all should need to.

I can see myself going through PPD with a walkthrough before I play through Ballerina. Jim Aikin is one author I'd always managed to look into, and I just haven't found the right excuse, yet. It really is a fun, long story, and although I ran out of energy because I had other comp games I wanted to look at, I enjoyed getting turned around a bit and having that sense of wonder I felt so long ago, when Internet one-click shopping made everything easier.