Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first two games with the Perplexity engine, Kidney Kwest and Baby on Board, were ... well, a bit different from this. Those were quiet domestic affairs. And while taking your medication for kidney disease is important, the stakes are raised in Headlights. Here, you're out in the wilderness and injured. What are you doing here? And why?

You may be able to guess, especially with the clues the game gives. The detective work is more about just looking around and finding items. The world's a bit surreal. For instance, there's dark liquid dripping from the ceiling of a cave, and when you taste it, it's awful. Guessing the liquid provides a clue. There are also minor puzzles where you need to find a way to make light or gain strength. It feels like standard cartoon or comic book logic, which again is an effective indication you aren't in the real world. But for the most part, you look around and find things based on the room's description, and the verbs you have to guess are very standard.

So it felt technically smooth, much smoother than the previous games. They certainly had their charm, but you had to wait a long time for the next move. You can probably guess what has happened to the mangled deer. Everything's pretty tidy. Though I'm still not convinced that, as-is, the Perplexity engine has any special advantages over a standard Inform parser. I like the drop-down box that appears to fill in a command, e.g at one point, you may try to PUSH BOULDER, which fails, and once you think you can, you can autofill after typing P. That's not related to syntax parsing, and I'm still not big on the debug messages that correct your grammar if you type "PUSH BOULDER" instead of PUSH THE BOULDER. But the tutorial was neat and helpful and the engine appeared faster than I remembered from Kidney Kwest.

The writer does have a good concept of design, but unfortunately the dream world introduces a lot of puzzling for puzzling's sake. If you know the conventions, there's not much to worry about, but the problem is, without much to worry about, the big reveal doesn't have a lot of oomph. It feels like implementing Perplexity for text adventures has overall been positive, and it resulted in a clean, sensible game, but I can't help the chat-style interface worked better in Thanatophobia, and the creativity of both authors (Jordan White and Eric Zinda) would be better served using something that's already there. So far I even think all three of the games would look great in Adventuron (sadly absent from this year's comp.) But it's obvious that progress is being made with Perplexity as a text adventure platform

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.