Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

SSoN's title does sound a bit ponderous, but fortunately, that doesn't carry over to the game, which has a great premise. The Summer Solstice Sovereign has refused to wake up the Winter Solstice Sovereign of the North, and until he wakes, the days will be very short and, I assume, cold. This comes to you in a dream. There's a ritual to perform. There's even a romantic interest. It all fits together quite nicely at the end.

SSoN isn't a huge game, with seven locations, and one is locked at the beginning. That's where an archaeologist lives, and you sort of have a crush on her. She helps you later on. But in the meantime, you need to find a way to cross the lake to get to the ritual site, and you're worried people may not believe you. Once you do, and you solve another puzzle, a neat cipher is revealed. Some suspension of disbelief is maybe required, here. You have about ten items in the cipher, which makes for a puzzle translating the ancient text that tells you what to do. And yet the puzzle was satisfying once I put this aside. The ritual isn't complicated or disturbing at all--you just need to find two items and use one semi-standard verb.

So SSoN feels like standard puzzle fare in some ways. And the puzzles do feel a bit puzzle-ish. One item I thought I had rendered useless turned out to be useful, but the in-game hints (I used them a few times--they work well) showed adventure game logic applied, sort of. The TLDR is, every location has a use. And there's one irregular verb that's semi-obvious for another item. There are two items that fuse together, as well, and while the actual combination was a slight stretch, it fit in well with the story. The location pictures similarly don't have a ton of detail--they remind me of Apple low-resolution graphics--but they adjust nicely when you move stuff around or even find or take an item. I don't know how difficult it is to adjust graphics across game states in Adventuron once, but having it work across the game is a nice progress gauge.

In the end, you get the girl and help the Winter Sovereign. I noted that English was the writer's second language, and this showed in obscure ways. It's a case where the translation is logically correct but, well, safe. It doesn't try any tricks, so sometimes the writing seems a bit pedestrian. I'm left feeling this would probably be a sharper, more colored-out story in the writer's native language. Parts feel on-the-nose. But the big idea is original and well-executed and very satisfying. So SSoN shines as not being like the usual "find and give gifts" which I've also enjoyed very much in the Adventuron 2020 Jam. Instead, it reverses something that we probably all wondered about as kids. What if the days don't get longer this year? We understand the physics, as adults, but SSoN reminded me of those fears and more. It also leaves open another angle, where maybe people try to summon bad magic to keep days extra-long, and you need to prevent that. I wound up thinking about that a lot after SSoN. I'd definitely play a game like that from the author.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wodehouse is one of those authors it seems easy to make a tribute to. The main problem seems to be avoiding too-well-trodden paths or, perhaps, a plot of his you just haven't read yet. And stories with Bertie Wooster and Jeeves seem particularly easy, because we know the formula. Bertie gets in trouble, sees a silly way out, and seems to make things work, until things turn out okay, because Jeeves planned things that way.

I knew this formula well, but the end was a nice surprise. I was distracted by the things I needed to do. And if part of the distraction was fighting the parser, well, I guess being slightly muddled helps put us in Bertie's shoes. Okay, your name's actually Bartie Worster (your middle name isn't Wilberforce, either,) and your butler is Gieves, probably for intellectual property reasons.

But DtHG does so much more than just say "Hey! You like Wodehouse? Here's something Wodehouse-y." Anything could be a bit too verbose, enough to bring back memories of Bertie, and we'd give it a cheerful wave and thumbs-up. Fortunately, the strong introduction made it clear the author knew their stuff, or knew it well enough I didn't mind being fooled.

The airy verbosity extends to useful error commands. Not that you have to have it. You can get rid of some '20s slang with an option, which helps limit one potential source of overkill (people's tastes will differ.) I admit at first the error messages threw me for a loop. But they really couldn't be the generic ones and keep the tone of the story! I think this is the first Adventuron game I've played with really custom error messages.

And there's a risk they may be too cute--I've had games I really liked where parser error messages backfired due to context. But here, Bertie has several random ones that loop. And my favorite staple, "you can't go that way" replacements are delightfully chatty. With each push-back I thought, hey, this is sort of neat, but then I realized there was a huge impressive body of work. Also, the help felt in tune with the 1920s and what Bertie would say. Outside of, well, the direct HELP that just states the main verbs. Bertie would probably be flummoxed by concepts such as a parser, after all!

The plot? DtHG begins in a town square, where you, Bertie, need to make change for a bell-ringer collecting for charity. You are not dropping a whole crown into their bucket! You actually have to make change twice. The game then twists to an estate where you, as a guest, are locked in your room and need to MacGyver your way out--the item descriptions make it pretty clear some of what must be used, and there's not too much.

For the third part, you need to rig things in the house so that Julia, the object of your affections, will step under the mistletoe and let you kiss her. You need to distract an overbearing aunt (a Wodehouse staple) and disable a door. Once it works, but doesn't, your final task seems trivial indeed.

The game is not very big (four rooms, one room, ten room in the three parts of the game,) but all the same there are enough places to visit, and the descriptions are funny. I got hung up trying to bring something messy in the house by tinkering with scenery I hadn't used yet and avoiding a room that had helped me solve a puzzle.

Jeeves is conspicuously absent from all this. But he plays a part.

DtHG, though, has some frustrating moments. The hints are well-done. You can HINT NEXT or HINT RECAP as needed, and Bertie vaguely discusses what he did in the big picture without spoiling things. There are also some guess-the-verb problems. HELP mentions this, and I agree that explicitly mentioning the verbs you need would spoil things, but the alternative is awkward, too! So maybe if there is a way for Adventuron to detect "Okay, you tried for the 10th time to do something with <ITEM>, I'll help you out" that would be useful. Or maybe things could be spoiled if you keep failing a certain way X times. That sort of balancing act's tricky.

I'm quite glad I played DtHG, all things considered. I imagine there's been a Wodehouse game tried elsewhere, and of course the Monkey Island games feel Wodehousian in their own way. And there are games that like to feel Wodehousian, with the 1920s setting and meandering stories I find more fun to read than actually sit and listen to. But based on what I've read, this feels the most closely connected to "Plum"'s works, and it pulls things off well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The enjoyment I got from Save Bigfoot's Christmas was well worth the struggles I had with the parser. This seems to be more a case of the author still learning Adventuron. It's a tidy, balanced game, in the big picture. You're an elf assigned with verifying who has been naughty and nice. Bigfoot is your subject. He believes he has been nice, but Santa has received information otherwise. That information is out of context, and your job is to find out why.

The crimes are not especially terrible: Bigfoot's hair is near a littered soda can in a national park, BIGFOOT has been sprayed on the side of a house in Hoboken, New Jersey, and Mrs. Maple's children have fingered Bigfoot as the thief of one of her pies. The graphics? Well, it's probably old hat to compare an Adventuron game to Sierra AGI graphics, but this feels particularly close to the good bits without rehashing any old Sierra puzzles, with graphics changing as you make progress, so that is very neat.

These locations are, unsurprisingly, spread out, and you need to go through a teleporter to get to them. In each one, your main goal is to (Spoiler - click to show)get rid of an NPC so you can rummage around the environs to find the needed evidence. The puzzles have a good balance of absurdism. In one case, there's a garage making a lot of noise, and you find a garage door opener. But of course the battery comes from another of the areas! So the puzzles have balance this way. You have to go in and out of the teleporter a few times.

Accomplishing each main task is pretty varied. Sometimes you must do something off-stage, and one (the campground) is pretty complex. There are a couple spare items I didn't figure the purpose of (the toy robot,) but the descriptions and basic verbs managed to clue me into what to do or try.

Brian Rushton's review mentions some of the exact verbs you need. This game pointed to a high-level weakness of Adventuron and maybe parsers in general: for Mrs. Maple's pie, I had an item to use and saw what to use it on, but the verb was tricky. Perhaps having a hint-cue if I typed both items would help, so the player doesn't flail too much. It was more notable than usual, since for an AAA battery, you couldn't type AAA or battery but had to type both. So hopefully this warning lets you know where not to get stuck.

Having that aha moment to get rid of the campers was the high point for me--after that, I had a bunch of wobbles, but the game clued me nicely to make progress inevitable but still challenging. Combined with a small puzzle-maze the game only made you go through once (I'm glad this user-friendliness seems to be more common!) it was clear the author was committed to the player having fun and was willing to offer ways to streamline the pedantic bits. There are still a few that could be sanded. For instance, you need to enter the transporter out and the portal back a lot, so ENTER TRANSPORTER and ENTER PORTAL could, after a try or two, be replaced by IN. Disambiguation for similar items could be honed. But there's nothing to really make you bash your head. SBC, despite being slightly raw, is genuinely uplifting and clever, so the bumps when the parser fights you a bit are quickly forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

Does anyone really like Applebee's? It's a pretty easy target. Maybe it deserves to be. Nobody likes working there. The food isn't great. But it seems convenient enough and not as unhealthy as McDonald's. You could do better. But you could do worse. You could say Applebee's is as easy a target as airline food was. It seems like a good target for someone like the author, who's so consistent about putting out an adventure gaming newsletter, and for light-hearted humor, it does well. It also goes beyond "Applebee's, amirite?" The main thing it hits is advertising. I mean, nobody really likes advertising. Many advertisers probably don't enjoy their jobs or the ethical implications. But over the years I've found ways to be able to zone it out, and I feel that's an achievement. Probably the trickiest was blocking the ads for stuff I didn't need between songs I didn't like at the athletic club. It's the sort of thing they don't teach you in school. But of course, advertisers are always looking for another way to horn in on your life, preferably without you feeling violated enough to push back.

One they haven't gotten around to in the real world is the protagonist's main power, which is being able to see in people's minds and also plant a thought there occasionally. So, yeah, you're getting quickly into "creepily overstepping boundaries" territory. And here I originally assumed the game would be about parlor tricks where the crowd paid money if you were particularly clever! (Of course, if some people just wanted to sit and eat and didn't know you'd be there, that's invasive in its own way.) There's a certain violation of childhood dreams for me, too--mind reading seemed like something really cool, but of course powermongers will ruin it. It's treated as an asset by corporate management, and not just an asset. One you'd better use to their advantage and maximize, or the lack of initiative goes on your performance review. But -- but! The ad agency you work for has ethics. Well, sort of. You'd better not mind-read more than once, or they'd be in legal trouble, and you can't do that to a place with such an innovative business model that helps you make the most of your abilities!

This is of course bad on many levels: one, that your psychic ability is for more ambitious and "big-thinking" people than you to enjoy, and two, that the legal branch of the whole corporate empire has considered all the angles here to provide loopholes if things go wrong, and they've probably cross-communicated with the number-crunchers, and even the lawyers who would sue you for violating other people's space are probably plenty sleazy. And so forth.

This is the scary bit. Fortunately there are funny bits. First, you work for Schtupmeister beer. The world can never have too many parody beer brands--these certainly do more for me than actual alcohol. The four people whose minds you want to invade are, well, imperfect in their own way. There is a cryptocurrency trader. This was written three months before Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX went belly-up, and now that happened, I'm actually sort of disappointed more wasn't written earlier about Cryptocurrency, and, well, it's a bit too easy of a target now. Cryptocurrency, like advertising, drains resources in ways most people aren't aware, and of course, there are some smug, slick types pushing it. But dang if the story doesn't roll out another side quickly!

There's also a somewhat lonely old man, and a waitress upset with her lot in life (I couldn't help but think Schtupmeister would both fire someone for drinking on the job and for, well, not getting enough people like her to start drinking on the job, or right after their job) and a kid who turns out to be exactly the wrong sort of special. Let's just say selling alcohol to minors isn't the worst thing going on here.

You have a small number of turns to try to get each to try your special brand of syrupy beer before Applebee's closes. Do so at the wrong time, and they ignore the instincts you planted in their brain. And this right time isn't obvious for all targets until you've played through UYPPA several times and read everyone's mind. Since it's not too long of a game, this is no burden, and I'm disturbed how nosy I got and how fast.

Once Applebee's is closed for business (my not just saying "closes" may be a minor spoiler) you can catch up with your targets to see if, indeed, your psychic invasions got them to buy Schtupmeister. The indications of whether they drank your specific brand of beer are amusing. For instance, one person has Schtupmeister beer spilled on their shirt instead of what they were drinking, and this pleases you greatly. In all cases, the fallout from people drinking Schtupmeister far outweighs any profits you redirect towards Schtupmeister.

Though you the player already have a pretty good idea, the performance review at the end hammers things home, both how well you did and how awful the Schtupmeister corporate culture must be. You get a combination of rah-rah and condescension from your sales manager no matter how many people you got hooked on Schtupmeister. UYPPA combines a lot of this sort of small horror into a big one.

Criticisms would be that UYPPA hits some low-hanging fruit, though it knows not to beat said fruit into a pulp. It's low-key terrifying, too, and I'm not surprised that an author who has a newsletter of short games understands balance. UYPPA reminded me of all the times I'd been accosted by salesmen, and how hard it was to turn them down, and the effort it took to be polite, because I knew it was their job, even though I knew part of their job was leveraging guilt and hesitation. These four decidedly imperfect souls of targets? Well, for the most part, I sympathize with them. The kid, no. His mother, yes. So this was definitely a successful entry, to me.

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.

"Elf helping Santa" seems like a good idea for a Christmas theme in text adventures. Being Santa would require the sort of big-picture administrative commands or tasks we may be putting off with our latest game. And between A Christmas Quest and Santa's Trainee Elf, the results are intriguing. There's probably a limit to stories that keep things fresh, but these have enough differences.

The big one is this: STE is full of NPCs, but you have been left behind after an elves' party, and you have one more package to help deliver. There are some optional cleaning tasks and a small bit of gross-out humor (avoidable, I'm pretty sure, and not VERY gross) but the heart of the story is very neat indeed. The present is not too bad to find. The transport is trickier! Christmas games are best when they riff on something you thought was completely played-out, and ACQ definitely does so with a heart-warming way of finding transport.

The main puzzle is actually cooking something up, which sounds potentially really tedious, except once you know what to cook, the why is really persuasive. There is, in fact, a lot of fiddling, but with the imaginary ingredient involved, why you're doing it feels as real-lifey as an imaginary trip to the North Pole can.

The graphics are also neat--they go heavy on the green and red in many right ways, and I enjoyed wandering around once more before calling it a day. On winning, the game also suggests some actions that are the sort of thing a young elf would enjoy. I get the feeling more were implemented, but they might've been hidden.

There are some fiddly bits, such as needing to TAKE something to READ it. But the in-game hints do the job, along with David Welbourn's walkthrough in case I tripped up. So I was able to forgive any parser hacking, or perhaps the latest version fixed some things post-comp. And maybe ACQ could have benefited from keeping score or having a brief list. But then again, if you forgive any game, a holiday game has to be at the top of the list. And it feels like something I could come back to next Christmas and enjoy working through now that I get it in the big picture.

Crash is commendably ambitious both narratively and technically. It doesn't mess around to start. You're given some trivial tasks to fix a spaceship (a microwave and cabinet are out of whack,) but of course those are just an introduction to the main plot. A spaceport to the side blows up. Obviously, someone needs to figure why, and you're the only person on the spaceship who can do so. Not because you're a detective, but because you're conscious. Not only that, you're on a crash course with a major spaceport! There's a lot of help early on with nice touches such as the Unicode character for an arrow. So I felt pretty comfortable attacking things early. And there was an in-game hinting system. I was making good progress while clueless of the very nice PDF walkthrough that came with the game.

My initial try, I spun out early, but the puzzles I solved, I was happy for. The scoring was neatly done, with a list of things you've fixed, want to fix and have to fix. In some cases it seems like there's an intentional bit of difficulty, for general humor or moving the plot forard. For instance, with a pair of bunks, I could CLIMB the one I didn't need to do anything, but the one I did, I couldn't. The alternative verb exhausted me for a bit.

Still, I had a lot of neat stuff to do and found it generally amusing to see or find what the solutions were. Like the microwave, which should be easy to fix, except I didn't have the right tools. Fixing the microwave, though not a puzzle requiring intense technical knowledge or deep building on what was there, had just the right sort of subversions and got that first point that said, gosh, I had Done Something, and of course it wasn't going to be super-simple right away. And I also enjoyed figuring how to go up from the galley containing microwave–you know something is there, and you hear voices, and it's a good part of the mystery, and it plays well on the fear of death and being lost. Then when you hear the voices, you have another choice to make.

I got stuck a bit after opening the way up, where double-checking the scenery got me "Really, the equipment trunk isn't important to the story. But by all means, continue to fiddle with it" and after a bit of wrangling
with the parser, this felt like someone was looking over my shoulder and saying "boy, you are clumsy with tools." I don't think this was the author's intent, and it may be gone in a post-comp release, Needling the player just the right amount is tricky, and a little snark can go a long way in the wrong sort of way, but hopefully forewarned is forearmed.

That's where I cut off in-comp. I'd started to see there were two people with opposite stories you needed to evaluate. I'd found a way to walk outside the spaceship. So I felt competent, even if I wasn't able to stop it.

So it's where I cut off, as I was at about the time limit, and I'd had a satisfying time, technical quibbles aside. Poking afterwards during a more relaxed time, I enjoyed the possible endings (failure, blowing the ship up without crashing into the city, success) and I'd even worked my way through a schematic with the help of some manuals. This is always tricky for me, as I like to play things to get away from technical manuals. And I wasn't sure if I would feel competent enough to make replay worth it, until the diagram made sense, and aha! There I went. The problem of trusting the Sergeant or Captain was interesting, and I certainly felt pressed to respond, but of course, I didn't have to.

Crash felt like a very enjoyable work that definitely wasn't my thing, and I always welcome those. The author's shown a great willingness to learn even more on the forums. And so Crash sort of has the feel of Marco Innocenti's first Andromeda effort in 2011 both because it's Sci-Fi and it involves an apocalypse and old-scoolish puzzles. In 2012, the second Andromeda effort won IFComp.