Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I didn't get to look at nearly as many Spring Thing games as I'd hoped, but all the same, I'm glad I got to The Bright Blue Ball. It's surprisingly cheery for something with the topic BBB has, and I don't think I was the only one who needed that. I'm more a cat person than a dog person, but I wound up being quickly invested in the protagonist, who escapes from their safe home to look impulsively for, as the title suggests, a bright blue ball. It's their favorite, and they know they should know better, and they feel bad the moment they're out the door, but they have to find it. And they have quite an adventure before coming home.

It's no spoiler to mention that, yes, you do find the ball, meeting people along the way and solving the mystery for you-the-player without you-the-character fully understanding what's going on beyond their own needs and the needs of humans they meet in a deserted town. This is hardly new, but here it doesn't feel forced, and so I had the impression the author had good command of the story side of things. For instance, if you went back home too early, your family would say different things based on how far along you were in the game. As to why they can't or won't go outside, while others are, that makes a good deal of sense quickly. The constraints, such as being able to carry only one thing at once because you are a dog, aren't just there as a nuisance. They add to the realism, and here the inventory limits are complemented by not having a lot of useless items.

As an example of the strength of the game world, I ran into a game-state problem where I was locked out of a win (I took a circuitous route that missed a few clues and thus stress-tested things rigorously,) and it was pretty clear, because a room description conflicted with the narrative built up. But it was easy to remember what to do, and I enjoyed seeing clues I'd missed, and so forth. When something potentially disastrous like that works out okay, you know you have something good. And if this is fixed in the latest release, so much the better!

While it's dreadfully unfair to compare a first-time author's work to something like Toby's Nose in detail, I think it carves out emotions and story that Toby's Nose doesn't, and it offers promise that there are others. I'd like to see more games where SMELL is a prominent command. And I think the technical mistakes I saw were that of a first-time author, so if they have something else to share, I'm looking forward to their next work. They seem to have the important and harder-to-teach things right.

Espiritu Roboto establishes a lane early, and it's a strong one: you're a robot who is about to undergo repair or, more likely, a memory wipe. In your dialog with another machine, there are a bunch of errors reminiscent of an unhelpful parser in the starting cut-scene, and bam, you're dropped beneath a house where you and other robots work. Early on, you try to get back to work, but something is clearly wrong in a hurry. You don't want to go through reprogramming/repair/death, so you set your sights on escaping.

There are, of course, obstacles to get by. Some are physical and inanimate, some are robots, and some are human. There are even cats that obstruct you for a while. You have a dark area you need to find a light source for. You'll probably see where the escape is, but you don't have the skills to get out. For that, you need to find another entity.

An entity beyond the robot spirit (implied by the game's title) you pray to--this is a neat bit of verb choice, with THINK reminding you of what you did and PRAY asking new questions. While the question list gets filled up near the end--some clues are removed, and others aren't--it's still handy and efficient, and it's not the only custom verb that works well. They're all clued, and the parser has covered a lot of good guesses.

Surprisingly for a game about robots, the puzzles aren't really where it's at. That may say more about the narrative, or how the puzzles were combined into a very solid story for such a small game. For instance, in a library, you need to push stuff out of the way, but then to blend in with humans you need something else. There's a sign on a door that says "NO ROBOTS," and getting by is a puzzle, but once you reflect on things, it's all a bit sad and frustrating. And in one case, a solution to one puzzle temporarily blocks getting another item you need, but it makes a lot of sense.

The only place where I got in trouble was when I assumed an item had just one use. I visited a place far away (well, relatively--the map is not huge, and I'm grateful the author drew up a map) and used the item there instead of nearby. Using it nearby didn't quite register as it almost felt too on-the-nose. I can imagine others getting stuck here, especially since if you PRAY, the robot spirit assumes you used the item in the almost-too-obvious place, so I'll note (Spoiler - click to show)the laser pointer has two uses.

That's really minor, though. Espirito Roboto worked for me. I'd also like to call out its graphics as a clear positive. There's nothing super-fancy, but there's good variety, and it feels whimsical without feeling dashed off or calling attention to its absurdity. This sort of snuck up on me, and at some point I turned around and said, yeah, good job there.

There are a lot of longer games that go into emotions more in-depth than ER, but sometimes I am just not up to them. I often don't have the energy to fully appreciate them, so in a way, ER provided a sort of tutorial experience for someone who knows parser games but is a bit wary of taking on a huge dystopia or too-heavy issues. It had a high return on time invested for me, with just a bit of unhappiness and servitude and looking to connect with someone else who understands, someone beyond the bartender who serves bacon-laced alcoholic drinks. This was enough to push me to remember my own nuisance I wanted, and still want to, move on from.

The cheery graphics in Library Quest quickly help reassure you nobody is going to be shushing you as you move between locations, or telling you to finally sit down and stop adventuring, or whatever. There's no deep research as you look to repair your mother's favorite vase, but there is exploration and discovery. So it's pretty low-key, and the atmosphere is favorable for a TALP game.

There are tangles, and I'd like to get them out of the way so you know what you can enjoy. Stuff like having the player DROP VASE to find a new and important item once you start looking on the ground is generally effective, and it wasn't until I finished the tutorial that I realized it was more on rails than I expected. Which was okay. Things don't have to be perfectly realistic, but sometimes the tutorial has you do stuff you don't use again, as when things taught to the player are only used once (GIVE ITEM, for instance--this is important for text adventures in general, but it distracted me a bit.) Other times, it works a lot better. You learn spells from scrolls, and the tutorial offers shortcuts by saying CAST and then a number. So that works okay, though there's some fiddling to X SCROLL, which gives a disambiguation question, then GET SCROLL, which gives another.

I'm being a bit fussy here, but this sort of thing slows things down and makes the tutorial feel a bit remedial and may also give a player the experience that all parser games force you to fight the parser. It seems fixable, though, as I think Adventuron has "does the player mean"-style coding syntax. And it's hardly fatal. But it's there.

So you go through the library, generally using one scroll to find the next, sometimes asking the librarian at the front about things. I got stuck there as I didn't fully spell out an item I needed. I managed to ask about (Spoiler - click to show)STOREROOM, STOREROOM DOOR, DOOR and KEY, without asking for the right thing. One hint also seemed to be misplaced--there's a plant you need to get by to read something on the desk, but the clue as to what verb to use is in a note on the desk. Then later I assumed I had another action was implicit. So the game feels a bit pedantic with what you need to do, even for a tutorial jam.

It's still got its share of fun, though. Once I was done, I was left wishing there was more of it. The spellcasting mechanic is well done, and the puzzle in the restricted area was foreshadowed nicely. Once things clicked, they clicked. And while I noticed occasional bugs (blank responses to retrying things that pushed the game forward) and also one scroll that kept reappearing if you searched the bookshelf twice, the world was well-built enough that the author can and probably will fix that sort of thing quickly, rendering parts of this review obsolete. (I never did figure (Spoiler - click to show)what the bucket or the water spell was for, either.)

But this is one of those games where I found a lot of quibbles because I was glad to pay attention. I could definitely do with an expanded version featuring more of an emphasis on exploring a logically laid-out library (e.g. rooms/branches for different subjects or combining spells) and less on fiddling with the parser.

I admit the title put me off a bit. The wrong preposition could signal much more serious problems. But fortunately the game turned out not just satisfactory but satisfying for me, even though some of the puzzles would wind up forcing me to wangle more than average.

The plot is simple. You, as a young kobold, fall off a cart and wind up in a human city. Since humans don't like kobolds, you need to sneak around. The first puzzle seems simple: find a disguise to blend in. Except it's not that easy! And that's where some custom verbs, along with USE X ON Y syntax (something I'm a big fan of), kick in. One custom verb in particular is clued and makes sense, and it's phased out as you solve puzzles.

You also have SEARCH MEMORY to see if you need to do anything in a location. It's interesting to require such a long command for hints--it certainly deterred me for going to spoilers. However, sometimes I went in for a spoiler when I didn't need to. I had the puzzle figured, but I didn't quite have the right syntax, so I wound up checking if I was on the right track. I was, and things seemed clued well enough, but this broke immersion a bit despite SEARCH MEMORY avoiding fourth walls. For instance, one puzzle requires USE X ON Y, but I didn't take X because X seemed kind of heavy and similar to another object I couldn't pick up. So I went with a bit of parser trial-and-error, but fortunately, there were very few errors to make.

There are also a few auto-deaths with timed puzzles where humans are getting closer. You just have to leave and return to reset the timer, but it's enough to create atmosphere. I wound up running ahead too fast after solving one non-timed puzzle, not realizing a useful item I left behind. So I thought "okay, okay, timed puzzle" while it happened, but it had a knock-on effect: I was that kid, running ahead, looking for their family, not taking the time to get centered and see everything that could help.

The timed puzzles start out pretty easy (just take something and leave) but the final puzzle requires a bit of prep beforehand. In one case, using a verb with an implicit object not only gives a reject but uses a turn. That's not too bad, as you can auto-save, but it's not very hospitable. I also worried I'd gotten in an unwinnable state when I seemed to have consumed an item I didn't, due to a reject message ((Spoiler - click to show)the game says you burned the plain stick, though it's still in your inventory).

Nevertheless, what was going on was pretty clear. There were a few "you can't quite do that" moments that forced me to make logic leaps that were generally pleasing once I pushed on to the next room. And while it's pretty linear, there are clues of side locations once you're stuck, and you'll realize you're stuck. The final puzzle has probably been seen and done before, but it's well done. At what I didn't know was the final room at the time, I felt the game might be ruined if it dragged on too much. There was potential for a maze, but the author cut things off, and it made for a strong or at least tidy ending.

So KiSfF has some rough spots, enough a post-comp release could boost it nicely (lots of parser clarification, implicit verbs and verb synonyms, and also custom bits like changing the RESTART from the generic "Would you like to forfeit the game?") but they're the sort that I think if you know of them ahead of time, you'll be prepared to sit back and enjoy it. And the tutorial does a good job of showing you what you can do.

For the first Year-End Speed-IF I participated in, I was a bit worried I wouldn't fit everything in that was suggested. I was assured that was okay. I did my best. There were some really good efforts that put everything together. I was proud to sit down and get writing. I think I got some good laughs. Danse Nocturne got more.

It didn't contain any of the suggested items or plot lines. It was definitely its own thing--not guess-the-verb--more guess the adverb, telling you how you, as a lady being courted, should dance. A lot is clued in the story and text, but you can guess and improvise and go against the story's grain without punishment, too. Guess-the-adverb works rather better and not just because you're spotted the last two letters immediately. There's no real way to gauge, at least at first, how well you're doing or what ending you'll get to the poem. There are several, and based on the stanzas you get, you decide what to do next. Guessing wrong gives an interlude-ish sort of line, which is far cheerier than the standard parser errors.

So this is a sort of guessing game, and there's not necessarily a right answer. You just follow it where it goes, and generally after fewer than twenty adverbs, you get an ending. They run the gamut of emotions.

I don't want to spoil the mechanics too much other than to say it's a Speed-IF game and there's no huge surprise and no need to twist your brain, but there's enough you'll keep engaged and probably won't try experimenting formally and measuring what does what for a while. It's possible, but it ruins the experience if you do so too soon.

So I was impressed and glad Joey broke the rules to bring everyone Danse Nocturne. I wanted to see the source, but I'm glad waiting for the source somehow got lost in the shuffle. I think I had a binary on my computer that I poked at, trying to figure the mechanics, and when I finally noticed the source was up, I was a bit sad to lose some of the mystique. But as a programmer, it was very nice to see relatively simple code (the long topic snippets amuse me--Joey recognized coding conventions were the last thing to worry about when trying to cram content into a 3-hour speed-IF, and he had things set up so adverbs could be added easily) bring complexity into speed-IF, and it reminded me that things are out there, where you don't have to be fancy. There are still rules to be broken the right way. In this case, it's guess-the-word, but it's robust and interesting and engaging, and it's hard to get stuck.

I'm glad I've had Danse Nocturne going in and out of my playing experiences over the years, and even if I'll never write anything like it, it guides the way for the sort of effective rule-breaking I like to see and maybe even do. It's one of those positive oddities where you say "I must know how they do this" but you don't want to know righ t away, as it spoils a bit of the fun.

The author told me about this game long ago and I never got around to playing it. He hasn't logged in for 5 years (since 2017) and seems to have disowned some of his early stuff, but this remains. It's a tribute to the very bad poetry of William McGonagall, which is now available in the public domain. I think I went and read it all and forgot to come back to ToC. One thing sticks with me more than any of his poems: someone claimed McGonagall would think twice about moving away from Dundee before the year 1893.

ToC is blandly titled and has little plot, and the only puzzle is an odd one, but that's appropriate, given how McGonagall's poetry itself is not especially rich, and it explores well-known rhymes and overused images. ToC is rather short and all in poetry, with very few rooms and only one real puzzle, but of course too much McGonagall could be, well, too much. At some point, we get the point, and that's that. The cadences are all in the McGonagall style, and years after reading him, I wasn't able to pick out what was original stuff by the author and what was fake. But it was all pleasant. McGonagall wasn't particularly known for his epic poems, and those that were kind of ruined the joke.

There are other, deeper poetry-based games out there, but this is amusing and a nice introduction, and I wish I'd remembered to look at ToC before the author left, so I could say thanks to him.

ToC feels like something that could be expanded a bit for other projects or for other authors (I'd love if someone did an Amanda McKitrick Ros matchup, as bad prose tends to take longer to grate than bad poetry--I believe the author may have let me know about her, too!) and there have certainly been more robust efforts. But this does the job for what it wants to be, and if the author has rejected other juvenilia, he has his reasons, but he was right to keep this up. It's a small joke but a good one.

It's hard to capture the feeling of discovering a new programming language or system and seeing that, yes, some things you always hoped were simple are, indeed. Or that new feature is a bit different in ways you didn't expect. There's a lot of plowing through stuff and educated guessing until it works. There can only be so many ways to do it wrong, right?

That's usually not so hot in games. The plowing through stuff had better be obfuscated by an adventure, or it should be pretty short, and in BBQPP, you get both. It's a two-room game, with Barry's computer room (old BBC Micro, new ZX Spectrum) and the downstairs room where a new package has come in. So there's a bit of excitement built up here and a bit of nostalgia as well, even though I never had a Micro or Spectrum. I did have various programming books I understood progressively more of, the more I programmed them and ran them and tweaked them, and years later I was excited to a PDF-scanned version of a sequel to a childhood favorite. I'm sure Barry did the same sort of tweaking, too, though I don't think a wash-rinse-repeat in BBQPP itself would've been beneficial.

BBQPP doesn't tell you the commands to win, and while it's a guess-the-verb sort of puzzle, the verb isn't too hard to guess, and it feels like when I'm learning a programming language. I start looking for too-obscure stuff before realizing the solution was simple, and it should be, or nobody would want to move over to the cool new programming language.

The first installment of Barry Basic isn't as robust as the ones that came after it, but it wasn't supposed to be, since it was for a jam with a very specific purpose, and I believe it hit the target there without micromanaging the player. But it captured moments of discovery I remember for my youth. Perhaps it only did so because I had already played and enjoyed the two Barry Basic games (as of May 2022--cross one's fingers) that followed it and wanted just a bit more. But it did so nonetheless and reminded me I didn't need any extraordinary excitement or huge fights to have those moments. I wound up looking a lot of odd programming stuff immediately after playing it.

ATY (we don't need the whole acronym) quickly establishes itself as metafiction: you, Em (short for Emerson,) are playing a distinctly mediocre game called Infinite Adventure with your friend, Riley, who's about to move away. You're young enough to still forgive programmers for the sort of simplicity found in IA, but you're old enough to want more and to start feeling bored. But these games are what you have. So you play them. You give an elf a carrot, because giving them a feather doesn't work. This continues until you and Riley realize that this is not the greatest way to spend time together before she leaves. And there's a nagging feeling you two aren't discussing what really matters.

There's not much to do besides play games, though, especially with the weather. Now part of ATY's task is: how to we make a game-in-a-game that's clearly boring, without making the game boring? Well, it makes several offerings, all of which are boring in their own way, but certainly back in the '80s this sort of variety felt like it had to be interesting. There's Infinite Adventure, featured in the blurb and cover art, which ... goes on, in its "give x to y" sort of way, until it's broken and you don't have the item you need to help a witch get organized. At this point, your in-game computer's menu reveals three other games: Warriors of Xanmor (all stereotypical adventure games should have an X,) Strip Poker and CompuDoctor. Each is a simplistic game with an adult NPC. All three have holes in their own lives. They're far from perfect. But each gives you appropriate distance from their shortcomings,. Strip Poker has impressive ASCII art which shows someone reclining without, well, showing anything. CompuDoctor is mostly textwalls with egregious typos (they're there for a purpose.) And Gardon, Warrior of Xanmor (the first NPC you meet) does the whole elevated middle English thing before lapsing into more normal chat or, once you're done chatting, estimating his experience points or performing other fourth-wall-breaking activities. There's also a shop in Xanmor, but your adventuring won't give you any currency it needs.

He needs something, and so does your opponent in Strip Poker and the doctor in CompuDoctor. Each one of them irks you in their own way. That's partially your own immaturity and part their own shortcoming as adults. There are particularly good parts here where you don't even want to talk to the doctor because he knows to much about you, and your strip poker opponent knows you aren't eighteen but tries to give you advice about growing up. And the three NPC, well, they know of each other, at the very least. And when I played through quickly, each time I had to give slightly different items to each NPC, which was a nice bit of flavor. But I think the best part is solving the 5th iteration of Infinite Adventure and beyond. AUTOPLAY gets you through and pushes the story right when you worry it's sagging a bit. It senses you get the point of how grinding is fun, until it isn't. Plus it signals things are going to go off the rails, both in terms of the game's realism and Em's own frustration.

There's a feeling of just extending time together for its own sake that the game captures well, then there's a flashpoint to what's brewing, because Em and Riley clearly have things they want to say but can't, and the adults in the games help them with that. And in fact you have the option at the end of explicitly not doing anything for Riley, or only doing part of what you can do, which affects the ending you choose. I enjoyed comparing them.

And things like this made ATY so much more than a look back with regret, or nostalgia, or whatever. For starters, I thought of how neat it seemed when I was 5 that a computer could almost sort of have another person inside it, or seem to, but I didn't realize what that realism would entail. Then there are shout-outs to other things from the '80s. They're not joyous, just mentioning, we liked this, but maybe there was better. The Amulet of Werdna is one. Wizardry's a good fit because it never really grew technically or provided a story, and it only slightly became less oppressive for starting players, and you could get nostalgic for it while missing Bard's Tale or Ultima. For me, Wizardry nostalgia was about making unbeatable characters with byte-editing and running through quickly, then discovering sibling folders on Asimov.net for RPGs I'd never heard of--and they were so much better once I had the guts to poke around or pay for an eBay copy of Quest for Clues.

As someone who can listen to one song on a loop, the Journey CD (CDs, wow) with references to newer, more experimental bands ring a bell, too. So the callbacks aren't just to cover retro-cred bases but to say, yeah, this was neat, but a bit was missing. So I had some regret that I never really got to discover BBSes or phreaking or assembly language, but ATY balancing things right still reminded me of long or slow goodbyes to certain friends, and even to ones I thought were my friends. Sometimes that good-bye was expected. Other times, maybe I should've seen it coming. I went to a big high school and had a feeling I'd stop being in classes with some people I'd liked to have seen more of. I had friends who showed me cool things and semi-friends who did, too, but they hid the GOOD stuff, and some of these friends-on-paper made me feel I couldn't share with others, or maybe I didn't deserve to share with others, and I felt the same sort of regret Em seems to if you end things wrong.

But ATY doesn't really dwell on things, or if it does, it makes it clear dwelling is not healthy, even if we can't see anything better. It has four possible endings, based on how well you want to remember Riley. They all bring up how dumb the Infinite Adventure game was but have different levels of contentment. But in any case, it does something good, which is to put in perspective some of the silly stuff I enjoyed, not just computer games, or stuff I played just because it was there or winnable, and that's not something to have nostalgia for. Maybe it was a game my friends and I all got better at until we hit a rough ceiling,and we should've been learning other skills instead. But it's also hinted when the adult characters inside the computer programs indicate that they want to move on, and Em has issues to address.

ATY was a tough one to replay, not due to quality issues, but because it was about how replaying lame stuff or nostalgia in general isn't healthy. The author mentioned in his postmortem a quote that nostalgia is anger misplaced, and I've certainly seen that when I've played through something old and thought "I wish I'd gotten the hint book earlier/had friends to share ideas with," and these thoughts often turn to "I wish I had more to be nostalgic about, like the trickier Infocom games." There are good memories, of course. And we should be able to get a lot of neat things from something that seems stupid on the surface. And looking back, I never realized how many adults I looked up to mixed in anger with their nostalgia. But I also think nostalgia is fear misplaced, or it has been for me. I want to try new things, but not really, just as Em and Riley like Journey, but it's hard to discover new things--what if we don't like the new thing as much? All the while, Infinite Adventure, the safe bet, gets more boring on replay. We're looking for something that isn't there. We do find new stuff, but less each time. I know even old beloved games get old, and sometimes (as with 2400 AD) the best part is finding a clever shortcut to make things go quicker. Narnia and the Chronicles of Prydain, well, I felt sad re-reading and finding nothing really new.

So I definitely worried ATY would have these severe diminishing returns to scale. It should be replayable on paper, but I think I paid enough attention to say: wait, ATY doesn't encourage too much of this sort of thing. I found ATY spurred me to try things I left out--that is the best you can hope for, grabbing onto someone's nostalgia and saying "Hey! I never saw that! I have a chance to now!" whether it's an old game or old video. Perhaps it's literal, where ATY mentions phreaking or some bands I never heard, or it reminds me of friends who said "What!? You never saw popular movie X?" Certainly the isolation ATY provides--the bulk of the real-world game takes part in place--reenforces that some nostalgia I had was itself too self-focused.

I remember on one gaming forum I had friends who liked retro games, but I knew I was looking for something different, and people wrote reviews, and eventually the reviews became more polarized, and the more aggressive personalities cut down favorite nostalgic games like Kickle Cubicle before leaving because "this place got a bit boring, no offense." I'd just never considered the anger angle before. The gradations of anger are reflected nicely in ATY's endings. But I also remember nostalgia as "boy, my friends and I were happy before we got bored of each other" and taking a while to realize we weren't a great long-term fit, and both sides may not have tried hard enough to find people they could grow with. ATY reminded me of several people like that--people I'd like to hook up with, but I wonder if we'd really talk about what we'd done since then and what we want to do, or if we'd get stuck.

I feel I don't have the qualifications to pick apart fully how good the meta-narrative is, but I think it must be Pretty Darned Good, as it reminded me of departures through college and beyond. It reminded me of people who said "keep in touch" and people who meant it, of people I should've gotten on with better. It made me Google a few dimly-rememebered names. I didn't dwell on whose fault it was we didn't get together more. And it made me (re)visit stuff I never got around to, in a way a detailed article or someone saying "OMG you have to listen to this" (or memories of people who bragged they knew it but never gave details--again, maybe a bit of anger on my part here they didn't share) never could. And, of course, it reminded me of the objectively boring things that provided bonds, even if they should not have, on paper. And even if those bonds were with people I ultimately fell out with, for reasons right or wrong, they were still there and far more real than the times I looked at something nostalgic and thought "this should cheer me up." And it should have, on paper, but it didn't.

So games like ATYC are extremely valuable to me. I wind up pushing myself to do or try a bit more than expected, because I don't want to be like Em thinking back too much to how things were, no matter how happy Em is in general. It certainly makes me want to try new things when writing (I worry I get in a rut) or coding (it's so easy to use the old packages you first learned and try to recreate the "Hey! This works!" excitement without trying for that next step) or, well, visiting new places. Works with exotic locales and exciting characters don't do it for me nearly as well. My feeling looking back is that Gardon and the doctor and Ashley don't need to be disturbed, but that also applies to real people and some of their memories, and I know I need that to block out possibilities that don't lead anywhere, to focus on the ones that will.

Don't worry if you don't like Westerns. I don't, and I quickly stopped caring that SotM was one. The emphasis here isn't on Western flavor or what-have-you, though there is plenty of it. Like the previous author's Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night!, it's more about MacGuyvering things, though it's a good deal more serious. I have to admit I remembered the silly fun more than the MacGuyvering, so I hoped the second bit held up, and it does. I also felt the path and plot were a bit clearer, which I think is a combination of both experience as a designer and programmer and the more realistic setting. So I was pleased and unsurprised to see it do so well in the Comp.

Things start out pretty badly for you, Boots Taylor. The Black Blade has kidnapped Rosa, whom you think you've connected with nicely, and you go chasing the gang by yourself. Unsurprisingly, you're ambushed, and while you're hiding, a thug named Ace is throwing canisters at you in order to kill you. The higher-up gang members have business back at the ranch, and you're unarmed, so how hard can it be? While ducking, you sort of wonder how they explode, but more importantly, you're wondering how to disrupt him. That's your first puzzle. Once he's gone, you find a small gold casket you find on his person. Operating it is the first real puzzle, and the game is quite kind saying "okay, next time just use (command)!" Earning points is always nice, but earning a shortcut is an extra bonus!

The casket(Spoiler - click to show), which is really a lighter, helps you kill three more enemies: the gang members who left Ace to kill you. They're all hiding so as not to give anyone a clear shot. But that means if you sneak around right, they don't have one, either. Podge sneaks around the corral, Whitey is on the roof of the barn, and Felipe is on a windmill. These locations, along with a stable where you make friends with a horse (a Western trope, but definitely worthy of a Senor Chang "I'll allow it") hold clues how to kill enemies you can barely see.

All three of these puzzles feel to me very smart, yet not obscure. Upon killing each person, you note they didn't deserve quite a gruesome death (I suppose safety ladders weren't invented back then, leaving Whitey and Felipe having to jump,) but you still find a letter and a key in a pocket on each corpse. Each is used to open a triple-lock (spare a thought for poor Ace, who didn't own one) that leads to the Real Mystery.

Given the time frame (just after the Civil War) there are some call-backs to invoking the Confederacy that feel relevant today. Other reviewers pointed them out a bit better. It's all quite a dirty business aside from that. I may be walking a tightrope avoiding what the Real Mystery is, as I'd like to, but I just want to add, I found the annotations at the end interesting. Some stuff, like the safety powder, I knew, and some I did not. I feel like this is a game I could revisit in a year or so, having forgotten a lot of details, and I would recall enough of it to enjoy it unfolding in a slightly different way. Maybe as a boost before any of 2022's longer IFComp games that might seem intimidating. However, if I had to use a walkthrough, I'd be glad to read the one included with the game. It's a story by itself and manages to avoid the mechanical "move here then here" or even the stronger narration/command back-and-forth. I don't think it would've worked nearly as well if it weren't walking you through such a good story. It asks questions about what you may've noticed, then tells you, and it has a few red herrings worth trying. It's great fun, with a lot of care put in.

Oh, one thing: once you finish, the opening scene makes a bit more sense. You'll probably have forgotten it when you've been engaged in the story.

The Libonotus Cup provided a nice break from the more serious entries which certainly had their own virtues. It's a pirate race, replete with weapons, treasure and mythical sea dangers. It's not too long, but replayable, and it has very high presentation values. While I put the web version of my game in Parchment, this goes a bit further, with custom CSS. It's a combination of JavaScript and parser and choice I didn't quite grok technically, but they're blended welll, and it's not hellishly complex. You've got a compass rose that changes to show which directions you can go...that sort of thing! It fits in great with the pirate theme, so LC never wore out its welcome with me, and I once quickly got tired of "talk like a pirate" memes and jokes.

Having the hybrid of parser and choice works well for when you have to do things with ship--you're the captain, so it might be a pain to type, say, "Have Joe tie the knots." It cuts through a lot of guess-the-verb, and it's better than the game spoon-feeding you the actions, which would make you feel less like a captain and break immersion. (Compare and contrast with Sting, where the parser does a good job of putting you in a slightly confused player-character's shoes without, well, confusing you.) and the choice options are quite nice especially when you see, okay, it would be hard to guess the verb for certain actions during the race, and at the same time, having the game spoon-feed you them would break immersion. So LC combines the best of different system, and sometimes the text of a hyperlink changes if you click it.

And if races have been done before, the puzzles are enough to make things rather interesting. You start with a damaged ship (you need new sails and a cannon) one day before the big Libonotus Cup race, and worse, Henry, the shipwright who could help you repair it, is dead drunk in a bar. Searching for a cure for drunkenness is an amusing puzzle, and it's been done before. Twice this IFComp, in fact! I wound up feeling a bit silly it took me a while until I realized there were twice the options I thought there were, and this only happened when the way forward seemed like the way back. One clue in the game text made me feel particularly silly, but it was a good one, and it fits in with the good-naturedess of the game, where even the death text and messages add nicely to the story. It's one of those "I don't want to spoil the obvious stuff. Trust me, it's funny" moments.

The race itself is fast-paced, with an emphasis more on knowing which crew member does what than on having to know, say, how precisely to tie a bowline. But given what a big chunk of the game the race is, you sort of need a bit. And contrasting Libonotus Cup's race with Sting, each captures something different–your character's more the one in charge in LC, and so I was glad they were combined together. Each also both got me googling a few terms, because it left me generally curious, and it was more about "Hey, I want to make sure I'm enjoying this fully" rather than "oh geez more studying before I understand things." The basic choices are: take risks maybe going too fast, take risks in battle, or just sail through. Err, don't rock the boat too much. Well, you know what I mean. It's clear what the big-picture choices are.

LC also has a lot more ways to fail and undo on failure (I like the explanation and GUI for undoing choice-based stuff) so that there's really no risk of messing up horribly.

Doing the arithmetic, it looks like you can buy all the best stuff if you perform a small task to get a discount on your new sails. There also seem to be several ways through other encounters. I played chicken, mostly, to survive, and I got second place. While I still have other entries to get through, my sneaky side is plotting how I might get to first. I sensed pretty clearly that some of my on-boat activites made some purchases redundant, or vice versa, and that all seems clued pretty well. Looking at the source, there are some nice surprises and funny deaths indeed. I didn't give myself the time, but I suspect players who are interested will find that time. I like the author's strategy of providing a walkthrough to get "only" second place.

With LC, I don't have much to say about it other than it's well-balanced and just a lot of fun and well thought out. It's innovative technically and well-tested, and I really like the concept of a race that takes a long while, yet manages to be packed into a relatively short game I want to revisit. Maybe I'll even use those cannons the next time through! And while I tried not to think too much about final placings in IFComp, I was happily resigned to LC bumping my entries down a place, because the fun I had was more than worth it. Other authors in our private forum agreed.