Reviews by Andrew Schultz

The author has labeled TMG as "experimental," and on my first play-through, that seemed like a cover for "heck, I'll throw something together and claim it's experimental." Oh, sure, the graphics of gardens depicted as rhomboid tiles was cute. It's neat that people offer that sort of thing on itch.io for free, and I think the visuals worked well with the game. But that was it, right?

Because the gameplay seemed awfully repetitive. Not annoyingly, tediously repetitive, but hey, once you get it, it's not too hard to keep going. You've been left some land to tend to, and the lawn and flowers and watermeadow by the river keep eroding, so they need to be tended to more. There's a pamphlet discussing the flooding, which seems like a red herring, but it's not, because the mill you've built is the reason the river is redirected and ruining your nice garden and such--also, the dry text says-without-saying that this sort of thing destroys beauty. It's not hard to figure how to be able to tend to everything you need to for each day of internal time. You then fall asleep, tired from your exertions, before you wake up and have to do it again. So after a bit, I said, okay, I get it, and I, in solidarity with the main character, fell asleep. Then I woke up and poked around to see if there was more. There was. A game-day later, I went through the motions and was asked "Is this how you wish to spend the rest of your days?"

The irony is that I probably wasted more time with more "interesting" stuff before I came back to TMG to see the whole point of it. Even then, I sort of missed the point until I thought about it again.

So the experiment worked. What seemed like a nice, harmless, tidily-packaged fifteen-minute game left a question stuck with me. Sure, I'd asked it before. I'd had others ask it of me, in that “your time isn't valuable but you're morally obliged not to waste it” sort of way. I'd felt bad not feeling fully inspired by people yelling "GET OUT THERE AND DO WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO DO." It reminded me of how I'd spent some days, not even building anything back up, and I'd have done well to ask myself that question before sitting around for three or more hours, doing something that took energy but not getting anywhere. Perhaps it was at a website that long outlived its usefulness or benefit. Or maybe it was playing a game I'd mastered and found nothing new at.

But by this time I'd forgotten that it was the mill's fault that you had to do this extra work to keep your nice garden up. And so the "is this how you wish to spend the rest of your days?" question becomes more serious. Work and profit have gotten in the way so much that you've forgotten Nice Things, or rather, upkeep of the Nice Things gets so boring, you've forgotten what was there. And that happens whether you own a mill or not. Coworkers distract you from time to yourself. You need to learn new skills. You need to meet and keep in touch with the right people, people who are far less likely to have a garden than you. It brings to mind the opposite of the ending of Voltaire's Candide where the main character says "bien sur, il faut tenir notre jardin." And it takes even less time to (re-)read than Candide.

All this is more motivating to me than being yelled at to either get out there and live or do what you have to do. It reminds me of days I want to tidy up works I've written, or how I want to exercise every day or look through my old writing notes, where there probably won't be anything awesome in any 10-minute stretch, but when there is, it's really awesome. We all need these wake-up calls, and I'm not the sort who likes loud, rousing ones. They exhaust me. I suppose TMG worked on a superficial level and then a deeper level, and it will stop working one day, and I'll have to ask myself "is this how you wish to spend the rest of your time you use to get motivated?" But in any case, TMG really helped me get through all the other entries in IFComp, and I'm glad I did.

Because "Is this how you wish to spend the rest of your days?" is a question we need to ask ourselves, and we know it, but we also need the right context so we don't blow it off, or so we find a better way to spend the rest of our days. And of course we need to ask it before making drastic decisions like building a mill. I'm glad TMG asked this of me, and hopefully the next time I spend more than 15 minutes somewhere out of inertia, I'll know to ask this question without going through a few loops.

I feel like I'm raving about how it's the sort of game you don't rave about. But I think we need that sort of thing. TMG is an oddity for an IFComp entry despite not saying "LOOK AT ME I'M ODD." Its economical design certainly made me think back to my plans for 2021's IFComp--with 100 entries in 2020, I really wanted to make something that people could enjoy briefly, feel good about solving or working through, and move on to the next one, while still offering challenging things to think about. And I certainly hoped to see other games that did this for me. It may seem like backhanded praise to "attaboy, sport" TMG as a "glue guy" sort of game or a "good team player," but I certainly saw it that way, as something small that punched well above its weight and gave perhaps the best insight-per-time-spent ratio of any entry. And if IFComp continues to have 70 entries, well, I think we need efforts like this that help us breathe and still reveal a few things. Some will find it over-general, and I can't blame them, but I'm glad I didn't.

Every year in IFComp there are a couple games with great ambition and obvious promise that have techincal errors, so things never shine through. Unfortunate is such a game this year. Without the bugs, it would be neat and bold, but with them, unfortunately, there's an additional puzzle of working out the right order to do things in so the story isn't dead-ended. With more testing it could've been quite interesting, and I'd have been more eager to try different endings. It's sad the author wasn't able to find testers.

In Unfortunate, you're at a party with 7 other people you give fortunes to. Once you do, things start happening. Someone drops a salsa jar. People make romantic plays for each other. There's almost a breakup. Then things wind down with a short timed puzzle at the end. Sadly, this timed puzzle can be started at the beginning, which hosed the causality for everything else. But as Unfortunate isn't very long, it's not bad to restart and try again and make sure that people don't disappear before they have their resolution. As things turned out, I was exploring and experimenting so much that I forgot to do a few simple nice things for people. The party bombed, and all my predictions (I spammed 1's, which seemed the most dire) came true. I scored 7 of 7 points! So I both totally won and totally didn't. This charmed me. Unforunate had several different ways through, clearly.

I admit, though, I had to decompile the game to see some of the text. As-is, the game offers helpful advice for compass-direction exits but doesn't mention two places where you need to go IN. So this threw me off one trail. Then I found a record in a closet and played it, but it was meant to bring two people back together--two that had disappeared. However, once I knew what scenery was relevant, things made sense. There are a lot of details that are well-observed but may not work well for parser fiction, or they might even be better with twine, e.g. you could highlight important items or closets with a link. Some nooks are important and some, like the shower in the bathroom, aren't. There's a lot of meaningful care given to certain details, which leads me to believe the author didn't know quite what to look for or where to ask for guidance, and they did the best they could, and that's not a backhanded compliment. But it's not enough to make Unfortunate playable without serious aid.

You see, there are games where I shrug and say "oh I guess they wanted to do that, that makes sense" and others where I'm genuinely disappointed for the author they didn't make things smooth enough, yet. And this falls in the second category. I obviously stumbled on an odd way to do things, going out of order because I just poked around to make a map, and I finally got my bearings in the bedroom, which was meant for later in the game. But Murphy's Law is cruel that way.

There's a thread on the intfiction.org forums of what order you need to do stuff in so Unfortunate doesn't go belly-up. It's worthwhile. And most of what you need to do is something that feels natural--but there are so many things, you may wind up forgetting something, leaving you with nothing to do. Unfortunate could use an update then, even post-comp, and I'm sad the author may've looked at the placing and decided this sort of thing wasn't for them. But if you have the patience to tiptoe around a few game-breaking bugs or learn from where others fell, there's a good experience to be had.

Smart Theory is a great title, from my view. I guessed what the game was about, and I was right. It's very slippery. You see, if you're an advocate of Smart Theory, you get to show how smart you are, but you don't actually have to put it into practice. And if you're wrong, well, it's a theory and You Can Evolve. Of course, the antagonist in this game, Paul Bother, who invented Smart Theory, doesn't state things so directly. He strongly invites you to his lecture on Smart Theory, and you have no way to wiggle out (smart of him to know all the angles, eh?) You find Smart Theory is simple and accessible and has also changed people's lives. Everything about it works, and if it doesn't work for you, well, you don't understand it well enough.

This seems very much like a cult but also of times people just needed to hear themselves talk and I was a convenient alibi. I wanted to tell them they were full of nonsense but just couldn't. Sometimes they rattled on for a half-hour, which was longer than I spent with Smart Theory, both when I tried to reject Paul Bother's "philosophy" completely and accept it.

Now this isn't the first game to railroad you and try to do so amusingly, but I think it's quite effective, and I'm glad it's only 15 minutes, because too much would be too heavy for me. The author probably knew this, too. Paul Bother, to me, is every sort of person who informs you how lucky you are they are sharing their opinion at, I mean with, you. When he gets up there to make that lecture, he gives you a lot of things to think about but, of course, no time to. It's impossible to leave. And of course you get the inevitable "How was it?" question at the end. There are no right answers. Fortunately, unlike Paul Bother, the game (via Paul) exhorts you to think about what he said, and then it actually leaves you to think about what he said.

ST certainly pulls the usual psychological tricks to keep someone roped into a conversation. It pulls a lot of psychological tricks on the protagonist that can hurt in real life. You have the sense no matter what you do, Paul Bother will show you why you just weren't being very smart. Around Paul, you need to kiss up, but you also need to expect to be ignored. More advanced Smart Theorists will understand. At some points the game lampshades Paul's "rules for thee but not for me" approach. He is more advanced than you, you see, and his secrets are worth $10000 because, well, they just are. Paul's a philanthropist with stuff everyone should know, but only the people willing to make a commitment deserve to know the good stuff. He knows how to shift from soft repression to hard repression of actual ideas. And sadly, learning these tricks from someone like Paul would, indeed, be worth $10000 or more to some people.

All these thoughts are serious, but ST never got too serious. I see a lot of self-important humbugs from my past in Paul. Some had good concrete information and some didn't. But in either case, their personalities overshadowed any good advice. All needed to be looked up to, or fawned on in different ways, but nothing too obvious. They gave me a sort of ceiling I felt I couldn't break through, and if I wasn't able to overwhelm them with praise, I did look back feeling guilty I didn't praise them enough.

So I was quite happy to see this sort of polemicism dealt with. It didn't need anything deep. I've long had an axe to grind with "if you believe it, you can achieve it" motivational speakers (note: there's a place for developing your intuition and faith, but it's not with the Paul Bothers of the world). And people who need to tell you how smart they are (or common-sensical, because all YOUR book knowledge, well,i it's not practical.) It certainly brought back memories of very awful conversations with very overbearing and self-assured people, both smarter than me or not. Ones where no matter how much I contributed, I was sure I was doing it wrong, even if someone said "chime in if you want to."

So I think Smart Theory captures the basics of Internet arguing and grandstanding quite well. I know I spent years wondering why I didn't fully agree with people who I should agree with. This seems teleological, but over the years, I've realized there are attention-grabbing tricks and methods, or even just flat out assuming people would rather hear you than listen to your own thoughts. Confidence and taking constant steps towards your goals ... works. We need to develop that, despite our fears. And we need to trap ourselves into taking action, too. We need people to push us with Morton's-Fork style arguments. But doing it the wrong way can make you into a Paul Bother type. Some people actually want that. And, of course, bad people can use all these skills to seem like they have something to offer.

So I'm glad I was exposed to Smart Theory in a context that showed it was nonsense. Perhaps sometimes it's occasionally too on-the-nose, that's okay. What was on the nose for me was probably an insight for others, and vice versa.

And yet in a way, maybe ST fooled me. I suppose it told me what I already knew, and I agreed with it, and I was intrigued to learn more. Or I saw what I wanted to, for better or for worse. Which left me worried how weighty the game actually was. But one thing's for sure: I enjoyed seeing Paul Button flipping from "just listen" to "you said you'd give me a chance but you didn't REALLY" all too quickly.

Other people saw something different. Perhaps we all see what we want, or what we expect, in ST's generalities. After further reflection, I'm inclined to believe it was meant to be ambiguous. And I think clearly it's not the sort of thing you say "ALL THE FEELS" or "SO MUCH YES" to. But if you're in the right mood, it will help you deal positively with the next person who "just wants a bit of your time" about "something you need to know." Maybe it will pinpoint something from your past to bury. For a fifteen-minute investment, that's worth it.

This is a short choice-based game with a relatively linear structure--you can try radically different things, but most of the time, they loop back to the main narrative. It opens up a lot of possibilities it never really acts on, and by the end, I'm not sure why it took the title it did. Yes, there's a war going on, but I never really encountered a darkness or overarching evil. That said, there's enough to do that I played through it twice to flesh the world out a bit more.

Enveloping Darkness takes you quickly through your younger brother getting captured by orcs. Then you grow up and ask to go on a quest to rescue your brother. You usually will. I only found one possibility that kills you. Trying to avoid your fate doesn't work. You can insult your king or neglect your half-orc ally who wants to help you get to the palace. You can even act sore at your brother. The choices are all plausible for an adventure-seeking adolescent.

The mechanics of the storytelling are good. It's well-organized. But there's not much to be emotionally invested in, which is a pity, because having a half-orc ally in enemy territory presents so many possibilities. The game makes good use of a few rather quickly, but it felt emotionally wanting. Sometimes the game seemed to steer deliberately away from any emotional revelations or depths. For instance, when you rescue your brother:

(Spoiler - click to show)First things first. You ask, "Where's dad?"

Shazia says, "Hello to you too.

This is a bit cold, especially from someone who begged to go on the quest in the first place! I've had this unintentional misdirection where I walked away from a story mid-idea and come back, where I've worked out the technical bits and forgotten about the emotional or readability side. The authors have kept track of things abstractly--there are some running tabs on how willing you were to let Troy, the half-orc, join you. But none of this is put into the narrative as you'd expect, when two very different teenagers have to rely on each other for survival as they flee Something Bad. It doesn't have to be heart-wringing. But here it buries the lede or jumps off a track for a bit. The story opens up possibilities--for instance, ditching Troy or expressing displeasure with him--but it's all tamped down too quickly, and all this avoidance of overwrought prose turns out to take away from the story's full believability in its own way.

Kidney Kwest is a short game aimed at kids who need to take medication for chronic kidney disease. I admit I couldn't find details on the condition, but fortunately, you (and kids who need something uplifting) aren't going to be quizzed on the biochemistry at work here. Your task is far less technical: you want to find a costume for a school play. There are plenty of props around. But you also have an inventory limit. You also are very hungry, and after you eat, you need to take a phosphate binder, to get rid of phosphate crystals your kidneys have trouble breaking down. For that, you go inside your body and explore your intestines.

It's pretty simple in the big picture, but it's slowed down by the parser. I realize there's a lot of criticism below, but it's the sort where I had fun despite having these suggestions and despite, thankfully, not having kidney problems. I think back to how I wish I'd had something like this as a kid for health stuff in general. It would have worked so much better than a video or in-person lecture featuring an adult telling you how you'd better take care of your body, because they wish they did.

It's very cheery (both text and graphics) and helpful for the holes you need to fill in with a non-standard parser, though (small warning) I had trouble taking my medicine even when I knew what to do, to the point where I lost and had to restart the game because I didn't get the syntax right. So not penalizing the player for good (I hope) guesses would go a long way. This seems easily fixable, though. TAKE A PHOSPHATE BINDER works.

The nonstandard (and slow) parser also takes a bit of getting used to (I for inventory and X for examine don't work–you have to spell them out) because you also get a warning if you forget to use "THE." The irony here is that the authors are using something that parses natural language, and it in fact brings back the inconveniences modern parsers short-circuited long ago. While the authors make clear their intentions and the software they're using, I think it's a case of maybe pulling something needlessly high-tech.

At the end of the game I had a chance to restart and get another costume. It would be neat if there were an expanded adventure, or some assurance of it. Perhaps more areas inside your body to explore. The first try had five rooms outside your body, and there was only one puzzle.

But I liked what I saw and hope this game, and this sort of project in general (teaching through parser games) continues to grow, and people try combinations they hadn't thought of before. Pure language parsing doesn't seem to be the way to go here, but this could be rectified in a sequel, if the authors chose to branch out, because sadly there are a lot of diseases, and it may not make sense to kids why they have to do things and all the other kids don't, and "because adults said so," no matter how kindly stated, gets a bit annoying.

I feel like a bum poking holes in a game with so much potential to do good. But I know the authors have taken the feedback they've gotten well and made some adjustments to the parser since I played this. I hope they continue to tweak things for this and other educational endeavors.

I got a bit confused by this one, and from other reviews, it seems like I'm not the only person. A very promising premise fizzles out quickly. While staying young's been done in Brave New World, and I remember a short story by Martin Amis where homosexuality became the norm and reproduction was an arduous process, The Daughter combines these concepts and throws immortality on top. Not only that, everyone's been immortal for a while, and there's no age when people grow old and die, to be replaced by others. This brings up a lot of different, interesting issues. For instance, nobody remembers how to bring a child up.

So how do people react to stuff that's totally new to them, but we take it for granted? This applies to both the issues of murder and the childbirth. I suppose someone had to see a child some time, but it was 2500 years ago, and immortality without infinite memory means you forget a lot. And won't the world get overcrowded if nobody dies?

But The Daughter never really explores these issues. The main incident also seemed a bit foggy and didn't have the emotional impact it should have, too. Why did it happen? I have my guesses, but it's unresolved. There are parts which could be very funny indeed even if they don't fit the tone established e.g. "There seems to be a weird obsession on true crime stories in pre-immortal society." This sort of thing seems to reinforce that, even though English is not the writer's first language ("hot 30 year olds" seems unintentional, though,) they have an eye for the important, but maybe they just got a bit glib here or rushed it. But when the story describes everyone as looking like "hot 30 year olds," I expect the translation may be off-base.

And The ending seemed abrupt. I read back to see why it should be. I didn't get the significance of the hotel--was the main character accepting his own mortality?

I checked off with other reviews on this, because it felt like it should have been more than it was. Joey Acrimonious's review in particular articulated some concerns I had. It feels like the author had a relatively strong vision and the ability to get it across, but they didn't. I'd be interested to hear more from the author, because despite my criticisms, this doesn't feel close to a total throwaway. Just be prepared to be let down by a sudden end.

Full disclosure: I tested The Vaults after IFComp was over, so I've been able to see a lot that wouldn't be accessible in two hours. I think I've worked well with the author, and he's been attentive about bug fixes--he even responded positively to a one-star review! I've enjoyed my time through it, and again. So this review will be a combination of my IFComp experiences and why it placed where it did, as well as a look forward, and things that are fixed if you want to check out The Vaults now. TLDR: there's a lot more player help and balance.

Within the two-hour judging limit (I think,) I got my keepers to level 2 in The Vaults. I saw basically what was going on: you have little three mini-ghost keepers, replete with hoods, who go about a terrain and fight adorably grouchy little knocker goblins. They're bluish and keel over and grimace further when they die, which is quite frequently. I even managed to gain my keepers armor and gauntlets. The armor cost one maximum hip point, which shows the author has put effort into balancing things in addition to, well, getting such a massive effort to work.

From a gaming perspective, I enjoyed The Vaults very much, but as a text adventure or perhaps freeware, it's wanting. It's in Unity and takes a while to load--longer than Cygnet Committee, Silicon and Cells or Mermaids of Ganymede. There are in-game purchases, which is just fine for a game that is going to Steam, but other people found it iffy. The ethical considerations here are tricky: you won't see all of the game in two hours, especially with all the special effects, but if you buy a pricey item, you can move forward quickly and thus be able to judge more! I think The Vaults unintentionally found a loophole that should be closed. I doubt this was through malice. The author probably saw, hey, there's a contest for unreleased games that starts just as my game is scheduled to release! So I think IFComp needs to re-evaluate its stance on in-game purchases. Competitors shouldn't feel pushed to make them in the name of fairness. This is far less black-and-white than releasing a game before comp start or actually charging, but I think now we've seen it, we need a future rule.

However, the main reason this game didn't work for IFComp is that it wasn't really text-based at the time. The big text gulps are before you go exploring, and then the screen times out before your next fight. It's possible to take a screenshot, but it shouldn't be. A few tutorial dialogues popped up but not enough to help you understand what was going on. Often text would disappear after some time out, or I'd just want to get through the splash-screen before the next fight and suddenly realized that text might be valuable! So having an information, umm, vault full of these screenshots would be nice. There are starting tutorials, but I wasn't in a position to really understand what they mean until you play a few fights. The game precluded you from doing certain things, too, such as attacking when attack power is zero and now I've gotten through it a bit, it's obvious to me, but not newer players. I almost gave up, and I maybe would've, too, if those poor cute knocker goblins hadn't shown terrible strategic reasoning by attacking me. I eventually decided to see what would happen if I just sat around and let them kill me, and at that point I realized what some of the numbers around the combatants meant.

All this is done much better now, though it's still light on text. Having said that, the graphics are good enough to figure what the red, blue, green and purple are for without text. I did it myself! Thankfully, you won't need to any more.

As it was, I assembled a deck by trial and error (it's now automated--your default cards go to a default deck), and I got bopped pretty badly as I pushed forward outside the first area. So I stuck with knocking around (ha!) the poor knockers goblins, deal with summons, and attack only when it's useful. I was overwhelmed by who did what at first, and again, there are helpful popup boxes now. The author's done a lot of this--allowed for more detailed graphics or animations, or just "hey! Here's the treasure from those twenty chests!"

The Vaults is an impressive piece of programming. I get a sense of strategy that interested me, even though I'm not big on card games. But I definitely wasn't in the right frame of mind for it, and given how I wound up grinding in the first area, the story was almost non-existent. It only unfolds with each new area and tougher monsters. That said, I did get to the end of the second map with a clear idea of what was going on. Even then, I hadn't explored duel mode or really used the Forge, which combines items (you get experience, and it costs gold) into more powerful ones. You also get to choose a specialization class later.

So The Vaults is a bit heavy on the technical effects, and thus it put itself at a severe disadvantage in a text-based contest such as IFComp. I feel like a goon playing gatekeeper and saying "IFComp isn't the right place for this game" because, after all, I did enjoy it. But all the same, given that the author has ambitions to put the game on Steam, I suspect the game's placing will be outweighed by the utility of any bugs judges find and report. I've learned a lot about the whole RPG creation process. And at any rate, it's really cool to be able to say I sincerely enjoyed my time testing both the first- and last-placed games in IFComp 2021, albeit for different reasons.

The title isn't joking around here. It gives you a clue that there is a lot of horror, and it may be overdone on purpose, but there is a point to it all. The problem with this is that one image or passage is probably not going to go down well for you. This is far from fatal, and I don't know how that can be helped. All I can say is, the bad guys are exposed as bad in the end. Because this was the game I most had to sit myself down to play. Others, my mind wandered. Here, I wanted my mind to wander. But there were rewards.

What, then, got me nervy? (Spoiler - click to show)You kill someone innocent in the game, rather early on. It made me get up and walk around a bit. It’s all there to establish what a bad person you are and how much you’ll do to gain power. But it’s there. And it quickly changed the tone, for me, from a light-hearted, silly "look how messed up bad movies can be" into other things. Yes, it’s supposed to be over the top. Yes, you may be the surprise-twist bad guy. That’s the point. Everyone’s revealed at the end to be awful, power-and-fame-grubbing people. But, hoo boy. One of the implements of death, well, might offend religious sensibilities. Perhaps people more comfortable with horror tropes can cast it aside. Part of the joke seems to be that you, a bumbling actor, get worse along the way to power. Knowing the author is a good person and a strong writer, I think this is the right explanation.

Maybe I felt ambushed by the gore, though, because the game does seem to go full-scale joke at the first required command. It's a pitch-perfect well-clued guess-the-verb that gives an idea of who you are. Then, after being called to Arnie, the director's, office, you discover that a cult is backing the whole production, and later, you find the big-shot actors also playing a role on-set are not quite as they seem. It goes well beyond needing makeup or a hairpiece. Along the way, you gain your first points, too. SCORE doesn't just give a numerical total but a list of "horror movie themed" things you did to avoid perilous situations, which mostly involve running away or, later, not letting someone else run away once your inventory's at full strength.

Enough strategic running away lets you make forward progress to Studio 5 (yes, there are four others) to see your first task. The actors are involved with that, and you not only need to gain their favor but also need an additional item for protection, which you can only get from killing the security guard. Security guards pop up throughout the game. They scold you and kick you to the studio lot without ever hurting you, so you see how it can be disturbing that you may need to deal harshly with one. There is a definite Chekhov's Gun lying around. I felt guilty considering doing what I needed to do. But I did it. And a part of me still felt, boy, it's pretty annoying to have to HIDE from the security guard for the fifth time. It'd be nice to get rid of them and get on with solving the puzzle.

Yes, there are five studios, each with a theme. Each brings you a phalanx you will need to defeat your executive director's evil cultish plans. The puzzles for all this work technically. The best one is where you have to summon and banish ghosts to create a sub-story by itself. This could be trial-and-error, but it's pretty clear who has to go where, and the locations also have clues. The outline of a body suggests a murder. And so forth. The build-a-monster one, while not as emotionally effective, signposted the pieces I needed, and then there was some thinking about how to tie them together. There's another one where you have to force someone who's scared of animals somewhere. I thought the English pub scene was the weakest, but it was still pretty good. The big basic types of horror movies are covered here: building a monster, giant predatory animals, and so forth. This was all well thought out, and there are a lot of good laughs leading up to the final fight scene, where you defeat evil. Of course, you don't exactly have a holy army behind you.

The final scene ... well, if I have to poke the author about something, it'd be to streamline the parser so you don't have to type in so much. Use abbreviations. Because it's a neat bit of five-on-five fighting, with different army groups pitted against each other. Then the surviving ones fight, and so forth. There are several possible outcomes here, but I found it amusing to compare aligning who fights whom to gerrymandering, which is a banal evil of its own sort. Gerrymandering? Why, yes. The way to win the war with balanced armies is to find who barely beats whom else (the mechanics, as far as I can see: (Spoiler - click to show)units start with 0-4 strength and lose one point for each fight they win,) and give yourself four wins and one big loss. You can even try to lose this way, too. But one thing I noted was (Spoiler - click to show)it wasn't whether you won or lost, but WHO won or lost, that caused the ending. There are three, and one is almost redemptive and potentially makes Dr. Horror feel like a big trolley problem. And this made me think: for all the physical power everyone has, or the offices and connections, you ultimately have the most power, because you have a bit of knowledge the others don't. And with this knowledge, your status as outward underdog is a bit fake.

Overall, if you're up to a lot of macabre jokes, and you understand/enjoy the genre (written or film,) Dr. Horror seems like it's for you. Perhaps it hit a perfect storm that almost made me put it down. But it was an "almost" because the craftsmanship is obvious, and the bad guys are clearly labeled as bad guys. "Bad actor trying to force their way through" could be a cliche, but here there's variety in the puzzles and knowledge of over-the-top horror films in detail.

One word on the fatalities and why I found them unpalatable: (Spoiler - click to show)I've run into mean security guards and nice ones. Perhaps it's not even security guards, but the people who work the late shift at the athletic club and have to deal with folks who won't go home. I remember leaving my house keys in the office at work and forgetting my badge to sign in when working late, and a security guard I knew helped me get back in. Or I left some writing notes on top of a machine at the athletic club, and the front desk person let me run in to get it. That sort of thing. And it's not a very respected job, and it's not where people want to be, but they need to pay the bills. But it's funny. I admit to thinking "gee, why can't the security guard reminded me more of that one condescending security guard from my high school? That'd be more fun." So Dr. Horror brought out that less-than-beautiful side in me. And I suppose the point is that you are killing innocent people, which is a step beyond Arnie ruining careers or providing lousy pay and benefits.

WH2G2 may have the most innovation at the parser level as any game in the comp. It's simplified for most commands, but you have a string of verbs you acquire as you go along. They're emotional verbs, leading you to a journey of finding yourself and recreating how things happen. What has happened is pretty clear, without the title. You're a ghost, and you're not used to being a ghost, so it stands to reason you died recently. Not only are you a ghost, but you can't pass through walls. This, in fact, Means Something in the greater context of things and is more than just a way to keep the game small and manageable. As you move around, you see your old house in ways you never did before, leading up to several Big Reveals. And while it's billed as Gothic horror, these reveals were more than enough for me to face certain incidents from my past in a way a self-help book, even a good one, never could. It worked at least as well as some self-help book satires, too. So I found it very powerful. And yes, there were violent and disturbing scenes, but they weren't there for their own sake, and they were contrasted with more mundane revelations which were crushing in their own sort of way.

To start, all you can do is examine stuff, and there's not much to examine, but then you wind up with your first verb, learning to excite. This helps you leave the initial attic room, and later on, you wind up learning new emotions. Some of these seem harmless, but they become darker as you see things in new ways. Technically, you're snooping, and it feels quite nosy, but on the other hand, you didn't ask to be a ghost. Also, as backstory is filled in, you find you've been trapped in your own home. Your family is ashamed of you. Your grandfather, who is on his deathbed, treated you badly.

But the real reveal is this: your sister, Eva, and your step-brother, Ian, have done worse. The game narrates Eva as "being mean some of the time," eventually saying you're the reason she doesn't get out as much as she wants. Ian, on the other hand, has been complimentary of your artistic skill. (Your paintings are shown several places in the house. Sometimes you're even allowed to walk around and see it!) He recognizes you are a better artist than he is, though he enjoys woodcarving. You recognize Ian and Eva are lovers, but you appreciate Ian's kindness. But then you discover notes written between Eva and Ian, discussing you. Ian seems almost moderate and apologetic. Eva is not. The more emotions you reclaim and places you explore, the harder it is to stop being upset. You visit your grandfather on his deathbed, and there are some strong moments of trying various emotions on him. He has some realizations at the end, harsh ones for him, but it could have been worse. For someone else, it will be. Even in death, though, you feel blocked off from the living people chatting. They leave once you solve more puzzles, which sounds clunky on my part, but the game weaves this together seamlessly. The more emotion you learn, the more time passes, and people leave your house.

There are several climactic moments in the game. A good one was when you lost the ability to desire, once you notice proof that Ian was in on your imprisonment. It's not just emotional but practical. You could get overloaded with too many possible actions to perform, and while you could work them out, it would be thorny. Another is the implicit realization of how hard it is for you to get to your bedroom. It's the last of seven doors that you'll open, and even though it's a prison, it's where you could be you, and you realize how much worse it would've been if you hadn't had your art. Then you realize for Eva, that twist of the knife was not a bug but a feature. There's also facing the housekeeper, who herself deserves closure, as well as what's in the chest at the beginning, and finally Eva and Ian. The end is not pretty, and it makes sense and feels just. Once you get to the end, you'll realize (seriously! A potential spoiler is ahead, even though I tried to make it vague) why you wind up in the room you do, instead of the bedroom where you were imprisoned for most of your life.

On the technical side, WH2G2 has a lot of good responses to its custom verbs. There's a lot to keep track of, and my coding self was dreaming up ways to test things so that the game absolutely might not miss a trick in the post-comp release, or maybe I just wanted to see neat tries the author responded to. It's something where if a first-time author hit every instance, they may not have spent enough time on big-picture things. But it also gets so much cluing right, without screaming "Hey! I'm cluing you here! Isn't this nice?" An example that drove this home was in your sister's room:

(Spoiler - click to show)excite bottom drawer
The drawer rattles, but it doesn't open like curtains or a door. It really needs to be pulled to open.

You never do get around to controlling everything directly. But you can do enough to unlock the mystery of why you are where you are. It's not a straight-up amnesia game, as the denouement shows. You learn things about people close to you. To me it mirrored "hey, do I have a right to feel negatively about person X?" So verbs do get more emotionally charged than EXCITE, which only rattles things slightly. As mentioned above, a few are rejected as undoable as your character learns and grows. This is addition by subtraction. Having too many verbs near the end would have potentially made things much tougher and slowed the game pace to where the big scenes had less impact.

So I have a lot of good things to say about WH2G2. I'm very glad I got the chance to test it before it went to IFComp, and my only regret is that when I swapped games with the author, I somehow missed the email with the binary attached. Revisiting it a month later, I noticed a lot of things I missed the first time around. They were silly technical things that don't really affect the overall game, the sort of thing that's a good excuse for a post-comp release to get alittle more publicity. But I pretty much was worrying about the sort of coding details that thrill longer-time writers like me. And I think they balanced coding and story quite well. About the only thin I remember is something others alluded to: the colored-door puzzle felt a bit artificial. But really, I have no suggestions how I would've done it, and after all, if that had been a roadblock to WH2G2 entering IFComp, we'd all have lost out.

One tangential thing about WH2G2 is that when I went to ask Inform questions of my own, I noticed the author posting lots of good questions on the board. I don't remember them, or how they fit technically in WH2G2, but it enhanced the game for me as follows. I sadly met some Evas and Ians in computer science courses I had or even on the job. No physical restraint, of course, and it wasn't as radical as Eva and Ian. Maybe it was just brushing me aside, or explaining I really should know certain terms or conventions. (Later, I would google said terms and give these other people more credit than they deserved for expanding my horizons.) So these people talked over me and left me feeling I should really take a back seat. Many of them are long since gone, but the way WH2G2 unfolded allowed me to (far less dramatically) put several of these people in the rear-view mirror. And I do think that after saying "gee, why didn't I ask these sorts of questions years ago?" I sat down and asked a few good ones of my own. So that was positive. And I in turn appreciated the author's hard work and good questions for Fourbyfouria.

On replaying WH2G2 to write this review, I took notes and wanted to check another detail. It wouldn't be hard. Abstractly, you just plug in the right verbs, and the game's well-clued without holding your hand, so it's no problem to figure out. I had a few problems the first time through, which I chalked up to bad memory and having a bunch of other games to look at, as well as enjoying it. I had one more detail to check off, so I re-re-played. And I still bungled a few of the puzzles. Not due to my laziness or bad cluing, but because I realized it'd let me Think About Stuff in a positive new way, and the thought I put into things during and after the game replaced my technical memory. So it wasn't just something cool to solve. That's pretty rare and, I think, not something you can just summon at-will.

I'm glad Adventuron exists. I think it fills a gap between pure-choice engines and Inform. It's not too rigorously pointed to pure text or to specific web effects. Certainly when I learned about Inform, I felt as though I had to learn all the verbs and their default behaviors, which was fun for a while when I wanted to feel competence, but then it just annoyed me to feel I had to. The person behind Adventuron has done great things to keep it simple yet attractive. You have the picture in the top half and the text prompts in the bottom. There are relatively few basic verbs--unlink Inform, Adventuron never felt a need to pay homage to Infocom with rarely-used ones. But of course you can define more. For those who want, you can have colored text or the fonts you want. And OSatDF seems better suited to Adventuron than a choice-based engine or Inform. It looks for a homage to, well, Lewis Carroll and is very successful, while still being its own story.

You play Zildud "Dud" Henderson, an orc who works at a Dream Factory. That's where non-orc clients beat up orcs for fun and adventure or, at any rate, excitement that helps keep the economy going. This isn't the first game to look at how the bad guys live, but it does give a credible view into how they could live and not really be the bad guys. Dud's not good at his job, but it makes money. His human co-worker, Jonathan, sympathizes with having to deal with his fairy boss, who doesn't understand why Dud fails to even put up a fight. Can't he get over it and be a decent employee? Not actually kill the enemies, of course. After all, they don't kill him. Employees all wear reanimators, which ensure you can come back from that in-between world to face a new foe? Just, Dud needs to do better, for himself and for his boss. And yet, he doesn't want to spend his whole life getting beaten up. To make things more complex, his father was a lot better at his job than Dud but got killed when his reanimator glitched.

Dud's first trip to work is, well, a dud. Not for the player, necessarily. There's a maze to start, and there's a trick to the maze, and once you're 3/4 of the way through, the game stops giving you chances to mess up, which is really nice of it. The forest maze pictures change nicely enough, and I almost felt a bit upset when Dud reached the clearing outside MEI (Dud's employers) and I wouldn't have to do that again. In this clearing, you have Dud wait and fight enemies, give a good effort (hopefully) and then enter the office to get more gold for humans to beat you up and take. The injuries are all mental, but they're there. The game's forgiving each time you lose, though if you've played before, or you really grind at the puzzles, you need only lose once, at the start. You have about the same hit points, but you generally do about 2 damage per round to the humans' 10.

How to rectify this? Dud's mother suggests he talk to his Uncle, an Orcish Lewis Carroll-a-like. There's a vulgar history book with orcs as brutes, etc., and Uncle Carroll discusses his feelings on it, but he has more practical advice. It seems painfully random at first, until you realize that there are spells involved. If Dud can learn defensive spells that tie enemies up, he can defeat opponents without hurting them. There are five such spells, which use Adventuron's rainbow text quite well. To find them, you alternate between reality and a sewer that contains runoff from the dream factory. For each item you find, you get a spell. They're tied in with Carroll's famous poem Jabberwocky, so you have stuff like wax lips and cabbage cloud and royal robe. (Talk of cabbages and kings, if you forgot.)

The contrast between the real world dream world(s) is quite effective. Your dream world is based on the cheap freebie experience potential clients get which, of course, is no-frills and low-res. The font is blocky and so are the corridors. Even a snake guarding an important item is extremely lumpy. So there's a great contrast in graphics, simply done. The dream world, in addition, has a different set of directions (forward, turn around, left and right, and you can type in just the first letter) from outside, and I thought that too was a nice hat-tip to first-person RPGs. It's the right size, and it doesn't sprawl, either. Finally, the combats have a cursive-ish font which is right at home. I've heard boring (to me) discussions of Evocative Fonts before, and they left me shaking my head, but OSatDF proved to me that, yes, it can be a very positive thing, and it doesn't have to be complex.

Once you have the spells you need, combat is pretty easy, and the descriptions of enemies (clearly quite different and weird to your orcish self, with their odd mannerisms and clothes) flailing around is pretty funny. You can just use trial and error to figure who gets befuddled be which spells. A story develops: your boss, who abused you for being no good, seems quite upset now you've gotten good. She is hiding something, clearly. And there's a climactic scene at the end I don't want to spoil.

OSatDF brings up many serious issues without really being heavy. When I got the game to test, I was worried it might be Just Another Carroll Tribute, and later I worried it might veer into My Lousy Job territory, but it quickly proved to be more than that. There's the surface complaint of "that orc you beat up had a family, too!" but OSatDF explores it, along with issues like what it means to have a demeaning service-industry job where the customer is always right. Or, in some cases, how to deal with people who want to defeat you in an argument–but not too easily! Or they want to pretend they had a challenge without actually having one. And while LavaGhost's review brought up more serious points, I had really only considered the dream factory clients as a similar, lesser version of people who go to Africa to "hunt" exotic animals bigger than they are.

Both endings were satisfying to me, where Zildud has a moral choice. I also think the last lousy point was quite apt. It was independent of any puzzles and definitely in tune with "a modern interpretation of (classic work X)" and made me laugh. At the same time, it showed one more way Dud was surveilled and, yet, gave a small message of encouragement from Uncle Carroll. Which is quite good, because with a Lewis Carroll poem as inspiration, a game like OSatDF could try to be too wacky. Fortunately, it imagines things that are quite real and preposterous at the same time, and it almost seems like escapism until you take a bit of time to consider Dud's employer, MEI, being both quite shady and pedestrian at the same time. They're offering people wild fun! What's wrong with that? Well, only certain SORTS of people.

I think the only other game I've seen that treats Orcs as the civilized guys is Magic Candle III, an RPG from 25+ years ago. It was great fun, with a lot of jabs at uncivilized humans. And I think I put in a silly bit in Ailihphilia where you get a "we're not the same" response for feeding a troll ort to the cross orc or ergot ogre. This is considerably deeper than both, of course, with a stronger story angle. I think it's effective and doesn't lean on the original material too much. You never get a "Look at me I'm literary" vibe from it. The author got a lot of small things right that a book just can't do.

On replay I was slightly upset the puzzles were easy to remember. Like the in-game antagonists, I suppose, I wanted to win quickly, but not too quickly. I grumped when it folded like Dud. But that cleared the way for some of the less whimsical themes the author hoped to address. Yet I can still take it as a fun game. I have to admit I forgot I tested it for some reason. It had been a few months, but it's memorable enough. Still, I was glad to piece together the parts I didn't quite remember. It's much more serious than it seems, if you want it to be. Or it can just be a lot of fun.