Reviews by Andrew Schultz

In the author's forum, I had planned to start this review a different way. "This game's quite good, but the end was frustrating. I just couldn't figure how to beat the final boss. It was a lot of fun, but after a while, you just want to get through with it, you know?” I knocked off another shorter game or two, then came back to try just one more thing and, uh, wound up trying a few more after the final boss. I then wound up seeing if I could play through faster the second time through, and despite the shortcuts I'd learned, I spent about the same time overall, nailing down the quests I didn't quite solve before or maybe trying different reward options. Which will tell you how involving I found the game.

It's quite pretty impressive technically: a procedurally generated RPG where you bounce between sixteen islands on a grand quest that, itself, is randomly determined. There are thirty possibilities for each game: ten classes, based on a combination of two skills, and three big-picture quests. The Tragic Queen's Relics lead you to a randomly placed tomb you must ask the locals about. Another quest has four map pieces. A third has you ascend the Heavenly Spire to fix odd weather with black snow. There's variety in the classes, too. I started as an Explorer, which let me build up experience and silver by just talking to locals. My next time as a Battle Mage, I didn't have that quick start, but I had a lot of fun blasting enemies every which way. As of the end of IFComp, I had some clear favorites for winning quickly. I wound up playing 4x4 before games in genres I was unsure around. So, yes, I won with all ten and enjoyed the varying challenges. I was especially thrilled to find (Spoiler - click to show)a "bribe" sub-skill let me use that excess silver to get half-experience in combat, which saved real-world time. I tweaked my bribing strategy for a bit. And, as I replayed, I alternated between favorite non-fighting skills, or between ranged or melee weapons, each of which works better for different fights.

And this speaks to some pretty impressive balance in 4x4. You may have noticed "experience by talking to locals" above. Generally, when you think of information in an RPG, it's stuff you'll know the second time through, so why waste time clicking through the thought-bubbles? Well, a lot does carry over here, but more importantly, asking the right people for information gets you experience points, so you don't need to fight early on--and with some classes, fighting early is a bad option. You can barely beat Giant Rats. You can, however, drink repeatedly at the first inn you find to get enough advice/experience to get that first level-up.

You also can get experience solving nonviolent quests. This experience can be pumped into five minor skills that improve luck, HP, MP, strength and magic power. They start at zero, and the requirements for the next level double until you hit level 5, when it's capped. Or you can bump your main class skills up to the maximum of level 2, or you can also pay for a third skill. One really cool thing I noticed on replay is that you need a balance between quick improvement and saving your experience for level 2 main skills. And also after a few plays I enjoyed understanding the game well enough not to need a third main skill. At first I found these caps restrictive, but soon I realized they signpost how you don't need to grind too much.

That's not to say you should ignore good quick ways to grind. 4x4 allows you to make silver pretty quickly. Several islands have markets that sell one of food, luxury items and/or crafting materials and buy the other two, one at an extra markup. So establishing these trading routes early is good, and yes, the Trading skill makes things extra lucrative. I remember being so thrilled I could make any sort of profit that I missed a way to maximize. It involved, quite simply, having a small 4x4 grid of what market sold what. I expanded it to other things the useful in-game journal couldn't quite organize. It felt about right--I didn't want everything done for me, and I liked having my own shorthand to target where to go. The journal's a neat way to keep track of stuff, and while it wasn't too wordy, it was still neat to be able to search the text for what I needed, even something like whether a dungeon was cleared. Between it and the auto-saves when you moved between islands or visited a mine or dungeon, I was really happy I didn't need to backtrack or remember annoying details. It also lessened the intimidation of having a lot dumped on me as I explored islands.

Perhaps the neatest bit is something I didn't see until replay. You have a chance for quests and incidents when you travel between islands, and "explore the island" can also give random encounters. Some are one-time, which means experienced players have to decide what to buy and how much to save. While save-and-restore is a possibility if you get a quest you're not prepared for, micromanaging briefly ruined the game flow for me, and I had to decide what was worth retrying and what wasn't. But you also have rumor-quests, eight of them, from a pool of twenty-four. Every island has rumors to check. Some are random. Others lead to the quests. Many of these have several ways through: you can fight or expend equipment or use skills--noncombat ones are prominent here, which is great for balance, and using them also fleshes out storylines you don't see if you just clobber the baddies bothering the villagers. Some, you can buy your way through with the right materials. The tougher quests might require a lot to avoid a tough fight, but the random unique rewards for solving them makes each playthrough interesting. The easier quests often give you a choice: renown, silver or experience. The harder ones give renown, experience and a great unique item.

Renown? Well, it seems useless but is key to the game, although silver and experience are more important and accessible early. You get renown for, well, actually acting like a hero, or defeating very tough enemies. Some random adventures give it. For instance, if you have crafting materials and run across a stranded boat, you can demand payment, or you can just give what you've got for renown. First-time players probably should just take the more tangible rewards, because they can't get going that early, but more experienced players will want renown in order to get quick access to the adventurers' guild on the main island. It can sometimes be quite random how much you get, based on your rumor-quests and when certain quests show up, but there's a way to prepare, and more importantly there are two cute ways to buy renown. They are (Spoiler - click to show)donating to the Academy, which is a heck of a quid pro quo, and paying minstrels to write a song about you, which is self-promotional in its own way. One thing I find amusing about renown and solving quests in general is that 10+ renown lets you rest free at inns--this isn't a game-breaker, but combined with one-offs where people recognize you and give you powerful items for (for instance) defeating a mist-monster at sea, the attention is almost slightly embarrassing, especially once you have more silver than you could ever spend.

But it takes a while to get there, and in the meantime, I liked how 4x4 made it so it was hard to be fully busted. As you travel between islands, you may gain or lose MP or HP, or tradeable items may get washed out from your boat or onto it. Your fortune stat (aka luck) controls this a bit--I think. You may also find NPC (mer-folk when sailing, hunters on the island) willing to sell you special armor or goods to trade for a profit or buy at a discount, and sometimes you just get small experience boosts for avoiding traps in the small dungeons. With all the random quests, you also have places that reliably give fights, though exploring may give experience and good items quicker. There are three such places (bandits, beasts and undead) placed on random isles, and you can visit the easy or hard sector, so they keep their value without screaming "GRIND HERE."

The procedurally generated text works well, too. There are possibilities for all sorts of contradictions if you try for less generic text, but they don't really pop up. The island descriptions are fun, as are the stories you can get from locals, and having them around really complements the strategic parts. The quests have a lot of hidden jokes, too. One random rumor quest has an arm-wrestling contest, and if you have maximum brawn, the organizers bribe you to let their son win in the final. Another lets you bribe a Red Knight's squire to find the knight's weakness before a fight. I forgot to mention that you can acquire allies who help (marginally) and one of them knows a bit about the history of the Archipelago and informs you when someone is telling a lie. This is all very vague, but I don't want to spoil the fun of discovery.

What encapsulated 4x4 for me, though, was finding ways to go faster and enjoying them despite missing out on side-quests I enjoyed. You see, it's possible to win the main quest without doing nearly everything. A sea serpent has more HP than two final bosses. One quest in particular involves a Wanderer who visits all sixteen isles. She tells you the terrain of her next isle, and you can consult the journal or the main page that displays them all--the islands are attractively drawn, clearly similar by terrain but not identical. So it's a fun mini-game of chance. It's rewarding to try and solve a bit quicker than you expected, and the choice of items she gives you at the end is very powerful. It helped me before I really figured how to get epic weapons and skills early. I also miss the Coral City, a place you can only find by luck until you have access to the Academy. It's a maze with nonreciprocal paths, but it works very well, and I don't want to spoil more.

Add all this up, and you can guess I really enjoyed 4x4A, both as a player and someone who enjoys learning about design, and both for the novelty of the first couple playthroughs and the enjoyment of honing strategy later. Strictly by the rules, it was probably a bit long for IFComp, but I was glad it was in there--it boosted me between games that weren't in my genre. I felt almost a bit guilty reporting bugs I only saw because I was really paying attention. So I really recommend it. It's quite well-balanced, and the randomization makes each playthrough different enough that 4x4 never quite get old. Each time I've sat down to play, it's fun to uncover quests and islands I've seen before, as something always pops up that I'd half-forgotten.

My initial thoughts on APBW rambled a bit. It brought up a lot of ideas that swirled around. They took a while to settle. It's a very ambitious work, and I'm not surprised it co-won the Golden Banana. But I'm also not surprised it placed highly, as I think it was rewarding to go through even though I only went in for part of its experience. It's about an online fan-community for young adult fanfiction that blows apart when the author of the books insults someone who's a big fan of theirs. In this case, it's GT McMillan, author of the Nebula series. To me, the GT sort of lampshades JK Rowling's hot takes on Twitter and fans' disappointment.

But I think it's more than just frustration with a Rowling clone. They get relatively little text compared to you and your friends. Overall, APBW helped me realize how much stability some online communities have, because with competent, sane adults in charge and some simple rules, along with punishment for trollish "look how these rules aren't perfect," really terrible things don't happen. But then again, these communities have decentralized power. For instance, the SBNation group of blogs knows the college athletes they cheer for are, well, only twenty or so, and they make mistakes. Or they know the commissioners of their favorite league aren't there out of altruism. Or they can see the good and bad sides of their favorite or most hated coaches. And the rules are simple: no bigotry, no flaming, no illegal streaming links. They work. I'll be comparing things in this review, because I had a lot of moments saying "Well, life goes on, right?" Though it sort of doesn't.

When you are young, that all is a lot tougher, even without trolls around. Any chaotic event throws things into turmoil, especially when an adult precipitates it, because adults don't DO these things, right? Especially one that could write such cool books that really stick it to bad guys?

Well, GT McMillan DOES do something. Not right away, though. APBW is told through the lens of an aspiring fanfic writer who blogs a lot on tumblr. You're amazed at the people who write more and, apparently, better than you do. But you'd like to try. You have friends you reblog and like and so forth, but you quickly realize they're at cross-purposes with each other. Some friends have troubles that get reblogged, both trivial and serious. Some friends just post for attention. Your reactions to this can get you blocked. I wound up completely ignoring the @brunova-official fanfic account, as I figured any drama with romantic fanfiction between Bruno and Gali, the two most popular characters (I didn't want to worry about the details of the work-within-a-work,) and I still made enough connections. I was amused to find the author's comments in the source, explaining how following and rehashing that sort of thing got you lots of likes, just because.

So I did all right with the whole writing racket. Despite my character's reticence and worry everyone was better than they were, I kept racking up likes, as my character paged through the five physical senses for ideas ("What do you think/smell/see/hear/feel/taste?") and my character wrote stuff down. This was meant to be mechanical and formulated on the player-character's just plowing through and doing what they were told in English class, when really they want to do so much more. People assure the PC that it's all so good and so forth. Then the pivotal moment comes. McMillan doesn't just cut down any fan but one who really looked up to McMillan. Others who did so, too, are confused. Some of your friends proclaim McMillan "over," even as the actors and actresses of the movie based on the series disagree. There's a split among fans with big followings, too, that goes beyond "Who's the coolest character?" Claire/Shadow-Protectrix, a big fanfic writer who organizes NebulaCon, comes down on McMillan's side (ironic, given their screen name) when your friend Luna is attacked by GT McMillan, prompting more attention than Luna ever wanted. She winds up deleting her account and starting a new one and not even asking for reblogs in support of her.

NebulaCon's largely organized by adults, too, or at least Internet friends who seem grown-up for their age! Most of whom are nice, but some of whom let the kids know who's in charge. And with every pronouncement of Claire's that she has to scale back, I certainly feared NebulaCon would be canceled. Because NebulaCon is only once a year, as opposed to twelve fall weekends for football, where fans of opposing blogs on SBNation get together for more than just the obligatory "preview with the enemy." They take pictures. They even share loss and big life moments. It can happen every week, even between fans of archrivals. And stuff like this shows the best of Internet fandom, of people getting together and helping each other through disappointment, of empathizing and saying "what if it happened to me?"

It's pretty clear the downside of the McMillan community collapsing is much higher for its members than for adult sports fans. And it's not just pro- or anti-McMillan. There's "we should've known it all along" and "I still can't believe it" among the antis. At one point, the main character wrestles with a passage that discusses not being false to yourself and how it was interpreted as pro-trans, but after MacMillan's words, they realize they maybe saw what they wanted to. This parallels fans tired of a losing coach, in a sports community. Some think they can still right the ship, some see the signs in retrospect, and flame wars start. But the stakes are higher, because when you're younger and don't know certain mind game tricks jerks play, and you have to hold on to what's there and be glad there's only so much trolling. You don't even feel you can speak out against jerks who like what you like, because on balance, they've been a positive, right? And it may seem there is no plan B if your group of book-loving friends collapses. The author touches on this by having some characters say "Hey! I found this cool KPop group." Which is different from what you'd expect, logically, such as "hey, there's another great book series." But in that moment I realized both you-the-character and your friends wanted to say "I don't want to lose you as a friend" but you didn't want to seem that desperate.

And, of course, you will need to stay together. Good things will end. As you write your final fanfic, you-the-character are far too aware the fourth wall break you make is as mechanical as checking off the five senses and "think" for writing prompts, and it's done before, and it will be done again, splitting community or not, because it's part of growing and moving on. You actually do finish your fanfic and go out on a high. That, along with trying to support your friend McMillan called out, is all you can do, especially when McMillan doubles down. (Well, actually, you can side with Claire. I didn't have the heart.) The older fans who orphaned their fanfiction–well, you get it now, you didn't see how they could stop if they had this gift, surely they could've just glided into a pretty-good ending sheerly out of momentum. You figured people just kept having stuff to say, and they don't. I had a similar thing happen when writing game guides at GameFAQs. I realized I was going to run out of motivation or games, and I also realized YouTube might become a Very Big Thing. I eventually just had a list of games left that would up my total word-count. I moved on, slower than I should've, of course.

It's difficult when a community dissolves, big or small, but it's also so nice to cross paths again. Still, you just don't think you will, and while that's out of the scope of APBW, I'd like to think the narrator plants the seeds for that, despite NebulaCon being canceled. They'll find other interests. I suppose it's the same sort of thing as a first crush, except, well, it's about having lots and lots of friends that evaporate, or you know you won't be able to keep track of them all.

Playing through once was exhausting. I had trouble remembering which player in the canon was which, and I also had to brush up on which of your blogmates did what. But it was the first of this sort of writing I'd seen in this form, and I found it amazingly effective for getting me to sit down and thing. I had a lot to say, and on reflection, it might not seem relevant now, but it filled a place that other IFComp games didn't come close to filling. So I think it was overall very successful as a story and an interesting world, as well as a reminder of all the stories I wanted to write but never quite did.

The author had a lot to say in their postmortem. There was a lot to read, so for the first time through, I simply looked at the source code to see some of the options and such that I missed. The check_blocked.txt file provided me with great amusement and demystified some of ChoiceScript. There still feels like a lot to unpack. But I found I was able to keep up with APBW, even if I had to ignore chunks, as I learned some terminology that made total sense once I read it.

APBW originally inspired some much more random, rambling thoughts that I don't want to pull out of the authors' forum. They're not really about APBW. But they were important to write and bury. They reminded me of the slow breakup of other communities and some I'm still shocked are there. APBW even reminded me to check some I thought were dead, and it's great to see them live on, or even see a 31-year-old say "hey, some people were really nice to me when I was clueless and 13, and I miss them." I remembered how I wrote game guides because I didn't feel qualified to write actual cool games, just as the narrator writes fanfic. (I still haven't written a graphical one!) I saw parallels between fanfic and some humorous features at SBNation sites, such as the ubiquitous Power Poll which ranks teams in a conference and compares them to characters from The Office or skits from I Think You Should Leave or, from one very creative person, stages of evolution. And it all works. It somehow pulls everyone together and reminds them of what they want to look at while they wait for the next game. Simple yet funny rules are established: on offtackleempire, a site for Big Ten team fans, you must punch in on Saturday if your team lost this weekend. There are inside jokes, but of course people with decent Google skills can figure them out, and they deserve to. And there are fanfic legends, people who wrote great stuff and are maybe retired now, but they drop in unexpectedly with a few hilarious tweets or essays.

This all is the result of a fully mature community and may not be as exciting as McMillan fan communities, but it's at least as rewarding. APBW made me realize how much we have, more than any impressive "look how far we've come and what we take for granted" speech could. For that I'm grateful. I'm even grateful for people I like only because we like the same team (just as APBW's characters like the same series and maybe even share a favorite book or character, and it's wonderful until they find other incompatibilities,) or even people I liked and then it fell apart. I even wound up sort of wishing I could explain this to some of the more upset APBW characters. Perhaps it's worth doing in real life.

It seems reasonable to critique APBW for problems of focus, or of certain things being too generic, but it's wildly ambitious and hits the mark often enough that I, a layman to fanfic, enjoyed it much better than more polished traditional efforts which seemed to fit in a nice box. Once I got into it, it felt like something someone would have done eventually, and I'm glad it got done so well. And it reminded me of all the things that could've gone wrong but didn't. It hurt when longtime Purdue basketball head coach Gene Keady laughed as he endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, a man Keady would've kicked off the team after a week on general principles. I was disappointed with the accusations swirling around Kingdom of Loathing's co-creator and how this forced a much more serious view of the nightcap you drink to get drunk with your turns gone at day's end. And I'm glad I didn't know about Roald Dahl's dark side until he was an adult. Yet at the same time, any one of these is the sort of growing-up experience I'd have loved to have other people around for, even if things fell apart at the end. APBW captured that and more for me, and thus, I value it.

With Rameses and The Cabal and now The Best Man, Stephen Bond is now a resounding three-for-three in the "be very, very harsh on the player character" department. It's not slapstick stuff, no physical wounds or financial ruin. Just brutal existential despair and failure and helpless and pointing out how the main character misses the point. The Best Man helped me revisit certain unfortunate relationships with better perspective, but on the other hand, I'm sort of glad I don't know Stephen Bond very well/at all, because I'd be absolutely frightened of any character portrait he might make of me.

You see, I really wanted to believe Aiden, the main character, sees a way through the abuse he received by the end, that his final statement he's put stuff behind him is true. I hoped and believed, and in my mind, it was so. I didn't want to reread _The Best Man_ to disprove this. Once I did, though, I had to change my opinion. I'd simply blocked out the worst parts, because I wasn't in the mood to cringe at the time. Surely Aiden had learned from these experiences? I'd had a few, wher I idealized people and I realized they weren't so great. And to me, Aiden was not as outwardly horrible as the social circle he was sucked into. But that's not much. He's the nicest guy around, and the nicest guy he knows, and it's good enough for him, and it isn't. I felt icky saying "boy, I sort of identify with Aiden there" or "I've seen that/been there before." It was a rough experience. It left me feeling I wished I'd stood up to a few people who were as outwardly respectable as Aiden's clique, people long gone. But it also made me realize how hard that sort of thing is. Dryly speaking, we're all prone to a sunk-cost fallacy. Most of us stop sinking, though. With Aiden, though, I wondered if perhaps he were a bit autistic--I'm not a doctor, but his treatment at the hands of his acquaintances reminded me of seeing some other people on a long-ago message board "just teasing" someone who was. So perhaps this story could be read not about Aiden but about human cruelty. It's important to recognize that Aiden is a very flawed individual, but the author does make it pretty clear that his so-called friends are worse, just more polished.

And he appears to have nailed things down, starting with the cover art. A white suit is unusual for a best man, and along with the title, it immediately brought to mind Philip Larkin's "Sympathy in White Major." This poem calls into question what selflessness and likability really are. The critical line is (Spoiler - click to show)"Here's to the whitest man I know, though white is not my favorite color." And, in fact, white isn't Aiden's favorite color, deep down, but he has no choice. I wondered if this would be another story about a repressed good-guy, or someone trying to be a good guy. It is, and the only question is if he breaks away from that. We've all done good deeds and not puffed our chest out. We've all felt a bit self-righteous at times. We've all been pinned down by compliments and unable to say "Not this time" and made unreasonable requests of our own, or we've had to pick and choose our fights. But Aiden seems in an active cycle of doing the technically right thing and feeling more miserable. He's unable to walk away, until he has to run way.

Aiden certainly has his fantasies about people realizing what a good guy he is. He's not even the first choice for best man at the wedding of Laura, a girl he had a crush on, a girl who likely used him as a social crutch and yes-man until she found someone she could live with. The groom-to-be is John, who, as we read more of the story, is really a male version of Laura. Aiden doesn't see this, and it didn't really hit me until later. Of course what Aiden sees as bad in John, he sees as joie de vivre in Laura. And on re-reading I think John and Laura kept Aiden in reserve for the sort of drudgeworthy tasks a hungover best man would not want to perform. Aiden wears white to be "on team Laura," as if weddings are competitive. And he's foolish enough to think he's running these errands just for Laura.

But it turns out Colm, John's main best man, has worse than a hangover. He suffered a very avoidable accident after Aiden left the stag party early. It was Colm's fault, and perhaps the best man also has a few last-minute errands to run, but hey, John and Laura were thinking of Aiden! They go looking to Aiden for aidin', we begin the flashbacks. Aiden meets Laura in college, waiting for a bus. She tries to "get him to live," as she "gently" reminded him of the ways he may be a bit silly. (Note: getting him to live didn't mean helping him live as he wanted, or well, just bringing excitement.) One of Aiden's attempts at spontaneity results in a pathetic act of littering. His choices of dialogue range from passive-aggressive to snarky, but the results are the same. Aiden's certainly self-absorbed, and he looks up to self-absorbed people like Laura who seem more absorbed than he is. John swoops by two years later, and he's a better match for Laura. She respects him a lot more. Perhaps she's been able to use Aiden. She knows that small things like a touch matter a lot to him--too much, perhaps. She gets him to like a teal-colored scarf. But a man like that won't stay interesting.

And Aiden also ascribes virtues to her that aren't there. At one point there's a buildup to "she gave me my agency," which, nuh-uh. None of his choices matter. And her laughing at him? Well, it feels nice, because it feels nicer than when guys do. It feels like life. "She created this world of ours, this was her world, and she chose not to live in it," Aiden says, unaware of how easy it was to create such a world and how empty it was and even how she tried to expand it, but he said no. Aiden seems in love with the idea of love. Later when Laura suggests he get to know Ash, a girl in her circle, better, Aiden says, well, he couldn't love Ash as well as he loved Laura. Truth, of a sort. So another member of the bachelor party, Nick, winds up dating her. It didn't work out, but Nick does seem better adjusted. Aiden's "Before I learned — before she forced me to learn — what it is to care about another human being" rings hollow because, well, you can't force someone to learn that sort of thing. And indeed, it's not clear what Aiden's learned, and in the scene Nick narrates, Nick picks things apart more meaningfully than Aiden does. He's cynical (weddings are a racket so stock up on "free" food, the stag party bored him) but sees Aiden as better than the lackeys and with some hope, because the difference between errand-boy and "person reciprocally actively encouraging bad behavior" is significant.

But that didn't stop me from thinking, geez, Aiden's really a sucker, isn't he? "I had to find that love within me. I had to find the energy to be there for you ... even at my own cost." But did it really cost him if his main goal was to be around Laura? I remembered people I looked up to or had crushes on, but I wasn't that bad, right? Stephen Bond is more eloquent. But there are passages interspersed, of the people Aiden meets. The people preparing the organ music for the wedding see him wandering around. Their lives may not be full, and they have faults, but they are self-aware. The couple selling the roses grumbles about things, but they at least account for others' behavior (each alternately forgives and lambastes the bad behavior of various wedding parties) and try to respond to each other's complaints. There's no hierarchy.

But Aiden still sees one: "Our group of friends, now pruned down to the classic 'gang of five' (the two of us, Aisling, Deirdre and Orla), held court every night in a different venue; we pronounced on topics far and wide; we praised the worthy and dealt justice to the deserving." One wonders how much pronouncing Aiden did, and how much he was there just to be someone to talk at. One even wonders how much he listened to said topics. Just before the wedding, he thinks "Orla, but sometimes you can go too far, sometimes you can be hurtful. Laura somehow is able to temper your worst excesses." Laura, who encouraged him to "live" and be snarky. As he himself says, bouncing from nostalgia to bitterness: "You started hanging out together once and you hang out together now and maybe later you'll hang out again and that's it. That's your story." He does a lot of that, based on his mood.

And he never admits that, well, he is at the bottom of the hierarchy. His neediness shows just before the wedding reception when he asks for a good-bye individually from each of the bridesmaids, which is maybe appropriate if you are twelve. He also has two tasks before the wedding, and he checks off with Laura to say he's got the first part of her requests done, and she blows him off beyond what he deserves for rambling on a bit. You suspect she'd have said "Oh, I was WORRIED about you, it was so senseless not to check in" if he hadn't called. And John gets in on the act, too. Colm returns miraculously (?) for a speech and a roast of John, but next it's Aiden who's roasted for his white suit. His speech as Best Man is, on the surface, decent, though it does contain a passive-aggressive slap at Nick, who deserves it the least. It gets scattered applause, where Colm gets roaring laughter. And this is tricky: you want to do the right thing, despite it all, but with Aiden, perhaps the right thing is to recognize when your good efforts aren't making anyone happy and say "enough." And he never can.

Aiden doesn't realize the no-win situations he's in. There's one brief scene where he calls Laura to say, yes, I got the flowers and I'm going to get the ring, and she lets him know she's busy and he'd better not call unless he has to and that's awkward, and my immediate reaction was, if he didn't, Laura would tell him it was awkward not to check up briefly. Then you/Aiden hang on for a bit for some empty chatter, to drive home Aiden's need for approval. He's pushed around by John's creepy cousin who hits on someone well below his age. The bridesmaids chide him for eating desserts left for the guests, then finish what he took a bite of. John gets gum on his expensive shoes and somehow still manages to embarrass Aiden a bit. Neither set of parents even recognized Aiden--no, Laura either didn't have a picture of him or take time to show one or even mention the white suit.

Even Laura and John's wedding march, Deep Blue Something's "Breakfast at Tiffany's," may be a joke at Aiden's expense. The church staff mention it is an inside joke, but it's never explained.

And I said, "What about Breakfast at Tiffany's?" / She said, "I think I remember the film" / And as I recall I think we both kind of liked it / And I said, "Well, that's the one thing we've got"

Aiden is saying this in his mind to Laura, even as they have drifted apart. And yet, Laura may be leaving him hanging, and perhaps she enjoys it, and she can use it to get him to do something. She knows she can point to the one thing they've got, in order to get him to do something. (Note: I still hate the song, even after I see its purpose here, because it's always felt too whiny. It's very apt here, though. Especially when the characters confuse it with other 90s songs I realize could be confused together. It's as if he could easily write something uplifting and lighthearted, but why bother?)

But the greatest humiliation may be internal. Aiden, of course, would love to blow up the wedding, and he has many choices at the moment where he hands over the rings, but each way he's foiled, often by someone different, and people forget about it. If you try to pocket the rings, someone grabs them effortlessly. If you wear John's ring, for instance, it's way too big for you and falls off, and to me that captured how John was just more imposing, physically and mentally, than Aiden. The worst you get is a sardonic "he had one job," which reminds me of how the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy changed its entry on Earth from "Harmless" to "Mostly Harmless." The least awful option is just to seethe and hand over the rings.

I'm not sure which hurts worse, being blown off or actively mocked, but Aiden certainly gets both. And I know I have. The first time I realized it was when someone younger than me in high school had the temerity to do so. There were episodes like where people told me I needed to swear more and not be a prude, and then I did and they laughed and they said I didn't do it right. But I recognized this--I think. I found ways forward, things to study, and so forth, so my time focusing on myself wasn't focusing on the approval of someone louder. Aiden doesn't seem to have that. He simply can't bring himself to say: these people are at fault, full stop. He'll kvetch about how they bug people, but he never says, "well, here's what I can do better." His looks inward are about him and Laura and climax with a scene in the bookstore five years later--no, he says, two--and which go off the rails as he nails down how best to imagine a meeting with Laura, now divorced from John. While the marriage doesn't seem like it will be happy, because Laura and John are fundamentally unhappy people, Aiden's constant revisions make it pretty clear he's going beyond the occasional daydreams about someone that got away. This registered with me the first time through, but I didn't process how bad it was. Perhaps it's because I've dealt with people like Aiden and learned to zone them out for survival's sake. It wasn't until I reread the game and noticed how Aiden would adjust and edit text that already appeared, that I saw -- this isn't a daydream, it's meant to be a habit. And the proofreading he does is never "well, I might not be making sense here." It's florid stuff like "(Reifying the symbolism of the incident with the crisp bag.)"

I didn't see a lot of this the first time through. Then, when I re-read, I realized how grateful I was for the non-Aiden scenes. With the excitement of initial discovery gone, I found Aiden's constant choices between passive-aggression and aggression exhausting. I sort of assumed "Oh, Aiden meant to say that but just forgot. He was too busy at the time. There was a wedding, and so forth." But all the same, we are getting Aiden's story, and that's what he chose to discuss, and when he digressed, it wasn't about what he learned, it was just about his next immediate problem. And his ruminations are "I will find the right words to make everything okay"--common magical thinking in many unhealthy relationships and, of course, in The Best Man, none of Aiden's choices turn out to be the right words to make anything okay.

The Best Man was a difficult read for me, but a good one. It can be hard to deal with times you thought were good and now realize weren't. Or times you thought you were being the best you could, but you really needed to stop pouring emotional energy down a drain. Or to have friends/acquaintances who tell you you'd better not embarrass anyone, because you're sort of prone to that, and then have these people embarrass you, because just being decent is boring. Or to see that people who were "just joking" were really being kind of mean and, more importantly, to find a way to deal with it.

Aiden does so with platitudes. Some are pretty black-and-white, such as when he talks about "the good guys." Others feel transparent, talking about faith or "I had to find that love within me." Or he talks about having to do good deeds and bury it -- but boy, does he remind you how you buried it! Since Aiden has an engaging sort of self-absorption, it's possible he has indeed, as he said at the end, done some good, more good for people than, say, if they'd made friends with John. Ameliorating nastiness isn't great, but it's better than nothing. People who don't know him very well might actually learn something, in the same way a fortune teller can accidentally remind you of something you want to do. But I can't see this as a basis for a healthy relationship. It may be a long relationship, if the recipient is as naive as Aiden, but not healthy. And it's sad that this is the best some people can do or be.

The ending, where Aiden talks about darkness, reminded me of friends, or nominal friends, who treated me as a second option, yet I still enjoyed how they were "opening me up to life" until I realized the truth later. Then I realized they were sort of mean, and much later I realized I hadn't thought about them for a few years and I was over them, though they were good "don't fall into that trap again" reference points. Man, high school sucked. Aiden, however, is a college graduate.

And I certainly think that believing others can improve, even if it isn't likely, helps me improve. But Aiden the unreliable narrator, looking to change his story beyond the standard "Oops, I meant..." seems to hide actively from changing himself. Perhaps, with the social circle he claims at the end, he has taken over John's role despite saying "that darkness is behind me now." Or perhaps he is not quite as insufferable as John, but he can buttonhole you for ten minutes. Maybe he's easier to blow off or admit you're tired of him. I'd like to believe he's become a better person, but I suspect on meeting Aiden I'd be very interested at first, and then things would fall off quickly and I'd look for any excuse to duck further conversation.

All the same, though, I'm left feeling how tragic it is Aiden found people who gave him bad life advice, not out of evil, but out of their own selfishness, a more exciting self-absorption than his, and he tried to learn from that. How much that leaves him off the hook for his long-term cluelessness, I can't answer. I do know Aiden failed to strike a balance between lashing out when someone goes overboard and soft-pedaling the "hey, ease up there, huh?" He certainly chooses his battles wrong. And so do I. I've had my share of Walter Mitty fantasies about standing up to people or maybe telling them, I saw what you did twenty years ago. The Best Man brought a lot of that back. But I also think they prepared me to actually stand up, and my fantasies of "what I really want to say" have a lot less anger. Whether or not Aiden became a good person, I see his potential pitfalls as my own, and I certainly want to make sure I didn't react or dwell as badly as Aiden did.

Earlier in 2021, the New Zealand touristry bureau released this great ad about avoiding cliches when visiting sites: avoiding certain poses or certain shots, and so forth. It's well-done and amusing, as it opens up some questions: why do we go interesting places? Are we really getting anything out of it? Are we getting what we should? How do we get what we should? Funicular Simulator doesn't pretend to answer these questions fully, but it does provide us with ways a sightseeing trip could be more than just something to check off on. In fact, here, it can lead to an entirely new life, or death. And, as Mike Russo's review (which will appear on IFDB in 35 days) invoked for me, it may give a feeling of being on public transport and having your own stuff to do, and yet being open to discussion if the right person is nearby. It helps scratch the itch of wondering what the interesting-seeming person on the bus/train is thinking about, whether you've never seen them before or recognize them on that route. So there are very accessible personal and fantasy elements at play here.

The situation here isn't exactly the daily commute to work or the weekly bus trip to the grocery store, though. You're on the tram to see an aurora that appears every twenty years. Four people around you seem, well, interesting. There's Luke the graphic artist, Sofia the pilgrim, Meena the scientist, and Ray the student. You choose one to start, and the game focuses in on them. Each has their own story. None fully expects you to believe them, and there's no reason to.

Well, until you reach the end of the line. One of the four leads you to a conclusion, and you have a choice of whom to go with, at that point, if you made friends enough. There's a sort of Groundhog Day mechanic at work here. You can mess up a bit, and the person just says they want to be alone, or in the case where someone is romantically interested, you can push them away. And you can try again, if they didn't invite you a bit further. Or you can choose another conversational companion. You know a bit more, and that "Yes, I know what the aurora is for" option is now more viable. Without enough knowledge of the future/past, you don't REALLY know what it's for. The "actually, I don't know" follow-up option disappears. So the same options feel different. Along the way, stuff we know isn't true (aliens, time travel, reincarnation, etc.) becomes believable. Or I want to believe it, or I might as well, and the best part is, there is no scientific mumbo-jumbo.

I found the game-ending choice on the third person through. It was pretty clear they would end things, and I could back out when I wanted. It never quite feels like lawnmowering, though given the content warning, I used process of elimination to figure what was up with my final conversant. Having a bit more meta-information than my own character was maybe not something the authors fully intended to happen, but it gave me another layer of complexity in the whole "looping to find knowledge/resolution" thing, which was neat. I didn't feel there were barriers on what I could or should imagine, either. Things could be possible without me having to explain them. And there were lines like this:

"Oh well," says Sofia. ... She laughs. "I haven't even told you my name! I'm Sofia."

Wait, I thought at first, that's just a clear mis-step. But of course, that's what happens when you cycle through and get to see a conversation more than once. You do know Sofia well due to the cycles the game goes in. I like takes on time paradoxes like this, whether they're heavy or light. I also found some question of whether or not your companions cycled through this train ride up several times, which put a spin on some of their small-talky "but you can't believe this" proclamations. I mean, maybe they learned and remembered a lot by observing you, as well, and it would be weird to explain that back to you.

So we get a lot of potential trippiness with very little "look at me I'm being trippy and showing you The Truth and yet The Truth is fungible" sort of nonsense. This is appreciated. Adding to the effect is the background–I remember tinkering with gradients in Microsoft Office years ago, and it was just fun, but it didn't mean anything. Here the effect is relatively simple and works well. It's sort of sunset-ish, but a bit more than that, and anything too jazzy would've been inappropriate.

The undo command allows you to see all five possible endings (go with anyone or stay by yourself) so you can get a feel for the narrative, and yet at the same time you feel as though you've earned it. Though I like logic puzzles, I'm glad there wasn't any huge logic puzzle to unlock each ending, more just asking questions and trying things out. There aren't many puzzles, but I liked how the bit with the scientist's chronon tracker worked, both how it was laid out and how you could find something if you were clever. You had to set a reading to a certain number, which was not bad with trial and error, but that wasn't everything.

I can't be the only IFComper who looks at the entries next to me alphabetically, to see if I'm in good company. Fine Felines before me was quite enjoyable, and I'm happy to report so was Funicular Simulator. (They wound up placing next to each other, too!) But it goes beyond just "wow, that's neat." Funicular Simulator is a game on the very surface about interesting people sitting next to you to learn from on a ride, thrown together by chance, and it has a bit more. You can bug whom you want to bug, and nobody will get annoyed. And, to me, it's a heck of a lot more interesting and involving than a luxury cruise could ever be. You get to ask questions and not worry if they're the wrong ones, and you never feel as though someone's waiting to pat your hand and saying "sweetie, there are no wrong questions or answers. No, really, not even yours."

wtr establishes the whole oppression angle early on: you start as one of four sisters in a decrepit apartment, one you're not encouraged to leave, even though your Momma doesn't seem to be anywhere around. And once you leave, you're in a gated community anyway. A decrepit one: dogs in the street, lack of food, and so forth. So the mystery is: what are you doing here? And, of course, can you get out? Well, there's a hunger puzzle to begin, and if you strictly explore and map things out, you'll die of hunger. But fortunately it's not hard to find food that'll sustain you for a while, before you find food that works indefinitely. This "find something good then something better" contrasts with the general tone, where you'll find something bad and, yes, it's even worse.

Exploring your enclosed town, you find clues of what life is like, with a schoolhouse, a pavilion, and many reminders of What Happens to Sinners. In particular, nosing around places that'd be off-limits with adults around give you painful memories, where the screen turns red, if you search enough. It becomes clear what your life situation is like, and the only big question is if this is a full dystopia or this community is unique. Of course, this is one you-the-character don't want to think of right away.

As you explore the town, you learn about the Prophet Hunter and his influence on the community. He said everyone would be taken to heaven and, well, they sort of were. You find the key to his house, which is better stocked than his followers'. You find a way past rabid dogs. There's also a woman whom you feel guilty gazing at, and it introduces a strain of legitimate supernatural interference if you keep annoying her. This made wtr more than just a smackdown of cults because none of this could happen--some of it, it wtr's world, could.

The game's feel is parser-like even though it's in twine. You have compass directions, and you'll see text on the left edge if there's a path west, and so forth, which makes a map easy to visualize, and it also gives a perception of distance. You have to move the mouse a good deal to actually go west. The occasional item use similarly just needs clicks, though it's kept in the center, and with all wtr threw at me, I was grateful not to have verb- or noun-guessing to wrestle with as well. I found the background color changes are quite effective as well. There's green for the farm area, purple for the Prophet Hunter's house, and different colors for the streets. I don't think detailed graphics would work well here because the main character has been sheltered and thus pays attention to little beyond their own survival. I suspect even the ASCII map of the town you find early in the game clues you in to how backwards this commune is. The map by itself is pleasing, but then you have to ask, who would've created it, and why? While a time frame isn't given in the game, I can't picture any era where normal society would go with an ASCII map instead of something more graphical. Here it feels like the time I visited the DPRK government website and noticed a link to forms in Esperanto--not the nice or useful touch the creator (in-game, not the author) thinks it is!

While you can die of starvation or of sacrilege, the game's true ending is--well, a success, of sorts. There's a big gate. You need to go through it, for salvation, of a sort. The tool(s) you use for this relative freedom are, ironically, symbols of strength and unity, but in this case, they're just one more thing that makes it hard for people to pull away.

wtr also offers seven different places to find memories that break open that much more of how cult life really is. The walkthrough mentions them and avoids saying where they are, and I like this procedure, because I know I can have everything spoiled if I'm not too careful. And if you manage to escape without the memories, perhaps you're like the main character, just doing what you need to survive. There's some learned helplessness at work here for the player: you don't want to search for local flavor when looking for endless food, but once you find it, you forget about looking around until you've escaped and can't and don't want to go back. So this surviving vs actually noticing details really struck me once I looked back. How I could've been more observant, but I just wanted to get out. And going through again reminded me of times I'd replayed bad episodes in my life, looking for that memory of cruelty that would clinch things. Sometimes I found it and realized it wasn't necessary, but it was comforting.

The main feature of Finding Light is immediate and very appealing. You can change between a human and a fox with the help of a gem, and you need to switch between forms to rescue your master, Aurel, who has been captured by bandits. It's done quite well. FL rejects rejecting physically impossible stuff and balances fox tasks with human tasks quite well and even hints the player special verbs to do or type without force-feeding them.

The game starts with you (Ezra) waking up, lost, in a forest. And it's pretty clear you need to become a fox to escape, but the problem with foxes is: they're color-blind. So this creates problems later. However, you, as a fox, can also talk to animals. You'll need to, to get into the bandits' fortress. The puzzling here is pretty clear but not trivial. There are two horses to talk to. One wants something before really helping you. Along the way, you need to change back to human form to handle a certain item. But one thing I really enjoyed was the game letting you open the gate as a fox-–putting the key in your mouth and finally getting it right. That is attention to worthwhile detail.

Then inside the fortress you find other obstacles. Ezra can't read and needs an ally who can. Ezra meets a rat who wants shiny objects and whose brother is missing. Eventually Ezra finds a secret passage that lets him infiltrate the inside of the fortress, but there's a maze, and I think it's well-done, especially when you go off-course. It tells you you've missed information without saying "go back and look for more," and while many of us (rightfully) hate mazes, I really enjoy seeing one more way the whole "big maze" trope is successfully subverted. This mechanic was, in fact, used independently in two other entries in the Comp. So maybe in 2022, it will be stale. But for now, it's something good, and each of the three games treated going off-course in the maze substantially differently. Here, the first time you go off-course, an animal will help you back to the start, if you found an optional item. FL is the strictest about getting the path through the maze right, though, as you'd expect. And it pretty clearly signposts things.

Crossing the maze seems to trap you in a final fight with no way back, and it's possible you might be locked out of the best ending. There's one item with a clear purpose that isn't used to get deeper into the fortress, but it plays an important role. FL is replayable and memorable enough to patch this up. And so you can hit all the endings. Some were sad, of course (you can sit and do nothing during a big fight,) but they felt emotionally right.

One thing I didn't try was changing forms around animals. I definitely have my testing side while I play through comp games, but I certainly felt "hey, my friends might react unfavorably," which speaks very well for the immersion factor. As do some choices you make (mostly interacting with other animals) that don't affect whether you can get through with the game: they're there, and they're real, and I didn't care if they were practical. They were worth thinking about.

I'm not surprised that a first-time effort like this would do well. Its goal is clear, the mechanics are intuitive and relevant, and the puzzles are smart without forcing you to pull your hair out. My major worry throughout this game was that the human/fox switching would be thrown to the side, but that doesn't happen. Each form gets approximately equal screen time. I took a transcript as I went through, and when I found a nitpick to comment on, I felt like a bit of a bum noting it despite all the fun I had. On replaying, I still enjoyed it a lot. And I think you will too.

Okay, so the cat was out of the bag pretty early that this was intended as a two-player game, and in retrospect, it was signposted pretty clearly by the author's comments, the introduction and, yes, the title, that this wasn't a strategy game, but I ignored these signposts. And I'm pretty glad I did, so there was that surprise. I've had enough neat surprises spoiled. But even if I'd paid full attention, I think I would have enjoyed the experience.

Because I expected an apocalyptic war, something far more fantastic, maybe two ancient kingdoms both pointing to a prophecy that said, well, on this night in Alexisgrad all will be decided, and each is sure the prophecy upholds THEM as the winner. And I'd certainly play something like that by this author. But the actual scenario is far less fantastical: there is the General of the Kingdom's Army and the Dictator of the Republic. You may play as either. If you think "Dictator" is a bit odd, you're right. But also, the king's army outnumbers and has more firepower than the army of a sovereign democracy of sorts, one that broke away from the Kingdom. With feuding factions (Republican and Socialist) that dissolved their government years ago. A look into the mind of the Dictator reveal someone who is power-seeking in her own way. The story certainly looks at certain paradoxes. Did the Dictator really become a dictator to save democracy? It also leaves things largely unsaid, like how Ivanov, the Dictator's rival, may have had better political instincts and thus committed suicide, knowing things were hopeless. And how, with some choices, the Dictator is revealed as selfish, as people who chase power can be, in a monarchy or democracy. Yet the Dictator seems as aware things have gone wrong internally as the General, who notes the inequality despite the republican/socialist aims. She gives the old "we have to try it" line, one I've certainly believed about liberal democracy. But it rings hollow when she says it.

On replay the opening feels like the strongest bit, and in fact that's where the main decisions are made, where maybe even Alexisgrad can be saved. I'm not spoiling this, but I didn't see this and just assumed inevitability and how and why the loss of Alexisgrad was bound to happen. (Note: even if the Republic pushes the kingdom back, they're still obviously always under the gun, long-term.) I feel silly not trying as much as I should've, but I'm grateful for the author mentioning different endings than most reviewers found, and I enjoyed reading the branches in the source to say: oh, yes, that's how this worked, or that worked, and I thought I tried it, but I didn't. Oh, and of course (choice redacted) was, indeed, very silly for one of the characters. There's one negotiation scene that's particularly interesting, where the General suspects or even knows their victory was hollow, because it should've been bigger, or the Dictator's followers are grateful that they only surrendered THAT much. Of course, the Dictator can negotiate badly, too, if she even manages to get where she can negotiate!

At first I found the General and Dictator, for all their power, seem pretty much fixed to behave a certain way, outside of what seem to be a few irrational choices. So I thought LNoA worked well as a "your choices are futile" game (The Dictator can escape with her life or semi-betray the people she serves/rules,) which I've seen before, but obviously there were more choices, which raised it in my estimatin. Even so, it usually starts with big plans which devolve into the General and Dictator facing each other, and you expect 15 years from now, the General and Dictator would be seen in the same light regardless what paths they chose and whether the Dictator was shot on the spot or sent to the King's mercies. And on replay, it seems the Colonel is more formidable than the General, and the Secretary of War/Defense is similarly tougher than the Dictator she advises. Seeing more of them would've been interesting, but the Dictator and General definitely have more interesting dilemmas, and LNoA already gave us a lot.

This sort of thing could get people playing more interactive fiction, because I think it's what interactive fiction can and should be. I say this as someone who prefers the label "text adventure" for most of my stuff. LNoA isn't too stuffy or preachy or high-minded. It takes a cool concept an executes it well. I played by myself but can picture people are interacting as they make choices, both with the story itself, to find the passages through, and with each other. There's a bit of strategizing, and some potential prisoner's-dilemma type strategy (you don't know how aggressively your opponent will bargain,) working together to see if you missed anything. It took me several plays to beat this story into the ground by myself, and I in fact missed a few things. Like the old Zork games before the internet, I could see people playing this poking at their friend to say hey, come on, you can figure out what to do so the Dictator comes out okay.

It's interesting to see who's in charge of things (one side is, more than the other,) and I really liked having to fit the story together in a non-conventional way. Looking back, I got close the first time to a stalemate of sorts. There's an overwhelming feeling of the powerful not only staying powerful but also being able to make it look like they worked hard to earn and keep their power (You are sort of ruthless, if that counts.) But that's a bit simplistic. LNoA seems to have avoided commenting on any important Political Issues of the Day, and I was glad of that, because too often they leave me grumpy whether or not I agree with them. It really does stand out more as something that breaks new ground rather than any sort of political statement, and I'd be glad to play knockoffs if they appeared in 2022.

Final note: A basic (frameset cols="*,*") with two (frame src="main.htm") tags worked very nicely for me to keep track of things on my own. But obviously the experience is better if you don't see everything right away.

Goat Game advertises itself as taking two hours, which I think is an overestimation. The first few times may seem tricky, but once you see the main branches, subsequent playthroughs go fast. You'll see the story and what roughly happens if you make certain choices. The main thing then may be to see how to get all the endings efficiently. There's some risk of repeating endings, even if you figure which choices fully matter. There are three stats on the bottom: work, opportunity, and social, and twiddling them correctly gives different endings. This sounds a bit dry, and it neglects the actual story and the neat illustrations which play well with the story. Though after a few times through, you may be more focused on which combination of choices makes a legitimately new ending. It's very logical but with a neat curveball.

You play as a goat researcher who will soon have the decision of signing a new lease or moving on with your life. While sticklers might say nothing in Goat Game relies on you being a goat, there are some nice touches like talking about horn enhancement and banging your horns under a desk when searching for something. Part of me wonders if more could've been made of your goatness, but maybe I'm being greedy here. It's creativity, and if it's for its own sake, it doesn't feel misplaced. It also helps soften some of the more serious themes.

Goat Game takes you through a workday or two and exposes you to the personal consequences of your action. It details your research at Yobel Labs, how you get there, how you interact with people. It asks how you like the job, or where you live. Later some co-workers offer to tell you about an ancient secret. The underground workhouses are a bit sobering even with the whimsical pictures. There are standard themes of worker exploitation. Soon after this tour (which you can decline,) something happens! An explosion. Tobias, the CEO of Yobel Labs, gives standard corporate-speak reassurances, and he's a bit of a jerk. Based on your earlier choices, you can confide with people you know. You're accosted by some protestors as you go to work, and then you have a chance to leave or stay. The protestor bit stuck with me because, no matter how you respond, they accuse you of Being With the Man. Not quite as awful as Tobias, but still annoying.

Each possible ending feels like it really branches out, which is creative on the one hand but a bit unpredictable and sometimes unrealistic on the other. They don't all fit together logically. Aaron, your colleague with a rebellious streak (he's the one who tries to get you to sign a petition after taking you belowground) swings from being very successful to nearly losing it. This seems incongruous on the face of it. You can't really affect someone else's life that much. But given the final ending, and the sort-of cutscenes (with some self-flagellation) after you achieve a certain number of different endings(Spoiler - click to show) (mostly dream-logic stuff or at least you worrying what could happen) it does make a bit more sense.

I saw the paths through as perhaps regretting what didn't happen or worrying what you'd turn into, and (Spoiler - click to show)the 15th ending only appears once you got through all 14 paths, a more universal message about people being different, etc. yet being able to work towards their goals as a consequence. You saw everything and were able to bring together people with different levels of dedication to their work or confidence they'd make a difference. The dream sequences seem to indicate there may be some woolgathering on the protagonist's part. There's always something wrong. Perhaps you feel lazy and layabout, or perhaps ditching Yobel for the startup made you a different kind of ruthless.

So this is definitely an interesting experiment. For having the endings branch out a bit too much, it's pretty tidy. However, I found that by the tenth or so playthrough, I was focused more on clicking through quickly (note: to save time and energy, choose the bottom options and work up, so the unfolding text doesn't push the options down.) And I also stumbled over something that confused me that, whether deliberate or not, provided an additional interesting wrinkle. I do think the number of endings was about right. An explanation of endings is below the spoiler--you may not wish to fight with things.

(Spoiler - click to show)Sometimes an action that seems like it should increase a stat doesn't. That's because the game gives a score of 0-3 for each stat, and 0 is low, 1-2 are mid, and 3 is high. So jumping from 1 to 2 gives nothing. But what the game really tracks is if you have any of each of the three stats (8 possibilities, discounting having zero in all three,) and then there is a yes or no question at the end.

Goat Game feels very well done, then, on balance. The final ending, while not super-profound, brought everything together well, so I'm glad I spent the couple extra minutes writing out what choices to make, when, to see everything. The small abstract exercise didn't dent my emotional enjoyment, and it shouldn't dent yours.

After several years, you may think you know what you're going to get from a DiBianca game, but maybe not. I say this as someone who's enjoyed beta testing his games before. They're already in quite good shape by the time I get them. I like the surrealism with more than enough backstory to allow for a nice variety of puzzles. And I like being able to get through the basic ending, then the more-fun full ending. There will be challenges, but I don't have to do everything the first time through. I know I saved GBRE for later after completing the easy part first. And, for the author's usual efforts, it is unexpectedly easy to get the basic end. But then again the author also leaves much tougher puzzles out there for those who want to stretch themselves.

You've managed to handcuff yourself without a key, but fortunately Grandma Bethlinda's Egg has just about everything you could expect from a mechanical egg, including lockpicks ... if you can figure how to open it. The egg, however, needs you to run diagnostics. Not too many, but enough to keep you busy. Each one opens up new commands, which may or may not be necessary for your immediate needs. A small puzzle with 3 variable letters in a 7-letter word is one example I'll focus on. There are a few ways to do it: one is to write a program that spits out all the combinations and compares it to my words file. Another is to write a script that grinds through all the possibilities with the commands. An example would be:

* change slot 1 3 times
* change slot 2 once
* steps 1, 2, 1, 2, 1
* change slot 3
* steps 3, 4, 3, 4, 3

Or, of course, you can just have fun with trial and error. There's a balance here. Too much brute force, or too many programs, is no fun. I tend to get a good blend of regular problem-solving and coding tries. I enjoy the meta-game of balancin things. There's also another puzzle where the egg is dirty and needs cleaning. But you need the right temperature of steam. So you VENT or WAIT for several turns, which heats things up or cools things down. It's an arithmetic problem, really, as VENT cuts the temperature in half. But it's a fun one, and I wound up getting the right temperature a mve early, which wasn't good enough. Figuring out what I missed was rewarding. It feels like it should be busy work, but it never quite is, and the author has a good intuitive feel for mixing things up, for starting with received knowledge and moving on to trickier things, and also talking effectively to the reader.

I got a basic good ending, which was enough. I knew there was obviously more. I was unable to print out the manual, which the game lampshades pretty early on. You don't have any paper to feed the egg, you see. But there are other things: a racecar that doesn't want to fall off a table and a mechanical dog that ... well, it seems fun. There are 21 or so bonus endings and more than 50 verbs to use or find. That sets the stage for a lot of experimentation. I admit I was a bit short of time, so on replay, I looked at some of the tricker puzzles. While the author's shown humor before in his puzzles, it's more explicit here, and you can't just sit down and calculate everything. There are timing puzzles, as well as puzzles for taking the right things out of the egg (too many, and it says you need to bring some back in.) There's even a survey you can (again!) brute-force, and I really liked the puzzle to get the egg to 100% commands. You control a microbot going up it, and the microbot can only describe the items blocking its way. From that, you have to order the egg to expel certain things, so the microbot can move forward. There's more lateral thinking than usual here, because GBRE gives you all the achievements' names, and you have to guess the right verb(s) or, more often, the combination of egg commands to get stuff done. Some experiments don't quite work, and that's kind of funny too.

Usually I tackle a Grandma Bethlinda game 100% right away, but then I didn't usually want to try to complete all IFComp games. GBRE isn't the first entry where you know you've missed something and you can put it off until later, but you do know roughly what you've missed, and it's easiest to play around with in your head, because all the pieces are there. And one other note: before looking at it, I flipped back through old issues of the New Zork Times. The author mentioned he'd gotten a letter published. It was about how A Mind Forever Voyaging was nice but light on the puzzles he'd come to expect, compared to Zork, etc. Perhaps someone may feel GBRE goes off in a different branch as well, one it shouldn't, one they didn't expect, and history will show that yes, GBRE offers something neat Arthur DiBianca's other games don't. I enjoyed the different humor after first saying, wait, there's a bit more lateral thinking and a lot less number/logic crunching than I expected. But whether the next Grandma Bethlinda related game is heavy on pure logic or lateral thinking or, more likely, has a neat balance of both, I'm looking forward to it.

It's rare that finding a hang in a game helps you appreciate it more, but that's what happened in Mermaids. Certainly there was enough to appreciate beforehand, in this high-production-value science-fiction tale where you take a crew to one of Jupiter's moons, crash, and meed mermaids and mer-sharks. It's not just about the technology. As a captain of a research spaceship, you have ways of escaping (relatively lax) imprisonment, a chase through or under an iceberg, and ultimately some moral choices to make at the end.

So where was the hang? It was in the iceberg maze, in chapter 4 of 5. Mer-shark ambushes were too frequent, and I couldn't figure clues of when they were close by. I somehow missed the "survey" command that pinged where to go next. So I got a bit frustrated and hit F5 to restart and play chapter 5. MoG let me choose how I'd behaved, since I didn't save my game. Now this had also been done in At King Arthur's Christmas Feast, but there, the choices varied less, in order to remain faithful to the source material. Here, it acted as a nice hint of things to retry without spoiling too much. I'm the sort of person who enjoys picking apart all the story lines, so I was glad MoG recovered so well from the hang. Robustness in programming is a good thing.

Pacing is also good. The "action" chapters are 2 and 4, with dialogue in the odd-numbered chapters. In chapter 2, you have a very hands-off house arrest. Talking repeatedly to the warden turned up empty threats of actual imprisonment, and it couldn't have been by accident. That combined with the choices on starting chapter 5 makes for something to poke at on replay. Though the dialogue (chapters 1-3) felt up and down to me. Your crew consists of V.C, a pilot who felt nondescript, Emmett, who is not very likeable and knows it, but more importantly, knows his stuff ("the geyser guy,") and Hyun Jae, whose mother is on one of the research flights that vanished. Hyun Jae knows her mother is (was?) a better researcher than she is, and that makes her the most interesting of your crew. Later there's Cixatli, a mermaid guide who moves the story along by being there, but I felt she could have done more. But it all feels quite well thought out and worth following, even if some of the prose and dialogue feels flabby. Being able to fiddle with the different endings in chapter 5 made up for that. You have big choices of whether to stay and leave at some point, and you learn what happened to Hyun Jae's mother.

I felt like things fit very well in MoG even if they didn't totally shine. Part of that is maybe because I'm not really a science fiction fan. But it did feel consistently well-organized in the big picture. The graphics and music felt appropriate without being intrusive. The world building is there, and replayability is built into it. It feels like an entry that may not be anyone's utter favorite, but I'd have been shocked to see it in the bottom half. The effort put into it by the authors is clear, and I enjoyed it, but my thoughts tended toward "Yes, I see the authors put in a lot of good effort" instead of the fully immersive "wow, this is just neat! You have to play this now!" Still, if you are playing through the IFComp 2021 entries, it's worth more than a drive-by look.