Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.

In TWR, you're a new hire at a nursing home, and the patients seem to be dying more painfully than you'd expect. There are unexplained incidents and mentions of shadow people, but your coworkers don't believe it. Until they sort of do, if you push them to investigate things they've grown acclimated to.

On your first day you meet a fellow nurse named Austin who tells you not to bother with Ethel, who is always complaining. Whether or not you do, and whether you determine her complaints to be real, is one of the meaningful decisions in the story. There are other things to do to verify Ethel's complaints, which seem like generic "old folks whining" stuff, but of course, TWR wouldn't be very exciting if that were it.

The next meaningful choice is when you are sent on a night shift with a nurse named Maria and have to face a Shadow Person. Maria sort of believes in ghosts and sort of doesn't, and after a few sequences that turn out to be dreams, you're faced with the fact that, yes, the Shadow People exist. Who they are and what they want is revealed if you know where to look in the dark wing of the hospital you've been relegated to. The mystery isn't a particularly tricky one, intellectually, but there's always an obstacle once you think you've done the right thing. Though I wasn't surprised, things fit pretty tidily with the introduction, and I realized I cared about the other patients in Ethel's wing as well.

I got the good ending the first time through, basically by paying attention and not being be a jerk. The story grabbed me enough, I felt like trying for the not-so-good one, though it was hard making some choices knowing what would likely happen immediately. I even worried whom my bad acts might take down. Both main endings turned out quite satisfying, and while writing this review I thought a bit about the dead nurse you find and what sort of person they must have been. My guess is, they'd have to be meaner than Austin. It was disquieting.

Perhaps hard-core horror aficionados might find it TWR too facile, but I was engaged, and the depiction mentioned in the content warnings weren't overwhelming to me. My brain said it'd be easy to blow off anything supernatural in a nursing home because conditions there are bad anyway, but TWR had enough emotional pull to overcome that.

I hate backhanded compliments, so I hope this is sincere: it's workmanlike, and it works, and quite bluntly sometimes I'd rather not have a story try to blow me away. This is a work by someone who knows what they're doing and how to tell a story without trying too little or much, but they didn't seem to shoot for the stars this time. It feels polished enough, but not shiny, and that's better than the reverse. I'd be happy with another work like this in IFComp 2022, but I also sense the writer can do more.

If you played another game first in IFComp 2021, this game may've set alarm bells ringing. (Spoiler - click to show)Because it is the game featured in BJ Best's And Then You Come..., the one Emerson and Riley play and alternatively sort of like and sort of find stupid. It's a part of their past. I apologize for the spoilers here--working out why IA is as it is was fun, more fun than playing IA, and it was pretty clearly planned that way. So I recommend playing "that game" first.

And on its own, IA's got a bit of simple charm that wears out quickly. It wouldn't deserve to do well, entered on its own. That's intentional, and unlike more overt "haha, this quick game I wrote is kinda lame" efforts, it works. Especially since I think it would generally have been impressive in the 80s, and I could've pictured myself playing it 50 times in a row just to feel better I couldn't get that one Infocom puzzle. So it evokes a bit of nostalgia there, for all the cheap games I played when I was frustrated by the hard games. "Hey, look! I'm solving something different every time!" I'd get back to that tougher game eventually. But I'd usually get tired first. So it waited until the next day.

Well, yes and no. You're dumped in a procedurally generated house of 5 to 12 rooms It's not really even a maze, just rooms connected horizontally and vertically wherever possible. Somewhere, maybe right next to you, there's an NPC or a box or an idol. Whichever it is, it requests a certain type of item, whether verbally or in writing. You then GIVE them the right item. It's pretty hard to bungle what to do. They ask for an umbrella, you search for one. The box requires something fancy, and it's probably not the VHS tape. You might have to go through all the rooms for a new item to turn up, but it'll be there. Since the rooms are procedurally generated, the fetch-quests, while clear, often have minimal sense or existential purpose. A zombie wants an eggplant. An orc wants a raincoat. You start seeing the same items. The game keeps track of wins (do what you're told) and losses (your quest giver overreacts and blows up the whole house.) Also, the text automaps for each area are legitimately neat--you can see the whole house even if you just arrived. It's the sort of thing that made me think "no way someone could do this" back then (Beyond Zork's randomized areas blew my mind for a bit,) but now I can see it's not too bad to plan out if you sit down and figure it out. Of course, they're there at the expense of things that seem more generally convenient now. Commands like GIVE IT after TAKE VIOLET don't work. You must type the whole thing out.

This is all pretty clearly the real author having the purported author, Adam Scotts (no biological relation to Scott Adams, I assume,) make a "nice big long" adventure. Especially since the garage sale where the disk was found is in (Spoiler - click to show)Appleton, Wisconsin, the location of the game above.

Except ... except ... there's more to the game. ABOUT ABOUT gives different text, which along with ABOUT suggests there are other commands. And, most importantly, one command reveals poor Mr. Scotts's production values and testing (either by himself, or by his friends) as utterly lacking. It's a command that really shouldn't fail, though the game is "winnable" without it. On seeing the unusual response to this command, I got to byte hacking, and the things I tried were much more obscure than they needed to be. I missed something relatively obvious.

I still feel The Ascot is a gold standard for "oh my goodness you do THAT" moments from an abstract point of view, and I utterly will not spoil it, and I'm not sorry if you go play the Ascot and fail to figure it out at first, because getting it right feels great. However, what to "really" do in Infinite Adventure had more emotional payoff than The Ascot or the (also quite nice) four-person meta-puzzle in the 2010 IFComp. It's cool to be able to do certain things you couldn't do in real life.

Other reviews may spoil things more explicitly than this one. I'd just like to say that the levels don't change, but in a reasonable amount of time, you get some some neat fourth-wall breaking stuff. How long do you need to play? I won't tell. I gave up at adventure 12 my first time through. But let's just say you don't need an exorbitant wait, and a perfect game isn't really the point. You can make more than one mistake. Oh, and if you really want to see what's up, the hex file editor you may've used to open the save file? Use it on the EXE. There are certain strings you can search for. Doing so made me feel like a hacker, the hacker I always wanted to be when I was a minor, even though robust hex editors remove many of the mental calculating challenges real hackers from the 80s had to face.

Also one odd thing that may be personal remembrance: I had to download DosBox to my (relatively) new computer to play this. My old one had it, but I hadn't use it. It brought back nostalgia for the first time I loaded DosBox. What was the nostalgia for? For the nostalgia I experienced of games I remembered or never quite got to play, or maybe I got to play slightly improved versions of old Apple games, or sequels to old Apple games that were too big for the Apple IIe. (Magic Candle II, for instance.) It reminded me of times I, as a kid, played a game I knew I could beat, so I could put off stuff I really needed to get better at. I knew I should be challenging myself a bit more, but winning at an easy game made me feel smart. Then, as an adult, I replayed some games--including some I never beat, but this time with cheat codes I'd snagged from the web. It provided closure, even just knowing that a certain "3 lives and you're dead" game looped. But playing IA and its connected game felt more satisfying than those actual games. In fact, so did looking at the source code the real author so kindly shared. As a kid, I got stuck with BASIC and had a disappointing experience with programming courses for compiled courses. So, more closure. Yay.

This may not apply to you, but I was at just the right age and had just the right life experience for this all to work. I like nostalgia that helps me move on, and IA provided a good deal of that for relatively little investment.

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.

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.

I was worried this was going to be about supernatural stuff, so I put it to the side. Too heavy for me, can't think about that, and so forth, even at a half-hour per playthrough. Might disturb me enough I have to think of other things before getting back to business. Well, there's no supernatural stuff (perhaps I saw the author's last name and Witch and thought Blair Witch, too,) but I needed to have a good think and clear my head after it. It was emotionally effective for me. But the "witch trial" is figurative.

You are a new investigator with a firm, and the boss has given you a case of his that got away. How you react to it will indicate whether you're a good long-term fit for the firm, though any discussions of that are outside the scope of this entry.

The case is one of alleged child abuse and whether an administrator showed criminal negligence in deeming it NFA (no further action.) Sarah Teller, a teacher, sees there's clearly something wrong with a student, Emma-Mai Morgan. The obvious signs are there (bruises and so forth) along with some creative writing that seems above Emma-Mai's level, and it's pretty dark stuff. It gets even darker: something serious happens, and Foster-Clyde, the case worker, is on trial for criminal negligence for ignoring her warnings.

Through the story, you click to open emails tangent to the case and exhibits offered in court. It's quickly obvious that, as the main characters say, Foster-Clyde is a bit of a prick (okay, maybe I'm biased against the name,) and Mr. Morgan, the father, is far worse. Andy Etteridge, the boss of the firm and prosecutor on the years-past case, sends emails to Sarah Teller to say, keep strong. Foster-Clyde seems to say the right things about not being too hasty and only so much that can be done legally, and yet he doesn't cc: Sarah Teller when explaining his NFA. He throws in a token "this may be important to you, but we're overwhelmed." He does tell Mr. Morgan to cool it, in person, but he doesn't do much more–like, for instance, noting Morgan's behavior is pretty classic DARVO (though that acronym might not have been so widely-known back whenever this trial occurred--we're not told.) And, of course, he has a very expensive, observant, biting lawyer who finds a flaw in Sarah Teller's personal history. It's saved for last. She's discredited before the jury but not in the court of popular opinion. I can't comment on whether this would be acceptable in court, in he UK or US, but putting myself in Sarah Teller's shoes and fearing a blindside like this can be crippling even if it doesn't happen.

This is tough for me. I've had times when things were far less critical than in the Morgan household and I heard "we can't do anything" or "there are more important things for you/society to worry about." Sometimes even with flowery words and a quick smile. Sometimes it was people who could've taken time to say something nice but didn't. But there was one time where, legitimately, someone said there was not enough actionable evidence. In this case, it was about an abusive schoolteacher ("but he made people laugh!") and four years later, that schoolteacher was pushed out the door. So it gives me some hope the form letters I receive are more than that, but it's also awful that the Foster-Clydes of the world hide behind them. One wonders why Foster-Clyde took the job he did, and one suspects there are many Foster-Clydes who just had the good fortune never to have a case they turned down blow up so spectacularly.

I also kind of froze for a while considering that the weakness the prosecutor found in Sarah Teller might be the reason why she saw something in Emma-Mai. Sarah Teller, too, knew unhappiness and family disappointment (her reaction to her father's death has a lot of anger, and it's unclear whether (Spoiler - click to show)her drinking was a suicide attempt) and despite being smart enough to be a teacher, acted in ways she didn't understand and hid certain things and wound up looking bad for it. Perhaps someone without that experience would've asked Emma-Mai "are you okay" and tried to help and that would be it, but what else can they do? They would not have pressed.

Perhaps you-the-character's opinion on the case is too much of a litmus test for whether you're right for the job, too, and that's meant to reflect on Andy Etteridge. I mean, yes, Morgan was a bad man, and Foster-Clyde slipped badly. I was a bit unnerved by how the boss wound up marrying the teacher who was subjected to cross-examination, so it wasn't just a case near to his heart. At the beginning, your coworker Cerys tells you "some people read it and decide it's not for them" and gives a general "oh yeah, THAT case" vibe. But it also feels weird and roundabout that you got the file on the anniversary of the court date and not, say, a few months after being hired. It suggests that Andy's frustration is more about him wanting good-fit employees who'll stay in line if he himself gets shouty than employees seeing if they are a good fit. Which, okay, you could Google him and find out his case, but something sat wrong with me.

It's minor compared to Morgan and Foster-Clyde, of course, but it's there. And it puts "Andy just wants to do right" in perspective. Sure, you want subordinates you're on the same page with. But this feels underhanded, and it's disappointing that a crusader against child abuse–especially one who got changes brought–would use his power in this way. And I can't quite shake it, and I suspect the author meant that. Certainly I've had experience seeing Political Crusaders being revealed as abusive jerks, usually ones who originally left me feeling I didn't have the passion they did, before their passion was shown as ... not for the best. Andy felt potentially that way to me.

This is a very tough piece to read for being so short. Certainly there are times I wanted to ask others if things were okay, or I wanted to be asked. But it's chilling to think that doing the right thing and asking may result in even worse, and the people who push for doing right are, in fact, motivated more by narcissism and not general altruism. Perhaps Sarah Teller even felt guilt for maybe escalating Morgan's anger.

All this also brings up the question: who is the witch? I assumed Mr. Morgan at first, as falsely accused, but of course, Sarah Teller gets her own witch-trial in the course of public opinion.

And one other thing that seems like a detail: the comp version skipped from exhibit H to J. There was plenty of interesting stuff to look through. But I'm still hoping to find exhibit I to maybe put one more piece in place. This speaks to how involved I was in the story even though it unsettled me.

I confess I was uneasy about this one, since it not only featured an all caps title but also one without vowels. The second bit reminds me of how Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole character sent John Tydeman a novel with all the e's missing, by fax. Which resulted in a very, err, polite letter back. Thankfully the author is a little better at the whole creative writing thing than Adrian Mole. (So, for the record, is the author of D'ARKUN, also in this year's comp.) So any fears of "LOOK AT ME I'M CREATIVE" vibes are unfounded, though as the title clues, you may just have to be ready for something unusual to get everything you can from it. I found it quite challenging, emotionally (it's largely puzzle-free,) and it looks like there were different paths through. It's also quite possible a timed-text bug disrupted me from looking as deeply into the story as I'd hoped. Sometimes you have to reset. But I know this, on replay: there's stuff I missed the first time through, and I'm glad I cheated a bit to see everything that was there. Some branches I missed made sense.

The first part of the story is a cross-country road trip, starting in California, destination Asheville, North Carolina. I've heard all sorts of things about how beautiful Asheville is–it certainly seems like A Destination. The main character, Jackson, is headed there, though they don't quite know why. Everything is set up to be a bit surreal, and by the end, it was unclear to me how much the narrator was hallucinating or imagining. However, given that they went to Black Mountain, an experimental commune/university which only existed until 1957 and which really seemed doomed to fail despite/because of its noble/nonmaterialistic goals. There are some breaks in time -- Confederate soldiers are off to the side, and you also meet Timothy McVeigh if you are brave enough to explore after dark. Yet things switch back quickly--your hotel has Wifi, for instance. It's nontrivial to keep track of. There's also weird stuff if you turn on the radio to keep you company. Someone named R. E. Lee describes a rebellion against the nation that has to happen.

Without spoiling too much, you can meet R. E. Lee. Bluebird is also referenced in Black Mountain. But it is quite possible to miss them, and though BLK MTN has an undo function, reworking through is tough. Perhaps a "go to this chapter" page at the end--or maybe a password-protected index--is in order. I certainly put off posting this review of BLK MTN to IFDB, because I was worried I'd miss something gigantic, but once I poked at the source code, things fell into place.

There's also a fellow passenger, Ashleigh, you can pick up for an intentionally awkward but not creepy love scene. So with all that, things didn't really start for me until Black Mountain. Perhaps that's because I really enjoy reading about noble failures, and things that should've worked but didn't, and maybe of people who should've been more famous but weren't. And at Black Mountain, we get a feel of that. The first time through, in fact, I failed to see everything, because I was still taking in all the names and ideas thrown at me right away. In short, I chose the "be a wimp and don't express yourself" options, because I did not to be in a virtual Burning Man convention. (My fears were unwarranted.) The only name I recognized was Walter Gropius, and him only because of his cameo in Tom Lehrer's song Alma, which has some of Lehrer's very cleverest rhymes. That I'm thinking of Tom Lehrer after reading a piece like this tells you where my priorities lie, but I do have to share this rhyme with people who haven't heard it.

(Spoiler - click to show)
While married to Gus she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter
Gus died and her teardrops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar


You meet someone called Marisol, who (Spoiler - click to show)reminds you of Ashleigh, and who eventually sings Bluebird (I missed this, because I don't care for live music, especially not "spontaneous" Bohemian live music or general 60s counterculture-style be-ins) and your friend who called you to Black Mountain, Jim Clemens, while not a historical figure, is sort of in charge, and he informs you Black Mountain has lost their lease. So BLK MTN ends with some interesting reflections.

These were scattered throughout BLK MTN and were the most interesting parts to me. The local flavor along the way--well, it seems like it had to be there, and it made sense, and I'm glad I took the detours, but it never quite soared. The reflections on memory that I appreciated at the time will probably pop up in some form, and it also called into question how much we can and should remember of past events. The story deliberately keeps this unclear, and I also found on re-reading that I valued a lot of parts differently the second time through. Any actual specifications or concrete suggestions on what to remember, though, would seem to violate the spirit of BLK MTN, where so much is vague and ambiguous.

So I do think the title is appropriate: you immediately see "Oh, this is Black Mountain, with stuff missing." In fact, I figured Black Mountain was just some bit of scenery, and this may've dented my expectations--I was quite glad to find it was an actual collection of people, and BLK MTN didn't end with telling you the journey was the important thing and a moment of realization. It's more than that. You will find stuff missing along the way, and once you hit the Black Mountain, you will see other stuff is missing, or it shortly gets lost. You will be sure you missed something. This isn't always positive, but it works.

BLK MTN seems most closely related to You Are Spam-Zapper, with its attempt to make philosophy out of something entirely different and wild, but it doesn't seem as optimistic, and for whatever reason, that worked a bit better for me, even if I do appreciate more optimistic works. Perhaps it didn't introduce any new terminology, even if some sentences clanked slightly. I feel bad not giving more detailed references and quotes, because BLK MTN seems to deserve it. It certainly got across much more serious ideas, left me with more, got far less in my face than I expected.

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.

I snickered at the thought of a slice-of-life game from someone named Sir Slice. There are a few other laughs sprinkled throughout this Twine effort where you attend a retro convention that features various slot machines and retro games. Despite this being a convention, there aren't people to talk to but just games to play. There's a variety of gambling–-the usual suspects-–but also a small parser adventure (pretty impressive, given this is Twine) and a football simulation and a card game called Double Dead Zed. You can leave at any time.

I really lean towards the gaming aspect of text adventures, but given that I was at a convention, I was expecting to interact with people, discuss cool retro stuff uncovered in the past year, and so forth. It seems there were opportunities, e.g. after winning the card game, you could find someone else who was pretty good at it or could show you other interesting retro stuff. That said, RetroCon shows a lot of neat basic tricks of stuff you can do with Twine. Maybe the lack of story encouraged me to poke around in the source, and I found how the parser game got written to be particularly interesting. However, this makes RetroCon 2021 a bad fit for IFComp, because even if it doesn't hit the classic puzzles everyone may be a bit tired of, none of the games really matter or tie you into something deeper. That said, the card game helped prepare me for some other comp entries that are a lot longer and also had card games.

The gambling stuff is fairly standard: Keno, slots, video poker, horse races, and so forth. The horse race reminded me of an Apple game that randomly raced horses and impressed me so much as a kid. It has a $5 cap on betting (you start with $100,) as if to note that gambling too much at once is a bad idea. With all my poking at the source, I forgot to try what happened if you went broke, so that is maybe something to revisit. As for Keno--I remember being overwhelmed by the flashing text and lights of a pirated Apple game of Keno when I was a kid. I never figured out what to do. I figured it must be terribly complicated. I felt ripped off when I learned the utter lack of strategy and also that I was able to calculate easily what a losing proposition it was. So that brought back memories of a sort.

Dozen Dead Zed is a simple card game. You must kill exactly 12 of your computer opponent's players. Cards you draw may kill 1, 2 or 3, and you can also draw a weapon card. There are other special cards like injure, first aid, jam (opponent's gun) and so forth. You can't actually use a 3-kill card unless you have a shotgun, and you can't use a 2-kill if you have a knife, and so forth. Injured players can discard all five of their cards and start over. It took me a bit to figure what to do, but the strategy seemed nontrivial, though sometimes you were just out of luck with bad cards.

There's also a two-minute drill where your football team is down 4 points with two minutes left. The game constantly reminds you a field goal won't do. This could have been tweaked a bit, because how many time-outs you have is important in the actual game. I got lucky with two down-the-middle long passes, since the clock seemed to stop no matter what, and an incompletion took the same time as a completion. Then I short-passed my way to a touchdown. So the balance may have been off, but it had that retro feel and reminded me of a low-res football game I loved to play on the Apple. You typed in your play and the defense's. If your team got a first down, the randomly generated crowd colors changed and it made a clapping noise. I miss it.

The parser game, Uncle Jim's Will, was most interesting to me. Your Uncle has died, and you must find the buried treasure in his house. Given that the game advertises CrappyParser as its engine, you can't expect it to be very good. Its super-blunt error messages heckle, almost bordering on trolling: "What in the world makes you think you can go east?" Though it is complex, as you do have the ability to TALK X ABOUT Y. And while there aren't many items in the game, you have alternate solutions. You can feed or play with the dog, and while you can probably guess where the treasure is without the map, there are two places to use the bronze key before it breaks, and if you get the map and not the spade, your neighbor loans you a shovel. So I thought the parser game was economical, and I put the heckling down to, well, the parser's name. I was also amused that, when I left the game unattended, it had about ten different nags to tell me to get moving, already.

After doing all this, you can go back to your hotel room, get some sleep, and leave whenever you want. I was disappointed not even to be able to attend a lecture about projects for RetroCon 2022 or cool games that got lost and found or whatever. The whole game seems to describe things as "kinda neat" or "yeah, that was fun" and I think I caught a "you guess you can." So don't expect emotional impact, as RetroCon 2021 feels like it'd work great as a programming tutorial. The parser is legitimately impressive. I don't know if it's been done before. I saw input text before in a game (ShuffleComp?) and I remember a review calling it a brilliant take-down of parser games, so seeing a serious effort, CrappyParser's flippant self-depreciating and you-depreciating aside, was neat.