Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

While I enjoyed the author's work Mite enough to wonder about her other works, the name Tough Beans made me cringe. It's not offensive or anything, of course. It's just, who says a phrase like that? Even ironically? It doesn't work! I remember someone in my college dorm who said Cool Beans, which was close enough to the borderline. (He also missed the point of Joe Pesci's "you think I'm funny?" rant in Goodfellas.) But eventually curiosity got the best of me. I didn't find out what the name meant for a while. It turns out it's the name of a coffee shop, the sort everyone goes to but nobody really admits they go to. It's there that the main drama takes place.

You start off late for work, at a job your father got for you, well sort of (he'd hoped to do better.) You've always felt a bit spoiled, and yet your family hasn't encouraged you into a career that really soars. You also have evidence your boyfriend Derek's been cheating on you, and there's also the matter of your dog having his jaws around one of your pairs of heels. So this feels like a "my bad job" sort of game, especially with your boss, Soren Pickleby, being--well, a real turnip. He's asked you to do some relatively simple stuff, but one quickly suspects he would enjoy saying "It's simple stuff, what's wrong with you?" more than actually having it done quickly. Oh, there's low-grade sexual harassment in there, too.

One of the things you must do, and do it now, is an errand to get coffee at Tough Beans, where you run into your cheating boyfriend Derek and the coworker who was supposed to help you sign off on one paper. The hijinks start piling up there--there's a vagrant who wants a cigarette, and there's a hipster with a cigarette behind their ear, and it's pretty clear what to do, there. (With appropriate "gee, does this guy really need a cigarette?" reflection.)

There's a certain amount of reflection throughout the game as to how you met Derek, what impressed you about him, why you're still together, and so forth, and he's revealed to be a bit of a slimeball. You go through a lot of denial about Derek's cheating, and there are endings where you realize it's over, and you don't. You do, however, have a moment of reckoning with your boss.

The puzzles (there are "do what your boss says" things which develop your character nicely but aren't really puzzle) aren't too tough. They can be solved nonviolently, but when you get to the end of the game, you may only have half of the full points. How you miss the points was interesting to me--the game doesn't display "your score went up by one point," and so I missed that calling the right person at the start got you a point. Which makes sense. We generally don't think of life in terms of scoring points. But the general idea with points is, there's standing up for yourself, and there's REALLY standing up for yourself and finding ways to. I enjoyed the mechanic, even if I didn't stand up for myself very well. And then there are the amusing actions that don't get points, like smacking Derek, who deserves it. You have a chance to destroy his car, which the game rejects, but it's fun to try. This sort of thing makes Tough Beans replayable, as you'll probably miss things, but on the other hand, you may argue you don't need to stand up for yourself perfectly, and looking back too much on that gets in the way if the next good experience.

There was a lot of light-hearted humor through Tough Beans underscoring your inability to stick up for yourself. This went beyond "poor me, the world is against me," and even though its main character was a completely different demographic from me, certain things resonated. It's an interesting meshing of "my lousy job/apartment/relationship" and does so without drowning in self-pity or hopelessness.

Neo Twiny Jam was a good time to explore and try things quickly, without going into the weeds. And many authors did, often exploring different themes of identity when submitting more than one entry, or trying for different forms of drama.

But Life of Puck and What They Don't Know, may be the pair of entries by the same author that differs most. It's a tribute to the author's pet rat. Rats, like most pets, don't have too much to do, and the author mentions they wrote this to figure out Twine.

It seems like an excellent choice of a self-tutorial, and technically it covers all the bases. Presentation isn't something I generally care much about, but the soft colors and fonts give a homey feel and add to the fun. It reminded me of an idea I had for a Twine game, about two cats I had. (Maybe next year for Neo Twiny Jam.) I'm sure someone else has a dog story. I hope they share it, to help us through the more serious entries.

There are five total endings, though they're not endings in the normal sense. You just have a new day. There are just moments when you've realized you've exhausted one action more or less, and you don't find that there are five until you choose the "take a break" option. I'd found three by the time I had, and at that point, I was able to remember what I hadn't really tried.

You get no special alert when you hit all five, but then again, pet rats aren't particularly goal-oriented. And it doesn't really feel like lawnmowering, just exploring. Also, looping over the same options several times with the same text doesn't feel repetitive, because rats generally don't worry about that sort of thing (okay. They can memorize their ways through a maze. But that's different.)

I'd feel kind of worried if even a pet rat got loose. But here it's a nice game without any real stress. You get out of the cage that is your daily routine as a human, find the five endings, and go back in that cage yourself once you've had an adventure, so to speak.

The Hunting Lodge was a shocking shift from the author's IFComp 2012 entry In a Manor of Speaking, submitted for EctoComp one month after. Both have unexpected deaths. This has fewer jokes--though they're there, in the descriptions, if you look. The author himself mentioned, when he re-released the game, that his post-comp fixes included some jokes, because he couldn't help himself. I think the changes are for the better.

The author describes it as partially influenced by Hunt the Wumpus, and it is, only the map is slightly imbalanced, and there are fewer rooms. You wouldn't know this at first, as you're driven to a barren hunting lodge where you haven't heard anything from your brother for a while. Then there's a moment when you know you're in trouble, because of something you did, which is rather good. Then the chase starts. There is a way to defeat the monster and exit.

The strategy here is tricky. The monster's roaring is louder the closer it gets, so you need to, whenever possible, avoid rooms with two exits. But of course one of the things you need is in such a room, and you must visit a dead end as well. So there's a chance you'll just get killed by the monster, and that's luck. But it adds to the fear, which makes it a good EctoComp entry. There's also a timed bit at the end, and you may be helplessly trapped by the monster as time runs out. More scary fun.

Given the author, I was sort of expecting a mounted moose head that gave you a raspberry or wet willy when you weren’t looking, or perhaps a Big Mouth Billy Bass gone bad. There is humor there (a note that breaks the fourth wall explains the rules) and some subtler hat-tips to authors the writer likes, but the main plot is dead serious. It's easy to forget those jokes.

Post-comp I think the author did a good job of fixing bugs and balancing gameplay. It's a quick tense effective experience. We should all try divergences like this from our main style. I know I haven't, and I'd like to.

metastasis shows that retro or bare-bones feel, a fixed-width font as you describe things clinically, the cursor slowly moving left to right, dispersing scientific information. You're obviously in the sort of laboratory where emoticons are frowned on.

And once you see the choices available, well, there is nothing to smile at--if you read the first passage carefully, you'll note something disturbing at the end. The choices belie the sterility of the lab setting. Riots are mentioned. There's shelter for the lab.

COVID was "inspiration" for a lot of Twine efforts, most of which deal with social isolation head-on. It's a bit more subtle here, in the lab, trying things out, maybe making some progress. You hope. There are four endings, none directly stating what happens, with some easier to figure out than otheres. A couple, I had to repeat to fully get it, and they made more sense once I saw all four. There are not that many choices to make. I slowly pieced things together. Once I did, I realized maybe I could have guessed fully, from the title and the blurb. But watching things unfold would still have been effective.

Not that everything could unfold, with only 500 words to work with for Neo Twiny Jam. A lot of details are left unexplored, but that actually makes the horror greater. Sort of like how COVID was even scarier when we didn't know what it was about, and while we read about mutations and how it lingers, there's a feeling of "oh no I better not go out so much," but we aren't blindsided. Still, three years on, we feel lucky this didn't happen, and we remember it as a real possibility.

Further credit to the author for allowing us to press the space button to bypass the typed-text-on-screen effect, so we could experience the remaining paths at our own speed.

The Commodore 64 text adventure Bored of the Rings (BotR) is an offshoot of Harvard Lampoon's great satire book of the same name. It includes most of the characters that go along with Frito but also manages to find goofy new names for each one of them. Frito's actually Fordo, for instance. The game even divides itself into three parts(passwords needed for the second two) and only marginally copies gags from the book. It does pretty well with the new sort of adventure; much of the game consists of picking up companions Traveling Ever Eastward before destroying the ring as in the trilogy. A serious game such as this, too devoted to the original material, would have been very dull. BotR, despite being a copy of a satire, manages to poke fun at its own genre and provide enough gratuitous stupidity and vulgarity to be memorable. Plus it doesn't take several whole days to finish unless you manage to get on the parser's bad side (it's a simple brute!)

Delta 4 Software cranked out a few goofy text adventures where it ignored words of longer than five letters and never was perfectly clear on what you had to type; as a whole they were worth it, but each game gives individual frustrations. In BotR, the worst is when you must GO LIFT and not ENTER LIFT. This non-satirical obtuseness, thankfully, is not pervasive.

You generally get points for clever actions and never just taking something or visiting a new room, and there are even optional puzzles, some involving guns. Something from Narnia will help in one of these. But the most challenging part of the game besides the puzzles and finding the right verbs (you must DESCEND TUNNEL and not enter it) is when you have silly locations that look like each other and need to navigate them. You can tell you've reached a new one when a new narrow picture pops up at the top.) The trial and error seems slightly pointless and is forgivable only because Fordo, your character, was established as a dupe early on by Grandalf and his uncle Bimbo.

There are shockingly few items to start out besides the hallucinatory beans from Tim Bumbadil, with emphasis on stumbling around bars successfully. You'll never have more than three items you can use at a juncture in such a linear game, and so it would be easy without the challenge of raking your mind for common verbs that have slipped your mind. Later on you'll find a swamp where the game doesn't bother to give you directions, and paths fork a bit. It's entirely possible you'll miss a direction to go from a location as well since the screen clears once you move away. There are also locations you'll run into and no matter what you do the next few moves your fate is sealed.

So the game's challenges are dominated by arbitrary concerns, but it gets the sort of things right that can help any piece of good satire stand out. The game is pretentious when you adjust your inventory and even invokes ancient prophecy to force you to sit through uncle Bimbo's party at the beginning, and all the people names and most of the player names work well. Aragorn's foil constantly discusses his family tree (more dialog would have been awesome) and is silenced by grumpy companions such as Legoland and Spam on the way to places like Isithard and Almanak. The events when you solve anything involve slapstick physical comedy and amusingly grave injustice, and you have all manner of degenerate forest spirits to creep you out and even break-dance, as well as a secret passage which doesn't help you one bit, and a signpost saying "Last Bridge 4 turns." You even get cool ways to die, which have the best pictures. And although the anti-computer jibes are the weakest (the ring you must destroy represents corporate computer interests,) the computer prison where people are forced to write budgeting software is a winner. Minor characters get unfair punishment, too, and the meeting with the Balhog is certainly not sappy.

Outside Infocom, BotR is really one of the better early ones I've uncovered. It would be disappointing if the game were fully faithful to either LotR or BotR, the books. It does well to drop in anachronisms instead of BotR (the book)'s fourth-wall deus ex machinas throughout. And given how early it is in the history of text adventures, and how badly other attempts I've seen fail, BotR does commendably well satirizing them. Yes, it's very on-the-nose and clearly below Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the puzzles really made you laugh and think. But I still snicker at the final command to destroy the ring. If you don't have the time to play, read a walkthrough, and that'll give enough laughs.