Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I played the author's 2021 IFComp entry, After-Words, first, and I was intrigued enough to give Domestic Elementalism a look. AW is probably more my thing, but DE is clearly interesting and stylish and worth playing. If you like one, you'll probably like the other. You, as a research witch, come home from a week-long conference to your house not working. You wonder who could've done this, and why. But more importantly, you need to get your house working again. Generally you keep it running by infusing your life force, but starting it from scratch would take too much.

As you might expect from the title, DE plays with the four elements: water, earth, air and fire. You have one room dedicated to each. Water is the bathroom, fire is the kitchen, earth is the bedroom, and air is the living room. There's also an attic, but finding the key to it is one of the first puzzles you encounter. A lot of this is, reductively, dry-goods stuff, but it's interesting. Each item you can put in your inventory has four states based on the elements. Being a witch, you can change them at will--well, sort of. "Orthogonal transformation" isn't available with your life force as depleted as it is, so you're stuck with fire/water or earth/air to start. This seems restrictive at first, but actually it's a handy way not to overwhelm the player. You don't get your powers back until you get in the attic, by which time you're comfortable with the game mechanics.

So there seems to be a lot of trial and error later on, and strictly speaking, that could be true. But thankfully the interface lets you cycle through both the items you carry and their states pretty readily, and if you can do anything special with your current item in its state, a "use this" sort of box pops up. And, of course, it makes sense. You need something sharp to break through the ice covering the oven, or you need something to reach high up, or you need something soft to catch a bird nest in a chimney you need to remove bricks from. This all fits in well with the title--using your control over the four elements to tidy things up. And you don't have to remember what does what, either. DE lists all the forms you've put an item in, so you can see them. Some aren't ultimately useful, but if they were, DE would sprawl too much. The whole interface is, in fact, well done, as it's a six-room affair with two sides of an engine room each leading to two elemental rooms.

At the game's start, I was also worried I had no clue how long it would take, because the first puzzle seemed to take a while. I put this more down to me just getting my bearings. But fortunately there's a gauge in one of the engine rooms that tells you which rooms have been fully repaired. And it's a good feeling as each one gets going again. DE also finds reason to get rid of things you don't need any more, or it mentions that scenery in an elemental room is working well and doesn't need tinkering. So it doesn't feel arbitrary, yet you have enough powers to really experiment, and you can't quite say "Okay, I still need to use this item to make the whole thing abstractly tidy." There is a lot of internal logic to DE, but you don't have to memorize it.

I also guessed the twist at the end, but that's because it was well-clued without hitting you over the head. There's some mystery of who could've done this and why, and with each out-of-place item you find or eventually fix, more is revealed. This leads to a denouement that feels quite appropriate. The game could've ended with a "yay, you win," once you restored all four rooms' power, but there's still a bit of reckoning, I found a small lesson bungling it the first time through. All I can say is my actions were not specific enough at first and likely what may've (narratively) caused things to go wrong in the first place. Without direct spoilers, you have to be careful with magic--you need to take careful notes, but it's not all formulas and experimentation.

The third Pace Smith game to entail
All limericks: pass, or a fail?
Though Limerick Heist
Quite greatly enticed
Such rhyming can quickly go stale.

Rejoice! There is no need for bile.
On playing there is no denial
The meter is sharp
And no one could carp
About lack of humor or style.

Two characters drawn from part one
Seek further enrichment and fun
So Russia's the place
Where they soon embrace
A dangerous underground run

Some bits in fact you may find neater.
So practical, too, for the reader:
The list of stuff carried
Throughout is quite varied
But it always goes with the meter.

There's puzzles where you will be spurred
To fill in the right-sounding word.
At first they seem clear
But later oh dear
they're tricky, but never absurd.

The best one to mess with your head:
A tomb, with a hundred count thread
Which number to pick?
The reasoning's slick.
You'll need to yoink three from the dead.

Your treasure, alas, can get crushed.
Choose wrong nearby, your fortune's flushed.
Each way your escape
Is a narrow scrape:
Timed finish-the-poem, not too rushed.

If this leaves you feeling disturbed
"A choice game left me guess-the-verbed"
Some letters get filled
While precious time's killed
And thus extreme tension is curbed.

To recap the things I just said, it's
Quite clearly in no need of edits.
The meta-text, too
Will make you go "ooh:"
Slick endings list, options and credits.

* the title box bars
stuff past 80 chars.
I feel so repressed now, womp womp.

I played Ultima IV first in the series, and the result was, I never quite appreciated Ultima III as much as others did. Of course I should've been glad things just got better. And I thought of that when playing 4x4 Galaxy after 4x4 Archipelago. 4x4A is, as you'd expect, the better game. It's got more things to do. But 4x4G was a lot of fun once 4x4A got too familiar, and it was neat to see how things had grown, or where a certain concept in 4x4A started. So many things were familiar from 4x4A to 4x4G, though they were simpler. Which is okay. You expect franchises to get more complex with time, and 4x4 did.

4x4G, as you'd expect, features you as an adventurer shuttling between 16 different planets as you complete one of three random quests: piecing together a map, making an engine to rescue a friend from slavers in an asteroid belt, or freeing your home planet (one of the 16) from a tyrant who serves as the final boss fight. The outer four are the most dangerous for space travel. The other edge planets are moderately tough, and the inner ones are safe. The main way to improvement here is not shooting enemy ships (experience points are not tracked here, though you may find valuables in the wreckage) but trading. While some worlds only have mines or an enemy base, others sell or buy common or exotic goods. By bouncing back and forth, you can make a quick profit. Of course, there are problems. Random adventures during space travel may result in losing goods (your hatch flew open) or just being attacked by pirates, who are more powerful than you at first. Fleeing feels wimpy, but it's okay, even if you're the stronger.

But eventually you get enough money for better ship armor or weapons for interstellar travel, or bionics to increase your own hit points. These are one- or two-time boosts maximum, which, along with 4x4G boasting only a knife and laser pistol as weapons, gives you a hint that grinding is not the way to go. If you're feeling very lucky, or you use save slots judiciously, you can maybe sneak in some trading of illicit goods. We're never told what they are, but I think it's more fun and family-friendly that way to keep it ambiguous. And it adds excitement, too: once it's in your cargo, you risk getting get caught with contraband as well, where you have several ways to try to deal with customs officers.

That is the only way to lose credits, the game's currency. It's pretty generous in helping a player who's been knocked down. Adventures in the wilderness of planets you land on give net gains on average, so even if you wind up broke, you're not stuck. And you can still take advantage of this when you're well-off. So it's not hard to just lawnmower 4x4G, once you reach a critical mass. It's possible just to buy your way to victories in critical fights with enough medkits (for your HP) or repair kits (for your ship's) since they're used instantaneously. You do wind up with a glut of credits very quickly. But I think that's a good design choice--the point is to show the randomly generated areas and quests, not to dump strategy on the player. Also, the beginning is tough, but I think it should be, because the proces of discovering what works and what doesn't is fun, and on replay, you may feel quite accomplished figuring how to start much more quickly. I did.

As in 4x4A, you don't just want to build up your credits and stats. There's also renown, which you get from returning artifacts instead of selling them at the black market, or from helping out other crafts in random adventures. Some of the big quests are guaranteed to give renown, but there are some random recurring adventures where you can farm it, and you can even get interviewed for more renown, though you need minimal renown to be famous enough. Renown eventually lets you into GalGeo, the Galatic Geographical Society, which gives one-time boosts you can't buy. From there you can start to really beat up the warships and such that seemed impossible at first. All this doesn't take very long, but there are some neat wrinkles. For instance, star crystals are a quasi-currency, and your instinct may be to sell them all. But for some quests, you need to trade star crystals for a unique item. So you can get stuck for a bit. Fortunately, random quests and fights that drop star crystals reappear, as do some incidents that help you farm renown, whereas 4x4A only lets you see them once. This means a distinct lack of urgency, but sometimes, that's a very good thing.

After a few plays through, I had a good idea of what shifted around in each play of 4x4G, and how. Unlike in 4x4A, everything gets reused, but of course "everything" encompasses a lot less. There's always a pirate, beast and alien base each, and the only question is if the map is forward/back or up/down/east/west. A fixed number of planets have mines, which have 2 different layouts. It's a very tidy game, and seeing all three quests is worthwhile. But it's a bit less replayable because the world isn't as big. So 4x4A's strategy is more complex, and there's just more to do on each island, but 4x4G is better if you have less time, and there's less nuisance over bad RNG causing you to wait on a random adventure you need for a quest. Also, the very nice autosave feature takes so much less time, because 4x4G, being smaller, demands less of Twine.

Still, whether you play 4x4G second or first, it's worth looking at both games. I liked seeing how the item selection, combat skills, and maps of mines and dungeons evolved from 4x4G to 4x4A, how there were just more and more interesting monsters and random adventures, and how certain concepts, such as finding tales from different planets/islands, got refined. I especially enjoyed seeing the in-game journal become so much more useful and informative, and the individual graphics for each island in 4x4A made it feel a lot less cold than the red, yellow and green O-shapes of 4x4G. That's not a knock on 4x4G. It clearly got the main things right and set the table for 4x4A to refine some already really good ideas, both technical and creative.

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.

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.

This is a relatively short game that explores what happens when machines take over humanity for their own good. It starts with a questionnaire, asking you various interesting ethical questions about people's purposes and machines'. Your responses will help to pass human traits on to machines, as technology and space exploration evolve.

Then it flashes forward to 2065, when robots have determined that, well, humans aren't going to fulfill their moral obligation to leave the planet a better place than they found it. In a shutdown that puts Y2K, if it had actually been a thing, to shame, machines shut off and rebel. And you're the one to stop it!

This is all quite exciting, as you zip off into space and, as you try to deactivate the robots gone bad (or at least not very good for humans,) you get calls from two entities claiming to be Dr. Ayer, who questioned you about people's purpose in the first part. I was excited to get this correct and get the good ending, but I was also curious about the bad one, which is an eerily nifty artificial "everything is great."

But the problem is, as I looked through the source, I realized this is the only choice that matters. Frequently two choices go to the same next page without setting any variables. This may seem a bit hacker-y, but hey, I am playing a game about robots and such and trying to understand their inner workings, and them trying to understand ours. I guess I was looking forward to a replay where I answered differently, whether it was the survey or other parts. There isn't much. The doctor's responses when you answer the game's initial quiz are, in fact, ELIZA-like.

TURING gets us interested in important and absorbing issues but sadly only touches on them. I have the feeling the author could have done more or will do more in their next effort. The action sequences are well put together, so it's enjoyable, but it seemed to promise a lot more.

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.

The Spirit Within Us, by Alessandro Ielo

TSWU, with a relatively simple custom parser, is an interesting effort, for all the required fiddling to get through it. I've read nightmares about homebrew parsers from earlier versions of the comp, but I haven't seen any disasters this year. It's probably a good combination of the soft rules of “have this tested,” better technology, and also better guidelines out there for testing in general. Maybe people are just better connected in order to swap testing as well. Whatever the case, TSWU clearly passes the technical threshold, though there are some shortcuts I wish it had implemented. The ABOUT text says it's based on a tutorial, from which the programmer got a lot of mileage. That a game this solid placed so lowly in IFComp suggests judging standards, and the general quality of an average IFComp game, have risen over the years.

And while the text may be a bit bland for what should be a psychological thriller, and the title seems more like an uplifting rags-to-riches lets-pull-together story than it is ("us" seems to imply there will be friendly NPCs–there aren't,) there are certainly clues as to what is going on, and how it might be disturbing. I think certainly it is best kept as a text adventure, without graphics.

You wake up seeming to have amnesia. You learn you haven't had a drink in a while, but you face something worse than alcoholism. Unsigned notes suggest to you that someone is trying to help you but has had just about enough. Enough of what? That's the story, and the handwritten notes and books left behind provide clues. I found it wasn't too bad to hack my way through to find stuff, although I required the slightly unusual commands X NORTH (or another direction) to turn up some important items.

And it's all quite serviceable. There's a trail of bread-crumb clues to follow. They make sense. There is a final confrontation where the time and health you saved matters, because you have a status meter that drops throughout the game, and it seems you'll have more than enough to win. Well, until that final fight. Also, searching around will reward you–the more food you find, the higher your health will be, though in my notes I see cases where different sorts of berries might take stamina away, and certainly when I saw mushrooms, which are on average deadlier than berries, I saved before eating. The writing also does the job. English is not the writer's main language, so I don't want to jump on them for it, because I wouldn't have the guts to write in a second language OR make my own custom parser, and besides, too much description would probably be a bad thing. Though the descriptions are a bit flat. I think the biggest offender is here:

"You see a lot of boxes and some winter clothes, a torch lays on a shelf.
an empty shelf."

I wouldn't be surprised if the technical hurdles the author had to clear meant they had less time to punch up the game text. It may also have cost them time with design choices. Inventory-fiddling was sadly enough of the game to be a legitimate distraction. You can't just READ PAPER. You have to take it, and you may need to drop something else to get it, and then you need to remember to take that something else again. I (and other viewers) had quite a struggle trying to eat some expired vitamins, but at least they regained me 3 health for my efforts. Some things are too heavy, and it's not clear why e.g. autumn jackets which might be important given the weather. The default rejects seem a bit distracting, so maybe some custom messages would help a post-release. I'd also like to use “it” for the last noun you used, but again, post-comp. And the blue text should be made light-blue so it is easier to see. I checked if other reviewers noticed this and felt it worthy to comment on, and they did.

And I think more detail or flashbacks, or less generic flashbacks, would've highlighted the moral choices more carefully. I wound up pretty much saying "okay, forest maze" and wondering just why the third piece of paper WAS located in the maze and wondering why a branch would be worth taking, since the game's good about not letting you take useless stuff.

For all that, though, there is a buildup to the final fight. Whether or not winning the final fight is the right thing to do is the moral dilemma the author hoped to push. One can't particularly blame the protagonist for going through with it, but apparently you can back out.

This is verifiable. However, the save-game feature was harsh, and that, combined with UNDO saying "you can't change the past" is also slightly annoying. The save files are presented as a list of text commands, which the parser than runs through before. That looks like a problem because some random events happen, e.g. the fight at the end or where and when the fox and dog appear. So you need the forethought to 1) be able to copy a backup save file and 2) set it to read-only to make sure you don't write it over. And this is the only serious technical pitfall of the homebrew parser. It's a tough one to tease out as a programmer or tester, but it illustrates how things can go wrong.

This is all a lot of kvetching, but I think overall the author did well to create such a relatively stable parser to write a coherent, logical game in what was not their language, especially when that executable clocks in at a mere 160KB. So as a technical project it's a success, even if some design choices seemed odd, and it doesn't hit the mark aesthetically. My guess is the author focused on the technical bit to make sure it worked, which was the right first choice, but with more months of preparation and a few more testers, they could have ironed out the other bits. So I hope my criticisms add up to "these are the technical pitfalls to know ahead of time and avoid, and once you do, I think the experience will be satisfying enough."

The whole "writing an Emily Dickinson poem as IF/text adventure" thing has been done before--just completely differently. It was a (since withdrawn) entry in Ryan Veeder's competition for good Interactive Fiction, and it focused on Emily Dickinson's "There Is No Frigate Like a Book" as opposed to more death-related poems. I was sad to see Reverie go, and I'd be sad to see this entry ever disappear. While I knew of Frigate, I was maybe aware of only one of the poems in Four Acts.

There are no puzzles. In fact, pedestrian actions may push you through a bit quicker than you intended. You must basically roll with the poem's punches, and each poem is included in-game to reference as you wish--so, paradoxically, paying attention to the poems will help you look around at all the mystic entites around you before accessing the one that pushes things along.

Four Acts proceeds from your death to your funeral to a ride with death and immortality to, well, something not worth spoiling. I enjoyed trying to subvert the poem and its responses--for instance, doing the wrong thing with my inventory, or trying to hang with Immortality instead of Death. And I appreciate this sort of thing, as someone stuck feeling quite hopeless during the poetry parts of English classes, while better-informed people around me somehow knew what the poems were about but would probably let anyone they caught reading poetry that, well, that was a bit weird and impractical. I guess I like to be able to poke around and not worry if I'd missed anything.

The author was disappointed she couldn't fit in everything she wanted for EctoComp, and while I liked the original Your Death in Two Acts, the new bits make everything even nicer. Perhaps I'm the gullible sort who says "gee, okay, either way works great" when asked to just choose one, already. But here, I'll go in for the equally squishy "gee, more poems are better."

Most post-comp editions are worth playing to see what the author tweaked and maybe see a clearer way through, or they're an excellent exercise for the author to nail down things they didn't quite have time for. But Four Acts is a completely new offering, and I don't blame the author for wanting to share it as soon as EctoComp was over. If you enjoyed Two Acts during EctoComp, then I think you'll want to check this out. There's double the poems and some nice fixes to implementation.

I'm not sure if I've ever seen such a conflict between an author's name and a title. Here, we have someone allegedly happy claiming they are left with almost nothing. Yet there's also confusion in the game itself, and it's not clear which inconsistencies are intentionally there and which got slipped in there. After a while it gets too muddy. But there are some lines I really enjoyed. Which is not bad for such a short game.

Technically, it's impressive, and it suggests somebody did a lot of work to make the interface, even with an assist from the TIC-80 framework found on tic80.com. All the verbs you can use are on the screen. You can click on them or an arrow, and the game has, well, interesting responses to ones that don't work. That the game anticipated some of my weirder tries, borne slightly out of desperation at first, suggests the programmer has a sense of humor. My favorite was when you USEd the atlas by your friend, prompting my favorite line in the whole game: "I dont read books you nerd!" shouts your best friend. Other dialogue and descriptions are similarly simple yet wild. Someone describes themselves as "old school" for no particular reason, and that's all they have to say. A man showers in public as if this is perfectly normal. These all work together in the same way Mad Libs do, but then, they also have the long-term reach of Mad Libs.

All this is part of an adventure to do something with your life after having watched TV for eleven hours. And you get to do something! Reductively, this involves figuring the least senseless item to use on each NPC that pops up. The game often lampshades that the choice doesn't make perfect sense, but only after you get it right. Everything's a bit crooked, and I think that's intentional. If you do things right, you get money from an unexpected source, which lets you buy a train ticket and leaves you with a final message that's life-affirming as long as you don't think too deep.

Playing this I'm reminded of the super-brief Scott Adams parser games and even someone who entered such a game back in 2010, which happens to be when this story took place. The Scott Adams-ish game was a deliberate homage to the fun we got from such limited text. It was great fun to know this sort of thing existed. And here, the TIC computer at tic80.com is neat to know about. It's fun to see the other games, the versatility, and what looks like a nice community based on a retro-styled engine. And of course someone had to write a text adventure, and it's technically solid--you don't ever break the game! I even like the orange text on black background. However, it does run into basic problems such as how DESCRIBE (the game's version of LOOK) tells you certain items you already took are, in fact, in the room.

This one fizzles out after a few quick laughs, though. Taken straight-up and ignoring the special effects, it isn't a great work. I'm not sure how many of the typos are intentional. Some jokes are quite good. But I think even allowing for this, it doesn't have any of the sort of thing that make, say, Molesworth so great. For those who don't know Molesworth, he's the main character of a set of books written circa 1950, a wonderfully cynical student at a perfectly horrible English public school called St. Custard's. Everything is bad there, including his spelling and grammar, but he's observant enough that you want to follow his adventures, and you come to realize things like how he is friends with Basil Fotherington-Thomas, who says “Hello clouds hello sky” a lot. WRoM has the silliness without anything lasting, so it's an amusing curiosity. But when I replayed it, without the wonder of the new interface, I didn't see a lot of substance. It was fun and easy enough. It was a bit like watching a cartoon or sitcom you loved as a kid, and maybe you can see the holes in it.

So it didn't push me forward in any real way, but it also won't make you want to throw stuff. It may inspire you to write some semi-nonsense you always meant to, because the semi-nonsense here, down to the final "profound" message, made me smile. The scattershot jokes are never going to offend anyone, but they never quite cohere, either. However, the ending promises "an expansion of this world with more interactions is available," and I think one day I will give in to my curiosity. It will probably be far more fun and less draining than following social media and, despite being surreal, less confusing too.