Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.

The Deer Trail may not be perfect, but it certainly left a good impression on me despite some technical flaws. It starts out as a deer hunt but then turns into a lot more. This is both bad and good; the motivation for finding the next item struck me as because-it-is-there, the game was organized so as to reveal secrets in the form of letters, up until the conclusion. But despite my criticisms below, I was impressed overall. Sometimes knowing what pitfalls to expect can help a person enjoy a work's strong points. That is this review's goal, because I think The Deer Trail deserves it. I suspect my major concerns will be obsolete if the author creates a post-comp version.

It starts as you manage to shoot a huge deer with your bow and arrow to start, but it's only wounded. So it flees. Early on, The Deer Trail gives you instructions of what verbs to use to hunt and track the deer, and eventually you wind up by a house. Somehow, the deer made it in, despite a locked door. You will need to follow. There are places to the side of the deer's trail of blood that hold tools and such.

Once you're in the house, things get a bit surreal, which isn't necessarily bad, but fetching the items for later does feel a bit arbitrary. Through the house, there are three journals which give the deer's backstory. Along the way you find items you have to combine together, which makes sense once you figure what to do, but you do have to pay attention to the scenery. And perhaps one is a bit too heavy-handed, since it's called chemical compound A.

This dents the emotional impact of the story. As do the achievements, which seem like a good idea to nudge you to explore everything. Perhaps "discovery" would be better? This is sort of quibbling, but word choices do matter. And some achievements seem more like thanks for paying attention than tension building. But it could build to more, in a post-comp release--maybe at the end the author could cue you to what you missed. I also found some nuisance in having to "use stairs" instead of going up or explicitly look in a cabinet after opening it.

The Deer Trail feels like it really sprawls, and it could be cut down (the three letters you find could be, in particular--maybe break them into four or five? Though maybe the trivial fix of throwing in a few "press and key" commands would work. Also, it would be nice to be able to read them separately, once you have more than one.) But I was interested and captivated and have no concrete suggestions what to leave out. Speaking as a horror novice, it seemed to avoid cliches and (oops, cliche alert) cover a lot of bases. Enough to clearly overcome minor technical issues, for me.

A Ghost Story is a relatively simple eight-room game where you may have to cycle around everywhere a bit before you find what's going on. It's the sort of thing Speed-IF was meant for, and I think the author chose the material and scope well.

As in The Libonotus Cup, the interface and appearance are quite attractive. Here you have white text on a black background, and when you're clued to the exits, they're orange, so hooray for Halloween colors. The directions appear nonreciprocal at first, but (Spoiler - click to show)if you map things out, they form a sort of octagon which makes sense later. There's a white tower in the middle you can't get to or pull away from, as well as an Igor (that's deliberate,) a poultrygeist, a Sphinx and a locked gate. What to feed the poultrygeist was a neat lateral thinking puzzle.

I was stuck with what to do for a while, because I was trying to coast through, and I can't say I missed a puzzle per se, but I was glad to find the next items that led to me getting to the tower. (I don't think it's a spoiler to explain that, yes, you need to get there.) Each was a small fetch quest, and (Spoiler - click to show)each room has a purpose of sorts.

A Ghost Story isn't especially deep, and you've probably seen all the elements before, but it is well done. I quite enjoyed how it corrected some misspellings I made. For four hours' work, it's quite good.

This Won't Make You Happy (shortened to THIS) is a short meta-humor game where your goal is explicitly to find a jewel of happiness. It shouldn't take long, either. The game explicitly admits at one point it was about learning to code, and I think we've all identified with just playing QuestyQuest or getting to that next level or whatever. And I certainly identify with COVID throwing me for a loop and wanting to try new stuff and not being very motivated. The choices are silly and maybe a bit reductive, and there's minor gross-out stuff, but they're never obscene.

And yet it only goes so far. Having seen a lot of games in the IF community, I've seen the basic puzzles people do to learn the technical parts of a language. It's new to them but not to those of us who have been programming. Towers of Hanoi, Wolf Goat Cabbage, truth tellers/liars, and so forth. It seems there are basic "unit" stories or tricks for programming more creative stuff. Fourth-wall humor, Do I Really Need to Keep Grinding, autobiographical ruminations, and, well, It Was All a Dream. They have more value, because although we've read them before (of course WINNING doesn't make you happy) we are more likely to get individual touches and treatments from the author. In this case, most of us know that getting a big fancy jewel won't make us happy. It's the journey. And here, the journey is nice, but there's not enough. I'd hear the jokes before, and they're not bad jokes, but they don't make for real individuality.

So what happens? You start off trapped in the Caves of Despair. You have some normal choices and some weird ones. Sometimes the normal ones fail, and you try the weird ones, and the game heckles you mildly. You find some gems and really have no choice but to take them, though you can sing a Gem Song if you want, and then there's a small green man, Grommo the Gremlin, who is in your way. You have no choice but to kill him, but after you do, you have choices of how to complain to the narrator. You do get to see the Gem of Happiness at the end, though first, you get to talk with the narrator about life and isolation from COVID and other disappointments. As for actually taking the gem? (Spoiler - click to show)You can't. There's just a loop. But you can quit the game.

Now I've seen these jokes in various forms. We know, abstractly, that "keep on questin' no matter what" is quite bad, whether it's a Candy Crush level that won't let you get 3 stars without really good luck or a lot of power-ups, or ... well, anything that gets your attention and then holds you in with sunk costs. So it's good THIS comes out against that sort of thing and provides humor. But nothing really memorable enough.

It did have a positive effect on me. The night before playing it, I was on chess.com last night just playing enough games to advance to the next league. You see, chess.com has leagues of 50 people and you get points for each win or draw. The top 10 (or 5 or 3 at higher levels) advance. There is no relegation. I was in the top 5 and managed to secure staying there, but I remembered how nervous I was that #6, whom I was ahead of by a factor of 1.33 or so, would catch me. But it didn't feel like enough! I was still looking over my shoulder. (I made it, of course. But it did call into question whether I should be playing chess games just to play chess games. I wound up deciding in favor of IFComp reviews, which was a good choice.)

One other thing: THIS's twine template may freeze up your browser. I admit I got rid of the timed text (a personal bugbear) with a few regular expressions. It seemed to get stuck some times, and the 15/20 second waits seemed indefinite. Replace (Spoiler - click to show)after:[0-9]+s with after:1s and t8n-time:[0-9]+s with t8n-time:1s.

This (puts on shades) made me happy. I got to see everything in the game a bit more quickly, and also I felt less helpless. And perhaps if THIS had explored these themes more, it would've soared.

In the authors' forum, someone compared the writing to Kingdom of Loathing, and once they mentioned it, it did remind me of that. I'm hesitant to recommend KoL because of what a timesink it was, even though it was terribly fun. THIS, but it does have that “first program” feel to it, and with more characters/obstacles like Grommo the goblin, we'd have something very cool. I think that's needed, because otherwise the main idea of "collecting gems is useless" is a bit trivial. In KoL's case, part of the fun is collecting worthless items like ghuol ears (not a typo) and batgut and putting them in a display case to be the person with the most batgut, and maybe even inflating their price in the process and having fun and not taking it seriously. That's hard to capture in a 15 minute game.

But THIS makes a start, and though if it didn't make me happy, it gave me a legitimate boost.

This sort of entry does seem to get hammered in IFComp because it is, well, linear, and also because the characters may be part of a social community we just don't understand, though we don't want to look down on others. But it touched a nerve with me in a good way. So I found it valuable. But it's exhibit B in why I find it hard to give stars to fellow IFComp entries. (Exhibit A is that I feel like I'd be knifing a fellow writer in the back if I said nice things but then gave a below-average score.) Exhibit B is that it is hard to compare two very different works, and we know the stars are just a rating, but it's all we have to go on. And complex ratings are too obvious.

But there is a lot to like for an entry that placed so low. First, it links up with another entry from the author's. I played this together with The Dead Account and recommend you to the same, with WG first. They are good on their own but sum nicely together well, and neither takes too long to play. The Dead Account revisits the events of Weird Grief and provides some sort of closure to things Weird Grief left open. I appreciated Weird Grief not explaining everything and letting me speculate, and I was satisfied with how The Dead Account tied things up.

Second of all, the title. It says a lot in ten letters. Grief should be grief. And it hurts to be called weird in any context, with or without justification. But there's the immediate implication that some people's grief is seen as less than normal people's grief because it's "weird," when the truth is, if you don't have a huge social circle to start, losing anyone hurts that much more. I also remember hearing "That's a weird thing to be upset about" over far smaller things than the death of someone I care about. Sometimes it was followed up by "But I didn't call you weird!" So the title gives that feeling of being accused, or being lesser. Which is pretty upsetting, when normal grief is filled with cliches and so forth. It also says: sure, you can grieve, but don't be TOO weird about it, okay?

It brings back memories of snarky teens whispering behind others' back. Does the weird person know we're whispering? If not, it's weird to be that clueless about themselves and others. If so, it's weird not to do anything to, you know, become more acceptable. In this game, the weird grief certainly comes off as much more acceptable than normal grief. The people who call themselves normal seem not to realize that the grief they call weird deserves to be more because, well, it's harder to find friends if you're not normal, so losing a friend hurts more. I hope this isn't too harsh on normal people, but I think it accurately describes too many people who, sadly, lump the world into Normals and Weirds. Perhaps they even have weird friends! But not that weird.

It also brings back memories of a Life in Hell cartoon. If the name doesn't ring a bell, the author, Matt Groening, went on to make the bold move of creating a prime-time cartoon show called The Simpsons and later Futurama. One of the characters was Binky. And he had scary thoughts, like, “if people start laughing at your funeral, do you have to sit there and take it?” And the pastor in the strip said “Well, he lived an interesting and useful life, sort of.” And WG brought that back again. It was easy to picture the deceased family's liking him "despite all that" and his friends actually, well, knowing him better.

As for knowing him? Well, someone named Mike dies at 33. We aren't told why until The Dead Account. Was it COVID? A rare disease? A hate crime? Drugs? (Note: this felt like it would've been the easy choice, with maybe some discussion of the "normies" saying "well he should've known better, why didn't you stop him" and his friends protesting.) But the author avoided any details, and I think that's effective, because at the end, we realize it doesn't matter, and Mike, like anyone, doesn't deserve to have people pry if they didn't care enough during his lifetime. Or, well, his family take backhanded potshots at him and his friends at his funeral.

And while my lifestyle isn't as different from the norm as the characters in WG, I certainly have envisioned a funeral full of backhanded compliments from my relatives. This flared up with the Coronavirus. If I died and my family looked at what I did, what would I have to show? I realized I'd never shared any of my text adventures with them. I think it'd get in the way. Perhaps they'd give condescending approval, but God forbid I sit down to explain it to them, or they take time to figure it out. And I realized people who listed family members as testers or inspiration … well, I couldn't relate. I realized there were people in the community I was closer to than I was to my immediate family, and I wasn't that close to them. But I still got a lot from them. And yes, I was at a funeral where Perfectly Normal people behaved Perfectly Normal and the result was shocking. At least the people involved (including the pastor) waited until the funeral was over to agree: yeah, that eulogy was BS!

And for Mike, that seems like the best possible case, which would be sad indeed. I'm also struck by how Mike's family may say “OMG we loved Mike” but on the other hand, they don't want Mike's inner circle to be able to say the same thing.

I got something different out of it than most people on the discussion board topic that flared up. I'd rather not have sex scenes in games I play, but it seemed appropriate here. The people need to do what they can to move on, and they don't have to worry about things like "what would your family say?" Perhaps they won't do so very well at first, or they're not sure what to do, but they deserve to try. And I know I've had ways of dealing with loss that worked, and people who nitpicked them, well, they showed who they were.

WG was cathartic for me. I recalled many other things, like the sort of awful no-fun fantasies of people I disliked, people I should've liked on paper, people I hadn't seen in a long time, showing up to my funeral and remembering the worst parts. With time I've been able to mix some humor in this, and it's because of positive life experiences and reading stuff like WG that reminds me that my fears are ... well, normal, no matter what my Overall Weird Quotient may be. I remembered reading on Facebook that a middle-school classmate I learned about on Facebook had died, and how that compared to having no grief over a teacher I disliked, one I should've liked on paper, who died and that was a different sort of weird grief, only it wasn't weird at all, and in fact it helped me move on.

I took an hour to reflect after Weird Grief, and I was able to bend some bad things--people laughing at me, fearing people laughing at me--not weird grief, but potentially weird regret and weird fears--into something funny. No, Weird Grief isn't intended to be funny, but it helped me find humor, and to me, that's more effective than straight-out comedy.

I played Plane Walker through with a walkthrough during IFComp. It was pretty wild and confusing, and yet, I thought there was something there. I hoped there was. Perhaps without the walkthrough I would've gone nuclear. But I'm glad it's there. Some people may be purists and say a walkthrough doesn't count. I like it as evidence the author tried to figure out and explain what was going on to people who might miss it. Unfortunately, the walkthrough is a bit plain (heh,) but after two playthroughs I had a better idea of what was going on. Perhaps I have a sympathy for games with weak blurbs and walkthroughs because I may rely on walkthroughs, myself. But the walkthrough was there, and it evidenced some level of rigor, and I think I saw that rigor the second time through. It actually leads you in the wrong direction, and when I discovered the right thing to do, I felt smart.

The table is set for so much more. The game name is clever, given the plot. You move from walking about a plane to (sort of) walking about, well, the plane of complex numbers. This gives very strong _A Beauty Cold and Austere vibes_. That was a big-idea general game that very effectively looked at stuff like basic graph theory and gave enough space for possible sub-games or spinoffs that discussed trickier mathematical ideas in detail. For instance, you could discover how to derive the Quadratic or Cubic formula. Or you could have a proof of sorts of the Checkerboard problem (I wrote an EctoComp game called The Checkered Haunting which tried to,) or maybe a look at induction or strong induction.

And I felt sort of bad when Mike Spivey asked me “what more would you do with this/what would you add?” after I sent a transcript. My answer was: yes, this is out of the scope of ABCA, but I'd do stuff like show how the quadratic or cubic formulas got derived. I don't know how, because it's hard, but if it could be done, that'd be cool. This sort of thing in a blurb might leave people running and screaming for the next game, but it would definitely attract certain people or make them realize okay, I need to buckle down here. IIRC, Mike responded "yeah, that'd be neat, but it'd be hard." But I think there is a lot you can do with probability or whatever that'd go beyond a story problem, and so forth. And ABCA covers a lot of basics and opens the door to much more that could be done.

But it's all a bit dry with Plane Walker. And the first impression it gives when you have to guess the verb a bit to short out a passcode keypad is unfortunate, though things pick up from there. You find a textbook, read it, enter a chalkboard, and flip to the right page to move forward in the game. There are a few aliens around telling you you have a mission, but I was unable to read between the lines. There's a dungeon area where you clean off a pickaxe and break down walls. There are also some classroom doors which the game says you should be able to enter, but you can't. Eventually you make yourself two-dimensional, which is kind of cool. (This spoils nothing, as the way to go 2-D is unusual.)

Unfortunately, though, Plane Walker seems to rely too much on the “intuition” part of “nothing but amnesia and intuition,” and I was left confused. Since the walkthrough was just commands, I wasn't even sure what my mission was. I floated around a lecture hall and read textbooks. This all should have had a more explicit, point but it didn't. I had a few moments where things seemed pretty neat, though in one case, I completely misunderstood what was going on in a puzzle. I thought you had to tie a rope around yourself to fetch a key around a bend, but instead, you got the 2-D puzzle above. On reflection, I can't remember why the rope was necessary.

Still, there are neat harmless trippy bits as well as good cluing of what doors will be available later in the game, as you wander the university hallway. Which is nice--the names are a bit drab (e.g. East Hallway) though the game is not too intimidating.

Every year IFComp throws out a game or two where I'd love to sit down and say "Oh, THAT'S what they meant to do!" But sadly they never get updated. With Plane Walker, which is indeed such a game, I'm glad I took the time to write out a map for others to look at, so I could at least figure out some of it. This is such a game, and unfortunately, having some math background left me unable to understand or appreciate what the author was getting at. I was waiting for it to work, and even a walkthrough annotation would probably give me a few real a-ha moments. But, in contrast to Codex Sadistica and some heavy metal terms I knew nothing about but was able to follow, this gave me imaginary numbers and I wasn't able to.

Looking at others' reviews, I am not alone. Some of the puzzles felt like some of my first-draft games before I realized, oops, I forgot to make this-or-that clear, or I really should throw in another example, and no, it won't spoil any puzzles. Plane Walker certainly arouses my imagination and curiosity more than easy-reading cliches, and I applaud the author having vision, even if they didn't communicate it well. There seemed to be jokes just waiting to work, but they never did. I'd love to see that vision fully formed. I'm glad I took a more careful look to see some of it, but a lot is too far buried. That said, playing it with a walkthrough was a positive and harmlessly trippy experience.