Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Hercules! raised some warning flags that I'm happy to say were just flags. First, it drew heavily from mythology, not the first IFComp game to do so. Second, it promised yucks, specifically yucks with a main character who's less than cool (eczema, asthma, lack of strength in general, perhaps mild OCD that is used to help Hercules know which task on the list is next.) Third, I was worried it might play a bit too dumb about Hercules or make the twelve tasks trivial. There's also the general possibility it would either force you to know too much mythology, or it would imagine all the wrong thing.

However, overall, knowing a bit of mythology helps the puzzles go down easier. And Hercules may be more brain than brawn, but not in the "look at all the weird stuff you know, you dork you" sort of way. He uses his wit to solve impossible-seeming tasks given to him by his cruel cousin, Eurystheus. Twelve total, just as in the mythology. Yes, the list says ten, but if you remember your mythology, you'll know why this is faithful, and it may even provide a hint. (Spoiler - click to show)Hercules got dinged for enlisting help on two of the original ten. So that was well-played. And while some of the puzzles feel like a stretch, the game's supposed to be the clever side of silly, and overall it works. The payoff in laughs is more than good enough. However, since there are twelve diverse puzzles that really all should work, there's a good chance one could be a stopper. So don't feel guilty consulting a walkthrough to keep the fun going.

Hercules is the sort of game that could fall apart at any time, because it's a farce, and "wait, it got TOO corny" is always a step away. But then I looked back once done and it never did. There's some suspension of disbelief I am a-okay with. Trick guns did not exist B.C., and neither did asthma inhalers. So if you're the sort of person who thinks a clever obvious anachronism invalidates a piece of work, well, you will miss out. Also, I like how Hercules, so bad at physical stuff, bounces from isle to isle. It reminds me of The Adventures of the President of the United States, an IFComp entry from way back when, where you were the President and did very silly things as you traveled to rooms labeled Canada and Mexico and whatever. That game's jokes landed but never quite came together. Hercules does better. The puzzles are a bit deeper, and they were a lot more fun than the times I was assigned mythology for an English class. I felt undedicated because I had trouble moving up from D'Aulaires. I wanted it still to be fun! Well, now I've had some fun mythology. That showed those adults from my distant past whose names I don't even remember!

The first quest with the lion establishes the sorts of jokes you're going to see: your cousin gives you a gun to shoot the lion, but it's a stage prop. You want to cut the lion's fur, but you're allergic. And so on. You enlist the help of your troublemaker nephew Iolaus for another task. Some areas are closed, because you panic if you do tasks out of order, and you don't want to visit certain scary places without a good reason. This is a creative way to help the player not wander too much, and certainly my big-picture fear starting out was "what if I go on completely the wrong tangent when discovering where to go?" While this whole ordering-the-tasks restriction may leave you stuck, overall I think it helps prevent sprawl. Though really, the game's not very big. At twenty room-countries, with at most one thing to do in each, you can cross them off and move on. But if you don't know your ancient Greek geography, it's a bit hard to envision, so I appreciated all the bumpers I could get.

The gags (and in-game hints) all held up well enough to get me through the maze on Crete (of course there's one! Every big text adventure that pokes at conventions needs a maze and a few cool ways to subvert it.) There were a few joke solutions, a few trivial solutions, and a few slightly odd ones, like what to do with a frozen ham. I admit to using the walkthrough a bit, but everything was sensible enough that on playing again in a few weeks to revisit the fun, I was able to logic everything out. The backstory with how Hera hates you is amusing, too. I forgot why this is the case in actual mythology until I googled afterwords, but I like how it's covered here. Hercules genuinely has no clue why Hera hates him or could hate him. He assumes it's because he's just clumsy and such. It reminds me of adults I was probably smarter than, hiding stuff from me as a kid, and not figuring the secrets is less shameful now. Hercules doesn't think of that sort of thing--and, as a side point, I'm glad the game doesn't play the "HA HA HERCULES IS BAD WITH GIRLS" angle, which would've made me cringe.

So Hercules! does a good job of playing slightly dumb without veering off into stupid territory or abusing its protagonist. Its easy targets are about silly laughs, which may seem unambitious, but it just hits so many of them. It reminded me of an Internet study done where people seemed to think mean people knew more. Hercules is definitely not a mean game, whether to its main character or you, the player who may not remember their mythology. It doesn't seem to know much, because it doesn't force anything in your face. There are enough jokes to distract you along the way that you never feel lectured to. Maybe it's the amusing ranks you gain for each quest you solve. Or perhaps it reminds you of your own physical or emotional weaknesses without cutting you down. It had a lot more heart than I thought it would, and the jokes that made me roll my eyes also made me smile.

It also reminds me of the quote from Amadeus where Mozart asks "Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus?" Well, here, we are Hercules, and we'd rather be him than the other mythological characters who sit on thrones or what-have you.

Oh, and on the self-indulgent side, I was thrilled to see someone with a last name of "Weinreb" enter IFComp. I considered Bernie Weinreb as a pen name for Ailihphilia, but I went with N.Y. Llewellyn and, in the second version, Sir Apollo Paris (mythology tie-in, sort of!) I commented on this and wasn't surprised the author himself was aware of, and enjoyed, that sort of speculation.

ICM was a bit intimidating for me to start, and not just because of the title. The introduction didn't say so, but I pictured being told "You'd better contain some seriously meaningful multitudes if you want to keep up with this game, kid." And I don't think wasting time on several very different websites every day counts a lot. The first moves, too, promise challenge and variety. There seems like a lot to do early on. You're Chandra Fitz, a junior engineer on a ship, and you're tasked with finding who murdered the Bishop of Elmee, one of the passengers. On the first move, you see a bunch of masks you can wear, and once you leave, there are all sorts of exits. So certainly I got the impression that this game will be very, very big. That, coupled with the captain saying "you have an hour to do things," left me worried I'd have to do a lot of mental calculus, and fast. I steeled myself for an initial mapping run before actually getting things done.

The reality wasn't so weighty. There was certainly more than enough, with interesting characters of noble birth, as well as the gruff captain and helpful ship's mate. Masks are only used for a few puzzles, though when they are, it's quite satisfying. They help give the fetch quests a bit of weight. This is reductionist, because the fetch quests do have a bit of dialogue and push the story forward, and the noblemen and women (and a chanteuse and a slightly mad doctor) who push you around, replete with appropriate highfalutin names and highfalutin dialogue, just can't be bothered to do things themselves. Too many, and the game might start to wear. But there are enough. If you please them, they may give you a key to their suite. And as you help them, you learn more about them. And the ship. It's not powered by the usual sources.

The nobles' needs certainly seem trivial. And each is a bit odd in their own way, and yet, they know something is wrong. Someone has film to be developed that they lost. Another person needs medicine or something resembling it. Another person wants you to sing with them. If you behave well enough, they may invite you to their room in the passenger's quarters, briefly. However, fetch quests aren't really the way to bring out the multitudes in you. And sometimes there's a bit of a fight to search promising locations that look likely to hide something. For instance, I had to SEARCH CABINET instead of X CABINET. Here's where the usually helpful Quest interface backfired. It will generally highlight things that are clearly important, but halfway through the game I got a bit lazy and relied on highlights to tell me what to do. Between that and a parser slightly less sophisticated than Inform's, I got slowed down a bit. These faults are likely not in the author's bucket.

The boat isn't a very huge place. Once you've pleased all the nobles, you find out there's something sinister happening in the engine, to which you have a one-way passage. I admit to poking through the source post-comp and having several a-ha moments. It's not quite spiritual possession--but the boat doesn't exactly run on high-octane gasoline or anything scientific. You do just need to be prepared. Here a choice of mask matters. There's a bit of retcon for certain masks. For instance, for one mask, you realize (Spoiler - click to show)you were the one that committed the murder. This conflicts with someone completely different planning the murder if you take the straight-up no-mask ending, where you get something about generally learning to be your own person, etc. That's all well and good, but it's a bit plain compared to the others. Stuff can get macabre. Perhaps the most interesting thing is the "where are they now" at the ending: choices you made during a dialogue can, for instance, cause a lovesick nobleman to enter or avoid a duel depending on how flowery a love note you ghost-write for him is.

ICM may have buried all this, and I don't think it gave an adequate technical carrot-on-a-stick to go look back--perhaps even a "you should try" option at the end. Though it does signpost that you should save before you visit the engine. So if you're reading this, save before you reach the engine, and take all the masks. It should be rewarding.

But given that, the concept of a ship powered by what it was powered by, and the end revelations (yes, the captain has a reason not to hire an actual detective,) makes for a good sort of creepy story that feels like time well spent. Certainly the final moves add a good deal of tension and some explanation. The biographies at the end add a lot of closure and explanation and, yes, a carrot-on-a-stick to say "what if I'd X instead?" I just felt I had a lot of adjusting to do after first impressions, and it wasn't until I replayed and looked at the source code that I realized who in the story got to say "I Contain Multitudes." It's only shown in one ending, perhaps the trickiest to get to, and one only hinted in the walkthrough that comes with the game. I don't blame the author for giving you the "plain good" ending in the walkthrough, though--discovering new endings, even cheating by looking at the source code, gave me a deeper appreciation of what ICM was doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't think you're supposed to get what's going on right away, here. It seems like just an escape-the-spaceship puzzle with other terrain thrown in later. We've sort of seen the puzzles on offer, too, but in a different context. Each has enough of a twist to make Starbreakers a much bigger game even before the big reveal.

Certainly, when the authors throw a Zebra Puzzle/Einstein's Logic type puzzle at you, along with other puzzles (filling and emptying buckets) you hope there's a bit more. The authors themselves are experienced enough. The writing is good. So you feel there should be. And there is. The mystery unravels as you become privy to instant messages around you that don't seem to be relevant. And as someone who's just trying to get through all the IFComp entries I didn't write, I cut corners and missed a few clues I didn't see until I hit the game's end, where it helpfully recaps said messages, and you see how they fit. For the record, I recommend going with the flow of puzzles you've seen before. There's a strong enough story to complement the puzzles. Let's just say after playing this, I'm definitely interested in the authors' other collaboration(s), as well. I hope that's enough of an endorsement.

Part of the twist is that it'd be wrong for you the character NOT to be oblivious, though you the reader may see something clearly up. Fatal and non-fatal mistakes are punished in roughly the same way, with the game cycling back to the last point you were safe. The game asks you for your name with "You should probably report in too. You search for the words; your mind feels terribly foggy. Your name is... it's..." Typing in actual words is then reserved only for specific puzzles, such as breaking a code, which is less intimidating than it sounds. First, you get an easy one, then you get a variation on the theme. For others, such as Towers of Hanoi or the Zebra-style puzzle or even shifting water between buckets, clicking works and works well. Apparently, there's hard mode, but I didn't want to risk messing up and having to restart. I made enough mistakes in the name of expedience (I'll call it expedience and not mental limitations) and the "oops you died" message should have provided me with more clues.

Because you're trying to figure who the traitor is who sabotaged the spaceship, and weird things happen. Someone else dies and pops up again. There's subtler stuff, like the companion named Andrew who got too crossed up in various logic puzzles instead of actually doing something. (Err, no comment there! The authors assured me this wasn't intentional.) Everyone else seems to have their hang-ups, too. You seemed to be the one really doing stuff, figuring stuff out. All the while you were being watched by others. The game does some fourth-wall stuff like "this sure is a weird way to unlock a chest" but things probably won't be clear until the game's over, and you can read what's happening outside your spaceship.

As I mentioned above, the logic puzzles aren't just "look what I can code." The bucket-balancing one where you had seven total units of water to throw around required 3-2-2 distributions in buckets of size 7, 4 and 3. This is a nice twist that doesn't drown the players in complexities. For the Zebra logic puzzle, the clues are less brute-force than "person X was not in room Y" without getting too conditional. The first letter-replacement cryptogram--well, a solution can be written quickly in Python. What is all this leading to, though? And why are certain details not quite right?

Even without the twist ending I would have tipped my hat to the successful efforts to give old logic problems new life in unexpected ways. And I in fact misunderstood the plot and had a laugh, then another one when the authors said "this is what we meant." I was pretty close, and I won't spoil it fully, but it made me laugh because (Spoiler - click to show)a coffee machine is part of why everything goes haywire, and as someone who does not like coffee, coffee machines, people talking about how they need coffee in the morning, or people talking about what coffee is good coffee and bad coffee, or people who have had their morning coffee and suddenly switched to "why can't you be as perky as me" mode, or seeing coffee beans in a filter in the wastebasket, I was glad to see it as a quasi-villain. (Okay, I don't hate the stuff THAT much. But I sure have fun hating it. As hates go, I hope it's harmless. And my apologies to the authors if they actually like, well, that.)

If an entry in IFComp is going to have one word (articles don't count,) then "Library" has to be up there near the top for me. I enjoy searching libraries, hanging out in them, or just finding a new city library branch to visit when, okay, I could've pulled an intralibrary loan, but I wanted some minimal adventure. And I wasn't disappointed. It's quite a fun game, and the writing is smooth, no small feat when English is not the writer's first language.

After meeting with an odd librarian and given a red pill (don't worry, here a pill is just a pill,) you're sent into a maze of twelve rooms, each named after a famed author, to rescue Edmond Dantes. Yes, a maze of twelve rooms–each has three others adjacent, and instead of compass directions, you can go back, left and right. Left (or right) then back from one room always leads you to that room.

TLDR for the comp release: the map is the trickiest part of the game, and I want to mention it up front, because it's well worth having a map by your side to subvert this, so the actual fun bits flow. Don't map it yourself, unless you really enjoy that sort of thing. Crib off someone else so the story doesn't get buried. The author originally meant to have 20 rooms in a Hunt the Wumpus sort of dodecahedron structure but cut it to twelve, leaving a few odd loops. The numbers just don't work out to make things symmetrical. Left and right looping in the first room gives two tidy pentagons, but then the map gets stickier. However, for the post-comp release, everything may be more symmetrical.

That said, the interface overall provides a good deal of innovative convenience. It's text at the top, and you can click on the important things to examine them. Books are the big one. In each library room, clicking on a book opens it, where you open it to enter the book itself. Then you find a bookmark to read the relevant passage that helps you understand what to do. Then you can drag and drop one item onto another to see if they work together. You can, of course, escape with no penalty if you're missing an item from another book. So the game has a parser feel without, well, fighting the parser.

So it helps to make a relatively smooth game once you enter the book in the actual room. Which is pretty cool, because though the idea of book crossovers has been done before, often in other books, having twelve to choose from is quite a task! In a linear book, it might be a bit messy, but here, there's a lot of fun. It may be tough to figure what to do first, as there's a lot of randomness involved, and there's no really logical way to say "Hey, I have to read this book first." It's not chronological. But I really enjoyed how some items linked up. You need to use Alice's cake to make someone grow. You need a way to kill Dracula. Dr. Frankenstein repairs someone's body with surgery. Edmond Dantes gets swallowed by the whale as in Pinocchio, with a crossover to Moby Dick. The connections are whimsical and quickly make sense most of the time. For me it was a bit odd to see Ulysses do something to get himself killed, until I realized, given the authors, where the action would lead. This all was a bit of a stretch–taking one step back to take two forward–but it was still entertaining.

The only thing I disliked about the interface was how left/back/right, for navigation, seemed to change order arbitrarily, making the maze even trickier. So when I wanted to try to loop to the left, or to the right, I had to pay more attention. And sometimes the page-turning special-effect, while a nice surprise in the introduction, wasn't what I wanted when I was trying to figure a puzzle. The author knows of this, and they were really receptive to feedback in-comp, so if there is a post-comp version, this may not be a problem for you.

But the puzzles are fun, and you really only need a passing familiarity with any of the books in the game. We all know the story of Gulliver being the giant, or Ulysses and the cyclops, and The Library weaves them together quite well. It kept me entertained and then some.

Sticklers will point to the map, or how some of the book scenarios are a bit off. Or how you have to take one step backwards to take two forward, e.g. by getting Ulysses killed. This may not be peak narrative and puzzles, but it's more than good enough, and it's still a lot of fun. If the rest of the game weren't very smooth, this wouldn't have stood out. Because combining books isn't a shoo-in. For instance, Edward Eager's children's stories are quite fun, as they go poking into other books, but there's a bit too much fourth-wall stuff and overt self-awareness and "ooh what a mess we made," and not enough getting on with it. Sierra's Mixed Up Mother Goose had its own simplistic charm, but it was mostly a fetch quest that just made sure younger gamers knew heir nursery rhymes, some of which made me cringe even when I was young.

The Library throws stuff together without saying "Ha ha, oops, I'm a bit disorganized, and that's part of the joke." While I think there's work worth doing for a post-comp release, it certainly made my gaming side assume a crossover among my favorite books would be easy. My programming and designing side knows better, and I'm glad The Library made it in, and I think if The Library 2 appeared in a future IFComp, I'd bump it up in the random order the website gave me.

Brave Bear is a short and sweet little game about a teddy bear who senses their owner's terror. It's not perfect, and in fact, there do seem to be cracks in the world-logic. But I ignored them the first time through, and it wasn't until I read some other reviews that I said "Yeah, I noticed that, but..." So I'll save the faults until the end, because it's a nice game to just enjoy and not worry about its imperfections. Also, I'm assuming this is the same John Evans whose previous entries in the comp wree more sci-fi style, so it was really neat to see the change of focus, which I think overall was successful.

There are phantoms to fight through, which you can handle on your own at first. But then you need the help of other toys. They're strewn around the house, and in some cases, you need to figure how to use them. The descriptions are deliberately opaque in certain cases, because part of the fun is figuring what the toy-friend really is. For instance, there's a frog reporter, which people who know the cultural context will figure immediately. Near the end, you take a trip outside to face the final darkness. It's never quite revealed what your owner fears, and it's possible I missed clues, but it seems as though (Spoiler - click to show)your owner's family is moving, and most of your friends are packed away, and your owner is scared, and apparently your owner's parents are apprehensive, too. At least that's what I was moving towards, though the actual few sentences just reference magic in general.

The house isn't very big, and the puzzles aren't very hard. The verbs are generally pretty old-school, and you have a score counter and everything. The trickiest bit at the end was getting the doll. I kept trying to get the transforming robot to transform, and that didn't work, so that was a bit of a loose end, but not really enough to affect my enjoyment.

The comparison game is always a dangerous one, but this brings to mind David Dyte's Bear's Day Out which worked even better for me. I'm still quite happy to have spent a bit of time here, in a sort of escapism without, well, childishness. I could play games like this all day, and if there are a few holes in the narration, they're fun to fill in with your own imagination. I had to suspend my disbelief in parts where I wasn't completely inmmersed, but a game like Brave Bear is a can't-miss effort if the writer shows a decent amount of skill, and that's definitely on display here. So ... stop reading and play the game right now if you're sold. Nitpicks are below.

(Spoiler - click to show)Probably the biggest confusion I had was with the first verb: ATTACK PHANTOM. Teddy bears aren't violent! Perhaps SCARE would've been better, as in "you are a teddy bear, so you can be scary if you have to, but do it too often and you get exhausted." I also wish you'd have used your friends a bit more to do things, beyond just having enough of them to attack a later phantom. And, well, the phantoms aren't really explained at the end. So these are loose strings. When touching this review up I had notes saying "loose strings" and I almost didn't want to go back to replay to check them out, but they're there. They shouldn't ruin the experience, though.

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.