Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.

The Belinsky Conundrum is a Facebook Messenger app about a top-secret mission to take out a spy who's managed to avoid his kids being chipped. It's a compelling premise, and it's extra-cool that it's on a new platform, and you can do this sort of thing on Facebook, and you (presumably) won't be suckered into in-app purchases along the way to get a better ending. Which gives it a leg up on a lot of games on Facebook.

But unfortunately there wasn't enough of a conundrum to really sink my teeth into. The game follows a pattern of asking for 3 different options, some of which feel very small-talky indeed and maybe did not give all the variety I hoped for, even though they gave a laugh. Given the tone of responese, this would be okay for a comedic slice of life game, but it feels out of proportion in something more exciting–perhaps the author's strength is more with slice of life games. An example is below–I'm not sure of the differences, and perhaps it would be better to have no choice at all, or "nod impressively / stay still ". I think we have some latitude for false choices in choice-based games, but unfortunately here it seemed to contrast with the gravity of the situation. One early example is below:

(Spoiler - click to show)"The national security of the United States is at stake," says Admiral Houfy.

Sweet! / That's messed up / Oh my god

Still, I managed to put up with my boss's orders to succeed or else, and make it to Norway, where I bought a car and gun "off the grid," which was quite fun. Apparently I owned a wind farm, or could pretend to own one, to make the purchases plausible. The only real puzzle I saw was finding the name of the gun dealer, and I chose the most oddly spelled one, because it was foreign, and it worked. I felt satisfied, and I'd have liked more puzzles like that, regardless of how bad they'd kill you off it you messed up. I was also curious who it was that the government had tracking me to make sure I did my job. TBC brings it up on the NorAir flight I took. There are suspects that are so obvious they couldn't be the one and suspects that obviously could be the one.

TBC feels very high-stakes at first, but it seems the only chance to go wrong was at the end, where you had a choice to try a hit on Belinsky or not. I did not and was told to stand down shortly after. This is a point where being able to undo things would've been appreciated, as I was hoping to read about the moral implications or possibilities. But it took a bit too long to get there. That was the first time. Fortunately, TBC was short enough that it wasn't hard to play again. This time, I eyeballed the correct passenger (the old lady) and went to Iceland where I found an underground maze where I met an old contact. Then I burst into the Belinsky house. I had a long, winding adventure with Belinky, escaping both world and US governments as well as some philosophical discussions about safety vs control/surveillance. They were a bit didactic, but they helped me put things together. There was a dramatic end, and yet I still can't help feeling so many of the dialogues and choices were superfluous and missed out on a chance to develop the core story. There was probably more there than what came before, but people might miss it, so I'd like to at least have that for reference..

I think TBC buries the bulk of its good stuff, and not just because it was on Facebook Messenger instead of a more traditional, accessible and lightweight format. But there is good stuff. I mean, I don't want to find out all the surprises at once, but it seemed a bit back-loaded and never quite built to the climax it should or could have had, because after being hit up front with many dialogue choices that didn't seem to matter, I was never really able to get back into a strategic frame of mind. Though without too many spoilers, I think it's satisfying Roosk gets pegged as dislikable in the end. And the chase where you actually try to rescue Belinsky was, for me, probably the best part of the game. So you probably won't want to miss it.

YCHDT's blurb spells things out pretty quickly. The title, however, is more fungible. And I wondered: there were so many ways to say it. Was the main character saying it to someone else? Were they hurt? Impressed? Was someone else saying it to them? Did the main character lash out unacceptably? Things seemed ugly any which way. I pictured a hugely dramatic resolution at the end. There was none, and I think YCHDT worked better without it.

Because as it turns out, there's another possibility, namely that (Spoiler - click to show)you don't feel able to do what you want to do, or what other people would have no problem doing, or what people expect of you, and people don't quite get why you can't.

This is built up through the story. It's your first day at a new job. You're given relatively remedial tasks (which you enjoy, and which some people might find weird you enjoy) and introduced to your coworkers. One is actually friendly, and one is surface-friendly, focused on "fixing you up," making you more "presentable," "exciting," etc. I've had this from people even though I'm not autistic (oh hi, gun nuts in my horrible old Boy Scout troop 2 years younger than me,) and there's no way to push back without seeming confrontational, and you suspect they just have more experience in a shouting match. They'll say "you need to ..." without asking what you'd ultimately like, or want. Perhaps they're just being oblivious, and it takes a lot more data to consign them to "seriously not worth listening to" territory. Of course there are things that let you blow someone off immediately, but bad actors don't have to be a genius to train themselves to avoid that. So they make themselves minimally tolerable and have something prepared if someone does lash out. We learn to deal with this as we grow older.

But it's hard to! We make a lot of bad guesses, whether or not we are autistic. And I can't speak scientifically whether autism means you start with more to learn, or it's harder to learn and retain what you learn. Just--being stuck in a situation where someone says "I was trying to help" and wasn't, or if they ask you an obvious question and you're too frozen to answer, maybe because you're worried they have a cruel follow-up, hurts. Maybe you realise there's a Hobson's Choice and it's tough to pick the less awful way. It doesn't have to happen often. But having it happen all the time must hurt terribly, whether or not people say "Gee, don't you learn?" whether it's due to actual learned helplessness or autism.

As someone who just didn't get the power games people played with dialogue and was conscious of that, this struck a nerve. But I was able to bounce back from this reading and some memories. I've had my share of people I had to back away from because their jokes are superficially friendly, or they start with self-deprecation to "justify" insulting someone later. Or they, being a bit narcissistic, expect constant brief verbal encouragement to continue their long rant.

And it's weird. The best response may be "oh" and look away. But it also may be the worst response. And the difference may be subtle gestures you're not aware of. I certainly felt, well, the narrator should be able to bounce back from the violations of personal space, etc., from their coworker. They deserve to. But they didn't. And this was all done with a lack of melodrama. It says a lot beyond autism to me, as it's about helplessness in general and not wanting to let people spoil your victories, big or small, that you should enjoy and be proud of.

In real life, we don't want our public transport to be exciting. We want it to be there and relatively on time. And in Chicago, it is. Just as in Boston, it's not perfect, but you can access arrival times and expected trip times on your phone. Train and bus routes intersect. You don't want to make too much contact with your fellow bus riders, except to ask if that book they're reading and you've heard about is any good. And so forth.

Yet what with COVID, I think I've had serious withdrawal. I never particularly enjoyed driving, especially in traffic. On the bus or train, there's time to sit and think of weird stuff or even look for something new on that route you've been down a hundred or even a thousand times before. Or there's that fear (or, if life's been particularly boring, hope) a three-transfer trip out to a suburb you can only locate on a map will get very, very weird indeed. There's that wonder, just where does bus route X go? I still enjoy seeing maps where buses with numbers over 300 sprawl to obscure suburbs. Though really, about the weirdest thing that ever happened to me was that a Pace bus out to Elk Grove had to pay a highway toll. This seemed like a violation of some economic principle or other.

What the Bus goes beyond that, in the safety of your own home--or maybe even if you are on the bus! It's about as adventurous and odd as public transport can be. It has good smattering of random text about what's going on around you, or where your GPS thinks you are (Las Vegas, Bhutan, and so forth.) And it doesn't start weird, but it gets that way once your original public transport is delayed. You start off with choices between the Yellow and Purple lines and wind up, if you're careful, on the Orange Vanilla, Chartreuse or Calico lines. The background changes to your train's color. Two choices have identical text but give radically different endings--of which there are only ten, but given how some game branches cycle, you need to make a few maps, even with that nice undo feature.

I suspect that a huge chunk of this game is natural to residents of Boston. And yet, it feels very weird to me. The Red, Yellow, Orange Blue and Purple lines all exist in Chicago, but not like that! The buses have different numbers. So it would be odd and mysterious even written straight-up. But it's a good weird. I've certainly had nightmares about public transport not going where it should, and this brought them back with a smile.

What the Bus offers nothing in the way of profound philosophy, but it doesn't have to. It's quite accessible, since it has UNDO commands, so you can knock off the ten endings pretty quickly. There is no grand reveal, just the satisfaction of seeing it all. I have to admit, 24 hours after playing it, I don't remember the endings--most of my time after playing was spent in memories of wrong buses taken, times I'd walked to a connecting bus to save time, or just barely managing to sneak in my second free transfer two hours after paying my first fare on a two-hour circular trip.

All this is fun for me, and I miss it, but it's probably not so exciting to make a game of. I was surprised What the Bus brought so much uncertainty and wonder back, especially of times before I got used to my now-favorite bus route as it went over a highway or past some once-mysterious business I finally Googled one day. I have to admit, I don't remember the endings all that well. But that just means the confusion will be fresh and wonderful if I ever pull it up again. It's the sort of game that fills a niche if not a huge need, and you're glad someone did it and did it well. I think anyone will enjoy the humor, but those who appreciate public transport despite all its faults will like it a bit more.

It's good news when an EctoComp entry is replayable. It's also quite good when I have to replay it, and I know it'll be worth it. But for this game, I didn't want to replay it until I considered the possibilities. Perhaps I'm just the right audience for it.

But it's just a simple game of Battleship. A 3x1 ship on a 4x4 board. For you and death. All for the right to avoid damnation. I won my first time. Maybe I just want to keep my perfect record.

However, I'm currently entertaining the notion that the game doesn't pick things at random. That it only seems to. After all, it gives you four guesses to start, and there's no guarantee one of them hits. (In fact, there never is, with four guesses. You need five: C1, D2, A2, B3, C4, for instance.) And Death hit me the move after I hit him. Then, in a stroke of luck, I guessed wrong, but so did Death. This isn't totally improbable, but there's enough linked that the story could go like so:

Death taunts a mere mortal, asking them why they deserve to avoid eternal damnation. The mortal's actually been a pretty good person, but Death doesn't want to make it easy. Death mocks them: "don't ask wise questions about how I know what you're thinking and how you might cheat." But Death has already made up its mind, in the person's favor. It's just part of the ritual. (Note: you have opportunities to be a smartaleck. Maybe this fixes you for a bad end. That'd be cool.)

As someone who has spent far too much time poking at advanced battleship strategies, such as they are, I didn't expect an oversimplified game of battleship to be so thought-provoking, but I'm glad it was.

From the screenshots, FoK seemed like this was one of those RPGs you could just lawnmower through. Which was a change of pace. And indeed, lawnmowering through gets you to an ending quickly enough. You start as an egg, and you become more fully developed into a Kabu (nightmare creature,) you learn (or think you learn) about your world. But there isn't anything like stats or inventory or combat. You simply have a few screens--some with areas you can't get to right away--and NPCs to interact with. There's a mole, and there's a child killing ants, and there are even other Kabu, who don't seem to like you.

And with all this is a small story with several different possibilities. You can go full nightmare, where you wind up killing an entire city in a surprisingly quiet manner, or you can try to learn what is happening and why you are who you are. I wasn't able to get a happy ending, though I think there must be one. I also originally assumed you couldn't get to a small spring. So I had a story in my mind about how your life is really depressing and there is no way out, until I managed to make my way to the spring. Life still wasn't perfect for the poor Kabu.

And perhaps the game isn't. You interact with NPCs by running into them, and I killed a few without meaning to, before I'd officially turned bloodthirsty. So this left me confused. But it's hardly fatal, and I didn't mind translating the Spanish text that crept in the game either.

It's neat that something like this could exist. Even if I'm not 100% sure what to make of it, or if my ideas are even reasonable, it'll stay with me. It's all a bit vague, but it's supposed to be, being a fable and all. Small things like how you hatch or discovering your mother or the color change as the story progresses work for a memorable experience, and the one-bit graphics work well, too. I even enjoyed the trial and error to see what I could walk over, as it was mostly intuitive, and often when I couldn't run through something, I was able to figure what it was. I'd always had vague ideas of blending a top-down RPG-style game with text, and it's neat to see how doable it can be, and that it's done pretty well. And I hope it's done again.

If you are going to make a last-day entry, EctoComp is the competition to do things in, and Twine definitely helps. Healy is an EctoComp specialist who provided cheery scary stuff in 2014 and 2019 and this year's entry follows up on that.

The basic plot is that you quickly meet a witch in the woods and then maybe Dracula. It felt like the game would branch out a lot more than it actually did, because I made the "right" choice to move forward, so I had my pencil ready to map the branches out. But then later I enjoyed how it gave the option flipped back between 2 weaker options, one of which is lampshaded as "cry." I was also amused by "text a friend" because I'll never forget a tweet that said "Boy, a lot of horror movies pre-1995 could've been solved by having cell phones!" But you are still scared.

And the endings are appreciably silly. So I got a few laughs. But my fears it might overstay its welcome (the title lampshades it's a bit overdone) turned out to be 180-degrees wrong. I wanted a little more. I hope Healy uses all four hours next year. I appreciate having games like this to recover from the darker ones, whether they're in EctoComp or even IFComp.

Haunted Mustache Pizza Delivery is a heck of a title, that's for sure. It reminded me of an article I read long ago, about a college football head coaching change. There was a picture of a mustache in a bowl of oatmeal. It was hilarious (no, really) because the old head coach had a cool mustache. The defensive coordinator had a cool mustache. He was considered the frontrunner, but the new head coach wound up having a cool mustache, too.

HMPD doesn't quite reach these heights, but it gave me a laugh or two. You have to stay late for one more delivery, and the chef is gone. So it's up to you to make the pizza.

Your mustache twitches as you put certain ingredients on. And there are a lot. I naively decided to put them all on, and maybe I should've seen the ending coming, given the clues. I replayed several times, and I managed to get several different pictures of pizza, from "boring school cheese pizza" to "looks more like a detailed woodcarving" to "full on vegetable platter." So I think what you put on affects what sort of picture you get, and I was curious, but I don't know enough about food to find everything.

I didn't find a truly winning ending. Perhaps there is one combination that works. But I enjoyed it enough. Yes, the content-warning bits Weren't My Thing, but they weren't tasteless. So it seemed nicely executed. Though my technical side wonders if it might not be better in Twine.

I'd like to see a post-comp release that tracks or clues the endings. I have a feeling I missed something, and while I Got It overall, it feels like the author may've had more they wanted to pack in. But it more than does the job as a short EctoComp piece.

I always enjoy seeing more Adventuron games, because it's a good new system, and the Adventuron community is serious about producing creative games with neat graphics. The River of Blood is no exception. It's well-suited for a 4-hour competition and well planned out, well beyond being able to type "U" for upstream and "D" for downstream.

You are dead and traveling through the afterlife, or something close to it, in a river of blood you can't escape. Items float by. You can go downstream to pick them up. There's also a Grim Reaper who approaches periodically--mostly for dramatic effect. It sometimes randomly killed me, but I was able to undo it.

If you do things in time, you find who you are. But if not, you die for-real. The time limit seems fair. There's one neat clue that changes slowly as time goes by. The first time, I missed a clue I should have seen. And when I won a second time, I realized I hadn't seen everything. Examining objects can provide even more clues as to who you are--though some must be examined after doing things.

I really like the retro feel of this game--the low-res graphics are quite effective, and detailed pictures would feel like overkill--and the red/white/black motif feels quite nice and economical, too. The sound also feels comfortable and old-school. It's quickly replayable so you can see everything and made up of low-pressure Halloween thrills.

It took a while to update Java so that it would run Wabewalker, and it was time well spent. (Note: download Java 17--you may wish to uninstall your curremt Java version first, too.) It’s a game that’s meant to be confusing at first, I think, but that's not just for its own sake, and certainly not due to the custom parser, which I found worked well. Finding a clue what to do (beyond "explore and take stuff") is a great introduction, and it’s quite possible you’ll solve a puzzle by accident and then realize what’s going on. And that all feels fair.

The oversimplified plot: keep getting killed, sending you to another person’s life, until you organize things right. You become three people total, in three different worlds. If you’re not careful, you get killed for good. At one point, I was quite legitimately worried there was an endless loop, and I very much felt the tension when I was trapped between two worlds, unable to open the third, because I’d forgotten about a door and instead looked for something else that changed game states. That something else was behind the door–I hadn’t taken careful enough notes. If this sounds vague, I want to keep it that way, to avoid spoilers.

Because this game has ambition. It forces you to say “Huh?! What?” and banks on you being able to sort that out. What are the panels with three lights for? How do they work? How do you change lights? And so forth. There’s a certain frustration when you’ve set more lights than you need to open something, then fewer, and you wonder what the heck you have to do. Because there are only so many possibilities, though there seem to be far more when you start.

After I figured what the puzzles were about, the rest seemed like scratchwork, and, well, it wasn’t. There were other moments I hoped I wouldn’t be getting killed like before. I thought I calculated it. But I was still scared. I’d spent all this time scratching out figures to possess three people’s consciousnesses properly, not really knowing who they were, and it had better pay off!

Other than these three people, though, there aren’t many you deal with. Someone invites you in to hypnotize you, for a short segue that lets you see beyond one area where you get killed. This confused me a bit since my host said “No, that worked wrong,” and I still got a scroll. But given I was a bit careless about the narrative, I found it trippy that somehow A might’ve killed B might’ve killed C might’ve killed A. One of them killed the other, though. There’s also a phone call over a landline, which I found amusing, because it plays on a few text adventure tropes. It wasn’t hilarous, because that didn’t fit the game’s tone, but it was a well-paced joke.

So overall, I was pleased. What could’ve been busy work felt like a legitimate adventure. I can’t rigorously decide how true to Buddhism it is, but I do like how things work–there are so many orders to solve the puzzle in, and you may loop around a while before getting it, and quite possibly it’s more rewarding if you loop around more.

As for issues? The end cheesed me off a bit once I knew what to do. All those similar commands to type felt anticlimactic, and between bad memories of Ultima IV shrines (meditating three times in a row, I would go do something trivial and notice my response time had timed out–plus, these games have two mantras in common) and being unable to use an up-arrow, I was ready to get on with things and not particularly close to inner peace. In short, the ending puzzles were what I feared the beginning would be. In fact, one item really seemed to cue that. I saw and thought “welp, I hope they’re not instructions for later.” This all contrasts with how solid the parser is in general and how economical the “open the locked door” puzzles are and how they weave together. So be prepared for a grind at the end, but it shouldn’t outweigh the rest of the game.

The custom parser overall worked very well, though I wish H (hints) would mention the MEMORY command. The author may have updated it by now--I suspect it is an oversight, since they did the hard work of tracking everything you have learned with MEMORY.