Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You actually didn't kill too many grues in the Zork games. Maybe none. You just shone a light on them, and they scattered. Here, you are a hungry grue, tracking down adventurers before you starve. There's no standard map to this game. You need to use your senses. It's a timed game, as you starve if you wait too long, both overall and at the final conflict. But there is also nothing wild to do, or any intricate puzzle.

Sight is not one of them, of course. You start with your eyes closed, in your layer, and if you open your eyes, you lose your other senses: taste, feel, smell and hearing. All four of these are used as you stumble through caverns. There's some trial and error here, but the main thing is, if you use certain commands twice, the adventurer is alerted to your presence. They may flee or outright kill you.

It's a sparsely described game, with a tense if quick hunt. At the end, you corner the adventure, and this is where I hit a wall. Some deaths were expected--you didn't prep yourself enough, or you used the same sense twice. But the final one, I just assumed you used one verb first, and I kept trying to find ways to make it effective. (There is a preparatory verb. It makes sense.) I didn't think of skipping over a certain step. There's some cluing here, as the game asks you if you want to, before the adventurer kills you. If you manage to get to the point, though, you have a meal!

Grue is clearly well beyond Zork: a Troll's-Eye View in terms of realism and description and character development. It's fairly quick to go through. I suspect it slid down the rankings due to the guess-the-standard-verb frustration at the end, as well as some other things which seemed like beginner mistakes. However, I recognized the author's name from some Apple II programming groups, so he is no beginning programmer, and he was probably just blindesided by stuff he could fix easily once he knew about it. Inform can just be tricky that way. It's a good idea and worth playing, and it's quite surprising someone didn't do it sooner. It feels like it has some holes that could be fixed pretty quickly. But all the same, I'm very glad it's there. There are a lot of Zork tributes that rely on canon knowledge or are just another treasure hunt, and this is genuinely different.

Aisle clones have been done before, of course. I did one I'm glad I did, but I'm not going to show it to anyone as an example of my brilliance. They help the programmer explore, and they're perfect for game jams like ShuffleComp. Especially if the author draws 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover by Paul Simon.

In 50SL, you're in Tom's Diner (I got that reference!) with your lover, Sam. Soon to be your ex-lover. But what is the best way to leave?

The standard Inform commands fall quickly at first. Some two-word commands work, but all have a parallel one-word command. For instance, LOOK and X SAM do the same thing. Meta-commands work, too, in line with the "poke technically at stuff because this is a game jam" ethos. I had things fall in bunches as I realized what to do. One command forced me to hold down the space bar to see a few subsequent related commands.

This all was amusing until I realized that I had no way to track what I did. Also, the text was overwhelming after a bit. The jokes, for the most part, landed. And, also, I really enjoyed the reject responses if, say, you typed SCORE twice. They're much shorter and snappier. Brevity can be the soul of wit.

That said some of the verbs have to do with love or being dumped, and some are Zorkian in-jokes, and the final one may be a meta-command. I had to use a text dump to see the last few.

50SL does have a few rough edges, with one particular synonym missed as they hacked the parser. (Spoiler - click to show)Z is not a synonym for WAIT. But by and large, it hits the main commands. And I do enjoy the rejections for stuff I forgot I did. It's just that you'll probably leave the hard verbs for last, and that gets frustrating, to be so close. You don't really have any clues--perhaps alphabetical listing of what you got, with ?'s for what remains, would be useful. One word in particular ending in Y irked me, and there was another noun from Zork.

Nonetheless 50SL was memorable enough for me to poke at it years later. I was amused to see I'd already disassembled it during the ShuffleComp judging period, but there were still puzzles involved. I submitted a guide to CASA so you don't have to jump through all the hoops I did, and you can enjoy this game before it potentially exasperates you. In this case it's better to check the hints too soon than too late. It's a neat idea, and you might as well use resources to be able to walk away appreciating it the most you can.

Neo Twiny Jam inspired quite a few entries where protagonists interacted with pets, or where you were an animal. It's not hard to see why--you weren't going to get suckered by detail. It's excusable to use one word instead of a full sentence to describe what you want to do. Oh, and you probably get automatic "cute points." Even without the appealing cover art.

Frog feels like it doesn't rely on said "cute points," which is very good. It quite simply follows the progress of a frog from egg to maturity. There is confusion, and there are roadbumps. The ending was very nice, and you may say "oh, I've seen this before," but for me, it works. There are forces beyond your control that decide whether or not you make it to adulthood.

There are worries about forced charm in an entry like this once we see the picture. If there was any, which I doubt, I am glad I am suckered by it. It was all quite clean and fun and a reminder to be decent to those who are a bit confused.

This was a nice first effort and a reminder not to worry if something you want to write is maybe too light or silly a subject to work. It's yet another Neo Twiny Jam entry that might be trying too hard if it went over 500 words, but it sticks the landing at its current size.

Reading this back in 2013, I felt this piece was a bit too rough or raw. But I couldn't put my finger on what I would do better. It feels too direct at some times, as if it doesn't give me room to breathe. Georgina feels like she is humblebragging to start out. Perhaps one may find her a cipher, or not likable enough, or whatever. But that may be part of the point. Targets of harassment are chosen because, well, they're putting themselves out there too much, or they're trying to hide from real judgment. They're acting too nice, or they're acting too brash. There's always something. So I think some melodrama can be the point, and whether or not we have a big or small win, there's always a worry that it's tripped up, or it's denigrated after the fact. And this is, indeed, not "all in our head." It's placed there by people who tell us we need to listen carefully to what they say, but all the same, their one offhand comment? Blowing off steam. As if you need to pay dues for basic human respect. That Georgina does not get it, both from clear louts and more sophisticated-seeming types, is the crux of Impostor Syndrome.

Because people can, indeed, be awful in many different ways. The place where Georgina feels the worst is a Ted-Talk style speech. There's a lot of anxiety. She aces the first slide, which has her name and experience. Everything else seems to be going okay, even as she remembers small things that went wrong with her process, nitpicks her boss found. Perhaps she should not even be here? Part of a minority quota? Ignoring, of course, the roadblocks that pop up for being a minority.

What strikes me about the dramatic moment is how crude and cruel it is, and how it is done by people surely nowhere near as smart as Georgina. She knows it's better not to look, and she knows it's not original, and she knows it's something she should be able to deflect, because it's been done before. She also knows it's aesthetically wrong. And we do, too, and it's not "freedom of speech" or anything like that, that people can do this with impunity. It's as if there's an unsaid voice saying "seen it before? You should deal with it. Not seen it before? Well, be lucky you haven't until now." (There's a parallel to "You never really listened to Trump" and "Trump lives rent-free in your head" taunts.)

Another thing that hit me--the same guys who micromanaged Georgina noting small things she did wrong (they probably let you know they don't suffer idiocy) do let the big stuff slip through at a talk she put effort into. It's a logical inconsistency and worse. I could picture them, after the presentation, say "Yeah, they were out of line, but you could respond better." Or suddenly forgetting talks they made about taking the initiative to build a positive culture, or whatever.

And Georgina has a chance to, near the end, to dare to get out of her lane and talk about non-technical stuff, but then she's worked so hard to focus and not waste people's time. This is the main choice in IS: you can skip it, or you can have a link-maze. If people are too critical of the aesthetics of a Twine link-maze, they are missing the big picture, but it is a relatively weak point. (I saved, but I still guessed the top five words most likely to do something, then looked at the source. It feels like link-mazes could have a way to be navigable, and I've seen Twine tricks where URLs turn into plain text, which I like a lot. Maybe that could happen here, blocking out similar words. But I sense I am turning into the same people who micromanaged Georgina.)

There are other things, too, placing harassment side-by-side with coworkers flat-out ignoring Georgina or uninviting her from important meetings and projects. Again, it's easy to imagine a voice saying "Oh, so you're mad when they bug you and mad when they don't. You seem to need things just so, don't you?" This is something I don't think I saw on the first reading, but it seems more natural now, and we really need more ways to bounce back quickly.

Working through IS I was reminded of a teacher or two who put me on the spot more than they should have. I think of how I was told others had it worse, just as Georgina was, and yet how I should be impressed by that teacher being so uncompromising! I'm older than they are now and have more access to information, so I can work through the past and know people who remind me of people like that are bad news. But they do seem to gain power.

Still, fight-back strategies are way more at our fingertips in 2023 and 2013. YouTube videos have discussions where even the most generic or overwrought descriptions of mistreatment bring people together. The techniques, short- and long-term, have lagged behind trolling techniques, because the second are much easier to develop. Looking back I'd be more interested in the small moments and victories and such--they are there in IS but intentionally muted.

The author said that this was intended to make people think, and I think it did, but it led me the wrong way at first. That's not malicious like the antagonists in the story leading Georgina the wrong way. But it is enough to say it is an opportunity missed. This should in no way preclude the author to keep fighting and tell stories that need to be told. It's been ten years. Sadly, there will have been more data to help hone said stories. But if we say IS is a bit too direct and the author has the talent to write something more powerful, one thing we can't credibly say any more is that the plot, or the narrator's feeling, are too exaggerated. It's not perfect, but it's very good it's there, as it addresses issues well beyond standard angst.

We've all read a story about someone who was told how they were going to die, took steps to avoid it, and had it happen anyway. Or that someone they loved would die a certain way. Years ago Ryan North built on this to say, what if there was a machine that could tell anyone how they were going to die? It spawned a short-story collection I read and enjoyed. One I didn't find out about until I played Machine of Death. I don't remember any of the stories, but I remember MoD, maybe mostly because it was part of IFComp, and so naturally I read what others had to say about it, and I remembered details.

But I think MoD's interactivity allows us to remember certain things. Anyone who got a card from the machine would wonder about all the details and start what-iffing. It must feel awful to know the walls are closing in, and you aren't even near. So should you? Well, in MoD, you're hanging out near a machine, wondering just that. Or maybe you'll just engage in Deathspotting, a wonderfully evocative word MoD uses that I don't think I need to define. You even chat with someone who got a card. It all seems impossible, even in this enlightened day and age where we can evaluate risk factors for a certain sort of cancer or whatever. But the moral and emotional import is pretty clear. We'd change what we do and who we are. It would be on our mind. Knowledge would not bring power.

So yeah there's a way to sneak out of the mall and say "nope nope nope." You can still learn a lot in the process. You can waste your remaining $5 at a fast food restaurant that gives discounts to people with certain death cards. There's a story of a famous person who did well by embracing his cause of death and another who lied about theirs.

But what if you choose a card? Well, then, there are three scenarios. I don't want to spoil them, because they're quite different and worth seeing, and with something like your own cause of death, it's a surprise. The game lets you restart from the beginning of the death scenario, or you can go back to the machine, where you can loop to the next choice. It doesn't directly allow undos, which might feel artificial given the theme, but this feels about right, since we all do trace through the past and think "could I have done better" and sometimes even hope for verification we did as well as we seemed to.

Suffice it to say one is pedestrian, one is absurd, and one contains a corporate slogan of sorts that can mean anything. This variety allows MoD to poke at certain tropes or obvious considerations without beating on them too much. For instance, if you're in a normally life-threatening situation, you can be risky because, well, you can't die THAT way.

I found the absurdist one to be the least effective, though it gave me the most laughs on the surface. There's some celebrity doppelganger stuff in there, which only goes so far, and because the cause of death is so specific, you really do try to do everything you can to avoid it, which weirds some people out. But hey, it wouldn't be weird if they KNEW. Still, there are ways out.

The corporate slogan is a bit different--you have a boss at work who knows their cause of death, and they let you know "I know my cause of death and I'm not letting it stop me! So I don't want to hear any whining." It's like "there's no I in team," but far, far worse for underlings. One of the main dramas here is getting to work on time. The bad end is lampshaded quite effectively, but the good ending blindsided me a bit and yet still made sense. The author, of course, wrote a lot of stuff to just make people laugh, but I appreciated the twist here, after skewering awful corporate types, to take some sting out of them abusing a catch phrase.

The pedestrian scenario makes a few things obvious, but the thing is--you know you aren't going to die violently! At least you're pretty sure. So everything's okay, right? But then you have a chance to look at someone else's death card. There are some implications there of what you might have to do. But one neat bit is that if you think you can do or avoid something because you're invincible, you only sort of get away with it. You aren't told what state of mind you'll die in, and that's something you have control over, for better or worse, with certain drastic actions.

The author is good at stringing juvenile jokes together without being cruel, and here he's a bit more profound than in In a Manor of Speaking. I can't say which entry is better, but I appreciate them both a lot, and it's neat to see the author have two drastically different successes from one IFComp to the next. MoD contains a lot of deep thoughts and worries under the jokes. It'd be ideal if we didn't need that to explore serious matters, but we often do. Replaying MoD almost ten years after its original release, I felt relief I hadn't found any stupid ways to die. I remembered the ways I worried I might die, instilled by teachers or peers or whomever because I was too careless or conservative. But I do think MoD is one of those things that help you worry less about dying so that you can, you know, pack more life in. And the whole concept of the Machine of Death turns out to have been prescient--ten years ago, we knew that machines knew a lot about you, but with political campaigns and so forth, knowledge of microtargeting and such has expanded to where it seems like machines can figure everything except how we're going to die. MoD lets us join in the fight against that sort of fatalism, or at least imagine how to, which would be worthy even if it weren't well-written.