Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I'm not big on alcohol, in general. I was fortunate to learn quickly that it doesn't work for me, and there were other ways to loosen inhibitions that did more harm than good. Yet as a kid I remember looking at all the drinks in bars and how people might mix them and it seemed like magic or artistry, perhaps even more fun than mixing a root beer float. The reality of bars was drearier, though. I still loved Cheers growing up, but that was much more for the characters. They all had their flaws, especially Sam, the bartender. But it was must-see TV, and my later (slight) experience in bars never came close to that. There were other TV bars, too, such as Phil's in Murphy Brown or McLaren's Pub in How I Met Your Mother or even (if for all the wrong reasons) Paddy's Pub. Again, they seemed more fun than the real thing. Also, there was the occasional illicit game of Tapper, or even Root Beer Tapper, at the arcade, with an amusingly violent end when you failed to schlep brews in time. Then later there were bars in RPG where you found information or new recruits or, perhaps, found experience-gaining fights. That seemed to cover it all. But T3 provides a new perspective: you're an employee who likes where they are, but you want to do better.

The production values for T3 are established early: the "wait, loading" graphic is a neat green snowflakey tesselation on a tan background. There's been a lot of thought put into the design, and it's not just about looking pretty. The whole experience is very smooth, and at the core, it is about mixing drinks, though there's a neat subplot as to why you want the money at your tavern job. And of course the title is very cool. It suggests some rough clientele who dig their knives into the table, just because.

So where does your bartending pay go? What are you saving for? Well, you've got a leaflet about joining an adventure academy, with a 300 coin fee for a course that starts in one week. This all feels a bit fourth-wall. In fact, the scenes at the beginning and end drive this home a bit too much for me, but on the other hand, that's probably my major complaint, and I'm not sure what I'd had the heart to cut out. Overall, T3 fell into the "I was just having fun and really paying attention, so I feel half bad for noticing this missing detail" camp. I recommend you do the same. I enjoyed many moments throughout the game, even ones the author probably did not angle for–for instance, I had a slow internet connection, and so the graphics of the various drink ingredients that appeared behind the bar popped up in amusing fashion. It almost gave the feeling the drinks were about to fall off the shelf, and I think it fit in well with the general lack of organization the author established was endemic to the tavern itself.

The mechanics are simple enough. You're the barmaid, and you mix drinks. Get them right, and you get tipped well. Miss, and you don't. You can decide whether to knock the tavern sign for luck (Roscoe, the owner, gives you a trivial fine) or to leave your tip box out, too. It might get stolen. I made sure to save before making the decision for the first few days, but I got absorbed enough that I forgot later, which is a good sign. (This almost bit me later, but the details are a spoiler.) You have a frenemy relationship with Brom, the cook, and Ez, who serves the food. Roscoe isn't very reliable, but it'd be boring if he was. People play stupid pranks on each other during slow times. Coffee isn't just for the customers.

I played on easy mode, so I was under no time pressure, and I assume the recipes were there for me to take my time with, so I did not miss out. It wasn't just easy mode that made T3 feel welcoming. I particularly enjoyed how certain syrups or fruits would be lumped together. Perhaps this is done behind the bar regularly, but in this case, I think the author nicely avoided clutter. You want it to be busy, but not too busy. The pull-outs for applying garnish were very charming, too, and I liked that I had to use some minimal reasoning to get some drinks working. For instance, there's only a specific section for citrus fruits, but if you're asked for oranges or lemons or limes, you just have to click there. So there's no need for additional futzing! You don't want everything done for you, but it's nice when a game trusts that you do, indeed, get it.

With all this, the first two days, with generic customers, were more than enough to help me adjust to the curve. I was ready for more challenge, and this came (one of those neat moments I don't want to spoil,) and it was pretty clear how this would fit very well into the timed/arcade version of the story. Then there were two special customers. Contrasting their goals with yours worked very well, I thought.

This special encounter helped me scrape by after just five days of the seven allotted. I tallied up my tips, and yes! I had just hit the mark! There were good-byes, and they felt appropriate, as I felt enough of a kinship with my coworkers. But once I'd moved on, I wanted to go back and mess up a bit to see how long things would last and whom else I could meet in those remaining two days, or even how my coworkers would react if I did not meet my goals.

It wasn't until the end of the story that I realized I hadn't used the cognac to mix anything, and I was never called on to use the paper umbrella! As a fan of The Jerk, this made me sad, but now I wonder if adding them willy-nilly might have gotten me bonus coins. The cognac felt like a sort of Chekhov's gun, along with the rattling tip box, and it's moments like this, where something you looked forward to didn't materialize and you still had fun, that make you realize what a smooth, enjoyable ride you had.

T3 established high standards quickly and gave my mind time to wander free. I've often thought of the good-citizen concept of IFComp entry, and sometimes it feels like "you didn't have anything profound to say, and you didn't pretend to! Yay, you!" In a way, yes, but in another way, this is something to enjoy and see things from a different perspective, and you don't need anything profound, and the game never taps its foot and expects you to find profound stuff. You know you don't need tense life-or-death situations to have revelations, or to remember something cool, or to say your own experiences are worth sharing. Plus it reminded me of those baffling bartender books I remembered seeing, and I never actually wanted to mix drinks, but I wondered what was in there. I did find trivia I might like to correct for a post-comp release, but in this case it would be an excuse to generate more deserved publicity. I think it's definitely one of the cheeriest and best-produced IFComp games, and it clearly doesn't rely on its production values only. It's a game about friendship and goals that doesn't get mushy. Part of me wants to try the arcade mode to challenge myself on replay, but the other part is worried I might miss a part of the story I meant to revisit.

Me and all caps don't get along so good all the time. Well, almost none of the time, to be honest, if I'm not the one typing 'em. And when an author puts their name in ALL CAPS, that's a bold move that could BACKFIRE! The author furthermore doubles down with a zombie game. Many of you may not remember IFComp back in 2010, but there were a lot of zombies in the entries back then. It was a weird coincidence, but then, each year there's sort of bound to be one of them. I'll cut the birthday paradox-related calculations here. And I was sort of tentative looking at this game. The introduction seemed like it was going for humor, which seemed odd for a zombie game, and I wasn't sure what to expect. Bluntly, I wasn't optimistic.

As it turns out, I played AH three times before even starting on a review for the authors' forum, and it turned out to be one of those gapper entries I play before more serious IFComp stuff (Anything too complex and I, uh, turn into a zombie and procrastinate.) It's really not a text adventure, and it may not be a great fit for IFComp, but it gives great fun for relatively little investment. It's more a real-time resource game where you can, if you want, just plug things in and let them run. It takes twenty minutes, under the half-hour it says it does in IFComp, and it's almost all big-picture stuff. You are in charge of a fortress the zombies will eventually break through, but until then, you can maybe build tunnels are research a cure for the zombie infestation or try to kill the zombies. I tried killing them. It failed.

There was a lot to digest at first. You assign people to jobs: Farmers, Guards, Builders, Researchers, Hunters, Scavengers. You can recruit more people with hunters and scavengers, or you can go out and kill zombies. Farming is necessary for food, and there's also a morale component. It's pretty relaxing, for a zombie apocalypse, with the main problem being clicking the pluses and minuses to switch people from one task to another. At the end, you are the star of a newspaper article, for better or worse, and you get a notebook log of your time in the bunker. The first time I read this, a few things at the start of the story clicked. I suppose I wasn't quite ready for the humor the author threw at me, so I'm glad I backtracked. Things made more sense the second time through, and I knew what to expect. I realized I was supposed to be laughing a bit more than I did

I confess I went in for easy mode (there are normal and hard,) but the in-game help (a note on the wall) points out that you can actually lose survivors who find your compound because, you know, it's risky hunting out there at the higher levels! It also contains mechanics for roughly how often hunters find supplies, and so forth. And I simply watched as the progress bars filled up–they start once you assign people to groups. Each one can have up to four tasks, and when they're filled, improvements happen. For instance, farmers can either create food or increase production. Research can increase maximum food production. So it's multi-layered. Recent events are presented in a sort of ticker-tape display, where you allocate resources but above the game-hint and general ground observation parts.

I never had food or happiness bottom out, but I had survivors not join because I seemed low on food. Now I've played through a few times, I wonder if I missed a funny ending based on losing all my survivors or food. At least on easy mode, it's not hard to win. I indeed got the cure the first time, and I escaped with 30 of my 50 companions on the second, trying to build a tunnel. Trying to shoot down the zombie hordes by building up crazy firepower failed. As I played through I also realized some allocations were wasted on easy mode (e.g. the radio tower, since I wasn't losing survivors) and also that I could get away with skimping on food or happiness, and I saw ways to help keep my troops lean and mean. I bet there are more.

Horde! definitely falls on the game side of the game/story continuum, and I'm glad it did. It's good enough that the author has earned the right for sure to present his name in all caps. It fits in well with the unsubtle, confident humor. I could see myself replaying on medium or hard. I like how I was able to get up and walk away for a few minutes, or switch tabs. Maybe zombie apocalypse simulators shouldn't be so stress-free, but I enjoyed being able to poke around, and it certainly put me in a more welcoming mood for the more serious zombie entries that might be ahead. It's legitimately replayable, too. So, Mr. CRAIG RUDELL, well done. Oops. WELL DONE.

In Witchfinders, you play as a potentially suspected witch who wants to help people with their problems back in 1800: sick cattle, a fever, etc. You have a witch score that determines how suspicious you seem, and when it gets to a certain point, you're in for it. I got to the best ending with maximum points after a couple tries, as the game's well-clued for success, and as you'd suspect, generally being hush-hush helps you a lot. The strongest part to me was having to keep your methods hush-hush, even if they didn't seem particularly magical. It's pretty clear they're actually helping people overall (there's a mix of common sense and alchemy,) but you can't say it, so louder, more powerful people prevail. So everything works, logically. And I gained a favorable impression of this work, but it's one I feel has untapped upside. So I have criticisms.

Because it never really soars, and a big reason may be an uneven translation. There's an attempt at Scottish dialogue, which works to my limited ear, but then there's a more contemporary narrative voice which pervades the dialogue, so the sense of place is disrupted. For instance, at game's end, you're asked "I guess we hang out for a while here?" which was not something said before 1950. There also seem to be several translation errors–they're mistakes a native speaker wouldn't make, though it's pretty clear what the author meant to say. The inclusion of points of out 100 also feels a bit off-key. It's good to know how far along you are, but on the other hand, in a relatively slice-of-life game with no ultimate goal, a point total seems incongruous. But then there are bulletins posted that change: they describe cruelty and such, suggesting the populace does not turn a blind eye to cruelty in general, only to witches they find guilty. This shows understanding of, well, witch hunts beyond the literal boring stuff.

So much seems on-the-nosee, too. For instance, the introduction at the start. So the writer knows what they are doing, but perhaps they concentrated too much on nailing basics that didn't need to be nailed down fully. And the result is that some events that should have emotional impact don't. Nevertheless, the option of playing to sneak around or get caught provides clear replayability, and I was interested enough to. The translation is adequate, and I know translation work is very hard, even without the attempted Scottish dialogue. But with more rigorous translation, Witchfinders could gain the full flow a story like this needs. As-is, I was interested, and I got through, and there's good craftsmanship. It finished respectably, as I expected. But many things prevented full emotional interest.

LC is way too big for two-hour IFComp's judging frame, but it still belonged there. It's a work of pure imagination and love, and its dreamworld is as interesting as people hope they are when they tell you about the dream they had last night. The map is big, at 17x17, not including the north pole. There's a Prime Meridian which sort of lets you get your bearing. I cursed it occasionally for being so big. The main takeaway is that I knew mapping would be a chore, and I knew ADRIFT allowed UNDO to make things easier, but I was involved enough not to want to. My last act for the two-hour judging period was naming an isle that had no name yet. I cursed myself for not properly curating my own list of weird names from my notes. It was the perfect chance to pick off something I always wanted to use but that couldn't fit into a creative work.

And that's a side effect of LC's dream-world! There are a lot of interesting parts, but so many reminded me of my own weird dreams, waking or sleeping, that I got distracted. Also, it is an investment to get started! You do have to read the instructions to have an idea what to do without extensive trial and error. They're quite good. You may be a bit lost without them, because there's so much you have to decide at once. And the character selection is amusing, well beyond basic dice-rolling stuff. Before entering the dreamworld, you're asked how you fell asleep, what odd item you're carrying, and what class/special talent you have. I restarted after 20 minutes once I had some data on what stats seemed to matter. And the procedural text changed. Bill Clinton, my old bartender, was replaced with Halle Berry. The old map is, well, like a forgotten dream now. I tried to wrap my head around the different currencies. There are several. But at some point it's just best to dive in.

Which is very rewarding. It took me a while to realize that death simply bumps you back to the center, and boy did I spend a lot of time avoiding death. The game has accomodations, though. The documentation, I mentioned. There's an automap, too, and while it's useful for getting started, once the map gets big, it starts to interfere with the text window on the left, so you have to close it. I wound up using Trizbort. I was able to annotate places with interesting or odd stuff. There's a certain sense of frustration combined with wonder as you know the odd place you stumbled on must be useful linked up with somewhere else, but you have no clue, yet.

It's a bit intimidating to guess what to do at first, but the game does put your actions for a particular location in all caps, so guess-the-verb is not a thing. A twist here is that you can perform one such action, but if you try to come back and perform it again, it may destabilize the dream world. Actions include fishing, finding diamonds, visiting shrines, or visiting markets. I had a bit of trouble at first making profit in the markets, because I needed to feed my crew while I was sailing, and I didn't realize that death was relatively harmless, because this was a dream world, after all.

So I sailed in search of, well, I wasn't sure. But that's part of the fun. There was definitely enough to keep me going, through weirdly named locations. I found Las Vegas. There is no shortage of silly humor in Lost Coastlines, and I think it's sort of needed, and it doesn't go overboard, and I'm pretty sure some is specific to the path you chose. Something like finding a friend in your dream, and if you talk to him, he will explain stuff you missed because you fell asleep in class (that's what I chose at the start, for when and where I fell asleep.) This helps break up some of the worries about chance encounters and pretty clearly indicates, yes, there's more fun stuff to look for.

It's not all arbitrary, and LC does a good job of balancing how you come in blank with general guidelines on how successful choices will be. You can't know what's good and what's not, although you're pretty sure, because when you have a choice of actions to perform, the game rates them impossible, difficult, or easy, also helpfully color-coded. I enjoyed looking ahead to when certain choices would no longer be impossible.

For instance, if you walk into a swungle on the first isle (a neat portmanteau, that, much better than jomp,) you can CUT the vegetation or TURN back, and you're told the odds of each succeeding. This isn't a high-risk choice, but as you sail farther, you hit impossible quests, ones you need to build yourself up for. The result of a bad encounter is that you can increase your worry, fury, madness or sadness. These are negative currencies, but you can also accumulate, for instance, knowledge. There are other currencies, and some, you can swap. This is a neat twist on trade routes. Others seem to offer--well, something else. For instance, you can't solve a certain mystery until you have fifty shards of knowledge, and that gets you an important (and cool) sounding special item. On the other hand, too much of any bad-mood stuff is pretty much a virtual death, and you're kicked back to the central port city where you started, which gives you sadness. I'm not fully sure how the moods interact, but I enjoyed having the negative stuff I had to balance, as well as the postiive. Too often in games you wind up getting too much gold and don't have much else to do, or you're worried about super-low hit points. Being stuck with negative stats adds a lot of color.

My fear of game death prevented me from exploring at first, even though I had a save game, and I eventually discovered a small base of merchant isles I could poke around. However, I got a bit frustrated in the Prime Meridian, where it seemed that the map got non-reciprocal. Which, given how big the map was, caused me to put Lost Coastlines aside for a bit. Granted, the Meridian should be weird, as it's marked as significant. I even found a hidden location there based on the nonreciprocal directions! But it took a lot out of me. The scrolling did help with mapping, though, as I wasn't pinned into a corner. But if you're forewarned, this probably won't be so bad.

I still don't really have a handle on Lost Coastlines after two hours. I understand the basic choices and where to stop off and what works, but I still haven't quite tried all options, and I didn't improve my character that much. I'm sad about this, yet hopeful. I suspect once I really nail down a trade route, or some way to keep moving between two locations that boost my stats, things
will get easier. In the meantime, thinking back to it feels like a dream state. One day I'll get the pieces of knowledge to unlock a quest! Or I'll figure a way to make a certain fight beatable. There's so much to do and no clear way to win, which is frustrating if you only have two hours to judge something. So I'll sit back and just remember the oddly-named places I visited, both those useful to my quest and not. I'll remember the thrill of finally mapping that weird central bit, of underpasses on my map (think: a square of islands, with only the kitty-corner ones connected diagonally) and the realizations I had when, oh, these two islands far apart link up!)

LC feels like one of those games you miss a lot but you worry it won't live up to the hype when you get back to it. And I'm frustrated by that, because I did want to play it more. I've seen entries that forced me in to care about a social issue or something. Perhaps it was an issue I already cared about or didn't care about enough, and I felt obliged to go back to it. Whether or not I did, I felt like a bum. But here I'd like to explore the author's dreams and remember my own. I think it's the best ADRIFT game I've played, and it uses ADRIFT's features (the auto map) well enough to reel you in. It's a definite positive advertisement for the author's other work, and given its size, I can see why it took four years to make, and the author was right to follow their vision. I enjoy seeing theirs--but unfortunately, when I'm in the best mood for that, I generally take time and energy to push my own forward. So LC may lose out for my attention, but it was a great reminder to, literally, follow my dreams. The author followed his, and I enjoyed doing so, too. The breaks were mainly to remind me of stuff I'd thought or dreamt. It's definitely exhausting in a whole stretch, but part of me wishes I would, say, make thirty minutes for it per day to see out one big whole dream--and it feels sacrilegious and intrusive to try to disassemble it too soon, but on the other hand, I want to see all the neat stuff the author dropped in there! I think, at the very least, the next time I reconsider playing an old favorite RPG, I will give serious thought as to whether LC might be a more valuable use of my gaming time, because there is so much to explore.

The other option is to stumble on a community of people putting stuff together for a finished general guide, or to notice things you couldn't on your own. The author has expressed a desire to find this or cultivate this. I'd definitely stop by. One can and should dream.

AIMBK is a relatively short Texture entry that seems a bit too linear to take full advantage of the medium. Nonetheless, the dynamic parts of Texture that don't have you move the mouse around everywhere are effective. You, Sara, have a sister named Sofia. She's been distant her whole life, in and out, and it's not clear what's wrong. The usual, well-trod problem (alcoholism/drug use) isn't the cause, here. Or if it is, it isn't explicitly stated. Unsurprising, as this is a horror game.

So what has gotten her? It's never clear, and that's intentional and more than acceptable. We're left with some ambiguity as to how the supernatural monster chased Sofia, or why. But we're left with the portrait of a narrator who realize they haven't done enough for Sofia, and Sofia has done a lot for them: listening, etc. Sara's provided material comfort for her back, but she can't help her with what's really bothering Sofia. It also seems implied that the narrator doesn't fully realize how Sofia sacrificed mentally to help her. The title itself suggests a feeling of "I've done enough--do I HAVE to do more?"

At least, that's what I'm guessing. I confess I pulled the text from the source, the same as I did for To Persist. And I put things together. I think I enjoyed it more that way. Perhaps this entry would shine more in Twine–as it is, Texture breaks up the flow a lot, though I still got enough out of it. Things got bogged down when turning a page becomes a matter of learning to drag-and-drop from the right place, to the right place. Perhaps this is less of a problem to people more comfortable with Texture.

That said, it's a nice touch to have your answer to the text's question change to a further question when it hovers over the highlighted text it needs to, but the payoff is too little for a story you can't undo, which feels to me like a weakness of Texture. There are three choices at one end, along with a semi-obvious "dud ending" branch early on.

This seems a bit harsh, because clearly AIMBK is well above a "look what I can do, I did something" entry. The writing puts it well above that. There are no Great Evil Proclamations, and I found several interesting revelatory moments. A lot of the ambiguity works. But I don't know if the author used the right tool for the job, and perhaps if they had, I'd have been able to see the author's vision of Sofia's world and trials more cleanly.

So, a game in GrueScript! If Robin Johnson isn't in IFComp this year, it's good to see his engine makes an appearance, which is the next best thing. I've been curious about GrueScript for a while–sometimes it feels like it could capture everything I want out of a parser, except maybe for gag commands like XYZZY or SING or profanity to be coyly rejected. I dabbled in USE X ON Y, hoping to make guess-the-verb less of the puzzle, and I may go back to that. But I realize how efficient GrueScript can be!

LatM is a bit of an odd game. There's no real market, officially, and I was waiting for one to show up, but it never did. It's more about your dreams as a musician and how you go about finding them. It felt a bit surreal to me, which given my stuff, I can't complain about, but it took a while to realize surrealism was the intended effect. You just need to find things to rig so that you can escape from various situations, some of which feel very odd. For instance, you are locked in a bathroom, but you have enough tools to make a hole and get out by trial and error. In another place, it turns out you're just in a dream, and you have to find a way to destroy that dream. Orr you talk with an old man who may or may not be your future self before doing something odd and symbolic ... but it makes sense in retrospect.

Your ultimate goal is to make it to a concert, though there are other endings that provide failure. In one, you avoid the stage and open an envelope, and you decide not to go on with things. It feels like the author had some metaphysical recollections they need to include, but they didn't, and they're leaving a bit too much hidden. And unfortunately this seems due to unintentional omissions. There are a couple bugs where you search scenery X and an item appears in the room. But if you search X again, the item reappears, even if it's in your inventory. This is particularly odd with a wardrobe after you've worn your costume to go on stage, which probably isn't the dreamlike effect the author wanted.

There are two ends, one where you give up on your dreams and one where you don't. You have a choice whether to sing a pop song enough. It feels like something the author could've explored more, and on balance, a lot of what seem to be philosophical statements feel a bit overgeneral. Nevertheless, LatM felt complete, though quite possibly the scope of its ambition was cut short by the IFComp deadline. It was a good technical demonstration of what GrueScript can do in the hands of someone other than its creator. I hope we have more.

The first two games with the Perplexity engine, Kidney Kwest and Baby on Board, were ... well, a bit different from this. Those were quiet domestic affairs. And while taking your medication for kidney disease is important, the stakes are raised in Headlights. Here, you're out in the wilderness and injured. What are you doing here? And why?

You may be able to guess, especially with the clues the game gives. The detective work is more about just looking around and finding items. The world's a bit surreal. For instance, there's dark liquid dripping from the ceiling of a cave, and when you taste it, it's awful. Guessing the liquid provides a clue. There are also minor puzzles where you need to find a way to make light or gain strength. It feels like standard cartoon or comic book logic, which again is an effective indication you aren't in the real world. But for the most part, you look around and find things based on the room's description, and the verbs you have to guess are very standard.

So it felt technically smooth, much smoother than the previous games. They certainly had their charm, but you had to wait a long time for the next move. You can probably guess what has happened to the mangled deer. Everything's pretty tidy. Though I'm still not convinced that, as-is, the Perplexity engine has any special advantages over a standard Inform parser. I like the drop-down box that appears to fill in a command, e.g at one point, you may try to PUSH BOULDER, which fails, and once you think you can, you can autofill after typing P. That's not related to syntax parsing, and I'm still not big on the debug messages that correct your grammar if you type "PUSH BOULDER" instead of PUSH THE BOULDER. But the tutorial was neat and helpful and the engine appeared faster than I remembered from Kidney Kwest.

The writer does have a good concept of design, but unfortunately the dream world introduces a lot of puzzling for puzzling's sake. If you know the conventions, there's not much to worry about, but the problem is, without much to worry about, the big reveal doesn't have a lot of oomph. It feels like implementing Perplexity for text adventures has overall been positive, and it resulted in a clean, sensible game, but I can't help the chat-style interface worked better in Thanatophobia, and the creativity of both authors (Jordan White and Eric Zinda) would be better served using something that's already there. So far I even think all three of the games would look great in Adventuron (sadly absent from this year's comp.) But it's obvious that progress is being made with Perplexity as a text adventure platform

(Trivia: with how I scheduled embargoed reviews, the original ETA was December 24, or 6 PM December 23 Central. I got behind, and not having this super-close to Christmas was a reason I considered shifting the chunk of reviews before it to after my review of the #1 entry. But then I figured, since it'd drop on December 29th, it'd be a sort of Last Christmas Present in its own way.)

LCP breaks a cardinal rule of parser games right away, but it does so for the right reasons. Which rule? The one about not forcing the player to examine more than once or use weird verbs or prepositions to search through something more than once. And why? Because you are a kid, excited to get presents, and you will probably look through things a bit carelessly and miss them the first time. (Note: I had trouble the first time figuring this, but then I got what the author was trying to do. This may be worth putting in the hints more directly, but I'm not sure how without spoiling it. Also, I may've missed clues. So technical purists may be upset, but on balance, I think it works well emotionally.)

And I'm not just saying this because games about Christmas presents are hard to hate, even if badly implemented, because who can give a thumbs-down to generosity and togetherness? LCP is well planned out on top of that. It's based on a real-life scavenger hunt which I also assume left all involved quite happy. Its Harry Potter-themed hunt for clues reminded me I disliked Harry Potter even before hearing JK Rowling's hot takes on certain issues. But it also reminded me the good parts of enjoying a story still endure, and of watching a cartoon I liked as a kid and recognizing its shortcomings but realizing they only mattered marginally. Maybe the main character in this story no longer enjoys Harry Potter, and that shouldn't affect their memories, or a player's enjoyment of LCP. It did not for me. It reminded me of things I grew too old for, and how I felt embarrassed at the time and don't any more.

LCP is a scavenger hunt, in a nice big house that isn't too big for a game, and I wound up wondering what the gift was eagerly enough, even though I've long since stopped caring about big gifts. I'm happier with a strategic Black Friday or December 26th bargain purchase, while still hating to see the horridness that is people fighting to be first in line to buy their own. And, yes, the final present is something I don't want to spoil, but it's neat to have that anticipation of what it might be. It's not anything terribly exotic, but it's something I couldn't have gotten as a kid, and that sort of filled a hole, that I was able to share in getting a gift. The end, where you're about to find what your gift is has some semi-obvious foreshadowing that is still exciting for the character, and I felt that through playing, too.

I also liked how the clues popped up. There are two kinds. One, you can ask parents for help--I was amused how this mirrored A Walk Around the Neighborhood, and I wish more games would do this, because you feel less like you are begging for hints. You can feel both worried you are disturbing your family and yet at the same time you want to show them you can figure things out! You also have to find four snitches (side note: I loathe Quidditch and JK Rowling's depictions of sports announcements in her books. It felt nothing like any experiences of sports fandom I know. There are better journalists and bloggers out there. None of this mattered while playing LCP. This may seem like a "oh don't let this bother you, I'm just saying" note, but I was impressed how LCP got me to like things I really should not have, or at least feel kinship with people who liked stuff I didn't) which, together, build a message. I was able to figure what it said after getting two, but I felt sort of guilty to the characters in the story if I'd have just gone and tried things based on what the message was. The puzzles aren't super tricky but don't need to be, and anyway, your family is there to give hints, which is clearly a lot more fun and immersive than poking at a hint menu.

There's a map, too, and sadly that's probably the thorniest of the implementations. Unfolding the flaps and folding them are probably great fun for the character, but for someone using a parser, there's a lot of disambiguation and such, so that's one part of the fun that didn't translate. The map was a pretty big part of the game, so sadly it dented my enjoyment some--but I think something as nice as LCP deserves a mulligan, even if it weren't the author's first game. This feels like a neat post-comp project, if the author is interested.

LCP took what the writer knew and did it very well. And it wasn't just something that's common experience but a unique experience that wasn't too private. I can imagine the main character, and the person the character was based on, maybe not liking Harry Potter any more but still having good memories of that Christmas. It's the sort of entry that should appeal to everyone. If you didn't get around to it during the comp, maybe try it during the holiday season, along with Garry Francis's Santa's Trainee Elf, which I always meant to get to. I'm more motivated now. There are other different Christmas-themed games, too. They may get more stars on IFDB, and they may deserve it. But I'm a bit surprised I've seen nothing like this yet, a more classical Christmas treasure hunt, and I'm glad LCP filled that void.

I knew this was going to be a horror story when I started, which isn't my thing, so I was pleasantly surprised by the first bit: you have a choice to applaud or not. The lecturer notices whether or not you do. This sort of thing invariably charms me, exposing people's passive-aggressions and leaving you helpless without melodrama, and it bought a lot of good will going forward. Because The Pool does feel a bit chaotic. Part of that is the author's intent–aquatic monsters have been created at a biological research institute, and you will want to figure out why. Oh, and survive, too. It becomes pretty clear that something has gone wrong with the experiment, but it also becomes clear that your definition of "wrong" may be others' of "right." The Pool is also a bit low on polish at the micro level, but I'm impressed with the branches where you can get yourself killed.

I managed to escape, and I felt a genuine relief beyond the trivial snark of "ha ha ha I can move on to the next entry, and that's good, because I'm behind schedule for reviewing everything in IFComp anyway." I'd reached a sort of operational base for my explorations into other branches, and I was interested in not only the ways I could get killed but what they meant. The instadeaths seemed a little less insta. So the organization is impressive. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes moving parts I didn't cop to in my first forays where I did stuff, undid, and looked around. My character felt like a bit of a cipher in the process, someone who wished they could do more, and even at the end where I eventually survived after a lot of trial and error, this didn't seem to be resolved.

This is okay if you're trying to make an AFGNCAAP, but here, you sort of wonder how someone so insignificant and malleable got a job at such a place. This is compounded slightly by going too far to the other extreme with, say, "Ask XXX who would like to attack first, but secretly hope XXX says yes." This is a bit on the nose, and it's not the only one. It does feel like a lot of dialogue could be cut down, and it would've given me endurance to look through even more branches to see the full backstory. Because I'd like to.

The Pool reminded me a lot of early Choose Your Own Adventures but was a heck of a lot darker and didn't have the totally random endings that sometimes got sprinkled in, the sort that seemed like a brilliant reversal when I was twelve but seem totally unrealistic now. There's still the sense of getting shot unexpectedly or dying other ways, and these do make sense the more you explore. So there's general creepiness and intrigue here, and it certainly reminded me of people I thought were my friends, but it turned out they weren't. (Don't worry! Nobody got killed there!)

Sometimes it feels the pace is too much, and the "help bad person X" choices are too scattershot, and it even seems a bit too bland, until you realize something genuinely disturbing is happening in the background, or you get shot, calling the integrity of another character into play. This more than saves The Pool as a solid work to me, and though I recognize it's not perfect, I legitimately enjoyed it, and if parts left me confused, there were bits I was glad to patch up and realized I'd just missed.

This is the author's third effort with a custom parser, and if you've played the previous two, you probably have a feel for what it is. The parser is very old-school and attempts to recapture the good bits and cut out the most useless bits. It pretty clearly succeeds. And with each game, Older Timer's work has made technical and creative strides.

But I also saw the potential to hit a wall. It's one I fear I have, too, for what I write, but in a different way. We write about different things. But it's OUR different thing, and we care about it, and we're willing to take a risk that people say "yeah, yeah, I get it" and move on. And we don't try for a huge emotional effect. And I see those sorts of similarities which could be comfortable for those in the know, and a formula that works for enjoyment for the people who like this sort of thing, but then that comfort formula will eventually run out. That time may be a long way away, but it's still there, and it certainly lurks in the back of my mind. However, being able to enjoy efforts like this consistently reminds me that, yes, there are ideas ahead, ones I should work on, even if they pull from previous works, or you realize you've seen that general twist before.

You start off getting a letter from one Ezekiel Throgmeister, who has left you to do your own thing–and if you do it well enough, you'll gain his approval and see many neat things. The ultimate goal is to find a bunch of reagents to make an alchemical spell that, well, completes his experiment. So you know you're getting an adventure game with this all, and if this is not your thing, that's okay. It is mine.

The most entertaining part of the game is a device that renews items. There aren't very many to renew, because even though The Alchemist is long, it doesn't flood you with items. But it's useful in some fun and unusual ways. Alchemy almost feels second to restoring a document or being able to refill a weightlessness or strength elixir endlessly, but then again, if alchemists exists, this is the sort of thing they would ultimately develop. And it's handy in-game, as if you make a mistake with where to use one of your elixirs, you get a small but not insurmountable penalty.

Another focal point of The Alchemist is a mirror that you walk through to visit new weird areas–fantasy staples such as a chapel. You find something new to do there, then move on. It's hard to hate on mirrors that transport you somewhere else, but having this magic contrast with seven-digit codes found on documents laying about didn't fully sit well with me. I wound up more with the feeling of accomplishment I got when I got a microwave or VCR working instead of "hey, I'm exploring a cool fantasy world." Especially since the game has you PRESS 1111111 and then PRESS ENTER–making the magic mirror feel more mechanical and less magical. There are some adherences to old- school parser that don't quite work for me. It's big and involving enough that this sort of busy work drains me a bit. Another nuisance was TAKE ALL/EVERYTHING FROM X, when a one-word verb like, say, CULL would be more convenient. But these are the sorts of things the author sanded down over time.

Sometimes The Alchemist feels a bit color-by-numbers, if you're an experienced player. And if you're not, it won't be for you. But it's fun for all that, and the author has craft. There are no great social insights to be had. It has a relatively low ceiling but also a high floor. It seems that, for non-parser players, just sitting down and going through the walkthrough could help someone familiarize themselves with how parsers work, both strengths and weaknesses. It seems universal but at other times a bit generic, with the various mirror codes. It clearly fell more on the "fun to play" side for me, though. And efforts like this probably will for a while.