Reviews by Andrew Schultz

This is a short story that takes an idiom and turns it on its head effectively. That idiom is "may I have your name," except, well, it’s literal in this case. It’s hard not to feel a bit defensive about all this. You get some interesting deflecting responses. You shouldn’t have to say them.

I don’t think there's any way to do as the fairy asks. But it’s a really neat look at invasive, unwelcome questions and having one’s personal space breached in a way that doesn’t make me need to go wash my hands after.

They way it ended for me, I wondered if the fairy ever had any intentions of taking your name, or it just wanted to be annoying, like a low-key catcall. Maybe it had no power to do anything.

It’s an interesting clever twist on chance encounters where someone was rude to you for no reason at all and you are left wondering "what did I do" and wondering why you feel just a bit icky even if you can't put your finger on what the random passer-by did to annoy you.

"Please don't take this the wrong way" can be said at least two ways: from a position of power, or not. It can act as a pre-emptive apology all polite listeners had better accept and, thus, let the speaker rattle on for longer than they really should. This sort of conversation is often laced with "no offense, but you know what your problem is?" or "I know I can be harsh sometimes, but people need to wake up and hear the TRUTH!" and other such gems. Or it can be legitimately confused, realizing you see something a certain way and don't want to look down on those who don't, and they don't even have to come over to your view.

The speaker in this interactive essay/poem is decidedly in the "not" category. They've probably heard the phrase a lot from more powerful and confident people, both those who want to help them, and those who don't. They have a pretty clear idea of what they want to say, but all the same, people do seem to take it the wrong way, or they offer pity or other things that don't help. Or they put more stock in certain actions than they should.

One of the key phrases revealed on clicking is "I just want people to listen sometimes." And this struck me: everyone wants someone to listen sometimes. For many non-autistic people, they know how to increase that sometimes until acquaintances find it hard to pull away, whether at the start of a conversation or after thirty minutes of yacking. Whil I can't speak for anyone autistic, they know they probably aren't good at it, and they see the facts, and that's all that needs to be said. But that makes people more squeamish than some narcissistic fool's endless blather about how they had to wait in line too long at the DMV, or something.

The essay itself has words or phrases you click, which let the user expound. If you're paying attention, you'll see roughly where it's going, that here is a person who just wants to be understood and really, clearly, does not deserve to have some "wise" adult pass off some rubbish like "to be understood, first you must seek to understand others" before, perhaps, saying they understand the speaker perfectly, and it ain't pretty.

I've met people who are able to laugh off self-destructive or self-impairing behaviors (a "happy drunk" is a relatively benign case here) and people who feel bad they can't fix things they want to. But there's also some unwritten rule many of us live by, in that if we see something wrong with ourselves or others, we should try and fix it. The narrator here has experienced do-gooders who followed that rule, in various degrees of good faith, and they don't help. Perhaps this can apply to those of us who are not very social but would like to be and fail, or even those who keep making the same programming mistakes over and over again. So I appreciate this work very much.

So I'm the sort of person predisposed to like this author's sense of humor, kicking well-worn tropes when they're down in a sophisticated playing-dumb sort of way, but I think this will have mass appeal. It has pretty much everything needed to make you happy you (sort of) wasted time. Each passage and choice is, you see, one letter long. The actual quest (as I see it) mirrors a well-known fantasy book, but you get there your own way. There are lots of ways to fail. Of course, there is the "sleep in bed and do nothing" possibility. One of them has you marrying a dragon and having a kid. This might not work with long drawn-out passages, but it does here.

There are also audio clues of the “best” choice. Sometimes it's pretty obvious. The right choice is contained in what the voice (the author's, which is a nice touch) says. Other times you have to remember some tropes. But it's non-intrusive, and I very much enjoyed the reactions, especially to one that promoted inclusivity nicely without being preachy.

I'm one of those people who always felt bad that I didn't enjoy 500-page fantasy novels as much s I should have, what with everything to track and the descriptions of scenery which quite frankly got repetitive and tedious after a bit. That's not a problem here, with just 500 words. On the one hand, it's an exercise in efficiency, but on the other hand, it was oh so wonderful for the author to have packed in as many jokes as they did. I was just happy I got things under 500 words, and I was relieved to get rid of some of the more flabby sentences. The author did me one better.

I'll likely enjoy said novels even less now, maybe because OWW (which may be an inappropriate acronym, yet it could fit into a passage or a choice!) puts things to a much higher standard. I hope more people see and enjoy this. The author's work is always good and funny and enjoyable to me but this, to me, is a spike up from his usual high standards.

This one, I thought I'd written a review for during the jam! It was one I connected with, but it felt almost silly to write, or to remember fears from high school. And it suggests some fears are still very real, if not especially crippling. I knew what I wanted to say. But I did not. At least, for a while. I wasn't sure how much to share. But on replay, I had even more. So here goes.

You see, I went to a horrible four(?)-week driver's ed school the summer before my senior year. For many kids, learning to drive was exciting. But I had quite a lot of my mother saying how expensive insurance was, and how teen drivers had better shape up because they are careless, and so forth. It was a bit of a shock to me that some people enjoyed taking Drivers' Ed. That includes kids who would lower their grade-point, even with the easy A, because of the boost from honors and advanced placement classes! One other thing about Drivers' Ed: it was at the fourth floor in my high school. I never went up there as a student. So it held some mystery when I finally went back on an open house night, after having sold my own car because public transport was good enough. It wasn't that exciting when I got there, of course. But it was a reminder of other things I'd built up and not looked into.

My first instructor apparently spent a lot of time in nightclubs, and he'd yack on endlessly about it, so as not to put people on edge, apparently. The (very faulty) reasoning being that if we were being deluged by the subject of how interesting and outgoing he was, we couldn't feel fear!

This confused me, since drinking occurred a lot at nightclubs. And drinking and driving was bad. Suffice it to say that I did not need the negative reinforcements from certain driver's ed movies, the newspaper clippings on the wall of very sweet and lovable kids who screwed up, assuring me that I had better not drink and drive. All blissfully unaware I'd never even been to a party with alcohol at that point!

How does it relate to the work? Well, TRH's background music--well, it reminded me of those horrible driver's ed movies that tell you not to screw up or you'll endanger your lives and others. It establishes fear, but a totally different one than perhaps the drivers' ed movies want you to feel. It's a fear of understanding too well how you might screw up and not having the confidence to avoid that. It's a fear based in how you maybe aren't acclimated to how cars have safety feature, and the rules of the road--well, how to be a safe driver has a lot of precautions, and if you're paying enough attention, you'll catch things. Or you'll wind up getting close to a mistake, but not really, and if you're conscientious, you'll realize why people do certain things.

At some point, though, being over-cautious is too much. And I never had anyone address that until my nightclub-visiting instructor said "YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY TOO SCARED TO GO ANYWHERE WITH A HIGHER SPEED LIMIT." Between them and my parents--ouch.

And the parents in this reminded me of, well, my own. They know how to nitpick. They never suggest the simple truth, which is that you learn things fairly quickly if thrown into the melting pot. And ... well, having a kid drive at night for their second lesson is a really, really bad choice. There's more to remember, with turning on lights. It's harder to look for a stop sign, or for people not wearing reflective clothing or whatever. There is so much to process, but the parents failed to keep it simple.

So I see, intended by the author or not, two parents that threw the kid in the deep end and, conscious or not, had something prepared for the kid's inevitable failure, or almost-failure. And the kid certainly beats themselves up. There is more fear than there needs to be and a shocking lack of empathy from the parents, who don't outright tell the kid they're a flake but jump on small mistakes.

Oh, that combined with [spoiler]the kid realizing they could have hit two pedestrians not paying attention[/spoiler]. I empathize with the narrator, for being pushed into fear that drains them, trusting adults to plan and do things correctly, but the adults did not.

This is all very negative. My story had a happy ending--I had a second driving instructor later who said "just go ahead. I trust you." And it worked. The second instructor actually smoked in the car, and it did not bother me. I reacted favorably to his lack of "exciting" nightclub stories tinged with belief he should be an even bigger man when out on the town than he was. (Note: the first instructor did shut up, but I felt guilty that I was so distractable, he couldn't share the stories he wanted. Also, he is on Twitter now, and one of his most recent pictures features an odometer going up to 100 MPH, which is well over all speed limits.) I don't drive much now, but I feel confident I recall the basics quickly. It's the opposite of fear--competence without excitement.

This is a bit long-winded, but it's my own driver's ed story, so different from the average "I AM GETTING MY CAR!" But I hope it shows more growth and overcoming fear and how TRH brought that home but also reminded me I had progressed past certain fears. In a nutshell, what is a joyful rite of passage for most teens is extremely stressful, for the narrator. And they, unlike most "normal" kids, are unable to put small mistakes behind them, likely due to adults who needed to flex how with-it they were and others weren't. That's sad and terrible, even before the story's climax.

On its own, this is just a choice between whom to call, without a lot of data You have a conversation, then hang up. But paired together with a predecessor, a penny drops. It becomes more than a small vignette but a true story.

The predecessor is a cookie-clicker sort of game called Literally WatchPaint Dry. It's not the first boredom simulator and won't be the last. But it's a relatively quick one. And it uses the cookie clicker engine to relate a story with all the paint you watch dry. A friend turns away from you based on who you are, but another takes place. The implication is that there are some people you can watch paint dry with, and some people who were maybe exciting at first, or you did more exciting things with, but they were unfulfilling.

Perhaps this back-reference bends the rules of NTJ slightly. But I think this entry in Neo Twiny Jam can stand on its own. Pair it with LWPD, and you have something very nice indeed. It requires a certain confidence to call a game LWPD or, indeed, to refer back to it. That confidence is not arrogance, here.

I confess I used a keystroke-sender to get through LWPD. There is nothing beyond the first day and a half (129600 seconds to be precise) and it subverts the whole pointles clicking genre with something neat and emotionally rewarding. You see the backstory behind the friend who wants to be with you and the one who doesn't. You realize perhaps you were calling the old friend out of habit or misplaced loyalty.

It reminded me of a friend who I thought was okay watching paint dry with me. Then I figured I got too boring for him. But then I thought of what his ideas of excitement were, and I was glad I was boring that way.

LttPR lives up to its credo--it allows you to take it or leave it, even if it is different from the other entries in the jam (it is very plain, itself, but refers to previous non-text-based games, in this case one made from a graphic engine for a game originally meant to be mindless) or not being very interactive. It may, in fact, not be exciting. This is not because the author has a lack of creativity. But there are many efforts about far more oppressive circumstances that get the point across and may seem shinier and more praiseworthy. Many are. But LttPR focuses more on personal rejection and coping with it without drama and, in doing so, it is saying it's okay with what it is. This isn't a backhanded compliment, but I always enjoy works that don't have to be exciting to be creative or thought-provoking, especially if they help me recall certain negative things in a more constructive light. LttPR did that.

If you worry Buck Rockford is too on-the-nose as a Western character name, fear not. This work is not fully in earnest. And Buck’s name works doubly for me. Why? Well, having lived in Chicago for a while, I know of a good-sized town about 90 miles west called ... Rockford! It is not a terribly romantic place to live, alas.

Buck Rockford Heads West (BRHW) is itself an effort written in Ink, where you, as Buck Rockford, have a choice of four professions to follow. Each is stereotypically Western, except for weird twists that happen once you start. In each profession, you may have a drastic life-or-death choice, except ... well, it only affects the story.

Each part of the story at first relies on standard Western tropes, and while Western tropes have been done and mocked enough to make me scream, this is different. There is no "howdy pardner" or long description of scenery. There is simply doing stuff wrong on purpose, which turns out to be way more interesting than doing it right. Here the enforced word count works well. Twists and turns are packed in nicely.

Eventually, Buck finds his destiny, which is sort of unexpected, but it makes sense given the surreal logic of the story. Strangely enough, I found it related to (Spoiler - click to show)Mr. Seguin's Goat, which I'd played a few weeks ago in ParserComp 2023, because of (Spoiler - click to show)the themes of having too much freedom not being so great. In fact, because of the nature of the story where one adventure does not help Buck on any of the others, we can either note that he is going around in circles with his four choices, or he does in fact find worse luck somewhere along the way. (It's possible there is a hidden ending for doing things the "right way." But BRHW doesn't feel like it wants to force to you. I played through several times to check.)

I was surprised how much I thought of it afterwards as more than just a bunch of clever jokes and misdirections. It reminded me of back when the World Wide Web was more volatile, and I thought I'd find a webpage where I'd stay longer than I did, or a community that should've worked, didn't. Some webpages seemed terribly avant-garde or clever, but they were just flashy, and once I heard the same old snark a few times, I moved on. Then on stumbling over a website from over a decade ago, it seemed old-hat, the "insightful" humor too cruel.

Similar things happen with art, of course--people loved Sasha Baron Cohen's Borat for different reasons. The parts that got the loudest laughs didn't seem to age well, and the odder parts, to me, showed profound insights. And Cohen himself keeps needing to try new characters or environs. Once his current alter-ego gets too popular, he needs to move on.

Neo Twiny Jam has its share of downright depressing works where someone is stuck. BRHW is about being stuck in its own way, but it has more a sense of melancholy, of searching for more. Perhaps not of discontent but of knowing you will kind of shrivel up and growing if you stay certain places too long. But it's told to you not by a self-help guru worth tens of millions of dollars, or even a teacher in high school who said you should be more interested in their subject than you were, because that's the way to a good job. But it's about looking into things you always meant to, a reminder of longing without saying, gee, pal, you wasted your life.

Well, that's what it was for me. You may find your own interpretation, and it would not be wrong. I have already yammered on so that this review eclipses the Neo Twiny Jam word limit. I think that says a lot.

ALL CAPS titles can reel me in or repel me quickly. This did the first. It suggests not just nonviolence but enforced nonviolence. After all, the sleeping beast hasn’t killed you yet! Um, at all. Who are you to strike the first blow? You're in no shape right now! And if you need to kill it, maybe you are being melodramatic about your problem? Maybe you have to admit you have a problem? Maybe you're ignoring the people with the real problems, or maybe you think you're too good to have real problems!

Yes, this is about addiction, or it can be, which you might infer from the cover art with beer bottles. Works about addiction always take a lot out of me, considering whether or not it works. So be warned. They can put me into a pensive rage about things I was told were good for me but in fact put me at serious risk of substance addiction. And I think I’ve discussed before how, say, playing games I don’t enjoy any more (or games just to say I completed reviewing everything for a comp/jam) is sometimes an anodyne that hides my fear of pushing ahead with something I've meant to do for a while. "Well, it’s not lethal," you hear. But there are less horrible sleeping beasts on the surface that can keep their hooks in you longer. That I thought about having to write reviews for every single entry, and writing a review for DNKTSB anyway--one that might even eclipse the 500 word jam limit!--tells you what I thought about this entry.

I think Twine works like this have definitely matured over the years. They’re a lot less in-your-face and feel a lot less like they have to prove a point or be exciting or exemplify the pinnacle of a certain art form. (Maybe I’ve mellowed on my views towards them, too, because there is less of a choice vs parser war than before.) But the fact is--this is surreal without being crazy, and it left me thinking yes, this is an addictive pattern I had, and this is something I couldn't break away from. Addiction is the easy one, but I also remember people who genuinely wanted to help me but I felt I couldn't pull away from some others. As if I didn't want to ruin the happy people's time. These people trying to help are the King in the story, who can be interpreted several different ways. His willingness to help and good intents and even his contempt for your situation are up for interpretation, as is the beast. Having a King and beast also, for me, left me with the question "doesn't someone else deserve to slay a beast first?" It's a nonsense question--you do what you can, and you can never be sure you've slain the beast. But it's one we've all had, if we're reflective.

As for the mechanics, there are a few questions with the same response. So this doesn’t especially branch, but I think (and this may be an old choice trope by now) it doesn’t matter, and you’re stuck. Here you ask how likable you are but are pretty convinced you’re not being objective, and if anyone really cared, or you were worth caring about, they’d help you out. It’s a heckuva dilemma to be in. Certainly I got to imagining "well, I-the-character am less likable for having an addiction, and I probably can’t get back to where I was, which wasn’t great anyway, or I would bring down the average happiness in the room there but not here."

The level of fantasy with the king, the knight (you) and the beast was not too in-my-face and gave me leeway to think of a lot of things. And it captured well how addiction/depression etc. is like a cycle where you say you don’t have the energy to tackle THAT yet, or it isn’t quite SO bad, or it could be worse. Then you have stretches where things go right and you wonder if they really are that right, or you feel dumb not breaking out in the first place.

It reminded me, too, of other things, such as comments by my family about how (paraphrased) druggies hang together. So don’t hang with the wrong crowd or you will get into drugs! And the isolation this presents turns that bit of nasty prejudice on its head because, as research has found, isolation increases the risk of drug use. No, it's not necessarily loud parties, etc. And this character is certainly alone in the game context.

While I prefer comedic works, or ones with a strong vein of comedy, I didn't want to pass up that DNKTSB was effective for me. It asked for a lot, but it helped address a few unfunny things that were tricky for me. I tend not to like kitchen-sink works about trauma. Perhaps I, like the hero in the story, just can't quite kill the beast today, so I settle for less. But on the other hand, a lot of side beasts can get killed with works like DNKTSB.

For what it's worth, after playing DNKTSB, which takes place at night when you're alone, I stayed up late, thinking about things that were broken and things I wanted to fix. It felt constructive. I made a small commitment to avoid some old beasts I didn't have to kill, I hope. So it was practical for me, too.

BBTA is right up my alley. It’s not the first spoof of adventure gaming, and it’s not the first twine game with directions out there (this could be inspired by the parser or by side-scrolling RPGs,) but I enjoyed it a lot, because I think having the word limit forced the author into stylistic choices to avoid elaborate jokes that maybe were heard before, or conventions which wouldn't add anything to the story.

Mages would have to worry about big long spell names. Priests? Praying and so forth. Thieves might be too obsessed with treasure. Bards? Well, you have to shoehorn in a song or two, to make them believable characters.

Barbarians are entities of few words, and they certainly don't futz about with spells! They are people of action. The result is a dungeon that is as big as it could be withe the word limit. I counted eight rooms when I mapped BBTA on a Post-it note.

BBTA also has a few deaths that you really should know if you paid attention. One is hinted particularly well. It is worth taking the scenic route for them. And as brevity is the soul of wit, they and the puzzles do indeed combine for a good deal of humor.

At the end, you get a choice of reward, and the unusual but in-character one is quite funny. About the only disappointment (for me) for this entry was that there wasn’t more in-game art like the image! That said, it was easy enough to imagine.

BBTA felt like more than comic relief as opposed to the more serious entries. There's craft and thought in there, like a Cheech and Chong skit featuring hapless idiots you can't help but like. (Hey, I like Cheech and Chong!) The decisions are surprisingly impactful. And it's fun to replay and see if the choices you make at the start matter for getting through the game. (Spoiler - click to show)They seem to make a difference with how much you get injured, but since you're a barbarian, you brush it off.