Reviews by Andrew Schultz

At the start this just looks like another story about meeting a shade rowing a boat on a river. The river and the shade's identity will be obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of mythology. Yes, it looks like you've died, and there's not much left, except the entrance/exit interview.

It's something the ferryman has clearly done a lot of, playing Death's good cop, letting you know your possessions don't really matter any more where you are going, and that's really okay. There are two pretty clear paths here. I found the path of resistance clever.

You see, you can keep asking "What?" This causes a number to go up on the screen. That number is, in fact, the ferryman's word count. He has a certain plan to small-talk you into submission, and it usually works, and in fact the direct "it can't be me, this can't be happening" approach is shut down quickly. There's the whole cliched bit about seeing the light, and so forth. It's been heard and done before.

But playing dumb and making him speak eventually makes him mad. You start with four candles, and each hundred words the ferryman speaks wipes one out. This plays along nicely with the concept of a 500-word jam, but it still falls within its bounds, since the conversation can cycle. (It's okay to reuse words/passages.)

The small talk on the boat reminded me of when I'd heard small talk that ostensibly was to put me at ease but really it was to stop me thinking, hey, wait, something's off here. And it is, if you pay attention and poke around. You may need several cycles through. The third solution, between meekly accepting your fate and getting zapped by the ferryman, is clever and satisfying.

It also raised a ton of questions for me. Was the ferryman just bored of their job? How did they feel about the people they helped across?
and how death is inevitable, etc. You don't seem to have much choice in the matter. Or do you? There are a couple of clues that may help you figure what is going on, or after a few times poking around randomly, you may figure out the mechanics. Either way, the third ending is rewarding, and you will feel accomplishment at finding it. I'm not spoiling it!

This was the sort of neat puzzle I'd originally hoped to see in Neo Twiny Jam. It took a while to uncover, and in the meantime there was other writing I found and enjoyed. It would be hard to recreate in a parser setting, which might give too many red herrings with standard verbs, and it also plays quite nicely on the jam's theme. So, well done to the author.

I'd have played Yak Shaving sooner, but for whatever reason, I fixated on that Ren and Stimpy episode I remembered that wasn't one of my favorites. I did not need to read that in text form.

What I didn't realize was that yak shaving had become a general term for the distracting stuff you need to do just to get through life that gets in the way of the big stuff you want to do. And the author relied more on that, and it's more a satire of, well, all sorts of things. There's a yeti and a yak and a corrupt Dada Lama. With a description like "A more or less matching pair of yak's wool socks, size 90," it's pretty clear things aren't at any great risk of going basso-profundo.

YS has two versions, Adrift and Inform, and I preferred the Inform version, being bigger, though it clocked in only at eight rooms. The author had promised some new locations, but some entirely different ones popped up instead. This only adds to the surrealism, of course.

It starts as a tongue-in-cheek quest for enlightenment. An acolyte tells you you can't see the Dada Lama while carrying any possessions. You, in a way, pass the Lama's "knowledge" to the acolyte. Helping the yak helps you unfreeze a yeti. Some items have the sort of uses you'd expect in a silly game. The end is of the "I learned I learned nothing at all, and nobody can" variety. Though it was surprisingly uplifting. Along the way, of course, you bash some zen tropes that have been done to death, but they're rather fun to kick a bit further.

For some reason I built YS up to be more than it was, even though the author generally goes in for shorter stuff (Excalibur excepted.) So it was nice to get around to it. Ironically I may have done a lot of yak-shaving (to use a new term I was enlightened with) instead of playing YSKG, and what's more, I recognized YSKG as a sort of yak-shaving for my own goals of writing text adventures, which have become yak-shaving for writing actual literature. This made me feel dumb and small until I looked through the jokes again. Then I felt better.

THJ is a short reflection on what it means to be happy, or at least to try to be. Of course there are people who will pontificate "don't search for happiness, search for fulfillment/service/enlightenment, etc." These people are tiresome if they do it too often, especially when you are really asking for ways to help certain things make you feel less unhappy. But on the flip side, grabbing it doesn't work. I mean, we don't like it when other people are clingy around us. Not even if we're the mean sort of people who laugh at others for being too clingy. But all the same, we do want to go reach out and find it and save it when we can for a rainy day.

It's hard to capture how fleeting happiness can be, and in this, the two main characters place a happy thought in a jar a day, to take it out when necessary. But when is it necessary? When do we realize we were happy? I know too often I've been captivated by someone who is clever with dialogue, but they were just selling the sizzle and not the steak. And yet -- happiness is that undefinable sizzle. And this shows through in the writing, as small arguments become big ones. You click through to see more text, and it's never clear where the next thing to click will be. Again, chasing happiness, thinking you've pinned it down, and it changes. Until it doesn't and you realize there's no more happiness to chase.

I found this quite an effective way of grasping something that seems obvious when you're five but is confusing now. It's clearly much sadder than SpongeBob trying to explain fun to Plankton, but it does search for things and acknowledge others do, too. And it highlights pitfalls to happiness without pointing the finger at you for falling into ones you should have avoided. It reminded me of the times I wrote something down and was thrilled to, then I worried it might lose excitement to read it too soon, or too late. Nevertheless, the arguments the characters had reminded me of times I was happier than I thought I was and times I convinced myself I was happy when I wasn't. I enjoyed the perspective.

FBS was written for ToasterComp, where the rules were: implement a toaster, and don't call it that. This opens the door for, well, the narrator not knowing what a toaster is. Enter you as Miles, a servant to Friar Bacon, in some unspecified Medieval year. Friar Bungay, an officious chap, tells you to fetch him.

But where is Friar Bacon? Perhaps that's the wrong question. You-the-player, armed with standard text-adventuring knowledge, will probably find the first clue of where he went. He's not in his office.

To find Friar Bacon, you/Miles will navigate a series of anachronisms, involving electric devices we take for granted. This has been done to death in stories or whatever, but it's still pleasing to figure out what is what. The most obvious candidates are electric light and, given the title of the comp, a toaster. Having a simple peasant find electricity the work of the Devil has been done before, too, but having do so from their perspective as the story deadpans away (Miles is very educated compared to his friend and understands the concept of "letters") reminded me how my five-year-old self might've had my mind blown by stuff that people find natural today. I probably wouldn't find it Satanic (well, maybe AutoTune. I did grow up in the rural US, which was big on that whole scare) but certainly a lot would be hard to describe.

Finding Friar Bacon is different from giving a successful ending (there's another funny one where you just flee,) but it really rounds out the story nicely. He and Friar Bungay come across as nasty people, but all the same, I wonder how I would act in their situation, knowing the existence of technology.

FBS was one of those games always on my radar, but I didn't look at it until I replayed My Evil Twin. It has source code included, which ironically was a look into the past from Inform 7 to Inform 6. And it taught me a lot about I6 that I didn't learn, and how simple it was, and if I didn't quite feel like Miles seeing the papers and knowing what writing was, FBS must have put me that much more in the right frame of mind to learn. This probably wasn't the author's explicit intent, but obviously I'm glad it happened, and to drag out an old cliche, the really good games are about more than winning them. (Another well-worn point: this was speed-IF, so there were typos. The author was obviously smart enough to sort them out if he had time, but I'm glad he spent his time actually pumping up the story and game mechanics and allowing interesting alternate paths through. It reminds me not to worry much about the little things, at least starting out.)

The whole experience leaves me wondering what other neat stuff is just out of my reach. It's very good for Speed-IF, with a well-constructed plot and backstory.

The review title is the response to X ME in My Evil Twin. But it also clues a roadblock later in the game. Because of your evil twin, it matters that you look more like yourself your twin, who exists in a world on the flip-side of a Vinculum Gate. And as you look around, you find evidence your evil twin is up to no good. How to stop them?

The game logic takes you to odd places, even though it's not big. In your world, there's a photo booth, but in your twin's, the location is walled off because it's a mind-control ray. Your neighbor's lawn in your world is a weapons shop in your twin's. (I won't spoil the theme of the weapons. It's pretty funny.) Navigating things so you can enter your evil twin's apartment is the main thrust of the game. The main mechanic is that not only does every room have a twin across the gate, but every object does, too. So if you drop something in Hyde Park and cycle through the gate, it'll be something else when you come back to Jekyll Park.

MET is filled with funny jokes and odd items that tie into the theme, from the statue of Grover Cleveland to a game of hangman. They'll slip if you don't notice them, and playing MET for the first time in over a decade, I got to see them afresh and definitely wanted to examine anything. And while I'd forgotten the precise walkthrough, MET clued the puzzles well, so it was a neat experience of rediscovery both of the world and solution and the conspiracy theories that make total sense in-game. It even gets a small bonus for even using XYZZY practically! XYZZY acts as a way to flip between your world and your twin's, if you're able to, which is handy to save a few keystrokes but obviously not critical to completing the game.

I'm not sure why I didn't review MET when it came out. Maybe I had nothing to say about it beyond "I hope to write something as cool and compact as this one day." Over ten years on, now's a good time. It takes you somewhere neat and new and dazzling so you can get lost a bit, and the fun wastes your time so efficiently. Due to the economy with which it uses the twin mechanic and throws out sly jokes, I think it's my favorite of all the Apollo 18/20 games.

It feels like a much bigger game could be made with MET's mechanic. But I am a bit greedy. I just remember thinking "oh, man, I wish I'd written something this good" on playing the pre-release version. Years later, I don't know if I have, but playing it certainly reminds me that there must be relatively simple ideas that can open up something like this. I'd be glad to uncover just one.

Look Around the Corner has one gimmick, but it's an effective one, because it helps open up a bit more story. You get up from your bed, go into the hallway and ... well, you get overwhelmed by eternity. In several different ways. Whether or not you look around the corner!

This creates an interesting set of perspectives and feeling of being overwhelmed. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it sort of captured the general feeling of waking up when you weren't really ready.

Hidden in these ways you are hit with eternity is the solution. If you are a smart-aleck kitchen-sink tester, you may stumble on the solution without realizing how or why you were supposed to. Indeed, back during ShuffleComp, I did so (I think I was in tester mode from testing other entries,) and then I figured how I was supposed to be reasoning, and the contrast was pleasing. When I replayed just now, years later, I was not in tester mode. I'm glad I didn't remember the solution, or the reasoning behind it, and I got to work it out again.

It would be neat to be able to chain a bunch of very small, focused efforts like this into a row of puzzles. I'd guess something like this would be a good break if you are stuck on a bigger game and need a legitimate reason to feel clever again. We all need the perspective this brings.

Oh, and contemplating eternity is good, too, in moderation.

CotC dropped very late in Neo Twiny Jam. On the heels of One Word Warlock and Curse of the Bat's Tomb and Tiny Barbarian's Big Adventure, I wondered just how complex the maze would be! Would there be RPG stats, even?

I'd guessed wrong, though. CotC is certainly sophisticated, but it's more about nuance and emotion and fear and need to escape than anything else. You are, in fact, a sword. You have some sort of sentience. You need to find the right person who will wield you to get out or, as the tagline says, ... better luck next century.

You have some control of the human that takes you, and apparently there's some luck defeating the guard(s) involved. The text is more focused on you worries about getting out and building tension than the directions.

The big question is what happens once you're free from your pedestal. The game's mood quickly establishes there is no easy happy ending. Well, for the character. As a player, it was satisfying, but I don't want to spoil it. Even if you're able to guess, it's worth playing through. The author clearly spent a lot of time on high production values, which paid off. This left it more memorable and worth a replay than a lot of the mood pieces I looked at and, yes, enjoyed as well.

I'm probably never going to have anything I waited a century for. But I know what it's like to wait for something and maybe grab it too quickly. Heck, I remember that one year I forgot about free Slurpees on July 11th until July 12th! (I got them next year.) I took time to think of all this and more, after I failed a few times. Then, I succeeded.

One might even picture the author thinking something similar about creating their game for Neo Twiny Jam. Was this a good idea? The last NTJ was eight years ago. Is there enough here to make a splash? Am I taking on too much? I don't want to have to wait eight more years. (Yes, the jam coordinators want to make this a yearly thing. Yes, that'd still be a while to wait, though I hope people who just missed the deadline are ready ASAP if/when it starts next year.) I'm glad they got it right in one try. Or maybe they tried once a week to write something until they finally got something good, and it slipped in under the wire.

Anssi Räisänen's games together really mark out a lot of territory. No one is particularly big, but they range from fantasy to realism, and they all have that very classic feel to them without flaunting their old-school credentials too intimidatingly. Puddles on the Path is distinctive among his works for the mechanic to solve major puzzles: many powerful spells are, in fact, common sayings. It's always good to breathe new life (ahem) into cliches, and this brief romp does that.

It's just good fun, as Anssi's works tend to be. You're a wizard's apprentice who can't help but be curious--you find a golden egg and try to get it, guards capture you, and then you must escape. Even though it's a null-sum game in this respect it's a lot of fun to find a magic sword and so forth and actually use the spells. Yes, I enjoy the odd syntax of ancient tongues, but it's also nice to breathe life into more well-worn words.

The game ended a bit soon for me, as I'd sort of hoped to use more than half of the proverbs you had in your spellbook to start. That would leave the door open for a sequel, much like Anssi wrote Ted Strikes Back in 2017 to extend his Ted Paladin game from IFComp 2011, which was the first of his works I tried. I remember hoping for a sequel to the original Ted Paladin game, but I didn't realize Anssi had sort of written one. Given it's 2023 and there was, alas, no Ted Paladin sequel within six years this time, it was neat to uncover Puddles on the Path.

Just looking at a map of the London Underground leaves me a bit dizzy. All those colors, all those loops, all those stations! Chicago is a lot more linear, but then again, part of that is due to just not having as much public transport. I remember a family trip to London where I diligently tried to memorize all the stations and hoped maybe we could visit them all. Of course, I wanted to visit all the tourist sites too. I vowed to be back one day, but of course, Life Happened. I don't think I've even gotten to all the Chicago L stations. Some are not in great areas, and I drove by them on the freeway, and that's enough.

Moquette, a Quest game with JavaScript effects (the best by far to me is how the text whooshes off to the left like a train starting off away from a terminal) helped fill in part of my desire to visit the London Underground without having to buy a plane ticket, as it's a faithful replication of, well, the central area. It starts you off at Balham station in the southwestern area. Balham is part of the Northern Line, which made it confusing when I was trying to get my bearings to start! Perhaps I should not have. The game describes your general path to your job: ten stops to Bank, change to the Central line, one stop to Liverpool Street.

And so you take the Northern Line to work. There's a constant intimation you, Zoran, might want to do something else than go to your vague tech job today. Eventually the game pushes you out at London Bridge, one stop short of Bank. It's actually possible to get to Liverpool Street, where there's no way to get to leave the Underground and go to your job. But all the same, you can't go further. You want freedom, but you don't want to end up in the middle of nowhere. (One wonders what people on the north side think of Balham. Perhaps it isn't the middle of nowhere, but on the other hand, it's impossible to visit the Highbury or Upton Park stations in Moquette.)

This isn't just arbitrary by the game. Part of what makes the London Underground so interesting to me is all the loops and runarounds and interchanges, and if the station names far out seem interesting, it does get linear. So it seeks to maximize the confusion and looping. Without a map I was baffled to see myself winding up at that same place I hit about eight moves ago.

There's not much, strictly speaking, to DO in Moquette. You look at people, think about their histories and what they want to do, and ponder changing. You leave the train if you feel it may wind up in the middle of nowhere. Some people may quit before this, and it's a satisfactory experience. Eventually you stumble on a girl named Heather, whom you sort of liked. This all is a bit awkward, but there's more of a point than just emo stuff. You fail to converse adequately with her, or you think you do, even if you remember stuff she liked.

Fortunately, an unrequited crush is not the main thrust of Moquette. It goes a bit further than that, and if I didn't particularly like the end, which felt too swervy and too on-the-nose at once, I do recommend the journey. First through without the map, then trying to hit specific places. The people-watching bit is well done.

My own experience with public transport is spoiler-tagged, as it rambles a bit, much like Moquette does, but I've rather enjoyed myself more than Zoran, just reading a book and occasionally people-watching. (Spoiler - click to show)It has revolved largely around getting near tricky-to-find places. There are city and suburban buses to go with the Chicago L. I remember one library in the northwest suburbs that had the only copy of a book I wanted to read, and I took three buses there. I enjoyed planning the bus trips. Then one day I realized it wasn't hard to transfer my city card to work in suburban cards, and if they weren't too far away, I could place holds. I sort of missed the adventure, but I'd done things once. And that library? It's gobbled up into the consortium which means a Chicago resident can just sneak north to Evanston, place a hold, and not have to go through some mazy public transport. I sort of miss the adventure. And sometimes even on Chicago's grid, you realize you've been going west and then south to somewhere, and you've never gone south and then west. It's weird seeing a place you remember, thinking you took a route you never saw.

That's enough adventure for me. It feels like there should be more, and you can't get it just by public transport, but it's often a good start to make you want more. Moquette did that for me, even if I felt its ending didn't stick the landing.

This feels like it might be a mood piece at first. You wade through a few rooms of dead household appliances, repeating a story about a heist you performed with a friend. Eventually this story trails off, and your inner monologue stops. There's nothing to do but find the treasure.

You have a shovel and a napkin, and on that napkin is written a clue where you should dig. There are a few approaches to finding the right place to dig. One I tried that failed was to (Spoiler - click to show)turn the flashlight off and look again, which didn't work. Depending on how observant and/or lucky you are, it should turn up. There's no super-hidden item, but on the other hand, you can't just go spamming words you see in the description. DIGging in the wrong place just seems too much.

The household appliances are an interesting choice of scenery. They are useless now, a perfect place to hide a stash, yet at the same time appliances could be a great target for burglars. They're also a sort of crime against the environment, whether from individual homeowners, or from corporation or governments who don't put enough money and effort into the science of recycling. Or perhaps the appliances are a symbol of a stable home that non-criminals take for granted but criminals never can, especially the air conditioner in the final room to the south. One suspects the narrator would do anything, with all their money, to have air conditioner repair bills to pay. They also reminded me of game shows where I never understood people were so happy to win a new dishwasher.

Or, you know, it's just amusing descriptions of a forbidding surreal landscape as a sad story unfolds, even if the main actors are criminals.