Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I heard enough buzz about Esther's in-comp that I decided to slip it in in front of what looked to be slower entries. This worked. I am not ashamed. Esther's certainly does not address any big issues, but why should it have to? It left me more recharged to deal with them than, well, pretty much any other way you can stare at a computer screen. Even my old favorites which are actually still fun. If I had run into something like Esther's when I was ten or so, Esther's would be an old favorite, too. Kids these days don't know how lucky they have it. At least, kids exposed to multimedia as nice as Esther's. The pictures are charming, and the story lives up to them.

The whole scenario of talking animals whose human friends don't understand them has been done before. That's probably because it's fun and leads to imaginative miscommunications such as what's found here. (Spoiler: it's easily resolved.) Having had cats, it's kind of fun to decipher what they want, even if it's not so fun for them while I'm being clueless. I found myself wondering if they really preferred one sort of canned cat food to another and whether I should give them variety or their favorite. I'm still not sure. I figured when they wanted petting, or they wanted to go out the front door, or they needed attention. But I'd have liked to do more. About all I figured was, they liked the taste of the chunky soft food as long as I mashed it up, but they still licked the sauce first.

The main characters in this story are mice, not cats, and they dine at Esther's. Esther is a clueless, well-meaning human who, like me, has no clue that Janie and Harold, the animals she serves, would like to eat something different today. They want avocado toast. Avocado toast as a meme was hilarious for a while but then got burned out from overuse, but the thing about good memes is, it's a great feeling when they're resurrected in new and different ways. That happens here.

And Harold and Janie not only get their avocado toast, but there's a lot of connection as Esther understands what they are asking, and why. Harold and Janie waste nothing. Esther is confused why they put some bits aside, but they eat it later. So a good day is had by all, including the reader. There aren't very many choices here beyond what sort of dessert you prefer, but I don't think there need to be. And really, would you want to be the sort of person who brings what seems to be a regular tea party tradition crashing down? I think and hope not.

Esther's reminded me of Susie and Mr. Bun in Calvin and Hobbes, and how Hobbes was real and Mr. Bun wasn't, and the shock Calvin had when he lost Hobbes, who wound up at Susie's tea party. But of course Esther's is its own story. There are so many creative variations on "talking animal/toy, confused owner/human friend" that make us happy, even if they are not very good. But Esther's is well-done, even without the wonderful artwork, and so I'm glad it was part of IFComp. The judges thought so as well, and unless you are very, very cynical, I think you will be, too.

I'm not really a fan of mythology, but the author's entry from IFComp 2021, Hercules, was a sympathetic look at a kid who was smart but not very strong, and I'd hoped to see more from them. Hercules, replete with lack of muscle and an asthma inhaler, could've gone off the rails with a "hahaha dorks suck but dorks rule" view, but it never got close. With my limited knowledge of mythology it was still pretty clear what to do without making the puzzles too obvious. I had a lot of good genuine laughs. And AWAtN, while modern and much more slice-of-life, gives them. Your grand objective is to leave your house during COVID quarantine. Your partner who may slightly be getting on your nerves, and you may be getting on theirs. It's all pretty direct without being heavy or cruel or overdoing the "gosh it's boring in here" angle, and it hit a lot of notes for me. The scenery is pretty clearly less sweeping than ancient Greece, but the result is tidier and a lot of fun, an ambitious escape-the-room game.

What really makes AWAtN work for me is the hint system. It's in-game--your exhausted partner, Alex, reminds you where you might've left your mask or cell phone or, because your battery is drained, your charger. There's that weariness that can too easily be forced, but here it wasn't. Yes, your partner gets a bit bored if you ask for a lot of things. It becomes fun to, because you learn a bit about your and Alex's history, and Alex can't know where you put stuff but sure has a lot of good questions. I remember long before COVID, I would lose something, and my parents would always ask "where did you leave it last?" which annoyed me. I figured why, now--Alex says "You know, you've left X around Y before." The "oh I'm not sure" dialogue feels so plausible and avoids spoiling things. You will get the hint, especially since your character often has stuff to say back.

"My messy apartment" or "I'm such a loner" games can often think they're quite self-aware by broadcasting their lack of effort, but Walk is much cleverer than that. It hits at some parser tropes like "LOOK BEHIND X" or "LOOK UNDER X" which are usually the bane of parsers. It just doesn't force the player to look every which way, but you remember something falling behind a sofa, or whatever. The implication is that you were a slob before COVID and worse after, without totally roasting you. Again sort of like Hercules, who is neurotic and physically weak, but the jokes aren't cutting.

You, Sam, have stuff to do before you go out. Dress up in sweatshirt and sweatpants instead of your pajamas. Look all over for stuff misplaced. And, well, the puzzles amused me, and I'm glad they seemed to amuse the judges, too. It's simple stuff like turning the TV on and opening a window, and you have a bunch of keys to track down, because of course you do. Turning on the TV gives vital information, and while this mechanic's done before, and the author is having a great big laugh, you get to have one, too. Certainly during COVID I flipped through YouTube channels for all sorts of odd information I wasn't really interested in, hoping something that useful came up. The conversation when you open the window (yes, this is also a nontrivial event) reminds me of how restrictive things are/were/need to be with COVID, back when we weren't sure if we should.

AWAtN also commits what is, on the surface, a cardinal sin: a convention among parser games is that LOOK UNDER and SEARCH and LOOK BEHIND are bad ideas. With AWAtN, they aren't quite the same thing. But they shouldn't be, here, and it's fun to have that extra guesswork which makes trying to find things just the right amount of frustrating so you don't give up, but you "get" Sam and Alex.

I had to look at the walkthrough for the final key to put on the ring. I thought I'd done something I hadn't. The other endings--well, I got the one where you get lazy and do a crossword--this sort of thing often kept me in before COVID, where instead of exploring something new, I'd go with something I knew how to do, but it felt different, because it was a randomized game. The walkthrough listed them, and some are obscure, but they should be. Some things in the game indicated "this gives a bad end," and I felt kind of dumb I overlooked them. Some seemed quite absurd indeed, where you have to be a bit too clever or dumb, but that seems like part of the fun--it's the sort of thing you think of when cooped in your house. I laughed just reading the commands to get the endings. But, funny thing: on replay, I picked off a few bad endings, but I wanted to just get through to the main ending to go out. I suddenly felt up to it. Most games generally try to trap you into playing them more, or they leave you fleeing. AWAtN hitting that third way is a welcome rare thing.

AWAtN also reminded me of This Won't Make You Laugh from IFComp 2021, which had its moments and (spoiler) mentioned a lot of frustration with COVID and was direct in its own way, in particular when the narrator broke the fourth wall, but the humor feels more consistent and less forced here. Alex was, on reflection, a more effective character than I thought. There's some suggestion Sam, the main character, and Alex are getting a bit sick of each other, and they need time apart whenever possible and know this, but they still care. This isn't nuance you should have to strain for, but then you shouldn't have to, to keep relationships going, and AWAtN doesn't claim to blow you away with it. The androgynous names for Sam and Alex are a nice touch, too--it's not the first time I've seen this, but games that include this generally work well.

I deliberately played AWAtN as a boost to start IFComp 2022 reviewing in the authors' forum, and I was right. It's got a bit of slapstick, but not too much, and it certainly got me started happily. I'm glad people can self-classify their entries so we can attack what we want first, as I seem to need the shorter ones to start, and this fit in place nicely. It's hard to imagine a "my messy apartment" entry doing better than AWAtN. It seems to have that right balance of cluelessness and self-awareness. But I'd be happy with something half as nice.

Um, so, yeah, Workplace crushes bad. There's reasons any self-respecting HR department has a whole stack of procedure on what to do about potential workplace relationships. But then again, HR is just about covering a company's legal liability, even if they throw in bromides such as "harassment-free work environment." Fortunately, there's more to Admiration Point than this. It weaves in the awkwardness with what is a very interesting look at a hypothetical museum in the future. It tracks social media in the 2010's and 2020's, and while it doesn't point the finger, it certainly lets the reader connect the dots. (It being the museum and story.)

Not that things are all dark and dystopian and so forth. You have a job as a graphic designer, though it's not the position of responsibility you want. Some of the things you need to do whitewash some very real struggles in the past in order to gain looks for your museum. (It seems to have missed the point of the social media it seeks to analyze. It's part of the problem, but hey, things happen like that.) The job seems pretty stable, though, maybe with some friends moving in and out. You have problems at home with your husband, about having sex, and while I try to avoid that stuff in my games (cheap and hopefully harmless jokes notwithstanding,) someone's got to discuss it, and in this case I'm glad it's not done in all caps or with dreadful text effects or, worse, talking about how they've been repressed from doing so by society. It's just: things happen. Certainly in high school, I had crushes on what I see now to be pretty awful people. But they were attractive. Or I felt impressed by someone who seemed charismatic and told dirty jokes. And, yes, some decent people didn't reciprocate to me, and that hurt. Immaturity isn't an excuse in the workplace, though.

There is considerable agency as to how much you can get to know Sean, your crush. I just didn't want to deal with him at first, because 1) I was interested in why the museum was there and its daily workings and 2) I didn't want to have to deal with workplace relationships. I'd seen some work well and some not. I also remember a poor schlep who, neglecting a co-worker's picture of her with her fiance she'd attached to overhead metal cubicle drawers with a magnet, say "Think I have a chance with her?" This may only scratch the surface of possible awkwardness--I realized I didn't want to deal much with the core issues AH brought up, and I was actually glad it didn't force me to, right away. Also, I generally don't think much of socializing, period, with coworkers more than I have to. So perhaps I am like Sean, except with friendship, for some people. Though I enjoy what they share, sanely, on Facebook. That Facebook (FACEBOOK!) works better for this than face-to-face may say something about a former work environment. Or about me.

So there's so much that can go wrong, but it's handled pretty delicately. I have to admit that after I'd gotten three endings, I sort of just breezed through the rest and said, okay, I have to be flirty to see it all, and I didn't want to be flirty, and I don't think I'd have wanted to even if AH's description mentioned things wouldn't be reciprocated. Thankfully there's nothing cringey beyond the signs misread, and you feel like you can forgive the protagonist. Yet all this sort of echoed how work can be – you do the same thing every day, except when some annoying emergency pops up, and then you wish you went back to the boring stuff, and the only way out is – to act out, or maybe to start an office fling. Anything to break the monotony. Fortunately you have enough of a life outside the office that you're offered other jobs in some threads, and this all feels more than satisfactory. I appreciate discussions of missing signs, because I've missed them, and I've had them missed, deliberately or not.

AH did a good job, to me, of capturing the discontent of office work beyond any mere need for romance or career fulfillment. Some games go full angst or corny joke, which are great whn you don't want to be chanllenged, but I'm glad middle ground is being filled. There were times I sensed the main character was as drawn to complaining about the hidden restrictiveness of her job as she was to flirting with Sean. So this feels like a nontrivial work. It certainly reminded me of my own frustrations and of people who acted out more than the player-character could have dreamed of. This with me not really being its target audience. So, well done.

LWG is a fun game that I feared might not get many reviews in IFComp 2022 due to a custom web-based parser, but I was glad to be proven wrong. While some homebrew parsers have been bare-bones, this one is technically impressive and manages to eliminate some outdated conventions and bring useful ones in. Here, the most obvious things are detailed headers, or small buttons with rounded edges that you can push with rounded edges to toggle things like dark mode. It's stuff you maybe shouldn't have to use the parser for, and I know a lot of times, I've fumbled what command to give to certain options, or I've had some overlap with more important verbs. This hybrid parser model makes sense, as I think a big draw of parsers is to type in a command to do something, and tweaking presentation is a lot less exciting or rewarding.

So, about LWG. You're not exactly a wizard in this one. But you want to be. You have wizarding exams ahead. The only problem is that you haven't studied much, or really, at all. The Wizards in charge, though, don't know that, and so they give you the exam, and you have to run around your magic school looking for reagents and finding places to cast spells. They start relatively small, such as unlocking a cupboard, which you have to do a couple times. This requires replenishing reagents, which isn't hard, but it helps you meet a few characters and gives some color to your unnamed school.

It's a small pity the school doesn't have a name, and it's a recurring theme throughout LWG. It may even be LWG's major fault, but having said that, as major faults go, it's not a bad one. The author gets so much right, but nothing really soars. I think what happened was that the author spent time nailing down technical stuff and putting out fires so that the parser worked well, and it does. But they left out potentially interesting details in the game proper. I've been there. Creative stuff distracts me from technical stuff and vice versa. And while I definitely sympathize with technically-heavy stuff, I'd still be interested in stuff like a school name or a small storyline for all of the characters. As-is, they do some things such as upbraid you appropriately for requesting reagents you already have, but fleshing out something beyond the game flow would be really neat in a post-comp version. They feel utilitarian.

There's still a lot of fun, of course, and it wouldn't have been worth holding up LWG to drop in the details. I think the author did well with the exam jinn who is there for hints if you want them, but it explains your grade drops a bit if you do. (Well, of course! But it's a creative way to discourage asking for hints too much. ) Also, I like how it transforms a lot as it follows you around. (Even) more of this, please!

Another thing that's right: the school size. There's enough to explore and get lost a bit but relatively few meaningless passages. And the puzzles are satisfying. At the start you're given some ideas about how you may be able to bend the rules a bit, which presents an interesting moral dilemma. If you've learned all the spells straight-up, you deserve a good grade, but if you learned a way around cramming, that's learning how to learn, amirite? LWG touches on this, but the restrictions given by the examiners feel fair, and they are so much more creative than "you can't go that way."

As for the puzzle content: this is tricky! An eighteen-year-old potential wizard probably doesn't need super complex stuff, so you don't need to do anything spectacular to win, and nothing weird is expected of you. But on the other hand, you don't get to do anything spectacular. Or the one potentially spectacular thing you do feels like a puzzle for puzzling's sake: you summon a vampire only to unsummon it immediately, and you just need to be prepared to dispel it. Perhaps this is a wry commentary on preparing strictly for a test and not looking for general knowledge, or maybe it is just a case where the final puzzle got stuffed in so that the player has a bit more to explore. If the second, that's no crime, but I sort of have to wag a finger at it affectionately.

This is technical stuff, though. Given the fun I had sneaking out of the grounds, during an official exam no less, or reading the forbidden books in the library that I had all semester to read but didn't, was quite satisfying. There's a forbidden attic and a dark basement that have been done before, and I knew they'd been done before, but I still enjoyed them.

LWG was certainly a lot of fun, but when I went to poke at it, I noticed a lot of details had fogged over. This isn't a bad thing. I really enjoyed the magic helpers. But it sometimes felt like it hoped to have a bit more of a story, all while throwing puzzles in your way. It does a lot right, though, from allowing you to leave with pretty much any grade, to hiding some tough extra credit. If you're willing to do a bit of legwork to replenish reagents in case a spell goes wrong and put up with a little recipe book reading and a few repetitive spells (but not much--it's hard to recommend how to do it better) you'll have a very pleasant game that deserved the strong placing it got. I've dropped a lot of quibbls here, but if the author keeps adding stuff to their custom engine (as an Inform author, I'd love to see pronouns implemented, e.g. X CUPBOARD.UNLOCK IT.) LWG was, I think, a success, and its relatively high placing was a pleasant surprise. And since the custom parser is probably more stable and needs fewer features added, the author may have more time to concentrate on the story for their next IFComp entry, and that could make it something really special. But if it's "only" as fun as LWG, I'd welcome that, too.

The United States had a census in 2020. Right in the middle of COVID. I didn't get a community organizer at my door, but I did get a census taker. Filling out the census had gone to the bottom of my priorities, below generally worrying how bad the virus could get.

I was glad to talk to them. I'm not a big talker, and we talked through the door, but I was also able to help them with the names of my neighbors, and I appreciated the reminder. I also appreciated not having any awkwardness about asking for money, or any of that sort of thing. It still must've been awkward to buzz up and ask for entry, more than usual.

And they must've appreciated that, well, they got paid for it, and it was a less than Sisyphean task. The more you went out, the fewer places you had to visit to remind people to fill out their censuses. Door-to-door nonprofit stuff holds no such relief--and, in fact, there's always the possibility that the cause you're espousing, or the candidate you're canvassing for, is wrong. I know certainly I feared being on the other side of that a lot. I'd feel guilty saying no and feel a sucker saying yes.

Before COVID, I did some cold calling for Elizabeth Warren back in 2020 and ... well, between the Trump supporters who yelled at me and the people who POLITELY asked to be taken off the list (these people were in Iowa and were sick of political ads) I realized how tough it was. Heck, it's tough to cold-call for your own profits, for different reasons. I'm just not cut out for that. I'm wondering if anyone is. Perhaps the overseers who say "you can do it! You just have to believe in yourself!" also primarily believed they could move up from cold calling to a leadership position.

And the kicker? Well, sometimes some black-swan event happens that's more effective than all the pavement-pounding. Or perhaps it's the tipping point that makes your efforts seem irrelevant. For instance, <img src="https://inthesetimes.com/article/rahm-emanuel-37-cent-tip">this photo</a> did more to make Rahm Emanuel look silly than a lot of community activism, and sadly, an unarmed suspect being shot 16 times was necessary before people really dumped someone people once thought might be mayor of Chicago for life.

Sure, someone had to do it, and anyone could've, but it feels like "oh geez all this hard work and someone else swoops in and makes a politician who deserves it look awful quickly." It isn't quite that way, of course. This guy had prior history with Emanuel. And there are far worse politicians than Emanuel. But he was whom we are stuck with. And now people have legitimate reasons to dislike his successor. So it goes. What was all that activism for, anyway? I say this as someone who has voted for people that turned out to be disappointments, or corrupt. Rod Blagojevich just seemed sort of obnoxious back in 2002, though he was possibly a bright young Democratic star. At least something good came out of Illinois in the oughts.

NOEDT capture the futility well, for me. There are 32 places you can visit, asking what issues are important to the residents and--no obligation, of course, money's tight these days--for donation. They are not shuffled randomly on replay or, at least, not until you refresh the browser. You can pick off which have nobody home, for when you replay. You have four hours to visit as many as possible, and five to ten minutes to visit each place but, and here's a mean but effective trick the game plays, you can't use nearly all the four hours knocking on doors.

NOEDT was surprisingly exhausting, and it wasn't due to overwriting, but rather to me realizing I was trying to connive the most efficient use of my time and game the system (e.g. take notes for replay) to, ostensibly, fight against powerful people who gained their own system in much more lucrative ways. So you really can't win, and even if you plan well and have foreknowledge, it doesn't feel like a win. There's no DESPAIR DESPAIR DESPAIR at the end, just, you meet all manner of people in the process of doing so, and there should be variety, but there isn't.

I'm glad NOEDT went for that sort of tone, because I think it is effective, and even if this sort of community organizing isn't what you see in the USA, it's still so awkward to cold call or get cold called, to know how the game is played and hate being on either side of it, but also to know that the alternative (none at all) would make things far far worse. Of course, even if you play the game well, things go wrong (there's sleight of hand by the author that doesn't feel totally fair. The writing isn't heavy-handed, but the mechanics are. Perhaps the author is saying there is no way to game the system, and even in informal "fight the power" structures or ones that don't take marching orders from big donors, there's still a lot of arm-twisting or helplessness.)

I end on a note of positivity: I've seen these things work in Chicago, where a corrupt alderman is pushed out, or another alderman established good constituent services or uses community resources or feedback effectively. Or there are regular gatherings for people's rights, or over the years something like a gay pride parade is less controversial. So it does work, but man is it slow. Things that seemed ridiculous years ago are now taken for granted. I voted for Tom Tunney as alderman back in 2003, and he was the first gay member of Chicago's city council. It was somewhat of a watershed back then, but we don't care now. Halsted Street, once mocked in whispers as Boystown, now has rainbow-themed lampposts and such. There are free, clean and useful health centers, away from the stigma of AIDS. And so forth. People who were activists now have bigger roles in the community. Their endorsements are actively sought. Sadly, most people like the protagonist get less credit.

One other thing: I was amused to compare and contrast the performance reviews at the end of NOEDT and Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's. Both about equally awkward, but NOEDT had better intentions. Or at least higher-minded. You never know, with anyone involved in politics.

A humble village! You, a new baker's apprentice! Why, there's a miller, farmer, priest and all that sort of thing! Sadly, a barrow-boy, hauling whatever they haul in barrows, and the old lamplighter are not in on the act. But you do what you can. The cake can't be too fancy. There's a system of barter and trust, roughly, with even a system of credit if someone can't pay just now. For instance, the farmer has given all their eggs to the priest, who is willing to swap for something later. It's understood that you help people carry or unload sacks, since you're so young. The font is a cheery cursive, and there are appealing graphics. Picturesque, indeed! You even get to type in your own name and the name of a cat you meet in a script font, which also appears at the game. This and the postcard-ish boxing of text gives an almost cutesy feel.

It will stay that way, as long as you don't get too nosy. The moment you do, though, sordid layers get peeled back. You find things you find in a trough, or in the baker's recipe book, or even around the nice old lady who assures you the "POISON" jar is not where the sugar is. So absent-minded! There are plenty of ways to get killed, but the game assures you there are lots of endings. I got 15 out of 8, presumably to reinforce the "more than meets the eye" angle. This sets us up for a potentially neat play/explore/replay cycle where we do eventually manage to explore everywhere and find interesting deaths. Another look at the cover art makes you realize something odd. That shadow is the wrong shape and color. Oh dear!

Unfortunately the technical side is a bit lacking. There are a few loops. If you click on "credits" at the end, you're kicked to a page with no way back. With little time left to judge IFComp initially, I threw in the towel, quitting while I was ahead. An individual playthrough is relatively quick, though there is a lot of overlap that seems unavoidable with the main quests--if you explore too much, you die and have to start over. So I quickly experienced a bit of dread looking through what I needed to. Maybe I didn't map what pitfalls were where carefully enough.

As-is, I got the "good" ending the second time, and I was invited to a faux-idyllic town gathering choose someone to be the Reign. They weren't happy about it. I'll invite you to play to find out why. So the cake got baked and eaten, which counts as a success. But I do think that, if there are different endings based on who is the reign, that's all a bit much to grind through repeatedly to see them. I wasn't quite curious enough to click through repeatedly.

This is a tricky one. UNDO all over would allow the player to lawnmower the end and know too much too soon, but blocking it out made exploring tedious. I'd suggest a compromise where, once you've made it to the gathering, you can click through "get the milk" and so forth on replay, to cut out a lot of unrewarding repetition. There'd be some leeway for the author on whether or not they should nudge the player to say hey, you're done here.

Let Them Eat Cake feels like a relative tap-in to fix some features to make it even more playable post-comp (the bugs mentioned,) and perhaps there's a good way to streamline different parts you've already seen or at least to indicate that the reader has done everything they can in a certain branch. So perhaps a one-two punch of post-comp releases would be good, one for maintenance, and one to smooth out seeing all of the village and all the deaths. Goat Game is a good example of how to invite lawnmowering without driving a player crazy or making them feel they aren't doing much. LTEC does seem worth the challenge, both for us and the author, though I haven't checked since my first try! It has a strong sense of setting, and while I saw what I reckon are a few errors in translation, those aren't nearly enough to sway a very favorable opinion of it. It definitely achieved "worth looking at" status, and I like the pace at which secrets were revealed to a player who poked around.

I'm pretty shocked EfG didn't get a top-twenty finish in IFComp 2022, and when I say top-twenty, I mean top-ten. I voted it top-two. It seemed very close to Prism in many ways in terms of building a distant magic city, though they were built in different ways. Prism was also in my top ten and likely well worth your time, but you get to see and imagine Prism, while you get to imagine and dream EfG. Perhaps it hit at the right time: I had gotten behind with my reviews, and here was a work about an interlocutor (there are three at the start--I'm not clear if they have anything different to say, but since there is enough to say in any one read-through, this doesn't matter,) with not much time to speak to me, and I had little time to consider what to ask him. After a few questions, my immediate reaction was: you know, as much as I'd love to hear about this city, others would deserve to, too! So I'd better ask good questions, even if the conversations took place across a few days in-work. My unexpected friend had a lot to offer, even if they were not part of the leadership, or movers and shakers in Wild Idyll, the city in question.

Perhaps playing EfG when I did was a happy accident, and I liked it more than I should have. And I've had my share of "how the heck did this place so low" or "I understand this placed low because it was unusual and the innovation isn't for everyone and it be remembered well post-comp" entries. But I've never felt, wow, this is really big, and I encourage a lot of judges who rated it low to go back and try to find the stuff I see. Maybe I'm off-base. I was almost scared to revisit it, because what if it didn't measure up? What if I was just making stuff up? I suppose part of EfG's thrust is to give you permission to make stuff up, or think of what your conversant would have said with more time.

That said, I don't know if I've ever enjoyed the difficulty of making choices as with EfG. I was devoid of the usual cynicism of how writers have to keep their work on rails to keep within the two-hour IFComp limit. And the thing was -- the question choices felt like quite possibly the best of that sort of thing I've read. Many very good and well-respected works give you a nice variety of choices to fit your personality, and you can clearly see the game design. You know which one you want to ask, or, if you're playing to win, you're pretty sure which one will give you an edge. Perhaps you will even remember something from your journey that helps you make the right choice, or you suspect you missed something that'd help give you information. But with EfG? Well, your friend seems to anticipate what you want, for instance when you slightly yawn and they change the subject to something else interesting. I often had a choice between three very, very good and quantitatively questions I wanted to ask all at once, and I couldn't. Many of them, I wish I'd thought of. They encouraged me, in fact, to ask more and better questions, or try to. I did so, for at least the next week.

I sort of cringed when my questions were technical, because they stopped well short of the author's goal, or one of them, which was giving free rein to imagine what could be, in as much or as little detail as you'd wish. And perhaps I saw where the ending was heading. (Don't worry, "the city was within you all along, if you just knew where to look" ain't it!) But I enjoyed the journey so much. And that, I think, was part of what the author wanted to get across. And thinking of EfG, I remembered all the Ink games (Ink works well with the narrative--it feels like a story flowing and not just text) where I figured, okay, this choice didn't matter, and neither did that one, and I usually tried some reverse-engineering. But I was too caught up in forgotten needs and desires and things I didn't know I wanted yet to do this sort of analysis. I've never had an IFComp entry do that. I've had ones give me something unexpected in a genre I hated, but this opened the floodgates and made me why I didn't want or question certain things before. I've never used psychedelics, but EfG feels like what some people hope the psychedelic experience is, and it does so without any of the old tired tropes or trying to shove anything in your face. It even managed to make a discussion of language interesting to me, skipping well beyond "where are the bathrooms?"

It's quite a wild ride, extremely ambitious, but it never throws its randomness or mythicness in your face or tells you how you are supposed to interpret it. It allows you to be skeptical and snarky with your questions. Even as it describes 497 ways the Elves said goodbye, you want to believe that happened, or could have. It regenerated me in a way that self-help books could only dream of, and not just for the final stretch of IFComp reviewing and judging. I was worried, coming back to it, I might not enjoy it the second time as much, as I had time to sit and be critical. Perhaps I would see proof that this work is really all just a pile of pretentious twaddle and I am a fool and sucker for enjoying it. I did not, but even if I did, I think I would still have enjoyed it immensely. It is the sort of work that should be intimidating, you feel, but it isn't, and it's about so many things that were lost, but you can't describe how or why or when, and you know even getting a bit of them back would be immensely valuable. And while a review can never nail down what a work is about, in this case I feel particularly disappointed and helpless.

Because a work like EfG certainly reminds me of all I want to do, as opposed to the stuff I take because it's there. I thought back a lot to CS Lewis's definition of Joy: a desire for something longer ago or further away or still "about to be." And this popped up throughout EfG. And I realized that even with a "well, the stranger was BS'ing you all the time" cop-out ending, that wouldn't change the things I'd forgotten about that I wanted to do or look at or that I believed were possible until I knew better. I remembered a few, because there is so much weird stuff we forgot we wanted, or weird stuff we might want once we understand. During EfG I thought about how hollow pop songs about saying good-bye or whatever were, or of summer days and nights that can't last, and of cliches like "the only constant is change." Those all felt dull compared to a surface EfG had helped me scratch, one I probably hadn't for a while, one I want to scratch at instead of clinging to old habits that aren't nearly as rewarding as they used to be.

This explains Wild Idyll. But the title? The title is given by your new friend's explanation that the Elvish language has 497 words for good-bye. At the end, of course, there's the big one: "This last 'goodbye' was a great equalizer-- ... this farewell was not one of decisive departure, but rather surrender to the inevitable: an abandonment of oneself to the force of fate." It feels a lot like that one work by Borges where a minor poet's one word destroyed a castle, though it felt less harsh than when people talk about the unspeakable name of God. I mean, after my brief time reading, I didn't want to let go, even though I needed to. I certainly wanted to remember crazy things I believed as a kid or wanted to talk about, or at least, I wish I had remembered them long enough to polish them. But then I got back down to earth: I was behind reviewing for IFComp, and I needed to pick things up, chop-chop, to find new stories and try to interpret them and maybe even fall asleep after a particularly odd one, to have weird dreams and wake up with new ideas, trusting the best would stick and saying good-bye to the ideas I loved that would not deserve to last, at least not with me, whether it was the ideas' shortcomings or mine for not being able to express them properly.

Physics searches for a GUT, a Grand Unification Theory. Literature searches for something that ties together our shared existence. I can't say EfG hits that, or that it does so better than anything else I ever read, but it gets up there and makes you aware of what could be. Perhaps it even makes you a bit more wary of literature that tries for the lowest common denominator. But it encourages you to find big stuff even in that. The climax of the story may be somewhat predictable from the title, but I don't think that's a spoiler (also, don't worry, Wild Idyll is neither the friends you made along the way nor something that had been in your heart all this time.)

Along the way you learn a lot, and I think each time I had a very different good-bye on finishing. While I won't have the 497 the Elves had, there will probably be more than 3 for EfG. I've certainly had gradated good-bye responses to all the IFComp entries I've seen. The total is probably around 497. But none made me realize as much as EfG that I needed to say good-bye if I didn't want to--to EfG, to this year's IFComp, or even to other things, and, of course, there were different ways I could, and should. Here, perhaps, it's an acknowledgement that whatever I go to next won't be as neat as EfG on its own, but perhaps with luck and persistence I will find another work very different from EfG that is still as satisfying and inspiring.

WSGEB is a fun, and funny, short effort by someone who's been here before with others. I used to call them good-citizen entries, because they do not demand too much from you, but if you want, you can look into them and see more. The only problem here is that WSGEB doesn't contain any good citizens! Or, rather, nobody's perfect, and everybody is suspected of murdering one Gum E. Bear. He wasn't a great person/candy thing or even a good one, but nonetheless, a murder is a murder, and murders must be solved. Every character here is some sort of candy, and the comic potential piles up and is largely achieved. The technical bits are a bit lacking--I say this, hopefully not to neg, but to brace you, so you have no letdowns as you enjoy the funny bit.

Your job, as a private eye named Bubble Gumshoe, is to figure out who it was. Or, you know, you can just ACCUSE everyone (and I mean everyone!) and undo until you guessed right, for humor value. You don't need any actual evidence, and in fact there really is no physical evidence to collect. Given the jokey tone of WSGEB, you may suspect it ends on a deliberate clanger, and you're right. Rest assured the villain's "you got me, but..." speech is funnier than the game bashing you when you pick the wrong person. (Note: my initial guess was right, but for the wrong reasons. I'm still proud of it.)

There's not much else to say. There are relatively few locations, and the characters are all entertaining. There is Officer Donut, Big Hunk who is a bouncer at the local nightclub, Jawbreaker who guards Don Toblerone's room with an intentionally stupid password, Don Toblerone himself, and Candy Kane, who operates a seedy bar. You can ASK them about stuff or (at least try to) SMELL and TASTE. This fits in well with the general candy descriptions of Sugar City.

WSGEB is about as light-hearted a murder mystery as it gets. Overbearing cop, seedy environs, rough dialogue, and so forth. The jokes landed home for me, with the stipulation that nothing was profound or meant to be. So it was a game about empty calories that didn't have much empty prose. I think people who give it a shot will enjoy the descriptions and dialogue enough to try everything they can. I did. And it's fortunate there's not too much--the implementation is spotty, which would become a factor in larger games, though on the other hand, WSGEB is high on my replay list.

It even hits a few serious issues. My sympathies tend to the ACAB side, and I found the swift portraits of police contempt for those who "serve and protect" quite effective and worth laughing at. I was genuinely glad to see the guilty party get their comeuppance. As someone who did not want to use drugs but always felt boxed in by anti-drug messages, some of the lines around it are just great, and they're infused with candy jokes without being tasteless, so the author is sympathetic to the victim.

As for what more I would do? This sort of thing seems ripe for having a suspect picked at random, with details shifted around, a la Christopher Huang's An Act of Murder, which has been on my to-play list for ten years now. WSGEB seems ripe for this treatment, maybe with a sequel or expansion pack--the author's a very experienced Twine writer, but shifting from choice to parser is tricky. I think on the whole, implementing the senses worked better to get the laughs across, and my technical quibbles are just that, and yours should be, too. Part of me wonders if the author should be so cruel as to carry out their "you can't undo once you accuse" threat in that case, to make a legitimate challenge. Maybe this all could be a hard mode you could unlock.

And I really enjoyed putting the game file through a disassembler to see the funny stuff I missed. So, one last suggestion for a post-comp release, or the author's next effort, because dang, there was a lot to laugh at: give the player a list of AMUSING stuff to do!

I like to draw a distinction between things that make you think and things that let you think. YMNE falls into the second category, which is the better and less forcing of the two. When prepping this review for IFDB, I kept writing down stuff on the side, ways to look at things from my own life, stuff worth noting that didn't fit into this review. This happens maybe once or twice per IFComp entry. Last year there was The Best Man. YMNE goes down a different road: instead of alienation from a group of friends, it's from society. These things can get horribly didactic horribly fast, perhaps with too much detail and preaching. YMNE has neither. It deals, at least in part, with the powers that be (TPTB) and how they are unfair. And it helped me accept that unfairness in ways a Wellness Guru (TM) never could.

Strictly speaking, it's just a maze game where you need to escape, without a ton of detail. The maze has clues that taunt you or give trivial help, and it's not clear which one's worse. It's not a very big maze, either, and you have a few side quests where you can do something for the souls of people at a cemetery. Your grave is there, too. The maze could be a metaphor for any number of things. The most obvious one is poverty--a jukebox plays a song about a tramp not welcome anywhere. Rain comes down and gets heavier. But I think it could be any sort of Not Being Normal, with the obvious big subjects (gender identity, sexuality, race) and others from something minor like social awkwardness to perhaps autism. Perhaps it is anything that makes you feel isolated, stuff that people who haven't had it don't understand. Mapping the maze isn't the main challenge, here. The author asked that players not spoil the mazes with maps, and I think that may extend in spirit to some details as well. But I'll say this--it's worth working your way through the map. The room descriptions alone help you more than the LCD displays that give encouragement, concrete or otherwise. And with what was there, I realized I felt sort of grateful that there weren't any dead ends with YOU HAVE DIED or a secret police force tackling me. I realized I had a sort of low-level Stockholm Syndrome thing going on there, which is impressive.

This makes for seemingly not much to do in a straightforward game. But YMNE isn't intended to be a game. It doesn't have many characters, either, or a ton of scenery. There's a man at the start, false-cheery and trying to help you, until you ask some obvious questions. You have security cameras you can destroy and park benches o rest at, though this is discouraged. Once I did so, I felt glad I'd snuck something by TPTB, whoever they were, but this soon passed. The ubiquitous LCD displays filled in so much more for me. They mirrored the double meanings of the game title itself: "You may not escape!" could be an expression of fear and concern for the poor player. Or it could be a stronger admonition that you don't have a right to, or we'd prefer if you didn't, because you don't really fit in there.

The double tone of the messages, though? Some give factually wrong information about the maze ahead, and some get it right, but it doesn't help you, because if you've mapped, there's a dead end ahead. Sometimes there's a useless "you can do it!" Other times, a message to kill yourself. My favorite one is "You should know that I donated to CAM two years ago? That's the Council Against Mazes. They've got a lot of big things coming up." This may've been my favorite line in IFComp--it's unclear whether the speaker wants to help or just wants to be seen as a help, but either way, well, they just don't get it--in the best case!

Having those contradicting messages from the LCD display made me think of some relatively unpleasant parts of my past, where people gave contradicting advice that I was apparently supposed to sort out on my own. And so I went into the weeds with other advice the LCD displays could've given, if TPTB (who may have hard or soft power) had been bothered. I suspect the author has thought about this a lot and wants us to think up our own. I was left with reminders of being told 1) I have no common sense and 2) I'm smart enough to work things out. These may not have come from the same people, or from very many people, but they certainly came from the loudest people, the sort that would think, say, a "motivational" message on an LCD screen would get people going, even though they expected much more for their own routine.

Perhaps the biggest contradictions: I should be glad the maze-square isn't bigger, since it would waste more of my time. But perhaps I should be glad the maze-square isn't smaller, as then I would feel no accomplishment getting out. Perhaps I should be glad things are colorless in the game, because that won't distract me from getting out of the maze, but at the same time, what kind of person am I that I would actually enjoy a colorless world? And the walls--a discussion of YMNE related how tall they were. I realized that TPTB could say, well, if you can't see over the walls, well, isn't it nice you're not being made jealous of the "real" world? And if you can, isn't it nice to have that motivation to get out? That sort of thing. I felt discarded, and apparently, I was smart enough to justify some pretty awful behavior from TPTB, but not enough to justify my own being-who-I-was.

For me there was also the specter of people trying to play both sides of the coin with my own experiences--whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, etc. It sort of reminded me how some people appreciate blues music but will be danged if they'll listen to, well, your own personal problems, no offense. "Hey! We haven't gotten to see the neat things you have!" while having their own things they show off for social status. Or people who've told me I should be so social also want me to understand why they're jealous of the rich internal life I have–and they never, well, quite get it.

And there was also the memory of how I once loved mazes, drawing them, trading them (sadly too rarely) and eventually realizing that no matter how different they look, they're all the same. I remembered a maze book my parents bought when I was young, and I wrote the path through in marker, and my parents told me not to get through it too quickly. Years later I found I'd never gotten to a few. The magic was gone. I no longer needed to feel competent getting through mazes. And, of course, mazes can be generated algorithmically now. But YMNE, unlike games with a maze popped in the middle, or even one that subverts it cleverly, reminded me of this, and of how solving a maze-book made me feel like I was working through something, and then I enjoyed playing RPGs where I might get lost but I knew I'd get through, and somewhere along the line, knowing there was an exit and I had experience became "big deal, anyone can do it with perseverance." So perhaps there's an angle of, we get certain shackles sluffed off on us, and we don't realize they're shackles until it's too late, and we can't get them off, and by then "helpful" people may say "I thought you liked that" or "Why didn't you say so earlier?"

Even escaping was unsettling. Maybe not so much for the final bit (it reminded me of the end of a Robert Cormier book, and I like Robert Cormier a lot) and I wondered if I'd really earned any feeling of accomplishment, because really, I'd seen this sort of thing before. I suppose one could feel guilty about going through too quickly and ignoring the graves, or maybe taking care of the graves and saying, well, I just did that to feel good. Did I really deserve to move on and pay my dues? Was I downplaying people who might be in a bigger maze than me? Was it silly to look through the dead ends, or was it selfish and over-expedient to avoid them? That all is survivor's guilt, pretty impressively captured by a relatively short game.

Other things happened maybe by accident, too, so they might not happen to you, but I imagine they happen stochastically and enough for people to say aha, this is important. I failed to do something the second time that worked the first. So I felt as though I'd slid, even though it was really more just because two items were close by the first time and I got lucky. Chance plays a big part--and we can beat ourselves up if it's against us, or puff ourselves up if it's not.

But replaying, I immediately pictured the LCDs with new announcements about how this doesn't really count and I already had advance knowledge, and that's just a bit unfair, isn't it? And shouldn't I have been observant enough to pick up on things the first time? Another conflict was between "oh you're not going to go back to replay this, you're going to forget and get lazy" and "oh you're using the mazes as a buffer to avoid IFComp entries that might challenge you more." Another thing I noticed on replay: (Spoiler - click to show)The path through is randomized, an impressive bit of coding in Inform 7, which gave me the image of many people having their own mazes, similar but different, and of course being alone and maybe even being prone to arguing over whose was tougher once they got out. I didn't decorate the graves the first time, and I almost had a "why should I help these people? I know how to get out" moment. But I did, out of duty, grumbling as I put the wrong thing in the wrong grave once or twice. In essence, I'd become like TPTB writing stuff for the LCD displays. Do what I do, figure what each person stands for, and move on. And I couldn't shake "you used to love mazes as a kid, when'd you get spoiled" versus "don't you want a more profound challenge than a maze? You're more than smart enough, you know."

Again with the being hit from both sides and paralyzed--and the more I played through, the more not-zen-koans came up. Sometimes they come from legitimate sources, and sometimes they're from trolls past or present, and sometimes they're stuff I thought, inspired by unpleasant people, where I'm vaguely glad at least they didn't hit me with them. These thought experiments are part of being human, and it's never clear how much you should turn them over before moving on.

YMNE doesn't hit you directly with them, but it certainly sets the stage with John Everyman at the start and the unhelpful LCD messages. We need to face that this trolling from both sides is there, and it hurts, and the more we can face, the better, but too much at once is crushing. YMNE provided a buffer for me to write down my complaints and observations abstractly. So I think it was more constructive for me than larger-scale horror games were. It's not so much the physical horror as the anticipation of horror and being lost. For me it was about working through contradictions, or trying to, for me. I wondered constantly if I was reading too much, or too little, into it. But it was an experience I'm glad I had, and I played it a few times while I wasn't quite up to reviewing the new IFComp game. The thoughts dribbled in.

So I got a lot out of YMNE. And ironically, for how boxed-in your character is, YNME let me think very freely about Stuff In General. I half expected an LCD message at the end saying "See? The struggles we put you through were worth it!" Or, perhaps, "You may think you got the point, but trust me, you didn't." Perhaps with dueling LCDs insulting me for being too dumb or too lazy to REALLY figure it out. YMNE may be a catalyst for recognizing this sort of thing in the future, not as a paranoid fantasy, but as a way to more fully accepting that things aren't fair, paved with rueful humor. It's not easy to learn and re-learn that, instead of a conspiracy of people making you miserable, there are enough people who don't care in different ways to sure make it seem that way. I value anything that helps me reflect productively on these matters, as YMNE did.

So, the pet peeves first. I wouldn't do this if IWYWD didn't have a lot to offer, because I try to avoid beatdown-style reviews. The first peeve? A title in all lower case. I'm a bit like the cranky narrator of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, here, as I've seen this sort of thing before, and it never ends well (though the ALL CAPS entries recently have been more than respectable,) and I immediately cringe at this sort of thing, expecting--and getting profanity later. (Small spoiler: it's not so gratuitous, as I have some sympathy for both characters in this work.) I'm still going to ALL CAPS its acronym in the review, though, so there.

The second sin? Timed text. Lots of it. I did my usual regex zapping with \(live:.*?\), and Notepad++ said "757 replacements." That's at least 15 minutes of pauses, assuming one second per pause, and it was often more. Running up against IFComp's judging period didn't help, either. That's not IWYWD's fault. But it does add a lot of bloat to people who want to get through it and explore different things to try, if the end could've been changed, and so forth. Because undoing doesn't give you a free pass back through the timed text.

But I'll tell you what. I bucked up and got through it. Because it was worth it. During the timed text, I did some exercises with my rudimentary equipment I have at home. I can't do this all the time, and I don't want to have to, but it was timely. I ignored the screen, thought of things as I did a set, and made my next choice. That's not sustainable long term, but IWYWD knew about the length it should be. Perhaps it was just flat out good enough that, despite my reflexive annoyances, I sat down and said this time, I'm not letting timed text bother me! Perhaps having less timed text than in years past softened me to say, okay, a bit is not so bad.

This digression hopefully isn't me showing off or venting but saying, hey, you too may want to find something worthwhile to do to wait for the text to show. Fix some tea or whatever. And sit down for a story of betrayal in love, though really, it applies to platonic relationships as well.

You, the main character, believe you've caught your partner cheating. They have a good explanation! They didn't mean it! (They never do.) You have the FACTS on your side, though, and you press them. They make confessions. They have excuses. They want you to stop before it's too late. Though it may already be. I was able to guess a good chunk of IWYWD's twist at the end, but not all of it. (Maybe the timed text forced me to sit back and think what might happen next more than I usually do!) That didn't make it any less effective. I've been on both sides of the argument, where I'm sure I'm right, and the other person is sure, and in both cases I know it'll end terribly. Too much has happened. The soda bottle is too shaken.

The dialogue here does not mess around, so I was able to feel the conflict. On reflection, the person you control has a lot of options of soft- or hard-pedaling their case, and the other character has something resembling plausible denials, if they could just explain. But you doubt your character is really open-minded. You definitely have cutting questions: "how could you do this? This was our movie." Then a bit more of the story comes out. This may not be perfectly fair to the player, who doesn't necessarily know the two people in the story have spent time apart. But it certainly can be interpreted as the character thinking certain things don't matter. Other details leak in later. The narrator, it turns out, has been negligent, in ways where you can't bang your fist on the desk and present good cold hard evidence. I didn't see all the branches, but in this case, not having much variance gives the impression that your character came into this expecting a victory, or what passes for a victory in an argument.

So reading IWYWD was useful-difficult for me. I know I can be distant, though I hope I'm not as possessive as the narrator, and I often wish I stood my ground as well as their partner. I've been thinking a lot about jealousy recently, though, about people who were upset I seemed to be having more fun than they did, or that I was able to use my time to do certain things. And the things they said. Some of them were people who should have been my friends on paper, and they'd approached me with similar facts that the narrator did, and I sympathized a lot with their partner. Of course, we probably all hope we have more in common with the partner than the narrator. You also get the sense that the target has had to tell a lot of little white lies to the narrator, some covered, some uncovered.

Maybe it's not so much lies as distortion. I remembered some people asking me why I did something a certain way, or thought something not very commonsensical, and wasn't that odd? And the truth was – I was covering for some of their obnoxious behavior in ways they'd never cover for me, or perhaps I was convincing myself they did care deep down despite some caustic behavior. There've been people I've had to break up with like that long after I hadn't seen them for a while, and I don't quite wish them dead, but I'd like to make them dead to me if possible. Well, except for being able to say "hey, if someone reminds me of X in the future, I want to steer clear of them."

One more thing: I was worried about severe melodrama from the title and I am glad to have been wrong on that count. I'd like to think the narrator's partner's response and frustration will help vindicate some of my own actions more fully and hopefully prevent me from diving in feet first to show I'm right. And I'm impressed about how IWYWD had several potential red flags that turned up far less serious than I imagined. So I, like the narrator, saw several red flags which came to much less than I suspected. But my experience was clearly happier.