Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Having enjoyed the bottom half of the 2019 Adventuron Treasure Jam, I had high hopes for the top half. And I quickly saw why A Troll's Revenge belonged there. It's in the same vein as Wongalot's Dungeon Detective series: the world of everyday mythical beings trying to clean up the mess made by adventurers after gold and experience points. I enjoyed them and hoped for more. Of course there's always a worry that this humor is overdone or too meta or whatever. But when it works, it works, and in A Troll's Revenge, it does. The revenge itself is pretty PG-13. The puzzles are clever. I felt sympathy for the trolls--for all their being, well, bigger than humans, they're the little guys when it comes to wins and losses, aren't they?

It's the humans that strike first, though. Your older brother, who is bigger but not as smart as you, was suckered by an apple that put himself to sleep. When you wake him up (this is a fun introductory puzzle in itself, suggesting you get some righteous revenge for various sibling fights) you remember how dad said, never take gifts from strangers. But now's not the time to point fingers! If you don't get the gold your brother guarded back, there'll be a very, very mad wizard, and not the "create small three-headed beasts for the fun of it" kind.

There's some tutorial work here telling you to look and search everywhere, which isn't too taxing, because there aren't many locations. You must visit the apple tree that put your brother to sleep, and what you use an apple for is kind of ingenious. Well, to me. There's no violence perpetrated on the other adventurers, save for the one who gets greedy and walks into a trap that knocks him out for a bit. Mo' knockouts, mo' recovered treasure. The innkeeper, despite being human, turns a deliberate blind eye to your acts, remarking the adventurers were kind of obnoxious anyway.

But then there's a problem once you have all the treasure! You can't carry it all at once from the inn, and if you take too long, the adventurers will be on your tail. Just being able to schlep stuff back home would be too tedious, and then there's the worry about puzzles for puzzling's sake, but the final puzzle hit the spot for me.

There's a lot of "hooray for the underdog" stuff here, from the trolls the adventurers robbed to you against your older brother. It nicely subverts the whole "TROLLS HAVE LOW INTELLIGENCE AND HIGH STRENGTH" line your average RPG helpfully offers when you are going to create a party. And the adventurers, maybe, learn a lesson. If they want to. The revenge isn't especially cruel. And, oh yeah, the graphics are pretty good too.

This game has no reviews yet, and while it's done well with average stars, I'd like to do what I can to encourage people to play it. Maybe Adventuron got overlooked when it was starting out, but the more I see, the clearer it is that it was just what some people were waiting for, to write that neat small game people could enjoy down the line. I did, four years later.

The House at the End of Rosewood Street seemed to hit many of the right "how not to do things and get away with it" buttons for me. It had a dreamy mythic quality despite the realism. This offering by the author has its similarities and differences. It feels more like an experiment on the player than one with it. And it's probably been done in other contexts before. But it's thought-provoking enough. My main beef is that it provokes thoughts I've already thought about, not quite as exciting the second time through. Since it is shorter than THERS, though, it's more replayable and won't leave you hanging as long as to what it is, or what it does. (Also, you can look at the source code. I did.)

You are a vagabond, looking for passage to the city of Clarence. Along the way, you eat an apple, run into a caged pheasant, and eventually meet someone else who asks you to keep them company. It's not clear what the "best" way through is. Do you plant the apple? Do you release the pheasant? How much do you share with your new companion? And when the fellow traveler gives you your fortune, how do you cut the cards?

The looping that likely follows has you asking, did I do the right thing? What could I have done differently? And so forth. It leaves open the question of if there is a right way through. You have a few extra chances to ruminate.

The scenario is as surreal as THERS, but with significantly less guidance as to what to do. I ran through a few times until I got impatient, when I saw (Spoiler - click to show)my choices didn't matter except to have one section where you reflect on them say "But I did things differently" or "But I did them the same. So you can really only dream ever of reaching Clarence. It's something I think we've all thought of, and as a journey with tarot cards and the fellow traveler making vague proclamations, I realized I sort of heard what I wanted to hear on each trip through. Because, well, it was roughly the same.

It's not the first work I've played through that uses this gimmick, but it felt like there could have been more. Perhaps I should've suspected the thrust, given the tarot cards I always received. But I felt a bit ripped off even as I thought back to times when I realized I worried too much about what might or would have happened.

The House at the End of Rosewood Street stuck with me over the years, not due to any hugely lush detail, or due to being one of the most impressive entries in IFComp 2013, but due to its oddness. You play as a handyman who helps with odd jobs and drops off newspapers for your neighbors in a neighborhood not very conducive to easy text adventure navigation. Your main job, in fact, will be giving newspapers. It's a bit of a fishbowl, but nobody's leaning over you.

This is all pretty easy, what with a well-organized street, though it's a bit odd to have left- and right-hand sides implemented. Fortunately it's a minimalist game, and it's orderly, and using the up-arrow helps speed through the repetitive tasks.

Then there is that weird mansion at the north edge. For whatever reason, you need to go north twice there, too, after visiting Janice or Glenn -- and going east or west brings you back to them. Glenn's a bit of a grouch who says "Don't trample my grass." In fact everyone is painted relatively quickly. Lottie confuses a toaster with a stove. If you give the wrong person an item they wanted fixed (a toaster, a kettle) the responses are rather funny. And of course it's fun to ask people about specific neighbors.

There is some pain with the parser, as after each knock you need to type in a new key for conversation. This all feels like routine, though, fixing whatever one of your neighbors asks you to end the day, until there are ten newspapers in the stack instead of nine. There is a definite mystery here!

The characters remind me of Di Bianca NPCs (though his first IFComp entry came a year after,) albeit with far far fewer abstract puzzles. The parser errors, too, have that something. "What would the neighbors think?" It might be annoying in a more complex and realistic game, but it's a bit charming here. There's also an odd bug--I suppose a well-crafted game can get away with one such bug that make things more topsy-turvy. Each game gets one, and here, if you walk away from a house and come back after talking to someone, that's when the owner waves and goes back inside. Unintentional, unless I am really missing something. But it adds to the atmosphere.

The only reason I came back to THERS instead of other IFComp 2013 entries that placed higher was, well, I didn't solve it, after getting the ending where you loop around back to Monday. So people looking for history or value may be better served by playing Olly Olly Oxen Free or Robin and Orchid first. Nevertheless there's something special about sort-of recovering something, an alternate ending you never quite saw but hoped for, even if it wasn't quite clued enough. (It wasn't. No big deal.)

And even with those top placers, the thing is, I remember them better, their flow and so forth, and it would be like visiting an old friend. They follow all the good rules of strong game design and break certain too-stiff ones to give them originality. THERS is more that odd cafe nearby that left me both worried and intrigued, or maybe it is that friend that occasionally pissed you off but had some legitimately good points and you wish you'd been able to listen to them a bit more. It has a weird chaotic energy buried in its minimalism, one that encourages me to maybe do things wrong, maybe not on purpose, but to have faith that looking around these odd corners may turn up something interesting and valuable. I'm quite glad I revisited it. But all the same I hope to write a walkthrough so the next person who's curious doesn't have to stumble through that much. I hope they're out there.

This Speed-IF jacket game certainly got a few odd assignments--it goes from being "west of house" to meeting Norse deities and even roughly corresponds to a Stephen King novel which was made into a movie of a different title (Stand By Me). There's some tongue-in-cheek conformism with some of the odder jacket blurbs, with NPCs called D'Teddy and E'Vern, and there's a "bad" ending before the good one, which is decidedly antisocial and again clued by the credits.

The oddness of the map helps with the tension, as you walk away from your house to find something very extraordinary indeed. There's a surprise twist at the end, too, beyond the expected one to defeat the bad guys who are much, much bigger than you could ever hope to be. I found it funny. For two hours' worth of programming, it's quite good.

The SpeedIF Jacket 2003 works were all relatively entertaining, and if they aren't necessarily lasting, it's fun to see odd creative jolts can and do work, and The Body feels like a good example of it. Perhaps it won't last in my memory. Perhaps the author half-forgot they wrote it, too. But it's a reminder to stick two ideas together and go with them, why not?

I remember testing the Author's 2020 IFComp entry, Alone. It did a lot right. I forget if the author told me they had entered in 2019 (COVID was weird) but I did feel like they knew what they were doing, and the stuff I found was easily fixable, and the overall story was strong. Later I wasn't surprised to see they wrote other stuff people liked.

However, I was surprised to see an entry of theirs in 2019 IFComp, when I didn't really pay attention to the other entries. (I should have. I'm still catching up. There were some good ones!) It's a classic story of a haunted house, and it starts as a bully and his Rottweiler waylay you, then chase you once you give them the slip. All this feels very real for a ten-year-old, and then as you hide out in the abandoned house, the bully puts a rock against the door. So you're stuck.

And it's not just a matter of getting out. Yes, you need to get out, but there's a mystery that unfolds along the way. Finding certain items gives you brief visions of why the house is haunted. The reason is violent and standard. You find various items (a useful bottle of poison) with chests to open, and there is a journal describing certain events. There's a fire, too, which you need to douse.

I found the end escape sequence once you find the secret nice and dramatic. It's very indulgent in terms of giving you time to get out, but I found it quite satisfying to perform certain actions before I fled, and yes, there's a neat creepy ending if you just wait around.

So the story is very good indeed, but there are a lot of the sorts of beginner mistakes that judges may frown on. For instance, there's a journal under a bed, and there's still something under the bed after you take it. Something's in the journal, and if you read the journal twice, it's blank. Some verbs need exact input. All this seems fixable, but it can blindside an author working alone, and it did, and it seems the only reason something like this would've placed so low. It appealed to me, maybe mostly because of the "kid chased into haunted house" angle, and I'm not really a horror fan.

I'd love to see the author clean up a few things and make a post-comp release. I bet it would be easy for them to do so, especially with a few transcripts. Their comments in Brian Rushton's review suggested they just weren't aware of certain things like getting more testing, etc., and for all that's lacking, I'm still impressed. The author got the hard parts right. But with 77 games, it's easy to get impatient and give something like this a low score.

David Welbourn has a walkthrough out now, and that ameliorates any fears people may have of poking at it. It's a well-conceived story with a lot of tension and spooky items to find and a mystery that slowly opens. Perhaps this ruins the puzzling aspect of it a bit, but I was able to enjoy the design without too many struggles with the parser. (Small voice) I actually liked the story better than the author's 2020 entry Alone--probably that's just because it was my style. And I also recommend The Lookout. This is quite good, too, with bumpers in place.

Mental Entertainment doesn't present you with lush backgrounds or anything like that. Object descriptions are cursory. Your ultimate decisions don't matter, and in fact, you come to them quickly. But ME is more about painting a mood and bringing up some really tough dilemmas it's hard to shake. You sort of hope they will be abstract for a while. But progress has other views, it seems. It deals with addiction, a common theme with many twine games, which are generally more about unhealthy relationships.

Here, society is messed up, and it's spawning addictions. You are a case worker who must check on whether people who show patterns of addiction to virtual reality actually are addicted, and if it is dangerous. One is a police officer who spends time as a Sheriff in the old west. One is a woman who is on UBI (universal basic income) which, it turns out, hasn't even close to solved all our problems, but at least it prevented stuff from getting worse, as you learn if you chat around. She just wants some park that reminds us of nature as it was, and she can't help notice that AI makes giraffes purple, and so forth. A third is someone who is disillusioned with academia.

Talking to them gives an idea of how we got here, and they make compelling cases both for the sanity of losing oneself in Virtual Reality and for how society as-is is built to, well, drive most people crazy. This sort of thing could easily be melodramatic, but the author foregoes twisty prose. The simple descriptions maybe indicate that AI only sees stuff on the surface, as expected. The cop relates how his wife continually gets promoted at the drug company (Irony here! There's no good way to know if AIs determine getting people addicted to drugs is worth a tradeoff!) The woman at the nature park knows soy is no replacement for real food and worries what other nutrients scientists will find we're missing. The academic realizes how easy it can be to make money with no conscience, both in the tech sector and the "public service" sector. (There's an interesting backstory about public and private police forces.)

This is one of those entries that place in the bottom half of IFComp that really do turn out to be quite good. There seem to be several every year. Playing something like this I worry about the other stuff I may have missed. Perhaps it placed so low because it didn't just ask unsettling questions, but it asked ones that would leave us unsettled and not immediately say "Hey! It's cool to ask unsettling questions!" Without any bold massive "Oh it's so ahead of our time" assertions, the author has shown a lot of foresight, and he's painted some quick and deft pictures of existential problems that exist and are only going to get worse. This left me relieved I 1) was not the only person scared of progress and 2) wasn't the only one pretending to be scared of it for a quick buck. It's not the first entry to pretty much say, okay, here things are, it's what you make of it, read as little or as much of it as you want. But I was pulled in, almost glad someone else had considered disturbing angles I hadn't. And, well, I was glad there were text adventures to help alert us to the dangers of AI, and to remind us we don't need that complicated stuff.

When Douglas Adams died, I remember the printed tributes, of course. I forget if I found out on the front page of GameFAQs or on Yahoo! Mail at first (I had an sbcglobal address) but the news hit hard. I re-read his stuff and played through H2G2 again and even looked for copies of the binaries of Inform titles I hadn't played, because mourning is a great excuse to break copyright laws that protect ... the profits of a defunct, well-loved company who wanted their work to live on. I think I went and bought Starship Titanic, too. And I heard tell of a story Adams wrote that might be floating around the Internet, called Young Zaphod Plays it Safe. I tracked it down, eventually! It was neat to have more Adams. Up until then I'd really only been tipped off to Last Chance to See and enjoyed it--it made me realize, contrary to what Very Serious Adults said, you could care deeply about humanity and be frustrated and still have a good laugh, e.g. not in the "everyone's an idiot but me" sense.

I didn't know much about the post-Infocom community for text games beyond, well, there were languages like Alan and Inform 6 I didn't have the stamina to learn. But I felt there should be more tributes than "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide trilogy was really great!!!" Or even, among the people I knew, the consensus that H2G2 clearly beat out most computer games these days. But it seemed like the whole community was well beyond me, and I stayed away for a long while. Which was a mistake.

Fast-forward past a movie and Eoin Colfer writing a new book in the series and a Dirk Gently television series and so forth, and me discovering the text adventure community and realizing ... hey, these things still exist! I was bound, eventually, to stumble on the SpeedIF collection of Douglas Adams tributes. And I think this is the best of them. Perhaps the only reason I discovered them was that I randomly searched for Milliways after someone mentioned they'd made their own game.

There's no bad tribute to Douglas Adams, of course. Many of the games are faithful to the subject matter of H2G2 or Dirk Gently, focusing on one scene where you know what to do and need moderate imagination. They bring back good laughs and sad memories, and none of them are too obscure. They remind me of the laughs I had, when I heard that there were really smarter or more important or hefty books out there, when I as a kid just knew the Trilogy made me laugh more than sitcoms ever could, and I was still probably missing stuff. (Nobody told me Douglas Adams went to Cambridge or was the Sixth Python.)

ITGN focuses on Dirk Gently. More specifically, Dirk Gently has turned up in the afterlife on what may be his final case. There's someone he owes money to that he must avoid. It's all a bit tricky, especially with a cell phone that may go off at an inopportune moment. The descriptions are droll, mentioning that you have no cigarettes, and there's an anchovy to eat, if you want, and of course if you've ascertained it has no effect on the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

The funniest part for me was at the end, where a clerk asks people their religious beliefs and they say "free-market capitalism" (we joke to deal with obvious reality sometimes) or other not-quite-religions. It's well worth it to wait around and not do the obvious thing that moves the story forward, for all the possibilities. You want to linger there, just as you wish DNA would have hung around a bit longer. But of course you can't. There's a sort of choice at the end, which has an Adams-esque twist. It addresses something Adams never discussed in his books but surely thought about deeply.

ITGN is pretty compact and sensible without a lot of distractions, and when I read in the author notes that the game took too long for a speed-IF (it, like Douglas Adams, blew past the original deadline) I'm glad it was included, because it felt like the very best of the tributes. Years later it doesn't feel like cheating to have given the author the extra time, and after all, it wasn't really a competition. They did have a lot to say!

It's rare to me to see a tribute that goes beyond the source material or compiling it into something new. Perhaps I am just not as familiar with the Dirk Gently books as H2G2 (certainly, rereading Dirk years later, I understood a lot more, while I missed far less in H2G2 as a teen,) so I missed some obvious parallels. But if so I'm glad I did. It gave me a bit more Adams years later, and of course I felt frustrated I hadn't joined the community sooner, but at the same time, well--something like this is a great look back, once H2G2 the game has been dissected, or the unfinished Milliways source code was published, and so forth. It's a reminder I was right to wish for more. There may be other tributes that are longer and more detailed, but this tribute would feel fresh even if it wasn't written just after DNA left us.

ANaM is one of the text-adventure tributes to Douglas Adams collected on the wake of his death in 2001, and while I haven't reviewed them all, that's more because some are very short indeed and I can't write a full review of them. It's more just, yeah, I remember that, too. It and Into That Good Night and How Many Roads Must a Man Walk Down? are the three most evocative entries. This one features popular NPCs and well-known items that even casual H2G2 fans will know what to do with. (Spoiler - click to show)It's a lot easier to get a Babel Fish in this game than H2G2! It's not surprising someone went the "story of the end of the universe in one of the author's books" route for a tribute.

There are really only two puzzles, and neither is particularly difficult. You must get into the restaurant, only to find you have a third-class seat, which doesn't give you a very good view. So you need to find a way to finagle ID that will get you to the first-class lounge.

This final puzzle isn't very tricky, and anyone who has read the books will figure what to do, but it is something poor confused Arthur Dent never quite managed to do. (I won't spoil it!) Reaching the first-class lounge gives a gratifying ending as well. I don't know how much the author wondered their work would last, but it's still moving to me, all these years later.

I felt slightly guilty I didn't really get So Long and Thanks for All the Fish as a kid. I do remember Douglas Adams taking forever to release it and wondering what the holdup was. He had high standards, of course, and the H2G2 trilogy was hard to live up to. I figured once you wrote something like H2G2, the floodgates just opened and you kept getting cool cosmic ideas. Of course, it doesn't work like that. Which is sort of a relief, because if it did, the rest of us would have nothing new to write about.

That said, SLaTfAtF grew on me. And reading a tribute about it instead of stuff in the H2G2 game canon or three main books reminded me, yet again, there was so much more to Adams than his jokes that challenged basic perceptions or clever wordplay.

The scene roughly replicates when Arthur goes to visit Wonko the Sane outside the Asylum, except you are not Arthur, and the person inside is a very tall man. He has a card you must trade for. It's not a very hard puzzle.

The ending has a finality about it that almost seems unfair. Most of the time, a game ending so abruptly wouldn't work, because it should last longer. (We could argue all good games end too soon, which is better than too late, but this ends way too soon!) Here, though, it works, because Adams indeed left us way too soon. The calculated silliness of the final scene mitigates the sense of loss a bit. But I found it a neat way to say good-bye, even though Adams has been gone over twenty years.

This and Into That Good Night and A Night at Milliways may be the most robust of all the DNA tributes, but all are worth your time. They capture the sadness beneath the big laughs Adams gave us and how we wish he'd given us more of both.

The SpeedIF Jacket competitions weren't supposed to be very high art, and this certainly isn't. But it is entertaining! It has throwbacks to Infocom games with the footnotes (with the appropriate meta-humor, of course,) and it has a relatively nonsensical point-scoring system that gives points for, as far as I can see, paying attention to the quotes given to inspire the game.

As it's Speed-IF, it has a relatively quick solution, and in this case it's rather sensible if you think about it, though you may have to see what a few items do and get killed a few times, as you look to kill the Ogre King who assigns you a quest to kill some other people who don't seem too evil. There's also a unicorn friend who deserts you early on.

I generally like games that do odd things with scoring and weird meta-humor, and while it might feel forced in a longer more serious work, it works pretty well here. There's a bad guy you can kill, anchronisms, checks to make sure you read the instructions, and even a way to make a hash of everything.