Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I'm not sure if I've ever seen such a conflict between an author's name and a title. Here, we have someone allegedly happy claiming they are left with almost nothing. Yet there's also confusion in the game itself, and it's not clear which inconsistencies are intentionally there and which got slipped in there. After a while it gets too muddy. But there are some lines I really enjoyed. Which is not bad for such a short game.

Technically, it's impressive, and it suggests somebody did a lot of work to make the interface, even with an assist from the TIC-80 framework found on tic80.com. All the verbs you can use are on the screen. You can click on them or an arrow, and the game has, well, interesting responses to ones that don't work. That the game anticipated some of my weirder tries, borne slightly out of desperation at first, suggests the programmer has a sense of humor. My favorite was when you USEd the atlas by your friend, prompting my favorite line in the whole game: "I dont read books you nerd!" shouts your best friend. Other dialogue and descriptions are similarly simple yet wild. Someone describes themselves as "old school" for no particular reason, and that's all they have to say. A man showers in public as if this is perfectly normal. These all work together in the same way Mad Libs do, but then, they also have the long-term reach of Mad Libs.

All this is part of an adventure to do something with your life after having watched TV for eleven hours. And you get to do something! Reductively, this involves figuring the least senseless item to use on each NPC that pops up. The game often lampshades that the choice doesn't make perfect sense, but only after you get it right. Everything's a bit crooked, and I think that's intentional. If you do things right, you get money from an unexpected source, which lets you buy a train ticket and leaves you with a final message that's life-affirming as long as you don't think too deep.

Playing this I'm reminded of the super-brief Scott Adams parser games and even someone who entered such a game back in 2010, which happens to be when this story took place. The Scott Adams-ish game was a deliberate homage to the fun we got from such limited text. It was great fun to know this sort of thing existed. And here, the TIC computer at tic80.com is neat to know about. It's fun to see the other games, the versatility, and what looks like a nice community based on a retro-styled engine. And of course someone had to write a text adventure, and it's technically solid--you don't ever break the game! I even like the orange text on black background. However, it does run into basic problems such as how DESCRIBE (the game's version of LOOK) tells you certain items you already took are, in fact, in the room.

This one fizzles out after a few quick laughs, though. Taken straight-up and ignoring the special effects, it isn't a great work. I'm not sure how many of the typos are intentional. Some jokes are quite good. But I think even allowing for this, it doesn't have any of the sort of thing that make, say, Molesworth so great. For those who don't know Molesworth, he's the main character of a set of books written circa 1950, a wonderfully cynical student at a perfectly horrible English public school called St. Custard's. Everything is bad there, including his spelling and grammar, but he's observant enough that you want to follow his adventures, and you come to realize things like how he is friends with Basil Fotherington-Thomas, who says “Hello clouds hello sky” a lot. WRoM has the silliness without anything lasting, so it's an amusing curiosity. But when I replayed it, without the wonder of the new interface, I didn't see a lot of substance. It was fun and easy enough. It was a bit like watching a cartoon or sitcom you loved as a kid, and maybe you can see the holes in it.

So it didn't push me forward in any real way, but it also won't make you want to throw stuff. It may inspire you to write some semi-nonsense you always meant to, because the semi-nonsense here, down to the final "profound" message, made me smile. The scattershot jokes are never going to offend anyone, but they never quite cohere, either. However, the ending promises "an expansion of this world with more interactions is available," and I think one day I will give in to my curiosity. It will probably be far more fun and less draining than following social media and, despite being surreal, less confusing too.

It took a while to update Java so that it would run Wabewalker, and it was time well spent. (Note: download Java 17--you may wish to uninstall your curremt Java version first, too.) It’s a game that’s meant to be confusing at first, I think, but that's not just for its own sake, and certainly not due to the custom parser, which I found worked well. Finding a clue what to do (beyond "explore and take stuff") is a great introduction, and it’s quite possible you’ll solve a puzzle by accident and then realize what’s going on. And that all feels fair.

The oversimplified plot: keep getting killed, sending you to another person’s life, until you organize things right. You become three people total, in three different worlds. If you’re not careful, you get killed for good. At one point, I was quite legitimately worried there was an endless loop, and I very much felt the tension when I was trapped between two worlds, unable to open the third, because I’d forgotten about a door and instead looked for something else that changed game states. That something else was behind the door–I hadn’t taken careful enough notes. If this sounds vague, I want to keep it that way, to avoid spoilers.

Because this game has ambition. It forces you to say “Huh?! What?” and banks on you being able to sort that out. What are the panels with three lights for? How do they work? How do you change lights? And so forth. There’s a certain frustration when you’ve set more lights than you need to open something, then fewer, and you wonder what the heck you have to do. Because there are only so many possibilities, though there seem to be far more when you start.

After I figured what the puzzles were about, the rest seemed like scratchwork, and, well, it wasn’t. There were other moments I hoped I wouldn’t be getting killed like before. I thought I calculated it. But I was still scared. I’d spent all this time scratching out figures to possess three people’s consciousnesses properly, not really knowing who they were, and it had better pay off!

Other than these three people, though, there aren’t many you deal with. Someone invites you in to hypnotize you, for a short segue that lets you see beyond one area where you get killed. This confused me a bit since my host said “No, that worked wrong,” and I still got a scroll. But given I was a bit careless about the narrative, I found it trippy that somehow A might’ve killed B might’ve killed C might’ve killed A. One of them killed the other, though. There’s also a phone call over a landline, which I found amusing, because it plays on a few text adventure tropes. It wasn’t hilarous, because that didn’t fit the game’s tone, but it was a well-paced joke.

So overall, I was pleased. What could’ve been busy work felt like a legitimate adventure. I can’t rigorously decide how true to Buddhism it is, but I do like how things work–there are so many orders to solve the puzzle in, and you may loop around a while before getting it, and quite possibly it’s more rewarding if you loop around more.

As for issues? The end cheesed me off a bit once I knew what to do. All those similar commands to type felt anticlimactic, and between bad memories of Ultima IV shrines (meditating three times in a row, I would go do something trivial and notice my response time had timed out–plus, these games have two mantras in common) and being unable to use an up-arrow, I was ready to get on with things and not particularly close to inner peace. In short, the ending puzzles were what I feared the beginning would be. In fact, one item really seemed to cue that. I saw and thought “welp, I hope they’re not instructions for later.” This all contrasts with how solid the parser is in general and how economical the “open the locked door” puzzles are and how they weave together. So be prepared for a grind at the end, but it shouldn’t outweigh the rest of the game.

The custom parser overall worked very well, though I wish H (hints) would mention the MEMORY command. The author may have updated it by now--I suspect it is an oversight, since they did the hard work of tracking everything you have learned with MEMORY.

This review was moved from the authors' forum, where the author helpfully pointed out some oversights: most notably, hints are written into the game text, and I missed some places to mine credits. But I want it up here so people will have an idea how to approach a worthwhile game that may feel intimidating. The TLDR is, even if you miss some of its neat features, it's still a smooth, rewarding effort.

Cygnet Committee is a big download at 140MB, and I admit I was intimidated by the size and 2-hour playtime suggestion, which was accurate, but I’m glad I pushed through with it in the end. The concept is intriguing: infiltrate a cult that worships Joan of Arc’s AI and destroy it. There’s a good deal of backstory here, which is shown as you get further into the base, where you reach save-points that give you small videos. You learn why Joan of Arc is so appealing and why she rose to prominence. You have a map at the game’s main screen, which is useful to show you how far you’ve gotten. It’s tidy and well-organized and purposeful.

The map’s not intimidatingly big, and the main mechanic is this: you move your mouse to detect sounds. There are four ranges on the screen, and one of them gives the right sound, and the others give the wrong one. Sometimes it’s no sound that’s right, as when you’re crossing a minefield or rotted bridge, and sometimes you want a sound, when you’re fighting a drone or guiding your helicopter. Other times, you’ll start with the same sound, but it changes at the end–punching in a keycode, for instance, or listening for a robot patarol. And in some cases, the same sound in all four sectors means you probably need to solve a puzzle so things quiet down.

This is something that isn’t nearly as dramatic with text. Any sort of typing would drag things out. It’s a neat streamlined way to give you a feel for the game and the mechanics without having instructions, which is handy, because having to remember controls and such would get in the way of the big-picture instructions as you weave your way through the base. Overall, the tension worked well, though I’m not sure if it was fatigue or anticipation that had me anxious at the end. I do think the timed puzzles were ultimately a good idea, though I wish the game had started with 20-second intervals to make 7 successive moves instead of starting at 15 and moving up. I was immersed enough that, on the one-minute puzzle, I faced a drone, and its voice made me think “Ah, I’m surrounded? Not really! But I bet I would’ve been, if I’d tried to make a break for (that one protected area.)” Then when I figured how I goofed, I was a bit scared to do the puzzle. But I had no choice. Similarly I liked the ending–it felt appropriately dramatic. I won in plenty of time. I realized, looking back, the game had more of a sense of humor than I gave it credit for.

So in the big picture, it’s a very strong game. I ran into a few pitfalls here and there, and looking at the long list below, they don’t cancel out the positives above, but they may help people push through bits that seem rough.

In one place, I thought I made a mistake, but a trap was unavoidable, and I took the wrong branch to find healing the first time. The purpose of the trap was to direct you to (Spoiler - click to show)a small cabin off to the side with information and supplies, and once I realized that, it was okay–but since I hadn’t saved in a while, I panicked.

On winning, I was notified I could only replay hard mode if I got 500 credits, which is a lot, because random combats give you 14 or so credits for each win, and while you find some credits, it’s just way too fun to disable cameras or electric fields or whatever so you can skip over the sound-tracking parts. It was a steady enough process–I never expected to mess up, and I was sort of curious what happened if I did, but too often I was a bit worried because I forgot when I’d last saved. Instead of hard mode, I’d have preferred some notes on how to get to the final map area, (Spoiler - click to show)past the waterfall and on top of a cliff, where the sound barriers were the same in all four areas. Or maybe how to fight drones more quickly, so it took less time to unlock hard mode. I couldn’t seem to get the in-game temporary for-x-moves hints (also a neat idea) too work. (I’d also like the option to skip videos–especially the ending one once you’ve escaped–the second time through. I mean, the second time you see them in-game, you can skip, but I’m just impatient like that. It’s a case of, get me to the next good stuff.)

Still I hope to come back and see about all the possible deaths and places I missed and gadgets I couldn’t quite afford–gadgets that let you bypass sound-puzzles you’ve mastered. I admit a walkthrough would help motivate me to revisit the game, with all the others I want to see in IFComp. And I think, sadly, the file size and potential system requirements will leave Cygnet Committee underplayed and undervoted-on in the comp. Which is too bad. On finishing this, I was reminded I did not finish Dr. Sourpuss, the author’s first offering, and I probably proceeded too cautiously with it. I started that way as well with Cygnet Committee, but once I jumped in, time flew–and I still got done in under just two hours.