Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

The title and subtitle here are very cryptic. Lucky day? You're sixty years old! It all feels a bit sarcastic, really. What can you find on the beach? Wouldn't more moderate weather be luckier? You're not searching for treasure, or anything.

Plus, for the most part you seem to have bad luck, or a tendency towards it. You are simply walking along the beach, for your health, but not too fast, or you will get a cramp. But if you stay too long, a seagull "hits" you. Quite frequently. I was unable to figure out any pattern.

The mechanical object of the game is to make 3000 steps–you start around 7000, and you need to get to 10000. So, thirty moves, since the average is 100 steps. I reverted to save-scumming to avoid those pesky seagulls, because UNDO was disabled. This perhaps reinforced how getting around is that much slower than you get older, though I don't know if the author wanted quite THAT level of reinforcement. There were signs along the way I read, too, about the importance of not messing with nature. Fair enough. Were you watching for a rare seasonal animal? If so, where were your binoculars?

The game has five distinct endings, which is not bad for being fifteen minutes long. They're not too hard to figure out. I don't think the author wanted the best one to be hard, because they were just going for a general vibe, but you can poke around too to find them all. The toughest one (I think) is being a jerk.

While the lack of UNDO and random seagulls may be a dubious design choice, it is attractively laid out – you can click on hyperlinks to use your senses, though sometimes it has you TASTE the sand. The writer uses graphics well. The fixed-width green font gives a retro feel that fits in with being old, and it contrasts well with the graphics, too.

So while it's not a grand production, it's all very tidy, and I enjoyed the twist at the end. It made sense of the subtitle without feeling sentimental or too random and gave a new dimension to the walk, too.

I tend to like the sparse humor in DiBianca games. It's particularly evident in Operative Nine where you, with your trusty PQ-807 microcomputer, LINK to various things in an attempt to infiltrate and upset the Agency, who are a step ahead of CAMFOR. It's unclear who the good guys or bad guys are. This provides, for me, part of the amusement. You are just doing stuff. There's no great evil to repel or instigate. You just have a list of tasks: put lethargex in the ventilator system, or replace the dossier on Person 372 with a fake one. None of this is done via inventory management.

Instead, the hacking has small mini-games where you, as a pair of @'s, run around. If you’re lost, step on the ??'s. Many of the early ones have Sokoban-style logic. There are boxes, 2-wide, to push onto pairs of brackets. Later, there’s a copycat logic puzzle. You have one puzzle where you move, say, four things around with arrows, though if one hits a wall, it doesn’t move. The brackets are in an odd formation, so you have to figure out where to put things. There’s a conveyor belt (the text graphics are particularly nice here) and even a timed puzzle where you have to cut a fuse. That was probably my favorite one once I solved it, because the seemingly most intuitive and direct way wastes a precious turn or two, and the bomb goes off. I solved it with zero turns left. Fortunately, in all the games, you can reset with an R at any time, even if you’re only trapped in a no-win situation e.g. a dead end in a two-level maze. In puzzles with multiple levels, you don't go back to level one if you fail. I enjoyed bashing into walls in an "avoid traps in the darkness" puzzle. The various different text scenarios are rather jolly especially for how abstract they are. Some are even a bit whimsical with the author showing off things he can program, like a quasi-hide-and-seek crowd-pleaser where you mow someone's lawn and search through a hedge.

There's the usual learning curve, including a tutorial (LINK MODULE in your inventory) that's kind of hard to bungle but quite fun for all that. The other inventory items are similarly useless to you except as accessories that help complete your objective once you solved the abstract puzzle. Then they vanish. I made the (sort of) mistake of just opening all the doors I could going north, so I wound up going doing some of the harder puzzles first and missing easier ones. So, with several things to do on my list, I was wondering just how hard it would get! I felt silly when I backtracked, even as I solved things pretty quickly. The last thing I did actually involved using the EXAMINE command on something that wasn’t really hidden. I’d been pointed to the right room. There was just a "X of Y" and I kept examining the Y not the X. Maybe the tougher puzzles fried my brain.

The humor is quick and effective. Since you’re a spy, you don't have time for long chats once something works, and your boss, who speaks through your earpiece, doesn't either. Often the stuff that’s left out is what’s really interesting, as the dialogue makes you say "Wait, what about ..." and there are several different possible amusing reasons why We Don’t Talk About Such Things In This Business.

I have theories why this didn't place as highly as usual. I think perhaps the puzzles were puzzlier than usual, which worked great for me, but not so great or others. I really like ones where you can step back and eliminate possibilities before diving in if you're careful, and I'd like to see more of them. But of course they're frustrating if you don't have that initial insight. Another problem might be, some were really long, and while you could reset, you couldn't save in-game as Inform didn't offer saves between parser moves. I made a few finger slips myself when I knew what I wanted to do, and I had to start all over. This was okay back in the 80s, and it's okay with an emulator where you can save states, but I did get a bit frustrated when I was almost all the way done, and I imagine it's tougher for people who feel less comfortable in such situations.

Such state saving is not trivial especially for the puzzles with moving pieces, and it'd require some grindy testing, but it seems worthwhile for a post-comp release. Perhaps another reason was, it just wasn't most people's sort of shuffling things around. I was able to sit back and appreciate some of the logic or logic jumps pretty quickly. I am a more experienced Sokoban player than can really be healthy, so the wrinkles added to successive puzzles felt quite fun. I enjoyed the conveyor belt puzzle as well. The trickiest one was the copycat puzzle where you started with one percent-sign to move into place, then two, then three, then four. Organizing them spatially was tough, but the key was to hit one against a wall (inner or outer) to straighten them all out. Another puzzle had four pins to move up and down, where pushing one moves another up and down, and I avoided moving them against the edge until I did some arithmetic to prove that you needed to push a pin against the upper or lower wall.

Operative Nine is simple to understand and to get going, and the variety of mini-games kept me happy. However, I can see how someone might get really stuck on one, if this isn't their thing. I think also there could be a few hints as to how and why solutions work, beyond your boss saying "keep at it," especially for the final puzzle in a set of four. Perhaps you could trigger an option to tell you you're on the right track, or if you made things unwinnable. This feels like user-friendliness, though.

This review may discuss puzzle mechanics more than plot. Other reviews on IFDB as of now focus more on the story, and I hope this one complements them, and it seems most of us enjoyed both the puzzle and the story, if in different proportions. You see, I never considered there was a way to work around the puzzles, or maybe I saw it and blew it off. (The observant player should find it quickly.) I was just glad to have different abstract puzzles make sense in the flow of a text adventure, ones that required scratch paper, but definitely not too much.

PGJ is the first in the Galaxy Jones series I've played. Given how it helped me ease back into reviewing after a two-week break during the comp to get back on track, I'm favorably inclined to check out the others. It has no walkthrough, but a walkthrough's not necessary with the skippable puzzles to unlock doors. The necessary non-door points require standard or relatively intuitive parser commands. There are two bonus points I took a couple playthroughs to get. They are nontrivial, and I questioned why you would want to do such a thing, until I re-read the logs and such. Then I actually felt kind of selfish for a bit.

You are Galaxy Jones, who best as I understand it keeps saving Mars and this time has to board a Siriusan ship to stop it from shooting Mars up with a huge destruct beam. This is a big quest, and (you'd assume) a big spaceship, but the map is hardly overwhelming. The spaceship seems empty, except for a voice over the intercom, and the how and why are revealed as you work through the story.

There are two ways to make progress, and one helps with the other. Your KIM device hacks locks. The first one needs no puzzles and opens up the spaceship. Then, the more complex ones require puzzles to solve. More important areas, unsurprisingly, have more complex locks and puzzles. A personal storage locker has four buttons, each of which twiddles some subset of four switches between blue and red. Elsewhere, you have nine. Along the way, you find different documents with Siriusan print that you can SCAN, and it helps you slowly understand their language and their motivations for wanting to destroy Mars. Not everything is translated, though. Proper names are left obscured. I like this a lot. It makes sense, because names are harder to give context to your scanner's algorithm or whatever, and there's still a bit of solving I got to do on my own e.g. "Oh, I recognize those letters as a name in another document, even if I don't know what they mean." It keeps the aliens feeling a bit alien, too.

Given that you'll probably quickly realize there's a countdown of some sort, this is a bit nerve-wracking, and it'd be nice to keep track of what documents you haven't re-read since your last successful scan. I had more than enough time, but if the author wants to add a cute feature for post-comp release, there it is.

As for the puzzles, I don't think I've used linear algebra more than once before in a game. That sounds hifalutin, as you don't have to have taken linear algebra to figure it out yourself, and you've probably used linear algebra concepts without knowing you have. (Operative Nine, for instance, they can quickly show you need to do something special with a puzzle.) So it strikes me this sort of game would be lots more fun to teach linear algebra than, you know, a 100-level college weed-out course. The TLDR is that you can say, okay, I need to push 2 of 4 of this button set, and so forth. This and other puzzles reminded me of the nice simple mix in Fred Snyder/Gamefic's 2023 entry Focal Shift, but it's more sophisticated here, with a learning curve, and the puzzles are tied into the story more clearly. So I found it fun to contrast the two. In fact, if you find PGJ a bit too tricky, you may want to play Focal Shift to warm up. It's a different sort of sci-fi, with random but simple puzzles. PGJ's are not randomized each walkthrough, but you're probably not going to remember the precise sequences if you replay to get the last point or two.

One of the puzzles takes a different tack. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit one of the doors made me wipe down my screen, which didn't need it THAT much, I swear. Why? Well, there's a puzzle that requires close inspection of the Unicode characters the author has inserted. A few glyphs are shaped like an L, each with its own diacritical mark, and most are different enough so you don't go crazy saying "oh these are the 2 L's which almost look like each other." But in my case, some of them were dotted in different places. I was unable to tell if one dot was a dirt speck. You need to figure which is which to unlock a door. So what about those quasi-L's? They're part of the Siriusan language. You may have guessed what part, based on the mysterious things you hear in the base. Solving them quickly may require backtracking a step that seems like a no-brainer to have in place, though if you were very observant and used a bit of scratch paper, you may get the puzzle right away. For which you should feel smart. I mean, smarter than if you just plain solved it. I like this use of Unicode, as it appears in the untranslated Siriusan and a critical puzzle.

One of the control rooms provides a clue of what you need to do to prevent the ship from carrying out its destructive mission, and they layout foreshadowed another plot concern: (Spoiler - click to show)you will meet the person making regular announcements on the intercom, but should you overpower or befriend them?. There's always the feeling the drama is going to jump once you open the right door, and yes, it does.

The first time through, I got 9/11 points (well, okay, 8/11 because I flubbed the first non-logic puzzle and got killed but saved Mars) which was satisfying given the other IFComp games I had to play. The final bit is legitimately different from the beginning, and it leans more towards classic parser mechanics. To launch my escape craft, I actually had to play some guess the verb, but it was oddly appropriate. Despite the countdown stalling out with each parser error, I still felt the time pressure. I enjoyed tracking my current rank as well. While I found the last two points the toughest to get, others may be leave the logic puzzles until last, using the helpful cheat. There are also several bad or suboptimal endings which are fun to page through, beyond the ship blowing up. You may wish to save at the start of a certain timed puzzle as well, just in case -- (Spoiler - click to show)you're left with plenty of time to do the bare minimum, but doing everything leaves little margin for error.

In the utterly pedantic department, there are a few hairsplitting things that would be cool to see in a maintenance release. But they are firmly in the "hey, if these pile up enough, they're an excuse for a deserved signal boost/low-risk update" camp. I feel bad listing them here. You may find them, too, but they're easy to shrug off, and I know from experience they're the sort of thing I know of but push to the back when I'm writing or testing more mainstream features.

This is a long review for a short affair. Perhaps other works will have more to say, and more rigorously, than One Step Ahead, and without the browser errors. But sometimes a short work gives me more time to look through things it reminds me of than a long review would. It reminded me of one point of embarrassment: I started playing around with AI image creation, saying "well, I can follow the lines and so forth of things I want to draw and compare them to how-to-draw texts or online tutorials." But I wound up just creating all manner of silly things. I didn't get good at drawing, at least not yet.

The story is simple. It's a precautionary tale about asking for help from a potential bad actor, getting it, and learning to rely on it. Then bam! By the time you realize you're in too deep, you're stuck. Perhaps it's a genie who gives a special power, a wish that goes awry, or the devil helping Faust get fame and fortune so forth. Or even MacBeth knowing what the future roughly holds. Or that one less pessimistic short story by Julian Barnes from 1980 or so where the narrator gradually gets more wishes coming true including Leicester City winning the English top flight(!) and eventually becoming their top goalscorer, before just wanting to be happy. He is sent back to his ordinary life as if nothing changed.

Now, none of us are probably ever going to get big chances like those. Or at least they wouldn't come up before the Advent of AI. Here the main character here cheats to seem smarter than they are. Just once. Everyone else is probably doing it, and not doing so would only be ripping themselves off. Right? That video where a university professor asks "Would you want someone who cheated on their engineering exam working on a plane you flew in?" doesn't apply to AI. So the ball starts rolling.

Because some forms of electronic help that seemed like cheating, then, aren't now. When I was a kid, people debated if calculator were ruining the rigors of thinking and so forth. They're accepted now--they help give us more time to grasp concepts! And I remember how even the calculator's output helped me learn. Why was 1/98 .01020408? I learned about infinite fractions that way. Word processors helped me type quicker so I could nail down racing thoughts. I can do even better now, speaking into my phone, and out comes, well, this review. I'm not distracted by the click-clack of keys, and actually saying something helps me turn ideas over in my mind that much more. The phone can correct spelling too!

Of course, this has its limits. It can't help if my writing stinks. Still, I got to depend on them. Adults for a while have almost bragged about how their smartphones help with their big busy jobs. And it's pretty easy to detect if somebody doesn't know how to actually use math or put words together, AI aside. And really, why should they be punished for not being able to do a five digit multiplication in their head quickly, or even not know how to spell camouflage, right? If they know other skills? So is there some middle ground?

Maybe, but I'm clueless about it. The "other skills" AI helps you use are still dubious. Does it free up more time to read AI-curated social media feeds? It all feels like a memory from an intro college statistics class I had where the assignment was to learn a relatively simple programming language. Instead of everyone actually typing in five lines of code and printing out the results of a random distribution, one person did so and Xeroxed their results. (Particularly silly because they could've just xeroxed instructions for what to type in.) AI use can be even more flagrant than this, but it's far less detectable. And it feels like a friend. Well, at first. Here you just follow a progression of cheat in college, cheat in grad school, cheat at your job. The twist is that the AI seems to be calling you back. Here I was reminded of Douglas Adams's Genuine People Personalities ("Ghastly" - Marvin.) It knows you owe it one. Maybe Adams didn't just foresee Wikipedia.

There are no deep philosophical revelations, but it seems to capture some of the "why do things the long way" ethos from college. Or at least the loud people who just wanted that silver bullet to a nice job or prestige, and they look for it several ways. Now, there are good shortcuts and bad shortcuts, and it's nontrivial to suss out which are which. It takes time, probably more time than AI needed to blow up. But technological progress you can learn from scared me before. I've seen it from playing chess and getting a report on the mistakes I kept making. What else will it be able to do?

All this made for some psychological horror for me, though it would've been more thought-provoking with more meaningful detail. It feels like a "my lousy job" for students, looping to pessimism I can't exactly disagree with, but this sort of thing needed and needs to be written. And it is, thankfully, free of AI slop. Other games must be out there, more rigorous and less fatalistic. I do hope for a way forward, but then again, it may be hard to find. And once we find one, I'd be worried how much we used AI to get it.

I'm reviewing a fellow author's game to give a signal boost to something sparsely reviewed before comp's end. However, I'll also note it's one where reading a review may spoil the effect. TLDR: please do work through the timed text.

140mb to download for an ostensibly ten to fifteen minute game is a big ask, even with download rates what they are. At 500 Mbps, this will take almost five minutes. (I was salty about this, having downloaded on the final IFComp weekend, stonewalling thoughts of hours or days I'd put off the reviewing I wanted to do. Then I got saltier when Unity crashed out due to insufficient memory. Again, my fault. I just had to close a couple web browsers.) So I really wondered what the payback would be, especially since I read in other reviews there was considerable timed text, which made me cringe when Twine came on the scene.

I can't say I'm very familiar with the history of regime change in Mexico beyond what is received knowledge, but it's made pretty clear here that you had 10 days of turmoil, and a lot of people got killed for potentially not much progress. Perhaps that's the point, that this sort of thing seems senseless, and people can get riled up into a cause. What's also made pretty clear is, you're about to die. You may or may not have regrets. The sergeant who will shoot you will be back in ten minutes. That's enough time to look back on your whole life.

The game often repeats the choices you make in your internal dialogue, typed out on the screen as if by a typewriter. This got me rather impatient for its end – yet I knew it was my end too, perhaps. I knew the end. I would be shot. But I did not know when the sergeant would stop by. Was it based on ten actual minutes of game time? Or would sitting and waiting draw it out?

The rambling internal dialogue works. It's not disjointed, but it touches on the people you met or should have known. For nineteen years old, you've had a life. You will have at least one child you will never meet. You wonder who will know or care you're gone. And of course you are confused. Some thoughts are the confusion of a nineteen year old, and some are stuff we're still not going to figure out. By the end I felt a bit callous I was doing small exercises as the timed text came up. The character was reflecting, but they needed someone to listen to them!

The choices don't seem to make a difference. This isn't the first work to use that trick, but in this case, it reinforces that revolutions we want are out of our control. But this isn't a particularly shocking revelation. So I was pretty much ready to just say, okay, this is has its points, but it is it really worth the disk space and the download time and so forth? What new does it bring?

So I think it has something over the Twine games back in 2015 that I saw, that discussed love more than your own mortality and what have you done with your life. They felt like a need for self-expression, and if they seemed autobiographical and self-focused, perhaps done more for their author or friends like them, they served a good purpose even if they bounced off me. This did not bounce, and it reminded me of another work from the dawn of Twine, Anna Anthropy's Queers at the End of the World, which I still appreciate. It seemed to open up the possibility of quick timed choice games where you don't, well, save the world. Both times, I was surprised how interested I was in this person very much unlike me. (How different? After, I looked back with a laugh about how my parents both wanted grandkids and warned me stridently against having a kid before I got to/through college and would thus be older than the narrator, with his one kid that he knows of. Different lives, indeed.)

As for presentation? I was kind of impatient that I didn't have at least a watch or something to tell time, but of course, it was 1900, back when computer games and the theory of game design weren't exactly a thing, and violent revolutions where a country's leadership changes hands wouldn't be centered around details like that anyway. But I liked the choice to close your eyes or not. You can't look at the line drawing of the sky and a mountain and have your next thought, which ... nice. There's sobbing on a loop in the background. It would've been easy enough to mute my speakers, but at the end, I realized I did not.

This entry had a much higher "what happens next" to "get it over with" ratio than I thought it would. Perhaps it's because I haven't read many such works about Mexico that it felt new. But it worked.

So, yeah, I was just surprised how after all that, which I thought I got tired of, I still didn't want to be the first to be shot. I had more things to think, honest! If only I could put a similar priority on my actual life more regularly. Maybe it's not the experiment the author intended to run on me, but I'm glad I went through it, as I saw it. I originally played this hoping just to boost a sparsely-reviewed game, and I was pessimistic I wouldn't have much to say. I can't say it was fun, but obviously the author wasn't going for that, and unlike some works not intended to be fun, I didn't walk away saying "Geez, that was really no fun."

Please Do Not the Cat doesn't inspire confidence with his title, but fortunately, the vanishing word is deliberate, and the game's header throws in a verb between Not and The, describing -- well, what you need to do with the cat in the game, or the complete opposite. It's usually pretty clear which. The cat has jumped into your life, or more precisely, onto you while you were sleeping on your couch, through an open window. Please do not wake the cat.

You can't move, but actually, you can, to go look a few places around the couch. This gives the impression that things aren't going to be very realistic, but there's some quick humor here, and once you're able to move around, you realize you need to feed the cat and play with it a bit, so it's relaxed enough for, well ... I won't spoil it, but you can guess.

So there's some basic apartment game + needless surreality in the your basic apartment game, which meands PDNtC won't be high art, but it's fun enough to figure how to read the cat's collar or make friends or play with it. It's not a mean or dark game.

When looking through TALP games I hadn't reviewed, I immediately said "oh no" to this, but it's pretty well-contained, and despite some minor verb-guessing, it's not going to frustrate you, and certainly after a minute or two I was pretty convinced it wasn't. So I got through quickly. There are some alternate routes, and how to talk to the cat and capture it are rather cute. When it's over it's even a bit sad. So while PDNtC is a bit plain, it's also relatively rewarding, and it focuses on the right parts of a Your Apartment/slice of life game.

So it's the sort of game you may say hack no to, and there is some verb guessing, but it's nothing terribly painful account because the world is pretty well contained. You wind up doing things that cats like kind of like bringing them food or toys, and then it's over it's a bit sad, too, but it's the right ending. And it reminded me of various cats I'd made friends with, and the ways I'd made friends. So it may not have intended to have great range, but it was nice and homey and (I think) did for me what the author hoped.

Adventurous Extraordinare starts with an intriguing premise: you're a detective who is trying to solve fairy tales gone wrong. The graphics are really very nice. It gets a little too absurd, and the custom parser doesn't accept simple things that should work, and I think that's part of the problem with writing something in the different than your first language. Those two things combined to make what should have been a simple and relatively tidy game with fun quirks become something rather tricky to play, where you know what do to but the parser just isn't quite cooperating. Perhaps I would've given up if I didn't want to review all ten games for the TALP jam. And yes, this was one I passed on, when I initially wrote reviews. It made more sense the second time through. But the writer gave themselves a lot of hurdles to jump over, and despite some clear diligence fixing bugs in their change log, it didn't always work.

Your first order of business is to get out of your office, which is locked, and of course you've misplaced your keys. This implies you actually sleep there and also makes for a handy lead-in to the tutorial. You can also read the writing on your office door, which is your name backwards (a nice touch: it's chosen from five random first and last names that fans of crime fiction will recognize, and of course it reads correctly once you're in the hallway) but you just don't recognize it. While AE is meant to be absurd, there's a lot of reaching that can strain belief, especially when you go to meet a huntsman who, the game says, you should really help people, and then he traps you and captures you. So you're bounced around a bit with a rather wonky plot.

Snow White and the evil queen get involved, too, and I think probably the strongest bit is the main puzzle in the forest, where you need to find a map in order to make it to the castle, and you bump around randomly until then, but fortunately, there really aren't very many rooms. The ending bit is kind of cute, too, because it's pretty clear what to do once you're in the castle with not many ways to get out but at the end, you actually have five different ways to answer the question the queen asks of you, which is one that's pretty standard for fairy tales. There are two standard answers, but the three non-standard ones make the payoff worthwhile.

Worthwile enough to forgive the annoyance of having to type WAIT TIME instead of JUST wait, or LOOK AROUND instead of LOOK. L is also used, but my brain had a brief blip where I saw them both and LOOK AROUND captured my attention, because it was a lot longer. Unintended consequences. And the inventory limit is a bit frustrating, and there's a way to lock yourself out of the ending, which I guess makes sense physically (all your items are taken, and you need to get them back,) and the player should know better. But it's kind of mean for such a relatively cheery game in a tutorial jam.

The author promised a sequel, or Day 2, and it arrived, replete with bears and gruel and even a troll. But it was unsolvable because I could not type a hyphen in. Looking at their itch.io page, they'd moved on to other whimsical but intriguing small projects. I was glad to see they were still creating and trying new stuff. But I sort of wish they'd have found more time to nail down AE's flaws--oh, and get Day 2 tested. I was able to read the source to see their plans, and it was similar to Day 1, and I was sort of sad I didn't have the chance to play through their intended experience.

The Rotten Wooden Room is a relatively linear game where, fortunately, there are much more exciting places to visit than the room where you start. It's got nice graphics, and it's pretty clear what to do. The fantasy and text adventuring troops are pretty standard here. You find a pickaxe to dig at gems, you give magic items to magic beings and eventually, you have a happily-ever-after ending. It's quite pleasant, and although there is one bug that had me baffled, it's well organized enough and you don't have to guess the verb. The place with the bug, the author simply misplaced a door in another room, so you go to unlock the door where it should be, and it says it isn't there. It's a puzzle of its own, which isn't terribly unwelcome, since nothing else overtaxes your mind.

It was written for TALP, and the tutorial bit is adequate, explaining what to do and how to get started, and it helps you in bits and pieces all the way through. While it's not necessary, it's still refreshing to see this sort of follow-up. The author cares. Though it does come off feeling like a first work, because the author has the basics of what a text adventure is down, and they don't make any big mistakes, but besides the bit at the end which I found very nice, it doesn't really start to achieve personality. It's still a pleasant journey.

And it's a relatively linear one. There are only two rooms that branch, and as you'd expect, you find items in each dead end that help you move on other places. You're not going to get lost here. You can even dispense with examining and such a lot of the time, once you know what to do, and it's not hard to find your way through again. You wind up making one guardian flea and making another happy with a gift. There's rudimentary dialogue.

I'm glad the author stopped by to write this, even if it isn't a world beater. It's interesting to see the sort of things people with a more artistic background come up with (they have a nice portfolio of other stuff on itch,) as I sure couldn't brave going into an art jam for drawing stuff. I think this is much better than what I'd be able to do. When I replayed this, I remembered some of the images very quickly, such as the castle with the clouds. So while it may not blow you away, it's more enjoyable and has more substance than most games that place low. It's a bit of a shame the title made it seem potentially dreary, because it really isn't.

I recently replayed MToH when it came up as CASA's "random game" because it seemed familiar--I clicked through, recognized it and forgot enough of it that I enjoyed revisiting and rediscovering while writing a walkthrough and drawing a map. I hadn't written a review back in 2021, because I felt I didn't have a whole ton constructive to say.

MToH isn't a huge game, clocking in at fifteen rooms in your eccentric departed (but maye not dead) aunt's house. Well, three to start, until you find a light source in the tutorial. That opens up five more rooms, and there are a few secret doors and passages to open, too. So it felt like more than fifteen rooms, but not in the bloaty way, especially with the door that's locked from the inside. There's mystery there.

The tutorial portion makes an odd first impression, as you TAKE and DROP an item you need to use very soon later. But that first impression was reversed by how the tutorial cued other things later. Some very good TALP entries wound up ditching the tutorial after the introduction, and I think that's a missed chance. Here there's nothing profound, but the author generally knows when the player might need help.

The first secret passage you'll open up will probably be to the ending room, where it's pretty clear you have to find stuff and bring it back. There's a safe among the locked doors. Its combination is found in two parts, though on replay, you don't need to read them in-game. There is also one barrier where it was obvious what items to use, but I had a bit of trouble guessing the right verb, as the usual violent ones fell short. (Spoiler - click to show)DESTROY was it.

MToH does a bit of everything -- it uses a bit of colored text for important items, gives tutorial nudges where needed, has secret passages and gives a good variety of verbs to use without making you guess too much. It's not especially heavyweight, but I was glad to visit it, and I was amused to remember how, now and then, I ignored further passage west of the main branch room, because I assumed there was a locked door there just like to the east. It was a weird blind spot to have. For whatever reason, I remembered the safe combination, or that it was one of four values. This gave an eerie feel I think the author intended. I enjoyed coming back to it.

The mechanics of Swap Wand User are pretty simple. You're given a jumbled sentence, and you SWAP (WORD1) (WORD2). These words must be of the same length, which eliminates a lot of guesswork.

There are seven main puzzles before the denouement, which is a narrative of easier puzzles where you switch two words that almost create a story. The main puzzles evolve into four sentences by the end, which may sound taxing, but of course there are clues beyond what the sentence/paragraph's general purpose is. If you have a capitalized word, it probably begins at the start of a sentence. Proper names belong together. And so forth. These were small realizations, but they made me feel smart. I'm not sure if there are many more such strategies to be uncovered from this mechanic, but I wouldn't mind a sequel that showed off a few more or was even a bit of a retread.

The sentences and eventually strings of sentences lay out a story, one in tune with Getting Things Mixed Up. It has a healthy dose of instruction manual tone crossed with "okay, something clearly went wrong here in the game world." It's interesting to feel both relegated to the sidelines like this and like I'm changing things--we never physically meet the characters, but it's our word swapping that helps unravel their fates and learn about them. I caught myself wondering "should I SWAP X Y or SWAP Y X" even if it didn't make a difference, which showed some immersion.

The pace and scope seem about right. Certainly I had the feeling of "this can't go on/be too big" but on the other hand it didn't try to tie things up too quickly. The longest puzzle has a lot of tension in it, because you do want to unwrap the tragedy, which itself involves people getting things jumbled up in the game world, but you don't want to do so too fast. And I've found it made me focus--a lot of times I can play or read a text adventure/interactive fiction for speed, and this slowed me down about right to have time to think.

On the abstract side, SWR reminded me of how I enjoyed doing the word jumbles in the daily newspaper as a kid (e.g. "WHELIA" to "AWHILE,") until they got too easy and I really didn't, because they were just abstract and repetitive. (I moved on to crosswords and enjoyed being baffled there.) Word jumbles only had so much scope. I'd hoped for more, and with SWR I definitely found some more.

So I liked it a lot but my technical side couldn't ignore one option SWR had: I'd have liked to see a different sort of help toggle than the hard/easy given. Easy, indeed, made it too easy and left me open to the temptation of brute-forcing things (it puts correctly placed letters in BOLD,) and in hard mode, my energy was directed toward the pedantry of finding and remembering which words had the same length, which started to get in the way of the fun of solving the longer puzzles.

Given that you can only swap words of the same length, it'd be interesting to keep track of which can be swapped somehow. Perhaps

(4)best (1)I (3)the (2)am

Or

4444 1 333 22 (with 10+ using a, b, c, etc.)
best I the am

Perhaps this would put the game over the 500 word limit need for (I think) contributing to the Short Games Jam as well. In this case having the constraint helped the author produce something original that didn't muck about. So maybe Twine would ultimately be better for the very smoothest experience -- different word lengths could give different colors, and we could reuse them eventually as, say, nobody's going to confuse a 10-letter word with a 1-letter word. The JavaScript in the clicking interface there would likely be even trickier than Inform, where the swapping still seems nontrivial.

However, if SWR hadn't been in ParserComp, I'd likely have missed it! So I was glad it was there. So maybe this is better reserved as technical feedback for the author, and I think something released in Twine or even Python could give the puzzle a new dimension. And that I played and came back a few hours later to check off details (e.g. the puzzles always appear in the same jumbled order) before writing this review shows how involved I was.